Two She-Bears

by Meir Shalev

  7

  Mother and Dad told the big ox to move back a little, guided the mulberry tree down into the wagon, added dirt until its roots were all covered, and watered it until the water dripped all around the wagon, and the mulberry tree said, “Stop, enough. It’s good.”

  “Now do you understand, Grandpa Ze’ev?” asked his mother and dad. “Tomorrow you won’t have to say goodbye to your mulberry tree. You’ll ride to school together in the wagon.”

  8

  The next morning Grandpa Ze’ev hitched the big ox to the wagon, climbed up and sat inside next to the mulberry tree, took hold of the reins, said “Goodbye” to his father and mother and “Giddyap” to the big ox.

  The big ox pulled out of the yard into the road.

  In the road were many children, all on their way to school:

  This one riding on a donkey, that one on a bicycle.

  This one went on foot and that one was carried on someone’s shoulders.

  Some walked slowly, some walked fast,

  Some went in a group, others by themselves,

  And Grandpa Ze’ev rode in a wagon hitched to an ox, with a mulberry tree planted inside.

  9

  When they arrived at the schoolyard Grandpa Ze’ev parked the big ox outside, went into the classroom, and sat by the window. All day long he learned songs and stories and numbers and letters, vowels and plus and minus signs, and all day long he was a very good student.

  But when the teacher wasn’t looking, he smiled through the window at the mulberry tree, and when the big ox closed his eyes and yawned—because oxen get bored more than any other animals—he reached out the window and petted him on the nose and whispered, “Don’t fall asleep, big ox, it’s very important to learn.”

  10

  During the lunch break Grandpa Ze’ev ate pita with cheese and olives, because that’s what he liked to eat.

  And he gave hay to the big ox, because that’s what big oxen like to eat.

  And the manure that the big ox made after the meal he buried in the soil of the mulberry tree, because that’s what trees like to eat.

  And at the end of the school day he got into his wagon and sat under the mulberry tree and said to the big ox “Giddyap!” and went home.

  11

  That’s what they did day after day.

  Grandpa Ze’ev studied well and got a good grade,

  And the mulberry grew and gave fruit and shade.

  And from lots of petting and lots of hay,

  The big ox grew bigger in a magnificent way.

  And he wasn’t just any magnificent ox—he was the most magnificent of them all.

  He didn’t fall asleep in class and listened to the teachers and learned all the letters and knew all the numbers.

  He was Grandpa Ze’ev’s ox, and Grandpa Ze’ev loved him more than all the other oxen in the world.

  NINE

  I remember: A summer evening, a messy bed, his left hand under my head, and his right hand embracing me, or the other way around, you decide which way you prefer, and I am reading him Bialik’s poem “Take Me Under Your Wing.” You find that funny? That was a routine of ours. Eitan had quite a few holes in his education, and I helped him fill them. I read to him, I showed him works of art, and something funny happened. Eitan, who cut all his literature classes in high school, suddenly took a shine to that Bialik poem, especially the line “And be for me a mother and a sister.” It’s interesting, and I tell you this as a teacher, it’s interesting what turns on someone like Eitan, who was never interested in art or poetry or literature. For whatever reason it was the simple words “be for me” that he picked up with such enthusiasm.

  “You mean,” he said, “that was in there when they taught us Bialik in high school?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can’t be. You added it now.”

  Our literature lessons took place in bed, of course—“The two of us, you and me,” he would say in English, “the two of us and Bialik, naked in bed.” But I read him other poets too. “I like Alterman,” he said, “because of the eh sound he uses so much—and also Yona Wallach. Her I’d also like to meet,” he said. But we were talking about Bialik and his “be for me” that Eitan fixated on and made his own and would say to me at every opportunity with different meanings; instead of “tell me,” “talk to me,” “hug” or “kiss” or “caress me,” or “touch me”—he would say “be for me.” I’m not sure that’s what Bialik had in mind, but for us “be for me” meant make me feel good, in body and soul and heart. Be for me, wash me, comb my curls or tie me up, do as you wish with me. Show that you love me, that you understand my love, and explain slowly and in detail exactly what you understand, and that we have our “together,” yahdav, not just an individual man and woman, but be for me and I will be for you, not just an imperative and in the future, but also now, in the present tense. You are now for me; I am now for you. The word “love” in Hebrew, ahava, is very close to Yehovah, the name of God. He said that to me one day, and it surprised me. I see in your eyes, Varda, that something is getting through the gates of gender. I am a veteran teacher, and I know that look of understanding.

  I remember: One day I showed him three paintings of women. The Mona Lisa, Botticelli’s Venus, the Maja by Goya. Actually four: The Naked Maja and The Clothed Maja.

  He glanced at them and said, “Art doesn’t interest me.”

  I said, “Who’s talking about art, Eitan? Look at them like a man looks at a woman. Whom would you go to bed with? Whom would you go to a party with?”

  About the Mona Lisa he said, “This one is surely considered beautiful, but she isn’t radiant. She’s one of those beauties who leaves you cold.”

  About Botticelli’s Venus: “Her head is beautiful, but her legs are sad.”

  On Goya’s Maja: “Sexy ugly. Butt-faced but beats the others hands down. She’s the sun in sheets, shining in her bed. The naked one and the clothed one too. It’s interesting which one he painted first and which next. What did he say after the first painting: ‘Take your clothes off’ or ‘Get dressed’?”

  “But all this art of yours,” he concluded, “can’t compare with the beauty of a Wonderful pomegranate, lying open on a white plate in the sunshine.”

  “You’re right about the type of pomegranate,” I said, “but not cut open on a white plate but pomegranate seeds in a silver cup, and not in the sun but between sun and shadow.”

  “Whatever you say,” he said. “You know best. I’ll be beautiful and quiet.”

  I laughed. “You just don’t get whose beauty I’m talking about, ignoramus that you are.”

  I already told you: he didn’t read much; he wasn’t a man to talk to about a good book or take to a play or museum. But he had this aura, and people were drawn to him like moths to a flame, and unlike those unfortunate moths, no one was burned in his good fire. And if you ask me, Eitan’s whole story is a story of fire. Light, and heat, and dying down, and cold ashes, and catching fire again. Whatever. Don’t get the impression that all day long I tried to teach him poetry and art. Most of the time it was his usual nonsense. His imitations and surprises and performances. Dovik and I also like to do imitations, but we imitate people, and Eitan would also imitate animals, not just the sounds, primarily movements and facial expressions, and also inanimate objects: “I will now impersonate a desk that chicken soup was spilled on.” Or “This is the face of a border collie that failed its truck-driving test.”

  Sometimes he would hug me and hold me close and squeeze me and inform me that he was imitating a Clematis flammula, a type of climbing vine that I love, with a thousand tiny white fragrant wildflowers. We, by the way, are one of the few plant nurseries in Israel that sells them. Grandpa Ze’ev brought the seeds from the Galilee, from someplace near Hurfeish, and every summer, when all the wildflowers are already dead, in the dry period between the last of the Agrostemma and the first squill, it’s the only one that blooms. It’s a little hot for it here, but somehow it ma
nages. In the days when Neta was still alive and Eitan was still my first husband, we would drive to the Galilee to see and smell it, and I always said to it: “You sweet and beautiful and relaxed thing, you clinging clutching clematis.”

  He was that way too, clinging and beautiful and holding tight, telling me over and over “be for me,” and I would have to guess what he wanted me to be or do for him now. And if I would guess right away, he would say, “You don’t have to hit the target, Ruta; I also love it when you miss and try again.”

  My whole body would melt. All of me would pool to a single place. A small sea under the diaphragm and the rest of the body was dry land. I have a small anatomical anomaly: another brain, which is not inside the head but for some reason under the diaphragm.

  I remember: One day he announced he had decided to set up a petting zoo. I thought he intended to bring a few little goats and bunny rabbits to divert the children of customers at the nursery, but that night I found the sign: a little note attached to a matchstick that he stuck in his belly button like a flag, with the words PETTING CORNER, 5 SHEKELS and a drawing of an arrow. Pointing guess where.

  That’s a very charming story, Ruta, but perhaps we can return to the topic that brought me to you?

  The whole moshava heard me laughing because of that petting corner, including my sister-in-law Dalia, who doubtless doubled over with envy, and including Dovik, who pretended to be asleep but couldn’t hold back and smiled. How do I know? I know. I have many ways to know. Either I see or I hear or I assume or I imagine or I remember.

  That’s how it goes. Once in a while voices emanate from our yard that the whole moshava can hear. Sometimes shouts, sometimes roars of rage, and there were also gunshots, sometimes weeping and shrieking, but also wailing and moans of passion and sounds of laughter. From the day Eitan arrived until the disaster, lots of laughter.

  He was great not only for the family but for our plant nursery. Dovik is good with numbers and accounting and bargaining with suppliers and dealing with municipalities and regional councils, so Eitan took on the job of rustling up private customers. And an interesting thing happened: you know how a handyman puts a magnet in a drawer, so all the screws and nuts and little nails will stick to it and not get lost? That’s how Eitan was with us. No sooner did he arrive than a whole little group formed around him.

  You think I mean women? For God’s sake, get away from gender already. I already told you: a group of men was drawn to him. Every one of them a male. Customers, neighbors, friends: a whole kindergarten of men. Women, she says…women are passé, Varda. What men really want are other men. That’s what they lack. True friendship, real friends. What most women have a surplus of, they have a deficit, and that deficit is the basis of everything for them.

  To cut it short, Eitan set up a pair of poikehs under Grandpa Ze’ev’s big mulberry tree, and the men began to gather round. You don’t need to write down the word poikeh, it’s a kind of heavy pot with little feet that stand in a fire. He lit a campfire, burned coals, cooked up and dished out his meat stew to customers. A wonderful period began: “The jug of beer shall not run dry nor shall the poikeh of beef be empty,” and our customers were spending huge amounts of money just because Eitan handed them a plastic bowl and plastic spoon and let them dig into the poikeh for a piece of meat and a potato with gravy and a slice of white bread for dipping, and they could sit together, to eat and drink and talk and look at his eternal flame. A fire was always burning here. Because of the cooking and also because men are attracted not only to one another but to fire. Not necessarily because they’re drawn to danger, but simply to fire itself. This is why the woman of the caveman tended the fire in the cave with such devotion, so he would want to return, and when he returned he would sit around it with other men who returned, sniff the embers, add twigs to the flame, keep busy with the fire and with each other, and not go out and pick fights with woolly mammoths and bears and other cavemen and do stupid things.

  To make a long story short, soon enough all the supervisors of gardening and landscaping from municipalities and regional councils in the north and center of the country, who constituted most of our business and our profits, stopped inviting Dovik to their offices and started coming to us to sit and eat under the mulberry tree. And when the children—Dovik and Dalia’s twins, Dafna and Dorit, and our son, Neta—got a bit older, they would come straight from kindergarten or school to the nursery instead of the house, and every school day would end the same way: Dalia would still be at work at the regional council, I would still be at my work at school, Dovik in the office of the nursery, and Eitan in the nursery itself, telling customers to wait a minute, giving each child a big ladleful from the poikeh, making sure they ate it all up, and sitting them down to do their homework at one of the garden tables we sell here.

  I remember: If they didn’t understand something, he would shout out to the whole plant nursery, “Is there someone here who finished high school? You? You have patience for kids? Sit with them a minute, please, and help them with their homework.” And if they brought school friends with them, after one of Eitan’s meals they didn’t want to eat whatever their mothers had made for them, and soon enough we had a day-care center here. Day care for kids of forty and fifty and kids of five and six. You know what? Maybe on second thought you should write the word poikeh in your notebook, because if there were more poikehs like this in your history of the Yishuv, all that Zionism would look a lot better.

  TEN

  Ruta: Were we on for today?

  Varda: No. I was at your neighbor’s house, and I decided to come over and say hello.

  Ruta: That’s nice. It’s like the joke about the bear in Alaska who says to the hunter: “You don’t really keep coming here for the hunting, do you?” Maybe when you’re a bit older and we become better friends, I’ll tell it to you. We haven’t yet gotten to the stage where I can tell you disgusting jokes. You want something to drink? Maybe instead of tea with lemon you would like some of Dovik’s limoncello? I just now poured myself some. You caught me red-handed. Here. You like limoncello?

  Varda: It’s delicious, but I’m not much of a drinker. Certainly not at this hour.

  Ruta: I’m so restless. Neta’s birthday is coming up and I’m like a caged lion. Neta. Neta. My child. The child that you never ask exactly what happened to him.

  Varda: I don’t ask because a person should talk about things like that on her own. Not wait to be asked.

  Ruta: I told you. I said his name and I said “disaster” and I said “grave” and “cemetery” and I also said “dead.” I said it. All you have to do is connect the dots. I said “after Neta died.” And I said I had a child who died. A boy of six. Almost six and a half to be exact. And you didn’t react. Only your research is important.

  Varda: I’m sorry. I didn’t see it that way.

  Ruta: Once I used to put it this way—“Life is over.” There was the disaster, and life was over. Funny, Neta died and I said “over” about my life, his mother. But the truth is, no, it’s not over, and in a certain sense it’s even worse than that. Neta died, and his father, in a slightly different way, also died. He wasn’t himself anymore. I lost the two of them, my man and my son, “him and his son on the same day,” as it is written. Have you noticed how disasters improve the Hebrew language? They make it more beautiful and ceremonious, with those special phrases that carry heavy burdens: “too holy to touch,” “too mysterious to understand,” “too ancient to bear.”

  Dead. He did not speak and did not laugh and did not touch me even once and primarily punished himself. And you know what? He should have. He had it coming. I didn’t hit him in the face with it, but he knew very well what I thought: that if there was someone to blame, it was him. And I too was to blame, for letting him take Neta on that hike. “A hike for guys,” girls not invited. That’s how it is with parents. Even when they’re the parents of a soldier who was killed, and there’s a whole list of commanders and politicians who can be blame
d—even then, they blame themselves. Surely we are to blame. Always. Even if we were at work and a drunk driver went up on the sidewalk and ran over the child on the way home from school, we are to blame. And if a doctor sent him home with the wrong diagnosis, we are to blame. And even if lightning were to strike him from the sky, why did the lightning strike him and not us? After all, that’s what we’re there for. All the more so a father who takes his little boy on a hike and brings him back to his mother dead. There are no others to blame.

  What a good boy he was, good and smart and beloved and full of love for others, but many six-year-olds are like that, and what can someone say about someone who died at that age? So many things could change. A talented boy, but not extraordinary. Maybe that was actually what was special about him, that everything with him was in moderation, properly balanced in body and soul. Already at the age of two he was steady as he moved and so bright-eyed it was almost scary, and another thing, a little hard to describe, but there’s a word for it: “symmetry.” Not just of right and left, also of inside and outside. No, I don’t mean symmetry. I don’t like symmetry. This is something else. Whatever. I feel I’m getting irritable and angry. I have a recurrent thought, it’s terrible to think this way, I know, but if somebody had to die, in other words, if the Angel of Death had a quota to fill on that day, then why that particular child? There are so many other children to pick as a victim instead. And I say that not only as a proud mother but as a veteran teacher, who knows—after generations of spoiled, arrogant, stupid, noisy children who sat in my classroom year after year—I know how to identify a special child.

  So that’s that. Life was over. The fire went out. In two private hearts and the one shared heart. Every couple has this eternal flame, sometimes small, sometimes big, which flares up and fades down, which is sometimes too strong and sometimes needs more air and always needs to be tended and fed. And with us the disaster extinguished it with a single blow. We had been married almost seven years and knew each other a few years before that, and one already knows one’s partner, his on-off switches and dials, and what he likes and what he doesn’t, what makes him laugh and what makes him feel good, and also what annoys him, which can be good too because it’s the flip side of boredom and routine. And suddenly—a stranger. A new husband. There are women who will tell you this is what happens in the end with every husband, but usually it happens gradually, and with me it happened overnight, all at once.