by Meir Shalev
I saw him pacing there restlessly, sitting on the throne and getting up and sitting down again. We got closer and then we saw Grandpa lying on the ground beside him. Dovik got up and said to the inspector, “Shalom. I called. My name is Dovik Tavori. I am his grandson.”
The inspector looked at the body.
“How old was he?”
“Ninety-two,” I said.
“And the eye patch, what is it?”
“It’s an eye patch. What exactly is your question?”
“How long has he had it?”
“A very long time. Before anyone here was born.”
“An eye patch with a flower? Why not black?”
“He loved flowers. I embroidered it for him.”
The inspector bent down, looked again, said that the picture was pretty clear. “A very old man, blind in one eye, walks around here in the middle of nowhere. He must have stumbled, fallen, hit his head on a rock. Here, this rock, look. With all the blood, right under his head.”
We all looked, and Eitan even got down on all fours and leaned his head to the ground and examined the rock from close up, like a dog sniffing something.
The inspector asked him what he was doing and he didn’t answer. The inspector told him not to touch anything and added that elderly people also fall at home, a safe and familiar place, on a level floor, so why wouldn’t they fall on some godforsaken goat trail with stones and rocks and uphills and downhills?
“How could you have let him go around like that?” he wondered aloud, so we would understand that a family that allows a man that old to hike alone in some obstacle-course wadi—that’s what he called Grandpa Ze’ev’s wadi in a burst of eloquence—is an irresponsible family, as he declared.
“A person of this age is like a child,” he announced, “like a baby. And if it had actually been a child, I would arrest you right now for negligence.”
I felt my anger rising but decided to keep quiet for the moment. Fortunately Eitan had kept his distance, looking around among the rocks, not hearing any of it. But Dovik blew up. He didn’t tell the inspector that we had a child who died on a hike but said that this was not the time to give us a lesson in the care and feeding of old people, and if he thought we had broken the law, he was welcome to arrest us but without sermonizing.
“And I ask that you remember that apart from your investigations we are in mourning now,” said Dalia.
The inspector said, “I understand your pain, but I have a job to do and I am doing it and you are not allowed to be disrespectful to a police officer. It’s against the law.”
“Fine,” said Dalia.
“And what’s he doing?” The inspector pointed at Eitan, who bent over and examined something near the tree trunk. “Get away from there, sir, you hear? You’re contaminating the scene.” And again he grew suspicious and added: “So I gather you know this place, that you were all here in the past.”
Dovik said, “We were here many times, several times a year, over many years. This is a place where our grandpa loved to hike and collect seeds of flowers and he knew the place like the palm of his hand. We even called this wadi Grandpa’s Wadi and this carob his carob.”
And I said, “I already told you. He took us here from the time we were little children.”
Dalia said her “how symbolic” thing, and because stupidity is a slightly contagious disease, Dovik, whose prolonged proximity to her had made him even dumber than he actually was, said, “You’re right. And maybe this was the symbolism with which Grandpa wanted to die.”
“What’s symbolic here?” asked the police inspector.
“So maybe not symbolic,” she said, “but definitely the closing of a circle, no?”
I suddenly felt that I was there alone, with Grandpa’s body and his big carob tree, and that one minute I saw everything from above, myself included, and the next minute I saw it from ground level. I was a bird in the sky and an ant on the ground. I shed a tear, but didn’t cry. Nobody cried. We weren’t brought up to cry, especially not in front of strangers.
“Here come the mazap guys,” said the inspector, as if we were friends of those guys and supposed to know that the acronym mazap means “forensics unit.”
The cop who had waited by the road arrived with two men in civilian clothes, who opened a small suitcase and began taking photographs and examining things the way they do in movies. The inspector put on gloves that they gave him, took Grandpa’s wallet from his pants pocket, examined it.
“There’s three hundred fifty shekels here,” he said. “Is that a normal amount in his wallet?”
“A reasonable amount,” said Dovik.
The inspector fished into Grandpa’s shirt pocket and removed a small pouch that we knew well.
“And this?”
“That is his hearing aid,” I said.
“He didn’t keep it in his ear when he walked?”
“Not always,” I said. “Even at home he didn’t always use it.”
“Did you look in his pack?” he asked Dovik.
“I didn’t touch anything.”
The inspector opened the pack. “There’s wine in here,” he said, with an odd look.
“He always drank red wine with his lunch,” I said.
“It’s even healthy,” said Dalia, “one glass a day.”
“Wine in the middle of the day?” grumbled the inspector. “No wonder he fell afterward on the rocks. Believe me that it’s only because of protocol that I don’t tell these guys to pack their stuff and go. We have plenty of other cases to investigate.”
The forensics people worked for a solid hour, looking among the rocks, and finally said it was okay to “turn it over.”
“ ‘Turn it over’ means to the pathology lab,” said the inspector. “Now is the time to tell us if you object to an autopsy.”
“We don’t,” I said.
With my extra brain I wondered, What else would the pathologist discover in this dead body? What other secrets?
“Where’s your husband?” asked the inspector. “Where’d he disappear to?”
“He went down to the wadi,” Dovik said.
“What’s he doing there?”
“He went down there to take a piss,” Dovik said.
I was thinking how similar and how different this was from my trip to the desert with Dovik to see the place where the snake and Neta met: acacia there and carob here, yellow there and green here, there a son and here a grandfather, there a snakebite and here who knows what, maybe in fact a fall. And rocks here and there, the one Grandpa fell on, the one that Eitan used to smash the head of the snake.
“I don’t see him,” said the inspector.
“Maybe he went into the cave,” I told him. “There’s a cave there we call the Cave of the Prehistoric Man.”
The inspector briskly walked down to the wadi, entered the cave, looked around. “He’s not here,” he announced. “But some goat fell in here. Lying dead on the rocks inside.”
Dovik went over too. “Poor thing,” he said. “Probably wanted to drink from the cistern. There are herds in the area. Good thing it happened recently, or it would really stink.”
Eitan suddenly surfaced from another point in the wadi. His heavy steps had grown lighter, as if his legs remembered an old forgotten dance. I could tell that something was happening at that very moment. In general, when you go for a hike with people, you quickly see who is accustomed to walking and who isn’t. Those who aren’t are always looking at the ground, checking where they plant their foot and walking too closely to others. And there are those like my first husband, who live in harmony with the trail and the rock and the earth and can walk at night as if they had eyes in their toes.
He approached the inspector and asked, “You’ll also be sending a tracker?”
“So you do talk? Very nice.”
“You’ll also be sending a tracker?” Eitan asked again.
“Why a tracker?”
“Because you also need someone wh
o knows how to read the ground.”
“You’re teaching us how to do our job?”
“Perish the thought,” said Eitan, and he turned to me and said, “I’m going back to the road.”
I was stunned, and Dovik told the police inspector that at this stage we had no more questions, and if he didn’t either, we would like to leave because we had to arrange the funeral and the shiva.
The inspector ordered the constable to wait by the body for the ambulance crew, and I hurried after Eitan because I started to worry: where was he rushing and what would stop him and where, because his body was still the thick sturdy body of my second husband, but his walking had become that of my first husband. Twelve years from the time Neta died, twelve years that he didn’t leave the nursery, and only walked along its paved paths with fifty kilos on his back, and now he was walking like then, on our hikes, with Neta on him.
The inspector went with the forensics people, who spoke with him in hushed tones, and then he joined us and expressed sorrow about the accident and even apologized for a few things he had said before.
“You realize,” he said, “that until the professionals say it’s an accident and not murder, everyone is a suspect, including, and sometimes especially, family members. But here it’s clear as day what happened.”
I told him that was okay and he explained how and when we would receive the body after the autopsy for burial.
When we got to the main road we found Eitan waiting by the car. We said goodbye to the inspector and headed home. After we drove off, Dovik asked Eitan what he was looking for and if he found something, and to our great surprise Eitan gave him an answer. Though all he said was “nothing,” any answer in his case was quite an accomplishment.
Dizzy with our success, I asked him again what he was looking for, and this was apparently a special day, because Eitan the chatterbox answered my question too, in the very same way.
I gasped. I felt that my name, Ruta, was poised to be spoken at the end of the answer: Nothing, Ruta. But he did not speak my name.
We understood not to expect further benevolence from him and moved on to other, more urgent topics. We phoned various relatives and people at the regional council, and when we got home there was already a voicemail message: the daughter-in-law of the deceased, in other words Dovik’s and my mother, said not to wait on her for the funeral, she would try to get to the shiva.
“She won’t come,” said Dovik.
“Has she no shame?” Dalia said. “Then again, since when is anyone in your family ever ashamed?”
Dovik remarked, “It’s okay. We haven’t yet reached the level of your mother at our wedding, so we have something to strive for,” and all distraught he went to his office at the nursery, to make more phone calls.
Dalia and I began talking about the refreshments we would serve the guests at the shiva, which she formally referred to as “collation for the consolers,” because collation is more respectable than mere refreshments, and the similarity of “collation” and “consolation” well suited her sense of symbolism.
I said that in my opinion some crackers and pretzels and cut-up vegetables and cookies and soft drinks would do just fine, and we’d also have hot water and paper cups for coffee and tea. But she said that a shiva was indeed a shiva and not, God forbid, a party, but many people were expected and this was also a family and social occasion. That’s how she put it, “a family and social occasion,” and also, listen to this, Varda, here’s a perfect Dalia-ism you can feel free to use: “Paper cups are fitting for a shiva, so we should remember that life is also a onetime thing.” And she also said it wouldn’t hurt for Eitan to cook up something in his poikehs.
“Where is he, anyway? Where did he disappear to again?” she wondered.
“Twelve years have passed,” I said. “Not only Eitan, but his poikehs too have probably forgotten how to cook.”
But Dalia didn’t think that was funny. “Where is he, anyway?” she asked again.
I didn’t answer. I sat down with Ecclesiastes to write something for the funeral, and the next day at dusk we buried Grandpa Ze’ev beside Grandma Ruth, woman of valor, wife, and mother, as the headstone said. Many people came. But later on a small group remained, closer friends and various distant cousins, old-timers from the Galilee, who spoke about Grandpa and told stories about the moshava, and Dovik, who was a little drunk, suddenly said, “Watch out for Ruta, she’s been writing stories lately and she might be writing about you or steal your ideas.” And Eitan smiled suddenly and said, “Why don’t you read us something, Ruta?” And I was astounded: He also speaks like he once did, with a style and tone reminiscent of my first husband.
I brought my notebook and read them the story I wrote for Neta about the prehistoric man, and they got all enthusiastic and said, “You have to publish this!” And then I also read them, with small changes, a story about some young man from the moshava whose father took him to a whorehouse, and Eitan spoke again, as if relishing an ability that had been restored to him, and said, “Ruta, you have to keep writing.”
THIRTY-TWO
THE PROOF
1
Ze’ev Tavori did not stalk his wife. He did not investigate or probe. And when the truth was revealed to him, it was revealed without his intention. He just happened by chance upon his wife and her lover, but chance need not affect the quality of proof. He went into the woods to inspect a dead oak tree and determine its suitability for firewood. After he completed his examination he heard a loud screeching of jaybirds, the screeching with which the jays alert one another to a gathering or celebration or riot. His curiosity aroused, he went deeper into the woods, and after walking two hundred meters or so, he heard human voices, a man and a woman.
He crept up silently and saw a couple making love on a blanket they had spread on the grass. The man lay on his back and the woman—from where he stood, he saw her from the back—on top, her thighs straddling his grinding hips, her loins fastened to his, her nape concealing his face. But Ze’ev recognized the blanket at once, for this was the embroidered blanket his mother had sent him in the wagon, and also the man’s boots nearby, the boots from Istanbul, unique in the moshava. They stood beside the blanket waiting patiently like a pair of servants who see nothing but know everything.
Ze’ev was surprised not only by what he saw but by his reaction—namely, the lack thereof. Precisely because he was so bold and violent and strong, so quick to wave a fist and wield a club, he couldn’t understand how he of all people was flooded by a frightening weakness. He stepped back a bit, stood for a moment behind a tree, and then began to tiptoe stealthily in a wide circle, to see if this was indeed his wife. The moment he saw the profile of her face and could no longer protect himself with uncertainty or doubt, Ruth leaned forward, buried her face in Nahum’s neck, and embraced him, and when she sat up to take a breath he extended a gentle hand and fondled her breast with love, a love that had grown over time and created its own language and world.
The scene shook Ze’ev to the depths of his soul, but it was also beautiful and fascinating, because the two looked like a woman and child playing in a field, she, his tall wife, with her broad hips and shoulders, and her belly that was already a bit swollen, and he, Nahum Natan, his neighbor and friend, with his thin arms, smooth skin, a body without blemish. A body that had not endured a life of manual labor, had not grown rough or scarred, had neither dealt blows nor absorbed them.
At that moment something even more terrible happened. Ruth turned toward him, toward Ze’ev, and seemed to be staring at him. A few seconds went by until he realized that she had not noticed him and was only looking in his direction, but before those seconds had elapsed he was certain she saw him and knew that he saw her, and his body froze with dread. He of all people, who had performed hard work since childhood and had given and gotten beatings and knew how to kick a wild dog and seize the neck of a burglar and slap the cheek of someone who dared insult his pride, did not know what to do now. Hi
s bones and muscles, pleading for a command, could not comprehend the weakness of his spirit, whose strength was depleted like water from a cracked barrel. He closed his eyes, shuttered the awful sight inside them, hoping it would not migrate into his memory, from which it could never be uprooted.
He stood still for a moment, and then Ruth turned back to Nahum, and Ze’ev managed to get away from the scene. His legs carried him a fair distance, but before the trees concealed the pair he turned his head back and gave them another look. He was shocked to realize that the image unexpectedly gave rise to feelings of love and longing for his wife, whom he had never seen in this way, and Nahum’s body, strangely enough, also aroused a tender stirring he had never felt before, and this angered him so much that he realized he had been mistaken: that he had suspected the two of them for a while, that his peaceful nights had been sleepless, that his dreams were not dreams, that for months he had been agonizing in his bed and seeing exactly these images, not in his heart or his mind or his churning gut or clenching fingers, but inside his eyeballs, whose frazzled nerves had plastered pictures on his retina that came not from without but from within. Pictures that returned again and again until they were projected outward and became real.
He picked up his pace. His heart was hard and pounding and his body so limp that he almost floated over the stones and almost plunged into the potholes. He remembered what his father had told him throughout his childhood and youth and told him on his wedding night, when he went out and saw him sitting in the yard, smoking his pipe and drinking schnapps: A man who lets others trespass on his territory, a man on whose mare other men ride without asking permission, and whose weapons they play with and touch, a man whose family members start to eat before he does, about whom people speak behind his back, whom strangers treat as if they were his friends—a man like that must fight back and lay down rules and facts. All the more so a man whose wife sleeps with another man. He must take revenge, teach a lesson, inflict pain, punish. But not now, he said to himself. Not at this moment. First his strength would return and grow.