The Book of Intimate Grammar

by David Grossman

  “I mean it, I’m going to kill you, now repeat after me.”

  Aron lay still as a new emotion welled poisonously up inside him: he was gloating, enjoying his own humiliation, the abuse of his own body. Go on, hurt it. Torture it.

  “Eef you vant to be a bradher …”

  He deserved this, he deserved this. For telling Giora about his parents, for listening to his silly prattle, for all the mistakes he’d ever made, great or small, like refusing to watch the wrestling with Papa on Lebanon TV at Peretz Atias’s—he might have learned some tricks to usein a situation such as this—because those bloated freaks disgusted him and now they were getting revenge, through Giora.

  “Repeat after me or I swear I’ll finish you—”

  Aron screamed. His arm felt as though it had been torn out of its socket. Giora jumped back. He approached to make sure Aron was still alive, then ran. Aron lay unmoving, his head in the filthy sand. Empty nylon bags and seaweed tangled with bird feathers splashed up on the shore. Through his open eye he could see the clouds turn pink. Maybe someday he would long for this, someday when he was all alone, fleeing across the icy taiga, going out of his mind in the frozen wastes. He closed his eyes and rested.

  Finally, with great effort, he picked himself up and carefully moved his throbbing arm to bring it back to life. At least he didn’t say he was sorry. At least he didn’t repeat the stupid rhyme. He didn’t foul his mouth. He brushed the sand off. He would learn judo, or maybe sumo. Three or four holds would do the trick. Slowly he dragged himself back to Gucha and Efraim’s.

  Five weeks later, at the end of a fifty-seven-day-long vacation, Aron left for home. At the central bus station in Tel Aviv he found twenty ticket stubs, and bowed down in resignation to collect them off the filthy floor.

  Later, as he watched the fallow countryside roll by, he thought about his bar mitzvah. It would take place a few months from now at the beginning of winter, and there would be a lot of guests around to observe him at close quarters. The bus began to joggle up the narrow slope of Bab-el-wad, and the heavy Orthodox woman in the next seat glanced at him disapprovingly. Open the window, she ordered, it’s stifling in here. He tried to open it, but it was stuck; his strength failed, so the woman stretched her hairy arms out and thrust it open herself. And still he couldn’t breathe. He unbuttoned his shirt collar, but that didn’t help much either. The hills rose up on the roadside and hemmed him in, and rusty auto wrecks with wreaths around them from the War of Independence blurred before his eyes. The woman leaned over and asked loudly if he was feeling sick. The driver watched him in the rearview mirror, scowling under his visor cap, and the passengers began to whisper, accusing him of being disrespectful to our valiant dead. With all his might he tried to prove his patriotism and hold it down, but the bumpy pass got the better of him, and he found the paper bag AuntGucha gave him just in time. The woman beside him stood up, holding her skirt out, and started looking for another seat, and Aron burned with shame. When they arrived at the central bus station in Jerusalem, he hid his face in the paper bag until the last of the passengers got off, and then realized with a sudden start that it had been ages since Mama and Papa mentioned the loan they were going to take out to pay for his grandiose bar mitzvah.

  10

  And three days after Aron’s return, Mama and Papa sent Grandma Lilly to the hospital. They were afraid to tell anyone what they were planning, especially Yochi, and they waited till she’d left for ballet and Aron had gone to the supermarket with a long shopping list before calling an ambulance; only, Aron arrived home just in time to see them helping the driver pull Grandma into the van.

  As soon as Aron noticed the commotion he understood. It was almost as if he had been preparing himself for this moment. He did not approach. What was the point. It was hopeless. Rigidly he walked past the ambulance, and Mama and Papa averted their eyes. He slouched up the stairs, pursued by Grandma’s screams, and set the shopping bags on the Formica table in the kitchen, but then suddenly he couldn’t stand it anymore, and he rushed to his window and peeked out from behind the curtain.

  Grandma was going berserk down there, cursing and kicking and scratching everything in sight. For a moment old words poured out of her and it was hard to tell whether she was in her right mind or not, preferably not, though, maybe: the whole world heard her scream that they were throwing her out, her, after all the years she’d sweated and slaved for them making the kishelech Hinda peddled at fancy prices, not that she ever paid her for her work so she could go out and buy herself a dress or a pair of earrings. Mama tried to hush her, grinning apologetically on every hand, but Grandma continued to blast her inHebrew and Polish: For twenty years I held my tongue, because if anyone finds out what even Mauritzy doesn’t know yet (Mauritzy was her name for Papa), you’ll be arrested as a murderess.

  Mama turned white and her hair stood on end. Then she lashed back at Grandma Lilly: “You shameless thing, you’re sixty years old, sixty, not sixteen, you hear!” And Grandma made a face and said, perfectly lucid, “And you’re the dried-up prune you always were, Hinda, even at sixteen!” Aron, who was listening behind the curtain, stuck his fingers in his ears and sobbed out loud, because they both had a point, especially Grandma: life for Mama was a sea of tsuris. What’s happiness, he heard her say to Yochi the night of Papa’s accident; a moment here, a moment there, and before you know, it’s over. “Is this my thanks for taking you in and feeding you all these years!” she yelled at Grandma now, her hair flying Gorgon-like around her face. “For bathing you and dressing you and licking your ass, is this what I get?!” Papa tried to separate them, but they flared up at each other like ancient torches, in front of the neighbors yet, and the children, even Zacky Smitanka was there, leaning over his handlebars, and trust Sophie Atias to step out just then on her way to the grocery store, naturally, she wouldn’t miss an opportunity like this to watch the Ashkenazim going at it, her and her gaudy Sephardic slippers; and finally, when the ambulance drove off with Papa and Grandma Lilly in the back, a kind of hush descended over the street, and Aron threw himself on his bed, utterly exhausted.

  He lay there motionless. He could hear Mama pacing around her bedroom, pleading her case before an invisible jury, accusing, explaining, blowing her nose. He tucked his head under the pillow with Grandma Lilly’s fancywork: there were hundreds, no, thousands of those pillowslips and coverlets: long-tailed parrots, luxuriant palm trees, brilliant butterflies, tropical fish … Deprived of her embroidery, Grandma withered, but hunching over her bright-hued threads again, she lit up like a lamp, and Mama would sigh and say, What are we going to do with these pillowslips, Mamchu, who’s going to buy them all? But Grandma ignored her, sewing with fervor, filling the house with her plump little pillows; there wasn’t much else to do, she rarely went out, and practically lived on the Pouritz, nibbling chocolates, licking her fingers like a child even in front of company, or skimming the Yiddish paper for gossip about the rich and famous. Mama wouldn’t let her lift a finger around the house, except for the Thursday “thorough,”and didn’t allow her in the kitchen, there was room for only one woman there. And yet how could somebody like Grandma Lilly, like Grandma Lilly used to be, bury herself in the house day after day, Aron asked Yochi, and Yochi squinted at him, the gloom in her dispelled by a knowing twinkle, and said, Watch, li’l brother, watch her face and her hands, and then look closely at the embroidery. And Aron gazed into Yochi’s eyes, wondering at her wisdom, and shyly asked her why she acted like that. Like what? The way she did around Mama, pretending … playing a role. What role, what do you mean? You know, as if you were, well, dumb or something, and he shuddered at his chutzpah, but Yochi threw her arms around him and hugged him tight, and murmured into his neck while he smelled her haimish fragrance, You’re a smart kid, Aron, smarter than I am in certain ways, but there’s one thing I know that maybe you don’t. She giggled, or did she gasp, his neck was damp, I know how to stay alive around here.

  Silence. Papa was
n’t home from the hospital yet. Yochi was still at ballet. And Mama was pacing in her room, up and down, to and fro. Again he tucked his head beneath the pillow and sniffed the mesh of embroidery, remembering something that happened once, on this very bed he was lying on, it was mean of him to think about it now that she was practically dead and about to become a saint, but long ago, when he was six or seven and Mama and Papa went away for their annual vacation at the Sea Breeze pension, and Grandma Lilly stayed home in charge, well actually Yochi was in charge, she was only ten, but even then she was more mature than Grandma, and Grandma put on such a show for them, here in this room, he shuddered to remember, she climbed up on the bed and acted out a scene from the detention camp in Cyprus, how she was released and sailed to Palestine after the war, and how—oh, why didn’t Yochi stop her—she was introduced to Mama.

  Aron couldn’t remember the details, all he managed to bring to light was an image of Grandma Lilly with her dress between her knees, jumping up on his bed and announcing in her artful baby voice, Now I show how I met your Hindaleh.

  Aron turned to Yochi, too young to understand, but troubled by Grandma’s roguish eyes. Yochi hesitated: early on she had chosen Grandma as her ally, partly to spite Mama, and she had her reasons for wanting Aron there to watch. Grandma covered her face as if inprayer, slowly seeping herself in memory, and suddenly she broke into a smile and started prancing on the bed. She carried herself with grace, old as she was, and you could tell she was remembering how she used to dance on the stage. “Ho, the zop I had me, you should have seen it, kinderlach, the braid was thick like so, down to my tuchis!” Her hand slid longingly to her nape, where Mama had shorn her hair in a charmless bowl shape long ago, Mama was her hairdresser too. “I used to dance the polka-waltz at the Kaffe Theater! And my cavalier, Mauritzy Wolfin, loved to watch his stomping ‘shiksa mit a ponytail’!” She threw her silvery head back and laughed. Aron drew closer to Yochi. “And when we lay in bed,” she whispered, “he spread my zop around me, black as sable, and said, This is the night sky, Lilly, and you’re my demilune …”

  Aron’s mouth dropped and Yochi smiled. She knew all those stories, like the one about how Grandma ran away from home when she was thirteen to join a traveling theater, and how she had Papa out of wedlock, though Mama better not find out she knew, it made her sick to see the blank in Papa’s identity card. “You see, kinderlach,” said Lilly, “I was only forty-one when I come to Eretz Yisrael. Forty-two at most, and still a beauty, even after three years in a dark cellar in Poland, and after the camp in Cyprus, eyes like fire, I had, a figure like fine champagne, they said, everywhere I go heads turn; and boobies, Yochileh, firm like this! And a pair of legs on me, aiaiai …” And she rolled up her dress again, gazing wistfully at her legs, which were still pretty good. “Even Lieutenant Stanley, the one at the camp in Cyprus, said my body was good enough for a certificate, so I board a ship for Palestine.” She sailed the bed with a dreamy smile. “And when I step off on land, I see Mauritzy, only the curls he had in Poland were gone! Kaput! And beside him was standing your mama, your Hindaleh.” She pronounced the name with a little smile, and Aron glanced anxiously at Yochi, but she didn’t glance back. “Mauritzy wore a coat like an old man, it was the first time I saw him since he was sixteen, when he turned Communist and ran away, and he didn’t write a letter from where he was in the war. I never knew, was he alive? was he dead? But now I took one look, like this”—she shook her head, arched a furious eyebrow, and melted into a smile—“and I saw Mauritzy was gestorben. Finished. Back in Poland he was strong, a little meshuggeneh maybe, like an animal, but a cavalier, with a fine smile and teeth like Jan Kipura. Andwhen we walk through the streets together engagé, the people take him for my husband, and he had muscles, Yochi, the Polacks never guessed he was a Jidovsky, and now when I step down from the ship I take one look at him, and vish!” Again she arched her eyebrow and squinted. “I know it: he’s through, kaput! And when he runs to me crying, Mamaleh, Mamchu, I cover his mouth and tell him, Sha! Shtill! Don’t call me Mamchu! Call me Lilly! What, everyone should know I’m the mother of this shlimazel. So then Mauritzy says to me”—she mimicked Papa’s lumpy, long-suffering face, and Aron giggled and felt a pang of guilt, and turned to Yochi, but Yochi stared past him, studying something of infinite interest out there—“And now, Lilly, meet my wife, I married her in Israel, and she’s practically a Sabra, she came from Poland when she was only two, and her name is Hinda Mintz, now Kleinfeld, the name she has from me.” Grandma Lilly nodded. “And your mama put her sweaty hand in mine and said, I will call you Mamchu now, only please remember, Mamchu, in Eretz Yisrael his name is Moshe, not Mauritzy. Tfu!” spat Grandma. Aron recoiled and Grandma gave a throaty chuckle. He hated the sound of it. Why was he stuck with her for a grandmother, why couldn’t he get one who was kind and loving, who liked to spoil you like a regular grandmother?

  Grandma’s eyes grew misty: her thin brown hand reached up to caress her shingled hair. “And that’s how it started,” she told them quietly in a voice so changed that Aron was astounded. “Yes, that’s how I met your darling mother.” Again she grimaced as though about to cry. “And she made me feel as small as a pencil stub that could fit behind your ear.” Yochi’s arm turned rigid at his side. “But she was even smaller, she was maybe twenty-six, it’s hard to guess her age, but she told Mauritzy she was twenty-one, she had him eating out of her hand, and I was forty-two at most, but she had the Hebrew and the brains, and education—all right, a kindergarten teacher’s diploma, but they call it education, and what did I have, Yochileh? My figure, my pearly teeth, and my kavalieren, and she had to go and cut off my zop!” She said this as though realizing it for the first time. Yochi jumped up on the bed with Grandma and hugged her around the waist. “She took her scissors and zip-zip-zip! And then she—” Grandma choked on her sobs. “She laughed at my kavalieren, the ones I had in Tel Aviv when we were living there! Casanovas, she called them! Criminals! Hochsta-plerin! Go home to your wives and children! And they were so goodto me … so kind … we laughed together, they wrote me poetry, poems for Lilly … and drank champagne from Lilly’s slipper … get out, go home, she said, Casanovas! Tramps! Klezmers! Artistes!” Grandma clutched at Yochi, who was only ten. “And I’ll tell you something else …” She wiped her tears and runny nose on the back of her hand like a child. “Maybe one in a thousand klezmers he’s a … Mozart someday … maybe one in a thousand poets he’s a Mickiewicz, but if Hinda ever came across a Yehudi Menuhin, you can be sure she would call him a klezmer artiste …” Aron didn’t know why she said that, nor did he care, he just wanted this irksome performance over with so he could run out and play with Gideon and Zacky.

  “And there are other things, Yochileh, things I shouldn’t tell you—” “Enough, Grandma, enough crying, no more now.” Who knows what secrets Grandma whispered when Yochi crept into her bed at night and the two of them giggled till Mama put a stop to it. “Hinda always gets her way … you have to behave yourself around her and make yourself small, good morning, Hindaleh, good night, Hindaleh, because if you don’t watch out she’ll dig into your kishkes like you were a chicken not a person …” Yochi signaled to him sharply behind Grandma’s back to leave the room. He heard the gloom in Grandma’s voice, like a bitter secret behind her youthful brow, calling him to stay, but Yochi’s hand swept him resolutely away, and he stood at the door still holding the handle. “She led me like this, and threw me into a tub of boiling water, and said, Now, Lilly-Mamchu, we’re going to wash off the slime of your wonderful Casanovas …” She choked on the words and shivered like a leaf. Aron ran out.

  The door opened and slammed. Aron froze: Yochi was home. She took a few steps forward. And stopped. He imagined her sniffing the air. Suddenly she turned around and walked into Grandma’s alcove. How did she know? Dead silence. The door to Hussein, the little cupboard in the alcove, swung open and slowly shut. Mama stopped pacing. Yochi hurried into the room.

  “Aron.”


  “What?”

  “Look at me.”

  “What?”

  “No. Raise your head.”

  “All right, satisfied?”

  “Did they send her away?”

  “Leave me alone, I don’t know anything.”

  “Her pajamas and bathrobe are missing. Did they throw her out? Did you see?”

  “No. I was at the super. They sent me shopping.”

  “You’d better be telling the truth.”

  She didn’t go to Mama. Or say anything about anything. She didn’t even ask where Grandma was. At seven o’clock Papa came home, silent and sweaty. There was a fresh scratch on his cheek, but he wouldn’t let Mama put a bandage on it. His mouth was tightly shut. Mama set the table, looking flustered, but her eyes were dry. Yochi sat in silence, and Aron averted his face. How stupid of me, said Mama quietly, I set five places. And suddenly she blurted, What do you want from me, Yochi, why are you staring at me like that! Aron was aghast, Mama wasn’t allowed to scream at Yochi anymore, she was forbidden to because of the squeaking in Yochi’s ears. And all this time I let her stay in my home! Show me another woman in my place who would agree to take her schweiger in and treat her with so much respect and consideration! Who else would have given her the time of day if they knew the kind of woman she was! Her voice was choked, and she hid her tearful face behind the apron with the kangaroo. You can’t even cry, Yochi’s eyes accused her silently, you can’t allow yourself to shed a tear for her. No one is going to have that pleasure, especially not you, Yocheved; last year, when she started going meshuggeh in the head, who took care of her? You will not look at me like that! Yochi had been sitting silently, cupping her ear. Tell me, who washed her dirty underwear? Who rubbed her feet five times a day? And what did you do for her? Well, what? What did you do besides reading the paper and telling her the news of the day, as if she knew the difference between Gamal Abdel Nasser and Levi Eshkol! I don’t want to hear a word out of you! Understand? Not a word!