The Book of Intimate Grammar

by David Grossman

  “I will pay generously,” said the visitor.

  “We’re not talking about money yet,” muttered Papa.

  “Just how much are you prepared to pay, Miss Bloom?” asked Mama, appraising her coolly with a broker’s eye.

  “Why up to … fifty pounds,” blurted Edna Bloom; you could seethat she herself was staggered by the offer, but she continued to nod insistently. Red blotches spread over her throat. You could feel how damp her delicate pink fingers were, the fingers which had tinkled over the piano that day. Papa groaned, and the big blue vein on the side of his neck began to throb. Fifty pounds was enough to close off the balcony, to start redecorating the kitchen, to buy a secondhand mo-torscooter he could ride to work in the morning … Mama leaned back and gulped. Papa mumbled, That really is too much, Miss Bloom, but he too fell silent and studied his hands. Mama hadn’t yet uttered a word. Her eyes were darting around in her head, her chin was quivering. A shadow like a slinky martin fluttered under her lips. So—a dog wouldn’t stick his snout out in this storm, yet she leaves her nice warm flat and comes here? The ravishing Miss Bloom couldn’t wait? Edna twisted under Mama’s invidious eye; that look, thought Yochi despondently, poking and probing everywhere. Edna raised her heavy lids and searched Mama’s eyes for a verdict; she and Papa seemed to await Mama’s blessings over something infinitely more complex than tearing down a wall between the bedroom and salon.

  “And when do you intend to pay?” Mama’s crassness shocked him; suddenly he saw that there was something not quite honorable here that made polite behavior superfluous, and his heart melted for Edna Bloom and what she had endured here, in their home. Because some people can tolerate vulgarity, he felt, while others get used to it little by little, but Edna Bloom was far too vulnerable. He was astounded at how fast she grew inured to Mama’s tone: why didn’t she just leave and slam the door behind her; but her long thin neck continued to writhe in agony, as though she had swallowed the rusks of her pride. “If Mr. Kleinfeld agrees to take the job, I will pay half the sum immediately and the other half when the job is completed,” she said, using the language she learned at work, in the office of a notary public named Lombroso.

  “Mr. Kleinfeld will work for you three hours every afternoon until he finishes,” decided Mama. “And either I or the boy or Yocheved will be there to assist him at all times.”

  Edna bowed her head in surrender. The tiny bracelets jingling on her rosy wrists disturbed her equanimity. She clasped them with her fingertips and tried to hide them: Aron’s heart went out to her again, calling her over and over like a cuckoo clock.

  Then she opened her red leather purse, fumbled with the zipper, giggled with embarrassment, blushed crimson, and took out several bills. She waved them limply in the air, and when she saw that Mama wasn’t going to reach out for them, she set them on the edge of the coffee table, from where they instantly flew off.

  “You’ll tear down her wall and we’ll buy a new Friedman heater, the old one stinks, and then we’ll forget about it. Tfu on her,” said Mama afterward, furiously scrambling eggs in the frying pan, livid at having been conned by the money of that Hungarian. Notice how she walks, like the living dead, and the way she talks, ta ta ta ta,rasped Mama, maliciously mimicking the cranelike ways of Edna Bloom, but even this outburst failed to relieve her: she always said she was no pigeon, yet this time she felt an itch in her navel that told her she’d made a big mistake.

  15

  One gray Monday Papa left to tear down the wall that separated Edna’s bedroom from her salon. The job was expected to take two days. He arrived at four-thirty, after a shift at the Jerusalem Workers’ Council, a proper meal at home, and a siesta. Wearing the blue shirt from his days at the Angel bakery, he picked up his toolbox, watched closely by Aron, who made sure no stray Roxanas slipped out; then he went down to the furnace room to fetch Og, the giant ladder he’d made with his own hands in 1948, when he and Mama first set up housekeeping, and plodded over to Entrance A and up four flights of stairs to Edna Bloom’s. Yochi trailed behind him, her arms full of old newspapers for collecting the rubble of the soon-to-be-demolished wall; after Yochi came Aron, lugging Papa’s sledgehammer; yes, he was back in her house again, this time in broad daylight and with permission, maybe he would even do it in there, with Mama and Papa around, who knows; and last in line, at Aron’s heels, stepped Mama, wearing her dreary brown cassock, grim as a brooding hen, with her hair in a stiff topknot and her knitting bag under her arm, carrying a thermos full of tea, because, she forked her tongue, you won’t be getting anything to drink from that cuckoo.

  Edna Bloom greeted them with a festive smile, and Aron gasped at the sight of her in the doorway. She had dressed casually for the occasion, in jeans and a yellow blouse, frayed at the seams, that fell softly over her small, round breasts; her wispy hair framed her features likea halo, and her face was polished to such a fragile and radiant symmetry that her beauty seemed almost pathological. Mama, Papa, and Yochi stared down at her slender bare feet, the feet of a bird that rarely alights. Edna invited them to sit down on the squeaky white leather armchairs. Before them on the coffee table there were plates with slices of pie she’d bought from Kravitz the gonif, who uses three eggs when the recipe calls for eight. Did you imagine the balebusteh would slave in the kitchen all day in your honor? And there was a pitcher of golden juice, and a bowl of fruit that looked as beautiful as a picture in one of her heavy art books, so beautiful you might have doubted it was real. Suddenly Mama—his well-mannered mama, who never touches food at a stranger’s house—groped through the fruit bowl as though she were choosing apples at the market, snatched a ripe guava, and sank her teeth into it. Edna cringed with a private pain and offered Mama a saucer for the peels, or ends, she whispered, and Mama quite deliberately, Aron realized, explained with a mouth full of fragrant pulp that she liked to eat guavas whole. Edna nodded meekly, then offered Aron and Yochi a box of Turkish delight with powdered sugar. “This I bought in Izmir,” she murmured, adding confidentially, “Every summer I take a trip to Turkey.”

  “Thank you. It’s not good for their teeth,” decreed Mama. “And Mr. Kleinfeld would like to get started already.”

  Edna Bloom was fading fast. She apologized and explained that she had wanted to launch the enterprise with a little celebration, but Mama gave her such a look she immediately shut up.

  Papa began by taking down the pictures and stacking them carefully against the far wall. They’re only reproductions, said Edna modestly, and Mama let out an ugly whistle of amazement, meant for Yochi and Aron’s ears. These are Degas dancers, and this is Magritte, and this of course is Van Gogh’s chair, and that’s one of Dalf’s, and this one is an abstract, and that’s a still life by Renoir or Gauguin; Papa carried them in his arms, and Aron was afraid to help because of the chirring; he sat in the white leather armchair staring at the faded squares left by the pictures, and thought of Grandma Lilly’s thick old braid, all wrapped up in newspaper, which he’d found at the bottom of the trash bin; maybe people leave faded squares like this too after they die.

  Papa dismantled the black bookcase. He respectfully removed the snow-filled globes Edna had collected in the lands she visited; whenAron sneaked in he liked to shake them, it was a little ritual he had; the melancholy magic of fairy tales would envelop him at the sight of these lonely mountaineers, swans, clowns, orchids, dancers, children, trapped under glass, surveying each other through the silent snowstorms, and then Papa took down the heavy art books Aron never tired of leafing through, where there were pictures of naked men and women, but with nothing dirty about them, and then, carefully, biting his tongue, Papa carried off the delicate prism and the pitcher with the long lips that seemed puckered for a heavenly kiss, in which there was a bouquet of straw flowers. And the princess didn’t lift a finger, she let you do all the work, like a Sudanese slave, but Mama was wrong: Edna took the pieces from Papa one at a time and set them down in a special place, and everyone witnessed that sl
ippery moment when the tips of her slender fingers met his, and he tried with all his might not to feel this strange contact, this airy caress, hurling himself into work, work, work. Only when he held up the carving of a sad, old Negro did they see he was losing control, because he ran his finger over the wise forehead, the broad, flat nose, the full lips; Mama gave a snort of contempt, and Papa stood up a little straighter. Sealing his face, he continued passing Edna the ebony figurines she brought back from her two trips to Kenya; and the statue of a slender youth, lost in reverie; and forms suggestive of feminine curves embossed in a piece of wood; when Aron was here on his own sometimes he would mischievously imitate their poses as he ran his fingers over them. The big secret was not what he did in her bathroom but the fact that he kept company with the pictures and the books and the sculptures. Pleasure trickled into him: he wanted to remain here, like one of her statues, so that when she came back from her Spanish class or her flower-arranging course, she would find him and allow him to stay, and she would gradually mold him till he was perfect in her hands.

  “There, finished,” Edna panted when the wall stood bare, almost indecently.

  Papa smiled, flashing his strong white teeth at her: “There are two sides to every coin, Miss Bloom, you must have pictures and things on the other side of the wall, am I right or am I wrong?”

  And truth to tell, Edna had failed to take into account what was about to happen in her home. Her face turned ashen: she wanted to tear down a wall, the decision had required an immense effort of will,it required all her stamina just to imagine a hammer striking the wall on one side, let alone the other. And the huge space that would be created. She stood there limply, head bowed.

  “Miss Bloom,” said Papa with unfamiliar gentleness in his voice, “maybe you didn’t think out what would happen here … tearing down a wall means dirt and noise and a big mess. Maybe you’d rather we put everything back in place and we’ll shake hands like friends, no hard feelings, really.”

  He tried to protect her, this wisp of a woman, floating embryonically in her sac of skin: they were facing one another now, and suddenly Aron saw how handsome Papa must have been, before he became so lummoxy with fat and his fixed expression, and Mama saw too, she was struck dumb, because she’d seen it once before, she couldn’t decide whether to sit there goggling at him, or to tear her eyes away and lose the moment forever; he had been so young then, a few years younger than herself when she first met him late in ’46, not yet handsome, practically starved to death, hollow-eyed and befuddled, but with a prominent forehead that radiated something, a kind of wildness and abandon, the longing of a child, of a generous urchin. In the middle of the street I found him, I took your papa in from the street, where he slept at night on a discarded door, half-dead; somehow he’d crossed the steppes of Russia and arrived in Palestine without friends or family and without knowing a word of Hebrew. Mama was a spinster, twenty-five years old, an orphan who’d raised five brothers and sisters, when he came into her life; she valiantly ignored the gossip of the neighbors and certain members of the family too, whom she didn’t forgive to this day, why, she hadn’t made up with Gamliel and Rochaleh until Aron’s bar mitzvah, and for five whole months, with threats and promises, she kept him from leaving her home; now it was coming back to her, here of all places, like a fountain bursting through layers of grief and oblivion, she felt her old love for him briefly stir. Hinda is Hinda, Gucha laughed to tears once, telling Yochi about those days, she let him think the British were hunting Communist infiltrators, so your papa, nebbich, did her bidding, spread honey on the ground she trod, and what touched his heart most was the way she took care of us little ones; there were five of us around her neck, motherless chicks, with Hinda this, Hinda that, and we saw the way he watched her as she fed us or dressed us or helped us with our homework, we thought he missed his own mama;we hadn’t met Lilly yet, of course, it was only when she turned up that we realized the opposite was true; it was your mama’s strictness, I think, that he liked so much, and then, schrechlich, he started playing the child; so help me, Yochileh, he slipped back to babyhood, cooing at Hinda, pestering her at the dinner table, playing hide-and-seek with us like an overgrown boy, and once, Mama recalled, when I came home from a hard day as a cleaning lady for a rich couple in Rehavia-what I didn’t do for a slice of bread and a couple of olives in those days—I found him rolling on the floor with Gucha and Rivche and Itka and Ruja and Isser, laughing like he didn’t have a care in the world, and I felt a zetz right here in my heart, maybe I spoiled him too much and now I would have to push him forward fast, and that was when I took him in hand and began to teach him Hebrew, and at night, by the light of a kerosene lamp, Yochi, I would sit with him and show him the letters and spell out words, he had a good mind for things like that when we were young, and I wouldn’t let him speak Polish anymore so he’d stop thinking about what happened and not waste any more time being homesick, and whenever he said something in Polish to me, I would say, What? and he would say it again, and again I’d say, What?, till he finally gave up, and Yochi asked wistfully, You mean you were together all that time without being married? And Mama answered, Now, Yochileh, he never laid a finger on me, not him or anyone before him, not like girls these days who serve the compote before the forspeiz, though I won’t tell you he didn’t try, he is a man, after all, but you can rest assured that on our wedding night I was like an apple he was the first to bite. Other food she fed him, recounted Gucha, don’t think your mama was quiet like now, she has more in her little finger than all of us put together, she knew how to hold on to a man, sometimes she went without to give him the best of everything, and we little ones were happy as can be, whoever heard of fresh eggs for breakfast in Jerusalem during the siege, or a roast chicken, Yochileh, imagine, Hinda went all the way to Kibbutz Kiryat Anavim and gave fifty haircuts, snip, snip, snip, in exchange for one poor starving hen, and the feasts she prepared over the Primus stove, first she would brown it, and while other folks were eating dandelion greens, your mama made kreplach and knishes stuffed with potatoes, and all around us people were practically starving to death, but your mama, when she sets her mind to something, nothing can stand in her way. It’s true, Yochileh, recalled Mama, her face veiledwith pleasure, in no time your papa started to improve, the hollows of his cheeks filled out … And now Yochi watched her with amazement, with pity, sitting here in Edna Bloom’s salon with her hands in her lap, defused for the moment, drifting away into the memories she shared so rarely. What was, was. When I retire I’ll write my memoirs and tell you all, oho oho, but now is not the time, Yochi, children don’t like to think what their parents did before they were born and why they turned into who they are, and it’s a well-known fact, she would laugh whenever Yochi screamed that they didn’t understand her, that only the children have psychology nowadays, not the parents, but Yochi perceived from the expressions she wore, from Rivche’s stories and Gucha’s giggles, that little by little Papa put on weight, and the man emerged from the skeleton; even he was amazed at the sight, he had been all of eighteen at the camp in the taiga, and was only now meeting himself as a full-grown man. You should have seen him in front of the mirror, Yochileh, laughed plump little Gucha, combing his hair for hours, slicking it down with brilliantine, that’s right, your papa, and one time our neighbor Miss Hemda Kotlarsky came over to borrow three tablespoons of flour, what else was there to borrow in those days, and when she saw him there, half-naked, fixing a broken window, she started grinning like a fool and forgot to leave, nu, and your mama, Yochi, took the jewels left by the grandmother you never knew out of her kifat, the gold watch, the silver pins, and some Bukharan rug they kept rolled up, and she went on the warpath, as they say; she would disappear from the house for days—where did you go, our Hinda?—but she held her tongue, and it was only years later that she told me, it made me sick, how she wandered through the alleys of the Old City, in those days it was dangerous for Jews there, and a woman alone yet, and she would stalk the
suq in Bethlehem and the casbah in Hebron, that’s how crazy she was, you know Hinda, once she sets her mind to something; so one time she dressed up like a beauty queen—Where are you going, Hinda?—no answer, and she set off to pay a call on that shit, you should pardon the expression, Professor Meislish, and she offered to sell him our own father’s prayer book for the High Holidays, if I’d known I would have killed her, the Venice machzor, he would have turned in his grave; that’s the power of love, you see; and after each excursion she came home exhausted and trembling and pale, and right away she would lift her skirt and unload a veritable market, andthen she would quickly cover the windows with blankets and stuff the keyhole with a garlic-soaked rag—the neighbors shouldn’t be jealous, God forbid, and give us the evil eye, we were living on top of each other in the Kerem Avraham quarter—and when she started cooking, Yochi, her face would light up, with your papa hanging on her apron, devouring the chicken with his eyes and her too, poor girl, he was that hungry, and she would feed him with a teaspoon out of the pot, choosing the fattest morsels, allowing him to lick the gravy, that’s right, you heard me, and there was a look in his eyes, like an animal grateful for its life. You mean our mama let him eat out of the pot? Strange but true, though only until the wedding, five months later, and she even managed to get hold of six eggs, six eggs, you hear, the grandest wedding cake in all Jerusalem, and you should have seen their eyes when they looked at the cake, or better yet, when they looked at your papa. Hinda ran a limp hand over her face, it was like magic, a miracle, how this poor refugee had been transformed, he even had a little goider on him; she smiled to herself, whirling like a queen among the astonished wedding guests, secretly following their gazes, her heart flying high: she saw their scorn and their amazement at the luxury which had fleshed him out, hiding his eyes behind mountainous cheeks, this in the days of austerity, when goldsmiths waxed rich melting down wedding rings, well, at least the women stopped ogling him. No more neighborhood spinsters gulping at the sight of him, or if they did—your mama acknowledged forbearingly—it was only a confusion of appetites, a derangement of gluttony, while she, Hinda, could look inside him and forge his manly charms out of that hulking carcass, like a miner striking gold, but suddenly she understood, she was shocked to her very soul, she felt knives twisting inside her, for Edna Bloom had seen HIM too, the forgotten handsome one, and it was to him she smiled softly now, while Yochi and Mama and Aron watched the way it permeated like precious oil through the rhinoceros hide his soul had grown. His face turned red. Mama burned, but it was too late.