The Book of Intimate Grammar

by David Grossman

  Edna and Papa walked out of the salon together and into Edna’s bedroom. With an arching of her eyebrow Mama sent Yochi after them. Aron stayed. He wanted to go with Papa, but he didn’t dare, out of loyalty to Mama perhaps, or maybe he couldn’t go in there with him just as he couldn’t go into the water at the seashore when Papa was there. He sat in silence, avoiding Mama’s flashing eyes: Look at you,sit up straight, stop sniffing, and now Papa was encountering Edna’s bedroom, the picture with the bull and the dressing table and the tiny basin she had installed in the corner for some inscrutable reason, and of course the big bed; sometimes Aron made so bold as to lie down on it, incredibly comfortable, he would say to himself to excuse the languor that came over him there, it was like being carried off to a warm den of sleep, and if you ran your hand over the bed, it too would fall asleep. Once he had drowsed off there, but luckily the news beeps from the apartment next door woke him up a quarter of an hour before Edna was due home; just think, what if she’d found you fast asleep on her bed.

  A screech and a groan, a giggle and a gasp were heard, they must have moved the bed into the center of the room. And what if Papa accidentally tripped and fell into it. Aron chuckled to himself. Big Papa lying spreadeagled forever in that bed. What if. Then Aron would have no choice, he would have to tear the wall down by himself. He stifled a smile, so as not to annoy Mama, but she noticed nothing. She was sitting stiffly in the white leather armchair, cursing herself for the greed which had landed her in this miserable trap. Get the green felt board, Aron prompted Papa from afar, where she tacks the snapshots of herself in strange, exotic places; once a year she took a trip, and then for two weeks he had the bathroom all to himself; in one of the snapshots she wore a glamorous straw hat; in another, a tall round turban; she posed in front of a pagoda, or a totem, or she peeked out behind a pair of enormous sunglasses in a piazza flocked with pigeons, or looked down on a grassy meadow from a cable car; and there were train tickets tacked on the felt board too, and picture postcards, museum tickets, theater programs, receipts from hotels, a matchbox with a photograph of her and some dark-skinned man with a droopy mustache. The snapshots, though taken at various locations, always showed Edna wearing the same expression, which Aron had seen for the first time when she greeted them at the door: she was bursting with joy.

  They returned to the salon, the three of them, and Yochi blushed, avoiding Mama’s eyes. “Time to get to work,” growled Papa, staring at the floor.

  “Just a moment, please!” cried Edna Bloom, and ran to get her camera. “This is history,” she explained to Mama, who almost choked.

  Again she tingled with excitement, with minuscule emotions, herfingers quivering. She asked Papa to wave his sledgehammer in the air. He was helpless before her; she peeked through the eye of the camera and saw him, and kept him waiting a little longer. What could I do, insult her? You saw how she was. And what if she told you to yowl like a tomcat, would you do that too? And then Edna squealed “Berdi berdi!” and Papa was bathed in magnesium light, and for an instant he looked smaller, more compact than he actually was; frozen and frightened like a hunted animal. And Edna Bloom whispered, “Now please,” and sank into the white leather armchair, winding around herself as though she had no bones, and then, inexplicably, she began to suck her thumb with a dreamy, faraway look on her face, and those strangers, those silent potato eaters all but vanished from her elegant salon.

  16

  Three sounds reverberated through the air: hammer blows as the wall gave way, the rumbling of thunder after weeks of drought, and Edna’s piercing shrieks.

  At the age of forty, after a red-eyed birthday, she had made the rash decision to give herself this frightening gift. Again Papa struck the wall and again Edna shrieked. It meant she wouldn’t have enough money for a trip abroad this year; it also meant perhaps that for the very reason she had dared to destroy something, she would have to stay in this apartment forever; and in such an apartment, with a big salon and a single bedroom, there would be no child.

  Again and again he stormed the wall, and Edna screamed instinctively, her hands fluttering at her sides; she wanted him to stop, she tried to stall, to breathe, but there was no going back, Papa pounded mercilessly, and the three of them sat watching her with startled eyes. Mama waved to Papa, signaling him to let up, but he was hard at work now, or at least pretending to be, deaf to her wild-goose cries, and not until the wall was properly smashed did he slowly turn to Aron and the women. With the back of his hand he wiped the sweat off his brow. How agile he was: the moment he picked up the hammer he seemed to plug into a source of power and grace; he smiled at her and said, Well, that’s that. And Edna bowed her head.

  He had worked for an hour, stopping only twice, to take off his blue work shirt, leaving his undershirt on, and a little while later, to takethat off too, with his back to the attentive audience. The smell of his sweat was overpowering, but it was Mama, not Edna, who finally went to open the window. Peeking out she saw a number of neighbors gathered on the sidewalk, Peretz and Sophie Atias with their new baby, the Kaminers, Felix and Zlateh Botenero anxiously clutching their little dog, all of them gazing up as though waiting for a mysterious communication. Pshi! she almost spat at them. They looked like fish down there, opening their O-shaped mouths in the hope of catching crumbs. When Papa noticed the expression on her face he too approached the window. Smiling down at them, he waved his hammer at the puffy gray sky. Don’t you worry, he joked, defying the elephantine clouds with his three-kilo hammer, we’ll show ’em what thunder is, and smiling roguishly, he vanished from the window and returned to pound the walls.

  Edna Bloom sat in her armchair, one of her virginal white leather armchairs; she had neglected to try them out at the store, and was mortified to hear the squeaks, the demon of reality mocking her again. Her eyes were half-closed now, her lips were parted, as though she was burning inside. Now and then she would listlessly offer Mama or Aron the snack she had prepared, though it was clear to them that this was but a last hollow gesture of gentility.

  Papa swung like a sledgehammer. Heavy chunks of stone and plaster piled up at his feet, as he vanished behind a thick white cloud of dust and slowly reappeared. He pounded the wall hundreds of times that day, trading his three-kilo hammer for the five-kilo hammer, sending shivers up the wall with his chisel and screwdriver. Every blow was solemn and precise, expressing his respect for inert matter, his high regard for the adversary and the rites of war. And the wall surrendered to Papa, yielding to him more and more, holding in the pain, the extent of which was slowly manifested in the jagged blocks and exposed wires, and the rusty rods protruding from its side. “This wall is thick,” said Papa, stopping to catch his breath. “They don’t make them like this anymore.” He patted the wall the way you might pat a good horse. Edna trembled.

  Every blow was a shock to her, goring her inside. Only when the destruction began did she realize how deeply the house possessed her after thirteen years; for there was a bedroom Edna and a salon Edna and a kitchen Edna too; in each she became a different person, andpassing from one to the other, she still experienced a subtle shift, an alteration of her spirit, different filings rising to meet the magnet; and there were things and people she could contemplate only in one particular room, by the light of one dear lamp and no other, and it was unthinkable that there should be a room without a basin, without, that is, even the hope of running water, which is why just as soon as she moved in, and for a considerable sum of money, Edna had installed little washbasins everywhere: in the hall, on the balcony, even in a niche of her bedroom; and of course there were the paintings, her reproductions, as she liked to call them, savoring the word like melting chocolate, and she even owned an original she had purchased in Montmartre, representing a shipwreck in a stormy sea, the bearded painter had a braid and a shiny gold earring, and his eyes were disquieting, like the painting, though she wasn’t really sure it was art, and then there were her books, many of which she hadn’t read yet,
reading was a sacred duty, she would wait for a time of perfect peace, but she liked to feel them like a protective wall around her keeping out the world, and there was her collection of paperweights, shake them and dream, and her dolls of the world on display, and her elegant desk with back issues of National Geographicneatly arranged on it and her PROJECT notebooks, as she modestly referred to them, and, of course, the twenty-one afghans and carpets and scatter rugs side to side throughout the apartment, one from each country she had visited, so that as she walked over them in her bare feet she was stepping lightly from Mexico to Portugal, from Kenya to Finland, camel’s hair and sheep’s wool and leopardskin and broadloom, like a stroll through the pages of a colorful stamp album, and there was Edna aged twenty-six and Edna aged thirty, and Edna the bitter-hearted after her love affair with a married man, he deceived her, no, you deceived yourself, and those faceless men who did what they did; she was like a frightened child on a runaway train, and when she finally got off she sank into a torpor, isolation petrifying all around her; how had she passed through all those stages that lead two strangers, two labyrinths, from the sublime to the animal, and once a year, when she traveled abroad, she would wink her inner eye, entwining with another body from a different world, an ephemeral lover picked up for the night, only she wouldn’t allow anyone to kiss her mouth; but once she fell in love, in “Lisboa,” she pronounced, “Bliss-boa,” at a tourist club she had ventured into, what a man you had for a night, you drovehim mad with passion till he swore he would leave his wife and children for you, and you had to persuade him to be reasonable, you brave and noble girl, and there was Edna of the university, with a single seminar paper left unfinished, and Edna after the removal of a growth in her womb, and Edna who spent weeks chewing dough to feed the gosling that fell into her nest and died in her hand, and Edna of the highs and lows, who sat here writing a letter all night long, but didn’t swallow an overdose in the end, and now, after a few blows from a sledgehammer, everything collapsed in a heap, her wall, the rooms of her soul.

  At six-thirty that evening Mama cried “Enough!” and her voice was hoarse from the dust and the silent curses, as if she had spent the whole time screaming the same word over and over. Papa heard. His red neck, gleaming with drops of sweat, contracted. He swung a few times more. For a moment he seemed about to rebel, as though he didn’t want to stop yet. She moved her lips to speak, but no sound came out. Papa slowed to a halt. And dropped the hammer. He reassumed his erstwhile shape, spreading out and thickening. As he swept up the rubble and the dust and the chunks of plaster, Edna waved limply and said, Never mind now. Go. Tomorrow at the same time. Papa glanced back at her. He was bewildered. He had not turned his head in the past hour, or seen the transformation taking place. His own face was also transformed now, though Aron couldn’t say how.

  That’s just the way Moshe looked, fixing up the house for me when we were newlyweds.

  “The ladder I’ll leave here,” he said.

  “Yes, do,” whispered Edna.

  “Tomorrow I’ll come again,” he said.

  “I’ll look after it for you,” she murmured.

  “How about that rain?” he asked too loudly, hurrying to the window, massaging his right arm.

  But the heavy clouds were moping over their interrupted journey. Far away, beyond the rocky hills, winter was closing in, galloping its chariots; a grim commander hurrying to a remote province where cries of mutiny had been heard. And the startled procession emerged through the door of Edna Bloom’s into the cold of the evening, with Mama in the lead, followed by Yochi, and then Aron, and Papa bringing up the rear, head bowed, like a bull led back to his pen for the night.

  17

  Supper was lapped in unbearable silence. Papa chewed and swallowed and asked for more, the work must have whet his appetite, and Mama dished his food out carefully, as though feeding the flames of an insatiable fire. Woodenly she watched him lean over his plate, his forehead glowing red in a rising crescendo of sucking and gasping and gulping. After supper Aron took the garbage out, but as soon as Mama handed him the pail, he knew; he knew by her face and her sideways glance. Near the rusty barrel of heating oil behind the building, Aron crouched down and stuck his hand in. He groped around in the muck until he found it: a stiff package tied with string. He took it out and unwrapped it: inside he found an old pair of high heels, but there was no whiff of champagne. When he finished dumping the garbage, he took the shoes down to the furnace room and hid them in his lair, together with the flowered dress, the striped bathing suit, and the shorn braid, now full of mildew.

  A year had passed since Mama and Papa put Grandma in the hospital, after the scenes she made at his bar mitzvah. Again she had fought like an animal, spitting and scratching and cursing at them, though without words this time, she could only cry and snort, so it was easy for Mama to help Papa load her into the ambulance. And later, at home, Mama put on her brown-check dress and packed some sandwiches and jars of sour cream and a bottle of tomato juice and a few squares of Grandma’s favorite chocolate, wrapped in wax paper and nylon, with a labelon every sandwich and a rubber band, and she put it all in her bag and set off for the hospital accompanied by Aron and Yochi.

  They found Grandma Lilly lying in the ward, after her sedative. She quietly gazed at the visitors but didn’t seem to recognize them. It’s me, Aron, he whispered with a chill of dismay. See, Grandma, it’s me, but she didn’t remember him. Mama, who was ready to cry, with a hanky in her hand, rose swiftly to the occasion and went to work, wiping the goo from Grandma’s eyes, arranging her pillows, massaging the soles of her swollen feet. She handled her without disgust, moving over her like a nimble spider. A pockmarked nurse with a scowling face brought supper in. She was about to feed Grandma when Mama grabbed the tray from her with a benevolent smile, rinsed Grandma’s dentures in the sink, stuck them carefully back in her mouth, jiggled her jaws till they were firmly in place, propped her up, tilted her head back, and started patiently spooning yogurt into her.

  Every day they went to visit her. Sometimes Aron ate lunch at home by himself, and then hurried to the hospital. Mama and Papa would already be there, next to Grandma’s bed, and usually Yochi too. Grandma lay in her bed, lost and tiny, barely moving. Maybe she didn’t notice the commotion around her, all the effort his parents had put into giving her a haimish feeling. She had a little cupboard by the bed, which Mama arranged for her as only she knew how: Grandma’s bathrobe, her soap dish, a glass for her dentures, a pillowcase from home, an embroidered serviette, her favorite comb, the elastic bandages for her swollen feet, a tube of hand cream, a jar of special face lotion, and a hot-water bottle—she had everything she needed, it was beautiful to see. With tender devotion his parents watched over her, Yochi and Aron at their side, quietly discussing the concerns of the day or the news of the world: about the Kaminers’ youngest daughter who landed herself a fiancé, but they’re keeping it a secret that her father is sick, because kidneys are hereditary, or about the latest invention, Papa told them, designed to help people like him fill in the Toto automatically, it guesses where to put the X’s all by itself, and mark my words, a hundred years from now everything will be automatic, they won’t need people anymore, everyone will be replaced by robots, there’ll be robots, robots everywhere, and Mama told them about the new counter at the supermarket, with delicacies like fish roe and lox and moldy green cheese at seventeen pounds for two hundred grams, horrid-looking stuff, but still,there’s a feeling of culture, a modern, European atmosphere. Every now and then she would get up to rearrange Grandma’s pillow, to change her position or wipe her nose. She performed her duties with lofty dedication, refusing to entrust her to anyone else, and there were already arguments at the hospital, with the nurses and with Yochi too, till Mama finally relented and gave Yochi the task of combing Grandma’s hair, and Yochi fought like a lion to stop Mama from cutting it when it started growing long, and Papa’s task, besides his calming influence, was to pick Grandma up so M
ama could smooth the sheets or put the bedpan under her, and even though he was very strong, his face would turn a bright red. Mamchu’s getting heavy, he blurted, she looks like a bird, but she weighs a ton, and Aron, whose special task was to make sure Grandma’s little toe, the rebel, didn’t start sneaking up on its neighbor, reflected that maybe she was heavy because there wasn’t enough life left in her, it’s life that gives lightness, and a moment later the sneaky little toe was curling up again.

  By now he knew all the labyrinths of the hospital. On his way to the canteen at four o’clock, he would slip away, peek in at patients, accidentally on purpose walk through corridors marked FOR STAFF ONLY; he had a little game he played with the cracks in the tiles: on the fourth floor there were big tiles, and once a day he would stroll nonchalantly past the children in their blue hospital robes, not all of them looked sick, and whenever they tried to talk to him he simply wouldn’t answer, he was a tourist, no speak Hebrew, he would walk to the end of the ward, pause, turn around, and walk right back again through a double file of children, amusing himself with his private game—never stepping on the cracks. All the doctors and nurses on Grandma’s ward knew him already. Every day he checked the roster to see who was on duty, and he would offer to do errands for the nurses and doctors, and when they saw they could rely on him, they even let him answer the telephone; he would pick up the receiver and say: Neurology, good afternoon. When Purim came around he volunteered (What are you volunteering for, they’re lousy with money, these hospitals) to premiere his new Houdini act for the staff and patients of the hospital, and he could hardly wait, he went over and over it in his head, it was a long time since his last show, he imagined himself escaping out of boxes and crates and vaults, they would stream in from all the wards to see him. And now, ladies and gentlemen, the dignified administrator would announce,the wonder boy, our own Israeli Houdini, will show us his breathtaking feats, and then a pair of twin musclemen would lock him in a medicine cabinet, the kind with a skull and crossbones painted on it, and Aron would be inside, his wrists handcuffed, running out of air, and a worried murmur passes through the audience. Sixty seconds of oxygen left, whispers the administrator in his black top hat, and Aron pries the little saw blade he swiped from shop class out of his trouser cuff and cuts through the knots with his sweaty fingers. Thirty seconds left, counts the administrator with a worried frown, and there in the darkness, he inhales the medicine smells and nearly suffocates, but reassures himself that it’s only a cabinet, made of steel; yet it emanates a certain nastiness the way a seemingly courteous salesman can be nasty, or the way a teacher can be really vicious behind a façade of decency. So sorry, my boy, I have my orders, they made me into what I am, a padlocked medicine cabinet, and from under the label on his corduroy trousers he takes out the passkey, turns it coolly, coolly my eye, just thinking about it makes him break out in a sweat, yes, he turns this celebrated key in the lock of the handcuffs, with precision and finesse, the way Eli Ben-Zikri, the hood, taught him, and suddenly he touches it, that tiny thing that makes them squeal, Stick it in, stick it in, and then there’s a click and his hands are free. Twenty seconds to go, whispers the administrator, anxiously running his finger over the whip in his hand, and the crowd begins to swish like foam in the sea, the crowd of strangers, that’s how it always is, strangers, maybe there were people there who secretly hoped Aron would fail this time and stay locked up forever, and that was weird, because if he came out alive, they would be happier than anybody, they would burst with happiness, for they, most of all, would be redeemed, and he turns his belt buckle inside out, feels around for his black lead nail, and with the virtuoso fingers of a guitarist, he fits it into the padlock on the cabinet; five seconds left, four, three, two, and at the last second, when the oxygen’s almost gone and the administrator cracks his whip, out bursts Aron, and the audience goes wild: What a feat, how did he do it, and Aron stands blinking in the light, his name on their lips, shouted to the rhythm of their applause; without his name they would be sitting in silence like frozen statues, but his name on their lips fills them with life, go explain that to someone like Shalom Sharabani, who sneers at him whenever he performs at parties, go explain what it means to burst out like thedawn, beloved as a baby, as if hearing your name for the first time on their breath, feeling like a person who has been allowed to peek at his cherished guitar in a dark pawnshop, but Aron pays no notice to the applause, he scorns the cheap fleeting love of the audience, he leaps off the stage, pursued by the spotlight, and the people stand up to look for him: Where is he going, who is that old woman in the wheelchair, what’s so special about her, still pretty, with a porcelain complexion but vacant eyes, and he leans over her, his hands on the arms of her chair, and watches the excitement in the air stirring her back to life, making her lashes flutter. It’s me, Grandma; a finger goes up, trembles antennalike in front of his face. It’s me, look at me, see; her lips wind around the core of his name, because she has to remember, she has to dredge it out of the mire. So what if she’s confused, he revolts, so what if she doesn’t even recognize Papa, her own son, she’s not allowed to forget my name, I’m not him, I’m me …