by Roger Cohen
Later that month, on the eve of the Iraq War, Rena went to South Africa with Pauline. Her mother had been offered a “repatriation” ticket by her employer to get her out of harm’s way during George W. Bush’s war. Throughout the trip Rena was depressed. Reunions with cousins and the beauty of what they still called the “old country” could not shake her mood. Once, near the end, Rena told a close friend she wanted to know more about Judaism. What Renata the reborn was saying was that she wanted to get closer to God.
Sometimes she would meet with Yaakov at a neighborhood café. Often he was late, blaming work. She wanted to get close to him again. His marriage to Maya had created a distance—and now they had little Uri. She had begun therapy and urged her brother to do the same.
“Thanks, really. But I’m all right,” Yaakov said. “Everything is fine. And besides it’s terribly expensive, and we do not have enough now with the baby, and the usual spending, you know.”
“I’ll help you, if that’s the problem,” Rena said. “I’ll clean houses, find another job, anything to help you, help us. It will work out, you’ll see.”
“But I’m all right, all right, really.”
“I need you to help me fill in the picture,” Rena insisted gently.
“Which picture?”
“The whole picture—Mom, Dad, the divorce, our life here in Israel, our Jewish identity, South Africa, the past. I am trying to understand how I got to this point, discover who I really am. You know, sometimes I feel like a transplant that did not take.”
“Rena, I don’t think I can go over that again now.”
“Okay. But one day.”
She smiled, before adding: “And, you know, I’m Renata now!”
Later, after his sister’s death, Yaakov began sessions with a therapist he had seen years earlier. He found himself going back to childhood days in Israel, to Pauline’s illness, to the California sabbatical, to the divorce, and as he did so, more and more pain and anger surfaced, and he found himself cursing the fact that all he had was his single account, and Rena, who had been there with him, who had been through everything with him, was gone; and throat choking, sobs welling up, he sees how alone she had been with her memories and how, in her anguish, she had wanted to sift through them with him because she thought it might help; and he remembers how she had told him, with a laugh, that he had often bitten her when they were children; and in his dreams he runs back to the same café, where he had been late, hurrying, hurrying to find Rena and ask for forgiveness, forgiveness for being late, forgiveness for everything, and hug her and hold her and go over their lost, shared memories together.
Rena would ride the bus down Dizengoff Street out to Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan. She gazed at the shoppers pouring into the stores and malls—this modern capitalist state of Israel that had taken form around her, almost overnight it sometimes seemed. She had been born into a raw country where the communal spirit of the kibbutz lingered still. Now she lived in a rich one of high-tech start-ups and high-priced brands and material obsessions, and if you allowed yourself to dream a little, you might imagine you were in California.
Not for long: her journey was punctuated with cries of “Rega! Rega!”—“Wait!”—as the gum-chewing, unshaven drivers tried to hurry the doors shut against some struggling grandmother or straggling child, and passengers eyed one another, making instant inspections of suspect packages or bags, rapid threat assessments of potential Palestinian suicide bombers. Suicide to kill others—it was a strange idea, and it seemed to be everywhere. Or perhaps it was not so strange, given the aggression in suicide. She could not think straight. The idea of it haunted her. On into Tel Aviv’s eastern sprawl she went, leaving the Mediterranean behind, crossing the eight lanes of the Ayalon, or ring road, past the Azrieli Center towers, which had gone up a few years earlier at the former location of the city’s garbage truck parking garage. She felt her gaze tugged toward the skyscrapers. Rectangular and circular, male and female, they loomed over the ramshackle sprawl of Tel Aviv, their glint greenish and magnetic and sickly in the sunlight.
It was a relief to get off the bus. Bar-Ilan was a haven, a large campus of lovely trees and unlovely buildings, as much an architectural hodgepodge as Tel Aviv itself. It had been founded in 1955 with the aim of blending the teaching of Talmud and secular academic studies. It sought to synthesize the ancient and modern, the sacred and the material, the spiritual and the scientific.
Through an old friend of the family, Naomi Becker (not her real name), Rena had secured a job helping out in the music school at the university’s Yehuda Amir Institute for the Advancement of Social Integration. Becker, another South African drawn to Israel by the desire to make a personal contribution to the building of a Jewish state, had done her doctorate on children’s musical understanding, with a focus on a Zulu song. Her department created teaching programs in music: material for kindergarten and schools, exercises for teachers, courses in music therapy. Rena was particularly active in a project developed for the Jaffa Institute, a center for Jewish and Arab children from underprivileged backgrounds who would go there after school, get a hot meal, and attend a variety of classes. Rena made a video chronicling the children’s progress.
Everyone liked Rena. She was quiet, cooperative, and responsible. She was natural, a young woman without airs. Her soft, low voice was soothing, her smile gentle. Nobody could know the courage it took sometimes to produce that sweet smile. If you happened to mention you had not had anything to eat, she would be back with a sandwich. When somebody left the department, she arranged the gift. She felt they were a great team and let that be known. She played the piano. She had a strong social conscience. She combined the qualities needed to get ahead. But when Becker suggested she could go further, perhaps move into the administration, she demurred. She still did not know what to do with her life.
Becker knew through Rena’s parents of her mental difficulties, but they were not apparent. Nobody else in the department seems to have been aware of them. “Some days she would say she could not concentrate,” Becker said. “I’d say, Take a break and come back later. There were times she was more bubbly, and others when she was very quiet, but not, it seemed to me, beyond normal mood swings.”
Rena’s uncertainty about her future was a regular subject of conversation. “We had long talks about that. She started a course in communications. She talked about pursuing art therapy. She took yoga classes. One day she arrived very low. We were going to install a stand with our music materials for a conference at a sports center, and it was very hot. She had to load and unload and set up all the stuff, and you know, by the end of the day, she was elated! There was someone there teaching capoeira. She’d decided to do a course.”
That was Rena, always questioning, tripping, and getting up again.
On Wednesday, April 30, 2003, Rena and her mother have breakfast on Gordon Street. It is a beautiful day. The pomegranate juice is sweet. They head for the beach. On the way they pass a young army recruit in her olive-green uniform, chewing gum, rifle at her side. Rena notices her pearl earrings and the reddish-brown-and-gold Shulamith hair cascading out from under her orange beret. Her black boots are polished. Perhaps she is going to an IDF rehearsal for Yom Hazikaron, Remembrance Day, which will begin in a week. Rena likes the solemnity and silence of that day as the fallen for Israel are recalled, and the way it flows into the celebrations and picnics marking Independence Day, when flags and pennants are everywhere and pride in the achievements of the young nation is irrepressible and air force jets streak across the blue sky in formation.
At the corner of Ben Yehuda and Gordon, there is a store selling T-shirts. She notices one that says, “America don’t worry, Israel is behind you,” and manages a half-smile. Someone behind her, talking real estate, says, “If you miss it, you miss it—you know how life is.” The story of Israel and Palestine, she thinks, is a story of missed opportunities. But then perhaps there is no room for both, just as there seems to be no plac
e where Rena belongs, precisely. Oh, sometimes, she just wants to stop her brain, decouple it from whatever current keeps prodding it in different directions. Life is just one snake-oil salesman after another, hustling to make a buck. Not even Zionism could resist that. The kibbutzim seem quaint these days, renouncing possessions, sharing their passion. Even the generals have brokers. Oh, the heat. Life is molten, like gold. She wants to be in a place so quiet that all she can hear is her breathing. She wants to live in a place that is not a “situation.” She wants to swim out two hundred meters into the ocean and dispose of all her pills, the pills that steal her energy, the pills that muffle and cover up and falsify. The pills she hates. No, more than hates—hate is like love—it is more implacable than that. It is loathing. She wants a life within defined borders.
Rena shuts her eyes. She can still taste the cardamom in the coffee. It fades slowly like the sound she loves of the ram’s horn. You have to be perfect in a new country, almost armor-plated, in order to adapt and belong and survive transplantation. Dad worked so hard. He helped, day after day, to build Israel, a noble undertaking after all. This beautiful Hebrew language had been as good as dead a century ago! Mom learned Israel through its archaeology and guided tourists through the Israel Museum. That was also noble. They were good people. They were decent people. Meyer-Dude with his data! They did their best and fucked up like all parents do. An unhappy marriage is unhappier in an adopted land. Our longings are merciless. It had not been simple for Pauline to remake her life. When Rena was nine, she had prayed at the Western Wall for her ears to be pierced. Her cousin from Cleveland prayed for a Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am. Or was it a Mustang? The city hums. The children chatter. The malls murmur, Buy me, buy me, buy me. What’s that cosmetic where body meets soul? Why is life always glimpsed as if through the slats of a blind? All the dogs here in upscale Tel Aviv are groomed, unlike the stray dogs down in the wadi of her childhood, where the figs broke their skins in their ripeness and she tossed pebbles into the brook. Before the aggression came and took over, the shouting and the shoving, the high-tech miracle with all its intoxicating millions, cars nosing in front of each other, never giving way at intersections. Intersections, dreams of surgeons cutting into her, getting sectioned, admitted to hospital whether you liked it or not, her scarred ovary with its emptied follicles, cesarean sections. She would wake up in a cold sweat.
Rena does not know what she can say to her mother to convey the raging in her mind. They stroll up and down the beach beside the sea where the sand is firm. Police are everywhere; there has been another suicide bombing early that morning, at Mike’s Place on the beach. Three Israelis have been killed. It would have been much worse if the security guard had not stopped the bombers from getting inside. You can be dead with scarcely a scratch depending on how the shrapnel sprays.
Rena tells Pauline about her sleep issue, about her job issue, about her indecision issue, about her medication issue, about her intifada issue, about her Iraq War issue, about her fatigue issue, about her psychiatrist-in-Jerusalem issue. She does not talk about the madness issue. That might be awkward. She was brushed with madness like a truffle brushed with cocoa dust! Mom, I’m crazy! Would that work? Nor about the fear issue, which comes and goes. Mom, I’m scared shitless I’m going to kill myself! Oy, life can be heavy. We have learned, here in the home of the Jews, how not to say things clearly, how not to talk about the Palestinian villages that were emptied, how not to talk about the nuclear missiles at Dimona, how not to talk about the occupation, how not to talk about where Israel’s borders lie. I’ve been scared all my life, Rena thinks. Yiush, she whispers, so lovely in Hebrew: despair. Yiush-yiush-yiush, like the sea receding.
“What would you like to do? What do you feel like doing?” Pauline says.
“I would like to go somewhere else.”
The words hang there in their vapor of ambiguity.
“Somewhere else?”
“Yes, Mom, somewhere else.”
“You mean, like abroad?”
“No, Mom, not abroad. Israel is my home. I’ve tried that. Maybe a moshav, a village community. Somewhere very quiet. I have to leave my job. Naomi is so good to me, and I love the kids in Jaffa, but it just isn’t working for me.”
“At least it’s a job.”
“But I’m tired. I don’t want to take the medication anymore. I’m flat.”
Pauline is silent. She feels helpless. Perhaps if Rena comes up to Jerusalem over the weekend, they can talk to the psychiatrist, see what Meyer thinks, and plan some new course. That would be a good first step. The medication cannot be right if it makes Rena feel awful. But then, would she feel worse without it? They stroll back up Gordon. A shutter is slammed shut. Everyone is jumpy. At a café a man is seated with a notebook. The city is full of journalists covering the intifada. To be paid to observe life—that would not be bad. Rena thinks she might be able to tell stories even if she is not sure she could order the facts. Or decide what the facts are—because, ha-ha, here everyone has a different set of “facts.” She might be able to describe painful situations, but she is not sure she could walk away from them afterward. Yes, life is molten, like gold. She is not sure she could separate one strand from another, deploy inadequate words and package life into stories.
Rena goes to work, and that afternoon Pauline returns to Jerusalem. Dusk falls. Rena wanders the streets of a rattled Tel Aviv. She cannot think straight. Her footsteps cloy as if in mud. She feels she may fall. She will go to Jerusalem Thursday and talk to the doctor.
That night she scarcely sleeps. When she lies on her left side, she feels her heart thumping. Her mouth is dry, she feels hot, close to panic.
Thursday morning is May 1. It is a time of rebirth. No more bombs had exploded the night before. What was that song they played at work whose first line was “Even on a heavy, hot day”? Rena crawls out of bed. May! Trees are budding. She forces herself to dress and go board the bus out past the Azrieli towers with their sickly greenish glint. She gazes at them, as usual. The serried ranks of the high-rises are dense as organ pipes. They have never looked so hideous. She is late for work. She hates being late. She believes in serious, committed work. She believes in her Israel, a place at last where Jews belong, if only she could feel her belonging.
That morning, in a drawer, she has stumbled on a passage she had written down in Canada: “It is an individual choice how long you want to hold on to the tree of life, how long before you feel that you have shown your true colors and lived your life. If you have lived your life and had your moment then it will be much easier to let go. You will know and your loved ones will know your unique beauty and it will be something they remember and live with. Then you truly achieve immortality.”
Yiush-yiush-yiush: the whisperer-reaper who will not go away. It is death that turns time into a living thing.
She will go on. She will persevere. The trees offer welcome shade on the Bar-Ilan campus. There is Naomi Becker with her big smile—such a good, kind woman. Rena thinks of the children in Jaffa covering their faces with their hands in shyness, singing scales, learning how to measure time through rhythm, learning that there is a time for self-expression, and a time for another’s expression, and a time for joint expression. Music demanded mutual respect. It was a valuable lesson for children.
And now, in the way time skips for her these days, Rena is in Naomi’s cramped little office telling her that things are not good and that, for the first time, she will have to leave early. She is suffering intermittences. “I’m so sorry, I feel so low. I’m very upset about my medication.” She will go to Jerusalem for the weekend, see Mom and Dad and the psychiatrist. She will somehow pry the demons from her throat. Naomi tells her not to worry. Of course it is no problem to leave early. She is uneasy, however, and calls Meyer in Jerusalem.
Rena walks to the bus stop. In the distance a siren wails. The bus driver wears reflector shades. She closes her eyes. The city hums. A soldier’s beret is tucked into her epau
let. Blue-and-white Israeli flags flutter here and there, the bunting of happy-uneasy Israel. Forgive me, forgive me. Kids with smiley cartoon figures on their T-shirts. Stay gold, stay gold. This is life—it is not a situation. The only life you have, for all its obstacles. The bus lurches and sways toward the city. What do the suicide bombers think before they detonate themselves? I am going somewhere else. The moon is like a fingernail.
At the Ayalon, Rena gets out. The Azrieli towers, magnetlike, attract her. It will be cool and fragrant and purring in the past-erasing mall. It will be the obverse of the Israel of the kibbutzniks who got their hands dirty to change the land and change Jews at the same time. On the escalator into the tower, she notices surveillance cameras. So there will be film of her. The store names and brand names and advertising slogans come at her in a gaudy torrent: SEXY SALE, CALL IT SPRING, TURN IT ON, KISS ME, IT’S A MAN’S WORLD, INTIMA LINGERIE, TAKE A DEEP BREATH, ONE LIFE LIVE IT WELL, BASIC IS BEAUTIFUL, IT’S A MAN’S WORLD, FOX BABY, MAGNOLIA, ZIP, REPLAY, CRAZY LINE, LIFE AIN’T JUST BLACK ’N’ WHITE, IMPRESS, ELECTRIC SUMMER. This Israel of luxury articles and antidepressants is a stranger to her, perhaps a stranger to itself. Rena’s head spins. She looks up at the sun slanting through the glass roof.
Mom and Dad will understand. It has been a long story and in the end an unbearable one. They will be better off without her burden. I only tried to love you with the full wingspan of my heart. I’m sorry for causing such a commotion. She must go elsewhere in order not to create any further disturbances. Her cell phone rings. It is Meyer calling from Jerusalem. She hesitates but does not pick up.
Now she stands on the second-floor terrace. The warm wind is in her face. Children dart about squealing, pursued by anxious parents. Two hundred feet below, people move on their set paths, disembodied little shapes. They are very busy going nowhere, like a cloud of gnats. Stop! On the far side of the broad ring road, a massive Israeli flag is draped down the side of a building. She presses her palms to those rosy cheeks. Independence Day is coming, picnics and gatherings and laughter. Israel will be fifty-five years old! And she will tumble, a lovely cousin with an old family curse, down the length of the flag she loves, the blue and white in which her Zionist great-grandfather’s coffin was draped.