by Eshkol Nevo
On the last day of your shivah, there were already fewer people in the house. After they left, only Hava Rosenthal and I remained in the house. As she helped me load the dishwasher, she said, “It’s nice that all of his court reporters came. Very touching.”
“He treated them exceptionally well.”
“Yes, he was a true gentleman, your Michael.”
“Yes, he was.”
Then she said, “Adar wasn’t here today.”
“Adar wasn’t here yesterday either. He’s not in touch with us.”
“I never really understood what exactly happened between you. Was it because of…the accident he had?”
“We don’t like to talk about, Michael and I.”
“Okay.”
It was actually because she didn’t pressure me that I told her. Standing in the kitchen wiping glasses. It just came out of me. And the more I spoke, the less sympathetic she looked. She stepped back from me toward the wall until the back of her neck almost touched the bulletin board that used to be covered with pictures of Adar until you destroyed them, and now only bills were tacked on it.
When I finished talking, she didn’t console or support me, she only said coolly, “You made your choice, Devora.” And I never heard from her or the other members of our book club again. She must have told them. And they must have thought I should be stoned, or at least not invited to the next meeting, when Elsa Morante’s History was going to be discussed.
Truthfully, I have nothing to say in my defense except that I didn’t believe I could live without you, Michael. And without him, shameful as it is, I knew I could.
Avner Ashdot turned the wheel and we drove onto the bypass road. Like Hava Rosenthal at the shivah, he shifted his body away from me.
Freud was right, I thought, as I turned away from him too, to look out the window. All men are actually searching for a substitute mother, and I’m not a good enough mother. I was never a good enough mother. When he was three months old, I handed Adar over to a nanny. I couldn’t bear my own powerlessness. I had graduated from high school with honors and from college with honors (right behind you on the dean’s list), and with Adar—from the first moment, all I felt was failure.
You tried to encourage me. You’d say: It’s not you. It’s the child. He’s difficult. And at first, when I was still sure of it, I’d say, There’s no such thing as a difficult child.
Through the window I saw clusters of Bedouin tin shacks crowded together. In one of them—I couldn’t help imagining it—a mother must be calling to her children to come and eat lunch. The heat is blazing inside the tin shack, and her galabiya is black and thick, but she feels comfortable inside her body. The role of mother comes naturally to her. She gives them food, a tin plate for each child. Her movements are effortless. The tin plates slide naturally from her hands to land in the right place in front of each child. The smells coming from the plates are good. Let’s say, rice with cooked carrots. The children arrive. Laughing loudly. Something is making them laugh. She laughs with them.
And if I had been a natural-born mother—the thought passed through my mind—would it have helped?
And if you had been a natural-born father, Michael?
Avner Ashdot pressed up against the window with the entire weight of his shoulder on it.
I can feel when an act of judgment is taking place where I am. And I knew he was judging me now. And finding me guilty. I thought, I can forget about compliments. About his hand on mine. Maybe it’s better that way. It was too early for me to open my heart to someone anyway. The conditions weren’t right yet.
Another sign pointed to a farm. This time it was Azrikam’s. I remembered what those farms were called. Isolated farms. I think you once ruled in favor of an NPO that represented Beduoins in a dispute about grazing lands between them and the owner of one of those farms…Or did you rule against them?
Avner Ashdot pressed the button that opened the window. Hot, dry air blew into the car. His right hand once again moved for a fraction of a second toward his shirt pocket as if reaching for a pack of cigarettes, and once again returned to the wheel.
“When did you stop?” I asked, rescuing us from the strained silence in the car.
“Stop what?”
“Smoking.”
He smiled. “Five weeks and four days. But who’s counting?”
“I imagine it must be hard.”
“I’m doing it for her. For Maya. She hates that I smoke. Always did. So I’m trying…for her…to improve. But yes, breaking any habit is hard.”
“You know, Avner”—I called him by name for the first time—“I think that after I’ve been so open with you, you should be open with me and tell me, if you would be so kind, where we’re going.”
“To Noit, a cooperative farm in the Arava,” he said. “She lives there. My daughter.”
As if in response to his words, a tornado of sand and dust suddenly swirled at the side of the road and then settled.
Why in the world does he want me to go to see his daughter with him? Am I supposed to advocate for him with her? How? Is he going to introduce me as his escort? His girlfriend, heaven forbid? And why is he suddenly willing, after saying it was impossible, to tell me where we were going?
I didn’t know. But I decided to do as he did: not to ask directly for answers, but to clear a bypass road leading to them.
I asked, “So how did she end up here…in the Arava?”
“She took an undergraduate course in desert agriculture and it fascinated her. While she was still at school, she told us that that’s what she wanted to do later. But we didn’t take her seriously. A girl who grew up in cafés, how could the desert possibly interest her? Right after submitting her final paper, she got on a bus and went to the Arava. Before she left, she arranged jobs she would do in exchange for room and board and told us that we couldn’t even imagine the huge expanses down there.”
“She’s right,” I said, and looked out the window. From the car all the way to the horizon, there wasn’t a single house, only acacia trees, endless acacia trees.
Avner went on, “She was so happy there. The first time since she was born that our little girl was happy. So we were happy for her.”
(Adar had his golden age too—remember Michael? The vacation between ninth and tenth grades. He got a job at the Safari in Ramat Gan. Do you remember suddenly noticing what a beautiful smile he had? For the first time in ages, I saw a flash of hope in your eyes. And then—money went missing from the cash register. And the internal investigation they carried out found that Adar was guilty. He claimed he hadn’t done anything. He screamed and cried. But even we didn’t completely believe him. With great effort and much sweet-talking, we persuaded that pig of a manager not to report the incident to the police. But Adar never set foot in the Safari again, and that beautiful smile disappeared as if it had never been.)
And if we had believed him? If we had believed him with all our hearts and taken his side, would it have helped? Was that the moment we still could have saved him, Michael?
“For three years”—Avner continued his story—“Maya went from hothouse to hothouse, from farm to farm. Dates. Tomatoes. Cherry tomatoes. Cucumbers. Green peppers. Red peppers. Melons. Eggplants. And then, after two years of fieldwork, she went to the manager of a farm with an idea of her own. You know those little peppers that sometimes grow inside the big ones?”
“Yes, of course.”
“It seems that they sprout naturally, without any fertilization. It’s called parthenocarpy.”
“How is that possible? How can a plant sprout without fertilization?”
“To this day, no one has been able to explain exactly how it happens. But my daughter claimed that she had been studying the phenomenon and believed that with the right temperature and hormones, she could cause it to happen—and also control it, that is, intentionally grow large peppers that have small ones inside them. And she could make sure that the small peppers weren’t misshapen the wa
y they are sometimes, but they would be as beautiful and perfect as the large ones.”
“Don’t you think that was a bit…presumptuous of her? Forgive me for saying—”
“It’s all right. That was exactly how the more experienced managers of farms in the area reacted. She asked them for a piece of land where she could do her experiments, and they told her, amiably and with a lot of pats on the back, to forget it. They explained that it wasn’t realistic—why would she succeed where great scientists had failed?—and reminded her that they only gave land to sons of residents and she didn’t even have a family. But she didn’t give up. She showed them data and proof and calculations, and told them that consumers would love the idea. You buy one pepper, she said, and for the same price, you get a small pepper as a bonus. It’s like a Kinder egg. In the end, she managed to persuade the manager of Noit to give her some land and a shack to live in on the outskirts of the farm. When she showed us her tiny piece of land right at the border with Jordan, Nira and I…Let’s say we just looked at each other. And on the way back, we agreed that if that’s the land they gave her, they wanted her to fail. But she succeeded. That girl, who didn’t have a single report card without a D in conduct, who had been thrown out of every group she’d been in and every job she’d had, from school to youth movement to waitressing, because she’d fought with everyone, that girl established the first hothouse in the world for babushka peppers.”
“Babushka?”
“That’s the commercial name she gave them.”
“They’re already on the market? Why haven’t I heard about them?”
They’re still trying to improve the taste of the small peppers. And make production more efficient. Only a year ago, they discovered that a particular bee, the Bombus, is especially effective in pepper pollination…That’s how she met the quiet boy who runs the Noit apiary, whose name is Adar.”
The tape ended, Michael. That’s why I haven’t left messages for two days already. It wasn’t deliberate. It’s not that I wanted to torture you by stopping the story at the most suspenseful moment. Not that you don’t deserve to be tortured a little, but that wasn’t my intention. The tape simply ended. And it wasn’t easy to find a new one for this machine. They don’t sell them anymore. No one uses answering machines anymore. I went from store to store until someone finally sent me to a place on Allenby Street. There, among the stores that sell stamps, was one that sold electrical appliances whose glory days were behind them.
The salesman, who looked like a refrigerator, tried to hit on me. He apparently likes his women, like his merchandise, to have been around for a while. He wanted to know if he could take me out for a cup of coffee.
I used the same reply I’d heard a tall, stooped girl use with a psychologist when she came to the tent for some support: “I’m still stuck in a relationship with my ex.”
The second thing I wanted to do after I understood that we were on the way to Adar was to call you (the first was to slap Avner Ashdot). I wanted to tell you. So you would know. Not so you could grant permission, God forbid. I’ve already said that I don’t need your permission. But I thought it was only fair to let you know. I wanted to call you and press on the loudspeaker button so you could hear everything Avner Ashdot told me later.
His daughter went to Adar’s shack and he opened the door, a look of alarm on his face. Instead of being alarmed herself, she showed him the babushka pepper she’d brought with her. He went silently to the fridge and took out some honey and apple slices for her. She asked him whether beekeepers like bees. He didn’t answer her. She wasn’t offended, but understood right away that this was a case of extreme shyness. As they worked together in her hothouse, she managed to create a picture from the rare bits of information he gave up: Since arriving in the south a few years earlier, Adar had only had contact with animals. At first, he worked with wild animals, then on the alpaca farm, and then he heard that Noit was looking for a beekeeper. No wonder, she thought, that he has no idea how to act with people. And then, one evening after they’d finished hanging another few Bombus hives among the babushka bushes, he asked if she wanted to join him on his walk, and when they reached the emergency reservoir and stood watching the ripples caused by the wind, he said to her, “You don’t know who I am, I’m trouble, I hurt people whether I want to or not. You should run away from me now while you still can.” And then he kissed her, taking her completely by surprise. She hadn’t even been sure that he liked her until that moment.
That kiss broke a dam between them and within a few weeks, a flood of emotion swept them off to a wedding, without a rabbi, on the lawn next to the basketball court, and he moved into her shack. Because, of course, houses are given only to sons of residents, although we can only hope that the fact that they were a couple definitely improved their chances for one in the future.
The monastery of silence—that’s what the people on the farm call their shack. That’s how they are, Michael, your son and his wife: They believe that words cause only misunderstanding. That we should do and not talk.
I should also tell you the ending, Michael: They had a son a month ago. They insisted on giving birth at home, and there were problems. Maya was taken to the hospital in Eilat. They saved her life. But she still hasn’t recovered from the operation. She can’t stand on her feet more than an hour a day. She’s not allowed. The surgical incision is infected. Stitches still have to heal.
When Avner told her that he met me in Tel Aviv, she asked him to bring me to them. To help. And warned him that Adar must not know. Because he wouldn’t agree.
We have a grandson, Michael. Do you believe it?
“Put on some music for us,” I ordered Avner Ashdot. “I need music urgently.”
“More Strauss?”
“No! Something calmer.”
“Chopin?”
“Chopin is good.”
The sounds of Chopin’s Piano Concerto no. 1 filled the car. The long introduction by the strings, and then the piano, which I usually found sentimental, now sounded hesitant. Stammering. A bit anxious.
I felt the stents. After Adar cut off contact with us and the chest pains started, you insisted that I go for a checkup. And you were right. For the second time since we met, you saved my life (the first time was when you rescued me from my parents’ house). To this day, I tremble at the thought that my arteries were completely clogged then. That if I had waited a bit longer, my heart would have given out. And you, Michael, you never moved from my bedside after the angiogram. You canceled all your sessions. You held my hand. You bought me tea and almond croissants from the café in the shopping center next to the hospital (I know that you know all this, but I’m not telling it for you, Michael. I’m the one who needs to remember now, at this particular moment, that you also had good qualities).
You’re not supposed to feel the stents after the angiogram, but I always felt them. I still feel them. Especially when I’m overwrought. They dance. Stab me with pain.
After a long few moments with music the only sound in the car, Avner Ashdot said, “We’re getting close to the farm.”
I asked him to stop at the gate.
He pulled over to the side of the road, a few meters before the gate. It was open. The guard booth was empty. Beside it was a rusty sign that said WELCOME TO NOIT COOPERATIVE FARM. Avner Ashdot turned off the engine but left the Chopin on.
He put his hand on mine.
I jerked it away. As if his fingers were a scorpion’s claws. I spoke without looking at him: “We’re not children, Avner. If you wanted to arrange a meeting between me and my son, you should have told me that was your intention.”
He said, “You should know that it was Maya’s idea. After you showered in my apartment the first time, I told her about you, about the impression you made on me, and she was the one who suggested—”
“It doesn’t matter who suggested it.”
“I’m sorry it had to be like this, but—”
Once again, I interrupte
d him: “It didn’t have to be like this. You decided that this is how it would be. Underhanded. Devious. You set me up, Avner. And I don’t like to be set up.”
I’m used to the way we argued, Michael. That’s why I expected Avner Ashdot to flatten my claims with his counterclaims. I expected well-founded justifications based on proof. I expected new information to be revealed at the critical moment that would shed new light on the facts. I expected precedents that would support his position and prove that he had acted properly, or at least find him innocent based on reasonable doubt…
Instead, Avner Ashdot merely sighed and said, “Maybe you’re right. And after a long silence, he added, “It’s hard to change bad habits. Deception is the only way I know, Devora. I practiced it for thirty years.”
A pickup truck drove out of the farm carrying some Thai workers in the back.
Avner waited for it to pull away—as if there was a danger that the Thai workers might hear him—and then said, “I was afraid that if I had told you where we were going, you wouldn’t have come. Or that you would have asked for time to think about it. And we don’t have time. The situation here is not good, Devora. But you’re right…I’m sorry.”
“I’m not a pawn on your chessboard, Avner.”
“I understand.”
“And I’m not Nira either,” I said. “You can’t hide things from me for twenty-five years.”
“That’s clear to me.”
I warned him, “If you trick me one more time, that will be the end of our relationship.”
He nodded. “Agreed.”
The stents continued to hurt me. There wasn’t much water left in the bottle, only the last few drops. Tilting it into my mouth, I trapped them with the tip of my tongue.
I said, “We’ll wait here until the Chopin is over. If we go in now, I don’t think my heart will be able to take it. When the Chopin ends, call them and tell Adar that I’m at the gate. I won’t force myself on anyone. If he doesn’t want to see me, we’ll turn right around and go back to Tel Aviv. Understood?”