Finally, in a colorful souvenir shop she asks about a whip, using the Arabic word, but it turns out that in the overflowing market of the Old City it’s difficult to get clear directions to a place where a whip may be found, and she is sent from one merchant to another, and they ask whether she wants a whip as a wall hanging or a real one.
“A real one,” she clarifies, “and long, if possible.” “How long?” the Arabs ask with a smile. “Two meters at least,” she says, extending her arms wide. “Two meters?” They are astounded. “Two meters is a whip to train a wild horse. Does the lady have a horse?”
“No horse,” she jokes, “but a husband as wild as a horse.”
The vendors like her answer, and the laughter echoes from shop to shop, and one young man, whose headgear seems a hybrid of a turban and a Hasidic skullcap, offers to take her to a place where she might find the whip she desires. He leads her past the Western Wall and beyond the Old City walls, and there, on the road near the tour buses, crouches a group of gaudily decorated camels, poised to carry tourists, and the young man explains to one of the camel owners what the lady is looking for, and the owner is puzzled: Why a whip? What for? Is it even allowed?—as if she were seeking a dangerous weapon. At last he consents, and consults with an old Bedouin sitting on the curb, who gets up without delay and approaches one of the camels, burrows into an embroidered saddlebag and produces two whips—long and longer.
The harpist, who has never held a whip before, examines the two and considers one versus the other. These are clearly whips that in their day have prodded camels, trained horses and struck donkeys. Their leather lashes are tattered and cracked and emit a strange smell. Now she brandishes the longer of the two, and as it whistles in the air, a nearby camel rises to its feet.
She chooses the shorter one and asks its price. This is a question for the camel’s owner, who thinks hard before declaring, “One hundred dinars.”
“Dinars? What’s a dinar?”
“He means dollars,” explains the turbaned young middleman.
“Dollars? Why dollars? We’re in Israel. Tell me in shekels.”
“If it’s shekels,” says the young man, “he will have to charge value-added tax.”
“VAT?” She laughs. “This Bedouin does VAT? What is he, a licensed contractor?”
“Why not? I can even write you a receipt in his name.”
“Too much.” She smiles. “A hundred shekels is plenty. It’s an old whip.”
“But genuine. You won’t find one as strong and good in the whole Middle East.”
They finally compromise on two hundred shekels, and everyone is happy. And she knows that the seller and the broker find her attractive, though she is neither young nor a virgin. She has not borne children, yet radiates womanly charm and sensuality. Thus even the Bedouin camel drivers, who doubtless have any number of wives, are in no hurry to part from her, and they take the whip from her on the pretext that it needs to be prepared, cleaned, oiled and bathed in a pungent liquid so that whoever is whipped will smell the lash and long remember it. Then they wrap the whip in a Jordanian newspaper bearing a photo of the king, and tie it with a linen cord. The young man in the turban, Yassin by name, who has learned Noga’s name and its celestial connotation, and has translated it for her into Arabic, insists on walking with her to the place he brought her from.
On their way back, as they pass the Western Wall, Yassin stops and says obligingly, “If you want, Venus, to pray and cry a little at your wall, I can wait for you on the side.” “No praying or crying, young man,” she says with slight irritation, “but you can definitely let me go now,” and hands him a twenty-shekel bill as an escort fee.
She decides to enjoy another ride on the light rail, which takes her near her neighborhood, and as she climbs the stairs to her parents’ apartment, she secretly hopes to catch the ultra-Orthodox boys fixed on their television elixir, so she can crack her newly purchased whip and possibly land a blow.
But the apartment is silent. Can it be that the older one has finally been sent back to his Torah school and a new chaperone assigned to the little tzaddik?
She lays the wrapped-up whip on top of the television, as if to confirm its existence, but after she gets undressed, puts on a light bathrobe and consumes a full bottle of water, she moves the whip to her parents’ closet, setting it on a shelf above the black suit that has yet to find its suitor.
Twenty-Two
SHE STAYED HOME for two full days, but the children didn’t arrive. She undid the bolt and lay in wait, but they didn’t come. Finally she left the apartment and went to a rehearsal of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, hoping the children would take advantage of her absence, all in vain. It was as if they had learned, in some mysterious way, of the whip that awaited them on the shelf above her father’s suit, a Jordanian newspaper spread out beneath it. Had she bought the whip for nothing? She considered this, though not with dismay. She knew she would take the whip with her to the Netherlands, where it might please the conductor of the orchestra.
She speaks with her mother every morning, but it’s impossible to deduce what the decision will be. “I’m not hiding anything from you children,” she says apologetically. “I’m truly ambivalent, still wavering. When I drink coffee and chat with a lovely resident who tells me entertaining stories, I say to myself, You’re a widow, from now on this is where you belong. But when we’re joined by another woman who keeps trashing everything and everybody around her, and I can’t get a word in edgewise, even to get up and leave, I say to myself, Why on earth am I here? People are all well and good, insofar as you have control and you can turn them off or on as you want. But here, you’re not allowed to bolt your door, either literally or metaphorically—you can lock it, but the management has a key to open it. And if you say, Nogaleh, there’s no difference between a bolt and a lock, because nobody will enter the room without knocking—still, you know, if you wish to die, the bolt is better protection against anyone intervening at the last moment.”
“You’re joking, Ima.”
“Not always.”
The mother goes on:
“In the dining room, looking at the lavish buffet, I say to myself, Yes, madam, this is where you belong, where you can be calm and contented. Here you don’t have to eat leftovers from yesterday or the day before, or something iffy just so as not to throw it out, waste it. Then I go back to my little flat in peace, but I’m also afraid of being bombarded with visits by unwanted guests, like one old woman who has had a lung and half her liver removed but is still amusing and lively as a sparrow. This woman has taken a shine to me, won’t leave me alone. She apparently wants to encourage me regarding my future health, but what she does is plant anxiety, and all kinds of organs I’ve never heard of are starting to hurt.”
“But Ima, now the grandchildren are close by.”
“The grandchildren are darling and sweet, maybe also geniuses, though I have to be careful not to beat them at checkers or bingo or they get irritable and depressed. It’s true, we’ve grown closer since I came to Tel Aviv, and the tension and annoyance they would pick up from Honi when they came to Jerusalem are gone. Also, they’re much freer with me, sometimes they bring friends, whom I also have to feed. There’s a big lawn here in the summer, but what happens in the winter? My one-room flat is tiny.”
“But you love children . . .”
“Who told you that?”
“What about the two boys you would invite to watch television?”
“Who said I invited them?”
“They said.”
“I didn’t invite them, I felt a little sorry for them. When they grow up and face life, they’ll be lost and won’t understand the new world around them.”
“They’re not interested in a new world, Ima, they get along fine in their old world.”
“You think so? Maybe you’re right. But tell me, why are we talking on the phone? Why don’t you visit me more often? It seems you came back and fell in love with J
erusalem.”
“There’s not much to fall in love with. I’m simply taking care of the apartment so no one will suspect you’ve given it up.”
“Still and all, come visit me. Because if you think I need to move to the retirement home, come and reinforce that decision. More than Abba and more than Honi, you know how to speak to me heart to heart. Even if the road you’ve chosen in life is totally different from mine, I’m still a lot like you, or you’re a lot like me, whichever is the way to put it.”
“Okay, tomorrow lunch.”
“Perfect. That way you can see for yourself what it’s like here.”
The next day she joins her mother for lunch, samples many of the dishes laid out on the buffet, rates their pluses and minuses. Her presence arouses interest in the dining room, and two elderly men in light summer suits come over to introduce themselves to the pretty daughter who has come from afar.
“Not so far,” explains the mother. “At the moment from Jerusalem. She is keeping an eye on my big apartment there until my experiment here is over.”
“And how will the experiment turn out?”
“Still a mystery, and my daughter is here to help me solve it.”
“In which case,” implore the old men, “help Mother decide in favor. There are not many among us like her, willing to listen patiently to other people’s troubles.”
“Maybe because I have no particular troubles of my own.”
“Even if, God forbid, you should have some,” the old men persist, “you would still listen with patience and good humor. We benefit from how you listen.”
When they return to the room, Noga says, “You’ve been here seven weeks and you already have two charming admirers. Maybe you should invite them, just like the two little boys, to watch TV with you?”
The mother smiles.
“I know you’re blaming me, but I wasn’t the one who started the romance with the two children. It was your father, believe it or not, a few months before he died. At night, when he would go outside to smoke with Mr. Pomerantz, he got interested in the children who run wild on the stairs and how to calm them. And then he learned that the little one, the strange retarded one with the angel face—”
“Not retarded, Ima. The word is ‘challenged.’”
“Whatever. Challenged . . . strange . . . unfortunate . . .”
“Challenged.”
“So Mr. Pomerantz told Abba that this sweet child is the son of a very important Hasidic family, with a whole community of followers. And because this is a slightly degenerative family—am I allowed to say ‘degenerative’?”
“You’re allowed.”
“Because they have been marrying among themselves for centuries, his older brothers are feeble and sickly, so there’s a good chance he will be their future leader.”
“The Grand Rabbi. The Tzaddik.”
“Yes. How do you know?”
“The older one told me. Yuda-Zvi.”
“Good. I see you remember his name. And as I told you, he is the son of Shaya, the charming boy you would always talk with on the stairs when you were a girl. He’s not as handsome as his father, but he is very bright and devious.”
“Abba . . . You were talking about Abba . . .”
“Yes, Abba. He was drawn to them, maybe because he missed the children you didn’t give us.”
“You? Give you?”
“Don’t get stuck on every word of mine, Noga. I was just saying. Neither of us ever complained to you that you didn’t want to have children. Anyway, Abba started getting involved with them, to kid around, play with them, and he also brought them home to tempt them with television. He would say, in jest of course, that this strange angel might someday be the head of one of the religious parties that could bring down a government, so we should get him accustomed to television.”
“Nice Abba.”
“Very nice. But not nice on his part to die a few weeks later, leaving me with the two little rascals who stole my key, and make you suffer now.”
“No more suffering. The bolt will stop them when I’m at home, and if I discover they’ve snuck into the apartment, I’ll whip them. I even bought a whip.”
“A whip?”
“Yes, a whip. A real one, in the Old City.”
“Great. Good thing you didn’t buy a gun.”
Noga yawns. The Tel Aviv heat and the rich food are making her sleepy, and her mother suggests she take a nap.
“Get some rest so you’ll have the strength to do my thinking for me, and at the same time test the bed, though I think that if I surrender to Honi and move here, I’ll bring the electric bed.”
“An interesting bed, yes, although at night I divide my sleep between it and my childhood bed.”
“Really! You know, me too. After Abba died, when we were both done with the narrow double bed—God knows how we managed it for so many years—and the electric bed arrived, I wasn’t satisfied and started going around at night from bed to bed. I’d start with the electric, then go to yours, then wake up and move to Honi’s, and from there to the living room sofa and finally back to the electric. Wandering between beds improved my sleep, and it didn’t matter that in the morning I’d have to make four beds. That’s another thing to consider if, in the end, I move here. In Tel Aviv I’ll have only one bed.”
“Like everyone else. It looks like a decent bed, and in a minute I’ll try it out. But what will you do in the meantime? Even if you sit quietly and just look at me, I won’t be able to fall asleep.”
“So I’ll leave. Maybe I’ll go to the lounge and find someone to play cards with.”
And she strips the sheets from the bed, puts on fresh ones, replaces the pillowcase, brings an extra pillow and cotton blanket, adjusts the air conditioner so a pleasant breeze will caress the sleeper and lowers the blinds to darken the room, all while inquiring if the guest would care for some soft music.
“No, Ima. Music for me is the real thing, not the background.”
“Obviously, because you, unlike me, are a real musician. But I have been falling asleep lately to the Mozart concerto that you lost because of me. Honi gave it to me to prove what a great sacrifice you’ve made.”
“A beautiful concerto.”
“Wonderful, bright, not sad. Moves along so easily, though the flute slightly muffles the sound of the harp, and I, because of you, am interested in the harp and not the flute.”
“It’s just because of a particular performance, undoubtedly by James Galway, whose flute is very dominant.”
“I suppose, but at least on the stage, in reality, you can see the harp. It can’t be hidden. Don’t worry, my daughter, you’ll get to play that piece as a soloist, and others too. You’re young and the world is waiting for you. Enough, I’m going, and you sleep well, and think of the assisted living as yours too, and when you wake up you can give me your opinion of the bed.”
Twenty-Three
AT FIRST SHE DOUBTED she could fall asleep. Yes, the bed is wide, and the mattress hard enough, but the room lacks intimacy, like a hotel room, with a faint medicinal aroma. It’s pleasantly cool, but the rumbling of the air conditioner is an unwelcome interference. Through the wall, from the adjoining one-room apartment, she can hear coughing and sighing, and feels sorry for her mother. Honi wants so much to move her to this confined, unfamiliar place, which is clean and respectable but nevertheless a place not her own. In her Jerusalem apartment she subdues her insomnia by means of four different beds, but here—where can she go in her distress? To the big lawn in back? Had she herself waited for a harpist position to open up at the Jerusalem Symphony, and in the meantime been content with a teaching job at the conservatory or the music academy, and had she given her husband Uriah a child, he would not have left her and there would be no need for any dramatic changes. Uriah loved her parents, but now her mother is left truly alone in Jerusalem, and it’s not right to have Honi, the perennial worrier, rush back there every time there’s a problem.
Filtering i
n from outside are the roars of Tel Aviv buses and perhaps of airplanes landing, but these somehow enable rather than inhibit her sleep. Can it be, she asks herself, that the engines of vehicles in the coastal plain sound quieter because they are free of the ups and downs of the Judean Hills? Encouraged by this horizontal hypothesis, sleep slowly envelops her. The clock on the TV cable box indicates that an hour has gone by since she got into bed. But why should an hour suffice? She is sleeping here at her mother’s request, sleeping in pursuit of introspection, so she should try to extract at least one dream from the depths of her soul. Soon enough, sleep becomes her shelter. She pushes aside the pillows and buries her face in the sheet to smell a motherly scent, a smell of sweet and secure childhood, as Jerusalem and Tel Aviv blend into one.
And so two more hours fly by on the clock, as if the cable box were generating its own time. Were it not for the soft, stubborn sound of crying from the other side of the wall, the harpist might have gone on sleeping. Could it be that the previous tenant, who died here slowly, altered time before his death? And what’s going on out there in the world? Could her mother still be playing cards? Maybe she’s gambling away everything she owns? But Noga’s fatigue has not been slaked, it has become hungrier, and not until she notices between the window blinds that it’s grown darker outside does she force herself to get up. In a daze, she gets dressed, opens the door to the porch, crosses the garden of wilted flowers and heads for the lawn to take in the remnants of the sunset. On a pair of lounge chairs sit her mother and brother, with the grandchildren kicking a ball toward an invisible goal.
“Nougat woke up!” shout the kids, calling their aunt by the nickname inspired by candy she brings them from Europe.
“This can’t be Israeli fatigue,” says the brother. “In Israel you don’t do much of anything. This is fatigue you brought with you from your Europe.”
Noga doesn’t reply. She silently kisses the kids, then warmly hugs and kisses her brother and her mother, as if emerging not from sleep in a small room, but from a long and perilous journey.
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