The first moment of an encounter dictates the way it will continue, she says aloud, I shall go into the house smiling, as if I’ve had good news, turn to her with some light banter. How absurd this is, I’m preparing for a meeting with Nitzan as if we were talking about something fateful and crucial – and this is my daughter, my bones and my flesh, but the absurdity doesn’t put a smile on her lips; rather it plunges her into a depression that she tries to alleviate with simple decisions, peering in the interior mirror and smearing on lipstick, blackening the eyes with a make-up pencil. Nitzan is waiting for her, of that there is no doubt, even if she doesn’t know it she’s waiting for her, so she’ll go into the house with a smiling face, no hint of reproof or petulance, and that way she’ll get her back.
There’s her satchel thrown down in the lobby, beside it a superfluous sweater that she forced her to take yesterday, giving off a barbecue smell of charcoal and incinerated potatoes, those are her sandals, and she herself must be in her room. Nitzi, she calls out in a sprightly voice, would you like something to eat? And when the girl doesn’t answer she opens the door of the room, and the smile that she prepared in advance remains in place, her lips drawn tight, when she sees her daughter’s naked back laid motionless on the exposed chest of a fair-haired boy, his eyes closed. On the single bed they are huddled together, clinging to each other like twins in their mother’s womb, and while she dithers in the doorway, stunned, the boy’s eyes open and scan her awkwardly, and then in response to the smile that has congealed on her lips, a smile is transmitted to her over her daughter’s back.
Taking small steps she moves out of there, her gaze fixed on his face, and without turning her back on him, as if this were a holy place, she retreats stumbling to the kitchen and stands again by the window, her elbows on the cool marble. With shaking hands she washes her face in the kitchen sink, full as it is of dirty utensils, her hair dipping in a greasy frying-pan, and while it’s still shedding fetid liquids on her blouse she goes back there, clutching the door-frame and peering in, her eyes scanning the short legs of the bed, the colourful sheet decorated with figures from fairy tales, the feet lying side by side, like two pairs of twins, her daughter’s slender ankles beside the boy’s thighs, and her cut-off jeans against his flanks, her smooth and milky back, her angular shoulders, her arms hugging his chest, while his arms are laid now at the sides of his body and his eyes are closed again, as if the vision that he saw, of a grey-haired woman staring at him in horror, was a marginal interlude in an otherwise pleasant dream, but even with his eyes closed it seems to her he’s watching her, and even when his lips are closed it seems to her, with the same crazy certainty that she identified this morning in her mother, he’s repeatedly mumbling, Mum.
Gideon, she whispers from the bedroom next door, putting the phone to her lips and he’s tense at once, has something happened? She says no, everything’s fine, forgetting even to mention her mother’s admission to hospital, but Nitzan, she adds and hesitates, wondering how to dress it up for him, Nitzan is here with someone, they’re asleep in her bed, it’s so strange . . . She tries to steer him cautiously towards the simpler extreme of the experience she’s had, and Gideon chuckles, oh, yes? Great, so she’s finally bringing him home, I told her she could take the initiative and not wait for him, and Dina seizes on this scrap of raw information, hard to chew though it is. What, she told you she had someone? She didn’t tell me anything, Gideon says. She met some guy called Noam not long ago, a friend of Shiri’s brother.
Shiri’s brother? she repeats irritably, then he must have done his army service, at least five years older than her, is that acceptable to you? she sneers, hiding behind the tiresome details which aren’t the main issue for her; she knows precisely how old he really is, after all he’s Shiri’s twin. In the background she hears Gideon telling someone, I’ll be with you in a moment, it’s Dina, pronouncing her name in a somewhat meaningful tone. Who are you with? she asks, feeling suddenly suspicious, and he replies, I’m in the middle of a photo shoot, Dini, is there anything else? and she adds, yes, my mother’s in hospital, she fell over and knocked herself out, and this time he sounds more alarmed than she is, demanding to know the details. I’ll call in there on my way home, he promises her, although this isn’t the promise she was hoping for.
Oh, Gideon, she sighs, putting down the phone and stretching out on the bed fully clothed. The warm breath that she detected in his voice arouses longing in her, and a sour taste in her throat as if she’s been drinking something contaminated, a drink she put a lot of time and effort into preparing, what a waste, and already too late, and it seems she herself doesn’t know what she’s referring to: too late to fall in love with each other, too late to bring a child into the world, too late for new life, but this contamination, wasn’t it always there? Oh, Gideon, if only we could start again, I’d do everything differently.
Like a blank canvas the past is spread out before her, giving itself into her hands. It’s forbidden to start on this, she knows, but still she goes ahead and devotes herself to this dangerous game of hers, as when she was a child, lying on her bed in the children’s house and imagining the life awaiting her, the future that would set her apart from the kids all around her, who didn’t read books, weren’t as gifted academically as she was, but now this turns into torture, to go back and imagine with such precision what could have happened and didn’t happen, and her fault alone. Here she is, sitting with Orly and Emmanuel in the university cafeteria as almost every evening, keeping their secret faithfully; it doesn’t even occur to Emmanuel that she knows and on the face of it he loves and admires the pair of them in equal measure, his two teaching assistants, his star pupils. He’s comfortable sitting between them, mocking the students who pass by them with reverent expressions on their faces, inventing nicknames for them and imitating their halting speech, his eyes twinkling wickedly under the silver quiff, and as she’s choking with laughter a morsel of sandwich sprays from her mouth on to the collar of his nicely ironed shirt, and he reassures her, it doesn’t matter, we’re like a family here, and Orly grins, Dina doesn’t know what a family is, she grew up on a kibbutz, and Emmanuel says, there isn’t anyone among us who doesn’t know, everyone learns at his own pace.
He was then exactly her age now, Professor David Emmanuel, eminent historian, did he too realise it was too late? Or did he still not understand anything, since from his point of view all of this could have carried on if she had not curtailed their future with one sentence, three futures that were closely intertwined; she bit the hand that caressed when for a moment it stopped caressing. That evening too they were sitting there after a day of teaching, as a violent rainstorm lashed the city, threatening to drill holes in asphalt roads and stone roofs. At once she sensed that something wasn’t as it had been the day before yesterday, since Emmanuel was pale, running a cold and blowing his nose incessantly, turning the end of it red, and Orly was quieter than usual and refusing to eat, and no wonder, after all she knew what he was going to say. Alas, girls, he sighed, you wouldn’t want to be in my shoes just now, and when they looked at him quizzically he wiped his nose again and coughed. I’ve been given an impossible task, he said, I have to choose one of you, our team is shrinking, only one of you can have tenure here for the coming year.
Why was he looking only at her, why was Orly looking down? The din of the torrential rain was deafening. I’ve chosen Orly, he said in a cracked voice, I’m sorry, Dina, I think she is more suitable, but I’m sure that within a few years there will be a vacancy here for you as well, and she stared at them, stunned, while Orly’s eyes sent her a desperate appeal, don’t reveal the secret that I told only to you, but the resentment wrapped around her throat, the resentment of the less-loved daughter. It isn’t fair, Emmanuel, she mumbled, I know you.
Did she say, I know you are lovers, I know you are having an affair, or did she perhaps say, I know she’s your mistress, seizing the opportunity to offend her too. It wasn’t fair, nothing about
this was fair, and that was all she knew for certain when she fled and ran to the bus-stop, and there she encountered the dean of the faculty, who greeted her with a smiling face. I read the article you published about the holy child of La Guardia, he said, a brilliant piece of research, I very much hope you will settle in with us here, you have so much to contribute, and she muttered, that’s what I was hoping too, until this evening, and she boarded the bus in a hurry, she’d already said too much, but he pursued her and finally sat down beside her, asking her to explain why her hopes had been dashed.
Unrestrained the words cascaded from her mouth, she told him everything, she turned informer, and thereafter she didn’t go back there, despite offers and appeals, and even these faded away as the days passed, and although the two of them left at the end of the academic year – Orly vanished as if the earth had swallowed her, and there were rumours that she had gone to study abroad on a bursary arranged for her by Emmanuel, and he himself left for a university in the south, apparently leaving the field open for her, if you’re really so well suited come and prove it – she refused to return to the history team, even when someone else, a woman younger than both of them and far less talented, took advantage of the confusion prevailing in the faculty. In her forbidden moments, when she allows herself to play this game, the three of them are still there and their futures still ahead of them, when the rain stops, and when spring bursts into flower, and when summer is shining, year after year, as it could have been if she hadn’t ruined everything, even burying her own aspirations under heaps of rubble.
And Gideon was definitely on her side then, until his patience snapped. What are you demanding of yourself? he asked her, bemused. They are the ones who did you an injustice, you had an obligation to expose it! How could he promote Orly when he was having an affair with her, and leave you behind even though you were much better qualified? He just wanted to keep her close to him so she wouldn’t betray him, don’t you see that? That’s enough, Dini, stop punishing yourself and go back to the university, you’re wasting your talents. But she was no longer sure of this. How do you measure talent anyway, maybe Orly really was better qualified after all, and when she stood before a class the following year, in the training college where there was a warm welcome for the distinguished refugee from the history faculty, and lectured on the causes behind the expulsions from Spain her voice was softer and less vigorous, and the words which in the past had flowed from her throat packed tightly together in impressive sequences began to sound haphazard and deflated.
A dry breeze of defeatism hovered there, which she was incapable of negating, even though in the first years she hoped that the transition would enable her to devote herself to bringing up her daughter, to enjoying her more, without the pressures of academic competition. But with the passage of the years Nitzan needed her devotion less and less, and the competition that she so much hoped to get away from was rampant, so it turned out, even among the defeated, and was more virulent than ever, especially with all the new regulations; as a result of these, if she doesn’t complete her doctoral thesis some time soon, the thesis that she began back then, eighteen years ago, under the supervision of Professor David Emmanuel, there won’t even be a place for her there.
For some reason she always goes back to that evening when the course of her life was changed, and it’s only from there that her consciousness moves to other focuses of pain, older and deeper, but again and again it seems to her that everything is determined from there, even events that happened years before then, as if there’s no early and late, only late, like that day when it became clear that her embryo wasn’t going to survive any longer. Gideon was still in Africa then and Orly accompanied her to the clinic for the tests, her face flushed as she regaled her with personal anecdotes, how Emmanuel invited her to his house for a Sabbath meal with his wife and children, who were already treating her as a big sister, and when he took her down to drive her home, believe it or not, right there in the parking space, in front of his house, he pounced on her, and at that moment his wife came out with the rubbish, what luck, she didn’t notice them, imagine it, Dina, and Dina imagined it, her hands on her bloated belly, a worrying tingle in the loins. You wouldn’t believe how beautiful he is when he’s making love, suddenly he goes wild – but now it was her turn, the turn of the doctor to inform her, to console her, he simply stopped developing, this happens a lot in twin pregnancies, and it’s better when it happens at this stage, you’re young and healthy and you can have many more children. But she wasn’t interested in many more children, and she didn’t even feel grieved; after all, she wasn’t a mother yet and only mothers know what grief is, and she went out of there to Orly and her stories. The thought of Emmanuel’s face leaning over her in the parking space she found more disturbing than the lone silhouette in her womb; no longer two pairs of wet ears but just the one pair listening to her secrets in the watery inner space, and now it seems to her again that all these things were connected, that if that rainy evening she had restrained her resentment, two children would be waiting for her at home today, and she sees them holding her hands, surrounding her with the wall of their love, built by four hands. She sees them growing up, her burgeoning breasts and his first moustache, her pelvis expanding and his voice changing, but when she recedes he stays; he always was a considerate, conciliatory child, obedient to her unspoken desires, and now he comes bounding out of Nitzan’s room and stands before her, with his bare and smooth chest, with his awkward smile, and she leaps up from the bed, just what the doctor advised her not to do, as the room turns dark and spins around her, but unlike her mother, who lost consciousness some hours before this, her consciousness clears miraculously as she falls, when she sees her daughter, roused urgently from her sleep and not pausing to put on a blouse, bending over her. She stares at her so acutely that it seems it’s her internal organs she can see, the fist of the heart, the twin lungs, the earthy clod of the liver, the delicate tracery of the intestines, as she saw her that day, visible inside her belly in shifting patches of light, but when she turns her eyes to the doorway, to the steadily darkening silhouette, a child, she will hear herself saying aloud, where have you been all this time?
Chapter Three
What is left for us in the evening of our days other than the visions that linger in our mind’s eye? So much has been taken over the course of the years, loss after loss, and all in the natural process of things; we must not complain. Even the one who has amassed wealth will die penniless, take her for example, Hemda Horowitz, who was born too late or too early, definitely not in a time and a place that suited her, but in a time and a place that demanded of her more than she was capable of giving, while what she offered they rejected with disdain. To jump up on rooftops they demanded of her, and to leap from roof to roof as if there were no yawning gap between them, to run across oscillating bridges, along railway tracks suspended in the air above river gorges, to fish in the lake on cold and pitch-dark nights, while she wanted to impress them with words. So many stories she had which were never put into writing; all of them she knew by heart, in miraculous fashion, but when she tried to tell them the children used to mock her flowery style, her implausibilities – that’s impossible! they used to upbraid her, the minority who condescended to listen, there’s no such thing as a lake that talks!
Because it was the secrets of the lake that she whispered into their disbelieving ears on winter nights, when the winds whistled around the isolated children’s house, snatching everything that stood in their way, all the stories that the lake told her of what he had seen with his eyes and heard with his ears, tasted with his tongue and probed with his fingers. He told her about the fishing-boat inlaid with gold buried in his depths, and asleep on its deck the girl who drowned, whose weeping is sometimes heard at night, Mummy, she cries, help me, Mummy, and about the man who searched for the loved one who was forbidden him among the reeds, and whispered of his love in the ears of the migrating birds, until he lost his wits and th
e marshes swallowed him, and even from under the ground he went on talking to her and his throat filled with mud until he died again and again, and about the woman who longed to bear a child and bathed every day in the waters of the lake to be purged of her barrenness, but the lake said to her, I shall be your son, I shall be your infant, and he dowsed her with water that filled her womb and distended her belly until she gave birth to a water child, a tiny wave disappearing amid his brother waves.
Even her father, who so loved reading, was hostile towards her stories, this is no time for stories, Hemdi, he would sigh, it’s a time for action, and the Jews have contributed enough stories to the world; only her mother, on her short visits, would listen to her with eyes closed as if hearing sweet music, write this down, she would urge her, you can’t remember it all, but she did remember, she cleared a lot of space in her head and remembered, not leaving room for anything else, until she had no regular words left in her. When they asked her a simple question she would open her mouth to give a simple answer, but only stories emerged, like steam from a boiling saucepan when the lid is removed, and anyone who came too close would be scalded. It’s a fact that they all kept their distance, except her father, who would grip her hand and drag her after him, fuming. You have to answer to the point, you have to answer them in their language. In a group every nonconformist is miserable, why do you always need to suffer? Sometimes she thought he was going to drown her in the lake, or drown the lake in her, and years later when she heard her father energetically backing the scheme to drain Lake Hula, in opposition to the other veteran fishermen, although she was already a grown-up married woman by then she couldn’t rid herself of the idea that this was nothing but delayed revenge on the entity that had robbed him of his daughter and destroyed his educational project, which was no less valuable in his eyes, and as it was to turn out over time, no less a failure. But he wouldn’t live long enough to realise just how foolish the project had been, and perhaps this was the very reason why he didn’t live long, because when the work of draining the lake was finally finished and the whole farm went wild over the territory which had been cleared, which did not repay them with the same alacrity, her father was the first to recognise the terrible mistake and the first to pay a personal price, which did no one any good.
The Remains of Love Page 6