by Yaël Dayan
Kalinsky first looked at his son, heavily resigned to not understanding him fully long ago, then took the envelope and opened it. ‘A gift?’ he said, smiling before he saw the tickets. He stood up pale and suddenly tall. ‘What are these?’
Daniel looked up. There was something impudent in his glance.
‘It hasn’t worked out for you here, and I feel responsible. You shouldn’t be prevented from going back, that is if you want to.’ The man in front of him opened his mouth as if to say something, and then he slapped him. His cheek burned and his first reaction was to hit back, when he remembered it was his father. He never knew what gave Haim the strength and courage to hit him that night.
‘I didn’t mean it. That way. I thought you were unhappy here.’ He talked fast now, trying to explain himself, inventing excuses.
‘Look at the way you live,’ he said. ‘With the rain in winter and the heat in the summer, with that little shop which demands all your time and doesn’t supply half your needs. You hate the place, you hate the people, you hate the mayor and the streets and even the stones and the hills. You came to see me, now we’ve met and you can go back.’
His father was grinning. He was holding the envelope and he handed it back to Daniel.
‘I have nothing to say to you. You can take this gift and walk out of here, and you don’t need to return. You don’t understand anything – you are spoiled and protected and your mind isn’t capable of existing even in the small circle you exist in. So the roof is leaking? Do you expect me not to complain? Of course the plumber overcharges, and I can’t afford to do half the things I would have liked to do but what is the answer? So take this answer you have produced and go away, and live some more and when you are ready to apologize come back. I won’t tell Dora anything, or Miriam, I am ashamed to. Good night.’
‘But, father …’ and the door was shut behind him.
He let the rain wash his face. Nili has gone he thought and he had two tickets to Warsaw in his pocket. Perhaps if he had the right to reject his own father, Nili had the right to reject his child. The rain formed puddles and he walked around them. He walked to Rina’s flat. Lipsky downstairs had the key. He would never return to his father’s house he decided. Rina was away and the flat needed a fresh whitewash. He looked at the hospital then, little suspecting that a long time later he would be standing at the same window staring at a blind window behind which his father lay dying.
It was summer and no chance of rain but he thought he heard raindrops and the sound of Nili crying. ‘When you slapped my face Kalinsky, once again you were not a common man and once again I couldn’t forgive you.’ Behind the window across the road another patient occupied a white iron bed and in a small private room Kalinsky was lying still.
But not dead yet. He didn’t know the difference between night and day but his weak pulse indicated life. The sun was up and for once it did not bother him, but his consumed body still had life in it and Dora sat on the white chair waiting for a sign, a sign of life or of death, a movement to redeem her from this long wait. Daniel washed and shaved, put on a clean shirt. He brewed some Lipsky coffee and tidied the place up. The street was being swept and Lipsky unlocked the glass doors and placed the tables and chairs on the terrace. Daniel crossed the street to the entrance gate and walked through the hall to the second floor. A strange bold man occupied his father’s bed and as he grabbed the arm of the first doctor he saw:
‘Where is Kalinsky?’
‘Who is Kalinsky?’
‘My father.’
‘You’d better ask downstairs, it’s not my ward.’
He returned to the lobby and the information desk. A crippled man was sitting behind the desk. ‘Can I help you?’ he asked.
‘I hope so … Kalinsky, Haim. He was on the second floor until yesterday.’ The man had one hand only and with maddening slowness managed to reach for the right list to look for the name.
‘I have it,’ he said triumphantly. He was new in the hospital, a social case. ‘The first floor, a private room. Any of the nurses on the floor will direct you.’
Daniel knew what a private room meant, he had been through it before, and the memory of Yoram’s parents crossed his mind. A nurse directed him to a closed door and he hesitated in front of it. He knocked and Dora’s voice answered, ‘Come in.’ All he could see at first was the crumpled white sheets and Dora’s heavy body on the small chair. The bed looked empty but as he approached he realized that what he thought were merely creases in the bed linen were his father’s thin limbs. Ignoring Dora he grasped his father’s arm and felt for the pulse. ‘Not yet,’ Dora whispered.
‘Will he regain consciousness?’
‘The doctor doubts it.’
‘I have to talk to him,’ he said. Dora didn’t ask him why he had waited so long. She didn’t give him a reproaching look, she didn’t give him any particular look. He stood between her and Haim, but there was nothing between her and her husband, nothing but the smell of drugs and thin sheets.
‘I saw Miriam last night. She told me about the haemorrhage.’
‘It doesn’t matter now. He feels no pain.’
Daniel couldn’t accept, the way healthy people cannot, complete unconsciousness. He wished Dora wasn’t there. He was sure he could hold his father and gently wake him up and talk to him, whisper to him and perhaps hear him say something, anything.
The doctor came in an hour later. He held his hand, felt for the pulse and laid the arm on the bed back in place.
‘His suffering is over,’ he said. ‘He is dead. I’m sorry.’
Simply so. One shameless word and it was all over. He looked at the corpse on the bed and shivered. ‘My father is dead,’ he said. ‘He’s not suffering any more.’
A hand touched his shoulder and the image on the bed changed its face. It was Yoram asleep and the hand was Rina’s and he touched it to feel a softness Rina never had. Miriam’s cheeks were wet and she hurt his arm now. He took her in his arms. Their father was dead. Dora was sobbing on the spare bed and the doctor gave her an injection.
‘You’re crying,’ Miriam told Daniel.
‘I wanted to tell him something.’
Briefly the grief separated itself from the dead. The three people were involved with their sorrow and the relaxed muscles of Kalinsky’s face gave it a smooth appearance. A nurse came in, suggested Miriam leave, and Dora was taken to another room. Daniel was left alone with his father.
He waited until they rolled the bed away and walked into the street. Lipsky was wiping his hands on his white apron and Mrs Lipsky quarrelling with a Bedouin family who had camped on the stairs leading to the terrace. A car sounded its horn in spite of the sign ‘Silence – Hospital’, and the sun melted an ice block left in front of one of the houses. Daniel looked at the faces of the people and some turned to look back at him because he was walking fast and staring at them fixedly. A woman’s laughter could be heard from a second floor and the pedlar was shouting, ‘Anything for twenty piastres’. He had balloons and plastic toys, cheap cups and wooden dolls. Daniel reached the main street and slowed his pace. They didn’t know. A man spat from an open car window and a woman said, ‘Disgusting.’ A group of schoolchildren crossed the street in pairs holding up the traffic.
The waiter at ‘Eshel’ waved to Daniel and Daniel waved back. It wasn’t his fault, he didn’t know either. What will they tell Shmuel, he wondered. Will they tell him his grandfather went to heaven? On a trip? Disappeared? God took him? What do they tell little children now? A command car stopped in front of a kiosk for evening papers and the market was crowded and alive. Somewhere in the morgue on the stretcher they were washing up his father, but the street was ignorant. He didn’t mind. He didn’t want to stop them and tell them, he didn’t care to share it with them, he wasn’t disturbed any more by not knowing who died for them that day. He had a secret and that made him different. His cheeks were wet and they were laughing and that made him special. His father died that morni
ng and they were bargaining about cheaper grapes and that made it all move forward.
He returned to the hospital. Miriam was downstairs waiting for Dora and they were given a parcel from the nurse. Kalinsky’s belongings.
‘Would you like to keep anything?’ his sister asked.
‘The watch, if I may.’ He was given the large old-fashioned watch, and he put it on.
‘He wanted to be buried in Gilad,’ Miriam said. ‘Do you think it can be done?’
‘Yes. I’d better leave today and make the arrangements. I don’t think you’ll need my help here.’
The green took over. He was going north again. His father wanted to be buried in black earth, near water and trees and his son.
He returned to his room as if from a battle and people came in to shake his hand and murmur a few words of condolence. He arranged for the funeral with the Kibbutz secretary. He fell asleep in the afternoon and woke up the following morning.
Cemetery Hill. Walks with Rina to look for plants and later for sherds. Walks with Yoram to drink in the view. Climbing alone with a book on a free day, burying Yoram, visiting the grave. Gilad’s earth is kind to the dead, warm and protective, and the new grave looked more natural than the last one he had seen. The family arrived and the black car carried Kalinsky up the hill. Miriam made it with difficulty, supported by her husband, and Daniel asked Kibbutz members not to participate.
He had learned the words of the Kaddish and his trembling voice sounded the prayer. ‘Do you ever pray?’ the rabbi in Jerusalem asked him. He was praying now as they lowered his father’s body and covered it with earth. ‘Yitgadal veyitkadash shmei Raba …’ words strange to him echoed and rolled down the hill past Yoram’s tomb, flowed south with the Jordan and filled the valley.
About the Author
Yaël Dayan is an Israeli author and political figure. Her father, Moshe Dayan, was the military leader who oversaw the stunning capture of Jerusalem during the Six-Day War. Like her father, Dayan served in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, of which she was a member for ten years with the Labor Party. An outspoken activist, Dayan has been involved with Peace Now and other organizations fostering the peaceful coexistence of Israelis and Palestinians. She has written five novels, including Three Weeks in October, about the Yom Kippur War. Among Dayan’s nonfiction works are Israel Journal, a memoir about the Six-Day War, and My Father, His Daughter, a biography of Moshe Dayan.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1967 by Yaël Dayan
Cover design by Tracey Dunham
ISBN: 978-1-4976-9875-8
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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