* * *
—
“For maybe ten minutes we didn’t say a word,” Rafael told me on the phone, “your mother just sat there with her head back and her eyes shut.” As I’ve mentioned, a script girl’s job is to notice the little details. For example, the way Rafael switched from “Nina” to the slightly preposterous “your mother,” which signaled imminent danger. Nina’s long, sinewy hands sat limply on her lap. Exhausted, he thought they looked. He could barely overcome the urge to take her hand in his bear paw. Without opening her eyes, Nina asked if he had any music, and he told her to look in the glove compartment, a little embarrassed about her seeing his taste. He was stuck in the sixties in that regard, too, with the same old Moody Blues and New Seekers and Mungo Jerry tapes, but apparently she couldn’t be bothered to open the compartment, or her eyes.
“And I drove,” Rafael told me, “I flew, you’ve never seen me drive like that, and I felt like we were”—I could hear his disconsolate smile—“like those couples in the movies? Where the man snatches his beloved from under the wedding canopy just as she’s about to marry someone else?” I listened, though I could not completely decode his voice. Why was he talking like an adolescent girl? Nina didn’t look at him. Without opening her eyes, she said, “Rafi, I have to tell you something, are you sitting down?”
He laughed, but his mouth went dry.
“It looks like I have something.”
“What kind of something?”
“A problem. An illness.”
“No, you don’t.”
“It’s that funny one,” Nina went on, “where you forget things. Where you say the same thing a hundred times, ask the same question a hundred times.”
Rafael slowed down at once. “This is a joke, right? You’re not serious. You’re too young for that.”
She turned to look at him. “Amnesia. Dementia, Alzheimer’s, wackiness, something in that family. It’ll take time, probably, a few years, they said, so I’m just at the beginning of the beginning, with all the excitement of newness and discovery. But the train has left the station. Even right now I’m being a little bit erased, look”—she held her hand up before his eyes—“now I’m in color, but three or four years from now I’ll be flat white, then transparent. No, don’t stop!”
“But I can’t talk about this without seeing your face.”
“Everything will be erased, even you, even Gili, maybe even Vera, although I can’t imagine that. Drive! Don’t stop. If you stop I won’t be able to talk.” Then she laughed: “I’m like those dolls you have to move to make them talk. Mu-mee, Mu-mee.”
He asked how she’d found out, and she told him, without any wisecracks this time. Where she lived, in the north, on a tiny island in the archipelago between Lapland and the pole, you can’t bury people. The layer of ice constricts and spits out the bodies, and the polar bears eat them, and that can cause contamination and disease. So once a year the residents have to undergo a physical, and anyone who has an incurable or life-threatening disease must leave the island and go back to the mainland.
“It’s horrible, it’s cruel,” Rafael murmured, and Nina said, “Not at all. It’s the law, and everyone who goes to live there knows that from the start.” “That’s not what I meant,” my father said. He was driving slowly. Drivers honked and conveyed their opinion of him with hand and finger gestures. His head was swirling with arguments and reasons to disprove what she’d told him. She saw this and sighed. “Let it go, Rafi. Let me die. This life is kind of a lost cause anyway.” Another high-pitched laugh that sounded to him like a whimper. “Maybe it really isn’t for everyone.”
At the first interchange they turned back to the kibbutz. Rafael thought, Here I am, taking her back to her black canopy. “Ultimately it defeated me, her ‘Let me die.’ ” He asked if Vera knew. “Vera will know in a few minutes, but I wanted to tell you first, like with a pregnancy.” He said nothing. “You really are the first, Rafi. This is the first time I’ve heard myself say these words out loud.” He couldn’t speak. “It’s a little stressful, the way you’re being so quiet,” she said, and her hand sought out his paw and her fingers found their place among his. “It actually makes sense, though, doesn’t it?” she observed.
“How does any of this make sense,” he said, choking.
“It makes sense,” she replied, “that if you spend fifty-some years investing humungous efforts to forget one particular fact—like, say, that your mother abandoned you and threw you to the dogs when you were six and a half—then in the end you forget the other facts, too.”
“Your mother didn’t abandon you,” Rafael hastily recited his lines, “and she was thrown to the dogs, too, to prison, to forced labor. She had no choice.”
“Try explaining that to a six-and-a-half-year-old girl.” Nina had her lines, too.
“You’re not six and a half anymore.”
“Yes, I am.”
Rafael drove into the parking area. He stilled the engine and turned to her. “Don’t say anything now,” she commanded and put her finger on his lips, “don’t pity and don’t comfort.” He kissed her finger. He didn’t dare ask where she would go if she wasn’t allowed to live on the island. He was afraid she’d go back to New York, to those men, who’d drop her the minute they found out she was ill. He imagined her there, alone, drowning in the illness and forgetting how to get back, and he thought that if need be, he would overcome his fear of flying and go to be with her, or bring her back to Israel if she wanted that. “Everything’s up in the air,” Nina said, “I mean everything’s coming down now. Slowly coming down. It’s actually quite interesting to see how it happens. All the microscopic movements the body makes, and the mind. A whole bureaucracy of absorption into the disease, before I’ve even figured anything out.”
In the little mirror he saw Vera marching toward them, one hand on her waist, her whole body slightly bent. “Why did you two leave me and disappear?” she grumbled. “Nina, didn’t you say you were staying for dinner? I made a salad.” She stuck her head into the car and sniffed. “What’s going on?” she demanded. “What’s wrong, children? You had another fight again? Why are you crying? What did you say to her, Rafi?” Nina suddenly caught Rafael’s hand and kissed his fingers one by one. It was an odd gesture, which embarrassed all three of them. Vera quickly pulled her head out of the car and looked far away. Nina got out and went over to Vera and put her arm around her shoulders. “Come, Majka,” she said with a sigh, “let’s have a talk.”
* * *
—
“And honestly?” said Rafael, who called me from the car right after he’d said goodbye to them, “everything she held back from me, your mother, all those years, is swelling up inside me now, blowing me up. I feel like I’m about to have a stroke, I’m telling you.” When he called I was almost home, and I thought I was going to have a heart attack myself because of what he told me about Nina being ill. I felt as if someone had suddenly pulled the keystone out from an elaborate structure I’d been building my whole life. I pulled over on the side of the road. The first thought that popped into my mind was that I couldn’t have the conversation I wanted to have with Meir in this state. Maybe I’d put it off for a while. A few days. “Look, Gili, let’s talk frankly,” Rafael said, or yelled. “I’m not a man of many talents—no, don’t stop me. At my age I know what I’m worth. Making movies, that’s something I know how to do, more or less. Or used to. I’m no Antonioni or Truffaut, definitely no Tarantino, but I knew the craft, and if someone in Israel had given me half a chance instead of tripping me up every step I took, I’d have made even better movies.” I said nothing. I thought how awful it was that my father had ultimately internalized the critics’ eye. “I was a craftsman. Not a genius, I know that, but every profession needs people like me, and that’s totally fine. They can call me sentimental, they can call me the poor man’s philosopher, they can call me—” a
nd here, as usual, he went on a tangent and enumerated the clauses of his charge sheet, with which I was all too familiar, having heard them dozens of times from him, and from others. But this time he got ahold of himself quickly: “I closed the book on that chapter of my life a long time ago, Gili. I cut it off, I cleansed the wound, it didn’t metastasize, I moved on, and now I have a job I like, one far better suited to me, a real world with real people—”
On this point he was right. The bitterness remains in him to this day, but when the filmmaking dream was shattered, he quickly rebooted. Six months after recovering from the heart attack he suffered on set, he started working with groups of at-risk youth in Akko and Ramleh. I’m jumping ahead. There are lots of things I want to relate, and it’s important to me that I write as many of them as possible before we sail to the island. I’ve waited too long—a whole lifetime.
Where was I—
“Dad,” I said. “Dad, listen—”
“Wait, let me talk. Are you with me?”
“Always.”
“But there’s one little talent I do know I have, and I might be the only person in the world who has it. Don’t laugh.”
“I’m not laughing, Dad.” I knew exactly what he was going to say.
“I know how to love her. You may think that’s pathetic, you may think she doesn’t deserve love, but I simply know how to love her whatever state she’s in. That’s my thing in the world: loving one person who is not easy to love. Making her slightly more able to tolerate herself.” I heard loud thuds. I guessed he was slamming his palm on the steering wheel. “And loving her is the one thing she’s never let me do, your mother. That’s the one thing she fled to the other side of the world to get away from. And I’m telling you, Gili, if she’d stayed with me, she would have had a life—” He choked up and pounded the wheel again. I imagined him exhaling and puffing his cheeks out and looking like a massive Poseidon, the way he used to. The way he did when I was a little girl riding on his shoulders while he lorded over a set, or when he decided—contrary to all the advice he received and despite all the pressure—that I would be his script girl. Who ever heard of such a thing, a seventeen-year-old script girl who’d never worked a single day in the business—
I don’t know why this came back to me now, but from within his roaring, injured speech, I was flooded by the feeling I used to have in my body when I would clap the board and Rafael would yell “Action!” and the set would come to life and magnetize itself to him, and his will became the will of everyone on the set. It was a feeling like nothing else, to be entirely within his desire, the desire of Rafael, my father, who now let out a long, whimpering sigh, and was once again a fat, ragged man with thick drooping lips, driving an ancient Contessa and mumbling to himself, “I could have, I could have.”
When I got home, I took a deep breath and walked inside. “You’re back,” said Meir. He always looks slightly surprised, and also grateful. And so we stood. He put his fingertip under my neck, on my collarbone. I closed my eyes and waited for the grounding process to end.
* * *
—
Rafael drove to Akko and was all turned inside out with worry for her, and the next day at 7:00 a.m. he woke up when she phoned and realized he’d fallen asleep at the computer after a night spent mostly on websites related to her disease. He thought Nina had taken off ages ago. He asked if her flight was delayed.
“A two- or three-day delay. I’m still at Vera’s.”
“I thought you rented a place in Haifa.”
“Listen for a second,” she said, cutting off his sleep threads, even though she knows full well that Rafael wakes up heavy and you have to give him time.
“Listen, Rafi, such a lousy night I had, you don’t want to know the thoughts.”
“I can imagine.”
“Maybe because I told you. I suddenly heard myself and the penny dropped and I realized this is it, it’s my turn now. Listen, I want to ask you for something.”
Money. He ran his meager savings accounts through his mind and wondered which one he could liquidate without too high of a penalty.
“Yesterday after you left, and after I told Vera, I was thinking maybe we should do it after all.”
“Do what?”
“Film Vera telling her story.” When Rafi did not answer, Nina went on: “She’s not young anymore, and I was thinking that for once we should hear from her in an organized way, from beginning to end, what really happened there.”
“Where?”
“On the island. On Goli Otok. But also everything that came before that. Say—since she and Milosz met. They had such a special love story, and what do we know about it? Two or three stories, always the same ones, almost nothing.”
Rafael swallowed. He didn’t think Nina could even guess how unique the love story was. “The truth?” he said.
“Only.”
“I’m not sure that would be good for her now. It was a good idea at the time, when she was younger.” He kept on prattling, but he wasn’t sure whom he was protecting from the truth—Vera or Nina. “She’s not what she used to be, you saw so yourself.”
“I’m not what I used to be either,” Nina pointed out dryly, “but it’s my right, and I told her that, it’s my right to hear the whole story for once, from beginning to end, isn’t it?”
“Yes, of course, everyone…it’s just that…what do you actually want us to do?”
“Sit her down in front of the camera for a couple of hours, maybe a little more, and you ask her questions. That’s all. And I’ll ask, too, every so often.”
“But what do you need me for? Wouldn’t it make more sense for you to sit down with her and talk to her like a mother and daughter?”
Nina had enough self-control not to burst out laughing, or crying. “We’ll both talk to her. You and me. You were slightly her child, too.”
“Not slightly,” Rafael blurted.
“That’s true,” she said quickly. “I’m sorry, Rafi, not slightly at all. The slightly was what I got.” She paused, allowing the past to swell and flood over the two of them, and then retreat and seep back into its tolerable places. “And you’ll film it.”
Rafael hesitated, trying to digest the meaning of this proposal. “We’ll have to rent gear,” he mumbled, “you’ll want it to be high quality.” He quickly drew up a list in his mind: a better camera than his decade-old Sony, a tripod, cables, reflectors, headphones—
“No, no,” Nina cut him off, “don’t start being some Hollywood big shot. The simplest home camera. Nothing professional. That one you used at the party on Saturday will do.”
“Great,” Rafi said with a sigh of relief, “I prefer that one.”
He asked how Vera had responded when Nina told her about the disease. “As expected,” Nina said, “total denial. It must be a wrong diagnosis, or maybe they switched the tests around in the lab, or maybe it’s just all in my head, which is unfortunately entirely true…Did you hear what I said? You’re allowed to laugh, it would do me some good if you kept laughing at my jokes.” He let out a little snort, which could be interpreted any way one wanted to. “Then she started with her expert medical opinions,” Nina ranted, “which are based on absolutely nothing! Just because that’s what Vera wants, and she’ll twist the arm of any fact until it confesses. And of course: you can’t tell anything, I look great, I’m glowing, it’s all a matter of healthy habits and good nutrition, and I should drink wheatgrass every morning, and she has a wonderful Chinese doctor who lives in Afula and she’ll give me two or three acupuncture sessions and that’ll be that, ‘no more Avremaleh.’ ” Nina quoted another of Vera’s aphorisms, the origin of which I don’t have time to explain because a cloud is starting to darken over my head.
“And me,” Nina went on, “I had the nerve to tell her that when it comes to diseases the most important thing is probably maki
ng sure you have good genes. She was offended, of course. Well, at ninety? If only we could all have a mind like hers. No, it’s not from her, this shit,” she pondered out loud, “maybe from my dad, maybe from Milosz, except he died on me at thirty-six, so who knows how he would have developed? Or deteriorated. And then I could hear her clicking away all night, click-click-click, and I guarantee you, Rafi, that she’s already read all the sites that have anything to do with—”
“So you spent the night at her place,” he couldn’t stop himself from observing.
“Yes, I couldn’t leave her on her own after that.”
And me—you could? he thought.
“So tell me…what…what does Vera say about your idea?”
“Of filming her? I won’t pretend she’s enthusiastic. After all, she is a little beat up by what I told her. A mother’s heart…” Nina couldn’t resist. “Also, she’s tired after the big party you threw her and all the to-do, but you know what she’s like, she can’t say no, to me or to my request, which is, you have to admit, a death row inmate’s request.” She stopped, allowed Rafael time to protest. He said nothing. I imagine her heart sinking and shrinking with loneliness and fear. “But mainly, she can’t say no to the chance for another minute in the spotlight, even though it’s not like anyone’s going to watch this film except me and you.”
“And Gili,” Rafael said.
“I wish. But I’ve released Gili, from everything.”
Rafael said nothing. The wound of his life bled a little. Drops, no more.
“Rafi, there’s something else.”
“I’m listening.”
“I’m not doing this just for Vera.”
“You’re not?”
“I’m telling you this in the clearest possible way, okay?”
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