Rafael and I, and Nina, stare at her and scarcely breathe. She sounds oddly lighthearted, detached, as though she’s talking about someone else and not about her and her mother. “There were in that yard iron shelves, with boxes of screws and nails, probably belonging to husband of the woman who took away babies, and I would play with those nails like they were mother and father and girls, and talk with them and reassure, until Mother came out and we would put hands together and walk slowly, carefully home.”
Her speech grows heavy and her gaze thickens, as if the story is only now beginning to percolate in her, for the first time since the events occurred more than eighty years ago. “And all the way home she would cry, and I would tell her about family of nails…” She stops. Licks her upper lip. “Well, this is surely not interesting for you. Let’s keep going.”
We are still recovering from the story when a heavyset man with a shaved head, walking a beautiful blue-eyed husky on a leash, stops to look at us. He asks what language Vera is speaking, and when I tell him, he spits on the road and walks away. Vera notices of course. She yells after him in Croatian and waves her fist. Rafael films her. Her face ignites all at once. Any minute now she’ll run after the man and attack him. Rafael physically bars her, and she slams into the camera (great shot!). The man spits again, without turning around. I’m not sure what it is, but something about him, perhaps the folds in the back of his neck, makes me envision Vera’s father crushing her mother, my great-grandmother, whom I did not know but to whom my heart goes out. The blue-eyed dog does turn to glance at us. He looks noble and somehow superior, which makes the whole affair even more depressing.
* * *
—
Our mood has blackened. It’ll be dark soon, and we have almost two hundred miles before we reach the hotel on the coast, from which we will sail to the island tomorrow.
But the high point of our Čakovec visit is still to come. We quickly walk back to Kavana Royal, where, opposite the café, stands a building of yellowing stone. Wide door. “Here, this,” says Vera, and suddenly everything slows down and there is quiet, and gravity.
A shroud seems to descend on us.
Rafael: “So this is where you met? What was this place?”
“It was for dancing, for balls. Now it’s—” Vera puts on her reading glasses and gets so close to the building that her nose practically touches the posters on the wall. “Now it’s a place for art shows.”
Rafael: “And how was it that you happened to meet here?”
“It was my high school graduation party. I was a girl, seventeen and something, and I’m dancing with everyone and I’m happy, I’m the belle in the ball, and here comes this young man, asks me to dance, and I—”
She stops talking at once. I look up from my notebook and see that Nina has suddenly entered the story.
Meaning, the frame.
She took three or four steps and walked into the frame, on her own initiative. And now she’s standing next to Vera, shoulder to shoulder, in front of the camera. She is rigid, her face pulled taut. Something’s happening to her. Vera rolls her eyes at her. Looks at Rafi. Tries to understand what’s going on.
“Please, go on,” says Nina in a strange voice.
“Go on?”
“Yes.”
Vera gives Rafi a questioning look. He nods. Vera takes a deep breath. “Well, all right. All right. Where was I?”
“A young man came up to you,” Nina says.
“Yes. Well. And he is young soldier fellow, officer, very thin, tall, with big ears and forehead like some philosopher—”
Vera’s eyes dart between Rafael and Nina. The words are like gravel in her mouth.
“Go on,” Nina says, practically pleading.
“Yes, fine. And he comes to me, asks me for dance. And while we dance he says to me that he does not know anyone here in our town.” She swallows. A dim sense of deceit hangs menacingly in the air. As though a crack is widening in the picture of reality. “And we dance and not talk, and slowly the not talking turns into talking more than before. Should I go on?”
“Yes.”
“And I feel delight dancing like that, and for the first time I think maybe this is what people say is love.”
Silence.
It might have been the word “love” that did it. Nina says out loud to the camera: “Hello, Nina.”
Silence. Rafi slowly lowers the camera. “Nina, honey, you’re a little confused.”
“Why are you stopping me?”
He strains out a smile. “You got mixed up.”
“About what?”
“Nothing, something small, probably from all the excitement. You didn’t notice that you said, ‘Hello, Nina.’ ”
“Don’t—stop—me—Rafi.”
“Okay. I won’t. What now?”
“Just record.”
“Okay. Tape’s running.”
“Hello, Nina,” says Nina, looking into the camera. “Look at me. Please raise your head and look at me.” Nina waves at the camera. “Yes, like that. Great. You can see me. Do you know me?”
Her voice is tense and choked up. It’s starting, this is how it starts, with this kind of weird little nonsense. We hadn’t realized how bad her condition was. On the other hand—no. This isn’t really happening. It can’t be that in such a short time…When was she actually diagnosed?
“I’m Nina. Look at me. I’m you. But you the way you were a while ago, years ago even.” Vera cannot move her head to look at her daughter. She stands by her side and stares into the camera. I see beads of sweat on Rafael’s forehead.
“Don’t be afraid of me, Nina,” says Nina to the camera. “I want you to be happy. Just be happy. Look at me, don’t shut your eyes. Can you see? We’re actually the same one. We’re the same woman, the same person. Look at me: this is how you were three or four years ago, or five. I am you.”
Rafael films. Judging by his face, the Sony weighs a ton.
“Hey, Nina, do you like me? Do you think I look nice?” A long pause. In my mouth, or between my mouth and my nose, a frost of disaster starts to spread. It occurs to me that what’s happening to Nina might be a little stroke. I try to remember if we saw a sign for a hospital in town.
And yet her appeal sounds so honest and so convincing that for a moment I expect a human voice to answer her from inside the camera.
“Look at me, honey,” she says, unzipping the parka that encases her. “See the sweater I’m wearing? Remember how happy you were when you found this sweater at that little market in Provence? Do you remember that you were in Provence?” She smiles at the camera, and I see that all this—but what is it? what is this thing that is happening?—is costing her dearly, but she won’t give up. “It’s a beautiful place in France, in the French people’s country. Remember that there’s such a country, France?” She smiles at the camera again. “You were in Provence years ago, with Rafi—remember Rafi? You were young. You were both young, and at least one of you was beautiful, as Rafi always says. And Rafi loved you very much. Do you remember Rafi who loved you so much?”
I look at my father. Amid all this madness he looks as if his entire fate hangs on the answer to Nina’s question. More than that: her answer will determine whether he even existed for all those years.
“And you loved him, too,” Nina whispers, “maybe you never told him properly, but you loved him.”
Rafael makes a strange gasping sound.
“I hope you’re being taken good care of, where you are,” says Nina and takes a step forward. My father, perhaps in alarm, takes a step back. She makes another move toward him and he steadies himself, solid again. And he films. And she smiles at him gratefully.
She says, “I hope, Nina, that you’re warm enough, and that you’re well dressed, that they give you nice clothes to wear, tasteful, and that they cook f
ood you like, and bathe you once a day, gently, and put on good moisturizer, on your elbows, too, Nina, because you always have dry skin on your elbows…”
What is happening here, I do not understand. Beyond my comprehension.
“And that they’re taking care of your hair and your nails. Don’t let them get away with not doing your nails, remember what your mother, Vera, always says: Fingernails are a lady’s calling card…”
Now it’s Vera who lets out a muffled moan.
“No background noises, please,” Nina whispers to her and looks back at the camera with a proficiency that surprises me. “I want to tell you a story, Nina,” she continues in that strange voice, floaty and slightly saccharine, “and it’s a story about you, Nina, about your childhood, and about your mother and father, Vera and Milosz.”
She is not crazy.
No.
She’s doing something I have no words to describe.
Right at that moment Nina crosses her arms over her chest and says, in a completely different voice, her ordinary voice, “That’s it, Rafi, you can stop filming. That’s what I’m asking from you all.”
Silence.
“But what is it?” Rafi carefully probes.
“That’s my request.”
“Request?”
“I can only ask it of the three of you.”
Vera takes a few steps and stumbles, then sits down heavily on the sidewalk with her head in her hands.
“Are you okay, Mom?”
“You frightened me so badly, my girl.”
Rafael swallows. “And when are you thinking of…I mean, where will you…Where will she see it?”
“Wherever she is.”
“Where is that?”
“I don’t know yet. When we get back from the island I’ll start looking. Someplace where people in her condition live.”
“In Israel?” Rafi asks voicelessly.
“Yes?” she replies forlornly.
A very old man walks down the alleyway. All hunched over. Supported by two walking canes. We say nothing. He stops and looks at us for a long time. The cogs in his brain turn slowly as he tries to understand what our story is.
“I’ll find her somewhere good, a place where they’ll agree to show this to her at least once a week,” says Nina after the old man walks away.
“To who?” Vera asks, confused.
“To the woman I’ll be in a while.”
“And what will they show her?” Vera whispers.
“The film we’re making now, and what we shoot tomorrow on the island.”
“And she’ll sit in front of a screen, or a computer,” my father mumbles, and I know his head is somewhere else: Nina is really coming back. Nina will live in Israel.
“I don’t know how much of it she’ll be able to understand,” Nina says, “but every so often, let’s say once a week, or once a month, she’ll sit and watch and listen to the story about herself, the way she once was.”
“Like a bedtime story?” Now it’s me whispering.
“Yes.” Nina, surprised, thanks me with a nod. “Exactly. A bedtime story before she—” She clears her throat, swallows. “Before she goes into the dark.”
The pain is like a punch. I never imagined how much.
“She’ll sit and listen to the story about herself,” Nina repeats wondrously, as if just beginning to understand what she’s proposing. “Maybe it’ll bring her back to herself for a few minutes. Maybe even give her the feeling that she’s someone. She’ll have a story, finally.”
Silence.
“We’ll do it,” says Vera. She gets up and stretches out her tiny stature. “Won’t we, children?”
Rafi says, “Yes, of course we will.” And he goes over and hugs Nina. “We’ll simply talk to her. Only to her.”
“But it’s not ‘her,’ it’s you,” Vera haggles.
“It’s me when I’ve become very ill. By that time I’ll be ‘her.’ ”
The signs, the looks between us. Everything is slow and stark. We still do not completely understand what we’ve become partners to, but a quiet awe fills us.
“So you want—” asks Rafael.
“Yes.”
“Where should we start?”
“Maybe here, where Vera and Milosz met,” says Nina. “That’s the most logical thing, isn’t it?”
“Logical in what sense?” he questions.
“In the sense that it was how she came into the world.”
“You.”
“She. Me. She.” Nina stretches her lips uncomfortably. “Could you just accept that this is what’s going to happen to me in the coming years? Me, she.”
“So should I tell it again from beginning?” asks Vera, looking very sad. “Should I start from how I met him?”
“Yes, but now just tell her, talk to her,” says Nina.
Rafael adds, “Pretend the camera lens is her eyes.”
“All right.”
“And try to smile, Majka, don’t put her in a bad mood.”
They sound very businesslike. With pauses in between the sentences. They sound like people walking through a fog, navigating toward one another.
“And what do you say, Gili?” asks Rafael. “You’re so quiet.”
I say nothing. They’ve made up their minds anyway. They’ve already given up in the blink of an eye on the movie we were going to make, my movie. I’ve been thrown abruptly into a bad place. I feel my throat tighten. I’m too old for sudden creative reversals like this. And honestly? It drives me crazy that in one second she charmed Rafael and Vera into doing exactly what she wanted. She is such a master manipulator. On the other hand, well, yes, okay, on the other hand—
But that baby, and the girl from long ago, they leap at my jugular, claws out: Don’t you dare let her soften you, there’s no “other hand,” don’t forget for a moment what she did to you. I walk away and sit down on the curb, and I look up with swollen eyes at my father, who comes and strokes my head and peers into me sadly and reads me like an open book.
“Write it down, Gili. Write everything down, including you.”
* * *
—
But it takes a while longer until we start. “Nina,” says Vera, “don’t be angry, but I can’t go on with anything until I know one thing: Are you really positive you have it?”
“I’m sick, Vera. And I will lose my mind if you keep doubting that. I am sick!”
“Okay, okay, there’s no need to—”
“How long?” Rafael asks.
“How long have I known, or how long do I have left?”
“Both.”
“Really knowing, I mean knowing it’s this, for certain, I’ve known for six months. Maybe more. Eight or nine months. Since January or so.” She sighs. “For the time being I’m in pretty good shape and, as you can see, fairly lucid. But…” She chuckles. “Would you kindly remind me who you are?”
Rafael laughs, but he remembers, as I do, that at Vera’s party, on Saturday, Nina couldn’t remember the names of Orli and Adili, Esther’s granddaughters, and she’d also asked Shleimaleh, Esther’s husband, “And how is your wife?” and had quickly tried to make a joke out of it.
“And the doctors?” Vera asks.
“Very well, thank you. Fit as a fiddle.”
“Nina,” Vera groans.
“It depends which doctor I ask. If I average out the prognoses I’ve been given, I have between three and five years until I completely lose my memory and stop being me, but there certainly is a fear that I’ll keep living for several years after that. Oh my, how we’ll laugh at me.”
Now it’s my turn to groan. A strange sound escapes my lips, half shout, half whimper. Something shrill and ridiculous.
“You took the words right out of my mouth,” Nina says to m
e.
She goes over to Rafael and puts both hands on his shoulders. “Do you understand what you’re getting into?”
“I told you, I’ll take care of you.”
“And you realize that includes helping me end it, when the time comes.”
He nods.
“You and Vera and Gili.”
“Me?” I splutter. “Why me? What am I in this?”
“Because Rafi will soften at the last minute.”
“And what about me?”
“You’re a hardheaded snotnose.”
She’s not joking. She’s completely serious. She looks at me. There is another conversation constantly occurring between us on a secret channel. So secret that we don’t know what is being said.
“Gili,” she says after the moment has been drained of all its juices, “it makes it easier for me to know you’re around.”
“Thank you.”
“Shall we continue?” Nina asks.
But Rafael isn’t up for it yet. He asks for a break. Hands me the camera. Walks back and forth down the little alley and clasps his massive head. That was how he paced the hospital corridors, roaring, after I committed suicide. Then he comes back and bombards Nina with all the questions he forgot to ask since she told him. As usual, when he’s scared, he has unhelpful outbursts.
Nina is her callous self again, which offers some relief. Her answers to his questions are curt and acerbic. Dementia and amnesia and dying and death appear in them as frequently as punctuation. And she articulates them with a strange glee. She enjoys hurting us and—even more so—herself. I film her with a medium shot and move in for a close-up. I know what twinge lurks in this twisting, turning intestine of the soul.
More Than I Love My Life Page 11