More Than I Love My Life

by David Grossman

  She rubs her eyes. Nina, next to her, dozes off. With a sudden resolve, Vera sharply pulls Nina in to lean on her, head to head.

  “I liked to be in the village,” she says into Nina’s hair. She takes Nina’s hand and slowly strokes it. “I liked it there, Nina. Everything was good for me. I bathed in the cellar, in a big barrel. Feet they washed every evening, and as their daughter-in-law, I had to sit on my knees, take off their shoes, take socks off my father-in-law, and bathe his feet in water.”

  She almost whispers. I hope the Sony is picking it up. Maybe the words matter less now. Her lips are close to Nina’s ear, as she tries not to fall asleep. Future-Nina seems to have disappeared. There is a sense that things are being restored. That they are finally rooted in time and family.

  “And to me everyone in the village told things. Because somehow I knew how to get inside them. Everything was interesting to me. Every person was to me special. So Milosz’s mother told me that her mother-in-law is evil and terrible, and the mother-in-law told me that Milosz’s mother cheated on Milosz’s father while he was in World War First…And to me this was all very interesting, I wanted to swallow everything…”

  The camera is on Nina. She smiles to herself, her eyes almost shut, seeking a comfortable place to nest in Vera’s body.

  “—and I went in the cemetery to talk to women who sat crying on their husbands’ graves, and I asked them: Tell me, please, kind neighbors, who was this precious man? Tell me about him, please. And I remembered everything. I still remember like it was yesterday.

  “See, Ninaleh,” she whispers, “I so wanted to soak in everything that belonged to Milosz, his whole world. I needed to understand everything so that I could understand him, because that is his root…”

  Her mouth is on Nina’s cheek. Nina opens her foggy eyes, perhaps trying to remember how she got here, and slowly surrenders to sleep. Something in the picture is heartrending: Rafi drives her, I film her, Vera tells her a story. The three of us awake, and she among us, falling asleep.

  “They liked me there because I was not a ‘madam.’ I walked through dirt and stinking, and instead of a toilet they had hole in the ground, and there were no beds at all. When me and Milosz came at first, they borrowed from the next-door village two beds and softened them for us with straw, and fleas were hopping around, and in that time girls were not shaving legs yet, and I had hairs, and all between them—fleas.”

  “Grandma, that’s gross!” I laugh.

  “Gross is today,” Vera says dryly, “then everything was different. There was poverty and there was war and there was Balkan. But I wanted it, I wanted to be part. For the first time in my life I felt I was part. I cooked food, and they all went to work, and at lunchtime I put a big stick over my shoulders with pots hanging on sides, and I walked through the fields to the vineyard, and I sang and I was happy and it was best in the world because Milosz was close to me, and he slowly came out of all his troubles and illnesses. The farmers in the fields said: ‘Hey, Miloslaw, who is that woman walking there? Who is singing like a bird?’—‘Oh, that’s Novak’s bride! She is bringing them food!’ ”

  Nina is asleep. After a few minutes Vera falls asleep, too, her head on Nina’s. I turn off the camera. My father and I drive the rest of the way in silence.

  * * *

  —

  A colorless, unfocused sadness descends on me. (Written on a windowsill at night, looking out on a little marina. The Adriatic Sea. A town whose name I won’t even try to pronounce again, otherwise I’ll need jaw surgery.) The only thing in the minibar is white light. Flocks of dry leaves and plastic bags fly around on the promenade. It’s an unattractive coastal town with a row of seaside hotels, and restaurants that are still open, empty but lit up with bright neon, emitting billows of noxious yet slightly tempting smoke from grilled meat, all with long freezer cases piled with mountains of ice cream in frightening colors. In three other rooms in the hotel, Vera, Rafael, and Nina are asleep. Tomorrow morning, if the sea permits and the storm doesn’t kick up again, we will sail to the barren island that lurks somewhere out there in the fog. That is the island where significant parts of my childhood and youth took place, even though I’ve never spent a minute on it. And that is where this voyage will end, and I will be able to go back to being me and not a hologram of the mess created by my father and Nina with every move they make, every time they talk to each other, look each other in the eye, hug, sigh.

  And all at once it hits me: they are still making me.

  * * *

  —

  Middle of the night. When they’re not crowding around me, I am with Meir. I can’t stop thinking about me and him and what’s going to happen. I swore I would erase him on this journey so as not to lose my mind, but I can’t do it. I think it might help a little if I write about him. Or about us. No, about us is not good for me now. I’ll write about the niche we carved out for ourselves. Not the sexiest start-up, let’s put it that way, it’s the latest in low tech, but it works for us and it keeps our heads above water when I’m in between film gigs: on the mountain across from our house, among the pine trees, we bury dead pets. People—mostly from the area, but not exclusively—bring us their dogs and cats and parrots and hamsters. Once we even buried a pony, and twice a donkey. We’ve buried a trained falcon (we found a beautiful urn for him, illustrated with a bird of prey), and we have a whole plot full of rabbits. Usually the funeral is attended by a parent and a child, but sometimes the whole family comes. I always join in. Meir needs time to warm up, and meanwhile I set out a little table with a thermos of coffee and a pot of tea and juice and cookies and fruit, and a bouquet of flowers. Meir takes the animal out of the family car’s trunk. Usually it arrives wrapped in a sheet or a blanket, as we request. All of Meir’s beauty comes out in those moments—quiet, tender fatherliness.

  No, there’s no doubt.

  I’m the problem. It’s me I don’t trust.

  The grave is prepared ahead of time. Meir places the animal in the ground and covers it, which is always a difficult moment for everyone. Then he puts a piece of cardboard on the grave with the name of the dog or the cat or the parrot. Sometimes the family asks to include a picture of the pet. Sometimes they want us to add their last name to the pet’s name. And there is always a little ceremony (we arrange it with the families ahead of time), where a little boy reads a farewell letter to his hamster, or a teenage girl plays the guitar for her dog. If the family hasn’t prepared anything, Meir spurs them on. He asks questions about the pet, and about the family. It almost always brings up memories, and there is laughter and also tears. It’s nice to see how he melts away their distress.

  After the ceremony, we encourage the family to walk around the graveyard. It lifts their spirits. They feel that their beloved pet won’t be alone. When they leave, we sit by the grave for a while longer, drinking tea and talking about the family we just met.

  Recently we’ve been having some trouble. Someone, probably one of the neighbors, snitched on us, and the Jewish National Fund is threatening to sue us and destroy our place because it’s state-owned land or something, and the income tax authority is coming down on us, too. Never mind, we’ll figure it out, chin up.

  And then comes a knock on the door.

  * * *

  —

  Nina stands in the doorway with her hands behind her back: “Don’t throw me out.”

  I move aside for her. She walks in. It’s 1:30 a.m.

  She puts a bottle of whiskey on the table. There’s a white polar bear on the label, and at least two fingers are already missing from the bottle. She asks for permission to sit on the only chair in the room. I sit down opposite her on the edge of the bed.

  “Can’t fall asleep,” she says.

  “I can see that.”

  “Lousy hotel.”

  “Really? I think it’s fine.”

 
“Doesn’t give any…I don’t know. Any sense of home?”

  Laughter flies out of me like spit.

  “What?” she inquires. “Did I say something funny?”

  “No, it’s just that if I were you I wouldn’t go around using words I don’t understand.”

  “Oh, you’re so witty.”

  It’s like we have to start walking the whole path toward each other from the beginning every time. She drinks and hands me the bottle. I never drink, and at home with Meir, alcohol is the devil I purged. One of them. But I wet my lips and cough my soul out. It’s so strong it brings tears to my eyes.

  “There’s a pub in my village,” she says, “actually there are two. One says it has the best whiskey in the world. The other one, which I like more, says it has the best whiskey in the village. In the evening, at the end of the day, I like being there. Not just me. As soon as evening falls, especially in the dark season—four months without sunlight—people are drawn there. A sort of need to be together in a warm porridge. Humanity.”

  I listen.

  “Sometimes there are guys there from the Arctic satellite station, sometimes also the miners. The encounter between them, just to be there…And almost every evening we sing.”

  “You sing?”

  “I hum.”

  She drinks. Rather generous swigs.

  “Around the village,” she continues, “there are enormous mountains, monsters, and they’re covered with snow, and it’s totally dark for four months—did I mention that? So dark you can hardly see a foot ahead. People walk around with flashlights. The weirdest thing is walking by the sea in that darkness. Hearing it without seeing it.”

  “Is it pretty?”

  “Is it pretty…? You can’t think of it in those words. Overall, words are not the strong suit of that place.”

  “Explain.”

  She thinks for a moment. “No. That would spoil there for me.”

  Her directness is good for me. I think she and Meir would get along excellently, as long as she didn’t try to fuck him.

  “Still, give me a hint.”

  “It’s like the end of the world and the creation of the world together.”

  “Are you happy there?”

  “Happy? I can’t say. I like how it’s all just a little bit. Succinct. I’ve never been as calm inside, within me, as I am there.”

  A sigh escapes me. My man, my succinct man.

  “And because everything’s diminished,” she says, “you become attentive to the tiniest things. It’s all signs.”

  “Yes,” I say, “I know the feeling.”

  We’re both making an effort. Fumbling around for the place where we can occur.

  “How long have you been there?”

  “Two years. Since I ran away from America.”

  “Ran away?”

  “A misunderstanding with the tax authorities,” she says with a laugh. I laugh, too. We have a common enemy. Any minute now we’ll be discussing VAT and business deductions. “But I was planning to leave anyway. I had to move. I’m a person who moves.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “And there up north, something calmed down.”

  “You know,” I say after a suicidal chug, “I look at you and I think: It simply isn’t possible that this woman flung me out of her life when I was three and a half.”

  “It’s a fact.”

  “And you don’t even…I mean, you aren’t considering apologizing?”

  “No. No. Definitely not.”

  “No?” I practically scream. She has some nerve.

  “There’s no apology for that, and even if I did apologize, there’s no forgiveness. That horror is something I have to live.”

  Eyes in eyes. There is something moist in her look, and for an instant I believe her. Then I think about the life poseurs, from the book that taught me about “the ideal marriage” (“people who are extremely impoverished in the realm of emotion and play the part of affectives. They are known as ‘life poseurs’ ”), and I believe her slightly less.

  “Tell me more,” I say.

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know. About that place.”

  “The thing they have more than anything else in the mountains around there is bears. Polar bears. White ones. Beautiful ones.”

  “For real?”

  “Absolutely. About two thousand of them. Every few weeks one of them wanders into the village to look for food in the trash cans, or to devour humans. We have a bear alert on our phones, but someone still gets eaten every few months. There’ve been four since I’ve lived there. It’s part of the deal.”

  “What deal?”

  “The fear.”

  I signal for her to explain.

  “It’s not like being afraid of someone who flips you off at the light, or of a man walking behind you down an alley. It happens in a totally different place in your body.”

  “But don’t people have weapons or something? Guns?”

  “If you leave the village, you have to take a rifle, but you need to know how to use it. You have to have done target practice.”

  “Do you carry a rifle?” The idea of her with a weapon makes me nervous.

  She laughs. “At night, when I walk home from the pub, I don’t.”

  “On your own?”

  “I’m alone there.”

  “Oh.”

  She gives me a probing look. It’s a little absurd, but she seems to be considering whether I’m worthy of her trust or not. “I walk down the main street and shout for a bear to come.”

  “You shout out loud?”

  “People think I’m drunk, but that’s when I’m sharper than ever.”

  “You walk around calling bears?”

  “In Hebrew, too, just in case there’s a multilingual bear around.”

  A polar bear pounces on her from behind while she walks alone at night. In utter silence it tears her to shreds. Massive nails rip her delicate body. It doesn’t care who she is. It doesn’t care that she’s beginning to forget names. That she once abandoned her daughter. For it—she’s just meat. In my hallucination she doesn’t shout, doesn’t call for help. On the contrary, she smiles a terrible smile—the smile of someone who just wants to be meat. And I think of the lechers, and the Korean from Jerusalem, because they also devoured her. Over their shoulders, when they’re on top of her, I can see her terrible smile, the smile of a skull, and I think: How much foreignness can a person contain and still be herself?

  “Where were you?” she asks. “Right now, just this moment, where were you? What did you see?” Her gaze digs into me feverishly, desperately.

  “Not yet,” I reply, “give me time to get used to this.”

  * * *

  —

  “We have a coal mine, possibly the last one in all of Scandinavia. They shut down all the others because of pollution, but they left us free to pollute.”

  “Have you ever been down the mine?”

  “I worked there.”

  “You worked in a mine? You actually mined coal?”

  She laughs. Takes a drink. “I cooked for them. For a few months. Lots of carbs.” There is a strange magic in the way she talks, especially after the whiskey. A dreamlike distance, continual, as if she’s talking about someone else.

  “Do you even know how to cook?”

  “I’m a wonderful cook, Gili. I wish you’d let me cook for you one day.”

  I feel a sudden beesting on my tongue. “Tell me, Nina, there’s something I have to know.”

  “Anything you want.”

  “How many days did you breastfeed me?”

  Her hand flutters over her blouse button. “Why does that matter?”

  “No reason, just tell me: Three or four?”

  “No
t even one.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “When I was pregnant, I got eczema on my nipples and I couldn’t breastfeed.”

  So Rafi lied to me. But if he was going to do that, why was he such a cheapskate?

  “I’m sorry, Gili.”

  “No worries. It’s all good.” But it’s hard to describe how painful this is. “Can I ask something else?”

  “Whatever you want, Gili.” She enjoys saying my name.

  “I still don’t understand—what’s your connection to that place?”

  “The village? Nothing.”

  “Nothing-nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Just a place you happened to end up in?”

  “No. It’s a special place. The most moving place I’ve ever been in.”

  “But?”

  “There’s no but. It’s moving, and it’s indifferent to me. Doesn’t give me the time of day. Doesn’t make an effort. Doesn’t care whether someone like me exists or not, or that any minute I’ll be gone. It’s not the indifference you get on the streets of New York or New Delhi. No one there cares about me either, but in the mountains, in the north, with the sea all around, it’s a way of totally uniting—with nothing.”

  “And that’s good for you?”

  “It’s hard to understand, right? It’s the best for me.”

  “Explain.”

  She gives me a simple, warm smile. “You won’t let me off the hook. Forcing me to think. It’s been a long time since I really thought. Let me tell you what’s good for me there. It’s good for me that with every breath, a little more of me gets erased. There is less Nina to be. What’s that look?”

  “Nothing. It hurts to hear.”

  “Hurts? Really?”

  I nod. How can it not hurt. A person isn’t made of stone.