Liar

by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

  At intermission, they went to the table with the sweet pastries. People passed them and asked, “How are you both?” and the “both” made it clear that everyone thought they were together, married. It didn’t surprise her. She remembered that lone hand raised in the middle of the hall, how he kept it in the air until she was beside him so she wouldn’t make a mistake at the last minute. She felt uncomfortable for feeling so comfortable with his attention, and she decided she would leave early. As it was, she would have enough information for the next trip from her Internet class and the Yiddish class she had signed up for. She was surprised when he said he would join her. He didn’t have the strength to listen to the government representative make his speech. And definitely not the organization director’s speech either. He’d been a shmuck in Theresienstadt, and he’d only got worse since then.

  When they went outside she thought he would offer to walk her to the bus stop, but instead he raised a hand and a driver pulled up. He opened the door of the shiny black car for her, and she smelt genuine leather upholstery, the strong smell of a car well taken care of and not often used. He took her downtown to eat at a Polish restaurant that had white napkins and fat, pretty waitresses. There were a lot of crumbs around his plate, but he told her it wasn’t because he was ninety. Even when he was nine he ate like a degenerate, but before his parents could argue with him about eating like a mensch they were gone. She told him about her parents and he listened the way he ate, so totally engrossed in what was in front of him that he didn’t mind if a few crumbs fell, what counted was the thing itself. He didn’t notice her vagueness, because he wasn’t interested in the small details. What interested him was her parents, and when he listened to her that way, she could actually hear them talking, after years when their voices had been dimmed in her mind. She asked him about his family, and as he told her, more and more people who once existed crowded around their small table with its white tablecloth, and somehow there was room for all of them. In the end, he told her he hadn’t spoken that way for years. Since his wife. Maybe it was easy to talk to her like that because they were both from Theresienstadt. She could have told him right then, but she thought she would never see him again and the time with him was so beautiful that she decided not to say anything.

  Since then, he had come to visit her almost every evening. To keep him from bumping into any of the residents, she asked him always to come after ten. He agreed happily, he couldn’t sleep at night anyway. When she was young she had been warned about men who only wanted one thing, and with Areh’le she remembered that warning with a smile. Not because of her body. It wasn’t her body he wanted to enter. It was her soul. The way he constantly undressed her. Hurriedly, like her hasty lovers and like Victor in the grocery storeroom, not even stopping to take off their clothes, just anxious to join together as quickly as possible. He asked her things no man had ever asked. Bluntly. With no gentle probing. What did she regret the most? If she woke tomorrow morning with the body of a twenty-year-old, what would she do? (Would she marry Victor again? Raise her children the way she did?) What trait did she have that she wanted to pass on to her grandchildren? Who did she miss the most? At first, those questions embarrassed her. Embarrassed her the way it had embarrassed her when Victor asked her to undress in the light, the day after they were married, no shutters and no sheet. She had almost refused then, self-conscious about her breasts, which looked too small, and he hugged her and said there was nothing more beautiful than a man and a woman naked together in the light, and to show her, he undressed himself. She already knew his body, but it suddenly looked larger, it filled the entire room. Look, he told her, all this is yours.

  She wondered what Victor would think of Areh’le. They were different in almost every way. Apart from that insistence: a man and a woman naked together in the light. And after a while, she dared to extend a probing hand with Areh’le as well. On their fourth night together, she told him that she had questions of her own. He listened gravely, answered to the best of his ability. Until the night reached its deepest moment, and the darkness began to fade away. They would boil water for tea – like Rivka, she left the teabag in the water for a long time – and together, in silence, they would watch the sun rise. Those silences were no less precious than their conversations. Perhaps more. There are many people you can talk to, but people you can be silent with are a rare commodity. In those silences, she tried to tell him that she was not from Theresienstadt. That her name was Raymonde. That she never thought it was still possible at their age. He would look pensively through the window, then smile at her – even at ninety, he had a lovely smile – and say, “Good morning, Rivka.”

  Then he would leave her room and slip away quietly to the driver waiting for him in the street. She didn’t want anyone to see him go out, and he agreed with her because he thought that the worst thing about being old is that everything is allowed and there’s nothing to hide, and without things to hide there’s no suspense or passion. He thought it was a game, thought she was acting like a teenager who might be thrown out of a girls’ school, while in reality no one throws you out of a retirement home except the burial society. He didn’t have the slightest suspicion that it wasn’t the house manager she was afraid of, but him, of the moment one of the residents met him and asked him to give regards to Raymonde. (You mean Rivka? No, Raymonde. Raymonde Azoulai.)

  At night she was with him, and in the morning she was in the classes she had signed up for, Yiddish and Internet and T’ai Chi, which she had begun to like, and in the afternoon she slept. But on that day, instead of going up to her room to rest, she decided to go downstairs and feed the cats. And so it happened that she was there on the bench when the girl suddenly appeared at the entrance to the home. When Raymonde saw her, her heart almost dropped into her briefs. It was frightening just to think what would happen if the girl went over to reception and asked where Rivka Kanzenpold was. They would tell her she’s been dead for months, and the girl would tell them it couldn’t be, she was with them on their trip to Poland. Raymonde looked around to see whether any of the residents were there now. This visit could cost her dearly. On the flight back from Poland all the children promised to come and visit her, but that hadn’t worried Raymonde. She knew they really meant it on the plane, in the air, but they would forget about it when they landed on the ground. She hadn’t heard from them for three weeks, and suddenly that girl was here the way people used to visit in the old days, before there were phones, when they just knocked on your door and came inside.

  “Do you remember me?” the girl stood in front of the bench and asked, “My name’s Nofar.”

  “Of course I remember,” Rivka replied, adding in her kibbutznik Hebrew, “it’s so nice of you to come and see me.”

  Two residents that Raymonde could never stand came out of the main entrance, looked briefly at the girl and continued on their way. They must have thought she was her granddaughter. Raymonde swallowed her fear the way you swallow a blood-pressure pill, first it sticks in your throat and a minute later it’s on the way down, just breathe deeply and take a sip of water. “Come here, maydele,” she said to the girl, “sit down next to me.”

  As soon as the girl sat down, Raymonde sensed something was wrong. She said she’d come to ask how she was, but one look was enough for Raymonde to know she’d come to tell her something you can’t tell other people. She’d crossed the entire city to see a familiar stranger. Her eyes were red and her sweet face was completely swollen, as if she were holding a whole doughnut in her mouth without swallowing it. Raymonde knew how to get secrets out of people with the same skill she had squeezed out blackheads on her children’s backs when they were little and still let her do it, or the way she took almonds out of their green shells. You just had to press in the right place. But here, she didn’t even have to make an effort. It was the only reason the girl had come. And really, a few minutes later she told her everything. How that singer had insulted her in the ice-cream parlour. The girl stil
l remembered exactly what he had said to her, as if it was written on her hand and she just had to read: “You pie-faced moron! You stupid cow! You should tweeze your eyebrows before going out in public. And those pimples, didn’t anyone ever tell you not to squeeze them? You just need a few olives on your face and they can sell it as a pizza. But forget the face, what’s with that stomach of yours? Didn’t the owner of this place tell you that if you eat too much, you’ll look like a hippo? Who would ever want to fuck you, huh? I’ll take one scoop of cookie dough.” And then the money he thrust at her, a piece of paper that made it clear who was the customer here and who had to serve him. Raymonde listened in silence and the girl told her how he ran after her and she swore that when she screamed in the alley, she didn’t know things would go so far. She just wanted him to leave her alone. But then everyone came and he humiliated her again, this time in front of everyone, and when they asked her if he’d touched her, a kind of “Yes” came out of her, not intentionally, the “Yes” of hysteria, and then it continued with the police and, later, on TV. The girl kept talking and Raymonde remembered that she had heard the story at the time. Rivka had been sick and had had no desire to read the papers, but even so, the scandal had trickled down to her from the other residents. It seemed that the whole country had known about it except for her, though she did now.

  The girl began to cry, saying that the trial was coming soon, and that she’d been at the police station today. They told her there he would be sentenced to five years in prison. Raymonde reached into her pocket and took out a handkerchief, slightly used, but the girl wouldn’t care at all, she was too busy with her sobbing, how can I tell them now, they’ll punish me, they’ll yell at me. Raymonde waited for her to calm down a little and then said that, with all due respect, there’s a little more to this world than what people say about you. There are things you must not do, and you did them. The girl cried more quietly now, without words, and Raymonde was afraid she might have gone too far, been too harsh on her. But it was clear that the girl had come all the way there just for that, for someone to slap her bottom and tell her what to do. People always come to old folks to tell them what the right thing to do is. But why would they know what the right thing is? The only difference between them and young people is a few dozen years more of mistakes and terrible decisions.

  The girl looked at her with enormous respect. The way you look at a wise and kind Holocaust survivor who has just given you a wise and kind bit of advice. Suddenly it frightened Raymonde, the power the girl had put in her hands. And even before she realized what she was doing, she opened her mouth and told her about Rivka. The phone that had remained with her after the funeral. The calls that came. The suitcase. The passport. The folded socks. She told her about the Yiddish lessons and her Internet research. She told her about Areh’le and felt her face suddenly grow hot. Until that moment she had been cold, and now her cheeks were flushed. She wondered if the girl noticed.

  Nofar didn’t notice. She was staring down at the ground. “So it doesn’t pass with age.”

  “It’s not the same thing,” Raymonde said quickly, slightly insulted, “with me, no one gets hurt, everyone wins. With you, it’s different.”

  “But someone who can talk like that to an ice-cream server, who knows what else he could do. Think about it, a person like him, he definitely must have hurt some woman in the past!” All the way over there Nofar had wanted to confess, but now, when that woman criticized her, she suddenly found she was defending herself. “And even if he never hurt anyone,” she added, “at least this will teach others a lesson.”

  That annoyed Raymonde, how hard she was trying to justify herself. “This is not a public-education mission. Someone will go to prison because of your stories. You have to stop this as fast as you can.”

  The girl looked at her with a bitter smile on her face that hurt Raymonde, who kept on saying that she had to tell the truth, but the longer she spoke about the evils of lying, the deeper the bitterness grew on the girl’s face, until she finally said, “I don’t think you have the right to preach to me.”

  Nofar looked at her. She was no Holocaust survivor, she was a Holocaust conniver, pretending to be a victim to gain things. It was no wonder she was like that, and it was no wonder that Nofar was like that too, since it paid off so well for both of them.

  37

  SHE DIDN’T SLEEP THAT NIGHT. All the way back from the home, she couldn’t wait for the moment she would finally lie down in her bed. She had fallen asleep on the bus and almost missed her stop. It wasn’t normal tiredness, it was almost like fainting. But when she finally reached her room and climbed into bed, sleep refused to come. Lying on her back, she was more wide awake than ever. She tossed and turned until she realized it wouldn’t work. She reached out into the space between the wall and the mattress and was horrified.

  It was a handbreadth away from the corner of the room. Back in primary school, when she had first begun to write in the notebook, she had set that distance – one hand with fingers spread – so she would know whether the hiding place had been desecrated. She’d been twelve when she started writing, deeply immersed in teen detective books, and she greatly admired secret hiding places and secret codes of all sorts. Over the years, she realized that no one would be spying on her for the simple reason that she wasn’t interesting enough, but she nonetheless continued to keep her notebook in the same place. Force of habit. Five years had passed since then, notebooks had come and gone, but the place was the same. A handbreadth away from the corner of the room. She had a precise physical memory of that place, so long before her mind understood, her fingers already knew for a certainty: the notebook was not in its place.

  It was there, but not exactly. It was three handbreadths from the corner. Nofar sat up in bed, told herself it had to be a mistake. She hadn’t touched the notebook for weeks. She hadn’t even stroked its cover the way she always did before going to sleep. As if the confession on its pages might burn her fingers if she touched it. And yet, she knew where she’d put the notebook the last time she wrote in it. And she knew that wasn’t where she found it. Suddenly, it occurred to her that Maya had been looking at her strangely since last night. Her eyes were red, as if she had an infection, and those infected eyes had followed her around from room to room.

  “Maya?”

  She called loudly, in the most normal voice she could muster. A moment later the door opened. The tension was visible in the way Maya stood, a spark of guilt was in her glance.

  “Could it be that you came into my room when I wasn’t here?”

  “Yes, yesterday, I came in to take a dress.”

  And why shouldn’t she come in to take a dress? They took each other’s clothes every day. They had always gone into each other’s rooms, covering the distance between them without hesitation, and even if they sometimes became angry with each other – get out of my room, don’t come in without permission – the complaint was for show, like the borders in the European Union that existed only to be crossed.

  But the air in Nofar’s room grew suddenly thick. Because if Maya had come in yesterday only for a dress, why was she standing that way now, in the middle of Nofar’s room, flushing slightly and sweating slightly? The little sister was talking about a piece of clothing she wanted to borrow, but while her mouth spoke about the dress in the wardrobe her eyes were looking at the narrow space between the wall and the mattress. If it were possible to follow looks the way we follow footprints, then all the footprints led to her mattress, of that she was almost positive.

  “Which dress did you take?”

  “In the end I didn’t take one.”

  When Maya left the room, Nofar sat down on her bed. That was why her sister was acting so strangely. But if Maya hadn’t said anything until now, maybe she wasn’t planning to do anything about it. On the other hand, even if she didn’t say anything today, what guarantee did Nofar have that Maya wouldn’t tell all tomorrow, or in another minute? Maybe she was only tryin
g to find the courage.

  Once again, Nofar reached out to the space between the mattress and the wall, and this time she wasn’t completely sure that the notebook had been moved from its regular place. Maybe she had pushed it by accident in her sleep. Maybe Maya’s look of alarm was only in her mind. And even if Maya had read the notebook, you can trust a sister. She wouldn’t say anything. She wouldn’t turn her in. So the girl tossed and turned in doubt all night, reassuring herself one minute, frightening herself the next, until she finally got out of bed and picked up a pen. For the first time in a very long while, Nofar filled the notebook with feverish, desperate writing.