Face Tells the Secret

by Bernstein, Jane

  When the boys left, I could see no one else on the beach. Though I had only been in this country for an hour, I surmised that the beach was deserted because the only fools who ventured out in these dangerous times were boys who thought themselves immortal, and me. I was wrong, of course. When the season changed, the beach would be packed, but on that evening, when I was busy surmising, this is what I believed.

  

  I heard the argument as soon as I stepped back into the building. A deep voice full of fury. An old woman’s tremulous rage. The door was open. In the kitchen was a huge man in a gray tracksuit, waving papers at my mother. Shaved head, stud in one ear, Star of David the size of a dinner plate trembling against his heaving chest: this was Kotovsky, the landlord. While I was trying to unearth a word or two of the language that I had not spoken since I was a toddler, my mother smacked this giant in the belly. The futile gesture startled Kotovsky and he laughed. Then I laughed. This displeased him. The drama resumed.

  I was ashamed that a stranger was seeing my mother’s wrecked place and went to shut the door. I want to go home, I thought; “home” just then a state of mind, as perhaps it was for my mother, too.

  Across the hall, a door opened, and a small, beautiful, bare-footed woman edged past me and walked up to Kotovsky. This was Dina. Though she was a foot shorter and half Kotovsky’s weight, she was a formidable presence, standing inches from him, her arms crossed. She had a big head, blazing dark eyes, lustrous black hair that she flipped back when she began to berate him in husky, rapid Hebrew. Her chin was a whole other language, full of emotion. Kotovsky could have grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and flung her across the room. But, no, he lowered his head, then glanced upward, like a shamed boy.

  Dina turned to me, said, “Leona is your mother?”

  I nodded.

  “A wonderful woman. Oh!” She clutched her chest. “We admire her so! This is so pity.”

  And indeed it was, I learned. My mother had neglected to pay her rent and building fees for several months. The water she’d left running had flooded the downstairs neighbor’s flat. Vermin from her garbage had slithered next door. Everyone was complaining about the stench.

  Dina returned to Kotovsky, hands on hips, head thrown back. The hair toss, the jutting chin. Kotovsky’s shoulders drooped. Dina put her arm around my mother and speaking in that same husky voice, guided her through the crammed living room, toward her bed.

  Kotovsky regarded me as if I were a thing, sexless as a chair. I have to admit it hurt my feelings. I started to speak in English, and he waved his hand and cut me off. “Lo.” Now the other hand. “Lo, lo.” More hand waving, as if in this interlude, a dance would begin.

  After casting a spell on Kotovsky, Dina walked me to an ATM so I could get enough cash to placate him until morning. It was dark by then, and I was dopey with fatigue and felt for a moment as if I’d squeezed my eyes shut and prayed this woman into existence. The neighborhood had come alive with a multitude of young people on the street and in the cafes. Dina’s admiration for my mother seemed boundless. To have as a neighbor a great intellectual was an honor, she declared. A woman who was so admired. “Such a wonderful mother, the love you have!”

  Our shoulders bumped as we walked. What love? I wanted to ask, as if we were old friends who’d grown up on the same street.

  “You have a husband?” she asked.

  I contemplated saying yes, as if a pretend husband might protect me in this country I did not know. “Not really,” I said.

  “You have the JDate in America?” she asked.

  I said yes, we had the JDate.

  “I am having such fun on the JDate,” she told me. “My English, it is no longer so good. You’ll correct my errors?”

  “Okay,” I said. I wouldn’t.

  A shirtless boy biked past, his hair in dreads. His bearded dog trotted alongside him.

  We paused in front of an ATM machine. “To be honored all across the world! To have so many accomplishments!”

  The urge to confess rose like a wave. “She’s difficult,” I said, as I plucked from my wallet a card that might work here.

  “Of course! You must be in charge. You must make the decisions. Oh! I am so honored to meet her daughter. We will be such good friends! You are familiar with the work of Amos Fischoff? A brilliant man, also very handsome; he is giving a lecture tomorrow night, Leona will come and you will come, also.”

  She saw my stunned look of sheer exhaustion and took the credit card from my hand. “This is how,” she said, because I’d been trying to put my credit card into the slot where the money came out.

  When at last we were back at their building, she said, “Now it is time for the daughter to take over. You will care for Eema.” She gave a last husky, orgasmic “Oh!” and left for the night.

  With the windows open, the motorbikes on Ha’Yarkon seemed to zip through the rooms the next morning. I slid off the canvas cot, thinking I’d finish cleaning the kitchen before Ma woke. I’d found a stash of crumpled plastic bags and dumped old food into them, triple knotting the tops, quick, mindless, a human vacuum, sucking up the stuff. Then, drifting into the living room, I filled bags with newspapers and old magazines.

  I was shoving a five-inch floppy disk into a bag when my mother appeared in the same thin nightgown she’d worn at my house, with its floating violet bouquets, screaming, “Get out!” kicking me with the side of her foot, nearly toppling from the effort. “Get out of my house or I’ll call the police!”

  I threw on my clothes from the day before, grabbed my bag and hurried out of the building. For a moment, I stood on the sidewalk. The small stores on the street were all open, their racks of housewares and bins of produce set out on the sidewalk. Children were walking to school with colorful backpacks slung across their shoulders. Life on this crisp, bright morning seemed impossibly serene.

  I headed south, with no destination, until I reached Gordon Street, where an internet café was open. I stopped in to check my email. An international crew, all of them skinny young men, sat at the row of computers against each wall. I took the only free computer, between a redhead with lace-up boots painted silver, and a pink-cheeked Hasid in a black hat and tzitzit. When I logged onto my account, I was disheartened and not surprised to see six messages from Harley.

  I needed to delete these messages. I knew this in my heart and knew it because I could hear Mindy telling me not to read his email or take his calls.

  I sat back, peeked to the other side. Someone reeked from pot.

  Once when I’d told Mindy I was desperate for Harley to leave, she said, “You know what desperate women do when they really need to leave a relationship? They set the guy’s car on fire. They cut his underwear in squares.”

  The Hasid was the pothead.

  Sitting in the internet café, I thought of our silent evenings in my house, our silent dinners at the noisy sports bar Harley liked, with its huge projection TVs, the bright flickering colors, the roar of the crowd, young people squeezed close at the bar, and Harley clutching the cell phone on his lap, while I dragged my French fries through a river of ketchup. I saw myself approach him in his leather chair, his expressionless face with those dead eyes, and the words pouring out of me as I tried to extract something from him, a nod, a frown, and getting only that stony face that stripped me to the core, as if I did not exist.

  “Get out of my house!” I’d screamed at Harley, throwing his wallet into the shrubs.

  “Get out of my house!” my mother had screamed. “Get out or I’ll call the police!”

  Don’t open his email, I told myself.

  I deleted the first five. The sixth had an attachment. Squelch the curiosity! I thought, opening the attachment. A photo Harley had taken of himself flat on his back burst onto the computer screen. His face, as he gazed up at the camera, was as soft and helpless as a baby’s. I looked f
urtively to either side, quickly closed the attachment and deleted everything.

  When I got home, I scrambled some eggs, made a salad with tomatoes and cucumbers, and put out the fresh cheese and rolls I’d gotten across the street. When I called my mother to the table, she said, “I’m not hungry.”

  I said, “Show me where you sit.” She took the chair that faced the window where you could almost see the sea and ate with gusto.

  That night it rained heavily, which surprised me. I had not expected rain or cold nights, restaurants full of young people, dogs in jeweled collars, laughter. I had not expected that I would read dreadful news in the English edition of Ha’aretz that my mother picked up each day—sixteen killed in a bus bombing, thirty-four in a car—then an hour later, run down the sloping path to the beach and pass muscular men playing mat-kot against a hotel wall, their bare chests bronze from the sun. I had not expected that Dina would do so much for me.

  Late that night, the buzzer sounded, and I hurried downstairs to meet a man named George, who’d pulled up on a motorbike with a plastic bag full of obsolete cellphones, one of which I could rent. I chose a simple gray brick of a phone.

  Dina had found George for me. Dina had explained the steps I needed to take so Mom could get home health care, then she put me in touch with a doctor who would examine her and start the process. His name was Dr. Barry Berenbaum, and his earliest appointment for a home visit was in two weeks. Dina found the current phone number for my cousin Ronit, who lived with her family in Ra’anana, and gave me a key to her apartment so I could use her internet when she was gone. Dina ran a program for disadvantaged children—immigrants from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union, Israeli kids at risk—and her workday ended early. When she came home, she knocked on my mother’s door to see if there was something we might need.

  “To have a friend so close is fantastic,” she said the first night. “You’ll come over, we’ll have tea and talk and I will show you the JDate and we will have a very good time.”

  I imagined the mother of my youth, raising an eyebrow and saying, “The JDate?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’d like that,” though having a very good time was not on my agenda. “As soon as I get this place in order.”

  “I’m still working on it,” I said when I declined the next night.

  By the third night, Dina looked so wounded that I opened the door wider to remind her of the crazy mess that filled the rooms, the lopsided stacks of magazines and journal reprints, restaurant napkins, rubber bands, twist ties, post cards, unopened mail, calculators, travel clocks with broken hinges, plant pots, baking dishes crusted with black grease, plastic containers, hangers, decorative boxes, floppy disks. I gestured to the gloves, scarves, knit hats, berets, galoshes, and sport jackets tumbling from split plastic bags.

  “I’ve got to clear out some of this stuff before Dr. Berenbaum arrives.” I waited for a sign that Dina understood.

  Then I gave up. “No sane home healthcare worker would take a job in a place like this. It’s gross. And also, if I can’t clean up, I’ll never get home.”

  Dina gave me a hurt look. “You don’t like it here?”

  “No!” I said. “I mean yes. But I have to keep on task, you know?”

  Dina flipped her hair. She didn’t.

  “I need to get Leona set up with someone who’ll be able to… She’s not the easiest person. I can’t clean when she’s awake. If she sees me touch anything, she gets upset.” I rolled my eyes and said, “Really upset.”

  Should I reveal in a hushed voice just how agitated my mother became? Other people seemed to know what to tell and what to hide. Lacking this instinct, I hoped that my eye-rolling crossed cultures and communicated what I could not bring myself to say.

  I quickly figured out that it was impossible to sort through my mother’s stuff. It would take a lifetime if I tried to make decisions. The only way to create any order was to open an industrial garbage bag, toss in enough stuff to fill it, and bring the bag downstairs. I could only do this when she was fast asleep, or went to the market across the street—the only sojourn she willingly took and one she insisted on making alone. Even then, when I saw her handwriting on paper I was discarding or took in a whiff of naphthalene, an electric charge of despair shot through me, as if a spark of her brilliant past self had permeated each item.

  How slowly she walked across the street, her shoulders hunched, shuffling. Sometimes, she rested on the bench, with her purchases in a string bag—a newspaper, a box of tea, an onion, a roll. Under the sink was a basket full of sprouted onions, and the cabinet was bursting with boxes of tea. The newspaper, she could no longer read; the roll, she ate for breakfast.

  One morning, in a fury of throwing out clamps, journals, and galoshes, I threw in some onions and a small ceramic burro with a flower behind the ear and a broken hind leg that I recognized from years back. Out you go, I thought, hefting the bag and carrying it into the garbage area downstairs.

  On my way back up to her apartment, I thought of the long journey that ceramic burro had made, from New Jersey to Israel, and the long journey she had made as a child on a train to France, and my heart began to ache. I paused on the step. Don’t do this, I told myself. Don’t think. The ache continued to grow inside me until I thought I would burst. So I returned to the garbage area, found the heavy black bag and dug through the metal and paper, frantically, as if the burro might be asphyxiated if I didn’t free it right away. When I found it, I felt no relief, so I stashed it in a desk drawer where I would not have to see it. Even out of sight, the broken burro seemed to have lodged within me.

  Send work! I wrote, in an email to Les. This is going to take time.

  Seeing these words on the screen made it real. I wasn’t going anywhere soon. I had to wait for the doctor to arrive then wait for his diagnosis. If he found that Mom had some dementia, he’d refer her to a geriatric health center for a series of tests called the “mini-mental.” I had to wait for those results, and hope they backed up the doctor’s assessment, so she’d get a referral from the Bituach Leumi, the National Insurance Institute, for home health care. Then I had to wait for a nurse to evaluate Mom to determine how many hours of care she would get.

  Take off your shoes, I thought. Make yourself at home.

  I cleared my throat and called my cousin Ronit. When someone answered, I said, “Shalom. Do you speak English?”

  This was the awkward start of most of my interactions. It was what I said at the pharmacy and at the bank, and later, how I began my conversation with the nurse who evaluated my mother and the clerk at the employment agency where I got the names of home health care workers. It was what I would say at the Ministry of the Interior, where I ordered my birth certificate before I flew home.

  “Ken.”

  I instantly recognized Ronit’s deep voice. “Ronit! This is Roxanne, your American cousin. It’s been a long time. Maybe you don’t remember me.”

  My mother barely remembered me. It didn’t seem farfetched.

  “Roxanne. You are in Israel on holiday? Leona and Morris are with you?”

  “My father died,” I said. “Awhile back.”

  “And Leona?”

  “She lives here in Tel Aviv.”

  “In Tel Aviv? This I don’t understand.” Ronit’s blunt declaration made me wonder if she was angry. Then I decided maybe not, since she invited us to lunch on Shabbat.

  Later that day, while out for groceries, I bought a chartreuse orchid in a white ceramic pot. On the way back to Mom’s apartment, I let myself feel how much I enjoyed walking on these streets, with their palm trees and crusty Bauhaus buildings. Ordinary life still seemed remarkable to me—the sight of children and dogs, women hanging laundry on drying racks; the two elderly women I often saw sitting together on a bench on Nordau Street, dressed in straw cloches, beige sweaters, and skirts. How do you do it? I always wondered.
Even before I’d passed the bombed-out shell of a popular club for Israeli Arabs and Jews and further south the twisted remains of the Dolphinarium, where so many teenagers had been blown apart, I asked myself that question. How do you live? Those women chatting on a bench were European; they’d survived something, I knew. When I thought of them sitting in the sun together, I wondered, how? The Ethiopian cashier in the market, as lanky and elegant as a fashion model—how? The Argentinian baker, with a sign in his window, se habla Espanol, beneath the one in Hebrew I could not read. The Palestinians I did not see—how? The Ecuadorian house cleaner who came to Dina’s with her little boy—so far from language and home and family, desperate enough to come here of all places.

  Holding the orchid, I found myself thinking: I am walking in a city where everyone is wounded. Though I badly wanted to go home, I began to feel an odd kinship with this place, to feel myself an exile among exiles. Even before I knew my own story I thought, we have all lost something.

  

  When Dina opened her door, I heard a bird squawk, Ma! She took the orchid without a word, and put it out of view, as if it disgusted her. Then she returned and said in a cheerful way, “Roxanne! I am thinking you don’t like me!”

  She drew me into her cool, tidy apartment, with its olive couches and tile floor, a mirror image of my mother’s but clean and well-appointed. The bandy-legged parrot followed us into a small bedroom where Dina had set up a computer desk and two wheeled chairs. The bird and the room had been her daughter’s before she’d moved to Bangkok to tend bar. It was a very low-class job for a girl from their family, Dina said, pulling out a chair for me. “But now, she is having her life and I am having the JDate.”

  We scrutinized the photos of men on the computer and the parrot shifted side to side, squawking, “Ma! Ma shlomkhah!”