by Batya Gur
Uzi, too, surrendered now to the shy, embarrassed smile that lit up Michael’s face, and he patted him on the shoulder and said: “And who’s ever heard of a Moroccan Yiddishe mama?”
Michael’s buried anxieties, a never-failing source of amusement to those close to him, mainly entailed his only son.
When Yuval was still a baby, his father knew that the moment would come when the boy would leave for the annual school hike, want to ride a bicycle, dream of a motorbike, join the army. The first nights after Nira came home from the hospital with Yuval, he couldn’t fall asleep for fear the child would stop breathing. When Yuval was a year old, there were already legends about the Moroccan-born father who behaved like a Polish Holocaust survivor. “We’ve exchanged roles,” Nira explained with mocking coldness to their friends. “It would have been logical for me to behave like that. What reason does he have?”
Michael Ohayon found no difficulty in waking up at night when the baby cried, and changing the diapers was actually an enjoyable task. And when they were still married, Nira’s complaints about Yuval’s emotional demands found no echo in his heart.
Hardest of all was watching his son’s first steps to independence and freedom, the ever-present consciousness that life indeed hung on a thread, that his control over outside disasters was minimal, and that it was his task above all to keep the child alive and well.
He never expressed his anxieties to Yuval, and the boy began going to school by himself in the second month of the first grade, in spite of the heavy traffic on Gaza Street, and joined the Scouts without suspecting what it cost his father every time he left on a hike with his friends. Yuval was six when his parents separated, and his father consequently lost what little control he had over the dangers lurking at every corner. He had the boy twice a week and every other weekend, until Yuval himself rebelled against the rigid schedule imposed by his mother and began coming to his father’s house whenever he felt like it.
The passion for scuba diving that had taken hold of Yuval was the realization of all his father’s fears.
In reply to the question “What do you want for your birthday?” the boy had asked him to pay for a diving course. “Just the course and the essential equipment; I’ve already saved the fare from working last summer, and it may even be enough for part of the gear,” he said when he saw the expression on his father’s face and thought that the problem was the money.
Michael Ohayon had to call on all his reserves of inner strength when he instructed himself to respond quickly and as calmly as possible: “That’s an original idea. Where do they hold these courses?”
“All kinds of places,” said Yuval, and his face took on an expression of pure pleasure. “But I want to go to Eilat. I thought of taking the bus on Friday morning and missing school in honor of my birthday; anyway, it’s the end of the year. Or else I could leave after school and hitch down.”
And that, of course, was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The longing on Yuval’s face was joined by a trace of cunning, and Michael wondered if he had really succeeded in hiding his fears. The boy looked at him expectantly.
“Are you thinking of going with friends?” Michael asked cautiously, and when the boy said that he hadn’t thought about it yet, the solution came in a flash, the same stroke of genius that had saved the situation before, on the first trip Yuval had ever taken that involved sleeping away from home.
“We could spend the weekend together, and I could go down to Eilat with you. I’ve got a friend there I haven’t seen for years.”
There was a new suspicion in Yuval’s eyes when he asked: “In your car?” Michael nodded.
“Just the two of us?” asked Yuval, and Michael replied: “Why, is there anyone else you’d like to come with us?”
“No,” said Yuval hesitantly. “I just thought that maybe you might want to bring someone else along.” And then the delight began to break through the suspicion: “And I’ll dive, right?”
“If you want to, why not?”
“And you’re sure we can go from Friday morning till Sunday?” asked Yuval, and Michael started to argue about missing classes at the end of the school year, but in the end he smiled and said: “Okay, you only turn sixteen once. We’ll celebrate it the way it should be celebrated. The way you want to, anyway.”
Yuval asked no more questions, but the words “you might want to bring someone else along” reawakened Michael’s need to speak to him about Maya. In Eilat; I’ll talk to him in Eilat. On the beach, thought Michael, and calculated that there were still two weeks left before Yuval’s birthday. A lot of things could change in two weeks, he thought despairingly. Perhaps Yuval would catch a cold.
And now they had already spent two in Eilat. Michael lay on the beach and leafed through Diving News. He even read the advertisements, ignoring the books he had brought with him. The sun was at its zenith, and the heat made him drowsy, but he couldn’t surrender to it because of the feeling of unfocused uneasiness that had accompanied him since they set out from Jerusalem.
When he woke up that morning, he had told himself that the first day was safely over, that Uzi was taking care of Yuval personally, that he had the finest apparatus available, that there was only one more dive to go, and that tomorrow it would all be behind them and he would be able to drive home with an easy mind.
But then he saw the title “Do You Have a Regulator?” and he began to read the article below it. “There are no rules governing the examination of the tank valve and the regulator; the sole responsibility belongs to the diver,” it said. He went on reading to the end of the article and decided to show it to Yuval as soon as he came out of the water. (“During the dive, immediately after the diver had executed the underwater somersaults, a fault in the air supply was discovered, necessitating an emergency haul to the surface, while I gave him buddy-breathing,” reported the diving-instructor author of the article, and Michael found himself reading with intense concentration. “Observation of the underwater pressure gauge showed a drop in atmospheric pressure from 100 lbs to close to zero, during inhalation from the regulator.”)
Michael Ohayon looked at his watch: the practice session was due to end in fifteen minutes. He stood up and approached the sea. The Diving Club was crowded. No father had ever abandoned his son to his fate like this, he thought in a panic, and then he saw the figure in the black rubber suit being carried from the boat by two people and laid on the beach.
The first thought, of Yuval, was immediately dismissed, because the youngster removing the diving mask from the supine figure was not Guy, the diving instructor who had gone out with Yuval, but Motti, to whom he had been introduced the previous evening. With him was a woman in a diving suit, one of the students in the course, Michael thought. From where he was standing he was unable to see the expressions on their faces, but something in their movements, as they bent over the figure in the diving suit lying on the sand, proclaimed catastrophe.
The premonition of disaster immediately turned into a certainty when he saw Motti rapidly pulling out his knife and ripping open the recumbent figure’s diving suit. The woman ran in the direction of the office, a small stone building on the beach not far from where Michael had been lying.
Motti began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and Michael couldn’t take his eyes off the spectacle. Without knowing how he got there, he found himself standing next to them, waiting for the chest to rise and fall. But nothing happened. Together with Motti, Michael counted the breaths to himself.
It was a young man. His face was pink and swollen.
Superintendent Ohayon, who had seen a lot of corpses during the course of his career, still hoped that one day he would achieve the callousness of the police investigators and private detectives on television. Every time, he was astonished anew, always after the event, by his feeling faint, by the nausea, the anxiety, and sometimes the pity too, that he felt in the presence of a corpse, precisely when scientific detachment and attention to detail were called for. Not
hing at all would be demanded of him here, he consoled himself when he realized that all the attempts at resuscitation would be unavailing.
The woman came running back with a young man who held a doctor’s bag. Michael drew closer, silencing the inner voices reminding him that he was on holiday and that it was none of his business.
People began to gather around the diver lying on the sand. The doctor freed the body from the buoyancy compensator, laid the rubber mask on the ground, ripped off the diving suit, and set to work.
Now Michael could see the neck, swollen and bloated as the ankles of old women carrying baskets from the market. The doctor, with swift, sure movements, touched the neck with his finger and let go, pressed again and let go. By now Uzi was standing next to him, and he cried out in a panic-stricken voice: “Let’s get him into a recompression chamber,” and the doctor, without looking at him, shook his head and said: “It won’t help. You need a big recompression chamber, where he can be given artificial respiration as well. Look how dilated his pupils are, look at his neck—subcutaneous emphysema has already set in, I’m sure that all the inner organs are ruptured.”
And to his horror, Michael saw a thin line of blood breaking from the corners of the blue lips and trickling down the chin, and afterward he heard, through rising waves of nausea, the doctor saying something about inserting an intratracheal tube. “I doubt if it’ll help, but what can we lose?” he said as he deftly inserted the tube into the windpipe, and Michael—like Yuval, who in his childhood had been obscurely attracted precisely to the things that frightened him most—moved up closer and saw the dilated pupils clearly, and he saw the trickle of blood too, clearly, and the cut the doctor had made to insert the tube: he saw everything, and it was all new to him.
He had never seen the dead body of a diver before, he said to himself, and tried to overcome the nausea by means of the “scientific mechanism” a pathologist had once described, which dissociated the humanity from the dead body and made it possible to “get on with the job.” That’s what the pathologist had said the first time Michael, then an inspector in the police force, had watched a postmortem being performed. But his nausea increased: the diver’s body was wet and bloated, the skin looked as if it had been replaced by some spongy material, and the pink face—a surprising color for a dead man’s face, thought Michael—was turning blue. Finally the doctor knelt down next to the young man’s head and with an effort closed his eyelids. Then he wiped the sand off his hands and put the instruments back in his bag.
All this time, Uzi stood in helpless silence. When the mobile intensive care unit arrived, he shook himself and helped to carry the water-saturated body into the vehicle on a stretcher.
The doctor in the mobile unit exchanged a few words with the other doctor, and Michael looked alternately at the deep blue-water and at his watch, while pricking up his ears, out of habit, to hear the conversation taking place behind the open ambulance doors. “I don’t know what to say to you—he was completely pink; you can still see the redness in the mucous membrane of the mouth. . . . I don’t know, it looks like carbon monoxide poisoning to me; but maybe I’m wrong. You’d better check it out.”
Michael heard the answer without taking it in, except for the last sentence: “We’ll have to check and see.” The professional terminology, as usual, meant nothing to him.
The ambulance doors closed, and the siren began to wail with a noise that startled everyone on the beach, as if such sounds belonged only to a main street in a busy town. Michael shuddered, and he asked Uzi, who was standing and kicking at the sand, what had happened.
It had been twenty years since he had last seen Uzi Rimon. The director of the Diving Club had been his classmate at school, and his future had been forecast by their teachers in the grimmest terms. Despite all the years that had passed, Uzi had not lost the boyish, enthusiastic expression Michael well remembered from their school days, when he, Michael, had been a boarder, while Uzi had been what they called a “Jerusalemite,” attending school during class hours—not with any great regularity—and then returning home. Michael was often invited there, and to this day he remembered the awe that had overwhelmed him when he first met Uzi’s parents: his father was a famous painter, with people coming from all over to worship at his shrine, and his paintings of the sea hung in all the museums in Israel as well as in the finest ones abroad. Uzi himself treated his father with a mixture of distant reverence and tactful compassion, the meaning of which Michael did not then understand.
The mother was much younger than her husband, and she often referred to the fact that she was only eighteen years old when Uzi was born. She welcomed with undisguised delight the friends Uzi brought home and involved herself in her son’s social life to a surprising degree.
At the beginning Michael was invited there on Saturday afternoons, to a ritual of coffee and store-bought cake. Uzi’s father would sit behind a vast desk in the living room, while his mother reclined on the red-upholstered sofa along the wood-paneled wall opposite the desk. She reminded Michael of a young Roman matron.
The atmosphere was exceptionally cultured. The walls were lined with a fine library in four languages, in all of which Uzi’s father was fluent, as his mother never failed to mention. On the shelves behind the desk stood big artbooks, which Michael longed to look at.
There was always music too, music which was unfamiliar to Michael, and it was in this room that he was first overcome by miserable embarrassment at his ignorance, when Uzi’s father looked at him in disbelief, in astonishment, and asked: “You really don’t know that? At your age?” after he had hesitantly asked what the music was that was playing in the background.
To this day he couldn’t hear Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake without that old embarrassment flooding him again.
The conversation was always discreetly directed by Uzi’s mother. She would draw out her husband, who would finally respond by producing reminiscences about his European childhood and his travels around the world. Both parents’ reminiscences contained stories about poverty told in a lighthearted, humorous vein. Michael Ohayon, who was then Yuval’s present age, would return from those visits charged with contradictory feelings: thrilled by the intimate, personal contact with a new world, so different from the world in which he had grown up, and with these two people—the great artist, who was revealed as a man of almost childish innocence, completely lacking in self-importance, shy and at the same time friendly; and his wife, who gave off signals of frank sexuality and aroused feelings of discomfiture and attraction in him.
Today it all had faded. The tempestuous emotions of those days had turned into touching memories. But then! What fierce envy Uzi’s home had aroused in him, and what incomprehension at the outbursts of his friend’s inexhaustible rage against his parents, at how Uzi could come from a home like that and be so alienated from it.
How baffled he had been by Uzi’s tense and angry attitude to his mother, an attitude Michael was incapable of understanding. On the rare occasions when his own mother came to parent-teacher meetings, he was aware of her awkwardness, of the way she gazed in silence at his teachers, of the poor Hebrew in which she replied when she was asked a direct question, lost and in need of a translation, straightening the scarf tied round her hair, smiling her warm smile. He, who felt shame, and helpless anger at himself for being ashamed, and at his teachers and friends for witnessing his shame, thought then that if only he could have brought Uzi’s mother to meet his teachers, or his eminent father, his life would have been completely different.
It was years before he could correctly interpret the tensions to which Uzi was subject, the heavy burden of his famous father, the loathing he felt for his mother and the love with which he could not cope, the drive to destroy their expectations and the inability to conform. In the end, reflected Michael, holding his towel as Uzi mumbled something about being in shock—Michael himself felt detached from everything that was happening—in the end Uzi had become, in his own way, a conform
ist. For years now he had been living in Eilat, managing the Diving Club. He had become an expert on marine life in the Red Sea, even though he had never taken the trouble to study anything formally.
It was true that he went from one woman to another—Michael had met the latest of them the day before—but even in this he followed a pattern. The women in his life maintained friendly and concerned relations with him even after they parted, and it was always they who broke off the connection. Noa, his second wife, the one who had given birth to their only son, had once taken the trouble to come to Jerusalem and seek Michael out. Uzi had told her so much about him, she said apologetically, and she had never understood why they stopped seeing each other. And thus, to his surprise, he learned that Uzi still thought about him. Until the meeting with Uzi’s second wife, Michael thought that his old friend had uprooted him from his consciousness, felt nothing for him but shame and anger. In the little cafe where he sat with Noa, he heard for the first time that Uzi spoke of him with great feeling, and she, for her part, couldn’t understand “why you haven’t met over all these years, as if there’s some terrible secret between you. It’s so mysterious!” Michael said nothing and offered her his most charming smile, and she was, indeed, charmed and stopped pestering him with questions.
He still remembered, with painful clarity, the day when Uzi discovered—quite by chance, of course—the fact that his mother, who was then younger than they were today, not quite forty, had been the answer to Michael’s prayers for an older, experienced woman to come and, in the words of the little books he read in secret, “rescue him from the torments of his virginity.”
Even at the meeting with Noa, fifteen years after what he called “the carpet scene,” Michael couldn’t smile at the memory of Uzi’s face as he stood paralyzed in the doorway of the big room, looking down at the heavy carpet and at his best friend and his mother, and slamming the door behind him without uttering a word.
