What? says Tamar.
Nothing, says her mother.
She tells her mother she’ll call her back.
2
But the next time she speaks to her mother is not until the following day, because she doesn’t pick up when Tamar tries her on the train back to Riverdale. This comes as a surprise: her mother has always picked up. It is already midnight in Tel Aviv, but her mother never goes to bed any earlier, which has always made the time difference between them less of an obstacle to keeping in close touch. Over the nineteen years that Tamar has lived in New York, she’s gotten used to those late-afternoon/late-night conversations three or even four times a week, conversations during which she had at least eighty-five percent of her mother’s attention, the rest remaining available to the wonders and trials being broadcast on her mother’s TV. Sometimes her mother would interrupt their conversation to tell Tamar some fabulous fact about the Bengali tigers or the Alhambra, or to inform her of the struggles of children living in the slums of Beirut, or that an island in Greece was the place in the world whose inhabitants live the longest. If these conversations comforted Tamar, it was in part because they went all the way back to her childhood, to the privileged hours she used to spend in her mother’s presence while her brother napped, basking in her attention, which seemed only marginally taken up by the pile of elementary-school tests in her lap that she corrected with a red pen.
When her mother doesn’t pick up, Tamar calls Shlomi. She isn’t worried, not really, but because worry has always been the currency of love in her family, rarely does anyone miss an opportunity to express it. Of the four of them, when there were still four, only Shlomi was relatively free of the habit, probably because their parents spent so many years worrying about him that he developed an allergy to it.
Shlomi is a night person like her mother, though only since he met Dan can he be found home at midnight. For the twenty or so years before that, Shlomi was out from nine p.m. until two or three in the morning, though it was often impossible to know when those hours fell for him, since his work as a DJ took him all over the world. But now that he has settled down and gotten married, he travels much less, and soon, once the surrogate expecting their baby in Nepal delivers, he will not be traveling at all. But Shlomi’s circadian rhythms, fixed from his teenage years or maybe much earlier, come through to him from their mother’s milk, can’t be reset, which means that he picks up after two rings, using the nickname he’s called her since they were little: What’s up, Tash?
She launches right into the story about their mother, but he cuts her off to say that he knows all about it, and that this guy, the Husband, seems quite nice, very refined, not to mention excellent with children.
It is then that she feels the first pang of bewilderment—bewilderment mixed with annoyance. What do you mean, you know all about him? she asks. He stayed? The Husband? That’s how you’re referring to a stranger that Social Services scraped up from God knows where, from the bottom of some barrel?
From Netanya, in fact, Shlomi says, but she ignores him and continues.
The Husband? And Mom! She had me on the phone for half an hour and didn’t even mention the fact that she’s accepted into her life a man that someone she doesn’t know from Adam showed up at her door and told her belongs to her? The way she told it made it sound like she thought the whole thing was crazy.
To which her brother replies: Maybe she felt uneasy telling you the truth.
It feels like a slap in the face. There is no malice in it, that isn’t Shlomi’s way, but, following from his freedom from worry, he has a talent for frankness.
Why would she be uneasy? asks Tamar, still stinging.
She can almost hear her brother shrug on the other end.
Because she knew you’d react like this.
Like what?
Prickly. Suspicious. A little defensive, even.
Defensive! Why would I be defensive? My response to a stranger being presented as her lost husband, when we all know that she never had any husband except for Dad, seems like the only sane reaction around here. What possessed her to take him in just like that, a perfect stranger?
Maybe because of that.
What?
That he seems perfect.
We don’t even know the first thing about him, Shlomi! He might be a psychopath. Or at the very least a con artist.
Maybe she knows enough.
I mean, does he even speak Hebrew?
It sounded to Tamar as if they’d found him far away, maybe even at sea. An image comes to her of the old man in the brown hat clinging to a broken plank and bobbing in the waves. For a moment, she almost feels sorry for him. But only a moment, because, also, who does he think he is? Going along with Social Service’s crazy idea, or maybe even cooking it up himself; sitting there in his dapper suit on her mother’s chair like the picture of innocence itself, opening his arms to accept babies?
He speaks it like a poet, Shlomi says. Like he stepped right out of an Alterman poem, the kind Mom used to read us when we were young.
Now he’s stepping out of Alterman poems!
And he’s some sort of genius mathematician, too, Shlomi added. Collaborated with Erdős himself. The guy has an Erdős number of one.
Who the heck is Erdős? Tamar asks.
But Shlomi has to hang up, because, lo and behold, Dan has finally gotten through to Nepal.
3
That night Tamar doesn’t sleep well. It’s Friday, her daughter Iris is out late with friends, and on such nights Remy, only ten, likes to sleep in his mother’s bed. She can never fall asleep until Iris is safely at home, and as much as she likes Remy’s sweet presence, he’s a mouth breather, and his hot skinny legs are always shifting under the sheets. Yet even after Iris is back in her own bed, not smelling of alcohol or cigarettes or weed, under the glowing sticker stars on her ceiling, and Remy has at last fallen into a place of stillness in the well of sleep, Tamar lies awake thinking about the Husband. What bothers her, she decides, is the idea of her mother being taken advantage of. As tough and sassy as she may be, she is still a seventy-three-year-old woman living on her own, who needs her son every time she has a maintenance problem in the apartment, and her daughter to sort out her bank statements. Her health is fine, thank God, but though her mind is still sharp, she’s become increasingly forgetful. She continues to teach Hebrew to Sudanese immigrants twice a week, but twice in the last month she’s misplaced her phone and had to have Shlomi backtrack through her day with her until luckily they located it both times, once at the counter of the Super Pharm, and once at Gordon Pool, where she swims twice a week and the lifeguards know her. After that, Tamar started to notice other lapses, too. She called her friend Katie, a neuroscientist, who told her not to worry, there was no reason to believe it was the onset of Alzheimer’s, it was just that the messenger in her frontal cortex that got sent to the hippocampus was growing a little slower, a little more tired. It wasn’t that the memory was eroded, it was all still very much there, but as the brain ages, the messenger sent to retrieve the memory gets weak and lazy, and sometimes lost along the way.
In other words, her mother is getting old. It’s nothing Tamar hasn’t already grasped. When her father was suddenly felled in the supermarket by a crushing pain in the chest, and died less than an hour later at the hospital before Tamar or Shlomi could get there, she’d understood something all at once about the fragility of her parents’ lives, understood that they had entered the stage in which death would now be always around the corner. Her mother isn’t a fool, and she isn’t frail either, but she is aging, and everyone knows how easy it is to prey on the elderly. Isn’t it their responsibility, Shlomi’s and hers, to make sure that their mother isn’t taken advantage of? A strange man, two strange men in fact, show up at her door without any warning and claim that a Husband has been found that their mother has never lost! Claim that someone who never belonged to her in fact belongs to her in the most intimate way, with all of th
e responsibilities, emotional not to mention financial, that that implies. Has Israel become so broken and corrupt, Tamar wonders, so wildly chutzpadik, that having failed to put aside the resources to take care of the very people it was founded to provide refuge for—the lost and dispossessed—having instead drowned all of its resources in defense, and the prime minister’s taste for cigars, pink champagne, and jewelry, that some crackpot in the administration, the Head Clown of Public Health, has hatched the crooked plot to deliver these poor old uncared-for people to innocent people’s doors, asserting that they belong to them, and so are their responsibility?
Is there no end, she thinks, flopping again from her back to her stomach while Remy breathes heavily at her side, is there really no end to the uses and abuses of the Holocaust they will come up with? Here they are, riffing off a deep emotional chord in the country’s history, playing on the moving stories her mother’s generation grew up with, which happened far too infrequently but were so often told, of fathers and husbands, wives and sisters, lost during the war and presumed dead, only to be miraculously dredged up by the Red Cross and reunited with their loved ones. Rescued from the lost and the dead in some hellish DP camp, packed onto a boat to Haifa, and in a moving ceremony of the impossible becoming possible, the unreal becoming real, which after all was to be the hallmark, the specialty, of that about-to-be-born country, delivered into the arms of the one who lost them, who presumably never took them for granted again. And now here was Social Services, or Special Services, or whatever they called themselves, claiming even now, seventy years on, to be turning up, in the form of little old men in shapeless hats, all the love that was lost? And, so that no opportunity for hypocrisy should be missed, at the very same moment when they were sending their agents out with a plan to thrust these unclaimed old Jews into other people’s homes and hands, they were sending out the police to round up the Sudanese in Florentine for deportation, and to pluck out of their homes Filipino children who had been born in Israel, whose first language was Hebrew and grew up singing “Ha’Tikva,” to throw them into jail before kicking them out of the country they’d grown up in for good. What kind of fools did they think they were dealing with?
She leaps out of bed and pulls on her robe, the puffy chenille one the kids got for her birthday a few years back, as comfortable as it is unflattering, yanks her phone from the plug, and marches into the kitchen. If Shlomi isn’t prepared to do anything about this, if he is happy to just sit by and let their mother be conned by this character and the agency acting in support of his audacity, then she will have to see to it on her own.
She calls her mother. It’s already eight thirty in the morning in Israel, and either she will be getting ready to go to the pool or preparing for her class. And yet when her mother answers after four or five rings, there is the sound of roaring and children shouting, and, after a moment, a booming voice warning someone of the rip current on the other side of the ropes.
Hold on, I can’t hear you! her mother shouts.
Where are you? Tamar asks, because it sounds like the beach, and her mother hates the beach, is always complaining that the sea is filthy, and accusing the packed cafés on the beach of highway robbery. On one of the few occasions that Tamar can remember her mother agreeing to take her and Shlomi to the beach when they were little, Shlomi got stung by a jellyfish, which only cemented their mother’s poor opinion of the place. She is content to look at the sea from the comfort of the promenade, which she walks on her way to and from the pool twice or three times a week, but otherwise she is one of the few residents of the city who has more or less turned her back on it.
I can’t hear you, her mother repeats, I’m at the beach.
What are you doing there?
We’re having a coffee.
As in, you and him?
Who?
The Husband.
Her mother says nothing.
I spoke to Shlomi, Mom. Here I was laughing on the phone at your story, but you sure took your time getting to the punch line of the joke.
What joke?
That he stayed! That you accepted a little old man that someone claimed is your lost husband into your apartment, into—and here Tamar pauses, because for the first time it occurs to her that her mother might have gone even further than inviting him to sit in the chair by the window, that she might have accepted him into her bed.
Her mother laughs.
What’s so funny? Tamar demands.
He isn’t so little, her mother says, and then she hears her say to him, It’s only Tamar, my daughter, Tamar.
We need to talk, Mom. I don’t understand why you’re going along with this, and I’m concerned.
About what? I’m having a coffee on the beach, that’s all. I’ll call you later. And why are you up in the middle of the night, anyway? Iris stayed out late again? You’re finally getting paid back for all of the nights you stayed out when you were her age. But it’s good for her, let her enjoy. Look how serious you turned out to be.
On this new, lighter note her mother hangs up, the roaring of the waves is cut off, and Tamar is returned to the silence of her kitchen in the suburban street where she has lived for the last twelve years, since Iris was three.
Not so little! she repeats. But all that comes back is the hum of the Subzero, a sound one only ever hears when alone.
In the days that follow, Tamar gathers from Shlomi that though the Husband has not yet moved in with their mother, he is spending a lot of time with her. He is from Hungary, his Hebrew is not, it turns out, as eloquent as Alterman’s, he only knows a poem or two of Alterman’s by heart, which he recites at moments when his Hebrew fails him. Their mother, however, is used to the broken Hebrew of immigrants, and is an excellent teacher, too; already the Husband is wearing her corrections well. Why he was lost for so long, why he only came to be found at this late stage, remains unclear: neither Shlomi nor her mother can explain any of it to her with clarity. He was extracted from Hungary some years ago—two, or three, or maybe five—or he had extracted himself, and since then had been living in Netanya, where he’d passed his time playing cards at the Hungarian club until someone had recognized him to be, or he had revealed himself to be, the lost Husband.
It doesn’t seem to matter to either Shlomi or her mother that the math doesn’t add up: that he was only a child during the war, and so couldn’t have been married back then to anyone, not to mention that her mother has no connection with Hungary, has never even stepped foot in Hungary. While the Husband was stuck behind the Iron Curtain, her mother grew from a girl into a woman in Jerusalem, attended Hebrew University, and met her father, got married, moved to Tel Aviv, and became pregnant with Tamar, and four years later with Shlomi. Why, Tamar asks, when that curtain finally lifted and let in the brief light of democracy, had the Husband not made any gestures that would have allowed him to be found? Why was it that only in recent years, as the Hungarian government moved toward the far right and became more and more overt in its state-sponsored xenophobia and its glorification of Nazi collaborators, and the brief light of democracy dimmed toward autocracy, did it finally dawn on the Husband, who had no family around him, whose neighbors in the small town where he lived were also getting more brazen in their anti-Semitism, to put up his hand, to raise the white flag of the lost who wish to be found? Is there not a statute of limitations on being able to claim that one is lost? And what in the world does her mother have to do with any of this?
For a brief while Tamar even entertains the idea that her mother has a secret story she’s kept from the rest of the family. Her mother has always been there for them, has always given Tamar, Shlomi, and their father enough of herself for them to feel gifted with her attention. When Iris was born and demanded everything, Tamar wondered how her mother managed it, this trick of making them feel seen and heard, watched and loved, while at the same time she kept something away, a small portion of herself reserved for elsewhere. Tamar herself doesn’t know how to do it. Either s
he gives too much or not enough, either she feels overwhelmed or selfish. She waited to have Iris until after she’d finished her research and set up her practice. David had wanted children from the very beginning, but she insisted on giving herself time. But when she finally agreed to get pregnant and Iris arrived, the baby was colicky and never stopped crying. It took every ounce of energy Tamar had to soothe her, so that from the very beginning her only choice as a mother, or so it had seemed, had been to devote herself entirely: to race around the kitchen island to keep the baby wildly bouncing in the carrier, to hum and shush and swing and sway and rock and let Iris suck all of the blood out of her pinkie, out of her life, to give up on seeing friends because if she didn’t possess all of her mother’s attention, Iris was inconsolable. And even after the nearly twelve months of colic ended, the child remained sensitive to everything; to little Iris, the world, however wondrous, was at base a menacing place, and Tamar was needed at all times to mitigate this danger. Was it something she’d done? Had she somehow communicated this grim and anxious outlook? More than likely. And yet she herself hadn’t been that sort of child. Her mother had always said she was an easy baby, though now Tamar thought that probably said more about her mother than about her. Raising Iris was a project that for a long time exhausted and drained her, which is why it took nearly five years for her to come around to having Remy. And even then, she thought she was only doing it for Iris’s sake, so that her daughter wouldn’t be alone. During that difficult period—catching sight of herself in the mirror and trying to work out where she’d gone, and if any of her would ever come back again, if whatever made her essentially herself had been lost forever, bartered for a baby—she would find herself wondering what her mother’s secret was. What her mother knew or possessed that allowed her to give just enough of herself, without ever giving herself fully away. Only now does it occur to Tamar that maybe her mother had something of her own, something, or someone, she’d needed and so taken for herself, which made all of that giving possible. And yet even if she’d had a secret life, even if she’d found her own way to receive back, through unknown channels, some of the love she gave, it couldn’t have been with him, the lost Husband, any more than it could have been with a man from Nairobi or Shanghai. The facts just didn’t line up.
To Be a Man Page 15
