by Eshkol Nevo
No kidding!
Apparently…that’s how he got to you on the couch.
* * *
I retained the memory of his touch the way I would the memory of a night of lovemaking. During the drive to the checkpoint, I felt the warmth pulsing in my body. In my stomach as it pressed up against his back. In my arms as they held him.
* * *
I wonder if he’ll remember anything when he wakes up, I thought out loud.
Usually he completely forgets what happened at night, Iris said. Once he ate half a pot of soup that was in the fridge. Just like that. From the pot straight to his mouth. As if it were a water canteen. And he didn’t remember a thing in the morning. But if he says anything, I’ll let you know. I have your e-mail address, right?
* * *
No one would dare to admit it publicly. Even I find my fingers blushing as I type this now. But when the victims of a terrorist attack live beyond the Green Line, it matters less to those who live on this side of the Green Line. Our minds hear the news, and from the names of the victims, we know whether they are members of the tribe or not, and often, we decide to push aside the pain and anxiety: “They chose to live there and endanger themselves and their children? So let them pay the price.”
* * *
—
I didn’t receive an e-mail from Iris. Nor did I send one.
But after the night I spent in Ma’ale Meir, the Green Line was no longer the line where compassion stopped.
On the contrary, for years after that, I still tensed up when I heard a report about a Molotov cocktail, a car that overturned after being stoned, infiltration into a settlement. I moved my radio dial from a music station to the IDF station, I listened to news bulletins. And when the names were announced in the papers the next day, I scanned the article with a pounding heart: Just not Nimrod just not Nimrod just not Nimrod just not Nimrod.
Maybe it was also the way she described him that made him seem like a kid who was asking for trouble.
* * *
“Four teenagers entered a Palestinian village, apparently to spray hate slogans on the wall of the local mosque. From the information we have received, it appears that a group of masked men were waiting for them, and now the boys are trapped in the mosque. The army is operating in the village. The situation is not completely clear at this time, but we can already say that there have been some injuries.”
I sat in front of the TV and listened to the reports.
Dikla said, Look at how they drive the whole army crazy, those settlers.
And she also said, I hope they learn their lesson.
I didn’t reply. I didn’t argue. I didn’t say that love conquers everything that stands in its way, including ideology. Or that love is the ideology. I kept watching TV all night. Waiting for the names.
I had a gut feeling. Like mothers have before the army representatives knock on the door.
It came right before dawn: “Our military correspondent reports that the boys were rescued alive. One of them, Nimrod Sali, is moderately to seriously injured, and has been taken to Tel Hashomer hospital.”
* * *
I waited for the right moment. I didn’t want anyone in the hospital to stop me and say that visiting hours were over. I didn’t want Iris or anyone from Nimrod’s family to see me. I sat beside Ari’s bed in oncology and we played the game we’d regularly played since he had started drifting in and out of consciousness: He closes his eyes and dozes off for a while, and when he opens them, he asks if Ronnie visited him while he was asleep. I say yes, sure, and he smiles in satisfaction, closes his eyes again, opens them after a while and asks if Lihi visited him while he was asleep. I say yes, sure. We continue like that, visited by more and more girls who had disappeared since he’d become ill.
* * *
—
When Ari fell asleep for the night, I walked around other departments for hours. I pretended to be a waiting relative and tried to find the path that would take me to Nimrod’s room, with zero exposure and a minimum of doors that opened only from the inside.
At four in the morning, I reached my destination.
When I entered the room, I saw Iris sprawled on a chair, sound asleep.
Her hair was speckled with gray. Her brow plowed with wrinkles. After all, the passing years had left their mark. On her and on me.
I walked over to the bed. The machines beside Nimrod gave off a dim light, illuminating his face. The stubble on his cheeks. His slightly drooping lips, giving him that old, offended look.
Gingerly, I climbed onto the bed and hugged him from behind, the way I had then. His body curved, abandoning itself to the embrace as if it remembered. His long lashes quivered slightly, as if he were about to wake up. But he continued to sleep.
I listened to his breathing to make sure it didn’t stop and waited for first light to appear in the window. Then I got out of his bed and headed home. I drove through the deserted streets and switched stations on the radio, maybe one of them would broadcast an update or at least play “Waiting for the Messiah.” But the Messiah didn’t come.
I waited in my living room for some news, occasionally getting up and patrolling the other rooms. Sunbeams had begun to penetrate the shutters in my kids’ rooms, illuminating their delicate faces, the dreamcatchers that guarded their sleep, and the furniture in their rooms, painted pink or blue.
Your grandfather, Levi Eshkol, may he rest in peace, was the second president of the State of Israel. How does it feel to be named after him?
Not the president, the prime minister.
Your grandfather, Levi Eshkol, may he rest in peace, was the second prime minister of the State of Israel. What memories do you have of him?
Not the second. The third. And he died before I was born.
Your grandfather, Levi Eshkol, was the third prime minister of the State of Israel. What legacy did he leave you?
Sugar cubes.
During the official memorial service in the Har Herzl cemetery, the family would stand in the first row facing the black marble headstone. After the chief military cantor chanted the final prayer—which always filled me with a general sense of deep sorrow that was unrelated to my grandfather, who died before I was born, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t mourn for him personally—each of the politicians would place a small stone on the grave and then stand in line to shake hands with the entire family. I remember that Shimon Peres’s handshake was limp, that Gad Yacobi was handsome, that one of the last people to shake my hand was a thin-haired man named Shalhevet Freier. Then everyone—by that, I mean all the members of the Mapai party, friends of the family, and Shalhevet Freier—would drive to Ramban Street, to my step-grandmother Miriam’s house, and stand in the small living room holding glasses of soda, analyzing the situation of the country as if it, the country, was their private possession, even though, in the years I’m writing about, Menachem Begin, the head of the opposition party, was already the prime minister.
We children, cousins, would retreat into a side room where there were thick files we were not allowed to open, and on the table that had once been his desk was a Scattergories game. For the letter L, in the category Famous People, it was obvious what everyone would write. So I chose Lincoln or Leonardo da Vinci to score more points, and every few rounds, my cousins—who were all older than me—would send me on a mission to the rear, which was the living room, to grab a handful of sugar cubes from the silver bowl and bring them, without incident, to the children’s room. I remember the taste of those sugar cubes in my mouth: First they were hard, like sucking candy, and after a few small bites, they softened on the tongue and crumbled into tiny bits. I remember that Doron, my eldest cousin, taught us how to drink tea, holding a sugar cube between our teeth and letting the hot liquid flow through it. And I remember that once, Shalhevet Freier caught me red-handed in the living room. He intercepted my hand on its w
ay to the silver bowl, held on to it, and said in a heavy German accent: It’s not candy, son. I must have looked very frightened, because he quickly let go of my hand, offered me a box of bitter chocolate, and said, Take this instead. I hated bitter chocolate, but I took it. Something in Shalhevet Freier’s tone told me not to argue.
He died a few years ago, and the obituary that appeared alongside his picture in the newspaper mentioned that he had been the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. And so, after a certain delay, I realized where the force of his deterrence came from.
Over the years, sugar cubes disappeared from the world. Like fireflies. Every once in a while, mainly in the Carmel Center and in the cafés populated by German Jews, they still put a bowl of sugar cubes in the middle of the table, and I take a few, suck them as slowly as possible to keep them from crumbling right away, and think about the grandfather I’d never known, saddened that I had never known him. They told me that he would compromise until he got what he wanted. That he had a warm, wise Jewish sense of humor. That not only his supporters but also his opponents loved him. That he was not a member of the conservative party, made up of people who had only one great love in their lives. That he stuttered at the wrong moment. That he was responsible for the Six-Day War victory but was never given credit for it. That he died before he understood how much trouble that victory would cause us. That even though he was almost never home, he managed to instill in my mother, it’s not clear how, a strong sense of his presence as a father. That, the older I get, the more I resemble him physically, so much so that, over the last few years, I avoid looking at pictures of him, because more and more they seem like a prophesy.
Does your grandfather’s political legacy influence you as a writer?
I had a real grandmother. Not famous. On my father’s side. Who lived in Holon.
She was an almost-Holocaust-survivor, having emigrated from Poland to Israel alone right before World War II broke out.
When I was fifteen, my grandfather died and there was no one left to argue with her in Yiddish.
She had two or three close friends, but most of the time she watched TV, went to the clinic, and cooked.
In her house, lunch was at eleven thirty. Dinner at six. And there was an entire shelf for medicines in her fridge.
When I was twenty-three, I split from Tali Leshem for good.
Since I was the one who left the apartment we lived in together, it was clear that I needed a new place.
It was 11:30 at night, and I had nowhere to go with the two garbage bags I had filled with my clothes.
I caught the last bus to Holon. I knocked on my grandmother’s door, where my grandfather’s name still appeared on the nameplate, and when she opened it and saw me, she asked in alarm: What happened, sheyne punim?
I told her.
She made me a cup of tea with three teaspoons of sugar and added a metal straw that had a small teaspoon on one end for mixing it. As I sipped, she opened the sofa bed in the small room near the bathroom and spread a flowered sheet on it. Although she was a very small woman, her arms seemed to grow miraculously long when she spread a sheet. I had already noticed that when I was a child.
When we went back to the kitchen, she didn’t say a word about Tali. Or the breakup. Nor did she mention what had happened when Tali babysat at my sister’s place. All she asked was whether I wanted a piece of cake with my tea. When I shook my head, she sat down across from me and remained silent in solidarity until I finished drinking.
In the morning, she woke me too early because she was afraid I’d be late for work.
I lived with her for three months. The longest stay of a grandson at his grandmother’s house in the history of the family.
I ate a lot of compote, sweet carrot salad, and instant tomato soup she enriched with real, home-cooked rice.
Every time I paid attention to a particular food on the table, she asked why I was ignoring the other food.
Every time I left a light on in the house, she turned it off.
Every time I wanted to watch soccer on TV, she gave up her programs without my asking.
Only when I lived with her did I realize what a sad person she was. A deep, fundamental sadness, like another organ in her body. And that somehow, that sadness of hers had transformed into concern for others.
Only when I lived with her could I see in her face the young girl who left her parents and siblings to move to Israel without knowing that it would be the last time she saw them.
Only when I lived with her did I understand how attached she had been to Grandpa Itzhak, and that when he died, a kind of countdown had begun inside her.
* * *
—
Two years ago, I went to Warsaw on a book tour.
My father gave me the address of the house my grandmother had lived in as a child, and I asked my hosts to take me to the Praga district. On the way, we passed bare trees and huge apartment complexes that reminded me of Kieślowski movies, and my mind was already arching to close the circle.
I didn’t know that Warsaw had been totally destroyed in the war, that not a single building had been left standing in the Praga district after the Allied bombing, and that it was so cold in that city that even gloves couldn’t save your fingers from numbness when you got out of a vehicle. I wandered the streets of the district for a while, trying hard to ask for help from the few people I saw, but the address written on the slip of paper no longer existed, and a man wearing a high hat, who, for a fraction of a second, I thought might be Hagai Carmeli, claimed that the street I was looking for had been in a different district altogether and no longer existed. Hailstones began to fall, hard as rocks. My pinkie turned to ice. So I decided to close the circle in a different way: to send my grandmother a postcard from Warsaw.
I sent her a postcard from every place in the world I’d been.
She never understood why I traveled so much—now that the Jews finally have a country of their own!—but she was always glad to receive a sign of life from me.
Near the ghetto, I found a small souvenir shop that still sold old-fashioned postcards and chose one with a picture of the reconstructed royal castle. I wrote to my grandmother that in the lobby of my hotel, they serve cremeschnitte and tea. And that yesterday, in a gourmet restaurant, the first course was chicken soup and kreplach. And that, though I didn’t find her house, everything in Warsaw reminded me of her. Even the concern of my hosts.
I sent the postcard to her old address, 164 Arlozorov Street, even though I had no idea who lived there now.
* * *
—
Whenever someone asks me about my famous grandfather, I want to tell them about my grandmother, may she rest in peace, but no one wants to hear.
Which artists and works of art influenced you when you were young?
On Arlozorov Street, one hundred meters from my grandmother, lived my aunt Noa Eshkol. A choreographer, the creator of movement notation. A guru with a group of believers who worshipped the ground she danced on. A woman who chose to oppose. Prizes. Clichés. Falseness. Hair-dying. Instead of children and grandchildren, she had cats and dogs. Instead of serving refreshments to her guests, she served beer. Instead of an upper floor in her house, there was a large, unfurnished space where you could run wild while the adults argued politics down below. She liked to argue, Aunt Noa. And express opinions so bizarre that they were infuriating. And now, as I write this, I suddenly see a fragmented line I never saw before, connecting her and Shira, my eldest child. Aunt Noa gave me the first record in my life—Stevie Wonder’s Hotter Than July. I smoked my first cigarette in her house. She didn’t come to my wedding because she didn’t like formal events, but when Dikla and I went to visit her a few weeks later, she was very excited and kept saying how much Dikla impressed her. Two minutes after we arrived, she was already stroking Dikla’s hair and saying how soft it was. When Dikla tried to share
a few anecdotes from our wedding, she stopped her in the middle and said: You know, it’s amazing, the difference between the tone of your voice, so reasonable and moderate, like a metronome, and the movements of your hands. They have…a private choreography of their own…full of passion…do you dance? she asked. I danced in a group in high school, Dikla said, but nowadays, only at parties. Aunt Noa nodded slowly, as if considering asking her to join her group, which had broken up years earlier. Then she took us to her studio on the third floor, showed us some new wall carpets, and said, Choose one, a gift. While I almost swallowed my tongue from shock—it was well-known in the family that Aunt Noa didn’t give or sell her carpets to anyone—Dikla walked around silently looking at them for a few minutes until she chose the one with the hidden wound, and Aunt Noa said, You have good taste. Then we went downstairs, opened more and more beer bottles, and talked, that is, it was mostly Dikla and Aunt Noa who talked, and occasionally Aunt Noa stopped to compliment Dikla on her original opinions, or on her eloquence, or on the way the color of her skirt matched the color of her tights. When Dikla went to the bathroom, Aunt Noa lit a cigarette, gave me a long look, sighed, and said, Oh, how much it will hurt. What will hurt, I asked. Aunt Noa took a drag of her cigarette and said, When she leaves. But seeing my grimace, she exhaled and added: I didn’t say it isn’t worth it, kid. She’s really something, your wife. It isn’t every day that you see such a beautiful combination of pride and delicacy.
She loved beautiful things, Aunt Noa. And since she rarely left the house—in fact, why didn’t she? what was she so afraid of?—she wanted beautiful things to be brought to her.
