So this is it, Yaron. Suddenly the world is spinning faster; there’s been a turning point. The mist has finally lifted. Walking and walking, two full years since our meeting, groping through that mist. And suddenly the air has cleared; such long months of wandering through your old letters were needed for this. How could I have forgotten my first love? It wasn’t a choice, my soul did it for me; the nightmare of parting did it. It was impossible to part without forgetting. And then, for years, I went on forgetting, building concrete walls of suppression, not to remember my previous life.
And what happened to me when we met, after twenty-eight years? You were so moved, Yaron, your whole being, so overwhelmed. Suddenly I appeared in your life. Was it all like a dream, appearing from the shards of the good memories? For those were the only ones you took with you, they were by your side, and in your heart, since we parted. And suddenly, there I was, facing you - Aya, alive, real. The storm that swept over you melted the concrete walls in my heart, turned them into fine sand, and my world slipped through my fingers. Unintentionally, the tempest of your soul crashed against the foundations on which my life had stood like a tower. Year after year, one after another, I had piled them up, shoring up the foundations, twenty-eight years. Will the day come when I’ll explain to you, apologise to you for having forgotten? I’m sorry, I erased our love from my heart, Yaron. I’m sorry, for how I escaped; and mainly – for what I remembered. Two memories that were etched in my mind, single sentences that you’d said back then, and now your eyes were telling me the opposite. Two single sentences, I detached them from your love and took them from you, as provisions for the road, building a new life on their memory.
***
A passage from your letter to me, I was almost twenty. It’s unbelievable how difficult our parting was, an ongoing nightmare, like the decision to amputate a limb.
In another few days you’ll receive my letter, Aya. You’ll weigh up whether to answer me, or to call, or perhaps even hold back, keep silent. And the voice on the line will remain behind the line, and the world will keep turning, and life will continue the way it does, and we… we will continue to seek happiness.
Yaron.
P.S. Are you going to keep my letters?
After three years of letters, thousands of pages, an infinity of love locked away inside wafer-thin sheets of paper, you’re asking me about keeping them. It must have been the sense of an ending that brought this on.
I kept them. Properly. I kept them safe and sound. I didn’t touch them. And to be on the safe side, I erased. I blotted out three years from my memory, almost without trace.
And you, Yaron. Yaron who once was “my Yaron”. That was your name. And me, I wasn’t Aya, simply Aya, for you I was “my Aya”, sometimes Aya’le, sometimes Ayush. That was my being, my existence; I didn’t have any other existence. How many names, how many endearments did we invent? They have also gone, evaporated from my memory, and I’ve discovered them anew, threaded like little pearls among the pages. And you, Yaron, you didn’t keep my letters. Did they weigh on you, being in your home, did you find them a way out? There - you gestured with your hand - there’s the door, you can leave. And you stood silently aside, averting your eyes, and letting Hagar, her two feet planted firmly on the ground, carry out the task and dispose of them, for real. And then you were free to preserve your memories. Your memory was preserved, refined, the acidity evaporated, and only our love remained, like a clear, pure crystal. Set down comfortably in a corner of your heart, the warmth of your body preserving it, like a hidden container, sealed and secured, keeping our love living inside.
35. Yaron
What happens over the years. It’s so slow, you don’t notice it. You age a bit, put on a little weight. Your hair goes grey, then thins. Your body isn’t what it used to be. At one time I could hardly ever find trousers to fit me, I always had to punch another hole in my belt. When Iddo was just a few days old and we were planning a party for the occasion, Hagar insisted I should have a new pair of trousers. She went and scoured the whole city until she found a pair in some teenagers’ shop; it was the only place that had my size. A few hours later she came back, really pale; I can’t understand how I let her go. Not only my size, that’s still more or less okay, but my fitness, my flexibility, it’s not what it used to be. You’re heavier, you’re slower. And one day you realise that you need glasses. You have to have them, at first only for reading, and after a few years, the whole time. Never mind, you say, there are also young people with glasses. But then they start, those health issues, they keep popping up. By now you’ve bought a home gadget for blood pressure, your local clinic’s number is in your mobile. You’re slightly preoccupied with health, not too much, just a little – these checkups which you’d never heard of before, and you don’t pay attention to your age, it crawls along slowly, so slowly, so quietly, like that game of Grandma’s Footsteps that you used to play in Scouts. Ever so patiently, creeping up on you from behind, while you’re busy with life, chasing the days.
You dozed off on your watch. A deep sleep.
And that’s when it hits you.
God decides to shake things up.
Because one day He sends her to you again.
Up to that day you were fine.
And then it lands on you.
Suddenly she calls.
You can’t believe it.
But yes. It’s her. In person. You heard her say her name.
And she even asked. You heard how she could hardly get it out. But she asked.
If you’d like to meet. Over a cup of coffee.
You heard it, you actually heard it; it was her voice.
That same voice.
And after a few days, she’s there.
Standing, waiting for you. Like she’d stand back then, when you’d come home for a weekend’s leave.
On the pavement. Where you’d arranged.
Waiting for you to find parking.
And then it happens, all through your body it happens, you can feel it, it’s been so long since you’ve felt it, you’ve forgotten, how could you have forgotten? It used to be so strong, that weight in your chest, like a huge lump pressing from inside, flowing through your stomach, your heart’s beating like mad till it hurts, you breathe deeply and it doesn’t pass, you don’t want it to pass, it’s years since it happened to you. When did it stop, you ask, it’s God you’re asking, why doesn’t it happen anymore, so what if I’m fifty, so what? I still want to feel, to be able to feel, till it hurts, I’ll always want to. I’m more than just my age, I’m more than just this body, it doesn’t look like it used to but inside I’m the same me, I want the same things, that enormous sensation in my entire body until I can’t breathe, why doesn’t it happen anymore, how can life go on without it?
And after some time you know.
You try not to think about it, but you know.
Perhaps it’ll never happen to you again.
36. Hagar
February 6
The day after tomorrow is Yaron’s birthday. Fifty-two. On Friday. We’ll have a special meal, I’ve bought a new tablecloth, it’s all planned. On Fridays there are now five of us around the table. Michal and Ben sit close together, holding hands under the table. “Well, Mrs. Noy, can I get you something to drink?” Ben asks her in front of everyone. Iddo sniggers, he hasn’t come to terms with his little sister being married. And last night, after we’d gone to bed, Yaron said to me, “Hagari, did you see the way that Ben was pampering her, even more than when they met? I have a feeling that you’re going to be a grandma.” It’s true, though no one can see it on her yet. She’d already told me two weeks before, but she was a little shy, she didn’t want me to tell her father yet. I promised her, and since then I could hardly hold myself back. “It’s true,” I said to Yaron, and I smiled at him in the dark. He stroked my face and pulled me to him, we embraced. “Hagari, we’re having a grandson. Or granddaughter.” “Yes,” I said, smiling, and I stroked his arm. We talke
d, we reminisced. It seems like only yesterday that she was born, and now she’s going to be a mother. And then he said, “It’s so good they live nearby, we’ll be able to see them a lot, and help them. Can you imagine us in another year, walking down the street with a stroller?” I caressed his arm and we embraced again. Then he added, “With your new short haircut and those new jeans you bought yesterday, no one’s going to believe you’re a grandma.”
Today I cleared up. Every third week on a Wednesday I change the sheets. The linen is folded up in the closet in the bedroom. It’s ages since I tidied up there; suddenly I decided to empty out everything and reorganize the closet. And then I reached the top shelf.
The top shelf. Those letters of Aya’s. It’s a while now since they’ve been put back in their place. Lying there, quite comfortable, in Yaron’s black leather box; folded up, neat and tidy. I put them all back, the pictures too.
He doesn’t even know. I’m glad I never told him.
I no longer think about them.
Maybe there are some problems we don’t solve. Maybe we just get rid of them, let them go. Or maybe the problem leaves you. Those letters, I simply let them go.
Perhaps it was all thanks to Yael, who stuck by me.
Maybe it was because of Yaron, because he’s changed. He’s different now.
Maybe it’s good that he met up with her.
I will never be able to ask him about it.
And Yoav. Well, I must simply forget Yoav. I was never real for him.
37. Aya
Early morning, six o’clock. Uri and me, our hair wet from the shower, still in slippers. A soft light seeps into the house, quietly, almost on tiptoe, illuminating the flowers on the curtains. Two cups of coffee in an embrace in the corner of the kitchen countertop, waiting, their aroma wafting toward us. Squashed together into the corner, the kitchen seems too big. I’ll be thinking about you today, he whispers in my ear. Only today? I grumble, inhaling that scent of his shaving cream. Well, Aychuk, for tomorrow I’ll need a new reason.
Why impossible?
It’s impossible to do it, Uri thought, and so did Hagar. Why not, why impossible, I railed against it, unable to accept. After all, Yaron is alive and well, and only an hour away from here. And this is the right thing, to meet up, so we can divide up those years, slice them thin. Turn that mist of time into days, into events; together, sort out the archive in my memory, three years of my youth, into the right compartments.
And then part again, softly; the right way.
It’s impossible, Uri and Hagar both said; twenty-eight years have gone by.
So we said goodbye, so what, I kept saying, voicelessly.
It actually is possible, Yehuda Amichai responded from one of the bookshelves at home, Not of This Time, Not of This Place. In books it is possible to split up time. And in those pages is Yoel, living with the wife he loves, walking through life. And the days go by. Until one fine day he stops, and turns his back on his life. He packs a suitcase, and travels in the direction of his past, in search of little Ruth, the girl from his childhood.
***
Parting, the right way
A timeless fantasy
The bewitching twilight hour, blue skies painted with brush strokes of orange. Ploughed fields, stretches of green and brown meadows, dotted with white patches of cotton plants. Low village houses with red roofs, small gardens with a plethora of colours, cycle paths. And among them, a little house with a garden, one room, a kitchenette, old stone tiles. That’s where it happened. The past mingles with the present, switching with the future and again blending into the past, times and lives merging and transforming, over and again, like the blue and orange in the sky.
“Hello, Aya.”
“Hi, Yaron, I’m so glad you came.” I smiled at him from the garden next to the house, put down the spade, shook off the clumps of mud, scraping my shoes clean. “Come on in, I’m putting the kettle on.”
“Well, here I am.”
“Yes, I’ve been waiting for you. You can lean your bike here. Nescafé with two sugars, right?”
“Yes, so you remember... well done.”
“There was no reason to forget.”
“How old are you now?” he asked.
“I’ll be turning forty-eight.”
“Stands to reason, you were two years younger than me then, too. I’m fifty.”
“But we look just the same as then,” I said.
“Well, you know it’s possible in books.”
“Sure. I’ve been waiting for you to come.”
“I know Aya, I’m sorry it took me so long.”
“It’s all right, because I haven’t done anything yet. Look how beautiful the flowers are this year.”
“You always loved flowers. It’s lovely, your home.”
“It was the right place to wait for you.”
“What did you do?”
“I waited. When you wait it’s sort of like going round in circles. I worked in the cotton fields, ploughing, picking; it’s the same every year. Sometimes I’d take a bike ride around the fields.”
“And what are you going to do now?”
“I’m going to marry Uri.”
“Uri? Really? But you hardly know him.”
“That’s right, not yet. I barely know that he exists. But we’re going to marry.”
“I just can’t imagine it, Aya,” he said.
“Yes, you’re right, Yaron, it is difficult to believe, when you think about it.”
“Sometimes it’s hard to accept that we’re not together.”
“It turns out that parting can be a nightmare, you put it off and put it off endlessly. But we both knew that it wouldn’t work out with each other.”
“I think you’re right, Aya. It’s good that we parted. And how will it be for you?” he asked.
“The best it can possibly be.”
“I just can’t imagine it, you with Uri.”
“Parting is letting part of you die. There was no way we could imagine, back then, that life would go on.”
“And what else?” he continued.
“We’ll have children, they’ll give us so much happiness.”
“Yes, you’ll have amazing children. They’ll look more like him, only a bit like you.”
“That’s true,” I smiled.
“And what are you going to do? On a day-to-day basis, I mean,” he asked.
“I’ll dive into my work. Sometimes it’ll be like a pool you dive into and don’t come out of, even forgetting to come up for air.”
“That’s a bit of a shame, Aya, can’t you change it?”
“I don’t think so. It won’t be good but there won’t really be a choice for me. That’s high-tech. And yet, life will still be really happy.”
“High-tech?” asked Yaron.
“It’s a sort of fictitious, crazy kind of world; there’ll be years when everyone will want to be in it,” I said.
“It’s so strange to be outlining the future so clearly,” he said, his eyes smiling at me.
“It really is strange. But you can do that in books. And at the age of forty-eight we’ll be living in a little house, facing a field. Our photo albums will have pictures of sunsets, a few more every year. We’ll have a small garden with flowers. Things will be really good, sometimes we’ll simply be happy. And work too - sometimes it will be just okay.”
“I’m glad it’ll turn out so well for you,” he smiled, relaxed.
“Thank you, Yaron. It’ll be good to remember those words of yours. Come on, give me a hug. And tell me, what about you?”
“I’ll marry Hagar.”
“I’ll like her the moment I see a picture of her.”
“Yes, she’s a fine woman, I think.”
“It’s not good to think. Better to feel.”
“It looks like it’ll take me some time,” he said.
“But Yaron, since we’re like this now, parting the right way, it won’t take you all that time.”
> “Yes, that makes sense. I’m glad I came now.”
“And we’ll stay in touch with one another,” I added.
“What are you talking about? Aya, any other way is just not possible. I can’t imagine us not knowing each other’s children.”
“No way. That can’t happen.”
“Yes, but Aya, the problem is that time will just fly by and we won’t even notice.”
“So let’s decide that we are going to notice it, we won’t let it happen. Come on then, I’ll make you another coffee before you go back to being twenty. Instant or fresh ground?”
“Fresh ground? That must be another one of your strange terms – micro, mobile, online.”
“You see? It’s so easy to let things go past you. So here’s the coffee, two sugars.”
“Excellent, Aya. So, we’ll see each other again soon.”
“Not so soon, but it’s all right. Your Iddo will already be two years old. Your hair will be a little grey, just a touch.”
“Why didn’t you come to the party when he was born? We invited you. Uri called us to apologise, he said you weren’t feeling well. I knew it must be something else.”
“You’re right, Yaron. I’ll be feeling ugly with that big tummy of mine, it’ll make me uncomfortable with you. But we’ll come after that, our Iddo will be in a stroller, and we’ll discover that we gave our sons the same name.”
“Yes, that’ll be unbelievable,” he smiled.
“Yaron, do you remember that bike ride at the age of forty-eight that we’ll do, the four of us?”
“Of course I remember, Aya, I told you that I’ll remember everything; it’ll be fun.”
So We Said Goodbye: A Contemporary Fiction Novel Page 19
