by Shifra Horn
In these wars my mother made no distinction among her opponents. She fought them all to the bitter end, and emerged victorious from every battle, routing all my heroes and sending them running for their lives.
Filled with a desire for revenge, I decided to go to the aid of my defeated heroes by mounting a cold war on my mother. I declined to answer her questions, refused to wash the dishes, and spent most of the time shut up in my room, planning acts of vengeance that would hurt her in the most sensitive spot. Indifferent to my efforts, my mother would pace the rooms of the house, full of the spirit of battle, devising new strategies for fighting the fresh recruits who had reached the battlefield after the regular troops had retreated.
“Just like my mother’s tomcats in heat,” she would say as if to herself, but loudly enough for her words to impress me behind my closed door. “One goes, and ten more come to take its place.”
* * *
Despite the anxieties instilled in me by the women of the family with regard to my great-grandmother Sara, and the fear that any change in my life would cut short her own, in my revenge against my mother I was obliged reluctantly to deviate from the daily routine that up to now had preserved my great-grandmother’s life. I had made up my mind to deliver my mother a crushing blow, and follow it up with another, which would finally detach me from her and leave her helpless and utterly defeated—by getting married.
As the first stage in my plan I rented a dark, windowless den in the neighborhood of Nahlaot in Jerusalem. I was sure that her witch’s broomstick would not carry her so far, and she would not be able to sweep my suitors away or chase them from my door. As the second stage I planned to register for the kindergarten teachers course at the religious seminary for girls, Yesurei Rachel. This female institution of so-called higher learning was particularly hateful to her. Whenever she wanted an example of an institution that was completely beyond the pale, that in addition to all its other failings was also religious, she would mention its name and list its shortcomings. According to her, the place was notorious for its foolish and ignorant students, for its bigoted teachers, and for its academic standards, which were the lowest of the low. Its name was mentioned frequently in our house, usually as a threat. At the end of every term, when she examined my report with an eagle eye, making venomous comments on this or that mark, she would repeat that if I failed to improve my marks by the end of the year, I would end up in Yesurei Rachel learning to be a kindergarten teacher. When I went there to register as a student, I knew that I had shattered all her sweet dreams, all the plans she had made for my future, and all her confident assumptions that I would follow in her footsteps. At every opportunity she would drum it into my head that I was duty bound to study law, and when the time came I would inherit her office and defend all the miserable wretches who besieged her door.
During the course of the long years she spent in court, my mother had perfected an inscrutable expression that she wore like a mask, at first only in her court appearances, but that was later assimilated into her skin so that she came home with it, did her shopping with it, and went to the movies with it. When I informed her of my new plans I was horrified by the sight of her reaction. The mask she maintained with such stubborn determination was suddenly stripped from her face, slid down her fox fur, and shattered on the floor at her feet. On her face appeared a mixture of revulsion, bewilderment, astonishment, and fear. The same expression accompanied me as I packed my bags. In a rare gesture she agreed to drive me and my entire past life bundled into my bags to the room I had rented, and then, when she walked through the door, her expression changed to one of pity. In the weak light of the single bulb her hands groped over the walls to find an opening to the air. When she examined her hands afterward she found a mixture of flaking whitewash and black mold under her well-manicured nails.
“This place is unhealthy. You’ll get sick,” she informed me unequivocally, slammed the door behind her, and left me there in the middle of the domed room with all my belongings scattered round me.
The next day I registered at the Yesurei Rachel teachers seminary, where they promised to find me a suitable match. After that I invited Amitai, one of my most persistent suitors, to visit me in my room.
* * *
My marriage was a failure known in advance. Known to everyone but me, that is. A conspiracy of silence united the women of my family against me. Everyone expected the marriage to fail, as if by a divine sentence that no mortal could change. Only crazy Dvora, who took such devoted care of my great-grandmother, actually said this to me in so many words, after hanging my husband’s picture in the row of male portraits in my great-grandmother’s gallery. At the time I refused to pay any attention to her words, which sounded senseless to me. Today I know that she was right.
On second thought, I’m sure that even if I had been told before the wedding that my marriage would end up on the rocks, I wouldn’t have believed it, and I would have married my chosen mate despite all the prophecies of doom. Nevertheless sometimes I am assailed by doubts. Especially on sleepless nights when I wake every half hour from an exhausting, hallucinatory sleep, tossing and turning on the thick down mattress framed in the brass bed and full of Sara’s memories. On these nights I am consumed by the question that gives me no rest, and gnawed by the suspicion that even if I had married some other man and given birth to his child, I would still have been abandoned.
If this question had been put to Sara, to Pnina-Mazal, or to my mother, and if they had agreed to answer it honestly, their answer would almost certainly have been affirmative. They were sincerely convinced that any man I married and had a child with would desert me forthwith, owing to circumstances that had nothing to do with me but belonged to the cycle of life whose meaning I was never able to discover. They made me feel like a puppet in the hands of fate, which I imagined as a short, fat, red-faced man, standing high above me, baring his teeth in a yellow, tobacco-stained smile while his orange-tipped fingers pulled the strings.
At moments when I felt trapped and suffocated by the walls around me, I would reconstruct my life from the point in time where it had frozen, making it impossible to go forward. From this point I would go step by step backward down the dark corridor of my memories, reexamining the doors I had irrevocably locked behind me and those that had been slammed in my face.
From behind every door voices arose. Each door and its voice. The strains of music and laughter from one, from another the sounds of lovemaking and groans of pleasure. From some of the doors I heard the sounds of strange, distant places that I had never visited and never would visit in my life. One heavy door embellished with carvings resounded with soft, inviting murmurs, while from the one next to it came the piping cries of the babies I had never given birth to. As I stood outside each locked door with my ears pricked, listening avidly to what was happening inside and trying to break through, the smells of the interior would succeed in reaching me through the keyhole. From one came the appetizing smells of dishes whose like I had never tasted, from another the heavy fragrance of flowers and perfumes I had never smelled. Some of the doors permeated the air with the complex molecules of strange love juices, making my head spin, and others exuded the smells of babies fresh from the bath combined with the sweet smell of milk and the faint odor of wet diapers. Sometimes, as if in obedience to a secret command, the doors would irradiate me with all the lights stored up behind them. The lights would filter through to me in a glorious rainbow from the cracks under the doors and from the keyholes, bathing me in a kaleidoscope of colors such as my eyes had never beheld in the world outside.
Slowly and despairingly I would make my way backward from door to door, pounding the locked doors with my fists in the hope that someone inside would hear me and open up. In vain I would try to turn the door handles, and when the doors refused to open I would throw myself against them and try to break them down like a detective in a movie. Despite all my efforts and pleas, and my attempts at physical force, the doors continued t
o bar my entry, confronting me blankly and uninvitingly. At those moments, breathing heavily and shedding tears for the life I might have had, I would hear the mocking laughter of the yellow-toothed dwarf at the end of the corridor. Then I would strain my eyes in the darkness illuminated by the colors filtering through the cracks beneath the doors, and look at him waving his nicotine-stained hands at me in contempt and pulling the invisible strings of my fate.
During those sleepless nights the hurt, anguished faces of all the men who had loved me and wanted to open all the doors to me would rise before my eyes. The men I had not married because of the laughter of fate and because of the divine decree that had made me fall in love with my husband’s feet.
* * *
Of all the men who loved me I’ll never forget Amitai. Amitai, kibbutz-born, with his mop of curls and handsome face, would display his sensitivity and his love for me in moist, tearful looks, which penetrated deeply into my eyes, ran through my body like electric currents, and melted my heart. For two years we lived together in the neighborhood of Nahlaot in the airless, sunless apartment that my mother called a rabbit warren, and that was permeated by the smell of our love juices. My own smell and that of Amitai were compounded by the act of love into a unique and complex chemical formula. The heavy odors, which to us were as fragrant as perfume, clung to the peeling walls with their varicolored coats of paint, saturated the mattress on the floor, and refused to leave the towels and sheets even after they had been through the ordeal of washing, boiling, and drying in the neighborhood laundromat.
Wrapped in our scents we would cuddle up on the mattress, listen to the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, gaze into each other’s eyes, and sniff like rutting dogs the smells we exuded, which united when we coupled into a new aroma of desire. Sometimes a spirit of mischief would descend on Amitai and he would pick the roses from the vine covering the entrance to the house, and sit patiently pulling the petals from the heads. Then he would approach me, holding the fragrant handfuls, and scatter my naked body with the velvety red petals. They would flutter in the air, cover my eyes, my breasts, and my navel, and collect in the hollow of my stomach. During the act of love, when I rubbed my body against his, our bodies would be stained crimson, and the scent of roses would mingle with the smells of our love.
Everything was wonderful until Amitai received a scholarship to study in Japan. He was a student at the medical faculty in Ein Karem, and his dearest wish was to study Chinese herbal medicine under the great master Van-yan III, who was third in an illustrious line of Chinese herbal doctors. This master was now in Japan, teaching at the school of medicine in Tokyo. Amitai took care of the tickets, went into the details of the scholarship, and told me optimistically that according to his friends I would be able to supplement our income by selling pictures in the street. My girlfriends told me that I would be able to work as a hostess in a bar, but this he would not countenance. “My future wife,” I heard him tell them, “will never work in a bar even if we’re starving.” This was the first time he had ever hinted at marriage. When it was too late I discovered that he had begun preparations for the wedding behind my back. The week he arrived in Tokyo he phoned to tell me that he had found us a small apartment whose floors were covered with rice-straw mats, and that he was waiting impatiently for my arrival.
At this stage fate stepped in, pulled the strings, played a joke at my expense, and threw me far from the loving arms of Amitai. His plans were never carried out. It would be possible, of course, to lay the blame on Air Egypt, which offered the cheapest flight, including a stopover in Bangkok. If I had bought my ticket from a different airline, my flight would have taken me straight to Tokyo, and I have no doubt that today I would be with him. On the Egyptian plane, full of excited youngsters exchanging information on the wonders of the East, it was impressed upon me that it would be a sin to fly directly to Tokyo without visiting Bangkok, tantamount to breaking the rules of the game. They told me the island of Japan was always the last stop on the journey; first one should taste the East with all one’s senses. I took their advice, and spent the three most magical days of my life in Bangkok, in a steamy tropical climate full of the heavy scents of flowers.
And because of those three days I didn’t marry Amitai. Afterward I discovered that he had planned a surprise wedding. Carrying a bag containing a wedding dress and pair of white shoes he had bought for me in Israel, he waited at the airport for the flight on which I failed to arrive. From the airport we were supposed to drive in a fancy limousine he had hired with the last of his money to the offices of the Jewish congregation, where about two hundred members of the community were waiting for us with kosher food and a wedding cake. When I walked into the room they were all supposed to shout “Surprise!” Then Amitai would lead me to the wedding canopy where the rabbi was waiting to conduct the ceremony.
Three days after the wedding that never took place Amitai met me at the Tokyo airport, and the liquid, loving look had disappeared from his eyes. After a week of sleeping on the fragrant rice-straw mats, which confused and changed the chemical formula of our love smells, I decided to leave. I said good-bye to Amitai and flew to Thailand. I retired with a few hundred other Israeli youngsters to the dreamy tropical island of Kosmoi, sipped coconut milk straight from the shell, abandoned my body to the sun and the hands of the local masseuses, and tormented myself with my thoughts.
Amitai disappeared from my life. Today I read about him and his method in the newspapers, and I even saw him once on a television program. His look, which penetrated me through the television screen, was blank. But the pain I had seen in his eyes when he met me in Tokyo was still there.
* * *
In the same past that became the known-in-advance and doomed-to-failure future, I met Ya’akov, who became my husband, the father of my son, and—the day after the boy was born—my ex-husband. If you asked me what I saw in him, the man with whom I shared about ten months of my life, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. Actually, I suppose I could explain, but I don’t think you would accept the explanation or understand the reason why I fell in love with this man. I fell in love with him on our first date, when we went to the beach. The minute he removed his shoes and socks I knew that I would marry him. To the question of how anyone could possibly fall in love with a man because of his bare feet I have no satisfactory answer, and so I had better confine myself to the facts.
The Saturday of our first date was the hottest Jerusalem had ever known. In an attempt to appear spontaneous, Ya’akov suggested driving down to the beach in Tel Aviv, and without waiting for my reply he opened the door of his car with a courtly flourish that was in stark contrast to the battered Volkswagen he drove.
Dazzled by the glare of the water and the white sand, we ran hand in hand, like the heroes of a romantic movie, toward the waves wetting the sand and darkening its color. We hired two deck chairs and I began to peel off my clothes, exposing my white Jerusalem skin to the longing looks of the dark-skinned boys lounging on brightly colored towels and soaking up the hot rays of the sun. Ya’akov sat down heavily on the deck chair and hesitated. Today, with the intimate knowledge of hindsight, I can guess that he was making up his mind which article of clothing to remove first. This hesitation, which amused me during the first weeks of our lives together, drove me crazy later, when he would sit on the bed and deliberate at length as to which shoe to take off first—the left, which he had put on first in the morning, or the right, which had been relegated to second place then and should be compensated now.
Since this was our first date and he wanted to impress me, he acted with relative speed. After cutting his soul-searching to a minimum, he decided to tackle his right shoe first. With slow and concentrated movements, to which he appeared to devote a great deal of thought, he undid the laces. After neatly setting aside his gleaming shoes, to which not a single grain of sand had stuck, he turned his attention to his socks. If you were to ask me their color, I would not know the answer, since I was too riveted to
his actions to trouble myself about trifles. First he removed the left sock as carefully as if his life depended on it, or as if he were about to reveal a long-buried treasure to the world. With deliberate slowness he rolled the sock down his calf in small, careful movements like a snake trying to shed its skin. Once the ankle of his left foot was exposed he pulled the sock off with one brisk, decisive gesture, shook it lightly in the air, lifted it to his nose, sniffed it with open enjoyment, and then folded it carefully as if it were a precious article of clothing liable to crease. After a moment of vacillation he laid it in his left shoe, which was waiting under the deck chair with commendable patience to receive it. His right sock was awarded similar treatment. I lowered my eyes to his feet. The ritual that had just laid bare these innocent extremities revealed a pair of touching ankles, slender, white, and hairless. The hair began to grow sparsely again beyond the shallow depression halfway up his calves, where the elasticized tops of his socks had left their mark. At precisely that moment I knew that I had fallen in love with him.
After my divorce, when I went out with other men and followed with interest the ritual of their sock removal, I reached the conclusion that the man had not been born who could move me once more by the baring of his feet. Most of them employed only a small part of the actions performed by Ya’akov, and I missed the integrity of all the movements as a whole. A few of them did indeed sniff with relish the socks they removed from their feet after a long day of sweaty service, others carefully folded their socks, but hardly any of them knew how to concentrate properly on the act of removing the sock itself. Sacrilegiously they would pull it off and then dismiss it with a callous wave of the hand, throwing it under the bed like a stinking little ball.
* * *
Two months after the episode of the socks we got married. Under the wedding canopy I was the happiest of women. In my imagination I reviewed the moving sock-stripping ritual awaiting me that night, and I knew that from this day forth I would be able to witness it every night of my life. In the throes of my excitement I heard the rabbi asking me to hold out my finger for the ring. I had bought this ring with my own money, after my beloved had refused to buy it for me on the grounds that he was broke. I did not know then that according to the Jewish religion this was forbidden. After our divorce, looking back on the marriage ceremony, I remembered the inquiry to which the rabbi had subjected my husband, and how Ya’akov had lied and declared out loud, without turning a hair, that the ring had been purchased with his money. If you like, this was the first sign of the preordained failure of my marriage, that my husband bought me with my own money.
