After two weeks, his mother put a new container of cottage cheese on the shelf. But the dairy products continued to mark the days: the expiry date of the yoghurt was the thirty-day anniversary of his death. The hard cheese had been processed on his birthday. Printed on one of the milk containers was the date of his discharge, which would never come. And then there were the sell-by dates that were unconnected to him. Simply dates. April 7th, for example. Or December 24th. Dates that said nothing except: two months and a week have passed. Or – it’s been a year and ten days. Or – he would have had a birthday in two and a half weeks.
Eitan turned away from the fridge abruptly, as if his continuing to stand there would cause the dates on the calendar to disappear right before his eyes. He hurried to the bathroom. A lone toothbrush stood in the glass. An orphan that said everything. He called Liat, vacillating between concern and anger. She wasn’t the dramatic type, and that was why he was frightened now. She answered after the seventh ring, and something in her tone told him that she had checked the phone display carefully before she had finally deigned to answer.
“Where are you?!” he exclaimed.
“Where are you?”
“Home. With a box of pizza.”
And two bottles of Coke, but he didn’t say that because the weirdness of the situation was beginning to paralyze him. It couldn’t be that now of all times, when everything had worked out in some twisted way, when he had finally left the garage for good, that Mr. Bear, his two children and three toothbrushes had disappeared.
When Liat spoke, her voice was like stone. After he’d lost it with Yaheli that morning, she had called him in the department. She was furious that he had disappeared the night before, but it was clear to her that they needed to talk. “The nurse said you were sick,” she said, “that you’d stayed home.” She said that and then was silent. She didn’t tell him how she’d hung up, her hand shaking, had left everything and driven home. Told Marciano she didn’t feel well. And she wasn’t lying. She really hadn’t felt well. She was nauseous all the way home. And when she opened the door and went inside and found what she knew she’d find, namely no one, she was so overwhelmed by nausea that she thought she was going to throw up.
She didn’t throw up. She went back to the office and told Marciano she felt better. An hour and a half later, the results of the autopsy on the Eritrean came in. They found traces of drugs in his body. Marciano had first thought that the Eritrean was working alone, but Liat knew right away that he was a mule for Davidson. The tough kibbutznik’s concern was nothing more than simple greed. Someone had killed Davidson’s messenger and he wanted her to catch the guy for him. The new information should have excited her, yet she was anything but excited. Mainly, she was tired. She asked Marciano to send two undercovers to Davidson’s restaurant that night to do some sniffing around. On the way out, she saw the detectives’ hostile looks. The last thing they felt like doing on Thursday night was work an ambush at some shithole on Route 40. On Thursday nights, you could smell the weekend as if it were a challah in the oven. You wanted to get home early. You wanted it to be Friday. You didn’t want a new detective to stick you with an ambush that was like a broom handle up your ass.
She had ignored their looks and driven home. On the way, she’d called her mother. Ignored the surprise in her voice when she asked if she could spend the night at her place with the kids. Ignored the explicit questions that came after she said that she might want to sleep there the next night as well. Her mother wasn’t the type who waited quietly with a serene look on her face that said, “You’ll tell me when you want to.” With her grandmother, it had been different. But her grandmother was lying in the Hadera cemetery now.
In the end, her mother wasn’t such a bad compromise. When she arrived with the kids, the house was in tip-top order, nicer than Liat had ever seen it. There were flowers on the table, and schnitzels, and her mother was just making a vegetable pie. Liat thought her mother looked like someone interviewing to be a grandmother because she had been fired from her job as a mother a long time ago.
Itamar and Yaheli were confused at first, but soon enough began to play. Liat and Aviva watched them. That was more or less the only thing they could do together. Aviva tried to ask and Liat said, “Enough Mom, you can see I’m wiped out.” An hour later, Itamar and Yaheli finished investigating the house and sat down in front of the TV. That was good, because both Liat and Aviva were getting tired of their running around, but it was also a problem, because they didn’t have to keep an eye on the kids if they were watching TV, and that meant they had to find something to talk about. It would have been perfectly fine if the food had been ready. When your mouth is full of schnitzel and cauliflower pie, the silence is legitimate. But the cauliflower pie had just been put into the oven.
“You know what we haven’t done in years?”
Liat gave her mother a perplexed look.
“We haven’t looked at your picture albums.”
Before Liat could object, Aviva leaped up from the couch and pulled a worn album off the top shelf of the bookcase. Then she sat down again, allowing herself to sit closer to Liat, slipping toward her with the album as an excuse. “My God, look at how sweet you are here.”
“How old do you think I am?”
“About six, I think. Yes, look at the cake in the picture under it. It was when I still baked them in the shape of numbers.”
Liat leaned forward over the album. “I remember that you used to bake them like that. They never tasted good, just the icing on top.”
Her mother’s laugh was mixed with hurt. “But look at how sweet you are here, with that yellow dress. You look like a princess.”
Liat reached out and removed the picture. “She doesn’t look like me at all.”
A girl in a yellow dress with her hands over her ears. Behind her a pink balloon. She’s looking at someone outside the frame. The dress has a fringe. The collar is embroidered. The girl’s hair is neatly combed. Further away is a blurred, white brick wall. Her elbows are sharp. Her arms brown. Her hands plump.
“How sad. Look at how I’m closing my ears.”
“What are you talking about?” Aviva cried. “You’re fixing your hair. You make that gesture to this day when you push your curls behind your ears.”
“No Mom, I’m covering my ears. Take a good look.”
“I’m looking.”
“And?”
There was no longer any nostalgia on the couch, but something else, nameless but very much present.
“If it’s so important to you, then okay, you’re covering your ears. Even though I think you’re fixing your hair here. Why would a six-year-old want to cover her ears at her own birthday party?”
“Maybe she was sick and tired of hearing her parents arguing.”
“Your father and I never argued in front of you.”
“So maybe she was sick and tired of you not talking to each other.”
The smell of cauliflower pie filled the living room. Aviva took the album and continued to leaf through it. “Look here at that big smile. Do you see, Liati, you’re really smiling here.”
Liat looked at the picture. There was no reason it should make her so angry, but it did. An old, unnamed affront now opened a yellow eye deep down in her stomach. “But it’s so typical that, in the first picture in the album, instead of looking forward and smiling like a normal kid, I’m looking off to the side and holding my hands over my ears. So typical, and with that sad look too.”
“Why are you so sure it’s a sad look? It looks to me like the space between one smile and the next. By chance, they took your picture between smiles and didn’t capture the smiles themselves.”
“And you don’t think that symbolizes something?”
“Why do you always think that something symbolizes something else? Explain to me, why focus only on this picture and not the others?”
Liat didn’t reply, and a moment later her mother let the question go, moved it far away,
the way she moved the plate with the candlesticks on it on Friday night so that a candle wouldn’t suddenly fall and burn down the house.
Liat looked at the picture again. A girl straightening her hair as she looks at her birthday cake. A six-year-old girl covering her ears, already disconnecting from the world.
“Come on, honey,” her mother said, “the pie will burn.”
And yet, something inside her refused to believe it. Despite the lies piling up one on top of the other, despite the nights she spent alone and the things the secretary had told her when she’d called the department. Despite his strange behavior, the mornings he sat silent and cut off, the nights he came home evasive and guilty, and the terrible, baffling outburst of anger at the kids near the car. Something inside her said it couldn’t be. That Eitan didn’t do things like that. She had chosen him because he was solid, arrogant, hers. She had checked him out thoroughly from the very beginning, and only when she was sure that he was really head over heels in love with her, completely mad about her, did she give herself license to do something very rare for her: she let herself become attached to him. And that license was not renewed automatically. She continued to investigate the way he looked at her from year to year, listened well to his “I love you,” poised to hear every subliminal discordant note. She tested him for three years, and only then did she tell him that she would let him propose to her. He roared with laughter. “It’s because of that cynicism that I love you,” he had said. But something inside him had understood, because the fact was that when he actually did propose two months later, he said he would have proposed much sooner if he hadn’t been afraid she might refuse.
So what, in fact, had happened? she asked herself all the way from Omer to Or Akiva. The kids were sitting in the back, curious and excited about the unexpected trip, and she spoke to them in a calm voice and to herself in a trembling voice, saying I don’t know, I swear, I don’t know. There were many other things she didn’t know. She didn’t know what she’d do when he came home and called her. She didn’t know whether she’d demand that he leave the house immediately or let him sleep on the couch for a few days. Whether to explain to the kids that Mom and Dad had a little fight, or just act as if it was all part of a spontaneous weekend trip. When she closed the album and sat down at the table in front of the cauliflower pie that was burnt around the edges, she thought this couldn’t be her life. Someone had screwed up and woken her up this morning to another woman’s life. The other woman also had two children, worked for the police, had an unsolved case and a wrinkle above the corner of her right lip. The other woman had been stupid enough to build her life at the foot of a volcano. She hadn’t checked the lay of the land earlier, she hadn’t made sure that there was no smoke billowing from the mouth of the volcano. Poor thing, that other woman. Really.
At 8:15, Eitan called. She and her mother were sitting in front of the TV with the kids eating burekas and watching an endless parade of auditions. Auditions for the cooking program, auditions for the dance program, auditions for the role of presenter who would preside over the auditions for a singing program. She was thinking about switching channels but didn’t have the energy, and it wouldn’t really make a difference. So she sat in the heavy, heated air of the apartment, squeezed onto the couch between her mother and her children with the TV wailing like a Greek chorus, and decided she had to go to sleep early tonight.
But at 8:15 Eitan called, and unfortunately she was still too awake to miss it. She waited seven rings before answering. Stared at the flashing display that showed the name: Tani.
Finally she answered. Not because of him. Because of Itamar. He looked at the phone, puzzled, unable to read the name of the caller from where he was sitting, but definitely capable of guessing. A seven-year-old shouldn’t have to see his mother screening his father’s calls.
“Where are you?!?”
She allowed herself to enjoy the surprise in his voice. The panic. He hadn’t expected to come home to an empty house. She waited a moment before responding with a question, although she knew very well what he would say: “Where are you?”
“Home. With a box of pizza.”
So she explained it to him. Slowly. What they had told her when she called the department looking for him. What she had found when she got home. What she had decided to do. And he listened on the other end of the line, breathing heavily into the phone, as if the air were too heavy to drag into his lungs. When she finished speaking, he was silent, and she thought about how all relationships are born in silence and end in silence, the silence before the first word and the silence after the last one, and asked herself whether the last-words phase was beginning.
Then he said, “I’m on my way,” and hung up. She went back to the couch, ignoring the looks of Itamar and her mother, smiling at the half-asleep Yaheli.
Time began to move slowly. Yaheli fell asleep and she moved him to the room her mother had prepared for the children. It was her grandmother’s room, and it still had the scent of her perfume in it. Rosewater and something else. Apart from the scent, everything in the room was different, and Liat thought that if it were possible to pack the fragrance in bags and donate it to WIZO, her mother would probably do it. Now, when she went into the room with Yaheli in her arms, Liat inhaled the fragrance deeply. She could actually feel her grandmother in the room. Her image took shape among the shadows, birdlike and thin, lying on the bed under the blankets. When she was a child, Liat had snuck into her room at night, once with the excuse that there’d been thunder and once that she’d had a bad dream, until her grandmother told her to stop looking for reasons and just come whenever she wanted to. Her grandmother would lift the blanket slightly and she would squeeze in beside her, smelling that rosewater-and-something-else perfume. The frequency decreased with the years, and when she was in high school she crawled into her grandmother’s bed only twice: the night before her math matriculation exam, when she couldn’t sleep, and the night after she’d had sex with Kfir, and she was in pain. But even when she remained in her room, she still knew there was a birdlike woman lying in the next room, and that gave her peace of mind.
Yaheli tossed and turned in his sleep, and Liat continued to look at the collection of shadows generous enough to disguise itself as her grandmother. How could she accept that she would never, never ever get into that bed? And the scent of rosewater and something else – how long would it take for it to fade away as well? Maybe that was why her grandmother had demanded that they give everything away to WIZO with one sharp blow, the way she’d crack the heads of the carp she bought for the Sabbath, explaining to the horrified Liat that it hurt less that way. And Liat suddenly remembered coming back after the funeral and seeing her toothbrush standing tall and proud in the glass. And her clothes folded neatly in the closet. And her socks. Who in the world folded socks? But her grandmother did. She folded even underpants. She folded tablecloths, papers, bills. Her quick fingers divided the world into squares and put them into the closet. For her grandmother, everything had its place, and everything was folded. One woman’s quiet but resolute mutiny against an entire world. Outside there was disarray, wars and khamsins and storms. But none of it crossed the threshold of the house. A simple screen door kept the mosquitoes, the flies and the world outside. And inside – perfect order. Life carefully folded. Jars of pickles arranged in rows, prepared for battle. And how quickly they ate them during the shiva, almost without noticing. They ate them with such wastefulness, one after the other, until her mother suddenly appeared from the kitchen, her face pale, and said: that’s the last one.
They put it on a porcelain plate and took it ceremoniously to the balcony. There it lay, as damp as a fetus. They waited for the last of the visitors to go and then cut it into three pieces – one for Mom, one for Liat, one for Uncle Nissim. They chewed it slowly, knowing that the taste that filled their mouths and tickled their tongues now was the last. The absolute end. And that their mouths had never been so full and so empty at the same t
ime.
During the shiva, the house seemed graced with benevolence. They treated each other with a gentleness they didn’t know they possessed. They forgave each other with the same ease with which, on normal days, they raged at each other. In the evening, after the last visitors had mumbled their condolences, they wandered around the house in silence. Gradually, they gathered in her room. A malicious trick – it looked as it had before. But the pictures on the wall had already begun to hang crookedly, the Persian carpet to unravel, the letters on the pages of the books to disappear. All the folded clothes spread their sleeves and rose skyward with a flutter of cotton and mothballs. A covey of white underpants beside a flock of black socks, woolen swallows, followed by her magnificent, embroidered shawls, rare birds gliding out of sight into the horizon. Or at least, that was what should have happened, because there is nothing more dreadful than an object that outlives its owner.
But they didn’t disappear, those objects. They remained folded. And if at first Liat and her mother wanted to go into the room and cherish them, they slowly began to hate them. Because the objects swelled until there was no room in the house for anything but the objects themselves. Liat couldn’t identify the moment when cherishing had turned into clinging. When had her grandmother’s room turned from a living, breathing place to a mummified corpse? On the second floor of 56 Ben Yehuda Street, time was frozen in the scent of rosewater. But there is nothing deader than a museum and there is nothing more alive than fresh longing that burns your throat like arak.
Waking Lions Page 26
