Why, why, because otherwise he will think that he has beaten me, and he has to know that we still have two or three unshakable principles, and that the father is stronger than the child; it is important, necessary, for him
But you are abusing him, this is really abuse … my temples pulse with tension. With excitement, too. We repeated the same words again and again, spoke the same sentences, we couldn’t escape the trap
Believe me, it’s not easy on me either, but I’m not going to give up, because I have already invested half a day of work into this, and there is no point wasting what has already
I was so confused that I asked him—I mean, it slipped out of my mouth so stupidly—why on earth he called me
Because I—I didn’t know what to say, why did I call her, of all people; because you understand children, and you have a child, and I just thought I could consult with you for a moment, but also
He didn’t say, Because—
-because you are a mother
Those five simple words fluttered their wings inside me, and a wave broke, and I almost started to cry. I couldn’t fall apart at that moment, though, so in order to keep up my strength, I fiercely held on to my thoughts of Anna, how much I wanted her to be with me now, at this moment; and how things will change between all of us; what will Yokhai understand, and will he understand that nothing will change between us, and I thought, This has to be a healthy child, God, I need a completely healthy child, terribly; and before anything, I need to call Amos. No, you can’t tell him such a thing over the telephone. I will ask him to come home, and tell him then; one minute, one minute, quiet, think
Miriam? Are you there? She suddenly disappeared on me. Miriam? Can you hear me?
I don’t know where I found the strength I gathered around myself in that moment; I lowered my voice the same way I do in class, to overcome the storm of voices inside my head, and I said, Yair, open the door right now, let him in, hug him and get him dressed and make him hot chocolate
No, no, you don’t understand at all, it isn’t like it is with you two, with your whole system
What does he mean, “our system”? I became furious, what does he know about “our system”? I could imagine the way he saw us, to what extent our home, and what we are as a couple, must seem false and delicate and castrated to him, in comparison to all that he calls “the rules,” with all the predatory battles involved, and with a laststrain to my muscles, I said, You can force a boy to say that he’s sorry, but it is pointless
No, no, why are you getting involved at all, who asked you to get involved and analyze the psychology of my
You called me, I yelled, and immediately regretted it
I’m really sorry about this, you’re right, forget it, I didn’t call at all, it was the weakness of a moment, I don’t want to get you involved in this, forgive me, all right? I didn’t mean for us to talk to each other at all, anyway. Forgive me as well, I thought, but did not say, for the lies I am telling you at this moment
But you can’t take it back, you already got me involved, I’m a part of it now, Yair, you can’t disappear now! Each time I raised my voice, I thought, It has been years since a yell has rung out in our home, and each shout dizzied me, and I thought, Perhaps everything will end right here, right now, maybe it will happen while I’m talking to him
And stop using my name all the time
Perhaps I want you to remember who you are
I don’t forget that for one minute—I am completely in control of the situation right now, and will manage it exactly as the situation demands
He kept babbling to me in this mix of arrogance and panic, I couldn’t escape the feeling that I am also a guilty party in some way; he was,with all his strength, rolling himself into a great void, so that he could cry out for my help from the bottom of the pit, force me to save him
I’m sick of her whining, I never imagined she would be so fragile, and while talking to her, I cut myself a thick slice of bread and wiped butter onto it. I added some tomato and sprinkled some salt and zatar on top, and settled myself down for a snack, because why should I get hungry because of him, and I patiently explained to her that it’s nothing personal, I even admire his powers of endurance, because, to be frank, it was almost daunting to see the toughness in him, being, after all, only a five-and-a-half-year-old kid
And you are thirty-three, I muttered, with not much hope that it would sink in, and could already feel how he is fencing with me, alongside this war with his child, and the more I plead for the child, the more I am doing him harm, urging Yair on, more and more
But then, without intending to, I peeped out at him, and wasn’t hungry anymore, I threw the slice of bread into the trash and shouted at him in my heart to just give up, give up, damn him, he should simply walk the three steps to the door and knock on the fucking door, why is he playing these games of honor with me
I thought I heard the sound of rolling thunder from afar, the air got colder, and I shivered; and I whispered to him, like an initiation, But you love your child, you love him
He fell, for the first time, at this moment. One of his legs simply collapsed under him, but he immediately stood up straight and dragged himself to a little wicker chair, a rocking chair we have in the yard
God, I thought, dear God, before you take care of anything else, make it so that over there, things will end well between them
He lay down across the chair, his head falling over one side and his legs draped over the other, his eyes were open, gazing at a little shrunken lemon left over from the summer
Perhaps it was because I fell silent for a moment. Without saying a word, he hung up on me again, completely matter-of-factly, as if he had completely forgotten I was there; I sank back into the armchair, and counted the days on my fingers again, and thought that I had to get things in order, and if there could just be one moment of quiet, but there was no quiet
Someone is holding a private, exclusive screening of this whole picture inside my head—Ido is outside, and I am peeping out at him, and the way everything repeats itself hopelessly, a slightly balding man bowing over the cracks of the blinds to watch his own pornography
I immediately dialed him again, before I lost my nerve and started hesitating. This is crazy, I thought, for eight months I didn’t dare call him, and now, for the third time this morning
My hands started to become blue, and I knew that I had to hurry now, because I didn’t have much time, I know the symptoms, all right? So I went around, opening all the windows in the house; the cold, cutting wind blew through it, and I stood up tall and allowed it to slice me as well, and after that, I ran to the windows and saw that he had gotten up and was walking, a few steps forward, and then backward, stopping then, confused
In spite of the intensity of the circumstances, I also felt a little special joy within my absurd internal confusion, as if Yair and I already had this routine of little chats in the morning
He took his little peanut in his hand, and pressed down on it, looking around to all sides, with a desperation that tore me apart
The air stretched out, became clear and alert, and the wind stopped, all of a sudden, not a leaf moved, and I thought, Here it comes
Now, he will surrender now, because of his pee-pee, he won’t have any choice, ha, at least we will be done with it, finally finished, and he stepped to the front door with tight legs, stood in front of it, and did not knock. I counted to fifty to myself, opened my eyes, and he was still standing in front of the door, his head bowed down, but still not knocking, not knocking
The rain, the first
What came to my mind then? How, years ago, Maya had asked me to teach her the proper way to fold our little boy’s penis into his diaper, upward or downward? Say you’re sorry, I yelled, and bit into my fist with all my strength
At first, a few, hesitating drops on the leaves of the lemon tree … now on the honeysuckle, and the jasmine, and here, the bougainvillea is getting wet, dust is being washed off,
leaf by leaf, heavy drops on the windowpane and
The marks of my teeth on my fist scared me, the blood that started dripping
It became stronger at once, became full, roared as if everything that had been stored in the skies since the beginning of autumn, the immense, held-back
I saw Ido, lifting his head, looking around, surprised, reaching his hand up to the sky, I didn’t understand his motions, it was as if he was dancing a little dance; he suddenly looked happy and I thought perhaps he was going crazy
I opened the big window, and all the smells of rain hovered inside: the smell of the earth and the rain, of the grass and the rain, rainy trees; the smells of this rain, and past rains, the smell of Annaleh in the rain, smelling like breath, when we were children, through the yarn hats we wore
It’s rain—just one minute—it started raining! How can I leave him in the rain
Good smells rise up from the distant chicken coops and my neighbor’s stable, everything suddenly smelled of a fresh foaling, even Jerusalem Forest slowly became green in front of my eyes, washed inside the milky fog
He is standing in the running water, not making any attempts to hide, maybe he is even enjoying it, maybe now he can understand that I will have to give up
This is the moment I have been scared of for months, this is the bounty that he resists
It only penetrated my head then, that it wasn’t just any rain, it is the rain; who imagined that this was what would become of it? Why, I planned to run in it, bathe in it, scream out her name and say goodbye to her for good, in the rain, in my tears, and instead I’m hiding from my child behind blinds
The house trembled under the strong showers; it was an unusually hard first rain, with thunder and lightning and a sudden darkness that went down on the valley and two or three sharp light beams that spread and reached across the valley like open fingers, and I thought, Everything will be all right, the rain came
His pants were already completely wet from the rain, perhaps from urine, too, and he didn’t stop jumping and dancing and spreading his hands out to the sky, as if he couldn’t feel how cold and wet he was, and how terrible it was to be outside in that weather; his hair was soaked with water, plastered against his face, and he was dancing
I was relieved, for no coherent reason; only my childish belief in the rain, and maybe it will end with a rainbow, a special gift for me, for how I will be by the end of this winter
I ran through the house like a madman and banged my head against the wall, hard, a few times, and the phone rang, and I knew it was her, so I didn’t pick it up, what can I tell her
I was again flooded by my marvelous intuition, which had absorbed itself into my body by now, all the heaviness and grace, and I still couldn’t contain it, not alongside what was happening to Yair and the child
I took off my pants, too, so I really wouldn’t have any advantage over him, and ran in front of the open windows only in my underwear, and thought I must be losing my mind
I let the phone ring for maybe five minutes. He didn’t answer. Perhaps he had already picked his son up and taken him to kindergarten, but I knew he hadn’t, I felt him continuing to call me with tingles on my flesh, the profundity of his madness prickling me across the distance
The little son of a bitch broke me. I’ve lost myself completely. All the gears of fatherhood have fallen apart on me, the only thing I thought I knew how to do well
The rain became terribly heavy, the few fingers of light folding together and clenching behind the clouds. The darkness of evening spread over the middle of the day, and my soul was suddenly lost in a panic. I saw the child outside, thrown down, frozen and naked. I called the taxi service in Giv’at Sha’ul, and they said it could take an hour because of the rain
I went to his room, got into his bed, and made some space for myself between his bears and monkeys and lions as if I was high on something
Don’t think, I told myself, just follow your instincts. I got dressed and went out into the rain. I was soaked after a moment, I hadn’t even taken the time to put on something prettier, or comb my hair, or put on lipstick, nothing; so he wouldn’t think that I—so he wouldn’t think
I pulled the covers over my head and shouted with all my strength for him to say he is sorry and come inside, blood from my hand stained the sheets, and I bit it again
The old Mini Minor was standing in the garage. I hesitated for a moment and thought I had better not, I haven’t driven for too many years, this isn’t the time to start, I don’t even have a license right now, I didn’t renew it this year
I thought I heard him talking outside and became worried that perhaps the old pervert had come back, or perhaps he had brought the police
I stood there, confused, torn by all my different impulses, and my new words shone in me again, amid the confusion and the burden: I’m pregnant, and an expanse of life spread itself out inside me, gradually, as if I was asking my body a question, and each time, my body answered yes, my body answered yes
He was only talking to the shriveled-up lemon, and told it that we always say he does everything “slow on purpose,” and then he answered himself as the lemon—he still had the strength for make-believe—and I thought that I wished Miriam would call, and the telephone rang. I picked it up, nervous—I meant to spew out everything I had been feeling about her that had been gathering up for a long time in my stomach juices, about her, and her Amos, who’s just so great, oh no, they would never come to such a pass with a child, no, they would sit down and talk quietly and reasonably and hum out some fair formula of compromise, and good for
You don’t understand anything
But it was Maya. She had arrived in Safed and couldn’t find me at work and was astonished to hear it, she couldn’t believe he was still there
This really is not the time to remember how to drive, not in such a rain, not when I’m so upset, I haven’t driven for seven years (and my reasons for doing so seemed so false to me, I almost forgot why—was it the fear that I might hit someone? To damage someone, so that my life would no longer be worth living, and the immense responsibility that would fall on Amos), but to start now, in my condition, in this situation—I suddenly have a “situation” …
So I poured out everything that had been building up in me, because she has some responsibility for what’s been going on, too, why, we had decided on this together, this morning; but, no, in the end I am always the one who has to punish him, and she gets away scot-free, and he will never forget this about me, and right at that moment, I was starting to stand trial, starting to know the tremendous hate he will feel for me for this morning
I ran to the gate of the village in the rain, the terrible rain, I shouldn’t run now—I vowed that the moment the matter with Yair and Ido is settled, I will start to be careful, keep myself healthy; where is Anna to tell me in Polish that I now have to be careful for two. Why haven’t I called Amos yet? But no cars passed through the gate, there wasn’t a living soul in sight
And on top of everything else, she’s busting my balls all the way from Safed, repeating Miriam’s same recital, that he mustn’t be broken, he’s only a child, I am the one behaving like a child
I’m standing there in the rain, and in spite of all the stress I’m also laughing, laughing at myself, something like this could happen onlyto me, of course, to the extent that I drive myself crazy over one thing, and to the extent that I had so given myself over to another person, I hadn’t made the time to understand all the obvious signs my body has been sending me
I thought I would explode over the way they both seemed to be teaming up with each other on how to scold me, from the height of their judge’s bench
I was sopping like a rag, and probably looked that way, too; I was hoping that all the excitement wouldn’t harm me; I spent the entire time trying to stay clear-headed, thinking about the child over there, outside; so I pushed back my thoughts about how blind I had been, about this pregnancy that had sneaked in when I wasn’
t thinking about it, not at all
Be My Knife Page 35
