He would lie on his back, straighten the pillow behind him, his long, beautiful body tense, and she would give lectures one after the other, teach him about equations, world wars, the beginnings of Zionism, the legislature and the executive authority, the rules of syntax and vocalization, a later novel by Agnon and an early poem by Bialik—neither of them studied the sciences. She remembers the relief on his face when he managed to understand something difficult, how sweet he was, kissing her excitedly, singing the answer in her ear. She loved teaching him, and perhaps when she finally recovered and had to choose life, that was what she held on to, the gratifying memory of teaching, of instilling knowledge, love, and joy. And so she was a teacher in the army and studied education afterward, to the great disappointment of her mother, who wanted her to go to law school, while her first pupil, so slow to learn, miraculously succeeded in medical school without her help and without even her knowledge.
When the door opens, the boy with the crutches limps out and the next patient in line, a potbellied man, leaps impatiently out of his chair intending to go inside. But there seems to be a sudden disruption of the familiar rhythm of those exiting and those entering, because another man comes out of the room and closes the door behind him and no one goes inside. Without his white coat, he looks like one of his patients, thin, slightly stooped, his bearded face tired, his shirt wrinkled, a patient coming out of the doctor’s office, empty-handed and heavy-hearted, who says to her unsmilingly, “Come with me.”
He always walked more quickly than she did, his steps longer, and now too, she practically runs after him through the corridors. She was elated when he chose her from among the lineup gathered at his door, but now she’s embarrassed by the way he is running down the steps as if fleeing from her, floor after floor, until she recognizes the cool operating rooms, where he turns around for the first time to make sure she is actually there and points to one of the waiting rooms.
It’s a windowless room and no one is there, no one can see him throw his arms around her. “Rissi,” he whispers, “Rissi,” and he strokes her hair, runs his fingers across her face as if he is blind, his touch strange and familiar. She closes her eyes and presses against his thin body, it’s him, her hands remember, it’s her and her body knows, it’s them and their severed love. It has always been there, beyond time and place, almost forever.
Then he moves her away slightly, sits her down on a hard armchair, places another one in front of her, so close that their knees touch, and stares into her eyes. He says in a soft voice, “You found me, Rissi. I feel like a criminal who’s been caught.”
“Don’t worry, I already release you,” she says quickly, offended, embarrassed, because his words are inappropriate to the emotion in his movements.
“Don’t release me,” he says. “I’m happy to be caught. I’ve wanted to ask your forgiveness for years.”
Once again she is offended if that is the only reason he’s happy to see her, just so he can return to his life with a clear conscience. She says coldly, “I forgave you a long time ago. You were a child, an orphan.” Her eyes examine every wrinkle and blemish on his face, even his beard is deceptive, because most of it is gray, but it still looks white. His lids droop slightly over his young-looking, pale eyes, and though the wrinkle between them is deep, his forehead is smooth. One moment she sees him as he is now, and the next as he was then. Does he see her that way too as his eyes examine her face? For some reason, she isn’t embarrassed, as if her skin is as smooth and radiant as it was then.
“We were both orphans,” he says, “but I have a daughter your age, and if anyone did to her what I did to you, I’d kill him.”
“My age?” she laughs. “I’ll be forty-five soon.”
“The age you were then, of course.”
“But unfortunately, I didn’t have a father who would kill you. That’s why you’re still alive. What’s your daughter’s name?”
“Miriam,” he says with longing, and she nods, of course, there was no other possibility but to name her after his mother. The noble Miriam Rosenfeld had become Miriam Rosen, probably a tall, slim girl with light-colored eyes.
“Does she look like her?” she asks, whispering for some reason.
“Less than I hoped. I didn’t make her alone, of course. She’s much fairer than my mother, but there is a resemblance.”
She suddenly chokes up as she thinks about the girl she should have given birth to, their Miriam, with dark hair and blue-green eyes, their Snow White. Is that why Alma is so angry at her, because she sensed from the day she was born that she wasn’t the daughter her mother hoped for?
“Don’t be sorry,” he says. “You have children too, right? I saw it in your file, married plus two.” But tears glisten in his agitated eyes as well.
“Did you recognize me right away?”
“Of course! How could I not? Flesh such as yours will not soon be forgotten,” quoting from one of the books she taught him then.
She smiles gratefully. “I thought I had changed completely.”
He shakes his head over and over again, a youthful smile on his lips. “For me, you are the same, Rissi,” and his fingers confirm his words, caressing her face as if they had never stopped.
“How can that be,” she protests happily, but for her as well, his present face becomes blurred, and she sees the face of the boy he once was, the boy who was hers. She feels her body fill with love as if it is an empty well finally filling with blessed rainwater, a cracked well that has been repaired and is whole now, able to contain the copious waters that cannot extinguish love. The streams that cannot wash it away are flowing inside her now, obliterating time, repairing the rift. The wounds of love can be healed only by those who cause them, she recalls a saying she once heard, her fingers covering his as they stroke her face, and her mind fills with all sorts of maxims: all’s well that ends well, better late than never. Day after day, night after night, we were together, all the rest has long since been forgotten.
“I have to get back to the clinic,” he says, taking his vibrating phone out of his pocket and looking at it. “They’re waiting for me.” He pulls her to him, raises her chin and presses her mouth to his, her lips trembling breathlessly, as if they have never been kissed. It isn’t the touch of his beard that she feels, but the cheeks of the boy he was then, when his lips were fuller, and then too gave off a hospital smell of antiseptics and drugs.
“Thank you for forgiving me, Rissi,” he says hoarsely, breathing the words into her ear as if that is the purpose of their meeting. “I have to go.” He releases her suddenly and opens the door.
“Eitan, wait a minute,” she says, and he turns to her, but a young doctor in blue scrubs stops him in the corridor and she stands off to the side and watches him, his expression once again stern and remote. When the young doctor continues on his way, she says, “Eitan.” She is ready to speak his name all day, day after day, until they see each other again. “Eitan,” she hears herself ask, “when will we see each other again?”
“Whenever you want,” he says, as if nothing could be simpler, and she is shocked by the incomprehensible change. How is it possible that this memory, this dark, sick part of her life she could barely allow herself to think about, has suddenly opened, awash in airy, pleasant sunlight, like a torture chamber that has become a health resort.
He takes a small business card out of his pocket and hands it to her. “Call me,” he says, and disappears from sight on the staircase.
She walks back along the bustling corridor. Here is the door he opened for her, the cool, windowless room, the two armchairs looking at each other with longing. Here she is, trembling with excitement, her hands on her lips that were kissed here, on her face that was caressed here. She sits down on the armchair, puts her feet up on the one in front of her, and closes her eyes.
The face of the boy he was moves closer to her, mouth slightly open, thick l
ashes shading his eyes, cheeks as pink as a baby’s from the sun, and if she opens her eyes, she’ll see the top of the mulberry tree that shaded them. They walked down the hill from Eitan’s house to the spring under the tree on the most golden day, through the narrow space between the cold that had been and the heat that was coming. The late winter flowering was at its height, and the air was saturated with honey. It might have been the only day they had allowed themselves to act like a pair of lovers and nothing else, and it was also, she has to admit, the happiest day of her life, happier than her wedding day, happier than the days her children were born. The touch of the hot stone on her back, her handsome boy caressing her breasts, the pink berries at their tips, and she wound herself around him on the ancient terraces in the absolute certainty that nothing would ever separate them. She remembers picking leaves from the tree for the silkworm larvae her brothers were growing in an old shoebox, remembers dipping her feet in the spring water while he immersed himself in it. “Come into the water,” he said, but she said skeptically, “Isn’t it too cold?”
Yes, the air-conditioning is getting stronger and she shivers—after all, not only thirty years have passed, but the few moments of their meeting, only just ended, also belong to the past she so yearned to revive. What precisely was said and what can be learned from it? What does she know about him? Almost nothing. He has a seventeen-year-old daughter, that he needs her forgiveness, that in his eyes, she hasn’t changed, which is almost too good to be true, or bad, actually. Because her life is now pouring into this new opening like sewage, because she doesn’t want to go home now, because the only thing she wants is to see him again, as if thirty years haven’t passed. So she will stay here in this room and wait for him, leave him a message that she’s still here, in this tiny waiting room known apparently to only a select few. Appearing on the blue screen that she now notices for the first time are the initials of the patients undergoing surgery, perhaps her initials, I.E., will be added, for she still hasn’t recovered from an operation that lasted almost thirty years. Now it turns out that it was all in vain, the teams of surgeons worked in vain to remove him from her body because, in an instant, he has come back and filled the space that nothing else has managed to fill, not Mickey, not her children, not her work, leaving it still hollow, ill, and painful.
Her eyes fix on the screen, she stretches her legs a bit. The armchair is hard, but she arranges her body on it as if she is planning a long wait, watching the scanty, fateful information flash on the screen: initials, date of birth, sex, length of surgery. M.D., born 1938, has already been taken to recuperation. He is exactly the age her father would be now if he were alive. Would he have killed Eitan if he had been alive then? Would she have been less devastated if she’d had a father?
R.L., a woman her age, has been in surgery for such a long time, she notices, since five in the morning. Where is her family waiting? She thinks about her own family waiting for her in one of these rooms ten years ago, Mickey, the children, and her mother, who seemed okay until the symptoms of her illness began to appear exactly when she needed to help Mickey with the children. Her help turned out to be a burden, even dangerous, when the three of them were almost run over because she insisted on crossing at a red light, when she was confused about the direction of the traffic on a one-way street, when she kept making chicken soup for them, forgetting that they were vegetarians. They were a family unraveling then, at the time her bones slowly knit together for hours and days, for weeks and months, with the help of screws and pins, as if she were Pinocchio, a wooden marionette. They never again became the family they once were because the absolute certainty of their fragility and vulnerability was burned into their minds and has never faded.
On the surface, they were united in their concern for her, in their nursing of her, but deep down, they had broken apart, like her pelvis, because in a single day, they had changed from an innocent young family into a bitter old one that had no illusions, that had nothing to look forward to. She knows all that now, as she sleeps, sees it with her eyes closed. She has to get out of here, but is still sleeping, how can she dash like a doe into the depths of the forest? Her cold eyelids cover her eyes, her arms hug her icy ribs, the air-conditioning is becoming more aggressive every minute, as if her body had been placed in the morgue while she was still alive.
She was brought to this room in order to freeze time, in order to take them both back to those years, because what is the point of loving anew when the world has changed in the meantime? New stories are being told in it, new matches are being made, new people, like her Omer and Alma, like his daughter Miriam, are being added, people who stand between them. Even as he hugged her, she sensed the presence of outsiders, her Mickey and his wife, their apartments, their mortgages and their friends, everything they have accumulated since then. She tries to picture his house, but can’t. Obviously it’s a large and elegant house not far from here, but she can see him only in his mother’s small, ground-floor apartment in a suburb of the city, standing there at the end of the seven days of mourning and informing her of his decision. Are the tears that have been hidden behind her dry eyes for years suddenly pouring out? Alarmed, she pulls herself together, shaking with cold, her fingertips frozen and her throat burning. A tidal wave of weeping is moving toward her, flinging open the door of her secret waiting room, gushing from wide-open mouths. Horrified, she knows immediately that her unwanted guests are no longer waiting, they are in mourning, and it’s because they have no one to wait for that they have come here and are standing in front of the screen, crying “Mama, come back, Mama!”
She looks at the screen and sees that R.L. has disappeared from it as if she had never been there, leaving behind numerous confused mourners now gathering around her. Pretending to be one of those waiting for a loved one to come out of surgery, she looks worriedly at the screen as the others, stunned, lament their loss.
“The doctors here are butchers,” a man of about her age, a black kipa on his head, shouts at her. “They killed my wife, they murdered her in cold blood. There was nothing wrong with her, just a simple operation. They destroy families! Is your husband having an operation? Get him out of there while he’s still alive. This place is hell!” The minute they see her, they crowd around her as if she has it in her power to save them, telling her detail after detail as if she can still fix the one detail that proved fatal. They remind her of her pupils, clamoring for her to resolve an argument and find the guilty party. “I told her, to me you’re beautiful just the way you are, why do you need that ring in your stomach?” he says, swaying back and forth as if praying. “She wanted to lose weight. She got fat after the babies and wanted to be thin, and now the children have no mother. God have mercy on us!” He sobs, and at his side, a heavyset woman wearing a headscarf, probably the dead woman’s mother, screams, “Eight children! Last time she had twins! In two months, they’ll be three!”
Iris listens to them, shocked. Did they expect her to take in the motherless children? With a slight stammer, the father continues describing the final hours before the operation, and it is no longer clear to her whether they are telling the story to her or to each other. How they realized that there were complications, that nothing would be the same, how they read from Psalms, “The Lord answer thee in the day of trouble, may he send forth help from the sanctuary, and give thee support from Zion.” Their presence has raised the temperature in the room, she feels her body defrost slightly, and she wants to get out of there, but how can she abandon them in their time of trouble? Every now and then a different family member speaks to her, adding another detail, as if she is supposed to document the event, but she gives most of her attention to the husband, whose name turns out to be Zion. He shouts over and over again, “A ring! A ring in her stomach! What are all these inventions? I sanctified her with a ring! To die for a ring? To be thin, that’s what she wanted. Now you’ll be thin. After the worms eat you, you won’t weigh anything at all!” He sobs and
all his siblings and the deceased’s siblings and her older children cry their hearts out until they once again begin to vent their anger at the doctors. “They’re murderers, they killed her, they destroy families. Get your husband out of the hospital before he dies,” they warn her. She listens to their advice, and as if hurrying to do what they ask, mumbling words of condolence, she walks quickly out of the room. It is only when she reaches the ground floor that she realizes it is already evening, the crowds have thinned, even the corridor outside his office is empty, the receptionist is gone and his door is locked.
She is the only one in the clinic now, as if pain has passed from the world while she slept, and the frightening tumult coming from the adjacent emergency rooms is the only sound she hears. Maybe she’ll go there and not to the parking lot, because she feels as if she’s burning up with fever. Her throat hurts, her teeth are chattering, her body is transforming the cold it absorbs into intense heat that freezes her and then into intense cold that burns her. She staggers to her car, turns on the heater, stares at the fogged-up windows. Black heat enfolds her, the heat of a summer night, a night that doesn’t end in the morning. She takes her phone out of her bag, she muted it hours ago, and there are dozens of unanswered calls, written and spoken messages, dozens of emails: her assistant called her almost every hour; Rachel from City Hall called over and over again; Arieh from the Ministry of Education; teachers, parents, the supervisor, Dafna; Parshant called on behalf of her mother; and Mickey left a curt message, “Where are you?” Omer asked for a ride to Yotam’s house and then back. Mickey asked again, “Is everything okay?” then made do with only a question mark, but she doesn’t respond. If she starts answering, there will be no end to it. She doesn’t want to answer, she wants answers, so she takes out the business card he gave her hours earlier and copies the numbers into her cell phone, but instead of entering his name under the letter E, the first letter of his first name, or under R, the first letter of his surname, she enters it under the letter P: Pain.
Pain Page 10
