Pain

by Zeruya Shalev

  The blanket moved slowly, with effort, and the face that was turned to the wall turned to her, examining her with huge, blue, surprisingly young eyes. “Welcome, Iris,” his mother said in a warm, gentle voice, shifting onto her side and leaning on her elbow, supporting her head with her hand and extending her other hand. “Nice to meet you. I’m Miriam. Forgive me for not getting up. My legs hurt.”

  Iris shook her hand emotionally—she loved her deeply from that first moment—and said, “You don’t have to get up for me. I’ll be happy to help Eitan take care of you.”

  “It’s enough that you take care of him,” his mother said, smiling. “It’s a great relief for me to know that he’s not alone.” When she tried to straighten up a bit more, the flowing hair suddenly detached from her head, leaving her bare skull exposed, humiliated, and she flushed in embarrassment. “I can’t seem to manage with this wig,” she mumbled, shaking it out and placing it on the pillow. She never put it on again, and now, as Iris sees her image in the mirror that has remained in the hallway since then, she runs her fingers through her own hair, which has remained smooth and shiny even after she rolled around on the ground.

  “Do you remember her wig?” she asks, and he knows immediately what she means.

  “I was just going to say that you really look like her, not only the hair. It’s incredible how much you’ve grown to look like her.”

  “She died at the age I am now,” she says. “What does all this mean?”

  He runs his fingers through her hair. “Let’s wait and see. Who knows.” For a moment, she trembles as if she has heard something ominous in his words. “You’re shaking, you have a high fever. Let’s finally take care of you. I don’t know how to begin. Do you want to lie down”—he points to the couch—“or maybe take a shower?”

  “Both,” she replies.

  “We’ll start with the shower.” He leads her gently to the bathroom from which he emerged a short time ago. “Hold on to the railing so you don’t fall,” he cautions her, pointing to the aluminum bars his mother used to hold on to, “and call me if you need me.” When he comes back and hands her a towel, she is almost naked, and he hurries out while she, surprisingly, feels no embarrassment. It’s not her that he’s looking at, not at the stretch marks on her stomach, the surgical scars, or the general flaccidity of her body. It’s the young girl she once was that he sees, and the image of his mother superimposed on her. For better or for worse, let’s wait and see.

  And so, when she emerges from her brief shower—the thought of missing precious time with him suddenly made her unbearably sad—she isn’t surprised when he hands her a faded flowered robe she vaguely remembers. “Maybe you can wear this for the time being,” he says, and she wraps herself in the robe, which smells surprisingly good, as if it has just been laundered for her. She lies down on the couch, drinks the tea he brews for her and swallows the pill he gives her, putting herself totally in his care. He cuts a slice of watermelon into small cubes and hands them to her, places a cool towel on her forehead, pours her a glass of water, and it seems to her that everything she did for him in the past is being returned to her in concentrated form. In a moment, he’ll sit down beside her and begin tutoring her for exams.

  “What’s funny, Rissi?” he asks gently.

  “I remembered how I used to teach you before your exams. It was really hard. How did you actually manage to get through medical school?”

  “There were always girls who thought the effort was worth it,” he laughs.

  “I never thought otherwise,” she says, clearly displeased.

  He lies down beside her. “The truth is that in a few years, my brain cleared. After the army, I discovered that I actually liked to study. Don’t judge me harshly. I know I was a complete idiot, but there were extenuating circumstances. You said so yourself.”

  “Of course,” she smiles, “I don’t judge you at all,” even though she doesn’t know whether he is talking about his learning difficulties or his abandonment of her. But it doesn’t matter to her now as she closes her eyes and holds his hand. She feels as if her flesh is melting from the fever, melting and blending with his into a single, indivisible mass. “What did you give me, morphine?” she asks with a smile. “Medical cannabis? I feel like I’m hallucinating.”

  “Just Optalgin.”

  She protests, “Optalgin I have at home. I don’t need a pain specialist for Optalgin. Why did you choose that specialty?”

  “Someone who doesn’t believe in cures goes into pain,” he says. “It’s a totally different worldview. For most doctors, disease is the main thing, but for us, it’s only of secondary interest. We don’t try to cure, just to reduce the suffering. You’re the last person who needs to ask that. You were there with me.”

  “Her suffering was terrible,” she says, the horrific cries that came from the other side of the curtain on the day of his mother’s death echoing in her ears. For a moment, they seem to be coming from her own throat. Has he given her his mother’s disease so he can tend to her as devotedly as he tended to his mother, reduce the pain he caused? She will accept it only if he remains with her here until the day she dies, only if she never goes back to her home. She needs time with him, she has so many questions to ask—she doesn’t know anything yet, doesn’t know, for example, what he did after he banished her, on that day and on the day after it. In fact, she wants to go through the calendar with him, through all the weeks and months that have passed since that day, even if it takes almost thirty years to re-create the large and small details in the order in which they occurred. What did he do in the army where did he go to school whom did he marry where did he live why did he leave whom did he marry next where do his children live when does he see them does he still love sour apples? But the feeling of infinite time blows around her with the night breeze, she has no idea of what time her watch shows, her time is different, she is in another country, inside the planet, where the years gather.

  “Are you sleeping?” he whispers.

  She shakes her head, adding, to her surprise, “I’m happy.”

  He strokes her bare arms, his fingers graze her breasts through the robe. “Rissi, what about your family? Aren’t they waiting for you? Won’t they be worried?”

  “So let them worry,” she whispers.

  But he pleads with her, “At least send a message. Where’s your cell phone? I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

  He puts the phone in her hand, it’s only 10:30, she discovers, she can still stay with him, she can’t leave him again, so she sends a terse message to Mickey, “I’m in Tel Aviv. Be back late. Don’t worry,” and he responds immediately, “What are you doing in Tel Aviv?”

  She quickly sends a message to Dafna: “I’m with you in Tel Aviv, okay? I’ll explain tomorrow,” and only after Dafna confirms does she text him, “With Dafna. Don’t wait up for me.”

  She arranges it all with astonishing skill, as if her life with him has been filled with lies, but she never cheated on him, never lied to him, always wonders at her friends who have affairs. It seems to her like an unnecessary burden on both body and soul, and until now, she has never met a man she felt was worth carrying that burden for. Every now and then, a pupil’s father would linger in her office longer than necessary. In meetings at the Education Ministry, she would sometimes notice suggestive looks, especially before she was injured. She never responded, not only out of loyalty to Mickey and the family, but out of the certainty she felt that they would not satisfy her hunger. Now, however, she is in another country where her great hunger has ended, she is in her own land of Egypt, and so she will lie brazenly to her children as well. To be on the safe side, she also texts Omer: “I’m in Tel Aviv. We’ll study tomorrow.” He replies immediately with a smiley face and “Have fun, Mom.” What does he even care where she is as long as his clothes are washed and his plate is full.

  The entire time, Eitan
putters around in the kitchen, giving her privacy although she hasn’t asked for it, and while she is still spinning her lies, he takes another bottle of beer out of the fridge and sits down in front of the computer again. She watches him as if she is still in the garden on the other side of the window as he types quickly, and for a moment, he seems to forget that she’s there at all, his brow furrows above his eyes, his already dry gray hair is brushed back, his clenched lips are dark, his expression grim. She closes her eyes and listens to the sounds of the keyboard. “What are you writing?” she finally asks, and only then does he stand up and go over to her, stretching his youthful arms above him and to the back.

  “I’m answering patients’ questions,” he says with a sigh. “There’s no end to it. I sit with these emails for hours every night.”

  She spreads her arms for him and whispers, “I have questions too, but I want the answers orally,” and he lies down beside her again. He has turned off all the lights, the room is illuminated only by the bluish glow of the computer monitor, and from the window, fingers of the cool, summer, plum-scented night breeze of the Jerusalem Hills caress them.

  “Can I answer orally, but without words?” he asks hoarsely.

  “How?”

  “Like this,” he whispers, his lips on hers, and she feels as if, with the long, ardent kiss, he is pouring into her the essence of the life he has led until now, without her, even lonelier than she. Yes, she already knows everything, she has no further questions, except perhaps why he isn’t worried about catching her throat infection.

  Under the flowered robe that once covered his mother’s body, her body is covered by kisses, her skin is blooming, she is a flowering plum tree, she is a hedge, she is magically transformed from animal to vegetable, her needs now simple, and she is planted in the ground. She suddenly remembers teaching him for his Bible exam, and he couldn’t understand that verse, “A man is like a tree of the field.” How exhausting it was trying to give a clear and simple explanation of the conflicting interpretations: is it possible to say that a man is the equivalent of a tree in the field? On the face of it, yes, because he too is created from a tiny seed, he too grows and is cut down like a tree. But the verse, from Deuteronomy, which is about the rules of war, is saying the opposite—is the tree of the field like a man who must endure the siege? A man can flee and a tree cannot, a man can attack and a tree cannot, and so it should not be destroyed.

  They sat here at the table and studied, and he kicked his chair in frustration, his eyes filling with tears. He always cried more easily than she, though on the day he banished her, he didn’t cry. But now he can’t banish her again because she is planted here like the plum tree, she has never so truly belonged, has never had such a profound sense of home in any of the apartments she has lived in. Now he carries her to the bedroom and takes off the robe, and there is nothing separating his cool skin and her burning skin—it is like an encounter between two climates, two continents caught in a single storm cloud, heavy with thick steam, hailstones crashing into each other, laden with electrical currents exploding in flashes of light. It is the encounter that creates the lightning and thunder that rolls through the skies like her voice, which keeps repeating, “My love, my love.” There is no end to the words she yearns to say to him, and each word yearns to be said endlessly in a single sentence that is as long as her life. To her surprise he suddenly answers her, begins to speak as his body intertwines with hers, telling her of the first years after their parting, his voice growing hoarse, and she listens intently, devouring every whispered word before he can no longer speak. “I was so lonely, Rissi. Do you understand what it means not to have anyone in the world? I was thrown straight into the army, I wanted combat, I wanted to die. I spent every weekend with a different friend. I chose them on the basis of how far from Jerusalem they lived, the farther the better. I didn’t want to see this house or my grandparents, who were devastated themselves. I don’t think I came to Jerusalem for about three years.”

  “And what about me,” she asks, “didn’t you want to see me?” Suddenly, her mother’s story becomes simply one more hallucination of her withering brain, and she doesn’t know whether to be happy or sad about it.

  He rests his gray head on her breasts and says, “Don’t be silly, of course I wanted to. You were the person closest to me, but I was afraid of that closeness. I ran as far away as I could from it, just so I wouldn’t feel anything. If you don’t feel, you don’t suffer. That was my dream for years, to numb my emotions. I had a reason for doing a residency in anesthesiology. I slept with women without feeling anything, I married without feeling anything. I didn’t feel again until Miriam was born.”

  “And what was it like to feel again?” she asks, suddenly realizing that her months of suffering, which he knew nothing about, were inconsequential compared to the long years he was describing. She may not even tell him about them, especially if he doesn’t ask. Because what can she say? I lay in bed without moving, frozen in one position for days on end? I didn’t eat or drink, I didn’t speak or hear? I was like a vegetable, because a man is a tree of the field? How can she even be angry with him? He left her because he loved her too much, hurt too much.

  He repeats her question, “What was it like? It was wonderful and terrible, and it destroyed my marriage.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “Because then I realized that I didn’t love her mother, and that was not a happy discovery. I left the house fairly quickly. It was Miriam’s loss when I began to feel again.”

  “I’m sure she also gained,” she says, finding herself consoling him, just as she did then, when they were young, when she was quick to take his pain upon herself.

  “Not enough, I’m sorry to say. With all the pressure at work, all the night shifts I had, and her hostile mother, it was very hard to build a relationship. She was too young when we separated. And later I went abroad to study and hardly saw her.”

  Iris eagerly absorbs the abundance of surprising new information. For some reason, she always imagined him happily married to a woman more accomplished than she, a woman it was impossible to leave, raising accomplished children with her. It never occurred to her that he might be divorced and was alone the entire time. And for the entire time, he is making love to her, speaking to her with every part of his body. She forgot that he is like this, that they are like this, she has become so used to Mickey’s down-to-business approach that separates words from touch. But here, with them, everything merges in the face of his past and her own, which she is re-creating in parallel to his. His daughter Miriam was born several months before her Omer, which means that when he left his wife, Iris was already in her second pregnancy, undecided about why she was actually having another baby. The question grew more pressing after Omer was born and drained all her strength, but she let it go because she didn’t have the time to think about it in depth, and also because, despite herself, she was grateful to the active, hot-tempered baby who constantly caused chaos and distracted her. As she re-creates her life in parallel to his, she is surprised to discover that she was happier than he, at least during those years, in spite of the vague sense of defeat she felt. Since recovering from her breakdown, when she felt profoundly close to destruction, a simple, low-intensity life was usually enough for her. But just when she seemed to have forgotten the lesson, a suicide bomber came into her life, a Palestinian policeman from Bethlehem, who reminded her once again how close the abyss was, and that solid ground was better. Now everything that happened takes on a new meaning, has a double significance, like the double face of her young man who has become a middle-aged man, and apparently not an easy one, with thick dark eyebrows, beautiful eyes, and lips only fully revealed when he kisses her. Once again she wonders at the double vision, layer upon layer—that must be how we see ourselves and those close to us. But she didn’t see the beard grow on his cheeks, and now it is turning white, she didn’t see him reach his full height, an
d he is already beginning to stoop. They have so much to fill in, almost thirty years were stolen from them.

  Now they have to be twenty or thirty years old again, marry and give birth to the children of their deep, old love, to their Miriam, because his seed is flooding the corridors of her body now and she knows that a forgotten egg of her youth must be waiting for it. He moves above her as if he is praying, and with his beard and the devout expression on his thin face, he looks like a cantor chanting the final Yom Kippur prayer a moment before judgment is passed: Open the gates for us when the gates are closing, for the day wanes. The day is waning, the sun is setting, let us come into your gates! Oh, God, please! Please pardon! Please forgive! Please wipe out! Please atone! Please have mercy! Please suppress anger, sin, and transgression! She joins in his prayer, her body pulsing with his in pleasure and joy, your prayer is answered, my prayer is answered, our prayer is answered.

  NINE

  When she opens her eyes in the morning, she still feels blessed, despite the raw throat and high fever. Slowly and gradually, images clear. The interrupted story of her life comes together in a colorful chain like the ones she used to make for the Sukkoth holiday when she was a child. Longing so much for a sukkah of her own, she used to cut and paste endless strips of paper in the belief that the longer the chain she offered to her neighbors, the happier they would be to welcome her into their sukkah, because there was no one in her own house to build one. So she cut and pasted and put on her holiday clothes, but on the way to the neighbor’s sukkah, the too-long chain tore under her feet and she returned home in tears. Now she is pasting again, a strip of red paper to a blue one, a blue one to green one, each strip adhering to its companion, suffusing it with its color and changing it completely, the way she has changed beside Eitan. Even the mere thought of him now changes her very being. Parting from him the night before, she felt that nothing would remain as it was. He was afraid to let her drive alone and followed her in his car, its headlights caressing her with two glowing eyes, imbuing her with a thrilling sense of peace as she led him to her home, to her life.