Pain

by Zeruya Shalev

  “Don’t be silly,” he finally protests gallantly. “I won’t go to play when you feel so bad. I’ll sit here with you.” Suddenly all the arguments they’ve had over the years about his chess seem so inane. What does she want from him? After all, he can’t give her what she needs even if he remains at her side every minute of the day, and for a moment, she feels sorry for him, lump of a man that he is. In fact, he is also her son, her ungainly older son, who unlike his siblings won’t leave the house when he grows up. How could she have suspected him of infidelity? Dafna is right, it’s so unlike him. He is naive, honest, and guilty of nothing. He simply isn’t enough for her, he simply isn’t Eitan. She has to continue taking care of him the way she takes care of Omer, but she will keep her emotional life for herself, as mothers do. A mother has the right to fall in love as long as she doesn’t neglect her children, and she won’t neglect them. She’ll stay here with them, preserve the family unit, and occasionally slip away to her other life. You can’t even call it a double life because there is nothing double about it. She is a woman there and a mother here, two parts that make up a whole, and that’s the solution that presents itself almost naturally, considering the circumstances of her life.

  After all, if Eitan Rosenfeld hadn’t left her, she would be living a full life to this day with him and the children they would have had together. But that didn’t happen, and now there are three people in the world she has an obligation to, an obligation she will honor only if they honor her needs, her feelings, her loyalty to the young girl she once was and the woman she has grown into.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” he asks.

  She snaps out of her reverie. “Me? Like what?”

  “Like you’re seeing me for the first time, or the last time.”

  She is seized by a paroxysm of embarrassed coughing. “I’m going to die of the flu, Mooky, so maybe this really is the last time. Someone is always dying of the flu.” She tries to make light of his words, to gloss over the accuracy of his perceptive comment.

  “Usually more elderly people,” he says, oddly serious.

  “I’m pretty elderly,” she says quickly. The more he thinks about her in those terms, the less he will suspect her and maybe he’ll even want her less. Is that why he’s still here, in the doorway, hoping that her passive presence in bed will grant him access? The thought of his touch seems vaguely perverse, like the inappropriate touch of a child who has already grown up, and her patience is already coming to an end. “I want to sleep,” she whispers.

  “But you still haven’t eaten the soup I brought you,” he protests.

  “I feel nauseous all of a sudden. Maybe later.” And in order to leave no doubt, she calls after him as he leaves, “Close the door. Good night.” She tries to hide the smile that appears on her face, as involuntary as a baby’s twitch.

  Because she actually likes this illness. How good it is that the air conditioner in the waiting room devastated her, it allows her rest, privacy, freedom, everything an unfaithful person needs. To her dismay, the word that emerged from Shula’s mouth is still drifting through the house, and she’s amazed again and again at her resourcefulness and creativity, at how much more accomplished she is becoming from moment to moment, as if she were born to be an unfaithful woman, a woman with a secret. Maybe I’ll open a workshop in infidelity, she thinks, I’ll instruct men and women on how to be unfaithful without arousing the slightest suspicion. Naturally I’ll start with the parents at school, then the rumor will spread and I’ll become a much sought-after lecturer.

  She observes her progress in amazement, because the next morning, he is there again. It isn’t Shula’s day to clean, but, learning from experience, she takes him into her room and locks the door, and on her daughter’s bed, she experiences the greatest of all encounters. Her body, now thinner, becomes the body of the young girl she once was, and the undivided, passionate soul that lives within her comes alive as well. Whenever she thinks she is sated, she wants him again. “Don’t go, stay with me,” she says, but he doesn’t have time, he has to return to his patients, he’ll try to come tomorrow.

  But the next day, he can’t get away when she’s alone at home, and she tosses and turns in bed, disappointed. Her skin needs him urgently, the way it needs a warm coat on a winter’s day or a cool breeze in a khamsin. Has he already grown tired of her? She can’t endure that again. But the following day, he comes early, a few minutes after Mickey and Omer have gone, smelling fresh, his eyes glowing. “I can’t go another day without you. I’m completely addicted,” he whispers.

  “Me too. I could barely get through yesterday,” she admits happily. She locks the door, takes off his clothes, and drapes them across the back of Alma’s chair, which stands at the desk where she used to do her homework, beside her now-empty aquarium. She caresses his body with every part of herself. What does that body possess that makes her so hungry for it? It is thin and sensitive, it makes her weep with pleasure, laugh with pain, it speaks to her constantly, demands all of her, the totality of her, every fiber of her being, all the sweet spasms of her passion. The bare walls of the room observe them, only the outlines of the pictures that once hung on them are left, their various sizes marking Alma’s growth from child to teenager to young woman: family pictures, drawings she made, posters of the TV stars she liked.

  “It reminds me of your room,” he says. “You had a bed like this that was too large for one and too small for two. We used to say that your mother should switch with us because she always slept alone. How is she? Still alive?” He doesn’t ask about Alma, even though he is a guest in her bed, and she herself manages to shut out all her upsetting thoughts about her daughter.

  No worrying about Alma while he’s here, she warns herself, and not after he’s gone, because then she will think about him, re-creating every moment and doubling the pleasure, the miracle of his reappearance in her life. Not in the afternoon, when Mickey comes home from work and she really tries to be nice to him, and not when Omer comes in from school and sits down across from her with a full plate and chats with her. Unlike Alma, he likes to share with her, and now he’s trying to decide whether to tell his girlfriend that he needs a little more space. And not when she reluctantly answers the dozens of emails, trying to pass on as many as she can to her assistant principal, a young woman she trained who is still enthusiastic and grateful for every expression of trust from the principal.

  Now Eitan looks around the room. “Are you in quarantine because of your illness?”

  “No, because he snores.”

  He laughs in relief, delighted at the snorer’s misfortune. Until now, he has asked very little and she has told him very little, not even about how sick she was after he abandoned her. It would be a shame to waste time on things I know, she thinks, better to hear from him what I don’t know, or simply to be with him, to rediscover him. She seems to have fallen in love before learning who he is now, returned all at once to the forgotten experience of an emotion so intense that it fills all the spaces, leaving not a single one free of him.

  When they were young, the opposite happened, of course. First she got to know him and then she fell in love with him. Well, maybe she didn’t really know him, but became used to seeing him, even though he was a year ahead of her at school and there was hardly any social interaction between the grades until he was in his senior year and his class had to organize the Memorial Day ceremony. These days, it horrifies her to see young men about to be drafted reciting commemorative verses as if they were preparing themselves for their own deaths, but back then it seemed natural, just as her participation in the ceremony seemed natural. There were several bereaved parents in her school, but only she had lost a father in war, so she was called to the stage every year to talk about his heroism in a burning tank on the banks of the Suez Canal, a story that obviously did not change from year to year. She also sang two memorial songs in her beautiful voice, songs that a
ctually did change from year to year. That year, unsurprisingly, Eitan had been chosen to host the ceremony because of his height, his blue eyes, and his serious expression, which seemed perfect for the occasion. So it happened that she spent much time with him during the weeks of rehearsal and preparations, and even though he was surrounded by the girls in his class, he clearly preferred to be with her.

  She felt as if the loss of her father interested him, but still didn’t know why, and tried to give weighty replies to the questions he asked: Had her memories dimmed with time? Was she angry at her father for leaving her, or at the country that took him away from her, or at the Egyptian soldiers who killed him? She tried to gather all her memories of her father for Eitan, even the uncomplimentary ones, such as his terrible fear of insects, which she inherited from him. To keep her safe from the creepy-crawlies, even just a roach or a tiny mouse, he would pick her up and spirit her away, to the sound of her mother’s strong objections. She also mentioned his terrible taste in women, as evidenced by his choice of her mother. She even told him that she thought it was only an unplanned pregnancy, or more accurately, an unplanned daughter, namely her, that might have forced him into marrying her, and that he had chosen to die in order to get away from that woman, who was wrong for him. “It’s her fault that I never said goodbye to my father,” she told Eitan. “She wouldn’t let him wake me up when he was mobilized and had to go off to war because she didn’t want our routine to be disrupted.” But mainly she told him how everything had changed abruptly after his death. It was as if they had moved to another country, as if their lives had been transformed, and her greatest loss had been the loss of anticipation because all of a sudden, there was nothing to look forward to. Until then, she had spent her days waiting for her father to come home in the evening, waiting for their little talks, sitting in his lap, encircled by his arms, observing the world triumphantly. The loss of anticipation was harder than the loss of her father because he spent only two or three hours with her, while the expectation of seeing him filled her mind for most of the day. Without it, she turned into a hardworking, gloomy little girl who unhappily helped her mother raise two unnecessary babies. Her only wishes were negative ones—for them not to wake up at night, for them not to be sick, for her mother not to be angry.

  She loved the way Eitan’s neck bent as he listened to her speak, the way he looked at her with an interest she was unused to, and she loved his mature and direct questions, the glowing depths of his eyes and his full lips. But she never dared to hope that he was interested in her and assumed that after the ceremony, they would once again be as distant as they had always been. But to her surprise, to her joy, that did not happen, because right after the ceremony, after the national anthem had been sung, he asked her what she was doing that evening, Independence Day eve, and invited her to go with him and some other friends to a spring not far from his house, a spring that no one knew about, under a beautiful mulberry tree.

  “Does our spring still exist?’ she texts him right after he leaves, and he replies after a while, “They built a housing project in the wadi and destroyed it. I heard that now they’re trying to restore it. I’ll check on Saturday when I go out to ride my bike.” On Saturdays, she learned, when his children are with their mothers, he rides his ultramodern bicycle, and the thought of him going back to that place where they knew such bliss thrills her. So she texts, “Wait for me, I want to go there with you,” and he replies two hours later, “I’ll wait.”

  But in the evening, when he has more time to write than she does, he texts her long messages, mixing memories and desires with plans of action. “My mother loved you so much,” he writes suddenly. “Before she died, she told me to marry you. I was so stupid. What do you say we get married at her grave?” She hears Mickey come into the house and sends a quick reply under the blanket: “We were supposed to get married at the spring. Have you forgotten?” “No I haven’t,” he replies, and adds that it’s impossible that night because his son is with him and they’re playing Snakes and Ladders. “I have to see him,” she writes, and he sends a picture. Again she ducks under the blanket to take a covert look at it. How young the boy is, she thinks sorrowfully, he’s nine, but looks six, there’s an impish gleam in his eye and he doesn’t resemble his father in the slightest. She still hasn’t heard anything about his mother, their conversations jump from one subject to another, constantly fragmented by touch, memory, constraints. “How sweet he is,” she texts right back, “I’d love to be with both of you now.” “Come,” he replies, just as, several days earlier, he said, “Call.”

  Just then, Mickey peers in from the door and says, “What are you doing there under the blanket?”

  She pops out immediately, blushing and excited. “Nothing. The light bothers me.”

  “What light? It’s completely dark in here!” he says, then complains, “Why don’t you go to the clinic? It’s been a week already and you’re not better.”

  “Probably complications from the flu…I don’t have the strength to go there, Mickey. I’m really weak.”

  “So we’ll call a private doctor to come here. It’ll cost whatever it costs,” he offers generously, and she apologizes silently for planning to badmouth him to Shula. Or has he heard about the doctor’s visit from Shula and is in fact testing her? She should close her eyes and pretend to be sleeping until the subject runs its course. Her cell phone vibrates in her hand, and she yearns to crawl back under the covers to see what he’s written, but Mickey is still there, staring at her in concern. For a week, he hasn’t seen her out of bed, which has become her fortress, the bed that does not call to him but rather rejects him. It has become a hiding place for her body, which has a secret, and for her cell phone, which has a secret, and he is not pleased. Through her slit eyes she sees him walk away, slack-jawed. “I’m making an omelet,” he calls from the kitchen. “Want some?” Why is he suddenly offering her food when she is supposedly asleep? Her phone vibrates again and, unable to restrain herself, she peers at it and her hand trembles as she reads, “I’m making an omelet. Want some?”

  What does it mean? She is alarmed, could Mickey have read the text even before it reached her? He is, after all, a high-tech person, maybe he has some secret way of catching messages in the air like butterflies in a net? What nonsense, she tries to calm herself, it’s just a coincidence. People are making omelets for supper now in many homes, but nevertheless, she won’t reply so quickly this time. Under the covers, her heart pounds. Maybe she isn’t cut out to be an unfaithful wife after all, maybe lying, concealing, looking for meaning in every word and gesture doesn’t suit her. It’s oppressive, it’s humiliating, and when she gets better and goes back to work, it will keep her from doing her job well. Maybe she’ll get out of bed now, sit at the table across from him, and tell him everything as she eats his omelet. It isn’t his fault, it isn’t her fault, it isn’t anyone’s fault. She has the right to fall in love and he has the right to know. Married people are also free people. He’ll be free to choose how he wants to continue his life and she will be free of the need to lie. She begins to straighten up in bed, her feet on the floor, her head spinning.

  “Mickey?” she says as she walks toward him. In the distance, she can see his back in front of his computer screen, an empty plate at his side.

  “Not now,” he says automatically, “I’m in the middle.”

  Perhaps it’s better this way, she can confess anytime. Everything is still so fresh, she doesn’t even know Eitan, she doesn’t even know herself anymore. Her life has turned upside down in a single week, it’s too soon to take steps there is no coming back from. And yet she returns to her bed with the feeling that she has missed an opportunity.

  “I almost told Mickey,” she texts, and he replies immediately, “Too bad.” She wonders what he thinks is too bad. That she hasn’t told him or that she was about to confess impulsively and endanger her marriage? How enormously different those two possibi
lities are. Should she ask him? If he hasn’t explained, he probably assumes she understood, and if she doesn’t understand, then she probably doesn’t know him well enough, and that means it’s fortunate that she didn’t confess. But she has a vague, disturbing feeling that the moment will not return and she will regret not having given Mickey, herself, their years together, and the two children they brought into the world that basic respect, the right to know.

  TEN

  Dear Parents,

  Love has many faces—soft and hard, imprisoning and freeing, permissive and restrictive, expanding and limiting. As parents and educators, we choose which face to pick from the supply at any given moment, depending on the current circumstances. But as our children grow up and gradually become more independent in greater areas of their lives, we usually set clear boundaries for them between the inner and the outer—teach them how to identify strangers, how to distinguish the foreign from the familiar, friends from foes.

  But how and when do those definitions change and turn into traps that ensnare us? The realities of Israeli society pose a constant challenge—how to approach and how to behave toward the other, the stranger who resides with us. In a city inhabited by both Jews and Arabs, Sephardim and Ashkenazim, religious and secular, refugees and foreigners, parents who want to protect and educate their children must reexamine those definitions and boundaries they have set. We have decided to integrate the children of foreign workers into our school and design a curriculum based on multiculturalism as part of the broader program, called “The Other Is Me,” being implemented in our school.