by Meir Shalev
He stuck three poles around the sapling and tied its slender trunk to them with strips he tore from an old sheet.
“A sheet is better than a rope, it doesn’t scratch the trunk,” he explained, “and don’t pull it too tight, so that the trunk will sway a little in the wind and develop muscles.”
And Eitan? Eitan came to the wedding in a crisply ironed white shirt—Someone is ironing for him? He can iron that well himself? asked the pretty woman inside the wild boy—and golden skin, which took my breath away and filled me with a desperate urge to touch it and feel if it was warm and smooth to the hand as well as the eye, and gold-greenish eyes and brownish hair and khaki pants and sandals; I can’t deny it, I liked what I saw. Really liked him. Not just as a guy but as a partner for playing ball and hide-and-seek. I immediately noticed that he was exactly my height, and that pleased me, because I knew he had already stopped growing and I hadn’t, and given my inclination to asymmetry I like couples where the woman is slightly taller, and what I like even more is that the man likes it, and I even toyed with the notion that just as he decided to come to our first meeting in clothes and skin that I would find attractive, he also wore the height that I would love.
In short, it all looked very promising, but nothing happened. In other words, I made the eye contact that Dovik demanded I make, and Eitan looked back at me and even asked me if I was the groom’s younger sister he had heard so much about and also smiled an undeniably nice smile, but I didn’t smile back quickly or broadly enough or answer him in some unforgettable way. Basically, except for mazal tov wishes and another little smile he flashed at me half an hour later across the table—Dovik insisted that his new friend sit with us at the head table—we didn’t get around to actual talking. Everything was potential, in an embryonic stage. The butterfly had not yet emerged from the cocoon.
We sat there, Dovik and Eitan and I and our mother and Grandpa Ze’ev and Dalia and her mother, who was called Alice. And you won’t believe what happened. She also made eye contact with Eitan, a look that lasted half a second in all but was effective enough to take him home with her. The mother of the bride! You understand? Dalia rode off for a honeymoon with Dovik, and his friend rode off to Tel Aviv, to the bed of her mother.
The family was in an uproar. The whole moshava was talking. “Only in the Tavori family do such things happen, and now they are intermarrying with their own species.” Good that for a change it was just a crazy story and not another horror from their cellar of horrors. But to me it was amusing, even exciting in a strange way, and I was also a little jealous, I must admit. Not that I entertained hopes of taking him to my bed—I was after all a boy without boobs, as I told you—but beneath the jealousy and beyond the inexperience and limited understanding was clear, sharp knowledge: Dovik would achieve his goal. One day Eitan and I would marry, and he would join the family.
And apart from that, it was all worth it just for the look on Dalia’s face. I was Ruta-mabsuta, happy as a clam, when I saw her expression. Because her mother, this Alice, not only was much prettier and more elegant than she was but also stole her show. Walked out of there with a guy nearly thirty years her junior, more accomplished and better-looking than the bridegroom—and I say this as someone who loves them both and knows them quite well—went off with him in front of the whole crowd, before the wedding was over: “Bye-bye everyone, I’m going home with my new toy. Ciao. Open the presents yourselves and say goodbye to the guests for me.”
Write it down, write it. You’re always writing names anyway. Alice. She was English. She also spoke English more than Hebrew. I think she came from Manchester. Write that down too. Part of the history of the Yishuv is where the Jews came to Israel from. What a character. With style. The real thing. Sexy the way only a woman of fifty-one can be, the way I will be in another few years, if I’ll know what to do with the brakes that stop me and the pain that contorts me and the weights that sit upon my soul.
A lively divorcée, egocentric, well put together, savvy, took good care of herself. She simply took Eitan by the hand—the hen that caught the fox by the tail, like in the children’s story by Bialik, which I read to Neta, but not to his father—and waved goodbye to everyone with her other hand, and I think she shot me a special look right then, as if she understood she was taking Eitan away not only from her daughter’s wedding but also from his first meeting with his future wife, and led him to her car.
I remember: A few years later, when Eitan was already my husband and I asked him why in fact he went with her, he said to me, “Because of the car, Ruta. You didn’t see what kind of car she had?”
“I didn’t notice,” I said.
“An old Mini Cooper,” he said. “A woman with a Mini Cooper like that has got to be something special herself. And besides going around the block with her, I wanted to go around the block in that car.”
“ ‘Around the block’? You’re disgusting.”
And in the parking lot—pay attention, Varda, and learn!—she opened his door and held it open the way a man opens a door for a woman, and Eitan picked up on it and immediately got into the role. He pressed his legs together, tucked an imaginary skirt under his butt, and sat down like a female, and I understood what kind of party was about to happen for both him and her.
She closed the door like a hunter on his quarry, walked around her very special Mini Cooper—just a jalopy, if you ask me—to the driver’s door, and got in and started the engine and drove off, and everyone knew where and what for. And after they were gone, and people began whispering, it was clear how silent it had become when she took him and walked out.
And what did Dalia say about all this?
If that’s what concerns you, Varda, if that’s what is most important for you to know, then on that evening she said nothing at all. It began only after she recovered: “She ruined my wedding, she took all the attention away from me to herself, on my night, at my wedding. She’s treated me that way ever since I was I little girl…” Until this day she hasn’t forgiven her, and “until this day” means even after Alice died. You know those women who keep complaining about their mothers their whole lives? What she did to me, what she didn’t do, at age three she forced me, at age ten she told me, at age fourteen she didn’t let me…Grow up already, girls. You’re big now. It’s your life. Take responsibility. Our mother, mine and Dovik’s, was worse. She left us when we were children, left us with her father-in-law and went off to America, so do I weep over it? The opposite. I look at it in a positive way: You have a shitty mother? Learn from her how not to be.
Okay, let’s stop here. I have a lot to say about my mother and I’ve had it up to here with Dalia too. But it was Eitan, after I really mouthed off about her one time, who asked me to stop. He said it was unhelpful and unacceptable. It was hard to grow up with an Alice like that for a mother, sparkling, polished, an ambassador of classy Europe in the screwed-up Middle East.
And what did you feel when Eitan rode away with her?
I already told you, I was a little jealous. More precisely, I told myself that what I felt was what’s commonly called jealousy. But my diaphragm brain kept deriving lessons and conclusions. I said it wasn’t so bad. Not so bad, Dovik’s friend Eitan or whatever your name is, I’m just the little sister who hasn’t yet got the goods, but I’m a winner and getting better all the time, and I have time and patience. In the meantime she will pamper you with cakes and ale and teach you everything that later on will make me feel good.
So it was that the first worthwhile words of courtship that I uttered to my lover I spoke to myself and not to him. He, with her in the stupid Mini Cooper that turned him on, didn’t hear and didn’t feel and didn’t answer, but I, when I told him all this in my heart, felt hot all over my body. Good thing that back then I already had that dopey quality that protects me. I said to myself, Calm down, Ruta, wait, what is meant to be will be. And I did wait, and several years later, when he was mine, a few days before our wedding, when I was already pre
gnant with Neta, a first pregnancy that sweetened my whole body, he was like candy in my womb, I demanded that Eitan finally tell me what happened after they made their getaway from the wedding.
He asked if I really wanted to hear it, and we both laughed, because my first husband Eitan was the retro-jealous type. He doesn’t agonize over what might happen and isn’t bothered by what’s likely to happen but gets irritated over what happened in the past. Even men who had walked past me on the sidewalk on my way to kindergarten irritated him.
“I really want to hear,” I told him.
“Okay, for a month and a half we were ‘the two of us together all day in bed naked.’ Those were her words.”
Now it was my turn to be annoyed, because till then I thought that the English phrase ‘the two of us naked’ was something he had invented for us, and only the two of us said it about ourselves, he and I about each other. And suddenly it turns out that this was her invention. But it was okay, I restrained myself, because this wasn’t the only good lesson he got from her.
A month and a half he was with her, and she barely let him go out. Not only out of her apartment, but out of her. She held him close with her arms and legs, and when they got hungry, she said, We’ll crawl to the kitchen attached to each other; I’ll show you how.
To make a long story short—she fed him delicacies to his heart’s content, and just as a few years later I would read him poetry, she played him music, requiems and “Stabat Mater” hymns, Rossini and Hasse and Fauré.
“I also heard Egyptian and Turkish music at her place,” he told me.
“Just like Ramona played for Saul Bellow’s Herzog,” I said.
He, of course, had no idea what I was talking about, but no problem. I see you don’t either. She was also the one who taught him what and how to drink, and that’s why besides Dovik’s limoncello I also like to drink Pimm’s and gin and tonic, sometimes I even treat myself to Hendrick’s gin, like she did—who would believe it, the granddaughter of Grandpa Ze’ev—and a kir in the afternoon and Calvados at bedtime. Don’t worry, I’m not getting drunk, just disconnecting a few synapses in my head. It’s good.
So I see, Varda, that you are beginning to understand who benefited from all this in the end? I, Ruta. Thank you very much. He served all the customers and friends the poikeh he cooked under the mulberry tree, and to me he served in bed the delicacies he learned from his sister-in-law’s mother. The whole deal about the poikeh is that whatever you throw in, everything but the kitchen sink, is considered a success. Eitan himself told me: a poikeh is a compost barbecue. That’s planters’ humor, a nursery joke. So all the putrid poikehs were eaten by friends and customers, and to me he served the meals she made for him: dinners where he and I were the first course, and suppers where he and I were the dessert. She only permitted him to cook one thing, the eggs at breakfast, because Eitan really knows how to fry an egg sunny-side up, with a soft yolk and crispy white. He always made two of those for me and him in the same pan and always gave me the one that turned out better, the one he would call the seeing eye, because always—and this is a principle of culinary history, Varda, and the history of mankind, and maybe even your history of the Yishuv—every time you fry two eggs in the same pan, one is always better than the other, and you give it to the one you delighteth to honor.
After two days he told her he had to hop home to change clothes; he would just change them and come back.
“No home, Ethan,” she said, that’s what she called him, in English. “No home, Ethan, no way, if you go out, with that smell on your fingers and cream on your face, someone will steal you away from me. Women can sense men that other women love.”
She’s right. They can feel it. Not just a man who is loved, that’s no great trick, but also a man in love, and a man who will soon blossom, even if he is already a grown man, and a man who will soon wither, even if he’s young, and a man about to die, even if he thinks he will live forever. Just like those dogs—I read about them in the newspaper—who can sniff cancer in a person. So too women can smell illness and health, strength and weakness, kindness and evil, potential, humor, intelligence, and stupidity. And it’s not from studying the eyes or reading the palm of the hand; that’s nonsense. It’s from the angle of the lips, from getting up from a chair, from words that repeat themselves, from the pouring of water from the kettle to the cup.
In brief, she took him to a men’s clothing shop, bought him everything he needed, and brought him back home with her for more love and more music and more meals, and everything was wonderful and also seemed wonderful to such a young guy, but after a month and a half she informed him, That’s it, Ethan, it’s over, now you have to go.
“What happened?” he asked. “You’re sick of me? That’s it? You’ve had your fill?”
It turned out that, no, she wasn’t sick of him and would in fact have been happy for another serving and yet another. But her regular boyfriend, some rich old fart from England, and a distant cousin of hers to boot, was a ship’s captain, on one of those supertankers that circles the globe, and was now done dispensing petroleum in the Philippines or Scotland or wherever the hell it was, and was arriving the very next day in the Israeli port of Ashdod.
“Why this surprise, why didn’t you tell me ahead of time that it would be a month and a half and that’s all?”
“Because I prefer a guillotine to an hourglass. A single blow instead of a slow burial. Come, let’s do it one more time and say farewell.”
She made him a festive and delicious last supper, fucked him, excuse me, in a final and festive and particularly pleasant fashion, slept beside him for the last time extremely close, and sent him away: “That’s it. Get out!”
“If you think,” he said to her at the door, “that you can throw me away now, and after your oil deliveryman sails off, you can call me back, you’re mistaken, Alice.”
“That’s fine,” she said, “you’ve already proved how young you are in very pleasant ways. You don’t have to prove it further with foolish declarations.”
When Eitan told me this he also said that, along with all the lamentations and angst and the “what a pity” and “what a waste” of hers, he found the whole situation really funny, because at the same time she was telling him he had to go, and it was clear to them both that they each wanted him to stay, all that went through his head was an image of her elderly English ship’s captain, with hair white from age and a nose red from alcohol and sleeves with gold stripes almost to the elbow, sailing from port to port in his gigantic supertanker, and everywhere he went he dropped his anchor, tied up to the dock, stood on the bridge in a white jacket, ringing a big bell and shouting, “Oil…Oil…”
That’s it. Ethan left, the sun was shining, and a Labrador puppy that stood on the sidewalk looked at him and smiled. Eitan said—to himself and to me years later—a Labrador puppy is a very good sign. He phoned Dovik and told him that he had just been thrown out of his mother-in-law’s bed, that he would be traveling abroad for a while; he had gotten an offer to join the security detail of some Jewish millionaire in Miami and would be back in a few months and concluded with “How’s your sister? Tell her hello.”
FOURTEEN
INSOMNIA
(Draft)
Someone walking on our street at night, if he passes by the nursery at its eastern end, will see a strong, sturdy man, wearing blue work clothes and Australian work boots. Sometimes he sits at the entrance and sometimes he patrols the grounds. His gait is strange. His legs bespeak strength of thigh and ankle and weakness of knee and calf, and his hands are gathered at his chest as if hugging or carrying something that only he hugs and carries.
This is how he walks, looks, guards, and inspects. On his forehead he wears a hiker’s flashlight, and in his hand is a small pickax, generally used for simple digging and uprooting onions and bulbs, but in the right hands it can be a lethal weapon. Between the fingers of his other hand is a cigarette, and he doesn’t toss away the burning butt but s
tubs it against a wall or the sole of his shoe till the burning end falls off. He stamps that out with his foot and throws the extinguished butt in the trash.
The few passersby, a worker returning from his shift, girls laughing after a party, an early rising soldier en route to his base, a young man returning from a night of love, seekers of sleep—where did it wander to?—they all look at him. Some with a quick glance, some with a lingering gaze. A few recognize him and there are those who even greet him. But he does not return their look and does not greet them back.
It happened once that two youngsters, one from a local family and a friend on his first visit to the moshava, tried to make fun of him. One of them even thrust out his hand and tried to knock the flashlight off his head, and the man suddenly dropped the pickax, spread his arms with astonishing quickness, and seized him in a bear hug that stopped his breathing. Then he lifted him easily, like picking up a baby, and carried him across the road. When he let him go the young man fell, coughing and wailing, “You broke my rib, you son of a bitch,” and vomited on the ground. His friend helped him get up, the two of them ran away, and the man returned to his post.
Who is the man? The young people and the new people believe that he is merely a watchman, a day laborer, or more correctly a night laborer, since by day he is nowhere to be seen. But the old-timers know that he is married to the granddaughter of the owner of the plant nursery, and he is the brother-in-law and friend of her brother, the manager of the nursery, and he works there at jobs assigned him by the grandfather. By day he lifts and carries and loads, whatever is necessary, and by night he stands guard, and he doesn’t sleep at all. There are those who escape from their pain into sleep; what he escapes into is insomnia.
