by Meir Shalev
I floated slowly to the surface. The body was still, the arms outstretched. Eitan pounced on me and began to pull me toward shore. I hugged him and laughed. “Eitan, you love me!”
“Love you? I was just worried. You’re my friend’s sister. What would I tell him if something happened to you?”
“Don’t give me that ‘friend’s sister,’ ” I teased him, “you love me. You’re allowed to admit it.”
I put my face close to his and we kissed. Kind of a quick peck, but tender. Closed lips but firmly pressed together, like sealing a deed of ownership.
His hand slid over my left hip, massaged it gently under the water.
“So nice to touch you,” he said.
“That’s because I put on weight in the army,” I said, “I got soft. I have to lose weight.”
And I remember putting my right hand on his chest with the fingers spread out.
“That’s nice,” he said, “and you don’t need to lose any weight.”
“Maybe you don’t see it because I’m tall but I need to lose three kilos.”
We got out of the pond. Eitan spread a blanket on the rough grass.
“This is going to be our first time,” he said, “I don’t want it to be stickly and prickly,” and got undressed like a married man—I mean like someone accustomed to getting undressed in front of his woman—and lay down naked on his side.
I got undressed too, lay beside him, and we looked at each other up close. Things were suddenly very clear.
He said, “Ruta.”
“What?”
“I want to ask you something.”
And he brought his face so near that his golden skin shone warmly on my face.
“Ask me,” I said.
“It’s something important.”
“I’m listening.”
“Those three kilos you’re going to lose…”
“Yes?”
“Can I have them?”
For a moment I didn’t understand. I looked at him and he looked at me. His face was serious and focused. I burst out laughing.
“I love it so much that you’re laughing at something I said,” he said. “Your laugh makes me feel good all over.”
“Me too,” I said. “All over my body. And not just my body. Your body too. I can feel it.”
“So what do you say?”
“About the three kilos or the laughing?”
“About the seventy kilos that are left.”
“They’re also yours.”
“When?”
“Is now okay?”
“Now is very okay.”
He stroked my hip again and said, “Remember we started here, at your hippy, and that’ll be the first word in our dictionary, and there will be more.”
We hugged with eyes open and kissed with eyes open, and it was our first time, beside the “clear, calm, silent pond, where everything is seen and foreseen”—that’s what I wrote to him afterward as a memento. I quoted, actually. As much as I love Alterman’s poetry, when Bialik is good, he’s better than anyone. I wrote: “With eyes that didn’t blink once, not to miss the sight of the other’s face. With a full heart. With the knowledge of doing what is right, the hunger to be sated and the thirst to be quenched. With the ceremony of a first time and the hope of the times to come, and in the strange lovely knowledge, so true yet untrue, that I am sleeping for the first time with a man I have slept with many times before.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
I’ve already told you, if I’m not mistaken, that Eitan had been waiting for me to turn forty and said it many times. Well, that day arrived. I remember: I got up early, I’m forty, good morning to me, alone in bed. I waited awhile. Nothing happened. Then I got dressed, went down to the nursery, and stood before him.
“Eitan,” I said, “I’m forty. Congratulations!”
He didn’t react. He kept on dragging, carrying, working. Did what Grandpa Ze’ev told him to do. There are situations and there are men that require hard work and not psychotherapy.
“Eitan,” I called out, “this is me. Just like you always wanted me. I’m exactly forty, today.”
He didn’t look at me or answer me, and I wasn’t surprised. I would often come to tell him about something and he wouldn’t react.
“It’s a shame, no?” I stood in his way, blocking him. “Isn’t it a shame I’m forty and you’re no longer with us?”
He didn’t say a word, set down the heavy sack in his arms, and did what he had done on a few prior occasions: grabbed me, hugged me, and lifted me like a feather. For the first second it felt good, and then I couldn’t breathe. All that work had made him so strong. Like a bear. He was able to crouch, wrap his arms around a pot with, say, an eight-year-old olive sapling, stand up, and carry it to another spot in the nursery. Crouch again, very slowly, so as not to harm the sapling, and lay it gently on the ground, then get up and go back and take another one. And every time a truck arrived with merchandise he was the one who unloaded it and arranged the goods in the storehouses or yard.
Incidentally, we also sell old railroad ties, for garden paths and stairs, and he would move them too, from where they were to wherever Grandpa Ze’ev said, and then back again, sometimes just a day later. I saw him once carrying a railroad tie on his back, with the end dragging behind him leaving a trail in the dirt. You can imagine what kind of thoughts that brings to the mind.
In the beginning I would yell at him, get angry, cry: “Look at yourself, Eitan. See what you look like. Smell yourself. You stink from compost and sweat.” And once I went over and blocked his path. “Maybe it’s enough, Eitan? Maybe you’ve worked like this enough?” And suddenly, involuntarily, I screamed, “Enough! Wash up already! Change your clothes! I can’t look at you. Don’t let yourself go like this!” And then too—he crouched, set down whatever it was he was carrying, picked me up, and put me aside like a mannequin. It was frightening. Look at me, I’m a fairly big woman, not a lightweight in any sense. He put me on the side and returned to his work.
He did a similar thing to Dovik once. Dovik is a friend, and a brother-in-law, and a man, and on top of these he’s an imbecile, so one day he pounced on him and shook him hard and shouted, “Enough already, Eitan! Even if he told you to do that, it’s enough! How long will you punish yourself and us this way?” And he picked him up too, and carried him aside, but judging from the color of Dovik’s face he squeezed him harder than he squeezed me, and when he let him go, Dovik collapsed, and coughed and spit and groaned.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, right.” He moaned. “I couldn’t breathe. He could kill somebody like that, he’s gotten so strong.”
Later on I found a method. I grabbed a garden hose in the nursery and sprayed him with cold water, and then he had no choice: he changed his clothes, and the occasion also constituted an overdue bath. He also had the awful smell of the cigarettes that he started smoking again after the funeral. This disaster provided us both bad habits. He started smoking and I started drinking, so that the alcohol would help me fall asleep and drive away bad dreams. Before the disaster, Eitan would come to our bed like Ruth came to Boaz. Festive and fragrant and clean, the whole biblical routine—“Wash, anoint yourself, put thy raiment upon thee, and go and lie down”—is that gendered enough for you, Varda? He had golden skin then, skin that glowed in the dark, and we would make love and then fall asleep together. And now, every night I can’t fall asleep without drinking and I think I’m slightly addicted.
You started to tell me about your fortieth birthday, Ruta.
Yes. Thank you for putting me back on track. I informed him that I had reached forty, and he removed me from his path and placed me on the side. That’s how he celebrated the day he had long awaited.
And what happened then?
I got up. I went back home, and then a teacher from the school called me. I thought she wanted me to substitute for her somewhere, but no. She and a few other women friends had decided to take me out for my bir
thday, she said. You understand? Let’s take Ruta out, the poor thing. For years she’s been without her son, and that situation with Eitan, and now a big birthday, let’s do something nice for her.
I said thank you, I went to work, came home, drank a little, ate a little—in the evening there’s a meal waiting for me—napped a little, woke up, took a shower, got dressed, went out with my friends to a restaurant.
The food was very good. I enjoyed the women rather less. I think I already told you that I’ve never had a real close woman friend, a soul mate to confide in, a female shoulder to cry on. Maybe because I’m not only a girl but also a guy, and maybe because, due to my family, I don’t talk about everything, and also because not all the rules and codes are clear to me, especially not the rules and codes customary among women. But it’s okay with me to go out with women friends for a good time and since the disaster it’s mainly to restaurants. It’s fine, because bereaved mothers also have to eat sometimes, and it’s also fun because I truly enjoy good food. I celebrate. I enjoy it like thirty pigs. That’s also a line from my first husband. “Like thirty pigs” was for us the most fun possible. Eitan would ask, not just about food, about many things: “So, Ruta, like how many pigs did you enjoy it this time?” And I would answer, sometimes ten, sometimes twelve, even twenty-seven. You don’t need to lick caviar from a silver spoon. Sometimes seeing a beautiful landscape is enough, or a good movie, like Fellini’s Amarcord or The Straight Story by David Lynch.
Or to be one flesh, Eitan in me, I in him. Sometimes mashed potatoes that only I know how to make but had no one to make them for. Then I would eat them alone and enjoy them, without thinking, You should be ashamed of yourself, Ruta, Eitan and Neta are dead and you are filling your belly, rebelling and defiling and defying. And playing word games.
The truth is, I’m not a glutton, I actually prefer small portions, and I also enjoy reading restaurant reviews and recipes. Sometimes I clip them from the papers. I loved the ones by the cardiologist Eli Landau, the finest gourmet in Israel. So we women went out and ate and talked and made dirty jokes and laughed a lot, and nobody flaunted what ailed them or dumped their burden on the table and we didn’t compare troubles, because the idea was to cheer me up and not to show me that others were suffering too. I also got a few nice gifts, but my enjoyment amounted to maybe nine pigs’ worth at most. All evening long I had this pang in my heart. “Pang” is an understatement, my heart was mashed inside a fist with my gut wrapped around it.
It started even before they came to pick me up, because while I was getting dressed and organized I again saw Eitan through the window. It was starting to get dark outside and I simply started to cry. I remembered how he had invented the word “fortyward” about this special day, the word that should have been my invention and by chance was his, and I cried even more.
Excuse me for just a moment. I have to take a breath now, a little breath, and walk around. Don’t be alarmed, it’ll pass quickly. I am a big strong woman, I am the granddaughter of Grandpa Ze’ev, and I am the best thing that ever happened to me. If I were a different woman in the same situation, it would be very bad. But sometimes, behind that bigness and those genes, I am really little. An empty peel. I’m like the passion fruit we used to poke a hole in when we were kids and suck out the insides and throw away. Funny, it’s been a long time since I ate a passion fruit that way. Today people cut them open and eat them with a spoon, even with ice cream. Whatever. I saw Eitan and I decided to give my fortieth birthday another chance. I wiped my face, opened the window, and called out to him.
He didn’t answer. He didn’t even turn his head toward me.
“Eitan, look at me. I’m forty. Just like you always wanted. Let’s get into bed, the two of us naked.”
He didn’t respond. Dovik and Dalia’s kitchen window opened for a moment, then slammed shut. A car horn sounded. The friends who came to get me were in front of the house, waiting. I wiped off my makeup. In general I don’t use makeup, and if I do it’s sparingly, but even the little bit I had put on was smeared by the tears. I quickly reapplied it, and went out to the street.
When I got back, very late, a bit drunk from the gin and tonics I overdid and stinking from cigarettes that someone else smoked, he was already lying in bed in the room that had been Neta’s, camouflaged according to his classic rules: not budging, because the eye notices movement, and blending into his surroundings, the whiteness of the sheet enveloping his own whiteness.
I got undressed, lay down beside him, drew close.
“Congratulations, Eitan, I’m forty,” I said to him for the umpteenth time that day.
His eyes opened. I lay my hand on his belly and said, “We’ve waited a long time for this birthday, no?”
I thought, And now what? Leave my hand on the sheet or slip it underneath? And where to go from there? Higher up and spread my fingers? Lower down and grasp? To the right and stroke his left hippy? To the left and stroke his right hippy? I withdrew my hand, climbed on top of him, lay my whole self on him, embraced him, buried my face in his neck, pressed the mound of my tuta on his body, my overripe mound that drove my first husband crazy and is the reason I swim in shorts and not a bathing suit, and, suddenly, a miracle: I felt he was returning my hug. For a moment I was left breathless, but quickly realized it was not from joy or love but simply from pressure. And again he did the one thing he knew how to do: he sat up and carried me into the next room, which had once been ours, and put me in the bed where we had once both slept, and returned to the bed that had been Neta’s and became his.
I coughed, regained my breath, got up. I smiled to myself, for seven times I rise and smile, as it is written of the righteous, and despite the level of gin in my system I headed for the freezer and poured myself an ample glass of my brother’s homemade limoncello. I drank with great pleasure and then stood up and looked at the mirror and the drunken woman in it. Because if not me and Eitan, then here we were, the two of us: tall and thin, broad skinny shoulders, strong prominent collarbones, too strong, I might add. Long neck, eyes far apart. The two of us naked and drunk. Ribs protruding in the space between her small breasts, just like mine. Her feet are as big as a man’s, her thighs are long, and where they meet is that domed space which only a chosen few, she and I, have. We both have muscular calves and, surprise: round ankles, almost chubby, like a baby’s. Luckily I didn’t inherit my mother’s legs and boobs. I inherited my legs from Grandma Ruth and the boobs from Grandpa Ze’ev, and I am very happy with that. All my busty friends, who always laughed at my doelike buds, ultimately discovered that Newton was right: there is gravity and it is very strong. Now their fabulous mammaries are on the floor and my little titties are still in their original place—“Moshe, Shlomo, every man bimkomo,” just where God and I intended and wanted them to be, all in order. This, by the way, is one of the few things about which God and I agree: that I may be on the ropes, but my tits will rejoice on high.
“That’s that, Eitan,” I told him, “we’re forty years old and you’re not here. I hereby announce that the party’s over.”
TWENTY-NINE
Varda: What are you doing, Ruta?
Ruta: I’m putting my face close to yours. Don’t be afraid. I don’t bite and I won’t plant a kiss on your lips. I just want you to see. I don’t have many wrinkles, and still only the two white hairs. You see? No new ones, though a disaster like mine could wrinkle a woman and turn her white in a heartbeat.
One day, at a parents’ meeting, one of the mothers told me that she and her daughter had been saying, en route to the school, how good Teacher Ruta looked, despite the disaster and all, and I told her, Thanks, how nice of you. And I remarked that maybe this was God’s way to compensate victims. And she said, “We never know what God wants. I go to a kabbalah class and they told us this is the way things are and even proved it by the numerology of gematria.”
Suddenly I felt extremely tired. Idiocy wears me out, and when I see and hear an idiot of either gender I can r
ecognize them with ease. Any number of them grow in my classroom, and I know what will become of them before they know themselves. Also absolute justice tires me out, a lot. Almost as much as the people who believe in it.
I’m smiling, right? Sometimes, if I don’t tell myself to smile, I don’t do it. Or I smile, but don’t feel it. That’s because there are days when I’m just an actress. I got the lead part in a play about a woman who lost him and his son, her two guys, in a single day. But apart from that, Varda, my life isn’t bad. I have work that I love, I do it well, and I have songwriters who write songs for me, so I can sing the harmony, and writers who write books for me, to read and edit as necessary. And I also know how to be alone, and I like it, and most of all—I know how to keep myself busy.
It’s not nice to say this, but sometimes I enjoyed life even after the disaster. Here and there I even heard myself suddenly laughing. And sometimes some man would try to catch my eye, not that anything came of it, because I had become a kind of Penelope, waiting for her husband to return from his travels, and his travails, his and mine. A great deal was destroyed, but not everything. And life wasn’t really over. I would say to myself: “Be happy, Ruta, that you’re alive. Be happy that you look good. Be happy you’re not an idiot like that mother.”
Well, Dr. Canetti, Yishuv historian, we’ve strayed again from the topic, so let’s go back. It’s a method Eitan taught me once, when we were young and out hiking and he tried to teach me to navigate and what to do in case of error: first we have to admit the error. That’s hard, but important and necessary. We need to admit we’re wrong and not try to redraw the map or the reality, not to raise up mountains or level the hills. And so, with a sense of optimistic failure, as he would say, we have to return to the last place we could confidently find on the map and in the field, and there start over.
