Two She-Bears

by Meir Shalev

I didn’t know Eitan as a child—which makes me very curious. And I won’t know Neta as a teenager or an adult—which tears me apart. Naturally I imagine him looking like Eitan on the day I first saw him, at Dovik and Dalia’s wedding. Not just because of genetics, but because he wanted to be like him, and I’m sure that’s a factor. I saw it in the way he walked, and how he smiled, and how he had the family knack for mimicry, and how they played together with the new tool kit.

  Neta looked at Eitan, studied him, practiced being like him, in almost every way. I remember: Eitan taught him how to light a fire, which was very important for us in the cave. I don’t know if I told you, and if I did, maybe not as categorically, but my first husband was the Prometheus of the Tavori family, the man who brought us fire every morning. I remember: On every winter day the yard would awaken to the sound of his ax, chopping the wood for the stoves that heated our houses—Grandpa’s, Dovik and Dalia’s, and ours. Dalia would get annoyed by the noise, Dovik said it was the nicest alarm clock, and Grandpa Ze’ev declared: “For a real man, work is also morning exercise.” My grandfather, by the way, couldn’t stand pure exercise. Such as the bicycle riders who turn up here every Saturday in their ridiculous outfits, or the gym that two women, one local and one from Tel Aviv, set up here: “Tfoo, a real man doesn’t need that nonsense.”

  I loved watching Eitan from the bedroom window, his graceful precision, the blade that rose from behind his back in a perfect circle and landed with amazing speed. I would stand in the window half naked with my breasts exposed and he would yell, “Put something on, I can see how chilly you are.”

  After he split the wood he built a fire in the poikeh pit and after about half an hour he had enough coals to bring to all of our stoves. He would appear, balancing the red, whispering pile on a shovel: “Good morning, pretty woman, I have brought you fire. So you will be warm and cozy even when I’m not here.”

  He put the coals into the stove, and over them a couple of wooden sticks, pinecones, two branches, and a log, shut the iron door, and stood up: “When the fire catches, close the vents halfway.”

  He brought another shovelful of hot coals to Dovik and Dalia’s house, and a third one to Grandpa Ze’ev, who was waiting for him with Turkish coffee, a slice of bread, salty cheese, and Neta, who had sped over there to sit with his father and grandfather and watch the flame that burst from the coals at the first contact with the wood.

  “Nu, what do you say, Eitan?” asked Grandpa Ze’ev. “It’s time to teach Neta how to make a fire too, no?”

  “He’s still too little,” said Eitan, in a tone that said—You’re right, but let’s have a little fun with him first.

  “I’m not too little,” said Neta, very serious and a little worried.

  “I’ll teach you, but not here. We’ll do it at the fire pit by the mulberry tree.

  “Most important of all,” he told him, “everything has to be ready before you light the match.” And together they prepared—that damned togetherness of theirs—the paper and slivers of kindling and twigs and thin and medium branches and the thicker logs, organized and ready to be added to the fire in proper order, each at its time and turn.

  Best to start with slivers of pine, which catch fire easily, he explained to him, and then some slightly thicker twigs, and pinecones, which also catch easily and burn at a very high temperature, and then the thicker logs. “If we were in the desert now, we’d also put on some branches from a broom bush. One day I’ll take you to the desert and show it to you. The broom burns at the highest temperature of all, and afterward we’ll come home and you can tell Mommy what we did.”

  He crumpled newspaper into balls, put a few wood slivers on them and then twigs, and over the twigs a structure of slats taken from old loading pallets.

  “You can build it like a little tent, or the way I just did, you see? This is called an altar, and you have to leave spaces for air. Fire needs air. It breathes, like we do.”

  Neta gazed at his father. With wonder, it’s safe to say.

  “Touch your skin, Neta, you feel how warm it is? And touch me too, you feel how we’re both warm? That’s from the fire burning inside us. That’s why we breathe. So the fire will have air and not suddenly go out. Don’t be afraid. Our fire isn’t like a campfire. It’s not as hot and also we don’t see it. A campfire burns quickly and dies quickly, and we burn slowly and we’ll live for many years.”

  Eyes filled with wonder—serious, trusting, with a trust greater than any other, a boy trusting his father. I remember: “Come, Neta, I’ll take you to the top of that hill over there, and you’ll take us back here.” I write: “Come, Neta, we’ll walk up at an angle, and sit where we won’t be seen by anyone who shouldn’t see us.”

  “Now we’ll light our campfire, but on one condition—you promise me you’ll never light a fire by yourself without telling me and asking my permission first. You promise?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not in the house and not in the yard and not anywhere else. Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  Eitan lit the match, touched it to a corner of newspaper. A tongue of flame, a thin curl of smoke, blackening and wrinkling the paper, swirling through the kindling, flaring upward into the thicker twigs.

  “It always goes up, you see how it moves? From the skinny ones to the fatter ones.”

  Neta’s eyes, like the eyes of so many children before him, from the prehistoric children in the cave in the wadi down to Neta in our cave, were glued to the little flames. He took a stick and moved one of the burning branches, so its flame would reach the other side of the “altar,” and Eitan smiled—another boy snared in the old male trap.

  “Pretty soon the whole thing will fall down,” he told him. “And if we’ve built the fire well, it’ll fall into a little pile of coals, and then everything will catch and burn without a problem, even oak, and all you need is to feed it some more wood. The fire doesn’t stop eating.”

  “Like Dovik,” said Neta, and Eitan laughed.

  That particular custom, of bringing us hot coals every morning in winter, continued even after the disaster, but without words. I once went over to Grandpa’s place to see if he was silent there too, like with me. Eitan came, with the burning shovel, with his awful whiteness and mute lips, failed to react to my presence, stuck the coals in the stove, and was about to leave.

  “You won’t light them for me?” asked Grandpa Ze’ev.

  Eitan didn’t answer, but Grandpa Ze’ev said to me, and Eitan heard him, “He still has the fire inside. The coals under his ashes are still alive. You’ll see, Ruta, something will light them. Someone just needs to breathe on them.”

  He fell quiet. After a moment, he said, “Somebody or something. Something blowing on them.”

  Eitan said nothing.

  “Thank you, Eitan, for the fire,” said Grandpa Ze’ev. “Go to the nursery and get to work. I’ll come see you later.”

  He stood up and opened the door and Eitan walked out to serve his sentence: to carry and lift and pile and move and weed and clean. Okay, enough. All that is over, belongs to the past, I don’t feel like talking about it anymore. I’ll go back to that birthday of Neta’s, a nice birthday, and in the evening, when everyone had gone home, we went through all the gifts and I told Eitan I was glad we had bought him the toolbox, not because of the gender thing, boy presents versus girl presents, because at this age it was still possible to combine work and fun and vice versa, and this led to a conversation that went from toolboxes to toy boxes, and from there to ammo boxes and having guns at home and from there to domestic accidents and disasters, and finally I asked Eitan, “Of all the fears and anxieties that parents have over a little boy, what do you most fear could happen to him?”

  Eitan said, “Why even think like that?”

  I said, “Because it’s normal, and surely you have fears like that in your head.”

  “The usual things,” he said, “road accidents, the house burning down, a child molester, I would kill th
e guy, and disease, playing with guns as we said, some lowlife going wild in a dune buggy on a beach, whom I would also kill, and drowning in the sea, falling from a tree. Did I leave anything out?”

  I said, “You forgot to say you would chop down that tree.”

  He laughed.

  “You have no imagination, Eitan,” I said. “You only think about external factors that could hurt your son. What about internal things? What’s the story with his masquerading as the Angel of Death? Maybe it’s something inside of him, something internal that will bring the Angel of Death, send him a sign—I’m here, I’m here—like the homing devices that you and your buddies would attach to a target. I’m very glad we didn’t buy him the robe and scythe he asked for.”

  A little over a year later, when our son died in a way that neither I nor Eitan had imagined, I remembered that conversation. There was no one then to remember it with, but I’d already perfected the ability to talk to myself: Maybe he reached out to the snake, as if tempting it to come? Maybe he compelled him to bite? And I remembered how a few months earlier a snake had turned up in the nursery, and it all came back to me. Somebody saw a viper among the flowerpots, someone else started to scream, “A snake, a snake…,” and they immediately called for Eitan, who else would you call. Eitan came, stood over the snake which had already tensed and cocked its head, and told me to bring Neta, because here was a chance to show him how you approach a snake and how you kill it.

  I didn’t even say no. I didn’t say, Why does a little boy need to see an act like this? I brought him. “Come, Neta, Daddy wants to show you something,” I told him.

  “What?”

  “How he’s going to kill a very dangerous snake in the nursery.”

  “Really?”

  “Come.”

  Eitan stood over the snake, Neta slightly behind and to the side, and I saw that he wanted to learn from him, to please him, but he was shaking all over. He was wearing, now I remember, the pants I patched at the knees with one patch like an eye and the other like a heart, which I had no way of knowing I would see someday on a cute little Russian boy on our street with his mother.

  I wasn’t afraid, because I had seen Eitan killing snakes in the yard. One or two every year. He always said that out in nature there was no need to kill any animal, not even a poisonous snake, but that in the yard and at home it was different. I wasn’t afraid, but suddenly I panicked. I said to him, “Maybe that’s enough, Eitan? I don’t like it that Neta’s so close.”

  And Eitan said, “It’s easy to kill this snake. It’s poisonous, but fat and slow, not like a black snake, which is very quick and a person can’t outrun it. With this snake only the strike is quick, so all you have to do is keep a proper distance.”

  And he turned to Neta. “So, how far should you stand from a snake, Neta? A distance greater than its length. Pay attention. My arm goes from here to here, the hoe from here to here, together they’re longer than the snake is. All you need is two hits, the first one anywhere, you see? Now it can’t run away, and the second one in the neck. As close as possible to the head.

  “Don’t be scared, Neta, snakes still coil up a bit even after they’re dead. Here, one more to be on the safe side. And now let’s pick it up and I’ll show you how the fangs with the poison open and close. Like a pocketknife, you see that? Let’s go scare Mommy a little.”

  After dinner, when the crows had eaten the snake and Neta was asleep, I asked Eitan, “What was that good for, that whole business?”

  “What business, Ruta?”

  “The business with the snake in the nursery today. What are you teaching him that stuff for? What do you want, that he’ll go near the next snake without fear? He’s all of five years old.”

  “He won’t go near any snake without me,” he said, “not at age five and not at age ten. But at a certain stage, yes. He’ll grow up and he’ll go near, for sure. And without any fear. You have to dare.”

  “To dare,” I said. “I’m tired of all your macho mantras.”

  He grinned. “We’re men. Not nice to laugh at the handicapped.”

  “You want to hear something interesting?” I said. “A few months ago I read in the paper about some new research. Most animals that get run over on the road—jackals, foxes, cats—have something in common. Can you guess?”

  “That they’re dead.”

  “Bravo, Eitan. Two points. Something more interesting? Perhaps something significant?”

  “I don’t know, Teacher.”

  “What they have in common is that almost all the animals that get run over are male.”

  “Really?” he said. “So I also did some research, and discovered that it’s because the animals on the other side of the road are female.”

  “That’s not why. It’s because they also think they have to dare. All these darers that their father taught them to dare before he himself was run over from an excess of daring. The females are careful. They always have a child, in their belly or at home or in their heart or mind. So they don’t dare.”

  “That’s very interesting research,” he said, finally serious.

  “A responsible parent,” I continued, “a parent who really cares about his child, doesn’t teach him to kill snakes or build fires. A responsible parent teaches table manners, Chinese and English, and also arranges him a second passport, a credit card, a flash drive with pictures of the family, and wings to fly like ragwort, as far away as possible.”

  Eitan brought his face close to mine and I felt the warmth of his skin. “A poisonous snake is a poisonous snake. If it comes to your house like this one did, you’re going to talk to it in Chinese? A poisonous snake that comes to your house or gets near your family, you have to kill it. Like you kill a mad dog or weed the grass.”

  You know, Varda, there are men who every once in a while need to kill something, and sometimes even someone. Otherwise they simply go crazy. It’s very simple.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIS IS REVENGE

  1

  At first a head appeared, peeking cautiously from behind a rock on the ridge. Then a rifle barrel, then the rest of the figure. A young, slender man, armed with an M16 with a telescopic sight, darted down the slope and crouched behind a bush.

  A few minutes later he stood and went down to the carob tree. He checked the surroundings and climbed straight toward the mastic tree beside the oak on the opposite slope. Eitan, hiding in the mastic, watched as the man drew closer. His easy step, so unlike the steps of the guy who had come in the morning to look for the cigarette lighter, was the walk of someone who feels at home in the outdoors. The man’s choice of the mastic tree was as logical as Eitan’s had been. It was clear that he meant to hide behind it and provide cover for whoever would soon arrive at the carob. Eitan sat in the hiding place he had made among the branches, the Mauser in his hand.

  The sniper arrived, lay on his belly behind the mastic tree, very close to Eitan, who was motionless inside it. He aimed his rifle at the carob, and as he adjusted his position Eitan said, “Don’t move, I’m aiming a rifle at your head.”

  The man didn’t move.

  “Nod your head yes, that you understand.”

  The man nodded.

  “Throw the rifle to the side.”

  The man did as he was told.

  “Put your forehead on the ground and your hands behind your back.”

  He emerged from his hideout and hit the man in the back of the neck with the butt of the Mauser, tied his wrists to his ankles behind his back, and pulled the rope tight. He sealed his mouth with the duct tape, sliced and removed his shirt, wrapped it around his head and eyes, and tied the sleeves around his neck. Then he lifted him up and put him behind the oak tree, and returned to his hiding place.

  2

  The man in the hat arrived fifteen minutes later. He sat down in the shade of the carob tree, removed his shoulder bag, drank water from a bottle, and looked around, trying to imagine where his adversary would come from and whe
re his helper was hiding. Eitan looked at him for two minutes or so, climbed out of the mastic tree, and approached the man, pointing the Mauser at him.

  The man didn’t budge, just followed him with his eyes. When Eitan reached the carob, the man said, “Put down the gun. I have a sniper here. You’re in his sights.”

  “We already met,” said Eitan. “Your sniper and I.”

  “Did you bring it?” asked the man.

  “What?”

  “What you found here.”

  “What exactly do you mean?”

  “A gold lighter.”

  Eitan took the lighter from his pocket. “Here it is.”

  “What do you want?” asked the man.

  Eitan said, “For the lighter or for your life?”

  The man said, “Don’t answer me with questions.”

  “You’re in no position to tell me what and what not to do,” said Eitan. “Now get up and put up your hands. I have to search you.”

  The man hesitated for a moment, and rose. Eitan held the rifle in his right hand, one finger on the trigger guard, the others around the butt, with the end of the barrel at the man’s throat, and his left hand frisking his body.

  “Your pistol is in the bag?”

  “What do you want,” said the man, “that I go around with a gun in my belt like an idiot?” And added: “This is ridiculous. You don’t intend to shoot me. The shot will be heard all over the area.”

  “This is not Tel Aviv,” said Eitan. “I already shot the guy you sent this morning and nobody came to check.”

  “A second shot will attract more attention. Even here.”

  “Okay,” said Eitan. “You convinced me. We’ll do it quietly, with no second shots.”

  He dropped the rifle, wrapped his outstretched arms around the man, and tightened his grip around his chest. The man responded with greater force and alacrity than his physique had suggested. He pummeled Eitan’s back, kicked his legs, tried to head-butt his eyebrows, but Eitan increased the pressure, and the man realized that his grip was more dangerous than a standard wrestling move. He thrashed like a madman. From inside his body, a snapping sound. Two of his ribs, now broken. Eitan too felt the same snap and loosened his grip a little.