by Meir Shalev
Those were truly the words: “go” and “find” and “a place of your very own.” And between your coughing fits I was reminded of that place that is not mine, the house that Liora bought us on Spinoza Street in Tel Aviv. The house and its mistress; she and her abode. The large, light-colored rooms just like her, and the proper angles just like hers; she of her wealth, of the whitewashed walls of her body, of the marvelous distance between the windows of her eyes.
2
BEFORE SHE FELL ILL, my mother was tall of stature, with fair curls and a single dimple. After she fell ill her stature bowed, her curls fell out, and her dimple was effaced. At the first memorial service we held in her honor, my brother, Benjamin, and I were still standing next to her grave when a dispute arose between us: on which cheek was that dimple? Benjamin said it was the right one, while I stood firm for the left. At first we joked about it, exchanging slaps and stinging remarks, and then my slaps grew heavier and his words became as snakebites.
After betting—we used to argue often; later we made bets, always on the very same lunch at the very same Romanian restaurant—we began interrogating anyone we could about the placement of that dimple. At once additional disputes awakened and additional brows wrinkled and additional bets were made. And when we came to investigating old photographs —with childish excitement and the sweet pain common to adult orphans—we discovered, with great disappointment and the thin, unavoidable feeling of having been cheated, that her dimple did not appear in any of them. Not on her left cheek and not on her right.
Could it be that we remembered a dimple that had never existed? Perhaps we had imagined ourselves a mother, her smile and her height and her dimple and her curls? No! We did have a mother, but it turned out that in photographs —we only learned this after her death— she did not smile. Thus, the pictures never show her large, identical teeth or the slant of the sneer on her upper lip or her dimple or the look that took up residence in her eyes during the first year of her marriage to Yordad.
When she spoke to us of him she did not say “Father” or “Dad” but “your dad”: Tell your dad that I am waiting for him. Recount to your dad what we saw in the street today You want to own a dog? Ask your dad, but do not forget to tell him that I do not approve. And because we were little and she continued to call him “your dad,” we thought his name was Yordad and we called him this when we spoke to him or about him. It has remained his nickname to this very day He did not protest, but he did demand that we not call him this around strangers.
“Call Yordad upstairs for lunch,” my mother told us each day at her punctiliously German one-thirty and we would charge down the stairwell to his ground-floor pediatric clinic—Benjamin at three already skipping while I, five years old, still stumbled—pushing each other and shouting, “Yordad, Yordad! Mother says you should come eat …”
They both smiled, she laughing aloud in the kitchen, he while silently hanging up his smock. Occasionally he would scold us: “Children, don’t run in the stairwell—you will disturb the neighbors,” his fair head hovering at the top of his great height. And occasionally he would lean down and turn on his “color lamp” for us, a large and shiny flashlight that shone red and yellow and green and that he would use to capture and soothe the hearts of the young patients who came to his clinic.
Now my mother is dead and Yordad has retired and turned his small clinic into his apartment. But then he was a pediatrician, four years older than my mother and twenty years more aged than she. More than once did he gaze at her as though she were a child, too, sometimes adding a gentle rebuke as well, and with the years, as happens with husbands whose wives do not age with them, he began making up useless rules, instructing her about what to wear because it was cold outside and what to eat because it was hot and pointing out “Once again you’ve forgotten!” about that which had slipped from his own memory
On occasion the need to establish rules and regulations arose in her as well, though these were very different from his. “What does a person need?” she proclaimed one day after the first spoonful of dessert. “Not much: something sweet to eat, and a story to tell, and time and space, and gladioluses in a vase, and two friends, and two hilltops, one on which to stand and the other upon which to gaze. And two eyes for watching the heavens and waiting. Do you understand what I mean, Yair?”
And another time, when we were already living in Jerusalem, you suddenly closed the book you were immersed in reading—a small, chubby book with a light blue cover, though my brother, Benjamin, believes it was gray—you closed your book and made another pronouncement: “I can’t take it anymore.”
“I can’t take it anymore.” I heard you then just as I do now “I can’t take it anymore,” you said; and fell silent, so that all those listening could be properly unsettled by what you had said; then you opened your small, chubby book and I—though this past February turned forty-nine, a sluggish, aging bull—I grow sad once again recalling that distant moment, for the colors of that book’s cover and the edges of its pages and its silk bookmark—the bright blue, the soft pink, the deep gold—I remember well. Your eyes, your skin, your hair were precisely the same colors. But I no longer recall the name of the book, nor will I ever read from it, to search out and find and know what was the sentence that so agitated you, that caused you to utter those words. To clarify for myself whether the idea that eventually led you to leave home sprouted then.
My mother left home in the manner that characterized everything she did: with a decision that swelled and ripened slowly and once made could be rescinded by no one. She would sit at the kitchen table with a large sheet of paper that she would divide into two columns. At the top of one she would write FOR and at the top of the other AGAINST. For and against painting the stairwell white, for and against chemotherapy and radiation, for and against committing suicide, for and against veal schnitzel with potatoes boiled in salt water and sprinkled with schnittlauch — chopped chives —and drowned in butter, or Sabbath afternoon meat pies with bay leaves. She made her lists, counted on her fingers, and made her decision only after tabulating and weighing. Sometimes I try to guess what you wrote there before you left home— and I am overcome with dread of the FOR and AGAINST of curiosity
That is what she would say to us, to me and my brother, Benjamin: “I am for going to the sea, but Yordad is against!” That is also the way she would shop or exile books she did not like from our home, the ones in which “the writer enjoyed himself too much or suffered too much while he was writing.” And with that very same decisiveness she composed our Family Constitution, over which Benjamin and I can no longer make bets, for it—unlike that blue-bound book—is still in existence and in my possession, and can be opened and viewed.
There are times when I am capable of astonishing speed and resolve, in contrast to my personality and my shape. So it was that day, the day of her death. While the news was just spreading, taking root, showing no signs of change or remorse, and while the doorbell and the telephone rang incessantly and Yordad wandered aimlessly, banging into the walls, and Benjamin, as always, was late or busy I rushed to take that Family Constitution of ours and I hid it away in one of the equipment compartments of Behemoth. It has been in my possession ever since. Here it is: written on thin, light blue letter paper, with your distinctive Hebrew lettering: the potbellied pe, the dandified beth. Here, your cranelike kaph-sophit, the samekh so tiny it looks like a dot.
Here, I say to myself over my small treasure each time I remove it from its hiding place—here, over this light blue, your hand hovered, hovered and wrote: “The children will tidy their rooms, dry the dishes, and take out the rubbish.” “The children will tell their mother stories and on Saturday mornings will shine the shoes of all members of the family” “The children will see to watering Mother’s parsley plant in the kitchen.” “The parents will clothe, feed, teach, caress, and hug the children and will bring no more of them into the world.”
And on and on, here. Right over this very
paper. Your hand. Hovering, almost landing, warm and alive.
3
SHE WAS AN EASYGOING, pleasant mother and her anger seldom flared: only when Yordad called her Mother instead of Raya, her name, or when her sons referred to her as “she” instead of “Mother,” or when they disturbed her as she painted the house, or when we answered “Not true!” to something she said.
Once, however, she did something that I understood only years later. It happened on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, five years after we had moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Benjamin was eleven and I was thirteen. On the eve of the holiday we put on white shirts and sneakers and went to the neighborhood synagogue. Usually Yordad did not permit us to wear sneakers, specifically because he was worried about the development of our feet and generally about all our bones. But for some reason the holiday customs, including the prohibition against wearing leather shoes, touched his heart. He even fasted, despite the fact that he normally did not keep a single one of the Jewish laws.
“In my father’s memory” he announced, the expression on his face sanctimoniously festive, a look we never saw on any other day of the year.
My mother, brother, and I did not fast, but according to his wish we refrained from eating anything that would waft aromas through the window, outside. “This is Jerusalem,” he said, “not Tel Aviv. We must be considerate of our neighbors.”
After breakfast my mother wished to listen to music on our gramophone, but Yordad restated his demand.
“We’ll listen quietly,” my mother said. “And you needn’t remind me all the time that this is Jerusalem and not Tel Aviv; I’m only too aware of that.”
“I beg you, Raya,” Yordad said, “do not listen to music on Yom Kippur here.” He pronounced her name the proper, official way, Ra-a-ya, instead of Raya., the way everyone—including him—called her on the nonatonement days of the year.
My mother buckled her sandals and put on her wide-brimmed straw hat, the yellow weave blending with her hair, the blue ribbon crowning the angry blush on her face.
“Come,” she said, “let’s go breathe some air outside, because suddenly we’ve sprouted a pope. A person could choke on all the righteousness and incense around here.”
Astonished and obedient—when referring to us and her, “astonished and obedient” was the way to describe our ongoing situation, apart from a few controlled mutinies staged by Benjamin—we followed her. We took Bialik Street down to the little garden planted by residents of the Beit Hakerem neighborhood to commemorate their sons who had fallen in the War of Independence, and at Halutz Street we turned left. Next to the plot of land used for growing crops adjacent to our school— to our relief, this time she did not jump over the fence to steal parsley from the vegetable beds —we descended to the valley, emerging on the other side, where today there stands an ugly row of hotels. Sometimes I pick up visiting bird-watchers from the doorways of these hotels, and sometimes Liora’s brother, Emmanuel. When her extended family comes to visit from America they stay at the King David, but Emmanuel is tightfisted, so that when he comes alone he stays at one of these hotels, near the entrance to the city
Back then an old pathway ascended from the valley, a remnant from the days of the Arab farmers and the peddlers and the mule drivers who passed from Malkha to Lifta and from Sheikh Bader to Dir Yassin. Benjamin, as usual, skipped and jumped from rock to rock while I plodded along, my eyes glued to my mother’s heels, my nose enjoying the scent of hot dust and my ears the crackle of leaves and stems of the end of summer.
Next to the large garage for buses belonging to the Mekasher company there was a small abandoned fruit orchard: a pair of pomegranate trees, a few grapevines and fig trees enclosed by a row of prickly-pear cacti. The pomegranates were not yet ripe, the prickly pears were already rotten, and the young grapes had turned to raisins, but the fig trees were bearing fruit. My mother loved figs. She explained that they should be plucked, not picked, so we plucked and ate until a passerby fainting from righteousness and heat and the fast shouted at us. “Shame on you for eating figs! Today is Yom Kippur!”
My brother, bolstered with the strength and courage of sinners by my mother’s presence and the sweetness of the fruit, shouted back at him, “Pious shmious!”
My mother said, “Stop that, Benjamin. There is no need to answer.”
The man cursed and went on his way and we entered the large bus garage, where we crossed a dirt path and came to the lot with the old buses waiting to be sold or dismantled. My mother sat on a boulder and, as though distracted, began juggling three stones. I, as usual, went looking for crabs and beetles. Benjamin leapt from boulder to boulder without looking ahead or to the sides or backward, as though he had eyes in the soles of his feet.
Suddenly, after her surprisingly successful tossing and catching of stones, my mother stood up and, without prior warning, flung them quickly, forcefully, one-two-three at one of the buses.
The silence shattered into a thousand resounding shards. Benjamin, close by her, and I, a little farther off, watched her anxiously, astonished. She bent down, picked up two larger stones, then two more, and smashed two more windows.
“What are you doing, Ra-a-ya?” my brother said, imitating Yordad.
“Go on—you two give it a try, too,” my mother advised us. “It’s very pleasant.”
“Shame on you, busting up buses,” Benjamin said. “Today’s Yom Kippur.” But I bent down like you, collecting, then pitching two stones.
“It really takes talent,” Benjamin mocked, “to miss hitting a bus from seven feet away”
My mother laughed and I, hurt and angry, stooped to pick up a stone as large as a loaf of bread. I moved around to the front of one of the buses and, with both hands raised over my head, hurled the stone against the windshield. The thick glass cracked but did not shatter while I, in the throes of rage and delight, cast about for an even larger stone to throw
“Wait, Yair,” my mother said. “I’ll show you how”
Over at the side stood the frames of several rusting seats that had been removed from one of the buses. She grabbed hold of one of them, a bench seat from the back of the bus that was nearly ten feet long. I lifted the other end and we carried it over our heads like an iron battering ram, she in the lead shouting, “This is Jerusalem, not Tel Aviv!” while I, head bent, pushed from behind, and we cracked the windshields of two other buses, and we were suddenly overcome with a wild and excellent lust for revenge and destruction that was thwarted only by Benjamin’s cry of “Stop! Stop! The guard is coming!”
We tossed the bus bench aside, crouched behind one of the buses, and glanced at one another, red-faced and smiling. From the far side of the lot the old guard rushed in. He was tall, with dirty hands and a look of permanent sweat on his face. We had seen him more than once at Glick’s kiosk ordering a fried-egg “samwich” with hot pepper.
Huffing and puffing, a filthy cap on his head and tattered shoes on his feet, the guard ducked in and out between the buses until he caught sight of us. He was amazed: a blue-eyed, golden-haired mother and her two pleasant sons were not in the mug shots of his assumptions.
“What’s going on here? What you are doing?”
“We are sitting here in the shade and resting,” my mother said.
“Tired from fasting,” Benjamin added.
“I heard breaking here. I heard metal and glass falling down.”
“There were some riffraff here before,” my mother said. “They were throwing stones. But when we came they ran away Isn’t that right, boys?”
My face was burning. I bowed my head.
“They went that way,” Benjamin said, pointing.
The guard went off to have a look around, and when he saw nothing but a silent city—Jerusalem during the days of awe, grumbling and righteous—he returned to us, crestfallen.
“I know who you are. You are the missus of Dr. Mendelsohn, the kiddie doctor here.”
“That is right.”
“My brother showed me you once. Me and him, we were at the Iraqi market, sitting at the tavern next to the chicken seller, and you walked up with him”—the guard pointed at me—“to do shopping. My brother says to me, ‘You see this one, this lady here? She is the missus of Dr. Mendelsohn from Hadassah Hospital. Her husband is a good doctor. He told me to bring my daughter to his clinic at his home and didn’t take any money at the end.’ Maybe those riffraff wanted to beat you up, Missus Mendelsohn? If only I catch them, I break their bones here.”
“No, no, everything is fine; the children are looking out for me, thank you,” my mother said. “Everything is fine here. We had a wonderful Yom Kippur here and we wish you, too, to be inscribed in the Book of Life here.”
She rose to her feet. “Come boys, let’s go home to Yordad.”
We followed, Benjamin in the lead, jumping from rock to rock, I trailing after them. On the street you took his hand in one of yours and mine in the other and you said, “It doesn’t matter what happens, you will always be mine here.”
We all laughed. Three years later you left home. Were you already considering it on that day? Benjamin says of course you were and I say perhaps, but we can no longer make bets over that.
4
“ABANDONED HER SONS …,” “another man …,” “no strength left in her …”—these conjectures and denunciations wafted through the corridors of Hadassah Hospital and among acquaintances, at school and at Violette and Ovadia’s neighborhood grocery One only thing was true and clear: if there was another man or if there was not, if he had appeared on the scene before her departure or after, my mother never returned to our home. She remained in her new place, her own, a rented flat on the outskirts of the Kiryat Moshe neighborhood, in an apartment block facing the flour mill and the bakery It was a tiny apartment, but from her window there opened up an endless view to the edge of the west.
