by Meir Shalev
Benjamin and I were adolescents then, I in the tenth grade and he in the eighth. He was already taller than I. I remember that year not only because my mother left but also because it was then that Benjamin adopted the loathsome habit of tilting his head downward to mine when we spoke to each other. We both opted to remain with Yordad at home in Beit Hakerem because at his place we each had a bedroom, whereas at Mother’s there was only the single room that was hers. Still, we came to her every day, always at the same hour. We loved sitting in her kitchenette. At home in Beit Hakerem she had had a küche — “a real kitchen,” Yordad said, amazed, as he contemplated the logic of her departure—while in Kiryat Moshe she had only a küchlein, a tiny crowded kitchenette.
Sometimes we went together and sometimes separately She was always alone and always received us cheerfully, with embraces and caresses, the scents of soap, fresh and plain, and coffee and brandy and talcum powder upon her. She would shut off her small gramophone— she listened to music extensively, mostly Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas — and move aside the vase with her beloved gladioluses, which now appear from time to time on her grave. Who brought them to her back then? And who now? She would serve us caraway-seed biscuits and tea with lots of lemon and sugar.
More than once I wondered what would happen if I came at some other hour. Would I meet the other man, even though there was no such man? A man trying to entertain her, please her, someone who would tell stories and dry the dishes and shine the shoes and take out the rubbish?
I would imagine him in my heart sitting at the small table, or even on the sofa that opened and became her bed in the evening, his eyes fixed on her, his hands lustful, his lips encircling strong teeth. But I never saw anyone there, other than one time when two men showed up. One was broad, dark-skinned, and bald and leaned on a cane, the other tall and elderly and thin as a shoelace. The one who limped hummed a funny tune about King Ahasuerus of the Purim story and drank black coffee that he prepared himself The elderly gentleman regarded me, curious and friendly, and asked me about my major in school and whether I knew what I wanted to be in the future. I answered that I did not know and he said, “Very good. No need to rush.”
Only a year ago, on the occasion of that surprising meeting when she gave me the money to purchase and build myself a new home, did I dare ask my mother about her leaving us, and for what reason.
“It was not you I left,” she said, “it was Yordad and his house. After all, I stayed in his Jerusalem to be near you two.”
And when I did not respond, you continued. “Why do you ask? You know the reason; I never hid a thing from you, I explained it all to you when you were still a young man, but perhaps you did not understand or did not wish to understand, or maybe you simply want to hear the story again and again.” And she reached over and patted me just like she did then, when I would visit her in her tiny flat. Not with the same strength but with the same motions.
Your fingers were cool and pleasant. When you drew them lightly through my brother’s fair curls they were spread wide. “What a beautiful child you are, Benjamin …” you told him, and you would reiterate: “What a beautiful child …” and your single dimple would bloom on your left cheek. As for the dense black bristles of my scalp, however, you scraped them with the vigor of a cattle breeder, leaning over me from your great height. “You little calf! What choice beef you are!” And I, with a heart both jealous and crushed, exchanged your love for him with those three-dot ellipses above.
After telling her about what was happening at school and at home, and about the nurse Yordad had hired to help him in the clinic—a small, apprehensive woman who was afraid of him and the patients and the ringing of the telephone and her own shadow—my mother would serve us two thick slices of her poppy-seed cake and pack a third in a paper bag. “Give this one to Yordad so that he will be happy too.”
We left her house and returned home, our heads still sensing the touch of her fingers, which had grown stronger and rougher, and suddenly Benjamin said what I had only dared think, that this was a sign of the difficult labor she was obliged to engage in now that “she no longer works in our clinic.”
And Yordad, playing a role in the next act of that very same play opened the paper bag and burrowed his mouth and nose inside it. His eyelids fluttered and shut after a short, tender struggle. I recall the long breath, and his hand, which was miraculously decisive and slack at the same time. He gave us the slice of cake because he was not strong enough to pitch it into the rubbish bin. “Take it. It is enough that she left—I do not need any more happiness than that.”
“I can’t take it anymore!” Sometimes in her voice, sometimes in my own, sometimes in the wind that blows through the large trees that she insisted be outside my new home. She made her decision, then made it known; she took her clothing and her gramophone and her recording of Dido and Aeneas — the opera she loved so well with the beautiful swan song; to myself I called it “Remember Me” because those were the only two words I could grasp—and she departed.
When she made up her mind about the FOR and AGAINST of our household expenses she added sums, counted coins and savings. When she decided about food she listed the diners, the potatoes, the plates and knives. But what did you count then, Mother? What does one count before leaving one’s home?
5
I DO NOT REMEMBER much from Tel Aviv We lived on Ben Yehuda Street not far from the Mugrabi cinema, which at the time was still standing. A small brass nameplate that read DR. YAACOV MENDELSOHN, PEDIATRICIAN was affixed to the door of Yordad’s ground-floor clinic, and another small brass nameplate —Y. MENDELSOHN, PRIVATE —was affixed to the door of our apartment on the second floor.
Also near our apartment was the cemetery on Trumpeldor Street, and you brought us there to show us the names of poets engraved on the tombstones. Benjamin played among the graves while I cast my eyes upon you and repeated the names. On occasion we traveled to the north end of the street and from there to the Yarkon River, which was not yet built up, and Yordad would find perfect spots for picnics or, in his words, “A pretty place with shade.” We went, too, to the zoo, but only the two of us —you and I—and only once. Near the entrance to the zoo there was, at the time, a fenced area with huge tortoises, and I remember the names of the lion and two lionesses: Hero and Tamar and Dolly
A peacock appeared suddenly, its tail fanned in the dirt, and it shrieked in a frightful voice. I wanted to see the monkeys but you said, “Let’s move on, Yair, I can’t stand them.” We walked up the path. Beyond the pigeon loft and the fenced-in elephant and the pool of the waterfowl there was some playground equipment, a tiny, shabby, amusement park. You stood there looking around, and when we were about to leave, a very fat man appeared and said hello to you. I could not stop looking at his enormous belly I said, “Mother, Mother, look what a fat man …” and he removed the cap he was wearing, bowed, and told me, “I’m not just any fat man, I’m the fat man of the zoo.”
The peacock shrieked again. Shouts of joy were coming from the other side of the fence, where people were swimming in a pool adjacent to the zoo. You told me, “This was once the watering hole of an orchard.” And when we left there a small parade of men and women carrying red flags passed by You said, “Today is the First of May Come, Yair, let’s go home.”
Many a time I return to visit there, even today in the rambles I am accustomed to taking. From the house that Liora purchased for us on Spinoza Street I set out for Ben-Gurion Boulevard, where I pass by young couples spending time together at the juice bar, and I am always surprised by how similar they are to one another. They all have handsome dogs and children, each man looks like the next, each woman like the other, each man identical to his woman, each woman to her mate.
I head right, toward the memory of the visit to the zoo. Sometimes I enter through the what-was-once-the-gate and sometimes I stroll along the no-longer-a-fence. Then I take another right and walk the length of the large square, the sycamores and citrus tree
s of which have long since been chopped down and whose sands are choked under the paving stones. I cross Frishman Street and pass by the French bookstore and reach Masaryk Square and the small and pleasant playground where a few young women are always sitting with their children and I wonder who among all these little ones will grow up and write about his mother; who will refer to her as she and who as you, who will call her Mother and who my mother.
From here King George Street leads me in a straight line to Dizengoff Center. I enter and paddle along in a sea of screaming children and short, dumpy women with exposed bellies and clear plastic bra straps, and I make my way up to the third floor, to the Traveler shop, my destination. Whoever situated the shop particularly in this spot did so wisely A few minutes in that vacuous space suffice to awaken a desire to travel as quickly and as far away as possible from there.
In the shop I purchase hiking equipment I will never put to use, listen to lectures about trips I will never take and places I will never visit. I observe with a gaze of jealous longing the young people making travel plans, and they observe with a gaze of jealous longing the expensive sleeping bag, lightweight and especially warm, that I carry to the cash register, and the alpine camping stove that burns for eight hours straight even in gale-force winds. I scan the notes pinned to the notice board by anxious young ladies with modern names and modern spellings, like Tal and Nufar and Noa and Stav and Ayelet, looking for companions to share a soft landing and perhaps even a trek in the dangerous, distant East.
Overwhelmed with no less dangerous and distant delusions, I leave there, taking Bograshov Street toward the sea, plowing through the sidewalk cafés filled with people, and at Ben Yehuda Street I turn left and proceed southward to the head of the street, past the house in which I spent my first years and which has been razed. A few years ago it was torched by one of the many religious fanatics our land is blessed with because, after we moved out and relocated in Jerusalem, the place changed hands and roles until, eventually, it became a brothel.
Back in those days Ben Yehuda Street was far more pleasant. I recall that there were many German-speaking neighbors, a language that my mother and Yordad understood but did not speak, except on rare occasions. We took our evening meals on a balcony overlooking the street. I remember the kiosk that stood underneath, and the royal poinciana tree that reddened the back garden, and the morning glory that climbed the balcony wall and that opened what she called “one thousand blue eyes” every day
“That’s that,” she would say at the end of every meal. “The plant is already closing its eyes, so let us, too, go to sleep.”
She loved that house very much. Whenever we returned to it, from far or near, she grew excited, filled with high spirits. “Soon we’ll be home!” she would say, and once arrived she would add, “Here we are, we’re home!” and sometimes she would even ceremoniously recite the lines of a poem that repeated itself as well: “Home is the sailor, home from the sea / And the hunter home from the hill.”
The keyhole of our apartment door was the height of a person’s head. You would lift me in your arms and say, “You open it.”
I would thrust the key in and turn it. You would press on the handle and open the door and say, “Hello, house …” to the cool dimness. “You two, say hello to the house, too,” she would instruct us. “And listen closely, because it will answer back.”
Benjamin said, “But it’s a house. How can a house answer?” And I said, “Hello, house,” and I fell silent and listened like you asked me to. “Be quiet, Benjamin,” you said. “And both of you, listen closely” The house was happy, too, at our return, and it breathed and it answered just as you promised. We crossed the threshold and you said, “Let’s have a bite to eat,” which meant a few slices of bread topped with soft cheese “spread oh so thin” and a hard-boiled egg—Plaff!—and anchovy substitute in a yellow tube and chopped parsley and tomato sliced so thin it was nearly transparent. Because that was what one did at home. One returned home, and said hello, and heard the answer, and entered. And then one had a bite to eat and was overcome with joy: we are home. From the hill, from the sea, from far away That is what we love and what we know how to do.
6
MY MOTHER and Yordad taught us many things even before we went to school. He would sit with us in front of the big German atlas and show us continents and islands and faraway lands, would send us sailing over oceans, crossing rivers, scaling mountain ranges and descending on the other side. She taught us to read and write.
“The little dots and dashes under Hebrew letters tell the letters which way to go. An aleph with a single dot underneath is read ee, a mem that has a dash with a tail is mah,” she told us, using the letters that spelled mother. I giggled with pleasure, because the little dots changed the shape of her lips and the expression on her face, and also with relief, for now the letter knew which way to go and what to do.
I was five years old then, and Benjamin would join the reading lessons. Even though he was only three, he picked it up faster than I. Within weeks he was already reading aloud the names of the poets, his legs skipping from grave to grave and his eyes skipping from the graves to my mother’s bright eyes. I remember how he even astonished and enchanted the passengers on the No. 4 bus: a veryyoung boy with golden hair reading the shop signs on Ben Yehuda Street in a precocious voice, in spite of the speed at which they passed by the window of the bus.
And I remember the dinner on the balcony when my mother announced, “Soon we shall have a baby girl. Your little sister.”
“How do you know it will be a girl?” I asked with apprehension. “Maybe we’ll have another brother.”
“It will be a girl because that is what Mother wants,” Yordad explained. “She has done her FOR and AGAINST and decided that after wishing for and receiving two sons, now we shall have a daughter.”
Then she teased us: “The FOR is she and the AGAINST is you two.”
Within several weeks’ time she began to retch every morning, and I would retch along with her. Yordad said that pediatrics had never seen or heard of such identification between sons and their mothers and that this new phenomenon should be named for me. When he said this his lips smiled, but his eyes did not. A dull anger skittered across them, as though he were a witness to an intimacy he had never known.
Every day we would sit, he and I, shelling almonds on the balcony “A pregnant woman must take care to eat properly,” he informed us, “and since there is not enough meat or eggs or cheese in the market, these almonds are a good and nutritious substitute. This way Mother will have plenty of milk and the baby girl will be large and healthy and her teeth will be white.”
He permitted me to eat every seventh almond. “Whoever does not work does not get any”
“But I’m working,” I boasted, expecting a compliment, too.
“I am referring to your brother,” Yordad said in a loud, stern voice, to ensure that Benjamin would hear.
Benjamin was playing off to the side and did not react. I gathered up my seventh almonds and chewed them until they were pulp, then swallowed them with deep purpose and conviction. I felt the whiteness of the almonds create a whiteness of milk and teeth inside me and you. I hoped that the sister you would give birth to would be small and thick and dark, but she was born before term and died straightaway, so that it was impossible to determine what her height or coloring would have been.
A few days passed before my mother returned from the hospital. That night we heard Yordad talking while Mother said nothing.
“You see,” Benjamin whispered to me in the darkness of our room, “you shelled those almonds for her for nothing.”
I grew angry in place of you. “Why do you say ‘her? Say ‘shelled those almonds for Mother,’ not for ‘her’!”
7
MORE THAN ONCE you sent me shopping, sometimes across Ben Yehuda Street at Zolti’s greengrocery and sometimes at the local kiosk. “There is no kiosk like this one anywhere else,” you said. “He stock
s lollipops, clothespins, sardines, chewing gum, ice cream, and, if you order in advance, shoes, refrigerators, and bridal gowns.”
I remember one day when the owner of the kiosk ascended the stairs to our flat and said, “Dr. Mendelsohn, your son has been stealing money from me, and apparently from you, too.”
I tugged at your dress and you tilted your ear downward to my mouth. I whispered my question: how was it that at his kiosk this man was tall but in our house he was short? You whispered your answer back at me: in his kiosk he stands on a wooden platform, while in our house he is standing on the normal floor. Your lips were so close and so pleasant to me that it took several seconds for me to notice Yordad’s stern and piercing glare, and when I did notice it my heart stood still inside me from shame and fear. Not due to the undeserved punishment for a theft I did not commit but because the possibility that it was Benjamin who had stolen did not even cross his mind.
The owner of the kiosk understood what was happening at once. “It’s not the dark one, the one that looks like a thug,” he said. “It’s the little one who steals, the one with the Goldilocks curls and the face of an angel.”
He descended the stairs and returned to his kiosk and became tall once again, and you rested a hand on my shoulder and cast a scowl at Yordad that spun him around and drove him away, so that he sought refuge in the clinic.
And I recall the daily trek to the seashore to take exercise and swim. These days I no longer go to the beach; Liora prefers the swimming pool and, anyway, the flying paddleballs and the young women’s bathing suits make me nervous. The sun’s rays frighten me too, a fear instilled in me by Yordad that I have never overcome. Way back then Dr. Yaacov Mendelsohn warned parents against the dangerous effects of the Middle Eastern sun, but no one listened; suntans were considered to be a sign of health and the fulfillment of the Zionist dream. That’s the reason everyone went to the beach before noon and only the Mendelsohn family went late in the afternoon, when the heat of the sun had abated, marching against the families returning home, a joyful caravan of irresponsible parents and seared and happy children with reddened noses and backs.
