by Meir Shalev
Many people would greet us, and some added requests and questions. In spite of his youth, Yordad already had a reputation as an excellent pediatrician, and these people wished to take advantage of the opportunity for some on-the-street advice. He would tell them, “I am in a hurry; come walk with me and we shall speak.” And he would extend his long legs into a quick stride so that the pestering party soon became befuddled and winded. But one day my mother said to him, “Be nice to them, Yaacov, it’s easier that way” And when he complained she explained, “It saves time. Try and you’ll see.” After trying, he saw, and admitted it. “You were right,” he said. “At least thirty percent less time …”
She told us that once upon a time, when she was a girl, before there were so many sidewalks in Tel Aviv, there were places where wooden planks were placed atop the sand. She loved the feel of these, the way they rocked and sank beneath one’s footstep and weight. I loved the spot between the end of the street and the start of the beach, that elusive space between two times and two places, where the city ends and the shore begins, where the asphalt and concrete end and the sand and sea begin. One leg still on the solid of the sidewalk, the other already in the soft and yielding sand.
We played with a small medicine ball, weighted according to our ages, and this was the sole sport at which I was better than my brother. I stood rooted, straining, while Benjamin was hurled backward time and again, falling in the sand and laughing, enjoying himself in spite of his failure. Yordad scolded him, “Stand firm!” Then, restraining himself—he never raised his voice, and when he was angry he whispered—he said, “Stand firm, Benjamin! How is it that Yairi can do it and you can’t?” A wave of pleasantness arose inside me: my mother called me Yair, Meshulam Fried, Tirza’s father, calls me Iraleh—“Iraleh and Tiraleh, alike as a pair of doves”—and until this very day Yordad is careful to call me Yairi, my Yair, as if reminding the world that I am his.
Benjamin grinned, sighed, and fell on purpose. Yordad grew angry He yanked Benjamin to his feet and sent us to run on the beach, with “knees high, Yairi, don’t drag your feet in the sand.” So we ran and sweated and breathed deeply, rhythmically We swam a little, exercised a little. We ate grapes while the sun dropped and the beach emptied, we gathered our belongings and retraced our steps home. I liked coming home better than going there and preferred the transition from sand to sidewalk too, one foot still feeling its way and sinking, the other already finding its resting place, the answer to its needs.
Yordad marched at the head, erect, I followed behind, and my mother and brother were behind me or ahead of me or next to me playing skipping games on the paving stones, “because if you step upon the crack, you will break your mother’s back.” A benign sun, soft and low, lengthened our shadows. There’s mine, wider and shorter than the others and, like its owner, darker, wrapped inside a long terry-cloth robe. That shadow was sullen and enraged and stepped on the cracks on purpose, and its robe was an old robe of my mother’s that she had tailored for me after much pleading. That robe drew a large share of mockery and teasing, but it filled its role—to conceal the strangeness of my body—quite successfully
So fair and tall and slender were the three of them, their tans so golden and burnished, and I was so dark and thick and coarse. More than once I had feared I was adopted, and Benjamin, who perceived every chink and impaled every foible, made me angry with a little song he wrote. “They sent you in a package, / They found you in the trash / They took you from an orphanage, / To Gypsies we paid cash …”
My mother was angry “That’s enough of your nonsense, Benjamin,” she said, but her dimple glinted, giving away a smile. Sometimes even she would joke about that very same matter. “What’s going to be with you, Yair? One day your real parents will come and take you for their own and we’ll miss you terribly”
I would turn to stone; Benjamin would join in her laughter. Yordad reprimanded them. “Do not be offended by them, Yairi, and as for the two of you—please stop this immediately!”
Adopted or not, I shall write here what I felt but never dared to state back then: that I was not turning out well and that my brother was the correction of the mistake.
8
ON THE FIRST DAY of summer vacation in 1957, we moved to Jerusalem. Yordad had been promised a position at the new Hadassah Hospital, which was just being built west of the city, and the opportunity to engage in what he had been prevented from doing in Tel Aviv: research and teaching, as well as maintaining a clinic in which he could see private patients.
I was eight years old and Benjamin was six. Two trucks draped with tarps, one small and one medium-sized, were hired to transport our belongings. We stood by the kiosk, eagerly awaiting their arrival. My mother said one large truck would have sufficed, but Yordad decreed that it was “forbidden to mix the clinic with the family”
Dr. Mendelsohn was in the habit of classifying and separating and isolating elements. He instructed us to return the blocks we played with to their box according to their colors and sizes. He sorted his clothing not only by season and type but also by time of day worn, shades of color, and fabric. He did not drink while eating nor eat while drinking, and he moved from food to food on his plate: first the schnitzel and only afterward the potatoes; first the fish and only afterward the rice; first the omelette and only afterward the salad. My mother said that if he had the time he would eat each component of the salad in turn: first he would gather bits of cucumber, then the peppers, and at the end, the tomatoes. But his prohibition against mixing extended far beyond food: he did not mingle one matter with another, or alcohol with secrets, or types of medications. He assigned each its own importance, and each brought that small smile to your face along with that single dimple in your left cheek and the asymmetry of your upper lip, which mocked Yordad openly whenever he was overly strict with us in the matter of table manners. Sometimes he would ask—and I do not know if he was being serious or joking—“What would happen if the queen of England were to invite you for supper?” And you would retort, “Exactly the same as would happen if we were to invite her.”
Yordad prepared the salad for all of us himself. He cut the vegetables with great expertise, seasoned them with oil and salt and pepper and lemon; then, when he had taken his share, he announced, “Now you people cut the onion and add it to your own salad.”
Years later, when Benjamin brought home Zohar, the woman he would marry, to present her to his parents, she said, “Dr. Mendelsohn, in my house we call the salad you prepare ‘children’s salad.’”
Yordad sized her up with his eyes. “Interesting,” he said. “And what kind of salad does one eat in your house?”
She laughed. Her laughter roused me because it reminded me of Tirzah Fried’s. “Salad in our house is made with meat and potatoes,” she said. “But if we do use vegetables, then we add soft cheese and warm slices of hard-boiled egg and black olives and chopped cloves of garlic.” Her description was so simple and true that I felt the need to taste it right away. Zohar smiled at me, and I was flooded with an affection for her that has not ended to this very day She is a large woman— full-bodied, full of life—who loves to eat and read: “Abadi’s Oriental cookies and fat novels.” In the Beit She’an Valley kibbutz she hails from she has three brothers as big as she and some dozen nieces and nephews, “all the same size: extra-, extra-, extra-large.”
Like many other affections, this one, too, stems from similarity Not the similarity between us—we are not similar at all—but the similarity between our spouses, between her husband and my wife, and as Zohar herself said to me many years later, in a moment that mingled alcohol with embarrassment, laughter with loneliness, “Our troubles are very similar. It’s just that your trouble is crappier than mine and my trouble is shittier than yours.” I felt a covenant had been established between us, that of two interlopers who had been appended to the same eminent family
I love her twins, too—Yoav and Yariv—in spite of the jealousy I felt when they wer
e born, and I am proud to say that I am the one who coined their nickname, the Y-Team, which stuck at once and has even undergone a number of improvements: Liora turned them into the Double-Ys, while Zohar decreed separate nicknames for each of her boys. Yoav, the firstborn, became Y1, while Yariv, born several minutes later, was Y2.
The family lust for eating made its appearance in the twins during their very first days of life. More than once Zohar said she planned to nurse them for years and years because their nursing was so hardy that it brought her to the verge of losing consciousness and she was addicted to these moments when her “boobs emptied and her boys filled up” and everything blurred and her body was light and bent on flying, while her boys grew full and heavy, becoming the sandbags that weighted her to the ground.
Indeed, at two years of age the Y-Team was taller and broader than any children their age, presenting round and solid potbellies at the front of their bodies. Like me and like their father, they learned the skill of reading before they entered the first grade, not from the tombstones of poets but from the cereal boxes their mother placed in front of their constantly emptying bowls.
At every family gathering they asked whether their kibbutz uncles had been invited, then hurried to find them, shouting joyfully “Save us a place!” and “We want to sit with you,” taking pleasure in the hearty backslaps their uncles planted on them from behind. The uncles always showed up in a band of pressed blue trousers, their sturdy potbellies ensconced in white, tentlike shirts, each one with a large spoon gleaming from a pocket. “We brought our own utensils — that way we manage to eat more.”
They paid no heed to the waitresses passing through the crowd and serving tiny hors d’oeuvres. “ ‘Those are just trivial distractions,’” Zohar quoted from one of her fat novels. They took plates from the tower of dishes at the head of the table and, while the nuptials were still under way, they stood, silent and patient, by the closed pots and serving dishes, only the tiny movements of the flaps of their nostrils and the particular angle of their cocked heads indicative of their efforts to ascertain what was under each lid.
“Have some salad,” Liora suggested to one of Zohar’s nephews, astonished by the mountain of goulash he had amassed on his plate.
The boy smiled. “Salad? You mean lettuce and stuff?”
“Why not? Vegetables are good for you.”
“What are you talking about, Aunt Liora? Don’t you know how the world works? Cows eat vegetables, and we eat cows.”
“It would help you move the food into your stomach.”
“Do I look like someone who needs help moving food into his stomach?”
“You see,” Liora whispered to Benjamin, “it was on account of these relatives of yours that I named the Chevy I gave Yair ‘Behemoth,’” to which Benjamin complained, “I don’t like for the children to sit with them. Why don’t they sit at our table?” But their mother had already smiled her slow, serene smile and said, “Because these are their type. With them they feel at home, they’re accepted as they are. They aren’t scolded or corrected, and nobody tries to make them into what they are not.”
“One day they’ll wind up looking like them, too. No girl will be interested in them.”
“They already do look like them,” Zohar said, reveling in the fact. “A little small yet, but coming along nicely Don’t worry And as for girls,” she added, “let’s wait and see, Benjamin. I know quite a few girls—in fact, I’m one of them—who like boys just like these. Large and kind-hearted, boys you can lean on and be carried off in their arms, boys you can slug when you need to and call on for help when you need to.”
“If that’s what you like, why didn’t you pick a big brute like that?” Liora inquired.
“I chose a brute like you.”
So you see, our family is small but full of affection. My wife is fond of Yordad and my brother, my brother is fond of Liora and himself, and I am fond of his wife and her sons, and I am jealous of him.
9
ALL THE FURNISHINGS in the apartment and the clinic were removed, and replaced with echoes. The movers pulled the last knots tight. With concentration and effort, the tip of his tongue moving in rhythm with the screwdriver, Yordad removed the DR. YAACOV
MENDELSOHN, PEDIATRICIAN and Y. MENDELSOHN, PRIVATE name-
plates from the doors. He put them, along with the screws, into his pocket and said, “Let’s go.”
My mother’s face turned red. She had two kinds of blushes: one that descended from her forehead and signified embarrassment and another that climbed from her chest and indicated anger. This time the blush came from below She turned and walked briskly up the stairs and into the empty house. We waited until she returned and announced that she wished to ride in the back of the truck, sitting on the clinic’s waiting room sofa. Benjamin rushed to say that he, too, wanted to ride in the back, but Yordad said it was dangerous. There would be sudden stops and winding roads and “If I know you two,” he said, “you’ll be leaning out over the side of the truck.”
She did not argue. We drove ahead of the trucks in our small Ford Anglia. “Watch behind us, boys,” Yordad joked. “Make sure that the movers don’t run off with the stethoscope and the otoscope and the color lamp.”
On the way, I suppose in Ramla, we stopped. Yordad bought a drink called barad and Arab ice cream, sticky and delicious, for us and the drivers and the movers. My mother did not want to join us. Yordad told a story about Napoleon, who shot a poor muezzin to death for disturbing his sleep right over there, next to that white tower, and farther on, between yellowing knolls and hills that came into view shimmering to the east, he lectured us on Samson from the Bible as we drove past the village of his birth.
We began our ascent into the hills. Yordad told us about the War of Independence, pointing out the remnants of armed vehicles and recounting stories of convoys and battles, some on the way to Jerusalem and some inside the city itself. My mother shut her eyes, and I did as she did, though I opened mine every few seconds to make sure hers were still closed.
We finished our ascent. The air had cooled; the weather was dry and pleasant. The engine had ceased its groaning and Yordad said, “She handled it like a Mercedes-Benz, our little Ford Anglia.”
My mother woke up. Young pine trees emitted a refreshing scent. Yordad praised the Jewish National Fund for its reforestation program and prophesied that there would be “many pretty places with shade here too in the hills of Jerusalem.” The road dipped and snaked through an Arab village and Yordad said, “This is Abu Ghosh, and over there is Kiryat Anavim, and now,” he announced gaily, “we’ll ascend Mount Castel.”
My mother said nothing. Our little car climbed to the peak of the hill and descended steeply on the other side. Yordad said, “Khuseini” and “the murderers of Colonia” and “Soreq Creek,” and then he pointed: “This is the border, so very close, and over there is Nebi Samuel, our very own Samuel the Prophet from the Bible, and why is it that those Moslems couldn’t make themselves a new religion with new prophets instead of taking Moses and Jesus and David and Samuel from other people and calling them Moussa and Issa and Daoud and Samuel?”
He talked and he lectured while you remained silent, and after one more ascent we found ourselves at the Gateway of Jerusalem—that’s what he called it. There was no gateway, but the city began there suddenly, around a bend in the road that did not herald its existence. “Jerusalem is like a house, boys. It has a doorway and all at once you are inside. Not like Tel Aviv, which starts a little here and a little there and has a thousand ways to enter and leave, wherever you wish.”
He fell silent and smiled, expecting a response, but Benjamin showed no interest and I was waiting for some utterance from you that did not come.
“Do you feel how wonderful the air is here? That’s Jerusalem air. Breathe it in, children; you too, Raya, breathe it in. Think about the terrible heat and humidity we left behind in Tel Aviv …”
Our small Ford Anglia turned right onto a
long street, on the bald and rocky left side of which was a bus terminal and garage and on the right side of which stood a housing project. We passed a small stone house surrounded by grapevines. For a moment I had hopes that this would be our new home, but we turned left onto a short street that was narrow and verdant.
“This is our new neighborhood,” Yordad said. “Beit Hakerem. Up here on the right is your new school. Here we’ll turn left again—this is our new street, Bialik, and our new house, directly in front of us.”
We stopped in front of a building that had one entrance and three stories, two small apartments on the ground floor and four more spacious flats on the upper floors. I asked you, “Is that the Bialik from the cemetery in Tel Aviv?” and you answered, “Yes.”
We got out of the car and walked up the stairs to the second floor. Yordad opened the door on the left side of the hallway We stood in the entrance to a large and empty apartment flooded with bright light and good Jerusalem air. I waited for you to say, “Hello, house …” so that we could enter, but you did not. Benjamin and Yordad marched into the flat; your hand lingered, hovering on my neck and shoulder. For one precious moment we remained, the two of us, outside; then your hand signaled me to step inside with you.
Yordad said, “Here, each one of you children will have a room of his own. This one is yours, Yairi, and this one is Benjamin’s.”
We did not argue. We rushed outside because the trucks had arrived, stopping with a great sigh of sound, and the movers were rolling up the tarp flaps. Residents of the neighborhood started to gather, for all our furniture was on display outside. The adults paid careful attention, wishing to ascertain the means and the taste of the new family, while the children watched the movers, who had already unfurled the straps they would use to carry the furniture and were binding them to their shoulders and foreheads. After all, it was not every day that one could watch a man load a refrigerator or sofa onto his back, reddening like a beet and climbing the stairs.
