by Meir Shalev
I refused again. “I’m not Gershon, and Tirzah’s already married to someone else.”
Meshulam grimaced. “What a wedding we made for her. Good food, good bride, pretty bridesmaids, only the groom should have been somebody else.”
I did not react. He said, “Pardon me. With Meshulam, the mouth and the heart are the same thing. What he says in his heart he thinks out loud.”
Several days later he phoned. “I found you a car. Come see.”
I hurried to his office. “What a shame,” he said. “Tiraleh was here fifteen minutes ago. I told her, ‘Hold on, your friend Iraleh’s on his way’ but she’s all the time on tender hooks, running from one job to another. That’s what happens when you got a husband like she got herself”
The minibus was standing in the parking lot. I told Meshulam it was exactly what I had been looking for and he told his fleet manager to check everything there was to check and to take care of transferring the title, and apparently he whispered a few more instructions, because after the test the minibus returned with a roof rack and a ladder on top, new tires, and an additional spare.
“How much did all that cost?” I asked, concerned.
“Peanuts. What, I can’t buy a little something for the son of Professor Mendelsohn? I wish you every success.”
“And where’s the seller? I want to talk to him about the price.”
Meshulam burst out laughing. “A guy who’s got Meshulam needs to talk prices? I already talked to him and I took him down and everything’s settled and you’re going to give me my money back when you start to earn something.”
4
A YEAR PASSED. The birds migrated and returned and my minibus — packed with bird-watchers from Scandinavia and Germany, from Holland and America—followed after them, from the Hula Valley to the Dead Sea, the Beit She’an Valley, and the southern Arava. My new business was flourishing and I had already succeeded in paying back a large part of the loan to Meshulam—after much argument.
During that time I corresponded with Liora. Her letters and life were far more interesting and entertaining than mine. We planned another visit. This time she would come alone.
“Now I’m a student of photography,” she announced. “Until they bring me into the family business I’m trying out all kinds of other things.”
I took her to photograph ibexes at Hever and Mishmar creeks, vultures at David Creek, and some rare owl at Arugot. We drove around a lot. We hiked a lot. We slept in a pup tent that filled up with love. She told me she had missed me, that she thought about and dreamt of that night when cranes had flown overhead and we had lain beneath them.
I told my mother and Yordad that I “had a girlfriend.” I told them that I intended to bring her home and present her to them. Yordad gathered his courage, phoned my mother, and told her that in his opinion this was serious and that they should spare me having to do a repeat performance. She agreed, and came for her first visit since she had left home. Benjamin, who was then a medical student, also made an effort and joined us.
“Let’s sit in the living room,” Yordad said, but we remained in the küche, the large kitchen that was once yours. You eyed Liora, while Yordad only had eyes for you. Afterward he composed himself, apologized, and said, “Liora, you really look like one of the family”
She smiled. “Your son didn’t warn us.”
Indeed, until that day the similarity between Liora and my mother, brother, and Yordad was known only to me. Now I enjoyed watching it work them over. They regarded one another, looked at her again, grew excited. A small and pleasant cloud rose up above them and blushed near the ceiling.
Benjamin left after an hour, and Liora and I a short while after that. “Why don’t you stay awhile, Raya?” Yordad said to my mother, but she left with us and declined my offer to drive her home. “I’ll go home on foot,” she said. “It’s not far.”
Liora returned to America, and about two months later I went there—my first and last trip abroad—to meet her parents and her brother Emmanuel. We came back to Israel a married couple. Liora never photographed ibexes again, nor did she go bird-watching. She set up the Israeli branch of the family business, succeeded brilliantly bought us a home, got pregnant, learned Hebrew quickly, and, with the same speed she amassed money and words, she lost her fetuses. My two children died in the grave of her womb one after the other and at the exact same age, after a pregnancy of twenty-two weeks.
I remember the slap of the doctor’s words — that very same old Vogelkundler who, several years earlier, had shown me the best bird-watching spots. After the first miscarriage he told us, “It was a boy,” and after the second, in monstrously bad Hebrew that mirrored the horror he was describing, he told us, “This boy was a girl,” as if hinting at something full of portent but without explaining its meaning.
“Why does he tell us?” I fumed. “Did anyone ask him to? It’s a good thing he didn’t tell us their names, and where they would have studied, and in which units they would have served in the army”
Liora brushed out her hair slowly in front of the mirror. It was impossible to detect anything in her face but fatigue; her beauty had actually increased. Cascades of copper and gold flowed between the black bristles of her hairbrush. We both regarded her, I in profile, she head-on. And then our reflected gazes met and Liora smiled forgivingly, as mothers smile at the sight of their tiny sons angry for the very first time.
She turned her fair and beautiful face toward me, the face of a queen, I thought. Ivory studded with sapphires and crowned with copper and gold. I felt the mirror’s affront, its pain: until that moment it had held the entirety of her beauty, and now, all at once, it had been emptied.
I said, “Maybe you’d like to stay with your parents for two or three weeks?”
She said, “My home is here, and my work and my office are here. You are here, too.”
My mother—I ran away from our house in Tel Aviv to see her in Jerusalem for a few hours — said, “Liora is a strong woman, as you already know, but when strong people crack the break is larger and the shards are smaller.”
“But maybe something’s wrong with her?” I asked.
“Don’t blame Liora,” she said. “Maybe it’s something of mine I passed on to you. Don’t forget that we had a miscarriage, too.” She put her hand on mine. “Do you remember how we would vomit together every morning, you and I?”
“Sure, I remember,” I said, smiling. “And I’m not blaming anyone, Mother, not her, not myself, not you. I just want to try to understand what’s happened.”
“Go back to her now,” she said. “It’s not good to leave a woman alone in such a situation.”
I went back. Liora had already pieced her tiny shards together so that nothing at all was discernible from the outside. She was as straight-backed and handsome as ever, her skin smooth and pure, her brushed hair whispering like fire, and her clear eyes quiet. She did not ask where I had been and did not scold me for leaving her alone, but when we sat to drink tea she told me she had no intention of getting pregnant again.
I said perhaps she should consult other doctors, but she cut me off “There’s nothing wrong with me,” she said.
I asked, “What are you trying to say? That the problem is with me? I mean, you did get pregnant.”
Liora grew angry “I don’t ever try to say anything, Yair. Whatever I have to say I say without trying.”
Later, I lay next to her, put my arms around her, tried to calm her with gentle words. She stood up and leaned over me from her full height. “Each one of us is absolutely fine. It’s the two of us together that’s the problem.” She wrapped herself in the large sheet that until that day had covered us both, took her pillow—Liora uses a particularly soft pillow; mine gives her a neckache—and moved to the bedroom that from that day forth became her own.
I did not protest, and in retrospect I think she was right. Even then she was always right. Once a month she would visit me in my room for her “treatment”—�
��To keep my complexion looking good,” she said— while I, I must admit, was grateful and even happy, then insulted and angry, because afterward she would get out of bed and return to her own room.
“It’s not polite,” I told her after her next “treatment.” “You act like those men that women complain about: you come and then you go.”
“I come? Don’t flatter yourself.”
“So why do you go? Why don’t you stay until the morning?”
“It’s too hot in bed with you.”
Who was this son, who was this daughter that were not born to us? And if they had been born, would they have looked alike? Taking into consideration that spluttering doctor’s diagnosis that one was a boy and his brother a girl, and taking into consideration the difference in their ages—exactly two years —I can only surmise and wonder. Even now, sitting on the wooden deck that Tiraleh, my luvey built for me in my new home, I imagine them as suddenly they take shape from molecules of air and view, becoming real in the transparent void as less transparent images. They do not float in it like fish, nor hover like winged creatures; although there is no solid ground for their feet, they walk as though there were.
About one thing I have no doubts: had they been born, they would have been good friends. It is a fact that they always visit me together, never separately He is two years older than she, and she— sharper-witted and more mercurial—is exactly those same two years younger than he. They always stand close to each other and are occupied with the same thing, like Siamese twins joined by a shared matter of interest. They argue, gaze at something in the distance, call each other’s attention to something with pointed fingers.
I do not give them names. It is enough foolishness that I conjure them before my eyes. Anyway, a name requires a familiar body upon which it can be hung, but these two—they are always changing. Sometimes they are like my parents and my wife and my brother—fair and thin and tall of stature—and sometimes like me, dark and short, though never one of each kind. They never have facial features. I sense all their movements, I hear their voices, but I do not see their faces.
“Why weren’t you born?” I ask them, and answer myself: perhaps this is simply happenstance, a case of being thwarted by the hand of fate, or perhaps their mother was right, that any mixture of mine and hers—home, child, work, sleep—was doomed to fail.
5
LIORA INHERITED her beauty from her father and her charm from her mother. He is the president of Kirschenbaum Real Estate in New York, and she is the owner of Kirschenbaum Pastries in New Rochelle. Other than parents Liora has an older brother, Emmanuel, whom I have already mentioned, the father of six daughters and the director of business operations for Kirschenbaum Real Estate on the East Coast: Boston, Washington, Long Island, New York City A long time ago he was a wild young man, fond of sailing and food and drink and expensive clothing. Today he wears the simple black suit and white shirt of a Hasidic Jew, his eyes and shoulders downcast, his voice soft and his gait a hurried shuffle as befitting a repentant Jew Still, his badgering has remained constant: back then he wore me out with discussions of designer shoes and boat engines, while these days it’s contributions to settlers and hidden messages in the Scriptures.
Liora does not believe that a person can change. “It’s all a big act,” she says about her brother. “He’s just as much of a pain in the ass as he ever was, and these ugly new clothes of his are just another way of showing off” She sneered, “Emmanuel is the only Hasidic Jew in the world who wears a tallis made by Versace.” In my opinion she is wrong, though. Emmanuel may still be a boring pain in the ass, but his repentance is real.
Two or three times a year he makes an appearance in Israel on one of his business-Judaism-family trips, and whenever he or some other Kirschenbaum comes, Behemoth and I are dispatched to the airport to bring them to their hotel. That is my job, lest we forget that my salary comes from the Israeli branch of the firm.
The automatic door of the arrivals hall opens for me. I enter and wait. Sometimes I even hold up a sign with KIRSCHENBAUM in two languages. I do not have the cap and uniform of a driver but I am good at acting my role, and the sign infuriates Emmanuel to no end.
Here they are. Emmanuel and his father come out first, then the two wives, both dressed modestly but expensively, Emmanuel’s wife carrying a round hatbox. Sometimes the arriving group is even larger. I do not know them all, but it is always easy to pick them out. Although they are quite different from one another, the Kirschenbaums—even those related to the family by marriage—radiate an ambience of unity and family identity “See how beautiful they are?” Liora scolded me when our wedding photos arrived from America. “Only you look different.”
“That’s the way I am,” I told her. “Even with my own family I’m the one who looks different.”
And after I am presented to the newest Emmanuel or Liora that has been born or has entered the family, I let them all hug and kiss and chatter while I load the luggage into the back of Behemoth or on the roof rack. I climb up, pull this way and that, load bags, tighten straps. Simple tasks imbue me with energy and diligence. I sit behind the wheel and await instructions.
Several days later, when the family and business meetings have ended, Behemoth and I are asked to take them on trips around the country Liora’s parents are easy tourists, happy everywhere I take them and with every explanation I make. Emmanuel, on the other hand, is interested in visiting only one kind of place: Rachel’s Tomb, the Cave of the Machpelah, illegal settlements and outposts in the West Bank. Lately he has also discovered the holy graves of the righteous in the north of the country, which means longer trips for me. I don’t mind driving, but it is hard for me to be in his company for so many hours. On those occasions, Behemoth, usually a roomy vehicle, suddenly becomes solitary confinement on wheels and I become a short-tempered and angry prisoner whose sentence carries no parole.
“I can’t stand these trips with him,” I told Liora.
“That’s the nature of the job. Every tour guide gets stuck with annoying tourists now and again. And don’t forget that this annoying tourist is the director of the company that pays your salary”
6
THE ISRAELI BRANCH of the company that pays my salary is a spacious and elegant office, full of air and sunlight, on Chen Boulevard in Tel Aviv. Liora can make the short walk there from our home on Spinoza Street in her spiked heels. That is how she goes to work each morning: she walks southward on Spinoza, crosses Gordon Street, ignores her admirers on Frishman—the men who wait to watch her firm calves and thighs pass swiftly by each day—then takes a shortcut, turns right, and minces her way up the moderate incline of the shaded boulevard, capping it off with a smooth, quick climb up the twenty-four steps that lead to her office.
Sigal, her stern, pudgy secretary, hands Liora her daily schedule of meetings along with a cup of lukewarm water with lemon juice, tea-hyssop, and honey Then it is straight to work. After all, someone has to earn a living, bring in the money to buy Yair travel clothes that will never travel and knapsacks that will never be carried and shock absorbers that will never be shocked to their fullest and skid plates for Behemoth’s undercarriage that will never get scraped on rocks.
Most of Liora’s clients are wealthy American Jews looking for an apartment in Israel, as well as foreign diplomats and, lately, rich Jews from France and Mexico, whom Emmanuel meets at religious conventions. She finds houses and apartments for them in the finest neighborhoods, in Talbieh and Rehavia in Jerusalem, in Caesarea, in Rishpon and Ashdod and Tel Aviv And since many of them neither live in these homes nor visit them regularly she handles their maintenance and subletting.
Sometimes Sigal sends me to make one of these houses ready for short-term rental or a visit by the owners. I check the water system, the electricity, the air-conditioning, the kitchen appliances; I hire technicians and cleaners; and on occasion I even buy a few food staples for the owners to find in their refrigerators. For all these services the Israeli bra
nch of Kirschenbaum Real Estate pays me a monthly salary, a sum that enables me to entertain an illusion of independence and my wife to write off a few more expenses.
There are several advantages to being married to a woman of means, but there is a disadvantage, too: I am required to make reports, to be measured, to be itemized into the smallest parts of worthiness. If you wish, my life with the wealthy woman you prophesied for me is a long chain of handing in receipts and proof
“You’re wrong!” Liora protested when she heard me make this claim. “I have never asked you why you need something, and I have never said no. But money is something orderly, and those are Itzik’s instructions. You have to know how much is coming in from where and how much is going out to where.”
Itzik is her accountant, a Moroccan-born Prussian with a tiny skullcap in place of a spiked helmet.
“I am a subject, I am a serf, I am a hostage,” I told her. “You and Itzik have the barrel of a wallet pointed at my head.”
“So quit. You’ll get workers’ comp from me and you can be self-employed.”
“There’s not enough work for tour guides these days.”
And because Liora reacted by maintaining a scornful silence, I erupted. “You know why I don’t have work? Because of people like your brother and his settler friends.”
“Don’t make excuses. If there’s no work in tourism, then change professions. I can set you up with loans and guarantees to get started. Like you were given by that friend of your father’s, the contractor who’s built half of Israel. I remember how he looked at me when we met at the party back in Israel after our wedding, how he glared at me with snake eyes.”
She gave me her own venomous glare. “I’ve heard he has a very successful daughter who’s busy building the other half of Israel. Why don’t you go work for them instead of me? Maybe you’ll feel more comfortable with her.”
