by Meir Shalev
She turned her face to mine and drew near. “Of course he did. He wants to bring us together again, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s already told you that, too.”
“He has.”
“You can’t take that away from the guy: with Meshulam, his mouth and his heart are one and the same.”
Tirzah did not pull pipes from the walls or pound on them. Instead, she tapped my head lightly, mockingly, with the tips of her fingers. People and images jumped from the furrow she had opened in my skull.
“We’re still alike,” she said, “and we’re growing old in the same way Same hair that will never thin out, same first gray hairs, same asymmetrical laugh lines by our mouths. But my deeper one is on the right side and yours is on the left.”
She tapped my belly, too. “And I don’t have this little spare tire. Punch me, see how hard my stomach is.”
I did not punch her. I prodded her stomach with the open palm of my hand.
“What’s this touchy-feely stuff?” Her eyes were laughing. “Hit me.”
I made a fist and punched her stomach lightly
“Harder!” And when I did not respond she said, “I am willing to take on this renovation, but on the condition that I work directly with you. If you bring in an architect or your wife shows up with all kinds of ideas or you sic an interior detonator on me, it’s good-bye. Your contractor will leave.”
“Okay” I said.
“Because we’re not building here, we’re just doing a refitting. We’ll take it in a little here and let it out a little there, we’ll shorten here and lengthen a few stitches there. That’s why you don’t need a fashion designer; a tailor who knows his stuff is enough.”
From the street came the sound of shouting. “What is this? What are you people doing here?” Two men I did not recognize appeared. “Who are you?” they demanded.
“Meshulam,” Tirzah called from the window, “will you please see what they want?”
Meshulam walked over to the two and said, “Good morning. And who might you be?”
“We’re members of the village secretariat.”
“Pleased to meet you. We’re the buyers.”
“What buyers? Who’s buying?”
“This house is for sale, right?” Meshulam pointed at me. “Well, that’s the buyer.”
“But you can’t just start working on the place. You haven’t even bought it yet!”
“We’re just giving all the thorns a little haircut. We wanted to see what the walls of this place look like, not just the roof. Anyway, it’s at our expense—we won’t take it off the price. So, good-bye now Please let us look around in peace and decide.”
“Come, Iraleh, let’s continue,” Tirzah said. “Tell me what you want to do.”
“I want the outside walls to stay as they are,” I said hastily, almost as if reciting, “and the entrance to stay where it is. I want bigger windows for the view And mostly I want peace and quiet. No leaks from the roof, no clogs in the drains, no cracks in the walls, faucets that actually open and close. Everything should be strong and tight and working properly”
“That’s all? I thought you’d ask for something special. A skylight, maybe? A bidet in the living room?”
And I want shade and wind where I need them and sunlight when I want it and lots of view should come into the house.”
“That sounds better. I suggest that here, instead of a large window, we knock down the whole wall and build you a deck.”
“Tiraleh,” Meshulam said, “before you start building him decks, are you willing to listen to what a professional has to say? Get rid of this wreck of a house and build him a beautiful new home.”
“First of all I want to hear him say he’s buying the place, that he’s serious,” Tirzah said.
“I’m buying it.”
“Good job. I’ll set up an appointment for you with our lawyer. He can represent you in your dealings with the village and the Israel Lands Authority and anybody else. I’ll send an engineer out here to have a look at the foundations and the walls.”
“To knock a place down you need a bulldozer, not an engineer,” Meshulam said. “I want a new house built here.”
“What’s this ‘I want’ stuff, Meshulam?” Tirzah said. “You can want in your own house, not here!”
Meshulam sighed. “You’re going to have to replace everything for him. You understand? You can’t leave any of the old stuff here. Floor tiles —new; roof tiles —new; windows, doors, solar heater—all new Get rid of the wiring and the plumbing, put new pipes and wires in. Faucets too, and central fuses and electrical outlets, and everything will need to be scraped down to the cement. Don’t let him skimp here.”
We went out to the backyard and moved away from the house. The freshly mowed lawn exposed the ground and brought an antique charm back to the house, even a hint of joy and a smile. “Here,” Tirzah said, “this area between the carob trees, where the tractor can’t reach, should be cleaned out.”
She walked in among the trees, raising her knees high above the thicket and trampling weeds with her work boots. “This is just a camp for nettles and snakes, and a real fire hazard. We’ll clean here, fix things up a bit, trim the carob trees, and then we’ll have a relaxing little haven here.”
“You asked me before if there was something special I wanted …” I said, feeling my face burn.
“Like what?”
“I want a shower out here, in addition to the one in the house.”
“No problem, Iraleh; an outdoor shower is a wonderful thing and very easy to build.”
“Something simple: a pipe with a showerhead for the head and a few tiles for the feet and a screen to serve as a shoulder-height wall. That way nobody will be able to see my butt but I’ll be able to see the view”
Our gazes locked suddenly, each of us understanding what the other remembered. Me, her, Gershon, spraying water on one another in the garden of the Fried home. Meshulam and his Goldie had gone to visit relatives. Goldie had said, “I left food for you in the kitchen.” Meshulam had said, “Behave yourselves, children.” The three of us stripping, touching, probing. Our “peepots” and hers, so different and yet so similar. Touching and probing, touching and probing: us boys — her; she and he—me; she and I—him. Holding tight, squeezing, discovering, pressing close, breathing.
“We can build it over here,” Tirzah said, “and the water will drain off to the lemon tree. That’ll make it happy Are you still here?” she asked the tractor operator, who had left his equipment behind and trailed after us, keeping at a distance of hope and fear. “Take some money and bring us something to eat from the grocer’s. Bread, cottage cheese, anchovies, a few vegetables.”
The tractor operator returned a few minutes later, handed her a receipt and change, and announced, “There were no anchovies!”
Tirzah took a Styrofoam cooler filled with cold water from the back of the pickup truck, along with a few plastic cups and plates. I brought the camping stove and the coffeepot from Behemoth. We prepared the first meal in the yard of my new home.
“What are you standing there for?” Meshulam said to the tractor operator. “Come join us.”
Tirzah said, “Our engineer will be free in a few days, and then it will take him another couple of days to prepare the plans and quantities.”
“Okay” I said. “I’m in no rush.”
“And I think it would be nice if you would take a few pictures of the house and show them to your mother.”
2
THE HOME I have been living in for twenty years, in the neighborhood known as Workers’ Lodgings No. 7, between Spinoza and Reines streets in Tel Aviv, belongs to my wife, was created in her image, and is her ally Once the house was actually two adjacent flats on the same floor, but when Liora found them and purchased them and connected them in a deal that was particularly complicated and successful—and highly enjoyable, according to her—they became one large apartment.
The place obeyed her and gave in
to her and allowed itself to be connected and changed, to have appendages added and tissues removed, and in no time it forgot the modest families of workers who’d lived in it once upon a time and became the home of a rich and beautiful woman from the state of New York. Liora installed sanitary fixtures and electrical appliances that had been flown in from America, showers with jet sprays hidden in the walls, silent switches, double glazing. She knocked down and erected, she pried open and sealed, and quickly the house left behind its former life and was reinvented in the image of its mistress. The few things it contained that I liked disappeared: the old cupboards in a niche in the wall were removed and the dish-drying cabinet with the shuttered doors and the wooden slats at the bottom was banished from its place above the sink, just like its netted brother, the vegetable cabinet, was uprooted from the patio. The door between the bedroom and the living room vanished, replaced with bricks and plastered over as though it had never existed. Electric jalousies were brought in to take over for the old wooden blinds.
The doors to both bathrooms, which had nice peepholes that stirred wonder and provoked conjectures, were exchanged for new ones. But when Liora served demolition papers for the sinks that lay behind them, I was spurred into action: “Not those!” I said, and I did not give in. They were spacious sinks, with short, thick pedestals and wide edges, suited to me in shape and character.
“I don’t care if they are old and plain!” I cried in a storm of emotion that astonished even me. “Please, not them too!” And because anyway Liora did not unite the bathrooms of the two apartments, as if she knew that one day one would become hers and the other mine, she said, “I had no idea they were so important to you,” and she left one intact. That is how I came to have my own bathroom, and in the morning, when I shave with a demarcating string she gave me to tie around my neck—“You need to establish a boundary between your beard and your fur”—I feel that in the alien and hostile place in which I live, deep in enemy territory, if you will, I have an ally It is only a sink, but when I lay my shaving gear and my soap on it—I like plain soaps, Liora likes them perfumed—it turns into my own private space.
Combining the two flats created seven rooms, and when I wondered aloud what they were for—after all, we have no children and apparently never will, and the few guests that visit us do not tend to sleep over— she reminded me that in her family’s home in America there are eight large rooms and two large garages for storage and one large basement, even though only she and Emmanuel grew up there.
I said, “Liora, this is not America and we have no children,” to which she responded in anger: Was I blaming her? Were only parents of children permitted to enjoy a spacious apartment with many rooms? Was I trying to hurt her? Was that what I thought of her “after those two miscarriages”?
“There are some people who apportion the rooms of a house according to their functions, or the people who occupy them,” she said. “I apportion them according to need and time. Just like we change, so will they But I don’t expect you to understand any of this.”
And that is how I found myself in a house that is a sworn and hostile enemy, a house that appears to contain bedrooms and offices and guest rooms but that, in fact, has morning rooms and evening rooms, rooms for solitude, rooms for fun and rooms for splitting up, rooms for arguing and rooms for making up. And between them, small, protean no-man’s-lands, border control, and roadblocks.
There are rooms, too, for wandering when Liora is not around, rooms that carry the scent of the changing states of her mood, for investigating the deep gashes made by her fingernails in doors. In spite of her tall, slim figure, she often reminds me of a male bear strolling through the woods of her home, leaving proof of her size on the doorpost-trunks and of her power in her footprints, and on the mirrors she etches testimonies to her beauty
I, too, have left signs behind. The rooms have become camera obscuras on whose walls are hung a permanent exhibition of my image: shrunken, upside down. I have been documented. I have been photographed. I have been put in storage. I have been copied a thousand times. In copious pictures of arguments, in rare scents of sex, in extensive recordings of silence. My shouts have been absorbed in the walls; her whispers ricochet.
3
WORKERS’ LODGINGS NO. 7 is a small and pleasant neighborhood, but the house itself stirs up a certain malaise in me. At first it seemed as though someone else were living there with us, just on the other side of the wall or inside a closet. Later it became a physical malaise: in summer, the walls emit heat, which Liora does not feel, and in winter the cold wafts off them, which Liora refuses to admit. In the end, my apprehension is palpable, the kind I get from eating food that is not fresh: undeniable pressure on the diaphragm when I enter the house and unmistakable relief when I leave it.
Even my morning walk to the local grocer expands my lungs and straightens my posture. I leave home, place the remains of yesterday’s bread on the fence, and go to buy myself a fresh loaf of rye and day-old salted white cheese. If you want, my life can be divided not only by women and places but by four different grocers: these days it’s the village grocer, recently it was Shai’s grocery on Gordon Street in Tel Aviv, before that, Violette and Ovadia’s place in the Beit Hakerem neighborhood of Jerusalem, and even earlier than that, Zolti’s on Ben Yehuda Street in Tel Aviv This is the way I return, heavier with each step, climbing the stairs and thinking, Everyone else descends to hell, only I ascend to it. I wonder whether this time I will manage to enter the apartment without incurring the wrath of the front door. When Liora opens it, the door swivels on its hinges in obedient silence, but with me it makes itself heard, a groan of sorrow upon my arrival and a clarion call of joy upon my departure, often accompanied by the shriek of the alarm.
Even when we had nothing more than a simple lock, before Liora’s art collection and the safe and the surveillance cameras and the sensors and the alarm sirens, the key would jam, the door would refuse to open. When that first happened I was confounded. I would wait outside for her to arrive, for her to listen with amused patience to my grievances; then she would take the key from my hand and open that obstinate door. The second time I tried using a little force; for weeks afterward I could hear her recounting and complaining—to herself, to Benjamin, to her family during their biweekly phone conversations: “He broke the key in the door. He has no idea how strong he is.”
“He is very strong,” says Benjamin, always quick to exploit an opportunity A slow, bright smile flitted between them suddenly, lifting off, arcing over my head, landing, like one of the winged documents on the screen of Yordad’s computer. I wondered: could it be that Benjamin and Liora are sleeping together? It is common knowledge that similarity between two people creates mutual desire; if the matter has occurred to me, it has certainly occurred to them.
My brother added, “By eight he was already lugging groceries for our mother, and tins of whitewash up the stairs.” He also has a good memory, but why are they my memories? She would skip ahead of me carrying only the paintbrushes or a bouquet of gladioluses or a carton of eggs “so they won’t break,” while I followed behind, eager to please, making great efforts and turning red in the face, lugging tins of whitewash, oil for the heater, baskets full of vegetables up to the second-floor entrance. “Without stopping, Yair. Let’s see you make it all the way to the top in one go …” And how you praised my strength: “Such a boy! Small, but so strong, a real ox-rocks!”
Later, too, after she had left us and gone to live in her own place, she would ask me sometimes to come move “something heavy” She and Benjamin would drink tea in her kiichlein while I dragged the large mattress to the verandah and beat it, wondering whether there actually was another man. I thought, Is my pounding erasing his scent or deepening it, making it penetrate?
I pass through the electric gates at the entrance to the courtyard and climb the stairs. I have already stated that I do not like this house, and the house, I must say does not like me. It senses me immediately,
shines a light on me, fixes its mistrustful electronic eyes on me: Who is this person walking up the stairs? Who is coming to disturb the mistress? I remove the key from my pocket and remind myself of what is to come: open the door, walk in, quickly punch in the secret code and neutralize the alarm. But Liora’s home has already aimed a scrutinizing lens at me, has captured my image and compared it to another husband, a better one, who should have taken her for his wife, and it raises a voice of protest and horror.
“You don’t punch the code in right,” Liora responded to my complaint, patiently inclining her head over mine in the way of yekke fathers and tall mothers.
“I don’t even get to the stage of punching in the numbers. Don’t you understand, it doesn’t even let me get near.”
“No, I don’t.”
Once I asked her to stand next to me to see with her own eyes how her house mistreats me. We positioned ourselves in front of the door, I took out my key and said, “See for yourself,” and the house behaved as it is supposed to: it waited for me to begin, gave me time to punch in the four-digit code, informed me that I had made a mistake, and granted me time and a chance to correct it, to improve myself, to become a better husband and resident.
“You see?” Liora said.
I said, “The door opened because you’re here. It opened for you, not for me.”
She said, “You’re crazy, Yair.”
I said, “What do you mean, crazy? Can’t you see that your house hates me?”
She said, “As if you liked it.”
But that night she came, opened the wings of the sheet in which she had wrapped herself, and slid in, sprawling next to me.
“Has a month already passed since your last ‘treatment’?” I asked.
“Just about,” she replied.
A surprise. She had brought along her especially soft pillow
“Does this mean you’re going to stay here and sleep with me?”
“If you don’t press up against me too hard.”
