by Meir Shalev
I did not react to her latest claim, but secretly I was surprised by the gap between her appearance and her behavior. She was a young and beautiful woman, not the kind of beautiful that parches your throat or weakens your knees, but definitely the kind that gladdens your soul. Nothing in her smile or her gait or her demeanor gave any indication of the wrath and misgivings nesting in her heart.
I considered for a moment, then told her that according to the blueprints prepared by the surveyors, the string she had set up was not exactly the border, but in fact had nibbled off a bit of her own land. Her husband, who had come out to listen to our argument, could not resist smiling, and the fury of the young wife rose to new decibels of shouting. She was fed up with “all kinds of new people with money” who came to the village and “interfered with our lives.”
Her husband said softly, “He’s not interfering with you at all, or me either.”
This made her even angrier. “Whose side are you on, anyway, his or mine?!”
They returned to their home, and I sat on a large stone and listened to the sounds around me. The rapid-fire shooting was a woodpecker on the trunk of the neighbors’ Persian lilac tree. What sounded like the stealthy footsteps of a murderer in the underbrush were actually blackbirds pecking at fallen leaves. The raucous laughter belonged to a large and brilliantly colored member of the kingfisher family—which one, I did not know—and the loudest noises of all were those of the jays, puzzling birds: I am never able to discern whether they are fighting or playing, cursing or gossiping.
The sun set. From the nearby field, high-pitched shrieks arose. I stood up and approached to see a flock of birds on the ground. Their bodies were a brownish-grayish yellow and slightly larger than that of the pigeon, their legs long, and they shrieked like mad and pranced about with all their energy, welcoming the night with a ceremony of dance.
The blackbirds sounded their last alarms, the darkness deepened, and the first howls of the jackals rose from the hill. Suddenly I recalled how we would hear them in Jerusalem, right near the edge of our neighborhood. There was a pack of jackals nearby, and a second would answer them, sometimes even a third, farther off, whose voices could be heard in the space between the other two packs. I asked you why and about what they howled and you told me that they were not like humans, who expend so much energy on nonsense: animals are very logical creatures. There is an explanation for their every behavior, and packs of jackals, you said, announce to one another where they are and where they plan to search for prey “Otherwise they will spend all night fighting instead of hunting for food.” I loved those little nature lessons of yours. It felt to me as though you, too, had had some teacher in your childhood, someone who taught you, someone whose lessons you loved to listen to.
I went back inside the house. The camping mattress lay on the floor, obediently inflated, and I stripped off my clothes and sprawled across it, closing my eyes. Outside, both winds you promised me were blowing: one in the large trees and a different one in the small trees. I drifted off to sleep and awakened again and again, once because of the “small, common, and hairy” owl, whose voice infused me with mystery and magic: the sounds were so uniform, so hollow, and the spaces between them so precise and measured that they brought on a pleasant sort of pain. Another time it was because I was hearing terrifying death rattles. I went outside and walked toward the source of them and found it was the breathing of a barn owl that lived in the attic of the secretariat building. I returned home, lay down, and did not fall asleep. You were right: the thin scratching overhead was pigeons walking about. Me-shulam had been right, too: the weak creaking from outside was the teeth of caterpillars in the fig tree. The pigeons would have to be banished, the holes filled, the fig tree uprooted and a new one planted in its place.
Sounds rose from over the boundary as well; nor was I mistaken about them: the neighbors were making love there, the sounds so clear that they must be doing it on the porch or even right in the garden. While he was silent, her moans were like the pleasant sostenuto of a violin as it crescendos, ending not in a loud cry but a small sigh of resignation. They made it easy for me to imagine the pleasantness of the press of her thighs and the smoothness of her neck and the soft sweetness of her sex. Let her draw strings and establish boundaries: a woman who resonated like that under her lover’s bow could never be a bad neighbor, no matter how hard that neighbor tried.
The house itself also emitted noises, becoming a sound box, a memory box. Some of the noises were clear and accidental: shutters in the wind, a door banging its lintel. Others were regular and harder to identify or define: perhaps a discussion between bricks doomed to live next to one another their whole lives; or perhaps of other times and people, old recordings, words uttered and left behind by those long departed— a man and a woman, the dream sighs of children, a baby’s cries; perhaps light once soaked up into the walls now wishing to escape as a tone.
I listened, I learned, I sorted, I committed to memory There was no blaming the neighbors’ apartment here. This was your house, breathing around you, expanding, teeming, contracting, enwrapping. The ground, which here is not corseted with cement and straitjacketed with asphalt, shifts in a slow, never-ending dance, while we—the houses, the trees, the people, the animals—are carried about in its arms, moving on its thin outer crust.
3
EVER SINCE her divorce, Tirzah has had no home of her own. She left the house they shared to her husband when they split up. “First of all because I felt sorry for him. And second of all, if you can get through it without any disputes, so much the better. How many years do we have left to live? Seven good years followed by seven terrible years? Maybe only three, like that poor Robert Louis Stevenson you told me about, who died after finishing building that house of his on the island? So, should we waste the little we have on property and revenge?”
She scrutinized me to discern whether I was catching her drift. “I didn’t mind him taking the house, making his day All I cared about was getting rid of him, getting him out of my sight. I don’t want to see him or hear him or feel him ever again.”
And now?”
Now she did not have a home. She had her car and her rooms: a room in the Tel Aviv offices, a room in a hotel in Haifa, a room in a hotel in Beersheba, and a room in the large house belonging to her father in the Arnona neighborhood of Jerusalem.
“What if you entertain a guest now and then?”
“You can speak your mind, Iraleh. You mean a one-night stand? A man for a night? A week? Is that what you call a now-and-then guest?”
“You know …”
“No. I don’t entertain guests now and then. Not for a night and not for two. It’s been ages. Women can live for quite a while without a man,” she said, then suddenly smiled broadly “But Meshulam, you’ll be surprised to hear, he entertains women sometimes.”
“I’m not surprised at all. Where does he sleep with them?”
“He doesn’t. They come and then they leave and then the sleeping part he does alone, in Gershon’s bed.”
“That’s strange.”
“What? That they don’t sleep over?”
“No. That your father sleeps in Gershon’s bed.”
“Nothing strange about it. Meshulam is the simple type of bereaved father. Apart from attending the annual Memorial Day service at the military cemetery, he doesn’t do anything. He didn’t even put out one of those albums in Gershon’s memory And that’s a pity because Gershon left behind a few phenomenal chemistry projects he worked on in high school and at the Weizmann Institute summer camp. I suggested to Meshulam that we give out scholarships in his name and he got mad at me. ‘My son’s buried and someone’s going to study and become a professor in his place?’
“Can you understand the guy? He just cries into his handkerchief and tries to make me call him ‘Father’ instead of ‘Meshulam’ like I’m accustomed, and he sleeps in Gershon’s bed. And that doesn’t bother a soul. Not me, not his lady guests, who leave
anyway Not my dead mother. I’d bet it doesn’t even bother Gershon that his father is sleeping in his bed. There’s enough room for two. So I don’t know why it should seem strange to you, of all people.”
That is how the Fried home became a hotel, and Meshulam’s garden shed, formerly his own private spot, had become his home. At first it had been a tiny room for tools and fertilizers and seeds, then a small, off-limits world with a folding bed and an immersion heater and a sugar container and two teacups. Ever since Gershon, he added a single burner and a small refrigerator and an armchair that knows how to lie back and become a bed, and ever since his Goldie, too, the shed has gone from being Meshulam’s private corner to his actual residence. When he gets home from work he goes straight there, rests and reads and prepares himself light meals; then later he lies down, a large handkerchief—the blue of which is lined with faded streaks of salty tears — spread across his face. Only in the evening does he enter the house itself, where he showers and shaves and entertains his lady guests. Afterward, they leave and Meshulam goes to sleep in his son’s bed and listens to the drops falling on the tin sheeting outside. “So much for all that nonsense about rooms and roles and names.”
4
A NEW NOISE awakened me in the morning. I peered out between the spaces in the planks of wood boarding up the window Two trucks were parked next to the house. Their cranes were unloading huge sacks of sand and gravel, bricks and floor tiles and roof tiles on wooden pallets, flexible and solid pipes in different diameters and colors, screens of various thicknesses, circuit boards and plumbing equipment. Two Chinese workers were pushing a cement mixer to the wall. This was Tirzah strewing her toys across her new playground.
I got dressed and went out to the yard. “Good morning, Iraleh,” Meshulam called out to me. “You see, it’s a good thing you pruned and cleaned up. Now we’ll be able to make you a very nice garden here.”
He swaggered, waved his arms, pointed, did what he likes best: told others what to do. “First of all we have to straighten out this slope. We’ll put boulders in here to make a wall and we’ll bring in three or four truck-loads of earth. I’ve got someone who’ll bring deep dirt, doesn’t have even a single seed of weeds in it, and it won’t cost you a penny because he owes me a favor.” He whispered something into his daughter’s ear, and I enjoyed the way their compact, sturdy bodies drew close, the intimacy with which the father planted his lips on the daughter’s temple, the self-assurance with which the daughter lay her hand on her father’s shoulder, stroking him, giving him strength, drawing out his pain.
“I don’t want a big wall there,” I hastened to state before the two could determine my fate. “I prefer two or three smaller terraces, and I want access for Behemoth from the back of the property”
“A single large wall is better,” Meshulam proclaimed. “As for the car, you’ve got the whole street in front. Why come from behind like some robber from the fields? Anyway, we’ve got to hurry because after the summer there will be rain and the entire field will be mud and the trucks with the earth won’t be able to come in close.”
But Tirzah also thought it was a good idea to keep the option of rear access for Behemoth, and she, too, believed that a few small terraces were preferable to one large wall. She suggested I build them myself “Look at him, Meshulam,” she said, pointing at me. “With all the energy this house is pumping into him, isn’t it a good idea to take advantage of it while he’s got it?”
“I don’t have a clue about this, or any experience,” I announced.
“You don’t need either. It’s donkey work that any jackass could handle,” Tirzah said. “I’ll give you my pickup truck. Go find stones, load them in, bring them, and build them. Your body is like mine; it likes and needs to exert itself I’ll take the terraces off the bill when we do the final accounting.”
She advised me, too: a terrace is not a house. It doesn’t require a certain kind of stone chiseled in a certain, unified manner. On the contrary: rough-hewn stones of different sizes and hues lend beauty and personality to the terrace. “And remember,” she called after me, “the pickup has to be able to get back on the road, so don’t overload it and drag it through the dirt.”
The pickup truck that Tirzah loaned me was quite different from the car that Liora had bought me. Rougher, tougher, and on rocky terrain it lifts a rear wheel at every opportunity “But,” as its mistress boasted, “absolutely nothing stops it. It’ll keep running long after your fancy chariot breaks down going over some step.”
I drove it carefully, enjoying the hum of the motor and the stubborn clutch after the smooth automatic gears of Behemoth. My hands grasped the steering wheel in the same place hers did. I felt as if I were wearing an article of her clothing, smelling her scent, imagining the heat of her loins that had been absorbed into the seat and was now rising into me.
Several minutes later, just as I plunged into the blind spot on the other side of the hill, I stopped to poke about in the compartments of the pickup. A person should know exactly who his contractor is, especially if his contractor is a woman. I found a small and shockingly bad collection of songs recorded by military bands, a pair of black sunglasses, clear Vaseline lip balm, a few plastic lighters, a packet of Drum tobacco, a medium-sized Swiss Army knife, a key ring with five keys on it.
“Tell us about yourselves, guys,” I told them. “One by one, please.”
I open the house she’s building for you. I open the Fried home in Jerusalem. I open the offices of Meshulam Fried and Daughter, Inc., and I, the filing cabinet.
And what about you?”
Silence.
I got out of the pickup and opened the back door. Rolling around on the floor were a hard hat and a pair of worn and faded hiking sandals very different from my own. Three bottles of mineral water, too, all of which had been drunk from, and toilet paper, and rubber boots. A straw hat sat on the seat, along with a digital camera, wet wipes, hand cream, and a number of dog-eared novels, all of which had been translated into Hebrew
“I can’t stand reading books written about us,” she told me later. “I prefer reading about other people and lands.” She smiled. “That’s the only question you have for me after poking around my car?”
Behind the seat I found tow straps with professional red shackles, tie-down ropes, an old army jacket with the name STAFF SERGEANT GERSHON FRIED fading on the lapel, and a pair of work gloves. From there I moved to the back, where I found all the tools needed by a stone thief: a crowbar, a pickax, a second pair of gloves. And then—relief! The fifth key fit a locked metal toolbox that contained a few repair tools, a coffee kit, and a sealed Pelican suitcase. I opened that, too: a clean, perfume-scented dress, pressed trousers, two shirts, two pairs of shoes, toiletries, a small bottle of aftershave, another key underwear. My heart—because it had relaxed—now contracted even harder. Where do you go for entertainment, Tiraleh? And with whom? When will you wear this dress with me? And this new damned key, what takes place behind its door?
I put everything back in place and shut the case. I continued on my way, at first along a shallow ravine, bouncing along over the metal bars meant to keep cows from straying, then up a moderately sloping hill to its other side, until finally I reached the small, ruined Arab village I had discovered during my wanderings over a map of the area.
All the buildings had been demolished. Some had caved in on their own; others had fallen victim to explosives training conducted by the army The collecting pool of the spring had been destroyed, but a trickle of water still flowed through a channel that emerged from the thick undergrowth of wild mint and raspberry All around were piles of stones, here and there half a wall still standing, or a stubborn arch upon which was scrawled the graffiti of soldiers on navigational training missions: YALLI’S TEAM; PLATOON FOR THE SICK, TIRED, AND FED-UP;
BORN TO KILL; FLYING TIGER RECONNAISSANCE UNIT. And, as in
every such abandoned village, hedges of prickly-pear bushes, bitter almond trees, grapevin
es crawling on the ground for lack of someone to shape them, prune them, harvest them. Here, too, forsaken fig trees cried out, their leaves drooping and their bloated, unripened fruit bearing witness to the terrible effort of motherhood to pass on the tiniest drops of moisture to the offspring.
Nearby stood several wild plum trees. Their fruit was small and blue and piqued my curiosity Once upon a time they had been grafted with apricots and cultured plums, but many years had passed since they had last been looked after, and the strong understock had overwhelmed the scions and produced shoots and tiny, sour fruit—not sweet and delicious like the cultured plum, but still tempting to the palate thanks to its strangeness. I picked a few to bring to Meshulam because they looked just like the plums in the picture on his bottles of fuica.
Next, I turned to the stones. The selection was large: cleanly hewn stones and simple fieldstones, stones from nearby and stones from far away A few I could identify as limestone, which someone must have brought from the coastal region. Several of the stones were quite ancient. Depressions made by hinges or bolts could be detected in some, evidence of the ways of this land: war, exile, people uprooted and banished, stones abducted, moved from one place and time to another. Perhaps I should take my bird-watchers to observe the flight of these migrating stones: stones from temples, from cemeteries, from bathhouses, stones from the catapult and the walkway, stones rolled from the head of a grave or the mouth of a well, stones that covered and walled and fenced, that served as corner or head or threshold or lintel. Stones from oil presses, milestones, upper and lower millstones. Mosaic stones and stoning stones.
Then, after I had finished selecting and loading them, I nearly fell into a large cistern, the opening to which I had not noticed before. I leaned over and peered into the dark void. Two pigeons, two bluish-gray rock pigeons, flew out from it with a startling beating of wings. I leapt backward. The pigeons rose high in the sky and circled slowly, waiting for me to depart.
