by Meir Shalev
and nails, a razor, and five memorial candles.
“Are you nuts? What are we going to do, shower in mourning?” “It’s nice to shower in the evening with candlelight, and memorial
candles don’t drip and they don’t fall over and they burn for a long time.
And anyway, it’s nice to enjoy yourself and know that others are dead
but you aren’t.”
2
THE SUN SET and Tirzah gave the tractor operator the keys to her pickup truck and told him to take the workers to their lodgings and bring them back in the morning. We were alone.
“Iraleh,” she said, “do you want to inaugurate the new shower I built you outside?”
“Tiraleh,” I said, “do you want to cut a ribbon and sound the trumpets?”
“No, just shower in it the first time.”
“Naked? Outside?”
“You can shower in your clothes if you want, but before you ask any more stupid questions, then yes, with me.”
I watched her while she undressed and opened the faucet, stepped under the stream. Her eyes, which were usually a yellow-green, turned blue under the water. She lifted her face to the flow, passed her fingers through her hair, squeezed her locks, pivoted to face me.
“Aren’t you joining me?” she asked.
I stripped and stepped under the water with her.
“Ever since Gershon, I haven’t showered with you,” she said. Two minutes later she turned off the water—“Jerusalemites can’t stand watching water flow for no reason”—and began soaping me with great purpose, like you bathe a child: behind the ears, the elbows, the “peepot,” the knees, between the buttocks.
“What are you doing?” I chuckled from being tickled and from embarrassment and from pleasure.
“I’m cleaning you, luvey I’m washing away everything that’s gotten stuck to you. Now you clean me like that, too.”
Tirzah’s body is solid and sturdy Her skin is naturally dark, not white with suntanned patches. I soaped her up, first hesitantly, then all over: neck and belly, hands and back. Lengthwise and crosswise, inside and around, front and back. The way I would soap the Double-Ys when they were little and they came to their uncle’s house for the weekend. I shampooed her strong, short hair. I crouched next to her and tapped her ankle and she laughed and presented me with one foot and then the other, like a horse being shod. “I’d remembered what a jerk you are but I’d forgotten how sweet you are,” she said.
Her hand, behind my back, turned the water on again—just a little bit, so that the flow was not full and solid but rather light showers and heavy drops and random, surprising streams. Our bodies overflowed with joy Tirzah pressed against me and said, “The thing I remember best is you standing in the window of your apartment and looking at me and how all at once I loved you.”
“You were ten years old,” I said.
“What do you think, that a ten-year-old girl can’t understand what she’s feeling?” For a moment she fell silent; then she continued. “There was a time when I thought we were brother and sister, that my father had had some old business with your mother. That really turned me on.”
“If we were brother and sister, your father would never have taken such trouble to get us together.”
“Don’t talk logic to me. I knew we weren’t.”
The shadows fled. A westerly wind was blowing, a wet and pleasant shiver. Lingering gooseflesh speckled my luvey’s skin. Our hands roved and settled. Our eyes, our lips tasted and saw We embraced. Between her thighs I felt her wetness; she was wet beneath the wetness of the water and hot beneath its coolness.
“Lie on the floor,” she said. “Until now we’ve been showering and playing around. Now we’ll inaugurate the shower in proper fashion.”
And later, when she rolled over on her back and lay beside me, she informed me that this was how we would inaugurate the new floor and the new roof and the deck and the kitchen, each in its turn. “So that you know it’s me building this house for you, and so that the house knows it, too.
“I could have built it in a single week,” she said. “I could have brought forty craftsmen here, worked on it for six days, and rested on the seventh. But this isn’t the heavens and the seas and it isn’t the trees and the earth and the animals. Here it’s cement and concrete, it’s plaster and loam. Every one of those guys takes days to dry It’s not people, my luvey, and it isn’t God: it’s the materials that hold up the work.”
That was how the thing started and how it continued. And that is the way I remember it now, when the house stands finished and Tirzah has left me and gone away I remember how she built and inaugurated, stage after stage. How she pointed and said, “Let there be a wall” and “Let there be a window” and “Let there be a doorway” and “Let there be a deck.” She built and named, inaugurated and labeled, and moved on to another day.
Chapter Twenty
1
THE VILLAGE is a small and stagnant puddle, every stone disturbing the algae that covers it, and Tirzah and I—and the house that is being created—attract visitors and curious onlookers. There are the polite ones; since I have not yet hung the front door, they knock on the doorpost, stick their heads in, and ask, “May I come in?” And there are the rude ones; since I have not yet hung the front door, they appear and, without saying hello, enter my home as if entering their own. They look around the house and the garden with the quick and knowing eye of a marten; they tally the number of bags of cement mixture, the pipes, the ceiling mesh. In seconds they have incorrectly estimated the budget and the scope of the renovations, and as soon as my gaze rests upon them they withdraw to the underbrush.
They do not anger me. I am a recent arrival, while they are the natives. And in such a place—so old and ripe that the trees are already large and the sidewalks are cracked and weedy and scores have been settled and enmities and loves have lulled—someone new is also a threat. His memories and his experience come from different places and he does not know the local order of importance. Such a person is liable to upset tradition. He needs to be sized up.
Former residents of the house have started to show up, too. The rumor has spread and they come. To investigate, to confirm, to negate, to wonder. A man older than I appeared and asked permission to cut a single lemon from the tree. “My father planted it,” he said. “That’s his fig tree, too. What happened to it? Why don’t you take care of it? Look at the holes in the trunk, thanks to you it’ll die …”
His lips trembled. His eyes skittered, and his mouth, too, from blame to memory: “Those houses over there weren’t built yet, and that road was a dirt trail for carts, and my father would walk from there to the junction because buses didn’t enter the village back then. Over here he made a little cement trough, the only one in the village, and he would bathe my sister and me in it. Where is it? Did you tear it down? Who gave you permission?” And with that he departed.
A young couple suddenly appeared, too. The woman had lived here for half a year as a child and now, just before her wedding, she wished to show the place to her intended. She wanted him to know what had remained and what had disappeared, what had existed and what had not.
She was young, but the dredging up of memories gave her the countenance of the aged. “There was a swing here,” she said, leading him through points of reference that no longer existed. “And this is where we hung laundry … there was a little cement trough here that my father dug up and threw out … this shed wasn’t here back then—there was only space between the columns. This is where we took off our boots and scraped them down in the winter and she would shout at us: Don’t drag in any mud …”
Suddenly she turned to me. “What, are you making it one big room instead of the small rooms?”
“Yes,” I answered shortly
“Why?”
The young man stroked her neck. His fingers spoke love while his palm grew heavy His voice was losing patience. “Let’s go. We’re bothering him.”
; Still, most visitors come out of sheer curiosity They wish to see the ne’er-do-well as he vacillates in the midst of the workers, and the woman of valor—since the time of the committee interview, everyone takes Tirzah for my wife—who orchestrates the work and has already been nicknamed “the whirlwind” by the elders.
Some people ask her advice on matters of building: What’s your opinion, Liora, on insulation bricks? What do you think, Liora, of prefabs? How about thermal plaster? Heated floors? And what about building with wood, Liora? What do you recommend? Finnish pine? Red pine? Treated? Painted? Exposed?
Some people ask for her assistance—Perhaps your Chinese worker can pop over to our place to fix a little something in the kitchen?—while others ask if everything is all right, and even offer advice: they know of a shop with fair and reasonable prices where you can pick up a showerhead, a galvanized gutter pipe, Marseilles tiles, Caesarean marble. They also have a cheap and excellent tiler or plasterer or roofer.
Others offer agricultural advice: how to nurse a dying lemon tree, how to get rid of weeds, how to kill the caterpillar still boring tunnels through the flesh of the fig tree. But I have no need for advice when it comes to gardening; Meshulam is very knowledgeable, and since he does not wish to argue with his daughter over matters of construction, he prefers to concentrate on the garden.
I listen to all my guests, try to remain patient and amicable—who else but me remembers my mother’s advice to Yordad: be nice to them, it saves time—and for that very same reason I am careful to smile abundantly and answer thriftily
The rules are clear. I know nothing about them and they, apart from my profession and the lies Tirzah told at our interview, know the same about me. But they know the people who lived in my house previously the children who grew up there and have since matured. They know the happy occasions that took place there and the painful ones that filled its rooms. Locked in their hearts are the shouts and the laughter, the clinking of forks and glasses, the moans and the sobs that hovered between the walls and flowed out the windows.
“This house could tell many stories,” one of them told me, expecting me to ask. When I did not, he said, “Better you shouldn’t ask,” and departed.
I did not ask. I do not wish to know I simply did what you told me to: I chose my home as you instructed. A small, old house in an old place. A home lived in over the years. I know nothing about the first occupant, and about the last I know only that he left behind four chickens to waste away of hunger and thirst in their prison. That is enough for me.
My young neighbor, too— the one whose wife drew a dividing string between us — showed up unexpectedly for a visit carrying a large, full bowl of perfectly cubed watermelon. The precise red cubes were so chilled that dew beaded on them. Only a woman who takes care that matters should be clear can cut watermelon so flawlessly
A gift from my wife,” he said. “How are the renovations coming along?”
“Everything’s fine.”
Her voice rose, broke in: “Did you give it to him? Don’t forget to return the bowl.”
He rose to his feet. Nonplussed, he picked up the bowl even though there were still several cubes of watermelon inside. “Well, I’ll be seeing you.”
“Thank you very much,” I called after him. “And send my regards and thanks to your wife.”
He turned his face back toward me. “You should know, she’s really fine!”
“I do know It’s a little hard to get used to a new neighbor all of a sudden. Tell her that I’m not so bad either.”
To myself I added, “And tell her that I hear you two at night and that I am serene and peaceful. A woman who makes love to her husband like she does really is fine.”
The local building inspector showed up as well. Young, short, energetic—his eyes were nice and happy, but his smile was evil. Where are the plans? He wants to see the plans. The plans are at the offices of the regional council? Really? So how is it that they didn’t show them to him there? Yes, he sees the building permit, but why does the signature appear here and not there? Suddenly the telephone in his pocket rang and he said, “Hello, Mr. Fried,” and “I didn’t know it was you, Mr. Fried,” and “No, there’s no need for you to phone the head of the regional council, Mr. Fried,” and then he took off
Mr. Fried’s daughter said, “I think Meshulam stands over on that hill with a pair of binoculars and watches what goes on here.”
And another inspector turned up: Liora’s brother, Emmanuel. Normally I pick him up and drive him around the country on his visits, but this time he appeared by surprise in a taxi.
“Let me introduce you to my contractor,” I said.
“Pleased to meet you,” said Tirzah.
Emmanuel circled the house, then entered it.
“Watch where you walk,” Tirzah told him. “We’re laying pipes today”
He had the stooped back and softened step and voice of a born-again Jew, but he was still as feisty and direct in his speech as ever. He said he had wanted to know if the story Liora had told him was true, and when he saw it with his own eyes he wished to know about the costs and the source of the money
Meshulam, who apparently had spied him through his binoculars, turned up a few minutes later.
“What business is it of yours?” he said. “The money’s his.”
“Who are you?” Emmanuel asked.
A friend of the Mendelsohn family And you?”
“His brother-in-law,” Emmanuel said. “Liora Mendelsohn is my sister.”
“Friends you choose,” Meshulam said, “but brothers-in-law you get without asking. Now I remember. I saw you at the wedding party of Iraleh and your sister. Back then you weren’t the tarragon of virtue you are now You came from America with a pair of snakeskin shoes on your feet and two floozies on each arm.”
“How much did you pay for this place?” Emmanuel asked, turning to me.
“Enough.”
And where did you get ‘enough’?”
“Listen, I’m going to explain to you where this money came from in a way that you can understand it,” Meshulam told him. “This guy bought a Shabbat fish in the market and found a pearl inside it.”
I escorted Emmanuel to his taxi. Before settling himself inside it, he warned me: “Just so you know, this house is never going to give you a return on the investment.”
“It’s not an investment,” I told him. “It’s a gift.”
“From who?”
“From me.”
“And that fish was Elijah the prophet!” Meshulam shouted after him. “And why don’t you buy yourself something like this, too. It’s very healthy to get presents from oneself”
And there were others who came to see the miracle himself: the buyer. Me. The man who, in such difficult times, did not bargain, who paid the full price in one payment and bought himself a wreck that could have been purchased for less. Naturally those visitors mocked me, but they also locked me in their gaze, studied me, so that they would know how to recognize others like me, so that they would not pass up a similar opportunity
Don’t expect other such buyers, I said in my heart. There is no other person whose mother determined his profession, who introduced him to his wife, and who, during her lifetime, gave him money to buy a place of his own: Take it, Yair, while my hand is warm and I am still alive to give it to you. A home that will wrap you up inside it, protect you, revive you. A home that will build you as you build it, and you will be grateful for each other, and the two of you will heal each other, and you will change each other’s roof and floor, and build walls and open windows and doors.
2
IN THE MIDDLE of the day, without any prior warning, another guest appeared: Benjamin. He parked behind the workers’ pickup truck and shouted, “Yair!”
I came out to him.
“So this is the house everyone’s talking about?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Who bought it for you?”
“I did.”
/> And who’s paying for the renovations?”
“Me again.”
“Where did you get the money?”
“Do you want the real answer or the answer that will make you feel better?”
He scrutinized me. We had not seen each other since the end of the mourning period for my mother, and the change that the house had brought about in me surprised him.
“You’re looking good,” he said. “Of course I want the truth. Liora already told me that she didn’t give you the money and she’ll be happy to know the answer as well.”
“I understand that the two of you are worried.”
“Of course we are. Each for his own reasons.”
“Meshulam loaned me the money to buy the house,” I said. “And Tirzah is renovating it for me as a gift.”
“That’s what I thought,” my brother said, relieved. “But Liora actually had a few different ideas.”
“You see,” I said, “on the outside you look real slick, but in fact you’re pretty gullible. Now do you want to know the real truth?”
His face darkened. “Mother gave it to you?” He fixed her blue eyes on me. “Answer me!” He drew close to me. “And no more tricks. Is she the one who gave you the money?”
“Yes,” I said. “A few months before she died. She summoned me, put a check in my hand, and said, Go find yourself a home. A place of your own.”
“How big was the check?”
“Not so big. About eight hundred square feet worth. Exactly the size of this house.”
“I knew it,” Benjamin said. “And I thank you for being frank.” Then he added, “That’s quite a nice gift. Surprising. Not only for the one who received it but for the one who didn’t.”
“Absolutely” I said. “Surprising and how!”
