by Meir Shalev
“I don’t like gravel under tiles,” Steinfeld complained. “Sand sits quiet. Gravel I can hear like this: kkkhhhh … kkkhhh … kkkhhh …”
Tirzah laughed, but this time she did not give in. “First of all, you won’t be living in this house. And second of all,” she said, pointing to me, “he won’t hear the kkkhhh … kkkhhh … You are the only person in the world who can hear it.”
Steinfeld muttered something, then acquiesced, and Tirzah said, “Never mind. You got your way about the tiles and I got mine about what goes underneath. Your victory can be seen, but mine can’t.”
Meshulam filled with pride. “You see that? You see how she’s fighting for you? By the teeth of her skin! By the skin of her nails!”
“That’s what makes you happy?” Tirzah asked her father later. “That your daughter, who has built hotels and hospitals and industrial centers and shopping malls and highway interchanges, and who wins battles against all the bureaucrats in the Defense Ministry and the Housing Ministry and the Transportation Ministry hands down, managed to bend Steinfeld the tiler to her will?”
“Don’t move!” Meshulam said. “You know you got two gray hairs over your forehead?”
“What’s going to be with you, Father? What kind of nonsense have you got running through your head?”
“Oh, that’s beautiful. Now I can finally rest in peace.”
“It’s bad enough that I cry over those gray hairs,” Tirzah said. “But you? Put that handkerchief back in your pocket right away!”
“It’s not because of the gray hairs. It’s because you finally called me ‘Father.’”
“Oh, stop talking rubbish. Go on, say it: ‘If my Gershon were alive, he would have gray hairs on his head.’”
Steinfeld got angry “Enough! You’re making it impossible to work around here.”
He drew a string the length of the room to indicate where the first row should be placed, and the younger of the Chinese workers flattened out the gravel on the exposed concrete. Steinfeld instructed him to pour into the mixing pan the white and the regular sand, the whitewash and the mortar, while he himself added the water.
The Chinese laborer ran the hoe through the mixing pan, chuckling to himself under a barrage of angry shouts issued by Steinfeld. “You see? That’s exactly why I didn’t want it! There are lumps! Try explaining to the Khinezer that the loam has to be as smooth and delicious as chopped liver.”
He placed the embroidered pillow he had brought with him on the floor and knelt on it with a groan. The worker brought him a bucket filled with loam. Steinfeld plunged his putty knife into it and tipped a fair amount onto the gravel, smoothing it, then adding a bit more and smoothing it, again. His movements were quick and thrifty, altogether different from his speech and gait. With the end of his putty knife he drew two little lightning bolts, two little z’s, in the loam. “That way it won’t all spill out the sides. From the pressure it’ll fill up the inside and reach everywhere.”
After that he placed the first tile, tapped it gently with the wooden handle of the hammer, and with the edge of the putty knife he gathered the leftover loam that had squeezed out from underneath. He set down the spirit level from north to south and from east to west and said, “You see how straight it is? Even if you put a ball bearing on it, it wouldn’t budge. Even the pool table of the president of the United States of America isn’t as level as the floor I’m building you here.”
He smoothed the gravel with the palm of his hand once again and grumbled. “Sand is better!” He placed more loam, smoothed it, drew his little lightning bolts, centered another tile, tapped. His taps were dull and measured and had their own special rhythm, as if he and the house were passing messages to each other like prisoners in their cells. He stroked the two tiles, passed a knowing thumb down the grouting joint, picked up the spirit level again, and placed it atop both tiles.
“A tiler’s mistakes are impossible to conceal,” Tirzah explained to me. “The electricity and the plumbing hide in the walls and the floor. The builder and the plasterer and the painter all blame each other and cover up one another’s errors. But the tiler is exposed, and because of the straight angles and the length of the grouting joints, even an untrained eye sees mistakes at once.”
“She’s a cheeky girl,” Steinfeld growled, “but she understands something about construction.”
Some two and a half hours later, when he had finished laying the first three rows, the elderly tiler extended a hand to the elderly contractor and said, “Help me up.”
Meshulam grabbed hold of him and pulled. Both groaned from the pain and the exertion. “Now that Steinfeld’s laid the first three rows like only he knows how, pretty much anyone can finish up,” Meshulam said. To which Steinfeld replied, “What I did for you here not even the government can screw up now The Khinezer can carry on—just make sure he doesn’t put rice down there instead of gravel.”
I walked outside with him. He looked inside the refrigerator and shouted, “Tiraleh, where can a guy get a piece of herring?”
“Everything’s in there,” she called back to him from inside the house. “You just have to look.”
“And what about a little vodka with the herring?”
“Not during work hours, Steinfeld. Have a beer—that’ll do.”
Steinfeld found the herring, took out a cucumber and some hard cheese as well, and grabbed some bread, then routed about and drew out a knife from the depths of his schoolbag, spread out a piece of fish, and sat on a chair. His right hand trembled.
“Been doing that for a few years already,” he told me. “No doctor’s managed to cure it, but it stops shaking when I get down on my knees to go to work.” He handed me the cucumber. “Peel it for me, please.”
I peeled the cucumber for him and offered to pour the beer into his glass. Steinfeld told me he preferred drinking directly from the bottle. “Everything spills out of my glass. Don’t tell Tiraleh, okay?”
After he finished eating and drinking I spread a tarp in the shade of my carob trees and he sprawled out there and fell asleep. Meshulam said to Tirzah, “Give the worker something else to do and we’ll continue with the floor for a while.” To me he said, “Tiraleh and I have already laid a few tiles in our days, and you can mix and hand us the loam and learn a new profession.”
I mixed, I handed, while Meshulam Fried and Daughter, Inc., knelt and laid tiles. Later Meshulam said, “Nu, Iraleh, why don’t you lay a few tiles, too. It’s your floor.”
I can still remember the exact location. Even today, several months after Tirzah left me and went away, I can still identify my tiles and her tiles and the invisible impressions our bodies left on the floor.
3
BUT AT THAT TIME we were still together, and Tirzah admitted, “Steinfeld was right. The eight-inch tiles really are prettier.” And the next day she announced, “Come on, the loam has dried. Let’s inaugurate our new floor.”
“Don’t you want me to spread something underneath us?”
“No. How many couples can say they’ve made love on the floor they tiled themselves? Lie on top of me, my luvey I want to feel your weight.”
I lay on top of her. Our chests touched, our loins were pressed together, our lips met. We were kneecap to kneecap and our hands were outstretched to the sides, fingers intertwined, as if we had been crucified to each other.
“Let’s get completely undressed. We’ll feel the heat of our bodies and the cool of the floor.”
The setting sun filled the gap torn in the wall on the first day of work, flooding and inflaming the space inside my new home.
“Did you miss me, Iraleh?”
“Yes.”
“So here, I’ve come to you. It’s me. I’m here.”
“Good.”
“And when I wasn’t here?”
“When you weren’t here, what?”
“Did you miss me then, too?”
“Yes.”
“When more?”
“Tiraleh, I
saw you only this morning.”
“I’m not talking about this morning. I’m not talking about today I’m talking about all these years, all the years that have passed since then. Did you miss me then, too?”
“You’re a pest.”
She laughed. “Are we going to argue? Because if you argumentate me I won’t be able to get it up later.”
We rolled over. Tirzah’s face came to rest above mine, sank slowly into my own. I began to quiver, not only from the pleasure but also from the immediate sharpness of the picture. There are some people whose sensory organs capture reality for them. But with me, my sensory organs mediate between reality and memory, and not every organ in its realm. Sometimes my nose connects sound to image, sometimes my ear feels, my eye recalls aromas, my fingers see.
Tirzah kissed my neck and made it tremble. She lifted herself up a bit so I could see her eyes and her body Although she had been pregnant and had given birth, her nipples were still small and well defined, the left one pink and the right one mauve. Sometimes she would check them with fingers slightly moist with spittle. “Look at them. I took this one from our sour pomegranate tree and this one from the sweet one.”
I never grew tired of thinking about her. Her small breasts, her thick hair, the slight bulge of her belly Her short, sturdy body her long legs. Her protruding navel and, below it, the dense darkness that astonished me each time anew, like when we were adolescents, when she laughed and said, “I’ve got steel wool growing in my peepot!” and, beneath it, the only softness on her body, like a stream running between reeds and rushes.
We caressed each other like Gershon instructed us to when we were young. All the memory cells in our bodies awakened, the ones in the muscles and the skin and the fingertips. Tirzah said, “This is unbearably pleasant.”
“What is?” I asked.
“The mixture of us. The me and the you. What we did together once and what we’re still going to do.”
Her hand, the fingers spread, moved from my waist to my lower back. She signaled me with a press of her hand. Come. Every woman in my body pressed against her brother in Tirzah’s. Every cell of my flesh found its mate in her.
Chapter Twenty-Four
1
THE NEXT MORNING the Illuz brothers returned and began building me a deck. They dug pits and filled them with cement and stones to support the iron toes that would grip the wooden posts. It took the dwarf roofers three days to finish the deck. They built the floor of planks and ran a railing around it, while overhead they pulled down flaps held by steel cables that gave it the look of a sailboat.
On the fourth night, after we had inaugurated the deck and fallen asleep, I was awakened by a loud sound of breaking and falling. Tirzah did not wake up, and I understood at once what had happened: the fig tree had collapsed. Meshulam had been right. The noise was the fulfilling of the prophecy
I did a FOR and AGAINST and decided not to get up. It would be better to assess matters in the light of day, since at night things look different than they really are. I lay there listening. Quiet was restored, filling up the void created by the fall, and following it came the usual noises: the blowing of the wind, the distant barking, the croaking of frogs, and finally the hollow, rhythmical hooting of the small owl and the tread of a hedgehog in the undergrowth.
Tirzah neither heard nor knew about any of this. She rose and left before dawn; I woke up an hour later and went out into the yard. The tractor operator had already been there, armed with a small power saw The branches of the fig tree were lying on the ground, its foliage strewn about. The broken trunk looked like a sack of sawdust split open. Only then did I understand how devastating the onslaught of the caterpillar had been. When he saw that I was awake, the tractor operator started up the motor of the saw and carved up the carcass, loaded it onto his cart, and drove off to dump it into the garbage heap.
That afternoon Meshulam showed up with a potted fig that was already sprouting and blooming.
“You knew You’d prepared it in advance,” I said, not certain whether I was complaining or acquiescing or expressing astonishment.
“Naturally!” he said. “After all, we saw the holes in the trunk that first day you brought me out here. I told you then she would fall.”
“That’s a pretty big sapling. You got it ready even before you came here that first time.”
“Meshulam is always prepared. For the good and the bad. And this is a real fig,” he said, “not like the one you had here until now She’ll give you beautiful fruit and she won’t abort them like some figs do.”
“We’re not so young anymore,” I told him.
“Who isn’t?”
“Don’t play innocent, Meshulam: Tirzah and me.”
Meshulam was neither nonplussed nor offended. “These days you got doctors at Hadassah who could even get old Methuselah and his wife pregnant.”
He went back to his pickup, brought a pickax and a hoe and a pitchfork and another new and strange tool—a long, thick galvanized pipe with the blade of a pickax stuck in the end, the wider side pointing outward.
“This is a planter’s tool, Iraleh. You won’t find a guy like this in any shop.”
He explained that before planting one needs to “think real good” in order to imagine what the place will look like in another few years, “when this little sapling will be a large tree and will need to get along with its neighbors: its plant-neighbors and its building-neighbors and its people-neighbors.”
The poplar, for example, cannot be planted near a house—“No way!”—because its strong roots lift floors and sidewalks and get into sewage pipes. The Persian lilac is beautiful and scented but it attracts woodpeckers, and in the end it falls on your head. The ficus makes a mess and attracts flies, “but,” Meshulam said, smiling in appreciation, “it sends its roots a long distance and steals water from the neighbors’ gardens. That’s what I call a good tree.”
And fruit trees, particularly apricots and plums, bear fruit all at once, and try picking and washing and organizing pots and jars and standing there making jam. “That’s what my Goldie would do every summer. If she was still alive I would argue with her and I would uproot all of those fruit trees of hers, but it’s not nice to do something like that when she is no longer around.”
We took everything into consideration, we imagined the future, and in the end Meshulam marked a spot by digging his heel into the ground.
“Here!” he instructed me. “You dig a nice pit here, and let a little of your sweat drip in. This is the first tree you’re planting in your new home, so let’s do it right.”
2
AT FIRST I PLUNGED the pitchfork into the ground and extricated large clumps of earth. After that I used the hoe, and when the pit was a little deeper Meshulam handed me the iron pipe with the pickax blade.
“Now try it with this guy You see? Top to bottom, like with the excavator’s bar they use in quarries. This way you’ll have a nice planting hole, just like a planting hole should be: deep, with straight walls.”
I dug and widened and deepened until Meshulam told me it was enough. He filled the hole with water and allowed it to seep in and disappear; then he doused the hole again—“So the tree will have a nice, wet reception.” Next he filled the bottom third of the hole with dirt mixed with compost and topped it with time-release chemical fertilizer. “We could use cow chips —they’re completely dry and don’t smell at all—but never bird dung. Now let’s take the sapling out of the pail.”
He knelt down and pressed in the sides of the pail all around while I pulled and removed the sapling—“Hold her bottom, too. Got to keep the part with the roots from breaking up”—and then I placed the little tree in the center of the pit.
“Let it lean on your shoulder so you can feel each other’s weakness and need. Today she’ll lean on you, but soon you’ll be sitting in her shade.” He raked some dirt into the hole, stepped back, commented that the sapling was lopsided, and had me tilt it gently leftward and pat it
into place.
“Put in some more dirt. Don’t bury her neck, we don’t want any rot-tiness! Don’t tamp it with your feet, you heathen! Don’t choke her! This is the first tree you’re planting at your new house. Get down politely on all fours and use your hands. A little strength with a lot of gentleness.”
The fig tree was in the ground. Meshulam brought three long wooden poles from his pickup. We planted them in a circle around the tree and Meshulam explained to me how to tie them to the dainty trunk. “Use strips of cloth. Rope will cut the bark.”
He checked to make sure the cloth strips were loose enough for the sapling to move a bit in the wind. “That causes her to use her muscles a bit. Makes for a thicker, stronger trunk.” He stepped back and said, “That’s it. She’s planted. Now we’ll give her a little water, and when we fix up the garden we’ll wind a few irrigation drips around her base. In the meantime, visit her every day with a watering can in hand so she learns to wait for you and rejoice when you come. And while you’re watering her, take the opportunity to give her a good look. Check her leaves and her bark—that’s the way to find out how she’s maturing and what her problems are, and she’ll know you didn’t just plant her and take off, that you’re continuing to take care of her.”
We sat down beside my new fig tree, me on the ground and Meshulam on the upside-down pail. He lit himself a cigarette and said, “It’s a good thing you don’t smoke, Iraleh. I want my Tiraleh’s fellow to be strong and healthy And I want to give you another piece of advice, because I don’t know if I’ll still be around when this tree bears fruit. You were right: I’d already prepared this sapling before you came to me with this house of yours; it’s a cutting from the tree Tiraleh likes better than all the rest, one of the green ones with a little yellow in the peel. I’ll tell you how you should serve the figs to her: chilled and cut crosswise, not lengthwise, so they look like figs should. You understand what I’m talking about, don’t you, Iraleh? Because that’s the way you tell her what you want and what you like about her, but politely, without being crass. And with the fig you bring her a little bowl with a tiny bit of arak inside.
