I was speechless. Not only because you had never before expressed an interest in law, but because since you were a child you had made a point of not modeling yourself on me. No, it was more than that—a point of defining yourself in opposition to me. If I spoke loudly you would be the one who always spoke quietly, if I loved tomatoes then you would hate them. I was flabbergasted by this sudden reversal, and struggled to understand what it could mean. Had you not been so earnest a person, I might have thought you meant to mock me. I admit that I couldn’t picture you as a lawyer, but then to picture you as anything in those days was not at all easy.
I waited for you to say more but you didn’t. Abruptly, you stood and said you had to go meet a friend. You who had refused to see anyone for months. After you were gone, I called your mother. What is the meaning of all this? I asked. All what? she asked. One day he is catatonic in his room, I said, and the next he’s enrolling to study law in London? He’s been talking about it for a while, she said. I thought you knew. Knew? Knew? How could I know? In my own house there is no one who speaks to me. Stop it, Aaron, she said. You’re being ridiculous. So now I was not only a brute, but ridiculous, too. A fool that no one thought to talk to anymore, the way one puts out a moody and burdensome cat and forgets to feed it in the hopes that it will wander off and find some other family to care for it.
You went. I could not bring myself to drive you to the airport. I drove you to war, but I could not deliver you to the plane that would take you away from your country. I had a trial. Maybe I could have canceled it, but I didn’t. The night before your mother stayed up finishing a sweater she had knit for you. Did you ever wear it? Even I could see that it was unflattering, bulky with her fear that you might freeze to death. We left our goodbyes to the morning. But when the time came for me to leave for work, you were still asleep.
From the beginning your marks were tremendous. You rose easily to the top of your class. The suffering did not vanish but appeared to go into remission. You kept it buried under endless, obsessive work. When you graduated, we thought you would come home, but you didn’t come. You became a barrister and were accepted in a prestigious set of chambers. You worked impossible hours, leaving no room for anything else, and quickly made a name for yourself in the criminal field. You prosecuted and defended, balanced the scales of justice, the years passed, you married, divorced, were appointed judge. And only later did I come to understand what perhaps you had meant to tell me that day so long ago: you would not come back to us.
ALL OF THIS was long ago. And yet against my will I find myself returning to it. As if to touch, ritually, one last time, every enduring pocket of pain. No, the powerful emotions of youth don’t mellow with time. One gets a grip on them, cracks a whip, forces them down. You build your defenses. Insist on order. The strength of feeling doesn’t lessen, it is simply contained. But now the walls begin to buckle. I find myself thinking of my parents, Dovi. Of certain images of my mother in shadowy evening light, in the kitchen, and I see that her expression meant something different than I had understood it to mean as a child. She would lock herself in the bathroom and was reduced to mere sound. Muffled, through the door, my ear to it. To me my mother was first and foremost a smell. Indescribable. Pass over it. Then a feeling, her hands on my back, the soft wool of her coat against my cheek. Then the sound of her, and at the end of all that, a distant fourth, the sight of her. How she looked to me, only in parts, never the whole. So large, and I so small that at any one time I could only take in a curve, or the swelling flesh over a belt, or the slope of freckles down to the bosom, or the legs sheathed in stockings. Any more was impossible. Too much. After she died, my father lived on almost another decade. Steadying the one shaking hand with the other. I used to find him in his underwear, unshaven, with the blinds drawn. A meticulous, even a vain man, in a stained undershirt. It took him a full year before he began to dress again. Other things were never righted or repaired. Something toppled within. His conversation gave way to gaping holes. Once I found him on all fours, inspecting a scratch in the wood floor. Muttering and applying to it some Talmudic knowledge he had acquired as a boy and, having no use for it, had forgotten until now. I have no idea, no idea at all, what his thoughts were about the afterlife. We didn’t speak of personal things. We saluted each other from across a great distance, from mountain peak to mountain peak. The clinking of the spoon in the teacup, or the throat cleared. A discussion of the best kind of wool, from where it came, type of animal, how manufactured, when there was discussion at all. He died peacefully in his bed, not a dirty dish in the sink. After filling a glass of water he would wipe the sink dry so that the steel would remain, true to name, stainless. For a few years I lit the yahrzeit candle for them both, but then I lost the habit. I can count on one hand the number of times I visited their graves. The dead are dead, if I want to visit them I have my memories, this is how I looked at it, if I looked at it at all. But even the memories I kept at bay. Is there not always some slight but unmistakable rebuke in the death of those closest? Is that what you will make of my death, Dov? A final installment of the long rebuke you took to be my life?
I WAS NEARING the end and then you came home. You stood holding your suitcase in the hall, and I thought—it seemed—a beginning. Am I too late? Where are you? You should have been home hours ago. What’s keeping you? Something isn’t right, I can feel it. Your mother is no longer here to worry. Now it falls to me. For ten days I woke up and found you here, sitting at this table. So short a time, and yet already I had come to depend on it. But this morning, the morning I came down the stairs prepared to break the silence and offer a truce at last, the table was empty.
There’s a pressure mounting in my chest. I can’t pass over it. For ten days we have lived under the same roof and you’ve hardly spoken, Dov. We move through the day like two hands of a clock: sometimes we overlap for a moment, then come apart again, carrying on alone. Every day exactly the same: the tea, the burnt toast, the crumbs, the silence. You in your chair, I in mine. Except today, when I woke and for the first time I coughed in the hallway, entered the kitchen, and no one was there. Your chair was empty. The newspaper still wrapped in a bag outside the door.
I promised myself I would wait until you were ready, that I wouldn’t push. Yesterday I came across you standing in the garden, a strange stiffness in your posture as if you carried a wooden yoke like the old Dutch, only instead of water it was great reserves of feeling that you wished not to spill. I tried not to disturb you. Afraid to say the wrong thing, I’ve said nothing at all. But every day there’s a little bit less of me. Just the tiniest bit, almost immeasurable, and yet I feel life slipping away. You don’t have to tell me what you don’t want to tell me about your life. I won’t ask you what happened, why you resigned, why you suddenly gave up the only thing that has kept you bound to life all these years. I can live without knowing that. But what I need to know is why you’ve come back to me. I need to ask. Will you visit me once I’m gone? Will you come from time to time and sit with me? It’s absurd, I’ll be nothing, just a handful of inert material, and yet I feel it would help me to go more easily if I knew that you would come sometimes. To sweep around the headstone, and pick a stone to set there with the others. If there are others. Just to think that you would come, even once a year. I know how it sounds given the oblivion I’ve never doubted awaits me. When I first began my little wanderings through the valley of death and discovered within myself this desire, I, too, was surprised. I remember exactly how it happened. Uri came to take me to the eye doctor one morning. Overnight, a tiny spot of darkness had lodged in the vision of my right eye. It was just a speck, but this little void drove me crazy, everything I looked at was marred by it. I started to panic. What if another spot appeared, and then another? Like being buried alive one shovel of dirt at a time, until there was only a prick of light left, and then nothing. Having worked myself into a state, I called Uri. An hour later he phoned back that he’d made an appointment and would
come for me. We went to see the doctor, none of this is important, afterwards we got in the car to go home. We were driving when out of nowhere a rock hit the windshield. The bang was tremendous. Both of us flew out of our skin, and Uri slammed on the brakes. We sat in silence, barely breathing. The road was empty, there was no one around. By some miracle it took us a moment to fully grasp, the glass had not broken. The only mark in it was a divot the size of a fingerprint almost exactly between my eyes. A moment later I saw the rock resting in the recess for the windshield wipers. Had it gone through the glass it might have killed me. I got out of the car, my legs trembling, and took hold of the stone. It filled my palm, and when I closed my fingers around it, it fit perfectly in my fist. Here is the first, I thought. The first stone to mark my grave. The first stone placed like a period at the end of my life. Soon the mourners will come bringing stone after stone to anchor the long sentence that was my life to its final, strangled syllable—
And then, my child, I thought of you. I realized that I didn’t care if the others came. That the only one whose stone I wanted was yours, Dov. The stone that can mean so many things to a Jew, but in your hand could mean only one.
My child. My love and my regret, as you were when I first laid eyes on you, a tiny old man who hadn’t had time to brush off his ancient expression, naked and misshapen in the nurse’s arms. Dr. Bartov, my old friend who broke the rules so that I could be present, turned to me and asked if I wanted to cut the cord, bulging, whitish blue and twisted, so much thicker than I’d ever imagined, more like a rope for tying a boat, and without thinking I agreed. Just like this, he said, he who had done it a thousand times before. So I did, and suddenly it began to dance like a snake in my hands, and blood spurted around the room, splashing the walls like the scene of a heinous crime, and you opened your eyes, I swear you opened your tiny wet eyes, my child, and looked at me, as if to fix in your mind forever the face of the one who had separated you from her. At that moment I was filled with something. It was as if a pressure had blown into me, expanding everything, pushing at the walls from within, as if I were being besieged from the inside, if that’s possible, and I thought I would explode from it all, from love and regret, Dov, love and regret as I never thought possible. In that instant I understood with surprise that I had become your father. The surprise lasted less than a minute because your mother began to hemorrhage, and one nurse gathered you up and hurried you away, while the other pushed me out the door and deposited me in the waiting room, where the men who had not yet seen their children looked at my bloody shoes and trembling lip and began to cough and shake.
I want you to know that I never gave up being your father, Dovik. Sometimes driving to work I found myself talking aloud to you. Pleading, reasoning with you. Or consulting with you about an especially difficult case. Or just telling you about the aphids attacking my tomatoes, or the simple omelet I made for myself one morning before your mother was awake, and ate alone in the bright silence of the kitchen. And when she fell ill, it was you I talked to while I sat in hard plastic chairs waiting for her to emerge from another procedure, another treatment, another test. I made a little scarecrow of you in my head and I talked as if you could hear me. The second time they bombed the number 18 bus I was two blocks away. Blood, so much blood, Dovi. The remains were everywhere. I watched the special Orthodox arrive to collect the splattered dead, to scrape the bits from the sidewalk with tweezers, to go up a ladder to peel a shred of ear from a high branch, to retrieve a child’s thumb from a balcony. Afterwards I couldn’t talk to anyone about it, not even your mother, but I talked to you. True Kindness, that’s what they call themselves, the ones who arrive in their kippot and their Day-Glo yellow vests, always the first there to hold the dying as they go in shocked silence, to gather up the child without limbs. True kindness, because the dead cannot repay the favor. Yes, it was you I spoke to when I woke with nightmares. You I addressed when I looked at myself to shave in the mirror. I found you everywhere, hiding in the most unlikely places, and though at first I wondered why, soon enough I realized it was because I believed I could learn something from you, from your example. You who had always been so gifted at giving up, of letting go, of making yourself lighter and lighter, less and less, one friend at a time, one father less, one wife less, and now you have even given up being a judge, there is almost nothing anymore to tether you to the world, you’re like a dandelion with only one or two hairs left, how easy it would be for you, with a little cough, a little sigh, to blow the last one away—
Suddenly I’m frightened, Dov. I feel a shiver, a coldness is seeping into my veins. For once I think I understand. What do I understand? Is it possible you’ve come to say goodbye again? That you intend to put an end—at last?
Wait, Dovik. Don’t go. Remember how I used to put you to sleep at night, always you wanted one more question? Where does the sun go at night? What do wolves eat? Why is there only one of me?
One more question, Dovik. One more song. Five more minutes.
What would she do?
Where are you? All your life I’ve been asking.
I’ll put on my shoes. I’ll get down on my knees. I’ll never mention it again.
I’ll do what your mother would have done. I’ll call every hospital.
ALL RISE
YOUR HONOR, IN THE DARK AND STONY COOLNESS of my room I slept like someone rescued from a typhoon. A restless disquiet, the awareness of some misfortune, fluttered at the edge of my dreams, but I was too exhausted to investigate it. It gathered and coalesced over long hours of sleep, until at the moment I opened my eyes it burst into consciousness as an almost fanatical dread. Just beyond my reach was an insistent question that needed an answer, but what was the question? I felt a terrible thirst and fumbled in the dark for the little glass bottles of cold water. I had no sense of the time, but through the crack under the shutters I saw that it was still light out, or had become light again. The question pressed up more insistently, but when I tried to grasp it it eluded me. I groped for the key to open the door to the veranda, knocking over a bottle that shattered on the floor. The lock stuck then gave way to the violent light of Jerusalem. I looked out at the walls of the Old City, deeply moved by the view, and yet still the question was there, and my mind went to it like a tongue probing the tender spot of a missing tooth: it hurt but I wanted to know. When the sun went down and darkness slipped over the hills like a hood, everything in my head became amplified as if in a theater with perfect acoustics, a wretched clamminess seeped back in, and the urgent question rose up again, but what was it, what, until with a shock of nausea it surfaced at last:
What if I had been wrong?
YOUR HONOR, for as long as I can remember I set myself apart. Or rather I believed that I had been set apart from others, chosen out. I won’t waste your time with the injuries of my childhood, with my loneliness, or the fear and sadness of the years I spent inside the bitter capsule of my parents’ marriage, under the reign of my father’s rage, after all, who isn’t a survivor from the wreck of childhood? I have no desire to describe mine; I only want to say that in order to survive that dark and often terrifying passage of my life I came to believe certain things about myself. I didn’t grant myself magical powers or believe myself to be under the watch of some beneficent force—it was nothing so tangible as that—nor did I ever lose sight of the immutable reality of my situation. I simply came to believe that one, the factual circumstances of my life were almost accidental and didn’t grow out of my own soul, and two, I possessed something unique, a special strength and a depth of feeling that would allow me to withstand the hurt and injustice without being broken by it. In the worst moments I only needed to pull myself beneath the surface, to dive down and touch the place within where this mysterious giftedness lived in me, and so long as I found it I knew that one day I would escape their world and make my life in another. There was a hatch in our apartment building that led to the roof and I used to run up four flights and scale a wall to whe
re I could see the hard glimmer of the overpass where the trains ran, and there, where I knew no one could find me, a secret quiver of joy slid coolly through my veins and the hairs stood up on the back of my neck, because I sensed, in the raw stillness of the moment, that the world was revealing something of itself to me alone. When I couldn’t get to the roof I could hide under my parents’ bed, and though there was nothing to see I felt the same thrill, the same sense of privileged access to the underpinnings of things, to the currents of feeling on which all of human existence delicately rests, to the almost unendurable beauty of life, not mine or anyone else’s, but the thing itself, irrespective of those who are born into and die out of it. I watched my sisters trip and tumble, one who learned to lie and steal and cheat, and the other who was destroyed by self-loathing, who tore herself up until she could no longer remember how to put the pieces together again, but I stayed the course, Your Honor, yes, I believed myself to be somehow chosen, not protected so much as made an exception of, imbued with a gift that kept me whole but was nothing more than a potential until the day came that I would make something of it, and as time passed, in the depths of me, this belief transformed itself into law, and the law came to govern my life. In so many words, Your Honor, that is the story of how I became a writer.
Great House Page 21
