Three Floors Up

by Eshkol Nevo

  But you ignored all those distractions. You stayed politely quiet and waited for me to crack, and finally, at the entrance to the kibbutz store, it happened. We were about to go inside, I wanted to buy you something to drink after your long trip, but you stopped me and said, “Let’s sit for a while,” and we sat down on the curb and you put a hand on my shoulder, not a confident hand, but a wary, probing hand—how much experience did we have with each other’s crises?—but it was actually the hesitation in your touch that made me dissolve into tears. Between sniffles, I tried to explain: “I don’t know what’s been going on with me these last few days, Netta, but it’s really scary, it’s as if…We have inside us, in our heart, our soul, something that connects all the parts of us, the part that remembers, that guides, that organizes. Everything comes from it and everything goes to it. It’s like a kind of essence, the thing that is us, like a spine, but not of bones, of feelings, do you understand?”

  I remember that you nodded. And that was very generous of you. Because you definitely didn’t understand anything at that point.

  “It’s like self-confidence,” I kept trying to explain, “but it’s more than that, it’s the confidence that you even have a self, that you have something stable inside all the…messiness of being a person, something you can depend on to see reality, to translate reality as it is, and for the last few days, that something…has been crumbling. I’m crumbling. Someone who is me sits in the guard booth and…We’re not allowed to read, Netta. We’re not allowed to listen to the radio. I have no friends here. This whole course was a mistake. And I don’t know…don’t know anymore…Look, you can see that it’s crumbling, I can’t even finish a sentence…My mother too, before she…before they took her away…her sentences stopped in the middle, as if, by the time she got to the middle, she forgot the beginning…or the end…I don’t know…”

  “But that, that thing, that spine you’re talking about, still hasn’t crumbled completely. You were sane enough to call me.”

  “True. I had…I had an idea.”

  “An idea?”

  “I thought maybe…you’d tell me about me.”

  “Tell you about you?”

  “Maybe that way I would remember myself.”

  “Okay.” You turned sharply to me, took me by the shoulders, and made me look into your eyes, something I hadn’t been able to do before then. “No problem, I’ll tell you about you.” And I could see that you were relieved that I’d switched from mental meandering to a concrete request. The kind that could be granted.

  “Once upon a time there was a girl named Hani,” you began. “And when Alon Geva, our Bible teacher, said in the middle of the seventh grade that he wanted us to put King David on trial for his part in the Bathsheba and Uriah the Hittite affair and asked who wanted to take part, only she and I raised our hands. So Alon Geva said, ‘If that’s the case, Netta will be the defense attorney and Hani the prosecutor.’ ‘What’s a prosecutor?’ the girl named Hani asked. And the whole class laughed, but I thought that this girl was really brave if she was willing to admit in front of the whole class of Hebrew University High School cynics that she didn’t know something. So I invited her to my house to prepare for the trial. And we were the first prosecutor and defense attorney in the history of Jewish law to work together.”

  “Right!” I said, already drawn into the memory.

  “We arranged to meet at my house the first time,” you went on, “because Hani said her house was sad. I wanted to say that maybe it would be better there anyway, because my mother is nasty. But I didn’t. The truth is that at the time, I didn’t see my mother that way. Every family is a planet unto itself, and sometimes you need someone from another planet to land on yours in order to understand. That girl, Hani, made me understand. After her second visit to my planet, she said, ‘You know, your mom treats you like she’s your stepmother.’ I choked. Because until then, no one had ever dared to say that so directly, without mincing words.”

  Then you said to me, “Oof, Hani, you’re going to beat me at the trial. You’re a really good prosecutor.”

  “Right.”

  “Sorry, Nettush, I interrupted you. Keep going.”

  “Is this helping you?”

  “I think so.”

  “Okay, so once…that Hani we’re talking about designed and printed a new menu for the Octopus Club without telling the boss and handed it out at one table only. At the end of the evening, she showed him that the table that had the new menu had brought in the most money, convincing him to let her redesign all the menus. Another time, not far from here, on Kibbutz Menara, in the middle of picking apples, an Argentinian volunteer named Enrique stood under a tree with a guitar and sang the Beatles’ “Something in the Way” in a hilarious Spanish accent, and when he finished, everyone in the orchard applauded and he expected a kiss, but Hani never liked dancing to the music of other people’s expectations, so she just gave him a charming smile and went back to picking apples, saving her kisses for that night, in his room, when and where they would be real and private, not on display for everyone. And another time…”

  You kept talking about me until you saw that I’d calmed down. Then you got up and said that you’d promised your mom you’d be home for Friday night dinner. “But there are no more buses now,” I said, and you said, “Don’t worry, I can hitchhike.” “But the road is completely empty at this hour,” I said, and you said, “It’ll be fine.” When we reached the gate, someone from the toy factory was just leaving, and of course he was happy to take the pretty hitchhiker to Jerusalem, what a coincidence, he was going there too. Before you got into his car, you gave me one more hug, took me by the shoulders, and said, “Promise me you’ll be okay?” I promised. And I was okay.

  It’s a little embarrassing that I need you again, exactly the same way, twenty-something years later, because I’d like to believe that the time that’s passed since then had some meaning. That a husband and two kids and a room of my own have given me a certain stability. But apparently our soul doesn’t move forward but only in circles. Dooming us to fall into the same pits over and over again.

  I’ll send you this letter. It’s terribly annoying when stories and movies end and the letters aren’t sent. It really sucks.

  But you don’t have to write back, Netta. Even though I’ve sprinkled a lot of question marks along the way, I don’t really expect to get answers from you. I don’t need a defense lawyer. And certainly not a prosecutor. What I really needed was a witness.

  I had to write this whole story to someone, uncensored, so I could believe that Eviatar really happened. Or at least believe that I really did imagine him. That I was desperate enough to invent him.

  I just read the entire letter from the beginning. I tried to see it through your Middletown eyes and thought that in your place, it would worry me. It might even make me leave everything and fly here to hug me tight and ask me to promise that I’ll be okay.

  I don’t know. Maybe I got a bit carried away while I was writing, maybe there’s something about writing that makes me intensify everything, or maybe all the hysterical death announcements and parentheses were fine at nine in the morning, and the fact that I wrote to you, the fact that you were with me while I was writing, have already calmed me down a little. (That’s what the fear of losing your mind is all about—it doesn’t only stem from loneliness, it also creates it. Traps you in loops of bad thoughts that you have to hide from the world, loops of thoughts that coil around you tight enough to choke you.)

  In any case, it hasn’t been nine in the morning for a long time now. And in ten minutes, I have to pick up Lyri and Nimrod from school. If I don’t bring my two little chicks back to the nest, no one will. No one! And that’s unthinkable. I’ll stop at the post office on the way, buy stamps, stick them on the envelope, and give the letter to the clerk. Then I’ll go to the supermarket and buy chicken breasts to make schnitzels, which I’ll freeze later and reheat after that. And I’ll be fine. I think.
>
  Assaf is going away tonight. A short trip this time. One night.

  After the kids go to sleep, we’ll probably have sex. It’s a kind of tradition: I tattoo a memory on him that he’ll carry on his body when he’s not with me.

  We have quite a few good moments that I kept from you in this letter. The truth about our marriage is much more elusive than what I described here. And then there’s the financial truth.

  In the morning, I’ll call the Verbin Studio. Amicam has a weakness for me. Always did. He’ll agree to take me back. If I haven’t opened my own studio by now, I probably never will. And I think that what I need to do most urgently now is get out of the house before one night, there are three owls on the tree…

  I suppose everyone has a certain amount of aloneness they can endure. And I forgot that with my family’s history of hysteria, I have to be especially careful. I sank too deeply into myself and now I have to climb back out.

  Cross your fingers for me? The walls of the pit are very slippery.

  Yours,

  Hani

  —

  P.S. It would be nice if you wrote me something. So I can see that you’re still alive.

  Maybe you can share a secret with me too.

  It can’t be that you don’t have one. Every woman does.

  Third Floor

  I know it’s ludicrous. Nevertheless, Michael, I must speak to you. There is no one but you with whom I can share this burden. For two weeks I have been trying to decide how to talk to you without feeling utterly ridiculous. After all, I won’t drive to the cemetery to talk to your headstone like a silly old woman, or write letters and address them to Pure Souls Street, Heaven, or go to a medium who will make your face appear in a crystal ball or slide a glass along a Ouija board. That is not my way. It is not our way. Yet my need to talk to you is real. And recently, things have happened that have turned it into a powerful urge.

  Several days ago, while I was sorting the things in your study, deliberating about which of them to throw away and which to put in a carton before the move (which I will tell you about later. I don’t want to put the cart before the horse), I found an answering machine in a drawer. The layer of dust covering it indicated that it had long ago been retired from active use.

  I stopped sorting—you know how easy it is to tempt me away from housework—connected the machine to the phone, and called our number. After four rings, the tape began to run and your warm, firm voice filled the house: “Hello, you’ve reached the Edelman family. Please leave your message after the beep and we will get back to you as soon as we can.”

  A year has passed since I last heard your voice. More than a year, in fact. Because the voice that came from your throat during the last weeks of your life was different: softer, less certain. The closer you came to death, the more willing you were to entertain the possibility that you were wrong. That you had been mistaken the entire time.

  But it was your old voice coming from the answering machine. When you finished speaking, the beep sounded, followed by a long silence: a void asking to be filled.

  I checked it a few more times, of course: I measured how long it took from the moment you stopped speaking until the three beeps sounded to signal the end of the message (two minutes). I counted the number of words it takes to fill two minutes (between 200 and 205, depending on the speed of the speaker. I’ve been speaking much more slowly since you left). But I had already made the crucial decision: This is how I would speak to you. I’d leave you message after message on the answering machine.

  Of course, this method is no less farfetched than the ones I mentioned above. The average person does not employ it. But when I hear your voice, I can temporarily put off my inner prosecutor who says, “Devora, you’re making a fool of yourself,” and fill the void that asks, almost demands, to be filled.

  My love—I called you that too rarely—before I tell you what is happening in my life, you will certainly want to know what is happening in the country. I assume you don’t have news flashes on the dark side, and I know how much you like to keep abreast. “News!” you used to announce in the living room and raise the volume of the announcer’s voice, and now that you’re not with me, I’m the one who sometimes says: “News!” And my voice ricochets from the walls like an echo.

  The country is overflowing with tents, Michael. A young girl set up a tent on a main street in Tel Aviv to protest against housing prices, inspiring others with different complaints to do the same. Each pair of tents gave birth to another tent, and now every town and city has rows of tents lining the main street, and every Saturday night, young people emerge from them and fill the city squares to demonstrate for social justice and a new country. I watch the demonstrations on live TV, sorry that you’re not with me to watch the miracle. They’re confused, those young people, their slogans are crude and their speeches unfocused, but they have a certain passion that reminds me of us during those years when you and I believed we would change the world.

  About three weeks ago, I decided to take action.

  After all, we had so often watched longingly as people gathered in town squares to call out messages that were important to both of us while we, owing to the positions we held, were forbidden to raise our voices along with them. But now that I have retired, the door to the cage is open. So why, I asked myself, do I remain behind the bars? Why not hitch a ride to the big city with a neighbor and join the demonstrators myself?

  I began, of course, with the Raziel family. As always, Avraham said, “Come in, come in, why are you standing outside?” But he stood in the doorway with his arms folded on his chest, blocking any possibility of going inside. I told him that I wanted to ask if, by any chance, they were going to the demonstration. “What demonstration?” he asked.

  I couldn’t hide my surprise. “Haven’t you heard the news?”

  He answered dismissively, “Ah, that. We don’t really believe in demonstrations. Besides, our friends come over every Saturday night to play poker. It’s a regular thing and we can’t change it.”

  “Poker?” I didn’t mean to sound disapproving. But I did.

  He was alarmed. “We don’t play for money, Devora, it’s just for fun. Everyone puts in a few shekels. That’s all.”

  I couldn’t restrain myself and said, “Well then, maybe if you win at poker tonight, you’ll finally be able to pay what you owe the tenants’ committee.”

  He looked right at me and said, “I’ve ordered some new checkbooks and the minute I get them, I’ll knock on your door.”

  “Good.” I turned to leave.

  “Have a good week,” he had the nerve to call after me.

  How could he not be embarrassed to pull the same lie out of his bag every time, Michael? And how could I have been so naive as to think that someone who wouldn’t pay his dues to the tenants’ committee would want to show broader social solidarity?

  I went down a floor. Behind the Gats’ door I heard the loud voices of children. I wasn’t sure I should knock. Perhaps it wasn’t a convenient hour? But I was determined to go to the demonstration at all costs. Hani opened the door, her son in her arms and her daughter pulling at her skirt. I said I was sorry for bothering her at that hour, and she gave a weary smile and said that the situation hadn’t been any better an hour earlier.

  I began, “I wanted to find out—”

  But then the little girl pulled Hani’s skirt even harder and it slipped down a bit, exposing the waistband of her underpants. She scolded the child: “I told you not to do that!” She pushed her away, pulled her skirt up, bit her lip, apologized, and asked, “What did you start to say?”

  “I wanted to ask…if you and your husband are going to the demonstration.”

  “As you can see, there is no husband here at the moment, it’s just me. Asaf is out of the country. I actually would have liked to go. I think it’s important. But I don’t see how I can find a babysitter on such short notice.”

  “I understand.”

  “A
nd tomorrow I’m getting up early. I’ve gone back to work. I’m sorry, Devora. Did you try the Raziels?”

  “They’re playing cards tonight.”

  “So try Ruth or her neighbors downstairs.”

  I pointed to the door across the hall. “What about Katz?”

  “In Crete. I think they’re coming back tomorrow.”

  “Strange, I thought I saw someone walking around in their apartment a few days ago,” I said.

  Hani suddenly looked startled—something different flashed in her eyes—and asked, “You’re sure? What did he look like?”

  She actually pleaded with me to describe the person I saw in the Katzes’ apartment.

  I tried to dampen her enthusiasm. I told her that the shutters had been half closed and I didn’t see anything.