The Remains of Love

by Zeruya Shalev

  The receiver is cold for some reason and when she lays it on her breast, a torrent of blazing heat rises from within and she clenches her lips – it seems if it escapes from her throat there will be no way back, fields will burn, forests will blacken, houses turn into charcoal, an unbearable heat will sweep the globe, consuming all at once those she loves: Nitzan sleeping over at a friend’s house, her body thin and frail, Gideon on his travels, photographing the relics of the Lag Ba’omer bonfires which burned out before morning. And for that reason she must not release the torrent raging inside her, she has to keep it trapped in her lungs, so it burns only her. She gave them so much, the two of them, over the years, and now it seems this is the last favour they will ever ask of her, and even if this is bound up with the total cessation of breathing she will take it on, prove to them her devotion, by the kitchen window I shall burn like a torch of memory, by the kitchen window I shall weep, and when they return they will find here on the floor a broken shell, repulsive gunge, the remains of life.

  Only this morning before he left she tried to delay him by the door, I have a pain, Gideon, and he asked coldly, with a minimal glance in her direction, where does it hurt? In the heart, she said resentfully, aware that this pain was inferior by comparison with pains of the body that merit instant recognition. And he, predictably, snorted with impatience, what’s been the matter with you lately? Get a grip on yourself, be glad that you’re healthy, that we’re doing OK, look around you for a moment and say thank you.

  Thank you, she says now, thanks to you for the support, really, but what did she expect? For years he’s been remote, immersed in his own concerns. Was there ever any basis for the belief that now, when she needs him, this will change? Is he the one she really needs? Again that pain in the innermost kernel of her being, crumbling from within like a diseased tooth. I’m sick, she says to the silent telephone receiver, I need help, I’ve lost something and I don’t know if I’ll ever find it.

  What will she call this thing, that has bound her to the tumult of life like an embryo attached to the feeding tube, years upon years, although recently it seems that a hard-hearted midwife has cut the cord with sharp scissors, as if to say, Mazaltov, you’re born, but she knows this isn’t birth, it’s extinction, sudden excision of the purpose of life. Her thumbs whiten on the telephone receiver which is making its voice heard again, but she doesn’t reply, putting it to her breast, her lips are clenched and she isn’t breathing, only she knows how dangerous her respiration is. And her brother Avner counts ten rings and cuts the connection and then leaves her a message on her still inactive mobile. Mum’s had a fall and she’s unconscious, he tells her angrily as if it’s her fault. She’s in casualty. Come as soon as you hear this message.

  Avner never liked being left alone with his mother. Even now, with her mouth sealed, albeit by an oxygen mask, and her arms lying motionless alongside her body, her eyes closed and consciousness flickering, he’s afraid of her, perhaps she’ll stretch out her wrinkled arms to embrace him, perhaps she’ll try to kiss him with her parched lips, perhaps she’ll embarrass him by bursting into tears, Avni, my boy, I’ve missed you. Almost every visit she greets him with a complaint, where have you been, I’ve missed you. And when he tries to reassure her, I’m here, Mum, she asks anxiously, but when will you come again?

  I’m here, be happy that I’m here now, he reminds her again, but she isn’t letting go. I see so little of you, and I miss you. Even when he’s sitting facing her she’s missing him, even when she sees him she perceives only the empty space of his absence. Milksop, mummy’s boy, the children in the kibbutz used to tease him when she lingered at his bedside, reluctant to leave him, or when she came looking for him in the garden, calling his name in her high, somewhat strident voice, Avni! Where are you? His face was flushed with shame when her cry was treated as an alarm signal, danger, time to hide, go to the shelters, and already the children were imitating her before his crimson features. How embarrassing to be loved so much.

  What a topsy-turvy world, he sighs, and what a perverse invention is the kibbutz, which has become the natural habitat of cruelty and lies, where all sensibilities are trampled down, especially for the males. Masculinity is a perverse invention too, since sometimes it seems to him that for years he’s been living underground, and not only he but all men, like war criminals afraid of exposure, like state’s witnesses, they all unwittingly wasted the best years of their lives, and not to realise some lofty target or other, but just to survive.

  In recent years it seems the stress has eased a little, when half of your life is behind you discipline starts to waver, as with an apprenticeship when the end is approaching, and then it happens that men become more feminine and women more masculine, but now in confrontation with her it is aroused again, his old tension, seeing the wreckage of this person who brought him into the world, the last witness to his infancy, his delicacy, his loneliness, his heartbeat, the whole nightmare of concealed emotions, his great shame.

  A flowery sheet covers her tiny body, and she used to be such a big, clumsy woman, in colourful and tasteless garments that she started to wear by way of contrast after leaving the kibbutz. Like a crumpled robe her skin has sunk, wasting away to nothing around her bones, wafer-thin and mottled, and he peers furtively at his own hands, inspecting his skin. How meagre is the dignity left here, how cruel the transformation, only with us is it so, since in animals old age doesn’t create such a radical change. They become a little slower, and the sheen of their fur is dimmed, and yet they remain themselves, whereas this old crone, whose hair is sparse and whose chin is sharp and whiskery, whose lips have disappeared into the void of her mouth, her dentures smiling at him from the top of the closet, has changed beyond recognition from the big-limbed woman who used to search for him in the grounds of the kibbutz, calling his name as if only he could save her from some terrible disaster that was about to engulf her. Avni, Avni! Where are you?

  Where has all the flesh disappeared to, he wonders, confronting the hollow skin of her arms when she holds out her hands to greet him, the skin hanging from them like bat’s wings. People grow smaller, it emerges, grow steadily smaller, and the space they take up in the world is reduced, likewise the space that the world takes up in them, and unconsciously he strokes his stomach, which has expanded recently, and then withdraws his hand as if it’s been burned because, it seems to him suddenly, that is where her flesh is hiding, all the flesh that was hers has migrated in recent years into his body, a kind of vengeful enchantment that his mother has succeeded in casting as a means of cleaving to him at the end of the day, just as she carried him in her womb so she has forced him in her last years to bear the flesh that has peeled off her, and so the world is not diminished, since their combined weight is unchanged.

  What a scary idea, he grimaces, seeing an involuntary spasm pass over her face, like the spasm on a baby’s face which is mistaken for a smile, what nonsense, it is all the fatty foods that the Bedouin are feeding him there, in their tents, brass plates heaped with yellow rice, and hot pittas and strong cheeses, sometimes even strips of mutton, seeking to show him their gratitude with the dishes that they serve him, whole sheep of gratitude are bleating inside him, flocks of them, trying to silence with their voice the echoes of the old disdain.

  What an anarchic place, he glances at his watch and sighs, he’s been here an hour and no doctor has come anywhere near, an hour has elapsed and there’s no sign of his sister. Not that he’s at all eager to see her, the arrogant face that has grown leaner in recent times, the unfriendly stare, but he wants to get out of here and this is the only way. Excuse me, he tries to attract the attention of one of the nurses, what’s with the doctor? How much longer will he be? But she rebukes him as she walks past him. It will take as long as it takes, believe me, the doctor isn’t playing cards now or drinking coffee, and he falls silent, chastened, lowering his gaze to his stomach. Just a few years ago, he had a different kind of prestige in public places, and ev
en if they couldn’t identify him by name, his face would provoke some reaction. I know you, they would say, flashing hesitant smiles at him, and sometimes memory brought clarity, ah, I saw you on TV yesterday, you’re the attorney who works for the Bedouin, right?

  Not only for the Bedouin, he would correct them pedantically, for anyone whose rights are being trampled on, and immediately he would be rewarded with appreciative looks, and it was only his wife who never missed an opportunity to mock him. Champion of the rights of man, she sneered, Robin Hood no less, and what about my rights? In her eyes, he was always in the wrong.

  What anarchic times these are. Only yesterday he returned humiliated from the courthouse. He was appealing for an order to restore the situation as it had been before, and the judge sent him packing without even looking at the documents. The petition had expired, she declared, the facts had already been decided on the ground and there was no way of changing them. When he left the building his forehead was burning, and he could barely drag himself to some bar to relax a little before confronting Shlomit and the boys. So much effort going to waste so easily, but how foolish it was, really, seeking an injunction to restore the status quo ante. Is there any such possibility on the face of the earth, to put things back as they were before?

  Even under the former dispensation the situation had been intolerable: ramshackle tents alongside the winding road to the Dead Sea, a few corrugated iron shanties. These were no longer proud shepherds roaming the desert with their flocks and living lives of freedom, moving in the summer to Shechem and in the winter to the Judean Desert. There was freedom no more, there was penury instead, territory shrinking and people forced to live like gypsies on the fringes of towns, cleaners and sanitation workers, thieves and ghosts, and he sits among them and eats, and can do precious little else.

  Hemda Horowitz, he’s awakened suddenly from his reverie when a man’s voice calls his mother’s name, as if inviting her up on the stage. Yes, he hurries to answer, as if his name has been called. He stands up from his seat for some reason, that’s my mother, he explains, and the doctor glances at him without interest. Tall and handsome, younger than him, his look proclaiming an unbridgeable distance. What’s happened, he asks, and Avner finds himself detailing, as if pleading a case in court, the entire sequence of ailments affecting his mother in recent years, but the doctor interrupts him, what happened this morning?

  She contacted me, although I bet she tried my sister first, he adds unnecessarily. The call was a total blank, I mean she didn’t say anything, but I heard her breathing and when I got there I found her on the floor by the window, and for a moment I was afraid she wasn’t alive. I called an ambulance straightaway. She was already unconscious although somehow she managed to dial my number before collapsing. He’s speaking on her behalf, and it seems to him it’s the judge who’s listening to him now, peering at him from behind the doctor’s back, trying to trip him up. Did you really hurry there? she sneers. You didn’t stop off on the way, not even for a moment, to drink an espresso perhaps? And when you saw her lying there by the window you didn’t feel the slightest twinge of relief, a warm infusion that spread through your body, much to your shame, and after calling the ambulance you didn’t by any chance get into her bed, cover yourself with her blanket, bury your face in the pillow, saturated with her smell, and you didn’t for the first time in years shed a tear, although it wasn’t for her you were weeping?

  Embarrassed, he wipes the sweat from his brow as the doctor walks away, giving rapid instructions to the nurse as he goes. What is this, what’s happening to me, he glances around furtively, afraid that the expression on his face, his tone of voice, his posture – all these are betraying him, and the whole of this assemblage, doctors and nurses who aren’t drinking coffee and aren’t playing cards, patients and their visitors, technicians and maintenance staff, all are watching him and they know that sitting there in their midst, at this very moment, is a son who doesn’t love his mother.

  Through the curtain which is only half closed he notices a man of about his own age who has also been brought in here, stretched out on the narrow bed with eyes closed, breathing heavily, and a woman with her straight back turned to him, wrapped in a glossy red satin blouse, pulling up a chair and sitting down beside him, in a hurry to hold his hand. Concealed behind the curtain, he peers, fascinated and alarmed, at his mother’s new neighbours, because it seems to him suddenly that through them reality is transmitting its dire warnings to him, hailing destruction, the end of all flesh! It isn’t that he doesn’t know that people of his own age and even younger fall ill and die, and yet he has never seen this with his own eyes, and he always felt protected from death by the very existence of his mother. Now he feels a pang of fear at the thought that his mother might be going to the world hereafter some time in the next few hours, leaving him without so much as a morsel of the supposed protection that she has provided. A man without parents is more exposed to death, he thinks, and for a moment he longs to turn to his neighbour and check with him urgently, find out if he still has parents, and he peers at the pleasant, yellowing face, drawn to the eyes, which open suddenly, and their expression is young, clownish almost, as if he’s only pretending and in a moment he’ll get up and walk out of the building, arm-in-arm with his statuesque wife.

  Is this really his wife? Their gestures are still fresh, without the ennui that accumulates over the years between partners in a couple, like dust on furniture that hasn’t been moved often enough, but on the other hand, they are about the same age, an observation that makes interpretation a little difficult, since it seems to him that new love in mid-life tends to involve an age-gap, like for example that between him and the young intern who’s waiting for him now in the office, and when he sees her in his mind’s eye he sighs, wiping the sweat from his brow again. Anati, who introduced herself straightaway by her nickname, and he blurted out, Avni, although nobody except his mother and his sister called him that, and since then her pretty lips have launched his childhood name into the ether unabashed: Avni, the client has arrived, Avni, the office is trying to contact you, and all in good heart and without ulterior motive, arousing in him heavy and sad desire, sacks of desire he carries on his back like a weary porter, and she doesn’t even notice.

  Strange, once the heat of passion would have put a spring in his step, whereas now it’s an infusion of lead into his bloodstream, forming clots of blood that roam around the body and threaten its survival. Is he really lusting after her, Anati, with the full body which she actually finds rather tiresome, the prim coiffure and the lovely eyes? So predictable, the lawyer and his junior clerk, and yet this had never happened to him.

  Through the curtain he hears soft speech, a melodious laugh, almost devoid of anxiety, sees his neighbour’s yellowish hand reaching out to the woman’s dark hair, smoothing it slowly, and when she turns towards him Avner catches sight of her aristocratic profile, and he sees her laying her head on the man’s chest, her fingers skimming the length of his arm, until it seems that it was a mistake that they were ever summoned here, to this abode of pain and sickness, when they should be relaxing now in a manicured garden, white wine in their glasses, or packing a suitcase for a short and enjoyable break, and suddenly he feels that it’s his duty to warn them urgently, open their eyes and get them out of this place before it’s too late, you’ve found yourselves in a poisoned cottage, and the witch will turn you into soup, or plead on their behalf in the assizes that determine the fate of bodies, but when the doctor approaches them and he forces himself to eavesdrop on their conversation it becomes clear to him that he’s left it too late: for three days no morsel of food has touched those lips, pains in the stomach are intensifying, and a reverential fear takes hold of him when he realises that here, right beside him, a man is ebbing away, at an awesome rate, and this man, suddenly he feels a powerful and devastating empathy towards him; this man is loving and being loved in a real moment, even as he is consumed like newspaper thrown into a bra
zier to keep the fire going, while he himself, Avner Horowitz, has never loved or been loved, and yet no one pities him.

  Take me instead of him, he wants to say, because this man, this sick body, contains within him a living love, and his anticipated death, like the death of a pregnant woman, is the very embodiment of perversity, and already he’s ready to lie down on the lean body as if to protect him from the explosives of fate, but very soon his sorrow for this couple is tempered by sorrow for himself and for his sons, especially the youngest, who will not remember him at all, even for Shlomit, and he imagines her directing a petulant glance at him, why are you giving in so easily, why aren’t you fighting? And already he’s wondering whether sentences of life and of death are really entirely separate, perhaps it is specifically the one who has known love who is entitled to depart from this world peaceably, whereas the one who hasn’t is required to stay and complete his education, and perhaps that’s why the couple beside him are behaving with such serenity, as if there is no contradiction between love and death, as if they complement each other. But who will take pity on the woman, no longer young, whose beauty radiates to him through the curtain, and what will become of the love with which she is loved, where do they dwell, the loves that live on after the deaths of their practitioners, and it seems to him that if he prays and implores with all his might, perhaps this curtailed love will migrate to him, as his mother’s flesh was transferred to him. She’s lying motionless before him, with the arrogance of one who has reached a ripe old age and is fully entitled to be a burden, when all the efforts and the essence of life are directed towards clinging to life, and after struggling a little with the notion of sacrificing his body, he finds himself ready and willing to sacrifice her body, to cast her flesh into the fire blazing beside him and add a few years of life and love to this man, who is still smiling sweetly, almost apologetically, and still going up in flames.