He seemed timid and bashful, but at home in their company he would periodically explode into terrible rages, especially after they left the kibbutz and for the first time were four people living in one house, a family in other words. In the tiny pocket-sized apartment in the housing project overlooking the Arab village that straddled the ridge, when he was working unwillingly as a clerk in a local branch of the bank and she, deprived of the protection of her kibbutz, sometimes felt that the three of them were being held hostage by a dangerous invalid, or to be more accurate, the two of them, she and Avner, since Dina was always beyond his reach, out of the danger zone; a fraternity of the deprived united them and has lasted until today, years after his death.
How he used to attack her beautiful boy when he stood in front of the mirror, adjusting his hair. Out having fun again? he would scold him. Sit down and study, or nothing will come of you in the end! Only yesterday you were out at the cinema, today you’re staying at home, and she would stand like a lioness between him and her son, what are you talking about? He hasn’t been out all week, you leave him alone, and at once the familiar arguments erupted, and Avner would flee the family home with tears in his eyes, receding in the distance, and at weekends escape to his girlfriend on the kibbutz, and sometimes she would come to them on a Friday afternoon, short and crop-haired, exhausted from the long journey.
Against her will she accepted her, the living partition between her and her son, hoping he would find a more impressive partner than this one, or better still remain hers exclusively for a few more years, but Shlomit wasn’t giving up so easily, to this day she has held on to him with her fingernails, with her arms that have thickened, with her children, especially the older one, so like her, and when she opens her eyes cautiously, slyly, and sees her there beside her, firm and enduring, again the old forgotten grudge wells up in her, and she stretches out her hand and pushes the spoon away, sneaking a glance at the stain left by the liquid on her daughter-in-law’s white blouse. Where’s Avni, she wants to ask, or more to the point, where am I, but no question is heard, although she feels her lips moving above the ignominiously empty gums, her tongue sliding over them again and again, searching for the lost teeth, the lost years.
Really lost? How much anger poured out of her after his death, sitting hour after hour by the window and fuming, like the peat that burned perpetually in the depths of the marshes, what a betrayal, a husband who leaves the world too early or too late, abandoning her to the last age, children who slip away from her as they grow up, and this city, Jerusalem, where she so much wanted to live a new life, and now it stands before her indifferent, locked and bolted, almost hostile in its dangerous fringes, live in me if it matters to you, love me if it matters to you, but don’t ask anything of me. Unlike the absorbent and vibrant entity that is the kibbutz, which both snatches away and bestows, she found the city non-negotiable, repelling all expectations and accusations, putting them back in her arms like her dead husband.
But what stopped you living, what stopped you making new acquaintances, finding new work, after all you weren’t that old, it was just your stupid pride; the daughter of kibbutz aristocracy, a queen voluntarily exiled from the far and mysterious North, what does she want with teeming neighbourhoods, young families mainly and their children running up and down the stairwells where the smell of fast cooking hangs, fried sausages, burnt rice, meat cutlets, and their dissipated lives, billeted in cramped apartments above her and beneath her and on all sides.
Why don’t you go out now and then? her children used to nag her, you can’t go on like this, sitting by the window all day, the landscape isn’t going anywhere, you have nothing to watch over, until she started to pretend, and when she heard them coming in she would immediately sit down with the notebook in her lap, the notebook she inherited from her daughter, and now she sits up in alarm, the notebook, she tries to say, don’t touch my notebook, as it’s suddenly clear to her that she’ll never go back there, never again sit by her window, staring at the ridges that mask the towers of Bethlehem, and she sees them coming mournfully into her apartment and rooting through her possessions, opening drawers and closets as if searching for the abstract of their experiences, and how great will be their joy when they suddenly find the old notebook hidden in the linen closet, and how great their disappointment when they open it with an air of reverent awe and find that it’s empty.
Yes, this is all that’s going to be left behind from her decades on the face of the earth, an empty notebook, since she never dared write one word in it, as this word, the first one, would need to be single and unique, a princess of words the like of which had never been written; this word must embrace all the sounds she heard and the sights she saw and the smells surrounding her, the rustle of the east wind stirring the thicket and the cries of the fish caught in the net, the smell of the papyrus huts of the Arabs on a sunlit day, and the dignity of the herons nesting in the reeds of the marsh, the chatter of the women mending the fishermen’s nets with their young fingers, the sound of the cracking of barbel eggs which stick to the stones of the river, the growl of the catfish recumbent on the floor of the lake, lying in wait for the small fry, the eye-catching courtship colours of the males at the start of the spawning season, the grunting of the wild boars, and the smell of the sudden smoke rising from the ground, the sight of the waves broken by the wind and turning on their foam-covered backs, the beauty of the clouds above Mount Hermon which foretell the approach of rain, and the bemusement of the cranes returning in the autumn and not finding the lake. Such a heavy weight she imposed on this one and only word that it sank, plummeting like those metal ingots that were found on the bed of the lake after it was drained, and it seems to her suddenly that maybe now she could try, a last attempt, not to mention a first, without words, just to hold her notebook close to her body, pressing so hard it penetrates beneath her skin, to dry up her milk and her blood. Is this not a sacred obligation, to keep a record while it is still possible, as the sole survivor from the disaster, and she waves her hand at her daughter-in-law, catching sight of her suddenly, some distance away, the notebook, she shouts, bring me my notebook, but Shlomit carries on receding, she’s already turned into a tiny dot on the landscape alongside the dwindling lights of the kibbutz, because a storm is brewing, an east wind shakes the boat, yellow water-lilies move about as if life has been breathed into them, their heart-shaped leaves spread on the surface of the water, tens of thousands of green hearts, and the thickets are stirring.
All the children had already gone to their beds that stormy night. She too was dead-tired when her father dragged her to the boat. Are we fishing on a night like this, Daddy? It’s so cold and rainy, but he scolded her, don’t be such a weakling, Hemda, you think people don’t eat in winter? He wrapped her little body in a fisherman’s rain-cape, and dragged her after him. There were four men in the boat, one at the oar and one with the net, and she a wet bird in the bows. The wind whistled in their ears as they spread the net on the pitch-black waters, and the marker-corks bobbed in a long line above the surface of the lake. It isn’t your turn to sleep yet, her father, the skipper, growled at one of the crewmen, dozing over the oar. Hemda, take over from Yosef for a bit, but rowing was such hard work. Sometimes they rowed two men to an oar, and here she was by herself, her face sweating from the effort despite the cold, while jets of rainwater ran off the cape and under it her limbs were shaking.
The lights of the kibbutz had vanished completely, violet flashes sharp as thorn pierced Mount Hermon and the rain intensified, foaming the surface of the lake, night birds screeching in the distance, and she leaned over the side of the boat and whispered, flee you tilapia, flee you catfish, although she knew that only a net crammed with colourful booty would put a smile on her father’s lips, and then perhaps they would return in the last watch to the jetty, singing lustily, God will build this land, God will build Galilee, content to unload the nets, sit in the dining hall and wait for fried fish, and she would grab a
slice of bread with jam and run to the school, wet and tired and stinking of fish.
But it’s only one of these nights she wants to tell her notebook about now, and about the ringing of the bell, made from an empty gas cylinder with a metal bar for a clapper, a means of informing the fishermen of the night’s events on the shore, and that night the bell rang out loudly, telling Yosef of the birth of his first-born son, and Yosef pleaded to be allowed to return to the jetty to see his wife, but her father refused categorically. We can’t stopping fishing in mid-shift, he rebuked him, you’ll see her in the morning. Yosef obeyed him, clenching his lips, restrained and disciplined man that he was, one of the founder-members of the kibbutz, and that night of all nights the fish outwitted them, and the nets came up as empty as they had been when they were cast.
Fishing is a riddle, said her father as the bell rang again and again, as if again and again the baby were being born, and when they landed in the morning, the empty nets in their hands, they were met on the shore by a group of comrades, bare-headed, who took Yosef by the arm and led him to his tragedy, to his son who lost his mother a few hours after leaving her womb, to the body of the young wife whose life was cut short by a rare post-natal complication, and Hemda wept profusely before the pale face of her father, it’s all because of you, she shouted at him, if you’d let him come back perhaps this wouldn’t have happened, and her father grabbed her arm and walked quickly to the dining hall, his lips quivering. If only he had shared his pain with her, if only he had said the obvious, I didn’t know, I couldn’t have known – but instead he snapped at her, you don’t stop a job halfway through.
At breakfast he didn’t eat anything, just poured himself cup after cup of scalding tea, and she watched him as he walked to his room, swaying slightly, the typical gait of fishermen, whose bodies expect the ground to move, and he was the veteran among them and the oldest of them, he taught them all to fish, everything that he learned from the Arabs in the early years he taught his younger comrades. She didn’t go to school that day; shivering from cold and exhaustion she hid among the bushes under his window. If she had heard one sigh she would have gone in and tried to console him, but a heavy silence rose from the room, which remained dark all that day, and in the evening at sunset, when they all accompanied the young mother to her grave, he came out of there and walked to the jetty, without assembling the rest of the fishermen, without taking a basket of food and drink. With a heavy heart she watched his boat receding, doesn’t he know how dangerous it is, going out fishing alone at night, has he forgotten the Arab gangs, poachers who lie in wait for unwary fishermen? Daddy, she shouted to him from afar, Daddy, come back, and all night she tossed and turned on her bed, sure she would never see him again, hating him and loving him, overwhelmed by pity and anger. Murderer, she was mumbling, tasting the word with her tongue, murderer, who told you you had to be tougher than God?
At the start she used to watch the orphan child, who grew up before her eyes like a monument under construction, like living testimony to the passage of time, to pain that doesn’t pass. She would see Yosef walking with him in the gardens in the afternoon, both of them lean and slightly stooped, a gloomy and isolated pair. How deep is orphanhood, how strong is widowhood; these words that she knew from books absorbed the likeness of these two, and in her imagination her mother would adopt the child to atone for what the father did, and perhaps even she herself, though she was only twelve years old that night, could turn into a mother for little Hanan, named after his mother Hana, because deep in her heart she believed she too deserved a part of the blame – if she hadn’t been in the boat perhaps her father would have been less severe. He was so intent on her education, on the personal example he set her, and she was afraid for years that the ghost of Hana was going to pursue her until she too died in the throes of childbirth, that would be justice, but when she held baby Dina in her arms for the first time, it was her father who lay before her, breathless and lifeless.
What kind of a deceptive plot, bereft of forgiveness, is she trying to tell her notebook, disaster following in the wake of disaster. So much had been taken over the years, and it was in the shadow of disaster that they grew up, generations of children on the edge of the lake; is that why they loved it so much? Since time immemorial ominous-sounding surveys had been conducted there. Engineers from the central areas visited them regularly, their faces full of importance as if they were taking part in something big and decisive, and carrying sophisticated measuring gadgets. This had been going on for years, and the children who changed with the years would watch them anxiously, what are you doing with our sea? Are you really going to drain it? But why?
Her father loved to tell her the stories he heard from the Arab fellahin about the giant Nimrod who lived in the high stronghold named after him, Kalaat Nimrod, the biggest fortress built by the Crusaders in the Land of Israel, with his massive physique and heroic persona: at every meal Nimrod devoured mountains of food and diverted a river into his mouth. Seated on the top of the ridge he could stretch out his hand to the sources of the Jordan and draw his water from there, but with his prodigious strength he dared, to his misfortune, to raise himself above Allah and to fight him with his bow and arrows, and Allah dropped blood from Heaven on his arrows, early in the morning and at dusk, and finally he sent to him the tiniest of his creatures, the mosquito, to punish him for his blasphemy, and the mosquito flew up his nose and penetrated his brain.
Every day the mosquito would come out to rest on the knees of the heroic giant and return to its residence in his brain, and Nimrod’s eyes were losing their sight, until he became sick of his life and commanded his servants to cut off his head and replace it with a head made of gold, and since then every year a great swarm of mosquitoes has risen from his grave and spread across the marshes of the Hula Valley, and she saw the giant Nimrod in the form of her father, and sometimes when her father was dozing in the bows of the boat in the light of dawn, she was convinced that in his sleep the Arabs had cut off his head and placed a golden head on his shoulders, hence his vicious temper, and the moment his genuine head was returned to him, she would feel his love once again.
Did she ever really feel it? From such an early age she was expected to learn to read the signs of love through harshness and unreasonable demands; of course if he didn’t love her he wouldn’t have invested so much effort in her education, he wouldn’t have laid such expectations on her and he wouldn’t have been disappointed by her again and again, no, she’s shaking her head now like an angry toddler, the fact is that his love for her mother was something else. Stop it, Hemda, you’re upsetting your mother, he used to scold her when she tried to share her troubles with her Mum, even during the war when she’d been wounded in the leg by a piece of shrapnel and was distraught with pain and fear it was the same rebuke: stop it, Hemda, can’t you see your mother’s crying?
So many species of fish, so many species of love, of pain, of holding on, even now she can’t let go, like the male tilapia whose mouth is full of fertilised eggs, his future offspring, and for this reason he can’t eat for months on end, so her throat is filled by her father and her mother, and until she can manage to open her gullet and accommodate her offspring, she lays her eggs and gets as far away as she can, and only later does she search for them in the undergrowth, among the boulders, running on the lawns of the kibbutz and shouting, Avni, Avni, where are you?
Between his office and the law courts, between his mother’s house – she’s returned in the meantime to her bed in the little room facing the window – and his house, between the two boys: the younger one, cheerful and precocious, and his big and clumsy older brother, so like Shlomit, Avner roams the streets in his car, the list of addresses nestling in his pocket, the list that Anati succeeded in getting for him from the vehicles agency with astonishing and heart-warming guile, and the task is proving harder than he expected: in subterranean car parks, at roadsides, in private parking spaces, roofed and exposed, gold-coloured cars h
ave been left, dumb, their seats upholstered in leather or fabric, souvenirs laden with significance, like the first pairs of shoes hanging from mirrors, and they are closed and sealed, their secrets hidden from the eye, and he proceeds slowly along the crowded city streets, holding up the traffic, chasing every flash of gold that dazzles him, accepting with resignation the hoots and the insults. Where are they now, where is their abode, perhaps they came from a different town anyway, perhaps they went back to the hospital, where without knowing it they shared with him a rare moment of beauty and pain that gives him no rest, and at night when he can’t sleep he gets out of bed and goes into the children’s room; is that man too standing now by his children’s beds, in the gathering gloom of the imminent end, sending them into a long life without a father? Is he seeking to be with them now as long as is possible or does he find it hard to endure their presence, wrapped up in his pain, as his own father was, and he imagines him walking at dusk in a big and fragrant garden, among laden fruit trees, golden medlars and plums, and ornamental trees with blossom just starting to fade, a nervous smile on his gaunt features, but why is he so eager to see him again, he can’t be his friend any longer, the ways things are, and anyway he hasn’t been in the habit of making friends in recent years; it would be more accurate to say, he never was.
He was never that fond of them, of men that is, and these last few years he hasn’t even bothered to pretend. Men of his own age depress him, and the younger ones arouse his envy and that depresses him too, and in fact the whole human race is appealing to him less and less, the oppressors and the oppressed alike, and yet despite this he goes on committing himself to these searches, going out of the office when the sun is setting, scouring the streets of the city, he’s never explored this city as thoroughly as he does now, in the grip of a gloomy obsession. Since he arrived here in his youth he’s had no leisure to get to know the place, too busy adjusting to the humdrum routine, so it became his city without any effort on his part to make its acquaintance; he had no qualms about leaving it to others to ponder its true nature, to attribute intentions and qualities to it, so long as it remained in his eyes an arbitrary collection of streets, his home in one of them and his office in another, the Supreme Court here and the District Court over there, and it’s only now that for the first time the details coalesce into some kind of fateful whole that includes him at its centre, into a blurred sense of mission, and although he has nothing to say to this man or to his family he needs to locate him; just at the very time when all the others are hurrying to their homes, to their children and their suppers, he finds himself loitering, turning eastward and passing his mother’s house at the moment the light in the window goes on, and he notices the blacker than black head of the new carer who’s been assigned to her, popping up and disappearing, and then he passes his sister’s house too, paying her an imaginary visit. Is that Nitzan standing there in the lobby, making an animated phone call, her mobile concealed by her flowing locks of hair, so it looks as if she’s arguing vociferously with herself? He never warmed to the girl, that small body uttering adult thoughts from such an early age always repelled him, and she for her part never showed any interest in him and his family; his children were a nuisance to her, and it seemed she and her parents had created a kind of closed and exclusive unit which needed no one, least of all him.
The Remains of Love Page 10
