Paper Bride

by Nava Semel

  Paper Bride

  Nava Semel (b. 1954, Tel Aviv, Israel) holds an MA in Art History and is an art critic. Semel has worked as a TV, radio and recording producer and as a journalist. She has written poetry, prose for children and adults, television scripts and opera libretti, in addition to translating plays. Semel has received several literary prizes, including the American National Jewish Book Award for children’s literature (1990), the Women Writers of the Mediterranean Award (1994), the Austrian Best Radio Drama Award (1996), the Israeli Prime Minister’s Award (1996) and Tel Aviv Woman of the Year in Literature Award (2007). Her latest novel in Hebrew is Screwed on Backwards (2011).

  Also by Nava Semel (in translation)

  Becoming Gershona

  Flying Lessons

  Bride on Paper

  Hat of Glass

  Love for Beginners

  Who Stole the Show?

  The Child Behind the Eyes

  And the Rat Laughed

  Paper Bride

  Nava Semel

  Translated from Hebrew

  by

  Sondra Silverston

  Published by Hybrid Publishers

  Melbourne Victoria Australia

  ©2012

  All rights reserved.©

  Copyright © by Nava Semel and Worldwide Translation

  Copyright © by The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew

  Literature.

  This publication is copyright.

  Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Requests and enquiries concerning reproduction should be addressed to the Publisher, Hybrid Publishers, PO Box 52, Ormond 3204.

  www.hybridpublishers.com.au

  English-language edition first published 2012

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Author: Semel, Nava

  Title: Paper Bride/Nava Semel

  ISBN: 9781742981284 (ebk)

  Dewey Number: 892.437

  Contents

  Uzik

  Chapter 1

  Imri

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Imri

  Chapter 4

  Aharonchik

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Mohammed

  Chapter 11

  Aunt Miriam

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  The Rabbi

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Mohammed

  Chapter 17

  Zionka’s mother

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Imri

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  The Rabbi

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Zionka’s mother

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Fahtma

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Miriam

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Miriam

  Chapter 34

  Aharonchik

  Chapter 35

  Fahtma

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Mohammed

  Chapter 38

  Major Charles Timothy Parker

  Chapter 39

  Uzik

  Uzik

  I won’t live forever. That thought, which seemed so obvious, struck me sharply when I tried to make a movie for the first time.

  I tried to correct the flawed, cruel landscape reflected in the lens. A ridiculous attempt to compensate for small injustices, but even so, I couldn’t give it up.

  I am not the main character of this story. All my life, I have always preferred to look at things through the transparent shield of a camera, using it as an intermediary to protect myself. I don’t pretend to include everything. The narrow strip of celluloid time has indeed been fastened onto the spinning reel, but I found a way—although not an especially original one—to interrupt and alter the arbitrary flow of the screening.

  I sometimes wonder if that really was my life, and I’m afraid that one day, I’ll discover that the most important things were left on the cutting room floor.

  In the end, I did not succeed in finding the image that would truthfully represent the grand words. I closed my eyes in despair a thousand times, as I tried to convey love of homeland in a tangible image. Words, after all, were never enough for me. Even when you arrange them this way or that, they never tell the exact story you want, and the story too, no matter how faithful it is, changes before your very eyes, as if another director were interfering in your work. Is what I described what actually happened? I, like everyone else, have the right to be skeptical.

  How arrogant it is to move through time as if it were my own personal possession. To appropriate my own story, to tear off pieces of other people’s memories, interspersing them with the opaque strips of film we call “leaders.” Methods have improved. Something new comes onto the scene every day, and confusion grows. I don’t fool myself that I’ll ever be able to bridge the gaps between the black strip and the white screen. If I made a bad bargain in my choices, this is my last chance to correct them, because what I choose to tell is what will remain, Zionka. And you asked me to learn one more lesson that had nothing to do with letters and words. The day will come—if it does—when I learn to forgive myself.

  One year in the life of a dog is equivalent to seven years of human life. That too is a strip of time spinning out on another reel. I’ve had endless conversations on the subject, but I still haven’t discovered whether dogs also find it difficult to reconcile themselves to the terrifying fact that they can’t live forever. I don’t know if any of the dogs I had, any of my Johnny Weissmullers, ever weighed the balance of good and bad in their lives, or regretted what they had missed.

  There are many ways to tell this story, and mine is not necessarily the right one. When the reel spins on the projector, and the last picture flickers in the air, practically slipping back into the projectionist’s hands, I ask myself if what I have done was worth doing. I ask, and will keep on asking again and again, whether there is a person there.

  Obcinać in Polish, ikta in Arabic. As for the Hebrew word, we never use it. How strange we use only the English “CUT”.

  Chapter 1

  Whenever someone asked me what my family does for the homeland—a question people never stopped asking in Palestine—I always answered immediately—“We get married.” I remember the first time I said it and my teacher threw me out of the class. He tried to get control of himself, silencing the first giggles with a threatening gesture. Banished, I stood near the principal’s office, my teacher’s note of complaint in my hand. Even though it was folded in a sealed envelope, I managed to take it out, careful not to tear the envelope. I tried to get someone to read the words for me, and Zionka was the only one who would do it.

  “Uziel has dishonored our people and our homeland,” the note said. Zionka was embarrassed. She lowered her eyes as if she were the guilty party. She could barely get the words out, and not because she had some kind of reading problem like I did.

  And so, dear children, we repeat the question. What does your family do for the homeland? Herzl Fleisher stood up first, followed by other pupils, all of them describing how their fathers or their uncles or other people they knew were active in the defense of the Jews in Palestine or had devoted their liv
es to building the country. But I hadn’t lied. My big brother Imri really did go to Poland to get married for the homeland.

  His first bride was Anna.

  The night Imri left, he went to the toolshed, opened the rusty metal locks of the old brown valise lying near the clay pots once used as bee hives, and emptied out his old school notebooks. Imri too had once been a kid, though that was sometimes hard for me to believe. Aunt Miriam says that he was the most outstanding student in the history of our village and made our mother and father very proud. They expected great things from him. That’s what Aunt Miriam told anyone who was willing to listen. To me, she used to say, “How lucky they’re not alive to see how you’ve turned out.”

  Imri filled the valise with clothes that had been lying around the shed since our father died. Watching him trying to fold our father’s best, English-made black suit and two wrinkled, white silk shirts, I began to laugh.

  “Imri,” I asked, “are you going to a fancy dress ball?”

  Then he stood in front of the small, cracked mirror he had hung on a hook and practiced knotting a tie. He kept getting a different, peculiar-looking knot every time, and I said he looked like a condemned prisoner who had volunteered to tie his own noose. But he wasn’t offended at all. He simply bent down in front of the small mirror, hunting for the exact spot where his head ended and his neck began and mumbling, “It’ll work. It has to work.”

  Imri didn’t pack his real clothes. There were none of the khaki pants and sleeveless undershirts Aunt Miriam mended every Saturday night. I don’t know where he found Daddy’s ironed handkerchiefs. I was sure Aunt Miriam had given them to the Sephardic old age home in Jerusalem a long time ago.

  He reeked of mothballs. I wrinkled my nose and said, “Imri, be careful these clothes don’t change you,” and he replied dismissively, “Clothes are just pieces of material loosely sewn together. What’s inside never changes.” When he was finally satisfied with the knot he had tied, he tightened it, stood up and said, “As for you, Uzik, take care of the house and the hives. And especially of Aunt Miriam.”

  I tried to look directly into his eyes, but couldn’t. He was too busy locking the valise and dragging it out of the shed, giving me orders the whole time as if I were a stranger. Don’t forget to feed the chickens and lock the gate to the yard with the heavy padlock every single night. Remember to pay Mohammed Daudi for his work on the first of every month, and be careful a swarm of bees doesn’t attack when you open the cover of the hive and fold back the burlap sack sticky with propolis and wax. And never ever go near the English air base that borders our land. And if anybody asks where your older brother has disappeared to, tell them he’s taken a boat to Italy to bring back some less aggressive, stingless queen bees that will produce thicker honey than ours do.

  It was a long list, and I only half-listened. He didn’t mention school, maybe because he knew it was hopeless. Finally, just before two strangers arrived in a van to pick him up, he said, “And promise me you won’t cause any trouble. No pranks while I’m gone,” and added as an afterthought, “It’ll be worth your while. I’ll bring you a present from Europe.”

  Wearing striped pajamas that were once Imri’s, I watched them pull away. I didn’t understand why he had to leave me alone with Aunt Miriam for such a long time. He was hardly ever home as it was. I was furious at the people from the Jewish Agency who had sent him on a mission right before the harvesting season. And most of all, I was afraid he was leaving me for a place where mysterious, incomprehensible things happen that have nothing at all to do with bees and honey. I ran after the van, calling, “Imri, Imri, don’t go!” When he didn’t answer, I shouted, “Something terrible’s going to happen and it’ll be your fault!” But my shouts were in vain. Either Imri didn’t hear me or he chose to ignore my threats.

  The van rocked its way along the narrow dirt road behind our yard. I saw the two strangers clap him on the back and heard them laugh loudly. One of them said, “There are such beauties waiting for you there,” and I recalled what Zionka’s mother said about elegant and educated European women. I hoped none of them would agree to have a boyfriend who smelled of mothballs. The sound of singing drifted over from the English air base, and I knew that the pilots were polishing off another one of the cases of beer they bought in Shmariyahu’s grocery in our village every morning.

  I sat on the floor of the toolshed. The lighted kerosene lamp scattered the old smells. Imri isn’t especially neat, but Aunt Miriam never yells at him about it. Our father’s old clothes were strewn all around. I couldn’t remember him ever wearing such fancy clothes. I gathered them into a pile, and didn’t find even one piece of women’s clothing. I smelled the mothballs for a minute, making an effort to remember. But I gave it up immediately. I’d be late for school again and my teacher would say, “So, what can you expect from Uzik the troublemaker.”

  I could’ve pulled a trick or two to delay Imri. If I’d taken the air out of the van’s tires, or opened a hive and let the bees out, then maybe he would have had to cancel his trip. But it was too late now.

  * * *

  What did you do for your homeland?

  I’m sure the principal suspected me of opening the envelope on the sly and getting someone to read the complaint note to me. He and the teachers have insinuated more than once that I really do know how to read. They think I’m purposely putting on an act just to annoy them.

  The principal sighed, “What are we going to do with you, Uziel? I hope this is the last time you carry on this way. We’ll have no choice but to leave you back a grade. Some day, you’ll learn that our homeland is not a joke.”

  I tried to guess what kind of punishment was in store for me. Anything but having to write a hundred times in my notebook, “Our homeland is not a joke.” I couldn’t even write that sentence once, let alone a hundred times. I’d have to ask Zionka to do it for me. She has such beautiful handwriting. She’s always getting compliments on her neat, round letters. But when I look in her notebook, I can never tell what’s on the page and what’s run off the edges.

  To my surprise, the principal simply raised his glance from the large diary that lay open in front of him and said, “Tell your brother I wish him a very successful trip.”

  * * *

  A single tie lay on the toolshed floor. An orphaned snake, like the kind I find during the summer near the gate of the English air base. I put it around my neck and tried to make a knot like Imri’s. The small mirror was still hanging on its hook. I looked into the crack and saw myself broken into pieces. I narrowed my eyes above the flickering face inside the small frame and said, “Shut up.” I was sorry I hadn’t hugged Imri goodbye, like in the movies. He’s my only brother. I don’t have any others. And it immediately occurred to me that, in the movies, only lovers hug that way when they know they’ll never see each other again. Imri, who had already seen quite a few movies, hates that kind of ending. The girl always whines and waves her handkerchief, looking sniffly and miserable.

  There wasn’t even one handkerchief in the whole pile of Daddy’s clothes. Imri had taken them all to blow his nose into or wipe his sweat with. Zionka’s mother is impressed by Imri’s manners. She says he’s “absolutely European,” and that’s exactly why I prefer my sleeve.

  My face in the mirror was squashed. For a minute, I looked like a whining girl. Even the tie hung pathetically from my neck because the knot was too loose. What a horrible beginning. The words kept echoing in my mind, “Our homeland is not a joke, not a joke ...” I blew out the flame of the kerosene lamp with one breath.

  Back then, I still didn’t know Anna.

  Imri

  What do I know about women? The mission I’ve undertaken is more difficult than I imagined. I shouldn’t have agreed. But they pleaded with me. For the sake of the homeland, they said. After all, what did I have to do? It’s a trivial matter to say, “Thou art consecrated unto me by the law of Moses and Israel” and then break the glass. Later, we get divorced
and I never see her again. It’s all arranged in advance, each of us relying on the good will of the other.

  Many men endanger their lives for the sake of noble ideas, and I’m not even risking my liberty. I only seem to be doing so. Getting my passport stamped requires no great effort on my part. And yet that faint imprint will bind me to a woman I’ve never seen before, in a place whose name I’ve never heard. Teach me, Aharonchik.

  I’ll have to be alone with her and I don’t even know if she’s attractive. What will I do if she smells bad or acts strangely? Should I open doors for her, bring her flowers, call her by her first name, and what will I do if, God help me, we touch each other or if I’m forced to put my arm around her shoulders to convince the authorities that she really is my wife?

  Now, contemplating the moment we stand face to face, nothing separating us, I’m filled with anxiety. The two of us in the hold of a ship, the compartment narrow and stifling, its round porthole like the window of a prison cell, the black sea rocking us. And I drink in the breath of that stranger lying in the bunk beside me. You could’ve stopped me, Aharonchik. I must have lost my mind. How naive I am! I may have read many books, but I’m not familiar with that intricate game a man and a woman play. She’ll bear my name, and even after I give her the divorce, the paper will bleed with her memory. No one ever taught me how to act with a woman. They teach you everything but that. How do you make love?

  Chapter 2

  In the village, they call me “Uzik the troublemaker” because of the things I do, which they call “pranks,” and when the village rabbi wants to console Aunt Miriam, he calls them “a bit of mischief,” as if a different name could change what it means. My pranks, I explain to Zionka, aren’t dangerous to anyone and have never yet caused anybody to run away from Palestine.

  I think everyone around me is too serious. They work from sunrise to sunset in the cow sheds, in the citrus groves and with the beehives, and they never leave their small stores, even on the hottest days. When we celebrate a special occasion in the village, like a wedding, they cry on the bride’s shoulder, trot out all the troubles they’ve had in the past, and recall all the dead people who martyred themselves for some cause or other. Especially Aunt Miriam, who keeps her feet propped up on a footstool the whole evening, sighing, “Life is hard.”