by Nava Semel
“What does love have to do with it? Who needs love?” I grumbled, looking at the bread.
Aharonchik preached to Zionka about the miracles of communism, predicting a great future in the egalitarian society to come, when it would not matter whether a person was a Jew or a woman, because only the bourgeoisie consider a woman to be a means of production. Zionka was slowly finishing off the bread, and I decided that I couldn’t take any more chances and had to get rid of the guns as fast as possible. Maybe Major Charles Timothy Parker would decide to come to our house again and trick Zionka. Next time, he’d find an excuse to go into the toolshed and look around, and he’d tell her he was looking for a game from Palestine to bring to his childish king.
I had no one to talk to about it. Imri was gone that morning. I heard Aunt Miriam explaining to my mother in the air that Imri was going to Jerusalem to persuade Tonka Greenbaum to give him a divorce. How could he persuade her? I asked. By telling her she was betraying the homeland?
Zionka’s mother had come in as usual and listened to the conversation. She said, “There were never any divorces In your family, Miriam. If your sister, may she rest in peace, were alive .” Aunt Miriam cut her off angrily, “My sister was a great patriot.”
In the meantime, I had a brilliant idea. A perfect prank. Maybe I would introduce Imri’s second wife to the English pilot, so she could steal his heart, and then Major Parker would break off a branch that a swarm of bees had landed on and give it to her, and he would call her “Toni.” In return, she would let him taste her nectar and whisper in his ear, “Charlie.” A branch that a swarm of bees had landed on had the power to awaken love? Just an old superstition. Only Zionka could believe nonsense like that.
* * *
Anna stayed in the house and wrote more letters. I didn’t understand what else was left for her to write. Nothing new had happened since she sent the last giant bundle. I started thinking that there were people in the world who write letters to themselves. Maybe Anna hadn’t told them she was divorced, because maybe being divorced was not such a great honor in Poland.
When Imri wasn’t home, I was in charge. That was a phrase I really liked. I had to get rid of the guns that same night and find a new hiding place. I sprawled on my stomach on my bed, throwing socks at the Jewish National Fund blue box. It was too bad Johnny couldn’t help me now. I needed a look-out who could warn me if strangers were around. My dog was recovering from his wound, but it seemed he liked being pampered in my bed, sinking into the soft lace pillows I brought from Aunt Miriam’s winter closet, chewing on my shoes to his heart’s content. He was still bandaged, but his tail wagged and there was the spark of a smile in his yellow eyes. I told him the details of my plan.
We’ll put our heads together. Your doghouse is out of the question, Johnny, because it’s too close to the shed. The chickens’ water trough is too far, and you know that Zionka’s mother is even worse than the chickens. The only thing left is the dowry trunk that Anna brought from Poland. A perfect hiding place.
I was pleased with myself, and Johnny also barked happily. No one would look there. Certainly not the polite Major Charles Timothy Parker, who called her “Annie.”
The blue box was banging against the door, but was still hanging on. I’d thrown all my socks at it, and they fell like the twigs of a tree.
You see, Johnny, that’s a sign that I’ll be able to get rid of the guns. When Imri comes back, I’ll tell him everything, and he’ll be proud of how clever I was. Maybe he’ll ask me to go on a mission for the homeland too.
It was night. I pretended I was going to sleep. I yawned at the table, and said I was tired. I put on my pajamas, brushed my teeth, and Aunt Miriam was happy. “The tachseet is finally on the right track,” she said to Anna, who didn’t reply. I thought she was anxious to know whether Imri had been able to get rid of Tonka Greenbaum and get a divorce. She wanted to check on Johnny Weissmuller before she went to bed, but I put her off. I didn’t want her to see the equipment I had spread out on my bed: the rope, the kerosene lamp, the dark clothes, and I even dug out of my drawer a small dagger Mohammed once gave me. Anna looked dejected, taking my refusal to mean she was no longer needed.
Aunt Miriam consoled her, “Tonya Greenbaum will understand that you cannot hold a man against his will.” She said her name as if it were a dirty word.
Then Aunt Miriam shrugged and sighed hopelessly. “Sometimes I think that child is a hopeless case. What will I tell his mother?” That was how she admitted to Anna that she talked to my mother every day. I thought Anna would be shocked, the way she had been before, and would think that my aunt had gone completely crazy. But Anna accepted her words calmly, as if conversations with dead people were perfectly natural.
I waited for them to fall asleep. Johnny Weissmuller was snoring on my bed. Spittle was dripping from his mouth onto Aunt Miriam’s lace pillow.
I was lying on my back in my clothes, my hands folded behind my head, staring into the darkness. I loved the night, not sleep, which I thought was a waste of time. I slept the best when it started getting light, and then it was hard for Aunt Miriam to wake me up. Every morning, she threatened to throw cold water on me from the washtub.
Some people are afraid of the night, like Zionka, for example. She dreamed that something terrible was happening to her father, who paved roads. Now she had a new nightmare of Nazis screaming “Jews, get out!” and she woke up covered in sweat. Maybe I’ll ask our teacher to reassure her.
My favorite time was when everybody was drifting around in his own world. Then I was wide awake, and thought up my best pranks. If they would teach me how to read and write at night, then maybe I would learn something, although now, after I saw a movie, I knew that you could make up stories without knowing even a single letter.
It was totally dark. I was piloting a Nimrod Hawker straight into the Beit Ha’Am Cinema, landing inside the screen. Just me. Imri wasn’t with me, and before morning came, I would get to see lots of movies. That boosted my spirits, because it was a sign that I still had lots of things to accomplish in my life.
Chapter 19
Everything was going according to plan. I slid down the rope. Maybe I could be a movie actor too. Cheetah’s part would be a cinch for me. In fact, I’d be willing to play any part at all.
I didn’t need a light because the night air was filled with hovering fireflies, a sure sign that spring was on its way. I opened the toolshed door but didn’t turn on the kerosene lamp. After all, Johnny Weissmuller does everything in the dark too.
Effortlessly, I pushed aside Grandfather’s clay pots, opened the small door and removed the pistols from the old beehive, working as if I were blind. I didn’t fumble because the picture was clear to me, even in the dark. If my teacher could see me now, maybe he would excuse me from reading and writing forever.
I covered the small door with some chicken coop netting I had hidden behind the castor tree before supper, and with Zionka’s baby carriage that I had dragged over for camouflage. It had been lying around their yard for years because her mother and father hoped they would have another baby, but I didn’t think there was any chance of that now.
I topped the pile of junk with the shoes Johnny had chewed up this week and the old clothes Imri had taken out of my father’s valise before his first trip to Europe. Aunt Miriam refused to give away my mother’s clothes, even though she never wore them, rejecting the rabbi’s appeals to donate them to charity. He said that twelve and a half years had already passed, but Aunt Miriam explained that she couldn’t part with them. My birthday is never a happy day, because it’s the day we visit my mother’s grave.
It was done. Now no one would suspect that guns had been hidden here. Just a run-down old shed packed full of all the things we didn’t need but couldn’t part with.
But I had something else to hide. I remembered it only after I thought I’d finished. I had to move everything and start all over. I opened the small door again and hid the candlestick I
had taken from Anna’s trunk in the old beehive, in place of the pistols. If that nosy Englishman should happen to get in here, he’ll think it’s a family heirloom we’ve hidden from thieves. I put the three shillings I’d saved up that year next to the candlestick so that Major Parker would be convinced this was the place we stored our valuables. The way Aunt Miriam puts aside pfuntim, sterling, for my future education in a respectable profession. I don’t know, Aunt Miriam, if they teach how to make movies. I wish I could learn that instead of reading and writing. I felt a twinge of regret about the shillings, because I had planned to spend them on the new Johnny Weissmuller movie coming soon to Tel Aviv, but I consoled myself that something would happen before the sequel to Tarzan arrived. Maybe the English would leave. I absolutely refused to think about the possibility that Anna might have to go.
I was satisfied. True, I hadn’t returned the stolen candlestick to Anna, but only because I couldn’t yet write the word “sorry.”
I climbed into her room through the open window. The curtain billowed across my face. I froze. Darkness suddenly overwhelmed me. The fireflies had vanished and all the objects in the room had been swallowed up. I couldn’t even make out the trunk. I tried to recall what Johnny Weissmuller did when faced with an unexpected obstacle, but there hadn’t been any scenes like that in the movie.
I began crawling, feeling my way along the floor, praying that Anna wouldn’t wake up. I reached the trunk containing her dowry, raised the cover and felt around among the clothes that were no longer neatly arranged the way they had been the day she arrived. I dug down, my fingers touching the hands of a clock. She had shoved the fur coat down to the bottom of the trunk. I ran my fingers over it. Soft and pleasant. I had no idea what kind of an animal it had once been. Not a brown dog, I hoped. I shoved the pistols into the coat sleeves. The coat swelled up, the trunk overflowed, and I was left with two guns I couldn’t squeeze in.
The curtain rustled. Suddenly, the darkness dissolved and I saw that Anna’s bed was empty. Where had she gone in the middle of the night? I didn’t think she could be writing letters in the hen house. For a minute, I was afraid she might have gone off forever, without a goodbye, without a kind word. Maybe she was fed up with lighting a single candle on Friday nights and suffering the pangs of longing and guilt.
Whenever I feel that way, I turn off the kerosene light in my mind and tell myself that my father’s heart will not suddenly start beating again, and my mother will never come back into the world through the air. Sometimes I rewind the pictures to the time when they were here, and I feel a little better. There are lots of pictures missing, as if someone had cut them out. My mother died while giving birth to me, so I don’t remember her at all, only my father, but even that’s something.
I hid behind the curtain, one foot outside, the other propped up against the window sill, and the pistols shoved inside my shirt. Then I heard them, soft voices like the buzzing of a swarm of bees taking off for a blossoming field. They were on Imri’s straw mattress, near the door to the room. Anna was leaning diagonally across it. I heard the rustle of falling material. I saw a white hand burst out of a sleeve, a round shoulder peek out and a dress fall to the side. Imri was also undressing. I guessed that she was unbuttoning his shirt, and they were eating something the whole time. Imri whispered, “It’s sweet, Anna.”
I wanted to turn on a light, but then they would have discovered me. Maybe the fireflies had conspired to help me see what I knew was not meant for my eyes. I was playing the most terrible prank of all, and I couldn’t stop. It was playing itself. I was frozen, unmoving, slowly breathing in the darkness. The air was scorching. Maybe I was cold, maybe hot.
Imri removed the pins, one after the other, from Anna’s hair. I heard the clink they made when they hit the floor. He freed her hair, which tumbled down in waves to cover her back. She always wore it up, and now I discovered that it reached below her waist. I saw her from the back, sitting like an erect, white statue. Imri bent and kissed the hollow of her throat, caressed the round lines painted on her skin by the light, holding in his hand an object that glowed in the dark.
“My queen bee,” Imri whispered, and I sprang back, almost plummeting from the window sill.
The picture came to me sharp and clear. There was no one to block it. He slipped a honeycomb into her mouth and they both ate from it, each one separately, then both at the same time, the wax cells of the workers and the queen linking them, and again they sucked the honey from the comb, or licked it from each other’s skin. Then they seemed to melt as they sank together onto the straw mattress near the door to the room. Now Imri was licking her fingers, then sucking the honeycomb, placing it between her lips like a female worker feeding the queen. But Imri was not a female worker, he was male, and I knew what happened to a male after it mated with the queen. He was doomed. Imri, Imri, you’re in more danger than I am. Guns are easier to get rid of than an extra wife. Anna is nothing to you anymore. How come that when you were married, you slept apart, and now, now that you’re divorced and married to another woman, you sleep together?
My finger touched the trigger of the pistol. If I were to shoot, they would stop, but the pictures continued to roll. There was nothing that could halt their caresses now, or the gentle buzzing emanating from their throats. The honeycomb had been tossed aside, and they looked like one person. Her hand, or his, wandered every which way, touching everywhere, and I couldn’t tell where her body began and his ended.
“Anna,” Imri whispered, “Repeat after me, ani ohevet otcha, I love you.”
She repeated the words in Hebrew, without the slightest hint of a Polish accent, as if she had been born in Eretz Israel.
Imri
A woman creates life inside her body, and a man cradles it outside her so it will not be spilled, heaven forbid. But I still don’t know how to give life, Anna, and I’m afraid to take what is not legally mine.
I feel your longing pouring out of you when you touch the empty hangers in the closet, and I tremble. I have no words, Anna. I don?t know how to console you. I search for words you will understand. You teach me to read your body, and yet there is something hidden inside you, a place I cannot reach. Even if you were my wife now, you would remain free. I am not sure if you will ultimately choose me. At first, I thought someone was deceiving me, but now, when I am another woman’s husband, I know that it is myself I am deceiving. I promised to marry four women, but I was never required to love.
You walk through the rooms, Anna, and your light steps make the air quiver. I hide my face against your throat, breathe you into me and whisper. My mother said to me, “This is life.” I didn’t know back then that it was the last time I would hear her voice. My mother’s big belly, something fluttering inside, seeking to emerge. If I had known what was going to happen, I would have snatched my hand away and shouted, “This is death!”
I could not save her. The child is not guilty. Stay, Anna.
Chapter 20
Sucking honey. Sucking honey. Sucking honey. I ran, talking to myself. Once, years ago, I swallowed a whole honeycomb and then vomited up my guts. I could feel the sweetness for days. Since then, I’ve been careful.
The fireflies were chasing me, glittering like the necklace Zionka’s mother wore around her neck when she went to a concert in Tel Aviv. And I was getting angry, because even though the tiny lights were beautiful—I admit it—they were only letters the female insects were sending out to the males, and that was a sign language I didn’t want to understand.
I had dropped from the window sill with a bang. I wanted to interrupt them, but they kept right on doing what they were doing. Maybe it was something people couldn’t stop once they started. I think I was angrier at myself than I was at them.
I had no one to talk to, and anyhow, no one would understand. I knew what a man and a woman did when they were alone, and they didn’t do it just to obey the biblical commandment to be fruitful and multiply, like the rabbi said. My mother and father di
d it, that’s a fact—after all, I was born, and so was Imri, twelve years before that. Maybe they were doing it in heaven too. For their sake, I hoped so, because dead people can’t get divorced.
The scene on the screen changed. Jane walked right up to Tarzan, who was a complete stranger, put an arm around his neck and stroked his naked chest, and that was even before he had said a single human word to her.
I corrected myself. It was the actress who was clinging to Johnny Weissmuller. She was just playing a part. What you see in a movie is “fictitious.” A stone pulled at my heart, because although Anna and Imri weren’t married on paper any more, what I saw wasn’t fictitious.
I wanted to stretch out on the ground that was already covered with soft spring grass, and hide from the world, but I had two of the newest made-in-Poland Radom pistols in my shirt that I had to hide, or else, disaster.
I ran and ran. I’d already circled the house ten times, and every time, the curtain billowed in the open window, because curtains had no idea what they were concealing. Even if I pulled it down and ripped it to pieces, they would stay inside and keep on doing what they were doing. And how would it end?
That’s what was going through the mind of the marathon runner as every step brought his life closer to its end. I didn’t know if he’d known from the beginning that he was going to die a minute before he announced the victory. My teacher didn’t say whether they mourned him, or, because of the celebration, they forgot all about him and no one bothered to come to his funeral.
What did they say to each other after they took off their clothes and were naked? I guess there were no secrets then.
