Paper Bride

by Nava Semel

  Imri is wearing our father’s old suit, and even in the picture, you can see that the sleeves are too long. His hand is creeping under Anna’s white dress. Soon, they could suck honey to their heart’s content. If I look at that picture for too long, it seems to be moving. Even Aunt Miriam’s lips, that talk to the air, are moving.

  I’m on Anna’s left, squirming in the pressed, long pants Aunt Miriam forced me to wear. Too bad you can’t see me, because at that instant, the Zionist duck was walking across the yard, attracted by the refreshments, and Johnny Weissmuller took advantage of the opportunity to bark loudly and send him running back to Zionka’s yard.

  Although there is no proof, I know I am there, outside the frame, next to Johnny’s tail that was caught in the picture without me.

  You can see Zionka very well. The whole time the photographer was busy preparing, your grandmother didn’t budge, her smile frozen on her face, as she waited expectantly for the longed-for moment. Behind her are her mother and her father, who came especially for the ceremony. Zionka’s mother is scowling because, at the last minute, Mali Perlmutter’s name was added to the guest list. Mali, who’d once been her best friend, had become her sworn enemy. Even when I’d grown up and left the village, they still hadn’t made up.

  Aharonchik is particularly noticeable, because he’s standing on an empty orange crate, carrying a book and waving it menacingly at the sky. From the beginning, he said that it was only for the sake of Aunt Miriam, who was finally getting a bit of happiness, that he was violating his principles to attend a religious ceremony, because he believed religion would always be the “opium of the masses.”

  On the wedding night, the guys from the van recruited the baker into their service, and the next morning, Aharonchik left for Europe to marry a woman. He vowed to seek a loyal communist for himself and for the homeland, but finally settled for a bourgeois woman from Cracow who wasn’t the least bit beautiful, with whom he spent the next thirty years of his life.

  The rabbi listed in the ketuba, the marriage contract, all the things the bride had brought from her parents’ home, and I asked him to add two copper candlesticks. I had thrust the stolen one into Anna’s hand when her face was covered with a veil. It was a good opportunity to apologize without having to stand shamefaced before her admonishing eyes. And I didn’t have to write the words on a piece of paper. To this day, I’m not very good with words. Throughout my life, I’ve managed to avoid writing and the written word, but I talk on the telephone for hours.

  I still hope to live to a ripe old age, so I make sure to eat honey every morning. Perhaps somewhere, Mohammed is watching my movie and knows that it’s me. His vil-lage no longer exists. The gangs were in control for many years, and the grim prophesies of my friend Mohammed Daudi were realized. Az a-din el-Kasam was shot by the British, but his name has never been forgotten. In the end, the Arab village was wiped off the map, and today, there is a kibbutz where it used to be. Even so, I know exactly where we stood that day. Near the first and last olive tree. A pit discarded by a passerby that grew into an entire grove, Mohammed had explained. Sometimes, I go there from Tel Aviv just to check whether the tree still stands on the rise of the wadi. The grave of the Sheik is still there too, although at my age, one no longer makes wishes. Do you remember, little one, that I once took you there and you made a wish instead of me? Maybe, since you’re my oldest grandchild, it’ll come true.

  I rewind the movie, look at the pictures again and again, and Mohammed’s words, “Blood will be spilled here,” send chills through my body, arouse the dormant poison. Yes, I too have been contaminated.

  Later, sitting in the silence, I roll the movie backwards.

  There I am, a child, running towards the Arab village, not in the direction of our home. Mohammed crosses the Jordan on his way back, and instead of parting, we unite.

  And even though everything appears to be moving backwards, every time I run the movie, our hug is still a hug. This angle, that one, it doesn’t matter. Each time, I’m gathered up in the softness of his kaffiyeh, choked with tears. Who else in the world will ever call me “Aza’ar?”

  Mohammed Daudi and his sister, Fahtma. Who can tell me whether she married the Tarzan she loved, or spent her life in endless longing? Who will reveal the rest of the story?

  I’m no longer a child, and I’ve already had other dogs named Johnny Weissmuller.

  After The King of the Apes, there were six more Tarzan movies, and around the time the seventh one reached the theaters, Major Charles Timothy Parker’s plane was hit. Charlie was leading a squadron of Lancasters in a Royal Air Force bombing of Dresden, Germany. I don’t know how Anna found out that, after his death, he was promoted to the rank of Colonel and awarded the medal of honor for “unusual courage, bravery and devotion in action against the enemy.” She wrote a letter of condolence to Lady Mary Parker in England on the death of her son, the Colonel. In my heart, I continue to call Charlie, “Major Parker.”

  He once said that the branch on which a swarm of bees chooses to make its home becomes a symbol of love. Do I lack love, or do I perhaps have an excess of homeland? Sometimes one fills you up at the expense of the other. But it’s all raw material, little one. Perhaps that’s why I never have to write a screenplay.

  How sorry I am that Charlie missed Johnny Weiss-muller’s five additional roars. We could’ve gone to the movies together. In Tel Aviv or London, or even Africa. Tarzan’s roar echoed throughout the world, except in the countries Hitler invaded. The Nazis succeeded in pinning a yellow star even on the thin strip of fabric that hid Johnny Weissmuller’s naked loins.

  Anna continued to write letters to her family in Poland even after the war broke out, and only with the passage of time did she begin talking to the air. There were never any replies to her letters. A survivor from her hometown of Lutsk told her how all the Jews had been herded into the ghetto and burned alive. Not one member of her family survived. For many years, I regretted not having returned to that café in Tel Aviv to get the photograph we left there. Maybe the couple in that picture really were Anna’s relatives. We never did locate them in America. They had been swallowed up in a crystal ball like the one Imri once brought me from Europe.

  Anna would occasionally whisper to her children that she missed home, a word she never dared put on paper. There is an entire dictionary of words it would be better never to write down.

  I remember how I stood outside the Beit Ha’am Cinema in Tel Aviv, hand in hand with Imri, refusing to leave. I was a child then. I didn’t know how to decide on an ending for the movie. Was this a happy one? After all, even though Jane Parker’s father lost his life on a journey to Africa, she and Tarzan did stay together in that primeval, virginal jungle where no human being had ever set foot.

  I begged Imri to decide for me, so I could sleep in peace and have dreams as white as the screen is before the pictures are projected onto it. Imri couldn’t help me. If the movie had been in color instead of black and white, we might have known the answer. I was lucky not to know then what Johnny Weissmuller’s end would be. An aging actor gone mad, institutionalized. He used to roar in the corridors, frightening all the poor souls in the institution, until he was finally thrown out.

  I never told you, little one, that the roar was a special effect, a combination of the cry of a hyena, or a camel, the bark of dog, a soprano’s high “C,” and the vibrato of a violin’s “E” string.

  Well, at least it had a dog’s bark.

  I stroke Johnny Weissmuller’s silver-streaked fur. On nights when the wind whistles, I call him to my bed, frightened that when the day comes, I won’t recognize Mohammed Daudi. Only you, Johnny Weissmuller, with your special dog sense, will know him.

  Did we have a good life? Anna and Imri? Those who are still with us and those who are in the air. Have our lives been full or empty? I don’t understand his gentle barks. Although I never learned animal language, I do know that he’s trying to tell me something.

  I
n the dark, the dog and I cover ourselves with the blanket, imagining the endings of movies. As I run my fingers through his soft fur, I feel the scar he inherited. He closes his eyes. The last Johnny Weissmuller.