‘Whose sharp tongue?’
‘Hers of course, my dear. Your mother.’
‘To tell you the truth, Mr … What is your name?’
‘Have you really forgotten me?’
‘Look. I’m very tired. You need to leave now,’ Dina hears herself saying. She feels like she’s trying to push the words out against a heavy fog. ‘It is already late. I need to be up at seven to take my son to school and I have a busy morning at the clinic, so I am very honoured you should visit me and want to chat, but I must get some sleep now. I promise you, we’ll talk another time.’
‘Stay in bed. You’re not going anywhere. She’s in the next room.’
‘Who?’
She might as well be talking to a corpse tonight, because this man certainly doesn’t seem to be listening to her. Dina has become fed up living with dead people, hovering around, kibitzing in the background her whole life. They never inject much humour into a conversation.
‘I need to tell you of a place where no one sleeps,’ he says. ‘It’s been almost fifty-seven years since I met your mother. That’s a long time, you know.’
Dina tries to sit up. A searing pain shoots across her abdomen. The eyes suddenly turn bloodshot and dart around the room, feverishly imploring her to lie back down and rest.
‘After liberation no one spoke,’ he says soberly. ‘Well, most of us were dead by then. But even those who survived remained silent, and anyone who whispered their secrets heard their words evaporate. No one wanted to listen. They still don’t.’ He stares straight ahead, not looking at anything in particular. Dina waits for him to speak again. ‘We knew about the certainty of death before we met, your mother and me,’ he continues. ‘Like two corpses lying in the mud, side by side. Rain was leaking in through the roof and the floor was covered in shit.’
‘Enough! Enough!’ Dina wants to shout. ‘All these stories of horror and blood and tragedy. I’m sick of hearing about them. Bad lot, the Nazis, yeah, we all know that, but it’s over and I have a life to live now. So just shut up. I don’t want to know.’
He is determined to go on. The eyes in the room stare at him as he fiddles with the lid of his shoebox, his hands still trembling.
‘Oh, do we have to go there? Do I really need to know all this? Leave me alone.’ But her mouth doesn’t open and the words never come out, because the eyes turn their disapproving gaze towards her, as if to scold her: Be quiet. Have some respect. The eyes can see her thoughts. She notices again their myriad colours and shapes: some young, some old, some beautiful and almond-shaped, others glazed over and blind. But they stare at her, waiting.
‘I was twenty-two years old when I first met your mother in Auschwitz, just before she was transferred to Bergen-Belsen. I was a bag of bones,’ he says. ‘Who ever saw a Jew that wasn’t skinny in those days?’ He laughs and Dina feels herself falling over the edge, down into the darkness of his memory, and landing with a thump. People are lying all around her. She recognises the man in pyjamas, slumped beside her in the mud. Dina’s mother lies next to him, stroking his hair.
‘Veyn nisht, don’t cry,’ her mother whispers. ‘One day we will have birthday parties again. And we will eat sweet challah loaves on Shabbat. We’ll be free soon, I promise. Try to sleep now. Tomorrow will be a new day. You’ll see.’
People moan. Everyone is soaked in urine and shit. The eyes start to appear in the air around them, like tiny fireflies darting around frantically, their tears raining down on the emaciated bodies. There is no food or water. Dina sits in the corner watching.
All of a sudden some of the eyes move aside, as if to make way for someone. The man stands up from the dirt, pulls a violin out of his shoebox and starts playing. Some stage lights turn on and people start singing all around them. He plays a mournful song about having no one left to laugh with, and no one left to cry with.
A roar of applause jolts Dina back to the room. The man is still sitting at the end of her bed. Slowly placing his violin on the floor, he reaches into his shoebox again and this time brings out a remote control. He aims it in the direction of the disembodied voices. The voices have followed them back from the past. He presses a red button on the remote control and they fall silent. His face turns sullen and his cheeks redden. Tears well up in his eyes. He whispers a name, calling for someone to come. Sitting back in his chair, he closes his eyes again.
Dina feels a sudden chill in the room. Here she is in conversation with a man who is mumbling a name over and over again. It seems his visit is important. He has started to age during the brief time he’s been sitting by her bed. His skin is withering; the lines in his face are deepening as she watches. The yellow crest on top of his head is turning grey and feathery. He begins to look more and more like her father.
‘Tati?’
Silence. They turn away from each other, both needing to catch their breath and decide what to do next. Dina notices a thin crack of light under the door. The outside world is pushing in on them. Shlomi is probably already asleep in his bed, tucked into his soft, small life.
She looks back at the man. It is her father; she knows that now. She notices his nails are white, his fingers taking on the sheen of bone that is not quite dead yet. His throat is swelling up with the story he is bursting to tell, but he cannot seem to find the words. She reaches out for his hand and grips it tightly.
The eyes surrounding them are starting to grow dull. Some have already withdrawn into the darkness. Dina’s father becomes restless, looking around the room, choking as he reaches out to stop them from disappearing.
‘Give me a few more minutes,’ he begs. ‘I must tell her. She needs to know.’
The voices whisper: She only has to remember. She already knows.
Her father looks around fearfully and leans forward in his chair. He opens the shoebox one last time and pulls out a tattered photo. He hands it to Dina. It is the same photo that was wedged between her mother’s stiffened fingers the morning Dina found her dead on the kitchen floor all those years ago.
‘Why are you showing this to me?’ she asks.
He stands up suddenly and looks over his shoulder. ‘They are coming,’ he whispers. ‘I must hide.’ He walks over to the door and reaches for the handle.
‘Wait!’ she shouts. ‘Please don’t leave yet. Can you tell me who the man is in this photo? I’ve always wanted to know.’
‘You’ve known that since you first found it, Dina,’ he turns to look at her. ‘It’s me.’
‘Who are the others?’
‘You read the letters your mother tried to hide from you.’
‘I never understood them.’
‘You did. You just don’t let yourself remember. I had another family who were taken from me during the war. You are named after my first wife, Dina Schuster. She was shot dead in our village in Poland in 1942 by the Gestapo, while hanging out washing on the line. Our little daughter, Lily, saw her mother fall to the ground and ran towards her Uncle Wolf, who called to her from behind a clump of trees, but she never reached him. He watched the soldiers fire one bullet into the back of her head before he fled deep into the forest.’
The Yiddish scrawls of her father’s old letters untangle themselves, stretching out into words, sentences, paragraphs, their meaning unfolding as they weave between Dina and the eyes left in the room, who are slowly closing their lids. Her half-sister’s death, so many years ago, was the very reason Dina was born. The loss of that family made Dina’s own existence possible. It was clear now that her father had always shared his love for Dina and her mother with his own ghosts.
‘I thought I could never go on after what happened,’ her father says. ‘I was simply waiting to die. And then your mother came along.’
He opens the door and the light from the hallway shines straight through his body. It casts a faint shadow onto the wall. Dina hears him whispering, her head reeling as his voice gradually fades with the approaching dawn: ‘Your mother saved me. She gave me courage amid the dr
ek of Auschwitz. When the war ended I weighed thirty-five kilograms. I met up with her again not long after liberation. She was filled with such hope, waiting for a better world,’ he says. ‘We married in the Displaced Persons’ camp and she became the love of my life, my refuge from a shattered world. I drew such strength from her, even though it was a struggle. During the war we had to make impossible choices: to run, to hide, to go, to stay, to trust or to betray. You would try to sell something that didn’t exist to someone who had no money with which to buy it in the first place. I was worn out with fear. After the war, your mother was the one who taught me to love again.’
Stability, safety, home, family. Everything is an illusion, Dina thinks. And love. What about love?
‘Love is the only raw material we can hope to rebuild from.’ Her father’s image slowly starts to disappear. ‘And even that may not always be enough.’
They are interrupted by a knock at the door.
‘I have to go now. They are here,’ he says. ‘Know that you are loved. So sorry I disturbed your sleep.’
‘Wait! Don’t leave me.’
Dina finds herself alone in an empty room.
CHAPTER 13
A group of doctors wearing starched white coats gather around Dina’s bed. A mousy intern flips through pages on a black clipboard and presents the case to the professor, who is leaning against the back wall.
‘So, Rivkin,’ he grills her. ‘What are the potential complications of bomb blasts during third-trimester pregnancy?’
The intern shuffles from one foot to the other. ‘I’m not sure, sir.’
‘Not sure?’ he hisses, a derisive smile creeping across his face.
Her colleagues glance furtively at one another. Some roll their eyes behind the professor’s back. He strolls over to where the young woman is standing. ‘Well, let’s start with what you would assess first, shall we Dr Rivkin?’
She nods, looking down at the ground.
‘So how about figuring out if the patient is male or female for starters?’
The other doctors in the group snigger, biting their lips or coughing into their hands to try and stifle their laughter. The intern’s cheeks flush.
Dina lies in her bed, watching them, unsure if she is awake, or in the midst of a lucid nightmare.
‘I would first rule out uterine or placental rupture,’ the young doctor mumbles, trying to regain her composure. ‘Especially if there is a history of blunt abdominal trauma.’
‘Now we’re getting somewhere, Rivkin.’ He smoothes down his wiry hair. ‘But what about intraperitoneal haemorrhage, or supine hypotensive syndrome? And what are the possible pregnancy outcomes after exposure to potential hazardous chemicals such as pulverised cement, asbestos, lead, glass fibres, benzene, biphenyls?’
They are talking about Dina as though she were merely a prop for their collegial performance. She tries to sit up but feels a piercing pain rip through her insides. The doctors don’t notice her discomfort. They huddle awkwardly together and continue discussing her case. If geese are a gaggle and crows a murder, what would this group standing around her bedside be called? A mediocrity of medicos? A disaster of doctors?
The veil of anaesthetic and morphine starts to lift and, all too abruptly, the image of her shattered waiting room washes over her like a tidal wave. Hassam’s blood-stained corpse lying beside Mrs Susskind, whose eyes gaze at him in a fixed stare. Sousanne, a look of shock on her grey face, her body heavy with destiny. Tahirih, wearing a smile of acceptance, even in death. And Evgeni’s dog, Murashka, yelping outside, as though it wishes it had died along with its owner. Yael’s red lipstick, outlining her lips in a death pout. And all leaving this world, just as Dina’s daughter is about to enter it. The dead encircle Dina.
The pain seizes her, swallowing all language except for howled vowels. A middle-aged nurse comes scurrying in, pushing through the doctors with the force of her presence. She takes charge, leaning forward to prop a pillow up behind Dina, fiddling with the drip, giving her a sip of water. The doctors move away gradually, like a crowd of actors gliding offstage into the wings, manoeuvring their way out of the room without having said a word to their patient.
The IV drips faster and the pain starts to ease slightly. The nurse busies herself with reading Dina’s chart.
‘Your little girl made it into the world against all odds,’ she squawks cheerily. ‘Already a survivor at birth.’
‘Where is she? And where is my husband?’
‘He’s waiting outside with your son.’
‘I want to see them.’
‘Yes, in a minute. I have to ask a couple of questions first.’
The drugs are starting to wash over Dina again. The nurse’s tanned skin has taken on the sheen of tarnished gold. Picking up the clipboard, the rotund woman looks like an angel standing at the gates to Heaven, holding her pen poised to mark the roll of the newly dead.
‘If ten is the worst pain you have ever experienced, how would you rate your current pain?’ the nurse asks.
Dina stares at the shimmering silver halo around the nurse’s head. The ache in her abdomen has almost gone. She thinks about how she should answer the question truthfully. But how to put a rating on agony?
‘On a scale of one to ten?’ Dina says. ‘Maybe one thousand. Now, can I please see my family?’
CHAPTER 14
Boker tov. Good morning to all our listeners. This is Radio Haifa. Terrorists opened fire on a queue of people waiting at a bus stop in the town of Hadera, killing four. Meanwhile, Israel has begun withdrawing its forces from Bethlehem. The weather will be unusually hot and dry today, with strong easterly winds. There is the likelihood of a sandstorm.
The dishes clatter in the sink. Eitan rubs steel wool around the inside of the soup pot and turns the tap on to rinse off the soap suds. He scrapes up runaway noodles from the drain protector and, flipping the dustbin open with his foot, throws them in. Lily sits propped up in her bouncinette on the floor beside him, burbling away to invisible friends.
Dina clinks the spoon against the edge of her empty coffee cup. She brings it over to the sink and hands it to Eitan. The phone rings in the other room, and for a moment she forgets, thinking it might be Yael calling to bitch about a patient. She doesn’t bother answering, doesn’t care who’s calling. She knows it won’t be Shlomi, because he slept over at his friend Noam’s last night and would already be in class. No one else matters.
She picks up a tea towel and stands beside the kitchen bench. Eitan hands the washed cup to Dina to dry.
‘I’m going to take Lily for a short walk before I head off to work.’ He wipes his hands dry and starts wrapping the papoose around him. He picks up Lily, tucking her into its folds. Dina follows them to the front door.
‘What do you have planned for today?’ Eitan asks.
‘Nothing much.’ She bends forward to kiss her tiny daughter.
Eitan stretches out his hand to stroke his wife’s shoulder. ‘We need to talk.’
‘About what?’
‘About what happened.’
‘Just leave it, please.’
His face looks soft, malleable. Dina breathes in deeply. Two months of nightmares have been calling her back to the waiting room, waking her well before Lily stirs in her cot each morning.
‘I don’t want to discuss it,’ she says, trying a gentler tone.
Eitan turns to open the front door. The groans of tanned, middle-aged men lunging for small victories on the tennis court next door filter up the stairwell.
‘But what about us?’ he asks, turning back to face her. ‘Where are we?’
Their eyes meet for a moment. She is trying to swim towards him, surfacing from the depths of an uncharted ocean. Her heart beats wildly, suddenly bursting through the swell and coming up for air. They are interrupted by Losha Gilbert, the woman who lives in the apartment above them. She is shuffling downstairs in her purple dressing-gown and matching slippers, hair tucked under a net. She holds a
n open pair of scissors in one hand and a pink rose with a thorny stem in the other.
When she sees the Ronens, she says with one of her almost-smiles: ‘I was just bringing you this to cheer you up.’ She makes a clucking sound with her tongue. ‘You poor, poor girl.’
She holds out the rose for Dina, but Eitan intercepts her, saying ‘thank you’ as he takes it. Like some beefy bodyguard, he grabs his wife’s elbow and quickly ushers her back into the apartment, closing the door in the old woman’s face.
Dina doesn’t want anybody’s pity, least of all her husband’s. She’s endured the worst this country has to offer; surely that should win his respect and acceptance? As soon as she walks back inside, Dina’s legs melt beneath her. Eitan places his arm around her waist, guiding her through the hallway. The sun’s in the sky again like a watchful eye, its light dense as it peers through the window. A fine layer of yellow sand dusts the glass, brought across the desert by an unseasonal hamsin. Their shadows follow them back into the kitchen.
For two months Dina has said nothing, turning away from Eitan in bed at night, listening to her own heartbeat, like a chant repeated over and over in the dark. Even her mother has grown quiet. Dina has stopped chasing the dead – the world of the living is more than enough of a challenge.
Place and time are fluid in the country of her mind. It is the waiting for answers that presses down on her most, like the sky this morning, with its promise of relentless heat. Before the day of the blast, engorged with her own ache, her own little death, she waited for the unrequited love of a land that would not agree to let her in. A place that called her Galutnik, New Immigrant, Anglo-Sexy, Aussie, Other. Anything but true Israeli.
Remembering the old marketplace, the fish swimming around their bowl on the windowsill at the shoemaker’s, the sound of the door of his cave slamming shut, the look in the old man’s eyes as he turned the key in the lock – all images growing grainier with each passing day – has taught Dina that the time has come for her to choose. She can’t go on straddling a fault line between her future and her past. And although strong need pulls her towards Eitan, she knows she must leave.
Waiting Room, The Page 18
