More Than I Love My Life

by David Grossman

  Vera said to Rafael, “No one in the world can be like your mother, and it’s your home and I am only guest, but I promise to try and do my best, and if you don’t want me, you only must say one word, and I will at that moment take my things and leave.”

  A minute? Five minutes? How long did they stand out there in the rain? There are different versions. Vera swears—replete with a ceremonial dry sideways spit, her upper lip covering her lower—that it lasted at least ten minutes. Rafael, without the spitting, maintains that it was less than half a minute. I, as usual, tend to believe him.

  In my old movie, which we’re now watching on Vera’s television, you can hear me quoting to Rafael something I once heard from his father, Tuvia, my agronomist grandfather: “Some seeds require nothing but a speck of earth to sprout.” At fifteen, I found that line captivating. Ten minutes or half a minute, Vera caught hold of Rafael’s hands, and he did not pull them away. She was still bandaged where he’d bitten her, but with her little thumbs she stroked his hands over and over again and waited until his sobs had subsided. It turned out that a speck of earth could provide for two, if they were desperate enough.

  * * *

  —

  Then Vera said, in her Ben-Gurion-like domineering tone, “Rafael! Off we go!” She would not let him carry her suitcase. They walked silently to Tuvia’s apartment. That walk, with the rain falling diagonally in the yellow beams of the path lamps, is something I’m dying to reconstruct one day, when I start making my own films, which will be any day now, fingers crossed. They did not meet anyone on the way. The whole kibbutz was indoors while the two of them, drenched and distraught, wordlessly confirmed their simple, unequivocal pact, a pact that has been upheld for forty-five years and never once violated.

  They reached the apartment—“the room,” in kibbutzish—and Vera put her suitcase down by the door. They heard Rafael’s father inside, singing an aria from Il Seraglio, which he always sang when he was in a good mood. Vera looked at Rafael: “Will you come tomorrow for tea?” He stood there looking down, tortured. With two bandaged fingers, she lifted his chin. It would have occurred to no one else to do that to Rafael. “This is way of the world, Rafael,” she said. He thought that after that night he would not be able to look his father in the eye, or her. “Good night,” she said, and he repeated her words in a whisper.

  Vera waited for him to disappear around the bend in the path. Then she took a little handbag out of one of the suitcase pockets, retrieved a compact mirror and a pencil, and proceeded to make up her face. Peering from behind a bougainvillea, Rafael watched her try unsuccessfully to puff up her wet hair—her hair was always sparse, which to me slightly belied the force of her mental and physical strength. When she looked up at the sky and her lips moved, he thought she was praying, but then he realized she was conversing with someone invisible, explaining things to him, listening, blowing a kiss up to the heavens. To Rafael she was “like a woman you see in the movies,” but unlike in the movies, she was practical and utilitarian and, as she herself attested, “without drop of patience for scoundrels or fools.”

  Vera perked up her nose, her chin, her short stature. Rafael forced himself to think about his modest, quiet mother, but she faded, refusing to appear. Vera knocked once on the door with her hand clenched in a fist. Tuvia stopped singing. Rafael knew this was his last chance to do something. He feverishly searched himself for his mother, so that at least she would know that he was being loyal to her at this moment, or almost loyal, and so that she would finally free him from the punishments and deprivations he imposed upon himself for her sake. She gave no sign of response. Her absence inside him was frightening, as if part of his soul had been erased along with her. That was when he understood that his mother had withdrawn her forgiveness forever. “Like the mark of Cain,” Rafael said to the camera in a dwindling voice. I was only fifteen, as I’ve said, but I was already starting to grasp something about families and missed opportunities and things you can’t go back and repair, and mostly I wanted to stop filming and go over and hug him and comfort him, but of course I did not dare. He would not have forgiven me if I’d squandered a shot like that.

  The rain fell softly. The globe lamp over the door cast a pale-yellow light on Vera. Tuvia opened the door and said her name, at first in astonishment, because of her drenched clothes, and then in a feverish murmur, over and over again, holding her in his arms.

  The door was shut. Rafael stood there, empty. He had no idea what to do. He was afraid to be alone, afraid that now he would have to do something terrible to himself, something inevitable that was growing stronger inside him. A hand touched his shoulder and he jumped. It was Nina, who’d been driving him wild in his fantasies. Her beautiful, white, soulless face. The face of a raptor, he now thought. “Mommy and Daddy are having a good time,” Nina said with a crooked smile, “we can, too.”

  * * *

  —

  Many years later, at the shiva after Tuvia’s death, Vera told us what she’d said to him when she walked into his room on their wedding night. “Before we go in bed, I want you to know right now: I will always respect you and be your best friend and most faithful, but I will not lie. I am a woman who can in her life love only one man, and no more. I love Milosz, who was my husband and died by Tito, more than anything in world, more than my life. I will every night tell you about him, and also what I went through in camps because I so loved him. And also I cry very much.” And Tuvia said: “It’s good that you’re saying everything directly, face-to-face, Vera. This way there are no illusions and no misunderstandings. Here, in our bedroom, there will be pictures of them both: your husband and my wife. You will tell me about him, and I will tell you about her, and they will be sacred to both of us.”

  And we, the younger members of the family—known collectively as the kindred—who worshipped the ground she walked on and stayed with her for the entire shiva, bowed our heads, as required by the gravity of the situation and out of respect for the dead, and also so that we would not encounter one another’s eyes and burst out laughing. Vera wiped away a pearly tear with the edge of the purple lavender-scented handkerchief (such a thing does exist, I swear it does; up until a few years ago, Khaled, her Bedouin friend from the nearby village, used to bring her sacks full of lavender) and then, to the astonishment of us all, Vera noted in an utterly flat and horizontal voice, “But during the…you know…the business, Tuvia and I would used to turn around their photographs to the wall.” She waited with a blank face until the kindred had finished shaking with laughter, and added, with perfect timing, “They got to know that wall very much well.”

  Since I’m already meandering off course in that dubious neighborhood, and since I’ve already desecrated the modesty of my grandparents, I must offer another anecdote for posterity: I don’t recall exactly when it was, but Vera and I were standing in her tiny postage stamp of a kitchen, as we often did, when suddenly out of nowhere she said, “On our first night, the first time that me and Tuvia, you know…well, Tuvia put on ‘head covering,’ that is what we called it, even though he knew very well how old I was. And that is when I saw that he truly was gentleman!”

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, while Rafael, stunned by happiness and awash in love, was lost in the deepest sleep he’d known for years, Nina packed up her belongings in a backpack and silently left her room in the leper colony, where the two of them had spent the night. She crossed the kibbutz in a straight line and barged into Tuvia and Vera’s apartment without knocking while they were eating their first breakfast as a couple. Without any preambles, she relayed to them in minute detail what she’d done with Rafael. As she looked at Nina, it occurred to Vera that not even in the UDBA’s torture chambers in Belgrade, and not even with the wardens on the barren island, had she been hated the way her daughter hated her. She put her knife and fork down. “Our whole lives, Nina?” she said. And Nina replied
: “Even beyond.”

  Years later, Vera told me that she stood up that morning and said to Tuvia that if he asked her to leave now, she would. She would leave the kibbutz with Nina, and he would never have to see them again. He went over and put his arm around her shoulders and said, “Veraleh, you are not leaving anymore. This is home.” Nina looked at them and nodded. Nina had—still has—a nod of bitter happiness every time an ominous prophecy of hers comes true. She picked up her small backpack and hugged it, but for some reason she couldn’t walk out. Perhaps something in the way they stood there facing her drove her mad. Then there was a quick-fire skirmish in Serbo-Croatian. Nina hissed that Vera was betraying Milosz. Vera clapped her hands to her cheeks and yelled that she had never betrayed Milosz: on the contrary, she was madly faithful to him, no other woman would do for her man what she had done. Then it went quiet. Nina sniffed something in the air and bristled all over. Vera turned pale and pursed her lips, then sat down weakly.

  Nina slung the backpack over her shoulder. Tuvia said, “But, Nina, we want to help you, we both do, let us help you.” With tears in her eyes, she stomped her foot: “And don’t go looking for me, d’you hear me? Don’t you dare look for me!” She turned to leave but soon stopped. “Say hello to your boy from me,” she said to Tuvia, “your boy is the kindest person I’ve ever met.” Her face was briefly illumined by a note of childishness, of heartrending innocence. Sometimes, when I feel kindly toward her—I have those moments once in a while; a person isn’t made of stone—I manage to remind myself that innocence was one of the things she was robbed of at a young age. “And tell him it’s not because of him at all,” she said, “tell him that women will love him a lot, a whole lot, and that he’ll forget me. You’ll tell him, right?”

  And she left.

  * * *

  —

  Jumping ahead again. I’ve been writing day and night. The flight is the day after tomorrow and I’m not getting out of this chair until then. Here is another memory that seems pertinent: It’s years after Vera and Tuvia’s wedding night. Tuvia, the sweetest of grandfathers, is still with us. Grandma Vera and I peel vegetables for a casserole in her kitchen. It’s afternoon, one of the loveliest hours on the kibbutz and in the kitchen. A low-hanging sun sends golden rays through the jars of pickled cucumbers, onions, and eggplants on the windowsill. A pail full of pecans that Vera and I gathered that morning sits on the counter. Vera’s big tape deck plays “Bésame Mucho” and other drooling tunes. It’s a moment of perfection and great intimacy between us, when suddenly, out of the blue, she says, “When I married your grandfather Tuvia, it was twelve years after Milosz. Twelve years I was alone. No man ever touched me even this much! With fingernail! And I wanted Tuvia, how could I not, but mostly I wanted to live with Tuvia so that I could take care of your father, Rafi, which was for me like they say in Zionism—the dream come true. But I was also scared of the bed like fire! I was scared dead what would happen, how would I know which way is up, and if I would even get back the wanting. And Tuvia did not give up, after all he was a man, only fifty-four, and to tell truth he still doesn’t give up today, even though I’ve been ready to close up shop for long time.”

  “Grandma!” I spluttered. I was barely fifteen: What were the grown-ups in this family thinking? Had they no instinct for preserving children’s innocence? “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I want you to know everything—everything! No secrets between us.”

  “What secrets? Who’s keeping secrets?”

  And here she let out a sigh that came from an inner crypt I was unfamiliar with. “Gili, in you I want to put everything I had in life. Everything.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because you are like me.”

  I knew that this, coming from her, was a compliment, but something in her voice, and even more so in her look, made my skin crawl. “I don’t understand, Grandma.”

  She put the peeler down and placed both hands on my shoulders. Her eyes were in mine, and I had nowhere to escape. “And I know, Gili, that you will never let anyone here twist my story against me.”

  I think I laughed. Or, rather, giggled. I tried to turn the conversation into a joke. At the time, I knew nothing about “her story.”

  Then her eyes gleamed with an inconceivable, almost animalistic ferocity. And I remember thinking, just for a moment, that I did not want to be this animal’s cub.

  * * *

  —

  They did look for Nina, of course. They turned over every stone, tried to get the police to help, unsuccessfully, then contacted a private investigator, who combed the country from north to south and finally announced: “The earth has swallowed her. Start getting used to the fact that she’s not coming back.” But after almost a year they began to receive signs of life. Once every four weeks, with strange punctuality, a blank postcard arrived. From Eilat, from Tiberias, from Mitzpeh Ramon, from Kiryat Shmoneh. Vera and Tuvia followed in the postcards’ tracks, walked the streets, went into stores and hotels and nightclubs and synagogues, showing everyone they met a photo of Nina from when she’d immigrated to Israel. Vera grew very thin in those years, and her hair turned white. Tuvia was with her everywhere, driving her in a pickup truck the kibbutz let him use, making sure she ate and drank. When he realized she was deteriorating, he flew to Serbia with her, to the little village where Milosz was born and buried. There, in the village, Vera was like a queen. Milosz’s relatives loved and admired her, and every evening they came to hear her tell the story of her love for Milosz. In the mornings Tuvia repaired the engines of tractors and old threshers, while Vera, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, sat on a rocking chair by Milosz’s grave, in front of the mossy gray headstone. She lit long yellow candles and told him about the hardships she was suffering because of Nina, their daughter, and about their search for her, and about Tuvia, her angel, without whom she could not have borne all this.

  Rafael conducted his own searches. At least once a week he ran away from the boarding school and roamed the streets of cities, kibbutzim, and Arab villages, simply looking around. He grew up quickly in those years, becoming even more handsome and anguished. Girls pursued him; they were crazy about him. A little over a decade ago, for his fiftieth birthday—Vera would not let such an occasion pass without a big production, of course; even at fifty he was still her beloved orphan—she pulled a treasure out from one of her jumbled drawers: an envelope full of photographs of Rafi from those years. Pictures of parties and field trips, races and basketball games, graduations. All the moist looks sent his way, the smiles, the lips, the young breasts surging at him—he neither saw nor felt any of it. “He sees Nina in his bowl of soup,” said Vera, employing one of her typically enigmatic sayings. Even when he began his military service, he kept looking for her whenever he had a day off. With money she got from Yugoslavia—the president, Marshal Tito himself, had ordered that she be paid a lifelong pension—Vera bought Rafael a secondhand Leica, which she hoped would distract him from his anguish and perhaps put an end to his yearning. But instead he began to photograph his voyage.

  He wandered the roads and described Nina to people he met, then asked permission to photograph them. Hundreds of times he told strangers, men and women, what little he knew about her. Over and over again he held up her picture and said, “Her name is Nina, we were together once, and she disappeared. Maybe you’ve seen her?” Sometimes when he heard himself, it sounded as though he were telling them a fairy tale.

  But these random encounters began to work on him. His eyes opened up, he told me in my youthful movie when he talked about that era. He learned to observe. He was mainly drawn to the faces of hardworking people, whose features made them magnificent, sometimes even regal: “You could see that these people were trapped in a small, restrictive life.” Vera and Tuvia tried to persuade him to stop wandering, to wake up, get his hair cut, go to university, take on a role at the kibbut
z. After almost two years of searching he accepted that he would not find Nina and that he had essentially given up on her, but he could not give up on the photography. Moreover, I think—or I know, who better than me—that he could not abandon the search, could not stop watching the way a person who has lost something watches.

  * * *

  —

  Thirty-two years after their first night together, Vera stood in the kitchen boiling water for afternoon tea. Tuvia was very sick by then. Vera refused to have him hospitalized or allow a paid caregiver into their home. For four years, day and night, she revived him, cheered his spirits, took him to concerts in Haifa and plays in Tel Aviv, solved crossword puzzles with him, changed his diapers, and read three newspapers out loud to him every day. It was widely believed among the kindred that due to Vera’s war of attrition, death was considering making a special dispensation for Tuvia.

  The kettle boiled, and she called Tuvia with their private whistle: the first few notes of “Tzena, Tzena.” Tuvia came slowly, skin and bones, coughing heavily. He walked down the hallway—the same hallway he’d run down years ago when his son Rafael bit Vera (excuse me for sticking that in here, but a person likes to have her own little mythology). On his way, Tuvia held on to a coat hanging on a hook, then a chair back. He sat down and sighed. Vera looked at him and her heart sank. “Tuvia!” she thundered. “In pajamas? Is that any way to dress for five o’clock tea with a lady?” Tuvia gave a translucent smile, shuffled back to his room, put on his black polyester trousers, a light blue striped shirt that accentuated his blue eyes, and, to amuse Vera, the suede jacket that had served him for twenty-five years of formal events and was now several sizes too large. “Is this better, m’lady?” he asked and sat down, out of breath. Vera poured his tea. They both stared silently at the thin stream coming out of the spout, and Vera saw Tuvia’s eyes roll back and his face turn ashen. She shouted, “Tuvia, don’t leave me!” And he fell to the floor, dead.