More Than I Love My Life

by David Grossman

  * * *

  —

  I think I’ve already said that my dad and I are at Vera’s, on the kibbutz, two days after her ninetieth birthday party and two days before we fly to Croatia. Where is Vera? Why aren’t we hearing from her? We will, have no doubt. She’s gone out, as she does every morning, to visit “her old folk,” all of whom, incidentally, are several years younger than her. She will sprinkle them with her peevish dust of optimism (“I already told Rafi: fifteen minutes you’re not to keep me alive if comes the day when I can’t stand up for Women in Black protest on Fridays! Not fifteen minutes!”), and she’ll walk thirty laps around the pool in her pink bathing cap, lips pursed, arms swinging vigorously. Then she’ll straddle her mobility scooter—face glued to the front visor, bum up, a menace to anyone on the kibbutz paths—and ride to the cemetery. As is her daily custom, she will place one rose from her garden on Tuvia’s first wife Dushinka’s grave, then proceed to Tuvia’s, where she will lay two roses, one for him and one for Milosz, whose spirit she summons to make the subterranean voyage from his grave in a village in Serbia.

  Perched on the edge of Tuvia’s grave, she rocks her body back and forth and tells her two husbands what’s new in the family and in Israel. She laments the sorry state of things: “The world wants to kill the humanity. Some of them it killed already, and now wants to kill what’s left.” She bemoans the occupation: “Yoy! And to think that it happened to us, to Jews, such tragedy of tragedy are we.” She cries a little, off-loads things from her heart, and wonders, “Milosz and Tuvia, my dear husbands, where are you? I’m more than ninety already! When will you come to take me? Don’t forget your Vera here!” Then she hurtles back on the scooter to her little clinic next to the doctor’s office, where she sits for three hours without getting up, dispensing advice concerning diets, love, and varicose veins to all who seek it.

  * * *

  —

  And then one day, by chance, he saw her. Rafael did. On Jaffa Road in Jerusalem, next to the Generali Building, at a bus stop. He quickly hid behind a noticeboard, snapped a picture of her getting on a bus, and did not follow her (“I was afraid she’d make a scene”). The next day at the same time she was there again, wearing a floral headscarf, large butterfly-shaped sunglasses, and a short, narrow green skirt. A delight to anyone seeing her for the first time, but lonely and wan to Rafael. Nina was working at the State Laboratory for Analytical Chemistry, near the Russian Compound downtown. For eight hours a day she analyzed food dyes to find out if they contained toxins.

  (It sounds so strange to write that. Why would she be working in a place like that?)

  Her duties at the lab included cleaning, and she always stayed after the other workers had left for the day. Out of boredom—or because she was in no hurry to get home, to the preposterous stranger waiting for her there—she began painting with food coloring on the thin glass microscope slides. She painted the street as viewed through the barred window. She painted her father, Milosz, and his beloved horse. She painted various parts of their little apartment on Kosmajska Street in Belgrade. Sometimes she painted Rafael. The beautiful lips that had kissed her, the bleak and demanding passion in his eyes, the devotedness that had terrified her.

  Every afternoon Rafael darted around the streets and alleys leading to her bus stop. When he got lucky, he tracked down another section of the route she took from the lab to the bus. After a few days of this scuttling, he located the lab, and he walked in and stood opposite Nina while she mopped the floor. She gave a startled yelp, followed by her sardonic laugh, and leaned one arm on the table. From up close he thought she looked ill, anemic. There were black crescents under her eyes. They say rescue fantasies are a feminine thing. If that is true, then there is no one more feminine than my father: his mind told him to leave right then. To recuperate from her. Instead, he hugged her as hard as he could and heard himself ask if she would come to live with him.

  She looked at him with her slow, faraway gaze. I can actually see her dipping him in some internal wasteland for a long moment. Then she ceremoniously handed him the mop and said, “But first you’ll have to slay the dragon.” He thought she was joking.

  * * *

  —

  But there was a dragon.

  “I ran away from the kibbutz and I was all over the country and I partied like crazy, and at some point I found myself here, in Jerusalem,” Nina told my father’s camera in a film I found a few months ago in his “archives”—four fruit crates from the kibbutz where he keeps souvenirs from his filmmaking years. It’s a seven-and-a-half-minute clip from a sixteen-millimeter film about her, which he never finished. This year I digitized the clip, and I might use it in the film I make about them, if there’s any good material from our journey to the island. There, I’ve said it explicitly, and the sky hasn’t fallen off its chair.

  In the clip, Nina is girlish and beautiful, and she’s in a good mood, at least at the beginning of the conversation. “In Jerusalem I met a Korean man—yes, from Korea, can you imagine?” Her teeth are small and pure white, her amazingly dark eyebrows are almost straight, the thin crease beneath her eyes adds a hint of disdain to everything she says. “And he got me that job at the lab, he knew someone there, and on weekends he would take me to work for him. He was a strange sort of man…”

  Vera told me about him once. The whole story is such a non sequitur, so disjointed and cold and foreign, that it almost hurts even me. This man was a biochemist who ran a private lab in his home, “a terrible man,” Vera told me, “and he used to force Nina to give blood once in a week for his experiments.” But Vera did not know everything.

  Nina in the film takes a delighted drag on her cigarette and laughs slightly hysterically. “I usually like tall, handsome men, like Rafi, who’s filming me now. Hello, Rafael, amore”—she blows him a kiss—“and this guy was small with big ears. Okay, I’m telling the story…He was Korean…”

  Her face grows more rigid by the minute. I notice tiny changes in it, which I seem to be very aware of with her, and not only because of my professional instincts. From this point on she talks fast, in a dry, flat voice: “But he grew up in Japan, and later he ended up in America—”

  It’s as though a total stranger is speaking from inside her. The smoking gets frequent and irritable, almost mechanical. My response, when I saw the clip for the first time, was: What is this rubbish? Who cares about this? Why is she going on about some Korean?

  “And then he fell in love with a Jewish girl—she’s dead now, never mind—and followed her to Jerusalem, and that’s how he met me on the street when I was looking for somewhere to stay, and he used to send me out to sleep with strangers and come back and tell him about it.”

  If there is any last remaining trace of evidence that might incriminate me as her daughter, it is that even today, at my age, I seriously want to die when she talks about her sex life. “That’s what he liked, and the crazier and more bizarre it was, the more he liked it. He always wanted details. Wanted me to notice every detail.” Great, I tell her silently, you really could have been a fantastic script girl. Maybe that’s where I get it from. I try to guess where, in what location, he filmed her for this clip. There are pine trees in the background, and it’s a hilly area. A wood in the mountains outside Jerusalem?

  “How did I feel?” She laughs, and her laughter is slow, disconnected. “You’re not asking, Rafi? Of course you’re not. You’re always a little afraid of my answers, aren’t you?”

  “How…how was it for you?” Rafi’s voice is also dry and flat. His camera is really honed in on her, on her face, her eyes. Her pretty mouth.

  “Like drinking water from a plastic cup and throwing it away.” Silence. Nina shrugs her shoulders impatiently, as if to say: Let’s get this over with.

  “And…how long did it go on with the Korean?”

  “Two years.”

  “For two years y
ou threw out cups of water?”

  “A couple times a week.”

  “Tell me.”

  “What is there to tell. I would go out, walk the streets, hunt down a person, a man, sometimes a woman, do it, come back to tell him.”

  Rafi lets out a long, quiet exhalation. When that film was made, he did not yet know what she had in store for him.

  “And in the end you found me, Rafi. You all know that already.” Nina looks straight at the camera, suddenly smiling with all her beauty, erupting at us. It’s all a game for her. “Life poseur”—a forgotten idiom from my youth heaves inside me like nausea. The term used to terrify me, even though I did not understand it. I found it in the book that was my secret bible in those days, Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique (whose Hebrew translation included a bonus treatise: “The Law of Marriage” by Prentice Mulford). I was eleven when I found it on Vera and Tuvia’s bookshelf, and for a couple of years I used to read it every time I was alone in their home. Even the chapter names were titillating: “The Purpose of Human Eroticism,” “Advances in Sexuology for Married Persons.” I read feverishly. I memorized. “The preamble to one’s choice of a lovemaking partner is the lovemaking disposition—a physiological condition in which the organism reaches a state of mental and physical arousal that requires release.” I didn’t understand it, but my organism quivered with a new sort of tension that required release. I read it over and over again. The language was peculiar, almost biblical. “Woman is not the ‘weaker,’ but the finer vessel, which contains the wine of spirituality. She is to man what the delicately adjusted magnetic needle of the compass is to the helm which steers the ship. Being the finer instrument, she does need to be shielded and protected…” I would walk down a street in Jerusalem, or on the kibbutz paths, and pick out beautiful people, but also others, men who looked like they could helm, and women who definitely contained the wine of spirituality. I would look deep into their eyes and, unbeknownst to them, force them to recite selected quotes for me: “It is sufficient for a creature of the opposite sex to appear, one who is blessed with the physical and emotional virtues suitable for the lovemaking conditions of a particular individual and his dreams, for love to be born!”

  As I said, I was eleven, or slightly older, when we made each other’s acquaintance—my guide to the jungle of matrimony and I. I did not tell anyone, I progressed through the chapters and deciphered every single word, sometimes with the help of a dictionary, and I learned how to speak like the book, but only under my covers. I liked to open it to a random page and put my finger on a passage, and I felt as if a prophecy were being thrown out at me. I remember the time when I read: “There are people who possess a feigned affectivity. People who are extremely impoverished in the realm of emotion and play the part of affectives. They are known as ‘life poseurs.’ Such individuals are only rarely qualified for sustained married life.”

  I wanted to die. Why did I, of all people, have to have a woman like that—

  “Hey, Rafi, my darling,” Nina chirrups in the film. Her Hebrew is impeccable, without the slightest accent. She speaks five or six languages just as fluently, the life poseur. “You combed the whole country for me until you found me, and you took me home, and you beat the living daylights out of that guy, you almost slayed the dragon. I want you to know, dear viewers, that Rafi always dreamed of rescuing a princess from a dragon. And ever since then we’ve been together, and not together, and meanwhile poor Gili was born, and now we’re even more entangled, and Rafi is making a movie about us.” She waves her hand at Rafael.

  I rewind the film. Even on the hundredth time, she really does say it.

  The camera holds steady on her face, as if giving her a chance to take it back, to say it was all a lie. But Nina has long ago erased any expression. She’s gone. She is not. But where is she when she is not?

  “And meanwhile poor Gili was born.”

  Rafael in the movie, as in life, cannot let go of her. He asks her if all that time she hadn’t felt any living feeling for someone.

  It takes her a while to come back from the place she was erased into. “There actually was one time…I went to the Old City, he often sent me to hang around there. He liked it when things happened to me with Arabs. It turned him on even more. Suddenly I heard Serbian, actual Serbian, with an accent from the villages in my father’s region. Milosz’s region. They were three sailors whose ship was docked in Haifa, and one of them was cute. I walked past him and threw out casually, in English, “Hey baby, come on, lose the others.” I took him home, and he couldn’t believe this was happening to him, that a girl who looked all right and spoke Serbian in his dialect would take him home and show him a good time, and even walk him to the bus afterward. With that guy I felt something.”

  Silence.

  “Yeah, it wasn’t a good situation,” she says, and her face falls.

  The camera is still on her.

  “What’s wrong with me, Rafi?”

  Rafi does not answer.

  The clip ends there.

  I play it again.

  * * *

  —

  They stayed in Jerusalem and lived together in a third-floor one-bedroom apartment in Kiryat Yovel. Nina worked at the lab, and Rafael took odd jobs. He loved her in all the ways she allowed him to, or imposed on him. Maybe she loved him, too—I’m not even getting into that, into what she felt for him; there are areas where every time I venture into them I experience suicidal nuttiness, and I can do without that—but her expressions did not return. On the contrary. Her beautiful face seemed to become even blander. He suspected that she was intentionally emptying it of meaning every time he looked at her with his kind eyes. “Like she was punishing me for something,” he told my Sony in a perplexed tone, and the interviewer, a young expert on ideal marriage, its physiology and technique, remained tactfully quiet.

  Time after time, Rafael told me, Nina would come back to him from her rambles, “dirty, smelly, defiled,” he said softly, “sometimes actually injured, cut, with black-and-blue bruises.” When she saw his look, she would flare up and fly at him, and not infrequently hit him, and he would defend himself, try to lock her in his arms so that she would calm down, but she was faster and wilder than him. And then there would come a moment when he lost his mind and started hitting her back, Rafael told the terrified young interviewer, who despite her rampant powers of imagination had never considered that possibility. “But you loved her!” the interviewer whispered in a choked-up voice. “How could you hit her if you loved her?” “I don’t know, Gili, I don’t know. These two”—and he raised his upper lip and showed the embarrassed camera his mouth and the gap where two molars should be—“these two, I lost in our wars.” Silence. The camera is on him, but the drama is occurring in the camerawoman. Because suddenly, when I look at it now, it’s painfully clear that the girl I was then, when we shot that film, was paying the price of her great deceit: posing as an adult.

  By the way, in that horribly faded and pixelated film, you can see that Rafael also feels uncomfortable. He constantly shifts in his seat, doesn’t look at me even once. He must know that he should stop the conversation here. That it’s not appropriate. That the girl’s emotional vessels cannot contain everything he is pouring into her. That it’s practically criminal. But he also cannot stop. He cannot stop.

  At least he spared me the descriptions of their sex when I filmed him, or kept them very concise. But again, he failed to grasp—how could he fail to grasp?—that it was the descriptions of their battles that distressed me and pained me far more.

  We are both adults now. We sit in Vera’s apartment on the kibbutz, just he and I, and we watch—what a sifted word—the conversation we filmed here, in this same room, twenty-four years ago.

  And I never did anything with that film.

  The two of us, Rafael and I, we did nothing with it. We shoved it into storag
e and forgot.

  “I’m so sorry,” Rafael says now, looking anguished, “I was such an idiot.”

  “Yes,” I say, and I want to cry for me, but I don’t, I never cry, and we both say nothing more.

  What is there to say when there is nothing to be done.

  * * *

  —

  At first, when he and Nina still had tender moments (almost always aided by marijuana and gallons of domestic cognac), he dared to hope—although of course he did not tell her, because how could you say something like this—that if they had a child, her expressions would return. But even after Nina gave birth to a five-pound baby just shy of being a preemie—who looked as if all she wanted to do was grow smaller and smaller until she vanished completely—even then Nina’s missing expressions did not return, and perhaps even the opposite: her eyes were more hollow, always looking right through you, and seemed to hardly blink, as though they’d frozen in a distant moment on something she suddenly saw or understood. That was the face the baby saw once she began focusing her gaze and noticing details. Those were the eyes that looked through her when she breastfed (for three days, or it might have been four, there’s a bit of vagueness around the issue; Rafi once said three, and another time four), and when her diaper was changed, and when she attempted cautiously and probably without much hope to examine the effect of her smile on the face before her, and perhaps that is why to this day her smile collapses slightly, retreating ahead of time.

  And that’s that? No memories? Not even bad ones? No moments of pampering, of cuddles in Mom and Dad’s bed? No kisses showered on her babyish stomach? What about cheering her first step, her first words? Where’s the light? Say “papa.”