More Than I Love My Life

by David Grossman

  Rafael replied quickly, “It’s for you, too, of course. You don’t know how happy it makes me that you’ve decided to…to document her seriously for once.”

  “And document me, too, right? I want to be on film as well. There are things I want to ask her.”

  He tensed up. I imagine him carefully treading backward. He once again asked why she really needed him to interview her mother.

  “You know exactly why. It’ll be easier with you.”

  “For you or for her?”

  “Both.”

  Silence.

  “But that’s not my whole idea,” Nina said.

  “It isn’t?”

  “Listen.”

  “She totally surprised me,” he tells me at this point on the phone. I’m sitting on the windowsill at home with my first cup of coffee. I’m watching Meir dig on the hillside opposite, and almost without realizing it, I have a pen in my hand, and I’m writing every word my dad says in my notebook, like we’ve gone back to the days of that production, when I was his script girl. But the pen suddenly goes limp in my hand.

  “I was thinking,” Nina said, “that maybe we could all go.”

  “Go where?” Rafael gawked.

  “To Goli Otok,” I tell him immediately.

  Rafael was astonished. “How did you know, Gili?”

  “I felt it coming,” I murmur. Then I realize: since yesterday, since he told me she was sick. It’s been falling on me like a slow-motion avalanche.

  Nina asked, “Rafi, do you think Gili would be willing to come?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It’ll be short,” Nina said, as if the duration of the trip was the issue, “two or three days at most.”

  “Then why don’t you suggest it to her?” Rafael said.

  Gili—the subject of the conversation—quickly doodles the atomic mushroom over Hiroshima.

  “Me?” Nina said with a bitter laugh. “She won’t even listen to my voice. You saw how she avoided me the whole party. She can’t look me in the eye for more than one second, she’s so disgusted. But maybe you could ask her? She won’t say no to you. Give it a try, what’s the worst that could happen? She won’t eat you up.”

  “You know what? I’ll suggest it. Worst case, she says no.”

  At this point there was a long pause. I know Goli Otok as if I were born there. I could give guided tours of the place. For my roots project in seventh grade I made a card-stock model of the island. Anything else? My email address? Gili.otok@gmail.com.

  I rest my case.

  Rafael is quiet. I draw the cliff hanging over the gulf and the sea. There, at the highest point of the island, my Vera stood for fifty-seven days in the blazing, hot sun, and did not jump. If I ever make it to that island, I know exactly what I’ll do: I will climb up to the cliff on the hilltop and stand there for an hour, two hours, and I’ll shout at the waves and the rocks and the gulf, because they’re still there, and they are part of the story.

  “Gili looks good,” Nina told him.

  “She does,” my father was happy to confirm, and to repeat to me.

  “She’s grown prettier over the years,” Nina said.

  “She’s happy now, and on her you can always see everything.”

  “So tell me…”

  “Yes?”

  “Is she with someone?”

  “Yeah, for a while now.”

  “How long?”

  “A while. Almost six years.”

  “Six years and you didn’t tell me.”

  “No.”

  A long pause. Rafael cleared his throat. “By the way, he’s not…not her age.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “A little older than her.”

  “Oh.”

  “Eleven or twelve years. He’s a special person, very gentle, with a complicated story.”

  “I didn’t imagine Gili would find someone with a simple story,” Nina said.

  This, incidentally, was a crude violation of a basic law. Usually, before their weekly talks, Rafael asks me for permission to tell her something about my life, a crumb. I always refuse. Rafael says that every time they talk, every single week, she asks about me, as if she enjoys hurting herself with my refusal.

  “I’ll talk to Gili, yes,” Rafael said.

  “Just don’t tell her it was my idea.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Ask her to come with us. She doesn’t even have to talk to me on the way. I’m willing to keep being air to her. But it’ll be much better, from Vera’s perspective, too, if Gili is with us when we shoot. And maybe…what would you say about suggesting that she write down some of what’s happening?” He smiled and his cheeks turned red. (How do I know? I know him.) “She can be your script girl again,” Nina said, and I have no doubt that she knew exactly which buttons she was pressing. “Suggest that she come on the trip and write ‘what the camera picks up and mostly what it doesn’t pick up’—wasn’t that the motto?”

  Rafael laughed. My naïve father. So easily bought. Then she asked him another couple of questions about me, about my job, about my plans for the future. Rafael didn’t go into detail when he reported to me, and I didn’t pressure him. This, as I said, was a clear violation of the law, but on the other hand, I would like to note that in those moments they were doing something together that had not happened for many years: in their limited and fucked-up way, they were being my parents.

  * * *

  —

  “So what do you say, Gili?” Rafael asks cautiously.

  “I’ll come.”

  “Yes, obviously.” He sighs. “I totally understand. That’s what I told Nina. I didn’t have any—”

  “I’ll come.”

  “I’m just saying, suggesting, you know…What did you say?”

  “I said I’ll come.”

  “To Goli Otok?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ll be with us when we film?”

  “Yes.”

  Silence.

  “But, Dad, listen, I have a condition.”

  “Whatever you want, Gilush, anything—”

  “This is my film.”

  “What…What do you mean, yours? In what sense?”

  “In the sense that you and I do everything together, but when it comes to editing, I have the last say.” I’m amazed at what comes out of my mouth. At standing up to him like that. It’s as if I’ve been preparing for this moment for years.

  “Look, that would be…I don’t know…It wouldn’t be easy.”

  “That’s true. Can you handle it?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll give it a try.”

  “No. I need your promise, Dad. Otherwise I’m not coming.”

  “You’re not going to give me time to think about it?”

  “No.”

  Silence. For a long time.

  I’m not backing down. I’m not backing down.

  “I agree.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Are you leaving me any choice?”

  Another silence. A very long one. His heavy breathing. I hope I haven’t hurt him too badly.

  “Then that’s how it’ll be,” he said.

  “Then I’m coming.”

  “Can I tell Nina?”

  “Yes, but with my condition.”

  He makes that sound again, the exhalation that comes after puffing his cheeks out so far that they almost burst. Poseidon blowing wind into the sails of a ship. My heart pounds. There’s going to be a voyage. We’ll be on the road soon.

  “Great. Good,” he says, sounding suspiciously serene. “Very good. Excellent, thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me. I’m doing it for me.”

  “Still.”

  “
Just tell me where and when. Do you want me to take care of the tickets? What about a hotel? Car?”

  “Wait, I need…Wow, this is something…But what about your work? Won’t it be a problem?”

  “There’s a project on the horizon, but only in a few weeks.”

  He swallows down his bitter urge to ask what the project is, who’s directing. It pains him most when it’s someone from his generation. I’ve turned down two pretty good offers only for that reason.

  “Okay, I’m calling Nina, I’ll get back to you with the details.” He chuckles. Maybe he actually feels relieved to know it’ll be my film and not his. “This is unbelievable, Gilush, what you’ve given me here is…” He makes an inappropriate little yelp and hangs up.

  I scribble a tall, large figure with a pile of black curls, head in hands, terrified eyes filling half the face. I look at the hillside across the way. A tall, slender man is out there working. The unhappy joy of my life. Ripped jeans, black T-shirt, shaved head glistening with sweat. Even with his back to me, he can feel me watching him. He stops digging, turns around, leans on his hoe. Maybe he also senses that I’ve made up my mind about us. Maybe yesterday, when we did our grounding ritual, he picked it up. He wipes the sweat off his forehead and smiles and waves at me awkwardly. I breathe a sigh of relief: he doesn’t know. I wave back. When I get back from Goli Otok, I’ll tell him he’s free.

  Free of me, I mean. Free to leave me.

  I have no right to prevent you from being a father, I’ll tell him.

  There, it’s in writing.

  * * *

  —

  Rafael and Vera have an osmotic relationship. Every piece of information delivered to one immediately seeps into the other. No more than seven minutes after I finished talking with him, the phone rang. “Gili!” my grandmother thundered. “Rafi just this minute told me! And I want to tell you how much thankful I am for it!”

  “You really don’t need to thank me, Grandma, I’m doing it for myself, too.”

  “Still, it’s very important also for your father and for me, and mostly for Nina.”

  “Well, all right, we’ll get through it. How are you, Grans?”

  “Well, since yesterday, from your celebration for me, which you took completely too far, and then Nina who told me what she thinks she has, you already heard, and I looked it up on the computer a little, and with all that I haven’t had any rest. And when I started thinking of us going there, to Goli, and I didn’t know it would be you, too, I lay in bed thinking, and I saw things running like movies, and some of the parts I’ve already told you, and some of the parts you don’t know, and all the way to this morning I had this sort of tremble…And I know how much you, Gilush, always felt all my pain, all my sadness…”

  Something in her voice, a certain shadowy little curve it took, reminded me of what she’d told me in her kitchen all those years ago, when she’d literally ordered me not to let anyone twist her story against her.

  This was the moment when I should have asked her if what I remembered her telling me, or think I remembered, was right. It happened a long time ago, when I was lying almost dead in intensive care at Hadassah Hospital, after slicing my veins and, to be on the safe side, stuffing my body with a cocktail of pills, because of that fuck-him who walked out on me after three years. He just tired of me in the blink of an eye, got up one night out of my arms, and I saw him sitting on the bed looking down at the floor contemplatively, which was peculiar in and of itself, because this was not a man necessarily known for contemplation, and then he ran one hand slowly through his wonderful wheat hair and said, Listen, Gili, this isn’t working for me. I looked where he was looking, in case the secret of life had revealed itself to him in that spot, and what I saw were my slippers, slightly larger than his, and I swear that was what brought down the empire. After three years of passionate togetherness and “kindred souls” and “You were born for me” and promises of a shared future. Grandma Vera stayed with me in the ICU for three nights and three days, demanding that I not die: Gili, don’t die, Gili, you’re not going to, Gili, chin up. Meanwhile, my father roamed the corridors and roared like a wounded lion; the whole floor could hear him, security guards asked him to leave, he kept promising to keep quiet, but the minute he got near my bed the roars erupted again. And all that time, Vera spoke to me constantly, she never slept, she fought to pull me out of wherever I was, for three days and three nights she barely ate—my father told me when I woke up—and she tore at the skin on her arms with her manicured fingernails to keep herself awake. Even though I was comatose, I could hear her, or I think I could, moaning to herself in a trance: Oy, how us Bauer women get crazy with love, we go all the way, we love our man more than ourselves, more than life. There was a strange sort of pride in her voice, something that even in my sorry state I could sense should not be there, that it was unbecoming for the situation. She seemed to be insinuating that I had now been accepted into an exclusive club of spiderwomen. And inside my fog, on the second or third night, during one of the dark hours when she fought for me, I heard her relay—or I somehow absorbed it the way knowledge sometimes seeps wordlessly between two people, or perhaps I merely hallucinated on an empty stomach just flushed clear of thirty clonazepams and twenty Tylenols, yes, more likely I hallucinated it—the uncensored version of what happened in the UDBA’s interrogation room in Belgrade, which had screwed up Nina’s life and continued to poison our family for three generations.

  “And now Rafi tells me you’ll come too with us, and you’ll make it into your movie together…” Vera rejoiced on the phone, and I almost dared, it was on the tip of my tongue to ask her whether it had really happened or if I’d been dreaming, but I didn’t. I was suddenly afraid that I wouldn’t be able to prevent someone (but who?) from twisting her story against her. I was so afraid of no longer being able to love her. “And the fact that you will come, that shocked me even more so out of a coma, Gili, and it showed me that I really might be so old—like Methuselah!” She laughed. “I’m as old as the Bible! And for so many years I was like a bear hibernating all winter, and now—uh-oh!—it’s springtime, and I must again fight for the life, for the truth of what happened.”

  My ninety-year-old grandmother’s first stage in preparing for battle was to climb up on a chair perched on top of a table, crawl into the attic, and pull out an enormous suitcase: not the one from her wedding night, but the one Tuvia and she had taken on their travels, all the way to Japan and Patagonia and Greenland. As she maneuvered herself backward out of the attic—I shudder to think of her doing that, at her age, alone, propping a chair on the table, climbing up, climbing down; I imagine her stuck with her head in the attic, her spindly jean-clad legs sticking out; it brings to mind Luigi Galvani’s experiments electrocuting frogs—she hit the dusty cardboard box on which she’d once written in black marker gili—various, which contained my ancient Sony and a few crumbling videotapes, and one dusty but intact tape, my first and last film, from age fifteen, which had never been shown, and which might now be resurrected thanks to whatever we film in Goli Otok.

  * * *

  —

  Thursday, October 23, 2008. Six a.m. Duty-free shopping area, Ben-Gurion Airport. Waiting for a table to free up. Vera and Rafael stand to one side speaking quietly. They throw us the occasional glance. Nina and I stand facing each other like two scolded children who won’t look each other in the eye. Rafael pulls the Sony out of his backpack; Nina and I move away from each other in perfect synchrony. He records, and I turn my back on him. Filming my morning face is totally unacceptable, and sharing a frame with Nina makes me claustrophobic. He zooms in on Vera. Strong, small face, pursed lips, red lipstick, irritated wave: “Really, Rafi, stop that, there are prettier girls around here!” He leaves her and moves over to Nina. She can’t be bothered to shoo him away as he circles around her. She huddles deep in a blue parka that used to belong to Tuvia, which also g
ets on my nerves. I mean, just think how you made his and Vera’s life a misery, and now you’re wrapping him around yourself? On the other hand, I can’t stop looking at her. Her pallor. Her face without a drop of blood. Transparent lips. Almost no chest. “The most feminine she ever looked,” Rafi told me once, “was in the weeks after she gave birth to you.”

  “Well, obviously,” I said at the time, flipping my hair back gracefully, “it was the contact with me.”

  What he saw in her, as a man, and what he still sees in her—God only knows. Almost all the women he was with after her were real women. Not always paragons of wisdom, but within a reasonable margin of error. So why is it that he’s been soldered to her skinny ass for forty-five years?

  He constantly circles around her with the camera, and she suffers silently, understanding that it is a sort of travel tax that she must pay. She is lost in herself, but not impervious to him. I observe them. There is undeniably something between them. What makes two people a couple? Longing? Belonging? Suspending a fraction of the pupil during a seemingly meaningless look? All of the above. And most important—feeling at home. Something like homeland. Now you’re getting carried away, Gili. Define “homeland.” Maybe: the place where you know in your body when the traffic lights are supposed to change? Not bad, but when it comes to two, Gili, two human beings—what makes two a couple? Maybe it’s the same thing with the lights?

  We’ve been together for six years, Meir and I, and it’s the first time in my life I’ve really been a couple. But now he wants a child. He’s been wanting one for quite a while. He’s stopped talking about it, delicate man that he is, but it constantly hovers between us, and I can’t do it. Me having a child is not possible. I’m child-accursed.

  Deflecting my wistful momentum, I flick away Meir, and myself. We’re not the story now. I’m erasing him for the next few days. He is not on this voyage. There’s no Meir, no Meir and Gili.

  I think about my father’s idea from when he was a boy, that if he slept with Nina she would regain her expressions, and about how what began as a romantic childish folly determined his fate and hers, as well as mine. And how a stupid, arrogant notion ultimately turned into such total love that it hardly depended on anything Nina did or did not do, on what she was or was not. Paradoxically, that love makes me respect my father, who is currently somewhat demeaning himself by badgering her with his camera. Because honestly, how many people at his age continue to sustain such an active, devoted, dogged love, something truly slavish, sometimes pathetic, and, on top of it all, so one-sided?