More Than I Love My Life

by David Grossman

  Nina says quietly: Rafi, stop. And he stops, as if coming out of a seizure, and he stands aside and wipes his forehead with a handkerchief. I’ve been begging him for years to upgrade to tissues, but what we have here is a particularly stubborn retro stylist.

  With an argyle sweater, knitted by Vera.

  He stands alone, parting the flow of people. They’re all moving toward a target, while he is stuck, a man without a purpose. He does have his street gangs, four tough groups in Akko and Ramleh, and he treats those kids as if they’re his children, I’m not exaggerating, and they see him as a father. But what will truly invigorate him, what will kick his life up a notch, if he gives up the heart flutters caused by his love for her?

  He turns to me and nods, as if having heard the question.

  Put in some work now, G, so R doesn’t accuse you of being a freeloader.

  Nina—puffy blue parka, light gray jeans, thin blue belt with a small silver buckle, light blue shirt as anemic as her, blue sweater with round collar. Hair tied back, undyed, gray on the verge of silver. Glasses with a delicate green frame. No rings. No earrings. No bracelets, no watch. Thin silver chain around her neck. Flats. No makeup. Ever. Why am I even making this list, which is completely unnecessary for the minor family movie we’re making? Because Rafael and I, as always, are taking our film very seriously.

  Because maybe, who knows, something else might come of it? Something bigger?

  That is why I adhere to the total school of thought advocated by Rafael, my father and mentor, who demanded that his young script girl take responsibility for the entire experience, including the one outside the frame: “Even things that only almost happen are part of reality.” I think I mentioned that I was seventeen when he took me under his large wing and taught me cinematography and directing, in his strict way, and above all insisted that I write: You have a good eye and a good hand, and it’s possible that writing is your thing, he told me more than once. He wanted me to write down the elements that don’t explicitly appear in the film: thoughts, associations, even the random memories of crew members, but also my own. He valued the ideas and memories of a chaotic girl, and he wasn’t afraid of abundance like some directors I work with now, who seem to regard abundance as simply bad taste.

  He taught me to overflow—with ideas, sparks, “thought-bastards,” as he called them, that’s how he spoke, he had his own vocabulary, and I liked to think that I myself was in some way his thought-bastard. Once I even made the mistake of saying in front of other people that I’d leaped into the world from his head like, and I do apologize, Athena from Zeus’s head, and his face fell, I saw it, he really didn’t like that, and he quickly joked about how, at most, I’d leaped out of the goose egg Nina gave him when he was a boy. So once again he managed to bring Nina in, and once again I lost out to her. Never mind.

  To achieve the totality demanded by R, I stand in the middle of Ben-Gurion Airport forcing myself to wonder, for instance, what Nina has gone through since the birthday party on Saturday. I try to imagine how she told Vera about her illness, what it was really like, moment by moment. Was there or was there not or could there have been on Vera’s face a slight spasm of disapproval, or even contempt, for Nina who had taken ill, been defeated, surrendered? (“Nina is spoiled,” she’d often told me, “she doesn’t have strength for life like I do and you do, Gilush. With us, it can’t be helped, inheritance skipped generation.”)

  Nina stares at me and suddenly everything in her sharpens, she gives me a terrified glare, and I panic: What has she seen? Which of my thoughts has she picked up? I push her away with a vigorous blink. Hey there! What’s up with you? Software stuck? Need a reboot?

  She shuts her eyes, and her face turns yellow. I shout for Rafi, but before he can move she takes a step forward and falls—falls? More like collapses onto me. “Sorry,” she mumbles, “I’m sorry, Gili.” I’m petrified, and the woman will not let go. “Sorry, I don’t know what happened…” Still apologizing into my neck, she moves even closer, and even under normal circumstances I don’t like being touched by anyone except Meir, or my father, who won’t stop filming us together. That’s what really pisses me off: that instead of flinging her off me, he’s immortalizing a false moment of kitsch. And I completely lose my sense of reality, because suddenly there’s skin, and it’s warm skin, delicate skin, and then the smell of Dove shampoo, which I also happen to use, and there’s a body, and her chest, I feel it pressing against me, and it’s soft—where does she hide it? And the tenderness of a cheek, and delicate wrists.

  She clutches me, this woman who thirty-six years ago cut me out of her life, had an abortion, for real aborted me, even if she did so a fashionable three and a half years late, because by then I already existed—poor Gili had been born, and she was a pretty cute girl judging by the pictures and some accounts, and this woman went and scraped me out of her, and now she’s shoving her head into my neck, and me, instead of throwing her the hell off me, I don’t move. And by the way, I discover that she is horribly light. Turns out, not only does she have no heart, but other internal organs seem to be missing, too.

  And to think how many tons she weighed when she was gone.

  My father keeps filming madly, surrounding us from all angles, stitching us together. His face glistens. His fleshy, droopy lips fill out. The man has waited a whole lifetime for this shot. I watch him betray me and I know he has no control over it. This is my father, who stuck foam onto the corners of shelves and tables when I was learning to walk, and now here he is in a frenzy, deserting me. I swear I’m going to throw up.

  And then I grab her waist. There’s no flesh there whatsoever. Right now, in front of the camera, I could give one hard squeeze and chop Nina in half—two wasp halves would fall to the floor. Except that my hand suddenly reaches up and strokes the back of her head. Is there any way I can stop from losing my cool? Can I rationally accept that my hand, flesh of my flesh, is sneaking a caress like the last of the beggars? Her hair is smooth and thin, my fingers swiftly run through it to the place where it’s tied back, and I touch the little elastic holding her ponytail—yes, this cuckoo bird does have a tail. But then I pull myself together and cut her away from me with both hands. Don’t you dare, I say pleasantly, quietly, straight into her ear that is tender as a leaf, how strange, it’s like a little girl’s ear. Don’t you dare touch me anymore, do you hear me? You lost your chance to touch me when I was three and a half and there’s no do-over for motherhood—

  I’m not sure I managed to convey the whole speech. My heart was pounding and I could barely breathe. I said maybe just a word or two of all that. And by the way, I never talk to anyone like that, under any circumstances. Not even in the toughest moments on set, when the film is getting insane and falling apart along with the director right in front of my eyes. So how did that garbage spill out of me instead of everything I’d practiced at home? We did rehearsals, me and Meir; I drove him crazy. He didn’t complain. He’s an adapter. It was like a press release, what I formulated in my head before I left the house, five or six levelheaded lines, the declarations it was important for me to make before we set off, and I wanted Rafael and Vera to bear witness: I have nothing with you, either good or bad. You stopped hurting me a long time ago. You were nonexistent my whole life, and you’ll continue to not exist now, and I’m taking this trip only to preserve Grandma Vera’s memories, capiche?

  I have reason to suspect that I didn’t say any of that.

  She opens her giant eyes at me. Amazing eyes, she has, there’s no denying it, the most living part of her. Vera’s eyes. Sharp emerald green. In this case “inheritance” did not skip a single generation. She undoes herself from me and hisses at Rafael to stop filming, and he obeys. People are watching. She straightens her clothes and hair, which are in disarray from her little pogrom. Her hands are shaking. She seems truly shocked by what has happened. Even she can’t fake that kind of pallor.
And then I get it: Is she afraid it’s a sign? A symptom of her illness?

  I read up on it last night. I couldn’t care less about Nina herself, but I do have a certain interest in the genetic diseases that course through her toward the future. And there was a lot of stuff about the patient’s need, especially in the early stages, to touch and stroke, even to hug total strangers. (Aha! Maybe that explains the lechers? Could I have been unjustly castigating a sick, helpless woman all these years?)

  I signal to Rafael: Maybe we should drop this? Look at the state she’s in. How can we travel this way? Vera walks over to Nina, puts two hands on her shoulders, and rubs her arms, over and over again. Somehow the motion calms us all, even slightly hypnotizes us. We stand staring at it, at that movement, which seems to flow into me from the hands of Vera, who betrayed Nina, who abandoned me, and there’s a hole at the bottom of the sea.

  It’s our boarding call. Rafael starts filming again, around the terminal this time: a pair of Indian flight attendants, a despondent puppy in a crate, an airport employee pushing a long snake of trolleys. Footage that will come in handy when we edit. Standing in line behind us, a family with a pair of angelic blond twins asks questions. Rafael explains that we’re going on a roots journey. First we’ll go to the town where Vera was born—“Granny,” he calls her, as if she were a cute little Mrs. Pepperpot—and then we’ll sail to the island where she was sentenced to hard labor for almost three years. Rafael likes talking to strangers, eager to turn them into nonstrangers. If he could, he would turn the whole world into nonstrangers. A quality he definitely did not get from me.

  * * *

  —

  Outside the airplane window there are forested mountains. Heavy clouds, lower than the mountains. The cabin is almost dark. If this weather keeps up tomorrow, we won’t be able to sail to Goli Otok.

  At some point during the flight my father and I meet in the line for the bathroom. He looks pale and sweaty. His fear of flying is taking its toll. I ask if he has any idea what Nina is planning for us. What sort of film does she want us to produce for her—a film about Vera? About Vera and Nina and what happened between them? Where is the focal point?

  He has no answers. He simply doesn’t know. In one of their phone calls, she told him that she had an idea, but she wasn’t capable of articulating it. “It’s not fully baked yet,” she’d said, and when Rafael pressed, she said that only when we were in the actual place, on the island, would she know if she was ready for it. Our dialogue is occurring, as I mentioned, outside the bathroom door, and it ends when my father goes in.

  He spends a fair amount of time in there. In recent years he’s been a little slow in that department, and now I, having interacted with him in public, am perceived by the other people in line as his representative and suffer their radiating bitterness.

  Rafael comes out. Gili goes in.

  Clean up quickly, destroy the evidence, even though no one would suspect I am the one responsible for this spillage. He is my father, besides everything else, and I do have some responsibility for him.

  Zagreb: a pretty town from above. Rain on the windows. A soft landing. I learn that Croatians, just like Israelis, eagerly applaud the pilot.

  Passport control. Everything goes smoothly. We split up: Vera and Nina stay with the luggage; Rafael and I go to pick up the rental car. Rafael speaks again, on camera this time, about that moment at the birthday party—the moment that stirred me, too—when Vera waved little Tom up in the air and, for one instant, seemed to be drawing the arc of an entire lifetime. Then comes the banal thought that Vera will probably not be here much longer—says Rafael while we wait for the Avis clerk with the Mohawk to bring our Mazda—and the thought causes him intolerable pain, as if it were the death of a very young person in the prime of her life, but also, he adds wondrously (Rafael, such a sweetheart, sometimes he’s an accidental tourist in his own mind), he feels as if he himself were still a little boy about to lose his mother. “A pretty ridiculous thought for a man my age, especially a man who’s already lost his mother once,” he says with genuine surprise to the camera I hold up, and at that moment I see what I’ve already seen more than once when shooting documentaries: something ordinary, prosaic, which someone says on camera—an attentive, supportive camera—hits them as if they were hearing it for the first time, and the story they’ve been telling themselves for years shatters.

  Rafael distractedly runs his hand over his large face, the disheveled beard and the high, furrowed brow, granting me a heartrending human landscape, then pulls himself together: “Stop it, Gili, the movie isn’t about me, it’s about Vera. Remember that.” But I’m starting to think otherwise. It’s about all of us: you and Nina and maybe me, too. No one gets out alive. And it occurrs to me that this is going to be a classic disaster film, except in slow motion: the ordinary disaster of life, which eats out of the palm of our hand.

  “Go on, turn it off, you’re wasting the battery,” Rafael says, “there’s our Mustang.” I turn around with the camera, making a good smooth rotation—today there are cameras that move just as smoothly as nature; one day, when I’m rich…I see a little lime-green vehicle coasting cheerfully toward us, and my face falls. What a moron I was, honestly, why did I cheap out? Rafael explicitly told me not to pinch pennies on the car, but as usual, I was worried about the production budget, which in this case was my father’s private budget, which came out of the crumbs he was thrown every week for being the oldest social worker in Israel, a street-gang tycoon, as I think I’ve mentioned.

  The lime pulls up in front of us and spits out the agent like a seed. Rafael gives me a “what were you thinking” look, then stands scratching his forehead. The only way the four of us are going to cram ourselves in there is with a shoehorn, and we will suffocate. This really is going to be a team-building experience, military-style. We will simply be bonded into one entity. It soon turns out, however, that the lime is small but mighty. The suitcases and the backpacks and my father find space, and I sit down next to him, and there’s even room for my ample legs. Apparently things are bearable in the back, too. Vera and Nina sit in stony silence, perhaps still stunned by the flight, or because they’ve finally grasped that we are all in this together—dead or alive.

  “The Bermuda Quadrangle,” I write in my notebook, and Vera leans forward: “What are you writing in there?” “Nothing, just stuff for myself. Notes. So we’ll remember for the editing.” Nina, from inside all her layers, takes an interest: “What kind of notes?” When I don’t answer, Vera scolds, “Gili, your mother asked you something.” And I say, “She’s not my mother.”

  * * *

  —

  We’re on the road. I struggle with the marvelously sophisticated GPS, which insists on giving us directions in Croatian. Vera complains that it reminds her of the commands that used to come over the loudspeakers in the camp. Nina is rolled up in her coat like a pupa in a cocoon.

  Noon. Vera hands out sandwiches. More than sixty miles to Čakovec, Vera’s hometown. The direction is northwest. Soft hills. Lots of green. Abundance. Vera starts making choked-up sounds of enthusiasm. Claps both hands to her cheeks, points with her finger: “Yoy! Such forests! Such mountains! So beautiful, my homeland!”

  Soft rain. Pretty games of light and clouds. I shoot some stills.

  Rafael is driving surprisingly well (the man was a film director, and now he handles the toughest kids, but still, it always surprises me when he demonstrates any competency in the practical world).

  I manage to Judaize the GPS. I suspect that Israelis were in this car before us, because the Hebrew directions are voiced by Shimon Peres.

  Čakovec. The metropolis. Fifty thousand residents.

  The rain has stopped.

  Now I start getting excited. This is where Vera was born. This is where she was a girl. My whole life I’ve been hearing about this town, about the house, the shop—�
�the kompanija”—and my great-grandfather’s exploits. I wish I’d had time for preparations and excitement. Everything happened so fast. The party for Vera, Nina’s visit, finding out about her illness.

  And there’s also the ordinary civic excitement—I’m in a foreign country!

  I haven’t left Israel for seven years.

  From one moment to the next, I can feel the Israeli stressors falling away (which immediately stresses me out).

  A city parking lot. Row 3, column B. We walk to the center of town. It’s starting. It really is happening. Notebook in hand. Rafael ahead of us. He films us, signaling for me to write down impressions, thoughts. I write. Flower beds, cafés, umbrellas with Coca-Cola logos, memorials. Tiled rooftops. Pigeons. “Write it down.” Who knows what I might need when I edit the film that could be anything.

  The main street in Čakovec. A serene pedestrian mall. Quiet. Only a barrel organ jangling away somewhere. No high-rises. There are maple trees (I think; I take stills on my cell phone to identify later). Red-and-white brick houses. A bright church. Almost empty cafés. Couples walking with strollers. “Write it down.” Large dogs snoozing on the street, projecting something babyish and trusting. Vera runs ahead, wobbling on her spindly cavalier legs. This used to be that, and that used to be something else. She walks up to an older woman with a nano-dog adorned with a ribbon: “Excuse me, madam, would you happen to know me?”