More Than I Love My Life

by David Grossman

  (Correction: almost anything.)

  “Eighty to go,” Rafi reads out from a road sign, and we wonder if it’s miles or kilometers. We conduct a quick debate about whether to keep driving or have a bathroom break, because the cold is destroying us. Only Vera, who has a bladder like the late president Hafez Assad’s, is prepared to keep going straight to the hotel. But she’s in the minority, and Rafi glides the car into a giant, brightly lit roadside rest area, which at this hour contains only a few employees manning food and drink stalls—pizza, pasta, burgers, coffee—and there’s heavy metal shocking our ears, and it’s very hard for the four of us to readapt to the external world and its screeching cogwheels.

  We wander around in a daze, through long aisles of shelves packed with bright stuffed animals and electrical appliances and old-fashioned chocolate boxes. We keep turning to one another as if wishing to hold on to something we held before, which has quickly faded in the light. Nina and I find ourselves face-to-face in the maze, and we cannot avoid each other. Sounding oddly calm, she says, “Remind me what we were just dreaming?”

  She says it with exactly the right measure of dryness for me to respond to, and I notice something nice on her face: her eyebrows seem to shrug their shoulders. Without thinking, I reach out and touch her thin collarbone, and it works. Unbelievable. She knows what to do with it. She listens to my trembling finger, nodding.

  This goes on for a long time, and a lot of information is relayed. There is a moment when it seems she would like to reverse the direction, to touch me with her finger, but she is smart enough to understand that it won’t fly. Then we turn away from each other and go back to roving the evergreen forest of capitalism, and my heart pounds.

  Out there in the distance, my father perches on a stool, sipping a double espresso. Drawn to him like a baby tilapia to its father’s mouth, I sit down next to him and find that he’s already ordered me a latte with extra foam and a cinnamon-raisin Danish, heated for fifteen seconds.

  In the enormous mirror on the wall above our heads, we can see Vera and Nina pass each other down parallel aisles.

  “Do we have a film?” Rafi asks.

  “Maybe. It looks that way.”

  “Don’t get mad when I give you bits of advice. This movie is completely yours.”

  “Of course. But I’m glad you said that.”

  “Oh,” he says after a brief pause, “I didn’t think it was that bad.”

  “Just pay attention,” I say.

  * * *

  —

  “After they heard in army that Milosz and me are engaged,” Vera continues the minute Rafi starts the engine, “Milosz was transferred one thousand kilometers, the most distance, to Skopje, in Macedonia, and that was punishment for him marrying a Jew, because in the government there were already pro-Germans, and there were laws against Jews, and in schools there was quota. And then my father said: ‘Exactly because they sent Milosz to the end of the world, you should marry him.’ So Mother and I—off we march! Quickly we went to Macedonia to meet Milosz and marry him.

  “But on the way we said we’d stop at Milosz’s village so that Mother should meet his parents and all his family. And it was a very tiny village in Serbia. First we went by train, and Milosz’s father waited for us at the station with horse and carriage. Mother got on and sat up high, and she wore a suit that her tailor in Vienna made, with hat and veil, and blue parasol and high-heel shoes. After about thirty kilometers we came to a stream, and my father-in-law said: Come, snaja—come, daughter-in-law. I will pull the rope on one side and you on other side. And Mother sits up there and whispers to me: Where are you taking me, Vera? To hell?

  “So like that we pull for six kilometers. There is no path, no electricity, no pipes, only mountains and rocks and the little stream, and that is why Germans did not reach there either.

  “We arrive, and the whole village comes out to see the wonder: ladies from the city! They bring me gifts as Milosz’s fiancée—three nuts, one egg, two sugar cubes, one chick…They wanted to give my mother one chick, and she shook with fear, she thought it was disgusting.

  “From there we went to Macedonia, me and Mother, and there Milosz was waiting, and hugs and kisses, and he had already arranged with a priest, and we only needed someone to walk the groom. The priest gave us horse and carriage so we could find drunk officer to do it, and we took them, and there on the side of road is a man named Simo Mirković, and he was drunkest officer Milosz knew there, so we put him up on carriage and took him and that was how we got married.

  “But most important thing I forgot: when we met Milosz, we saw he had a new problem, they’d given him an operation for his ulcer—oh, silly me, I forgot to show!” She dives into her white handbag and fishes out a dirty old plastic bag with a few photographs, including one of Milosz after the surgery. I zoom in on it. I thought I’d seen all the pictures of Milosz, and I wonder why Vera has hidden this one up to now.

  Milosz. Chest bared, large square bandage on his stomach. He looks thin and brittle, but definitely not weak. Vera says this is her favorite picture of him.

  That half-naked Serbian officer with his ribs sticking out—the pair of enormous eyes and the almost embarrassingly penetrating look—is my grandfather.

  That skinny man with the high forehead and the authoritative nose, Milosz Novak, Nina’s father, a commander on the Yugoslavian riding team, an officer of General Tito’s cavalry, and a partisan in World War II—a war hero. My grandfather.

  He is very fair and very thin. The thinness gives his face a spiritual aura. His cheeks are sunken, which makes his ears look comically large. But the main thing, without a doubt, is the eyes. There is something ageless in them. Like the wide-open eyes of a blind man, or of a profoundly complex and piercing soul. The more I look at them, the more I feel we could have been good friends. He’s my people.

  He’s about thirty years old here, nine years younger than I am today. He reminds me a little of my father when he was a boy. I can even speculate that something in Rafael as a boy looked familiar—and beloved—to Nina when she met him in the avocado orchard. Maybe that was why she headbutted him as hard as she could.

  And me—do I look like him?

  If in some alternate reality our looks happened to meet on the street, would we guess that the same blood flowed in our veins? That I was his only grandchild? Would we slow our footsteps for a moment?

  The thought saddens me. (I have an issue with the sorrow of randomness. But that’s for another time.)

  “He loved you so much,” Vera says to Nina. “Did you know he wouldn’t let me bathe you? Said I wasn’t gentle enough with you. And he did everything—bathed, dried, changed diapers.”

  Nina asks to hold the photograph. She looks at him and then at me for a long time. I don’t kick her away from my face. In the contrary: I want her to see me, to see who ran through her. To see whom she lost out on.

  “It amazes me all over again every time,” Nina whispers. The photo is passed around to everyone once more, including the driver, and judging by the silence I understand they are all seeing something I cannot see.

  “That is why I love so much to look at Gili’s face,” Vera comments.

  Nina says, “The eyes.”

  “Eyes like that only one person in the world had,” Vera says. “Milosz is dead, and now they are Gili’s.”

  “Hey,” I say, “enough with the organ trade!”

  * * *

  —

  Vera turns to the camera. “Now we tell happy things: it was once a Sunday, I think you had your birthday, Nina—five? Six? And after the horse-riding-school parade, all the riders on horses came down our street with swords, and they all sang together ‘Nina! Nina!’ and you did like this with your hands for them…”

  Vera pulls out another photograph: she is standing in front of the tiny house that Milosz and h
is family built in their village for the new couple. The house looks like a children’s drawing, with two square windows, a door, and a tiled roof with a chimney. Vera is about twenty-two here, wearing a thin wool sweater with a white collar showing beneath, very respectable looking, but her gaze is defiant, provocative, life-thirsty. She is beautiful. Arched brows, thinly penciled, full and glossy lower lip. The single curl falling perfectly on her forehead.

  “Already when I was eighteen, Milosz used to send me the most loveliest letters, you couldn’t believe it, Nina, that such a young person wrote them. But I also saw in him something that scared me. Sort of sadness in his soul.” Vera leans in. “Because he felt despair, yes, and he did not at all believe in people. And that is a strange thing, because he was a Communist and an idealist, and most of all a humanist, but only I knew the truth, that already at young age he stopped believing in kindness of human beings.”

  Nina, upset by what she hears, gives herself a lonely hug.

  “He always would say, ‘To do even some little good in the world, Vera, you have to really make an effort. But evil, you just have to keep it going, just join in with it.’

  “And he also would say: ‘You brought me light, Vera, you gave me happiness, you gave me a path. Alone I had no path and I had nothing.’ Because you see, Ninotchka, I always had lots of friends, and always there was noise around me, that is how I am in my personality, it can’t be helped, there are some who like it and some who don’t. But Milosz, he did not have one single friend. Never. Even when he was a child. Even in the village. He did not believe very much in human beings. He believed only in me.”

  Those words raise Nina’s eyes to Rafi’s in the mirror. The two of them conduct a constant conversation. Things Vera says arouse echoes in which I have no part.

  For the thousandth time I realize that I probably don’t have the courage to comprehend how powerful and deep—despite everything—their togetherness was.

  “We were set for two,” Rafi once explained to me.

  * * *

  —

  “I opened eyes for your father. He was not at all revolutionary man. He was not! Sometimes, because of what he did in the war, in the forests, people think he was big revolutionary, big hero, brave partisan, ideologue. But no, no, that was all from me. I taught him from the beginning that whole language.”

  “See, this is what drives me crazy,” Nina suddenly intervenes. You can feel her claws coming out. “Because if anyone else talked about themselves like that, people would say they were an arrogant egomaniac. But somehow, when it’s you…I really don’t understand how, but it works…it’s part of…do you see what I’m saying?”

  “No.” Vera licks her upper lip. “Please explain to me.”

  “With you, people accept it. Everyone does. Everywhere. In the family, on the kibbutz, your friends in Yugoslavia. And more than accepting it—they admire it. How is that possible? No, seriously, Mom, explain it to me, teach me…”

  Vera shrugs her shoulders. It is a cruel and terrible movement.

  * * *

  —

  I was fifteen or sixteen, we were in her kitchen, cooking and talking, and as usual she was talking about Nina, her open wound, when she blurted out something: Nina has no charisma. That’s what she said. I don’t think I even knew exactly what that word meant, but of course I enthusiastically agreed with her: she has no charisma, she was always spoiled, and weak, and a princess, and with Vera and me, the “inheritance” had skipped a generation.

  How could I have been seduced like that? What an idiot I was, to let her program me with her version.

  “You should understand, Nina, honey,” Vera continues, ignoring Nina’s outburst, circumventing the trap without blinking an eye and aiming at the more submissive Nina, the one in the camera, “you should understand that Novak men have no revolution in their blood at all. They are quiet. No initiative. And I was always revolutionary. I was a fighter, from very small age and all my life.”

  “A fighter for what?” Nina agitates, but she’s out of focus.

  “For what, Nina? Don’t you know yet?”

  “I want to hear. I want it on record.”

  “I wanted more justice for humanity!”

  The determined line between Vera’s eyes. The exclamation point that juts her jaw out, straightens her nose. My cute, funny grandmother, my generous, warm, endlessly devoted, fanatical, tough, cruel grandmother. Grandma and the wolf under the same skin. How can it be tolerated? How can one tolerate what she did to Nina?

  And how to keep being me and yet still love her?

  “In that case,” says Nina, “explain to me how a revolutionary like you fell in love with a man who was actually, from the way you describe him, an obedient soldier?”

  “First of all,” says Vera, “there was his head, and we had a very lot to talk about. For half a year after our wedding we only talked. Did not touch.”

  My father hits the brakes, the tires screech, and we all lurch forward.

  Nina splutters: “You didn’t touch?”

  “What you heard.” Vera crosses her arms over her chest and looks far ahead.

  Nina asks her to explain.

  “We had agreement from the beginning, that half a year after the wedding we will not touch. It was a platonic thing, Nina, that you cannot imagine…Like a magnet we were, and sleeping in the same bed and burning on fire—and no!”

  “But why?” Nina practically yells.

  “That is how Milosz said, right at the start. Half a year. Like a sacrifice. Where you give up something most precious of yours. That’s what he created, and I liked his head and I went with it, and we were proud of it.”

  Nina blinks in the background. “So what did you talk about, you and my father, when you weren’t touching?”

  “Ah! Lots we talked about what was happening in world. There was already Hitler, and Mussolini, there were things to think about. Ideas, plans, discussions, new roads to search, and there was Zionism. There was where you feel at home and where you feel a stranger.”

  She keeps talking, but I, and perhaps Rafi and Nina, too, are not with her now. This notion of the young couple holding back, so determined, seems to shine an unflattering light on them.

  “For example, in ’42 we got from Moscow that the slogan now is ‘For Homeland and for Stalin!’ And I said, Milosz, I’m done with all that. Where do I have a homeland? Where there is proletariat—that is where my homeland is! I am an internationalist! Milosz got scared: ‘Oh, Miko, you’re Trotskyite! You’re Nihilist! Don’t say such things!’ He was miserable over me being like that, it might God forbid tear us apart. And to me it was clear that with Stalin there was a lie. That Stalin did not settle my problems as a Jew, because I wanted socialism like there was later with Dubček. Humane socialism.”

  She stops and sighs. Perhaps she picks up the cool breeze and distance coming from us. “You cannot understand all this, can you? This is for you like the world of dinosaurs…”

  “Why do you think so? It wasn’t that long ago,” my father mumbles, and Nina and I produce a noncommittal hum.

  “No, no, you cannot understand my world. And my wars, and the air I breathed.” She wrinkles her face and shrinks back. Her loneliness flutters, exposed, the loneliness of a ninety-year-old woman whose world is gone and whose friends have all died. “You won’t understand anything,” she murmurs, “you say ‘war,’ but war in the Balkan is not like with us in Israel. In the Balkan, war has different logic. War in the Balkan is first of all rape. Here they rape. Not because a man wants a woman. They rape with a gun at her head so that she will carry his seed, and then her husband doesn’t want her. That is the logic of war. And here the Chetnik Serbs slaughtered children of Communists with knives and then licked the blood off the knife. And Ustaše Croatians who were servants of Nazis—I don’t even want to say what they did. The B
alkans enjoyed it. Something was left from what the Turks did to them. Something abnormal was left here. And you saw also their cruelty in the war that happened here recently, there was no other such thing in the world, maybe only in the Mid-ages there were such things.”

  Silence. Vera allows her words to seep in. Something evasive has slipped by.

  “But you want to hear other things…Love stories…Hollywood…” She sighs.

  “Tell us whatever you want to,” my father says softly.

  She shuts her eyes. “I want to tell you about Milosz and me.”

  “We want to hear,” my father reassures her.

  “For instance, we also had a lot of interest about books. Oh, Ninotchka, your father used to read! I never met another man who read like that.” Her face slowly goes back to itself, shining at Nina in the camera lens. The way she turns her back—physically—on Nina sitting next to her starts to bother me.

  “And you were little, sweet, and your father read to me every evening out loud, and once, you were maybe four, I sat in his bed knitting, and you played next to the bed with dolls, and we thought: She is a little girl, she doesn’t understand. He read me a book about Momyshuly, who was the hero of Kazakhs in World War Second. So, after a few weeks later you had a high fever, and you started hallucinating and you shouted: ‘I am Momyshuly! Give me shooting machine to kill all the Germans!’ ”

  Laughter in the car. And laughter is an opportunity to breathe. Nina wipes her eyes. I hope it’s just from laughter: “You see, Gili, they even nationalized my nightmares.”

  “Do you know when childhood ends?” my father once asked me after one of my rants about Nina. “Do you know when people really start to mature? When they can accept that their parents have a right to their own psychology.”