More Than I Love My Life

by David Grossman

  * * *

  —

  “Your father and I, Nina, we had kind of a game, to see how together we think of all sorts of ideas. Thoughts. Him a sentence, me a sentence. To see how the logic of us together works. Everything we thought together. Everything we aimed together to the same point. One head, one soul. And don’t think, Nina, even after half a year of not touching, it wasn’t with us just sex and bed,” she explains gravely to the camera, “it was a pact between our minds. In our brain, here, we had internal agreement and we had no need to talk much.

  “Before we married, Milosz said to me: ‘Listen, we are very young. No one has insurance that for our whole life we will be in love to one person. But I promise you that if something in my head will attract me to another person, I will very soon tell you, and you will also tell me, and we will separate like human beings. Chin up. And everything we do, foolishness, mistakes, we come and tell the other. That way you never betray me and I never betray you. There is no such thing between us as betrayal.”

  Rafi drums madly on my knee. Good God—he’s saying on our internal Morse code—she really did never betray him.

  You could die from how much she didn’t betray him.

  “Yes, he was something special, Ninotchka.” Her stark look into the depths of my lens embarrasses me, as if someone had touched me inside. In the close air of the car she is giving away something precious and profound, but she gives it to future-Nina, and has probably never given it to this Nina, who leans on her now without holding back, and I can finally see in real time what it looks like—that stripped need, that howl.

  “Your father, Ninaleh, mila moja, my sweet, he was not handsome man or healthy man, I told you, but he was so much man, so human…Our minds talked together even when we slept. Lots of times I knew what he will say in a moment. I know what you want, Milosz—” Her voice suddenly changes. She shuts her eyes, and her hands come together as in prayer. “To this day I know to think together with you, and so deep I am with you that even after fifty-seven years I am all the time with tears shut up inside because you’re gone.” She is barely audible. “I lost something. Such happiness does not exist in the world. Few women, I think, have been blessed with such happiness with a man. A man who talks and thinks and loves and is weak and strong.”

  Nina draws away from her. Her entire being says: What chance did I have against that?

  * * *

  —

  “But then there was already war and there was Hitler, and I suddenly don’t know where is Milosz, and where are my poor parents, and only later I knew they took them to Auschwitz.” Vera hesitates, then whispers out of the corner of her mouth to Nina next to her: “Can I tell her about Auschwitz?”

  “Tell…that Nina?”

  “Yes. What does she know, what doesn’t she…”

  “Try. I have no idea.”

  “Just imagine,” Rafi murmurs to me, “forgetting Auschwitz. What a gift.”

  “Anyway, I’m in village at Milosz’s family, and it’s terribly cold, and there’s no food. There is only two kilos of goose fat left, and maybe twenty kilos of corn, for everyone. And they start with lists of who was killed and who was taken hostage by the Germans. They hang them on school noticeboard, and Milosz is not on lists, and so I say to his father: ‘Svekar—that is what I called him, father-in-law—I am going to look for him.’ And he says: ‘You are crazy, snaja, how will you go? Where will you go? There is a war!’ But one more day, and one more, and he sees that I insist, and he says: ‘I promised my son to take care of you and I will go with you.’

  “So, with pistol that Milosz gave me once, wearing clothes of Serbian farmer woman, with pointy opanci shoes, and my father-in-law walks with me in his village clothes, thick embroidered socks, trousers puffed up in back, and big belt. Very handsome, he was. A handsome Novak. We walk on foot, and it’s a hundred kilometers, because you always have to go around. We walk through mountains, we pass sheep huts. When night comes, my father-in-law says: Lie down here! And he stands in the doorway, stands straight, protecting me with gun in his hand. Every hour at night that I open my eye—I see him standing there.”

  I rotate the camera to capture Rafi. His large, bearded, wrinkled face. I wonder if he’s thinking about his journeys in search of Nina.

  “And all the way we talked. All the time he wanted to know more and more, about the world, cafés, theaters, cinema…He was very smart. I told you, all Novak men are smart. Milosz’s father, he was illiterate farmer, but such conversations, Nina! Such philosophizing! When evening came we would light a small fire and hide it with stones, so no one sees, and roast potatoes or corn, and talk. He asked me: Tell me, my snaja, about the big world, tell me about Jews, about your faith. He never as a boy heard there was even such nation as Jews. He thought we were Tsintsari, that is a sort of people mixed with Greeks and Serbians who lived in Macedonia.

  “And all the time he says to me, ‘You’re crazy, snaja, what will happen if they catch us?’—‘They won’t!’—‘But how far do you want to go searching?’—‘As far as Germany! As far as Hitler! I will find him!’

  “So we walked like that, from morning to evening. Eating a little bread with fat, drinking from streams, not seeing any person. If we see someone from far, we hide.

  “He was a pure man and I had trust in him. Big blue eyes he had, like a child.” Vera giggles. “His wife, Milosz’s mother, was not beautiful, but she was stronger than him. She was a devil, oh yes! Listen to this, Nina honey—”

  Vera shifts into a more comfortable position, leans into the camera, and rubs her hands together gleefully. “I once asked my mother-in-law if in World War First, while he was in the army, she cheated on him. So she said to me, ‘You know how it is, Vera, when we danced, I had here on my head a red flower, and so-and-so took the flower from my hair in his teeth…’ Well, from this I understood that she had an affair with this so-and-so.

  “In general, I told you and I will tell you again: Novak men are quiet, very handsome, very smart, but not sexy. The girls—devils. Not pretty at all, but they are sexy in their root. And Milosz’s sisters—oh boy! Lots of trouble with them, lots of stories…”

  Nina and Rafi’s glances meet again in the rearview mirror. You can almost hear their sabers clanging. Because of the angle I’m sitting at, I have to contort myself to see in the mirror. Rafael sends Nina a slightly crooked smile, she sends one back, and I see everything. I keep every muscle in my face so perfectly still that Nina asks him, with her eyes, whether he’s told me. He nods.

  I asked you not to tell, say her insulted eyes.

  I have no secrets from Gili, say my father’s shoulders.

  Vera furrows her brow: “Wait, wait, what’s all that about?”

  “Nothing, Grans,” I say, “just survivors sharing a moment.” Nina bursts out laughing, which fills me with foolish pride: I managed to make the sad princess laugh.

  * * *

  —

  “You look a little stunned,” Nina said to him. It was five years ago, in August 2003, after Vera’s eighty-fifth birthday party. She’d dragged Rafi on an evening stroll where the avocado orchard they’d met in used to be. Now it’s a phone-screen factory, which generates a decent income for the kibbutz. “I can see this is hard for you, Rafi sweetheart. Your eyes…You can’t believe that what I’m telling you is true. And maybe it really isn’t true…Listen,” she said with a gravelly laugh, “sometimes in the morning, before I’m fully awake, I lie for a few minutes and think: This can’t be my life, this can’t be what it looks like, with this crazy thing going on—

  “I don’t even know why I’m telling you. I mean the whole thing, the whole point, is that each of them only knows a part of me, each one only knows his girl, and now here I am, giving everything away, of my own free will, giving the whole package to one person—and it’s a person holding a camera, and it’s the person I tr
ust more than anyone in the world, there’s no one I trust more than you, you know that, don’t you, Rafi?”

  Rafi said yes. He’s allergic to alcohol, and her breath was giving him a migraine.

  “But you’re also the worst person to tell this to,” Nina said with a laugh, “and the person who will be most hurt by it…You can still change your mind.”

  “I’m listening,” he said dryly. It amazed him that she’d offered, and even demanded, to have him film what she wanted to tell him—a confession? A will? Another indictment of Vera? He couldn’t make up his mind, but a coldness had begun spreading through him, and he already sensed that this was one of those moments after which many things would be irredeemable.

  “Also because when I’m in those waking-up moments, when my brain is, how to put it, restarting me, I can’t grasp that it’s for real. That I’ve messed up my life like this, and now I can’t see a way back to the life of a normal person, an ordinary, honest person. In here”—she rapped hard on the back of her skull—“I have so many secrets and lies, so how can I not lose my mind? Tell me that. How can I hold that whole knotty mess inside this little box?”

  Rafi told himself he was only the cameraman. That he’d try to understand this later.

  “When you and I were together, in Jerusalem, being with you was what held me together a little. Drew a line around me. I had a border. I knew where right was, I knew where light ended and darkness started. It’s true that most of the time I wanted to run away from it, and I did, but I came back. Listen, Rafi…”

  “I’m listening,” he mumbled.

  “I’m going wilder now than I ever have before.”

  Rafi told himself that none of what she was going to tell him would break him.

  “And you should know that I haven’t…to anyone, not any person in the world…not like this…And that’s why I wanted you to film me saying it, do you understand?”

  He shook his head.

  “You don’t, huh?” There was dark desperation in her eyes. “So that for once, in one place in the world, all these things will be together, all the lies, and then for a few moments they’ll be the truth—”

  “Nina,” he said softly, “why don’t you stop? Let’s go back to Vera’s?”

  “—and I look at myself now, I look at myself through your eyes, and I can’t believe it’s me, that this is happening to me, that my life got so messed up. And my love—I’m not talking about love for someone, I don’t have that now. I’m talking about the place of love that was inside me, the place where I could love simply, faithfully, the way you love Mom and Dad when you’re three…

  “And to grasp that it’s become this depraven—is that how you say it? I’m losing my words, I’ve had a little too much to drink…My love is depraven, and I am, too, and it wasn’t supposed to be this way!” She shouted those last words, and Rafi pulled back, and she laughed. “I’m scaring you, hey? This is not what was in my cards, Rafi, and I think it’s also not in my character…My real character was taken away when I was six and a half, and they gave it back to me three years later ruined, destroyed…Because I still remember who I was, what kind of girl I was…” She shouted from the depths of her heart: “I remember her, I remember her, because I was a happy child, serious but happy, and she is the most precious thing I have, and from her I draw my strength to this day, I have no other strength. Just think: a woman of my age drawing everything she has from a six-and-a-half-year-old girl…”

  “You’re lucky to have her,” he said, “now let’s go back. Vera will be worried.”

  “I suddenly remember, this is just something unconnected, I was six, and Dad went to Rome with the cavalry, and he brought me back a beautiful pair of white sandals. And another time he brought me a shirt made of—what’s the word—silk, shantung silk, and he said it would bring out the color of my eyes. But I wanted to tell you something else. My thoughts are running away…I’ve been a little forgetful lately, it’s funny, with all this complexity, all the secrecy, the double life—if only it was double, but it’s triple, quadruple…But we were talking about something else…What was I going to…Wait, just a minute, I remembered. About the difference between what you see from the outside and what is really…Look at me, for example, forget for a minute that you sort of love me, make the effort, for my sake, and tell me what you see. A pretty ordinary girl, right? Not in her prime. Not someone who, how to put it, turns heads, except for your head, luckily for me, but that has more to do with your screwed-upness, I’m not taking responsibility for that…So anyway, a pretty ordinary girl, at first glance. At her job in Brooklyn, where she’s been working for seven years, maybe five people out of a thousand know her first name, or that she even has a first name. She’s just Ms. Novak, a slightly anemic woman, not enough flesh on her, even though sometimes, in a certain light, she’s quite attractive, almost pretty, but obviously not in her prime. Would you agree to that description?”

  “I’ll tell you later.” He suddenly realized how important it was to her that he film her now, right after the family party, with the same camera he’d used to capture all the moments she’d exiled herself from.

  “Now imagine that inside Ms. Novak, the pale blonde from the Hebrew desk in the Business, Finance and Technical Translation Department’s Middle East branch, beneath her thin skin, there is something constantly darting around, a demon, but a real one, with a tail and demented red eyes, and Rafi—what is that demon inside me? Where did it come from? Tell me, if you even know, if you’ve ever felt how it burns your brain and your guts on its way down to your dick, and how it grabs you by the balls and turns you inside out like a glove, and it doesn’t care about you, you see, it doesn’t care about me at all, and I accept that, I’m okay with that, it suits me well, and I know the demon is just using me to survive. Using me for its pleasure, far more than for mine, and it rubs me up against any dick it comes across, that’s what it needs, my demon, and I struck a deal with it, and it’s good for me, because what it’s looking for is the motion, the friction, you see? The speed, the movement, the friction, that’s how it gets its electricity, and that’s also what I need, you know that, the speed and the friction and the constant switching, the switching around of my innocent lechers, who never stop to imagine that they might not be the one and only name on my dance card, but now you know, and you’re the only one in the world who knows, Rafi, that there are four of them, as of today, four that switch around, flip-flap-flip-flap!” She flicked her hands back and forth like a card sharp. Her eyelids fluttered shut, and there was a peculiar drunken quality, yet also an alertness, to her choked-up speech. “And four of them may not be enough for me soon, I’m warning you, Rafi, four might not be enough, because I’ve already learned how it is with four, see? I’ve learned to juggle four and none of them ever falls, none of them collide, and it’s certainly conceivable that I’ll need to up my dose soon, to juggle five, no, wait, six, why not six, and maybe after a while six won’t be enough either, and I’ll need seven, why not—”

  She breathed heavily. Her cheeks were flushed. Seeing her like that—my father told me—seeing the look in her eyes, he understood the meaning of the phrase “strange fire.”

  In the end, by the way, he showed me everything he’d filmed, all the footage, nothing spared. He showed me after my endless pleas. I kept praying that he wouldn’t, that he’d be a responsible adult and protect me, that he’d be my father. But in the end he gave in, which, he says, he regretted every single day of his life. And so did I.

  Where was I.

  “The way you’re looking at me now, Rafi…I know what you’re thinking, but I want you to hear everything and only make up your mind afterward, okay? When I’m done, you can give me a decent, cautious, sane man’s verdict.” She spat out the words. “Maybe you’ll decide I need to be exiled, sent away for reeducation, maybe to a prison on an island. Islands seem to work out well for my fa
mily, especially a naked island like Goli, but remember, Rafi, remember that you can’t scare me with that, because I’ve been there on that island for ages, I’ve been there since I was six and a half, and I’m alone there, I was put on the island without sentencing, just like that, no one could come to court to testify for me, and you’re the only one in the world who might be able to say something good about me, the only person who still believes I might be acquitted, aren’t you, Rafi?”

  She puts her hands up before him, fingers spread, like a drowning person. “Acquitted not only when it comes to them, the lechers, but acquitted in general…If I could just for once be dipped in some kind of substance and pulled out clean and pure and, most of all, simple—that’s what I miss most, forget about all the rest, just simple, the way I used to be, you know, for even five minutes, before what happened on that morning in Belgrade, when Mom sent me to Jovanka’s and I walked away, and it was cold outside, it was October, and there was a half-erased hopscotch chalked on the sidewalk, and I jumped and skipped, and there were fall leaves, I remember it so well.” She puts her head back, eyes closed. “Big yellow and red leaves, and the roasted-chestnuts man was just setting up his cart on the street corner, and I remember looking back at the house, I could tell that Mom was worried and distracted all morning…You know Vera, she’s never distracted, but that morning she put my sweater on back to front, and twice she tried to braid my hair, but her hands wouldn’t seem to…And when I looked back I saw a tall, large man in a black coat at our door, and he looked at me and it frightened me, so I walked quickly to Jovanka’s house, and I didn’t run back home, not even to be with Mom so that she wouldn’t be alone with that man who scared me. I ran, my instincts told me to get far away, but how did I even end up talking about this?”