More Than I Love My Life

by David Grossman

  She gave Rafi a haunted, startled look.

  “What was I talking about?”

  “About things being simple.”

  “Simple, yes, lucid. So you could look into me and see all the way to the bottom. But that’s no longer possible with me, my lens is dirty, or actually there are several lenses on top of each other…How much, tell me? How many lies can you stuff into one person’s life before their brain starts leaking? One after the other they come to me, sometimes two a day, one leaves and two hours later the next one arrives, and I don’t want you to think I’m doing it for the money, God forbid, if any of them makes that mistake and offers, he’s off the team, there’s no forgiveness for that, but for everyone else I’m the sweetest, honeyest thing, I’m innocent and tender and motherly, or slutty, depending on what the audience demands, Nina is up for anything, any initiative, the crazier the better, you cannot imagine, Rafi, deeper and deeper into the muck, and that’s what drives my masters crazy, that anything goes, any fantasy and any whim—am I disgusting you? Should I stop?”

  “I’m just filming.”

  “Keep filming, I told you, I have to have all these lies together, for once…My poor Rafi…What a life you could have had if your soul hadn’t caught on the nail that I…Should I go on?”

  The camera nods.

  “And they can’t believe their good luck, they can’t believe that the skinny wisp of a girl from the department of so-and-so, the one they flirted with in the elevator, or on the subway, or in line for frozen yogurt—flirted unintentionally even, maybe just to be polite, to make her feel good—that this anemic owl is suddenly turned on and burning between their hands, and writhing wildly like they’ve slept with three, four, five different women, and the only thing she won’t let them do is kiss her on the mouth, which is one way in which she actually does resemble her prostitute sisters. Oh Rafi, my sweet.” Here she took a step forward and wrapped her arms around his neck and breathed desperately, then pulled herself together and stepped back and talked to the camera. “I’m rambling and rambling without saying the main thing, and the main thing is…What is the main thing, I can’t remember now, what is the main thing, you tell me…”

  “The main thing is that you’re making all this up to depress me,” Rafi said quietly, his fury barely held back.

  “Oh, I wish”—she sighed—“I wish…If there was a way, some magic trick to put it back where fantasies belong…It’s all true, Rafi, and you don’t understand, you’re too good and too pure to understand this sort of thing. Now listen and let me say the whole thing, because I will never get another chance to tell these things to anyone, and everything you’re recording now you will hand over to me and I will throw it into the deepest pit I can find. The main thing I wanted to tell you, so you’ll know, the main thing is the last moments before the next one up knocks on my door. That is the moment when my brain burns the hottest, you’ll be surprised, but, yes, it’s before he arrives, lecher number two, or three, do you see? The main thing is the ten, fifteen minutes before, when I imagine him getting off the subway, and I see him walking toward me, getting closer, and with every step he takes I reach out and halt him—slowly, darling—and he flies to me like an arrow but in slow motion, and he walks past the Korean girls’ nail salon, and then there’s the deli, and the Indian guy’s grocery, and I’m almost dying with anticipation, oh Rafi, why didn’t we stay at home together in my room on the kibbutz when we were kids, why didn’t you lock me in there after we slept together until I could clear out all this poison, this drug?”

  Rafi said nothing.

  “And the guy is by the drugstore on the corner now, and he starts smiling to himself because my waves of warmth are wetting him, they rise up to him from the street, from the asphalt, and there are also…how can I describe this…circles of fire, like in a circus, I can’t think of the word…”

  “Hoops?” Rafi whispered disgustedly.

  “Hoops,” she said, savoring the word, “but he’s the only one who can see them, all the other people walk past them without seeing them, they walk to their left or to their right, but he walks through my hoops of fire, he jumps through them easily like a majestic lion, with his mane puffed out, bursting out of his suit, and he knows, he knows, he feels that he is jumping through my rings of fire, he understands that he’s lost his volition and what moves him now is only me, the strong magnet that is me, what am I doing telling you all this nonsense, Rafi, stop me when you get sick of it, how are you not sick of me, and now, look, imagine, be with me, don’t leave me now, see with your own eyes, hear the ancient elevator creaking downstairs, see it slowly carry him up to me, ninth floor, tenth, eleventh, twelfth…And he wants it so badly, he is all one big burning desire. It’s me he desires, Rafi, me, do you understand? And I am consumed with desire for him to want me, I’m on fire because he is choosing me, choosing his little Nina, and I am inside his pure desire, and his dick is like the needle of a compass pointing at me, because it’s me he’s choosing out of all the millions of people in New York at this moment, and he is clear and unequivocal, and by the way, all my lechers are like that, there is no such thing as ‘I don’t know what’s up with me today, this has never happened to me before,’ no such thing. He’d be disqualified on the spot and a replacement would be found, because I—Rafi, my darling—must be wanted. Do you understand? Do you?”

  Rafael sighed. His head was aching, as if someone had drilled into it. “You’re drunk, Nina. Let’s go back to Vera’s, we’ll make you some strong coffee—”

  “Wanted and desired, and wanted again, until there’s no room in my brain for anything other than the fact that I’m wanted. That’s my condition for acceptance. The choice—I have to be chosen—” She shouted those last words and then sobbed.

  Rafi swallowed. For the last few minutes he’d been outside of himself. Now he felt as if a hypnotist had tapped him on the temple and woken him up. And the pain.

  “Well?” she said after a few moments of silence.

  “Well, what?”

  “Say something, spit at me, crush me under your shoe like a cigarette, call the kibbutz out for a stoning. I can’t believe what I’ve done.”

  She crumpled and sat down on a manhole cover. Held her head between both hands. “I can’t believe it.” She groaned. “Of all people—you? Give me the camera.”

  “We’ll talk about that in the morning. When you’re sober.”

  And to his surprise, she agreed. She looked up at him with her torn eyes. “At least say something. Don’t leave me bleeding like this.”

  He sat down next to her, took a deep breath, and held her to him.

  “You don’t think I’m contaminated?”

  “I don’t know what to feel.”

  “You think I’m contaminated.”

  “Once, when we were…When we’d just started, I made a vow.” He sighed. “Well, I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I took a vow that I would always soak up your poisons until you were completely clean, and then, this is what I thought, we could really start being.”

  “And now?”

  “I don’t know. I think I’ve soaked up as much as I can.”

  “As much as you can—or more than that?” Her voice cracked.

  Rafi did not answer. He thought perhaps it really was time to get her out of his life.

  “I understand,” she said. She clung to his arm, leaning on him. He thought about her body, about the life of her body. She’d once told him you could write two completely separate life stories: one about her, and the other about her body.

  His hand on her shoulder was lighter than usual.

  “He’s cooling off,” Nina noted, “I disgust him.”

  He was awash in her desperation, in the fact that she’d gone so far, so far beyond anything he could comprehend. He felt her falling, plummeting into the abyss. All at once he turned her
toward him and kissed her on the mouth.

  And kissed and kissed. And she did, too. They kissed.

  Then they broke away and stood looking at each other.

  “So,” she said without breathing, “did you soak up some poison?”

  “It’s like it’s our first kiss,” he murmured.

  A group of girls walked past. “Get a room!” one of them yelled, and another added, “In assisted living!”

  Nina and Rafi laughed.

  “My first kiss in a very long time,” Nina said.

  “Your mouth is so sweet.”

  “We kissed…What did you do to me, Rafi?”

  “I kissed the woman I’ve loved my whole life.”

  A soft sigh escaped her. “You’re so screwed up,” she said, suddenly furious, as if he’d casually ruined a complex plan she’d been working on for years. But she quickly pressed up against him with her whole body again. “Run,” she said, “save yourself.” They kissed again. “We’re already nine kisses deep,” she murmured. He laughed and she was happy. He kissed her again. “Is that a goodbye kiss?” she asked. He kissed her again. She rested her head on his arm. Her eyes were closed, her lips extended. “You know how sometimes you start eating something and only then realize how hungry you were?” Her body went slack and she dripped into his arms.

  “We’d never been so close in body and soul,” Rafi told me after I finished watching the footage and wanted to die.

  The next morning, earlier than planned, without saying goodbye to my father or to Vera, she flew back to New York.

  * * *

  —

  “So we arrive to Belgrade, my father-in-law and me, and it’s night, and we must travel into Croatia, my country. First I want to visit my and Milosz’s home in Zemun, which is right next to Belgrade, where we lived before war began. I want to be even ten minutes in my beautiful apartment and take some clothes and things we can sell for money to help us find Milosz.

  “But in Belgrade there is curfew, and the German army is already there, and there is a pontoon bridge to cross the river to Zemun. I see an army vehicle with Hungarian flag, so I scream in Hungarian: Take me! And they take me and my father-in-law over the bridge. And then we are in Croatia, and it is dark, and we walk to my house, there are tall houses with four floors, and I see that my blinds are open, and clothes of German soldiers hang outside on the line. I go upstairs in darkness and get to the door, and on the door there is a red sign with that bird of theirs and it says: occupied by german army.

  “I open a little the door and peek inside, and there is light, and soldiers, and prostitutes, and my beautiful crystal glasses are getting smashed, and I shut it quietly, go down back, and say to my father-in-law, ‘We wait a little and then I go in.’ And he says, ‘You are crazy, snaja, I am not letting you go back in there, because I promised your husband I take care of you.’ And I say, ‘I must get my things to save Milosz, and I have a plan.’ He says, ‘But where will you look for Milosz? Maybe there is no more Milosz?’ And I say, ‘There is Milosz and I will find him.’ So we make big plans, and we both do not think of how we are in the middle of Croatia and my father-in-law is in Serbian clothes, and I am dressed like a Serbian farmer. When we remember that, we are very unhappy.

  “I think to myself: I cannot do anything right—is this proof that I don’t love Milosz enough? Then I see next to my feet, maybe two meters away, on the sidewalk, lies a shape of human being, and says to me, ‘Miko, how did you find me here?’ And I say, ‘Milosz, how did you know to come here of all the world?’ Milosz says, ‘I knew you will come to our apartment to take things so that you can get to me.’ And I say, ‘Milosz, you look very sick, are you really alive?’ He says, ‘I am alive but wounded badly. I crawled here for almost two weeks.’ ”

  “Not true,” whispers Nina.

  “What’s not true?” Vera retorts.

  “Is that really what happened?”

  “That is what happened.”

  “You two are such a story…” It’s hard for me to decode what she means.

  “Yes,” Vera agrees with strange joy, “we are a story.”

  “Go on, Grandma,” I urge her.

  “Milosz tells us that his division fell apart, and Croatian fascists took Serbs like him hostage and shut them in gymnasium in Bjelovar, and Milosz jumped out of the window and fell on his stomach where he had the operation. The stomach opened up, and he started walking and falling on the street, and he is still in Serbian uniform, and then he sees clothing store belonging to Gruenhut—a Jew! He knocks on the door and says, ‘Mr. Gruenhut, open up for me!’ This Jew gets scared, but he opens. And Milosz says to him, ‘My wife is Jewish, Vera Bauer.’ ‘Bauer? I knew Clara Bauer from the Bauer kompanija—she must be your wife’s mother! Come in quickly!’ So this man gave him food and burned Serbian army uniform and gave him Croatian clothes, and Milosz slept there for a few nights in the storehouse, until he said, ‘I must go now to meet my wife.’

  “This is what Milosz tells us, and I notice he talks to me like a woman, in female, not like a man, maybe because his father is with us, or maybe because he misses me so much, and meanwhile we three of us sit in the dark on the sidewalk, and I resist from hugging him or dancing around him, and he also resists touching me even with tip of his fingernail because of respect for his father. Then we see soldiers and prostitutes coming out, drunk, singing. I tell the two men: It is my world now. I will go in. If there is someone there, drunk or prostitute, I will kill them. I take my gun and I go into my home, and there is no one there, everything is destruction. They ruined my apartment, those prostitutes and soldiers. I start throwing to my father-in-law from the window my mother’s jewelry, which I hid in marmalade jars, and I found also some money and silverware. Two suitcases I filled and threw down, sheets and the eiderdown I still have today, which Rafi, when he was little, and later Gili, they liked to sleep with it even in summer.”

  Rafi says that blanket smelled like overseas. I remember how I loved to feel it enveloping me. I film Nina’s silence.

  “So that was how I stole my things, and I went back down to Milosz and his father, and I said: ‘Now we will very slowly take Milosz back home.’

  “Now, what is the problem? Problem is that Milosz almost cannot walk. He leans on me, he is in pain. His wound from the operation is open and leaks out pus and dreck, and he holds with both hands his stomach so the guts don’t spill out. But we are together, so everything is all right. His father walks a few steps in front, like he’s not looking, not seeing how I stroke Milosz’s hairs so they don’t fall in his eyes. And I think in my heart: If only we can walk like this all our lives, more than that I do not ask. But Milosz has no more strength and so I carry him on my back, because his father has an injury in his back from World War First.

  “We get to the bridge, it’s three o’clock at night, we wait until there is some light, then they put the bridge down and let first the farmers with land in Serbia go across. I go up to a farmer who has cart and two cows. We have injured man here, I say. I have silver forks and teaspoons and all this is yours. He tells me: Put it all here. We get onto his cart and he takes us over the bridge, and after the bridge there is market, with farmers already there. I leave Milosz and his father and take my ring with diamont—”

  “Diamond,” Nina says distractedly, “it’s pronounced diamond.”

  “But that’s how I said.”

  “You said diamont. Never mind, go on.”

  “That’s exactly—diamont!”

  “Okay, don’t get mad,” says Nina and tilts her head back, hissing to herself: “Forty-five years in Israel, and she still talks like an immigrant.”

  “And there is also a hostelry,” Vera says. “Is that the right word, Nina? Or is that an immigrant word?”

  Nina laughs. “You win, Mom, I’m just…Go on, just continue.”

>   “I go inside and I shout: Which man has horse with carriage, I will give him this diamont ring! The innkeeper examines it and says: ‘This is worth three carriages with horses.’ ‘I need only one carriage!’ So we put Milosz on the carriage. I wrap him very well with the sheets and eiderdown from my apartment. I tell the innkeeper to go to Milosz’s village and that I want to enter the village at night, so no one will know Milosz is back, because someone might inform and they will take him again, and I will have to find him again. So that’s how we arrive, and his mother, my mother-in-law, quickly slaughtered a sheep, took off its fur skin, wrapped Milosz inside, and sewed it up with a big needle, and Milosz fell asleep inside for almost two days. When we took him out of the fur, he already had some color back in his face, and we put him in a small room without windows and only me and his mother took care of him.

  “Poor Milosz, he suffered more because of me than because of him. ‘How do you survive, Vera? All this life is not right for you at all!’ And me—what do I care? I’m with you! Everything is right! You are alive? You are next to me? Then everything is fine!”

  Rafi points to a road sign: forty miles—or kilometers—to go. The rain has lightened up a little. The lime sails down the road with the ease that comes after great effort. Rafi stretches out, filling the space of the car with his body and his yawn—like the MGM lion’s roar. We drive in silence for a long time. I think Nina starts to nod off.

  “And all the time I also worked there in the village,” Vera recounts quietly, almost in a whisper, to the camera. “In the fields, in the vineyard. Milosz was sick and lay in bed, and his mother told me, ‘You must do two rows, also for your husband!’—‘But it’s your son!’—‘But it’s a mouth that eats!’ That is the logic of farmers, and that is what I accepted.”

  I focus on Nina’s face. The tension and anger have melted away. She listens with her eyes closed. Smiles.

  “Every morning I looked at the chicken’s bottom to see if she has an egg, and I cooked food for the pig—potato peels and pumpkin, with bran, and in the mornings I baked for everyone bread from cornmeal, big loafs, I hardly could get them out of the oven. And I would cook food for the men in the field, cabbage or beans, that is their national food. Meat is almost never. Only for holidays. Sometimes chicken. They slaughter a pig maybe once a year.”