More Than I Love My Life

by David Grossman

  Nina purses her lips. “I want to tell you something, but let me finish saying it.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “You, by your nature, no matter how much you deny it, are a belonging person.”

  I can’t tell if there’s mockery in her voice, or if she’s jealous of me, or what. “Me? Don’t make me laugh.” But I think she’s right. And it excites me to think that she’s even given me any thought, that she has opinions about me.

  “You belong, Gili, and you have your own place, and you have people and you have reasons and you have landscapes and colors of earth and smells and Hebrew, and you have Vera and Rafi and Esther and Chana and Shleimaleh and the whole tribe. And me?” She laughs. “I’m a leaf in the wind. Or rather—I’m that bird that never touches the ground. I can’t think of its name…”

  “Albatross. But that’s just a myth. It does touch the ground sometimes.”

  “Me, if I do touch it, it’s only to gain momentum to fly up again.”

  “And I have love,” I say, and I think this might be the last time I’ll be able to say it in the present tense.

  “Yes. Rafi told me.” She nods gravely. “And soon you’ll have a child.”

  I say nothing.

  “Oh dear,” she says, “I shouldn’t have…”

  “I’m not pregnant.”

  “Oh, you aren’t?”

  “No!”

  “Strange. I’m not usually wrong about that.”

  “But where would you even come up with the idea that I’m—”

  “I don’t know. I have a sense…Pregnancy always turns on all my alarms.”

  “I can’t believe you’re even allowing yourself to—”

  “Wait, give me a second. Let me explain. When I saw you yesterday at the airport, when I fell on you, and I’m sorry, again, but it just threw me off when I saw you like that—”

  “Like what?”

  “Continuing the fucked-up dynasty.”

  “But I’m telling you I’m not pregnant!” I scream in her face, and we both stare at each other, horrified by the scream that ripped a hole in the air between us, and it’s true that for a moment I am almost tempted to believe that she senses something invisible, a mother’s heart—as if!—but even if there is something, and there isn’t, she’s the last person who’d be able to sense it in me.

  I walk to the window, slightly unsteady, open it, and take a deep breath. Cold sweat breaks out all over my body. That’s it, she needs to get the hell out of my room and my womb.

  She murmurs behind me, “But when you are, at least make sure it’s a boy.”

  I’m so furious at her that in my despair I start laughing. After a moment she joins in. We laugh slightly hysterically. I don’t fully understand it. It’s a laughter that changes colors in the course of being laughed. They used to have candies like that, when I was a kid.

  “But tell me,” I say after we both calm down.

  We look at each other. I have to find out what she sensed in me.

  “Ask, Gili.”

  I take in some air. “Do you really think I’m capable of being someone’s mother?”

  “Gili,” she says, “you’ll be a good mother.”

  “I will?”

  A whole life can be pressed into those two words and the question mark.

  “Yes,” she says with utter confidence that comes from somewhere I don’t know. “A good, belonging mother.”

  * * *

  —

  Later, much later, she says, “Rafi told you about those men.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s something that I—”

  “I really don’t want to hear about it now.”

  “Let me say it. For two and a half years I was in that story.”

  I stiffen, grieving the lost moment of grace. “That’s your business.”

  “Listen, please. For two and a half years I was like…You know, what do you call someone who walks in their sleep?”

  “A nymphomaniac?”

  That hurts her. I can see it. But she hands me the bottle with a strange sort of tenderness. I suckle down more and more.

  “Every time I lose a word, I panic,” she says.

  “Of course.”

  “Tell me honestly, Gili—can you tell?”

  “No.”

  “I keep having this feeling that I’m, how should I put it…Do you understand?”

  “No.”

  “Like I’m constantly playing almost the right note.”

  I don’t respond. It’s amazing how well she can feel something that she doesn’t know.

  I go back to the window. A cold breeze blows in. Nina comes and stands next to me. We look at the night sea, with its white shivers.

  “But about a year ago,” she says, and by now I recognize the swipe of the cynical blade inside her words, “someone finally turned up who wants me and only me, and insists on me, even unto death, and I don’t need anyone else anymore.”

  “Who? Another boyfriend?”

  “The disease.”

  How sad that in the end it was the disease that restored her expressions, not my father. She puts a hesitant hand on my shoulder. What am I supposed to do with that now. I drop my shoulder and wriggle away. Nothing happens. She stands by the open window hugging herself.

  * * *

  —

  A soft knock at the door. Followed soon by three loud knocks, and then someone impatiently turns the handle. There is only one person who would barge in like that, tolerating no barriers. I open the door and lean on the handle, slightly dizzied by the last few moments. “I had a feeling you were all here,” she grumbles and walks through me into the room. It’s the same way she bursts into our house every few weeks, unannounced, with bags full of food. She sits down on the edge of the bed. She is wearing her wool hat with the leather earflaps, and a coat over her pajamas. “Great,” I say, “let’s have a slumber party.” Vera sniffs, detects the whiskey, and hurries over to it. She takes a swig. A not-insignificant one. Wipes her mouth off with her hand. “It’s no slivovitz, but not bad.” She offers me some. I refuse. Grandma scrutinizes me: “Are you all right, Gilush?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You were talking, you two?”

  “We were talking,” Nina says, and I realize with horror: I didn’t videotape our conversation.

  “What’s the problem,” Vera says, taking off her coat and hat, “videograph it now.”

  “Dad has the camera. Should I get it?”

  “No, no,” they both call out together, “leave it, let him sleep.”

  Vera glues the bottle to her mouth and drinks. She and Nina hold the bottle by its neck, not by its body, and drink with the same exact motion. She passes it to Nina. They’re both going to be wiped out tomorrow. They’ll do the whole island without remembering they were there. And I’m not filming this.

  “Tell me something, Vera,” Nina growls, and I identify a slight tattering of her mind from the whiskey, “explain to me, and you, too, Gili, you’re a girl with your head on your shoulders and you understand about people, don’t you?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Explain to me why I’m still stuck there, on Goli? Why can’t I simply accept it?”

  “What’s simple about it?” Vera gripes.

  “There was simply a dictatorship. And just like in a hundred other dictatorships through history, they threw a woman named Vera Novak into the Gulag for three years, and on the way they also screwed up her daughter’s life. Big deal, what’s the story? What’s the fuss? It happened, it’s over, on we go. Chin up!”

  She looks into Vera’s eyes like someone who has decided to stare straight at the sun, come what may. I curse myself for not having the camera. Rafi will be furious at me for not calling him, and right
ly so. But I can’t tear myself away from the two of them, not now, not when lines are being drawn.

  Also, I couldn’t stand having anyone else here. Just the three of us.

  “And why have I been stuck in this shit for almost sixty years?” Nina snivels. “Fifty-seven years of being stuck at six and a half, isn’t that a little over the top? Isn’t it crazy?” While Nina talks, Vera nods to herself and emits a sort of inner hum, as if she’s rehearsing her answer. “Fifty-seven years, stuck in a reeducation camp, isn’t that a bit much? Shouldn’t I have been reeducated by now? Gotten over it? Forgiven? Put it behind me and moved on? No, really—” She puts her fists to her mouth, refusing to give in to the tears. “It’s just the three of us here now, just us, no world, we’re the world, and I want you to both tell me to my face, once and for all, what is it about me that’s screwed up? Where did my software get messed up?” She looks at Vera with eyes wild with pleading, and with terror.

  Vera takes a deep breath and straightens up. She’s going to talk now. It’s going to happen.

  But then, all at once, as if her last remaining drop of stabilizing substance has run out, Nina collapses. She sobs with her mouth open, loudly, snot streaming. Vera wipes Nina’s face and puts her head on her shoulder. Nina is exhausted. Vera looks at me over Nina’s head, and I remember how she used to talk about her (“Nina is weak, Nina is spoiled”). How close we were to speaking the truth.

  With drunken eagerness, Nina suddenly hugs Vera and kisses her on the cheeks and head, and kneels down before her and kisses her hands, and begs forgiveness for everything she did to her. All the heartache and the worry and the shame. She waves the empty bottle around. Demands that we fill it. Vera and I stand her up and walk her to the bed and lay her down. I remove her shoes. Her feet are small and delicate; no man would run when he saw her shoes next to his own. But she, too, like me, and like Vera, has a right pinkie that climbs over the next toe a little, as if clinging to it.

  She bolts up in bed: “Majka, tell me how I was born!”

  “Shh, shh, lie down, my girl. Why do you want to hear how you were born now?”

  “Now! Now!” She grabs Vera’s sleeve. Anyone would think she was asking for proof that she really was born.

  I grab my notebook: if there’s no footage, at least we should have words.

  For example, these four words: Rafi will murder me.

  “Ninotchka,” Vera sits down on the bed next to her and holds her hands, “you were born on June twentieth, 1945. In Belgrade. On that night we happened to have friends visiting from my town Čakovec. They were Communists like us, and when war almost started with Stalin, all the ones who were pro-Stalin Communists were straightaway sent to the front so that they, with their body, will find the land mines. So then, at night, when the Danube froze, they all ran away.”

  “You see, Gili?” Nina laughs with her mouth wide open. “I ask about my birth, and I get the Danube. And frozen, at that.”

  “No, no,” Vera protests, “you’ll hear why in one minute. In 1945, friends came with brigade from Russia. And in the evening our good friend Pišta Fišer came to stay with us, and he was so tired, and I’m running all over the house with contractions, not letting him sleep. Poor Pišta Fišer came to sleep one night, and that’s when I have a baby!”

  “Such lousy luck.” Nina laughs through her tears. I fall about laughing, too.

  “You laugh,” Vera says, “but your birth was terrible…Twelve hours! We Bauers have very big babies. Gili is the only one born small, premature, but I was almost five kilos when my mother had me, and all my life I only got another forty-two kilos. And in pregnancy I looked like a monster. Nina, you were sixty centimeters—giant! And you were such a beautiful baby, and you looked on me with open eyes like you already wanted to talk to me…”

  Vera strokes Nina’s hair in a circular motion, smoothing over her face. “Already when you were born you had curlish hair, and skin like Milosz’s. Like a peach.”

  I go back to the open window. It’s still dark, but the sea is calmer. On the breakwater, next to a little boat, a man and a woman of a certain age dance under a streetlamp on the pier. There is no music playing as they do their strange, erotic dance, synchronized, moving close to each other, then away, their arms spreading out and gathering in. I feel terribly homesick.

  Behind me, from the bed, Nina murmurs, “Tell me more about us. About me and Milosz.”

  “He used to coach you, remember?”

  “I don’t remember anything.”

  “He was always doing with you, how do you say it—proba. Practice. Teaching you to find streets in town, to look at a map, to hold a compass, to be independent. To be like a partisan in your own town. From the youngest age he would tell you: Now go to Jovanka, a few streets away, and give her this paper. And the paper said: ‘Jovanka, just write down that you saw her.’ You would come back after ten minutes: ‘Daddy, the bell over there is very high, I cannot ring.’ And Milosz said: ‘It’s not my business how you reach! Do you have brains? Then think.’ And you went back there, and as soon as a neighbor went into the building, you followed in like a cat without him noticing.”

  “I did that?” A bright smile spreads over Nina’s face. “I don’t remember anything. That whole period is gone, my whole childhood is gone…”

  “Yes,” Vera says.

  “Because of what happened afterward.”

  “Yes.”

  “How you went to Goli Otok.”

  “How I was put on Goli Otok.”

  “And you left me alone, both of you, you and Dad, in one day.”

  “So clever you were. You picked up everything fast.”

  “You trained me.”

  “God forbid trained. We just prepared you. Your father, he had a saying: ‘Every person, his turn in the game comes only once.’ And that is how he lived. So many times he was in danger, and in war, and life was also war, and everything was the logic of war, so that he, under his conscience, he knew he must prepare his daughter, and he had everything planned, including that he would in one moment need to commit suicide because of something. On the edge of a knife: that’s where our life was.”

  Nina shuts her eyes.

  “All in all,” Vera says softly, to herself, “with me life plays a lot of games.”

  Nina has fallen asleep. Vera strokes her face again gently. Irons out her wrinkles. “I’m very tired now,” she says to herself and lies down next to Nina.

  I suddenly realize they were out fishing, that couple on the pier. They must be a husband and wife, back from the sea and folding up the net.

  “Turn off the light, Gili, and come, too, because soon we must get up.”

  In any other universe it would never have occurred to me to get into bed with Nina, but I lie down next to her. The three of us share one pillow, which crowds our heads together, but the blanket is big enough.

  I look at the ceiling. Nina’s body is warm. She snores softly, and after a moment so does Vera. Meir claims I snore, but he’s absolutely unwilling to sleep in separate beds. He can’t sleep without spooning me. His arm surrounds me and he cups me all night. Sometimes it’s stifling and sometimes I like it.

  I think about what Nina said. I put my hand on my stomach. I’m dead scared.

  At some point I can no longer hear Vera snoring, or breathing—that’s all I need now. I sit up and see that she’s on her back. Mouth open. Eyes wide, staring. She doesn’t see me, and I’m convinced that this is it, she’s gone, we’ve lost Vera a moment before her return to the island. Then her eyes focus and look intelligible again. She props herself on her elbow and whispers to me soundlessly, over Nina’s body: “I think she already knows.” I whisper back: “She’ll only really know when you tell her yourself.” “No, no, it would kill her.” “I’m telling you she knows, Grandma, even without knowing, she knows.” Nina gives a littl
e sigh, and her mouth twists as if she’s about to talk, or cry, or perhaps she’s searching for a word that slipped away in her dream.

  Then she stills.

  Still is the furrowed brow, still are the cheeks, still is the mouth. She smiles to herself, pulls the blanket up to her chin, and turns over on her side, facing me.

  * * *

  —

  They walk her. The sun beats down on her shaved head. She falls asleep midwalk. A woman with a foul-smelling cigarette puts her arm around her from behind and shoves a big rough hand under her armpit. Every so often the woman fondles her breast, crushing, pinching, and when she tries to shake off the hand she gets a quick, sharp slap.

  “They’re taking you,” she tells herself out loud, “watch out for her.” But after a minute she falls back into a slumber. All she knows is that she must put one foot in front of the other. They drag her like a rag doll. “But where are they taking you,” she wonders. Her voice is hoarse and shattered, she’s not convinced it’s coming from her. “And what are they going to do to you there.” The warden’s laughter rouses her. “You’ve really lost your marbles,” the warden explains good-naturedly, “you weren’t like this when you got here. I remember you, I was at your interrogation once, you were tough as nails.” Judging by the sound of the footsteps and the breathing, it’s just the two of them, her and the warden. They’ve been climbing for a long time. It’s a tall mountain. “There are all kinds of mountains on the island,” she says to herself and nods gravely, counting on her fingers, so rigid she can hardly bend them, “there’s the mountain at the camp for men who work in the quarry. And there’s the mountain where you push the rocks. And there’s the mountain for the quarry men, and the one where you push the rocks…” The warden laughs and pats her back, practically knocking her over. Vera tries to smile, she feels a smile is in order here, but she doesn’t understand what the joke is. She thinks she heard the sound of metal hitting rock. Maybe a rifle. Maybe they’re going to kill her. The path must be narrow now, because the warden has to walk behind her. She directs Vera with punches on her shoulders and back, right, left, waking her up every time she falls asleep or stares into the darkness inside her eyes. She trips on a stone and falls. Her hands break the fall, she gets up, licks the blood. “Tasty,” she grunts, “bedbugs have the right idea.” Out of breath behind her, the warden groans, “You still have the strength to crack jokes?” “What’s the joke,” Vera wonders.