Great House

  We called everyone but no one knew where you were, not even your girlfriend at the university. Your mother worked herself into a wreck. Don’t jump to conclusions, I told her. I who had known about your midnight ramblings for years, who was familiar with your way of escaping the rest of us, of finding a way to live a little in the world while it was unpolluted by people. It gave me pleasure to know something about you that your mother didn’t.

  Then we heard the keys in the door and you burst in, agitated and excited. We didn’t ask where you’d been and you didn’t tell us. It was some time since I’d last seen you, and I was surprised by how broad you’d become, almost physically imposing. The sun had tanned you and given you a new sturdiness, or maybe something else, a kind of dynamism I hadn’t noticed in you before. Looking at you, I felt a pang for my own lost youth. Your mother, full of nerves, hurried around the kitchen preparing food. Eat, she urged you, you don’t know when you’ll get your next meal. But you didn’t want to eat. You kept going to the window to look at the sky for planes.

  I drove you to the meeting point. Do you remember that car ride, Dov? Afterwards, there were things you couldn’t remember, so I don’t know if you do. Your mother didn’t come. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. Or maybe she didn’t want to infect you with her anxiety. Your gun sat across your knees along with a bag of food from her. We both knew you were going to throw it out or give it away, even she knew. As soon as we got on the road, you turned to look out the window, making it clear you were in no mood for conversation. So fine, we won’t talk, I thought to myself, what’s new? And yet I was disappointed. Somehow I thought that the circumstances, the emergency brewing around us, the fact that I was delivering you to a war—I thought the pressure of it all would force the cork and that something of you would come trickling out. But it was not to be. You made yourself clear, turning sharply away to stare out the window. And though I was disappointed I was also, I admit, a little relieved. Because I, who always had something to say, who leaped to have the first word and pressed on until I had the last—I was at a loss. I saw how your body had grown around the gun. How casually you held it, how at home you felt with it in your hands. As if you had absorbed its mechanism—all it demanded of you, its power and its contradictions—right into your flesh. The boy whose own arms and legs were once alien to him had ceased to be, and in his place, sitting next to me in dark sunglasses, his sleeves pulled up to show bronzed forearms, was a man. A soldier, Dova’leh. My boy had grown up to be a soldier, and I was delivering him to war.

  Yes, there were things I wanted to say but I couldn’t just then, so we drove in silence. A huge convoy of trucks was already there, the soldiers eager and restless. We said goodbye—it was as simple as that, a kind of hurried pounding on each other’s backs—and I watched you disappear into the sea of uniforms. At that moment you were no longer my son. My son had gone off somewhere to hide for a while. Wherever it was you’d been before you came home—walking some trail alone in the hills—it was as if you knew what was to come, and had gone off to bury yourself in a hole. To hide there, beneath the cool earth, for as long as it took for the danger to pass. And what was left once you’d subtracted yourself from the equation was a soldier who had grown up eating Israeli fruit, with the dirt of his forefathers under his nails, who was leaving now to defend his country.

  In those weeks your mother hardly slept. She wouldn’t speak on the phone so as not to occupy the line. But it was the doorbell we feared the most. Across the street they arrived at the Biletskis’ to say that Itzhak, little Itzy whom you and Uri played with as children, had been killed in the Golan. He had burned to death inside of a tank. After that, the Biletskis disappeared inside their house. Wild grass grew up around it, the curtains were always drawn, sometimes, very late at night, a light came on inside and someone could be heard playing two notes on the piano over and over, pling plong pling plong pling plong. One day when I went to deliver a piece of mail that came to our house by mistake I saw a pale spot on the doorframe where the mezuzah had been. That could have been us. There was no reason it had happened to their son and not to ours, why it was Biletski playing two notes and not me. Every day sons were being sacrificed. Another boy in the neighborhood was exploded by a shell. One night we got into bed and turned off the lights. If I lose one of them, your mother said to me in a low, trembling voice, I will not be able to go on. Either I could have said, You will go on, or I could have said, We will not lose them. We will not lose them, I said, holding her thin wrists tightly. She did not say, I will not forgive you, but she didn’t have to say it. Uri was stationed on a mountain overlooking the Jordan Valley. He managed to call us once, so we knew he was there. Much later, years later, he told me how he could hear on the radio transmitter the desperate Israeli tank units fighting in the Golan. One after another simply vanished from the radio network, extinguished into silence, and he couldn’t stop listening, knowing he was hearing those soldiers’ last words. We knew from him that your brigade had been sent to Sinai. Every day we waited for the doorbell to ring, but it did not ring, and each dawn that broke without it ringing was another night you had survived. There were many things your mother and I didn’t say to each other during those days. Our fears drove us deeper and deeper into a bunkered silence. I knew that if something happened to you or Uri, she would not have allowed me the right to suffer as she would suffer, and I held it against her.

  That night, two weeks after the war began, the telephone rang close to eleven. That’s it, I thought, and the bottom opened out in the depths of me. Your mother had fallen asleep on the sofa in the other room. Bleary-eyed, with static hair, she stood now in the doorway. As if I were moving through cement, I rose from my seat and answered. My eyes and lungs burned. There was a pause, long enough for me to imagine the worst. Then your voice came through. It’s me, you said. That’s all: It’s me. But in those two syllables I could hear that your voice was slightly different, as if a tiny but vital piece had broken inside of it like the filament of a lightbulb. And yet in that moment it didn’t matter. I’m all right, you said. I couldn’t speak. I don’t think you’d ever heard me cry. Your mother began to scream. It’s him, I said. It’s Dov, I choked. She rushed to me and we both put our ears to the phone. Our heads were coupled together and we listened to your voice. I wanted to listen to you talk forever. Talk about anything, it didn’t matter. The way we used to listen to you babble on in your crib in the mornings before you called to us. But you didn’t want to speak much. You told us you were in a hospital near Rechovot. That your tank had been hit, and that you’d been wounded from the shrapnel across your chest. It isn’t bad, you said. You asked about Uri. I can’t talk much now, you said. We’ll come for you, your mother said. No, you said. Of course we’re coming, she said. I said no, you snapped back, almost angrily. And then, softer again: They’ll bring me home tomorrow or the next day.

  That night your mother and I held each other in bed. In our reprieve, we clung and forgave one another everything.

  When you came home at last you were neither the soldier I had watched disappear into the crowd, nor the boy I knew. You were a kind of shell, emptied out of both of those people. You sat mute in a chair in the corner of the living room, a cup of tea untouched on the side table, and winced when I went to touch you. From your wound, but also, I sensed, because you could not bear such contact. Give him time, your mother whispered in the kitchen, preparing pills, teas, swabs. I sat in the living room with you. We watched the news and spoke little. When there was no news we watched the cartoons, cat-and-mouse chases, How many lumps do you want? and then the mallet on the head. In time it came out—not to me of course, only to her—that two others in the tank had died. The gunner who was only twenty, and the commander who was just a few years older. The gunner had died instantly, but the commander lost a leg and threw himself out of the tank. You climbed out after him. The communications system was dead, there was smoke and confusion, and the driver, who in all of this had
perhaps not understood that the others had evacuated, started it up again in reverse and drove away through the sand. Perhaps he panicked, who knows; you never met him again.

  You and the wounded commander were left alone in the dunes. How many times I tried to imagine it as if it had been me. Nothing but the endless dunes and the wires on the ground left from Egyptian missiles. The sound of explosions. Trying to carry the wounded man on your back, but it being impossible to make any headway in the sand. The commander, in shock, begging you not to leave him. If you stayed there, you both would die. If you left to find help, he might. You were taught never to leave another soldier wounded in the field. It was a cardinal rule the army had driven into you. How you must have struggled with yourself. Only there was no self to struggle with. The dumbstruck look on his face when he understood you were going. How with difficulty he removed his watch and held it out: This is my father’s. Does it surprise you that I imagined it, that I tried, I really did, to put myself in your shoes? There was no one left in you, and so like the walking dead you abandoned the commander. Put him gently down in the sand, became the last thing he would ever see except for the endless repeat of sand, and walked away. You walked and walked. In the desert, in the heat, with the explosions in the distance, and the missiles overhead. Dizzier and dizzier, losing your senses, hoping you were headed in the right direction. Until at last, like a mirage, a rescue unit appeared and you were lifted up among the dead and the barely living. The truck was full of the wounded and dying, so they could not go for him then, they told you, they would have to return for him later. Either they returned and couldn’t find him, or they never returned. He was not heard from again, and was listed among the missing. Even after the war they never found his body.

  The watch sat on your desk for days. When you finally got the address of the family in Haifa, you borrowed the car and drove yourself. I don’t know what happened there. When you returned that night you went into your room and closed the door without a word. Your mother bit her lip as she washed the dishes, holding back tears. All I know is that the commander was an only child, and that you returned the watch to his parents. We thought that would be the last of it. In the weeks that followed, you improved a little. Uri came to visit you every few days, and the two of you walked together. But about three weeks later a letter came to the house from the dead soldier’s father. I discovered it in the pile of mail, and put it aside for you. I barely looked at the return address, I was entirely ignorant of what it contained, but it was I who delivered it to you and I, in the end, who became wrapped up in its accusations. A father writing to a son, only he was not your father, and you were not his son, and yet all the same, through associations I was powerless against, I was dragged into it.

  It was not an eloquent letter, but the crudeness made it worse. He blamed you for the death of his son. You took his watch, he wrote in spindly handwriting, and let my son die. How do you live with yourself? He had survived Birkenau, and brought this into it. He summoned the courage of the Jewish inmates at the hands of the SS, and called you a coward. In the last line of the letter, scratched so hard that the pen had broken through the paper, he wrote: It should have been you.

  The letter destroyed you. Whatever fragile wholeness you had managed to preserve was shattered when you read it. You lay in bed with your face to the wall, and you wouldn’t get up and you wouldn’t eat. You refused to see anyone, numbing yourself with the opiate of silence. Or perhaps you were trying to starve the little surviving portion of yourself to death. Your mother now feared for your life in a new way. (How many ways are there to fear for your child’s life? Pass over it.) At the beginning your girlfriend used to come, but you turned her away and she left in tears. She had long brown hair, crooked teeth, and wore a man’s shirt, and all of this somehow only strengthened her vitality and beauty. You will think I go on too much about the beauty of your young girlfriends, but I have a point, which is that in all of your suffering up until then you had not been blind to beauty, one might even say you found a certain shelter in it. But no longer; now you turned away this beautiful girl who cared for you. You wouldn’t even speak to your mother. If I am honest, I have to admit that a little part of me was glad to see her receive the same treatment as I. That she should feel what all my life I felt from you. That she should have to exist a little on my side of the fence, and see what it felt like to throw oneself against that impenetrable barrier. And as if she sensed my satisfaction, whatever gentleness had come to visit us after we found out you were alive, whatever benefit of the doubt we silently agreed to give each other, dried up. Our discussions about you—in low voices in the kitchen, or at night in bed—became tense. Your mother wanted to call the father in Haifa, to shout at him, to defend you. But I wouldn’t let her. I grabbed her hand and pried the phone loose. It’s enough, Eve, I said. His son is dead. His parents were murdered and now he has lost his only son. And you expect him to be fair? To be reasonable? Her eyes turned hard. You have more sympathy for him than you have for your own son, she spat, and walked away.

  We failed each other then, she and I. Failed to support each other as we should have. Instead we each retreated alone into our own anguish, the special, unique hell of watching your child suffer and being helpless to do anything for him. Maybe she was right, in a way. Not about my lack of sympathy—you were my child, for God’s sake, you are still my child even now. But right, perhaps, about a lack of generosity in the way I viewed your reaction to the tragedy that had befallen you. You ceased to live. Your mother believed that something had been confiscated from you. But to me it seemed you forfeited it. As if all your life you had been waiting for life to betray you, to prove what you had always suspected of it—how little it held for you except disappointment and pain. And now you had an irreproachable reason to turn away from it, to break from it at last, just as you had broken with Shlomo, with so many friends and girlfriends, and long ago with me.

  Terrible things befall people, but not all are destroyed. Why is it that the same thing that destroys one does not destroy another? There is the question of will—some inalienable right, the right of interpretation, remains. Another person might have said: I am not the enemy. Your son died at their hands, not mine. I’m a soldier who fought for my country, no more and no less. Another might have closed the door to the agonies of self-doubt. But you left it open. And I admit that I couldn’t understand this. When you didn’t get better after two or three months, the pain of watching you suffer turned to frustration. How can you help someone who won’t help himself? After a certain point, one can’t help but see it as self-pity. You resigned from all ambition. Sometimes, passing the closed door of your room, I would pause in the hall. What about the shark, my son? What about Beringer and his mop and the ceaseless drip from the leak in the tank? What about the doctor, and Noa, and little Benny? What will become of them without you? But instead, when I found you hunched over a plate of food you refused to eat, I demanded, Who are you punishing? Do you really think life will be hurt if you deny it?

  Wherever you went the hurt rattled in you, the old injuries mixed up with the new. In all of this I became deeply implicated. From every angle I was given only your back. My resentment grew, for both you and your mother who had formed an exclusive camp together from which I, the brute, was excluded—to punish me for my vast misunderstanding, and many other things of which I was guilty. He feels hurt by you, she said when, in the course of a gratuitous argument, I lashed out about her complicity in your silence, the special glass silence you reserved only for me. And you think he has a good case for these feelings? I asked. You think he is right that—what? I didn’t treat him fairly? That I didn’t love him properly? Aaron, she said sharply, sucking in her breath in frustration. I loved him as I knew how to love him! I shouted, aware even as I shouted I was only adding to her mounting evidence, yours and hers. Perhaps I even threw a bowl—a bowl of strawberries it was—across the room, and the glass shattered. It’s possible I did this. If mem
ory serves. It’s true there were times my temper got the better of me. The glass shattered, and in the wake of that crash her righteous silence seeped into the room. I would have liked to throw more.

  I only had to open my mouth for you to grow angry and pained. He is a victim in everything now, I said to your mother. He toils to cultivate his right to suffer. But, as always, she took your side against me. One night, fed up, I shouted at her, So now it is I who am responsible for the commander’s death? It was unfair, yes, and I regretted it immediately. A moment later I heard the front door slam and knew you had heard me. I went after you and tried to bring you back. On the street you were crying and tried wildly to throw me off. I grabbed you and held your head to my chest until you stopped struggling. I hugged you to me as you sobbed and if I could have spoken I would have said, I’m not the enemy. I’m not the one who wrote that letter. I would rather a thousand died instead of you.

  The months passed and nothing changed. Then one day you came to see me at the office. I returned from a meeting with a client, and you were sitting there at my desk, gloomily scratching a design onto my message pad. I was surprised. For so long you had barely left the house and now you sat before me like the living dead. I couldn’t remember the last time you’d come to see me at work. At a loss for words, I said, I didn’t know you were coming. I came to tell you I’ve made a decision, you said gravely. Good, I said, still standing, wonderful, although I had no idea what the decision was. Just the idea that you had begun to be able to imagine a future for yourself was enough. You sat in silence. So? I said. I’m going to leave Israel, you said. To go where? I asked, trying to control a flare of anger. London. To do what? You hadn’t met my eyes until then, but now you lifted your head and looked squarely at me. I’m going to study law, you said.