Great House

  And so five minutes later, against my wishes, I found myself in the rental car with you, Ronit’s bag filled with little plastic tubs of food on my lap. The interior was black leather. What is this thing? I demanded. A BMW, you said. A German car? I said. You’re driving me home in a German car? You’re such a big shot that you can’t accept a Hyundai like everyone else? It’s not good enough for you? You have to specially pay extra for a car made by the sons of Nazis? Of death camp guards? Haven’t we had enough of black leather? Let me out of this thing, I said, I’d rather walk. Dad, you pleaded, and I heard something in your voice I didn’t recognize. Something hiding there, in the upper registers. Please, you said. Don’t make me beg. It’s been a long day. And you weren’t wrong, so I turned away from you to glare out the window.

  WHEN YOU were a boy, I used to take you with me to the shuk on Friday mornings. You remember, Dova’leh? I knew all the merchants and they knew me. They always had something for me to taste. Get some dates, I would tell you while I locked horns with Zegury, the fruit man, over politics. Five minutes later I would look over and you were plucking them between two fingers, one by one, studying each with exotic remove. I would grab the bag containing the little pathetic collection. Like that we’ll starve, I’d say. I’d pick up two, three heaping handfuls and drop them in. I never saw you eat a single one. You claimed they looked like cockroaches. There was an old Arab at the shuk who used to cut people’s profiles out of black paper. The person would take his place on a crate and the Arab would look at him and snip away. You used to wince as you watched, afraid the Arab would cut himself, which he never did. He would snip maniacally, then hand over the paper essence of his subject’s face. To you he was a genius on the level of Picasso. You were mute in his presence. When no one came to sit, the Arab sharpened the scissors on a stone and hummed a long, convoluted passage. One day I had you and Uri with me and when we reached the Arab, feeling proud or magnanimous, I said, Who wants a portrait, boys? Uri leaped up onto the crate. He summoned all his youthful gravitas and struck a pose. The Arab regarded him through lowered lids, snipped, and out came the proud outline of my Uri. All the glory of a potent life could be read in the aquiline nose. He hopped off the seat and took his likeness, utterly delighted. What did he know of disappointment and death? Nothing, as the Arab’s portrait made clear. Nervously, you took your place on the crate where so many had been sized up and reduced to a single unbroken line by the tremendous artist. The Arab began to snip. You sat very still. Then I saw your eyes flutter and drop to the floor where the accumulated clippings had fallen, the scraps of black paper. You looked up again into the Arab’s eyes, opened your mouth, and screamed. You screamed and sobbed and wouldn’t stop for anything. You’re acting crazy, I told you, shaking you by the shoulders, but you carried on. You cried all the way home, lagging three feet behind us. Uri clutched his profile, worriedly glancing back at you. Later your mother put it into a frame for him. I don’t know what became of yours. Maybe the Arab threw it away. Or kept it in case I came back to claim it, since I’d already paid. But I never went back. After that, you stopped coming with me to the shuk. You see, my boy? You see what I was up against?

  YOU DROVE me back to our house, your mother’s and mine, only now it was no longer hers. She was spending her first night underground. Even now I can’t think it. Mrs. Kleindorf, it makes me gag, to think of my wife’s lifeless body packed under two meters of earth. But I don’t shy away from it. I don’t comfort myself by imagining that she is sprinkled around me in the atmosphere, or has come back in the form of the crow who arrived in the garden days after her death and stays on, strangely, without its mate. I don’t cheapen her death with little fabrications. The gravel crunched under the wheels of your German car, we glided to a stop, and you cut the motor. The sky above the hills was deep indigo with the last glow of the day, but the house was already closed up in darkness. And listening to the little, dying pings of the engine in the fresh silence, I suddenly remembered the day we moved here from the house in Beit Hakarem. Do you remember? All morning you had been locked up in your room, transferring the fish from your aquarium into plastic bags filled with water—worrying over them, opening and closing the bags. While the rest of us hurried around taping up boxes and moving furniture, you measured out your fish and readied your beloved turtle for the journey. The care you lavished on that reptile! You used to let him stretch his legs in the garden; every day you gave him his moment in the sun. You stared into his little beady eyes for the secret of his soul. When your mother bought the wrong kind of cabbage you got so angry that you cried—screamed and cried because she had been so insensitive as to buy red instead of green. And I screamed back that you were an ungrateful wretch. In my fury, I grabbed your little friend and dangled him above the whirring blade of the blender. Desperately, it tried to wrestle the leg back into the safety of its shell, but I pinched it between my fingers and revved the motor. You screamed a bloodcurdling scream. What a scream! As if it were you yourself I was prepared to sacrifice to the blade. A pleasant tingling spread through the ends of my nerves. Afterwards, once you had fled to your room cradling the pathetic creature in your arms, your mother’s face turned to stone. We fought, as we always did when it came to you, and I told her she was crazy if she thought I was going to indulge such behavior. And she, who since you were a toddler had inhaled every last book of child psychology, had eaten whole every theory, tried to convince me that to you that turtle was a symbol of yourself, and for us to act cavalier about its needs and desires was, to you, the same as disregarding your own. A symbol of yourself, for God’s sake! Following the orders of those ridiculous books, she found a way to contort herself to fit into your little skull, so that she could not only understand but empathize with you in your belief that the purchase of iceberg over romaine constituted an emotional assault. I let her finish. I let her wear herself out, tangling herself up in theories. Then I told her she had lost her mind. That if you saw yourself as a smelly, disgusting, brainless reptile then it was time to start treating you like one. She stormed out of the house. But half an hour later she was back again, clutching a sad little head of green cabbage, and pleading with you, whispering and begging through the crack of your door, to be let in. A few months after that we bought the house in Beit Zayit and you were up all night scheming about how best to transport the turtle. All morning you spent divvying up the fish in bags and counseling the turtle psychologically. You held the tank on your lap as we drove to the new house, and with every turn I took the turtle skid and bumped into the corners. Your eyes welled up with tears, believing I was being cruel, but you overestimated me: even I wasn’t capable of such deliberate torment. In the end, it wasn’t at my hands that your precious pet met its tragic end. One day you left it out in the sun, and when you came back it was lying on its back, its shell cracked open, dying from an assault by a real beast.

  IT WAS soon after we moved that you started your nighttime ramblings. You thought no one knew, but I knew. You trusted me with nothing, but I kept your little secret. In those days it often happened that I woke up ravenous in the middle of the night. I would go down to the kitchen and stand in front of the fridge and tear meat from the roasted chicken, too hungry to take a plate or sit or even turn on the light. One night, I was standing there eating in the dark and I saw a figure crossing the front garden, a kind of stick figure who had been lent some kinetic energy moving across the grass. It stopped for a minute as if it had seen or heard something that pricked its interest. There was a little moonlight, and from what I could see the stick figure looked like neither a man nor a woman, and not a child either. An animal, maybe. A wolf, or a wild dog. Only when the figure began to move again around the side of the house, and a moment later I heard the door open softly, then the quick, solid movements of one who knew exactly where he was—only then did I realize it was you.

  I remained still in the kitchen until I heard you disappear upstairs to your bedroom. I went to study your muddy
sneakers lying exhausted on their sides by the door in order to guess what your stealth little outing had been about, what trouble you had gotten up to, and with whom—though if it involved anyone it could only have been Shlomo. Whatever happened to him? Shlomo, whom you were attached to like a Siamese twin, with whom you communicated under the radar of others in a private, ingrown language of grimaces, eye-rolls, and tics. Yes, I was almost certain your midnight outing involved some half-baked scheme you two had wordlessly cooked up with a few twitterings of the facial muscles you’d somehow managed to send and receive in class while with pained expressions the Mrs. Kleindorfs hammered into your heads the two thousand years, always the two thousand years, and sent you to sit at opposite corners of the room. I intended to confront you about it the next morning, but when you appeared at breakfast nothing on your face gave away even the slightest hint of your adventure, and I began to wonder whether it was possible you had been sleepwalking. But four or five nights later I was up at 2 a.m. devouring the last of the schnitzel when I saw you come up the front path again. The moon was bright and I caught a glimpse of your face bathed in the most peaceful expression.

  NOW YOU walked me up the same front path and waited as I fumbled with the keys, and for once I was glad I had forgotten to leave on a light so that you couldn’t see that suddenly my hands were shaking. At last I got the lock open and turned on the lights. I’m fine, I said. You can go now. And only then did I look down and see that you were holding a small suitcase in your hand. I looked at the suitcase and then I looked back at you. At your face, which I hadn’t looked at, truly looked at, for a long time. You’ve gotten old, it’s true, but there was something else there, something in your eyes or the tilt of your mouth, a kind of pain—but not just pain, more than that, a look as if you had been beaten down by the world, like you had finally been defeated. And something happened in me. A kind of ravaged feeling entered. As if now that your mother was gone, now that she was no longer there to absorb your pain, to tend to it, to feel it as her own, it had been left to me. Try to understand. All your life your pain infuriated me. Your stubbornness, your determination, your inwardness, but most of all your pain that always made her come running to your rescue. And at that moment, looking at you in the light of the hall, I saw something in your eyes. She was gone, she had finally abandoned us, left us alone with each other, and I saw something in your face and I was overwhelmed.

  I looked from your suitcase to your face and back to your suitcase. And I waited for you to explain.

  WHEN YOU were a boy your mother told me she would kill to save you. You would kill another so that he could live, I repeated. Yes, she said. And would you let five die so that he could live, too? I asked. Yes, she said. A hundred? I asked. She didn’t answer, but her eyes turned cold and hard. A thousand? She walked away.

  NO, IT ISN’T my fault that you didn’t become the writer you wanted to be. You wanted to write about a shark that takes the brunt of human emotions. Suffering, I said to you. What? you said, a quiver in your lips. Listen to me, Dov, you have to take control of it. You have to grab it by the horns and wrestle it down. You have to suffocate it or it will suffocate you. You looked at me as if I had never understood anything in my life. But it was you who didn’t understand. You stood in your army uniform, your kit bag slung over your shoulder. In a uniform a man can go about detached from himself, can lose himself in the flank of a great beast of which he has never seen the head. But not you, my boy. In plainclothes you suffered, and in a uniform it was no different. You’d come home on leave for the first time in three months. Do you remember this? You were still in love with Dafna. It was her you’d come home for. Maybe in the beginning she had been drawn to your suffering, but even I could see it was already beginning to bore her. She came over and the two of you closed yourselves in your room, but not as you used to close yourselves in, epically, against the world; now she came out after only an hour wearing your army-issued T-shirt to explore the refrigerator or turn on the radio. Make yourself at home, I said as she picked through the bowls of chicken salad and cold pasta. I sat across from her and watched her eat. Such a small girl and such a large appetite. She was sure of her beauty; it was evident in her smallest gestures. She flung her arms and legs around with unstudied carelessness, but they always landed with grace. There was an inner logic that organized her thoroughly. Tell me something, I said. She looked at me, still chewing. A musky odor clung to her. What? she said. I sat there, hair growing out of my ears. Never mind, I said, and let the giant shark swim off away from me. She finished eating in silence and got up to clean her plate. At the door she paused. The answer to your question is no, she said. What question? I said. The one you didn’t ask, she said. Oh? Which one is that? About Dov, she said. I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. There was much in that instant I failed to grasp. I heard the front door close behind her.

  All throughout your service, before what happened to you, you used to send packages home addressed to yourself. Your mother passed on your instructions that these packages were not to be touched except to be placed in a drawer of your desk. You lavished no end of tape on them, so that you would know if anyone tampered with them. Well, guess what? I did. I opened them up and read the contents, and then I closed them back up exactly as you had, with more tape, and if you ever asked I would have told you it was the army censors who were to blame. But you never asked. As far as I could tell, you never again looked at what you had written. Sometimes I even convinced myself that you knew I broke open the packages and read what you wrote; that you meant for me to read it. And so, at my leisure, when your mother was out and the house was empty, I steamed open the envelopes and read about the shark, and the interconnected nightmares of many. About the janitor who cleaned the tank every night, wiping the glass and checking the tubes and the pump that sent fresh water in—who would pause in his work to check on the feverish, shivering bodies asleep in their beds, who would lean on his mop and stare into the eyes of the tormented white beast covered in electrodes, attached to tubes, who every day grew sicker and sicker from absorbing the pain of so many.

  The girl, Dafna, left you of course. Not immediately, but in time. You discovered that she had been with another man. Could you blame her? Maybe this other man took her out dancing. Cheek to cheek, groin to groin, in one of those noisy discos with a tribal drum-beat, and she was intoxicated by her nearness to a man whose body was not a distant country to himself, a distant and at times enemy country. No, the story isn’t difficult to imagine. Already at twelve or thirteen you began growing inward. Your chest collapsed, your shoulders rounded, your arms and legs became caught out in awkward positions, as if they had become disassociated from the whole. You closed yourself in the bathroom for hours on end. God knows what you did in there. Tried to make sense of things. When Uri used the bathroom he would burst out, the water still gurgling down the toilet, rosy cheeked and even singing. He could have done it in front of a live audience. But when you at last emerged you looked pale, sweaty, troubled. What were you doing all that time, my boy? Waiting to let the smell pass?

  She left you, and you threatened to kill yourself, came home on leave, and sat in the garden like a vegetable, your shoulders draped with a blanket. No one came to see you, not even Shlomo, because a few months earlier, because of God knows what injury that you judged unforgivable, you cut him off, your best friend of ten years, as close to you, closer, than your own limbs. What is it like, I once demanded of you, to be a man of such high principles that no one else can live up to them? But you only turned your back on me, just as you turned your back on everyone who betrayed you with their shortcomings. So you sat hunched in the garden like an old man, starving yourself because the world had disappointed you again. When I tried to approach, you stiffened and became mute. Perhaps you sensed my disgust. I left you to your mother. The two of you whispered together, and fell silent whenever I entered the room.

  There was another girl after that. The one you met in the
army, when you were stationed together at Nachal Tzofar. You stopped coming home on the weekends; you wanted to stay close to her. Later she was sent to the north, wasn’t she? But you found ways of seeing each other. When she finished her tour of duty she enrolled in Hebrew University. Your mother told me that you planned to follow. The army wanted you to become an officer, but you declined. You had better things to do. You intended to study philosophy. What is the application? I asked you. You stared at me darkly. I’m not a fool; I recognize the value of expanding the human picture. But for you, my child, I wished a life of solid things. To move in the opposite direction, toward greater and greater abstraction, seemed to me a disaster for you. There are those who have the necessary constitution, but not you. From a young age, you tirelessly searched for and collected suffering. Of course it isn’t that simple. One doesn’t choose between the outer and the inner life; they coexist, however poorly. The question is: Where does one place the emphasis? And here, however coarsely, I tried to guide you. Sitting in the garden wrapped in a shawl, recovering from your forays into the world, you read books on the alienation of modern man. What does modern man have on the Jews? I demanded, passing you with the garden hose. The Jews have been living in alienation for thousands of years. For modern man it’s a hobby. What can you learn from those books that you weren’t born knowing already? And then, watering the vegetables, I let a little spray drift in your direction, soaking your book. But it wasn’t me who stood in your way. I couldn’t have even if I wanted to.