A Wall of Light (7 page)

S
ONYA

I
had spent over a decade discouraging men who came up to me and asked whether I was free that evening and would I like to have coffee, see a movie, go down to Eilat. Some of the men were charming and nice, and I was tempted, but I never gave in. People thought my refusal had to do with the twins, but they were wrong. The twins had no bearing on my life; I refused to let them leave their mark on me, and it angered me when anyone thought they had. My refusal had to do with my particular world. I wanted to go out with a man who spoke my language, a man who would come up to me and sign, “Hey, Sonya, let’s go hiking this weekend.” And as luck would have it, the few eligible men who qualified were not my type. They knew how to sign but they didn’t understand me or anything about me.

The closest I ever came to yielding was, remarkably, with Eli Yigal, philosophy professor and campus womanizer. The washrooms were filled with graffiti about him:
Eli will do it for free
or, more allusively,
Eli’s coming and he thinks you are too.
At the gay and lesbian fair there were buttons for sale that said,
I didn’t do it with Eli;
the money went to the AIDS Help Fund. I bought one just for the hell of it, but I never wore it, of course, though I could have.

There were many rumors about Eli; no one knew which were true. Ma’ayan, who had told me various Eli stories over the years, admitted that most couldn’t be verified. In the category of “definitely true” were stories from twenty years ago or more, when he taught at the Hebrew University: he would drive up from Tel Aviv to the dorms in Jerusalem to visit his students in their rooms, three per trip, in succession. He’d make the three dates in advance, an hour apart, and he’d move from room to room like a salesman offering a special deal on sex. He swore each student to secrecy—not because he was worried about his job, but in an attempt to keep them from finding out about one another and comparing notes.

In the category of “probably true” were stories about unstable sixteen-year-olds whom he’d driven over the edge; I myself had been present when his wife had jumped out the window of their second-story flat during a party. In the category of “unverifiable” were rumors about sado-masochism. He was famous in his field and he’d been married several times, though one of the things he was famous for was his philosophical position on the bearing of children, which he opposed for interesting reasons. He’d had a vasectomy at an early age and he kept a bowl of condoms on his desk for students; he described the features and advantages of each type and made sure his students knew how to use them properly.

I had been a student of Eli’s as well, when I was doing my doctorate. I’d completed my master’s degree in Beersheba; there was a teacher at the university there, Nava, whose work interested me, and I went down to the desert of Beersheba like a pilgrim following a prophet or sage. It had always seemed to me a stroke of extraordinary good fortune that thinkers of her caliber were to be found in our low-paying universities, for I was not ready to study abroad, in a foreign hearing environment.

Nava was well past retirement age. She wore baggy cotton shorts, leather moccasins with short white ankle socks that always bunched up, and shapeless sleeveless tops that allowed us to stare for hours at a time at her aging body: the loosening, spotted skin on her upper arms; the skeletal bones protruding through her upper chest as though impatient to take over. She wanted us to contemplate death. That was not the reason she wore sleeveless tops, of course; she wore them because she was hot. But she did want us to contemplate death—and life—and I felt that the exposure of her body was a reflection of her desire to probe our pitiful coordinates as relentlessly as possible.

But Nava left for a sabbatical in Holland before I began my doctoral dissertation, and she confided in me that she might not be back when the year was up. She’d had enough, she said, and yearned for some peace. There was no point in staying at Beersheba after she left, and I enrolled in Tel Aviv University.

I’d read one of Eli’s books,
Presumption, Progeny and Power
, and I liked its elegant arguments and subtle humor. I signed up for a course with him and was not disappointed. Eli was a good teacher: organized, focused, generous. He had a pedagogical instinct; he really wanted to transmit the things he knew and thought, and he had a striking way of perceiving the world. He told funny stories, too, about famous people he’d known at Yale, stories full of sly slander and delicious tidbits: Hilton Morris inviting the
New Yorker
to photograph him slumming in a hick dive, Jacques Derrida buying a designer raincoat for his photo shoot. It was impossible not to be entertained, in spite of the way he looked at his female students.

I had no personal contact with him at the time, though I watched with amusement as beautiful young scholars entered the classroom decked in their sexiest clothes, expressed petulant doubts about Heidegger during the lesson, and went up to Eli after class with urgent questions about phenomenology.

It wasn’t until I was faculty that Eli tried to seduce me. I was sitting at the outdoor cafeteria of the law building, correcting exams under the shade of a large striped umbrella that was secured to the center of the table. Out of the corner of my eye I saw someone coming toward me; it was Eli. He pulled out a chair, not opposite but next to me, and sank heavily onto it. Then he set down his coffee, took the pen from my hand, and wrote in the margin of one of the exams,
“You have your mother’s eyes. How is she?”

“Visit her and see for yourself,” I answered, signing as I spoke. “My eyes aren’t anything like my mother’s,” I added. “Are you sure you knew her?”

“Of course I knew her,”
he scribbled, in his barely legible handwriting.
“Everyone knew her. She was the life of the party. A golden-haired Russian princess.”

“She once studied physics,” I said defensively.

“Yes, she was smart,”
he agreed. And without warning he slid his arm around my waist.

You can’t acquire or attain through deliberate effort the sort of magnetism Eli had; it’s something you’re born with. I’d been aware of his charisma before, but only in the way one is aware of a bird’s red wings or an ant’s ability to carry a corpse twice its size on its back. I never came under his spell and I considered myself immune until he touched me. I was aroused, and suddenly I was also curious. When someone has that sort of reputation, you can’t help wondering what it’s all about. For a few seconds I was tempted, I felt I wanted to follow him to his car, bring him home and find out what made him special, if anything. But sanity prevailed. I got up and gathered my exam papers.

He wrote,
“I know what you went through. I’m sorry.”

“What do you know?” I replied defiantly. Even by Israeli standards, Eli operated on and elicited a level of directness that was unusual.

“The two men.”

“Does that turn you on?”

“No, it makes me sad.”

“Why?”

“I can’t imagine anyone doing things like that to another person.”

“People say you’re into S&M.”

He didn’t answer; he merely stared at me with a pointed expression: partly amused, partly disappointed but forgiving.

“That event has nothing to do with how I feel about you,”
I wrote.
“I don’t go to bed with men who don’t speak my language.”

He looked surprised and a little confused. I spelled good-bye and left quickly, before I changed my mind. Eli made you feel he was inviting you to join a club, a very exclusive and wonderful club, and that was the problem, that was the lie. There wasn’t any club, only Eli’s insatiable hunger; and the fact that he had the ability to tempt women with this lie, tempt them by placing his arm around their waists, made his lie all the more inexcusable. In the end, I decided, he was nothing more than a wicked wizard who used his magic powers for his own benefit and, in so doing, created havoc and pain.

Matar, because he was more innocent than Eli, had managed to get farther: he’d taken me into his arms and kissed me. I moved away, taking a step back. What a strange thing kissing was—entirely instinctive and yet so unlikely. Why would two mammals want to slide their tongues into each other’s mouths? No other species did that, as far as I knew. And yet it felt wonderful: generous and intimate, and somehow innocent, as if you were playing. Shall we have a round of checkers or would you like to kiss?

Not allowed
, I wrote on the board, in small letters.

He wrote
Allowed
next to the Xs surrounding the square, and then he drew a heart and wrote under it,
Not allowed.

I said, “Wait until the course is over. At least then we can talk.” I sketched a cartoon version of Masaccio’s
Expulsion of Adam and Eve
, with Tel Aviv University in the background, and
dean
written on the robe of the banishing angel.

Matar smiled, happily this time.
“I dream about you all the time,”
he wrote.

I picked up the eraser and erased everything on the board, wiped it clean. I felt him watching me. He had a crush on me, that was all. Maybe even less than a crush. Maybe just lust. That was the way things were in this country: people were promiscuous and sexually confident. No one had to talk about sex because everyone was doing it. I wondered what I would tell him when the course was over.

My drowsiness, which had vanished in the excitement of our exchange, returned with greater force than before. I suddenly wanted nothing more than to flop down on my bed and go to sleep. I said, smiling, “Take care of yourself,” and left Matar alone in the classroom, looking at me with his intense and terrible eyes.

N
OAH’S DIARY
, J
ULY
4, 1984.

In the news: nothing interesting.

I
got into a huge mess today.

Since Passover, Oren’s been going out with Ariella. It began when she had a fight with her family and she asked him whether she could go to his place for the seder instead. In the end she stayed with her family—they didn’t actually make up but they convinced her to be at the family seder. Some crazy fight over a pair of boots she wanted that they said were too expensive or something. Her family’s really rich, they even have a computer. They buy her lots of things, but there was some problem with the boots, I don’t know exactly what.

Oren and Ariella started going out right after that and they also started doing it pretty fast, on the second date. Oren’s given me quite a detailed description, which I’m storing in my brain for future reference. Anyway, for a few weeks he’s been saying that Ilanit told Ariella, who told him, that she likes me. Actually I already knew—Ilanit made it pretty obvious, always coming up to me with questions about what I think about this or that and asking for help with English, touching my arm with her fingers but making it look like she didn’t notice she was doing it.

Anyway, today was the opening of another part of the boardwalk, from Trumpeldor to the Dolphinarium, and there was supposed to be a big celebration with all these performers and singers. I kind of wanted to go to that, because what if someone like Danny Sanderson or Matti Caspi showed up? But Ariella arranged for us all to go out to a movie followed by a picnic on a different part of the beach. The reason we had to do it today was that Ilanit’s family won’t let her go anywhere unchaperoned. But they agreed for her to come with Dad and me and Sonya and Ariella and Oren to the opening of the boardwalk. Luckily they themselves couldn’t go because Ilanit’s grandmother is in the hospital.

We told Dad we might “go off on our own” and he didn’t care, of course. Things are a bit tense at home because Mom is in the worst mood ever and it effects Dad, who gets into a bad mood, too. Mom’s in a bad mood because some Palestinian high school kids on a bus were tormented by a border guard, Cha’im, who made some of them get off the bus and stand up and sit down and stand up again and so forth, and when the other kids on the bus began to protest, Cha’im and the ten soldiers with him opened fire and five kids were wounded. Mom says the army invented a crazy story to cover up. Sometimes I think Mom is going to end up the most hated person in this country. Maybe she is already. Once Oren and I were at the pool and this furious woman came up to me and said, “Your mother is a Nazi whore.” Oren said right back, “Even if you tried to be a whore you couldn’t, you’re too ugly.”

So Dad, who’s in a terrible mood but trying to pretend he’s not, said no problem, we could go wherever we wanted, as long as we promised not to go into the water past our waists, because the lifeguards are on strike and already a kid from Qalqilya and two old people from Tel Aviv almost drowned.

I have to admit Ilanit has a lot of guts, because if she’d been caught, her father and brothers would have killed her. Anyway, we went to see this movie,
Body Heat
, which was fantastic, with a really great ending—you couldn’t guess it at all, it came as a total surprise. During the movie Ariella and Oren were making out like crazy. I guess Ilanit expected some move from me, too, but what’s the point when your mind is on something else? You can’t concentrate on two things at once. Kathleen Turner was fantastic. After the movie we took the bus to this beach farther off, which was completely deserted because everyone was at the celebrations. We sat on a blanket and ate pita and hummus and salad and stuff. We were starving.

It started getting dark, so Ariella and Oren took off their clothes and went in the water. I tried not to stare at Ariella but I couldn’t help it. I mean, Oren I’ve seen naked a thousand times but Ariella it was my first time, so how can I be blamed? By this time Ilanit is in the worst mood ever and starts attacking me and crying and sulking like Sonya did when I accidentally killed her spider.

She said I was wrapped up in my own world, that was the gist of her attack. But she said it in several different ways, like that I don’t notice anything around me, which is completely untrue but I guess she meant I don’t notice
her.

Then I did something really, really mean. It just came out of me, without warning. I didn’t even know I could be so mean, but I was getting tired of listening to a list of all my faults and I said, “I notice things when they’re interesting, not when they’re boring, and if Kathleen Turner was here you’d see what I mean.” Then I felt really bad, because I knew that what she really wanted was some move on my part, but you can’t just make a move, just like that, with people around. You need to build up to it. It’s like she had it all planned and I wasn’t doing my part, but what about my plan? Maybe I have a different plan! I mean, I can’t just do something because she decided that’s what I’m supposed to do at that moment. I need the right mood and atmosphere.

And the worst part is that I like Ilanit. First of all, she’s extremely cute, there’s no question about it. She’s a bit taller than me, but not so you’d notice. She has long brown hair, wavy, olive skin, nice eyes. I like her teeth, they’re so small and perfect. Well, she walked off in a big huff. I knew I was supposed to run after her but I didn’t. I don’t know why. I wanted to, but something stopped me and then it was too late. Instead I watched Oren and Ariella making out on the sand. I figured I might pick up some pointers. It was like
Body Heat
part two.

Or should I say
Body Treat
ha ha.

I got quite a show, even though it was pretty dark, but I have good night vision thanks to all the carrots. I’m surprised they didn’t mind. I guess they were too absorbed with what they were doing to care. It was a little strange seeing Oren doing something I never saw him do before. I mean, I’ve seen him in just about every walk of life but this was like he had another side I didn’t know about and wasn’t a part of. Actually, it was like it wasn’t him from
his
point of view either. I mean, as if he was also just acting and he also knew it wasn’t really him. But maybe that’s the way it is with sex. Maybe sex is fake by nature. I mean, sex with another person. Sex with another person is pretty weird, when you think about it.

One thing was pretty obvious, though—Ariella was having a good time. She kept saying “More!” I think I’d get pretty nervous if a girl kept saying, “More, more!” as if you were a coffee machine or something, but Oren told me he likes it. To be perfectly honest, I was a bit jealous.

I feel terrible about Ilanit, though. I don’t know what to do. I guess I blew it. I never realized how complicated these things were. My fights with Sonya are never complicated. But it’s different when there’s love involved.