A Wall of Light (8 page)

L
ETTER TO
A
NDREI
, F
EBRUARY
27, 1957

D
earest, I feel I am sending this into the void, but I must continue writing to you, even if I don’t know when these letters will ever reach you. If only I could mail them directly to you! But we are lucky to have Heinrich, so I must not complain.

We have had a small crisis. We were in the middle of rehearsal, Tanya was in a terrible muddle over her speech about Nature and Fortune but doing her best, and Feingold was doing his best to be patient and not burst into tears. Before anyone knew what was happening, a young man came into the room, or I should say stormed into the room, and began hitting her.… Oh, it’s all very complicated, dearest. He didn’t know Tanya was involved in a play, and he doesn’t approve. We were all afraid of him but Touchstone (the onion-eater) was wonderful. He began yelling at him in such a voice! So at least the man left Tanya alone and he and Touchstone took it outside. We were all afraid to find out what happened, but when we finally went to look, there they were, sitting on two stones smoking together! But Tanya is out of the play. It’s just as well. Feingold would have been forced to cut most of her remaining lines (he already cut more than half). We must find a replacement now.

I have been a little down, lately, my sweetheart. It is because I am so worried about you. If only Heinrich would write and give me some news!

I send you my love, I send you my whole self.

S
ONYA

I
walked to Gate Four and pushed the tall revolving turnstile—four walls of horizontal bars designed to prevent terrorists from sneaking into the university. Then I looked around for a taxi. Walking home was out of the question today.

I made my way down Klausner, which is more of a mini–central station than a street; all day long cars drive in and out, dropping off and picking up students. A taxi sped past me and I waved, but I was too late; the driver didn’t see me. Just before I reached Ha’im Lebanon Street I saw another taxi parked a few meters from the intersection. It was an odd place for a taxi to park, and it wasn’t clear what the driver was doing there.

The windows of the taxi were rolled down and I poked my head inside inquisitively. The driver looked at me and nodded, so I got in and pulled out my map. I always carried a little map for taxi drivers, showing the route to our house, which was on a small dead-end street no one had heard of. The map was decorated with cartoon cats and Little Prince scientists with cotton wool hair on either side of their heads, pointing the way. Drivers tended to get quite chatty when they saw my map, and I had to explain that I was deaf. Often they didn’t believe me.

This driver was different. He just looked at the map, seemed to be memorizing it, and then handed it back to me with another nod. He didn’t speak; he was thinking about other things.
Maybe about how he needs to have the air-conditioning in his car fixed
, I thought, staring at the evil eye medallions dangling from his rearview mirror. The medallions were blue and silver: blue eyes on the palms of silver hands. I leaned my head back on the passenger seat, wondering about air-conditioners in cars, how much it cost to install them, whether they broke frequently—and, remarkably, I fell asleep.

I had not fallen asleep in a car since my student days, and even then I only drifted off during late-night rides from Beersheba to Tel Aviv, after a long week of classes and exams. When I was very little I nearly always fell asleep during car rides, and Kostya had to carry me back to the house. At that point I’d wake, but I didn’t let on because I enjoyed being carried to bed. Now, for the first time since I was a child, I shut my eyes and fell asleep almost as soon as the car began to move.

It was the non-soporific antihistamine, of course.

I woke up with a start. The taxi was parked in front of our house and the ignition was turned off. I looked at the driver and was surprised to see that he had apparently not tried to wake me, but had instead been waiting patiently for me to wake up on my own. No, he was not really waiting; he was in a meditative trance, staring straight ahead, letting events unfold. Eventually the sleeping woman would stir; he wasn’t in any hurry. Come to think of it, he had been in the same sort of trance when I’d first poked my head through the window.

I wondered briefly whether he was perhaps not all there; it also occurred to me that he might be stoned.

He turned to look at me then, and his eyes were friendly. He was not mad, definitely, but I couldn’t yet rule out the possibility that he was slightly stoned. I paid him and quickly left the taxi. I didn’t know that he was calling out after me; I had left my briefcase in the car. It was full of important articles, important work; I’d never forgotten something like that in my life. An umbrella, yes, or a sweater—but never my work. And even lost umbrellas are rare occurrences for me; I am not usually forgetful or absentminded. But today I was distracted. I walked down the front garden, took the house key out of my shoulder bag, and slid it into the door, still unaware that anything was missing. I was about to step inside when I felt the driver’s body approaching me. I turned around and there he was, his arm extended, my briefcase in his hand. Seeing my briefcase in his tanned hand was a little disorienting, but it was a pleasant, exciting sort of disorientation—the kind people seek in amusement-park rides. A little like my elevator dream that morning.

I was amazed at my carelessness. And then impulsively, because I liked him, quite simply liked him, I invited him in. “Would you like a cold drink?” I asked him. “Or a cup of coffee?” I opened the door, and like a lady-in-waiting welcoming a guest to the castle, I waved him in with a small curtsy. He seemed startled, and I saw him hesitating. “Come,” I said, and placing my hand on his shoulder, I ushered him in.

I walked straight to the kitchen but he tarried, looked around inside. His eyes stopped at the large full-length mirror in the hallway and he stared at himself, as if in surprise, as if he had not looked in a mirror for a long time. Then he turned away, followed me to the kitchen, and sat down at the table. When I looked at him he lowered his eyes.

And there, in the kitchen, on this August day, after my short refreshing nap, I decided that finally I would lose my virginity, and that it would be with this man, assuming that he was willing. I wondered whether Matar’s kiss had woken me from a hundred-year slumber, whether he’d made me see what I’d been missing, and how ridiculous it was to go on missing it, because it was nice, it was splendid, and I’d been a fool all these years to be so stubborn.

Or maybe it was something else, something about this man, his silence, his appearance, the way he behaved with me. Maybe the time had simply come. Maybe, maybe, maybe. In fact, I had no idea why I was suddenly attracted to the man sitting in my kitchen. It was the sort of charged, involuntary attraction I might have felt toward a movie star or popular singer in the past—but never toward someone I’d actually met.

Let me describe my taxi driver: three vertical laugh lines on either side of his mouth, a beautiful mouth, black hair, eyes full of life and intelligence. He was definitely handsome, but in this part of the world one sees handsome men every day. In the end, what draws you to one man and not another is apparently a mystery.

“Would you like cold juice, lemonade, coffee, tea … beer?” I asked, peering into the fridge and then at him.

“Coffee, thanks,” he said.

“Coffee?” I repeated, just to be sure, and he nodded. I made coffee and arranged Kostya’s apple turnovers on a plate. I poured milk into a porcelain creamer and set it down on the table along with a bowl of sugar cubes. Then I sat down facing him. I was too much on edge to eat, but he bit into a turnover with evident enjoyment. We drank our coffee in silence. He was waiting for me to speak but I had nothing to say, and in any case I didn’t trust myself to understand his response. I had the sense that he welcomed the silence, that he found it peaceful. When he seemed ready to go, I touched his hand with mine.

He froze; he seemed astonished. He stared at my hand and didn’t move. But he didn’t protest, either—he didn’t draw away or get up or give any indication that he didn’t want me. I closed my hand on his and led him to my bedroom.

He stood in my bedroom with his arms hanging by his sides and watched me. He seemed very curious, as if I were an exotic animal in a zoo, as if he’d never seen anyone like me before. The bed wasn’t made, as usual, and I straightened out the sheets a little. Then I closed the shutters; I didn’t want him to see my scars. I returned to the bed and held out my arm, invited him to join me.

He didn’t move: he was immobilized by indecision. I saw him standing there and deliberating. His body was in an odd state of suspension, pulled in opposite directions by two contradictory impulses. Caution was urging him to make an excuse and leave, but at the same time he was clearly turned on. I said, “It’s all right if you don’t want to.”

This seemed to help him arrive at a decision. He approached the bed, removed my panties, licked his hand to wet me, discovered that it was unnecessary, unzipped his black jeans, and found his way inside.

I stroked his back through his thin ironed shirt, a sad white shirt with pale yellow stripes. I couldn’t reach his face, which was turned away from me, but I kissed his shoulder and touched his hair, which sparkled as if it were made of black jewels. What a cute mating ritual, I thought. I wanted it to last a long time but it was over in a few minutes. He rose from the bed and pulled up his jeans.

I said, “You’re my first lover ever.”

He looked confused when I said that, and then suspicious. It was his turn to wonder whether he was in the company of a mad person.

“I’m deaf,” I said. “Do you want to say something? You can write it if you like.” I handed him a small notebook from my night table.

But this only made matters worse. He stared at the notebook, mumbled something about being in a rush, and fled from the bedroom, fled from the house.

I followed him outside and watched him hurry to his cab and drive away.

I sighed. What a disaster!

It was half-funny, half-depressing. I couldn’t help seeing the man’s quick escape as slightly comic; it was like something out of the Marx Brothers. And here I was, standing barefoot on the pathway, staring at the empty space where the taxi had been parked. I felt foolish, to say the least.

I returned to the house and poured myself a glass of lemonade. I took the lemonade out to the back garden, sat on the white cedar swing, and rocked gently back and forth, the soles of my feet brushing the grass. I felt a great sense of relief, as if I’d removed a curse a jealous fairy had cast upon me at birth. Several things had surprised me: first, the intense physical pleasure of the moment he entered me. No wonder there were so many of us on the planet, millennium after millennium, despite plagues and earthquakes and every conceivable misery. I had felt the man’s cock gently seeking a way in, finding its way like a little hedgehog burrowing in the earth, whispering to my body. Even though we were strangers, we were both aware of the intimacy of our coordinated movements, our coordinated pleasure.

Even more striking was what happened to his body when he came. Here was a moment of utter submission to the universe, to all the souls and ghosts and spirits of the universe. This was a man disappearing; replacing him was something elemental, like a crystal, for example, or a stone shaped by water. Here was a human body, gone, shivering, moaning, disintegrated by ecstasy. I felt a surge of power, as if all the control he’d given up had been transferred to me, and I was at that second the most powerful person who had ever lived. Male orgasms were evidently different from female orgasms, which I would compare to a delicious bowl of mashed potatoes dripping with butter and brie, delicately spiced, eaten when one is absolutely starving. Or maybe orgasms during sex were different from orgasms you had on your own; maybe one day I, too, would disappear through my orgasm, though I doubted it. I couldn’t imagine vanishing like that, ever, even for a few seconds.

After he came, I felt his bafflement at the loss he’d experienced, I felt his need to reestablish himself in his own eyes. It took him a few seconds, and it was sweet and funny, watching him try to regain his dignity, his maleness.

Those things were interesting. I thought of the way he had licked the palm of his hand; it turned me on when he did that. Was he being considerate or pragmatic or selfish? Did he want to wet me so it would be more pleasant for me, or simply in order to make it easier for him to enter me, or did the licking of his palm mean that he didn’t care whether I was aroused or not? Well, he could have assumed that I was; otherwise why was I lying on the bed waiting for him?

I rocked on the swing and sipped my lemonade. The heat surrounded me like an inflatable Humpty Dumpty toy, grinning mindlessly as it leaned against me. At the edge of the swing a ladybug was crawling precariously on a thin, drooping leaf. She, or he, decided the leaf was not steady enough to make the effort of looking for aphids worthwhile, and tried to exit via the stalk. For some reason ladybugs will always try to walk first; flying is a last resort. Do they have poor aeronautic skills? Or is it the hungry hunt for more aphids that makes them prefer a grounded stroll? There are fewer aphids in the air.

When I was little I interrupted these creatures’ lives; I took them in and tried to establish relationships with them. But they were happier in their chosen setting and my attentions didn’t appeal to them. There was one spider, however, who definitely became attached to me. She lived on the windowsill and knew when I was there, recognized my voice, looked forward to my treats. But Noah developed an odd antipathy toward her and she came to a sad end.

I watched the slow progress of the ladybug and thought about Matar—his eyes, his revelation, his kiss. He’d been responsible for carrying out an assassination; he’d received a medal for its success. He’d taken upon himself the role of God, handing out life and death. If God had eyes, they’d look like Matar’s. That was what happened to you when you became God. You didn’t look sad or guilty or pained because God doesn’t feel those things, at least not our God. You looked the way Matar did. And you could never shake it off.