Great House (7 page)

Soon I heard my name called. In time others joined in the search. I saw you walk across the garden, distorted through the glass, calling. You! Calling me! It almost made me laugh. Suddenly I saw you as you were at the age of ten on the trail in Ramon Crater, pacing wildly, out of breath, your little mouth agape, sweat trickling down your face, the ridiculous sun hat drooping around your head like a wilted flower. Calling and calling to me because you thought you were lost. Guess what, my boy. I was there the whole time! Crouched behind a rock, a few meters up the cliff. That's right, while you called, while you screamed out for me, believing yourself to be abandoned in the desert, I hid behind a rock patiently watching, like the ram that saved Isaac. I was Abraham
and
the ram. How many minutes passed while I
let you shit in your pants, a ten-year-old boy facing his smallness and helplessness, the nightmare of his utter aloneness, I don't know. Only when at last I decided that you'd learned your lesson, that it had been made clear to you just how much you needed me, did I pop out from behind the rock and saunter down to the path. Relax, I said, what are you shrieking for, I was just taking a piss.

Yes, that's what I suddenly remembered while I watched you through the bathroom window thirty-seven years later. There is a fallacy that the powerful emotion of youth mellows with time. Not true. One learns to control and suppress it. But it doesn't lessen. It simply hides and concentrates itself in more discreet places. When one accidentally stumbles into one of these abysses, the pain is spectacular. I find these little abysses everywhere now.

You went on calling me for twenty minutes. The children were drawn into it, too, lured away from the television by a real-life mystery, perhaps if they were lucky even an emergency. I saw the smallest one through the window, trailing my sweater across the grass. Leaving my scent for the dogs, perhaps. They are all so educated, the grandnephews and grandnieces. Pooled together, their knowledge could run a small, terrifying country. They speak with confidence; they hold the keys to the castle. I was the afikomen they searched for. A few minutes into the game I heard the pack of them scratching at the door. We know you're in there, they called. Open up, one said in a little hoarse voice, and then the rest joined in, their little fists raining down. I tapped a giant bruise on my knee that I couldn't remember getting. I've reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without. Uri arrived, calling off the beasts. Dad? he said through the door. What are you doing in there? Are you all right? Many ways to answer the question, but none sufficient. You have no toilet paper? one of the kids piped up. A pause, footsteps receding, then returning again. The sound of a struggle with the knob, and before I had time to prepare the door shuddered and sprang open. The crowd peered at me. Among the children, giggles and scattered applause. The smallest one,
my little Cordelia, approached and touched my bruised knee. The others, rightly, backed away. In Uri's face I saw a look of fear I hadn't seen before. Relax, my son, I was just taking a piss.

 

N
O
, I
AM
not a man who harbors romantic ideas about the extension of the spirit. It's something I'd like to think I taught my sons, to partake of the physical world while it is yours to take, because that is one meaning of life with which no one can argue. To taste, to touch, to breathe in, to eat and stuff yourself—all the rest, all that takes place in the heart and mind lives in the shadow of uncertainty. But the lesson didn't come easily to you, and you never accepted it in the end. You shot yourself in the foot, and then you spent years trying to account for the pain. It was Uri who embraced my lessons about physical appetite. You can knock on Uri's door at almost any hour of the day or night and he'll answer with food in his mouth.

 

T
HAT NIGHT
after the guests had gone, leaving behind the tubs of humus crusting over, the egg salad, the stinking whitefish, the pita growing stale before our eyes, I saw you and Uri huddled together in the kitchen. You'd left him alone to shoulder the burden of your aging parents—of chauffeuring us here and there, passing the time with us in waiting rooms, schlepping to our house to look into this problem, investigate that complaint, to find the pair of glasses no one could find, sort out this or that confusion with the life insurance forms, organize a roofer to come fix a leak, or, without a word to anyone, install a chairlift after he found out that I'd been sleeping on the downstairs sofa for a month because I could no longer climb the stairs. Imagine, Dovik, a
chairlift
, so that whenever I want I can fly up and down the stairs like an alpine skier. And if all that wasn't enough, calling us every morning to find out how the night was, and every night to find out how the day was? All that he did without complaint,
without resentment, even though he had every right to be furious with you. I looked into the kitchen and there were the two of you, head to head, two grown men speaking in hushed tones just as you did as kids, intensely discussing whatever it was you two used to discuss, girls, probably, their shiny long hair and their asses and breasts. Only this time I knew you were talking about me. Trying to figure out what to do with me now, your old man, without having a clue, just as once you had no clue what to do with a pair of tits. If it had been Uri who had been doing the figuring, that would have been fine with me, I was used to it already, he had a way of doing it that didn't cost me my dignity. God forbid I ever lose the ability to hold my own dick while I piss, Uri will find a way to do it for me that will let me keep my dignity, with just the right joke and a funny story about something that happened to him the other day at the supermarket. That's Uri. But the fact that now suddenly you were involved, you who for so long lived over there in silence while your mother and I fumbled and grew old, who suddenly now decided to sweep in to bestow your magnanimity, to pretend that you were part of it all, with that disgusting look of concern on your face—that was more than I could bear. What the fuck is going on here? I said. And you turned to me, and in your eyes, behind all of that false magnanimity, I thought I saw a flare of the old anger, the one you kept boiling, that you stirred and stirred for me when you were seventeen, nineteen, twenty. And I was happy, my boy. I was happy to see it again, the way one is happy to see a long-lost relative.

Nothing, you said. You were always a bad liar. We're talking about what to do with all this food. I ignored you. I'm ready to go home, Uri, I said. Dad, he said, you sure you don't want to stay here? Ronit can make up the guest bed, the mattress is brand-new, very comfortable, I've been forced to try it a few times myself, and then he cracked one of his grins, because he is a man who can make jokes at his own expense. It costs him nothing. Just the opposite: the more he jokes about himself, the more he encourages people to laugh at him,
the happier he is. Does that baffle you, Dov? That a man can accept, can even
invite
, the mocking laughter of others? You were always too afraid of being made a fool. If anyone dared to laugh at you, you turned sour and privately registered a strike against him in your little accounting book. That was you. And look at you now: a Circuit judge. One day, if all goes well, they will ask you to sit on the High Court of England. To sit in judgment on the serious crimes, most serious of all. But you started training long ago. To sit above the rest, to judge, to condemn—all of this came naturally to you.

Thanks all the same, I said, but I want to go home, and Uri shrugged, called to Ronit to pack up some food, and went to find the car keys. Gilad, who for the first time in ages I was seeing without an enormous pair of earphones stuck to his head, came into the room with a determined look on his face and made a beeline in my direction. I looked over my shoulder, thinking he was focused on something behind me, and when I turned back we collided. The boy, hardly a boy anymore, a fifteen-year-old man-child, was applying something to me, a kind of pumping or pressure that turned out to be a hug. An embrace, Dovik, my grandson who for years had not answered a single one of my questions with anything more than a monosyllable was now clinging to me, his eyes squeezed shut, his teeth bared. Apparently trying to hold back tears. I thumped him on the back, There, there, I said to him, Grandma loved you very much. Which was all it took for the boy to sputter, spraying me with spit, and break down into a blubbering mess. Because no one taught him anything, not even here in this country where death overlaps life, and now he is getting his first taste of it. And he isn't crying for her, not for his grandma, he's crying for himself: that he, too, is going to die one day. And before that his friends will die, and the friends of his friends, and, as time passes, the children of his friends, and, if his fate is truly bitter, his own children. So there he is crying. And while I am trying wordlessly to comfort him (I have a sense that even in this weakened, alert state, the man-child is deaf to all words except
those that come to him through the enormous, furry portals of the earphones), Uri returns jingling the keys. And then out of nowhere you put your hand out to stop him. You, who, as far as I was concerned, knew nothing about anything. I'll take him, you said. Him? I almost shouted.
Him?
As if I were a child waiting to be taken to dance lessons. Uri glanced at me to gauge my reaction. Uri who keeps the clicker to my garage clipped to the sun visor of his car, right next to the clicker of his own garage, that's how often he uses it. And yet what could I say? There was Gilad still clinging to me. You put me in a position. How could I tell you what I really thought of your offer with that overgrown child gripping onto me for support and comfort as he absorbed the shock that all of this, all of us, everything he has ever known, is temporary?

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.

 

W
HEN 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?

 

Y
OU 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.