Light Fell (13 page)

Joseph takes pleasure in the look of surprise on Shlomi’s face. It is the reaction he had hoped for. Shlomi could not possibly have guessed that Joseph has children, and certainly not five grown and hungry boys. “Do they visit you often?” he asks.

Joseph does not like this question and busies himself with the groceries; he shows sudden impatience with the young doorman.

But Shlomi is at heart a diplomat and looks for a way to soften matters. “We’re seven brothers and sisters and my mother is always complaining we don’t visit enough. So she spends all week cooking our favorites to entice us to show up on Saturday. She’s not satisfied until she has at least three children and half a dozen grandkids messing up the place.” As Shlomi makes space for the last bag, a large, deep purple eggplant wobbles out and thumps onto the floor.

“Oh, I’m really sorry, sir.” Joseph watches the doorman pick it up and inspect it for damage, holding it close to his face and prodding it with long, thick fingers. For a shadow of a second Joseph falls back into a pocket of time when fingers like those probed his own body, young and supple then and ripe to the touch. But he quickly shakes himself free to observe Shlomi’s rapt attention, so like his eldest son Daniel as a child, the way he used to lose himself in what he was doing, suddenly and completely unaware of the world around him. The bowl of a spoon, a parade of ants, a cat’seye marble, galaxies of dust whirling in shafts of sunlight: these were Daniel’s world, a shifting series of sensual diversions each more captivating than the last. “Look, it’s not bruised at all,” Shlomi concludes. Joseph nods and smiles; as he takes the eggplant from Shlomi he wonders how much change he has in his coin purse.

“My mother makes the best eggplant dish in the world. It’s called Aubergines Rachelle, after her. King Hassan himself once invited her to make it for him at his winter palace in Marrakesh. She never gives out the recipe, but she’d probably give you a hint about the ingredients.” He looks hopefully at Joseph, eager to find favor.

Joseph is anxious to be alone, itches to store the food away so he can get to work polishing the dining-room floor. “I would be happy to hear about this recipe sometime, thank you, but my menu for this weekend is set. I’m making the boys’ favorites, all the dishes they liked when they were children.” He stops himself, frowning at how much he has already told this young man, an employee. “Thank you for your help, Shlomi,” he says, curling a twenty-shekel bill into the doorman’s palm.

When Shlomi has left him, Joseph imagines the doorman’s mother in a tiny flat crammed with dark-featured children helping themselves to an endless supply of unidentifiable spicy dishes and oily vegetables in small painted bowls. Sheared lamb’s meat steams from a long, low platter and the fish in a tomato sauce looks just like the summer squash with gamba. The pastries are dry and flaky, then sprinkled with powdered sugar or drenched in honey. Joseph has tasted all these delicacies. Like edible perfume, they leave him feeling sticky and bloated. They are not to his liking nor, he feels certain, to his boys’.

There is no need to consult his to-do list. Joseph has looked forward to his next task all week. He wants to tire himself out on hands and knees, feel a satisfying ache climb through his upper arms, become hummingly intoxicated by the waxes and polishes. The dining-room floor was torn from a castle in Tuscany. To Joseph, caring for it is like applying creams to the skin of a peach-faced old grande dame who has been oiled, steamed, and massaged since birth and whose flesh has taken on a soft luminescence. He leans in close to inspect the grain and to marvel all the more at the floor’s careful crafting, like a great seamless puzzle, how in some places it bends and swells as if defying its own strict properties. The floor was removed from the castle in one solid slab and installed still attached to the stone beneath it, so that all the other floors in the apartment needed to be raised several centimeters for parity.

But such meticulous rubbing and buffing is harder work than Joseph remembers. He feels a stiffness in his joints he knows was not there yesterday and curses himself for having left the window open through the night. The solid sheet of wood and stone beneath him does not empathize with his pains. The thick pad he has rolled out under his knees makes the effort barely bearable. He reaches the four depressions in the center of the floor, the shallow crater lakes formed by a massive dining table that sat in the same spot for two hundred years. Pepe, a fanatic for detail, had their own dining table sized to match these grooves. Joseph sits back on his heels, inspecting his work. His will to finish the job wanes as his body broadcasts, with increasing vehemence, its litany of complaints: the creak of brittle joints, the groan of chronic pain, the sigh of insulted limbs. But more than making him-self sore and irritable he is afraid of finishing his chores too early and with too much listless energy intact, allowing too much time for thought and worry, so he pushes on.

He presumes Rebecca would enjoy the irony of his circumstances, the occupant of a Tel Aviv penthouse—with hired help for the asking—down on all fours performing such a thankless task. Often, long ago, he returned home to his wife at the end of a day of studies or work, careful not to conceal his displeasure at finding the sink overflowing with dirty dishes and the laundry basket buried under mountains of dingy T-shirts and soiled socks. In the beginning Rebecca would lead him into the bathroom to show him how she had spent hours dismantling faucets to scrape loose the gathered residue, and didn’t Joseph notice how the water ran in a straighter, harder stream now? Or how she had patched the boys’ frayed trouser knees or tinkered with the fridge to stop its incessant clanging or swept the chicken coop or bathed the dog. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to see beyond the dishes and the laundry, and eventually Rebecca hardened: she stopped making her reports and left the sink and hamper fuller than before. Now, despite the demands of a fairly successful academic career, Joseph’s real vocation is that of
hausfrau
, a position he only mildly resents. He wants this rich, ancient wood to glow in small pools of yellow light, wishes to capture the reflected sparkle of crystal in its polished surface.

Growing up at Sde Hirsch he was certainly the only boy who could cook and sew, not because he particularly enjoyed those occupations but because teaching him was his mother’s way of spending time with him while tending to the endless needs of a demanding husband. Manfred never explained what he wanted; he simply left her a list of chores and errands each morning on the kitchen table. These lists— written in German despite his complete ban on speaking that language—formed the center of her world, his likes and dislikes the pillar of smoke that guided them by day and the pillar of fire that guided them by night. So Joseph learned the proper way to iron a shirt (arms first, collar, sides, back), how to squeeze, poke, and shake fresh produce, when to stop whipping cream, how to mop the floors of an entire house using one small bucket of water. He can soft-boil an egg to perfection, and when he relieves a pomelo of its peel it becomes a flower exploding into bloom. He knows dozens of recipes by heart and can wash a ritual prayer shawl without entangling a single strand of
tzitzit
fringe with its neighbor. He can turn any overripe fruit into compote and has five or six tricks for saving stale bread from the waste bin.

Joseph finishes with the floor and after edging the massive table, in tiny increments, back into its grooves, stands facing the room from the slate tiles in the kitchen. Even in the plain gray light of this day its beauty is palpable. He would like to put his cheek to it as a sculptor might embrace the creation at which he has so lovingly hacked and chiseled.

Five recipes are lined up on the kitchen counter. Joseph shuffles their various requirements into one complex plan of action. In place of lunch he tops some thin rye and onion crackers with camembert and avocado, and these he eats standing over the sink, careful not to sprinkle crumbs on the polished countertop. Twelve egg whites for the angel food cake need to breathe and expand for one hour before being beaten. The filo pastry Joseph removed from the freezer last night has completely thawed, but before embarking on the broccoli strudel he detours to the mushroom moussaka, slicing and salting the eggplant and laying out the purple-edged ovals in an oblong colander perched over the sink, to sweat out the bitter juices. He slides the vegetable steamer from its compartment, measuring and pouring water and rice—which for Gideon’s meticulous religious observance he scrutinizes for impurities like tiny pebbles or insects—and thinks briefly of Rebecca as he pours the dozen useless angel food yolks down the drain. She always disapproved of the Birthday Cake, which Joseph suspected was due to the waste involved. She would rescue the yolks, intending to find some way to use them, but invariably they would sit in the refrigerator, sometimes for weeks, until one of the boys tipped the bowl over or Joseph surreptitiously disposed of them.

For the chocolate mousse Joseph separates five more eggs, but these yolks he places in a small bowl and that into a larger bowl containing hot water. The smallest electric hand mixer is ideal for the required twenty minutes of very gradual beating. Joseph begins to feel the veins in his calves swelling up and after a minute of beating he moves the whole operation from the island in the middle of the kitchen to the counter at the window, where he can sit on a stool and watch the boats in the marina bob on the waves.

All the thoughts and images in Joseph’s mind pop like flimsy bubbles of soap the moment the phone rings. He is so startled that he forgets even to worry about its being one of the boys phoning to cancel.

“Hello, Joseph,” she says carefully.

His ex-wife has not called in years, and though her voice is frayed and full of fatigue, he recognizes it at once. “Rebecca, nice to hear from you. How are you?”

She considers for a moment. The question and the potential answer are far more loaded than Joseph could imagine, but she is not going to tell him everything just now. Not yet. She wants to discuss another matter first. “It’s your father,” she says at last.

Joseph holds his breath. Manfred turned ninety this year, but Joseph has not seen him, heard from him, or spoken with him in twenty years. A most ungracious thought crosses his mind: he hopes his aging father will not ruin his birthday and reunion weekend by dying just now.

“He has been behaving strangely lately, and yesterday afternoon he had some sort of attack. We got him to the hospital in Hadera, but even though he’s come back home for Shabbat I know he is not doing well. I think maybe you should visit him.”

“Rebecca, you know I have no problem visiting him. He’s the one who wants no contact with me. Why would you think that’s changed? Has he said anything?”

“Of course not. But still . . . the time has come for you to take over. Whether he is willing or not. I’m not able . . . I cannot . . .” She falters, her resolve dissipating. The words she needs to describe her malady have clogged in her mouth, made her tongue their prisoner. Once, early in their marriage, his ability to see what was in her thoughts had seemed uncanny to her, but time and distance have made them near strangers. She can hear the impatience in his breathing. The moment has passed and she is both sorry and relieved.

“Joseph,” she says, her heart settling back to its normal rate, “we need to talk. I have a problem and I will . . . need your help. But I’ll let you get through your Sabbath with the boys first. How about coffee in town next week?”

“Fine, fine.”

“Fine,” she repeats. Just as she is poised to return the receiver to the cradle she remembers something. “Joseph, did Noam phone you?”

He stiffens. “No, I haven’t heard from him.”

“Hmmmm. I was afraid of that. He told me he couldn’t get a flight before Shabbat, but he promised he would call you.”

“A flight? Where is he?”

“Spain somewhere. Modeling for a television commercial. I thought you knew.”

Joseph gazes out at the empty sea. He says nothing.

“Well,” Rebecca says kindly, “perhaps this means he’ll manage to arrive on time.”

“Perhaps,” Joseph echoes weakly before they hang up.

Joseph feels cold and hollow. His father is ill; his middle son, the easiest one, is missing and may not be on hand for the celebration; Rebecca has something to discuss with him after so many years of silence. Overwhelmed and fatigued, Joseph is tempted to crawl into bed, but instead he wills him-self to turn his full attention to the egg whites for the angel food cake, which have been breathing for just over an hour. He is pensive as he watches their transformation from clear, gluey liquid to the frothing peaks that remind him of Switzerland, the nation that gave him both a mother and a wife. He thinks this cake must turn out as white and pristine as those iced mountains, the way Daniel and all the boys loved it. And then everything will be fine.

* * *

When the wind kicks up, teasing the daughters’ skirts sky-ward but leaving the mother’s synthetic wig unruffled, Gavriel glances at his watch. In fact, he knows what time it is. This strange, low wind blows every day just after noon, more accurate than any clock. Nothing surprises him here anymore. He thinks of these rock-strewn hills as bewitched and bewitching and his love for them is physical. Most of the winter rains have fallen and the hills have taken on a lush softness, carpets of bright green grass covering them like moss. He dreams often of cupping these hills in giant hands, caressing them like breasts. He imagines himself rolling naked from hill to valley and up hill again, then chides him-self for such sensuality.

The early
minha
prayer services will begin in less than an hour and he still has quite a bit to cover with this family of Orthodox American Jews, but they have asked too many irrelevant and misguided questions for which he invariably provides long answers, so he has fallen far behind schedule and worries he may miss the last bus to Tel Aviv before the Sabbath. Of all his brothers he has been most vociferous about taking part in their father’s celebration. How could he, of any of them, fail to show up?