Light Fell (21 page)

“One thing that bound us together was the unhappiness we were both experiencing in our marriages. To put it in terribly simple terms, he and his wife were too dissimilar, while your mother and I were too much alike. We were, after all, second cousins and you just can’t escape your genes sometimes.” Ethan chuckles. Gavri nods in agreement. “It became clear to us both that we needed to separate from our wives, that while these two women themselves were not necessarily the source of our grief and frustration, they could not help but exacerbate our feelings. We both understood that this would be difficult for our families. There were no precedents for divorce in Sde Hirsch and almost as few among Jerusalemites, especially for a rabbi of his stature. We planned to live together, for support. We knew we would get along well, help one another with family issues and careers, and save money by sharing rent and expenses. We settled on Tel Aviv, where we would be halfway between our two families and where we could both find employment.

“That last Saturday at home was hell. It was cold and rainy and you boys were cooped up in the house all weekend. I don’t ever remember there being so much noise as on that Shabbat. One of the twins—Gidi, I think it was—was running a fever, and Daniel, you were going through a privacy phase where you’d clobber Ethan and Noam for coming into the room you all shared when you didn’t want them to. Your mother had tried to finish stripping the paint off a piece of furniture on Friday and didn’t get to all the cooking she’d planned. By Saturday lunch we were short on food and you boys, who usually picked at and complained about everything, suddenly developed tremendous appetites, all five of you. Grandfather, of course, could not be expected to do without, so your mother and I gave away our portions and nibbled biscuits that afternoon. It was then, over biscuits and tea in the kitchen, with the five of you hooting and hollering nearby, that I told her I was leaving.”

You see, Pepe, they don’t ask questions. They don’t want to know what I am not telling them. They want my version. Maybe later, at home in their beds in another week or another month, perhaps then they will ask themselves questions, wonder about events and emotions I did not discuss. But they will not pick up the phone to ask. They will not consult their brothers. Gidi will not lean into his wife to share his thoughts or a question. I know these boys.

“You were all sent to bed early that Saturday night. I bathed the little ones and wondered when I would have that pleasure again. Your mother was stone silent, but she functioned. I don’t know how either of us managed, especially her. We were in some sort of trance, I suppose, just doing what we always did. Ethan was the last to fall asleep. I think he sensed something. You plodded into our bedroom in those furry slippers—do you remember that pair Tante Lotte gave you? You had names for them even.”

“Bunny and Runny,” Ethan says hoarsely, without a smile.

“Bunny and Runny,” repeats Joseph, nodding. “You came into the room and before I had even started packing, before I’d taken out a suitcase, you asked where I was going. I didn’t know what to answer. I barely knew myself and had no idea why you were asking that question. But I was wearing a beret instead of a
kipa
, which gave me away to you. And you wouldn’t go to sleep until I agreed to lie next to you and sing you a goodnight song.

“I packed quickly, left a note for your mother that I’d prepared on Friday, said goodbye to her in the kitchen, kissed you each in your beds, and left. I think I cried all the way to Tel Aviv.

“That night I found a place to live, just stumbled into the first apartment I saw with a FOR RENT sign posted out front. The next morning when I woke up I was so totally confused. On the one hand I loved the sunlight flooding the small, barely furnished apartment, the quiet, the sense of having a choice— when to get up, what to eat, what to do that day and for the rest of my life. On the other hand I was desperate for your morning noises, the way you’d burrow your way under our covers and race to be the first to wake us up. You big boys would try everything to make yourselves wake up before the twins and Ethan usually won, but Gidi and Gavri were little speedies, always up with the roosters. Noam was the only one who ever needed to be wakened. He’d usually stagger in when all the rest of you were already fussing and fidgeting under our covers, and we’d all laugh at his messy curls and sleepy eyes.”

They laugh lightly, remembering. Noam shakes out his mane, the curls so much longer than back then, twenty years ago. “His pajama bottoms were always twisted around sideways, or he’d be wearing only one slipper!” says Gavri, chuckling.

“It was the most frightening moment of my life,” Joseph continues, slightly irritated by the mirth this memory has provoked. “I had built this life with your mother and brought five wonderful boys into the world, and I was terrified at what I was in the process of doing.

“It took forever in those days to get a phone line— months and even years, in fact. Pay phones weren’t even that plentiful and often they didn’t work. It was after noon before I managed to phone Jerusalem to tell Yoel I had left home. But I couldn’t reach him. All day I went back and forth between my new flat and the pay phone, calling his office, occasionally calling his home. This continued through Monday, and by Tuesday morning I’d made up my mind to set out for Jerusalem to find him. I was making breakfast when I heard the news on my transistor radio:
The young
Torah genius Rabbi Yoel Rosenzweig was found dead in an apartment
in the Old City
.” Joseph pictures that apartment, often their secret hideaway for lovemaking, but keeps that memory to himself.

“I wanted to attend the funeral, to see for myself that this could really have happened. But I could hardly move myself from that little apartment I had hoped to share with him. Even in Tel Aviv there were terrible rumors about his death. The streets were abuzz with the news of it. A suicide, they said. ‘Then why was he allowed to be buried on the Mount of Olives, with the holiest of the holies, the first to be redeemed when, God willing, the Messiah liberates us all from this world?’ ‘He lost his mind; the chief rabbi said so. How can you blame him for his actions?’ I’ll tell you all, he had more of a mind than anyone in this world. It wasn’t something he could lose.

“I have tried for years to understand, to accept what happened, my fate and his. I have recovered from those days only thanks to time, but sometimes, when I’m feeling most alone, those wounds seem as fresh and raw as if they’d happened yesterday, and the love I felt for him seems not to have dissipated over the years, but to have grown and flowered. He would have been in his mid-fifties by now, probably a bald old grandfather. We might not have gotten along after all. We might each have remarried or simply followed different paths. But there are three things for which I can never, ever forgive him: for opting out of this world when he could have made a world with me, and for failing to share his feelings with me, his misery, when I, more than anyone, could have helped him find his way.”

There is a short silence until Ethan asks in a gentle, coaxing voice, “What was the third reason, Father?”

As Joseph looks around the table it seems to have shrunk, pulling his sons and Batya unbearably close to him. “I once gave him a marvelous gift, the most wonderful thing I have ever owned, an ancient glass bottle that Arik Shushinsky found at the beach and passed on to me.”

“Arik from the moshav? Assaf’s father?” Ethan finds it hard to believe Joseph could have received such a gift from his best friend’s father. He has never known Arik to give a gift to anyone, let alone to Joseph, a man he openly loathes.

“Yes, the one and only Arik. We were the best of friends once, as kids. I got him through school for years. He owed me. Anyway, Yoel prized that bottle. No one had ever given him anything so precious before.” Joseph closes his eyes and breathes deeply. He has never told this to anyone before, never let even Pepe wrestle this last secret from him. “The newspapers reported that he’d used shards of glass from an ancient bottle to slash his wrists. I understood right away: he’d made me the instrument of his death.”

When Joseph opens his eyes, the room seems transformed. The light is dimmer; the shine and sheen have evaporated and there are puddles under the goblets and decanters. Joseph is not yet certain whether this unburdening will bring him the release he longs for. His boys seem moved, however.

Ethan is the first to break the silence. “I think I speak for us all when I say we had no idea. I mean, it must have been awful for you. . . .”

Gavri adds in an awestruck voice, “It’s like you’re a Righteous One, punished on the spot for your transgressions.”

Gidi nods and Batya smiles.

“Why didn’t you tell us any of this before?” asks Noam. “Why did you keep this all to yourself?”

“Well, I was never sure you were really ready to hear it all. In fact, I wasn’t sure now either, but turning fifty makes me realize I have to put things in order, and first on my list is my relationship with you, the people I love most in the world.”

Daniel has been silent throughout his father’s story, quiet and enigmatic as they all expect him to be. Now, as if awakening from a long, deep sleep, he shouts across the table at his father, startling everyone. “But you love yourself more than you love any of us, more than you loved Rabbi Rosenzweig, and certainly more than the old Brazilian fart who keeps you here like a whore!”

Joseph does not move a muscle, does not blink, does not make a sound.

Daniel speaks quietly now, with malice, and suddenly Joseph feels the true menace. “That was a lovely story, Father, really. If it were anyone else telling it I would probably have bought it and fallen for the poor, misunderstood soul. But all of us sitting here, we’re the victims of your selfishness and recklessness, so now I’m going to tell you a story, too.”

Joseph has never seen such a look of sheer hatred, especially on Daniel. Moody and brooding, yes, but never ruthless. He understands that his eldest son is about to pay him back for all his sins, whatever Daniel perceives to be his crimes. He is about to receive the cruelest punishment of his life. How ironic, thinks Joseph, as he realizes this is the release he has been searching for all along. He cannot wait for Daniel to continue.

Daniel has shifted to the edge of his chair. “Do you have any idea what it was like to be your son? I remember your rages, the hysteria about finishing your doctorate in Cambridge. You made life miserable for Mother, for all of us. I think I peed in my bed every night that year. It got to the point where I took to sleeping bottomless on a sheet of plastic covered with a towel to save Mother the bother of washing pajamas and sheets and blankets on a daily basis. You were out of the house from dawn until late at night, but that was better than when you were around, like on Shabbat. In shul everyone thought you were more lenient than the other fathers because you let us play outside during services. But I knew it was because you didn’t want us around. You were afraid we’d make noise and bother or embarrass you. Noam, Ethan, do you remember the game we used to play?
Don’t
wake the giant?
I would pretend to be asleep and you two would make noise and taunt me and then I’d scream and holler and beat the shit out of you both.”

Ethan nods solemnly. Noam has a quizzical look on his face; he does not remember.

“Those months when we were alone in Israel, while you finished your work in America, were the best in my life. I loved speaking Hebrew again, made lots of new friends, and thought nothing could be better than helping Grandfather pick fruit or feed the chickens. Best of all, you weren’t around. But then you came back and things were worse than ever.”

Joseph cannot help wondering how much of this Daniel really felt during those years and how much is anger that he has projected onto the past. Is Joseph Daniel’s great excuse for not succeeding in life? Joseph remembers him as dreamy and distracted, more withdrawn and contemplative than most kids his age, rarely a smile on his face. Each of his sons provoked a different reaction from him when he looked in on them in their beds. The twins were roly-poly red-cheeked tykes who made him laugh. Noam was pure mischief; he exuded impish confidence even in his sleep, and while his pranks and wiles caused Joseph no end of grief, they also tagged him as a child who would always manage to take care of himself, so Noam commanded his respect. Ethan’s attitude was no-nonsense, and even asleep he demanded to be taken seriously. But with Daniel, Joseph’s emotion always bordered on pity. Such a beautiful, clever boy, never quite happy. It was impossible to fathom where his head was, what was bothering him, what he really wanted. Joseph felt quite sure Daniel himself hadn’t a clue.

“Are you listening, Father? I want you to hear every word of this.” Daniel’s cheeks are flushed. Joseph gives him his full attention.

“When you left we didn’t see you for weeks and weeks. Mother told us you were busy in Tel Aviv. Then she said you had to go to America for a short trip. That first week she kept burning herself, scalding herself with boiling water or touching the coils in the oven. We used to think she had hands of steel; she could touch the hottest pots without flinching, but that week she managed to sear her fingers countless times. Everything seemed wrong. Then, a few days later, Bina Hartog asked if it was true that my father had left home because my mother was having a relationship with Grandfather. I didn’t even understand what her words meant, but I beat her up anyway and went home to ask Mother about it. She smelled vile, Mother did. I don’t think she’d showered or brushed her teeth all week. I wasn’t so upset when she didn’t answer me. I just wanted to escape, to run to a different room or out of the house.

“That night I thought I heard a crash in the bathroom. I lay in bed for a few minutes before getting up to investigate. I was afraid terrorists had broken in to kill us all, and since there was no longer a father in our house I would have to fight them off alone. Very quietly I put on my Shabbat shoes, my heaviest pair, in case I would have to kick any of the terrorists to prevent them from bolting before the police could catch them. As I was tying the laces Ethan sat straight up in bed and asked if I’d heard a crash, and the next thing we knew one of the twins was screaming in his bed down the hall.