Light Fell (23 page)

Joseph awakens in his bed after a short but deep and satisfying sleep. Faint light spreads from the east but the sea remains dark and murky. His thoughts spring lightly from the boys to Rebecca to his father to Pepe, staying nowhere for long.

In the medicine cabinet Joseph finds a small box in wrapping paper he recognizes, from the boutique of a favorite goldsmith on Shenkin Street. Its gold bow winks at him under the halogen lamps. He is grateful now, ready to be pampered. He slits the ribbon and the fancy paper with a nail file but stops to register a small smile in the mirror before pulling off the top of the box.

The ring sits on a bed of pastel pink cotton wool. It is wide, wider than any ring Joseph has ever worn and for a moment it seems gaudy, ill suited to his narrow fingers, like a barrel on a skinny man. Without touching the ring he lifts the box to eye level and sees that it is really two rings, a heavy inner band with raised edges and a thin outer one that surrounds the other. The outer band is engraved with letters he knows belong to some ancient Semitic language, but this puzzle will require some work and Joseph is thankful for the diversion.

The ring is a perfect fit and not too wide on his finger after all, reaching only halfway up to the knuckle. He spins the outer band round and round, holds it close to the light, then thrusts his finger toward the mirror. It catches every reflection, shines gold light back at him from every angle. He is charmed by the ring’s simplicity and glad that this year Pepe has chosen a quiet, elegant gift rather than flash and sparkle.

He fetches a pair of glasses from the bedroom then sits on the edge of the bathtub for a better look. As the tiny letters come into focus he realizes the script is ancient Hebrew, closer to Sumerian than modern Hebrew but Hebrew nonetheless. He is disappointed to decipher its meaning so quickly; by the second word he recognizes the verse from the Song of Songs:
I am my Beloved’s and He is mine
. Has he ever told Pepe about chanting the Song of Songs with Yoel, or that Yoel had once etched those very words in the sand on the beach at Tantura? He is almost certain he has not.

Joseph is about to slip the ring off his finger and back into the box when he pauses to think about the conversation around the table. What could possibly be taboo now? He keeps the ring on his finger and leaves the bathroom.

Silence. More silence. Ahuge, empty galaxy, a soundless universe. But it is very early Sabbath morning, Joseph reminds himself. Whoever is still here is sleeping. Outside, even secular Tel Aviv takes a break, only once a week, only in that sliver of time just after the last black-clad revelers fish and fumble for keys and veer off from unwanted lovers and dear friends, no longer able to stand their own stench, and just before the dog walkers and joggers reclaim the city, rubbing the pavement smooth with their rubber-soled shoes and blinding the accidental early riser with their sunburst muumuus and candy-colored spandex leotards. Between the two groups the air seems to have been sucked out of Tel Aviv like between trains in an underground.

At night I lie down weeping, but in the morning, joy!
Will it be joy today? He thinks that a shaky contentment, a cautious relief, is the most he can hope for.

The bedroom doors are closed, which gives him hope. He identifies Noam under a thick comforter in one room and is not completely surprised to find Gidi sprawled on a sofa facing the terrace in the living room, both the glass and screen doors flung wide open. The air is cold, but he resists the urge to slide them closed and goes instead to the kitchen. He will make a pot of tea and begin the massive cleanup that awaits him.

But to his amazement the kitchen is spotless. There are stacks of clean dishes near the sinks, pots and pans left over-turned to dry, perfect rows of spotless glassware and piles of silver cutlery sorted by type: salad forks, dinner forks, dessert forks, soup spoons, teaspoons, knives, then ladles and serving forks and, at the very end, one small, curved, intricately carved silver gravy spoon lying on its back, the bowl faceup to the ceiling. The counters are wiped clean, and Joseph finds the leftovers neatly wrapped in the refrigerator. Even the sinks are immaculate, not so much as a teardrop of water in either one.

Joseph understands that he is looking for some imperfection, determined to find the flaw that will give him the advantage. The perpetrator of this act could not possibly have managed a cleanup more thorough than his own would have been, organized and executed better than he himself, supreme lord of this kitchen, could have managed. But all at once he does not care; he graciously accepts the job for what it is, the birthday gift his sons had not brought. And now that he has received this clean kitchen and the ring from Pepe, he recognizes his birth date, realizes that today is, in fact, fifty years to the day since his birth.

“Not a bad job, right?” Joseph spins on his heel to find Gavri perched on a stool at the counter by the window, framed by the gray-black sky just beginning to show streaks of colored sunlight from the east. He is still dressed in his Sabbath clothes, his white shirt loose at the bottom,
tzitzit
fringes dangling from underneath. “Batya was amazing. You can tell she’s been doing the dishes for a large family her whole life. There was no stopping her! And you should’ve seen her ordering us around in here. Ethan learned a few things about commanding his troops, and she even managed to get Noam—Noam!—to share a bit of the work. Truth is, we had a lot of laughs.”

A rain cloud of jealousy sweeps for a moment over Joseph’s heart, then moves on. “I’m glad you had fun together, and I’m amazed to find the kitchen in such great shape this morning. I thought I had hours of work ahead of me. I just can’t imagine how you managed all this without making a terrible racket.”

“Oh, we were noisy! We kept shushing each other, expecting you to straggle in in the middle of it.”

Gavri is buoyant, radiant even. He grins and shakes his head, a small, private joke bubbling to the surface.

Joseph cannot keep from lightly tapping the skin around the bruise of their lives. “What did you all talk about for so long?” One word more and his voice would catch.

“Nothing. Everything.”Gavri looks up at his father. “Do you remember the cat we had in Cambridge? Ginger colored, with stripes. It’s like the only thing at all I can picture from then.”

“Yes,” Joseph says cautiously, trying to remember.

“It was called Ginger Thumper because the older boys couldn’t agree on a single name. Noam and Ethan said it was the most neurotic animal they’ve ever seen, nothing like the flow of pets we had back on the moshav. Spent all its time trying to avoid contact with human beings, especially us five rambunctious boys.” He laughs. “They said I was the worst, that I’d chase the poor thing around for hours, but even then the cat would never, ever leave the apartment. Ethan says Mom liked the cat because it kept the place mouse-free, but you couldn’t stand it. He told us how you ripped apart the house trying to get your hands on it one time when we were going on vacation for a week and the neighbors had agreed to keep her in their apartment. He said by the end, when it seemed like we’d miss our train because of the cat, you went wild, throwing pillows, overturning chairs, flipping beds over. When you finally caught Ginger Thumper she scratched you up pretty bad and you nearly strangled her in return. Daniel got so frightened he locked himself in the pantry and then we really
did
miss our train.”

Vermont. Somewhere way up north near the Canadian border, in a house offered by a colleague at Harvard. Daniel did not speak to him that whole vacation. He avoided Joseph, averted his gaze the entire week. And when they boarded the train back to Cambridge and Joseph reached for Daniel’s elbow the boy recoiled in terror as if bitten by a snake. Joseph remembers it all now—that mangy cat, those neighbors, the smell of the corridor that separated them. Daniel’s eyes, huge and round as he watched his father nearly strangle a cat, then throw it at a wall. Didn’t Ethan mention the wall as well? He’d thrown the cat at a wall, though at the last second—at the very moment his hands were about to release it, just as he could hear the pulse in his palms shout, “Harder! Harder!” just as he could already feel the deep thud, the fat and fur and bone striking plaster, maybe breaking the cat’s neck, maybe splattering its guts down the bedroom wall—at that second he had relented, slightly, imperceptibly. Only he would know that he had recognized this evil in him and would not entirely succumb to that vein of violence flowing through him thick and hot as lava. His pulsing palms had stopped their shouting and the cat had grazed the wall on a toss, hit the floor, and skidded to a halt at the bed. Dazed she was, but not injured. Joseph had scooped her up and without a word to anyone carried the cat to the neighbors.

It was a terrible violence he had in him back then, nearly murderous. It occurs to him that in all his years of living alone, and later with Pepe, he has never known that feeling again. Joseph heaves himself onto the stool next to his son. “Those years were so difficult for me. I can’t tell you how awful it was living with myself back then. It wasn’t the cat or you boys or even your mother, only me. I was confused, over-burdened, and just plain mad at the world.”

“Dad?”

“Hmmm?”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Always.”

“When did you know about yourself? I mean, when did you figure yourself out?”

“You mean my sexuality?”

Gavri nods.

“Oh, I was late. Not like people today.” His mind darts to Philippe. “It wasn’t something people talked about.”

“But when?” Gavri’s voice, a pleading whine, puts Joseph on alert.

“Well,” he says, “when I look back, there were tiny little clues scattered over a long period of time, even perhaps when I was a teenager.” He watches Gavri’s eyebrows rise in surprise. “And there were bigger clues during the Harvard years, but I still wasn’t really paying attention. I suppose I didn’t work it all out until I met Rabbi Yoel, and by then I was older than you are now.”

Gavri nods in understanding.

Joseph feels he wants more. “It wasn’t easy figuring myself out at a stage in life when so many people were depending on me. I never said it was fair. But once I had that knowledge about myself there was no turning back. Then again, I’ve often played the game, over the years, of imagining my life differently, you know, ‘What if?’ What if I’d been aware as a teenager, if I hadn’t inconvenienced so many people, turned all of your lives upside down? What if I could have made the same decisions earlier, in a quieter, less dramatic way? Well, then I wouldn’t have you five boys and I would be sitting here, at fifty, unable to forgive myself for ignoring the Torah’s very first and most important commandment, ‘Go forth and multiply.’ I would have missed the richest experience life has to offer, and I would have felt I’d missed it, too.”

Gavri can no longer sit still. Joseph has noticed his left foot jiggling under his chair, watched him cradle himself, but now he is exploding. He paces to midkitchen, back and forth three times, before speaking.

“What if you’d ignored it, just buried it? What if you’d prayed and repented your evil thoughts and made pacts with God to ease the burden? Couldn’t you just have controlled your feelings? Couldn’t you have lived from day to day, promising yourself that today, just like yesterday, you’d be good?” He is nearly frantic now, his pacing accelerated to three large steps in each direction,
tzitzit
fringes lunging forward then jerking back at each wild, syncopated turn.

Joseph leans his back against the counter and answers quietly. “No, Gavriel, I could not have lived like that.” He pauses to observe his son’s pacing a minute longer, deciding. “But I think we’ve stopped talking about me and started talking about you.”

Gavri halts abruptly and the
tzitzit
fringes fall to his sides. He stares at his father, silent, and before the first sound Joseph can see the convulsions, watches his son crumple at the middle. He is quick to jump from his stool, catching Gavri on his way down and hoisting him, with difficulty, back into a standing position, embracing the full weight of his limp body.

Gavri is nearly choking on his deep sobs and copious tears. Joseph sees how new and strange crying is for him and tightens his grip while Gavri continues crying for several long minutes. Neither moves when the tears subside.

“I don’t know what’s happening with me.” Gavri is talking into his father’s shoulder. His voice is muffled and small, but Joseph thinks it has mellowed, even if only a tiny bit. “I’m so confused; it’s all I think about anymore. Sometimes I think about him during prayers and I push myself into a sort of trance to concentrate, but he just keeps thrusting his way into my consciousness and it seems like I’m praying to him instead of God. I don’t know if this is your fault or I was born this way, or—what does it matter? There’s nothing I can do about it. I don’t know anything and I can’t talk to anyone, not even—not especially—my own twin brother. I
hate
this,” he says with spite, and Joseph thinks he may cry again.

“One thing at a time, sweetie. Who’s ‘he’?”

Gavri pulls himself up and away from Joseph, then sits on a stool, sniffing and wiping his eyes. “The head of our group of settlers. Shilo. We’re best friends but I always seem to want more.”

“Have you ever discussed your feelings with Shilo?”

“Are you crazy, Dad? This isn’t America here. He’d never talk to me again and he’d make sure nobody else did either. And he’s right. There’s no place for anything like this in our lives. It’s forbidden in the Torah and that’s all there is to it.”

Joseph sighs deeply. There are so many answers and at the same time there are none. He chooses a path. “Gavriel, you are young, and this may be nothing more than the crush every boy feels for someone he respects: his basketball coach, his camp counselor, his older cousin. Or it may be more than that.” He sees Gavri wince with pain. “I can only give you one piece of advice, and it’s not even mine: be true to yourself, both because you owe it to yourself and because you’ll never be true to anyone else if you can’t manage at least that. It’s the only way a person has a chance at weathering life with any real success. Otherwise you wind up spending so much time and energy on being someone you’re not that there’s literally nothing left of you. That is, of course, what made me leave the family twenty years ago, but it may also be what helps you settle down into your life, marry, have a family. Just make sure you listen to yourself. That’s all I ask.”