My Michael (11 page)

Now he stood bent over the sink as if his neck were broken, his gestures very weary. He washed the glasses in hot water, then rinsed them in cold. I crept up behind him on bare feet. I kissed his close-cropped head, threw both my arms round his shoulders, and took hold of his firm, downy hand. I was glad that he could feel my breast against his back, because since the beginning of my pregnancy my husband and I had been distant. Michael's hand was wet from washing the glasses. He had a dirty bandage on one of his fingers. Perhaps he had cut himself and not bothered to tell me. The bandage, too, was wet. He turned his long, thin face towards me, and it seemed more emaciated than it had been on the day we first met in Terra Sancta. I noticed that his whole body was emaciated. His cheekbones stood out. A fine line had begun to show by his right nostril. I touched his cheek. He showed no sign of surprise. As if this was what he had been waiting for all these days. As if he had known in advance that it was this evening that the change would come.

Once upon a time there was a little girl called Hannah, and she was given a new dress, white as snow, to greet the Sabbath. She had a pretty pair of shoes, too, of real suede, and her curls were tied up with a pretty silk scarf, because little Hannah had lovely curly hair. Now Hannah went out, and she saw an old charcoal-seller bowed down under the weight of his black sack. The Sabbath was approaching. Hannah hurried to help the charcoal-seller carry his sack of charcoal, because little Hannele had a kind heart. But then her white dress was covered with charcoal and her suede shoes were filthy. Hannah burst out crying bitterly because little Hannele was a good girl, always tidy, always neat. The kindly moon in the sky heard her crying and sent his beams down to play on her gently and to turn every smudge into a golden flower and every spot into a silvery star. For there is no sadness in the world that cannot be turned into great joy.

I lulled the baby to sleep and went into my husband's room wearing a long, transparent nightdress which came down to my ankles. Michael put a marker in his book, closed it, put down his pipe, and switched off the table lamp. Then he stood up and put his arms around my waist. He did not speak.

Afterwards, I spoke the deepest words that I could find in my heart: Tell me something, Michael—why did you say once that you liked the word "ankle"? I like you for liking the word "ankle." Maybe it's not too late to tell you that you're a gentle and sensitive person. You're rare, Michael. You will write your paper, Michael, and I shall make the fair copy. Your paper will be very thorough, and Yair and I will be very proud of you. It will make your father happy, too. Everything will change. We shall be released. I love you. I loved you when we met in Terra Sancta. Maybe it isn't too late to tell you that your fingers fascinate me. I don't know what words I can use to tell you how much I want to be your wife. How very, very much.

Michael was asleep. Could I blame him? I had spoken to him in my gentlest voice and he had been so desperately tired. Night after night he had sat at his desk till two or three in the morning, bent over his work, chewing on his empty pipe. For my sake he had taken on the job of marking first-year essays and even translating technical articles from English. With the money he earned he had bought me an electric fire, and an expensive baby carriage for Yair with springs and a colored canopy. He was so tired. My voice was so soft. He had fallen asleep.

I whispered to my absent husband the most tender thing I had in me. About the twins. And about the pent-up girl who was queen of the twins. I hid nothing. All night long I played in the dark with the fingers of his left hand and he buried his head in the bedclothes and felt nothing. Once again I slept beside my husband.

In the morning Michael was his usual self, subdued and efficient. Recently a fine line had begun to show under his left nostril. As yet it was barely visible, but if deeper wrinkles began to spread and cover his face, then my Michael would grow to look more and more like his father.

I
AM AT REST
. Events can touch me no more. This is my place. Here I am. As I am. There is a sameness in the days. There is a sameness in me. Even in my new summer dress with its high waistline, I am still the same. I was carefully made and beautifully wrapped, tied up with a pretty red ribbon and put on display, bought and unwrapped, used and set aside. There is a dreary sameness in the days. And especially when summer reigns in Jerusalem.

What I have just written is a weary lie. There was a day, for instance, late in July 1953; a bright blue day full of sounds and sights. Our handsome greengrocer early in the morning, our Persian greengrocer Elijah Mossiah and his pretty daughter Levana. Mr. Guttmann the electrician from David Yelin Street promised to mend the iron within two days, and promised to keep his word. He also offered to sell me a yellow light bulb to keep mosquitoes away from the balcony at night. Yair was two years and three months old. He fell down the stairs, and so he beat them with his tiny fists. Spots of blood appeared on his knees. I dressed the wound without looking at the child's face. The previous evening we had seen a modern Italian film,
The Bicycle Thief,
at the Edison Cinema. At lunchtime Michael expressed reserved approval. He had bought an evening paper in town which mentioned South Korea and gangs of infiltrators in the Negev. There was a squabble between two Orthodox women in our street. An ambulance siren sounded in Rashi Street or one of the other streets nearby. A neighbor grumbled to me about the high price and poor quality of fish. Michael wore glasses because his eyes hurt. They were only reading glasses. I bought an ice cream for Yair and another for myself in Cafe Allenby in King George Street. I spilled ice cream on the sleeve of my green blouse.

The Kamnitzer family upstairs had a son called Yoram, a dreamy, fair-haired boy of fourteen. Yoram was a poet. His poems were about loneliness. He brought me his manuscripts to read because he had heard that I had studied literature in my youth. I was the judge of his work. His voice trembled, his lips quivered, and a green flicker shone in his eyes. Yoram brought me a new poem, which he had dedicated to the memory of the poetess Rachel. Yoram's poem compared a life without love to a barren wilderness. A solitary wayfarer searches for a spring in the desert, but is led astray by mirages. By the side of the real spring he would finally collapse and die.

"Imagine a well brought up, pious, Orthodox boy like you writing love poems," I laughed.

For an instant Yoram had the strength to join in my laughter, but he had already begun to grip the arms of his chair and his fingers were pale as a girl's. He laughed with me, but suddenly his eyes filled. He snatched up the sheet of paper with the poem on it and crumpled it in his clenched hand. Suddenly he turned and fled from my apartment. By the door he paused.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Gonen," he whispered. "Goodbye."

Regret.

That evening Aunt Leah's friend, old Mr. Avraham Kadish-man, came to visit us. We drank coffee and he criticized the leftist government. Were the days all still the same? Days passed without leaving a trace. I owe myself a solemn duty to record in this journal the passing of every day, every hour, for my days are mine and I am at rest and the days flash past like hills seen from the train on the way to Jerusalem. I shall die Michael will die the Persian greengrocer Elijah Mossiah will die Levana will die Yoram will die Kadishman will die all the neighbors all the people will die all Jerusalem will die and there will be a strange train full of strange people and they like us will stand at the window and watch strange hills flashing past. I cannot even kill an ant on the kitchen floor without thinking of myself.

And I also think of delicate things deep down inside my body. Delicate things which are mine, all mine, like my heart and my nerves and my womb. They are mine, they are my very own, but I shall never be allowed to see them or touch them because everything in the world is distance.

If only I could overpower the engine and be the princess of the train, manipulate two lissom twins as if they were extensions of me, left hand and right hand.

Or if only it could really happen that on the seventeenth of August, 1953, at six o'clock in the morning, a Bokharian taxi driver named Rahamim Rahamimov would finally arrive, powerfully built and smiling, on my doorstep, knock on the door and ask politely if Miss Yvonne Azulai is ready to leave. I would be absolutely ready to drive with him to Lydda Airport to fly Olympic to the snowbound Russian steppes at night in a sledge wrapped in bearskins the silhouette of the driver's massive skull and on the huge icy expanse lean wolves' eyes gleam. The rays of the moon fall on the neck of the solitary tree. Stop, driver, stop a moment, turn your head and let me see your face. His face is a woodcarving, coarse-grained in the soft white light. Icicles hang from the end of his tangled mustache.

And the submarine
Nautilus
existed and still exists, gliding through the depths of the sea, huge, brightly lit and soundless in a gray ocean crisscrossed by warm currents and tangled underwater caverns at the roots of coral reefs in the archipelago, gliding deeper and deeper with powerful thrusts, it knows where it is going and why and is not at rest, unlike a stone, unlike a weary woman.

And off the coast of Newfoundland, beneath the northern lights, the British destroyer
Dragon
patrols watchfully and her crew knows no rest for fear of Moby Dick, the noble white whale. In September
Dragon
will sail from Newfoundland to New Caledonia to carry supplies to the garrison there. Please,
Dragon,
don't forget the port of Haifa and Palestine and faroff Hannah.

All these years Michael has nursed a hope of exchanging our apartment in Mekor Baruch for one in Rehavia or Beit Hakerem. He does not like living here. His aunts, too, wonder insistently why Michael lives surrounded by Orthodox people instead of in a civilized neighborhood. A scholar needs peace and quiet, the aunts maintain, and here the neighbors are noisy.

It was my fault that we had still not managed to save enough even for a deposit on a new apartment, although Michael was considerate enough not to mention this fact to his aunts. Every year, with the return of spring, I am overcome by a mania for shopping. Electrical gadgets, a bright gray curtain to cover a whole wall, lots and lots of new clothes. Before I was married I bought few clothes. As a student I used to wear the same clothes right through the winter, a blue woolen dress my mother had knitted me or else a pair of brown corduroy trousers and a chunky red sweater such as girls at the University used to wear at that time to produce a casual effect. Nowadays I grew tired of new dresses after a few weeks. Every spring I felt a desire for new purchases. I stormed feverishly from shop to shop, as if the big prize was waiting for me somewhere, but always somewhere else.

Michael wondered why I no longer wore the dress with the high waistline. I had been so pleased with it when I had bought it less than six weeks before. He fought back his surprise and silently nodded his head up and down as if expressing an understanding which made my blood boil. Maybe that was why I went into town with the express intention of shocking him with my prodigality. I loved his self-restraint. I wanted to shatter it.

***

Dreams.

Hard things plot against me every night. The twins practice throwing hand grenades before dawn among the ravines of the Judean Desert southeast of Jericho. Their twin bodies move in unison. Submachine guns on their shoulders. Worn commando uniforms stained with grease. A blue vein stands out on Halil's forehead. Aziz crouches, hurls his body forward. Halil drops his head. Aziz uncurls and throws. The dry shimmer of the explosion. The hills echo and re-echo, the Dead Sea glows pale behind them like a lake of burning oil.

T
HERE ARE
old peddlers who wander around Jerusalem. They are not like the poor charcoal-seller in the story of little Hannah's dress. Their faces are not lit by an inner glow. They are enveloped in an icy hatred. Old peddlers. Weird craftsmen wandering about the city. They are weird. I have known them for years, them and their cries. Even when I was five or six I was terrified of them. I shall describe these, too—then perhaps they will stop frightening me at night. I try to decipher their ways, their orbits, to guess beforehand on which day each of them will come to cry his wares in our streets. Surely they, too, are subject to some scheme or regular pattern. "
Gla-zier, gla-zier
"—his voice is hoarse and stark. He carries no tools, no panes of glass, as if resigned to receiving no response to his cry. "
Alte zachen, alte shich
"—a great sack on his shoulder like the burglar in an illustration in a children's story. "
Pri-mus stoves, pri-mus
"—a heavy man with a huge, bony skull like the archetypal blacksmith. "
Mattresses, mattresses
"—the word resounding in his throat with an almost immoral suggestiveness. The knife-grinder carries about with him a wooden wheel worked by a treadle. He has no teeth, and his ears are hairy and protruding. Like a bat. Old craftsmen, weird peddlers, year after year they wander about the streets of Jerusalem untouched by time. As if Jerusalem is a wraiths' castle in the north, and they the avenging spirits lying in wait.

I was born in Kiryat Shmuel, on the edge of Katamon, during the Feast of Succot in 1930. Sometimes I have a strange feeling that a bleak wasteland divides my parents' home from my husband's. I have never revisited the street where I was born. One Sabbath, in the morning, Michael, Yair, and I went for a walk to the edge of Talbiyeh. I refused to go any further. Like a spoiled child I stamped my foot. No, no. My husband and my child laughed at me, but they gave in.

In Mea Shearim, in Beit Yisrael, Sanhedria, Kerem Avraham, Achva, Zichron Moshe, Nahalat Shiva live Orthodox people, Ashke-nazim with fur hats and Sephardim with striped robes. Old women huddle silently on low stools, as if there were spread out before them not a small town but a broad expanse of country, whose furthest horizons they must scan daily with the eyes of a hawk.