My Michael (17 page)

Aunt Jenia left. I could hear her anxious footsteps on the stairs and on the stone-paved yard below. I remained standing just as I was when she walked in, leaning on the ironing board and holding a hot iron. Michael spun around and dashed to the balcony as if he meant to call after her "Auntie Jenia, Auntie Jenia."

A moment later he came in again. He closed the shutters, silently shut the windows, and then went out to lock the kitchen door. As he came along the passage he uttered a low sound. Perhaps he had suddenly caught sight of his face in the mirror by the coat-stand. He opened the closet, took out his dark suit, and transferred the trouser belt. "My father has passed on," he said softly, not looking at me. As if I had not been there while his aunt was talking.

I put the iron down on the floor of the closet, put the ironing board away in the bathroom, and went to Yair's room. I stopped him playing, wrote out a note, and sent him with it to the Kam-nitzers. "Grandpa Yehezkel is very ill," I told him before he left. A twisted echo of my words came back to me from the stairs, as Yair excitedly proclaimed to all the children in the house: "My Grandpa Zalman is very ill and my parents are going to make him get better soon."

Michael put his wallet in his inside pocket and buttoned up the jacket of the dark suit which had once belonged to my late father, and which my mother had altered to fit him. Twice he buttoned it up wrongly. He put on his hat. By mistake he picked up his battered black briefcase, then put it back with an irritated gesture.

"I'm ready to go," he said. "Perhaps some of the things she said were rather uncalled for, but she's quite right. It shouldn't have happened like that. It's not right. To take an honest, upright old man, not very strong and his health none too good, and suddenly throw him down on the sidewalk in the middle of town in broad daylight, like a dangerous criminal. It's indecent, I tell you, Hannah, it's cruel, it's ... cruel. Indecent."

As Michael said the words "cruel, indecent," his whole body began to shake. Like a child waking up in the night in winter and finding, instead of his mother, a strange face peering at him out of the dark.

M
ICHAEL ABSTAINED
from shaving during the week following the funeral. I do not think he did this out of respect for religious tradition, or even in deference to his father's wishes (Yehezkel had used to describe himself as a practicing atheist). He may have felt that it would have been degrading to shave during his week of mourning. When we are hemmed in by grief we sometimes find trivial things bitterly degrading. Michael had always hated shaving. Dark bristles covered his jaws and gave him a furious expression.

With his bristles Michael seemed to me like a new man. At times I had the feeling that his body was stronger than it really was. His neck had grown lean. There were wrinkles around his mouth which suggested a cold irony which was not in Michael. There was a tired look in his eyes as if he had been worn out by hard manual labor. My husband in his days of mourning had the look of a grimy laborer from one of the little workshops in Agrippa Street.

Most of the day Michael would sit in an armchair wearing warmly lined slippers and a light gray dressing gown with dark gray checks. When I put the daily paper in his lap he bent over to read it. If the paper fell on the floor he did not trouble to pick it up. I could not tell whether he was pensive or vacant. Once he asked me to pour him a glass of brandy. I did as he asked, but he seemed to have forgotten. He stared at me in surprise and did not touch the drink. And once, after listening to the news, he remarked: "How strange." He said no more. I did not ask. The electric light shone yellow.

Michael was very quiet in the days following his father's death. Our house was quiet, too. At times it seemed as if we were all sitting waiting for a message. If Michael said anything to me or to his son, he spoke softly, as if it were I who was in mourning. At night I wanted him very much. The feeling was painful. All the years we had been married I had never felt how degrading this dependence could be.

One evening my husband put on his glasses and stood leaning over with his hands on his desk. His head was bent, his back drooping. I came into the study and saw Yehezkel Gonen in my husband. I shuddered. With his bent head, his sloping shoulders, his unsteady bearing, Michael seemed to be acting his father. I recalled our wedding day, the ceremony on the roof terrace of the old Rabbinate building opposite Steimatsky's bookshop. Then, too, Michael had looked so much like his father that I had mistaken each for the other. I have not forgotten.

Michael spent his mornings sitting on the balcony, following with his gaze the antics of the cats in the yard below. There was calm. I had never seen Michael in a state of calm before. He had always been rushing to catch up with his work. Pious neighbors came in to express their sympathy. Michael received them with cold politeness. He eyed the Kamnitzer family and Mr. Glick through his glasses like a stern schoolteacher staring at a pupil who has let him down, until their condolences stuck in their throats.

Mrs. Zeldin came in hesitantly. She had come to suggest that Yair should stay with her until the period of mourning was over. A grim smile played round Michael's mouth.

"Why?" he said. "It is not I who have passed on."

"Heaven forbid, perish the thought," said his visitor, startled. "I only thought, perhaps..."

"Perhaps what?" Michael cut in sternly.

The old schoolmistress was taken aback. She hurriedly took her leave. As she went out, she apologized as if she had offended us.

Mr. Kadishman arrived, wearing a black serge suit, a solemn expression on his face. He announced that he had enjoyed a slight acquaintance with the deceased through Miss Leah Ganz. Despite a certain difference in their political outlooks, he had always held the deceased in the deepest respect. The deceased had been one of the few honest men in the Labor Movement. Not one of the hypocrites, but one of the misguided. "He is not lost, but gone before," he added.

"He is certainly not lost," Michael agreed coldly. I suppressed a smile.

The husband of Michael's friend from Tirat Yaar appeared at the door. He declined to enter, out of a natural delicacy of feeling. He wished to convey his sympathy. He asked me to tell Michael he had called. On Liora's behalf as well, of course.

On the fourth evening we had a visit from the professor of geology and two assistant lecturers. They sat on the sofa in the living room, facing Michael's armchair. They sat with stiff backs and with their knees together, considering it improper to lean back. I sat on a stool by the door. Michael asked me to make coffee for our three guests and a glass of tea for him, without lemon because of his heartburn. He inquired about a survey of Nahal Arugot in the Negev. When one of the young men started to speak, he turned his face to the window with a sudden, violent spasm, as if a spring in him had broken. His shoulders shook. I was alarmed, because I had a feeling that he was convulsed with laughter which he was unable to suppress. Then he turned his head back again. His face was tired and expressionless. He apologized, and demanded that they resume what they had been saying. "Please don't leave anything out; I want to hear everything." The young man who had been speaking took up his remarks precisely where he had left off. Michael shot me a gray look, as if he were amazed by some detail in my appearance he had never noticed before. A night breeze banged the shutter against the wall of the house. It seemed as if time were taking on visible features. The electric light. The pictures. The furniture. The shadows cast by the furniture. The trembling line between the light patches and the shadows.

The professor suddenly came to life and interrupted his assistant's remarks:

"The outline you drew up for us at the beginning of the month has not proved disappointing, Gonen. The facts agree with your hypothesis. Hence our mixed feelings: we are disappointed at the results of the drilling, but at the same time impressed by your thoroughness."

Then he added an involved observation about the thankless-ness of practical as against theoretical research. He stressed the importance of creative intuition for both kinds of research.

Michael observed drily:

"Winter will soon be upon us. The nights are growing longer. Longer and colder."

The two assistants looked at each other, then glanced sideways at the professor. The old man nodded energetically to show that he had grasped their hint. He stood up and said solemnly:

"We all share your grief, Gonen, and we all look forward to your return. Try to be strong, and ... be strong, Gonen."

The visitors took their leave. Michael accompanied them out into the vestibule. As he hurried forward to help the professor on with his heavy overcoat, he moved somehow clumsily, and was compelled to apologize with a faint smile. From the beginning of the evening up to that moment I had found him impressive, and so his faint smile pained me. His politeness sprang from deference, not from sympathy. He followed his visitors as far as the door. When they had gone he went back into the study. He was silent. His face was towards the dark window and his back towards me. On the fringe of the silence his voice spoke; he did not turn his shoulders. He said:

"Another glass of tea, please, Hannah, and would you mind turning off the main light? When Father asked us to give the child a rather old-fashioned name we ought to have deferred to his wishes. When I was ten I had a very bad fever. All night, night after night, Father sat up by my bedside. He kept putting fresh damp cloths on my forehead, and singing over and over again the only lullaby he knew. He sang out of tune and flat. The song went like this:
Time to sleep, the day is done, In the sea has set the sun. Stars are shining in the sky, Lulla, lulla, lullaby.

"Have I ever told you, Hannah, that Aunt Jenia used to try by every means she could to find a second wife for Father? She rarely came to visit us without bringing some friend or acquaintance with her. Aging nurses, Polish immigrants, skinny divorcees. The women would begin by advancing on me, with hugs and kisses, boxes of sweets and cooing noises. Father used to pretend not to understand Aunt Jenia's intention. He was polite. He would start talking about the High Commissioner's latest edicts, and such like.

"When I had the fever I had a very high temperature, and the perspiration poured out of me all night long. The bedclothes were soaked. Every two hours Father carefully changed the sheets. He took care not to move me roughly, but he always overdid the caution. I would wake up and cry. Before dawn Father would wash all the sheets in the bath, and then go out in the dark and hang them out to dry on the washline outside our building. The reason I didn't want lemon in my tea was that the heartburn is very bad, Hannah. When the fever abated Father went out and bought me a checkers set at a discount from our next-door neighbor Glober-man's shop. He tried to lose every game we played. To make me happy he would groan and hold his head in his hands, and call me 'little genius, little professor, little Grandpa Zalman.' Once he told me the story of the Mendelssohn family, and jokingly compared himself to the middle Mendelssohn, who was the son of one great Mendelssohn and the father of another. He prophesied a great future for me. He made me cup after cup of warm milk and honey,
without the skin. If I was stubborn and refused to drink, he resorted to temptations and bribes. He would flatter my common sense. That was how I recovered. If you wouldn't mind, Hannah, could you bring me my pipe? No, not that one, the English one. The smallest one. Yes, that's it. Thank you. I recovered, and Father caught the fever from me and was very ill. He lay for three weeks in the hospital where Aunt Jenia worked. Aunt Leah volunteered to look after me while he was ill. After two months they told me that he had only escaped death by good luck or a miracle. Father himself joked about it a lot. He quoted a proverb which says that great men die young, and he said that fortunately for him he was only a very ordinary man. I swore before the picture of Herzl in the living room that if Father died suddenly I would find some way of dying too, instead of going to an orphanage or to Aunt Leah. Next week, Hannah, we'll buy Yair an electric train. A big one. Like the one he saw in the window of Freimann and Bein's shoestore in Jaffa Road. Yair is very fond of mechanical things. I'll give him the alarm clock which doesn't work. I'll teach him to take it to pieces and put it together again. Maybe Yair will grow up to be an engineer. Have you noticed how the boy is fascinated by motors and springs and machines? Have you ever heard of a child of four and a half who can understand a general explanation of how a radio works? I've never thought of myself as outstandingly brilliant. You know that. I'm not a genius or whatever my father supposed or said he supposed. I'm nothing special, Hannah, but you must try as hard as you can to love Yair. It will be better for you, too, if you do ... No, I'm not suggesting that you neglect the child. Nonsense. But I have the feeling that you're not wild about him. One's got to be wild, Hannah. Sometimes one even has to lose all sense of proportion. What I'm trying to say is, I'd like you to start ... I don't know quite how to explain this sort of sentiment. Let's forget it. Once, years ago, you and I were sitting in some cafe, and I looked at you and I looked at myself and I said to myself, I'm not cut out to be a dream-prince or a knight on horseback, as they say. You're pretty, Hannah. You're very pretty. Did I tell you what Father said to me last week in Holon? He said that you seemed to him to be a poetess even though you don't write poems. Look, Hannah, I don't know why I'm telling you all this now. You're not saying anything. One of us is always listening and not saying anything. Why did I tell you all that just now? Certainly not to offend you or hurt you. Look, we shouldn't have insisted on the name Yair. After all, the name wouldn't have affected our regard for the child. And we trampled on a very delicate sentiment. One day, Hannah, I'll have to ask you why you chose me out of all the interesting men you must have met. But now it's late and I'm talking too much and probably surprising you. Will you start getting the beds ready, Hannah? I'll come and help you in a moment. Let's go to sleep, Hannah. Father is dead. I'm a father myself. All this ... all these arrangements suddenly seem like some idiotic children's game. I remember we used to play once, at the edge of our housing project, on an empty site near where the sands began: we stood in a long line and the first one threw the ball and ran to the end of the line until the first became the last and the last became the first, over and over again. I can't remember what the point of the game was. I can't remember how you won the game. I can't even remember if there were any rules or if there was any method in the madness. You've left the light on in the kitchen."