My Michael (4 page)

Michael said:

"If we had met as children you would have sent me sprawling. I used to get knocked down by the stronger girls when I was in the lower grades. I was what you'd call a good boy: a bit lethargic, but hard-working, responsible, clean, and very honest. Nowadays I'm not at all lethargic, though."

I told Michael about the twins. I used to wrestle with them furiously. Later on, when I was twelve, I was in love with both of them. I called them Halziz—Halil and Aziz. They were beautiful boys. A pair of strong, obedient seamen from Captain Nemo's crew. They hardly ever spoke. They either kept quiet, or else emitted guttural sounds. They didn't like words. A pair of gray-brown wolves. Alert and white-fanged. Wild and dark. Pirates. What can you know about it, little Michael?

Then Michael told me about his mother:

"My mother died when I was three. I remember her white hands, but I can't remember her face. There are a few photographs, but it's hard to make them out. I was brought up by my father. My father brought me up as a little Jewish socialist, with stories about Hasmonean children,
shtetl
children, children of illegal immigrants, children on kibbutzim. Stories about starving children in India, in the October Revolution in Russia. D'Amicis'
The Heart.
Wounded children saving their towns. Children sharing their last crust. Exploited children, fighting children. My four aunts, my father's sisters, were quite different. A little boy should be clean, work hard, study hard, and get on in the world. A young doctor, helping his country and making a name for himself. A young lawyer, valiantly pleading before British judges, being reported in all the newspapers. On the day that independence was declared, my father changed his name from Ganz to Gonen. I am Michael Ganz. My friends in Holon still call me Ganz. But don't you call me Ganz, Hannah. You must go on calling me Michael."

We passed the wall of Schneller Barracks. Many years ago there was a Syrian orphanage here. The name reminded me of some ancient sadness, the reason for which I could not recall. A distant bell kept ringing from the east. I tried not to count its strokes. Michael and I had our arms round each other. My hand was frozen, Michael's was warm. Michael said jokingly:

"Cold hands, warm heart."

I said:

"My father had warm hands
and
a warm heart. He had a radio and electrical business, but he was a bad businessman. I remember him standing doing the washing-up with my mother's apron round him. Dusting. Beating bedspreads. Expertly making omelettes. Absently blessing the Hanukah lights. Treasuring the remarks of every good-for-nothing. Always trying to please. As if everyone was judging him, and he, exhausted, was forever being forced to do well in some endless examination, to atone for some forgotten shortcoming."

Michael said:

"The man you marry will have to be a very strong man."

A light drizzle began to fall, and there was a thick gray fog. The buildings looked weightless. In the district of Mekor Baruch a motorcycle went past us, scattering showers of droplets. Michael was sunk in thought. Outside the gate of my house I stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. He smoothed and dried my forehead. Timidly his lips touched my skin. He called me a cold, beautiful Jerusalemite. I told him I liked him. If I were his wife I would not let him be so thin. In the darkness he seemed frail. Michael smiled. If I were his wife, I said, I would teach him to answer when he was spoken to, instead of just smiling and smiling as if words didn't exist. Michael choked back his resentment, stared at the handrail of the crumbling steps and said:

"I want to marry you. Please don't answer immediately."

Drops of freezing rain began to fall again. I shivered. For an instant I was glad I did not know how old Michael was. Still, it was his fault I was shivering now. I could not invite him up to my room, of course, but why couldn't he suggest we go to his place? Twice after we had come out of the cinema Michael had tried to say something, and I had cut him short, saying, "That's trite." What it was that Michael had been trying to say I could not remember. Of course I would let him keep a cat. How peaceful he makes me feel. Why will the man I marry have to be very strong?

A
WEEK LATER
we went on a visit together to Kibbutz Tirat Yaar in the Jerusalem hills.

Michael had a school friend in Tirat Yaar, a girl from his class who had married a boy from the kibbutz. He begged me to go with him. It meant a lot to him, he said, to introduce me to his old friend.

Michael's friend was tall and lean and acid. With her gray hair and her pursed lips she looked like a wise old man. Two children of uncertain ages huddled in a corner of the room. Something in my face or in my dress made them collapse periodically into bursts of muffled laughter. I felt confused. For two hours Michael engaged in animated conversation with his friend and her husband. I was forgotten after the first three or four polite phrases. I was entertained with lukewarm tea and dry biscuits. For two hours I sat and glowered, fastening and unfastening the catch of Michael's briefcase. What had he brought me here for? Why had I allowed myself to be talked into coming? What sort of a man had I landed myself with? Hard-working, responsible, honest, neat—and utterly boring. And his pathetic jokes. Such a dull man shouldn't be forever trying to be amusing. But Michael did everything he could to be witty and gay. They exchanged boring stories about boring schoolteachers. The private life of a gym teacher called Yehiam Peled reduced Michael and his friend to howls of vicious schoolboy laughter. There then followed an angry argument about a meeting between King Abdullah of Transjordan and Golda Meir on the eve of the War of Independence. Michael's friend's husband thumped on the table, and even Michael raised his voice. When he shouted his voice was frail and tremulous. It was the first time I had seen him in the company of other people. I had been wrong about him.

Afterwards we walked in the dark to the main road. Tirat Yaar was connected to the main Jerusalem road by a lane lined with cypresses. A cruel wind nipped me all over. In the afterglow of sunset the Jerusalem hills seemed to be plotting some mischief. Michael walked beside me, silent. He could not think of a single thing to say to me. We were strangers to each other, he and I. For one strange moment, I remember, I was overcome by a sharp feeling that I was not awake, or that the time was not the present. I'd been through all this before. Or else someone, years before, had warned me against walking in the dark along this black lane next to an evil man. Time was no longer a smooth, even flow. It had become a series of abrupt rushes. It may have been when I was a child. Or in a dream, or a frightening story. All of a sudden I was terrified of the dim figure walking silently beside me. His coat collar was turned up to hide the lower part of his face. His body was thin as a wraith. The rest of his features were hidden by a black leather student's hat pulled down over his eyes. Who is he? What do you know about him? He's not your brother, no relation at all, not even an old friend, but a strange shadow, far from human habitation, in the dark, late at night. Maybe he's planning to assault you. Maybe he's ill. You have heard nothing about him from anyone responsible. Why doesn't he talk to me? Why is he all wrapped up in his own thoughts? Why has he brought me here? What is he up to? It's night. In the country. I'm alone. He's alone. What if everything he has told me was a deliberate lie. He isn't a student. His name isn't Michael Gonen. He has escaped from an institution. He's dangerous. When did all this happen to me before? Somebody warned me, a long time ago, that this was how it would happen. What are those long-drawn-out sounds in the dark fields? You can't even see the light of the stars through the curtain of cypresses. There is a presence in the orchard. If I scream and scream, who will hear me? A stranger, walking with fast, clumsy steps, heedless of my pace. I fall back a little, deliberately. He doesn't notice. My teeth are chattering with cold and fear; the winter wind howls and bites. That silhouette doesn't belong to me; it's distant, wrapped up in itself, as if I were just a figment of its thoughts, with no reality of my own. I'm real, Michael. I'm cold. He didn't hear me. Maybe I wasn't speaking aloud.

"I'm cold, and I can't run this fast," I shouted as loud as I could.

Like a man distracted from his thoughts Michael hurled back his reply:

"Not long to go now. We're almost at the bus stop. Be patient."

As soon as he had spoken, he vanished once more into the depths of his great overcoat. A lump rose in my throat, and my eyes filled. I felt insulted. Humiliated. Frightened. I wanted to hold his hand. I only knew his hand. I didn't know him. At all.

The cold wind spoke to the cypresses in a hushed, hostile tongue. There was no happiness in the world. Not in the crumbling pathway, not in the darkling hills around.

"Michael," I said, despairing. "Michael, last week you said you liked the word 'ankle.' Tell me this, for heaven's sake: Do you realize that my shoes are full of water and my ankles hurt as if I were walking barefoot through a field of thorns? Tell me, who's to blame?"

Michael turned round sharply, frighteningly. He glared at me in confusion. Then he put his wet cheek against my face, and pressed his warm lips to my neck like a suckling child. I could feel every bristle on his cheek against the skin of my neck. I enjoyed the feel of the rough cloth of his coat. The cloth was a warm, quiet sigh. He unbuttoned his coat and drew me inside. We were together. I breathed in his smell. He felt very real. So did I. I was not a figment of his thoughts, he was not a fear inside me. We were real. I took in his pent-up panic. I reveled in it. "You're mine," I whispered. "Don't ever be distant," I whispered. My lips touched his forehead and his fingers found the nape of my neck. His touch was cautious and sensitive. Suddenly I was reminded of the spoon in the cafeteria in Terra Sancta, and how it had enjoyed being held in his fingers. If Michael had been an evil man, then surely his fingers, too, would have been evil.

A
FORTNIGHT
or so before the wedding Michael and I went to see his father and his aunts in Holon, and my mother and my brother's family at Kibbutz Nof Harim.

Michael's father lived in a cramped and gloomy two-room flat in a "Workers' Dwelling" housing project. Our visit coincided with a power failure. Yehezkel Gonen introduced himself to me by the light of a sooty paraffin lamp. He had a cold, and refused to kiss me out of fear I might catch it from him just before my wedding. He was clad in a warm dressing gown, and his face was sallow. He told me he was entrusting a precious burden to my care—his Michael. Then he was embarrassed and regretted what he had said. He tried to pass it off as a joke. Anxiously, shyly, the old man enumerated all the illnesses Michael had had as a child. He lingered only on a very bad fever which had nearly proved fatal to Michael when he was ten. He stressed, finally, that Michael had not been ill since he was fourteen. Despite everything, our Michael, though not one of the strongest, was a decidedly healthy young man.

I recalled that when my father was selling a second-hand radio he used to talk to the customer in the same tones: frankness, fairness, a reserved familiarity, a quiet eagerness to please.

While Yehezkel Gonen addressed me in this tone of courteous helpfulness, with his son he barely exchanged two words. He merely said that he had been amazed to receive his letter, with the news it contained. He regretted that he could not make us some tea or coffee, as the electricity was cut off and he did not have a paraffin stove or even a gas ring. When Tova, God rest her, was alive—Tova was Michael's mother ... if only she could have been with us on this occasion, everything would have been more festive. Tova had been a remarkable woman. He wouldn't talk about her now because he didn't want to mingle sorrow with gladness. One day he would tell me a very sad story.

"What can I offer you instead? Ah, a chocolate."

So, feverishly, as if he had been accused of neglecting his duty, he rummaged in his chest of drawers and produced an ancient box of chocolates, still in its original gift wrapping. "Here you are, my dears, help yourselves. Please.

"I am sorry, I didn't quite catch what it is you are studying at the University. Ah yes, of course, Hebrew literature. I shall remember in future. Under Professor Klausner? Yes, Klausner is a great man, even though he doesn't approve of the Labor Movement. I have a copy somewhere of one of the volumes of his
History of the Second Temple.
I'll find it to show you. In fact, I'd like to give you the book as a gift. It will be more useful to you than to me: Your life is still ahead of you, mine is behind me now. It won't be easy to find it with the electricity not working, but for my daughter-in-law nothing is too much trouble."

While Yehezkel Gonen was bending down, wheezing, to look for the book on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, three of the four aunts arrived. They, too, had been invited to meet me. In the confusion caused by the power failure the aunts had been late, and had not managed to find Aunt Gitta and bring her with them. That was why only the three of them had come. In my honor, and in honor of the occasion, they had taken a taxi all the way from Tel Aviv to Holon so as to be on time. It had been pitch dark all the way.

The aunts turned to me with a slightly exaggerated sympathy, as if they saw through all my schemes but had decided to forgive me. They were delighted to make my acquaintance. Michael had written such nice things about me in his letter. How glad they were to discover for themselves that he had not been exaggerating. Aunt Leah had a friend in Jerusalem, a Mr. Kadishman, who was a cultured and influential man, and at Aunt Leah's request he had already made inquiries about my family. So the aunts, all four of them, knew that I came from a good home.

Aunt Jenia asked if she could have a few words with me in private. "I'm sorry, I know it's not very nice to whisper in company, but there's no need to insist on strict politeness in the family circle, and I suppose from now on you're one of the family."