The Remains of Love (18 page)

What does Hemda mean? Elik asked her the first time he dared to address her, and she replied, it’s a kind of ecstasy, a short-lived happiness, and he nodded seriously and repeated her name, stiffening it with his strange pronunciation, and she was enchanted by his seriousness, imagining mistakenly that as he accepted her name, so he would accept her, wholeheartedly and with dignity, even if without joy.

How hard it was in those days to salvage even a little happiness, like the futile attempt to extract a drop of honeydew from a withered flower, and that’s what her Elik was: a desiccated bud, decaying before he could blossom, as she was too, and all of those around her, traumatised by the casualties of the great world war, traumatised by the casualties of the regional war, refusing to be comforted. How ashamed she was of him in those days, even at the outset of their love, and how ashamed she was of herself when she realised how thoroughly she had imbibed the values of her father, the ethos of heroism and valour. She wanted her loved one to fight on her behalf, fight for her country, and thereby expunge for her the stain of her disabled childhood, and prove to her father she was worthy, but he wandered around the farm, nice to look at and as thin as a girl with his murmuring heart while his contemporaries were at war, incapable even of grasping the horrors haunting her mind.

Because she longed to sacrifice him, and perhaps that’s why she chose him, an orphan innocent lamb whose parents sent him far away to keep him safe. She shifts painfully in her bed; even if it wasn’t his absolute death she saw before her eyes, but only his readiness to die for her, for her kibbutz, for her country, he wouldn’t understand, stranger that he was.

Some thirty years later, did she try to sacrifice him again for the protection of her son, and this time did she succeed? When young Avni, superbly attractive with his black hair and his blue eyes, was training his body in readiness for his call-up day, returning from a run and doing press-ups on the sparse patch of grass by the entrance to the building, panting noisily, chest rising and falling, she looked on from the kitchen window, admiring his muscular back and his strong shoulders; how can I foil your plans, my dear son, after all I have no life without you – until her salvation came from an unexpected quarter, her salvation which was also her disaster. A few weeks after her son enlisted in the combat unit for which he’d been training a whole year her husband, his father, fell ill with the disease he was to die of, and suddenly she had a compelling excuse. You’ll have to serve closer to home so you can spend more time with your father, who knows how long he can hang on, the army isn’t going anywhere but your father is, and Avner submitted at once. Without a struggle he abandoned his greatest ambition and applied for a transfer to a base closer to home, so he could come round every evening to see his father staring into a static void, expressing no gratitude and showing no interest in him, unaware of the secret deal that had been stitched up behind his back, fading steadily but not dying, not absolutely, not even prepared to perform the single gesture which would have absolved his son from the shame of deserting his post and from the torments of guilt, and it was only a whole year after his discharge from the army that his father left this world, having forced them to make disreputable calculations of profit and loss, opportunity and advantage, and ostensibly to wait for his death although in fact they had been waiting for years to be allowed into his life.

How dark are the deals woven in the interior of the house, in the name of love and sacrifice, without contract and without witnesses, without words and without mercy, deals even Satan wouldn’t have thought of, hiding behind our inadequacy we decide with an idle thought the fates of those dearest to us, and she purses her lips, refusing to submit to the laden spoon that’s trying to penetrate her mouth. Never has she seen things so clearly, never before have the days of her life coalesced before her into a web devoid of pity from beginning to end, and it seems to her now her bones are cracking under the weight of consciousness. What desperate deal brought her into the world, and what deal will take her out of it, exactly as her husband was taken, and she covers her face with her hands because here he is approaching her with a metal object in his hand, leave me alone, Elik, this isn’t the way things are done in the family structure, the family battlefield would be more accurate, your punishment won’t come to you at the hands of the one you have injured but at the hands of the one you love most, the one on whose behalf you sinned.

But where is this loved one and where is her love for him? It seems her heart has dried up over the years and the conditions for love are no longer there, like water in the desert; even if you succeed in getting to it by some miraculous means, the sun will vaporise it in a moment. And perhaps it never was there at all, just a mirage, sweet memories that have changed their taste, as after betrayal. Can you delight in memories of love, after betrayal has become evident? Even your most beautiful memories will be stolen from you, and yet in spite of herself her lips are drawn into a smile when she sees young Avni running to meet her and she spreads her arms in welcome, the scent of freshly mown grass enfolding their embrace in an enchanted robe against the backdrop of the silvery peak of Mount Hermon. Again and again he runs to meet her with a charming smile, his legs plump, a shirt with green and white stripes on his solid body, from a distance he looks like a tiny animal springing from the ground, and she doesn’t run to him to shorten the journey, he likes it when she waits for him rooted to the spot with arms outstretched as he comes closer and closer, his panting preceding him a little, until he falls into her embrace, and this moment when her arms are wrapped around him and his body clings to her wobbly body and sinks down on the lawn with its freshly mown grass, this is apparently her moment of short-lived joy, her
hemda
moment.

When she smiles some rough liquid is forced into her mouth and she grimaces, refuses to swallow, what has Elik prepared for her, has he burned the stew again, will she have to scrub the bottom of the pan and cook something else in a hurry? When they left the kibbutz and settled on the outskirts of the city with two moody adolescents, the four of them were surprised by the sudden need to eat, the daily burden that was almost alien to them, feeding four people three times a day, far from the nit-picking but comfortable ambience of the dining hall. A time for transformations, although it didn’t work out well, a time for agreements, for recognitions, very nice too, or perhaps not quite so nice: this is your house, these are your children, this is your husband, he’ll do the cooking, you’ll do the cleaning, he’ll work in the bank, you’ll teach in the school, but how she hated his cooking. Gloom took hold of her whenever the four of them sat at the table confronting another mess of burnt lentils, tasteless rice; there were only a few dishes he had learned to cook and almost always he blackened the edges of the pan, and yet every evening he expected gratitude and admiration, and every evening he disappointed and was disappointed. Even Dina he used to scold when she had difficulty praising his cuisine, and she herself wondered about love, does it, like faith, transcend the mundane daily details, or is it precisely those details that inform it? If she loved him more, would she have loved the meals he served up too? After all, it was the essence of his personality that he presented them with every evening in the naïve expectation that they would find it palatable; until one day when he treated them yet again to a burnt offering she rose in fury and threw the whole dish including the pan into the bin and marched out, slamming the door, signalling to her children to join her, but only Avner followed her down the stairs, a little flustered though he was already a mature youth, and they went to the local pizzeria which had just opened and ate in silence, staring at the families huddled round the plastic tables, while Dina remained in the house with her father. He never again tried their patience with his cooking, nor did he try to bolster his status in the family in any other way and she wonders about this now when he seems intent on feeding her, surely she too, like him, is already beyond hunger and thirst. Is this their first meeting in the next world, where he’s an old-timer and she’s the newcomer, the direct opposite of their meeting in her kibbutz? In the world of the dead, will he exact his vengeance from her, or will he perhaps greet her with grace, hold her wrinkled hand and show her the attractions of the place, the way she led him to the lake the very first time they met? For a moment he’ll be revealed before her as he really was then, with his bright boyish face, and it seems that only thus can she love him, she at the end of her life and he at the beginning of his, only thus can she see him the way he was, lonely, needy and an outsider; how quickly his loneliness turned into self-imposed isolation, his neediness into persistent demands, and his outsider status into alienation.

A shudder grips her legs when she climbs to meet him on the rickety rope-ladder, will he extend to her his white, slender hand that hasn’t grown sufficiently? All of him stopped in mid-growth, as if separation from his parents stunted his physical development too, and that’s why she always felt clumsy beside him, with her tall stature and her broad shoulders. At last we are compatible, she whispers to him, see how I’ve shrunk. When I walk beside you in the avenues of the world of the dead, between the spirits of blue apple trees with clouds trapped in their branches, we will look like husband and wife in every respect, and a second wedding canopy will be set up for us there, late compensation for the first, discredited one, back then in the long shadow of war.

It was her father who led her to that canopy, exactly the way he forced her to walk on her feet twenty years before. He always stood behind her, watching her every movement like a hawk, a blue-eyed hawk. How meagre was his faith in her and in her strengths, he was the one who said, marry him, Hemda, he’s a good boy, and he loves you, as if these were the only conditions needed for a decision of this kind, and she hadn’t dared say, but I don’t love him, Dad, I mean I don’t love him enough, how simple and almost enticing it would be, to sink into the depths of his disbelief in her, and drown all her desires in it.

Under the canopy in the dining hall on a rainy evening when it seemed the marshes surrounding the kibbutz were overflowing, threatening to sweep away the lawns, the low houses and the trees they planted to hide them from the Syrians, she felt this wasn’t a wedding but her bat-mitzvah, which had never been celebrated and wasn’t even recognised in this atheistic kibbutz. It seemed to her this was an internal family event between her and her parents, and every one of the invited guests was an external element, even the bridegroom by her side, who might have been the senior invitee but was in no sense at all a member of the family.

How beautiful her parents were that evening, her mother in a cream-coloured silk dress, greying locks of hair framing her head, eyes moist and kindly, her lips with the first tiny wrinkles around them parted in an innocent smile, as if she didn’t understand anything, and perhaps she really didn’t understand – this wise woman, the one the leaders of the kibbutz turned to for consultations, some of them secretly in love with her, who managed complex corporations but knew nothing about her daughter Hemda, standing now under the canopy, the misery of defeat overwhelming her to the point where she longed to escape, roll up the ends of her dress and run to her lake, which waited for her in stormy spate, enclosed by bubbling swamps. This was exactly the way they had surrounded her in the dining hall when she was one year old, eager to see her taking her first steps, and she wasn’t capable then of giving them the present they expected of her, and now once more they were all standing round her smiling in anticipation and she was paralysed again, again she had fallen on her back and was weeping bitterly, but this time no one could see and no one could hear, the art of concealment she had learned well over the years, sometimes it seemed to her this was all she had ever learned, perhaps only he could see and understand, her father who stood tensely beside her mother, his hair already sparse and his forehead etched with wrinkles, but his beauty still as potent as ever, anxiously watching every step she took, a menacing look in his eyes; would he take her to the doctors again as he did before, my daughter refuses to walk, my daughter refuses to love.

How great is the power of refusal, it seems only thus is it possible for her to feel the very essence of her existence, this bony entity who is named after transient joy. How strong is the refusal to love her husband, to love her daughter, who came into the world after long years of reluctance, and only when Avni was born did the internal bone marrow dissolve, and she was filled with light, with compassion, with
hemda
, a whole lake of graciousness sprang up within her, fields of water-lilies, pink-white clouds of pelicans hovering over them, but the petulance of her husband grew ever more intense, even now she recoils under the blanket, repelled by the memory. Almost every night the expectant look would rise to his face, shortly followed by the movement of the hand thumping her back, and she would mumble, I’m tired, Elik, and pretend to be asleep, her body embarrassed and recoiling from the perpetual desire that he aroused and yet undermined, what did he really want, and from whom? It couldn’t be me that he longed for, persistently and constantly, and she tossed about on her bed at night, wondering if this was the way things were done in the neighbouring houses, wondering about herself, accustomed from the dawn of her childhood to the gloomy austerity of her father; he was wrapped up entirely in her but without happiness, and it seems that without realising it she has been halted there, bound to the angry face of love, for only according to the intensity of the gloom was it possible to estimate the intensity of love.