The Remains of Love (40 page)

Come on then, I’ll give you a hand, she offers, taking his arm and letting him lean on her, a pleasant autumnal smell wafting from her hair, and he tries to extricate himself, thanks, there’s no need, I’m OK now, thanks a lot – how complicated things get when you start telling lies. How can he explain to her why he’s standing outside his own house without a key, about to ring the bell hesitantly like an uninvited guest? Are you sure? she asks and he hastily says, yes, I’m sure, and when she continues on her way he calls after her, thanks, you rescued me. From behind she looks like a young girl, in tight jeans and a long white blouse, and suddenly he wants her to come back, and he waves to her with the bottle in his hand, although it’s empty, although she isn’t looking. Hey, your bottle, he shouts, as if she’s entrusted him with something valuable, but she’s too far away and he puts it to his mouth and tries to draw the last drops from it, as a savage thirst attacks him again, and he imagines himself crouching down and lapping up water like a dog, drinking from puddles and gutters, his tongue growing longer and longer until his mouth can no longer contain it, grabbing every drop of moisture that comes its way. His tongue is so heavy it’s weighing him down, as long as a tail and wagging incessantly, and any moment now it will lay him out flat almost on her threshold, and in a panic he gropes for the bell, so he’ll have time to sound a sign of life before he collapses on the asphalt, giving her one last opportunity to take him into her house and into her bed, secretly wipe away a tear with the edge of her blouse and promise him all will be well, he’ll be feeling better soon.

Her touch stings him when she lays a hand on his forehead, you’re running a temperature, she says, you should go home. Is it because she hasn’t seen him in so many weeks that her hands are so cold, has she been waiting for him all this time? Reluctantly, she opens the gate to him, wearing a faded red dress and hair gathered up in a bun, her hands brown with mud and a hose pipe wrapped round her body; apparently she’s been watering her little garden, apparently she saw him leaning on the fence and was in no hurry to open up, perhaps she heard him telling that woman this was his house. The smell of wet earth arouses a vague longing in him, when he says, I’ve missed you, Talia, I don’t feel well.

Come inside, I’ll make you some tea with lemon, she says, filling the kettle with water as he stretches out on the sofa, exhausted. I can’t go home, he growls, I’ve left home, flinging at her words heated in the acrid vapour of his mouth, not as he had planned it, casually and offhandedly, and she retreats a few paces, driven back by the impact of his new dream in collision with her old dream; how she had longed to hear these words but not from his mouth. Really? she asks, why? He’s never spoken to her about his wife, confining himself to uneasy sidelong hints, and now, clumsily, he’s going to offer her his special present, and he repeats her question, why? What a strange question, he rebukes her with sudden anger, it can’t be answered anyway. There are many reasons and there’s no reason, and she says, you’re right, I meant to say I’m sorry to hear that, and again he’s angry, why is she sorry, as if he’s shared his misfortunes with her, there’s a prospect here too, and hope, for too long he’s waited, too much preparation, and now their conversation isn’t going well, he should have come here the night of Anati’s wedding, when the course of action was burning between his fingers, come to her vibrant and passionate, overwhelming her with the power of the moment, and not like this, sick and weak, rotten with flawed thinking. How severe her expression is, it seems she’s repelled by what he’s done; after the death of Rafael Allon, who never quite managed to leave his home, did she think no man on earth would dare do this, let alone before her very eyes?

She’s washing her hands now in the kitchen sink, wiping the touch of his skin from her fingers, and when his glance wanders over the bookshelves he notices the two photographs, the pivotal points of her story, aren’t there any more, is she too expecting to start again? And once more he feels a sudden surge of pique as if he’s the one she’s shutting out; after all it was only the dead man who forged the precarious link between them, with his thin and morbidly yellow fingers he gripped their arms, held them together. Where are the pictures? he asks, and she replies, Elisheva was here yesterday, I took them down not wanting to hurt her and I forgot to put them back, and he’s amazed, Elisheva was here? What did she want? Once again he’s swept almost with alacrity into her familiar story, our story almost, he thinks, we’re not getting another one.

To talk, she says, leaning on the marble and facing him, to listen, to fill in the picture, and he asks, how was it? And she sighs, it was sad, what would you expect of a meeting between widows, and he’s taken aback by the pride he hears in her voice, is she now recognised as a widow by the official widow, what an awesome achievement, and he wants to shake her, life is running away, Talia, as agile as a rabbit, cunning as a fox, isn’t it enough that you’ve given up the first half of your life for this man, are you going to sacrifice what remains of your life too, like those Indian widows who throw themselves on the funeral pyre, and you’re not even a widow.

Your tea’s going cold, she says, drink it, I put in a slice of lemon from the garden, and he says, your life is going cold, and she turns to him with a suspicious look, sitting in the armchair facing him, very erect, and he imagines her body, solid and impervious as the body of a doll, tiny breasts without nipples, genitals without aperture, what are you trying to say? And he avoids her glance, how will he offer himself to her? Don’t be offended, Talia, obviously it’s none of my business but I care about you and I was glad to see you coming back to life.

You’re making too many flawed assumptions, she says, I’ve nowhere to come back to because I’ve never been a part of this life that you’re talking about, and I never wanted to be a part of it, I didn’t want a family, I wanted Rafael, that was all, she continues in a monotonous voice and she remembers how she stood alone on the stage, dominated by his smiling portrait, people confuse love with family, children with lust, and that has never suited me, not when I was young and definitely not now. Her mobile, on the table between them, emits a brief squawk and she reads the incoming text avidly, I hate what’s happening to women here, this enforced servitude that they accept so willingly, she says, her eyes still fixed on the screen and for a moment it seems to him she’s quoting from it, apparently they’re liberated from their husbands but they’re still in thrall to their children, they stop being women and turn into mothers, I didn’t want that. Only yesterday I realised how much I had gained from him not leaving home, I got the best of him, we had a sacred kind of love, not a secular one.

But do you really not regret not having children? he asks, for some reason protesting on behalf of his own children, as suddenly he misses them and wishes they were here beside him now, and she replies, I always knew I’d have no children, I don’t like mixing things. What does that mean, mixing things? he asks and she explains, when I was a little girl I loved painting but I hated mixing colours, I loved the beauty of the primary colours, most kids mix them all together and end up with incoherent splodges of paint, and he listens to her and remembers his sister. You know, my sister, he starts and at once breaks off, he really doesn’t want to bring up the saga of his sister, deciding suddenly that without a new child her life is no life, he looks at her and wonders about them, about women, putting her on one side and his sister on the other and his wife in between them. It seems to him nothing links them other than their reservations towards him, deep and fundamental reservations, with various and even contradictory motivations, is this what unites the whole of womankind on this earth? Even his intern has recently launched a campaign of crude hostility towards him, but who knows, maybe it’s all about an aversion that radiates from him, as it seems to be expanding to the point where he can’t look at her, and he turns his attention to the meshed window with its view of the inner side of the fence, shadows quivering between the interlaced branches. Is it because she doesn’t need him that he’s suddenly recoiling from her?

A big yawn crumples her face and she apologises, I didn’t get any sleep last night, Elisheva stayed until the morning, I’m so tired, and he says hurriedly, I’m going, Talia, don’t worry, I don’t want to put pressure on you, believe me, from the first moment I saw you I wanted to help you, and now that seems unnecessary, in fact I’m more in need of help than you are, can you imagine it, just now a woman in the street, a stranger, was helping me to walk, and she smiles at him with sealed lips; only the delicate twitch in the skin of her cheek tells him she’s smiling. How fragile is this skin, he thinks, when she grows old it will crack rather than wrinkle.

I’m grateful to you, she says seriously, help is a complicated business, you must see that in your line of work, I wish you could help me, I wish I could help you, and she bends over her foot and peels a thin layer of mud from her ankle, as if unwrapping a bar of chocolate, but perhaps after all I can help you with some advice, she hesitates, you must go home, and he listens to her with pain, the void of his body already foretelling emptiness, how do you know? You have no idea what my life is like with my wife, and she says quietly, true, but if it’s carried on until now it can’t have been that terrible.

What has it really been like up to now, he wonders, it seems to him he’s done nothing in his life, never married a wife or brought children into the world, knocking again and again on a locked door, his gift not accepted, again and again and at the same time never, never has he allowed himself to become so committed, his skin scratched by the thorns of missed opportunity, the void of his body already feeling the emptiness that will dominate him when he’s forced to uproot her from his life, and he stares at her, her hands absently massaging her ankle, the black varnish has gone from the toenails and they are pale, almost invisible.

What do you want, Talia? What’s to become of you? he asks, and she says quietly, I’ve planted cyclamens in the garden, holding out her hands by way of proof although the mud has just been washed from them, and I’m waiting to see them flower in the winter, I love cyclamens, I love my work, I’ve just received a grant for new research, my parents lived small lives here and now it’s my turn, and he thinks about his family, with us it was always big stuff but only in the imagination, that’s the most fatal combination, big dreams and meagre achievements. In our family we create myths, he wants to tell her: his mother’s dying lake, the consummate kibbutz society of her parents, his father’s lost Europe, he himself is the champion of the downtrodden, and now his sister has devised an ambitious and desperate myth of her own, reckons she can save a child and thereby save herself, what do we know about growing cyclamens? What do we know about small lives? But he so much wants to be there with her in the winter, when the cyclamens will bloom in their soft pink colours, to sit with her in the garden while his sons play with a ball on the burgeoning lawn, and when the cold sets in they’ll go inside and he’ll make the hot chocolate, and this will be simple and glorious, an event so tiny in the annals of humanity, but sensational for him because it will happen before her eyes. Before her eyes he will embrace his children, before her eyes they will pass their tongues over their chocolate-sweetened lips, and perhaps this thing is so sensational precisely because it won’t happen, it will never come about, he knows and she knows, even the children dozing on their beds know, and his wife who burns with anger like an eternal flame and has no consolation, and therefore he must uproot himself from this doll’s house in which even the most modest of dreams aren’t going to materialise, but before doing this he needs to touch her. This isn’t lust but a deep and ancient yearning which stretches from the soles of his feet to the top of his head, a yearning born before him that will outlive him, like the yearning of the universe for that primeval radiation which in the beginning accompanied its creation.

Now she stands up and walks to the bedroom, and he watches her movements tensely, will she signal to him to follow her? She returns with an armful of white bedlinen and a pillow, you can sleep here tonight, she says quietly, you can’t go walking the streets in that state, and he stands up heavily and watches her smoothing out the sheet like a chambermaid, plumping the pillow, and all of this for him, and yet she won’t be sorry if he says to her now, thanks all the same, Talia, I’ll sleep at home, that is what he’s supposed to say, that is what he’s supposed to do, and yet the words emerging from his mouth are quite different. Thanks, he says, I don’t feel up to driving, I’m staying at my mother’s place in the suburbs, he adds unnecessarily, while taking off his shoes and putting them on again immediately, worried about the sweaty smell, but she doesn’t seem to notice, handing him a pair of blue pyjamas, decorated with yellow stars. When you look at the sky you always see what used to be there, the stars of the past, light-years separate us.

Rafael liked pyjamas, she smiles, he said with pyjamas he could sleep much better, like a little boy, and Avner grins, really? Did he have a teddy-bear too? and he holds on with interest to the fabric which smells of soap, as if recently laundered. I wear these sometimes in my sleep, she admits, I wake up with them in the morning and don’t remember putting them on at all, and for some reason he lets go of the attractive garments, maybe he wants you to wear these, he suggests, no thanks, I’ll manage without them, I always sleep naked, he adds, wondering about the dry intimacy that’s unfolding here, could we have been lovers twenty years ago, twenty years in the future, since now the time isn’t right, the night isn’t right.

Good night, she says, from close up her face looks thin and tired, the shadows under her eyes doubling their size and he whispers, good night, Talia, acute misery pricking his flesh at the thought of not seeing her again, he knows this for a fact when the bedroom door closes behind her; he will see her just once more, when the little reading lamp beside her bed is turned off and the footsteps in the alley fade away, and the rustling of insects in the garden grows louder, and the soughing of the lawn as it tightens its grip on the ground, and the whisper of the cyclamens budding between the onion beds, and he’ll stretch out on the sofa fully clothed, his body aching and his loins aching, he’ll put the pyjama top over his face and sigh heavily. Hot words split like chestnuts in the incandescent void of his mouth, his desire mounting and no outlet for it, how deceptive is her proximity, a few paces separate them tonight and it seems there’s no woman in the world as far away from him as she is, even the woman who gave him the drink of water and disappeared is closer to him than she is, and he puts a hand to his loins and straightens up, he has to go, he has to escape from here, but before this he must take his leave of her in his own way, how can you be separated from something you never had?