The Remains of Love (44 page)

His body was never as pleasant to her as that night, when he couldn’t return her touch, and she nestled against him, refusing to be parted from him. Her children were still asleep and she didn’t rouse them, they would do him no good, and anyway she wanted to be alone with him for ever, but a sudden ringing was heard at the door, she forgot she’d asked a technician to come in and repair the television set facing his bed, and the technician came into the room and opened his bag of tools and started working, stealing a glance from time to time at the motionless recumbent form. She didn’t say a word, standing in the doorway and gazing proudly at her handsome husband, who looked remarkably young in the strong morning light, his glass-blue eyes open and staring out of the window, and long minutes passed before the technician came to her and asked with a shudder, excuse me, is he dead? She nodded drily, as if this were a routine occurrence, but the man picked up his tools and fled in a panic saying, sorry, I’m from a priestly family and I’m not allowed any contact with the dead, and she called out after him, but what about the TV, forgetting that he wouldn’t be needing it now, you can’t leave me like this, she chased him down the stairs weeping bitterly, it isn’t fair, you take ages to arrive and then just go!

How young he was when he died compared with her today, how young her parents were, who would believe she would be a pioneer in this of all things, the first in the family to attain grey old age, not letting death dominate her, and sometimes she thinks that because she hasn’t lived she won’t die either, and if death is a wake-up call for the living, how can anyone who hasn’t been asleep be awakened? Does this mean that in her life she has died and in her death she will live, because sometimes she sees him in a higher form of life, life without body, and so perhaps from the beginning she has been fated to die, after all as far back as she can remember her body has been a burden to her, ever since her father beat her for refusing to walk.

I’m fated to die, she mumbles, my fate is to die, and sometimes she longs to experience the separation from her ever-diminishing body, from day to day she is shrivelling, light as a ghost, so it seems to her the force of gravity has no influence over her, it’s only the weight of the blanket that’s holding her down on the bed, and the moment it’s removed she’ll be out through the window, hovering with the migrating storks. She hears them calling her name, Hemda, are you really the one who waited for us in the blue autumn, amid the papyrus reeds? How perverse you are, you humans, compared with the birds! The passage of the years makes no impression on our feathers, whereas on your skin every year is inscribed. Is it awareness that emphasises the weight of the years?

Poor Hemda, aged child that you are, they nod to her with a flurry of wings. Even then you had nothing but your lake, so we named it after you, Lake Hemda. Soon you too will be flying in the sky, you’ll circle around your loved ones, you’ll no longer be capable of reminding, testifying and warning, time is running out, Hemda, tell them the story now, tell them the history of your father and your mother, tell them your history, tell them their history.

Hurry up, you’ll be late, she whispers to the flock of storks conversing with her, winter has come early this year and you still have a long way to go to reach the warm countries, and they answer her in ringing chorus, you need to hurry too, Hemda, your winter is cold and it’s the last one, you won’t have another, even if you haven’t lived you shall surely die. Tell what has been entrusted to you, things no one other than you knows, and she sighs, who shall I tell, for years I’ve been trying and no one wants to listen, and they answer, tell the child, the new child who will arrive at the end of the winter, when you won’t be here any more, he’ll need your story, he’ll long for your testimony, and it seems to her she hears other voices suddenly rising from the interior of the house, voices of a man and a woman bound closely together. Is this her mother and her father coming to collect her? Just a moment, she tries to call out, her heart pounding, I haven’t yet found the first word, my notebook is still empty, but when the voices come closer she recognises her son and her daughter, hears them conversing in whispers in the kitchen next door. How warm their voices are, in her body she feels this and in her blood, she’s never felt them so close, she’s never felt herself so much loved, after all if they love each other their love will pass through her body, which gave them life, so much loved she can almost take her leave, but not before she has her notebook in her hands, pulling it out with an effort from under the pillow. Dina Horowitz, Class Eleven, History, is the inscription on the cover, written in blue ink. Her father hated waste and was always checking her exercise-books to make sure she was writing on both sides of the page and not leaving empty spaces, and she too was in the habit of checking her children’s homework from time to time and scolding them for their extravagance, until one morning Dina angrily threw this notebook down in front of her and it became her property.

With an effort her finger caresses the hollow lines, sees them filling up with blue words like rivulets from a spring, as it will not only be stories of the lake written there but stories of its tributaries too, her children who have grown up, and her parents like mountains casting a shadow over the dying water. I’ll start and you carry on, she will say, looking around at the room that suddenly seems vast to her, so spacious her eyes struggle to take it all in, has it really grown or is she the one who has shrunk? This is the smallest room in a minuscule apartment, but now as she is confined to her bed from morning to evening it seems its dimensions have expanded, it would take her hundreds of paces to reach the window, hours by the score, who knows if she’ll live long enough.

Chapter Twelve

He hears a knock on the door and his heart pounds as he’s aroused from his sleep in the narrow bed in the room of his youth in the long night, the days contract and the nights are drawn out, bound by the colourful chains of fabricated stories. He has never before slept so absolutely, acquainted with his sleep and craving it, waking again and again to enjoy the prospect of more slumber awaiting him, going to bed early, although it isn’t weariness that sends him to sleep but desire. No, he isn’t weary any more, it seems the heavy fatigue that’s accompanied him in recent years has melted away in a single moment, and that’s why in his bed he strays time and again to that moment, how he returned to his house in the dead of night and entered silently like a thief, coming not to take but rather to give, although his hands were empty, empty and cold, when he walked into his house and found three people asleep in three beds, one small and one medium-sized and one large, and more than anything else he longed to plunge into their sleep, a diver submerged in the depths, sinking between them in silence, a dance without movement, a song without sound.

This was the longest night of his life, longer than his whole life, since this was when everything nearly happened, he nearly got the woman he wanted, and he nearly got his wife back, and his children and his house, and he nearly wrapped himself up in his early life, an ancient disguise, but in the end nothing happened, and it seems to him now that within this nearly, in the space narrow as an infant’s footstep between action and inaction, his entire life has been crammed. He stood and stared at his sleeping wife, leaning weak and worn-out on the wall facing her, and lusted so intensely after her sleep, longing to blend with her into one sleeping body, forgetting and remembering in turn why he came and what he wanted to say to her, until he sat down beside her, stroked her hair and whispered in her ear telling her not to grieve, she shouldn’t weep for her youth since time is cyclical, even if its trajectory is clear, and therefore youth is diffused over the whole of life, exactly like old age, while the gift of love is waiting around unexpected corners, and it isn’t too late, sometimes one moment of love is weighed against many years, or the memory of love, and sometimes it’s possible to be content even with expectations, and when he came out of there in the blue light of dawn, leaving the house buried in sleep as it had been when he entered, he felt in all his bones, shaking in the cold of the winter morning, the state of being bereft of everything, the depth of failure attending on all his actions, and it seems to him there’s always a woman involved in this, how easy it is to depend on women, and has been so since the dawn of history, but evidently the time has come to exist without women and this will be his time, even if it lasts months and years.

His aching knees as he descended the stairs reminded him of his age, all the years that had been snatched away, chewed up and discarded, but all of these did nothing to dilute the good news that adhered to him that early morning, some weeks ago, and even now they’re hurting as he rises, still half asleep, from his bed, and gropes for the wall and shuffles towards the door. Who can it be, nearly midnight and he isn’t expecting anyone, he put the children to bed in their house and Shlomit seemed relaxed about it, almost appeased, anyway she’s not going to leave her home at a time like this and Dina’s having a weekend break by the Dead Sea, it must be a mistake, but when he peers through the spyhole he sees her and hurriedly opens the door, what’s going on, where’s Gideon? Didn’t you go to the Dead Sea?

We did, she says, but he didn’t stick around, and I wanted to visit you and Mum before my birthday was over, and she holds out her arms to him and walks into his embrace, his arms enfolding her, and he’s astonished to find how thin she is, he’s used to Shlomit and her chunkiness, and he probes the slim back with curiosity, also the vertebrae protruding like little nuts, since when have you been so thin? he asks, you weren’t always like this, do you remember how you used to make yourself sick in the bathroom to keep yourself slim?

What, you knew? she asks, surprised, why didn’t you tell me you knew? And he replies, I didn’t want to embarrass you, and she sighs, what a pity, that would have helped me, and he remembers the thin woman who offered him a drink of water in the street, if he had held on to her he would no doubt have felt the same direct pulsation, bone against bone, without the guile of the flesh, how fascinated he is suddenly by this close contact with bones, and he holds her hand and leads her to the kitchen, come on, Dini, let’s make you a proper birthday.

What will you drink? he asks as she takes her seat on the backless chair and she says, hot milk, and the lips that smile at him are pale and beautiful and her skin is lustrous, and he comments, it’s done wonders for your complexion, the Dead Sea, did you bathe in the sulphur? And she says no, we hardly went out of the room, it’s this pale light that does it, Mum’s economy bulbs, and he says, I don’t know, you look different, and he boils the milk in a pan and pours it into two old yellow cups.

Good health, Dini, he clicks his cup against hers, happy birthday, sister, and she looks up at him with her deep and damp brown eyes, and he remembers how exactly thirty years ago they sat like this, his sister at sixteen and he nearly fourteen, a few days after they left the kibbutz, the apartment was still full of packing cases and their parents were arguing in the bedroom. All that day the house had been in uproar, because in the morning their mother was notified that the teaching job she had been promised in the local high school had been cancelled, and their father was yelling at her incessantly as if it was her fault. We should never have left the kibbutz, he shouted, what are we going to live on now? You think my salary from the bank will be enough? And if they sack me too? I warned you over and over, this is no age to be starting a new life! And with all the commotion and the anger Dina’s birthday was forgotten, but when he got out of bed at midnight he found her in the kitchen, so clearly he remembers this now, wearing a long-sleeved nightdress with a motif of grey flowers, her dark hair combed, drinking milk and eating the plain biscuits they brought with them from the kibbutz.

For a moment she recoiled when she saw him approach, but then she moved her feet from the chair opposite and signalled to him to sit and said almost apologetically, it’s my birthday today, as if only on a birthday were eating and drinking allowed, just once a year, and he well remembers that he wanted to hug her because his heart went out to her, but with a typically clumsy adolescent movement he jolted her arm and the cup she was holding was shaken and the milk spilled on the table, and she scolded him and mopped up the milk in somewhat slovenly fashion, letting it drip on the floor, and he hurried back to his bed, embarrassed and chastened, but he couldn’t get back to sleep and then he heard her shutting herself in the bathroom. At first he didn’t understand what they were, the sounds emerging from there, the coughs and choking sighs, for a moment he was afraid someone was attacking her, and when he realised what was happening he was furious at the waste, they sacked Mum today and we have no money and there’ll be no food, and you’re puking up biscuits.

Only now, thirty years later and at midnight, is he capable of expressing an opinion of that girl who crouched over the bowl in her flowery flannel nightie on her birthday and tried to purge her gut of biscuits dunked in milk, and he looks at her sadly but to his surprise she’s beaming and she says almost apologetically, my world has turned upside down, I should feel terrible but I feel wonderful, and he asks, what happened? Did you quarrel over the adoption? And she says, more or less, we didn’t really quarrel, I just told him I wasn’t giving up on the child and he said it’s out of the question as far as he’s concerned, but he’s agreed to do what’s necessary and not spoil it for me.

So what’s going to happen? he asks and she says, I’m going ahead with this, as soon as he left I contacted the company and arranged a meeting, and he persists, you’re really prepared to dump Gideon? And she draws the flattering purple sweater more tightly around her body and shrugs her shoulders, I don’t know, but that isn’t the main issue, I simply can’t give up on this child, and if to him this constitutes grounds for separation, he has that right, of course, but it isn’t my decision.