The Seven Good Years (11 page)

B
efore Lev's sixth birthday, we asked him if he'd like us to do anything special. He gave me and my wife a slightly suspicious look and asked why we had to do something special. I told him that we didn't have to, but that people usually do special things on their birthdays because it's a special day. If there was something Lev would like, I explained, like decorating the house, baking a cake, or taking a trip somewhere we don't usually go, his mother and I would be glad to oblige. And if not, we could just spend the day as usual. It was up to him. Lev stared at me intently for a few seconds and said, “I want you to do something special with your face.”

And that's how the mustache was born.

The mustache is a hairy and mysterious creature, far more enigmatic than its woollier sibling, the beard, which clearly connotes distress (mourning, finding religion, being marooned on a desert island). The associations aroused by a mustache are more along the lines of
Shaft
, Burt Reynolds, German porn stars, Omar Sharif, and Bashar al-Assad—in short, the '70s and Arabs. So rather than “What's going on?” “How's the family?” or “Are you working on anything new?” it's only natural for an old acquaintance encountering your mustache for the first time to ask, “What's with the mustache?”

The timing of my new mustache—ten days after my wife miscarried, a week after I injured my back in a car crash, and two weeks after my father found out he had inoperable cancer—couldn't have been better. Instead of talking about Dad's chemo or my wife's hospitalization, I could divert all small talk to the thick tuft of facial hair growing above my upper lip. And whenever anyone asked, “What's with the mustache?” I had the perfect answer, and it was even mostly true: “It's for the boy.”

A mustache is not just a great distraction device; it's also an excellent icebreaker. It's amazing how many people who see a new mustache in the middle of a familiar face are happy to share their own private mustache stories. That's how I found out that the acupuncturist who treats my newly aching back had been an officer in an elite Israel Defense Forces unit, and that he once had to draw a mustache on his face. “It sounds like a joke,” he said, “but we went on an undercover operation once, disguised as Arabs, and they told us the two most important things were the mustache and the shoes. If you have a respectable mustache and believable shoes, people will take you for an Arab even if your parents are from Poland.”

He remembered the operation well. It was in Lebanon, it was winter, and they were moving through open fields. They noticed a man wearing a kaffiyeh at some distance coming toward them. He had a weapon slung over his shoulder. They lay on the ground. Their orders were clear: If they encountered someone with a Kalashnikov, it was a terrorist and they had to shoot immediately; if he had a hunting rifle, it was probably just a shepherd.

My acupuncturist heard the two snipers in his unit arguing over the walkie-talkie. One of them claimed he could tell by the butt that it was a Chinese-made Kalashnikov. The other said it was too long to be a Kalashnikov—he thought it was an old rifle, and not an automatic. The man was getting closer. The first sniper kept asking for permission to open fire. The other sniper said nothing. My acupuncturist lay there in a sweat, a twenty-year-old boy with binoculars and a painted-on mustache, not knowing what to do. His first lieutenant whispered in his ear that if it really was a terrorist, they had to shoot before he spotted them.

Right at that moment, the man who had been walking toward them stopped, turned around, and took a whiz. My acupuncturist could now easily see through his binoculars that the man was carrying a large umbrella.

“That's it,” said the acupuncturist as he pulled the last needle out of my left shoulder. “You can get dressed now.” When I finished buttoning up my shirt and looked in the mirror, the mustache in the reflection looked completely unreal, exactly like the story I had just heard. The story of a kid with a scribble that looked like a mustache, who almost killed a man with an umbrella that looked like a rifle, on a covert operation that looked like a war. A day after Lev's birthday I'll shave this mustache off, after all. Reality here is confusing enough as it is.

F
ive years ago my parents celebrated their forty-ninth anniversary under slightly painful conditions, my father sitting at the festive table with swollen cheeks and the guilty look of someone who's hidden nuts in his mouth. “Ever since his dental implant operation he looks like a scheming squirrel,” my mother said with more than a little malice. “But the doctor promised that it'll pass in a week.”

“She allows herself to talk like that,” my father said in rebuke, “because she knows I can't bite her now. But don't worry, Mamele. We squirrels have long memories.” And to prove that claim, my father went back fifty years to tell my wife and me how he and my mother first met.

My father was twenty-nine then and worked installing electrical infrastructures in buildings. Every time he finished a project, he'd go out and spend his wages carousing for two weeks, after which he'd stay in bed for two days to recuperate, and then go to work on a new project. On one of his sprees, he went to a Romanian restaurant on the Tel Aviv beach with a few friends. The food wasn't great, but the liquor was nice and the Gypsy troupe that played was fantastic. My father stayed to listen to the musicians and their plaintive melodies long after his friends had collapsed and were taken home. Even after the last of the diners had gone and the elderly owner insisted on closing, my father refused to part from the troupe, and with the help of a few compliments and some money, he managed to persuade the Gypsies to become his personal orchestra for the night. They walked down the beach promenade with him, playing magnificently. At one point, my drunk father had the uncontrollable urge to urinate, so he asked his private group to play a snappy tune suitable for such osmotic events. He then proceeded to a nearby wall to do what people do after excessive drinking. “Everything was just perfect,” he said, smiling between his squirrel cheeks, “the music, the scenery, the light sea breeze.”

A few minutes later, the euphoria was interrupted by a police car that had been called to arrest my father for disturbing the peace and demonstrating without a permit. It turned out that the wall he'd chosen to urinate on was the western wall of the French embassy, and the security guards thought that the man urinating to the accompaniment of a cheery band of Gypsy musicians was staging a creative political protest. They lost no time in calling the police. The policemen pushed my father, who was cooperating happily, into the backseat of the car. The seat was soft and comfortable, and after a long night my father was glad for a chance to take a little snooze. Unlike my father, the Gypsies were sober and resisted arrest, protesting vehemently that they hadn't done anything illegal. The police tried to shove them into the car, and in the struggle one musician's pet monkey bit the officer in charge. He responded with a loud yell that woke my father who, like any curious person, got right out of the car to find out what was going on. Outside the car he saw policemen and Gypsies fighting in a slightly comic battle, and behind them a few curious passersby who had stopped to watch the unusual show. Among them stood a beautiful redhead. Even through the alcohol haze, my father could tell that she was the most gorgeous woman he'd ever seen. He took his electrician's pad out of his pocket, grabbed the pencil he kept behind his right ear, always ready for action, went over to my mother, introduced himself as Inspector Ephraim Keret, and asked if she had been a witness to the incident. Frightened, my mother said she'd only just gotten there, but Dad insisted that he had to take her details so that he could question her later. She gave him her address, and before Inspector Ephraim could say anything else, two furious policemen jumped him, cuffed him, and dragged him to the car. “We'll be in touch,” he yelled to Mom from the moving car with characteristic optimism. Mom went home quaking in fear and told her flatmate that a serial killer had cunningly managed to wheedle her address out of her. The next day, Dad arrived at my mother's doorstep, sober and carrying a bouquet of flowers. She refused to open the door. A week later, they went to a movie, and a year after that they were married.

Fifty years have passed. Inspector Ephraim Keret isn't in the electricity business anymore and my mother hasn't had a flatmate for a long time. But on special occasions like anniversaries, my father still pulls a special bottle of whiskey out of the cabinet, the same whiskey they served in the long-defunct Romanian restaurant, and pours everyone a shot. “When the doctor said only liquids for the first week, she meant soup, not that,” Mom whispers to me as we all clink glasses. “Watch out, Mamele, I hear everything,” Dad says, filling the space between his swollen cheeks with a sip of whiskey. “And in another ten days, I'll be allowed to bite again.”

In the taxi on the way home from my parents' house, my wife says there's something about the story of how couples meet that hints at how they're going to live their lives together. “Your parents,” she says, “met under colorful, extreme circumstances, and their life together continued to seem like a carnival.”

“What about us?” I ask. I fell in love with my wife in a nightclub. She came in as I was about to leave. We'd known each other only very superficially before then. “I was just leaving,” I shouted, trying to be heard over the noise of the music when we bumped into each other near the door. “I have to get up early tomorrow.”

“Kiss me,” she shouted back at me. I froze. From the little I knew about her, she had always seemed very shy, and that request was totally unexpected.

“Maybe I'll stay a little longer,” I said.

A week later, we were a couple. A month later, I told her that her “Kiss me” at the nightclub door was the most daring thing I'd ever heard a girl say. She looked at me and smiled. “What I said was that you'd never find a taxi,” she said. It is a good thing I misheard her.

“Us?” My wife thought for a moment in the taxi. “We're also like the way we met. Our life is one thing, and you always reinvent it to be something else more interesting. That's what writers do, right?”

I shrugged, feeling slightly rebuked. “Not that I'm complaining,” my wife said, kissing me. “Compared to your family tradition of drunken peeing on embassy walls, you could say I got off cheap.”

O
ne morning, my grandmother's brother decided to stop being religious. He shaved his beard, cut off his payos, shed his yarmulke, packed his things, and resolved to leave his hometown of Baranovichi and begin a new life. The town rabbi, considered a Talmudic prodigy, asked to see him before he left. The meeting between Avraham, my grandmother's brother, and the rabbi was brief and not very pleasant. The rabbi knew Avraham to be a gifted Torah student and was profoundly disappointed that he had decided to abandon religion. But he didn't mention that to Avraham; he merely gave him a piercing look and promised that he would not die before he returned to the ways of the Torah. It wasn't clear at the time if that was a blessing or a threat, but the words were spoken with such conviction that Avraham never forgot them.

I hear that story during the shiva for my father. My older brother is sitting to my right, and my sister is seated on a low stool to my left. I offered her my comfortable chair, but she said no. According to the customs of Jewish mourning, which my ultra-Orthodox sister strictly observes, the family of the deceased must sit on chairs lower than those of the people who have come to pay their condolences. Sitting across from us is a distant relative from the ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak, and like many others who come to visit us during the shiva, he offers not only a bit of solace but also a new, totally unknown story about our father. It's amazing how many more sides there were to that man than the ones I knew when he was alive. And it's no less amazing that it's the total strangers, people I've never met before, who help me grow even closer to my father even now that he's gone.

The ultra-Orthodox relative from Bnei Brak doesn't eat or drink anything in our house during the shiva, refusing even a glass of water. I don't ask why, but it's quite clear that he doesn't completely trust us on matters of kashruth. All he does is tell the story. As if he's come here as a messenger, to place another story about Dad at our doorstep, offer a few restrained words of comfort, and leave. But before he goes, he has to finish the tale.

So where were we? That meeting between Avraham and the rabbi. Years after Avraham, Grandma's brother, left the yeshiva in Poland, immigrated to Israel, and joined a kibbutz, he found himself in the very heart of a terrible war. It was 1973, and on Yom Kippur, a surprise attack was launched against Israel. The Israeli army was caught unprepared, and during the first days of the war, everyone felt that the end of the State of Israel and of the Jewish people was approaching. Avraham was in a place that was being heavily bombarded by the Syrians, and with shells bursting everywhere around him, he stood up and called to a woman who was lying on the ground not far away to come and lie down beside him. The woman hurried over, and when she asked the supremely confident Avraham why he thought it was safer where he was, he explained that she should stay close to him because no shell would fall anywhere near him. “A lot of unlucky people are going to die in this damn war,” Avraham said, trying to calm the frightened woman, “but I won't be one of them.” Shouting over the whistling of the artillery shells, she asked how he could be so sure of that, and Avraham answered without hesitation, “Because I still haven't returned to the ways of the Torah.” Avraham and the woman survived the bombing, and years later, when he fell into the sea during a storm, the rescue team found him thrashing in the water and shouting to the heavens, “I still don't believe in you!”

Avraham raised a large, thriving family and reached a ripe old age in relatively good health until serious illness struck. At one point, after he had lost consciousness, the doctors told his family that he would not last more than a day or so. But that day went on and on, and a few weeks later, when my dad visited Avraham's family and heard how much he was suffering, he asked them for a prayer book and a yarmulke, went straight to the hospital, entered Avraham's room, and prayed all night beside his bed. At dawn, Avraham died.

“It's not so hard to pray for the soul of a Jew when you're a believer,” that relative says as he makes his way to the door. “As a religious man, I can tell you that it's very easy, like a reflex, almost involuntary. But for a secular man like your father to do it—he really has to be a tzaddik.”

That night, when the last of the visitors has gone and our mother goes to bed, only my sister, my brother, and I are left in the living room. My brother is smoking a cigarette, staring out the window, and my sister is still seated on her low stool. Soon we'll all go to sleep in our childhood rooms. My parents left the three rooms exactly as they had been, as if they knew we'd come back one day. On the wall of my room is a poster of a comic book hero I loved as a child; in my brother's room, there's a map of the world hanging above his bed; and on the wall in my sister's room is a tapestry she embroidered when she was a teenager, depicting—of course—Jacob wrestling with a white-robed angel. But before we go to bed, we try to steal another few minutes alone together. The shiva ends tomorrow. My sister will go back to the ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem neighborhood of Mea Shearim and my brother will fly back to Thailand, but until then we can still have a cup of tea together, eat the strictly kosher cookies I brought for my sister from a special store, savor the stories we heard about our father during the week of mourning, and be proud of our dad without apology or criticism, just like children should.