Two She-Bears (8 page)

Ruta: Were we on for today?

Varda: No. I was at your neighbor's house, and I decided to come over and say hello.

Ruta: That's nice. It's like the joke about the bear in Alaska who says to the hunter: “You don't really keep coming here for the hunting, do you?” Maybe when you're a bit older and we become better friends, I'll tell it to you. We haven't yet gotten to the stage where I can tell you disgusting jokes. You want something to drink? Maybe instead of tea with lemon you would like some of Dovik's
limoncello
? I just now poured myself some. You caught me red-handed. Here. You like
limoncello
?

Varda: It's delicious, but I'm not much of a drinker. Certainly not at this hour.

Ruta: I'm so restless. Neta's birthday is coming up and I'm like a caged lion. Neta. Neta. My child. The child that you never ask exactly what happened to him.

Varda: I don't ask because a person should talk about things like that on her own. Not wait to be asked.

Ruta: I told you. I said his name and I said “disaster” and I said “grave” and “cemetery” and I also said “dead.” I said it. All you have to do is connect the dots. I said “after Neta died.” And I said I had a child who died. A boy of six. Almost six and a half to be exact. And you didn't react. Only your research is important.

Varda: I'm sorry. I didn't see it that way.

Ruta: Once I used to put it this way—“Life is over.” There was the disaster, and life was over. Funny, Neta died and I said “over” about my life, his mother. But the truth is, no, it's not over, and in a certain sense it's even worse than that. Neta died, and his father, in a slightly different way, also died. He wasn't himself anymore. I lost the two of them, my man and my son, “him and his son on the same day,” as it is written. Have you noticed how disasters improve the Hebrew language? They make it more beautiful and ceremonious, with those special phrases that carry heavy burdens: “too holy to touch,” “too mysterious to understand,” “too ancient to bear.”

Dead. He did not speak and did not laugh and did not touch me even once and primarily punished himself. And you know what? He should have. He had it coming. I didn't hit him in the face with it, but he knew very well what I thought: that if there was someone to blame, it was him. And I too was to blame, for letting him take Neta on that hike. “A hike for guys,” girls not invited. That's how it is with parents. Even when they're the parents of a soldier who was killed, and there's a whole list of commanders and politicians who can be blamed—even then, they blame themselves. Surely we are to blame. Always. Even if we were at work and a drunk driver went up on the sidewalk and ran over the child on the way home from school, we are to blame. And if a doctor sent him home with the wrong diagnosis, we are to blame. And even if lightning were to strike him from the sky, why did the lightning strike him and not us? After all, that's what we're there for. All the more so a father who takes his little boy on a hike and brings him back to his mother dead. There are no others to blame.

What a good boy he was, good and smart and beloved and full of love for others, but many six-year-olds are like that, and what can someone say about someone who died at that age? So many things could change. A talented boy, but not extraordinary. Maybe that was actually what was special about him, that everything with him was in moderation, properly balanced in body and soul. Already at the age of two he was steady as he moved and so bright-eyed it was almost scary, and another thing, a little hard to describe, but there's a word for it: “symmetry.” Not just of right and left, also of inside and outside. No, I don't mean symmetry. I don't like symmetry. This is something else. Whatever. I feel I'm getting irritable and angry. I have a recurrent thought, it's terrible to think this way, I know, but if somebody had to die, in other words, if the Angel of Death had a quota to fill on that day, then why that particular child? There are so many other children to pick as a victim instead. And I say that not only as a proud mother but as a veteran teacher, who knows—after generations of spoiled, arrogant, stupid, noisy children who sat in my classroom year after year—I know how to identify a special child.

So that's that. Life was over. The fire went out. In two private hearts and the one shared heart. Every couple has this eternal flame, sometimes small, sometimes big, which flares up and fades down, which is sometimes too strong and sometimes needs more air and always needs to be tended and fed. And with us the disaster extinguished it with a single blow. We had been married almost seven years and knew each other a few years before that, and one already knows one's partner, his on-off switches and dials, and what he likes and what he doesn't, what makes him laugh and what makes him feel good, and also what annoys him, which can be good too because it's the flip side of boredom and routine. And suddenly—a stranger. A new husband. There are women who will tell you this is what happens in the end with every husband, but usually it happens gradually, and with me it happened overnight, all at once.

Varda: You didn't tell me how Neta died.

Ruta: It's so strange for me to hear his name spoken by another person, especially an outsider.

Varda: Do you want to tell me?

Ruta: “Do you want to tell me?”…Quite the therapeutic tone, all of a sudden. Not a bad imitation of you, right? No, Varda. I don't want to tell you, but I will, because I'm polite and it's only right. Neta died from a snakebite. It's weird, but I'm sometimes embarrassed to say so. As if dying in the army is honorable, and to be killed in an auto accident is part of the life people made for themselves. I mean, no society prohibits the use of cars because of the sanctity of life. Sanctity of life is bullshit. And illness is reasonable, and of course old age, but snakebite is something that must be hidden. It's a shameful, frightening death. Because who ever heard of such a thing? That here, in the twenty-first century, an animal could kill a person? Where are we, dammit? India? Africa? But every year two or three cases like these are published, and people read about them in the newspaper or see them on television and say, “Look at that, Shula, unbelievable. Somebody died from a snakebite.” Who's that knocking at the door? It's me, the Angel of Death, dressed up as a snake.

You don't need to write the name Shula; it's just the generic name of a woman who reads a book while her husband is watching sports or the news and—you know what?—the editors of the papers and the husbands of the Shulas are right. It really is in the unbelievable category. To die from a snakebite? “He shall strike at your heel”? “You shall strike at his head”? What's come over you, God? We're not in the Bible anymore. Enough already with those plagues of Egypt, the vipers and snakes and all the blight and mildew and boils and leprosy of yours. We've made progress. Today you can get run over in a crosswalk, get blown up by a terrorist, overdose on drugs, be killed by friendly fire, or unfriendly fire, or in a plane crash. Why did you come down on my poor kid with your most ancient shtick? And what else are you going to take out of your arsenal for me? A lion will arise from the Jordan Valley? Two she-bears will come out of the woods and mangle children? What? A band of destroying angels? Big rocks falling from the sky? Will the earth open its giant maw and swallow me up?

A snake. You understand? A snake. And in the desert yet, in the most remote and isolated place with no way of calling for help. That's how God loves us: “As a bride you followed me in the wilderness, in a land not sown,” says Jeremiah. Female not male, singular not plural. Second person singular, alone and afraid. You wanted gender? So here you are: a whole people who are one female person, hungry, tired, dependent, terrified, thirsty, dying for a shower, no cell-phone reception. Far from home, far from a road, far from love, far from a hospital, far from people—that's how God loves his spouse.

A hike for guys, with all their dumb army slang for loading gear, locking down, navigating, zeroing in. Orienting with a map, so he could take our son without getting lost, straight to the place and time of the snake. This cannot be denied or changed. He took him there. Not I. Girls not invited, he told me, and smiled that smile of his, and Neta looked at him and gave me the same exact smile. Did I stand a chance? A hike for guys. Just the two of them alone. You and he.

Varda: You can stop here, Ruta, you don't need to say it all at once.

Ruta: But I'm also to blame. I could have said: No, don't go. I could have objected: No, I won't allow it. But as opposed to what they say about mothers and motherhood, I didn't feel the famous feeling that something was about to happen. And by the way, even at the moment that it happened I didn't feel that something had happened, as better mothers than I am, or better liars, feel. Nothing. I sat at home fully relaxed and then went to sleep with no problem. After all, Eitan is the most responsible and organized guy there is. He never forgot a detail, and on that hike everything was organized like clockwork, the list of equipment and checking the vehicle and planning the route, but nobody took the snake into account. Not Eitan either. Here exactly is where he bit him. On the inside of the wrist. But that's not the picture I can't keep out of my head. Not the two fangs stuck in the flesh and not the squirt of the venom, what I keep seeing is Eitan running, hugging and carrying Neta in his arms, running and knowing it was hopeless.

How did you meet?

Who?

You and Eitan.

Nice of you to ask. And also wise. The time has come for just talking, girl talk, fun stuff, not the downer of my disasters and not your boring history of the Yishuv.

We'll get back to both those topics. I'm counting on us both.

Is that a threat or a promise?

That depends upon you.

You will be surprised to hear, Varda, that Eitan and I were an arranged match. The matchmaker was my brother, Dovik. He came home one day all glowing and announced, “I met a guy who's perfect for us. I'll bring him here when I get the chance.” And the chance was his wedding to Dalia. In the same breath that he announced that they had decided to get married, he also said he intended to invite his new friend to the wedding, so we could meet him.

“Never in my life have I heard you talking with such excitement about someone,” I said to him.

“Because never in my life have I been so excited about anyone,” he said.

“What did you invite him as?”

“What do you mean? As a friend.”

“As a friend or as the bride? You seem to me slightly in love, Dovik.”

“The bride? But he's a guy,” Dovik said, with typical obtuseness.

“That's exactly what I'm talking about. Do we maybe have a
feygeleh
in our family?”

“Very funny,” said Dovik.

“I don't understand the direction this conversation is taking,” said Dalia. “We're announcing our engagement and all of a sudden all this talk about this guy?”

And Dovik said, “Dalia's right, you're talking nonsense, Ruta.”

“Thank you, Dovik,” said Dalia. “You're sweet. Can we move along now to truly important matters? I want to talk about the food we'll serve and the clothes we'll wear. I want every detail of the wedding to symbolize love and intimacy.”

Dalia really loves symbolism. She finds it everywhere. She can be standing by the dairy section at the supermarket and say, “Wow, how symbolic, ten in the morning and already they ran out of three-percent cottage cheese.” But Dovik paid no attention to the symbolism of the buffet, put on a sly look, and continued, “But if you're asking what I invited him for, then definitely not as a bride, but as a groom. I want you to make eye contact with him at the wedding, because it could be that one day he'll be the one for you.”

At the time I was sixteen and a half and not interested in any matchmaking. But Dovik said it again: “Listen to what your big brother is telling you. Make eye contact with him, Ruta, you hear?” So then I was convinced I was right, that he was really in love with his new friend and that he decided to use me as bait to keep Eitan close to us or that this was the next best thing to getting into bed with him himself. Either way, it was very amusing to see him in such a state.

“Eye contact, Dovik?” I said to him when he nagged me about it the next day. “I'm all of sixteen years old, and if you hadn't noticed, I'm one of those sixteen-year-old girls who still has no tits at all. I don't deliver the goods.”

As you've surely noticed, Varda, and I've noticed that you've noticed, even now I'm not outstanding in the boob department, but back then I was flat as the kitchen table.

Dovik laughed. “When you see him, it'll come to you naturally. As for your tits, we're all waiting for them patiently, so he can wait too.”

To cut it short, Eitan came to the wedding, and I made the obligatory eye contact. It wasn't hard because I definitely found him attractive, and he definitely noticed me and smiled at me, and we also exchanged a few words, but that was it.

The truth? I was disappointed. He looked fine, not just a pretty boy, a nice inviting face, beautiful hands, graceful walk. What I liked best was his skin, which had a unique color, kind of golden. My diaphragm brain wondered if he glowed in the dark and I felt myself blushing.

It was obvious that he liked me too, but nothing happened. I mean something did happen, big time, but not with me. With me everything happened only much later, when Eitan kept coming to visit more and more, and it was quickly clear to me that he wasn't coming because of Dovik but because of me, and another thing, that although I was twenty and he was twenty-five, I was the one who would have to wait for him to grow up and not the other way around.

Whatever. Back to the wedding. Dovik and Dalia stood at the gate to the yard hand in hand, the same way Dalia symbolizes her happiness in public to this very day. They greeted the guests—hugs and backslapping, kisses on the cheek and big hellos, jokes about the gifts, who gave what and how much—until Eitan arrived. And then, the moment Dovik saw him approach, he said, “Here he is,” and he left Dalia and went to him.

He took him by the hand and led him in with a look of “see what I found” and again whispered to me like an idiot, “Eye contact, Ruta. You hear?” But it was already clear that the last thing Eitan needed was eye contact with me, a girl of sixteen and a half who was too tall and too flat-chested, since all the well-developed women there were already looking at him. Even our mother, who deigned to come from the United States and got a new face-lift in honor of the wedding of her firstborn son, asked me, “Who is that
handsome
guy, the one Dovik likes so much?” And I said, “I have no clue, Mother”—it's so strange for me to say that word, to her then or to you now—“I have no idea, it's some friend of his from the army.”

At the time, I didn't yet know all the details, but I later learned that they both had indeed served in the same army unit, but not at the same time or in the same job. Eitan was a combat soldier and Dovik an operations sergeant; that was the formal definition of his job, but in practice he was a jack-of-all-trades, a cross between a secretary, a quartermaster, a personnel manager, and an intelligence officer, a finger in every pie. He knew everything that was happening, took part in every mission briefing, designed and stitched together ammunition vests and customized carriers for special operations, pilfered equipment from other units, waited for the combat soldiers like a devoted doe-eyed company clerk, and to this day he is active in their veterans' organization and raises money and hires musicians for their get-togethers.

I'm sure one reason he fell in love with Eitan was that Eitan was a combat soldier, and he wasn't. Dovik has breathing problems, and from childhood he was wedded to his inhaler and exempt from gym class, despite which he turned into a fearless kid who never got tired. He climbed to the top of the tallest trees, leaped between rooftops, invaded the pens of horny young bulls, picked fights with dogs, stole cars, always with a plaster cast that migrated from limb to limb. When he was a teenager he would ramble in the hills and play make-believe: on a mission deep in the Syrian territory, en route to blow up the headquarters of Black September, to wipe out infiltrators, demolish bunkers, and sabotage missile launchers. And because Dovik is a romantic type, he also rescued girls from the harems of Saudi sheikhs and the prisons of the Arab Legion.

The draft notice came, and Dovik, with 45 out of 100 on the army fitness profile, moved heaven and earth to get into the best combat unit possible, in whatever job. He also succeeded, as you know, but he met Eitan outside the military and totally by chance, because Eitan is younger and got there only after Dovik got out, and it was a first meeting that was more random and charming and even more romantic than my first meeting with him.

Dovik knows all kinds of cool places. A really beautiful tree, a secret clearing in the woods, a natural spring or a well. “I've been all over this land on foot, in a car and a jeep,” he loves to boast, and then doesn't understand why everyone's laughing at him. In short, not far from our moshava, past the ancient aqueduct, he had a place to be alone, which I think I already mentioned, his hidden pond. In the shallow part there was always a lot of mud from cows who came to drink, but suddenly, all at once, it gets clear and deep and very cold, and there, they used to say when I was little, lived an old crocodile left over from the days when Nile crocodiles multiplied in the Land of Israel, young lions roared in the vineyards, and she-bears came out of the woods.

The older kids in the moshava told the younger kids that once a year the moshava has to sacrifice a boy or a girl to this crocodile so he won't hurt us. So watch out, Ruta, that they don't pick you, because the way you're behaving, it could happen. One day, incidentally, a little girl came to the moshava from the city, the type with golden curls and a short pink dress and red shoes, and went hiking in the area and got lost and drowned in the aqueduct, and when they found her they identified her only by the clothes she was wearing, and they said the old crocodile ate her, and some people were happy: We don't have to give him a child of our own; he already got one.

Okay. Back to the pond where they met. Totally hidden, surrounded by raspberry bushes, inula, reeds, and bulrushes, with a narrow path in the bush tunneled by wild boars, and always something slithering in the grass, something chirping and rustling. When Dovik grew up he used to take girls there; it was a melting place, that's what he called it, a place where girls melted. Dovik, as I told you, is not especially intelligent or elegant, and kind of clumsy, but he's great at closing in for the attack, an army term applicable to other situations as well.

He took me there too, when I was a little girl, to teach me how to swim. All the children of the moshava were taught to swim in the public pool by Shaikeh the gym teacher, and all the children knew that Shaikeh used this opportune occasion to touch all sorts of body parts, neglecting no one, boys and girls alike. In short, one day, after I had screamed “Don't touch me!” at him in the middle of a lesson and stuck a finger in his eye and bit his hand, Grandpa Ze'ev came to the school, beat him up in front of all the students, and made certain that he would leave the school and the moshava that very same day. As he phrased it: “Be glad you're leaving in an ambulance and not a hearse of the Hevra Kadisha.” And he ordered Dovik, “Now you, and not that dog, will teach your sister to swim, because every child must know how to swim.”

Dovik always did what Grandpa told him, but he discovered very quickly that I'm not all that coordinated and I get confused with the strokes and the breathing, and he had a brilliant idea: instead of swimming he would teach me to swim underwater, not in the pool at the moshava, but at his secret pond. I was six then, and he was fourteen, and at first he walked me into the water until it was up to my chest and told me to bend my head down into the water and exhale gently and then take my head out and breathe in, and do it again, and after I felt comfortable with my head in the water he told me to sink down to the bottom, all of me, and sit there and do nothing, just let air out very slowly and enjoy it. And if I felt like it I could take two stones and knock them together and listen to the nice noise they made, because everything sounds better underwater.

After I got used to sitting like that, he showed me how to do the breaststroke but told me to do it completely underwater, so the movements didn't need to be coordinated with breathing. And when I ran out of air, I should stand up, take my head out, fill my lungs with air, and go back under.

After a few lessons like these I started to lift my head from the water and inhale without standing, and that's how I still swim, like a seal. Most of the time underwater and taking my head out as little as possible. In general it's once every twenty or thirty meters, but if necessary or if I just feel like it, I can stay under for one hundred meters without stopping, and I can also hold my breath for four whole minutes. That's not a world record, but for ordinary people it's a lot. More than a lot, it's huge. Most people can't stay underwater more than thirty or forty seconds, and I became what they call a free diver without knowing I was one.

I don't know what I love more: diving itself or my ability to dive. Either way, it's good, and since the disaster it's had a soothing effect. It's like being weightless, like flying in slow motion. I'm not one of those deep divers. Two meters is plenty enough for me. I slide above the bottom of the pond, I glide like an underwater bird, and every time I dive I'm so happy I smile and also want to cry. Maybe I do cry, I don't know, inside the water it's hard to feel other wetnesses. Not sweat, if we actually perspire there, and not tears.

I remember: One day, when I was a young maiden, as the old ladies of the moshava would say, I was swimming in the moshava pool, and I picked up my head right next to Haim Maslina, who was sitting beside the diving board, trying to make an impression on someone I didn't know, some visitor from the city. I don't know if I've already told you about this pitiful loser, but he's the grandson of Yitzhak Maslina, a wimp in his own right, who was my grandfather's neighbor and likewise a founder of the moshava. To cut it short, as I took my head out of the water this moron says to me, “How can a girl with tits like nits have such enormous lungs?”

I wasn't angry or insulted. I love my little tits and they love me. And sometimes I'll say to them, How sweet it is that I got you, and not Dalia's, for example. And sometimes they'll say to me: How sweet that we got you and not her. They know how to talk, absolutely, but they're not into conversations with strangers, but only with me, and with each other, and with Eitan, when it was still possible to talk to him. Whatever. I said to Haim Maslina, “How does a family with a brain like a nit produce a genius like you?” And I dived back under and kept swimming.

By the way, ten years ago, on a school trip to the Jordan Valley, I took my students to the cemetery at Kevutzat Kinneret to show them the grave of the Hebrew poet Rachel, and I recited her words “I will wait for you till my days are done, as Rachel waited for her beloved,” which is how I felt about my first husband. I also showed them the grave of Berl Katznelson, who lies there serenely between the grave of his wife and the grave of his other woman, and after these tidbits of Zionist education I permitted them to take a dip in the Sea of Galilee. A few of the girls joined in, and in their honor the boys decided to hold a contest of swimming underwater to a raft that floated fifty meters from the shore.