A Wall of Light (14 page)

Raya pulled the towel off her hair and gave her head a vehement shake, as if drawing pleasure from the release. She picked up the pen and replied,
“Yeah, he’s okay. His wife just gave birth to triplets. Took a fertility pill so she wouldn’t have to have sex too often. Apparently a lot of them do that, the religious women. Can you imagine? Can you imagine someone hating sex so much she’d rather give birth to
three babies
at once than have sex?”

“Depends on the husband! I have to go, Raya. Thank you.”

“You’re going to give him the letter?”

“Yes.”

“I still think you have nothing to apologize for.”

“I just want to give myself a second chance.”

Lily and my brother were still talking; they had not been listening to our exchange. I knew my brother had struck up a conversation with Lily in order to ensure my privacy, though I really didn’t mind if this tranquil woman heard my story. But now I could see that whatever his initial motive had been, Kostya was enjoying Lily’s company.

“Would you like some scrambled eggs?” Raya asked, using her own invented sign for “scrambled.”

“Thanks, we just ate,” I said. “And I’m impatient to go.”

“How will you find him?”

“We did some detective work. He lives in East Jerusalem.”

“Good luck, sweetheart.”

I summoned my brother. For the first time ever, he seemed reluctant to leave Raya’s flat.

N
OAH’S DIARY
, M
AY
2, 1986.

In the news: there was a nuclear accident in the Soviet Union, they’re saying only two people died but everyone says it’s hundreds and the clouds are spreading all over the place. What if that sort of thing happens here!? Everyone knows we’ve got reactors in Dimona.

T
hings are different now that Oren’s moved to Herzliya. I’m bored at school and I’ve stopped studying for exams. I know I should be studying but I can’t concentrate. Instead I just laze about doodling and watching TV in Sonya’s room. I don’t really care much but I need to pass high school to get into Bezalel. Dad thinks I should go into costume design and not fashion design and he may be right. Not for the reasons he says (art versus capitalism blah blah) but because of last night. Last night Oren and I went to see Nina Hagen at the Liquid Disco. We were really lucky because we couldn’t get tickets the first two nights, and last night she was supposed to be in Jerusalem, but they couldn’t sell any tickets there, so she did another show in Tel Aviv instead.

People came all dressed up to impress each other and themselves, and she was wearing a shiny pink leotard with tiny light bulbs on the nipples, not the outfit I would have chosen for her. Punk has enormous possibilities but you have to know how to make predictability ironic, if that makes sense. Everyone was hoping she’d undress on stage and get off like she used to do, but she probably doesn’t trust Israelis not to be obnoxious and she’s right. Besides, she doesn’t do that stuff so much since she moved to the States—her agent must have told her it wouldn’t go over too well there. Anyway, the whole scene turned me off. People were just trying too hard. They thought they were being original and cool but they were just copying one another. As far as I’m concerned, it would have been more original to come dressed in a bar mitzvah suit. So I’m thinking Dad’s right. I’d rather do theater where you have to fit the costume to the play and not the other way round.

Dad is calling me. I told him I’m busy at the moment. That will keep him quiet for at least half an hour. He wants to grill me on my “homework situation.” He’s enlisted Sonya to help me with physics and trig, not that I don’t understand but I’ve fallen a bit behind. Luckily she already did these exams last year, so she knows what I have to cover. She’s a good teacher, I have to say. She knows how to explain things and she’s very patient.

She’s coping amazingly well with being deaf now and no longer seems in the least bit unhappy. After all those dramatics, which scared us all half to death, she’s decided that being deaf is no big deal. In her place I’d be depressed for the rest of my life, maybe I’d even kill myself or go live on some island somewhere with King Kong and a few other dogs and a horse, but she’s in a good mood most of the time, just like before.

Actually, the strange thing is that she’s a little more normal than she was before. You’d think she’d get weirder but the opposite has happened. She’s actually acting like other people now. I guess she doesn’t want to be left out more than necessary, so is making more of an effort. She stopped bringing lizards to school “to keep her company,” finally got a haircut, has lost all the extra weight and started going to her own parties instead of tagging along on mine, no longer walks around the house in her underwear or draws goofy faces on her stomach and hands, doesn’t announce at the dinner table that she got her period or clown around with her food. Our house is more normal too, because Dad hired someone to do repairs, even though we have to pay for it and it’s not deducted from our rent. We have some interest now from the money Sonya got from the secret donor (probably the doctor who gave her the drug, that’s my guess), and that’s what she wants to spend it on. She still sleeps next to Gran but I think it’s more for Gran’s sake, not hers.

At first when she talked she shouted and sounded weird, but now she has speech therapy and she’s back to sounding the same as before. You’d never know she was deaf. Funny to have to learn to talk all over again. She absolutely refused to go to a special school, so Dad found this old lady who looks like an apricot to teach her Sign and to accompany her to our regular school. Dad and I are still working on our signing. It’s really hard but interesting, like a secret language.

Sonya also pretends she can’t lipread but she can. I catch her lip-reading all the time and she also knows if people are speaking Hebrew or English or some other language. Dad says it’s important to talk as we sign, even though it’s not always easy to do, it takes practice. But Dad says Sonya wants to know exactly what we’re saying because she wasn’t born deaf and spoken language will always be her first language.

They say if you lose one faculty the others get better. Well, it’s true. Sonya can read people’s minds—she knows what they’re thinking and feeling just by looking at them. We were watching a newscaster on TV and she tells me, “He’s holding in a sneeze.” There was absolutely nothing about him to indicate that he was going to sneeze, but a few seconds later he did. Or at the supermarket this woman walked out with her kid and Sonya said, “She’s stolen something.” She hadn’t seen the woman stealing but she could tell by the way she was walking or the look on her face. Four days later the store detective caught this woman. She can read my mind too, a little. She knows when Dad’s driving me crazy, even though I do my best not to show it and not even to feel it. “Don’t plague Noah. He’s very sensitive,” she jokes around. She can even tell I’m hungry sometimes. If it was anyone else I’d get nervous, but Sonya doesn’t use anything she sees or knows against people, she just notices and that’s it, it ends there.

In the beginning she tried to get into fights with me and it really insulted her when I didn’t fight back because that meant I was feeling sorry for her. But I
do
feel sorry for her, I can’t help it! Well, I guess she finally figured out that I really, really don’t want to fight with her and she gave up. I have to admit, now that she’s acting more normal and got a haircut and lost weight and everything, she’s quite good-looking. If anyone takes advantage of her I will kill them with my own bare hands.

L
ETTER TO
A
NDREI
, M
ARCH
23, 1957

I
must tell you about our opening night, dearest! It was a resounding success, with standing ovations. There was such a flood of people coming to buy tickets when we opened the box office! We sold out immediately and we had to turn many disappointed people away. We couldn’t sell any tickets for tomorrow’s show because the tickets didn’t arrive from the printer—not even today’s tickets. We finally had to make them ourselves, by hand. Kostya and his friends helped because it was a frantic rush to get them done in time.

The credit all goes to Feingold. He used our low budget to great advantage, creating the entire set and costumes out of ribbons. We wore only white: white slips or white frocks for the women, white gatkes (long thermal underwear) and undershirts for the men. The colored ribbons were clothes, borders, water, walls, tug-of-war ropes, love letters on trees, and you see—we were all intertwined! All connected in one way or another. It had to be carefully choreographed, and our last rehearsal was such a disaster that we were quite worried. And yet, as often happens, under the pressure of a real audience we rose to the occasion.

I did forget one line. No one noticed but I was very disappointed in myself. It’s just lucky for me that people are not familiar with this text.

Kostya enjoyed himself very much. He was an usher.

Being an usher is a very difficult job in this country, as everyone pushes in. Lines don’t form in an orderly fashion: people just congregate in one place, such as a bus stop, in a chaotic, random way, and it’s impossible to know who came first and who came last. Then when the line begins to move—let’s say it’s the line to the bus—everyone begins to shove, trying to get on. People press against each other with great intimacy; they are not afraid to feel a stranger’s body close to their own. At the same time everyone keeps yelling, “Don’t push! Stop pushing!” It’s quite astonishing to watch this. As you know, I can’t bear that sort of thing, and as a result I often walk instead of taking the bus, because so many buses pass by before someone takes pity on me and calls out, “Let her through, let her through,” and I can finally get on.

Well, for the show we had marked seats. We went to a lot of trouble to tape numbers onto the folding chairs. But even so people were in a frantic state, acting as though their seats would be snatched away if they did not reach them in time. But Kostya was very calm and people respect him because he’s tall and at the same time a child, and he has a strong presence, the kind all actors long to have.

Why are people so frantic here? They must have had many experiences of being left out, and are determined not to let it happen again.

Now we are waiting for the reviews. I am sure they will be excellent. I saw one reviewer everyone is a little afraid of; he came “backstage” to ask Feingold a few questions. He seemed to be glowing with pleasure, as if he had just eaten a wonderful meal for which he had waited a long time. Someone else told me they saw him applauding very heartily. But even without reviews, the response of the audience assures us that the play will continue to be a success.

I desperately wait to hear from you!

S
ONYA

M
y brother and I walked down the dark stairwell, encouraged at first by the recent memory of Raya’s air-conditioned flat, but gradually defeated by the suffocating heat. I was fine once we were on the street and I could breathe in the sea air (mixed, however, with equal portions of exhaust) but Kostya looked as if he had shriveled on the way down.

“I can take a bus to Jerusalem,” I offered.

“No, I’m happy to drive you,” he said. “I just hope the car makes it.”

My brother always delayed taking the car to the garage because he knew he’d get lectured on the futility of hanging on to it. Neither of us was surprised when it broke down halfway to Jerusalem. The police arrived first, then a tow truck, and then Tali in her sleek silver Peugeot. She parked at the side of the road and joined us. Her body looked compact and energetic in a green summer dress and she glittered with jewelry: rings, bangles, looped earrings, a beaded necklace. I felt myself childishly drawn to her jewelry, her red lipstick, her neatly styled auburn hair. Everything about Tali was deliberately cheerful.

In spite of her exuberance, or maybe because of it, I could not imagine involving Tali in my mission. “You go on home, I’ll take a taxi the rest of the way,” I insisted.

My brother was not happy with this plan. I could see him only reluctantly admitting to himself that I was in fact an adult and could do as I pleased. I don’t know how he talked Tali out of taking me to Jerusalem.

We phoned for a taxi and waited in the shiny Peugeot. Twenty minutes later a slightly dented dark blue Mercedes pulled up behind us. My brother checked out the driver, an ancient toothless Yemenite. To my great annoyance he told the driver to take care of me. If anyone needed taking care of, it was the driver. He appeared to be about a hundred years old and was probably as deaf as I was.

“Call me when you get there,” my brother said.

“Yes, Your Highness.”

I sat in the back of the Mercedes. The letter Raya had written was in my shoulder bag; I took it out of its envelope and looked at the pretty Arabic script. Hard to believe the nearly identical-looking squiggles were distinct phonetic symbols. If it turned out that Khalid was interested in me, I’d take a course, learn Arabic. The idea excited me and I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it before.

I slid the letter back in my bag and stared through the window at the silent hills and eternal patterns of stones that decorated them; it was easy to imagine a Roman soldier or some peasant prophet sitting on one of the stones and eating dates or ducking behind the brambly trees to hide from an enemy. You are dust and to dust you shall return.
This can’t go on
, I thought. The words took me by surprise: I was referring not to the layers of bones that had fed these hills, but to my life.

I loved my brother, I loved the way he looked after me and worried about me and cooked for me. I loved his hands stirring batter or peeling potatoes for his famous mashed potato–chocolate cake. Who but my brother would discover a chocolate cake that called for mashed potatoes? Only Kostya.

And yet it seemed to me that the reason we still shared a house had to do, at least on my side, with inertia, though the inertia was fueled by solicitude. It seemed, after Noah moved away, that I was all Kostya had left: how could I do anything but stay? Possibly Kostya felt the same way—that he could not desert me.

I tried to imagine Kostya wandering like a lost soul through the nine rooms of our empty house if I left: it was an unbearable image. At the same time, I was seized with the conviction that often accompanies a sudden surge of annoyance: I could no longer share a home with him. Maybe I would stay and he could go live with Tali, I thought, conveniently rearranging his life to suit mine.

No, we would have to sell the house.

It was the first time I’d considered such a possibility. I had seen our home as indestructible—and as for our lives together, we’d achieved a self-sustaining state of mutual understanding. Now, in one easy move, I had destabilized the present by envisioning an alternate future. I was at the spinning wheel, trying to turn gold into straw.

And yet the house had never seemed entirely reliable; it was the sort of pleasure dome one expected to float away one day or simply vanish. I was deeply attached to the garden; I derived continual pleasure from our oval pool; and sitting by the fireplace in winter was almost a religious experience. But as I considered these things I realized that they already seemed weightless, and the unknown home that would replace them had, at the moment, a far more substantial presence.

What would Nava, my Beersheba teacher and unofficial guru, have said? She was the wisest person I’d ever known, and I missed her. She never did come back from Holland after her sabbatical, and a few years later I heard that she had died in her sleep. We’d exchanged occasional letters, and she invited me to visit; when she died I regretted that I hadn’t taken her up on her offer. I must have imagined that she would live forever.

Her field was pure math, but she saw math as allegory. An allegory for human stubbornness, capriciousness, bewilderment, adaptability, sense of futility and fear. Phenomena in mathematics and physics inevitably revealed, in her view, the human impulse that created or discovered them. “Often,” she said, peering at us through her deep ironic eyes, “we like to hold on to the ideas we have for as long as possible—and even beyond that.” These phrases—and the wry smiles that accompanied them—came back to me when I needed to be harnessed. Or maybe it was just the opposite: maybe they came to me when I needed to run wild.

Nava was the only one who understood my high spirits when I was recovering from my encounter with the hoodlum twins. She visited me in the hospital and told me about her experiences during the war; she’d spent four years hiding in a cellar with her two sisters. “We passed the time by imagining and inventing our futures, the wonderful lives that awaited us. Imagination is the only thing that can save you in this life, Sonya. But to imagine alone is irresponsible, it hurts others. Imagination must be shared, it must be a collective enterprise.”

Nava would have known that there was no going back. The idea of parting from Kostya had settled snugly inside me and was not going to budge. Maybe we’d find separate apartments in the same building, a building that was not far from a community swimming pool, and we could still meet at the pool and race one another. Or we could live in the same neighborhood; that would also be all right. But I needed my own place. A flat with a balcony and, if I was lucky, a view of the sea. Every morning I would step onto the balcony in my housecoat and look out at the Mediterranean, misty and powerful in the distance.

Predictably, the aged Yemenite got lost. He was a Tel Aviv driver; Jerusalem was alien to him. He drove bravely on, constantly talking into his intercom with a slightly desperate look on his face or calling out to other drivers at red lights, but their rushed instructions only confused him further. I had never realized Jerusalem was so large, though maybe it only seemed that way because we were going in circles; I was certain we’d been on Emek Refaim, Valley of Ghosts, at least twice. The street seemed appropriately named at the moment.

It finally became obvious that despite the many amulets hanging from his mirror—amulets nearly identical to the ones that had lulled me to sleep this morning—my driver’s situation was hopeless. I told him to stop, gave him 150 shekels, and escaped.

I found myself on an unusual street, lined with renovated shops and trendy cafés: Jerusalem chic. The narrow trees and old stone walls seemed self-conscious in this setting; the contrast added to the street’s charm. I wandered into the nearest store. Despite its polished exterior, the usual Middle Eastern chaos reigned inside: wooden crates, burlap bags, cardboard boxes, and the goods themselves all appeared to be eternally suspended in some mid-process of sorting and ordering. I bought a bag of pistachio nuts, an orange, and a bottle of water. For a moment I considered getting something for Khalid, in case he was home and invited me in, but I decided against it. I sat on a folding chair outside the store and peeled the orange. A warm feeling of satisfaction spread through my body. I was on my own, and I was going to see a man—a man I loved, a man who had been inside me.

When I finished my snack I entered the store again and approached the owner. He was a thin, middle-aged man with wild hair and restless eyes. I wrote in my notebook,
“Could you please order a taxi for me? I need to get to Mejwan: is it far from here?”

I handed him the notebook and he squinted at what I’d written. He seemed confused and shook his head. He opened a drawer, took out a large sheet of paper, and wrote in large letters,
“Wait a minute,”
then vanished into a back room. I noticed that the sheet he’d written on had been torn out of a school notebook and there was writing on the other side. I turned the page over and saw, in a child’s scrawl, a list of seven vocabulary words in Hebrew:
road map, elimination, retaliation, ticking bomb, military solution, diplomatic solution, secure border.
If I needed additional evidence that I lived in an insane country, here it was. This was the week’s lesson for what appeared to be, from the handwriting, second or third grade. Look, Mom: today I learned how to spell
hisul
, elimination.

The owner came back and retrieved the sheet of paper. He wrote,
“If you wait ten minutes, my wife will take you a little closer.”

I thanked him and returned to my place on the folding chair. The heat was less intense here, on the hills of Jerusalem, and the gentler light of evening was moving in. It was nearly six.

A few minutes later the man’s wife appeared. She was a striking woman and quite young; I would have taken her for the storekeeper’s daughter rather than his wife. Her thick, copper-colored hair was wound in braids around her head, and I had the distinct feeling that she was a performer of some sort; this would explain her eccentric hairstyle and elegant posture. A small gold cross lay like a sleepy smile against her throat. I guessed that she was from Europe, and had fallen in love with her husband while on a visit. Maybe she had come to this very store, maybe she too had needed directions. But she held on to her faith; she had not converted for her husband.

The storekeeper and the young woman spread a map on the counter and ran their fingers along it, searching for Mejwan. They both looked puzzled, but eventually seemed to come to a conclusion.

The woman smiled and offered me her hand. I was slightly shocked; she thought I was backward. I scribbled in my notebook,
“I’m Sonya, math professor at TAU. Very pleased to meet you.”

She read the note, laughed at her mistake, and wrote,
“My husband never explains anything properly! Sorry. I’m Lorelei. I teach modern dance.”

We walked to Lorelei’s car. She had some difficulty starting it but finally succeeded. She’d been driving for only a few minutes when we came upon a demonstration, and we slowed down to take a look. Six or seven protesters were trying to prevent a Palestinian house from being demolished. I remembered Iris fuming about the cat-and-mouse game: Arabs aren’t allowed to build houses without permits, but the government refused to give them permits, so they went ahead without them; the homes were demolished; they rebuilt. The signs of the demonstrators read
DEMOLITIONS VIOLATE HUMAN RIGHTS; SAVE THE MUBAREK HOME
and, more poetically,
IF YOU DEMOLISH OUR HOUSES, ARE WE NOT HOMELESS?
Two police officers were dragging away a bearded rabbi who was lying flat on the sidewalk; he’d gone limp and refused to cooperate, so the officers were pulling him by his arms. On the roof of the house another officer tried to move a chubby old woman who, unlike the rabbi, was putting up rather fierce resistance. The officer found himself temperamentally unable to fight with an old woman and tried to be gentle, but she elbowed him sharply in the stomach.

Lorelei pulled over to the side of the road, and I watched with fascination as her body expressed a dramatic struggle, slightly reminiscent of my lover’s moment of indecision when I invited him to join me on the bed. On the one hand she seemed about to spring out of her car; her body was tense with a kinetic impulse to run out and help the rabbi. But she was also weighing the consequences of possibly getting arrested and missing her class, and this held her back; it was a corporeal civil war, muscle against muscle. Maybe she could use this interesting dichotomy of movements in her next dance. Finally she shook her head, mumbled something to herself, and drove on.

The landscape changed; there was a ravine and small neighborhoods scattered in the distance, and then we were on a winding street with a chaotic assortment of multipurpose urban buildings, each with its unique character and inventive architecture. The street ended abruptly: a stone wall blocked our way. The wall stretched out on both sides as far as the eye could see.

“This wasn’t on the map,” Lorelei said, miming the words. She looked at the wall with curiosity; evidently she’d never seen it before.