Great House (21 page)

I wrote Yoav a note and left it on his desk, eager to get out of the house before I ran into Weisz. It was still drizzling outside, the fog low and heavy, and by the time I reached the station the damp had seeped through the coat my mother had bought for me. I took the Tube to Marble Arch, and from there I caught the bus back to Oxford. As soon as I unlocked the door of my room a crushing sadness descended on me. Away from Yoav, my life in Belsize Park took on the uncertain quality of a play whose stage could be dismantled, its players disbanded, and the heroine left alone in her street clothes in the darkened theater. I crawled under the blankets and slept for hours. Yoav didn't call that day or the next. Not knowing what else to do, I dragged myself to the Phoenix where I watched
Wings of Desire
twice. It was dark by the time I walked home along Walton Street. I fell asleep waiting for the phone to ring. I hadn't eaten all day, and at three in the morning the gnawing in my stomach woke me. All I had was a bar of chocolate, which only made me hungrier.

For three days the telephone didn't ring. I slept, or sat immobile in my room, or dragged myself to the Phoenix where I sat for hours in front of the flickering screen. I tried not to think, and lived on a diet of popcorn and candy that I bought from the incurious punk anarchist who ran the concession stand, to whom I felt gratitude for possessing
principles that approved of whiling away one's days alone in a cinema. Often he gave me free candy or a large soda when I'd only paid for a small. If I'd really believed things between Yoav and me had come to an end I would have been in far worse shape. No, what I felt was the torment of waiting, stuck between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next which might or might not bring a hail storm, plane crash, poetic justice, or a miraculous reversal.

At some point the telephone finally did ring. One sentence ends and another always begins, though not always in the place the last one left off, not always continuous with the old conditions. Come back, Yoav said in something close to a whisper. Please come back to me. When I unlocked the door in Belsize Park, the house was dark. I saw his profile illuminated by the bluish glow of the television. He was watching a Kieślowski film we'd seen at least twenty times. It was the scene where Irène Jacob goes to Jean-Louis Trintignant's house for the first time to return the dog she'd hit with her car, and finds the old man eavesdropping on his neighbors' telephone calls.
What were you,
she asks, disgusted,
a cop
?
Worse
, he says,
a judge
. I slid onto the couch next to Yoav, and he pulled me to him without a word. He was alone in the house. Later I found out that their father had sent Leah to New York to retrieve a desk he had spent four decades searching for. In the week that she was gone, Yoav and I fucked all over the house, on every imaginable piece of furniture. He said nothing more about his father, but there was a violence in the way he wanted me, and I knew that something painful had taken place between them. One night, always a light sleeper, I woke suddenly with the feeling that a shadow had passed over us in silence, and when I crept down the stairs and turned on the hall light Leah was standing there with the strangest look on her face, a look I'd never seen before, as if she had cut the fraying ties to whatever had moored us. We had underestimated her, but no one more so than her father.

W
HERE ARE YOU
, D
OV
? It's past dawn already. God knows what you do out there among the grasses and nettles. Any moment now you'll appear at the gate covered in burrs. For ten days we've lived together under the same roof as we have not for twenty-five years, and you've hardly said a thing. No, that isn't true. There was the one long monologue about the construction down the road, something about drainpipes and sinkholes. I began to suspect it was a code for something else you were trying to tell me. About your health, perhaps? Or our collective health, father and son's? I tried to follow but you lost me. I was thrown from the horse, my boy. Left behind in the sewage. I made the mistake of telling you as much, and a pained look gripped your face before you reverted back to silence. Afterwards I began to suspect that it had been a test you'd concocted for me, one for which the only possible outcome was my failure, leaving you free to curl back into yourself like a snail, to go on blaming and despising me.

Ten days together in this house, and the most we've done is stake out our territories and inaugurate a set of rituals. To give us a foothold. To give us direction, like the illuminated strips in the aisles of emergency-stricken planes. Every night I turn in before you, and
every morning, no matter how early I rise, you are awake before me. I see your long gray form bent over the newspaper. I cough before entering the kitchen, so as not to surprise you. You boil the water, setting out two cups. We read, grunt, belch. I ask if you want toast. You refuse me. You are above even food now. Or is it the blackened crusts you object to? Toasting was always your mother's job. With my mouth full, I talk about the news. Silently, you wipe the sputtered crumbs and continue to read. My words, to you, are atmospheric at most: they come through vaguely, like the twitter of birds and the creak of the old trees, and, as far as I can tell, like these things they require no response from you. After breakfast, you retire to your room to sleep, exhausted from your nighttime rambling. Close to noon you appear in the garden with your book to stake out the only lawn chair whose seat has not broken. I claim the easy chair in front of the TV. Yesterday I followed the news report of an obese woman who died in Sfat. She hadn't moved from her sofa for over a decade, and when they discovered her dead they found that her skin had grafted to it. How it was possible for things to have gotten so far—this they didn't get into. The report was limited to the fact that she had to be cut loose from the sofa, and hoisted through the window with a crane. The reporter narrated the slow descent of the enormous body wrapped in black plastic because, as a final humiliation, there was no body bag in all of Israel big enough to fit her. At two sharp you reenter the house for your solitary monk's meal: a banana, a cup of yogurt, and a meek salad. Tomorrow, perhaps, you will appear in a hair shirt. At two-fifteen, I fall asleep in my chair. At four, I wake to the sound of whatever odd job you have chosen for yourself that day—clearing out the shed, raking, mending the roof gutter—as if to earn your lodging. To keep things fair and square, so that you won't owe me. At five, I summarize the late-breaking news to you over tea. I wait for an opening, a crack in the hard glaze of your silence. You wait for me to finish, wash out the cups, dry them, and return them to the cupboard. You fold the dish towel. You remind me of
someone who walks backwards, sweeping away his footsteps. You go up to your room and close the door. Yesterday I stood and listened. What did I think I would hear? The scratching of a pen? But there was nothing. At seven you emerge to watch the news. At eight I eat dinner. At nine-thirty, I go to sleep. Much later, perhaps close to two or three in the morning, you leave the house to walk. In the dark, in the hills, in the woods. I no longer wake with a hunger that drives me out of bed to gorge myself before the open refrigerator. That appetite, which your mother called biblical, abandoned me long ago. Now I wake for other reasons. Weak bladder. Mysterious pains. Potential heart attacks. Clots. And always I find your bed empty and neatly made. I return to bed and when I get up in the morning, no matter how early, I find your shoes lined up by the door and your long gray form bent over the table. And I cough so that we can begin again.

Listen, Dov. Because I'm only going to say this once: We're running out of time, you and I. No matter how miserable your life may be, there is still more time left for you. You can do what you wish with it. You can waste it wandering the forest, following a trail of turds left by a burrowing animal. But not I. I'm rapidly approaching my end. I will not come back in the form of migrating birds, or pollen dust, or some ugly, debased creature befitting my sins. All that I am, all that I was, will harden over into ancient geology. And you will be left alone with it. Alone with what I was, with what we were, and alone with your pain that will no longer stand any chance of being allayed. So think carefully. Think long and hard. Because if you came here to be confirmed in what you have always believed about me, you're bound to succeed. I'll even help you, my boy. I'll be the prick you always took me to be. It's true that it comes easily to me. Who knows, perhaps it will even excuse you from regret. But make no mistake: While I'm buried in a hole void of all feeling, you will live on in an afterlife of pain.

But you know all of this, don't you? I sense that it's why you came. Before I die there are things you want to say to me. Let's have it out.
Don't hold back. What's stopping you? Pity? I see it in your eyes: While I fly up in my mechanical chair I can see your shock at my diminishment. The monster of your childhood defeated by something as mundane as a flight of stairs. And yet, I only need to open my mouth in order to send your pity scurrying back under the rock it came out from. Just a few well-chosen words to remind you that despite appearances I am still the same arrogant, obtuse asshole I've always been.

Listen. I have a proposal for you. Hear me out and then you can accept or reject it as you choose. What would you say to a temporary truce, for as long as it takes for you to say your piece and me to say mine? For us to listen to each other as we have never listened, to hear one another out without becoming defensive and lashing out, to put, for a moment, a moratorium on bitterness and bile? To see what it's like to occupy the other's position? Perhaps you will say it is too late for us, that the moment for compassion is long past. And you might be right, but we have nothing more to lose. Death is waiting just around the corner for me. If we leave things like this it's not I who will pay the price. I will be nothing. I won't hear or see or think or feel. Maybe you think I'm belaboring the obvious, but I'd venture a bet that the state of nonbeing is not something you spend much time thinking about. Once you did perhaps, but that was long ago, and if there's one idea the mind can't sustain it is its own nullification. Perhaps the Buddhists can, the Tantric monks, but not the Jews. The Jews, who have made so much of life, have never known what to make of death. Ask a Catholic what happens when he dies and he will describe the circles of hell, purgatory, limbo, the heavenly gates. The Christian has populated death so fully that he has excused himself altogether from the need to wrap his mind around the end of his existence. But ask a Jew what happens when he dies and you'll see the miserable condition of a man left alone to grapple. A man lost and confused. Wandering blindly. Because though the Jew may have talked about everything, investigated, held forth, aired his opinion,
argued, gone on and on to numbing lengths, sucked every last scrap of meat off the bone of every question, he has remained largely silent about what happens when he dies. He has agreed, simply, not to discuss it. He who otherwise tolerates no vagueness has agreed to leave the most important question mired in a nebulous, fuzzy grayness. Do you see the irony of it? The absurdity? What is the point of a religion that turns its back on the subject of what happens when life ends? Having been denied an answer—having been denied an answer
while at the same time
being cursed as a people who for thousands of years have aroused in others a murderous hate—the Jew has no choice but to live with death every day. To live with it, to set up his house in its shadow, and never to discuss its terms.

Where was I? I'm excited, I've lost the thread, you see how I'm frothing at the mouth? Wait, yes. A proposal. What do you say, Dov? Or don't say anything at all. I'll take your silence as a yes.

Here. Let me begin. You see, my child, a little bit every day I find myself contemplating my death. Investigating it. Dipping my toe, as it were. Not practicing so much as interrogating its conditions while I still possess powers of interrogation, and can still fathom oblivion. In one of these little excursions into the unknown I uncovered something about you that I'd almost forgotten. For the first three years of your life you knew nothing of death. You thought that it would all go on without end. On the first night you left your crib behind to sleep in a bed, I came to say good night to you. Now I'm going to sleep in a big-boy bed forever? you asked. Yes, I said, and we sat together, I imagining you on a flight through the halls of eternity clutching your blankie, you imagining whatever a child imagines when he tries to conceive of forever. A few days later you were sitting at the table playing with the food that you refused to eat. So don't eat, I said. But if you don't eat, you can't leave the table. It's as simple as that. Your lip began to tremble. Go ahead and sleep there for all I care, I said. This isn't how Mama does it, you whined. I don't care how she does it, I spat, this is how I do it, and you're not moving until you eat! You
burst into tears, protesting and carrying on. I ignored you. After a while silence filled the room, punctuated only by your little whimpers. Then, out of nowhere, you announced, When Yoella dies, we'll get a dog. I was surprised. Because of the bluntness of the statement, and because I had no idea you knew anything of death. Won't you be sad when she dies? I asked, forgetting for a moment the war of the food. And you, very practically, replied, Yes, because then we won't have a cat to pet. A moment passed. What does it look like when people die? you asked. As if they're asleep, I said, only they don't breathe. You thought about this. Do children die? you asked. I felt a pain open in my chest. Sometimes, I said. Perhaps I should have chosen other words.
Never
, or simply,
No
. But I didn't lie to you. At least you can say that of me. Then, turning your little face to me, without flinching, you asked, Will I die? And as you said the words horror filled me as it had never before, tears burned my eyes, and instead of saying what I should have said,
Not for a long, long time
, or
Not you my child, you alone will live forever
, I said, simply, Yes. And because, no matter how you suffered, deep inside you were still an animal like any other who wants to live, feel the sun, and be free, you said, But I don't want to die. The terrible injustice of it filled you. And you looked at me as if I were responsible.

You'd be surprised by how often in my little peripatetic wanderings through the valley of death I meet the child you once were. At first it surprised me, too, but soon I came to look forward to these encounters. I tried to think about why it was that you would appear like that when the subject had so little to do with you. I came to realize it had to do with certain feelings I felt for the first time when you were a child. I don't know why Uri didn't arouse the same feelings before you. Maybe I was caught up in other things when he was an infant, or maybe I was still too young. There were only three years between you, but in those years I grew up, my youth officially came to an end and I entered a new stage of life as a father and a man. By the time you were born I understood, in a way that I could not have
with Uri, just what the birth of a child means. How he grows, and how his innocence is slowly ruined, how his features change forever the first time he feels shame, how he comes to learn the meaning of disappointment, of disgust. How a whole world is contained inside of him, and it was mine to lose. I felt powerless against these things. And of course you were a different kind of child than Uri. From the beginning you seemed to know things and to hold them against me. As if you somehow understood that built into raising a child are inevitable acts of violence against him. Looking down into the crib at your tiny face contorted by screams of grief—there is nothing else to call it, I've never heard any baby cry like you—I was guilty before I'd even begun. I know how this sounds; after all you were only a baby. But something about you attacked the weakest part of me, and I backed away.

Yes, you as you were then, with your fair hair before it turned coarse and dark. I've heard others say that when their children were born they tasted their own mortality for the first time. But it wasn't that way for me. That isn't the reason I find you hiding there in the shallows of my death. I was too caught up in myself, in the battles of my life, to notice the little winged messenger come to take the torch from my hand and silently pass it on to Uri and you. To notice that from that moment on I would no longer be the center of all things, the crucible where life, to keep itself alive, burns most vividly. The fire began to cool in me, but I didn't notice. I carried on living as if it was life that needed me and not vice versa.

And yet you taught me something of death. Almost without my being aware of it, you smuggled the knowledge into me. Not long after you asked me whether you would die, I heard you talking aloud in the other room: When we die, you said, we'll be hungry. A simple statement, and then you went on humming off-tune and pushing your little cars across the floor. But it stayed with me. It seemed to me that no one had ever summed up death quite like that: an unending state of longing with no hope of receiving. I was almost scared by the
equanimity with which you faced something so abysmal. How you looked at it, turned it over in your mind as best you could, and found a form of clarity that allowed you to accept it. Maybe I am ascribing too much meaning to the words of a three-year-old. But however accidental, there was beauty in them: In life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry.