My Michael (27 page)

"I'd like to travel in Europe. Have a telephone. Buy a small car so we could go to the seaside on weekends. When I was a child we had an Arab neighbor called Rashid Shahada. He was a very rich Arab. I expect they live in a refugee camp now. They had a house in Katamon. It was a villa built round a courtyard. The courtyard was completely enclosed by the house. You could sit outside and be shut off and private. I'd like to have a house just like that. In a district of rocks and pine trees. Wait a minute, Michael, I haven't finished making my list. I'd like to have a daily maid, too. And a big garden."

"And a liveried chauffeur." Michael smiled.

"And a private submarine." Yair plodded along behind him with short, loyal steps.

"And a prince-poet-boxer-pilot husband," Michael added.

Yair's brow wrinkled like his father's when he was thinking out complicated thoughts. He paused for a moment or two, then exclaimed:

"And I want a little brother. Aron is the same age as me exactly, and he's already got two brothers. I deserve to have a brother."

Michael said:

"An apartment here in Rehavia or in Beit Hakerem costs a small fortune these days. But if we started saving systematically, we could borrow a little from Aunt Jenia, a little from the University Assistance Fund, a little from Mr. Kadishman. It's not entirely a castle in the air."

"No," I said, "it's not entirely that. But what about us?"

"What about us?"

"In the air, Michael. Not just me. You too. You're not just in the air, you're in outer space. All except Yair, our little realist."

"Hannah, you're a pessimist."

"I'm tired, Michael. Let's go home. I've just remembered the ironing. I've got piles of it waiting to be done. And tomorrow the decorators are coming."

"Daddy, what's a realist?"

"It's a word with a lot of meanings, my boy. Mummy meant someone who always behaves reasonably and doesn't live in a world of dreams."

"But I have dreams at night, too."

I asked with a faint laugh:

"What sort of dreams do you have, Yair?"

"Dreams."

"What sort?"

"All sorts."

"Such as?"

"Just dreams."

That night I did the ironing. Next day the whole apartment was whitewashed. My best friend Hadassah lent me her maid, Simcha, again for a couple of days. The winter rain started again in the middle of the week. The drainpipes grumbled. Their music was sad and angry. There were frequent, prolonged power failures. The street was muddy.

After the whitewashing and the cleaning-up, I took forty-five pounds from Michael's wallet. I went into town in a lull between two cloudbursts. I bought chandeliers for all the lights. Now I would have glittering cut glass in my living room. Crystal. I liked the word "crystal." And I liked the crystal.

T
HERE IS
a sameness in the days and a sameness in me. There is something which is not the same. I do not know its name.

My husband and I are like two strangers who happen to meet coming out of a clinic where they have received treatment involving some physical unpleasantness. Both embarrassed, reading each other's minds, conscious of an uneasy, embarrassing intimacy, wearily groping for the right tone in which to address each other now.

Michael's doctoral dissertation was approaching its final chapters. Next year he had a distinct hope of advancement on the academic scale. In the early summer of 1957 he spent ten days in the Negev, carrying out certain observations and experiments which were essential for his research. He brought us back a bottle filled with different-colored sands.

From one of Michael's colleagues I learned that after submitting his dissertation my husband intended to compete for a fellowship which would allow him a lengthy period of advanced study in theoretical geology at an American university. Michael himself had chosen not to tell me of this intention, because he knew my weaknesses. He did not want to cause me fresh dreams. Dreams may be shattered. Disappointment might ensue.

Gradual changes had made themselves felt over the years in Mekor Baruch. New apartment blocks had been built to the west. Roads were paved. Top stories in a modern style were added to buildings of the Turkish period. The municipality put up green benches and trash cans in the side streets. A small public garden was opened. Workshops and printing presses sprang up on vacant sites previously overgrown with weeds.

The older inhabitants gradually left the district. The civil servants and Agency employees moved to Rehavia or Kiryat Shmuel. The clerks and cashiers bought cheap apartments in the government housing developments in the south of the city. The dealers in textiles and fashion accessories moved to Romema. We were left behind to keep watch over dying streets. It was a continuous, insensible decay. Shutters and iron railings gradually rusted away. An Orthodox contractor dug foundations opposite our home, unloaded heaps of sand and gravel, then suddenly abandoned his project. Perhaps he had changed his mind, perhaps he had died. The Kamnitzer family left our house and Jerusalem, and went to live in a suburb of Tel Aviv. Yoram came home on special leave from his army unit to help with the packing. He waved to me from a distance. He looked bronzed and fit in his uniform. I could not talk to him because his father was standing sternly by. And what had I left to say to Yoram—now?

Orthodox families moved into the numerous vacant apartments in the neighborhood. Recent immigrants, too, who had begun to get established, mainly from Iraq and Romania. It was a gradual process. More and more washlines came to be strung across the street from balcony to balcony. At night I could hear shouts in a guttural language. Our Persian greengrocer, Mr. Elijah Mossiah, sold his store to a pair of perpetually bad-tempered brothers. Even the children at Tachkemoni Orthodox Boys' School seemed to me to be wilder and more violent than in the old days.

At the end of May our friend Mr. Kadishman died of a kidney disease. He bequeathed a small sum to the Jerusalem branch of the National Party. To Michael and me he left all his books: the works of Herzl, Nordau, Jabotinsky, and Klausner. His lawyer was requested in the will to call on us and thank us for the warm atmosphere in which we had received the deceased. Mr. Kadish-man had been a lonely man.

That same summer of 1957 the old kindergarten teacher Sarah Zeldin also died, after being hit by an army truck in Malachi Street. The kindergarten was closed down. I found a part-time job as a filing clerk in the Ministry of Trade and Industry. It was Abba, my best friend Hadassah's husband, who secured me the job. And in the autumn three Jerusalemites who had been close friends of my parents when I was a child also died. I have not mentioned them before because forgetfulness managed to pierce my defenses. The greatest effort cannot withstand it. I meant to write down everything. It is impossible to write everything. Most things slip away to perish in silence.

In September our son Yair started at Beit Hakerem Elementary School. Michael bought him a brown satchel. I bought him a pencil case, pencil sharpener, pencils, and a ruler. Aunt Leah sent a huge box of water colors. From Nof Harim came D'Amicis'
The Heart,
beautifully bound.

In October our neighbor, Mrs. Glick, was sent home from the institution. She displayed a silent resignation, seeming quieter and more peaceful now. She had also aged and put on a great deal of weight. She had lost that rich, ripe beauty with which she had been compensated for not having had children. We never heard again those hysterical outbursts and cries of despair. Mrs. Glick came back from her prolonged treatment apathetic and submissive. She sat for hours on end on the low wall by our front gate, looking out into the street. Looking and soundlessly laughing, as if our street had become a happy, amusing place.

Michael compared Mrs. Glick to the actor Albert Crispin, Aunt Jenia's second husband. Like her he had had a nervous breakdown, and when he recovered he succumbed to total apathy. He had been kept for sixteen years in a boardinghouse in Nahariya where he did nothing all day but sleep, eat, and stare into space. Aunt Jenia was still supporting him at her own expense.

Aunt Jenia left her job in the children's department of the general hospital after a serious quarrel. After several attempts she managed to find another job, as a doctor in a private institution in Ramat Gan for old people with chronic complaints.

When she came to stay with us for the Feast of Succot, Aunt Jenia terrified me. Heavy smoking had made her voice coarser and deeper. Each time she lit a cigarette she cursed herself in Polish. When she coughed badly she muttered to herself through pursed lips: "Shut up, idiot.
Cholera.
" Her hair had become thin and gray. Her face was like the face of a bad-tempered old man. She was often at a loss for a Hebrew word. She would light a fresh cigarette with a frantic gesture, spit out rather than blow out the match, mutter in Yiddish, curse herself in sibilant Polish. She accused me of dressing in clothes which did not become Michael's position in life. Charged Michael with giving in to me in everything, less like a man than a rag doll. Yair, in her view, was rude, insolent, and stupid. I dreamed of her after she left, and her image merged with the figures of those ancient Jerusalem ghosts, the itinerant craftsmen and peddlers, musty with age. I was afraid of her. I was afraid of dying young and afraid of dying old.

Dr. Urbach expressed anxiety about my vocal cords. I repeatedly lost my voice for a few hours at a time. The doctor instructed me to undergo a lengthy course of treatment, certain features of which caused me physical humiliation.

I would still wake before dawn, wide open to the evil voices and the recurrent nightmare which took on progressive, inexhaustible nuances. Sometimes a war. Sometimes a flood. A railway disaster. Being lost. Always I was rescued by powerful men, who saved me only to betray and abuse me.

I would wake my husband from his sleep. Burrow under his blanket. Cling to his body with all my might. Wring from his body the self-control I craved. Our nights became wilder than ever before. I made Michael amazed at my body and his own. Initiated him into colorful byways I had read of in novels. Tortuous paths half-learned in the cinema. Everything I had heard whispered in my adolescence by giggling schoolgirls. Everything I knew and guessed of a man's wildest and most tortured dreams. Everything my own dreams had taught me. Flashes of quivering ecstasy. Floods of blazing spasms in the depths of an icy pool. Deliciously gentle collapse.

And yet I evaded him. I made contact only with his body: muscles, limbs, hair. In my heart I knew that I deceived him again and again. With his own body. It was a blind plunge into the depths of a warm abyss. No other opening was left me. Soon even this would be blocked.

Michael could not take this feverish, stormy abundance lavished on him before dawn. He generally yielded and collapsed with my first stirrings. Could Michael feel beyond the flood of wild sensations the humiliation I inflicted on him? Once he dared to ask in a whisper whether I had fallen in love with him again. He asked with such evident apprehension that both of us knew there was nothing more to be said.

In the morning Michael gave no sign. There was his restrained sympathy, as usual. Less like a man who has been humiliated in the night than a tender youth courting for the first time a haughty, experienced girl. Will we die, Michael, you and I, without touching each other so much as once? Touching. Merging. You don't understand. Losing ourselves in each other. Melting. Fusing. Growing into one another. Helplessly coalescing. I can't explain. Even words are against me. What a deception, Michael. What a despicable snare. I'm worn out. Oh, to sleep and sleep.

Once I proposed playing a game: each of us was to tell everything about his first love.

Michael refused to understand: I was his first and last love.

I tried to explain: You must have been a child once. A young man. You read novels. There were girls in your class. Talk. Tell me. Have you lost your memory and all your feelings? Speak. Say something. You never say anything. Stop keeping quiet, stop ticking on from day to day like an alarm clock, and stop driving me mad.

Finally a forced understanding dawned in Michael's eyes.

He started describing in carefully chosen words, without using adjectives, a long-forgotten summer camp at Kibbutz Ein Harod. His friend Liora who now lived in Kibbutz Tirat Yaar. A mock trial in which he was the prosecutor and Liora the defendant. A veiled insult. An old gym teacher called Yehiam Peled who called Michael "Goofy Ganz" because of his slow reflexes. A letter. A personal explanation to the youth leader. Liora again. An apology. And so on.

It was a dismal story. If I had to lecture even on geology, I wouldn't get so confused. Like most optimists, Michael regarded the present as a soft, shapeless substance from which one has to mold the future by dint of responsible hard work. He viewed the past with suspicion. An incubus. Somehow unnecessary. The past appeared to Michael like a pile of orange peels which must be disposed of, not by scattering them along the way, because they would make a mess; they must be collected up and destroyed. To be free and unburdened. To be responsible only for the plans which have been set before him for the future.

"Tell me something, Michael," I said, not troubling to hide my disgust. "What on earth do you think you're living for?"

Michael did not answer immediately. He considered the question. Meanwhile he collected some crumbs on the table and piled them into a heap in front of him. Finally he declared:

"Your question is meaningless. People don't live
for
anything. They live, period."

"Micha Ganz, you will die as you were born, an utter nonentity. Period."

"Everybody has strong and weak points. You would probably call that a trite remark. You'd be right. But trite isn't the opposite of true. 'Two times two is four' is a trite remark, but nevertheless..."

"Nevertheless, Michael, trite
is
the opposite of true, and one of these days I shall go mad just like Duba Glick and it'll be your fault, Doctor Goofy Ganz."