The Remains of Love (21 page)

When she dresses, exhausted, in the morning, confronting the scattered bedclothes, inside the bra that she’s fastening she notices, nestling silently, pockets of flesh that have lost their vitality, the monthly cycle of filling and emptying, and they hang on her body lacking stimulus and sensation, almost like an internal organ you never knew existed, and she averts her gaze dismally. Of course she didn’t expect to keep her youth for ever; for years she’s been shadowing her mother’s ageing process, but she didn’t expect it to come to her so soon, and she wonders about those close to her who don’t sense these transformations, treating her as if they know her while she goes on changing, but how few they are, those who are close to her; she has always preferred to be alone, with just a few people around her, and even they aren’t as close as they used to be. It seems that the thing closest to her now is the house, with its four rooms and its enclosed balcony, and like her it is wondering where they’ve all disappeared to, because the place always used to be full of commotion in the afternoons, when Nitzan came home from school with a friend or two, and Gideon sometimes came home early to develop his pictures, dipping them in his trays, showing them to her and asking her opinion, and the mothers of the schoolfriends would stay for coffee, and her students would contact her from time to time, and now it seems to her the house is decaying, its arid rooms closing their eyes in thirst, because Gideon is coming home late, and even then he’s tired and not inclined to talk, sitting down with his laptop and transmitting his pictures to the editorial team, occasionally muttering some criticism of young editors who have never in their lives been in the field and have no idea which pictures to choose, and Nitzan usually prefers to accompany her friends to their homes or to roam the streets with them, and when she returns she disappears into her room and Dina hesitates by the closed door, listening to the twittering of the voicemail and the ringing of the phone and the clicking of the computer keyboard and the giggling emerging from the room. Already she’s incapable of distinguishing between a human voice and an electronic voice, and thus whole hours of the day have lost their clear and reassuring structure and turned into an extended mishmash of time, in which it’s apparently possible to do wonderful things, to help the needy or develop latent talents, or alternatively do the things that are required, such as her doctoral thesis, without which her job isn’t secure, but she’s unable to gather her resources of strength together; they are scattered about the rooms, leaving her feeling as if she’s about to faint.

You’re sick, she says aloud, almost with malicious satisfaction, you’re sick, in the end you’ll be like that woman who hanged herself, and she scours the house, wondering how you carry out something like that, it seems that even for suicide talents are needed that she doesn’t have, practical creativity, resourcefulness and determination. Her gaze wanders over the light fittings, the taps, the lintels, here’s the stool that Nitzan used to climb on to brush her teeth, that could come in handy, and she shakes her head in an effort to dislodge this dreadful thought, and yet she can’t let it go.

You remember you told me about a woman who killed herself? she asks Gideon, how exactly did she hang herself? He doesn’t remember anything about it, his life is packed with one-off encounters, random information, I’ve no idea, Dina, why are you so interested, did I say she hanged herself? But he doesn’t wait for her answer, he’s too busy. It isn’t easy competing with younger photographers, to run from demonstration to funeral, from military operation to government session, and search once again every time for the special angle, and he’s never satisfied, even when he wins prizes and recognition, and he’ll always be worried, always hoping to find tomorrow what he didn’t find today. It isn’t her his interest is focused on, but his camera, and although this is the way it has been for ever, it has irked her more and more in recent times; still, she can console herself with the thought that she doesn’t need close and cloying love, didn’t she tire of the calm and gentle man who was then at her side, and choose Gideon instead?

He admired her wisdom and that was why she thought him stupid, he was besotted with her and that was why she recoiled from him, he wanted to marry her, he wanted a big family, he surprised her with gifts and on top of everything else he was tall and handsome, and she ditched him in a moment, at the party she went to with him, on an unfenced rooftop in Jerusalem, where she met the short man with the camera slung round his neck, with the childish features and the sardonic look, and he said the most predictable thing to her. That’s what Gideon was like, not trying to impress, but with a tone to his voice that embellished the words and imbued them with extra significance, so much so that he seemed to be deriding any interlocutor who failed to understand him fully.

Are you new in town? he asked her, or something like that, and she admitted to this at once, although it soon became clear that in fact he was the new one in town, and this was his party, a kind of housewarming, if this tiny penthouse apartment could really be called a house, and when he said to her, you’re invited to stay after the others have gone, she grinned, taken aback, hadn’t he noticed she was with a partner? She stayed close to Eytan most of the evening but began watching Gideon intently, would he issue the same invitation to other girls, and she was especially surprised that he didn’t take a single photograph, as if he didn’t think them worth it. He walked among his guests with dignity, drinking incessantly, not dancing much, and when she finally saw him dancing with an unfamiliar girl, long blonde hair and a tiny miniskirt, she felt a twinge of jealousy as if he had betrayed her, and all this time her Eytan was whispering endearments in her ear, filling her plate, and turning in the course of one night into a millstone round her neck.

Two and a half years they had been together. Her father went into hospital alongside his mother, they died almost the same day, and it seemed a covenant of orphans had been sealed between them then, a seal that no one could break, but how easily it was broken, as things turned out; the day after the party it was broken, when she climbed the sixty-four steps and stood panting before Gideon’s door at the very moment it opened and the blonde came out, her hair wet; the breath knocked out of her, Dina started to retreat, blushing like a beetroot and almost fainting from embarrassment, and to her dismay she heard his voice behind her, hey, why are you running away? And when she turned to face him like a trapped animal, there was a sudden flash of light from his camera, flooding her anguished features.

Come up, he said, leaning on the rail, did you leave something here last night? and she mumbled gratefully, yes, my sunglasses, and he grinned, are you sure? You come to a party in the middle of the night wearing shades? And she said, yes, just imagine it, I hate the light. Then how are we going to live together? he said sadly, I’m addicted to the light, and she smiled, taken aback but her confidence returning to her in a reassuring current, driving white cells of identity through her veins; look, she has an existence of her own, she has a name, qualities, preferences, she doesn’t like light, for example.

So it seems we’re not going to live together, she replied, I’ll just collect my glasses and go, and at that moment she believed with total sincerity that she had really left her sunglasses here, and she followed him to the roof and searched for them among the empty beer bottles and the full ashtrays, while in fact they were perched above her forehead, and all this time he was walking behind her and photographing her, wearing only his underpants, surprisingly strong and muscular, and it was only when she came across a mirror hanging on the wall in the corridor that she noticed her glasses hovering above her scalp, and she didn’t even manage to murmur, this is my spare set, or my boyfriend lent them to me, before he gently removed the sunglasses from her head and the camera from his chest and stood facing the mirror from behind her, peeling off her long grey dress, her bra and panties, and because he was slightly shorter than her, his reflection in the mirror was virtually invisible to her and it seemed her clothes were being removed by themselves, but then she felt the sudden shock as the portals of her body were invaded and she saw her shoulders heaving and her breasts shaking and the astonishment on her face, she had never before seen her face during the act and now it seemed she couldn’t do anything but look, though it was a taboo, almost like incest, seeing her eyes open wide in a kind of ecstasy she never knew she was capable of feeling, lips parted and longing to be kissed, and her whole expression that of a woman submitting in the archaic and almost demeaning sense, a woman whose body opens before a man, and a stranger at that, who has just dismissed another woman.

Her breath misted the mirror when he uttered a sigh of intense and subversive delight, and tears filled her eyes, and it was only then that he appeared in the mirror behind her. Don’t cry, sweetheart, he whispered. In time he would call Nitzan that, but he didn’t ask why she was crying, and if he were to ask, how could she explain it? To her surprise, he gathered her to him and laid her head on his shoulder and his skin had a sour and enticing smell of pine needles, the heavy pines that surrounded his roof, which today enclose her tiny study, and he said, don’t be sorry, whatever you want you can have, take your time, I’m here, showing her with a few simple words that her situation was clear to him, committing himself easily as if the words had no value, or perhaps the opposite, giving her a rigorous and surprising present, whatever you want you can have. How did she know what she wanted, she didn’t even know him, did he whisper that to the girl who was there before her? And when she went home that evening she found Eytan waiting for her in the kitchen, slicing vegetables for a salad, and she held his hand and told him in a trembling voice what had happened that morning, and he shook his head again and again as if not believing, Dina, Dina, he mumbled repeatedly, and that night he packed his possessions and left, and she wandered sadly around the empty house; it seemed to her her father had died again and she was left alone with her mother, and once more she had only herself to blame, since the photographer on the roof wasn’t renowned as a high achiever, he wasn’t capable of absorbing the pangs of grief and regret, and of course he had no interest in finding himself in constant competition with another man who loved her unconditionally, although after less than a year he married someone else, so apparently he didn’t really love you that much, although you can be sure this was only a sign and symptom of the scale of the crisis he was going through, and maybe the four children he has brought into the world since then with his rich American wife in a settlement in the Jerusalem hills are likewise sign and symptom of his love for you, who knows, and you found yourself with a stranger, someone you’ve never been able to figure out to this very day, you couldn’t have guessed at his coolness and insularity, and on the other hand his devotion; the rare moments of intimacy between the two of you are still more precious to you than the abundance that others could offer.

Because in the end, as she discovered, she too was suited to this style of life, living beside him but not with him, especially when Nitzan was there to enliven and console, but now as she sits at her laptop on the enclosed balcony surrounded by pine needles, she knows that for the first time since the moment on the roof of his house, a decision stands before them, and that all their love and hate, their friendship and their rivalry, their happiness and pain, are piled up on one pan of the scales, while on the other for the first time there is a heavy and menacing aspiration, an aspiration which apparently came from nowhere but is deeply rooted in her essence and in her secrets.

Because only this can breathe life into her, put back into her hands the miraculous sphere of the future, only the thought of that baby who is waiting for her far away, and yet the whole idea seems to her so far-fetched she doesn’t try to put it on a practical footing, it’s like those fantasies of childhood that have no limit because they have no validity, and she sits and stares at her computer in her transparent study, your watchtower, Gideon used to jest, because from there she looks down on birds and treetops and clouds and solar thermals, on all those who don’t need her; her desk is piled high with exam papers she’s supposed to be marking, what a strange childhood, she says again. Her mobile rings and she hears Nitzan’s voice. Don’t wait up for me, Mum, the girl announces, I’m staying over at Tamar’s place tonight, she’s got the house to herself, is everything all right with you? she asks unexpectedly and Dina replies hastily, yes, of course, why?

You’ve been acting a bit strange lately, Nitzan says, but at once her voice is swallowed up by the hubbub of the school, and Dina replies with an effort, strange? How? – not wanting to overload the thread of the conversation with her issues, or pressurise her only daughter the way her mother pressurised her, but Nitzan’s already moved on, so I’ll be back at midday tomorrow, OK? She’s impatient to join her friends who are calling her, perhaps she’ll tell them where he disappeared to, the boy who slept beside her in her bed. Well, enjoy yourself, Mum, you can have a romantic evening with Dad, she chuckles. And Dina says, thank you for that, my dear, although the conversation is already over, and she rests her head on the pile of exam papers, her eyes smarting, and the air-conditioning wafts a gust of hot wind in her direction; her watchtower heats up easily and is inundated by the dust of the desert, although its windows are closed.

Yes, a romantic evening is in store for them, and what is she going to say to him this evening, find me a baby because that’s what my mother muttered in her sleep? Or will she quote the words of Rachel to Jacob, give me a child or else I die? Anyway she hasn’t the faintest idea what it involves, how you go about it, where you start, and all at once she shakes herself and attacks the computer, how easy it is these days to garner information, and a lot more besides; in the space of a few hours she meets more people than she’s met in the whole of her life, people who, like her, are longing for a child, who give themselves strange and sometimes ludicrous nicknames, and yet they take themselves absolutely seriously, and expect to be taken seriously by others, and here they are readily sharing with her their life-stories and aspirations, and especially the problems they have had in foreign and alien countries, confronting devious and venal authorities and unwieldy bureaucracies, and they are ostensibly powerless but bursting with hope, and although they are apparently strangers to her, they feel so much closer than her husband and her daughter, than her mother and her brother, and it seems to her suddenly that a generous and overflowing heart beats in the body of the computer, which until now has served her for the purposes of her work alone; she reads and reads breathlessly about men and women, together or individually, who haven’t managed to bring a child into the world, and yet have found that the world is full of children, although the way to them is long and arduous, full of pitfalls and miracles, and so they have taken a child from the world and given him a home, and their stories describe a love affair like no other, a sense of destiny and a deep bonding of souls.