The Remains of Love (23 page)

Chapter Seven

The smell that pursues her, the smell streaming in through the open window and flooding the apartment, clings to the sheets and the skin, the smell of fire and dust, the smell of the peat burning perpetually in the depths of the marshes. How could they ever have believed that agriculture would work in the place? Fields of cotton they wanted to plant there, wheat and barley, sugar-cane, didn’t even the specialist brought in from Holland say, nothing will come out of that peat, only dust and permanent fire. It will oxidise at an accelerated rate, he warned, it will dry out, it will petrify, it will subside, it will combust spontaneously under the ground and burn for weeks on end, however hard you try you won’t manage to dowse the fires.

What had always happened there in the past was the rare miracle of water and fire clinging together, intertwining amid the fans of the papyrus, until the water disappeared and the fire celebrated its victory over the land as it subsided further, like a malicious laugh rising from the belly of the earth, sending them all fleeing to their homes, to close the windows, although there was no defence against it. Year after year their food was impregnated with the smell of the burning peat, the loaves and cakes they baked, the clothes they wore and laundered, even the babies born to them, especially her Dina, who had a lengthy and miserable birth, and sprayed around her without knowing it the smell of the fire, the smell of the mistake, the smell of the incinerated dream.

And it was this smell that drove her from the kibbutz in the end, at an unsuitable age, in conditions that didn’t conform, too late or too early, but how naïve she was to think she could get away from it; it has found her in the end, it has chased her this far and day by day the fire is drawing closer to her, in the belly of the blazing earth they will lay her body, her heart will blend into the heart of the earth, like it she has dried out, petrified, subsided, like it she has disappointed, after all she, she and no other is the peat bog which is no good for anything.

Close the window, she tries to shout, but only a hoarse croak emerges from her throat; the smell is heavy and as tangible as a hand grasping her neck, it seems to her that a strip of fire is racing towards her from the foothills of Mount Hermon, the kiss of fire destined for her alone, year after year it has been on her trail, searching her out from house to house, any moment it will find her, now that she can’t walk; her steps always were faltering. How can you possibly walk with confidence when under your feet a constant battle is raging, years of warfare with no decisive result, until her father died and the fire defeated the water. How high the flames rose after his death, cavorting around the sterile plains, sending up clouds of viscous smoke; get him out of there, he’s burning, she used to run to her parents’ room shouting, the fire is getting close to Dad and we must get him out of there, and her mother would look at her with a pained expression, relax, Hemdi, the fire won’t reach the cemetery, nothing’s going to happen, she sighed, anyway the disaster has already happened.

How do you know what’s going on under the ground? she would whimper, you have no idea! And her mother did her best to reassure her, calm down, your father’s soul is with us, and nothing else matters. What a strange phenomenon is a mother without a father, indeed what a strange phenomenon is a mother, but she was a mother too, here comes Dina’s Mum, the nursery staff used to proclaim whenever she entered the children’s house in the kibbutz and she always imagined she heard sarcasm and censure in their voices, because her baby was invariably uneasy in her presence, embarrassing her with her screams in front of the other mothers, choking when she tried to feed her, spraying the white liquid in all directions, and the smell that emanated from her surprisingly swarthy skin was the smell of fire.

Close the window, she pleads, Dini, Avni, have they left her alone, and where is that woman with the black and glossy hair, who reminds her of her nanny in the first kibbutz, Shula, she remembers the name, which of them is called Shula? Close the window, but the room is dark and silent and she takes short breaths, beating her head on the pillow. If only she could get out of here, if only she could make it as far as the window, but she’s so weak and her legs are painful, she can’t even sit up. The phone is beside her and she grabs it, pressing digits at random as if it were a mysterious chest with a combination lock, a treasury of deliverance tucked away in it, but how will she get the right number, and what is the right number anyway, and since when has her daughter’s number been the right one.

I’ll call her in my heart, she mumbles, my Dini, because the memory of a rare moment reverberates in her consciousness: the early rain was falling, wild and stormy, and she took the baby with her to her father’s grave, no one saw her when she ran out of the children’s house, and she sat panting on the new, wet basalt slab, clutching the baby in her lap, stroking her hair as she told her the story.

I was the first baby born on the kibbutz, she told her in a whisper, and they all gathered together in the dining hall to see me walking. With sparkling eyes they looked at me, encouraging me to walk, and I was scared but I wanted to please them. I put one foot forward at the very moment my father let go of my hand, and everyone shouted, a terrifying sound, and I fell down on my back and for two whole years I didn’t walk, and they wanted to take me to a specialist in Vienna, until a doctor in Tel Aviv told my father, she’s just afraid to walk, make her more afraid of you than she is of walking, and suddenly a faint smile appeared on the baby’s lips, and under the high and prominent forehead there was a wise and attentive look, and she told and told, holding her tight, interlocking rib to rib so it was impossible to separate them, until the baby let out a treacherous wail which betrayed them at once, and suddenly she was surrounded, her husband and her mother and the nanny, and they snatched the wet and shivering baby from her, as if she had done her some harm, and after that she wasn’t allowed to spend time alone with her, not that she wanted to do that anyway; she had lost faith in her, they had both lost faith in each other, since then that look had never returned to her daughter’s eyes, only doubt and unease she found in those eyes, with their lightening colour.

She doesn’t love me, she would whisper secretly, my baby doesn’t love me, and now she clutches the pillow and raises it slightly, little Dina, she whispers, my poor little one. The pillow is bulging too much and she makes an effort to give it the right shape, to narrow the waist, and a soft rustle wafts towards her through the pillowcase, a barely perceptible movement of life, and she presses it to her bosom. My baby, she wails, as if she hasn’t seen her daughter since then. They reprimanded her sternly, snatched the infant from her and walked away, what was she supposed to have done, so what if the baby was a little wet? The rain treated them kindly, the rain put out the fire, soothed the body of her father laid under the slab, so many stories she wanted to tell her little daughter, so many corpses of stories have been buried inside her, my baby, help me.

How could I help you if I was a baby? She recoils on hearing the cold voice, drops the pillow and strains her eyes in the darkness of the room, has she arrived? Did she hear her calling to her in her heart? But why has she come in such a hostile mood if she’s responding to the call in her heart? How long have you been here, Dini? She tries to grope, to get a grip on details, but her daughter isn’t interested in details, since that evening their wishes have ceased to be compatible. I’m always here, Mum, she says, don’t say you didn’t know, and Hemda chuckles awkwardly, again the bitter way she says Mum, as if this is an honorific title she doesn’t deserve. That’s exactly the way the nursery staff used to greet her, here comes Dina’s Mum, forcing her to confront a whole convocation of ponderous women kneading their babies like lumps of dough with their experienced hands, to confront Elik, who was just waiting for the opportunity to rise above her, to prove himself better than her, and it’s a fact, the baby did smile at him, never stopped smiling, and she moved further away from them, taking her pupils out on long walks, telling them the stories of the lake instead of teaching them about the natural world, sitting for hours on her father’s grave in the little cemetery and all of them staring at her anxiously as if she’d gone out of her mind, but she showed them when her Avni was born, she showed them what motherly love was all about. How easy it was to hold a baby in her arms, a strong and healthy male after a frail and lifeless girl; the touch of female skin has always repelled her and she found it hard to understand how a woman can give birth to a woman. Surely a woman should bear a man and a man should bear a woman, what a shame this isn’t the way of the world, even seeing a woman suckling a baby girl is difficult for her, and she averts her gaze as if it’s a perversion.

And to think she nearly gave up on him, alienated in equal measure from her swollen belly and from the toddler dogging her footsteps and she was hoping for a miracle. She bathes in the water of the lake and the belly is detached from her body and floats on the surface of the water and turns into a great fish, and here she is running to the summit of Mount Hermon, wallowing in the snow until the belly is torn open and subsides slowly, rolling away like a snowball, but then the little girl would hold out her arms to her and she would pick her up angrily as if she was the one who made her pregnant and all of this was her fault, and it seemed to her this was a pregnancy that would go on for ever, a sterile pregnancy with no birth at the end of it, how sterile in her eyes were the fertile years.

But just when she despaired of miracles the true miracle happened, something she had never considered or imagined, although it was as it turned out the most common miracle on the face of the earth, bringing tears to her eyes even now, since after the noisy flurry of limbs at the birth silence reigned, and when she opened her eyes she found beside her a solid and stalwart creature with rosy cheeks, staring at her calmly through half-closed eyes.

Hypnotised she gazed at him, people came and went and yet she remembers only him, and the serenity between them, as if a spectral voice had come down from heaven and declared this was the soul destined for her, and although in this face opposite hers there was no outstanding beauty – it was creased and flushed from effort – she couldn’t take her eyes from it, and apparently he felt the same way, as his eyes didn’t shift from her face, narrow and dark and sweet, like little raisins, they watched her, and she put a finger to his cheek, she was so weak this was the most she could do, and tears of sudden plenty flowed from her eyes.

And suddenly she’s alarmed: had her memories been spoken aloud, had they reached the ears of her daughter, sitting in the armchair in the darkness and keeping silent, for years she has been denying this, as if it were a secret love affair, you love him more, you always loved him more, her daughter had been throwing at her the whole of her childhood, and she was constantly denying it, trying to take her in her arms, but a faint physical revulsion welled up in her when confronting the new female limbs. Who is putting this nonsense into your head? I don’t want to hear this any more! Was this Elik? She always found it hard to believe he would betray her so blatantly.

I was young, my father had died, and you weren’t an easy child, it took us time to get used to each other, but she never managed to say these simple words, only a fervent denial intended to cancel out absolutely her daughter’s resentment, and now she strains her eyes in the darkness, are you there, Dini? she asks, did her daughter hear the ancient memory emerging from her mouth in explicit words, a confession that will destroy what remains of the closeness between them, and she hastily emits a nervous laugh. You won’t believe it, she says in a jesting tone, I dreamed about a baby, I dreamed a baby was born to me, and I loved him, she adds with emphasis as if describing an extraordinary thing, but the armchair facing her is silent, perhaps she’s gone to sleep, perhaps it’s the nanny sleeping there, and perhaps there’s no one there at all, as in the children’s house when she was ill, moving an empty chair close to her bedside and laying a blanket on it, and in the delirium of fever she would see her mother sitting facing her, worried eyes fixed on her and on her lips a thin smile of self-control.

I’ll be all right, Mum, don’t worry, she used to mumble, because her father was always telling her, you mustn’t upset your mother, you mustn’t worry Mum, and to this very day she doesn’t understand why, she only well remembers what a hard test childhood illnesses were for some of the parents: some of them couldn’t stand it, and would creep into the children’s house at night, and the young Hemda liked the thought that her mother was watching over her in her sleep, and even if there was doubt she preferred it to negative certainty, but now when she coughs, trapped and constrained by the smell of fire, she finds it hard to endure the doubt, Dini, she scolds her in a loud voice, why didn’t you close the window?

The window is closed, Mum, she hears her voice, just like your heart, and she recoils in shock, that’s enough, Dini, what do you want from me? I received much less from my mother and I loved her so much, I never doubted her love, why are you blaming me all the time? But her daughter interrupts her, what do you want from me, all I said was the window’s closed.

What’s the time she asks, morning already? Lately she’s been almost enjoying the time that enfolds her, without reservations or boundaries, and she walks in its wide open spaces as if in a giant orchard, plucking a sweet fig, a plum warmed by the sun, melting in the mouth, freer than she has ever been before, and it cancels for her benefit the rigid rules of early and late, it was or it was not, turning a blind eye to minor offences. A time criminal she has become these last weeks, and in the midst of her misery she’s happy and in the midst of her loneliness she’s surrounded by people, inviting in whomsoever she pleases, a guest in the midst of her life she visits herself at the staging posts of her time, loitering as long as she chooses, but now, confronting her daughter she has to get a grip, she always had difficulty sleeping in her company, her presence inspires unease in her, and when they left the kibbutz and started living together it was the most embarrassing problem imaginable, a mother who can’t sleep because her daughter is in the next room.