The Remains of Love (39 page)

I’ve left home, he reminds himself in the night, I took a few clothes and some books, the laptop and the mobile, I didn’t even kiss the children in their sleep, went down the stairs as if I was just taking out the rubbish and I’d be back directly, got into the car and not for a moment did I think of her, of her astonishment and her anger, and I didn’t calculate the resentment of the years passed and the dread of the years to come. No, all tabulations and computations have been left behind, in the grey zone of inactivity, while I have been at the heart of the action itself, trapped in it and energised by it, the little deed: one man goes in the night to his mother’s house, to sleep in his youthful bed with its faded linen, to be again, to live again, before he dies.

I’ve left home, he reminds himself again, home, he’s careful to say, and not Shlomit, because the abandonment of a woman may be interpreted as an act of betrayal, whereas leaving a home sounds like a sacrifice, giving up something precious for a worthy objective, but what is this home and was it really mine, was it precious to me, and he finds himself thinking more and more about the house, about its furniture and fittings and odd corners, the balcony overlooking the street, where he sometimes took a chair and sat in the sun, a book in his hand, but instead of reading he tended to watch the passers-by, trying to catch snippets of their conversations, jealous from the outset, wondering in his usual way, is it possible they’re all happier than he is? And he thinks of the corner of the lounge and the old leather armchair facing the TV set, where he loved to stretch out and doze although it was usually occupied, and the cramped kitchen where he always felt he was in the way, even when he was cooking or washing up; he was responsible for the bigger items and she for the smaller – in fact he hardly ever felt comfortable in his home. On rare occasions he found himself alone there, and that wasn’t particularly enjoyable either, but normally the house was the least secure of pastures where he was hunted relentlessly, caught and subjected to her implacable scrutiny, always a disappointment, always guilty. No, he didn’t like being at home and that’s why he feels no sorrow repeating the words, he even enjoys the sounds they make, the surprise they put on the faces of his audience – his mother, his sister, Anati, who has come back after a short honeymoon, a few of his friends – and in a triumphant tone he goes on proclaiming his achievement, I’ve left home, as if he’s defeated an enemy in battle.

Big hero, he mocks himself at night, victor over a woman and two children, over a helpless old biddy, since the very idea of staying with his mother he’s suddenly no longer afraid of, for so many years he has feared finding himself alone in her company, any excuse to avoid close contact with her, while now he almost enjoys living with her; most of the time her eyes are closed and she’s in a state of quasi-sleep, laid on her back and not asking him for anything, her face has withered and her cheekbones protrude, giving her a new kind of dignity. When he turns to her she shakes herself with an apologetic smile, I slept a while, I’m late, she mumbles, opening one eye with an effort as if winking at him and a moment later she’s fast asleep again, and between sleep and wakefulness a few words emerge from her mouth: even if he could interpret them they would remain of dubious relevance.

Who do you love, Avni? she asks him from time to time, and he avoids the question, what does that mean? I love my children, and she ignores the answer and asks again, who do you love, it’s impossible to live without love, and it’s not only her questions he’s evading, he’s ducking some questions of his own: why did you leave home and on whose behalf, how is your life going to look, and your old age, how are you going to live alone and how will you cope with heartbreak, that’s bound to happen, if it hasn’t already; it seems to him he’s holding his heart very carefully in both hands, like a cracked vessel that the slightest careless movement could shatter, so he has to avoid disturbance of any kind, proceeding ponderously, at a slow and hesitant pace, and for this reason he makes a point of not meeting Talia, although he passes by her alleyway from time to time when bringing the children back home, and he leans against the bamboo fence, trying to catch brief glimpses and slivers of conversation but not going inside, returning to his mother’s house and going to bed early, or sitting alone in the bar in some local pub, revising his plans once more, what will he say to her and how will she respond? Will there be any link at all between what he has to say and her response, is there any way of inducing her to react differently, to accept him in other words, to love him in other words? There’s no such way on the face of the earth, so it’s best she doesn’t even know he’s left home, his wife and his children, he’s done for her what the man she loved was incapable of doing, better she doesn’t know; it would be clear to her then just how simple and straightforward was the deed, and her resentment would be redoubled and her grief magnified, knowing it wasn’t done for her by the right man at the right time.

Perhaps all the same my love will succeed in arousing her love, he sometimes thinks, but at once he hastily erases the hope, since when did things like this happen in reality, what are you, an adolescent? Have you not yet learned the simple rule of the chain of unrequited loves, that every person falls for the one who doesn’t want him? There are times when he does indeed conduct himself like an adolescent, much to his embarrassment, wild and impetuous in imagination; the charm of life beginning is roused in him and sparkles, all the things he never allowed himself to feel, the power of falling in love and its truth, its riddles and traumas, it seems all these things are redoubled within him since it’s by himself that he experiences them, without her, since he’s as lonely in his love as a bachelor at a wedding, lonely as a pregnancy without an embryo, and absence intensifies the sensation that no one can set boundaries before you. So she will go on with her transformation into a supernatural and superhuman being, a goddess of love who’s come down to the earth and there she walks about barefoot and sad, a goddess of love who has only been elevated by virtue of her suffering. Now she’s tormenting others, a goddess who needs to be pitied and guarded against, as she’s more vulnerable than most mortals, and if she is injured then love is liable to leak from the hearts of human beings like water from a broken vessel, and how bitter and hollow they will be without it, bitter and hollow like the woman he has left, whose face is contorted with hatred and who seems to loathe even her children.

Was her devotion to the children really meant to prove to him her superiority over him? His departure signalled the end of the competition and apparently as a result of this she lost interest in them, he sees this in their clothes, in their faces, their movements, their diet, and his heart goes out to them and is aroused to make up the deficit. Where shall we go today? he asks Yotam, who’s waiting for him at the garden gate, climbing on the fence like a little monkey, fancy an ice cream? Pizza? The zoo? And the little one responds enthusiastically, usually choosing the last option on the list, but he hears his distress at the end of the joyful whoop. In vain he will stuff him with sweet and sickly distractions, he’ll be content with the modest local playground, just so long as afterwards they go up to the house together, to the reassurance of routine, and he knows there’s only one way he can appease them, only if the break-up that he’s forced on them through no fault of theirs will ultimately give them a better father; it’s up to him and he owes it to them, however hard it proves to be, less so with the cheerful younger one, resembling the baby he himself once was, more so with Tomer and his perpetual scowl.

He must work hard to forge a way through to him, to exploit this time of opportunity, when Shlomit loosens her grip, seeing that in this land it’s very short and circumscribed, the time fathers spend with their sons, and when he’s finding it hard to sleep at night, his thoughts skip from his mother, who whimpers like a baby, to the mother of his children and the one who will now never have children and he finds himself thinking more and more about his country. It seems his sense of belonging to her has strengthened since he uprooted himself from his home, he clings to her and wonders about her and her destiny with growing trepidation, sometimes with malicious pleasure when he reflects on the ways she has so sorely disappointed him, and then he counts her mistakes and her blunders, and sometimes it’s her sufferings that are revealed to him, choking him with grief, she’s as close to him as his mother and his sister, and like them she is complex, and like them she is flawed, and like them she is precious to him in her distress, and he bemoans her fate as if it’s already been decided, so many years the state has existed, and before growing up she has grown old, and before ripening she has decayed, and he contemplates her death as he would contemplate the death of human beings, the anticipated death of his mother. How will this happen in the final analysis, which is the organ that will decide the outcome of the battle, what calamity will scourge the state that hasn’t done enough to endear herself to her citizens, the state that will yet force her citizens to betray her and abandon her, exactly like Shlomit; it seems to him he’s gone out of his mind when he conducts nightly conversations with his country, reproving her and delivering moral homilies, his heart beating fiercely when he thinks of her intolerable demands, a country dependent on so many of the dead, trusting them to continue holding her up with raised and enfeebled arms. Tens of thousands of the young dead, children almost, lifting their arms while she lies with spread-eagled limbs, unbearably heavy, lazy, foolish, greedy and sacrilegious.

Wear sackcloth and ashes and fast, he berates her, perhaps you will yet succeed in saving yourself, if not for the sake of the living at least for the sake of the dead, but she laughs in his face, a resounding laugh, who are you to preach at me? You who weakened me and betrayed me, because of people like you I fell sick, and now I am sick, sick, she shrieks in his ears, and her tirade blends into his mother’s moans, the weeping of the baby from the apartment next door. Don’t cry, Yotam, he mumbles, it’s just a bad dream, Daddy’s here with you, Daddy’s looking after you, but of course he isn’t with him and if he calls he won’t hear, and what’s left of being a father if he doesn’t hear his son crying in the night? He must find an apartment, and soon, and fix up a room there for the children, but in the morning, as he grinds through the traffic-jams between his mother’s suburb and his office in the centre of the city, he relaxes the pressure on himself, it’s too soon to get established, it’s all happened so abruptly, without thought and without planning. It’s necessary to think, this being the case, after the event, to plan for the future that will follow the event, which he will not necessarily regret. The possibility of returning home he finds nauseating, but it’s another home he’s thinking about day and night, a little apartment in the middle of the alley, with a fragile fence separating it from the passers-by, who would never imagine that so close to them, in the heart of the tumult of life, the world to come is quietly residing.

He peers between the yellow and interlacing branches, is there a light in the lobby, can he hear voices emerging from the interior, is that a fleeting movement he sees at the window? How flimsy is the fence, and yet so impervious, just like her; at times he feels a sudden surge of hatred for her – how can she be so indifferent to his absence? It’s been a long time now, more than a month, and nothing is omitted from her regular routine with which he’s so familiar: in the evening she’ll park her car close to the alleyway, go down the main street to buy some groceries, she’ll cook herself a light supper, vegetables, cheese, bread, glass of wine, put a CD in her sophisticated sound-system, opera again; for someone who doesn’t like words, she’s strangely addicted to opera, and then perhaps she’ll stretch out on the sofa with a book in her hands, or sit down in front of the computer and correspond with colleagues abroad, and it seems nothing will grieve her any more or gladden her either, nothing will shock or shake her. Just a sterile old woman, he thinks irritably, women like that used to be called aunts, this is Auntie Talia, he’ll tell his children if he ever takes them to her house, and at once he’s appalled by the intensity of his hatred. What does he expect of her, what does she owe him, he was the one who suddenly latched on to her while she was in mourning for her life, burdening her with unrealistic expectations and having the nerve to be angry when they’re not fulfilled, and he drags her feet away from there. At the end of the alley he notices the gold car that wasn’t parked there before, and at the sight he feels suddenly weak and his knees buckle: she’s here and she can save him, she’s here and she’ll never save him, and he leans helplessly against the car, its engine still warm, pressing his cheek against the roof, and the body of the car responds to him as he strokes the smooth paintwork with his fingers, how long had he been hunting for her, criss-crossing the streets of the city as the summer was just beginning; now it’s coming to an end and still he’s as far from her as ever.

A sudden tremor shakes him, bringing with it a choking sensation, what’s happening to him, are his eyes closed or has it suddenly gone dark, can it be sunstroke, the sun must be setting by now, suddenly he can’t see, can’t see anything at all, but he can hear, and he hears a pleasant voice asking if he needs help, and he hesitates before answering; he certainly needs help but what exactly, and from whom, help is a complicated business. Would you like some water perhaps? the voice goes on to ask, and a bottle is pressed to his lips and he takes it gratefully, he hadn’t realised how thirsty he was, his eyes are thirsty too and he splashes water on his face until his vision clears and he sees a tall woman standing there, her body bony and her face sharp, her hair long and damp. There’s a virus going round, she says, fever and convulsions, I only just got over it myself, I know exactly how you’re feeling, and he replies with a groan, really? How long does it last? And she says, not long, a day or two. Do you need help getting home? And he answers, no, it’s all right, I live here, and he points to the bamboo fence.