The Remains of Love (48 page)

And the first evening, after he’s left his clothes in the ornate and solid oak wardrobe, among her clothes, left there with his agreement, alongside some of the dead man’s clothes, I’ll come round in the summer and sort everything out, she promised, he stretches out on the sofa on which Rafael breathed his last breaths, and a joyful pain fills him, a painful joy, I didn’t know such a combination could exist, he reflects, who knows what else I am going to discover, and in the night on her bedlinen, experimenting with her double downy woollen blanket, so many things she left behind there, towels and kitchen utensils and books, there was barely any room in the house for his possessions, he thinks that since the two of them, she and the dead man, are absent from the house in precisely the same incontrovertible way, and yet their clothes are present there in an incontrovertible way, perhaps they are existing together somewhere far away exactly as they dreamed, perhaps they went away together and together they are destined to return and he is left here like the priest in a sanctuary, keeping the flame alive for them, or perhaps the two of them have died, died together, the painful gap has been erased and he is the last who has survived to testify to their love, as if he were their only son, the fruit of their longing and desire.

I too shall yet have such a love, is his prayer between the white sheets. It seems he’s grown accustomed to the hard bed in his mother’s house and suddenly he feels he’s sinking into the softness of pillows and blankets and mattress and he shudders, clutching the sides of the bed, echoing in his ears are his mother’s stories about the marshes bordering on the lake, how they used to crawl like crocodiles so they wouldn’t sink, is he not crawling too, and has been year after year, but how tiring it is, time perhaps to pack it all in. Between sleep and consciousness he lets go of the sides of the bed, and a strange delight sweeps over him as he’s swallowed up by the moist softness of the marshes that were drained before he was born, and in the morning he’s almost surprised to find himself awake, I still exist, I exist still, exist I still, he turns the words over, and when he leaves the apartment and sets out for his children’s house to walk to school with Yotam, locking the gate behind him, he will see in his mind’s eye the tall and girlish woman who offered him water when he collapsed at the end of the alleyway, I told her I lived here, he will remember, and this is where she will find me if she wants me, she believed me, although I was lying, and the lie has now become the truth.

Chapter Thirteen

The timescale allotted to her will be equivalent to the duration of pregnancy, in nine months from now you will have a child, they promised her the day she signed the contract, perhaps even earlier, there are pleasant surprises too. She has already been pleasantly surprised, realising to what extent the anticipated change is gathering her in, tightening her days. No more idle distractions and wasting time, suddenly every free moment is devoted to them, to those scattered communities in Spain, standing on the verge of annihilation, to those Jews who will be forced to choose between expulsion and conversion, between poverty-stricken exile and abandoning the faith of their ancestors. Can the faith of the ancestors really serve as a substitute for home, homeland, security, it is stripped of love after all, and yet there are those who will say faith and faith alone is the one and the sole security, fragments of families, fragments of communities, setting out broken-spirited for unknown lands, anything rather than abandon their faith. What was the role of the holy child of La Guardia in this cruel choice that was put before hundreds of thousands of human beings? A child who never existed and never was born, whose body was not found, whose disappearance was reported by no one, succeeded in whipping up a storm that led to the drafting of the expulsion order imposed on the Jews of Spain, since in spite of conflicting testimony and in the absence of any evidence, the Jews of La Guardia were accused of a horrific ritual murder. The stories that circulated described how, when the boy was bound and his heart ripped from his body, the earth shook and the sky turned dark, it was also said he was stolen from his blind mother and the instant his soul left his body the light of her eyes was restored to her. Was this blood-libel an exceptional event, or part of a systematic campaign to prepare the ground for the impending expulsion? She pondered this question in the first article she published, nearly twenty years ago, the article that was praised so fulsomely by the dean at the bus-stop, when she was broken, and told her story.

But this time she isn’t letting any concern unravel the thread of her concentration, and there is certainly no shortage of concerns, impossible even to count them: who will the child be, the one allotted to her, is she really sure she can cope with the difficulties he’ll bring with him, how will Gideon react and how will all this affect Nitzan, is her little family heading towards disintegration, and the toughest question of them all, is this really an act of lunacy, with drastic consequences that will not be slow in coming, and every one of these concerns splits into scores of secondary concerns, and yet she succeeds in setting them all aside, as she did many years ago, when she used to sit for hours in the library, engrossed in her work, writing the first dissertations, and it seemed her way was clear before her. How happy those years were, had she not longed for this as long as she could remember? To study, amass knowledge, cling to solid facts like stakes in the ground, dates, processes, not morbid imagination, what could have been, what was not, but what was and was so, what was real.

As then she sits facing her books, and it seems for the first time since the action that threw her off course she is towing behind her a sturdy rope that will not be easily broken, and only now and then when she gets up from her seat to stretch her bones does she look around her and for a moment wonder where she is, or more to the point, when she is, because sometimes she’s a girl studying for the baccalaureate in precisely this room, in the cramped lounge of her mother’s house, and at times the months of pregnancy reverberate in her, how alarmed she was when Gideon left her and only Orly was by her side, ostensibly supporting her and at the same time intensifying her isolation with her forbidden stories, with her supercilious glances at the distended young belly.

I’m not bringing any children into the world, she used to promise repeatedly, I don’t intend to look after anyone, I’ve had enough trouble bringing up my younger brothers, and it’s because of them I haven’t had any kids, I just want to look after myself, and Dina would listen to her, thoroughly perplexed. Perhaps she’s right, perhaps it really is perverse, this absolute obligation, from now until death to care for someone else, someone she doesn’t even know, the fact that he’s been a temporary resident inside her doesn’t mean she’s going to like him, and she’s on her own, if only Gideon were with her, enjoying her and her pregnancy, she would certainly feel encouraged, but he’s left, he left even before he knew that the creature which had doubled itself had reverted to single status, and she looks back now at those days with tolerant bemusement, how little we know about what’s in store for us. She struggled so hard back then to endure the thought of the little person who needed her, while now she can’t endure the opposite thought, that there won’t still be on the face of the earth a little person who needs her, and to reach him she’ll turn worlds upside down, and who knows, perhaps she’s got it wrong again, wandering blindly in the labyrinth of her life, precisely as she used to then, and perhaps what was good for her then isn’t suited to these days, but the moment the doubts intensify she kicks them brusquely aside, not now, the war is still in full spate, in the heat of battle you can’t begin to doubt its urgency, you need to wait for the moment of truth, follow Gideon’s example. She knows that’s what he’s waiting for, only a few days ago he said to her, surely you’re not going through with this, I know you, at the moment of truth you’ll get cold feet, when you’re confronted by the child and you’re asking yourself what he means to you, and if you really want to commit yourself to him from now until the end of your life.

Sometimes within the stream of time that advances and recedes, sending up sticky foam, she misses him, the early days of their love which are imprinted in her indelibly, what was there that anyone could consider unacceptable? She remembers her mother trying to dissuade her, how can you give up Eytan, any woman would love to have a husband like that, you’re making a dreadful mistake, and the harsh words she found immensely gratifying, she’d succeeded in driving her dreamy mother, always wrapped up in herself, to the point of losing control. What do you know about it anyway, she answered her, what do you know about love, because Eytan’s good qualities lost their powers of attraction the moment she met Gideon, and she knew her mother was watching the turnaround tensely, after all she had made no secret of her amazement that such a paragon of masculinity was taking an interest in her daughter, and now she watched their parting with sorrow and scowled at the stocky and introspective man who took his place, but she herself was ecstatic for months on end. She loved looking into his eyes, narrowed one moment and the next suddenly bursting into life, she loved listening to him, again and again she would wipe away a tear when he talked about his mother, who died in her prime and left him alone with his father, a dour and depressive Holocaust survivor who was constantly telling him how sorry he was, even apologising for giving him life. If it was up to me you wouldn’t have been born, was his steadfast reassurance, but your mother insisted and now what, she’s died and left me with you, forgive me, son, for bringing you into this terrible world, and he used to go down on his knees and plead, and his little boy would forgive him yet again, and Dina loved stroking his arm as they talked, side by side on a thin mattress, pine trees lowering above them, perfuming the air with a sticky smell of resin, and it seemed they were inhabiting a higher plane of existence, and normal life taking place down below on the ground wasn’t touching them at all. Down below were her mother and her brother and Eytan and a few friends, but up on the roof amid the treetops everything was vivid and sharp, pain and pleasure and intimacy, she loved feeling close to him in a way she had never known before, he didn’t put pressure on her and didn’t steal anything from her, when he was silent she too was present in his silence, and when he spoke she was always surprised to hear him choosing the same words she would have chosen, but he didn’t exert himself at all, didn’t strive to curry favour. She loved having it proved to her again and again how comfortable he felt in the world, mainly because he didn’t need its approval, he was comfortable in his squat and muscular body, comfortable inside her, when her thighs were wrapped around his body and she clung to him, so there would be no partition between his skin and her skin, and yet there always was, and the effort to eliminate it imbued days and nights with a pungent and feverish taste which lingered a long time, over so many years, and from time to time it cropped up again even afterwards, and surely it was this that set the process in motion.

What kind of thorny project is created by the vacuum seeking to be filled, she thinks, and we yearn for what will starve us, not what will satisfy, but it seems to her that recently this mysterious mechanism has been spoilt, from the moment the balance was disrupted and the non-existent covered the existent almost entirely, like an eclipse of the sun, and even if at times she longs to return home in the dead of night, and creep naked into their bed, roll aside the stone of controversy and concentrate on love, or invite him to come to her, she’s reluctant to contact him, there’s no point to it, it will only weaken her, and perhaps he won’t want her at all, she doesn’t know what’s going on in his life, better not to know. When she passes news-stands she occasionally sees a picture he’s taken on a front page, recognising from a distance his fresh vision, that somehow he’s managed to preserve all these years. So it seems he’s working normally, and he wakes Nitzan in the morning and takes her to school and comes home early to be with her in the evening, he does the shopping and cooks the meals and makes sure she goes to bed on time, all this she hears from her daughter, who describes to her with some amusement her father’s record as a single parent, awesome, she says generously, sharing his efforts with her mother and not a word of complaint, but beyond this she knows nothing, who is he talking to, who is he seeing, what is he planning to do, does he miss her; of course these aren’t questions she can ask her daughter, who to her surprise doesn’t seem perturbed by the change that’s taken place or by the one that’s coming.

Almost every day she visits her there, at Grandma’s house, after school, and it soon becomes evident that shared lodgings in themselves don’t encourage close contact, while hospitality affords time that is clear and purged of surprises. A long time since they spent so much time together, Dina realises, astonished, there are moments when it seems to her they are drifting apart, and that is why they have seen fit to devote so much attention to each other, both understanding that something incomparably precious is coming to an end. Is this childhood? Is this their individual existence, mother and only daughter, only daughter and mother? And of this they hardly ever speak. She does try from time to time, but Nitzan is evasive, let it go, it’s between you and Dad, I already told you, if it’s so important to you, go ahead and all the rest will sort itself out somehow.

Sometimes she pokes gentle fun at her father, describing his failures in household management, he turned all my clothes pink, she grins, and his pasta is a disgrace, he never takes it out in time, and when Dina comments cautiously, it must be hard for you like this, living alone with him, she says, that’s enough, Mum, don’t suddenly turn psychologist on me, I know this is my time and it really isn’t that hard, it’s nice to change colours now and then, and I have a life too, you know, she chuckles, but she doesn’t talk about that either, occasionally her mobile chirps and she texts hurried messages, her fingers dancing on the keys, sometimes going aside and conversing in a low voice, and Dina watches her with curiosity, it seems it’s been easier for her since she left the house, and apparently a new relationship is growing up between them now, relaxed, ventilated, healthy perhaps? Is this what health is like, distant and lacking weight?