The Remains of Love (8 page)

Why was he looking only at her, why was Orly looking down? The din of the torrential rain was deafening. I’ve chosen Orly, he said in a cracked voice, I’m sorry, Dina, I think she is more suitable, but I’m sure that within a few years there will be a vacancy here for you as well, and she stared at them, stunned, while Orly’s eyes sent her a desperate appeal, don’t reveal the secret that I told only to you, but the resentment wrapped around her throat, the resentment of the less-loved daughter. It isn’t fair, Emmanuel, she mumbled, I know you.

Did she say, I know you are lovers, I know you are having an affair, or did she perhaps say, I know she’s your mistress, seizing the opportunity to offend her too. It wasn’t fair, nothing about this was fair, and that was all she knew for certain when she fled and ran to the bus-stop, and there she encountered the dean of the faculty, who greeted her with a smiling face. I read the article you published about the holy child of La Guardia, he said, a brilliant piece of research, I very much hope you will settle in with us here, you have so much to contribute, and she muttered, that’s what I was hoping too, until this evening, and she boarded the bus in a hurry, she’d already said too much, but he pursued her and finally sat down beside her, asking her to explain why her hopes had been dashed.

Unrestrained the words cascaded from her mouth, she told him everything, she turned informer, and thereafter she didn’t go back there, despite offers and appeals, and even these faded away as the days passed, and although the two of them left at the end of the academic year – Orly vanished as if the earth had swallowed her, and there were rumours that she had gone to study abroad on a bursary arranged for her by Emmanuel, and he himself left for a university in the south, apparently leaving the field open for her, if you’re really so well suited come and prove it – she refused to return to the history team, even when someone else, a woman younger than both of them and far less talented, took advantage of the confusion prevailing in the faculty. In her forbidden moments, when she allows herself to play this game, the three of them are still there and their futures still ahead of them, when the rain stops, and when spring bursts into flower, and when summer is shining, year after year, as it could have been if she hadn’t ruined everything, even burying her own aspirations under heaps of rubble.

And Gideon was definitely on her side then, until his patience snapped. What are you demanding of yourself? he asked her, bemused. They are the ones who did you an injustice, you had an obligation to expose it! How could he promote Orly when he was having an affair with her, and leave you behind even though you were much better qualified? He just wanted to keep her close to him so she wouldn’t betray him, don’t you see that? That’s enough, Dini, stop punishing yourself and go back to the university, you’re wasting your talents. But she was no longer sure of this. How do you measure talent anyway, maybe Orly really was better qualified after all, and when she stood before a class the following year, in the training college where there was a warm welcome for the distinguished refugee from the history faculty, and lectured on the causes behind the expulsions from Spain her voice was softer and less vigorous, and the words which in the past had flowed from her throat packed tightly together in impressive sequences began to sound haphazard and deflated.

A dry breeze of defeatism hovered there, which she was incapable of negating, even though in the first years she hoped that the transition would enable her to devote herself to bringing up her daughter, to enjoying her more, without the pressures of academic competition. But with the passage of the years Nitzan needed her devotion less and less, and the competition that she so much hoped to get away from was rampant, so it turned out, even among the defeated, and was more virulent than ever, especially with all the new regulations; as a result of these, if she doesn’t complete her doctoral thesis some time soon, the thesis that she began back then, eighteen years ago, under the supervision of Professor David Emmanuel, there won’t even be a place for her there.

For some reason she always goes back to that evening when the course of her life was changed, and it’s only from there that her consciousness moves to other focuses of pain, older and deeper, but again and again it seems to her that everything is determined from there, even events that happened years before then, as if there’s no early and late, only late, like that day when it became clear that her embryo wasn’t going to survive any longer. Gideon was still in Africa then and Orly accompanied her to the clinic for the tests, her face flushed as she regaled her with personal anecdotes, how Emmanuel invited her to his house for a Sabbath meal with his wife and children, who were already treating her as a big sister, and when he took her down to drive her home, believe it or not, right there in the parking space, in front of his house, he pounced on her, and at that moment his wife came out with the rubbish, what luck, she didn’t notice them, imagine it, Dina, and Dina imagined it, her hands on her bloated belly, a worrying tingle in the loins. You wouldn’t believe how beautiful he is when he’s making love, suddenly he goes wild – but now it was her turn, the turn of the doctor to inform her, to console her, he simply stopped developing, this happens a lot in twin pregnancies, and it’s better when it happens at this stage, you’re young and healthy and you can have many more children. But she wasn’t interested in many more children, and she didn’t even feel grieved; after all, she wasn’t a mother yet and only mothers know what grief is, and she went out of there to Orly and her stories. The thought of Emmanuel’s face leaning over her in the parking space she found more disturbing than the lone silhouette in her womb; no longer two pairs of wet ears but just the one pair listening to her secrets in the watery inner space, and now it seems to her again that all these things were connected, that if that rainy evening she had restrained her resentment, two children would be waiting for her at home today, and she sees them holding her hands, surrounding her with the wall of their love, built by four hands. She sees them growing up, her burgeoning breasts and his first moustache, her pelvis expanding and his voice changing, but when she recedes he stays; he always was a considerate, conciliatory child, obedient to her unspoken desires, and now he comes bounding out of Nitzan’s room and stands before her, with his bare and smooth chest, with his awkward smile, and she leaps up from the bed, just what the doctor advised her not to do, as the room turns dark and spins around her, but unlike her mother, who lost consciousness some hours before this, her consciousness clears miraculously as she falls, when she sees her daughter, roused urgently from her sleep and not pausing to put on a blouse, bending over her. She stares at her so acutely that it seems it’s her internal organs she can see, the fist of the heart, the twin lungs, the earthy clod of the liver, the delicate tracery of the intestines, as she saw her that day, visible inside her belly in shifting patches of light, but when she turns her eyes to the doorway, to the steadily darkening silhouette, a child, she will hear herself saying aloud, where have you been all this time?

Chapter Three

What is left for us in the evening of our days other than the visions that linger in our mind’s eye? So much has been taken over the course of the years, loss after loss, and all in the natural process of things; we must not complain. Even the one who has amassed wealth will die penniless, take her for example, Hemda Horowitz, who was born too late or too early, definitely not in a time and a place that suited her, but in a time and a place that demanded of her more than she was capable of giving, while what she offered they rejected with disdain. To jump up on rooftops they demanded of her, and to leap from roof to roof as if there were no yawning gap between them, to run across oscillating bridges, along railway tracks suspended in the air above river gorges, to fish in the lake on cold and pitch-dark nights, while she wanted to impress them with words. So many stories she had which were never put into writing; all of them she knew by heart, in miraculous fashion, but when she tried to tell them the children used to mock her flowery style, her implausibilities – that’s impossible! they used to upbraid her, the minority who condescended to listen, there’s no such thing as a lake that talks!

Because it was the secrets of the lake that she whispered into their disbelieving ears on winter nights, when the winds whistled around the isolated children’s house, snatching everything that stood in their way, all the stories that the lake told her of what he had seen with his eyes and heard with his ears, tasted with his tongue and probed with his fingers. He told her about the fishing-boat inlaid with gold buried in his depths, and asleep on its deck the girl who drowned, whose weeping is sometimes heard at night, Mummy, she cries, help me, Mummy, and about the man who searched for the loved one who was forbidden him among the reeds, and whispered of his love in the ears of the migrating birds, until he lost his wits and the marshes swallowed him, and even from under the ground he went on talking to her and his throat filled with mud until he died again and again, and about the woman who longed to bear a child and bathed every day in the waters of the lake to be purged of her barrenness, but the lake said to her, I shall be your son, I shall be your infant, and he dowsed her with water that filled her womb and distended her belly until she gave birth to a water child, a tiny wave disappearing amid his brother waves.

Even her father, who so loved reading, was hostile towards her stories, this is no time for stories, Hemdi, he would sigh, it’s a time for action, and the Jews have contributed enough stories to the world; only her mother, on her short visits, would listen to her with eyes closed as if hearing sweet music, write this down, she would urge her, you can’t remember it all, but she did remember, she cleared a lot of space in her head and remembered, not leaving room for anything else, until she had no regular words left in her. When they asked her a simple question she would open her mouth to give a simple answer, but only stories emerged, like steam from a boiling saucepan when the lid is removed, and anyone who came too close would be scalded. It’s a fact that they all kept their distance, except her father, who would grip her hand and drag her after him, fuming. You have to answer to the point, you have to answer them in their language. In a group every nonconformist is miserable, why do you always need to suffer? Sometimes she thought he was going to drown her in the lake, or drown the lake in her, and years later when she heard her father energetically backing the scheme to drain Lake Hula, in opposition to the other veteran fishermen, although she was already a grown-up married woman by then she couldn’t rid herself of the idea that this was nothing but delayed revenge on the entity that had robbed him of his daughter and destroyed his educational project, which was no less valuable in his eyes, and as it was to turn out over time, no less a failure. But he wouldn’t live long enough to realise just how foolish the project had been, and perhaps this was the very reason why he didn’t live long, because when the work of draining the lake was finally finished and the whole farm went wild over the territory which had been cleared, which did not repay them with the same alacrity, her father was the first to recognise the terrible mistake and the first to pay a personal price, which did no one any good.

She remembers him restlessly pacing the open expanses, suspiciously fingering the dry, peaty soil, prone to overheating, walking among the kibbutz members like a morose prophet, until one morning he didn’t wake from his sleep, and when she came to visit him at the end of the day, heavily pregnant as she was, he was already as cold and stiff as a marble statue, on his face the anger and disappointment that were turned on her in the early days, when she refused to walk. She stood frozen by his bed, and it seemed to her that again his hand was held out to strike her, because again she was the one unable to walk and he was the one hitting her, from his bed and from his death, and again this wasn’t loss of control but an unbearably sad compulsion, and she put her hands on the folds of her belly which was racked with pain, how regular its beats, every second minute she groaned, falling on her bed as then and trying to uproot from her inner self the pain of his beatings and the pain of his love, the pain of his life and the pain of the death of the dearest to her of them all, and when they found her there it was almost too late, and by a miracle they managed to make it to the hospital just in time, and she gave birth to Dina, much earlier than planned.

The birth of her first-born daughter, the death of her father, the capitulation of the lake, all these together were congealed in her consciousness into a complex and suppurating knot. The motherhood and orphanhood which were bound together with a fateful and cyclical bond left her so confused that it seemed to her in those days that her dead father needed her more than her living daughter, desperately needed her forgiveness, and she would sit for hours beside his freshly dug grave, her breasts leaking milk that quickly dried, and on the way back she was looking for the lake, believing that if she searched well enough she would find him, it couldn’t be that he had disappeared completely, that his mighty and supernatural presence had been nullified by the hand of man. All that he had done was restrict himself, not in dimensions but in appearance, and henceforward he would be like a god, revealing himself only to those worthy of it, and she was certainly worthy, who could be more worthy than she, and so she used to walk among the new fields of wheat with the fire lurking in their depths, while he waited to appear before her with all his winds and his smells, his waters and his secrets, and all this time laid on a bed in the children’s house was one baby born prematurely, hungrily sucking her thumb, a baby who instead of bringing consolation and blessing as is the normal way of babies, seemed to be in the grip of a curse and waiting for some sorcery that would lift the curse, and bring her mother back to the world of the living and to her.