The Remains of Love (9 page)

And waiting too, as silent and disappointed as his little girl, her Elik, lean and handsome and foreign-looking, precisely what she was attracted to when he arrived on the kibbutz with a group of boys and girls from Europe who filled the familiar space to overflowing with their strange expressions, with their unfamiliar accents, with their stories about snow and cherries, forests and trams, stories which, like candy spiked with drugs, aroused forbidden longings among the grown-ups, while the children reacted with superior scorn, but she was drawn to them and in particular to him. It seemed that even in their circle he was an outsider, refusing to strike roots, wandering alone at the edge of the highway as if waiting for a visitor who never arrived, and only after they became acquainted did she discover that he was indeed waiting with dedication for his beloved parents, who put him on a ship and bade him a tearful goodbye, promising to join him in two to three weeks, as soon as they had the papers they needed. But a year had passed and not a word heard from them, and yet he went on waiting all his life, refusing to grow up without them. Not until his parents were approaching the age at which people are expected in the normal way of things to go and join their ancestors, and he himself was close to the age of discretion, not until then did he give up hope, and when this desperate flame was extinguished, his grip on the world faltered and he soon fell ill with the disease that would kill him.

Is this the true story, she sighs, until the last moment she will be telling herself stories, only herself, after all no one else is interested in her story, and is she entitled to condense her husband’s biography into such a small space, with a few sentences that are pleasing to her ears? And maybe it wasn’t for his parents he was waiting, but for her, and maybe not for her but for another woman, another life. It was his misfortune to turn up on her kibbutz, his misfortune to fall into her arms, fair and sensitive-looking, shorter than her by a head; she wasn’t worthy of him. It soon became clear to her that in her heart her father had already taken up residence, despising any display of weakness, and this time she was the one forcing a helpless creature to walk along railway lines suspended above a chasm, she had no patience for him, she derided his longings, the sentimental memories repeating themselves; salty tears pricked her cheeks but she couldn’t wipe them away when she was lying underneath him, clamping her thighs together. She always loved looking at him but recoiled from his touch, the exuberant and flustered touch of an adolescent, grateful for the briefest of moments.

How clear it was that he couldn’t help her in those days, and yet she still had hopes. She used to visit him in the kibbutz secretariat, and find him glowering among piles of papers; he wanted to study law but the kibbutz wouldn’t authorise it, they said they needed an accountant, not a lawyer, and he would look up at her in his most persuasive manner and say Hemda – even her name he had difficulty pronouncing – soon we’ll go and visit the baby, she’s developing so nicely, and she would nod sadly, yes, let’s go and visit poor little Dina. In her memory the birth of her daughter and the death of her father were bound together like a single blow, so that sometimes she tended to believe it was the birth that hastened the death and not vice versa, and there were moments when she saw her father being born out of her while her daughter lay as still as a marble statue, and how could Elik with his bruised consciousness grasp the smallest part of all this if he even had difficulty understanding her language? He came without a single word of Hebrew to her of all people, with her lavish and high-flown style, he whose life ended there in the port of Hamburg, and she who always felt her life had not yet begun.

And where was Mother? Her beautiful mother, always busy, and again incapable of perceiving her distress; of course she couldn’t do that, after all she had lost her beloved husband, bearing her grief with pride and coming and going, looking at her with that air of tolerant curiosity, like then, when she returned from her long trip and noticed her budding breasts, but where was your mother when he rousted you from your bed on black and rainy nights and dragged you crying and kicking to the fishing boat? As strong as a man he wanted you to be, stout-hearted and bold-spirited like him. Is that why he reconciled himself so easily to his wife’s absences, letting him mould his daughter as he pleased?

How heavy the oar was in her hands, when he showed her how to hit the water with it. Get away from here, fish, get away, she wanted to shout. This is just a trick, don’t believe it, because that’s what they used to do then, beating the water with oars to scare the fish, which would dive deeper in their fear, straight into the net spread out down below, but the fish are the children of the lake and he’s going to miss them, she thought, feeling the pain of the bereaved lake, who was losing more children every night, and sometimes she feared his vengeance, lying at night trembling, terrified, in the dark children’s house, convinced that at any moment his grieving waters would rise and sweep away the buildings of the kibbutz and drown their inhabitants, and only hundreds of years from now would the relics of their bones be found, like the elephant’s tusks and ancient human bones that had turned up in the marshes nearby.

He forced her to go out fishing, he forced her to eat the miserable fish, how powerful was the anger building up in her body, though she never dared be angry with him for any length of time; now and then she would be seized by a momentary wrath which changed at once into deep trust: he must know what he’s doing, it isn’t possible that he doesn’t know. He was a wise and responsible man, their conscience and their compass, how could he be wrong? His premature death curtailed their separation and left her close to him, but finally she had been given an opportunity to defy his authority, and that is why he has returned to her suddenly, sitting beside her bed and looking at her with his lovely blue eyes, and she shakes her head at him in a rage, holding out her arms to him but not to embrace him, to hurt him is what she wants, to revenge herself on him, my father, it’s still hard for her to express her grievance which turns at once into a thin whimper, how could you dare mould me in the image of another person, how could you dare leave me like this, suspended in the air between heaven and earth, incapable of being the girl you wanted me to be and not the girl I was destined to be.

She sees before her the two girls: one of them tough and resilient, knowing no fear, and the other timorous, dreamy and lazy, and between them she herself, except that her limbs are splayed in the space between the two of them, before they collide together with the contrary force of attraction and repulsion, and how will they coalesce in the form of one girl who is whole, firm and enduring, and she’s so tired of this dizzy dance which has been going on for decades, more than her father’s years, more than her mother’s years, more than her husband’s years, so exhausted, and only one thing she has the strength left to do, the strength of her love and her wrath, to hold out her hands to her father’s attractive neck and squeeze it in a slow strangulation that will drain the last surge of will-power remaining in her and leave the two of them lifeless.

Her arms catch him off-guard as he bends over her, trying to bring his ear close to her lips and to detach some intelligible words from the howls that come gurgling up from the throat like bitter vomit, how quickly has her innocent joy turned to discontent, and as he’s trapped between them, the old aversion to her touch is aroused in him. He’s suddenly so close to the bony clavicle, the empty chest, but to his surprise the enfolding movement doesn’t turn into the familiar, needy embrace, but focuses on his neck with an intensity he didn’t know existed, accompanied by angry moans, and out of the fog of excessive proximity to her skin with its wrinkles and blotches and the vapour from her mouth it dawns on him that his mother is trying to squeeze the life out of him, stopping him from inhaling or exhaling ever again. For a moment he is prepared to commit himself into her hands, revelling in the first helplessness like a baby in his mother’s arms, for punishment or for mercy, surprised to discover how much he prefers her strangulation to her embrace.

Her muscles, which have leaped out from their hiding-place, tighten a ring of fingers around his throat, which is pulsing vigorously and he closes his eyes in pain and bewilderment, like someone tempted to play a dangerous game with a child and finding that he is the stronger of the two. In the kibbutz pool he used to compete with the other children to see how long he could keep his head under the water, and he always won, and only his sister Dina could defeat him sometimes. What lungs you must have in your family, the children used to laugh, the lungs of a hippo, but he knew, as she definitely also knew, although they never talked about it, that it wasn’t a question of inflating the lung; it was all about a life force inadequately developed, a dark attraction to self-destruction, an attraction that he senses now in its full intensity as his head sinks down on his mother’s chest and his mouth drips saliva on her torn nightdress.

How did you dare, how did you dare, her voice is growing in volume and the words strike him with an awesome inner conviction, you ruined everything, left me with no prospects, her toothless gums belt out her snarls in full, undigested and unchewed, you were wrong! You weren’t right! she growls underneath him, her eyes screwed up with the effort. Why do I need to drive a tractor? Why do I need to catch fish in the lake? I was afraid, afraid, why did you force me? You were wrong, she repeats. No father should be allowed to get things so wrong and make his daughter a failure too. Her words surround his neck, tightly gripped in her hands, the air in his lungs is diminishing, as if he were already sinking, heavy and lifeless, to the bed of the lake. I am the drowned boy, brother of the drowned girl. Is he breathing at all, does he still exist? It’s obvious he could extricate himself but he doesn’t do it, it seems he’s even making an effort to help her in the fulfilment of her last wish, as if obeying a law of nature, what could be more right than the one who gave life being the one who takes it back.

In the swooning mists he remembers the smile of the man who lay on the adjacent bed, and tries to smile back at him. You and I, he thinks, have been fighting with the same energy, and now we’re both standing down, because with standing down comes a happiness sharp as a needle, a cruel happiness which no sadness in the world can overcome, and I feel it migrating from your body to my body and I’m prepared for it, at the moment of your death it will come to me and then I shall die too, but now rapid footsteps are approaching their bed, and he is impressed – apparently the white-gowned nurse knows his name and the name of his mother, Avner! Hemda! What’s happening here? she scolds them as if trying to separate two brawling children, her hands too stretching out to reach his neck, to prise away the bent fingers clutching it. Let go of him, Hemda, she shouts, and the old woman obeys, flustered, don’t be cross with me, Mother, she whimpers, he’s the one who got it wrong, he wasn’t right! You always cared about each other more than about me, and Avner lifts his head slowly from its resting-place on her wasted bosom, as if waking from sleep, and to his astonishment, recognises his wife. What are you doing here? he mumbles, as if her presence in this place is beyond all imagining, at this moment it belongs exclusively to him and to his mother, and she’s still incensed. Dina asked me to come here and relieve you. Why didn’t you tell me?

She looks suspiciously at him and at his mother, who has suddenly fallen silent, as if trying to interpret the scene that has just been curtailed, and Avner peers at his wife angrily, again she’s extricated him without checking that he really wants to be extricated, the way she did it back then, in their youth, again from his mother’s arms, and again that amalgam of grudge and gratitude that he felt towards her even then, although nothing is left now of the slim short-haired woman who offered him a temporary and apparently comfortable refuge which turned into a final refuge, just his grudge against her. How heavy this grudge of his had become in recent years, how heavy she had become too, thighs and hips and nape, short neck; a thick-fleshed woman has swallowed up that young lady, wrapped her in a crumpled and stained white blouse, why wear white if you can’t protect your clothes from dirt?

As the air flows again in his throat, almost against his will, he is filled with a prodigious hunger, and he straightens up and probes his neck. He longs to get out of here and to breathe savagely, to escape to another life, a life not yet lived, overlaid with virginal beauty, after all it wasn’t death he was rescued from, but submission; it wasn’t her hands he was delivered from, but his own, and he coughs, his throat is dry and his neck still throbbing vigorously. She’s really confused, he apologises on his mother’s behalf, she thought I was her father, as if such an episode were a routine occurrence between a daughter and her father. For some reason it’s important to him to keep this incident under wraps, the physical intimacy between him and his mother that he hasn’t experienced in years, arousing ancient memories of their love, and when he looks at his wife with her reddening cheeks, he knows that again a moment of good will has been lost. She hurried here to be by his side, disregarding tiresome calculations, she was hoping to support him and again it turns out she is superfluous, and again he is to blame, again they are creating the same feelings for each other. Is there a way out from this accursed circle, and is he really interested in getting out; perhaps there’s no point in making an effort, in drawing her close to him and embracing her round the waist and thanking her for coming, there’s no point in inviting her to drink coffee with him in the cafeteria nearby. He glances at his watch and says drily, I must dash to the office, I have an important meeting, stay with her here until I come back, all right?