The World Between, page 7
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Our first year of marriage. The hours it took us to unwind after a performance. We stayed up until three or four in the morning, until sunlight clawed at the horizon. The central bus station was deserted and the neighborhood so noisy during the day was silent, muffled as if someone had thrown a blanket over it. In summer no matter how tired we were, the heat made it impossible to sleep. We drank Goldstar beer and smoked packs of whatever Rothman smuggled in, and when we couldn’t get the European brands, we bought the cheapest Israeli cigarettes, Nelson’s and Noblesse, picking twigs out with our fingertips, watching them catch fire when we couldn’t reach them. We listened to American jazz and ate thick wedges of watermelon and munched on roasted peanuts and sunflower seeds. The night sky was dark with only a star or two pinned to it. Everything we said, no matter how inane, seemed important and tenuous as if the world were cradling us in its silken web. We heard old Shalom (Remember him?), our neighbor on the floor below, snoring, and joked about how if he snored any louder, he’d strip the paint off the cars. If he snored any louder, the streetlamps would explode. If he snored any louder, he’d cause a tidal wave. We carried on like that, laughing so hard, beer spit out of our noses, until I blurted, if he snored any louder, fruit would drop from the trees. The most innocuous statement of the evening and yet you turned pale and quiet, retreating into yourself.
What’s wrong? I said, hoping to draw you back to me.
The trees.
What about them?
Nothing.
Tell me.
In the camp.
Yes?
My head’s spinning, you said.
It’s the heat. I poured you a glass of water.
We fell silent, lying side by side on a thin foam mattress we’d dragged onto the balcony earlier that night. I was aware of your body, of its heat, each pore a tiny furnace. I thought of how all the parts of you fit all the parts of me, how even my tongue had found a home in your mouth. My heart in your heart. I wanted to make love and fretted that I wanted it more than you did. While you searched for the right words, I tried to remember the last time we had sex. Was it that morning? The night before? Days ago? What if time had slipped like a chain on a gear and I had no recollection, no way of trusting the day, the hour, or what I knew?
What happened to the trees? I said, picturing us making love right there, out in the open on our little balcony, aroused at the thought of who might hear us or see us, which neighbors would look, which would turn away, who would listen? How quick we would have to be, how slow and quiet?
It’s not about the trees. It’s the woman, you said, exasperated, as if I should have known who she was.
A grand lady, a duchess, in a blue riding habit. She rode her horse outside Bergen-Belsen all spring and summer. She dressed him in indigo plumes. Her footman wore a royal blue uniform. He accompanied her everywhere.
She must have been married to one of the officers, I said.
Probably.
What kind of trees were they?
The lights were out in the building across from us. Everyone was asleep. It was very late and I knew it would be dawn soon. The drivers would return, and the street would rumble with bus engines.
Cherry trees, you said.
Cherries, I repeated. What did she do?
It’s not what she did. You stubbed out the cigarette you’d just lit.
I picked it out of the ashtray, an old habit, to save for later.
You turned on your side away from me. Your voice dropped. I had to strain to hear you say, She picked the fruit off the trees. We weren’t allowed to touch them. We watched her gorging on cherries while we starved for them, for her. When had any of us seen a woman like that?
Your breath deepened and you finally turned to face me and kissed my neck. Relieved, I loosened the drawstring on your shorts. You slipped the straps of my camisole down over my shoulders.
We were invisible, you muttered. Garbage to her. She knew what that place was, what would become of us.
You slipped your hands under my hips.
Was that all? I said, and wrapped my legs around your waist.
She tortured us.
How?
She threw handfuls of cherries over the fence and watched us drop to our knees and dig for them like dogs in the dirt, stuffing them into our mouths soil and all until the guard cocked his rifle and asked us if we wanted to die that day. We’d have gladly died for the chance to get our hands around her skinny white neck.
Show me, I said.
You placed your palms on either side of my face and kissed me. We fucked.
Old Shalom’s snores rumbled through the night. A breeze blew, carrying the smell of the distant sea.
You held me in your arms and said, What a play she would make.
Maybe you’re mistaken. Maybe all she wanted was to feed you, I said. Maybe she was just trying to be kind.
But you had already fallen asleep, and the next day we awoke to the news that there had been an attack on the Burma Road near the Nachshon Junction. Three soldiers killed. Old Shalom knocked on our door. We had no telephone then and used the one in Baruch’s shoe factory, where old Shalom was the manager. He gave you the message that you were called into the reserves and were to report that afternoon to your unit commander at the Tel HaShomer military base. We never imagined you’d be gone two months.
39.
Dr. S coughs into a large white handkerchief. He sets his vacant stare out the window, tapping his long fingers on the green blotter.
Are you all right? I ask.
Fine, he snaps.
You don’t look it.
He brushes away my concern. Tell me about Rothman. Is he the reason you returned to Israel?
No, I say, and blush.
But he’s someone to you, someone special, he prods.
Yes.
Dr. S coughs so hard, I can hear his bones grind against each other. When had he gotten so thin?
Let’s call for tea, I say. I can use a cup.
No more distractions, he warns.
Sister Francoise, I call, knowing she is hovering outside the door. The doctor isn’t feeling well.
Dr. S gives me a baleful look.
Sister Francoise strides in, frowning. She takes Dr. S’s pulse, places a hand on his forehead.
It’s nothing, he says. A seasonal cold.
In a stern voice, she says, Are you trying to make yourself sick? You belong in bed, not infecting everyone with your germs.
Then Sister Francoise gives me a kind look and says, Come, my dear, I’ll take you back to your room, then we’ll see about putting the doctor to bed.
40.
You left to join your unit. I spent the days rehearsing Medea and came home late at night to an empty apartment. The loneliness was claustrophobic and made worse by the grim news in the papers. Rothman came around every few days to see that I was all right and to store the more expensive contraband he dealt in, in the spare bedroom. We’d walk on the beach, get something to eat at one of the cafés. He helped pass the time and I was grateful for his company, but then he’d leave again, and I’d sink into a well I couldn’t climb out of. I smoked too much, forgot to eat, and drank more than I should have. I thought about Medea a lot, about Jason, and her children, about how easy it was to lose love, to lose everything that grounded you and then have that ground give way, spinning you out into the nischt ahin, nischt aher, where nothing mattered or existed, where you were swallowed by time and haunted by memory.
You’d been gone five weeks. I was in dress rehearsals. It was midnight. I’d just gotten home and made myself comfortable with a whiskey on the balcony. The heat of the liquor made me break into a sweat. Someone was playing the oud, a melody that wove like a gold thread through the streets. There was a knock on the door. My stomach lurched into my throat. I imagined the worst as I often do. I imagined a soldier in dress uniform, a messenger behind that door ready to give me the news that you were wounded or dead. I imagined you standing there waiting for me to answer because you’d forgotten your key or were afraid I wouldn’t be there. My heart thumped so hard, I felt faint. When I flung the door open, I saw Rothman. His face unrecognizable, beaten, bleeding, one eye swollen shut, his bottom lip split. I half carried him in. I thought it might have been a car accident and asked if he wanted me to take him to a hospital.
He pleaded with me not to.
His clothes were filthy, and I helped him undress. I switched on the dood, so there’d be enough hot water for him. He could barely stand in the shower. I washed him the way I would a child. Dark bruises bloomed on his ribs, back, and buttocks. He’d been kicked over and over again. We managed to stop the nosebleed, but then my breath shuddered at the trail of blood that trickled between his legs. He groaned in pain. His bad leg shook, and I was afraid he’d fall. I toweled him dry as gently as I could and gave him a few pain pills I had stashed. Rothman took the pills and asked that I stay with him. I lay beside him in the bed, scared to leave him alone, worried his ribs were broken, that he’d punctured a lung, that he’d run a fever.
It was dark. I couldn’t see him but felt him trembling.
Who did this to you? I whispered. I couldn’t imagine one person doing this kind of damage and asked, How many were there?
He remained silent.
It’s all right, I said, and wrapped him in my arms, taking care not to hurt him.
At some point during the night he said, Three. They knew me from the beach.
There was something in his voice that I’d never heard before—despair and something much worse, a brokenness. I don’t know how to explain what I felt except that I was frightened for him and yet I was never stronger. Rothman needed me. It was the first time I saw him cry, not just a tear he’d quickly swipe at the thought of the sister and parents he’d lost, but a real sob scraped up from some charred place Rothman had never acknowledged. I thought of what my father said about how we are all vessels and that our souls are the light inside them that shatter into the darkness. It wasn’t fear that made Rothman cry, because he’s fearless; it was shame. We never spoke about what those men did to him or what they took from him.
He stayed with me a week. We didn’t talk much but he did ask if I’d heard from you. My answer was always the same—no. I went to rehearsal and came home to find Rothman smoking on the balcony, staring out at the rooftops. The world far from him and he from it.
The last night we went to bed, he turned to me, his lips no longer swollen, a jaundiced bruise on his jaw. The black and blue around his eyes beginning to fade. I had never felt so close to him and had never seen him so vulnerable. I caressed his cheek, and he kissed the palm of my hand, and we made love in a way that I had always imagined we would. We comforted each other. We knew each other and shared a deep intimacy. It was never a rejection of you, Max. He was gone the next morning and I wouldn’t see him for months afterward. You returned some weeks later and I found that I was pregnant. I had no words for the joy I felt. Rothman didn’t know, at least not then. You were my husband, and that meant Asher was yours in all the ways that mattered.
41.
Dr. S is on medical leave. Dr. E is his replacement, a middle-aged woman in gold wire-framed glasses that give her the appearance of a big-eyed bug. There’s a photograph of such an insect in a volume on entomology titled Insects of the Holy Land on a shelf in the sunroom opposite the piano Tomasz-Henrik plays. Her frosted hair is the same length as mine. I think the Sisters must have gotten to her too. We’re twins sitting in silence, our hands cupped in our laps like schoolgirls reprimanded for smoking in the bathroom. I am angry with Dr. S for leaving without saying goodbye. Bereft. How dare he!
When the hour is up, she opens the door and waits for the orderly on call to take me to my room. I search for the vodka the Georgian woman bought with the money Rothman gave me. But it isn’t in my shoe, or coat pocket, nor the desk drawer where these pages are. I keep meaning to send these letters to you, Max, but there’s always so much more to say. The last place I search, and by this time I’m exhausted, is the narrow cleft between the bed and the wall. There like a treasure in Ali Baba’s cave, the bottle is inside a stocking, hanging from the iron bed frame. I take a shluk and then another and another and the vodka burns through the rage and the sorrow, but it doesn’t quite reach the frozen earth beneath.
The next time Dr. E and I meet, I gather my courage and say, I want to go home.
Of course you do, she says, it’s only natural. Her voice carries just the right amount of sympathy for me to feel hopeful.
Dr. E, I say, Dr S’s release forms are in the middle drawer of his desk. All you need is to sign them, and I can leave.
I understand, she says. You must be homesick. You miss your life. You miss your husband.
Yes, I say. Yes.
I wait for her to reach into the drawer, but instead, she looks out the window at the crows thrashing the air; their violence is mesmerizing.
In some cultures, crows are harbingers of death, she says, while in others they represent spiritual transformation. We aim for something like that here. An emotional transformation. Our goal is to help you create a bridge toward the center, toward equilibrium. From what I’ve read in your file, you haven’t found that center yet.
I want a cigarette, but Dr. E doesn’t smoke, and Dr. S’s cigarette box has vanished like Dr. S himself.
She places a hand on my shoulder. It’s surprisingly heavy and damp. Let me help you get there.
The overhead light snags on her glasses, and I see my reflection in them. She runs her palm over my head like the Queen of Razor Blades, her hand sliding across the slick plane of my scalp.
People have a tendency to live in the past, Dr. E says. They prefer memory to reality.
My eyes slip past her face to the photograph on her desk of an old woman.
Is that your mother?
Dr. E is surprised by the question, but then her face softens, and she says, Yes it is.
When is Dr. S coming back?
I don’t know. He’s on extended medical leave. She looks at the clock on the wall.
Is he sick?
She smiles benignly and says, Time’s up, my dear. I’ll see you tomorrow.
Sister Francoise appears at the door to escort me to my room.
Max, maybe if you call Dr. E on the telephone, she’ll listen to you. Tell her I’m fine, fully recovered. The small matter of the nervous exhaustion that brought me here is resolved. You’re an impressive man. People take you seriously. When you speak, they listen. Tell her to send me home. You don’t know what it’s like to be in this room. Each day it grows smaller and the bed narrower. A steady erasure. Make the call, Max. Please.
42.
A few weeks in our old apartment on the Street of Shoes, and a routine emerges. Each morning I wake to the roar of buses, car horns, and the modulated chirping of sparrows that perch for long minutes on the balcony before swooping off. After a leisurely breakfast, I head to the makolet to buy fresh rolls and cheese for lunch. On the way, I pass a group of African women sitting cross-legged on straw mats, selling fruit and vegetables. They wear peacoats, and bright kerchiefs round their heads, their feet in open-toed slippers. The December cold bores into the bones, so I bring them socks. They give me a sack of oranges. Between the shoppers, the sheyroot vans that transport passengers from city to city, taxis, trades people shouting, and the brisk business in the nearby souk, the decibel level in the old central bus station is as deafening as ever.
Today when I reach the stuccoed bungalow with the blue light, I stop at the sight of the young woman with the bleached hair and large green eyes. Her cheeks are drawn and pitted with scars of teenage acne. She sits in a moldering armchair, pale with fatigue, smoking a cigarette, absently rocking a baby carriage with her foot. I cannot see the child. Usually, the boy sits up and plays with the plastic rings on his carriage, mouth slack and drooling. His clothes are either too big or too small, hand-me-downs from some charity or another.
May I see your baby, I say in Hebrew.
Yeled yoshen, she says in a thick Russian accent; the boy is sleeping. She looks at me with suspicion and grinds the cigarette under her heel.
I’ll be careful, I say.
The boy, possibly a year or more, is too large for the small carriage. He lies on his back, legs dangling over the sides. He isn’t sleeping. He’s gazing at the ceiling, until I come into his line of vision. Then he stretches his small hand toward me, and I place my forefinger in the center of his palm, shivering at the urgency with which he grips it.
You from government? the girl says.
No. I live in the neighborhood. I bow low and coo at the boy.
Around here? You?
Yes. Can I give him a cookie?
I had put a package of petite-beurre biscuits in my bag for him before I left the apartment, hoping he’d be out today. Her eyes travel the length of me, calculating the cost of my shoes, wool coat, and leather handbag. She’s about to answer when a car screeches to a stop and honks its horn. The baby startles. He lets go of my finger and wails. Nebach, such big tears. I want so much to hold him in my arms but am afraid his mother will get angry. Brushing me aside, she scoops him up and rushes to the car, whose back end is smashed, the trunk held shut with a rope. She leans in through the window, the child balanced on her hip, and kisses the driver full on the mouth. His hands stretch round and squeeze her rump like it’s a melon. He’s got a boxer’s nose, broken more than once, pounded flat at the bridge, round as a tulip bulb at the tip. He’s about forty and bald, and right away I don’t like him. She slaps his hand and kisses him again. Mouths parted, they draw in each other’s breath. I’m pinned to the spot by the image of them, a family on the curb of that dirty street, a family where garbage collects and streaks of bat guano decorate the top floors of the buildings.
