Yarkon 116B, Final Part

Yarkon 116B, Part One Yarkon 116B, Part Two Yarkon 116B, Part Three Yarkon 116B, Part Four Yarkon 116B, Part Five Yarkon 116B, Part Six Yarkon 116B, Part Seven Yarkon 116B, Part Eight Yarkon 116B, Part Nine Yarkon 116B, Part Ten Yarkon 116B, Part 11, Chapter 46, 1974

Yesterday people from television came to the club to see it. See them. Ilze calls the place a club. A club, to be precise, and she almost enjoys seeing Naomi get irritated and correct her every time to “community center.” Community center, what a strange word. Like all that difficult language, which long ago gave up any desire to make friends with her.

People from television came because they heard that this club has a ballroom dancing class for adults, and they wanted to check whether it was “worth a story,” as they said. It is a little ridiculous, in her view, to call the three young people who arrived “people from television.” To her, they looked more like three teenagers drunk on their own importance, as people that age tend to be, with their sloppy clothes and no less sloppy speech. Some kind of lazy mumbling, as if it were beneath them to make the effort and move their lips when pronouncing the rough words in that awful language. She could barely understand fragments of the words they said, not really what they meant. Luckily Adela, the instructor, understood them and explained to the regular class participants what they wanted. Like her, they too did not understand what the three disheveled ones were looking for among them. She is amused by the whole thing. She does not understand why they and “our viewers,” as the girl in the trio insisted on saying, a lanky, masculine girl with a nasal voice, are so excited by people dancing, whose only uniqueness is their age, old by the standards of the disheveled ones. One could think. What is all the fuss about?

The disheveled ones stared at them in astonishment when they began to dance. As if it were impossible that after the age of seventy-five people could still have coordination, not to mention a sense of rhythm, flexibility or the ability to move gracefully. As if all this were some big thing worth talking about. Only twenty-year-olds think life ends at sixty. In fact, maybe they think life ends at fifty. What do they know.

Meir, her dance partner, who is not only an excellent dancer but also quite a good painter, she has seen his work, despite the fact that he never studied painting or did it for a living, and before retiring he was in fact a senior bank clerk, says that television makes everything into “a thing.” But he was actually happy, even somewhat excited, when the three, after whispering among themselves in a corner, told Adela, who immediately informed them, that they would come next week to film the class in action. Ilze was less impressed. Big deal, she thought to herself and dismissed the commotion and agitation that had seized her dance friends as much ado about nothing.

After three years in another country, a country familiar with television and channels, even if she watched them little, if one could even call what she knew of television “watching,” lacking any real command of the local language and considering her impaired vision, she still knew how wide their range was and how shallow most of their content, and long ago stopped being impressed by them and by their fleeting, momentary effect.

Every week at the end of the class, Meir and Ilze go to a nearby café by the club and there, over a cup of her decaffeinated coffee and a cup of his tea, along with some sweet pastry, they talk about what they danced that week, about their fellow dancers and, above all, about the situation. The situation. Another local expression unique to this place, for which she has no adequate replacement, one that would be comforting, soothing or pleasant to the ear and mind. And the current situation in the country, where a terrible war has just ended, another war, complex and fragile.

Ilze had prepared herself for a variety of crises before their return to the country from the years abroad, almost all of them family and personal. In her imagination she considered all kinds of possibilities, for example one that would stem from the fact that Mati was about to embark on a new professional path of his own. Would his rosy economic forecasts actually come true, or would she once again have to pull the two of them out of yet another financial hole? Or the well-founded fear, based on past experience, that Mati would return to his old ways, to the arms of an old mistress or some new one, since here, in his homeland, his home, where he was no longer a representative or envoy of the state but only his own master, he had repeatedly proven that he had no restraints. Would she once again have to serve as a protective wall for her daughter, who in her renewed foolishness would again absorb every new affair, exactly as she had done in the past? Or perhaps the crisis would be connected to the new apartment they had reached when they returned, and she had also thought about and prepared herself for the possibility that it would prove unsuitable, uncomfortable, too far away, detached from the surroundings they knew and in which they felt at ease?

But none of the many different scenarios she had prepared for included a surprise war that would break out in the middle of Yom Kippur. For the first time in his life, Mati was at home when the first alarm sounded, by force of circumstances, since they had just been cut off and had returned from years in another country. For the first time he found himself outside the circle of those who knew, who were on call and who were needed. But already the next day, after countless phone calls, he located his uniform in one of the boxes that had not yet been unpacked, uniforms he had not worn for three years, got dressed and went on his way, leaving behind two confused children whose Hebrew still rang with a foreign accent, a disconnected and nervous wife who struggled to keep her composure, and a hard-of-seeing mother-in-law who was still a stranger in her new home, a house in which only half a kitchen had been installed and was functioning, boxes were still scattered through the various rooms, a house that still was not a home, only a new apartment, not entirely ready for use.

More than anything, Ilze found the descent to the shelter during air-raid alarms difficult, a quick descent of six floors down the stairs. And not because of physical exertion, which was not much of an exertion for her, since she was in excellent physical shape. In the other country she had established a routine that included regular participation in exercise, movement and dance classes at the local Jewish community center. The difficulty stemmed from her partial, impaired vision, which further limited her in the dim stairwell, even when it was lit by lights that often went out, certainly amid the uproar of neighbors rushing down in visible, often not-hidden fear, the kind that drives people onward without regard for whoever stands in their way.

Cataracts, was the diagnosis she received years earlier, months before the trip, months before the possibility of the trip was even raised before Mati, months before he failed to get the next position he coveted. Her world went dark then. Literally and metaphorically. She, who had relied all her life on her eyesight, whether for reading and writing, for examining people or goods, or to perform or ensure the performance of every task for which she was responsible, from producing meticulous and detailed financial reports to baking a many-layered, many-flavored cake, was forced, with a single diagnosis, to accept the continuing blur in her vision, the details slipping from the unclear picture, the blurring edges of the field of vision, the glasses that were no longer of any use.

That was why she, who for so many years had looked for ways to leave here with her family, was the one who asked to remain here when the opportunity for the family to go abroad arose. Of course, she did not explain it that way to Naomi and Mati, but in retrospect she knows that Mati understood. Naomi did not. Naomi was already convinced she would manage here without them. That it would be better, as she herself told them. That they would finally get used to separation. Naomi the romantic fool. In her eagerness to see this severing journey as an opportunity to reshape her marriage, she did not pause for a moment to think about the financial feasibility or meaning of the move. She was like a young woman who becomes pregnant and, in a romantic, or perhaps truly thoughtless, way, decides to bring the child into the world without giving any thought to how she will support the newborn and herself, from what and how they will live day by day, Ilze thought then with a bitterness she forced herself to restrain.

Maybe this is her chance to let them stand on their own feet, or fall on their own, she thought to herself then, without the crutches she always keeps nearby, ready to extend. But Mati, who as always saw in her things that her daughter did not see, knew that her new visual impairment was not the right time to force her, by necessity, into exercises in independence in a country forever foreign to her. And he insisted that she come with them. He insisted in her ear, decreed it in Naomi’s ear, and stood by it before the officials who appointed him to his post.

For the first time in her life she flew in an airplane. For the first time in her life she reached the other country. For the first time in the chapter of her life that began after she left her homeland, she returned to live in a mansion, in a separate wing of her own, and to conduct a life freed from the many responsibilities she had taken on by consent, by necessity or in silence, in the years since she first set foot on the soil of Palestine. From managing the household and finances to caring for the children. The other country and the posting, and to a large extent also her mother’s impaired vision, forced Naomi to become a housewife in practice, even though she insisted on defining herself as a “diplomat’s wife,” a title she wore as if it had some reality beyond being an eternal second violin, official and ever-smiling, to Mati for his needs, to his guests, to the people he wanted to honor, to the events that served the aims of his work.

On the other hand, Ilze thought then with a thin ironic smile, that had been her entire essence from the day she married Mati, long before she adorned herself with the title of “diplomat’s wife.”

The three years in the other country passed in the blink of an eye. There too the doctors did not know how to treat her deteriorating vision, although at times she suspected they had been overly cautious with the diplomat’s important relative, who was also a medical doctor, and who they so wanted to impress. Never mind. Even with limited and narrowing vision, she made the most of every moment of the new freedom she had been granted in the other country. At the end of exactly three years, as the stamps in her passport showed, they returned here.

To a new apartment. To a new environment. To a new war. To a shattered, new reality. At times it occurs to her that the fracture in the country, which she has followed as it took shape, grew and changed from the day it was founded and in fact even before then, that this fracture, slowly, partially and differently mending, forms a kind of common denominator bridging the gaps between her and Meir, between her and all the other club and dance friends. Her new friends. If she had acquired a new skill in the other country, it was the ability to make easy, nonbinding friendships with new people around some matter, even if only one thing, temporary and fleeting. Superficial, light, easy friendship. Devoid of any real depth, usually also dissolving at the end of a trip, outside the gymnasium or at the end of a series of concerts. And, surprisingly, Ilze discovered that this fluttering friendship suited her, fit her size. This way she does not become deeply attached, does not lose her footing, is not bound too tightly, does not regret irreparable differences. She misses nothing when the connection ends.

So it is with Meir. An excellent dancer, without a shadow of a doubt. And quite a respectable painter, after all she had seen as much as she can see herself. They also found common ground in financial matters, since his area of expertise in his days as a banker was investments. He had already given her one or two useful tips that she applied to her accounts. She easily ignores his blatantly Polish mannerisms. After all, despite all his years in Austria, Leon was also Polish at heart. But unlike Leon, who through his gift for languages adopted and assimilated Austrian German along with his Austrian citizenship, the German in Meir’s mouth often slips into the Yiddish she hates. But she keeps silent. Such is nonbinding friendship.

And so too in their weekly conversation, in which they analyze the situation from their mature perspective, scarred by life and wars, here and there. Yes, Meir too lost many family members, too many, there. He himself, he told her, managed to get here in good time. His family thought then that he had lost his mind when he told them he was going to Palestine. The familiar story. The painful one. He lost his wife two years ago. One day she went to sleep for an afternoon nap and simply did not get up, he said, adding with a bitter but relieved laugh that of course he himself was not at home at the time, since he never naps in the afternoon.

Sometimes she thinks about the deceptive nature of a friendship like theirs: on the one hand, they do not meet or call each other outside the class days, and on the other hand, in their conversations they speak with complete candor about any topic that comes up. Their opinions of Golda. Of Dayan. And of the protesting fellow, Moti Ashkenazi. About the economic situation. About their children, who are busy with themselves. About the war. About the body’s betrayal, her declining eyesight, his failing hearing. And now television. Meir is enthusiastic, Ilze indifferent.

“Everyone will see us,” he says.

“So what,” she replies, sipping her coffee calmly. It is not hot enough for her taste. It is never hot enough for her taste in that café, but she no longer complains or asks in advance that it be served very hot, because there is no point. It always arrives at the same temperature, not hot enough for her taste.

“Do you know how many people would want to appear on television?” he asks, crushing the crumbs of cake on his plate with his fork.

“What do I care if they see me on television,” she asks with a small smile. “Will someone invite me to act in a film because they saw me dancing for a few seconds at the club, in some TV report? No, right? So what do I get out of it? I won’t even get a discount at the supermarket,” she concludes, pleased with the logic she has presented.

Meir falls silent before her and wonders to himself how it is possible that a woman full of so much fire can be so calm, almost indifferent, and serene.

A week later a television crew indeed comes to the community center. When the class participants arrive, most are excited at the sight of the many crew members bustling around. The bearded cameraman and the tall sound recordist, the reporter they know from the screen, the woman armed with an array of makeup brushes and belted with a many-pocketed apron full of products, and the three disheveled ones who visited them a week earlier, two of whom are directing the lights and moving about busily. The makeup artist powders Adela’s face and urges her to wear bright red lipstick just before the reporter turns to her with an overly broad smile and asks her, with feigned amazement, about the class and its participants.

Out of the corner of her ear, while she puts on her dance shoes and adjusts her dress, Ilze hears Adela list her and Meir among her most outstanding students. Meir will certainly be pleased. She only hopes he will not step on her out of exuberant delight while dancing.

To Ilze’s displeasure, the lesson begins late because of the preparations for filming. It continues at a snail’s pace and with interruptions. Nothing like a regular class. “Let’s do that again,” Adela cheers brightly when the reporter whispers in her ear that this is what she wants. Ilze glances at her watch. If they keep wasting time like this, she will have to disappoint Meir and skip their weekly meeting. She must get back home in time to prepare for the evening concert. She must return to the new apartment, which she still does not call home, change clothes and then take the bus back into town. The distance of the new apartment from the city center, from all the places that had previously become anchors of sanity in her routine, makes things difficult for her and forces her to waste a great deal of time, too much time, on bus rides. She cannot linger, lest she be late.

The class ends an hour late. Meir accepts her apology for having to leave with disappointment but understanding. He reminds her again to bring him a current portrait photo of herself next week. He wants to paint her. The gesture flatters her, but also arouses a measure of amused embarrassment. True, in the mansion house in Vienna’s suburbs there hung painted portraits of family members, but even then, in her youth, that had seemed to her an old-fashioned tradition, and in any case suitable only for people who were truly handsome. And she had never been foolish enough to think she was one of them.

A month later someone tells Naomi that her mother starred in a television feature about a dance class for the elderly. “You were on television and you didn’t tell me?” she asks Ilze with a slight mocking smile. “I forgot about it,” Ilze replies indifferently.

“How did you forget?” Naomi insists. “They said you were the star, you danced both with a partner and in a solo piece.”

Ilze fixes her with a sharp look. “So what exactly surprises you? That they filmed me? That I dance? That I dance well? That I was the star?”

From the window of her room in the new apartment, orchards are visible, instead of the sea that filled her window in the old apartment. The orchard is nice, sometimes even fills the air with a pleasant citrus scent that reminds her of her first home here. But Ilze does not deceive herself. While the sea gave her comfort and lasting calm by being endless and eternal, she knows the orchard is a temporary substitute. She knows its time is limited. After all, as a businesswoman she herself would have brought down the orchard with a logging axe without hesitation and turned the land into a financial real estate gold mine. She still remembers the citrus trees that once stood and were cut down one by one in the neighborhood where she first lived in Palestine, before there was yet a state, until only the one remaining tree was left in the yard of their house on the boulevard. One way or another, to her it is all the same. She can barely make out the outlines of the trees in broad daylight. At dusk, like now, the shadows of the trees merge with the shadows of the rest of the world as it appears to her.

This week she finally gave up any effort, or perhaps pretense, of reading a book and asked Naomi to get her a library card for the blind. Someone in the dance class told one of the others, she had not asked herself, only overheard a conversation, that one could borrow audiobooks there in all sorts of languages, including German. Next week she will ask Meir to recommend a tape recorder she can buy in order to listen to the recorded books. Today she did not have the heart to bring up the subject. When she does, she will have to explain why she is suddenly interested in such a device, what need she has for it. In other words, she will have to tell Meir that her vision is worsening, that what was a nuisance is becoming a limitation. And today she could not tell him that, not when he presented her so ceremoniously with the painted portrait of herself, which he had painted from the photograph she had brought him. He was so proud and excited, so pleased with his work. She had no choice but to admire what she could not really see. She saw the large square, felt the wooden frame with her hands, identified the dark tones of the frame and the work itself, which was some kind of drawing. “I thought this was the most right, the most fitting for the dignity that radiates from you,” he explained fervently, like a student defending a thesis. “Yes, it’s definitely impressive,” she said, tilting her head left and right to convince him of her sincerity.

Now she is trying to decide where to ask Mati to hang it. The options are few: one wall of the four walls in her room is completely covered by a closet, and the second is the wall of the large windows, to her delight, facing the balcony, beyond which lie the orchards. Mati and Naomi almost never use the balcony, so its shutters are never closed and nothing and no one hides the view from her. On one of the remaining two walls hang two pictures already, and the last is the wall where the front door is fixed.

Ilze sighs, the framed painting in her hands. She was never especially good at interior design. She always preferred to leave the task to professionals and settle for instructions about her needs from any given space and her preferences regarding colors and so forth. To tell the truth, she would have preferred to hang the painting in the house corridor, a place of passage where one glances at pictures but does not linger over them. But the corridor is full of photographs of Naomi and Mati and their children, a habit Naomi adopted enthusiastically in the other country, and so all the photographs are from there too. As if all the smiling faces were evidence of family happiness. Nonsense, Ilze knows. But that tunnel of simulated happiness is certainly not the right place for her painting, which Meir painted from the portrait she gave him. After all, she gave him a true image of herself, one that makes no attempt to hide her sharp features and whose entire expression speaks of sober seriousness, without a trace of a smile.

Naomi knocks on the door and opens it at the same time. “Moti, come eat,” she says, and her eyes catch what is in Ilze’s hands. “Did you buy a picture?” she says in surprise.

“No,” Ilze answers and turns the picture so that its face is toward Naomi. “Meir, my partner in the dance class, painted me from a photo I gave him, framed it and gave me the painting as a gift. I’m debating where to hang it,” she says, fixing her half-blind eyes on Naomi.

Naomi steps forward, examines the painting and steps back. “Well, he’s not a great painter,” she dismisses it, folding her arms across her chest. Ilze senses the defensive, defiant movement of her daughter more than she sees it.

“Why do you say that? I think he’s a good painter,” Ilze replies.

“You?” says Naomi dismissively. “You can barely see, so what do you know,” and she glances again at her mother’s face looking out at her from within the frame in her hands. “The whole picture is so dark, and you’re so severe. Almost... intimidating,” she says and immediately rushes on. “No, more than that: frightening. I hope you weren’t planning to hang it outside this room,” she adds in an hostile tone and leaves the room.

Ilze is not offended. For years she has not been offended by her daughter. She only wonders from time to time where this cruelty in her comes from, the need to hurt even when there is no reason or justification. There is a limit to how much can be attributed to basic insecurity and inferiority feelings permanently ingrained.

And in that moment she decides to hang the painting alongside the other two, on the wall above her bed.

Almost twenty years later, after Ilze’s death, when Naomi hurries to clear out her room in favor of renovations that will break down its walls and erase every trace of her mother and the life she lived beside her, in her home, she will take the portrait painting and hang it in the living room of the renovated apartment. The reluctance and revulsion will disappear, and the rejected painting will, after the death of the one portrayed, become art worthy of display in the front window of the house, the living room. To those wondering who the woman with the vivid expression and presence in the painting is, she will say, “That? That’s my mother. One of her suitors, and she had many after my father died, painted her from a photograph. He, too, like my father, like all her other suitors, died before her. She buried them all.”

***

She enters the apartment and immediately hears Naomi’s loud sobbing rising from the bedroom. Well, she has finally found out. Or stopped pretending not to know. Ilze suppresses a sigh and goes to her room. She knows: now the melodrama will begin, lasting days or weeks, a drama that cannot be shortened and whose course is known in advance. Naomi will confront Mati. Mati will deny it. Naomi will scream to heaven. Mati will disappear from the house for almost entire days. The little one, who is no longer little, will stand guard to protect the little one, who is no longer little, because she knows what comes next: Naomi’s threats against Mati, against the other woman, against herself. Mati’s pushing back. Sometimes outside intervention, such as a series of harassing phone calls from the other woman or her side.

But the little one who has grown up also knows by now that none of this will happen. One only has to survive the period needed this time for the current ugly melodrama to run its course. She is strong, the little one who has grown up. She does not complain, does not break, does not tell anyone what is happening. Not at home and not in her soul. She reminds her of herself.

Naomi opens Ilze’s bedroom door in one swift motion, without knocking or waiting for an answer. She is barefoot, her hair disheveled, her eyes red and swollen from crying, her blouse partially hanging out of her pale trousers, she is barefoot.

“He did it again,” she seethes in a whiny voice and starts crying again.

Ilze restrains herself from slapping her. “Calm down,” she says instead, feeling on the nightstand beside her bed and handing Naomi a box of tissues. Naomi tears a tissue from the box absentmindedly and begins pacing the room.

“I don’t understand this, what didn’t I do for him, what didn’t I give up?” she demands of Ilze, but does not wait for an answer. “I did everything exactly the way he wanted since we came back. The house is the way he wanted, I arranged his clinic the way he wanted, I save on secretary expenses because I do the work, I didn’t go back to my profession,” she blows her nose with a loud blast.

“Where exactly were you waiting for them?” Ilze mutters to herself, knowing that her daughter once again, as always in moments like these, is mostly presenting to herself the improved version of reality. She did not return to her profession because her profession is a fluid, dynamic, changing field, not at all like what it was when they left years ago for the other country. There was nowhere for her to return to. But Naomi, who already chooses what to deny and what to emphasize in the distorted narrative she creates for herself about her distorted life, does not even stop to listen, or ask what she said, and storms on.

“And that bitch has no limits! Do you know who it is?” She turns her furious, swollen face back to Ilze.

“Yes,” Ilze answers calmly and returns the tissue box to its place.

“Yes? What yes?! You knew about this story and didn’t tell me anything???” Naomi screams. She can once again be angry at her mother instead of at her husband or at herself.

“I may not see,” Ilze replies in a measured tone, “but I am not blind.”

“Jesus Christ,” Naomi cries dramatically, “you saw that whore of a neighbor cling to Mati and didn’t say anything???” She sobs again at the top of her voice.

A feeling of disgust envelops Ilze. She places her hands on her hips, tilts her head to the side, releases air and orders her daughter, “Stop whining right now. One would think your tears make any impression on anyone. And lower your voice, your children do not need to hear all this filth, they do not need to be part of this war of attrition between the two of you. If you want to kill each other, that is your business, but only your business. Not your children’s and not mine.” Her eyes blaze.

Naomi stops sobbing and begins to hiccup.

“Moti,” she turns to Ilze pleadingly. “I need you to give me money. I have to put a detective on them, I need proof, to show that idiot of a husband of hers, to prove to Mati that he better not dare say there’s nothing, that he isn’t pouring our money, my money, into her...” She is on the verge of tears again.

“I am not giving you a penny for such nonsense. It is throwing money in the trash.”

“A detective is throwing money in the trash?” Naomi asks.

“Of course. What is there to prove that everyone already knows? And what do you care what that woman’s husband knows or does not know. More important is that none of this be known to your children, don’t you think?”

“And what about all the money of ours he is pouring into her?”

“Then take a lot of money out of your account too. Put it in another account. Yours alone.”

Naomi looks frightened. “No. I can’t do something like that to him,” she says.

Ilze snorts contemptuously. “Well, yes. You can’t do something like that to him,” she emphasizes the “him.” “But you can allow him to do something like that to you. Very well, if that’s the porridge you’re cooking, then eat it.”

A string inside Naomi snaps. She seizes Ilze’s arm in fury.

“What’s wrong with you? I’m your daughter, why can’t you help me when I ask?”

“Because this is not help in my eyes,” says Ilze, fixing her half-blind gaze on Naomi’s hand, which does not let go of her.

Naomi continues directing all her anger at her. “What am I asking you for? To talk to him? No. To talk to her, and God knows you are capable of instilling mortal fear in anyone, no. I’m only asking you for a little money, and you... you have money. Enough money. In fact a lot of money, after all you have almost no expenses, you’ve been living at our expense for years! So what will happen to you if you give me a little, what do you think you’re going to do with all that money of yours, what do you need it for?” she shouts in frustration.

Ilze breathes deeply, fixes her dark eyes on her daughter, and with a sharp movement shakes herself free of her grip. Naomi’s hand drops from her like a wet rag.

“And how do you think I’m supposed to live after you die?” she asks Naomi bitterly.

Naomi wilts before her.

“And besides,” she adds in freezing coldness, “it is my money, money I have already given you and your husband more than enough of over the years, except that you, ungrateful as you are, tend to forget that fact over and over again. If anyone here is living at someone else’s expense, it is you living at my expense, not me living at yours. Since the day you were born,” she spits out the words. “Now take your usual drama to another room. I have no desire to participate in it. And I know exactly how this will end.”

It does indeed end, as Ilze knew and expected, as always, with the affair exploding, this time after Naomi went to the neighbor’s husband and told him what his wife and Mati were doing. The neighborhood gossips did not know what hit them from joy over the juicy story that unfolded between the floors of the shared building. The couple of neighbors immediately began divorce proceedings, which led to their leaving the shared building at the end of that school year. Naomi, as usual, chose to see the fact that Mati preferred to come home as if nothing had happened as her own victory. Ilze’s heart secretly ached again. And the only thing no one had taken into account was the fact that the daughter of the neighbor and her husband, who studied in the same school and grade as the little one who had grown up, would shame her until the end of the school year as the daughter of the man because of whom her parents were divorcing, the daughter of the man who not only cheated on his wife, but also tore her family apart. It would take years before the little one who had grown up told anyone what the affair of her father had done to her and the way her mother chose to bring it to an end.

- Chapter 47 -

Now I think about all the times I should have been angry at you and wasn’t. At least not openly. Not to your knowledge. I think about all the times I could have been angry at you. That I had a justified reason to be angry, and I wasn’t. At least not openly. Not to your knowledge. I think about all the anger toward you that I accumulated and stored up for years, without being aware of it, without letting it out. Without even imagining letting it out. Because there’s no point. Because I know you didn’t mean it. How did I know such a thing? At sixteen, seventeen, and afterward? Was it because I was born with this broken mechanism that invents excuses for anyone who hurts me, whether intentionally or not? He couldn’t have known, he didn’t mean to, it wasn’t against me at all, he’s going through a hard time, he’s under stress, that’s how he talks to everyone... Tons of explanations I have, of every kind. I gave almost all of them to myself in your name over the years.

When the affair with the neighbor exploded and her daughter pointed a darkening finger at me at school because I was your daughter, I swallowed her words until she got tired. Not because I really believed it had nothing to do with me, not at all. I was ashamed. That I was your daughter. Of you, who had an affair, and with a neighbor from the floor below, and one whose daughter studied in the same grade as I did. It is a little hard to believe you truly managed not to see anything unusual in this arrangement. And of Mom too, who went and informed on the neighbor’s husband, who apparently really knew nothing until Mom threw that stinking bomb on him. On the other hand, she would not have made that ugly move if you had not started it. I was ashamed and I kept quiet, by instinct. The same instinct that told me not to give in to Mom whenever she tried to pit me against you so she could end some affair, because once, that one time I didn’t understand what was happening and what I was doing when I was twelve, it worked. I did not give in. Never. I refused her and stayed silent in front of you. Even that crazy night when she dragged me with her to open the door to the apartment that served you as an office in that project that was scrapped a few months later, an apartment that turned out to also serve you as a trysting place with that same neighbor and on that same night, somehow, you got locked inside. You had the unbelievable nerve to call her, to come with the spare key to open and extract you. She had the unbelievable nerve to force me to accompany her on that journey into madness. And all that night, and in all the nights and days after it, I kept silent. And to myself I said it was between you and her. I was not a party to it. I did not know how to see that there was another party hurt. I did not understand that there could be a party hurt even if it had not really participated in the war. I did not know that I was a party hurt in the long war between you, a war soaked in betrayal, accusations and revenge.

***

In elementary school, parents of other children whispered and I always heard, even what was not meant for my ears, that you were on the parents’ committee but never came to meetings and that it was really disgraceful. It isn’t disgraceful, I told myself silently and kept quiet outwardly. They don’t understand anything, you can’t come to meetings like other parents, you’re an army doctor, you come home very late too. In my childish mind there was no place for the possibility that perhaps you could have refused the prestigious appointment, given it up when you saw that you could not fulfill the role, or at least explained in advance or afterward any absence from those meetings and not simply say screw this whole forum, which is exactly what you did. And just as I heard the trickle of those adults’ remarks, their children heard them too, and when they liked to speak and quote their parents, they would say, with the knowingness of children who know nothing, that my father is insolent.

***

When I gathered myself enough to do what was needed to end the fiasco of my marriage and turned to you, probably for the first, last and only time in my life to help me, what did you do? You sent me to a lawyer you knew from somewhere, who turned out to be a traffic law specialist, who failed and caused me to fail in the process, and you said you could not help me with money. Period. You told me that from the living room of the apartment you bought for the current mistress. Ethan and I still call it “our apartment” to this day. The one neither of us got. Not even a part of it.

What do I want from him, I told myself then. He doesn’t really know lawyers. He got confused. He didn’t mean to hurt you, he just didn’t really mean it because that’s how he is. And he has no money, because he is with her now, and he pays all his expenses with her and also all of Mom’s, who never lets up and makes sure to drive him crazy, if not in any other way then in his wallet. I can’t believe I felt sorry for you then. And backed off. And asked for nothing more. And did not get angry. Actually, it turns out I was angry, but inside. And until we reached the final straight I did not know how angry I was. I did not know how much anger there was inside me. For almost a whole year now it has not stopped coming out of me and it does not end. In a crooked way, your dementia, the one that stole you from yourself, also freed you from the need, or the possibility, of answering me for all the weight of my anger toward you. Because when I began to understand, you stopped. When I could no longer keep silent, you lost the ability to speak coherently. When I dared to say it, you no longer knew how to listen.

- Chapter 48 -

1992

For the past few months she has not felt well. A general weariness fills Ilze’s limbs, slows her steps, weighs down her heart. Since the strange last war that took place here last year, the one that forced on her, as on everyone else, those terrible rubber masks, she has not been able to regain her full strength. The rubber masks. She had difficulty putting them on, difficulty breathing inside them, detested their smell. They brought the smell of suffocation to her nose. If suffocation has a smell. The smell of memories of another war, a distant one, the great war. Her first war, which she experienced as a young girl, the war that introduced her for the first time in her life to death in the family. The war that was supposed to be the last. And was only the first. And even then the adults whispered in low voices, thinking she could not hear, about masks and gas.

She sighs softly. She has lived through too many wars in her lifetime. The world, it seems to her, keeps moving forward, but also stays in place. People invent miracle devices, eradicate diseases and fly to the moon, and at the same time never stop fighting one another, sowing destruction, breeding hatred and developing means of killing and annihilation. Long ago she stopped counting the wars that took place in her lifetime. The very act of counting them could only stir up thoughts she carefully avoids, deeply suppressed memories she keeps far outside the reach of daily life. From the moment her life veered off course because of that war, the most terrible of all, she has always made a point of looking straight ahead. Toward the rest of the day, toward tomorrow. Toward what is expected, what will come, what may come, even what might come. Never toward what was, or was not, what almost was or could have been.

But lately thoughts are rising in her. Perhaps it is the heart, which is struggling to return to its normal rhythm, which was perfectly fine before the black-mask war. Perhaps the cause is the weather growing more extreme here all around, now in a cold, rainy winter that floods the streets and reminds her of bitter things from her early years here, a bleak winter wet to the bone, which came after a particularly dry and exhausting summer. Or perhaps, as Naomi claims in every argument or quarrel with her, with no small amount of schadenfreude, perhaps it is her advanced age.

“You’re an old hag,” she raises her voice, “you’re already deep, deep into old age, you can just die quietly!”

Yes, she knows: her daughter believes it would be better for her to die. First of all, because Naomi thinks that with Ilze gone, it will be easier for her. Ilze is not offended by her short-sighted daughter, knows very well that this is a false hope Naomi nurtures. Naomi never really made her way in the world by her own strength. At no stage in her life. Ilze was always there behind her, in the background, as refuge, escape, support when needed. Whether it meant providing a pampered home and proper roof over one’s head, caring for her children, financial support, or maintaining Naomi’s mental stability every time she threatened to collapse.

Naomi, her mother knows with the same clear-eyed certainty with which she always knows her bank balance, is incapable of acknowledging any of this, because she is blind to her own flaws, blind to her character weaknesses, to her mistakes. This blindness is a basic flaw in Naomi’s character, one that has accompanied and weakened her since childhood. A character flaw that over the years translated into, and continues to translate into, a dense protective network of self-deception.

Her only daughter is nothing like her. Not in appearance, and certainly not in character. She was always, and remains, manifestly different from her. She also bears no resemblance whatsoever to her late father, lacking from the outset his handsome features, not endowed with the personal charm he had, and never dreamy like him. God knows how the two of them produced such a daughter.

As for herself, she does not think her age is the cause of her bodily woes. Her eyesight was impaired long ago, and it has been gradually weakening for years. There is nothing new in that, nor in the fact that the severity has not changed in years. The nail that was inserted into her thigh, placed there in an operation also performed several years ago, was not due to bone weakness but to the negligence of the driver who hit her with her car. For a long time after the nail was added, she continued to dance in the dance class, and she continues to go out and come back as she pleases, wherever she wishes. That is why remarks like the one the family doctor at the health fund tossed at her during an annual checkup infuriate her. “Little granny,” he said, raising his voice like young people who think all older people have hearing trouble. “There’s nothing to do, you’re no spring chicken anymore.” As if age itself were the cause of her weakness. The insolent fool. Leon would have sharply rebuked him for such a remark.

Leon. For many long years she has not devoted even a shred of thought to him, for good or for bad, except on the anniversary of his death, when she goes to his grave as required. Even in this moment the passing thought that crosses her mind does not stem from personal nostalgia, but from the fact that he was a mentor to young and beginning doctors. Leon the man, the private person who had been her partner, is not missed by her at all. He never was. Not even in the period before and immediately after their marriage, not even when he went to Palestine and it seemed they would never see each other again.

Nor are the “cavaliers” who came after him, as Naomi used to call them with open disdain, her colleagues and friends from the various groups she joined, the concerts, the café meetings, all of whom she drifted away from when their company began to weigh on her, or, as happened more than once, when they left this world, missed by her in the least. The only man whose absence remains a scar that does not heal in her soul, a scar carefully hidden beneath the silence she imposed on herself long ago, is Gustav. Gustav whom she failed to save. Gustav she met too late in her youth. Gustav from whom she parted too soon. Gustav she will remain silent about forever.

She sniffs, feeling around on the table for the tissue box. A wasteful item in her view, whose use has been forced on her against her will. Years ago, when they were in the other country, Naomi informed her that she refused to include or send for laundering the cloth handkerchiefs she used, because “it’s not hygienic.” She left Ilze no choice but to switch to paper tissues, whose touch she never got used to and never stopped complaining about, especially after she discovered that Mati, in some obscure nostalgic fit, had returned to using cloth handkerchiefs alongside paper tissues.

“I’m not agreeing to Mati either, he just happened to have a cloth handkerchief today,” Naomi used to feign innocence when Ilze tried to overturn the decree on the grounds of equal rights. Her failure was crushing: she could not conduct a detective operation deep inside the laundry baskets, and each time she pointed to a case in which Mati had used a cloth handkerchief, she encountered Naomi’s irritating and false response that it was a one-time event, which happened “by chance.”

And now she has caught another cold and her nose is running, and she suspects that the box of tissues placed in her room is of a low-quality kind that irritates the skin of her sensitive nose. The cold is tiring her too. As she is debating whether to lie down for a little rest or leave her room and sit in the living room or dining area until lunch, the door to her room is flung open without any prior knock, and Naomi stands in the doorway, blinking angrily at the dim room.

“Why are you sitting in the dark?” she demands.

Ilze keeps silent. She is tired of explaining to her daughter that the dimness helps her, because her vision has long been reduced to shadows and silhouettes alone, not to mention that there is no point wasting money and electricity in the room of someone who can barely see.

“Maybe go outside a bit? It’s nice outside and you’ve been sitting here in your room for days.”

“It’s raining outside.”

“Not now.”

“But it’s still cold.”

“Since when are you cold in Israel? Didn’t you come from a homeland with snow?” Naomi scoffs.

“I prefer to listen to a book.”

Ilze refuses to get dragged into another battle of barbs, the kind Naomi has recently come to love. “As you wish,” Naomi waves her arms in a mock gesture of surrender and retreats.

Ilze settles back into the only armchair in her room and straightens the cushion behind her. She closes her almost blind eyes for a moment. Behind the curtain of her eyelids she sees distant landscapes, green and comforting, a blooming garden in the family estate and the edge of a forest almost touching it. She sees the large kitchen, the enormous table in the center, on which Suzy the cook would knead with her broad hands the dough for the cakes she baked so beautifully. She can almost smell the scent of the vanilla bean that slipped into the gently bubbling pot of milk, the smell of yeast raising the dough in a large white ceramic bowl, under a red-and-white checkered cloth, the sweet aroma of chocolate melting in a small pot hanging above a larger one, set on the stove and sending steam up beneath the melting chocolate. Her recipe book. It has Suzy’s cake recipes too. Where is she?

Her eyes open, the spell of the scent evaporates. She does smell something sweet baking, but her nose, attentive to smells, can tell that the cake in the oven is surely already beginning to burn at the edges, another shortcut-filled substitute recipe of the kind Naomi likes. When the smell fills the kitchen and dining area, Naomi will arrive as usual at a run and curse vigorously at the oven, the recipe, the clock. Every factor except her own complete distraction when it comes to baking and cooking. “Useful chores, but not important, not interesting and not requiring too much intelligence,” she once dismissed a dish she had burned. What does she know. Nothing, in that area.

And so Ilze reminds herself again that she wants to give her recipe book to her granddaughter, so it will not fall into Naomi’s hands, who might simply throw it straight into the trash out of lack of interest or ability to deal with the recipes in it. The little one, who has long since grown up, does not know how to read German, but she will have no trouble finding someone who knows the language and can also decipher Ilze’s handwriting. Ilze is also convinced she will do it because of her interest in cooking and baking, because of her general curiosity and her well-known fondness for all the cakes Ilze baked for her in childhood.

Where is she, really? She has not seen her, has not heard from her, for too many days. She will call her. Tomorrow. When she has the strength. When Naomi and Mati are not at home. When no one is listening.

The next day she feels her watch, a watch for the blind she bought about a year ago, right after Naomi and Mati leave for his clinic, and waits ten minutes to make sure neither of them comes back because they forgot something at home. Those hours, when the large empty house is hers alone, give her a sense of calm. Temporary. During them she is not required to endure the exhausting vigilance toward Naomi, toward Mati, toward Naomi and Mati. Constant tension fills the air, like static electricity, when they are home. Collisions, loud shouting, nervousness, mutual accusations, slamming doors and drawers, all these are usually only a matter of time. And she is no longer as light-footed and busy as before, and can no longer go out on her errands for hours, far from the arena of their clashes.

Their children, too, once grown, hastened to leave the house as soon as they could. The little one who had grown up even managed to marry the wrong man too, and divorce him. At least she had the sense not to fall in love with her mistake, and to correct it quickly.

Now she walks measured steps to the living room, to the large armchair beside one of the telephones in the apartment. Her gait is calculated. Her limited vision dictates a different pace than the one that characterized her in the past, a slower one. In the apartment she counts steps, knows by heart the number of steps from place to place. From the armchair in her room to the armchair in the living room, to her place by the table in the dining area, to the bathroom, to the front door. Counting steps allows her to walk without hesitation, an appearance of control over situation and space.

She sits in the armchair, feels for the telephone, brings the receiver to her ear and dials the grown little one. She answers, slightly breathless, after six rings.

“Mama,” she says after Ilze greets her. “Is everything okay?”

Why do young people always think something is wrong when older people call? “Yes, yes,” she replies. “Why are you out of breath?”

“I heard the phone from the stairwell. I hurried to get to it,” she says.

“Are you sure everything is okay?”

“Absolutely. I just wanted to hear how you are. It’s been a long time since we talked, since we met.”

“True,” her granddaughter says quickly, and her voice is tinged with apology. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

A short silence falls between them, a silence filled with sadness and longing.

“I thought you’d come on Saturday,” says Ilze. “You haven’t come on Saturday in a long time.”

“That’s true,” her granddaughter says and pauses for a moment, searching for the right words to phrase her answer without burdening her grandmother. “It’s a little hard for me with Mom and Dad lately. They...” Her voice fades.

“They’re always fighting,” Ilze completes for her.

Her granddaughter lets out a relieved breath. “Exactly. And it’s really not pleasant for me. I’m already tired of coming just to witness their fights or try to mediate between them. I have enough of my own things.”

Ilze sighs quietly, knowing how right the grown little one is, knowing היטב what a burden Naomi has placed, and continues to place, on her over the years, how little consideration and responsibility Mati has shown, and continues to show, toward her.

“You know,” she says carefully, “I think your mother loves you.”

“If so, she has strange ways of showing it,” says her granddaughter, and restrained anger flickers between her words.

“I’m not angry at you, mama. And I’m sorry I don’t come visit you enough,” she emphasizes the word “you.” “But I also work a lot, because you know it’s expensive for a woman to get divorced,” she chuckles.

Ilze leans back in the armchair and closes her eyes. “Everything is expensive for a woman,” she says. “And always more than for a man.”

She can almost hear her granddaughter’s nod of agreement.

“I’ll come visit in the next few days, I promise. When they’re at the clinic or something,” her granddaughter adds.

Ilze does not respond immediately. “You know,” she says at last, slowly, “I want to ask your forgiveness.”

“For what do you want to ask my forgiveness?” the granddaughter does not understand.

“We... I never told you enough how much I love you. All these years we didn’t say, I didn’t tell you enough that I love you.”

On the other end of the line, the granddaughter tightens her grip on the receiver. She tries to breathe properly, her eyes filling with tears. For a moment she fears her grandmother is speaking from some kind of confusion.

“What?” she barely manages to whisper, hoarse from suppressed tears.

“I love you,” says Ilze. And the sentence sounds strange in her ears, almost as it does in her granddaughter’s.

***

Ilze sits alone at a corner table. In the dining room, bright with fluorescent light, plasticware and unfamiliar to her, she makes an effort to sniff and feel what is on her plate without dirtying her surroundings or showing shocking ill manners. It is difficult. But at least she is again allowed to eat something herself, unlike being fed intravenously. The night before last, Mati decided she had to be hospitalized. When they arrived at the emergency room, she heard the urgency in the way the doctors spoke there, caught fragments of sentences whose meaning she struggled to decipher, but she understood well the tone of the conversation that took place between Mati and the doctor on duty, who almost scolded Mati.

She knows: Mati, despite his well-known talent for diagnosing patients and diseases, failed in her case. He chose to believe what she said and what she did not say and to ignore what his own eyes saw, reluctant to ask invasive questions, delayed a physical examination that would have revealed the intestinal obstruction earlier, a day or more sooner. Now, with a tube inserted in her nose and leading who knows where, she sits in front of a steaming bowl in which, she has managed to determine, there is a watery, tasteless porridge. That is what is allowed to her today. She wonders whether this slurry is even worth the effort that will be required for the act of eating.

A brisk nurse approaches her, with another human silhouette behind her.

“Well, little granny, why aren’t you eating?” asks the nurse in feigned cheerfulness and a loud voice. Too loud. Another one, among many in this place, who thinks that elderly patients cannot hear unless one almost shouts at them. And why does none of them address her by name, it is elementary courtesy.

“Look who came to visit you,” the nurse booms again, not waiting at all for an answer to her question.

“Mama, how are you?” she hears her granddaughter’s familiar voice, as she sits down across from her and extends her hand.

“Were you bored at home, the drama from Mom and Dad was no longer interesting enough so you decided to come here?” she asks.

“Eat, little granny,” orders the nurse.

Ilze shakes her head, moving the bowl away from her. “Not tasty,” she rules.

“It’s okay,” her granddaughter hurries to mediate, “we’ll find something else that tastes good to you.”

“She can’t eat whatever she wants,” the nurse warns.

“Fine, I’ll make sure with you what she is allowed to have,” says the granddaughter to the nurse and turns back to Ilze. “How are you, mama?”

“Well, could be better,” says Ilze, and a faint smile hovers on her lips. “It’s better now that you’re here.”

The granddaughter strokes Ilze’s withered hand, covering the age spots that speckle it. She surveys her grandmother’s face. The silver mane adorns her pale features, the brown eyes burn in their blindness, the large hawk nose looks embarrassed by the foreign tube inserted into it.

“Does the tube hurt?” she asks Ilze.

“No.”

“Mom told me only yesterday that you were in the hospital,” she apologizes.

“No matter. A hospital is not a pleasant place to visit.”

“So why did you come?” the grown little one laughs.

“Your father made me. Sometimes he is such a nuisance,” she almost smiles again.

“Has Ethan been here already?” asks the granddaughter.

“No,” says Ilze and a cloud passes over her face. “He is a good boy, but hospitals are hard for him.”

“Only doctors and nurses don’t find hospitals hard, but only when they’re working. If, heaven forbid, they have to be hospitalized, then it’s hard for them too. Never mind. And Mom and Dad?”

“What about them?”

“Were they here?”

“Where?”

“Come on, mama.”

Ilze makes an effort to sit up a little in her chair. “They’re busy people, you know. And I hope,” she adds, “that tomorrow or the day after they’ll discharge me, so that’s that.”

Her granddaughter looks at the watery gray contents of the bowl. “It really does look disgusting.”

“Well, what did I tell you? And the presentation is not attractive enough either.”

The granddaughter smiles at Ilze, who always takes care not only that the food is good but also that it is nicely presented and that table manners are observed. Since childhood she remembers her grandmother insisting on her meals, even when it was only a sandwich. Ilze never ate just a slice of bread spread with butter and topped with a piece of cheese. Her sandwiches were always garnished with chopped chives or a thin slice of cucumber. Ilze does not see her granddaughter’s smile, but she feels it. And she smiles back and pushes the rejected bowl a little farther away.

***

“Come. Now,” Naomi orders on the phone in a strained voice.

“What happened?” her daughter asks.

“We hospitalized her again last night. She’s in a daze.”

“What do you mean, in a daze?” her daughter asks, suddenly alarmed, her eyes leaving the computer screen they had been fixed on. She knows that after her grandmother was discharged from the hospital, once the intestinal blockage from which she suffered had been cleared, she came home weak. But in the two weeks since then, she had been convinced Ilze was recovering, as she always did, only a little more slowly.

“She’s at the end,” says Naomi.

“What do you mean, at the end?” escapes her mouth a foolish question, one that above all shows she refuses to believe Naomi. In a sort of childlike magical thought that had never left her, she had assumed Ilze would always be there for her. She cannot die now all of a sudden.

“She’s ninety-two, what did you think? That she’d live forever?” Naomi is impatient.

“Kind of. Yes,” the granddaughter whispers, mostly to herself.

***

Ilze lies on the white bed, her eyes closed, her silver mane faded on the hospital pillow, adorned with its washed-out emblem. Soon Naomi will arrive, pace to and fro, mutter a few empty words to the nurses, to the doctor she will stop by chance in the corridor, and eventually sit in mute embarrassment on a chair beside her bed. And wait. Shortly after her, the granddaughter will arrive in a hurry. She will lean toward her, sweep aside a strand of hair, ask her to stay and try very hard not to cry. The grandson will also arrive. He will stand for a few minutes on the threshold and retreat into the corridor when he can no longer contain the tears. He was always a sensitive boy. Last will come Mati. He will glance at the patient file, feel for a pulse at the wrist, glance toward Naomi, shake his head. No. Finally he will look at her and a single, rebellious, almost invisible tear will slip beneath his glasses and he will hasten to brush it away with a wave of his hand. And both of them will know how much she will be missed by him.

When she turned ninety-two, only five months earlier, Ilze had not imagined that her birthday would in fact signal the beginning of the end. But as someone who had never deceived herself, in no matter what sense or matter, she had not deceived herself about this either. She knew it the moment the process began. She knows it will end soon. She is not afraid. There is no point in fear. It is not useful for anything. She only hopes that this end, waiting in the corner of her current bland hospital room and about to arrive, will be as free of pain as possible. The painkillers given to her here since she arrived because of painful, exhausting shortness of breath help her greatly, almost pleasantly. They free her from the need to respond, to answer, to comfort those around her. They surround her wandering thoughts with softened edges, with a cotton-like quality.

She hates being ill. She hates illnesses. To her they are a kind of weakness, even if it is a bodily weakness over which its owner has no control. She hates lack of control. Her list of goals is empty now. There is nothing left in it. Once she had far-reaching goals. She was on her way toward them. The path was blocked. Erased. She found a new path. The goals along it were short term. Short-lived. Small. Practical. Everyday. Achievable.

***

In her ninety-two years she had two cycles of life. She actually lived twice. There are people who do not really live even once. In her first cycle of life, in the family into which she was born, she was a child of wonder, a favored girl who surged forward on the path she chose and shaped for herself. It was a cycle of life in which her dreams and plans came true and were realized. In which she achieved every goal she set for herself. Those were wonderful lives.

But had she clung to them and not let go, she would not have reached here, to the age of ninety-two, in a country that did not even exist when she lived those wonderful lives. And she recognized these facts of life in time, in real time. Therefore she chose, with a clear mind, to leave those wonderful lives just before her fortieth birthday. Because she chose life. Different life. She chose to begin again, in the only way she knew, a second life, which has now lasted fifty-two years. Only she truly knows what came before them. What she lost. What she gave up, so as not to give up life. Only she knows what the costs were for her choice. Only she knows how great was the distance between her first and second lives. And yet, she chose them. And she does not regret her choice. Because she would never have given up life.

- Chapter 49 -

Now a year has passed. From the funeral to the memorial service. Exactly a year ago I was here, in this same nursery. The oppressive, humid heat outside is the same heat, the cold inside the nursery’s cooling room strikes your face with the same force when you go in, the flowers in the containers are silent in the same varieties and colors. Only the quantities I buy have changed. This time I am not buying buckets of flowers, only one bouquet for myself and one for Ethan. He, for his part, will bring one of your whiskey bottles. Yes, he steals it from the house that was also yours, because Mom does not allow anyone to touch your old whiskey bottles, as if you might come down for a drink or two any minute. And it does not matter that for years you did not touch them because you stopped drinking whiskey and switched to wine and beer, and the only reason you did not throw them out or give them away was that anything not in your study did not interest you. Period.

Tell the truth, did I ever interest you? I mean really interest me. As a person. As someone who maybe had interesting ideas, some achievement, a trait you might have valued. Not in the sense of filling in some form where you had to note details about your children. Not because you attended my wedding even though you hated weddings, because we both know that not attending would have cost you far more energy and time than appearing at the event. Not because someone you happened to meet told you I had received some certificate of distinction. Not because someone told you I had written a clever column in the newspaper. Not as a detail filed away or forgotten the moment it was used, if in your case it was needed or useful for something. Just like that, for no practical reason. Did you ever actually read anything I wrote in the paper, other than the one column in which I referred to you and to your generation, the generation of the founders of the state, which Mom decided everyone would know was about you and therefore framed and hung for a limited time, of course, in the kitchen? I don’t think so. Or more precisely, it seems to me you didn’t. You didn’t read it. Because what did the subjects I wrote about matter to you. I didn’t write about medicine or health. I wrote about people. Those creatures, for whom even before your soul became exhausted, you had no energy.

It is a little funny, now that I think about it, that דווקא you, a man who did not love people, ended up with a daughter whose favorite thing in the world is people. Forget it. I was not offended in real time, because I knew the subjects I wrote about did not interest you. It’s not me, I told myself. It’s them, the subjects. That’s how, as usual, I excused you, gave you a pass, made allowances for you in advance. Even that time when a short story I had written was published in the newspaper, in some holiday supplement, and I drew your attention and Mom’s to it, so you probably felt the need to read it, either superficially or really, I will never know. Do you remember what you said? I’m guessing not. But I do. Too well.

You said then that it was certainly not bad, but what would be really good was the story, or the book, it seemed to you the same thing, the next next thing I would write. Not even the next story. Great compliment, right? No. Not really. But even then I did not take offense, or so at least I convinced myself at the time, because I told myself that you were simply you. But that was not true. Not true that I was not offended. I was very offended. But you had to die so that I could tell you that. You had to be gone for this one-sided dialogue to be possible.

A whole year that I have been rummaging through our lives, yours and mine. Rummaging among thoughts, in old documents, in crumbling albums. Among dented, messy files, worn boxes from age and dusty binders. Looking for answers and explanations and reasons. In papers. In memories. In feelings. In the soul. Between you and me, between me and myself. You would not believe how hard that is. A whole year in which everything rises and surfaces and floods over, does not stop and does not end. Sometimes I felt as though I had simply asked to clean a toilet and found myself wallowing in overflowing sewage.

A whole year that I am settling accounts with you. Angry at you. Openly. Defiantly. A whole year that I am remembering and reminding you of everything. Even what you forgot when you still remembered, even what you never remembered, because it did not count in your eyes. It was not important in your eyes. A whole year that I am asking questions, knowing that I will never get answers, and still, I have to ask the questions. A whole year that I am getting upset. Fuming. Sad. Frustrated. Troubled. A whole year that I do not let go, that you do not let go of me. A whole year that I miss you. Mostly what never was.

I hate you. I love you.

Yarkon 116 B' / Orit Harel

To purchase the book on the ybook website Responsible editor: Dov Ikhenwald Original literature editor: Selin Asayag Book editor: Tirtza Flor Copy editor: Shlomit Eisenman Cover design: Noa Alonim Shnir Typesetting: Teper Ltd. Yedioth Ahronoth * Sifrei Hemed Still, do you have the Hebrew app? Download now: For iPhone devices, Hebrit App - App Store. For Android devices, such as Samsung, Hebrit Books - Google Play apps.