The Remains of Love Read online

  You’re not my mother, she would shout finally when she returned to her parents’ room and stood facing her, and the strange woman would look at her sadly, her eyes fixed for some reason on the perky incipient breasts of a twelve-year-old, covered by a grimy blouse. My poor darling, how neglected you look, she would say, as if she herself hadn’t been doing most of the neglecting, and at once she would try to placate her. I was sick for a long time, Hemda. I was laid up in the hospital and that’s why they cut off my hair. I had a kidney infection and my face swelled up, and Hemda searched in that face for the familiar scars of chickenpox, two tiny craters between chin and cheeks. You’re not my mother, she declared again, disappointed, you have no scars, and the strange woman fingered her chin, I have scars, you just can’t see them, here they are, and Hemda burst into tears, where is my mother? What have you done with my mother? – and at once she fastened on her father’s scrawny thighs, don’t touch him, don’t do to him what you did to my mother, he’s all I’ve got left now, and the first nights she used to writhe on her bed in the children’s house and see in her mind’s eye how the stranger, the woman who swallowed her mother, was now chewing her father’s thighs as if they were roasted chicken legs, sucking the marrow from his bones, and soon she would tuck with relish into her meagre flesh too, perky little breasts and all.

  Two breasts, two thighs, two parents, two children, and in the middle she herself, more obsessed with her dead parents than with her living children. A son and a daughter were born to her, a pair of children, the expanding mirror-image of the couple who created them, while the third pair in the family, she and her husband, always seemed to her like a transit station between two capital cities, and now when she places her feet on the floor, still cold although outside the air is blazing, she sees them there before her, the first couple, her father in blue working clothes and her mother in a white silk blouse and pleated skirt, the braid adorning her head like a soft royal crown, and they stand on the edge of the lake and smile at her, pointing with their hands towards the calm water, the colour of milky coffee.

  It’s late, Hemda, time to wash and go to sleep, they say, pointing to the lake as if it’s a wash-bowl meant only for her, look at how dirty you are, and she hurries towards them, out of breath. If she doesn’t get a move on the lake will disappear again, the young parents will disappear, but her legs are heavy, sinking into the sticky mud. Mum, Dad, give me a hand, I’m drowning. Tentacles of viscous mud wrap around her waist, drawing her body into the depths of the swamp. Mum, Dad, I’m choking.

  Crawl on your stomachs, she remembers the instructions of the nature studies teacher when they went out to look for swallows’ nests and the mud attacked them, enfolding their legs. Her mouth, open to scream, is filled with compacted earthy mush and she’s choking. Give me a hand, but her parents stand and watch her without moving, smiles on their lips as if she’s putting on an entertaining show for them. Can’t they see she’s sinking, or do they want her to disappear? Her body lands heavily on the floor underneath the window. It seems she’s been taken from this place, as the entrails of the mud eagerly digest her ankles. How welcome she is in the depths of the earth, she has never felt so warm a welcome, but she’s still struggling, trying to hold on to the legs of the table, the time hasn’t come yet, too early or too late, the time hasn’t come yet, and with the last remnants of her fading consciousness she crawls to the phone. Crawl like crocodiles, the man shouted, otherwise you’ll drown. Her parched throat is blocked. Dina, come quickly, I’m suffocating.

  Dina is standing motionless before the kitchen window, gazing in astonishment at the pine needles that have joined together, interwoven, stretching out to her like empty hands, begging alms. She has taken the eggs, the grey dove. Only last night, before going to sleep, she peered again at the window sill and saw the eggs gleaming at her from the darkness of the nest like a pair of benevolent eyes, and at once the dove appeared and covered them with her body. Warmth wafted towards her from the body of the dove, gentle tranquillity, sweet memory. What could be simpler, just sitting like that, without moving, for hours upon hours, eyes alert but body still, all gathered together, concentrating on the objective. She has moved the eggs from here, flying away in the darkness of night with a white egg in her beak; she laid it in a different nest which she prepared in advance, and came back to collect the one left behind. Was it her insistent staring that scared the bird away?

  What a strange pain, she mumbles as the phone rings on, what a stupid, unnecessary pain, to stand like this, in gloomy reverence, as if before a desecrated tomb, confronting the stack of pine needles, which yesterday was a house of miracles and today is a meaningless agglomeration, and she holds out her hand to the tiny cradle and crumbles it. The spring breeze will disperse the twigs in a moment, and no trace will be left of the life that for a whole week was so vibrant here, filling her with a strange emotion: two eggs in the nest, one egg unhatched.

  Why did she take them? she asks aloud. More and more she’s been hearing her own voice recently, surprisingly loud, especially when there’s no one else around, her thoughts emerge from her throat unrestrained and it’s the voice that exposes their nakedness, their embarrassing simplicity. Must buy milk, she hears herself announcing with solemn intensity, as if talking about a national assignment, or I’m going to be late, or where is Nitzan? It seems this question has been heard again and again in the void surrounding her, and it isn’t so much where is her only daughter located at this particular moment, because there are still simple answers to this one: she’s at school, or at a friend’s house, or on her way home – but where is her heart, which all through the years has been close to hers and is now alien to her, beating against her vigorously and aggressively. How can even the most natural of loves turn into disappointed love, she wonders, following the child with yearning eyes, trying to tempt her with those treats that in the past elicited cries of sweet delight from her: come on, Nitzi, let’s bake a cake together, come on, let’s go to the cinema, have you seen there’s a new pizzeria just round the corner, fancy a pizza? But now she meets a look of sulky indifference and a cold voice answers her, some other time, Mum, I’ve no time just now, but time for her friends, she has plenty of that, because straightaway she’s making arrangements with Tamar or with Shiri, disappearing as if escaping from her, and Dina watches her go with a frozen smile, trying to hide the hurt. What a strange pain.

  Leave her alone, let her grow up, Gideon scolds her, anyone would think you wanted to spend time with your mother when you were an adolescent, but she doesn’t answer; her answers to him are left unspoken, roaming around in the void of her belly and finding no outlet. It isn’t the same thing at all, my mother actually preferred my brother, my mother was never a pleasant companion, with those depressing stories of hers about the lake, she always saw only herself, she didn’t know how to be a mother, she learned too late.

  Two eyes, again she hears her voice breaking the silence, coarse as the voice of the dumb, two precious stones, diamonds that gleamed from the window sill as if from the floor of a dark mine shaft, why did she take them, what scared her away? The guttural wail of a cat answers this question, drowning out the ringing of the phone with another hot, hairy flame, squirming between her legs. Where have you been, Rabbit? she greets him ceremoniously, filling his bowl with dried titbits, where have you been and what have you done? But he’s in no hurry for his brunch, lingering between her bare legs, nuzzling her warmly. That’s the way he goes and circulates between the three of them as if trying to bind them together with his tail, to imprint on her skin the heartfelt wishes of her daughter and her husband, to imprint on their skin some desiderata of her own, because lately it has seemed to her that this cat, this overgrown tom erroneously named Rabbit – with his white fur and long ears he should really have been called Hare – is the last remaining cause that unites them, like a child of old age preserving a faint echo of the family, besides possessions, of course, the furniture, the walls, the c
ar, the memories.

  Because she has noticed recently that almost every approach to her daughter begins with a memory. Do you remember how we used to play in this garden? We loved staying here after dark, after everyone had left, and there’s Bar’s house, do you remember when you went there for a sleepover but called us in the middle of the night and asked to be taken home and after that she didn’t invite you again? You remember how I used to take you to the crèche and afterwards we’d buy ice cream here? Why does she need so much corroboration on the part of her daughter, what difference does it make if she remembers this detail or another, and it isn’t all these things that she wants to remind her of, but their love. Do you remember that you loved me once, Nitzan?

  Where did it suddenly spring from, this moment in which the balance between memories and desires is shattered? No one has prepared her for this, neither books nor newspapers, neither parents nor friends. Is she the only woman on earth who feels this at such an early stage of life, and without any disaster visible to the eye, the first to feel that the pan of the scales laden with memories is overflowing, while the pan of desires is as light as a feather, and focused entirely on restoring something that used to be.

  Enough, she says, enough of this already, you hear me, Rabbit? Enough, but the cat isn’t giving up, latching on to her with devotion, pricking up a sinewy tail as if presenting her with an abstract of all the anticipated summer heat. This is unbearable, she says, all at once it has become too hot, just a moment ago it was winter, and now in one day it has turned to summer, without stages, without transitional seasons, what a lost, desperate country, always going from extreme to extreme.

  Because the smell of the overnight bonfires is still weighing heavy on the sweltering air, how hard it is to breathe and perhaps there’s no need for it, recently it has seemed to her even the smallest of tasks is too complicated for her, and perhaps it’s her motivation which is no longer strong enough. Once, when Nitzan needed her, she used to breathe frantically, stealing oxygen from the mouths of passers-by, but now that the girl is distanced from her, hurting her deliberately, she has no interest in oxygen, let others breathe it. What an unpleasant age, she sighs, forty-five, once we would have been dead at this age, we would have given up raising children and expired, liberating the world from our presence, the prickly presence of women no longer fertile, husks devoid of charm.

  We’re not answering, Rabbit, she informs him when he leaps up on to the marble worktop in the kitchen, for all I care they can carry on calling until tomorrow, I don’t have the strength to talk to anyone, but when he paces with majestic slowness towards the window sill and sniffs with satisfaction the empty space left behind by the dove eggs she understands – someone left the window open in the night despite her clear instructions; this is the one that destroyed the nest, the rabbit, or rather the cat, and when she peers out, to her dismay she sees broken shells on the pavement below, and a repulsive gunge, the remains of life.

  Gideon, she yells, I’ve been telling you all week, don’t open the kitchen window, but he went out some time ago, his old Leica hanging round his neck like a child’s lunchbox, and an extra camera slung from his shoulder, wandering about restlessly, eyes darting, relentlessly seeking the unique combinations which define reality for him. Did she really say this? For a moment she hesitates, maybe she only intended to say it, and again the strange pain between the ribs, the anger aroused again. Two little embryos once resided in her nest, two precious stones, and only one of them hatched, her Nitzan, a tiny but healthy baby, while the other didn’t survive, turned into repulsive gunge, and nobody was to blame for this, but all the same she insisted on blaming, especially herself. Was this down to her preference for the girl? Was it their anxiety in the first weeks of pregnancy which drained the young creature of the will to live? How are we going to cope with this, tell me, he used to sigh, he had only just been sacked by the paper, and he was shutting himself away for hours in his improvised darkroom, and emerging from there grim-faced, as if disaster had struck: two parents, two embryos, all at once, what’s going to happen, who’s going to bring them up, who’s going to bring us up? For hours they used to lie on the sofa, staring at the walls of the cramped apartment, what’s going to happen, we need to find a better apartment, need to find work, need to take out a loan. The list of obligations grew longer, intensifying the helplessness. A menacing nihilism emerged from within her in those days, meeting his own in a dark alley, until one day he packed a small bag and left, I need time to recuperate, he muttered at her, as if this was a blow that had landed on him, and she thought he would return that evening or the next day, but a few days later he called her from Africa, and when he finally returned he had in his knapsack some exclusive shots which turned him overnight into a celebrity photographer, while in her hidden nest there was just one egg.

  Can thoughts kill, can wishing for failure engender disaster? She wanted to be left alone in those days, with two tiny creatures clinging to the walls of her womb like snails on a tree-trunk, and most of the hatred she directed at him, at the male. Could she have been otherwise, probably not, but neither could he. In the first years she was so busy with the baby she was almost incapable of imagining in herself the existence of another creature, but the more Nitzan grew, the more he haunted her, the child who wasn’t born, the child who gave in too easily, and sometimes at night when she came to tuck Nitzan into bed, it seemed to her she could hear someone else breathing in the room, a sound wafting between the toy shelves, and in the daytime she used to see him cavorting alongside Nitzan as she played – his hair the colour of honey, as rich and abundant as hers, his eyes brown-green like hers – and when she painted, and when she read, and when she wept, but now that Nitzan is moving further away from her he isn’t receding, he always was a sweet child, considerate, silently obeying her repressed wishes.

  What are you waiting for, have another child, her mother used to urge her, Nitzan needs a brother or a sister, and you need to back off from her a bit, and she would reply scornfully, really, Mother? The way you backed off from me? You should know, they call that abuse, not backing off. Deep down inside she knew her mother was right, and still she hesitated, she so much enjoyed devoting herself to her daughter and giving her all the things she herself never had, to say nothing of the obstinate refusal of Gideon, and she always believed it wasn’t too late, there was still plenty of time to convince him. Now and then she would try, we have another opportunity for happiness, Gideon, come on let’s do this before it’s too late, but he would recoil at once, how do you know this would be happiness, it could be precisely the opposite. We’re doing all right as we are, why spoil it? Why risk what we have for the sake of something unknown?

  What kind of a world do you want to bring another child into? he would chide her, as if she had expressed some exceptional and outrageous request, you have no idea where you’re living, join me on one of my trips and you’ll get to know this land, they’re not all sitting in comfy apartments talking about happiness, there are people for whom a kid just means an extra mouth to be fed, and she wondered why this was relevant: was a child that they brought into the world destined to steal the rations of another child, and again she would back down, afraid of pressurising him, afraid on her own account of change. Weren’t they doing all right like this? Yes, it was good, too good perhaps, bringing up Nitzan without competitors – unlike her experience of growing up driven by jealousy and hatred directed towards her younger brother – and the girl flourished, surrounded by love, why endanger what is for the sake of something unknown? Yes, it sounded convincing, and it almost convinced her, but in her training college which had turned over the years into a university, the students had different ideas, and when she stood up in front of them and lectured on the expulsion of the Jews of Spain they laid sensitive hands on their tumescent bellies, and they didn’t seem to be risking their happiness, on the contrary they were boosting it, and recently she has begun to suspect that they were right, she wa
s the one in the wrong and it was too late to make amends. She of all people, supposed to be teaching them, had not read the book of life correctly, since the Nitzan of today isn’t the sweet and loving girl she once was; the quick-tempered girl who slams the door of her room in her face, the door of her heart as well, is hardly going to console her with her very existence for the children she didn’t bear.

  Don’t get worked up about her, they tell her, be glad that she’s daring to kick out at you, that’s exactly the sign that means she’s growing up right, she needs to get away from you but she’ll be back, and in the meantime make the most of the extra free time you’re going to have, you might finally get round to finishing your doctoral thesis. They all have words for her, Gideon, her mother, her friends, all of them offering her words from moving lips, like remedies for an embarrassing disease, but what is she going to do with them? Can she cradle the words in her arms, take the words out for walks when the air cools down a bit, show them the moon and the stars? What a strange pain this is, peeping out between her ribs as if they are the bars of a cage, she’s cultivating it and it is certainly well-nourished, developing nicely; within a short time it has turned from a tiny snail into an oppressive and demanding creature, impeding respiration and arousing waves of nausea, stopping her concentrating on her work, not allowing her to perform the simplest of tasks, even answering the phone, which apparently has been ringing for the past hour. She’s become so used to it that it seems to her to be emerging from inside her own head, through the ears and into reality, the ringing of alarm bells because there is no point to words, this is an era of sound which is starting now, with the remains of her life, it is she who is ringing out to the world, it isn’t the telephone, because when she finally approaches it nothing is heard.