Pain Read online

  Through closed eyelids she peers at him with that old fear—he was always unpredictable. “Madam Principal!” he calls to her, saluting for some reason, and she sees with relief that he’s wearing exercise shorts. He is in excellent spirits—if somebody’s heart is going to be broken here, it won’t be his, and she watches them as they eat across from one another in the dining room, filling and refilling their plates. “Delicious!” they purr with full mouths as if they are complimenting each other, chewing and laughing, and she’s surprised at how little they speak. Does her presence silence them, or do they have no need of words to make them feel close?

  How different they are from the way we were, she thinks. I was exactly Omer’s age and Eitan was slightly older, and we talked endlessly and laughed very little. There wasn’t much to laugh about then, when his mother was dying and Eitan, her only son, nursed her devotedly, sitting at her bedside in the hospital for hours and hours. From there, he would come to her house, tall and gaunt, his pale eyes burning with sad bewilderment, and she would feed him, console him, soothe him with her love.

  What do they understand, she thinks angrily, observing with sudden hostility as her son and his girlfriend chew across the table from each other, forage around in the fridge, then return to the table with something else that is delicious, “really delicious,” they say, trying to be exact, their fingers brushing. Why does the happy sight make her feel so nauseous? Or perhaps there is no connection, after all, she has been feeling nauseous since morning. She isn’t jealous of her son, heaven forbid, on the contrary, she’s grateful that he has been spared Eitan’s torment or her suffering when he abandoned her, because immediately after the seven days of mourning for his mother, after the last mourner left the house and before they went to visit her grave, he told her clearly and coldly, as if he had prepared it all in advance, that he planned to start a new life, a life without pain, and she had no part in it.

  “It’s not personal, Rissi,” he had added generously, “I’m just tired of being weighed down,” as if she were the one weighing him down when all she wanted was to ease his burden. “Try to understand me. I’m not even eighteen yet. I want to live,” he said, “I want to forget this terrible year, and you’re part of it.” She listened to him horrified, and even years later, when she remembered his words, her teeth chattered, and she could still see the way his jaws moved incessantly beneath his smooth cheeks.

  “I don’t believe it. You’re punishing me for being with you, for supporting you this whole year,” she had said in a stunned voice.

  “It’s not punishment, Rissi, it’s inevitable,” he said, “if I met you now, everything would be different. I would definitely fall in love with you and we’d be together, but we met too soon. Maybe we’ll have another chance someday, but now I have to save myself.”

  “Save yourself from me?” she asked, astonished, “what have I done to you?” He took her hand and for a moment seemed to share her feelings, to be sad along with her about this inevitable turn of events. But he quickly withdrew both his commiseration and his hand, for which she has never forgiven him, Eitan Rosenfeld, her first love and maybe her last, because never again did she feel that absolute, indisputable emotion. To this day, she hasn’t forgiven him for feeling no remorse for her, for their love, or for the cruel breakup he forced upon her, because even if he had believed it necessary, he should have mourned along with her and not left her that way, alone with the fate he sentenced her to, alone with the loss of purpose and hope, of trust and youth, the loss that, for her, was on a par with the loss of his mother, the loss she barely recovered from.

  “What’s with you, Mom?” Omer says, walking over to her. She must have groaned unintentionally. “Why are you lying there like a sack of potatoes? Is there a strike I haven’t heard about?” His chest is long and narrow, compact and smooth, and his cheeks are still almost hairless, like Eitan’s.

  “My own personal strike,” she says, “I’m in terrible pain. Get me a pill from the drawer and a glass of water, Omy.” If the pain stops, she thinks, so will the memory. She hasn’t allowed herself to think about Eitan for so many years, nor has she lain idly on the couch for many years, and in the meantime, her son has almost reached his age without her noticing and his girlfriend is giving her the same curious glance that she herself gave Eitan’s mother when she saw her for the first time, lying on the couch in the living room of their small apartment.

  Eitan was the only son of a single mother who had only one breast. She had fallen ill and undergone surgery when he was a child, and Iris remembers the surprise in his eyes at the sight of the perfect symmetry of her upper torso when he undressed her for the first time. She also remembers looking surreptitiously at the neckline of his mother’s worn pajama top when she sat beside him at her bedside in the hospital, and the scarred crater that showed when she leaned toward them did not look like anything she had ever seen before, nor did the large moonlike skull that hung swaying above the thin neck. She loved going to see him there, stroking his free hand as the other held his mother’s, she loved the silence in the ward, the sacred silence of a battle of titans, of the expectation of miracles, of life that was being peeled away, layer by layer, until only the exposed, trembling inner core was left, the essence of existence that refused to depart. She pictured herself at his side, walking through a forest of withering, breaking trees of life. How could she possibly have imagined that her devotion to him in his distress would arouse such antipathy in him? For her, those had been hours that bound them together in a holy mission—he and she, a young boy and girl in the world, trying to lessen suffering, he trying to alleviate his mother’s, and she trying to alleviate his. For long months, she felt that her home was there, at the bedside of the noble, sick woman, that they were her true family and not the harsh, demanding mother, a war widow who gave little and expected much, not the twins who were born four and a half years after her and filled the house with noise. No, she belonged to them—the refined woman suffering in silence, and her only son, who was so devoted to her. But if she had become less involved in their pain, if she had kept herself separate, she would not have been abandoned, for she quickly realized that his extreme abandonment of her was the other side of his extreme devotion.

  Until one day in early summer she went there again after school, a sour apple and a carton of chocolate milk in her bag for him, and before entering the room, she saw through the curtain the smooth skull swaying back and forth in an aggressive, rebellious way she had never seen before. Eitan, looking pale, came out to her and said, “Come back later, Rissi, this isn’t a good time,” but she stood frozen in place at the door to the ward, knowing she’d never be coming there again, unable to leave.

  She saw two nurses hurry to the room and heard a terrible, animallike voice coming from inside. She couldn’t believe it came from the throat of that most delicate of women. In awe, she watched from behind the screen as if she were standing before a divine revelation, before a miraculous, supernatural sight of the sort you learn about in Bible lessons, a burning bush, the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, until one of the nurses closed the door in her face and she walked away on trembling legs. She sat down on a bench in the lobby of the building, the neutral territory between the land of the sick and the land of the healthy, and took tiny bites of the apple she had brought for him. When evening fell, Eitan emerged, his shoulders stooped, his gaze lowered to the coarse floor tiles of the lobby, not surprised to find her there. They walked slowly, the way they would walk the next day behind her body, wrapped in a white sheet, as if both of them had been orphaned.

  She continued to walk beside him that way during the seven days of mourning—she was his seventeen-year-old wife receiving the mourners, including her mother and brothers. At night, she stroked his back until he fell asleep, and in the morning, she got up before him and readied the house for a new day of mourning. That, in fact, was how she saw their future—an endless shiva, a
comforting, painful, and sometimes happy din of seven days of mourning that fused them together so they would grow as one, like two plants in a single pot, nourished by the same soil.

  It was her second time being born, her second time losing a parent, choosing to be born and to mourn at his side. And so she became his mother, his sister, his wife, and the mother of his children, because her young body burned with the desire to give birth to a baby girl and name her after his mother. At night, when he wept in his sleep, she felt the little crown emerge from between her legs. Only she could give birth to her again and honor her memory, only she could console him, but when the shiva ended, she found that she was not only an orphan and a widow, but also bereft of all her dreams.

  She packed her belongings in two large garbage bags and walked resolutely, her head held high, from his house to the bus stop without looking back. She boarded the right bus, got off at the right station, reached her house, and climbed into bed with her clothes on, the bags of her belongings at her side, and lay there with dry, open eyes until her mother arrived. She didn’t answer her questions because she didn’t hear them, and she didn’t respond to her pleas to get up and eat or shower. Beneath her dry eyes, her body had frozen and remained in the same position for days. “Once I was so sad that I was paralyzed,” she told Mickey a short time before they got married, “I was paralyzed for a few weeks, but I’m fine and it won’t ever happen again.”

  Mickey, of course, wanted to hear more, and she disappointed him in that as well, but her mother occasionally mentioned it, giving away one detail or another, and the menacing looks she shot her way were of no avail. “Yes, I was depressed. Who doesn’t get depressed about love when they’re seventeen?” she summed up in an effort to convey how unimportant the memory was to her, focused more on her mother’s betrayal than on the matter at hand. And what was the matter at hand, she sometimes wondered. That she had almost died of the disease called love? And what was more surprising, her disease or her recovery? The fact that, in the end, she chose life, chose to be born again, all alone, into the emptiness that slowly filled up?

  As her daughter has grown into a young woman, she has followed her love life with apprehension, frightened that she would have a similar breakdown, but for the time being, Alma has only brief, superficial relationships. She can, of course, find something in that to worry about, but not to the same degree, and in any case, Alma doesn’t tend to keep her in the picture. Her son seems calm and relaxed with the girl wearing his underpants, and apparently her fears on that front will not be coming true in the near future, she can stop watching the young couple taking shape before her eyes. Meanwhile, the pain has lessened, leaving her body stunned. She senses it observing her from a distance, permitting her to get up from the couch slowly and sit down at the computer as she does every evening to write her weekly principal’s letter to parents along with messages and instructions, questions and answers. What will she write about tonight? Perhaps she’ll try to breathe life into the last few weeks of the school year between Memorial Day and the Festival of Weeks, the tired time after most of the year has passed but before it has ended, the time that is much more crucial than it seems, because if something can still change, that’s when it will, in the tension between memory and renewal.

  THREE

  She hasn’t seen that time on the clock for years: 3:40 in the morning. An unbearable hour. For years she has been as protective of her sleep as if her life depended on it. At ten o’clock, she already begins her going-to-bed rituals. “Wait a while, what’s the rush?” Mickey occasionally complains from in front of the TV, “The movie Dafna and Gidi recommended is just starting,” or “This series is really terrific, you’ll love it.” And sometimes he says nothing, merely observes her departure with bitterness in his eyes.

  “I need to sleep, I have a very busy day tomorrow, a meeting first thing in the morning,” she says, but even when there is no teachers’ meeting, she is always the first one at school. Standing at the entrance gate every morning, winter and summer, she says good morning to the pupils as they arrive, remembers them by name, exchanges a few words with their parents. But he isn’t impressed. “You’re not the only one who works hard, you know. You’re not the only one who gets up early.”

  “Sorry, Mooky, I’m dead tired. My eyes are closing,” she mutters, evading his arm, which is trying to hold her back. It isn’t only the early hour that angers him, she knows, but mainly her decision to turn Alma’s room into her bedroom when she left the house a few months earlier. “It doesn’t mean anything, Mooky,” she said, trying to mollify him. “It’s just more comfortable sleeping alone, that’s all. Sleeping together is a primitive custom—we only disturb one another. There’s even been some research on it. Don’t you hate it when I wake you up because you’re snoring?” Yes, he expected her to accept his snoring with love, and he certainly didn’t expect her to desert to Alma’s three-quarter bed and close the door in his face.

  “It’s not against you, it’s for me. It’s only sleep, it doesn’t have to affect intimacy,” she kept telling him, honestly and truly believing that it wouldn’t have an effect, why should it? After all, couples don’t make love while sleeping, don’t have heart-to-heart talks while sleeping, and anyway, when Alma comes home, she’ll give her back her room and return to their double bed. But who would have thought that Alma would come home so infrequently, barely once a month, and that the things she now kept on the night table beside Alma’s bed would settle there. The eye cream, the glass of water, the socks—her feet were always cold—the hand cream, a book or two, slowly their number increased until, on her last visit, Alma said, “Great job Mom, you’ve taken over my room! You want me to sleep with Daddy in your place?”

  Of course, she collected her things quickly and put them back in their former place, already deciding that she had no choice, she’d go back to sleeping with Mickey. But to her great dismay she discovered that all the things that had disturbed her before disturbed her a hundred times more now that she had grown used to the freedom of having her bed to herself. After a totally sleepless night at his side, she found herself waiting impatiently for her daughter to leave her bed and go back to her roommate in the apartment they had rented for her in Tel Aviv, which she did in the evening. She was so tired that she couldn’t even have a serious conversation with her daughter that weekend to hear a bit more about what she was doing and what her plans were, though Alma would probably have avoided such a conversation even in the face of a much more alert mother, because she wasn’t doing anything and had no plans except to waitress at night in a restaurant in south Tel Aviv and sleep during the day.

  How could they have produced such a daughter, so lacking in ambition and direction? Even as a child, she never stuck with any after-school activities, never took an interest in anything, sat for hours in front of the TV or the mirror, who knows which is worse. For all these years, she saw her parents working hard, but it seemed to have had no impact on her. Even if Iris managed to have a conversation with her on the weekend, her daughter would surely have mocked her, “It’s all good, Mom, lighten up. I’m not a pupil in your school, or maybe I should say not a soldier. After all, they’re like little soldiers there.”

  “So why do they come en masse to register if it’s so terrible?” she’d defend herself quickly, re-creating in all its details a conversation that never took place, though similar ones have buzzed between them these last few years, fragmented, oblique conversations that were meant to bring them closer but always drove them further apart, meant to clarify but always obscured. Naively, she expected her daughter to be proud of her, to value her life’s work—transforming a failing school in a poor neighborhood into the most sought-after school in the city—and she certainly didn’t expect such ridicule. “I guess it suits them, but not me,” Alma would say, looking up at her defiantly. How could they have produced such a short daughter? All her friends’ daughters were taller than their mother
s, and only Alma remained short, even though both she and Mickey were tall.

  As a young child, she hardly ate, and all their pleas and threats were futile. Only when she was distracted in front of the TV did they sometimes manage to get some food inside her, shoving a wedge of omelet, a slice of cheese, a vegetable patty into her mouth, and she would move her jaws absently, chew and swallow, until she suddenly shook herself as if waking from sleep and protested loudly.

  How her heart had pounded during those stealthy feedings, as if her daughter were standing on the edge of a high roof and she had to sneak up behind her and grab her before she became aware of her presence. Every omelet bite took her one step further away from the edge. She was a young mother and thought that her daughter’s thinness reflected very badly on her, so she tried to fight it with every means possible, until Omer was born and his demanding presence drained her strength so much that she couldn’t continue all the maneuvering, wheedling, pleading, and threatening, which naturally benefited everyone. The fact was that the girl survived. She must have eaten enough to exist, and during adolescence, she even developed a healthy appetite while all her girlfriends tortured themselves with fasting. But by then it was already too late to affect her height, and she remained so short and thin that she looked like a twelve-year-old, but breathtakingly beautiful with those huge black grape-colored eyes, that long straight hair, the combination of her childlike body and mature, seductive expression.