A Wall of Light (22 page)

S
ONYA

We
dressed with the sobriety of adults returning to the serious business of life after a temporary suspension of everyday rules—or at least of ordinary experience.

Khalid phoned someone he knew and asked him to drive me to Central Station. A stocky, healthy-looking man showed up in a taxi. His rather dour wife was sitting beside him in the passenger seat, and they had brought their two little boys as well. The boys sat quietly side by side on the backseat. The family was secular or possibly Christian: the man’s wife was not wearing a head covering and her long black hair was gathered into a purple clasp. Khalid had told them I was related to Iris Nissan, and as a result the driver was very well disposed toward me—or maybe he was just being effusive because I was Khalid’s friend, or because he was an Arab and I was a guest.

Our parting was necessarily formal. Khalid spoke to his friends through the car window, then shook my hand. I got into the car and shut the door. Khalid waved good-bye as we drove off.

Khalid’s friend took a roundabout route in order to circumvent the walls. Instead, we had to pass two checkpoints, but we had no difficulties at either one; the soldiers or border guards peeked into the car, checked our papers, and waved us through. No doubt God had sent the checkpoint angels to help us. The little boys beside me were very still and solemn; it seems that a protective passivity almost instinctively descends upon children when they know their parents are themselves vulnerable. I had to suppress a strong desire to lift one of them onto my lap and hold him close.

Because of the detour, it took us over an hour to reach Central Station, and I was distressed at having put these people to so much trouble. I insisted on paying
—“lil-uwlaad,”
I mumbled in embarrassment, hoping I was saying it correctly. The man wasn’t keen on taking payment but his wife firmly said,
“Shukran”
before he had a chance to refuse.

The bus for Tel Aviv was just about to leave. It was only half-full, and I was grateful to have two seats to myself, for I desperately needed anonymity and privacy at the moment. There were several things I had to sort out.

If Khalid wanted me, if he loved me, I would take a sabbatical and rent a room in Mejwan. I’d start learning Arabic immediately; it wouldn’t take me long. Kostya could stay in the house or sell it, it would be up to him. If Khalid didn’t want me, I’d know at once. I’d know it from his first e-mail, if there was one—I’d know late tonight or tomorrow morning. I didn’t want to think about what it would be like if he didn’t want me. But I’d need to be on my own, I’d need to mope in a cheap rented room downtown, where my surroundings matched my unhappiness. I would need the freedom to feel wretched, without Kostya hovering over me and suffering on my behalf.

Khalid had insisted on using a condom this time. Even when I thought I’d never marry I hoped to have a child one day: possibly by finding a sperm donor and hiring a hearing person to help—maybe even Ma’ayan. She was reliable and she’d be good with children. Now I wanted Khalid’s child, but it was possible that even if he loved me he would not want to have a family with me. For one thing, we’d have to move—for if one were to be honest with oneself, peace was not going to descend upon us anytime soon, and a child with mixed parents would encounter endless difficulties. I could apply for a job in Britain and Khalid could study there, do his doctorate.

But even if Khalid wanted to see me again, it would probably take him a long time to decide how far he was willing to go with the relationship; he wasn’t like me. Maybe in general men took longer in these matters.

I shut my eyes and drifted into a bizarre, chaotic dream. Nava was in Khalid’s room, looking down at the two of us as we lay naked on the bed. She was wearing her usual moccasins and ankle socks, but a beautiful African gown had replaced her shorts, and she was young and healthy in the dream. Khalid and I were feeling a little conceited because we were so content, and we weren’t paying proper attention to her. She was talking about the numeral two, and in the dream I could hear her, but Khalid couldn’t. “Two will often take you by surprise,” she said. “But in fact there are exactly eight integer solutions of x
²
+4=y
³
.” I was glad Khalid couldn’t hear her. There were mourners downstairs who had come to mourn Khalid’s mother, and they’d accidentally let in several stray cats. I had to go down and feed the cats, make sure they were safe, but then it seemed that they weren’t cats at all but miniature lions, and I’d have to put them in cages and return them to the wild. Then Khalid turned to me and said, “You have your mother’s eyes.” I said, “You’ve never seen her,” and he said, “Yes, I have: I peeked inside your ID.”

I emerged from the dream and shook it off with a sense of relief. “You have your mother’s eyes”—that was what Eli had written in the margins of a student exam when he tried to seduce me outside the law building. I remembered being surprised by that comment, because he’d known my mother, whose eyes were round and blue, while mine were like upside-down Vs and very dark. If anything, my eyes bore a slight resemblance to his.

Eli … why was I thinking about Eli, when I wanted only to sink back into the sweet memory of Khalid’s kisses? His style, for example, was different from Matar’s. He was less hesitant and cautious—though of course the encounter with Matar had taken place under very different circumstances.

I was thinking about Eli because of what Khalid had said.
Do you resemble any of your mother’s friends?

Maybe Eli made that comment about my eyes because he was trying to ward off an unconscious fear, to deny a buried suspicion. On the other hand, if in any remote corner of his being he thought I might be his daughter, surely he would not have tried to seduce me. Of course, his arm around my waist may have been nothing but a manifestation of the sort of compulsive flirting for which he was famous. Maybe he never meant for it to go further; maybe he knew I would not give in.

What if it was true—what if his fear was founded in fact? It seemed impossible: how could someone like Eli be related to me? Even if he was my mother’s lover … well, the timing was about right; I was born shortly before his first marriage. My mother’s periods were no longer regular, and she had not had one in several months when she conceived. Eli, who was in his early twenties at the time, could have easily been persuaded that she was too old to have a child. And maybe in those days he was not quite as careful as he became later, after his first wife’s abortion. He had written about that abortion extensively in his books; it was a turning point in his thinking.

But surely my mother would have known if it was him, and she’d have told me: why wouldn’t she? She would have told him, too, and asked for child support. It was more likely that my father was someone with a family, and she didn’t want to ruin his marriage and career. Her experience with the Russian physicist may have decided her against a replay of that doomed situation. For I no longer believed her claim that there were too many potential candidates to choose from, as if she’d slept with dozens of anonymous men. She was quite picky, actually, and she often told us about the men she’d rejected. Teeth in bad shape. Dandruff. Cracked nails. The smallest things were reason enough to dismiss an offer. Instead, she would invite her unsuccessful suitors for supper. If they couldn’t have her, at least they would be treated to a sample of my brother’s cooking.

It was possible, though, that my mother knew my father was Eli but wanted to protect me from him. Given his views on parenthood, she may have felt that I would only be hurt by his inevitable rejection.

All the same, it seemed very unlikely. We were so dissimilar—though now that I thought of it, the way he organized his papers at the end of each class, with a determined defiance of lackadaisical tendencies, was nearly identical to my own brisk offensive on my briefcase. And maybe, if I really thought about it, if I really wanted to think about it, there were some other things, too: his sense of humor, his careful logic, his love of teaching. He was a patient teacher; he was informal and friendly in the classroom, and respectful of even the most annoying or rude students. He liked people; he was almost never seen alone. Though he slept with all and sundry, he needed one loyal, close person in his life at any given time. His spontaneity, his refusal to be intimidated, his quiet way of rebelling: these personality traits were familiar. Oh—he could be so cruel, though! But we are not created in our parents’ image. I remembered a funny sticker I’d seen somewhere, showing a sloppy hippie kid and a conservative father in a suit glaring at each other.
ANY GENETIC RESEMBLANCE IS UNINTENTIONAL
, it said.

It would take some getting used to, if it was true. I remembered a film I had once seen about the grown daughter of a womanizer.
Daddy Nostalgia
, it was called. Scenes from the movie came forcefully back to me.

On the spot I decided to pay Eli a visit and question him. I was suddenly very impatient: it was imperative that I see him immediately. What if he died of a heart attack during the night and I never had another chance? Besides, if Eli was the person I’d been waiting for all these years, I had waited long enough.

I phoned Kostya and entered,
Going to Eli’s to ask if he’s my father, don’t wait up.

To my astonishment, Kostya replied,
I can tell you. Yes.

I stared at the words on the little screen.
I can tell you. Yes.
Kostya knew. Kostya knew and he hadn’t told me.

I turned to the window and looked out into the darkness. Beyond the darkness were the hills, beyond the hills houses, inside each house furniture, bodies, vases. The highway blocked out the walls and chasms. What I needed was a wall of light, a blinding light that would leave nothing out: nothing to find, nothing to search for. Inside it, every dead and living body would surface like a digit in a unique system that negates all the systems preceding it. I would float up to the wall, buoyed by the light, I would be the keeper of the wall.

I had trusted my family: my mother, my brother. I thought I knew them inside out, and in the end I had missed the most basic thing there was. In the end I was profoundly stupid. I had lived with three adults who were keeping a secret from me—for Iris must have known as well—and I’d never noticed.

But none of that mattered, really. The only thing that mattered was that I had found my father, after all these years. Thanks to Khalid, really.

And now I would go and tell him.

I brought my gaze back to the words on my phone screen.
I can tell you. Yes.
I was doomed to be surrounded by people who wanted to protect me. Kostya and my mother didn’t understand that Eli’s attitude to children or the sort of person he was were beside the point. All that mattered was knowing. You could deal with something you knew, find a place for it in your world, even if it was only a shed in the backyard. But if you didn’t know, a ghostly absence accompanied you everywhere you went.

And really, how could Kostya and my mother have predicted his reaction, were he told that he had a cute little child? He might have been happy, he might have loved me.

Upon the surface of my love for Khalid and the euphoria of our time together, this new excitement of having a father came skimming like a dizzy dolphin. As for the creepy close call of seduction: my attitudes to dating must have convinced Kostya that I was safe from Eli. He was right. I
was
safe from him. But what a chance to take!

It was a little comical, really—the man who handed out free condoms to students, who wrote so brilliantly about the untenable ethical implications of having children, himself had a child. Maybe he would write a whole new book when he found out.
Parenthood, Purpose and Passion.

Or
Parenthood, Panic and Predicament.

N
OAH’S DIARY
, M
AY
2, 1991.

In the news: poor Sonya.

I
’ve been discharged one month early but I’m not at home, I’ve moved in with Marion and two other people, Dalia and Modi, downtown. Our apartment is on Henrietta Szold Street. I also applied to an art school in Berlin.

I have fantasies of killing those guys. I didn’t think I’d ever want to kill someone, just kill another human being, just drive a knife deep, deep into another person’s heart and watch with joy as he died, hopefully with a lot of suffering. Even with Mom I didn’t have fantasies of killing the murderer, I just wanted him found, I wanted him to go to prison. But now I really want to kill those two. That’s who I am, that’s inside me. I imagine sneaking into the prison with a gun. I’d start with the kneecaps, I’d shoot them bit by bit, so they’d die with the greatest amount of pain possible. If I could do it, would I? I think I would. I really think I would, but I can’t.

As for Sonya—I don’t understand her at all. She’s acting as if she just found out she won the Nobel Prize or something. She’s in a great mood, cracking jokes, totally cheerful, she even ordered a cake with candles to celebrate her own recovery. Is she putting on a show so we won’t feel bad, or is this a way of avoiding what happened? She says that’s her way of winning. By not caring. She also says she’s glad to be alive and that she appreciates life in a new way, like in eighteenth-century novels where the wayward hero reforms after a near-fatal illness. She says it was a non-event, because the past has no existence and no reality, as everyone knows: the only thing that gives the past form is memory. I think she needs a therapist and so does Dad, but she totally rejected the idea. Oh, God, she’s so
weird.
Maybe that comes with a high IQ, I don’t know.

Dad’s holding on as usual but he looks like a wreck. He was furious that the police report went straight to the press, but there’s no law against it. And Sonya didn’t care, which is the main thing. She said those brothers made fools of themselves and now everyone knew what kind of perverts they were. If they’d had a brain they’d be embarrassed, she said, but most likely they lacked one. That’s what she said in the hospital when I first came to see her. I was afraid that as soon as I saw her I’d feel sick again, the way I felt when Dad called me at the base.
I have something to tell you. It’s about Sonya, she was attacked by two men.
That was it, that’s all he said, I found out the rest from Dror, my commander, who had spoken to someone in the hospital. It was good that Dror told me. He was the right person for that job.

I thought that visit would be the hardest thing I’d have to do in my life but in the end it was easy because of Sonya’s attitude. We’d been in a fight for three years and the first thing she said was, “So the break I had from your stubborn, annoying personality has come to an end. Oh, well, nothing that good can last.” Then she gave me a long list of things she wanted me to get for her: Belgian chocolates, pomegranates, a mohair shawl, new earrings, a mug, thank-you cards, and a hardcover edition of
War and Peace
, which she would finally have time to read, because the doctors told her she had to take it easy for a few weeks.

What sort of family are we? It’s as if we’re marked or something. Actually Oren’s family is going through a lot, too. His parents are getting divorced—his father left for some girl he met, and his mother isn’t taking it very well, she’s threatening to kill herself. Also his sister dropped out of school and has gone wild. She’s doing heavy drugs and living in some hole with all her addict friends. I was going to join him in Brazil and meet his girlfriend, but now I can’t. I need to stay here, more for Dad than for Sonya.

We finally took Gran to a home. Dad just couldn’t cope with her any longer, so I took the initiative. There was an opening for her at a private nursing home and Dad took her there just to see if she liked it. He made a list of other places for us to look at on the same day but Gran took to this one right away. The minute we got there she went up to the receptionist and said, “I’d like a single room with a view, please. There are seventeen oranges in the trench.”

She didn’t want to leave the residence so we left her there, and Dad went back in the evening to bring all her clothes and things and to decorate the walls. I think he’s really relieved. He said Gran nearly set the house on fire last week.

It’s sort of sad, but on the other hand she’ll never be afraid of dying, the way most of us are when we get old and sick. That’s a definite plus.

I just can’t get the images out of my head. I feel totally haunted and I also feel so angry. Marion says I have to relive Sonya’s experience a few hundred times in my mind before I’ll be free of the images. She says she went though the same thing because her mother was an orphan who was sent to live with these senile ex-Nazis (they didn’t know she was Jewish!) and their superstitious housekeeper (who was also the old man’s mistress). Marion says that people we love are more vulnerable and defenseless in our imagination than they are in real life.

She’s teaching me German. She learned it from her mother.