A Wall of Light (23 page)

L
ETTER TO
A
NDREI
, J
ULY
11, 1957

D
earest, such a very long time has passed since I’ve heard from you, it feels like at least a hundred years! Every time I walk on the beach at night I long for you to see the beauty of the sea, how it changes color with the light, how it brings out all the emotions inside you and carries them on its waves. I want you to feel the soft sand shifting under your feet as the two of us walk along the shore. I imagine you’re with me and I carry on conversations with you in my thoughts. I know it may be a long time before we have the chance to be together again, but one day it will happen.

Two days ago in the middle of the night there was a desperate knock on the door. My heart froze because for one second I forgot I was in Israel and that here I don’t have to be afraid. It was such a relief to remember where I was! I opened the door and there was Tanya, in terrible shape. Her boyfriend, or whoever he is, hit her again. There is unfortunately violence against women here, too—and without the excuse of drink. I suppose there is no avoiding these things, no matter where you go. I have heard that there are some African or Asian tribes in which women have never been mistreated. They must be descendants of another species that only looks like
Homo sapiens
from the outside.

Luckily Kostya is a sound sleeper and didn’t stir from that little corner of his behind the bookcase.

Tanya has moved in for now. It’s very crowded but she has nowhere to go. We found a foam mattress for her which we keep on my bed during the day. At night we move the table against the wall and there is just enough room for the mattress on the floor. She has told me a little about herself, it’s a very sad story. But she’s so lively and high spirited in spite of everything. She is really a good example to us all.

I don’t think she will stay here long. She’s very restless. She longs to have her own little place and says she “will do whatever it takes” to get it. I don’t think she means robbing a bank … I hope she will change her mind. She looks up to me so much, it’s very touching. She’s only fifteen! Remember, I had a feeling that she wasn’t telling us the truth about her age, and I was right.

My love, I await your letters and I pray you are getting mine. I want you to know how safe we are and how well we are doing here, despite the dreadful heat and the difficulties that crop up. But difficulties are an inevitable part of life. Above all, Kostya is thriving. He has really taken to this place, and you know, in many ways it’s a children’s paradise here. Some streets are not even paved and the boys and girls make bonfires on the sand and sing songs all night long. They bake potatoes and then they spread the charcoal on their faces and run around pretending to be
“kushi,”
which comes from the word Cushite and means a dark-skinned person from Africa. The children in this country are quite wild and talk back to their parents, but for all that they are sweet, on the whole. Do you know that on a crowded bus old people will almost always stand up for a young child, and a parent with a child will let the child sit while the parent stands? It’s really quite something. Parents will also buy chicken (which is extremely expensive) for their children, while they themselves make do with sardines, chicken feet,
gorgels
(throat),
pupiks
(belly buttons) and tongue (and you know me—I would rather starve than eat those things!) or else they’ll buy sour cream for the children and the cheapest factory cheese for themselves. Children are placed at the center of everything here, it’s almost like a cult. They are the new hope, they are supposed to make all our dreams come true. Let’s hope Kostya is wrong and there are no more wars.

Darling, I have read your last letter, the one that came in April, so often that I know every comma by heart. I keep it under my pillow along with your watch chain. It’s so hot, darling! I’ve never known such heat in my life. But at night we go to the beach and it’s quite wonderful swimming in the warm water and then coming out all wet. The beach is full of people and no one is shy about who they are here, so you get to see everyone in their true colors. There is quite a remarkable spectrum. Yet the heat seems to make us all very similar: hot!

I hope you too are enjoying milder weather and some sun, my darling, and that you have completely recovered your health. I await your next letter.

S
ONYA

I
knew where Eli lived, because I’d once ended up at a party at his place. He owned a beautiful split-level flat not far from the university. The flat was neat and clean and elegant; Eli was known for his personal library of rare books, carefully arranged by subject, and for his love of Japanese art. He also had the largest collection of classical CDs I’d ever seen in a private home.

Many of these were apparently gifts. According to Ma’ayan, there were two categories of women in Eli’s life. The vast majority were women of all ages, backgrounds, shapes, and sizes with whom he had sex until they broke the rules, which was usually right away, sometimes even minutes after sex. For example, the woman might say, “Do you like Indian food?” or “When will you be in town again?” or “Are you coming to Dudu’s party?” In the second category the women were also heterogeneous: Eli didn’t care whether they were clever or stupid, sophisticated or infantile, beautiful or frumpy. In Eli’s mind women seemed to be generic beings, endless replicas of Eve. Our distinguishing features weren’t significant.

What the women in the second category had in common, however, was that they were astute enough to understand the rules, and masochistic enough to accept them. Women who didn’t understand the rules vanished very quickly from Eli’s life; Ma’ayan said he could be quite brutal in getting rid of them. Often he would say something sufficiently memorable to make the rounds on campus.

Within this second category, among his special coterie of three or four women (one of whom would be his wife), he inspired great devotion, and these women gave him wild, unaffordable gifts—all their savings, or a car, or a set of 100 classical CDs. Even the temporary women, while they were still in the running, gave him gifts. Something about Eli inspired gift giving in women.

The party I’d been to had ended dramatically, with Eli’s fifth wife jumping out of the window. Luckily she landed on a bush and only broke one arm and cracked her hipbone. Eli began to cry; he’d had a lot to drink. “She never took anything for herself,” he moaned, kneeling on the lawn as the police tried to keep the gathering crowd at bay. Eli made it sound as if his wife had had a choice in the matter, and though everyone knew this premise was faulty, people felt bad for him. The police suggested he get some sleep before coming to the hospital; what they meant was that he should wait until he was sober. He found consolation in the arms of a new student from Argentina, the star of the women’s basketball team.

I didn’t care about any of that. All I wanted was to stand in front of a flesh-and-blood person and know that I was his daughter, and for him to know it, too.

We pulled into Tel Aviv’s new Central Station shortly before midnight. I took a taxi to Eli’s: it was my eighth ride that day. I’d been in one vehicle or another with an odd assortment of people: my lover, Kostya, an ancient Yemenite, Lorelei, a lonely soldier, a Palestinian family, strangers on a bus, and now a garrulous taxi driver. The driver chatted the entire way, never once noticing that I couldn’t hear a word he said. He seemed to be complaining about taxes, regulations, corruption … it was just as well I wasn’t following.

I gave the driver the last of my cash and he drove off, leaving me alone on the dark street. The smell of cut grass and hyacinth swept through the night air and plunged me into a memory that was more an elision of time than a remembered set of images. In one of those rare flashes that seem to transport us bodily to a specific moment in the past, my old kindergarten room resurfaced, one afternoon during nap time. The same smell had drifted in through the open windows as I watched a ray of sunlight slant down on eight washed spoons lined up on a red checkered dish towel. For some reason I brought out everyone’s solicitude back then: adults smiled at me, children gave me toys, dogs licked my chubby legs. Every detail of that afternoon came back to me: the eight spoons glinting in the sun, my excitement at the number eight and its multiples, the funny assortment of bare feet, white and brown and dark brown, on the blue mats.

I wanted this immersion into the past to stay with me, but it lasted only a second or two before retreating to the realm of mere memory, and there was no luring it back.

Eli’s flat was on the first floor of a four-story building that was divided symmetrically into four split levels: two at the bottom and two on top. It occurred to me that he might not be alone—but maybe that was just as well: having a witness would add solidity to the encounter. I ran my hands along the sweet-smelling bushes that lined the pathway, as if confiding my hopes to the leaves.

For some reason, the door to the building was open and held in place by a doorstop. I walked in, climbed the stairs to Eli’s flat and knocked on the door.
Here I am, your daughter
, I thought happily.
Hello, Father.
I had imagined this moment countless times, and though I’d pictured a somewhat different setting—a house rather than an apartment, an entire family rather than a solitary and difficult person, a stranger rather than someone I knew quite well—all the same, I felt like Aladdin coming across his genie. “Bring me to my father,” I would have told the genie. And here I was.

There was no answer. I knocked several times without results. Most disappointing! I sat down on the hallway stairs, wondering whether I should wait for Eli to come home. As I was deliberating, the door opened.

Eli stared at me, then past me, with a bewildered look on his face. He said something I couldn’t make out, something like
baba.
He was quite drunk.

There are people whose persona stays intact no matter what they do. Even when he drank, Eli came across as complicated, clever, and entirely self-assured: someone who could not be intimidated. He’d be at ease wherever he went, knowing exactly what to do or creating new standards of behavior if he didn’t. Everything about him was just right: his casual jeans and black T-shirts and old running shoes, his battered leather briefcase, his cute sunglasses. And yet in spite of his informality and audacity, or the quick blow jobs in his parked car after class, there was a protective, impenetrable barrier around him, a message of
do not enter.
No one was afraid of him, but at the same time no one dared to cross him.
Trespassers will be prosecuted.

And so even now, with his hair disheveled, his feet bare, his shirt half tucked into his jeans, and two of his toenails black with a fungal infection, he retained his infallibility, his handle on the situation—though when he turned back into his apartment he tripped on a chair and knocked it over. Eli’s flat had been clean and tidy when I’d last seen it, at the party: despite the drinking and hashish and belly dancing, no one had dared displace so much as an ashtray. Eli’s wife continually made the rounds, removing empty bottles, picking up pieces of tin foil, and straightening out the bathroom.

Now the place was in a dreadful state and smelled of decaying bananas. A hand-painted Japanese vase had tipped over and smashed into bits; the pieces lay scattered on the tiled stone floor amidst old newspapers and dirty dishes. I was afraid Eli would step on one of the shards. “Be careful,” I said, maneuvering him toward the sofa. He flopped down against the fat blue sofa cushions and repeated what he’d said earlier, which I now understood was “Barbara.” Barbara was expected, and she was late.

I went to the kitchen in search of a broom, located one in the adjacent laundry room, and swept up the shards, setting the larger ones aside for safekeeping; the delicate painted flowers on the white china were too pretty to throw out. Eli in the meantime was sliding his hands between the sofa cushions, apparently looking for his cigarettes.

He found the pack, finally, and tried to light a cigarette but he was having difficulty with the lighter. I took the cigarette from his mouth, lit it myself, and handed it back. I noticed an uncovered vial of Valium on the side table next to the sofa; it was half-empty.

I decided to call Raya. Had Eli been sober I could have managed on my own, but as it was I needed some backup.

At Eli’s, can you come?
I asked her.

Be right there
, Raya answered.
Should I bring Lily?

If she wants.

I put away my phone and went to the bathroom because I had to pee, but also because I wanted to feel that I was part of my father’s house. I wanted to examine the rooms, become familiar with their distinguishing features. Here in the bathroom, for example, pale green guest towels had been carefully folded on the rack, and a little pink square of naphthalene deodorant—my favorite kind—had been placed discreetly behind the toilet. There was a substratum of order beneath the current mess.

When I returned to the living room Eli looked at me and said, “Sonya,” pleased with himself not so much for locating my name within the fog, but for anchoring himself by means of the retrieval.

“Yes, I’m here.”

“Come, Sonya.” He clasped my wrist and tried to pull me toward him.

I freed myself from his grasp. “Eli, listen to me. I’m your daughter. Remember my mother, Anna? Remember you had an affair with her, when you were young? Before you were married? You thought she was too old to get pregnant, but she wasn’t. Do you remember?”

“Turn on the radio, maybe there’s been a bomb,” he said, extending his arm in the direction of his elaborate sound system.

“The radio?”

“The news … maybe Barbara’s … been killed in a bomb. Suicide bomb.”

“There hasn’t been any bomb, Eli. I’m sure Barbara’s fine.”

“Come, sit by me,” he said, reaching out for me again.

“You can’t start with me, Eli. I’m your daughter.”

“Hey, aren’t you supposed to be deaf or something?”

“Sometimes I can see the shape of sounds.”

“The shape of sounds, I like that. The shape of sounds …” He mumbled something else, which I lost.

“Raya’s coming over,” I said. “Remember her—the belly dancer? She danced at your party. She’s coming over with Lily, we’re going to get you to bed.”

“It won’t work out. Barbara’s coming …”

“I don’t think Barbara’s coming, and even if she does, you’re too drunk for visitors.”

“Never too drunk for a warm, wet cunt,” he said, and began to cough. I was tempted to pound his back, but I held back. Kostya said pounding rarely did much good in any case.

Eli shut his eyes for a few minutes. Then he lifted the bottle of whiskey, which he’d set on the carpet by the sofa, and poured himself another drink. The glowing orange-gold liquid looked like a magic potion—something that could make you invisible, say, or fill you with love.

I strolled over to his bookshelves. Eli’s own books took up nearly half a shelf; he’d published several poetry collections, two short-story anthologies (his least successful endeavor), and nearly twenty academic books on a wide range of topics. I took down his most recent book, a volume of collected poetry, and read the biography on the back flap, with its long list of awards and accomplishments. I felt a giddy pride. This was my father! I kissed the austere black-and-white photograph and held the book tightly against my chest. I wanted to waltz with it around the room. Instead, I opened the book and began to read one of the poems, an early one from 1973, the year I was born:

If only there had been a voice from the clouds
Or fiery letters moving across a wall—an
alef, a mem;
But I was beguiled, half-senseless, and she
Braced herself for pain, panic—but just for herself.
She thought only of herself then.
This is the way of mammals:
Heedless, munching on apples,
Staring stupidly at the road while cars
Like flaming swords pounce and gorge on air
And we still can’t add two and two.
Fate, which means chance, which means
The way things fall out,
A fat sacrificial well waiting for virgins,
Devours the placenta.
East of the garden the gate has been pried loose.
No matter what you do or pray
The gate has come loose.
Newborns stray.