A Wall of Light (24 page)

N
OAH’S DIARY
, A
PRIL
20, 1992.

In the news: talks, maybe. I’ll believe it when I see it.

I
was packing, getting ready for Berlin, and I was looking all over the place for my harmonica. I looked in Sonya’s wardrobe and I came across a box marked
Anna.
Mostly it was letters in Russian on old blue airmail paper. Also, a whole bunch of dialogues. I guess Gran was working on a play or something, they’re in her handwriting in these old school notebooks with pictures of Herzl on the back. The play is about a young guy and an older woman. The guy loves her and wants to marry her, but she refuses. They keep talking in circles and it’s pretty good, actually—you can’t tell whether she’s refusing because she loves someone else (who died) or because she thinks he’s too young or because she doesn’t trust that he’ll be loyal. The reader keeps thinking one thing, but then it goes in another direction, and then you start thinking there’s a fourth reason that’s a secret. But I guess Gran never managed to finish it.

I also found something else, a sealed envelope with the word
PRIVATE
written on it in Sonya’s unmistakable handwriting. I steamed it open. It was a detailed description of what happened to her down in Beersheba, in the classroom. I forced myself to read it. Then I put it back in the envelope, resealed it, put the box back in the wardrobe and went for a long walk. I was supposed to meet Marion but I stood her up, I didn’t feel like seeing anyone. I knew she’d understand, she’s very good about stuff like that.

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. I shall fear.

L
ETTER TO
A
NDREI
, J
ULY
25, 1957

D
earest, can you imagine it, that teacher I told you about, who came to complain about Kostya, has sent me a letter proposing marriage! How ridiculous! Poor man. I am sorry to be hurting him, but how could he be so deluded, so out of touch? Even if he had the slightest chance, which he does not, imagine proposing to a complete stranger! That is hardly the way to go about these things. I am reminded of your arranged marriage and how badly that turned out. To think that love can be forced or created out of nothing … Love is the most uncontainable thing there is!

I have not had any other marriage proposals, but men here are very forward. And the women are cooperative, they like the attention. Everyone knows not to waste their time on me, though. There was one poet in particular, a shy young man, whom I finally had to shake off quite heartlessly. I have explained that I am married (for we are, even without the official stamp) and that I shall never be disloyal, ever. I am only yours, yours, yours. I know you told me I have to forget you and try to start life over, find a husband who will love me. That will never happen. But if I do not hear from you soon, I am sure I will die.

I must cheer you up now, and myself, with a marvelous story about our Kostya. Last month I took him to a free outdoor chamber music concert and immediately he decided he must learn to play the violin. He went up to one of the violinists after the show, a pretty young woman, asked her a few questions, and told me of his decision. Of course we don’t have a penny to spare for lessons, let alone an instrument! But Kostya told me not to worry.

You will hardly believe how resourceful he was—but of course you will, remembering what our son is like. He collected scraps of paper from here and there and he wrote on each one:
12-year-old boy will do cooking and small chores in return for violin lessons and violin practice time. Please contact Kostya at 8/12 Spinoza Street.
He put these notices up all over the neighborhood. Well, the following day at seven in the morning there was a knock on our door, and it was someone from the radio! They wanted to interview him! So we went down to the radio station in their car (Kostya was very excited to be in a private car) and Kostya explained his situation on the air.

When they asked, “What do your parents think of this?” he replied, dearest, “They are both very supportive.” I was so moved. You see, you are on his mind.

Of course he had many offers! People responded from all over the country. It was really something to see. One person offered us a violin! A man from a nearby town whose daughter died of leukemia—he said we could have her violin. He had not wanted to sell it, but felt that this was the right thing to do, finally, with her instrument. We didn’t feel it was right to take it for free, so we agreed that it would be a loan for now. We’ve become friendly, and this man comes over for Kostya’s
lokshen
(noodle) kugels quite regularly now. He is divorced; the marriage broke up after his daughter’s death.

So now Kostya has a violin and an excellent teacher—the pretty young woman (her name is Dafna) whom he approached after that concert. I wonder whether this entire endeavor was meant to snare her! Several other teachers contacted us, but Kostya seemed to be waiting for her. However, he has not taken up the violin merely in order to have lessons with Dafna, for he really is talented and spends all his free time playing. I wonder we never noticed his love of music before.

In some ways, living here in Israel is like living with a huge extended family—with all the advantages and disadvantages that come with families. I long for you. Come soon.

S
ONYA

P
eople said that Eli was different when he was younger; they said he was once shy and introverted. Maybe when he knew my mother he was kinder. If only I could ask her! But my mother, like Eli, was another person now. She had been transformed into an alien being who spoke no known language.

My last visit to the nursing home had been almost implausibly surreal; I could have been on the set of some experimental horror film. It was night, and there had been a power outage in the building; under the emergency lights objects seemed to waver, as if trapped inside the eerie violet shadows. The receptionist on duty was a young immigrant I’d not seen before. He was red faced and puffy, and he was paging through a bodybuilding magazine, staring at photos of men who had molded their bodies into grotesque shapes—inspired, no doubt, by childhood fantasies of comic-book superheroes. It struck me that the young immigrant was looking at one anatomical disaster while surrounded by another, the kind brought on by age. I wondered whether one canceled out the other for him, and made the human median more tolerable.

I signed in and made my way down the long corridor. Bleak human odors half smothered by disinfectant clung to the airless gloom, and the small square windows on the doors peered at me like glazed eyes in a heart-of-darkness jungle. I reached my mother’s room and peeked in. It was pitch black inside and smelled of urine. I left the door wide open so the weak light from the corridor could filter in. My mother was awake. Like a wrinkled human doll she watched me impassively.

The bars along the bed were not easily adjusted, and I had to struggle to bring them down. I led my mother to the carved wood chair by the side of the bed; I’d brought the chair here long ago, to replace the depressing institutional one that had come with the room. I did it for myself, of course; I wanted to cheer myself up when I came to visit. I lifted my mother’s wet flowered nightgown over her head and replaced it with a freshly laundered one. Her small breasts were still beautiful, as smooth and round as they had been when I was little.

I changed the sheets, brought her back to the bed, and climbed in with her. We sat there, side by side, my mother propped up on pillows. I held her hand and told her about the bodybuilding magazine and the power outage, and her breathing fell into rhythm with my voice.

Eli came over and took his poetry book from my hands. He stared at his own image on the back cover and said something I didn’t catch.

“What did you say?”

He seemed to be looking around for a pen. I handed him mine. He opened the book and wrote on the title page,
For Sonya, whose heart is pure, from Eli.
His handwriting was a little choppy and he had some trouble with the word
tahor
, pure. “Take it, please,” he said, giving me the book.

“Thank you.”

“How about some music?” he asked.

“What do you want?”

“You choose.”

I pulled out a CD at random; it was the Vienna Boys’ Choir singing Mozart. Like pools of crystal water, their voices would promise peace:
Ave verum corpus natum de Maria virgine …
Could an implant really restore hearing? Or would it just mean noise and distortion, a muddle of sounds you couldn’t control, a robot feeling of being attached forever to a portable machine?

I felt a hand on my shoulder. Raya and Lily had entered the flat.

“I’m so happy to see you,” I said.

“Yes,” Raya said. “What’s going on?”

“Oh, nothing. Eli’s a little drunk, that’s all, and I came to tell him something important.”

“More mysteries! How was Jerusalem?”

“Very wonderful—I’ll tell you later. Eli asked for some music.” I handed her the CD, but she dropped it carelessly on the coffee table.

Eli was both baffled and pleased by the arrival of two more women. “The three muses,” he said, looking at us. It was a relief having Raya there to translate. “Melpomene, muse of Tragedy,” he said, staring at Lily with flattering interest. “And … Clio.” He moved his glance to Raya but quickly looked away, for just as he knew intuitively which women he could seduce, he also knew which ones disapproved of him. “And you, Sonya, are of course Calliope. Three such lovely creatures … I never hurt anyone.”

“You’ve hurt hundreds of women, Eli,” Raya said. “We’re going to make you coffee. And I’ll bring you a glass of water.”

“Come to think of it, I have a strong suspicion that I’m going to be sick,” Eli said. He made his way to the bathroom but didn’t shut the door. After a few minutes I went to check up on him. He was sitting on the edge of the bathtub and holding on to the shower curtain for balance. When he saw me he tried to get up, but made the mistake of pulling on the shower curtain for leverage. The entire apparatus came crashing down on his head, and the curtain, a large sheet of nylon covered with blue swans, enveloped his body. He began flailing his arms wildly from under it, as though battling some giant squid. I burst out laughing.

Lily and I untangled Eli while Raya made coffee. Eli wanted to stay in the bathroom in case he had another wave of nausea, so we left him there and began to clean up a little. I wiped a sticky patch on the floor and Lily collected dirty dishes. Then a sound caught her attention and she looked at me with a worried expression on her face.

But before I could react, Eli emerged from the bathroom. He looked much better. He’d tucked in his shirt and washed his face.
My daddy is a handsome devil
, I hummed to myself.

“Thank you,” he said, as Raya handed him a glass of water. He sank back down on the sofa, pulled a cigarette out of the pack, and handed it to me. He wanted me to light it for him again.

“No,” I said. “You’re not going to smoke any longer. That’s it, you’re quitting!” I broke the cigarette in half. Eli was dumbfounded. “Raya, I have something amazing to tell you. I’m Eli’s daughter. Eli, are you listening?”

Everyone looked at me. “My mother knew all along. So did my brother, but they never told me. Eli didn’t know, of course. They never told him, either. Eli, do you remember being with my mother? With Anna?”

“Anna … yes, I remember her very well.” He leaned his head sideways against his hand. It was a familiar gesture, one he was famous for: the long fingers supporting his skull as though to keep the thoughts inside from spilling out or misbehaving.

“It was before you were married. You thought she was too old to have children, but she wasn’t. Look at me, I have your eyes, your hair.”

Raya was very surprised, of course. “Poor Sonya! Yes, you look alike. I don’t know how I never noticed it before.”

He sat up with the abrupt anxiety of someone who suddenly remembers an important meeting or a pot left on the stove. “Where’s Barbara? She was due hours ago, hours and hours ago.”

“Barbara’s not coming,” Raya said with satisfaction, as if she’d kept Barbara away herself.

“Bitch. Bitch. I’ll make her pay.… What a cunt though. A cunt from heaven … Well, she can go to hell, for all I care. It’s this new generation. A generation of screwed-up feminists, don’t know what they want.”

Raya, who was still signing for me, looked thoroughly disgusted.

I came to his defense: “You always claim to be a feminist, too, Eli.”

“Are the two of you lovers?” he asked Lily. He was hoping to discover a less personal reason for Raya’s hostility.

“No such luck,” Raya answered.

“What are you all doing here?” Eli asked, sinking back into confusion. “Pass me that bottle, please.” There was only a small amount of whiskey left. Raya shrugged and handed him the bottle. Her careless, aggressive gesture made me realize just how much she disliked Eli, and I was hurt.

“I came here to tell you you’re my father. And you were drunk, so I called Raya and Lily to help me.”

“You’re my daughter?” He took a swig from the bottle.

“Yes.”

“Anna … She was beautiful, but neurotic. She had lots of lovers. That what’s-his-name, the editor, you know. That schmuck … you know.”

“She told my brother it was you. And look at me, Eli. We look alike and we put our papers in our briefcases exactly the same way.”

He stared at me. “Yes, you’re a beauty, all right.”

“Eli, I love you. Because you’re my father and people love their parents, no matter what.”

“I don’t have children. I’ve never had children.”

“Well, it was an accident, Eli. Now you’re stuck with me.”

“Really? I have a daughter! And so stunning, though you could stand to lose two or three kilos. Smart, too. Aren’t you some sort of genius? Finished university at twelve or something?”

“You have to love me now. You’re my father.”

“Yes, I love you, Sonya. I love you.… What time is it?”

Raya couldn’t bear this conversation any longer. “Why don’t you go to bed?” she suggested. “We’ll help you.”

“Okay, okay. I have a meeting tomorrow, I think. What day is it? I think I have a fucking meeting with those impotent morons. If you knew the contempt I had for the world of academe—I don’t mean you, Sonya, my daughter. You’re in … math. Yes. The sciences are fine. Everything else should be banished. Universities are meant to advance humankind, and that means science. The humanities cause
regression
, not progression. Are you really my daughter?”

“Yes.”

“I’m glad. I’m glad,” he said. “You sprang fully formed,” he added in English.

“I’m going to tell everyone.”

“Good, good. I’m very proud of you. We’ll go see a movie.”

We helped Eli up the stairs and into his bedroom. He lay down on his bed and smiled. “Barbara likes to be tied up,” he said, shutting his eyes. “She asks for it. She begs. So much for feminism. She asks me to hit her with a belt. ‘Harder, harder,’ she says. I’ve given women what they asked for. I’ve given them all what they asked for. Isn’t that right, Raya?”

“I’ll answer when you’re sober,” Raya said.

“They ask for it,” he repeated, opening his eyes and looking at Raya. He wasn’t challenging her: he was truly curious to hear what she’d say, and he suddenly looked like a small child trying to understand a difficult adult concept.

“Women in love will do anything to get love back,” Raya said. “If they think that’s what it takes, if they think that’s the only way to be intimate with you, then they’ll try that. And tell me the truth, Eli. Isn’t that the only way to get intimate with you? Isn’t it?”

Raya was right: people in love were desperate creatures. We fell in love with different sorts of people, and our desperation took different forms, but love was as strong as death. I hadn’t known that until today. Noah once told me how bothered he was when his high-school girlfriend said she would die for him. What does that mean? he asked me. What does it mean?

“Thank you,” Eli said, and his eyes softened. He looked at us with gratitude. “Thank you very much. You’ve saved my life.”

“You haven’t taken anything else, have you?” Raya asked, looking at him with reluctant concern.

“No, no. Just a Valium or two. Help me get these off.” He was struggling with his jeans.

“I’ll do it,” Lily said tactfully, for clearly neither Raya nor I were the best candidates for the task. “It’s okay, I’ll look after him, you can go.”

Raya and I left the bedroom and returned downstairs.

“How did you find out?” Raya asked.

“I’m not sure. I had a dream, and I began to wonder, and then Kostya confirmed it. I don’t know why I never thought of it before. I guess because Eli’s so famous for not wanting children. Or maybe because when Narcissus looks at you he sees only himself reflected back, and you get sucked into that when you’re with him; you also start believing that he must be a closed system.”

“They shouldn’t have kept it a secret from you.”

“They thought he’d hurt me. But they were wrong, they couldn’t be sure. We almost had sex! Imagine! I feel sick thinking about it.”

“You and Eli?”

“He made a pass. I don’t know, maybe it wasn’t serious. Maybe he knew I’d say no.”

“I guess Kostya wasn’t worried about that, seeing as you refused even to sit at a café with a guy.”

“He couldn’t know. He took a horrible chance. He could have destroyed my life.”

“By the way, your brother’s totally smitten with Lily. She likes him, too. They already have a date for tomorrow.”

“What’s her story?”

“Another casualty … but she’s trying to pull her life together. Lost her husband when she was pregnant, back in the late seventies.”

“In the war?”

“No, some sort of accident—a hostage-taking incident, Ibrahim’s son was involved. That’s why his son went to prison, that incident. He paid for the army’s mistake.”

“Oh, yes, I remember that story. My mother knew him, they were in a play together once.… What a small world.”

“I met him once, too, at a party at Ibrahim’s. Lily remembers me, but I don’t remember her. It was ages ago, I was just a kid. I hope she’s okay up there with Eli.”

On cue, Lily reappeared. “He’s fast asleep and snoring away,” she said. “I washed his feet with a towel, they were filthy.”

She sat down on the sofa and said, “That nap I had earlier really refreshed me. I fell asleep at Raya’s after you left,” she explained. “So rude of me, but I didn’t plan it, I just drifted off.”