Great House (22 page)

How can I explain it? The way you frightened me a little. How you seemed just the tiniest bit closer than the rest of us to the essence of things. I would walk into a room and find you staring at something in the corner. What's so fascinating? I wanted to know. But your concentration would be broken, and you would turn to me, a wrinkle in your brow, a faint look of surprise at being disturbed. After you left the room I would go to see for myself. A spiderweb? An ant? A disgusting hairball coughed up by Yoella? But there was never anything there. What's wrong with him? I asked your mother. He has no friends? By that time Uri had already befriended the whole neighborhood. There was an endless stream of kids coming in and out of the house for him. The only time Uri spent in the corner was when he was wrapping his arms around himself and wriggling as if he were French-kissing. He would run his hands up and down his back, squeeze his own ass, and give a little yelp, screwing his head back and forth in an imitation that made everyone roll on the floor. But amid the laughter you were nowhere to be found. Later, pruning the tomato plants, I came across a patch of the garden where you had mysteriously assembled little piles of dirt in rows, alternated with squares or circles etched into the ground with a stick. What the hell is this? I asked your mother. She cocked her head to study it. It's a city, she announced without a shade of doubt in her voice. Here is the gate, she pointed, and the fortifications, and this here is a cistern. Then she walked away, leaving me defeated again. Where I saw little pathetic piles of dirt she saw a whole city. From the beginning you had given her the keys to yourself. But not to me. Never to me, my son. I spotted you crouching near the hose. Come here, I shouted. You lumbered toward me on
your short legs, your face crazily stained from a Popsicle. What is the meaning of this? I demanded, gesturing with the clippers. You looked down and sniffed. Then you squatted and carried out some lightning renovations—hurriedly sweeping, patting, refashioning a lump. You stood to examine it again from above, cocking your head at the same angle your mother had. So that was the secret, I thought. You have to turn your head at a special angle to make sense of it! No sooner had I absorbed this clue than you lifted your foot and, with a few quick stomps, leveled the entire thing and retreated into the house.

Which came first? Was it I who backed away, or you? A strange child with secret knowledge that I came to resent, who grew to be a young man whose world was barred to me. Do you want to know the truth, Dov? When you came to me to tell me about the book you planned to write I was taken aback. I couldn't understand what made you decide to come to me of all people—me, with whom you shared so little of yourself, whom you only spoke to as a last resort, when it was absolutely necessary. I was too slow to respond as I might have liked. I couldn't change so fast. I assumed the old position. A certain tone of voice, a roughness that had always been my defense against all I couldn't grasp in you. To reject you before you could reject me. Afterwards, I regretted it. The moment after you walked out of the room I realized that I'd lost my chance. I understood that you had offered me a reprieve, and I'd squandered it. And I knew it would not come again.

A shark that is a repository for human sadness. Who takes all that the dreamers cannot bear, who bears the violence of their accumulated feeling. How often I thought about that beast and the chance I lost with you. At times I felt I was on the verge of understanding everything the great fish stood for. One day I went into your room looking for a screwdriver you'd borrowed, and on your desk I found the opening pages. My first feeling was of relief that I had not, after all, dissuaded you. No one else was home, but I closed the door anyway and sat down to read about the terrible animal with the bared
teeth suspended in a tank that glowed in an otherwise dark room. Electrodes and wires attached to its greenish body. Machines that hummed at all hours of the day and night. Somewhere also the persistent sound of a pump that kept the shark alive. The beast twitched and rolled, and expressions—is it possible for a shark to have expressions? I asked myself—passed over its face at a rapid speed, while in small, windowless rooms the patients continued to sleep and dream.

I don't need to tell you that I've never been much of a reader. It was always your mother who loved books. It takes me a long time, I have to make my way slowly. Sometimes the words are a puzzle to me and I have to read them two or three times until I can crack their meaning. In law school it always took me longer to study than the others. My mind was sharp, my tongue sharper, I could debate with the best of them, but I had to work harder with my books. When you learned to read so easily, almost on your own, I was amazed. It seemed impossible that a child like you could have come from me. It was yet another effortless understanding you shared with your mother that I stood outside of and would not be let into. And yet without your knowledge or consent, I read your book. Read it as I had never read a book before, and have never since. For the first time, I'd been given a way into you. And I was in awe, Dovik. I was frightened and overwhelmed by what I found there. When you enlisted and left for basic training, I was distraught to think that my secret reading would come to an end, that the doors onto your world would be closed to me again. And then, lo and behold, you began to send back the packages every couple of weeks, wrapped in brown tape, and decorated with the words PRIVATE!!! DO NOT OPEN!, with express instructions for your mother to place them in your desk drawer. I was happy. I convinced myself that you knew, that you had known all along, and that your extravagant charade of secrecy was simply a way to save me—to save us both—from embarrassment.

In the beginning I used to read the pages in your room. Always when your mother was out doing the shopping, volunteering at
WIZO, or visiting Irit. With time I became bolder, sitting in the kitchen or making myself comfortable in a lawn chair under the acacia tree. Once she arrived home earlier than expected and caught me off guard. Not wanting to arouse her suspicions, I carried on reading, pretending it was a brief for one of my cases. A landlord who wants to evict, I muttered, glancing up at her over my glasses. But she only nodded and gave me that semi-smile she always offered up when consumed by other thoughts—of Irit, perhaps, and her pathological needs and her noisy emergencies to which your mother always arrived like an ambulence. As easy as that, I thought, but not wanting to test my luck I snuck back to your room and put the pages away in your desk.

I didn't always understand what you wrote. I admit that in the beginning I was frustrated by your refusal to state things plainly. What does it eat, this shark? Where is this place, this institution, this hospital, for lack of a better word, with the enormous tank? Why do these people sleep so much? They don't need to eat either? No one eats in this book? It was all I could do to keep myself from making a note in the margin. Many times you lost me. Just as I was finding my way around Beringer the janitor's room with only the tiny window way up high (and why was it always raining outside?) and his shoes lined up like soldiers under his little hard bed, just as I was getting the feel of the place, to smell the odor that a man gives off when he sleeps alone in a small room, suddenly you threw me out and started to drag me through the forest where Hannah used to go to hide from everyone when she was a girl. But I did my best to stifle my complaints. I gave up my questions and put aside my editorial suggestions. I put myself in your hands. And as the pages turned, my objections came less and less often. I gave in to your story and it picked me up and carried me away with it, with poor Beringer fingering the crack in the tank while in the little rooms attached by wires to the great hall that held the tank the dreamers lay dreaming, the boy Benny, and Rebecca who dreamed of her father (tell me, Dovik,
was it me you modeled him after? Did you really see me like that? So heartless, and arrogant, and cruel? Or am I being as egotistical as he to think I had any place in your work?). I developed a soft spot for little, feverish Benny and his still-undying belief in magic, and I took a special interest in the dreams of Noa, the young writer, who, of all of them, reminded me the most of you. I even felt, God knows how, a strange compassion for that great, suffering shark. When the bundle of pages came to an end I was always a little saddened. What would happen next? And what about the terrifying leak that Beringer watches helplessly, and the sound of the water,
drip drip drip
, which filters into all of their dreams at night, invading them, becoming a hundred different echoes of the saddest things? Sometimes I had to wait weeks when you were especially busy in the army, even months for the next section. I would be left in the dark, not knowing what would happen next. Only that the shark was getting sicker and sicker. Knowing what Beringer knew, but which he kept from the dreamers in their windowless rooms: that the shark wouldn't live forever. And then what, Dovik? Where would they go, these people? How would they live? Or were they already dead?

I never found out. The last section you sent home was three weeks before you were sent to Sinai. Afterwards, there was no more.

 

O
N THAT
S
ATURDAY
in October, your mother and I were at home when we heard the air raid sirens. We turned on the radio but, being Yom Kippur, there was only dead air. It crackled in the corner of the room for half an hour until at last a voice came on saying that the sirens had not been a false alarm; if we heard them again we were to go down to the shelter. Then they played Beethoven's
Moonlight Sonata
—to what? to soothe us?—and at some point the broadcaster returned to say we had been attacked. The shock was terrible: we had convinced ourselves that we were finished with wars. Then more Beethoven, interrupted with coded mobilization messages for the
reserves. Uri called from Tel Aviv, speaking loudly as if to the nearly deaf; even halfway across the room I could hear what he was saying to your mother. He joked with her; he might have been going to perform a magic show for the Egyptians. That was Uri. Afterwards the army called looking for you. We thought you were with your unit on Mount Hermon, but they told us you'd taken leave for the weekend. I wrote down the location you were to report to in a matter of hours.

We called everyone but no one knew where you were, not even your girlfriend at the university. Your mother worked herself into a wreck. Don't jump to conclusions, I told her. I who had known about your midnight ramblings for years, who was familiar with your way of escaping the rest of us, of finding a way to live a little in the world while it was unpolluted by people. It gave me pleasure to know something about you that your mother didn't.

Then we heard the keys in the door and you burst in, agitated and excited. We didn't ask where you'd been and you didn't tell us. It was some time since I'd last seen you, and I was surprised by how broad you'd become, almost physically imposing. The sun had tanned you and given you a new sturdiness, or maybe something else, a kind of dynamism I hadn't noticed in you before. Looking at you, I felt a pang for my own lost youth. Your mother, full of nerves, hurried around the kitchen preparing food. Eat, she urged you, you don't know when you'll get your next meal. But you didn't want to eat. You kept going to the window to look at the sky for planes.

I drove you to the meeting point. Do you remember that car ride, Dov? Afterwards, there were things you couldn't remember, so I don't know if you do. Your mother didn't come. She couldn't bring herself to do it. Or maybe she didn't want to infect you with her anxiety. Your gun sat across your knees along with a bag of food from her. We both knew you were going to throw it out or give it away, even she knew. As soon as we got on the road, you turned to look out the window, making it clear you were in no mood for conversation. So fine, we won't talk, I thought to myself, what's new? And yet I was
disappointed. Somehow I thought that the circumstances, the emergency brewing around us, the fact that I was delivering you to a war—I thought the pressure of it all would force the cork and that something of you would come trickling out. But it was not to be. You made yourself clear, turning sharply away to stare out the window. And though I was disappointed I was also, I admit, a little relieved. Because I, who always had something to say, who leaped to have the first word and pressed on until I had the last—I was at a loss. I saw how your body had grown around the gun. How casually you held it, how at home you felt with it in your hands. As if you had absorbed its mechanism—all it demanded of you, its power and its contradictions—right into your flesh. The boy whose own arms and legs were once alien to him had ceased to be, and in his place, sitting next to me in dark sunglasses, his sleeves pulled up to show bronzed forearms, was a man. A soldier, Dova'leh. My boy had grown up to be a soldier, and I was delivering him to war.

Yes, there were things I wanted to say but I couldn't just then, so we drove in silence. A huge convoy of trucks was already there, the soldiers eager and restless. We said goodbye—it was as simple as that, a kind of hurried pounding on each other's backs—and I watched you disappear into the sea of uniforms. At that moment you were no longer my son. My son had gone off somewhere to hide for a while. Wherever it was you'd been before you came home—walking some trail alone in the hills—it was as if you knew what was to come, and had gone off to bury yourself in a hole. To hide there, beneath the cool earth, for as long as it took for the danger to pass. And what was left once you'd subtracted yourself from the equation was a soldier who had grown up eating Israeli fruit, with the dirt of his forefathers under his nails, who was leaving now to defend his country.

In those weeks your mother hardly slept. She wouldn't speak on the phone so as not to occupy the line. But it was the doorbell we feared the most. Across the street they arrived at the Biletskis' to say that Itzhak, little Itzy whom you and Uri played with as children,
had been killed in the Golan. He had burned to death inside of a tank. After that, the Biletskis disappeared inside their house. Wild grass grew up around it, the curtains were always drawn, sometimes, very late at night, a light came on inside and someone could be heard playing two notes on the piano over and over,
pling plong pling plong pling plong
. One day when I went to deliver a piece of mail that came to our house by mistake I saw a pale spot on the doorframe where the mezuzah had been. That could have been us. There was no reason it had happened to their son and not to ours, why it was Biletski playing two notes and not me. Every day sons were being sacrificed. Another boy in the neighborhood was exploded by a shell. One night we got into bed and turned off the lights. If I lose one of them, your mother said to me in a low, trembling voice, I will not be able to go on. Either I could have said,
You will go on
, or I could have said,
We will not lose them
. We will not lose them, I said, holding her thin wrists tightly. She did not say,
I will not forgive you
, but she didn't have to say it. Uri was stationed on a mountain overlooking the Jordan Valley. He managed to call us once, so we knew he was there. Much later, years later, he told me how he could hear on the radio transmitter the desperate Israeli tank units fighting in the Golan. One after another simply vanished from the radio network, extinguished into silence, and he couldn't stop listening, knowing he was hearing those soldiers' last words. We knew from him that your brigade had been sent to Sinai. Every day we waited for the doorbell to ring, but it did not ring, and each dawn that broke without it ringing was another night you had survived. There were many things your mother and I didn't say to each other during those days. Our fears drove us deeper and deeper into a bunkered silence. I knew that if something happened to you or Uri, she would not have allowed me the right to suffer as she would suffer, and I held it against her.