Great House (25 page)

And so it happened time after time, the unspoken conviction always returned and won out over the anxious uncertainty. And though as the years passed one book after another fell short, each a new form of failure, I remained wedded to an unspoken belief that the day would come when I would fulfill my promise at last, until simply, with stark lucidity, as if a knock on the head had shifted my perspective and everything clicked into place, it seized me—
What if I had been wrong?
Wrong for years, Your Honor. From the beginning. How obvious it suddenly seemed. And how unbearable. Over and over the question tore through me. Gripping my mattress like a raft, tossed into the whirlpool of the night, I turned and thrashed in my bed, consumed by feverish panic, waiting desperately for the first sign of light in the sky over Jerusalem. Come morning, exhausted, half dreaming, I wandered the streets of the Old City, and for a moment I felt on the verge of an exquisite understanding, as if I might turn a corner and discover, at last, the center of everything, the thing I had been striving to say all my life, and that from then on there would be no need to write, no need even to talk, and that like that nun walking ahead of me, disappearing through a door in the wall, wrapped in the mystery of God, I would live out the rest of my days in the fullness of silence. But a moment later the illusion was shattered and never had I been farther away, never was the extent of my failure more breathtaking. I'd set myself apart, believing myself to be in contact with the most essential things, not the mystery of God, which is a locked and foregone conclusion, but—what else can I call it, Your Honor?—the mystery of existence, and yet now, as the sun beat down and I stumbled along another narrow alley, tripping on the uneven paving stones, the growing horror unfolded that I might have been mistaken. And if I had, the repercussions of that mistake would be so vast they would leave nothing untouched, the columns would come crashing down, the roof would collapse, a void would open up and swallow everything. Do you see? I devoted my life to that belief,
Your Honor. I gave up everything and everyone for it, and now it is the only thing left.

It wasn't always like this. There was a time when I imagined my life could happen in another way. It's true that early on I became used to the long hours I spent alone. I discovered that I did not need people as others did. After writing all day it took an effort to make conversation, like wading through cement, and often I simply chose not to make it, eating at a restaurant with a book or going for long walks alone instead, unwinding the solitude of the day through the city. But loneliness, true loneliness, is impossible to accustom oneself to, and while I was still young I thought of my situation as somehow temporary, and did not stop hoping and imagining that I would meet someone and fall in love, and that he and I might share our lives, each one free and independent, and yet bound together by our love. Yes, there was a time before I closed myself off to others. All those years ago when R left me I hadn't understood. What did I know of true loneliness? I had been young and full, bursting with feeling, overflowing with desire; I lived closer to the surface of myself. One night I came home and found him curled into a ball on the mattress. When I touched him his body flinched and the ball tightened, Leave me alone, he whispered or choked, his voice arriving as if from the bottom of a well. I love you, I said, stroking his hair, and the ball became tighter yet like the body of a frightened or sick porcupine. How little I understood of him then, of how the more you hide the more it becomes necessary to withdraw, how soon enough it becomes impossible to live among others. I tried to argue with him, in my arrogance I thought that my love could save him, could prove to him his own worth, his beauty and goodness, Come out, come out, wherever you are, I sang in his ear, until one day he got up and left, taking all of his furniture with him. Was it then that it began for me? True loneliness? That I, too, started not to hide but to retreat, so gradually that I hardly noticed it at first, during those stormy nights when I sat poised with the little wrench in my hand, jumping up to tighten
the window bolts, sealing myself in to keep out the howling wind? Yes, it's possible that was the beginning, or nearly so, I can't really say, but it took years for the journey inward to become complete, for me to seal up all of the routes of escape, first there were other loves and other breakups, and then the decade of my marriage to S. By the time I met him I'd already published two books, my life as a writer had been established and so was the covenant I'd made with my work. The first night I brought him home we made love on the shag carpet with the desk hunched a few feet away in the darkness. It's a jealous beast, I joked, and thought I heard it groan, but no, it was only S, who at that moment perhaps foresaw something, or recognized the little grain of truth lurking inside the joke, how my work would always win over him, luring me back, opening its great black mouth and letting me slip in, sliding down and down, into the belly of the beast, how silent it was in there, how still. And yet for a long time I continued to believe it was possible to dedicate myself to my work and share my life, I didn't think that one need cancel out the other, though perhaps I already knew in my heart that if it were necessary I would not side against my work, could not any more than I could side against myself. No, if my back were pushed to the wall and I had to choose I would not have picked him, would not have picked
us
, and if S sensed that from the start soon enough he came to know it, and worse yet, for my back was never pushed to the wall, Your Honor, it was less dramatic and more cruel, how little by little I grew lazy with the effort required to hold and to keep us, the effort to share a life. Because it hardly ends with falling in love. Just the opposite. I don't need to tell you, Your Honor, I sense that you understand true loneliness. How you fall in love and it's there that the work begins: day after day, year after year, you must dig yourself up, exhume the contents of your mind and soul for the other to sift through so that you might be known to him, and you, too, must spend days and years wading through all that he excavates for you alone, the archaeology of his being, how exhausting it became, the digging up and the
wading through, while my own work, my true work, lay waiting for me. Yes, I always thought there would be more time left for me, more time left for us, and for the child we might one day have, but I never felt that my work could be put aside as they could, my husband and the idea of our child, a little boy or girl that I sometimes even tried to imagine, but always only vaguely enough that he or she remained a ghostly emissary of our future, just her back while she sat playing with her blocks on the floor, or just his feet sticking out of the blanket on our bed, a tiny pair of feet. What of it, there would be time for them, for the life they stood for, the one I was not yet prepared to live because I had not yet done what I had meant to do in this one.

One day, three or four years into our marriage, S and I were invited for Passover at the house of a couple we knew. I don't even remember their names: the kind of people who enter easily into your life, then leave it just as easily. The Seder started late, after the couple had put their two young children to sleep, and we—all the guests—were talking and joking, maybe fifteen of us around the long table, in the sheepishly embarrassed and so overly jocular way of Jews who are reenacting a tradition they are far enough removed from to cause a painful self-consciousness, but not far enough to give up. Suddenly, into this raucous roomful of adults enters this child. We were all so busy with each other that we didn't notice her at first; she couldn't have been more than three, dressed in those pajamas with the feet, her bottom still saggy with a diaper, and clutching a sort of cloth or rag, the shredded remains of a blanket, I suppose, to her cheek. We had woken her from sleep. And suddenly, bewildered by this sea of strange faces and the clamor of voices, she let out a cry. A wail of pure terror that cut through the air, and silenced the room. For a moment everything froze as the scream hung above us like the question to end all the questions that particular night, of all nights, is designed to pose. A question which, because wordless, has no answer, and so must be asked forever. Perhaps it was only a second, but in my mind that scream went on, and still goes on somewhere now,
but there, on that night, it ended when the mother stood, knocking over her chair, and in a single fluid motion rushed to the child, gathered her in, and held her aloft. In an instant the child quieted. For a moment she tipped her head back and looked up at her mother, and her expression was illuminated with the wonder and relief of finding, again, the only comfort, the infinite comfort, she had in the world. She buried her face in her mother's neck, in the smell of her mother's long lustrous hair, and her cries slowly grew dimmer and dimmer as the conversation around the table started up again, until at last she became silent, curled against her mother like a question mark—all that was left of the question that, for the time being, no longer needed to be asked—and fell asleep. The meal went on, and at some point the mother rose and carried the limp body of the sleeping child back down the hallway to her room. But I hardly noticed the conversation that swelled around me, so absorbed was I by the expression I'd glimpsed the moment before the girl had buried her face in her mother's hair, which filled me with awe and also grief, and I knew then, Your Honor, that I would never be that to anyone, the one who in a single motion could rescue and bring peace.

S, too, had been moved by what had happened, and that night after we arrived home he began to talk about having a child again. The conversation led, as it always did, to the old obstacles, the name and shape of which I can no longer remember exactly, beyond that they were well known to both of us, and, as we had identified them, required solutions before we could proceed with bringing our child, the one we imagined separately and together, into the world. But under the spell of that mother and little girl, that night S argued harder. There might never come a right time, he said, but despite the grief the child's expression had torn open in me, or maybe because of it, because I was afraid, I argued just as hard against it. How easy it would be to make a mess of it, I said, to crush the child as we had each been crushed by our parents. If we were going to do it we had to be ready, I insisted, and we weren't ready, far from it, and as if
to prove the point—it was already dawn now, sleep was out of the question—I walked away, closed the door to my study, and sat down at the desk.

How many arguments and difficult conversations and even moments of great passion over the years ended the same way? I have to work, I'd say, untangling myself from the bedsheets, separating from his limbs, leaving the table, and as I walked away I could feel his sad eyes following me, as I closed the door behind me and returned to the desk, folding myself in, pulling my knees to my chest and crouching over my work, spilling myself out in those drawers, nineteen drawers, some big and some small, how easy it was to pour myself into them as I never could or tried to do with S, how simple to put myself into storage; sometimes I forgot whole parts of myself that I put away for the book I was going to write one day, the one that was going to be filled with everything. The hours would pass, the whole day, until suddenly it was dark out and there would be a tentative knock on the door, the little scuff of his slippers, his hands on my shoulders, which, I couldn't help it, became tense under his touch, his cheek next to my ear, Nada, he whispered, that's what he used to call me, Nada, Come out, come out, wherever you are, until at last one day he got up and left, taking all of his books, his sad smiles, the smell of his sleep, his film canisters filled with foreign change, and our imaginary child with him. And I let them go, Your Honor, as I had been letting them go for years, and I told myself I'd been chosen for something else, and comforted myself with all the work yet to be done, and lost myself in a labyrinth of my own creation without noticing that the walls were closing in, the air growing thin.

 

A
T SEA
in the night, losing myself in the city by day, almost a week passed lost inside a question that could no more be answered than that child's wordless question posed inside her terrified scream, though for me there was no comfort, no beneficent, loving force to
gather me up and alleviate the need to ask. Those days after I arrived in Jerusalem run together in my mind into one long night and one long day, and I remember only that one afternoon I found myself sitting in the restaurant of the guesthouse, Mishkenot Sha'ananim, which looked out onto the same view as the veranda behind my room: the walls, Mount Zion, the Valley of Hinnom where the followers of Molech sacrificed their children by fire. In fact I'd eaten there every day, sometimes twice, since it was easier than trying to eat outside (the hungrier I became, the more impossible it seemed to enter a restaurant)—often enough that the heavyset waiter who worked there had taken an interest in me. While he scraped the crumbs from empty tables he glanced at me out of the corner of his eye, and soon he gave up trying to hide his curiosity and leaned on the bar watching me. When he came to clear my dishes he did so slowly, and asked whether everything had been to my liking, a question that seemed not to be so much about the food, which I often left untouched, but other, more intangible things. On that afternoon, after the dining room had emptied out, he approached me carrying a box displaying a variety of tea bags. Take, he said. I hadn't asked for tea, but I sensed there was no choice. I selected one, hardly looking at which. I'd lost my taste for everything and the sooner I chose one the sooner I thought he would leave me alone again. But he didn't leave me alone. He brought over a teapot of hot water, unwrapped the tea bag himself, and dropped it in. He lowered himself into the chair across from me. American? he asked. I nodded, pressing my lips together, hoping he would sense my desire to be left alone. They told me a writer, yes? I nodded again, though this time an involuntary squeak slipped out from between my lips. He poured the tea into my cup. Drink, he said, it's good for you. I offered him a tight little smile, more like a grimace. Over there, where you were looking, he said, pointing with a crooked finger toward the view. That valley under the walls used to be no-man's-land. I know, I said, crumpling my napkin in impatience. He blinked and continued. When I arrived here in
1950 I used to go to the border and look out. On the other side, five hundred meters away, I could see buses and cars, Jordanian soldiers. I was in the city, on the main street of Jerusalem, and I was looking at another city, at a Jerusalem I thought I would never be able to touch. I was curious, I wanted to know, what was it like there? But there was also something good about believing I would never reach that other side. Then there was the war of '67. Everything changed. At first I didn't regret it, it was exciting to finally walk those streets. But later I felt differently. I missed the days when I looked out and didn't know. He paused and glanced at my untouched cup. Drink, he urged again. A writer, eh? My daughter loves to read. A shy smile flickered across his thick lips. She's seventeen now. She studies English. I can buy one of your books here? You'll write something to her, maybe, she could read it. She's smart. Smarter than me, he said, with an irrepressible smile that revealed a wide gap between his front teeth and receding gums. His lids were heavy, like a frog's. When she was a little girl I used to tell her, Yallah, go outside, play with your friends, the books will wait for you but one day your childhood will be over forever. But she didn't listen, all day she sat with her nose in a book. It's not normal, my wife says, who will want to marry her, boys don't like girls like that, and she swats Dina over the head and tells her if she keeps going like that she's going to need glasses, and what then? I never told her that maybe if I was young again I would like a girl like that, a girl who is smarter than me, who knows things about the world, who gets a look in her eyes when she thinks about all of those stories in her head. Maybe you could write in one of your books for her, To Dina, Good luck with everything. Or maybe, Keep reading, whatever you think, you're the writer, you'll find the right words.