My Michael (2 page)

"You seemed different this morning, too," I said.

Michael was wearing a gray overcoat. He did not take it off the whole time we sat in Cafe Atara. His cheeks were glowing from the bitter cold outside. His body was lean and angular. He picked up his unlit pipe and traced shapes with it on the tablecloth. His fingers, playing with the pipe, gave me a feeling of peace. Perhaps he had suddenly regretted his remark about my clothes; as if correcting a mistake, Michael said he thought I was a pretty girl. As he said it he stared fixedly at the pipe. I am not particularly strong, but I am stronger than this young man.

"Tell me about yourself," I said.

Michael said:

"I didn't fight in the
Palmach.
I was in the Signal Corps. I was a radio operator in the Carmeli Brigade."

Then he started talking about his father. Michael's father was a widower. He worked in the water department of the Holon municipality.

Rashid Shahada, the twins' father, was a clerk in the technical department of the Jerusalem municipality under the British. He was a cultivated Arab, who behaved toward strangers like a waiter.

Michael told me that his father spent most of his salary on his education. Michael was an only child, and his father cherished high hopes for him. He refused to recognize that his son was an ordinary young man. For instance, he used to read the exercises which Michael wrote for his geology course with awe, commending them with such set phrases as: "This is very scientific work. Very thorough." His father's greatest wish was for Michael to become a professor in Jerusalem, because his paternal grandfather had taught natural sciences in the Hebrew teachers seminary in Grodno. He had been very well thought of. It would be nice, Michael's father thought, if the chain could pass on from one generation to another.

"A family isn't a relay race, with a profession as the torch," I said.

"But I can't tell my father that," Michael said. "He's a sentimental man, and he uses Hebrew expressions in the way that people used to handle fragile pieces of precious china. Tell me something about your family now."

I told him that my father had died in 1943. He was a quiet man. He used to talk to people as if he had to appease them and purchase a sympathy he did not deserve. He had a radio and electrical business—sales and simple repairs. Since his death my mother had lived at Kibbutz Nof Harim with my older brother, Emanuel. "In the evenings she sits with Emanuel and his wife, Rina, drinking tea and trying to teach their son manners, because his parents belong to a generation which despises good manners. All day she shuts herself up in a small room on the edge of the kibbutz reading Turgenev and Gorki in Russian, writing me letters in broken Hebrew, knitting and listening to the radio. That blue dress you liked on me this morning—my mother knitted it."

Michael smiled:

"It might be nice for your mother and my father to meet. I'm sure they would find a lot to talk about. Not like us, Hannah—sitting here talking about our parents. Are you bored?" he asked anxiously, and as he asked he flinched, as if he had hurt himself by asking.

"No," I said. "No, I'm not bored. I like it here."

Michael asked whether I hadn't said that merely out of politeness. I insisted. I begged him to tell me more about his father. I said that I liked the way he talked.

Michael's father was an austere, unassuming man. He gave over his evenings voluntarily to running the Holon workingmen's club. Running? Arranging benches, filing chits, duplicating notices, picking up cigarette butts after meetings. It might be nice if our parents could meet ... Oh, he had already said that once. He apologized for repeating himself and boring me. What was I studying at the University? Archaeology?

I told him I was I rooming with an Orthodox family in Achva. In the mornings I worked as a teacher in Sarah Zeldin's kindergarten in Kerem Avraham. In the afternoons I attended lectures on Hebrew literature. But I was only a first-year student.

"Student rhymes with prudent." Straining to be witty in his anxiety to avoid pauses in the conversation, Michael resorted to a play on words. But the point was not clear, and he tried to rephrase it. Suddenly he stopped talking and made a fresh, furious attempt at lighting his obstinate pipe. I enjoyed his discomfiture. At that time I was still repelled by the sight of the rough men my friends used to worship in those days: great bears of
Palmach
-men who used to tackle you with a gushing torrent of deceptive kindness; thick-limbed tractor drivers coming all dusty from the Negev like marauders carrying off the women of some captured city. I loved the embarrassment of the student Michael Gonen in Cafe Atara on a winter's night.

A famous scholar came into the cafe in the company of two women. Michael leaned toward me to whisper his name in my ear. His lips may have brushed my hair. I said:

"I can see right through you. I can read your mind. You're saying to yourself: 'What's going to happen next? Where do we go from here?' Am I right?"

Michael reddened suddenly like a child caught stealing sweets:

"I've never had a regular girlfriend before."

"Before?"

Thoughtfully Michael moved his empty cup. He looked at me. Deep down, underneath his meekness, a suppressed sneer lurked in his eyes.

"Till now."

A quarter of an hour later the famous scholar left with one of the women. Her friend moved over to a table in a corner and lit a cigarette. Her expression was bitter.

Michael remarked:

"That woman is jealous."

"Of us?"

"Of you, perhaps." He tried to cover up. He was ill at ease, because he was trying too hard. If only I could tell him that his efforts did him credit. That I found his fingers fascinating. I could not speak, but I was afraid to keep silent. I told Michael that I adored meeting the celebrities of Jerusalem, the writers and scholars. It was an interest I had inherited from my father. When I was small my father used to point them out to me in the street. My father was extremely fond of the phrase "world-famous." He would whisper excitedly that some professor who had just vanished into a florist's shop was world-famous, or that some man out shopping was of international fame. And I would see a diminutive old man cautiously feeling his way like a stranger in an unfamiliar city. When we read the Books of the Prophets at school, I imagined the Prophets as being like the writers and scholars my father had pointed out to me: men of refined features, bespectacled, with neatly trimmed white beards, their pace troubled and hesitant, as if they were walking down the steep slope of a glacier. And when I tried to imagine these frail old men thundering against the sins of the people, I smiled; I thought that at the height of their fury their voices would dry up and they would merely emit a high-pitched shriek. If a writer or university professor came into his shop in Jaffa Road, my father would come home looking as if he had seen a vision. He would repeat solemnly casual words they had spoken, and study their utterances as if they were rare coins. He was always looking for hidden meanings in their words, because he saw life as a lesson from which one had to learn a moral. He was an attentive man. Once my father took me and my brother Emanuel to the Tel Or Cinema on a Saturday morning to hear Martin Buber and Hugo Bergmann speak at a meeting sponsored by a pacifist organization. I still remember a curious episode. As we were leaving the auditorium Professor Bergmann stopped in front of my father and said, "I really did not expect to see you in our midst today, my dear Dr. Liebermann. I beg your pardon—you are not Professor Liebermann? Yet I feel certain we have met. Your face, sir, seems very familiar." Father stuttered. He blanched as if he had been accused of some foul deed. The professor, too, was confused, and apologized for his mistake. Perhaps on account of his embarrassment the scholar touched my shoulder and said, "In any case, my dear sir, your daughter—your daughter?—is a very pretty girl." And beneath his mustache a gentle smile spread. My father never forgot this incident as long as he lived. He used to recount it again and again, with excitement and delight. Even when he sat in his armchair, clad in a dressing gown, his glasses perched high on his forehead and his mouth drooping wearily, my father looked as if he were silently listening to the voice of some secret power. "And you know, Michael, still, to this day, I sometimes think that I shall marry a young scholar who is destined to become world-famous. By the light of his reading lamp my husband's face will hover among piles of old German tomes; I shall creep in on tiptoe to put a cup of tea down on the desk, empty the ashtray, and quietly close the shutters, then leave without his noticing me. Now you'll laugh at me."

T
EN O' CLOCK
.

Michael and I each paid our own checks, as students do, and went out into the night. The sharp frost seared our faces. I breathed out, and watched my breath mingle with his. The cloth of his overcoat was coarse, heavy, and pleasant to touch. I had no gloves, and Michael insisted I wear his. They were rough, worn leather gloves. Streams of water ran down the gutter toward Zion Square, as if something sensational was happening in the center of town. A tightly wrapped couple walked past, their arms round each other. The girl said:

"That's impossible. I can't believe it."

And her partner laughed:

"You're very naïve."

We stood for a moment or two, not knowing what to do. We only knew that we did not want to part. The rain stopped and the air grew colder. I found the cold unbearable. I shivered. We watched the water running down the gutter. The road was shiny. The asphalt reflected the broken yellow glare of car headlights. Disjointed thoughts flashed through my mind—how to keep hold of Michael for a little longer.

Michael said:

"I'm plotting against you, Hannah."

I said:

"Be careful. You might find yourself hoist on your own petard."

"I'm plotting dark deeds, Hannah."

His trembling lips betrayed him. For an instant he looked like a big, sad child, a child with most of its hair shaved off. I wanted to buy him a hat. I wanted to touch him.

Suddenly Michael raised his arm. A taxi screeched to a sodden halt. Then we were together inside its warm belly. Michael told the driver to drive wherever he felt like taking us, he didn't mind. The driver shot me a sly glance, full of filthy pleasure. The panel lights cast a dim red glow on his face, as if the skin had been peeled off and his red flesh laid bare. That taxi driver had the face of a mocking satyr. I have not forgotten.

We drove for about twenty minutes, with no idea where we were going. Our warm breath misted up the windows. Michael talked about geology. In Texas people dig for water and suddenly an oil well gushes up instead. Perhaps there are untapped supplies of oil in Israel too. Michael said "lithosphere." He said "sandstone," "chalk bed." He said "Pre-Cambrian," "Cambrian," "metamorphic rocks," "igneous rocks," "tectonics." For the first time then I felt that inner tension which I still feel whenever I hear my husband talking his strange language. These words relate to facts which have meaning for me, for me alone, like a message transmitted in code. Beneath the surface of the earth, opposed endogenic and exogenic forces are perpetually at work. The thin sedimentary rocks are in a continuous process of disintegration under the force of pressure. The lithosphere is a crust of hard rocks. Beneath the crust of hard rocks rages the blazing nucleus, the siderosphere.

I am not absolutely certain that Michael used these exact words during that taxi ride, in Jerusalem, at night, in the winter of 1950. But some of them I heard from him for the first time that night, and I was gripped. It was like a strange, sinister message, which I could not decipher. Like an unsuccessful attempt to reconstruct a nightmare which has faded from memory. Elusive as a dream.

Michael's voice as he spoke these words was deep and restrained. The dashboard lights glared red in the darkness. Michael spoke like a man weighed down with a grave responsibility, as if accuracy was at that moment of supreme importance. If he had taken my hand and pressed it in his I should not have withdrawn it. But the man I loved was carried away on a subdued tide of enthusiasm. I had been wrong. He could be very strong when he wanted to be. Much stronger than I. I accepted him. His words lulled me into that mood of tranquillity which I experience after a siesta; the tranquillity of waking to twilight, when time seems soft and I am tender and things around are tender.

The taxi passed through drenched streets which we could not identify because the windows were misted up. The windshield wipers caressed the windshield. They beat in twin, steady rhythm, as if in obedience to some inviolable law. After twenty minutes' drive Michael told the driver to stop, because he was not rich and our trip had already cost him the price of five lunches in the student restaurant at the end of Mamillah Road.

We got out of the taxi in a place which was unfamiliar: a steep alleyway paved with dressed stones. The paving stones were rain-lashed, for in the meantime the rain had started again. A fierce wind beat at us. We walked slowly. We were soaked to the skin. Michael's hair was drenched. His face was amusing; he had the look of a crying child. Once he stretched out a single finger and wiped away a drop of rain which was clinging to the tip of my chin. Suddenly we were in the square in front of the Generali Building. A winged lion, a rain-soaked, frozen lion, gazed down on us from above. Michael was ready to swear that the lion was laughing under his breath.

"Can't you hear him, Hannah? Laughing! He's looking at us and laughing. And I for one am inclined to agree with him."

I said:

"Maybe it's a pity that Jerusalem is such a small city that you can't get lost in it."

Michael accompanied me along Melisanda Street, the Street of the Prophets, and then along Strauss Street, where the medical center is. We did not meet a living soul. It was as if the inhabitants had abandoned the city and left it to the two of us. We were lords of the city. When I was a child I used to play a game I called "Princess of the City." The twins acted the part of submissive subjects. Sometimes I made them act rebellious subjects, and then I would humble them relentlessly. It was an exquisite thrill.