The Lion Seeker (63 page)

Sometimes she would ready herself to go out and by the time she reached the bedroom door she wasn't feeling well again and had to lie down. Other times she might make it outside, walking with her hair combed nicely and still moist, her dress clean and bright, hanging on her thinned frame, her once strong hand now bony and dry as desiccated fruit curled around the handles of her carrying bag. She would feel how good the fresh air was on her face and how good the heat of the sun, and how fine its vivid light looked on the faces of the people and the buildings. She could smell the petrol of the cars and hear the chinging of the bicycle bells. Then the smell of the fish on ice from Sidelovitz the fishmonger as she passed, and then the feel of the rough grain of the carrots and the pumpkins, growing things of the earth, still with the red sand clinging to their crannies, from the grocery stand two doors farther down. Those times, feeling as well as she ever had, she would smile at people who greeted her. They were always more friendly to her than was natural and instead of
How are you?
they asked her
How are you feeling these days Mrs. Helger?
and she would tell them fine, I'm fine. And they would touch her, sometimes, and tell her she was going to be all right. And when she went on she could sense the fear in their looking after her, in their low talking. She knew too that some avoided her, ran from her. She had become more than just a human being; she was also a kind of living symbol for what the world can do to you without excuse or warning, an object of dread contemplation.

But those times out in the street, walking without pain, she would know that she really was all right and of course was going to continue to be all right and how stupid it was of people to even have to think to wish her otherwise. The idea of dying then was as remote and ridiculous as some rumour about someone else. The illness somehow had nothing to do with her, it was as if all of those medical ordeals, those visits in doctors' offices and hospital wards, had happened to another person and she had watched
that
woman go through it with bored detachment, it didn't mean
her
, the real Gitelle, of course not. Not the strong unpained healing woman walking in the now through the colours and motions of her home street as she always had. Even if they think they are right, I am the expert of me and they are wrong. Look at everything I have been through in this life and survived and I am still here. Still a young woman!

But then The Pain would come and all would change. If she was on the street when she started to feel it she would have to turn around and hurry home; but sometimes on the way home she would get better again and turn back for the shops. Sometimes the badness would reappear, and once more she'd turn for home. It could go on like that, back and forth switching her directions, five or six or seven times. Such was the sadistic way of this cowardly sideways disease, creeping, scuttling, named rightly after a crab with its method of rushing out of a hole to ambush, with awful pinching claws. Or else Gitelle might think of a cat and how it played with a captive bird. Allowing her the illusion of hopping to freedom before pouncing; chewing a limb and letting her go once more.

Because when The Pain hit fully it was so brutal and so large she could scarcely believe such a depth of hurt possible. A pain that throbbed barbed and electric, stinging and bruising at the same time, a pain through every part of her, even into the jelly of her very eyeballs, and twisting alive in the capsules of every joint and sawing like a demented madman with a blunt saw at every sinew and artery and corpuscle so that even with the morphine tablets given her still she cried out, the tears squeezed from her crumpled face as if she was a child again, her pride gone.

At those times there was no question of death bypassing her—she was being torn out of her life in its jaws, shaken and pierced without mercy. At such times she had more than once whispered to Abel to give her a lethal dose, to end it. But he would not, because once the pain had eased she would be up again, soon making the old jokes with the customers in the workshop, asking how they were, how their children were doing.

But all this time—pain or no pain—she would not relent in her refusal to see Isaac. All her life Isaac had been a part of her, the best part, the part that shone out into a better future, and she would never have believed that any force on earth could have succeeded in amputating him from her, at least not without also destroying her. Yet she had done this very thing to herself and, more than that, though she dearly wanted to undo it and make things as they were before, she found it impossible. It wasn't that she had to dwell on her sisters or put their memories together with the pictures in her mind of what must have happened to them in order to drum up outrage and anguish; wasn't that she felt cindering anger against Isaac, not at all. It was more basic, almost physical: she simply could not see him. A part of her would not allow her even to try. Maybe she couldn't begin to face what he was. Maybe because facing what he had done to her would force her into facing what she had done to herself, since she knew she was responsible for making him into the man that he was—and that he had done it in his own way
for her
. He was the fruit that she had borne and now that she had found out that the fruit was full of poison she did not wish to bite it or even look at it ever again. What did it say about her? She would never know because she would not admit him back into her life.

So she went on not seeing her son and feeling well and strong sometimes and feeling agony and imminent death at others and only a little time passed before all of it came to a quick end.

 

Gitelle died on a Tuesday, in the afternoon. She had taken some radishes and a boiled egg for her lunch and was on her way back to the sewing room when she'd felt the stirring of the illness and gone to the bedroom instead and taken some of her tablets and lain down on the bed. The curtains were drawn and it was dim but still she put a cloth over her eyes so that she might have complete darkness. It was twenty minutes to three. From the workshop she could hear the faint sounds of Abel mending broken time, the whirr of his lathe not unlike her own sewing machine's. She expected the doorbell to jingle and wondered who might come in next, Mrs. Cooper or that Berkowitz she had never liked. These thoughts she knew were distractions because the deeper part of her was bracing herself for an attack of The Pain. The waiting for The Pain and the fear of its return were in some ways even more exhausting than the attack itself. Behind her closed eyelids under the cloth she began to pray, and this time she used a line from a prayer that she had not thought of in years, yet it floated into her mind now like a snatch of a song she could not stop replaying. She heard again how the men at the synagogue in Dusat used to sing it, almost baying it to the heavens.
Kudosh, kudosh, kudosh. Adonai Tsevaot
. Holy holy holy is the Lord of Hosts. Quite suddenly she felt herself begin to die. She knew it was happening now. She was grateful that there was no pain. She wondered if she would try to cry out so that Abel could come to her but she didn't think she would be able to and she lay still and memories rose through her like a silvered rush of bubbles ascending through dark waters. She saw the face of her father Zalman, the pious butcher with his sad black eyes. She saw herself again on the cart with little Rively and Isaac leaving Dusat for the train station at Obeliai and how Isaac wanted to stand up on the luggage and she kept having to turn around and make him sit down. She saw Branka the Shabbos maid in the kitchen chopping onions to throw into the stewpot on the pripachik and all of her sisters at the long table with their father at the head. She saw Dvora combing her long straight hair the colour of autumn leaves and Orli's gulping laugh, her head going backwards. And she saw Abel coming up the path that day to see her when the sky was as blue as fresh paint and deeper than any ocean with a cold wind off the lake going into the green pines and making them hiss and creak, Abel limping but resolute, refusing to use a stick, and she was standing at the window next to the front door in her good dress with a bow, her hands touching her veil, and watching him come to see her and wondering in herself if he was really the man for her, studying him so carefully as if a vital clue might appear. And then the memories of what had happened to her that seventeenth day of April also burbled up through her, and she saw herself and felt an immense pang of pity, a deep piteous sadness as the hands tore at her, as her blood poured out.

But then she was realizing that she was apart from all of these memories and they seemed no longer real, and in place of what she thought was the mass and solidity of her self came only a feeling of emptiness and space. The memories were more and more distant. They were no longer bubbles in dark waters but tiny particles of dust in a vastness of space. It was as if there was nothing inside of her that was real, only this empty space through which the dust of a few sensations was quickly drifting, fading, while the space kept growing more and more vast, the fading dust more tiny and distant. She had nothing solid in her, nothing to endure or hold on to, she was dispersing, dispersing. There was a prick of panic then and she spoke to herself. I don't understand, she said. No one told me. She wanted to throw off the cloth on her eyes but she couldn't. Then she had the strange powerful feeling that a baby was on her breast, healthy and warm. My Yitzchok, she thought. And she knew that she had to see him, Isaac. Had to forgive him, nothing was more important, how could she have forgotten, why had she not seen him and told him this, why? When forgiveness was the one solid act that could have endured.

She exerted herself mightily.

Slowly her head lifted, her shoulders.

She said, I have to live long enough to see Isaac once more.

Her hand shifted a little towards the cloth then she felt heavy and fell back, back, and died, her head twisting and her mouth lolling wide open so that when Abel came later to look in on her the first thing he saw in the dim light of that curtained room was that angled gape so rigid-looking and frightful that it stabbed him with horror through his heart, the face of his wife twisted towards one of the bedposts so that he knew she was gone even before he'd crossed to her with three of his limping steps.

OF COURSE IT HAD BEEN IMPOSSIBLE
for Rively to see her mother before she died as all during the month of May there was war in the Holy Land; the British had withdrawn and Arab armies moved in fast to eliminate the state of Israel in its cradle. Rively was evacuated with her two children, Shulamit and Ezra, from her kibbutz, Kfar Etzion, but Yankel stayed on. The kibbutz was overrun by the Arab Legion, using armoured cars and artillery. A hundred Jewish fighters put down their weapons and surrendered; the Arabs machine-gunned them, used grenades to finish off survivors. Wounded, Yankel Bernstein crawled into a culvert. He watched the legs of the soldiers passing not two feet from his sweating face. At nightfall he escaped. It was another week before he found his way back to Rively and she was able to try to get to South Africa.

Though Jews bury their dead quickly, Abel delayed the funeral to give her the time to fly down. She found him mourning alone, still refusing to see Isaac in honour of his late wife's wishes. She told him unless Isaac came to the funeral she would not herself attend. So Abel relented and Rively told Isaac to come.

 

It was a sweet and pleasant Johannesburg day, bright and cool. The sycamore trees shed their whirling seeds to the fresh wind and Abel came early with Rively for some private prayers at the West Park Cemetery near Northcliff in the northern suburbs, towards whose peaceful spaces Gitelle had always craved. He had dressed in a black suit and fitted a big cupping black yarmulke under his hat. When the car with Rively came he picked up a pocket watch, a beautiful gold instrument on which he had engraved Gitelle's name, and the time on it was set to seventeen minutes past four, to the moment when he had looked in on her and found this most vital of women transformed into a corpse. The first thing he'd done was to gently roll her head back to the centre, then he'd lifted it so that her jaw closed and he'd puffed the pillow and settled the head higher to keep it that way.

Now Rively parked at the cemetery and they walked up to the graveside on a path through the white headstones, a slight incline that Rively wanted to help him with, but he pushed her arm off and stabbed his walking stick and limped firmly all the way up on his own. The grave was dug: beside it stood a wide mound of red soil with three long-handled shovels stuck in it like flagpoles. In the near distance, the workers—Blacks in blue overalls with woollen caps—were sitting under oak trees, quietly talking and smoking.

Abel looked into the grave, the open rectangle rimmed by grass and a frame of steel tubes with winches at the corners. He saw the soil was muddy and waterlogged at the very bottom and he had a terrible feeling in his body of how it would be for her down there in the cold wet clay, the blackness covering her bones, the worms gnawing through the wood to find her rotting flesh. He imagined himself being in the coffin, thought that if he had been given the choice he would have switched places with her; she had loved life more than he, she had suffered more also, let her have the years ahead.

Abel took out a small siddur, a daily prayer book, and holding it with both hands against his sternum, he began to rock and to recite the mourner's Kaddish. He prayed as he always did, concentrating on each word as if it were the smallest broken cog in a tiny wristwatch. As he sometimes did, he felt what he thought of as the voice of God underneath his own, a divine whisper, an intimation of formless harmony that opened a prickling down the back of his neck. He prayed to God to grant mercy on Gitelle's soul and to give him strength to endure the grief for this day, also to help him to make sholem—peace—between himself and his son.