Two She-Bears (12 page)

Then they looked at a field guide and together identified birds: warblers, rosefinches, and black-something, there is such a bird. I forget if it's a blacktail or blackback or blackbelly or blackhead.

“In a couple days he'll get used to us and eat from our hand,” Eitan said to Neta, just like he said to me on one of our hikes, before we were parents and it was just the two of us. Lucky I wasn't there with them; I would surely have upgraded his grammar, with that schoolteacher Hebrew I keep slipping into.

Toward evening, when the sun calmed down and no longer wanted to kill anyone, they went for a walk, to get to know the area and how it looked in this light, because “Tomorrow morning you won't recognize it, Neta, in the desert the landscape changes with the time of day.

“Come, I want to show you something,” he said to him. I so loved that sentence of his. Always, when he said, “Come, Ruta, I want to show you something,” there'd be something beautiful awaiting me, something funny, something good.

“Come, Neta, look. This is the hour when the sun is no longer strong and all kinds of animals start coming out to look for something to eat. Let's take water, and something to nosh, and the camera to take pictures of ourselves and the scenery, so we can show them to Mommy when we get back. Come, I'll lead us to the top of that hill over there, and you'll lead us back down here. So look around and remember how we go, because it'll get dark, and if you don't find the pickup and tent we'll have to stay in the desert forever.”

How do I know all this? The truth is, I don't, but I know enough to guess. I'm sure that Eitan repeated and emphasized what he would also tell me on hikes, that you have to turn your head around every so often, to see and remember what the path looks like in the other direction. He preferred circular routes, not the back-and-forth kind, but sometimes there's no choice and we have to retrace our steps, and trails look completely different going and coming.

“That's another thing I love about you,” he once said to me, “that I can take you twice on exactly the same walk, once in this direction and once in the other, and you think it's a new place you haven't been before. You're easy to please.”

They went. The two of them
yahdav.
Together. First in the wadi, and at a certain point they climbed diagonally to the top of the ridge. “To get to the ridge we have to go diagonally, Neta, the way animals do, and it's best to walk on their trail and not leave a new line of footprints.” I can recite that to you too, because I also hiked with him. “You climb at a diagonal, and you don't stand on the open ridge like a putz but a little lower down on the slope, because we don't want to be seen from kilometers away by someone who shouldn't see us.”

They went up, they sat down to look at the grand expanse and the red sun beyond it, and Eitan took a few more pictures, and that's how they turned out: pictures of evening and sunset, a feeling of farewell, as if the camera knew something they and I didn't. He took pictures of the two of them too, last pictures, rather dim, teeth and eyes gleaming in dark faces. I'm not imagining or guessing. I saw them. But only a few years later. Maybe I'll tell you sometime.

“Come, Neta, it's already dark, take us back to the tent,” and I figure that at that moment Neta placed his hand on the ground the way you put your hand when you get up from sitting on the ground, and on that very spot was the snake. This was the hour when they warm themselves on the rocks, which all day had been exposed to the sun, absorbing as much heat as possible before starting to hunt, and it bit him here, on the inside of his wrist, a place with big blood vessels close to the skin.

It was an adder. I know because adders live among the stones and rocks on the slopes, not like the ringed snakes and Persian vipers, which prefer the sand and pebbles of the wadi. All this I learned later, a little too late, I admit, but when they don't tell you anything you have to discover it for yourself, to research and to learn.

What a name, “adder,” in Hebrew
ef'ah.
In Hebrew there are snake names that sound like hissing—
shfifon
and
tzefa
and
saraf
and
ef'ah.
The generic word for snake,
nahash,
is like that too. I remind you that this happened in springtime, and the adder had only lately awoken from its hibernation. It sounds like a children's story, right? But that one I will not write. The adder woke up from his sleep, yawned, and stretched: Whom will I bite today? With glands full of poison and a belly full of hunger.

That's it. It took a quarter of a second. That's all. Neta Tavori, age six, bitten by an adder. A boy whose father had warned him about every possible danger, who drank enough water not to be dehydrated, who camouflaged the pickup truck lest someone notice it who shouldn't notice, and who climbed to the ridge at an angle so as not to leave new tracks and didn't stand there like a putz but sat down so as not to be seen. You get it? If he had climbed in a straight line and stood up straight on the ridge, all those imaginary enemies would have seen him, but he'd have been a few meters away from the snake and would not have put his hand on it and would not be dead.

He screamed. A scream of shock and pain. Eitan leaned over to him: “What happened, Neta? Did something scare you? Something hurts? Did something sting you? Where?” A flashlight went on. “Show me.” He saw the two fang marks, felt the trembling of the body, immediately understood, and immediately looked and found the snake. You understand? He wasted time finding and killing the snake and putting it in his pocket.

“You have to bring the snake to the hospital,” he later explained to Dovik, “so they can identify it and know what antidote to give.” But I don't buy it. Yes, it's standard procedure, but I know him too well. Forget the antidote. It was for revenge. It's stronger than he is, this automatic reaction, to kill anyone who harms a loved one, a family member, certainly his son. Not that I am arguing that the ten seconds it took to find the snake and smash its head with a rock would have saved Neta, but I can't not think about that possibility.

And so, with the dead snake in his pocket and the dying child in his arms, he ran down the slope and along the wadi back to the pickup. Neta at that time weighed twenty-seven kilos. I know that because I weighed and measured him every three months. I marked the height on the kitchen doorpost, and beside each mark I wrote the date and also his weight. Twenty-seven kilos for a boy of six and a half, a boy not especially tall and not at all fat—that's serious weight. A solid boy, Eitan used to say, a
shtarker
! And he would pat him the way you pat a calf, between the shoulder blades. That build, by the way, he inherited from my grandfather, but what difference does it make now? He's done enough damage. Rest in peace and please leave us alone, you and all the manly men in this family.

He ran. With the weight of Neta in his arms, in the darkness. But Eitan is Eitan: he does not stumble, does not get tired, does not lose his way, with those feet of his that can see in the dark. Running. Carrying and hugging. He got to the beautiful acacia he had chosen, lay Neta down on the ground, tore the tarp off the pickup, put the boy on the backseat. He then saw, by the inside light of the pickup, that blood was oozing from his nose and mouth and that the hand that was bitten was swollen and purple with blood under the skin. That's the bleeding you can see, but the worst bleeding is internal, in the heart and kidneys. He lowered the front seatback to hold him in place and took off like a madman, like only he knows how to drive, till he had phone reception and began making calls. Dovik, ambulance, police. Dovik, not me—that too I won't forgive. He reached the road, turned on the four emergency blinkers, poured out fuel from the jerrican, and lit a fire so that those who did need to see would indeed see.

He took Neta out of the pickup, and although he knew he was already dead, he set him down very slowly, protectively, on the ground. And then he collapsed alongside him because he had no more strength and he had nothing more to do and no reason to stand. Just to lie beside him and wait.

Meanwhile Dovik began to mobilize forces. They have these networks spread around the country, men who might not see one another for ten years, but when the network is activated it's high alert, phones are ringing, lights go on, maps and aerial photos are marked up, and the system is running, breathing, passing information, and giving orders. All this, by the way, comes under the heading of “Brothers-in-Arms,” but don't be confused, Varda, I already told you and I say so again: there's no real brotherhood here. They will rescue, they will pitch in, they will lend a hand—but it's another one of their games, squeezing out another spermy droplet of action and adventure. This isn't friendship the way we understand it, and I say this as a woman who doesn't have and never had and apparently never will have a true friend. That's why I'm pouring it all out to you, a woman who's basically a stranger. You think this is easy for me? It's not.

Whatever. What's important is that within a few minutes Dovik organized a helicopter, and when the helicopter arrived an old reservist from their unit was already waiting there, having arrived in his car from Moshav Paran, with a boy of twelve, thin as a rail with big ears, I know what he looked like because he came to Neta's funeral the next day. They got out of the car, the old man ran over to Eitan, and the boy didn't say a word but immediately found a landing area and marked it with light sticks, those green glowing things that guys like that always have on hand, as if he'd been doing it every night before bedtime since he was three. And when the helicopter landed, Eitan wasn't able to do anything; he lay beside Neta like a shroud that slipped off a corpse, and they piled him too onto a stretcher because he couldn't stand up. He had carried the dead weight of Neta while running in the dark for several kilometers on sand and pebbles and stones, but his own body he couldn't lift from the ground, even take a single step. The friend phoned Dovik that the helicopter was flying to Soroka hospital in Beersheba, and he should drive there, and contacted another friend in Omer to get there right away because he was the closest. He then went back home in his car, and the skinny kid with the big ears drove our pickup to his house, by himself, off the road in total darkness, because he didn't have a license.

I, at home, slept peacefully that whole time. I already told you: not only did I not have a premonition, all those stories about the telepathic mother who wakes up suddenly with the feeling that something happened to her child and it turns out that at that very moment—are not told about me. Maybe I am not as good a mother as they are, or maybe they are better than I am at making up stories. And when I suddenly woke up, it wasn't from a sense that something terrible had happened but because there was noise coming from Dovik's house. Lights went on, phones, I heard Dalia shouting, “Wake up Ruta. You have to wake up Ruta. Why me? You wake her up!” And as I jumped out of bed Dovik came in and said, “Ruta, I have something really terrible to tell you. Neta is dead.” And he added, “He was bitten by a snake.”

And there, in the morgue at Soroka, after a dreadful ride with Dovik and Dalia, which I would have rather spent in the trunk of the car, I saw my only son and my first husband for the last time. I don't want to talk about how I saw Neta, but I saw Eitan being questioned by a policewoman, talking to her like a robot and saying not a word to me. He didn't speak to me and didn't dare look at me.

I don't understand: how can a man lose his courage like that? But luckily he gave all the details to the doctors and the police and also spoke a little with Dovik, because a few hours later he shut down and there was no one to talk to. You understand? He did everything he could do to save Neta; he failed; like a loyal soldier he reported everything there was to report, like they do after a failed military operation; and that was it. He shut down and was no more.

I yelled at him, shoved him. “What happened? Tell me what happened!”

I hugged him. I shook him. I hit him. “Tell me how this happened! How could a thing like this happen?”

I scratched his face with my fingernails. I cried on his shoulder. “Tell me, you hear?”

He did not budge. My brain did not understand. Our mouths did not speak. His body said to my body: I am dead. And my body answered his body: I can feel it. But to myself I didn't say and my self didn't say to me that this was it, that this dead man would be my second husband.

That's the story. And the next day was the funeral, Neta was buried in the cemetery, and Eitan was buried inside himself. And after the funeral, on the orders of Grandpa Ze'ev, he began hard labor at the nursery, did not speak anymore to anyone, also not to me, slept in what had been Neta's room, and it was clear that this was it, that life was over. So it went for twelve years, until one day, suddenly, right after Grandpa Ze'ev died, something happened and he began to come back to life.

I was surprised. I thought that Grandpa Ze'ev's death would finish him off for good, because they were strongly tied to each other, and Grandpa Ze'ev was the only one who knew how to treat him after the disaster—male treatment, simple, cruel, but treatment that succeeded. He worked him at the nursery at the hardest and most basic jobs, carrying and dragging and moving things and standing guard at night, and that was what kept him going in life—if you can call it that—my grandfather's therapy and the connection with him. Not the friendship with Dovik and not the army buddies, and it pains me to say so but also not love and life with me. Twelve years of silence and hard labor, and then Grandpa died and Eitan returned. Not a hundred percent, I'm also not the same Ruta I was before Neta died, but he returned. To me and to himself.

The first thing I thought, after my shouting and screaming that the whole moshava could hear, was: God, I do not want any more children by this man. And later I thought: And if by chance I am pregnant now, please make it a girl.

God did not answer, but I knew he was listening. I urged and prodded him: You can, God, you can. And I also translated it into his language, so he would understand better: “Shall anything be beyond the Lord's power?” In third-person honorific, so he'd be pleased. And apparently I convinced him, because one week later, Aunt Ruby came to visit. I think I'm smiling, and if so it's because of you. You don't need to write down the name Aunt Ruby. She's not a relative of ours and she's not a character in the history of the Yishuv. “Aunt Ruby” was one of the many nicknames for my period. And this one was a period the likes of which I never had, a flood. And with pains and symptoms that till then I'd only heard about from other women. As if God were explaining to me that the world as he designed it was still functioning, that the sun was rising and setting and the moon waxing and waning, and so too my body, which informed me that even with all the anguish over one child who died, it was thinking about the next children. But for the next children I needed a guy. Aunt Ruby arrived, left, returned, left, and I stayed here with my dead son and my living-dead man, who from then on did not talk to me or smile at me or cook for me or touch me or make me laugh. He did only what my grandfather told him to do—he loaded and moved and stacked and unloaded, and everything was heavy and everything was slow—but I, every time I saw him, I saw a person running. It was clear to me that inside his body he was running. Running with the child in his arms, hugging and carrying, from Neta's scream to his last breath. One step and another, one year and another, twelve death anniversaries he didn't take part in, twelve birthdays which I marked alone, twelve Passover seders without Neta and without his father, who sat by himself in the nursery and smoked, ignoring the matzo balls and gefilte fish that I brought out to him the way you bring leftovers to a dog tied outside, and hundreds of my visits, without him, to the cemetery, and one long wait, not for Neta, I knew Neta would not come back. I waited for Eitan to return.

Look at me
—I watched him from the window—I'm here. Smile at me, come back to me. Come back and we'll come back, comely man of mine. I already told you I prefer the word
ishi,
“my man,” and I also told you the reasons, but there's one more reason, you'll laugh, and it's the sound and look, which Eitan loved so much, of the letter
shin
coming from my lips. I never imagined that someone would want to know how a certain consonant emerged from the mouth of his beloved, and never thought that my
shin
was different from other women's. But Eitan was a meticulous guy and got down to details in every area that interested him.

I remember: One day, I was in my eighth month, a Friday afternoon, a sweet moment, we were sitting in bed, Eitan and I and Neta in my belly. And suddenly he said, “Soon he'll come out and we won't ever be just the two of us naked in bed. We'll be father and mother and baby, so I want to take advantage of still being just us and do something important.”

“Whatever you say,” I said, because after sentences like that very nice things would always happen.

“I want you to go over the letters with me one by one because I want to see how each one changes your face when you say it. Say
alef,
and
bet—ah, bah—
and
dalet, dah, di, doh
…”

He didn't ask for
gimel
or
het,
because they do nothing to the face, and
nun
is ugly and makes you ugly, so he said. Then we got to
shin,
almost at the end of the alphabet, and he started to test it out with all kinds of words and sounds: “Say ‘shalom,' and say ‘Shimshon,' and say
ashasheet,
say the number
shishim v'shesh,
and the hour three thirty-eight,
shalosh shloshim u'shmoneh.
” I did whatever he asked, and he looked at me but wasn't satisfied until I said, “Just a second, Eitan, I have to sneeze,
ani mit'ateshet.
” And he said, “That's it! The
shin
of
mit'ateshet
makes you the most beautiful and the most
you.
From now on, say the word
mit'ateshet
whenever possible. And do it in front of the mirror.”

It was a summer day. There was a popping sound outside—the pods of the lupine plants that Grandpa had spread out in the sunlight on the concrete floor. He did this every year, explaining that lupine seeds needed a decent dose of summer sunshine so they could sprout fully later on. I remember those sounds well, the popping of the pods, the pinging of the seeds flying out, the soft and hard noises of their cracking open.

I said, “So this is love? Sneezing all day long?”

He laughed. “You just have to say it, not do it. That's the lovely thing about language, a word can be more beautiful and true than what it describes.”

I was taken aback. I had no idea that he had thoughts like this in his head.

“You're funny,” I told him.

And let me tell you, he really was funny. One day, a new guy from Tel Aviv came into the nursery, one of those city types who move here and right away want to plant a vegetable garden and raise chickens. He wanted to buy seeds and saplings, tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, and so on, and asked if they were organic. Eitan told him that it's not the seeds that are organic but the way you raise the vegetables afterward.

“What does that mean?” asked the customer. “What do I have to do?”

“It's very simple,” Eitan told him. “Ordinary vegetables are sprayed during the day and organic vegetables are sprayed at night.”

Dovik said, “Our Eitan is so funny that you can't always tell when he's joking and when he's clowning.” Sometimes even my blockhead of a brother comes up with a good one. And he would always say, “our Eitan,” and not just “Eitan” or “your Eitan.”

Let's go back to the
shin.
Eitan took out his camera, and over and over I had to say the word he liked so he could take my picture saying it again and again, and as a result I am the only woman in the world who has naked pictures of herself, with an eight-month belly, saying “sneeze” and bursting with laughter. And all this because, as I told you before, I am a mother without premonitions. I did not know then that the child I had in my belly would die at the age of six and a bit. Six,
shesh,
two
shins
of my lips and teeth and tongue.

It was also written up in the newspaper, but not six and a bit and not six and a half but six exactly. And not the word but the number, “Neta Tavori” with 6 in parentheses, “bitten to death by a snake.” And below, in smaller letters: “Tragedy in the Desert. A boy found his death on a hike with his father.” What a strange expression, “found his death.” Because it's death that finds the victim and not the other way around. That's the expertise of the Angel of Death, no? Learn the map coordinates, routes, navigation; getting there, finding the place, remembering addresses. But no, insists the Hebrew language. Death walks behind us for our whole lives. Follows and seeks and draws near, and now, we found it. This is a language that knows and remembers things that we don't want to know or that we forgot long ago. Okay, let's drop it, Varda, before I cry so much I'll start laughing.