Two She-Bears (16 page)

“So what did they send me from home in the wagon?” Grandpa Ze'ev would quiz me and Dovik when we were little. And we were supposed to answer him in rhymes that he composed: “A rifle and cow / A stone and a plow / A mulberry tree / And Grandma for me.” The mulberry tree, by the way, he loved no less than he loved Grandma, and out of love he didn't plant it in the ground but left it in the barrel it came in and on the same wagon, and everywhere he rode, so he told us, he rode with his tree.

And the mulberry grew and grew, and grew and grew, until what happened? “What happened, Dovik? Ruta? What happened, Neta?”

The roots of the mulberry tree burst through the barrel, and Grandpa Ze'ev filled the whole wagon with earth, and so the wagon became a giant flowerpot on wheels, and Grandpa Ze'ev and his tree continued to go out to work together. The magnificent ox pulled the wagon, and when they got to the field it was harnessed to the plow, and Grandpa plowed and planted and seeded, and at lunchtime he lay in the shade of his tree and ate and rested: “I ate what Grandma Ruth prepared for me, and for dessert I had berries from the tree, I cut grass for the ox and piled it up for him, I gave his poop to the tree, and the ox pulled it and me in the wagon. That's how families are.”

Ultimately the mulberry grew so big that even two pairs of oxen couldn't pull the wagon, and the wagon itself began to fall apart from the pressure of the roots and weight of the tree and wetness of the soil.

“And what happened then, Dovik? And what happened then, Ruta? And what happened then, Neta?”

“Grandpa dug a long deep hole at the edge of the yard, the oxen pulled, he pushed, the wagon went into the hole.”

“And what happened then, Dovik, Ruta, Neta?”

Grandpa Ze'ev released the oxen, and they climbed out with their harnesses; he removed the wagon shafts and covered the wagon with a lot of dirt. That's it, that's how he planted the mulberry tree in the yard and how it became our big mulberry tree today, which looks as if it was there forever, as if it hadn't come to Grandpa Ze'ev and been planted in his yard, but instead that Grandpa Ze'ev came to it and decided to build a house in its shade. But we knew it came in a wagon, which was buried beneath it, and Dovik—who was a very active child and wanted to make an impression on other children and also to make money, so he said, to buy plane tickets and visit our mother in America—kept nagging Grandpa to dig out the wagon and attach it to a tractor instead of an ox so we could ride in the shade of the tree as he had in his younger years and maybe sell tickets to people who wanted a ride. But Grandpa Ze'ev said that the wagon was already completely rotted away, and even if it wasn't, the roots of the tree had already pushed through the bottom and stuck way deep into planet Earth. That's what he said—“stuck deep into planet Earth”—not into our yard or the land of the moshava.

Eventually, when Eitan showed up and joined the family and heard the story about the mulberry tree that rode in the wagon, he went to the carpentry shop of an old army buddy and came back with a small wagon, about eighty centimeters long, a precise model of an old farmer's wagon, with rubber wheels and tall sides. He filled it with dirt, planted a lemon sapling, and said we should manufacture and sell these in all sizes with different kinds of trees.

The idea was that one could move the trees from place to place in a garden and change its appearance every day, but Dovik said, “It won't work. People don't like it when their trees move from place to place. It gives them a bad feeling.”

He was right. It's enough that we move, we are shaken, pulled, shoved. Trees must stay in place and bestow confidence and calm. And I tell you all this, Varda, because our family can be described not only by the seeds and flowers from Grandpa Ze'ev's wadi but also through its trees. Not the tens of thousands of poor little saplings at the Tavori Nursery, with roots yearning to break free from their black bags, wondering, Who will buy and raise me? Who will eat my fruit? Who will sit in my shade? I don't mean the trees we sell, but the three truly important trees: Grandpa's big carob in his wadi, in whose shade he taught us about plants and under which he died. The good and beautiful acacia in the Negev, in whose shade my man and my son camped on the trip from which they did not return. And the big mulberry, under which nobody has died as yet, except for Eitan's cold
poikehs,
which sat on the chilly ground for twelve years and came back to life after Grandpa Ze'ev died.

Three big trees. Size matters. Big trees help people relax. It's the thickness and strength of the trunk, the shade and security and serenity of the scene, the whisper of the wind in the branches, which even in a storm sway slowly—such is the calm and beauty of the natural landscape. I won't take you to the carob and the acacia, but you can see the mulberry through the window. Turn around and look. You see?

By the way, you can also see it clearly in the aerial photograph on the wall behind you. Get up a moment, Varda, come, I want to show you something. Here, you see the dedication on the photo? “To Teacher Ruta, who taught me everything, I want you to teach me more.” This is a present from Ofer, the son of the neighbors, Haim and Miri Maslina. My beloved student, who almost drowned from that bet about swimming underwater in the Kinneret. He started taking pictures when he was about bar mitzvah age, and when he finished high school he put together a wonderful exhibit that counted toward his matriculation exam. Everyone called it “the exhibit of aerial photographs of the moshava,” but Ofer called it “God Looking at Our Moshava and Thinking Thoughts.” I remember how he took those pictures. A friend of Haim's took him up in a motorized paraglider every day for a week, and all day long he took pictures from different heights and at different angles of the sun, street by street, house by house, plot by plot of land, yard by yard, and the noise of the motor overhead drove the whole moshava crazy.

“Maybe shoot him the way you used to shoot the jaybirds?” Dovik suggested to Grandpa Ze'ev. But Grandpa for some reason surprised us all and didn't shoot him, and Ofer kept taking pictures. He had the prints made in the city and had them framed with captions that also annoyed everyone concerned, in other words the whole moshava without exception.

About us, in case you're interested, he wrote: “The Tavori Family. Vast floods cannot quench, the earth cannot cover up, memory will not be swallowed in the abyss.” I asked him, “How do you know that? Where did you get that language?” And he said: “From you, Teacher Ruta,” and he made me this print and gave it to me with that dedication. What a boy he was, so different from that family of his, wretched people generation after generation. So you see? This house, the one you and I are sitting in right now, was Grandpa Ze'ev's house, and that one is Dovik and Dalia's house, and that one is the house that was mine and Eitan's. Dalia wanted to rent out Grandpa's house, but Dovik and I refused. We don't want strangers wandering around on our property. One day it'll belong to one of Dovik and Dalia's twins, Dafna or Dorit, whichever of them gets married first. The husband has yet to appear, no one knows his name or his face, but Dovik hates him already, because he, unlike Eitan, will not change his family name to ours, and the House of Tavori will become the house of who the hell knows.

And here's Grandpa Ze'ev's old storage shed, which Ofer wrote was the “subconscious” of the other houses of the Tavori family and perhaps the whole moshava, and not long ago, after Grandpa Ze'ev died, we tore it down, and Eitan poured a new concrete floor and built a new storage shed, which isn't the subconscious of anything, just as a shed should be. And this is the area of the hedges and vines of the nursery, and there the spices and medicinal plants, and there are the seedlings of the vegetables and all the equipment you need to create a flowerbed.

Do we also have orchids? You want to buy some? I knew it. I knew that not only the Tavori family but also your family is hiding a terrible secret, and now, in a moment of indiscretion, it comes out. Just as we've begun to develop a kind of intimacy, it suddenly turns out, Varda, that you love orchids. So you should know that from the perspective of the Tavori family and the Tavori Nursery this amounts to a declaration of war. This is our red line. If there is one plant that we all agree is unbearable, it's orchids. Even Dalia can't stand orchids, though it would be just like her to love them. I'm not talking about Grandpa Ze'ev's cute little wild orchids, which no one wants to buy anyway, but orchid-orchids. The most plastic, kitschy, pampered, nouveau-riche, pretentious, arrogant, show-offy, love-me, alien plant there is.

I remember what Grandpa Ze'ev said to Eitan after we told him we were getting married, and he began giving him instructions in advance of his joining us. Among other things he said, “Three types of dreck will not enter our nursery—orchids, bonsai, and the people who grow them.” He also couldn't stand cactuses but didn't make a big deal about it. Bonsai are those Japanese dwarf trees. I told you before that trees need to be big? So these are the littlest trees possible. They take a seedling, plant it in a pot that's too small, like they used to bind the feet of Chinese women, and the pot doesn't let it develop and makes it look like an old distorted dwarf, and I'm sure that it's not just the pot, that they abuse it in other ways. So because of the suffering of these trees and the sadists who grow them, we don't want plants and people like these around here. It's true that a fair number of customers are interested in them, but we don't want in our nursery a tree that some Dr. Mengele of botany experimented on. Not here.

Here's the domain of Dovik, the office of the nursery. Nothing grows there, but it's the most important place. My being able to chat with you about wildflowers and mulberries and big versus little trees is all because of the office. Dovik, despite Grandpa's teaching, isn't really interested in flowers and plants or nature in general. But he's the one who does our big business, and big business is not Grandpa Ze'ev's cyclamens and squills and poppies and not Eitan's
poikeh
club and not the petunias and periwinkles and vegetables we sell to private customers. It's the decorative trees and landscaping of the squares and boulevards of the cities and regional councils—and Dovik handles all this skillfully and successfully.

In this corner behind the office, you can see a shower and toilet for the staff and another for customers and the tool and equipment shed of the nursery. Here's the outdoor storage: flagstones, patio stones, tufa, gravel, flowerpots and planters, poles and netting. And what are those? Are those people? From high up it's not immediately clear. Most of them are customers, but that one I think is Dalia, coming back from work and going to the office to make sure that no daughter of Pharaoh is pulling her husband, and this strange creature, hard to make out at this angle, is Eitan, hugging a barrel with a seedling and carrying it to this truck. That is what Grandpa Ze'ev sentenced him to do and that is what Eitan wanted: punishment. Prison with hard labor, with no time off for good behavior and no reduction in sentence or granting himself a pardon. That's what he looked like then and that's what he did for twelve years. At most he would sometimes take it easy by weeding or, to be exact, eradicating. For hours. He would get down on all fours and start to crawl through the whole nursery, crawling and uprooting every evil weed, eradicating without mercy. Making very slow progress, and the ground, which had been dressed up and dotted in green, was left brown and bloodied, naked and bare.

That is what he did until my grandfather died. And then something happened, as if someone blew on the dirt and an old ember suddenly came to life, glowing red, a tongue of flame, a tiny finger, flickering, catching fire.

At Neta's funeral I screamed only once. That was when the old man from Eitan and Dovik's unit arrived, the one with the skinny kid with the big ears who guided the helicopter landing on the road and drove our pickup truck to their house in Paran. Now they brought us the pickup. The old friend went over to Dovik, a brief ritual of hugs and backslaps, and gave him the keys.

I'd never seen this man before in my life. I hadn't seen him and never heard of him before the disaster; he also wasn't one of Eitan's or Dovik's buddies, but much older. But he drove the whole way up from the Arava to return the pickup and attend the funeral. And his wife, with this strange kid—a son? grandson? maybe he too, like Dovik and me, was raised by his grandparents?—drove behind him in their car all the way from their home in the Arava to take him back down south afterward, and they also brought two cartons of vegetables to eat during the shiva. But I, when I saw him handing the pickup keys to Dovik, attacked him without realizing what I was doing. It was awful. You have no idea how sorry I am over that. I screamed at him in front of everyone, “How can you be so organized? How come you're so efficient, and find your way everywhere in the dark without getting lost, and you bring and organize and help, so how is it that by you everything is so hunky-dory, but it was by you that my son happened to die? You should all go to hell! How does a thing like this happen?”

The skinny boy came over immediately, stood, and stared at me with his cold pale eyes, and the man, who was about sixty, sixty-five, with tiny little sapphire eyes, thick gray hair as curly as steel wool, a small wiry body, sunburned and tough as an old work boot, who had not known of me previously and saw Neta for the first time only as a dead child, gave me a good look and said nothing, and Dovik, who felt a need to help out, went over and said to him, “Niso, I'd like you to meet my sister, Ruta, who is also Eitan's wife.” And to me he said, “Ruta, this is Niso, an officer from the unit.” In other words—Know before whom you stand. Here was another of their Lords of Hosts, a rider through the deserts.

But this Niso, as if we had known each other for years, simply took me aside and said, “Ruta, for heaven's sake, I'm a friend, I'm just trying to help…” And I stopped yelling and cursing and I started to cry: “So why didn't you help before? Why didn't you make sure to warn them there was a snake like that over there, why didn't you kill it? You live there, you know every wadi and stone, you must also know all the animals.”

I saw Dovik gesturing to him to let me be, that I would soon calm down, but what he did was hug me, which was pretty funny because I was a head taller than him. Whatever. At the cemetery I behaved just fine. I exploited my talent for holding my breath underwater, and also a technique I developed when our mother handed Dovik and me to Grandpa Ze'ev and went off to America: I gave myself secret stage directions, clear, curt instructions. At first in the imperative—Stand, Sit—and then the wording of a professional dramatist writing about herself: She smiles, She sighs, She waves goodbye, She wipes a tear. And just as I didn't fall apart then, when my mother left her children, I didn't fall apart at the funeral of my child, who left his mother. In this family we don't fall apart.

It so happened that one of the first directions I gave myself was not to walk beside Eitan. To be precise, I didn't direct myself to walk beside him, and so it went. We walked separately. People noticed, how could they not? Whoever heard of such a thing, that a couple who had lost a child, a young couple, a small child, an only child, would not walk together behind the coffin? We were spaced out, literally and figuratively, distant and apart. Not only that, but Grandpa and Dovik walked with Eitan, and Dalia, dripping with symbolism, walked beside me. I noticed that people noticed, and whispered, and I knew it would be discussed in the moshava well into the future, the Tavori family supplying them all with yet another story.

And later, at the grave, the clods of earth knocking like clichés on the coffin, I gave myself additional direction: not to fall on the ground, not to collapse, not to scream the way you always see at funerals in Israel. But Eitan, apparently, did not give himself direction and did fall. He didn't scream, that he did later; but he did collapse.

They picked him up, sat him down on a chair. They expected me to take care of him. But I didn't give myself that direction. Instead I directed myself to go over to that Niso and apologize to him and I even smiled: “This won't happen at the next funeral. I promise you.” That's how it is in our family. We are also able to smile. Even to laugh and make others laugh.

So, alone and spaced apart, Eitan and I heard the clods of earth falling onto the lid of the coffin, and the strangled sound of Neta's blood crying out from inside it, and the weeping of so many people, and the eulogy of his first-grade teacher, who spoke about what was “folded up within him”—the butterfly wings that would never open, never spread, those were her words, and we would never know what might have been.

I found myself silently correcting her Hebrew grammar, the word “wings” being feminine not masculine. What's become of you, Ruta, you teacher you, unable to restrain yourself. But that, after all, is what will be imagined and pondered for years to come: the wings that will never be spread. Where would they have carried him? On what winds would he glide? To what heights would he soar? Where would he land? Put down roots and blossom? Years later I had an odd habit—I would see around me the girlfriends he might have had, in the schoolyard, at the bus stop, in the library, at the beach. Once I even saw his wife crossing my field of vision for a moment: tall like me, with low-waisted pants and a shocking belly shirt, so revealing that I could see the faint glow of the hundreds of thousands of eggs that gilded her lower abdomen, some of which—four? three?—would become grandsons and granddaughters of other grandmothers.

But at the time I heard only the hoe in the mound of earth, the raking sound, the falling and knocking, which I heard as if I were lying with him in the coffin; I heard it and gave myself direction: Stand up straight, lips sealed, don't look behind you. Not even when Eitan, who stood a few steps behind me and didn't give himself direction, suddenly fell like a toppled tree.

As I told you: everyone expected that his wife would go over and take care of him, but I didn't even look at him. Not there, beside the grave, and not on the way back home, and not under the tarp that friends had already put up to shade our front lawn. The plastic chairs were arranged, refreshments placed on the tables, and the comforters approached the mother, namely me, who sat under the big mulberry tree—Too bad this happened at Passover and not later in the spring when we could've served you all buckets of mulberries, it occurred to me, in between my brain spasms and clenched throat—and then they wanted to approach the father too, but he was not to be found, because he went off to a far corner of the nursery and paced around until he disappeared in a maze of vines, where he started to scream, more precisely to bellow, a hideous, horrible bellowing.

No one dared approach him, as if a wounded ox or bereaved bear were hidden in the foliage. Everyone kept looking at the mother, waiting for her to say or do something, and she just smiled with exhaustion. “Let him yell, it can only help.” And when I said that he reappeared, crawling out from under the bushes.

Everyone was frightened, but Grandpa Ze'ev stood up and went to him and held out a hand and said, “Get up from the ground, Eitan. Get up.” And in a whisper that only I heard, because I knew what he would say and my ears were already attuned for the exact words, he added, “A man must not fall like that and scream like that in front of everyone. You hear? Not in our family. Get up!”

That night I wrote down that scene in one of my notebooks. I still remember a few lines by heart: “The father rose heavily. Gone was the spring in his step. Gone were his lightheartedness, his carelessness, his quickness to act. From now on the body will burden the spirit, and the spirit the body. The weight of sin, the weight of disaster, the weight of his dead son—how heavy are the dead—he will carry on his back forever.”

In normal language, Varda, Eitan gave his hand to Grandpa Ze'ev and walked after him like a toddler, straight to the shower I showed you in Ofer's aerial photos. Eitan had built the shower a few years earlier and screened it off with bamboo and installed hot and cold water faucets and hooks for clothes and towels and equipped it with sponges and brushes—a small brush to remove mud from under fingernails and a brush with a long handle for the back—and a laundry basket and a small bench to sit on together, the togetherness of naked men after a day of work, how good and pleasant to curl and spread their toes, to drink cold beer and dry off in the breeze.

“And the grandfather,” I wrote, “without turning his head, ordered his granddaughter to bring clean work clothes. Whether it was because she was accustomed to obeying him, and maybe out of curiosity, and maybe because she didn't want to argue in front of the crowd of comforters, which kept growing and swarming, a storming monster of goodwill—she did as he said. And when she brought the clothes he had requested, she saw that he had already gone with her husband behind the bamboo partition and she quickly followed them.”

Eitan stood with his back bent and head drooping, one hand on the shoulder of Grandpa Ze'ev, who sat beside him on the milking stool, which till today, years after Grandpa sold off the last cow, we still call the
taburetka
in Russian like the day it arrived in the wagon with the woman and the tree and the cow and the rifle, and which in recent years he would sit on to wash his feet without fear of falling. That was one of the first signs he was getting old. A sign that was belatedly understood, but from then onward it touched the heart and was never forgotten.

Grandpa Ze'ev began undressing Eitan. First he untied his shoelaces, then he tapped him on his legs, one calf and then the other, the way you tap a horse when shoeing it, and Eitan picked up one foot and then the other, and then his arms like Neta used to do when he undressed him for a bath before bedtime.

I remember: “One handie,” he used to say to him, or sometimes “hando” or “handle,” and “Now a leggie” or “leggers” or “legeleh” and other cute names that were very funny to a boy of three and four and five and six. Before three he didn't yet understand, and after six he was dead.

Shoe after shoe, button by button, one sleeve and the other, left pant leg and right. And all these with precise, gentle pats and pulls, and she quickly realized she was dreaming a waking dream and would never forget the sight she saw: the old man tapping, removing the clothes caked in the mud in which the young man had wallowed, and the latter cooperating with quiet trust and obedience, his eyes closed, his shoes side by side under the bench, his clothes thrown in the basket, until he was completely naked and ready to be washed, purified, prepared for the rest of his life.

Eitan didn't say a word. Didn't give me a look. But Grandpa Ze'ev suddenly turned his head and stared at me.

“What is this, Ruta? How long have you been in here?”

“Since his second shoe, Grandpa. Just joking. Since you went in, from the beginning.”

“ ‘Joking'?”

“Is there any other way?”

“You brought his clean clothes? Very good. Put them here and go back to the guests. They came for you.”

“These are not guests, Grandpa, they're here to console us at the shiva.”

“These are guests, but let's not argue now. Go to them, please.”

But I couldn't go. Even though he said “please,” a rare word in his vocabulary. My feet were stuck to the ground and my eyes stuck on them, the two men left to me, the clothed old man, who would stay with us till the day he died, and the naked young man, who would be here but switch off and disappear and would return to us on the day Grandpa Ze'ev died, the day of redemption—his redemption, our redemption, payback time.

I was filled with curiosity, but also concern, because Grandpa Ze'ev was not a normal person and had done unexpected and even horrible things in the past. And also, I admit, I stayed because I was curious. I felt that if I stayed I would see something that women don't usually see. That famous male bonding that few men experience, and fewer women have witnessed.

You know, Rudyard Kipling has a short story about an Indian boy named Tuma, who learns how to be a mahout, which is an elephant trainer or elephant driver or something like that, I don't recall exactly. Not training for the circus, God forbid, but training for serious things: working together in the forest, carrying tree trunks and other loads. In short, the oldest of the elephants, I forget his name, but don't worry, it'll pop up in a moment the way other things do. Whatever. This elephant, which the boy would wash every day in the river, took him one night to the forest, to see the meeting of the wild elephants, an event that no human eye had ever seen. I'm telling you this because that's how I felt then. I felt that if I wasn't afraid and I stayed, I would see something that a female eye had never seen, or at least the eyes of this female.

Grandpa Ze'ev glanced at me with his typical glance, which on an ordinary day would mean: This is not for you! But the corners of his lips expressed agreement, and his one eye suddenly turned warm and good, so I should understand that it was for me, that I should stay. I was surprised. Sometimes I think that he did this since there was no choice, because I took advantage of my new status. You understand what I'm taking about? Neta had just died, and I was already exploiting the status of bereaved mother, who cannot be refused or insulted, and she and her wishes must be respected.

In any case, I stood my ground, and Grandpa Ze'ev said, “I see you're staying, so hold him a minute so he won't fall because I have to get up.”