Two She-Bears (17 page)

I held Eitan's left hand with my right one, and I leaned my left hand gently on his chest. A woman's hand in the middle of her man's chest, especially with the fingers spread apart, says only one thing: I am here. I am with you. Sometimes, when he would lie on his back and I would ride him, we would put our hands like that. His palm on my flat chest and my palm on his flat chest. But now I did it so he wouldn't fall. I didn't actually hold him up. That's not always necessary. Sometimes just a touch like that is enough—clear, exact. Instilling confidence: It's me. I'm here.

I remember: Once, when Neta was three, we were walking with him in the street, and he wanted to walk on top of a garden wall that was a few centimeters wide. He was crazy back then about balancing and walking like that, and it made us crazy too, because we couldn't pass by a fence without his wanting to walk on it, and he would ask over and over and promise: Just this time and no more.

Eitan picked him up and put him on the concrete fence, held his hand, and walked alongside him, and I saw that he was smiling.

“Now Mommy will give you a hand,” he told him after a few steps, and whispered to me, “Just feel it, what great balance he has. He doesn't need support, he just needs the touch of a hand.” What was his name, Kipling's elephant? It's making me nuts.

I put my hand on Eitan's chest, and he leaned on it only a bit, but I could feel how cold he was. Only after a few weeks I understood that this coldness foreshadowed the dying of the flame and fading of the gold and the creeping iciness that would turn his skin to white.

And then, when it seemed that Eitan was standing steady, Grandpa also began to undress. I was shocked. He had never been naked in front of me. He used to berate me if I went around undressed at home in front of Neta.

“He's all of four years old,” I told him then.

“It's not right,” he argued, “a son should not see his mother without clothes.”

And now he was disrobing, right in front of me, and I am not four years old, not a little girl, and he's undressing in a calm and natural way, like a woman taking out a breast and nursing her baby in front of strangers, men she would never expose herself to in other circumstances.

I looked at him, our elderly male. I didn't stare, God forbid, but I looked. I definitely looked. This was the first and only time I saw him naked, and I was sorry I hadn't seen him like that when he was young, and I knew that Neta would have looked like him if he reached that age.

I will read, with your permission, what I wrote in my notebook about that day: “I explored his flesh with my eyes. I studied it. This terra incognita with its ridges and plains, its dead zones and forbidden cities. In his old body one could see small islands of youth, clear and defined and alluring: a smooth strong back beneath a wrinkled neck and crooked shoulders, big lively calf muscles below gaunt bony thighs that had lost their shape, a surprisingly solid curve of the buttocks.”

It's funny. Usually with men the butt is the first to go. Not that I've seen a representative sample of butts, but you know how it is, women tell each other. I heard somebody say that from her point of view a man with a dead butt was dead overall. Another one said, “My husband would sit shiva over his butt, if he had one to sit on.”

Eitan once said to me, when the subject came up, “What difference does it make? In daily life the owner of a butt doesn't make eye contact with it anyway.” I would be happy to keep telling you funny stories about backsides, but we are in the middle of a funeral so I will resume the proper tone.

I surveyed my grandfather's body and thought that, for me, the opposite was surely true by now—little islands of aging in a body still young. I was twenty-nine years old then, but I already had the start of little wrinkles here and there, and two strands of gray in my black hair. When they appeared I thought it was too bad my mother wasn't here with me to see them. And today I think how I won't see white hairs on Neta's head or on the head of my other child, who will never be born.

It's interesting, no? Interesting what a person thinks when he sees the first gray hairs on the head of his son or daughter, like the first quiet mourners at his own funeral, or little warning flags that foretell his death? Or maybe I didn't exactly think it, and these weren't thoughts but little particles of light and understanding that passed extremely quickly through my mind. Don't be alarmed. I pounded the table because I remembered. Kala Nag, that was the name of the elephant from the Kipling story. Kala Nag means “black snake” in Indian or Hindu, whatever you call that language. I told you it would pop up and here it is.

And then, when Grandpa Ze'ev was completely naked, he gently removed the patch from his blind eye and handed it to me. “Hang it there, please.” And the pale ugly awful mass that had once been an eye looked at me, like the day he took off the patch and showed it to Dovik and me.

Now, totally naked, concealing nothing, he adjusted the water temperature, stood under the shower, and said, “Bring him to me and please step aside.”

I hope you are attentive to these subtleties, Varda. To the fact that he said “step aside” and not “get out of here” or “leave us alone,” as he said to me on many other occasions, and again he said “please”—for the third time that day if I'm not mistaken.

And I walked Eitan the two steps into the shower and I stayed there because I wanted to see more. I watched. Of course I watched. I stared. I didn't even dare to blink, so as not to miss a thing. You wouldn't have stayed to see something like that? It was a onetime opportunity that only my guys, Neta in his death and Eitan in his disappearance and Grandpa Ze'ev in his wisdom, could give me.

I see. I hear. I remember every detail: Grandpa Ze'ev put his arms around Eitan and held him tight to his body and said, “It's all right now, Eitan.” Yes. And then: “It's already better now, right?” And Eitan suddenly answered. He spoke. He said a small weak yes.

I didn't say anything. But I remembered the teacher I had in the third grade who would ask us every morning, “Have you prepared your homework?” We would all say, “Yes!” And she would say, “That was a truly insipid yes.” I liked the teacher very much, her name was Batya, I liked that she didn't say “Did you do” but “Have you prepared,” which I also say today, maybe in her memory, and I especially liked that expression of hers: “a truly insipid yes.” There were years when I used that too in the classroom, until I realized that most of my students didn't understand the word “insipid” and thought it was a medical term.

A few days later, I wrote: “Silence suddenly fell. The clatter of the water in the shower was the only sound in the ear, the nursery, the moshava, the whole world.”

I realized that the hundreds of men, women, and children who had come to Neta's funeral and shiva were stone silent. They stood and listened behind fences and walls. No one came close, but the ears were perked and the mouths were sealed and the hearts heard and understood.

The two stood under the water, joined in their nakedness. My grandpa supported, my man leaned, their lips moved, but the voices were unheard.

I know what they said:

Grandpa Ze'ev asked: “Are you standing, Eitan? Standing well?”

And Eitan said: “Yes. I am standing.”

Grandpa Ze'ev said: “I have to sit down now so I'm letting go. Don't fall.”

And Eitan said: “It's fine. When you're with me I won't fall.”

Grandpa Ze'ev said: “I let go. I'm not holding you now. Stand up.”

And Eitan said: “I'm standing. But stay here near me.”

Grandpa Ze'ev pulled the milking stool closer and sat down next to Eitan and again tapped his leg, and Eitan again picked up one leg and then the other with the same obedience and the same closed eyes that expressed total trust, and again placed a limp hand on Grandpa Ze'ev's shoulder, not for support, just to touch it. And Grandpa Ze'ev washed and soaped him, first his left foot and leg, then his right foot and leg. Soaped, washed, tapped him to turn around.

I could not fail to notice that Eitan's penis was really close to his face, nearly touching it, as Grandpa Ze'ev matter-of-factly washed it too and I realized this was how it would be, that Eitan and I would not shower here together anymore, and this organ would always remain limp, and I wouldn't get him off anymore in that very same shower with my soapy hands, fastening our lips to muffle the moans from before and the laughter of just after, because more than once we did it during business hours, with customers present at the nursery.

Grandpa Ze'ev also washed him behind his knees and between his legs, buttocks, and toes, the way you bathe a child, and Eitan understood every tap and tug and lifted and lowered as necessary and turned this way and that, and Grandpa Ze'ev got up from the milking stool and continued on to the chest and shoulders and back, and lifted his arms one by one to soap and rinse his armpits, and finally tapped him on the back of his neck so he would sit on the stool for a thorough shampoo, behind the ears included.

And that was that. He rinsed off the shampoo and soap and Eitan stayed seated, hunched and dripping and apathetic, as Grandpa Ze'ev finished soaping and rinsing himself too, and closed the faucets and dried Eitan and dressed him in the clean work clothes I brought, tapping him with the same orderly efficiency—Pick up, put on, turn around, come here. And then he dried and dressed himself and extended a hand to me.

“The eye patch, please,” he said. “Give me the eye patch. We're leaving.”

And so, clean and clothed, they came out. The crowd parted. Grandpa Ze'ev crossed on dry land, like the Israelites at the Red Sea. He led Eitan to the outdoor storage area and said, “You see the sacks of compost and the flowerpots and the sod all arranged here? They all have to be moved to the other side of the storage. So do it, Eitan, now, please.”

That was it. That's how it started. Each sack like that weighed thirty kilos, and there were a hundred sacks, none of which really needed to be moved. But Eitan did what Grandpa Ze'ev told him to do, and we all saw him: crouching, clutching, lifting, carrying, stacking neatly in an enormous new pile.

The next day, when he was done, he came and said, “I'm done, Grandpa Ze'ev.”

He could barely walk, his knees were like butter, his whole body trembled weakly. But Grandpa Ze'ev said to him, “Very nice. Now the flagstones, move them from here to there and arrange them again.”

You know what flagstones are, Varda? Those flat stones for paving paths and other areas in gardens. Each one weighs a couple of dozen kilos, sometimes more. “Move them to the right side of the parking lot and stack them in piles of five,” said Grandpa Ze'ev, and Eitan began to move the stones one by one. Bending, lifting, clutching, carrying, bending, laying, and over again.

No one who had come to console approached him, not even his so-called army buddies. And a lot of people were there at the shiva. They sat, chatted, kept quiet, cried. A shiva is also an event, a reunion, we talked about that before. People who haven't seen each other for many years meet again, and despite the grief and mourning, they also chat about other things, argue, and even laugh. The shiva for Grandpa Ze'ev, twelve years later, was like that too. Dovik even said at the time, “Lucky he's dead. If he were sitting here with us he wouldn't like what's going on.” But at Neta's shiva that didn't happen. People talked, told stories, but they didn't laugh. When a boy of six dies and it's his father's fault, you don't laugh. And when that father doesn't say a word to anyone, only shows up every few hours and repeats, “I'm done,” and asks, “What should I do now?” that's also not funny. You understand? The guy that ran half the nursery business and attracted customers like moths to a flame and kept track of every item, from flowers to funnels, from fertilizer to drip irrigation, and now he's carrying stones and sacks like a beast of burden.

Grandpa Ze'ev always had strong-minded principles and clear-cut solutions. He gave orders, Eitan obeyed, Dovik watched them, and I could see he was about to burst out crying. But Dovik is Dovik and got hold of himself. “Mazal tov,” he announced a few days later, “we have a new forklift. Thanks, Grandpa.” And we all smiled together with him, except for Grandpa Ze'ev, who said, “Eitan, a truck will soon arrive with flowerpots and window boxes, unload them.”

That's what Eitan did during the shiva, and in the weeks thereafter, moving and hauling everything from everywhere to everywhere else in the nursery. I went to Grandpa Ze'ev and told him, “Maybe tell him to stop all this?”

Grandpa Ze'ev said, “He can stop whenever he wants. Nobody is forcing him. If he keeps doing it, it's a sign that it's good for him.” And he added, “We won't be able to save your child, but we can and must save your husband.”

At the time I still didn't realize that Grandpa Ze'ev would save Eitan in another way. I kept silent and said to him in my heart, If this is what you call saving, enjoy yourself. And under my diaphragm I said, But this is your business, the business of the men in the family. So go save one another, kill one another, kill your women, their lovers, their children. Just leave me out of it.

After the shiva Dovik announced that he had to drive Dafna and Dorit down south to Sde Boker. That was the year they started to study there, and if you ask me, Dalia sent them there because she had already felt my connection with them getting stronger, and maybe feared that now, after my son had died, I would take control of her daughters. In any case they loved hanging out with their cool aunt Ruta next door, somebody they could talk to and do things with that were forbidden or weren't fun to do with their mother. But apart from all that, it was clear to me that Dovik would take advantage of the trip to continue farther south, to Nahal Tzihor, to find and bring home the equipment Eitan had left under the acacia and to see the place where the disaster happened.

And in fact, I saw him talking to Eitan and Eitan handing him some sort of note, and when I questioned him he said that he wrote him the coordinates of the place. He didn't say them in words but wrote them down. He silently wrote him the numbers on a piece of paper, handed it to him silently, and silently returned to that awful work of his. And only after a few days did I realize that this was not just work but a punishment, he was serving a sentence of hard labor, and the silence was no ordinary silence but his great silence, and no one, not even I, had any idea how long it would last.

Dovik marked the place on the map and proudly declared that he would have no problem finding his way there and then took me aside and asked if I wanted to come with him. I told him no, that I couldn't bear it, and asked, “And why are you going there, anyway? For a tarp and a ratty old tent? It's not worth the time or the gas. And besides, someone probably stole the stuff by now. You yourself always say that's how it goes on trips to the Negev, that you can't leave a vehicle for more than ten minutes without thieves showing up and stripping it bare, not to mention the times when the vehicle vanishes into thin air.”

“It's not just the equipment,” he said. “I need to check it out and understand what happened. And besides, Ruta, it's not just the tarp and the tent. I'm going to find and bring back the camera that Eitan took. I bet it's where the biting happened.”

“Snakebite.”

“Okay, Ruta, snakebite.”

“That's why you're going? For that old camera?”

“Ruta,” he said, “Ruta, you're supposedly the smartest person in the Tavori family, certainly smarter than me, so how do you not understand something so simple: I'm going because there might be pictures in the camera. Eitan must have taken pictures of Neta and the scenery. These are the last pictures of your son. Have you thought of that?”

“I did, and I can't bear the thought. I don't even want to know if you find it or not.”

Dovik loved Neta very much and was a wonderful uncle. “Because he is a male child,” he used to say, “he's my son too,” adding more than once: “Because with my twin daughters, I don't sleep at night, worrying that sons-in-law will take control of our family's land.”

As I already told you, Dovik is a very good big brother, but he's no great genius. He often talks foolishness, but luckily in our family we have stories and problems that are much worse than my big brother being a bit of a moron sometimes. Whatever. That wasn't the first time he talked that way about future sons-in-law. Dalia and Dafna and Dorit didn't like that at all, and one time Eitan remarked to him, “And what about me? I'm also a son-in-law.” That was before the disaster, of course. After the disaster Eitan didn't do any remarking.

“You're something different,” Dovik said at the time, and said to the twins, “I'm just kidding, you guys. Where's your sense of humor?”

Dafna and Dorit corrected his language. “We're not guys, we're girls.”

Whatever. He took them down to Sde Boker—“We know where you're heading from here, Abba, and we want to go too,” they said—and continued farther south by himself. Mitzpeh Ramon, the Crater, past Nahal Meshar, across the Paran, finally arriving at Tzihor. There he turned right onto a dirt road marked in red—I saw it all on a map, in case you're wondering how I know the details—reset his odometer, and drove to the tree. There are guys like that who only need coordinates and a reset button and everything is clear and good. On the other hand, if you take away their coordinates, they're worthless.

He reached the acacia, which was standing there among other acacias exactly where it was supposed to be. It wasn't hard to identify it, he told me when he got back, because it really was the most beautiful acacia in the area. And when he got closer he saw that all the equipment was still there. Nobody had touched it, as if the thieves also knew what had happened and didn't touch a thing: the tent still stood there, waiting, and the gas burner, cold and waiting, and the tarp still tossed to the side, and the two mattresses they never got to sleep on, and the bird handbook that I read and studied later on, to know which birds my little boy saw and identified before he died and which birds saw and identified him.

Dovik put it all in the pickup, spread the tarp over it, found Eitan and Neta's footprints, and followed them. The footprints of a father and son on a leisurely hike were mixed with the footprints of a father who ran back on exactly the same path. The footprints of a running man look completely different from those of a walking man, especially if he is carrying a child in his arms, and especially if this child is dying, and especially if this dying child is his and he is to blame for his death. Things like this have a great effect on the footprints. You can learn a lot from footprints, even about the state of mind of the person who left them.

Dovik followed the footprints, climbing to the top of the ridge on a diagonal, as one should, and reached the place where the snake bit Neta and Eitan killed it. There he also found the camera, which in the commotion had slipped a bit down the slope, where it was blocked by a rock that luckily shaded it from the sun during most of the day.

He also found the stone that Eitan used to smash the snake, and also the bare spot of ground where the stone had originally lain. I know all this because a few weeks later I changed my mind and asked him to take me there, and he, my dear big brother, suddenly objected: “Why do it, Ruta? What for? You yourself said you couldn't bear it.” It was a good imitation of me, by the way, and he also tried to tell me that there was nothing at all to see there. There had surely been flooding since then and everything was erased.

He told me all that, and I put on a performance of a mother and sister that he would never forget. Even Bialik never imagined a mother and sister like that. An imitation of a bitterly grieving she-bear from the woods, roaring loud enough for the whole moshava to hear her. Don't be alarmed, Varda, I'm just imitating myself screaming at him: “What kind of flooding in your dreams, Dovik? Where'd you pull that one from? It's the dry season and you're going to take me there. Otherwise I'll go by myself to look for your coordinates and you'll be responsible if anything happens to me!”

Sorry, I apologize. I already told you. Sometimes screams and shouts emanating from our property provide raw material for all the ears and mouths of the moshava, and this was one of those times.

Whatever. We drove down there, and on the way we didn't talk much, but there were nice songs on the radio and we joined in, he singing the melody and I the harmony, and we arrived at the acacia that Eitan had picked out, which was indeed good and beautiful, and we walked to the spot where Neta was bitten, and Dovik said, “This is it, Ruta, here's where it was.” And I actually held up well, and on the way back we stopped at Sde Boker to visit Dafna and Dorit, who were surprised by the visit but not by its cause. I was very happy to see them, because after Neta died and they went off to Sde Boker, we were left without children, and it was terrible. The yard was empty. Yes, I had more than enough children whom I taught at school, but that's not the same. I'm not one of those teachers who calls them “my” children. They're not.

“Abba took you to see the place where Neta died?” asked the girls, both asking and declaring, and I said yes, of course, it's the duty of a brother and the right of a mother.

A few weeks later we went down there one more time, because Grandpa Ze'ev suddenly wanted to visit the place where his great-grandson had died. He was eighty by then, and it was easy to see that he wasn't comfortable in the desert, it wasn't a place that suited him, the plants were unfamiliar, it was all too yellow and dry, stony and bare, but the footprints were still there and Dovik showed them to him, and he walked along the wadi without a problem, and he looked and examined and asked questions. And a few months later, during the Sukkoth holiday, there was a sudden rainstorm there with flash flooding. A huge rainfall, the likes of which the Negev hadn't seen for many years. Flooding in Tznifim, Tzihor, Paran, Karkum, I look at the map from time to time and know the roads and the names of all the wadis.

It was the first rain after Neta died, and the first rain of that year, which fell not in the Galilee or Golan or in our moshava, which gets a lot of rain, but in the desert. There of all places, in that shitty wasteland.

The rain came down, and there was a flood, and everything was washed out. God took time off from his other activities and for a few hours did not kill or bring to life, did not make marriages or break them, did not uplift or bring low, did not bring forth cows from the Nile or she-bears from the woods, did not visit the iniquity of fathers upon children or the iniquity of children upon fathers. No. He only returned to the scene of the crime and destroyed all the evidence.