Two She-Bears (9 page)

None of them reached the raft, and after they got out of the water I asked if it was okay for the teacher to enter the contest. They laughed, and somebody asked, “Hey, Teacher Ruta, we're finally gonna see you in a bathing suit?”

“Not really,” I said, “I like swimming in shorts, and I bet you I can swim underwater even farther than the raft.”

Somebody said, “And I bet you that you can't.”

I asked, “What are we betting?”

He said, “Teacher Ruta, I'll give you a shekel for every meter you go beyond the raft and you give me a shekel for every meter you come up short.”

I asked who else was betting, and ten hands went up.

Well, you can just imagine the rest. I got into the water up to my waist, waved goodbye, dived underwater, and after three and a half minutes that scared the shit out of them I came up twenty to thirty meters past the raft. I waved to them, took a gulp of air, and swam back to shore, under the water.

They were stunned. “What a Tarzan you are, Teacher Ruta, what else do you know how to do?” That's a good question. What, really? I know how to talk. A lot, as you have surely noticed. And I also know how to talk back to someone who deserves it, give a tongue lashing, like I gave Haim Maslina about his idiotic remark at the pool, and I know how to wait, a long time: twelve years I waited for my first husband to come back, and he was worth waiting for. I'm also not bad at crying, but the other three are my strongest suits.

And then, embarrassed and excited the way only teenagers can be, they tried diving in again, and the student I loved best, Ofer Maslina, the son of that same Haim Maslina, nearly drowned on me out there. This Ofer, you should know, was a very unusual boy. Not my best student and certainly not the hardest worker, but he was the most unique and interesting. He had something I really value and love—a completely different head. You could say he overcame the genetic baggage he got from his famously fucked-up family. I'll tell you something that once happened to me in class. You remember the Bible story about the prophet Elisha, the disciple of Elijah, how some kids laughed at him for being bald? They laughed at him, he cursed them, and when a prophet curses, there are consequences: “And there came forth two she-bears out of the woods, and tore apart forty-two of the children.” Now as I tell you this I'm thinking, Too bad my grandmother couldn't also curse the kids who followed her and the tractor in the field and laughed at her.

Whatever. When I taught them that chapter, which because of Neta I have a really hard time with, I told them that Elijah the Prophet, Elisha's teacher, who in general was much more extreme and cruel, would never have done such a terrible thing to children, certainly not for ridiculing his baldness. And suddenly Ofer stopped drawing his little pictures, these little snails he always drew in his notebook, and raised his hand.

“Yes, Ofer, what would you like to ask?”

And in my heart: You sweet boy.

But I said, “Yes, Ofer, I'm waiting.”

And in my heart: I am the grieving she-bear named Ruta. I would have come forth from the woods and devoured you.

“Teacher Ruta,” he asked, “the Bible uses the feminine form of ‘two,' but ‘bears' is masculine, so how come you get mad at us when we say ‘two shekel' or ‘two boys' in the feminine?”

I looked at him. It wasn't clear if he was being a smart-ass or he just didn't understand, and I answered him, “You're right, Ofer, but ‘two boys' in the feminine is an ugly mistake, but the ‘two bears' is a lovely mistake. There are authors who would pay good money to make such a beautiful mistake.”

And I felt more words rising from my diaphragm to my heart like bubbles from deep water: Like you, Ofer, a beautiful mistake like you. Lead me not into a big mistake.

Whatever. Back to the bet on the Galilee shore. Ofer took a deep breath, went under, disappeared, and after about half a minute I suddenly realized that was too much time and I got up and shouted, “Ofer! What's going on with Ofer? Anybody see Ofer?”

And then we saw his hands come out of the water, waving desperately, and then the top of his head, and he sank again, and it was lucky he was still fairly close to the shore. I ran in and swam to him, grabbed him, and pulled him out, and several students helped me get him from the shallow water to the shore.

We laid him down on the ground; he vomited a little and came to. The boys started laughing. “It's all an act. He wanted Teacher Ruta to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.”

He was confused and embarrassed, and I said, “Don't think this little drama made me forget about our bet.” And I went around with my straw hat, Ruta
-mabsuta,
satisfied. “Put your shekels in here.”

Somebody asked, “Teacher Ruta, what will you do with all that money?”

Another one said, “How about inviting us for a beer at the pub of the kibbutz?”

I said to them, “A teacher does not provide her students with alcohol.” And I said to myself, Though here too I could easily outdrink them.

The next day I gave all the money to the school secretary, told her she should use it for new library books or test tubes for the lab, and I thought I was totally okay, but the students talked about it at home and parents complained: “What's a teacher doing betting money with students?” And Haim and Miri Maslina, our next-door neighbors, were alarmed: “Our son almost drowned with her!” And don't ask, all the problems that ensued. The principal summoned me for a disciplinary chat, the supervisor wrote a reprimand in my file, and in the end I got fucking sick of all of them, and in a parents' meeting I gave each parent the few shekels I won from their child in a performance they would never forget.

Dovik would usually drive to his pond alone. Grandpa let him take the pickup—this was our old pickup truck, the rickety Ford with the rounded fenders—from the age of fourteen, on condition that he not drive on the roads but only through the fields. At the pond he would undress and swim and then float naked on an inflated inner tube, which he called Dovik in the Basket, and imagine, so he told me, that if Pharaoh's daughter were to arrive, preferably with her handmaidens—as it is written in the Bible, so why change it—he would explain to them exactly how to pull him from the water and what to do with him after that.

As you surely understand, he would steal away and go there quite a lot, lying there and fantasizing about battling crocodiles like a king of the Zulu, and about our mother and what she was doing in America and whether she thought about us, and what it would be like to visit her there and pester her to buy him a Harley-Davidson as compensation for abandoning her son. And how on the one hand she handed us over to Grandpa, but on the other how good it was that she left us with him, and how could it be that everyone in the moshava was afraid of him but with us he was so good and gentle.

When he got a little older, he would escape to the pond from the chores Grandpa assigned him, hang out and dream how he would finally finish high school and go into the army and that he would kill himself if he wasn't accepted into an elite combat unit because of his asthma. And years later he began to escape to the pond from Dalia and her nagging and the symbolism she saw in everything, and once he also told me, “I realized that Pharaoh's daughters weren't coming there to pull me out, so sometimes I bring along a Pharaoh's daughter of my own.”

Dalia, incidentally, is one of those women for whom it's terribly important to put on a display of happy marriage. She walks with Dovik in the street holding hands, and for this reason she also named their twins Dafna and Dorit—so all their names would start with the same letter—and when they were small, she would force him to come with her to the kindergarten every morning and afternoon, so that everyone would see that they brought them and picked them up together, and every so often she would hint at some special quality of lovemaking, and she would always speak about how much he loved her cooking, and don't misunderstand, she is a very good cook. I also love her meals. But food is food, and life doesn't center on that.

At first it slightly annoyed me: For whom are you making this show? But after a while I got it—she's not putting on a show for anyone; it's herself she's trying to convince, and at that point I began to feel a little sorry for her. Whatever. Today Dovik almost never goes to his secret pond, because despite its secrecy somebody told somebody who told someone else and in the end some journalist wrote about it in the paper. One of those journalists who recommends places worth visiting, so that swarms of kebab grillers and hookah smokers from all over the country will encamp there like families of locusts and leave behind empty potato chip and pretzel bags and piles of shit, pardon me, and toilet paper, and the noise they make remains even after they've gone. So one day Dovik saw a family there making a barbecue, which from his point of view is the greatest sacrilege possible. So distraught was he that he let the air out of their car tires and then began consorting with his Pharaoh's daughters in other secluded spots. “I discovered they could pull me even without the Nile or a basket,” he once told me as he asked me to taste a fresh batch of
limoncello
and help him recalibrate the alcohol and lemon and water.

We did a lot of tasting back then, with different levels of strength, variations of sour and sweet, and at a certain stage we would begin laughing and talking nonsense. Dovik makes a beautiful
limoncello
and always says that it really depends not on the person who makes it but on the lemon tree, and something interesting happened with our old tree: ever since Grandpa Ze'ev died it has produced much better fruit. You could sense that it had an easier time of it when he was gone. The mulberry tree, on the other hand, mourned for him. It bore rotten fruit and lost its leaves in midsummer. That's how it is, trees have feelings and remember and don't know how to lie.

To make a long story short, one day Dovik came to his pond, and this time not in the pickup but riding lazily on the old bicycle, and saw an army jeep parked by the path. The jeep looked familiar. He took a look and saw that two of the modifications on it were his. Who drove my jeep? Who walked on my path? He crept quietly to the pond and heard someone swimming in the water. Who is that swimming in my pond? He discovered an army uniform hanging on a bush and underwear and a T-shirt and a worn pair of Balti trekking boots with socks stuffed inside. Who wears Balti and also wears them out like that? Only somebody from my unit.

Dovik hid in the foliage and waited. After a quarter of an hour this somebody stepped out totally naked and urinated on the ground. Dovik was elated. First of all this was not someone who pisses in a pond but comes out. Second, his looks, how handsome he was. Everything about him was handsome, he told me, a few years later: “If Pharaoh's daughter and her maids had shown up, they would have pulled him, not me.”

The fellow finished pissing and went back in the water. And Dovik, without thinking twice, stripped and jumped in after him, splashing as loudly as possible, to indicate that the boss was present. That was it. That's how my brother and my man met: “Dovik, Eitan, nice to meet you, where're you from? Where are you from? Who told you about this place? And where are you in the army? I knew it. I was there a little before you and recognized your jeep.”

“Really? What's your last name? Tavori? Ah…so you're Dovik Tavori?…They still talk about you, about all the mechanical tricks and upgrades you rigged up.”

Dovik swelled with pride, and after the “Do you know him?” and “Do you know that one?” and the “Get outa here!” and “No way!” he invited Eitan to have some mulberries from our tree that he had brought with him.

They sat naked till they dried and were not ashamed. Eitan made coffee; Dovik served mulberries; they ate and drank and got back in the water. Eitan suggested they dive to the bottom, and Dovik said he couldn't dive because of his asthma. But, he added, if you're into diving, you should meet my sister, she dives much better than I do.

That was that. Eitan finally had to go back to his base. Dovik accompanied him to the jeep and said, “I didn't only install this mount for the hi-lift jack, I invented it,” and also “I have a feeling we'll meet again.” And Eitan said, “I do too. Looking forward. See you.”

And in fact, a few months later, after Eitan finished his army duty, they met again at a get-together of their unit. You should see the invitations to these get-togethers. Every invitation is just numbers, eighteen digits in a row. The first six digits are the date. Always six, because these cavemen include zeroes. The eighth of May 1967, for example, is zero eight zero five six seven. The next four digits are the hour, and the last eight are the coordinates of the location of the meeting. You should understand, Varda, with them every place is a waypoint and every get-together is a military operation. And even if it's a club in Tel Aviv, the address will not be a street and number but those asinine coordinates of theirs. Why? Because they don't simply go, they
navigate.
And anyone who can't find the waypoint doesn't deserve to be there.

They recognized each other right away, and Eitan, with his marvelous capacity for silliness, embarrassed Dovik in front of everyone. He pretended he didn't know who he was and finally said, “Ah, it's you, I just didn't recognize you with your clothes on,” and everyone who heard started to laugh. And that was it, that was the beginning of their friendship, which unlike all the clichés about comrades-in-arms was a genuine friendship. Yes, Varda, clichés, idle chatter—all that army-buddy stuff is vanity of vanities, something they paste on like an actor's mustache, no more than a pose of men nostalgic for their youth and a pretext for another dose of action and experience. They will help one another, and they'll get together and tell stories, but it's not real friendship. Yes, rescues and fund-raising and loans when necessary, but they simply don't know how to open up their hearts. And in truth, Eitan—and I too, I'm the same way—never had real friends. Even those who served and fought alongside him. It was Dovik, who didn't serve when Eitan did and wasn't a combat soldier like he was, who turned out to be his truly good friend.

And the reverse is also true: suddenly Dovik, who talked only about glorious tales of the army and about girls he'd been involved with, began to talk only about his new friend, and for the first time with love instead of his usual bragging. And because of that he also fixed us up. I have no doubt. He kept Eitan by his side. He told me how handsome and nice and amusing Eitan was, and gave Eitan a briefing: “I have a sister much smarter than I am,” he told him, “and I want you to meet.”

Eitan laughed. “The one who dives better than you do, or another sister?”

“I have only one sister,” Dovik said. “Come and I'll introduce you.”