More Than I Love My Life Read online

  And all this time Nina does not say a word. Straggles behind. Head down. As if looking for something she’s lost.

  That’s the woman who darkened my life?

  At every moment, at every second, even without looking, my body knows exactly where she is.

  * * *

  —

  On the way to Vera’s childhood home.

  She seems slightly apprehensive about the encounter. She asks to stop for a reviving cup of coffee first. Declares that there is only one café worth its salt in all of the Balkans. Leads us swiftly down narrow lanes, navigating without a map to a café named Kavana Royal, which she knew as a child. Incredible how she has no doubt that it still exists and is waiting for her obediently after more than eighty years. “Can you help envying her?” Rafi whispers in my ear as he rushes past me with the camera.

  Surprisingly, the café does still exist. Vera is all aflutter. “Here! Yoy! Here is where we used to sit. Here Father played preferans with his friends, and I ate strawberry ice cream!” A sign hanging over the bar announces a hypnotist’s show. A silver star glints from the corner of his mouth. The headwaiter—or, rather, the only waiter, but he is mustachioed like Emperor Franz Joseph and has therefore been promoted—points to a glass box on the wall, which contains a gorgeous china tea set with delicate teapots and ornamental cups, and declares in Croatian, which Vera translates for us: “A tea set just like that, ladies and gentlemen, was owned by King George in Buckingham Palace! In London!”

  He doesn’t know whether there’s a synagogue in Čakovec. “But there is a memorial statue for the city’s Jews who died in the war. They took them to Auschwitz.”

  “My father and mother went there,” says Vera.

  “It was a terrible thing,” the man says, “to this day it’s impossible to understand that it happened.” He says this simply and genuinely. Tears appear in his eyes.

  A man of a certain age sits next to us reading a newspaper attached to a wooden dowel. Hearing us speak Hebrew, he comes over, bows, and asks permission to join us. Goatee, glasses. Brown suede jacket, elbow patches, shipshape. A professor of Slavic literature. He sorts out the Balkan mess for us. Tells us about the war that raged here in the nineties. “No!” he fumes when I make the mistake. “It was not a civil war!” His face turns red. “It was a barbaric military assault by Serbian soldiers with Serbian tanks!” And now he can’t be stopped. He lectures furiously about rivers of blood and massacres and rape. Four members of his family were murdered by their neighbors and good friends.

  I feel bad. Very bad. To the point of dizziness. All that bloodshed, that hatred, that humanity.

  The professor continues his lecture, and I try to write, both to honor the man and for my own edification. But I grow tired pretty quickly and start skipping things, superficial being that I am. Rafi and I exchange casual glances on our internal wavelength. These Balkans are a real jumble, and I’ve only landed here three hours ago, and back in Israel I have my own charming conflict, which I don’t fully understand anymore either.

  * * *

  —

  The house where Vera was born is on the main street, not far from the café. We hurry over there. Vera is a few steps ahead of us all the time. By the time we get there, she’s already standing outside, arm outstretched: “It’s here, children, here I was born.” He doesn’t give it up easily, but I take the camera from Rafi and film Vera with the house in the background. I know its history by heart. On the first floor was Bauer General Store, owned by Vera’s father, my great-grandfather, and the family lived upstairs. Father, mother, and four daughters. Now there is a large branch of Zagrebačka Banka on the first floor, and a private residence on the second. We can glimpse a large, neglected yard through the locked gate. I record, constantly switching between video and stills. The camera on my cell phone is lousy, the pictures come out with white spots and long cracks. I ask Vera if she wants us to try to enter the living quarters on the second floor.

  “Nothing here is like it was and there’s nothing for me to see here.” But she happily tells us: “We had a good, rich life here, all on all. We had a cook at home, and my governess, like a nanny, until I was ten, and girl who cleaned rooms, and gardener, and one person who took care of trees in garden behind, and there was stove which took wood, three-level ceramic stove…”

  She describes an enormous, well-lit sitting room, thick rugs, curved staircase to the second floor. Next to the kitchen was the špajz, the pantry, with sausages hanging and large sacks full of rice and flour and sugar, jars of goose fat, barrels of pickled cucumbers and sauerkraut. And in the cellar, on the straw, potatoes for the whole year…

  Rafi, flushed with excitement, asks for the camera. His eyes are laughing. The trip is starting to hook him. He focuses on me. Leave me alone! But he insists, asking me to say a few words for the beginning of our voyage. I’m not good at these proclamations, but then I think of something: “There’s a line from a poem by Moti Baharav: ‘Before you are reborn, take a close look at where you are.’ ”

  Rafi asks me where I would like to be reborn.

  “What makes you think I want to be reborn?”

  He moves away, looking for a more pliable collaborator. “Vera, over here, look at me. Tell us something about your parents. Was there love?” If that’s where he’s searching for the inspiration for Vera and Milosz’s absolute love, he’s looking in the wrong place.

  “Love?” Vera laughs. “No, no. I suppose she got used to him in the end. But my mother was very restrained woman, and there were big differences between them. He liked to have fun, for example, to have good time, and she did not. He used to go every winter at Christmas to Budapest. Took with him something like fifty thousand dinar and went from café to café, to theater, to whose-know-what-else. And he did parties! He danced! That’s how it is with Hungarians, Rafi, they hear tzigane music and they smash glasses! That was how my Milosz was, also. Much as he was shy and delicate, he danced like the devil. You wouldn’t believe it of him. When he and his peasant mother danced, their feet did not touch the ground! My mother-in-law, she was like this, with handkerchief…” And she twirls around on the street, doing a clumsy tap dance in her bright purple sneakers. What a fantastic shot—Rafael grins at me.

  But where is Nina? The script girl is also the sheepdog of the herd, and Nina, by any parameter, is both a lost lamb and a black sheep. She stands with her back to us, eyes on the ground, looking slightly crazy.

  Vera goes on: “When I was twelve, for first time I had this serious thought: while I was still sleeping in bed under blankets, there came already the servant to the home, and she lit fires in rooms and in bathroom, so that when I get up, when the masters get up, they will be warm. And that was the first time this idea started to work in me.”

  “Which idea?” Rafi asks.

  “Idea of responsibility for human beings, and idea of money and poverty. Because I went to high school on the train, and from all villages around came children who walked on foot in the dark, next to train tracks. And in school there was a stove and they put their socks on to dry. And I went home and asked Mother: Could I maybe bring two or three such children back to us? My three big sisters got angry at me: Those smelly kids with lice? What a little idiot you are, girl!

  “Mother actually said yes, but she had no say in the home. And she sat down and read to me from the book Mother, by Gorky, and I then understood that Mother was with me, and here in my stomach started to work something about rich and poor people, and about injustice which there is in the world.” She turns to me. “What are you all the time writing, Gili?”

  “I’m writing down what you say, Grans. And what we’re filming, and what’s around us.” And what is not said, and what is not visible.

  “Really? What is that good for?”

  “That’s how Rafi and I work, it’ll help us later when we edit.”

&nb
sp; The partisan in her is ill at ease. The woman who worked in Tito’s counterespionage for two years after the war is ill at ease. She squints at me. The fact that I’ve been her granddaughter for almost forty years does not currently count in my favor. Her right eye moves in on me at a close-up. “And what, for example, are you writing at this second?”

  I read out: “ ‘Vera is a Communist at heart.’ Is that right to say?”

  “No! No, no, no! You see, it’s good thing I asked! Socialist at heart, that is right! And only after that I came into communism, but God forbid not Stalin’s communism…Not the murderers’ kind!” She runs a puzzled look over me again. Her intuition is not flawed. Ever since we left, and on the days leading up to the trip, I’ve been a little distant from her. Every time our eyes meet, I send her warnings along the lines of: You’re my grandmother and I’m crazy about you, and you saved my life when I was a little girl, you took care of me and Dad after Nina left, you raised me like a daughter—more than a daughter, because you didn’t raise your own daughter like that—and you saved my life again when I committed suicide, and for a whole year you resuscitated me with casseroles and soups and cakes, you cooked me and baked me, and I will not forget that, Grandma, but if at some point on this trip you don’t tell your daughter what you told me that night in the ICU, I swear I don’t know what I might do.

  Actually I do know.

  I’ll tell her.

  * * *

  —

  But why would I tell her? Good question. On the one hand I say: Let Nina spend the rest of her life without knowing what really screwed it up. That’s the punishment I’ve meted out—that to her dying day she will feel like one big dissonance. A chicken with its head cut off that spends an entire lifetime running around without understanding what’s happened to it. But on the other hand—

  Is there even another hand?

  And even though in the name of the baby I was, and in the name of the girl I was, I should not make any concessions to her, ever, that’s what I swore, I took an oath, I must not betray that baby and that girl, because there is no one else to seek their vengeance except me. Still, when she straggles behind us like that—

  I don’t know. Since this morning, since she fell on me at Ben-Gurion, I’ve been feeling down about what she brings out in me.

  The meanness she brings out in me is bringing me down.

  On the street outside Vera’s childhood home: “When I was five, I had tonsils removed in private sanatorium, and Mother said: Because you behaved well and didn’t cry and didn’t get scared, you will have gift. And what was the gift? Five-year-old girl will go for first time in her life to opera! I don’t remember what opera they made, but at intermission there was a singer with perika on his head like a judge, and he sang ‘Funiculì, Funiculà.’ ”

  And she stands there in the middle of the street, singing in Neapolitan. A little circle gathers around, a few people sing along with her, two wave their hats to the rhythm, one bangs his walking cane on the asphalt. Vera conducts them, her white plastic handbag with its gilded clasp hanging from the crook of her arm, and she’s in seventh heaven. Glowing. People applaud her. But for me, somehow…Ever since Nina arrived for the birthday on Saturday, she’s been slightly ruining the grandmother I used to have. Without any effort, just with that look of hers, she makes Vera seem a little—how should I put this—on the narcissistic spectrum.

  * * *

  —

  “We’re in Čakovec,” Vera explains to the camera in a tour guide’s cadence, “near to Hungary border, near also to Austria border. We went to see theater and opera in Budapest and in Vienna. That was our culture, and Hungarian was our first language. So I am not Balkan Jew, and not Ghetto-Jude. I am Jew of central Europe, is what I am! The most real Europe! There is no Europe like me left!”

  Her little audience of locals does not understand Hebrew, of course, but her pathos captures their hearts. At their applause she bows her head magnanimously. We’re going to have to hurry her up. The sun will set soon, and we still have a long drive ahead of us. It’s a real shame that I didn’t have enough time to organize this trip properly. We should have stayed here for at least another day. Allowed Vera to take in more. It hurts to think that this is the last time in her life she will be back here.

  A quick walk takes us to the school. At this time of day it’s empty and shuttered. A dreary, unremarkable building. Tiled roof, chimneys. I imagine little Vera running around here, a flash of light. Vera: “I was the smallest girl in class, in age and in shortness. I look like six, and they look like eight, and there is a girl in class, Jagoda, which means ‘strawberry,’ and she from my first day in school made herself like a bodyguard to me. And one week after that, I was already her commander in everything. Every time I make excursions in the snow and the forest, I take Jagoda by her hand and say where we go and what we do and when we go back—”

  Nina, nodding to herself with a crestfallen face, on the fringe of the little group, has all the cheerfulness of a gallbladder. She forces herself into the role of a mangy, injured stray dog who straggles after us but knows we’ll pick up a stone and throw it at her any minute.

  I can see that Vera is torn between her excitement about being here and the pain she feels for Nina. I’ve had enough of it. “Look,” I go over and tell Nina, “are you with us or not? Are we doing this whole thing for you, or am I wrong?”

  She looks up at me with an utterly wiped-out face. Good God, she’s barely alive. I feel suddenly scared. She holds on to a tree trunk. Perhaps we’ve underestimated how bad her condition is. Perhaps she wasn’t telling us the whole truth. “It’s all a little too much for me,” she says, almost inaudibly. Her lips are white. “I didn’t imagine this. Let’s take it slowly, okay?”

  “What’s too much for you? We haven’t even started anything. You haven’t even been born yet.” I cut away from her.

  “Gili.”

  “What now?”

  “I thought of something—”

  I stand facing her with demonstratively impatient body language. This woman is going to keep me forever young, or at least forever three.

  “I had an idea, Gili, and I think maybe—”

  “Ideas are Rafael. Take it up with him,” I blurt out and walk away. And then back. “Would you like some water?”

  “No. I just need to talk.”

  “Rafael will be happy to.”

  “Gili-”

  * * *

  —

  Freeze! That word I just wrote, “Gili” with a hyphen—

  This is how it happened: The girl I was at sixteen, and to my great misfortune also at five foot six, with the jawline of a good-natured boxer and masses of acne, traveled to the Ministry of Interior’s Haifa office to amend the national identity card she’d just been issued. But the stone-faced Gorgon at the counter refused to leave the mother’s name box blank. The girl, who, due to her height and size was prevented from causing scenes or drawing any attention whatsoever to herself, was about to leave, shamefaced, but a moment before surrendering she astonished herself by asking if she could, perhaps, please, add “Nina” to her own name.

  She threw the request into space, almost yelling, and immediately eradicated it from her memory because it was impossible to believe that such a request could have a hold in reality. And when, two weeks later, the new identity card arrived by mail, bearing the name Gili-Nina, the girl felt as if someone had cast a spell on her—

  At age eighteen, by which time she was five-eight (God, she thought in those days, what if it simply never stops? What if she keeps going, like a bad joke, and where is the red line at which she will put an end to it?), the girl went back to the Ministry of Interior in Haifa. This time she was served by a smiling redhead who was working there over her summer break, and with great ease and no anesthetic she cut Nina off from Gili. And then Gili asked, with
the submissiveness of those who cannot defeat their lust, if it might be possible, perhaps, for a while longer, to retain the hyphen, just for the hell of it. The girl asked, “What do you mean?” and Gili quietly pronounced her name with a hyphen at the end, like an open call into the void. The girl scanned her slowly, perhaps sensing something, and she looked around and whispered that it was really not done, to have a name with a hyphen, but let’s give it a try, what’s the worst that could happen, and if anyone asks we’ll say it was human error.

  * * *

  —

  Exterior. Day. Again outside the family home. Slightly chaotic and circuitous, our route around Čakovec. The little crowd of admirers has scattered, and we are four again. Vera: “My mother and father, a good marriage they did not have. That I already told you, children. She even at first did not love him, and he, I told you also, he was always cheating on her. And I was like, say, her couple. With me she spoke everything, to me she poured out her heart. Not with him and not with my three big sisters.

  “Twenty years ago, you remember, Rafi, on my seventy birthday that you made so lovely for me, by surprise, my three sisters came from Yugoslavia to kibbutz, to see with their own eyes how silly Vera lives and is giving up private capital. And we sat together for a few days, and so what do we do? We talk about what passed. And my sisters asked me, ‘How did you get close to that sphinx, our mother? She never laughed and never cried.’ ”

  Nina looks up. I remember: on the kibbutz, when they arrived from Yugoslavia, my father said, the kids called her Sphinx.

  “And I asked my sisters, ‘Did you ever ask Mother something? Did you know something of her pains? Did you give her opening of your heart?’ ‘No!’ ‘Why not? Did you not have feelings to her?’ ‘Maybe our mother wasn’t to us such an interesting person.’ ‘But to me every person is interesting! There is no person without meaning! Do you know, for example, that Father made her pregnant eight times, and she got abortions on the table?’ ‘No…we didn’t know…But how did you know?’ ‘Because with me she talked, and to me she told, and me she took every time she went to the woman who does it!’ ‘She took you?’ ‘Well, who else did she have?’ ‘But you were just a girl, Vera!’ ‘What matters, just a girl? I was a girl and I was with her! I saw her! She would go inside, maybe half an hour, no more, and I would play in the yard.’ ”