More Than I Love My Life Read online

  “Break,” Rafi declares and puts the camera back in its case. He takes out an apple and slices it with a pocketknife. The refreshing taste fills our mouths. We all feel easier the minute the camera shuts its eye. We’ll be on our way soon, and tomorrow we sail.

  “But did I speak well to the cinematographer?” asks Vera, glancing in her little round mirror and smoothing down a curl on her forehead with saliva.

  “You spoke perfectly,” I say, “you’re a natural-born storyteller.”

  “Yes, well.” She sighs. “Just brush the mothballs off Grandma.”

  * * *

  —

  At 8:00 p.m., with a thunderstorm raging, we set off. We drove south to Crikvenica, a town on the Adriatic coast where we planned to spend the night before sailing to the island in the morning. Vera and Nina were huddled in the back seat, very close together but each in her own world. I was filling in gaps in my notebook. I deciphered the notes I’d scribbled throughout the day, and wrote down some ideas. Then I checked my messages and texted Meir that it had been an exhausting day and the journey was, in every respect, a lot more than I’d bargained for. “It’s ripping me to shreds,” I wrote, but deleted that before hitting send. I mustn’t overburden him, he’s allergic to hyperbole. I waited a few moments. He’s capable of going a whole day without checking messages. But this time the reply came quickly: “Take care of yourself.”

  There’s no doubt: the man misses me like crazy.

  The fog closed in on us. The rain grew more violent, and sudden gales rocked the lime. The heating started to waver. We huddled in coats and gloves, and in various and sundry wool hats that each of us had brought (and which, we discovered, had all been knitted by Vera), until we looked like the village fools’ annual field trip. Rafi drove slowly, his head practically butting the windshield. Again and again he asked me to wipe his steamed-up glasses. Twice we drove into a pit the size of a mass grave and were convinced that it was over, the car had given up, but three cheers for the feisty lime, which forged ahead through any obstruction.

  “Almost from first days that we met,” I suddenly hear Vera murmur to herself in the back seat, and I dive into Rafi’s equipment bag, which sits between my feet, and fish out the Sony. I switch it on as I unbuckle my seat belt so I can turn around, dismantle my headrest so it isn’t in the way, and from the corner of my eye I can see that Rafi is pleased with me. I’ve already got Vera in a wide-angle, and Nina beside her rolls her eyes, confused. “I wasn’t asleep!” she blurts, as if anyone had claimed otherwise.

  So that’s how she looks when she wakes up.

  Terror-darkness on her face. How ugly fear makes us. A terrified little girl, bracing for the blow, for the catastrophe.

  And then quickly—erasure.

  I saw it.

  No expression.

  A six-year-old sphinx.

  “From our first days,” Vera says to the camera, “Milosz would walk every day at exactly one past our house, where you saw, with his officer’s sword thwack-thwack on the sidewalk, and I was quickly at the window. And he looks at me and I look at him, without words.

  “In evenings, Father was with friends at that café, where we went, playing preferans, and Mother was alone, and me and Milosz were walking, talking. After about a week I say to Milosz, ‘I cannot leave my mother alone. From tomorrow she comes with us!’ And Milosz says, ‘I even more love you because you think about your mother!’ ”

  Rafi wants to know if you can see anything on the camera screen in this darkness. He suggests we turn on the dome light above Vera and Nina. I also improvise a little reflector out of the tinfoil that wrapped some cookies Vera brought. Not optimal lighting, but I quite like the reddish, grainy picture.

  “Just remember—” Nina warns.

  “Nina!” Vera scolds. “I am not forgetting her even for minute.”

  “Thank you, Mom.”

  “And for three years, we three walk like that. We walk from factory of wool and knitting that belongs to Granner brothers, and sit on benches outside talking, and walk to railway station and back, and always talking. And don’t forget, Ninotchka, you must not forget”—Vera wags her finger at the camera—“that my mother was from Hungary and did not speak one word in Serbian, and Milosz was Serbian and spoke only Serbian. So I walk between those two, translating. ‘What did she say?’ ‘What did he say?’ Turning this way, turning that way.”

  Nina smiles delightedly. “Three years?” she asks.

  “Hard to believe, yes?”

  They laugh. On the little Sony screen you can see two blurred characters, round and puffy in their coats, and so close to each other that it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Their faces are a patchwork of pale red splotches and dark shadows. And again—I actually like the way it’s sometimes difficult to know which of them is talking and which is listening. The story flows between them as if it’s being redistributed.

  “Mother kept from Father that I have a non-Jewish fellow, and no one in town either had the courage to tell Father that his Vera has a non-Jewish fellow, or that she has a fellow at all, and Mother and us all the time said what would happen if he knew, what would he do and what would we do, and if we would run away or stay, and if we would take Mother with us. You understand me, Nina, everything I say, yes?”

  She’s completely on it, Vera, as if that other Nina really is watching her right now from within the depths of the camera. The current Nina gives her a sideways look, amused but also a little embarrassed, and then she leans on Vera, very touchingly, as if to attract her attention.

  “But on Milosz’s family side it was actually fine. He came to his father and said: ‘I am in love with a Jewish girl, and if you won’t let me marry her, I will leave and you will never see me again.’ And his father said, ‘If you go with a black gypsy or with a little Jew, it is you will live with her, not me.’

  “In February of the year forty, some Jewish woman told my father, ‘Listen, Bauer, do you even see how your daughter looks? She’ll come down with tuberculosis. They’re so thin, she and her boyfriend, that Serbian officer, walking around town like two trench coats with no humans inside!’ And that, Nina honey, was how the first time my father heard about my boyfriend Milosz, and he almost fainted!” She slams her knee. “Ran home and asked Mother if it’s true. She told him: Ask your daughter. And he shouts at me to come immediately in his room. I run and see his face and I understand.”

  Rafi is driving slower than thirty now. We have the road to ourselves, and the rain, left with no other audience, puts on the show of its life for us. I wonder if the camera mic is picking up Vera’s voice over the screeching windshield wipers and the din of the storm. Rafi has the same thought at the same time, and he slows down the wipers, but that turns out to be perilous, and we agree that we’ll have to compromise on the sound, too.

  “So my father stands next to the big stove, and his foot jumps like it’s on electricity, and he asks me: ‘Is it true you have a fellow?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And is it true your fellow is an army officer?’ And I say: ‘Yes!’ And he says: ‘Only once I ask, Vera, so think carefully, because this is your last chance: Is it true your fellow is a Serbian officer, a goy?’ And I hold my head up most high: ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’

  “He turns white: ‘First you’ll have to kill me.’ I say: ‘Father, let me marry him.’ He says: ‘Before you bring that shame on me, I will jump out the window.’ So I said: ‘Here, I’ll open the window for you.’

  “Next morning, Father goes to see the rabbi. He was a Neolith rabbi, very liberal, and he says: ‘Mr. Bauer, we are for three years seeing your daughter and her fellow, and how they walk respectably with Mrs. Bauer. We know him now in town, and he is excellent young man. Hitler is already in Austria, and who knows—perhaps thanks to this fellow it will only be your daughter left alive of all of us. We did not dare tell you, we were afraid you w
ould kill the poor girl. Ask him to come see you, get to know him, see who he is.’

  “My father thought he was going crazy, but he said, ‘Bring the fellow to me.’

  “And I never in my life forget that picture, Ninaleh: in our living room, next to the big stove, my father stands straight up like a soldier. And in comes Milosz, gets down on one knee, takes my father’s hand, and kisses.

  “Father shouts: ‘Mein Gott! Before old Jew an officer on his knee? Vera, tell him to get up now!’

  “And ever since then my father loved him more than all his sons-in-law. ‘Oy, my lovely goy son-in-law,’ he would say, ‘there is no other in the world like Vera’s husband!’ ”

  She leans back, tired out. Gives a nod to the person who seems to be watching her from inside the camera, tying a thin thread between them that I do not completely understand.

  “Want to hear some more, Ninotchka?” she softly asks the camera.

  “Yes, tell us more,” says Nina beside her, and she also sounds weak and faded.

  A picture of Nina in two or three or five years flashes in my mind. Sitting in a wheelchair in an empty room in an institution. On the wall opposite her, between two hanging pots with plastic plants, there is a television showing this voyage of ours. Her head droops on her chest.

  * * *

  —

  “One year after we met, because of a law that officers cannot marry until age twenty-six, Milosz went and bought a gold ring.” Vera pulls the ring off her finger. They are thin and gnarled, her fingers, and shiny as if made of wax. She holds the ring up to the camera, and I focus on it. Her mouth looks like a hoop in the background.

  “You see, Ninaleh?” she says tenderly to the camera, “this is the ring that your father gave your mother.”

  Rafi drums urgently on my thigh. Nina. He senses that I’ve abandoned her. He knows where the drama is really occurring: Nina’s eyes are two throbbing embers. Look how Vera completely forgets us, her eyes say.

  “And Milosz said to me: ‘You are now my wife before God and before me.’ And I said: ‘There is nothing that will come between us. Such a thing has not been created.’ And I did not show anyone the ring he gave me, not to Mother or to my sisters or my friends. I covered it with a bigger ring, and we kept living like before…And we had our life, yes…”

  Vera puts one hand over her chest and shuts her eyes. At first I think it’s another one of her gestures. She leans back with her mouth open, mumbling that she’s hot, her heart is pounding. I keep filming. I’m a little alarmed, but I won’t abandon the shot. Nina massages Vera’s shoulders with one hand, and gives her some water. Vera chokes. Dry heaves. Scary. Rafi gives panicked glances over his shoulder, but drums on me with his hand to keep filming. (He once summed everything up for me in a golden rule: Photographers don’t stand during the national anthem.) Vera motions for us to open a window. The storm pounces on us through the crack. A freezing-cold wind bursts inside with a strange, almost human whimper. It makes me want to jump into my mommy’s lap. Nina, who technically is my mother, looks as if she’s wishing the same thing. The car veers all over the road, drifting this way and that, and Rafi shakes his head, and amid all the chaos and fear (perhaps it’s the storm that addles my brain) a thought jumps into my mind about how there are a few staples—a certain type of humor, for example, and a fairly high tolerance for loneliness, and generally speaking a cactuslike personality when it comes to relationships with human beings—regarding which it is Nina, more than anyone, who can understand me.

  * * *

  —

  “You know, Mom,” Nina says later, after we shut the window and Vera has recovered, “you never, really never, told me any of this.”

  She’s already pointed this out. It’s still eating at her.

  “I didn’t tell you? I actually did tell lots of it.”

  “No. You only told me about Goli, over and over again.”

  “That’s not possible,” says Vera, “maybe you forgot.”

  That was a cheap blow, even if an unintentional one.

  “Do you think I would forget something like that?”

  Vera doesn’t answer. She crosses her arms over her chest. Her eyes roam far away, her lips pout innocently. She’s a fox, the lioness.

  “Honestly, Mom,” Nina whispers, “do you know how helpful that could have been for me? To give me some solid ground beneath my feet?”

  “Come on, Vera, tell us some more,” Rafael intervenes, hoping to douse the fire before it gets out of hand. “Do you have the strength?”

  Vera: “Do you have strength?”

  “It keeps me awake,” Rafi says with a laugh, and pounds on the steering wheel.

  “But Nina must say. What do you say, Nina? Should I tell more? Don’t you want to sleep a little?”

  “I’ve slept enough.”

  * * *

  —

  “You should also know, Ninotchka,” Vera says, turning sharply to my camera, “that your father, Milosz, was not a very healthy man. He had serious illnesses, because he was a child of mountains and hills and countryside, and clean air and skies, and then suddenly he is in the city, the army, the smoke, the spoiled food, all the poisons. So he got tuberculosis.” She sighs. “He coughed at night; like a dog, he coughed. He would put hot compress with onion and honey on his chest. Doctors told him he was the national champion in Koch’s test, because, listen carefully, Ninaleh, he was the sickest person with tuberculosis in all Yugoslavia! Two cavernas in his lung! And six months after I met him and after we danced at the party, he got sick also with jaundice. Well, they put him in military hospital in Zagreb, and from then Milosz was never again well. And that had many consequences. Should I tell?” she asks us out of the corner of her mouth, and Nina snaps again, “Tell us everything, every detail, I have almost nothing, do you really not understand?” “Okay, okay, you don’t have to shout. I’m telling. I’m telling everything.” Vera looks down, for a long time. Forehead creased, face severe, lips moving soundlessly.

  “Oy, Ninotchka,” she says softly, and it seems to me that she’s pulling herself up by the hairs on her head to look at the camera, “nothing worked with him properly anymore. Tummy aches and diarrhea all the time, and blood all the time, and fever, and weak and special diet and he ate like a bird. ‘But I’m fine, Miko,’ that’s how he said. ‘Miko,’ he called me, which means for us like ‘my little friend.’ He generally spoke to me like I was a boy, a fellow. We liked to talk that way and I got used to it. He said: ‘If you and me are fine, Miko, then the whole world is fine. We are two of us, in our togetherness, holding the whole world!’ ”

  “Miko?” Nina laughs. “That’s true, he did call you that…I remember…” She moves in closer to Vera again, slowly, sneakily, lowering her head onto Vera’s shoulder.

  Meanwhile, Rafi and I develop a language: his hand is on my knee, and he signals which way to aim the camera by pressing his pinkie or middle finger or thumb. To be honest, it’s irritating. This is my film, as we know, but he’s incapable of giving up control. On the other hand, in the nutty situation evolving here, it’s good to have another pair of eyes.

  Either way, very soon I will have to remind him of our agreement and which way is up.

  “My mother, she did not care at all that he’s not Jewish, it meant nothing to her! I told you. We were modern, atheist Jews, specially Mother. But she could absolutely not understand how a young healthy girl like me thought to live with such a sick man. And I said to Mother: Sick? So he’s sick! When I met him half a year ago, he wasn’t sick, and when I danced with him, he wasn’t sick, and when I saw him at train station with bicycle, he wasn’t sick, so now I should leave him because he’s sick? In the contrary: the more he got weak, I was even more closer to him!

  “And my sister from Zagreb, your aunt Rozi, she didn’t talk to me for ten years. She called Milosz
‘rotten Serb’ ”—Vera spits out the S—“and her husband asked Milosz to Zagreb, to talk to him.” Vera leans forward, talking secretively to Nina deep in the camera. “Listen to this: that brother-in-law of mine, like he was all friendly, told Milosz, ‘I will pay you a big amount of money if you ask army to send you to another town far away, and forget that there is any Vera in the world.’ And Milosz told him: ‘I am very poor, but I am not a cow for sale!’

  “And they made him miserable!” she exclaims, presenting the facts for future-Nina’s judgment. It drives me crazy how, within minutes, she completely internalized the strange plan hatched by Nina, about how we should talk to future-Nina, and translated it into simple, purposeful practicalities, just as she did five years ago, at eighty-five, when she decided she had to learn how to use a computer. “I will not be left behind!” she’d frothed at the kibbutz committee, stomping her feet, and twisted their arms into paying two fourteen-year-old computer geeks. Twice a week they sat with her, and of course they fell head over heels in love, and within a day or two she was sending them chat messages and emails roughly twice an hour, pounding the keyboard with her iron claws, surfing online forums, forwarding links to New Yorker cartoons, sharing her recipes for jam and povidla cake (“Milosz used to lick his fingers!”). A few weeks later she had an empire of contacts, corresponding with old friends in Belgrade and Zagreb, as well as new soulmates who popped up every day in Prague or Montevideo. They were all quickly brought into the family, knew exactly who Aunt Chana was, where Esther’s granddaughters were doing their pre–military service, and the status of Shleimaleh’s prostate. She achieved this with speed and technical acumen, and with a wonderful capacity to understand the inner world of objects and instruments, as if she were one of them. Exactly the same way that she grasps—without even glancing at instruction manuals—how to operate vacuum cleaners, microwaves, cell phones, and any other device Rafi buys her without a second thought because it’s his way of keeping her young. While I, on the other hand, can spend hours just figuring out how to unbox similar machines. (My beloved has two left hands when it comes to anything requiring manual dexterity.)