More Than I Love My Life Read online

  * * *

  —

  The friend left, and Vera and Tuvia were stuck on the sofa on their own. When he raised his arm to scratch his forehead, Vera noticed the black hairs peeking out of his sleeve. Thick hair also sprouted from his chest, stopping at the red shaving line on his neck. This both repelled and attracted her. Her first and only lover, Milosz, had had smooth, fair skin that took on a honeyed hue in the sun. Vera’s body suddenly remembered how she and Milosz used to cling to each other like kittens. She loved to burrow into his thin, sickly body, to inject it with warmth and strength and health, of which she had plenty, and to feel how the more she flowed into him, the fuller she became. Now her stomach contracted and her face fell, and she almost got up to leave. Tuvia, who had not noticed the commotion she was experiencing, stood up and said that he had to go to a secretariat meeting, but as far as he was concerned the matter was settled and they could give it a try. He held his hand out in a straight line, as though unfolding a carpenter’s ruler.

  His clumsy proposal elicited peals of laughter from Vera, despite her mournful thoughts of Milosz. Looking scolded, Tuvia stood there and made a characteristic effort to shrink his body. “So what do you say, Vera?” he asked pleadingly, and sat back down on the edge of the sofa, lost and completely pliable. Vera still hesitated. She liked him, he seemed manly and direct and readable—“I straightaway saw his potential”—but on the other hand, she knew almost nothing about him.

  Just then, with the miserable timing that typified almost every important moment in his life, in came Rafael, Tuvia’s youngest son, with a black eye, gashes on his face, and blood congealing around his mouth. He’d been in another fight, this time with some older boys at school. He lived, as was the kibbutz rule in those days, in a school dormitory with the other kids and had come home for the customary afternoon tea. He had on the hooded sweatshirt from his mother’s funeral, which he wore every day no matter the weather. He opened the screen door and saw his father sitting shyly next to Vera, and he froze. Vera quickly stood up and went toward him, and he sounded a cautionary grunt. She was not frightened. She stood facing him and gave him a curious look.

  Rafael, like his father, was confused by her gaze. He’d seen her before, of course, passing by on the kibbutz paths or in the dining hall, but she hadn’t made any impression. A little woman, determined and fast, with pursed lips. That was more or less what he’d seen. It had never occurred to him that she was the mother of Nina, the girl who furnished his fantasies day and night. “You’re Rafael,” Vera said cheerfully, and it sounded as if she knew a lot more than that. Without taking her eyes off Rafael, Vera sent Tuvia to the bathroom for some iodine and gauze. Then she reached out to Rafael’s bloody face and touched the corner of his mouth with her finger.

  There came a sharp yell and a muffled curse in Serbo-Croatian, which brought Tuvia running from the bathroom. Rafael stood there startled, with a taste of foreign blood on his lips. Vera was trying to stanch the blood dripping from her finger onto the floor. Tuvia, who had never hit Rafael, lunged at him, but Vera pounced with her arms out and stood between them. As she did so, she let out a hoarse, deep, almost inhuman warning. Her movement and the terrifying sound she emitted made Rafael feel, deep in his gut, like a cub: “She was an animal fighting for its young,” he told me.

  And although it was incongruous with everything he felt toward her, he suddenly wanted very desperately to be this animal’s cub.

  * * *

  —

  Tuvia was not a violent man, and he was frightened by the force that had burst out of him. Ashamed, he kept mumbling, “I’m sorry, Rafi, forgive me.” Vera leaned on the wall, slightly dizzied, though not from the blood—blood never scared her. She shut her eyes. Her eyelids trembled and concealed a quick conversation with Milosz. It had been almost twelve years since he’d committed suicide in the UDBA’s torture chambers in Belgrade. She told him she was going to live with a different man now, but that she was absolutely not saying goodbye to him or to their love.

  She opened her eyes and looked at Rafael. She thought how much he looked like his father, and what a striking man he would become, but she also saw what it had done to him to have lost his mother at such a young age. Nina, her daughter, had also lost a parent, under indescribable circumstances, but Rafael’s devastation and loneliness and neglect made Vera feel motherly in a way she never had before. She reiterated that sentiment to me several times over the years, with a broad spectrum of emphases. “How could you have never felt it before?” I once blurted. “You already had Nina! You had a daughter!” We were walking on our favorite path, in the fields around the kibbutz, arm in arm, which is still how she likes to walk with me, despite the difference in height. She, as is her wont, replied with dreadful candor: “It’s like with Nina I had missed-carriage, and with Rafi it all of a sudden was everything right.”

  * * *

  —

  Rafael and Tuvia scarcely breathed under her gaze, and that was the moment when she knew without a doubt that she would marry Tuvia, and would have married him—she said this more than once—even if he’d been ugly and a scoundrel and a drummer in a brothel; this was one of her many peculiar idioms, the meaning of which was never entirely clear, and which Tuvia’s family through the ages gleefully adopted. Because what are all your noble ideals worth—Vera asked herself at that moment—and what is the point of all the communism and the solidarity and the red star and the inspiring Pavel Korchagin in How the Steel Was Tempered, and what is the point of all the wars you fought for a better, more just world? They’re all worth zilch—she answered herself—if you abandon this child now.

  For a moment or two they were each lost in their own world. I like to imagine them standing there with their heads bowed, as if listening to an emulsion beginning to fizz inside them. That was, in fact, the moment when my family was created. It was also the moment when, ultimately, I myself began to transpire.

  Tuvia Bruck was my grandfather. Vera is my grandmother.

  Rafael, Rafi, R, is, as we’ve said, my father. And Nina—

  Nina isn’t here.

  She’s gone, Nina.

  But that was always her unique contribution to the family.

  And me?

  Dear notebook, with your seventy-two locally made tree-free pages: I’ve filled a quarter of you already and we haven’t even been properly introduced.

  Gili.

  A problematic name whichever way you look at it, being not only derived from the Hebrew root for “rejoice,” but phrased in the imperative.

  * * *

  —

  Rafael retreated into his room, which was as tiny and dark as a lair. He shut the door and sat down on his bed. The little woman frightened him. He’d never seen his father so enfeebled. On the other side of his door, Vera walked Tuvia to the sofa and let him bandage her two bitten fingers. She delighted in how pale her hand looked between his. They shared a good silence. Tuvia fastened the bandage with a safety pin. He put his mouth to her fingers and bit off a stray thread, and her heart was dissolved by his potent masculinity. He said, “The boy has been like that since his mother died. Or since she got ill, really.” Vera put her bandaged hand on his. “I have Nina and you have Rafael.” The quiet words brought them closer. She resisted running her fingers through his thick hair.

  “So what do you say, Vera, maybe we should—”

  “Together, we can try, why not.”

  * * *

  —

  Two days ago we celebrated Vera turning ninety (plus two months; she had pneumonia on the actual date and we postponed the party). The family gathered in the kibbutz clubhouse. “The family,” of course, means Tuvia’s family, which Vera had joined, but, over the course of four decades, she’d become its core. It’s always amusing to think that most of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren who cling to her and compete for her attention
don’t even know that she is not their biological grandmother. Each child in our family goes through a little initiation rite when, usually around the age of ten, they learn the truth. And then, without exception, they ask a question or two, furrow their brows slightly, narrow their eyes, and finally give a quick flick of their head to shake off the bothersome new information.

  Chana, Grandpa Tuvia’s eldest daughter, my father’s older sister, gave a short speech: “After thirty-two years of them being together, I think I can say from the bottom of my heart that not only is Vera a full member of the family, but that without her we probably would not be the family we are.” Chana spoke simply and modestly, as usual, and Rafael was not the only one who wiped away a tear. Vera twisted her mouth—she has an automatic grimace of disdain when she senses things are getting sappy—and Rafael, who was taking pictures, as he does at all family events, whispered to me that every movement and gesture Vera makes are so hers.

  She’d announced right from the start that today she was the only one who was allowed to say nice things about herself, so we could just go ahead and eat. But this time the family wouldn’t let her off the hook. People from every generation and every age got up and sang her praises, a highly unusual occurrence because the Brucks are not known for being gregarious, and it would never have occurred to them to say such direct and intimate things to anyone, and in public moreover. But Vera was someone they wanted to say things to. Almost every person in the room had a story about how Vera had helped them, cared for them, saved them from something or from themselves. My story was the most sensational, featuring a touch of suicide at the age of twenty-three due to having my heart broken by a man whose name shall be expunged from my filmography. But it was clear to both Vera and me that what I had to say I would tell her privately, as always, eye to eye. One especially stirring moment occurred when Tom, Esther’s two-and-a-half-year-old grandson, needed his diaper changed and adamantly refused to have his mother or Grandma Esther do it, and when Esther asked whom he wanted, he shrieked, “Tata Vera!” and everyone laughed heartily.

  Vera jumped up with remarkable speed, ran almost like a girl, except that her body was slightly bent to the left, and changed Tom’s diaper on a side table, all while signaling for us to go on talking and “get it over with already.” She focused on Tom’s grinning face, speaking into his belly button with Serbo-Croatian murmurs in a Hungarian accent, while also listening intently to the things being said about her behind her back. When, unburdened by her ninety years of age, she waved the freshly changed Tom up in the air while he laughed and tried to grab her glasses, I felt a bite deep inside, the pain of what I will never be and never do, and I missed my man Meir so badly, and I realized I should have asked him to come with me: I knew, after all, how exposed and vulnerable I would be here, with Nina, my rarely seen mother, present.

  * * *

  —

  Forty-five years earlier, in the winter of 1963, on the evening when Vera and Tuvia were about to start living together, Rafael was walking to the kibbutz gymnasium. Behind the gym was an empty sandy lot, where, in the year since his mother had died, he went to practice throwing shot put. The sun had set, but there was still a faint strip of light in the sky, and splinters of rain were in the air. Again and again, dozens of times, Rafael launched three- and four-kilo iron balls into the air. The fury and hatred did wonders for his distances. When he got cold and wanted to go to his room at the boarding school and bury his head under the pillow and not think about what his father was doing tonight, or perhaps at this very moment, with his Yugoslavian whore, suddenly there was Vera right before his eyes. She was holding a brown suitcase that was almost as big as her, fastened with leather straps and metal buckles (a beautiful accessory that I’ve been coveting for years). Vera put the suitcase down on the mud and stood facing Rafael with her arms spread out, as though she were offering herself up for trial. He had no choice. He kept putting shots without looking at her. In the two weeks that had passed since he bit her on their first meeting, Rafael had learned that Vera was the mother of his beloved. This fact was so horrifying that he tried with all his might to distract himself from it, but now Vera was right in front of him, a living reminder.

  The rain had caught her by surprise. She was wearing a thin eggplant-colored sweater with a white muslin collar, and white shoes that were already muddy. A small purple hat was perched on her head at an angle that irritated Rafael no less than the hat itself. She also had a thin gold chain and pearl earrings, things that only city girls wore.

  In fact, now that I’m writing this, it occurs to me: that was Vera’s bridal outfit.

  It was her wedding night.

  In her heavy Hungarian accent—at home in Croatia they’d spoken mostly Hungarian—she asked, “Rafael, will you talk to me for moment?” But he pulled his hood down over his eyes, turned his back, and put another iron shot into the dark. Vera hesitated, then walked forward, picked up a shot from the pile, and gauged its weight. Rafael stopped in midmotion, seeming to have forgotten what the next step was. Without any preparation, no circling around herself, only one deep groan, Vera put the iron shot to an absurd distance, perhaps a whole yard farther than his.

  Rafael was a thin but strong young man, one of the strongest in his class. He picked up another shot and nestled it in the round of his shoulder, his eyes closed, in no hurry. He crammed all his loathing of her into that ball.

  It was not enough, and he kept circling around himself, infusing the ball with his hatred of his father who was about to betray Mother with this stranger who was Nina’s mother. Even that thought could not make him launch the ball, and he kept turning on his axis until he discharged a dark spurt of fury at his mother—at her, of all people—for having begun her retreat into her illness when he was only five years old.

  The darkness thickened; the rain hardened. Vera rubbed her hands together, because of the cold or because of the competitive glee that had been sparked in her. In my film, Rafael gave a demonstration. I had seen that quality in her, and I did not like it. Incidentally, to this day she’s the same way: something steely and determined emerges in her face, her eyes, even her skin, at the height of an argument or a conflict, usually over politics. If, say, she suspects someone in the family or the kibbutz of adopting a right-wing position or if they dare to say a kind word about the settlers or, God forbid, begin to find just a little bit of religion—then she’ll unleash an ungodly terror, fire and brimstone.

  Rafael the boy also sensed—he later explained—that this was “not the way a mother moves.” Not that he knew exactly how a mother might move. He was utterly illiterate in motherhood when Vera burst into his life. She took off her necklace, bracelets, and earrings, placed them next to one another on the suitcase, and covered them with the ridiculous hat. When everything was in its place, she quickly rolled up the sleeves of her sweater and blouse. That was when Rafael saw her muscles and snarled tendons. He stared at them anxiously: With muscles like those, how could she dream of being someone’s mother?

  The world had gone dark now. Thunder rolled in from Mount Carmel. Vera and Rafael hardly saw the shots they were putting. Only their black metallic glimmer was briefly visible in the light shed by a path lamp, and sometimes by a distant flash of lightning. The shots fell closer and closer to them, and when they picked them up off the mud, they had almost no strength left to hurl them again. But they kept at it, the two of them, throwing and groaning and standing there panting with their hands on their hips. Every few minutes they walked side by side in silence to retrieve the balls that lolled about like fattened tadpoles in puddles.

  A moment before Rafael admitted he was out of strength, she put her shot down, held up her hands, and walked to the suitcase. He had the feeling that she’d intentionally lost to him, and he liked that. That was what a mother did. (“You have to understand, Gili, in those days I divided all of humanity into two, and you’ll laugh, but it included m
en: who is a mother and who isn’t a mother.”) Vera stood with her back to him and quickly put on her jewelry, then her hat, which she tilted at the angle that gave Rafael the urge to grab it off her head and throw it into the mud and jump up and down on it with both feet. Then she turned to him. Her body was trembling from the cold, her lips were frozen, but her gaze was steady.

  “Listen for one minute. I came here to talk to you before I go into your home. I need you should know: I do not want to be your stepmother, God forbid. I could never mother you.” She had decent Hebrew—back in Yugoslavia, while waiting for their exit permits, she and Nina had learned Hebrew from a Jewish journalist—but she had that accent, and it was raining, and for a moment Rafael thought she’d said murder you.

  You’ll never be my mother, he thought to himself. You’ll never know how to be like my mother. In the last years of her illness, she had been confined to her bedroom and he’d hardly seen her. Sometimes, when he heard her calling him in the throaty, masculine voice she’d developed, he would jump out of his bedroom window and run away. He couldn’t tolerate her face, which had puffed up like a balloon and rendered her a caricature of the lovely, refined mother he used to have, and he couldn’t bear the sour smell she gave off, which filled the house and clung to his clothes and his soul. When he was little, five or six, there were nights when Tuvia carried him sleeping to his mother’s bed, so that she could see him and touch him. When Rafael woke up the next morning, he always knew—by the smell of his pajamas—that he’d been taken to his mother at night, and then he would demand, sometimes with a tantrum, that his pajamas be sent immediately to the laundry.