More Than I Love My Life Read online

  A large eraser runs back and forth over my consciousness.

  And then Nina left. One morning we got up and she was gone. Probably heard a whistle from outside, on a frequency that only dogs like her can hear. Didn’t even take a toothbrush, left and disappeared for years. She flew—as we later learned, from letters she began sending Vera—to New York and was absorbed by the city, and this time no one searched for her. Rafael and the little girl were on their own. Grandma Vera came to help, of course, at least twice a week, three buses each way, bringing baskets of food, coloring books, wooden animals carved by Tuvia. On the other mornings the girl was deposited, along with a few other younger children, in a day-care center at a neighbor’s, a woman who hardly spoke, and her silence must have infected the children because she remembers the day care as a very quiet place (which doesn’t make much sense, but that is how she recalls it). Devoted friends of Rafael came to watch her at night, when he worked. He was an aide at Bikur Cholim Hospital, a night guard at the Biblical Zoo, an attendant at a gas station. In the mornings he studied social work at the Hebrew University, and took a Ministry of Labor course in cinema. The girl was always waiting for him. That anticipation is her most solid memory of the period. Constant hunger. She cannot remember what she did while she waited, but even today she can reawaken that anticipation in herself, the stomach contracting upon hearing his heavy footsteps on the stairs. Apologies for the third person employed here, but the first person is too painful.

  Vera begged them to come and live with her and Tuvia on the kibbutz, where a new life awaited. Everything Nina had robbed them of, Vera would give back. But Rafael, and perhaps the girl, too, in her own way—who knows, who knows what the world whispered to her animal instincts—seemed to need a complete consummation of the abandonment Nina had condemned them to.

  But still, what does she remember of that time? Not much. Almost nothing. Meals eaten in silence. Rafael standing at the closet with his face weltering in Nina’s dresses. A real puppy with long ears, which Rafael found and brought home for her and which, after a week of unimaginable joy, fled the moment someone accidently left the door open. A gray afternoon at the neighborhood playground. A young mother turns to Rafael and tells him the girl isn’t dressed warmly enough for the weather, and the two of them, she and Rafael, get up and leave without a word.

  There was the life she conducted under her covers. She lay there for hours on end, telling stories and staging plays. She did not speak Hebrew in there. She had a different language, one that existed only under the blanket, and of which she apparently did not remember a word when she was outside. But one evening the blanket was suddenly flung off, and there stood Dad in a fluster, claiming she was speaking Serbo-Croatian in complete sentences. He didn’t understand the language, apart from the little Nina had taught him (“Mommy,” “Daddy,” “daughter,” “family,” and a few dirty words), and the girl, of course, had no idea what he was talking about.

  “But remember that we were also really happy together,” Rafael says in the film, almost pleading. “I used to put on shadow-puppet shows for you, and we had a whole family we made out of potatoes, and a gang of matchsticks and beer caps, and we played foosball, with nails for the players and a marble for the ball, and we saw lots of movies, don’t you remember?” He leans over and suddenly pulls the camera out of my hand and aims it at me, and then you see me shouting and protesting, flailing my arms hysterically to try to erase myself. “Stop flipping out for a minute and see how cute you are,” says movie-Rafael and laughs, and I put on an act of laughing with him like everything’s cool: “You and Nina are so good-looking, how come I came out such a train wreck?” Movie-Rafael laughs even harder: “You’re totally nuts, Gili, honestly!” And that is an unsatisfactory answer to an issue that tormented me in those years—I saw the grimace flicker over my face in the film—and it’s another one of those moments when I hated Nina with all my heart, because you can see on me what I lacked, you can see the barrenness, because bottom line, no matter how crazy I am about my dad, and no matter how deeply Ideal Marriage delved into my secrets, a fifteen-year-old girl sometimes needs a mother, even a cuckoo-bird one, even a mother of all sins, but a mother who will look at her once in a while, woman-to-woman, who will hug her confused body, who will marvel and tell her how much of a woman she is.

  And this is where the picture gets stuck, just when my face fills the entire screen. The magnetic emulsion must have peeled off, black-and-white spots flicker, and all at once my face fractures into twisted fragments and then freezes, and it somehow looks like a mirror that shattered after Nina looked into it, and it is concrete and terrifying, and we both sit and stare for a few seconds, until Rafi jumps up and unplugs the machine.

  * * *

  —

  I remember: the magazine of the Bolex, my dad’s first sixteen millimeter, held four hundred feet of film. Eleven minutes and eleven seconds waiting to be filled with moving images. To this day, the movements required to load and unload the film are fresh in my fingers. I was maybe seven as my hands and my dad’s moved together in the lightproof black changing bag. The bag was made for one pair of hands, but we managed to both fit in. He guided me, leading my slender fingers. As he loaded and unloaded, he would shut his eyes and tilt his head back, and I did the same. With our eyes closed and our hands inside the bag, we would open the camera lid, gently grasp the edge of the new film, and thread it through the rollers. His thick fingers moved swiftly and delicately. Today, with video and digital, all this sounds ridiculous, but I have sweet memories of the way our hands moved, and also of how time felt back then, the eleven minutes and eleven seconds that galloped through the rollers.

  Where was I?

  Starting at age five, the girl breathed in chemicals. She got used to sleeping on a mattress in an editing room. Her father was apprenticed to a very important man. The important man had cat eyes, and sometimes he made funny faces so the girl would laugh, but most of the time he sat hunched over a Steenbeck, cutting film and taping it together, muttering to himself. The room filled up with drapes of film, which she rustled as she walked among them with her arms spread wide.

  Rafael took her to see films at Lessin House in Tel Aviv, or at Lia van Leer’s home in Haifa. From producers’ trash cans, he fished out films whose distribution rights had expired. He swiped films from the workers’ union library. He educated himself: Antonioni one week, Howard Hawks the next, Frank Capra, Wilder, Truffaut…She would fall asleep on him, with her head on his shoulder. Waking up in the dark, in unfamiliar rooms, she saw the movies reflected in double vision on his glasses lenses.

  At the age of seven, halfway through the school year, the girl was brought to Gershon Agron School and introduced to the class as “a girl who needs help.” On the other hand, almost that same day, writing was invented, the miracle of reading was discovered, and a new life began.

  Well, I’ve worked hard this morning. I haven’t written this much for ages, and I’m doing it by hand. Here is just one more little anecdote before R and I go have lunch in the kibbutz dining room, where we will meet people who knew me back when I was in a stroller, and who will very tactfully not ask me anything about myself.

  When the girl was eleven, and to everyone’ s surprise and to her own horror she had sprung up to over five feet (she did a great job of growing, the almost preemie) and was secretly writing breathless poems and moving stories of orphans and had read almost all the grown-up books in the kibbutz library and in the Phillip Leon library at the community center in Kiryat Yovel, and had memorized Ideal Marriage and The Perfumed Garden, which had utterly discombobulated her, but in a different way—after all this, she stood up one morning in front of the whole school at the Remembrance Day ceremony, and instead of reciting Haim Gouri’s war poem, as planned, she declaimed a mortally embarrassing private lamentation that began with the words, “Where do expressions go when a person freezes?”


  * * *

  —

  Nina arrived the evening before the ninetieth birthday party. It took her three flights to get from her Arctic village all the way to the kibbutz—Rafael paid, of course, using money he doesn’t have, and Vera chipped in, too, because Nina was broke, as usual. I’m told that despite her exhaustion, she outdid herself and stayed up late getting the clubhouse ready for the party, and only called a cab after midnight, having insisted on mopping and polishing the floor herself. She chose not to stay at Vera’s, or in Akko with Rafael, a decision that hurt and angered him, and of course the unnerving idea of her staying with me and Meir in our one-and-a-half-bedroom on the moshav was never raised. Instead she rented an Airbnb in Haifa for three days. That was as much as she’d allotted for her visit to the hinterlands. From the Tromsø Airport in Norway, she called Rafael and promised to write a birthday toast for Vera and read it at the party. But on the day of the party she went up to Rafael twice and asked in a whisper if it was okay that she hadn’t written anything. Rafael said something like, What matters is that you speak from your heart, just say something nice to Vera, and Nina agreed to do exactly that: she would simply look at Vera and speak to her. “After all, I have so many good things to tell her,” she added with a vigorous nod. But every time Aunt Chana, who was emceeing the event, turned to her with a questioning look, Nina gave a “later” or “after this speech” wave, and in the end she did not say a word to Vera.

  The longer her silence stretched on, the more we could all see the disappointment on Vera’s face. And we all sensed that although Nina was agonizing, she couldn’t do it, she simply could not sing Vera’s praises. The whole family tightened around Vera in those moments, like a body protecting its own vulnerable organ. She was one of us, and Nina was not. We were willing to accept Nina only by virtue of Vera. And another thing: the family always knew that the border area between Vera and Nina was infected, perhaps even malignant, and it was best for us Brucks not to go near it. Besides—thought the thick-necked domestic Brucks to themselves—we’ll never be able to understand the perplexity of what happened almost sixty years ago between Vera and Nina. And I should clarify: the Brucks, generally speaking, do not perceive such fine resolutions of the human soul, and I have no complaints: you don’t choose your family.

  What else did I want to write?

  That it’s a pleasure the way this notebook allows for things.

  I haven’t handwritten anything for years. I thought those muscles had atrophied long ago.

  Putting pen to paper, as befitting the days when the events occurred.

  Come and find me, carpal tunnel syndrome!

  * * *

  —

  We’re at the party. In the clubhouse. God-awful furniture. Everything looks like it was slathered with mud some time back in the fifties. Rafael and Nina haven’t seen each other for five years, not since her last visit to Israel. Nina and I also haven’t met since then. And on that visit we barely exchanged a few words, at the end of which I let loose on her in front of everyone. I put on quite the horror show and humiliated myself spectacularly. We undoubtedly give new meaning to the term “family.”

  Before the event began, while everyone was standing around chatting, catching up on family gossip, I shut my eyes and slowly counted down from ten, and at zero she walked in. I have no explanation. Nina entered the room, and Rafael’s heart grew very weak. I saw it. And then there was a flurry of kissing and hugging around her, while Nina just stood in the middle, smiling quietly and hugging herself as if even here she was cold. The family took advantage of the occasion to get a little taste of abroad, namely to yell “Oh my God” and various other American shrieks that signified excitement and smacked of hypocrisy, and beneath all that, of course, were the hasty appraising glances, the tallying of wrinkles and skin and hair and teeth. The usual jamboree. I could tell straightaway, as could everyone, that Nina was not in good shape. Not only had her beauty faded (here was one fate that we fuglies were exempt from) and not only was the skin on her forehead and her amazing long cheeks and around her lips covered with crisscrossed lines, thin dry creases, as if someone had lashed her with a bundle of little twigs, but also—and this was what shocked Rafael most, as he told me with his eyes—Nina had expressions.

  I noticed it, too. It is the job of a script girl (also referred to, fittingly, as a “continuity girl”) to notice these sorts of surprising changes, irrational skips in the frame or in the text. I looked at Nina, and an alarm went off inside me. Rafael stood up, heavy and flustered. I hurried over to him, linked my arm with his, and felt him lean on me, his pulse going crazy. I offered him a chewable aspirin and some nitroglycerin spray for angina, which I always have on hand for him. He rejected both, with an irritated and slightly unkind gesture, but he had extenuating circumstances.

  How does one describe something like this phenomenon, where a person who did not have facial expressions suddenly does? Of course she’d always had slight expressions, Nina. Let’s not—she wasn’t a statue or an iceberg, and she wasn’t really a sphinx, I only described her that way to uphold and foment my own aversion, and Rafi claims I’m exaggerating the whole thing. Still, she really was unbelievably different now. One might cautiously say, difficult as it was to admit, that she suddenly was.

  That child from Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs? The one the Comprachicos kidnapped and disfigured so that he always looked like he was laughing, because it was good for the begging business? When I was little I was so scared of that book, terrified by the child’s frozen expression on the cover illustration, yet I repeatedly read about his bitter fate and cried.

  Here’s a question: What makes an average, reasonable person, meaning not someone who was disfigured by Comprachicos as a child, look almost always indifferent or unmoved? Or scornful. Is it something in the eyes? Is it the thin little crease under her eye sockets? The distant, hollow, always slightly distracted look?

  From the spindly, foal-like appearance she’d had up to a fairly late age, at least five years ago, when I last saw her, she seemed to have skipped straight into the wilting stage, without spending any time in mature, full womanhood.

  In life.

  Her face magnetizes my father and me, as if we’re watching a film—another film—that has been shelved for decades. A film about our unlived life. The life we might have had. Ripples of affection and happiness and disappointment and sadness blow across her face. And smiles. Good God, how warm and quiet and simple her smile is: Where was all that when I needed it? Rafael beside me stares at her, with his pulse and the shortness of breath—I think I’ve said that—and I swear I will not let him fall because of her, not again; there’s only so much a person can be tormented.

  * * *

  —

  Nina saw Rafael’s horrified look when she walked in. He couldn’t hide it. Over all the people crowding around her, she shrugged her shoulders at him somewhat apologetically, and something in that movement reminded me of a scene in the film Rafael tried to make about her back in the seventies, before she ran away from us for good. “Do you think you’ll still love me when I’m old and ugly?” she asks him on camera. They’re in bed, where else, in tangled sheets, sharing a rare moment of warmth. “You know me,” he replies, slightly puffed up with pathos, “if you were to suddenly turn into…I don’t know…a hunchback, then I’d start loving hunchbacks.” “Eh,” she says, waving her thin bare hand, “I bet you’ve said that to a thousand hunchbacks.”

  * * *

  —

  Later, after the speeches that were delivered and Nina’s that was not, and the talk that did not take place between Nina and me, our little tribe, which is not so little anymore, stormed the tables laden with delicacies. The women of the family, and a few of the men, had prepared dishes inspired by Vera’s cuisine. Only the four of us—Vera, Nina, Rafael, and I—remained seated, each in our spot, slightly bruised even
before we’d really connected. Nina and Vera looked at each other, and it was a look…

  A dreadful smile suddenly came to Nina’s lips. I could clearly see that it was almost involuntary, a sort of grimace that Vera arouses in Nina by her mere existence, a cranial grin that instantly mocked and dispelled all the praises that had been heaped on Vera, exposing a secret disgrace.

  I was afraid. Abruptly invaded by the kind of fear you feel only when facing human darkness. And I knew that Nina’s smile had no translation into any language spoken in the light. I saw my grandmother shrink into herself, as if Nina’s smile were sapping the nectar that makes Vera who she is even at ninety.

  At that moment Nina also looked at what she herself had caused, at the shell of Vera, and she was horrified. I saw it. She got up and walked over to Vera tentatively—

  And she knelt in front of Vera’s armchair in a strange but rather touching way—I was caught off guard, I admit it—and wrapped Vera in her arms and put her head on her lap, and Vera leaned over and stroked her daughter’s thin, brittle neck.

  With long, slow caresses.

  A few of the relatives noticed and signaled to others, and there was silence. Vera and Nina were braided together. And I thought that for the rest of their lives those two would be encircled by a line that separated them from everyone else. From the whole world.

  I thought that I, too, whether I wanted to be or not, was slightly surrounded by that line.

  Nina stood up, and I could tell that it was hard for her. Her body had lost its youthful ease. She wiped her eyes with both hands—“Pfff! Don’t know what came over”—and went back to her seat. Vera took a compact mirror out of her handbag and used a napkin to quickly wipe the smeared makeup from the corners of her eyes and moved her red-painted lips this way and that in the mirror. Nina watched, gulping her down with her eyes, and for a moment I could imagine her giving Vera that exact same look when she was a six-year-old girl in Belgrade, in their pretty apartment on Kosmajska Street, watching her mother put on makeup in front of—I’m guessing—an oval mirror adorned with bronze vines that hugged her figure, and perhaps a tiny photograph of Milosz, looking fair skinned and serious, tucked into the frame.