More Than I Love My Life Read online

  * * *

  —

  Esther, Dad’s sister, who cannot tolerate even one moment of awkwardness or silence, clinked her teaspoon on a glass and declared that Orli and Adili, her granddaughters, had prepared a short piece based on “two or three humorous anecdotes” that Vera had told them for their roots project at school. Nina tensed up, apparently not finding much humor in her mother’s recollections. The two vivacious girls, with curly black hair and red cheeks, said how lucky they were that Grandma Vera had chosen to fulfill her grandmotherly aspirations in their family, and how, with her wisdom and her giant heart, she had restored everyone’s happiness after Grandma Dushinka, Grandpa Tuvia’s dear first wife, had died. They spoke on top of one another, and interrupted, but with a synchronicity and amiability that only a healthy family—way to go with the oxymoron, Gili—knows how to instill.

  They asked Vera to forgive them if they went a little overboard with their imitation: it was all from love. Vera waved her hand and said, “Go ahead,” and the girls signaled to their cousin Evyatar, and the sounds of Sinatra’s “My Way” filled the air with pink cotton candy. The two girls pulled a suitcase out from under a table, and the script girl skipped a heartbeat, because it was the very same suitcase that Vera had brought to Tuvia’s on that evening when she and Rafael threw shot put together. From the suitcase they began to pull out colorful necklaces, large and small, which they draped around their necks, and they swayed to the music in a dance that was, if not salacious, then at least flirtatious—it was a little embarrassing, in my opinion. Then, like magicians, they pulled out all manner of hats in light blue and purple, Vera’s colors: small and wide brimmed, respectable and bold, European and tropical, native and colonial. I can confidently declare that no other woman on the kibbutz, nor in the entire kibbutz movement, could carry off Vera’s combination of hard labor in the dairies, in the coops, among brambles and thistles, with such a naturally aristocratic elegance.

  (After she moved in with Tuvia, who had been known throughout the kibbutzim of Israel as a desirable widower, the ladies in charge of the work schedule assigned Vera to week after week of cleaning and mopping in the dining room. At the end of her shift she would come home to Tuvia and show him her hands, with their skin peeling off and eaten away by detergents, and her grimy, broken fingernails. Tuvia would soak her hands in warm water with chamomile, then apply nail polish—Vera used to imitate him, with his tongue between his lips. “Chin up,” he would always say. And just like that, with her head held high and her nails held out like ten glistening drops of blood—“I am proletariat in my soul! No job is too low for me!”—she would return to the battlefield the next day.)

  Then the girls sat down on the suitcase and held each other’s hand and, in a perfect duet, parroting Vera’s voice and her accent and her Hebrew mistakes, recited a story that most of the family knew: “When I was born, in town of Čakovec, in Croatia, in the year eighteen, it was still World War First, and when Austrian soldiers saw that Austria was losing, they quickly ran home, and my mother was afraid of what they do to us, so she took me on train to her parents in Belgrade. And me, because there was so little food, I was very ugly, skinny and pneumonic, with running nose and coughing, and Mother held me on train high up above people, and it was all crowded and stinky and drunks, and people shouted at her: Throw your ugly cat out the window! Soon army men will come home and you will make beautiful new babies!”

  The little crowd in the clubhouse rolled about laughing. Vera called out “Bravo!” and clapped her hands. Nina, sitting opposite Rafael and me, shook her head with a strange blend of amusement and ridicule. Just look how she’s enjoying all this, said her bitter smile, and Rafael and I yanked our eyes away from her as one, wary of joining her in any conspiracy against Vera.

  * * *

  —

  “And my father,” the twins stood up and kept recounting in Vera’s voice, “was such army man! Yoy! And our mother all the time said to him: But, Bela, you have no soldiers at home, you have four daughters! But he did not know another way, how could he? In his soul he was sergeant major, even though he was never in the army for a single one day. And when he came home, we must stand up in his honor, even, excuse me, if we were sitting in toilet. Such Hungarian man, it set the fear of God!”

  The two girls crouched down, stood back up, and clicked their heels together. The kindred overflowed with laughter and cheers. “And my mother, she was very closed,” the girls said, resting their chins wistfully on their fingertips. “She was dead scared of him. Everyone was! Not a person in town would dare say a word to him!” The twins stuck out their chins, and for a moment they both resembled the young Vera in a way that has no logical explanation, because they had none of her blood. “One time, I was maybe fifteen,” Vera said through their mouths, “I heard Father raise his hand on Mother. I don’t know how I found courage, and I went into their bedroom without knocking the door and I said to Father: That’s it, no more! Last time! You never slap her again! You never shout at my mother again either! And Father stood like this, mouth open, and I for two years did not talk to him because of that…”

  Already at fifteen—said the look Nina held on Rafael—already steel.

  The girls flicked their heads up sharply, with Vera’s strident expression, lips pouting, and the room frothed with applause and cheers. Vera jumped up from the armchair we’d decorated for her and went to stand between the girls, who were a head taller than her, and waved their arms up: “Wait, wait a minute, listen, children, another thing you forgot to tell about my father: there was one time that my older sister, Mira, she was nineteen, maybe twenty, and in little town next door they make dilettante theater, and there was one very famous play, which Mira she played part of some very important madam, with long cigarette, and my father jumps out of auditorium onto stage and in front of everyone he gives her one pljuska on her face—‘You must not smoke!’ ”

  “Vera, let the girls breathe, you’re strangling their hands!” exclaimed Shleimaleh, Esther’s husband, and Vera said, “One more minute listen well, girls, so that you’ll have material for my hundred birthday. For me, since day I was seventeen, Father put every evening outside my door one new pack of cigarettes and wrote on it that he hopes snotnose with hard head will get a little more softer…”

  But the snotnose never did soften up, Nina mouthed to Rafael from the other side of the table.

  “What? What did you say?” Vera whipped her head back toward Nina. It’s hard to understand how—on what frequency—she’d picked up Nina saying something about her silently. “Nothing, nothing,” Nina mumbled. Vera let go of the girls’ hands and went back to her seat with suddenly weary steps.

  But she recovered quickly, straightened up, and crossed her legs—neither foot reached the floor, they dangled in the air: “My children, my dears, first of all I want to thank you from my heart’s bottom for this lovely fete you held for me, and I very well know how all of you worked here until last night late, and you made efforts and cooked and put pictures on walls of me, so that everyone will see how much beautiful I used to be…” Vocal protests from the crowd: “You still are! You still are!” “And also you came all the way from such places—yoy! From end of world you came, and my Nina even came from Norway with three airplanes from her little snow village, and I know how hard it is for you, Nina, and how busy you are and how important and sacred your work is there, and still you found time for me and you came to be with me on my festivity.” Nina shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “Well, okay,” Vera hastened, “I just want to tell you how happy and joyful I am to have everyone here, apart from my dear Tuvia, who is not with us, and my beloved Milosz, who has not been for fifty-seven years, and how I thank you for taking me with whole heart into your beautiful family and letting me be part. And every morning all over again I say thank you—not to God, God forbid, and don’t argue with me now, Shleimaleh! You are wrong and I will t
ell you why: because if there was God, he would commit suicide a long time ago. Okay, okay, we know what you have to say, you clericalist! What are you all laughing? Why? I’m not right?”

  Nina sat watching the buzzing family hive where Vera reigned supreme, and what she saw both enthralled and repulsed her. I could see it, I even recognized some of it in myself, and I found myself feeling sorry for her.

  “But even without bringing Shleimaleh’s God into this,” Vera continued, “to my good fortune I do say thank you every day for meeting here my dear Tuvia, who gave me thirty-two good years together, and thank you, thank you, thank you for meeting here also Rafi and Chana and Esther, his children who agreed to take me, and Rafi was only a boy then, only just sixteen, think of what heart he must have for letting a stranger woman…” Tears appeared in her eyes, and others were tearing up, too. Rafael’s eyes turned red, as did his big porous strawberry of a nose—

  I took the camera from him, though it was hard to pry it out of his hand, as usual, and I slowly ran it over the whole room. The familiar faces, the young and faded and beloved and annoying faces in which I knew every wrinkle and mole. When I got to Nina she bowed her head a little, and I skipped over her slightly, and the synchronization of our movements alarmed me for some reason. I gave the Sony back to Rafael and sat down feeling weak in the knees.

  * * *

  —

  The party slowly wound down. We had coffee and gobbled the cakes Vera had baked, and then we dispersed. Vera asked Rafael and Nina for one last coffee at her place before they left, she to her rented room in Haifa, he to his austere apartment in Akko. It’s been a long time since he’s had a woman in his life, and that worries me. Rafael without a woman always seems slightly less deciphered, and I like my Rafael deciphered. Of course Vera asked me to stay and spend the rest of the day with her, but I was anxious to get home, where there was a talk with Meir that I suddenly could not put off for even a second longer. A fateful, if not fatal, talk. And so everything I recount from this point onward is what I heard in retrospect from my father, my mentor, Rafael, although I did fill in a few gaps myself.

  “So we’ve met again without talking,” Rafael said to Nina as she walked him to his car. As usual, her head was down, and she was hugging herself. Rafael wondered if she was thinking, as he was, about what she’d told him in the final moments of their last meeting, five years earlier. She was living in New York at the time, and he wanted to ask if in her new place, on an island halfway between Lapland and the North Pole, she was still carrying on the way she had with her American lechers. That’s what she’d called them. But he couldn’t bring himself to talk about it. He remembered how he’d felt after she’d told him.

  At some point she put her arm in his and they walked slowly, at a pace she dictated. “I found it strangely slow,” he noted when he told me, “because always, my whole life, I’ve had to run after her.” They reached his Hino Contessa 900, twenty-three years of age and, according to Rafael, “in the prime of her life.” “Nice wheels,” Nina said with a laugh, and scraped an imaginary spot off the windshield coated with mud and droppings. “I gather the social-work business is booming.” “You’ve done well, too,” Rafael said. “Why, what did I do now?” “Oh, nothing. It’s just that you’ve been here for two days, and tomorrow morning you’re flying away for who knows how long, and you’ve managed not to be alone with me for even a minute.” Nina let out a forced laugh. “Why are you so afraid of me?” Rafael asked, the insult riling him up as it always did. “We’re old now, Nina, and the world is a shitty place. Isn’t it time we did some good for each other?” “I’m not ‘good,’ Rafi. I’m a major burden, I’m a pain in the ass, get it into your head already, give up on me already.” “I gave up on you a long time ago,” he said, trying to fake a laugh, but the words came out heavy and crooked. He saw her lips clench. He enjoyed hurting her a little, but it also pained him. It was their age-old ritual, yet Rafael felt as if they were in a different place now. There was a new, invisible partner to their conversation.

  “Maybe you could try to like me a little after all? At least for show?” she said. The words sounded fawning, but the melody did not. Her voice was tense, almost desperate. Rafael remained cautiously quiet, trying to understand what he was hearing.

  “So that’s a no?” she murmured painfully. “You’re right.”

  She let go of his arm and hugged herself again and shivered. The unwritten rule of their mutual torture dictated that she desperately needed his unrequited love. His stubborn, absolute adoration was axiomatic, one of the few stable elements in her life. But this was something different, Rafael told me, and he felt the earth slowly dropping away beneath his feet. Yet he still tried to grasp at the familiar, at their blithe way of talking: “You’ll laugh, but sometimes it feels like an ulcer, or like a wound I have to keep scratching so I can keep feeling something for you.”

  “I’ve never been compared to an ulcer before,” Nina hissed with a bitter laugh, “come on, give me a hug and let’s say goodbye.” She hugged him, noting, as usual, how plump he’d become, drumming both her hands on his paunch. “It’s like hugging a mountain,” she grumbled into his chest, but she did cling to him for a moment longer than usual, said my father the erotic trivia fan. Oh well, I’ll be objective and throw her a bone: it’s hard not to cling to him, it’s hard not to hug into him. Something about the contact with that large, solid body works on me, too, I admit it—like a can of Ensure hopefulness. And it’s amazing (“Write down everything,” he taught me when I was his script girl, when he was still a director, “write down everything that goes through your mind; in the end everything belongs to everything, it’s the law!”), it really is amazing how a fragile and frail and unhealthy man like him can give such a feeling of security and stability. He told me that he tried very hard not to make a single mistake at their moment of parting. He was careful not to abandon himself completely for her. Her body was virtually unchanged, he reported without being asked. In fact I explicitly asked him not to go into detail. I’d seen her myself, after all: the long, slender body, thinner and bonier than it had been, with the same itty-bitter breasts, as I used to call them. Nina gave him a quick peck on the cheek, and then, to his surprise, her fingers slid over his face with a tender motion he’d forgotten.

  He tried, but he couldn’t resist asking if he was going to have to wait another five years to see her again. Nina said, “Who knows, this time it might be much quicker than you think. My life is a mess.” Her throaty laugh made him feel, again, that she was both hinting at something and obscuring it, as she always did, so that he would guess wrong. He realized how exhausting their meetings always were. He was too old to keep up with her moody pendulum swings. Nina felt him retreating and quickly pushed him into the Contessa, so that it would be clear who was getting rid of whom, and she made sure to shut the door after him, then leaned her arms on the open window. Her face was close to his, and for a long moment they looked into each other. “No other woman looks at me that way,” Rafael told me. “What way?” I asked, bracing myself. “You know, with that mixture.” “What mixture? Explain,” I insisted. My voice sounded synthetic, like that woman who announces the elevator floors. “Of love and grief,” Rafael said, refusing to collaborate with my tone. “Or passion and grief,” he added, and I almost screamed, I could barely keep my mouth shut: What passion are you talking about? She doesn’t give a crap about you! And as for “the business,” as Vera calls it, Nina has her herd of lechers to ride, so do me a favor, okay?

  But deep down I knew Rafael was right. And that she also had a mixture of mockery and grief, and of cruelty and grief. The grief was always there, the foundational color of her eyes. I vividly envisaged that scene between the two of them, so that I could reconstruct it if I ever, maybe, made my film about him and her (the victim’s cut). Her face in front of his through the car’s open window, they do not touch each other, but they are t
ogether in a tense, trembling severity, like an arrow before it’s shot. Was that how they looked at each other when they made me? Did she stop him a moment before he came and force him to look into her eyes? Did she warn him then, with her gaze, that she couldn’t do it, that she didn’t have it in her? That he was making a child for himself?

  And meanwhile poor Gili was born.

  * * *

  —

  Nina ran her hand over Rafael’s face again. Over the unkempt beard. It was strange. He felt she was having trouble saying goodbye this time. She touched his forehead, on the spot where she’d headbutted him forty-five years ago and given him that legendary goose egg, which had merely hinted at all the horns she was yet to grow on him. “See you later, half brother,” she said with a sigh, and gave the Contessa a little pat. She walked away and Rafael mumbled his part of the ritual, and I thought for the thousandth time: Hey, I’m actually the product of marriage between relatives—is it any wonder I turned out this way?

  Rafael was slowly coasting out of the little parking circle by the old-timers’ neighborhood, when he heard a familiar two-fingered whistle, and in the side-view mirror he saw Nina running after him. There was something extraordinary about it: with all her restless flitting around the world, Nina always had a ladylike way of moving her body. She flung the door open and sat down next to him: “Drive.” “Where to?” “Doesn’t matter, just put me in motion.” Rafael cheered inside and hit the gas and off they went.