The Remains of Love (2 page)

Come on, Hemda, put your foot down on the floor, lean against the wall and stand up straight, beside the bed your stick awaits you but you don’t need it, you need only me, as in those days when you were a wandering heron, looking for shelter among the papyrus-beds. Do you remember how you used to swim naked in the winter, diving into the freezing water which scalded you like fire, until you fell ill and your father wouldn’t let you carry on, but still you used to sneak away to me from time to time, throwing your clothes on the shore, and one time he came and found you there and ordered you to get out of the water, and when you emerged and he saw you were naked he ran away and after that he stopped looking for you there, so just the two of us were left but something was missing.

And where was her mother? Time and again it was her father who tried to twine her hair into braids with clumsy hands smelling of fish, it was he who forced her to walk and run, and climb on the roofs of the kibbutz like the other children. She couldn’t keep up with them, while they were leaping like monkeys from roof to roof, she felt faint with fear and refused to try, until he appeared on the scene, blue eyes fixed on her with a look of menace. What are you more afraid of, the jumping or me, life or death, and she climbed with an effort, cursing him and weeping, stupid, stupid ass is what you are, I’ll tell my Mum everything.

But where was your mother? her daughter asks when she deigns to listen to her stories, familiar to the point of nausea but still surprising, disconcerting anew every time they are repeated. You grew up without a mother! she tells her mother with an air of satisfaction, and Hemda protests, no, you’ve got it all wrong, I loved my mother so much and she loved me, I never had any doubts about her love, but Dina isn’t giving up, since a whole chain of enticing inferences derives from this declaration. You grew up without a mother so it’s no wonder you don’t know how to be a mother, and it follows from this that I didn’t have a mother either, and even my little girl is suffering from this. Don’t you see how the absence of your mother, who you’re not even angry with, has affected us all?

You’ve got it all wrong, she shakes her head at her. I wasn’t angry with my mother because I knew she was working hard. She worked in the town and came home only at weekends, and even when she went away for a whole year and came back and I didn’t recognise her, I thought she was a stranger who’d murdered my mother – even then I wasn’t angry with her, because I understood she had no choice. You people and your anger, you and Avner and the whole of this deprived generation of yours, what good comes of all these complaints? But sometimes it seems to her she too is angry, a terrible, murderous anger, directed not at her parents only, not at her father who was so devoted to her in his own hurtful way, or at her mother who was always busy, but at them, at her children, and especially at this daughter of hers, whose hair is already turning grey.

Only yesterday, she plaited a braid in her black and curly hair, her fingers as clumsy as her father’s fingers in her own hair, and now it is lank, metallic, and her daughter doesn’t dye it as most women of her age do, with the excuse that this grey mane of hers is the best frame for her girlish features, and it seems to her, to Hemda, that even this is intentional, it’s only to punish her that her daughter is mortifying herself, only to prove that those childhood days were fatally flawed, and to this end she will neglect herself, starve herself, turning more skeletal from year to year. And her own daughter is a good deal thinner and smaller than her. They are progressively diminishing themselves, the women in this family, and apparently in another two or three generations they will be obliterated, while her son will go on expanding, so much so, she sometimes has difficulty recognising the rotund, balding man, with his heavy panting, her handsome son who inherited rare blue eyes from his grandfather, and sometimes she looks at him with a shudder, because it seems to her that this man murdered her son and is living in his stead, sleeping in his bed, bringing up his children, precisely the same suspicions she once had towards the stranger, the woman who returned from America many years before and ran to kiss and hug her, claiming she was her mother.

All the kibbutz waited for her on the lawn, to greet her on her return from that extended mission, and only she hid in one of the trees, a little monkey after all, looking down on the tense expectation that was absolutely impersonal; which of the children remembered her mother if even she had forgotten her, and which of the adults was really expecting her, besides her husband and a handful of relatives. In fact most of them were jealous of her, especially the women working long hours doing turns in the kitchen, the children’s houses, vegetable garden, sewing room, barn, storeroom, in blue working clothes with blue-veined legs, while only she, Hemda’s mother, wears elegant suits and sits in some office in the town, and sometimes even this isn’t enough for her and she goes away on some assignment, on whose behalf, God only knows. Yes, all these words she heard while hiding among the branches, and even if she didn’t hear, she guessed, and if she didn’t guess she thought them for herself, since it wasn’t her they were expecting but a breath of fresh air from the big world, hope, sweet memory – all those things being brought supposedly by the woman now extricating herself from the dark taxi. Who was she? Even through the branches she could tell this wasn’t her mother. The long lock of hair had disappeared, the face was full and pale, the body clumsy. Miserable and bemused, she jumped down from the top of the tree, no one saw her escaping from there, running as fast as she could and as far as she could, to the lake.

You’re not my mother, she would shout finally when she returned to her parents’ room and stood facing her, and the strange woman would look at her sadly, her eyes fixed for some reason on the perky incipient breasts of a twelve-year-old, covered by a grimy blouse. My poor darling, how neglected you look, she would say, as if she herself hadn’t been doing most of the neglecting, and at once she would try to placate her. I was sick for a long time, Hemda. I was laid up in the hospital and that’s why they cut off my hair. I had a kidney infection and my face swelled up, and Hemda searched in that face for the familiar scars of chickenpox, two tiny craters between chin and cheeks. You’re not my mother, she declared again, disappointed, you have no scars, and the strange woman fingered her chin, I have scars, you just can’t see them, here they are, and Hemda burst into tears, where is my mother? What have you done with my mother? – and at once she fastened on her father’s scrawny thighs, don’t touch him, don’t do to him what you did to my mother, he’s all I’ve got left now, and the first nights she used to writhe on her bed in the children’s house and see in her mind’s eye how the stranger, the woman who swallowed her mother, was now chewing her father’s thighs as if they were roasted chicken legs, sucking the marrow from his bones, and soon she would tuck with relish into her meagre flesh too, perky little breasts and all.

Two breasts, two thighs, two parents, two children, and in the middle she herself, more obsessed with her dead parents than with her living children. A son and a daughter were born to her, a pair of children, the expanding mirror-image of the couple who created them, while the third pair in the family, she and her husband, always seemed to her like a transit station between two capital cities, and now when she places her feet on the floor, still cold although outside the air is blazing, she sees them there before her, the first couple, her father in blue working clothes and her mother in a white silk blouse and pleated skirt, the braid adorning her head like a soft royal crown, and they stand on the edge of the lake and smile at her, pointing with their hands towards the calm water, the colour of milky coffee.

It’s late, Hemda, time to wash and go to sleep, they say, pointing to the lake as if it’s a wash-bowl meant only for her, look at how dirty you are, and she hurries towards them, out of breath. If she doesn’t get a move on the lake will disappear again, the young parents will disappear, but her legs are heavy, sinking into the sticky mud. Mum, Dad, give me a hand, I’m drowning. Tentacles of viscous mud wrap around her waist, drawing her body into the depths of the swamp. Mum, Dad, I’m choking.

Crawl on your stomachs, she remembers the instructions of the nature studies teacher when they went out to look for swallows’ nests and the mud attacked them, enfolding their legs. Her mouth, open to scream, is filled with compacted earthy mush and she’s choking. Give me a hand, but her parents stand and watch her without moving, smiles on their lips as if she’s putting on an entertaining show for them. Can’t they see she’s sinking, or do they want her to disappear? Her body lands heavily on the floor underneath the window. It seems she’s been taken from this place, as the entrails of the mud eagerly digest her ankles. How welcome she is in the depths of the earth, she has never felt so warm a welcome, but she’s still struggling, trying to hold on to the legs of the table, the time hasn’t come yet, too early or too late, the time hasn’t come yet, and with the last remnants of her fading consciousness she crawls to the phone. Crawl like crocodiles, the man shouted, otherwise you’ll drown. Her parched throat is blocked. Dina, come quickly, I’m suffocating.

Dina is standing motionless before the kitchen window, gazing in astonishment at the pine needles that have joined together, interwoven, stretching out to her like empty hands, begging alms. She has taken the eggs, the grey dove. Only last night, before going to sleep, she peered again at the window sill and saw the eggs gleaming at her from the darkness of the nest like a pair of benevolent eyes, and at once the dove appeared and covered them with her body. Warmth wafted towards her from the body of the dove, gentle tranquillity, sweet memory. What could be simpler, just sitting like that, without moving, for hours upon hours, eyes alert but body still, all gathered together, concentrating on the objective. She has moved the eggs from here, flying away in the darkness of night with a white egg in her beak; she laid it in a different nest which she prepared in advance, and came back to collect the one left behind. Was it her insistent staring that scared the bird away?

What a strange pain, she mumbles as the phone rings on, what a stupid, unnecessary pain, to stand like this, in gloomy reverence, as if before a desecrated tomb, confronting the stack of pine needles, which yesterday was a house of miracles and today is a meaningless agglomeration, and she holds out her hand to the tiny cradle and crumbles it. The spring breeze will disperse the twigs in a moment, and no trace will be left of the life that for a whole week was so vibrant here, filling her with a strange emotion: two eggs in the nest, one egg unhatched.

Why did she take them? she asks aloud. More and more she’s been hearing her own voice recently, surprisingly loud, especially when there’s no one else around, her thoughts emerge from her throat unrestrained and it’s the voice that exposes their nakedness, their embarrassing simplicity. Must buy milk, she hears herself announcing with solemn intensity, as if talking about a national assignment, or I’m going to be late, or where is Nitzan? It seems this question has been heard again and again in the void surrounding her, and it isn’t so much where is her only daughter located at this particular moment, because there are still simple answers to this one: she’s at school, or at a friend’s house, or on her way home – but where is her heart, which all through the years has been close to hers and is now alien to her, beating against her vigorously and aggressively. How can even the most natural of loves turn into disappointed love, she wonders, following the child with yearning eyes, trying to tempt her with those treats that in the past elicited cries of sweet delight from her: come on, Nitzi, let’s bake a cake together, come on, let’s go to the cinema, have you seen there’s a new pizzeria just round the corner, fancy a pizza? But now she meets a look of sulky indifference and a cold voice answers her, some other time, Mum, I’ve no time just now, but time for her friends, she has plenty of that, because straightaway she’s making arrangements with Tamar or with Shiri, disappearing as if escaping from her, and Dina watches her go with a frozen smile, trying to hide the hurt. What a strange pain.

Leave her alone, let her grow up, Gideon scolds her, anyone would think you wanted to spend time with your mother when you were an adolescent, but she doesn’t answer; her answers to him are left unspoken, roaming around in the void of her belly and finding no outlet. It isn’t the same thing at all, my mother actually preferred my brother, my mother was never a pleasant companion, with those depressing stories of hers about the lake, she always saw only herself, she didn’t know how to be a mother, she learned too late.

Two eyes, again she hears her voice breaking the silence, coarse as the voice of the dumb, two precious stones, diamonds that gleamed from the window sill as if from the floor of a dark mine shaft, why did she take them, what scared her away? The guttural wail of a cat answers this question, drowning out the ringing of the phone with another hot, hairy flame, squirming between her legs. Where have you been, Rabbit? she greets him ceremoniously, filling his bowl with dried titbits, where have you been and what have you done? But he’s in no hurry for his brunch, lingering between her bare legs, nuzzling her warmly. That’s the way he goes and circulates between the three of them as if trying to bind them together with his tail, to imprint on her skin the heartfelt wishes of her daughter and her husband, to imprint on their skin some desiderata of her own, because lately it has seemed to her that this cat, this overgrown tom erroneously named Rabbit – with his white fur and long ears he should really have been called Hare – is the last remaining cause that unites them, like a child of old age preserving a faint echo of the family, besides possessions, of course, the furniture, the walls, the car, the memories.