In the ugly, hasty days during which the place we called home was emptied of its contents — among gaping boxes, and furniture pushed aside and waiting to be sold, and cast off objects that nobody wanted; among heaps of dust, and scattered papers bearing footprints, and the stacks of Shaya’s books sent in one lot to the shredders — in those hasty and ugly days, I paid no attention to the photograph albums. And even if I had, I don’t think I would have taken a single photograph from them. But Elisheva in the depths of her grief and her sickness paid attention and took and hid. I suppose she hid, because in our basement flat, of that I’m certain, no photograph revealed its presence.
•
When we were finished with the house and the yard, we got back into the pick-up, and my new sister drove her guest to smear additional layers of paint on the picture of the little town in the background: this is Monticello’s square, this is Monticello’s café, this is its church—“not ours, ours is in Urbana.”
And I was driven and escorted, and I nodded and murmured appreciatively, and expressed my admiration at the beauty of it all. And all the time I never stopped thinking about my blindness: how could I have failed to understand that my sister in the midst of her insanity was also mourning our mother?
The death of our mother was, as they say, a difficult event. It also led to a chain of events that were very difficult for me indeed. But even with all the difficulty, Erica herself — my mother the deserter, the perfumed narcissist who opened the door — I didn’t miss for a moment.
And on the great days of a woman’s life, her wedding day and the birth of her children, this woman said to herself that she was actually glad to be rid of her mother’s lilac scent.
My father and my sister wept bitterly on our mother’s grave, and I looked on skeptically at my father’s impressive mourning and his gestures of grief, and closed my eyes to my sister’s sorrow.
In any case, whatever I did and whatever I didn’t do in the days of the basement apartment, the damage was already done, and it was irreparable. And the little I could do to repair it was to accept: to accept the fact that Elisheva missed our mother. My sister pined for the woman who had exploited and abandoned her, and absconded to her eternal rest when she could no longer deny her crimes, and all I could do was to accept it without challenging or arguing with her.
•
I promised order, and I shall now accordingly return to the proper order of things, where afternoon is followed by evening, an evening in which the white wooden house filled with guests.
“This is Mark, he works with Barnett at the university, Eve is his wife, a very dear soul. This is Iris, and Martha you must remember, she visited us when we were still living in our apartment in Talpioth.”
One after the other they deposited their aluminum trays in the kitchen and came to shake our hands and inquire after the peace of Jerusalem. And then they stood around beaming brightly at us, because God loves the Jews, and because we came from the Holy City, and because I was the sister of dear Elisheva: I was the heroic sister who had taken care of her so devotedly after the tragedy.
For all these things they admired and loved us so much that the air grew steamy with love, relaxing tense muscles as in a sauna.
“I remember your special tea,” Martha said to me and patted my shoulder.
Barnett’s mother brought Sarah. Bearing a towering chocolate cake before her, the beautiful little girl greeted her uncle and aunt with self-confident courtesy, without a trace of shyness, and after her father relieved her of the cake she wrapped herself around us and listened with a frown of concentration to every word we said.
It occurred to me that our Nimrod, who was fond of children and got on well with them, would have fallen in love with his little cousin at first sight. And it was a good thing that Atlanta was far away, and he wouldn’t have the opportunity to fall in love with her. Little children take in things that adults have no idea of. This was without a doubt a child who listened, and there was no knowing what she had heard from her parents and what might come out of her mouth even without her understanding what she was saying.
During the course of the years I had fed my children quite a consistent version of “our tragedy”, so to speak — a difficult, but not dangerously poisonous story. A story you could cope with. A world you could live in, a picture of the world you could live with, the provision of which, like a meal and a shower, is no more than the basic duty a mother owes her children, and which every healthy instinct prompts her to provide.
Atlanta was far away, and no innocent remark would reach my son’s ears to injure and agitate him.
More guests arrived: one of Barnett’s brothers, tall and hollow-cheeked and not at all like him, and the son of another brother, and others as well. The women, without waiting for instructions, laid the table. Amid the buzz of conversation I heard my husband’s voice talking about politics, and I saw people standing around him and nodding with expressions of sincere concern inappropriate to the occasion.
After making sure that all the guests were equipped with plates of food, my brother-in-law invited his mother to say grace, and once again the Lord was praised for the food and for “our very dear guests. You all know how Elisheva and Barnett longed to see them.”
Later on in the evening the mother hobbled over to me. Mrs. Davis, a sturdy woman with lizard-like skin, her white hair tied up in a pony tail with a redundant and rather dirty velvet ribbon, gave me a clumsy pat on the shoulder. And almost immediately, without preamble, she said to me: “Your sister is a real treasure. Did she tell you that last Sunday she agreed to read to us from the Bible in Hebrew? Up to then we understood that she was shy and we didn’t want to press her. But we’re all so happy that she succeeded in overcoming her shyness: hearing the Psalms in Hebrew was an experience that people here won’t forget. I just want you to know how much we all love her, and how much we all admire the way you cared for her. I have an eye for these things and I can see that you’re a very special person.”
Once again, the legend about my devotion and strength. I didn’t know how to react to this falsification, whose source was without a doubt in my sister; my sister, who — and this too is certain — didn’t have a clue that she was falsifying.
I muttered something to the effect that Elisheva had always been wonderful and that I hadn’t done anything, and was immediately overcome by disgust. The expression on Mrs. Davis’s face told me that she had interpreted my automatic disclaimer as evidence of the virtue of modesty. My father had been an expert in such affectations of humility.
“I also want to thank you for the accepting way in which you related to my son,” she continued complimenting me in Americanese. “He told me how understanding you were when you first met in Jerusalem.”
“It wasn’t difficult. You have a wonderful son,” I mumbled, because what could I say?
She agreed that Barnett was a good boy, but not everyone would have seen this when the child was in the throes of his crisis. “Thank you for being so non-judgmental and accepting. In the state he was in then, a lot of people would have had a hard time seeing who my son really is.” She lowered her voice to a near whisper that sounded louder than a normal speaking voice in my ears, “And they would have been concerned, you know, about the genetic question. I hope your mind has been put at ease in this matter and that you’ve been informed that there have never been any cases of schizophrenia in our family: neither in mine nor in my late husband’s.”
I wondered what the horse breeder would have said if she had known that our genetic dowry included a suicide and a rapist.