Lunch. Saturday. Yariv sits across from his grandfather — my father — contending with the revelation that Grandpa was once a little boy. A lovely crease ploughs its way across his forehead as he gazes at Dad suspiciously. Considering. Examining. Straining to find a place for this new truth. I watch as his mind processes the geology of knowledge. Effi watches too, still with an angry look on her face. Before lunch she had discovered that Yariv was unfamiliar with Little Red Riding Hood. She took him to his room to tell him the story, and emerged after a short while, announcing, “Your kid’s a retard. He had no problems with the wolf, but he was afraid of Little Red Riding Hood!”
We eat in silence. What can we say? Our current life stories pale in comparison to the history evolving over at Grandpa Yosef’s, where Grandpa Lolek’s recuperation is rapidly progressing. Only two months have passed since Grandpa Yosef took him in, and Grandpa Lolek is already taking slow, probing steps around the neighborhood. He roams Katznelson Street, looks at his Vauxhall, even sits down in it for a furtive cigarette once in a while.
Except that doubt has seeped in. Something hasn’t been sitting right. Grandpa Lolek’s rehabilitation process has begun to seem suspiciously marginal, as if its true tenor is in fact the advancement of the capricious protagonist, Grandpa Yosef. Something about him strikes us as odd. At first, when he insisted that Grandpa Lolek come to his home to recuperate, we thought he was simply trying to buy some more time before the inevitable loneliness set in (no-one-to-make-an-effort-for-no-one-to-make-an-effort-for.) He had escaped to the Caribbean, had then seized the opportunity to fill his home with the presence of Hans Oderman, and finally spent a heroic era at Grandpa Lolek’s side in the hospital. We thought he was now attempting to acquire yet another stretch of time. But that was merely the outer layer of a disorganized thought.
We monitored the recuperating Grandpa Lolek as he slowly returned to us. We applauded the internal powers that redrew him without losing an iota of his former character. We were optimistic, despite the slight and perhaps typical oddness of the way his health was restored. His limbs and senses convened in separate units to regain their strength, each disconnected from the other. The first to recover were his legs, along with his vision and appetite. His hands remained rigid, almost paralyzed, and not a word left his lips. When his left hand recovered enough so that he could leaf through the obituary pages in Yediot Aharonot, an anonymous notice representing an opportunity to make a quick profit sufficed to extract a cry of excitement from his lips; thus his vocal capabilities were rebirthed. His right hand recovered along with his hearing. He slowly relocated his back pain and the urge to smoke. The lust for opportunity, the debtism — it all came back. He regained strength daily, limb by limb, sense by sense, character trait by character trait, as if he were healing himself according to an old blueprint he had kept hidden away somewhere. Eventually he came back to us completely, the old Grandpa Lolek we knew. He took an interest in the world, in what was different and new, in the dollar exchange rate and the family’s well-being. He was somewhat alarmed by the rainfall, unaware of the drought that had raged while he was gone. He did not entirely comprehend his medical condition, utterly surprised to discover that he had been considered ‘ailing’ for some time now. He was very curious about the treatment options, the physician referrals, the types of surgery to choose from. He converted the proposals into a line of prices, options and costs, which clarified his situation with surgical precision.
We were impressed. We monitored him. With Grandpa Lolek — everything was fine. Coming along nicely. But with Grandpa Yosef there was a wild and indeterminate motion. From the moment Grandpa Lolek awoke and regained his senses, our suspicion increased. At all hours of the day and night, Grandpa Yosef hastened to pick up on Grandpa Lolek’s every wish, fulfilling each and every desire as though it were a holy mission. Even when we considered his usual personality, together with the uniqueness of the situation, we were still far from understanding the power of his enthusiasm.
The devoted care-giving affected Grandpa Lolek in many ways. We found him usually vibrant and cheerful, well cared for, his face joyous. Even when the discussion revolved around surgery and the correlated risks, his face was full of surging optimism. Talk of the costs still did not diminish the lightness of his wrinkles. It seemed that Grandpa Lolek was not in complete control of a burning desire to smile, to rejoice, to enthuse. We could not understand the source of this happiness. We suspected it might be the delicacy that Grandpa Yosef cooked up for him every day, the inactive ingredients of which were pickled herring and onion, but which was in fact a potion concealing powers that sometimes took the form of dillweed. Grandpa Lolek ate it eagerly, asking for more every day, longing for the next helping to the point of total dependency. A light glow enveloped him, a constant light into which the dish was poured onwards and inwards.
Grandpa Yosef had become a complete savage in the kitchen. He turned his soups golden with turmeric and scattered cardamom pods in his fritters. Ginger and cilantro enhanced his meatballs, while the flavor of cinnamon took hold of rice pudding like a tyrant. Whenever we came, at any time of day, we would find the table covered with leftovers from their banquets, and over in the kitchen a new feast being concocted in the oven. Whenever we tasted anything, we recoiled. Grandpa Yosef was exploiting the temporary malfunction of his recuperating guest’s taste buds by embedding fiery spices in all his dishes, turning Grandpa Lolek’s body into a refinery, a test-tube. Grandpa Lolek happily dined on the meatballs, the fritters and the dumplings, while mysterious reactions burned within his body. And Grandpa Yosef stood watching, concentrating, his eyes ablaze with purpose. “Stand back, stand back,” he would urge, pushing us away.
Nutrition and digestion could not contain all of Grandpa Yosef’s intentions. A fire was burning there, a great mystery. Perplexed, we watched as Grandpa Yosef rushed around and drained his energies. We asked ourselves what was going on. Effi was the first to understand: “Well, he’s trying to turn back time.”
We were amazed. No, not amazed, for this was an idea we had already considered — it had amazed us once and been rejected, but now it was clear. From the moment the idea was voiced, it seemed so obvious. How could it be otherwise? Grandpa Yosef was trying to turn back time. We looked at Grandpa Lolek, who had touched the brink of death and returned, rowing back into a life already lived. We looked at Grandpa Yosef staring longingly at him — if only Grandpa Lolek could recover and go back to the moment of the stroke. If only he could push and heal him a little more. Even the doctor had said, “Just give it time, take good care of him, and he’ll be younger than he was before.”
Grandpa Yosef was a realist, but he suffered from a mystical unconscious. His soul was preparing to create a miracle: to cure Grandpa Lolek with dizzying speed, to hasten the arrow of retreating time, and to use the momentum of his recuperation so that time would gallop backwards and restore Grandpa Lolek to his previous life, thereby also restoring Moshe. And by truly pushing reality to it limits, Feiga too would be restored. Grandpa Yosef’s unconscious barely let him in on these plans. It only ran him around like a messenger boy, working towards the great purpose — to turn back time and demand that it give back Moshe and Feiga. To restore everything to the way it was.
Grandpa Yosef took in Grandpa Lolek like a beloved burden, a yoke worth its weight in gold. From his illness, from the regions of death he had touched, Grandpa Lolek was launched towards health, a load pulled back and released. Together with him, according to the laws of physics, and without disrupting the principle of inertia or the law of conservation, without transgressing the laws of this world, time was also supposed to be swept away, or at least to flutter and leave behind a twist, a fold, a dimple — that was enough.