MY HAGAR, FOR EXAMPLE
My Hagar, for example, tends to chew on the word “love” interminably, and in recent years she has also developed the irritating habit of remarking “I love you” at the end of every conversation with me, casting the two of us in some American television drama.
This is the recurrent pattern: first she provokes some argument with me on e-mail, and then she calls to say, “Mommy, I just want you to know that I love you.”
“Yes.… Same here,” I echo in embarrassment. And only once I said: “Look, surely we can have an argument without pinning this tail to it. It wouldn’t kill us.”
“And it won’t kill you to hear that I love you. Why is it so hard for you to hear me say it? When I have children, I’ll tell them that I love them ten times a day.”
“I’m sure you will.”
“And I want to make it clear to you that I know that you love me.”
“I very much hope that you know.”
When she was here over the summer I almost vomited at the conversations she conducted with her boyfriend on the phone: I love you. I miss you so much. I know you care for your brother. I know it hurts. I wish I could share it with you. More than once she stood opposite me in the kitchen with the cordless phone, she didn’t even take the trouble to go to her room, and against the background of the synthetic music of these phrases I cut the cucumbers and tomatoes on the chopping board into tiny pieces so that my daughter would have a proper Israeli salad after a winter in New York.
Hagar sincerely believes that “love is communication,” and that “love is above all friendship and shared values,” and that “love is growing together”; she recites these theses to me without a hint of irony, and since “Peter’s aggressive-depressive silences sabotage their love” she doesn’t think she’ll marry him, even though for the time being they’re not breaking up, either. Peter hurts her feelings, and you don’t marry someone who hurts your feelings, right? No, my clear darling, says her mother, on no account should you marry someone who hurts your feelings, even if those feelings sound to your mother like commercially packaged nothing.
ALEK
Alek came on the night of the twentieth of November. At half past ten on the night after the war.
How can I convince myself that love is an insane delusion, when Alek appears at my door in the dark as in a vision?
His face is white as that of a tense clown, and he is wearing something white under his army coat. “May I?” he asks, standing so passively in the doorway. You don’t ask “May I?” about something that belongs to you anyway, I thought afterwards, when I drew back to get my breath between heartbeats. My heart had gone completely haywire, it had expanded to alarming dimensions leaving no room for my lungs. Alek let me go for a minute and put his Kalashnikov down on the marble counter. “What are you doing here?” I asked when he pulled me back into his embrace. “What am I doing?” he mumbled to my forehead, and without seeing or hearing — perhaps only from the touch of his lips — I made out the words, “What am I doing here? Apparently trying to be Hemingway.”
“No,” he added immediately and tightened his grip, “no. That’s not it. I was a soldier here, and there’s you and the child and Yoash and a few others. It wouldn’t be normal not to come.” And later on, at dawn, he said too that “as soon as the war began I couldn’t stand the anti-Semites. Understand, I’m allowed to hate this country, but what is permitted to Ginsberg is forbidden to an anti-Semitic goy, and Paris is full of such anti-Semites, even if they don’t know that they’re anti-Semites and they just hate Israel.” Only then, at dawn, I discovered that he hadn’t gone to Heidelberg at all, and had flown straight to Paris when he left in June.
Heidelberg: One of the most beautiful cities in Germany. Known for its famous university, which was founded in the Middle Ages. Tchernikhovsky and Klausner studied there. I know, I looked it up in Grandma Dora’s encyclopedia one Saturday when I traveled to the kibbutz with Hagar to show ourselves and stand the test of gossiping tongues. For five months I had imagined Heidelberg at the foot of the Odenwald mountain range, until I could walk down the cobbled streets in my imagination and make my way to the river. I sometimes went into travel agencies simply in order to see the name of the city on a poster. Before I went to sleep I would look at the atlas and measure the distance in days of walking. And whenever they said “West Germany” on the radio, I would turn up the volume. And all that time he had been in Paris.
Alek didn’t ask about Hagar sleeping in her room that was once his room. Not right away. First he led me to bed and sank himself in my body, and gave me back my body that had as if been taken from me after the birth. Gave me back my body so that I would lose it under him and above him and this way and that, and then I would fill it up again until the tips of my fingers and toes dripped happiness.
“We weren’t Jewish heroes,” he mumbled when I rested on his arm, and his fingers dripped with milk from my breasts.
“We weren’t?”
“No. My father is a Jewish hero. Official hero. Two years he fought at Leningrad, you know: blocked the canon with his body. He himself breached the blockade.”
“Where is he now?”
“In the same place, apparently. In Sverdlovsk, Ekaterinburg, where they killed the Czar.”
“And you, where have you come from now?”
Years later, too, when he became a full-time journalist, he wasn’t in the habit of volunteering information in answer to questions of the who-what-when-where kind. “In the area of the enclave. The Golan Heights,” he answered reluctantly.
“Was it hard?”
“For those who were there at the beginning it was hard. This week they finally brought coats for everyone.”
As always happens with him, to this day, Alek opened up time for me and stripped the moment of all its specific attributes. Amikam was dead, that I already knew. The IDF was positioned forty kilometers from Damascus, Golda was conducting talks with Kissinger, Tami’s brother was in Tel Hashomer Hospital, Yoash was still serving in the reserves, and in Alek’s arms, in the clean smell of his body, I was far away, in a place consisting only of the absolute raw materials. Man, woman, war, baby.
Even when I saw his white face in the doorway I knew that he would not stay with us, but I was like a person whose faith has found confirmation: nature abhors a vacuum, and the vacuum is filled with what fits it. Alek had not left me, and he would never really leave me.
At some point or other Hagar began to whimper and Alek didn’t get up with me, he waited; I went to her and waited, dense sweet heart-trembling moments, until he came and stood silently next to the wall over us. I didn’t switch on the light, and I didn’t need to. I saw everything like a cat in the dark. My vision has never been clearer. Alek was dressed — perhaps he was cold, perhaps he felt it wasn’t fitting to enter this scene naked. I think that’s what he felt. He stood hugging himself in that so familiar position, and from the armchair I could see his fingers gripping his ribs. Something happened to time, which slowed down and spread out between the beats: Hagar’s sucking. My breathing. My heartbeats. His breathing presence in the dark. As if infinity could enter between the beats. I don’t have the right words to describe it, but I know for certain that in those moments I wanted nothing, I hoped for nothing, my thoughts stayed still. I was all gathered in, all wrapped up, and it was enough for me to know that the moment indeed existed, and since it existed, it would never ever be denied.
Only when I put Hagar back to bed did Alek come up and stand next to me and reach out to put one finger on her hand, which immediately clenched around it. I didn’t dare look at his face, I didn’t look until he whispered something and I turned my head to read his lips. “Fingernails,” he whispered, “I didn’t think of this. Of this I didn’t think. I didn’t think she had fingernails.”