From a Sealed Room Read online

  At night, when they had finished with their abrupt love and Nachum slept beside her, Tami looked around the sealed room in the dim light at the things that belonged to her son, the desk where he stacked his magazines, the bed where he had slept, and she knew that he had seen the depths of her selfishness and there was nothing she could do.

  When Rafi called that afternoon, Tami kept him on the telephone well after she told him Dov was not home.

  “And how is your training?” she asked him for the third time.

  “Training . . . training is training. My commander, Oded, he likes to tell stories about his family. The other day, we’re standing at attention, one and a half hours we’re standing at attention while he tells stories about his great-uncle. He’s a joker, and tough too, but he’s good to us. The hike we did yesterday had some of the guys crying into their canteens, but at the end Oded flagged a truck hauling oranges to Tel Aviv and the driver broke open a crate for us.”

  “And your unit? And the food?”

  “Let me tell you about the food. I see olives in my sleep.”

  “Olives?” Tami echoed, and let his energetic response wash over her.

  Rafi was the only one of Dov’s friends who did not make Tami nervous. When he came to the door he spoke to Tami instead of right away asking for Dov; he teased her, opening the refrigerator to look for a snack without asking, and played with Ariela with a seriousness that made Tami smile. “The girls get crushes on Dov. And me? They want to be my friend, they like to hug me,” he told Tami. She smiled her warmest smile at him when he told her this, although she dismissed his words without a second thought—she could not see any problem, there didn’t seem to be any real couples anyway. Just one group of them, doing everything together, unable to be apart for an instant. When Dov was in high school and had missed classes for paratrooper tryouts, the phone rang a dozen times on the same afternoon. “It’s Dafna,” a voice informed when Tami answered the first call, and while she tried to connect the name with a face, Dafna went on. “A few of us wanted to pick up Dov from his tryouts. If you could just tell us where they’re being held?” After the third call, Tami began telling Dov’s friends that he had been picked up, picked up ten times over already. Privately she wondered, Didn’t they have anything better to do with their time than drive for six hours?

  And now they were all in the army. Together or separated, they still seemed to Tami an unbreachable whole. When Dov returned to Jerusalem for a weekend, Tami knew his entrance would be followed within hours by Rafi’s knock at the door. The two of them were a center of activity: the apartment vibrated with outlandish insults, a soccer ball flew between hands, and the telephone rang without cease, familiar voices asking brusquely for Dov or Rafi.

  “So I’m convinced that the ramatkal loves olives and has brain washed his staff.” Rafi clucked his disapproval. “Either that, or it’s an army experiment to determine the psychological effects of olive saturation on—”

  “Rafi,” she interrupted. “What about Dov?”

  “What about him?” Rafi stalled. “He hates olives too.”

  “I mean his plans.”

  Rafi was selecting his words with care. “Dov is one terrific soldier.”

  “But do you think he’ll go to university after his three years? Nachum says he’d be an excellent student. Or is he planning to be an officer?”

  “All I know is, the commander likes him. So it will be up to Dov whether to stay in the army.”

  “Then he wants to be an officer? But for a few years, Rafi, or for his career?” Her pulse raced, although she could not have said exactly why.

  “I didn’t say he’s decided.” She could see Rafi fidgeting as clearly as if he sat before her, his skinny frame angled against the sofa’s back, one heel propped on the coffee table. “He’ll choose well. He’ll choose whichever path makes even more girls chase him, of that I’m sure. Don’t worry about Dov.” There was a brief pause. Then Rafi’s voice took on its usual tone of mischief. “He’ll choose well, of course he will, he has such wonderful parents.”

  The sound of the dairy truck unloading at the market boomed from up the street. It was the store’s first full restocking since the missiles had stopped, and women waited outside the doors with their shopping baskets.

  “Jerusalem is delightful,” Fanya said. She stood beside Tami in the kitchen, peering into the pot on the stove. “How is it I forgot all this time? Tell me, Tami, how could I forget?”

  “Maybe you should come visit more often, you won’t forget.”

  “Don’t be fresh.” Fanya stepped to the window and looked down into the street.

  It seemed to Tami that she had been sincere. She tucked a strand of hair behind one ear and stirred the heavy-smelling stew—something she had looked up in the “From Europe” section of a cookbook because Fanya would not eat the spicy salads Tami bought at Mahane Yehuda or the frozen mellawach she fried for Ariela’s lunch.

  Already the sun was past its height, and Tami chided herself for the morning wasted. As usual, Fanya had risen shortly after dawn and talked cheerfully over breakfast, mapping out her plans for the day while Ariela rubbed the sleep from her eyes. Making her exit as Tami braided Ariela’s hair, Fanya promised that she would have walked more of Jerusalem than all the fancy tour guides combined by the time Ariela’s short school day was through. Ariela giggled.

  When the afternoon heat had settled into the neighborhood, Fanya returned to Wolfson Street, climbed the steps to Tami’s apartment, and retreated to the bedroom with a satisfied smile. While Fanya napped inside, Tami sat on the balcony and watched Ariela playing on the street below. Watched, and waited for Fanya to rise. Tami had not spent so much time with her mother in years. It made her excited and nervous, so that she sometimes slipped and repeated herself, or forgot what it was that had brought her to the hall closet; Ariela would have to remind her that she had come to get Grandmother’s sweater.

  Now Fanya was leaning out the kitchen window, standing on her toes with stockinged calves peeking from the back of a tailored skirt. Tami had the impulse to pull her from the sill as she would Ariela. Instead she stirred the pot. “What are you doing this afternoon?” she asked.

  “Watercolor class.” Fanya spoke out the window. She had enrolled in a four-week painting class at the YMCA, a short bus ride from Tami’s apartment. “Why not?” she had explained to Tami. “As long as I’m already in Jerusalem, I may as well see some life here.”

  “Anything after that?” Tami asked.

  “After that, a walk in the Jerusalem Forest with Shmuel Roseman.”

  “Him again?”

  Fanya pulled herself into the kitchen and brushed her elbows. “Yes, him again. He’s a nice fellow, you know, poor thing.”

  They were all nice fellows and all poor things, these men who discovered Fanya wherever she went. Elderly widowers from Hungary or Germany, and once one from France who called Fanya every afternoon for weeks with long descriptions of the delights of her chin, her eyes, her complexion, before she finally advised him to take his affections elsewhere. Fanya accepted their invitations and their flowers and compliments until she grew tired of them. “That one was a sweet man,” she said of each, and gave no other explanation. As for Shmuel Roseman, Tami had known him for years; he was in his seventies, from Prague. In the mornings he sat in the back of the jeweler’s shop on Aza Street and repaired watches. He squinted for hours at wheels and pins far smaller than the tips of his fingers. On the rare occasions when Fanya ran errands with Tami and they stopped at his shop, he pushed aside the thick magnifying lens that jutted down from the strap across his forehead and blinked his heavy-lidded eyes at Fanya in adoration. “Your mother is a remarkable woman,” he would tell Tami when next she came alone to the shop, and repeat it in a murmer as he held a tiny piece of metal to the light. “A remarkable woman.” Tami imagined him trailing behind Fanya along the paths of the Jerusalem Forest, out of breath and in love, while Fanya pointed out sights and
paused now and again as if on a whim. Letting him catch his breath just enough, but not completely, before setting off up another steep incline.

  Popularity came effortlessly to Fanya. Since Tami’s father had died, twenty-five years before, Fanya had taught singing twice a week to a group of old women at the Arts House in Tel Aviv. Each year her speech was more clipped and each year she was closer in age to her students, but to the women she led through warm-up trills and winding Stradella arias Fanya was still a miracle: seventy-two years old and as graceful and poised as they had always wished to be. She was delicate, her Dutch-accented Hebrew impeccable, her hair dyed a shade of honey blond that perfectly complemented her keen blue eyes.

  “You’ll never guess what nonsense the American instructor was spouting the other day in class,” Fanya said. “He insisted America was the source of some of the greatest inventiveness in watercolor. I mean, for heaven’s sake, Tami. Of course that one woman in New Mexico had some talent, but Los Angeles? Don’t tell me it can compare to Paris for one instant. America is well and good, in its place. But really, now.”

  Tami was ladling some of the stew into a second pot; it might cook faster in smaller lots, and she was impatient with the rising heat of the kitchen. “Did you say anything to him?”

  “I asked him, didn’t he think he might be overstating the case for American art? And he replied that I ought to give America a chance, maybe Europe will find it has something to learn.” Fanya tittered. “I told him he’s a misguided young man, but a charming fellow all the same. Americans never lose that optimism, do they?”

  “What’s so bad about liking American painting?”

  “Nothing’s so bad, Tami, it’s just—” She made a helpless gesture. “I suppose you would have to know something about Americans.”

  Tami flinched. “I do know something about Americans, I studied English in high school, remember? You said then that English was foolishness, a waste of time, remember? America, the upstart country with no culture, and a cowboy language?”

  “Now, I never said everything about Americans was bad, only that they might temper their pride somewhat to match their accomplishments, don’t you think?” Fanya crossed to the mirror in the hallway and patted her hair into place. “Our cousin Hope is proof, of course, that America has its merits. Mind you, I’ve never understood her love for politics. Still, she’s a refined woman in her own way. But Tami. When you understand Europe you’ll know what culture means.” Fanya smiled into the mirror. “For example, did I mention I’m going to the Waldmans’ this evening? I’m to sing for their guests, and Lila is going to accompany me on piano.”

  “I thought the Waldmans had left Jerusalem for good.”

  “Oh, no—that was just an extended vacation they took. In Paris.” Fanya shot a pointed look at Tami, who grimaced at what was coming. “Some people have the sense to take vacations in proper places. Not like your father. I wanted to go to London, but no, it had to be Palestine for your father.”

  Tami struck a match to light the second burner. In her mind played the litany she knew so well she hardly noticed any longer whether Fanya actually recited it.

  It was August 1939 when Fanya and Daniel Gutman came to Mandate Palestine from Amsterdam on their honeymoon. When the news of the war in Europe reached them they decided to extend their stay into the fall. And then, only temporarily, until matters in Europe calmed, into the winter and spring. “Of all places to be stranded, we had to be in Palestine,” Fanya had told Tami over and again. “Rough and mosquito-infested, a barbarous place, and it still is. We could have been stuck in Argentina, or Canada even, someplace with a hint of civilization. But instead, Palestine. And that, Tami, is how your kind came to this country, not because it was the Garden of Eden, mind you, and don’t let your Zionist friends tell you otherwise.”

  Fanya and Daniel Gutman stayed and the country changed around them, each year more clamorous with broken Europeans and straight-standing pioneers; native-born Jews and Muslims jostling alongside immigrants from every direction; living languages, dying languages, and one, long dormant, now rebirthed by an unbreakable force of collective stubbornness. The new state was sealed north, east, and south by hostile borders and washed on the west by the merciful Mediterranean—the sea into which its children dove as if into the arms of complete freedom and from which they learned the audacity they made their trademark, and into which Fanya never stepped after she saw a jellyfish floating in its waters.

  Tami’s friends had always envied her her mother. “Fanya doesn’t cling, she has such flair,” they marveled, and Tami had to agree with them. “What I wouldn’t do for a mother who was with it enough to be my friend,” her classmate Hanna said, Hanna whose mother spoke only Yiddish at home and punched dough with thick fists, and who would not let Hanna go out in the evenings without jacket and hat. Tami had never been able to make her mother the friend everyone thought she was, and she felt sure it was her own fault—something she, in her clumsiness, had forgotten to do. There were the moments of conspiracy, when her mother grabbed her arm and asked about some new fashion or about the boys in her scout troop. Tami would stammer a response, but it was never enough to hold her mother’s attention. “Live for the moment,” her mother told her once, after a long silence, and Tami turned the words over in her head for days afterward. But these instants of heart-pounding attention were brief, and Fanya’s moods evaporated without warning. After her father’s death, Tami would find her mother sitting motionless in a dark room. Fanya stared out the window that overlooked the shore, a scarf wrapped dramatically around her throat. Once, when Tami came close and Fanya could not avoid looking at her, she lifted a piece of Tami’s short pale-brown hair and let it fall. “It’s a pity you inherited your father’s hair and not mine,” she said, and turned once more to the gray waves outside.

  Some years after Tami’s father died, Fanya began to insist that Tami call her by her first name. “You’re a big girl now, you don’t need a little-girl word for me,” Fanya said. But Tami saw how her mother blushed when she, a teenager, called her “Mother” in public. She could not call her mother Fanya; she called her nothing instead. She watched Fanya become skittish, and coquettish without warning; she saw how her mother would not greet even Nachum without first checking her makeup in the mirror and straightening her skirt.

  Cursing her own inattention, Tami ran a spoon across the scorched stew at the bottom of one pot. She turned off the flame. “Tell me again what the American instructor said. I didn’t hear the first time.”

  Fanya smiled brightly at Tami. “Never mind, there’s no need to get excited, it doesn’t matter. Now, how is Ariela doing in school?”

  “Fine, she does fine.” Tami combined the contents of the two pots, dropped the emptied one into the sink and let the water ring against its charred bottom. The rush of steam caressed her arms and briefly obscured her view of her-mother.

  “I mean, does she have friends?”

  Tami shut the tap, wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands, and crossed to the window. On the street, Ariela was pulling another girl in a wagon. “Of course she has friends.”

  “Mm.” Fanya picked a piece of lint from her blouse.

  Tami waited, but her mother did not continue.

  “Why? Why don’t you think she has friends?”

  “I just wondered. She’s very quiet,” Fanya said. “Like you.”

  Below the window, the glossy crown of Ariela’s head, with its narrow, precise part, filled Tami with hopelessness. She thought she knew how her daughter would feel in a few years, eyeing her own face in the mirror with disappointment.

  “Should I expect you back for dinner?” she asked.

  “Oh, don’t bother about dinner for me.” Fanya glanced warily at the one pot remaining on the stove, its contents a leaden mass. “I’m sure the Waldmans can come up with something for a hungry entertainer.”

  “It would be no trouble.”

  Fanya looked at Tami, puzzled. “
Really, Tami, the Waldmans will give me dinner.”

  Nachum’s breakfast was always the same, a container of yogurt with hyssop mixed in and a pita to dip into it, a crisp cucumber, and a glass of watered-down mango juice, which he stirred noisily with a spoon. Tami slid a bag of milk into the plastic holder and snipped off a corner with the heavy kitchen scissors. Ariela was seated at the table, eating a new kind of American cereal with chocolate flavoring that colored the milk brown on contact. Tami watched Nachum finish his juice and set his glass in the sink. She caught her breath.

  “Maybe we’ll go see a movie tonight, Nachum? Yael tells me Ghost is good. We haven’t gone out in so long.”

  “All right, so we’ll go.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “Sure.”

  “I heard it’s sad. Yael said it made her cry.”

  Nachum groaned. “Yael. What’s to cry about? A movie is a movie. It’s not real. We’re real. Right, Ariela?”

  “Right.” Ariela spoke through a mouthful of cereal.

  “If you don’t want to see the movie just say so,” Tami said.

  “Tami, do what you want. If you tell me we’re going to a movie, we’ll go to a movie. I’m happy.” He bent and kissed Ariela on her forehead, and shook his head at Tami as at a child. “I have to go.”

  “Nachum.” Tami’s voice stopped him at the door. “What do you hear from Dov?”

  He stood with his hand on the knob. “Same as we all hear. He’s doing fine.”

  “But is he going to enter the officer training course?”

  “I don’t know. I know they want him to.”