From a Sealed Room Read online

  Tami hesitated. “Do you think he should?”

  Nachum tilted his head, as if giving the matter serious consideration for the first time. “If he wants to be an officer a few extra years or even to stay in the army long-term, then he ought to. He seems to like it. It’s not a bad life. And it’s not as if he can escape reserve duty either way—any way you look at it, we’re all in the army, all the time.” Nachum stood motionless before the door. “Of course, it can be a dangerous life. I suppose I thought he might go on to university after his three years.” He pushed open the door, and spoke carefully: “Really, Tami. About the movie. I’m happy to go.”

  The psychiatrist on the radio that morning had said that nights in sealed rooms could be traumatizing, and that in the weeks after the war parents should watch for stress in their children, signs of which included loss of appetite or inability to sleep. Tami woke from an uneasy slumber in the middle of the night and scuffled down the hallway to check on Ariela. She was sleeping, holding her favorite stuffed bear to her chest. Tami wandered into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water. She listened to the apartment’s night sounds: the drip of a bathroom faucet, Nachum’s snores from the floor of Dov’s room, the rattle of the refrigerator as it turned itself off.

  It was not that she wanted Fanya to leave. The longer Fanya stayed, the longer Tami wanted her to stay, as if something that had never been might yet be retrieved. Tami had not spoken with her mother on a daily basis in years; Fanya did not call her daughter every morning, as other mothers did. She called only when she had a story to tell, or when a particularly triumphant evening’s singing left her flushed and restless for an audience. Tami knew that on those occasions she was little to her mother but a willing listener. Still, she stayed on the telephone until Fanya was through. With a thin satisfaction Tami registered the contented sigh that meant her mother’s story was over, and knew she had not retained half of it. You can have my time, she caught herself thinking, but that’s all it will be. A miserable curse she cast at her mother: I’ll be here, but I won’t really be here.

  But now there was something that made Tami want to listen closely. Or rather, there had been, on those nights when the sirens brought her mother to her door. Those nights after Nachum had reached for her through the yet static-filled silence, brushing a hand over the mound of her stomach and over her nipples, which felt instantly tight, as though her body had been waiting for him without her knowledge. Those nights when they made love and fell asleep side by side but not touching, and their sleep was broken by a steady voice on the radio rising and falling with the awaited announcement. On those nights, the flutter of Ariela’s hands against the door was a prelude to Fanya’s sudden appearance in the grainy light—as if Fanya had come to rescue Tami from a childhood nightmare, although Tami was certain she had not cried out.

  Every few days Fanya made some motion to leave. She began to gather the cosmetics she had spread over the dresser top in Tami and Nachum’s bedroom, or she asked for the telephone number of a taxi company for the Jerusalem—Tel Aviv route.

  “Stay as long as you like, and leave when you like,” Tami said as if she did not care. She wanted her mother to stay, to stay a long while, although she did not know why. The longer Fanya stayed to enjoy her postwar freedom, the more alone Tami felt.

  Nachum made no mention of Fanya’s presence, and he did not seem to mind sleeping on the mattress in Dov’s room. His silence unsettled Tami, and several weeks after the cease-fire she asked whether he thought it was time for Fanya to go back to Tel Aviv. Nachum smiled his broad weathered smile and said only, “She’ll leave when she feels steady enough.”

  “But don’t you mind sleeping on the floor?” Tami insisted.

  “Fanya won’t stay forever, she doesn’t like to be in the way. Right now she’s out seeing Jerusalem and it makes her happy, nu, so what’s the harm?”

  She had never understood Nachum’s patience, the slow, easy manner that won him confidences and friends in places where he did not even look for them. She was grateful, this time, that he did not complain about Fanya’s staying on. Yet it made Tami want to rage sometimes, how effortlessly he passed through life. Long ago, this way of his had charmed her, but now it made her feel alien to Nachum and alien to herself, untrustworthy because she wound herself in knots while Nachum continued at his same steady pace, never hurrying, and the world slowed to accommodate him. He was late for everything and apologized with a smile; he never turned away a question or a request on the street, and when he lagged because of it people shook their heads and laughed. “That’s Nachum,” they said. “Nachum can get away with anything.” Friends at the post office let him go to the head of hourlong lines, the last bus of the night slowed to let him on as it pulled away. Next to Nachum, Tami felt methodical and ineffectual.

  Still, she accepted his tolerance of Fanya with relief. “All right, if you want her to stay,” she told Nachum, “then it’s fine with me too.” And when Nachum left to join the conversation humming elsewhere in the apartment, she went down the hallway. Carefully she straightened Fanya’s toiletries on the dresser, adjusting each item with care: powders and creams, and a single slender bottle of perfume. She stood for a while, then, in the silent bedroom. By the time Tami followed Nachum into the living room, he was seated in his favorite chair, holding court.

  “Once,” Nachum was addressing the three men in the living room: Moti and Yoni from the electronics shop, and Shmuel Roseman, who, Tami thought, was the only one who hadn’t heard Nachum’s stories half a dozen times already. Tami made herself busy with some linens she’d taken off the line that morning. She fingered a sloppily folded tablecloth and waited, despite herself, to hear which story it would be. “Once, when I was twenty-one, I had just gotten my first apartment. It was here in Jerusalem, a few months before Tami and I married. I had moved all my things into the place, but the telephone company said I had to wait for a line. Wait and wait and wait again. Every day that I was free, it was me going to the secretary at the telephone company and telling her I had no telephone, and she chewing gum and saying, well, that’s a shame, because the only person who can get me a line is her superior, and he’s on vacation abroad and she can’t contact him until he returns.”

  Nachum leaned forward, inviting his audience to join him in a secret. “I said to her, ‘But the telephone company is government-owned. The telephone company is the government, nu, what do you mean you don’t have a superior in the country?’ She said, ‘Complain to the government, then, I’m supposed to be on my lunch break already anyway.’

  “And I said to myself, ‘You don’t have a superior in the country? We’ll see about this.’ So that afternoon I went to a pay telephone.” Nachum made a swift motion as if picking up a receiver. “I called the operator and told her, ‘Quick, put me directly through to the office of the president of Israel.’ The secretary in the president’s office sounded suspicious, she wanted to know if it was important, and I said, ‘Oh yes, it’s very important.’ And the secretary hesitated and then she said, ‘Because the president isn’t in, but if it’s urgent I can get him on the field telephone. He’s on a tour of the Jordanian border with the commander-in-chief, the ramatkal, you understand.’ So I said of course I understood, of course it was important, would Nachum Shachar call if it wasn’t important? And the secretary didn’t know what to say to that. So she connected me to the ramatkal’s field telephone, and over the static—I had to shout so he could hear me—I said to the president of Israel, ‘Hello, this is Nachum Shachar, I just called to say good day, and do you know by the way why it is I’m calling from a pay telephone?’And there was no answer, so of course I had to explain the whole situation to him, how as our appointed leader he might be interested to know that the national telephone company hadn’t seen fit yet to give me a line. And when I’d finished saying that, he didn’t say anything for a minute. We both listened to the telephone crackling and whining, he and I.” This was Nachum’s favorite part o
f the story, and Moti and Yoni nodded encouragement. “‘Shachar,’” Nachum said in the raspy voice of the president, “‘Shachar, you are a thorn in my rear end.’” Nachum smiled and cracked a sunflower seed between his teeth, sucked out the inside and picked the shell halves delicately off his tongue with quick fingers. “And within an hour my apartment had a dial tone. Of course I immediately called our president to thank him, nu, don’t let anyone say I don’t have manners, but apparently he’d left a very clear message with his secretary that he was not to be disturbed again. Even for Nachum Shachar.” While the men laughed, Nachum winked and reached for the bowl of seeds.

  Jerusalem bloomed that spring in muted colors. The rainfall had not been enough, the Galilee was low, and the lilacs in Liberty Bell Park gave only a hint of scent. Tami, walking home from the post office along the edge of the Valley of the Cross, watched two soldiers flag down a friend on Herzog Street, shouting that they needed a lift to the central bus station. Along the sidewalk hurried an Arab flower-vendor with her pan balanced on her head, making her way, Tami supposed, to a better street corner, where the pre-Sabbath rush might relieve her of her wilting stems. In the valley outside the monastery stood one of the black-robed monks, conversing with an elderly tourist in a long yellow skirt. Tami passed through the concrete tunnel and out onto the tree-shaded path.

  Dov would be at home. He had arrived in Jerusalem the previous afternoon on a bus from the north, toting his soldier’s bag and his gun. His face was sunburnt, slower to change expression, marked from too much coffee, too many cigarettes, too little sleep. He was thinner too, and hoarse, and favored his right leg when he walked. When he spoke it was in a vocabulary of acronyms and slang. Even Nachum had to ask him what he meant by some of the phrases he threw about as casually as he dropped the Glilon onto his bed. Tami concentrated on his laundry: uniforms matted with dust and sweat, pierced by splinters.

  They were chuckling in the kitchen, Dov and Nachum, and Rafi, who nodded with mock formality at Tami’s entrance. Rafi had lost weight as well, and his eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep, but his grin hadn’t changed. Tami felt herself smile back with gratitude.

  “I’ll just be a minute,” Tami told them. She was changing her clothes at the other end of the apartment when she heard a call from Nachum, something about taking the boys down to the shop. The door slammed and there was silence. Tami came into the kitchen buttoning her shirt. On the table was a pile of photographs. Gingerly she sat in the seat her husband had occupied.

  The first photographs were of Dov and some other boys in uniform, looking serious as they leaned against one another and against their guns jammed into the ground. The next pictures showed lithe uniformed figures bent over a pile of gear on the hard-packed-dirt. Then a picture of an airplane overhead, and then three of parachutes in the air, figures dangling from them, something dizzying about the angle of the shots that Tami could not place. She tried to find Dov in the photographs, but all the jumpers looked alike, stick figures hanging by strings from taut canopies. A picture of a billowing parachute that filled the field of the camera startled Tami, and when she came to the shots of Dov’s face grimacing at close range, his features pushed up by the force of the air, his eyes slitted in laughter against the wind and his arms extended to hold the camera in front of him, she realized: He had sneaked his camera on a jump.

  In the quiet kitchen, she stared at the proof of her son’s cleverness. The photographs were glossy and smooth, she could get no purchase on them, and so they fell through her hold like water.

  She had known Nachum, of course, when she’d started her own army service; she had known him growing up, in Tel Aviv. Nachum had attended the high school in the next neighborhood. Whatever the local scout troop’s activity, he was always one of the leaders, arranging hikes or carpools or rendezvous points on the beach for midnight bonfires. They had never spoken, but Tami, like everyone else, knew Nachum’s comically raised eyebrows and his endless ideas. Because he surely did not know her, she found vague reasons to disparage him in the privacy of her mind. She participated from time to time in the troop’s activities, but mostly she ignored the invitations to movies or picnics that Nachum and his friends passed out after meetings.

  When they had met at the laundry counter of the Negev tank base to which they had both been assigned, he did not recognize her. But he was quick with an invitation to a gathering that evening at the shed, where sodas and coffee were sold until after eleven, and the soda vendor left his radio propped on the stony ground so they could sit on the plastic benches and listen to American rock and Israeli news. Tami brought Yael with her that first night, and again the second, but she came alone the third.

  She had not had a boyfriend before, unless she counted Aryeh, who used to walk her home from school with an arm across her shoulders while she, flushed, stared fixedly ahead. Fanya had not deemed any of the boys at school good enough for her, and Tami had not resisted her mother’s judgments.

  She was quiet with Nachum, and thought he would soon lose interest in her. The girls she had seen him with in the scout troop had been loud and free with their opinions, long-haired and tall: the sort to pick their way to the front of the hiking column and lead the group through the dry, bone-colored chutes of a wadi. While Tami herself trailed behind, running her fingertips over the slippery, water-smoothed stone that made the hikers’ voices echo out into the blue sky beyond.

  She was surprised when Nachum told her that he admired her quietness. “I’ve never met anyone like you,” he said, and she felt a surge of unfamiliar pride. They had been dating for months before they slept together; Nachum seemed to enjoy being courtly with her, as if she were a breed apart from the sharp-tongued daughters of Tel Aviv whose signatures and scrawled remembrances Tami had discovered on his folded high school diploma.

  They had been given the day off from their training. Nachum borrowed a jeep, and they drove, first on the highway and then off, over a rocky plain, until they were deep in the desert. They got out of the jeep and Nachum spread a tarpaulin on the hard ground. They would build a fire, make coffee, scout the area before settling in for the night—Nachum’s ideas—but first they sat.

  They took off their boots and stuffed their socks inside, and moving on hands and knees to keep the tarpaulin from blowing away, they anchored each corner of the crackling cloth. Nachum kissed her, and Tami smiled at him and looked away. Around them, the hills were dark against the fading sky. There was no sound of motors, of voices or animals or anything save the breeze against the side of the jeep.

  “Are you comfortable?” he asked, and she nodded, too full of the desert and the wind and the last glow off the stones to answer. They watched the sunset spread and sink over the hills to the west. In the east, above the Jordanian border and the dim plains beyond, stars began to emerge.

  Nachum had his eyes half closed, and the last of the light cast a faint shadow at the base of his throat. Tami thought to herself that he looked the way they were supposed to look, the way she had always wanted to look—dark-haired and strong-featured, suntanned and unafraid. She imagined the two of them free, wandering the hills as easily as the night animals; as unquestioning as long-ago, miracle-stunned men and women who knew that this was their home. It was what her mother would never understand: the Israel that had always eluded Tami herself, yet that at this very moment seemed closer to her grasp than ever before.

  She told Nachum about her reassignment to the base communications office and about Yael’s new boyfriend, and he appeared to listen. He took her hand, caressed it between his warm, dry palms, and pushed her gently down onto the tarpaulin. He began to undress her, and without a word she mirrored his actions. They lay on the unyielding ground, soundless in the cool and silent desert air, under a sky so black and thickly clustered that she could reach out past his back as he moved into her and fill the spaces between her fingers with stars.

  The radio newscaster said that a near-fatal road accident had occurred ou
tside Jerusalem. Drivers were admonished not to use cellular telephones while in motion. In other news, tourism was recovering slowly since the war. The airlines could not fill their flights; four out of five Americans believed Israel was a “hazardous destination.”

  Shmuel Roseman sat in the living room. Fanya was in the bedroom getting ready for their picnic; Shmuel had convinced her to relinquish her wristwatch for cleaning, and now, sitting in slacks and jacket opposite Tami, he spread the watch parts out on the coffee table.

  “Poor Fanya, the war was so hard for her,” he said, his expression laden with sympathy. Making a thoughtful O with his lips, he strapped his magnifying lens into place. With one eye distorted by the thick glass, he appeared to Tami to be weeping, only with a sorrow too great for regular tears, so that the eye itself had no choice but to waver and melt into a luminous blur. His other eye, squeezed nearly shut, seemed sturdily intent on the work at hand.

  Tami watched him manipulate the tiny springs. She had hardly slept the night before, and she was mesmerized by the grace of his thick fingers. Then she realized what he had said. She turned off the radio and laughed sharply. “What about the rest of us?”

  “You?” Shmuel spoke without lifting his gaze from his work. “You native-borns survive, it doesn’t touch you. And old men like me, what does it matter for us, anyway? But Fanya, she’s not used to these things.”

  “My mother has lived in this country longer than I’ve been alive.”

  Nudging a part gently back into place, Shmuel Roseman looked at Tami pityingly. “You don’t understand. She’s more sensitive than you are.”

  “Sensitive? During the SCUD attacks you think we weren’t sensitive enough? We should have talked poetry and sung arias those nights in Dov’s room, maybe?” Tami tried unsuccessfully to control the spite in her voice. “You Europeans think nothing matters except hearts and flowers and love.”