Fate

CHAPTER ONE

It’s Me, Rachel

She stood there, facing the closed door in silence. What was the point in ringing the bell or knocking? His mother had already noticed her. She sensed the shadow of a movement through the open kitchen window, as slight as the blink of an eye. A huge pot boiled on the kerosene burner, hiding a woman of short stature clutching a wooden spoon. It was lentil soup she was cooking, the steam escaped out the window, scorching the visitor’s face, absorbing into her hair. Was it for her beloved son that she cooked? Was he here?
“Sonya, open the door,” she called out to the pot, adding needlessly, “It’s me, Rachel.” It seemed to her that she could hear her mother-in-law’s indecision, a collision of shadows. Would she dare to ignore her, after she risked her life to get here? Those days it was terrifying to make the journey to besieged Jerusalem. Arab gangs lay in ambush by the roadside, sniping at convoys. It’s suicide, her friends in Tel Aviv told her, but what choice did she have? Letter after letter she’d sent, and he hadn’t replied.
“Sonya, I’ve got to see Mano!” she tried again, “I came especially from Tel Aviv. I’m worried about him, I don’t understand what happened. Is he home?”
The steam coiled around her as if she were a genie out of a bottle, and it seemed she would soon melt, leaving behind a small puddle for her mother-in-law to sweep down the steps. She had forgotten how harsh the Jerusalem sun was during the first heatwaves of spring. “Sonya, I’m thirsty,” she shouted, gripping the bars of the window. “Can I have a glass of water?”
On her first visit to this apartment, four years ago, she found the heavy woman in a faded housecoat at the top of the steps, without so much as a blink emptying a kettle of boiling water over the neighborhood children who were picking fruit from her loquat tree. A few drops splattered onto the red dress with yellow flowers that she wore in honor of the visit, and she stopped at the curve in the stairs, watching the children fleeing with terrified shrieks, the twisted smile spreading across his mother’s face. No way this is Mano’s mother, she backed away, I must have come up to the wrong entrance, the buildings here are so similar, but then he came out to meet her, pale and abashed, berating in a hushed voice this woman in a housecoat. He was always particular about etiquette, until he up and left without saying goodbye, without leaving a letter.
Now for some reason the fruit was still green and attracted nothing but wasps. When it ripens the fruit will be all the more attractive in this starved city, and his mother will not dare waste her ration of water. How would his mother keep away the little plunderers, with stones? And how would she keep her away? After all, Rachel plundered her most precious fruit of all.
A faint rustle came from the direction of the balcony, and she turned to the water tank that was recently installed, a large one made of metal. Was she hiding behind it? The Arabs have cut off the city’s water supply, she had written in one of her letters, and I was forced to install a tank on the balcony for emergencies. I scatter breadcrumbs over it, and the birds come and peck at them. I know how much water remains by the sound of their pecking.
“Are you there, Sonya?” she tried again. “Open the door for a minute, I won’t stay long, I have to get back to Tel Aviv.” What else could she have said to soften her heart? Finally she was answered with the heavy steps of house shoes approaching the door, a key turning unwillingly in the lock. Here was the puffy face, the oily hair, the black, distrustful eyes. His mother never liked her. Was she worried Rachel was too beautiful, too sought after, that she would break the heart of her beloved youngest child?
But she was wrong. He was the one who left. He was the one who didn’t answer her letters. He planned his departure secretly, and she in her innocence suspected nothing. She knew he was overwrought, that he suffered, but she never imagined he would disappear from her world.
“Why did you come here, what do you want?” his mother asked in a heavy Polish accent that had not faded over her decades in Israel. Her accent embarrassed him, with its stubborn errors. His Hebrew was exquisite, elegant. For a moment she feared she might never hear it again. “What do I want? To see Mano is what I want. Is he here?” and she almost added, to eat soup is what I want, because its aroma had opened a pit of hunger in her belly, and she thought she was about to faint.
“You can’t see him,” her mother-in-law declared with satisfaction. “He’s unwell. He said if you come, I must absolutely not let you in.” The large room loomed behind her back, dark as a cave, his bed by the window, the shutters closed, and she strained her eyes. Was that a movement under the blanket? Was that the stain of his head on the pillow?
“He’s unwell? What’s wrong with him?” she asked, defeated, gripping the doorframe, and his mother said impatiently, “Rachel, go back to Tel Aviv and don’t ever come here again.” Had she said he can’t see her, or won’t see her? Suddenly she must remember that precise detail, precisely now, almost seventy years later, as she prepares for the expected meeting. Can’t or doesn’t want to? But the more troubling question that returns to her is why she did not push away the malicious gatekeeper and burst into his room. After all, she was considerably younger than his mother, and stronger, she could have overcome her easily and pounced on his bed. If she could have managed to get to him, speak to him, he might have changed his mind, changed the verdict.
Because she really had not seen him since then, almost seventy years ago, aside from that hour in the rabbinate building, where he took care to sit at a distance from her and did not look in her direction, and right after the humiliating divorce ceremony, when she asked to say a few words of farewell to him, he turned his back on her and walked away with quick steps, and she remained silent in exactly the same place in which they were married, and only then did she notice the date, the twelfth day of the month of Av, August seventeenth, nineteen forty-eight, the exact date on which they married one year earlier.
So many dreams were cut short that year, so many beginnings were left open, she sighs as she washes smooth, cold plums for her guest, who is already late. An hour ago she called, and when she heard her voice she was fearful for a moment that she was calling to cancel. Only then did she understand how much she was really waiting for this meeting that was virtually forced upon her, which she had done her best to postpone.
But no, it was not to cancel that Mano’s daughter, Atara, called, but to let her know that she would be delayed because of traffic, and Rachel, sitting vigilantly on the couch, ate the plums herself, one after the other, and now she washes three more plums, refilling the bowl that has emptied.
Today people are late because of traffic jams, once we didn’t even know if we’d get there, and a sudden resentment rises within her when she remembers the journey back from Jerusalem on that same terrible day. Dozens of terrified travelers huddled together on the bus, hunched over and trembling for fear of snipers, and only she remained straight-backed, awaiting a bullet to shatter the window and strike her head. Just one bullet, to sever her from a life that seemed to her even more hopeless than death. She did not know what to expect after death, but she felt with certainty that nothing in life awaited her after her separation from Mano.
Somehow the snipers took mercy upon her. No shots were fired at the convoy, and when the bus reached Tel Aviv safely she had difficulty alighting. She wanted to return to Jerusalem, to bang on the door and push his mother aside. Why had she given in to his mother? She was as stupid as the man from the countryside who had allowed the gatekeeper to keep her from the Law in the story Mano had once told her. But no one knew when another convoy might leave, and as she stood there, at a loss, a man dressed in a European summer jacket approached her, asked her if she needed help, and she, shy but proud, nodded and immediately fell to the boiling asphalt, and he took her in his arms and never let her go.
That was fate. There was no other way, neither to Jerusalem nor to his besieged heart. Her Burma Road was not breached and perhaps that was all for the best, she will never know. It was pointless to remember all this seventy years later, and she would not have remembered it had it not been for her late guest, who had surprised her at the theater a few months ago.
A woman approached her in the long line for the restroom, and when she excitedly introduced herself it seemed as if the play had continued into intermission and taken an unexpected turn. How did you recognize me? She wanted to ask, stunned and annoyed, how do you know about me? After all, she had never told her sons about her first marriage, a fruitless marriage that ended in nothing after one year.
“You’re Rachel, right?” she asked, almost begged. “I’m Atara Rubin, Mano’s daughter, I’m so pleased to have found you.” Mano, she said, and not Menachem, and not Professor Rubin, as if she saw her as part of the family, and Rachel surveyed her, astonished at the thought that this stranger could have been her daughter. She was as tall and thin as he was. She looked young, much younger than her own sons. She was probably born when Mano was much older, but perhaps the clothes and the hair are what made her look young. Long curls, black and wild, tight-fitting jeans, boots. A few fine wrinkles flickered around her big dark eyes, as dark as her grandmother’s eyes that had glittered cruelly at her that distant morning, but pleasanter.
“I am sorry for your loss,” Rachel said quickly. A few months ago, she heard on the radio that he had passed away at the age of ninety-one, or perhaps it was a small item in the newspaper dedicated to the death of the eminent neuroscientist, and his daughter thanked her with excessive warmth and blurted out: “Would you mind telling me about him? About what happened between you?” As if now, with his passing, a barrier had been lifted, and Rachel found it difficult to resist this woman’s fervor, a woman she had never met before, and found herself reciting her telephone number again and again, because the pen didn’t work and the cellphone, switched off during the play, had trouble springing back to life, until finally when the third bell sounded his daughter pulled a bright red lipstick out of her bag, yanked up the sleeve of her sweater and wrote the numbers on her long arm, and they looked like wounds and made her feel uncomfortable, and she hoped that the number to reach her might smudge until it was erased, but the next day her exuberant voice sounded in the earpiece of her phone, and Rachel hastily said that she was about to be hospitalized for a simple procedure, which of course would have complications. She did not divulge her cellphone number, and when she finally returned home the woman called again, her voice already familiar, and again she evaded her on the pretext that she was still weak, in the hope she would leave her alone. What does she want from her, why did she suddenly remember her? She has no interest in dealing with that old story. It was only a few weeks later that she agreed to set a remote date, and as it drew near, she found herself waiting for it with both worry and hope. Hope for what? Worry for what? What would she tell her: I stood there, facing the closed door in silence?