My mother-in-law called me every day with soothing small talk, as if I was the one who had to be appeased. But by the time our usual Friday night visit came round, Menachem had already surrendered unconditionally, with patriarchal dignity, because his son refused to be satisfied with less.
The men came to whatever agreement they came to. In response to his father’s surrender, my husband conducted himself with ironclad politeness — for the first time since we met I noticed the resemblance between the two men — and when we all sat down at the table Menachem put his arm round Oded’s shoulder.
“My son has beaten me,” he said to me, and his son did not bow his head or raise his hand to touch him. He looked straight ahead, his face was hard to read, in those days it was hard even for me — I can only say that he looked reflective.
Deeds have consequences. Necessarily so, but was this a late development leading from our actions? Was it the events of that night that had brought about a change in my husband’s personality? From the point of view of the plot it could be presented like this: one thing leads to another, until everything is made plain. But the truth is that I don’t know what led to what or how my husband was affected, just as I don’t know what exactly led me in the end to visit my mother’s grave. There are never any definite reasons for such things, neither in life nor in truth, and my immediate and apparent reason was Elisheva.
The anniversary of our mother’s death was approaching, it was clear that she would ask me, and I didn’t want to be evasive or lie to her.
I didn’t want to disappoint her; at this stage I already felt stable and I knew that I had it in my power to please her. And once I had decided to fulfill her wishes, I realized that going to the cemetery was not going to be a sacrifice or a forced concession made for her sake. I understood this when instead of the resentment I expected to feel, I was actually seized by a kind of curiosity; a wish to reassess myself at the graveside of the mother who had deserted us. I had not undertaken such a fundamental self-examination since I gave birth to my first son, when my motherhood was still new to me. A lot had happened since then. I did what I did, I made an end, I removed a Not-man from the face of the earth. I had no alternative, the earth could not bear him, and neither could I. Had this act of removal somehow softened my attitude toward my mother? Perhaps she too could bear no more, and therefore she made an end.
Once I had made my decision I had to find out where the grave was located; I had simply forgotten the dead woman’s address, and when we got there, Oded and I — not on the date of her death but two days before it — could hardly recognize the place. The trees on the slopes had grown tall. New roads cut through the mountain, and the whiteness of the graveyard had spread far around. It was dusk, and from the spot where we were standing I counted five bulldozers parked in the area.
The view awoke nothing in me, no tender forgotten memory, but I did what was expected of me: I got hold of a pail, filled it with water, and washed away the yellow dust that had accumulated on the tombstone.
There was no sense of reconciliation in this act, no purification, and I point this out because I could actually have concocted a catharsis out of this scene: mixed the water of purification with the amniotic fluid of birth, and holy water with tears at the end of a drought.
Alice had retired. Ever since her attempt to stir up strife between me and my husband I no longer heard her voice or saw her. Perhaps she had despaired of me when I failed to respond to her Nemesis act, perhaps she had gone to look for another disguise. Perhaps she had gone to join the dead whose place of burial is unknown. One day I will have to give her a proper funeral. In any case, wherever she may be, Alice had not put in an appearance these many months.
Alice had retired. But even without her, even now that my winsome little charmer was gone, the impudent symbolism of many waters went on paying court to me and seducing me: the tourist had departed, but apparently she had not packed up all her seductions and taken them with her.
The deceptive symbolism winked at me. Symbolism likes to wink, inviting the writer to cheat and prettify the picture, to inflate the nothing I felt into something. Because the truth is that I hardly felt anything at alclass="underline" no feeling of symbolic uplift visited me as I lifted the pail and poured tepid water over the gravestone of the woman who had been my mother. No ceremonial uplift and no blurring tenderness either. I was very well able to differentiate between water and water, and above all between mother and daughter. My mother deserted and abandoned and I, when all is said and done, did the opposite: I did not desert my beloved and I did not abandon the world to the serpent. For all my sins against my beloved this was the end of the matter, this was the end, and in the end I did not abandon.
This is the thought that came to me at the gravesite, but it too did not come as a sudden revelation. The verdict had been delivered and upheld before. I had been aware of the great difference between us before, and therefore the awareness did not strike me, so to say, but simply concentrated itself there. For one concentrated moment I measured myself against my mother. For a moment more I stood there with the empty pail in my hand, but already when Oded took it from me I looked down at my toes, which had been a little muddied, and immediately started to think about the lamb I would prepare for my son Nimrod in honor of his homecoming. The day after tomorrow, I thought, the day after tomorrow would be a good time to go to the butcher. The weather was reasonable, the walk to the Nablus Gate into the Old City would be pleasant. But for the root vegetables I would wait till Friday morning, because roots dying in the fridge spoil the pleasure.
So that’s it, that’s the story as it was: we drove to the cemetery and returned — during the entire visit I did not splash with my mother in a bath of reconciliation, and wellsprings of consolation did not well up in me — but as soon as we got home I wrote an email to my sister, because it was mainly for her sake that we had gone there in the first place.
I informed her that we had visited the grave, and explained that because we were so busy and because of Nimrod’s imminent homecoming, we were unable to go on the actual date of the anniversary itself. “In spite of the hard summer we have had here the trees in the cemetery look good. The plants are flourishing in our garden too. We watered them a lot and it seems that the combination of the heat and the water encouraged the plants and made them think that they were in a tropical country.”
The next morning the reply was already waiting for me, and the letter that opened with an expression of sorrow trembled on the screen with more than the usual emotion.
Elisheva had sad news for me: their good friend Martha, dear Martha who had visited us in our apartment in Talpioth and whom I had met in their home, had passed away this week after a long illness. When I saw her I must have noticed how sick she was. And exactly yesterday, perhaps exactly when Oded and I were at the cemetery, they had accompanied to “Mount Hope” the woman who had been like a mother to her since she came to America. Wasn’t it strange that Oded and I had been obliged to visit our mother’s grave before the anniversary, and that we in Jerusalem and they in Monticello — had visited cemeteries on the very same day?
Martha will be sorely missed by us all, wrote my sister, but it was important for me to know that up to the last minute she was very brave and continued to be an inspiration to all who loved her.