“Tell me,” I said to Oded, “do you remember any mountain in the area where my sister lives?”
“Mountain — what mountain? Where do you get a mountain from? There isn’t even a hillock there.” He was busy organizing his briefcase for the office, leafing through some documents or other, and had no inclination to chat.
“I don’t know, Elisheva wrote about some funeral, and I’m trying to understand what kind of people call a cemetery situated on a plain—‘Mount Hope.’ It’s the same deceit as calling a town where there isn’t a single Italian Monticello. ‘Mount Hope.’ What hope is there exactly in death?”
My husband wasn’t in the mood for wondering and didn’t answer me. But after he left the house, I thought that I would like to be sure that there was no hope and no eternity. Because if there was hope in death, then what had been erased wasn’t erased. And the serpent still existed, and I had to believe that he had no existence. Not even in hell.
After the first death, there is no other.
Years and years after I had read Dylan Thomas to my sister and been appalled, an entire era afterward, I understood at last that this was a sentence of consolation: there was no eternity in which I and Not-man could dwell together. There was no eternity in which we would breathe the same air. There was no eternity — and therefore none either for “two little sisters, Eli and Eli” and a pointing finger, and “Ha-ha, said the uncles, this one or that one?”
After the first death there is no other. The First Person would not be reincarnated. What was dead — was dead, and only the living existed. My sister had survived the Valley of the Shadow of Death, she was fine with her life, and I was here, and I had mine.
Here I was washing dishes in the kitchen, turning the tap right and left, enjoying the control over the jet of water as if I had made a new discovery. Here I was rubbing cream into my hands and breathing in the smell of camphor, lemon, and lavender; the vapors of the camphor deepened my breath and tickled my nose.
And here in two and a half days’ time my arms would embrace Nimrod and Nimrod would embrace me back without embarrassment, because my youngest knew how to embrace. Cleansed, I would drive to the airport with Oded to meet our son, and clean and free I would sit here with the two of them afterward at the table: if I spread a tablecloth over it, would the festivity seem exaggerated to Nimrod? After I had pulled false sugary faces at him, and after I had ruined the trip to Seattle I could not burden him further with any exaggerations: it was important for everything to be ordinary, quiet and normal, it was important for us all — and that’s what it would be, quiet and normal.
Quiet and normal because there were no more images clamoring for attention and spawning nightmarish litters.
Quiet and normal because everything I had been dragging after me, all that vociferous, metastasizing abomination, had been cut off and cast into oblivion.
That’s how it would be, yes, as quiet as it was now, because after the first death there is no other.
•
I didn’t know what to write to my sister: I hardly knew her friend Martha and I had never seen her Mount Hope. So instead of a reply I simply sent her an up-to-date photo of Yachin; it was a beautiful picture, a really beautiful picture of my handsome son, with a clean sea and boats in the background.
— 2 -
The narrator has jumped the plot months forward: skipping smartly over certain difficulties and solving them without any problems. Now all is well with the couple who were saved and returned to the Garden of Eden, and soon their son will be back too.
I jumped the plot months forward, and this acrobatic act, which no doubt did not escape the notice of the reader, may perhaps give rise to the impression that I have something to hide:
For what happened, what actually happened after we came home from the desert? Is it conceivable that we simply wrote off that night and went back to our old routine? That we put the lid on the past and hardly spoke about it? That our actions had no effects or that the consequences were all beneficial?
That’s not possible, things by their nature happen differently: you can’t put a lid on the past so easily and that’s no way to end my story.
Silence hints at a secret, and if so — what is it? Is there really a secret that I’m keeping quiet about? Am I pulling an Alice and directing the eyes of the observer to the dust bunnies so they won’t notice anything else? I don’t think so, but to remove any doubt, let me pick up the story where I left off:
We came home. Oded, who was sweating profusely, went into the shower first, and I went in after him. While he was showering I prepared iced tea. We emptied the jug quickly, I prepared another one, in case one of us grew thirsty in the night, and in the meantime we talked a little, saying things that sounded almost routine—“Are you going in to the office tomorrow?” “Will you be okay? What will you do all day?”
The fridge chugged loudly like it sometimes does. Oded gave it a shove to shut it up like he sometimes does. We said that we would try to sleep.
According to Oded he slept like a log, and I dreamt a surprising dream whose details I didn’t remember in the morning: I only knew that it was full of brilliant color and sweetness perfumed with rose water. This was the first in a series of Oriental dreams that came to me in the following weeks: dreams flowing in shiny brocades and silks. When I opened my eyes I would smile in wonder — and almost in embarrassment at the memory of the tickle of their peacock feathers. No actual pictures of these fantasy trips remained with me, but their sweetness seemed to seep into me gradually, and gradually it padded and rounded me.
The heat wave broke in the early hours of the morning. The next day Oded cut his hours in the office short, and I spent most of the day weeding the neglected garden. Approximately every hour I went inside to check the news sites on the internet, but nothing relevant to us came up.
On his way home Oded stopped at the video store and took out two thrillers, which we watched one after the other.
“I still can’t take in just how warped he was, it’s simply incomprehensible,” he said to me between one movie and the next, and for a moment it seemed that he was referring to the main villain we had seen on the screen. “So many words he had. Do you think that all that intellectualism simply provided him with an excuse, or that he really believed. .”
I put a warning finger on my mouth. “Don’t start with that. Just don’t start with it.”
“With what?”
“With trying to understand. Don’t even try to get close to his head, and don’t ask about that thing, what it was. There was nothing there. You saved me from what there was, and now there’s nothing.”
Then we watched another movie. And in the coming days, many more.
In those days of the beginning of our return, I caught myself keeping a fearful eye on my husband, assuring myself that he was doing his work, keeping to his schedule, sleeping enough and eating what I cooked with a reasonable appetite. I knew that he wouldn’t fail me and that he wouldn’t crack, but I still couldn’t stop myself from keeping an eye on him — but secretly, so he wouldn’t sense that he was being tested. After he fell asleep I would examine his face, trying to guess his dreams and watching for signs of disquiet. His features looked calm. He slept uninterruptedly and rose early as usual. Early in the morning in my dreams I would hear him busying himself in the kitchen, going out to the garden and after that a silence, in which I wrapped myself in my dreams again. Only several days and many dreams later I realized that he stayed in the garden and that he had stopped going out for his morning run. And when I realized, I got out of bed and went out into the air of the new day to join him and asked him why.