The cup of tea came. Grandpa Lolek stirred in three teaspoons of sugar (courtesy of the café) and jolted the teabag around in the boiling water to get everything out. After fishing out the bag, forgoing his usual Selektion process, he put it with its predecessors in the saucer and sighed. “Such a pity you cannot smoke what’s left of tea.” He stared at us with his crystal blue eyes and sighed again, from the depths of his chest.
Fake.
If not for our keen senses, he might have been able to trick us. But something about the sentence rang false, something in the sigh he had amateurishly copied from Grandpa Yosef. Since when did Grandpa Lolek sigh? As we left, we were not surprised to see him stealthily collecting the used tea bags in a little plastic bag, intending to produce another eight cups out of every bag, and then on to his great mattress plan.
We had fun at his house. We learned new shades of miserliness, ones that were not evident to us during regular encounters. In his kitchen window boxes we found herbs he had planted following the guidance of a television program, with plenty of sun and a little water. In his lamps he used only monastic low-wattage bulbs, which produced a brownish-golden light. In the kitchen, he required every match to last for three uses. When he tried to make us soft-boiled eggs, the first match completely failed and Grandpa Lolek looked at us accusingly. Before bed-time we took showers. We wanted baths with water up to our chins, but Grandpa Lolek recommended showers. “After beach, it washes better the sand.” We reminded him that we hadn’t been to the beach, but our protests were drowned out in a stream of water. He kept us apart (“No romances should be here”) and sent Effi in first. To pass the time until it was my turn, and since I was going to wash soon anyway, I helped him polish shoes, wash the dishes in the sink, throw out the trash.
After my shower, Effi and I shared our astonishment at the soap. We discovered that not only did he dilute the liquid soap by the sink down to nothing, but that the bar of soap for use in the shower had also been subjected to his artistry. In a painstaking process, he had hoarded and united the tail-ends of countless bars of soap, and with the skillfulness of a goldsmith had fused them into one multicolored lump, a bumpy hedgehog ready for use. This hedgehog, when it reached the end of its days, was also reduced to a soap tail-end and used, in turn, in a further welding. Through this process of reduction and fusing, Grandpa Lolek created a new entity, a bar of soap in which every particle had its own age and its own parent-soap. This alchemical creature, “a wise man’s soap” that resulted from the filtering down of hundreds of initial bars, astounded us with its multitude of colors. At home, our soap had only one color, usually a faded shade of brown.
And we discovered more rules. When he had a headache, he left his house to have a cup of tea with a neighbor. Then he would suddenly murmur, “Happen to have a pill for my headache?” That way, he also gained a glass of water to swallow the pill with. He was distressed by the red light on the hot water heater, which lit up every time it was turned on. Grandpa Lolek wanted hot water, not light. They explained to him that the light was in fact intended to conserve power, to remind him to turn the boiler off. Grandpa Lolek could not comprehend this. How could anyone leave the boiler on? Who would do that? He blamed the boiler for the waste, as if the hot water was designed to pamper the heating elements.
We came to believe that Grandpa Lolek existed on a level of miserliness that few could achieve. We could not have known that he was still only half-way up the peaks he was yet to scale. But even then, we sensed how to wind him up. “Starting next month, it will cost money to call an ambulance,” we told him. Or, “They said on the news there’s going to be a tax on bus fare.” (He rode the bus to preserve the Vauxhall.)
By the second day of our visit, Grandpa Lolek was shirking his duties. He handed a thimble-full of cleaning fluid to the maid who came in the morning, instructed her to wash everything twice, then hid the container. He took us for a measly trip to the Carmel Center, where he walked around with us impatiently. Too many hours had already been robbed from his life. When lunchtime arrived, he did not hesitate to set off to his regular restaurant. He left us at home without much remorse. The maid had left us a pot of mashed potatoes to heat up with beans, two rolls wrapped in plastic, and compote for dessert. In disgust, we ate nothing but the rolls, saving time for the main event: a thorough rummage through Grandpa Lolek’s house of wonders. We cautiously opened closets, bureaus, draws, cabinets. We found account ledgers and binders and lots of pictures of smiling people, including some of ourselves at Nathan’s bar mitzvah. We found a crystal swan with a broken neck — more precisely, we found only the hook of its neck and head, with no body. We found two envelopes stuffed with stamps, all in the same color, red. When I stood on a chair and Effi risked her life by climbing up on my shoulders, we discovered a treasure. From that height, Effi saw something in the rug on the floor. The rug was nicely spread beneath the table, with its edges under the armchairs and couch, but from up above she saw an indentation down the length of the rug. A bunker! We quickly uprooted the table, the couch, the armchairs and the rug, revealing a trapdoor that led to a cellar. And there it was. Our dreams had come true.
Grandpa Lolek’s house stood on a small hill, a position which created interesting geometrical possibilities. It had been built by a founding member of the underground Haganah movement in the thirties, and he had exploited every single possibility. When the Haganah man was killed, the house was left to its tenant, Grandpa Lolek, who managed to defend it against claims by the legal heirs. After a generation of fighting, the heirs were exhausted, but to this day, every few years, a feeble legal bleating comes from the direction of Ness Ziona.
Now we stood over the opening of a hidden cellar, a weary cloud of dust rising up from below. We looked inside. All we could see was a dark staircase winding its way down. We were drawn to this Pharaonic tomb, and despite our familiarity with the curse (Death shall come on swift wings to him who disturbs the peace of the king), we had to go down. Guided by some force of maturity, we descended, older than our years, and crossed an invisible line between childhood and what comes after.
We advanced slowly. Effi went first. We stood blinded on the cellar floor, inhaling a stench of dead lizards and bricks touched only by dampness. Dust, dust, wormy and horrible. The moment was too sacred for words. We tried to accustom our eyes to the darkness. No light deigned to enter. Above us, through the cellar opening that faced the living room, daylight loomed, but in the heart of dustiness darkness reigned. We could vaguely see that the cellar continued far on into the darkness. We walked slowly, hoping for the best, until we touched a damp wall. There were two windows of a sort there, which gave way to the yard above, but no light shone in through them. Mosquito screens had been hung long ago and they were thick with spider webs, allowing only a slim line of light to barely penetrate and drag its shadow behind with a limp. Effi decreed that someone had to go up for matches.
It was me, of course. Out I went, passing through the rooms like a short apparition, pausing in astonishment opposite the hallway mirror to scan the mass of cobwebs on my body. I found two flashlights in the kitchen cabinet (the battery was kept separately, of course, in the refrigerator) and I also took candles, matches and a lighter. I looked around at the house. The furniture and rugs were coated with dust. Punishment hovered over our heads. I went back to the cellar, concealing the dusty horrors from Effi. We turned the flashlights on and dark objects sparkled and crackled in surprise from every corner. Light! Light!