Grandpa Lolek would sit with us at Grandpa Yosef’s on Saturdays, smoking, perplexed by this interest in soccer. He found it inconceivable that anyone could be excited over a profit divided among eleven men. And he had other criticisms of Grandpa Yosef’s preferences: “How is it that with all those brains in his noggin, he married that woman?”
That woman. Feiga.
Feiga was, simply stated, a princess. The world had mixed things up and sent her to Kiryat Haim by mistake. World War II had shuffled the deck of history cards and Feiga had been uprooted from the life she was supposed to lead, but she let it slide. True, she had been destined to inherit kingdoms — the Sheba Kingdom, the ancient city of Cadiz, the Inca Palaces — but, exiled in Kiryat Haim, she established a little court and spread her monarchy over one subject, Grandpa Yosef. He was her foremost knight, her royal counselor and her stable boy. He slaved away without a grumble, tending to her and to the affairs of the kingdom — Moshe, the kitchen sink, the bills, the medications.
Ever since we could remember, Feiga had lain ill in her room. She was always cold, a stable condition unchanged by khamsin days or by the bundles of clothes in which she wrapped herself. A mixture of dresses, robes and sweaters arranged itself on her body in lumps and bulges, layer upon layer, until she looked like a bunch of grapes covered up beneath the blankets. Caretakers and cleaners were forbidden to enter Feiga’s palace and any attempts they made, for Grandpa Yosef’s sake, she torpedoed. She set extremely rigid terms. Feiga demanded perfection — an utter absence of errors. When this was achieved she had no complaints, but she rarely permitted Grandpa Yosef to attain this state for long. His failures were many and they begat one another, branching and mingling into a suffocating network of omissions. Had Feiga not been a princess, she surely would not have tolerated it all. She would have taken harsh steps. But as it was, she made do with complaining. Her complaints were a constant echo in the house, lacking any logic comprehensible to an outsider. Like the call of a mating bird in a forest that would mean nothing to a weekend hiker, Feiga’s cuckoo call set the pace of time, changed the clocks.
Between her engagement to Grandpa Yosef and the end of the war, Feiga had found herself embroiled in a mysterious marriage to a young rabbi. It was not through any passion that suddenly overcame the man in the shadow of the Aktionen and the annihilation, but a desperate magical attempt to put creation right, or something of the sort. A few weeks after the mystical ceremony, the rabbi was shot on the street in down-to-earth simplicity, his attempt to change the world ending in nothing but Feiga’s widowhood.
As soon as we found out about this, we confronted Grandpa Yosef with his embarrassing deputyship.
“So you were her second,” Effi determined.
The silver medal winner graciously granted an interview. “Well, yes, the second,” he said consolingly.
Grandpa Yosef worshipped Feiga.
We, conversely, found it difficult to take an interest in her.
In the face of her first husband, a spiritual giant, her intellectual prowess had been cowed. The few weeks spent between the holy rabbi’s sheets had absolved her from the need to prove anything at all. Grandpa Yosef could make his own efforts, study Talmud, do righteous deeds — she had done her bit.
She did marry Grandpa Yosef when the opportunity arose, but her first marriage was the pillar of fire in her life. After being within a hair’s breadth from the Lord of Creation, she was less than eager to relocate to suburban Haifa. And since she had been fortunate enough to serve as a holy vessel, Feiga had no choice but to continue her stormy life beneath the covers. In her own eyes, she was akin to the lantern of the temple, plundered by the evil Titus, cast upon her bed beside a window that, curiously, looked out onto the Acre-Haifa train tracks.
She generally spoke with the grammar of diseases, a language in which the subject and predicate of the sentence were diminished in the face of its object, where the true essence of the sentence occurred. Sometimes the subject and predicate were completely dropped in favor of a daring voyage into tempestuous auxiliary clauses:
“Pain in my forehead because the crows did not rest the tree will fall.”
“When no blood in the feet, like a wild animal from the stomach down.”
“Rain, tsk, tsk, no energy to the bones, all day, amen, Doctor Brattlebaum.”
The Oracle of Kiryat Haim also gave blessings to the needy. People came to her and, by virtue of the late rabbi’s holy sheets, she blessed them. Her days in the presence of the deceased had imbued her with a vast reserve of holiness. On her finger, she wore two wedding bands. This was not sanctioned by Jewish law, but it was by Feiga.
What Grandpa Yosef saw in her was unclear. How he withstood it — unknown. We could not understand how he was able to perform all his jobs and study a page of Gemara every day, and keep up his prayers and run around doing good deeds — his tzedakah—and study at the university. Genius could not explain everything, and so we had to add the factor of love to the equation. Grandpa Yosef broke the record of Jacob our Father, who worked for seven whole years to win Rachel, and then another seven. Grandpa Yosef worked for Feiga for forty-five years, well on his way to the perfectly biblical sum of seven times seven years. Inside his home, Grandpa Yosef was tantamount to a slave, while outside, in the neighborhood, he was the king of kings, the beacon of salvation. He was a patron for the needy, a solver of problems. As he walked or rode his bike, people stopped him to present a new problem, report on an old one, or remind him of problems long solved but still bothersome. Those who were unable to get out of bed to present their claims to Grandpa Yosef were treated to personal visits.
In that neighborhood, the Holocaust — the Shoah — had never ended. People had settled there after the war with their memories, their stories, their grudges. Like a huge flock of storks, they came all at once and landed near the woods on the edge of Kiryat Haim, and there they remained. Sick people, confined by their memories. After the war they had families, they existed, they made a living. They took cautious little steps. Every day they dragged themselves around anew, tied to the rotating minute hand of a clock. Distorted, bound, hauled. Date after date fell away on the calendar. The windows of their homes were closed, a slit in the blinds sufficed to see everything. Most stayed at home, where they sat by large radios that broadcast news in their languages. They sat quietly. Illegal-immigrants-for-ever-and-ever. If the day came to a close and nothing had happened — so much the better. Sometimes their heavyset bespectacled sons came to visit. Not often.
Everyone in the neighborhood had two types of past: there was “what you did during the war” and “where you came from before the war.” The present and the future languished insignificantly in the distance. Everyone knew everyone else’s stories, and bit by bit they were elucidated until thoroughly comprehended. The tales accompanied people’s lives, never lost, never growing old. When the owner of a story died, the story went on without him, leaning on other stories on either side, plodding along in a row. Like in the camps, in rows of five, the weak leaning on the strong, the rows proceeded.
The place had a complex arc of supervisors and supervised, patients and caregivers, with no clear partition between the two. Helpless bedridden dependents would suddenly rise in afternoon miracles and go to care for a needy friend. Each of them jealously guarded their story, their troubles, their business, a possessiveness that led to a lot of sighs. They were always sighing. They gathered together to sigh, as if something too large was sitting inside of them and could not be released all at once for fear of explosion. And so they had meetings where they sat and sighed, let it all out in little pieces, looking for opportunities to sigh. And they cheated the rules by speaking in Yiddish, which allows for the release of larger portions.