“Sorry about the mess,” Gal said. “I just got in from work, and with two teenage boys at home, you know…. Do you have kids?”
“Not yet, but soon, my boyfriend and I moved in together just a few months ago,” Ya’ara responded. “My mother’s anxious, too,” she added with a smile.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to grill you, I was just asking. They’re so messy, my boys, I can’t even remember the last time this place was clean and tidy. Sneakers everywhere, jackets thrown all over the place, socks…” She ended her mini rant and continued: “So you want to make a movie about my father?”
“Not only about your father. About the Russian Artists Association in Bat Yam. It’ll be my final project for school. Like I told you on the phone, I go sometimes to the Bat Yam Museum. It’s not really a museum, as you know, but more of a large gallery. And sometimes, alongside the main exhibition, they show pieces by a local artist. Those small side exhibits always move me deeply. They immediately offer one a sense of the loneliness of the artists, their determination, the dreams they’re trying to force into a measure of reality. Okay, I’m rambling on. Anyway, I got in touch with the association, and I think there’s a story there through which I can shine a light on those people, artists working on the sidelines of the Israeli art scene, and also tackle pertinent questions concerning immigration and life on the margins of society. And the people at the association mentioned your father, and they showed me two of his pieces that are on display in their small office, and rather than begin with the current situation, I thought it could be interesting to start off with the early years, when the association was first established.”
Gal was staring at her intently with her green eyes, which reminded Ya’ara of a cat’s. “Yes,” she said, “I spoke to Vladislav and he told me you had been to the association. He and my father were friends, many years ago. My father passed away almost fifteen years ago. It seems so far away all of a sudden. She’s a very attractive young woman, that’s how Vladi described you. How do you like that, even at his age he has an eye for beautiful women.”
Ya’ara asked if she had any of her father’s paintings, personal documents, journals he may have kept, letters, and the like. Gal showed her three oil paintings that were hanging in the apartment.
“Actually, there are a few more of his paintings that I’ve simply rolled up and now keep in the storeroom, in the building’s bomb shelter. As for documents, papers, I really don’t know. I left my father’s apartment untouched for months after he died, and then I had to clear it out quickly, because I found a buyer, and I threw away a lot and packed the rest into some boxes. They’re downstairs. I haven’t looked at them in fifteen years, and thought maybe I’d just get rid of them and that’s it. I need the space. If I haven’t got to them by now, I’m sure I never will, so why keep things for nothing? People are like that, they like to hang on to things for no reason.”
“And tell me, did you know Katrina Geifman? Vladislav mentioned her when we met, he said your father did a wonderful sketch of her, and he thinks it’s among his papers that still remain at the association. They have a box there of his stuff, you know? But he started to look for it and couldn’t find it, and got a little annoyed, and said he’d let me know if he does.”
“I know who you’re talking about. I was almost seventeen when they first met, but I wasn’t spending much time at home. I preferred to study as much as possible with friends, at their homes. And then I enlisted in the army and only came home on weekends. I hardly saw her, maybe once or twice, and I certainly didn’t know her very well. Honestly, I was angry with her and my father to begin with, and I was angry in general. You know how it is, I had a mother, and then she died, and suddenly along comes this beautiful woman, so beautiful and impressive, dressed in clothes I’d never seen in Israel, and so inappropriate, for my father and for our tenement building in Bat Yam, and my father was absolutely besotted with her, like a teenager. It embarrassed me terribly.”
“But maybe he really loved her?” Ya’ara asked softly, playing the part of the student looking for a theme for the perfect film. “It was actually quite a few years after your mother died, right? And I know that he loved your mother dearly, you can tell right away from the painting you showed me, in the study.”
“I get it better today perhaps, now that I have teenagers of my own. We don’t really exist to them, you know? Just like our parents didn’t exist to us. And to actually think of them having a life, falling in love, having sex. Eww, it’s hard for me even now to imagine it.” Gal smiled. “But I think he really did have something unique with that woman, with Katrina. Even though, like I said, she was so special, or glamorous, it’s hard to find the right word for it. I thought back then, too, insofar as I could feel and think through my anger, that she really did care for my father, and loved him as he was. Not because he was rich or handsome or extremely talented, but because he was a good and gentle man, a likeable man with vision. You know something, Ya’ara, it makes me happy today to know that my father had a love story like that.”
Ya’ara reached out to touch Gal’s hand for a brief moment, before clasping her fingers around her cup of coffee again. “I hope to have moments like that in my film, to be able to show the people whose stories I’m telling, your father, as they were. Without all those things that people dress themselves in to feel more protected. Clothes, layers, thick skin, rudeness. Just them, as they are.”
24
Ya’ara smiled shyly and wiped the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand. She and Gal had finished loading the boxes from the bomb shelter into her car. And she had just caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror in the hallway: Strands of light hair had escaped her ponytail and her cheeks were flushed. Gal looked a little disheveled, too, her hair ruffled but a smile on her face. “Take good care of everything,” she said to Ya’ara. “I’m going to go through it all when you return them. What can you do, one has to move on, memories shouldn’t remain in boxes. But maybe there’ll be a movie now, and that’s something, too. I’m sure you’ll make a lovely one. You have that way, that special way, of seeing things,” she said, warmly touching Ya’ara’s hand.
25
Dearest Katrina, my love,
It’s with a heavy heart that I write to you now. My darling, I’ve read your last letter over and over again. I read it and didn’t know what to do with myself. I know it’s hard, I know it isn’t easy to deal with, but why are you so adamant and determined? Why put an end just like that to such a special and rare love story, to our love, which has been nothing but beautiful?
I’ve come to terms with the fact that our relationship is such a fragmented one. We see each other once a year, always at your initiative, always when it suits you, never for long enough and always too painful. And our letters have been my comfort—as if we’re living in a different century, way back when, the seventeenth century perhaps, maybe the eighteenth, with you the unattainable princess, and me the poor poet in a faraway land. And the words bind us, making their way across the sea, over mountains and wide open plains, bearing the fibers of our emotions, the passion of our bodies, the undying yearning, to be together, to sit facing one another, to look into your deep eyes, filled with sorrow and beauty, and to feel so close, so close.
And now all of a sudden, without forewarning, you tell me it’s all over. No more! No more meetings and no more writing to each other. As if you’ve been summoned by the forbidden-love police and ordered to do so. And me, I’ve never asked for more than you could give, and each time I saw you filled me with the strength for another year, another ten years if need be, until I could see you again. But now you say: We’ll never meet again. I won’t write any longer, and don’t write to me either, my dear Igor.