First Notebook

Let Me Begin

After it was all over I walked down the dirt track leading from the new cemetery to the old cemetery, leaving behind my back the mountain with the low white houses of the village of Kaba-beer planted on its summit, huddled in the shade of the stone mosque with its chalky dome and two twin minarets. Before, when the stretcher tilted sideways and your body wrapped in white slid into the pit, I opened my eyes wide and forced them to look. Afterwards they wandered to the line of the mountain ridge, trembling against the background of the silvery porcelain sky of early autumn. Yes, you had come home, to the sea and the Carmel mountain you loved, your view from now on.

I parted from your son last, briefly touching his clammy, lifeless hand, avoiding his eyes, and he nodded with a kind of mechanical pecking motion, his two blue beetles blank as ever. What did he feel? What did he understand? Only twenty-two years old, and already his fair hair was growing thin, and his body was stooped as if he bore the weight of a lifetime on his shoulders. A boy with autistic traits, a strange, alien child, a retarded infant robbed of his mother, who had seen far more than he should have; a fetus whose little body was crushed under that heavy burden and whose legs kicked in protest, a spermatozoon that met an egg in a little hotel in Paris, a misconceived idea.

A hand light as a wing came to rest on my shoulder. I turned my head to the tall woman with the gray hair cropped short in a boyish haircut, and in front of my eyes the slender curly-haired girl of once upon a time emerged, with the high cheekbones and the two clear scraps of sky above them, and the beaky nose, which had now turned red. In her hand she held a bunch of wildflowers. "I've just arrived, I'm so sorry I'm late," panted Osnat, blowing her nose on a white tissue.

"It was the same as it always is," the words fell heavily out of my mouth.

"But she wasn't like anyone else," her eyes stared at me in surprise.

"No, she was completely herself."

"Did you speak?" she wanted to know. "Did they ask you to say something?"

"They didn't ask. I read a poem."

"Did he say Kaddish?"

"He stammered something, in an American accent, Yoel helped him."

"I'll go and say hello to them and give her the flowers."

"They're lovely. She would have liked them," I said, and remembered another bunch, that you gave to Osnat, your best friend, on her fifteenth birthday, after not speaking for months, and the two scraps of sky opened up to you then in huge delight.

"Did you come by car?" she asked. "You can drive back to Tel Aviv with me. You live in Tel Aviv now, don't you?"

"Yes, but I'm staying here. I have a few ends to tie."

"Visiting relatives?"

"That too," I nodded, remembering our family plot in the old cemetery, my grandmother and grandfather under one stone, my mother by herself, between them and the path.

"I read somewhere that you had a daughter," said Osnat.

"In the meantime I've had another one. Carmel will be eleven, and Noga's two. And you?"

"My children are already grown up," she smiled. "Tamar's studying art in New York, and Roi is in the army."

The only time I saw her she wasn't planning to get married. When was it? The summer of seventy-nine, twenty-two years ago.

"Are you writing something new for us?" she asked. "I've read all your books, they always take me back to Mount Carmel, with the wind and the cyclamens and the pinecones."

"Lately I've mainly been erasing," I apologized. Once, when I was young, my words were quicker and wiser than I was. With the passing of the years I've gained in wisdom and maturity, while the words, tired and bewildered, trail behind.

Suddenly she embraced me. "You should write about her," she whispered in my ear, "about the two of you."

"Yes," I hesitated, "my memory is covered with white spots. I have to find the diary I wrote then. It's buried somewhere."

Yes, that's where I'll go, to the disaster area, to the place where the fire flower was born and where it was buried alive. I'll go down to the wadi, to our dwarf pine, and look for the hiding place under the flat rock, and dig for the notebooks, even though there's almost no chance of finding them after twenty rainy winters. Now that your body's resting in the earth I'm free to resurrect those years that I've never written about, or spoken about to almost anyone. I myself could hardly believe that they were what they were, that the two of us were what we were, and I buried them deep within me and I knew that it was forbidden to wake them up.

"Will you call me, Rivi? I'm in the phone book. Let's meet in some cafe?" Osnat's hands were holding my shoulders, and the scraps of sky, which time had not dulled, examined my face sorrowfully. "That time when we met you were still really a child. How time laughs at us, I can't believe that I'm already fifty."

"I'll call," I said, and I knew that she too knew that I wouldn't.

Osnat stroked my arm as if to console me, and I looked at her ungainly figure walking down the path and kneeling next to the mound of earth covered with stones and flowers, surmounted by a little wooden sign with your name on it.

The gate to the old cemetery is open. I pass under the ornamental inscription. "Righteousness shall go before him." The iron letters leave no room for argument. The black funeral board is empty, with chalk marks, as if wiped by a tired teacher's hand at the end of the day. I climb the asphalt path, which in recent years has become my way home, and here they are, the three of them, resting in the shade of the cypress tree; Grandma and Grandpa under one marble slab, above them the high, broad headstone in "natural" stone, with the inscription in elongated, rather fancy letters, "Lipkin," and underneath it the names Emanuel on the right and Rivka, who waited for him almost thirty years alone under the stone, on the left. Mother next to them in a single grave inclining slightly towards theirs, like a little girl creeping into her parents' bed after having a nightmare, and they moved a little to give her room.

Her headstone is identical to theirs, and the letters too; at the top only the first name, Carmela, like the notice on door of my daughter's room, "Carmel's room," and below, in smaller letters, "Shenhar, born Lipkin."

For eleven years we've been coming here every 24th of Nisan — Oren, Noam, and I. I arrive first and sit down on her cold stone, leaning my back against the headstone and letting the wind cool my face burning in the khamsin. It's pleasant here, in the shade. Nowhere else have I heard the birds sing like this, in real joy. In front of my eyes is the back of the Schwartzbergs' headstone, polished black marble, in which every year I see my changing reflection: long hair, short hair, brown, blond, highlights, sunglasses, prescription glasses, contact lenses, thinner, fatter, twice pregnant, age spots on my arms and face. Only like this, with my body very close to what remains of her body, I relax and feel at peace. Without words I tell her what's happened to me, only...