Mishka Ben-David - Forbidden Love in St. Petersburg

Why her?

Because she’s the one who informed me. No one else knew how to find you.

Will do, I agreed.

I was left sitting on the sun-bed, drained, a dull, indefinable pain in my chest. I felt as if the remnants of the light lunch I ate by the pool were turning over inside me. I got up, rubbing my chest to relieve the pressure, and went up to my room to get ready to leave.

His death was expected. But why now? And why without me being able to sit at his bedside in his final hours; once again to hold his emaciated hand and listen to his whispered words? On my last visit a week earlier, he was, at times, still lucid, although nothing but skin and bone, barely able to utter two consecutive words, refusing to eat and spitting out the food his carer spooned into his mouth. He declined signing an authorization to feed him intravenously or through a gastric tube. The doctors said that this couldn’t be done against his will and remained in the dark about the disease that was ravaging his body and sapping every ounce of his strength.

I continued to think that after turning over the management of the farm to me he simply lost the will to live. And when my mother could no longer recognize him, complained that this was not her home, and asked who the old man lying in her bed and interfering with her sleep was, he decided to stop living. But his body hung on for a few more agonizing years.

The driver who picked me up at Ben Gurion Airport was prepared to drive me south but I said that there was nothing for me to do in the village that night and that I would make my own way there in the morning.

At eight the following morning, when I was already at the Beit Kama junction in the northern Negev, I phoned the village secretariat but all I got was the answering machine. When I reached Beersheba I tried again but still no one picked up. Perhaps no one is there until nine, I thought, and though I didn’t feel comfortable about it, phoned Orit. She was sympathetic and businesslike. Everything is ready. All you have to do is get here. There are even notices in the morning papers.

I’m bringing my mother, I said. There was a long silence at the other end.

Do you think that’s necessary?

I think I owe it to her.

I don’t know if the nurses in the dementia department had given my mother a tranquillizer but she was certainly calm and wrapped in her own thoughts. The agitation had gone, as had her suspiciousness and obstinacy. She was dressed in black, in clothes that were now far too big for her shrunken body. She let me lead her by the arm to my car and was silent all the way from Beersheba to the Arava. Who could possibly tell what was going on in that much loved and mysterious head of hers? At one of the junctions I leant over and kissed her but she merely smiled a faraway smile, her eyes still clouded over.

I hoped that images of our life together would come to mind, but all I could conjure up was my last time with my father, his emaciated, lifeless hand in mine, his withered jowls trembling, in his eyes a look that was decidedly not human.

Forcing myself to recall pleasanter images of the three of us, all I could manage to evoke were some photos from the family album. My father in uniform, wearing a paratrooper’s beret with a lock of ruffled hair escaping from the front; my mother, in her flowery dress, her hair tousled; the two of them walking down Dizengoff Street in the 1960s, two young people with wide grins on their faces. My father, with his powerful arms, holding me up, still a baby, at the entrance to their small Jewish Agency-built home, with nothing but the sand of the Arava desert around us and my mother looking on tenderly. Me with a hose, watering newly planted seedlings in our fields. My parents on either side holding my hand on the beach in Eilat. I’m a chubby child, my father a well-built man, my mother a bit on the plump side, beautiful, smiling.

I also remembered trips in the car when my mother would enrich my mind with sums and rhyme games. ‘There isn’t without’ was our favourite. ‘There isn’t a house without a door’ she would begin. Then it was my turn, ‘There isn’t a room without a floor’ and father from the driver’s seat would chime in ‘There isn’t a sea without a shore’ and so on.

These childhood recollections gave way to images of the dying old man and the elderly woman at my side with that dreamy, distant look in her eyes. Sadness overwhelmed me. I could feel it in the mounting pressure in my chest, the sense of suffocation in my throat, and the tears welling up in my eyes. I breathed in deeply to release the feeling of strangulation and prevent the tears from flowing.

A few dozen people stood waiting at the village cemetery, my parents’ peers and mine. Also standing by was the private ambulance with my father’s body on board.

Orit and her parents came up to us. She looked youthful again, and I saw that she must have given birth. Kindly, Orit had saved me from that particular piece of news. Her parents, whom I’d not seen for a very long time, were clearly ageing. They leant on my mother and gently embraced her. She responded to the love surrounding her, letting the three of them kiss her and then took the time to hug and kiss the circle of her old friends–members of the core group who, together with her and my father, had built the village. Orit turned to me, kissed me and burst into tears as she clutched my neck.

A lament for my father, or was it for my mother as well? Was she perhaps crying about me, about her, about the two of us? Were these the tears of sadness for the baby we could have had together or an expression of unease about the child she now had? I didn’t know, yet her tears triggered my own.

Some of my classmates and pupils from other years as well gathered around me placing firm, sun-tanned hands on my shoulders as we walked behind the stretcher on which my dead father lay. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Orit and her partner, a tall, thin, pale man, walking behind her parents who were supporting my mother. Around the grave were the villagers who took it upon themselves to dig out the soil and then use it to cover the body. One of them, the only one wearing a skull cap, read the burial prayers and then invited those who wished to say their farewells to come forward. I didn’t. I was choked up as it was. I’m no wordsmith, nor did I know what to say. Some of my father’s old army friends, men in their mid-sixties, robust, sun-tanned, dressed in their work-clothes and boots, one in shorts, said words of praise about ‘Ben-Ari’, the way they always called my father. One spoke of the difficult conditions in the early days of the village when my father told them to ‘go and do battle with the bureaucrats at the Jewish Agency’s offices while I grow tomatoes so that there’ll be something to show them when they come’. Another friend spoke of my father’s vacillations when changing his name from Aaronson to Ben-Ari and referred to me by saying that my father had a son in his own image who had gone far across the seas and oceans of the world. I couldn’t tell whether this was intended as a veiled criticism for my having left the village or an implied praise for my Mossad service.

I recited Kaddish for my father. Within me I felt an aversion to the incomprehensible words of the Jewish prayer of mourning which glorifies a Being in whose existence I didn’t believe, and made mistakes pronouncing the ancient Aramaic phrases. Only when my friends came up to shake my hand in parting and asked where the Shiva would be held, did it occur to me that we would need to sit the traditional seven days of mourning and that the most logical place for it was my parents’ house.