David Grossman - The Book of Intimate Grammar

They also gave up their social life. There were no more evenings with the few friends they had, and Papa stopped going over to Peretz Atias’s on Sunday afternoons to watch wrestling on Lebanon TV, and Aron was relieved not to have to watch those cruel giants anymore, in front of Sophie Atias yet, who kept parading around with her baby and showing her off. And there were no more Friday-night rummy games either. Mama confessed she hadn’t enjoyed them in years, enough already, she said, it was fine when we were younger, the cards and the joking, but we have to act our age, she said, and suddenly Aron realized that his parents were getting older, soon they would be forty-five. They’d even stopped listening to the news every hour on the hour. “So what could happen already?” Papa would say, and Aron would think, A currency devaluation, but then he realized that what was happening here overshadowed everything else in their lives, effacing it completely, it almost seemed.

And once, or maybe twice, as the four of them sat around Grandma’s bed, figuring out how long the effect of the tranquillizers lasted or reviewing the food she’d eaten that day and the number of times she had evacuated since they started feeding her pablum, and talked aboutclipping her nails on Friday, and the new ointment Mama discovered at the Romanian pharmacy, and about the Araber from Abu-Gosh who was going to whitewash the apartment, because there were stains on the walls again, pretty soon there would be people coming to pay condolence calls, once or maybe twice it happened that Aron was startled out of the peace that bore him gently over the voices and the words: as he looked up at Mama and Papa and gratefully beheld their serious faces, the way they kept pondering those unknowns with silent sighs like an endless lament, and beside them, Yochi, who was equally devoted and probably loved Grandma Lilly more than anyone, though as usual she barely spoke, she merely listened blankly to what they said, as if here too there were things to be learned which would one day serve her in good stead, like an anthropologist collecting specimens of conversation about the coldhearted nurse who had changed for the better, about white blood corpuscles and the social security forms that cheated them out of welfare money only because Grandma could still be continent sometimes, Aron suddenly looked up and caught sight of something in Yochi’s face — she was choking with rage, shuddering with hatred.

Aron trudged upstairs from the furnace room, wiping the expression off his face so Mama wouldn’t know. Seven months had gone by since his last visit to Grandma. Just before his parents fizzled out: he’d seen it coming, he was really sensitive to things like that these days, so he stayed away. They didn’t even know they were fizzling out. They simply started grumbling to each other, in front of him and Yochi, that it was hopeless, neither here nor there, said Mama sadly, like not being able to swallow or to vomit either, and Aron understood and kept silent. And then they started explaining on the phone to Gucha and to Rivche that it didn’t matter anyway, since Grandma didn’t know whether she was dead or alive. It’s a wonder she’s still breathing. She only wakes up to take another sleeping pill. It’s true she’s young, relatively speaking, but when it comes it comes, once it has you by the claws it never lets go. And then just before Passover they did some redecorating, the house looked like a hovel, so they painted and hung new curtains and wallpaper, and they bought a buffet; at first they considered fixing up the old one but the carpenter found a worm in it, and Mama swore it didn’t get the worm in our house but from a stranger’s furniture at the carpenter’s shop, and she would never let it back in our salon; and thenthey bought a new lamp fixture. All this kept them busy for a couple of weeks, months, months and months of shopping and checking and comparing prices and debating half the night, and there wasn’t always time left for other things. Occasionally Mama went to feed Grandma and roll her over and put the ointment on her bedsores, but when she came home she didn’t tell what was new anymore, and no one asked. So what could be new already? Once, though, she confessed to Yochi that sometimes when she was taking care of Grandma Lilly she would pour out her heart to her, to her body, that is, the way you do when you visit a grave, and Yochi thought, Ah, I guess I have to die before you’ll talk to me like that, but eventually Mama gave up, she wasn’t made of steel, you know, and at first Mama’s heart pounded every time the phone rang, maybe they were calling from the hospital to tell them it was over, but she got over that in time as well; Grandma wasn’t living in the street, she was in a proper institution, receiving excellent care; and sometimes a whole week went by without anyone saying, Grandma.

The alcove stayed empty. They offered it to Yochi, with your exams coming up and all, said Mama unctuously, if you want top marks and an army deferral you’ll need a little peace and quiet, won’t you, dear? And then Yochi let her have it: In the first place, who said she wanted an army deferral, and in the second place, she wouldn’t set foot in the alcove as long as Grandma was alive, and Mama shut her mouth, and Aron saw that look in her eyes again, as if she were remembering a terrible crime she had committed long ago, and the alcove door stayed shut, though sometimes Aron would peek in, which is how he discovered that Grandma’s embroidery with the parrots and the monkeys and the palm trees had disappeared. For a moment he was mortified and wanted to run to Mama and tell her something horrible had happened, maybe a robber had stolen it, but suddenly he remembered what Yochi told him once, that he had to learn how to survive around here, and he controlled himself and didn’t say a word to anyone, and now he kept his eyes open as only he knew how; in fact, two days later the hook for the embroidery had also disappeared, and the day after that, the hole in the wall was filled with toothpaste. And then things started turning up in the trash bin, like Grandma’s dresses and shoes, and her hairpins and ribbons, and her braid. And Aron gathered them in secret and hid them away.

Now he took the empty can out to the pantry and noticed Mama watching his face. Spiegler, Spiegel, Primo, Bellow, Drucker, Talby, Rosenthal, and Young — he named the players on the soccer team, enabling himself to walk past her without revealing anything. Papa was on the Bordeaux sofa in the salon already with a newspaper over his face. They had barely spoken to each other since the day Edna Bloom came in asking him to work at her house. Aron went to his room. Under a halo of light behind her desk sat Yochi writing, homework or letters, soon he’d know.

“Yochi.”

“What?”

By the tone of her voice, he guessed it was letters. When she was doing homework she welcomed interruptions. Better keep mum, though. But the memory of those high heels in the garbage—

“Yochi.”

She was silent. There was a little brown envelope under her elbow. A sign she was answering her soldier. She had six or seven pen pals collected from the newspaper over the years and she wrote them each a letter a week. Aron recognized them by their envelopes: the university student she’d corresponded with since he was in high school, the kibbutznik from Mizra, and the guy from the agricultural center, and there was one who was training to be an able-bodied seaman and sent her letters from the Shalom liner, and a religious guy, and someone by the name of Evyatar, an Israeli who lived in Australia and was a cripple.

“My valiant soldier, you will not believe what happened to me today …” says Aron artfully, and Yochi veers around with daggers in her eyes: “If you ever so much as touch my letters! …” “Who the heck cares about your letters. You always lock them up anyway. Tell me, don’t you get bored writing the same thing over and over seven times?”