speaks to me. Stop it, Aaron, she said. You’re being ridiculous. So now I was not only a brute, but ridiculous, too. A fool that no one thought to talk to anymore, the way one puts out a moody and burdensome cat and forgets to feed it in the hopes that it will wander off and find some other family to care for it.
You went. I could not bring myself to drive you to the airport. I drove you to war, but I could not deliver you to the plane that would take you away from your country. I had a trial. Maybe I could have canceled it, but I didn’t. The night before your mother stayed up finishing a sweater she had knit for you. Did you ever wear it? Even I could see that it was unflattering, bulky with her fear that you might freeze to death. We left our goodbyes to the morning. But when the time came for me to leave for work, you were still asleep.
From the beginning your marks were tremendous. You rose easily to the top of your class. The suffering did not vanish but appeared to go into remission. You kept it buried under endless, obsessive work. When you graduated, we thought you would come home, but you didn’t come. You became a barrister and were accepted in a prestigious set of chambers. You worked impossible hours, leaving no room for anything else, and quickly made a name for yourself in the criminal field. You prosecuted and defended, balanced the scales of justice, the years passed, you married, divorced, were appointed judge. And only later did I come to understand what perhaps you had meant to tell me that day so long ago: you would not come back to us.
ALL OF THIS was long ago. And yet against my will I find myself returning to it. As if to touch, ritually, one last time, every enduring pocket of pain. No, the powerful emotions of youth don’t mellow with time. One gets a grip on them, cracks a whip, forces them down. You build your defenses. Insist on order. The strength of feeling doesn’t lessen, it is simply contained. But now the walls begin to buckle. I find myself thinking of my parents, Dovi. Of certain images of my mother in shadowy evening light, in the kitchen, and I see that her expression meant something different than I had understood it to mean as a child. She would lock herself in the bathroom and was reduced to mere sound. Muffled, through the door, my ear to it. To me my mother was first and foremost a smell. Indescribable. Pass over it. Then a feeling, her hands on my back, the soft wool of her coat against my cheek. Then the sound of her, and at the end of all that, a distant fourth, the sight of her. How she looked to me, only in parts, never the whole. So large, and I so small that at any one time I could only take in a curve, or the swelling flesh over a belt, or the slope of freckles down to the bosom, or the legs sheathed in stockings. Any more was impossible. Too much. After she died, my father lived on almost another decade. Steadying the one shaking hand with the other. I used to find him in his underwear, unshaven, with the blinds drawn. A meticulous, even a vain man, in a stained undershirt. It took him a full year before he began to dress again. Other things were never righted or repaired. Something toppled within. His conversation gave way to gaping holes. Once I found him on all fours, inspecting a scratch in the wood floor. Muttering and applying to it some Talmudic knowledge he had acquired as a boy and, having no use for it, had forgotten until now. I have no idea, no idea at all, what his thoughts were about the afterlife. We didn’t speak of personal things. We saluted each other from across a great distance, from mountain peak to mountain peak. The clinking of the spoon in the teacup, or the throat cleared. A discussion of the best kind of wool, from where it came, type of animal, how manufactured, when there was discussion at all. He died peacefully in his bed, not a dirty dish in the sink. After filling a glass of water he would wipe the sink dry so that the steel would