In the end, the mountains of imagination were nothing
but a house.
And this grand life of mine was nothing but an excuse.
You've been hearing my story so patiently for a lifetime
Now hear this: it was nothing but a fairy tale.

Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi

Walls

Walls

“Akavya ben Mahalalel said: Reflect upon three things, and you will not come to sin. Know from where you came and where you are going and before whom you are destined to give account.” Pirkei Avot chap 3

My first memory of where I came from, of my so called ‘past’ is the middle entrance, third floor apartment out of six, first building out of identical seven. That is where I came from, and that is where he came from too. For so many years I thought I knew where I was going, but then the picture got blurry as if the road ahead lost its clarity. At that time of my life we met again.

I did not know him then, even though we grew up only one entrance away. The age difference and religious background placed us in different circles. But in some subtle way I knew him more than I should have. You see, we shared our bedroom wall, my bed on one side, his on the other.  

Was he aware of that, of me eavesdropping in the quiet of the night?

This question never crossed my mind until we met again in a different country years later.

I learned about him getting married, one day when I change my route back from school and for no apparent reason other than daring myself, decided to go home via the first entrance and across the flat roof. The change required me to pass by the open door to his father’s dark workshop in the basement. For months, I was intrigued but also appalled by the line of dust covered Plush animals displayed on the window seal. There was nothing endearing about them, in their bulging eyes, or in their crooked smiles. Yet every day on my way to school as I passed by the half sunken to the ground windows, against my will, I looked at them going, and again on my way back.

His father, a man in his mid-sixties was sitting on a high swivel chair filling one of these questionable creatures with a gray looking material. When he saw me he waved, smiled, and said something. I did not stand long enough to hear. I ran up the stairs, and bumped right into him, going down the stairs. All flushed and barley breathing I tore into our apartment.

My mother was standing in the middle of the kitchen talking to my father and all I manage to hear were her last words.

“They are getting married this week, I wonder if they will move in with his parents.”

My father just nodded, as always only half listening and walked out of the room. 

Few nights later the wall next to my bed became alive.

I never went home via the first entrance and across the flat roof again. Few months later we moved to another neighborhood and my bedroom’s walls had only open space behind them and the shrieking wind at night, when the winter came. 

When we met again, in a different country I was twenty-three. I came to study for an advanced degree, I came to find the way I felt was lost.

As a new comer to town I was invited to join him and his wife for dinner. At the end of the meal he said as if to no one in particular, “you can only know where you’re going if you know where you came from.”

Until that moment, he did not show any sign that he made the connection, that he remembered who I was. The old neighborhood, sure, he acknowledged the geographical location, but if I remembered, he probably did too and was playing some bizarre hide-and-seek game, toying with me.

Or maybe it was all in my mind.

The man from across the hall, the one who’s bedroom wall, in the apartment building on the outskirts of Jerusalem we shared. During the day, he was the young man I occasionally passed, and nodded my head, not even looking directly at him. He usually ignored me. I was just a kid. But late at night, lying in my bed, I realized from the night sounds that his bed touched mine, also, how thin and porous the wall was.

It was wrong, I knew, to listen to the voices of the night, the most private moments between a man and his woman but I was young and curious, thirsty for any bit of knowledge my religious community did not voluntarily share. 

Did he know all that time?

Still avoiding eye contact, I moved her head and scanned the people around the table. 

I was painfully aware of the fact that between him and me separated more than a cement wall and years. He was a married man and strictly religious, and I; let’s face it, lost my way years ago. That apartment in the old neighborhood was merely a pale memory I did not feel any connection to.

“You can only know where you’re going if you know where you came from,” When he said it using the same tune he used before for the blessing on the food, it went right through me like a knife.

An old saying, I remembered it from home. Against my will, I raised my eyes and looked at him. When our eyes locked, the realization like a galvanized electricity flash, bridged over the years.

 To my horror, he was looking straight at me, and he winked.

Leah

The apartment is on the second floor of four stories, no elevator building. The off-white, slightly peeling stucco and blue wooden blinds set it apart from the white marble, chrome, and glass of the modern buildings that surround it.  “A relic from another era, just like me,” for some reason the thought makes Leah feel lighter and calmer, facing this notable change in her life.

The only new addition, she notices, is the glass and metal door at the entrance that opens without a sound. She is startled when she steps in, her hand automatically searching for the light switch to light up the stairs, and the light turns on by itself.

The second floor to the right, a brown door without a name, she hesitates for a minute rehearsing the instructions her friend Tamar gave her the other night, and then push the key in and with determination steps in.

“Not very glamorous,” she must have said it aloud as her voice sounds strangely loud in the vacant apartment. She takes off her shoes and leave them by the door, starting her journey, getting accustomed with the unfamiliar environment. The apartment is silent, the closed windows and doors block most of the street sounds, all that is left is a soft hum like the one of the ocean on a calm day, or the light breeze going through the fall leaves. It is also dark, except for a few rays of light filtering through the blinds, serving as a vehicle to golden dust specks traveling to the floor creating small pools of light on the rug.

With a quick move, Leah pulls on the chain that controls the balcony’s sunshade. The heavy metal sighs as if the effort is too much but rises slowly to reveal a thin blue line, a bit darker than the sky, the sea, like her friend told her, always coming in through the windows bringing in a taste of salt and a hint of promised adventures.

With the open shade, the town bursts in with colors and movement. It feels good, knowing that so much life is out there, almost within touch, yet she is safely hidden two floors up, in this quiet oasis of thick carpets and heavy furniture.

Completing her tour; walking through the kitchen, bathroom and one bedroom, Leah returns to the living room. Next to the couch she finds the phone; black with a rotary dial. She feels like a little kid trying to fit her fingers in the finger wheel and move the dial, number by number to create the number etched in her mind.

When she hears the ring, she freezes for a minute and almost drops the handset to the floor, but the coiled cord bounces back and saves it from landing on the floor. No one picks the phone on the other side; no answering machine either.  Leah takes a deep breath and sets the handset gently amazed to see that her hands are slightly shaken.

This was not supposed to be that difficult, Tamar coached her, step by step as if it was some elaborate role play and she felt confident that she was ready, but now alone in a foreign apartment in the heart of a town she does not know she starts to doubt the whole idea. 

“Maybe later,” she takes a few deep breaths, and with a glass of icy water, she found in the fridge steps out to the small balcony overlooking the busy street. The cool sea breeze on her flushed face feels good as does the constant moving parade below.

She can do it, the first step is always the hardest, but she did it, she came, didn’t she?

And then an hour later the phone rings. For a long minute, Leah is disoriented, the apartment is dark; she must have dozed off still holding the water in her left hand. In her rush to pick up the receiver, she knocks the glass down and the water spills on her lap trickling to the floor.

“Hello,” she hates that her voice sounds shaken.

“Who is this? “The voice on the other side unfamiliar, but something about the faint accent evokes an almost forgotten memory.

Leah hesitates, she can’t seem to find her voice.

“Someone called from this number and did not leave a message,” the voice on the other end acquires a tinge of impatience.

“It’s enough with these anonymous calls, I will report you to the police.”

“Eve,” Leah’s voice is shaken and broken, “Eve is that you? This is me Leah, your sister.”

A long quiet takes over the line, so she repeats the same line. “It’s me, your sister Leah, I know it’s been almost fifty years, but I am here now, I am here in Tel-Aviv, can we meet?”

She knows Eve is still there; she can hear her heavy breathing, deep shrieking, in and out almost hot on her face.

“Eve,” she starts again, but then she hears a heavy object hitting the ground and minutes later the shrill sound of sirens.

People talking, the urgency in their voices carries over the line, and then a man voice, the one who seems to be the one in command.

“OK, she is stabilized let’s get her to the nearest hospital,”

In the quiet all she can hear is her own breathing, sitting on the couch still holding the phone.

“Too late, is she too late?” That all she can think of when the line goes dead. 

Some Stories

Some stories seem to write themselves without any effort by the writer; others need to be stretched in different directions, pound on, pressed upon and all kinds of varied gentle, or harsh, manipulations like dealing with a resistant piece of dough.

When Rachel received a phone call from her mother one early Friday morning, she was in the process of struggling with a particularly stubborn story. When the phone rang, she was still in bed recuperating from a sleepless night full of dreams that all had one thing in common. She was tearing, in a fit of rage, pages and pages and the pieces of paper flew out the window.

When she heard the loud ring, she was trying to chase, desperately, the last piece which she just discovered had on it the one story she wanted to write.

She rolled on her side and picked the receiver and mumbled a sleepy “Hi,”

“Rachel, wake up,” that was her mother, and as always, she avoided what she called “unnecessary introductions.”

Rachel looked at the clock next to her bed; it’s numbers glowed in angry red – 6:00 am.

“It’s only 6:00 am,” she protested faintly. “What the rush?”

“You have to make it to the hospital ASAP, Aunt Eva had a heart attack, last night, she wants to see you, “that was her mother alright, no small talk.

“Me, why me?”

“She wants to tell you about her younger sister before it is too late.”

“Too late? she does not have a younger sister, what is going on?”

“Well she/us obviously do/did,” it was not like her mom to stumble all over her words, this must be important.

An hour and three buses later, Rachel stood in the entrance hall of the Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem. Planted at the end of a twisting road, with steep mountains on each side, made this hospital, a huge conglomerate of buildings, appear like an aloof space station, as did the breath-taking Chagall glass windows encircling the hall and throwing eerie blue shades rich with Jewish motifs.

Aunt Eva, her mother’s younger sister was found after a short search, in a room with two other beds looking surprisingly well and energetic.

“Rachel, my favorite niece,” she exclaimed, seeing her at the door.

“So glad you could make it,” she added as if this was a casual everyday meeting in her Jerusalem apartment.

“Mom said this is urgent, and you need to tell me something,” Rachel was not going to let the moment slip away. If there was a story, she wanted to hear it.

“Ah, old stories die hard,” her aunt, who was a passionate and skilled storyteller, waved the sentence aside.

“A younger sister, no one ever mentioned before?” Rachel was unbending.

Somewhere in the back of her mind faded pictures, in black and white, accompanied by hushed conversation late at night seemed to press on. There was another sister no one ever spoke of, suddenly she knew it with an unexplainable certainty.

“Lea, “startled, Rachel looked at her aunt.

“Her name was Lea,” Eva annunciated the words as if she, Rachel, was hard of hearing.

“She called me last night, she is here, in Tel-Aviv, after all these years something like that can give a person a heart attack.”

Rachel refrained from stating the obvious, that they were indeed sitting in the hospital, and instead set her goals on establishing guilt, a much better technique, she learned over the years.

“Ok, so an aunt no one ever mentioned and here she is in the flesh, a little too late to deny her existence.”

Eva gave her a troubled look, “We did not know where she was, or if she was even alive,”

“You cannot understand, these were different times, people did disappear during the war, and no one knew where they were and if they will come back.” She added as response to Rachel’s skeptical look.

“Did you look for her?” Rachel cannot let the moment vaporize.

“I was still mad, “Eva said in a hardly audible voice, “and your mother, I guess she was mad too,”

“And the years went by, and the dust covered any trails, so we stopped thinking about her,” Eva’s last sentence hung in the air when a long quiet took place.

“So what’s now,” Rachel’s voice sounded loud in the quiet room.

“Do you want me to meet her, see who she is,” It seemed like a cheap detective story, but at this point of her writing career, any story will do.

“Would you?” Eva’s voice was small and imploring.

“Sure, no problem, I will knock on her door, introduce myself,”

“Hi, I am Rachel your lost nephew, so glad to meet you, an aunt I did not know existed.”

Rachel was playing out the meeting, trying to ease the thick atmosphere.

“and then what?”

 “Tell her I am not mad anymore, “

“Tell her I forgave her,”

“Tell her I forgive her for stealing the man I was supposed to marry.”

“Tell her I am an old woman and probably dying.”

With that Eva closed her eyes and turned towards the wall.

“Should I bring her here to see you?” Rachel tried to draw her aunt back into the conversation but from years of experience knew it would not work.

This was all she was going to get and from here on it was her story to chase, following her Ariadne’s Thread into the labyrinth of family secrets and denials. Hoping to emerge with a story worth telling. A story that will tell itself.