I must tell Avi immediately, best to get it done with: Mother wants to come home, and I’ve agreed that she should.
I imagined you here, here this very winter, making it your home again, repossessing us, me, Avi, our very house where even the colours of the walls remain the same as they were when you were here. Avi doesn’t sleep in the house, of course, you remember that—he sleeps with the other children, as is the way here, or had you forgotten? Nor would your other children, the girl and boy, children I don’t know, whose very names elude me, sleep with us in the house. You realise that, don’t you? Are you sure you want to bring them here, to a world they do not know, a world that would be strange to them, leaving their father behind, as you once left us?
I sat there on the mountain, a place I’ve visited often over the years, both in winter and summer. The rain stopped and it was quiet there, save for the sound of water, surging down the mountainside, and I looked down on the kibbutz. The gardens are different from that distance, from above, and I see things there that I would not notice on my normal rounds. That morning, for instance, I realised that the wisteria I have been cultivating all these years does not belong on the western wall of the children’s house. I won’t go into the details, but once observed I knew that it was absolutely wrong there and would have to be moved, though moving wisteria is a troublesome business—you know how difficult it is about flowering. In fact I knew at that moment that I only planted it there when Avi was a boy so that the scent would come to him as he slept.
After that observation I did what I don’t normally do, I lit a cigarette. Generally speaking, I save this cigarette for the evening, one cigarette a day, that’s all I allow myself; but that morning I broke my strict rules and I smoked one, for I came to a realisation there on the rain-soaked mountainside. I remembered something and that remembrance, that stab of memory, made me realise that you absolutely must not come back. You see, the exact detail of the day you left came to me, I hadn’t thought of it in a long time; I once thought of it often, once I saw the image of you leaving a thousand times in a single afternoon, for years and years. When I stopped seeing it I can’t remember, but I thought of it that morning and I remembered your eyes, the life inside them dying, how dull they became; and I wondered how life with us died for you as completely and utterly as it did. I remembered you stirring your coffee that morning, the tears running down your face, because of the constant heat you said.
It’s different now, of course—we have air conditioning and life is comfortable. The management committee has become more lenient about privately owned luxuries, too lenient I often think, and I am not the only member of this community who feels like this. There are more than enough comforts, I am sure you would enjoy them. I tried to convince myself of that.
But mostly I remembered what you said. It hit me with a blow to the chest that morning on the mountainside, even all these years later, your words of that July day still contain the same powers of destruction that they did then. Do you remember? You said that youth is above all a collection of possibilities, and that with every day you spent with me another of those opportunities died. Died before your eyes, you said. Do you know how it feels to watch those opportunities die, you said. I can’t stay here and watch them die anymore, you said.
That summer is still inside me—the daze through which I laboured in the gardens, the greenfly that devoured the rose garden, only detected when it was far too late for action, the weeds that overcame the display of colour opposite the communal laundry, the rows of putrid strawberries that I neglected to harvest, the buzzing of the swollen flies around them—is still with me. You have not forgotten it either, that
I imagined you here, here this very winter, making it your home again, repossessing us, me, Avi, our very house where even the colours of the walls remain the same as they were when you were here. Avi doesn’t sleep in the house, of course, you remember that—he sleeps with the other children, as is the way here, or had you forgotten? Nor would your other children, the girl and boy, children I don’t know, whose very names elude me, sleep with us in the house. You realise that, don’t you? Are you sure you want to bring them here, to a world they do not know, a world that would be strange to them, leaving their father behind, as you once left us?
I sat there on the mountain, a place I’ve visited often over the years, both in winter and summer. The rain stopped and it was quiet there, save for the sound of water, surging down the mountainside, and I looked down on the kibbutz. The gardens are different from that distance, from above, and I see things there that I would not notice on my normal rounds. That morning, for instance, I realised that the wisteria I have been cultivating all these years does not belong on the western wall of the children’s house. I won’t go into the details, but once observed I knew that it was absolutely wrong there and would have to be moved, though moving wisteria is a troublesome business—you know how difficult it is about flowering. In fact I knew at that moment that I only planted it there when Avi was a boy so that the scent would come to him as he slept.
After that observation I did what I don’t normally do, I lit a cigarette. Generally speaking, I save this cigarette for the evening, one cigarette a day, that’s all I allow myself; but that morning I broke my strict rules and I smoked one, for I came to a realisation there on the rain-soaked mountainside. I remembered something and that remembrance, that stab of memory, made me realise that you absolutely must not come back. You see, the exact detail of the day you left came to me, I hadn’t thought of it in a long time; I once thought of it often, once I saw the image of you leaving a thousand times in a single afternoon, for years and years. When I stopped seeing it I can’t remember, but I thought of it that morning and I remembered your eyes, the life inside them dying, how dull they became; and I wondered how life with us died for you as completely and utterly as it did. I remembered you stirring your coffee that morning, the tears running down your face, because of the constant heat you said.
It’s different now, of course—we have air conditioning and life is comfortable. The management committee has become more lenient about privately owned luxuries, too lenient I often think, and I am not the only member of this community who feels like this. There are more than enough comforts, I am sure you would enjoy them. I tried to convince myself of that.
But mostly I remembered what you said. It hit me with a blow to the chest that morning on the mountainside, even all these years later, your words of that July day still contain the same powers of destruction that they did then. Do you remember? You said that youth is above all a collection of possibilities, and that with every day you spent with me another of those opportunities died. Died before your eyes, you said. Do you know how it feels to watch those opportunities die, you said. I can’t stay here and watch them die anymore, you said.
That summer is still inside me—the daze through which I laboured in the gardens, the greenfly that devoured the rose garden, only detected when it was far too late for action, the weeds that overcame the display of colour opposite the communal laundry, the rows of putrid strawberries that I neglected to harvest, the buzzing of the swollen flies around them—is still with me. You have not forgotten it either, that
Similar Books
