The Center

Karen Alkalay-Gut

It is a torture to visit my great-grandmother.  It means two busses to Tel Aviv and then the crowded 24, and all that pushing and shoving.  And then the past with all its political imperatives snagging me as I walk that beautiful avenue up to her apartment building.  I want it to mean nothing to me, just an environment where I can meet the beautiful women I see on television whose lives are bound up with their careers in this city.  But every stone, every tree, reminds me of how much Tel Aviv means to me, and how hard I have to fight for it.

Even the avenue is such a strain right now, its elegant charm forcefully reminding me of a generation and a world that totally disappears in my mind when I stand all day long at the checkpoint.  Unreal: the old ladies sitting empty in the sun with their Philippine caregivers, the dogs playing as if they had no cares in the world, and the gorgeous girls attached to them by these miniscule leads.

And they never notice me.  It took me months to learn to not look into people’s eyes when I’m asking them for their identity cards, and now it takes me hours to get used to the fact that it is possible to have any kind of conversation that embodies no threats, no dangers.   And that if I did, it might do me some good.

But the worst part of the trip is turning off that balmy avenue into her dingy apartment.  How many years has it been since she’s had the place painted, and why won’t she agree even to a thorough house-cleaning?  Her smell is everywhere and it seems like it has been building up since the birth of the State, when she arrived.  The papers, the books, the grimy pictures I never look at up close.  The sofa shows stains of the legendary German shepherd who was put to sleep in the seventies, and a vague odor of mildew rises from the carpet. 

We always sit in this stifling living room.   There is always tea and dry homemade cake on the coffee table, and we sit opposite each other while she asks me about how the army is treating me and whether I get enough to eat.  Then she asks about the family.

My family news is always two weeks old, but I get the job of updating her because I can pass through the city on my way home up north.  And because I look like my grandfather and my father in all the pictures before he bled to death in Lebanon.  Or at least that’s what she tells me every time she opens the door to me.   And I know my mother  (who remarried within the year, when I was just a baby)  and my stepsisters (who have no relation to her except through me) would never elicit that expression of joy. 

This time I try not to get on to the subject of my father – After what I’ve been through this week I can’t bear the thought of any kind of loss, much less discuss my own.   There was a boy at the checkpoint who so reminded me of myself that I relaxed, slipped, didn’t check carefully enough to see that he was wired.  So now I must try not to slip again, not let my emotions get in the way, and to try to focus her on a light and easy present. “Hey Grandma, what’s new?”  I ask her as I walk in. 

“You think because I’m a lonely old woman nothing could be new?”  She rejoins with her typical negative irony, and we’re off to the usual start. 

She starts to sit me down in the ‘salon,’ where the past covers every crack in the ancient wall.  This first husband  – Auschwitz; this brother – partisan; this aunt – burnt alive; this cousin – who knows where they disappeared to.  My grandfather, who died of sorrow. And my father.  My father. My father.  Today I can’t take it.  I want to say to him – if you only knew what I have to do every day, you’d wipe that proud, shy grin off your face. 

“Grandma, I need fresh air, I can’t breathe.”

“And in this polluted city you think the air outside is fresher? … Nu, you with your asthma, come out to the balcony.”

I help her bring the tea outside and we put the dishes on the rickety table next to the wide railing so we can sit, lean over and see the avenue.   I must have done this often long ago with her, but now it seems like a ritual I never really knew.  Maybe I was too small to see over the railing before.

Somehow her entire appearance changes outside – she is now longer only the mistress of my only link to the past, but a resident of the city, a wise urban lady.  I notice suddenly that her traditional raisin-cake has been replaced by a cellophane-wrapped loaf with a sticker that says “Lechem Erez.” 

“Don’t eat it – it’s dry,” she says. “Anyway it’s time to change our style. You can’t eat the same thing every time.  So I’ve ordered some good Jewish food for you, just like Grandma used to make.  It should be around any minute.”  

“So how are you feeling, Grandma?” I say, distinctly sensing I have lost her attention.  She’d already noted how brown my face is, how tall I’ve gotten, how much of a man I’ve become, and now her gaze is inching toward the passersby, the people rushing past with endless important things to do. 

Of course it is hard for me to focus as well.  We’re only one and a half meters up from the street and if I lean way forward I could almost touch the hair of the red-headed girl riding by on a bicycle.   I have seen that color hair before on the base, but it’s tied up and twisted under hats.  Or under shawls.

“What, I should maybe complain to you about my sciatica?  I should show you the way my hands tremble?  I can do that every day in the Health clinic at Zamenhoff, when I meet all my old ladies from the neighborhood.  The only day we don’t go there is when we’re sick.”

And then, while I’m making myself laugh at her old self-parodies, at the absurdity of it, she suddenly puts down her cup and grabs my face.  “Listen,” she says.  

Standing up she is eye level with me while I remain in my chair. Actually I’m too surprised to move.  “I try to see my life as a funny little joke, and it’s true I have a full-time job taking care of an old woman, but even though I can’t do much to help, I know what’s going on around here.  I can still read the news, watch the people, and I’m as much a part of this country as you are.  I know about how I have to keep myself together, just like you do.”

It doesn’t make sense to me. Is she really comparing our lives?

“Listen,” she says again.  “Do you think I don’t know what’s on your mind, on your back?   Do you think I don’t know that you’ve got more pain and more responsibility than anyone in my own generation?  Or even your father’s?  Don’t think I don’t understand that all my generation and the next are sitting on your shoulders with all our weight.”

She turns her face away. “The only thing I can teach you is how I’ve made it through, how we all make it through – we take the materials that we have available and we make new life out of it.” 

“New life?” I look around at the peeling walls, the tottering table. 

“Don’t look here, all this can be fixed up by someone younger who comes to live here with new vision.    Look at the street – the way things change here every day, every minute!”

Suddenly she stops talking as if she’s lost interest.   She’s turned to the avenue and is calling out from the balcony. “Ah, here’s Dalit!  Dalit!”  A slender dark-haired girl waves from below.  “I’m on the way up to you with dinner from Bebbele like I promised!” 

The door opens and Dalit brings the two paper sacks she’s carrying onto the dining room table.  “I don’t know why you ordered so much this time.  It’s a regular holiday meal!” 

“Never mind – you’ll stay and have some.   It’s a holiday when my great grandson comes to visit. Why don’t you set up the table and I’ll go change my shoes?

She leaves me alone with Dalit, who chatters non-stop as she takes course after course out of the bag.  “Here’s some chopped-liver, and here’s three orders of chicken soup, and ….”  I’m not listening to her list of food.  I’m just enjoying the sound of her voice reporting me to the unexpected bounty we are about to eat.  I’m also slowly registering that from the next room there are distinct snores being issued.

If I didn’t know her I would think they were real snores, but they are meant for me – “I’m not really asleep – it’s just what a funny old lady would do in this situation. Ha Ha.  I’m just cunningly leaving you alone with this pretty girl I’ve been fixing up for you for weeks.”

“This really has to be eaten right away,” Dalit says. “We shouldn’t wait for her.”

“So we’re on our own.” 

“Don’t worry.  She’s not the first old lady with a soldier son she’s trying to fix up.  This is Tel Aviv, you know.”