The Book of Israela. Rena Blumenthal

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СКАЧАТЬ in toward me, and I caught the trace of a delicate perfume. “But so many of the things he was saying were interesting. Even lyrical. And thought-provoking. There was something about him . . .”

      Two coffees were unceremoniously plunked down on the table by our surly young waitress. I wondered if it was run-of-the-mill Israeli rudeness or a sign of disdain for people quietly enjoying a coffee mere hours after a bombing. Dina added cream and sugar to her coffee with excessive concentration, struggling to stay calm. She finally took a sip and looked up at me with sad, frightened eyes.

      “Don’t worry,” I assured her. “With time you’ll grow thicker skin, I promise. The first hospitalization is always a little traumatic—I still remember mine from more than fifteen years ago. And to have it happen at the exact same time as a bombing downtown . . .” I shook my head sympathetically. “It’s no wonder you’re as upset as you are.”

      “I really liked him,” she said. “Do you think it will help him to be shut up in a hospital ward, where no one will listen to him? I feel like I failed him.”

      “Dina, the guy was a full-blown paranoid schizophrenic. Any sense you made of his rambling was out of your own unconscious need to heal him. There are drugs that can help people like that.” I made my voice as soothing as I could. “If you’re going to be successful in this field, you’ll have to work on your own countertransference issues. I’m going out on a limb here, but I’m guessing that there was someone in your own family you were helpless to heal.”

      “You’re right,” she whispered, her eyes filling with tears.

      “Do you want to tell me about it?”

      “I don’t know. It’s embarrassing.”

      I picked up my coffee and took a sip, watching her with a deliberately patient, sympathetic gaze. If there was one thing I had mastered over the course of the years, it was the power of strategic silence.

      She looked down at her drink, gathering her resolve, then back up at me. “When I was very young, my father left my mother for a younger woman. You can’t imagine how humiliating that was. My mother had to raise us alone, and she was stressed all the time, her eyes always red and brimming with tears. I wasn’t the oldest, but I was the only girl in the family, and I thought it was up to me to take care of the household, to make life easier for her. One day, when I was eight years old, she started crying and crying and couldn’t stop. I got really scared, and finally I called my father to ask him what to do. When he came over, he said she was having a ‘nervous breakdown,’ and arranged for her to be hospitalized. The whole experience was devastating.” She paused, collecting herself. “She was never the same after that. I still haven’t forgiven myself for calling him. If I had been able to handle things better, maybe she would have recovered on her own.”

      She was so young, so vulnerable. How did people like her get through life? I wanted to tell her to leave this profession, leave this war-torn country, become an accountant in a place like Sweden. She kept snuffling her tears like she’d done in my office, wrinkling up her nose in that adorable way. I reached over and took her hands in mine as she raised her watery brown eyes, large drops of liquid hanging precariously on her lashes.

      “You’re not the only one who went into this field to heal someone they love,” I said, in as gentle a tone as I could muster. “You need to understand that very well, or it will interfere with your work. You have to separate your mother’s pain—”

      There was a flash of movement and I heard something clatter noisily on the table. Startled, I pulled my hands away from Dina’s, staring stupidly from Nava’s face to the wedding ring that had been dropped, with exquisite precision, into my empty coffee cup. She was wearing a crisply tailored maroon jacket and the brightly colored silk scarf I had bought for her birthday, tied just so. Elegant, as always.

      “Don’t even think about coming home tonight.”

      “Nava, you don’t understand. This is Dina; she’s a new intern at the clinic. I left you a message. We just hospitalized a patient. It took a long time because of the suicide attack, and—”

      “I’ve understood for years, Kobi.” Her voice was full of anger and pain, but her posture was poised and erect, like the dancer she was. “Right in our own neighborhood. Bombs going off in the middle of the city and you’re pursuing your latest conquest. She’s young enough to be your daughter. And just a month before the bat mitzvah; Yudit will be devastated.” She raised her head to look out the window, as if speaking to the windswept saplings. “Don’t you dare come back to the house. I’ll call the police if you do. You can send someone to pick up your stuff; I’ll pack it myself. The locks will be changed tomorrow.” I started to speak but she cut me off. “It’s over, Kobi . . . for good.” She turned on her heels and with sublime self-righteousness made her way to the door, gracefully skirting the clutter of empty tables and chairs.

      I frantically fished in my pocket for money and dropped a twenty shekel note on the table while scooping Nava’s coffee-sticky ring out of the cup. “It’ll be fine, Dina,” I blurted out, grabbing my jacket. The girl looked shell-shocked, but I’d have to deal with that later. Clumsily, I negotiated my way around the obstacle path of tables to the front door.

      “You only got what you deserved,” cried a loud-mouthed crone, and the handful of café patrons laughed and applauded. Couldn’t anyone in this country ever mind their own goddamned business? Nava must have been taking a short cut through the alley and spotted me through the window. What kind of bum luck was that? I should have been more careful after everything that had happened these past couple of weeks. By the time I made it out the door and into the cold, harsh wind, she was long out of sight. As I stood stunned on the sidewalk, wondering what to do next, I felt Dina slip out the door behind me, watched her race down the street toward the intersection of Rachel Imeinu, clutching her bag to her chest as if being chased by a thief.

      I spent the night, and then the weekend, at Yossi’s flat, sleepless on his foldout couch, trying to evade the whirlwind his four-year-old twin boys habitually left in their wake, and listening to his American wife, Elizabeth, extol Nava’s virtues and berate me for my selfish stupidity. I called home numerous times, leaving increasingly desperate messages of apology and explanation on the answering machine, which had already been changed to erase my presence from the household. I could imagine Nava glaring at the ringing phone, explaining to Yudit in graphic detail why her no-good abba wasn’t going to live with them anymore, Yudit’s serious little face scrunched in worried thought as she took it all in.

      Yossi walked over to the house Saturday afternoon to pick up my car and watched Nava hurl three garbage bags full of clothes and sundry possessions into the back seat, conveying to him with each angry toss that I should stop leaving useless messages; that Yudit was just as furious and was refusing to speak to me; that I shouldn’t even consider attending the bat mitzvah. As the car pulled away she yelled out, for good measure, that she would be contacting a lawyer first thing Sunday morning to initiate proceedings for a divorce. As he dragged the garbage bags into the flat, Yossi shook his head to convey the hopelessness of it all. “That’s one angry lady, my friend. You better stop calling—give her some space.”

      It was almost a relief when the weekend finally ended and I could return, groggy and disoriented as I was, to the stultifying routines of my job.

      2

      The first thing I noticed when I entered my office Sunday morning was the missing dartboard. A Chagall reproduction hung in its place, a romanticized shtetl scene with scantily clad lovers floating upside down under a garish moonlight, a cow head leering from the rooftops.

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