Redemption
By samvaknin
- 386 reads
My grandfather sat on a divan, back stiff and eyes tight-shut, when
the news arrived. At the age of seventy, his body still preserved the
womanizer's tensile, proud, virility. He dyed his hair jet black.
Original Moroccan music, wistful and lusty, the desert's guttural
refrain, poured forth from a patinated gramophone. The yearning tarred
his cheeks with bloodied brush, a capillary network that poured into
his sockets.
Now, facing him distraught, my father was reciting gingerly the
information about his little sister, confessing abject failure as the
clan's firstborn. His elder sister died in youth but even had she lived
she wouldn't have qualified to supervise the brood due to her gender.
It was my father's role to oversee his younger siblings, especially the
females, the thus preserve the honor of his kinfolk.
Being a melancholy and guarded man, he blamed them for conspiring
against him. He envied them instead of loving. He kept strict ledgers
of help received and given. He felt deprived, begrudging their
successes. They drifted apart and my father turned into unwelcome
recluse, visited only by my tyrannical grandfather. On such occasions,
my father was again a battered, chided, frightened child.
That day, with manifest obsequiousness, he served the patriarch with
tea and home-made pastry arranged on brightly illustrated tin trays. My
grandpa muttered balefully, as was his wont, and sank his dentures into
the steamy dough, not bothering to thank him.
As dusk gave way to night, my father fetched the grouser's embroidered
slippers and gently placed his venous, chalky feet on a dilapidated
stool. He wrapped them in a blanket. Thus shoed and well-ensconced, the
old man fell asleep.
These loving gestures - my father's whole repertoire - were taken by my
grandpa as his due, a pillar of the hierarchy that let him beat his
toddler son and send him, in eerie pre-dawn hours, to shoulder bursting
wineskins. This is the order of the world: one generation serves
another and elder brothers rule their womenfolk.
"Whore" - my grandpa sneered. His voice subdued, only his face conveyed
his crimson wrath. My father nodded his assent and sat opposed, sighing
in weariness and resignation.
"Whose is it, do we know?" - my grandpa probed at last. My father
snuffed the ornamental music and shrugged uncertainly. My grandpa
rubbed his reddened eyelids and then slumped.
"We need to find him and arrange a wedding" - he ruled. My father
winced, propelled by the incisive diction into the grimy alleys of his
childhood, the wine tide and ebbing in the pelt containers, the origin
of his recurrent nightmares, nocturnal shrieks, sweaty relief when
nestled in my mother's arms, his brow soaked, his heart in wild
percussion.
"Today it's different, Abuya" - my father mumbled, using the Moroccan
epithet. My grandpa whipped him with a withering glower.
"I will depart tomorrow" - my father whispered - "But I don't wish to
talk to her."
"Don't do it" - consented grandpa, his eyes still shut, waving a steady
hand in the general direction of the decimated music - "Just salvage
our dignity and hers."
The next day, father packed his crumbling cardboard suitcase, the one
he used when he fled Morocco, a disillusioned adolescent. He neatly
folded in some underwear and faded-blue construction worker's
sleeveless garments. On top he placed a rusting razor and other
necessaries.
I watched him from the porch, he waning, a child size figure, going to
the Negev, the heartless desert, to restore through a defiled sister
the family's blemished honor. He stood there, leaning on the shed,
patiently awaiting the tardy transport. The bus digested him with eager
exhalation.
He has been away for four days and three nights. The fine dust of
distant places has settled in his stubble. He wiped his soles on the
entrance rug, removed soiled clothes and gave them to my mother. He
slipped into his tunic and his thongs, uttering in barely audible
relief, then sank into an armchair.
My mother served up scolding tea in dainty cups. He sipped it
absent-minded, dipping a sesame cracker in the minty liquid. Having
reposed, he sighed and stretched his limbs. He never said a word about
the trip.
A few months passed before his sister called. She phoned during the
day, attempting to avoid my father, who was at work. My mother spoke to
her, receiver in abraded hand like hot potato.
We were all invited to her forthcoming wedding. She was to marry a
Northern, elder man of means. He will adopt the child, she added. Still
enamored with her elusive lover, she admitted, it wasn't the hideous
affair we made it out to be. These days and nights (too short) of lust
and passion in the wasteland have yielded her a daughter, a flesh
memento of her paramour.
My mother listened stone-faced. "We cannot come," - she said, her voice
aloof - "my husband won't allow it." But we all wish her happiness in
newfound matrimony. In the very last second, as she was replacing the
handset in its cradle, she whispered, maybe to herself: "Take care of
you and of the little one."
She subsided on the stool, next to the phone, and scrutinized the blank
wall opposite her. I busily pretended not to notice her tearful
countenance.
When my father came back from his excruciating work on the scaffolds,
my mother laid the table. They dined silently, as usual. When he
finished, she cleared the dishes, placing them in lukewarm water. "Your
little sister called" - she told him - "She is inviting us to her
wedding up north. She is marrying a wealthy man rather older than
herself, so all's well that ends well. At least she won't be
destitute."
"None of my concern" - interjected my father gruffly, heavily rising
from the chair.
The following day he traveled south, to meet my grandpa. He then
proceeded to see his other brothers and his sisters. That over, he
returned, called in sick and remained at home for weeks.
When his youngest sibling, my uncle, came to visit, my father embraced
him warmly. He loved them all but only this Benjamin reciprocated. My
father pampered him and listened attentively to his seafaring tales,
echoes of distant places, among the glasses of scented Araq, a powerful
absinthe. They munched on sour carrots dipped in oil.
At last, my father raised the subject. Retreating to our chambers, we
left them there to thrash the matter out through the night. Their
voices drifted, raised and then restrained. My father shrilly argued
but his brother countered self-convinced. He packed and left in the
early hours of the morning.
My father entered our room, defeated, and tucked us in unnecessarily.
He turned off all the lights, a distended, dismal shadow, and surveyed
us, his beefy shoulder propped against the doorframe.
My mother instructed us severely:
"If daddy's youngest brother calls, don't answer. Nor he neither his
wayward sister are part of our family. Your father excommunicated them
forever and cursed their lineage. They have disgraced us. Now they are
perfect strangers."
I liked my uncle - boyish and outgoing, hair long, and smooth, and
often brushed and dried, his clothes the latest fashion from abroad. He
was a seaman. His visits smelled of outlying cities and sinful women
thin-clad in bustling ports. He carried stacks of foreign bills stashed
in his socks and bought my mother foreign, costly fragrances (she
buried them among her lingerie until they all evaporated).
At the bottom of his magic chest lay booklets with titillating tales of
sizzling sex and awesome drug lords. I waited for his visits with the
impatience of an inmate. He was the idol of my budding willfulness and
nascent freedom. I resented our forced estrangement.
And so began my mutiny. Lured by the siren songs of far-flung lands, of
sexual liberation, and of equality, I traveled to my grandma's home, an
uninvited guest. My uncle, whose name now we could not pronounce, was
there. We strolled the windswept promenade of Beer-Sheba, kicking some
skeletal branches as we talked. He treated me as an adult.
Then it was time to return. My father, aware of my encounter, regarded
it as treason, another broken link in the crumbling chain of his
existence. To him, I was a co-conspirator. I shamed him publicly. He
felt humiliated in his own abode. He didn't say a thing, but not long
after, he signed me over to the army as a minor. My mother tremblingly
co-signed and mutely pleaded with my father to recant.
But he would not. Immersed in hurt, he just imploded, blankly staring
at the television screen. He took to leaping anxiously with every phone
ring, instructing us in panic to respond. He didn't want to talk to
anyone, he promised.
When I enlisted, he accompanied me to the draft board. Evading any
contact, he occupied a tiny, torturous wooden stool. He didn't budge
for hours and didn't say a word and didn't kiss farewell, departing
with a mere "goodbye". I watched him from the bus' window as he receded
, stooped, into a public park. He collapsed onto a bench and waved away
the pigeons that badgered him for breadcrumbs. Finally, he let one near
and kicked her with his shoe. They scattered.
I didn't visit, not even on vacations. I found father-substitutes,
adopted other families as home. At times, I would remember him, a tiny,
lonely figure, on a garden bench, surrounded by the birds.
One day, my service in the army nearly over, my mother called and said:
"Your father wants you here."
At once I felt like burdened with premonitory sadness, with the belated
anguish of this certain moment. She told me that my uncle died in
shipwreck.
"His cousin was with him to the end. He clung on to a plank all night,
till dawn. He fought the waves and floated. And then they heard him
mutter: what's the point and saw him letting go and sinking under. They
say he drowned tranquil and composed."
I alighted from the belching bus before it reached my parents',
traversing accustomed pathways, touching childhood trees, pausing in
front of the boarded cinema house, a fading poster knocking about its
peeling side. A titian cloud of falling leaves engulfed it all. The sea
roared at a distance as if from memory.
I knocked, my father opened. We contemplated one another, vaguely
familiar. Alarming corpulence and evil hoary streaks. Time etched its
brown ravines in sagging flesh, the skin a flayed protection. He spread
his arms and hugged me. I cautiously accepted and dryly kissed his
stubble.
He ushered me inside and sat me by my brothers. I greeted them in
silence. My father helped my mother serve refreshments, peeled almonds
and solid confitures. We sulked in mounting discomfort.
Sighing, my father rose and climbed the spiral staircase to his room.
He soon returned, clad in his best attire, his synagogue and festive
uniform, the suit he wore in my Bar-Mitzvah.
Like birds after the storm the house was filled with curled rabbis.
Flaunting their garb, grimly conferring with my father, they eyed the
table critically.
"There's more!" - my mother hastened - "There's food, after you
finish."
"Are these all your children?" - they demanded and my father, blushing,
soon admitted that my sister wants no part in the impending ceremony.
They nodded sympathetically. They linked their talliths (prayer shawls)
into a huppah (wedding canopy) and ordered us to squat beneath
it.
They blessed the house, its inhabitants and future monotonously. My
father's face illuminated, his eyes aglow. He handed each rabbi and
each cantor a folded envelope from an overflowing pocket in his vest
and poured them Araq to warm their hoarsely throats. They gulped the
fiery libations, chanting their invocations as they swallowed.
With marked anticipation they assumed the better seats around the table
and plunged into my mother's dishes. She waited on them deferentially.
Burping aloud, the food devoured, they broke into a vigorous recital of
pious hymns.
Night fell and my father entered the guest room and settled by my bed.
He drew the covers to my chin and straightened wrinkled corners.
"We blessed the house," - he said - "to fend off a disaster."
I asked him what he was afraid of. He told me that he cursed his
brother to die young and now that he did, my father was anxious.
"You loved him very much" - I said and he averted his face.
Waves clashed with undulating ripples to deafening effect.
"There will be a storm tonight" - my dad said finally.
"I guess so" - I agreed - "Good night. I am bushed, I need to rise and
shine early, back to the army."
I turned around to face to the naked wall.
==============================
Short Fiction in English and Hebrew
http://samvak.tripod.com/sipurim.html
http://www.suite101.com/files/topics/6514/files/worksinenglish.zip
Poetry of Healing and Abuse
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