Her brother Noam

 

When Tali was a baby, she used to sleep by her mother’s side. Her voice was too weak, and her parents would not have heard her from another room, if she would wake up and need them. Her twisted, useless arms and legs hurt so much, that the kind Dr Katznelson gave her parents a “very strong medicine”, but they never let her have it. Tali cried, threw things that landed not at all where she wanted them to land, and tried so hard to form words, to explain, to get through to them – but words would not come. She cried when food fell out of her mouth, she wept when the physiotherapist hurt her, trying to get her to stand on matchstick legs that would not support her weight. And so it went, week after week, interrupted only by Shabbat, when nobody tried anything with her, and just let her dream sitting in her wheelchair on the porch, and her parents gave her sweet juice to drink through a straw.

She grew slowly, and Jerusalem grew with her. A stunning bridge that resembled the inner workings of a piano arched now by the entrance to the city; soon, digging began on Jaffa Street for the long-awaited tram. Tali could see both from their tiny porch on Hertzl street, from a building that had turned brown with age and did not resemble the usual golden Jerusalem stone anymore. Buildings grew taller and taller, and if you did not visit a street for a year, you might not recognise it next time you showed up. Her father, a kindly man named Rami, would carry Tali downstairs, place her in the enormous wheelchair with restraints for her hands and feet and a supporting pillow for her perpetually shaking head, and take her for long walks. He would point out cats and dogs, trees and stones, but never waited to hear her opinion on them. He knew he wouldn’t understand her attempts. They just continued as if nothing happened.

Her mother would roll her bed in front of the TV and put on cartoons, but Tali had no voice and no words to explain to her that cartoons were boring, and that she wanted to watch something new. She wanted to sit up, to move… She cried; but her mother was busy in the kitchen, cooking or washing dishes, and ignored her whining. Sometimes, her mother cried, too, using the TV to mask the sound, but Tali knew. Tali just wanted to talk to her, to hear her mother’s words directed to her, and not to someone else about her, but that was not to be.

So it went on, until Dr Katznelson looked into her eyes when she was nine years old, and gave a long whistle. “Pnina, Rami, I believe she understands us!” Things began to change then, mainly in the matter of her schooling. Now, Tali had to wake up at 6 in the morning, and wait downstairs with her father for the special bus that took her to her “school”. It was still stupidly boring, they showed her cards with everyday objects and named them, then put on some more of the same cartoons. Tali hated it, but didn’t cry, because the privilege could have been taken away just as easily as it was given, if she was deemed unworthy – or too stupid. She got to see other kids, but they had saliva dripping down their chins, or vacant eyes, or features that just looked wrong. Some of them had to breathe through an opening in their necks, which made funny whistling sounds. There was no talking to them, either. Now her parents talked to her – later, Tali would refer to it as “talking at her.” They still did not expect – or receive – an answer. They carried on, as if nothing happened.

“You must keep her happy!” – The doctor would emphasise, looking at their dour faces. “Happy, do you understand? No matter what it costs you. She will only develop if you make the effort.”

They tried their best. The stupid cartoons were replaced by adventure films on big video cassettes called VCR, and Tali was happy for a while.

There was one bright light throughout it all, though, and it was her brother Noam. He came home late, when their parents were already sleeping, and left before they woke up. It was always this way, and when you grow up with something, you don’t question it, even inside your own head. He never ate or watched TV with them, and her parents never mentioned him. There were three pictures of him in the living room, one – in a large golden frame. Noam looked so proud of his army uniform in that one. The others were Bar mitzvah photos, one – of him with their parents, and one – of a little boy wrapped in a tallit. But there were no photos of Tali anywhere, with or without anyone else. She knew they were ashamed of her, and maybe even wished she didn’t exist, and the realisation tasted sour in her mouth. She knew she was a burden, that she made their lives miserable, that her mother cried because of her, and it made her rage inside – not at them, and not at herself, just futile rage that comes before giving up, perhaps at life itself.

Noam was the only one who understood her miserable attempts at speaking, and encouraged her. He read her stories from the books they kept in the living room, about Sinbad the Traveller and Aladdin, and even the princess stories, like Cinderella. Then, he began reading her the more advanced books, and asked her questions afterwards. He would explain the unfamiliar words, and wait for her to nod. Noam told her about the neighbouring countries, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. Yes, they were enemies, but mostly they were just confused and unhappy. “Like me,” – Tali had thought then. Sometimes, he would bring her little snacks, letting her explore tastes that their home did not have, like halva, or smoked fish, or bitter olives, which he fed to her carefully, piece by piece.

“Why don’t you take me with you? I want to see the port of Tel Aviv and the Luna Park. I want to see Eilat.” – Tali had said once, and he understood. His face darkened; he was silent for a while. Then he said very seriously, “I wish I could, little sister. But it’s impossible. You will go when you are grown up, I promise you. You will see all these places.”

That was not good enough, and she cried. He sat there, holding her little pale hand with his big and strong one, and did not explain.

When Tali was twelve, a miracle happened – a company that made communication devices reached out to them, asking if Tali would like to participate in a trial. Her parents started teaching her letters, and she could not tell them that she knew how to read already, that Noam taught her years ago, and she would have loved to read books, if only someone would sit by her and flip the pages. In anticipation of the device bridging the gap between them, her parents tried talking to her more, though, and really started trying harder to understand her.

The night before she was due to receive the device, Noam put away the book he had been reading her, and said very seriously, “I won’t be able to come to you anymore, darling sister.”

At first, Tali did not understand.

“Are you getting married?”

“What? Oh… no, no.”

“Are you flying to another country? America? Will you send me pictures?”

“No… it’s not like that. I just won’t be able to come anymore.”

She did not understand, and began crying. Noam hugged her tight, and whispered in her ear: “Remember me, and you will see me again. The time grows short… Sleep, sister.”

She slept.

Indeed, Noam had stopped coming after that. Her nights were now her own, with no stories or treats. Tali couldn’t wait to communicate with her parents to ask about him. She learned to type individual letters on a screen by operating a small joystick, then pressing the button on top of it when she had the right letter. Then, a mechanical voice would read her question out loud to her parents.

“Where … is… Noam?” – The voice read.

Her parents’ reaction was unexpected. They wept with joy at her first communication, but there was also something wrong, she could tell.

Then, her father blew his nose on a large checkered handkerchief, wiped his eyes, and said, “Oh, baby… We didn’t know you remembered him. Noam was killed in Lebanon when you were two years old.”

“But… I… saw… him!”

Her parents exchanged glances.

“Children will have funny ideas sometimes.” – Her mother said. It was clear that she did not believe her. They looked at his photo in the army uniform, and then at each other. Then, as always, they continued as if nothing happened.

Tali thanked her brother in her college graduation speech, pre-recorded into the newest communication device, and followed by a storm of applause from all the people who tried very hard not to notice her for the last 4 years. Her parents still did not understand. But it no longer mattered. She had a trip to Eilat already planned out on her device.

 

Nati's evening

 

The door of the supermarket swung open, and a tall teenage boy strolled out, pulling his jeans up with his left hand, and carrying two full shopping bags with his right. It was no wonder the jeans kept on sliding off – he was painfully thin, but he did not look pale or weak. In fact, he was quite dark, the kind of skin that comes with tanning, not being born with it. His hair was curly and dirty blond, and bleached by the sun into a cap of cotton wool.

He crossed the road to the bus stop and settled to wait, kicking his flip-flops off for comfort.

Nati was just fifteen, but nobody would have guessed that, including at the garage, where they let him tinker with the engines and help out for a bit of a salary. He got the money in cash, in a long blue envelope, from the owner himself, but then so did half of his workers. Ashi didn’t like to pay tax, and griped on and on about it, as they worked, and he sipped his Turkish coffee. Then he would tip the dregs out onto the mud under a sickly palm tree in a huge pot sitting under the air conditioner, saying, “It’s healthy for it”, stub out his cigarette and go back to watching porn under the cover of his desk. He thought nobody knew; he also thought they had to respect him, because he provided livelihood for a dozen families. Neither was true. The previous teenage worker who manned the “out-of-my-kindness position”, which held not an ounce of kindness, and was in fact not too far removed from actual slavery in terms of hours, had climbed up on the roof, and lowered a camera down on a long cable to a window behind Ashi’s desk. When they had finished laughing, cursing and spitting in the direction of the office, the secretary came out, called them “bad boys”, and threatened to report them. Grudgingly, they dispersed, but nobody had forgotten the secret vice of their benefactor, who was getting ready to trade his BMW for a Rolls Royse. There was only one problem, however: a total and utter absence of any Rolls Royse models in Israel, even the oldest ones.

Nati jumped up when he saw the number fifteen approaching, and settled down in the back, where there was room for his legs, opposite a young Ethiopian mother with a toddler in tow. The child looked up at Nati, and his eyes got bigger and bigger as he took in his height.

“Do you have chewing gum?” – the kid asked.

Nati shook his head. “A pity…” – the toddler drawled. His mom smiled, then turned back to her phone. The kid stuck his tongue out at Nati.

In the front, three older ladies in extravagant clothes, one of them wearing a theatrical hat with a veil on top on jeans dungarees, another – a gypsy-style costume, and the third in strict business attire, but with a pink frilly blouse underneath, were having an animated conversation.

“I am telling you, it was when we came back from Eilat, when he decided he knew the way, the idiot…”

“No, it was after I had my first colon-what-do-you-call it… when you crap like a cholera victim for three days, then they stick a tube up your arse…”

“You’re both wrong. It was after my grandson nearly hung the dog, and my daughter sent him to me, because she was afraid she’d …”

Nati stuck his earphones deeper into his ears, as deep as they would go. He was exhausted after a day at the garage, and was hoping to sleep on his bus, even if it was for fifteen minutes. He still hadn’t decided what was worse – the noisy kids in the afternoons, or these ladies.

“So, Chayim was asking me, karaoke or a movie? Of course it’s karaoke, I said. There’s nothing to drink…”

Their conversation punctured his music so painfully that he caught himself jerking up to go and ask them… but what was the point. He didn’t. He also remembered that he had some homework to finish, and that nearly made him groan. Algebra… dreadful. His school was mercifully minimal, but still not altogether non-existent.  

The summer sun flooded the bus with its slanted rays, making people squint against it. Nati got off, shrugging his shoulders in the sudden swampy heat, feeling the rivulets of sweat starting again between his shoulder blades. Air conditioning inside the bus could make one forget the season… but at least it was air conditioned, unlike home.

The post box was full of letters and bills. He stuffed them inside the shopping bag without looking at them, and ran up to the fourth floor, just to test his resilience. It would serve him well in the army, this ability to sprint from zero to a hundred… “Just kidding, I’m not a car!” – he chuckled to himself, as he opened the door.

He was greeted, as always, with a smell of dirty diapers and an overflowing bin. He sighed. Some things would never change.

“I’m home!” – he announced to the empty living room.

His mom hasn’t gotten out of bed today, he could tell, just by how the dishes sat in the sink, thrown in haphazardly one on top of another. At least now she remembered her pills, most of the time.

Nati poked his door into the kids’ room. Rafi, Aliza and Amit were sitting on his bed and watching cartoons on their mother’s phone. When they saw him, they jumped up, dropping the phone, and surrounded him, Aliza climbing into his arms, and Amit protesting loudly, on the verge of a big tantrum.

“I got you burgers from the supermarket! And dry corn, to make popcorn. But you only get it after you clean up!” – he announced.

“Popcorn! Popcorn!” – Amit started jumping on the bed, but Rafi gently moved him onto the floor. “You’ll ruin the mattress!” – he chided. – “And then what will we do?”

Nati sighed again. His algebra homework was rapidly moving away into the moonlit evening, with its chances of being done today approaching zero. Those women on the bus… she shuddered. They didn’t let him get his nap…

He looked into his mother’s room. The dusty easels still stood by the wall, some with equally dusty canvasses, some – just with clothes, eerily similar to scarecrows. Or alien robots from some Sci-Fi book. The paints were still stern all over the floor, just as they were… No, he is not going to think about that.

Or about the day when his grandma Esther, his father’s mother, drove over all the way from Hadera, just to yell at their mom and hit her with her slipper, yelling at her to “think about the children, you rotten piece of chicken’s innards”, and some more in Arabic, which they didn’t understand. Then she ran the water in the bathroom for the longest time, and someone retched and vomited again and again, until everything went quiet, and his mom lay in bed, so quiet and so pale, and their grandma was shoving pots and pans in the kitchen, muttering to herself in two languages at the same time. Aliza had never stopped being afraid of Grandma Esther since then. “Because she hurt mom.”

“She saved mom, you dumbass”, - Rafi always said, and Amit closed his ears. He didn’t want to know.

The children never went into this room, because their father’s face stared at them from every easel, in oil paints and in acrylics, in pencil and in charcoal, with an army beret and with long hair, in Thailand and in Venice, in wedding attire and as a bar-mitzva boy. And even on the bedroom window, drawn in whiteboard markers, was their father’s profile on a body of a bird.

Only Nati could manage it – because he was the oldest, and frankly – because he had no choice. He lifted his mom, - she weighed almost nothing, especially after a car engine, - and carried her to the living room. It was easier than helping her walk. Something in her pills made her muscles resist moving.

He could not let the younger ones make popcorn in the heavy cast iron pan, so he still had to do that. Nati hated it when the children asked him permission to do things, as if he was the adult. He earned the money, and he did the household things, like laundry and dishes, so he had earned the honour, but it still felt wrong. It’s only because his mom basically checked out when… No. Mustn’t think about that, or shadows would start dancing in front of his eyes again, and then the spirit of madness would claim him, too, like it took his mom. Never, he vowed to himself, never-ever-ever.

Rafi served the burgers in the old plastic plates they all used as children, because all the ceramic plates were in the sink, and Amit squeezed the ketchup for everyone, because he had to prove he was “so strong!”. Aliza turned on the TV, even though Nati hated it. He grabbed the remote, and quickly switched it from the news channel to entertainment, mercifully fast enough for their mom not to realize. She hated the news.

Amit cuddled up with their mother in the big armchair, and she smiled down at him, a sad absent smile. But it was a smile, nevertheless.

Aliza began her daily recital of what each friend had said, and why, and what the teacher did. Nati nodded in all the right places, then got out his algebra, telling the little ones to go shower. Listening “with one ear” to the kids, just in case, he decided to at least to stopper the water in the sink and run it full, to soak the dishes. His mother still gaped at the TV with her regular absent look, a combined effect of the pills and whatever she was suffering from. He tucked the light blanket tighter around her feet, because they looked a bit blue, especially the toes, despite the heat.  Actors sang and danced on the TV, but he paid them no attention. Another day at the garage was coming too soon… he opened the book.

He woke up only when the kitchen window smashed, buckling under the heat. Thick black smoke was pouring out from the kitchen cabinet above the stove, with flames a meter high dancing right under, licking the other cabinets, while someone – someone as tall as him – was batting at it with a blanket, instead of covering it. “Cover it! You’re fanning it higher!” – Nati yelled, as his body propelled him towards the bathroom. The children! He could not carry all three! 

He dropped a wet and slippery Aliza on the bottom stair outside, making her twist her ankle and cry out in pain. She glared at him from inside her towel, tears rolling down her cheeks. “I’m naked!” – she wailed. “Never you mind that,” – he said gruffly, his throat full of smoke. He ran back in for Amit, and nearly collided with Rafi at the door. He was dragging the computer, and bashed Nati painfully on his hip bone with its corner. The neighbours began running up and down the stairs. Someone was pouring water onto the fire in the kitchen, spraying it up with the big bendy tap. Steam and smoke were choking Nati, and he couldn’t see a thing, but he could hear the fire hissing behind his back, being extinguished by the stranger. He carried his mother onto the stairs, even though she had tried to walk. He ran back up. He just had to make sure the fire was fully out, and see who was helping them.

Sirens blared outside.

There was nobody in the kitchen, but the cabinet was just smouldering. The fire was out.

“What an idiot…” – Nati thoughts were sluggish, from waking up in such a shock. “I left the frying pan on after I made popcorn… and I tell the kids they can’t be trusted. Idiot!”

Looking up to inspect the damage, he saw that the top cabinet was actually intact, even though he had seen it burn. So was the window. Even the soot was minimal. Something here didn’t make sense… who was the tall man in the kitchen? Where had he come from, in a house on the top floor with the door locked. This just cannot be right…

A suspicion made him feel cold inside.

Sneaking into his mother’s room, he stood in front of the easel that held the portrait of his father in the army beret. It was empty, a clean white easel with no dust on it whatsoever.

Someone laid a hand on his shoulder. He turned around, and looked into his mother’s grey eyes, absolutely lucid and feverishly bright.

“Don’t tell anyone, or there will be two officially diagnosed mental cases in this family. I know whom we saw… we have a trip to make tomorrow. To give thanks…”

Nati nodded. He just knew. A trip? She hadn’t left the house since…

His mother bent down and picked up a dusty purple army beret off the floor, then shoved it into Nati’s hands. “I don’t want you in combat, when the time comes… but this is yours, anyway.”