About the Night (28 page)

Mano sighed. “It’s tough every time. The disappointment. But there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s decreed. Maybe she should stop trying. Even the doctor said there’s a time to set aside wishes.”

“Something drastic needs to be done,” Lila said, “in order to change destiny.”

Nomi was hoping that Uncle Mano would ask to see her drawing, but a cough came from the bedroom, the kind that Margo faked so that they would come running, and indeed all three of them stood up as one.

Uncle Mano was first in the room. He felt her forehead. “Thank God,” he said, “you don’t have a fever.”

Lila drew near and kissed her cheeks.

Nomi stood in the doorway and said, “There’s blood on the sheet.”

Mano dashed out of the room, and Lila found some cotton wool in the bathroom. “Go to Uncle Mano,” Lila said when she realized that Nomi was still standing there. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

Margo drank two glasses of water one right after the other, then plunged back into sleep.

“Sleep is healthful,” Lila told Mano. “Forgetting is, too.” They discussed who would stay the night to look after Margo and Nomi. Lila was hoping he would offer to sleep there—after all he was family—and they were both miserable at having to give up sleeping alone in their own beds for a night.

Uncle Mano walked around uneasily. “It’s a woman’s matter,” he said.

Lila announced, “I’ll stay.”

The phone rang. Uncle Mano was quick to answer. “It’s your father,” he whispered to Nomi. His brow wrinkled with effort. “I can barely hear you!” he shouted. “What am I doing here?” he said, repeating the question. “I came to visit. Everything’s okay. Margo’s resting. She can’t get on the line now.”

He stalled for time and looked to Lila for instructions on how to act. Should he keep the news from his brother, or tell him?

Lila moved her lips soundlessly. “Tell him,” she said.

“It didn’t take,” Uncle Mano said. Menash either didn’t hear or didn’t understand because Mano repeated himself. “It didn’t take. Again. She lost it.”

The line went dead. Mano, still holding the receiver, looked helpless, at wit’s end. “Your father said he’d be home soon,” Mano told Nomi. She smiled, even though “soon” actually sounded far off in the future.

“I’ve got to go,” Uncle Mano said, suddenly impatient. “It’s good you’re here, Lila. Hold down the fort.”

He kissed Nomi, once on each cheek and once on the forehead. “Remember,” he whispered to her, “before Rosh Hashanah I’m taking you to Tel Aviv, just you and me.” She could feel the heat from his face, and she waved to him as he made his way down the stairs. She wished to go with him, and she didn’t care where.

In the days that followed, Margo regained her health and her strength. She went back to work seven days after leaving the hospital, even though the pink that everyone envied had not yet returned to her cheeks. Nomi heard her sobbing in bed but could not bring herself to go in, feeling herself nailed to the chair of her desk. She preferred to pretend she could not hear.

When her father returned from the Negev, he looked as though he had been kidnapped by ghosts. He was lost, scared, the expression on his face one of pain and confusion. His eyes skittered about as they did when something happened that he did not know how to address.

Nomi did not hear them talking or even arguing. Their silence was surprising at first, then frightening. Margo had grown mute, and he along with her. They passed each other like shadows and did not remain together in the same room. The quiet that Nomi so often longed for instead of the usual din was unfamiliar and threatening. Margo’s anger, usually noisy and combative, was stifled, and it was difficult to understand what she was angry about and what she wanted from him. Unlike with her usual anger, she did not confront him with anything. Was his absence to blame, or maybe his presence? Or maybe his acquiescence, his silence?

During her convalescence, Nomi heard Margo crying bitterly into the phone that “the burdens of this household are shouldered by one person alone.”

The more they kept things from Nomi, the more she searched for words and meanings, hints and intentions, attempting to gather bits and pieces and turn them into a single truth. She looked for the moment her parents’ marriage had gone wrong and turned ugly, sealing their destinies. She wanted to know when it had happened and how and who was to blame, since not only were they doomed to live this failed life together, but she as well.

She began to realize that her father had been free and admired when her mother was determined to win him for herself. He had spread himself among many women and belonged to no one.

“He was like the ace in a deck of cards,” Uncle Mano had once told her. “All the women wanted him in their hands.”

One evening, Margo had sat cutting up small photos, and when she was done, Nomi gathered the cuttings and pieced them together, chin to chin, bangs to bangs. On the back of each were inscriptions:
To Menash, yours forever,
or
To Menash with love.
And there were so many names: Rachel and Leah and Marta and Mira and Sophie and Judith. This was the proof of her father’s glorious past, which she now kept for herself.

Nomi overheard snippets of arguments between Menash and Margo. “You were all over me,” he once said in a rare outburst. “You didn’t let up. You were a three-ring circus trying to get me to marry you. We both know what you did.”

To which Margo wailed, “What did I do in my life to deserve this punishment?”

One thing was clear: there was no love between them, and if there ever had been, it was long since over. No gentle feelings had survived the years of disappointment and rejection. Menash had lost his status as the man admired by all women. Margo had trampled his opinions and his manners and the way he spoke and how he slurped soup and his whistling and his ineptitude at supporting the family. She left him nothing of his lofty youth, extinguished his good looks and joie de vivre, and was especially good at domesticating him. Back when he had been nourished by admiration, he shone, while in his marriage, stuffed to the brim with hostility and enmity, he turned ashen, like a man who imbibed poison with his food on a daily basis.

Mano kept his promise and took Nomi in his car for her first visit to Tel Aviv, which was hugely pleasurable for her. On the way home, he picked up a pretty girl he knew from the pharmaceuticals factory, and Nomi took consolation in the conversation they had, two irresponsible adults talking as though a girl was not sitting in the backseat. They discussed someone they knew who had gotten pregnant and someone else who had had an abortion.

That evening, in her bed, Nomi hugged the new shoes Uncle Mano had bought her, and once she’d found the perfect balance between the coolness of the room and the warmth of the bed, she burrowed down and closed her eyes. It was then, as the headlights of passing cars shone light through the slits of the blinds on her window and Nomi had very nearly drifted into sleep, that she suddenly solved the riddle. All at once, and with great clarity, she understood the secret they had all been keeping from her, that her mother had had a miscarriage. The baby in her mother’s womb had fallen out, and Menash had learned about it over the phone from his brother, and Lila had been summoned to look after Margo, whose womb had emptied out. Nomi wondered how the baby had fallen out and what they had done with it.

What this meant was that her mother had been pregnant. Her mother, whom Nomi thought looked too old for that, had had a baby inside her, and nobody had told her a thing about it. So what other things had they kept from her? Suddenly, her world felt uncertain; perhaps she should question everything around her. Perhaps her father didn’t really go to the oil fields, perhaps a baby had actually been born and given up for adoption or had been born too tiny, the kind they keep in incubators. After all, as Lila had told her, wherever there was one lie there were surely more to follow.

She tried to recall exactly how Lila had put it and played with the words until they were more or less as Lila had uttered them: “A lie is like a pain: the first arrives and brings others with it.” Or maybe she’d said it like this: “Lies are as despicable as pain. They never come alone, always with others.”

The light was on in her mother’s room, where she could hear Margo working with crazed determination on her sewing machine, piecing together a white suit whose creation was helping to restore her vitality. Nomi slid a foot out from under the blanket and placed it squarely on the smooth north wall, the one that faced the winds that blew from Sacher Park. Who else knew the truth and who found out like she did, by herself? She had a sense of satisfaction at having worked it out on her own, but that feeling was only momentary because on its heels came other feelings: emptiness and insecurity and the sense that everything is as fragile as a piece of pottery and might crack open at the slightest touch. After unearthing a secret, the only sure thing is that there are more where that one came from.