once upon a time, when she was a girl, before there were so many sidewalks in Tel Aviv, there were places where wooden planks were placed atop the sand. She loved the feel of these, the way they rocked and sank beneath one’s footstep and weight. I loved the spot between the end of the street and the start of the beach, that elusive space between two times and two places, where the city ends and the shore begins, where the asphalt and concrete end and the sand and sea begin. One leg still on the solid of the sidewalk, the other already in the soft and yielding sand.
We played with a small medicine ball, weighted according to our ages, and this was the sole sport at which I was better than my brother. I stood rooted, straining, while Benjamin was hurled backward time and again, falling in the sand and laughing, enjoying himself in spite of his failure. Yordad scolded him, “Stand firm!” Then, restraining himself—he never raised his voice, and when he was angry he whispered—he said, “Stand firm, Benjamin! How is it that Yairi can do it and you can’t?” A wave of pleasantness arose inside me: my mother called me Yair, Meshulam Fried, Tirza’s father, calls me Iraleh—“Iraleh and Tiraleh, alike as a pair of doves”—and until this very day Yordad is careful to call me Yairi,
my
Yair, as if reminding the world that I am his.
Benjamin grinned, sighed, and fell on purpose. Yordad grew angry He yanked Benjamin to his feet and sent us to run on the beach, with “knees high, Yairi, don’t drag your feet in the sand.” So we ran and sweated and breathed deeply, rhythmically We swam a little, exercised a little. We ate grapes while the sun dropped and the beach emptied, wegathered our belongings and retraced our steps home. I liked coming home better than going there and preferred the transition from sand to sidewalk too, one foot still feeling its way and sinking, the other already finding its resting place, the answer to its needs.
Yordad marched at the head, erect, I followed behind, and my mother and brother were behind me or ahead of me or next to me playing skipping games on the paving stones, “because if you step upon the crack, you will break your mother’s back.” A benign sun, soft and low, lengthened our shadows. There’s mine, wider and shorter than the others and, like its owner, darker, wrapped inside a long terry-cloth robe. That shadow was sullen and enraged and stepped on the cracks on purpose, and its robe was an old robe of my mother’s that she had tailored for me after much pleading. That robe drew a large share of mockery and teasing, but it filled its role—to conceal the strangeness of my body—quite successfully
So fair and tall and slender were the three of them, their tans so golden and burnished, and I was so dark and thick and coarse. More than once I had feared I was adopted, and Benjamin, who perceived every chink and impaled every foible, made me angry with a little song he wrote. “They sent you in a package, / They found you in the trash / They took you from an orphanage, / To Gypsies we paid cash …”
My mother was angry “That’s enough of your nonsense, Benjamin,” she said, but her dimple glinted, giving away a smile. Sometimes even she would joke about that very same matter. “What’s going to be with you, Yair? One day your real parents will come and take you for their own and we’ll miss you terribly”
I would turn to stone; Benjamin would join in her laughter. Yordad reprimanded them. “Do not be offended by them, Yairi, and as for the two of you—please stop this immediately!”
Adopted or not, I shall write here what I felt but never dared to state back then: that I was not turning out well and that my brother was the correction of the mistake.
8
O N THE FIRST DAY of summer vacation in 1957, we moved to Jerusalem. Yordad had been promised a position at the new Hadassah Hospital, which was just being built west of the city, and the opportunityto
We played with a small medicine ball, weighted according to our ages, and this was the sole sport at which I was better than my brother. I stood rooted, straining, while Benjamin was hurled backward time and again, falling in the sand and laughing, enjoying himself in spite of his failure. Yordad scolded him, “Stand firm!” Then, restraining himself—he never raised his voice, and when he was angry he whispered—he said, “Stand firm, Benjamin! How is it that Yairi can do it and you can’t?” A wave of pleasantness arose inside me: my mother called me Yair, Meshulam Fried, Tirza’s father, calls me Iraleh—“Iraleh and Tiraleh, alike as a pair of doves”—and until this very day Yordad is careful to call me Yairi,
my
Yair, as if reminding the world that I am his.
Benjamin grinned, sighed, and fell on purpose. Yordad grew angry He yanked Benjamin to his feet and sent us to run on the beach, with “knees high, Yairi, don’t drag your feet in the sand.” So we ran and sweated and breathed deeply, rhythmically We swam a little, exercised a little. We ate grapes while the sun dropped and the beach emptied, wegathered our belongings and retraced our steps home. I liked coming home better than going there and preferred the transition from sand to sidewalk too, one foot still feeling its way and sinking, the other already finding its resting place, the answer to its needs.
Yordad marched at the head, erect, I followed behind, and my mother and brother were behind me or ahead of me or next to me playing skipping games on the paving stones, “because if you step upon the crack, you will break your mother’s back.” A benign sun, soft and low, lengthened our shadows. There’s mine, wider and shorter than the others and, like its owner, darker, wrapped inside a long terry-cloth robe. That shadow was sullen and enraged and stepped on the cracks on purpose, and its robe was an old robe of my mother’s that she had tailored for me after much pleading. That robe drew a large share of mockery and teasing, but it filled its role—to conceal the strangeness of my body—quite successfully
So fair and tall and slender were the three of them, their tans so golden and burnished, and I was so dark and thick and coarse. More than once I had feared I was adopted, and Benjamin, who perceived every chink and impaled every foible, made me angry with a little song he wrote. “They sent you in a package, / They found you in the trash / They took you from an orphanage, / To Gypsies we paid cash …”
My mother was angry “That’s enough of your nonsense, Benjamin,” she said, but her dimple glinted, giving away a smile. Sometimes even she would joke about that very same matter. “What’s going to be with you, Yair? One day your real parents will come and take you for their own and we’ll miss you terribly”
I would turn to stone; Benjamin would join in her laughter. Yordad reprimanded them. “Do not be offended by them, Yairi, and as for the two of you—please stop this immediately!”
Adopted or not, I shall write here what I felt but never dared to state back then: that I was not turning out well and that my brother was the correction of the mistake.
8
O N THE FIRST DAY of summer vacation in 1957, we moved to Jerusalem. Yordad had been promised a position at the new Hadassah Hospital, which was just being built west of the city, and the opportunityto
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