A Wall of Light Read online

  Praise for A Wall of Light

  “Like the great Israeli novelist Amos Oz, Ravel employs the contemporary family unit—a group of disparate people thrown together by genetics or happenstance, loyal to one another despite their differences, and planning for a shared future they can’t predict—as the ideal metaphor for the Jewish state.… She recognizes the cynicism and anger felt by those who have suffered, and her valuable novel offers the simple wish that they will feel love, too—for each other and for life itself.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “Ravel is a master of conserving detail and uses it in an almost painterly fashion, while leaving us with the sense of a mystery unraveling teasingly before us.… Ravel’s Vronskys are always determined in their apparently insensible decision-making. What makes them appealing is Ravel’s skill for portraying a sense of universality.”

  —Jewish Independent

  “In A Wall of Light Edeet Ravel gives us a fascinating, beautifully textured portrait of Israeli society at three stages of its history as seen through the eyes of three characters. The unifying strand is one day in the life of Sonya, who by nightfall has journeyed to the heart of Jerusalem and to the core of her own being. Ravel writes about human complexity with disarming ease. By probing into every corner of her characters’ lives—sexual, emotional, political—she creates a world of deep and refreshing intimacy that replaces barriers with a wall of light. Her style is immediate, honest, subtle. Her language is effortless. Every page brims with life.”

  —2005 Scotiabank Giller citation

  “Skilfully juggling the weight of the multi-layered past with the bright intensity of the present, Ravel has written a book that shimmers with suspense, mystery and wit. Tell your friends.”

  —Toronto Star

  “Like its predecessors, this concluding volume focuses on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the toll it takes on human lives and especially on relationships. Here, however, the three narrators weave the story together most effectively, showing that while war is a destructive force, love is powerful as well. Ravel writes poignantly about survival and hope in the midst of tragedy. Recommended for all libraries.”

  — Library Journal

  ALSO BY EDEET RAVEL

  Look for Me

  Ten Thousand Lovers

  for Fred Harrison

  life artist

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am grateful for the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.3 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada. For their help and support in the writing and publication of the Tel Aviv trilogy, of which this is the final volume, I am deeply indebted to Meir Amor, Yudit Avi-dor, Yardena Avi-dor, Miki Bitton, Alison Brackenbury, Alison Callahan, Nada and Jihad Charif, Marwan Charif, Anne Collins, Pam Comeau, Richard Cooper, Jay Eidemiller, Rezeq Faraj, Rachel Goodman, Mary Harsany, Christopher Hazou, Eric Hamovitch, Michael Heyward, Malcolm Imrie, Matan Kaminer, Ruttie Kanner, Yitzhak Laor, Shimon Levy, Kfir Madjar, Mark Marshall, Michael MacKenzie, Rachella Mizrahi, Moshe, Adrienne Phillips, Ken Sparling, Gila Svirsky, Yafa Wax, Claire Williamson, Margaret Wolfson, Miriam Zehavi, the Headline crew, the staff of the Metropolitan Hotel in Tel Aviv, and the many fellow activists who have given me the strength to maintain hope in the midst of tragedy. Filling my life with fun and love, my daughter Larissa continues to inspire and enchant me.

  All losses are restored,

  and sorrows end.

  —Sonnet 30, Shakespeare

  SONYA

  I am Sonya Vronsky, professor of mathematics at Tel Aviv University, and this is the story of a day in late August. On this remarkable day I kissed a student, pursued a lover, found my father, and left my brother.

  The morning began with a series of sneezes. The sneezes interrupted a dream I was having about a glass-walled elevator that had left its shaft and was shooting about wildly through immense futuristic building complexes. Like something out of Asimov, I thought. I was just starting to enjoy both the sensation and the spectacle when the sneezes woke me.

  I like to sleep with the shutters open; I like to feel the sun on my body as soon as I wake. A warm, luminous world awaits me—or so I imagine. Ordinarily, I would have switched off the air-conditioning, opened the window and looked out at our garden; I would have turned my face toward the sky and breathed in the sweet, tyrannous August air. But today my sneezing distracted me. My late-summer allergies were kicking in.

  I sat up in my queen-sized bed and reached for the box of rainbow-colored tissues on the night table. I set the box between my knees, which were protruding like two islands from under the sheets. A boxy ship, precariously balanced.

  My mother, who slept next to me when I was little, always accompanied her good-night kiss with a quote—affectionate if she was sober (“Come, live with me, and be my love,” for example), gloomier if she was inebriated (“Out, out, brief candle!”). Then she’d turn off the light and I’d snuggle up against her lace nightgown, breathe in her cinnamon perfume. My mother was a night bird; when she woke she was not in a quoting mood. But I am the opposite, more inclined toward poetry in the morning than at bedtime, and I suppose my choices are also somewhat less formal than hers. “You are old, Father William …,” I began, but didn’t finish; a sneeze interrupted me.

  Kostya, my darling brother, appeared in the doorway, dark and shadowy because the light was behind him. With his trimmed gray beard and his tall, still body he looked like a character in a French film from the 1960s, a film about alienation and ennui, with the male lead dark and brooding. In fact, he was there to offer me an antihistamine. My brother has very low tolerance for disruption, and the sneezes were annoying him.

  But I’m being unfair: he was also trying to help. My poor brother lives with the guilt of my two catastrophes, neither of which he had anything to do with. Human error lay behind the first disaster: twenty years ago, when I was twelve, I was taken to the hospital with a kidney infection, and some nurse or doctor or hospital pharmacist gave me the wrong dose of the wrong drug. I moved into another dimension, spooky at first, frightening at first, then surreal, and finally exotic or ridiculous, depending on the day. I lost my hearing.

  And human evil, which no one can entirely avoid, accounts for the artillery unleashed at me in an empty university classroom by stoned twin teenagers with shaven heads and dragon tattoos.

  But guilt has a way of insinuating itself into the path of any series of events leading to a given outcome. Kostya believes, for example, that had he fixed our broken toilet, I would not have come down with a kidney infection in the first place. The toilet howled and groaned like a ghoul in chains and I was afraid to use it; my solution was to drink less in order to limit my visits to the bathroom. I didn’t tell anyone about my aversion; had Kostya known, he would have attended to the problem. And then, had I not been deaf I might have heard the twins before seeing them (this is really stretching it) and escaped in time. These are tenuous links but well entrenched in our family mythology.

  “Do you want an allergy pill?” my brother asked, speaking as he signed. “It’s non-soporific.” We’d developed so many signing shortcuts and private gestures over the years that by now we almost had our own language.

  “Oh … kay!” I managed to say between sneezes. He vanished and returned with a small yellow pill, his heartbreaking offering of the morning, nestled in the palm of his large, intelligent hand. In his other hand he held a small bottle of Eden spring water.

  I obediently swallowed the pill. “You’re lucky I’m so nice to you,” I said.

  My brother smiled. It would be no exaggeration to say that he suffers from my misfortunes more than I ever did. He should take comfort in the fact that I have a good life, that I have fun—and maybe
he does, to some degree. Maybe not. It’s hard to know for sure.

  “Tell me when you’re ready for breakfast,” he said.

  I blew him a kiss and he left the room. My briefcase was next to the night table, and I emptied its contents in front of me. Exams, articles, receipts, notes and miscellaneous slips of paper floated out angelically and settled on the bed. I organized them all efficiently and quickly. Then I waddled to the bathroom like a goose headed for its mud pond, and had a shower. There is nothing quite as wonderful and endlessly surprising as a soft, heavy stream of hot water falling on one’s shoulders and down one’s body. I was filled with gratitude, as I always am during the first few moments of a shower, that something so lovely exists on this planet, and I was only sorry that it was not available to everyone. A few kilometers away, there was not even enough drinking water.

  But, inexcusably, my sense of guilt soon faded, and as I ran the soapy sea sponge along my legs I succumbed completely to the pleasures of my morning shower.

  NOAH’S DIARY, JUNE 20, 1980.

  In the news: the Yarden boy is still missing, day 11, no leads, police asking people to check sheds. We don’t have a shed but I checked under the porch.

  This is me, Noah Vronsky. Only kids in yeshivas get called Noah—just my luck. I got named after my grandfather, my mother promised him when he was dying. But everyone at school calls me Noonie, or Numi-Numi when they’re joking around. I’m only Noah at home so it’s not too bad.

  My family consists of five people: me, my gran (actress and waitress, tall with long blond hair, smells of cinnamon), Sonya (Gran’s daughter, which makes her my aunt but she’s three years younger than me if you can believe it!—chubby with curly black hair in cute ringlets), my dad (bone doctor), and my mom (lawyer whose clients never pay her, short with straight black pixie cut).

  I also have a best friend, Oren, and I’m a pretty good soccer player and artist. I like drawing things divided down the middle. One side alien, one side human. One side Mom, one side Dad. One side Mani our soccer coach in his uniform, one side Mani naked with his funny thing hanging down (Oren and I caught a glimpse of it in the locker room). For high school Dad wants me to go to a school with an art program, but I’d rather go where Oren goes.

  Today was my birthday, I’m ten. Mom gave me a ten-speed bike, Oren gave me a cool poster of American basketball players, Sonya gave me logic problems she made up (the kind I like: “The man in the red sweater is sitting next to the wife of the cook’s brother …”), Gran gave me songs of innocence and experience, and Dad gave me this diary.

  He says he gave it to me because I have “interesting thoughts.” This worries me. How much does he know???

  LETTER TO ANDREI, JANUARY 2, 1957

  Dearest darling, I am so relieved that Heinrich managed to get all my letters to you during his last visit! What luck! Of course, by the time you get the letters they are out of date, and your reply with all its good advice is sometimes no longer relevant and it’s frustrating as hell but no matter. Please, darling, promise promise to burn my letters at once, don’t take any risks. It’s a miracle as it is that you haven’t been suspected of helping me escape. I can’t even bear to think about the chance you took for me, and for our Kostya. And what could have happened … I promise to keep copies of all my letters for the day when we will be together again.

  I am so happy, dearest, to hear that you are well. Needless to say, I worry about your health all the time. You must take care of yourself, my love. You write that the days are dark and empty without me, but we must think about the future, when you too find a way to leave our beautiful and terrible country. But it is no longer “our” country—only yours now. I must accustom myself to being a real Israeli, with a little identification booklet to prove it. How is that troublesome toe of yours, did the powder help? How is sweet Olga? I miss her as much as if she were mine. Don’t work too hard, darling.

  Kostya is fine, getting quite tall, and arguing with all his teachers—but most of them don’t mind. Only one has taken a dislike to him, a young man whose skin is too delicate for his razor but who insists on being closely shaven and so is always covered with cuts. He came over to complain about Kostya, and sat here in our tiny one-room apartment, his knuckles white, his voice trembling, his leg so jittery it gave me vertigo. He was in the Sinai campaign last year.

  He complained at length about Kostya talking back in class. I told him it’s a free country (finally I can say that!!—the words roll off my tongue like pearls) with free speech, and my son can say whatever he wants in class, he’s not harming anyone. But this poor man thinks his authority is being undermined. During the entire visit I was of two minds whether to offer him the last piece of cheesecake I brought home from the restaurant. So precious! I was really battling with myself. In the end for Kostya’s sake I took it out of the icebox and gave it to him. He gobbled it up like a starved man and was much appeased, but he is still sending Kostya home with notes and punishments—for example, copying out long passages from the works of the Hebrew poet Bialik “with vocalization.”

  Our clever Kostya is fluent now in Hebrew, after only a year! I wish I could say the same for myself, but I am struggling with this language like Jacob with his angel. But now I come to my big news! A group of us are trying to start a theater. Our first production is going to be As You Like It—in Hebrew, of course. Now the only problem is to find a hall, a budget, actors and a translation—other than that we are all set! By “we” I mean really only four of us. First, the director, Feingold, who is very brilliant and brimming with enthusiasm and ideas which are constantly coming up against hopeless obstacles; it’s a pitiful thing to see his face fall as each idea gets dashed against the rocky cliffs of reality. Please don’t be jealous, dearest, because you know my heart belongs only to you and Feingold is overweight, has asthma, he wears the same shirt many days in a row and his fingernails are none too clean. He studied with all the greats before the war, however, and he really is a genius. It’s a little sad to see him in these surroundings.

  Then there’s Tanya, who is seventeen—she says! I think she’s younger and I believe she is a runaway. Tanya is full of life and maybe even possesses a hint of a trace of acting skill. The third in our little group is Carmela, who is forty or so and a second-generation Israeli. She’s going to be our fund-raiser, trying to get grants and applying to all sorts of institutions here and abroad—and though she’s shrill and bossy, we already depend on her entirely. The rest of us are just too impractical and we don’t know the ins and outs the way that she does. The following exchange will give you an idea of how most of our meetings unfold:

  FEINGOLD: This is a play about disguise and identity and the instability of roles—the most important thing is costumes. I want the actors getting in and out of them onstage throughout.

  CARMELA: We won’t have a budget for costumes.

  TANYA: I could have sex with the person in charge of grants if it helps.

  Oh dearest, I miss you so much. If I didn’t believe I’d be seeing you again, my life would lose all meaning.

  SONYA

  I didn’t stay in the shower for long because I knew my brother was waiting for me. Wrapped in a massive oyster white towel, I approached the closet. I’m very fond of beautiful clothes and I’ve collected quite a few skirts and tops over the years. That’s what I like to wear: short skirts and matching tops—outfit of choice, I once read in a silly magazine, for shy but ambitious women. I deliberated for a minute or two and finally chose a silky flowered skirt and a white V-neck top with a strip of lace lining the V.

  I dressed, inserted all my papers carefully into my briefcase, and made my way to the kitchen, where Kostya, the family chef, was preparing my breakfast.

  Our household had now shrunk to two, but even in the old days, when there were five of us—Kostya and his wife Iris, their son Noah, my mother, and me—Kostya did the cooking. Iris was too busy with her law practice, and my mother was not the sort of person to
take an interest in the culinary arts, to say the least; she lived mostly on pistachio nuts and orange juice mixed with vodka. My brother, on the other hand, was a fabulous cook right from the start. He consulted cookbooks with great dedication and used us as guinea pigs for his experimental creations.

  As soon as I entered the kitchen Kostya began preparing two poached eggs with Hollandaise sauce for me. An elaborate salad and a plate of apple turnovers had already been set on the table, next to my empty plate. I made my own toast, feeling I should participate a little, even if only symbolically. When the eggs were ready, Kostya went to the bathroom to tidy up after me: spread and shake out the shower curtain, hang the towel properly, realign the bath mat. He used to make my bed, too, but I finally put my foot down and told him I’d like to decide for myself when my bed should be made. That was usually never, and I knew the disordered bedding was hard on Kostya, but he was stoic about it.

  While he was tidying up I glanced at the newspaper. The usual mess; there was hardly any point reading the details. A Gaza air strike killing six, Qassam rockets killing no one, a soldier stabbed, settlements expanding, the Knesset in disarray, a pollution crisis looming. If you went only by the news, you’d think you were stuck in the same day forever. As an experiment, the newspapers should reprint an edition from four years ago and see whether anyone noticed. Or maybe even twenty years ago.

  Kostya returned and we chatted about nothing in particular—the weather (unchanging), taking the car in for a tune-up (urgent), whether to rent a movie (yes)—and then he ran off to the hospital. He would not have had to put up with my sneezing for very long.

  I stepped onto the back patio with my buttered toast and sat down on the first of three steps that led to the garden. I grew up in a comically malfunctioning house in north Tel Aviv, on Yahud Street; its only redeeming feature was a large and glorious garden. My brother methodically uprooted the garden on the day Iris was murdered but resurrected it when we moved to our new house. The new house was a big step up from the Charlie Chaplin bungalow on Yahud; this was thanks to an anonymous benefactor who read about the medical error that changed my life. The story made the front pages for a day or two, with my small, baffled face peering out at scandalized citizens from under a huge mass of black ringlets. Some rich person read about me and was horrified: a poor fatherless child (all my virtues were generously listed) who had gone deaf because of inexcusable negligence. Possibly his incentive was Zionist ardor, a desire to demonstrate that the country was not all bad and that wrongs could be balanced by good deeds; or maybe he simply felt sorry for me.