Temporary Homes

1

Elka’s interview for her new job took place on a beautiful, bright morning in January. She wore an orange cotton shirt with a gray diamond print, out of which thousands of purple eyes framed in delicate turquoise smiled at her in the rearview mirror. She tried to detangle a knot in her hair while sipping coffee and chatting with Sophie over speakerphone.

When she drove up Gaza Street it appeared she still had plenty of time left, but before she reached King George Street, at an intersection that wasn’t usually busy, traffic came to a standstill. Now she was forty minutes late. “Maybe it’s a bomb threat,” she told Sophie.

Sophie was sitting at her kitchen table, trying to read a Russian newspaper while simultaneously listening to Elka. “You don’t say,” she murmured. “But there are no more terror attacks now!”

Elka said, “True, but what else could it be?”

In response, sirens sliced through the street, a black car whizzed by, followed by another and another, until a long line of black cars with opaque windows lined up at the traffic light.

“Oh, it’s the Prime Minister,” Elka said. But a breathless radio announcer corrected her when he reported that a ceremony to welcome German Chancellor Angela Merkel had just concluded at Ben Gurion Airport, and that the chancellor was currently headed to the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in a convoy, which Elka’s car was now riding behind.

“Hello?” said Sophie. “Elka? What’s wrong?”

But Elka forgot all about Sophie and her job interview. The window in one of the black cars rolled down and Angela Merkel poked a very pale, confused face framed by wild blond hair from the opening in the black metal. She blinked at the abundance of light in the world, nearly unseen through darkened car windows. On TV, it sometimes looked as if she had no neck, but now she used the muscles of a perfectly reasonable neck to pop out her head. She turned it slowly from left to right, watching the last houses of the Rehavia neighborhood, the Terra Santa building, the long line of cars waiting at the light, the geraniums on the balconies of the Kings Hotel, and the big synagogue.

If you sat on the other side of the car, you could have seen the roofs of Old City churches—the taller ones, at any rate—and the unfinished building above the Agron supermarket, thought Elka. You’d have liked that.

“Hello? Elka? I’m going to hang up on you,” Sophie threatened.

But Elka didn’t hear. She was the first in the line of cars behind the black convoy, sitting right across from the lowered window, and smiling at Angela Merkel—not that Angela could possibly see her from so far away. Then a hand reached from behind, pulled the chancellor back into the car, and rolled up the window. The light changed and the convoy rode on. A few minutes later, traffic dissipated, and Elka continued on to her interview.

“The roads were closed because of Merkel’s visit,” she apologized as she walked into an office, the door of which was marked, Management. But the interview was not a highly anticipated event so nobody took much notice. Someone picked a stack of files from one of the chairs to allow her to sit, people came and went, some introducing themselves or shaking her hand.

“You were one of those people who came and went during my interview,” Elka told Perah later, when they’d gotten to know each other and become friends.” “You walked in and told the people in the room about some symbol you’d made on a blueprint. It sounded super sophisticated and I had no idea what it meant.” But Perah had no recollection of the event.

A dignified-looking man—most likely the manager—walked in, placed a cardboard folder on the desk, watched her while he waited for some documents to be signed for him, and nodded. Elka thought, He’s got no idea I’m not from here. Then forms were filled out, permits were issued, and she started work.

When she told Sophie she’d gotten the job, Sophie called up her best friend Tamara—whom Sophie and Elka’s father, Max, had nicknamed Tamarka, or, in moments of giddy intimacy, Tamarkin—to share the good news. As everybody knew, nothing ever truly took place in the world until it passed through Tamara’s ears. Sophie spoke to her in fast Russian, especially emphasizing the title Elka would have at her new job, which may not have been as impressive as Sophie had anticipated, but was much more impressive than the one Sophie had previously had at the Ministry of Immigration. Perhaps Sophie was excited because she imagined Elka reaching heights that Sophie herself had failed to, or perhaps she saw Elka’s new job as an accomplishment shared by the entire family. A victory over the system—a system for which, at this late stage, she must not have had any fond feeling.

Since Sophie was so excited, Elka chose not to say that she wasn’t sure if this job would last forever. If she’d said it, she would be stating the obvious anyway, the thing that always lurked in the background of everything, and which, therefore, did not bear saying.

2

Sophie must have already been full of cancer by the time Elka started her new job. Perhaps she knew and perhaps she didn’t. Perhaps everybody knew, but knowledge of this sort is useless, because one doesn’t know they know it, or does not understand what one knows. At any rate, a few months after Elka started her new job, Sophie was rushed to the hospital and was dead within a week.

On the last night she was conscious, she no longer answered Elka’s questions, not even the crucial ones, such as whether or not she should bring the kids over. But she did check her text messages, and Elka thought, World’s best mom. This is your last chance to say something meaningful to me or anyone else in the world—the very last chance this time!—and instead, you’re playing with your phone.

Elka was familiar with nights like these. Or similar ones. Camping nights spent in fear out in nature, afraid of surprise dangers necessitating quick action. To act quickly, she first needed to find her glasses, which are never handy out in nature, always tucked away in some odd hiding place that obviously cannot be recalled in the event of a startled awakening. Then she spends the entire night in a half-sleep, with gnawing sounds rising from the backpack and a redoubling weight on the back of the neck, constricting the airways, and it’s obvious there isn’t anything really on the neck or on the airways, but her hands are petrified inside of the sleeping bag and cannot be pulled out to check. When she does finally doze off, she dreams about standing by a clock tower, or asking someone for the time, but wakes up before she can see the hands on the clock or get a response to her question. And all around her everything is dark, threatening, and empty, and whenever she wakes up, she prays for signs of first light. But just like on Sophie’s final night, the signs never come. Then Elka gets chills recounting the sound of footsteps near the sleeping bag, the gnawing from the backpack which results in a nibbled apple discovered the next morning. And yet these are good nights, compared to nights that end with no morning, especially when one can sense this outcome in advance. (How the hell can one sense that? Her husband’s grandfather was infuriated when, nearing one hundred years of age, he was no longer able to write for his newspaper. “They show up and tell you, ‘Now drop everything and come with us,’” he said bitterly, “and you say, ‘But I want to stay,’ and they say, ‘No, that’s impossible, we’ve got to go.’ And you say, ‘Fine, but where are we going?’ But they don’t answer, and you must do as they say.”)

It was only much later that Elka considered that perhaps what Sophie was doing on her phone on that last night was something other than checking her messages, and someone really ought to do something about how slowly we realize things in this world—it’s a goddamn evolutionary mishap. Take, for instance, the time that passes between eating sufficiently and feeling full, during which all tragedies, which in this case related to the number on the scale, take place. At any rate, what occurred to Elka only much later was that Sophie must not have been checking her messages or playing on her phone, but that time was standing still, or moving too quickly, and that due to either of these she kept glancing at her phone screen—which for most people had become the place for time-telling rather than the wrist, where it used to be and ought to be, close to the pulse—and that she wasn’t just checking random messages that people who aren’t dying text each other.

Elka and her husband were renovating their Jerusalem apartment at the time and were living in a temporary apartment. One could say, with a great deal of truth, that regardless of the circumstances, all homes are temporary—even the one they currently live in, which is not the one they’d been renovating back then, but a real house. But the apartment they were living in when Sophie was hospitalized was temporary by definition. It was a lovely, spacious apartment on the second floor of an old stone house in the Katamon neighborhood. Its façade faced the San Simon Monastery and the surrounding garden, which was very different than the sparse gardens in the neighborhood where they were renovating their apartment. The trees around the monastery were dark and ancient, towering over the monastery and its bell, the ringing of which caused birds to flutter out with screams every morning. Then the children would bring milk and rolls from the corner store, which was owned by a man who had a name. The neighborhood where their permanent apartment was—the one they were renovating—did not have a corner store. There was a large supermarket a fifteen-minute walk away, with six cashiers whose names nobody knew. Either way, at the end of the month, which was drawing near, Elka and her husband planned to pack their belongings and return to their renovated apartment, far on the outskirts of the city, five kilometers away from the temporary apartment in Katamon and sixty kilometers away from Elka’s parents’ Sophie and Max’s apartment in Tel Aviv.

3

Before she started her new job, Elka used to work at small, unofficial organizations. At her new job, which differed from these organizations mostly by its status as an official government planning institution, she hoped to deal with issues that affected the masses, or public space, or the masses and public space, rather than an occasional, random handful of people.

In the mornings she worked on her papers, waiting for the monastery bell to ring, or for the first birds to sing—whichever came first. When the birds woke up or the bell rang, she took the dog for a walk, came home, showered, got dressed, packed the children’s lunches, drove them to school and daycare, then continued to her new job from there.

The new job also turned out, in retrospect, to be temporary. But there was no way of knowing that when Sophie was admitted to the hospital. And, in fact, by that time the job was not so new anymore. Elka already had an employee I.D., a regular computer, entry passcodes for the front door, the library, the archive, access to technical support, and the printers, as well as partial ownership over the kitchenette, the microwave, the water cooler, and the hallway. Of course, not all of this happened at once. God, each step took forever. But by the time Sophie was in the hospital, Elka could occasionally work around unexpected obstacles, or do something without anyone wanting to fix it right away. And she had her new friends, Perah and Ye’ela, who knew how much money to give as a bat mitzvah gift, how to be friendly to people they wished they could slap, how to make long-term plans, and other things that Elka typically didn’t know how to do.

When Sophie was hospitalized, Elka’s new friends said, “Brace yourself, this could go on for years.”

So Elka did. She and her sisters divided their nights and days into eight-hour shifts, and Elka bought a laptop so she could work from Sophie’s bedside during her shifts.

“I could find a studio apartment near the hospital and stay close to her for a couple days a week,” she told her sisters on the balcony where they met every morning at ten o’clock. “When the children are older, they’d be able to use it. Our friends, too. And we could spend summers there together, go to the beach every day and sleep in a pile, the way we used to do on especially cold days.” Invaluable assets have often been born through such improvisation.

But things evolved so fast that Elka never had a chance to improvise anything, and barely even had any use for her new laptop—even though merely owning one was a thrilling development in and of itself. She also never had a chance to check real estate prices around the hospital, or anything else. Nothing at all.

The dog was temporary, too. Someone had shoved its leash into the hands of one of her children by the temporary apartment and said, “Hey, kid, hold the dog for a minute. I’ll be right back,” then took off and never returned.

A few weeks later, as their move to the renovated apartment approached, the dog disappeared. It happened while Elka was walking him by the monastery, just before sunrise, around the same time that, an hour’s drive away, Max looked at Sophie as she lay on the couch, moaning, and said, “I’m calling an ambulance.”

It sounds almost funny now, but even Sophie and Max, Elka and her sisters’ parents, were temporary.

4

The trips to the hospital began when Elka was already familiar with most of the dog owners in the San Simon garden, and when it occasionally rained.

“Let’s stay here,” she told her husband one night when she returned from the hospital.

Her husband said, “Do you have any idea how much this place costs? And also, have you forgotten that this apartment has already been sold?”

The answer was: she hadn’t forgotten. A friend had sublet it to them short-term, after his tenants moved out and before the new owners moved in. And I want to live every place that I like, anyway, thought Elka. If we lived everywhere I wanted to, we wouldn’t stay in one place longer than a week. Besides, the contractor had already applied the final layer of plaster to the walls, sealed most of the cracks between the floor tiles, and started clearing his tools out of the renovated apartment.

The shifts and turns fell apart and meshed together, and ultimately the sisters and Max spent most hours and days at the hospital together. Even—or, perhaps, especially—after Sophie was anesthetized and hooked to a ventilator. On the fourth, fifth, or sixth night at the hospital, Max went home to take a shower, the doctors stopped by for their rounds, and the sisters sat in the low lobby chairs near the elevators, drinking coffee from the vending machine. Or maybe that was the first time they’d visited the shopping mall by the hospital, crying into their shawarmas instead of eating them. At any rate, it was after this doctor’s visit that Elka picked up her laptop and drove the sixty kilometers separating the hospital from the temporary apartment. She collapsed into the bed, which faced the monastery, and before falling asleep next to her husband, who wrapped his arms around her without waking up, thought, We’ll pack up and go home this weekend and everything will be okay.

At dawn, when the San Simon bells rang, Elka was standing on the beach and a dog ran toward her, shaking his coat, sending wet sand flying through the air. She tried to stay within the dream that was melting into reality until it finally became clear that the ringing wasn’t coming from the bells, but from the phone, and that she didn’t need to pick it up to know why she was being called back.

Her husband got up, answered the phone, and spoke to someone, and Elka thought, If you’d only jumped out of bed like that when the kids were babies. Then she fell back asleep. Now Sophie was in her dream, saying something Elka couldn’t decipher.

Elka woke up, dozed off, and woke up again, and then her husband took a seat next to her.

“I dreamed I love my mother,” Elka said.

Her husband replied, “I’ll take the kids to school. You need to put some clothes on and get going.”

5

The taxi rate from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv was very high, but the drivers were happy to settle on a lower price face to face, once they were already on the road. Normal people didn’t take taxis to Tel Aviv, but Elka hated driving in the dark, and buses were a last resort and may not have even been running so early. It wasn’t only once that she’d taken a taxi from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv during the week Sophie had spent at the hospital, but three or four times, maybe more—though naturally not much more. That morning, which was the last time she did it, Elka told the driver how quickly everything had transpired, and how stunned everyone was.

The driver listened with genuine interest, not the commonplace manufactured one taxi drivers often utilize. “What do you mean, stunned?” he asked. “What, there were no warning signs?”

“No,” said Elka. “She complained about pain, but she was always complaining.”

“But what did her doctor say?” asked the driver.

“Nothing,” said Elka. “She wouldn’t go to the doctor.”

The driver drummed on the steering wheel, agitated. “Would you look at that,” he said. “Is that any way to treat your mother?”

They were driving through Shaar HaGai, the part of the highway where the road barely had any shoulder, and other than the taxi—Did the taxi even have a roof light? Elka suddenly couldn’t remember—the road was almost completely empty. He’s going to pull over and drop me off right here, she thought. She tried to calculate the chances of another taxi passing by and picking her up.

“I don’t know,” she said. “That’s just how things work in our family.”

Now the driver said nothing, and Elka hoped the silence would last long. This man clearly came from a different world—a better world. People in his world took care of one another, told each other things, and went to see doctors. Their doctors solved their problems and helped them, and children could keep their parents alive. The driver still said nothing, and Elka thought about her phone conversation with Max, which had taken place a few weeks ago.

Max had said, “Mom will call you later. Her back hurts so she’s lying down.”

“Why don’t you go see a doctor already?” Elka said.

Max said, “No need for that. She took some pills, it always helps.”

Now it occurred to her that maybe Max had said, “She took ten pills.” If that was the case, how was it possible that the word “ten” hadn’t stood out to her in this context?

“Ten?” she’d asked.

But Max just said, “Never mind, she’ll call you back soon.”

Maybe I’d assumed he was just exaggerating for comedic effect, Elka thought now. And maybe he really had been joking.

“You’ll regret it,” the driver suddenly said. “You’ll regret it and blame yourselves, but it’ll be too late. You’ll regret every time she complained and you didn’t listen, but it’ll be too late. Oy, how you’ll regret it. Oy, oy.”

With that, Elka thought, I cannot argue. Oy.