Sarah/Sara. Jacob Marperger Paul
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going to have to deal with what happened to my parents and my own recovery.
Eventually, I’ll have to confront the relief I felt yesterday when I bathed without any mirror to confront me, the way I didn’t look down at my own body when I stood up out of the sea.
I can’t hide from this text forever.
It’s a lot easier to think about my return to Jerusalem now that I’ve begun planning out this apartment. I pity the real estate agent that helps me find it. I’m not going to be at all open to suggestions. I’ll need exactly what I’ve dreamt up here. But it’s happy thinking about my life to come, my life as Sara.
I imagine shopping for the bedroom. Sara will take the bus to Kiriat Yoel to the Lavanah superstore to shop for linens and paints. Of course I picked out the color today, though I don’t know what it’s called, it’s a kind of green, the green of the stunted willows here: pea-green up close but nearly frosted blue when viewed from a distance, cool, soothing, trimmed with dark brown window and door frames and a white ceiling. Even stranger than the apartment is to think of people. Sara will be on the bus and perhaps after a stop or two a soldier will get on and sit next to her, his Galil resting, butt down, between his legs. Maybe Sara will notice something quiet, haunted even, in the way the skin around his eyes sags. He’ll catch her looking and smile. A real smile but a sad smile. For a moment, they won’t notice the noise of the bus, Army Radio blaring its hourly update of doom, the other passengers jabbering away at each other. For a moment, it will only be the two of them.
Sara will notice that he’s not as young as she first thought, just fit and tan. In fact, there’s gray sprinkled through his short hair, peeking out from beneath his small, knit yarmulke. And the lines that accentuate his grief also speak of age, place him in his forties even. He’ll look away from her eyes, look down at Sara’s hands, see her calluses. My hands are getting very calloused from all this rowing, weathered and wrinkled from salt water and sun. Looking at her hands, he’ll notice the sleeves that creep below her wrists, threaten her palms. It will occur to him, to Udi—yes, he will be Udi—that this woman is ultra-orthodox, that in the strange caste system that exists amongst religious Israeli Jews, defined for men by yarmulke style, she’s really a large black felt yarmulke, possibly even a black hat, not a small knit yarmulke that some aspiring lover, or loving relative, has made by hand and inscribed with the three Hebrew letters that spell his name, ayan, daled, yud. But Sara will speak to him, after all. She’ll ask him if it’s his forty days. “No,” Udi will reply, he’s career, a soldier for life. Then Sara will notice the insignia on his collar, realize his rank, colonel. Then why the rifle? Maybe he isn’t carrying a rifle. Perhaps he’s just in uniform, holding a beret in his hands, his elbows on his knees, leaning forward, that look of loss ringing his face unmistakably.
He will ask Sara why she’s so tan. It isn’t often one sees an ultra-orthodox woman so tan. “We all have our burdens to bear,” she’ll point out. And something in the way she’ll say “bear,” the choice of phrase will make him think she’s American, though her face is not American. And after she’s said “burden,” she will notice the way he swallows his own breath, as if a private tide was rising, one he couldn’t afford to let out on a bus.
She’ll ask, “Where are you going?”
“You’re American.”
Sara will nod. He’ll squint his eyes shut, his mouth puckering, lips sucked in, a lot of emotion for a colonel. Then he’ll blurt it out. “I have to tell a mother her son is dead. It happened this morning. He was in my command. He tried to stop two men in a car. I had trained him not to shoot too quickly.”
“And they killed him?”
“No, that never would have happened. Another man, also in my command, a reservist, opened fire. There was a ricochet. His throat. He died this morning. I have to tell his mother.”
Sara’s own losses will swim around her, and then she’ll let her mind drift on a warm red ray of arctic sun. It will calm her, the rhythm of paddling in her shoulders, the trained immobility of legs accustomed to the bind of a kayak’s hull. She’ll respectfully avoid staring at the beret Udi slowly twists into a taut felt rope. Then he will look up at her, a look of hope on his face even less colonel-like than his previous show of emotion. He’ll seem desperate. He’ll ask her to come with him. Not to see the mother, no, but to wait downstairs at a café, and to have a cup of tea afterwards, so he’ll know someone’s there when he finishes. “I’m not so good with cafes anymore,” she’ll say, quietly.
“We all have our own burdens to bear. I’m sorry I bothered you. It was inappropriate.”
“No, I’ll go,” Sara will say and laugh (not a carefree laugh, though, more the wistful kind). “I can’t stay out of cafes for the rest of my life. Not in this country. Not with my caffeine addiction.” And he’ll laugh too, and sniffle, and she’ll realize how close to tears he was.
“Thank you—.”
“Sara.”
“Thank you, Sara.” Udi will say, not even bothering to pretend he doesn’t need her, doesn’t need someone waiting downstairs for him. And it will occur to her that this is strange. She’ll ask him about it later, and eventually, when she learns the truth, that the boy’s mother was once Udi’s wife, his child’s mother, she’ll realize his hesitancy, his need in a way she won’t have before.
Love is complex but need is simple. Hashem made the yetzer harah to inflict us with taivah. But taivah differs from need. I know that now. It’s a complexity I didn’t understand for a long time. Needs are forgivable, even by Hashem, even when they lead to sin.
July 26
It is no better and no worse without booze. It is also not the same. The swings are mitigated, the time away from pain reduced, the pain, when felt, reduced as well. I spent a second day hugging as close to shore as I dared. I had to row today. No breeze to speak of. And when there was wind, it blew against me. All things seem to blow against me. You sound awfully melodramatic, Sarah. Yes. But, I’m afraid. I’m afraid of bombs. I’m afraid of planes that crash out of the sky. I’m afraid of abstract and, for here, impossible fears. Every time I try to concentrate on why my heartbeat races and the blood drains from my face, every time I try to capture an image of real danger, of cold, of drowning, of bears, of stampeding caribou, I cry for my parents. I sit in my boat and sob and sob and sob.
It is strange that in this journal writing I don’t always disclose everything there is to disclose. I don’t talk about the time on the waves mourning. I don’t speak about the tears. I never discuss scars. But it’s harder to keep those away without the drunkenness, without the booze. With the booze, they came out; but they came out and shortly afterwards I blacked out. And in the morning, it was the sweat of alcohol induced exhaustion that fired my body, that forced what of my brain could focus to focus on the immediate. Now that’s gone. I live with the grief, with the fear, all of the time.
The day I let my mother hang up on me, the day I wrote about before, when she banged the phone against the counter, shouting,—perhaps shouting “motherfucker,” I’m not sure—it’s only been nine days and suddenly I’m comfortable saying motherfucker, fuck—well that day, later on, my father called me. Wait, I want to write about what my father said to me. It’s haunted me all day, tear-strokes between the paddle’s dip, and such. But I don’t want to dismiss my mother, my Eema, so quickly. Who was this woman? That question resonates for me with ever mounting volume.
I have this clear understanding of my father. He was this guy who loved to row, who loved his daughter, who cut deals for the Investment Banking Division at Morgan Stanley. But my mother—often days I scream into the wind, trying to find out who this woman who I interacted with so much during the first twenty-three years of my life really was. And then I fall apart when I realize she can’t tell me. Sometimes I worry that the grief will fade, that I’ll mourn them less. When that happens, I quickly try and evoke the physiology of overwhelming sorrow. It has four symptoms: your eyes sting and well with tears; your chest tingles, contracts