I nod, and don’t know where to hide, I’m so embarrassed. What he says is even slightly painful. I know that journalism was a last resort for me because my score on the psychometric exam prevented me from applying to medical school or law school. Besides, my days as a distinguished journalist are slowly drawing to an end, so that even when I do find a good story that I don’t even have to struggle for, a story that’s happening to me damn it, in my own village, I can’t pick up the phone and talk to my editor.
My wife seems taken aback to see me in the hallway. I smile at her, to make sure she knows there’s nothing wrong. She leaves her class for a minute. “Anything wrong? Why aren’t you at work?”
“There’s some kind of roadblock at the entrance to the village.”
“Yes, I heard something about that, but I thought you must have made it out before they closed the road.”
“I didn’t, even though I’ve got loads of work, but it’s no big deal. You’re about to finish, right?”
“In a minute. Come on in.”
I go into her classroom. The children are giggling, whispering to one another. Grade 4-a, the same classroom I was in. My wife gives them homework for the following lesson. All of the questions, 1 to 6, in the chapter about the halutzim, the Jewish pioneers. My wife is a geography teacher, and they’re still teaching the same material they taught twenty or thirty years ago. She writes the words on the blackboard—swamps, eucalyptus trees, malaria, diseases, mosquitoes, children dying, sand, desert.
I doubt the children know who those halutzim were. I had never understood they were Jewish immigrants. It was never stated in so many words. I was convinced they were wise heroes that all of us ought to admire because they invented important things like netting for windows and doors, to keep out the poisonous mosquitoes which used to kill babies.
Sometimes I wonder if my wife herself knows that the pioneers were Jewish immigrants. Sometimes, when I look at the tests she’s correcting, I wonder if she knows what the Jewish National Fund is, considering she’s been singing its praises for years. My guess is that she hasn’t a clue. She just accepts what the books say at face value. She’s always been a good girl, a good wife. If the JNF spends money on land, public parks and playgrounds, that’s what she’ll tell her students.
My wife doesn’t give much thought to questions like that. She’s never really had a chance to know the world outside the village. She’s all of twenty-three. Soon as she graduated from high school she entered Beit Berl Teachers College, like all the good girls do. The best thing a girl can do is become a teacher. Girls who attend Beit Berl succeed in retaining their honor despite going to school. The college is very close to the village. They go there each morning and return home in the afternoon. Unlike women who go to a university, they don’t have to stay away from home, and everyone knows what bed they slept in. The Beit Berl girls are considered the best match. They’re in high demand. You could say they’re both well educated and respectable, besides which they find convenient jobs, which allow them to get home early and to be on vacation precisely when their children are. That’s more or less what my parents explained to me about my future wife before they went to ask her parents for her hand. “There’s nothing better than marrying a teacher,” my mother said, and she still says so.
I doubt my wife knows who Berl Katznelson was, the man that Beit Berl College is named after. In fact, I’m pretty sure she thinks he was a hero and an exemplary educator, because that’s what it says on the sign at the entrance to the college.
The bell rings. They’ve replaced the large copper bell, the one the principal used to operate with an iron rod. They have an electric bell now, one that plays a catchy theme song from a famous movie. The children are delighted. They pick up their chairs and put them on their desks, then rush out of the classroom. My wife packs her bag and is the last to leave. The children emerge from school, running. Some of them stop at the kiosk near the front gate, jostling and buying grape-flavored ice pops.
“So what’ll you do?” my wife asks. “Won’t you go to work today?”
“No,” I say, and I understand she thinks the roadblock was only put there for the morning and that things are back to normal. I look at her now, among her students, and suddenly she seems so small, so young. We’ve had some nice moments, I think. We have. I’m sure of it. I march down the school hallways with her. A few other teachers wave to us. I know they’re watching us. I wonder what they think. I’m sure their thoughts about us are good ones. It crosses my mind that to an outside observer we must seem like the perfect couple, who’ve done everything by the unwritten book of the village. For some reason, this thought gives me new hope. Why not, in fact? What, just because of money? Someday soon things will all work out. I know they will. I walk out of my elementary school with a little smile on my lips.
9
As always, we’re eating supper at my parents’. It’s been almost two months since we moved here, and we still haven’t cooked so much as a single meal. My wife and my older brother’s wife are sitting in the kitchen talking about the schools where they work. My older brother’s wife is a teacher too. She teaches science in junior high. They’ve known one another since their college days. My three-year-old nephew is chasing a ball from the kitchen into the living room. Every few minutes he screams, “Goal,” and my brother cheers. My mother’s in the living room, holding my daughter in her arms and rocking her to sleep. My father’s in his customary spot on the sofa, looking preoccupied, a bit more than usual, scratching his palms and waiting for another newscast. In Hebrew this time.
There isn’t much to do in this village except sit around with one of our families, mine or my wife’s. Actually, the two houses we were born in, my wife and I, have become the two focal points of our lives. And we’re not the only ones. Everyone here is like that. The life of my older brother and his wife, for instance, revolves around the homes of his in-laws and our parents, even though they tend to cook at their own home from time to time and to have dinner on their own too. Whenever they do, it upsets my mother. “I don’t mind that she cooks,” she says. “Every woman likes to feed her husband, but why don’t they let me know? What am I supposed to do with all the food I cooked? Isn’t it a shame to let it go to waste?”
My wife prefers to eat at her parents’ house. She says she feels more comfortable eating there, and she doesn’t get the feeling that someone is watching her the way she does at my mother’s.
Even though I enjoy my brother-in-law’s company, and even though he’s really the only person outside of my immediate family that I talk to in this village, I don’t feel comfortable staying for too long at my wife’s parents’ place. Certainly not now, certainly not when my wife is mad at me, and the devil knows what she’s been saying about me to her mother, who generally looks like she resents me and makes me feel I’m the reason for her daughter’s unhappiness. I suppose it’s true, but I can always claim that the reverse is true too, except I would never complain and I would always take what I have coming to me without trying to change things or improve them. And when it comes to my relations with my wife, I’d say I’m a believer.
My wife constantly blames me for the fact that we’ve returned to this stifling, bleak village that has nothing to offer her. She mentions my brother and his wife, who take their son from time to time and head for a shopping mall in one of the nearby cities. We go sometimes too, even though I’ve never figured out why people enjoy spending time at shopping centers, and I’ve never understood the smile on my wife’s face as she strolls through the shops and along the food court, even if she’s not about to buy anything.