Heirs
by Amos Oz January 22, 2007
The stranger was not a stranger. Something in his figure repelled but also intrigued Aryeh Zelnik at very first sight, if it was indeed first sight; it seemed to Aryeh Zelnik that he somehow remembered that face, those long arms, almost down to the knees. Remembered vaguely, as if from an entire lifetime ago.
The man parked his car right at the front gate. It was a dusty beige car; its back and side windows were covered with a crazy quilt of colorful stickers, all sorts of pronouncements, warnings, and slogans with exclamation points. He locked the car but took the time to check door by door, shaking each one vigorously to make sure that they were all properly closed. He lightly stroked the hood, then stroked it again, as if it were not a car but an old horse, tied to a fence and given a friendly pat to indicate that the wait would not be long. Then he pushed open the gate and strode toward the front porch, which was shaded by a grape arbor. His walk looked jerky and a bit painful, as if he were stepping barefoot on hot sand.
Aryeh Zelnik, seeing and unseen from his place in the hammock in the corner of the porch, had observed the guest from the moment he parked his car. But, as hard as he tried, he could not bring to mind who this stranger-unstranger was. Where had he met him? When? On one of his trips overseas? In the Army? At the office? On campus? Or perhaps back in his school days? The man’s expression was wily and jubilant, as if he had successfully played a trick and was now enjoying his victim’s agony. Behind, or beneath, the strange face was the elusive insinuation of an irritating, familiar face, a face that unsettled Aryeh Zelnik. The face of someone who had once treated him badly? Or perhaps the opposite—someone to whom Aryeh had done some forgotten injustice?
It was like a dream, nine-tenths submerged, with only the tip still showing.
So Aryeh Zelnik decided not to get up to greet the arrival. He’d receive him from here, in his hammock, on the front porch.
The stranger skipped and wove hastily up the path from the gate to the porch steps, his small eyes darting relentlessly left and right as if he feared being discovered too early, or as if he were afraid that a furious dog was about to jump out at him from the thicket of thorny bougainvillea bushes that grew on both sides of the path.
The insipid, yellowing hair, the red neck whose crumpled, slack skin was reminiscent of a turkey’s crop, the watery, turbid eyes that flitted like intrusive fingers, the long chimpanzee arms—it all gave rise to a vague anxiety in Aryeh Zelnik.
From his hidden vantage point in the shade of climbing vines, he noted that the man was large-bodied but a bit flabby, as if he had just recovered from a serious illness—as if he had always been thickset and had only recently caved in, shrunk within his own skin. The summer sports jacket he wore, a grubby beige with swollen pockets, also looked too big for him, and hung loosely on his shoulders.
Even though it was the end of the summer and the path was dry, the stranger took the time to wipe his shoes carefully on the mat at the bottom of the steps. When he had finished, he lifted each foot in turn and took stock of the cleanliness of his soles. Only when he was satisfied did he ascend the steps. He examined the screen door at the top, then, after knocking politely a few times without receiving a response, he finally redirected his eyes and discovered the man of the house vegetating placidly in his hammock, surrounded by large potted flowers and planters of ferns, in the corner of the grape arbor.
The guest immediately put on a broad smile and almost bowed, then hemmed and cleared his throat before opening with a declaration:
“A lovely place you have here, Mr. Zelkin. Breathtaking! It’s really the Provence of the state of Israel! Provence? Tuscany! The view! The woods! The vineyards! Tel Ilan is quite simply the most enchanting village in this entire Levantine country. Very nice! Good morning, Mr. Zelkin. Excuse me. I hope that I am not, by chance, disturbing you just a tiny bit?”
Aryeh Zelnik returned a dry “Good morning,” and corrected the error. His name was Zelnik, not Zelkin, and he was sorry, but in our house we don’t buy anything from salesmen.
“Quite right! Absolutely right!” the man said approvingly as he wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. “After all, how are we to know that the man before us is a salesman and not a swindler? Or, God forbid, a criminal who has come to case the territory for a gang of burglars? But I, Mr. Zelnik, am, in the matter at hand—I am quite certainly not a salesman. I am, I beg you, Maftzir!”
“What?”
“Maftzir. Wolf Maftzir, attorney-at-law. From the firm of Lotem-Prozhinin. It is my pleasure, Mr. Zelnik. I have come to you, sir, with regard to a subject that, how may I put it—or perhaps it would be best if we did not make any attempt to define the subject but simply got straight to the matter itself. May I sit down? It will be a more or less personal inquiry—not personal for me, certainly not; I would never dare intrude and disturb you without advance notice about my own personal affairs, although of course we tried, we definitely tried, quite a number of times we tried, but your telephone number is unlisted, and you did not see fit to respond to our letters. We therefore decided to try our luck with an unscheduled visit, and we apologize profusely for the disturbance. This is certainly not common practice for us, to invade a person’s privacy, in particular if the individual in question lives in one of the loveliest spots in the entire country. In any case, as I mentioned, this is definitely not just a personal matter of ours. Absolutely not. Under no circumstances. In fact, quite the opposite. The purpose is—how may we put it delicately? Perhaps we should say it this way: the purpose is a personal matter, sir, of yours. A personal matter of yours and not just ours. More precisely, it touches, in fact, on your family. Or on your family in a general way and, in particular, on one member of your family, Mr. Zelnik, a specific member of your family. You won’t object if we sit and talk for a few moments? I promise you that I will do my best to insure that the entire matter not take us more than ten minutes. Although, in fact, it really depends on you, Mr. Zelkin.”
Aryeh Zelnik said, “Zelnik.”
And then he said, “Sit down.”
And immediately added, “Not there. Here.”
Because the fat, or formerly fat, man had just landed on the double hammock, thigh to thigh with his host. A miasma of thick smells surrounded his body like an entourage—smells of digestion, of socks, of talcum powder, and of armpits. Spread over all these smells was a faint netting of pungent aftershave lotion. Aryeh Zelnik suddenly thought of his father, who had also swathed his body’s smells in the pungent aroma of aftershave.
The moment Aryeh Zelnik told him, “Not there. Here,” the guest rose and staggered a bit, his ape arms pulling at his knees. He apologized and moved the rear of his overlarge pants to the spot designated for him, on a wooden bench on the other side of the garden table. The table was a country type, made of half-planed boards, like the ties under railroad tracks. It was important to Aryeh that his sick mother should, under no circumstances, see this guest from her window—not even his back, not even his silhouette against the grape arbor. So he pointed him to a place that was not visible from the window. She would be shielded from his fat, cantorial voice by her deafness.
Three years earlier, Na’ama, Aryeh Zelnik’s wife, had gone to visit her best friend, Sara Grant, in San Diego. She hadn’t returned. She did not, in her letters, say explicitly that she wanted to leave him but, instead, first hinted at it tactfully: “In the meantime, I won’t be coming back as planned.” Half a year later, she wrote, “I’m still staying with Sara.” And, a few months later, “There’s no need to keep waiting for me. I’m working with Sara in her rejuvenating studio.” And in another letter, “Sara and I are good together—we have similar karma.” Then she wrote again, “Our spiritual teacher feels that it is right for us not to give each other up. You will be fine. You aren’t mad, are you?”
Their married daughter, Hila, wrote to him from Boston, “Dad, I suggest, for your own good, don’t pressure Mom. Find yourself another life.”
And because he and his son, Eldad, had long ago severed all contact, and because apart from this family he had no person close to him, he had decided last year to liquidate his apartment on Mt. Carmel and go back to live with his mother in the old house in Tel Ilan, to live off the rental income from the two apartments in Haifa that he owned, and to devote himself to his hobby, building model airplanes.
In this way, he had found himself another life, as his daughter had suggested.
In his youth, Aryeh Zelnik had served in the marine commandos. From his earliest childhood, he had been unafraid of danger, undaunted by enemy gunfire or climbing up cliffs. But, in later years, he had developed a potent fear of darkness in an empty house. So he finally chose to go back to live with his mother, in the old house where he was born and grew up, on the outskirts of the village of Tel Ilan. His mother, Rosalia, was ninety years old, deaf, and extremely bent over, and she seldom spoke. Most of the time, she let him take care of the house without interfering, almost without comment or question. Sometimes it passed through Aryeh Zelnik’s head that his mother might fall ill, or age so much that she could not survive without constant care, and he would have to feed, clean, and diaper her, or bring in a nurse, and then the house would lose its serenity and his life would be bared to strange eyes. On the other hand, it also occurred to him that his mother’s decline might give him a logical and emotional justification for transferring her to an appropriate institution, and then the entire house would be his. If he wanted, he could bring in a new, beautiful wife. Or not a wife but, instead, a series of young women. Maybe he could even knock down the inside walls and redo the house. Another life would begin.
But, in the meantime, both of them, the son and his mother, lived in the murky, antiquated house, in peace and in silence. Each morning, a cleaning woman came, bringing with her the groceries he’d requested. She cleaned, cooked, put things in order, and then, after serving mother and son their lunch, went quietly on her way. Most of the day, the mother sat in her room and read old books, while Aryeh Zelnik listened to the radio in his room and built airplanes out of light wood.
The stranger suddenly gave a knowing, ingratiating smile, a smile like a wink, as if he were proposing to his host, “Let’s sin together!” But, also, as if he were apprehensive that his proposal might get him punished. And he asked warmly, “Excuse me, perhaps, if you don’t mind, I might take a bit of that, please?”
And because it seemed to him that his host had nodded his head the man picked up the glass pitcher of ice water with a slice of lemon and a few sprigs of mint that stood on the table and filled the single glass, Aryeh Zelnik’s glass. He then brought the glass to his fleshy lips, finishing it off with five or six loud, expansive slurps, poured himself another half glass, and gulped that, too, thirstily, then immediately set out to justify himself:
“My apologies! It’s just that, here on your beautiful porch, one doesn’t feel how hot the day is. It’s a very hot day! Nevertheless, despite the oppressive heat this spot is simply charming! Tel Ilan is really the loveliest village in the entire country! Provence! Provence? Tuscany! Forests! Vineyards! Hundred-year-old farmhouses, red roofs, and such tall cypresses! So what do you think, Mr. Zelnik? Would it be more comfortable for you if we were to chat a while longer about its loveliness? Or will you allow me to go straight, without any circumlocution, to our little agenda?”
Aryeh Zelnik said, “I’m listening.”
“The Zelnik family, the descendants of Leon Akabia Zelnik. You were, if I’m not mistaken, among the very first families in the village? Among the earliest founders? No? Ninety years ago? Almost a hundred, even?”
“His name was Akiva Aryeh, not Leon Akabia.”
“Of course,” the guest enthused. “The Zelnik family. We so greatly esteem your family’s illustrious history. Not just esteem, cherish! At the beginning, if I am not mistaken, the two older brothers arrived—Boris and Simeon Zelnik. They came from a little hamlet in the Kharkov district in order to establish an entirely new farming colony here, in the heart of the untamed landscape of the forsaken Menashe highlands. There was nothing here. A desolate plain of thorns. There weren’t even any Arab villages in this valley; they were all on the other side of the hills. Later, Boris and Simeon were joined by their young nephew, Leon, or if you insist on it, Akabia Aryeh. Then, at least according to the conventional story, Simeon and Boris went back, in turn, to Russia, and there Boris murdered Simeon with a hatchet, and only your grandfather—your grandfather? Or your grandfather’s father?—only Leon Akabia stubbornly remained. Not Akabia? Akiva? Excuse me. Akiva. To make a long story short, it’s like this: By coincidence, we, the Maftzirs, are also from Kharkov! From the forests of Kharkov! Really! Maftzir! Perhaps you’ve heard the name? We had a very famous cantor, Shaya Leib Maftzir, and there was one Gregory Moisevitch Maftzir, a very important general in the Red Army. A very, very important general, but Stalin had him executed. In the purges of the nineteen-thirties.”
The man stood up and imitated a firing squad with his two chimpanzee arms, ticking off a volley of bullets and displaying, as he did so, sharp but not entirely white front teeth. He reseated himself on the bench with a smile, as if he were pleased with the way he had carried out the execution. It looked to Aryeh Zelnik as if the man expected a round of applause, or at least a smile, in exchange for his own saccharine grin.
The host, nevertheless, chose not to smile. He pushed aside the used glass and the pitcher of ice water and said, “Yes?”
Maftzir clasped his left hand in his right hand and pressed it joyfully, as if he had not seen himself for quite a long time and this unexpected meeting had raised his spirits considerably. Beneath the gush of his eloquent vocabulary incessantly burbled a subterranean effluence of inexhaustible mirth, a Gulf Stream of self-satisfied glee.
“Fine. Perhaps we should start laying our cards on the table, as they say. That I allowed myself to intrude on you today is with regard to personal matters between us, and, aside from that, perhaps it also touches on your dear mother, may she live to be a hundred and twenty. In other words, the venerable Mrs. Zelnik. Of course, of course, only on condition that you do not object in any particular way, even a tiny bit, to my broaching this delicate subject?”
Aryeh Zelnik said, “Yes.”
The guest rose from his place and removed his dirty, sand-colored jacket. Large perspiration stains showed at the armpits of his white shirt. He hung the jacket on the back of the bench, settled into his seat, and said, “Excuse me. I hope you don’t mind. It’s just that it is very hot today. Will you allow me to remove my tie as well?”
When his host remained silent, the man slid off his tie with a single pull, in a movement that reminded Aryeh Zelnik of his son, Eldad, and proposed, “As long as your mother is on our hands, we will not, as you know, be able to realize the asset.”
“Excuse me?”
“Unless the two of us find her an excellent arrangement in a very excellent institution. And I have just such an institution in mind. That is, I don’t have one, but my partner’s brothers do. All we need is her consent. But perhaps it would be easier for us to get certified as her guardians? And then there would be no need for her consent?”
Aryeh Zelnik nodded two or three times, and scratched the back of his left hand with the nails of his right hand. He had indeed pondered recently, once or twice, the question of his invalid mother’s future: what would happen to her, and to him, when she lost her physical or mental independence, and when the moment came to make a decision. There were times when the idea of parting from his mother filled Aryeh Zelnik with sadness and shame, but there were other times when he almost looked forward to her decline and to the possibilities that would open up before him when she was taken out of the house. These suppressed hopes made him feel guilty and even disgusted with himself. But the strange thing to him was that this repellent man seemed to be reading the ignominy of his own thoughts. He therefore requested of Mr. Maftzir that he go back to the beginning. Whom, precisely, did he represent? Who had sent him here?
Wolf Maftzir chuckled.
“Maftzir. Just call me Maftzir. Or Wolf. In the family, after all, ‘Mr.’ is entirely superfluous.”
Aryeh Zelnik got up. He was a large man, much taller than Wolf Maftzir, and his shoulders were broad and strong, although both men had long arms that reached almost to their knees. Rising, he took two steps, so that he was standing at full height above his guest, and said, “So what do you want.”
He pronounced these words without a question mark, simultaneously buttoning one button in his shirt, through which his gray-haired chest showed.
Wolf Maftzir chirped in a tiny, placatory voice, “Why do we have to hurry, Mr. Zelnik? It’s best to proceed with our matter cautiously, with moderation on all sides, so as not to leave open a single loophole, not even a crack. We cannot afford to err in any detail.”
To Aryeh Zelnik, the guest looked a bit flaccid and limp. Apparently, he had been fat, and had only recently, perhaps due to illness, shrunk and caved in. He looked as if his skin were a little too large on him. His eyes were watery and somewhat turbid.
“Our matter?”
“That is, the problem of the elderly Mrs. Zelnik. That is, Mrs. Zelnik, your mother, in whose name our property is still registered, and will be to the end of her life—and who knows what she thought to write in her will—or until the two of us manage to get appointed her guardians.”
“The two of us?”
“This house could be demolished and a sanatorium built in its place. A health farm. We could develop a place that has no peer anywhere in the country: clean air, pastoral tranquillity, rural landscapes the equal of Provence and Tuscany, medicinal herbs, massages, meditation, spiritual guidance. People will pay good money for what our place can offer them.”
“Excuse me, when, precisely, did we make each other’s acquaintance?”
“Oh, but we are already acquaintances and friends. Not just friends, my dear: relatives. And even partners.”
By getting up, Aryeh Zelnik may have intended to force his guest to get up, too, and get out. But the guest did not rise; instead, he continued to sit in his place and even stretched out his hand and poured more ice water with lemon and mint leaves into the glass that had been Aryeh Zelnik’s until he had appropriated it for himself. He leaned back on the bench, and now, in his sweat-stained shirt, without his jacket and tie, Wolf Maftzir looked like a trader with time on his hands, a sweaty livestock trader who had come to the village to negotiate with its farmers, patiently and artfully, a cattle deal from which, he was certain, both sides would profit. He evinced a furtive joy in the misfortune he was causing, a kind of surreptitious euphoria, and it was not entirely foreign to his host.
“I,” Aryeh Zelnik lied, “have to go inside now. I must take care of something. Excuse me.”
“I,” Wolf Maftzir said, smiling, “am not in a hurry. If you don’t mind, I’ll sit and wait for you here. Or perhaps it would be better if I went inside with you and made Mrs. Zelnik’s acquaintance? After all, I must gain her confidence quickly.”
“Mrs. Zelnik,” Aryeh Zelnik said, “does not receive visitors.”
“I,” Wolf Maftzir insisted, rising from his seat, ready to accompany his host into the house, “am not exactly a guest. After all, we are, how should I put it, somewhat related? Even partners?”
Aryeh Zelnik suddenly recalled the advice of his daughter, Hila, to give up on his wife and begin a new life. The truth was that he had not made much of an effort to get Na’ama back. After they had quarrelled bitterly and she had gone to visit her best friend, Sara Grant, Aryeh Zelnik had packed all her clothes and belongings and shipped them to Sara’s address in San Diego. When Eldad had cut off all contact with him, he had packed up his books and even his childhood toys and sent them to him. He had cleaned away all traces, the way you clean out an enemy position at the end of a battle. A few months later, he had also packed up his own belongings, liquidated his apartment in Haifa, and moved into his mother’s house here in Tel Ilan. Now he wanted, more than anything, absolute relaxation: he wanted each day to be like every other, and its hours free.
Sometimes he went for long walks around the village and even outside it, over the hills that encircled the little valley, through orchards and dusky pine groves. Or sometimes he’d wander around the yard for half an hour, through the remains of his father’s farm, which had been liquidated many years before. Some decaying structures still stood—chicken coops, corrugated aluminum sheds, a hayloft, a barn for fattening calves. The stable had become a storeroom for the furniture from the apartment on Mt. Carmel, in Haifa. There, the armchairs and couch and carpets and sideboard and living-room table from Haifa collected dust and adhered to one another with thin nets of spiderwebs. His and Na’ama’s old double bed had also been shoved into the stable, on its side, in a corner. The mattress was buried under a pile of dusty quilts.
Aryeh Zelnik said, “Excuse me. I’m busy.”
Wolf Maftzir said, “Of course. My apologies. I won’t disturb you, my dear sir. Under no circumstances shall I disturb you. On the contrary. From this moment on, I will be perfectly silent. I won’t make a sound.”
With that, he strode in his host’s footsteps into the house, which was dusky and cold, and smelled faintly of sweat and old age.
Aryeh Zelnik stood his ground. “You will please wait for me outside,” he said.
Although what he actually meant to say, even somewhat rudely, was that the visit had come to an end and that the stranger was requested to leave.
But the guest didn’t dream of leaving. He floated in after Aryeh Zelnik, and on his way down the hall opened door after door, serenely surveying the kitchen, the study, Aryeh Zelnik’s hobby room, with its model airplanes made of balsa wood suspended by sturdy cords from the ceiling and swinging slightly in the breeze, as if preparing for brutal dogfights. His behavior reminded Aryeh Zelnik of his own habit, dating back to childhood, of opening every closed door and checking to see what lay hidden behind it.
When the two of them reached the back of the house, at the end of the hallway, Aryeh Zelnik blocked with his body the entrance to his own room, which had once been his father’s. But Wolf Maftzir had no intention of invading his host’s bedroom. Instead, he knocked gently on the deaf old woman’s door and, since there was no response, he placed his palm, as if in a tender caress, on the door handle and opened it softly and entered and saw the woman, Rosalia, lying in the center of a wide double bed, covered up to her chin with a woolen blanket, her head wrapped in a kerchief, her eyes closed, and her bony, toothless jaws moving as if she were incessantly chewing.
“Just as we dreamed,” Wolf Maftzir chuckled. “Greetings, my dear Mrs. Zelnik. We missed you so much, and we so keenly hoped to meet you in person! You must, of course, be very happy to see us?”
And he leaned over her and kissed her twice, long kisses on her two cheeks, and then he planted another kiss on her forehead, until the old woman opened her clouded eyes and stretched out a skeletal hand from under her blanket and stroked Wolf Maftzir’s head and mumbled something and then something else; her other hand also emerged from under the blanket and, with both hands, she pulled his head toward her, and he acceded and leaned even farther over and slipped off both shoes below the bed and bent over and kissed her on her toothless mouth and lay down beside her in the bed and pulled the edge of the blanket over himself and said, “Here, this way,” and said also, “Greetings, my very dear Mrs. Zelnik.”
Aryeh Zelnik hesitated a moment or two, turned his gaze to the open window, through which he could see one of the abandoned farm sheds, as well as a dusty cypress up which orange bougainvillea had climbed with fiery fingers. He circuited the double bed and closed the shutters and the window and drew the curtain, and, as he darkened the room, he unbuttoned his shirt and undid his belt and he also removed his shoes and undressed and lay down on the bed beside his ancient mother. And so they lay, the three of them, the lady of the house between her mute son and the stranger, who did not stop petting and kissing her and murmuring softly, “Everything will be fine here, my dear Mrs. Zelnik. Everything will be wonderful. We will arrange everything.” ♦
(Translated, from the Hebrew, by Haim Watzman.)
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