2014, Hospital (near Tel Aviv)
Poised as the night nurse is, on the outer edge of the crush of people assembled around the General’s bed, it’s she—looking absolutely guilty—who is first to catch Ruthi’s eye.
The doctors are in the room along with a team of nurses, and, because the General is an important man and a legendary figure, and because he is himself a bulldozer who raised a pair of bulldozers for sons, it seems that the family could not be convinced to lessen its swelling numbers.
Stuffed in with the night nurse and the attendant hospital staff are those two sons and their wives, and their many children, whom Ruthi can’t help but count, even then, confirming that all the General’s grandchildren are in attendance.
She has not even crossed the threshold when the night nurse hooks her arm and takes her back into the hall.
“It happened right after Shabbat. The sons already here when I showed up.” She frees Ruthi’s arm so that she can turn her friend to face her, now grasping Ruthi’s shoulders firmly. “They made me promise. I obviously wanted to call. I was dialing already when they stopped me.”
“None of that matters now,” Ruthi says, though it deeply and painfully does. If she could have, she’d already have killed the weekend aide—from the rotating cast of ne’er-do-wells, none of whom Ruthi trusted—who’d covered her shifts when she was home. “Only tell me,” Ruthi says, “what’s gone wrong?”
“Everything. Whatever little was working isn’t anymore. First the lungs, then the heart, now the kidneys are going into failure, and the liver is on its way too.” She pauses to tsk-tsk the medical facts of it. “From the liver, it’s never long.”
Dr. Brodie exits the room then, pushing past without a word. The extraordinary power that the doctor carries away with him draws the family’s attentions outward, where they see their sweet Ruthi coming apart (she is well aware) in the hall.
They fawn all over her. From their manner, it would seem to any observer that Ruthi is also family, and that it is true tenderness and warmth that she receives.
Rightly so. For not only has Ruthi been caregiver to an incapacitated father and grandfather, but for how long prior was she his beloved and loyal right hand? Back in those days, Ruthi was like another sibling to those sons and daughters-in-law: attendant at the family gatherings, in on the private jokes, unfailingly available to listen to, absorb, and allay their endless worries about a sizable, excitable man who was always stretched perilously thin.
When the General was newly prime minister, and Lily still newly gone, Ruthi was like another grandmother, as well. She remembered the birthdays, spoiled the kids rotten, filling in wherever possible for the General’s love—always great and plentiful when he had time to give it—while he ran a country that was never not on the edge of destruction.
The skinny son now hooks her arm, as the night nurse had, and escorts her over to the bedside. The littlest grandchild hangs off her free hand.
Ruthi knows and keeps telling herself that the family’s tenderness is genuine, troubled as she is by the knowledge that the choice not to call her was equally sincere. She struggles to focus on the General while abashedly reconciling these contradictions in her mind.
Ruthi leans over the side rail and, freeing her hands, presses them hard to the General’s, feeling him, still with them, alive.
She stays there for no more than an instant before letting go and backing silently out into the hall. Because like family is not family.
After all those years, Ruthi sees herself as no more than what she definitively is, an employee hired to do a job. Looking in upon that vigil, she watches the circle close up around the bed, the General hidden from view.
2002, Paris
They wake up twisted in the sheets. It is late in the day and Z and the waitress are both confused for a moment as to where they are. The waitress tells Z to get dressed, she’s going to treat him to a fancy dinner, a thank-you for all his generous hosting, since she basically moved in on their first date.
When Z says that he doesn’t want any thanks and, anyway, he’d rather eat in, the waitress won’t hear of it.
“You go out when you want to. You must. I met you out twice.”
“Lapses in judgment,” he says. “Both times.”
If Z won’t budge, the waitress says she’s going to make him a nice heimishe-Italian meal. She will see to it that he is thanked whether he likes it or not. “If you didn’t adore me before,” she says, “you will after I cook.”
The waitress goes downstairs and returns loaded with groceries. Along with the food, she’s also bought him a pair of proper wineglasses and two very fine bottles of wine. “Open the white,” she tells him, “while I get to work.”
She pokes through his cabinets, making do with the poor selection of pots and pans and the one passable broken-handled cutting knife.
“I’m impressed,” he says, as she moves confidently about, stopping only to pass him her glass when it needs topping off.
“This is nothing. A nice, easy pasta. A salad, so your Ashkenazi heart keeps pumping.”
“You’re already worried about my health?”
“From the instant you told me you crossed the city for chopped liver three weeks in a row.”
It’s all moving along seamlessly but for the salt, which he doesn’t seem to have, and which she finds to be an astonishing testament to his sad bachelorhood. “Salt, olive oil,” she says. “These are basic things.”
She grabs his keys without asking and nips out to the corner store.
He looks out the window when she goes, following her down the block in that gloamy evening light.
The dinner they share is as simple and homey and wonderful as the waitress promised. She grates bottarga atop his spaghetti, and, like all things related to this woman, when he tastes it, he falls instantly in love.
“It’s my father’s favorite,” she tells him. When he asks her exactly what it is, she says it’s better just to eat and enjoy.
Z does just that. Eating and enjoying while gazing across at a person whose giant curls fall perfectly into her face every time she looks down at her plate.
When he tries to pour out the end of that second bottle of wine, it’s the first he senses how long they’ve been sitting and talking and drinking, and how fully besotted he is.
Z has barely lifted the bottle when the waitress stays his hand. “An unmarried man should never pour out the last drops.”
“Are you sure about that? I’d be shocked if there was a superstition we didn’t have in my house.”
“This one is Italian, not Jewish,” she says, and she works so hard to empty the bottle, Z expects she’ll wring it out like a dish towel before she’s done.