The Remains of Love Read Free

absence of your mother, who you’re not even angry with, has affected us all?
    You’ve got it all wrong, she shakes her head at her. I wasn’t angry with my mother because I knew she was working hard. She worked in the town and came home only at weekends, and even when she went away for a whole year and came back and I didn’t recognise her, I thought she was a stranger who’d murdered my mother – even then I wasn’t angry with her, because I understood she had no choice. You people and your anger, you and Avner and the whole of this deprived generation of yours, what good comes of all these complaints? But sometimes it seems to her she too is angry, a terrible, murderous anger, directed not at her parents only, not at her father who was so devoted to her in his own hurtful way, or at her mother who was always busy, but at them, at her children, and especially at this daughter of hers, whose hair is already turning grey.
    Only yesterday, she plaited a braid in her black and curly hair, her fingers as clumsy as her father’s fingers in her own hair, and now it is lank, metallic, and her daughter doesn’t dye it as most women of her age do, with the excuse that this grey mane of hers is the best frame for her girlish features, and it seems to her, to Hemda, that even this is intentional, it’s only to punish her that her daughter is mortifying herself, only to prove that those childhood days were fatally flawed, and to this end she will neglect herself, starve herself, turning more skeletal from year to year. And her own daughter is a good deal thinner and smaller than her. They are progressively diminishing themselves, the women in this family, and apparently in another two or three generations they will be obliterated, while her son will go on expanding, so much so, she sometimes has difficulty recognising the rotund, balding man, with his heavy panting, her handsome son who inherited rare blue eyes from his grandfather, and sometimes she looks at him with a shudder, because it seems to her that this man murdered her son and is living in his stead, sleeping in his bed, bringing up his children, precisely the same suspicions she once had towards the stranger, the woman who returned from America many years before and ran to kiss and hug her, claiming she was her mother.
    All the kibbutz waited for her on the lawn, to greet her on her return from that extended mission, and only she hid in one of the trees, a little monkey after all, looking down on the tense expectation that was absolutely impersonal; which of the children remembered her mother if even she had forgotten her, and which of the adults was really expecting her, besides her husband and a handful of relatives. In fact most of them were jealous of her, especially the women working long hours doing turns in the kitchen, the children’s houses, vegetable garden, sewing room, barn, storeroom, in blue working clothes with blue-veined legs, while only she, Hemda’s mother, wears elegant suits and sits in some office in the town, and sometimes even this isn’t enough for her and she goes away on some assignment, on whose behalf, God only knows. Yes, all these words she heard while hiding among the branches, and even if she didn’t hear, she guessed, and if she didn’t guess she thought them for herself, since it wasn’t her they were expecting but a breath of fresh air from the big world, hope, sweet memory – all those things being brought supposedly by the woman now extricating herself from the dark taxi. Who was she? Even through the branches she could tell this wasn’t her mother. The long lock of hair had disappeared, the face was full and pale, the body clumsy. Miserable and bemused, she jumped down from the top of the tree, no one saw her escaping from there, running as fast as she could and as far as she could, to the lake.
    You’re not my mother, she would shout finally when she returned to her parents’ room and stood facing her, and the strange