The Threefold Cord / Michal Miron

THE THREEFOLD CORD

“And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him;
But a threefold cord is not quickly broken” (Ecclesiastes 4, 12)
Three points in space create a plane.
Every three points.
You, me and Dad. The threefold cord.
Is not quickly broken.
The Fig Tree
Before it all began, Mom, you were the fig tree in “Yotam’s Fable” performed in Negba,
our kibbutz, for the Shavuot holiday.
You pulled your hair up, laying bare your long thin neck. You wore a black maxi dress, tied
around your body, and your shoulders remained naked.
The fable tells the story of the trees that looked for a king to rule them; you used to tell it to
me before my bed time, describing the fresh smell of the fig tree, and the silver gray that
colored the olive trees, as the moon touched their leaves late at night in the ancient land of
Israel.
In one of the rehearsals, the choreographer of the show, Hanna, reminded the dancers,
“Shavuot is a holiday of nature. The trees are trees of Israel; they all bear fruits. You have to
think of fertility and generosity when you give your part.” She told the dancers to take their
example from you. Then she gave you a sign and you flowed on to the stage with your arms
swinging upward like an eagle, and circled the smooth floor softly but strongly, in a dreamy
motion, as if you were forgetting yourself.
In a picture from that holiday you hold your palms up wide open, in quiet and measured
giving. Varda was the olive tree, and Dina, I think, was the vine, but everybody said that you
were the best dancer.
I cannot recall who got the part of the thorn-bush that year.

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Right afterwards the thorn-bush came along and burned everybody down; somebody in the
audience laughed, and everybody turned around and looked at Dad. He sat in the last row and
clapped his hands when nobody else did.
My girlfriend Gili sat next to me and laughed. She said that it was stupid to dance without
ballet shoes. I said that she was the stupid one, and that fig trees never wear shoes.
After you came down from the stage, you explained to Gili and me that modern dance
breaks the rules of classical dance. It is not necessary anymore to remain on your tiptoes with
your spine straight all the time. It is possible to make strong sudden moves that make your
body look broken or twisted, and then your bare feet help you keep your balance.
In the summer of ’69 we had to leave the kibbutz because of Dad’s fight with the secretary
of the financial board. He had asked the kibbutz to budget his academic studies and start
working on his doctorate, but Izak had denied his request.
We moved to a little town in the south of the country, Beer-Sheva, the capitol of the Negev
desert. We both were home for vacation, until school started again. We had each other and all
the hours of the day until Dad came back from work at the nuclear laboratory in Dimona.
We used to hang the laundry on the clothes lines at the hottest hour of the afternoon.
Afterwards we would stand and look at the loaded lines, satisfied with the job we had done
well and the order of the wet clothes on the lines. We would stand silently by the yellow plum
tree loaded with ripe fruits, giving ourselves to the melting heat of the afternoon and to the dry
summer grass tickling our bare feet. I imagined that I heard the mist coming out of the wet
cloth and returning back to the air.
These hours of the day were still in order; everything made sense. Nature was in charge. It
was like an unspoken agreement between us not to mention the evening hours that would
come later, when Dad was back from work absorbed with acid hostility, angry because of a
new argument, this time with the head of the Radiation Department. Dad had warned him
about a possible radiation leak in the lab, but Dr. Payne had admonished him for crossing the
scientist in charge of security.

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In the morning we sat again under the vine pergola, joyfully snacking some cold water
melon. Little larks hopped around us, gray and quiet, singing a silent tune between leaves still
wet with night dew. There was light and we were waiting for the steaming hour to take the dry
laundry off the lines, and fold it orderly into the closets.
When the summer was over you taught me how to get up in the morning, and pretend that
nothing had happened the night before. You said that you knew how hard this was for me but I
had to try to understand: It was a difficult time for him too -- the new job, the quarrel in the
kibbutz, with Izak the secretary, when Dad started hitting him, and blamed him, saying “You
kibbutz people are all the same; you think that the world owes you; you’re so spoiled you can’t
even earn your own bread. Pigs.” When you spoke of Dad you used the words, “miserable-
childhood” and “homeless-child,” and mentioned Grandma Fania and how she threw Dad out
of the house when he was only eight. You even talked about the Holocaust and how Grandma
would never recover from seeing her brother slaughtered in front of her eyes, and how still
today what happened in that war affects our family, even though it was so long ago.
You promised that very soon things would fall in to place and that we would find a
solution, maybe even talk with a counselor. Meanwhile we had to be patient and do our best
not to upset him.
When I felt broken in the middle of the day I would go to the bathroom at the public school
in Beer-Sheva, cry quietly behind the closed door and return to the classroom right away so
that I didn’t miss any new material.
A couple of years later you learned in a holistic-medicine class that every seven years all
the cells in the body are renewed. You laughed and your eyes were full of hope. You said that
soon you were going to become a new person and me, too.
It’s been sixteen years since that summer.
I’m coming to visit you in the cemetery in Negba – the kibbutz where you and I both were
born.

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 The Threefold Cord / Michal Miron

The pine trees whistle in the wind as if there is no life beyond the fence that surrounds the
trees and the dead people of our kibbutz.
A begonia is breaking its way through the dry soil that surrounds your grave.
Sixteen years and I still can’t get used to your death. Still dancing barefoot through the
broken pieces of my life.
What’s Dad doing now?
Maybe he’s working in the garden, just like he’s always done at this season, preparing the
grapevines for the winter.
*
He arrives home all irritated, after a nerve-racking day at work, parks his dusted Ford
outside and goes straight to the garden, without even stopping to let us know he’s arrived.
On the grass around him, he places all the necessary tools: a pruning hook, electrical tape,
nylon bags and twigs from Muscat grapevines.
Then he starts.
The world stops. It’s only him and his vines.
He chooses a branch, cuts it sharply at an exact angle, pulls out a twig which he has
prepared beforehand from a bucket of water, laid there well cut, perpendicular to other twigs.
He joins it slowly to the cut branch and presses them together. Then he wraps it around with
grafting tape, covers it with a nylon bag and wraps it again with tape.
He concentrates. He handles the vines with the same attention of a scientist perfecting an
atomic weapon. The same attention he gives to me.
There is an intense determination in his motions. And love.
After he’s finished he adds another safety bind with a rope that he’s found in an abandoned
cowshed, at a nearby moshav. That’s that.
Next year this vine will bear Muscat grapes. The Thomsons were a stupid mistake, but here
we fixed it in no time. So says the king of the garden.

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 The Threefold Cord / Michal Miron

You are upstairs in your bedroom, sleeping with your ears plugged. The air is cool and
quiet, with only a thin buzz coming from the Katzmans’ beehives. You’ll wake only when his
work is completed, when my nightmare is over. Like you always did. You’ll come out to the
garden with coffee and bright wet figs on a tray. With a concerned look in your eyes you’ll ask
him whether he’s remembered to take his vitamins in the morning.
*
At this hour of the day the tower of the electron-accelerator in Dimona is getting ready, too,
for the coming night.
It stands tall, surrounded by clouds colored pink and orange in the sunset. Its base is
planted in the ground, covered with green Chinaberry trees exhausted from the heat of the day,
now sweating in the air.
Underground a ray of electrons shoots an atom from the Periodic Table of Elements and
shifts it out of its physical balance.
The scientists do it for research purposes. Dad and his colleagues improving a secret
weapon for the navy. They are not even overwhelmed by the huge energy secreted from the
broken atoms.
You can look at the tower from the bus stop of the army base that encircles the nuclear
facility, when waiting for Dad to finish his work and come out from behind the tall wire
fences, driving his old Ford.
I’m thinking of the darkness underground. The ray of electrons that cuts the dark in a speed
close to lightning, flows in pressure through the lower passages. I think of the atoms that lose
their balance at the end of the day. Like me, when the night comes and covers us with its thick
heavy blanket, quieting our screams.
I used to believe that time was like an axis on which people can move forward and leave
the past behind them, forget it until it has no substance anymore.
But time is not flat, Mom. It is more like a threefold dimension.

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Sometimes you explode into places neither forward nor backwards, but more into depth.
You’re thrown away from reality into wild and dark worlds that you cannot guess on the
surface level. And even when you come back to earth, you already belong to a different reality.
I remember pictures from the day you died: I came home from school. The gate was
broken, the door open. I walked in and saw you lying on the carpet in a pool of blood with a
Luger in your left hand. Dad was standing above you, in the living room, yelling, “Why,
Thelma, why?” as if you could hear him.
I turned back to the gate, pulled it behind me quietly and went right to Gili as if nothing
had happened. We played together all afternoon, rambling teenage nonsense, and only in the
evening the phone rang. Somebody called Gili’s mother to tell her, and she came into the room
panicky and looked straight at me.
Later she drove me back in her new shining Honda. Near our home there was a police car
and a crowd of people. Somebody held my hand and led me into the house and although the
kitchen fluorescent was on, I couldn’t see a thing; the picture was black.
Why, Mom?
The Thorn-Bush
Last night I dreamt of you, Dad.
You came as a young man, tall and handsome, your face bright, with a high forehead, and
your hair, dark and full, combed back like a movie star’s.
Your sensual lips were holding a secret smile, sealing from me the words of an untold love.
We danced together at a late night party; the dream continued and we went out to the bank
of the Jordan River. A small pier lay in the quiet water and the Eucalyptus trees, dark and tall,
bounded us all around. The air was misty and empty when the morning filled up the dark.
You took me and I was yours. Together we betrayed Mom.
*

Next morning after the dream I went to swim before meeting with my psychiatrist.

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My thoughts raced back and forth, like the laps of the pool that I swam. The words got
mixed up with the noise of the water that surrounded me. Little bubbles from the feet of the
swimmer ahead of me touched my face and tickled me, seducing me into worlds of the
unreal.
Look, Dad, I told Dr. Stein about the vines.
One day we’ll have to talk about this, you and me; maybe you’ll be able to explain it to me.
For me this picture, although dark and wild, is connected with love.
In my memory I have always been mesmerized by you, like a lovesick person; I tried to be
strong and tough like you, to be logical and rational, never emotional. I studied computers
instead of theatre, and prayed that my breasts would grow smaller somehow, like Mom’s,
because you thought that small breasts were nicer. I tried to be thin and to love the people that
you would love, never spoke about politics -- that was your territory. I learned to drive your
Ford with a steady and confident hand, and tried not to lose my mind when the house was
messy; I even adopted your macabre humor when telling jokes near Grandpa’s grave in the
kibbutz, on his memorial days.
Love sick.
Until I lost myself.
I came home from the asylum to visit you, and for a whole day it was just you and I; the
rest of the world stopped.
I stopped at the gate to our house before I came in. Now it was fixed and painted with new
green, joined back to its hinges. I lifted my eyes, and you were there, waiting at the door.
Then you were around me, with your quiet presence, fixing me lunch, making a bed for me
with clean sheets in my old room, suggesting, “Maybe you need a nap, girly; those medicines
make you tired.”
In the afternoon you made coffee for both of us, and sliced a fresh honey pie that you had
bought just for me, with little raisins and cinnamon, like you remember I love it.

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You worried and followed every step that I took, ready to hold me any moment if I
collapsed. And I didn’t; now that Mom was gone I was the perfect wife, and washed the dishes
after our coffee, and even managed to handle a skilled conversation with you about the new
economic plan of the government, and the policy in the Palestinian territories.
But at the end of the day I suddenly panicked; I was afraid that I wouldn’t make it back on
time, that they wouldn’t let me into my ward. You stood in the garden with a hose in your
hands, watering the vines. The same vines.
I ran to you, breathless and barefoot, and explained to you how dangerous everything was,
and the many things I still had to do in the little time that remained. You hugged me
generously, and silently, and volunteered to take the dry laundry off the lines for me. You let
me go only when you were sure I had calmed down.
I went back to the hospital because when I’m around you, only you exist; I cannot hear nor
see anything else but you.
I know now that you’ll never be mine. I understand that I won’t be your wife, ever.
Understand and accept.
*
But there was one night before Mom died; you also remember it. After dinner, with
Erickson, the electrical engineer who came from Frankfurt to consult your company about a
new German wiring machine. At Grandma Fania’s, at 4 am. There was nothing between us
except the moon.
Mom stayed at home, and Grandma slept in the other room; we could hear her heavy
breathing, and without talking agreed to keep quiet so that she didn’t wake up. Even though I
insisted on taking a shower, and then you did, too, and even after I dragged the mattress that
you had prepared for me in the living room to the porch and then opened the shutters to let the
wind in and to look at the sea from a distance – blackening and heavy, at the end of Haifa, a
city laid on the Mediterranean.

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It was dark. I was lying on the mattress; you were there, too, with a cigarette. Sitting next
to me almost touching.
Darkness and a thin line from the moonlight. They ruled.
Erickson looked at the sky and said, “What a lovely night.”
He put his arm around me and turned to you. “Very pretty lady. Well done. Good for you, is
this your first marriage?” and told us that he himself was divorced; only his daughter stayed
with him, but he said, “Hey, not now. Let’s toast. Let’s drink and forget.”
That night for the first time, Mom hadn’t called to check on your vitamins, because she
knew, and Fania hadn’t made the beds for us, and hardly agreed to give us the keys to her
apartment when you said, “We’ll come back late, Mom. You’ll already be asleep.”
The moonlight came through the open shutters, touched my naked back with quiet silver
and colored your smoke rings with bluish gray when they ascended to the sky in a shining coil.
*
I once mentioned that night to you and you didn’t deny it; you kept silent. Your eyes
reddened and got wet. I saw it.
I saw but I won’t tell, because no one would believe.
“If two lie down together, then they have warmth, but how can one be warm alone?

And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him.

But a threefold cord is not quickly broken.”