The crash jolts me from my desk, the thwack and rattle of glass. A bird has collided with the window, perhaps a robin or mourning dove. I scan the balcony, the tree tops, the yard below. On the window, tufts of feathers quiver. I see the faint imprint of a wing. Downstairs, I scour the yard, my terrier beside me. The bird is nowhere. I tell myself it lives and bemoan the fact of glass.
I return to my desk, distract myself with an online article telling me to “click on the masterpieces.” The woman bathing dissolves beneath my cursor to reveal a bearded man wearing a jacket and bow tie—Picasso’s Blue Room. Beneath Van Gogh’s Patch of Grass appears the scarf-wrapped head of a Dutch peasant. A homely woman glowers behind Allori’s gentle Isabella de Medici. I am transfixed. Underpaintings revealed by infrared x-rays, abandoned and painted over.
I click out of the article and a photo from our trip to Israel appears on my screen. My mother gazes toward a lapping Mediterranean, face resplendent. We are in Jaffa, her birthplace, on a tour of the Holy Land. It has taken seven decades for her to return. She was 12 when bombs shattered the King David Hotel, the explosion reverberating for miles. Her parents bundled their seven children into the car. A precautionary few days away. No backward glances at her dolls, her piano. She remembers the coat she wore, the smell of damp wool. She does not remember we have spoken twice by phone today. The day is long.
My husband is asleep when I slide under the covers, the moon shining through the plate-glass doors. I lie propped too high for sleep, thinking of the bird, the shock of wings against glass—and of my mother, the shock of memories gone. I want to sort it out, as if life can be paired, folded, and stacked in drawers.
We never know our mothers except as mothers. They come into being only upon our birth. It is through no fault of our own. We do not possess infrared vision. That they pre-exist us is of little relevance, until we start to lose them.
For seventy-one years, she refused to return. Too dangerous, she said. The rockets of a thousand enemies threatened. I do not point out the direct hits of cancer, divorce, and—now—the erosion of memory. Bits of herself loosen, peel, flake off, lay waste the portrait. The only longing to return seemed to be mine, a sacred pilgrimage across time, her childhood my holy land.
At eighty-three, dazed by the collision into time, she forgot her fear.
The moon illuminates the bedroom, a heavenly light on a blue planet. We fix our eyes on the seen, but it is the unseen that tells our story. I think of Picasso.
Clouds shaped like mythic gods sweep above the German Colony, a tree-lined neighborhood outside the old city of Jerusalem. We jostle beside the stone wall fronting her childhood house, the Arabic taxi driver waving us into a pose, see too late that my mother has pushed open the hunter-green gate, is crossing the leafy courtyard, approaching the front door, our protests unheard. “This is my house,” she says. The young man—a caregiver—offers a kindly smile, and beckons. We—children and grandchildren—follow, first through the house and then into the yard. Beneath the scudding clouds, the portrait of a mother at dusk dissolves to reveal a curly-haired child at play among the chickens. From gnarled branches, her brothers pelt a nearby house with apples. Her sister has toppled into the pond, her bucket too heavy. The clouds break. My mother is bathed in a burst of sun.
My husband stirs, settles, eyes masked against an alabaster sheen. Who we are, time takes. But I do not lose heart. Glass is no barrier to heavenly light.