The Man With the Roses

“One? 10 shekels. You know, you look just like her. Especially the eyes. Did you know that your eyes never change from when you’re born? You’ll have the same eyes you have now as when you’re old like me. Maybe you can’t imagine it. 

“I’ll tell you, you’ll never forget what it feels to be young. You’re done with your army service at 21 or 22 and the world is yours. I moved to Florentin. It was a bold move back then since it wasn’t the young place it is now and even dirtier than it is today, if you can believe that. I had just finished the army and wanted a place of my own, so I moved into a small studio apartment on Hertzl Street. It was the saddest place you’ve ever seen, old and ugly, in a neighborhood that was mostly deserted. Not the place for someone as beautiful as you, but like I said, I had just finished the army. It was the best I was going to get. What it did have, which was the reason I chose it, was a wall with floor-to-ceiling windows and a balcony. Too bad the only view I had was the building across the way.  One day, I was sitting there as usual, listening to music before work – I had a job as a bartender six days a week. That’s when I saw her.

“I’ve never been happier than that first time. A beautiful girl in blue overalls, just like you, with paint everywhere. In her hair, all over her fingers. She had enough paint cans at her feet to paint the entire city, arranged by color in a nice little line. And from all of Tel Aviv she had chosen to paint the wall on the building across from my place. What she was painting, I couldn’t tell you. I forgot to look. What I can tell you is that I spent the whole night at work wondering what it could have been. I ran home because I couldn’t wait anymore.

“At first I was disappointed. I was tired and covered in sweat, and for what? Half of two people. Half of two people leaning over the front of two bicycles. They were feet, legs, all the way up to fingers holding the handlebars. That’s the highest it went. This is what she had spent hours working on? Nothing special, and certainly nothing worth thinking about, until I looked at the little field she had painted under the bicycles. It was green from far away, but once you got close you realized your eyes were playing tricks on you. Once you got close, you could see the colors she had used. Purple, brown, red, orange. Layers on layers. I don’t know how someone could create that level of detail with colors that don’t even make green. 

“The next day I didn’t work. I spent hours standing in front of that field, staring at it. It shouldn’t have been possible. When it started to get dark, I went to sit on my balcony and stared at it some more. She came by again, this time in a clean pair of overalls with a flashlight clipped on to the strap. I sat there with my beer, watching her paint, unable to take my eyes off her for hours. She got started on the bikes, painting one pink and one yellow, though I’m sure you understand by now that they weren’t pink or yellow at all. Eventually I got the courage to go down and offer her a beer.

“‘How do you do it?’ I asked her. She told me she it just happened that way without her trying to ‘do’ anything. We talked so long that by the time she left, my neighbors, an old couple who did everything together, were already walking to work. I barely slept and spent the day sitting on my balcony, waiting, thinking about nothing but when I would see her again. 

“She never came. I was almost an hour late for work, I waited so long. Then I left my shift early, hoping that I could apologize to her for not waiting long enough. Another week went by just like this, then another, and I became so depressed that I thought of living somewhere else. Anything so I didn’t have to look at the yellow and pink bicycles. But I didn’t have anywhere else to go – my father had died while I was in the army. So I went home every night, promising myself that I was never again going to look at or even wonder about those two half-people standing in the field. This promise meant I spent a month without a day on my balcony or a single glance at the wall, until one night, when I was coming home from my shift at the bar, I felt this pressure pushing on my chest with all its might. ‘Look! Look!’ It was telling me. 

“We were sitting on the bicycles, her on the pink, me on the yellow. I was wearing a yellow sweater with the sleeves rolled up to my elbows, although it’s a fact that I didn’t own anything but black t-shirts and jeans at the time. We were laughing, our noses touching. Behind us she had painted the sky just like how she had painted the field, blue from far away but with every color inside. There were flowers in her hair. I can’t tell you how long I stood there – and there’s no better word to say this – entranced by the wall before she came to stand beside me. We didn’t say a word until sunrise.

“From that moment on we were inseparable. She moved into my apartment two days later, with one bag of clothes and three suitcases of art supplies. She came with me to work for a while, bringing her sketchbook and a travel watercolor set. I told her that I didn’t want her spending half of her waking hours wasting time on small watercolors, so I took her to the store and bought her a new set of paints and brushes for our apartment.

 “I came home from work the following night to see that she had painted our square kitchen table. Each of the legs was the trunk of a tree, growing to the top. On the flat surface there were hundreds of small birds, each no larger than two or three centimeters, flying in the sky over the leaves. Then she started on the walls, the ceiling, the set of cabinets under the sink. Everything she touched became so beautiful that it was impossible to remember a time before she lived there. She didn’t use colors – she invented them. She surprised me every day with what she could do. Have you ever met someone like that? One day she learned how to dye fabrics, and soon I had installed a metal rod for the burgundy curtains that hung above the doors to the balcony. I picked up my Strat for the first time in years, and we’d spend hours listening to brushstrokes and guitar picks. Artists from around the country would go out of their way to spend a few hours at our place, learning from her. They loved her. They gave us some of their own most treasured creations: drawings, photographs, pottery, woven blankets, jewelry, sculptures, and paintings, of course. Even the ones who were 20 years older than her, whose faces were dull and worn away, would come to life when they received her praise. And she found something to praise in everyone.

“To these people, she was a prodigy, a girl who didn’t care that she was the outcast of her rich family  because she rejected the comfortable life that anyone else would have accepted. Her father was a ‘67 war hero with connections around the country, and her mother represented many of the region’s up-and-coming politicians. There are pictures of them at her birthday parties, at her high school graduation. She could have been anyone.

“When she was 18, set to join one of the military’s most highly ranked intelligence units, she suddenly got an exemption from her service. A tumor, people said. She spent six months in intensive care at Ichilov, only visited by blood relatives. It was here that she took up painting, and just a few weeks after she was released we met. Another few months and she was famous. In less time than she had spent recovering under the care of the best doctors in the country, she had created a name for herself on her own. Never once in our entire relationship did she ever express a passion or desire to paint, though. She told me that it was just how she passed time. I do know that she was happy to be surrounded by art. Often I would wake up and see her sitting on the balcony holding a cup of coffee in one hand and a gift in the other, admiring it, looking up every now and then to smile at us on our bicycles. 

“Most mornings would begin like this. We both went to sleep around 3 every night, but she was almost always up by 9. She would boil a kettle of water for Turkish coffee, then go sit on the balcony for an hour or two. By 12 she had always prepared breakfast for us, fruits and vegetables and meats and pastries. More afternoons than not we had visitors, but we had enough time before they arrived to go to bed together and go on a long walk. Every guest knew that when I left for work, they had to leave also. She liked to have the nights to herself.

“I knew her better than anyone else in the world, from how every minute of her day would be spent to what every small change in her expression meant. What I didn’t know, because she didn’t tell me for some time, was why she was the way she was. I knew the relationship with her family wasn’t a healthy one. I noticed she liked to sit in the corner of a room where she could see everything – I think that’s why she liked living in our studio so much. But I never asked her to share anything, just like she never asked me. She knew from the start that I was a depressed user with no family, and she never treated me differently – even on the days when I could barely look at her, the days when all I did was get high, and the days I sat on the balcony listening to music, crying, with a person we had just met right in front of us – and she never asked me to change.

“I remember when I learned why. We had reached nine months together. I had just woken up in the middle of the day, like I usually did – but she was still laying with me, curled up in my arms.

“‘I peed the bed,’ she said. 

“It was no secret to me that she had nightmares. She would thrash around in the middle of the night and act like everything was normal by the morning. This was the first time that it had paralyzed her for hours. I waited patiently, holding her for a few hours more, before she told me everything.

“Her father was her role model growing up, the definition of sacrifice. But he had sacrificed too much and seen things he couldn’t get over. He was an animal behind closed doors, beating and raping her mother in front of her, living in some memory that neither of them could see. When she was old enough, she became the victim. She knew this man wasn’t her father, that the look in his eyes was the look of someone who feared for his life. He never remembered what happened when it was over, and her mother pretended like nothing had happened at all. So she learned to accept it with the understanding that every family has sensitivities that are best kept private. And he kept his family close. She never had a boyfriend before me and only a few friends. The first night she ever spent without her parents close by was when they began treating her tumor.

“That’s when the nightmares started. Away at last from the tight grip of her father, it was like her body was trying to expel years of abuse all at once. She would scream out in the middle of the night, thrashing around so that she had wrapped herself up in her blanket and ripped out the morphine drip. During all of this, she was asleep. Her nurses would run into the room, shaking her back to life, blood dripping from where the needle had dragged through skin. The doctors switched her to opiates when a needle broke in her arm and caused an infection. Only the supervising nurse, Adi, made her feel safe there. Some days, Adi would be the only person – not even her parents – allowed to visit. Adi kept a close eye on her six days a week, and as her condition worsened, her father made a generous donation to the hospital to keep Adi around for 24/7 care. Adi was the one who convinced her that the dangerous brain surgery she had initially refused would be her best chance. And she was right – the surgery was what saved her. To celebrate, Adi bought her a set of paints and a sketchbook.

“Adi was the first and only person, other than me, who knew about what happened to her. Once in a while, she would invite her over for coffee while I was at work. And Adi was the one she stayed with before she died.

“I never wanted to leave her. We had built a life together. But once she told me what happened, she focused all of herself on taking care of me. The simple breakfasts she made became elaborate courses which took her hours to prepare. She started coming to work with me again and began to ignore more and more of our visitors. She stopped painting. It became clear four months later that she had latched onto me as her only form of identity. The longer she stayed with me, the more of a shell she became. I met with Adi, who agreed that the best thing for her was to take some time and figure out who she was. You just need a few weeks without me, I told her. Just to feel like yourself again. She didn’t want to do it but agreed when she found out she could stay with Adi. I called her the first night while Adi was at the hospital, surprised to hear her sounding happy and relaxed.

“‘Everything’s going to be okay,’ she said. The next morning, she was gone. 

“Oh, don’t cry. I’m sorry. I’ll stop for a minute.

“Her parents then pressed charges against me, no doubt because they were facing pressure from their friends and the media about the cause of their daughter’s sudden death. It only made sense that her junkie boyfriend had gotten her hooked. This was the first time in the year of knowing her that I had ever spoken to her parents. I didn’t expect it, but they invited me to their home to talk before we were set to meet with the lawyers. It was clear when I arrived that it was her mother’s idea – her father wasn’t even there. She had bags under her eyes and a hollow stare that went right through me. She just wanted to know what happened, she said, and I was open about everything. I needed her to know that everything would live on with me. That what they did wouldn’t be forgotten.

“‘That can’t be true,’ her mother said, when I had told her.

“There had been incidents, she said. She admitted that her husband had beaten and raped her, that he would turn into a beast. She knew the burden she was taking on when she married him. There was simply no way that anything could have happened to her daughter, though, because they had taken precautions. She began to crush up pills and put them in her husband’s coffee ever since her daughter was born. That kept him calm for years. Unexpectedly, when her daughter was six, her father smashed his wine glass on the table in the middle of dinner, pulled his wife by the waist, and dragged her across the floor. He went inside her as he slammed her head against the tile, his daughter crying at the table, begging her daddy to stop. Not once after that would she leave her daughter alone with her father. She threatened to divorce him unless he agreed to have an operation which made sex impossible. Her daughter began therapy twice a week, which she would continue until the tumor, although she was never quite the same. That’s why they were so protective of her. 

“Anyways, they ended up dropping the charges against me. Her mother told me she hoped I could move on with my life and that they would be happy to help if I ever needed a job or a place to stay. We could all keep her memory alive together, she said. And I don’t mean to bother you with the ramblings of an old man. I just can’t help it when you look just like her.”

The man with the roses, his clothes tattered and torn and his skin turned to leather, his fingernails caked with dirt and his shoes filled with sand, muttered to himself as he counted his shekels and put the coins in his pocket. There were three roses he hadn’t sold, still wrapped in their brown paper. He grumbled and left them on the tayelet.