Tuesday, December 3, 2019

How do you survive pain?

Ten years before Zeruna Shalev's novel Pain begins, Iris, the book's central character, was driving around stopped a bus in Jerusalem when a suicide bomber inside the bus set himself off. The blast literally blew Iris out of her car, and she spent months in hospital being stitched back together.

Today, inexplicably, pain has returned, first knocking her to the floor of the family apartment, then sending her to a pain clinic where a specialist alleviates her agony.

Iris is astounded to realize the specialist is Eitan, the boy—now a bearded man—who unceremoniously dumped her almost thirty years earlier when they were both seventeen. Does he recognize her as well? He makes no sign, but he must recall the two beauty marks on the left side of her navel. One kind of pain has been replaced by another.

I suspect many of us never recover entirely from our first love, the one we didn't marry. What would life had been like if we hadn't broken up? If she hadn't married someone else? If he hadn't been killed? Iris was devastated when Eitan dropped her; she spent two months in bed, virtually catatonic. Now forty-five, long recovered from the break-up trauma and the terrorist bomb, the wife of stolid, reliable Mickey, the mother of 21-year-old Alma and 17-year-old Omer, Iris is a school principal and a solid citizen. Or is until the brief meeting with Eitan in the pain clinic.

Eitan has retained his dead mother's apartment, a sanctuary in which to live after his second divorce. Because it was his mother's, Iris is able to track him to it. He is unencumbered; she is susceptible. Despite working exhaustively to rebuild her life and create a fulfilling and successful career, Iris's existence has been devoid of joy or passion since Eitan left her. Despite her guilt, they begin an affair.

One of Pain's many pleasures is Shalev's ability to convey Iris's physical ecstasy and her emotional joy in rediscovering Eitan's lovemaking. "There is no end to the words she yearns to say to him, and each word yearns to be said endlessly in a single sentence that is as long as her life. To her surprise he suddenly answers her, brings to speak as his body intertwines with hers, telling her of the first years after their parting, his voice growing hoarse, and she listens intently, devouring every whispered word until he can no longer speak."

It begins to appear that Iris will leave good old unexciting Mickey (who's more interested in playing computer chess than his wife anyway) for Eitan when she learns that Alma, who is living in Tel Aviv, has become a questionable guru's disciple. As Alma explains one of the man's teachings: "sex is a tool and you have to practice using it just like you practice using any tool, with no connection to love or physical need. For instance, last week, my exercise was to sleep with a different man every night in order to reach me." More pain for Iris.

That Shalev herself was wounded ten years ago in a terrorist bombing and is a talented writer gives Pain, her fifth novel, a certain authority. Shalev says about the apolitical themes she explores in the contemporary Israeli setting, "All the stories told in my books could have happened in other places too. They deal with universal themes of relations between parents and children, husbands and wives. My challenge is precisely to maintain sensitivity in a rough place, to depict nuance within an extroverted, aggressive situation, to describe the shadows rather than the glaring sunlight."

Because I do not read Hebrew, I cannot judge Sondra Silverston's translation other to say that it is smooth and convincing. I would not title a novel Pain for fear of putting off potential readers. The title is apt, however, and one can only hope that readers who are interested in a complex family tale of love, redemption, and disillusion are able to not put off. They will find pleasure in Pain.

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