Kalb - Nobody Will Tell You This But Me: A True (as Told to Me) Story

Its a terrible thing to be dead. Oh, how boring. How maddening. Nothing to do. Nothing to read. No one to talk to. And everyones a mess. Thank God for that, at least. The rabbi at the service didnt know me from Adam. I didnt pay attention. I was watching your grandfather. I always hated HebrewBessie, there was too much of it!but when everyone started the chants he finally stopped crying. Fine. Good for Hebrew. I will say this: Im more upset than any of you.

The worst part was the dirt.

I never understood why they make the family shovel dirt onto you. What an awful thing. I appreciate you refused, Bessie. Whats next? They make the kids push the embalming fluid into my veins? Honestly, the whole thing was degrading. Id kill your uncles for how much dirt they shoveled. Your grandfather seemed calmed by the ritual of it. And I believed him when he told me, as he poured it onto the coffin, I wish it was me, Bob. I wish it was me.

My zayde, my fathers father, died at ninety-six. Older than me. He was drunk as a skunk! He went to temple that morning, drank his weight in the wine they had thereprobably brought his own potato vodka, too. It could dissolve paint. Then he crossed the street and a bus hit him. Bam. Dead. What a way to go. When they crowded around his body, he was smiling. The bus driver says he smiled at him. Or at least that was my brother Georgies story. The funeral was a party at the temple. Everyone got drunk and walked home and lived to tell the tale.

My coffin was perfect. Absolutely perfect! Although I could have done without the Jewish star. What am I? A Zionist? All of a sudden everyone becomes very religious on behalf of the deceased.

I never understood why your mother went to that kibbutz. She had just been accepted to Columbia School of Architecture, and she had a bad feeling about the whole thing and decided to travel to Europe. So she flew to Paris and stayed with her friend Claire, who was an au pair for a wealthy family, and she got bored almost immediately and she met a few Jewish kids who said they were going to Israel to live in a commune and pick strawberries and smoke drugs. Heaven. So she bought a ticket to Tel Aviv the next day. She stayed in some terrible international hostel and asked around and ended up getting on a bus to a banana farm in the north along the Sea of Galilee.

It wasnt the type of kibbutz where they all danced around in peasant blouses and banged the tambourine and sang songs. It was a tough camp where the kids worked outside all day and drank arrak all night until they passed out in the fields and woke up with frost in their hair. Your mother arrived, and the old man in the front office had blue numbers down his arm and he gave her a job peeling potatoes in the mess hall. Every morning shed wake up at dawn and put on rubber boots and stand in a cold vat full of potatoes and water, peeling them one by one and tossing them into another vat. Plunk. And in the afternoons she rode a tractor up and down the banana fields and picked the bunches in the sun, and her hands grew calloused and turned so brown people at the markets would speak to her in Arabic.

To her, it was paradise. She didnt have to think about architecture school. She didnt have to plan. She didnt have to worry about the boyfriend at Brown whod asked her to get married. She didnt have to do anything but peel potatoes and ride a tractor. It was the same every day, every night, for two months.

She sliced her hand open one morning and ended up in the medical tent, and the woman who patched her up was kind and funny and smart, and by the time she finished stitching her wound your mother had decided to become a doctor. Just like that.

I knew shed be flying back to New York by way of Paris, and in one of her letters she said shed call on Labor Day when she got back to Claires apartment. Labor Day came and I didnt hear from her. No call, no telex, nothing. I woke your grandfather up at four the next morning and I said, Something is the matter with Robin. He told me not to worry. Ha! Thats the last time he ever did that.

On a whim, I called the American Hospital of Paris. Thats the family rule: if anything happens to you when you go abroad, you go straight to the American Hospital. Whatever it costs. So I called and I said, Robin Bells room please, and Ill never forget what I heard next: Just a moment. The longest moment of my life. And the nurse picked up and brought your mother the phone, and she said, Mom I hung up and hit your grandfather on the head.