“Why aren’t you saying anything?” Nechami asks, annoyed.

“Because you don’t know how to play violin.” Shua puts his Rabbeinu Tam tefillin back into their velvet bag, with a great effort to hide his mirth.

“I’ll learn. We’ll find me a Russian violin teacher, a real drill sergeant who’ll make me practice three hours a day and think that’s still not enough.”

“You want to take violin lessons?” He’s already breaking her dream down into realistic chunks. “We could find you a teacher. I think they have lessons for women at Ne’imot, you know, the music academy. You could take evening lessons. And a violin doesn’t cost that much.”

“I don’t want to learn how to play violin.” Nechami takes a slice of bread and smears it with chocolate spread. She’ll have a toddler’s breakfast. “I want to know how. I want to play piano, too — a grand piano, like the ones they have in the train stations. And I want to not have to do anything.”

He stops tending to his tallis and tefillin. “What?”

Before it’s too late, she plunges a finger into the dike. The water is rising all around her. Any moment now, the dike will crack. The water will come cascading down. There’ll be a flood.

“I wanted it to turn out that the reason Ruti had a breakdown was because it was just too much for her to hold down a day job while taking care of kids all night, every night, without a break,” she says to him in a strange voice.

“But that wasn’t the reason.” Her husband, with all his good middos, doesn’t understand. “You can’t want things to turn out a certain way after they’ve already happened.”

We’ve already agreed that time moves forward, right? Not backward.

• ••

He doesn’t understand what’s happening. She’d always been such a good wife.

His mother always sang her praises. On Thursday nights at 1 a.m., as he walked quietly through the sleeping streets on his way home from Milkov, he would call his mother to give his weekly update and she’d say to him, “You should know, Nechami is one in a million, the way she runs the house, cares for the children, and she works, too — and she does it all so well!”

His mother was busy on those late Thursday nights in her little moshav kitchen, putting challah dough aside to rise, rolling out babke dough, filling and braiding it, waiting for the fish to cook, and peeling vegetables. Shua, father of two and then three little ones, would stride through the streets of Mekor Baruch as he spoke with her.

“And she lets you learn until this time of night, and never asks you to come home earlier! You have a real gem,” his mother would say.

Her words carried the fragrance of his childhood to him.

So what’s this all of a sudden? The first drops of a cloudburst? Is there going to be a flood?

“I thought you were just asking when I’d be coming home,” he says. Back then, back when she’d asked, Nechami was the superwoman who didn’t need his help.

“I thought you were just mentioning that you weren’t feeling well,” he says. Because back then, back when she’d mentioned it, he really did think that’s all it was.

Why didn’t she tell him to come home? Why didn’t she say, outright, that she wasn’t managing and needed his help?

“I couldn’t tell you to come home,” she explains. “That would have gone against everything I learned in seminary. So I only mentioned, since you already called, that the kids were all awake and one of them was throwing up. And I asked when you were coming home.”

But why not ask for help? He would have been happy to help, doesn’t she realize?

“Telling you to stop in the middle of learning was unthinkable.” She doesn’t cry, she won’t cry, she’s cried enough in this story. Let everyone say what they will, she’s going to be tough now. Focused. What is there to get emotional about? They’re talking here about facts. “So I said I was feeling awful, that Chanochi was coughing and needed his inhaler, and Bentzi was screaming.”

And then it’s five minutes to nine. He goes. As always. To be on time for kollel.

• ••

Outside is a bright, pleasant winter sun. With every passing day, it’s a little higher in the sky. A quarter of a degree. Yesterday at this time, the light illuminated the stair railing. Today, the potted plant is lit up too, with a ray of sunlight dancing on it. She knows that when summer comes, sunlight will flood the whole yard, warming everyone who had the patience to wait.

She goes down to the office, to one email from a private client and a bunch of messages from Odelia Gunter, chastising her with varying degrees of politeness. “It’s sad that you don’t feel like part of our team anymore, ever since you started freelancing,” Odelia had written. “I realize you have other clients, but please keep us in mind, too.” Oh, Odelia, must you resort to emotional blackmail? “It would be a shame if we lost the whole Beit Amir network because they didn’t get their simulations on time.”

“Don’t worry, you’re not going to lose them,” Nechami replies, ignoring the exaggerations. “And their simulation will be ready today.”

She’s not going to get distracted today. She won’t think, she won’t breathe, she’ll do nothing but sketch, measure, and model. She opens 3ds Max. Goes to her recent files. Her phone rings. Why didn’t she silence it?

A familiar Beit Shemesh number is on the screen. Nechami answers with a trace of impatience, hoping Shifra will keep it short. But it isn’t Shifra. The voice on the line is childish and hesitant.

“Nechami? It’s Tovi. Tovi Silver from Beit Shemesh.”

“Hi, Tovi. Don’t you have school today?”

“No, we have the day off to study for this big Navi test. And my mother is at a client’s house. She’s making a seudas pidyon haben for them.”

“So what was it you wanted, Tovi?”

“Um… I was just wondering if… I wanted to know if there’s enough money yet.”

“Money for what?” Nechami is no good at playacting. She might be able to learn violin one day — but she’ll never be an actress.

Her feigned innocence doesn’t fool her niece. “You know. For my operation. I know they set up a fund for me. I already tried calling Shemesh Tzedakah, but they wouldn’t tell me. I know the whole family is helping Abba.”

“You know too many things that you aren’t supposed to know,” Nechami says, going into her severe mode, which requires no playacting. “Let the adults take care of all the technical issues. You start thinking about which suitcase you’ll bring, what to pack, and what presents you’ll buy for my kids in Los Angeles. Is that clear, Tovi?”

Nechami’s eyes are on the muddled list of files on her computer screen. Beit Amir1. Beit Amir final. Beit Amir really final with OG corrections. Beit Amir FULLY UPDATED. Beit Amir FINAL UPDATE. She sorts the files by date modified. The latest one turns out to be “Beit Amir NU THIS IS IT.” She opens that one.

“Money isn’t a technical thing.” Tovi hasn’t given up yet.

“Of course it is,” Nechami tells her. “If your abba needed to download Kupat Cholim forms, and authorizations and things like that, we would help him with that, right? So if he needs fundraising help, it’s the same thing. Now go study for your Navi test.”

“I’ll study, don’t worry. Just tell me if there’s enough money.”

“There’s enough for everything you need,” Nechami says — brazenly, knowingly deceitful. Aside from Odelia’s donation and her own maaser money for the next few months, she hasn’t raised a single shekel. And she doesn’t know where to turn for more, either.

“Oh,” says Tovi. She sounds a little disappointed.

“You’re not happy,” Nechami observes. The clock is racing. In a moment she’ll have to go up to the house and put up lunch.

“No, it’s fine, only… okay, thanks.”

While Nechami is trying to figure out why there’s a persistent gap between the inner and outer walls, when suddenly something in her mind clicks loudly into place. Shmaya. Shmaya Silver. Uncle Shmaya. What a fantastic idea! He’s Bubby Silver’s cousin in London. And Tovi is named after his grandmother. He’s elderly, retired, and well-to-do. In his younger days, when Nechami was a child, his visits to Eretz Yisrael were grand occasions. He would hand out gifts to them all, and he remembered everybody’s name.

He would surely be happy to contribute. Maybe he’d even give 5,000 pounds sterling, which would cover the greater part of their pledge, but even three or four would be very nice. If he’d even give 2,000, she’d have no objection. How could she have failed to think of Uncle Shmaya? Yet somehow, until this moment, she forgot that she has a rich uncle.

She looks at her watch. At 1:15, Shua will finish morning seder. She’ll call him and ask what he thinks of the idea. Maybe he can call Uncle Shmaya himself, and win him over with an interesting vort.

Odelia calls. “You sound cheerful,” she comments. “It would be nice if we could make the people at Beit Amir happy too.”

“We will. The file is almost ready,” Nechami reassures her. “But to tell you the truth, I’m happy because I just had a great idea for that fundraising drive I’m doing. I just remembered that we have a wealthy relative in England who’s elderly and bored. This is exactly the sort of thing he’d love to take part in.”

“So call him right now,” Odelia advises.

“I’d like my husband to talk to him — and he’s learning now.”

Her words are infused with pride. And there’s a genuine smile on her face, with no flood pushing up against it. Everything is going to turn out just fine. She knows it. Just a little patience, and soon the sunshine will come.

to be continued…

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 889)