Chapter 54
Another Exhibition
A few days after photographing the flag, Lily said goodbye to Eilat and moved in with her parents.
The students at the workshop were completely shocked by the announcement of her departure.
They begged her to stay for a farewell party they wanted to hold in her honor.
Lily refused. From the moment she made her decision, she was determined to leave the city at any cost. No parties.
In silence. She was sure that living in the center would make things easier for her.
She never imagined how much she would miss the pace of life in Eilat.
From her parents’ house, she went to her studies, to the galleries, and to the hospital for tests.
I had to remain in the southern city alone for a few more weeks, until a replacement doctor arrived at the base.
In the meantime, I traveled up to Tel-Aviv two or three times a week.
On one of the weekends when I stayed in the center, we found an apartment to rent in Ramat Aviv.
She chose the room facing south toward Eilat as her workroom.
For the exhibition in Rehovot, Lily prepared twelve drawings on identical sheets of white cardboard.
She bought charcoal, watercolors, and gouache – materials she had hardly used before.
I wasn’t surprised. I had known from the start that this time she would do something completely different. I could feel it.
Her behavior also changed. For reasons unclear to me, Lily decided not to include me in the process of creating the work.
Maybe she wanted to surprise me. Maybe she was hiding something.
Maybe she didn’t feel comfortable sharing it with me.
This time, I was especially anxious about the content of the work, about the darkness she might be concealing inside.
I wanted her to share it with me, but I also didn’t want to pressure her.
From her responses to my questions, I realized she had decided that only once she had finished would she present the work to me.
Perhaps it was a response to my refusal to fully cooperate with her back in the desert.
“I want to finish the work this weekend,” she told me about two weeks before the opening of the exhibition.
“You haven’t even started,” I whispered in her ear. “Right?”
“True, but I don’t want to get stuck. I have to finish it. I’ve worked out an idea. I hope you’ll like it.”
“What’s the subject?”
“Don’t be clever. You know I don’t tell until I’m done.”
I understood that what mattered most to her was that the new work – whatever it would look like, whatever it would contain – would please me. At that stage, she cared less about what the visitors would think.
“Why not tell me? P-l-e-a-s-e!”
“P-l-e-a-s-e, be patient!” she answered, imitating me.
The decline in Lily’s kidney function forced her onto a special diet.
Therefore, she preferred not to join me for Shabbat at my parents’ house, so as not to upset my mother.
This time, I used the “exhibition and the pressure on her” as an excuse for her absence.
Later, when I returned from my parents’ house, she told me that about half of her work was already finished.
“Can I see it?” I asked politely.
“If you insist … but I’d rather you see it only when it’s complete… I promise it will be much more impressive!”
“So do you want me to…?”
“If you don’t mind.” She cut me off.
“Aren’t you tired? Don’t you want to rest?”
“No!”
“Then I’ll go rest. But when I wake up, you’ll show me.”
“All right.” She hugged me in loving complicity.
“Finished?” I surprised her with a hug from behind in her workroom.
“The work isn’t here – it’s in the living room,” she said.
“So should we go there?” I asked, as if it were miles away.
“Close your eyes, and open them only when I say so.”
I closed my eyes. Lily led me five careful steps from her workroom to the living room.
“Now!” she whispered in my ear.
I was stunned.
On the living room floor, with the furniture pushed aside, lay the completed work.
It was composed of twelve white cardboard sheets, arranged like a crossword puzzle, three by four.
On each was a drawing, in black and white and in color, of a disabled or handicapped patient: A man on crutches, several wheelchair users – one of whom seemed to be in an imaginary race, an elderly woman walking with a cane accompanied by a nurse, an amputee with a cane in motion, and opposite him, an amputee missing an arm standing and staring.
An old woman in a wheelchair gazing at a pregnant woman leaning on a crutch, and a few more disabled figures in different postures or movements.
All of the figures in the drawings wore dark sunglasses.
“When this is hung on the wall, it will be “Wallpaper of the Disabled,” she told me.
For the first time, Lily didn’t wait for me to name her work – she named it herself.
“Wallpaper of the Disabled?” I repeated.
“Yes, ‘Wallpaper of the Disabled.’ They will hang proudly on the wall.”
“Every time I’m hospitalized, I look at those who sit in wheelchairs. I feel they’re embarrassed, even ashamed,” she explained the work.
“I don’t want them to be ashamed. Look how they all hide their eyes.
But in Rehovot, at the exhibition, and afterward here in our living room, they’ll be free.
I want those who don’t want to see them in the hospital to see them today here, and tomorrow in the exhibition.
They’re human beings. You can’t just erase them, ignore them. ”
“I never thought of it that way,” I thought to myself, moved by her sensitivity.
“For you, the hospital is another world,” she continued. “You go there as a doctor, as a husband. I go as a patient. Think about it – the perspectives we each have on the same place where we met are completely different.”
“Are you angry with me?” I sensed a kind of restrained anger in her voice.
“I could never be angry with you. I love you too much.”
“But Lily, you go in and out of hospital. Each time you get a new chance.”
“Yes, I go in and out. But the disabled remain disabled forever. If not in the hospital, then everywhere else. It doesn’t matter where they are, they are always hiding.”
“So you’re bringing them out – to living rooms. To the gallery. To the spotlight.” I tried to understand.
“I wish I could. But I know no one would dare hang this, this wallpaper, on their wall at home.”
“Yes… regular wallpaper usually has flowers, sun, sea, light.”
“They’re much more than flowers, than sun and light. They are the light. They are life. Despite all the suffering and rejection by society, they live,” she said with a clear and calm voice.
On one hand, I was stunned; on the other, I understood that not only was there truth in her words, but her act was profoundly special.
I awaited the encounter with the public at the exhibition.
Saul, Lily’s brother, and I worked together on how to display the works. The museum management allowed us to hang the collage of the disabled on the wall.
“It’s very impressive,” I told her when we finished hanging the works.
“Do you like it?”
“It’s hard to say like,” I tried to put into words what I felt. “It’s such a difficult work, but one you can’t ignore. The suffering of the disabled is immense, and it comes through in the work in an extraordinary way. They look alive.”
“If you didn’t know me, would you hang this in your living room?” Lily looked me straight in the eye.
“I don’t think so,” I answered with the same directness.
“I love you,” she said.
“And I you,” I replied.