Before goldfish die, they swim for a few hours on their sides, turn over, sink into the shallow water, and float up to the surface again. I once had a little orange goldfish that spent the whole day dying like this, until at dusk it sunk to the bottom of the bowl, its eyes open and its body twisted into a question mark.

I took a plastic cup and fished out the corpse. I went to the kitchen with the cup and poured the water carefully into the sink. I laid the fish on the black marble counter, took a dagger, and began cutting it up. The little shit kept slipping away from me on the counter, so I had to grip it by the tail and return it to the scene of the crime. For about an hour and a half I worked on that fish, until I’d turned its body into little strips you could measure in millimeters.

Then I looked at the pieces. In very ancient times, in the land of Canaan, righteous men would sacrifice bigger animals than this to God. When they cut up a lamb, they would be left with big, bloody, significant pieces in their hands, and their covenant would be a real covenant.

I seasoned the strips of goldfish, put a bit on my finger, lit a match, and brought the flame up to the flesh of the fish until it was a little charred, and my finger too began to smell like a steak. Then I threw my head back, opened my mouth wide, and let the first strip of fish fall straight into my digestive system.

I did the same thing with the rest of the fish, and when I was finished I sat down to contemplate my dying dog, a fourteen-year-old cocker spaniel bitch who was suffering from heart failure. For fifteen days I sat on the armchair and looked at her, at her dry, lolling tongue, her rapid breathing, her dulling eyes. During the course of these fifteen days I gave her food and water, and, of course, medication. She ate and drank next to nothing, and she threw up the medicine. I hooked her up to an IV, into which I injected the drugs, and this helped a little.

I was sorry that I hadn’t treated the fish to an IV too, but I immediately dismissed this thought on the grounds that it didn’t seem possible to find a vein in such a tiny goldfish. Altogether, it didn’t seem possible to find a vein in any fish, even a herring.

After fifteen days of continuous dying, when she no longer ate, stopped drinking, and the medication too became worthless—I allowed myself to open the medicine cabinet and prepared an anesthetic injection from which she’d never wake up.

I went up to her, I stroked her. She licked my fingers with her cleft, sore tongue. She licked my face, her sores scratched my skin, but I didn’t mind.

I laid her on my desk, rolling gentle words around on my tongue, murmuring them to her and stroking her orange head while in my other hand was the hypodermic needle.

Even before I’d finished injecting her, my dog closed her eyes and fell asleep. I stroked her and released her neck from the collar bearing all her metal immunization tags, each of them engraved with my address and the promise of a reward for her safe return.

I sat down on my barstool and looked at my fat dog, wondering how long it would take from the moment of the injection for sleep to change into death, and how exactly this changing of the guard took place.

My pet’s breathing grew increasingly heavy, deep, and full of significance. Each breath thought itself the last, but another one would always follow to steal away its title. Until…It was finished. The dog had had its day.

I called the vet. It was the middle of the night and I woke him up. A few days earlier, when I’d gone to consult him, he’d mumbled something about a man who buried pets for seventy shekels. I asked him for the phone number. He grumbled, “Can’t it wait till morning?” and immediately read out the number.

I spoke to the gravedigger and said what I had to say and was just about to hang up when he suddenly broke in:

“I hope you don’t think you’re coming with me, Miss…”

“Excuse me?” I said in astonishment. “Why not? It’s my dog you’re burying after all. I have every right to be present at the event. What have you got to hide?”

“Listen, lady,” he barked, “your seventy shekels is no big deal. Dogs die every other minute. I bury them in the dunes, near the sea. I do it at night, quietly, by myself. Take it or leave it.”

 

The window was wide open, and beyond it, the dark sky was visible, dotted with stars. I was busy working. There was a ring at the door and I cut myself. Blood dripped from three of my fingers. I wrapped them in a little towel and hurried to the door. In front of me stood a short man with a large face and a sagging stomach. He introduced himself by his full name, which immediately evaporated from my mind, and noticed my blood-soaked towel.

“Allow me,” he said and came closer.

“No, there’s no need,” I said. “Really.”

But the guest noticed my pallor and shaking knees, led me to the green velvet sofa, and laid me down on it. Then he hurried to the bathroom, took the first-aid kit out of the medicine cabinet, and as he cleaned my wounds with the gentleness of a medical intern, he joked that if he’d come any later, I would have had to pay double, both for the cocker and for myself.

He bandaged my fingers, went into the other room, put the cocker spaniel into a black garbage bag, hoisted it onto his back, and asked for the money in cash. I took the notes out of my pocket. I felt like rolling them up into a tight wad and shoving them horizontally between the gravedigger’s upper lip and his nose, like a moustache, but all I did was hand them over and say good-bye, thinking that I would never see him again.

Scarcely a minute had passed, however, before I did—in the distance, from the heights of my thirty-seventh-floor apartment. He tossed the bag with the dog into the trunk and sat down to start the car. But he couldn’t get it going, and I thought to myself, here’s your chance, Dolly. I ran outside, got into the cylindrical glass elevator, which moved up and down in a series of unnecessary spirals in order to save energy, and made it to the ground floor in time. In a crouched run I made my way across the asphalt, slowly opened the back door, and crawled inside. The little criminal hadn’t succeeded in starting the engine yet and was spewing out a sea of curses. It was ten minutes before the charmless solo of the motor was heard, and we set out. I glanced at my watch, it was eight minutes past two, while my compass showed that he was driving west, just as I’d thought.

 

Twenty minutes later the car signaled a right turn and we drove onto a dirt road full of humps and potholes, on either side of which garish prostitutes displayed themselves. The driver, who apparently had an erection, muttered something to himself, swerved sharply to give one of them a fright, and laughed a wheezing laugh that only subsided some minutes later, when he had turned off the road and receded from the prostitute’s view.

The car stopped abruptly and he jumped out with a spade in his hand. I too stole out, into the damp, salty wind blowing from the sea. I hid behind a hillock covered with yellow evening primroses, which didn’t remind me of anything, and settled down to watch.

The round pit was dug, and all that remained for this crook to do was drop the bitch into it and cover her up. But instead of finishing his business, he started a whole new ball game. He took the cocker spaniel out of the bag, pulled a pitchfork from the trunk of his car, and began mutilating the corpse, stabbing it, decapitating it, amputating its legs, throwing whatever was left of my dog into the pit and hastily covering it up.

I trembled all over, enraged, a battle cry on my lips. The man turned in surprise and I, in my grief, snatched the pitchfork from his hand, and instead of sticking it into the ground in a civilized manner, I drove it into the gravedigger’s stomach with all the strength I’d accumulated over my years of manual labor.

He doubled up in pain. I went berserk and finished him off in a couple of minutes.

Puffing and panting, I stood there for one minute longer. Then I caught my breath, gathered up the pieces of my dog, and buried them in the light of the crescent moon. Finally, I wiped my damp and itchy brow.

I started the car and abandoned myself to a sense of peace I hadn’t felt for ages. In this state of serenity I drove that box on wheels back to the main road.

 

A few seconds after I’d passed the deserted, brightly lit gas station, noticing and not noticing the wavering human silhouette next to the petrol tanks, I began to hear sounds that were incompatible with my surroundings. I couldn’t locate these sounds anywhere in the landscape, they seemed to be coming from inside the car itself. I pulled up to the side of the road, and my eyes came to rest on a black plastic bag lying at the back of the car, on the ledge between the backseat and the rear window.

Little cars, mostly Volkswagen Beetles, drove past me in both directions. I waited until the road was momentarily clear, knelt on my seat, and leaned over toward the sound. I opened the plastic bag, and there, wrapped in Health Department diapers, lay a blue, hungry baby.

I rummaged in the bag for documents, looking around for some clues as to the dead man’s identity, and in the end, underneath the driver’s seat, I found some old income tax forms for a shoe store.

The baby screamed and made sucking motions with his lips. I didn’t know what to do to calm him down. I undid the diaper and found a festering hole, two centimeters wide, in the middle of his stomach, surrounded by dried blood. I picked him up and placed him in the passenger seat.

Cars flashed past, all of them Volkswagen Beetles. I threw a glance at my companion. I began to drive, the street lights flickering across his face. The headlights of the cars opposite me dazzled my eyes. I took another peek at the pit in his stomach and remembered coming across the story of a man who’d lived a not inconsiderable number of years ago, and who had agreed, in the interest of medical science, to have a hole left in his stomach, which enabled his physicians to study the functioning of his digestive system. I’d read about this man when I was in my twenties in Katmandu, while I was studying medicine there. I was the only Jew in the university.

 

I parked the car in the building’s underground parking lot. In the cylindrical elevator, which was made of thick, transparent glass, I pressed 37, and within seconds I was in my official residence. It was already morning. I knew that I had to act quickly and efficiently.

I took some anesthetic from one of my cupboards, and consulted my medical books to check the correct amount for anesthetizing a newborn baby. The frogs in the glass aquariums croaked in alarm, thinking I was about to use it on them. I laid the blue, naked baby on my operating table. He screamed. His little mouth gaped like a gondola. I silenced him with the injection, disinfected him, sewed up his stomach, and bandaged the wound. While he was sleeping in the recovery room, hooked up to an IV of drugs and minerals, I walked the streets, and within half an hour I was back in my apartment with everything a baby could need. I prepared a soft, padded room for him, and went out onto the balcony for a cigarette.

I pleaded with myself, I tried building a logical case for postponing the execution for a while, but instead of the voice of reason making itself heard, the situation took control of my eyeballs. They kept looking up, higher and higher, as if there was always something to see up there—more and more sky, a stairway of sky, a Tower of Babel of sky, instead of one deep, blue, unambiguous heaven.

There was no alternative: I injected myself with a sedative that calmed me down, and for the time being the infant’s life was spared.

I tried to get my mother on the phone, but the line was busy. When I was a child this woman told me about a mother who’d put her baby in the washing machine and switched it on. The judge sentenced her to life plus hard labor in the prison laundry, as a laundress. So deeply did my mother imprint this story in my mind that even now, while putting the baby’s clothes into the washing machine, I imagined seeing the baby in there too, and I fainted.

The baby woke me with his screams, and again—because the influence of the sedative had worn off by now—I wanted to strangle him. But I said to myself: Why waste your energy, Dolly? In any case, that weakling’s going to die in a few days’ time, of an infection or neglect or carelessness, and even if he does get himself murdered in the end, so what? He should have been dead already anyway.

Nevertheless, my brain started working overtime thinking of a name for the infant. I thought of “Kid.” I assumed that he wouldn’t survive the age of three. I went on racking my brain for names, but all the while the baby was screaming so hard he nearly burst. I injected an anesthetic into his spine, and he shut up.

I lay down on my giant bed and watched the TV shows picked up by the satellite dishes on the roof, smoking like a chimney as I did so. For a moment I caught myself whistling for the dog, and a string snapped in my body, C sharp, then I closed my eyes, and decided to call him Son, so that if anyone ever called him a son of a bitch, he’d take it personally and beat them up for the both of us.

 

During the first days of Son’s life, I turned thirty, and it was also five years since I had moved into the four hundred story tower. During these years I hadn’t made a single friend among my neighbors, except for Itzik, the magician from the forty-seventh floor. When I’d run out of brown sugar or guinea pigs or antidepressants, I would go up to see him.

About a week after I became an unwilling mother, at midnight, I was all ready to go to sleep, but sleep eluded me like a toddler hiding from his parents between the concrete pillars of a parking lot in Ashdod.

There was a heat wave blowing in and it was hot as hell. The air-conditioners weren’t working, the lab animals were restless. Only the baby was sleeping—like a corpse.

I realized while still in the elevator that Itzik was throwing a party, no expense spared, no questions asked. Every few weeks this guy would invite all the magicians in town, male and female, to one hell of a party.

The host opened the door. Behind his back appeared the heads of his colleagues, men and women heavily made up.

“Excusez-moi,” I simpered, “I wonder if you have a packet full of yellow pills?”

“Pardonnez-moi,” said Itzik, “is the shoemaker barefoot?”

“Just say yes or no,” I urged him.

“Pardonnez-moi,” he said, bowed, and retired into the room, leaving the rectangular space of the door full of dozens of faces examining me with interest. After ten minutes the host reappeared with only twenty pills and a glass of water.

“The stock’s finished, Doctor. All I can offer you is an invitation to come in and join us.”

He handed me the pills and I swallowed them all on the spot. For almost ten years I’ve been taking yellow antidepressant pills, which have had no effect on me at all. They were recommended to me by a Thai computer science student I fucked about ten times. I don’t know for sure why I go on swallowing more than twenty of these pills a day. I swallow them, they have no taste and no effect either.

In Itzik’s living room the magicians were performing that trick where they put some female into a box with three compartments and stick swords into her, and in the end she comes out without a scratch. But this time something went wrong, and terror swept across the magicians like a jet of water from a revolving sprinkler.

“Ai, ai,” screamed the model-magician, swords cleaving her body at all kinds of sharp angles without shedding a single drop of blood.

Itzik looked at me, white as an angel. I knew that as a doctor I had to act quickly, but at the same time, as a human being, I didn’t really care if the girl died.

“I’m begging you, Dolly, do something.” He went down on his knees in a theatrical pose, taking my hand and tenderly kissing my knuckles, which he knew would be hard for me to resist. His lips were dry and cracked from all the forced smiles he smiled at the children’s birthday parties, where he put on a double act as a clown and a magician at once.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “What’s done is done. There was an accident, and the girl died.”

“Please, Doctor Dolly. I’m begging you. Take pity on Noga Hasson. She’s one of our best. It could happen to anyone.”

However much I hated myself for it, when I heard the words “Doctor Dolly”—it gave me a thrill, and Itzik the magician knew it. I went down to my clinic, and a little while later I returned with my bag. All the magicians were sitting on the living room floor playing games that were appropriate to their IQ level. They entered into it wholeheartedly, excited and enthusiastic like a bunch of monkeys.

In the meantime I removed the swords from her body, but far from feeling a sense of dedication and importance, confronting the exalted task of saving a human life, I felt like performing hara-kiri on the patient instead.

After everything was over, the magicians laid the lady on the sofa and licked her wounds, while she kept saying thank you, thank you. At the same time, people came up to me and kissed me on the cheek, and I exchanged a blushing smile with Itzik, who’d fucked me more than twice.

I went home sick of my life and took it out on the bunnies. I tied their ears together, one rabbit’s ear to another rabbit’s ear, I cut the ears off two other rabbits, one ear each, and sewed them back on the wrong way round.

 

A thunderstorm began, and heavy clouds, weighing a ton and a half each, collided and inundated Dolly City with blessed rain, flooding roads, filling wells, and shutting mouths.

I went out to the kitchen balcony and lifted the three tiles under which I hid my money. I counted very little and my heart fell. I knew that I didn’t have enough money to get through the winter in the style to which I was accustomed. I didn’t even have enough to buy firewood.

A piercing chill spread through the house and sank its teeth into my bones. I looked at the snowflakes covering the town with a soft, white blanket. In the grate my last log was burning. I shut the windows, pulled down the blinds, and drew the curtains. I took the polar bear skin I’d once bought in Alaska, which was spread on one of my armchairs, and covered the baby with it. But he was still cold, and in order to forget the chill I began to occupy myself with him. I weighed him, measured the circumference of his head and his length, and entered all this data into the American growth chart. As I sat at my secretaire, a book caught my eye. It was a sixteenth-century book on pediatrics, which I’d never opened before. I took it down from the shelf and began to read. It was written in Latin and described horrible childhood diseases, all widespread and fatal at the time. Instead of putting it back and taking down something soothing about dreams, or looking at a Botticelli print, I read on voraciously, and the name of every disease sent a shiver through my heart.

The mite went on sleeping soundly in his cradle, but the information streaming into my brain made my blood run cold. For some reason, I couldn’t help associating these diseases with my son. The possibility that he might catch them horrified me, I simply couldn’t bear the thought of some disease getting its claws into him. How conscious I was at those moments of the heavy hand of oblivion, which is nothing but infinity in one of its many disguises. I remember I was sucked into some place outside the normal atmosphere. I was terrified, and my terror had a magic, addictive effect. I remember that right at the beginning it was quite exciting. It was like standing a centimeter away from a racing train and feeling the shock waves of that heavy object hurtling through space. I thought to myself, yes, Dolly, fear, the greatest, most terrible fear of them all—it too is merely the shock waves of death.

I found myself lying on the floor, foaming at the mouth. I wiped it and hurried to the bathroom to put my head under ice-cold water. I let the water massage my scalp.

I wrapped my head in a towel, and made up my mind to try to control the terrible fear of losing my child by protecting him as best I could against whatever diseases were out there. I knew that I could never overtake fate, but I decided to try and fight it anyway. I said to myself that the world was full of pitfalls, full of bottomless pits, abysses behind the loquat trees, but that I, as a mother, had to fight against all these troubles, I had to protect this child against countless evil afflictions and natural disasters. I had to keep him safe, keep the lightning and thunder from striking him and the earth from swallowing him up. I declared war to the bitter end: Dolly against the rest of the world. It was as if I said to God that if this child was my responsibility—then he was my responsibility. I didn’t want favors from anyone, including His Holiness, I didn’t want anyone else to do the job for me.

First of all, I decided, I would inoculate the child against as many diseases as possible. I ran outside to buy vaccines against tetanus, whooping cough, diphtheria, polio, measles, jaundice, scarlet fever, small pox, influenza, etc., and I gave them to him all at once—although I knew you shouldn’t do this. I couldn’t stop myself, I couldn’t control my maternal instinct. The child reacted immediately with a high fever and convulsions. It wasn’t that it was anything new to me—in the villages of Nepal infants had died in my hands, mothers had torn the bodies of their dead children out of my arms—but this time, with this child, the thought that I might have harmed him sent me into a tailspin of guilt.

I gave him something to bring down his fever, and from forty degrees it plummeted to thirty-four. Hypothermia, the diagnosis echoed grimly inside me. I trembled. The child trembled too and turned blue. I gave him an emergency resuscitation treatment, and after the color began to return to his cheeks, I sat down with him on the rocking chair and rocked for a long time, until he fell asleep.

I put him down in his cot and injected myself with additional sedatives, but to no effect. I lay down on the treatment bed of the domestic hospital I’d set up, and connected myself to the electric current. I gave myself a few jolts to get my head straight.

But I overdid the dosage, and my heart began to fibrillate. I immediately massaged my chest and put an oxygen mask over my face, but nothing helped—I was clinically dead.

 

Three hours later I opened my eyes. My mother sat opposite me and embroidered. At her feet, on the trampoline, lay the baby. My mother was embroidering a tapestry with a picture of an eighteenth-century woman standing in the middle of a forest and carving the letter S on a tree trunk. My mother was sure that the young woman was carving her lover’s name on the tree—but I was sure it was her own name, because she was egocentric as hell.

It was my mother who’d revived me with a special tea she’d brewed according to the specifications of her homeopath. The old woman was firmly opposed to conventional medicine and believed in all other forms of therapy and remedy sneered at by certified physicians. She was convinced that all doctors were murderers, and that it was the doctors who’d killed my father in a sinister conspiracy that also included the cigarette companies and the manufacturers of the hydrochloric acid he’d used to get stains off the bath.

I escorted my mother to the elevator. The transparent door closed behind her, and I watched her sink down through the transparent floors. I ran to the balcony and managed to catch sight of her crossing the street.

“Mother,” I screamed, “Mother, Mother—” The trains rushed past at the speed of a typhoon.

 

I ordered from abroad the most up-to-date medical encyclopedia about children’s diseases and their treatment. For days on end I devoured all the names and descriptions and learned them by heart. This was a terrible mistake, because the up-to-date information was far more complex than I’d imagined, and when at last I understood it, it felt like some sort of sex maniac had been let loose inside me, wreaking havoc.

Frantic, I rushed to my laboratory. I looked at all the cages, at the animals and their bleary eyes, at the centrifuges, the bottles, the test-tubes, the cupboard where I kept solutions with billions of germs of dangerous diseases, supposed by many to be extinct, but which I had succeeded in my experiments to revive and coax into resisting common vaccines.

I shuddered. My hair stood on end, the heavy curtains on the windows soared, the copy machine duplicated the same document a thousand times without any command on my part. The X-ray machine shot sparks and crackled.

The animals saw me shivering and scurried round their cages in panic. They knew what I knew—that I had to prevent my son from being infected by these diseases at all costs. I poured disinfectant over my hands and scrubbed them for half an hour, until my skin puckered and began to peel and my fingerprints were almost rubbed out. Then I filled a bathtub with an antiseptic solution and sat in it for an hour and a half considering what to do with the laboratory. Should I set it on fire? Should I employ a lab assistant to operate it and give her instructions from a safe distance? Or perhaps I should lock it up, and let nature take its course.

While I sat trembling and twitching between these alternatives, the terrible fear of my son’s possible premature demise continued to mount, until I found myself standing over him and watching him breathe, for fear that he might suddenly be snatched from me by crib death. The names of diseases were no longer simply names, but menacing, dangerous entities in and of themselves. I’d inflated these disasters to mythological proportions, and it was driving me out of my mind.

A voice kept calling out inside me: Destroy the laboratory, bury your sinister career for the sake of the infant’s bright tomorrows. Burn it down, for the sake of the next generation.

I locked the laboratory and barred the door so that no disease lurking in the depths of some test-tube would escape and get its claws into my son. As a doctor I knew that the only remedy against disease was to stay healthy.

 

All that night I stopped myself from breaking into the lab and trying something new. I touched the black wooden door, behind which swarmed the life over which I exerted my control: mice running round little cages, rabbits pink and sick with ten diseases at once, suffering the torments of hell and wishing they were dead. In another minute I was going to break in and drown myself in these diseases of my own creation. In my terror I rushed to the baby’s room. I ripped off the blankets and saw the little head, the tiny body. I strained my eyes—could it be possible? The child had stopped breathing! I ran to fetch the stethoscope, and put the cold metal disk on the place where the little heart was situated. My ears filled with rapid heartbeats, and I was relieved.

I changed his diaper, and as the child lay naked on his back I suddenly realized that I never had him circumcised. Right away I opened the phone directory and looked for a mohel to perform the ceremony. Since I had no recommendations, I chose a name at random.

I dialed the number, and while I waited I tried to imagine what a mohel’s voice sounds like. I imagined that it would probably be hoarse due to wear-and-tear, and indeed the man was very hoarse. As a matter of fact, when we met at the intersection of two streets undermining each other, he asked me to do him a favor and push him under a moving train instead of paying him for the job.

He told me that he had cancer of the vocal cords, and that he couldn’t afford to lose his voice. All his life he’d wanted to be a cantor in a synagogue but his voice wasn’t good enough. His brother’s was, and he was a famous cantor. I stole a glance at the mohel’s face, purple in the neon light, and got myself out of there.

I came home and burst into Son’s room. I whipped out my stethoscope and checked to see if he was alive. He was alive, and he even looked at me with a hint of reproach in his eyes. But I couldn’t control myself. I wanted to give him a blood test. He seemed pale, as if he had a vitamin B12 deficiency.

I rushed like a woman possessed to my clinic, next to the lab. I turned the key and went in to get sterile instruments. I cut the child in his foot and took blood. And then I panicked again, fearing I had lost him, and I checked his heart again. His heartbeat was normal, but I panicked. I thought I heard a murmur.

I wanted to perform open-heart surgery on him. I ran to the operating room and started getting it ready. While I was sterilizing the knives, I remembered that I’d left the baby with an open wound, and he must be losing a lot of blood. I burst into the room and saw my son fading away as his blood dripped to the floor.

Blood, blood, I needed a blood donation. But where was I going to get a blood donation from? I wasn’t the blood bank, and I didn’t have their phone number either. The few people I’d operated on in my life had all died on the operating table. My career was a living example of the rule: the operation was a success but the patient died. The little mite’s sheet was completely red by now. Yes, the incision I had made was too deep. I ran back to the clinic, took out my sewing kit and closed him up with butterfly strips. I examined his heart. The beat was even and distant, like war drums at the other end of the world.

I’m losing him—the thought echoed hollowly inside me, and once more I was filled with fear. But I got hold of myself. I became professional. I cut a vein in my arm, inserted a tube, and prayed that it would work.

When I opened my eyes, my life gained a new dimension. The color had come back to my baby’s cheeks, the blinds were open, my mother was sitting in the rocking chair and embroidering, and two cabbage butterflies were fluttering about the room.

The baby’s cot was clean, everything was white and fresh.

“How long have you been sitting here?” I asked, still dazed.

“A few minutes, only a few minutes.” She fell silent. I raised myself slightly and leaned on my elbows.

“Tell me, Dolly,” she began. “Why don’t you throw out those disgusting mice of yours? Why are your knives dirty? Why are your hypodermic needles rusty? What are you trying to prove—that there’s no God?” She fixed me with her beady little eyes.

“I’m trying to find a cure for cancer,” I said after a long pause.

“Don’t mock me,” she said. “This isn’t the way you look for a cure for cancer. This is the way you get up to monkey business. You only cut for the sake of cutting.”

“That’s not true,” I defended myself.

“And why didn’t you invite me to the baby’s bris?” she asked after a moment.

“What bris?” I ripped the diaper from my baby’s loins and realized—she was right.

“You’re getting senile, aren’t you?” she said and pointed to the four photo albums lying at the end of the room. I leafed through one of them, it was incredible: the standard pictures of a bris in a big hall, with a band and refreshments. There were a lot of people there, but it was impossible to distinguish them from each other.

“There’s a video cassette too,” she said and pointed to the snowy television screen.

I went through all the albums and watched the video over and over again, but I was unable to make out a single face. Naturally I couldn’t see the mohel either. The only one to come out clearly on the video was my sister, who was tangoing on the dance floor. I called her up to ask who the mohel was, and she gave me the phone number of the national airline, Pan-T, baggage department.

When I phoned Pan-T, I had a déjà vu. My father had worked for Pan-T for thirty-two years before he died.

In the baggage department they told me that they did indeed have a mohel working there, and they put him on the line. The mohel was discreet; he refused to tell me who had hired him, revealing only that it was a tall, sturdy man with silver hair, and as far as he knew, a senior pilot with the airline. He thought he was the baby’s grandfather. I asked for more details about the child’s potential grandfather, but the man told me no more.

I gave my mother a sleeping pill, and she fell off the chair and lay snoring on the carpet. I fed the baby, nurtured him with some anti-infection medicines, and put him to sleep. I took two pistols from my armory, one for my right hand and one for my left, together with a few other gadgets, and went out.

It was August, snow was falling softly. It covered all the roads and pavements, and people were walking about wearing Russian fur hats. I stopped a cab and asked the driver to take me to Ben Gurion Airport. At Ben Gurion it was summer, the sun beat down on the cosmopolitan heads with calm tyranny. I went into the public lavatories and peeled off a few layers of clothing. I put them into a suitcase and sent them home.

Resolutely I strode into my late father’s office, the company’s salaries department. I knew they had an up-to-date list of the pilots’ names.

I whipped out one of my pistols and shouted at the secretary:

“The pilots’ names, and be quick about it!”

“But it’s confidential, Dolly,” she said, and I stuck a bullet in her heart.

A dwarfish clerk advanced slowly towards a filing cabinet, murmuring that he was crazy about Luis Buñuel. I gave him one between the ribs. The new head of the department, who’d taken my father’s place, was shaving underneath the table. I let him have it. Nothing personal.

I opened the filing cabinets. Everything was still organized the same way. I recognized my father’s handwriting on a few of the labels. I found the list of pilots without any problem—all I had to do was look for the names with the biggest salaries—and strode rapidly out of the shed where my father had killed himself.

I entered the boss’s office and injected Ashkenazi\Idelman\Mimelman with galloping syphilis on the grounds that he’d intimidated and humiliated my father. He begged me to cure him, and I pretended to consider it and promised to give him a massage, and so got him to come home with me.

As soon as I walked into the flat with my prisoner I gave him a shot in the ass, laid him down on a stretcher, tied him down, and suspended a string from the ceiling with a hungry, demented rat hanging at the end of it. I didn’t know which of them I was torturing more, but it gave me a thrill anyway.

Then I had another severe attack, and instead of taking it out on the bare chest of the prisoner, I took it out on my baby. Again the two words “heart murmur” surfaced in my mind, like a rustle heard in the undergrowth during an ambush, and I froze where I stood, like a hypnotized person when she hears someone say the magic trigger words that have been implanted in her mind. I remembered that in the heat of my revenge, I’d forgotten to examine the little one’s heart.

I appeared in his room with the lethal tray. I tied the green surgeon’s mask around my face and began giving him every test in the book. Everything was fine, the kid was okay, he had a fine heart, not a murmur to be heard. But even though the child was a hundred percent healthy, I decided to cut him open. I succumbed to the chronic doubt from which I suffer. I wanted to check and see with my own eyes that everything was really in order, and then to check up on my checkup, and then to make sure that there hadn’t been any slipups in the re-examination, and so on and so forth.

I gave the child anesthetic, I put him to sleep, and I did it. I slipped my hands into white gloves and began slicing into his thorax. His internal organs were revealed to my searching gaze, his heart, his lungs. Once I’d opened him up, I poked around in there too. Then I opened up his stomach, I held an organ roll call, I demanded to know if they were all present and correct.

Everything was in place, there were no deviations from the norm. I confirmed this again and again, I repeated my examination tirelessly, I opened books and compared notes—everything was one hundred percent okay.

All this went on for about six hours. I closed him up and gave him a blood transfusion to revive him. I was reassured. I sat in the armchair, let my head fall back, and looked at the second hand of the clock on the wall. In the interrogation room my father’s employer screamed and whimpered. Because of him it took me more than an hour to hear my little lamb bleating, and I hurried to his room.

I looked at the huge scar running all the way down his body. Instead of being sorry that he wouldn’t be able to wear bikini briefs—I was consumed by doubts, I disappeared into them like Saint-Exupéry disappeared into the sky. I was overwhelmed with regret for not having operated on his head while I was at it. I wiped this thought clear out of my mind, and went to change the prisoner’s rat. The hero didn’t blink an eye, even though his face was already torn to shreds.

There was an unspoken agreement between us that he deserved it.

 

I took the list of pilots and a can of Diet Coke and went out to the balcony. Under the open sky everything looks clearer. I marked the names of the pilots who seemed tall and silver-haired with a fluorescent marker. I dialed the number of one of the silver princes of the air and his wife answered.

“Hello,” I said, “can I speak to Armand Levy?”

“Who wants him?”

“Dolly. Doctor Dolly. I’m speaking from Pakistan and I haven’t got any time to waste. Please hurry!”

“Sorry, Armand’s not at home. He’s on a flight.”

“When will he be back?”

“Tomorrow at eight.”

The baby screamed. I hung up. The boss had fainted. I pulled up the string with the rat, and smeared his open wounds with rabbit droppings. Immediately after that I picked up my son and rocked him to and fro to calm him down.

I sung him various songs as we approached the balcony railing. Sometimes, even in Dolly City, I feel like a stranger. I look at the traffic jams, I listen to the ding-dong of the big clock tower, the gong of the Chinese restaurant, but in spite of it all I begin to tremble, I want to go home—even though this is my home.

I looked down at the trash heaps, the carcasses, the distant ships, and I felt dizzy. For a moment I was close to tossing the baby out. Ten times over I rechecked that I was still holding him, moving back before I did something I’d be sorry for later. It was the same lousy trap. The mere fact that it was theoretically possible for me to throw him off the balcony was enough to give me the heebie-jeebies—as if I’d already done it.

I called a welder and ordered bars. I said to myself, with children it’s no joke, you don’t take risks.

An hour later there was a ring at the door. The welder and I went from room to room, balcony to balcony, window to window. I even asked him to bar the holes in the bath and the basin. I don’t want any trouble, I told him, you might as well put little bars on the taps too.

“Lady,” he finally said, “are you completely crazy?”

“I only want to be sure,” I said.

“I won’t be a part of this lunacy, sorry.” He turned to go.

“What do you care?” I called after him. “I’m paying you aren’t I?”

He turned round, and with the same movement he flung his ruler to the far end of the room.

“Pick that up,” I said authoritatively. “I don’t have to put up with your tantrums.”

“My tantrums? Mine?” he yelled and turned completely red. “My tantrums, you say? Mine?” And he stiffened for a moment and then fell senseless to the floor, and there was nothing left for me to do but confirm his death, pick him up, and throw him down to the hungry Arab workers living on the first floors of the building—let them eat him if they liked. In the same manner I got rid of my prisoner, of whom there was hardly anything left.

 

I called another welder who didn’t ask any questions. By midnight the whole house was barred. I stood on the balcony and breathed. The air was still, and the tops of the soft towers, which usually swayed in the wind, were stiff and erect as masts. The bars were ruining the view, without which my life wasn’t worth living. Shivers ran down my spine, my forehead was as cold as steel. I made up my mind that first thing in the morning I’d call in a welder to get rid of all these bars. They were driving me crazy, and if I was afraid that in a moment of stupefaction I might toss the child out of the window—well there were only two possibilities, either I would or I wouldn’t. The fact that there were only two options available, and that the possibilities weren’t endless, gave me a brief feeling of confidence. Confidence in what, I don’t know.

In the morning a welder arrived and took the bars down. After he piled them up on the living room floor he said: “What do you want me to do with them, Miss?”

“As far as I’m concerned you can swallow them, shithead,” I said, upset. The welder stared at me in astonishment.

“Excuse me, Miss, but there’s no need to be so agitated.”

“Don’t tell me what to do, asshole! And get your ugly mug out of here.”

He gave me a friendly smile, hoisted a few of the crooked bars onto his back, and turned to go.

“There’s a letter for you under the door,” he called, bent down, and handed me an envelope. It was letter number one thousand and something in the correspondence I’d been conducting for the past three years with the bureaucrats and functionaries about their refusal to approve my medical degree from Katmandu, and their insistence that I undergo lengthy additional training in Beersheba, which I refused to do. I have no intention of taking any more courses, ever. Eight years in the University of Katmandu were quite enough for me.

 

When I bought this apartment, the previous occupant told me that it had been designed by a Bedouin architect, who had lived in it years before and who’d possessed a tremendous sense of space. I don’t know the exact measurements in meters, maybe it’s a more like a kilometer, but it’s three hundred square meters at least.

From time to time various pieces of furniture would fly out of the skyscraper windows, and sometimes my line of longitude would be crossed by suicides whose screams were swallowed up in the terrific noise of the trains and cars and airplanes.

I sat on the balcony and looked outside. The flies were bothering my baby. I slowly sipped my decaffeinated coffee with cyclamate-free sugar and turned on a fan to chase away the flies. Once again, terrible thoughts began to emerge from the depths of my despair and crush me like pythons. I tried to fight them by letting them express themselves and letting them go as far as they would, and indeed, when I confronted the worst and looked disaster in the eye, I felt somewhat calmer.

From the minute the Pan-T airline came into my life again I felt a certain relief, and so, I assume, did the child, since instead of harassing him and upsetting my peace of mind, I began harassing the airline pilots. I developed the fear that one fine day one of them would come and take my little project away from me, claiming that he was his grandfather. I couldn’t bear the thought of any other Pan-T employee touching my son, let alone feeling he had grandfatherly rights to him.

I played a tune from a music box to the child, the same tune about two hundred and fifty times, until he vomited the goat’s milk he’d just gobbled up all over himself, and I began harassing the pilots to increasing degrees, just like burns. I began with the first degree. I ordered Dutch cheeses and pizzas with onion rings to be delivered to their addresses. I lay in wait for their children when they came out of school, and filled their mandolins with shit, I flooded the pilots with telegrams consoling them on the death of a loved one, and I sent them countless press clippings about planes that had crashed or that disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle.

I only wanted to upset their self-confidence a little, shake the Persian carpet under their feet. I wanted to prove to them that you can drown in fire, get burnt by water, and not just theoretically either.

 

One night I woke up at three o’clock in the morning with an intense desire to operate. Once upon a time, when the urge took me, I would find myself in my laboratory, opening and closing animals, but now that my research was shelved and the lab was taboo there was nothing for me to do, and in any case there was nothing left for me to operate on, since dissecting dead bodies bored me stiff.

At the bottom of my heart I knew I must not, I definitely must not go into the baby’s room. He was sleeping soundly. I advanced on him wearing my green surgeon’s uniform, undressed him, and laid him on his belly on the cold metal table. He shivered with cold. I counted his vertebrae. It seemed to me that there was one missing. I counted them again and again, and after I was one hundred percent, two hundred percent—and so on in arithmetic progression up to a million percent—certain, I started feeding all kinds of data on my child into the computer, until it began to groan like a woman in labor.

The baby was still lying on his stomach. I put him to sleep, even though I still didn’t know where I was going to cut. I tried desperately to suppress this drive of mine to mess with the child, I tried pacifying it with a simple enema, but to no avail.

I took a knife and began cutting here and there. I drew a map of the Land of Israel during the Biblical period on his back, just as I remembered it from school, and marked in all those Philistine towns like Gath and Ashkelon, and with the blade of the knife I etched the Sea of Galilee and the Jordan River, which empties out into the Dead Sea that goes on evaporating nonstop.

Drops of blood began welling up in the river beds cutting across the country. The sight of the map of the Land of Israel, amateurishly sketched on my son’s back, gave me a shiver of delight. At long last I felt that I was cutting into living flesh. My baby screamed in pain—but I stood firm. When I’d finished marking all the sites my neglected education succeeded in pulling out of the creaking drawers of my mind, I went back to being what I am—a doctor—and I disinfected and dressed the cuts, and sewed them up where necessary.

I contemplated his carved-up back: it was the map of the Land of Israel, nobody could mistake it.

 

At night, when I couldn’t sleep, I would go out to the balcony and try to pull myself together. Dolly City lay below me in all its chaos and ugliness. Dolly City, a fragmented city, a crosshatched city, one motherfucking city.

I tried to ignore the terrible noise of the metropolis, the clatter of the machines, the screeching and rattling of the traffic, which behaved as if Dolly City belonged to it. Cable cars, steam engines, express trains, ships, trams, airplanes, automobiles, trucks, motorbikes—they all crossed each other’s routes, colliding with each other, freaking me out, making me frantic.

In the middle of the day the sky was one big traffic jam of leaden planes. I would search for a bit of blue sky and fix my eyes on it. These were rare moments when I would try with all my might and main to feel part of a world far wider than Dolly City, but it was almost impossible. I was my own prisoner. I couldn’t escape. All I could do was look at the jet-propelled trains being swallowed up in the black tunnels of infinity, of other people, of the rest of the world.

 

One evening I lay on the carpet and surveyed my son’s body meticulously, as if he was right next to me, instead of in the next room. The computer located trouble spots in the lower back region, and a thought reared up inside me: the kidneys, Dolly. You didn’t examine his kidneys! I forcefully restrained myself from moving. With a thousand tongues I persuaded my cracked and peeling hands not to touch the baby, to be content with routine tests in order to check if the kidneys were functioning properly.

The whole of the next day I pored over his urine, trying to discover worrying signs of albumin, or clear traces of an infection, but the child was healthy. This had never bothered me in the past, and it didn’t bother me now either. I opened him up. I dug and delved, I poked and prodded and stared and paled: the child had one kidney. I counted fifty times over, and “one” was the result that came up most often.

I sunk into depression. It was a foregone conclusion: a transplant was unavoidable. I racked my brains as to where the hell I was going to find a kidney, and in the end I came up with a five-year plan.

I took a taxi to Ben Yehuda Street, to the Pan-T building. I walked into the building with measured steps, and sat down opposite a diligent clerk who was busy making calculations. She muttered the figures and arithmetic operations aloud to herself, as if she were praying.

I waited for five minutes until she looked at me inquiringly.

“Yes,” I said to her. “That’s right. Look at me, go on, look.”

“That’s what I’m doing isn’t it?” she said and turned red. “That’s what I’ve been doing for fifteen years, isn’t it?” She stood up, utterly overwrought.

“Calm down,” I said. “Take a deep breath, and don’t be so sensitive. Let go.”

“You think it’s easy?” she barked rudely. “You…

“Look at me,” I interrupted her. “Do I look familiar to you?”

“No.”

“Look harder, you slut. These features. The nose. Pay attention to the nose. Especially the lower part. The nostrils. The small eyes. The pale eyebrows. The nervousness, the nerves. How many more hints do you need?”

“The more the merrier.”

“My father was an employee of your company.”

“I’m delighted to hear it.”

“His name was S—”

“Who cares?”

“He was the head of the salaries department. He died of mesothelioma. An extremely rare form of lung cancer. You get it from asbestos. In the medical literature, only…”

“Stop right there!” cried the clerk in alarm. “No talk of illnesses, please. I’m a hypochondriac.”

“And I’m a doctor.”

“Seriously?” Her eyes lit up for a moment, but were immediately clouded by insanity as she leaned forward and whispered, “Look at my eyes, honey, give me an off-the-cuff diagnosis. Are the pupils the same?”

“Yes.”

“Thank God,” she said in relief, and her eyes were clear again, but the next minute they darkened, as she pointed to a light brown spot on the back of her hand, “And this mark, is it cancer?”

“I don’t think it’s cancer.”

“Do me a favor. My brother suffers from migraines. Could it be the beginning of meningitis? How long does it take before you know if you’ve been infected as well?”

“Give me a ticket to Düsseldorf, business class, and I want a discount.”

“Why?”

“Because you’ve got cancer. You’re going to die. You have to fight it. You must never give in!” I clenched my fist and waved it in the air.

“I have to fly,” she grabbed her purse and hastily straightened the knot in her brightly colored scarf.

“Where do you think you’re going?” called the girl sitting next to her. But the diligent clerk took no notice and rushed straight into the street.

“Actually, I need two tickets,” I said to the second clerk. “One for me and one for my baby. How much will I get off if my father worked for Pan-T in the years…”

“Nothing. Your right to a discount or a free ticket died with him.”

She made all kinds of calculations and in the end she threw a sum at me and I wrote a postdated check. When I stepped outside, the two tickets in my hand, I looked at the spiraling steps climbing up the outside of the Pan-T building. I reached the roof and was just about to take one hell of an Olympic dive, but at the last minute I saw a Pan-T plane making its way in the direction of the blue sea, and I watched it until it vanished into the white clouds.

 

It took me three days to sterilize all my operating instruments and pack them up, and the very next day I was fastening my seat belt and that of my son, and we flew away into the unknown. Sitting next to me was a tank who must have weighed at least two hundred kilos, with swarthy skin and a wig on his head. He was suffering from a toothache and he was crying, and the flight attendants came and went with painkillers and glasses of cognac to put the area to sleep. Nothing helped, except for the sedative I injected into the lower regions of his paunch, which silenced him, apparently for good. I wanted to use the opportunity to have a nap, but suddenly I saw a flight attendant running up the aisle and crying in all directions:

“Is there a doctor on the plane? Is there a doctor on the pl—” Nobody got off their ass but me.

I said, “I’m a doctor, what’s the problem?”

“Come with me,” she said and tore the baby from his seat. “There’s a woman about to give birth.”

“Where is she?”

“In the pilot’s cabin.”

“And who’s the pilot?”

“Goldberg.”

“Aha.” As far as I remembered, there was no Goldberg on the list.

“Is he new?”

“Old as the hills. On his way out. His daughter went to school with me. She doesn’t even look Jewish,” she looked at the little golden Magen David nestling on my chest, “she’s so pretty. She’s studying medicine at the Technion.”

“Medicine at the Technion?” I said in amazement. “You can’t study medicine at the Technion.”

“No?” the flight attendant shrugged.

I helped some woman lying on the floor of the pilot’s cabin to give birth. It turned out to be a boy, dead. I sewed her up, waiting all the time for the pilot to turn round, so I could see if there was any resemblance between him and my son, but he kept his eyes in front of him all the time.

 

The decision to fly with the child to Düsseldorf, Germany, in order to obtain a kidney for him from a German baby, was made on purely moral grounds. At first I thought in practical terms. Where, I thought, could I kidnap a baby and remove his kidney, without caring? The first place that leapt to mind was Brazil, where one-year-olds already run brothels. But Brazil sounded too far away, and who’s got the energy to dance the samba? Then I thought: an Arab baby. They hate us, we hate them. I’ll kidnap an Arab baby, remove his kidney, and transplant it in the body of my only son. But then I frowned. Everyone knows that you can’t mess with Arabs, even talking to them is dangerous, and if you turn your back on them you’re dead. And then I sat and thought about the history of mankind. Who of all the people that ever lived were the biggest pigs, which of them had broken all the records? The answer was clear.

It was no skin off my nose to take some German baby from an orphanage in Düsseldorf, cut out his kidney, and donate it to my son. On the contrary, I even felt a sense of vocation. I knew I was doing the right thing. Worst-case scenario, I might end up killing a German baby or two.

 

Already on the way to the hotel, in a taxi following the minibus containing the Israeli Pan-T aircrew, we passed a gang of neo-Nazis carrying posters in their language and waving their fists at the Jewish minibus.

The hotel was incredible. I’d never in my life seen such wealth and splendor. The waiters were well-scrubbed, the reception clerk was smooth as a baby’s bottom, and he gave me the keys to my room on the hundred and seventy-third floor.

As soon as I entered my suite, I took care of the baby for a bit until he fell asleep, and then I leafed through the German phone directory. I was looking for orphanages off the beaten track, abandoned institutions in forest clearings, cellars in godforsaken villages. I found a few.

I packed the child in a perforated suitcase and went out into the pouring rain to hunt for a taxi.

The rain beat down on my thick skull, beat down on the suitcase, got in through the holes and wet the baby, who sneezed nonstop. I cursed myself for not bringing my X-ray machine along, I would have taken an X-ray of his lungs right there and then to see if he was developing something.

The taxi driver was a typical German schmuck. A loathsome creature who made me want to puke right on him, a real sub-human. He criticized the way I was keeping my baby. I didn’t even answer him. The day some German tells me what to do and I take any notice of him—that’ll be the day chickens grow teeth. The imbecile went on passing remarks but I controlled myself. He’s my child, and I’m entitled to bring him up the way I see fit. I wanted to teach him something nobody ever taught me—to live in the privacy of his own four walls.

We entered the forest, and it began to snow. After driving for about thirty minutes on muddy paths, I let the driver go next to a lonely, dilapidated old house, and I knocked on the rusty iron door.

I was tense and out of breath. I just wanted to get it over with and go back home to Dolly City. I’m not cut out for world travel. The door was opened by a young brunette, who announced that her name was Stephanie Poldark, and that she was a nymphomaniac. But what did it matter.

It wouldn’t have taken a genius to guess that Stephanie Poldark was a bullshit name. She brought out a fantastic cheesecake with whipped cream and decorations, it was really something. After I had polished off three slices—those yellow antidepressants give you a craving for sweets—I asked her in English if her grandfather on her mother’s side was an officer in the S.S.

“No,” she replied. “My grandfather on my father’s side was an officer in the S.S. I’m so ashamed of it, you can’t imagine! That’s the reason I decided to devote my life to helping others,” she said and embraced three of her little wards, who clustered for shelter under her wings. But their kidneys were of no interest to me. I was looking for someone of Son’s age.

“I want to entrust this baby to your devoted care,” I said and took him out of the suitcase. “He’s yours. I don’t fancy him any more.”

“Hand him over,” she said. “He’s Jewish, isn’t he? It’s so obvious!” She stroked him tenderly and kissed his fingers—something I’d never even come close to doing.

“But first of all,” I said, “I want to stay here for a few days, to check the place out…”

“Yes…” said Stephanie Poldark, but it was obvious that she was deep in thought. “Sometimes I ask myself,” she said, from a dense cloud of contemplation, “how long? How long will I go on devoting my life to others? When will I, at last, be able to start fucking whoever I feel like fucking? How long do I have to go on serving this sentence I passed on myself? I want to be free! Free of this guilt! I can’t take it any more.” She fell silent and her tears dripped onto my baby’s face.

“Stephanie Poldark,” I said suddenly, because I knew that an open wound was a great doorway to opportunity, “I want free access to the kidneys of all your babies up to the age of six months.”

“Whatever you like,” she said. “Just do me one favor. If you’re already opening them up—open their heads too. See if there’s a screw loose somewhere in our German heads.”

I said sure, but I had no intention whatsoever to actually check. What good would it do to know that German heads are full of shit?

 

I worked all night long. I tried all the kidneys of all the forty babies of the proper age in the orphanage. Some of them died on me. I left them lying there with their guts spilling out, and took a coffee break.

At five in the morning I transplanted Sonny’s new kidney. I sewed him up, and with the string I had left over I stuck a few butterfly stitches onto the rest of the surviving babies, but the butterflies, instead of staying where they were and stopping the flow of blood, flew right out and the babies expired one after the other.

I felt a bit uncomfortable when I saw Stephanie Poldark, who’d been such a charming hostess. I didn’t know how to tell her that a few dozen babies had kicked the bucket. But she took it in stride, and said dryly that there was no need for me to feel any guilt whatsoever.

The transplant was a success, the organ was accepted by the body, and everything went according to plan.

I said good-bye to Stephanie and her children and flew back home. On the return flight, too, the flight attendant asked if there was a doctor on the plane, and some woman called Judy stood up. If she’s a doctor, I said to myself, then I’m Dr. Zhivago. But I kept quiet. People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

 

Five minutes after I walked through the door I felt a new attack coming. The gnawing doubts, the fear and the trembling. And what, I asked myself, what if the baby never had a kidney missing in the first place? What if I’d been mistaken, and my son now had three kidneys? I’m only human after all—I’d almost certainly made a mistake.

If anyone had made a mistake it was more likely to be me than God.

That cloud, that familiar, wretched black cloud, entered my soul and filled it with soot. Operate! I said to myself. Operate! Check it out! Make sure!

A thousand times, I counted. Once I counted two, and once three. Once I came up with four, and another time—with one. I could have taken him to be examined by a normal doctor, but I didn’t trust anybody, and of course, I didn’t want to expose myself either. So, what was I to believe? How many kidneys did he have? How many kidneys did my baby have? I decided to give it a rest and come back after a break.

I gave him an anesthetic shot and left him open on the bureau, like a telephone off the hook, while I lay down on the carpet. I couldn’t fall asleep. In the end I went and knocked on the door of my neighbor, Itzik, who was in the middle of mauling some woman’s clit, and I said:

“Do me a favor, I need a second opinion. I don’t feel so good. Can you come and count my baby’s kidneys?”

“You’ve got a baby?” he asked in astonishment. “Whose is it?”

“What do you mean whose is it?” I snapped and changed the subject. “What a mess, what a mess. You have no idea how bad.” We went into the elevator.

“Tell me,” he said, “how am I supposed to know if it’s the kidneys? How do I know it’s not the liver?”

“All you have to do is count—I’ll tell you what you’re counting,” I said dryly.

Itzik the magician counted three kidneys, and I fainted. He thought I was dead and was about to throw me out of the window, but fortunately I opened my eyes just in time. I sent him on his way, and hurried back to poke inside my child. He began to lose blood, and I, fool that I am, forgot which was the transplanted kidney. I couldn’t tell it from the originals. In the end I took a shot in the dark, chose one of them at random, and ripped it out. If this child was fated to die on the operating table—what could I do about it? I was doing everything humanly possible to save him.

I closed him up with a patch of skin I sliced off my thigh, and lay down on the carpet to read the Dolly City news, but I couldn’t concentrate. I felt as heavy as an IDF tank, together with a strong desire for radical change. I longed to get away from Dolly City, to abandon it, to banish it from my sight as if it was a mangy mutt dogging my steps. Dolly City was driving me crazy. I was so desperate I even stopped harassing the pilots.

I looked out of the window, but how long can you go on looking out of the window at rushing trains? Especially when they’re rushing to where these trains were rushing. All the trains in Dolly City rushed to Dachau and back again. Not that Dachau, just some old plank with the name Dachau written on it, a kind of memorial. How long can you let your eyes work overtime, flipping through images until you can’t see straight anymore?

There had to be a solution.

 

June, July, August, September, were already behind me. The child was already nine months old, and the danger of him suddenly dying of crib death had decreased. I went on giving him routine examinations and occasional cosmetic surgeries to smooth out the scars. I had an idea—more like an invention, really—instead of opening and closing a person up every time you had to look inside him, you could install a kind of little Venetian blind in the weak spot, and then all you’d have to do would be to roll up the slats and peep through them.

 

The day the child turned one and stood up on his hind legs and began to walk, and I saw before me a person, small, but a person nevertheless—I got the idea into my head that maybe he was developing cancer. The fear of cancer was the worst of all. Cancer, in my opinion, is the most important disease that the Angel of Death has invented to date. This disease is one big trap, both for the doctor and for the patient, because you can never know with absolute certainty if it has already begun to bloom in the depths of a person’s body. Nipping it in the bud is like trying to catch a bird by jumping into the sky. Even if you catch it in midair you fall flat on your face and break your jaw, if you’re lucky.

Throughout my research in bygone days I’d tried with all my might to find a cure for this disease—but it was not to be. During my experiments I would always stray to other fields. The wings of imagination carried me beyond cancer, to research for research’s sake, and thus I found myself carving up all kinds of animals just for the hell of it.

And so, although he didn’t have cancer, he didn’t have cancer, although he definitely didn’t have cancer, I still decided to give him a course of chemotherapy and large amounts of vitamin A.

Just to be on the safe side.

The child grew thin, his hair fell out, but I knew: this dreadful disease had to be fought, it had to be stopped.

I didn’t sleep at night. First of all, the trains and the expressway drove me crazy. Over the years, the population of Dolly City grew and it filled up with all kinds of nonentities and subhumans, who demanded more and more means of transport, more and more roads and railways. For lack of space, new roads and railways were built one on top of the other, and the terrible noise of the trains became such an integral part of my being that sometimes I thought it was a figment of my imagination.

And yet every time I thought so, I got up to make sure. To make sure again. And again, and again. Until I was absolutely, absolutely, absolutely certain that the trains I saw down below, the colliding cars, the commotion of the modern world, were really and truly there. The echo took over my life to such an extent that I was unable to distinguish it from the original sound.

These symptoms of my disease, the disease of infinite possibilities, the determination of doubt, would even manifest themselves in relation to the very existence of my child. Sometimes, in particularly difficult moments, I would send an SOS to my mother to come and tell me what I saw, on the basis of her experience. She would say: That’s a table, Dolly, that’s a chair, this is a living room, this is an open-circuit television. I’m your mother, you’re Dolly, and here’s a baby. What a beautiful baby! What a darling baby!

What a regression! What a catastrophe! At the age of thirty-something, the old woman had to come and prove to me that the ball was round, the ball was red, the ball was green and bouncing.

The one who really benefited from all these superfluous explanations was the precious child. He would listen to my mother with his big, black eyes wide open. His head was so small, like a tennis ball, that sometimes I felt like giving it a bash and serving it over the net.

Before going any further, I would like to stress something: I don’t want to give the impression here that I took a child and destroyed him. I only wanted to protect him from harm. I wanted him to live to a hundred and twenty, and what’s wrong with that? I wanted to be in command on all fronts, and what’s wrong with that? Why this hypocrisy? In some societies a man can be forced to chop off his sister’s clitoris with his teeth—and I’m not entitled to demand sovereignty over the defense of my son?