Winds blew, evil winds, winds that pissed on the citizens, piss disguised as rain. I looked out at the ceaseless movement of this city, at the frenzy of the traffic, at the fury of the buses forced to wait for all the lost, senile old ladies to get on, at the conductors who spent their breaks fucking the drivers on the moldy backseats. My house stank too, it exuded the smell of ancient dampness.

According to my calculations, Son was now one year and ten months old. He sat on the carpet and played with all the sterile toys I made him—pasteurized carcasses of lab animals, sterilized frogs. He put them in his mouth and chewed and chewed, like a cow, getting on my nerves and preventing me from watching McMillan & Wife on TV.

It drove me up the wall, this sound of tireless chewing, and until I locked him in the closet, I couldn’t watch McMillan going down on his wife in peace.

I settled down on the sofa again to watch the copulating couple. For five consecutive episodes they’d been showing the same serialized screw. You really have to hand it to them, the way they drag it out.

When they took a break, I listened intently for Son. There was only a disconcerting silence. I got up and opened the melamine closet. It turned out that the little one had smuggled a heap of little knives into the closet, God only knows how he managed to get hold of them, and while I was watching television, he was cutting his epidermis and his dermis, covering himself with all sorts of sketches.

He sat there and gazed intently at the fine threads of blood oozing out of the cuts. Immediately I dragged him out of the closet, like a midwife delivering a fresh new baby, slapped him hard on both cheeks, and yelled:

“You want me to send you for psychiatric observation? You want to end up crazy so I can have that on my wayward conscience too?” The child went berserk, he threw himself on the floor and shrieked like an Arab woman. He knew what was coming. Every time he dared hurt himself, I dumped him directly in a bath of iodine, gave him a tetanus shot, and put him on antibiotics for two months as back-up. When the skinny mite lay in the purple-red bath, up to his neck in the stinging fluid without making a sound, I cupped his tiny head in my hand.

“You can rest assured that your mother takes life seriously,” I told him. “That’s why you’re in there. Is that clear?”

 

I left him soaking in the iodine for twenty minutes, and by the time I took him out he was swollen with pain. I gave him an analgesic shot and put him to bed in his room, in a sterile plastic tent with filtered air vents.

Although it was eleven o’clock in the morning and other children, maybe not in Dolly City but no doubt in other big cities, were playing on conventional seesaws and swings, I put out the light and shut the door softly behind me, because like it or not—there are some things in life that have to be kept under wraps.

Up to that time my son had never been outside the house in his life, had never seen other children, except on television, which he hated. When I went out for a few hours—very rarely—I put him to sleep. As an educator, I didn’t teach him to speak—what for? So he could say “mama?”

When I wasn’t rummaging in his insides, I didn’t pay attention to him at all. When he sat down opposite me and looked at me sitting, just sitting, facing the window, always facing the window, and him small as a raisin, his hair thin and mangy—I’d tell him to get out of my sight, his watching me got on my nerves. Those eyes—I felt I had to do something about his eyes, maybe sunglasses, maybe tear them out. After all, in Dolly City a sense of hearing is enough to drive you mad, so why burden your mind with visual information too?

Every morning began with a check-up. Every day I concentrated on a different area, in what is called in our jargon “fishing expeditions.” My concern for his health knew no bounds. It was voracious, it was grotesque. In the middle of an operation on his leg I would discover problems in the groin. So I would close up the place I’d opened, and open the place that was still closed, and so on and so forth, for hours on end. Until it reached a stage when every inch of his body was open. And then I would pass out.

It was an impossible life, but I lived it nonetheless.

 

The child was three years old, but he scarcely spoke. His motor development was rudimentary. He was slow, and the only thing he knew how to say was “Don’t wanner,” instead of “Don’t want to.”

I stopped going out altogether. Everything over the phone, leave it on the doormat and go, no tip, no nothing. I lived off money I found under the floor tiles, but it too was running out.

Sometimes my mother came to visit. She would look at the child and ask him who his father was. The very posing of this arithmetic problem made my blood boil, and once I took a jar of strawberry jam and smashed it on the floor. Tears flooded my parent’s sick eyes, and I asked her to stop it, but she didn’t stop it, and then I yelled at her to shut her mouth, and she shut it. I glared at her, and she hugged the child.

The old woman was getting more and more like her mother, the one who’d left me her gold bracelets. Her bones were losing calcium, her eyes were getting smaller, her feet were swelling, her circulation was rotten. Lately she’d been falling down in the street, just collapsing onto all that shit with her bags. She never asked me to have a look at her open wounds, not once. She knew I had troubles of my own, she knew that without my guinea pigs I was lost, that without my diagrams there was nothing for me to do in Dolly City. So she tried to encourage me, to persuade me to get back into the thick of things. Once she brought me a rabbit with leukemia, and once a rheumatic tortoise, together with a few crooked knives she’d picked up in the flea market. Naturally I rejected them out of hand, I had no intention of getting back into all that stuff. I’d seen where it had led me, and decided to leave it alone for the time being. My inactivity upset her. Every day she phoned and asked me:

“What are your plans for today?”

“What are yours?” I asked her. “Have you got any suggestions?”

“I want to buy some soft peaches in the market and bring them for you and the child.”

Soft peaches, the old woman was suffering from a soft peaches obsession. She subscribed to all these popular medical journals that I detested. They had charts of vitamins and graphs with longevity on the y-axis. There it said that peaches were good for your blood pressure.

 

A hard winter came. It rained nonstop, winds blew with a force that swept away thin old men and children suffering from malnutrition. It was freezing cold. The child liked spitting and watching it turn to ice in the air. Apart from which, there was a recession. The trains had almost stopped running. Only the planes were still working, and they were forced to function as land vehicles and transport recruits to their training facilities by coasting along the muddy roads, which soon finished them off.

Due to the situation, my mother sold her house in Hadera and went to live in a trailer car in Rehovot. She told me that I was liable to find myself in the street if I didn’t lower my living standard. She advised me to give private lessons in medicine. In these troubled times, she reasoned, no one would bother to check on my papers, and if they did, who’d understand Nepalese anyway?

I took her advice. I opened a course entitled “Introduction to Philanthropic Medicine.” I started with three students, and their number grew to fifteen. I was my own boss, nobody asked me what the hell philanthropic medicine was, I could say whatever I liked to my class of ignorant philistines and they swallowed it whole. I exploited the secret desire everyone possesses to be a doctor, to heal, to find a cure for fatal diseases, to lengthen life, to discover the secret of creation.

Sometimes the students would catch a rabbit and bring it upstairs with them, but I would not allow any strange animals on the premises. My guinea pig was therefore the child, who was now already four and a half. I would demonstrate on him, thereby killing two birds with one stone. To attract pupils I started a promotional sale—every third lesson free for anyone who agreed to undergo a simple operation during the course—surgical tooth extraction, liposuction, etc.

I made contact with shady organizations that in exchange for a minimum fee referred manic-depressive personalities to me for surgery. People came. In this manner I performed open-heart surgeries, bypasses, valve replacements, and gave radiation treatments to cancer patients.

Practicing medicine and coming into regular contact with people kept me on an even keel. I no longer occupied myself exclusively with the child. True, I went on opening and closing him like a curtain, but my drive to ascertain that his insides were in order was no longer as strong as it used to be.

 

In the spring I opened an additional course, in psychiatry.

I accepted only bleeding-heart liberals, or the sort of smug, self-satisfied person who’s never even been sodomized. My knowledge of psychiatry is nonexistent, so I really let myself go. I told them all sorts of bullshit, that people can be divided into two classes, those who’d been fucked in the ass and those who hadn’t, whether metaphorically or in practice.

The psychiatry course gave me tremendous satisfaction because I really had freedom of action. I did whatever came into my head: I humiliated some people, I exalted others, I poked fun at anyone I felt like poking fun at. I had a ball. I got the biggest kick out of the hypochondriacs. I drove them crazy. I proved to them that they were suffering from several diseases all at once, and that one neutralized the other, with the result that they weren’t suffering from anything at all. They didn’t know how to take it, so then I said, “Three times a day, before going to bed,” and I laughed myself sick.

I discovered a new type of phobia in Dolly City—Arabophobia, fear of Arabs. I had lots of those. The ones with the compulsive fears I harassed the most, because I once read somewhere that you should tackle fear head-on. Fuck Arabs, if you’re afraid of them. You fuck them—and you see that the devil’s not as black as he’s painted, they’re just like everybody else.

But one fine day my liberalism was nearly the end of me. I never went into the personal histories of my students, and so, in the middle of performing a gastric bypass on the child, one of my quietest students suddenly stood up, took out a business card, announced that he was a psychiatrist, a graduate of “The Hy and Bye College of Psychiatry, Wimbledon,” and demanded that I come with him and be hospitalized, that I undergo in-depth treatment once and for all, and that I place my child in my mother’s custody until my soul was healed.

All my life I’ve run away from psychiatrists as if they were policemen. I threw a couple of chairs and ran down the stairs, and he pursued me with the agility of a grasshopper. Next to the concrete pipes he caught me and gave me an extremely painful shot in the ass. I woke up tied to a bed in a padded room with lichens on the walls, some of them in frames. A very tall orderly came into the room. I showed him my breasts and asked him if he wanted to suck me off. In a second his head was inside me, and I was screaming with pleasure.

My shrieks woke up all the crazy people in the ward, and all of them, men and women, implored the orderly to suck them off too. The orderly really lost it, he didn’t know who to suck off first. I took advantage of the uproar to free myself of my bonds, and escaped the insane asylum, because this is the role of loony bins in the world—to provide something to run away from. I didn’t return to my apartment, because I knew that was the first place where they would look for me.

 

I went out to Agrippa Street. The whole street was full of roof-tarrers’ signs, and the smell of boiling tar pervaded the air. Busty blondes were stirring the barrels of boiling tar. They all had their hair piled high on their heads, they all had that whole oh-my-lord complex.

And then it hit me: I saw cancerous growths on the blonde women’s faces, on the barrels of tar, on the wheels of the buses, on the telephone poles, on the trees, on the wheels of the cars, on the newspapers—wherever I looked, malignant, terminal, spreading tumors danced before my eyes.

I was shaken to the depths of my soul. As a doctor, I knew that it was my duty to treat these tumors, to cut them out, to do something—but I was helpless. Overcome with despair I fell to the ground and closed my eyes, which kept on wanting to open and see the truth—the metastases multiplying in front of them. For half an hour I lay there on the pavement, I could have seen under the horses’ tails if only I’d opened my eyes. I could, if I wanted to, have given the horses blowjobs and suckled at the mares’ teats.

Eventually I felt better and I sat up. Passersby crossed the long street stretching perpendicular to the sea, where big trees cast their elongated shadows. The cars drove along the wet roads and made a noise like opening a box of wafers. In the sky a flock of seagulls took off, and a blue and white Pan-T plane flying above them entered an air-pocket, but emerged from it heroically.

I raised myself to my feet and dragged myself to the cemetery. I crossed acres in which all the French soldiers who’d died in World War I were buried. Then there were more relevant acres. I reached my father’s worn gravestone, and to my amazement I discovered that it too was afflicted by a rare form of cancer. At this point I understood that I’d gotten it bad. I left the graveyard and swooped on everything I came across without exception. I scraped layers of paint off No Parking poles with a Ginsu knife. Everything leapt up and hit me in the eyes, the metastases were taking over the world—it was their finest hour. I stopped passersby and asked them to let me operate on them because they were very, very sick. Only immediate surgical intervention could save them. And I’m a doctor, I told them, and whipped my papers from my pocket. But apart from three nose-less beggars nobody would let me treat them. People were in a terrible hurry. I assaulted a few trees as well, I tore off malignant leaves. The cars had cancer too—skin cancer. I scratched them, collecting samples for biopsies. The whole world was sick, and the entire burden was on my shoulders. I tried everything, God is my witness that I tried to help the cellars and the wine barrels, the drunks and the cripples, the welfare coupons, the purses and the cats. They were all equal in my eyes and they were all very sick.

“You’re sick!” I screamed in the streets of Dolly City. “Let me heal you!”

The possibility of saving them all was as remote as five hundred times the distance from Dolly City to the moon. The immensity of the task facing me made me despair.

I hung my head in shame: I was a failure. Everyone was going to die of cancer—and it was all my fault, because I hadn’t diagnosed it in time. Afterwards I calmed down a bit. I don’t know what calmed me, probably nothing. After the dementia there’s always a lull. I bought myself a few chocolate cookies and sat down on a bench to finish them off. I ate with my eyes closed, in order not to see those cancerous worms again.

I tried to accept the situation. I said to myself, okay, Doll, you blew it. Now at least try to alleviate the pain of the world a little, to make it bearable. I patrolled the streets and gave people shots of morphine in the butt. I stood at bus stops and pressed against people like a pickpocket, but I didn’t touch their purses. I pressed up against men, they thought I had the hots for them, they started talking dirty, but they had it all wrong. I talked dirty right back, but I stuck my needle into them while I was at it. And I stuck it into tires too. In my heart of hearts I knew that it was complete insanity, that it was a mistake. But I asked myself how I could be so certain this mistake wasn’t really the best solution? My reason countered: How can tires have cancer if they haven’t even got leukocytes? I don’t know how—but with me it’s possible. I told myself that just as human beings can deceive and disguise themselves, so can atoms, molecules, and all the rest. If we can say that the sun is good, that it smiles down on you—how can it also be carcinogenic? But if the sun is carcinogenic, then it’s got cancer too.

This was very basic logic, but it was very painful too. I infiltrated the oncology wards of the government hospitals, and stole various analgesics. I made the rounds of the wards, soothing the fatally ill, and went out to the corridor to relieve the suffering of the Arab workers from the Occupied Territories who were cleaning the floor. I didn’t discriminate against the mops or the pails either, because nothing human is alien to me.

I knew no rest. My brain worked at the speed of a hurtling train without brakes. My vocation as a doctor destroyed me completely. I took my profession too seriously.

A point of interest: I didn’t inject myself. In myself, in my own health, I had complete confidence. Even when I had a fever, I simply jumped into the Thames for a swim or went down to the cellars for a shower. My basic assumption was that I—with my expert understanding of the theory of improbable possibilities—would know if and when cancer caught up with me. And I can say right here and now that even if cancer ever does catch up with me—that’s not what this monologue is supposed to be leading up to. No, these are not the confessions of a titless woman.

 

In November I went to Rehovot to visit my mother. From a distance I could already see that she’d grown even smaller, that yet more calcium had managed to find its way out of her. She was standing in the yard hanging up the laundry, and not far from her, in a big plastic tub, sat the child, surrounded by real, authentic, quacking ducks.

In bygone days this scene would have horrified me, and I could easily have shot my mother for daring to expose my son to the dangers of the world—but now I just grimaced. I waited for my mother to turn her back, whipped out my syringe, and injected the child’s bathtub in front of his astonished eyes.

“Stop it, Mom,” he said in a tolerant tone.

That was the last straw. I grabbed his head and pushed it into the water so he could see a few fish. I left him with his head underwater for two minutes, he struggled like a chicken in the hands of a butcher. The kid really wanted to live. Suddenly I calmed down. The attack ended as abruptly as it had begun, and I took him out of the water. He was completely blue and his scars were purple.

I left him on the ground, dying, and I knew that I’d just committed the greatest crime a mother, who is also a doctor, can commit. You’ve been corrupted, Dolly, I said to myself. You made your bed—now lie in it.

The boy lay motionless. I searched for his pulse, but it escaped me like a zebra in the savannah. I didn’t have my instruments—I’d left them in a locker at the railway station, but I’d forgotten the number.

I straightened up. I touched his face with the tips of my fingers. It was cold and wet. Underneath my fingers cancer cells were swarming, dividing, and multiplying, multiplying like the abyss that had swallowed me up, and which kept on multiplying itself over and over again as I fell, until I stopped taking any notice of it. Although the child had nearly died of suffocation—I was worried about cancer. My mother emerged from behind a sheet, took in the situation at a glance, and called an ambulance.

“It’s insane!” I cried out to her. “To what extremes the female human mind can go, ah, Mother?”

For over an hour the group of doctors tried to resuscitate the child, but it didn’t work. I saw that they were on the wrong track. A woman doctor gave him an electric shock. His little body leapt into the air. This was the crucial moment. I couldn’t trust anybody.

“Move aside,” I cried and pushed my way through, “I’m the mother, and I’m telling you to get out of the way!”

The group of doctors rustled like the wind in a field of thorns, their gowns fluttering on their rigid bodies.

“Get up!” I commanded the child. “Did you hear me? Get up, or I’ll take you home!”

“I don’t wanner,” he said.

“There you are,” I said to the startled doctors. “Some children will do anything for attention.”

“Strange,” said the woman doctor. “There was no pulse. I’m willing to bet a thousand dollars that there was no pulse.”

My mother dressed the child, who sat there apathetic and withdrawn. She kissed him. I couldn’t stand to see her spoiling him like that—I didn’t want him to grow up to be a sissy. But I didn’t say anything, because I still doubted he would survive.

 

I slunk back to Dolly City alone, but when I arrived at my front door, with the intention of jumping straight into bed and forgetting everything—I was astonished to discover that a clan of Kurdish refugees had taken over my apartment. Everybody in Dolly City knows that you can’t argue with the Gypsy or the Kurdish refugees or with Asians either. They’re terribly sensitive, they can’t tolerate any kind of remark or criticism, and you just have to leave them alone.

“Excuse me,” I said, “many years ago I used to live here. Can I just come in for a minute and look around? Thank you so much.”

The Kurds were sitting in the Jacuzzi and using my shampoo. In the bedroom I saw the maniac psychiatrist who hospitalized me fucking one of the refugees. I came closer, they were in the throes of passion, the psychiatrist was busy cursing all the women in the world, calling them whores and saying that they should all have their clitorises and breasts cut off to teach them a lesson and put them in their place. He noticed me and wasn’t in the least surprised to see me there.

“Dolly,” he said, “did they give you a vacation? How are you? What was your week like? How is the treatment progressing?”

“As planned,” I replied, whipped one of my knives out from my belt, and castrated him. What I’d done to my animals dozens of times—I now did for the first time to a living man, and I have to say that it was worth every minute.

“Now, you son of a bitch, go and get hormone treatments in Bangladesh, and next time call your mother a whore.”

I smiled at the woman, but she wasn’t interested. She pounced on the amputated member and went on pursuing her romance with it as if nothing had happened, and I thought to myself that the real problem with most people, including me, was that they were so sickeningly thorough. It was this damn sense of responsibility that drove them insane.

The eunuch’s eyes rolled around in his head, he screamed, and jumped out of the window.

 

It was night, the last night of October. The moon and the stars were sprinkled over the sky like salt on wounds. Desperate men fucked tree trunks.

I arrived at a big toy shop. It was full of mothers buying their children Circassian dolls that could easily be taken apart and put together again. Six months had passed since I tried to drown my son, but also six months since I’d brought him back to life, depending on exactly when you start counting. That, by the way, was the last time I’d seen him.

A saleslady in a brown dress came up to me. I averted my eyes and pretended to be looking at something else. I didn’t have the money for a Circassian doll, so I attached myself to a tall woman holding one.

“Quick!” I cried when I caught up with her, “Over there!” and I pointed to one of the skyscrapers, “A child! He’s about to fall!”

She screamed and dropped the Circassian doll. I picked up my loot and ran to catch the fast train to Rehovot. It rained all the way. The train traveled so fast I could hardly breathe, but everybody behaved completely normal.

My mother opened the door almost immediately, her hair as pale as her lips, and her face wrinkled and tired. Behind her, on a little rug, the child was playing with wooden blocks. It was dark, I didn’t know what to say. I said:

“Hi, Mother. You’ve aged. Your hair’s gone all white. Your face is wrinkled. You look awful. Would you like me to give you a face-lift?”

She stretched her lips in a kind of smile and opened the door wide. Son looked at me. His eyes went blank, and he returned to his blocks.

“Say hello to mommy,” said my mother.

“I don’t wanner,” said the boy.

“You don’t wanner?” I said. “Can’t you say I don’t want to? Want to? Want to?” I yelled. “I’ll show you!” The blood almost burst out of my skull from rage.

I grabbed hold of a bamboo carpet-beater, brandished it in the air, and brought it down with all my strength on the child, but he managed to escape in the nick of time. My mother jumped on me and tried to wrest the carpet-beater from my hands.

“Don’t interfere between a mother and her son,” I snapped. “Ever!”

“But you’re my daughter!” she cried.

“Can’t you understand anything?” I said. As I was struggling with her, with Son sniggering in the distance, she suddenly froze in her spot and fell to the floor of the RV. I dropped the carpet-beater and bent over her.

“Call the doctor,” she murmured. “I’m not feeling so well.”

“What’s the matter with you? Have you forgotten that I’m a doctor? Tell me, where does it hurt?”

“Even Napoleon thought he was Napoleon,” she said, and the kid sprinkled cold water onto her pale face from the palm of his hand. She recovered and sat up, and he returned to his blocks.

“Why does everyone always pick on Napoleon?” I said, overcome by weakness, and fell into a chair. “Why?”

“What’s that?” she pointed to the parcel containing the doll.

“It’s for him,” I confessed. The kid stood up and approached me cautiously. I saw that he was afraid of me, so I rolled the doll towards him.

“Open it, open the present, kid,” I told him.

He pulled the colored ribbons and looked at the doll with interest.

“What is it?” he asked.

“A Circassian doll,” I said.

“Chocolate?” he asked.

“A Circassian doll, you pest.”

“Candy?” he asked. “A Circassian doll—”

“French fries?”

“What’s the matter with you? Are you deaf? Dyslexic? Couldn’t you teach him to talk like a human being?” I reproached my mother, who was ironing a shirt in a corner of the RV.

“Are you still seeing tumors everywhere?” she asked me.

“Believe me when I say that I don’t know exactly what I’m seeing anymore,” I said, and she nodded. “Not always,” I began trying to answer her question again, “sometimes all I see is swelling. Things swell up out of all proportion. I have a problem with the process of growth. I suppose I have a problem with the process of life. I don’t know. Either I see red,” I narrowed my eyes, “or I see black. Lately I’ve been seeing flies in the pupils of people’s eyes, the pupils of butterflies’ eyes, in the pupils, pupils—believe me, I don’t know why I should be so stuck on pupils.” I fell silent and rubbed my treacherous eyes.

“Tell me, dear, maybe you just need eyeglasses? Maybe after all these years your vision has simply weakened?”

“Bullshit,” I snapped. “Can’t you see that glasses aren’t my problem?”

She went back to her ironing in silence, and I watched a talk show on TV.

“Pardon me, Doll,” the old woman said warily, “what do you mean, you see red, you see black?”

“It’s more like a red spot, the memory of a spot, as if the color didn’t have enough exposure to the eyes, and only the brain managed to perceive it somehow.”

“Look at me, my daughter,” she said, straightening up and setting the iron on its aluminum base, “do you see red and black spots on my face?”

“Yes,” I replied. “And on him too. He’s got a rash. Maybe it’s a childhood disease, maybe it’s the beginning of leukemia. Come here, come here.” The old woman tensed and leapt to the defense of the child.

“Leave him alone, he hasn’t got a rash.”

“Don’t you understand, stupid? Can’t you see? The child’s got a rash, he’s going to die, get out of my way,” I gave her a shove. “Show me your vein,” I said to the kid, “show me your stomach, pull your shirt up. I don’t know, has he got a rash, Mother? Come and look, I don’t know what I’m seeing any more.”

The woman shot me a hostile look.

“Do me a favor, look at him, do me a favor.”

“He hasn’t got a rash, his skin is completely white.”

“In my opinion he’s got smallpox. Didn’t I inoculate him against smallpox?” I asked myself aloud.

“There’s no smallpox in Rehovot,” said the old woman in a stern voice, picked the child up in her arms, and carried him to the far end of the trailer. I followed her. I was having a severe fit.

“Give me the child,” I said. “I have to take blood.”

“You’re not touching the child.”

“I have to count his leukocytes, to see if he needs antibiotics.”

“To count his what?”

“The child has to get a few days’ sick leave, he’s got to be in an isolation room.”

“What sick leave are you talking about? What isolation room? The child’s five years old!”

“In Staff HQ,” I said coldly.

“But the child,” cried my mother, “is only a child! What are you talking about, Staff HQ?”

“Yes, I suppose you have a point,” I said.

“You don’t say!” cried my mother, but I took no notice of her.

“I have to make sure he won’t be fit for combat…”

“Get out of here!” shrieked my mother. “I never want to see you again. You’re no daughter of mine. Inti majnuna, you’re out of your mind!”

“Give me the child,” I said, and she shook her head hysterically.

“Over my dead body, over my dead…”

Don’t worry—I didn’t kill her, I just put her to sleep. I grabbed hold of the kid’s arm, I was about to cut it with a kitchen knife, but suddenly I asked myself a simple question: how was I planning to count the leukocytes, without any measuring instruments? A cool breeze of sanity blew through me and told me that if the child had leukemia, he would certainly have other symptoms, and if he had smallpox, then sooner or later he would die or recover, at which point these two possibilities, that he would either die or recover, somehow seemed less overwhelming, and I decided that maybe I was cuckoo, maybe my mind was as shaky as a rotten wooden bridge over the source of the Thames—but he was my son, for better or worse, in sanity or insanity, and I was taking him home to Dolly City.

 

All the way back to town the child lay with his head on my lap, and I picked out his lice and squished them with my fingers. Even inside the train people kept on moving, the movement of the train wasn’t enough for them, the rattle of the rails, the revolutions of the earth weren’t enough for them, they had to keep passing from one coach to another, and to get up all the time to go to the lavatory, open and close the windows, change seats, anything to keep moving.

No one in Dolly City rolled out a red carpet for us, no one welcomed us home. People were in a hurry to arrive, to catch the last train, because all the trains in Dolly City were the last ones, all of them thought they were more last than the others.

I saw malignant tumors on the Saint Bernard dogs, on the barbed wire, on my child’s head. He had brown spots on his hands, moles sprouted all over him, he was covered with a horrifying neon rash, and he limped too, he had rheumatic fever. I had already made up my mind to resign myself to the cancer of the environment and concentrate on the cancer of my son, to take care of him and only him—and the rest of the world could die and burn in hell.

I bought a pair of binoculars and went into an old laundry. I planned to look at my child through them, maybe I’d see something I hadn’t seen before. A teacher of medicine in Katmandu had once told us, his students, that sometimes, in making a diagnosis, you should step back and look at things from a distance through binoculars. I sat the kid with the Circassian doll on a dryer (closed, the door of the dryer was closed), took several steps backwards, aimed, and locked in on the target.

I couldn’t tell my ass from my elbow, and I realized that it must be set for greater distances, or else my binoculars were fucked.

“Sit there, and don’t touch anything,” I warned the kid and went outside. It was peak hour, and a million people were going in and out of the subway stations, walking past the obscene graffiti on the walls like on any other day without blinking an eye. They were in such a hurry that they even continued walking on the escalators, onwards and upwards. I found an optician’s shop. I went in and persuaded the optician to come with me and enlighten me on the mysteries of the binoculars I’d bought. I led her to the laundry, and while I was busy explaining the problem in all its details, I located a malignant growth on her neck, and cut short my explanation in order to inform her that it was the end of her, but she didn’t care. She declared that life had to go on whatever happened, took my binoculars apart, and told me that it was trash.

“What do you mean?” I asked, but she didn’t reply.

“Who’s that?” she inquired, looking at the boy.

“My son.”

“What does he want?”

“Just to live, I suppose.”

“Did you ask him?”

“He hardly talks, he’s very problematic.”

“What do you mean, he doesn’t talk, is he dumb?”

“He can’t get the words out. Do I have to come up with an explanation for everything?”

“What a strange woman you are,” she said.

“If one of us is strange, it’s probably you,” I said.

“Me? What’s your name?” she asked with a pretence of friendliness.

“Dolly.”

“Dolly. Is that short for Dikla?”

“It’s an acronym. And what’s your name?”

“Ninette Oberzon. An acronym of what?”

“Aren’t you tired?” I asked her, hoping she’d get the hint. She yawned and said: “No. Actually,” she said as she yawned again, “I can’t keep my eyes open,” and her eyes closed, she lay down on the floor, put her head on a pile of dirty underwear, and fell asleep. The child’s face was swept with terror, he feared what was to happen next, and with good reason.

I picked up Ninette Oberzon, put her into the washing machine, and pressed the “Start” button.

 

Dolly City, a city without a base, without a past, without an infrastructure. The most demented city in the world. All the people in Dolly City are usually on the run. Since they’re always running, there’s always someone chasing them, and since there’s someone chasing them, they catch them and execute them and throw them into the river. The trains in Dolly City run like runs in panty-hose—if you don’t stop them, they’ll reach your crotch. Dolly City, a city of intensive traffic—in everything, babies included. All the babies in Dolly City are adopted, the little bastards. All the mothers in Dolly City are fucked up, screwed up. All the trains in Dolly City rattle nonstop. The regime in Dolly City is democratic, however ridiculous it may sound, Dolly City is a democracy. There are two big parties: Bureaucracy and Procedure. The parties each have gangs of street kids who take the law into their own hands. The soldiers of the Bureaucracy party are the Trashers. Revolting, dirty, unhygienic types, who spend all their time pickpocketing, coughing, wiping their noses on their sleeves, and relieving themselves in their pants. A Trasher never says hello, he only acts—they especially like to spray graffiti on walls where there’s a strong smell of male urine.

The Trashers mainly eat easily digested fish, or tuna mousse. On the other hand, the Alrighters of the Procedure party are an entirely different kettle of fish. They’re all right—absolutely, gorgeously all right. Every one of the Alrighters has swum across the Kinnereth dozens of times. They all adore hiking in Jerusalem, most of them go jogging round the Old City walls every evening. Most of the Alrighters polish diamonds and sing wonderful songs in the shower. They know all the great, old Hebrew songs, including, “Oh, the garden of sycamore trees, oh-ho.”

There are gangs in Dolly City too, like the Apostrophes, whose slogan is as dumb as their faces. They sing to a Reggae beat: “The state is me / Please decapitate me.” And then there are the Cowards, the Archetypes, and the Bonbons, but most of the inhabitants of Dolly City belong to the category of “like-thats,” because of the line, “There were people like that, too, a long time ago,” from the song, “Oh, the garden of sycamore trees, oh-ho…” The “like-thats” are the descendants of ancient and enthusiastic woodcutters who suffered from hyperactivity, and cut down all the trees around their houses simply for the sake of having something to take their aggression out on.

Luckily for me, I managed to avoid falling into any of these groups—I learned to keep a low profile. I learned that the trick is simply to pretend to be asleep, and so clandestinely undermine.

 

So—we found ourselves in the streets, me and the child. We slept, like most of the homeless, in filthy niches, in buses, in abandoned train coaches. The usual bullshit of life went on. That whole shtick of day following night, with the seasons also doing their best to take over one from another, if not always with notable success.

I forbade the child to touch me, or enter my field of vision, because I would immediately have discovered a tumor and been obliged to operate, and I no longer had the instruments or the right conditions, and to be honest I’d begun to detest these Sisyphean operations, I was just plain sick and tired of them.

I went to an old carpenter and asked him to glue the child to my back. First of all, I wouldn’t see him, and because of the layer of glue I wouldn’t actually touch him either. Secondly, he would grow on my back, and gradually he would become part of me, and I would become part of him, and then, when the barriers between us broke down completely, I would be able to incorporate him inside myself and forget all about him, and I wouldn’t have to worry so much anymore. As for the not particularly aesthetic hump, I didn’t give a damn, I knew that anyone who wanted me would take me as I was, and if my hump bothered him—let him go fuck somebody else.

As soon as I emerged from the carpenter’s moldy den, another ghastly accident took place. A train was derailed, the coaches turned over, two hundred people were crushed to death, and the wounded screamed under the wreckage.

I looked at this familiar scene, and wondered how many times in human history people had been buried under the ruins of something which they themselves had built. I addressed myself to the task of tending the wounded. My son—as if the carpenter’s glue wasn’t enough for him—hugged me tightly, and this made me panic, I was afraid that before I knew what hit me he would plant a kiss on me—and a kiss meant cancer of the teeth, the mouth, and the gums. Apart from which, my back was itching like hell.

I leaned over a severely wounded man. He implored me to amputate his foot, and I asked him to scratch my back in return. We made a deal, I lay down on my stomach in the middle of a sewage canal, my chin right in the shit and my nose getting a hell of a whiff, and the bearded, wounded man pushed a twig into the narrow space that the carpenter had omitted to smear with his carpenter’s glue, and scratched and rubbed, and asked: “Is that better? Is that better?”

“Yes, that’s better,” I said.

We went—or so I thought—our separate ways, but half an hour later, when I stopped to take a leak, I saw the man with the amputated foot walking behind me, if you could call those crooked hops walking. I stamped my foot to chase him away. You take a person’s foot, and they want to give you their whole leg. I threw stones at him, let him go somewhere else, let him pose as a wounded war veteran, let him collect Social Security—what did he want from me?

“What do you want?” I asked him eventually.

But the leech didn’t reply. I crossed roads, walked across bridges, went up and down on escalators—and he kept on following me.

“What do you want?” I asked him again.

“I want to show you something.”

“I’ll see everything in hell when I get there.”

“No, no, please, you must. I want to show you something.”

I gave in and followed him. For half an hour we proceeded in silence, and then the man entered the courtyard of an abandoned building, made his way to the far end, opened a creaking wooden door, and pointed to a few plants growing on the ground.

“What’s that?”

“My garden.”

“Is that what you brought me here for?”

“Yes.”

“Do I look like a psychiatrist? You think I’ve got time for your nonsense? Go to hell.”

“Go to hell and get fucked yourself.”

“Fuck you, and your father too.”

The man smiled, held out his calloused brown hand and said: “My name’s Gordon. I’m the first Jew to work the land since the destruction of the Second Temple.”

“Scratch Gordon.” It slipped out.

“I grow organic vegetables. I thought, for the child perhaps, that you might want organic vegetables.”

The man stuck to me like a leech. Wherever I went he followed me with his organic vegetables. Apparently he’d succeeded in planting vegetables in various places in Dolly City and growing them without any chemical agents. Looking back, he was a pest, but at the time—not that I’d actually converted to his ideas—I let him talk. The only thing I censored was his tendency to sing in the evenings: “How lovely are the nights in Canaan.”

He took an interest in me and the child. He asked questions about his educational upbringing. He inquired as to what school of thought I belonged. “No school,” I said.

“Only the earth,” he said after hearing a bit of the child’s history. “Only Mother Earth. You’re a bundle of nerves. You belong in the earth. You have to find the roots of your soul, you have to dig for them. Who knows,” he said in a different, reflective tone, “maybe you’ll discover that you’re the child’s real mother…”

“That I’m this child’s real mother?”

“Perhaps.”

“Then who’s the father?”

“The father’s less important. A child needn’t know who his father is, but a child who doesn’t know who his mother is—that’s serious.”

“And what about the video of the bris? What about the hidden connection between him and the Pan-T pilots, especially one specific pilot and his daughter?”

“You know what,” he frowned, “you pay too much attention to details. You should take a more global view of things. You think I haven’t got cracks in my memory? You have to resign yourself to the existence of illogical, uncertain elements. Look at me, I’m sixty-seven years old, and I’m not afraid to die because I’m not afraid of Mother Earth. I’ve cultivated her all my life, and in the end she’ll reward me when she becomes my eternal resting place. Like the fruits of the earth, Dolly, when I ripen—I’ll drop from the tree like a guava on the eve of Sukkot.”

 

Gordon and I learned firsthand that wandering through Dolly City was far more horrible than wandering through anywhere else. Better do it in cities like Rome, Paris, or Katmandu, if you must. All we did in life was try to stay alive. We just soldiered on.

And winter came again. The child was cold as iron. Snowflakes caught on Gordon’s gray beard, snow whitened his gardens, and he, with his inner serenity, cleared the snow from his strawberry beds and shook the flakes off the frozen child.

Gordon felt connected to the history of the world, especially the history of the Jews. He drew me out a little, and I told him about all kinds of things that I’d done. I toned down the tales of my cruelty, but I think he understood. He even suggested that I write down the names of all the people I’d killed in my life in a notebook, dividing the page into columns: one for those I’d killed out of negligence, one for those I’d killed by mistake, and one for those I’d harpooned with everything I had. One day he even bought me a notebook, but I left it lying on the bench.

In the course of one of our heart-to-hearts, on the banks of the frozen river, warming ourselves at the flames of a campfire he’d lit, he asked me: “Tell me, Doctor Dolly, why didn’t you study medicine at the University of Tel Aviv? Why did you go all the way to Nepal?”

“Why did I go all the way to Nepal?”

“Why did you go all the way to Nepal.”

“I’ll tell you why, I had a free ticket, the last free ticket my father, who was a Pan-T employee, managed to get for me before he died. On his last night in the Ichilov Hospital, in the oncology ward, he murmured to me with the voice of a dying man, ‘Oh, Dolly, you have no objectif in life. You’re just drifting, it’s insufferable. Study something, study medicine, study medicine in Katmandu for all I care, as long as you study.’”

“Aha,” said Gordon, “so he was the one who put that ridiculous idea in your head.”

“You could say that.”

“But you know, Dolly,” he said, and threw another twig onto the fire, where it was immediately welcomed with jolly crackles by its burning friends, “can’t you tell the difference between something said seriously and something said metaphorically? Your father may he rest in peace didn’t actually mean that you should go and study in Katmandu. He meant…”

“How do you know what he meant?” I interrupted him. “How the hell does anybody know what he meant?” I was terribly offended. The thought that my father hadn’t actually intended me to go and study medicine in Katmandu was devastating, since this was the first and last thing he’d told me to do that I actually did. Gordon noticed my agitation and stopped talking. After all, he too hadn’t gotten off lightly in life. His worship of the earth and its fruits had made him lose his sense of proportion. Instead of shooting up heroine, he injected himself with chlorophyll, but it didn’t have any effect because it was just chlorophyll, there was nothing narcotic about it. He was convinced that it did something for him, and I didn’t want to spoil his high.

He decided that I didn’t have a clear enough idea of my identity, and he drilled me by asking me questions:

“Name please.”

“Dolly.”

“Occupation?”

“Doctor.”

“Family situation?”

“X plus child.”

“What’s X plus child?”

“I don’t know, it just came out.”

“Profession?”

“Doctor.”

“Hobbies?”

“Medicine, biology, zoology, pathology.”

“Parents?”

“Two.”

“What do you mean two?”

“Father, mother. Two.”

“Origins of parents?”

“Nile River, next to the delta,” I said carefully. He smiled. “Education?”

“Whose? My parents’?”

“Yours.”

“Medicine. I’m a doctor. I studied medicine in Katmandu, Nepal.”

“Place of residence?”

“Dolly City. That’s enough. I’ve had enough of this nonsense. Stop it.”

 

For six months we dragged our asses from place to place. Our walks got more and more depressing and made us both wish we were dead. Once I nearly jumped into the Thames with my child, who kept on growing on my back. If it weren’t for Gordon, I would have put an end to it long ago. With the child. Without the child. Without the child, because he might have kept me afloat like swimmies and saved my life.

Toward the end, things didn’t go too smoothly. The atmosphere between us became heavy. But we still managed to get through to each other.

Once Gordon succeeded in persuading me to shoot up with chlorophyll. He told me it was a thousand times more natural than those yellow antidepressants I’d been swallowing for fifteen years.

“It’s organic,” he said. “It can only do you good.” And it was really something—if it was anything at all.

He succeeded in persuading me to shoot chlorophyll, and I succeeded in persuading him that it was possible that telephone poles had cancer.

Maybe five times I found myself tripping on chlorophyll. Once, Gordon, who was also high on the stuff, said let’s go to a strip show. It really freaked me out, that the old man wanted to see strippers. When we went into the show in the November Club, he didn’t take his eyes off the fig leaf covering the girl’s crotch. Afterwards it turned out that it was the fig leaf that turned him on, not what was underneath it, because when she removed the leaf, and all the men filled their undies with their mango juice, Gordon went for the green leaf, which he put into his mouth and chewed.

 

One day he said:

“Doctor, I think I’ve put my finger on your problem. You think your child’s made of sponge, and that eighty percent of him is water. You think your child’s a sliced-up watermelon. The child is not a watermelon. Get that into your head.”

“Gordon, my head’s already full to bursting.”

“Full of shit, that’s what it’s full of—shit!”

“So?”

“You’re a blasphemer. That’s what you are. If you weren’t a blasphemer, you would never have come to the conclusion that your son is a watermelon and that eighty percent of him is water in the first place.”

“I’m a blasphemer? You know, you’re not the first person who’s ever called me a blasphemer.”

“You doubt creation. That’s the heart of the matter. Let God do his job. Why are you interfering? You don’t trust God. Just look at the world, it’s all handmade. Just look. Black and white, yellow and orange—it’s all the work of one God.”

“I don’t trust God?” I was offended.

“No.”

“It’s God who doesn’t trust me,” I said.

“You’re a fool,” said Gordon. “You’re driving up a one-way street in the wrong direction.”

“I don’t get it.”

“So you don’t get it, so what? So you don’t get it. So you’re dumb. And that’s that.”

“I don’t understand you, Gordon. All the streets in Dolly City are one-way streets, but everybody drives in all directions anyway—that’s the main reason for the chaos!”

“You’re a fool.”

“I’m not a fool.”

“You’re a fool.”

“You’re a fool!”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. Why don’t you build yourself a ghost town of your own?”

“Why don’t I build myself a ghost town of my own. An excellent question.”

He sank into thought, while I passed the child a few tablets of pressed wheat.

“Why don’t I build myself a ghost town of my own…” repeated Gordon after half an hour.

I sighed.

“Maybe you don’t want to build yourself a ghost town, but a ghost village. Are you with me?”

“Yes, I’m with you,” he said, but it wasn’t true. For a few weeks already I’d noticed he was changing. He hardly slept and spent whole nights sitting motionless at the edge of the canal.

“When I die—” he suddenly said one evening, “will they really bury me in the Rishon LeZion wine cellars, like it says in the song?”

“What?” I was startled.

“I don’t want to be buried in the Rishon LeZion wine cellars. Can they force me?”

I didn’t say anything. History and folklore had taken him over completely. All his theories about Mother Earth and working the land were bullshit. He was just an intellectual the entire time.

We parted after about nine months on the roads together. He said that he was sick of Dolly City, he wanted to try his luck in Mexico City.

“You’re unhappy in Dolly City…” I said, overcome by melancholy. Dolly City was indeed one big grave.

“Dolly City,” he said, “is not a place to put down roots or start a farm. It’s not a place. It’s an ugly, disgusting, stinking, filthy, boring, depressing town—what else is there to say?”

“So,” I said, deeply offended, “you’re getting out?”

“Aha.”

And he left. He stopped a truck, got on, and it drove off. And I went back to town.