A few months before my father kicked the bucket, a few months before the doctors came to the conclusion that he was on his way out, one of the medical giants who was treating him, a long-faced specialist from the outpatient lung clinic at Ichilov, had a sudden revelation and sent him to the pain clinic on Henrietta Szold, the parallel street.

“There’s nothing the matter with you. Apart from a terrible pain in the left side of the lung. It’s nothing, it’s nerves, pure nerves.”

For three months, every Tuesday or Wednesday, my father showed up at the pain clinic, and week after week one of the not-quite-doctors there took a huge needle and stuck it in his back, brutalizing one of the nerves. The not-quite’s hobby was killing nerves in cancerous bodies. The hobby of his colleague, that first not-quite, was convincing the patients to kill off the nerve.

Up until then I’d never heard of this genre of physicians—the not-quite-doctors, who aren’t exactly doctors and aren’t exactly quacks, but something in between. From what I gathered, these characters smile easily, their touch is warm and pleasant, the color of their skin is grayish-brown, and they speak good Hebrew and passable English.

These two not-quites led my dying father up the garden path. Three days after this nerve-killing ritual, during the course of which my father convinced himself that the pain had gone—it came back, bigger than ever. The not-quite-doctors attacked the nerve with their injections about twenty-five times. They had a full-scale strategy, they marked black dots on my father’s back with all kinds of special pencils, they stuck compasses into his back and drew circles on it, God knows why. And my father, that poor sucker, would sit there without saying a word and submit to their treatment, which had no affect at all on his agonizing pains, against which I myself waged a failing campaign by telling him he was only imagining them.

Only after three months of barren treatment—I remember, it was the middle of summer, the three acacia trees in the empty lot across the street were green, the bus was carting away the excrement of the North Tel Aviv suburb—my father sat in a rocking chair, and told me that he knew he had cancer, that he only went to the pain clinic for the fun of it, and that when a doctor told you there was nothing wrong with you, it was a sure sign you were going to die.

 

I sat on the bench with my fat ass spilling in all directions, with the kid stuck on my back preventing me from leaning properly against it, and asked myself if I shouldn’t open a pain clinic like the one in Henrietta Szold, in other words, with the main idea behind the treatment being to concentrate exclusively on the pain, and not on its causes. About three years earlier, when I lost my marbles and saw malignant tumors everywhere, back then I’d also concentrated on the pain, but that was out of distress, out of compulsion, whereas now we were talking about an entirely new conception I’ve embraced.

As a beginning, to get some ideas, I went to Henrietta Szold Street in Dolly City. I assumed that if there was a Henrietta Szold Street in Tel Aviv, there would be one in Dolly City too, between Ichilov and the Haifa expressway. I did find the street, but I didn’t find a pain clinic. In the place where the clinic should have been, there was a brothel run by a few Kurdish refugees who’d moved in and taken over.

I went to Gare Saint-Lazare. I assumed that if there was a Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris, then there would be one in Dolly City too, but there wasn’t anything that came anywhere near it. Instead I found another brothel run by Kurdish refugees.

I returned to the main street, deep in thought, wondering how I was going to adapt my program to the existing circumstances. I went into a brothel and asked the madam, who was actually a man, to give me a shot so that I could use the money to establish a pain-relief stall. I asked for something clean and easy. She understood right away and fixed me up with someone who only wanted to rub against me. I didn’t understand exactly what he had in mind, and it took me a while to realize that that was all there was to it. He just walked past me and rubbed against me slightly with his leg, continued to the end of the room, took out a few bills, and left.

I waited for a day and a half at the Dolly City city hall for a license to open a stall, until in the end they informed me that it was out of the question and impossible. I found a piece of cardboard and wrote on it: “Soother: Instant Relief from Your Pain.” I said to myself, you see, Dolly, all you have to do with your ideas is institutionalize them. A few years ago you ran around Dolly City with a syringe, injecting everyone you came across with painkillers, and now you’re doing the same thing—but you’re earning a living at it.

 

I drugged people. When I couldn’t get hold of sedatives or analgesics I injected them with Pepsi-Cola, and I have no idea what it did to them. A lot of Pan-T flight attendants and air-crew personnel came to me directly from their flights so I’d stick it in their backsides. They suffered from migraines due to stress. Quite a few pilots suffering from lower-back pains came too. They came dressed in their pilots’ uniforms and behaved as if the whole world was supposed to lick their boots. I got rid of them real quick, I couldn’t stand the smell of their aftershave.

I had another reason for keeping them at arm’s length: I was afraid one of them might recognize his grandson on my back. But my fears were superfluous. After everything he’d been through, the child looked like nobody but himself. To be exact, he looked like a ghost, and passersby would stop in the street to stare at him as if he were a freak of nature. Some of them made fun of him too, and I let them, so he wouldn’t get too spoiled, so he’d know that this world was a hospital for the mentally ill.

My son would see the hostile looks and roar like a tiger with an arrow stuck in its chest, hours would pass before he’d begin to cry, and then another few hours until he’d calm down.

I accumulated hundreds of hours of injections, but gradually people either died or got used to living with the pain, and my business started rapidly deteriorating. The state of my finances was in deep shit. In order to go on breathing the salty air of Dolly City, I was obliged to take up euthanasia—the branch of medicine I hate the most, because it’s neither one thing nor the other. It’s not murder, and it’s not saving lives—so what is it? It’s the moment when medicine admits failure. I hated killing off terminal geriatric cases—even more than a dentist hates pulling a tooth that he could have saved if he’d seen it a few years earlier.

I got fed up with euthanasia. I went into sexual diseases. I kept it up for two months. For a while I walked around with a sign saying that I was a gynecologist, and when I was sick of that, I became an ear-nose-and-throat specialist. For months I kept at it like a yo-yo. I wandered from field to field, from specialization to specialization, like the Israelites wandering from place to place throughout the long years of their exile.

After that I took a rest from medicine for a while. I couldn’t take it anymore, my doubtful diagnoses were coming out of my ears. Maybe if I’d been a doctor with a clinic and business cards and white coats, maybe then I could have carried on, but this hand-to-mouth medicine was killing me as well as my patients. I found a job in the cemetery as an usher, taking the mourners to the grave and showing them the quickest way out. But it bored me stiff, and I gave it up after a week.

I might as well take the opportunity to say a couple of things about madness here. Beyond any doubt—madness is a predator. Its food is the soul. It takes over the soul as rapidly as our forces occupied Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip in 1967. After madness takes over and settles in the territory of the human mind, the mad cows come into the picture. All they know to do is eat, so they stuff themselves sick and lay the fields waste. And if a state like the State of Israel can’t control the Arabs in the territories, how can anybody expect me, a private individual, to control the occupied territories inside myself?

And once I’m on the subject of politics, I’d like to ask, why don’t the Americans bomb Dolly City? They’ve got atomic weapons! Why don’t a few enlightened nations get together and blast this wretched city right off the map?

After humanity succeeds in finding a cure for cancer, it will have to devote itself to finding a way to kill madness without killing the madman with it.

 

I went into a pub. A blonde singer was singing, “Electricity flows through your fingertips.” I wanted to lie down on the table and say: Okay, okay, let’s have the shock treatment, even though it doesn’t help, it doesn’t help. The kid was turned on by the music, he began jumping up and down and going berserk on my back, I wanted to turn around and whop him one.

In the middle of the night they closed the pub, and I went outside with a piece of cheesecake in my hand. I ate the cheesecake. It was my eighth or ninth slice, I was so fat I could hardly walk. The pregnancy on my back didn’t make life any easier either, to put it mildly. I lay down on a stone bench on my stomach, above a column of black ants, and tried to remember the last time I had lain on my back. I thought to myself that I must be about thirty-six, if not more, and I calculated that the kid must be six years old by now, and maybe the time had come to detach him from my back and send him on his way. Let him get on with his life. As far as I was concerned, let him hang some ugly sign on his transparent chest and beg for money in the street, and I’d be able to lie on my back in peace.

I found a store that sold everything. I went inside, and asked if they would get the child off my back. They looked at me suspiciously, and asked me why, since the child was young and weak. I said that I only wanted a few days without a sack of flour on my back. Just a few days, and after that I’d stick him back on again. They agreed. I lay on my stomach for half a day until they managed to get him off my back without tearing any skin off him or me. They proceeded millimeter by millimeter, and all the time they kept saying that they didn’t understand why I was putting in all this effort if I intended to stick him back on in a week’s time.

They finished the job. I threw a few coins on the wooden table and went outside. I planned to give him the slip. Let him go, let him get on with it, leave me alone. We reached the anti-anti-Semite quarter of town, where the holocaust survivors crucify a different goy every day. They were just crucifying a Finnish carpenter. He begged them to spare him, but after all, their parents didn’t want to die either.

The kid was fascinated, and I disappeared on him. I hid behind a pillar to see how he was getting on. One part of me said: Run away, Dolly, disappear, but another part told me not to move. For an hour and a half my son bawled, until I stepped out. As soon as he saw me, he ran towards me, but I averted my eyes. The kid looked bad. He was the reflection of the madness of years. I told him to walk a meter or two behind me and to do his best to avoid his reflection in mirrors or shop windows.

 

We reached Milano Square. I lay down on the green grass opposite the Milano Café and looked up at the blue sky. The kid popped up in my field of vision, luckily for him the sun was in my eyes.

“What do you want?” I asked him.

“I feel sick.”

He was weak, he couldn’t walk. He lay down next to me, and I opened my bag and told him to turn over and lie on his stomach. I wanted to bring the map I had drawn on his back all those years ago up to date, to enlarge it in accordance with the child’s growth, and to color the green line an olive-green.

He lay on his stomach until I was finished. In the end I contemplated the map, with all that Lebanon, those cedars of Lebanon, and all those Jordan Valley rifts, all those lofty peaks, and swamps drained by pioneers, and Kiryat Shmoneh, where I had an albino cousin who once spat at me, and Arad, where I had another cousin, and suddenly an idea came into my head, I looked at the razzle-dazzle all around me, and I said to myself: Dolly, an exhibition! With this map as one of the exhibits.

I was filled with joy and a certain feeling of anticipation. I opened my portfolio and took out all kinds of things I’d done over the years. There were sketches from Katmandu and all kinds of instruments, and I arranged everything in a row, more or less. I called my exhibition “Forte Depressione.”

I surveyed my exhibits and smiled. Men and gentlemen rushed past me frantically to catch the last train, casting a glance at this display of mine as they ran, but some of them stopped and looked at my exhibition with disgust.

“You want to buy?” I asked, and pointed to one of the more interesting heads in my collection, but the repressed inhabitants of Dolly City looked at my treasures with a vacant stare.

Only one of them, dressed in a toady-green leather jacket, examined my exhibition with interest, and in the end he said:

“One thing I can say for you, ma’am, you’re not trying to bribe God…”

“You’re right,” I replied. “I’m not trying to bribe God. I’m only trying to keep the devil at bay.”

“What’s that?” he inquired, pointing to a limp arm tattooed with a concentration camp number.

“That’s part of life,” I replied.

“Don’t get smart with me,” he said. “Just tell me—”

“Only if you buy it.”

“I’ll buy it.”

I dropped my eyes.

“That’s the arm of my elementary school teacher. I met her recently in the streets of Dolly City. She didn’t recognize me, but I recognized her all right. I offered to give her an enema. She looked at me with revulsion.” I was silent for a moment. “I hated her. She made me ashamed of not being the daughter of holocaust survivors. Because of her I was ashamed that my uncles weren’t murdered by the Nazis, but are all alive and kicking in Kiryat Ata.”

“And that?” he pointed to another exhibit.

“That’s my brother who never existed. He died in the Yom Kippur War. On the first day of the war.”

“I don’t understand. If he never existed in the first place, how did he die?”

“It’s a little difficult to explain,” I said uneasily. “And those,” I pointed to a bit of hair, “are the remains of my father’s moustache. He had a moustache. I tried to get hold of his mother’s bones too, they say she’s buried in Gaza. He had four sisters, all four of them died of different diseases before they were twenty-five. My father never said a word about them. His mother died of a broken heart. She gave birth to my father and put an end to it. They say that her husband was the death of her. He’s buried in Haifa. I’ve never seen his grave…”

 

I went into a little café. It was one o’clock in the afternoon. I sat down on an aluminum chair and seated the child, who hardly moved, opposite me. A woman of forty was sitting in the corner, and about every fifteen minutes her soul had a sudden contraction, and she’d scream loudly and mutter something in Ladino I didn’t understand. Her back trembled. Who knows, I said to myself, maybe her son died of cancer.

I ordered whipped cream and old strawberries at a reduced price for myself and the child. He ate about three and fell asleep with his head on the table. I ate mine and his, and could easily have eaten more. I was bloated, I couldn’t move. I opened a button on my pants, and thought, Oh Dolly, you’re getting fatter by the day. You eat too much bread and yesterday’s cakes that the cake-shops throw out. Your legs are like an elephant’s already and your face is so huge that it frightens the child.

I gulped down a can of Schweppes and looked at the woman. My mood was in the pits. I’d just closed my exhibition and chucked everything into an enormous dumpster. The woman turned around and saw me, and it was evident that she was yearning to unburden her heart. Her face was sullen. She looked at the child and softened.

“What a darling,” she said. “Where did you find him?”

“Just around the corner, a minute ago,” I said. “You want him?”

“Are you selling?”

“If you’re buying.” I felt that I’d fallen into a trap. I looked at the child. Somehow I couldn’t part from him like this. “So,” I tried to change the subject, “what’s your story? Why the tears?”

She sighed. “Is there a shortage of trouble in the world?”

“Don’t get smart with me. What did your son die of, cancer? What kind of cancer did he have?”

“Cancer of the valleys.”

“Oh my God, are you telling me that the valleys have got cancer too?”

“The valleys have got cancer, the fields have got cancer, the mountains, the rocks, everything.”

“I see you’ve got cancer on the brain,” I said, got up with my can of Schweppes, and sat down opposite her, smiling.

“My dear,” she said to me, “the world’s divided into two: those who’ve got cancer, and those who haven’t got it.”

“Which of them do you belong to?”

“Up to three weeks ago, to the ones who haven’t, but now I’m riddled with metastases.”

“Metastases! Oh my God!” I said.

“I feel like hanging myself.”

I put out my hand and said: “Glad to meet you. I’m Professor Dolly, head of the oncology department at Kaplan Hospital, Rehovot. Would you like me to speed things up for you?”

“If you can.”

I drew my pistol and shot one bullet, which went through her head and lodged in a landscape print behind her. I shook the kid awake and together we emerged into the dense fog of Dolly City. The fog of Dolly City—it envelops you like a silk gown, it pricks you like acupuncture, it goes straight to your nervous system.

It was April. In Dolly City, because of the eternal squabbling between Bureaucracy and Procedure, April drags on for three months, until it finishes saying everything it’s got to say. I dragged myself along with the little one, who’d learned a long time ago that it didn’t pay to mess with me.

 

In Dolly City the priests and nuns pop up out of nowhere, or maybe they come out of the walls, they crawl out from the cracks between the stones. I haven’t got a clue, I don’t know how it happens. The nuns and priests are dressed in black, and they’re always running, you can always catch sight of the hems of their habits disappearing round the corner.

I sat on the curb and ate shit. The kid ate shit too. What more can I say? We finished off with cheesecake. I gave the kid a burned piece, I don’t want him getting a sweet tooth, I can’t afford dentists, and if there’s one thing I don’t know the first thing about, it’s dentistry.

I looked at a priest running down the street after another priest, who was running after a nun, who was running after a black cat, who could tell where it all began and ended.

I remembered the Wailing Wall, that high wall with all the plants growing out of it, where people are always getting stabbed in the back if they try to reach it through the winding alleys, that towering wall that whenever I get anywhere near it—I’m told in eight languages to get back, to keep my distance, not to touch the sacred stones, not to desecrate the place with my impurity.

I wanted to send God a message, and taking a trip to the Wall was out of the question for numerous reasons. I sat and thought how I was going to get a message to God in his heaven if I was grounded in Dolly City? I realized I needed an intermediary. I spotted a priest or a nun and the kid and I ran after him-slash-her for three hours, over and under the botanical gardens, over and under bridges, but he-slash-she eluded us. In the afternoon we sat down on the steps of the Museum of Colonialism, resting from our barren pursuit.

I said to my son:

“Son, your mother has to find an intermediary who will take her words, fold them up, make them into an airplane, and send them flying into the great beyond.”

 

The road to Kfar Habad, the Orthodox village, was full of radioactive fallout. All kinds of measuring instruments warned the travelers on the road against overexposure, and I, aggressively over-protective mother that I am, was filled with anxiety and instructed my son not to breathe. At least his lungs would not be contaminated.

Pan-T planes cruised above us like primordial birds, flying southeast or northwest or whatever direction their twinkling screens said they were flying in. British Airways planes cut across the yawning immensity of the sky too—but Pan-T is a whole other league. We were driving in a Beetle convertible I’d stolen back in town. I turned on the radio and listened to Gregorian chants.

Desert winds carrying mustard gas beat against the Beetle with tropical audacity. The child was tied down in the backseat with about five hundred belts. A sign saying Kfar Habad pointed left, and I turned obediently onto a road that wended its way through a dry creek.

People always look up with admiration to whatever is stronger than they are. Crazy people like saying that the craziness is stronger than them. Not me. I may be crazy, but it’s not stronger than I am.

I penetrated the village in the afternoon. Men were standing under the trees and praying or dancing like dervishes, since the Hasidic shtick was, of course, joie de vivre—radioactive fallout or not.

I got out of the car, as fat as I was, a round, waddling ball, a balloon, a walking mountain with a checked cloth cap on my head and another on the head of my son. I approached one of the worshippers, who immediately said:

“It says in the Torah: Pour out thy fury upon the goyim that know thee not. Do you pour?”

“Do I pour out my fury? I don’t think I’ve ever done anything but pour out my fury.”

“Do you pour out your fury in any old direction, or do you hit the goyim?”

“Look, I’m dying to hit the goyim, really dying. And I’ve hit a few of them too, in Germany, in Düss—”

“Germany doesn’t count,” said the Hasid, who was long, long-limbed, long-faced, long-haired and long-bearded—black with flecks of gray.

“Why?” I asked.

“I’m taking care of Germany myself. It’s being taken care of. You’re wasting your time.”

“So what’s available?”

“You’ll have to look at our lists.”

The conversation broke up to smithereens. It began to snow and the fellow ran home, while I hurried back to the Beetle. My son was sitting inside shivering with cold, his lips as blue as the deep sea. I threw my coat over him and turned on the radio. It said that people today were moving from east to west, and that all movement from west to east had come to a complete halt. I imagined European tribes galloping on wild horses in Europe during the ninth or the seventh century, before all those barbarian hordes became so full of themselves, their asses grew to hippo-size scale, and they begun flooding the world with their dumb ideas.

I started the engine and drove slowly down the whitening paths of the village as it snowed and rained simultaneously. I was looking for their archives, to see the list and find an available goy kingdom. I wanted to know who else was taking care of the Germans, and if what I’d done in Stephanie Poldark’s orphanage had been taken into account. I wanted to see who was taking care of pouring out his fury on the Brazilians, the Swedes, the Mongolians, who was screwing the neutral Swiss, with all their skiing and white snow, and all their ridiculous slalom competitions, which they watch in woolen hats and gloves, cheering from the sidelines.

I reached the archives, but they were closed because of the situation. It stopped snowing and raining. I got out, holding my son’s icy hand, and looked for someone I could confide in so he could pass it on for me, right on to the top.

I looked at the wooden doors. I knew that behind most of them sat an elderly man with a long white beard and a twinkle in his eye, and indeed, when I opened a few doors carefully, and I and my son peeped in, that was exactly what we saw.

“Can I help?” said the Hasid revealed behind the door.

“Yes,” I said quickly, “you can tell God that it was me who killed my father, not the cancer. That’s to say, he was dying of cancer, but the lethal drug that killed him was injected into his IV by yours truly, mercy killing, yeah right. Can you pass that on to God?”

“Why don’t you squirt it out to him yourself?” he said and returned to his perusal of the Talmud.

“You want a bullet in the head?” I said and took out my pistol.

But I didn’t shatter his skull, I let him go on living, and the child and I went on living too.

We returned to the Beetle, but it was beginning to get on my nerves so I set it on fire to get a bit warm. I set out for the road with my son running after me shouting: “Wait for me, wait for me, wait for me.” I kept looking behind my shoulder, not at him, but in the hope of getting a ride from some Hasid who had decided to abandon the faith of his fathers. But they all stuck to their old ideas and I was obliged to head back to town with a drooling hooligan of a truck driver. The kid laid his head on my shoulder, and I felt the hollows in his skull, a reminder of the bygone days when his head was at the head of my agenda. Although his touch freaked me out, I didn’t hurl him to the other end of the cabin, but allowed his head to bounce up and down on my shoulder in accordance with the potholes and bumps in the road.

I examined myself. I wanted to see if I was still seeing cancer everywhere. I sensed that the road had cancer, this freeway, Route No. 1, was riddled with cancer, and so was the driver, but it all left me cold. I no longer felt the urge to open them up and take it out before it spread. I said to myself: Honey, just drop it.

 

That same day I figured out the way to fight my insanity: ignore it. I taught myself to treat my madness the way you treat a crazy person you meet on the street—you humor him, nod your head, and move on. “Move on”—these are the key words. Look and learn, I said to myself, a man goes out of his mind. He can leave it behind and move on. He can take that crazy mind of his and put it away, isolate it, and if possible tie it down—just as they do to crazy people themselves. For weeks I worked on this isolation, I isolated the thought that cancer had taken over the world, that cancer was the devil, that the devil had cancer.

The boy was six and a half, maybe more. I took him to Rosh Hanikra. I bought him a croissant and let my thoughts wander all afternoon. We sat on the cliff and watched the cable cars taking people down to the grotto to see the sea coming in and frothing and foaming precisely up to the points marked by the Nature Protection Society. In summer, the sea is too polite and tactful to make fools of the Nature Protectors in front of the tourists. Only in winter, when there’s nobody there, it does what it likes and doesn’t give a damn.

We went straight back to our den, to sleep, to forget, to get away from it all.

 

Months passed, like they always do, the show must go on and all that bullshit. People were deeply depressed, but no one wanted me to give them a massage or an enema, or even work with them on correct breathing.

We were down to our last crust, and we went to the only normal place left in Dolly City—the Carmel Market. It’s unbelievable how organized everything is there! Rows of smiling stall-owners who know exactly what they’re selling, their hands yellow with nicotine, all kinds of funguses sprouting on their necks. Lines of professional hawkers to the left and right, and in the middle, the moonlighters, yelling out warnings when a municipal inspector arrives.

We wandered down the streets of the market. With one hand I held my son, and in the other a wicker basket, which I filled with leftover fruit and vegetables and bits of chicken. We reached the stall that sold yellow antidepressants by the kilo, mountains of yellow pills. The hawker ladled them with a big spoon into brown paper bags, and people bought them like peanuts.

I bought two kilos of pills to last me the month, and swallowed eight at once. I let the kid have a couple as well, to get him into the swing of things.

At the market’s exit I sat down on a bench and cracked pistachio nuts. Mothers with children hanging on their chests or backs, or still inside their stomachs, hurried past me, rushing from the Carmel Market to the black market on Lillenblum Street, where men in checked pants stand, their little pricks tucked into white y-fronts and their faces erased, as if someone had flattened them with a brick. They’ve all got $-shaped, crooked mouths from all the times they’ve hissed the black market rate of the dollar out of the corner of their mouths.

The kid looked at those children who had questionable fathers and fucked-up mothers, and I told him to thank me, to have a good look at these people worse off than me and be grateful that he’d fallen into my hands and not those of the really crazy women, the quiet ones who never say anything at all until they take a glass and smash it on their children’s heads. And the kid, who thought that he’d finally found a chink in my armor, asked me for a popsicle shaped like a rooster. He’d gone too far. I seized his head firmly between my hands, gave him a good shake, and yelled if he’d like me to send him to a kibbutz in some valley. I told him that if he didn’t shut up, I was going to send him to Beit Netofa Valley, to Kibbutz Ein Shemer, to the giant swings between the Poinciana trees.

The kid gave me a frightening look, a really frightening look, and I shut up, with a completely new anxiety rising in my breast. I shivered at the thought that I’d made him mentally ill, that I was beginning to pay the price for his carved-up childhood. My blood ran cold at the thought that from now on he was going to wear out the rest of his days in lunatic asylums. I could already see him at the age of sixty, sitting on a bench with a look of incurable insanity in his eyes, his hair uncombed and thinning. This abyss pulled me down like chewing gum. Instead of facing it, I went to sleep and dreamed that he was fucking me, my own child was fucking me. When I woke up I must have looked like Charlotte Rampling after a lay.

As for my son, he was standing in front of me, clean and neat, all dressed up in new clothes—I think he was even wearing a checked flannel waistcoat—hanging onto the hand of my only sister, whom I hadn’t seen for years.

“Natasha,” I said, my head spinning. “What are you doing in Dolly City? Have you gone out of your mind?”

“I’m opening a shelter for battered children, sister. Children of perverted, dangerous parents, sister. I’m taking the child away from you, I’m confiscating him. You know why.”

“And when are you going to return him to me? After all he’s my child, for better or for worse—”

“When you return to the ’67 borders,” she retorted.

“What?”

“You heard me,” and she grabbed the kid and marched off in the direction of Allenby Street, and he walked calmly next to her without so much as a backward glance.

 

Rain in Dolly City isn’t just bullshit, it comes down as thick as spaghetti, but for five years it hasn’t rained a drop. Friendly missiles were fired from the outskirts of the city to tear the virgin clouds wide open and get things moving, but the missiles entered the clouds and got stuck inside them like horses’ dicks.

To overcome their depression, the inhabitants of Dolly City swallowed yellow pills in increasing quantities. I too was plunged in gloom, and I too increased my dosage.

I earned my living exclusively from enemas, I became a real expert in the field. A certain accountant I serviced told me that for several nights he had dreamed that the numbers themselves were pursuing him, intent on fucking him up the ass, and he didn’t know what to do. He wasn’t the only one in Dolly City to have this dream. My clients—a cross section of the demented population suffering from a representative collection of deprivations—would pour out their boring confessions to me, so boring that even my hair went to sleep. When people start talking, it’s like that trick Itzik the magician used to do in our skyscraper, the one when you take a yellow handkerchief out of your mouth, and then a red one, a green one and a purple one, and so forth and so on, there’s just no end to it.

I was growing old. I turned forty-one. I got even fatter. All I ate was chunks of halva. I think I weighed around ninety kilos, and that’s without the child. Frost descended on the city, there was no escaping it. The colder it grew the more halva I devoured. I was crazy about halva, halva’s really something.

The telephone poles shivered with cold, birds froze in mid-flight and fell like stones. The sculptors went completely crazy. Everything that petrified from the cold—they claimed as their own work. Minor wars broke out among the sculptors, quarrels in broad daylight, public disputes on street corners.

I joined the down-and-outs round their crackling fires. People said nothing and tried to get warm. There was no smoke without twenty people standing round it. They breathed in the vapors coming out of each other’s mouths, and so, despite their revulsion, people stuck together.

 

Another April came to an end, the fifth in succession, and February arrived. The sky was overcast, not with clouds but with planes—Migs and Mirages of the French Air Force, dropping bombs on my only grazing ground. For several months their planes had been bombing Dolly City for no apparent reason. They would simply appear in the sky two or three times a month, shit on us, and fly away again. I ran with everybody else to the botanical gardens for shelter, because people said that the French would never touch the botanical gardens—they were sentimental about plants on account of their big perfume industry. But this was bullshit. The botanical gardens were thoroughly bombed, and I really had to laugh when I saw the gigantic tropical flowers with unexploded bombs stuck in their jaws.

I was deeply depressed. For years I’d been preparing for a cancer attack, for years I’d been identifying cancer cells wherever I looked—and along came the French Air Force with a few of their asshole pilots, dropping booby-trapped ostrich eggs all over my moon.

 

One day, let’s say in March, the twenty-second of March, or maybe the thirtieth of December—only you, God, know what’s happened to my memory—two Concords collided over Dolly City with a mighty crash. I lay on a bench and watched all the people and their parts falling down. The rescue teams prevented the crowds from turning the survivors into kebabs.

But the people of Dolly City had never in their lives taken any notice of anyone’s pleas, and they went ahead and did what they did.

I was hungry as well. I was really dying to get my teeth into something, say a chocolate croissant, but the bakeries were shut, the people wanted to eat meat. I went into the graveyard of the French soldiers who’d fallen in World War I. Pale crosses with all kinds of Jean-Clauds and Jean-Pauls. I lay down on the charged earth and took a nap.

I opened and closed my eyes. I knew I had to get up—people have to get up, they have to stand on their own two feet! And if they don’t want to—too bad. They must get up!

I got up and stood on my feet and felt dizzy. I could hardly straighten my back, my vertebrae hurt. I went back to town. People were walking in the streets, they were drinking beer in bars, they were fucking behind curtains. I went into a café, I asked for a glass of water and swallowed eighteen pills all at once, to give me a little lift. But it didn’t have any effect. Those things are useless. I walked down the street until I found a bib with a picture of Donald Duck hanging from a power line. I found myself climbing up the pole—I took the risk for that bit of cloth. I rescued the bib, I examined it, it looked more or less okay to me, and I set out for the home established by my sister, the social worker—a shelter for battered children and debilitated old folks.

“What’s that?” asked my sister, whose hair had turned a little gray.

“A bib.”

“Who for?”

“The kid.” I recoiled. Why did she ask who for? “Are you trying to tell me that he’s dead?”

“No.”

“So where is he?”

“In the pool.”

“What pool, you have a pool?”

“There’s a little lake inside the volcano.” She cast a glance at the bib. “That’s too small for him,” she said.

“Too small?”

“The child’s thirteen years old, Dolly. How dumb are you? You think that if you haven’t seen him for six years, he’s stayed the same as the last time you saw him?”

She went inside, and I followed her. Her curls were tied back with a black ribbon. She’d grown thinner, she looked like a stick.

A group of merry adolescents passed us. I tried to look for the kid among them but he wasn’t there. I found him in the pool, lying in a black rubber tube. My sister turned on her heel and walked away.

I looked at this creature inside the tube, and I couldn’t communicate with him, I couldn’t find the words. I couldn’t even say hello. There was too much history. I said to myself, this is it, Dolly. The monster you created in your madness. Be prepared for the worst, I said to myself, but I knew that there were no limits to reality’s imagination, no limits at all.

The boy let his head fall back with a blissful expression and wet his long, black, curly hair. Although he looked familiar, I wondered if it was him at all. I had one way of making sure.

“Get out of the water, that’s an order!” I shouted.

He snickered, but nevertheless he obeyed, jumped out of the tube, and swam to the ladder. When he got out of the water and came toward me, I noticed that his stomach was scarred, but anyone’s stomach could be scarred.

“Turn around,” I said.

He obeyed, and I saw the map of the Land of Israel on his back. The map was amazingly accurate and up-to-date; someone had gone over all the lines and expanded them as the child had grown. I examined the map carefully, and one thing stood out:

He had returned to the ’67 borders! Beyond belief!

Yes, that’s the generation gap for you, I reflected. My mother spits on the Arabs, I look them straight in the eye, and one day my son will lick their assholes.

 

The kid went to get dressed, and I waited for him impatiently outside the showers. Things change. I grow fat or thin, swell up or shrink, and my son grows tall, and looks down his nose at me.

He came out to meet me, neatly combed and wearing jeans and a colorful T-shirt—elegantly dressed, in comparison to the rags worn by the inhabitants of Dolly City, clothes without rhyme or reason.

“Shall we go?” he said.

“Where to?” I asked him.

He didn’t answer, but began walking towards the gym, where boys and girls two or three years older or younger than him were exercising. Twelve-year-old girls were walking on bars, and other kids were doing corkscrew somersaults in the air. An impressive setup, this place my sister’s built, I said to myself as we left.

We emerged in the street. Although it was only a quarter of an hour, maybe half an hour, since I’d entered the institute, it seemed to me that five years had passed. The air seemed different, I myself seemed different, the streets seemed to have broadened, the buildings to be a little further apart, and here and there I even saw a few flags, but I couldn’t tell which countries they belonged to. From what I could see when I looked up—the sun was shining behind the buildings, the sky was above me, even the moon was stuck up there in its usual rut. I looked at my son, at his profile. I said to myself, his profile, I never touched his profile, that’s why he’s got a profile.

My son talked and talked, as if he’d swallowed a radio. He met people, people shook his hand, he slapped them on the shoulder, he stopped to exchange a few sentences with them about some rock concert, I wasn’t really listening. I was busy realizing myself. We kept walking aimlessly, or so I thought, but after a while it turned out that he was leading me to a barbershop. He asked the barber to trim his black curls.

“Wouldn’t that be a real shame?” I asked him, but again he didn’t answer me.

I sat down behind him and looked at his hair falling to the floor. There was a woman there having her hair set with rollers, and another one with bits of silver foil stuck onto her hair, whose face looked quite frightening. The assistant barbers moved about, dancing around the head barber who was busy joking about the political situation with my son, who displayed surprising curiosity and even more surprising expertise. He knew all about the regional conflicts, he understood all about the interests of the surrounding states, he even understood the motives of the more distant ones, and argued with the barber about Churchill and Chamberlain and many other people whose names begin with Ch, like Che Guevara. I looked into the distance, at the mountains in the large landscape painting on the far wall of the barbershop. I asked myself when was it coming, in other words, when was he going to ask me about all those scars, and from what diseases exactly he’d suffered and was currently suffering. I dreaded this moment because I was already worn out by all that medicine and disease. I didn’t want to hear another word about it.

 

Half an hour after we’d returned to the street and I’d bought him a cheeseburger in a pita, he told me that he wanted to undergo psychoanalysis, that he felt he had something to get out of his system.

“Who put that into your head, my sister?” I asked sourly. “It sounds like her style. Just because she used to be in the business she thinks…”

“Everyone at the home undergoes psychoanalysis,” said the boy. “Straight after their bar mitzvah—psychoanalysis. It’s the rule.”

I put my hands on my hips: “And who do you think is going to pay for your psychoanalysis?” I asked provocatively. “Your father’s bank perhaps?”

“Whoever’s paying for my bar mitzvah will pay for my psychoanalysis.”

“You—you—you—watch out, mister,” I warned him. “You don’t know who you’re messing with! You watch out for me!” I waved my finger in the air.

“But why, Mom?” he said with a sly smile. “What’s wrong with it? I’m having a bar mitzvah under the open sky in the national park, and after that everyone’s going to the Safari.”

“The Safari? Are you crazy? You want to take people to the Safari? Who do you think is going to pay for it? What’s the matter with you, you think I’ve got a gold-mine? Who do you think is going to buy tickets for you and your guests to go to the Safari?”

“Whoever’s going to pay for my psychoanalysis.”

“And who is going to pay for your psychoanalysis?”

“Pan-T.”

“What did you say?”

“You heard me, Pan-T.”

“The Israeli National Airline?”

“Yes. They pay for all the activities of all the kids at the home. Your sister, my aunt,” he giggled, “obtained ten years’ funding from them. She raises the kids, and the ones she recommends undergo aptitude tests to see if they’re fit to work for Pan-T.”

“I can’t believe what I’m hearing here!” I cried, and looked at those double-decker buses. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” I muttered again, and I thought to myself that even in this realized existence, you’re never free of anything. In the elevator to hell I’d bump into the first man I ever slept with.

My son and I walked a long distance in silence. He strode half a meter in front of me, and I trailed behind him. Both of us were deep in thought. Mine could be described as coils of barbed wire, or abandoned tumbleweed.

“You know,” I cried eventually, “psychoanalysis, what do you need psychoanalysis for? Ignore your past. Just don’t take any notice of it. All those childhood complexes, those pacifiers and daddy’s underpants, what good can they do you now?”

“Forget it, Mom. I’m going for it,” he said without even turning round to look at me. “Daniella,” he continued, “the Pan-T social worker, studied social work with your sister at Bar Illan University, and they’re both terrific.”

The boy went on talking, but I’ve got a low attention threshold, and I stopped trying to understand what he was getting at.

A few minutes later I was flooded by the memory of that last harassment of my weary mind, and I addressed the boy firmly:

“I forbid you unequivocally to have any contact whatsoever with the national airline company! I’m telling you right now that if you go into psychoanalysis you’re no son of mine. Is that understood?!” I shrieked.

The boy’s eyes filled with tears. He gave me a wounded look, turned away, and began to run. As soon as he reached the corner it began to pour with rain, ah yes, Dolly City finally got a cold shower. I charged after him, but he eluded me, and I sat down on a trash can in an alley, wet to the marrow of my bones, took out a handkerchief and wiped my face.

 

Throughout the following hours I searched. I called out to the boy, I stood on the trash cans and shouted: “Son, you son of a bitch, answer me!”

I walked between the buildings, some of them hit by the French bombs. I was a bundle of regrets. In an instant I’d given up my demand that he refrain from getting analyzed. I said to myself, why not, let him do it, let him bring up the memory of my morbid operations, let him know what he’s up against, let him understand that his mother wanted to be responsible for him in the fullest sense of the word, and not to share the responsibility with anyone else, including Creation, or all its synonyms put together.

I understood that I’d been wrong, that I should have let things happen. I mean, the child was thirteen years old, and he was still alive. Technically speaking, there was no need for all that poking and prodding. I had carved him up for nothing. I wandered on, in terrible despair. I tried to pick up radar signals, like a mother-bat, but it was a no-go.

“God help me,” I murmured, and sat down on a bench under a heavy rain shower. Thunder and lightning struck, and suddenly a man stood before me wearing a black raincoat and hat and carrying a black umbrella. He smiled a pale smile at me. His lips were almost white. I had no doubt that he was fatally ill. When I looked harder, I saw that he was McMillan from McMillan & Wife, but something wasn’t kosher. I assumed that he was just another of Dolly City’s imposters, another one of the delusional lunatics.

“Pleased to meet you,” he said and held out his hand. “I work for Hercule Poirot, my name is McMillan.”

“Pleased to meet you,” I said with suspicion. “I’m Professor Dolly, head of the geriatric department in the Beilinson Hospital, Petah Tikvah.”

We shook hands. His hand was frozen.

I immediately suspected that the man was connected to Pan-T, because my father, instead of actually paying attention to people around him, the minute he came home from work would begin to read French pocket books starring Hercule Poirot and other such characters. These were books with large print and photographs of revolvers on their shiny, creased covers. He would plough through eight or nine of them in a week.

McMillan suggested that I phone the police about my son and report him as a missing person. A real wiseass—all the pay phones in Dolly City have been out of order for years. The minute you pick up the receiver you hear a busy signal. It’s impossible to phone anywhere except Yavne, and in Yavne they pick up the phone and ask if they can help you, but it’s only a recording.

McMillan spread a map of Dolly City on the muddy pavement, and for the first time in my life, I looked down on things from above. What can I say about the things I looked down on? I accorded them all due respect. McMillan pointed to the Wells of Despair, the Lakes of Fear, the Swamps of Boredom, and the Canyons of Mannerism, and all those arrows signifying people’s migration patterns.

He said that he thought he’d go and look for my son at the Trappist Monastery—maybe one of those taciturn monks would open his trap. The guy sounded like a total imbecile to me, and I soon realized that it was all total nonsense. I ignored him, and after a series of sentences that received no acknowledgement, he said:

“One day you’ll be sorry. You’ll pay for having insulted me!”

“Aha,” I snorted, “I’m shaking in my boots.”

“You think you’re so clever—your father is dead. If he were alive you wouldn’t dare.”

“Oh yeah? How do you know?”

“It’s not so hard to know.”

“You know what? You’re disgusting, you make me sick,” I flared up. “I’m gonna smash your face in, so fuck off! I’ll tear your brains to strips of crumpled cellophane.”

“Shh, shh,” said McMillan, patting my shoulder to calm me down. “Shh, you’re going to be all right.”

“Kiss my ass,” I said and pushed him.

“If your father were alive—you wouldn’t dare talk like that. With him around you’d never have dared say the word ass.”

“Who says?”

“Nobody.”

“Shh, shh, shh-ut up,” I said. “And kiss my ass.”

“Why don’t you freshen up your vocabulary a bit, Dolly?”

“Kiss it,” I said.

He walked away, and I boiled over with rage. I shrieked like some bleeding heart samurai. I shot him in the back, and he fell bleeding to the ground and lay there dying for quite a while. All that time he twitched and moaned, but I did nothing about it. After he died, I came closer and rummaged through his pockets. I found my father’s big bunch of keys with all the keys to his secret drawers in the Pan-T offices and at home. I put them in my pocket and walked off, but instead of the sense of reality, of having been realized, I felt the burning pain of loss, then a black cloak covered me, and I struggled in vain inside it like a tigress caught in a trap.

 

Once more I was in the loony bin, tied down to the bed and listening to a lecture delivered by one of the lunatics, while all the others listened to him attentively. I understood that he believed he was running for election to the Knesset, and he was asking all the loonies to join him and get their families’ signatures on various forms he had prepared from litmus paper, or something of the sort. The lunatics suggested things he should add to his party platform, and he shared his doubts with them. One of the items on his platform—as I understood it—was that the state should pay for the psychiatric treatment of its citizens, since the state was responsible for unbalancing their minds.

Someone wrote on the wall, Madness is a ripe orange, and therefore it should be wrapped up and sent to Europe in crates stamped with the word Jaffa.

My son walked into the room, with an open book under his arm. He smiled at me, and said: “How do you feel today, Mom? Better?” And he put his hand on my forehead.

My head was heavy, I didn’t know what they’d fed me. I looked around to see if my environment was still cancerous, but I couldn’t even glimpse a common cold. Someone had obviously plucked my ripe orange, I thought, and was horrified to feel a very sharp stab of sorrow. I realized that they’d done something to me, but since my hands were tied I couldn’t touch myself, to see if they had opened me up.

My son read my thoughts.

“Sorry, Mom,” he said.

My lips were dry. I licked them.

“Water,” I said.

“Sorry, Mom, you’re not allowed water. Only tea with sugar.” And he put a blue plastic cup of dark tea to my lips. I opened my mouth slightly and sucked up the drink. With the boy’s help I drank up the whole cup, and leaned back, fixing my eyes on a bit of white curtain.

“Tell me something,” I said to my son.

“What?”

“Where were you? Where did you disappear to?”

“I was at B.G. Airport,” grinned the boy. “I’ve begun dialysis.”

“Dialysis?” I got the word out with difficulty. “Weren’t we talking about psychoanalysis? Don’t you want to have psychoanalysis any more? Are you content with dialysis?”

“I’m content with dialysis,” he said and gave me a mischievous wink. “I’ve decided to look ahead, and to forget all the bullshit.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. I mean that you might be said to be the only mother in the world who knows her son inside out.”

“Ah,” I shuddered.

“Yes,” he said and laid the book on my mattress.

“What are you reading?” I asked.

Magellan’s Voyage, he said in a satisfied tone.

“What? Good.” I whispered, and he didn’t answer, only a diligent glint flashed in his eyes. I was too weak to say a word. I closed my eyes and almost in a dream I heard my son saying:

“Guess what?”

“What?” I opened my eyes.

“I’m joining the army. They’ve accepted me!”

“What?”

“I’m joining the army.”

“At your age?”

“They accepted me. Yes,” he lifted his chin proudly.

“The air force?” I was terrified.

“No,” he said. “The navy.”

“The navy?”

“Yes, the navy cadet school. The Academy of Brutal Seamanship. Don’t try to stop me. Give me your blessing. Believe me, Mom,” he said with sparkling eyes, “to sail, Mom, to sail with all those white sails, in the wind, to get out of Dolly City, to sail to Sierra Leone, to see the natives jumping on the shore, to go round Africa in seventy days. To all those wonderful places that only the great explorers experienced. I’ve decided, Mom, I’m giving everything I’ve got to the sea.”

“And who’s paying?”

“Pan-T. The idea behind it, I think, is for me to discover new places for Pan-T to fly to.”

“Come on, do you really think I buy any of that?”

“Buy what?”

“I…I…I…” I said and noticed my new difficulty in speaking.

“Ciao,” he said.

He ran out of the ward, rang the bell, the armored door opened, and for a split second a few sunbeams filtered in.

 

A redheaded, curly-haired psychiatrist of about forty walked into the room, her face exuding the bitterness of a woman with no options—there are things in life that have to be done, so why shouldn’t she be the one to do them? She was wearing a white cotton dress and over it a white gown. I knew her, she was treating me, God only knows what I’d already told her.

“How are you, doctor?” she said.

“I could ask you the same question.”

“I’m well, thank you. There were a few traffic jams on the way. I don’t know how they can call that road a highway.”

“Doctor,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I understand that these people are your patients,” I nodded towards the political meeting that was taking place not far from us. “But my case is different. Even if I am crazy—I’m not like them. I’m special, if only because of the fact that I’m a doctor myself.”

“Yes,” she said.

“My heart aches,” I said.

“Mine too, believe me. When I see all those dead people on the roads, when I read the newspaper—my heart aches.”

“But my heart really aches. I’ve got pains on the left side of my chest and in my right arm.”

“It’s stress, Dolly. It’s nothing. It’s the field of thorns after the fire. Now we have to wait patiently for new seeds to sprout.”

“What new seeds?” I remembered Gordon. “I was happy. I was realizing myself. I had a goal. What have you done to me? Why did you clean the metastases out of my eyes?”

“We didn’t clean anything out of them, you simply came to your senses! Look at me—have I got cancer?”

“Maybe,” I said but I wasn’t upset. Previously, the mere possibility would have freaked me out. Now I said, “Only a CT will tell.”

“You know,” she said, “this is the first time in years that I feel I’m making progress. Working with you is a real treat. You’re quite reasonable in comparison to other crazy people, it’s a pleasure to work with you.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Now you’ll feel longing for your child. It’s natural, do you understand me? When I tell you that it’s natural, don’t resist it. Go with it, Dolly. Perhaps he’ll send you photos, and you’ll put them in your wallet in the transparent compartment, where your father put the photo of you aged four next to the Eiffel Tower.”

“How do you know about that photo?”

“You told me,” she said. “You told me a lot of things. It was really nice. It’s okay to enjoy life a little. It’s okay.”

“What?”

I massaged my throbbing temples. The doctor patted my shoulder affectionately and went on to say: “You have to remember—your child may die in battle. He may die in battle, you’ve got to get that into your head. He may die of drowning, or a shark may kill him, if he fell overboard. You have to get it into your head that he may even die of cancer, but it’s reasonable to assume that if he dies soon, it will be in battle. Because severe battles are being waged in the ocean. Very severe indeed. They say those French sons of bitches are going for broke.” She paused for a moment and then continued: “And then, if he dies in battle, you’ll be a bereaved mother, just as if you die he’d be an orphan. There are names for things! There are identities! For God’s sake, Dolly,” she cried, “take the lifeline I’m holding out to you, take it and let’s put an end to this! Don’t you understand? Why? Why? Tell me, are you still convinced that you’re a doctor who studied in Katmandu?”

“Of course,” I said.

“So where’s your passport?”

“What?”

“Where’s your passport? Where’s the stamp in your passport saying that you were in the Far East? We’ve bent over backwards trying to find it. Your mother says that your sister’s got it, and your sister says that you’ve got it yourself.”

“I don’t know where my passport is,” I muttered. “Seriously, I don’t know. I don’t know exactly what you want of me either. I’ve told you twenty times that I’m a doctor. That I studied medicine in Katmandu. I keep on telling people all the time, and they believe me—so why don’t you? Do you think that you’re better than everyone else? More talented? I simply don’t understand what makes you people tick. What makes you tick? Why do you keep smiling? What makes you laugh?”

“What makes me laugh?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Mainly improvisations. All kind of skits in the street, at four o’clock in the afternoon. And sunbathing naked on the roof. Those are amusing things.”

“I think I can confidently say that you’re completely normal,” I said. She looked desperate. Her mind wandered round the ward—she was looking for a new, fresh, convincing argument. And then her eyes fell on a new inmate called Kobi. This fellow was completely nuts, he was brilliant, he had a T-shirt that said: I’m a mad genius. I could read the psychiatrist’s thoughts. She averted her eyes from him and turned to face me, slightly parting her lips, which were smeared with poppy-red lipstick.

“Don’t say it, I know,” I said.

“If you know, then what do you say?”

“What do I say?”

“You want to be like him? He’s a hopeless case. I’m violating my professional ethics and telling you that he’s finished, there’s no hope for him.”

“I don’t know.”

“Do yourself a favor, Dolly, Doctor Dolly. Enough with the bullshit already. Enough, okay?”