She was obsessed with doing the right thing. Ever watchful, her fixation on right and wrong guided her as she tuned up and set out to sound a note. “You made the right decision, to go to that Plissay Melville place over in France,” she said.

“It’s Plessis Belleville,” I corrected her.

“Whatever,” she said, dismissing me. “Plissay, Plessis.”

We sat at the airport cafeteria for more than two hours over greasy sandwiches and lousy coffee. Her oval-shaped head, with its short-cropped hair, emerged from the turtleneck of her sweater, which enveloped her long neck up to the chin. She sat huddled in a gray wool coat. Every so often, she would arch her slender neck and cock her head to one side, recoiling from the crowds of people passing by us. I noticed she had adopted a new habit of turning her coffee mug upside down and then the right way up, and examining the formation of coffee grinds that had run down its insides.

“It’s definitely the right thing for you to go,” she repeated herself, suddenly sticking her cigarette-stained finger into her mouth and sucking it. The smell of hamburgers frying in the cafeteria, sounds of rolling laughter at a nearby table, and the muddy, brown mess on Sarah’s mug made me nauseous. “What’s so right about it?” I said irritably. “It’s not a question of right or wrong, it’s a matter of family.”

She took the camera out of her cloth bag. “Do me a favor, not now,” I said.

“Just the end of the roll,” she begged. “There’s already more than half a roll of Mims in here.”

I was silent for a moment. “How is Mims?” I asked.

She snapped a couple of pictures. “He’s all right. He asked about you before I left. He’s with Udi.” Her black eyeliner was smudged beneath her eyes.

“Here.” I handed her a damp napkin. “Wipe under your eyes; you’re all smeared.” She grimaced with impatience as she rubbed her face. “How are you managing?” I asked.

“I haven’t had much work lately, but it’s basically okay. I’ve got Udi’s alimony, and things come along here and there, I’ve got my overdrafts, some savings I’m eating up. It’s basically okay.”

“What savings?” I asked. “Since when do you have savings?”

“I don’t.” She grinned, undoing her coat buttons. “It’s really hot in here.”

“Why do you just say things?”

She reached across the table and grasped my hand. “I always just say things; you know that.”

I jerked my hand back; my face was burning. We said nothing for a while. I took my checkbook out of my purse and made out a check. “Here, so you’ll have something until next month.”

She carefully folded it in half, smoothed it over, and put it in her pocket. “How come you have money?” she asked.

“Things come along here and there, I’ve got my overdrafts, savings I’m eating up—you know,” I said.

She looked away, smoothing her cropped hair. “You’ve changed.” She lit a cigarette, gave it to me, and lit another one, blowing smoke into my face. “I’ve missed you,” she said.

*   *   *

I hadn’t seen her for more than a year, not since Mims’s birthday party—seventy something guests in a seven-hundred-square-foot apartment decorated with balloons and gold paper chains, everyone standing over quiches, salads, and cold cuts; stubbing out their cigarettes in leftover quiches, salads, and cold cuts.

“Sign this.” She’d headed toward me, holding out a petition that denounced keeping Palestinian prisoners without trial. “We want to get it into tomorrow’s paper.” She wore an unflattering black boat-necked T-shirt that exposed her sharp collarbone and somehow emphasized her protruding, knobby nose. She stuck a cotton ball soaked in whiskey into her mouth—her tooth was killing her.

“Where’s Mims?” I asked.

We went to the boy’s bedroom. “Wait.” She stopped me on the way, pushed me into the bathroom, and locked the door. She opened her mouth in my face: “Have a look and see what’s in there, won’t you?” I couldn’t see anything, but there was a stench of alcohol and unbrushed teeth coming from her mouth. She took out the wad of cotton and held her tongue up to the roof of her mouth. “I have a huge cavity in there; they’ll probably have to pull it out.”

“Let’s go to the emergency service right now and get it over with,” I suggested.

“I can’t,” she said indistinctly, poking around in the medicine cabinet.

“Why not? They can manage without you here for an hour.”

“No, it’s not that.” She waved me away. “I just can’t. Anyway”—she stuck the dirty cotton ball in her mouth again—“it’ll go away.”

Her intense fear of doctors coexisted with an unqualified, almost blind faith in their powers. The whole thing came across as oddly cultish.

Someone knocked on the bathroom door. “Are you in there?” Udi called. He couldn’t find Mims, he said; he’d searched everywhere.

Sarah stomped out and made her way to the bedroom, squeezing through the clusters of people grouped in the hallway, stepping over the children rolling on the rug. She headed for the closet. “He’s not in there,” Udi said. “I’ve looked.” “He is, he is,” she retorted, taking a deep breath. “Mims … my angel,” she whispered. The children crowded around her curiously, pushing toward the closet. “Out.” She turned to them. “Everyone out now.” She shooed the stragglers from the room. “Good boy,” she said sweetly to the closet door. “You can come out now; there’s no one here. Come out, honey.” She put her ear up against the door. “Come out.”

A creaky sound came from the toy chest behind her. The lid slowly rose, and a fair, wispy head peeped out. Mims rubbed his eyes; he must have fallen asleep in there. Udi leaned down and picked him up, burying the boy’s yellow head in the hollow between his neck and shoulder. Sarah reached out to him. “Come to me. Come here, honey.” He refused, plucking bits of wool off the back of Udi’s sweater as he clung to him. Udi looked down at the floor. “I’ll make him something to drink,” he said finally.

Sarah didn’t watch them leave. She stood for a long time just staring out the window, then abruptly bowed to the wall with her back straight and started banging her forehead against it.

“Stop it,” I said, grabbing her arm. “What are you doing?”

“He doesn’t want me. You saw what happened, he doesn’t love me.”

I didn’t know what to say. I touched her hair gingerly. “He does love you,” I said mechanically. “What are you talking about?”

*   *   *

They had broken the news to him a few weeks earlier, sitting on either side of him on the living-room couch. “Like in an airplane, before takeoff,” she said. He waited quietly with his short legs dangling, wearing red hand-me-down slippers from his cousin.

Udi went first. “Emanuel,” he said, and immediately fell silent.

The boy pondered for a minute. “Emanuel is a grown-up name,” he commented.

“That’s right,” Udi quickly seized the line of thought. “And now you’re grown-up, and you can understand grown-up things.” He told him about the apartment he’d found “nearby” and about the nice room he’d set up for him—was going to set up, Udi corrected himself. Finally, he said, “Mom and I aren’t getting along.” His glasses were coated with white dust from the humidifier next to the couch.

The boy munched on some candy, shoving three pieces into his mouth at once, gurgling slightly with his heavy raspy breaths. Pinkish toffee dribbled down either side of his lips. “But what if…?” He began chewing vigorously, trying to dislodge the toffee from his teeth with his tongue. “What if I sleep over, and in the middle of the night I meet a bug in your room that I don’t know?”

Sarah said nothing. Distractedly, she gathered up the toffee wrappers the boy had scattered on the floor. At some point, she couldn’t recall exactly when, she felt an intense, warm gush flooding her underwear, spreading to her skirt, to the couch. She sat in the fetid wetness for a long time without moving. Udi put Mims to bed, made some tea, washed the dishes in the kitchen, turned off the hot-water heater. “Are you coming to bed?” he asked. She spread her legs and carefully pulled the fabric away from her skin. “Bring me a blanket,” she said. Udi was confused. “You want to sleep in here?” She shook her head. He spread a blanket over her and waited. “What do you want to do?” he asked. Upstairs, the neighbors began their strange ritual of furniture moving—a nightly occurrence. “Sarah,” he said, and wiped his glasses on the edge of his shirt. Silently, he went over to her and knelt on the floor. “Say something,” he entreated. As he laid his head on her covered lap, she stealthily slid her hand down the back of her skirt, then spread her fingers over his bowed head. They were smeared with blood. “Maybe we should give it another chance,” he said in a dim voice, his mouth buried in the blanket.

She felt her cheeks turning pale; another stream flooded her thighs and buttocks, creeping toward her lower back. “I have to get up,” she said. “Let me get up.” He pulled the blanket away. A dark stain covered the plaid upholstery. “Something very bad has happened to me,” she said, her knees shaking. “Very bad,” she repeated, as he walked her to the bathroom. He helped her take off her clothes and get in the shower. “Very bad,” she mumbled as he soaped between her thighs, her belly, her back, the soles of her feet. He wrapped her in a towel and led her into the bedroom. “Very, very bad,” she emphasized from beneath the comforter, her teeth chattering. Udi lit a cigarette and sat down on the floor, leaning against the door. “Don’t you want to know what happened?” she asked. “I can imagine,” he replied. Then he turned out the lights, got undressed, and lay down. The impervious, dull weight of his body was like a package beside her.

*   *   *

She often asked herself what would have happened if he had said something completely different. If he had wanted to. “He didn’t want to,” she said. “I suppose he just didn’t.” “Want to what?” I couldn’t follow. “To know,” she said. “To know what was going on.” We were talking on the phone two days before I left. She had called after hearing about the death of my cousin Michel. I didn’t recognize the metallic “hello” until she said, “It’s me.”

We talked about Michel with a certain degree of relief, like two travelers putting down their bags at a bus stop, stretching their swollen fingers for a moment, resting, waiting.

*   *   *

The last time Michel visited Israel was when Mims was two. He didn’t do much. He’d spend whole mornings lying around on Maman’s yellowing lawn, staring at the fleshy leaves of the fig tree. Occasionally, he’d toss a stone at the stray cats, monitor the cars in the neighbor’s driveway, or snooze beneath the spread-out pages of the Le Monde Sarah brought him from Tel Aviv. We visited him twice, Sarah and I. Barefoot, she danced around and snapped pictures, made him laugh, and burst out laughing herself. She was particularly fond of laying Mims on Michel’s stomach, where he would quietly, tirelessly make his way up toward the chest hairs sticking out from the shirt, then to the earlobes, nostrils, and two-day stubble on my cousin’s cheeks. Michel was crazy about him, Mims. They went off together for hours, wandering the dreary neighborhood streets, through the playgrounds, the neighbor’s carpentry workshop and the field full of thistles behind it, the kiosk at the shopping center, where they played on the slot machines and ate ice cream before dinner. “What did you do, bathe him in it?” Maman scolded when they came home. She cleaned out Mims’s ears with a Q-tip and spread his little toes apart, triumphantly showing Sarah the congealed pools of chocolate ice cream gathered between them.

Sarah was not bothered. “It’s really funny, Inès,” she said to Maman. “Don’t you see how funny it is?” Maman politely agreed and scrubbed the boy under the water hose in the yard, but Sarah’s disregard for cleanliness and order reminded her, to her chagrin, that she was not “one of the family.” Although Maman tried to make light of what she referred to as “that sloppiness”—to navigate the serpentine path that would lead to Sarah’s complete and total assimilation—she kept coming up against it, as though it were a hill in the middle of a city plot, forcing the builders to subordinate their plans by constructing bypasses, terraces, and tunnels.

Other things came up between them too, nonsense; things that had or had not been said would emerge, like bubbles, up from the mass of insignificance that words take on when spoken out of love; just as quickly, their sense of insult would sink back down again. Like bubbles, the integrity of these impressions was transient and feeble. The brief flicker of injury amounted to nothing more than the blink of an eye, and depended entirely on the flux of other bubbles—a shifting interplay of shape, size, and luster. Momentarily suspended in midair, with an illusion of heavy viscosity, the bubbles adhered to the dishes, the slices of bread, the bottle of orangeade, even to Michel’s elaborate wristwatch when he insisted that we eat outside, on the lawn.

We reclined as we ate, swatting at flies, ants, gnats, and “germs,” as Sarah said. We quickly grew exhausted by the food, the sun, the wine, the flat monotony of the crows’ screeching on the electrical wires, the soap bubbles Mims blew as he moved among us in diapers, stepping on dishes, napkins, a bed of African violets and freshly planted periwinkles.

“He’s making more work for me, your boy,” Maman said as she mopped up bean sauce with the soft part of the bread and swallowed it almost without chewing. Sarah unfastened the top button of her pants and rolled up her shirt, smiling with heavy, droopy eyelids. “That’s why I brought him, Inès.”

“What did you say? What are you talking about?” Michel asked in French.

“About Mademoiselle hole-in-the-head and her son,” Maman replied, and watched as he scooped up a handful of ice cubes and carefully placed them on Sarah’s bare stomach. She jumped up, frightening away two wide-eyed cats.

*   *   *

We were happy then, I think. Increasingly, my recollection of that particular day grows into something larger than the sense of happiness itself, becoming almost an absolute, an entity in relation to which all other feelings of joy—both earlier and later—are defined. The feeling then was unique in that it was not cheaply bought and did not creep up on us suddenly.

We did not, as Sarah once put it, have “much of a talent for happiness or abandon.” Even under the influence of Michel’s gentle charm—which enveloped us, sweetening any mutual peevishness, sourness, or harsh feelings—even then there was something rigid about us. We knew each other too well, and we had no illusions, certainly not by then. More than release or respite, we gave each other room to breathe, I think. None of us wanted or were able to pretend that there was more to it than that. And that was enough.

After a while, with the coffee and cake and the good liqueur that Maman took out of the linen closet (where she kept expensive drinks, fine chocolates, and marzipan decorations for birthday cakes to signify that they were much more than mere food—they were luxuries, artifacts, like the china dolls and crystal candlesticks in her living room), Michel played Meredith D’Ambrosio and Abbey Lincoln tapes on the large boom box he had brought with him from Paris. Mims fell asleep in Sarah’s lap. She bent her body and head over him protectively. Her fingers burrowed in his fair curls, picking out lice. She strained her eyes in the fading light from the porch, examining the larvae and the eggs caught beneath her fingernails. I watched her slowly becoming engrossed in the meticulous act, hypnotized by the boy’s scalp and her own fingernails, reminiscent of Picasso’s Mother and Child—that same absence of gaze and deliberateness of body, the mother’s outstretched legs covered with a heavy blanket, the child strewn over them like an object, not breathing, evoking the oppressive sense of a complete inanimate, an amputee. I was shaken by the thought.

Maman, too lazy to go inside, wrapped herself in a towel from the laundry line and dutifully tolerated the music. “Ayuni,” she said, “my dear.” She looked softly at Michel. “Il fait froid. It’s getting cold; go and put something on.”

He fast-forwarded the tape to play us D’Ambrosio’s wonderful French version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “It Might As Well Be Spring.”

“Everyone’s Jewish over there,” Maman muttered to herself. She listened intently at first, then gave up and turned her attention to fiddling with the triangular tiles that bordered the lawn.

Sarah closed her eyes in surrender to the music. “It really is unlike anything else,” she said.

Michel and I exchanged glances. She was completely tone-deaf, couldn’t tell the difference between the theme song from the nightly news and Bruce Springsteen, a Hebrew folk song and the overture to Don Giovanni. She heard it all as one cacophonous mess.

“It’s because she has so much inner noise,” Michel explained. On one of his previous visits a few years earlier, he had accepted an invitation to join her on a tour of Gaza and had endured Channel 2 and Army Radio the whole way. “She has constant inner noise.”

*   *   *

Back then she was making two or three trips there a month, with or without a reporter. She would come home as if she was ill, staying in bed for a whole day, swigging down bottles of mineral water, leafing through the glossy pages of Elle and Vogue, staring at the large damp spot on the wall, sleeping for hours. These attacks of depression were a type of rest, I think. When she regained her strength a little, she would shuffle around in her slippers and spend hours stirring granola into a container of yogurt, looking at the mail and the bills, cooking, sorting her photos.

She divided them into two groups: commissioned and noncommissioned. The commissioned photos, the ones for the paper, roamed the house in brown envelopes that were transferred from the kitchen table to the phone stand in the hallway, from the bookshelf to the pile of phone and utility bills, from among the scattered newspapers to the couch and under the clothing removed from the laundry lines. She never showed the other ones, the noncommissioned photos; those she arranged in exemplary order in a specially purchased filing cabinet. Udi once found them when he was looking for some staples.

The photos lay there in packages of twelve, wrapped in plastic. He opened a few: people in Gaza asleep in different positions, different spaces, inside or outside houses; men, women, soldiers, old people, hospital patients, children; together or alone.

*   *   *

Udi and I talked about the photos, among other things, on that terrible, endless night. Like two blind people, we fingered every object we came across in the darkness Sarah had left behind, discounting no detail, following traces of which we knew nothing, treading uncharted paths.

“They weren’t important at all. Just ordinary pictures of people sleeping,” Udi said as he lay on the couch, shielding his eyes against the blinding light from the lamp. “Still, there’s something extraordinary about catching them like that,” I said. He thought for a moment. “Maybe,” he agreed finally. “But the pictures were ordinary. They were boring as hell, believe me.”

I didn’t believe him. But he obstinately went on smearing the pictures with his layers of plaster and blocking them out. At the time, I could not understand what he had been looking for in those pictures and what had disappointed him. A year or more later, as I sat with Sarah in the airport cafeteria, I saw her smooth her hand over her cropped hair; it was a gesture of alienated loneliness—compassion toward herself, a gesture of foreignness—and I finally understood. Udi had been searching for signs of the devastation that had befallen him—for more than signs: the devastation itself.

*   *   *

The whole thing was strange. Consciously, I had been waiting for it all the twenty-something years that my life had been bound up with Sarah’s. I had positioned myself as an observer, standing at the ready, waiting in an attitude of anticipation—what would Sarah do, what would she say—that was almost like part of my personality. Nonetheless, I was unprepared for what Udi called “this blow.” In my private, imagined scenario of the “great deed” that Sarah would one day carry out, I had forgotten—as one tends to do with grand visions—the ordinariness of sorrow.

*   *   *

But she never forgot, not really. When she walked me to the escalator going up to the departure lounge, she stopped for a moment and grasped my shoulder. “Did you think it would turn out this way?”

“What would turn out what way?” I said innocently.

“Everything.” She waved her arm broadly, circling the air. “What’s become of us.”

“Spare me the pathos,” I told her. “We’re only thirty-five—”

“It’s not about age,” she interrupted. “It’s the point where personality becomes destiny. Do you know when I understood that?”

“When?”

“When I was twelve,” she said. “I was driving home from Haifa with my parents; we’d been visiting my aunt and uncle. On the way we passed the power plant in Hadera—you know, with the tall chimneys and all the lights. That was always the halfway mark to Tel Aviv. But when I saw it that night, I had no interest in the distance, how long we’d been going and how far we still had to drive. I had a strange feeling about myself, a kind of perspective on myself living in a future that wasn’t entirely my own. I knew I’d be in it, though, I was certain. No matter what I did and how I did it, I would still be in it.”

I was quiet for a moment and then finally asked, “What’s that got to do with the power plant?”

She lit a cigarette, showing her narrow lips, and pulled her turtleneck down from around her chin. “I’m not sure. I was moved by the power of those towers, the way they’re built out in the sea, surrounded by all those sand dunes. It gave me a sense of eternity—not the eternity of nature, that’s something else. No, the eternity created by humans and the things they leave behind. I knew then I’d always think about what’s left behind, that it would be a sort of role for me.”

“You have to be pretty sure of yourself to think that way,” I said, without really thinking about it.

She brought her face very close to mine; her hazel eyes widened and took on a purplish hue. She shut them as she touched her cracked lips to mine. “You’re very much mistaken, Ofri,” she said.

 

 

 

The house in Plessis Belleville looked slightly lopsided, crooked, like a face being twisted by the hand of a thug.

At first, Tante loved it. Then she didn’t. “It’s all because of the windows,” she said. “The ones on the top floor lean to the right; they’re crooked. They look stupid and arrogant.”

At six in the morning, with the beautiful beads of dew and the Corot light, the windows’ curtsy to the chestnut or some other tree seemed utterly personal, as if directed at you, alerting your sense of supervision and order, recalling those prattlers who would step out of their lines during the morning inspection to whisper to each other. I had plenty of time to devote to these musings while my cousin, Alain, fiddled with the iron chain around the gate, cursing quietly.

He wasn’t well. He looked exhausted; his skin was dirty-white like porridge, lips parched. It was the magnesium tablets he took four times a day to balance some bodily element, he explained. He hadn’t slept a wink for two days, making phone calls all over the world, smoking incessantly. There was a problem finding a rabbi. One of Michel’s final requests concerned the funeral arrangements: an Orthodox rabbi and a cremation.

“It’s going to be difficult,” Alain said. “It’s almost impossible to find a rabbi who’ll agree to do it.” We were crawling along behind a line of trucks on the way from the airport, sipping coffee from disposable cups. The heavy traffic was unusual for this early time of day. “It’s not almost impossible. It’s absolutely impossible,” I replied. He was lost in thought. “In some ways, I’m actually glad it’s so hard,” he finally said. I looked at him, puzzled.

Suddenly we were thrown back and then jolted forward toward the windshield. Someone had rear-ended us.

“I don’t know,” he reflected. “Something about the impossibility of the deceased’s wish makes it somehow even more precious. As if it’s a test of sorts.”

The guy from the car behind us was pounding on the windshield, losing his patience. “A test of what?” I asked.

Alain exchanged his phone number with the driver.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “Maybe of our willingness or our ability to keep on being with him. I mean, it makes sense to me that just as the distance between life and death is impossible, there is also an element of impossibility in his wish—to have an Orthodox rabbi and a cremation. That’s how I feel. That it’s right.”

We wound along the wooded road, damp and dim. The promises of this gateway to Plessis Belleville were not fulfilled by the dull destination.

Of all the townships and villages between Paris and Roussy, Oncle had chosen the most tedious of them all, the flagship—not just of French provincial dreariness but of provincial dreariness in general. It was radioactive dreariness, vigorously powered by a huge, multiturbine pump. A kind of dreariness that was the definitive offering of emptiness, something that exists beyond ordinary forms of boredom and vapidity, a truly morbid dreariness—not painful but slowly exhausting. A perpetual, shrouded sense of hazy grayness, as if the sky had been covered with a multitude of mosquitoes. Frequent confusion between hot and cold, a bothersome buzz in your ears, dryness of the palms, increased perspiration, indigestion, an undermined sense of time and space, sensitivity to dust and semihallucinations of dust, the systematic corrosion of mental, verbal, and emotional faculties.

Chose is a fitting word in this context, for Oncle had driven everyone crazy for many long months, almost two years, in his search for “this bonbon,” as my aunt put it. Nightly journeys to godforsaken rural estates with rotting barns, decrepit horses, open sewage pits, and worm-eaten wooden shutters, departed souls in yellow and green. Meetings in cafés with real estate agents wearing stained cuffs, trips to and fro, accompanied by building contractors with bids, futile negotiations, suspicions, doubts, second and third thoughts, banks, pros and cons, and “you do what you want, Henri; do what you want; I can’t be bothered.”

And all that time there was Michel and his “thing,” the AIDS, which came and went and came again, like a basting stitch in a piece of cloth. “He’s finished,” Marcelle would pronounce every few months in a long-distance phone call, almost believing her own words.

Now she waited for us at the entrance, standing on the little porch at the top of the steps, wearing a tracksuit. Alain hated it when she dressed like that. “Go and put something on,” he reprimanded her. “Just a minute”—she brushed him off—“let me breathe.” Her thick, weak body rocked me from side to side as we hugged. “See what’s happened?” she said. “See?”

I saw: she had become the spitting image of my mother. There was something terrifying about the similarity; the common physiognomy seemed to have been waiting for them both, masterful and cold. Like a flamethrower, it had devoured huge discrepancies in genetic makeup, temperament, destiny, choice. During those days before and after the funeral, I was afraid to acknowledge even to myself the vague awareness that this common visage was none other than her dead son’s.

Oncle was standing in the hallway, half concealed behind the heap of hanging coats. He pecked my cheeks. “Can’t find your mother!” he announced. The message had reached her in some mountain resort near the Norwegian fjords. She was on a “Golden Age” tour of Scandinavia—the life and soul of the group, no doubt. I had barely managed to locate her before leaving Israel. I talked with her and with the tour guide, a likable nag who insisted on reporting my mother’s behavior over the noisy telephone line. It was a huge nuisance to make the travel arrangements from Norway to Paris, involving phone calls to Golden Age Tours to persuade them to cover the airfare, phone calls to Norway, phone calls to Oncle Henri in Plessis Belleville. Henri, now retired, had been the manager of the Lufthansa branch in Paris. He took on the operation with gusto but complicated matters because no one could understand a word he said.

An ill-fitting set of false teeth, a heavy Parisian-Polish accent, a Louis De Funés tempo, a general impatience toward others, and the chaos of the grief made a bad situation worse, as he garbled his words. I managed to gather from him that my mother’s tracks had been lost somewhere between Oslo and Paris. They couldn’t locate her on any flight. He had spent an hour on the phone in the study, declaring with great satisfaction to several of his interlocutors: “J’ai perdue ma belle-soeur.”

Misunderstandings, mistakes, the mystery resulting from deceptive reality—these had always been a source of strange joy for him. He would throw himself with such glee into the “action,” the “deciphering,” the “unraveling,” often involving intricate bureaucratic toil that itself snowballed into an indistinct mass and was drowned out in chatter. He inhaled such a sense of power from his dubious victory over lack of knowledge and attempted to validate it by repeatedly descending the hill, only to climb up again and raise his flag.

*   *   *

We sit in the kitchen until midday, Marcelle, Alain, and myself: cups of coffee, cigarettes, a leg of lamb that had been stuck in the oven with sprigs of rosemary, some editions of Le Canard Enchaine, a sewing box to fix a shirt for tomorrow, tranquilizers, fresh lettuce leaves (washed), more coffee, three packs of floor mop-cloths from Israel, three-quarters of a batard loaf from yesterday, a yogurt maker, a pair of pinking shears, Lilly.

Lilly, blind in one eye, old, a little clumsy, but still with her feline grandeur, silently roams the table. She makes her way around objects, rubs up against them, sniffs, then suddenly meows and glares with her one eye at the shiny copper pots, the spoons, the forks, and the ladles hanging from the large wooden beam above. With heavy, swollen eyelids drooped over half-closed eyes, Marcelle follows her as she moves from right to left, from one corner of the table to another, all the way to the edge, where she suspends one foot in the air as if about to jump, but then changes her mind, arches her spotted back, leaps back to the middle of the table, sticks her pink nose in the bunch of blue and orange silk flowers, pricks up her ears, and stares at Marcelle. She meows again—a kind of human imitation of a wail.

“Maybe we should give her to the baroness,” Alain says. “Why don’t we give her to the baroness?”

A jar of yogurt suddenly shatters, and an Evian bottle topples, spreading a large puddle of water over the tablecloth, which consumes the bread, the newspaper, the sewing thread, Lilly. She flees. A slipper lands in the center of the table. Oncle Henri stands in the kitchen doorway; he shuffles toward us wearing one slipper. “Not on the table where people eat!”

Marcelle looks at him with her moon-shaped face and says flatly, “Which people, dear? Which people eat?”

“You and me and the kids. Everyone. Everyone who eats.”

He leans his hands on the table forcefully as if trying to squash it into the floor, and buries his head as he hunches his shoulders around his cheeks. A sticky tuft of thin, yellowish hair falls from his bald head onto his face. Marcelle wearily, strenuously, extends just her arm—independent and exhausted—her face and body uninvolved. Without looking, she slowly inserts her hand under his shirt and strokes his bare back up and down in a dry, superficial motion, a mechanical polishing. “Shhh … shhhh.”

Alain straightens up in his chair with his arms hanging at the sides of his body. The oatmeal hue of his skin has been replaced with china white, his eyes like two plates. “I said perhaps we should give her to the baroness. She stayed with the baroness two summers ago when Michel went to the Caribbean,” he says, then pauses. “Or to David.” A car door slams shut outside. Marcelle rushes to the window. “Inès!” My mother drags two suitcases bound with ropes up the gravel path. She had spent six hours in Zurich, it turns out. “Zurich?” Oncle is amazed. “How did you get to Zurich?” She doesn’t know how. It was a terrible flight; the plane was tossed around in the clouds like a barrel; her stomach turned inside out. She sips some water. Her Adam’s apple bobs up and down as she examines the back of her hand at length.

“What’s happening tomorrow?” she asks, gazing at the wide gray square of window.

“They’re cremating him,” Marcelle replies. She adds, imploringly, “It’s what he requested, Inès.”

Maman takes in this information gradually: the knowledge passes through in installments, like a bird being digested by a boa constrictor, vertebra by vertebra. “Etjananti?” she says finally. “Have you gone mad?”

“He requested it,” Marcelle repeats dryly.

Maman blinks, wipes her eyes with her sleeves, then gets up suddenly and goes to the curtain to hook up a loop that had come off the rail. She wipes her face on the curtain. “Sometimes children need to be told no. Sometimes you have to say no to them, to set limits.”

“The child is dead,” Marcelle says. “He has no life, Inès.”

Alain and I set the table—he, cutlery; me, plates and cups. Marcelle can’t decide between soup and pâté for the first course. “Don’t worry about courses,” Maman says, “just put out whatever we have.” A cloud of uncertainty still hovers over Marcelle’s face. “But if we’re having soup, we need bowls,” she says, perplexed. Maman guides her toward a chair. “Sit!” she orders. Marcelle sits down and meticulously spreads a napkin over her lap. “Eat!” Maman puts a plate down in front of her.

Oncle Henri holds his tongue against his upper lip as he concentrates on carving the meat. “It came out well, the meat,” he says, and pours some Beaujolais into the wineglasses.

Maman cuts the meat on Marcelle’s plate into small cubes and feeds her. “Go on,” she says. “Chew and swallow.”

Marcelle smiles at me feebly with her mouth full. “Why aren’t you eating your meat? Eat it; it’ll make you strong.”

I push my meat to the edge of the plate.

“Don’t you like meat?” Alain asks.

“I do.”

“Leave her alone,” Maman interferes. “She has her notions, that one.”

“It’s lamb,” I explain. “I can’t eat a lamb.”

“Lots of people don’t like mutton,” says Oncle Henri. “Remember when David was little?” He turns to Marcelle. “Remember what he used to say when you made mutton?” She nods. “‘Maman, this beef tastes funny.’ That’s what David used to say.” Oncle laughs.

“But you eat mutton,” Alain insists. “I’ve seen you eat mutton before.”

“In fact, lamb has a much more subtle taste.” Oncle Henri cuts himself another slice. “It seems strange that you would like mutton and not eat lamb.”

Marcelle jolts her chair back and pushes away her plate. “Enough! Let her be, all of you. How can she eat lamb when her sister’s baby girl has the name of a small lamb in Hebrew. ‘Talia’ c’est-à-dire ‘little lamb’ in Hebrew, right?” She looks at me. “Right?” No one says a word. “I’m going to lie down for a little.” She retires to her room.

“Is that true?” Alain whispers to me.

Oncle Henri turns the wineglass between his fingers. “It’s going to be difficult, Inès. It’s going to be very difficult.”

“It’s already difficult,” she says, and puts the cheese platter on the table.

“How are things in Israel?” he asks after a pause.

“Same as usual,” Maman says. “Lousy.”

“Do you think it will work, this peace agreement?”

“Who knows? Only God knows. There are so many people in our country who are riding on the tail of this peace, sucking its blood. That’s Jews for you, Henri—you know what they’re like when they all get together, don’t you?”

“I’ve never understood why those religious people have to go and live right in the middle of the Arab population,” Alain says. “Why make everything as difficult as possible? And besides, it’s dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” Maman snorts scornfully. “Dangerous? They’re shameless, those people. All they want is to be parasites. They’re lodged right here, in our throats.” She hits her neck. “You can’t digest them, and you can’t throw them up.”

“Shimon Peres and Rabin, though, they’re strong. I’m sure they can come up with a solution. I’m very impressed with their characters, especially Peres. There isn’t a European statesman who can hold a candle to him,” Oncle Henri says.

“Statesman or not, it won’t do him any good, Henri,” Maman responds. “They’ll eat him alive. Don’t you know our people, Henri? They’re a very strange people, very strange. I can’t explain to you the nature of this people—stupid, full of hate. People full of hate for everything. Everything, Henri, I swear.”

“There’s hatred everywhere, Inès. Look at this Le Pen we have over here. Our best friends in the neighborhood voted for him—you know, Philippe and Geneviève.”

“Philippe and Geneviève?” Maman is stunned.

“Philippe and Geneviève. Marcelle stopped talking to them after that. I felt the same way. I won’t have people like that setting foot in my house. And he used to work with me, you know, it wasn’t easy.”

“Everyone has their fanatics,” Alain says. “Believe me, Tante Inès, when I see those religious people of yours and what they’re doing, I’m ashamed to be a Jew.”

“I’ve forgotten the shame.” Maman sighs, clearing the dishes from the table. “But I hurt for all those young men dying for nothing—for nothing. On our side and theirs,” she mutters.

“Even so, you have to find a way to talk with them,” Henri says, “to make them understand that this war and these provocations against the Arabs won’t achieve anything for Israel.”

“Talk with them?” Maman slams the pile of plates down on the marble-top counter and turns to him with furious eyes. “There’s no point in talking to them, Henri. Those fanatics, all they understand is force, just force. My whole body shakes when I think about those bastards with ‘their’ Torah. Do you see? I’m shaking. I’d burn every last one of them, I tell you!”

Henri’s face turns red as he breathlessly moves his head from side to side, pulling his shirt collar forward to give himself room. “Let’s drop this argument, Inès. Forget it,” he suggests.

Alain buries his gaze in the tablecloth and scratches at something with his fingernail. “I’ll try and get hold of the rabbi again,” he says finally. “His wife said to call at three. What time is it now?”

“Quarter to three,” says Oncle.

“I’ll try anyway.”

 

 

 

I hadn’t seen her for more than a year, not since Mims’s birthday. That day I said good-bye to her for the first time at around five in the afternoon, after the last guests had left.

She called me later at eleven. “Come with me to the emergency dental clinic.” We arranged to meet at Gate 5 in Dizengoff Center in fifteen or twenty minutes. She arrived after three-quarters of an hour, carrying a sleeping Mims wrapped in a blanket, dragging a huge orange shopping bag from Boutique Isabelle. “It’s the birthday gifts,” she explained. “He wouldn’t part with them.” “Why didn’t you leave him with Udi?” I asked as we went up the escalator to the emergency clinic. “He’s out drinking with his friends,” she said, steadying Mims’s sweaty, damp head that was lolling from side to side. “I feel like someone’s drilling inside my head the whole time.” She put her hand over her ear. “Here, on the side.”

She had terrible teeth. “Bad genes,” she explained once, while she scarfed down three chocolate bars one after the other. She’d read all the research. “Did you know, Ofri, that the number-one cause of tooth decay is genes, not candy? And anyway, studies show that it’s actually bread—just plain bread—stuck between your teeth, that’s the most dangerous thing, because it doesn’t get washed away by saliva.”

Until the age of eighteen or so she did not brush her teeth at all. “How can you get up in the morning without brushing?” I was appalled. “I brush differently,” she said, squirming. “I have a special mouthwash, disinfectant.” I made her life miserable over brushing her teeth. Of all her eccentricities, this one alarmed me the most, for some reason. I perceived it as a clear sign of future deterioration, the deterioration. “I’m not falling apart yet, Ofri, stop worrying,” she’d reassure me, to no avail. She also went about in the world as if she had no skin, no skin at all. Clumsily bumping into furniture, she would have bluish bruises on her arms and legs that lasted for weeks. Minor cuts and burns became infected within days, and she’d be sporting soggy Band-Aids or improvised bandages. A common cold almost always escalated into pneumonia; monthly periods were more like attacks of malaria.

Now she peered fearfully at the line of people in rows of plastic chairs in the waiting room, staring in a trance at the office door. “Maybe we should come back another time,” she said. I took the orange bag and sat down, leaving space for her on the chair. “We’re not coming another time,” I said.

Mims moved from side to side as if about to wake up, but instead plunged his head onto Sarah’s other shoulder and kept on sleeping. “Do you know how much he weighs now? My back is broken from lugging him around,” she said. She put her nose in the gap between his chin and neck and sniffed. “I can’t believe he still has that baby smell.”

I looked at his swollen cheek with a pink rash in the middle as it lay like a cupcake on the turquoise surface of Sarah’s sweater. His soft golden hair shone from up close, deepening the caramel tone of his skin. “How can he sleep like that?” I wondered.

The nurse called out Sarah’s name to summon her to the room. She put Mims in my arms and covered him with the blanket. “Don’t move,” she commanded. I held my breath. He turned around and rearranged his body on my stomach, making his way up my ribs as if they were a flight of steps leading to the wall behind me. Finally, when he was almost vertical and his legs were squashing my chest, he opened his eyes. “Sarah,” he said. I sat him down on the now-vacant chair beside me. “She’s with the doctor now, she’ll be out soon.” He said nothing. With his mouth slightly open, eyes hazy with the confusion of sleep, he examined the room. A lady sitting opposite smiled at him and clicked her tongue. He turned away from her and buried his face in my sleeve.

“The sky is sugar,” he said dimly. “What sky?” I didn’t know what he meant. He slid off the chair to the orange bag, burrowed inside it, and pulled out a rectangular box with a jigsaw puzzle. He pointed at the picture. “The sky is like sugar,” he repeated. I looked at the box. The stupendous pale blue background of the picture looked as if it had been scraped with sandpaper to expose generously scattered dabs of white cardboard beneath. “It really does look like sugar,” I admitted. I watched as his fingers expertly sought out the jigsaw pieces. He hummed a strange tune to himself that sounded like the whir of an old refrigerator engine. I didn’t know any other children quite like him.

*   *   *

“That’s because you don’t know any children, Ofri. There’s nothing unusual about him,” Sarah had explained.

“I do know other children,” I insisted. “What about all my dozens of nieces and nephews?”

“Hah!” she exclaimed. “Dozens! All of two nephews and a niece, and they’re very shy when you’re around.”

I remember we were lying on the big bed on a Saturday afternoon, resting after a lunch of cholent. Mims slept between us with his limbs spread out diagonally, his feet on Sarah’s chest, and his head by my stomach. Sarah kept hiccupping. “I feel as if I haven’t had anything to eat except cholent for years and years,” she complained. Weary, and possessed of a kind of blank indifference toward everything, we got drawn into the foolish game Sarah had once invented, the “What would you eat to save my life?” game. “You start,” she ordered.

“A pot of sauerkraut with hotdogs and potatoes?” I began.

“All right,” she agreed.

“How about three bars of Rosemarie chocolate?”

“Yup.”

“A kilo of sunflower seeds?”

“I’m not sure,” she hesitated.

“To save my life?”

“Maybe,” she conceded.

“No maybe,” I argued. “That’s against the rules. Remember, we’re talking about my life.”

“What about your life, Ofra?” Udi came into the room and leaned on the closet, watching the three of us.

“It sucks,” Sarah replied and hopped off the bed to make some coffee.

*   *   *

They were floating, the two of them, like two bodies side by side. “We behave as if we’re tourists, helping one another out,” Udi joked bitterly, quoting a poem.

He was working long hours at his new job with Intel. When he came home late at night, he’d empty the contents of his pockets onto the phone stand in the hallway and arrange the keys, wallet, checkbook, and crumpled Kleenex. His coat bore the strong odor of outside and loneliness. He no longer asked if she was home, or when she was supposed to be home. He hung up his coat, smoothed it over with a long sweep, lingered by the coat rack for a few minutes. “Is everything all right, Ofra?” he always asked from the same exact position, to the right of the wide living room entrance, on his way to the kitchen. Then he would join me, his large body landing in the rocking chair, jolting it forward. He would put down a tray on the table between us: cups of tea, thick slices of bread, olives, cheese, and a slightly dirty kitchen knife.

*   *   *

His gaze fixes on the book at my side, his twisted face upside down. “What are we reading today, Ofra?”

“Same thing.”

“I thought you were a quick reader.” He eats three slices of bread spread with cheese. “Did Mims fall asleep late?”

“Not really. Same as usual, at eight-thirty.”

“Did he take a bath?”

“Yeah.”

“Eat?”

“Half an omelet and a bag of chips.”

“I’ll go and look in on him.” He gets up and walks to the room. I close my eyes and silently count to about 235; then he reappears and collapses in the chair again. “He’s a little warm, don’t you think?”

“It’s from sleeping. Children are always warm when they sleep.”

We sit smoking in silence for a long time. Udi leans over to me and lights a cigarette. “When did she leave?”

“At seven or so.”

He glances at the bottom shelf of the bookcase. “The cameras are here.”

“Yeah, she didn’t take them.”

He leans back and rocks in his chair a little. “I’m so tired. How come you’re not tired, Ofra?”

“I am tired.”

He looks at me. “It doesn’t show. Nothing ever shows on you.”

He orders a taxi for me. “Did she make arrangements with you for tomorrow?” he asks in the doorway, his finger holding down the switch for the stairwell light.

“Not yet.” I avert my eyes.

Dense darkness greets me when I open my apartment door. I forgot to leave a light on again. On the table in my room, I find Sarah’s photos from the Neve Tzedek neighborhood series, which she had developed that day. Roman red spills over a building wall, pooling into a thick lumpy mass, bursting out again downward, thinned out, pale, struggling with the overlapping layers of plaster, dirty light blue, and a harsh yellow stain in the middle. In the upper corner, the crushed angle of the wall thrusts into the solid, illuminated blue of the sky, draped over like a prop. The photograph fills me with anger; I turn it facedown. I am sickened by the poetry, the pleading intensity of feeling.

I lie in bed, drifting in and out of sleep. At two-thirty I hear someone softly knocking at the door. She comes in, hurries to the bathroom, turns on the faucet, and waits for the hot water to run.

She smells like sex as she walks around the room, dispensing the scent like incense, even after she has bathed, washed her hair, and put on perfume.

“If you ask me, all those soaps and perfumes are even more suspicious than the other smell,” I say, arranging the pillows behind my back.

“I didn’t ask you, Ofri. I have nothing to hide.”

She lights a cigarette and dangles it out the edge of her mouth. Then she notices the photos lying on the table. “What do you think?”

“Mediocre.”

“What’s the matter?” She looks around the room. “What’s wrong with them?”

“They don’t work. Very weak.”

She looks at me. “Okay, what’s your problem?”

“Let’s see. Three A.M., Mims, Udi, showers, and all the perfume. That’s my problem.”

“Since when did you become the poster child for family values?”

“Since yesterday, all right?”

She widens her eyes, tugs her shirt down despairingly toward her bare knees; the muscle at the corner of her mouth twitches. “I’ll have this love, Ofri, or I’ll die.” She is quiet for a while. “I’ll die whether I have it or not.” She jumps on the bed beside me. “Move over.” We lie with our heads next to each other and the blanket pulled up to our chins.

“Why don’t you just take a shower there?” I ask.

“He doesn’t have any hot water; the boiler’s been broken for weeks.”

I don’t know how long we lie like that. I doze off. When I wake in the morning, she’s gone and my neck aches from sleeping uncomfortably all night.

She doesn’t always come by my place. Sometimes she rushes home and sits with Udi in the kitchen, hashing out what has happened and what’s going to happen until almost daybreak. Or else she takes off her shoes in that hallway, swiftly undresses, and curls up beside him as he pretends to be asleep. She holds her breath until he reaches out heavily, grasps her thigh, and kneads it in a kind of involuntary reflex, sleepily, until she yells out.

*   *   *

She escalated easily to yelling, in any situation, emitting deep, reprimanding wails, well spaced, like a donkey’s brays.

She had stood and brayed like that at our gym teacher when he tried to make her cross the four-foot high jump. We all sat in a circle staring at the jump, too petrified to laugh. She stood very close to him with her head and neck sticking forward like an ostrich’s and her mouth open, wailing. The back of her neck was red with effort, as if a scalding hot towel had been dropped on it. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. At first he cocked his ear toward her a little and listened attentively, trying to understand the sound. After a few minutes, he turned his back to her and tugged awkwardly on the string that held the whistle around his neck. “All right,” he said finally, his voice drowned out in the din of the school bell and the shouting outside. “I suppose that’s all for today.”

“He was an evil man,” she said years later. “He had a black heart.”

We were celebrating her birthday. Udi had cooked a meal and invited Haggai and Nitza, Shelly, Dorit, and Marwan.

“There’s no such thing as evil,” Haggai interrupted her. “People are not usually evil, they just mess up.”

“Oh yes there is. I believe in evil just like I believe in good, but you can call it messing up if you insist,” Sarah said. She was a little drunk and spoke rapidly, nervously twitching her shoulders.

“In that case, you’re with Yosef Ben-Shlomo. He believes that the Holocaust was Satan’s visit on Earth, no less. Arendt’s banality of evil is like a red rag to him. I couldn’t bear it, I got up and walked out of his class,” Haggai said, tearing at his stuffed artichoke with a fork and eating the outer layer.

I couldn’t stand him. His corduroy jacket with the elbow patches, his goatee, the way he meticulously rolled his own cigarettes, his suspicious lips, and, above all, his ostentatious insistence on balanced positions, fair points of view, which to me always seemed like evidence of the arrogant, indulgent pleasure he took in himself. On top of everything else, he was a psychiatrist.

He had pursued me for a while. He borrowed two books that he never returned, made speeches at me, polished off an entire bowl of peanuts, then pressed my head to his shoulder at the end of the evening. “We’ve had a marvelous time, Ofra.”

Udi tried to talk me into giving him another chance. “Give the guy a break, Ofra,” he said. “You’re always putting people down, what are you so afraid of, for God’s sake?” Sarah burst out laughing. “What are you laughing at?” he said, insulted. “I’m not right?” She patted him on the back. “Totally right.”

Now she turned to Haggai, slightly bored. “When did you get to hear Ben-Shlomo anyway?”

“Years ago, when I was an undergraduate, I took some intro courses in the humanities. Why do you ask?”

“No reason.” She looked down, concealing a malicious spark in her eye. “Just that you already knew what you couldn’t stand, that you walked out in the middle—that sort of thing.”

“Hmm,” Dorit said thoughtfully. “And how come the ones who are so sure of themselves are always the ones who have penises?”

“Here we go again.” Udi got up and pushed his chair back. “Let’s move to the living room, it’s more comfortable.”

Marwan and I stayed in the kitchen to clear the dishes. “You look pretty today, Ofra,” he said as we threw the scraps into the trash. “Green suits you.”

“Especially my face, right?” I said.

He didn’t get the joke, taken aback for a moment. Then he smiled and said, “Can’t you take a compliment?”

I watched him take control of the horrid kitchen in his long-sleeved black cotton shirt, not a bit of filth sticking to him.

“What are you doing in here? Leave it for later,” Udi scolded us.

“Cleaning up is in our genes,” Marwan said, and followed him into the other room.

Sarah drank more and more, sailing off on some pointless anecdote, shooting a sideways glance every so often at me and Marwan. She had on her new red dress, hipbones protruding through the fabric. She wore no makeup; her features looked dimmed; her black hair emphasized her paleness and she was gaunt, with purple rings around her eyes. Very heroin-chic, as she said.

She seemed to take up almost no space, huddled at the edge of the couch. I had a sure sense that she was slipping toward something, melting, taking on the form of the vessel into which she was flowing, forgetting.

*   *   *

She was afraid of forgetting. “The thing I hate most at the dentist is the anesthetic. At least when there’s pain I remember that I have a body,” she complained as we left the dentist, her cheek still swollen. “What did they do to you?” Mims was curious.

“They pulled my tooth out,” she explained and swerved down the empty hallway in Dizengoff Center with him in her arms. “How come you’re awake, honey?”

He squashed her cheeks in his hands, turning her face toward him; he wanted to ask her something.

“What?” she said, covering his arm with kisses. “What did you want to ask?”

“Was it good or bad?”

“What?”

“The tooth they pulled out.”

“Very bad,” she said emphatically. “Really rotten.”

We spent a long time looking at the Elda Toys display window. Mims pressed his nose up against the glass and devoured the Ninja Turtles with his eyes. “Tomorrow you’ll buy me Raphael and Michelangelo,” he said. “Promise?”

“Forget it,” she said. “You’ve had enough presents today to last a lifetime.”

He pondered that for a moment. “Then Daddy will buy it for me.”

“No he won’t.” She yanked his arm. “Now let’s go.” He pursed his lips and would not budge. She leaned over and knelt down in front of him. “Mims, it’s late now, that’s enough.” He inspected her swollen cheek, then suddenly turned and ran away, disappearing around the bend in the corridor. We looked after him in astonishment. Sarah started running first, and I followed her with the orange bag. Within moments they were both gone. “Mims!” Her shouts echoed through the mall. “Mims!”

I tried to locate where the calls were coming from, running after endless reverberations from endless wide empty spaces that intertwined with each other in a maze, until I suddenly reminded myself that it wasn’t her I was looking for, but him. I traced my way back, or at least tried to, and found myself on one of the glass-covered bridges that join the two sections of the mall. I peered behind benches and large trash cans, stopping to catch my breath for a few minutes by a closed stall.

A cleaning man went by with a large mop. “Have you seen a four-year-old kid anywhere?” I asked. He prepared himself thoroughly for his reply: leaned his mop against the wall, wiped his fingers on his apron, straightened the rag on the edge of the bucket. “No speak Hebrew,” he said, scanning me with eyes that drooped down to his cheeks so that the eyelids did not cover them, revealing wide, inflamed rims. “Cigarette?” he asked. I gave him one, desperately looking over his shoulder at the wide passageway that stretched out in the darkness. “Mims!” A dull cry came from the other end.

I passed locked gates, went up and down staircases until I arrived at the entrance leading out to King George Street. I saw them from a distance, next to the security guard. I approached them, my arms around the big bag which had torn in the meantime. She was holding him by his little shoulders, shaking him back and forth; a veil of hair covered her face. “Why don’t you answer when you’re called?” She caught his arm, turned him with his back toward her, and smacked his behind several times. “You freaked me out, do you hear me?” Her hands flailed in all directions, as if beating pillows or kneading a large ball of dough. The body fluttering beneath her hands merged with her own—head, face, chest, thighs, buttocks.

The security guard politely took a few steps back. “Don’t you think that’s enough? He’s got what he deserved,” he ventured.

She made no reply, looking down breathlessly at the boy curled up next to the large trash can, silently weeping. “Get up.” She shoved his behind with her foot. “Get up now.”

My hand reached out of its own accord and grabbed the half-full cup of coffee from the security guard. “Sarah…,” I said in an unfamiliar voice. She looked at me hazily. “What?” I hurled the coffee at her; a dark puddle gathered in her hair and dripped down slowly.

*   *   *

I didn’t see her for more than a year after that, until she accompanied me to the airport.

I carried the image with me for more than a year. With each passing day, it lost its immediacy and acquired a different memory, a strangely powerful image: The lines of a narrow face are barely visible behind a screen. The screen is made of long, crooked, crosshatched lines. There are tracks of dark, thick liquid, slivers of tears, strands of straight wet hair, side by side, crowded, lengthwise, from the roots above the forehead down to the jaw, then a sharp twist to the neck and the bare triangle of skin exposed by a V-neck sweater. The eyes are like those of a porcelain beetle, fixed on nothing, and the arms hang down to the sides as if it’s all over. Someone holds up a handkerchief, drowning the face in it.

 

 

 

The units of time arrange themselves before me in various permutations, like Lego blocks of different sizes and colors. Unable to choose one principle of organization and order, I waver or skip among them. I find it particularly difficult to arrive at precise measurements of duration and quantity: scenes that lasted only a few hours stretch out over years in my memory; years squeeze into the blink of an eyelid.

“You’re my biographer, Ofri,” Sarah says impassively. On the pages, I take revenge, devouring whatever I can lay my hands on. I maintain a general scheme for my own reference, like some secret code or rigid routine, outlining three main blocks of time: mideighties, almost to the end of the decade (Udi, Gaza, the pregnancy); late eighties and early nineties (Mims); roughly toward the midnineties (the affair with Marwan, the divorce).

Once in a while I require her assistance, but she infects me with her vagueness. My attempt to cast her into language uncovers what I already know: vagueness, for her, is not a weakness. It is a matter of style and outlook. “You’re gathering evidence against me,” she jokes once. “Against me,” I reply. She spreads her hand out over the pages. “Sometimes it’s the same thing, you know, Ofri.”

 

 

 

Outside in the backyard, the usual silence. I stick my finger into a large potted plant. Virtually parched. The garden hose is neatly coiled up nearby, but I can’t be bothered. It was a good November here this year: a strange, fragile, springlike air, softened sunlight, diluted with the pale green lucidity of aquamarine skies.

The hammock Oncle once hung between two trees is still here, full of feathers, cat hair, dry leaves, thistles. Lilly is sprawled out on this bed, pretending to be asleep. “Get off, Lilly,” I say. She doesn’t move. Her thick tail beats the hammock twice. I upturn it onto the mowed lawn. She drops to the ground like a sack and grudgingly opens her hazy eyes as a look of wonder extends over her face. There’s something hypnotizing about her: the immeasurable stupidity, the innocence—almost pampered, but not quite—an utterly dark innocence, impervious to the most basic instinct of self-preservation and well-being. Her astonished response to the world is an entity unto itself—perpetual, fascinating, divorced from time and circumstance. The strange fondness this creature rouses in me is marred by a slight sense of repulsion, in itself also pleasurable. Even when I settle in the hammock, she continues to lie on her side beneath it, undisturbed, undisturbing. Branches, thickets, and patches of sky move loosely from side to side in a breezy motion. My hand slides back and forth over Lilly’s fur, hanging carelessly over the grass, subject to the movement of the hammock. What a strange, radiating silence emanates from the gaze of the figure behind the trees in Ginaton’s drawing!

I recalled the drawing at that moment with a sudden inner shock infused with intense precision. But rather than the original work, I saw in my mind the catalog reproduction, which hides the painter’s hand—the physicality of the hand—and the oil pastels, thus giving some spirituality to the mysterious bliss behind the trees: the invigorating colors, the piercing lucid gaze of the figure sprawled out before us, not quite with us, fixed on some distant promise, lying beneath the plastic-looking artificial glimmer of the fig tree’s fleshy leaves; the shadows on the sprawled figure’s face that appear as burns; the fig tree that bisects the drawing horizontally like a laundry line, cutting through the artichoke on the right that threatens to fall on the face; and especially the two bare feet that abruptly enter the drawing from the upper corner and suggest yearning and nightmare which threaten to break up the picture at any moment.

For the first time since Michel’s death, there were tears in my eyes. As if finally the drawing’s vitality and the cautious pain of the bliss behind the trees had melted away the hard scab of horror that had covered Michel and sealed him off. They offered him the gift of a different kind of exit, a generous one, a path whose traces slowly, hesitantly, disappear into the woods.

I must have dozed off, because I suddenly felt an unbearable itch and opened my eyes. David was leaning over me from behind, tickling my neck with a stalk. “Did you get some sleep?” he asked.

He sat on the edge of the hammock and rocked it with his feet on the ground as he rolled a cigarette. His harsh profile was shiny, as if oiled. His high, thin cheekbone plunged down to his chin, the bone of his nose was pronounced, full lips swelling out of that wonderful olive-skinned face with its sharp twists and turns, full of motion and games of hide-and-seek. What an asshole!

I had been crazy about him when we were kids. Stubborn as a mule, he was guided by a tremendous, inflexible, gristly will—a desire to mold himself and his surroundings—which alternated with sudden spurts of boundless, capricious generosity, sometimes assuming the shape of strange vindictiveness.

A love scene: I am eight years old, curled up on the lawn with my head between my knees. David stands over me, hitting my head with a flute.

He was a pain in the neck for years, an endless nuisance. Mixed up with drugs, police, monthlong disappearances, thefts, friends “with hair all over the place” and long fringes on their pants, rock ’n’ roll, Trotskyite groups, Maoist groups, then anarchist groups. “He really took this whole bourgeois thing personally, poor thing,” his mother observed.

Then he disappeared to South America for three years—Peru. He cleaned himself up, went into seclusion, and sunk his teeth into South American culture, mainly music, with his usual maniacal, cold enthusiasm built on obstinacy and a will to subdue the thing he desired. He became a musician, returned to France, fixed up a room over the garage, and wore white shirts, nothing but white shirts and jeans, all year round. Even then he still had his own way of being a pest. He sneered at Alain, humiliated him at every opportunity, and constantly fought with Michel over nonsense (which he did very conscientiously). He was argumentative beyond reason, always lying in wait for a cause, pouncing on every word. “My yeshiva student,” his father teased him.

At some point in his midtwenties, David suddenly calmed down. “It’s as if he swallowed a magic pill.” Tante Marcelle was suspicious. He seemed to abruptly become unclenched, and as he loosened up, it was as if a few inches had been added to his height. He went away again, this time to Arizona, where he settled down in some dump, played with a jazz band at a local club, and made his living teaching music at a conservatory.

He had a girlfriend, Catherine, a Frenchwoman with glasses and a thin mouth, arched with no lips. She was a doctoral student in math who had decided unshakably at the age of twenty not to bring children into this disastrous world of ours. “Do you know of a better one?” Tante Marcelle asked her, astounded. Marcelle was afraid of her and her reasons. After all, she told herself and others, “that cold fish” sure as hell knew her math.

“Come without the woman,” Tante Marcelle had ordered when she called David in Arizona one month before Michel died. Michel had wanted him. Of all the family members, he chose only David. With one foot in the grave, all skin and bones, covered with bedsores, bleeding, suffering excruciating pain, his huge eyes consuming his face like two clear mirrors, unseeing, he rejected the family during his final days. He pushed them away with both hands, too weak to achieve even this without help—he needed someone to translate his desires into the correct gestures. He chose David as one hires an employee: someone cool, determined, controlled, experienced.

Marcelle thought she was witnessing love. “The way they loved each other, those two brothers, you should have seen it,” she kept saying to Maman. Her sentence would trail off as she revived the compassionate image of her pietà, reaching only to the point where nervous cross-hatchings from a very different picture began to intrude into the canvas—distorting, terrifying, obscuring the original scene.

*   *   *

He got the hang of it right away, David. With no trouble, he grasped the main points of Michel’s outlook: a scathing hatred of suffering while at the same time, loathing anything that wasn’t suffering. His systematic rejection of all things at odds with the suffering, with the fury and loneliness of the suffering; and his simultaneous elevation of all these—on a daily basis, every minute of the day—to the one true reality, turned everything else into a disdained surface, into bullshit, and essentially into a lie.

God only knows what those two talked about, if anything, all those days and hours when no one else was allowed into the hospital room. Once Michel asked to see Lilly. Marcelle thought that was a good sign, thought he was returning to her. “He’s coming back, the boy,” she announced to Oncle Henri. They rushed Lilly to him in a wicker canary cage, unable to find her usual plastic carrier. They barely managed to push her into the cage through the narrow opening, limb by limb; head, front paws, the twisted body which was stuck for a long time half in, half out, back paws, and tail. She filled the entire space of the cage as she poked her little paws through the wicker bars in astonishment. Once she’d arrived at Michel’s room, she refused to come out. In vain, they tried to pull her, turned the cage upside down and on its side to frighten her, tempted her with slices of salami. That was how Michel saw her: squashed inside the cage like a lump of dough rising in a baking dish, edges spilling over, staring with one eye, her right ear snagged on the miniature Ferris wheel attached at the top. Oncle Henri waited in the cafeteria. “Of all people, her he chose,” he hissed on the way home.

They had to cut the cage to get Lilly out. First they used a kitchen knife and when that didn’t work, a saw. Oncle sawed vigorously, angrily, without resting, even when the bars across the top of the cage finally fell open and the jagged edges of the saw came perilously close to Lilly’s neck. Marcelle grabbed his wrist and yelled, “Stop it! What are you doing?” He looked at her with his sweaty red face and rolled his eyes. “The face of a madman,” she later told David.

*   *   *

David strokes Lilly’s red collar with his fingers as he sits smoking. He leans back against my knees and gazes up at a particularly sparse, pathetic treetop. “I’m going back to Arizona tonight,” he says.

“You’re not coming to the funeral?”

“Obviously not, if I’m leaving.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why aren’t you staying for the funeral?”

“I’ve finished my duty here, there’s nothing left for me to do. Whatever happens from now on is none of my business.”

“Tell that to your mother, I’m sure she’ll love that.”

“She knows.”

I run my fingers through his coarse dark curls and massage his scalp, then hold my palm against his shiny forehead. “Do I have a fever?” he asks.

“In your brain.”

“Do you still love me?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“Don’t evade it. Do you?”

“When we were little, I was crazy about you.”

“And now?”

“You’re not on my mind the whole time or even most of the time, if that’s what you’re asking. I have my own life now.”

He closes his eyes, now fingering the hem of his shirt. “Do you know what I can’t stop thinking about?”

“What?”

Alain walks over to us. “I can’t convince him,” he says.

David straightens up and brushes off his trousers. “Who?”

“The rabbi. There was no choice, we got a Reform rabbi, some guy called Kolman. He wants five hundred.”

“Five hundred? Why, what’s he going to do that’s worth five hundred?”

“That’s what it costs.”

David turns back to the house. “I’m going to pack the books for Catherine.”

“Piece of shit,” Alain says as he watches him go. “Have you heard he’s leaving today?”

“I heard.”

“I can’t understand it.”

“It’s hard to judge him after everything he’s been through with Michel over the last month.”

“What has he been through? At least he could do something. What can we say? We weren’t allowed to do anything. We couldn’t go in, couldn’t help, couldn’t take care of him. We were barely allowed to say good-bye.” These last words are mumbled in a lowered voice. Maman and Tante Marcelle cross the lawn arm in arm, spreading a cloud of the Amarige de Givenchy they had sprayed on each other.

“Come to the supermarket with us,” they suggest. “We’ll take a walk there.”

“I’ll drive you,” Alain volunteers.

“That’s all right, I have to stretch my legs a bit,” Marcelle says, examining her swollen ankles.

 

 

 

Tante Marcelle meanders, lagging behind us, stopping by the real estate agents’ tiny display windows covered with index cards and pictures of lush villas. She and Maman choose a couple of particularly luxuriant houses with swimming pools, jacuzzis, and fitness rooms in the basement. Maman is worried about the upkeep and the cleaning. “You’d need an army to maintain a house like that properly,” she says, staring purposefully at the grand facades. “Just cleaning all those windows, Marcelle.”

“Anyone who can afford that kind of house can pay someone to clean the windows,” Marcelle says. She suddenly shuts her eyes and puts her hand to her forehead, swaying a little. “I’m through with this place, Inès. The second all this is over, I’m leaving. I won’t stay a moment longer than I have to.”

Maman takes her hand and practically pulls her down the middle of the narrow street. “Where will you go? Henri would never leave this house and his carpentry and everything, he’s not the kind of person who moves.”

“Let him stay then,” Marcelle says. “He can choke on his carpentry for all I care.”

“How can you talk like that?” Maman scolds.

“Easily. I know exactly what I’m saying,” says Marcelle, pulling her hand away. “If there’s a God,” she pauses and points to the electric and telegraph wires overhead, “if there is a God up there, he has to pay Henri back for what he did to me all these years, with Michel and all that. Years, Inès. All that time he tore my heart up, always with the ‘you, you, you’re to blame for him being this way.’ That’s what he did.”

They walk on, side by side. The faded gloominess of Plessis Belleville at four in the afternoon on the verge of a late winter descends on our heads like a sack of potatoes.

A tight-lipped mood prevails. The few people who pass us by, poorly dressed, the street traffic, the housefronts with their hollow, suburban grandeur, the large gray industrial structures that tower over them in the distance, even the fields of faded sunflowers.

There is a kind of joyous energy in the decisive whiteness of the shopping center, of all places, which sits shapelessly in this barren setting, like a large puddle of milk. Marcelle pushes a shopping cart around alertly, carefully reading the product labels. A debate about dinner: leftovers from lunch or something fresh? “But something that will warm our insides,” Marcelle stipulates. Fresh bunches of broccoli catch Maman’s attention. “This kind is good; all it needs is some butter and lemon,” she says with longing. Marcelle is suddenly vague, drifting off to another topic.

“Tomorrow, when everyone comes to the house afterward, we have to make something.”

“Nothing,” Maman says firmly. “The simplest dish—a big casserole of potatoes, mincemeat, and some roasted mushrooms, a little side salad, and that’s it.”

“Henri has to have his steak, you know he can’t have a meal without meat, he’s not like us with our vegetables and cheese,” Marcelle says, distracted, placing five cans of tomato paste in the cart.

Maman picks up three and puts them back on the shelf. “He can make his own steak. You prepare it for him in the morning and put it in the fridge, he can make it himself and leave us in peace.”

At the checkout line, the cart is overflowing. “How are we going to carry all this home?” Maman wonders. Confident, Marcelle pushes the cart outside, and we both hurry after her. “Where are you taking it?” Maman asks, amazed. “Home,” says Marcelle. “I’ve been wanting one of these for a long time.”

They push the cart up the open road from the shopping center. Pudgy, graying hair, matching pearl earrings, and tailored skirts in navy and bottle-green containing large, wobbly behinds. Passing drivers look on with amazement; some of them slow down. I burst out laughing behind them, walking unsteadily along the side of the road, tripping over the occasional bump. My eyes are stinging, but I can’t stop. They join in the merriment. “Henri should see us now,” Maman chokes. “He’d have a heart attack on the spot,” Marcelle adds and lets out punctuated peals of laughter. Long after they’ve quieted, letting out a few final giggles, I still cannot calm down. Half doubled over, I loosen my blouse and roar. Maman’s expression turns grave. “Stop it,” she says. “That’s enough.” “I can’t,” I say, hardly breathing. “I can’t stop.” She turns to me and holds my shoulders. “Come on, that’s enough, calm down now.” I writhe; my knees almost touch the ground. “You really cracked me up. I’ve never laughed this much.” Her arm waves in the air, and a second later her rough hand lands hard on my face. “Stop!”

I touch my burning cheek in disbelief. The salty tears feel like acid. Marcelle leans over the shopping cart and silently buries her face in one of the brown bags. Then she turns to me, holds my waist, leans her head on my shoulder, and sobs. We collapse into a nearby ditch along the side of the road, where we hug as we sit on a mound of dirt. Maman drags the cart onto the shoulder and finds a place to sit next to us on a rock. “I wish it were me instead of him,” Marcelle says dully. Maman examines the ends of some loose strands of hair; she goes on pulling out more strands. Darkness has not quite fallen. The headlights pass us as if searching for something, then quickly move on. The sudden chill makes me hungry. I rummage in the cart and pull out a package of coated wafers. Marcelle refuses at first, then changes her mind. We stay there until the package is finished.

 

 

 

“The poor little thing didn’t have it easy when she was a kitten,” Sarah says as she holds the cat between her thighs and shoves vitamin pills into her open mouth. Udi’s not sure about the pills. “I’ve never heard of anyone giving vitamins to a cat,” he says dubiously. “Don’t worry, it’s fine,” Sarah reassures him. “I’ve always given vitamins to my pets.” “Maybe that’s why none of them survived,” he replies, helping himself to another serving of rice pilaf with almonds, raisins, and chicken livers.

We were tired after our long walk. We’d spent the whole morning strolling through the old Tel Aviv port, the Neve Tzedek neighborhood, Hassan Bek mosque, Jaffa. On a Shabbat morning, the city was flooded with a restrained fluorescent whiteness, like a shrouded diamond. Our footsteps echoed in the empty streets.

I had slept at their place that night and got up at six-thirty. I found Sarah in the kitchen huddled in one of Udi’s long flannel shirts, dangling an anchovy strip in front of the cat’s nose. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. She bunched up the baggy shirt fabric in the small of her back and thrust out her stomach. “He was kicking all night.”

I boiled some water for coffee. “I can’t believe the baby’s already kicking in the fifth month,” I said with hesitation.

“You’d better believe it,” she assured me. She took my hand and pressed it on her stomach. “Feel this.” The taut, warm skin of her stomach was still; then after a few seconds something flitted by deep down like a scurrying fingerling. “See?” she said defiantly.

*   *   *

The pregnancy unsettled her a little. She would wonder wistfully, amazed at the fetus and at her own body, suffer bothersome attacks of worry and anxiety that expressed themselves in strict vegan diets (potato juice, millet, a juice maker for blending carrots and celery which spat orange specks on the tiled walls and floor), yoga exercises, and fervent reading of self-help books. At times she shifted from moods of extreme indifference to a demonstrative contempt for her body, and even to genuine hostility.

In her moments of gloom, when she would hurl herself into a state of self-abuse, she spoke of the baby as if it were a growth developing in her stomach—a foreign body with cells multiplying fervently, incessantly, day and night, growing at her expense and swelling against her will and beyond her control. Then there were the absences: oppressive silences during which she would chain-smoke and twist her hair around her fingers, tugging at the roots.

You had to wait. Close your eyes and wait for her to finally reappear, hours or days later, like a firm image emerging from the blurry surface of a Polaroid.

Udi excelled at the waiting, although not out of generosity. His notion of dignity entailed, first and foremost, a code of decency and an obligation to honor agreements. Udi was not a man with desires, but he did desire Sarah, motivated more by the force of his own wanting and the joy of its discovery than by Sarah herself. They had, so he said, “a contractual agreement.” How that man sustained himself with quantities of legalese as he ran around her like a sprinter shackled to a perpetual circling of the stadium track. He had, in any event, but a vague sense of their contract; the vagueness, like the legalese, gave an unspoken validity to this alliance of mutual protection into which he had entered with Sarah.

He was thirty-one when he met her, seven years her senior. This age difference gave him hope, for it was exactly the same as the difference between the poet Mandelstam and his wife, Nadezhda, he explained to her after a few dates, when he had mustered up enough courage. She couldn’t believe what she heard, she later recalled. They were on their way from the Gilman building at the university to the bus stop to go downtown. She stopped and grabbed his sleeve. “Why did you say that?” she asked. He didn’t know where to look. He apologized. “No reason. I just finished reading Hope against Hope. It’s an incredible book.”

“But why did you say that?” she insisted.

He had no choice but to answer. “They loved each other very much, they had a good marriage.”

Years later Sarah singled out the event as a turning point in their relationship; she had asked him to sleep with her. That evening, at the Kind Heart restaurant in the Yemenite Quarter, as he slid cubes of meat off skewers, she said suddenly, “I want to sleep with you.” Udi thought he had misheard her over the din of cutlery and dishes and loud chatter. “What?” he asked. “I want to sleep with you,” she repeated.

They walked to her apartment at the north end of town, talking about the army’s withdrawal from Lebanon. He talked about the war. When I ran into them at the corner of Ibn Gvirol and King David Streets, they were in a heated debate. Sarah was arguing, she was ready to poke his eyes out because he hadn’t refused to serve in the army. She forgot even to introduce us. We stood at the street corner talking for a long time. Udi kept saying, “It’s not as simple as you make it out to be.” He took a tissue from his pocket and then jammed it back in again, blinking; he always tended to blink when he was excited. “I didn’t say it was simple,” she retorted. “But even within the complexity we all must have our red lines: Do we or do we not participate in this obscenity?” That must set me off, even though I was engaged in examining Udi’s facial expressions more than in the argument. “What do you mean must?” I said. “Who are you to decide what the red line is and where each person should put it? I’m sick of your moralizing.”

She said in a restrained voice, “I’m not the one who decided where it is, Ofri. This is not some whim of mine. I’m talking about universal ethics, if you don’t mind.”

Her quiet didactic tone was irritating. “Universal ethics, my ass!” I left Udi dangling midsentence and walked away without saying good-bye.

She called at eight the next morning. “Something’s happened, Ofri,” she whispered into the phone.

“What’s the matter?” I was alarmed. “Why are you talking like that?”

“I don’t want to wake him, he’s still sleeping,” she said.

I was confused for a moment. “Who? Who’s sleeping?”

“Him, Udi, I slept with him last night. I think I’m going to marry him.”

“Shouldn’t you maybe wait a day or two?” I suggested.

She went on, her voice getting hoarse from whispering. “I woke up at three last night as usual, you know. He was sleeping next to me. There was no sex, there was nothing before that; we just hugged—” She suddenly stopped.

“And?” I urged her.

“And nothing. When I woke up, he was lying next to me on his side and watching me. He had been awake watching, or maybe he just woke up as soon as he sensed that I had. I’m not sure, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is the way he was watching me. It’s hard to explain. I suddenly knew that whenever I woke up from a nightmare, his eyes would always be there, watching. Do you understand?”

I said nothing. “Did you take a picture of him?” I asked finally.

“Not yet,” she admitted. “Soon. But I think he’s one of those people you can’t take pictures of.”

*   *   *

She kept on trying, though, furiously snapping dozens of rolls of color and black-and-white, poring over contact prints with a magnifying glass, “like a police detective looking for a criminal,” Udi said, laughing. She’d toss them aside or bury them in a drawer, exasperated by her inability to find “the one.” Her failure by no means motivated her to give up—quite the opposite; over time, her desire to capture the true portrait became a real nuisance, accompanied by bitterness and inappropriate suffering. Udi tried to help her, thinking it was a question of goodwill. “How do you want me to be?” he urged. “Tell me how to be.” “That’s the thing”—she was angry—“you can’t want to be a certain way. That screws everything up.”

*   *   *

He abdicated all responsibility. Back then, still captivated by her silly “mad artist” act, he refused to feel that she was in any way insulting or degrading. “It’s got nothing to do with me. It’s about her and how she is,” he explained.

I didn’t argue with him, although I was childishly tempted to show off a little. After all, she was my topic, my field of specialization, and I was an expert on every single aspect of her. For years I had devoted myself to a systematic organization of information and insights concerning Sarah, to studying this clearly demarcated territory in which I could never lose, or win.

I was very aware of my position and tried to squirm my way out of it. “It’s enough, Ofra,” I told myself. “Enough of being a parasite, of living someone else’s life. Live your own life, it’s high time.” When I despaired of the false, flush-cheeked vigor of “pulling myself together,” the affected indifference of it, I turned to a quasiliterary rationalization for the nature of my involvement with Sarah. I constructed a notion of myself as chaperone, the character who seems to intrude on the family parlor and holds an ambiguous position, both furniture and confidant, the knowing one, without whom the story cannot be told. It was pathetic consolation, and in any case it did not work for long. My mouth was too big for me to remain a chaperone, and in some equivocal way I was also struggling for my “part” in the story. And so I continued.

*   *   *

I visited them in their apartment at least three times a week, before and after they were married. On rare occasions, they visited me. I recall one evening in particular, when I spent two days preparing the meal, trapped in an ambitious decision to make stuffed grape leaves and onions. I had no clue about cooking, and the narrow kitchen in my rented apartment was a mess, overflowing into the hallway and living room. They turned up an hour late, tired and full; they hadn’t realized I’d invited them for a meal. We sat wearily over stuffed grape leaves, too big and too cold in my opinion. I was in no way able to imitate my mother’s tight, finger-shaped version. Sarah consoled me. “They taste exactly the same, whatever the size,” she said. Hers were wonderful, just right. She used to linger in my mother’s kitchen for days, picking up everything with the speed of light and never forgetting. All that I despised about that kitchen Sarah embraced enthusiastically: peeling artichokes, shelling peas, chopping off the ends of string beans, pickling vegetables, and, worst of all, separating stubborn, sticky grape leaves “without tearing them.” If Sarah had been satisfied just with the toil over the vegetables, I would have said nothing. But no, she simply had to turn every wrinkled artichoke leaf into an ideology, every pickled baby eggplant into a worldview. She spoke of the culinary traditions that pass from mother to daughter to granddaughter, of the wealth of secret feminine knowledge that never appears in the history books, that is given no voice. “And it’s a good thing it isn’t,” I quarreled with her, putting chocolate spread on my third slice of bread. “Your voice is loud enough for the whole Orient.” I used to sit between them in the kitchen, usually wearing pajamas, getting under their feet the whole time, as Maman carped. Once in a while they’d assign me a menial task: take the trash out, wipe the table off, dry the lettuce leaves. When they finished their business in the kitchen, Sarah would turn to improving my appearance. She would wash and blow-dry my hair and pull it back in a high ponytail. “I like you that way, with your hair tied up,” she would say softly and hold my chin as she inspected her work. Her brown eyes projected the ripe, deep softness of wet suede. She was, quite simply, the finest person I had ever known.

*   *   *

Anyway, I didn’t believe her when she said the size of stuffed grape leaves was not important, the main thing was the taste. The shape, in my view, went a long way toward determining the taste. Udi agreed with me. As he swallowed two pieces at once, he pondered, “How come a Sephardi like you, Ofra, can’t cook?”

I looked at Sarah. Her cheeks paled slightly beneath their blush. She finished her wine in one gulp. “How come an intelligent person like you can’t keep his trap shut sometimes?” she said.

He didn’t understand. “What did I say?”

“The wrong thing, as usual.” She put the glass down on the table with a deliberate clink.

He got up and let his napkin drop to the floor. “I’m leaving.”

“See you!” she said.

“When you calm down, let me know,” he added as he slammed the door behind him.

We sat quietly for a while. The neighbors’ television blared through the window. “He’s such a dope sometimes,” she said finally.

“I wasn’t insulted, Sarah,” I said.

“I was. I can’t stand it when people look at other people from the outside.”

“What did he say that was so terrible?” I defended him. “That I’m Sephardic and that I can’t cook. Both true.”

“Ofri,” she implored.

“What?”

“That’s enough. Stop being a smart-ass. My head is exploding; can’t you restrain yourself a little?”

I restrained myself. She stayed over that night, opened out the sofabed and lay there widthwise with her cheek buried in the pillow. “At least let him know you’re here,” I suggested. She dismissed me with a gesture and drifted into sleep. I cleaned up the house until one A.M. I was really fed up with the whole thing—with Udi, with Sarah, with myself. At almost two, I still couldn’t fall asleep. As I sat at the dining table, leafing absentmindedly through the newspaper and glancing at Sarah every so often, envying her sleep, a sense of clarity supplanted my feeling of burden. I suddenly felt I had been made a fool of; I could clearly see the maneuver between Sarah and Udi in which I, and the trivial issue of my being Sephardic, were in fact a pretext for something else—for a different, earlier fight. My fingers trembled as I lit a cigarette. I suddenly despised the way she had demonstratively taken my side, when in fact there was no side to take—no side at all. I choked up over what seemed to me a clear act of exploitation and degradation; she had felt an insurmountable need to act urgently, to vehemently inform the world of my insult.

I woke her up. “Get up.” I shook her shoulder. She barely opened her eyes.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“It’s the middle of the night,” I said. “I have something to say to you.”

“Now?” She twisted her lips in a weak smile.

“I get it,” I said. “That you fought, and why you fought, and how I was the excuse—I get it.”

“What do you get, Ofri?” She sat up on the couch and crossed her legs.

“All of it, everything,” I said. “Next time you want to fight, please don’t do it at my expense.”

“That’s not the way it was at all,” she said. I turned my back to her and squeezed my eyes shut to hold in the tears. “Ofri,” she pleaded. “Listen to me for a minute, turn around.” I held my silence, steadfast within the illusion of control. “Ofri.” She hugged my shoulders, laying her head against my back. “I want to tell you something.”

“What? What do you have to say?” I barked.

“Look at me first,” she demanded. I didn’t turn.

She moved to the rug in front of me and knelt down, peering at my face through my hair. “What happened tonight has nothing to do with what’s going on between me and Udi,” she stressed. “It’s hell in there sometimes, you know that, but I made a decision and I’m going to stick to it.” She paused. “My drama with men and our drama, Ofri, are two separate plays, I swear. Well … maybe not completely separate, but they’re not connected in the way you think they are.” She touched my wrist, played with the beads on my bracelet. “You’re my family, Ofri. Why don’t you get it?”

I did, in fact, get it, at least twice a day, when my gaze fell on the picture of us that stood on the bookshelf in my room. Udi had snapped it.

*   *   *

In the photograph she had the face of an eleven-year-old, like the day I first saw her. Her features were pressed into the sharp, small shape, as if fighting for their space. Fine straight hair, graceless and motionless, tied back with straight bangs in front like a Hussar cap. Her mouth was slightly pursed, always aware of its vulnerability. Her nose was bent, bothersome. She wore a white Diolen blouse fastened up to the neck, and her arms were crossed above her head, right hand grasping left wrist, left hand holding a cigarette: Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photograph of Carson McCullers in Central Park.

She had purposely struck that pose for the camera, as a gesture in my honor. She knew how much I admired the portrait. The lean shoulders beneath the fabric of the blouse, the hypnotic gaze fixed straight ahead without blinking, living out its existence in each of the thousand announcements it delivers to the world: chutzpah, childish satisfaction, cruelty, desperation, crudeness, sensual tenderness, vulnerability, temptation, defiance, and sadness. I sit behind her, slightly higher up on the steps. Above us, in the background, a faded geometric shape that captures all the light—Danny Caravan’s White City sculpture, which we went to see during the Sukkoth holiday. Her head and arms conceal my lower body. I am bent forward, with my chin resting on my crossed arms, looking sideways down at Sarah, half smiling.

 

 

 

I was always at least half a step behind her. In my wide school skirt I looked like a tube of toothpaste with a band tied around the middle, squeezing me in two. She thought half a step behind was a good position to be in. “If you’re a slow walker, no one expects anything from you, no one bothers you,” she once said as we wearily plodded home after school. Her arm was bandaged or in a cast, and I was carrying her tattered book bag, which was covered with a dusty layer of sand and chalk that set my teeth on edge. She was always tossing it casually on the floor or in the playground, dragging it by its straps, or just completely forgetting about it. The school janitor gave her a warm welcome at the lost and found. She thought it was wrong that I had to carry her bag and wanted to make it up to me. “But how?” she wondered.

When we got home, she came up with an idea. She resolutely removed the gilt heart-shaped pendant from around her neck, put it in the palm of my hand, and pressed my fingers around the cold metal. “Keep it for me.” I could see trouble ahead.

“What will your parents say?” I was worried. “What will you tell them?”

“They won’t notice. And if they do, I’ll just tell them the truth,” she promised.

On the table in the bright kitchen, Shula had laid out our lunch. She cooked and cleaned for Sarah’s family every day. I didn’t like the calculating way she glanced at us beneath her heavy eyelids, nor the sly, flattering sweetness of her words. “Shula treats you well, doesn’t she?” she said, as she danced around Sarah, placing “slightly burned” potato pancakes on her plate, just the way Sarah liked them. I refused to touch her food. “I’m not hungry,” I declared, my protest impressing no one. Two hours later, when Shula had gone, I would steal into the kitchen, quickly slice some bread, and stuff it in my mouth.

All of this went straight over the top of Sarah’s wispy head, her hair full of knots and tangles, her mind always stuck in a cloud. Innocently, with her straightforward integrity, she told Shula about the necklace. “Doesn’t it look prettier on Ofri?” She sought confirmation with a gleam in her eye. The woman’s face yellowed slightly. She stood for a minute or two, ostensibly concentrating on drying the dishes, scheming. “Very pretty,” she finally said without looking.

I took the necklace off and placed it on the table between us. “I can’t take it.”

She argued with me for a long time but eventually gave in. We went to her room and got on with our usual business. What did we talk about during all those long hours, until the narrow rectangular window in her room darkened? I vaguely recall the cascade of words that blew from us like confetti, clothed us, reshaped our form, shielded us—both from ourselves and from the world. Two naked girls in a big empty house where pungent odors of air fresheners and cleaning solutions lingered, defining and differentiating its spaces. The lemony Ajax in the kitchen, the violet scent on the row of velour towels in the bathroom, the lavender in the large closet in her parents’ bedroom, the bleach in the toilet bowl, the slightly moldy mixture of pinewood and cigarette smoke in the wall-to-wall carpeting in the living room. We waited for the front door to shut behind Shula and then undressed, tossing our clothes in every direction. I paid dearly for this habit when Sarah’s old dog peed on my blouse. She lent me one of hers, and I went home full of fear and impatience in anticipation of the interrogation. On the bus, when I rummaged in the front pocket of my backpack for the bus ticket, my fingers encountered cool metal. She had put the necklace in there. I put it around my neck so I wouldn’t lose it, and buried the pendant inside my blouse, one trouble concealing another.

She didn’t even notice the borrowed blouse, Maman, but her eye immediately caught the glint at the edge of the collar. She pulled out the necklace. “What’s this? Where did this come from?”

I mumbled something, but she was not in the least bit reassured.

“Come on.” She pulled my arm. “We’re going.”

“Where to?” I was afraid and let her drag me down the street to the bus stop.

“To give it back.” She tightened her fingers around my arm until it turned blue. “To give back the charity.”

“She gave it to me as a gift until tomorrow,” I said. “Just to keep it for her.”

“There’s no such thing as a gift,” she retorted. She shrank into the bus seat next to me; her neck receded into her chest and barely supported her face, which was slowly drying like a plaster mask, fixed in a strange expression. The jagged yellow shadows of the bus’s dim light flitted over her face, a picture of Sephardic dignity.

*   *   *

Through the wide living-room window of Sarah’s apartment, we could see the light was on. I was ashamed to go up. “Call her,” Maman advised. I couldn’t make a sound. “Sarah…,” I called weakly. “Louder,” she urged me. I took a deep breath. “Sarah!” I yelled. The windows were closed. Maman pushed through the rosebushes into the backyard and stood beneath Sarah’s window. “Now call her,” she said. I called out. Nothing. Maman tried to throw a stone at the window. The stone hit the shutter on the lower floor. “Go on up,” she ordered me. I refused. I sat down on the damp earth and would not budge. Maman went up herself. The next day, in a panicked state of confusion, Sarah told me that Maman had apologized to her father, claiming Sarah had forgotten to take her necklace back from me.

*   *   *

We never mentioned the necklace, not until that cool Shabbat morning before our walk. I sipped coffee as she drank her third mug of apple-cinnamon tea. We looked at the ivy and the stalks of hoya growing nicely in the window boxes, intertwining around the window bars. The cat walked gingerly on the sill and reached out to the mint leaves with her little white paw. Sarah watched with delight. “Wait and see what she does, she loves mint.”

Sarah had brought the cat home four months earlier, a foundling from one of her trips to the Galilee. Udi was horrified: “She’s at least three years old, and she’s covered with fleas.”

“She’s special,” Sarah decreed. “You should have seen the way she followed me, she wasn’t afraid or anything. I’ve never seen such a strange cat.”

“She certainly is strange,” Udi agreed. “Strange and revolting.” The cat’s bouts of madness frightened him. All of a sudden, driven by what seemed to be an electrical short in her brain, she would charge around the apartment, attacking the air with awful yelps, pouncing on objects or feet, and sinking in her malicious teeth.

“Come here, sweetie.” Sarah clicked her tongue at her now. “Come here.” The cat skipped over and lay on Sarah’s protruding stomach: two mounds, one on top of the other. She examined her pink ears. “Don’t you think the fact that I found her just when I got pregnant was a sign?” she asked.

I took a deep breath.

“A sign of what, Sarah?”

“I don’t know.” She touched the cat’s long, sharp whiskers. “Just a sign, like an amulet. Do you know what else happened the same day I found her, or rather the day she found me?”

“What?” I asked impatiently.

“I lost the heart necklace. Remember, the one I gave you once? Don’t you think that’s another interesting coincidence?”

“That is interesting,” I agreed.

“It all seems somehow connected to the pregnancy.” She put her cheek on the cat’s tiny head. “I’m a little scared, you know, Ofri?”

“Scared of what?” I asked.

“I don’t know, that something will go wrong, that there’ll be something wrong with the baby, something wrong with me. I don’t think I have a natural maternal instinct.”

“Of course you do,” I assured her. “Just look at how you’re always running to help any poor schlep you come across. You like taking care of people.”

Sarah shook her head. “It’s not the same, Ofri. Sometimes I think it may even be the opposite.”

I was absorbed in something, a kind of fatigue following harsh self-criticism, an argument with myself. “At least you have the courage to go through with it,” I said.

“Maybe,” she said thoughtfully. “But it’s not really courageous, you know, it’s just letting something happen and then not really being there when it does.”

I looked at her thin white neck, slightly bent, smooth and narrow like a roll of toilet paper, easily encircled by the strong fingers of one hand. I was alarmed by the image, by both the vitality and the fogginess of the emotion that gave rise to it.

“Don’t worry,” I found myself saying out loud, decisively. “We’ll bring up the baby together. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“Which we?” She smiled.

“You and Udi and me.”

 

 

 

When evening fell, they would go down to the beach. They walked there almost every day during the first summer they met, arm in arm, habitually, like an elderly couple. Udi held her heart in his hands. That’s how she put it. “He holds my heart in his hands, Ofri,” she said once, while we were sitting over one of her interminable thesis papers.

She drove me crazy with those papers. Every other day she’d discover something “completely new” and “innovative.” We would work for days, sometimes weeks, on a specific, agreed formula; then she’d suddenly call and erase all our work with one stroke. “It doesn’t stand up, Ofri, what we’ve done. I’ve been thinking about it.” That was bad news. “I’ve been thinking about it” was very bad. I would try to cool her enthusiasm, hating myself for my own insipidness. “It’s all right. It’s just a paper, stop blowing it out of proportion.”

She had no sense of moderation or limits, no sense at all. Two dozen pots of language and thought were simmering on the stovetop at any given time. When she wrote, page after crowded page, overcome with dizziness, you had to translate it into ordinary language or, as Udi said, “Just get her a new brain.” Wearing a faded T-shirt, which she claimed brought her good luck, chain-smoking, and shaking from too many cups of artistic Turkish coffee, she’d sit at the kitchen table and sail away wherever the wind took her—the lame captain of a ravaged ship—far away into confused and obstinate waters where there is no recognition of the sovereignty of punctuation and syntax, of ideas that progress and come together, of metaphors with a reference to something imaginable, of sentences that at least have the appearance of form, that seem at least like citizens of the world and not stowaways.

All this would have been comical if not for the way she suffered. Barely believing in her own ideas, she would chastise Udi and me for our narrowness. “I’d like to see you tackle Emily Dickinson with your worn-out ideas,” she’d say. Udi didn’t know who Emily Dickinson was. “An American poet,” Sarah threw at him. “A very important poet, for your information.”

“Well, you’re not a poet, you’re not writing poetry,” Udi said.

“That’s true, but a text is a text is a text, it doesn’t matter what you call it. Don’t you agree, Ofri?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. In this case what it’s called does matter—it’s a university thesis.”

She glared at me. “You always manage to step between the raindrops without getting wet, Ofri,” she said.

But I got wet all right. Of all people, she should have known that.

*   *   *

That was our first serious quarrel. There had been others, moments of anger that were resolved within a day or two, but this was our first big fight. It went on for more than two weeks, almost three. Silence took over, creating entire expanses in which I could find no comfortable place for myself. I had my job, of course—a sort of receptionist in a gallery—and my thesis on representations of action in American Abstract Expressionism, but never before had that seemed so backward, pretentious, unnecessary.

Every day, I made at least two major decisions. To go to New York and cut off all ties; to go to Paris and send a laconic, hurtful letter; to move apartments, drop out of school; to go back to Maman and get married; to devote myself to my work and my dignity. I was spinning around in something bad and, primarily, shameful. It was not the recognition of my loneliness that tortured me so much as the need for someone or something that would give me back my voice. The foolish notion that I would be able to make do with myself paled next to the awful, nightmarish hunger.

Five times a day I almost called Sarah and then changed my mind. I had been trained too well to do that, something else we had argued about. “You smother yourself with pride, Ofri,” she once said.

“It’s not pride, it’s just the way I grew up.”

“There’s no just about it. You need to stop letting yourself off the hook with indulgent concessions.”

I liked the way she could hit the nail on its head like that, thrusting her sharp hand into the heart of the matter, direct, interfering.

*   *   *

In fact, our friendship started because of her directness. For many months I had slouched over my desk at the new school crying. I wanted to die. That’s what I said when she came up to me, stood for a long time, and then leaned over, brushed my damp hair behind my ear, and whispered, “Why are you crying?” I turned my face away and then back when she sat down next to me. She wrote something quickly on a note and slid it over. “Why are you sad?” I didn’t reply until I felt her finger running across my forehead, drawing a line. We were alone in the classroom. I wiped my nose on my sleeve. “I want to die,” I wrote in large letters that filled the page. Then I straightened up for some reason, and wiped my face with the dirty napkin she handed me. She looked at me with great concentration. “You speak very nicely. Do you always talk like that?” she said. I shrugged my shoulders. She walked me to the bus stop. Just when the bus had stopped at the lights, about to pull up, she asked, “Would you be my friend?”

For years I reflected on that “would you,” on its precision: “would you,” rather than “do you want to.” Even though she could easily have said “want,” she left the choice in my hands, as if agreeing would be an act of charity on my part; there was no blowing of trumpets but rather quiet unassuming tenderness.

I started working for her, writing essays. That was what I knew how to do. I had transferred from my shabby neighborhood school. I had to take two buses to get to the new school and when I first arrived I was a tabula rasa, nothing at all. I had even forgotten my one weapon, eloquent Hebrew and a certain talent for recitation; the principal at my old school had made me recite Janusz Korczak letters every holiday and memorial day. Now my life became terrible. I stared at the green chalkboard for almost six months. The children were awful; the teacher, a Tartuffe; the headmaster who summoned me to his office a few times was terrifying, constantly stroking his insincere hands, repeating in a quiet, low voice, “Our school … in our school,” overenunciating the “oo.”

She saved me, Sarah. I never forgot that and I was indebted to her. The fear of forgetting my debt became forever connected in my mind with the prospect of forgetting myself.

And so, with the great joy of relief, I agreed to her request to write down her “thoughts.” I particularly excelled in “From Sorrow to Joy,” her second term paper. The essay I wrote for Sarah far exceeded my own. After diligent rewrites and refinements, a decorative masterpiece finally emerged. “I said that?” She was amazed and read it over and over again.

Over time, my job description expanded. Rumor spread among the other children and during breaks I wrote fervently for everyone, no matter what the subject. Cautiously, without disturbing me, they placed candy, pencils and erasers, party invitations on the edge of my desk.

Eventually, when I couldn’t keep up anymore, Sarah began to filter the applicants. The criteria were not clear to us at first, and we discussed them at length. I tended to prefer those who offered interesting subjects, while Sarah thought we should give preference to those who had real difficulties. Nonsense—the ones who “really” had difficulties, as she put it, never came. I knew them only too well, those kids at the back of the classroom who wore the stamp of exclusion, who carried a scent of shame and feebleness, of having given up. I avoided them like the plague, knowing how easily, with one careless move, I could have been one of them.

It’s hard to say what would have become of our joint enterprise if some corrupt girl we had rejected had not squealed on us. Investigations, parents, threats of suspension, accusations of fraud, and pleading promises ensued.

We went underground. From then on our transactions were made covertly, on the way out of school, sometimes through an inconspicuous intermediary. One problem was my identifiable writing style. I began to practice disguise. Sarah suggested I use books, copy out excerpts. She refused to give up, kept pursuing the balloon of our operation long after it had deflated. She was so blindly determined. What was it—her passion for acting and a temptation to cheat the system? A matter of honor—her own and mine—which existed as if separate from us, a kind of independent and demanding limb? A desire to prove something to me? Or her pigheaded sense of justice?

*   *   *

I never knew for certain, nor did I want to. My appetite for observation could never be sated. She was always moving, rustling with every breeze like those colored mobiles with bells that hang over a crib.

There was something electrifying in her sprightly movement of body and thought, not quite sexy but somehow related to sex appeal. Had she wished, she could—without batting an eyelid—have persuaded her photography subjects to pose in a dishwasher holding a watermelon on their head. But she didn’t want to.

She would circle them for hours, often days, trying to banish the powerful seductiveness that oozed out of her effortlessly. I witnessed it many times when I went with her on photo shoots. She seemed to constrain herself in a corset of discipline that focused her attention, distinguished vapid from significant movements; paradoxically, it stretched her to her limits rather than shrinking or dampening her ability. It was painful to even watch this vast effort of hers, which was, primarily, a physical endeavor. Her narrow neck bent forward under the weight of two large cameras, her supple strides around the room like a panther, her unqualified attentiveness to her subjects and their gestures, to the fluid relationship of voice, expression, and body language that constantly demanded adaptation, redeployment.

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that portraits fascinated her mainly as a form of presence, of not being absent, which is why she so disdained the notion of “capturing” subjects of their momentary suspension of consciousness during which the photographer captures someone who is not watching. She belittled the opposite effect as well: cooperation between photographer and subject, when the subject would turn himself into a third entity, material.

She wanted more, much more. In moments of exhaustion and helplessness, she thought the gods would punish her for her hubris. After brief reflection she would add, “Actually, they already are, the bastards.”

*   *   *

I thought of that when she suddenly turned up at my place after three weeks of not calling. “You win,” she said. I was so happy to see her thin, crooked profile in the darkness of the doorway that I was speechless. “Have you heard the news?” she asked. I hadn’t heard anything. “Where have you been living? Tell me,” she said, collapsing on the couch with her legs spread out.

“Between the raindrops.” I couldn’t resist.

She turned grave. “Ofri, listen to me carefully now. There’s some serious stuff going on in Gaza. People are going out in the streets with stones, and the army is losing control. Do you get it?”

“At last,” I said. “It’s about time.”

She jumped up. “What do you mean ‘at last’? How can you be so complacent? Don’t you see the implications?”

It was not the time to argue. “Why don’t you tell me what the implications are,” I said.

“They’re shooting at them on the streets—at children, Ofri, at children,” she repeated loudly, her face very close to me. I could mainly see her round lips moving.

“That’s awful,” I said, slightly embarrassed.

“Don’t say ‘awful’ just to be polite, I can’t stand that. If you don’t have anything to say, then just shut up, it’s more dignified.”

Now I was annoyed. “Look, you can’t just barge in here all hysterical and expect total identification within minutes. It takes a little time, don’t you think?”

“Well, there isn’t any time.” She turned to the window and lit a cigarette. “Coming?” she asked.

“Where to?”

“Gaza. I’ve arranged to go.”

“Now?” I was alarmed.

“Right now. Get your jacket and we’ll go.”

Her shoulder bones protruded from beneath her flight jacket; she wore faded sneakers. As I looked at her, I was torn between the urge to drop everything and throw myself into an adventure, and a keen suspicion of myself, of her, of this whole childlike escapade.

“I can’t,” I said finally.

“Why not?” she asked. “What’s so important here that you need to stay for?” She motioned toward the quiet, tidy room.

“I can’t suddenly rush down there just because there’s nothing important for me here,” I rationalized.

“Ofri.” She came close and held my shoulders with both hands. “Stop this hairsplitting. Stop sitting here in your den splitting hairs all day long. Put yourself aside just for a while, okay?”

“Okay. Starting tomorrow.”

We burst out laughing. She opened the refrigerator. “Do you have anything to eat? I’m starved.” We ate cream cheese and radish sandwiches, followed by canned applesauce.

She had been working almost around the clock for the last week, she said, and had hardly been home. A few times she’d found herself in the middle of huge demonstrations in Jabalia and thought she wouldn’t make it out alive. “I froze. I couldn’t move. I wrapped the camera inside my coat so it wouldn’t break and let the crowd carry me along. I did nothing, just let the movement of the people running, throwing stones, fleeing the tear gas, carry me along.”

She had escaped down an alley and into someone’s house. She had banged on the door for ages until someone opened it. She had no idea who the people were.

“Weren’t you scared?” I shuddered.

“I was scared as hell, I was shaking. I had to get to a phone, to try and find the reporter I’d lost in the commotion. Leave him a message at least.”

The father of the house opened the door. He spoke fluent Hebrew. Turned out he’d done plasterwork for years with some Israeli contractor in Ramat Aviv. The room was stifling, completely dark. Only after a while did she notice a row of children, two women, and an old lady reclining on mattresses along the wall. In the middle of the room was a boy of about fifteen with his hands and feet tied to a chair. “So he doesn’t run outside to throw stones,” the father explained.

They dragged in a couch from the next room and served her coffee and refreshments. There was no phone, nothing. Meanwhile, evening fell, and a curfew was imposed. It was dangerous to even go next door. At eight-thirty the family got ready for bed. They offered her a separate mattress, but she refused. She sat on the couch all night with her legs folded beneath her, dozing off briefly then waking, staring for hours at the boy’s head lolling sideways in the chair opposite her. The scene was illuminated intermittently in the headlights of the jeeps that patrolled the alley every half hour and shone through the torn curtains.

At six in the morning the father took her to the neighbors’ house, where there was a phone.

“And Udi?” I asked.

She dipped her finger in the plastic cheese container and licked it. “Worried, I think,” she said distractedly, wiping her hands on her pants. We were quiet for a while. “If you only knew, Ofri, the things going on there, the stories people are telling.”

“Like what?”

“Horrors. Men and boys rounded up in school yards, day and night, torture, beatings, a group of people tied together and dunked into a pool of water all night long. It’s a mixture of real and imaginary, and the worst thing is, no one cares which is which. The Israelis are just beating the crap out of them, and they’re trying to construct a national myth. Go be a humanist in all this chaos.” She lit a cigarette, leaned her head back, and blew the smoke upward. “What have you been doing all this time?”

“Nothing. Trying to work.”

“Have you made any progress with the thesis?”

“Not much. Things got in the way.”

“Things always get in the way,” she echoed, slightly distracted. “Everything just gets in the way.”

A wave of anxiety shuddered through me, like a train shaking the walls of a house as it passes by. I didn’t like this kind of talk. “Maybe you shouldn’t go back for a week or two. Give it a rest for a while,” I said.

“On the contrary, that’s the only place I can rest. I can’t explain it even to myself, but I feel like I’m in my element there, Ofri. Does that sound strange?”

“It sounds twisted.”

I couldn’t tell whether she was silently condemning me when she eventually got up, gathered her things, and left. She lingered at the door, running her fingers over the mezuzah the landlord had put up. “Would you like to come with me sometime?” she asked.

“Sometime,” I said.

*   *   *

She took whoever agreed to be taken: friends, fellow activists, distant acquaintances, strangers, Udi, even Maman.

“You have to see it, Inès, to understand,” Sarah coaxed her.

“I already understand it,” Maman replied. “What more is there to understand?”

Still, they left early in the morning and reached the Erez checkpoint in a taxi from Gaza that had been waiting to pick them up at the Tel Aviv bus station. Maman was all a-tremble, “and not from fear, I’ll have you know—from excitement,” she said. On the way, she struck up a conversation with the driver, Adnan, the cousin of Samir, who was Sarah’s closest friend in Gaza and acted as her liaison. Adnan wanted Maman to keep talking, whatever the subject—it had been ages since he’d heard such beautiful Egyptian Arabic. Maman glowed; as far as she was concerned, the excursion was already a success. At the checkpoint, they were stopped by soldiers, who peered into the car, walked away, came back, looked in again, asked Adnan for his papers, walked away, conferred, looked in again. “Where are you from?” they finally asked.

Sarah stiffened, lighting a cigarette. “From Tel Aviv.”

Maman volunteered, “I’m from near Petach Tikva.”

“What are you doing here?” one of them asked.

“We’ve come to visit,” Sarah replied curtly.

“To Gaza?”

“To Gaza.”

He looked in the trunk. “What’s this package?”

“Some shelves I brought for my friends. Just wooden shelves,” said Sarah.

He ripped open the paper wrapping and examined the shelves. “Okay.” He scratched his neck, hesitating a little. “Fifty-shekel fine for you,” he told Adnan.

“What for?” Maman demanded excitedly. “What’s the fine for?”

“For smoking in the taxi. You’re not allowed to smoke in a public vehicle.”

“Who was smoking?”

He pointed at Sarah. “She was. She was smoking just now.”

Maman reached out of the car. “All the blood rushed to my head,” she later recounted. She grabbed the soldier by his sleeve. “Tell me, what’s the matter with you?”

Sarah tried to pull her back down. “Leave it, Inès; let’s not make trouble.”

“What do you mean ‘make trouble’?” Maman was livid. “There’s already trouble.”

The soldier seemed a little embarrassed by her white hair. “Calm down, lady, it’s the law.”

“I want to see your officer,” she demanded. “I want him to tell me why this poor man has to pay a fine.”

“There’s no officer. I’m the officer,” said the soldier as he tried to pry his sleeve out of her grip. “Calm down, lady.”

She didn’t calm down. She went and sat in the guards’ hut to wait for the “officer” like a person waits for a store manager. Consumer injustice, or what she perceived as injustice, drove her up the wall. She insisted on staying there all morning, refusing to negotiate with any soldier who was not “the officer.” Sarah and Adnan didn’t know what to do with themselves. Sarah pulled out the money and tried to pay three times, but Maman prevented her. “Don’t you dare!” she threatened. “You keep your money, it’s a matter of principle.”

Sarah was exasperated. “What principle? You don’t know them, Inès; sometimes they make up laws, let’s just forget about it and leave.”

“We’re not going to forget about it,” Maman thundered. “Justice is justice. The day they start fining people for smoking in taxis in Tel Aviv, then I’ll pay here too.”

At around two, an officer finally came by. They told him the story. “What’s your problem, lady?” he asked Maman.

“You’re my problem,” she replied. “Why are you unfairly taking money from someone?”

He glanced at Sarah, at Maman, and finally at Adnan. He shrugged his shoulders. “Drive on.”

She wouldn’t talk about the rest of the visit, Maman; she always got stuck at the checkpoint scene, fuming every time she recounted it. She would chastise herself for getting so angry, then justify her fulmination, explaining, “It’s only money, but it’s still infuriating.” Then she’d sigh and calm down and, slightly mollified, admit, “I’m like that man who let the whole convoy of camels go, and when the ant came along he said, ‘Not you; you can’t go through.’”

Sarah laughed. There weren’t many things that made her laugh back then, when she’d wander from room to room like a Fury, the hem of her orange robe trailing behind her like a big waterfall, sweeping the floor as it swished from side to side.

*   *   *

Udi went along with it all, let her be herself, maintained an impossibly fastidious distinction between what was truly “the justness of the cause” and what was merely personal caprice.

He greatly admired strong feelings. “A political position is primarily a firm ability to say ‘no’ to something and be willing to pay the price. It’s too easy to turn everything into a caricature,” he claimed.

“Who are you trying to convince?” I asked. We were sitting on their porch eating stale pistachios while we waited for Sarah.

“Myself, mainly,” he said, and spat a greenish mess into a napkin. “These pistachios are inedible.”

We looked down at the street, watching the girls from Zeitlin School on their way to their youth movement. They walked in fours, whispering and giggling, their white ankle socks gleaming in the rust-colored twilight.

“Look at their freshness,” Udi said as he leaned on the railing.

“Give them another couple of years, then we’ll see how fresh they look,” I said.

He turned to me, his cheeks resting on his crossed arms. “It’s not good to be so bitter this young, Ofra, it will happen anyway.” He looked at his watch. “She’s late.”

She turned up at nine-thirty as the weather forecast came on the news, dragging Shelly with her. They had met at the demonstration outside the Defense Ministry. “I thought you’d be there,” Sarah grumbled.

“Why would we be there when we’d arranged to meet you here?” I asked impatiently.

Udi brushed his lips against Sarah’s bare shoulder. “How are things?”

“There weren’t that many people today,” Shelly said and looked away awkwardly.

We knew her from here and there; she was always tagging onto someone or something, bumming cigarettes. A real character. She had come on her own from Argentina at the age of sixteen, after falling in love with someone who immigrated to Israel. She had lived with him for a while on Kibbutz Netiv Halamed Hei, and when the affair was over she moved to Kibbutz Mashabei Sadeh and lived there for about a year. She learned Hebrew, screwed anything that moved, then came to Tel Aviv, where she worked as a delivery girl, completed her high school diploma, and hooked up with radical leftist students from the Matzpen movement. It took her about five minutes to get an exemption from the army. There was a whole folklore surrounding her—the way she attached herself to people and got on their nerves, her run-ins with the police at demonstrations, her embroidered sixties-style skirts, and, most legendary, the line, “Where is this Shelly girl?” which had stuck after a fling she’d had with a crazy black basketball player from Atlanta who used to go looking for her at night, banging on her friends’ doors and yelling, “Where is this Shelly girl?”

Now she rolled a joint, inhaled sharply, and held it out to Sarah. “This is the end of Zionism. Just wait and see,” she said.

“Wait and see what?” Udi asked with hostility. He had no patience for her.

“Within a couple of weeks the Israeli Arabs will get swept up in the uprising and that will be that—the Zionists can start saying kaddish,” she said.

“I don’t see Israeli Arabs in such a hurry to join in. They’re fully aware of the distinction between themselves and Palestinians in the territories. They’re not going to hand over a reason to deport them again like in forty-eight,” Udi said.

“We have to support the armed struggle, it can’t wait. Otherwise we’ll be just like those armchair liberals in Peace Now.”

Udi swallowed. “What armed struggle? What the hell are you talking about?”

“The one that’s coming in a few days. It’s a sure thing. They’ve got tons of weapons,” Shelly said. She took off her shoes and crossed her legs beneath her on the couch.

“I’m making an omelet,” Sarah said. “Does anyone want an omelet?” Shelly did.

Udi glared at Shelly’s swollen white ankles beneath her skirt. “How do you come up with all this crap? That’s what I’d like to know.”

Sarah poked her head out of the kitchen door. “Why are you talking to her like that? What’s with the attack?”

“She’s talking a load of nonsense.” Udi raised his voice. “I can’t stand her sitting here spewing out this nonsense.” Shelly folded her legs in a little closer and looked at them with dismay.

“She always talks nonsense, what else is new?” Sarah yelled. “Pick on someone your own size.”

“I’m not talking nonsense, it’s all facts,” Shelly protested feebly.

Udi threw up his arms in despair and went into the bedroom. We sat quietly. Shelly filed her nails with a nail file she found on the table. “Shelly, please,” Sarah begged her. The scraping sound gave her the chills.

“I need somewhere to stay for a few days until I find my own place,” Shelly said.

“What’s wrong with your apartment?” Sarah asked.

“The landlord’s selling it, he gave me a week’s notice, and I haven’t found anything else.”

“Do you have money for rent?”

She shook her head. We looked at each other, Sarah and I.

“Do you need a loan?” Sarah finally asked.

“I’ll be all right. I’m thinking about leaving town and living in the country. It’s much cheaper there.”

“What would you do in the country, Shelly? You don’t even know how to drive. How will you make a living?”

“People get by. I have a couple of friends who moved to Ramot Hashavim, and they grow vegetables in their garden, raise chickens, that kind of thing.” She seemed to contemplate something, pulling at her long, sticky eyelashes.

“You can stay with us for a few days until you get settled,” Sarah said.

Shelly looked up with her strange, slanted eyes. “Really?” she asked.

She picked at her omelet in front of the television, smoking in between bites, and fell asleep with a cigarette stub between her fingers. Sarah took it away gently and placed it in the ashtray.

“So that’s that, she’s moved in?” Udi asked as he passed through the room on his way to the bathroom.

“Don’t be mean,” Sarah said. “She doesn’t have anyone.”

It was after midnight. “I’m leaving,” I said.

Udi put his shoes on. “Come on, I’ll walk you. I need some fresh air.”

*   *   *

We walked down Ibn Gvirol Street, keeping a slight distance between us. He walked quickly with his hands in his flight jacket pockets, bent forward. Every so often he wiped his runny nose; he suffered from allergies. At the corner of Basel Street he suddenly stopped and turned to me. “Do you think I was mean?”

“A little,” I said. “You were a little mean.”

“I don’t know what got into me, I lost it. That Shelly is so pathetic, it just makes me feel so helpless, and then I get annoyed.” We walked on silently for a while. “What am I going to do now?” he asked.

“About what?”

“You know, about having hurt her. I feel sick at myself.”

“This country drives everyone a little crazy, what can you do?” I said.

We reached the entrance to my building and lingered for a while by the shrubs. “Don’t start up with ‘this country,’ Ofra,” he said angrily. “There’s nothing I hate more than this blanket doctor’s note—this excuse not to be human beings. ‘This country’ or any other—ultimately, each of us has to decide what kind of person we’re going to be.”

He didn’t often say things like that. His worry about Sarah all those months, his efforts devoted to reining her in, had cost him dearly. She was getting in the way of his duty, which was holding her heart in his hands.

*   *   *

Maman couldn’t resist telling him “the truth.”

“I love Sarah like my own daughter—more than a daughter. But the truth is, Udi, that you’re letting her treat you like a piece of dirt.”

He disagreed. “I know exactly what I’m doing, Inès,” he said.

She examined his long, handsome face that was polished with a kind of sharp clarity, his prominent chin, receding hairline, droopy left eye—a nervous tic he couldn’t shake off, now a scar of sorts. “People who turn themselves into dirt get trampled on, Udi,” she said.

“So I’ll get trampled on,” he replied.

 

 

 

According to my calculations, they had been married for six years. “Five and a half,” Sarah argued.

“Why did you marry him?” I asked her in the taxi on the way home from the emergency room. She pressed her face against the window. Her hands were buried between her thighs, holding themselves tightly against something. “I don’t know,” she said in a strange voice. The taxi driver had the radio on loud. He glanced at us in the mirror.

“What are you looking at?” I snapped. “Don’t worry, we’re not stealing your seats.”

“What’s your problem?” He stuck his head out the window and spat. “Ugly cow,” he muttered.

Sarah grasped my wrist. “Don’t say anything,” she ordered.

He screeched to a stop in front of my apartment building. “Go on, get out.”

She slowly walked down the path, stopping every few steps to close her eyes and inhale the cool night air. When we got to the entrance, she leaned against the row of mailboxes. “Look at me.” She pressed at the light switch in the hallway. “Just look at my face.” She was purple and blue. I ran my finger over her swollen upper lip.

She lay on the couch in my room, holding a hot-water bottle wrapped in a towel against her ribs. I stood at her feet like a hangman. “Who did this to you?”

“What difference does it make, Ofri? What matters is why.”

“Okay then, why?”

“I didn’t take care of myself. I thought I could just consume the world and nothing would ever happen to me. I thought I was invincible.” She was quiet for a minute. “Come and sit next to me, Ofri.” I sat by her feet on the edge of the couch, almost falling off. She turned around and laid her head in my lap. “Tomorrow I’ll get my hair cut,” she said.

I sat with her head in my lap all night. She drifted in and out of sleep, watched a few minutes of television, closed her eyes, then woke again. When I got up to turn off the television, she protested. “Leave it on, leave it on.” I left it on and was glued to the fuzzy screen, kneading my fingers into Sarah’s scalp, pulling the blanket over her when it slipped off. To kill time, I traced the events, the story. She ambushes Marwan. She lurks in the entrance to his house for days, lying in wait. “Go,” he tells her. “Don’t break my heart. It’s over.” “Nothing’s over,” she says. Hours, days, nights, she lies in wait. He sends out his landlady, Mrs. Kaisi, to make her go away. “Go on, ya habibti. You have your own home and your child. Leave the man alone, this will only bring sorrow,” she says. “I don’t care,” Sarah says. A blanket is draped over the large window upstairs that faces the street. She monitors his shadowmoving behind it. Udi comes to get her. “Come on, come home, Sarah.” He envelops her. She won’t go, her body hard as slate. He beats the crap out of her.

Sarah opened her large eyes, surrounded with dark circles. “That story’s not right, Ofri.” She had been following my words like a child tracing a line of ants.

“It might not be right, but it’s the only story we’ve got.” I raised my voice, hoarse with anger. “It’s the only one we have.”

 

 

 

Tante Marcelle, Maman, and I return home with the rattling supermarket trolley. “I went out to look for you,” Oncle Henri complains; then he notices the shopping cart. “What’s this?”

“A shopping cart. There was no delivery service,” says Marcelle.

“So you pushed the cart home like a band of gypsies?” He turns pale.

David comes out of the bathroom with his hair smoothed back with gel. “Is someone taking me to the airport?”

Marcelle unpacks the food, climbs on a kitchen stool, and buries her head in the top cabinet. “Just don’t let your father drive, he can’t see a thing at this time of day.”

“At least take the cat with you, she can’t stay here,” Alain says bitterly, jingling a bunch of keys.

“I can’t. Catherine’s allergic to cats.”

“Oh.”

Silence lingers. Alain tosses the keys in the air and catches them. “Is there anything she’s not allergic to, this Catherine?”

David pounds his fist on the marble counter, goes over to Alain, and grabs his shirt collar, holding his face very close; he’s a full head shorter than Alain. “What is it that you want?” he asks. Three balls of spit escape his mouth and glimmer as they land on Alain’s chin.

“What do I want? Why don’t you tell me what you want.” Alain takes a step back and bangs into the china cupboard.

“Stop it,” Marcelle begs, still standing on the stool, rustling a packet of spaghetti. “This is all we need now.”

“You’ve had it in for me ever since I got here, you haven’t taken your eyes off of me. Do you think it’s been fun, this whole thing?”

“It’s hard to know with you,” Alain hisses. “It’s impossible to know, with all your”—he suddenly stops with his mouth open, face red—“all your self-importance, your martyrdom, your insufferable sanctimoniousness. Who do you think you are, anyway?”

“Henri!” Marcelle shouts from the stool. “Come and see how the children are behaving, Henri!”

The doorbell chimes a long ring of “Für Elise,” and I rush to the door. The baroness is standing there, huddled in the darkness on the far corner of the front porch. “Is this a good time?” she asks as she cautiously steps inside. She walks past me in her blue airline uniform, blue high heels clicking. “I came straight from work,” she explains as she glances at Alain and David, still grappling by the china cupboard. She looks questioningly at Tante Marcelle. “You came just in time,” she says. She gets off the stool with Maman’s support and kisses the baroness twice on each cheek. “I’m glad you came.” David mutters something and stomps up the stairs to his room. Maman boils water for tea and meticulously arranges almond-rum biscuits on a dish. Delphi, whom everyone calls “the baroness” because of some significant familial connection, places a gilt box of slender cigarettes on the table, pulls one out, lights it, and smokes, flinging back her heavy hair.

“I found something of his yesterday,” she tells Marcelle. “I thought you might want it.” Marcelle stares at her weakly. “You look so nice, Delphi,” she says softly, stroking the baroness’s crossed leg. The baroness leans down, digs around in her large blue handbag, and pulls out a package wrapped in pale blue tissue paper, tied with a ribbon. “He bought this one day when we were out together, and he left it in my car,” she says. Marcelle looks at the package without touching it, her arms hanging alongside her body. “You open it, Delphi.”

Delphi unties the knot. Inside the thin paper lies a glowing, rich down of mohair. Delphi unfolds the shawl deliberately and, with the knowing smile of a carpet merchant, spreads it around Marcelle’s shoulders. Green, indigo, and purple-red shimmer from the lush fabric. Bold, heavy, almost three-dimensional, the stunning colors cascade, seeking an outlet, making their way across the shawl’s feathery composition, filling the room, bursting with vitality, as tangible a presence as a human.

The shawl on Marcelle’s shoulders mesmerizes us; we gaze at it breathlessly, almost frightened. Maman walks over and strokes the mohair with her eyes closed, then opens them to examine the dangling price tag. “Nine hundred eighty francs,” she says wondrously.

*   *   *

He was an uncontrollable consumer, Michel. He turned spending money into a moral imperative—a principle to live by, a yardstick. He had special contempt for people with “inner hunger,” the kind who measured life out on scales, “afraid to pee in case they lose something.” He bought things without batting an eyelid and gave them up just as easily, disdainful of any sense of ownership—he was a slave to the moment when the spark would ignite, lighting up the bills of money, which he would scatter like the thousand shimmering sparks of a firework.

He liked to strut his stuff, decked out as he was with a checkbook, a trigger-happy finger, and a take-it-or-leave-it expression—a kind of young Brando meets Sinead O’Connor, buying and being bought without a second thought. He would eat from anyone’s hand, but not out of innocence. On the contrary; guided by a stubborn, wary inner barometer, essentially moral, he chose to present himself as a “devoted idiot,” both in defiance of what he called “the evil of the penny-pinchers of the world,” and because he found the stance completely enchanting in and of itself; it freed his imagination. Above all, though, it gave him the air of risk and willingness to take risks, which he, in any event, considered a superior human quality, if not the highest.

It was precisely in this way that he fell at the feet of Mathieu, whom he declared from the start, with a strange, slightly bitter enthusiasm, was “a lost cause, not someone you really want to know.”

Mathieu was bi, which was just one of the illusive eel-like personas he would take on and discard, but in essence he was completely devoid of sexuality. Thin as a toothpick, there was a semideliberate sloppiness in his dress and in the emotional tone of his personality; he projected a dull sense of spirituality that hovered about him, noncommittal, evident in his wonderful, impenetrable Cheshire-cat smile. He flitted back and forth between Michel and the baroness in a tireless game of tug-of-war.

He exhausted them. Weary like two exiled princes, dispossessed, Michel and Delphi clung to each other and to what stood between them even as it bound them together: the absence of the beloved. They took vacations together, volunteered in Doctors without Borders, went to shopping malls, movies, and operas (their great love), all the while dragging Mathieu’s shadow behind them. The result was an increased “grace under pressure,” as the baroness put it, at which they both excelled, but she—so she claimed—even more than him, because she was backed by “an entire female history of heroism and foolishness.”

When Mathieu finally deigned to disappear (the computer company he worked for transferred him to Silicon Valley), he left the disease as a souvenir. “She was saved by a miracle,” Tante Marcelle stressed repeatedly at different times, but always in the same tone. Devoid of resentment, she was merely amazed, taken aback, at the further evidence produced by fate in support of her conviction that the baroness was, after all, not like other mortals. Her familial connections were clearly not just a matter of honor, but a kind of eternal defense—intellectually ungraspable—against both bodily and mental harm.

*   *   *

Marcelle takes the shawl and wraps it around Delphi’s neck. “You take it, it’s too much for me.” Delphi looks down at the long mohair fringes, which take on a flickering bluish purple hue in the kitchen’s turbid light, like witch’s hair. “What time does it start tomorrow?”

“At twelve noon, next to the crematorium at Père Lachaise,” says Alain, who can’t resist going over to stroke the shawl. Lilly shows up suddenly and rubs against Delphi’s leg. She tries to bite the edges of her skirt, then skips onto her lap and purrs, digging her nails into the mohair. Delphi extracts the curved nails from the scarf one by one and burrows in Lilly’s fur. “What about her?”

“Do you want her?” Alain asks. “You can have her if you want to.”

A barely perceptible cloud passes over the pointy, ivory triangle of Delphi’s face, concentrated in the rounded forehead and the thin, nervous wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. “I’m not sure if I can, I need to think about it.”

Marcelle sips her tea until it’s finished and turns the cup upside down on the saucer. “He’ll kill her if she stays, he’ll just strangle her one day, without meaning to.”

“Who?” Oncle Henri appears from behind in his work clothes, carrying a long wooden plank. “What are you talking about?” he asks, then suddenly notices Delphi and pulls himself together. “You’re here,” he determines, feebly shaking her outstretched hand.

“What are you going to do with that plank?” Marcelle looks at his back with a pained expression.

He drags a chair over to the large window, stands on it, and measures the width. “It should be a little shorter,” he says, then reconsiders. “But it’s all right if it sticks out a bit at the ends.”

“What sticks out? Who sticks out?” Marcelle gets annoyed. She pokes around for a half-burned cigarette in the ashtray, lights it, and smokes.

“The shelf,” he says, pointing to the window. “Here, over the window frame. I want to put up a shelf for all your knickknacks, all that copper stuff that’s always getting in the way.”

Maman is impressed. “Good idea. That will be nice, Marcelle, a shelf up there, so you can store all the little dishes.”

Marcelle shoots a look at her. “Yes, that’ll be wonderful, now we’ll have drilling all day and night.”

“Half an hour’s work,” he announces coolly, gets off the chair, and wipes the plank with a rag. “Are we eating soon?”

“Stay and eat with us, Delphi?” Marcelle suggests.

She gets up. “I don’t think so, I have to go by the office.”

“Do you mind giving me a ride to the airport?” David asks from the doorway. He is wearing his flight jacket, and his bags are packed.

The wooden plank drops noisily to the floor. Oncle Henri stands erect as if he has been nailed to a board, his lower lip slightly trembling. He walks out, pushing Delphi aside on his way. The front door slams shut.

A helpless smile spreads over Marcelle’s face. “Did you take everything you need, my pet?” she asks with unusual tenderness. He nods and looks down at his freshly shined shoes.

For several long minutes after they leave, the baroness’s peachy, slightly sour scent still lingers in the room, occasionally overwhelmed by other kitchen smells—the odor of fried onions and steamed mushrooms—then emerging again to assert its uniqueness. Maman labors over a potato casserole with meat and mushrooms for tomorrow, spreading the mashed potatoes in a large dish.

“But what about today?” Marcelle frets.

“We’ll manage,” Maman announces, and starts to heat up leftovers from lunch and pluck lettuce leafs for a large salad.

Marcelle remembers the broccoli and takes out the green bunches from the refrigerator, holding one in each hand like flags.

Oncle Henri reenters without a word and sits at the table, focusing on his plate, as if hoping to find a reflection of himself in it. He eats quickly, taking only a small portion, with one ear on the television news in the next room.

“Turn it down, you’re giving us a headache with that television,” Marcelle nags.

Alain draws wavy lines with his fork on the plate and doesn’t touch his food. He suddenly has a craving for “floating islands” and gets up to see how many eggs are left in the refrigerator. “Will eight be enough?” he asks. Marcelle nods, mopping up salad dressing with a piece of bread.

I separate the whites from the yolks, Alain boils water in a large pot and beats the egg whites. The noise of the mixer rouses Oncle Henri. He stares for a minute, shakes his head in disbelief, and goes to watch the TV. We slowly drop the foamy mounds into the boiling water, fascinated by the asymmetrical white puffs as they shove at each other in their effort to rise to the water’s surface and secure their place. They sprout beards in every direction. Marcelle thaws out some leftover vanilla sauce from the freezer. We eat silently. “There goes the diet, goddamn it.” Maman sighs. “Starting tomorrow,” Alain announces as he scoops up fractures of islands from the dish and dips them in the sauce. A yellow spot rests on the edge of his nose.

 

 

 

His father was a retired colonel, and his mother owned a lingerie store in the Neve Avivim shopping center. He was horrified by the thought of an “engagement feast,” as he called it.

“But what’s the worst thing that could happen?” Sarah pestered him. “What could your parents do that you’re so afraid of?”

“That’s just it—they won’t do anything,” he retorted. “They’ll just be.”

“Then we’ll forget the whole thing,” she decreed.

Udi was shocked. “We can’t just forget it, they’ll torment me for the rest of my life.”

“Let them. I’ll protect you.”

“Sure.” He smiled. “Out of the frying pan and into the fire. No thanks.”

A flock of seagulls tore through the sky in a straight line: a white carpet lifting off the water in unison and flying toward the jetty with a long, synchronized screech. It was six in the evening, and the sunset still lingered, generously scattering its signs—the slow blush of sky, the light that was turbid one moment, brilliant gold the next, gleaming over the tops of the tall hotels, across the shore and onward, toward the port of Jaffa, the open sea, a distant ship, foreign lands. Sarah glared intently at two men thrusting a sunshade pole into the sand. “Ofri, have you ever noticed how fat and hairy our nation is?” she commented with affected sorrow, and flitted to a different topic, the sunset. She was wholeheartedly convinced that if we were to forget it and look away for a moment, the sun would be gone. “You always find what you’re not looking for and vice versa,” she explained.

“Not everything has to do with magic, Saraleh.” Udi yawned. He placed her large velvet bag under his head and sprawled on the sand. “It’s just daylight-savings time. Science.”

She took a handful of sand and spread open her fingers, watching the steady, yellow flow. “So what are we going to do?” she asked.

“We’ll see.” He closed his eyes and crossed his arms over his chest. “Maybe we need to dilute them, so they’ll be less noticeable.”

“Who?” I asked. The sun was torture for me. I sat next to them looking like a bundled-up old woman, with Sarah’s shirt wrapped twice around my head.

“My parents. We’ll invite Inès and you, some friends, Sarah’s parents, her brother, and his girlfriend. We’ll drown them out in a collection of people who don’t really get along. That’s our only hope.”

As he bit on his full lips, they disappeared inward and a film of gloominess covered his face—an expression he retained, so it seemed, for himself alone.

*   *   *

“Basically, you’re an orphan, Udi,” Sarah once declared. “An absolute orphan.”

Indeed he had that combination of spiritual autonomy, the assertion of a particular sadness and style you find in people who have raised themselves. His parents’ bungalow in Tzahala was cold, with the chill of spaces deliberately filled to conceal the emptiness that nevertheless persists. In childhood photographs, Udi seemed jammed between old parents; his matchstick legs extended from a pair of wide shorts—very foreign, Sarah claimed. He was a good boy. From behind his glasses, his eyes projected an alert, almost compassionate wisdom. His mother was half Dutch. She had him at a late age, after almost having given up hope. Some trace of her resignation was imprinted on him, as was the phrase drilled into his ears throughout childhood: “Act normal, Udi, that’ll be crazy enough.”

His parents’ love for him was full of clumsy goodwill. When they were all together, they seemed to be reaching out to him, longingly. Made awkward by an unexpected last-second move of his; their arms would suddenly shift sideways, elsewhere, inches away from him, grasping at thin air.

Sarah was a thorn in their side. Udi’s father’s introversion—of a tyrannical, laconic variety, suffocating yet fixed by the madness of habit—and his mother’s blurry absentmindedness, verging on hysteria, could hardly digest the various and conflicting displays of womanhood that Sarah presented. Her parents’ money sweetened the pill a little, but at the same time opened up new and endless avenues of discomfort. There was something touching, to me at least, about their honest efforts to navigate between the concrete forms of social class and the near-ephemeral airiness of individual choice.

“Oh, spare me the phony magnanimity, Ofri. They’re just boring, destructive petits bourgeois.” Sarah dismissed them harshly.

“How are they destructive?” I protested. “Where do you see destruction?”

“In everything they represent. They’re the silent majority. They’re who we call ‘the people’—the foundation that supports the occupation, the injustice, the stink. They’re the justification.”

“You can’t judge everything through the lens of occupation and injustice. It’s narrow-minded, sick.”

“It’s not just that you can, Ofri—you must.”

I loathed her so much in those moments that I would gladly have hurled something at her. It took me a few minutes to regain my composure. “You’re so arrogant, Sarah. You’re the most arrogant person I’ve ever met.”

“Apart from you,” she said, picking the last of my strawberries and cream off my plate with her fork. “It’s just that my arrogance is out in the open, and yours is covered up with all kinds of refinements and understanding.”

Udi leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “I can’t believe we got through this evening in peace.”

“This is what you call peace?” She took off her shoes and flung them into two different corners of the room.

His parents had arrived first, an hour early, carrying a huge bouquet of gladioli, a bottle of wine, and “a little something” for Sarah—a thick, gilt bracelet, studded with zircons and azure quartz. She turned pale when she put it on, looking at her wrist in distress. “You don’t have to wear it the whole time,” his mother said jokingly.

I liked her. Her red tailored suits, excessive jewelry, and noncommittal chatter gave her an aura of a pleasant, perfumed mist, from behind which her deep-set gray eyes gazed, seeing everything yet deliberately hiding their capacity for sight, revealing less than their perception.

*   *   *

Sarah ran into her on the street a few weeks after Udi had moved out. Tessie was on her way to the Cinematheque for an Open University lecture on film. In the harsh, direct glare, projected like a spotlight on the concrete square in front of the Cinematheque, her broad face looked like a marble cake. The cracked layer of makeup revealed pale in-roads of wrinkles in her tanned skin.

They stood and talked for a while. Tessie was swaying a little, shifting her weight from one foot to the other suffering in high heels. “So what do you say?” she asked after a pause, looking helplessly over Sarah’s shoulder at a row of buildings.

“About what?” Sarah asked.

“About the two of you. How did it fall apart?”

“I don’t know,” Sarah said. “Sometimes it’s better to get divorced than to live together in hatred.”

“There was no hatred, why do you use that word?” She gestured to one of the benches. “Why don’t we sit down for a while?”

They sat. Fat pigeons pecked at something unidentifiable at their feet. “There was no hatred,” Tessie repeated. She took off her glasses and wiped them on the edge of her blouse. “It was all out of love, I think.”

“I don’t know, maybe hatred isn’t really the word.”

Tessie grasped her arm. “There is no word, Sarah. It’s a secret, what truly keeps a man and a woman together.” She sat silently for a moment, her dark sunglasses resting on her face like two plates. “You raise a child and you think you know him, but you don’t,” she said. Heavy, dark tears spilled from beneath her glasses and rolled down to the silk scarf wrapped around her neck.

They went to a nearby café. Tessie spent fifteen minutes in the rest room and emerged completely restored, moving on to a new topic. “Most of the audiences at these lectures are women my own age,” she said, cutting her croissant in two and spreading jam on each piece. “Sometimes the lecturer addresses us as ‘ladies,’ which irritates me, because I feel he’s mocking us, as if he thinks we’re just dimwits who’ve come to kill some time between the cooking, the husband, and the grandchildren.”

“Isn’t that so?” Sarah asked.

“Maybe, sometimes, but so what?” she said, a spark lighting up her eyes. “Don’t you think it’s better to be someone who wants to improve oneself than someone who thinks they already know everything, as if there’s no room for improvement?” She stirred the layer of foam on her coffee, thoroughly dissolving it, then suddenly resumed speech in her calculated, squeaky voice. “I watch these women very carefully—don’t think I don’t see all that’s ridiculous, not only about them but about myself too. I know that they’ve come to the lecture after going shopping, running errands, and doing the cleaning, just like I have. The house is in tiptop shape, and so are they, with the makeup and the clothes and all. I know that by coming and sometimes hearing things they don’t completely understand, they’re like me—fighting for something, trying not to neglect themselves, not to let themselves go. It’s very important to keep up appearances. It’s more important than anything else.” She looked up and scrutinized Sarah.

“I’ve ruined everything,” Sarah said suddenly.

“Not everything,” Tessie said, clasping her hand and stroking it. “Your hands are so cold, Sarah.” Then she took Sarah’s hand and rubbed it between her own to warm it. “But breaking up your home is not like drinking a glass of water, not like your generation seems to think,” she said.

She came to visit Sarah and Mims later, bringing a toy rifle with a noisemaker. Sarah tried to hide it in the closet, but in the end she gave in. “The kid loves guns. He sleeps with it, Ofri,” she told me with a mixture of protest and satisfaction.

*   *   *

Mims slept with half the house in his bed: stuffed animals, Lego blocks, dolls, bows and arrows, battleships, pieces of wood, an old blanket, a Ninja costume from Purim, ceramic projects, crayons and egg cartons from kindergarten, empty plastic containers and gift wrappings, a piggy bank, ropes, a ball, and an animal lotto game, all piled up in a huge mound in his blue crib. Sarah insisted on keeping the crib until he was almost five.

“You don’t want him to grow up,” Udi berated her. He tried to persuade her to trade it in for a proper children’s bed.

“True,” she agreed, pressing Mims’s head to her chest. “Why should he?”

Udi lost his cool. “What do you mean ‘why should he’? People grow up, Sarah, whether you like it or not.”

She buried her face in the blanket wrapped around the child then huddled with her eyes peering up at the wall at an angle and her narrow nostrils quivering. You could see that look of hers on the upper, exposed part of her face.

*   *   *

During the first six months of his life, she was unable to utter his name. “The baby,” she would say, or just “baby.” She cried all the time, traipsing around the house with a heavy blanket around her shoulders, followed by a trail of crushed tissues, shivering from cold. The slightest thing frightened her—the sudden screech of a car outside, an ambulance siren, a lightbulb popping, the food burning on the stove, Udi or myself being a few minutes late, a faulty phone line. For long hours, sometimes days, she became entangled in the simplest daily activities. She would despair, then try again only to trip up. She would stare in astonishment at the clothesline or the electric kettle as if she had just been hit over the head with a sledgehammer.

The baby lay quietly in his yellow room, opening his eyes then falling asleep, attaching himself to the breasts that led a life of their own, floating hugely in space, beyond the body that was consuming itself. She did not eat. She gradually gave up solids and started eating only dairy puddings or yogurt, then finally only fluids, mainly milk. Five times a day she checked to see if her breasts were drying up. She pinched the hard nipples between her fingers, forced down half a cup of milk with a bothered expression, then checked again. She grimaced from the pain during feedings, pushing the baby’s head away from the nipple when she couldn’t take it anymore, then pulling it back again, closing her eyes, and surrendering to the pain. They did dry up, after a month or so, fell limp and empty. We started feeding him formula from bottles. Every morning, before leaving for work, Udi left the daily bottle allocation in the refrigerator to last until the afternoon, when I would come. We took shifts, Udi and I. A weight hung in the air, permeating the apartment—a vague sense of catastrophe, blurring past and future, what had already happened and what might be about to happen. We watched with amazement as she put this heaviness aside the moment she held the baby; she talked to him incoherently, singing in a hoarse voice. The baby and his existence were in a protected zone, circled by forbidden light. His endless hours of sleep marked the realm in which she permitted herself certain things, being sucked into the centrifugal force that knocked her about within the walls of herself. The softest moan from the baby’s bedroom sent her rushing in. Gaunt and exhausted, she’d stand over the crib on tiptoes inspecting him, melting with tenderness and pity for herself. For the baby.

*   *   *

Udi thought we should persuade her to get out, to get some fresh air. She and I went out. We didn’t get very far; when we reached the White Gallery restaurant at the end of the boulevard, she asked to sit down for a while and ordered a strawberry milk shake. “Who knows what he’s doing now,” she said, drawing curvy lines on the sides of the glass with the straw.

“Udi?” I asked.

“No, the baby. I wonder whether he’s still asleep.”

“He’s fine. Udi takes good care of him,” I said. My words tasted like cement.

“Do you think I’m crazy, Ofri?” she asked after a brief silence.

“No more than usual,” I answered.

She caught my eyes. “You’re lying. I can read your thoughts. Your thoughts are my nightmare, did you know that?”

“I don’t have that many thoughts, I’m just worried, that’s all.”

“So you do think I’ve gone crazy,” she insisted.

“Do you?”

“There are moments when I do, when I feel like after a burglary, you know, when everything’s a mess and strangers have touched your stuff, that kind of thing.” She stopped for a moment. “Knowing kills me, Ofri. I think that knowing is my madness.”

“Knowing what?”

“That there’s no way back from this baby. That it’s the only connection in the world you can’t withdraw from.” She fingered the hem of her blouse. “You can’t leave.” She cried and wiped her face with her sleeve. “I love the baby very much, Ofri, do you believe me that I love him very much?”

“Yes,” I said, glancing sideways at the waitress staring at us. “Of course I believe you, it’s natural.”

“No.” She shook her head irritably. “That’s just it, that it’s not natural. It’s an effort. Do you know how much of an effort it is?”

We sat for almost an hour, watching the boulevard reflected in windows on the other side of the street, the cars veering sideways as they rounded the bend. “Maybe you need help … a therapist of some sort,” I ventured.

“I can’t talk,” she said. “I’m tired.”

“You’re talking to me.”

“That’s different, it’s like talking to myself, only out loud. I want to tell you something,” she added after hesitating.

“What?” I became alert.

She looked around. “Not here.” We paid the check and walked out to find a bench.

“What did you want to say?”

“Don’t look at me,” she asked. I sat sideways, turning my back to her. “I’m afraid that I’ll do something bad to the baby,” she spat out rapidly.

“Why?” I asked stupidly. “Why would you do something bad to him? So far you’re only doing bad things to yourself.”

“You don’t understand. This nightmare grabs at my throat, right here.” She hit her larynx. “I can actually see in complete detail how I would be capable of it.”

“Capable of what?” I was losing my patience. “Of what? Stop talking in riddles and hints.”

“Don’t be angry with me, Ofri,” she said.

My foot kicked the sand as she spoke, my fingers grasped the edge of the bench.

“I read a story in the paper a while ago about a mother who drowned her daughters in the bath, did you see that?” she asked.

“So?” I asked hostilely.

“I can’t get it out of my head. Parents can do terrible things to their children. The thought is like poison. How can such a satanic creature, such a Medusa, come from the safest, warmest, softest place? I can’t get that out of my head.”

“It’s got nothing to do with you. You may be nuts, but you’re not sick, there’s a difference.”

“I’m not sure there is. Anybody can do anything,” she said dimly. “It’s amazing what comes out of people. You can suddenly just fall into a kind of emptiness. Evil.”

We made our way back up the boulevard heavily. “Have you told Udi?” I asked.

She shook her head and thrust her hands in her pockets. “I need to take pictures of the baby,” she said when we reached the corner of Balfour Street. “Do you realize I haven’t taken any pictures of him yet?”

*   *   *

She did. Countless sheets of tiny negatives crowded the shelf above the television, the hallway mirror, the bookcases, Udi’s desk, the space between the tiles and the kitchen cabinet, stuck to the fridge with magnets. Hundreds of small portraits, smiling, crying, staring, grave, or bored, hundreds of round babies with squashed noses.

Mims grew up in this hall of mirrors. His image was reflected from every surface; the crowded network of his portraits became a location, a city, a country, a world—the dense, cross-hatched world of stupid Waldo from Where’s Waldo? lost or hiding inside overcrowded sketches, urban and rural.

He joyfully clanged two spoons against a pot, a pot against a pan, a ladle on a lid, stopping for a moment to listen to the echo with a huge, satisfied smile. Sarah tied his long curls in a little ponytail that stood up over his forehead. She was constantly threatening to take him to the Orthodox hair-cutting ritual at Mount Meron. “Let’s go to Meron—how about it, Mimselach?” she suggested. “Meyon, Meyon!” he rejoiced, banging the pots even harder, then suddenly tiring of his clanging he crawled into the pantry. He would spend a long time examining the storage jars, their lids and labels, and then turn to the real thing, stretching out his tiny hand to take handfuls of beans, lentils, rice, dried broad beans, buckwheat, scattering them in little piles on the floor. He slithered over the grains with his limbs outstretched, swimming, coated in white from the jar of flour that had fallen from the top shelf and spilled everywhere. Then it was time for the liquids. Quick as a lizard he darted away, crawled to the pail used for washing the floor, put his hands in, and sprayed the water out. At first he was guarded, exercising caution; then finally in a state of ecstasy, he’d immerse his arms down to the shoulder in the pail, dunk his head, and shake it gleefully in all directions like a puppy. Tireless, he sought out the squeegee and cleaning rag—his great friends, although reluctantly so. Full of wonder, trying to decide whether or not to be insulted, he would watch as they foiled him again and again, frustratingly true only to themselves. He overcame the rag somehow, carried it in his two small hands like wet laundry, stepped on it, spread it out, then bunched it up again against his body, this time balled up and dripping beneath his armpit. He approached the squeegee leaning against the wall. He tried to wrap the rag around the bottom as he had seen Sarah do, but the squeegee reared up and kicked his forehead. As he was still trying to wrap the rag around the squeegee’s plastic edges, the long pole suddenly tilted forward to remind him of its existence. He had a love-hate relationship with that squeegee. He delivered lengthy speeches to it in his baby dialect when it stood in its usual place on the porch outside the bathroom; he’d admonish, wonder, reprimand, and beg, then walk away and come back again a minute later, holding out a hesitant finger, touching. When he would tire of his negotiations with the squeegee, he would climb into the drawer where the pots and pans were stored, or the wastepaper basket near the desk, after meticulously emptying it. “The elastic child,” Udi called him, and bought home a large yellow plastic bus with his Visa card reward points.

Mims insisted that I sit in it next to Sarah, who was wearing a cap and was the only passenger, as well as the conductor. “Sit down, Ofri, why not?” she implored.

Out of breath, red-faced, Mims pushed the empty bus along the hallway. It bumped into walls, leaving a long gash in the paint, and finally became lodged among the electric wires near the TV cart in the living room. At that point, the situation escalated, gaining momentum as it rushed toward its inevitable end. Mims was unable to retrieve the bus from its dead end. He pushed it forward, rattled the sides, pulled backward, tried to release the wheels from the mess of wires, leaned his full weight against it, and shoved against the wall. Offers of help from Udi, Sarah, and myself only increased his stubborn desperation. Within minutes he had thrown himself on the floor and begun to sob and kick. Sarah leaned over him, mainly to comfort herself. “It’s all because you’re tired, sweetie. You’re just so tired.” She suddenly leaped back with a yelp as his foot shot into her ribs.

She touched the injured spot and stared with disbelief at the writhing child. Even the slightest unhappiness he experienced was proof for her. “Proof of what?” Udi said. “What does it prove? He’s having a tantrum, that’s all.” She shook her head. “No, no, you don’t understand, it’s not that at all.”

*   *   *

The way she deployed the word that sometimes struck me as conniving. “What does that mean? Why must you blur everything and make people feel that they’ve almost understood but not quite?” I was annoyed. In conversation, she would use a style and tempo that were almost ceremonial, a kind of coded language that hinted at gaps left for the obvious points that did not require words; the implication was that you were being sanctified, ushered into her temple. For years, I allowed myself to be duped by the sensation of exclusivity, of being treated to something unique that her conversational manner conferred. It was like being fitted by a master tailor who takes inscrutable, unexplained measurements of the circumference of your neck, your arm, your wrist.

I looked up to her. When she flattened the backs of her sneakers, trampled on them, wearing them as if they were slippers, I did the same to mine. When she became a vegetarian, so did I, and when she gave it up, I stopped soon after. When she blew through the straw into her Coke bottle to make bubbles, I did so too. When she transferred from French to Arabic in the middle of eleventh grade because learning Arabic was “terribly important, Ofri,” I kicked up a fuss until they transferred me too, and later, when she didn’t take her final, I also dropped the subject in the middle, offering absurd excuses.

“I thought you had character, you,” Maman threw out disappointedly; her disdain only fueled her disappointment. I dismissed her misgivings. I didn’t think much of “character,” preferring to abandon myself to vast longing—which became a personality—to cease being myself. Once I almost managed. I swallowed more than thirty pills, standing in front of the bathroom mirror.

*   *   *

We had just started tenth grade. “This filthy lying place has nothing more to offer,” Sarah pronounced one day during recess, as we retreated from the mass of students. She devised a plan. We’d go down to Eilat, work in a hotel as waitresses or maids or some such thing, save up enough money to live in Tel Aviv and get our high school diplomas, and that’s it. We’d just live.

I packed my things a week before our scheduled departure and hid my bag in the shed. For two nights I didn’t sleep a wink, lying with my eyes open in the dark, monitoring Maman’s irregular breathing and mumbling from the other side of the plywood wall. On the appointed day, I wanted to sneak off in the morning before she noticed. At five-thirty, before the buses were even running, in the sleepy twilight of dawn, she caught up with me next to the neighbors’ trash cans. She was wearing a nightgown, half asleep. “Where to?” she demanded. My voice took on a hostile tone of detachment as I explained to her. “Home. Right now,” she said. I started walking up the street toward the bus stop. She caught up with me. I never forgot her eyes—terrifying, mad with pain. “You’ll wind up with no education,” she said. “For this I cleaned toilets for strangers?”

We stood in the middle of the street. There were no cars, nothing. A gecko suddenly darted across the asphalt; its tail touched my shoe. She grabbed my hair and pulled me back. “Starting tomorrow—work. Like your brothers. If you’re not going to school, you’re going to work. I won’t have a parasite in my home.”

I trailed home behind her with my bag. The triangular roof over our porch was covered with brown wood rafters; as I looked up at it from the path, it seemed final, a sealed fate, mine. For one instant, brought on by tiredness and anxiety, the pillars supporting the roof on either side disappeared, and it seemed to be jutting out of its own accord, floating on air like a monstrous birdhouse built to house every bird in the world.

I shut myself in the bathroom, brushed my teeth, and examined myself in the mirror for signs of black mustache hairs on either side of my lips. I plucked them with tweezers and used acetone to clean off the hot-pink nail polish that Sarah had painted on my nails two days ago. I emptied the cabinet. Nine oxazepams and ten Valiums—Maman’s; eight Dipyrones; four antibiotic tablets from the last bout of flu. A long time went by. She sat in the kitchen wearing a red blouse. I tapped on her back as if she were a door. She turned to me. “I took pills,” I said.

She ran outside to look for someone with a car. All she could find was Sammy with his tractor. We stood up straight in the front next to him the whole way to the hospital, through the deafening noise.

Sarah came in the early evening as I was waking up. She stood talking quietly with Maman. She was white as the curtain drawn around my bed, which separated me from their dim conversation coming from some outside world. “I didn’t mean it,” she said.

“You’re one thing, and Ofra is another. Everyone needs to know their place,” Maman replied.

Sarah bowed her head. I saw her silhouette moving behind the curtain; her chin touched her chest, no neck; every gesture she made almost reached Maman.

The next day, they sat on either side of me in the backseat of the taxi. We stopped on the way to buy falafel. Sarah did not shut up for a minute, flitting from one subject to the next, putting one thing away and pulling out something else, like those fast-talking con men who prey on wealthy old ladies. We weren’t convinced, even for a second. Discord lay between her and Maman like a river between two banks, each person standing on her own bank, gesturing, without hearing the other. She didn’t think everyone needed to “know their place,” as Maman had said. She rejected the very notion of a person’s place in life. Her map of social strata was a kind of canal city: soft, round passageways led from one point to the next; there were no signposts, but a continuous, natural flow that offered countless opportunities to move from one site to another, from nature to civilization. It took me years to understand that what she denied was not the effort involved when a person moved but that there was a price to pay, as well.

*   *   *

Maman was the queen of prices. “When you don’t have enough, that’s when you start counting the pennies,” she said.

“I’ve never counted pennies, and I never will, even if I’m starving to death,” I answered.

“You have me to lean on. Wait until you’re on your own, with no support,” she spat out. She made a huge deal out of having someone to lean on, of support. It was her yardstick, the border that divided the planet into two, separating people into two populations, each united by its clear trademark—one so well supported that it barely moved, nailed to a thick plank of wood like a kind of second back; the other writhing at its feet, an unsupported pile of muscle, tissue, and nerves.

She had adamantly refused to attend Udi and Sarah’s engagement party. “It’s not my place,” she kept saying.

“It’s not anyone’s place, Inès,” Sarah said. “We’re only doing it because we have to.”

The three of us were sitting on Maman’s covered porch, discussing the options for Sarah’s wedding dress. “You’re not going to wear one?” Maman refused to believe this. “It’s a civil ceremony in Cyprus,” Sarah explained patiently, “I don’t need a dress.”

“But you’d look pretty in white. A real doll,” Maman said sorrowfully. Sarah glanced at me and then at Maman and back at me, charting an imaginary triangle in the humid air. “Maybe Ofra will wear white,” she said finally. “Ofra?” Maman dismissed the idea impatiently. “When she starts wearing any kind of decent clothes, then we’ll talk about white. First let’s see her in something decent.”

She looked ahead, half-smiling, half-distraught by the latest nocturnal turn of events in the yard shared by herself and her neighbors. A large rusty barrel had been tossed out during the night and was lying in front of the house in plain view. “They’re ruining the garden, them and their filth,” she fumed.

Experienced, I waited quietly for the situation to evolve. But not Sarah. “Go and tell them, Inès, it’s your yard too,” she urged her. Maman immediately marched over to the neighbors’ house and knocked loudly on the door. “They’re not home,” she said when she returned, “but just you see what I’ll have waiting for them this evening when they come home.”

“It’s such chutzpah on their part, after everything you’ve put into this yard, Inès,” Sarah said.

Maman melted, glowing, basking in the warmth of Sarah’s simple, uninhibited solidarity. “You’re right,” she agreed. “You’re absolutely right,” she repeated, sounding like the thundering applause of an entire stadium.

Maman had adopted Sarah, inventing her character as she went along and, more than that—she was full of hope for her, filling that hope with much love and goodwill and warmth, which in fact helped bridge the swampy stretches of how much she did not know.

“Don’t you have any parents, you?” Maman once said, smugly.

“They’re not to my liking,” Sarah had replied and reached into a pot with her fingers to fish out a potato.

 

 

 

“Busaina Hiju was the beginning,” Udi said as he placed chamomile-soaked cotton balls on his eyelids. He wiped off the dark rivers of tea that crept down to his shirt collar.

“The beginning of what?” I asked.

“Of the deadline.”

We waited to hear from her all night—a phone call, a message, something. Distracted and drained, we managed our anxiety with words, conjectures, foolish attempts to impose an order of cause and effect, to comfort ourselves with meaning.

My resentment of her increased by the minute as the night wore on and we made our way through it; like two fools taking a ride in a haunted house, in the end all we could do was utter fearful sounds. My resentment was not over something she had or had not done; not at all. Rather, it came from her having forced us to interpret her, to talk about her, which ultimately glorified her. She was the grand dame quitting the stage, a recluse silently leaving a void behind her and an urgent need to fill it with yet more meaning. The partnership between Udi and me was specious; an alliance forged only by the space we shared and the sounds of Mims’s breaths from the next room.

*   *   *

During those months, Udi drifted off to a place where I did not wish to join him. I knew little, saw even less, but what I did know and see was enough. “You don’t see anything, Ofri,” Sarah decreed.

She was wearing shorts, and her pale, knobby-kneed legs were covered with blue-and-red bruises. Beneath her loose shirt two long deep gashes ran down her back. “What’s that?” I asked.

She looked straight at me without blinking. “That’s from the furniture, Ofri. You know me, always getting grazed.”

“I know what grazes from furniture look like, and they’re nothing like that. This is something else,” I said.

“How is it different?” she insisted. “That’s exactly what it is.”

“You’re hiding something.”

“What’s this interrogation for? Since when are we obliged to report to each other, Ofri?”

We weren’t. Her eyes stabbed my back as I walked away, and remained lodged in my body like two knives.

*   *   *

She used to come home with me, to the neighborhood, at least twice a week after school. The bus ride was a great adventure. She rang the bell at every stop, initiated conversations, and teased the fat chickens in cages that people were bringing home from the market. I buried myself in my seat and hid behind a book. “What are you ashamed of?” she nagged. “What have I done?”

At home, a warm meal was waiting for us on the stove. Maman had already left for her evening job, closed and locked the shutters to keep out the stray cats who wandered in and ate all our food. We spent hours on our homework, chattered, stared at the pages of our notebooks, and declared “a break” every fifteen minutes with a sigh of relief.

Sometimes we went outside, where the neighborhood children convened near the electricity pole by the neighbor’s orchard.

They stuck to her like flies, lapped up her every gesture, every word. She made up stories incessantly. I sat on a large rock, away from the commotion, listening in every so often with sleepy boredom. More than anything else in the story, she valued the element of suspense, was almost insulted when I commented “very nice” upon hearing the strange plots, crowded with characters of her own invention. “What do I care about ‘nice’?” She shrugged impatiently. “Tell me if it’s suspenseful.”

When everyone tired of the never-ending twists and turns of her stories, we played Sarah’s version of hide-and-seek. Slightly embarrassed by her love of this game at the age of eleven, she concocted a variation. The group of children, the singing nanny, and the father from The Sound of Music are hiding out from the Germans in the Swiss Alps. In the middle of June, she would cover herself with an old wool blanket from Maman’s storage, her teeth chattering. “Cover yourself, my child, cover yourself,” she would urge me in a quivering voice and invite me to join her beneath the blanket. When she gave the sign, all the children would scatter around the orchard and entrench themselves in the deep depressions of the citrus trees.

*   *   *

And then there was Mordechai. She hardly remembered him years later. “Who?” she exclaimed. Her ability to annihilate entire segments of her memory was both amazing and suspicious. He used to cling to her and follow her around everywhere. He was like a huge sheet that someone had cut a small napkin out of; slightly feebleminded, a pronounced chin, size-thirteen shoes at the age of fourteen, and a cunning streak in his eyes that made you question everything else. He worked as the apprentice of an apprentice at a locksmith in the Yehud industrial zone and always straggled behind the little kids, doing odd jobs for them. He would mend bikes, build dollhouses, put together kites, inflate plastic paddling pools, install machine guns, bows and arrows. “Come and hide with me.” He took my arm and pulled me when Sarah gave the sign. I was surprised; I glanced at Sarah, but her expression did not change, as if her face was coated with wax. Then I felt her eyes following us from behind. I turned around for a moment. They were still there, covered with a strange film of relinquishment, the sorrow of knowledge.

He pulled me by the arm to the edge of the orchard, silencing me all the while, “Shhh…” He told me to lie down silently on the mess of weeds behind the trees. The feeble chirping of a Palestine sunbird up at the top of a nearby bush drew my attention as I felt the weight on top of me, flattening me on the ground, the strange panting movement back and forth, his hard penis against the crack of my behind through the cotton fabric of my trousers. I opened my mouth. A handful of sand and weeds were shoved inside it by his large hand. The sunbird chirped again, and a figure passed by in the distant field on the other side of the road. The sudden limpness of the heavy body on top of me, a wet stain of semen on my pants. I ran away, leaving one shoe behind. The street lamp shed a pale yellow shaft of light. We went home. She leaned against the bathroom door and watched me vomit into the toilet.

Over time and distance, a slow, almost imperceptible shift occurred in my memory, from the event itself to the circumstances surrounding the event, to the gaze that had accompanied it, a blessing or a curse, knowing yet denying what it knew, not necessarily malicious, rather the look of an alliance. “You knew what happened with Mordechai,” I said years later. “What difference does it make now, Ofri?” She evaded me, scratching at the checkered bedspread with her nail. An expression flitted across her face like the flutter of a transparent, hazy scarf, alerting me to the certain knowledge that she had been there in that ditch before me, with the weeds and the sand, the heaviness, back and forth, everything.

I met him in the neighborhood sometimes. He got into the sewage business, acquired a large tanker, and went from house to house emptying clogged-up cesspits. He came to us at least three times a year, because of the pit beneath the tall cypress in the yard. For years, he and Maman would discuss whether to cut down the cypress and save the cesspit, or move the pit somewhere else and save the tree, whose deep, tangled roots were eroding the pit’s walls. She treated him with the respect she reserved for professionals. She sat with him on the porch for hours with cups of coffee, lemonade, date cookies, and nuts; his blue work clothes reeked. Most of the time he was quiet. Periodically, he would grunt and make Maman jump. “What did you say, dear, what did you say?” she would ask with the urgency of ducks widening their beaks for a piece of bread. I passed by him like air, tossed my backpack in the hallway, and disappeared into my room. “Say hello to Mordechai,” Maman scolded me. “Why don’t you say hello?” she asked later. “Just because,” I said, cranking up the volume on my record player. “You know, he makes a lot of money from this business,” she told me once. “Don’t think he doesn’t do well for himself just because of those clothes of his. He does very well for himself.” “Good for him. What’s it got to do with me?” I said. She examined my face. Nothing. Just words. On his next visit, he startled me. I was lying on the lawn, blinded by the sun, when he suddenly appeared from behind, grunting, “Want some gum?” I didn’t. I picked up my Oxford Anthology of English and American Literature and the Alcalay dictionary and went inside. “You’re reading that whole thick book, Ofra?” he called after me. It was my first year at college—three buses there, three back, saving money for an apartment in Tel Aviv. “Mordechai can drop you off at the station sometimes,” Maman suggested timidly.

I lost my cool. “Mordechai this, Mordechai that—what do you want from me?”

“He asked for you. Yesterday he asked me for you.”

I almost choked. “Asked you for me? What do you mean he asked you for me?”

“To get married.” She laughed.

I told Sarah. She shook her head vigorously. “That can’t be true. Not Inès. It can’t be.”

“You’d better believe it. You don’t know her.”

“I know what I need to know. I know her humor, her incredible charm, the feminist courage of a woman who raised her children alone, built everything alone. That’s what I know,” she said solemnly.

“Why don’t you organize a rally?” I said. “You’ve got your slogans all ready.”

“It’s mean of you to turn every disagreement between us into a political argument against me.” She was insulted.

“All’s fair in love and war,” I retorted, slightly embarrassed.

We were quiet for a while; the hum of the fan filled the room. She took my hand and placed it against her cheek, pressing hard. “You’re so harsh sometimes, Ofri, it scares me, you know that?”

“Why does it scare you?”

“It just does. Sometimes I ask myself whether I really know you.”

“There’s no such thing as really.”

“That’s just it—there is and there isn’t,” she said. “A person’s a piece of shit if they think that there isn’t, and an idiot if they act like there is.”

*   *   *

She moved between these two options, doubt and certainty, as if vacillating between two market stalls. Busaina Hiju was something she placed on the second stall. I could see the girl, in her blue skirt with red polka dots, hair tied back untidily at the nape, quietly opening the green iron gate of her Gaza house, going out into the alley, each step taking her closer to her vanishing, like Alice after swallowing too much of the mysterious shrinking potion.

For months, Sarah occupied herself with Busaina like a child with her doll. She dressed and undressed her, bathed her, combed her, wrapped her, fed her, took her from the kitchen to the nursery, spoke to her, wagged her finger at her, introduced her to other dolls, friends. She infected Udi and me with her, perceiving any lapse in our attention as a sign of betrayal. During the last few months of 1989 she wove her own version of Busaina’s story, squeezing the entire intifada into the tiny portrait of the girl standing between her four brothers that stood on the coffee table in her parents’ house in Khan Younis.

She was shot on August 25 between a quarter to six and six-fifteen in the evening. The precise time of the shooting was unclear; at six-thirty, one of the neighbors came to call her parents. Busaina was lying in a pool of blood twenty yards from the house, the father recounted. Many times he repeated the phrase “twenty yards from the house,” as if the proximity meant something, somehow made the death that much more horrifying. Sarah actually measured the distance—it was thirty-six yards, not twenty. From then on, she corrected him every time he said “twenty,” trumping him with her “thirty-six.” Then there was the question of his statement. Sarah sat for hours with the father and the attorney, Tamar Peleg, collecting witness accounts. She was impatient, crawling out of her own skin and getting under everyone else’s, determined to find whoever was responsible for the killing and bring them there to apologize.

“Forget it,” Udi said.

“You forget it. I’ll drag them there by their ears if I have to.” She speared an olive with her fork and then changed her mind and let it go.

“Why her of all people?” I dared to ask. “Lots of children have been shot, dozens.”

“She was nine years old, Ofri. Think about it, nine years old. Went to buy cigarettes for her dad.”

Udi looked at his watch and turned on the radio. “Should we listen to the news?”

“You’re getting yourself into a bad situation,” I said.

“That’s just how it is.”

“That’s not just how it is,” I insisted. “You’re obsessed with this little girl.”

“It’s not an obsession, Ofri. At most, an intolerable reaction to an intolerable situation.”

“Even so, what makes a political act count is its effectiveness. You can’t just be concerned with your own moral purity. That’s egotistical and, ultimately, less moral,” Udi said cautiously.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Effectiveness is overrated,” she spat out sharply.

*   *   *

Grandma Pitti disagreed. “What is this good for, all these things you’re doing, Saraleh?” she asked, blinking with concentration. “For the soul, Pitti,” said Sarah as she dismantled a small sandwich and swallowed the soft part of the bread. The grandmother’s name was actually Yosefa, but everyone had forgotten that since Sarah had started calling her Pitta years ago, and then just Pitti. We went to visit her once a month in her apartment on Hanevi’im Street, where we polished off platters of little salami sandwiches and thin slices of cucumber.

Sarah had lived with her several times when she left her parents’ house. She slept with her in the enormous bed that occupied the whole room. It was good for her; for the first time in her life she stopped dashing around, ate properly, tucked her shirt in. Every morning, at seventy-five years old, Grandma Pitti put on her medium high heels and went to check out what was new in town. “What could be new? You were just there yesterday,” Sarah teased her. “You’d be surprised,” Pitti replied with a knowing grin. She could drawa detailed map of the town according to its stores, but she barely knew the names of the streets. Her clique of four women and one man met at Café La Javanaise, where they tore the world to shreds. “A fraction of the viciousness at that table would be enough for a whole city, Ofri,” Sarah swore after accompanying her there once.

“Why are you always pulling people apart?” she asked Grandma Pitti.

“It’s not serious,” she replied. “It’s just to kill time, a façon de parler. Every one of them has a heart of gold, believe me.” Sarah had her doubts. “Do you have any idea, Ofri, how many seamstresses the old fox fired from the factory just before their first year of work was up, so she wouldn’t have to pay them severance?” she told me.

In the midfifties, Grandma Pitti had opened a knitwear factory called Nava Model. It was “one of the first in the country,” she claimed. She started it in a little workshop in Petach Tikva, where she employed two seamstresses. She was propelled by her keen sense of business and her fine taste, which she adapted to her clients’ needs without completely abandoning her own style. She didn’t start from nothing—there was a fair amount of money in the family on her father’s side. He was a hat maker with a good reputation back in Budapest. He did well in Israel too, with a workshop in Bnei Brak and two branches in Jerusalem and central Tel Aviv. But Grandma Pitti had grown tired of hats and bonnets. “Hats belong to another civilization,” she declared, and trained her only daughter, Nava, Sarah’s mother, as her successor in knitwear. Constantly in each other’s pockets, they were never separated for a moment. They talked on the phone at least an hour a day, discussing minute details of the factory’s finances, employee issues, suppliers, and the manufacturer’s association, followed by detailed descriptions of backaches or shoes that someone had worn. They split the arena between them. Grandma Pitti had “the hand,” while Nava excelled at sales.

At sixty-eight, Grandma Pitti suffered a heart attack and had to retire from actively managing the factory. She took it bravely. “From nowon, I’m going to spoil myself, after the sweat I gave all these years,” she announced. Even so, she could not completely kick the habit of “checking the stitches.” Once in a while she would turn up at the factory and climb the iron spiral staircase to the second floor, where the seamstresses worked. She would go from table to table, gently pushing away the women with varicose veins in their legs who fell about her with hugs and kisses, coaxing “Mrs. Pines” this and “Mrs. Pines” that. “No flattery, girls,” she warned, “I know very well what you think of me, and that’s just as it should be.” She derived great pleasure from this role of “a character” that she had chosen to play; she sharply rapped her walking stick on the floor. Sarah didn’t buy into it for a minute. “Stop making yourself out to be more of a witch than you really are, Pitti,” she said. “How do you know what’s more and what’s less?” Pitti said, applying lipstick to her taut mouth, going over the upper lip. “I know,” Sarah said. She curled up next to her on the couch and buried her head in her lap.

When Sarah was three months old, Pitti had started taking her to the factory in an infant seat, after having dismissed a series of “Draculas,” as she called them, good-for-nothing nannies. Nava wasn’t really involved in the business at the time—she was hospitalized in Beit Levinstein for more than a year, after suffering a bad car accident only a few weeks after giving birth. Sarah had a wet-nurse. One of the seamstresses who had just given birth would hold the baby between her heavy breasts as she pressed down the pedal of the overlock machine. Grandma Pitti took good care of her. She raised her salary and paid the mortgage on her apartment. Sarah nagged her for years, wanting to know who “that woman” was. “She left a long time ago.” Grandma Pitti evaded the question.

“And you didn’t keep in touch?” Sarah was shocked.

“In touch? Why do you think either one of us would want to?” Pitti said impatiently.

“The story is monstrous! Straight out of the Industrial Revolution.”

“What are you talking about, ‘Industrial Revolution’? Since when did you become such a feminist?”

“What’s it got to do with feminism? There’s no connection.”

“There isn’t?” Pitti barked at her. “How do you think women made a revolution and got their rights if not on the backs of other women? Tell me. Can you think of a single schmuck who ever gave anyone anything of his own free will?”

Her suspicious nature was boundless. “She digs around in every thing good until she finds the source of contamination,” Sarah complained.

“She doesn’t need to dig around very much,” I commented.

She looked at me with wide eyes. “You and she are real kindred spirits, you know, Ofri?”

“Kindred spirits” was an overused phrase of hers. She usually positioned herself as the fixed spirit—the sun—while the variant spirit, the twin—the planet—revolved around her. Me and her, Udi and her, me and Udi, Marwan and her, she and Busaina. But Busaina was different.

“Busaina is different,” I said. “Don’t give me your two-bit mysticism.”

“I feel a connection with that child, Ofri. I’m not making it up, I swear.”

She cropped out her portrait from the picture with her brothers, enlarged it, framed it, and gave it to her parents as a gift. The enlargement was less than successful, and they stared without recognition at the grainy image smeared in the photograph’s blurriness.

She spent months bombarding Knesset members with letters, along with journalists, intellectuals, members of Rabbis for Human Rights, the judge advocate, and Civil Administration officials. She managed to get a meeting with the head of the Civil Administration in the territories after weeks of phone calls, pleas, and calling in favors. She persuaded me to join the small delegation that went to his office to meet him. She spread out the photographs and the statements on his desk in rows like Tarot cards. We were sweltering in there; the air-conditioning was broken, and the heavy drapes gave off an oppressive heat and dusty light. He promised to look into the matter. We stayed to have a drink afterward in the café on the corner of Kaplan and Ibn Gvirol Streets. “Well, that was a dead end,” she said dimly. She wet her fingers with water from the glass and moistened her cracked lips.

Udi was enraged. “Have you lost your mind, to go and collaborate with the secret services?”

“It’s not the secret services…,” she said, puzzled.

“Then who did you think that guy was, Mother Teresa? Don’t you know when to stop, you and that group of idiots you dragged there with you?”

“I’ll go right to Satan himself if it would do any good. I don’t care.”

“Do what any good?” He shook her shoulders until her jaw shuddered. “What? She’s dead, Sarah. The girl is dead, they shot six rounds into her.”

The number drove her crazy. She pored over the details again and again, unraveling them, weaving them back together. “Six rounds is not a stray bullet. The army says it was a stray bullet, but how can six rounds be stray, Ofri? And all in the same direction? Tell me.” I said nothing. “It’s so hard to grasp the malice of it,” she continued. “On the surface, it seems like pure malice.”

“Maybe one of the soldiers got scared by the stones and just lost it?” I conjectured.

“There were no stones. There was no rioting at the time. There was the girl in the alley, there was the neighbor across the street who came out for a minute, stood in the doorway of the house and saw the shooting, there was a gang of about eight kids a little farther away, running from the tear gas in the next alley.”

“Maybe Busaina herself…,” I ventured.

“What do you mean, Busaina? Threw stones? Forget it. She was a little lamb, Ofri, afraid of her own shadow. She hardly set foot outside the house, just took care of her baby brother all day long.”

*   *   *

We were on our way to Dorit’s wedding party at some friends’ house in the Dan apartment complex. We muddled our way through the identical, dark streets for half an hour, searching in vain for a pedestrian who would give us directions. Sarah was driving; she turned my stomach with her sudden stops and jolts that shocked the car’s chassis against the speed bumps in the road. “Calm down, won’t you?” I blurted out. “What do you mean?” she asked distractedly. She was a bad driver and denied it vehemently. “I’ve never had an accident, Ofri,” she assured me.

When we arrived, we grabbed a table at the edge of the garden and waited for Udi. He came straight from work, looking like a plucked chicken after wetting his hair “to freshen up.” We sat sullenly on the lawn, sipped bad wine, watched Dorit in her sky-blue dress as she passed among the guests, thin, flat, semitransparent, like a roaming piece of Perspex. “A moth,” Shelly said, biting her thumbnail.

She’d had a bad day, Shelly, a huge fight with her boss at the law office where she worked, and had left in the middle of the afternoon slamming the door behind her. “You have to find a job that doesn’t make you unhappy, you can’t go on like this,” Udi said. She rotated the wineglass between her fingers and stared blankly ahead. “Like what, what do I know how to do?”

“Take a course in computer programming, I’ll try and find you an entry-level job with us,” Udi suggested. Shelly dismissed the idea. “I hate computers. I’d like to get a job working with animals, veterinary work, something like that. How many years do you have to study to be a vet?”

Sarah rolled her eyes. “Too many. Forget about vets and birds,” she said impatiently. Someone announced the chuppa over the speakers. “That’s not a bad idea, veterinary studies,” Udi pondered out loud, munching on a sandwich. Sarah shot him a hateful look from the other side of the table. “Look what you’re doing, you’ve smeared it all over yourself,” she spat out, pointing to his shirt pocket soiled with lox spread. “It’s no big deal; it’ll come right off.” He wiped his shirt with a napkin dipped in water. “It’s grease, it won’t come out,” she insisted. He tossed the napkin on the table. “Why don’t you go back to Gaza for a while, have a little vacation?”

As soon as he got out of the chair and started heading to the exit, she jumped up and hurried after him. Shelly and I watched them from afar as they stood opposite each other under the flowers hanging over the entrance, waving their arms around. Then they disappeared and reemerged an hour later, when the dancing started. Sarah pulled her chair closer to his, held his hand between hers, and massaged his long fingers one by one. Her bare thigh rested on his.

*   *   *

“What was it that she wanted? I never figured out what she was looking for,” Udi said on that long night of waiting, our second one.

“I don’t know. Sometimes I just wished she wasn’t her,” I said, and paused to let the bitterness of the words sink in.

“Me too,” he said in a choked voice, muffled by the cushion he held over his face to block the blinding light from the lamp.

I mulled this over. “You didn’t really want that.”

“You’re wrong, Ofra. She was the one who always stayed, not me.”

“Come on.”

“Really. Her staying was a choice, a struggle even. I’m just there wherever you put me, without moving. Could be her, could be anyone.”

“Liar.”

He moved the cushion away and looked at me. “Yeah,” he said. Then he straightened up and stretched out his arms. “What was the mistake, Ofra? Tell me.” He yawned.

“Which mistake?”

“Mine. What did I do wrong and when? At which point did I begin to make the mistake worse, I ask myself. When I think about it honestly, it doesn’t have anything to do with Sarah or with what happened between us.”

“What, then?”

“I don’t know—destiny, the space you take up in the world from the time you’re a kid. I always wanted to be a soccer player, I was dying to be a soccer player, and I didn’t become one. Do you know why?”

“I have no idea,” I said, bored.

“I didn’t become a soccer player because in the end the desire to watch the game was greater than the desire to play and score goals, you see?”

A soft moan came from the next room. Udi jumped up: Mims.

He came back a few minutes later. “That’s it, he’s asleep again. He’s been having a lot of nightmares lately. Every night he cries in his sleep. Do you think he senses something?”

“Maybe,” I said sleepily, sprawled on the rug.

He stood close to me with his head bent down, his shadow fell crookedly on the bookshelf. “I’m really glad you’re here, Ofra, it makes me feel good.”

I opened my eyes and stared up at his dim gaze. We did not move. I envisioned a chameleon gingerly making its way along a thread stretched out between us, which would drop to the ground if we made any sudden movements. He suddenly reached out with his bare toe and slid his foot against me, from my ankle up to my bare thigh beneath my skirt. “Can I?” he asked.

“No.”

His foot returned to the rug. For a while, he kept standing there, watching. “Do you ever get laid, Ofra?”

I got up and looked at the clock. “It’s five-thirty now, I’m going to call.” I went to the phone.

He grasped my arm hard. “No. Let’s wait some more. It’s too soon to involve the police.”

“Too soon? It’s been almost forty-eight hours!”

“Shhhh…” He covered my mouth with his hand. “You’ll wake Mims.” He laced his hands behind my back and pulled me against his body. “Calm down, Ofra.” His skin had a sour milky odor.

I escaped to Mims’s room and climbed into his bed among the piles of toys. I lay next to him, cramped in the narrow space he had left; the wooden bars along the side poked into my back. He turned around, sighed in his sleep, threw his naked, plump leg over my waist and put his hand on my face, near my ear. His fair curls were soaked with sweat and saliva, but smelled of shampoo. Beneath his arm, with my half-closed eye, I could see the dim morning light creeping through the Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck pattern on the drawn curtain as it lightly waved in a sudden breeze. I hugged the boy to my body, hoping to catch some of his sound sleep. The loud voices of the trash collectors came from the street; trash cans rattled; a tired truck engine idled. I closed my eyes. My eyelids shut out nothing; they tore at the pupils that pressed against them. At once the room was flooded with red—the walls, the ceiling, the floor tiles, red, crude daubs. The sweeping morning sun lit up the red curtain and illuminated everything.

*   *   *

We bought the curtain, Sarah and I, in some store in Nahalat Binyamin. I thought it was awful. “It’s cheerful,” Sarah argued. “Look at all the joy in that red color and the Mickey Mouse pattern.”

“It’s annoying. The kid will go nuts from those colors.”

“All right.” She eventually came around, but it was too late: the cunning salesman had already cut the fabric and refused to change it for anything else. There was still the matter of the sewing. In honor of the curtain, she had bought a sewing machine that could do embroidery. She paid for it in twelve installments. “I used to watch the seamstresses at the factory,” she said confidently. “It’s a piece of cake to sew with a sophisticated machine like this, Ofri.”

She started with a pillowcase as an experiment, so as not to ruin the fabric. “I hope you do ruin it so we won’t have to look at it anymore,” I prayed.

“The more I see it, the more I like it.” She squinted at the needle eye in the machine, trying to thread it.

When the curtain was finally installed, crooked hems and all, it added the last crushing touch of sweet theatricality. Three months before the birth, Sarah arranged the room and the baby’s things, preparing the arena. She painted, sewed, rearranged, dragged furniture, positioned and repositioned it, devoted long hours to inspecting chests and beds and then ordering them from a carpenter after endless debates, sketches, and consultations. Grandma Pitti bore the expense but repeatedly warned Sarah against the evil eye. “You’re not allowed to do this before the baby is born, you’re not allowed.”

Terrified by the threat’s vagueness, yet completely carried away by her urge for activity, she went to consult with Maman, whom she considered an expert in matters of the evil eye. Maman laughed in her face. “In Egypt we even used to embroider initials on the baby’s things. We bought and arranged things from the first month of pregnancy. When I came to Israel, I’d never come across this nonsense before—all invented by Ashkenazis—about how you’re not allowed to do this and you’re not allowed to do that.”

From then on Sarah proclaimed “Inès said” at every opportunity, waving this dispensation at the doubters like an amulet. She made a big to-do over the baby blanket. I couldn’t understand it. “How much fuss can one person make over a blanket?” She turned bright red; natural embarrassment, usually disguised by her anxious thorniness, suddenly emerged with the pregnancy. “I just went a little nuts,” she said, smiling shyly.

She went to the Kitan linen store at least five times during her ninth month, going back and forth over three baby blankets, all made of velvety wool with a satin border in different colors: yellow, purple, and turquoise.

She slipped into the house each time with the parcel beneath her arm as if she’d stolen something, spread out the blanket, and stroked it over and over again. She folded it in different ways, placed it near the baby’s sheets to check the color coordination. She concealed episodes of her adventures with the blanket from me and Udi. We were able to watch her progress only by the woolly bundles at the edge of the crib, which changed color every few days.

I caught her once as I walked by the room on my way to the porch. Her face was buried in the blanket, eyes closed, daydreaming, imagining.

Udi was glowing with joy, although he didn’t get involved in the details. “Let her obsess over blankets as much as she wants,” he said. “What’s it to you, Ofra?”

“It’s strange, this craze,” I said.

He looked up from his newspaper. “There are worse things. Stop rubbing her the wrong way, Ofra.”

“Who’s rubbing her the wrong way?” I protested.

“You are. You’re constantly sizing her up, giving out grades. You know what I think, Ofra?”

“What do you think?” I mocked him.

He considered briefly. “That you’re jealous.”

I got up abruptly. My face was burning as if a hot iron had been held against it. I stood over the kitchen sink and splashed my face with water, postponing the moment when I’d have to turn my face to him. “Where are you going?” he asked when I left.

*   *   *

I sat at a nearby café for over two hours, classifying the passersby according to their shoes, bags, and proximity to the edge of the sidewalk. Shelly walked by and joined me. She’d cut her hair, cropped it all off, which made her look suddenly mature. “How’s Sarah?” she asked.

“The baby’s due soon,” I said.

“I haven’t seen her at any of the events recently. She’s dropped everything.”

I touched my arm, suddenly frightened; I pictured the lining of my body as a tin coating, a rusty, dark cavity in which the organs floated, knocking each other around. “You hungry?” I asked Shelly.

She thought for a moment. “Kind of,” she admitted suspiciously. “Why?”

“Let’s go and eat. My treat.”

We crossed over the square and walked to the Chinese place next to the Cameri Theater. Shelly walked slowly and stopped every couple of blocks to examine her ankles. Finally, she took off her shoes and walked barefoot. “You’ll get something stuck in your foot,” I warned her. “It’s full of broken glass and crap.”

“I have elephant skin. I’m not exactly fragile,” she said.

A sharp pain made me lose my breath as I contemplated her reply. “Did you do anything about the veterinarian stuff?” I asked.

“I looked at the Weizmann Institute’s bulletin in Rehovot, but I have to improve my graduation marks,” she said.

“So, what’s stopping you?” I urged.

She stopped. We were standing by the restaurant. “Why are you so interested, Ofra?” she asked. “What’s it to you what I do or whether I do anything? You’ve never shown an interest in me before. All of a sudden you’re asking me out to eat?” She looked straight at me.

“I just thought it would be nice,” I apologized. I was feeling emptier by the minute.

“There’s no reason why it would be nice,” she said and stared at me at length. “Well, see you.”

I watched her all the way to the corner and across the street. Then I ran after her, almost bumping into a cyclist. “Don’t leave, come on,” I said.

She joined me in silence. I watched her in the murky light of the restaurant as she blew on her soup, wiping her mouth with a napkin after every sip. “Why aren’t you eating?” she asked. “I am.” I stuck my spoon into the soup, piled on half a dumpling, and chewed. “Is something wrong?” she asked, staring again. I went on chewing. “I can’t swallow,” I said and spat out the mush into a napkin. “Just drink the soup. Leave the dumplings,” she advised. I tried to swallow but gagged. “Let me.” She took the spoon, filled it with a little liquid, and held it up to my mouth. “You have to sip slowly, in small amounts,” she said, watching the spoon, waiting for me to swallow, letting me wait between sips.

“How do you know all this stuff, Shelly?” I asked.

“The same thing happens to me about once a month. Once I even wound up in the hospital when it went on for a long time,” she said calmly. I looked at her pockmarked forehead, exposed beneath her bangs, at her full mouth, which seemed to be set upside down in her face. “You’ve been through a lot in life, Shelly,” I said.

“No more than anyone else.”

She walked most of the way back with me. “It’s so strange to think that Sarah is going to be a mother.” She lit a cigarette.

“I know,” I admitted.

“You’ve been friends for a million years. How do you have the strength to keep it going for so long?” she wondered.

“Maybe we don’t have the strength not to,” I said.

“What?” Her eyes opened wide.

At the corner of Nordau and Sokolov Streets we parted. “Take care of yourself,” she said. She hesitated for a moment and then added, “Ofri,” and kissed my lips. I watched as she carried her shoes and walked away with birdlike steps. She turned back to me at the corner of the next block and waved good-bye.

*   *   *

I saw her at Sarah’s place a few weeks after Mims was born. She turned up unannounced as usual, holding a large wrapped package, a gift for the baby. Sarah had fallen asleep on the couch in the living room. Shelly looked at her for a moment, walked on her tiptoes, and asked to see the baby. I took her into the room. We both stood near the crib covered with mosquito netting and looked. Shelly examined the tiny feet peeping through the blanket at a strange angle. “Such white socks.” She was impressed. She reached out and touched his red forehead with the tip of her finger, trembling. “He’s so tiny.”

We sat in the kitchen and waited for Sarah to wake up. Busaina’s father had come to see her, Shelly said; he had managed to get away from the curfew for a few days of work in Tel Aviv and came to see how things were going. He asked about Sarah. Shelly finished her coffee in one gulp; her Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. “He sent his best wishes to Sarah.”

“Don’t tell Sarah anything about that now. Wait a while,” I warned.

“Don’t tell me about what?” She suddenly appeared in the doorway, disheveled, swimming in Udi’s huge slippers.

“Nothing. Ali Hiju says hello,” Shelly said apologetically.

“Oh.” She opened the refrigerator and stared at the yellow lamp inside. “What does he have to say for himself?” she asked and took a swig of water from a bottle.

“We didn’t talk much.” Shelly squirmed. “He just came by for a minute.”

Sarah collapsed on a chair next to us, stretched her legs out, and massaged her knee. “I don’t know what this pain is in my knee.” She shut her eyes tightly and then opened them. “If you see him again, you can tell him I said to go screw himself.”

“You’re overreacting,” Shelly mumbled, “it’s not like he did it intentionally.”

Sarah closed her eyes and dropped her head back. “I don’t care whether or not it was intentional, I don’t care about intentions,” she said in a dark voice. “He should have known when he sent her out, and he did know. He just pretended that he didn’t know temporarily.”

“You can’t judge him. You’re not in his shoes. It’s very easy for you to judge him from here,” Shelly said.

“Easy?” She jolted and straightened up in the chair. “Does it look like it’s easy? He said it explicitly, Shelly, he told me the last day I was there when I asked him how he could have sent her to buy cigarettes when there was a curfew, how he could have been so unthinking, he said so himself.”

“What did he say?” Shelly was confused.

“‘How can I keep my children inside when my neighbors send theirs out to the street?’ That’s what he said.”

We sat silently and watched the cat as she stepped over and sniffed the ashtray on the table.

“It’s a war waged by civilians, Sarah, not by soldiers. The children are part of it,” I said.

“My brain gets it, but some other part of me doesn’t.” She reached out to the cat and grabbed her tail. “Did you close the door to the baby’s room?” she asked. “I don’t want her going in there.”

We sat in the kitchen until late afternoon, when a faint cry came from behind the closed door of the baby’s room. Sarah didn’t move. “Should I bring the baby here?” I offered. She nodded and undid her shirt buttons to reveal her breast.

Shelly stood close by and watched, hypnotized by the baby’s grimace as he sucked. “How many times a day does he feed like that?” she asked.

“A million,” Sarah said. She detached him from the right breast and shifted him to the left.

Udi suddenly appeared in the doorway and looked at the three of us. “Well, if it isn’t the Troika,” he said. “What are we debating today?”

Her face looked like an old washcloth as she turned to him. “Shut up,” she snapped. “Just shut up.”

 

 

 

An afternoon stroll with the baby. Sarah lags slightly behind the stroller as she pushes it; Udi walks beside her. Sometimes she insists on carrying the baby in her arms the whole way, his little head covered with a blanket, hiding in the hollow of her neck as she takes brisk, determined strides.

“You’re getting him used to being held,” Udi warns. “That’s bad.”

“Why is it bad to get used to something good?” she bickers with him.

He calls from work at least three times a day. “How’s the baby?” When she’s late one day coming back from the clinic after stopping at a café, he hurries home and paces the hallway, looking out the window every few minutes. When he sees them walking up the path to the building, he stomps down the stairs. “Where have you been?” He extracts the sleeping baby from the stroller, dropping the blanket. “Where did you disappear with him all this time?”

Their place grows cluttered with objects, logistical arguments, resentments that settle like greasy stains that cannot be removed. Udi keeps an eye out. He stealthily tests the temperature of the milk in the bottle after she has already checked it, peers into a freshly changed diaper and replaces it with a new one, calls the pediatrician after her visits to find out what they really told her there.

“Any minute now he’ll be docking my pay, Ofri,” she says, nervously bouncing her leg.

Dozens, hundreds of petty compromises pile up between them, hidden. She strokes his arm one day, near his wrist, and feels his hair stand on end.

She shuts herself in the bathroom and huddles on the floor by the toilet, wiping her face with toilet paper. “What’s the matter with you?” He follows her there and shoves his foot in the doorway so she can’t close him out. “What’s gotten into you?”

“The air is poisoning me,” she says.

“What air? What are you talking about?”

“Ours,” she says. “You think I’m a lousy mother, I can see that perfectly well.”

“You’re wrong,” he says as he slowly closes the bathroom door. He leans against it in the dark hallway for several more minutes. “You’re the one who thinks that, Sarah, and sometimes I believe you.”

 

 

 

We discuss the sleeping arrangements: Alain in the guest room, Maman in Michel’s room, and me upstairs in David’s room over the garage, near Oncle Henri’s workshop. Alain carries my suitcase up there. Strong odors of mildew, turpentine, and linseed oil greet us. Alain opens a window to air the room and points to the common wall between the bedroom and the workshop. “He could be in there all night making a racket, you know.”

“I’m a deep sleeper.”

“I hope so. I wouldn’t be able to stand it.”

He flings himself on the double bed, stretches his legs out, and looks around. “I can’t understand how he lived in this cell. Look at it—no decorations, nothing.”

I find a dusty guitar hidden behind the bureau. “Here’s something.” Alain wipes the dust off and strums a few chords. “Do you play?” I ask.

“A little, not very well. He taught me once, David. Me and Michel. The most awful teacher I’ve ever come across. Everything got on his nerves.”

“Which one of you was better at it?”

“Michel, of course. With his musical sense, he picked it all up without even being taught. I was the studious one,” he says, then thinks for a moment. “He was right, David, there’s no doubt about it.”

“Right about what?”

“About me getting on his nerves. My god, what a nuisance I am!”

We laugh, Alain rolls over to the edge of the bed and peers underneath. “Look what else I’ve found!” He pulls out a half-full bottle of cognac covered with cobwebs. He wipes off the top and hands it to me after taking a swig. We drink until midnight, sprawled on the bed in virtual silence. Alain holds the bottle up to the dim light coming from outside and examines the contents. “We did quite a job on this.” I strain my eyes trying to read the spines of the records strewn in a distant corner of the room.

“I never believed he really was,” Alain stammers.

“Was what?”

“Gay. I found it hard to believe. I took it as another one of his poses. He was full of poses and masks, Michel, you know. I thought his homosexuality was just another one.”

The room spun. “Maybe,” I say.

“Well I don’t think so anymore. I think I was wrong.”

“What changed your mind?”

There is a long pause. I can hear his heavy breathing next to me; his breath smells of alcohol.

“When he got ill, it really obsessed me. Drove me mad. I had to know whether it wasn’t some terrible accident, you see. I thought he might have fallen victim to his own pose. I had to know.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“Are you crazy? He never spoke straight about anything in his life. All I would have gotten from him is fog. I didn’t talk to him, I tried it myself.”

“Tried what?”

“I screwed a guy. To see what it’s like.”

I close my eyes. The dizziness lets up for a moment. “And what is it like?”

“Awful. For me it was awful. It’s not an act, you can’t do it as an act, the…” He stops for a moment, takes another swig. “The brutality of it, of the rear penetration—there’s no ambiguity in it, none of the vagueness there sometimes is with a woman. You have to really want it, not as an act. Do you understand what I mean?”

“I think so.”

The horrible sound of an electric saw rattles the wall. Alain sits up and tucks his shirt in. “There he goes.”

“Doesn’t he ever sleep?”

“Very little. He could never sleep properly because of his crazy work hours, and now it’s only gotten worse. What’s infuriating is that he wants everyone else to stay up with him.”

He leans over, touches my forehead with his cold lips. “Sleep well, anyway.”

I lie there fully dressed for a long time. A breeze stirs the dirty curtain, its filth perceptible from afar. A heavy coating of grime weighs it down toward the wood skirting around the hardwood floor, once brown. After the electric saw comes the hammering and then an ominous silence. A faint creaking sound is barely audible from the other side of the wall: sandpapering and soft radio music. I cover myself with the thick blanket and try to sleep. “Floating islands” and bad cognac give me nausea. The heavy door hinges creak, and then I hear a whimper; Lilly is here. I sit up and put on my glasses. She roams around the room with her tail straight up, digs her nails into the cracks between the wooden floor planks. The door suddenly opens. Henri stands there with a cigarette drooping from the corner of his mouth. “Is she in here?” he whispers. I nod.

“Do you mind having her here?”

“Not at all.”

“Then shut the door. I don’t want her wandering around the house all night waking everyone up.”

I shut the door after him, go to the bathroom, and brush my teeth. When I come back, Lilly is curled up in the warm imprint left in the mattress by my body. I push her over a little, toward the pillow. When I wake up the next morning, she’s lying wrapped around my head.

 

 

 

On my way to the kitchen the next morning, I peep into the oddly quiet workshop. Oncle Henri has fallen asleep in his chair under the bright light, his head slouched over the worktable amid the hammers, nails, pliers, and screwdrivers. I switch the light off. The coffeemaker bubbles downstairs in the kitchen, sending warm vapors upstairs.

“Did you get some sleep?” Alain asks, already showered and shaved. We drink our coffee on the narrow porch adjacent to the kitchen with our feet up on the banister. Oncle’s silver Mercedes, a significant slice out of his retirement compensation from Lufthansa, takes up almost the entire driveway in front of us. “I couldn’t sleep a wink,” Alain says. He lights a cigarette and offers it to me.

“Because of the noise?”

“Because of the noise in here,” he says, tapping his head.

The sprinklers turn on automatically and start watering everything in their path, mainly the Mercedes’s tires. Alain gets up. “Come on, I want you to see something.”

He leads me down the corridor to Michel’s room, which had been transferred in its entirety to the new house. He quietly opens the door a crack. Maman and Tante Marcelle are asleep in Michel’s narrow childhood bed, pressed against each other front to back, almost falling off both sides of the bed. Marcelle’s arm rests on Maman’s waist as if holding on to her, and her gray head is buried in her back. They are watched from above by baby-blue and pink furry teddy bears on the shelf, a rabbit-shaped night-light that gives off a reddish glow, china piggy banks shaped like pigs and elephants. On the opposite wall next to the door hangs a relic from another age, a midsize Edward Hopper poster carelessly stuck there with tape. In the picture, a girl in an orange corset sits on the edge of a bed in a hotel room, bent over, her feet dangling, almost touching the floor, arms buried between her thighs; her profile is hidden in the book she holds.

“The two sisters,” Alain whispers behind me. “Look at them.”

Suddenly, we hear a massive crash from outside, followed by the deafening monotone of the car horn. We rush to the kitchen porch that overlooks the garage driveway. The Mercedes is thrust into the splintered garage door with its front completely crushed. Oncle Henri trips over a large bucket standing at the side of the drive as he barely makes his way out through the mangled door, shouting furiously: “What are you looking at, idiot? Come and help!” He had forgotten to pull the emergency brake and the car had rolled down the steep driveway, into the closed garage. Alain runs over to him and worriedly examines him from every angle. “Are you all right?”

Wild and bug-eyed, his face turning blue and purple, Oncle runs amok around the car, fingering its crushed body. Finally, he sprawls over the fender and pounds it with tight fists; his cheek rests on the car, lips seemingly kissing the metal. “Shit, shit, shit!” he wails. Marcelle emerges in her nightgown, rolling her eyes. “What happened, mon dieu! What has happened to him now?” Alain and I grab hold of his arms and try to wrench him away. He pushes us back with his elbows, refusing to let go. Alain reconsiders, then gets into the car and turns on the engine. “The engine’s fine,” he calls out to Henri. “The engine’s absolutely fine, there’s no mechanical problem—it’s just bodywork and paint, that’s all.” Henri refuses to listen, rolls his head from side to side on the metal, his upper body completely sprawled over the car.

Marcelle comes to her senses. She walks up to the sprinkler, disconnects the hose, points it at him, and sprays. “Move. Move away,” she orders us. She stands there for several minutes, hair disheveled, squinting as she holds the hose and sprays, soaking herself and him with the water. Her thin cotton nightshirt clings to her hips, all the way up to her large stomach, revealing a dark triangle of pubic hair.

He severs himself from the metal like a snail separating from its slobbery trail, and drops to the ground on his hands and knees. Then he stands up and leans against Marcelle, swaying slightly. We watch as they walk to the house, slowly climb the steps one by one, unsteadily, dripping with water.

Alain, meanwhile, running on three cups of coffee, concocts a plan. We would both drive—he in the Mercedes and myself in his car—to the Mercedes dealership on the outskirts of Paris, where we’d drop off the car. Then we’d come back to Plessis Belleville, load up everyone in his car, drive to the hospital to collect the body, and then to the cemetery.

Oncle Henri reemerges, now looking clean and orderly. He fiddles with the pin on his black tie, dissatisfied with the plan. He wants to drive to the dealership himself, so he can talk directly to François, the mechanic, “about the situation.” Alain is doubtful. It’s already nine-thirty; he’s concerned. Oncle is positive they can make it on time if they hurry now; they must leave immediately. “Maybe you can put off this business with the car and the garage until later this afternoon?” Maman suggests softly. Alain leans over and kisses her neck. “Forget it, he’s not going to listen,” he whispers. They leave in a hurry, clad in black suits. Maman leans her head back. “Patience. Just let God grant us patience,” she murmurs. Oncle suddenly returns and kicks up a big commotion; he seems nervous and boisterous. With his mouth full of bread, he chuckles and points to his feet: one gray shoe and one black one.

Marcelle is curled up in a yellow flannel robe; she lights one cigarette with another. She spreads out neat rows of tranquilizers in front of her like candy, then shuffles them around and arranges them in circles. Maman anxiously jiggles her thigh under the table; she scoops up the pills impulsively, leaving only three. The clock chimes ten; the phone rings almost incessantly; Marcelle tries “to grab a snack” in the midst of it all. Maman gives her a facial with the mud mask she brought from the Dead Sea. She drapes a towel over Marcelle’s shoulders, tucks her hair into a bathing cap, and spreads the brown mess over her face, massaging her forehead, cheekbones, and neck in circular motions. Marcelle surrenders, smiling feebly. “I really miss the Dead Sea, Inès,” she says.

“There’s nothing like our Dead Sea in the whole world,” Maman declares vibrantly. “Just one look at it is enough to make you healthy.” Marcelle recalls one woman in particular, Sophie, who was completely cured from her terrible skin disease. “A few days at the Dead Sea, and her skin was like a baby’s,” Marcelle recalls. Then they go into the bathroom together to wash off the mud. Marcelle walks with her eyes shut, her face coated with the stiff cast of brown mess, holding on to Maman’s shoulder as she leads her.

 

 

 

They gave her away when Mims turned one. Michel held her and stroked her dull fur, his face a mixture of tenderness and repulsion. “Why not, after all?” he deliberated out loud.

“Take her.” Udi eagerly stuffed her brush, flea powder, shampoo, and a few remaining packets of food into a plastic bag. “Take her now.”

Sarah chain-smoked silently. “You don’t have to be so enthusiastic about it,” she said.

“Why not?” Udi was angry. “I couldn’t stand this cat from the moment you brought her home. And now Mims is helping me get rid of her, right Mimsaleh?” he cooed at the baby as he sat gravely in his infant seat with his three chubby chins. His body took up the whole seat.

“I take him if you let me,” Michel said in broken English as he leaned over the baby and pinched the pinkish rolls of fat around his wrists. He waved the blanket fringes in front of Mims’s fascinated round eyes. Mims twisted his nose a little and then a grin spread over his face. “Tickle?” Michel laughed.

“You need your own baby, Michel,” Sarah said. “Someone you can play with every day.”

“I’ll pretend you didn’t make that joke.” He pulled up a chair and sat opposite her, scrutinizing her appearance. “You look awful. Disaster.”

“I know.” She averted her gaze and smiled weakly, helplessly. “What can I do?”

“You can stop feeling sorry for yourself, Mademoiselle. Get up in the morning and put on a brave face.”

“We love her just the way she is.” Udi came over and pressed her scraggly head against the side of his stomach, covering her small face with his hand. “Just like she is, no face, no nothing.”

“Oy, oy, oy.” Michel sighed, cocked his head at an angle, and squinted at them.

Later, we walked along the promenade, eating ice cream and trying in vain to find a vacant spot on the wooden benches. We finally sat down on one of the cement planters. “It looks very bad, this business with the officer,” Michel said.

For years, he had insisted on calling Udi “the officer,” both to his face and behind his back; he considered it an affectionate tease. Udi explained awkwardly, “Not everyone who serves in the army is an officer, Michel. I’m just a medic, not an officer or anything special.”

Michel found the gravity of Udi’s expression even more entertaining. “No, of course you’re not,” he would reply, his face widening into a contagious smile that lit up his eyes, which revealed their many shades of brown.

Now he carefully nibbled the bottom of his ice cream cone. “The officer can’t see what’s going on,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“She’s suffocating, Ofra, can’t you see she’s suffocating?”

I could. At times she would suddenly grab my hand and squeeze tight. “I can’t breathe. I’m out of air.” During one such episode she lay down on the couch, then stood up and grasped her chest. I was terrified. “I’m taking you to the doctor,” I said. She stomped her foot impatiently. “No! I’d rather die here in silence.” That “die in silence” had an immediate sobering effect on me, it reassured me, again, the words.

She savored words like a winemaker, letting them do their work, turning metaphor to reality with one daring leap, and forcefully ripping them from their ordinariness. The way that word would become fresh in an instant was dizzying. How easy it was to fall into the verbal trap she laid—for herself, above all—blind to the snare, to its having been set, to the others who stumbled into it, who blurred and merged with her own self.

*   *   *

“Where did you find her, that one?” Michel often wondered.

“She found me,” I said.

Not exactly. I had noticed her immediately, as I stood in front of the class in my oversized school skirt that came down to below my knees, thinking about the thick slices of challah with cheese and jam that were turning to mush in my backpack. I carefully scanned the rows of children. She was sitting at the second desk from the right, squashing her cheeks in and pulling her eyes down to make a face. Her hands were scribbled with pen markings, and her white earlobes stuck out from her frizzy hair. When I sat down next to her, she moved her chair all the way to the edge. The next day I found a pencil line drawn down the table to divide it in half. “Don’t cross over into my half,” she warned dryly and leaned over her notebook, covering her head with her arm so I wouldn’t copy from her. Once, when she left her Bible studies notebook on the desk as she ran to huddle with the girls during recess, I peeped at it. The page was full of spelling mistakes.

I never moved from the desk, not once, from the beginning of the day until the end. I never even went to the fetid girls’ bathroom. I hated every movement; I despised its complacency and confidence. Most of the time I observed. I put all of myself into my gaze and imagined two spouts of hot lava gushing from my eyes, pouring over the tumult and wiping it all out, turning everyone into those hollow human statues in Pompeii from my geography book.

She wreaked havoc, shuffled her moods like a deck of cards. Most of the time she was indifferent; then suddenly she would shift from clear alienation to an inexplicable gush of friendliness, like the day she offered me her midmorning snack of half a bar of chocolate. The squares of chocolate sat on the table all day. “It’s not poison, you know,” she hissed as she grabbed the chocolate and tossed it into the trash can. She took the chocolate incident badly. Walking home, me in front and she following me, she mimicked me behind my back as the other children cheered all the way to the bus stop, where she turned to the street leading to her house. I felt my face burning as I went on walking to the next stop and then the next one and the next, until I’d walked almost halfway home. I consoled myself with the knowledge that if I hadn’t managed to make her like me, I had at least gained her respect. The next day, our homeroom teacher called the two of us to a meeting in the staff room—she must have heard something. I vehemently denied that there was any trouble. “It was nice of you not to squeal on me,” she conceded as we left. But there was loathing in her voice.

“Don’t think you don’t owe me,” I said.

“What do you mean?” She looked at me, confused.

“You figure it out.”

“Forget it.” She turned her back and ran to the kiosk.

I didn’t forget it. I waited two months until she suddenly spoke to me one day on the way home. An ugly mongrel dog was following us; he was limping, his tail was drooping, and he sniffed at our socks. She picked him up and burrowed in his grimy fur. “Someone must have kicked him out,” she said. “Someone threw him out onto the street like trash.” A clinging pair of tiny ticks climbed up her arm. I squashed them as hard as I could. She looked at the crushed ticks, at the small spot of pale blood, and at my fingerprints on her arm. Then she wiped the blood with a napkin she took from her backpack. “You did well,” she said approvingly.

We sat on the bench at the bus stop and talked while the dog snoozed between us, pricking up his ears every so often. We let two buses go by. Every afternoon, she told me, she walked around town looking for mistreated animals. “The worst is the cats,” she said, staring at the bushes across the street. Once she caught a bunch of boys red-handed as they were burning cats’ tails and hanging the creatures head-down from a tree, “like this.” She held the backpack up by its straps to illustrate.

“What do you do with them?” I asked.

“With who?” she said, puzzled.

“With the children who abuse them.”

“I write them down in here.” She pulled out a notebook and showed me. “One day, when I have enough information, I’ll give this whole list to the police.”

I could barely conceal my smile. “They won’t do anything, they don’t care about that stuff.”

She seemed suspicious. “How do you know?”

“I just do,” I said confidently. “My uncle’s a policeman.”

“Really?” Her eyes widened. “Then maybe he can help us.”

The future suddenly brightened. “What do you mean us?” I asked cautiously.

She was excited now. “You and me! The two of us will start a club that helps animals, and your uncle will help us catch the children who abuse them and he’ll punish them.”

The next day I found myself straggling behind her through thorns and nettles in the backyards of houses. “There are no torturers out today,” I said. I collapsed on a rock, bored, and stared up at a tree. She was bubbling with plans and schemes as she ran ahead, clearing the path with a long stick. I kept guard while she crawled through the narrow windows of bomb shelters and basements to investigate. “We have to publish the list so everyone will know,” she said. “Where?” I wondered.

“In the school newspaper and then in other kids’ newspapers, like maybe Ma’ariv La-Noar,” she said. She pulled out her notebook and stuck the pencil in her mouth. “How should we start?” she pondered.

That same evening I wrote “The Fate of a Stray Cat” for her. Three pages of calamities described with the stylistic grandeur of a daytime soap. She read it over and over again and wiped tears from her eyes. “It’s so sad, what you wrote,” she said. Then she thought for a minute. “But I’ve never come across a cat like this one. Do you think it matters that this cat is made up?”

“Not at all. What matters is the idea,” I said, acting resolute.

She showed the composition to her mother that night. “Look what Ofri wrote.” She glowed, caressing me with her eyes.

Nava put on her glasses and then pushed them up onto her forehead and held the page up to her nose. “You wrote this?” she asked. She looked me over. “No one helped you?”

My ears were burning. “No one.”

*   *   *

She used to make my heart sink, Sarah’s mother. From Sarah’s room at the northern end of the large apartment, I would hear her dragging her limping leg, dressed in white, exuding a perfumed mist of musk, orchid, and citrus blossom. I almost always made sure I was gone before she came home from the factory in the evening; she would linger in the semidark hallway to look over the mail with pursed lips. Once I ran into her there, on my way out. She took off her glasses and looked at me. “You’re here,” she determined. I could never figure out the purpose of the various pairs of glasses in her purse; there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the way she took them off and put them on. Every act and expression had the stamp of something foreign, indefinable, a little menacing. I often thought she was a changeling.

“What do you mean, a changeling?” Sarah was amazed when I told her what I thought.

“A changeling. Someone who was exchanged by extraterres-trails. I read about it once in a science fiction book. The changeling behaves and looks just like a human.”

“I suppose it’s possible,” she said with a shrouded look, seduced by the notion. “It would definitely explain a lot.”

There was always a quiet sense of dissatisfaction between them—almost an aesthetic dilemma, as if they had bought a piece of furniture and were spending years deciding whether or not to return it. Nava would sit erect on the couch in her corner with her feet resting on the velvety ottoman and rustle the pile of foreign magazines on her lap while she observed Sarah—not quite pleased and yet not entirely displeased. “Did you want something?” she would ask in her flat voice when Sarah opened the refrigerator to scan its contents. She was a person with no temperament.

*   *   *

At the age of twenty-eight, Nava had an arranged marriage. He was the son of a citrus-growing family in Petach Tikva and a “lovely fellow,” said Grandma Pitti, who had found him through “friends of friends” and orchestrated an accidental meeting at the factory. Nava was indifferent to her mother’s transparent maneuvers and brushed them off as if they were no more than a fly. Ever since her youth, she had possessed a calm sense of acceptance; perhaps an odd power, perhaps a weakness. Pitti’s endless vivacity “broke something in her,” Sarah believed, but more than that, it seemed to have emptied her. She married him mainly because she hated “making a fuss” and wanted to be left alone.

Her perfect, complete loneliness prompted no questions, as if it were a natural, organic phenomenon, a mound of gravel or a rocky mountain slope; it had always been there. When she wasn’t working at the factory or taking frequent business trips overseas, she sat leafing though magazines, moistening her finger once in a while to separate the pages. Over the years I came to see the gesture as her trademark; it was the first clear image that came to mind, synonymous with the person, with Nava. She was illegible, like the seventh carbon copy of a document, and I never knew whether she could stand me, my friendship with Sarah, the long days I spent at their house. Sometimes she would drive me home, twenty endless minutes of silence in the cool space of the car, her narrow, white wrist glistening on the stick shift. Once, when we drove down the dark road that crossed through the orchards on the way to my house, she suddenly said, “A tunnel.” And then, after a few minutes, “The idea with these tunnels is to come out on the other side.” “Yes,” I stammered nervously.

Once when I slept over at Sarah’s, I tossed and turned for hours, trying to push Sarah’s bossy legs to the other side of the bed. I heard Nava from the room next door saying, “Not now, not now.” Then there was silence, footsteps, the toilet being flushed. I opened my eyes; our door was ajar, and I peaked through the narrow opening. She was standing directly beneath the ceiling lamp in the square hallway, with her arms stretched up high and her eyes closed. The bottom of her transparent, orange nightdress lifted almost to her navel, exposing slender thighs and a vagina that was completely smooth, like a girl’s.

I replayed the image over in my memory dozens of times, in slow motion: the hallway, the edge of a Manet reproduction on the wall, the slightly flaccid arms stretched up with clenched fists, the stripe of the nightdress hem on the concave stomach, the light fixture in the ceiling overhead like a covered pool, the long, reddish crack in the smooth vagina which pointed toward the abdomen, color unchanged.

For years, I said nothing, silenced by the strange compassion that remained after the fear.

*   *   *

I thought of the image when she came to the maternity ward with Shmulik. They pulled along a baby stroller decorated with an English tea party motif; a two-foot yellow Winnie the Pooh sat inside it. They wandered from room to room and finally followed the nurse into the right one. Nava looked at Sarah from a distance of two steps from the bed and watched as Shmulik fell on her with a bear hug, sobbing. “Are you all right?” she asked. Nava’s chin quivered slightly, briefly cracking the smoothly made-up face, darkly tanned, pasted above the white of her blouse as if the fabric had been smeared with mud. When she finally approached, she lifted Sarah’s hand and held it to her lips. I looked at her back, at the gauzy blouse clinging to her bra strap, at the hem slightly hitched up at the waistline, at her bony behind beneath the white trousers.

“Well, you did it!” Shmulik fawned over Sarah ecstatically and kept embracing her. “Did what?” she asked flatly and gently pushed him away. “You gave me a grandson!” He wiped his large, flushed face, which looked as if someone had held a grater to it. When he finally relaxed and agreed to sit down and drink a glass of grapefruit juice, he set about planning Mims’s financial future. “I put aside fifty thousand for him today, and that’s just the beginning,” he said. Nava froze for a moment, suspending her hand in midmotion as it softly smoothed over the blanket. “Not now, not now,” she said in that sandpapery voice of hers. Sarah looked at her with gratitude, breathing life into the aristocratic pact they shared whereby “money is not discussed.”

“Donate it to the hospital ward,” Sarah said. “Please don’t put anything aside for me, I don’t need anything put aside.” She spat out the last two words.

“It’s not for you, it’s for him,” he said. “You’ve made your choices in your life.” He arranged the pillows behind her, brushed away some strands of hair from her forehead, and laid his hand by her head. “Please don’t get angry, not today.”

He had contributed “his share” to the marriage, as Sarah put it, which consisted of some orchards between Petach Tikva and Bnei Brak that had been rezoned for construction. She took him to task on that too. “How could you let them uproot those orchards and sell them to those bastard contractors?” she pestered him. “I’m a contractor myself,” he reminded her.

He had a kind of natural warmth—crude, unmediated. At home, he walked around in an undershirt and boxer shorts, checkered or decorated with penguins, which Nava brought him by the dozen in New York. He was always chewing on something and shouting into the telephone. He could never remember my name and finally settled on Ora. “It’s Ofra, Dad, Ofra,” Sarah berated him. “How can you forget someone’s name?”

“I’m lucky if I can remember my own name,” he defended himself.

He was always falling at her feet, begging her to take things from him. “Take what? What do you want me to take?” she’d say brushing him off.

“Anything. I don’t know. You won’t take anything. People will think I have nothing to give you.”

“Who’s going to think that—your disgusting friends who give money to right-wingers like the Likud?”

“Watch what you’re saying. You used to pee in their laps when you were little, did you forget that?”

“They probably deserved it,” she said as she sliced herself a huge piece of chocolate cake and held the plate up to his nose. “Here, smell this. Suffer a little,” she teased him. He jerked back and twisted his face. “Why do you do that to me? You’re cruel.” He spent most of his life enduring diets, full of cravings for “the good life”—Hansel and Gretel’s gingerbread house without the wicked witch. But he was always having a good time. He took great pleasure from frequently bickering with bank managers, foremen, and customers; he would promptly become conciliatory and retreat into sob stories composed of a thousand little lies—the smokescreen he put up between himself and others, the big fry.

He got himself into so much trouble that on two occasions he had to declare bankruptcy; Nava did not lift a finger to help him. He bounced back quickly, although she transferred the house and all the assets to her name. “I’m not going to clean up after somebody else,” she said, and went back to her magazines.

“Listen, shmatte queen, don’t do me any favors, okay?” He choked on a carrot stick and suffered a long coughing attack. That was during the carrot diet, when he kept pointing at the gap between his belt and his belly.

“Spare the girls,” she would say, without looking up.

“Girls?” he bellowed. “They’re almost sixteen, these girls! They need to know what’s waiting for them in this world, Madame.”

“Oh, and what world would that be—yours?” she said wryly.

We were sitting in the kitchen, Sarah and I, studying for a history exam. We recited to each other details that promptly evaporated from our memories, and stared at the few pictures in the book, completely alert to the silence coming from the next room and the front door slamming. Sarah’s tangled hair looked like a deserted bird’s nest, accentuating the narrow paleness of her face, which became longer and longer, pointing down toward her notebook. “She’s so cruel,” she whispered. “God, she can be so cruel.”

The next day, she relocated to Grandma Pitti’s house for the second time that year, where she watched television all day, stole cigarettes, and hid them under the pillow until they were completely crushed. Shmulik called three times a day to plead and beg. He swore she could come home to a clean slate—no more troubles, no more hassles. “There have been enough slates, it’s your mind you need to clean,” she said, and slammed the phone down.

Two weeks later, Nava came to the school and waited outside. She leaned against the car in her white suit, then slowly limped to the gate when she saw us. Her sharp cheekbones jutted from beneath her thin skin like the blade of a knife under a taut glove. “How was the exam?” she asked, jingling her key chain.

“Which exam?” Sarah asked.

“The one you were studying for.”

“Okay.”

Silence.

“I’m going away next week for ten days,” she said. “Can I bring you anything?”

“No thanks,” Sarah said.

“All right.” She looked at her for a long moment, limped back toward the car, then stopped and changed her mind. “Do you need a ride?”

Sarah shook her head and wrinkled her nose at the exhaust fumes as she watched her mother drive away.

Nava didn’t go away, not that week or the next. She came to school every two or three days and waited, smoking her long slender cigarettes and spraying air freshener into the car to get rid of the smell. Once she brought a gift of earrings studded with aquamarine, “the seaman’s lucky stone,” she said, and watched Sarah put them on. “It watches over the sailors to keep them from drowning,” she added.

Sarah walked up to the side-view mirror on the car and examined her earlobes closely. “How do you know that?” she asked.

“I read it somewhere.”

Sarah took the earrings off, turned to her, and leaned in very close. “You need these earrings.” She put them in Nava’s hand and pressed her fingers over them tightly.

*   *   *

We forgot about the earrings, Sarah and I, until Mims was born. Then Nava wore them to the circumcision. They dangled heavily next to her withered, tanned neck. She wrapped the baby in Swiss lace, fiddling over the dozens of fastenings in the tiny garments. When the mohel came, Sarah ran outside. Nava watched her hesitantly. She held the baby with outstretched arms as if she was carrying a scalding pot. That was how she presented him to the mohel. Her eyes were closed, and she opened them in amazement when he turned her around and sat her down on the elevated armchair. “You must hold him, please, not me.” When he bent over the child to unfasten his clothes, she jumped up, almost dropping the baby, and grasped my wrist until it turned blue. “I can’t watch this.” There was a slight commotion, a rapid reorganization, and Shmulik took her place. I went outside and looked for Sarah for several minutes. I found her sitting in the backyard of the building on a pile of withered leaves with the cat purring in her lap. “How did she get here?” I was surprised.

“I think she fell out of the window.”

I looked up to the window on the second floor. “That can’t be.”

“Yes it can,” she said, examining the cat’s erect, pink ears. “She fell asleep on the windowsill as usual and just fell out. She’s fine.”

I smoothed my skirt carefully and sat down next to her; I watched a large beetle making its way toward us. “It’ll be over soon,” I said. She covered her ears with her hands. “Don’t say anything, I don’t want to hear about this barbarism.”

A short scream came from above, followed by silence. “Ofri,” she said. She held the cat around her neck until her eyes started popping out and she escaped with a howl. “Go and see what’s happening.” I got up. “Wait,” she said. “Don’t come back here, I don’t want them to know where I am.”

“Then how am I supposed to tell you what’s happening?”

“I don’t know.” She bent over and rested her forehead on her knees. “Give me a sign from upstairs that everything’s okay,” she said finally.

I went upstairs. “Are you the mother?” the mohel asked as he bandaged the child’s tiny penis. “Where’s the mother? She needs to feed him now.”

I went to the window. She squinted up at me. I motioned for her to come up, but she shook her head. I glanced at the baby. He was crying; his body contorted as his legs flailed in the air. I wrapped him in a blanket and took him in my arms. Udi stopped me on the way. “Where are you taking him? Are you crazy?”

“She’s downstairs,” I said, and rushed down with one hand on the banister. I handed Sarah the baby. “Here. He needs to feed.”

She looked at him suspiciously and then at me. “No. I can’t.” She shook her head.

“Why not?” I was almost shouting.

“I can’t,” she repeated. “After what they did to him.”

“Feed him now!” I stomped my foot to chase away a painful prickling sensation. “Stop behaving like a spoiled brat.”

The baby was screaming; blinded by the sun, he waved his little fists in front of his eyes. She covered her ears. “He can have a bottle. I’ll feed him later, Ofri, I swear.”

I looked around desperately. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the next-door neighbor leaning over her porch railing and watching. “Take him,” I said angrily and put the baby in Sarah’s lap. I pressed his head to her chest, undid her blouse buttons and the hooks on her feeding bra. “Now feed him.” She looked at the child without moving, her breasts spilling out of her shirt. I took her right hand and wrapped it around the baby’s head. His lips opened in a sucking motion. She slowly moved her other hand to her breast and limply shoved it into his mouth. I sat down next to her on the grass, fascinated by the steady rhythm of his sucking lips. I reached out to touch the soft spot at the center of his downy head.

She placed her hand over mine and felt the soft skull between my spread fingers. “Eggshell,” she said.

She kept fingering that spot for months, monitoring as it slowly closed and fused, protected by the honey-colored tufts of curls that sprouted untidily from his scalp.

 

 

 

When Mims was three months old, she started dressing him in a grayish brown hat with round, droopy mouse ears that was much too big for him. “It’s to protect him from the sun and the critters outside,” she said.

He had an easygoing temperament and patiently endured almost everything Sarah inflicted on him: frequent changes of clothes; measurements and examinations by various doctors who gave him balls and blocks then took them away, tapped his knees with hammers, and pushed cold metal instruments into his ears; comprehensive nutritional analyses that required him to be fed different compositions of fruit or vegetable purees every day; long baths at least twice a day, which he liked very much and he never protested even when the water was too hot or too cold. He entered into each day full of trust. When the sun rose at five-thirty in the morning, he would mumble to himself and laugh out loud as he stood up in his crib, held on to the bars with his yellow blanket drooped around his shoulders like a knapsack, and stretched out his chubby hand to the pale light coming in through the curtains.

Then he would sit down with his plump legs dangling through the bars and throw toys, bottles, disposable diapers, and clothes onto the floor. The blanket posed a dilemma. Torn between two opposing urges—to toss it out and to hold on to it—he would finally give in to despair and break out in a short wail that was immediately replaced with a wet grin at the sight of Sarah. When he learned how to crawl, he followed her around like a puppy, victoriously displaying his loot of buttons, coins, pens, papers, an old crust of bread, dead bugs, a whole roll of toilet paper trailing behind him. Sarah was horrified. “Where did you get that?” She tried to extract a coin from the tightly clenched little fists, which gladly loosened their grip as soon as a real reward was offered in the form of a cookie. “He’s a businessman at heart, that child,” she complained, as she sat him on her lap to explain. “Coins are dangerous. You could swallow them and choke. No coins, even if you don’t get a cookie, do you understand?”

The word no acted on him like a tickle, making him extraordinarily cheerful. He would break out into loud peals of laughter and almost gag. Over time, as he discovered the cookie storage in the pantry, he upped his bargaining stance. “No!” He would shake his head, throw the bribe on the floor, trample on it, then look with wonder at the cat as she sniffed the crumbs and walked off with her tail in the air. She caused him much grief. He crawled around for hours, looking for her all over the house. His round knees were bruised from constantly rubbing against the floor. “Sssss…” His version of the catcall carried through the air as he cried out to the ceiling, the walls, the blue square in the window, then sat back heavily on his behind to rest, despairing. “Sssss…”

She watched him from the height of the bedroom closet or perched on the curtain rails, closing her eyes in disdain every so often. Once Udi saw her beady eyes staring out at him from the pile of toys in the crib. She was banished from the crib, thrown onto the rug, where she froze in one position for a long time and glared at him. Mims happily interpreted her persistent lingering as a sign of devotion. He held her tail and pulled gleefully, pausing for a moment when she turned her head toward him with half-closed eyes and an expression that seemed almost pitiful.

He let go of her immediately, shamed by his efforts, as if a moment of clarity had suddenly made him aware of her elevated place in the world. The cat was outside of the game, he realized. Not for him, not against him. She meandered over to the bowls of water and cat food laid out for her on the porch. She took a small taste, licked her lips, and positioned herself in the square of shady tiles behind the potted plants, where she watched indifferently as Mims celebrated her retreat. He covered himself in dirt, he poured the bowl of water into the food and mixed it up with his hands immersed in the thick, brown liquid. Then he slapped his filthy palms on the white wall, ecstatic at the sight of his handprints. Udi almost passed out, then scrubbed him in the bath with half a bottle of liquid soap, locked the door to the porch, and declared for the thousandth time, “That cat is impossible.”

“Mims will grow up, and then will have peace and quiet,” Sarah reassured him.

“That’s the whole problem—the quiet. With all the mischief these two get up to it’s still completely silent. I haven’t heard a thing for an hour.”

She picked up the cat and closely examined her paws. “She’s not really well, Udi. Since she fell out of the window, I think she has some kind of brain damage.”

She tenderly bandaged the cat with her gaze, moved by the thought of brain damage. When the cat disappeared one day, slipping out through the door left open for the delivery boy, Sarah almost lost her mind and spent half the night searching the neighborhood. She found her two days later next to the trash cans in the adjacent yard with her head stuck inside an empty cottage cheese container, blindly chasing her tail and wailing madly.

That adventure elevated the cat in her esteem twofold. “Don’t you think, Ofri, that it’s rare for a domestic cat, whose survival instincts are entirely dormant, to survive like that among all those delinquent cats on the street?”

I agreed. I had no choice. Her usual impatience toward any show of disagreement or reservation had taken on a new tone during those months. A tone of terrorism. We let her be, Udi and I, each retreating into our own isolation.

 

 

 

“We abandoned her,” I said on that long night in their apartment as I leaned over the railing on the porch, listening attentively to the sounds of footsteps from far down the steamy, dark street.

“We didn’t abandon her, Ofra, we took care of ourselves. You’re forgetting how she can wear down everything she touches. She’s an exhausting person, Ofra, she exhausts you to death,” he said and rested next to me with our elbows touching on the bars.

“I haven’t forgotten,” I said.

He stretched and tried to take a deep breath. The air stood still.

A cleaning rag awakened the faint hope of a breeze as it swayed on the clothesline outside the building opposite. Then it hung limp again, dangling near the rusty gutters, the closed shutters with missing slats, a dusty, barren planter, the protruding air-conditioning units, crooked wires, a huge spot of patched-up plaster—poor workmanship. My throat closed with a sense of loathing. “This whole town is one refugee camp. A slum. North, south, center, the Bauhaus, the shmattes. It’s all a slum.”

“Actually I like it,” he said into his shirt, leaning his forehead on the railing and looking down at his feet.

“What do you like? What’s there to like here? It’s a fantasy that you like, same as everyone else,” I said.

“Even a fantasy is worth something.”

I looked at his thick, hairy neck. “Can’t you see how sickening it is?”

“What’s sickening, Ofra? What?”

“All these euphemisms. Self-deception. That’s what. Bugs trapped inside a jar, that’s what we are here.”

“What do you want? Why are you starting up with all your gloom and doom?”

“Well, what’s wrong with a little beauty? Things should at least look normal.”

His face suddenly widened into a smile.

“What’s so funny?” I was annoyed.

“I don’t know. I was just imagining Inès charging through the streets from one building to the next, leading a renovation crew. Give her one year, she’d make this place look great. She’d toss out all the junk, including half the population.”

“It’s too late for that. The ugliness is flowing through our veins,” I said. I took his cigarette to light my own.

“That’s not the only thing flowing in our veins.” He looked at me with his red, sleepless eyes, heavy eyelids. “I’m starving. Do you want something to eat?”

I didn’t. I leaned on the railing again and listened to him opening and closing the kitchen cabinets, the fridge door squeaking, the cutlery rattling, water running. Down below, the quiet, innocence of the street lay sprawled before the backdrop of the household noises, which stirred something in the streets, like the artless sounds produced by clanging empty bottles. I followed him into the kitchen and watched the meticulous order of his actions. He was wiping the crumbs off the counter with a paper towel.

“Change your mind about some food?” he asked.

I sat on Mims’s stool, carelessly paging through yesterday’s newspaper. “We could call Shelly, maybe she knows something.”

“No.” He turned to me sharply. “Don’t you dare.”

“What are you afraid of—that people will find out? Everyone knows anyway.”

“Not from me. They don’t know it from me.”

“What difference does it make who they hear it from?”

“It just does.” He dragged a chair over and sat down with a plate balanced on his lap and his legs at a strange angle, the soles of both feet facing each other crookedly. “To go and air your dirty laundry in public is giving up. I haven’t given up yet.”

We sat in the kitchen for a long time, he on the chair and myself on the stool at his feet with my head leaning against the greenish porcelain tiles on the wall. I looked up at the bare light-bulb hanging from the ceiling by a wire, swaying, dividing its attention equally between left and right. We waited. Supposedly, for her. We drifted into sleep with our eyes open and gaze turned inward, accompanying our slow decline into a sense of heaviness. It was not swamplike, but rather a different kind of weight—a vast, deep field of Styrofoam balls that produced a chilling sound as they rustled against each other.

 

 

 

For months, she comes home just as the first trash collectors roll around, at four or five in the morning. The workmen downstairs are yelling; the trash cans hit the sidewalk; the cats yelp as they flee the tumbling trash cans.

He waits for her, his cheeks covered with yesterday’s stubble. He stands behind her in the kitchen and massages her neck.

“Sarah.”

She places two fingers on her temples and turns to him. “What?”

“Either talk to me or fuck me.”

She sprawls forward over the table. “I’m beat. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

“Save some energy for me,” he says with his arms dropping down to her chest, like two shoulder straps, squeezing her shoulders on their way. “Don’t I deserve some of your energy?”

“You do.” She undoes her blouse buttons, shivering on the edge of the chair. “Close the window, it’s cold.”

“I’m not cold.” He pulls her arms out of the sleeves, stands her up, unzips her skirt, and watches it drop down around her ankles. She steps out of the skirt, runs to the bedroom, and lies on the bed with her legs spread. He kneels at the foot of the bed between her two legs and kneads her thighs in a circular, deepening motion. “Don’t be like this,” he says. “Can’t you put your heart into it.”

She sits up with her legs crossed and her long breasts hanging. She holds his face in both hands and touches his teeth with her narrow tongue. “What’s the point of all this? Just throw me out and be done with it.”

“That would be too easy,” he says as he thrusts her body down. One arm grasps her shoulder, pushing; the other is supported by the mattress as he penetrates her. He stares at the wall, concentrates, attentive to nothing beyond the immediate contact, like a child coloring a picture, careful not to draw outside the lines.

 

 

 

I go upstairs to dress in my room. When I turn to the window as I fasten my bra, I see the reflection of David sprawled on the couch with his legs spread out, wearing his macho flight jacket, smoking, duffel bag at his feet. I hurriedly pull a shirt over my head. “Where did you come from?”

He rounds his lips and blows rings of smoke. “From the airport, where do you think?”

“So you didn’t leave?”

“No. I spent the night at the airport, and in the morning I got in a cab and came back.”

“We didn’t see a cab pulling up.”

“I asked the driver to stop at the next street over, and I walked here. I have the key to the room.” He pulls out a bunch of jangling keys from his pocket. “I hope you don’t mind me bursting in like this.”

I brush my hair briskly. I feel like hitting him. “Get out of here. Your mother’s in the kitchen. Go and explain this to her.”

He clicks his tongue. “I don’t think so.”

“What do you mean you don’t think so?”

“I don’t think that’s what I’m going to do. I’m staying here.”

“You came back and you’re still not going to the funeral?” I look at him with astonishment.

“No. I feel like staying here.”

“Why did you come back then?”

“I don’t know. Do I have to know everything?” He gets up and walks around the room with his hands in his pockets. “I can’t say there’s been much improvement in this place.”

I pick up his crushed cigarette stub from the floor and toss it into the ashtray. “So what am I supposed to do?”

He stands in front of me and runs his finger down my face, from the hairline down the nose, stopping at my lips. “Keep it a secret. Don’t tell anyone I’m here, I’m not in the mood for it.”

“Well, I’m not in the mood for your crap.”

With his face close to mine, he suddenly reaches out, shoves his hand under my shirt, beneath the bra, and pinches my nipple, hard. “Yes, you are.”

Without thinking, I sink my teeth in his arm, near his wrist. He looks at the deep ring of marks. “Nice,” he says finally.

I slam the door behind me and rush to the kitchen. Maman is trying to perch a black beret on her head. “Does this look okay?” she asks. “No.” I pull out the two hairpins holding the hat and throw them into the sink. “You look like a drunken sailor in that hat.” Marcelle calls me in to the other room to zip up her skirt from behind. “I thought about wearing black, but in the end I settled on navy. He hated black, Michel. You know, there was nothing black in his closet. He didn’t even have a pair of black shoes.” She’s in the middle of a gushing flow of talk. She pants as she rolls the nylons up her legs, wipes her nose incessantly with tissues that she balls up and throws everywhere. “Do you know what he said about black when he used to see all those characters at the gallery openings dressed in nothing but black? Do you know?”

“What?” I hold out her jacket as she puts her arms in the sleeves.

“He said that all that black is Western civilization in mourning for itself. He couldn’t stand it. He had nothing to mourn for, he didn’t want to mourn. That’s what he used to say.”

At five to eleven we go downstairs to wait outside for Henri and Alain. Marcelle is worried. “If they call to tell us something, we won’t hear the phone ringing.”

“Why would they call?” Maman dismisses her worry.

Marcelle sorrowfully scans the rosebushes and plucks off some withered tendrils. “We’ll have to replant them, these ones.”

Henri and Alain drive up at eleven-twenty and hurry us. “It would be very nice if of all people we showed up late,” Oncle Henri grumbles, jolting us out of our seats as he presses down on the gas.

To my right, out of the corner of my eye, I notice Lilly roaming the sidewalk, sniffing the stones alongside the road. “Lilly!” I call out. “Stop the car!” Henri stops.

“Where?” Marcelle clutches my arm and squeezes. “Leave it,” she whispers. I look at her, uncomprehending. She tightens her grip: “Leave it. Let her go.” I pull my arm out of her grasp, open the car door, and run after Lilly as she crosses over to the field on the other side of the street. I finally manage to catch her, wrestle her back to the house. I lower her into the garden shed through the window and fasten the lock so she can’t get out.

In the car, Marcelle stares straight ahead with a stony face. It’s quarter to twelve by the time we reach the hospital, and then we have to circle the parking lot for several minutes to find a space. Oncle Henri perspires, curses everything in sight, and finally parks illegally at the delivery truck entrance. “I’ll stay in the car to make sure they don’t tow it,” says Alain. “You’re not coming in?” Maman is amazed. He shakes his head and looks for his lighter on the floor. “You’re not going to say good-bye to Michel?” she asks. Marcelle tugs at her: “Come on already.” Maman looks at the car as she trails after Marcelle, then walks back and raps on the window. Alain opens it. “Come on, my sweet, come and say good-bye to your brother,” she begs.

We all go inside. A nurse in a clean white uniform rustles through a stack of papers, then leads us to the morgue. I stare for several minutes at the devious light that seems to shine up from an unknown source in the floor. “Is that him?” I ask Marcelle. It is. Oncle Henri is impenetrable, imprisoned inside the shriveled shell of his body. He shakes his head from side to side and holds his tiepin. Marcelle licks her finger a few times and smoothes Michel’s eyebrows. Then, with superb coordination, she and Maman kneel on either side of him, each woman holding a translucent hand with long fingers, each resting her face on it. We go out to leave Marcelle there alone. Maman splashes water on her face from the cooler; Oncle Henri smokes and paces the hospital corridor like a man waiting for his wife to give birth.

They take the body out through a wide back door which opens to a neglected garden with a fountain. Two men clad in black in the black hearse consult a map with Oncle Henri to find alternative routes to Père Lachaise Cemetery; the main road is congested because of roadwork. Alain keeps taking off his dusty sunglasses to wipe them as he drives. He concentrates on the slow black hearse as it drives ahead of us with a kind of majestic self-importance, indifferent to the traffic maneuvering around it, to the rhythms of the street. Two or three times we lose the hearse, then find it waiting for us on the side of the road, sealed like a box.

We arrive late and drive up the broad avenue to the paved square in front of the crematorium. The two tall crematorium chimneys protrude from a mantle of huge trees, emitting smoke of a color I have never seen and dispersing a sickly sweet smell.

A small group has assembled, waiting for us. Most of the people wear Air France and Lufthansa uniforms. Michel and Oncle Henri’s coworkers. At the side, near the small square surrounded with carved stone benches, two people stand with their arms around each other. Philippe and Geneviève. Marcelle holds out her arms straight in front of her body like a sleepwalker; her fingers pluck at the air as she walks toward them with broad steps, eyes half closed. She stops at arm’s length from them and distractedly gathers their hands to her chest. Oncle Henri nods his head coolly in their direction and pulls her away: “Come on.” Geneviève catches his sleeve: “We’re sorry, Henri. We want to apologize.”

“Apologize for what?” He dismissively glances over his shoulder as he walks away. Geneviève runs after him. “You know, for everything, for what happened.”

A squat figure wearing a dark suit with a crooked tie flapping in the wind, a large black yarmulke perched on his tangled, rust-colored hair—itself a kind of yarmulke—suddenly stands between her and Oncle Henri, a wavering smile on his oval face. The rabbi. He clasps a leather-bound prayer book to his chest. He leans forward to Geneviève and begins to recite, in strongly accented Hebrew, “Modeh ve-ozev yerocham, Madame.” Whoso confesseth and forsaketh his sins shall have mercy. She widens her eyes in amazement and retreats toward her husband, who gathers her in his arms and leads her away. Lowering his voice, he reprimands her: “Now’s not the time, Geneviève, I told you.”

The baroness and Maman sit on either side of Marcelle on one of the carved stone benches. They each thread an arm through hers and sit tightly enmeshed, as if molded together. Oncle Henri chats with his Lufthansa colleagues, occasionally stomping his foot on the stone square. He was “their Jew,” he said.

*   *   *

At the age of twenty, after the war and the camps, he had gone back to Paris and worked at anything he could, passionately driven “to make it.” At first he was a porter at Orly Airport. He was noticed for his insatiable curiosity and the powerful vivacity and joy that resulted from it. He was also distinguished by his fluency in five languages, his acute sense of time and space, and his agility, which he had acquired “over there” as a matter of life or death. He rose quickly. Lufthansa was just starting its Paris branch during those years, and was striving to “improve its image.” He was the right man for the job in every respect—especially, he noted bitterly referring to his origins, “in that respect.” His salary went through the roof. For forty years he was poisoned by his hatred of them, and spent some time every so often recovering from the emotional exhaustion in convalescent homes in Switzerland. He was never their guest, nor they his; he never used words of warmth, friendship, or affection. Tight-lipped, he worked tirelessly at building the walls of his territory, declaring in his heavy Parisian-Polish accent, “I am the master of my domain!”

The Israeli national airline aroused great excitement in him, and he took it under his wing by force, going to any lengths for its employees, dispensing endless advice free of charge. He was especially fond of pursuing “suspects” during the Arab hijackings of the seventies. He held secret meetings with the airline’s security officials and even managed, so Alain claimed, to thwart a few “absolutely real” terrorist attempts.

Standing now at the top of the steps leading down to the basement of the crematorium, he seemed wrinkled, his skin the color of his white shirt collar. He surveyed the small crowd surrounding him, waiting, like him, and he said bitterly to Alain, “None of those louses from El-Al showed up.”

He forbade Marcelle to go down to the incinerator. “It’s not something she needs to see,” he explained to Maman. She argued and tried to grab his hand as it flailed in the air. “Marcelle does need to see it, she does. How can you go down there?”

“I’ve seen it before,” he said. He swayed a little and grasped the banister. She went with him.

 

 

 

Surrounded by greenery, the concrete wall separating the safari from the zoo looked determined and gray. “Wait here a minute,” Sarah ordered us, and rummaged in her big tote through the tissues, Mims’s bottle, and a plastic bag with rotting pieces of peeled pears. She finally fished the camera out, and we watched as she ran to the southernmost edge of the wall. She stopped abruptly near the row of yellow mimosas and held the camera up to her face. “Where did she go?” Mims blinked and stuck his thumbs into his mouth. “Why is she leaving?”

I cursed quietly as I felt the sticky pink drizzle of grape juice dripping from Sarah’s bag onto my foot.

“What did you say, Ofra?” he asked.

“Nothing, nothing.” I held his hand tightly. “Hold my hand so you don’t get lost. There’s a million people here.”

He scanned the concrete square in front of the ticket booths. “I don’t see a million.”

“I just meant that there are a lot of people milling around,” I corrected myself impatiently. I was trying to listen to the dim shouting coming from the direction of the wall: “You bitch, you squealer.”

Sarah returned breathlessly with the camera hanging from her neck. “What happened?” I asked.

“They thought I was someone from the management taking pictures, spying on them.”

“They? Who?” I couldn’t follow.

“Two kids climbing over the wall from outside, sneaking into the safari. We’ll see how the pictures turn out.”

A sixteen-by-twenty-four enlargement revealed the kids’ round behinds hanging over the wall clad in shorts. Viewed from the side, they each have one foot extended over the top of the wall and the other hanging down. Their heads are in the coveted safari side of the wall, deep in the darkness of the trees. The concrete wall cuts down the middle of the photo with odd, unarticulated reliefs and illegible graffiti, trampling the pale green lawn at its feet. I couldn’t take my eyes off the wet clarity of the lawn, greenish yellow—not withered but fresh and sharp, just sprouted, feathery.

“So-so.” She twisted her lips with dissatisfaction as she viewed the photo.

“That’s not true,” Udi objected. “It’s an excellent picture.”

“It’s innocent and resolved, there’s no mystery in it.”

“‘Mystery,’” he mumbled, nervously smoothing his hair. “You have no idea what’s good.”

“Yes, I do,” she countered, and rejected the photograph along with eight others. The remaining selection for her exhibition included the Neve Tzedek series and three other old pictures, from Rome and Paris: a narrow, red street in Rome with cars parked along both sides and an empty street corner at the edge, disappearing into white mist; an orange-red Roman wall, partially visible through a car’s dirty window; a couple leaning over the railings along the Seine, the young man’s face obscured by a ray of light.

The layers of red in the photographs mingled in my memory with the blouse she wore to the opening. It was silky red, with seashell buttons undone down to her cleavage, revealing a fair, freckled patch of skin. All evening, from the northeastern corner of the gallery where I stood near a blocked-up window, the red splotch stood out in my field of vision as it moved heavily through space like a drop of oil trapped in liquid.

Outside, an old poplar stood in the center of the courtyard, a reminder of something else that had once stood in this spot. It was a chilly weekday evening in early September. The verandas were wide-open; westerly breezes lightly rattled the broken windowpanes of the corner café, emitting delicate hit-and-run scents of jasmine, orange blossom, and sea salt.

“Lovely,” she had said when we had arrived earlier, before everyone else, and looked up to the top of the weary, illuminated city hall, the dense sky hanging darkly above. Her long neck was stiff and tilted, aimed in an odd angle upward and forward, with the voracity of an ostrich. When she straightened her gaze, brushed a strand of hair away and tucked it behind her ear, her round forehead produced a kind of pearly sheen, projecting the soft light of a covered lampshade over her face.

She had never been so beautiful, so in love, or so in “that state,” as she called it. “That state” was a busy, throbbing infusion of something yearning, like helium, which launched her out of her skin and propelled her upward. She started painting her lips with plump, wine-colored lipstick.

“It looks like congealed blood,” I said once, watching her image in the mirror as she put her makeup on. She laughed, the lipstick missed her lip and she drew a thick strip up to her nose. “Look what you made me do.”

*   *   *

Three or four evenings a week, on her way out, she’d prepare herself by putting on makeup, changing from jeans and T-shirt into the uniform. “What uniform are you talking about, Ofri?” she asked. “The female one,” I said. “You could at least stop dressing up as a female.” She came over and rapped my chin with her finger. “Femininity is not a disease, Ofri; it’s not typhoon fever, like you think it is.”

“Typhoid, typhoid fever,” I corrected her. She wasn’t listening; she’d remembered something, a dream she had yesterday. “You and I were in a cave, a closed-up space like a cave, with mildew on the walls and a strange, shiny floor. When I looked down, I saw that the ground was made of ice, and then you suddenly fell into it, with half your body inside, breaking through the ice. I watched you sink, and suddenly I said to you, in English, ‘I can drown you.’ As soon as I said it, something bothered me, as if I’d made a grammatical error, as if you can’t say that. I thought I should have said, ‘I could have drowned you.’ Don’t you think that’s weird, Ofri?”

“Dreams are weird,” I said, then paused. “What’s going to happen?”

She put on her new high heels and squeezed into a narrow skirt, smoothing down the creases over her thighs. “With what?”

“All this, everything you’ve created here.”

“I’m not thinking about what’s going to happen, Ofri, but I know perfectly well what I don’t want.”

“What’s that?”

“A life in which you mortgage the present for some foggy future. This is what’s happening, and this is what I’ll take.”

As she left, Mims and I were watching the Ninja Turtles on video with his head in my lap and his legs waving in the air, rubbing against the wall. “Bye sweetie, sleep well.” She leaned over him and kissed his lips. He wiped his mouth off with the back of his hand, his eyes glued to the screen. She was hurt. “Why do you wipe your mouth off when I kiss you?” He pointed at Raphael: “Look, Ofra!”

“Tell me,” she urged him. “I’m talking to you.”

“What?” He looked up at her with wonder. “Why do you wipe your lips off when Mommy kisses you?”

“It’s wet,” he said, and turned back to the movie.

We watched television for over an hour, and at the end of the movie we rewound it to the beginning. He put his legs on my lap with his head turned the other way on the pillow and faced the screen sideways. He kept forcing his droopy eyelids open as his hand tightened and loosened its grip on the edge of the couch, until he fell asleep with his head hanging down from the pillow.

I carried him to bed, boiled some water in the electric kettle, and forgot about it until it got cold; then I boiled it again. When I finally sat down with a cup of coffee, took my shoes off, and started reading through my adviser’s comments on the first draft of my thesis, I was overcome with exhaustion. I lay down, covered my face with the pillow, and followed the winding path of my thoughts.

“Ofra,” a voice woke me; I sensed a gaze that must have been on me for several minutes. I jumped up. “Go back to sleep,” Udi said. “Do you want a blanket?” Instead of bringing one, he sat on the sofa beside me. We watched the final news broadcast of the day without moving; it was almost midnight. We stared at the waving flag on the screen as the national anthem played in the background to signal the end of programming. “Did she tell you what’s going on?” he asked finally.

I nodded. His large smooth hands rested on one another; they suggested certain imaginary scenes, filled with life and cinematic motion: the street, the taxi, the building, the entrance, the room, the street. She clicks down the street, unpracticed in her high heels, wobbling slightly, holds up one hand to hail a taxi, smoothes out her skirt as she gets in, tells the driver whatever she tells him, stares out the window at the promenade lights, the sea, remembers, takes out a compact (she doesn’t have one), fixes her makeup, looks out again; her nylon stockings rub against each other beneath the skirt, inner thigh touching inner thigh, knee touching knee as she gets out of the taxi, hands over the money through the window, waits for change; her gaze strays down the desolate Jaffa street then suddenly stops short, afraid, cutting off the chain of events.

*   *   *

“Stay with me, Ofri,” she says one night when she comes by my place. “Don’t leave now.”

I don’t answer. I feel my cheeks burning and hold up the back of my hand to cool them. “Don’t you think there’s something degrading about all this?” I finally ask.

“Degrading for who?”

“For me. It’s voyeuristic.”

“There’s nothing degrading about it, Ofri. Everything’s out in the open, there’s none of that bourgeois crap of keeping things hidden.”

“Actually, they’ve come up with a few good ideas, the bourgeoisie.” I can’t resist.

“Such as?” Her face takes on an expression of excessive outrage and stupidity.

I hand her the jacket, purse, and shoes. “All right, princess, go home now. It’s enough for today.”

*   *   *

Udi is waiting when she gets home, lying on the couch or having a snack in the kitchen, poring over the paper, staining it with his greasy fingers. She hurries to the bedroom, undresses, and puts on her tatty house clothes. She joins him and sits with crossed legs on the straight-backed chair facing him. She reaches out to his plate, wipes up the crumbs, eats them, then wipes up some more, a routine overture to their late-night conversation.

Three pairs of hands knead and grope at these long nighttime exchanges. From one set of hands to another in a random sequence—her to me, me to him, him to her, then back to me—we pass around months upon months, more than a year, a length of time that is never early or late, with no now or soon, time that becomes space, a drunken spaceship.

The boy is the time, the continuum along which perceptible change occurs, the occurrence that does have a sooner and a later. He goes to preschool, comes back from preschool, gets winter viruses, stops eating vegetable puree, grows to like meatballs, makes friends, keeps his pacifier and the pillow.

He appears sometimes at night as they sit in the kitchen. Quiet as a lamb, he stands in the doorway in his fluffy pajamas and turns his eyes up to the light until they notice him. She holds her arms out. “Come here. Come to Mommy.” He climbs onto her lap, drenched with urine, and holds on to her long curl, the one that always escapes from her ponytail. He wraps it around his finger, sucks on it, and rests. Dreams emerge from beneath his droopy eyelids like the crack of light under the door.

“I’d pay a small fortune to know what he dreams about,” Udi says.

Sarah smiles and burrows her cheek in his curls. She feels his little fingers wriggling as if they are counting something over and over again. “We’re thinking of moving in together,” she says.

“When?”

“When he finds another job. We’ll rent a place when he gets a decent job.”

“Wait a while, don’t do something you’ll regret.”

“It’s not a matter of regret, Udi,” she says, and looks away. “It’s not that at all.”

“Then what’s the big rush? Give it time.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?” He suddenly turns red and slams his fist on the table. “That too is a matter of choice.” The child opens his eyes for a minute, stares at Udi, and closes them again.

She cries; murky tears, diluted with makeup and eyeliner, seep into the child’s fair curls. “It hurts when I’m not with him. My whole body aches when he’s not close,” she sniffles.

His head drops onto the table and rests on his crossed forearms. “Don’t push this to the brink, Sarah.”

“Then help me.”

“How? How can I help you?”

“I don’t know.”

He pauses. “Do you want me to leave, would it be easier for you if I left?”

She shakes her head.

He walks over, gently separates the child’s hand from her hair, and carries him to his bed.

She puts on water for tea and absentmindedly holds her hand in the white, hot steam bursting from the kettle.

“I changed him,” Udi says. “He was full of pee.”

They dip biscuits in the tea.

“This is the first thing I’ve eaten all day, I think.”

“You’ll collapse if you go on like this, with the coffee and the cigarettes.”

She gets annoyed. “Why are you so worried about me all the time?”

“I’m worried about myself, first of all. And Mims.”

“Leave him out of this.”

*   *   *

But she doesn’t. At four in the afternoon, on their way home from preschool, they take a taxi and stop by Marwan’s. Sometimes he’s out. She knocks and knocks at the door until the old lady from the apartment across the way looks through the peephole, buzzes them in, and stares at them from behind the door chain. She takes out a piece of sour candy from the pocket of her housecoat and holds it out for Mims through the door. He hides his face in Sarah’s shirt, afraid to look.

“She’s not a witch, she’s a nice lady. She’s very old,” Sarah entreats him as they go out into the street and head to the shabby park opposite the building to wait for him there. “She has hair coming out of her nose,” Mims says. He tastes the candy with the tip of his tongue and pulls back. He wants to swing on the crooked swings in the park. Two young boys are sitting on the swings, talking. Mims stands and watches them, waiting for them to get off. He stands there for a long time, staring with endless patience, waiting for his turn. Sarah makes up her mind not to interfere, appraising the situation from afar until “it’s no longer tolerable.” She goes over to them. “Why don’t you let him have a go for a while? He’s just a kid.” They exchange a puzzled look, shrug their shoulders, and grudgingly slide off the swings. “Come on, sweetie,” she calls Mims. She turns around, and her breath stops: the child is gone. A moment later she sees him on the sidewalk across the street, falling on Marwan with a hug. She hurries over to them and forgets to be happy. “Don’t you ever cross the street on your own!” she scolds him. They go upstairs to the apartment. Marwan carries Mims in his arms, and the boy throws bits of paper on Sarah from above. He is pleased when she shakes them off her hair and pretends to be insulted.

The apartment is quiet. The landlady is at work, and her two grown daughters are asleep in front of the television in the living room. They tiptoe to his room, being careful not to wake the girls. Marwan opens the glass-paned door that separates the room from the porch, with tape stuck over the cracks lengthwise and widthwise. Sarah peers over the railing and fearfully examines the deep holes in the concrete that expose the iron shell beneath. She reaches out to him, touches his chest with her fingertips. He pulls her hand to him, kisses her fingers one by one, and looks up at her. “Ahalan, ya Sarah,” he says in his warm, deep voice.

He makes coffee for the two of them and pours grapefruit juice for Mims. The boy makes a face. “I hate this.”

“I know, I forgot to buy grape juice again. Maybe I’ll go down to get some?”

“Absolutely not,” Sarah protests. “He doesn’t have to drink anything. He’ll wait.”

Mims goes into the room and wanders around there for a long time, making his small sounds.

Marwan puts his hand on her thigh. “I was thinking about you all day.”

She crosses her arms over her chest and hugs her shoulders with her eyes closed. “What were you thinking?”

“I can’t remember now,” he says, and runs his finger from the inside of her thigh to her knee, along the inner seam of her trousers. Then he gets up, leans over her, blows warm breath on her face, puts out his tongue, and runs it over her lips meticulously, like lipstick. She puts her hand on the back of his neck and presses his head to the hollow of her neck. “Here,” she says.

“Marwan,” a squeaky voice comes from the doorway. They disentangle abruptly; the child is standing there holding Marwan’s makeup box.

“Do you want to do like we did yesterday?” Marwan laughs. Mims nods and waits with the box on his lap. “I need someone to hold the mirror for me. Will you do it?” Marwan asks.

Mims lifts the mirror up like a flag. “Lower.” Marwan steadies his arm and arranges the jars of face paint. He starts with a white foundation. “A happy clown or a sad clown?” he asks Mims.

Mims ponders for a minute. “Happy and sad.”

Sarah smokes, her gaze wanders down to the street, over to them, and back again. She watches a police car down the block. “There’s something going on,” she says. “Police.”

“There’s always something going on,” Marwan says. He stretches his lips and outlines them with a red pencil. “And when there isn’t, someone always makes sure there is. Action.”

“Do you know the story about Mr. Grape Juice?” Mims inquires.

“You mean the kind I forgot to buy for you?” Marwan laughs.

Sarah interferes. “Marwan doesn’t know the story about Mr. Grape Juice. They didn’t read him that one when he was little.”

“Why not?” Mims asks. “Didn’t they want you to know that story?”

Marwan straightens up with his lips drooping toward his chin. He sticks a finger in his nose and starts limping toward the room. He pretends to fall flat on his face in the doorway. Mims glows. “He walks like Grandma Nava!”

“Like Grandma Nava? That’s no good, no good at all,” Marwan mutters to himself. “We’ll fix that soon.”

Then they blow up balloons and burst them with pins one after the other, chasing them around the room. Sarah can’t stand it. “I’m leaving if you don’t stop,” she threatens.

“Please, right this way.” Marwan opens the door for her and takes a deep bow. Mims laughs until tears run from his eyes. “Please, right this way!” he imitates him. She stands in the doorway and smiles hesitantly. “Do you really want me to go?” she whispers to Marwan.

He pushes her outside, lightly kicks her behind, and throws a pile of coats and scarves from the nearby coat rack on her head. “Go!”

Her face falls. “I don’t like this game, it’s enough.” She walks over to Mims and wipes the remnants of paint off his face with a Kleenex. “We’re going home.”

Marwan turns grave. “What’s the matter?”

“We have to go,” she says nervously.

“Wait.” He holds her shoulder. “Will you come tonight?”

“I don’t know.” She looks away.

 

 

 

She spreads her toes apart to paint them with nail polish. “I’m going with him to Shfaram at some point, to visit his family. We may go next week.”

“They’ll be thrilled,” I say from the rug, where I am lying on my stomach at her feet. I examine a pencil stub under the sofa coated in spiderwebs and thick dust. “Exactly what will you be going as—a family friend?”

“I’ll be going as myself, that’s all. Why do you always have to define who and what you are?”

I looked at her lips—slightly parted in that self-righteous expression of indignity she had—and her aquiline nose. Her narrow face suddenly widened, spreading out toward the hair pulled back behind her ears, shedding its sallow hue—like the skin on boiled milk—to reveal the full, radiating layer of ivory beneath it; for the first time, I saw her as invulnerable.

Over time, that sense took on the validity of an irrefutable certainty; it turned against me, embodying a solid distance that had come between us and parted us, like a letter of dismissal.

*   *   *

“No one dismissed anyone, Ofri,” she said at the airport cafeteria when she came to see me off. She nibbled the burned edges of her toasted sandwich and tried to extract the crumbs that had fallen down her turtleneck. “Some things are not based on relationships of power.”

“Such as?” I said defiantly.

“Love.” She looked up from the turtleneck, and I was startled by the dull shimmer and intense, dry heat of her eyes. “When there is love, power stops being relevant,” she said.

“I don’t think so,” I said, rejecting her gaze more than her words.

“How would you know? Have you ever loved anyone?”

A group of Hadassah women pushed through the narrow aisle on their way to the self-service counter and knocked Sarah’s cup off the edge of the table. “I loved you,” I said.

She bent over to the floor and soaked up the puddle of coffee with paper napkins. “That’s true.” She straightened up and wiped her fingers on her sweater.

We walked to the escalator leading up to the departure lounge and lingered near the vending machine. Despite my protests, she insisted on equipping me with a selection of candy bars, shoving them quickly into my bag.

“Have you heard from him in the last few months?” I asked.

“From who?”

“From Marwan. How is he?”

“He shows up at the volunteers office every few weeks. He’s okay, I think.” She stopped suddenly. “He’s not the issue at all, Ofri.”

“How quickly you forget.” I held out my passport at the gate and looked for the boarding pass, which, for some reason, had fallen out.

She grabbed my elbow, pulling me back. “I haven’t forgotten anything, you dope. Do you really think that the past and memory exist as separate entities, unaffected by the present? If I’ve forgotten anything, Ofri, it’s only in the nostalgic sense, that’s all.”

“Are you going up or aren’t you?” the security officer snapped. “You’re holding up the line.”

We looked at each other, our arms hanging at our sides. “Take care of yourself,” she said as we hugged, swaying from side to side a little. “Behave yourself, like a lady.”

“What do you mean ‘like a lady’?” I laughed.

She squeezed both my cheeks between her hands and looked solemnly into my eyes. “Kindly, sensibly, with tact and humor. Like a lady.”

I thought of those words a week later, at Plessis Belleville, when her letter arrived: “I think I’m getting better as time goes on, mainly because now I have a routine and there is something protective about a routine. Getting up at a set time, taking Mims to kindergarten, picking him up from kindergarten, cooking, cleaning, reading, or pretending to read. Sometimes when I can’t fall asleep at night and I think about what happened (not in a detailed, reckoning sort of way—more as if the whole thing has taken on an abstract form and become a kind of fleck in my consciousness), the shame devastates me. I’m not sure what or who it is that I am ashamed in front of (myself, perhaps, but that’s too simple and moralistic to be true). But what bothers me is not so much the politics of the emotion but the enfeeblement. I think about that a lot, about the fact that unlike certain characters in those great novels you and I loved, who are changed as a result of the blows they suffer, who learn something—all that bullshit about educating and being educated—unlike them, when I look around (including at myself) what I see is something else. In short, Ofri, what I’m trying to say is that I didn’t come out better at the other end, I didn’t learn anything from the blows, and I realize that people who suffer blows usually emerge weaker, more tired and bitter, and, above all, more miserable. What can I say—that I did the best I could? That’s what you say when you fail. What did I do to my baby, Ofri? Why couldn’t I keep it? That time I spent in the hospital, those two days. You weren’t there.”

 

 

 

The rabbi asks us to come up to the main room of the cemetery; the cremation will last about fifty minutes. I take over from Maman, slipping my arm through Marcelle’s. A tall, steep, wide staircase towers before us, showered with capering drops of blue, red, and gold light pouring down from the stained-glass windows above, which, in turn, are refracted in the recesses among the mosaic tiles of the high Gothic dome. We climb up slowly. The baroness and I subordinate ourselves to Marcelle’s heavy pace and mummy like expression.

They’re waiting for us upstairs, already seated on the plastic chairs set out in a semicircle along the walls. Henri’s legs are spread out, his head resting on the yellowish wall; he pats the reserved chair beside him for Marcelle. Maman wipes her forehead and neck, sweltering. “Like a loaf of bread, they shoved him in there. Like a cake,” she blurts into her handkerchief.

With his large yarmulke drooping down over his forehead, revealing prominent gray eyebrows, Rabbi Kolman begins in French. “We have gathered here today, dear friends, to accompany our dear Michel on his final path. For ‘What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?’” he continues in Hebrew and gestures at Alain to quickly hand out the French translation. “‘One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits. All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. All things are full of labor; man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.’”

He pauses his nasal recitation every so often to wipe his soft, sweaty palms on a gray handkerchief, struggling with his bandaged right middle finger as he turns the thin pages.

“‘Is there anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new? It hath been already of old time, which was before us. There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after…’”

On her chair beside me, Geneviève tries to suppress a coughing attack by covering her mouth. She holds her hand over her mouth until her painted eyes pop out of their holes, leap through her glasses, and float up high above, toward the narrow windows, which look distant and hopeless like peepholes.

“‘I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit. That which is crooked cannot be made straight; and that which is wanting cannot be numbered. I commanded with mine own heart, saying, Lo, I am come in great estate, and have gotten more wisdom than all they that have been before me in Jerusalem; yea, my heart had great experience of wisdom and knowledge. And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.’”

He spits the last word at us, almost reprimanding, slanting his gaze at Marcelle, who is kicking her shoes off. Her feet are swollen from the heat radiating from the floor and the walls.

“‘It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart. Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better.’”

He takes a breath and then continues, glancing at the large clock on the wall opposite him. The congregants shed their coats and sweaters; some convert the prayer pages into fans. The heating system in the building is operating on full power with no thermostat, emitting an awful arid heat, which dries out our skin and cracks our lips.

“‘Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? For thou dost not inquire wisely concerning this. Wisdom is good with an inheritance: and by it there is profit to them that see the sun. For wisdom is a defense, and money is a defense: but the excellency of knowledge is, that wisdom giveth life to them that have it. Consider the work of God: for who can make that straight, which he hath made crooked?… That which is far off, and exceeding deep, who can find it out?’”

The rabbi stops abruptly and looks up from his book at the baroness, who suddenly stands in front of him grasping her forehead, pouring with sweat, her clinging blouse revealing the lace border of her bra. She sways a little, then collapses silently at his feet; the heavy chestnut cascade of her hair spreads out over his shoes. The congregants stare at the floor with amazement for a brief moment. Alain and one of the Air France people carry her outside.

“‘For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them. This wisdom have I seen also under the sun, and it seemed great unto me. There was a little city, and few men within it; and there came a great king against it, and besieged it, and built great bulwarks against it. Now there was found in it a poor wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city; yet no man remembered that same poor man.’”

Oncle Henri straightens up in his chair, grasps Marcelle’s arm, and nervously jerks his head at the doorway, motioning for her to see. Two service boys in uniform are standing there, one of whom holds a gilded urn hanging from a chain, impatiently dangling it to and fro. During the remaining ten minutes he stares with wide eyes at the two boys, at the dangling urn. Blue veins quiver on both his temples, supporting the terrible widening of his eyes; his eyelids seem to be pulled up by tongs.

“‘Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days. Give a portion to seven, and also to eight; for thou knowest not what evil shall be upon the earth. If the clouds be full of rain, they empty themselves upon the earth: and if the tree fall toward the south, or toward the north, in the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be. He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.… In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand: for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good. Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun: But if a man live many years, and rejoice in them all; yet let him remember the days of darkness; for they shall be many. All that cometh is vanity. Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes: but know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment. Therefore remove sorrow from thy heart, and put away evil from thy flesh: for childhood and youth are vanity.’”

The rabbi raises his arm to motion for the congregants to rise and concludes in a great, ceremonial voice: “‘To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; A time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; A time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; A time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; A time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; A time of war, and a time of peace.’”

As the rabbi utters the last phrase, Oncle Henri rushes to the doorway and accosts the two service boys with the urn. “Couldn’t you have waited downstairs until we were finished? You were in such a hurry to come up here and put that … that thing in front of his mother’s eyes?”

“My son, be calm,” the rabbi thunders from behind him, placing his chubby palm on Henri’s bald head.

Oncle Henri shakes him off and looks at him with hatred as he wipes his face.

“And now, when you go home: hard-boiled eggs,” the rabbi’s voice sings out. “You shall eat hard-boiled eggs. It is a great mitzvah to eat hard-boiled eggs in a house of mourning. Like the egg that is round, so our destiny is round, a never-ending cycle in the world. As the egg has no mouth, so the mourning has no mouth,” the rabbi emphasizes as he raps his fingers rhythmically on Oncle Henri’s chest. He must leave now, he explains to Marcelle; he is not permitted to be present during the scattering of the ashes, he regrets.

Downstairs, in the clear, sweet garden air, an awkward fifteen minutes ensues. Oncle Henry, Alain, a couple of friends from Air France, and the two crematorium service boys with the urn debate the interpretations of Michel’s demand that his ashes be scattered “in nature.” “The question is, what nature?” Alain wonders out loud. “There are a thousand and one kinds of nature in the world: oceans, forests, fields, mountains. The question is, what did he mean?”

Oncle Henri is angry. “If he had wanted one of those, he would have said so. He didn’t specify any forest or ocean, he just said ‘nature.’”

The service boys politely interfere in low voices. “The accepted custom among them is to scatter the ashes on the farthest lawn, near the northern wall surrounding Père Lachaise. In that respect,” they stress, “the precise wishes of the deceased are of no consequence because that is the only location where it is customary to scatter the ashes of the deceased.”

Oncle Henri loses his temper and demands to see the manager. “What do you mean, the ‘wishes of the deceased are of no consequence’?”

The friends from Air France try to calm things down, proposing a compromise; in any event, they say, the family can take the ashes with them and scatter them wherever they see fit. The service boys confirm that. “Would you prefer to take them with you, Monsieur?” they address Oncle Henri.

Refusing to discuss anything further, he briskly walks away, waving his hand and mumbling. “‘Take them with you’… like some take-out service. Soon they’ll be wrapping them in aluminum foil to keep them warm. ‘Take them with you’… the bastards.”

Alain is forced to settle the affair on his own. “We’ll scatter the ashes on the lawn, and that’s that,” he decrees.

The service boys in their scarlet-and-gold uniforms lead the little procession across the paths of Père Lachaise to the lawn. Alain and I drive along the peripheral road and park close to the lawn, “so if someone happens to feel ill, we can get in and leave.”

We wander around the tombstones while we wait for everyone. The brown chimney tops protrude from behind the giant trees in the distance against a backdrop of cool pale-blue sky and two milky streaks left by jets. Alain inspects the inscriptions on the tombstones, reading a few out loud for me. He suddenly stops and holds his stomach. “I don’t feel well.” I get a bottle of water from the car, but he refuses it, unable to swallow anything. He sits down on the curbstone and buries his head in his lap. “I feel like I’m inside someone else’s nightmare, like someone is directing me,” he says in a muffled voice. A green leaf blower rambles noisily down the paths of Père Lachaise, blowing yellow and orange leaves into soft piles along the high curbsides; they are promptly collected by two dark-skinned workmen with rakes. The procession rounds the path up the hill, meandering behind the two service boys in their official uniforms. They, in turn, follow the green leaf blower and the two workmen and adapt their steps to a deliberately slow pace, their pale chins jutting out with an expression of purity and devotion.

They pass by us on their way to the lawn without glancing in our direction. Marcelle is practically being dragged up the path, between Oncle Henri and Philippe; two long runs climb up her nylon stockings. The lawn is very green and very wet; the sprinklers have just been turned on. We all trample through the puddles covering the adjacent paved square and arrange ourselves in a long row to watch—strange, ceremonial witnesses to a strange agricultural ceremony. The two service boys pull out a wide plug from the bottom of an urn, exposing a filter with large holes. They slowly walk back and forth across the lawn, swinging the urn with the filter and scattering the ashes like fertilizer, methodically covering the entire area with the powder. As they are about to finish, a flock of gray pigeons suddenly swoops down to the lawn and flutters through the spray of water from the sprinklers. A moment later they take flight, furiously beating their wings and screeching loudly, alarmed by the fire-engine sirens that suddenly rip through the air in the street beyond the cemetery wall.

 

 

 

She refers to Marwan as the kid—“the kid’s coming,” “the kid’s going,” “the kid’s thinking.”

“He’s twenty-four years old,” I protest. “Twenty-four is not a kid.”

“Yes it is, Ofri. Look closely at his thin, childlike bones, look at his shoulders.”

I examine the photograph. “That kind of bone structure comes from poor nutrition during childhood.”

She snatches the photo away from me. “You witch. I won’t tell you anything anymore.” She buries the photo under the pillow, turns to face the wall, and pretends to be asleep.

I pinch her waist. “Move over, make room for me.” She moves so that her forehead almost touches the wall.

The books on the shelf across the room are in disarray. I am overcome with an urge to go and push back the few that are sticking out, perched on the edge of the shelf. I do nothing. “What does he say about me?” I ask.

“Who?” she says sleepily.

“The kid.”

“He doesn’t.”

“He was the youngest of six children in one of Shfaram’s most distinguished families. He was idolized.”

“What did you stick in distinguished for?” Sarah jumps up. “What are you, the government spokesperson?”

“Let me finish the sentence,” I beg her.

“Well, if that’s the way you’re going to start, you’d better not finish.”

“You try and describe him then,” I say. “Let’s see you.”

She throws the blanket off, sits up in bed with her legs crossed, holds her ankles, and sways her upper body back and forth, rhythmically. “He’s the youngest of the family, and ever since he was born his parents and sisters have treasured him like a Torah scroll. He’s had nothing but love in that home. You only have to see him doing something—walking, talking—to know right away that this man was loved very much.”

We sit silently for a long time. Sarah turns on the fan and then switches it off. She nibbles some old crackers she finds in the kitchen.

Hesitantly, I ask, “What turns you on more—that he’s young, or that he’s an Arab?”

She shoves me against the pillow and crouches over me on all fours like a cat, breathing. “What irritates you more, Ofri?”

 

 

 

I’d known her for years, since the time when I’d first started to think for myself. Our long-standing friendship, my independence of thought, and, above all, the connection between the two, amounts to a profound lie, though this perception is in itself a lie.

We had gone through a lot, were tempted into believing that our childhood alliance was a legacy we would not exchange for anything, that would accompany us, grow and take on new forms. We believed that the distortions of consciousness and feeling that come with time were, ultimately, trivial. We believed in ultimately: another lie.

The closeness—what we termed the intimacy—evolved of its own accord, untended, with no control or discipline, confusing violence with warmth. Years after we had given up on of ever reaching something “better”—we would thrash the life out of almost any other affinity or issue that came between us—what remained was the curiosity that guided my hand, and her eyes, over the paper. It was not the “future” that sustained our attention, but rather the question of what the future would be composed of. “The fabric and not the form,” Sarah said, unwittingly trampling on what was, for her language and imagery and for me, reality.

“You’re not as ugly as you make yourself out to be, Ofri,” she consoled me.

We were jostling each other in front of the narrow mirror in her room, trying on outfits for the year-end school party. I looked like a large stick of bubblegum in the saccharine-pink pantsuit that Maman had bought for me at HaTeumim Fashion downtown. I plucked up my courage and looked: wretchedness was reflected in my eyes, caught in the corners of my mouth, and glowed from the gleeful pink. The sky fell in on me.

I undid the buttons. “I’m not going.”

“You can’t not go.” She sat down next to me. “You have to play Hannah Senesh—you’re the heroine.”

I sprawled on the bed and pulled the blanket up to my chin. “Tell them I’m sick. Dead. I don’t care what you tell them.”

“You’re supposed to die in the play, not here.” She snatched the blanket away. “Just wear ordinary clothes, wear whatever you want, but you have to go.”

I turned my face to the wall, reached out, and scratched it with my nails. “It’s not the clothes.”

“What do you care what people think, Ofri?” she said after a long pause, fiddling with something in her hands. “You know that if anyone so much as makes a squeak, I’ll poke their eyes out with a knitting needle. You know that, Ofri, right?” She leaned over my shoulder and brushed the hair back from my face. “Right?”

I nodded, persuaded by the knitting needle image.

I was like a hunter in her presence, on the lookout for the moment when that powerful, violent image would appear. I held my breath, waiting. Over the years, that anticipation took on the taste of addiction. “To what?” I wrote in my notebook. “To feeling or the semblance of life.”

“‘Feeling or the semblance of life’?” she read out loud, looking up from the notebook. “Is that what you think, Ofri?”

I had come back from work in the middle of the day and found her at my desk, nosing around.

“I have no idea whether that’s what I think. It’s what I wrote.” I pulled the notebook away. “Why are you reading this without my permission?”

“No reason, I was bored,” she said, and got up to walk around the room. She opened the blind, then closed it, ran her finger over the landlady’s art-deco lamp. “Dusty. It’s unlike you, Ofri, to have dust.” Her upper lip was swollen and split, colored orange from antiseptic cream, and her right shoulder was bandaged; we had been in the ER until two in the morning.

In the darkness of the taxi on the way home, stretched out on the backseat with her head on my shoulder, I had asked, “Who did this?”

She was quiet for a moment. “I’ll stay at your place tonight, okay?”

I picked up Prizzi’s Honor from the video store at her request. Later that night, she lay drowsing on the couch in front of the movie. “Don’t ask me that question, Ofri. Ever.”

I stood between her and the screen, deliberately blocking her view. “Who did this to you?”

She opened her eyes for a second and then closed them again. “Someone who loves me very much.”

*   *   *

I left before she woke up the next morning, careful not to make any noise. I met Udi on his way to my apartment, wearing too much aftershave. “She’s still asleep,” I said. We went to a nearby café and waited for them to turn on the espresso machine.

“How’s she doing?” he asked after a long silence, cracking his knuckles.

“Stop it.” I rapped his hand.

He gazed through the café’s large window. “Do you think she’ll see me?”

“Why do you ask?” I was suspicious.

“I don’t know.” He shrugged his shoulders twice, once too often. “I was just wondering.”

A sleepy waitress brought us the coffee. He took a bill out of his wallet without looking, put it on the table, and got up. “You haven’t had your coffee yet,” I said.

“I have to run.” He turned to the door. Then he changed his mind and came back. “Make sure she’s safe, Ofra,” he said, and looked away to the next table.

“From whom?” I asked.

He pursed his lips, fingering two or three bristles on his chin. “We’ll talk,” he said.

In the afternoon, Sarah and I went to pick up Mims from kindergarten. She turned up the collar of her flight jacket to cover her mouth; one foot dragged slightly as she walked. She stopped at the corner near the kindergarten. “I’ll wait here for you,” she said. “Mims is one thing, but I can’t take those teachers with their gossip.”

I found him in a distant corner of the playground, lying on his stomach in the sand, closely observing a ladybird, chin resting on both hands, chubby legs crossed one over the other. I stopped a few steps away and watched as he mumbled something. “Get out, you hateful creep, or I’ll smash your face in!” he then said in a deep voice followed by a squeaky falsetto: “Have pity on me, Michelangelo, I won’t come back to town, I promise.” The deep voice thundered again, “Leprous dog! Woe to he who believes a word you say.”

“Mims…,” I called softly.

He turned around, surprised, and looked beyond me. “Where’s Sarah?” he asked.

“She’s waiting outside.” I put his sandals on his feet.

From afar, we could see her sitting on the curb outside one of the buildings, half concealed behind a bush. He went over and touched the bandage on her shoulder with the tip of his finger, then the cut on her upper lip. “Does it hurt?” She nodded and kissed his fingers. We walked to Sheinkin Park to look for Celia, his friend, stopping at the grocery on the way to buy candy. He inspected the selection of chocolate bars for a long time, oscillating between two different kinds.

“Take one of each,” Sarah suggested.

He turned his strange eyes on her, a look of astonishment on his face, then grabbed two identical bars. “We both have to have the same kind, me and Celia,” he explained.

The park was relatively empty, blazing in the sudden mid-autumn sunshine. Sarah and I collapsed on the parched grassy mound and watched Mims walk to his regular outpost near the playground area, where he waited.

“I can’t get that Celia out of his head,” she said, digging a hole in the lawn. I could barely hear her against the deafening waterfall of the horrible fountain.

“What’s her real name, that girl?” I asked.

“Meital, I think, or Revital. Poor thing, she has no idea what he wants from her.”

*   *   *

Every day in the afternoon we had to take him to the park to see Celia. We would wait for her until it was almost dark. She was twelve, a wooden sort of girl with a wispy ponytail that reached down to her behind. “Celia!” he said when he first saw her helping two children go down the steep slide. “Celia! Celia!” he called after her, and proceeded to follow her wherever she went and lavish her with gifts and candy.

In the evenings, after the park, he would go back to the other Celia—Alice’s pallid sister in his Alice in Wonderland tape. “The real Celia,” Sarah noted emphatically.

“No, she’s the real one,” Mims protested, practically sobbing. “She’s the real Celia.”

For about a week, the lovesick toddler amused the bustling, bony girl, until she grew tired of him. “No more Celia, do you hear?” she scolded him, then ran away and hid behind the fountain’s concrete wall, or climbed up to the top with the rough kids to splash water and throw stones.

“She’s no Celia, that one—she’s more of a Pippi Longstocking.” Sarah was impressed. “Celia is a well-bred British girl. This one’s about a hair’s breadth from having a parole officer.”

When she didn’t show up in the park for a few days, he broke down and demanded that we go and visit her. We all went to her house one afternoon, Sarah, Udi, Mims, and I, and Marwan, who met us on the way and came along. Udi went up to the third-floor apartment with Mims while we waited downstairs and sat on the steps munching on sunflower seeds. Half an hour later, they came down. “Well?” Sarah asked anxiously.

“She wasn’t home, so we sat for a while with her little sister and her mother,” Udi informed us.

“Are you disappointed, baby?” Sarah stroked the back of Mims’s neck. He shook his head; he was holding something against his striped T-shirt. “What’s that?” She pulled the photo from his hands.

“Her mother gave him a picture of her,” Udi explained.

When we got home, he asked for some chocolate milk and placed the photograph in front of him on the kitchen table. Then he took the straw out of the cup and let it drip on the photo. He dipped it back in the cup and drizzled again. “Why are you doing that?” Sarah grabbed the cup. He sat there looking down at the dirty table surface. “Just because,” he said. “That’s not an answer,” Sarah argued.

“Stop it, leave him alone,” Marwan said and went over to Mims. “Give me five, pal!” He held his hand out. Mims perked up a little, and a mischievous smile crept over his face as he pounded the outstretched hand over and over again.

 

 

 

That was when they were in the middle of the affair, she and the kid. All of twenty-four years old, he moved as if he had been through enough for at least five lives—rarely surprised by himself or others. Weary. Yet there was something airy and weightless in his weariness; it never came across as bitter or demanding. At its core was a kind of willingness to let go at a moment’s notice and easily move on to something else or disappear into vagueness.

He had begun his studies at the University of Haifa but moved to Tel Aviv when he craved the big city. He worked at the check-in desk at the Sheraton Hotel and also took over a friend’s gig as a birthday party clown every other weekend. He had had no contact with his father since the age of fifteen or so. “He cut me off. He cut me off a long time ago,” he said once.

Sarah wasn’t following. “You mean he puts you down?”

“I mean he cut me off—as in erased, buried, discarded,” Marwan explained.

He spoke wonderful Hebrew with almost no trace of an accent. We had a fight about that, too.

“That observation smacks of racism, Ofri,” Sarah claimed.

“What are you talking about? I’m just stating a fact. He speaks wonderful Hebrew.”

“That’s true,” she agreed. “But you wouldn’t bother to say that about an Israeli. That’s racism.”

“Marwan is Israeli, Sarah.”

“Don’t split hairs. It’s low.”

I backed into my corner, spinning thoughts to myself like a fat spider. She had finally produced the one thing we could not speak about; we could only tiptoe from one pothole to the next or just avoid it altogether: Marwan. Sometimes we saw eye to eye over this, Sarah and I, as we both observed her from a distance. She was caught, trapped in a tangle in which love was just one of the threads, binding her like ribbons tied around a gift. There were moments when she recognized this.

“More than moments, Ofri, don’t worry. I’m constantly struggling with the grotesque,” she said.

“What’s grotesque?” I asked.

“You know, the affair between the Jewish woman and the Arab, all that,” she said impatiently.

“Then let it go,” I said. “Cut it off right now.”

“Never, Ofri.” She turned to me, brandishing her eyeliner like a sword. “I’ll crawl through this mud as much as I have to, to find the diamond.”

I paused. “There’s a diamond?”

“There is,” she said.

They met twice a week at the workers’ rights organization for months before anything happened. The kid tried hard to teach her some basic Arabic for the volunteer work, so she could interview exploited employees. “Where do you live, what’s your identification number, where did you work, when did they stop paying you, who’s your employer.” She could never remember the phrases from one time to the next, explaining, “I’m incapable of grasping any foreign language that I didn’t hear as a child.”

“What did you hear as a child, other than Hebrew?” he asked. “A little Hungarian. My mother and grandma babbled in Hungarian,” she admitted sheepishly.

His thinness preoccupied her. She was always trying to fatten him up, appearing at the office with halvah, mangoes, bread, olives, and slices of mortadella from the butcher she passed on the way. He was picky with food. He would take a polite nibble, suspiciously taste a morsel of something, and finally just polish off the bread. She was unable to find out what he liked. “Forget it,” he dismissed her. “What’s so important about food?” “When you don’t eat, it’s important,” she argued. “But I do eat,” he defended himself. “I eat at the cafeteria in the university, and I make food at home. Just drop it.”

She wouldn’t. She went to Haggai to get her facts straight. “Could there be such a thing as an anorexic guy?” she asked cautiously.

“There could be anything you can think of,” Haggai said. “But the statistics are very low. Why do you ask?”

“No reason,” she said. “I just wanted to know.”

Udi glanced at me, pursing his lips in concentration.

After the office she brought him home. He was reluctant, didn’t want to get in the way. He finally gave in to her pleas. “Get in whose way?” Sarah implored. “Everyone’s dying to see you, especially Mims.” He pretended to be engrossed in the pile of paperwork in front of him, barely concealing a smile. “Dying, really dying?”

“Dying,” she confirmed.

“You’re a real character,” he said slowly, looking up. “A gem.”

*   *   *

The meals and the conversations went on until after midnight. Sarah insisted that I come, and made me sit in my regular place near the window. “Ofri will sit here,” she declared festively, surveying her guests with the satisfied delight of a hostess. Udi cooked and served the food, rarely interfering in the conversation. Once in a while he would disappear into Mims’s dark room and eavesdrop from afar.

“The best thing that could happen is for the grassroots leaders of the intifada to sever their ties with the PLO’s corrupt leadership. Arafat would sell them all for a bowl of lentils to save his own ass,” Sarah said.

“What are you talking about? The intifada leadership is the PLO, that’s where all the organizations and the fronts are represented. If you think the activists are working against the party line, you’re wrong,” said Shelly.

“Even so, there’s a lot of tension between the leadership in the territories and the organization in Tunis, don’t you think, Marwan?”

He was trying to clean a grease stain off his shirt, dipping a paper napkin in water and rubbing the fabric. “What?”

“Don’t you think there’s tension between the PLO and the leaders of the intifada?” she repeated impatiently, tapping her fingers on the table.

“I don’t know,” he said hesitantly. “I don’t really have an opinion.”

“What do you mean, you ‘don’t have an opinion’?” She was annoyed.

“I just don’t, you know. I don’t know enough about it.”

He looked at Udi, who had come back in the meantime and was standing at the sink rinsing scraps of food off the dishes. They half smiled as their eyes met for an instant. “The fact that Marwan is an Arab, Sarah, doesn’t make him an expert on the internal politics of the PLO,” Udi commented.

Her face turned red all the way to her earlobes. “I didn’t say he was an expert. We’re not experts either. What’s the big deal—only experts are allowed to have an opinion?”

“If only we knew what the intifada leadership was. No one really knows who or what they are,” Shelly reflected, continuing a lost train of thought.

Marwan stood up and shook the crumbs off his trousers. “I’ll be going now.”

“So soon?” Sarah blurted out, her eyes widening in disappointment.

Silence fell like a coin clanging in the dark. “I’ll go with you,” Shelly said finally.

*   *   *

We sit at the table for a long time afterward, destroying toothpicks.

“You could at least be discreet,” Udi says suddenly. “We don’t all have to see your underwear the whole time.”

“Discreet about what? What underwear?” she asks.

“The kid,” he says.

“What about him?”

“You’re crazy about him.”

“You’re imagining things,” she says, turning to me imploringly. “Ofri, tell him he’s imagining things, tell him.”

“You’re imagining things,” I say mechanically. “There’s nothing going on between them.”

“Yet,” Udi says. “There isn’t yet. There will be.”

“What’s the deal? Do you want him to stop coming here, is that it?” She looks straight ahead, blinking.

“I didn’t say that. I don’t believe in censorship.”

I study him closely as he says that, taking in his face, his thoughts. I think of him as one thinks of a circle of white.

At nights, working on my thesis, I’m suddenly overcome by a strange suffocation, as if I’d swallowed motor oil. I drink gallons of water and stare at a Jackson Pollock reproduction. In a kind of listless stupor, I comply with a fixed, monotonous refrain: Sarah is my friend, Sarah is my friend, Sarah is my friend, Sarah. The curtain rises—heavy, creaky—the stage is dusty and bare. Nothing has played on this stage for years, until today. Three figures move across it almost imperceptibly, wearing borrowed clothes. Udi holds a broomstick with one end thrust into his stomach, pushing it in, and the other jabbing at Sarah’s lower back, pushing forward: “Move, move.” They move slowly toward the stage door, very slowly, taking care not to dismantle the odd carriage they’ve assembled. The kid is there at the edge of the stage, clasping his hands, smiling helplessly.

*   *   *

The kid keeps on coming, twice a week, like clockwork. When he doesn’t come, Udi calls him up to find out what happened and urges him to visit them another day, any day. “We’re always at home.”

Udi hires him as an Arabic tutor. He catches on quickly.

The kid won’t take any money. “No payment between friends,” he declares. Udi won’t hear of it. “Friendship is one thing, and business is another. You live off this money.”

The kid digs in his heels. When Udi secretly slips folded bills into his coat pocket, he gives them back. Sarah is furious. “What are you doing putting money in his pocket as if he’s washing your hair at the hairdresser’s?”

“He won’t take it any other way,” Udi argues.

“Then respect the fact that he doesn’t want to,” she barks.

The Arabic lessons are a pretext. Udi knows it; the kid knows it. Udi is ablaze with a cold flame: he has a project. The kid is the project. Udi studies the project like you take apart an old radio to figure out where the sounds are coming from.

“You’re in love,” he grates at Sarah. “You’re afraid of the fact that you’re in love. Why shouldn’t you be in love? He’s a lovely young man.”

“I’m not,” she says. “I like the kid. He’s a lovely person. I’m not in love with him.”

“How can you lie to yourself like that?” Udi drops to the bathroom floor near the open door, watching her bathe. She takes a bath twice a day, covering her eyes with a black eye-mask like the kind given out on airplanes, and burying her body in foam. Her hand ripples the water, making waves. She takes off the black eye-mask. “You want me to fall in love with him for some reason which I don’t even want to fathom. You’re waiting for me to fall in love with him.”

“I see things the way they are,” he says. “I’m just trying to look reality in the eye, that’s all I’m trying to do.” He pauses. “It’s not easy, believe me.”

“You’re creating this reality, Udi,” she says, holding out a wet hand and touching his kneecap. “You’re creating this decadent reality.”

He walks away, grabs himself a beer, and comes back to watch her drying off. “What are you thinking of doing? Just so I know.”

“When am I going to fuck him? Is that what you’re asking?”

“That doesn’t interest me, that’s marginal.”

“Then what are you asking?”

He takes a long swig from the bottle and wipes his lips with the back of his hand. “What about me?”

 

 

 

That winter, she wore a yellow fur coat with a thick fringe that hung down below her hips. She found it in a used clothing store, stinking of nicotine, patchouli, and burned hair. She laid it out on the windowsill for a week to air out, took it to be dry-cleaned, but to no avail. Not only did the smell not dissipate, it was now strengthened by laundry detergents. She hardly ever took it off. She walked around with her hands thrust into the large pockets whose lining was torn, and sat huddled in it by the electric space heater.

Maman was amazed at her. “Aren’t you ashamed to walk around like that, like some clocharde?”

They met almost every day between three and four in the afternoon, when Sarah came to get Mims from kindergarten. She would arrive a little early, and the two of them would sit for an hour on little chairs in the large day-care kitchen among the polished pots and pans, sipping soup from red plastic bowls followed by orzo with meatballs, left over from the children’s lunch. Sarah had arranged the job for Maman by recommending her as a cook to the center’s manager. “She was so impressed by my recommendations, Ofri,” she told me, her face lighting up.

I could barely disguise my dissatisfaction. “That’s great,” I said.

“What’s the matter?” She stared at me. “What have I done now?”

“You’re meddling,” I said. “You’re always meddling in other people’s lives. Just stay out of it.”

She shook her head in disbelief, furrowing her forehead. “Oh dear, Ofri, oh dear me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, nothing.” She took my hand and shoved it into the shaggy, warm coat pocket. “See how nice and cozy it is in there.” She kept my hand there for several minutes, covering it with her own. “Are you ashamed, is that it?”

We were sitting on the bare grassy hill in Sheinkin Park, watching Mims on the square near the fountain as he diligently fastened his skates, steadied himself, swayed from side to side, fell on his behind, and fiddled with the fasteners again.

“It’s got nothing to do with shame,” I said, pulling my hand out of the pocket and shaking it off. “Just stop playing the guardian angel, that’s all.”

“What angel, what guardian?” She became angry. “I heard about a job, I set it up for your mother. What’s the big deal?”

I got up and shook the tufts of grass off my coat. “The big deal is that you’re meddling. Don’t meddle in my business, don’t interfere.”

I went on and on about it to Maman. “They’re taking advantage of you,” I told her. “What is this—ten shekels an hour? You should throw the job back in their face.”

“That’s what they pay nowadays,” she said, confused.

“That’s shit for pay,” I replied.

She said nothing for a minute. “I like the work. It makes me feel good to see all those little ones enjoying my food.”

“That’s exactly what they’re taking advantage of. The fact that you like the work.”

She discussed it with Sarah at length. That evening, Sarah turned up at my apartment in a whirlwind. “What are you trying to do?” she said as soon as I opened the door. “What are you trying to ruin, Ofri?”

“Wait a minute,” I said, and went back into my room to put my glasses on. I couldn’t see a thing.

She fell on the couch. “Don’t ruin this for your mother, Ofri, please,” she said after a while in a small voice, hiding her forehead in her knees. Curled up in her yellow tattered coat, she suddenly reminded me of a giant chick. “You’re all grown up, Ofri.” Her voice emerged from the coat. “Get it into your head that you’re grown up now.”

I stood in front of her on the cold tiles, barefoot. Abruptly, I let go of it all. “All right,” I said.

*   *   *

I went with her sometimes to sit in the day-care kitchen with Maman. When we left, Maman would stealthily slip some plastic containers into my bag with mashed potatoes, cabbage salad, and meatballs. “So you’ll have some hot food to eat at home,” she’d say secretively. I would toss them into a trash can outside one of the buildings on my way home, after saying good-bye to Sarah and Mims at the nearby taxi ramp.

Once, when she left Mims with me to go and see Marwan alone, he saw me doing it. “What did you just throw out, Ofra?” he asked.

“Just some stuff I don’t need,” I said. We walked down the boulevard holding hands. His little, padded hand squeezed my hand and loosened its grip intermittently, accompanying the rhythm of a thought. “What are you thinking about?”

He stopped and held out his right thumb. “Look at this wound!”

I examined the barely visible thin red line on his thumb closely. “It’s nothing,” I promised, touching my lips to the tiny wound. “It’ll heal.”

He seemed reassured for a while, until we reached the round pond in the square in front of Habima Theater. He threw stones into the water. “In our kindergarten there’s a horrible boy, he’s always being punished. Do you know what he does, Ofra?”

“What?”

“He spits,” he said. He filled his cheeks with saliva and gleefully spat on the paving stones. “He spits on other children’s food and on the toys.”

“And they don’t do anything about it?” I was horrified.

He shrugged his shoulders, smiling a big, satisfied grin. “Nothing. He spits when no one sees, and once he told me that if I don’t give him my Leonardo as a present he won’t be my friend.”

“And did you?”

A shadow of hesitation passed over his face. He thought for a minute. “Everyone does.”

We walked slowly down Ibn Gvirol Street, stopping on the way at the nut shop, the pizzeria, and the ice cream store. When he got tired, I carried him. He wrapped his arms around me and patted my back. “Just a little farther, Ofra,” he urged, “we’re almost there.”

*   *   *

We lay on the rug in my room all afternoon, until nighttime, playing “Guess Who” and pickup sticks and watching television. The phone rang three times. I didn’t answer it. He looked up and asked, “Why aren’t you picking up, Ofra?”

“It’s a wrong number,” I said, and pulled the plug out of the wall.

The room got dark. When he fell asleep on the rug, I carefully moved him to the bed and covered him with a fresh sheet. I draped a towel over the bedside lamp to dim the light and sat near his head, listening to his steady breathing. His round, shiny curls took on the hue of freshly polished copper in the lamp’s glow. When my right leg fell asleep, I got up and sat at the desk. Every so often I looked up from my work to gaze at the child, at his active sleep, full of motion. He whispered and mumbled as he lay there like a talisman.

I had never worked better. The signs of life breaking through the silence from the other end of the room had me suspended in a state of complete lucidity, agility. In two hours, I had devoured my way through the paper with a kind of freedom and a strange sense of bliss; I reached the last chapter of my thesis.

Udi arrived at ten, pushing me aside as he burst through the door. “He’s here,” he said with a sigh of relief. His gaze wandered to the disconnected phone. He grasped my shoulders and shook me back and forth. “Why did you do that?”

“I didn’t want the phone to wake him up,” I said with great effort.

He stared at me for a long time. “You’re sick, Ofra, just like her. I’m surrounded by sick people.”

I looked at him. His short hair was arranged on his head like a large yarmulke, flopping back, and his chin was quivering with anger—self-pity that had momentarily taken on the form of alarm.

Indifference came over me. I watched as he kneeled on the floor and rummaged in the linen drawer for a wool blanket to wrap Mims in.

*   *   *

He was fighting for his life, all those months, or at least for what he believed gave it meaning. That’s what he said one night when he came home from work. We were on our way to the door; the taxi had honked its horn for me downstairs. “The more I think about it, the more I think of meaning as being one of the departments of hell,” he said.

I went home, undressed, took a shower, read a little, placed a glass of water on the stool beside the bed, and waited for Sarah. The word hell was overwrought.

Life went on. The anguish made sense after a while, like a filing cabinet in the diligent hands of a clerk. We had to remind ourselves every so often that things were not as they should be. We would hesitate a little over this unusual taste, as if approaching a highly exotic fruit. We were engrossed in the bureaucracy of the drama—who would look after Mims when and where, who would drive whom, take over from whom, and when. Holding our breath, we waited for the solution to reveal itself, to appear, to thrust its horns out from the thicket.

Life went on. Friday night dinners—one week at his parents, the next week at hers; ordering groceries from the supermarket over the phone; Marwan; a Chanukah party at Mims’s kindergarten; switching from one health insurance to another; a picnic in Ben-Shemen forest one Saturday with Dorit, Meir, and Shelly; Sarah’s redecoration schemes; Marwan; Shmulik’s hospitalization in the middle of the night, a possible heart attack; a meeting at Bir-Zeit University in Ramallah with activists from Palestinian women’s organizations; a new bike without training wheels for Mims; Marwan; Udi’s business trips to Santa Cruz, California, plans for a long stay; a fight with the neighbor from the ground floor over the co-op dues; a six-thousand-mile maintenance service for the car; Marwan.

*   *   *

The taxis put a strain on the budget. Sometimes she took a taxi to his place and back twice a day: once in the afternoon with Mims, and once more in the evening, at around nine, washed and dressed up. Udi was well paid and didn’t make a fuss over money, but she was still ashamed to ask. Sometimes she stole bills from his wallet, vowing to pay back “every penny.” I lent her money several times, despite her protestations. I was living on a meager income from the gallery and a scholarship from the Sephardic Fund. After a while we came to an arrangement: I borrowed money from Udi and gave it to her.

She wasn’t doing much photography back then, squirming out of almost every assignment until they stopped coming. “You’re burning your bridges,” I warned her.

“I can’t take photos,” she said. “I’m not in the mood.”

“Yes, you can.”

“I’ll look for another job. Something completely technical, where you don’t have to think.”

“A packer at the Sunfrost factory?” I suggested.

“Don’t get on my case, Ofri.” She curled up next to me in the narrow bed, hugging me and pulling the blankets up over her head. “It’s hard enough as it is.”

In the mornings, after three hours of sleep, she would take Mims to kindergarten, where she closely went over yesterday’s drawings and chatted with the teacher for a while. He clung to her, refusing to let go. He would accompany her to the steps and wave good-bye, then chase after her to go through the whole ceremony again. “Stay a little longer!” She often asked the teacher to distract him while she could sneak out; she’d pace the sidewalk outside the kindergarten; peering through the bushes to see if the children had gone down to the playground yet.

*   *   *

She spent hours in cafés, circling ads in the papers and clipping them, looking at her watch every half hour, staring at the cold mounds of froth on café lattés, calculating: bus times, university lecture times, cafeteria breaks, shifts at the Sheraton, phone calls, phone calls. The shift manager at the hotel restaurant had learned to recognize her voice. He would wrap things up quickly: “No calls in the middle of work.”

“You call, Ofri,” she begged. “He doesn’t know your voice. Say you’re his sister with a family emergency.”

I adamantly refused. She recruited Shelly, with her heavy South American accent.

The kid could hardly believe it. “Did you tell Shelly to say she was my sister?”

She waited for him by the workers entrance, finding shelter from the harsh sea winds behind a large dumpster. “I had no choice,” she explained. “He hangs up on me as soon as I call, your boss.”

They walked along the promenade all the way to Jaffa. The kid’s imposing, bushy eyebrows blew in the wind, and she stopped suddenly, licked her finger, and smoothed them down. They reached his apartment half frozen and fell on the electric space heater, which had only one working coil. She kept her yellow coat on, almost singeing it on the heater. The kid poured boiling water into two plastic cups of instant meals, conscous with vegetables. They ate out of the containers with their legs crossed on the rug in the orange-blue glow of the heater. Later, when she undid his shirt buttons and pushed her head inside, inhaling the faint odor of soap and sweat on his thin chest hair, he pulled her away. “No.”

He didn’t want to let it happen. He thought it should not be allowed to happen. When it did happen, he beat himself up. She devoured that as well, cradling his guilt.

“Don’t think about it.” She brushed back his thick curls to expose his earlobe and covered his forehead with her palm as if applying a wet compress. He was lying on his back between her arms, naked, limbs askew, eyes looking up at the ceiling. “I can’t not think about it. It’s all I think about.” He turned his head to face her and reached out, fearfully touching her sharp chin.

She leaned over him, pressing her face to his eyes. “I wish we could stay like this forever,” she said.

The front door slammed: Mrs. Kaisi home from work. She went into the kitchen and cooked up some meatballs. A strong odor of garlic, onion, and fresh cilantro penetrated the room from beneath the door. “Did you cook today?” the kid asked, inspecting Sarah’s bitten fingernails. “What did you cook today?”

“I didn’t,” she said. “I never cook in the middle of the week.”

“You should cook,” the kid said. “You’re neglecting your home.”

She laughed. “Who am I going to cook for? Mims eats at day care, and Udi eats at the factory or a restaurant. There’s no one to cook for.”

He turned grave, dropping her hand. “Even so, you should.”

“Why?” She straightened up. “Says who?”

“Says me.” He threaded his feet into his trousers as he sat up, then pulled on his cotton undershirt. “You don’t treat him well. It’s terrible.”

“What do you care, anyway? What business is it of yours?” She got excited.

He covered her mouth. “Shhh … she’ll hear us.” He was quiet for a minute. “It is my business. I care about him.” He lit a cigarette and got up; he lifted the corner of the blanket hanging over the window and looked out. “Should I call a cab for you?”

She put on her yellow coat; she felt cold. “I can’t go home like this.”

“Like what?” he said with his back to her.

“In the middle of a fight.”

He knelt next to her and pulled her bare thighs beneath her coat to his chest. “Okay, okay, it’s over.”

They lay on the thin rug, embracing. His hand stroked her body, from her back to her waist, her behind, down to her ankle. “It’s over, it’s over.”

Some days she goes with him to the hotel when he works the evening shift. She loiters outside the employees’dressing rooms, striking up conversations. She sits at the table directly opposite his check-in desk for six hours without taking her eyes off him. She orders a huge cheese sandwich and juice but doesn’t touch them. “Go home,” he mouths to her silently, writing the words on a piece of paper and holding it up to her. “Go home.”

She waits there until his shift is over and he softly pulls her out of the chair. The maître d’ shoots them a dirty look. He picks it up immediately, the kid, and takes the man to a corner where they hold a whispered conversation until his face lights up.

*   *   *

He used his charm as if he were drawing a sword from its sheath: cautiously, with absolute precision. Caution was his middle name.

“What are you being so careful for?” Sarah nagged him. “What are you afraid of?”

He bared his teeth and held up two fingers to his head like horns. “Of monsters, okay?”

“No, seriously,” she said gravely. “What do you think could happen?”

“Anything. Absolutely anything.”

*   *   *

“There’s a sense of persecution about him, Ofri,” she says, finishing off the remainders of Mims’s packet of chips. We’re sitting on the concrete bench in the park overlooking the fountain, hardly able to hear ourselves above the waterfall. “How could there not be?” I say.

She tenses as Mims approaches the fountain curb and leans his body forward over the water. “Come here!” she calls. “Come here now!” He disengages himself begrudgingly and slowly walks toward us with his chubby Raggedy-Ann legs, feet turned in. “Don’t go near there,” she admonishes, fastening the top button of his coat and staring hatefully at the fountain. “Something disastrous is going to happen one day with that monument of water and cement they stuck there.” “Who stuck it there?” Mims asks, as we all watch four older children climb up to the top of the fountain, where they throw empty cans and sticks into the water. One child slips down and gets soaked up to his waist. His friends fish him out. She stops munching and stares hypnotically. “Something ought to be done about that fountain, to teach them a lesson they won’t forget.” “Who?” Mims asks again, peering with dismay into the empty chips packet. “The jerks who designed it and built it,” she replies. “We’ll come up with something.”

“Bubble bath,” I say absentmindedly.

Her face lights up. “Yes. That’s a very, very good idea.”

She wouldn’t let it go all day, bursting with excitement. At eight in the evening we made our way back to the fountain, armed with two bottles of laundry detergent. A group of young boys was sprawled on the lawn, watching us. She emptied the first bottle into the water, and I followed with the second. We waited, glancing at each other, trying not to grin. After a few minutes, something began to swell. Gradually, the clean, foamy mound in the cascade of water became higher, swelling and rising, becoming more solid and plump by the minute, overflowing the fountain, then starting to crawl beyond the curb around the fountain and onto the square.

The boys stood up and raced over, drunk with excitement. They splashed around in the foam, and soon one of them came to his senses, ran and brought another bottle of detergent and poured it in. Within half an hour the white shroud had spread in length, width, and height, covering the entire cement square, grazing the lawn, erecting white humps, protrusions, hills, and mounds that almost concealed the fountain. We fell about laughing, holding on to each other and swinging the empty bottles. Suddenly she stopped, turning pale, and motioned toward the boys with her head. There were ten of them now, tearing through the mountains of foam in a mad rush. Two fell on the slippery pavement and slid toward the edges of the fountain, which were completely covered in foam. “What should we do?” she asked nervously. “Someone’s going to get hurt.” We stayed to keep guard, yelling at the boys in parched voices.

At midnight the white carpet began to disintegrate, gathering in dirty puddles on the cement square. We sat in the deserted park, which gave off a pungent odor of soap, and watched a Labrador leap over the slippery pavement and his owners as they tried to fasten a leash to him. She sat huddled on the bench with her knees folded up to her chest. The park lamp shone dimly on her with its capricious yellow light, enunciating certain features in her face and concealing others. “That was such fun,” she said emptily.

I paused to gather strength in anticipation of what I was about to say. “You didn’t go there today.”

“No.” Her voice echoed. “He’s out of town.”

*   *   *

Once every few weeks, he went to visit his family in Shfaram and stayed for the night.

“Why can’t I come with you sometime?” she pleaded.

“What for?” He squirmed.

“I don’t know, just to meet them.”

“That’s not a good enough reason,” he said.

His mother and two sisters paid him a surprise visit at the volunteers office once when they were in town. He was late, held up at the university. “Come in, come in”; Sarah ushered them in and set out three chairs in a semicircle in the middle of the room. “Sit down.” They sat clutching their half-dozen shopping bags, suspiciously examining the bare walls. “This is where he sleeps?” the mother finally asked after a long silence. “No, this is the office. He lives in Jaffa, he has an apartment,” Sarah explained, pausing to consider for a moment. “A very comfortable apartment. You can see the ocean.” They watched her as she walked to the little kitchenette, where she rustled cellophane wrappers as she opened packets of cookies. Just as she was serving the coffee, he suddenly showed up and stood frozen in the doorway for a long time. “What’s going on?” he asked, staring at the mugs, the tray, the dish of cookies.

“You have visitors,” she announced, self-satisfied.

He pulled her by the arm, almost dragging her to the entrance hallway. “What have you done?”

“Nothing.” She was puzzled. “I made coffee.”

“Don’t make coffee, don’t make anything,” he hissed through closed lips. “Here.” He threw her coat over her shoulders and pushed her to the door. “We’ll talk later.”

*   *   *

They didn’t. He wouldn’t answer her calls for a week and didn’t show up at work. “There goes the kid,” she said as she applied lip balm. “I scared him off. I somehow scared him into running away.”

“He has his baggage, I’m not sure it has anything to do with you,” Udi said in a strange voice, speaking in choppy syllables. He pressed in his cheeks and pulled them upward toward his eyes.

“How would I know if it does have anything to do with me? I have no way of knowing. I’m in the dark,” she said.

“That’s part of it.”

“What’s part of it?” She stared at him.

“The darkness,” he said, getting up and coming to sit next to her. He attentively examined a long wisp of hair that had escaped her ponytail. “Come to bed, Sarah.”

“I can’t fall asleep.”

“Then just lie there without sleeping.”

“No.” She recoiled, pushing his arm away.

“You’re coming to bed.” He grabbed both her wrists and held them together as he pulled her up from the couch. “You sure as hell are coming!”

She squirmed, kicked his knee, and got away from his grasp. “Don’t tell me what to do,” she whispered. “I will,” he whispered back. Mims was sleeping. “I still have an ounce of control around here.” He held her waist, pinning her to his body then dragging her to the hallway. “Let go, I’ll come on my own,” she said quietly. He loosened his grip hesitantly and looked at her, breathing heavily, then suddenly gazed down at the floor, leaned against the wall, and looked up at the ceiling. She came close to him and put her arms around his neck. She stood on her tiptoes with her lips resting on his collarbone. He held her, and they rocked together for a long time, his back rubbing against the wall. “What are we going to do, Sarah?”

 

 

 

“He has a lot on his plate, poor thing,” Maman says a few weeks before the end. The three of us are sitting in the day-care kitchen; doughnuts for Chanukah are frying in a vat of oil on the stovetop to our left. Every so often Maman goes over and turns them with a long fork. “We all have a lot on our plates, Inès,” Sarah says, lost in her yellow fur, crumbling a slice of bread between her fingers. Maman snatches the bread away from her angrily. “Leave it alone, don’t play with food.” Sarah’s face is green. She looks up at Maman. “It’s not all my fault, Inès,” she says. “Who said it was your fault?” Maman says defensively, then pauses. “But why do you want to break up?”

“Life’s not good,” Sarah says.

“When is it, tell me? When was it ever good?” Maman loses her temper. “What’s the problem—does he drink?”

Sarah shakes her head.

“Does he go with other women?”

“No,” Sarah says.

“Does he bring home money?”

“That’s not the problem, Inès.”

“Then what is the problem? Tell me, I want to understand.”

The long windows in the kitchen are steamed over from the frying vapors. Next door in the kindergarten they’re rehearsing for the Chanukah party this evening, singing, “I Have a Little Candle.” Mims plays the fourth candle.

“I don’t love him, I think,” Sarah says finally. “Ultimately, I suppose I don’t love him.”

Maman wipes her hands again and again on the dish towel hanging over her shoulder, blinking. “You love him, you don’t love him—who loves anyone anyway? Children, you love. That’s love.”

Sarah cuts up a doughnut and eats around the jelly. She suddenly gags and gulps down a glass of water to clear her throat. “They came out well, the doughnuts,” she says, and gets up to go and look for Mims.

*   *   *

In the evening, she dresses him for the party in a blue Petit Bateau pantsuit that Nava brought him from Paris. He hates that suit, Mims, especially the wool shirt collar that scratches the back of his neck. Udi thinks it’s ridiculous. “He looks like an ultra-Orthodox kid from Meah Shearim.”

“What nonsense.” Sarah labors over the part in his fair hair and puts on the gilded cardboard crown with the menorah. “My silly little fourth candle,” she says as she takes a step back and looks at him with satisfaction.

“Don’t call him silly,” Udi mutters, furrowing his brow. He removes the cardboard crown from Mims’s head and pushes his little arms into the coat sleeves. “Let’s go, or we’ll be late.”

They walk a few feet behind us the whole way. Every so often we stop to wait, watching them. Udi lowers his head to Mims, listening intently, then explains something at length.

There is a deep, mutual esteem between them. “Even though Udi’s a medic, he doesn’t know this,” Mims might say, in reply or as a response to something.

Sarah gets annoyed. “What do you mean ‘even though he’s a medic’? Medics don’t know everything.”

Mims pauses for a moment to organize his thoughts. “I didn’t say he knows everything, but he does know a lot. Only God knows everything, but I don’t believe in God.” He erects two pirates on the stern of the model ship he just built, then changes his mind and moves them to the front deck. He examines one of them and shoves it quickly into his pocket.

“What did you put in there?” Udi jumps up. “What did you hide in your pocket?”

“Nothing.” He presses the side of the pocket into his abdomen. “I didn’t put anything there.”

Udi goes over and pries his fingers open one by one to get to the pirate. “This is for that bully at kindergarten, the one who makes you bring him things, isn’t it?”

“He doesn’t make me, he’s my friend.”

“Someone who threatens you is not your friend. It’s called blackmail.”

Udi makes up his mind to put an end to it. First thing next morning he arrives at the kindergarten to wait for the teacher in the hallway, and demands that she do something about the bully. Unhappy with the teacher’s vagueness, he convenes a group of parents and initiates the election of a committee, which won’t let the matter go until it’s resolved.

Sarah is reluctant. “What do you want the outcome to be? Do you want this kid to be put into an institution for juvenile delinquents?”

“I don’t know what I want!” he thunders. “But it can’t go on like this. The children are afraid to go to kindergarten because of this creep, did you know that?”

“How can you talk like that? He’s a child. He’s only four years old.”

“I don’t care if he’s four or fourteen—he’s a conniving blackmailer.”

He effects a three-day suspension from kindergarten for the child and closely monitors subsequent events.

“Did he bug you today? Tell me,” he presses Mims.

Mims nods his head. “They put him in the sinking corner all day.”

“The sinking corner?” Udi is confused.

“Thinking,” Sarah explains. “The thinking corner.”

“But he ran away,” Mims continues with a grin. “They looked all over for him, and they couldn’t find him. I was the only one who knew where he was, and I didn’t tell.”

“Good for you! It’s good to support anarchists,” Sarah responds.

When she comes to pick up Mims the following afternoon, she finds him in the principal’s office. He is doodling something with his left hand, and his right hand is in a bandage. “He fell off the slide,” the principal explains. “It’s just a bruise, no broken bones.”

Sarah kneels beside him, fingering his body worriedly. “How did you fall? How did this happen?”

“They pushed him,” two children explain to her. “A boy from his kindergarten pushed him over.”

“Who pushed you?” she interrogates him, holding his chin.

“He did.” Mims wipes his eyes on his sleeve.

Sarah bursts out of the room, flies up the steps to the classroom, yanks the boy up from his place where he is sitting cross-legged watching television, and drags him by the collar out into the hallway. “You touch him one more time, and you’ll have me to deal with!” She shakes him hard and slaps his behind. “Just one more time, and I’ll beat the crap out of you. Do you understand?”

*   *   *

Udi struggles to make sense of it. “You hit him? You hit a four-year-old child?”

“Well, what about you?” she retorts. “Do you think your committees and your schemes are any better? Violence under the auspices of law and order, that’s the only difference.”

“How can you compare the two? Going off to settle accounts with little children—you have the mind of a mobster.”

“At least I spoke to him in his own language. An eye for an eye. I didn’t launch an antiaircraft missile to combat a slap.”

“In his own language,” Udi mimics her bitterly, “in his own language. Take a good look at yourself, Miss Enlightenment.” He puts on his coat and goes out “to get some fresh air.”

*   *   *

He often goes out during those months. He comes home close to midnight and aimlessly zaps through the TV channels.

“Where does he go?” Sarah wonders. “Where could he be?” She’s lying on her side in front of the space heater, chewing the end of a pencil. “Yesterday he came home even later than me, at around two.”

“I know,” I said.

“How do you know?” she asks, surprised.

“I was there.”

“Yes,” she concurs. “You were there, Ofri.”

She often forgets: places, dates, events, names. Every other day she makes a resolution to organize her paperwork. I find her sometimes sitting cross-legged on the floor, wrapped in her orange robe amid a puddle of papers, newspaper clippings, notebooks, and photographs, in front of the gaping chest of drawers.

“Just toss it all out. What do you need all this crap for?” I urge her.

“I don’t need it. I want it.”

She never throws anything away; she’s a hoarder. Theater programs, movie ticket stubs, old school notebooks, letters, badges from the Servicemen’s Welfare Association and the Society for Autistic Children, communiqués, notes, prescriptions, recipes, advertising leaflets, hundreds of negatives, receipts for utility bills paid ten years ago.

“Here!” I pounce on one of them. “You can throw this away easily.”

She peruses the payment stub. “Are you sure?” she says dubiously.

“Absolutely.” I toss it in the wastepaper basket. She later steals it back and shoves it in some bag.

The huge sack she carries with her everywhere is always bursting with worry, coming apart at the seams. I bought her a new one for her birthday, the kind you carry on your back. She walked around with it for two or three weeks and then went back to the old one. “At least get it fixed. Everything will fall out,” I warn her. She makes no reply, intrigued by Mims as he unpacks the contents of the bag methodically: large binders he examines page by page, files and plastic sheets with negatives, brown envelopes emptied out on the table, piles of notes, receipts, bus tickets, pencils, aspirins, a tattered packet of tissues, three crushed cigarettes, loose change, a hairbrush, a toothbrush, mouth spray, lipstick with no cover, two address books, a cracked mirror. When he pokes his head into the dark interior of the bag to see what’s left, she calls softly, “Mims.” He looks up at her with his round eyes. “Is this what you’re looking for?” She pulls her hand out from behind her back, revealing a large, gold-covered chocolate coin.

I watch them leaning toward each other with their heads close, diligently extracting the mess of melted chocolate from the metallic wrapper.

*   *   *

The kid sends him those chocolate coins every so often. He also sends little plastic animals or stickers with Sarah, in flowery paper bags. At night she puts them out on the kitchen table so he can find them there in the morning as soon as he wakes up. Udi frowns on this. “There’s no need for this bribery.”

“It’s not bribery,” she protests. “He’s really attached to Mims.”

“In that case it’s even worse,” he replies.

*   *   *

Marwan stuck to his guns. Every Wednesday he insisted on picking Mims up from kindergarten, skipping a lecture to do so. They went bowling, hung out with the grown-ups, and then ate humus at a restaurant in the Yemenite Quarter. Mims would have been willing to eat gravel for Marwan. Normally, he was a picky eater, spending hours over a scrambled egg with cream cheese. The kid had his opinion on this. “I wouldn’t eat that white food either,” he rebuked Sarah. “What kind of food is that?”

“It’s a perfectly normal meal for a child,” she explained. “That’s what children eat for dinner. Since when did you become an expert on raising kids?”

He and Mims played soccer for hours in the playground of the elementary school nearby and studied the features of the Cobra helicopter, which excels at bombing small villages.

Sarah fumed. “Small villages? What are you teaching him?”

“It’s only a game,” he reassured her. “We both know it’s make-believe.”

“Make-believe, my ass,” she said bitterly months later, when it was all finished. While she and Udi were laboring over the separation agreement and the custody arrangements for Mims, Marwan suddenly showed up at the lawyer’s office to ask for his share.

“I deserve a day with the boy too,” he demanded.

“You deserve?” She went berserk, pushing him into the hallway. “It’s over, get it into your head!”

He said calmly, “Between you and me it’s over, not between him and me.”

 

 

 

She swallows down the rest of the coffee in one gulp, keeping the same broad smile on her face that she had minutes ago. “He wanted to spend one day a week with Mims,” she keeps saying. The weak, unnatural lighting of the airport cafeteria gives her skin a sickly, jaundiced tone. A noisy group of Hadassah women with tags pinned to their lapels pushes through the narrow aisle between the tables, dragging my cup along and knocking it to the floor. Sarah bends down to soak up the puddle of coffee with paper napkins. The cleaning girl arrives and observes our feeble efforts with indifference; she goes over the floor with a large mop. Sarah stares beyond my head, through the wide glass doors behind me. “Do you know what’s odd about it, Ofri?” she asks, in that same flat, almost bored voice. “What’s odd is that he had no desire to keep his own. He wore me down over it. He had no desire for what might perhaps have been his.”

I am overcome with an urge to force her to utter the word. “His own what? What didn’t he want that was his?”

She looks back at me for a long time. “I said perhaps, Ofri.”

I won’t let up. “And the beatings—was it him?”

She puffs cigarette smoke toward the adjacent table. “Let it go, Ofri.”

I let it go, get up, and walk to the gate that leads to the departure lounge upstairs. I’m swallowed up by a group of Italian pilgrims crowding onto the escalator.

“Ofri,” I hear her cry hoarsely, breathlessly, at the bottom of the escalator. “Ofri!”

 

 

 

We drive home in the pouring rain. “It’s as if the rain has been waiting for us all this time,” says Maman. She carefully opens a tin of sour candies in powdered sugar and passes them around. “They’re really good, these ones,” she tells Marcelle. The sound of sucking on candy, the squeal of the windshield wipers, and the pattering rain outside fill the warm padded, space of the car, prompting a sleepy forgetfulness. Alain looks in the rearview mirror every so often to make sure Philippe and the baroness are still following us in their cars. At the gas station near Plessis Belleville, Marcelle asks for a rest-room stop. Maman goes with her, and we all step out into the rain to stretch our limbs. I zip up my jacket and tuck my hair into a wine-colored wool beret I found in the car. Alain is amused: “You look like some eccentric spinster from a British movie, like an art history teacher.”

“That’s exactly what I am.”

“I know, stupid.”

We scan the selection of candy in the gas station’s crowded little kiosk and settle on a KitKat and a packet of M&M’s. Oncle Henri shoves five in his mouth at once, trying to remember something. “Do we have any eggs at home?” he asks. Marcelle and Maman approach, wearing plastic bags over their heads. “This was the first time I managed to use the bathroom the whole week,” Marcelle informs us. Oncle Henri ignores her announcement. “Tell me, do we have any eggs at home?”

“I don’t know, I’m not sure.”

We set off; Alain waves to the baroness as she passes us by. “Why do you need eggs?” Marcelle asks after a while.

“I need them. The rabbi said we have to eat hard-boiled eggs.”

“Why does it have to be eggs?” she argues. “And you with your cholesterol!”

He pounds his fist on the glove compartment. “Because! He said eggs, so it’s eggs, and we’ll eat eggs.”

Alain tries to catch Marcelle’s eye in the mirror as he explains. “What he said, the rabbi, is that it’s a mitzvah to eat round things like eggs or lentils, because fate is round and repeats itself cyclically in the world.”

Her face lights up. “Then maybe we could make lentil soup?”

Oncle jumps in his seat, stymied by the seat belt. “What is this nonsense about soup? He said round things that stay round, like hard-boiled eggs. Not an omelet, or a scrambled egg, not a soft-boiled egg. Hard-boiled eggs.”

“Just like the egg has no mouth, so the mourners have no mouth,” Alain quotes, turning to his father. “I just remembered that I used all the eggs yesterday for the floating islands. We’ll have to buy some.”

“Floating islands,” Oncle Henri grumbles, nervously rapping his fingers on the dashboard. “All of a sudden you simply had to have ‘floating islands.’ Who has ‘floating islands’ in the middle of the week? Tell me.”

“Leave the boy alone,” Marcelle interferes. “You with your crazy ideas. Since when do you care what the rabbis say? Have you become a believer or what?”

He turns to her. “I care. I care very much, Madame. Would you rather I behave like your family, who barely know they’re Jewish?”

Maman tightens her hand into a fist and takes a deep breath. “Our family, Henri, knows very well who and what it means to be Jewish. And we don’t need any rabbi”—she pauses and lowers her voice—“or Germans, to remind us. And if you must know, we also ate round things in our house during mourning. Sesame cookies are round as can be.”

“Sesame cookies…” Marcelle sighs. “I could really go for some sesame cookies right now, Inès, with my coffee.”

The two cars are already waiting for us outside the house: the baroness with a couple of friends from Air France and Philippe and Geneviève.

Alain and I go on to the supermarket to buy eggs. As we approach the round piazza by the pharmacy, I suddenly remember with a fright: “We forgot to get Lilly out of the shed!” We drive back to the house and rummage in the large plant next to the gate, where the key to the shed is normally kept. We can’t find it. Alain goes to the supermarket on his own, leaving me to peer through the shed’s colored-glass window. “Lilly,” I call out. “Lilly!” A faint meow comes from the far corner, where the rakes, brooms, and lawn mower are stored. I crawl through the window into the dim, cramped space, straining my eyes in the dark. “Pssst … pssst…,” I whisper. I suddenly bump into a soft woolly object and hold my hand out to the ground. It’s an old sheep’s wool rug. Another very faint meow comes from up above. I look up to see a pair of yellow eyes darting around in the dark, on the wooden beam supporting the ceiling. I try to coax her down for several minutes. She huddles fearfully at the edge of the beam, edging sideways once in a while with her ears pricked up. I get one of the brooms and hit it against the beam near Lilly’s arched back. She dashes across the beam and eventually skips down.

She scratches and squirms in my arms as I carry her home and throw her on the kitchen floor. “Where did you find her?” Oncle Henri wonders, uncorking a bottle of wine.

“The shed. We forgot about her all day.”

“You should have left her there,” he says severely, pointing to the edges of the wallpaper. “Look at the way she ruins everything. She destroys everything she sees.”

I set out little bowls of water and cat food on the floor. She sniffs at them, sticks out her pink tongue, takes a taste, and walks off. “See!” Oncle gloats. “Nothing’s good enough for her, the wretch.”

Outside in the conservatory, we sit down to eat. Everyone compliments Maman’s potato casserole. Geneviève asks for the recipe. “It’s nothing, nothing at all,” Maman declares.

“Every time she says ‘nothing’ about a dish, my stomach turns inside out. Nothing means ‘it’s a ton of work,’” Marcelle comments, slicing off a piece of Gruyère for her bread. Maman joins in the laughter, unsure whether or not to be insulted. “You always exaggerate, Marcelle,” she complains, explaining to Geneviève. “She’s always exaggerating, that Marcelle.”

Simon Busheira, an Air France colleague, reminisces about his childhood in Jerba, Tunisia. “During mourning days, all the neighborhood women would come to our house with platters and pots full of meatballs, couscous, fish, sweets, and cookies. My mother and grandmother weren’t allowed to do anything. The mourners don’t cook; that’s the custom.”

Oncle Henri puts down his fork. “What do you mean ‘the mourners don’t cook’—then who does?”

“Only the neighbors and friends. They used to call it ‘the healing feast,’ or ‘the wellness feast,’ or something like that. It’s the first meal after the funeral, when you only eat what your friends and relatives bring.”

Oncle Henri fidgets nervously. He pushes his plate away. “How could you not know that? You with your customs!” he hisses at Marcelle.

“Know what?”

“That family members aren’t allowed to cook during mourning.”

“I didn’t cook, Henri. Inès cooked. Do you think I was in any state to cook yesterday?”

“Inès is the same thing. Inès is close family, she’s not friends and neighbors.”

The room falls silent, then the front door bangs loudly. Alain appears with two cartons of eggs. “What should I do with these?”

“Put them in water and boil them,” Maman says, hurrying into the kitchen.

Simon Busheira clears his throat. “I don’t think it matters all that much, all the little details. What matters is the intention. Michel,” he adds after a pause, “was not a religious man. He didn’t have a clue about these kinds of things.”

“He did.” Oncle Henri raises his voice. “He certainly did. I’ll never forget how when we went to Colombia when he was sixteen, he asked us to give him a bar mitzvah with that rabbi, Marcelle’s uncle in Bogotá. He asked for it!”

“What are you talking about—that rabbi?” Marcelle says tiredly. “My cousin in Bogotá wasn’t a rabbi; he’s a ritual slaughterer, not to mention a gambler and a cheat. He’s a man who makes his wife see stars every night. Don’t you remember how poor Nadia came to us at the hotel, all swollen, with blue bruises on her face? That’s the rabbi in Bogotá,” she explains to the guests.

“Yes, but Michel had his bar mitzvah,” Oncle argues.

She straightens up, her lip quivering. “Did have a bar mitzvah, didn’t have a bar mitzvah—what difference does it make now? Who cares? This is what’s worrying you now? His bar mitzvah?” She turns to him. “Did you have any idea of who he was when he was alive? Did you ever talk to him? All you did was suck the blood from him. And from me. ‘Homo, homo, homo,’ like a broken record.”

Philippe looks at his watch, distraught. “Maybe we should be leaving, Geneviève, it’s late.” Marcelle retires to her room, dragging her feet as she walks.

The guests stand up one after the other, shake Oncle Henri’s hand as he sits cross-legged, slouched on the chair, chewing a toothpick. Maman reappears with a steaming pot of a dozen hard-boiled eggs bobbing in water. “Take some for the road,” Oncle Henri suggests with a crooked smile.

 

 

 

She meticulously folded the silver wrapping from a cigarette box into a narrow strip and wrapped it around her finger. I noticed some strands of gray in her short cropped hair. A soothing female voice announced something on the airport speaker system. “What did you do with the pictures of the people sleeping in Gaza?” I suddenly remembered. We still had another fifteen minutes to kill.

“What people?” She looked up.

“The pictures you took in Gaza a few years ago.”

“Nothing. They’re in a drawer somewhere. Sleeping,” she added with a grin.

“Do you want them?” she asked later, as we walked toward the boarding gate area. The idea frightened me for some reason.

“What would I do with them?” I squirmed. “They’d just lie around.”

“They’re just lying around in my place too,” she said, seized with a strange gleefulness. “We can have some of them lie at your place and some at mine. We’ll figure out which ones will go where.”

“I thought you wanted to show them in an exhibition,” I said.

She stopped and grabbed my elbow angrily. “Where did you get that idea?”

We were quiet for a while, pushed aside by a group of Italian pilgrims in hats. “I don’t see what’s wrong with exhibiting them,” I said finally.

She thought for a moment. “It’s a private thing, sleeping.”

I didn’t want to argue with her, not then. I moved toward the escalator. “Whatever,” I said.

“Write to me,” she said when we said good-bye. We swayed a little from side to side, embracing.

“I’m only going for two weeks,” I reminded her.

She walked back a few steps, bent, slightly hunched, her thin neck buried between her collarbones. “You left ages ago, Ofri.”

*   *   *

I thought about that afterward, wondering what she meant by “ages ago.” When did she mean? I ran the sequence of events through my memory over and over again, the way you pass a fine-toothed comb through lice-infested hair, examining the lice and the eggs under the tiny magnifying glass inset in the comb. But lurking, casting its shadow, was the error of my basic assumption—that there was a sequence, that I knew what it was, that it was graspable.

She knew, or at least, she thought she did. “You blamed everything on the kid, Ofri. Right from the start you blamed everything on him. You never forgave me for that. You left.”

During the arid year before my trip, when I hardly saw her, a question gleamed like a cool, metallic object in the emptiness. Why, in fact, could I not forgive her? Had I not forgiven her? The thought seemed, on the surface at least, to cause a small earthquake, and I waited to see what would occur at its conclusion. Nothing happened. I stayed as I was, looking out like an old general surveying the fields where once, long ago, there had been carnage.

I was loathe to admit the truth, writhing in the admission like an animal trapped in a sack, beating its tail in all directions. Finally I broke free and was able to speak, and to wonder at the blandness of my liberation, of the admission: I couldn’t stand the kid. I wanted him gone.

*   *   *

Marwan stirred things up in the way that he had. “You basically want me to disappear, Ofra,” he blurted out once, when I was helping him practice for the role of Treplev in the theater department’s production of The Seagull.

I gulped. “What are you talking about?”

“Well, I ask myself what it is that bothers you,” he continued in the same uniform, indifferent voice. “What is it that’s the thorn in your side, Ofra, more than anything else? Tell me.”

I pulled myself together a little. “It’s not you, it’s the situation.”

“Situation—don’t give me that crap,” he said and went back to the text.

“‘She loves me, she loves me not; she loves me, she loves me not; she loves me, she loves me not. See? My mother doesn’t love me. Why should she? What she wants is to live, love, wear bright clothes. And here I am, twenty-five—a constant reminder she’s not so young as she used to be. When I’m not around, she’s thirty-two; when I am, she’s forty-three. That’s why she hates me. Besides, she knows I don’t accept her theater. She loves the theater. She thinks she’s serving mankind, a sacred art, but as far as I’m concerned the theater today is all rote and delusion. When the curtain goes up on an artificially lit room with three walls, and those great talents, those priests of ancient art—’”

“Sacred,” I corrected him, “‘sacred art.’”

“‘—priests of sacred art,’” he continued, “‘show how people eat, drink, love, walk, and wear their jackets; when they take stock lines and stock situations and try to squeeze a moral out of them, a smug, homespun, oversimplified sort of moral; when they serve up the same thing in a thousand variations, over and over again—then all I can do is run, flee, the way Maupassant fled the Eiffel Tower, afraid its vulgarity would rot his brain.’”

“‘But we need the theater.’” I read the part of Uncle Sorin, glancing at my watch.

“Are you in a hurry? Do you want to stop?”

“I have a little more time,” I lied.

“‘What we need is new forms. New forms. And if we can’t have them, we’re better off with nothing. I love my mother, love her dearly, but the self-indulgent life she leads—running around with that writer, getting her name in the papers—it wears me out. Sometimes the ordinary selfish mortal in me wishes she weren’t a well-known actress. I might be happier if she were an ordinary woman. Can you picture a more hopeless, more ridiculous situation? She has some people over—celebrities every one: actors, writers; I’m the only nonentity present. The only reason they tolerate me is that I’m her son. Who am I? What am I? I left the university in my third year “due to circumstances beyond my control.” No money, no talent, and papers that say “Kiev tradesman.” Well, my father was from a family of Kiev tradesmen, even though he himself was a well-known actor. Anyway, whenever the actors and writers in my mother’s drawing room deigned to pay me a little attention, I had the feeling they were sizing up my worthlessness. The humiliation I suffered reading their thoughts…’”

He folded the corner of the page. “Always giving speeches, that Treplev; he never shuts up for a second.” He paused to examine his fingernails. “I don’t really think much of you either, Ofra.”

“Why?” I asked stupidly.

“You’re bossy, frigid, messy. A dried-up dyke.”

“You forgot racist,” I said. The blood was throbbing in my temples.

“No, not a racist. It’s got nothing to do with racism.” He looked up at me. “What are we going to do?”

“What do you mean we?” I got up and moved to the couch.

“We, the two of us, with Sarah. She’s crazy. We have to get her to go back home. We’re in this together, Ofra, make no mistake about it.”

A dull pain crept along my left arm, spreading: my heart, I said to myself.

“So what do you say, Ofra?” he asked.

“You don’t love her.” I forced the words out of my mouth. “It’s not even love, it’s all meaningless.”

He rested his forehead on his crossed forearms. “I never said I loved her. I got myself in a bind, there’s no question about that.”

We were quiet for a long time, the long room stretching between us. “I’m afraid of her, that’s the truth. I feel like she could ruin everything for me, everything I’ve built—university, the job, my family, everything.”

“I’m sure you’ll do just fine for yourself,” I said.

He lunged across the room and stuck his face in front of me. “I should never have even talked to you.”

*   *   *

We went to see the production. He was a lousy Treplev: stiff and lackluster, he moved mechanically across the stage in his narrow trousers as if operated by remote control. “It’s hard to judge by one performance, he was excellent at the dress rehearsal,” Sarah said.

We waited for him outside the auditorium, near the lawn in front of the Mexico building. We languished there for fifty minutes until he finally came out. He was radiant, as he gathered Sarah into his open coat. “Well?” he prodded.

“Wonderful!” she said.

“How could you lie like that?” I tortured her the next day. “How could you say ‘wonderful’ when you know he was shit?”

“It wasn’t really a lie, Ofri. It makes me happy to see him, it doesn’t matter in what context and how.”

We were sitting in a café, constantly shifting our chairs to chase the winter sun, which was moving in and out of the clouds.

“He can’t wait to get rid of you, get that into your head,” I said, looking straight ahead.

She took off her sunglasses and turned to me abruptly. “How do you know?”

“He told me.”

Her lips twisted into a grimace. She crushed the almost untouched piece of cake on her plate with her fork and then crammed the mush into an empty cigarette pack as she fearfully looked around.

“What are you doing?” I gaped.

“I don’t want to hurt her feelings, she always asks me whether I didn’t like it.”

“Hurt whose feelings?”

“The waitress,” she said, wrapping the bulging packet in a plastic bag and dropping it into her bag. She held two straight fingers up to her temples and rubbed them with small, circular motions, allowing the dirty flow of tears and eyeliner to gather at the top of her mouth. “My head is exploding. Do you have something I can take?”

I reconsidered quietly for a moment. “You’re ruining his life, that’s what he said,” I continued.

“That’s not true, I am not,” she said.

“Yes you are, he doesn’t know what to do about you.”

She got up and walked off, not before tossing my sunglasses and purse into her bag by mistake. I kept sitting there for a long time, squinting in the sun, the empty coffee mugs in front of me, wondering what to say to the waitress. Finally, Shelly passed by and loaned me twenty shekels.

*   *   *

Shelly showed up at my place unannounced a few months after the mess. I was in the shower when I heard someone pressing down on the intercom buzzer for a long time. I came out dripping water and left damp footprints all over the room. She relayed her recent history in a tiresome, loud voice through the closed bedroom door while I got dressed. When I came out, she looked at me with a surprised expression. “You’ve changed, Ofra. Did you do something?” she asked. I shook my head and put some water on to boil for coffee. She trailed after me into the kitchen, bumped into me by the fridge, and proceeded to monitor me as I went to throw out the trash on the little service porch. She had a new job at an advertising agency, she told me, in the accounting department. I glanced at her suspiciously, detecting a new alertness in the tone of her voice, in the smoky-purple eye shadow she wore. She’d left that dump in the Yemenite Quarter not long ago, she continued, found a really nice apartment to buy on Yehoshua Ben-Nun Street. Her parents sent her some money, and she paid the rest with a special mortgage for single people. “Did you know you can get a good mortgage if you’re not married, Ofra?” she asked, half scolding me. I didn’t. Actually, she had come by because she remembered an old bureau I wanted to get rid of. She needed a bureau, she said as she surveyed the room.

“Sarah took it ages ago,” I said dryly. “It’s been gone for ages.”

We said nothing. She reached out to the sugar bowl and dumped four teaspoons into her coffee, then stirred and stirred. “You call that coffee, what you’re drinking?” I couldn’t resist. “It’s more like jam.” We laughed.

“What a bummer it all was, Ofra.” She suddenly turned serious, nibbling a chocolate cookie.

“You should know better than anyone,” I said.

“Know what?” She put the cookie down on the edge of the plate.

“What happened,” I said.

“I knew nothing, Ofra. I guessed, just like everyone else.” She thought for a moment. “Just like you.”

“I wasn’t there,” I said.

*   *   *

Shelly was there, supervising the havoc with her usual good-natured haplessness. She constantly switched sides. She took the kid’s side, then Sarah’s. Then the kid’s again. She bickered with the whole world over the phone, flitted back and forth between the members of the volunteers association who demanded that the kid be turned in immediately after the beating and those who were reluctant to do anything. She admitted to honestly having believed in one thing and its polar opposite at the same time: that they mustn’t file a complaint against him because the police wouldn’t care whether he’d done it or not—they’d have a field day over him anyway; and that they must file a complaint regardless of the fact that he’s an Arab. She faltered slightly on the last word. “They covered their ass, as it turned out,” she added.

My train of thought was cut off for a moment. “Who did?” I asked.

“Everyone. All the volunteers. Can you imagine how ugly this would have been if the press had gotten hold of the story?”

I turned up the radio: Regine Crespin in an old recording of Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’Eté.

*   *   *

I stood by the window, taking in the green plumage of fresh weeds covering the backyard. A family of gray cats looked up in anticipation, as if following a sign. Twilight was trapped in the abandoned courtyard between the buildings, settling the wrong way—from the bottom up, rising from the weed-filled earth to the windows and the back porches.

Shelly listened quietly for a long time. “It’s so beautiful, Ofra,” she said in awe.

I pressed my nose to the windowpane, seeking the coldness of the glass as a counter to the sudden wave of heat that was swelling inside, from the soles of my feet to my chest, seeming to melt my organs, the walls and partitions of my organs, turning my insides out. I looked very deliberately at a rusty bicycle leaning against the wall. A yellow plastic basket was perched on it. “I mustn’t, I mustn’t, I mustn’t,” I recited to myself, seeking the completion of the thought. “I mustn’t give my hand to what’s good. Here is what’s good.” For the first time in many long years, I knew I was sad.

“He didn’t do it,” I heard myself say suddenly. “It wasn’t him.”

 

 

 

“We ripped her into shreds, all of us,” I said to Udi that same awful night that we waited for her. He leaned over the table, perusing the sports section.

“Speak for yourself, Ofra,” he said flatly.

“Like dogs we tore into her. Each one grabbing his own piece.”

“Enough!” He beat his fist on the table. “I can’t listen to this anymore.”

“I have to listen to myself saying it,” I said. I was sobbing, I had no idea what I was saying.

He stood in front of me, held my cheeks, and pulled my head to his stomach, against his sweater. “It’s all right, Ofra, it’s all right.” I bit down on the edge of his sweater, then the cotton fabric of his undershirt. I glanced up: he threw his head back. With one hand he unbuckled his belt, unzipped his pants, and pressed my lips against his shorts. I opened one eye: they were red. I took him in my mouth. The semen covered my neck down to my chest. “I loved her more than anything in life,” I said. He fell to his knees at my feet with his pants around his ankles and his buttocks exposed. He buried his face between my thighs, kissed my hands. “I did too, Ofra.”

After a while he went to take a shower, spending a long time in the bathroom. I took advantage of the moment to call Shelly, but the line was still disconnected. I lay on one of the couches and fell into troubled sleep. Udi retired to the bedroom. In the morning, he dressed Mims, took him to kindergarten, and came back with the newspaper. I was getting ready to go. “Stay a bit longer,” he asked me. We sat in the kitchen, munching toast and drinking coffee, dividing the newspaper sections between us. At close to noon, while I was washing the dishes in the sink, a key turned in the front door. Udi jumped up and hurried to the hallway; I followed closely. We stared at her: her wet hair was pulled back, tied in a high ponytail at the top of her head, giving an indefinable look to her face—naked, yet masked at the same time.

“What’s that?” Udi asked.

“What?” She hung her yellow coat on the hook and dug around in its pockets for an old tissue.

“That hairstyle. What have you done to your hair?”

She smoothed her hand over the ponytail and wrung out the wet strands of hair. “I’m sick of having my hair in my face the whole time,” she said.

We sat around the coffee table, waiting. “What are you waiting for?” she asked finally.

“You,” I said.

She played with the ring on her finger. “It’s all over,” she said to Udi. “Don’t worry—”

“Where were you?” he interrupted. “Where have you been for almost two days?”

She looked at me, imploring. “Ofri…”

He placed both hands on the table, stood up abruptly, and brought me my bag from the kitchen. “Go home, Ofra, I need to talk to my wife.”

I hurried to the door; I didn’t dare look at his face. She rushed over and leaned her back against the door with her arms spread out. “She’s not leaving.” She turned to me. “You’re not leaving.”

“Let me go, we’ll talk later,” I said. I stomped my foot, trying to stop the tremor that was spreading from my chest down to my stomach, my knees.

She reached out to the coatrack and wrapped her coat around her upside down, with the sleeves hanging toward the floor. “I’m coming with you,” she said.

He dug his fingers into his scalp and pulled at his short hair. “Don’t do something you can’t take back, Sarah,” he said.

We wandered through the streets with our arms linked for almost two hours without saying a word. When I walked her to the kindergarten in the afternoon, she lingered a little, leaning against the latticed gate. “I’ve already done it,” she said. “That’s what he doesn’t understand, that I’ve already done it.”

“Done what?”

“What he said, an act I can’t take back.”

I said nothing. Then, “Where were you? Where did you disappear?”

She picked fleshy, dusty leaves off the bush and crushed them into a green pulp with her nails. “At Shelly’s. Shelly took me to the clinic.”

*   *   *

She had stayed with Shelly for two nights, until Thursday morning, leaving me and Udi high and dry. On Saturday evening after the news on TV, they told Mims. They sat on either side of him on the couch in the living room, “like in an airplane, before takeoff,” she told me. He sat silently with his short legs dangling, wearing red hand-me-down slippers from his cousin. Udi went first. “Emanuel,” he began, then fell silent.

 

 

 

She made the decision. She wanted to give volume and body to “the act you can’t take back” and then repeated the words over and over, rolling them on her tongue until they felt valid. I refused to be impressed.

“We’re breaking up, Ofri,” she announced to me.

“Good luck,” I said distractedly. I was busy updating the bibliography for my thesis.

She was lying on the bed in my room with a hot-water bottle on her stomach, staring at the opposite wall. “You must do something about that mildew, Ofri.”

“Other than moving, there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s been fixed a thousand times,” I said.

She thought for a while. “Then let’s both move,” she said finally. “With Mims.”

I hid my face in the pages strewn with my handwritten notes.

“Why shouldn’t we finally live together, like we used to?” she said out loud.

“What do you mean?” I was annoyed. “When did we ever live together?”

“It used to feel like we did, like we were little girls in the woods,” she said, tracing circles in the air with her finger. “I’m tired, Ofri.” She turned sideways with her eyes wide-open.

I sat with my thighs pressed together against my hand. “Tired of what?”

She shrugged her shoulders, turned to the wall, pulled a blanket up to her ears, and fell asleep.

*   *   *

She always fell asleep easily, in midsentence or still chewing gum. More than once I had poked my finger into her mouth and pulled the gum out carefully, afraid she’d choke in her sleep. I would toss and turn for hours on the mattress next to her, cursing the night, until dawn. We slept over at each other’s houses at least four times a week; once at mine and three times at hers.

I knew the sequence of the sounds in the big apartment, I counted and waited: her parents’ bedroom door, the toilet flushing, the bathroom, the hairdryer, the plastic slats from the blinds rattling against the glass, the neighbor’s car engine at two in the morning, the fridge door opening and closing, slippers padding down the hallway. Sometimes I would get up and walk around the living room in the long nightgown Sarah loaned me, or page through the pile of magazines. I would look out through the blinds at the narrow, dark yard. Once her father bumped into me by the bureau in the hallway. He was half-asleep and thought he’d surprised a burglar. “A heart attack, your weird friend gave me,” he complained to Sarah the next day.

“He’s scared of you, Ofri.” She laughed. She gobbled up slices of mango then tore the rest of the fruit from the peel with her teeth. She was fascinated by sleepwalking. “If sleep moves around, that must mean it doesn’t have a home,” she pondered out loud with sparkling eyes. A few days later, when I slept over, she built a tent of blankets over my bed and secured it with ropes on all sides. “Okay, Ofri, get into the house of sleep,” she urged me. It worked.

From then on, she built the blanket tent over my mattress every night, always adding improvements: she erected flags, cut windows into the sides, and brought in a picnic box with drinks and sandwiches. She hung a bell in the opening and would ring it worriedly every few minutes. “Are you asleep yet, Ofri?”

*   *   *

We were eleven years old and, in her opinion, “mature for our age.” We ate out often, amused by the elderly waiter who was, in turn, amused by us at the eastern European restaurant downtown. She left generous tips. “Where’s the money from?” I worried. Every morning she stole money from her mother’s purse. “She’ll catch you one day,” I warned her. The food stuck in my throat just thinking about it. “She has so much of it, she’ll never notice, believe me,” she reassured me.

We took up gambling. Every day after school we lingered at the crowded store that sold stationery, cigarettes, and Lotto tickets, spending hours at the automatic billiards game, which swallowed coins insatiably.

*   *   *

Money was an issue. At the age of nineteen she insisted on giving up her shares in Nava Model. Shmulik had a hard time making sense of her decision. His Adam’s apple flared, becoming a kind of red triangle beneath his yellowish face, as if a bandanna had been tied around it.

“What’s got into your head?” he asked. “Where did you get this bee in your bonnet?”

“It just did,” she said. “It’s not mine, that money.”

He stretched his undershirt down over his potbelly and stared at her and then at Nava, who moved slowly, limping toward her armchair. She had just been through the eighth or ninth operation on her leg and was blurry from the painkillers.

He turned to her. “Say something. Tell your daughter to get off her high horse.”

“What horse?” She held the armrests with both arms and pushed her behind toward the back of the chair. Her eyes were closed, her face fixed in a grimace of pain—of aversion to pain, an expression that became her trademark.

“Tell your daughter,” he repeated. He took a banana from the fruit bowl, peeled it, and threw the peel on the table.

She fixed her gaze ahead, beyond Sarah, at the kitchen window. “Whether she takes the money or doesn’t take the money … in the end everything will pass and it will be the way it should be,” she said flatly as she massaged her thigh. She paused briefly, until a slanted, hopeful smile emerged over the solidified bitterness of her face. “Or not.”

*   *   *

They had the same attitude about money, Udi and Marwan, and they badgered her with an odd kind of glee. “You’re so intent on not worrying about money that you’re constantly caught up in devising ways to get around it,” Udi warned.

“I don’t want to touch it, I know all too well how this money was made.” She raised her voice, enunciating each word.

The four of us were sitting at Rauf’s on the beach in Jaffa, picking over slender fish bones in the dark.

She had been furious since yesterday, when her father had sent them a new washer to replace the old one, which had died. He had also tossed in a dryer. The two monstrous crates stood in the hallway for two days, blocking the entrance. She refused to open them.

“How was it made?” Marwan was curious. “Tell me about that.”

She threw an olive pit at him. “Don’t mock me.”

A large smile shone on his face, lighting up the little wrinkles in the corners of his eyes. “What’s the matter, ya Sarah?” he said in a charming voice. “Anyone would think he’d sent you the seamstress’s own blood and sweat.”

Udi recoiled a little in his seat. “There really is something crass about it, though, sending gifts like that without even bothering to find out if we want them.”

“What’s to find out?” Marwan dismissed his objections. “Who wouldn’t want a new washer?”

She and Udi stared at each other. “It’s not the washer, Marwan,” she explained with contrived patience. “It’s the way he did it, the fact that he’s trying to force money on me that I don’t want.”

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t mind having someone force things on me like that,” Marwan said, and downed his glass of wine. “If only someone would!”

*   *   *

She did, turning up at his place with bags bursting with corduroy shirts in three colors, socks, belts, a new bedspread, an electric kettle, a leather-bound address book, pens and pencils, a cordless phone, cookies, liquor, a Henry Schlezniak print. It gathered dust in the corner of his closet for months. “Why don’t you put it up?” she said, insulted.

“It’s not my taste,” he admitted.

That was one of her last visits to his place. She spent a long time persuading Mrs. Kaisi, the landlady, to let her wait for him in his room. He came back at midnight and found her curled up in her coat on his bed covered with the blanket.

“You’re here,” he determined, turning on the bright desk lamp.

She straightened up and pulled the blanket up to her neck with her knees touching her chest. “Where were you all this time?”

“What difference does it make?” He sat down beside her on the edge of the bed and examined her face at length. He reached out to push back a tuft of hair from her eyes and tucked it behind her ear. “What difference does it make where I was? I was everywhere except here.”

“Come next to me,” she said, patting the mattress.

He pulled her bare feet from beneath the blanket and put on her socks and shoes. “Come on, we’re going.”

“Where?” she asked.

“You know where.”

She was quiet for a moment. “I’ll go now, but I’ll be back.”

*   *   *

He had no choice. Deep inside me I knew he had no choice. She was everywhere, always: sitting on the stone wall opposite his house, in the parking lot near the rear entrance of the hotel, emerging from behind a car, huddled in her yellow coat, in the lecture hall at the university, at the pub, on the telephone, in the organization offices. That’s where it happened.

“What happened?” she said sharply. “What happened that was so terrible, Ofri?”

We were in the taxi on our way home from the hospital. She asked me to sign the bandage wrapped around her arm up to her shoulder. “It’s a bandage, not a cast,” I argued. “You only sign casts.”

“What do you care?” She begged me. “Just a little signature.”

I scribbled something with a green felt-tip pen I found in my bag. “It would have been nice if whoever did this had also signed his name afterward,” I commented.

She pressed her face against the window and hummed something softly.

“You have to file a complaint,” I said after a pause, when we were three blocks away from home.

“A complaint about what?” she asked, stuck to the window. “Against who?”

“Him. He can’t get away with this unscathed.”

*   *   *

He didn’t. When I ran into him on the street a few weeks later, he looked as if he had been steamrolled. He seemed flat, his oversized arms poked out of a short-sleeved T-shirt, his mouth was wider than usual, crookedly dividing his narrow face in two as if it had been cut with a knife by an unskilled hand. “How is she?” he asked.

“All right,” I answered.

We were quiet for a few minutes. We moved toward the covered square outside Photo Faraj when it started to drizzle.

“Have things calmed down in the association?” I ventured.

He shrugged. “I could give a shit.” He looked up at the top of the fig tree, blinking. “I really couldn’t care less.”

We walked to the bus stop. “How is she?” he asked again, distracted.

“You already asked that,” I reminded him.

He suddenly grabbed my arm. “I’ll never forgive her for what she did.”

“What she did?” I choked.

It started to pour. We hurried, almost running to the bus stop. He held his wide backpack over his head and rushed on, out of breath, tripping over a bump in the sidewalk. He wiped the streams of water off his face with his arm.

“Yes, what she did,” he said.

I looked at him with great concentration, straining the force of my memory toward some kind of future: I remembered him precisely that way. Panting as he held the dripping backpack over his head with thin fingers, blue with cold. Two years later I heard he had gone back to Shfaram, abandoned the theater, gotten married, and run for the Communist Party in the local mayoral elections.

 

 

 

We sit on the screened-in porch for a long time, until it gets completely dark and the nearby streetlight projects a yellow, murky beam on the large panes of glass in the ceiling. Lilly minces over to the table and rubs up against our legs. Oncle Henri keeps half an eye on her, lost in a thought. Mechanically, as if coated with a layer of cobwebs, he reaches out dreamily to the potato casserole and puts it down on the floor. “Come on, Lilly, have some,” he invites her.

Maman is surprised. “Isn’t it a waste, Henri? We could eat it tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow…” He waves his arm dismissively and goes off to the television room. “God only knows what tomorrow will bring.”

Alain, Maman, and I clear the table and wash the dishes. “What are we going to do with all these eggs?” Maman wonders.

Alain and I go out on the porch to smoke a cigarette. The coolness of the night is pleasant and refreshing. Moments later, freezing air starts to creep thinly, slyly under our skin, cutting it off from what lies beneath it. I shiver. “Are you cold?” Alain asks.

“A little.”

He leans over to the banister and looks out at the dark asphalt square. “What a day!”

“What a day,” I repeat.

“It’s strange, you know,” he says after contemplating.

“What is?”

“The cremation. When I think about Michel and his final wish before he died, to cease being a body, it’s strange that the burning of the body actually makes things far more physical than they seem in a regular funeral; do you see what I mean?”

“I’m trying.”

“I mean, I never felt such a vivid awareness of Michel as having a body until this … ceremony. The fact that it takes fifty minutes to annihilate that body, that there’s a measured unit of time, that there are ashes in the end, that you see it—it’s not an abstract. You’re constantly remembering the body, do you see?”

“That’s what he wanted.”

“I also tell myself ‘that’s what he wanted’ as a kind of consolation, but I’m not at all convinced. What was his will really worth during the last few months? How much like his own self was he?”

“Do you think the family shouldn’t have obeyed his wish?”

“No, that’s not what I think. I talked to someone who treats people with AIDS from that organization of theirs. He told me that many of them ask for their bodies to be cremated because they have a sense of impurity about their body. I don’t know if that was relevant for Michel, but I hope it’s true.”

“Why do you hope so?”

He pauses for a minute, crumbling a cigarette butt between his fingers. “I don’t know, it’s much easier for me to think that this whole cremation business was something between him and himself, not between him and us. The idea that he asked for it as a kind of statement to us, that’s hard for me to take.”

“That’s all I think about.”

“I know.”

“Come and see, come and see!” Oncle Henri calls to us from the room. “Come quickly!”

“I suppose we have no choice.” Alain stubs out the burning cigarette on the banister. “We’ll have to go and see.”

Oncle Henri is pointing at the television screen excitedly: a flush-cheeked girl with a golden ponytail tosses her head back and takes a drink of water. Her painted, full lips diligently work the plastic mouth of the bottle, sucking, closing in, then releasing. Her sharp, pinkish tongue licks her lips longingly. “Evian water. So refreshing, so clear,” the narrator’s voice whispers in the background. “Is that what you wanted us to see?” Alain is astonished.

“Agh!” Oncle throws his arms up with disappointment. “You missed it. They were on a second ago.”

Marcelle is sprawled on the couch on her side with her large head resting in Henri’s lap, holding his hand beneath her cheek. Half asleep, she mumbles drowsily, “They showed those creatures from outer space, those green things who visited Nancy.”

“It’s the first time they’ve found proof that they’re really from outer space. They ran a lab test on the green stuff they excreted,” Oncle Henri declares and leans over Marcelle. He runs his fingers over her eyelids. “Can I get you anything?” he asks, concerned.

“It’s all rubbish, if you ask me. Lunatic fantasies,” Alain says. “All those people who swear they saw it, I’d lock them up in an asylum.”

“That’s what I thought at first, but I’m slowly becoming convinced. Listen, there really have been supernatural phenomena recently that can’t be rationally explained. You can’t tell me there haven’t.”

“The only supernatural thing that can’t be rationally explained, to my mind, is Jacques Chirac. All the rest is a bunch of primitive nonsense. And look at what kind of people are always testifying that they’ve seen these creatures: all kinds of peasants, all kinds of farmers and rustics who can barely string together a grammatical sentence in French.”

“They showed them, Alain,” Marcelle protests and sighs happily as she curls up with her arms between her thighs. “They actually showed them on TV. Cute little things.”

“E.T. phone home.” Alain giggles as he pours himself some whiskey from the bar. “Anyone want a drink?”

Oncle Henri does, but then changes his mind. “It’s not good with my pills.”

Marcelle sits up with her legs crossed. “Give me a sip of yours,” she says to Alain.

“I’ll pour you some. It’s no problem.”

“No, I want a bit of yours, just to wet my throat a little.” She takes a sip and turns to Maman. “Inès, tomorrow I want us to go through Michel’s things together. I have no one to give them to. I want you to take them with you. You’ll be amazed when you see what excellent things he has. Silk underwear, pure wool sweaters, the Air France suits, maybe twenty pairs of shoes. You know how his taste was.”

“No problem. Just let me know, and we’ll arrange everything,” Maman says, glowing in the bluish light from the television. She loves a good sorting out and tidying up.

“Isn’t there someone here you can give the stuff to? Why should Inès have to shlep it all to Israel?” Oncle Henri argues.

“Maybe there is, but I don’t want to,” Marcelle says. “I want Inès to take it.”

“Do you have anyone?” Henri asks Maman.

“Anyone? I have plenty, and believe me—they’ll all bless you. There’s that Russian, the garbage collector. He barely makes ends meet. And then there’s Fathi, the neighborhood gardener from Nablus. He takes anything—ten kids, he has.”

“What happened with all those Russians who came to Israel?” Alain asks curiously.

“You see them everywhere, they took over everything. All you hear is Russian, everywhere you go: in the bank, on the bus, at the clinic, at the Social Security, at the council. They know how to get by, those ones.”

“Some of them aren’t even Jewish, I heard,” says Oncle Henri. “Just ordinary Russians looking for a way out of their country.”

“Can you blame them?” Alain says. “I’d pretend to be Jewish too if it would get me out of that decaying society. Everything’s in ruins over there.”

“They don’t have it easy in Israel either; don’t get me wrong,” Maman says. “I see them, whole entire families living in one room with the children, the grandma, the grandpa. It breaks my heart.”

Alain looks thoughtful. “What I can’t seem to forget is how three years before Gorbachev came to power, that French researcher—I can’t remember his name—predicted the fall of the Soviet Union. That was amazing. Do you know what he based his prediction on?”

“What, sweetie?” Marcelle asks, smiling.

“On statistics of infant mortality. Infant mortality in the USSR before Gorbachev was ten or more times higher than in the West. This sociologist said that was the red light signaling that the regime was toppling—that whole facade of a developed, industrialized society.”

Oncle Henri gets up, letting Marcelle fall from his lap. He paces the room, disheveling his sparse hair then smoothing it down again. “A red light, you say? When children die, it’s always a red light, I tell you.” He turns to Alain angrily. “Except that the people who should be noticing it never realize it’s a red light until it’s too late. No one cares; everyone just waits for it to happen already so they can believe in it.” He looks down at the floor briefly, bumps into Lilly, and throws his leg out, kicking her hard. He kicks her again. “Crawl back into your hole, you; I don’t want to see you!”

Marcelle throws her body forward to his foot and holds it. “Leave her alone already, you madman! It’s not her fault, do you hear me? It’s not her fault at all.”

Maman picks up the meowing cat, who tries to cling to the curtain, and locks her in the walk-in closet in the entrance. “That’s that,” she says. “She can stay in there all night. Don’t open that closet.”

“There’s not much air in there, Inès,” Alain comments feebly.

“There’s enough. There’s holes in the top. Air gets in from there.”

At eight o’clock Some Like It Hot is on television. We all sit down to watch it. Oncle Henri and Marcelle cuddle on the couch, Alain sits in Oncle Henri’s TV chair, Maman on the rocking chair, and me on the rug, surrounded with cushions. Maman disappears into the kitchen to make a large pot of chamomile tea and misses the beginning. “I wonder what happened to the eggs?” she muses.

“What’s that, Inès?” Marcelle asks.

“The eggs I cooked. I think there were about ten of them, and now there’s only five or six.”

“Maybe you got confused.”

“Maybe, but I don’t think so. How many of us were there at the meal?”

“Shhh…,” Oncle Henri hisses. “I’m trying to watch this.”

“Five of us, Philippe and Geneviève, Delphi, Simon Busheira, and his friend—altogether ten.”

“Exactly,” Maman says. “That’s what I thought.”

Henri loses his temper. “Will you stop with the chattering already? I can’t concentrate like this.”

“What’s to concentrate?” Marcelle says. “There’s nothing to concentrate on in a comedy. You only need to pay attention when there’s suspense or it’s scary.”

Maman stares at the screen. “Who’s that?”

“Tony Curtis’s girlfriend, she’s helping him and Jack Lemmon get that job in the girls’ band.”

“Marilyn Monroe?” Maman says, astonished. “She looks so different there!”

“What are you talking about? You think that ape is Marilyn Monroe? She’s got just a minor part, I tell you.”

Alain falls asleep within minutes with his mouth wide-open. Marcelle looks at him with filmy eyes. “He looks like a child when he’s asleep,” she whispers to Maman.

“He is a child,” Maman says. “What makes you think he isn’t a child?”

Oncle Henri rejoices, slapping his knees excitedly. “Look, look at them with the women’s clothing! I love Jack Lemmon in this scene.”

“I just wish he’d find someone, Alain,” Marcelle says. “It worries me that he’s alone.”

“He will, he will. You know these things aren’t made to order.”

Oncle Henri picks something up with half an ear. “For all I care, he can stay on his own. Those women, all they bring is trouble. He’s talented, successful, he has a heart of gold, I’m not worried about him.”

Marilyn Monroe strums her ukulele on the train. “She’s so gorgeous, that devil, just look at her.” Marcelle melts.

I go upstairs to my room. I can’t stand the French dubbing.

 

 

 

I went to Mims’s kindergarten and lurked behind the hedges a couple of times during that year I didn’t see her.

His hair had darkened and now reached down to the bottom of his neck, soft and thick. His shoulders looked round beneath his striped T-shirt, folding in to his chest like the edges of a roll of paper. He was usually crouched in the sandbox, making big mounds and driving pieces of wood and stones over them, humming something to himself. Then he would suddenly get tired and sprawl out next to the mound with his head resting on his arm, and stare at the green latticework on the opposite wall. I would stay for over an hour, until the teacher called the children in from the playground and hurried them inside. Once Sarah almost caught me; she took me by surprise as she shuffled around the corner in her clogs, long before her regular pickup time. I ran away, blushing with shame.

In my dreams, Mims walks carefully, heel to toe, on the brink of a canal or a river. He suddenly falls into the water. Naturally, in total silence, he dives down between the corals with his eyes closed and a big smile on his face, and quietly threads his way through the underwater greenery, thin and flexible.

“What does it mean, that dream, Ofri?” She clasped her fingers nervously.

“I don’t know,” I said. “He was very happy in it.”

We asked for some more coffee and waited for a long time until finally the cleaning girl explained, “It’s self-service.” We were too lazy to go ourselves, wary of the long line at the counter. “Will someone be waiting for you there when you arrive?” she asked disinterestedly.

I nodded and stole a glance at my watch. I prayed for the time to pass. She looked around. “I like airports,” she said. “I’d be willing to live here for a year or so.”

“How’s the house?” I remembered that she had sold the old apartment and moved to another one a few months after Udi had left.

“Good.” She smiled. “It has a good aura, I think. Come and see us sometime, Ofri.” I was quiet, concentrating on the crowded, pale text printed on my ticket. “Will you come?” she asked.

“We’ll see,” I said finally.

Later, when we walked toward the escalator leading up to the boarding gates, she suddenly stopped and grabbed my elbow. “Don’t you love me anymore, Ofri?” she asked quickly.

I didn’t answer. A large group of Italian pilgrims wearing hats pushed us forward toward the gate.

We kept walking. She lingered for a few minutes by the vending machine to fill her bag with candy for Mims. “I’ll tell him it’s from you,” she said, and couldn’t resist eating one herself. “Ofri,” she said with a mouth full of chocolate, “you may not be my friend anymore, but I’m still yours.”

We stood by the escalator leading up to the gates for several minutes with my carry-on bag between us, until the security officer reprimanded us. We moved aside. I ventured a look: she was staring at the distant newsstand with her mouth slightly open, exposing teeth covered with dark chocolate and wafer. “My heart aches for the baby,” she said in a foreign, dry voice.

“You have Mims,” I said.

“It’s not a substitute, Ofri, there’s no substitute.” She grasped my hand and squeezed hard, an instinct of sudden fright.

I pulled back and bumped into a loaded luggage cart. I was looking for my boarding pass, which had fallen out of my passport for some reason. I remembered shoving it in between the pages, I was certain. Sarah pulled me aside to the benches and emptied the contents of my bag. Nothing. We looked at each other, distraught. “Wait here, maybe we left it on the table.” She started running toward the cafeteria. I waited obediently, looking up at the big round clock. I plunged my hand deep into my coat pocket. There it was, folded in three. I waited a while longer and then approached the escalator going up to the departure gates. Halfway up the escalator, as I caught my image for an instant reflected in the dirty glass, I heard her from below. “Ofri!” she yelled hoarsely. “Ofri, Ofri!”

*   *   *

She tried many times to remember when she had first called me that. She usually became engrossed in the subject just as she was about to fall asleep or say good-bye. She used it as a pointless filler for the dead, tedious minutes in the middle or at the end of a never-ending conversation. It was her way of pestering. “Why is it so important to remember that now?” I asked wearily. “It’s not important, Ofri, it’s nice,” she emphasized.

We were lying, I think, on the prickly rug in her room, completely naked underneath huge tablecloths of ivory brocade, which we had wrapped around ourselves up to our chests. On our heads, we wore turbans of shocking orange and turquoise—leftover fabric from Nava’s factory. We lay on our stomachs, shoulder to shoulder, reading a book placed between us. We took turns turning the pages. I had to wait at the end of every page; I read faster than she did. I liked the empty clarity of those moments of waiting that stretched out in the quiet room, red, gold, and blue from the colored glass pieces in the lampshade. I looked at her closely, stealthily, watching the way she moved her lips as she read. The sharpness of her profile became ripened, softened, as it absorbed a warmth of expression that seemed to dissolve her high cheekbones and pronounced chin. I fixed an intent gaze on her for a long time; gradually, it became a blurred stain. I was suddenly alarmed; she must have been talking to me. I could barely hear. The thick layers of turban fabric covered my ears like bandages. “What?” I heard myself calling out loud. “What did you say?” She pulled the twisted material off my head with one crude tug and grinned as she leaned over to my ear, negating the grin with her severe, ceremonial intonation: “Turn the page. It’s your turn, Ofri.”

*   *   *

Years later, I often thought of that day with the same bothersome mixture of wonder, aversion, and sweetness that I felt when I first heard her say “Ofri.” Coming from her lips, the nickname had a touch of the imperative.

Maybe that’s what the kid meant that time when we stood beneath the covered square outside Photo Faraj. “She gives orders, Ofra. No one seems to notice it, but she’s always giving orders.” He blinked and fished out a bent, damp cigarette from the depths of his backpack. We had run into each other at the corner of Dizengoff and Arlozorov a few months after the mess. We stood talking for a long time, very close to each other, finding it difficult to say good-bye. We were holding on to something that was not present in the conversation but rather in some other place which, between the two of us—out of embarrassment or uncertainty—we refused to name. Just before we parted, it became clear to me. There was a pact of the unemployed between us, people who wallowed in a withered present, a suspicion of the future, and a bitter yearning for their past job: Sarah.

We drew out the conversation, standing there until my feet hurt. I tried to drag him to the café across the street, but he didn’t seem to hear me. He kept talking and talking in a rare burst of fluidity, flitting from one subject to the next with a sense of urgency like a real estate agent on his first day at the job.

We talked about that night and about the day preceding it, then about the night again, and the one before it, and again that night. And about the week that followed, in the holding cell at Abu-Kabir. And that night.

*   *   *

He went to Shelly’s apartment at around eleven. It might have been close to midnight; he doesn’t remember. He had been hanging out drinking in a pub for hours. He doesn’t know how to drink. Three glasses of wine and he’s a goner. Then he somehow got up and went out. Maybe at ten. He roamed the streets for an hour or two, in the area of Habima Theater and then along King George Street toward Allenby and the sea. He wandered around the Yemenite Quarter looking for Shelly’s street for a long time and eventually reached the dark market stalls. He got into a brawl there; he can’t even remember what it was about. He thinks someone just attacked him for no reason, but he can’t be sure that’s really what happened. His nose was bleeding. When he finally found Shelly’s place, he knocked on her door for several minutes, but she wouldn’t let him in. He tried to force his way, shoving his foot between the door and the frame. He heard Sarah say, “Tell him I’m not here.” “You are here!” he called out. “I know you’re here!” Shelly finally managed to shut the door and locked it in his face. He went downstairs and stood in front of the building. He must have been shouting, because neighbors began to appear in the windows. He saw her; he saw her clearly peering out from behind the blinds. “Why didn’t you keep the baby, you bitch?” he yelled, throwing stones and broken glass at the window. Then the light upstairs went out behind the blinds. He started to throw up. When the police arrived, he was sprawled on the sidewalk, lying in his own vomit. He looked up at the apartment as they dragged him to the patrol car. The window opened wide. She leaned over the railing wearing a white nightshirt and looked down at him.

*   *   *

He had a drunken hallucination on the floor of the patrol car, or later, in the interrogation room, when they beat him up. He couldn’t get the nightshirt out of his head. She stretched her thin arms up high for a moment, and they emerged from the large, white sleeves which flowed in a desperate kind of softness. Her arms looked like thin, brittle sticks as she slowly waved them from side to side. With a quiet rustling of wings, she almost took flight. “Where did she get a white nightshirt from?” He stopped and wondered out loud.

*   *   *

We sat on the wide steps outside Photo Faraj. We sheltered my cigarette against the wind, and then his. “Who bailed you out?” I asked after a while. He looked up at a sparse, dripping treetop without answering.

“She called the police,” he said after a long silence.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I know. She told me.”

“She’s lying,” I said.

We started walking to the bus stop. It began to rain. I lagged behind him a little, battling with my umbrella, which refused to open. He stopped and turned to me suddenly, holding the dripping backpack over his head. “Have you seen him recently?”

“Who?” I was confused for a moment.

“Mims, as she calls him,” he said, counting out change for the bus. “Emanuel.”

*   *   *

She pulled out a photo of her and Mims as we walked to the departure lounge. She held it toward me. “Do you want it?”

I stared at it for several minutes. I found it hard to believe: there was Mims in my place, on the white steps.

“Do you see what I see, Ofri?” she asked smugly.

I was quiet for a long time. “Who took it?”

“Shelly, two months ago,” she said. She took the photo out of my hand, looked at it again, and handed it back. “It’s a perfect match.”

She had the face of an eleven-year-old in the photograph, like in that picture of the two of us from a few years ago, like the day I first saw her. Her features were crowded into the sharp, small visage, as if fighting for their space. Fine straight hair, graceless and motionless, tied back in a sidesweep with straight bangs in front. Her mouth was slightly pursed but full, always aware of her vulnerability. Her nose was bent, bothersome. She wore the same white Diolen blouse she had on then, fastened up to the neck, and her arms were crossed above her head, right hand grasping left wrist, left hand holding a cigarette. She had struck that pose once again for the camera, staging an homage to herself, to that other photograph. The same lean shoulders beneath the fabric of the blouse, the hypnotic gaze fixed straight ahead without blinking, living out its being in each of the thousand announcements it delivers to the world.

Mims sits behind her, slightly higher up on the steps. Above them, in the background, a geometric shape that captures all the light: White City. Her head and shoulders conceal Mims almost to his neck. He is bent forward with his chin resting on his crossed arms, looking sideways down at Sarah, half smiling.

 

 

 

The bathroom that Oncle installed demanded particular vigilance; the sink wobbled on its loose china pedestal, which stood on wobbly floor tiles, creating a strange relief of depressions and protrusions. The round mirror shone as it stuck out of the wall at an impossible angle, thrusting itself eagerly in front of the face reflected in it. The flow of water in the shower was extreme and could not be regulated—scalding hot or bloodcurdlingly freezing. And the entire construction was in perpetual danger of flooding, which necessitated an almost constant use of a mop.

Oncle Henri believed he had “golden hands,” and enforced a strict reign of do-it-yourself terror throughout the house, which ultimately resulted in having to pay for every project two or three times over.

All this would have been more or less tolerable if it were not for the fact that he demanded fervent participation, emotional and otherwise, from each member of the household. Never resting for a moment, he enforced noise, embraced noise, and created noise even when he breathed or fell asleep for an hour with his limbs sprawled out in front of the television. He seemed to be surrounded by a vociferous halo that preceded him everywhere he went in the house, announced his presence and precise location, declared his complete inability to tolerate any degree of loneliness. And yet it isolated him like nothing else could have, as he sat in his car or in the workshop, listening to old tape recordings of military marches, shaking his head like a large ventriloquist’s doll to some other rhythm, another deafness.

Even from a distance, I could hear his voice while I showered. A dim echo like rocks rolling, rising and falling, absorbed by the thin plaster walls of the bathroom, disseminating unending dullness and weariness, longing for a dark, padded muteness beneath the comforter.

I wondered where David had disappeared. His belongings still sat meticulously arranged in the corner of the room; it was uncharacteristic. A caricature of neatness: the pile of neatly folded shirts on the suitcase, looking freshly laundered, tied with a ribbon he had found somewhere. That was his note.

“What do you think of my arrangement?” His voice came from behind my back.

He was soaking wet. His face and hair were dripping; pools of water gathered in the leather creases of his flight jacket. He had gone out “for a walk,” it turned out, and got caught in the rain. “How was it?” he asks after a long time.

“Go and get dry first.” I throw a towel at him.

I lock the door, take my nightgown off, and stand in my underwear.

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“What probably must happen.”

He walks over and stands very close to me; he smells of damp leather. “You’re wrong.” He smoothes his wet hand over my shoulder in a round motion, down to my arm. His fingers flutter over my waistline to my buttocks, my thighs.

“Here.” He throws the nightgown over my shoulders. “Get dressed.”

I’m shivering all over; my teeth chatter even when I cover myself up to the neck with a blanket. He is next to me under the blanket fully clothed, leaning back on the wooden headboard, smoking, dropping ashes on the floor. “I don’t do it like that.”

“Oh—you have principles.”

“Not principles, just a certain taste for how things should be done and how they shouldn’t.”

I jump off the bed suddenly, wrap a sweater around myself, and come back to huddle under the blanket with my back turned to him. “Nazi.”

He leans over me and puts his hand around my neck. “What did you say?”

“Nazi.”

“Don’t you dare say that ever again.”

“Well, I may not say it, but I’ll be thinking it.” I sit up and fling his hands off.

“What did you want?” he barks, bringing his face in close to mine. “Tell me what you wanted? A friendly fuck after the funeral—exciting but not too exciting—so you could wash everything away? Those impersonal sex games, a one-night stand with a familiar stranger who suddenly jabs his prick into you with no warning—rape, as if—a dried-up spinster’s clichéd fantasies? Well, sorry, but I can’t deliver those goods today.”

My breath is labored; my cheeks burn. I throw the door open. “Leave. Leave now.”

Slowly, mincingly, Lilly creeps into the room and joylessly nibbles at the tufts of the bedspread. Then she hops onto her warm spot in the bed. I look at her with astonishment. “How did she get out?”

“Out of where?” he asks.

“The closet in the hallway. They locked her in there earlier.”

“There’s an attic over the closet that reaches all the way to the kitchen, where there’s an opening. She can beat any odds, our Lilly, can’t she?” He rubs his cheek on her fur and scratches her white neck.

I lean against the doorway and wait for him to leave.

“It won’t do you any good.” He looks up at me. “I’m staying here simply because I have nowhere to go until my flight leaves at five A.M. tomorrow.”

“In that case, I’ll leave.” I pull my pants on and put on my shoes.

He jumps off the bed and slams the door shut, blocking it with his body. “No, please don’t go.”

“Do you need entertainment?”

“I don’t know what I need.” He lays his head on my shoulder, touching my neck with his lips, his fingers digging through my hair. “Don’t ask me to be anything in particular now, I can’t take it.”

“Anything in particular such as what?”

“I don’t know—a man, a boy, a friend, a cousin, anything.” A sudden gust billows the two curtains covering the open window. Like huge, swollen bellies, the fabric gets entangled with the lamp standing on the floor and knocks it over.

I turn on the light in the bathroom and leave the door open. In the dimness I can see him lying on his stomach next to Lilly. I take his shoes off, pull off his socks, hold his cold feet between my hands for a while, then put them underneath my shirt, against my stomach, covered with the sweater.

“You lied,” I say. “You always lie.”

“What did I lie about?” he says in a muffled voice with his face in the pillow.

I kneel by him without moving, his feet on my stomach. “About what happened there between you and Michel, about what he did or didn’t want.”

He is quiet. “How can you be so sure?”

“I can sense it.”

“You don’t know anything, you’re just full of yourself. You’ve always acted as if your feelings have some absolute value.”

“Not in this case. As soon as I saw you yesterday, I knew you were hiding something. The way you left the house and then came back like a little thief, like a liar with a lie that’s too big to handle.”

He straightens up, comes over, and crouches down next to me. He opens the zipper of my pants and puts his head beneath my sweater; he rubs his cheek against my abdomen. “I was stifled. I wanted so badly to let him breathe that I stifled myself, I had no air.”

Without touching him, I lean back on my hands to support myself. “What did he want?”

“For me to die with him, more or less. I think he wanted to kill me. You know he could never stand me, and during the last few weeks of the disease that grudge he bore against me became something completely monstrous, religious almost. As soon as he laid his eyes on me I could feel him cursing me, putting a spell on me.”

“Why didn’t you leave?”

“He wouldn’t let me. When I went to the bathroom for a few minutes, he would let out this strange scream, like a chicken. I can’t even reconstruct it. And his pain, his pains.”

“What about them?”

“I don’t know, it was as if there was a sense that every pain of his strengthened his grip on me. Every tube they shoved in him, every infusion long after he had any veins left. During the last week of his life, that thing called his body was a kind of limp bag, an unstuffed taxidermied animal. I don’t think I’ve ever loathed anything in my life as much as I loathed that body. He infected me with it, with his loathing of his own body, and then he loathed me for loathing him as much as he did.”

“And the cremation?”

“The cremation.” He pauses. “That issue came up in the final week, along with paying off his debts. He left huge debts, you know. Whenever he managed to get his head above water a little, in the hospital, he would buy stuff over the phone with his credit card from the home-shopping channel. When we figured out at some point that his life insurance would cover the debts, he was relieved. Then he started talking about cremation. He always tended to romanticize himself, you know. All that bullshit about scattering his ashes in nature was very appealing to him.”

He turns to me and takes his head out from the layers of clothing. “How did that go anyway?”

I feel around the dark room for the pack of cigarettes and light one. Lilly opens her yellow eyes to stare at the blue lighter flame.

I lie next to him on the floor. “Why do they persecute her the whole time? It’s weird. I mean, she belonged to him.”

“Don’t you know?” He leans up on his elbows and looks at me.

“No. What?”

“I thought you knew. Cat-scratch fever.”

“What?”

“Cat-scratch fever, it’s a disease cats pass by scratching. It’s harmless for healthy people, but it can be lethal for people whose immune system is messed up by AIDS.”

“Did Lilly scratch him?”

“Oh yeah. Two months before he was hospitalized. It shortened his life by about six months, if not more, that disease.”

I close my eyes and summon an earlier, distant sense: the motion of the hammock in the garden beneath the trees, Lilly, the aquamarine skies. “He really will kill her one day, Henri,” I say.

“Very likely. He’s capable of it. Not consciously but semiconsciously. It would tear him apart, though.”

“You’re worried about him?”

“What do you think, that I’m some heartless thug?”

“No, just a thug.”

He sits up with his legs crossed. “I’m starved.”

“Did you even eat anything all day?”

“Nothing. I swiped some hard-boiled eggs from the fridge. What did they make so many eggs for?”

I lay my hand on his forehead and run my finger along three deep wrinkles.

“Do I have a fever?”

“Would you like to?”

“Very much. A high fever that takes a week to get better. With stupors and hallucinations.” He leads my fingers into his mouth, one by one. “You’ll always be my bride, you know. You promised.”

“When I was ten.”

“It doesn’t matter. We should be together, now and always, and have lots of retarded in-bred children.”

“Not in this lifetime.”

“Okay, forget it then.”

He rolls onto his side and lies silently with his eyes closed for a few minutes. He reaches out to touch my thigh and smooths his hand over it. “I need you to help me with something.”

“What?”

He sits up at my feet with his knees apart, my legs stretched out beneath the arch created by his legs. He pulls down my pants, fascinated by the white triangle of my underwear. I reach out to his high, glimmering cheek and move away. “Let’s not be sentimental.”

I turn over to my stomach and bury my face in the rough fringes of the rug.

We fall asleep then for a while and wake up to the urgent voice of an announcer on television. He gets dressed, pulling his jeans up over his sticky skin. “What time is it?”

I glance at my watch. “Almost one.”

“Get dressed.”

“Why?”

“I want you to help me with something.”

“With what?”

“Getting rid of Lilly. Then you’ll drive me to the airport.”

We walk downstairs barefoot, stopping cold at every sound. I carry his duffel bag, and he carries Lilly, hidden in his flight jacket, with his hand covering her mouth. The car keys are next to the coatrack in the hallway, luckily for us.

I lock Lilly in the trunk, and together we block off the openings with layer over layer of tape.

We drive for a long time through main roads and side roads, winding along the gravel paths of villages, around the squares, the forests beyond which the silver, sealed face of a lake is just visible.

*   *   *

“Where are we going, anyway?” I ask after a while.

“I don’t know.” He changes stations on the radio, looking for the local jazz station.

He hesitates briefly at a bright intersection and stares at the arrow pointing toward Paris, then he follows it, pressing down on the gas.

The road is almost completely empty. On the other side of a fence we see workmen with florescent orange jackets laying boiling tar on the road, smoothing it over the asphalt with huge rakes. In the growing dark I see pointy cypress trees and a moonstruck building beyond the hill surrounded by vast empty expanses. I am suddenly terrified. “Where are we going?”

“The question is not where, but for how long. About an hour and a quarter, I think.”

He slows to a stop on the shoulder of the highway and turns on the hazard lights. “Come on.”

We get out and open the trunk. The cat lies on her side in silence except for a soft wheezing sound.

He whistles weakly. “What endurance.”

We lay her at the side of the road, between the asphalt and the gravel.

We drive on to the next intersection where we can turn and head to the railway station that will take him to Charles de Gaulle. He stops at the station entrance, digs around in his pocket, and discovers he’s out of cigarettes. I give him mine. I move to the driver’s seat. He sticks his head in the window. “Can you find your way back?” His dark eyes are sunken in dark circles, dark on dark, a backdrop for the pure white of his vacant eyes.

I muddle along the roads until I get directions from someone at a gas station. The directions mean nothing to me, but miraculously I find my way back to Plessis Belleville.

As I quietly close the door behind me and restore the bunch of keys to its place, I notice a strip of light beneath the kitchen door.

Oncle Henri, Alain, and Maman are sitting at the table in their pajamas. “Where have you been?” Alain asks.

“I was just driving around. I couldn’t fall asleep.”

They’re slouched over the long, dirty surface of the table top that glows beneath the yellow flame of the low lamp overhead. A watermelon sits directly beneath it, sliced down the middle as if cracked open by hand.

“Why are you all awake?”

Oncle Henri looks up at me with narrow eyes. “They’ve murdered your Rabin.”