WHEN HENYA EXTRACTED the sharp scissors from the green plastic sheath with the picture of the dissected chicken sketched on it, her eyes started glazing, and when she put her hand to her granddaughter’s head and parted the shining, golden hair, which tumbled like curled laces under the clicking scissors, her face had already turned into a mask.
“Come closer to the window, baby, so that Grandma can see better and won’t hurt you. Grandma loves you and never wants you to feel pain. Bend your head a little so that Grandma can do it properly.”
There was a note of urgency in Henya’s voice and the child, sensing the importance of what was being done to her, stood for a long time motionless and obedient, her head bowed, her hands tucked behind the belt buckle of her short dress, and her eyes staring at the long blonde clumps of hair piling up around her sandals.
“We’ll do this properly,” Henya whispered promisingly to the pale, slender nape exposed to the light. “Nothing will be left on your sweet head and all the dirty stuff will drop off.” Her left hand burrowed in the small child’s extraordinarily long hair, and her right hand quickly manipulated the scissors; her body was arched like a bow over her grandchild’s head. Thus she worked with a frozen glaze, like a woman possessed.
The parting between the two golden curtains was getting more and more jagged until at last the entire head was shorn; short stubble, like mown stalks of wheat, stood on the pale scalp, exposing the tender white skin that had not seen the light since the hair first grew on it.
Henya emitted a feverish breath and her whole body was seized by a tremor. She returned the scissors to their sheath, dropped exhausted into a chair as if after great exertion, drew the grandchild to her, hugged her with all her might, and covered her nape with kisses, as if they were about to part. Her voice regained its soothing tone, despite the turmoil that had overwhelmed her. “Everything will be all right now, baby. You don’t have to worry anymore.”
The child raised tender hands to feel her head and recoiled from the new sensation. Then she looked at the heap of hair on the floor and turned her head away, her face contorted with crying. “You cut off all of my hair. Now I look like a boy.”
Henya pulled the child to her bosom and stroked the anguished face. “We had to do it, baby.”
“Why?”
“Because of the note from your teacher. You remember she pinned a note to your shirt collar? That’s what it said. But now everything will be fine. Your hair will grow quickly and be very, very clean.”
The girl ran to the big mirror in her parents’ bedroom and returned to her grandmother sobbing. “I look ugly without my hair. I don’t want to go to school like this. They’ll make fun of me, ’cause it’s ugly. It’s even shorter than Hedva’s hair. I’ll tell my mommy on you. She won’t talk to you, and then she’ll stick my hair back on.”
Behind the glazed look, Henya’s irises started flitting. “Baby, come here to Grandma. Closer, closer to Grandma. I want to tell you something. I know tomorrow is your birthday and you’re a big girl now and you understand a lot of things. So now I’ll tell you something that only big children can understand, and then you’ll see that we had to do what we did.”
THE FIRST TO see it was Zvi. For a moment he stood there flabbergasted, his head tilted back as if he had been slapped. Then he looked as if he were about to burst into tears: his lips were sucked in and his eyes clouded over. He lowered the cardboard box he was carrying and put it on a bench in the hallway without taking his eyes off the girl caught in Henya’s arms, as if trying to figure out what a strange child was doing in his house being embraced by his own mother. Then his gaze wandered to the puddle of golden hair and his hands shot to his head, clutching his temples.
The girl tore herself from her grandmother’s arms and started to cry, her little hand groping on her scalp. “Daddy, look what Grandma did to me; she cut off all my hair, and it’s not nice at all. The children will say I look like a monkey.”
Henya rose briskly from her chair and spoke to her son as she used to when he was a child, “Zvika, come with me. I want to show you something.”
Zvi put his hand on his daughter’s head, and his palm, feeling its way like the palm of a blind man, stroked the coarse, straight spikes on the child’s head. “Mother, I don’t know what came over you. This time you’re really out of your mind.”
“Look what it says here.” She held the note before his eyes. “Read for yourself and then tell me if it isn’t a shame and a disgrace that a thing like this should happen in our family.”
Zvi read the note, and his hand wandered in the air and stopped on his brow, as if he were struck by an excruciating headache.
“This is a note from the teacher,” he said. “She sends such notes to all the kids every Friday.”
“You didn’t read it, Zvika! Read it first. Read carefully what it says.”
“I already know it by heart. Every Friday I fetch Miri from nursery school and she has a note like this pinned to her collar. It always says the same thing.”
“Zvika, it says she has head lice.”
“I know.”
“What do you mean, you know? As if it was a normal thing in our family. And the teacher knows and anyone who sees the note on the child’s collar knows. People will talk. There are people here who know me from abroad.”
“Mother, this time you really went out of your mind,” he said. The girl wailed suddenly, frightened by the shouting between her father and her grandmother. She pressed her cheek to his thigh and hugged his waist.
“Look what you’ve done to her. She had the most beautiful hair in the school. We’ve never cut her hair since she was born. And you knew it, you were so proud of her hair. How could you do this, explain to me, how?”
“But Zvika, she has head lice!” Henya’s eyes turned into two black rings in her face. “What does it matter if the hair is pretty or not if you have lice?”
“And now you argue with me. You refuse to realize what you did, and you’re sure you’re right. Don’t you know that all the kids have lice? It’s an epidemic. You yourself told me last month that you saw on television how they declared a nationwide campaign to wash all the children’s hair that day, so that they wouldn’t reinfect each other. Ziva washes her hair every week and treats it with a special chemical, and still she picks it up from the kids in her nursery school.”
“Zvika, listen to me. I know what’s good for my children. I’ve been through a lot and I know. When you’ve got lice, no chemical and no washing will do. The best thing is to crop the hair right away, down to the roots. Every hour there are more and more eggs and every minute counts.”
“Cut it like this?” he asked, his voice on the brink of crying, and he pointed to the head clinging to his thigh. “If you decide to cut it, why like this, in a fit, why not at the hairdressers, in a straight line, so that it will look pretty?”
Henya looked at her grandchild as if seeing her for the first time: the shorn stumps of hair, the shrunken head, and the tender neck that looked like a plucked chicken’s. Her head was still bent toward him, as if trying to explain. Henya suddenly started to cry and to emit a strange sobbing sound, like a person who was born without the ability to cry but has learned to fake it, to reduce the distance between themselves and other human beings.
“It really didn’t come out so nice,” she sobbed. “It should have been more straight. But I was so agitated, I didn’t pay attention. Will you forgive Grandma for doing such a poor job, baby? Will you forgive Grandma? You know, Grandma only wants the best for you, don’t you? You know I have only Zvika and one Miri in the whole world.”
The child lowered her eyes, unwilling to look at her, and a moment later turned her back to her, tightened her grip around her father’s waist and buried her face in his trousers. When Henya put out her hand to pat the shorn head, the small body trembled, as if scorched by fire.
“It will grow again soon, baby,” Henya promised her, her heart sinking at the sight of the recoiling girl. “You’ll again have the most beautiful hair, and, more important, you won’t have lice.”
Zvi was staring at the felled hair scattered on the floor, beneath the window, like wisps of light. He said in a lifeless voice, “I really don’t know what to do about this. Come with me to the other room, Mother. Ziva will be here soon; she only went out to order the birthday cake. What she will do when she sees this I really don’t know. She’ll blow her top. You’d better not be here at all. Go in there, and when Ziva gets here I’ll take you home as quickly as possible.”
IN HER SON’S study, with eyes staring at the darkness, Henya heard her daughter-in-law screaming, her granddaughter wailing, and her son trying to intervene, to explain, but his voice was drowned by theirs.
“Why should I care about that now?” she heard her daughter-in-law. “So what if that’s what they used to do in the camps forty-five years ago. The world has advanced a little since then, and we are not in the camps now. Look at your daughter! Look at her! Tomorrow is her birthday. On this side she is completely shaven. And look here, she has a scratch. She cut her skin! Her hands should be broken so she’ll never touch a pair of scissors again! Get that woman out of here or I’ll kill her with my own hands. And tell her never to set foot in here again. I never want to see her face. Never again in my life!”
Zvi’s voice struggled and rose, and for a moment sounded loud and clear and dominant in the adjacent room, but Ziva’s voice immediately overpowered it: “Stop it, it won’t do now. I’m telling you, it only makes me madder. I don’t want to hear about it anymore! Those stories are prehistory by now. I told you not to ask her to baby-sit for us. She’s crazy. You must realize that your mother is crazy. I told you a long time ago. She lost some screws in her head in the Holocaust. Look at the catastrophe she brought on us. A catastrophe! I’ll never let her near my child. And I don’t want her to come here again. If you want to see her, you’ll have to go to her house. She’s crazy and you should put her in a nuthouse. Any doctor will agree to commit her right away. Look what she’s done to our daughter. You remember what a pretty girl you had? Look at her now. She’ll suffer for this all her life. Look here—and there. Turn around, Miri, so that Daddy can see. Can you take a child into the street like this? What shall we do with her? Put a wig on her? Shave her head? It will be at least a year before it looks okay. I want your mother out of my house now. I don’t want her to stay for the birthday party. Anyway, we must call off the party.”
Suddenly the screaming stopped and Miri’s shrill voice was heard turning into a sob. “Do you hear what your child is saying? She knows what the lice did when people died in the camps. A four-year-old needs to hear such things? Is this a story fit for her age, I ask you? I want my child to hear stories about Cinderella, not about Auschwitz!”
THE TANGLE OF the voices stopped at the door of the study and Henya was enveloped by deep silence. The death rattle of the boy who was hanged by his feet in the passage between the men’s and the women’s camp had stopped a while ago, and since then only distant barking and rustling of leaves broke the silence now and then. In the corner of the barrack, near the only window overlooking the woods beyond the electric fence, a woman was tossing on her berth and groaning in her dream. The woman sleeping next to her moaned and turned too, so as not to find herself without the sack that served as a blanket, trying to warm herself against the nearby body. Henya raised her hand and with nailless fingers scratched her head; it made a dry, crackling sound, like a wooden floor scoured with a coarse brush. Her skull was itchy, the flesh of her nape inflamed, and she felt tiny bites in her armpits. In the morning, she will find that her neighbor on the other side, the one who had ceased to dream many weeks ago, died in her sleep. For weeks her face had borne the look of the dead, yet on the morning of her death she looked more alive than ever, serene, her eyes staring at the ceiling with a sort of curiosity. When the women hurry in the morning to line up in front of the barracks, the lice will start to leave the dead body; they will look like a black dotted line cutting across the forehead, feeling their way toward another body, looking for a new life for themselves.
Translated from Hebrew by Marganit Weinberger-Rotman