It turned out that the bullet had scratched his buddy’s ear and he needed a stitch or two. The next day he was back in the field, as good as new. They kept Moshe in detention for twenty-eight days. Inspections all day long, inspections of every kind. When he got out, he wiped the entire event from his mind. When his friends in the neighbourhood asked why he’d been confined to the base, he told them that the military police had caught him without a beret. That was the only thing he could think of saying. And he never talked about it again.
Not until this week, when he took his hallucinating father home from the hospital in the afternoon. He suddenly remembered it, the exercise with his platoon. He bit his lip. Why was he remembering it now, of all times? And he had that same strange feeling he’d had when his commander jumped into the ditch to see if the soldier was dead: as if an ice cube were climbing slowly up his back to his head.
*
Come over, Sima called me through the water heater hole, you have to see this.
Gina brought an exorcist to get the demon out of Avram.
What?!! I said, shocked.
Yes, it’s really amazing, Sima said. It might be good for that project of yours? On God and all that.
I wanted to tell her that the project had been scrapped a long time ago, but I grabbed a camera and ran out instead.
In the end, of course, they didn’t let me take pictures. The exorcist, Hacham Yehieh ben Amar, Yehieh ben Amar the Wise, said that demons don’t like cameras and asked me politely but firmly to put the camera back in its case. I also remembered that the witches in Bolivia wouldn’t let anyone photograph them either, so I didn’t argue (one of those witches sold a yellowish love potion in a small bottle to a friend I was travelling with. We laughed about it for hours, trying to decide whether to put it in the tea or just pour it down the sink, and the next day, she met the love of her life).
Gina, tie Avram’s hands together, Hacham Yehieh ordered, and Gina did what he said. Now his feet, he said. Gina raised an eyebrow. Sorry, Hacham Yehieh apologised, it’s so that if the demon wakes up, he won’t kick us, God forbid.
Sima and I stood on the side smirking at each other. Hacham Yehieh saw us smiling and gave us a strange look that seemed to rebuke us but also hinted that we were accomplices. He looked pretty weird, that Hacham. I would’ve expected a certified exorcist to have a tangled beard and wear a long white robe, but Yehieh had on stonewashed jeans and a rainy-grey sweater, and he fussed around Avram with quick steps that made him look almost like he was dancing.
Avram was passive, completely out of it. Somehow, his eyes followed what was going on in the room, but without offering an opinion.
Now, Hacham Yehieh said and sat down at a safe distance from Avram, now bring … but before he could finish the request, a tub full of water was put in front of him and Gina handed him a towel. She knows the drill, I thought.
Hacham Yehieh put his hands into the tub and asked Gina to cover it with a towel. Sima jumped up and did it for her. She tucked the edges of the towel carefully under the tub and shot a look at Gina to check that she was doing it right.
Hacham Yehieh closed his eyes and started mumbling in a language I didn’t understand. I think he’s calling the demons now, Sima whispered in my ear. Even though I’d been warned not to, the temptation to pull my camera out of its case was enormous: a ray of sunlight had just come through the window, with dust motes drifting through it, and there was Hacham Yehieh, with his intense piety and Gina, with her wrinkles, and in the background the colourful cloth hanging in their living room, and a picture of Avram looking twenty or thirty years younger, wearing an old-fashioned white undershirt and holding one of the boys, maybe Moshe, in the air.
No, I told myself, and kept my hand close to my body. Gina would get angry. And Sima would never forgive me.
For a few minutes, nothing happened. Hacham Yehieh mumbled. The towel moved a little. Outside, two dogs barked a conversation. And then, all of a sudden, Avram started to tremble. At first, it was a slight trembling in his bound hands, then it got stronger and moved to his arms, his shoulders, and finally his whole body was shaking violently. Gina let out a terrified scream. It really was very scary. No external force was shaking him. He himself was looking at his arms in total shock.
Now Hacham Yehieh went from mumbling to shouting. I didn’t know what he was saying, but some of it sounded like pleading and some of it like threats. His hands were moving under the towel as if they were battling something. His face contorted in real or fake suffering, and shrill, chirping sounds came from the area of the tub, although we couldn’t tell who was making them. Calm down, Noa, I told myself. Those can’t be the voices of demons. There is no such thing as the voices of demons. Hacham Yehieh must be a ventriloquist and those voices are coming from his stomach. It’s coming from his stomach, I gestured to Sima, but she was totally mesmerised by what was going on under the towel and didn’t notice me. Small bumps began appearing on the surface of the towel, like the kind you see on boiling hot pizza, hills rose and fell, rose and fell, as if someone or something was trying to get out and couldn’t. OK, I thought, trying to calm myself down, maybe it’s his fingers, maybe he’s pushing his knuckles against the towel to create that effect. But no, there are too many bubbles. It can’t be that he’s raising his fingers in six different places, unless … unless what?
Very slowly, the hills flattened out and Avram’s shaking subsided. And Hacham Yehieh stopped suffering and spraying water all over the place.
Amir won’t believe me when I tell him about this, I thought. He’s at home all week, and the day they have their own episode of X-Files here, he goes to Tel Aviv.
Hacham Yehieh opened his eyes and motioned with his head for Sima to untie Avram’s hands and feet and take the towel off the tub.
I almost fell off my chair: the water was full of blood.
He wounded me, that momzer, Hacham Yehieh grumbled and asked Gina to bring him a bandage. Sima was so shocked that she cried out when she saw the deep cut that split one of his fingers. OK, that doesn’t mean a thing, I thought sceptically, he could have cut his finger himself. All you need is a paper-cutter up your sleeve.
Gina wound the bandage around his finger, shooting worried looks at her husband, who’d gone back to staring at the world with vacant eyes.
He’ll be fine, Hacham Yehieh said. You have nothing to worry about, Gina. There was an old demon inside him, a stubborn old demon who’s been wandering around here for almost fifty years. The demon cut me, but I drove him away, and now he knows not to start up with Yehieh. I’ll write something for you to put in an amulet he can wear on a chain around his neck so the demon doesn’t come back.