In his other hand, the hand that wasn’t holding up the portion of jam, Dad’s holding a bag. A bag with lots of tissues inside. His passport too. And a party official’s card. Dad sees the card as a weapon, his only weapon. Sometimes he leaves the card on a stool near the door so that his relative can see it clearly.
‘When you’ve flipped the trip switch, come back through this door,’ Dad whispers. He puts his hand into the bag and picks out the card. He does a turn of about 270 degrees towards the door of his relative’s room, from where one can hear the sound of weapons being loaded and unloaded. Dad doesn’t trust his relative. ‘Do you think he’s inside?’ he asks me.
The jam has come to rest at the relative’s door.
‘Maybe,’ I say, though the words hardly make it out of my throat. I conclude that I’m also frightened.
Dad and I both know that the relative is in his room. Dad could have turned ninety degrees instead of 270 degrees. It occurs to me that he wanted to come with me to flip the trip switch, but then he remembered the jam.
The fuse box is in the kitchen, so in order to reach it I have to leave our room through a side door – a door that leads to the corridor on the ground floor where we live, and from that corridor I have to come into the house through the front door, where you find the kitchen and the bathroom. ‘Shut the door quietly and don’t be long,’ Dad says.
There are rats in the building, and they like to sneak into houses in the dark. I open the door a fraction and sidle out, kicking the air at ground level to frighten off the rats if there are any there. I shut the door quietly, as Dad requested, so as not to annoy the relative, though we don’t know if he’s alone in his room or has someone with him.
I feel my way along the wall of the corridor and come to the front door of our house. I take out the key that I always keep in my pocket. I open the door and sidle into the house, aiming several swift kicks at the air near the floor, but behind me this time. I approach the fuse box, touch the switch and push it down, but the power from the generator doesn’t come back on. Now I’m in the kitchen, while Dad remains immobile in our room. Between him and me lies the relative’s room, which Dad and I are banned from entering, and the relative can come into the kitchen directly through a door from his room.
I can’t speak to Dad from here because I’d have to raise my voice and that might upset our relative, who might be doing business with one of his clients. So I can either go back to our room and wait with Dad for the power from the generator to come back on, or I can stay in the kitchen, switching back and forth between the mains and the generator, or I can go and pay the bill for the generator, because the owner of the generator might have cut us off for not paying it. Of course it’s not a good time to pay the bill because it’s 11 o’clock in the evening. I can’t see Dad from where I am in the kitchen and he can’t see me either. After I don’t know how many minutes, the relative comes out of his room, with a gun in his hand, because he feels hot. That’s what he does when he feels hot – he picks up his gun and comes out. He’s about to say angrily, ‘This piece is smuggled, smuggled from Israel,’ but he treads on the jam. The portion of jam splits open and splatters his foot with sticky apricot jam, so he opens fire.
My father no longer goes to the hospital to work, because you don’t find nurses in wheelchairs working in hospitals. But he’s made a deal with a colleague, who brings him little portions of jam twice a week. He can’t stand up, and he can’t even push his wheelchair with his hands. But he looks up towards the lightbulb whenever he sees me coming into the room. I’m no longer a child, though. Inside the lightbulb I find a portion of jam. ‘How did you do that?’ I ask him. But Dad doesn’t answer because, just as he can’t walk or move his hands, he can’t speak either. He smiles. I try to reach the jam but I realize it’s impossible, because the lightbulb’s too high and the only person in the house who can bring it down is our relative, with a bullet from his revolver.
Curtain
OUR BED IS NEAR THE BALCONY DOOR, AND THE balcony door has a curtain. My wife likes to leave the door open and pull the curtain closed when we have sex. Our flat is on the seventh floor and it can be windy up here. The wind comes in through the window and goes out through the door. It moves the curtain a little. Our neighbour, an elderly dwarf, watches us from the building opposite and shouts, ‘There’s someone fucking on the seventh floor.’ All the people come out of their flats and stand on their balconies. Our neighbour says it in a loud voice but in a solemn tone, as if he’s in a literary salon. He doesn’t even look in our direction when he announces his discovery.
Nothing stops me when I’m fucking. I can’t. If I stopped, it would put me in a bad mood for the rest of the day. It would also have a negative effect on my wife, who’s so sensitive she says she wants a divorce whenever I say anything that offends her. So what I do is I ask her to hold the curtain and pull it down when we’re having sex. That way we make sure the wind won’t lift the curtain up. But when my wife reaches orgasm, she clenches her thighs and her fists as tight as she can, and her body becomes twice as heavy. On one occasion she pulled the curtain down when she reached orgasm and it came off the rail. This was seen by the old dwarf, who apparently has nothing to do all day but spy on us. He shouted out, ‘The woman’s having an orgasm!’ and people flocked to their balconies like maniacs and started looking in our direction and making comments. Some of them even said, ‘Wow! What a stud!’ One of them clapped and another one whistled.
I suggested to my wife that we simply keep the balcony door closed but she refused. She has a good reason. ‘When it gets hot, my husband, you can’t keep going for long, can you?’ she said. This is true. And there’s no electricity in the neighbourhood most of the time, so there’s no solution other than to change the curtain or change the neighbours.
I’ve thought about threatening the dwarf, or getting revenge on him. He’s ruined the moments that are dearest to my heart, the moments when I am having sex with my wife. Anyway, we decided to change the curtain for a thicker one. At the same time I made up my mind to visit the dwarf and speak to him calmly about the problem.
The man has never married. That may be why he’s so interested in other people’s business. He doesn’t have a job either. At the end of every month he receives some money from one of his brothers in the United States. His brothers have suggested that he move there, but he refuses. He says he really loves this city, and since he discovered that the young couple who recently moved into the area have sex two or sometimes three times a day, he never leaves the balcony. He carries a walking stick and the doctor has advised him to walk. You can see him walking up and down the balcony instead of going downstairs to walk along the seafront, because he doesn’t want to miss a single moment of the sex show, which is much more important as far as he’s concerned. But the balcony is small and he misjudged the distance, walking much further than he would have walked on the seafront. After two weeks, his legs felt tired, very tired. They did an operation on him but it didn’t work and now he can’t walk without the aid of a Zimmer frame. He no longer carries a stick and he’s slower.
Two or three weeks ago a fire broke out in the big house where he lives alone and it destroyed all his furniture and possessions. The little man only just managed to escape. But he did survive and he thanked the Lord. Then he sent a message to his brothers, who quickly sent him some money. Since the fire, he hasn’t appeared on the balcony and I heard that he was accusing me of laying a curse on him, saying that the whole fire was to take revenge on him for spying on us and trying to cause scandals for me and my wife.