Heker’s central theme is the family and its responses to the encroaching world. Also, the curious rituals that couples, adults and children, and siblings among themselves, invent to relate to one another, rituals that, at the same time, help them find their singular identities. The consequences of tiny acts may be enormous (“Now”) or ineffable (“The Night of the Comet”). They may distil the creative life to a handful of experiences (“Early Beginnings or Ars Poetica”) or portray a future life in a single all-encompassing relationship (“Jocasta”). They may entail the loss of everything we take for granted (“The Cruelty of Life”) or everything we might hope for (“The Music of Sundays”). They may stem from a quasi — soap opera atmosphere (“Family Life”) or from lives of quiet desperation (“Georgina Requeni or the Chosen One”). They may lead to vast existential questions (“Bishop Berkeley or Mariana of the Universe”) or to infinitesimal epiphanies (“Strategies Against Sleep”). In every case, Heker’s stories raise the quotidian to the literary status of an epic. Her characters face minute dilemmas with the wholeheartedness and courage of knights errant, as if they realized that possible solutions to our greatest sorrows can sometimes be discerned in the undergrowth of private heartbreaks and the tangle of intimate losses, in secret paths that may lead away from the traps of private violence, alcoholism, betrayal of love, familiar misunderstandings. A certain Hasidic belief in the microcosm reflecting the macrocosm underlies Heker’s conception of the universe.
One of Heker’s best-known stories, gathered in countless anthologies, is “The Stolen Party.” The careful building-up of a child’s expectation at a birthday party that lies implacably beyond her unnamed borders, mirrors, on a miniature scale, the partitions and prohibitions of society as a whole. Everything can be played out as normal, but one tiny misplaced gesture is bound to shatter the entire social structure. Nothing is said, but the outstretched hand of the ‘lady of the house’ in the last paragraph, poised in the conventional action of giving, becomes all of a sudden its shadow, the hand of a society that robs children and denies them their right to equality.
Commenting on the craft of the short story, the Irish writer William Trevor said: ‘I think it is the art of the glimpse. If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an Impressionist painting. It should be an explosion of truth.’ When the explosion has taken place and the dust has settled, the reader of Heker’s stories is aware that something has been revealed, and that now the world seems both stranger and clearer than before, and feels grateful for the modest miracle.
Alberto Manguel
THE STOLEN PARTY
As soon as she arrived she went straight to the kitchen to see if the monkey was there. It was. What a relief! She wouldn’t have liked to admit that her mother had been right. Monkeys at a birthday? her mother had sneered. Get away with you, believing any nonsense you’re told! She was cross, but not because of the monkey, the girl thought; it’s just because of the party.
‘I don’t like you going,’ she told her. ‘It’s a rich people’s party.’
‘Rich people go to Heaven too,’ said the girl, who studied religion at school.
‘Get away with Heaven,’ said the mother. ‘The problem with you, young lady, is that you like to fart higher than your ass.’
The girl didn’t approve of the way her mother spoke. She was barely nine, and one of the best in her class.
‘I’m going because I’ve been invited,’ she said. ‘And I’ve been invited because Luciana is my friend. So there.’
‘Ah yes, your friend,’ her mother grumbled. She paused. ‘Listen, Rosaura,’ she said at last. That one’s not your friend. You know what you are to them? The maid’s daughter, that’s what.’
Rosaura blinked hard: she wasn’t going to cry. Then she yelled: ‘Shut up! You know nothing about being friends!’
Every afternoon she used to go to Luciana’s house and they would both finish their homework while Rosaura’s mother did the cleaning. They had their tea in the kitchen, and they told each other secrets. Rosaura loved everything in the big house, and she also loved the people who lived there.
‘I’m going because it will be the most lovely party in the whole world, Luciana told me it would. There will be a magician, and he will bring a monkey and everything.’
The mother swung around to take a good look at her child. She put her hands on her hips.
‘Monkeys at a birthday?’ she said. ‘Get away with you, believing any nonsense you’re told!’
Rosaura was deeply offended. She thought it unfair of her mother to accuse other people of being liars simply because they were rich. Rosaura wanted to be rich, too, of course. If one day she managed to live in a beautiful palace, would her mother stop loving her? She felt very sad. She wanted to go to that party more than anything else in the world.
‘I’ll die if I don’t go,’ she whispered, almost without moving her lips.
She wasn’t sure if she had been heard, but on the morning of the party, she discovered that her mother had starched her Christmas dress. And in the afternoon, after washing her hair, her mother rinsed it in apple vinegar so that it would be all nice and shiny. Before going out, Rosaura admired herself in the mirror, with her white dress and glossy hair, and thought she looked terribly pretty.
Señora Ines also seemed to notice. As soon as she saw her, she said, ‘How lovely you look today, Rosaura.’
Rosaura gave her starched skirt a slight toss with her hands and walked into the party with a firm step. She said hello to Luciana and asked about the monkey. Luciana put on a secretive look and whispered into Rosaura’s ear: ‘He’s in the kitchen. But don’t tell anyone, because it’s a surprise.’
Rosaura wanted to make sure. Carefully she entered the kitchen and there she saw it, deep in thought, inside its cage. It looked so funny that Rosaura stood there for a while, watching it. Later, every so often, she would slip out of the party unseen and go and admire it. Rosaura was the only one allowed into the kitchen. Señora Ines had said, ‘You yes, but not the others, they’re much too boisterous, they might break something.’ Rosaura had never broken anything. She even managed the jug of orange juice, carrying it from the kitchen into the dining room. She held it carefully and didn’t spill a single drop. And Señora Ines had said, ‘Are you sure you can manage a jug as big as that?’ Of course she could manage. She wasn’t a butterfingers, like the others. Like that blonde girl with the bow in her hair. As soon as she saw Rosaura, the girl with the bow had said, ‘And you? Who are you?’
‘I’m a friend of Luciana,’ said Rosaura.
‘No,’ said the girl with the bow, ‘You are not a friend of Luciana because I’m her cousin, and I know all her friends. And I don’t know you.’
‘So what,’ said Rosaura. ‘I come here every afternoon with my mother, and we do our homework together.’
‘You and your mother do your homework together?’ asked the girl, laughing.
‘I and Luciana do our homework together,’ said Rosaura, very seriously.
The girl with the bow shrugged her shoulders.
‘That’s not being friends,’ she said. ‘Do you go to school together?’