Hand in hand they went, Hansel and Gretel, up and down in the land of the endlessly terrifying possibilities of conflagration: when she was at the bottom of the seesaw, he was on top, when she was on top, he was at the bottom. No less theatrical than she, and in some ways far more so, quick to take fire, rushing in his imagination to the scene of the catastrophe, not rooted to the spot like her, but on the contrary: full of eagerness, great enthusiasm behind every roar of fear. He lived in the movies. That’s what she said: “He lives in the movies.”
He did live at the movies, in the cinemas in the neighborhood or in Tel Aviv: matinees, first show, second show, the same film. Surfing in their third-row seats, he and his friends polished off whole cardboard trays of chocolate-coated banana candies, sliding down and falling asleep on one another’s shoulders. Afterward, sitting in the car crowded like puppies, until three or four in the morning, they went over what had happened in the movie and what could have happened, acting out whole scenes, choking with laughter at their inventions. They parked on the dirt road leading to the shack, close to the rectangular orange building of the welding shop, among the construction pipes lying on the ground outside the building, ready for work the next day. Once in a while one of them left the car to pee in the thorn field and ran back so as not to miss anything. We heard them from inside the house, the mother and I: voices rising and falling in the dark, dissolving into a murmur, blaring forth again in wild shouts of laughter. Afterward silence fell. Her little bedside lamp went on again, and I heard the shuffle of slippers. She went out to them. From the kitchen window I saw her outside, on the dirt road: completely white in her white nightgown, knocking on the car windows: “Get up already, yallah.” They rolled out, still half huddled in sleep, my brother first and two others behind him, and fell on the ground in a huddle, moaning as if they were dying. “Enough with the acting.” She aimed a light kick at Sammy’s shoulder. “You have work tomorrow, how are you going to get up?” He went on lying on his side in the sand for a little while longer, then he rose on all fours, and all the way he followed her on all fours, barking, drooling, and trying to bite her ankle to the sounds of giggling from behind. “What are you laughing at, at your own foolishness?” She pretended to be insulted, trying to suppress her laughter and to escape from Sammy, lifting up her long nightgown.
In a matter of moments all was quiet again; he threw himself onto the carpet at the foot of my bed and fell asleep in his clothes. “Get up and go to bed,” she tried. “Get up.” In the end she gave up, covered him with a blanket, and went back to bed, switching on the towel-cloaked light again. Her sleep was over. Until half past five she went on lying with her eyes open, fixed on the same book, the same page. I got out of bed, skipping over my brother’s body, and went to lie next to her, but not close, on the edge of the bed. I closed my eyes, pretended to be asleep, feeling the lying tremor of my eyelids, the orange light of the lamp penetrating them. She lay on her back, staring at the gleaming Formica doors of the wall closet opposite her: “Why aren’t you asleep, you?” she whispered. The purple walls of the room closed in on us, or so I imagined when I saw them through my eyelids, moving closer toward us, surrounding the bed on all sides, standing at our heads as if they were waiting for us. At my side I felt the movement of her thighs, slightly jolting the mattress. I felt that she wasn’t sleeping, that she wasn’t going to sleep. A delicate despair, lonely as the head of a pin in the wastes of the wilderness, rose from something in the rhythm of her breathing, the position of her body, a despair that didn’t want anything, and wasn’t addressed to anything, not even to herself. I heard her get up, open the shutters, lean out of the window, get dressed in yesterday’s clothes hanging on the hook, bending down next to me, at the side of the bed, to straighten the pale green rug, the nephew of the dark green carpet on which my brother was sleeping at the foot of my bed.
THE SAME BOOK (1)
SHE READ. SHE would lay with her eyes open all night, switching the bedside lamp off and then switching it on again, returning to the same book lying on its back, open at the same page. What did she read? Almost always detective stories, always in French. She spoke Hebrew but she barely recognized the letters: women of her class in Cairo did not read and write Hebrew, only men, and not all of them. At some stage Grandfather Izak, her father, suddenly felt a pedagogical urge to hire a Hebrew teacher to teach her and her brothers at their house. They learned nothing. “We made his life a misery, poor man”: they threw the Nona’s feather comforters on him from the top of the stairs, they hid away, they smeared his glasses with flour and water paste, they glued the pages of his books together, they planned an engagement party for him and the neighbor’s ugly daughter and invited the whole quarter. The teacher ran away. “I’ll pay you not to have to teach them,” he said to Grandfather Izak.
The story about the Hebrew teacher and his troubles filled the mother with satisfaction but not gloating. All the victims in the story were pitiable. “That poor teacher,” she would say, “My poor father, may he rest in peace,” and even “Poor Nona.” Even Nona.
“Poor Nona” would take her out of school to look after her little brothers while she herself went to the mountains to stay at sanatoriums and convalescent homes. “One week I would go to school, one week she would take me out, decide that she was sick,” the mother recalled resentfully. For years she swore that her hatred of doctors and medicine and illness came from all the fainting spells and weakness and swooning that attacked Nona as if she were the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel and sent her to bed for days on end. “The whole house would jump to attention, the whole house, because of her and her ailments.”
The truth was that she actually liked two or three nineteenth-century novels, especially two of them by a father and son: Alexandre Dumas père and Alexandre Dumas fils. The Three Musketeers and The Lady of the Camellias. Every few months she would take out the old volumes that Maurice had once bought her and read them again. Alongside the ordinary “everyday” books, the dozens and hundreds of detective stories her sister sent from France, she had the ones she kept for best, the really good ones, the musketeers and the camellias. She knew both of them almost by heart, even with her memory, which was usually short, erratic, and irritable but expanded when she owed someone something, never mind what: then she remembered in minute detail exactly when, where, and how much, “down to the last penny.”
She returned again and again to The Lady of the Camellias with a solemnity that was almost reverential; she spoke about her and even with her, in a low, discreet voice that became suddenly refined in the presence of the spectral tubercular thinness of the saintly courtesan Marguerite Gautier. When she told the story she would mainly dwell on one crucial, harrowing scene: Marguerite Gautier is crucified. She agrees to her own crucifixion, sacrificing herself for the sake of her beloved’s future, for the sake of pure and absolute love, which triumphs over every interest and earthly desire. Her sacrifice is a secret, something between her and the father of her beloved, who demands that she leave his son alone, but more important, it is a secret that she shares only with God, not with society. Marguerite Gautier the courtesan is pure, white as snow. Society is dirty, the society that judges Marguerite and crucifies her is dirty. Marguerite Gautier is a victim of dirty society, “beautiful and white as an angel, poor thing,” she said, her eyes filming over, perhaps with tears, perhaps because of the burning sensation in her left eye, her hand reaching for her cup of coffee, raising it to her mouth, but not to drink, only to rest her dry lips on its warm rim.