The excitement, the near-electric conductor of her body under the big shawl that came down to her thighs.
“Don’t force it,” I said. “Don’t force yourself to eat.”
She examined the edges of the shawl intently, separating the tangled tassels from one another. “Nothing by force,” she said.
We went down in the elevator to the inner courtyard of the hospital, next to the cafeteria: a dozen white plastic chairs scattered randomly over the clearing of lawn surrounded on three sides by glass walls and open to the sky above. In the middle of the courtyard was a tree that refused to grow, or that wasn’t meant to in the first place. She thought she wanted coffee. I fetched some. She took two sips and put the cup down on the dripping saucer, wiping it with the paper napkin. The mild sunlight of the beginning of December, behind the glass wall an entire family following one of their members on a gurney. “A lot of them come here from Kalkiliya,” she said. “The one they brought last night to the bed next to me is from Kalkiliya. She didn’t sleep all night.” I moved my chair toward the narrow strip of shadow cast by the wall. Two dragonflies, one big and one medium-sized, came to rest on the used wrapping of something or other, some sandwich somebody had eaten. “I think a lot,” she said, carefully prodding the sandy lawn with the toe of her slipper, “there are a lot of thoughts here at night.” “What thoughts?” I asked. “You know, the way I was, this and that.” She raised her eyes and looked in front of her, blinking. “How were you?” I asked, reluctantly, out of a sense of obligation. For a moment she was silent. “Like some sort of donkey, I think,” she said, closing her eyes: “Yallah, let’s get out of this sun.”
We waited for the elevator, she held my elbow — just touching it, really, making the motions of leaning but not actually leaning.
She glanced at me briefly, like a passerby. “Don’t you be like a donkey,” she said.
The elevator opened its doors, two-thirds occupied by the lunch trolley. We could have squeezed into the remaining third, but we didn’t want to. She didn’t want to. “What have we got to do? We’ll wait for the next one,” she said, and stared up at the blinking lights showing the location of the elevator. I bent down to pick up the lighter that had fallen out of my pocket. I felt the shy tips of her fingers on the nape of my neck, heard her low, bashful voice above my head: “It’s good that you’re writing a book.” “I’m not,” I said. “Never mind”—she took back her fingers—“it’s good.”
THE SAME BOOK (6)
HER SISTER IN France crammed seventy-six detective paperbacks into sixty-five “items” of various shapes and sizes: women’s plastic imitation leather handbags, copies of Louis Vuitton designer handbags made in Singapore. “How did I get all those romans policiers into the Louis Vuitton, how?” Aunt Marcelle beamed, delighted with herself, lighting another cigarette, forgetting the one slowly consuming itself in the ashtray. The mother waited for her “like the Messiah” to bring her “something to read” because that’s what those romans policiers were, “something to read.” The plots, the heroes, and the writers of these books in their dark, glossy, almost identical covers, were all fed into a giant blender and ground into a confused narrative with characters who came under the general heading of good guys and bad guys, with nothing to distinguish them from one another.
For long moments she stood in front of the low bookshelves in the bedroom, turning one of the paperbacks from side to side: “I really don’t remember if I’ve read this one or not,” she murmured, creasing her brow and returning the book to the shelf, pulling out two or three others and going back to the first one with a resigned sigh. The interval between the aunt’s visits was measured by the number of times she had read and reread the “something to read”: “When are you coming again, ya bint sitin kalb, you daughter of sixty dogs? I’ve already read the books you brought last time six times over,” she complained to her sister over the phone.
She dragged the books over half the world, that sister: from France to India, from India to Nepal and Singapore, and from there to Israel, almost always arriving on a night flight and landing in the wee hours of the morning.
In the erratic light of the living-room chandelier, shaped like a ship’s helm, spinning around itself and casting nervous epileptic shadows on the walls, the three of them — the mother, the aunt, and my sister, Corinne — stood sternly in front of the enormous open suitcases, examining the Louis Vuittons being extracted from the bolts of marvelous, glistening silk: Louis Vuitton for the morning, Louis Vuitton for the evening, Louis Vuitton for summer, Louis Vuitton in all shapes and sizes — school satchels, shopping bags, triangular, trapezoid, flattened balls. They wore magnificent Oriental robes embroidered in scarlet and gold, straight from the suitcase: the aunt in purple, my sister in white, and the mother in orange. The aunt and my sister, Corinne, smoked like crazy, stepped on the hems of their robes with the Louis Vuitton hanging from their shoulders or around their necks, talking business, business, while the mother tried to get in a timid word or two, but immediately withdrew in the face of the torrent of figures, economic forecasts, and hopes, like someone attempting again and again to jump off the sidewalk and hold on to a racing streetcar crowded with passengers.
They were working out the details of a business scheme with the Louis Vuittons, the aunt and my sister: this was the beginning. “Fetch a pencil and paper,” commanded my sister; she drew a long, crooked line across the page and stuck the tip of the pencil in her mouth. Her lovely face, whose elusive, almost abstract, delicacy was impossible to capture and fix in the mind and always gave a disturbing impression of not being located in the face itself but somewhere else — her face now hardened, froze in one movement of intense tension, and seemed to withdraw, to absent itself: the force of her imagination took her far beyond the columns of figures, dismissing them and leaping over them toward some high, flickering reflection, exalted and fateful, of herself. Within a short space of time this absence turned into a strange, distracted rage: “Fetch a pencil and paper,” she instructed me again, gathering her hair into a chignon above her nape, loosening the hairpins and gathering it up again.
The aunt sailed on. She unpacked rags and put them back, busy and serene as she received her public in the soft confusion of the Louis Vuittons, the coffee cups, the balls of cotton with which she cleaned her face, and the piles of books standing on the carpet. The Nona came in and sat down, the neighbor woman, my brother’s worker from the welding shop, the brother from the kibbutz.
Corinne went to “put something on”: at eleven o’clock, before the shops closed for the Sabbath, she and the aunt planned to drive to Tel Aviv, with the Louis Vuittons and what Corinne referred to as “the markup.” The aunt nodded responsively whenever Corinne said “the markup,” but on the way, sitting next to her in my brother’s battered Chevrolet, she dared to ask: “But what is this markup, ma chérie?”
I sat in the back, watching over the enormous sack of Louis Vuittons so that it wouldn’t fall off the seat whenever my sister braked. Her hands gripped the steering wheel with such force that the veins on the back of her hands stuck out and turned blue, forging their way forward, as if threatening the ringed fingers, a ring on every finger. “Just let me get out of the shit of the job I’ve got now,” she said to the aunt, the cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth, stained bright red by her lipstick. I looked at her nape exposed under the piled-up hair, gathered into the chignon that “always keeps its class,” she would say, changing the color of her hair every two weeks at the hairdresser’s where she worked in Petach Tikva, but never the chignon: she never touched the chignon even when the ends of her hair grew dry and brittle from the dye. Now her nape was reddish, almost scalded, as if a boiling hot towel had been laid on it. Marcelle was hungry, “dying of hunger,” she said. She wanted to go to the Petach Tikva market first to eat fava beans. For months she had been dreaming of those fava beans, with the onions and the green chili peppers: she swallowed them whole without blinking an eye. We turned off to the market: in the side mirror I saw Corinne’s face, stretching and stretching, thin and sharp as the blade of a knife. This delay cost her in blood, and her jutting cheekbones registered her hostility and sense of betrayaclass="underline" the aunt was not with her, no, that woman was not with her.