That was how the mother found her when she came home from work: sitting in the water, her trousers dripping, with the encyclopedia on her lap. The terrifying yell, the mother of all yells, would have shaken the windows had they been there — but they weren’t, because in summer the mother removed them from their hinges so they wouldn’t collect dust, leaving only the shutters. She took off her shoe, the mother, and shoe in hand approached the child, who dropped the book into the water, and ran outside barefoot, into the thorn field behind the welding shop. The mother chased her, she took Corinne’s one-year-old son’s iron rocking horse from the porch and ran after her in the thorn field, barefoot, waving the rocking horse in the air with her strong, furious arms. She came closer. The child heard the sound of her breathing, glanced behind, and ran faster. The mother, too, ran faster with the rocking horse and threw it at the child’s back when she was six feet away from her. The child leaped sideways, a hairbreadth separating her from the iron horse lying on its side in the thorns at her feet, and went on running to the edge of the hill and the abandoned reservoir. Until evening fell she sat there on the concrete floor of the round reservoir, with the echo passing through its riddled walls, with the excrement and the newspapers at the other end next to the opening, and the round sky above her, a blue plate turning red.
In the evening the mother came and stood in the hole that was the entrance to the reservoir. “Come home now, enough,” she said. The child didn’t answer, she ran her fingers over the chalky side of the stone she was sitting on, examined her white finger smeared with chalk. “Come out of that dirt,” said the mother, not moving, looking at the child; her face suddenly twisted to the left, squashed sideways as if someone had taken hold of her chin and cheek and twisted, squeezing out the sobs and pulling them sideways together with her chin: “I could have killed you. Thank God I didn’t kill you,” she said.
THE RESERVOIR
LIKE HER, I have no places that fill me with nostalgia, and the notion of going back “there,” in thought or in reality, depresses and paralyzes me. I am prepared to know the face of nostalgia when I come across it, but not to remain there, not to put down roots. Roots — something else the mere idea of which distresses me.
A bulldozer drove over the stinking old reservoir, leveled the ground, and replaced the reservoir with a park. Brightly colored terraces. Waterfalls cascading in zigzags from the terraces. It’s a good thing they removed the reservoir. I’m glad they replaced it. There is nothing vindictive in this: this is not the hoarse cry of memory demanding a reckoning. Memory stands on the escalator going up, and turns its face to look down at the bottom of the stairs, giddy with its erasure, the merging of the bottom and the top. There are no ghosts and no revelation in this merger, because everything — the future, the horizon of the present — is already happening. My sense of simultaneity (of the three dimensions of time, which are more than three) is my earliest sense of myself, more personal than my own name. There was never really a “there,” and from the floor of the old reservoir on which I sat, I could see the reflection of someone gazing at me, inscribing me as I was inscribing her into the backward-looking future. I received the citizenship of being a guest in my own life. Since the beginning of time, the element of pathos in the world of objects has always manifested itself in nostalgia, in the yearning heart, which was born with the first gaze at the first object: the pathos of the reservoir. The future, in the guise of the yearning backward gaze, was also the past and the present, a memory that I must discard if I am to preserve it.
Our neighborhood (“Ours?” Yes, ours) was full of places and things that began as memories discarded at the moment of their birth, because they never, not from the first, carried any belief in the future. Everything seemed momentarily suspended, as if it would at any moment continue onward, without noticing either the suspension or moving on. There was a lot of air between the objects, between the memories, between the objects and memories of them. The reservoir gaping open at the top, riddled with holes at the sides, was full of air; even the concrete floor, with the changing reflection of the sky in the pools of rainwater, seemed to be floating in air. The reservoir’s past, as a working functioning reservoir, interested nobody, not even the old people whose great past almost always overshadowed the smaller immediate past: it was as if the reservoir had been built from the start as an insignificant remnant of something that was insignificant in the first place.
But there were echoes in the ruined reservoir. We got a kick out of the echoes, Rachel Amsalem and I, she as a game and I as a nightmarish hallucination made real. We stood in the middle of the round floor, in the puddle of water, and called out to ourselves. Animal droppings lay on the bare parts of the concrete. Water lilies floated in the water. When we called out together I wanted to call just to myself, but when I went there alone something was lost; there was an echo but not the right echo, the one that was lonely but also had a sense of self. My loneliness required another pair of unseeing, disinterested eyes, indifferent as those of Rachel Amsalem: a blindfolded audience.
We did not keep on going to the reservoir for long, Rachel Amsalem and I: there was too much imagination there, which in the end impoverished the imagination. Our different and alien lonelinesses were increasingly deposited in other, hidden places: in the dank, shadowy areas alongside the bleeding dramas of our families and shacks, in the lies we told and the truths that pretended to be lies.
LIES
SHE, THE MOTHER, said that there were lies and there were lies. She had a special tone of voice for the phrase “and there are lies,” not ironic but emphatic, like the exaggerated motions of the lips when speaking to a deaf-mute: the “and” said with a rising inflection and after it a sharp drop. This second kind of lie she called a “white lie.” “But why is it white? What’s white about it?” Corinne demanded. For her, the range of moral possibilities was subjugated to questions of fashion, what to wear where, how, and in what color. Apart from that, she was almost incapable of the sidestepping involved in the daily strategies of life: her inner drives, like her desire for theatrical expression, were so powerful and intense that they defeated the calculations of self-interest. Corinne told people “to their face” exactly what she “thought of them.”
The contradiction between the delicacy of her face, which looked as if it had been woven from threads of air, and her proven ability to “open her mouth,” and what a mouth, was almost scandalous. In the mother’s crises, when they didn’t cause her to collapse to the floor, and mainly when they didn’t concern her, my sister was often the enthusiastic audience cheering her gladiator on from the balcony of the arena.
“Tell them, if they come again, that there’s nobody home,” the mother said to me. Corinne rummaged in the big wooden box where she kept the dozens of pairs of earrings she bought by weight at the central bus station. “Don’t say anything, don’t answer them at all,” she added. “But they ask,” I tried again. “What do they ask? What have those people got to ask?” Corinne flared up, “Tell them he’s dead. Dead. Do you understand? Dead.”
The next day I returned to my post on the thorn hill, opposite the bus stop, waiting: not for them, for somebody. I sat on a patch of sand on the edge of the hill, forbidding myself to move, in muddy pants, wet with urine. Around me, buried in the ground, were my graves, four or five of them. I sat there after lunch working on them, every day anew, keenly aware of what was happening at the bus stop, not with my two normal eyes, which were fixed on the sand, but with some other, third eye. First I collected and piled up broken bottles and then flowers whose petals I had pulled off. Then came the digging. I dug a deep little hole in the ground that I had previously watered, and on the bottom I arranged the petals in a colorful spiral. On top of them I laid the broken base of the bottle: a transparent gravestone through which the petals were revealed. I covered the graves with sand, one after the other. Now I began an elaborate and mysterious procedure of uncovering and discovering: I dug in the ground again, as if at random, as if without the faintest idea of what lay buried there, suddenly discovering the cool, smooth glass, slowly scraping the sand until the petals were exposed, acting out the discovery and the surprise over and over with each grave.