Her deep, feverish silence gave way incessantly to patterns and designs: at sixteen she cut up Sammy’s army uniform and made herself a “safari suit” with three-quarter-length pants and a belt tied in front, and showed it off in the neighborhood where people thought it had been sent to her from a fashion house in Paris. That same year she left the hairdressing school where the mother had registered her. She thought they had nothing to teach her, and she went to work as an apprentice at a number of hairdressing salons, where she swept hair off the floor, suffered, and observed. She practiced at home on Eva and her sisters, Hannaleh and Riva, on the mother and the child. She liked cutting hair standing up and “dry,” not the way they taught in the hairdressing school. This way, she argued, she could “really” see what she was doing. Tight-lipped, she held the scissors tensely, entirely given over to the desire to match what was before her to what she saw in her mind’s eye, to what “could be”: “Stand up straight”—she pinched the child on the nape of her neck—“don’t move.” The child’s wavy black hair fell in thick bits and pieces to the floor, and Corinne pushed them aside with her bare foot. Hours after she had finished cutting her hair “à la garçonne,” Corinne went on chasing her with the scissors in her hand “to trim something.” “You have to be careful of that one when she’s holding scissors in her hand,” said the mother, but she herself wasn’t careful; she, too, entrusted her head to Corinne, who forbade her to look in the mirror until she was finished, submitting to the categorical imperative of the beautiful, how it was to be achieved, and how exactly it was supposed to look — an imperative that she, Corinne, radiated from afar, unexplained and even full of contempt for explanations and justifications.
Once every two weeks Corinne dragged the child with her to the central bus station in Tel Aviv, to various wholesalers of hairdressing products and equipment, in order to “check things out.” They went in and out of dark holes, cellars, and dusty basement apartments, crammed with giant plastic containers of shampoo and conditioners, rollers, and hair dryers. Corinne stepped on stiletto heels like stilts, her face turning greener by the minute. She bought the child burekas and orange juice, invariably arguing with the vendor over the change, mainly because she was impatient and got mixed up counting the coins. She didn’t exchange a word with the child, and she always concluded the business survey with the purchase of three or four pairs of shoes in the cut-price shoe shops on Neve Sha’anan Street. When they returned home, getting off the bus at dusk after hours of futile wandering about, she went up to the tree next to the bus stop and vomited her heart out. The mother was sitting on the porch when they reached the shack. She hurried after them into the room, opened the boxes, and took out the bargain shoes one after the other, muttering, “She’s opening a shoe shop here.” Corinne had already taken off her clothes and was sitting at the kitchen table in her bathrobe, dunking pretzels in her coffee and soaking her swollen feet in a basin of lukewarm water. The next morning she marched off to the hairdressing salon, her feet plastered with Band-Aids and shod in one of the new pairs of shoes with the gilt buckles. “You’ll ruin your feet,” scolded the mother, “buy yourself clogs, like all the girls at the hairdresser’s wear.” “I’ll die before I put my feet into those ugly things for washing floors,” retorted Corinne, fixing the mother with her clear, pale look, full of contempt and defiance and entreaty: “You wear those clogs,” she said.
CORINNE SLEPT
CURLED UP ON her side in the fetal position, her knees coming up to meet her chin. One hand buried between her thighs and the other under her cheek. Her eyelids transparent, still painted, she was too lazy to remove the eyeliner. The almost disintegrating towel she couldn’t sleep without had slipped from her fingers, but it was still close to her face, lying on her neck. From close up you can see: a delicate trickle of saliva is dribbling from the right side of her mouth, wetting the towel.
In what bed was she sleeping, where? In what room and what metamorphosis of a room? Where was I sleeping?
FIRST PORTRAIT OF CORINNE IN THE FLYING SHACK
HER FACE DIDN’T change at all, either when she was hanging behind the flying shack or underneath it, like a tail stuck in the wrong place, gripping the mother’s ankles with two straight arms, her body horizontal, almost parallel to the ground below us, her chin thrust forward, into the air, and her eyes closed against the wind; the longer we went on flying the deeper they sank into her skull, making their way through the two tunnels intended for this purpose and popping out on the other side, through the hair flying in the wind, looking backward, staring at the air, remembering all the contacts we tried to forget.
We weren’t in the least surprised; we went along with what was happening to us when it all began, or was about to begin, with little tremors foretelling the road opening before us: at first the door frames shook, especially the frame of the front door, twisting into itself and freeing itself of the wall only to rejoin it again a few minutes later, in order to take flight as a whole and not as a part, as the mother wished without even asking. She conducted the whole thing, that was clear, in a sleep that wasn’t hers but ours; she conducted it all while sleeping our sleep, none of us in her own bed, shivering in our heavy blankets, silently counting the thuds of the legs of the bed on the tiles and the thudding of the tiles getting ready to join in the great flight. Everything was joined to everything else: the door frames to the walls, the walls to the floor tiles, the floor tiles to the panels, the panels to the cleaning rags, the kitchen utensils, the stove, the tables, the pictures, the sewing machines, the one they’d bought already and the one they were going to buy.
We flew as we were, doing nothing, following “elmuhandis,” the engineer, with our eyes shut, elmuhandis who was the mother, because that’s what we called her — my brother first, he said it first and he flew first: “Elmuhandis is lifting the shack,” he called and leaned out of the window, half his body outside in air that was getting thinner and thinner, high above the orange welding shop, the health clinic, above the thorns that covered the rectangle of land we left behind us, going up in flames at last, above the neighborhood and the shacks cut through by the curving asphalt road and the boys inside the shacks eating what they liked to eat in the blazing hours of the day with the beans in tomato sauce dripping from the half-loaf of bread they had stuffed after removing the soft inside, above the tapping of the heels of the girls on their way to the synagogue, above the Nona’s quarter-shack trapped between Amsalem’s half and the amm’s quarter with the cows, and a special multipurpose cloud that screened the Friday afternoon Arabic movie with the character of the important man in the suit who was always called elmuhandis. And it was he who accompanied us, elmuhandis, in the movie in the cloud, orange, yellow, or gray-green, on our flight, bowing and straightening up, straightening up and bowing to the mother elmuhandis, who bowed back to him, muhandis to muhandis, he with a cigar-shaped lollypop, and she trying to put our shoes on our feet, snakeskin shoes she had brought from God knows where: pale green for Corinne and blue-black for me, long and black, entire snakes, with an opening in the middle for the foot, that writhed when we walked, but not too much, managing the corners nicely and lying in a long straight line when we took them off, Corinne next to her bed and me in the middle of the room, praying for them to be returned to the shop.