And with the special binoculars that only registered people, not landscapes, the mother elmuhandis looked down at everyone waving to us and throwing us black grapes that fell back into their open mouths. “They can say good-bye to the most beautiful house in the neighborhood,” said the mother elmuhandis, “the most beautiful that ever was and ever will be,” she said and pulled my brother away from the window with the elastic of his underpants, to prevent him from being sucked into the movie-cloud flying next to us, and packed him into white clothes on the carpet, white but not festive. The tiled roof rose and fell above our heads, rose and fell, as if the shack were doffing its hat to us, exposing a strip of sky whose color we were too exhausted to guess, not knowing if it was day or night, and mainly if it even mattered whether it was day or night, following the mother elmuhandis come what may, watching her peel her skin off in strips, move heavily with Corinne hanging onto her legs, clinging to her ankles without letting go, crawling flat on the floor behind her, between the two snake-shoes, and licking the mother’s calves imploringly until the highest, sharpest, most dangerous air to which we rose, the glass air that started to crack the floor, ripping it open between the kitchen and the hall and sucking Corinne out, without any clothes on, her body flying through the glassy air and her hands on the ankles of elmuhandis, hanging on.
SNAKE (1)
SHE FEARED SNAKES more than fires, but only a little more: the two most obvious enemies of the shack posed completely different styles of destruction. She was afraid of fire, of its rapid and resolute powers of annihilation, but she respected its honesty, its lack of pretense. When it came to fire, what you saw was what you got. Unlike the snake: its slipperiness, its agility, its stealth, the thing that pretended to be something else, the personal promise of death it bore in its poison — all this sent cold shivers down her spine. She was appalled by the personal aim of the snake, the aim that had your name and your name only in its sights. The fire raged, it made no distinctions between things and people, it was impersonal and therefore not completely vengeful and vindictive; it didn’t have a black heart. The fire she understood. Not the snake. “The black ones don’t do anything, we only have black ones here,” my brother Sammy reassured her. She listened suspiciously. “But the way it looks, just the way it looks, black or white,” she said, and shivered.
SNAKE (2)
ABOUT MAURICE SHE sometimes said he was “like a snake,” in Arabic, which was much more snakelike: “elthaaban.” “The thaaban,” she said, “when you cut off its head the tail goes on playing,” she said: “That’s elthaaban, put him in the ground for a hundred years, and his tail goes on playing,” she said, unconsciously combining two central images of Maurice: the twitching snake’s tail and the tree with the crooked root, that even after a hundred years, wouldn’t grow straight.
Maurice was thin, very thin, and over the years he grew even thinner: his dark cheeks were sucked in so much that they seemed to meet in the cavity of his mouth and join between his upper and lower jaws. The burning of his narrow brown eyes was like no other burning, as was the sweetness of his tongue: no one had ever talked like Maurice. No one swooned at that sweet tongue like Nona. “El-lisan elhilweh,” she sighed yearningly once a day, with that veiling of her watery blue eyes: “That sweet tongue.”
The substitution of a general idea for the particular name Maurice led no one astray but herself: this indirectness, too, as a rhetorical principle of the first order, was the essence of el-lisan elhilweh.
The mother detested el-lisan elhilweh, she saw it as an alliance against her, a many-armed octopus: “Why are you beating around the bush, just say what you want to say.” The Nona drove her crazy. She would put on her sphinx expression, pretend to be sunk in reflection. “Everyone has his own opinion,” she said at last, giving the agreed signal for the second or third act of the argument: what exactly was “his opinion?”
They quarreled most of the time and about everything under the sun: about food and money, intervention and nonintervention, the neighbors, sicknesses and cures, the political situation, manners and etiquette, a word spoken or not spoken, children, God, hypocrisy and sincerity, daughters-in-law and sons-in-law and cousins, the weather, the garden, the maintenance of the shack, “the child,” my brother’s friends, education in Israel and abroad, the length of Nona’s hair, how often a person should shower, fasting on Yom Kippur, what exactly had happened “then,” whether bears were vegetarians or carnivores.
But they really tore into each other about one thing only: him. He was the one underlying subject, hidden or half-revealed, waiting in the wings to make its appearance behind all the lurid masks in the theater of their bitter quarrels. It was all him and everything led to him, however remote, foreign, and ostensibly irrelevant.
Him and his lisan elhilweh.
Him and his tip-top suits, his Omar Sharif, Doctor Zhivago mustache.
Him and his jawful smile, gaping from ear to ear.
Him and his demented mother.
Him and his swindler father.
Him and his unhappy, abandoned sister.
Him and his lordliness.
Him and his cunning, slippery ways.
Him and his criminal friends.
Him and his important friends.
Him and his debts, past, present, and future.
Him and his extravagant, grandiose gestures.
Him and his politics.
Him and his limitless egoism.
Him and his desertions.
Him and the women he had and didn’t have.
Him and the looming catastrophe — the catastrophe he was himself and that he brought upon others.
Him and his eternal, congenital vagrancy, the way in which the Nona embraced it. Around this there was absolute silence, around the dark circle surrounding the figure of the vagrant. Maurice the vagrant was the hidden, secret subject of the hidden subject that was Maurice in generaclass="underline" the secret within the secret. When this figure appeared before their eyes, emerging from the churning froth of the talk “about him,” the two of them were speechless, gazing wordlessly at the figure of the vagrant who did not look back at them: the elusive thing, hidden from the eye, waiting for its turn, was not the bitter reckoning of their bitter grievance, but their compassion.
SNAKE (3)
THE MOMENT WHEN the shack was the victim of a shocking mutilation that remained for many months, the moment when the shack stopped being what it was and became something else, as if something poisonous: even the story she told and retold about what happened and how, it became the horrifying thing itself, as if it wasn’t a story about something that had already occurred, history, but a prophecy soon to fulfill itself through the mere pronouncement of the words.