It slithered into the house at noon: she didn’t say “slithered”; the twisting arm, the hand moving from side to side, said it. Out of the corner of her eye she saw it: a yellowish rope, quick as lightning. She was standing in the garden, hoeing the rose bed, she didn’t really believe she had seen it, she thought she was imagining things. But still, she put down the hoe and went inside. The house was quiet, spick-and-span, the floor still damp from the mop. For long moments she stood in the doorway and scanned the space in which she was familiar with every object, every stir or stillness, even the wind passing between the objects. There was no sign, but the very absence of a sign signaled a menacing meaning: it was there.
“There’s a snake in the house,” she announced in the welding shop. Sammy didn’t hear, he was in the middle of welding. “There’s a snake,” she yelled. The three of them went into the house, Sammy, his worker, and she, stepping hesitantly as they peeked under the beds, behind the chests, in the corners of the rooms, behind the fridge, into the big plant pots. “There is,” she insisted, “I saw it, I wasn’t dreaming.” “You were dreaming, you were,” said Sammy, sticking his black fingers into the saucepan on the stove, fishing meatballs out of the sauce for himself and the worker. When they left she checked the house again, even pulling out the big linen drawer: “You were dreaming, ya bint, you were dreaming,” she said to herself, and dropped onto the sofa in the hall, to rest awhile before she went to work, stared unseeingly at the book in her hands, and immediately shifted her gaze to the wall with the window in front of her: “You were dreaming, ya bint.”
The faint breeze of early fall stirred the folds of the curtain, ruffling them a little: the curtain was new, striped in a spectrum of shades of yellow, from dark to pale. For a moment she closed her eyes, giddy with the wavy motion of the strips of yellow color sliding into each other, and immediately opened them again and saw it: hanging between two stripes on the curtain, “straight as a column,” its tail curled around the curtain rod. She thought they looked at each other. “He looked at me,” she said. She remained rooted to the spot for a moment longer, riveted by its alien gaze, and then she jumped up, burst out of the door, and flew to the welding shop at a speed that defied the force of gravity and the powers of speech. When the three of them returned to the house with hoes a profound silence met them, different from the one before: the yellow curtain still stirred, the snake still hung motionless on the curtain rod. It was the worker Binyamin who saw it, not Sammy: “There he is,” he said. Sammy stood staring and blinking with his one good, seeing eye: “Where?” he asked. They began hitting with the hoes. She stood behind them, covering her eyes with her hands, peeping through her fingers, terrified. They beat the curtain, the window frame, the wall of the shack, in which a big hole immediately opened, revealing the shriveled rose beds and lawn of the end of summer, the wall of the welding shop, the clotheslines. She saw no more, she ran outside: she was not a witness to the decisive stage in the battle “against it.”
We didn’t go into the shack for a week, we slept on the floor in Nona’s room, where she trampled on our arms and legs when she groped her way to the toilet at night. For a week the pallor never left the mother’s face, the tremor never left her lower lip: “His head had already been cut off with the hoe, but the thaaban kept going without its head, he kept going with his tail and all the rest of him,” she repeated what she had been told, what she hadn’t seen.
JULY-TAMMUZ: THE MONTH IN THE GARDEN
THE MONTH OF July is one of the hottest of the year and maintaining the freshness of the plants and flowers during this season is no easy job.
The life cycle of a number of plants ends in this season and they turn yellow and brown and lose their beauty and do not add to the charm of the garden. All we can do in this season to beautify and freshen the appearance of the garden is to plant annual flowering shrubs.
Annuals are purchased at nurseries in little cups that do not hold much growth substrate, and therefore when planting them care must be taken to dig a hole one and a half times the size of the cup, to return soil not tightly packed to the hole and fill it with water, to fit the size of the hole to the size of the roots, and then to insert the plant and water it immediately and go on watering every day in the evening or morning hours and even twice a day, until it takes hold in the ground. It should be noted that most of the annuals developed in the nursery in conditions of semi-shade, and the existing leaves will therefore wilt or shrivel in the glare of the sun, but with proper watering the plant will recover and become accustomed to the new conditions.
Lawns: in these hot days the lawn should be watered twice a week in order to prevent it from drying up. It should be mowed two or three times a month and fertilized once a month with small amounts of nitrogen-rich fertilizer. The blades of the lawn mower should be raised a little so that the lawn remains higher than in the spring. Mowing too low is liable to expose the roots and cause damage. At the same time, care should be taken to mow the lawn frequently. When the growth is too high the air cannot penetrate, causing the lawn to shrivel.
In this season of the year due to the increased humidity, the lawn should be regularly examined for various diseases of the leaves. The most common of these is wheat rust, which is characterized by the appearance of brown spots on the grass and which calls for spraying with Mancidan or Saparol.
Roses: all the wilted blooms should be removed. The ground around the roses should be padded in order to keep it wet and keep the roots cool. The roses should be given extra fertilization with soluble fertilizer. The rosebushes should be sprayed against pests and leaf diseases and it is recommended to spray regularly once every two weeks, or as required according to the nature of the garden. A good time for spraying is in the early hours of the morning.
A GOOD TIME
THE CHILD WAS told that she was growing up at a good time, and afterward this was corrected to a “better” time. The mother and the Nona said this sadly, and Corinne reluctantly, with a kind of shrug. “Corinne,” they said, “didn’t grow up at a good time. There were problems, issues, Corinne grew up in the middle of the problems.” About Sammy they didn’t say whether he grew up at a good time or a bad time: he was outside time, outside the shack that was the home in its first stammering decade, before the sadness. It was clear: the time was the shack, the home, the issues. “Sammy,” they said, “was in the street all the time, he ran away from the issues.” But the words “ran away” gave the game away. The child caught hold of it: “But why did he run away, Sammy?” she asked Nona. “He didn’t run away,” the Nona corrected, “he ran around. He didn’t see. Corinne saw, she sat at home then. She saw everything, poor girl, everything that happened.” “And she didn’t run around?” asked the child. “She did, and how,” pounced Nona, “and how she ran around. She was of the streets, btaat elshwiri she was. Just like you’re btaat elshwiri, and if you don’t stop I’ll have your head. With us, girls don’t run around in the street.” “With us” meant the mother and Nona and Sammy. The three of them asked, “Where have you been?” and over and over again: “Where have you been ya btaat elshwiri?” But Sammy didn’t scold. Unlike the two of them he had no opinion, good or bad, about bitaat elshwiri: in general he had no opinions, Sammy, only anxieties and fears, almost exclusively fantasies, anxieties, and fears.