He was fourteen when the child was born, he still liked wallowing in the dirt with his friends. “He would come home black as pitch,” said the mother, and she would scrub him in the shower with the hard loofah until his skin was red. As soon as he saw her approaching with his good clothes, especially the ironed white shirts, he would burst out crying loudly: “Not nice clothes, not nice clothes.” Nice clothes always ended up the same way, with furious beatings. This is how he came to identify freedom with tangible poverty and poverty with cheerfulness: there was no property to defend and nowhere downhill to go.
Years after the childhood distress of the “nice clothes” he would still feel overcome with anxiety when he saw a stack of fresh new shirts or trousers in the closet, and he made haste to throw half of them out or give them to his worker. The mother would run after him, rummage in the garbage can to salvage the garments, which he would just throw away again. “He’s not normal, that boy,” she said, but her face beamed: he was the one who was always in tune, by virtue of what he was and what he did or didn’t do, with her hidden agendas, hidden even from herself. He was the one who read her instructions correctly. She said: “Look after the child when I’m not here, don’t leave her alone with Nona.”
He didn’t. In the evenings, in his work clothes as an apprentice welder in the industrial part of Petah Tikva, he would barge into Nona’s room, pinch her swollen arm, undo her braids plaited around her head, dip into the saucepan on the stove, eat standing up, and drop down exhausted: onto Nona’s bed, next to the child, the carpet, the armchair, the concrete step on the threshold of the quarter-shack, or on the toilet seat, with the water running over his head in the improvised shower, a tiny alcove toilet with a shower tap stuck in the wall. “Let’s wake him up, ya bint, he’s fallen asleep in there,” said the Nona, and the two of them called out: “Sammy! Sammy!”
Dragging his feet, a towel wrapped around his waist, he threw himself onto Nona’s bed, making himself out to be more exhausted than he really was, but he was quickly chased off the bed and removed to the carpet. The bed was the stage, and the hour was the hour of the child’s performance: “Yallah, get it over already so we can go to sleep,” the Nona prompted her.
Almost every evening the child would stand on the bed in front of Nona and Sammy and sing “Tombe la Neige,” until from behind the wall, from the Amsalems’ house, the banging and the groaning would begin: Father Amsalem demanded quiet and got it, Rachel Amsalem split her sides laughing.
Sammy wanted to go out, his friends were waiting for him, sitting on the stone wall in front of the house. He waited for the child to fall asleep, lay next to her on the Nona’s bed, and made up a story to distract her. She didn’t listen to the words, only to the melody, forcing her eyes to stay open, staring at the steamy, hazy air that filled the windowless room and gave rise to a dense white mist. For a moment Sammy thought she had fallen asleep and he sat up silently, but she sat up, too: “I want to sleep in our house,” she said. He wrapped her in a blanket, tucked it tightly around her in her pajamas, and the two of them went down the path joining Nona’s quarter-shack to the mother’s shack, leaving behind them the rectangle of opaque white glass set in the Nona’s door, which the child looked at as they walked away. The mother’s shack was clean, empty, and dark. The emptiness of hours was in the air and it didn’t go away even now, undisturbed by their presence. Again Sammy lay next to her on the bed, one of the beds, again he told her a story, stopping every now and then, when his friends knocked on the door, to call out, “Just a minute.” After an hour they made their way back again to Nona’s. He carried her in his arms, lying on his shoulder, running along the path to the quarter-shack on top of the mild slope of the hill.
THE TOP OF THE HILL
IT’S POSSIBLE THAT the neighborhood was as flat as the palm of your hand. Perhaps we only imagined its hollows and curves, its slopes and wadis and hills, inventing a topography that didn’t exist, or, more accurately, superimposing a mental topography on the physical one, referring to distortions and exaggerations of scale, to concepts that had been coined in relation to other places and had frozen in language and consciousness, with no connection to anything, addressing only themselves. We never actually said these words, we never said “hills,” “hollows,” “wadis,” we were not acquainted with the words and what they represented. We said “up there” or “down there,” we said “go up” but never “go down.” For some reason we never said “go down.”
There was the big “up there.” Sammy said: “I’m going to up there.” The big “up there,” ten minutes’ walk from the shack along the asphalt road or through the thorn fields, consisted of a cleared patch of land, worn wooden benches, two kiosks, a grocery store, and a cinema. But these details were just the framework for “up there,” not the essence — that involved “everybody” hanging around and waiting for “everybody,” the stories people told themselves or each other, pointless stories that went nowhere and wanted nothing but to create friction, a mild, gentle flame that never developed into a real fire. Their talk was the babble of babies. They lounged on the non-lawn or on the benches, Sammy and his friends, drowning in this gibberish until the wee hours, feeding each other. Then they went together to piss in the field, putting off as long as they could their parting from the place, from the thing that was the best of themselves. That was what “up there” once was: the place where the best of themselves was aired and aired again.
I wrote “once”: I thought of “once,” walking side by side with Sammy “up there,” not hand in hand, to see the movie we had seen yesterday and the day before and the day before that, sitting in our regular places in the movie theater, the air fresh and empty, heartbreaking in its emptiness. Sammy tests me on the multiplication tables as we walk through the thorn field or along the asphalt road to up there. “Five times five, seven times eight, nine times six, four times three, five times nine, ten times twelve.”
ONCE (1)
THE FURY THAT “once” prompted in her, the past, any wallowing in the past: “Once” she shook her fist at someone, never mind who; “Once it was. Now it’s dead.” With its good and bad, she saw the past as weights of concrete on her legs, impeding the movement of her forward-striving body, of her mind, which closed its eyes and hastened its steps as it passed the still faces of stone monsters. “Once” was the stone monsters, embodied in memories, in objects that held the memories and objects that held nothing, squatting like dead weights. She threw things out all the time, to make room: there was never enough room. She could never throw out enough to satisfy her.
She divided the human race into people who threw things out and people who didn’t, who wallowed. The ones who threw things out were positive, optimistic, industrious, straightforward, clean inside and out, and full of consideration for others, not imposing their “mess” and torment. The non-throwers were the opposite: dreamy, lax, lazy, clinging, “sitting on their souls,” muddy and muddying and missing the most important thing in life, clarity.