The Nona stood and watched Sammy casting the concrete, too, the child clinging to her thigh. Then Sammy went to the welding shop, until the concrete hardened. Nona went inside to go about her business, deaf to the sound of the radio. Then came the call.
ONCE (5)
I CAN SUMMON the scene down to its last detaiclass="underline" he flew. He was fifteen and a half and barefoot. The call came from outside, from beyond the half-tarred road, beyond the row of single-story shacks, reaching him in the welding shop that isn’t his, it’s the neighbor’s, a windowless orange building with a sliding iron door the width of the building and almost the height of the wall. The call was absorbed by the heavy door of the welding shop, where it echoed dully. I heard it unwillingly. I stood rooted to the spot, frozen into what I was doing, into what I was at the moment it came: “Sammy! Sammy!”
I was the omniscient narrator, I could anticipate the action step by step, propelled by the calclass="underline" he was welding something when they called him. The call broke through the noise of the blowtorch. He ran to the house and there, at the entrance to Nona’s shack, at the bottom of the concrete steps he himself had cast, he saw the child lying in a pool of blood.
He couldn’t understand where the blood was coming from, whose it was. Nona said: “She opened her head. It’s her blood from her head.” He held out his arms straight in front of him. Nona laid the child on his outstretched arms. The child lay almost straight on his arms, her lower back a little curved, her head drooping toward the ground, past his right arm. They bandaged her head, taken a towel off the clothesline and wrapped it around her head. The towel didn’t wrap well, it was too thick, it slipped off the narrow forehead, off the head. “The child will die,” said the Nona. “If you don’t take her she’ll die.” “I’m taking her,” he said, staring at the bloody towel, at the flattened face covered to the lips by the towel, “I’m taking her.” “She’s dead, she’ll die,” repeated the Nona, “she’ll die if you don’t take her.”
When his feet left the ground, racing toward the thorn field, he could feel the warm, swarming touch of the anthill he had trampled once before. He was barefoot, his arms stretched out in front of him, carrying the almost horizontal child with the heavy limbs of an unconscious body without a will of its own. Her big head, split at the temple, swung from side to side, and down toward the ground. The wet towel had slipped. His hands were covered in blood; his feet were covered in a mess of soil, blood, and grass. The path through the thorn field was hardly visible; the thorns had spread. He opened up the path with his legs, momentarily forging a passage that was immediately effaced again, conquered once more by the thorns after the bare, wounded feet departed, their skin cracked and burned by the blazing sand. He chose the shortest way to the top of the hill, to the clinic; he told himself that he was choosing the shortest way. From time to time he raised his eyes, to measure the distance to the top of the hill, which was blurring in the sun.
He didn’t say “hill,” or “blurring”: the landscape was as plain as bread in the parched afternoon.
In the single-story shacks strewn over the plain, women and boys did things with bread. They took a whole loaf, scraped out the soft, white inside, and filled the space with beans in a spicy tomato sauce. That’s what the boys liked to eat, that’s what they were eating while he carried the flat child resting like a tray on his outstretched arms, his eyes suddenly falling on her Adam’s apple projecting from her throat and pointing at the sun.
That was apparently the beginning: a sturdy boy carries a bleeding child in his arms. He is fifteen and a half and a bit, she is one and a half and a bit, his little sister.
Over the years the picture is rewound over and over again, someone rewinds it, not me, it’s an anonymous memory that doesn’t exclusively belong to anyone.
The boy and the bleeding child slowly leave the ground as his running carries them not forward but up, forward and up at the same time; slowly they take off, entering the low sky above the thorn field, above the single-story shacks, carried higher, above the taut black electric wires, the old water tower and next to it the new one, above the luxuriant orange groves of Kfar Maas and onward, to the high sky, above the clouds, where the two of them linger, the boy and the child, circling around in what looks from below like a monotonous dance in slow motion, the movement of their bodies skywriting white vapors against the murky blue of the hazy sky, huge trembling letters overlapping one another, erasing one another; only Nona knew how to read them as she looked up at the sky without seeing a thing. “The child’s alive, she’s not dead,” said Nona, “she was dying but she didn’t die. There was a miracle.” “Not a miracle, not a miracle,” said the mother. “There was an effort. The effort was the miracle.”
A PORTRAIT OF SAMMY FRIGHTENING HIMSELF
ONE OF HIS eyes, the left one, is half shut, squinting anxiously and suspiciously at the other eye. His left leg limps a little in the wake of the eye, it, too, at a squint, nobody knows why. When he tells a story, to himself or others, he always exaggerates, crashing cymbals like the guy in the firemen’s band. “Take a quarter of what he says and throw three-quarters out,” says the mother, but she doesn’t take her own advice, she listens to him wide-eyed until she catches herself and brings the two of them back to the dryness of the straight and narrow. “Stop with that nonsense of yours,” she scolds, but not seriously, only as a reminder of the secret code agreed between them, which is also connected to the obscure dance about money: at least half of what he earns as an apprentice welder he spends on toys for the child; she condemns the waste, but turns a blind eye and still gives him money. He spends money on toys for himself as well, but not much, he invents things: he stays in the welding shop for hours after work, collecting scraps, old parts, and builds a tall circus bicycle of the kind he has long coveted — one giant wheel and behind it a little one. The first ride on this bicycle was also the last: he rode all the way from the welding shop in Petach Tikva to the neighborhood, about six miles, turned his head to look through the windows of a bus at the astonished passengers, and crashed. After that he built a joint bicycle for himself and his friends, welding five bicycles together in the backyard into a snake of a cycle that did very well on a straight path but collapsed and came crashing down on the bend in the road to “up there,” throwing the happy riders off to the side of the road. And there was the bowling arcade he tried to construct behind the shack, then the huge electronic board with switches to calculate the multiplication tables, which he presented to the child’s kindergarten (on the day of the presentation the teacher refrained from pulling the child’s ear), and after that the reading machine, his tour de force, the most detailed and precise realization of his dream of idleness, the great sleep, life in bed, for which he never stopped pining. The reading machine was a rod that rose and fell, to which he welded a huge board with a tray at the bottom, and tubes dangling from its right and left sides: the person lying in bed could keep his hands under the covers, while the machine turned the pages for him; he held one of the tubes, one for drinking and one for smoking, in his mouth. The truth is that Sammy hardly ever read, in bed or anywhere else, but the machine united two fantasies: the fantasy of total rest and the fantasy of reading. He did read to the child from the animal book he had bought for himself, but only the first three lines, after which he tired and began to invent.