They lay side by side on the sofa bed in the yellow hallway, the clumsy machine almost squatting on their chests. On the board in front of them the book opened to the page about the lion, which was his favorite. From time to time Sammy paused in his story to suck sweet raspberry juice from the tube, red and dense as blood. “The lion is the king of the animals,” he began to read wearily, in the tone of an insurance company brochure, and immediately abandoned the text. “And he followed me all the time, he kept after me with his teeth at my throat, but he didn’t stick them in, whenever I moved I felt the points of his teeth on my throat and I was afraid to move, but if I stood still he would have gone for me, that’s all he was waiting for, to tear me open and rip out a chunk of my butt,” his voice rose and fell, dropping to a whisper that sent shivers through his body. Beneath the covers the child felt the shiver, and she, too, shivered. “What happened then?” she whispered. He closed his eyes, half asleep. “If you finish the yogurt I’ll tell you.” She didn’t finish it, not before the reading machine and not after it, for hours she stirred it with a teaspoon, held the white stuff in her mouth, and spat it out in the sink behind Sammy’s back. After that they got up and went to Levy’s shop: a back room in his shack where he sold candy, building materials, pens and pencils, toilet paper, stockings, and toys. There was only one bit of floor clear of dusty goods to stand on in Levy’s shop. And they stood on it. The child raised her eyes to the high shelves, to the dolls dressed in crimson brocade or faded blue, staring with dead glassy eyes from the top of cardboard boxes, pointed at them, and said: “That one, that one, and that one.”
THEY LAY SIDE BY SIDE IN THE YELLOW HALLWAY
THEY LAY SIDE by side in the yellow hallway, which was yellow even when it wasn’t and was defined by its changing yellowness — sometimes lemony and sometimes ripe egg-yolk yellow, falling to the floor from the point where the walls met the ceiling, so uniform in appearance as to look like another wall of yellowness. Sammy spoke into the yellowness, putting words in the air that bumped into each other aimlessly, merged in the yellowness that was not their lives but also was their lives. This is what the child thought, not in words but in the space that was love, in the absence of expectation, in the permission she had been given to drift, to pay no attention, to be aimless, which was love. And within the sheets or waterfalls of yellow, the child left Sammy precisely because he stayed, precisely because of the free-floating love and the fact that he stayed, the child left and drifted, she left Sammy and his story and went somewhere else, to a place where nothing fell from the point where the wall met the ceiling, to a place where one solid wall met another solid wall and the endless yellow of the hallway came to an end, turned into the little passage leading to the toilet, where there was a picture hanging on the wall that called to her again and again, precisely because of its mysterious silence, which, she felt, kept out the pouring yellow, blinding in its golden brightness. The picture, unlike the pouring yellow, did not say, “me, me,” but “you, you.”
She turned on her side, turning her back to Sammy, who didn’t notice that she had turned her back to him, because this was the only way she could see the picture the way she wanted to see it, from the side and not head-on, looking in a way that both avoided it and dared to steal the sight — only this way was it possible to see the picture exactly as she had seen it the time before, with the same deep, dark, seething feeling that rose up in her but did not overflow because it stayed contained in the people in the picture, a murky promise. The longer the child looked, only from the side and with one eye open because the other one was squashed into the pillow, the more the wonder grew inside her, a sense of enormous oppression and enormous awakening at the same time; the weight of the oppression did not cancel out the awakening but magnified it, propelled her forward toward the picture and the three people in it, in whose presence there was something inexplicable and but also feverish, especially in the young woman in the white dress, sitting with her back to the other two, leaning against the wrought-iron railing of the balcony and looking straight ahead with blazing black eyes, dense with a fierce, glowing blackness whose gaze seemed to covet nothing at all in what it had settled on, nothing but the contemplation itself.
THE PICTURE: LE BALCON (1)
SHE COULDN’T PUT the toilet and the bathroom anywhere else because of the plumbing, so the rooms changed around them in an ever-shifting pattern like nervous dogs, maddened by the inexplicable immobility of a scarecrow. In the endless rearrangement of the shack, the toilet and the bathroom and the passage leading to them were the one constant element: she contented herself with changing the ceramic tiles three or four times and exchanging the plastic shower curtain for sliding doors and the reverse. The picture was the right size for the wall of the little passage and so it remained where it was: a reproduction of Le Balcon by Édouard Manet. There was no lighting in the passage, and most of the time the picture remained shrouded in darkness, fitfully illuminated when someone switched on the light in the bathroom or the toilet or when a ray of light from the yellow hallway suddenly revealed it.
DOGS (1)
SOMETIMES SHE SAID: I really need a dog here, to keep guard. From time to time someone brought her one or she acquired one: all of them pure-bred pedigrees: German shepherds, cocker spaniels, poodles, once even a Siberian husky. It’s impossible to describe what Sammy called “her attitude” toward dogs, just impossible: shameless instrumentality, anxious concern that bordered on panic, cruelty. The first two weeks with “the dog” (she always called it “the dog,” male or female, forgetting or ignoring its name) were a golden honeymoon. She was excited: “the dog” looked at her as if it understood everything. “The dog” was clever, bless it. “The dog” sensed everything — it waited for her, stood at the door and waited for her to come home from work. Sometimes she would scold it lovingly, with a kind of display of petting that consisted of clumsy pats on its head: “What do you want, ya mshahwar, you’ve already eaten, mshahwar, go to sleep, mshahwar, that’s enough for today.” (“Mshahwar,” an exaggerated expression of affection: a combination of dumb, sooty, and black.)
And then the mshahwar didn’t want to eat the special food she bought for it. None of the mshahwars would eat it. In astonishment, in worry, in budding resentment, she would watch the dog sniff the bowl and go away without touching the food. She said: “I don’t know where I got this luck that none of them want to eat their food.” For a day or two she maintained a firmly pedagogic stand vis-à-vis the canine resistance: “You won’t get anything else ya mshahwar, you hear? You’ll go without food.” In the end she broke: she gave it bread and cheese, or fried chicken livers. These it ate eagerly, which enraged her and prompted her to put it back on the diet of dog food “as a matter of principle.” And again she watched outraged as it sniffed, raised its tail, and went away without touching the food. This was the moment when “the dog” turned into a “he”: “he” was stuck-up, selfish, spoiled, thought himself too good for her. “He’s doing it to me on purpose,” she said. Or with undisguised hostility: “Who does he think he is, that I’ll spend so much money on him, ibn el-fashari?”