Nevertheless she brushed its coat every day and washed it once every two days, so it wouldn’t have “that smell.” It would take another few weeks, not many, for her to discover to her amazement that the dog was not a piece of furniture or an object and never would be. It moved. It chewed carpets, chairs, books, and the leaves of the potted plant. It shed fur and did its business on the new mat in the bedroom. (Five times she scrubbed it with vinegar and water and put it out to air on the lawn. The smell of the vinegar pervaded the shack for weeks.) It didn’t impress the criminal cats that went on invading the kitchen and turning over the pots on the stove, and worst of all it destroyed her roses in the garden, digging up the soil around them. “This is no life,” she said, chasing it with a slipper and hitting it until it hid under the sofa and refused to come out all day, despite her coaxing. “He’s sulking,” she announced bitterly, “his honor is sulking.” And she went and planted a new plant to replace the one the dog had eaten.
The shack and its routines unraveled from day to day before her eyes; she unraveled: dejection and despair took the place of rage and insult. She gave up, looked for “someone to give him to,” lobbied the possible recipients, and also believed with all her heart that “the problem is me, it’s me that’s crazy. I’m not suited to dogs. He’s a good dog really.”
The dogs were given away and passed from an uncle in Petach Tikva to a distant nephew in the north, from my brother to my sister, Corinne, and to my sister’s neighbor. The ones that weren’t given away were ruthlessly banished when the blood rose to her head: “Take him, take him,” she thrust the dog into the arms of my uncle with the commercial van, cramming the dog’s bowls, blanket, and food into a bag. “Let him out somewhere.”
DOGS (2)
THERE WAS LENNY, one of a series of strays the child collected and brought home. When she talked about Lenny the mother’s eyes clouded over: “I don’t know what it was about that mshahwar Lenny that got into a person’s heart like that.” She gave him away shortly before the child was hospitalized with severe pneumonia, and then she went and brought him back. The next day he was run over by a car. She lay on top of him, on the road, covered with blood. It was impossible to pull her off the mangled body of the dog on the road.
DOGS (3)
FIVE MORNINGS A week she cleaned the house of Rabbi Nathaniel and his wife, a childless couple, in the suburb of Savyon. If they summoned her to show up on a Friday, too, because of a reception or something of the kind, it was the end of the world: “My Friday is mine,” she fumed, “It’s mine, without my Friday I can’t tell my head from my feet.” But she went, she never said no to Nathaniel, everything about whose demeanor and person spoke of civility and good manners, even the surprisingly crooked parting in his scant, greasy hair. The madam wore checked suits, of linen or tweed: a checked skirt and a short jacket, nipped in at the waist, whose last button, the one lying on her bulging stomach, was left unbuttoned. She had that little dog, Cookie, a vociferous black poodle who wore a kind of little checked coat in winter and sat in a straw basket with a checked mattress. They kept mating her with male poodles and she kept littering puppies, black and curly like her. Rabbi Nathaniel patted her absentmindedly on her head; he didn’t let her get to him, unlike his wife. Her pale, rice-paper-thin skin creased, her nostrils trembled with insult when she said: “Cookie didn’t touch her food all day, Levana, you know she didn’t touch it?” And the mother, impatient but resourceful, mixed Cookie’s brown Bonzo dog biscuits with a little cream cheese, “to get it into her in a different way.” “She gets sick and tired of the same thing every day, those little brown balls,” she scolded-coaxed the madam. “You think she isn’t sick of seeing the same thing all the time?”
The madam didn’t answer, trapped in her own absentmindedness, which was different from the rabbi’s and murkier, directed outward in nervous tension and even dread, especially when Corinne came to help the mother with the ironing. She, Corinne, sat on the spacious terrace of the spacious house, surrounded by fresh, sloping carpets of lawn, her calves resting on the chair opposite her and her golden thighs, where Cookie lounged, exposed, chatting with Rabbi Nathaniel about her “plans.” With her smooth back exposed almost to the tailbone, framed by the long straps of her blue summer dress, one arm hugging the other shoulder, touching and not touching the slender earlobe with its earring sparkling with cheap stones, with her hair loosely, sensuously gathered above her nape, and above all, in the way she was sitting, with her ankles rubbing each other on the seat of the opposite chair, there was something brazen, not in a deliberate defiance, but precisely the opposite, in its utter naturalness, completely relaxed and apparently unself-conscious: the lordly naturalness of the mistress of the house or a child. And she saw it, Madam Cookie, she stood in the French window and she definitely saw it, her painted eyes widening in astonishment, and she rushed off to the walk-in closet and returned with an armful of garments and put them on the table in front of Corinne: “There are a few things here that I don’t wear and I was going to throw them out, but perhaps you’d like them,” she said. Corinne didn’t move. She reached out with one hand to rummage casually in the pile, examined it with a cursory, sidelong look, and said: “They’re not my style, thanks.”
But the madam liked the “little one,” liked her very much, once she even gave her one of Cookie’s puppies. “Did you bring the little one with you?” she asked the mother, or complained: “Why didn’t you bring the little one today?”
The child was then four years old, and the mother brought her, mainly for Rabbi Nathaniel, “who hasn’t got any children, poor thing,” and whose face lit up whenever he emerged from his study and found the child lying on her stomach on the marble floor of the vast kitchen, taking the brown Bonzo balls out of the bowl and putting them back in, occasionally slipping one into her mouth behind the back of the mother who was scrubbing something nearby. The rabbi held out his soft, padded hand to the child and said: “Let’s go for a walk.” They walked down the sloping lawn to the flat ground below, which was also covered with lawn, and the rabbi pointed to a dry stone basin and said: “There’ll be goldfish here.” Afterward he called Madam Cookie and the mother to listen to the child singing in Hebrew, French, and a little in Arabic — the refrain from the Umm Kulthum song that Nona always sang — and how she recited a story she had heard on the radio at top speed and with proper emphasis, word for word. Rabbi Nathaniel picked her up in his arms, patted her lightly on the backside, and said solemnly: “This child will be the next Golda Meir when she grows up.”
The child came to the spacious house with the sloping lawns because of the smell, which pervaded the interior and all the things revealed and concealed in it, even wafting from the bag of soup almonds in the pantry and the calendar hanging in the toilet. The smell had no discernible origin, no body and no words to name it: the smell was of absolute transparency, pure, refined, and imperceptible as the elusive flutter of a butterfly’s wing on an eyebrow; it was different, odorless, the smell of an enlightened life, straight angles, calm orderliness, large-mindedness. The child wandered through the rooms after the mother, sniffed the tassels of a tablecloth, buttons, dusters, and pencils; she put one in her pocket to show Rachel Amsalem the smell. On Saturdays, early in the morning, she took Rachel Amsalem to the big house, to show her more. The iron gate was barred: Rabbi Nathaniel and his wife had gone to the synagogue. The little girls sat on the step and waited for them; they jumped up whenever they saw distant figures beyond the turn in the deserted street. It was noon when they returned, wearing white, arm in arm. “The child,” said Madam Cookie in surprise and fished two caramel candies from her jacket pocket, holding them out. The little girls accompanied them to the house but didn’t go in; they stayed on the terrace: each of them stroked Cookie once. Rabbi Nathaniel saw them to the gate, bowed down, and kissed the back of the child’s hand: “And say Shabbat Shalom to Mrs. Levana,” he said.