The child rubbed the toes of her bare feet together, suppressing the resentment welling up in her against the Nona, against her “yimken” and its heavy irony filling the room like the white haze, beating against the windowpane and stopping there, retreating from the darkness outside, which, for the time being, contained no “perhaps,” but only unequivocal bleakness that was unlikely to give rise to anything except more darkness.
She tensed: another bus came down the road, stopped beyond the shack, at the bus stop. The darkness ripened now with juicy promise, like the seeds of a pomegranate. Now the child could make out the dark contours of the shack, Sammy’s welding shop, and the garbage can, looming up in the dark.
A thin stream of cold air stole in under the door, freezing the child’s feet and calves. Perhaps it was winter. Yimken. In winter there was more of everything: more darkness, more white haze, more long blanks between the expectation, more murmurs and imaginary sounds and false alarms, more urgency when the mother suddenly opened the door at last, poking the dripping umbrella in first and after it her dripping self, wrapped in a big shawl over her coat. The child fled to Nona’s bed, pulled the blanket over her head, tucked her hands between her thighs when the mother pulled the blanket down, standing next to the bed still in her dripping coat: “Are you coming?” The child didn’t answer; she shut her eyes tight, felt the transparency of her eyelids through which she saw the mother’s face, high and distant, as if stripped of its skin. She didn’t answer, and pulled the blanket up again. “Good,” said the mother and left. The child jumped up and flew to the window: slowly and with difficulty, as if pushed from behind, the bulky, huddled figure of the mother advanced down the path leading to the shack and was swallowed up in the darkness close to the edge of the lawn, next to the cypress tree.
For a long time she went on standing there, staring at the spot that marked the verge of the disappearance and then the disappearance itself, and then she went back to Nona’s bed and covered herself with the blanket. Nona lay down beside her, unbuttoning the child’s sweater under the blanket, and laying her hand on the ribs that were shaken by weeping: “Bitayeti leh ya omri, why are you crying?” The child sat up, quickly pushed her feet into her shoes without tying the laces, raced in her pajamas down the dark path to the shack, straight through the unlocked door to the bedroom, to the mother’s bed, and lay down next to her in the empty, solitary place. Her teeth chattered a little from the sharp transition between cold and heat, between the cool, flat freshness of the sheets — so different from the warm, deep hollows of the Nona’s bedclothes, steeped in smells of urine, medical ointment, chamomile, and lavender water, and from the pity for Nona and Nona’s loneliness inside those bedclothes. The mother switched off the bedside lamp and turned over on her side. Time passed; the child got out of bed in the middle of the night, every night, ran back up the path to Nona’s quarter-shack, and knocked loudly on the shaky door with the glass: “It’s me,” she said.
THE CYPRESS TREE (1)
THE CYPRESS TREE announced the shack, heralded it from far away, from the turn in the road to Savyon. Tall, calm, collected, it was the guard, the strict-yet-reasonable nanny of the wild, out-of-control child that was the shack. Corinne had brought it home with her from Arbor Day at school when she was small, and it was small, too, that’s what they said.
THE CYPRESS TREE (2)
IT SOMETIMES STUCK in her craw, that cypress tree, when she didn’t appreciate it. Either she was praising it, or it stuck in her craw: obdurate, solid, hard to move. She had her reasons for why it did that: “Its roots spread in the ground and block the drains,” she said.
Consultations took place on the sunny porch, what to do about the cypress tree and the roots. Taking part were Marco the gardener, Benny Levakar from the plumbers, Sammy, Nona, and her. Marco said that they had to lasso it with ropes from top to bottom and find the exact angle for it to fall. “Otherwise it could fall right onto your roof tiles, bring the whole house down, smash all the fancy lamps in your living room,” he warned. She paled, wiped her hands on her housecoat even though they weren’t even wet. “But there are special people for that,” she argued nervously, “there are special people from the council for things like that.” “Not from the council,” intervened Benny Levakar, chewing his fifth date cookie, “It’s the ones from the Beautiful Land of Israel that take down trees like this, it’s only them that do it.” Sammy was beside himself, against the whole idea in principle, even though he took part sporadically in the discussion, running back and forth from the porch to the welding shop: “But why take it down, why do you want to take it down, what’s the point of taking it down?” he yelled. “What’s the point?” she retorted, “Every second day the drains get blocked and you ask what’s the point? He’s blocked as the drains”—she turned to the others, waving her arm in Sammy’s direction—“I explain to him and he doesn’t take it in, the blockhead.”
Sammy was given over to the skeptical, suspicious shaking of his head; he didn’t hear a word, or else he heard exactly what he was supposed to hear, like they always heard each other’s words: ready-made rhetorical flourishes in lovers’ quarrels. He feared what he called her “extremism,” the rash acts from which there was no going back, how he detested them! In a matter of minutes she would defeat him in their passionate debates over “doing or not doing,” that almost always took place after she had already decided or done the deed, and he would withdraw, or pretend to, turning to some third party present in the room, or to some piece of furniture: “That’s her problem, she’s so extreme. Never consults anyone, just goes ahead and acts. Me, I take advice about everything, I like to hear what people have to say. Not her. She charges ahead, doesn’t give a damn.” Now he turned back to her, as if he had just remembered something, and opened a second round: “But why do you have to go to special people, pay them money? Can’t we bring the tree down ourselves, me and the worker, in a couple of days? You have to deal with it now, right now?”
She really did. “Now” or “immediately” was her middle name. For her there was no pause between the thought or the wish and the act — the act was the simultaneous fruition of the wish and its fulfillment. Every delay, even the slightest, was an act of cruelty, a deliberate torment. She always acted alone — an entire Foreign Legion that deployed on its own behalf, to win. “That’s me,” she’d say after it was over, which was at one and the same time full of an arrogant sense of will that brooked no obstacle and arch amusement: “That’s me. I don’t wait, ni un ni deux. I act, and that’s it.”
But the cypress tree was not uprooted. “Something” stopped her. What was that “something”? She didn’t know herself, she was apparently overcome by a rare sense of respect for inhibition, she couldn’t dismiss it, and she uncharacteristically invented a false sentimental pretext: “Corinne brought it when she was small in an olive can and planted it. I remember how she planted it,” she said. Corinne raised the two brown-penciled arches that were her eyebrows. “It wasn’t me who brought it, it was Sammy,” she said, in the indifferent voice of a court recorder. They could uproot the tree or not — it made no difference to her, because, every thing and every act were doomed from the outset to obey what was inherent and preordained — annihilation, catastrophe, and getting uglier all the time, canceling out the spectrum of difference between action and inaction, something and nothing.