SORROW
THERE WAS ONE time when he came for a few days, he came in good faith, had not been thrown out of his life into the shack in the dead of night, from one abyss to another, but simply knocked on the door, in the normal way, not our house but on Nona’s door. Holding a plastic bag in one hand and flowers (gladiolus) in the other, his briefcase tucked under his arm, Maurice stood in the doorway, looked at the child who was sitting right in front of him, on Nona’s armchair facing the door. They looked at each other, he and the child, and didn’t make a move. Nona was busy in the kitchenette, oblivious, while the child took in what he was wearing: a burgundy-colored shirt and beige trousers. Burgundy socks the same color as his shirt. Summer shoes with holes in them, but made on purpose, in a kind of close pattern, the leather supple as the shoes of a dancer. He didn’t say a word and went on looking at her intensely, but the intensity of the gaze suddenly changed, becoming a slack, watery indifference, as if the puppeteer holding him up had loosened his grip. “Nona!” the child called.
They sent her to play with Rachel Amsalem, the Nona and Maurice. “Go, go and play ya bint,” said Nona, wiping her glasses with the greasy towel, and Maurice smoked Nona’s cigarettes, pulling a disgusted face as he smoked: “How can you smoke these cigarettes?” he complained, giving the child an absent look through the smoke and looking away again: “Go on, run along now. Afterward I’ll give you something nice,” he said. “Rachel isn’t home,” said the child, and she sat on the floor at their feet and played pick-up sticks with herself, putting the tips of her fingers on the points and pressing down hard until the sticks bent. The white gladiolus were lying on the white bed in two bunches wrapped in cellophane, long and dead: one bunch for the mother and one for the Nona. The child sank as she heard the words and refused to take in their meaning; time was reversed like a sock turned inside out. When Maurice got up to go to the toilet, Nona said that perhaps he would come home. “All the children have a father and a mother. Don’t you want your father and mother to be together?” she asked in a wheedling voice. “No,” said the child, “I don’t.” “Nobody’s asking you.” The Nona’s face hardened. She crossed her legs: “It’s only here in this country that people ask children about everything,” she said, undid one yellow braid, and plaited it again, throwing it over her shoulder.
He wanted to do it “properly” this time, Maurice, to give and take, not to just drop on them. “I, ya sitti, didn’t come to drop on anyone,” he said to Nona in the end, after one of the ends in the conversation, which had a lot of ends, punctuated by heavy silences. This the child heard, “to drop.” She peeked at him when he said it, at his wide lips distorted in disgust or pain: impossibly thin he stood on the edge of a well, his feet over the side, one little push to his back and he would fall, he had already fallen — swept inside as if he had been flung, not pushed, swallowed in a second into the mouth of the well.
That afternoon in the shack was full of politeness. The mother took off from work. They talked in the living room, couch facing couch, they talked in the kitchen, they talked on the porch, they talked again in the living room, carrying full or half-full cups of coffee. There was a new, solemn embarrassment in the shack, full of suppressed, agonizing expectation. The air grew denser and denser; it reached a point where it almost erupted, as if it had been filled with a pump, leaving room for nothing except his gaze, fixed on the mother and only on her, narrow and focused as the point of a pin and wide as the sea, brimming over — beyond his eagerness, hunger, supplication, yearning, and sorrow. When he retired to the bedroom to rest awhile, lying on the bed in his clothes, with a handkerchief soaked in cold water on his forehead because of a headache, the mother went to the Nona, to sit with her, shifting her thighs nervously on her chair. This time she spoke in a lowered voice, like a schoolgirl caught copying a test, drinking in Nona’s words, which had the flavor and the tone of spells, of oaths: “Tawli ruhek, tawli ruhek,” she repeated over and over again: “Be patient.”
Corinne and Sammy had vanished, they were nowhere to be seen: one thing seemed irreconcilable with another. Things were somehow out of joint and the shack stopped being “home,” stopped being itself: doors and windows were shut, closed to something. The child was impossible; whatever they said to her she answered, “No, no,” she wanted nothing, not to come in or to go out. Maurice wanted to go out, he wanted them to get dressed up and take the bus to the cinema in Ramat Gan to see Doctor Zhivago. They went to call the child, behind Rachel Amsalem’s house, in the thorns. There was an old tap there that didn’t turn off, and she and Rachel crouched under the running water, in the mud, competing to see who could eat the most crammed into their mouths in spoonfuls and washed down with water. The mother dragged her away, pulled her by the arms and dragged her lying on her stomach as she dug her feet into the ground. The mother pushed her into the shower, filthy and crying, scrubbed her body, and shampooed her hair: twice she escaped wet and covered in lather and twice she was forced back under the boiling jet of water that stung her skin more than the mother’s pinches and slaps.
Maurice sat in the living room, leafing through the newspaper, but a few times he came to peep into the shower, leaned against the door in his light gray suit, and looked at his face reflected in the mirror above the basin, smoothing his narrow mustache with his yellow finger: “But it’s Dr. Zhivago,” he said in surprise.
He liked Omar Sharif, he had even met him once, he told the mother on the bus, when the two of them sat on their bench in front of the child. His arm, she noted, encircled the mother’s shoulders but didn’t touch them, it rested on the back of the seat. The mother nodded, drinking him in, her shoulder blades moved under her dress: her back was a quivering map of feelers and open mouths, a tension of intent and intense devotion, intense tenderness. She had been taken, the mother: the child saw it with horror, how she was being taken.