For long moments before they entered the cinema they stood and licked the ice creams Maurice bought for them (he took a few pennies from the mother), they stared at the giant picture of Omar Sharif on the giant poster. He and the mother suddenly held hands, looking at the poster, not at each other, united in a profound agreement — Maurice and Omar Sharif were two peas in a pod.
Omar looked at Omar. No, Omar looked at the mother looking at Omar in the darkness of the movie hall, watching the screen only out of the corner of his eye while he looked at her, only at her, watching the screen but not really watching it, seeing through the Omar on the screen the Omar sitting next to her and gobbling her up.
They almost missed the last bus back to the neighborhood. The child fell asleep and Maurice carried her for a way in his arms, panting. It was night, but the next day had already begun, in the night, the tiny cog wheels of the next day.
The mother got up early to go to work, but the child didn’t go to school; she said she had a stomachache, covered herself with the blanket, and scratched lines on the sheet with her fingernail as she listened to the sounds and noises made by Maurice in the shack, marking his passage from room to room, the metallic clatter: the mother’s copperware that he overturned as he passed. The child got up, lay under the cypress tree, and pretended to read. She didn’t say a word to him. She noted with hostility every move he made, every expression on his face. He told her he would prepare rice fit for a king, or a queen. He didn’t ask her to come with him to the kitchen, but she went, sat down next to him, and asked if he believed in God. In the kitchen he was on wheels: pots, pans, ladles, boxes of spices, bits of parsley stuck to the counter and the floor, towels he kept taking out of the drawer because he forgot where he had put the one before. “I believe in man and in his free will, not in God,” said Maurice. “There’s nothing like the will of man.” In the meantime he fried the ingredients for the rice fit for a king, or a queen: chicken livers, hearts, gizzards, onions, pine nuts. To the rice he added saffron. A wintry sun came in through the low kitchen window; light poured onto the floor. Maurice ate with his hands, scooping up rice and livers with his long dark fingers and putting the food in his mouth without dropping a single grain. Even his fingers, it seemed, stayed dry, not greasy. She did as he did: she gathered the rice in her fingers but she kneaded it a bit until it turned into a little ball, feeling his radiant smile shining on her, his whole smiling face spraying glowing sparks, like Sammy’s blowtorch. “I believe that there’s a God,” said the child with her mouth full of rice. He took her hand, brought it to his lips, and kissed it, holding it for a long moment: “It’s good that you believe, never mind in what, it’s impossible to live without believing,” said Maurice. That evening he stayed with her till late, at the table in the hall, until she finished her math homework, or almost finished it; he chain-smoked, with that smile from the afternoon, with the sparks of light, still on his face, waiting with gentle patience, not pressing her even when she sat for a long time daydreaming, chewing the tip of her pencil. He daydreamed, too, and woke up suddenly to the sound of his own voice: “What did you say, ya omri?”
When she came home from school the next day, he was no longer there. The shack was empty of him, of his few belongings. The mother didn’t say anything. She read her book, lying on her side, curled up with her knees close to her stomach. The child threw down her schoolbag and flew outside, to the bus stop. She reached it breathless just as the bus was leaving. For a moment she was sure that in one of the windows she had glimpsed the edge of a burgundy sleeve and carefully combed dark hair, with a part on the side. She ran after the bus to the next stop, a little before the parched square of “up there.”
UP THERE
SHE HAD THE little “msandara” and the big “msandara”: the little one was the storage space at the top of the clothes closet, the big one in the attic under the tiled roof of the shack. The big msandara, which was reached from outside, by a long ladder, she called “up there.” There were differences between the little msandara and the great big up there, separated only by the tiles from the sky.
The little msandara at the top of the closet was a temporary hiding place, while the big one was a refugee or quarantine camp.
The little one was a lockup for objects that behaved badly but whose sentence had not yet been passed, while the big one was the penal colony to which they were exiled after being convicted (there were appeals).
The little one was crammed, without a crack of air between the objects, while the big one was two-thirds empty and full of air.
The little one was all immediacy and present tense, a direct and natural continuation of now, while the big one was all past tense: still, dark, full of cobwebs, dust, and lost glory.
The little one was visited every day, things were put in and taken out, while the big one only twice a week, and after a difficult journey.
The little one was the mother’s flesh and bone, first person, an extension of the word “me,” while the big one was the absolute other: she annexed it, but it refused to be part of her.
The little one was everyday, secular routine, while the big one was magic, a temple.
Everyone knew about the big “up there,” they were accomplices, or witnesses, or something: the big “up there” was almost the only site in her life that she couldn’t direct and create on her own, the way she preferred and was accustomed to, which demanded cooperation, linked arms, that “lend a hand” of hers.
The thing was that she hardly ever saw it, the big “up there,” saw it with her own eyes, except for the few times when she took her courage in both hands and climbed the high ladder leading to the small opening with its little wooden door, and peered trembling inside, into the tall, empty darkness. She was afraid of heights. She — who hardly knew the meaning of fear (“for myself I’m not afraid”) — became dizzy at the mere sight of the ladder leaning against the wall of the shack at an ominous slant. But she volunteered to hold it, gripping the lower rungs hard and pushing the ladder toward the wall and into the rose bed where its feet were planted, and urging on the climbers from below, her eyes on the ground: “Climb, climb!”
Everyone without exception was a possible addressee of those exhortations: Sammy, Corinne, me, Sammy’s worker, the neighbor, Corinne’s boyfriend, the man from the council who came to check the water meters, and once even the boy who came to collect money for what she called “the paralyzed children”: first she gave him juice and cookies and then she sent him up the ladder. To be ready for the moment when somebody showed up, she arranged the objects intended for “up there” in a corner of the porch or on the back path, closest to the ladder, and watched brokenhearted as the volunteer trampled her roses (in anticipation of the destruction, she prepared new roses to plant, in season or out): a compelling necessity was at stake, overriding all other considerations.
The vast space above the ceiling, this dark upper domain spread over the entire area of the shack, was a perpetual invitation, a calclass="underline" it called out to her to “take proper advantage” of it, but also to subdue it. As far as she was concerned, “up there” meant the possibility of extending her range of movement, enlarging its scope: she “showed” the narrow, rectangular opening to the attic what was what. Against the will of the opening, against the will of the “things” (sideboards, dining tables, bookshelves, chairs, and armchairs), she succeeded in accomplishing the impossible and shoving them through the narrow opening, in squaring the circle, but not for long: “up there” was no ordinary storeroom, it was a storeroom for stage sets, and what went in after a while came out again, visited the shack or other houses, and was taken back “up there” again, after the usual quarrel with Sammy about the ladder (“You’re taking my things from work”).