The arms dangled lengthily at the sides of the figure down to the hem of the dress, and then bent to make long, flat hands, spread out horizontally on either side, like a pedestal fixing the figure to the floor and holding it up in the air. The mother looked at the dozens of drawings, turning them over, one after the other: “But what’s so special about this dress? It’s just a petticoat,” she wondered. “That’s exactly what’s special about it.” Corinne snatched the pages from her impatiently and wrote in her spidery hand in the middle of each dress “raw silk,” underlining the words with two thick lines.
It was Sammy who first brought Mermel to the house: they met in military prison when they served for about half an hour in the army and were arrested again and again for being AWOL, or cheeking the officers, or something. The conversation between them was as follows: Mermel walked past Sammy in the holding cell and hissed, “Have you got a cigarette?” and an hour later Sammy walked past Mermel and pleaded, “Have you got a cigarette?” Later on they were both about to be released, but Mermel was immediately arrested again — in a rush to meet Corinne in her hairdressing salon he stole an army truck and drove straight into the wall of a nearby building. He didn’t have a driver’s license.
He worshipped Corinne, Mermel, as if she was some sacred object: sometimes, when he fixed his hungry gaze on her, seeing her and only her, it seemed that if he had to cut off his head with his own hands in order to preserve this worshipful stance toward her, he would cut it off. Her laconic coldness, the uncompromising, sinewy element inherent in everything she said or did, and everything she didn’t say and didn’t do, her haughtiness full of the restrained pathos of an exiled princess, and above all her beauty, unattainable and inconceivable even to herself — all these things hypnotized him. He brought her piles of brass and plastic jewelry that he bought by weight at the central bus station, flowers, fine chocolates that she didn’t touch because she couldn’t stand sweet things, stuffed animals, fans, handbags, stolen bottles of perfume, and once even a pair of Persian cats, male and female, which he asked for in exchange for a fitted closet he installed in some villa.
He was a carpenter by trade, but what he really did, according to the mother, was play cards. He spent hours in seedy gambling joints next to the market, betting the shirt on his back, until his parents turned up and made a scene in vociferous Yiddish — especially his mother, who had the control of her tear ducts down to a fine art and could bring herself to shed decorative tears at the drop of a hat, which infuriated Corinne and immediately ignited bitter exchanges between them: within a few weeks she learned to quarrel in Yiddish, Corinne; she picked up foreign languages out of thin air, with the accent and everything.
But Mermel was beautiful, tall and beautiful — the most beautiful, said Corinne, actually she didn’t say, she screamed, covering her ears with her hands. Sammy and the mother sat or stood opposite her, while she curled up in the corner of the couch, her feet tucked under her, and lectured her. “I know him, he’s not for you,” Sammy drummed into her. “He’s not for you, I know him,” and the mother repeated after him like an echo, “He knows him, Sammy knows him.” Corinne’s face was frozen, obliterated, as if it had been covered by the blurred and blurring cross-hatching on the faces of her drawings — all the muscles of her face were stiff while she pretended to listen, until she suddenly released her face and burst into that sharp, jagged scream, a terrible bellow loud enough to shake the rafters, pressing her hands to her ears: “But he’s beautiful! He’s beautiful! He’s beautiful!”
CRYING
THE FILM THAT covered the mother’s eyes from time to time wasn’t tears, but an emotion that almost came to fruition and then held itself back. It was always accompanied by a certain tilting of her head, that filming of her eyes, not as if she wanted to hide, but as if she wanted to dim what was happening. We never saw her really cry. But we never really looked either: it wasn’t “in her nature” to cry, it wasn’t “in our nature” to look. It was in her nature to scorn whining, complaining that was like crying, to really hate it. She didn’t put it in so many words, but she was vehement: at the bottom of the pit, in the blackest of the black, you didn’t cry because you had leapt beyond the hurdle of crying, and as for all the rest, the intermediate degrees of shit, crying was putting on an act, or worse, falling into self-pity. What she did permit herself, however, was to shed a tear over “nonsense”: The Lady of the Camellias, Egyptian films on television, the moment Enrico Macias’s voice broke slightly when he sang “soleil de mon pays perdu,” and at Corinne’s wedding in particular.
Sammy organized playing the record on the gramophone, silencing the three members of the band in the functions hall with the grayish-pink curtains in Petach Tikva. The mother waited, going back and forth — from the rabbi’s seat to implore him to delay the ceremony to the entrance to the hall, which opened onto a sidewalk full of garbage cans in the middle of the industrial zone.
She was wearing a long lavender-mauve dress, the color of her bedroom walls. This was what Corinne had decided, “lavender-mauve,” angrily wiping the mother’s eyelids, which Miriam had painted a peculiar phosphorescent blue. There she stood, the mother, in the lavender-mauve dress whose hem swept the filthy sidewalk, waiting for Maurice, taking off her gloves and putting them back on, scanning every passing cab in despair. For over two weeks they had tried to locate him, she and Sammy, to tell him about the wedding. In the end they found him, staying in a friend’s house in south Tel Aviv. “Come, Maurice, you can’t not come,” she said. He twisted and turned until he finally confessed: he didn’t have anything suitable to wear, he had left all his clothes in the rented flat he had abandoned in the dead of night because of the money he owed the landlord. He needed a new suit. They went together to the tailor, they chose material together: she bought him a suit.
At a quarter to nine, over an hour late, when she was back inside the hall, her dry cracked lips splitting the lipstick, he finally arrived, stood in the doorway looking in like someone who had landed there by accident, come to search for something or to ask for an address. Sammy had just set the needle on the song, brought the band’s microphone up to the gramophone. She went to Maurice, to where he was standing, stepped alone on the green carpet to the strains of “soleil de mon pays perdu,” wiping her damp eyes with the lavender-mauve gloves, almost the color of the dress; she tucked her arm firmly in his and almost dragged him toward the marriage canopy.
A FRIEND’S HOUSE
MAURICE SAID HE would come on Friday morning and he did come, only not on that Friday but another one, the one after, or the one after that, when “it could be arranged.” And the child wondered, when what could be arranged, what was the thing that had to be arranged, which appeared in her imagination in the pluraclass="underline" the things, the affairs. The things that piled up on top of one another, empty titles, giant boxes sealed with packing tape, containing something or not, obscure representatives of the obscure thing that was his life, his troubles, because that was what he said, “I’m in trouble up to my neck.” When the two of them walked down the asphalt road with the orange grove on the right and the thorn field on the left, on the way to the bus stop to Tel Aviv, he said it: “I’m in trouble, but I’m getting out of it.”