“See what a scowling little face she’s got,” Corinne cooed, kissed her on her nose, and then kissed Patishon, too, so he wouldn’t be jealous. She slept with them in her bed at night, fed them from her hand, delighting in their pink tongues lapping the soft bread dipped in milk from her palm, but was overcome by terrible anxiety whenever one of them disappeared from sight. “Where’s Patti, where’s Patishon?” she cried, morning, noon, and night, prowling wild-haired and swaying around the rooms of the shack and afterward the front and backyards, the baby crawling behind her with his diaper undone, his face smeared with grape juice and mud, wailing like her.
The mother grew more resentful from day to day, from the general upheaval of the invasion of the shack, and especially now, with this Pat and Patishon, which was “all she needed.” They filled her with bafflement and hostility, these pedigreed pups: “They’re like bibelots, so pretty you could put them on a shelf,” she announced once a day to please Corinne, who beamed in gratification, but then she came out with the truth: she wanted to drown them, that’s what she wanted, for them to stop standing “in front of her eyes” with their pampered little faces, those strange squashed faces of theirs, distracting Corinne, who was like “some kite” anyway, from the tasks of life. She told Corinne she should find a job: “Get up already. How long are you going to sit there without a penny to your name, cleaning up after those dogs all day?” she scolded her. Corinne held Pat and Patishon close on her chest, near her neck, burying her chin in their fur, her light brown eyes with their thick lashes gazing into the distance, wide open in astonishment and disbelief.
The mother brought her a notice she had torn down from one of the trees in Savyon, after reading the word “wanted”: “Wanted, a saleswoman for a new book and record store in the commercial center.” Corinne was silent. But she couldn’t get enough of the advertisement; she read it again and again until she had to throw it away in the evening after Patishon overturned a cup of coffee on it.
The next day the two of them, she and the child, rode the bicycle to the commercial center. They arrived too early and sat and waited on the stone wall for the shop to open. Corinne smoked cigarettes halfway, and ground them out on the stone walclass="underline" “I don’t want the owner of the shop to see me smoking,” she said, lighting another cigarette. There was hardly anyone else in the commercial center: three times they circled the little square overgrown with yellow weeds, looked into the few display windows, to which Corinne, after a scrupulous examination, said as if to herself: “Anyone would think God knows what they were selling here. No style. Lousy taste.”
At exactly four o’clock a plump little woman opened the door of the book and record shop, placing a stone in front of the door to keep it open, and turned on the light. Corinne didn’t move; she examined the woman like a spider waiting for the right moment to ingest its insect: “Quick, tell me the names of books,” she instructed the child without taking her eyes off the owner of the shop, whose silhouette was visible moving heavily behind the windowpane. “What names?” demanded the child in confusion. “Names, names”—Corinne pinched her arm—“If she asks me about books.” “Three Loves,” blurted the child. “More, more, tell me another two or three,” urged Corinne. Crime and Punishment, Angélique, The Foundling,” the child added quickly.
Corinne went into the shop, leaving the child to watch the bicycle, next to the stone wall. Behind the glass she saw Corinne sitting very straight on a high chair, hardly moving her lips when she talked, tightening the clip in her hair gathered in a chignon on her nape. “What did she say? Did she take you?” she asked as she walked back next to Corinne pushing the bicycle. “She said I was pretty,” confessed Corinne reluctantly. “Is that all?” asked the child, disappointed. Corinne stopped and thought for a minute: “She gave me something to write at home, for some graphologist friend of hers to look at my handwriting and say if my personality is suitable.”
They walked down the middle of the wide road with the darkness arching above them, trapped inside the vault made by the tall branches leaning toward each other and meeting high above their heads, sending a fateful shiver through the child, paralyzing and inexplicable, as if she and Corinne had been walking since time began under the high dome of the branches and would go on walking there forever, in this silence of knowledge that brought down all the barriers between past, present, and future, and planted her in a place beyond time, from which she looked neither forward nor backward but down from the heights. She looked sideways at Corinne, at her firm profile that lightened and darkened alternately; because of the shadows passing across her face or because of some inner shift, she saw how the despair that had previously settled on Corinne’s face changed its nature and turned into something different — not the opposite of despair, not happiness, but a different despair, subtle and mysterious, resembling the height and darkness of the arch of the trees more than the shop and the owner of the shop in the commercial center.
* * *
WHEN THEY reached the part of the road next to the dirt track leading to the shack Corinne suddenly stopped, her eyes widening in terror: a dog fight. Three or four dogs attacking each other ferociously with dreadful barking, their bodies writhing on top of one another on the dirt track, merging into a single frantic mass, digging their teeth into each other’s necks, hanging on and not letting go, their tails projecting for a moment from a single violent trembling body and then disappearing. Abruptly Corinne dropped the bicycle and raced to the scene, threw herself into the jumble of fighting dogs yelling, “Pat! Patishon!” The child stood nailed to the spot next to the bicycle lying on the ground. She saw Corinne’s gleaming white blouse in the pile of dogs, her thigh, her arms trying to force open the jaws of one of the dogs locked on the neck of another. And then came the scream, or the shriek, a terrible, piercing sound that erupted from Corinne and quelled all the barking and howling. The dogs extricated themselves and fled. Corinne lay on the ground, bitten on her leg, close to the ankle. Back at the shack, Pat and Patishon lay in their basket, cuddled together.
Corinne spent most of the following days sitting on the porch, in the sun, her bandaged leg with the stitches resting on one of the wrought-iron chairs in front of her, her hand supporting her forehead bent over the white pages that she tore off the writing pad, crumpled, and threw away and tore off again, starting and restarting “that thing for the graphologist” in her handwriting that strained to be rounded but wasn’t, like the writing of a child trying to write like a grown-up, or the opposite, an adult who wrote like a child: “I was born in the month of November under the sign of Scorpio. They say that scorpions die in the end from their own poison but I don’t believe it. I have an aesthetic sense and in my opinion I have taste. Ever since I was a child I have been interested in everything regarding style in clothing and furniture and I wanted to be a designer.…” She stopped, recopied, stopped again, and started again with the hope of the new white page.