Mermel came to visit, having heard about the incident with the dogs and the bite. He parked the Lark on the dirt track and remained sitting in it until Corinne came out to him, and sat next to him on the front seat of the car. The mother came out to the porch a number of times and looked at the car from a distance, at their heads close to each other in the car, waiting. Mermel brought Corinne presents: a ring set with a pink opal and a pair of opal earrings to match. He left, but he arrived again toward evening, wearing a jacket and giving off a good smell. They went out to a “fancy restaurant” according to Mermel, and took the sleeping baby wrapped in a blanket, and Pat and Patishon in their basket, with them. The mother arranged the piles of clothes and shoes in the sheets, and tied them securely, to be ready for the next day, or the same day in the middle of the night, she didn’t know: “He’s buying her, that Corinne, he’s buying her again with a few toys,” she said.
THE SLEEPING BABY (1)
THE BABY SLEPT swaddled in layers of white cloth, layer of white on layer of white, white merging into white, the broad plump white of the dress of the woman holding him on her lap, into the white of her headdress whose edges fell onto her dress. What’s called the “background,” too, was white, or almost white: the space behind the woman holding the baby, which looked like a garden covered in snow, or the opposite, like an arid desert verging on whiteness, almost achieving it. And then the white was interrupted: the photograph was torn, half of it was cut off. It was from Egypt, the photograph. It had the color and the mood of Egypt and photographs of Egypt. The mother didn’t look for it; she always came across it when she was looking for “some paper”—she would keep every single official document because she wasn’t sure of what was written in it, “maybe something from the bailiff.”
We sat on the floor, in front of the cabinet’s open door: she took out papers and more papers, “tell me what this is,” and “tell me what this is.” And the sleeping baby invariably popped up in the end; buried in some pile, hidden under some paper or other, he was revealed — he wanted to be revealed, instantly silencing the noise of the day-to-day, of the bureaucratic business. She always looked at him as if for the first time, and began to cry, but soundlessly: “That was Zizi,” she said, “and the one who’s holding Zizi, she was his wet nurse. Because I didn’t have milk for him.”
She didn’t know what had been torn from the photograph, who had been torn off, and why. Another time she did know, or thought she did: “It was Maurice who had his photo taken with him and the wet nurse on the day before he died,” she said. She didn’t remember who had torn Maurice from the picture: “It got torn. Stop asking me questions about ancient history, why it got torn. It got torn.”
The story was born bit by bit, in installments, with years separating one part from the other, white spaces. “He died at the age of three months, because of Maurice,” she said once, not in front of the picture, in its absence, after it was lost and no longer came to light among the papers. “Maurice fancied himself a gentleman. He didn’t want to take Zizi to the hospital. Only the so-called lower classes went to the hospital. Maurice was stubborn. The baby died at home, of stubbornness, in the arms of the wet nurse.”
THE SLEEPING BABY (2)
AS SOON AS she saw Corinne’s baby she asked about his sleep, why he wasn’t sleeping. She wanted them to go to sleep already, the babies (“Yallah, edardem ba’a”), not only because their quiet sleep bore witness to their well-being and somewhat allayed her guilt over the world they had been brought into, which wasn’t anything to write home about, but also so that they wouldn’t get in the way of her overturning and reorganizing the house. How she would bend over a baby sleeping in his cradle or carriage, examining this great accomplishment with respect, even awe: “Look how he’s sleeping!” On the other hand, a baby that went on sleeping too long gave rise to a panic that expanded exponentially: in a matter of seconds the baby went from a state of exemplary health to near death. Then even she would run to “the doctors,” her usual aversion overcome by abject terror, and the Nona would celebrate a victory.
They both danced attendance on Corinne’s baby, who always arrived at the shack with his bundles “just for an hour” and stayed for eight — a dance that consisted of arm-wrestling, open and disguised, over authority, and especially the source of authority. The dance steps obliged the mother, who secretly recognized the Nona as the source of authority on babies, to do whatever she could to avoid the humiliation of explicitly acknowledging this recognition, while Nona for her part spread her net of cunning tricks and verbal evasions under the mother’s feet, without asking for recognition of her authority, not at all — as long as they did things her way.
Corinne’s baby, who first slept and slept in his carriage on the sunny porch, his wrinkled red face (“like an old man’s face,” said Corinne) occasionally distorted by the grimace of a smile or momentary distress as he slept, suddenly woke up with shocking screams. What happened? What was it? “The end of the world, the end of the world,” muttered the mother in despair, changed him, fed him, turned him on his stomach, his back, his side, walked him in his carriage and in her arms, stuck a suppository in his rectum, sang to him, scolded him, put him down in his carriage and ignored him for a few minutes, put a cold compress on his forehead, swung with him on the neighbors’ creaking swing — and nothing. His screams only grew louder, his little arms and legs fought the air, he turned blue with crying and then red and then blue again, losing his breath. Nona sat in the corner of the porch in affected detachment, looking in front of her or not, and hardly seeing anything anyway, muttering as if to herself words that could be clearly overheard, clasping her long white fingers and waiting for the moment to ripen. The moment ripened: in her slippers and housecoat the mother ran to the clinic with him, to the doctor. The blood drained from her face on the way up the hill with the screaming baby and on the way down, with the still screaming baby: “I’d rather be a construction worker, it’s easier, I swear,” she said.
She sank into a chair next to the Nona, her eyes glazed, apathetically rocking the carriage with the screaming baby. Now the stage belonged to Nona; nobody could stop her. “You saw that this morning, when the neighbor dropped in, she said, what a lovely baby, you saw that?” the Nona said slowly and quietly. The mother nodded in agreement; she laid down her arms, surrendered unconditionally to what she called Nona’s “old-fashioned nonsense.” “And when she left the child turned over,” the Nona continued, and fell silent. In the rich, saturated silence that descended between them the baby’s crying sounded all the louder — still determined but a little hoarser, glazed like the look in the mother’s eyes. “Mafish fayida, put salt ya Lucette.” The mother dragged her feet to the kitchen, brought the big salt-cellar with the cooking salt, and began to sprinkle salt on the carriage, the blanket, and the baby’s clothes. “On the head, on the head,” urged Nona, “put salt on his head against the Evil Eye she gave him, mafish fayida.” She sprinkled salt on his head and inside his little hands. The weather changed, the sun withdrew from the sky and the porch, and the air darkened. They went inside with the salted baby, sat on either side of the carriage, and stared. “At that minute he slept, like from God. He calmed down in a minute,” recounted the Nona.