THE SLEEPING BABY (3)
THE CHILD WASN’T simple-minded, but she sometimes thought, heard, and said things at a slant. Rachel Amsalem’s big sister, Yaffa, told her that she made herself look simple-minded by believing everything people said. “What people?” asked the child. “Tell me what people?” They were sitting at the bus stop, waiting for the next bus. Perhaps the child’s mother would be on it, bringing the waffles left over from the party at the student center, which the child had promised to give to Yaffa. Yaffa herself, on the other hand, was said to be a little simple: she was fifteen and she still played with dolls with the little girls, with the child and with Rachel. Their feet dangled in the air when they sat on the bench, shoulder to shoulder: the dogs had dug a deep ditch next to the bench, so that it was possible either to jump over it or to stumble into it. Yaffa did neither. When they wanted to get up, the child jumped first over the ditch, and Yaffa said, “Give me a hand.” The child gave her a hand and Yaffa gathered up her long skirt so it wouldn’t get in the way, closed her eyes, and took a long step forward, throwing the whole weight of her body onto the child and almost making her fall. She had a big body. She wore her mother’s clothes: skirts to below the knee, blouses buttoned to the neck, and sleeves reaching past the elbows, thick brown nylon stockings. “Closed, closed, all closed up,” the child’s mother said about her, raising her hand to her throat in a gesture of suffocation. Yaffa’s frizzy hair, coarse as steel wool, was stuck all over with dozens of hairclips, to keep the curls from jumping up. From Friday night to Saturday night she straightened her hair in an abu-aguela, pulling it tight to one side and then the other, with a scarf tied tightly around her head, singing Sabbath songs out of tune in her choked, rusty voice, alone in the dark half-room with the Sabbath candles, on and on until she was interrupted by her brother David’s despairing roar: “Enough, ya rabbak, enough! You’re sawing through my brains with those songs of yours!” and silence fell, settling on the Amsalem half-shack and crushing it, sinking it even farther down into all the barrels, junk, old bicycles, and the cinder blocks they wanted to use to extend their kitchen and got stuck in the middle.
They walked through the thorn field on the shortcut to the child’s house, which passed by the reservoir at the edge of the hill. The darkness was shallow, full of sounds; faint lights shone from the distant shacks, almost at the end of the horizon, as if from dying ships about to drown. Yaffa told the child that God would punish her for lying, for saying that she would bring her waffles and then not bringing them. “But I wasn’t lying,” protested the child. “I wasn’t lying, I wasn’t lying,” she repeated, shuddering a little at the sound of the metallic clatter of her own lying voice — not the lie referred to by Yaffa but a different, far greater lie, hidden and fortified as a secret, but a secret that was a lie, not the truth, a truth that was a secret lie. In front of them shone the reservoir: a cat was walking along the flat upper wall; it walked as if it were blind, swaying from side to side, but it didn’t slip. “So you don’t want to play mother and baby?” asked the child, picked up a long stick from the ground, and began beating the tall thorns on either side of the path, on the right and the left. “Just a minute,” said Yaffa, and she stepped off the path, onto a clearing between the thorns, pulled down her panties, squatted, and peed. The child looked at the strong jet making its way onto the path and collecting in a puddle. “Don’t you need to pee?” asked Yaffa. The child shook her head, she held it in. “You never need to pee,” said Yaffa, pulling her nylon stockings up from her calves.
Her broad, expressionless face, dissolving into its own blurred expanses, bent over the child: “Who’s there in your house now?” she demanded to know. “No one,” said the child. They stood next to the reservoir and looked at the big holes torn in the round stone wall, as if it had been smashed with heavy hammers. The child averted her eyes from the dark holes and looked at Yaffa, who also turned her face away in order not to see the footprints left by the white man when he walked on the walclass="underline" the holes were his footprints. “I’m dying of hunger,” said Yaffa. They walked down the hillside, toward the pointed silhouette of the cypress, which was suddenly covered by a strange, alien film, which now passed through the child, too, turning into the nagging doubt of “perhaps”: perhaps not here. But out loud she said, “Perhaps Sammy’s at home.”
“Sleeping?” asked Yaffa. “Sleeping,” said the child.
The shack stood in its solitude in the garden, next to the cypress tree and in front of the row of young pines at the back. Since early in the afternoon, when the child came home and the mother left, it was completely alone. The mother left food for the child on the stove, meatballs and rice, rice and beans, or liver and rice, covered the saucepan with a towel, but the child ate two slices of bread with chocolate spread, forgot the knife smeared with chocolate spread on the counter, next to the cleaning rag soaked in soapy water, which had stiffened as it dried, into a strange shape with hollows and bumps, like a rock or a crystal. She sat on the stool in the kitchen, chewing the bread and looking at it, at the little flies hovering over it and sticking to it.
This was the empty time of the shack, the long hours unraveling into non-time, until the night when the emptiness was interrupted twice, first when Sammy came home, and then when the mother came home. When the child looked at the polished objects and furniture standing in the polished rooms, it seemed to her that they were breathing air into the still spaces made glassy by the emptiness, filling them with the vapors of their breath. Now it was hers, the whole shack was ostensibly at her disposal, without anyone to tell her what to do, but when she went from the kitchen to the living room and then to the little room and the mother’s bedroom, she became a guest, interfering with the emptiness and the conduct of the emptiness, its welling and bubbling between the rooms, that fullness of the emptiness that turned into the presence of something, she didn’t know what, which slowly, the more time passed, changed from disapproving to terrifying. She entered the rooms with her back to them, walking backward, so that whatever was in there wouldn’t meet her at once, wouldn’t fix its eyeless stare on her face. Outside, outside the shuttered shack, were the ordinary sounds of the day — marking the hours, creating the illusion that everything was normaclass="underline" the carpentry shop, Nona calling every now and then from her concrete landing, the tractor digging something up in the thorn field. It was then, in the afternoon or early evening, that she slammed the door behind her and ran to Rachel Amsalem’s half-shack, to wait for her. Yaffa, not Rachel, was there, sitting on the porch, cracking the thin skins of broad beans and humming quietly to herself. The child sat down next to her, waiting for her to finish, and collected the empty skins fallen to the floor, and as she skinned, hummed quietly, stopped humming, and started again, she told the child that her problem was that she had twelve faces. “Everybody says you’ve got twelve faces, that’s why nobody wants to be friends with you,” she said. The child was silent. She stared at a column of ants making its way to the anthill, in the corner of the porch, and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “You don’t have to cry because of that,” said Yaffa, “you’ve got a really nice house.”