Now Corinne left me alone, collected her toys, and licked them one by one, picked up from the round floor of our marble a pair of cymbals, which were actually the covers of emergency openings. Because that was what was written on them: “emergency openings.” She fitted the cymbals onto her hands, brought them to the sides of my face, struck my cheeks with them for the first time, and said: “Maurice sucked our blood.”
She struck the cymbals for the second time: “Maurice has poisoned our blood.”
She struck the cymbals for the third time: “Maurice drank our blood.”
She struck the cymbals for the fourth time: “Maurice drained our blood.”
She struck the cymbals for the fifth time: “He is the blood. The blood must be spilled.”
My head spun, or perhaps there was something else in me that spun. I was seized with a terrible thirst and I started to drink more and more of the water in the marble, grateful to the glass animals, which now came and surrounded me on all sides so that I could look clearly at their internal organs visible through their glass skin and copy the right answer. The right answer was: “So what should I do now?” And I said it quickly to Corinne who was busy with something else and hardly listened. She was feeling the cymbals, looking for the end of the wire, and she began to pull it and pull it. She unraveled the cymbals into a spool of gilded wire that she began to coil around my body, starting with my feet and moving up to my calves and thighs. “You don’t love him, you can’t love Maurice,” she said in a rhythmic chant whenever she concluded coiling, tightening and tying the gilded wire of the cymbals around another part of my body: “You can’t love him if you want to be ours,” she said as she pushed the coils of wire together on my skin with her fingers, so there would be no strip of skin exposed, all of it covered with an impermeable layer of gilded wire: “Does it hurt you, Toni?” she asked, wiping her tears with her shoulder. I felt the blood stopping in my thighs, congealing in place. “But I love him and I always will.” The glass animals sang in chorus, clustering around me, their food bags crammed with strawberries hanging and swaying on their necks, signaling me to join in the refrain: “But I love him and I always will.” “No, no.” Corinne shook her head, moving the spool up to my arms, coiling the gilded wire around my wrists and pulling hard to tighten it: “You mustn’t love him. You don’t love him.” She straightened my arms to cover my elbows closely with the wire: “You mustn’t, you mustn’t, you mustn’t,” she muttered as she coiled. I could see the beads of sweat breaking out on her forehead even in the dark water of the marble, glittering like sapphires, and staying there on her forehead, radiant and solid, not trickling down, just like the tear drops that remained suspended from the corners of her eyes. “But I do love him,” I tried again, gazing at the marble eyes of the beautiful glass animals kneeling next to me on the rounded floor and letting me stroke their pricked-up ears.
“Yallah,” said Corinne, “we’re finished for today.” She gave me her hand and helped me up, clothing my body covered with wire, which now, close and smooth and complete, looked like a diving suit. We sat down, Corinne and I, against the rounded side of the marble and began rolling with it toward the edge of the flying porch, up to the place where the floor tiles stopped and gave way to the starry infinity of the nocturnal landscape of hills and lakes, which Corinne called “the sky.”
THE GLASS ANIMALS
“COME WITH ME,” Corinne nagged the mother for months. She wanted her to come to Cairo, to show her. “Show you what?” protested the mother. “What’s there to show after all these years?” “Well, there’s your house and all the places you said, Café Groppi and all of them,” said Corinne, who despite herself eagerly swallowed all of Maurice’s tales of Cairo, as told by Sammy: he traveled there once a month, Maurice, radiant with joy over the peace agreement. He had “his own affairs” there: the regular cafés where he met his friends, the renewal of old connections, cheap dental care by a Cairo dentist, books, newspapers, and nightclubs, buying and selling, and business schemes he dreamed up: the first was an agency for organized tours to Cairo under his guidance and inspiration, which he opened in his room in the Hatikva quarter, actually a reincarnation of the Suhba, only without the comrades, and the second, secret at least in definition — an attempt to export thousands of valium pills to Egypt, which suffered from a severe shortage of tranquilizers, as Maurice discovered to his regret (“What’s all this ‘to my regret’ all the time?” asked Sammy).
But the mother didn’t want to hear about it: “I have nothing to go for and nothing to show. The people I loved died or left, and what’s the use of a place without its people? You go,” she urged Corinne, to get her off her back, but Corinne nagged and nagged, and in the end she broke her. “She broke me,” the mother announced. “When that one wants something she’s got uwwat ozraeen, the strength of the devil.”
They went for five days with three suitcases, the mother’s one, and the two big ones belonging to Corinne, whose face showed the first sour signs of disappointment: the Mena House Hotel where she wanted to stay was too expensive, and she was obliged to compromise on the Marriott. “The Marriott’s class, too. What’s wrong with the Marriott? What are we, the prime minister, that we have to go to the Mena House?” The mother tried to mollify Corinne, who pursed her lips tighter and said, “All right, all right.” Corinne’s eyes widened with pleasure at the sight of the colonial-style room in the Marriott, but to the mother she went on saying, “All right, all right,” and went with her, at least for the first two days, to all the places that everyone goes to: the pyramids, the museum, the Khan el-Khalili, and to the mother’s old residential neighborhood in Sharre Elsakakini.
“What, is that all?” demanded Corinne, dismayed at the sight of neglect, the dirt, and, above all — the size. “The whole thing’s no more than a street in south Tel Aviv,” she said to the mother who stood rooted to the spot, looking around her: “Poor, poor Egypt, poor country, poor people,” she said in a choked voice. Nevertheless, they went up to the apartment building where the mother thought they had lived before they left Cairo and knocked on one of the doors. An old woman opened the door, stared at them for a long moment in the gloom of the corridor, until suddenly, after a short exchange, her face shone. “Umm Sammy, Umm Sammy,” she cried and took the mother into her arms. They sat with her in the miserable room with its closed shutters and drank coffee from sticky little cups. She patted the mother’s thigh, held her hand: “Why did you leave us and go away?” she asked again and again. “Why did the Jews leave us alone with all the evil that came on us afterward and go away?” The mother unpinned the gold brooch with the amethyst stone from the lapel of her jacket and gave it to her, pinned it to the collar of her dress: “Keep us in your heart,” she said.
Afterward the two of them went to sit for a while on the bank of the Nile. The mother was pensive, her eyes veiled: “Look how she remembered, Umm Sammy, Umm Sammy,” she said over and over to Corinne, who was silent and morose, suddenly stung by a bee that left her ankle red and swollen and sore. She had had enough. In the coming days the mother roamed the streets of Cairo alone. Corinne didn’t want to leave the hotel. She spent all day at the pool or in the bar or in one of the halls of the lobby, and made friends with a doctor and his wife and sister from Abu Dhabi.