The shack had no foundation, not really. It had been simply set down in the dunes. Sometime at the beginning of the fifties, trucks arrived and unloaded prefabricated shacks, putting them down at random on the sand dunes in the new immigrants’ transit camp: “When they got tired, they stopped and put one down,” she said.
The sands were all the same and the shacks were all the same. During the long dark nights people got lost in the dunes, knocked on strange doors, looking for their shack. People sometimes wandered lost in the moonlight until three o’clock in the morning. Until Maurice arrived (he stayed then for about half an hour) and came up with an idea: all the men, the heads of households, would put a flagpole on their roofs and fly a petticoat or nightgown belonging to their wives. Nobody would get lost. And that’s what happened. “Yes, believe me, that’s what happened,” said the mother, with a grave, stern expression on her face that seemed to match a different thought and a different story, which had apparently gone astray in her mind and ended up in the wrong neighborhood, at the wrong door, like the people in the story about the petticoats in the sand dunes, which of all the stories about Maurice was the one she chose to tell.
THREE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING
THE CHILD WAS woven by a thousand visible and invisible threads into Nona’s story, because the mother was silent. In the spaces of the silence left by the mother Nona talked and talked. The power of the imagination, which Nona possessed in plenty, did not defeat the power of memory, which she also possessed in abundance: she repeated the story, written and directed and acted in her mind, letter by letter, word by word, with the same pauses and stresses, the same theatrical pathos, the same transitions from language to language in exactly the same places, even the same technical hitches, a power outage that darkened the stage for a moment at exactly the same place in the plot.
Did the child sit on her lap while she told the story? No, the place on Nona’s lap was taken by the ashtray. This was the time for her cigarette, after eating and before resting. The child sat at her feet, on the thin mat her uncle had once brought from the Bedouin market in Beersheba. The Nona couldn’t see the colors that the child told her: red, yellow, blue, green, brown. The Nona practiced the colors with the child in French: rouge, jaune, bleu, vert, brun.
The child repeated the colors every day, even when the mat was no longer there: the mother threw it out one day in a rage after it got tangled up in Nona’s feet, not for the first time, and she tripped and fell. “That’s all I need, a wheelchair,” said the mother. Nona was silent, puffing on her cigarette without inhaling the smoke, the blank lenses of her glasses misting over (by this stage she couldn’t see a thing and the glasses were for show). “Indi karami,” the Nona said to the child after her silence came to an end, after the mother left the room. “I have my self-respect.”
The child couldn’t understand the connection between the mat and the “karam,” Nona’s self-respect. She asked, “But what’s the connection. Tell me what the connection is.” Nona turned her head aside and hid her face: the face that had been turned toward the child before was now turned away, to look blankly at the glass panes in the front door. Perhaps the Nona didn’t understand the word “connection” or perhaps it was one of her moments of deliberate deafness. In the end she said something. She said: “Only God sees what I have in my heart.” But that wasn’t true. Everyone saw. “Everyone” was the mother and the child, the child’s brother and her sister. “But Maurice,” said the Nona, “he sees for himself, he’s like me. He’s your father,” she went on. “You remember that Maurice is your father?” “Yes,” said the child. “Tell me what you remember about him,” she asked, “tell me things.” “I don’t remember things,” said the child. “You do remember things about him, I know you do,” said Nona, stretching out her hand to touch the child on her forehead, but touching her eyelashes instead. “Whenever your heart sleeps for Maurice, wake it up, because he’s your father and his heart is awake for you. Do you understand?” “Yes,” said the child, and she pinched Nona on her right arm, which was both withered and swollen. Nona had to have a special sleeve made for her dresses. “Make room for me.”
Now they were both sleeping in Nona’s bed, covered up to the neck by the heavy blanket. Nona slept on her back and the child slept on her side, burying her forehead in Nona’s arm, not the swollen one, the normal one, smelling her elbow through noisy breath. “What a good smell,” said the child. “It’s from the good soap they brought me, I kept it in my clothes. Until yesterday, when I said to myself, Yallah ya bint, who are you keeping the good things for, the dead?” the Nona explained as her eyelids closed, the white, transparent lids covering her metallic blue eyes. “Don’t sleep,” the child requested. “I’m not sleeping, I’m resting,” said Nona in a heavy voice. The child waited a moment or two, footsteps pounded in the next-door house to the right of Nona’s quarter-shack, or to the left, in Rachel Amsalem’s father’s house. “You’re sleeping, you’re sleeping,” said the child. “No I’m not, I’m just closing my eyes for a bit, to let them rest,” said the Nona with difficulty.
The child turned onto her back, distancing herself, marking a border between herself and the Nona with her finger on the mattress so their bodies wouldn’t touch, a deep long moat between two now-hostile states. She examined the map of moldy stains on the dank ceiling: the fat one on the right was angry when they brought it food not from a can, it ate the amm’s cow but only the skin, without the meat, so it would have black cow fur on the inside, too, and whenever it wanted it could turn itself inside out and both sides would be the same, but its aunt on the left, who was browner, saw that everyone was running away from her — her fingers, head, arms were all running away — and she began shooting at them so they would come back quick, but only the fingers came back, all except the thumbs, which hid inside something and only came back after they had grown all by themselves in an envelope full of sugar.
A voice suddenly emerged on her right, from under the layers, as if from the depths of the floor. It was the Nona continuing some train of thought: “Maurice brought me that good soap. He knows how to bring all the good things.” She paused for a moment: “When he wants to, he knows to bring the best things.” She rubbed her stocking feet against the feet of child, who was now close under the blanket and lay her head on Nona’s broad, soft, liquidy stomach. “You came out of my stomach, you did, said the Nona from far, far away, from the open air inside the room, and then added reluctantly, “It’s as if you came out of my stomach.”
The child sat up, “as if” at the beginning of a story, the beginning of the beginning. The Nona, too, raised herself heavily from lying to a sitting position, leaning against the two flat pillows propped up against the wall. The iron railing of the bed pressed against the base of her spine, but she didn’t notice. The child leaned over to the side table, took a cigarette out of the packet, lit it, puffed on it once, and handed it to Nona with the ashtray. The Nona looked straight ahead, with great preparation and a certain veiling of her eyes: it wasn’t the concentration of an effort to remember but of self-hypnosis.
Her voice was thick, hoarse, saturated with the vapors of a mix of grief and enthusiasm. “She got rid of them all before you came, the mother. Zizi in Egypt she didn’t get rid of, he died on his own, but all the others that came afterward she got rid of like kittens, because Maurice left. How would she raise them? When you were in her stomach she wanted to get rid of you, too. “Enough,” she said, “I’ve had enough.” She fell silent, as if listening to the faint voice of the radio. “And what happened then?” asked the child, playing with the Nona’s hand lying on the blanket, counting the hollows in the place where the fingers ended.