Disobedience

by Naomi Alderman

  Tock

  She looked out the bathroom window. A certain ripeness had fallen over the blue of the sky. The leaves of the apple trees, the red-tiled roofs, the parked cars, the roads all exhaled, saying, we are done, for this week our work is completed. They settled into the earth, allowing themselves to sag. Esti looked at her watch. Sixteen minutes. She looked at the sky. The blue was even more profound. The Sabbath was beginning. She looked back at the window in the plastic wand. And she found a blue line held in that small space. And that line was a boundary between one state and another. And that blue spoke to her of other beginnings, and changes of an even more perfect order.

  Dr. Feingold says: the subconscious knows no past or future. For the subconscious, everything is happening right now. Trauma that happened when you were four still feels exactly as threatening now as it did then. Trauma that happened when I was four, I say, like the death of my mother? Yes, she says, for example. Do you want to talk about that?

  I tell her that her ideas about the subconscious remind me of God. She says, “God?” In the Torah, Moses asks God to tell him His name. And God gives him a word: YHVH. No vowels, so it can’t be pronounced, even if you wanted to. It’s an impossible conjugation, three separate tenses of the verb “to be” smashed together in one word. It means having been, going on being, and going to be in the future, all together. From this, we learn the timeless nature of God. The past, the present, and the future are all the same to Him.

  Dr. Feingold listens to this silently. When I’m finished, she leaves a space of another few seconds. She says, “There’s a difference, though. The subconscious is wrong about the past and future. Things that were threatening in the past aren’t so scary anymore. That’s different than your idea about God, isn’t it?”

  I say, “Yes. If ‘my idea’ about God is correct, then the subconscious is quite right. The past hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s right here.”

  On Sunday, I went back to my father’s house, just to check. The locks had been changed. I tried one key, then another, then another, jiggling each one, pulling the door toward me, pushing it away. I stood holding the whole useless bunch, flicking at the peeling red paint by the hinges with the toe of my shoe, as though that’s what I’d intended to do all along.

  I walked to the side of the house, pushed open the rotten gate, and walked through into the garden. The overgrown lawn had yellowed in the heat. One of the apple trees was bent double, its branches scraping along the weed-ridden flower beds. And by the fence was the hydrangea bush. I picked my way along the path and bent over to examine it. A few flowers were still hanging on, petals beginning to curl up and brown. I crushed one between finger and thumb and inhaled the succulent scent.

  I remember only in fragments. The bare legs, the hydrangeas, the taste of her mouth. There was a place, between the hydrangea bush and the fence, where two girls could crawl, if they were little enough, and not afraid to scratch their knees. It was one of those places that seems obvious to children, hidden to adults. A secret place. In winter it was nothing; the bush was bare. But every summer the little room bloomed again.

  Now there was nothing; the bush had become overgrown, the ground was too wet to crawl on. I couldn’t have sat underneath there, even if I’d wanted to. Plus, I was much bigger than I’d been back then. I knelt for a long time, though, my palms resting on the damp earth, my fingernails sinking into it. When I got up, finally, and started the walk back to Esti and Dovid’s house, I tried to scrape the lines of dirt out from under my nails. The harder I scraped, the deeper I pushed them in, black ingrained against red.

  We’d known about the hydrangea bush for years. Once we were inside, we were unseen, screened from the house, from the eyes around and above. It smelled, I remember. The thick, sweet smell of rotting hydrangeas, and damp old earth. Even now, the vegetable scent of hydrangeas holds power. In springtime, passing by hydrangea-filled buckets at Grand Central Station will flicker into a sudden, sharp memory of dirt underneath my fingernails and too-warm, maroon-colored sweaters and the bare whiteness of the tops of her legs when she’d taken off her tights.

  It was a school rule: we had to wear thick, dark, opaque tights, so that no man could see our legs and become aroused. Because, of course, in the minds of the teachers at the Sara Rifka Hartog Memorial Day School, no man would ever become aroused by a schoolgirl in tights. After school, Esti would come back to my house to do homework. So I suppose that’s where it started. With the heat of summer, with Esti and me racing to my bedroom, wrestling our tights off and standing bare-legged and triumphant.

  To begin with, we just enjoyed sitting where no one could see us. No one being my father, who wouldn’t have been looking, and Bella, the housekeeper, who’d generally gone home by then anyway. To begin with we just sat, talking or reading or staring up at the sky through the geometric flowers. But it was there that things started. Like the thing with the blood.

  We’d learned it in school, studying ancient customs in geography. Miss Cohen explained it, sniffing and curling her lip to make us understand that this was something primitive and disgusting. But I listened, and I didn’t think it was disgusting. It felt like I was remembering something I’d always known, or heard long ago.

  Esti had cut her knee, that was the next thing. She was always cutting something; she could barely make it through a games lesson or a walk across the playground without tripping. The heels of her hands and her knees were constantly dotted with little scabs: fresh, half healed, and old. This cut on her knee was more than the usual skid-scrape. She’d fallen on broken glass left at the corner of the sports field and had needed five stitches. All the girls talked about it afterward, mentioning the “five stitches” with glee, imagining the needle passing in and out of flesh for each one. The wound was long and curved, with puckered stitches. It looked like her knee was smiling, with crooked teeth. Even after the stitches, if you pulled at the edges, you could still make it bleed: fresh, new blood, running in red viscous lines down her shin.

  Anyway, that’s how it happened. We were sitting behind the hydrangea bush, Esti with her knees pulled up tightly to her chest, me sprawled on my back, staring at the leaf-roof above us, panting in the heat. Our shirts were rolled up above our elbows, tights off, skirts pushed back. Such careless exposure of flesh. If we’d dressed that way at school, we would have been punished for immodest behavior. Esti craned her neck to examine the smiling scar on her knee. I had a little scab on the palm of my hand, about the size of a halfpence piece. I peeled the brown cover off my hand and watched with satisfaction as a bead of red rose to the surface.

  I said, “We should become blood sisters.”

  She looked at me.

  “You remember, from geography? We mingle our blood, and then we’re sisters forever.”

  She shifted uncomfortably, bringing her knees tightly into her chest.

  “Will it hurt?”

  “Only a little bit, we just have to open your cut. See, I’m bleeding on my hand. We have to let them mix. Come on.”

  She stretched her leg toward me. I pulled on the cut at the edge until it seeped water, and then blood. Her legs were cool, despite the warmth of the day. When I looked at her face, I saw that she was biting her lower lip, eyes ready to overflow.

  “Don’t cry,” I said. “You’re such a baby.”

  I squeezed the graze on my hand, scratching it with my nail until the blood was flowing more freely. I looked carefully to see where the hole was, then clasped my hand to her knee, matching up the places, blood to blood. I looked at Esti. She looked at me. An insect thrummed in my ear. A small breeze disturbed the leaves above us. Somewhere a few gardens along, someone was mowing the lawn. I realized that I was sweating, just at my hairline. On Esti’s leg, a crust of blood, like watery jam, had congealed around the edges of my palm.

  I said, “There. Now we’re sisters.” I took my hand away.

  Esti looked at her knee, still bleeding, and my palm, rosy with her blood. She
took my hand, examined it for a moment, and put it back in place on her knee, blood to blood. She held my hand firmly there on her leg, her palm cold against my knuckles.

  What you have to understand, I say to Dr. Feingold, is that it was our place. We found it. We sat there from the leaf-buddings of spring until the autumn destroyed it again. We never mentioned it to anyone else, or invited anyone else in.

  She says, “So you felt betrayed?”

  Did I? It’s plausible. But that’s not how I remember it. I remember feeling angry.

  On Monday, I made the telephone call. I told myself it meant absolutely nothing. I checked with them that, yes, the ticket could be canceled up to twenty-four hours in advance. One hundred percent refund, yes. And as I gave them my credit card details I concentrated on the thought that it was just a precaution; I’d never use it. But I chose the times of the flight with care, as though I were thinking of getting on that plane.

  That evening, at supper, Esti’s hand crept over to Dovid’s. Her fingers touched his knuckles lightly. He looked as surprised as I was, both of us flicking our eyes down and then up again. But her hand stayed where it was, her head bent down, concentrating on her plate.

  What really annoys me about Esti is not how inarticulate she is, or how sensitive, or how really, at bottom, conventional. It’s the fact that she just can’t admit who she is, can’t look herself in the face. Neither one way nor the other. Even then, she couldn’t see what I could see. She didn’t know. Maybe she still doesn’t bloody know. But I knew.

  It was the summer we were thirteen. The summer of becoming blood sisters. Dovid had headache after headache that summer. He was supposed to go to Yeshiva the next year, but he spent days just lying in bed. In the afternoons, when a headache had left him weak, I used to sit by his bed talking to him. And that was how it happened. I introduced them.

  They’d met before, of course, but never really talked until that summer. I brought Esti up to sit with him, and he told me later that he liked her, because she was so quiet and peaceful. I was proud that I’d found him something he liked, as though I’d brought him a toy or a book he’d enjoyed. So we three used to sit, talking, in his room, most afternoons. If I’m honest, I did most of the talking. I used to think that if I hadn’t been there, they probably would have just sat together in silence. So at least I rescued them from that.

  Dovid got a little better, and a little better. After three weeks, he only had a headache every four days, and he went back to studying with my father in the mornings, and by himself in the afternoons. But somehow, he still found time to play or talk with me most afternoons. Whenever Esti was around. I didn’t really notice that, then. Not until the very end of the holidays.

  The last day of summer holidays always contains a certain fluttery fear—of the return to school, of returning to the person you are at school. My father didn’t notice. He kept me busy, running errands for him all afternoon, returning a book to someone, picking up spare tallits for the shul from someone else. So much so that I was late. Esti was supposed to be coming over to say good-bye to Dovid. He was going back to Manchester, we were going back to school, and we wouldn’t see each other until the winter holidays. I remember thinking as I ran home how awful it’d be for the two of them to be there together without me. They wouldn’t have anything to say.

  I ran faster, gym shoes pounding on the pavement, skirt swaying against my calves and ankles in the way that always made me wish I could just rip it off and run without. When I arrived back they weren’t in the lounge. Maybe in Dovid’s room? I dashed upstairs. Nothing. I looked out the window. The garden was still, but a little movement stirred the hydrangea bush. I walked downstairs, through the kitchen, and into the garden.

  I heard laughter coming from the place and a rustling of leaves. I ducked my head under and crawled through. Dovid and Esti were sitting in the hydrangea nest together, laughing. His legs were stretched out, trousers covered in dust, and he was smiling, a thin laugh escaping from the side of his mouth. She was tightless, legs drawn up, skirt tented over her knees, choking on little high-pitched laughs. As I entered, they both turned toward me, then looked at each other, then smiled back at me, and Esti said:

  “Oh, Ronit, Dovid just said something so funny…”

  And she stopped, looked back at Dovid, and started to laugh again.

  It wasn’t really as though I wanted either of them. I just expected them to be there when I needed them. I just expected that they’d stay where I put them, wouldn’t cause trouble. They were both so obedient.

  I ran out, back through the kitchen, into the hallway, out of the house, running and running, and not really looking where I was going because I just needed to keep on moving and moving, which in retrospect was dangerous and I was quite lucky that I didn’t run into the road but instead just into a tree. I whacked it with my elbow. The force was strong enough to make me cry out, and when I turned my arm I saw that I’d ripped a gash in my upper arm. Blood was splashing onto the ground. And then there was pain.

  Esti and Dovid followed me up to the bathroom, hovering on the threshold. Esti said, “Can I do anything? Does it hurt?” Dovid said, “We must call your father, Ronit. This could be serious.”

  I closed the door and locked it, shutting them out. I remember the blood dripping into the basin, startling crimson drops, the swirl of red and pink when I turned on the tap. I remember crying, just a bit. Being surprised to find myself crying. Looking at myself in the mirror above the basin, seeing my own face crying and not knowing my own reflection.

  I didn’t have stitches. I washed it and put plasters on, gathering it together, and hid it under my sleeve. By the time I came out of the bathroom, Esti was gone. And the next day, so was Dovid. The wound healed unevenly, leaving a piece of tree bark lodged in my elbow.

  I didn’t do anything the first day of school. Or the second, or the third. I don’t know why. It wasn’t as though Esti would have known what I was thinking. Maybe I remembered that God was watching me, and I thought I could put Him off the scent by leaving a few days between cause and effect. So I left it till the fourth day after Dovid left. I waited until we were sitting after school, warm and drowsy, in our secret place, bare-legged and open-necked.

  “Esti,” I said, “I have a new game.”

  She blinked at me.

  “You have to lie very still, and I have to try to make you laugh, okay?”

  She rolled away from me, lying on one side. I lay down next to her, not quite touching her, but feeling the heat from her body on my skin. Softly, I stroked the curve of her neck, from ear to shoulder—a ticklish place. She didn’t move, or speak. I ran my hand along her arm, brushing the delicate hairs gently. So far, this was charted territory. She remained perfectly still. I moved in a little closer, my stomach against the small of her back, my knees tucking into hers. I slipped my hand under her shirt, circling my thumb around her navel, and still she lay, inert. I began to wonder if I had misunderstood. Was she about to leap to her feet, accuse me of terrible things? I shifted a little, to look at her face. Her eyes were closed, her lips curved in a smile. Her breath was long and shallow, a flush on her cheeks. She moved a little and opened her eyes, as blue as water. And her skin, on her belly and her thigh, was so soft, like the skin of a child. As delicious as wine. And as she stirred against me, her lips parted and she uttered a breath, like a sigh. And she turned and placed her lips against mine.

  The tree of unhappiness, they say, grows from a seed of bitterness and brings forth the fruit of despair. What would have happened if I had never touched her? Might she have gone to Dovid as freely as a bird, knowing no different? If I had not existed, might she have found peace, or would she simply have sown her discontentment elsewhere? If I had not existed, how would she have found Dovid at all? No one can answer these questions, not even she or I.

  We didn’t know what to do, really, that first time. We leaned on each other’s hair, fumbled and blushed. But there, behind the hydrangea
bush, slowly, we learned. We went from one thing to another as we wished, as we understood. After the moment when her lips touched mine, when we knew we had transgressed, there was no road to travel back. Everything was already done. I remember the sensation of her cool fingers passing over the tip of my breast, hardening, wrinkling the skin like a whisper of wind. I remember the shock of it, the unmistakable heat. I remember her shiver of delight. I remember learning in school later that human beings are electric animals, flowing with current, and thinking, I know, I have already learned this fact of electricity within the skin. I remember only in moments.

  On Tuesday night I had a dream, one that I hadn’t dreamed for a long time, although it was as familiar as my own skin. I dreamed that I was getting ready for Shabbat, but I was late, much too late. We all have this dream—perhaps I could suggest it to Dr. Feingold as a subject for a book: The Anxiety Dreams of Orthodox Jews, Ex–Orthodox Jews, and Heretics.

  I was in an unfamiliar place trying to get home, but I didn’t know how and the sun was setting. I was racing through unfamiliar, dirty streets, looking for a subway or for a taxi. But all the taxis were full, and there was no station. I had to watch the sun dip lower and lower until it finally disappeared over the horizon. And after that, what, really, is there to lose? I noticed my office and decided to go in. But when I went through the door it wasn’t my office at all. It was Esti and Dovid’s house and they were perched on a kitchen work-top, hand in hand, kissing like schoolgirls.

  On Wednesday, I went to see Hartog. I showed him my ticket and he smiled everywhere except for his eyes, and told me what a wise decision I’d made. We went to my father’s house that night and he watched with a supercilious air as I gathered together a clutch of items I’d found: the pictures, the kiddush cup, the spice box, the Seder plate. Under the sink in the kitchen, I found a plastic bag and swept them all in, shielding them from him. As we were leaving the house, I tried to take the bag, but he shook his head, as though speaking to a small child, and said: