by Asaf Schurr
So, did he do this in order to finally invert their balance of power? Suddenly the power is in Motti’s hands, and the debt will flip, as will everything. But this is a dubious thesis at best, because you can’t invert power structures just like that. If only the consequences had occurred to Motti, the great break in the order of things as they should be—even as they must be—perhaps he would have decided differently. But none of this occurred to him, just a desire to be restrained, a desire to contribute (to take a part of the blame, one might add), and without thinking about it he gave in to these desires. Now: guilt proclaimed, blessed routine, just one decision and everything is already out of his hands. A few years out of his hands. He’ll sit in his cell like he did in the hallway, in a doorway, waiting calmly, stubborn in a freedom born from borders now solidified, from the closing of doors, from necessarily diminishing choices. And the years ahead will indeed wait, everything will settle, shrink, recede, just as it should.
SECOND
IN BETWEEN
Now we may describe these cases by saying that we have certain sensations not referring to objects. The phrase “not referring to objects” introduces a grammatical distinction. If in characterizing such sensations we use verbs like “fearing,” “longing,” etc., these verbs will be intransitive; “I fear” will be analogous to “I cry.” We may cry about something, but what we cry about is not a constituent of the process of crying; that is to say, we could describe all that happens when we cry without mentioning what we are crying about.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue Book
28
It’s hard to follow stories to their end. Especially when they don’t actually take place. As though someone took a small hammer and struck a sheet of glass. The center of the break is obvious to the eye, and from it the fracture’s lines run and branch out again and again, and at each juncture the paths grow more and more narrow (they’re no less crooked, nor do the number of branches decrease). It’s hard to follow them, and anyway, what kind of idiot strikes a sheet of glass like that? Here, for example, is a story in which Motti and Ariella run into each other on May 14th a few years from now: They met one day at a convenience store, it was entirely by chance, in the evening they went to a Chinese or an Italian or a French restaurant or for falafel, they ordered dessert or didn’t order dessert, and the dessert reminded her of something or pleased her or, let’s say, ruined her diet and at night they returned (let’s say) to his apartment, and they made love or just had sex, and Motti came too fast or didn’t come too fast, and in the morning, if she stayed until the morning, she put on a white or pink or striped shirt with buttons or without, and she got pregnant or didn’t get pregnant, and they were together forever or not, and she became a veterinarian or a librarian or an unemployed interior decorator or a cosmonaut or a surveyor, and each and every day they did something or other.
There, I wrote everything in a hundred and fifty words, even less, but where does love enter into this condensed story, where does Motti’s great longing come in, where is the burning passion, the desire to visualize, the urge to realize, the fear, the sweetness?
Overall it would have been better not to write this chapter. Nevertheless, I did.
29
She’s had it, Edna has, up to here (she indicates with her hand a bit above eye level). She needs to clean up after him like he’s a little boy. If not for the children, she swears she would just leave for good (she says this out of anger; she actually has it good with Menachem most of the time. She loves him).
So be it with the tab at the store (would it kill you to take a wallet when you leave the house, she asks him sometimes in jest and sometimes in real anger, because by now it’s getting unpleasant for her too, dealing with that fellow—which is, in refined Hebrew, the code word for Arab—who almost begs her each time to talk to Menachem already, to tell him that this is impossible, for years now they’ve refused to put anything more on the tab, it throws off their books and makes for big trouble with the suppliers and income tax people). So be it. And so be it too, this irresponsibility of his, like a child who promises he’ll take care of it and forgets. And so be it too his outings to the city, when they got married she already knew she wouldn’t ask him to give this up, bitterness would just build up in him, so why not, let him go out with his friends and enjoy himself, he’s a good father and a good husband after all, and even if he has a big mouth out there, she knows which bed he returns to at night (and things are still good between them there, thank God, no complaints).
He almost killed you, that friend of yours (she yells at him). Almost killed you and ran over a poor woman, and now you bring home his dog? Tell me, what’s your problem?
What do you want me to do with her, Menachem says in his defense. He’s my friend, c’mon. I owe him.
I don’t care what you’ll do with her, Edna is still angry. Give her to the Humane Society, for all I care.
I can’t do a thing like that, Menachem says. C’mon, look how the kids…
How the kids, how the kids, Edna is raising her voice. And who’ll take her out? You? The kids? And the fur everywhere, who’ll clean it up, tell me, who. Everything will fall on me again, Menachem. And I’ve had it up to here. Up to here, are you listening?
And Laika, standing reluctantly behind Menachem, shrinks at the sound of this shouting.
I’m not mad at you, good dog, Edna says, almost still screaming, but only out of the inertia. C’mon, come inside, both of you.
How could I not take her? Menachem asks as he enters the hallway and drags Laika behind him. Look at her eyes, this dog. Beautiful like your eyes on the day we met (and he slaps her, Edna, on the butt).
You, you…ugh, Edna laughs and kneels next to Laika, to pet her.
C’mon, Menachem says, I told you it would be okay. You know I’m fucking crazy about you.
30
And in the house of Sarah Rosenthal, darkness. Her picture on the bureau in the living room (from a time when she was still alive, of course), with her own particular smile, her own particular teeth, her own particular hair, her own particular ears, her own particular chin.
Darkness descended, but no one sitting around got up to turn on the light.
Okay, okay. Not really darkness. When the day began to dim someone got up and turned on the lights, with all the associated unpleasantness, because how can this be, she’s dead, and in her home people sit, get up, talk, eat, use electricity. As time passes they will turn on lights without this discomfort, without feeling that something here isn’t right (apart from her absence), without looking around with the thought that there’s some protocol to death, an order to mourning that one must obey, an attentive force in the blind universe that truly cares if you turn on or don’t turn on a light and laugh or don’t laugh, fall asleep at night or toss and turn in bed, cry or moan and blow your nose hard.
31
And Motti is in a cell. To his right a wall and to his left a wall, in front of him a wall (and a door), and behind him a wall, above him and below him only time. Presses an ear to the wall (no voice from the other side) and imagines. True, it’s possible to argue that this is unproductive, even pathetic, him and his folded-up life, but he’s so free in a way, even in his cell in a prison he’s so free, one can only be jealous of this, and even though his actual life is pushed up like this against the wall, the other lives he imagines and remembers are quite numerous, more numerous than usual, even, and there is freedom in this too, and as the years accumulate, when at last time is mainly something stretching out behind us, what does it actually matter what we truly lived and what we only remember living?
In the corridor a bunch of keys jingle. Two prison guards are walking by. “Listen,” says one of them, we’ll call him Guard A, to his companion, “Listen, I don’t understand all this bellyaching with kids today. They sent me a social worker, can you believe that? A social worker. And for what? For what, I ask you. What dad alive doesn’t give a little slap here and there, isn�
��t that how it is? Spare the rod, spoil the child, I say. And what, didn’t my own parents lower the boom on me from time to time? They lowered it, you bet they lowered it. And it made a better man out of me, let me tell you. I can’t pretend I remember every slap, whatever it was for—but so what? I don’t remember, but all in all they’re good people, I’m telling you. They’re good people, my parents. I also turned out—knock on wood—okay. Why should I remember every slap, whatever it was for? So I don’t remember. So what. And let me tell you, it’s given me the upper hand in life. It’s given me the upper hand.”
“It’s given you a hand all right,” agreed Guard B.
THIRD
INSIDE
I am taught that under such circumstances this happens. It has been discovered by making the experiment a few times. Not that that would prove anything to us, if it weren’t that this experience was surrounded by others which combine with it to form a system. Thus, people did not make experiments just about falling bodies but also about air resistance and all sorts of other things.
But in the end I rely on these experiences, or on the reports of them, I feel no scruples about ordering my own activities in accordance with them.—But hasn’t this trust also proved itself? So far as I can judge—yes.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty
32
Like many others, at first Menachem loved his father because of who he thought he was, then hated him because of who he actually was, ultimately went back and loved him, this time because of who he tried to be.
No one knew, but in the back of one of the drawers in the big writing desk, the very same desk he hid under as a boy, his father found him there, excited and amazed with his discovery time after time, gathered him up in his arms and flew him around and around in the room, and announced, Rachel look what I found, Rachel look what I found, and Menachem laughed and got excited, and always waited there to be gathered up like that, to be discovered by surprise and gathered up like that, and once his father travelled someplace else, wasn’t at home three whole days, and on the morning of the second day Menachem hid there again, under the writing desk, and waited and waited, it seemed to him then like eternity but certainly wasn’t more than twenty minutes, and in the end his mother, Rachel, found him there, and spoke to him softly and invited him to eat the eggs that were cold already after more than twenty minutes of waiting on the breakfast table, and she didn’t understand why he was so sad and disagreeable, but that was only one time, almost all the other times his dad found him and flew him around and around, but in any case, in the back of one of these drawers in that desk he’d hidden a small box with all the letters he ever received from his father, postcards from abroad and letters from when he was away on reserve service, cards with birthday wishes and other scraps of paper. No one knew. Not even Edna. How did she never find the box? Who knows. In any case she didn’t find it.
And this evening he didn’t look through it. He sat next to the writing desk and stared into space. When Edna came into the room, he jumped slightly.
Everything okay?
Perfectly okay, said Menachem.
The children are already at the table, she said. You’re not coming to eat?
Just a second, honey, said Menachem.
Something bothering you?
No, not at all, answered Menachem. I’m thinking about Motti, you know. What’s he doing there, how it is in prison.
Give him a call, suggested Edna, who was a practical woman, even though she was still really shocked by the trial and everything having to do with it. Write a letter. Tell him, I dunno. That he’s your friend, that you’ll help him get set up when he gets out, that he should hang on and stuff. Things like that.
Forget it, said Menachem. I don’t like all that…all that…
Sentimentality? offered Edna.
Yes, said Menachem. All that sentimentality.
After she left the room he did in fact open the drawer and look at the tattered treasures hidden inside. Sat without moving and looked at them for a long time, as if trying to set them on fire with his eyes. For quite some time no postcard has been added. A longing consumes him.
33
“In short,” Guard B says this time to Guard A as they stroll down the corridor with a light step, their bodies free like the land of our fathers, on their way to pass by the door to Motti’s cell—actually, from their perspective, on their way to the staff dining hall, but from the perspective of this story the door to Motti’s cell is what’s important, even though they don’t care one bit that this is his cell door, and as they pass by it they don’t give it so much as a glance, “in short, this Mahabuta Banana, whatever they called him” (says Guard B, as if he’s being dismissive, though actually he’s not being dismissive, that’s just his way of speaking, these days), “among ourselves we always called him Jimbo and that’s all, black as the night he was, maybe his name was Mabruto, go figure, you know what their names are like, anyway we called him Jimbo and that’s that, he was lying there under a tree in Grandma’s yard may she rest in peace, sleeping like he was dead, worked hard, poor guy, but if you took your eyes off him for a second he disappeared, you have to put those ones on a short leash, the agency told us that too, they said, if we had a Filipino we’d send him over, you can get an honest day’s work out of them, the Filipinos, but this one, look, keep a good eye on him and he’ll do the work, and he really did the work, all in all, but Grandma, her voice would cut out on her, she could lay in bed for an hour calling him, he would laze around in the yard or something, he once showed me a picture of his wife and kids, cute kids, who knows what’s with his wife, no way could I sleep quietly like that with my wife in another country, who knows what she’s doing there, and with who, but I’m still not married, don’t want to jinx it, may it come quickly, you know, and maybe with them it’s fine, a little on the side like that, because here, it’s a fact, he would sleep like a baby, and we ourselves were kids then, we didn’t think about stuff like that. In short, what was I saying, he was sleeping there under the tree with a Golani beret and one of those end-of-basic-training shirts, I think they make them especially for guys like him, no idea where he got his hands on it. In short, we came to get a cigarette off him, we came quietly, like little elves, and when we pulled out his bundle his passport fell out, and let me tell you, we stuck it in the tree with his hat two meters up, man, what a mess that was, two days he didn’t find it, what a mess, we only heard about it later, he turned the whole house upside down, for two whole days he wouldn’t leave the house, Grandma went nuts, but in the end he found it” (the voices get weaker and weaker now, at the end of the corridor is another corridor, at its end the dining hall), “told all his friends how the immigration police screwed with him, all over town they took it, in the end they stuck it in the tree, his passport, because they were afraid to hand it over to him, that’s what he told everyone, said he told them they’d better watch out for him, he’d fuck them over, to the police he said that. Only we know the truth, but go tell him that now, they made him a national hero, like he threatened the police and all, afterward you couldn’t get a day of work out of him. But look, we weren’t bad kids. We left him a shekel for the cigarette, like at a kiosk” (according to the laws of physics, sound waves and all that, the voice couldn’t carry to Motti’s cell throughout this whole story, but in a book it carried well enough, Motti heard every word, the laws are different here, maybe the pages echo or something).
Hours later, at night, Motti lay in his cell, listening to the faint noises or snores and moans and sleeping breaths, and was consumed with regret and flooded with fantasies and so forth, and was nevertheless happy. In his way, he was happy.
34
Edna has a yeast infection.
If I wanted to, I could slice her life into strips of realism.
But not because she’s a woman. Because she’s a character.
She has a yeast infection, this is quite irritating. And on her right leg the veins form
the map of a secret land. She loves her children, and even though their constant demands are sometimes more than she can handle, it turns out they aren’t more than she can handle. As evidence: she complies. Even if not always happily. Her brown hair splits at the ends if she doesn’t insist on cutting it regularly, therefore she insists on cutting it at least once a month. And once every two to three months she goes to Chaim’s salon, who implores her to dye it, and once every two to three months she refuses. Except for that time she assented, and afterward regretted it. Chaim offered to dye everything back, but Edna decided to live with the results. When she was younger and single she was happy to hunker down in the bathroom for a half hour to read a book or magazine. Now she doesn’t do this. Over the years her mother’s wrinkles have started to crease the sides of her mouth. At first she did silly exercises with her lips, ten or even twenty minutes each day, but it didn’t help. She gave up. She once suffered from an ingrown toenail on her right foot (Menachem, too, same thing), and when she brushes her teeth too hard her gums bleed. Her stomach, which was flat, has been curving out nicely since the second pregnancy, but this doesn’t bother her. She loves an omelet and bread with cream cheese and olives, like her dad would eat when he got home from work. And once, after their first child, she shaved her genitals entirely, to make them like a little girl’s, but Menachem didn’t care one way or the other, and so she let the hair grow back. It itched horribly. She was a very serious girl and now she’s only a somewhat serious woman. When she was a serious girl she had a cat named Fifi that got lost one day and never came back. Her parents bought her a hamster that ran restlessly in the hopeless wheel in its cage, and after two and a half weeks died from an intestinal virus. She buried him in the garden because she felt that this is what serious girls must do, but she didn’t cry. Her parents praised her, what a strong girl, and she hurried inside and locked herself up in her room, so they’d think she was secretly crying there. The truth is she read a book and gnawed on the nails of her left hand. She slept with four men before Menachem. Not all at once. (One of them was actually a teenager. She too was a teenager then. It didn’t hurt her. She didn’t love him. Or not in retrospect. At the time, when they broke up, she thought she would die. Now she laughs about it, if she thinks about it at all. But laughs with longing. Not for him. For the great drama of adolescence, when everything is so critical. Now it’s hard to take anything so seriously.) At the office she puts on a brave face. At home she’s a bit tired. Five or six years already she hasn’t slept more than five or six hours at night. If they would leave her alone she thinks she could sleep an entire day and wake up fresh as a flower. Actually she would wake up after six hours, maybe six and a half. If she were to survive a plane crash in isolated, ice-capped mountains, she wouldn’t be disgusted by cannibalism. One must survive, that much is clear. Should she not survive, she wouldn’t kick up a fuss if the others were to eat her flesh. What does she care? She would be dead already. She thinks that the people at work don’t know that everything could be otherwise with her, that she easily could go mad or scream, that she could fill her life with wonderful adventures whose nature she doesn’t bother to imagine now, but if they were to happen to her, she would enjoy each and every moment. Or she thinks that perhaps the people at work know her very well, actually, and there aren’t hidden things like these in her, her life is the only life she could choose. Then she gets a bit sad, then she mocks herself for her pretensions, for her childishness, for these hidden aspirations that aren’t appropriate (she thinks) for a woman of her age. But without doubt she could fly to Africa to hunt elephants, only she’s not interested in this, and what kind of person wants to kill elephants in the first place. So maybe she couldn’t after all. Sometimes she shaves her armpits. Her legs every week. And bleaches her facial hair. And visits her parents once every few days, even without the children. In the evening her back hurts a bit and her legs hurt. In the morning she drinks strong coffee, to shake off sleep and her secret dreams, and only then wakes up the children. And Menachem, of course. Menachem too. She feels obligated to listen to classical music, but nevertheless listens mainly to talk radio. And gets annoyed by the callers to those programs, by what they say and by the vulgar language. Listens nevertheless. And loves cooking with fresh herbs, in moderation. At night with Menachem she prefers to be on top and close her eyes. And when she gets close she opens her eyes and looks right in his face. Sometimes this turns her on. Sometimes turns her off completely. But she can come other ways too. When she’s on the bottom. Also from behind. More daring things than this they don’t do. Even though each of them thinks about it on their own. Menachem just because, in the middle of the day. And she only when she does it to herself in the shower. She wears makeup in moderation, and prefers her old skirts that have already taken on the shape of her body. And sleeps sometimes in a very, very old shirt that belonged to someone she slept with once. Not the teenager. One of the other ones. How many washings that shirt has gone through since. Not a single cell of his skin remains there. Holes have appeared in it. She loves her clogs too. And the cutting board that she took from her parents’ house when she left, it’s still with her. She cuts up the most delicious salads on this board. With a new knife. She has a habit of saying what she really means, and then laughing as if this was only a parody of what other people meant, other people entirely, altogether different from her. Her mother does this as well (when she complains to waiters, for example, or wonders why some item or another in some store or another isn’t on sale when she would be very interested in buying it if it was). And Edna sometimes recognizes this similarity and is crushed. She doesn’t read poetry, though she wrote some once. Gets along with dogs. With cats too. Not with Sweet’N Low. That aftertaste, she thinks, it’s something not worth getting used to. And she was proud of herself when she learned to draw out, at work, tables on the computer and to make it so that some of the fields would update themselves, with mathematical functions that sometimes were really complicated. On the back of her hand she has an old scar, impossible to remember what from. She had a root canal once, but has still never taken the car in for an inspection herself. Not because of chauvinism. Out of convenience. Burned-out lights make her sad. She hangs shelves herself. She doesn’t play an instrument. Women’s magazines annoy her. Once she sprained the small toe on her left foot. Hit it on the doorpost at night, and her eyes filled with tears. Menachem was in the reserves then. She catches colds easily. A pack of tissues is hidden in a drawer at work. She doesn’t need glasses. Or maybe just for reading. Her shoulders are just the right width. When she breastfed, her nipples cracked. When she was a teenager, the signs of her growing sexuality made her rebellious. More than this: they outright offended her. That all at once the world reduced her to the status of a biological machine—this is the organ for mating and this is for breast feeding, and the widening hips are for giving birth one day, and the blood that synchronizes all this comes once a month (regular as a clock, with her). Now, go figure why, she finds beauty in all that. Comfort even. At the time she thought that her sexual organ was like a wound gaping out at the world. Sometimes she still thinks this. Her breasts have become like the anchor that attaches her to the (relatively) stable ground of life. She won’t tolerate dirty fingernails. Nor insects. She doesn’t like hearing her own recorded voice. Quickly erases messages that she left on the answering machine at home. They really disgust her. Never smoked much. Only in social situations. And sometimes, as I pointed out, she’s had it up to here (she indicates with her hand at the height of her forehead, even higher than that). And she shouldn’t strain her left hand. It starts to hurt very quickly. In the years to come it will get worse, the pain will take much longer to pass. That’s how the body is. Once she got burned by an extremely hot frying pan. She’s burned her tongue many times. She eats quickly, but enjoys it. Work’s fine for her. She believes she can hold on until retirement. When she complains about a stomachache, for instance, and Menachem laughs and says, get out
of here, you’ll bury all of us in the end, she gets angry and says, how can you talk like that? What kind of a terrible thing is that to say to a mother? But usually she isn’t dramatic like that, and when her cheek itches, she scratches it absentmindedly. Sometimes she eats falafel while standing. Sometimes she just finishes the kids’ portions. When she was small and her mother would cover her face with both hands in play, she would be terrified. Who knows what kind of face would be there when she removed her hands. After this too some time would pass until she calmed down. Who knows what kind of face was there before she removed them. But now she’s no longer a girl, and in her tummy delicate cells are multiplying. I give the baby eighty-three years at the most. Eighty-seven, on average, if it’s a girl. Eighty-two if an Arab citizen of Israel (though the chances are slim). It will be a boy, in fact, and he will be the one she loves the most, though she won’t admit this to anyone ever, and after two or three years she’ll be pregnant again and he’ll say to her, Mom, I want always to be your littlest, littlest boy, and within a week she’ll have an abortion, won’t say a word about it to anyone, years later she’ll tell him, not in order to demand anything or hurt him, she’ll just tell him, as a fact, so he’ll know how much she loves him, how much she always loved him, from the beginning. And this abortion won’t result in an infection and there will be no gynecological damage and no feelings of guilt, she won’t have to pay any price of that sort. All it will do is shake up the living boy when she finally tells him, he’ll already be grown up then, he’ll go and tell his spouse, she’ll think that it’s totally screwed up, but all that is no longer our concern.