by Batya Gur
“That girl is heading for trouble,” said Mrs. Jesselson decisively, and narrowed her small eyes at the setting sun as with the back of her hand she wiped her broad face, which gleamed as if it were floating in a layer of fat. “Mark my words.” She waggled her finger. “That girl is spoiled rotten and heading for trouble. She’s so full of herself, Zahara, that she doesn’t even say hello, and at the grocery store when I asked her how her mother was she turned her head aside as if I was air. I’m telling you, you can see it on her forehead that she is thinking bad things. Really the evil eye, heaven help us.”
Mrs. Jesselson looked around and whispered: “The evil eye against Ashkenazim. Did you know that Zahara hates Ashkenazim?” and an evil look appeared in her faded blue eyes. Like a ray, that faded blue look touched Nessia, and she shrank, because Mrs. Jesselson looked like she was going to talk to her mother about “a new diet for the girl” and about Nessia’s skin, “where in a little while there are going to be adolescent pimples with pus if you don’t watch her diet.”
If it weren’t for the cake that Mrs. Jesselson baked every week—Nessia waited from one Thursday to the next for the moment when Mrs. Jesselson would call her in the high voice that could be heard in the yard: “Nu, so do you want some cake?”—she would long ago have put a curse on her. But she could not give up the golden cake and the warm sweetness that filled her mouth and the sweet vanilla icing and the raisins she found inside like treasure. It amazed her how Mrs. Jesselson’s fat ugly fingers, with the red nail polish that was always flaking, could prepare such a wonderful delicacy, and how her sour expression and her mean little eyes did not spoil the perfect taste of her cakes.
Nessia’s mother said that Mrs. Jesselson wasn’t a bad person, just a gossip you had to be careful of and not tell anything. You just mustn’t tell her anything, her mother would say; yes, even if she asks how Zion is doing and how much longer he has in the army, or whether Yigal already has a girlfriend, or when Peter is coming from America (he was supposed to be coming from Australia, from Sydney, but Nessia did not correct her) or how school is and what your grades are. And every Thursday evening Nessia went upstairs to the second floor and entered the spotless apartment after she had wiped her feet on the floor rag in front of the door, and sat down in Mrs. Jesselson’s kitchen and didn’t say a word while she generously sliced the cake and certainly not when her mouth was full of the cake as across from her Mrs. Jesselson followed every bite she took and made sure that no crumbs fell on the floor. Not for a moment did Mrs. Jesselson stop asking her about her mother’s job and her brothers, about Mrs. Rosenstein and school and everything else. Below her gleamed the floor tiles that Mrs. Jesselson had just put down, like her mother wanted to do “so that there will be a bit of light in here instead of how dark it is with those old gray tiles,” but that was one of those things Mrs. Jesselson could allow herself, because she had a husband who did whatever she said.
Not only did Nessia know every single one of the people who lived on their street, she also knew things about them that no one imagined she could know. And these, too, she sometimes put down in the reports she wrote, but in code or a shorthand that only she knew how to decipher. All the residents of the street knew about the long feud between the Basharis and the Beinisches, who lived right opposite the apartment block where Nessia and her mother lived. Before the War of Independence, an old Arab woman had lived in the two-family house, and once a year, when she came to visit, Mrs. Bashari would bring a stool outside and give her a glass of cold water, full to the brim, so that she wouldn’t bother her anymore. Everyone knew that Naeema Bashari had not agreed to let the Beinisch family build a second floor on the single story house, and everyone knew that there was nothing in the world that Mrs. Beinisch wanted more, because she intended to build a small apartment there for her son. She was even prepared to buy the agreement of the Bashari family, and to allow them to build a second story as well. And Mr. Bashari, who Nessia’s mother said was a good person who didn’t even become snobbish after he became the manager of the entire Co-Op supermarket chain in Jerusalem, had been prepared to give in long ago, and build a room there for Zahara, but his wife didn’t agree. (“Naeema Bashari would cut off her nose to spite her face,” Nessia’s mother had said once.)
Everyone followed the sequence of quarrels between the two families—once because of a leak from the Basharis’ water tank, and once because of a section of the yard that Mrs. Beinisch took from the Basharis to build a stone barbecue, and once because of the people from the cable television company who left their filth in the yard. On the eve of Rosh Hashanah, everyone had come outside of their houses upon hearing the sounds of yelling, and were in time to see how Mrs. Beinisch’s head was rolling from side to side from the slap Mrs. Bashari had given her, and how Mr. Beinisch, who always wore suits because he was an important accountant (Nessia did not understand what “accountant” meant. Did he count ants? She could also count ants, but it wasn’t that interesting), called the police on his mobile phone from the middle of the street. Everyone watched him, but only Nessia had seen Naeema Bashari dump a sack of garbage in front of the Beinisch family’s door in the middle of the night. Everyone had heard her shouting “Damn you” and waving her fist at the Beinisches’ door, but only Nessia, while walking Rosie early in the morning, had seen Mrs. Beinisch break Naeema Bashari’s rosebush; for a moment she glanced right and left, and after she broke the rosebush she lifted the edges of her housecoat and trampled the white flowers of the jasmine with her feet.
And she, Nessia, was the only one who knew the two families’ deepest secret of all, because only she knew how to see everything, not only in the neighborhood but also outside the neighborhood, far from home. Nessia had not told anyone. She hadn’t told anyone anything, because she realized that anything could cause trouble. Even with Peter, her brother’s best friend (apart from Jalal, who didn’t really count because he was an Arab), with his funny talk in English, half of which she didn’t understand, she spoke only a little, and never told him anything really important.
Peter was the first person in the world who had said to her, “We’re friends,” as if an adult could really be friends with a girl of nine and a half—and a fat and ugly one at that. Her brother Yigal didn’t really like it when she came to their place—”You again? That girl is like glue,” he would say—but Peter insisted on hosting her, and once he even gave her a lift in his green Fiat, when she was little, maybe just eight. He stopped at the corner of Bethlehem Road and Yiftah Street and opened the door for her as if she were already a lady, and said: “Get in, get in, so the dog doesn’t get sick from the rain.” In the little Hebrew he knew he asked her whether she walked the dog every day, and then he said to her very slowly in English, so that she would understand, that it was easy to see that she was a good girl and a few more things that sounded to her like compliments, and if he wasn’t being flattering because of Yigal, he was very smart and already saw her the way she really was.
“You’re a girl who sees things,” Peter said to her in the car. “You see a lot.” And Nessia didn’t know what he was aiming at. When he stopped in front of her house, she quickly said, “Excuse me, thank you, goodbye,” and ran after Rosie, who was already pulling her out. What was it he thought she saw? What had she said without noticing? If he knew things about her, maybe he also knew that she took stuff. And you had to be careful when you spoke to him—and not just to him. There were things she didn’t want people to know about her; she would die if people knew about them. Yes, even if what she wanted most in the world was for people to know about her. Not those things, but for everyone, really everyone, to know her as she really and truly was.
She, Nessia, knew too much. Even about that blonde woman who came to the second house from the corner in the morning when Mrs. Golan had gone on a trip with her mother to Romania in search of their roots. Only Nessia had seen the cab stop in front of the house, and Danny Golan, who her mother thought was a good person after
he had brought her two little pots of mint from his plant nursery, took the woman inside and kept all the shutters closed, just as Nessia herself did whenever she checked out or measured her special things alone in her room.
And this, too, she knew: Mati Bezalel, the third son of the Bashari family, an important army officer, comes home to visit. On Thursdays he comes home to eat the calf’s-foot soup his mother makes for him, and sometimes he stays until Friday afternoon, and then you can hear the yelling that goes on in the house. Mr. Bashari, who looks like a gentle person in the street—taking small steps and always looking down as if he were looking for something—fights with him about things that Nessia does not exactly understand, and after every quarrel Bezalel leaves and slams the door behind him and his mother runs after him yelling that he should stay. “At least eat a little hashwiya mumraqiya. I made it especially for you. At least have something to eat,” she cries out to his receding back, and Bezalel keeps walking quickly with long steps until he disappears around the corner.
You could see into the Basharis’ living room from the wall around the apartment block, but the window of perfect Zahara’s room faced the garden, and sometimes, when Nessia walked past with Rosie in the evening—they had a special route around Zahara’s house—she could see the light in the window. On winter evenings it would filter out through the slits in the iron shutter, and in the summer you could even see Zahara herself, looking in the mirror or combing her hair or singing to herself in English. Her voice was sweet, low and warm, and Nessia though she could be famous in all of Israel like Zahava Ben or Sarit Haddad and appear on television, too. If Nessia were beautiful like perfect Zahara, she would also stand in front of the mirror and look at herself and sing. But Nessia is fat and has pimples and hair like steel wool (that’s what the children said) and her voice is only good for singing off-key. Zahara does not know that Nessia sees her. In fact, she does not know she has a little, devoted fan who even collects the hair she throws away, yes, and glues it onto her little doll, the one who wears a short white dress like Zahara and even sings when you press on her stomach. The one Nessia sticks pins in where the heart would be.
If only she manages not to step on the lines, and especially now, on the eve of the holiday, maybe she will finally manage to lose weight and maybe even little breasts will begin to grow on her chest that will fit into the purple bra with the black flowers. And on top of her breasts, instead of the wide blue sweatshirt she got from her aunt Sarit, she will wear a shirt that leaves her midriff bare and tight jeans, wide from the knee down with pockets and embroidery down the side. A shirt just like that and jeans just like those were already waiting for her in her hiding place, and also red tights, which her mother had seen only once and asked: ‘Where did you get those?”
“I borrowed them from Sarit for gym class,” Nessia had replied.
Her mother pursed her lips and said: “For those you need a figure, don’t you think? Eating all day and wearing tights just don’t go together.”
Nessia shrank and kept silent, and after she had folded them into a tiny package, like she had when she found them in the Mashbir department store, she put them back into the cardboard box that she hid in the shelter. There, in the shelter, where her mother never went, she also kept all her father’s things—not just clothes that smelled of mothballs, but also the inhalator and the humidifier and the back brace.
Every evening, before she walked the dog, she went down to the shelter to have a look at her hiding place: A: to see that everything was all right, and B: to see that no one had moved anything. She had found the flashlight she used in the shelter at the Hikers Shop, and it too she hid in her sweatshirt. She already knew that small things like that didn’t beep when you left the store. Every evening she checked her treasures: She fingered the chain she took from the boutique on Emek Refaim Street, and the underpants from the mall, and the purple bra and the midriff shirt and the tights and the tight jeans. Every evening she carefully opened the heart-shaped little bottle and breathed in the sweet perfume and every evening she touched the box of colored markers, the pencil case and the two notebooks she had taken for writing down her observation reports.
Three times a week her mother would come home late from the health clinic, because she only went to clean there in the evening, straight from Mrs. Rosenstein’s house. On those days she left food for her in the morning, and every time she explained all over again how to light the stove, as if she were a little girl and not a big girl of ten and a quarter, who already knew about periods and pregnancy and all those things from sex education (and even the nurse had told all the girls that now they were already young ladies). On those days Nessia preferred to wait for her mother and not eat alone, and in the meantime she could bring things upstairs from the treasure box in the shelter.
Recently, it had stopped filling up: After she had seen on television how they caught a boy in a huge department store in America who had taken a baseball hat with a picture of Superman, and how they dragged him to the police, she got scared and didn’t dare take anything from anywhere, even if she really could have found it in the dressing room after someone had left it there. It was almost boring to try on the jeans with the wide bottoms and the embroidery down the side again, and they still wouldn’t close on her.
Nessia actually doesn’t eat all that much, really not, and she doesn’t know why she is fat. She always leaves half the meat patties, and she doesn’t finish the soup, either, and she just likes to dip the bread in the gravy. A little gravy, that’s all, and not more than a few slices of bread. It’s just that if she doesn’t eat white bread, her tummy feels empty. A kind of pit that makes her dizzy, as if she were about to fall down like a rag doll. And she also likes candy, but candy is small, not a meal. Anyway, lots of times she doesn’t manage to put anything in the basket at the grocery store while Nissim is adding things up, not chocolate or wafers or anything she could eat in bed before she goes to sleep.
Mother says that this is how it is in her family—everyone is fat, and people have a fate and you have to accept it. This is written in heaven, and maybe all the other details are also written there, in heaven: that they will live in a ground-floor apartment where the sun comes in only in the summer, when it’s hottest, and in winter it’s dark and cold as the grave, and you have to turn the lights on and have the heat on all the time; and that they can never take a vacation or go to the beach; and that in their family, on her father’s side there is diabetes and on her mother’s side fat and varicose veins. Her mother says these things lots of times when they’re watching The Young and the Restless or Julia’s Revenge, because mixed in with her explanations of what was happening and what’s going to happen, she likes to talk about what fate has in store for the two of them. Nessia remains silent and keeps her eyes on the television, and sometimes, if her mother doesn’t notice, she covers her ears with her hands, but she can hear anyway.
“If they would at least let Zion out of the army,” her mother says time after time, “he could help a bit with supporting us.” And she also hears about Moshiko, who is in trouble with the police all the time, and about Yigal, who isn’t getting married even though he’s already over thirty—no wife, no children, no wonder he’s in such a bad mood all the time. (“Except when Peter comes,” notes Nessia, and her mother replies: “Peter’s a friend, not family.”) Her mother always concludes these exchanges by saying there is nothing to be done about it, boys aren’t girls, they go their own way, and only girls stay with their mother. Then she sighs and says, That’s how it is, that’s her fate, because what has she ever done bad to anyone? Nevertheless, good people suffer and the evil flourish. Since the Bible it’s been like that.
During school vacations her mother takes her to Mrs. Rosenstein’s to help her with the cleaning, and there Nessia can touch thin goblets of pink crystal and the smooth, shiny bedspread and the marble panther on the buffet. Her fingers can caress the smoothness of his tensed back, and the golden frame in which t
here is a photograph of Mr. Rosenstein when he was still young and thin: wearing a three-piece suit and a hat with a hatband, and a mustache above his thin smile. Nessia has only seen him once, and in real life he does not look at all like the photograph: He is fat and short and he doesn’t have a mustache.
Opposite this photograph is a large painting of a woman in a purple dress and a wide-brimmed black hat. She is sitting in a green velvet chair, her white arm on the arm of the chair and three gold rings with red stones tightened around her plump fingers. Mrs. Rosenstein once told her that this was her grandmother. “At least we saved this portrait from there,” Mrs. Rosenstein said, and told Nessia, who didn’t understand what a “portrait” was, about the beautiful house she had grown up in, with a garden that went down to the river, and how they had to leave everything suddenly in the middle of the night.
There were also books in Mrs. Rosenstein’s house, lots of books in a big cupboard with glass doors. Sometimes Nessia looks at the books, and especially at the ones with pictures, and from one of them she had got the idea of the doll. Mrs. Rosenstein, who showed her the book, explained every one of the pictures to her: the chief, and the witch doctor and those dolls the blacks make when they want to harm someone. Mrs. Rosenstein gave her other books, which she could read and understand, like Ellé Kari, the Girl from Lapland and Noriko San, the Girl from Japan, for her birthday when she was in third grade, and said to her then: “This was my daughter’s, and she won’t need it anymore.” (Mrs. Rosenstein’s daughter lives in America, and when she’d come to visit with her children she would sleep in her old room again, and in the morning her curls on the pillow would look so different from her mother’s straight hair.)