“Come on, sweetie pies, we don’t want to be late.”
Her voice was bright and calm, but her voice was lying. She knew it. Eitan knew it. Even Itamar and Yaheli knew it. Yaheli stopped crying, just sat quietly in her arms and looked at his father. Itamar didn’t look at his father. Or at her. He focused his gaze on a nearby ants’ nest, which looked disorganized at first glance, but was actually remarkably organized. Ants had rules, and they stuck to them. If you studied their rules well enough, you’d know exactly what ants would do. For some reason, it didn’t work that way with grown-ups.
“E.T., get into the car.”
Itamar looked away from the ants’ nest and walked over to the Toyota. Eitan watched him. He wanted to call to him, but there was no point. He wouldn’t put them in his car. His children wouldn’t get close to that SUV, to that blue baby. He trembled when he remembered the small mound of sand five kilometers from Beersheba. He needed to take the car in to be cleaned. Maybe he’d sell it. The car seat had to go, that was for sure. He couldn’t see Yaheli sitting in the same place where that… thing had sat. (Because that’s what it was. A thing. Not a person. It hadn’t had time to be a person. When he’d stopped the SUV, it hadn’t even looked like a doll. But it had five fingers on each hand, and that finished him off. The fingers finished him off.)
Liat’s Toyota pulled out of the driveway and drove down the street. He waved goodbye to the kids. They waved back from their seats. Seeing that, he allowed himself to think that maybe everything was okay. Children are more resilient than we think. Their bones are more flexible than adults’ bones. Evolution did that to protect them from the blows they were going to receive.
The car disappeared around the curve. One minute they were there, Liat holding the wheel, Itamar and Yaheli waving – and the next minute, they weren’t. They continued to exist, of course, continued to move in the space outside of his field of vision. Until recently, Itamar used to doubt that. “When we go to sleep,” he’d said many times, “how do we know that things in the world don’t start to move? The tree in the yard, or the mailbox, how do we know they’re still there?”
“Because they’re there,” Eitan had replied, knowing that wasn’t really an answer. At the time, the sink full of dirty dishes waiting for him outside Itamar’s room didn’t leave much room for philosophical matters.
“But Daddy, if you don’t see them you don’t know they’re there.”
Even so, they’re there. Liat and Yaheli and Itamar. They don’t disappear when you don’t see them. They can’t disappear. They’re on the hmo registry, in the Ministry of Interior files, in the National Insurance computers. People know them. People are seeing them at this very moment. The boss, the preschool teacher, the grocery store clerk. And all of those people are on the lists as well. People know them too, and that’s how they validate each other’s existence, with a nodded greeting, official letters, certificates and glances. If one of them were to disappear, one of those other people would notice. And if no one did, then the official institutions would. It would take longer, but in the end some computer would send out a warning about unpaid property tax, outstanding bills, a child absent from the first grade. People like that don’t disappear. The world doesn’t let them disappear.
But there were other people as well. You see them, but you don’t know they’re there. About those people, Itamar was right: you close your eyes and they disappear. You don’t even need to close your eyes. They disappear in any case. A quick flash on your retina, nothing more. The blue baby, for instance. He wasn’t on the lists. Nor was his mother. Ordinary people don’t know them. Real people, the sort who are registered in institutions and whom other real people know, the sort who don’t know anything about the blue baby or his mother. And so the blue baby and his mother can drop out of the world without anyone noticing.
He still had to tell the mother. Eitan’s stomach contracted when he thought about that. The blue baby was under that mound of earth, and the Eritrean woman in the garage didn’t know anything. Or maybe she did know, with that intuition mothers have, the way his mother had known about Yuval that morning. She had woken that day and shouted at his father to turn off the radio even though, since the military operation had begun, all they did was listen to the radio. Perhaps they’d thought that the endless jabbering of the broadcasters, the journalists, the interviewed people who had suddenly heard a boom – all those words somehow protected them. An invisible wall of situation analyses and predictions through which no bullet could pass. But that morning his mother had turned off the radio, and suddenly there was silence in the living room. After so many days of noise, it was strange. Unpleasant, even. He and his father exchanged a glance that said, be careful, Mom’s jumpy, and his father said, sit down Ruti’le, I’ll make you a cup of coffee.
She never drank that coffee. When his father handed it to her – in a glass cup, one saccharine – she was already hanging laundry in the yard. Ten years earlier, they’d bought a large German-made dryer, but after using it twice she said it had been a mistake. “It might dry the laundry, but it doesn’t stop the buzzing in my head.” His mother had an entire theory about the buzzing in your head, about how the only way to stop it was to work with your hands. Yuval had developed a formula that enabled him to predict how many plates she needed to wash in order to calm down after a medium-size argument. “Laugh all you want,” she’d tell them, “but it’s definitely better than all those sunflower seeds you devour when you’re upset.” Sunflower seeds were the official tranquilizer for the men in the family. A small bag before a big exam. A large bag after splitting up with your girlfriend. Three kilos during the shiva for Grandpa David, his father’s father. They had sunflower seeds and she had the dishes or the laundry, and sometimes, on the really tough days, also the bedclothes in the very large linen closet, which were all neatly folded, from top shelf to bottom, on the days of the shiva, and then refolded, from bottom shelf to top, on the days that followed the shiva. The new dryer remained in the bathroom, white and shiny. His father refused to throw out something that had cost so much money, and perhaps he took some small pleasure in looking at it occasionally and sighing loudly enough for his mother to hear. Gradually, they started leaving things on it. Laundry soap. Fabric softener. A pile of clothespins. Shaving cream. The white elephant became another shelf in the bathroom, and probably would have continued being that if Yuval hadn’t come home from his first week of basic training and announced that from then on, he wanted to put his laundry in the dryer (he said they could call him up at any time; he needed his uniforms to be done quickly). His mother objected mildly, but finally agreed. In part because it was logical. But mainly because it was Yuval. She always agreed when it was Yuval. Eitan had to threaten to run away from home to get permission to go to Eilat with friends when he was at the end of his junior year in high school; Yuval they drove to the central bus station. When Eitan wanted to skip the educational field trips in his senior year, he had to forge sick notes; when it was Yuval, his mother simply called his teacher and told her that he didn’t feel well. When he saw how readily she offered Yuval the car on Friday nights, he could keep his mouth shut no longer – it had taken six months for him to get the Suzuki at night. She was surprised. She apologized. Tried to say that it was a classic case of big-brothers-little-brothers. It had been the same with her and Aunt Naomi – everything she spilled blood to get was given to Naomi on a silver platter. But Eitan knew that it was more than that. There was something about Yuval that made people say yes to him even before he asked. Sometimes he thought he could see a bit of that trait in Yaheli. Pre-school teachers loved his younger son. Sales people in shops did as well. All he had to do was look at something – candy or a toy – and a hand immediately reached out and gave it to him. And it wasn’t because he was especially beautiful. Cute, definitely, but not the sort of kid you see in ads. He simply had that elusive quality that makes the world nod. Eitan didn’t have it. Neither did Itamar. Naturally, pre-sch
ool teachers and sales people in shops handed things to his older son as well. But only after he asked. After he paid. After Eitan drew their attention to the fact that the quiet kid standing there still hadn’t received his.
That ability of Yaheli’s to charm people surprised him. Perhaps because he didn’t think that hiding somewhere in his genes was the same trait that had been entirely Yuval’s. (But in fact, why not? Eitan inherited the light-colored eyes and Yuval the brown, and Yuval had cried to his parents that it wasn’t fair, why did Eitan get the blue and I got this shitty brown, that’s how much it bothered him that he wasn’t as good. And Eitan had said to him, you jerk, stop cutting your biology class and learn that even if people see the brown, Mom’s blue DNA is still hiding in there, and maybe your kids will have blue eyes. Yuval had laughed and said, okay, I’m willing to settle for that, not knowing that he was going to settle for much less, for nineteen years, five months and two days, and not even a nephew named after him because Eitan wouldn’t allow his children to be turned into a memorial for other children. His parents understood that, though they didn’t understand much of anything else.)
He didn’t remember Yuval as a baby. He was only three when he was born, and that’s why it took time for him to understand that Yaheli resembled him. His mother saw it first, but he thought that was because she saw Yuval everywhere anyway. But when Yaheli grew up a bit, Eitan began to see it as well. Not only in that openness of his, but also in the way he wrinkled his nose when he was upset, a perfect copy of Yuval’s face after every game Maccabee Haifa lost. It was great to see those flashes of Yuval, but it was also strange. And it was even stranger to look at Itamar and Yaheli and feel that he had to protect his quiet older son from the charm of his younger son. Protect him firmly from what might be taken and what might be given. Even now, Liat didn’t understand why he wasn’t more dazzled by Yaheli; the entire neighborhood is dazzled by him except for you and those stingy smiles of yours. What could he tell her? That he was saving his smiles for the other child, the one nobody was dazzled by? So what did he think, that smiles were a limited resource? Even if they were a limited resource with his parents, what did that have to do with that child of his, what did Yaheli have to do with the automatic nod, the “yes” that was Yuval’s?
And there was that other, magical fear as well, the one he couldn’t speak about. The fear that, just as it had been with Yuval, the world would one day grow tired of saying yes to Yaheli, and a huge, resounding “no” would come all at once in the form of friendly fire, of an entire unit firing (by mistake! by mistake!) on that successful, favored brother. Some part of him was jealous of Yaheli, of his small son, and he hated that part. But part of him was also frightened for Yaheli and wanted to protect him from the jealousy of others. Perhaps that was how Jacob felt when he saw Joseph go out into the field with his brothers, the ones who would soon throw him into a pit. And Eitan understood those brothers so well, with their plain clothes, driven mad by the luxurious coat of many colors. Perhaps that was why he always made sure, even on birthdays, to bring presents for both of them. So one would never open the crinkly wrapping paper while the other watched with his hands empty. But he didn’t understand that it wasn’t because of the coat that they threw Joseph into the pit, but because of the look on his father’s face when he put it on him. You can distribute presents equally. Not so with looks.
On the morning they came to tell them about Yuval, his mother had gone out to the yard with a tub full of laundry. There were sheets, towels, Eitan’s clothes and his father’s clothes, but she foraged around in the pile of wet cloth until she pulled out the jeans Yuval had worn on Saturday. She shook them out and straightened them carefully, then hung them up first. She hung them with the determination of someone stating a fact – no one whose jeans are hanging on the line outside to dry is dead. She managed to hang another few shirts before the army guys arrived. They didn’t have to knock. She saw them from the yard. They went into the house through the back door with her, straight into the kitchen. Eitan remembered the taste of the cornflakes in his mouth at the moment his mother came inside with the two men in uniform and began to cry.
But she didn’t look surprised. On the contrary. As if something inside her had been expecting this since morning. Eitan remembered a description he’d read in the papers about the tsunami in Thailand. How people stood on the shore and watched the waves coming. They saw them in the distance, saw them approaching. Some tried to run, but there were others who knew there was no point, the water would reach them in any case. So they simply stood there and waited, and perhaps they also hung laundry.
His mother knew even before they came, and perhaps also the Eritrean woman in the garage already knew. Or at least guessed. But even if she knew, her body didn’t. It continued to produce milk for a baby who wouldn’t be coming. The pituitary gland secretes prolactin. The prolactin sets the colostrum flowing. Eitan remembered how the previous night, a long time before the baby was born, the Eritrean woman’s dress had already been soaked with milk. Two large, round, dark stains, one on each breast, grew in size from hour to hour. Her body dripped. Sirkit suggested that she take off her dress. She had so much pain anyway, so why add the discomfort of cloth sticking to her breasts. But the woman refused. Perhaps she was self-conscious in front of him. It was embarrassing enough that he looked at her like that, between her legs; she could at least keep her breasts for herself. Or the milk oozing from her and staining her dress might not have bothered her at all. Perhaps she was glad that the cloth that was meant to conceal was suddenly revealing. The body was speaking to itself with absolute clarity, saying: I’m full. I’m full of bursting life.
It drove him mad to think about the milk. That dress and the round stains expanding on it – he didn’t want to picture them anymore. He went into the house and washed his face in the bathroom sink, and then went into Yaheli’s room, lay down on the Robots sheet and fell asleep. Toy soldiers watched over him as he slept. A toy tank sat on the rug, and that was enough to keep anyone from stepping over the threshold. Eitan lay on his side and slept, not tossing or turning even once.
*
She didn’t know whether it was sleep or unconsciousness, but she was happy that Semar had finally closed her eyes and stopped screaming. She wiped the sweat from her forehead, straightened her blanket and scrubbed the sheet Semar had bloodied during delivery. She scrubbed for a long while, scrubbed and rinsed and scrubbed again, but she couldn’t get it clean. She looked at her phone again; maybe he had called, but there was no call. Not that she needed a call from him in order to know. She’d seen the baby. She knew what that color meant. And unlike Eitan and Semar, she didn’t close her ears when death came knocking at the door. She knew it would enter in any case. None the less, she waited. Decided to wash the sheet again. Scrubbed and rinsed. Straightened the sleeping Semar’s blanket again. Swept the garage floor. Arranged the bottles of medicine. One, two, three babies, and now four, though obviously it made a difference that this baby wasn’t hers, but still.
He didn’t call. He might still be trying to save the baby in their hospital. Maybe he never got there. Maybe he’d managed to do something to reverse the clear, unmistakable direction of life emptying out of the baby’s face. Maybe he didn’t think it was so urgent to let her know, and she wasn’t even sure why she had to know so urgently. Waiting was something she knew how to do very well. She was an expert in the secrets of sitting still and silent, waiting for what would come. The total suspension of thought and feeling, until someone else came and decided. “We’re leaving,” and she’d leave. “We’re going back,” and she’d go back. “We’re getting up,” and she’d get up. And now, as always, she had to wait. To hear what the doctor would say. And if he didn’t say anything, that was fine too. He didn’t call, and from that silence she understood that the baby had died. From that small silence she understood the large, final silence of lungs that no longer breathed. If she were angry at him about anything, it wasn’t a
bout the baby – it really wasn’t his fault. It was about how unbearably effortless it had been for him to switch their roles. She was waiting and he was deciding; he was the master of time and she was the one sitting on the sidelines, scrubbing a sheet that would never be clean, waiting.
11
HE WOKE UP SCREAMING. Discovered he had slept only two hours, though it felt like much more. He immediately called Sirkit. His voice shook a bit when he told her about the baby, but he didn’t care. Your voice should shake when you tell somebody something like that. Even if you’re a doctor. Sirkit’s voice didn’t shake. Eitan had expected nothing else. He almost forgot the tears he’d seen in her eyes when he went out to her after the birth. Now he hated her more than ever. He had to blame someone for what had happened. Babies don’t die for no reason. There had to be a reason. Someone had to have screwed up. That chemical transformation of sadness into anger relieves the body and quiets the soul. And Sirkit had delayed him when he wanted to leave with the baby. Had threatened him. Had stolen precious seconds. (Those seconds wouldn’t have changed anything, but he held on to them all the same. In Yaheli’s room, lying on the Robot sheets, surrounded by toy soldiers, he again realized how good it was to divide the world into good guys and bad guys.)
She asked him to come and check on the mother, who was still bleeding, and he said fine, but he had to shower first. Standing under the water, covered in foamy, almond-and-green-tea-scented shower gel, he read the label on the shampoo bottle. Herbal essence. Natural spring water carried the flowers and essences straight from the field. Who writes that stuff? Who reads it? After stepping out of the shower and drying himself, he went back to Yaheli’s room and sat on the bed, then lay down again. Closed his eyes. Waited for the moment when the final thought came, the one after which there was only the endless expanse of impervious sleep. The final signal from the spaceship before you are finally lost in the unknown. But this time, the soldiers and the Robots did not help. He tossed and turned. He sweated. The sheets prickled and the mattress was too small. But he didn’t get up. Finally, he fell asleep. An hour later, he woke up screaming.
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