The Falafel King Is Dead

by Sara Shilo

  I took out the rubbish and hid the bucket in the bushes. Then I made my way to the nursery, to Mama. My feet started running almost by themselves, as if they too wanted to talk. Then I wondered if I was really running away, trying to get to the nursery before I was caught by ‘You’ll Be Sorry’ and ‘You’ll Be Ashamed’, who follow me everywhere. They certainly had discovered that I’d left the house without them, because they immediately started shouting after me, ‘You’ll-Be-Ashamed-and-You’ll-Be-Sorry’, so loud the whole street could hear. But I didn’t listen.

  It was afternoon nap-time, I thought. The children are asleep and I can talk to her. I’ll just tell her, in simple terms, that it’s impossible to carry on like this, that she has to tell the twins the truth before someone says something horrible in the street or in school. They’ll be at school in a few months and then it’ll be too late. Mama never went to school here and she doesn’t know how cruel the playground can be. What does she know about school? Just what she hears at parents’ meetings. I stood up to my pursuers and said exactly what my brothers will hear in a few months at break-time:

  ‘My brother Zion swears to me on the Torah that your dad is dead!’

  ‘Everyone knows Kobi is just your brother!’

  ‘You don’t have a dad!’

  ‘Tell me, who doesn’t know who their dad is?”

  And, as if that won’t be enough:

  ‘Who doesn’t know your mum is fucking your brother Kobi?’

  5

  ‘A woman can do without it, but, for a man, one week is like eternity!’

  It was the voice of Ricki, the cook. I stopped on my way up the path, hugged the wall and walked quietly, so they couldn’t see me. They only had the screen door closed. Every day at the same time they sit near the entrance on low children’s chairs around the little table. I could hear laughter, but didn’t recognise Mama’s laugh, which always sounds as though she’s trying to cough it up. I couldn’t hear Aliza’s melodious laugh, either.

  ‘There isn’t a man alive who’ll get my body before the wedding,’ Sylvie declared.

  Levana replied in Moroccan and they laughed again.

  ‘Yalla, girls,’ Ricki prodded them, ‘are you glued to the chairs? No cleaning elves are coming to help us today.’

  I heard them moving the table back to its usual place, and reminded myself why I was here. But, for a moment, all I could think about was the man of their conversation. I pictured him as a letter, as I did when I was a girl, with the broad shoulders of the letter ‘m’ in ‘man’. One leg kicking forward, with a little head and protruding eyes. He looked a little like Itzik’s kestrel. His hands were jammed into his pockets, hugging his body – it was hard for him to do without. Then I saw a woman in the letter ‘w’. She was belly-dancing, as if she were alone in the world, her hands raised and her legs spread, her long hair covering her bottom.

  Suddenly the screen door opened and dirty mopping water splashed onto me. Levana, mop in hand, said, ‘My goodness, you gave me a fright! Come in, come in. Are you here to see your mama? Wait for me to put a dry cloth down so you don’t bring in any water.’

  I went to the toddler room where Mama and Aliza worked. The kids were asleep on little iron beds. The air was full of sleepy breathing. One bed was empty, its sagging green canvas inviting me to climb in and go to sleep in the sweet-smelling cloud of pee and vegetable soup.

  I found Mama and Aliza in the children’s toilet. They were taking white cloth nappies out of the children’s bags, all clean and dry, and, one by one, dipping them in the toilet where they had rinsed the dirty nappies. They didn’t notice me, and when they did, Mama was worried until I swore everything was fine at home. Then she went back to what she had been doing, wetting dry, clean nappies in the toilet.

  ‘Etti, my precious,’ said Aliza, ‘just guard the door so no mothers come in. Then we can finish these, chic-choc.’

  And Mama said, ‘You never get a word of thanks from them, never. Not even for a good job sewing doll’s clothes. Where do they look first? In the bag of shit, counting the nappies. What do they think they’re going to find? A diamond?’ She dips another nappy in the toilet. ‘If there aren’t four dirty nappies in the bag, they jump on you: “Why didn’t you change his nappy?” She starts yelling, then, saying her kid was running around in pee half the day. If their bottoms are red, it’s the nursery’s fault. God forbid you should say it’s because they forgot to change their kid at night.’

  She stood up, then, her hand on her hip. She said she was dying for a cup of instant coffee with milk, that it was the only thing which would help her back.

  Aliza gestured to me to take Mama’s place. I looked at them for a minute. I wanted to say something but I didn’t. Instead I took a dry nappy from Mama. As I leaned over the toilet, I saw my face reflected there, as if I’d fallen into the water in Mama’s wake.

  ‘Aliza’s dipped the nappies in the toilet,’ Aliza said in a bitter yet sugary tone. ‘She’s done one each for Rosette and Shula, two for Yaffa, another one for Annette, but there’s none left for Sima! So she went and looked, she looked everywhere, and lo and behold, she found one for Sima.’ I kept looking at my face in the toilet. Every time Aliza wrung out a nappy, the image was distorted. I’ve already started thinking like them: ‘Moshiko’s got two dirty ones, so we’ll wet him another, and then, when he gets up, we’ll change him again. That way he’ll have four dirty ones and his mum will be happy.’

  Aliza passed me the soap. She washed her hands, dried them, and looked at herself in the mirror. Her face seemed cleaned of anger and resentment. From the pocket of her smock she took out a pair of tweezers and expertly plucked the hairs that had grown outside the narrow line of her eyebrows. ‘Wash your hands properly and then come and sit with us,’ she said to me, still looking in the mirror. ‘Whoever works deserves to rest.’

  I realised that if I tried to talk to Mama, to say that the time had come to tell the truth, I’d sound like a baby who wouldn’t let go of a broken doll. ‘Oh, Etti, where are you, and where is life!’ she’d say.

  I went back home and decided to tell them myself.

  I tried to picture my family in the shelter. Kobi would be standing near the door, waiting to go out, as if he was saying to himself, ‘I’m just here for a while – this isn’t really me’, like a mannequin in a shop window telling herself she’s not part of the noisy, dirty street. Oshri and Chaim would hardly take up half a mattress. They sometimes curl up in the washing tub, saying, ‘Look, Etti, look! This is how we were in Mama’s tummy!’ Dudi would be wandering around, looking to make people laugh, to make friends. Itzik would be calling Dudi to come and help with the kestrel, which would be annoying everyone in the shelter. Mama would be trying to make everyone sit quietly, so that people wouldn’t talk about us after it was all over, not even about Itzik and his bird. And if Oshri and Chaim aren’t in the shelter, she’d be praying that Yehuda would come in and tell her he found the little ones in a different shelter, just like he found me.

  Where are they, though? I can’t remember where I left them, where I was before the Katyushas fell.

  I made my way home from the nursery with a new lie, then I did my Bible study homework. It was a normal evening, and then night fell. I went to sleep with Oshri and Chaim. A few hours later I woke up, got out of their bed, and drew the covers up to their necks. It was late. I saw Dudi was sleeping, and I went into the hallway and stood outside Mama and Kobi’s door. I pressed my ear to the door but I didn’t hear anything. I thought about opening it, but I didn’t dare.

  I went to my own bed, but I couldn’t sleep. I went out onto the balcony and looked at the washing that Mama had pegged out that evening. The washing lines look like the lines of a poem. ‘Mama’s dress’ or ‘Itzik’s trousers’ sit on them like words, the pegs like commas. Mama’s dress, comma, Itzik’s elasticated trousers, comma, Dudi and Itzik’s shirts, comma, Kobi’s white shirt, comma, Oshri and Chaim’s socks, comma, my school skirt,
comma, Mama and Kobi’s sheet, full stop. In simple, clear language, our clothes told the outside world we were a family, but inside it was a different story. In truth, there wasn’t a single day when everyone’s clothes – Papa, Mama and six children – hung together on one line.

  6

  Quietly I went back into the twins’ room and covered them up again. I was wide awake. I took my bag and went to the terrorists’ cupboard. I had never opened it. Every time I passed it, I was reminded that it was Kobi’s cupboard, not mine.

  The year Papa died, Kobi took all the shelves out of the cupboard and began to practise going in and coming out. He’d go in, sit down, then come out, over and over again, until the cupboard was wobbly. Even then he didn’t stop. With his new bar mitzvah watch, he’d measure how long it took to get to the cupboard from anywhere in the house, how long it took to get in and close the doors from the inside. He’d jump out of the bathroom, or even run off in the middle of a meal, shoving aside whoever was in his way, timing himself, and announcing the result when he got back. Once he jumped inside and one of the cupboard’s feet broke, so he stopped training and put a rock in its place, pestering Mama to have it fixed. Mama rang Uncle Avram – that was before the big bust-up, when Papa’s brothers were still talking to her – and he lay the cupboard down on its side, reattaching the foot with a few nails. Kobi was pleased. No one said a thing about it, or about the fact we didn’t need a hiding place when Papa was alive. Anyway, there wasn’t enough room in it until he cleared his clothes out of it (all Mama’s colourful clothes had been thrown out first).

  I crawled into the cupboard barefoot. Once inside, I folded my legs and closed one door, leaving the other ajar for light. There was room for two adults, or three small children. I lifted my head to see how high it was, and caught sight of a pair of boy’s underpants pinned to the ceiling of the cupboard, with a bottle of oil inside them. Something was written on the bottle in blue pen. As I stood up to read it, my head bumped the bottle. There were six words in Kobi’s neat handwriting: ‘Don’t forget: pour oil on floor.’ As I read, I thought of Hanukkah that year. Papa’s year.

  Mama went to work in the nursery that day, and before she left she fried us some sfinj. Oshri and Chaim hadn’t yet been born, and neither had the lie. Back then the youngest in the family was Papa’s death. It was just half a year old, a baby death with a fresh smell. At that point you don’t know how it will grow up. Death changes fast. In the first month it just lies on its back, crying and not moving. Then it starts to turn over and around, to crawl and knock things over. You have to be with it all the time, to follow it so it won’t destroy everything that was there before it was born. But it’s faster than we are, finds breakables within its reach. Everything that Papa held dear, we didn’t know how to protect. Death would touch, feel, eat, examine, throw, break, destroy and tear. And you couldn’t leave it alone, not for a minute.

  And when we left the house we’d take death with us. It came to school in the sandwich Mama had made for us; got into our dreams at night, waking us in tears. In the morning it would get up before us, standing next to our beds before we even opened our eyes, so we couldn’t get up without remembering it was there, couldn’t see the sun without looking first into its baby eyes with their false innocence: ‘What have I done?’

  That afternoon, Kobi took the deep frying pan with the cooled oil from the sfinj. He went into the hallway with it and poured the oil onto the floor. Then he slid on it, the way we used to slide in the corridors at school. I stood in the bathroom doorway, laughing. I hadn’t laughed like that for six months. Dudi and Itzik waited their turn to slide. Just then, Mama came home.

  She already had a big belly by then, the biggest I had ever seen. It was a week before the twins were born. When she saw us laughing and Kobi lying on the floor in a puddle of oil, she cried out, ‘Oh my God!’ Then she put her hand to her mouth and began to cry. In that moment we saw ourselves through her eyes. Like baby chicks, we crowded into her eye sockets, and saw what we hadn’t seen until then: her children, her orphans, making fun of how their father had died.

  ‘It’s for the terrorists,’ Kobi told her. ‘To prepare for when they come. I wanted to see how much oil you’d need.’ Then he went and changed his trousers, leaving us to clean up. It was an impossible job. The oil never completely washed away, and neither did that moment, that image.

  I sat in the cupboard, my legs crossed, the bottle of oil swinging above my head. I opened my bag and took the radio out of its plastic bag, as well as the batteries, which I keep in a sock so they won’t get used too often. I didn’t know whether it was worth using them now. I tasted them with the tip of my tongue and put them into the radio. It was Papa’s little transistor. All the knobs were missing. I rescued it from the rubbish bucket behind the falafel shop. Using my teeth, I managed to twist what was left of the tuning dial to hear the radio-woman talking.

  That’s what I called her when I first heard her voice. Later I found out that her name was Reuma. I liked saying it: Reuma, Re-u-ma. In Hebrew it can mean ‘look’. I played around with her name, wondering who had come up with it, and whether she was called Reuma from birth or whether it came afterwards when she started to say: ‘Look what happened’ or ‘Look how good that is’.

  A month after Papa died, on the way back from a school trip to Jerusalem, the guide pointed at two tall antennae that looked to me like a pair of Eiffel Towers. ‘That is where the news is broadcast from,’ he said. I was drawn to those towers more than all the important places we had visited, and was sorry we didn’t go inside. But ever since that day, every time I pressed the radio to my ear, I’d tell myself that the radio-woman was patiently waiting for me to finish school, that I’d learn how to speak Hebrew just like her, with beautiful words that sound as though they come from distant lands. Without shame, I kept saying them until I understood them. And before I went to sleep, I’d imagine how I’d climb the steps of her tower, more pointed the higher it goes, and under a tiny roof beneath the sky I’d find a place for just one chair. Reuma would be sitting there, waiting for me to come and to say, ‘You can come down now, Reuma. I’ll take over.’

  Then I’ll talk to her, pronouncing ‘heit’ just as she does. I’ve practised this using the daily Bible quotation. To do it properly you have to think about the ice cream scoop on Shimon’s stand, where he also sells sunflower seeds and salted nuts. You have to imagine it curving inside your mouth, slipping into the hollow of your palate. I’ll also see what she thinks of my ‘ayin’, a sound like a round coin rising gently from the throat. Every word that comes out of my mouth will be like a glossy ripe grape. I picture Reuma getting off her chair, sitting me down in her place, showing me the microphone and the other equipment. When she leaves, I stay, and I know I’m going to stay at the top of the tower for ever.

  I hear the news programme’s theme tune, my voice talking into the microphone for the first time: ‘This is Etti, speaking to you from Jerusalem. First, the old stuff.’ The news doesn’t interest me, just the things they don’t bother reporting, or lie about if they do.

  After the news, I got out of the cupboard and went for a nap. In the morning, because of the alert, they sent everyone home from school at eight-thirty. Mama came home from the nursery and we went down to the shelter with the neighbours. Then, because nothing happened, we went home again, and I fell asleep with Chaim and Oshri at midday. When they woke me, the whole apartment was empty. It was just the three of us. Mama had disappeared, too, without saying a thing. I stayed with Chaim and Oshri. I didn’t know how to begin telling them about Papa. I thought maybe we’d start with a story they already knew.

  So we sat on my bed, and I took the pillowcase off and put my hand in, pretending to stir the stories – they like me doing this – and then … oh! I caught a story.

  7

  I took out my fist and peered into it to see what I had caught. I opened my fingers a little, pushing the twins away so they wouldn’t peek, and said, ‘
You won’t believe what I’ve got – the story about the woman who turned into an octopus.’

  And Oshri said, ‘Etti, promise you’ll make it have a happy ending.’

  They jumped on the bed until the springs creaked, then fell on it together like two burst balloons.

  Chaim said, ‘Promise, Etti! Otherwise I won’t listen!’ And he covered his ears, screaming, ‘I can’t hear a thing, can’t hear a thing!’

  ‘I can’t hear anything, either!’ Oshri crowed. ‘I’ll shout so I can’t hear myself.’ He opened his mouth wide and shouted, ‘Aaaaaahhhhhh …’ until he ran out of puff, and Chaim took over.

  ‘That’s enough!’ I said. ‘You’d better stop shouting now, or there won’t be a story.’ Then they were quiet.

  ‘Today I’ll go beyond the end of the story,’ I told them. ‘I’ll go on until we have a happy ending, I promise. Put your hands on your knees, just like you do in your pre-school assembly.’ Their expressions were suddenly obedient, and I panicked about my hasty promise. Gentle afternoon light streamed in through the window behind them, and when I looked at them again, they had relaxed, their hands slipping from their knees to the mattress.

  ‘The name of the story,’ I said, ‘is “The Woman Who Turned into an Octopus”.’

  And then I began.

  ‘Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a woman, a completely normal woman. She had two arms, two legs, a tummy and a back. She had a face with two eyes, one nose and two ears. Everything about her was totally normal. She was just like any other woman.’