Obviously she has no right to touch her things, but it’s too late, she can no longer stop. The entire apartment will be clean, no exceptions, and she’ll clean Noa’s room as if she were her mother. She thinks for a moment about that mother, who she is and what she knows about her daughter’s life. Maybe she’ll find some clue here that will enable her to contact the woman, to join forces with her against a common enemy. Probably all the information is on the computer on her desk, which she dares not turn on. So she glances at the few books, most of them children’s books, for some reason—the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, Winnie the Pooh, The Little Prince, and beside them, The Drama of the Gifted Child, which she knows quite well, and resting, like cause and effect, on Osho’s In Search of the Miraculous. Browsing through it, she is happy to find the name of its owner, Mira Varshavsky, which gives her a lead and a sense of a shared destiny. But she won’t call her now, not until she has completely annihilated the filth and the stench, which return again and again, like drifting sand, not until the rag finally comes away unblackened and she wipes the floor with pleasure. The toilet bowl and the sinks are already shining, the new sheets have been put on the beds, the two large fans she bought are blowing through the apartment. Now it’s time to cook a healthy meal for the hardworking girls. She fries onions on the old stove and adds cubes of tofu, cooks brown rice and steamed vegetables—they need vitamins, nutritional fiber—she’ll make the salad when they sit down so it’ll be fresh. She washes grapes and plums and puts them in a bowl on the small Formica table and imagines the girls sitting down and eating her food, happy she is there, chatting away comfortably about the day they’ve had.
That’s exactly how it was with Alma and Shira, so many meals after they came home from the afternoon childcare center, or before ballet class, which became piano class, which became painting class. Dafna was always late, but that didn’t bother her, on the contrary, Shira was so open and extroverted that Alma loosened up a bit when she was there, talked more about what troubled her and what made her happy.
You’re such an idiot, she shakes off the memories now, what exactly do you think she’ll tell you? Those aren’t the stories I want to hear, but I’ll hear it all anyway, just as long as they talk and take me into their world. She walked around the apartment again, smoothing a wrinkle on a sheet, hanging a towel, tasting the food, glancing at the clock. It will be night soon and they haven’t returned, they must go from one job to another without coming home. She’s waiting in vain, they’ll come back near dawn, sleep until noon and go out to work again, they won’t even have time to notice the nest she created for them. With a sigh, she lies down on Alma’s bed, her back aching from the effort she isn’t used to. She mustn’t fall asleep and miss them again, just lie there with open eyes in front of the powerful fan.
Suddenly she feels as if the hair on her forehead is moving and she gets up to shift the direction of the breeze, but the strange movement continues as if her hair has taken on a life of its own. When she looks up and sees the long, thin legs appear from an eyebrow, exactly the same color as her hair, she jumps up in a panic, slapping wildly at her head to remove the frightening visitor, and there it is on the floor, a huge black spider walking with surprising, provocative slowness between her feet. Probably its life is as precious to it as hers is to her, but she steps on it with horror, and it withdraws into itself in acceptance, pulling in its legs, which walked along her scalp only a moment ago, and becomes an inanimate black ball. She stares at it in terror, she doesn’t know very much about spiders, is it a black widow or a more innocent creature that just looks threatening?
No, nothing is innocent in this apartment, where the trap was laid for her daughter and which now mocks her efforts to turn it into a safe, pleasant place. What is the point in all that cleaning if when you’re done, you find a giant spider on your head? That didn’t happen on any of her school trips to the north and the south when she slept outdoors in a sleeping bag beside her pupils. But it happened now, in the gleaming apartment, in Alma’s bed with its clean linens, and she flees the room, leaving behind the spider’s corpse. There is no living room in the apartment, so she sits down, trembling, in the small kitchen, still slapping at her head to drive away any additional visitors. A burning sensation spreads over her scalp, and she calls Mickey, tells him every small detail of what happened, as if this were their biggest problem.
He listens to her with a patience that lacks all empathy. She always knew that in her guerrilla wars with the insect world, he would always stand with the insects, which he considers more helpless than she does. He always prefers to remove animals from the house gently instead of carrying out her death wishes for them. Now too, he interrupts her and asks, “How many legs did it have? It was probably a totally harmless furry spider. You didn’t have to kill it, it’s actually on your side. It eats cockroaches, which you hate.”
“I don’t know which I hate more, it was so disgusting, and it was after I’d cleaned for hours. I’m alone in the apartment with the spider’s corpse. Alma hasn’t come home, I don’t know what to do here without her, and I don’t know if I’ll get to see her at all.”
“So come home,” he says joylessly, “if you don’t feel there’s any point in staying.”
“I’m not sure yet. For the time being, I’ll lie in wait for her.”
“You see,” he chuckles, “you’re not very different from the spider you killed. It was lying in wait patiently for its prey. Just be careful that a giant foot doesn’t crush you.”
“Really, Mickey, that’s a terrible comparison. I’m planning to devour Alma?”
“From her point of view, maybe.”
She knows that now they are both remembering that night in the first apartment they rented together several weeks before they got married. It was a ground-floor apartment in a cheap neighborhood, bedroom, living room, and another locked room where the owners stored old possessions, and even though she tried to ignore its existence, it bothered her. One night, a tiny gray mouse scurried out of it just as they were about to turn off the light in the living room and go to sleep. She saw it first and ran screeching into the bedroom, closed the door behind her, and, terrified, barked orders to her future husband. “Kill it, Mickey, I won’t come out if it’s still here. I’m moving, I won’t live with a mouse.”
“Why should I kill it,” he protests, “how should I kill it?”
But there was no pity in her heart, neither for the mouse nor for Mickey. “I don’t care how,” she roared, bloodthirsty, “just as long as it dies!” Unable to summon up the courage to oppose her, Mickey found himself undergoing the first test of his manhood she put him through, and because he gave up his principles for her, he was doomed to failure. He went after the mouse with the new purple broom they had bought a week earlier, when they moved in together. She sat on the bed, body contracted, eyes closed, and covered her ears to block out the whacks of the broom against the wall and the strangled squeals that might have been coming from the mouse or from Mickey, she couldn’t tell. She wanted to be rid of them both, to escape through the window from the battle that seemed to go on for hours without a victor, because even when the wall grew silent and the front door opened and the cover of the garbage bin outside opened and closed, even when he came into the bedroom and said, “You can come out, the field is clear,” his voice was weak and his expression bitter. And although she said, “Thank you, my hero, you saved me,” they both knew it was a defeat. She tried to pull him to her, kissed his neck, his forehead, his lips, wanting to show him that, at least for her, he had passed the test and deserved a reward, but he pushed her away and moved to the far end of the bed. “Come to me, Mickey,” she whispered in surprise, he had never refused her before. “Don’t call me Mickey, call me Mickey Mouse,” he said, lying immobile, breathing quietly, shaken to the depths of his being. They were so embarrassed by that battle that they never spoke of it again.
The next day,
she sealed the door of the closed room with strong tape, as if hazardous chemicals might leak out of it, and when their lease was up, they left the apartment without the slightest regret. Ever since, she has made sure that they lived on a relatively high floor and tries not to ask for his help in her battles with the insect world. But if she does ask for it, she knows that he will pick up the bug gently and set it free through the window.
Now she calls him again and says, “Have you forgiven me, Mickey?”
“Not now,” he says, “I’m in the middle.” Then, exuberantly, “Yes!”
She laughs, “You won?”
“Yes, a great victory,” he says, slightly abashed.
“Congratulations, you’re such a little boy.”
He surprises her by saying, “In response to your question, Iris, I’ve forgiven you, but not myself. That was the worst night of my life, my adult life, in any case.”
But she has to contradict him. “Don’t exaggerate, Mickey, it was worse at Alma’s bar, and the day I was injured was worse, and so was the day your mother died.” She continues to list their disasters, trying to absolve herself of the responsibility for the worst day of his life, but he won’t surrender.
“There’s no comparison, being angry at yourself is harder than being angry at fate.”
“So who were you angry at when I was injured?” she asks, trying to trap him.
“Why do you always go back to that?”
“Because something from back then hasn’t been resolved.”
“You think everything else has been resolved?” he mocks. “You go back ten years as if what happened yesterday is resolved? I, for example, still haven’t resolved the question of what you were doing at the interchange the night before last.”
“So why don’t you ask me?”
He answers quietly, as if talking to himself. “I don’t believe in questions and answers anymore.”
She has to stop there because if she has to choose either the closeness that has so suddenly and casually appeared between them or the safe distance that the lie creates, she still trusts the distance more, so she says, “I interviewed a teacher there who couldn’t come to the city. She’s on maternity leave with twins. You see, you’re just not a dialogue person! If you just asked questions, you’d see that the answers are simple. She couldn’t come so I went to her.”
“Not now, I’m in the middle,” he mutters, and she understands that he has started a new game instead of listening to her nonsense.
Her unnecessary lie chokes her and she sighs, “You’re right, Mickey, there’s no point in questions, and definitely not in answers. I just wanted to ask you to forgive me.”
“Why are you talking about this now? I’ve already told you that I’m not angry at you. You are what you are, you couldn’t have acted differently.”
But she persists, “Not just about the mouse, Mooky.” Is he engrossed in the game or in the things she doesn’t dare say?
“You are who you are,” he repeats finally.
The spider’s corpse is still lying in wait for her in Alma’s room, so she stretches out on Noa’s bed after pounding it with a pillow to make sure it’s insect-free, and then pounding the pillow itself. Evening is falling, but she doesn’t turn on the lights. Does he know? Has he discovered the truth on her cell phone and is he waiting nobly for everything to end? Or were his words insignificant, because he listened to her with his usual distraction, absorbed in a game? For some reason, it makes no difference to her now, alone in the apartment with the spider’s corpse, thinking sorrowfully about her father, because not only are dreams inherited, but also nightmares. While he was still alive and even after his death, her mother used to blame him for that. “Leave the child alone. Why are you infecting her with your fears?” she would admonish him when he took her in his arms to distance her from every insect, even if it was only a roach or a tiny spider. “Look at you, you’re just like your father,” she scolded her over the years, “what are you both so afraid of, two spoiled babies.” But now, for some reason, she yearns to hear even those reproaches.
“Hello, Iris. You want talk to Mama? Mama in shower,” Parshant tells her. “You want Mama call you after shower?”
And she replies, “Yes, please help her call,” but as she waits, she thinks sorrowfully that she has been too late for a long time now, there is no longer any point in asking her mother questions about her childhood, about the very short time she had and meager memories she has of being a little girl with a father. For years she believed that there was no reason to hurry, there were always more important things to do, but in one elusive moment, it became impossible. Her mother is still with them in body, but not in mind.
Yes, she sighs, we will always be doomed to long for an earlier time, which did not have much to recommend it either. On her last several visits, she noticed, to her sorrow, an additional ebbing of her mother’s mental faculties. She was immersed in a fantasy world, pointing to places in the room and describing sights and scenes she was imagining. The only witness to Iris’s first years can no longer bear witness for her, and she must settle for her own early memories. Nevertheless, she still hopes she can get her to talk and extract some recollection from the muddle of words that comes out of her mouth.
“You won’t believe it, Mother, I just had a huge spider on my head,” she tells her, agitatedly. “Remember how afraid Daddy was of bugs?”
But her mother dismisses her words scornfully. “My father? He wasn’t afraid of anything! After what he went through in the Holocaust, you think he’d be afraid of bugs?”
“I’m not talking about Grandpa Moshe,” she says, slightly ashamed for some reason. “I mean my father.”
“Your father? Who is your father? I don’t think I knew him.”
“You married him, Mother,” she implores, “of course you knew him! Gabriel Segal, your husband.”
Her mother repeats the name sourly, “Segal? It sounds familiar, but I really can’t remember what all the neighbors were afraid of!” Iris can imagine the angry, childish expression on her face now. At first she sometimes suspected that her mother was pretending just to annoy her, and even now she is angry at her, as if she is deliberately refusing to give her what she wants. “What is so frightening about bugs?” she continues to jeer, “you step on them and that’s that. Parshant and I aren’t the least bit afraid.”
Yes, her mother coped fearlessly with the terrifying creatures, ridiculing her squeamish panic, she couldn’t abide squeamishness. Strange, for many years Iris attributed her masculinity to the fact that she was a widow, that she had to be both father and mother to her children, and only when she became an adult did she consider that it was her personality that had apparently determined her fate. She was direct and harsh, judgmental and opinionated, and she strongly condemned all shows of weakness in everyone, including her deceased husband.
As Iris grew older, her mother allowed herself to be more critical of her father, and her list of complaints grew longer over the years. “He never did anything with himself,” she would say, as if after his death, she expected him to develop, to show initiative and resourcefulness. “He was a spoiled, lazy little prince, your father, and he had no ambition,” she would occasionally say bitterly, convinced that with a bit of healthy resourcefulness, he would have been able to evade the artillery shell that hit his tank. It made no difference that dozens of other soldiers were also killed, including ones less spoiled than he. She found him guilty of his own death, and his mother even guiltier, for spoiling her only son rotten. “She never even let him make an omelet,” she would sometimes tell her, “he didn’t know how to change bedding and it took him two hours to put the duvet into the duvet cover. He was so used to having her do everything for him that he atrophied. She didn’t prepare him for life. I’m sure that even when the tank started to burn, he sat there helplessly, waiting for his mother to come and rescue h
im. I have no idea how he survived the army at all. Someone must have always covered for him just because he had such a beautiful smile.”
He really did have a gorgeous smile, astonishingly like Omer’s. In most of the pictures they have of him, he is smiling, and only in the last one does he look serious, staring at the chessboard in concern, as if he knows he is going to lose very soon. She sensed that her mother enjoyed criticizing him because she was jealous of how much he loved their daughter from the day she was born. Sometimes she heard a hint of gloating in her voice when she told her how much he loved her, but their blissful years together were brief, cut off with a single blow, and life without him turned Iris into a hardworking, gloomy little girl who joylessly helped her mother raise two superfluous children. Every morning, her mother would get up early and go off to the clinic to “take blood,” as she put it, leaving her to get her brothers ready for kindergarten and school alone while she sat in a chair and drew the blood of patients who waited in a long line, their arms extended to the needle and test tubes. The darkness was so deep and protracted that she remembered almost nothing of her childhood and teenage years, only the constant, dreary burden of existence. She learned how to make an omelet and put a quilt into its cover, how to diaper and clean, wash clothes and hang them up, do her homework with half-closed eyes. It wasn’t until Eitan entered her life when she was sixteen and a half that it filled with light for a full year, until he too disappeared abruptly without giving her a chance to say goodbye. Lying in the silence in the strange bed, she wonders why she is suddenly thinking about all of that. She doesn’t usually have time for memories, but now that she momentarily has nothing to do, that previous, fatherless existence has attacked her. She lay in the silence in her small bed just like this, taking her afternoon nap as her father threw on his uniform and went off to war. Of course he wanted to wake her with a hug and a kiss and words of love and farewell, but her mother wouldn’t let him, better not to disrupt the routine, which was disrupted beyond recognition anyway.
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