But how will those right words reach Alma if she doesn’t come home? She wakes up every hour to an apartment whose tenants have gone, as if they have vacated it for her, and only when the sourish lemony light rises and the street traffic comes to life does she hear the door open. She listens tensely for their voices. Do they know she’s listening and is that why they aren’t speaking? Or are they too tired, because apart from the sound of flowing water and several quick whispers, she hears nothing. They don’t eat the nutritious food or notice the shining floor, the polished counter, the bowl of fruit on the table. They are not in reality, they are above or below it. She lies on the bed silently, above the still-dying spider, and welcomes the new day, tense and excited. She’ll see him again, she’ll get up soon, shower and put on the short black tricot dress, she’ll see him again in one of the seaside hotels.
She’ll wait for him in the lobby, he’ll come immediately and they’ll go up to one of the rooms, where their souls will intermingle as they did in the beginning. Dafna was right, there is no reason to remove him from her life now, of all times. As she drinks her coffee, she sees Alma come out of Noa’s room on her way to the small bathroom, wearing a black shirt, her skinny legs bare, and then she hears her brush her teeth.
“You’re still here,” Alma says uneasily as she pulls on her pants.
“You’re going out already? Where to? You’ve hardly slept.”
“To work, I have the morning shift,” Alma replies coldly. “You always complained that I was lazy, now I’m working hard, and that’s no good either?”
“Should I make you some coffee? A sandwich?” she offers.
“Coffee.” Alma yawns widely, her eyes half closed, looking totally drained, so wrung out by the internal and external work she does that she accepts her mother’s presence.
Iris hands her the cup and, like a devoted housekeeper, reports, “Today I’ll bring your clothes from the Laundromat. Would you like to meet later? We’ll buy you something pretty to wear?”
“I don’t have time.”
But to her surprise, Alma doesn’t ask when she’s leaving, when she’ll return her key and vacate her Tel Aviv bed, which she has also taken over. Is it really out of tiredness that she doesn’t protest, or deep down, does her mother’s presence make her feel safe?
She goes out into the street again, the humidity striking her face like a used floor rag, exhaust fumes filling her throat, and walks to the parking lot, so excited about seeing him that the heat doesn’t bother her. Nor does the ominous news broadcast waiting for her on the car radio or the high cost of the parking. The rendezvous awaiting her lifts her by the hair and raises her above reality. As she drives to the hotel where the conference on nerve pain is to be held that day, she suddenly realizes that this is exactly how her daughter must feel now, because that man, the owner of an inconsequential little bar in south Tel Aviv, rescued her from the boredom of her daily life and offered her change, an acrobatic leap over the reality of her life. No more TV sets, computer monitors, and radar screens, but roller-coaster days and nights, and that’s why she’s a prisoner, mesmerized by the terrible, exhilarating experience she is suddenly having, by the additional faces she never found in the mirror before. But she, her mother who brought her into the world, must teach her, just as she taught her to walk and talk and cross on the crosswalks, that we have to forge a peace treaty with reality as it is, with its heat and humidity, its dreariness and boredom, its high cost of parking and its news headlines—for only there are we free. She must teach her, even though she herself has only just learned that what appears to be life above reality is, in fact, enslavement.
The sea sparkles, winking at her with countless turquoise-white eyes, and she lingers in her car in the hotel parking lot. Hasn’t she drummed it into the teachers and parents that only by setting a personal example can we truly effect change? If she does get out of the car and see him now, as she yearns to do, if she does take her life in that direction, she will have no right to expect her daughter to diverge from her path. It isn’t black magic, it’s education.
Is that his car moving toward her? If she sees him now, she won’t be able to overcome her feelings—she is meant for him and he for her, the spring and the mulberry tree will testify to that. But a young woman gets out of the car and hurries inside to the conference, while she leaves behind the luxury hotel that overlooks the sea and drives with a heavy heart toward the ground-floor apartment that beckons to thieves, Peeping Toms, and insects, the apartment that suddenly became a booby trap. She drives slowly, as if in a funeral procession, despite the honking horns and passing cars signaling her, her heart as heavy as the price. She doesn’t know how or even if she will justify it, because together and separately, she and Alma will have to learn about the beauty of reality as it is.
SEVENTEEN
Though they didn’t eat a thing, she cooks again. Maybe she’ll go out into the street with the full pots, distribute the food free to passersby, force them to eat the way she forced Alma, and while chopping onions, garlic, and eggplants, she tries to plan her next move. She has to get to Alma, but not she herself, she needs a messenger, so she browses through the contacts on her phone. She once had friends in Tel Aviv, but she hasn’t kept in touch and feels uncomfortable calling suddenly, and mainly she doesn’t want to have a meaningless conversation or share intimate information either. Her fingers are drawn to the newest number that joined her list of contacts yesterday, and before she can change her mind, he answers and she asks quickly, “Are you free tonight, Sasha?”
Surprised, he replies, “The truth is, yes, I am. Don’t tell me that I’m going out on a date with the principal!”
“Not exactly a date, and not with the principal, just with a worried mother, okay? You must know all about that.”
“Absolutely, my mom is always worried. Cool, so where should we meet?”
She tries unsuccessfully to remember the name of the café she saw next to Alma’s bar. “I’ll text you the address when I’m on the way, okay? How about seven o’clock?”
“Cool,” he says again, still surprised. “A date with the principal, it’s huge!”
She hangs up on his laughter and hurries into the shower, her body once again bitter and sweaty. Eitan is surely waiting for her, occasionally checking his phone. The conferees won’t be looking out of the windows of their room on a high floor, from there everyone looks as tiny as grasshoppers, and so does their pain. No, she must immerse herself in the masses now like a foreign worker who has left behind everything she holds dear. Is there really no other way? Tonight, apparently, there isn’t, and tonight is the night she needs help urgently, she can’t wait anymore for the girls to come home at dawn. She dries herself quickly, combs her hair, puts on the long black dress, and leaves the apartment. In the muted twilight, she sees the desolation of the city, its heat undiminished by the evening, a sick, festering city that infects young girls with its disease. Night has not yet fallen to hide the dirt and congestion, the party has not yet begun. Again and again, she bumps into bike riders, baby-carriage pushers, and grocery-cart pullers, but now, for some reason, they seem as frightened as she. Does it have something to do with the news broadcast? She wants to talk to them, ask them to follow her in a long procession all the way to Alma’s bar, where they will gather in front of the large window until Alma comes out of her own free will. Alma might actually be lonely, filled with anxiety the way Iris was yesterday, so she’ll surround her with people. Only it isn’t to Alma’s bar that she walks now, but to the one nearby that looks almost the same.
Do all these wretched places look alike? The waitress is skinny and appears stressed out. Does she also work for nothing, is she also battling her ego? Probably it’s only because of the workload, it isn’t easy to pay for an apartment in the middle of Tel Aviv. She listens distractedly to Sasha’s plans for the future, he wants to be a psychiatrist, to treat children like him.
She makes do with a frozen vodka, but orders the most expensive item on the menu and a huge beer for him, enjoys watching him as he eats and speaks, his sharp jaw moving rhythmically under his high cheekbones, his blue, slightly slanted eyes, his dark skin. He was such a breathtakingly beautiful child that people took pleasure in looking at him, but under the angelic mask was a devilish determination. “I’m sure you’ll succeed, Sashinka,” she says, “that’s what your mother calls you, right? Even when you were eleven, you were the most determined person I’d ever met.”
Chuckling, he says, “Determined to make everyone’s life miserable.”
“In the end, that seems to have been marginal. It’s a fact that you managed to channel that determination in the right direction. At meetings, we always used to say that you’d be either the head of the Mafia or the prime minister.”
“It turns out that’s more or less the same thing. Hey, this is great beer, can you order me another glass?”
“Leave room for the rest,” she says, “our night is just beginning.” When he looks at her in embarrassment, she laughs, “Don’t worry, Sashinka, I’m not into younger men. I need your help with Alma.” As he eats, she explains what she needs him to do, simply sit in Alma’s bar, text her about what’s going on, and wait for the moment when he can be of use to her. “I want her to feel protected, to know there’s someone else watching, that she doesn’t have to face him alone. Do you understand?”
The longer he listens to her, the softer his expression becomes, and she sees in his face the sensitive, volatile child he once was, so hurt when he felt wronged. Now it seems as if the wrong has been done to Alma, and that, along with the wrong she is doing to herself, hurts him personally. “Thank you for your faith in me,” he says with emotion, his eyes moist. “I’ll do what you say, I’ll sit there all night if you want me to. You know there’s no one in the world I owe as much as I owe you. I only hope it helps.”
“Thank you, sweetheart.” Her third day in the city and she too is tossing about cheap terms of endearment. “It has to help. I don’t have any other ideas at the moment.” Then she gives him some money and says, “Order whatever you want, stay there as long as you can.”
“Should I try to talk to her?”
“Maybe, if it isn’t forced. I trust you, kid.”
He stands up slowly, apparently finding it difficult to leave her. Then he bends down and pats her shoulder in an awkward gesture of encouragement. “It’ll be okay,” he says with a smile, but his eyes are moist. “I believe in miracles, and also in mothers. Just look at me.”
Yes, she smiles as she watches him walk away in his striped shirt and cargo pants, his huge light-colored sneakers, you really are a miracle. Most of the staff were sure that in only a few years he would be in a center for juvenile delinquents. Teachers came to her in tears and parents called constantly, threatening to take their children out of the school if he wasn’t expelled, as he had been from several other schools. Then there was his mother, who worked hard in a pharmaceutical factory, helpless and also frightened of him. How could Iris expel him and cause her to lose more days of work, how could she transfer him to a special education school when she sensed his rare mind, his extraordinary abilities under the hooligan’s mask he showed the world. So she took him under her wing and patiently and firmly dismantled the wall of obstacles he had built. He occasionally disappointed her and she almost broke, but she couldn’t give up on him. Even when he hurt one of the hamsters in the animal petting corner she had cultivated, she believed him when he said that he had just wanted to see its inner organs. “He’ll be a surgeon one day,” she promised his terrified mother, “don’t worry, believe in him, in yourself and in us. We’ll show him the path and he’ll take it.”
Now, with a heavy heart, she recalls that year. Even without him, her job would have been almost impossible, what with the supervisor who was just waiting for her to fail, the staff of burnt-out teachers, and the difficult pupils, but she didn’t give up. Of course, her Alma paid the price, because when she came home exhausted, she didn’t have any patience or interest left. Perhaps there was a rare cosmic justice in the fact that the boy who had drained her mother’s patience was now mobilized to save the girl who had been neglected because of him, who had become a child of the cosmos.
And here comes his first report. “I’m sitting at the bar, Alma looks wiped out, the other waitress is more interested in me, the boss is wearing white clothes, sitting at the bar next to me, can I punch him in the face?”
She reads and rereads the words until another text appears: “Rissi, the conference is over now. Can you meet me? Let me help you.” All those letters spin around her, asking for her attention, and her fingers hesitate above the keyboard. “My love,” she types, again feeling that if she sends the text, Alma is lost, and if she doesn’t send it, Alma will be saved—or perhaps she’s wrong?
Perhaps she should learn from Noa’s mother. “I have my own life,” she had proclaimed, “what we do is our own business.” Alma will gain nothing from her loss, but nonetheless, she erases the words, then immediately retypes and sends them, her heart pounding. But she is answered immediately with a question mark and a smiley, realizing that she has mistakenly texted Sasha instead of Eitan. This, she is convinced, is incontrovertible proof that she must put her own wants aside until she saves Alma, even if this act is so much more formidable as compared to her small mistake. She puts her phone in her bag to avoid being tempted and orders another frozen vodka. Then she immediately takes it out again because, after all, she’s waiting for reports, and the knowledge that Eitan is waiting for her reply lies heavily on her. Is she taking revenge on him for having left her?
Instead of answering him, she texts Alma: “Hi sweetie, you must be tired. When will you get home? I’m waiting for you.” Then she updates Sasha, “I texted Alma,” and Sasha replies, “She has no time for texts, she’s running back and forth, the place is mobbed.” To her surprise, she receives a quick, curt reply, “Don’t wait for me, go back to your house,” and when she reports to Sasha, he sends her a blurry picture. But she recognizes Alma’s cell phone with its red cover lying on the counter next to a white sleeve, and she understands that it wasn’t Alma who replied, but Boaz. Her anger mounts when she realizes that her text led Boaz to interrogate Alma aggressively, and she is being raked over the coals that very moment. She can barely keep herself from jumping up and running over there—it’s so close—to drag Alma out of that place. No one can stop Sasha, who will be happy to display the power of his fists by landing a few punches on the owner’s face.
Forget everything I once preached to you against violence and finish off that man, she’ll whisper to him, but she has to wait, the time isn’t ripe yet. She calls Mickey to let him know what’s happening, and she is startled to hear how alert and calm he sounds. He’s helping Omer study for his civics final, he tells her, knowing it will make her happy. “He has a good head,” he says, almost surprised, and she decides not to disrupt their pleasant time together with bad news from Tel Aviv.
“Lovely,” she says, “so we’ll talk later.”
Once again she reads the text, “Don’t wait for me, go back to your house,” scrolling back over the few texts they have exchanged. How many of them were actually written by him? “I’m busy, sorry,” “I’m at work,” “I have a really crazy day, I’m doing a double shift and have to close up too,” “Can’t make it Friday,” “Can’t make it Saturday,” “Can’t make it Sunday.” Why did she agree to give him free access to her cell phone? Is he also sending texts in her name to the men she sleeps with at his behest? She shakes with rage, how did this happen to Alma, how is this still happening to young girls, young women, in the twenty-first century, after all the revolutions? Her grandmother was married off against her will to a man who turned out to be violent, she was prevented from getting an education, kept from achieving independence. But Alma, whose parents are so an
xious for her to enroll in university, who sees a model of equality at home—how can she be so willing to give up her freedom?
“Are you cold? Should I lower the air-conditioning?” the waitress asks.
She mumbles, “It doesn’t matter, I’m cold on the inside.”
But the waitress won’t stop: “Do you want a cup of tea? Maybe soup? We have great celery soup.”
Iris orders both tea and soup even though she wants to get out of there, even though she doesn’t know where she will go. There is no place where she can escape the unbearable feeling, because for some reason, Boaz’s control over her daughter’s phone horrifies her even more than his control over her mind. Her throat contracts and she breathes heavily, as if she has been exposed to hazardous materials and is beginning to die an agonizing death. Once again she reaches for her phone, maybe she’ll call Eitan anyway, maybe he’s still in the city. What’s the point of a personal example that no one knows about, that saddens her so much, that tortures her, because she is meant for him and he is meant for her. The spring and the mulberry tree will testify.
Maybe she’ll ask the solicitous waitress to tie her to the chair so she can’t call, the way Odysseus commanded his sailors to lash him to the mast. Who knows how she’ll respond; after all, even in this city, which has seen everything, this will undoubtedly be an unusual request. But she is in an unusual situation and she is the mother of a daughter who is in an unusual situation, and isn’t that, in fact, what her daughter has chosen, to shackle herself completely?
This place is almost empty for a reason, the soup is bland and the tea tepid. But that’s fine with her, no commotion around her and no one to look at her apart from the waitress, who comes over to her again now and asks mechanically, “Is everything okay?”
Iris nods resentfully. People have stopped listening to what they say, have stopped looking around and exercising good judgment. “Does it look to you like everything is okay?” she rebukes her, then apologizes, “I’m sorry, it’s nothing personal, it’s just that those questions are so unnecessary.”
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