Pain

by Zeruya Shalev

  “Come back to me? Now that’s really something,” Omer says with a chuckle, looking at her suspiciously and then at his father.

  To her surprise, Alma comes over to her, takes the paper from her hand, and without looking at it, crumples it into an ever-smaller ball. “It must be a mistake,” she says.

  Iris looks at them, her gaze moving from one to the other. They are here now, they are present. “It’s not a mistake,” she says, “it’s an old story.”

  Zeruya Shalev was born at Kibbutz Kinneret. She is the author of four previous novels, The Remains of Love, Love Life, Husband and Wife, and Thera, and a book of poetry and two children’s books. Her work has been translated into twenty-five languages and won multiple awards including the Corine International Book Prize, the Welt Literature Award, and the Prix Femina étranger.

  Sondra Silverston is a native New Yorker who has been living in Israel since 1970. Among her published translations are Amos Oz’s Between Friends, which won the 2013 National Jewish Book Award for fiction, Eshkol Nevo’s Homesick, which was long-listed for the Independent Translation prize, and works by Etgar Keret, Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, Alona Frankel, and Savyon Liebrecht.