Three Floors Up

by Eshkol Nevo

  Do you get it? Lyri looks exactly like my mother. And Nimrod doesn’t look like Assaf either. When I tried to explain to myself why he seems so cut off from them, this thought crossed my mind: maybe if one of them looked like him, it would be different. And now a new thought joined that one: maybe he too noticed that Nimrod looks like Eviatar. And that’s what put him off.

  I was so lost in thought that I didn’t notice they were still standing in front of me, puddles forming at their feet.

  “His pajamas are under his pillow,” I said.

  He told them a bedtime story.

  That is, first he asked them what book they wanted him to read them, and they began arguing, as usual, but then, before the argument could escalate into insults and tears, he said, “How about if I make up a story for you?” The offer shocked them so much that it stopped the argument, making them silent with expectation.

  I was silent too. I pressed my shoulders against the wall next to the bedroom and listened.

  “A fire once broke out in a forest,” he began.

  “Andrea doesn’t like scary stories,” Lyri said.

  “Tell her not to worry,” Eviatar said. “It has a happy end.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “Then okay.”

  “All the animals in the forest crossed the river that ran through the middle of the forest so that the water in the river would protect them from the fire. Only the scorpion stayed on the riverbank, scratched its head with its claw, like this, and didn’t go into the river. Do you have any idea…why he didn’t want to go in?”

  “Because he’s allergic to water,” said Nimrod (who’s allergic to chocolate, yogurt, bee stings, and spring).

  “Exactly,” Eviatar said. “Scorpions live on land. Their bodies aren’t built for water. But this scorpion was very lucky. Because who happened to pass by at that very moment? The turtle. Hi, turtle, the scorpion said, is there any way you would agree to carry me on your back to the other side of the river? No, there is no way, said the turtle. You’re a scorpion. You’ll sting me. Why in the world would I sting you, said the scorpion. If I sting you, we’ll both drown. But you’re a scorpion to the core, you’ll have to sting me in the end, said the turtle. I promise I won’t sting you, turtle, said the scorpion. Swear it, said the turtle.”

  “He should swear to God,” Nimrod said (his nursery school teacher’s helper is religious).

  “I swear I won’t sting you, the scorpion said. And the turtle let him climb onto his back. The fire burning the trees in the forest was racing toward them, so they hurried—as much as a turtle can hurry—into the water. The turtle swam toward the other side, and the scorpion lay on his back the whole time so that the water wouldn’t touch his claws, God forbid.”

  “This is a scary story,” Lyri said. “You promised Andrea that it wouldn’t be a scary story.”

  “So I’ll hold your hands, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “When they were more or less in the middle,” Eviatar continued in a slightly brighter voice, “the scorpion suddenly felt a kind of tickle through his whole body. He knew that tickle. It was the tickle that always made him sting. Yes, all of a sudden, he really felt like stinging the turtle. No, what he felt was that he had to sting the turtle. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be a scorpion.”

  (I almost walked into the room at that point. It annoyed me that he was about to break his promise to Lyri, because the end was horrible, and Lyri couldn’t always distinguish between stories and reality. Later, she might imagine that there was a scorpion creeping around in her room.)

  “But then”—Eviatar raised his voice, for me, as if he knew I was waiting tensely on the other side of the wall—“without their noticing it, a huge, kindhearted crocodile approached them…”

  “How could they not notice it,” Nimrod objected, “if it was so huge!”

  “An ex-cell-ent ques-tion”—Eviatar stretched out the words so he would have time to think of a good enough answer to the boy’s objection. “So it’s like this…First of all…despite their huge size, crocodiles can be very hush-hush when they move. Besides…the turtle and the scorpion were so involved in being themselves, in acting the way they were supposed to act, that it never occurred to them that a huge, kindhearted crocodile might come along and act like a kindhearted crocodile is supposed to act. And that’s exactly what happened. He approached them underwater…very hush-hush, of course, then opened his huge mouth and…and trapped both of them inside.”

  “God help us,” Nimrod said.

  “All at once,” Eviatar continued, “they found themselves in its mouth. And the inside of a crocodile’s mouth is totally dark. Not a single ray of light can penetrate it. So what does a scorpion do when it’s in such a dark place?”

  Lyri and Nimrod didn’t answer.

  “What do you do when Mommy turns off the light and says good night?”

  “We say mean things to each other.”

  “And then?”

  “We fall asleep,” Lyri said.

  “Exactly,” Eviatar said. “The scorpion fell asleep and snored through its tail on the turtle’s back and forgot to sting it.”

  “But then the crocodile ate both of them, right?” Nimrod said, still rebelling.

  “That’s just it. It didn’t. The kindhearted crocodile had no intention of eating them. He didn’t particularly like the way they tasted. With the one eye that he always kept out of the water, he’d seen what was about to happen. He’d seen that the scorpion was going to sting the turtle and drown them both, and he figured that the only way to save them from themselves would be to approach from the side and…do something surprising. And that’s why, right after he took them into his mouth, he climbed onto the opposite riverbank and spit them out. As they rolled around on the ground, they separated. The turtle walked slowly in one direction and the scorpion, who woke up slowly, walked quickly in the other direction, and the three of them—the turtle, the scorpion, and the crocodile—were saved from the fire, which didn’t cross the river because fire, naturally, has to be fire, and it can’t cross water. A happy end.”

  “A very happy end. Another story!” Lyri said.

  “It’s late,” Eviatar said.

  “So just say ‘hush-hush’ one more time,” Nimrod begged. “Please?”

  “Hu-u-ush-hu-u-ush,” Eviatar said with such hush-hushiness that it wasn’t only Nimrod and Lyri who laughed. I chuckled quietly on the other side of the wall.

  “Okay, sweetie pies,” he said, “I’m turning off the light now and you’re going to do what you do when it’s dark…”

  “Say mean things to each other! Then go to sleep!” Nimrod cried, sounding very wide awake.

  “Can you ask Mommy to come and wish us salty dreams?” Lyri asked (before they go to sleep, I always say: Sweet dreams, salty dreams, peppery dreams, punctuating each spice with a kiss).

  “Sure,” Eviatar said. “I’ll call her.”

  As I walked into the room and he walked out of it, our shoulders brushed against each other. That sounds hot, but the truth is that he’s so skinny that his prominent shoulder bone stabbed me.

  The kids, on the other hand, were as soft as usual. Those are my favorite moments of the day, you know? I lie down next to each one of them. First I cuddle up to Nimrod under the covers, then I do it with Lyri. We hug, kiss, talk. Nimrod loves me to rub his back between his shoulders. Lyri loves me to stroke her hair. Both of them love it when I rub their necks with the tip of my nose.

  If I’m permitted a moment of satisfaction, I think that one of the things I’m most proud of as a mom is that I’ve taught my children that the first way to show love is with physical contact. I see the way they say goodbye to other children. They’re always the ones who initiate the hug. Sometimes it’s funny because the other children don’t always understand where it’s coming from and just stand there with their arms hanging in the air—but still, the sight always fills my heart with joy. Why?
Because at least in that, I’ve succeeded in breaking the chain: my grandmother didn’t hug my mother, so my mother didn’t hug me. But I hug Lyri. So she’ll hug her daughter too.

  Right before Lyri fell asleep she asked whether Andrea could stay over at our place. “She’s afraid to go home in the dark,” Lyri explained, “because there are lots of scorpions in the street now.”

  “No problem,” I said.

  “Will you tell her mom?” she asked. Responsible, as usual. Like an oldest child, like me.

  “Yes,” I promised.

  Nimrod didn’t say anything, even though I could tell from his breathing that he was totally awake. That’s really something. He can snatch things out of his older sister’s hands, scribble in her notebook with a marker, pull her hair, and repeat every sentence she says just to drive her crazy.

  But he never teases her about Andrea. Only sometimes, when she’s not around, he comes over to me and asks quietly, “Andrea isn’t real, right? She’s in Lyri’s imagination, right?”

  The doorbell rang not more than half an hour after the kids fell asleep, Eviatar was scraping the dishes and putting them in the dishwasher. Without thinking about it, I got up to open the door. But he hurried over and stood between me and the door, signaling me with his finger on his lips not to speak, and went to look through the peephole. Then he took a piece of paper and wrote, “It’s them. Tell them that you’re looking for the key.” I did. I made searching noises. Meanwhile, he opened the sliding doors and went out to the balcony. I gestured for him to wait a minute, and wrote on the paper, “The neighbors across the hall are out of the country. Hop over the railing to their balcony and hide in the children’s playhouse.”

  I opened the door, deliberately sliding the chain off its runner to show the confidence of someone with nothing to hide, smiled, and said, “Good evening. And who might you be, gentlemen?” (I was very good, really.) The loan shark thugs were short, but something about their haircut was violent. One of them was wearing a tight white T-shirt and had a wide chin. The other one was wearing a tight black T-shirt and had a pointy chin.

  “We’re looking for Eviatar Gat,” the one with the pointy chin said.

  “There must be some mistake,” I said. “This is Assaf Gat’s house.”

  “We know, ma’am,” he said. And they began walking around the house, opening doors.

  “Excuse me, what do you think you’re doing,” I objected angrily. I followed them. Tried to block their way. “There are children here! You can’t just come in like this—”

  They ignored me (only later did I understand how scary that was) and kept looking for Eviatar. Under the armchairs. In the crawl space above the ceiling. They opened kitchen cabinets, searched through the shirts in the closet, overturned the laundry basket. I protested, threatened to call the police, even took a picture of them with my cell phone. But they couldn’t have cared less.

  Nimrod and Lyri slept through the visit. Even when the men turned on the light in their room. Even when they opened their closet. (In that respect, thank heaven, the kids are like Assaf: nothing wakes them up.) I thought that if one of those thugs dared to touch my children, I’d put what I learned in that self-defense class to use, and was already tensing one foot for a kick to the balls of the one in the white shirt, but they finished searching the kids’ room quickly. As if they didn’t feel comfortable about being there either.

  Finally, they opened the sliding doors and went out onto the balcony. Whenever anyone describes moments like that, they say, “I held my breath.” I didn’t hold my breath, but my thumb climbed onto my index finger and started tapping it, which always happens when I’m stressed.

  They stayed on the balcony for a long time, then came back into the living room. The one with the white shirt said, “Sorry for the mess” (that’s what he said, I swear). “We got some bad information.” The one with the black shirt turned his pointy chin toward me and said, “A word of advice, ma’am. If Eviatar Gat happens to show up here, don’t let him in. He’ll just cause you trouble. You have kids, so think of them.”

  “Clean up the mess you made,” I said.

  “What?” They looked at me, shocked.

  “You turned my house upside down. Now clean up the mess you made,” I persisted.

  They didn’t. And I didn’t really say that. But wouldn’t it have been great if I had? As I write, I constantly feel the temptation to describe what might have happened instead of what really happened. I’ll restrain myself for the time being, but consider yourself warned. I don’t know how long I can keep the impulse under control.

  This is what we agreed on in the hushed, inter-balcony discussion I had with Eviatar right after the thugs hopped into their car (the owl sat on a nearby branch, looking pleasant and saying nothing, but clearly disapproving): He absolutely could not stay with us any longer. It was too complicated. I’d unlock our neighbor’s apartment with the key they left us before they went away and he could hide out there until the yacht that was supposed to take him to Cyprus was ready. Unless one of the chins came wandering around our building again. In that case, he’d have to leave.

  “Of course,” he said.

  “I’m warning you ahead of time,” I said, “the neighbors’ apartment is a bit weird.”

  “Okay. I’m not exactly in a position to be choosy,” he said. (I’m asking you, as a film expert: do you think there really is something sexy about people who keep their sense of humor even under pressure, or do we think that only because all the action-movie machos behave that way?)

  The upstairs neighbor, a retired judge, opened her shutters. Not completely, but she clearly moved them. That’s all I need now, I thought in horror—for a representative of the judicial system (retired, but she must still have connections) to see what’s happening here right under her nose. I signaled Eviatar to wait and hurried to open our neighbor’s door.

  Our next-door neighbors’ apartment is full of clocks.

  When I say full, I mean exploding with them. They have clocks in the living room, in all the bedrooms, in the hallways too. In fact, there isn’t a single space in their apartment that doesn’t have a few ticking clocks. Hanging one next to the other. With only a very small space between them.

  It started with the father’s private collection. The mother—she talks about it as if it’s furniture they buy in Ikea, as if it’s totally normal—told me that he brought them with him to their first apartment, and since then, he’s been adding a few more to the collection every year.

  I don’t know if I’m getting across to you just how crazy it is. They don’t have even a single picture on the walls. Just clock after clock after clock. Round clocks and elliptical clocks, clocks with Roman numerals and clocks without numbers, cuckoo clocks and grandfather clocks, clocks that show the hour here and clocks that show the hour there. And they all tick constantly in every corner of the house, every second. Tick tick tock. They must be used to it, but every time I go in there, I get tics in my eyelids.

  There are four kids in that family. The oldest is an eighteen-year-old girl. The youngest is a six-year-old boy.

  I wonder what it’s like to grow up with such a clear knowledge that time is running out.

  And what makes me laugh is that they’re a quiet family. Solid. Can you picture it? Apart from that clock fetish—they’re terribly respectable. A clichéd cliché.

  They always take their annual vacation in the same place too. Crete. And always for exactly ten days. They leave me their key so I can go in and air out the place for them every other day. Clocks need to breathe, the father explained to me once (I swear, that’s what he said).

  Usually, when I go in to air out their place, I walk around a little to see the new clocks that have been added in the inner rooms that visitors don’t usually enter. Sometimes, you can connect the clocks to various stages of life: in the teenage son’s room there was a new clock that had a woman’s legs as hands. And sometimes the connection is extremely obscure: what d
oes it mean that in the eighteen-year-old daughter’s room, the insides of all the clocks are exposed?

  In any case, I had no time for clocks then. I didn’t even turn on the light.

  I said to Eviatar, “Don’t open the door for anyone. Under any circumstances. I’ll bring you some lunch tomorrow, and I’ll knock three times, pause, and then two more times.”

  “Thanks. I’m sorry about all this…”

  His bottom lip trembled again.

  “Be sorry at lunchtime tomorrow,” I interrupted him.

  That night, I dreamed that the two of us, you and I, were walking along the main street of Granada. The shop owners on the street devoured us with their eyes as we passed by. I thought they were looking at me more than at you, and I liked that, but then Rami Leider, who was my commander in the army, suddenly appeared and said that we had to leave that city as quickly as possible because civil war was going to break out the next day. I tried to argue with him, to tell him that a bullet hadn’t been fired there in years, but he was very assertive and sure about his sources, and he took us to the central bus station. Except that as the bus was leaving the city, I remembered that I’d forgotten my lucky sweater at the hostel, the checked sweater I bought in the thieves’ market. I wanted it very badly, so I stood up to get off the bus, but then your face, Netta, suddenly turned as white as the owl’s and you pushed me firmly back into my seat and said that it was too late to go back and I had nothing to worry about, Andrea would get the sweater for me.

  At 7:30 in the morning, I was already knocking on the neighbors’ door. I knew it was wrong. I knew I was putting myself in danger. But the kids wanted, demanded to see Uncle Eviatar, each in his own way: Lyri went back to bed, surrounded herself with a fortress of pillows, burrowed under the covers, and said in a firm, quiet voice that she and Andrea were not getting out of bed until Uncle Eviatar came back. Nimrod stood in the middle of the living room and screamed, “Uncle Eviatan! Uncle Eviatan!” Lyri corrected him from her room: “It’s Eviatar, stupid.” And Nimrod shot back: “You’re stupid!”