Zion's Fiction

by Zion's Fiction- A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature (retail) (epub)

  Liron went to the nearby hardware store and came back with the expensive salad serving bowls I wanted to buy last week before she had said, “Danielle, we don’t have three hundred shekels, and we hardly ever eat salad.” It was only when she unpacked them and started washing them with hands already red and wrinkled from water that I realize that I would have to crack the mirror.

  The thought made me feel tired. The last time I cracked the mirror was only two years before, and it took me over a week to get over the terrible fatigue. I lay in bed with red eyes, staring at the ceiling, getting up only to go to the bathroom. Fortunately, Liron didn’t see the cuts on my hand. It took her physically carrying me to the doctor’s—I was too weak to walk—and his not finding anything wrong before she could be persuaded that all I needed was some rest.

  When night fell, and Liron’s weeping from the den finally died down, I stood in front of the mirror, trying to delay the inevitable while examining the oh-so-smooth spotless surface, the ancient gilded frame, my own familiar reflection.

  Liron hated the mirror. She thought it was ugly and old fashioned. I didn’t like it either, for completely different reasons. At first I loved looking at it, especially after cracking it. The first time I did it I was ten years old, after destroying—in a fit of rage—the doll Nana Chana left me, the only thing she gave me other than the mirror. Now, I wouldn’t crack the mirror for something as silly as that. I did it then, and for months after I would sit in front of the mirror holding the doll, enchanted, looking at the other Danielle who put the fragments in a small jug by her bed and would occasionally take them out and touch them. Once, she cut her finger on one of them. When she grew up and would look in the mirror, I would study her reflection, comparing it to my own. Same red hair, same green eyes, but something in the eyes was different, and it wasn’t just that she couldn’t look right back at me.

  I stopped watching that Danielle. I had thought she would grow up to be much like me, and it would be boring to look at her. But things turned out differently. She went to a different high school, studied nursing, and married a doctor. A man. I stopped looking at her because I could no longer see myself in her cold eyes when she put her hair up in a tight bun every morning. It bothered me, seeing how different from me she became over such a small thing. I didn’t look much at the others, either, since I had Liron.

  Liron, I reminded myself. I’m doing this so Liron won’t be unhappy. I thought about one more minute, gathering my strength. And then I made a fist. I hit the mirror hard, concentrating on Mika, thinking about her fur, white with gray spots, about her quivering whiskers, a soft purr under the blanket. The mirror cracked. The sudden pain in my hand followed the sharp sound of breakage. But the little crack didn’t stay on my side. It faded into the mirror. And then a different Danielle looked at me from the other side. Yet she wasn’t looking at me, but at the small crack in her mirror. Her hand wasn’t bleeding, and there was a confused expression on her face. She was wondering what had happened, I knew, wondering what she is doing there. And then she heard Liron cry louder again from the other room, confusion turned to sorrow, and she left the mirror and went again to hug and comfort and pack.

  On my side, Liron had stopped crying, and a small white cat with grey spots stood for a moment in the door, licking herself before making her way to the bed. I looked at her for a long moment, smiling, until Liron appeared in the doorway. I quickly hid my bleeding hand.

  “Whatcha doing?” she asked, coming up behind me. She put her arms around my waist and looked at our reflection in the mirror. She didn’t see what I saw on the smooth surface—the empty room, the sounds of crying and begging from the other room, followed by shouts, a door being slammed shut.

  “Looking at my pretty girl,” I answered, and turned into her hug, turning my back on the mirror. Liron smiled against my lips. “Flattery won’t get you anywhere. It’s your turn to do the dishes.”

  I would spend more time looking before Liron became mine. I was curious to know if the mistakes I fixed, the errors I erased, were justified for me. I looked at them often, as if to make certain, with evil satisfaction, that they were miserable, so that I could be happy. I would look at the Danielle who made the mistake of choosing biology instead of communications as her major in high school, so she never ended up getting close to Shiri Rosenstein, never kissing her on the lawn. She lived with a man and would often look at the mirror to avoid looking at him. He hugged her at night while he slept and she would lie awake, looking at the mirror, and I knew that she couldn’t understand why she wasn’t satisfied. I would look at the Danielle who decided to study gender instead of literature. She was a little plumper than I and lived with an angry woman who’d shout at her. I would look at the Danielle who had refused the job offer at the new publishing house because she was afraid it would be too big a risk. She, like me, met Liron, but Liron left her six months later after yet another fit of rage. She would edit, mostly at nights, sitting bleary-eyed in front of the computer, drinking a lot. I was certain that she would get fired soon.

  The need I hated in myself, to always make sure the other Danielles were unhappy, disappeared when Liron came into my life. It was a month after we moved in together, and right after we hung a sign with our names on it over the door, she wouldn’t stop complaining about it. “Why do we need a mirror in the bedroom?” she complained. “Why this mirror? It’s so ugly.” I told her that it was a family heirloom and that it had sentimental value—which was true, so I felt only slightly guilty.

  On the evening when she broke the mirror, Liron waited for me in the kitchen when I got home, and when I saw her face, I immediately knew she did something to the mirror. But she was so pale and frightened that I also knew that it wasn’t on purpose. Liron said that she tried to get some cardboard boxes she realized she would never unpack onto the top shelf, and one of them fell, hit the mirror, and broke it. “The broken remains are there,” she said. “I didn’t know whether to clean … maybe you want, I mean, to patch it up … or maybe keep them in a box and put a new mirror in the frame. I’m sure we can fix the frame….”

  My suspicion was confirmed when we entered the bedroom. The mirror was on the floor, next to the cardboard box that had broken it, where it fell. It was intact. There were no shards on the carpet and not a single crack on its smooth face, which reflected Liron’s astonished expression. She looked at me, confusion and fear on her face, and rubbed her eyes. Her hands went, on their own, to wander on the mirror’s smooth, perfect, surface.

  “You must have only thought you broke it,” I tried.

  “No, no….I’m sure, it was here … and there were shards all over the floor.” She pointed, afraid. “And the frame, it was here, in two pieces….”

  “You dreamed it.”

  “I did not dream it.”

  It took me a long time to calm her down.

  At night we lay with Mika snuggled between us, her back to my belly, her soft paws resting on Liron’s chest. Liron claimed that was uncomfortable. “I have scratches on my boob,” she complained, inspecting her body in the mirror in the morning. I smiled when she went to shower and I went to examine myself in the mirror. The weakness was not as bad this time—Liron barely noticed, but I still saw the unnatural pallor of my skin, the fatigue in my motions. Pain still pulled in my hand. Liron bandaged it earlier—I had to break a plate while washing the dishes to explain the cut. Cracking the mirror took so much energy. I hoped I wouldn’t have to do it again soon.

  A need I didn’t understand led me back to the other Danielle, the latest one. She was standing in front of the mirror, looking at her expression with eyes red with tears. The bed was made—apparently, Liron had not come back that night. Suddenly, I felt the full weight of the guilt, as I have never felt it after cracking the mirror. I didn’t understand why I felt that way. She was just another Danielle, a mistake. And it was my right to fix my mistakes. It wasn’t my fault Liron wasn’t with her now. “There are so few people who ca
n change their lives, choose their options,” Grandma said when she gave me the mirror. “You should be proud to be one of them.”

  I touched the mirror, its perfect smooth surface, looking at a crack that only existed on her side. “Sorry,” I said, even though I knew she couldn’t hear me.

  I sorrowfully turned my eyes from the other Danielle, who kept looking at the mirror. Suddenly my back tingled, and I froze, turned around slowly. The other Danielle wasn’t looking at her reflection. She was looking at me. I was sure of it. Her eyes focused on me with pure hatred. I stared at her, frozen, stunned, trying to understand how she could look back at me. Her look was cold and furious, and she balled her hand into a fist. Fear suddenly ran in my veins, and I reached out to stop her, screaming, “No!”

  She was smiling at me while she broke the mirror.

  Liron lies so close, but there’s a wall between us. Her back is to me, stiff and upright. She’s been so cold to me since Mika, and I can’t help but wonder whether one day she’ll look at me again with love in her eyes. We don’t know which of us left the carrier open, but I know she blames me. I want to hug her and erase the pain she’s feeling, to be happy and to make her happy. But instead I cry silently, and my tears fall on the sheets, soak into the mattress, disappear into the night.

  And as I stop looking at her and turn around, refusing to sleep facing the frozen back, I wonder if it all could have been different. If only I could change it, the brief, stupid moment when the cage opened and Mika darted out of the cage and into the street. I think about it as I fall asleep, while my eyes rest on the crack that suddenly appeared, only two days ago, on the old mirror that my Grandma left me.

  The Stern-Gerlach Mice

  Mordechai Sasson

  I kept on falling even though I had regained consciousness, falling way, way down. I screamed like crazy and opened my eyes to find myself in a hospital bed. But the sensation of falling persisted. Worse than that, I could hear thoughts. Hear, not read—I perceived people’s thoughts through my sense of hearing. For half a day I kept pleading with doctors and visitors to stop the yammering inside their heads. People sitting beside me kept emitting an incessant, enervating babble of noises. I had to shout when I wanted to talk to them; otherwise I couldn’t hear myself. To make things worse still, my visitors shouted back at me, assuming that I was suffering from a loss of hearing.

  I finally realized that this mind-hearing thing had a lot to do with distance—inverse-square, or some other exponent. The further the persons who did the thinking were from me, the quieter their thoughts became. My pleadings finally made people sit as far away from me as possible, and then we really had to shout at each other. So all this talk about reading minds and broadcasting thoughts is bullshit. Old wives’ tales.

  Old wives? What about my Nana? Yes, they assured me. She’s alright.

  The police officer who came to question me asked if I had been injured by the mice. I told him that a sophisticated mouse-made weapon had been used against me. The policeman wanted to know how I could tell it was mouse-made. I said that the weapon was totally mousy, was designed to be operated by a mouse. The disgusting rodent had used its tongue to manipulate it.

  “Lucky for you, the Tin Beggar saved you,” said the policeman.

  The officer’s thundering thoughts told me how upset he was. First there was all this imbecilic biogenesis thing in the Judean Desert, with an outbreak of evolution so wild it ought to be called a revolution; then there was this American lady who came from outer space down to Jerusalem, after the Thirteenth Shock that had left her lethally disturbed. And now the mice were making their appearance on the troubled and troublesome stage of homeland security.

  I could hear how disgusted he was with the forthcoming war. He didn’t think it’s such a glorious deal, fighting mice. His thinking became too noisy, and I had to shout at him to stop it, just stop thinking and let his mind rest, let me rest as well.

  The sensation of falling lasted the whole day, even though I was awake, and because of this I was afraid even to move a finger. I lay stretched out like a wounded rubber sheet, pale as death itself, nausea churning inside me. My tongue lolling, I held tight both bedsides so as not to tumble in my nonexistent plummet.

  It took the entire day before I calmed down, ceased feeling that I was falling, and stopped hearing thoughts. The side effects of my injury slowly ebbed away. Now I could turn my mind to the war.

  The mice had taken over Nana’s street. Preserved in its old style as a Jerusalem heritage site, this street bordered on the religious neighborhoods. I didn’t think it was such a big deal, taking over that street. It had been taken over by roaches a long, long time ago. And the mice held it for just a short while. The Tin Beggar, willing to sacrifice its metallic soul, bravely defended all those unconscious people and, specifically, saved me. The Tin Beggar also evacuated people from the street, for which it won an official citation from City Hall. Lucky beggar!

  Then came the police, and later on the military. The military overcame the resistance offered by the mice and drove them away, devastating half the buildings in the street as collateral damage. The way I heard it, not a single house remained entirely intact. The Stern-Gerlach mice suffered seven casualties during the military’s assault, that’s all (I myself killed more than that), because of this ability of theirs to shift to microscopic size and evade direct hits. The military, on the other hand, filled a whole hospital ward with soldiers who kept begging those around them, as I did, to think quietly.

  The Stern-Gerlach mice!

  How did we get ourselves in such a mess?

  All thanks are due to science’s indefatigable efforts to uncover The Truth. Some smartass biophysicist had tried to measure the Stern-Gerlach effect produced by an electron beam (beta radiation) passing through living tissue. Except that the beta radiation was immediately absorbed by the tissue. So what did our clever fellow do? He drilled a hole in a cat’s skull, attached an array of powerful magnets to the sides of its head, and beta-radiated directly into the cat’s brain. The electrons were absorbed, of course, but an electromagnetic wave kept propagating as a pulse from the point of impact. Passing between the magnets, the pulse split, then split again when it passed between the next pair of magnets, and so on.

  The biophysicist rubbed his hands in pleasure when the cat lost consciousness in a series of bizarre convulsions. The cat remained unconscious and slowly perished because its immune system could no longer recognize it and started attacking it.

  Various animals were then beta-radiated directly into their brains, all of them responding with various ways of expiring, stranger and stranger yet. The form death took depended on the brain area radiated, and the length of time it took them to die proved to be species-dependent. And so, in this relentless pursuit of The Truth, the lab turned into an enormous slaughterhouse. All this bloody spectacle just to show that something happens when an exposed area of the brain is beta-radiated inside a magnetic field. Cleverness will get you anywhere!

  The experiment would have been halted in short order were it not for this curious fact: mice that were beta-radiated into the right temporal lobes of their cortices insisted on staying alive. Furthermore, lo and behold, the electric activity in their brains was enhanced. These mice became smarter than their control group counterparts. They learned faster which were the right buttons to push. Their ability to find the relationships between cause and effect across a time interval improved—meaning, their time perception became more extended. They turned out to be the uncontested champions in running through mazes in search of bits of cheese.

  This was all the biophysicist could discover. He wanted to try it on humans but was immediately told to shut up. However, one group of irradiated mice escaped the lab, multiplied, as mice do, and became Jerusalem’s scourge. The media gave them their name: the Stern-Gerlach mice. It was nearly impossible to get rid of them. You try to trap or poison a smart mouse with a good memory. In addition, the mice started massa
cring the cat population, making the alley cat the first urban animal officially designated a protected species.

  Despite all this, the Stern-Gerlach mice had never built tools, never shifted their size … until they took over Nana’s street.

  Three days after I had been injured, having recovered from all those side effects, I was released from hospital and immediately went to see Nana. Because this was how it all began….

  It all began when I came to see Nana at lunchtime the day before Tish’a b’Av, kicking crumbling pieces of pavement as I went along. A stubborn growth of Bermuda grass burst through the tough surface. I reached the heavily shaded corner, under Hasson’s pear tree, that led into the alley. The sun made me sweat profusely, but it also made the pears on this tree plumper. At the end of the alley, in front of her open door, Nana sat talking with the rest of the neighborhood’s old ladies. The biddies were chatting, occasionally bursting into laughter or stabbing their synthetic wool with knitting needles for emphasis, performing fancy fencing moves.

  Among the yentas sat Orit, Yaffa’s fat, unmarried daughter, making her best efforts to fit in with their Little Old Ladies world. The viciousness of her gossip, the poison in her words, and her habit of gloating were yet to be softened by age.

  Coming closer, I allowed myself a tiny smirk at their gossipfest and then called out to my Nana. Her eyes lit up when she saw me. I bent over and kissed her cheek. I love Nana even when she dabbles in the sea of gossip, and my love renders this murky sea pure and clear. Nana is proud of me—her eldest grandson, the university student.

  “My legs ache,” she said to me, “so why don’t you go in and warm some food for yourself? Think you can manage?”

  “Sure, Nana.”

  I went in, ate some, then dragged out a stool and sat there facing the old ladies, smoking a cigarette as they amped up their vicious gossip, brazenly besmirching those not present, shamelessly fawning on those who were. Every once in a while Orit would aggressively stop her needlework and ask me a question, just to be nice, to keep in touch with hers, the younger generation. I answered indifferently because she was so damned ugly.