by Zion's Fiction- A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature (retail) (epub)
The nun refused to touch the ring the Pole had put on the table in front of her. The next day he blocked her way on the stairs and tried to kiss her, but her shouts summoned Gila, who came running and managed to push him down the steps.
Frightened that the Pole might attack her, too, Gila begged the man to send him away, but the man claimed that the Pole had apologized to the nun and that they really needed the help of another man. And in fact, the intrepid Pole, with his highly developed senses and knowledge of the secrets of the place, would sometimes discover treasures, and in the end his presence in the room he chose for himself, next to the child’s room, was accepted as permanent. Again and again he’d offer the ring to the nun, which she refused, and because of that, or perhaps despite it, he would lie in wait for her, trap her in the pantry, where one day he managed to rip her dress, and one night he sneaked into her room and stroked her breast as she slept. The nun was terrified of him. For days after that night, she trailed after Gila like her shadow, barricaded the door to her room with heavy furniture, prayed out loud, murmuring the name Mary over and over again, and sought the nearness of the child, who would soon be three, sitting beside him as he studied Hebrew, writing square words on pieces of flat leaves that were as strong as cloth with a pipe stuffed with the peel of a black fruit, as hard as lead.
On clear mornings the two men would go out together, and whatever they brought back was received with cries of joy: wild chickens, edible fruit, a kitten they gave to the child as a gift that made him glow with happiness. Those days brought with them an awakening of new life, and Gila discovered in herself hidden desires she hadn’t known before. They further helped to delineate the borders of her new world, and just as, in the past, she used to long for new clothes she saw in shop windows, she now longed for a hat she’d seen in the passenger car of the train lying in the aisle among the theatrical clothes strewn there.
One day a golden-tailed bird appeared and built a nest in one of the trees, and a few days later, two more birds arrived, one white with a crown that resembled a bridal veil and the other covered with blue spots. On mornings when there were wind storms, Gila stayed under the covers beside the man, luxuriating in the ordinariness and the tranquility of the birds’ chirping, and she would feel her stomach and find the limb that had sprouted overnight, then shift her hand to the man’s stomach and hear him say, “It’s still there.” Sometimes the child would squeeze in between them, and the three of them would lie together in a tangle of arms and legs. One day the Pole succeeded in igniting a large flame by rubbing two bits of metal together, and they immediately replaced the rare flints, which required expertise to kindle. When the wild wheat ripened, they refrained from touching it because it reminded the man of a poisonous plant, but the Pole explained that it was edible and they went out into the fields the way people did in biblical times, and Gila had a memory from her previous life, the story of Ruth and Naomi and a play in her elementary school in which she played the part of Ruth, for which her cousin had lent her an expensive white nightgown she’d bought in Paris. That memory, like so many others, no longer caused her severe pain or longing, but merely tugged gently at her heart, as if she’d received regards from a distant lover. And there was a joyous day when the man found a bush whose leaves were excellent for making cigarettes. He kept the process a secret but allotted a generous number of cigarettes to the others, and in the evening they sat together and smoked, all except the nun, filling the air with yellowish smoke that smelled as sharp as eucalyptus. And one day Gila and the nun walked as far as the strange trees at the edge of the plain and saw that they had turquoise orbs, like amulets against the evil eye, hanging from the tips of their branches, and they found wild berries. The nun taught Gila a children’s song in Italian about children picking wild berries. The whole way they spoke in the new language they had created, a mixture of English and Italian, and before they reached home the nun had gotten Gila to swear twice that she would protect her from the Pole.
When the boy turned three, the sick man’s condition worsened. Now it was difficult for him to climb the stairs, so they emptied out the office for him, and he slept there. The nun brought a tub of water there every morning and helped him wash and dress, as devoted as a daughter. The sick man spent most days sitting and looking at the back garden. On cold days he looked out at it from inside the house, and during warmer hours he sat in the garden with his eyes closed or else he stared at the mounds of earth that marked the graves of the dead. Gila would occasionally go out and sit down beside him, fearing conversation with him and fascinated by it. And he, aware of this, openly amused himself with her.
“What do you look at all the time?” she asked.
“The question is not what we look at, but what we see. You, for example, look but you don’t see.”
She knew he was talking about the man, whom both of them had once seen staring at the nun.
“What do you see?” She would not allow him to drag her where he wanted.
“The question is not what I see, but whether what I see actually exists.”
“And how can we know?” She was still thinking about those looks.
“We can’t. Kant asked whether our consciousness has the tools to decipher the reality outside of us. And what, in your opinion, did he think?”
“What?”
“That we don’t!” He celebrated his victory over her lack of knowledge. “But Heidegger, yes, Heidegger thought that the question was irrelevant, that we are inside reality, we know it. Oh, Heidegger, I would love to know what he’d say about the reality here.” He closed his eyes and cut himself off from Gila with deliberate cruelty, leaving her determined not to think about the man looking at the nun.
Later on, as if the Pole had infected everyone with his own delirium, came a time that was as feverish and overwrought, as strident and unpredictable, as adolescence. Something in the air signaled calamity, and even the child felt it, never leaving the woman’s side throughout that time. The Pole tried again to attack the nun, and she managed to escape to Gila’s room. The old man, overtaken by rage, destroyed the fence in the back garden before he calmed down. The man, Gila knew without his saying a word about it, thought constantly about the woman who played the harp and about the son who was planning to be a musician. Restlessness permeated the air, as if the era of unexpected disasters had passed and dozens of signs were heralding the arrival of the next disaster.
During one of their nocturnal conversations, her head on his shoulder and her eyes on the moon that linked the worlds of time, the man suggested setting up a place for prayer in one of the empty rooms, because it was now—after they had a place to sleep and bread to eat and they knew of the treasures and traps the world around them held—now that they might begin to ask themselves the questions the ancients had asked after natural disasters had occurred, about good and evil, about crime and punishment, and it seemed right to prepare a place where they could draw strength from God.
“But you don’t believe in God,” she said in astonishment. “And besides, what kind of God could we create that would be good for me and for the nun, too?”
“As a nonbeliever, it’s clear to me what isn’t clear to believers: that they all believe in the same thing. But we won’t make a revolution, we’ll split Him up. We have at least two Catholics and one Jew, and the child’s parents were probably Buddhists.”
She chuckled in the darkness, “Look, you’ve created a new religion.”
The next day, the two women emptied out the small room with tiny windows, took down many of the paintings from the walls of the house, and hung them in the room as crowded together as if they were stamps in an album, next to each other and above each other, wall to wall and floor to ceiling. They put small tables in the corners and assigned a different religion to each. The nun, radiating an aura of light, put a picture of Jesus and the small wooden cross the boy had made for her on one of the tables and decorated it with flowers and leaves. Gila took off the chain an
d Star of David she had bought for herself on Rosh Hashana and put it on the table across from the Christian corner. The child put on his table one of the cars from his toy train, which had once belonged to a child who himself had been a passenger on a train. The old man, ridiculing the entire idea, put on the fourth table an empty pillbox and a cane that he hadn’t used in months, and the Pole put the ring the nun had refused to accept beside them. Then chairs were brought to the room, and the child dragged them this way and that to form a circle.
After supper, everyone went up to the prayer room. Gila was excited by the smell of the boiled apple leaves and the special tranquility that reminded her of the synagogue on Rosh Hashana eve, permeated with holiness and splendor and the fear of God, who was looking into people’s souls. And that spirit, she imagined, had wandered from the synagogue on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea to the inn whose owners had given it its name in a moment of prophetic inspiration, and the spirit pervaded the room with its two small windows, enveloping the random, everyday objects as if they were holy vessels. Gila looked at the cane and remembered the watercolor that had hung next to the blackboard in her first-grade classroom: a group of people and a flock of sheep led by Abraham, his expression determined, walking toward the Promised Land, and the walking stick in his hand was the cane lying on the table in front of her.
The nun began praying in a hushed voice. They joined her until she whispered “Hallelujah,” to which they responded like a practiced, many-voiced choir, and all the while a splintered, striped light filtered in through the small windows, softening their features. Gila looked at the Pole, wondering if he was sorry for what he’d done to the nun, then shifted her gaze to the man and saw that he was looking at her. A flood of feelings rose in her, and for some reason she recalled the excitement that had made her knees weak on the day of her bat mitzvah, and she reached out to put her hand in his, which she found waiting and welcoming.
The old man watched them from the side, his malicious gaze fixed on their joined hands. For a moment she caught his glance, and he did not hide from her the laughter in his eyes.
“Why did you come to the room yesterday?” she asked him the next day.
“I couldn’t pass up the entertainment.”
“So you came to laugh at us?”
“I like to watch people. I’m interested in their need to look for a reason for something that has no reason.”
“So what is all this,” she waved her hand around at the evidence that stretched as far as the eye could see, “Isn’t there a reason for it?”
“That is the external manifestation, not the reason.”
“What’s the reason?”
“No one knows, not even a scientist who studies it for a million years.”
“But there has to be reason!” She fought for the last remaining bit of logic.
“No.”
“So what is it the result of?” she persisted.
“A whim.”
“Whose whim?”
“That’s the whole point: no one’s whim.”
Once again, she was annoyed after the conversation with him, but she could see clearly that something had changed in the group from the minute they’d begun praying, joining them to each other with the force of destiny as she had been joined to the man in that miraculous moment she’d met him on the train of the dead. The man, like someone with a detailed plan who bases his actions on intelligent logic, said later, “The time has come to start thinking about the future.”
“What do you mean, the future?” she asked, remembering how, in another world, she had been proposed to.
“I mean the next generation.”
She looked at him in surprise. She had mentioned her infertility problems to him many times and had told him about the many years of treatment she had endured before she became pregnant with the twins. “And who will give birth to it?”
“Not you,” he said as if it were a promise.
“But she’s a nun!” she said, horrified.
“She’s the only one who can do it. She’ll have to understand.”
“And who will the father be?”
“Whoever she chooses.”
She needed a long minute to digest this new situation and also to absorb the fact that he had made his plan secretly, without including her, and the seed of suspicion planted in her by the sick man began to sprout.
“And if she chooses you?”
“Then it’ll be me,” he said like a soldier volunteering for a mission.
“Have a good time,” she said, anger rising in her at his plot, his pretense. “And who’s going to tell her about this interesting plan?”
“You, of course.”
“Not me, and not of course,” she said, revealing how offended she was.
But the idea insinuated itself into her until it gained a foothold and would not let go, and the thing she was supposed to be fighting ambushed her, and against her own wishes Gila set out to fight a new war—to convince the nun to have a child—a war that was lost before it began, where her victory would also be her downfall, where she might lose more than she possessed. But she didn’t give in to logic, and in a short time she had thrown herself into her mission as if she were obsessed. Again and again, the image of a baby girl flashed through her mind, the image of her daughters when they were babies, a baby that was crawling on all fours around the furniture in the room, holding on to the back of the armchair and rising up onto her feet, rocking in her cradle, sleeping between her and the man in their bed; sleeping between the nun and the man in the very same bed, and Gila was shocked at the sight.
On one of their fruit-gathering walks, after scrutinizing her constantly from every angle, Gila asked the nun if she liked babies, and the young woman nodded happily. Gila asked if she wanted a baby of her own, and the nun looked at her inquisitively. Gila pointed wildly at the nun’s stomach, and the nun looked at the feverish eyes in front of her, embarrassed and blushing deeply. Gila did not mention the idea again for several days; she let herself calm down, let the possibility sink into the young woman’s awareness. One day, while they were preparing a meal in the kitchen, Gila looked at her and, as if the matter had been settled, asked which man she’d choose to make a baby with. The nun gave her a penetrating look, suspecting that her only ally was about to betray her, and Gila, as if the name Judas Iscariot had not passed through her mind, spoke the name of the man as if it were a question. The nun shook her head firmly, her eyes terrified, perhaps recognizing the signs of an evil spirit that had taken possession of the woman who had sworn to protect her, perhaps frightened by the menacing persistence and by what lay beyond the menacing persistence.
But the thought of the nun’s pregnancy—sometimes separate from the man—gave Gila no rest, and a few weeks after the idea had first been raised, as if she were thinking logically, she convinced herself that there was no choice: the child was already three years old. In another fifteen years he’d be ready to be a father himself. Who could guarantee that he’d find a bride then? Now, now was the time to arrange for a wife for him with whom he could continue the next generation.
She schemed for hours about how to convince the nun how imperative the act was, to describe to her in simple words, in her basic Italian, that there was no choice and she had to choose one of the men because she was the only one who could guarantee that life would continue, and there was no doubt that both Jesus and his mother would understand and permit it, because after all, Jesus too was born in an unusual way. Over and over again, with growing excitement, she told the man of her musings and imagined she saw a look of amazement in his eyes. His look, like a mirror, made it clear to her that he had been a part of her life for only a few years, and that she would never know whether it was his desire for the nun that had spawned the idea. She pursued the relentlessly intractable young woman the whole month, kept the child away from her, punished her with prolonged silences, and did not soften even when she heard the sounds of weeping coming in from the
nun’s room at night. Every morning, in a voice that grew colder and colder, she asked again which man she would choose, and the nun again burst into tears that made Gila feel relief and also an unfamiliar wrath.
She would never remember who came up with the idea of giving her to the Pole. During moments of self-awareness or when she was on the verge of sleep and less able to keep secrets, she suspected that the idea had been born in her own brain, imagined that she remembered some hesitation on the part of the man, but she wouldn’t allow the memory to come. She did remember—but perhaps it was only after he brought up the idea and she objected—that the man had suggested waiting until the nun matured and maternal feelings developed naturally in her, and maybe, in the meantime, a man would appear who didn’t frighten her; or maybe another young woman would come in another few years who could be the child’s bride. Gila remembered herself becoming furious, but perhaps that was only after he had planted the idea in her brain; no man the nun might want would suddenly appear, she had said heatedly. The girls who survived after the cataclysm had probably been devoured by animals or sucked up into the funnel of air. Finally, she told him angrily of her suspicion that he hoped the nun would choose him in the end and that he wasn’t trying to protect the young woman, but to keep her from the Pole. Several weeks afterward, he grew tired and surrendered to the madness that had gripped her, and he agreed to her idea, not so he could implement his plan but to put an end to her suspicions. But she took as a good sign the fact that he agreed on that particular day, because that very morning it had occurred to her that the funnel of air hadn’t been seen for quite a while. On the calendar they had marked, she counted forty days. A good rain was falling outside, the sign of a blessing, not a lashing rain and not a rain that uprooted bushes, but one that fell generously and quietly, fertilizing the earth.