The smell of Papa’s cigarette drifted in from the balcony.
He was bursting with impatience.
At least ten times a day he called his unit, the military police, and they kept saying they didn’t need him yet.
From the salon came the sound of mumbling: Mama.
There was something in her tone of voice, a wrinkle of secrecy and subterfuge.
Aron jumped up, always prepared, and tiptoed to the hall for a peek.
But he was wrong this time: there was nothing out of the ordinary going on.
Mama had sat Grandma on the Pouritz with her right hand on the armrest.
She rotated it to the desired angle and then placed Grandma’s paralyzed left hand on the support she’d made with two volumes of Winston Churchill.
Aron watched, trying to remember what had excited his attention.
On the balcony he saw the broad shadow of Papa’s back with a slender column of smoke rising above it.
Mama wound the yarn on Grandma Lilly’s outstretched hands.
Now try to remember, Mamchu, she whispered so low he could scarcely hear, Leibaleh’s brother, What’s-his-name, the one you told us about who was killed by the Germans, remember?
Nod yes or no, the one you said there was something wrong with, do you remember what it was?
What?
Show me by nodding.
Was he, eppes, deaf?
Was he epileptic?
If yes, nod; was he crippled from polio?
Was he a midget?
And she began to wind the yarn from the double pack on Grandma’s hands into a ball, sputtering questions Aron strained to hear: Was he missing any fingers or toes, Was he an albino?
Was he feeble-minded?
Aron stared at the growing ball
of yarn, and Mama’s nimble fingers, and her lips moving in the monotonous interrogation, till at last she fell strangely silent, though she seemed still to question Grandma wordlessly as her hands flitted right and left, stretching and winding, her little face receding to the monotonous winding rhythm, and Aron watched the green wool stretch and wind, stretch and wind; he knew that color, it was his sweater!
The green sweater with the triangles she knitted him last winter, that still fit, what was she doing, her eyes were turning glassy, shining coldly.
Aron took one step forward, even if he went in and stood in front of her now she wouldn’t notice, she was completely out of herself, her hands worked on mechanically.
Now, now, go in and scream at her: Why, how dare you, it was a perfectly good sweater, but he said nothing and only stared at her glassy eyes over the green ball of yarn, her tongue sticking out between her teeth, small, pointy, very pink; she took short whistling breaths, her hands never stopping, like a human spinning wheel.
Unless someone stopped her, she could go on like this forever.
Grandma stared blindly ahead, maybe she would stay in her condition for years, maybe death had forgotten her, maybe she was already dead, maybe this was death, and when the yarn was all gone, then Grandma herself would start to unravel, and then the Pouritz, and then the Vichtig carpet and the Methuselah
fauteuil
and the Bordeaux and the buffet and the wallpaper and the walls, everything would start to unravel, it wouldn’t die, it would unravel into one long thread, and just then the tail end of the green yarn passed through Mama’s fingers and she twiddled the empty air.
Her shoulders dropped.
Her face fell.
She sighed.
The next day Aron went off with his school bag and a sandwich and an apple, but he hid at the Wizo Nursery School till he saw Mama leave to do the shopping, and then he hurried home.
First he made sure Grandma was still breathing under the tightly tucked Scottish plaid, then he went to piss and smelled vomit in the toilet; somebody barfed in there, well, they probably had an upset stomach, that’s all, maybe the herring yesterday was spoiled, why twist everything around, they’re old, at their age it’s impossible, yes, but what about that woman in Egypt, the one Yochi mentioned.
Quickly he climbed up on a chair and started rummaging through the top shelves in his closet.
But he forgot, why had he climbed up here and what was he looking for, and then he started groping around, unfolding his old clothes, all the shorts and long trousers, the checkered flannel shirts and the pullovers and pajamas,
from last year and ten years ago, even his baby clothes; we never throw anything out around here.
With this pair of pants he won the fifth-grade jumping championship, on these pants there was a permanent bloodstain, he had worn them the time he tried to find out how a blind person feels riding a bicycle, and here was the Trumpeldor shirt with the cut-off sleeve for the plaster cast, and here were the pajamas he wore as a five-year-old when he slept over at Gideon’s for the first time, and here it was, this was what he had been looking for, the red T-shirt from day camp, the time he and Gideon had their big feud, when Aron was the captain of the volley ball team and had to choose his players and he picked Gideon last, not because Gideon wasn’t a good player, he just wanted the suspense to build up before he rescued Gideon in the end, like when he pretended the Arabs conquered Jerusalem and the Egyptian Colonel Shams, out of esteem for Aron, let him save his five best friends from the firing squad, and Aron went down the lines of beseeching faces; he only did it to increase the excitement and Gideon’s relief and happiness, like Joseph confessing to Benjamin and his brothers at the last minute, but that started their big feud, for a whole month, the worst month of their lives, which was when Aron devised the secret sign system, to guarantee that no future fight of theirs would endure for more than a week, and now he tried to fold the clothes and straighten up the mess he’d made.
Hmm, how long would it take her to notice, he wondered, and then he washed the red shirt with water and ran downstairs to hang it as conspicuously as possible on the line behind the building, only a blind man would miss it there, and then he went back home.
He sat down at his desk and started writing to Yochi: he hoped she was well, taking good care of herself, things here were fine, nothing new at home, her bed was waiting for her; and he started wondering about her pen pals, they must all have been called up by now, and blithely, as though someone else were doing it, he opened her drawer and weighed her padlocked letter box in his hand, she’d taken the key with her to the army, and as he was closing the drawer he found a page sticking halfway out of the box, and he couldn’t resist, he pulled it gently and read the strange list of names there, the names of all her pen pals, with unintelligible directions next to each in a tiny scrawl: lover killed in action, poet, daddy longlegs, dreamer, athlete, adopted, twenty-five years old, attempted suicide, romantic invalid; and beside the name
of the cripple from Australia, printed clearly: the truth.
Aron read up and down the page, but it made no sense to him and he didn’t have the energy to fathom it.
Quickly he scribbled out a few more lines to Yochi: Keep up your morale, the nation is behind you.
He arrived at the rock at four o’clock and sat there waiting patiently, but no one came down the path to the valley; maybe Gideon was at home getting ready, getting ready for what, all he had to do was say whether he was or wasn’t, even if he didn’t say the words out loud, if he just nodded, it would be understood.
And Aron reviewed the signs he’d left so far, maybe he’d skipped one and Gideon was confused, but no, he’d left them in the proper order.
From the bottom leaves of the ficus tree to the red camp T-shirt.
Hmm, interesting, even then he’d had the brains to think of all those signs, and at a time when there was nothing to worry about yet; on the contrary.
He stood up and stretched as though from boredom, and started pacing this way and that, wondering about that list of Yochi’s.
Someday when it was all over, he would have the time to think about things, like Yochi, and historical things like the Phoenicians, or science and flights to outer space, and discoveries and inventions and animals, and the lives of Thomas Alva Edison and Abraham Lincoln, which had interested him for years only he didn’t have the time, or about Louis Pasteur and about explorers, and about the voyage of the
Kon Tiki,
and about the Gypsies and the Aztecs, and about dirigibles and zeppelins, the world is full of knowledge, and once again he found himself in front of the little refrigerator and he climbed in and noticed that, once inside it, he was less aware of the stink coming out of him, the stink of his breath, and he decided to go through a trial run, without actually closing the door, and then he looked around and found a cardboard box to put his rescue tools in, and set it down on one of the shelves, and, using the little Yemenite, unscrew to the left, lifted out the two small side shelves where you put the eggs and margarine and jars of sour cream and the horseradish and mayonnaise, so they wouldn’t get in the way of his elbows, in any case he could move only his left hand in there and with that he had to untie his right shoelace and remove Mama’s nail file from under the insole, since it was probably the only tool that could fit between the tongue and the metal pin.
He let it drop deliberately from pretend-sweaty fingers and groped around the floor with his eyes shut; it took him at least ten seconds too long
to find it again, he would have less than sixty seconds to act in a clearheaded way.
Again and again he practiced dropping it, training himself to think coolly so he would know by the sound where to find it immediately.
Then he went back to the rock and waited till exactly seven o‘clock.
Tomorrow, he thought, it would be three weeks since Independence Day, since he said goodbye to Gideon, the waiting, the baiting, the grating, the skating; maybe Gideon had forgotten him, he had other things to think about now, at a time like this it was easy to forget some kid you knew, nobody at school seemed particularly upset that Aron hadn’t turned up in a couple of weeks; they hadn’t noticed at home, for that matter.
And suddenly evening fell and it turned cold and he rushed home and burst through the door in the middle of supper; they hadn’t waited for him, they had started without him.
He sat down at his place and ate without appetite, and Papa said he called his unit again and they told him to wait patiently, first they take the younger men.
As if I’m old, he fumed, I could show those guys where their legs sprout from, and he swallowed an enormous hunk of bread.
“Get this, Hindaleh, at work today we were listening to the Voice of Thunder on Cairo radio, and the meathead who reads the propaganda in Hebrew said Nasser’s going to make us ‘lick the bust,’ you hear?
He said ‘lick the bust,’” and he split his sides laughing, spraying spit and bread around the table as Mama watched impassively.
“Ah, you’re all alike,” she said.
“Arabs, Jews, you’re all alike.”
She stood up with a sigh and dragged Grandma off to bed.
A few minutes later she returned, with a hasty glimpse at Aron still sitting at the table all by himself; he didn’t even bother to hide the blue-and-purple stains on his knuckles from her.
Mama cleared the table.
She set about baking a cake to send Yochi.
She worked in silence beside him.
More wearily than usual.
When the silence grew unbearable she turned on the transistor.
The management of the Sport Toto wishes to announce that due to the recruitment of many players to military service, all upcoming lotteries and National League games are hereby postponed.
Tickets will be refunded at their place of purchase—She switched it off angrily.
Aron was shocked.
What did they mean, postponing the games.
He shook his head in anger: It’s not fair.
They’re not fair.
Mama groaned as she cracked the first egg, and her face turned very pale.
Aron watched her, not daring to move.
She pressed a frightened
hand to her belly.
Slowly she took off her kangaroo apron and hung it on the hook.
Aron didn’t get up, and didn’t ask what happened.
He saw her totter to her bedroom.
He was left alone in the kitchen.
He cupped his hand around his nose and mouth and smelled the stink, and he knew it came from inside him, from his putrefying brain; soon all the thoughts and words that went through it would come out sick, covered with white patches, stubbed like a cigarette butt.
Nervously he switched on the transistor, heard that the Helena Rubinstein Corporation wishes to inform the women of Israel that we are doing everything possible to continue production in this emergency state, to help you look your loveliest for that special man in the army.
Kibbutz Or Haner announces that the wedding scheduled for next Tuesday has been postponed until—He switched it off.
Soon he would go to sleep.
To muster strength for tomorrow.
He looked for a clean glass to drink water from but didn’t find one.
Drank from a dirty glass instead.
In the sink was the egg with the big bloody spot.
He felt exhausted again and sat down.
He thought he could see Papa on his knees at Mama’s bedside, hugging her, his head buried in her body.
Over and over he grumbled to himself, What do they mean, postponing the National League, what harm would there be in letting the players out of the army for a day, for a measly few hours, instead of shutting them in there with those stupid Helena Rubinstein people.
Furiously he smacked his fist.