Motti (8 page)

I am taught that under
such
circumstances
this
happens. It has been discovered by making the experiment a few times. Not that that would prove anything to us, if it weren't that this experience was surrounded by others which combine with it to form a system. Thus, people did not make experiments just about falling bodies but also about air resistance and all sorts of other things.

But in the end I rely on these experiences, or on the reports of them, I feel no scruples about ordering my own activities in accordance with them.—But hasn't this trust also proved itself? So far as I can judge—yes.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein,
On Certainty

Like many others, at first Menachem loved his father because of who he thought he was, then hated him because of who he actually was, ultimately went back and loved him, this time because of who he tried to be.

No one knew, but in the back of one of the drawers in the big writing desk, the very same desk he hid under as a boy, his father found him there, excited and amazed with his discovery time after time, gathered him up in his arms and flew him around and around in the room, and announced, Rachel look what I found, Rachel look what I found, and Menachem laughed and got excited, and always waited there to be gathered up like that, to be discovered by surprise and gathered up like that, and once his father travelled someplace else, wasn't at home three whole days, and on the morning of the second day Menachem hid there again, under the writing desk, and waited and waited, it seemed to him then like eternity but certainly wasn't more than twenty minutes, and in the end his mother, Rachel, found him there, and spoke to him softly and invited him to eat the eggs that were cold already after more than twenty minutes of waiting on the breakfast table, and she didn't understand why he was so sad and disagreeable, but that was only one time, almost all the other times his dad found him and flew him around and around, but in any case, in the back of one of these drawers in that desk he'd hidden a small box with all the letters he ever received from his father, postcards from abroad and letters from when he was away on reserve service, cards with birthday wishes and other scraps of paper. No one knew. Not even Edna. How did she never find the box? Who knows. In any case she didn't find it.

And this evening he didn't look through it. He sat next to the writing desk and stared into space. When Edna came into the room, he jumped slightly.

Everything okay?

Perfectly okay, said Menachem.

The children are already at the table, she said. You're not coming to eat?

Just a second, honey, said Menachem.

Something bothering you?

No, not at all, answered Menachem. I'm thinking about Motti, you know. What's he doing there, how it is in prison.

Give him a call, suggested Edna, who was a practical woman, even though she was still really shocked by the trial and everything having to do with it. Write a letter. Tell him, I dunno. That he's your friend, that you'll help him get set up when he gets out, that he should hang on and stuff. Things like that.

Forget it, said Menachem. I don't like all that…all that…

Sentimentality? offered Edna.

Yes, said Menachem. All that sentimentality.

After she left the room he did in fact open the drawer and look at the tattered treasures hidden inside. Sat without moving and looked at them for a long time, as if trying to set them on fire with his eyes. For quite some time no postcard has been added. A longing consumes him.

“In short,” Guard B says this time to Guard A as they stroll down the corridor with a light step, their bodies free like the land of our fathers, on their way to pass by the door to Motti's cell—actually, from their perspective, on their way to the staff dining hall, but from the perspective of this story the door to Motti's cell is what's important, even though they don't care one bit that this is his cell door, and as they pass by it they don't give it so much as a glance, “in short, this Mahabuta Banana, whatever they called him” (says Guard B, as if he's being dismissive, though actually he's not being dismissive, that's just his way of speaking, these days), “among ourselves we always called him Jimbo and that's all, black as the night he was, maybe his name was Mabruto, go figure, you know what their names are like, anyway we called him Jimbo and that's that, he was lying there under a tree in Grandma's yard may she rest in peace, sleeping like he was dead, worked hard, poor guy, but if you took your eyes off him for a second he disappeared, you have to put those ones on a short leash, the agency told us that too, they said, if we had a Filipino we'd send him over, you can get an honest day's work out of them, the Filipinos, but this one, look, keep a good eye on him and he'll do the work, and he really did the work, all in all, but Grandma, her voice would cut out on her, she could lay in bed for an hour calling him, he would laze around in the yard or something, he once showed me a picture of his wife and kids, cute kids, who knows what's with his wife, no way could I sleep quietly like that with my wife in another country, who knows what she's doing there, and with who, but I'm still not married, don't want to jinx it, may it come quickly, you know, and maybe with them it's fine, a little on the side like that, because here, it's a fact, he would sleep like a baby, and we ourselves were kids then, we didn't think about stuff like that. In short, what was I saying, he was sleeping there under the tree with a Golani beret and one of those end-of-basic-training shirts, I think they make them especially for guys like him, no idea where he got his hands on it. In short, we came to get a cigarette off him, we came quietly, like little elves, and when we pulled out his bundle his passport fell out, and let me tell you, we stuck it in the tree with his hat two meters up, man, what a mess that was, two days he didn't find it, what a mess, we only heard about it later, he turned the whole house upside down, for two whole days he wouldn't leave the house, Grandma went nuts, but in the end he found it” (the voices get weaker and weaker now, at the end of the corridor is another corridor, at its end the dining hall), “told all his friends how the immigration police screwed with him, all over town they took it, in the end they stuck it in the tree, his passport, because they were afraid to hand it over to him, that's what he told everyone, said he told them they'd better watch out for him, he'd fuck them over, to the police he said that. Only we know the truth, but go tell him that now, they made him a national hero, like he threatened the police and all, afterward you couldn't get a day of work out of him. But look, we weren't bad kids. We left him a shekel for the cigarette, like at a kiosk” (according to the laws of physics, sound waves and all that, the voice couldn't carry to Motti's cell throughout this whole story, but in a book it carried well enough, Motti heard every word, the laws are different here, maybe the pages echo or something).

 

Hours later, at night, Motti lay in his cell, listening to the faint noises or snores and moans and sleeping breaths, and was consumed with regret and flooded with fantasies and so forth, and was nevertheless happy. In his way, he was happy.

Edna has a yeast infection.

If I wanted to, I could slice her life into strips of realism.

But not because she's a woman. Because she's a character.

She has a yeast infection, this is quite irritating. And on her right leg the veins form the map of a secret land. She loves her children, and even though their constant demands are sometimes more than she can handle, it turns out they aren't more than she can handle. As evidence: she complies. Even if not always happily. Her brown hair splits at the ends if she doesn't insist on cutting it regularly, therefore she insists on cutting it at least once a month. And once every two to three months she goes to Chaim's salon, who implores her to dye it, and once every two to three months she refuses. Except for that time she assented, and afterward regretted it. Chaim offered to dye everything back, but Edna decided to live with the results. When she was younger and single she was happy to hunker down in the bathroom for a half hour to read a book or magazine. Now she doesn't do this. Over the years her mother's wrinkles have started to crease the sides of her mouth. At first she did silly exercises with her lips, ten or even twenty minutes each day, but it didn't help. She gave up. She once suffered from an ingrown toenail on her right foot (Menachem, too, same thing), and when she brushes her teeth too hard her gums bleed. Her stomach, which was flat, has been curving out nicely since the second pregnancy, but this doesn't bother her. She loves an omelet and bread with cream cheese and olives, like her dad would eat when he got home from work. And once, after their first child, she shaved her genitals entirely, to make them like a little girl's, but Menachem didn't care one way or the other, and so she let the hair grow back. It itched horribly. She was a very serious girl and now she's only a somewhat serious woman. When she was a serious girl she had a cat named Fifi that got lost one day and never came back. Her parents bought her a hamster that ran restlessly in the hopeless wheel in its cage, and after two and a half weeks died from an intestinal virus. She buried him in the garden because she felt that this is what serious girls must do, but she didn't cry. Her parents praised her, what a strong girl, and she hurried inside and locked herself up in her room, so they'd think she was secretly crying there. The truth is she read a book and gnawed on the nails of her left hand. She slept with four men before Menachem. Not all at once. (One of them was actually a teenager. She too was a teenager then. It didn't hurt her. She didn't love him. Or not in retrospect. At the time, when they broke up, she thought she would die. Now she laughs about it, if she thinks about it at all. But laughs with longing. Not for him. For the great drama of adolescence, when everything is so critical. Now it's hard to take anything so seriously.) At the office she puts on a brave face. At home she's a bit tired. Five or six years already she hasn't slept more than five or six hours at night. If they would leave her alone she thinks she could sleep an entire day and wake up fresh as a flower. Actually she would wake up after six hours, maybe six and a half. If she were to survive a plane crash in isolated, ice-capped mountains, she wouldn't be disgusted by cannibalism. One must survive, that much is clear. Should she not survive, she wouldn't kick up a fuss if the others were to eat her flesh. What does she care? She would be dead already. She thinks that the people at work don't know that everything could be otherwise with her, that she easily could go mad or scream, that she could fill her life with wonderful adventures whose nature she doesn't bother to imagine now, but if they were to happen to her, she would enjoy each and every moment. Or she thinks that perhaps the people at work know her very well, actually, and there aren't hidden things like these in her, her life is the only life she could choose. Then she gets a bit sad, then she mocks herself for her pretensions, for her childishness, for these hidden aspirations that aren't appropriate (she thinks) for a woman of her age. But without doubt she could fly to Africa to hunt elephants, only she's not interested in this, and what kind of person wants to kill elephants in the first place. So maybe she couldn't after all. Sometimes she shaves her armpits. Her legs every week. And bleaches her facial hair. And visits her parents once every few days, even without the children. In the evening her back hurts a bit and her legs hurt. In the morning she drinks strong coffee, to shake off sleep and her secret dreams, and only then wakes up the children. And Menachem, of course. Menachem too. She feels obligated to listen to classical music, but nevertheless listens mainly to talk radio. And gets annoyed by the callers to those programs, by what they say and by the vulgar language. Listens nevertheless. And loves cooking with fresh herbs, in moderation. At night with Menachem she prefers to be on top and close her eyes. And when she gets close she opens her eyes and looks right in his face. Sometimes this turns her on. Sometimes turns her off completely. But she can come other ways too. When she's on the bottom. Also from behind. More daring things than this they don't do. Even though each of them thinks about it on their own. Menachem just because, in the middle of the day. And she only when she does it to herself in the shower. She wears makeup in moderation, and prefers her old skirts that have already taken on the shape of her body. And sleeps sometimes in a very, very old shirt that belonged to someone she slept with once. Not the teenager. One of the other ones. How many washings that shirt has gone through since. Not a single cell of his skin remains there. Holes have appeared in it. She loves her clogs too. And the cutting board that she took from her parents' house when she left, it's still with her. She cuts up the most delicious salads on this board. With a new knife. She has a habit of saying what she really means, and then laughing as if this was only a parody of what other people meant, other people entirely, altogether different from her. Her mother does this as well (when she complains to waiters, for example, or wonders why some item or another in some store or another isn't on sale when she would be very interested in buying it if it was). And Edna sometimes recognizes this similarity and is crushed. She doesn't read poetry, though she wrote some once. Gets along with dogs. With cats too. Not with Sweet'N Low. That aftertaste, she thinks, it's something not worth getting used to. And she was proud of herself when she learned to draw out, at work, tables on the computer and to make it so that some of the fields would update themselves, with mathematical functions that sometimes were really complicated. On the back of her hand she has an old scar, impossible to remember what from. She had a root canal once, but has still never taken the car in for an inspection herself. Not because of chauvinism. Out of convenience. Burned-out lights make her sad. She hangs shelves herself. She doesn't play an instrument. Women's magazines annoy her. Once she sprained the small toe on her left foot. Hit it on the doorpost at night, and her eyes filled with tears. Menachem was in the reserves then. She catches colds easily. A pack of tissues is hidden in a drawer at work. She doesn't need glasses. Or maybe just for reading. Her shoulders are just the right width. When she breastfed, her nipples cracked. When she was a teenager, the signs of her growing sexuality made her rebellious. More than this: they outright offended her. That all at once the world reduced her to the status of a biological machine—this is the organ for mating and this is for breast feeding, and the widening hips are for giving birth one day, and the blood that synchronizes all this comes once a month (regular as a clock, with her). Now, go figure why, she finds beauty in all that. Comfort even. At the time she thought that her sexual organ was like a wound gaping out at the world. Sometimes she still thinks this. Her breasts have become like the anchor that attaches her to the (relatively) stable ground of life. She won't tolerate dirty fingernails. Nor insects. She doesn't like hearing her own recorded voice. Quickly erases messages that she left on the answering machine at home. They really disgust her. Never smoked much. Only in social situations. And sometimes, as I pointed out, she's had it up to here (she indicates with her hand at the height of her forehead, even higher than that). And she shouldn't strain her left hand. It starts to hurt very quickly. In the years to come it will get worse, the pain will take much longer to pass. That's how the body is. Once she got burned by an extremely hot frying pan. She's burned her tongue many times. She eats quickly, but enjoys it. Work's fine for her. She believes she can hold on until retirement. When she complains about a stomachache, for instance, and Menachem laughs and says, get out of here, you'll bury all of us in the end, she gets angry and says, how can you talk like that? What kind of a terrible thing is that to say to a mother? But usually she isn't dramatic like that, and when her cheek itches, she scratches it absentmindedly. Sometimes she eats falafel while standing. Sometimes she just finishes the kids' portions. When she was small and her mother would cover her face with both hands in play, she would be terrified. Who knows what kind of face would be there when she removed her hands. After this too some time would pass until she calmed down. Who knows what kind of face was there before she removed them. But now she's no longer a girl, and in her tummy delicate cells are multiplying. I give the baby eighty-three years at the most. Eighty-seven, on average, if it's a girl. Eighty-two if an Arab citizen of Israel (though the chances are slim). It will be a boy, in fact, and he will be the one she loves the most, though she won't admit this to anyone ever, and after two or three years she'll be pregnant again and he'll say to her, Mom, I want always to be your littlest, littlest boy,
and within a week she'll have an abortion, won't say a word about it to anyone, years later she'll tell him, not in order to demand anything or hurt him, she'll just tell him, as a fact, so he'll know how much she loves him, how much she always loved him, from the beginning. And this abortion won't result in an infection and there will be no gynecological damage and no feelings of guilt, she won't have to pay any price of that sort. All it will do is shake up the living boy when she finally tells him, he'll already be grown up then, he'll go and tell his spouse, she'll think that it's totally screwed up, but all that is no longer our concern.