But as soon as I heard the bus turn into the street and knew he was OK, I didn’t feel like making up any more. I put the box of cornflakes back in the cabinet, jumped into bed, covered myself and pretended I was sleeping. I heard the bus door closing and the front door opening and Moshe humming an Ehud Banai song, ‘Maybe after all this, we’ll sail off to an island. The children will wander along the shore.’ Why’s he humming? I thought. What’s he so happy about? And our whole fight came back into my mind, all the ugly things he said — not said, yelled — what’s good for the whole neighbourhood is good for us too. If you don’t have God, you don’t have anything. He’d yelled all kinds of things like that in an extremely loud voice, like a person who’s not sure he’s right. Like my father yelled before he left.
By the time Moshe finished in the bathroom and came into the bedroom, I had forgotten that I’d softened up and just waited for him to say one wrong word or forget to turn off the light in the living room so I could stick him with some sharp words, but he didn’t say anything, and he turned off the lights and got undressed quietly, without banging into the wardrobe, and got into bed carefully and lay down next to me without stealing the blanket. But still, I couldn’t control myself and said what I said, turned my back to him and pressed my nose up against the frozen wall. When he tried to stroke my hair from behind, I said to him, Moshe, don’t touch me, in a tone so full of disgust that I even scared myself a little.
*
When form time was over, I put everything into my bag and locked the buckle. Rinat reminded me that we still had a catch-up English lesson. I told her I know and I don’t care. Lately, I bunk lessons a lot, but no one says anything to me because I lost my brother. The headmistress even took me to the grove behind the field for a talk and leaned her elbow on a tree and got dirty from the sap. She told me about what a good student Gidi had been, as if I didn’t know, and told me that her door was always open — which is not true, it’s always closed — and that I shouldn’t hesitate to come to her about anything, anything at all.
It was very cold outside, it was even drizzling a little, so I decided to run, but I stopped after a few metres because my bag bounced around while I was running and my pencil case dug into my back.
When I got home, I didn’t feel like going inside. Mum was probably in bed, she rests every day and stares at the ceiling or at Gidi’s picture. If I went in, she’d say hi, Yoti, there’s food in the fridge, warm it up for yourself. And I’d sit alone and eat cutlets and mashed potatoes, and the potatoes’d be hard around the edges from being in the fridge for a hundred years. I can’t go to see my friends from class either, they’re still in the catch-up English lesson, and besides, lately, it’s no fun with them. All the things they do, like sneaking looks under girls’ dresses with a mirror or setting up a secret camp in the Mevessert woods, don’t interest me any more. I mean, I drag boards with them from Madmoni’s construction site and exchange Beitar cards with them, but I have this bland taste in my mouth, like old pitta, and sometimes their talk makes me really pissed off like yesterday, when Dor said he hates his big brother because he always hogs the computer to play Doom and doesn’t let him play, and I wanted to tell him, Dor, you jerk, say thank you that you even have a brother. But I didn’t say anything.
I’d rather go straight to Amir’s.
I knocked on his door. While I waited for him to open it, I pressed my ear against the far wall to hear if Moshe and Sima were still arguing. Last night, Mum and Dad went out to the garden and all the way up to the fence so they could hear the shouting better. Dad said: They’ve been living next to us for six years and I never heard them raise their voices even once. Mum said: It’s a good thing that Gina can’t hear very well, it would break her heart. I stood behind them and was glad. Since Gidi, I haven’t heard them talk quietly to each other like that. I hoped that Moshe and Sima would keep fighting all night.
Noa opened the door. She’s so tall, I barely come up to her bellybutton. Are you looking for Amir? Yes. He’s not home. Is he at the university? No, he’s at the club. What club? She gave me that look grown-ups give you before they decide whether what they have to say is for children’s ears. He volunteers at a club, she said, but tell me, Yotam, maybe instead of standing outside and getting wet, you’d like to come in and wait for him here? She brought a dry towel and spread it out under me so I wouldn’t get the sofa wet. What club does Amir volunteer in? The Incognito? I asked again. When I want an answer, I know how to be stubborn. She laughed, no, it’s not a dance club, it’s a club for sick people, I mean, sick people who are already starting to get better. I didn’t understand. What does that mean? Sick with what? Noa offered me a glass of Coke. I didn’t give up. Sick with the flu? With strep? No, she sighed. More … more like sick in their minds. In their hearts. Crazy? Not exactly. Sort of. Half crazy and half normal. Half crazy, half normal? I remembered an episode of Star Trek when Captain Pickard comes back from the planet of the Medusas and starts acting weird on the ship. Instead of being serious, he laughs, instead of being decisive, he’s confused, and the whole crew is scared, that’s not the Captain they know, until Data the robot discovers that the Medusas on the planet secreted something that got absorbed through the Captain’s skin without his noticing it, and that’s what made him act like that.
I thought that Noa probably didn’t watch Star Trek, so I didn’t tell her about the Medusas. I didn’t say anything and just kept on fiddling with the sofa cover. Tell me, Yotam, would you like to help me with my homework? she asked me out of the blue. Why not, I said even though it annoyed me that she said homework, like she was a kid. She took me into the bedroom, to a glass table that was lit up by a lamp under it, like a moon. There were camera films on the table, arranged in rows. These are negatives, she said. And this table is called a light table. If you put the negatives on the light table, you can choose which picture on the film is the best and then scan it on the computer. Want to help me choose? OK, I said.
Every picture showed more or less the same thing: the display window of a shoe store. But there was a different high-heeled shoe in the middle of every picture. Sometimes, the price tag was in the middle and the shoes were around it. This is a project we have to do on the subject of religion and God, Noa said. I didn’t understand what the connection was between God and shoes, but I picked out two pictures that looked nicer than the others and pointed at them. Why those? Noa asked. I don’t know, I said, it’s like the things are arranged better in those pictures. Composition, Noa said. What? Composition. That’s what we call the relationship between the different elements of a picture. Truth is, you’re right, Yotam. The composition of those two really is special.
We went on picking out pictures according to their composition, and meanwhile, Noa told me about other things that have to do with photography: the camera shutter, the light meter, the special light at the beginning and end of every day that’s called ‘magical light’, and her photographing days when she just goes out into the street and waits for something special to happen in front of her eyes. Sometimes a whole day can go by without anything happening, and sometimes a fantastic picture falls into her lap right away. Like for instance yesterday, the minute she went out, Madmoni’s workers were getting out of the pickup that brings them to work and one of them, who’d fallen asleep, stayed in the cab. He was wearing a woollen cap with a brightly coloured Indian design, the kind you see only on people who have come back from trips to South America, and then she had this feeling in her stomach that she has when she sees something she wants to photograph, and the only feeling that comes close to it is the way you feel when you see yellow peppers in the supermarket, so she asked the worker if she could take his picture, and he said yes. She loves those kind of mistakes in the world. Let’s say, a plastic bag swimming in water like a jellyfish, or a stone sticking out of the wall of a house, like the one in Avram and Gina’s house, or the empty lot between their apartment and ours, which in her eyes is one big mistake. I didn’t understand why the lot was a mistake, but I felt funny about asking her, so instead I asked about the black container that was standing in the corner of the bedroom. That’s the Jobo, Noa said. You put the film in the Jobo and it turns it into a negative. Without Jobo, you can’t start the developing process. The third time she said the word Jobo, I had a laughing fit. That word, Jobo, made me laugh hysterically, and no matter how hard I bit my lips, I couldn’t stop. Noa tried to control herself, but in the end, she caught it from me and started laughing and pushing her long hair from side to side with her hand so it wouldn’t get into her open mouth. I suddenly noticed that she really was beautiful, like Amir told his friend on the phone. Especially when she laughed. After a few seconds, I started to hiccup the way I always do when I laugh for a long time without stopping, and that only made us laugh more. If Mum could see me laughing like that, she’d probably make an ‘aren’t-you-ashamed-of-yourself’ face, like she’s been doing since Gidi whenever I watch a comedy on TV, even if I turn the sound off. But Mum didn’t see, so we kept on laughing until the laugh muscle in my stomach hurt and Noa’s eyes glittered with tears. And then Amir came in. The minute we saw his face, we stopped. Even though he smiled at me and kissed Noa on the lips, you could still see right away that the half-and-half club had made him a bit crazy. How was it, Noa asked him, and he started zigzagging around the room, saying, it’s not easy, it’s not easy. I picked up a picture and looked at it so he’d think I wasn’t listening. Nava says that it’s because of the Rabin assassination, he said, and I watched him over the top of the picture, like a detective. The thing is, he went on, talking with his hands, that they don’t care about Rabin himself. Some of them don’t even know he was Prime Minister. But all those memorial ceremonies, and the sad songs and the special programmes on TV, it’s like their emotional antennae are picking up the idea that something in the order of things has been disrupted, and that pulls the rug right out from under them. Do you see what I mean? he asked Noa. Without wanting to, at the worst possible moment, I hiccuped and she didn’t have time to say yes, she understands, because Amir asked me in a worried voice if I felt OK. He’s fine, Noa said and smiled at me as if we had a secret we couldn’t tell Amir. Good, he said in a nervous tone that didn’t sound like him. I’m going, I said. I felt like I was sitting in the stands at a Beitar game when too many fans had gatecrashed and you can’t breathe. I felt like I was keeping them from doing something, although I wasn’t sure what. Thanks for the explanations, I said to Noa. She smiled. I should thank you, she said. Because of you, I chose really beautiful pictures. Won’t you at least have a drink of water? Amir asked. No, I answered, they’re probably worrying about me at home.