Something in her fatigued me, something unclear. I’m not talking about the little speeches that she used to make to me, it wasn’t that, I was quite willing to listen to them, though there did seem to be something unreal about them, not because she inhabited a reality different from mine, no, it wasn’t that … something else … something that I didn’t know how to express, and so I said nothing. More and more it seemed to me that she was missing the real world, drifting away from it, but what the real world was of course I couldn’t say. And clearly she was no dreamer. She organized, worked, studied, rushed about, had contacts with all kinds of people. She tended to walk quickly, decisively, with a slight hunching of her shoulders. Elderly movements. No, not elderly, greyish, not greyish, something else, these aren’t the right words. But how to describe her? I want to describe her. Where to begin? It seems to me that I still haven’t begun.
DAFI
But do I complain? Lately they’ve both been leaving me alone, in their different ways. Osnat’s always telling me “They leave you alone, your ageing parents.”
Your old parents?
I was a bit surprised, but I didn’t say anything. Is it true? Poor Osnat, she gets no peace. Her ten-year-old sister shares a room with her, she’s exactly like her, only uglier, and apparently more intelligent. She gets on Osnat’s nerves, prying in her drawers, trying on her clothes, butting into every conversation. There’s no getting away from her. Then there’s the little baby, who was born a year and a half ago, causing a lot of excitement in the class because we were all invited to the circumcision to see what they’d do to him. Such a sweet little baby, already starting to walk on his twisted little legs, getting everywhere, Osnat calls him a moving disaster. Always catching colds, wiping his runny nose on blankets, on sheets, on the clothes of guests. His hands covered in black ink, and if they try to get it off him he shrieks so loud you’d think someone was murdering him. He scribbles on the walls, on books and note pads. And always howls and tears and confusion. Bedlam, this house. In addition to all this they have guests from all over the world coming to stay with them, and Osnat has to give up her bed and sleep on a mattress in the living room.
“It’s so quiet in your house. Dafi, let’s switch places.”
True, it is quiet in our house. In the afternoon when Mommy’s not at home and Daddy’s still at work, it’s so quiet in the dark, tidy house you can hear the ticking of the thermostat. It’s not natural. It’s lucky that I’ve got a room of my own, my kingdom, where I can be as untidy as I like. My bed’s always in a mess, my clothes scattered about, books and note pads on the floor and posters on the walls. There was a time when they tried to force me to keep my room in order but they gave up in the end. This is my order, I said, my rhythm, and I took to shutting myself in, so they wouldn’t come in and look for disturbed things.
In general this trick that I’ve adopted over the last year of shutting myself in my room has proved a great success. When guests arrive I can ignore them. But we don’t have many guests visiting us. Sometimes when the bachelor uncle from Tel Aviv is passing through Haifa he stays to eat supper and then goes. Now and then, on a Sabbath eve, four or five couples come to eat with us, dull people usually, with fixed expressions, their childhood friends or teachers from the school, sometimes even the ones who teach me. Once they even invited Shwartzy to the house on a Sabbath eve. I came out to see how he behaved in his natural surroundings, and I saw that there wasn’t much difference — pompous and bossy as usual. These evenings are so boring, they never really talk about themselves or discuss personal things, they argue about politics or the price of apartments or the trouble caused by children. There’s always one of them who dominates the others, who bears down on everyone. Daddy’s very quiet, passing around the plates of biscuits and nuts and sitting there not saying a word. Working in the garage dulls him a bit. Sometimes I used to go in quietly and sit down among them, making sure to eat a cake that I’d had my eye on since lunchtime, before everything got eaten. But lately I’ve decided that I see enough of the teachers in the morning at school, I don’t have to meet them in the evening at my home as well. So I’ve taken to shutting myself away in my room and showing no sign of life. Sometimes a guest opens the door cautiously, thinking it’s the bathroom, and he’s surprised to see me sitting there quietly, thinking thoughts. He smiles at me ingratiatingly, starts talking to me, asking questions. They’re always amazed at how much I’ve grown, listening to them you’d think I’d grown right there in front of them.
Then I took to locking the door, sometimes even in the daytime. But there are times in the afternoon when Mommy knocks loudly on the door, Aunt Stella, Grandfather’s sister, has come to visit us with one of her friends, she wants to see me. So I go out to meet them, kissing her, sometimes kissing the other old woman, who I don’t always know. Sitting with them and answering questions. Aunt Stella, erect and tall, with a long mane of white hair and a wrinkled face, beside her another old woman, a dried-up midget, with dark sunglasses and a thick, short cane. And the interrogation begins. She knows a lot about me, she even nursed me when I was a baby, when Mommy was studying. She asks me about my marks in school, she knows I have problems in maths, she remembers the names of Tali and Osnat, she even knows something about Tali’s father, who left home. I answer her quietly, smiling. I listen as she interrogates Mommy as well, asking her what she’s been doing over the last month, scolding her for being involved in so many activities, she’s interested in the back pains that Daddy had years ago, she passes on the good wishes of friends of hers who’ve had their cars repaired in his garage. Hardly saying anything about herself, interested only in us, or in others. Mommy sits all tensed up on the edge of the armchair, blushing like a little girl, laughing an unnatural laugh, running to show them a new dress that she’s bought, all the time fetching biscuits, sandwiches and salads from the kitchen, but Stella doesn’t touch anything, only the other old woman sits there, munching away. She really admires these old women, waiting on them humbly and eagerly, and when at last they get up to leave, she pleads with them to let her drive them home.
At last they go. Mommy drives them to the centre of town. I open the little box of chocolates that Stella brought, very superior chocolates. Mommy comes back half an hour later in an agitated mood, sits down in the chair that Aunt Stella sat in, dazed from the experience, incapable of doing anything. I take a good look at her, her hair that’s going grey, the wrinkles in her face, the slight hunching of her shoulders, she’s ageing happily, soon she’ll get herself a cane.
ADAM
But how to describe her? Where to begin? With her feet, the graceful legs of a girl set in solid, low-heeled shoes that hide most of the foot, comfortable shoes perhaps but lacking style, even a bit shabby.
She had strange taste in clothes. A taste that became depressing. In the Carmel Centre she found a shop belonging to a pair of fussy little old women who dressed her in grey woollen dresses with white poloneck collars and half-length sleeves. Pretty masculine-looking clothes with padded shoulders. They used to give her a discount and this delighted her, even though sometimes she had to take a dress with some slight fault in the material. When Dafi was little the old ladies used to bring her little dresses of the same design and the same material, and Dafi looked like a little old woman.