Sammy split his sides laughing — first thing in the morning he went with his spade to dig trenches in Savyon and the surrounding area with Moshe and Mermel, both of whom had also been rejected by the army — he fell apart whenever the mother walked past him with her brisk tread, off to her fighter-plane engine factory, with her first aid kit and the rake whose handle was broken and which she had replaced with a six-foot-long pole. “Ya hadret elzabet,” he called her, “your honor the officer,” instead of his old nickname, “el muhandes,” the engineer.
For days on end she raced around like a weather vane, looking for a place to “volunteer.” She went to the Labor Federation Center with Georgette and Bracha to “lend a hand” at the Soldiers Welfare Association, and left after a while because “all they do there is gossip all day long; not a soul in the neighborhood escapes those big mouths of theirs,” but above all she devoted herself to improving the shelter.
She smoothed the sandy walls down with a spatula, hung sheets over them, organized a kitchenette with a hollow in the sand for the gas burner, laid down straw mats, made a bench to sit on and a cradle for Corinne’s baby, relayed electricity from the welding-shop generator for lighting, and endlessly raked the floor.
There were no bounds to her delight and keenness when it transpired one morning that the army had decided to make use of Sammy’s welding shop for the war effort: at half past five in the morning two army trucks drove down from the old reservoir hill loaded with damaged vehicle and tank parts. She stationed herself at the bottom of the hill, directed them to the welding shop, and opened the heavy iron door for them: Sammy was still sleeping. He shuffled up to the truck in his pajama pants whose belt was torn, holding them up with one hand.
In the brief breaks she afforded herself, she went to quarrel with Nona on the pretext of “going to sit with her awhile and have a cup of coffee,” but suddenly stood up in the middle of the argument and walked out. “This time,” said the offended Nona, “I’m finished with her, daughter or no daughter — I’m finished with her.”
When the air-raid warning went off Nona remained sitting in her armchair, lighting the wrong end of her cigarette in the excitement of her resolute resistance, holding it between her lips with the filter burning like a brand. The mother hurried everyone into the bunker, bringing up the rear like a shepherd rounding up stray goats, glancing at Nona’s open door and waiting a moment or two before entering the bunker herself, but Nona did not appear, or even come out to the concrete landing of her steps to look. “If she wants to stay there let her. Let a bomb fall on her in her stubbornness,” spat the mother, sat down for a minute on the bench, and immediately got up again, rushed outside, and ran to Nona’s place, to the sound of the sirens, which alternately deafened the yells coming from the quarter-shack and was deafened by them. She came back trembling with rage: “You go and get her,” she ordered Sammy. Corinne, dying of fright both during the air-raid warnings and between them, sat pressing the baby’s head to her bosom with one hand and the child with the other, muttering: “What a madhouse, what a madhouse.” Ten minutes later Sammy crawled back to the bunker: “She has to get ready, she’ll come soon,” he announced with a smirk, the mischievous glint in his eye testifying that “she has to get ready” was an invention of his own, to madden the mother. When the all-clear sounded, they saw the Nona emerging from her room, descending the steps one by one, advancing slowly and haltingly down the path, in almost deliberate slow motion, “as if she’s on a go-slow strike,” stated the mother in astonishment, and surrendered, turned her back on the whole business, once again proving her utter hopelessness at conducting negotiations, which always opened with her taking the hard, uncompromising line of a tyrannical dictator only to blow up in a moment of impatience and disgust, when she washed her hands of the whole thing: “Let them take what they like. They can take the elastic from my panties, as long as they let me breathe,” she said.
That same day Sammy dug a separate little bunker for Nona, next to the concrete steps of her quarter-shack. She only went down there twice, because the war ended — in a terrifying roar, which sent almost all the inhabitants of the street flying for their bunkers even though there was no alert: one of Nona’s gas balloons blew up when she rashly threw a lighted match through the window.
Nona’s little bunker was taken over by Rachel Amsalem and the child: they sat there for hours with the thirty pens in the shape of an umbrella that Rachel had slipped into her pockets from the booty her father the cook had brought back from the war. Rachel brought a map and showed the child what they had conquered, dictating the names of the places for her to write them down in the notebook the two of them had bought from Levy especially for this purpose, pausing between the names, knitting her brows in affected deliberation when the child pointed to the map and asked: “And did we conquer this?”
GAS
FROM TIME TO time she smelled something in the shack and coming from the shack, sniffing, passing between the rooms with her eyes fixed in front of her, hoping to catch sight of it. “I can smell something,” she said, turning to the child, or Sammy, or Corinne. “Can’t you smell it? There’s something here, some smell.” She bent over the unlit kerosene heater, checking for a leak, stuck her nose into the bed covers and the curtains, poked her head into the closets, the kitchen cupboards, the garbage pail, lay on the floor and peered under the beds, and in the end stopped next to the stove, the main suspect: gas.
One by one she sniffs the flames, dismantles the rings, and soaks them in the sink, shuts off the gas at the main, opens all the windows and the front door wide, and still she smells it: subtle, elusive, sly, coming and going, full of tactical retreats simply in order to get organized, gather strength, and attack again, suddenly hitting her in the face as she lies on her side in bed, persuading herself that there’s nothing there. Again she hurries to the stove, goes outside to the gas balloons in the yard, shuts them both off, and goes back inside, sits down on the armchair next to the open window, with her book. She puts her hand to her neck, moves it from side to side as if she wants to get rid of something clutching her throat. “Can’t you smell gas?” she asks Sammy. “There’s a smell of gas.” Sammy sniffs. “There’s nothing,” he says. “Just shut the window. It’s cold.”
“What do you mean, there’s nothing?” she argues. “There’s gas. Smell.” Sammy goes to the kitchen, opens and closes the gas tap, wets it with soapy water to check if there’s a leak; there’s no leak. There’s nothing. She stands behind him, wringing her hands. “Am I dreaming?” she asks. “Am I imagining I can smell it?” “You’re imagining,” he says, and goes about his business, leaving her alone with “it.” “Where are you going?” she asks in a panic, following him to the door. “To work,” he answers in astonishment. “Where else have I got to go?” He slams the door behind him and she opens it again. Now she is surrounded by a sweetish, viscous smell, fainter than before but more poisonous: she feels nauseous. She goes to the bathroom basin and tries to vomit, sticking her finger in her throat, but she doesn’t vomit. “I don’t know how to vomit,” she says, looking at the child riveted to the radio. “Was I crazy smelling that gas all the time?” she asks her. The child doesn’t answer, kneeling by the radio and trying to learn the words of the song it’s playing by heart, registering the mother’s calves next to her, with the hem of her dress coming halfway down. “What gas?” she responds in the end. The mother goes on standing next to her, without moving, casting a dense, heavy shadow. The child raises her eyes and looks at her: her lower lip sags loosely, the contours of her face seem to have blurred and suddenly spread, overflowing their borders. For a moment she recovers, the mother. She sprays the shack with an air purifier, finishing off almost the whole can, escapes to the porch from the suffocating scent, and waits.