To my regret, we are continuing the same arrogant and contemptible vein of propaganda to this day. It seems, too, that we have learned nothing from the political cunning of our allies in this war, the English and the French. They were able to transcend their military victory and put it behind them, thereby proving themselves superior to us in political maturity. They were not slow in denouncing the war and those who led them into it, and who paid the price in their political careers for this superfluous war. Thus relations improved between these two powers and the Egyptians and political and economic ties between them were renewed.
And here in Israel? All we can do is go on arguing about the battles of the Sinai Campaign, reminisce fondly about the stories and legends and battles of the war, and invent more and more dubious facts about that war. Which shows that we are still worshipping the golden calf of the militaristic Ben-Gurionist doctrine that will lead us to the next war.
MORE AND MORE
THE CHILD WANTED Nona to tell her more and more about herself. “Tell me more,” she begged, especially when the two of them went to town to sit in Café Milano almost every Tuesday afternoon, because Nona had to have a change of air. “Let’s get a change of air,” she said to her at two o’clock in the afternoon on a blazing khamsin day, setting the tub in the middle of the room, and taking off her slip, naked with the door open. “People can see you,” cried the child in alarm, “they can see everything.” “Let them see”—Nona tested the water in the tub with the toe of one foot and then the other—“What’s there to see already? Didn’t they see what I’ve got on their mothers when they were born?” With her silver hair gathered into a flat bun on top of her head, her vast hips, shiny-white and silky, the long neck rising from her chest, her breasts spreading out and rounding at the bottom — she looked like a huge china jug set on an unsteady surface and wobbling slightly. Afterward she sprinkled herself with half a bottle of eau de cologne, sneezing as she did so. “You’re putting on too much scent,” scolded the child, who also scented herself with eau de cologne, but the way Corinne did it: behind her ears and on her wrists. “That’s because I haven’t got my eyes,” explained Nona, who sat in the armchair dressed and combed, her handbag on her lap, and waited for the appointed hour, the four o’clock bus.
The room was dark. There were no windows apart from the rectangle of light from the front door open onto the concrete landing overlooking the mother’s shack at the bottom of the path, behind the thorns of the amm’s backyard, behind the brick fence of the welding shop, behind the cypress tree. The child went out to call Rachel Amsalem, so that she, too, could hear all the things Nona told her about herself, and found her next to the guava tree, sorting out the fallen fruit that wasn’t rotten and collecting it. She came with the child reluctantly, cradling the guavas in front of her in her shirt. The two of them sat on the floor at the Nona’s feet. “Well?” demanded the child, and looked at Nona expectantly, afraid that Rachel would get bored and run away. The Nona cleared her throat, and opened: “Ya wai wai, ya baruch Adonai,” she said in an unenthusiastic, perfunctory tone: her mind was on her “change of air.” “Not like that,” said the child in disappointment. “say it all from the beginning.”
She began again: “You, ya bint, with you it’s either wai wai or baruch Adonai—bless the Lord.” The child roared with laughter and glanced at Rachel Amsalem who was sitting cross-legged with a blank, embarrassed expression of incomprehension on her face. “She said that I’m either ay-ay-ay or baruch Adonai, did you understand?” she pressed Rachel, and the Nona contributed: “That’s what you say about someone who either sees everything black as black or white as white.” Rachel barely smiled and took three caramels from the jar standing on the little table. The Nona went on to the next bit: “Pity the poor madrub who marries you. He probably wanted to hang himself, and went to get married instead, the madrub.” This was even funnier, and the child laughed till tears came to her eyes. Rachel laughed, too, but she whispered to the child: “What’s a madrub?” The child wasn’t sure what a madrub was and she looked at the Nona: “I don’t know exactly,” she said. Nona paused for a moment, lit her cigarette, took a puff without inhaling, and said the third part: “You, ya bint, elriglen fil-khara walraas mtartara.” Rachel Amsalem tensed at the word “khara”—shit. “What did she say?” The child couldn’t answer, the laughter was choking her. “What are you laughing at? You laughed yesterday,” the Nona scolded her, and she turned to Rachel and explained: “Elriglen,” you know what that is — feet. So the feet are in the shit but the head is up in the air, “mtartara,” going around and around,” she explained.
Rachel Amsalem wasn’t pleased about something. She arranged the guavas in her shirt and got up and left. The child saw her home. “Wasn’t it funny, what she said about me?” She looked at her anxiously. “No,” pronounced Rachel, kicking a stone with the toe of her shoe: “She insulted you and you laughed like an idiot.” “She didn’t insult me,” protested the child. “Yes she did,” insisted Rachel. “She said you were shit, that’s what she said. Why isn’t that insulting?” She stood still and stared straight into the child’s face. From so close up her eyes seemed to squint, coming together toward her nose. The child was silent. She thought for a long time: “Because it was her who said it.”
TIME
MAURICE’S TIME WAS a time of absence: the past and the present had no headstone. This timelessness was flat, with no footholds to hold on to: when he came, when he went, what came first and what came afterward, when he stopped coming, at what age and what year — all this was not history but metaphysics.
His sudden appearances and disappearances were welded in the child’s mind into the one great, burning appearance that consumed itself even as it was taking place, vanishing into the whiteness of absence. The longing was not an arrow sent into some future or past. It had no map: it was a longing for longings, for the white absence itself.
And then, at some point along the length or breadth of the flat expanse, he stopped appearing for a very long time, which was called “years”—and then he popped up, after the “years,” emerging like the tip of a mountain that had been covered by the sea, when the child was eleven or twelve years old. This was his final appearance: after that there were meetings, but no appearances.
He didn’t come to the shack; he could no longer just come to the shack and flee from it: that movement was over. He went to Corinne one afternoon and sent Mermel to tell the child to come and see him there, at Corinne’s place.
It was after Purim but nevertheless Mermel found her on the lawn of the mother’s shack in her costume, dressed as a nun, sitting up straight on one of the wrought-iron porch chairs and kissing the wooden cross covered by the mother in silver aluminum: Sammy’s friend who couldn’t make it on Purim was taking a photograph of her like this, and then another one of her standing between the rosebushes, holding an open Bible, the ends of the black head scarf flapping behind her back and the hem of the black dress hugging her calves, exposing the tops of her white socks that had slipped down into her shoes. Mermel peeled a banana and looked at her being photographed: “That’s a nice costume,” he said to the mother, putting off what he had come for. But she knew him only too well, especially his inability to keep his mouth shut: “What’s up?” She gave him a look. “Out with it.” Mermel squirmed a little and peeled another banana. “Maurice wants to see her,” he said in the end.