Now the photographer told the child to pray. He sat her on the stone fence outside the welding shop. “But how?” she asked. “Like this.” He put her hands together next to her stomach. “That’s how they pray,” he said. Instead of doing as he said, she did what she had once seen in a movie: she pressed the palms of her hands tightly together against her clavicle, closed her eyes devoutly, and mumbled something. Mermel stepped up to the stone fence, sat down beside her, and Sammy’s friend photographed them both: Mermel eating a banana with his thighs open, and the child with her profile turned toward him, the black scarf covering half her face.
“He wants to see you,” Mermel said to her. In the meantime the mother got dressed, locked the door of the shack, leaving the key for Sammy in the big flowerpot next to the door and forgetting the coffee cups on the porch table. “Take off that costume so people won’t think you’re crazy, walking around in a Purim costume after Purim,” she said to the child. “No,” replied the child, pulling her socks up to her knees. “What do you mean, no?” demanded the mother in astonishment, and thought for a minute: “Then you’re not leaving the house, you’re staying here.” The child sat down on one of the wrought-iron chairs and held her tongue. The mother sat down on a chair herself: “We’re not going anywhere. Let her not see her father,” she announced to Mermel. “What do you care if she goes like that?” Mermel tried to persuade her. “She can go, I’m staying.” The mother rose furiously to her feet and went inside. “You can’t break that child,” she muttered.
Mermel and the child went off, got into the silver Lark standing at the side of the road. When Mermel started the car, they saw the mother coming. She got in and sat down wordlessly on the front seat, and the child in her nun’s costume moved to the back, pulling the white fabric swaddling her neck up to her chin, so as not to leave a scrap of skin showing. Nona, who grew up among the nuns in Cairo, said that it was forbidden to see their bare flesh except for their faces, the only part of themselves they were allowed to reveal. She didn’t say “bare” but another word, pursing her lips, as if she had betrayed something against her will, and the child tried to remember what the word was, as she fingered the cross on her chest and stared at the orange groves of Gat Rimon, through which the Lark drove as if it were undoing some zip, which opened wider and wider as the car went on driving, cutting through the heavy density of the greenness.
On the front seat Mermel was telling the mother about various job offers he had received, repeating, “I’ve made up my mind to change, enough,” dangling his left hand out of the window with the cigarette whose ash blew back in the child’s direction. She heard the mother say, “If only, if only,” and her voice sounded dull, veiled, as if it were emerging from layers of cloth.
She didn’t come up to Corinne’s apartment with them, the mother; she said that she would wait outside. “Where outside?” asked Mermel. “Outside,” she said, turned toward the little playground in the sweltering lot next to the building, and sat down on a bench with her back to them.
The child went up. The child came down. The mother was no longer sitting on the bench; she was standing and waiting outside the stairwell. She had bought herself a jam tart at the nearby grocery store, but she had eaten only half and was looking for a garbage can to throw the rest away: “Too sweet,” she said, examining the parcel the child was holding under her arm. “What did you get?” she asked. The child showed her: a white summer dress with red and blue polka dots and a low waist, red patent-leather shoes, and a package of finger biscuits dipped in chocolate. Mermel couldn’t start the Lark. He said he would get hold of a friend to take them home, but the mother didn’t have the patience to wait. “Yallah, we’ll manage,” she said, and started walking to the bus stop with the child, who almost tripped a few times, stepping on the hem of the black nun’s habit, looking straight ahead without blinking an eye in the face of the amused astonishment of passersby.
Night fell as they waited for the bus, sitting on the gloomy bench. The mother took the dress out of its tissue paper again. “At least you got something out of him this time,” she said to the child who looked across the road, at the housing project that was being built there: the ragged buildings were drowned in the darkness like dentures in a glass. She scratched the silver paper off the cross with her fingernails, until they were scratched with the sharp edges cutting into them.
FINAL PORTRAIT OF CORINNE IN THE FLYING SHACK
WE REMAINED ON our own, Corinne and I, on the flat porch of the flying shack, thrust up toward the clouds like a fingerless hand of a beggar, the clouds recoiled, retreating backward or forward — it was hard to tell — the closer the porch came, carrying just us trapped inside one of the big transparent marbles that had rolled off Corinne’s hair and caught us inside it, inside the rich dense water that almost entirely filled it and was happily very warm. The mother and Sammy had abandoned us or been left by us, taking the flying shack with them and leaving us the porch as a favor or deposit on some unfriendly future to come, loading the shack onto Sammy’s patched-together bicycle, which up in the air, for some reason, did not fall when turning but succeeded in flying “straight, straight ahead,” obeying the mother’s wishes.
We remained there, Corinne and I, me and Corinne, inside the fertile water in the marble, which provided us with all the necessary nutrients to keep us in precisely this state, neither growing nor diminishing, with our eyelids stuck to our eyes with spit, through which we saw each other as if reflected in curved mirrors, confirming our existence to each other, especially when Corinne leaned over me, and she leaned over me all the time, almost prostrating herself on me, as if the spherical conditions and the roundness of the water in the marble allowed it, in the absence of flatness.
The spiral rings of Corinne’s breath on my face turned into shining glass toys as they left her mouth, into undefined hybrid animals grafted together, a head to a tail, and they grouped politely at one side and waited, while Corinne said what she said, and this is what she said: “I’ll tell you the truth. Someone has to tell you the truth at last.” I shut my eyes inside my closed eyelids and saw how Corinne’s face so close to mine was sucked into the beam of my eyes, disintegrating and then reconstituted: “What truth?” I asked.
The glass animals whose beauty broke my heart stretched their necks and raised their heads together in the water of the marble, not to hear us better but to lick with their glass tongues the strawberries that began to sprout above them, at the rounded top of the marble. I noticed that Corinne was brushing her fingertips lightly over my face, a gesture that gradually grew more aggressive, pressing harder and harder on my cheeks, my forehead, and my chin, on the space between my upper lip and my nose: “The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about Maurice and who and what he is,” said Corinne. “All right,” I agreed, hoping that this would bring the matter to a quick end, “but tell me only with a sweet tongue, because without ellisan elhilwa I won’t have a face left to show or hide.”