She dressed herself up; morning, noon, and night, she dressed herself up, making an appearance in the breakfast room or the restaurant, accompanied by the mother who was astonished every time anew, recoiling a little from the admiring silence that greeted Corinne’s beauty, the heads that turned toward her or after her, full of an almost fearful wonder at the regal halo shooting sparks like firecrackers around her oval face held high in huge, inexplicable yearning, at the graceful refinement of her walk, at the musical sweetness of her bell-like voice, and — above all — at the tension aroused by this fragile beauty, so delicate and transparent, which seemed to be held seamlessly together by means of her breath alone.
Between the pool and the thickly carpeted halls Corinne spent her time in the souvenir shop of the hotel, buying and buying: beaten silver jewelry, pure white kaftans, “handmade” embroidered tablecloths, and six or seven colored glass figurines of not quite recognizable animals, which for some reason mesmerized her. She bought two a day — dogs or cats that stretched their necks and pricked up their ears in a manner that suggested something between a giraffe and a deer. She arranged them on the dressing table in the room, crowded together as if in a narrow pen, keeping a suspicious eye on the mother when she brushed her hair in front of the mirror: “Be careful not to break them,” she said.
And then the mother went out to sail on one of the tourist cruise boats plying the Nile, giving up on Corinne and leaving her with the Abu Dhabis in the hotel bar, with a frozen wedge of crystallized orange on the rim of the tall glass of her San Francisco cocktail.
It was a very hot, humid morning, and the mother kept wiping her face, which seemed to her to be covered with a layer of sweat and sand, sitting on the boat next to a group of Israeli Palestinians from Umm al-Fahm on holiday in Cairo, and chatting with them. The dark-haired bespectacled young man next to her, with his arm around the shoulders of his young bride, who was green and nauseous with seasickness, listened to the conversation, admiring the mother’s fluent Egyptian Arabic. They spoke, he and she, slowly and absentmindedly unraveling a bundle of threads of origins and intersections. At a certain moment, she couldn’t say exactly when or how it came into being, she understood: Victor, this dark and pleasant-mannered young man, was the son of Sammy’s father from his second marriage after he came to Israel, Sammy’s half brother. Now belly dancing began on the deck, accompanied by rhythmic hand clapping from the vacationers. The boat swayed. She and Victor looked at each other in amazement; her hands shook. They exchanged telephone numbers and addresses, promised to hold a family reunion at the mother’s place, or Victor’s place in Ashdod.
She returned from Cairo with the coiled spring, the mother, but this time it was different: a joyful anticipation about to burst its bonds, the thrill of suppressed delight tiptoeing around itself. Something had suddenly emerged from the viscous tar coating her former life, come back in a different form, purified by time, innocent as bread.
Sammy looked again at the note, at the address written down in Victor’s handwriting: “And you say he’s my brother, this Victor?” he asked again and again in embarrassment, in the anxious expectation that for the first time in his life had granted him the dubious asset of adulthood: a sleepless night. All night long he sat on the wrought-iron chair on the porch, dressed in his pajama pants, narrowing his burning eyes opposite the amm’s thorn field, which in its stubborn lonely neglect in the dark looked so hopeless and pitiful.
The next morning he called Victor and invited him to visit them on Saturday. Victor wasn’t sure, and neither was the mother. She wanted to go and see her brother on the kibbutz, and she went. But in the end Victor came that Saturday. He sat in the wintry sun on the lawn of the mother’s shack without the mother. Sammy barbequed meat; he burned his finger in his excitement. They sat side by side, Victor and Sammy, compared their damaged eyes: both had been infected with herpes in the left eye, at about the same age, and lost their sight in it. About “the father, may he be healthy,” Sammy and Victor’s father, they hardly spoke: he wanted nothing at all to do with Sammy or Umm Sammy.
In the evening the mother returned, saw the remnants of the luncheon party, and went off the rails: she overturned the barbeque grill, threw and broke the plates left in the sink, chased us with the broom: “You wanted to cut me out of the whole thing, do the whole dirty business behind my back,” she yelled at us. “What dirty business?” asked Sammy on the point of tears, avoiding the broom and covering his face with his hand: “Why dirty? You wanted me to meet this brother, you brought the phone number and everything.” She went inside, slamming the door and locking it behind her: “I didn’t want anything, anything. Who gave you permission to get into my bones like this and decide behind my back?” she cried from behind the locked door.
For over a week she didn’t speak to a soul, shut herself up in the shack, went only to the grocery store and back, slammed the phone down on Corinne, me, and Sammy. “But what’s going to happen?” Sammy scratched his arms savagely, making the rash worse — eczema had broken out all over his body. His lips were gray, cracked with panic. He knocked on her door twice a day and she refused to open it. He crept around to the back window, tried to look inside and talk to her. She closed the blinds an inch from the tip of his nose: “Go away, I don’t want to see anyone,” she said.
The stone closing the cave of the past had been removed for a moment and then returned to its place with the same breathtaking and inexplicable suddenness with which it had agreed to move a little, to open and be opened.
One night Sammy implored me to come with him, to go to her together, he and I and Corinne. Perhaps the three of us would be able to get her to climb down. The shack was padded with darkness. Only in the passage a little light went on and off again a minute later, as soon as the sound of our steps rose from the flat porch surrounded by the pale, sickly patch of lawn whose baldness had been laid bare by the mower.
THE SOUND OF OUR STEPS
PERHAPS WE WERE deafened to the sound of our steps in the rain at the time of the event, walking abreast along the road at night, at measured intervals, which enabled us to spread across the road, from sidewalk to sidewalk, stepping in time, at a measured pace, neither fast nor slow, but with precision — not like people escaping from something or someone, buffeted by the movement of the pendulum between the past and the future, between what had been and what would be, but like people who had been granted the grace of the moment, bathed for a moment from head to toe in the golden drizzle of the present, warmed by its humble furniture: the rain, the road, the night, the cat, the dirt path, a random sentence spoken or not, the crooked branch of a Persian lilac tree, the shack we passed without making anything of it, and walking on.
The mother marched in the center, if there could be said to be an actual center, walking between Sammy and me, keeping an ear out for Corinne, at Sammy’s left, without turning her head to the side or being tempted in some other way to appear to be watching her, which was not necessary now, because everything was over — not “everything” in the sense of the course of life, but the “everything” of the skin’s quiet knowledge, the skin that keeps watch through the inattention of the mind, the heart, circumstances, and fate.
We didn’t drag our feet in any way, our bodies whole and determined even in the rain, not surrendering to the feebleness of defeated withdrawal, and not to false stiff-backed bravado either; no surrender was needed here, since there was no battle, no friction between what we were and what we weren’t — man, object, or nature.