“I’m just painting a little, to pass the time,” she said coyly. The easel stood on the porch with the big sheets of Bristol paper, and she started early in the morning “quickly-quickly”: flowers, flowers, and more flowers. Flowers in the form of anemones, of roses, of cyclamens, of poppies. Even some of the cyclamens were painted in burgundy. From seven to eight in the morning she got through “maybe twenty.” Then she hurried to remove the easel, the paints, the paintbrushes, in order to flood the porch with water and “begin the day.”
This was the hour of Mustafa, the gardener who had worked for all the residents of the neighborhood until they all let him go, for fear of knife-wielding Palestinians. Only the mother went on employing him and occupying herself with him. “Let them fear for their ass if they want to. The only one I’m afraid of is God,” she said. Every morning she was waiting for him with the coffee, and they began with a review of her work: “Nothing to write home about.” She surveyed the paintings with a critical look. “Not so good this time, eh, ya Mustafa?” “Good,” he disagreed. “Why do you say not good? Straight from Paradise they are, those flowers you paint.”
On his face there was always a half-embarrassed, half-ironic smile, and his fingers were long and delicate and manicured as a pianist’s. But the mother envisaged a different future for him. She wanted him to be a muhami: “You should be a lawyer, ya Mustafa, with brains and a tongue like yours, a muhami,” she exhorted him. He walked behind her to the rose bed at the back, the disaster zone. “You see?” She pointed in despair at the wilted bushes, bending down and turning the soil over with her fingers: “It’s all because of this lousy soil, sand and more sand, mafish fayida, there’s nothing to be done with it.” Mustafa knelt at her side, dug his fingers politely into the soil, not because he needed to verify anything, but in order to prove to her that his conclusions were based on empirical research. “Why do you say mafish fayida?” he said after a prolonged silence. “The soil is good, there’s nothing wrong with the soil, very good soil.” The mother spluttered: “How can you say such a thing?” “Behayat elnabi, by the life of the Prophet, the soil is good,” vowed Mustafa, brought new rose plants, planted them, and urged her not to touch them. “Leave it with me,” he said.
Now they visited the new roses, which had not yet bloomed, every morning after the coffee and the paintings: “Nothing,” pronounced the mother bitterly, “these will die from the soil, too.” Mustafa produced a metaphor of his own: “A man at work, does he like people standing over him all the time?” “He doesn’t like it,” the mother said reluctantly. “It’s the same with the roses,” concluded Mustafa. “They don’t like people standing over them either. They, ya sitti, are also working.”
A few days after this he stopped coming, because of the curfew, and he disappeared for long months. “I’m worried about Mustafa not coming. My heart is afraid for him. Who knows what happened to him?” the mother said repeatedly, and she persuaded Sammy to drive her to the village of Yaabad on the West Bank, to look for him. They set out in the morning in Sammy’s pickup and arrived in the afternoon, losing their way among the stone barriers outside the Palestinian villages and the army roadblocks. Mustafa “lost his color” when he saw them: his wife had given birth to a new baby that morning, his fifth. They entered the only room of his house apart from the kitchenette, sat down on the long sofas, which opened up into beds at night, and looked around them: an entire wall of the room was covered with the mother’s flower paintings.
They were stuck close together, rectangle next to rectangle, with no gaps between them, “like wallpaper,” covering the wall from floor to ceiling, only it seemed that they had been altered a little.
The mother came closer. She almost pressed her nose to the wall and looked: on the areas of the pictures painted brown for the soil, Mustafa’s daughters had stuck real reddish soil, on the green gouache of the leaves they had pasted green leaves from bushes and trees, and on the huge flowers painted burgundy, yellow, and purple — petals of red, yellow, and purple flowers, some of them fresh, most of them already wilted.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
RONIT MATALON, the author of Bliss and The One Facing Us, among other books, is one of Israel’s foremost writers. Her work has been translated into six languages and honored with the prestigious Bernstein Award; the French publication of The Sound of Our Steps won the Prix Alberto-Benveniste. A journalist and critic, Matalon also teaches comparative literature and creative writing at Haifa University and at the Sam Spiegel Film School in Jerusalem. You can sign up for email updates here.