Agency until he finds a place of his own. Shaya only keeps his harmonica for himself and refuses to play it even when urged to do so. But on summer nights when the windows are open, a passerby in the streets of Beit Hakerem might hear a harmonica playing “A wandering star” somewhere in the distance.
I have been working with Alice for years and her ability to deceive can still surprise me; the naturalness with which she flutters her eyelashes and performs her legerdemain; draws our attention to a ball of dust under the radiator so that we won’t notice the used condoms next to the bed. Knows that the superficial dirt distracts from the sordid filth, that admitting the existence of the dust creates the illusion of honesty.
Alice flits quickly past the reception office of the pension and leaves Erica, the mother, sighing over her “weak heart,” as if she were some romantic nineteenth century heroine, to her fate. Six years, she states briefly, are the difference in age between her and the father. The couple claims six years, but the actual difference is nine. Alice, like everyone else, finds it easy to pass over the sickly mother and fill our ears with the pretentious ideas of the father.
Convenient to ignore the fact that one little daughter in a fancy dress hasn’t been bathed for two weeks, and the other, suffering daughter, has been left to act as a servant in the house, crawling on all fours to gather up the muck of wet, used tissues.
Not a thought to little girls fraternizing unsupervised with strangers. Not a word about the parents’ screaming quarrels with Jamilla, and not a word about the never-ceasing torture through which the two of them put each other. The man wants to sell the pension and the woman refuses: the pension is her inheritance, and her father, who put his whole life into it would turn over in his grave.
In private the man begs, implores, coaxes. Outside the range of hearing of the guests, but definitely within the hearing of his daughters, the man describes in glowing terms the personal and familial happiness awaiting them if they would only sell the house. The woman softens, agrees on principle to sell, but not now. Never now. Next year if everything is all right, after her health improves, after the price goes up, first they have to get another, more serious offer, first they have to get their affairs in order, and in any case it’s impossible until after the end of the season.
Just because of her obstinacy we’re stuck here. Just because of your mother’s petty fears of moving without insurance certificates in hand. Wouldn’t you like to live, girls, for example, in an artist colony in Italy? Or if it has to be a pension, then why not in Cyprus? You know that with the money the agent is already prepared to pay us, cash in hand, we could buy a little house exactly like the one on the postcard? Wouldn’t you like to live in a little house like that with a veranda on the roof? Wouldn’t you like a little donkey of your own to ride on? And if your mother doesn’t want to go abroad—how about right here in Israel? A small apartment in Tel Aviv, facing the sea, wonderful winters, five minutes’ walk to the theater and ten cinemas to choose from. Sitting in cafés with famous people passing by. There’s no need to be afraid all the time. You have to know how to think big because it’s the only way to succeed. Remember, children, what your father says, at least remember this: don’t be afraid.
“My wife takes everything to heart,” Shaya explains to the Jesuit when her wet sighs rise from the room.
“Your mother isn’t sick, she’s just sensitive,” he reassures his daughters when the blonde one’s eyes start to blink uncontrollably. “She has thin skin and little things penetrate it and give her heartburn. Tomorrow she’ll be fine, and she’ll take you to buy coats fit for a princess.”
“Hysteria,” pronounces the Yiddish singer calmly, “with her it’s simply hysteria, we’ve seen it all before.”
“Manipulations,” whispers Gemma, the amateur painter from Verona, to her English girlfriend. “That’s how she controls her husband.”
“Problem with regulation of the spleen,” announces the guest who claims he was a very great doctor in Georgia, and my father looks gratified as the three of us are given a picturesque lesson on the gall bladder and its effluents.
But no doctor confirms my mother’s self-diagnosis, according to which she suffers from a sick heart. In one of the emergency rooms somebody once mentions “anxiety attacks.” At the age of seven or eight I learn the word “hypochondria,” but when I use it, my father scolds me for a crudeness he would not have expected to hear from his clever daughter. The soul, he tells me, is mysterious and as delicate as a spider web.
“Who are we and what are we to judge our fellows,” he adds to the Jesuit who is sitting with us. And to me he continues: “What would help your mother is for all of us to go and live in Italy. For a refugee like me, everywhere is both exile and home, but for your mother’s nerves, a quiet village in Italy would be best.”
“Hypochondriac, hypochondriac, hypochondriac,” I chant in spite of him after the two of them have left the table.
“Hypochondriac,” I insist over the remains of their breakfast, which I have already made up my mind not to clear away.
When did my mother begin to treat herself with Digoxin? Who was the criminal doctor who prescribed Digoxin for a woman who was physically healthy? Did she swallow these pills for years in secret like a junkie, producing the terrible vomiting and irregular heartbeat that won her a bed in all the emergency rooms of the city?
“Doctors don’t understand anything,” she liked to say. Perhaps it was only after she understood what had happened to my sister that she began to use the drug seriously, because it can’t be possible that she took it consistently for years, certainly not in lethal amounts, perhaps only one pampering pill from time to time, and straight to the hospital for a few hours of pleasurable care and concern.
“Do you think she took those pills to make herself sick, or that she really believed that she had a cardiac disease and that they’d cure her?” Oded asked me once, a long time ago. And he went on probing: “Do you think it was connected to what happened to your sister?” This was soon after we met, in the period when I was still running around and saying things to people I’d just met such as: “My mother’s dead. She poisoned herself,” and “My mother was a junkie, she killed herself with prescription drugs.” I would say things like this and smile.
“Don’t you get that I’m not interested in what it’s connected to? That I really, really don’t give a damn?” I growled at my well-meaning boyfriend. “That woman nearly ruined my life, that’s what she did. So do you expect me to understand what went on in her head? There’s nothing to understand and I don’t want to go anywhere near her head. Or maybe you expect me to feel sorry for her too? Is that what you think? That I should pity her? Empathize?”
Oded didn’t protest or argue. My love accepted it, like he accepted everything, without questioning or nagging. He simply let it go, he set my mind at rest, and cradled me until I learned to sleep for nine hours at a stretch to the lullaby of his no-no-no-I-shall-fear-no-evil, for he was with me.
•
My pigtail-sucking Alice is a perfect idiot and a chronic faker. She isn’t capable of producing a single straightforward sentence, and her description of my childhood is, of course, completely false. That’s what she’s like, that’s how I created her, and I take full responsibility for her falsifications and for the small pleasures they afforded me.
But what about my own account? Is it truer? More reliable? Was my childhood really as grim as I describe it? Were there no moments of grace in it? No dewy lawns of happiness?
You could say that I came out okay: I’m sane most of the time, functioning, and I raised
