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Translated from the Hebrew by Marganit Weinberger-Rotman
THAT SUMMER SHE sat on the patio under the rounded awning of the Italian swing, as the straw fringes intertwined with the edges of the cloth dome rustled softly, sounding like forest noises, her eyes on the red glow flowing from the western horizon at sunset, her baby already standing on his own two widespread legs, his chubby fingers grasping the bars of the square playpen made of interlocked wooden bars. The lilylike hibiscus waved its circlet of toothed leaves bound in an envelope of buds, only their heads peeping out of long, laden calyxes, pouting like the lips of a coquettish girl, the abundant tranquillity all about deluding only the part of her already dormant, not the part that was driven, tensed toward something beyond the apparent silence, knowing the restlessness of someone under eyes constantly prying but always unseen.
That early winter—the mud, the puddles of cement, and the rusty fragments of iron—already seemed distant and impossible, with the three Arab men giving off the stench of wood smoke and unwashed flesh. The men with their bad teeth, with high-heeled shoes that were once fashionable, now looking oversized, with the leather crushed under the heels.
In her dreams they still visited her sometimes, coming too close to her, which, perhaps, where they live too, could be interpreted as what they might have meant to hint, though perhaps it was done inadvertently. For a long time she wondered about it: did Ahmad draw close to her unintentionally, touching her legs with his rear as he dragged a sack of cement, with his back to her? And later, was it by chance that his elbow touched her breast when he passed by her, balancing a bag of lime on his shoulder, while she raised her arms to the lintel of the door to check the concrete rim as it dried? And did Hassan really believe that she would invite him in on that black night when he came back for his coat?
That summer, for a long time after they went off without ever reappearing, she avoided the roof when it was dark, fearing that they might pop up from behind the high potted plants. Sometimes, when she happened to pass the back corner, which was imprisoned within three walls and served, for the moment, as a storage area, and she saw the tools they had left behind and never came back to collect, a chill would climb up her back like a crawling creature with many legs, stirring a column of water in the depths of her belly like the pitching that afflicts you when you’re seasick.
But there was no one else to accuse. She had brought the whole thing down on her own head. And if her baby wasn’t slaughtered, and her jewels weren’t stolen, and nothing bad happened to her—she should bless her good fortune and erase those two winter months from her memory as if they had never been.
Yoel, her husband, had been opposed to the idea from the moment she had brought it up, still just an idle notion in her mouth and still lacking that fervor, that stubbornness, and that unyielding feeling of necessity that
