He twisted his face and took off his glasses as he did when he was angry. “Do you know how filthy construction is? Do you have a notion how many tons of soil and rocks will fall on your head when they break through the ceiling for the stairs? And I don’t see why we need another room. There are already two unused rooms in the house. And if you want sunlight—you have half a dunam of private lawn.” Against her rebelliously pursed lips, which for a long time, until his initial patience broke down, were to convey a defiant silence, he added, “What gave you this sudden notion of building? What do you need that for, with a four-month-old baby?”
“So why did we take the trouble to run to the engineer and the municipality to get a building license?” she countered his argument. “And didn’t we pay all the fees and the property improvement tax and all that?”
“So we’d have it in hand,” he replied, “so that if we want to sell the house one day—it will be more valuable, with the license already in hand.”
But the idea had already taken root, twisting up inside her with its own force, like an ovum that had embraced the sperm and was now germinating, and the fetus was already stretching the skin of the belly, and there was no way of putting that growth to sleep.
All that time she was wrapped up in her firstborn son, Udi, who summoned her from her dreams at night. She would come to him with her eyes almost closed, as though moonstruck, and her hands turning the tiny baby clothes of their own volition. On her walks, pushing the baby carriage across broken paving stones, past piles of sand, she found herself lingering around houses under construction, raising her head to see the men walking with assurance on the rim of high walls, amazed, learning how stories grow, how windows are squared into dark frames, shutters raised panel after panel by an enormous yellow machine with the look of arm-bones scraped free of flesh.
From one of the yawning holes that would be a window, someone shouted at her with an Arabic accent, “You looking for someone to service you, lady?” She blushed as though caught in wrongdoing and pushed her baby away in a panic. Near a building that she often passed, a contractor told her while looking into the carriage, “Excuse me for saying this, but this is no place to wander around with a baby. Dirt and cinder blocks or iron rods sometimes fall around here, and it’s very dangerous.”
After she started leaving Udi with a baby-sitter in the mornings, a woman who looked after a few infants in her home, she would go to those places in her old trousers worn at the knees, climb up the diagonal concrete slabs, supporting herself on the rough rafters, and grope in the darkness of stairwells still floored with sand. Here, she would later say to herself, she saw them face to face for the first time, in the chill damp peculiar to houses under construction. They came toward her from corners that stank of urine, all of them with the same face: dark, scalding eyes, sunk in caves of black shadows, hair cut in the old-fashioned way, shoes spotted with lime and cement, and dusty clothes. Here, too, their peculiar odor came to her nostrils: sweat mingled with cigarette smoke and soot. While she exchanged words with the Jewish foreman, oblique glances would be cast at her by the Arab workers, down on all fours laying floor tiles; panting as they transported sacks of cement or stacks of tiles; running to ease the effort; ripping out hunks of food with their teeth, half a loaf of bread in one hand, an unpeeled cucumber in the other.
Some foremen were irritable, refusing to answer her questions, dismissing her with a contemptuous wave of the hand and continuing to give directions to their workers, ignoring her as she stood behind them, ashamed, sensing how the Arabs were laughing at her inside, in collusion with their Jewish foreman. But sometimes the foremen answered her willingly, watching as she took down what they said in her notebook like a diligent pupil. As she turned to leave, they would say with amusement, “So we have to watch out for you, huh? You’re the competition!”
In her notebook the pages were already densely packed with details about reinforced concrete, the thickness of inner and outer walls, various gauges of iron rods, a sketch of the way the rods were fastened for casting concrete pillars, the ceiling, plaster, flooring, conduits for electricity and water, tar, addresses of building materials manufacturers. She hid her notebook from Yoel in a carton with her university notebooks. Once, when he asked, “What’s going on? Zvika said that twice he saw you coming out of the building they’re putting up on Herzl Street,” she looked him straight in the eye and said in her usual tone of voice, “Probably someone who looks like me.” And he responded, “It’s about time you changed your hairstyle. Last week I saw someone from behind, and I was sure it was you. She even had the same walk and the same handbag.”
Afterward, when everything was ripe, like a girl coming of age, Yoel came back from work one day, his eyes troubled. He said, “They want me to attend a training course in Texas for two months. We’re getting a new computer. I said I couldn’t leave you alone with the baby. Let them find someone else.” She answered firmly, alarmed at the swift feeling that leapt up in her like the shock wave of an explosion, “I’ll be quite all right—you should go.” And when the tempest had died down within her she thought: a sign has been sent from heaven.
The day after she saw Yoel to his plane, David, the Jewish foreman, came accompanied by three Arab workers, members of the same family, looking amazingly alike. They all wore old woolen hats. They sat on the edges of the chairs, careful not to ruin the upholstery, with their eyes cast down most of the time. Only occasionally would they raise their eyelids and cast a quick glance at her and the apartment, squinting at the baby on her lap. David wrote down some kind of agreement on a piece of paper, explaining some sentences in Arabic, and they nodded their heads in consent. David copied their names from a form he’d brought with him and their identity numbers from the creased documents they took out of their pockets. He wrote out a description of the dimensions of the room they were to build, detailing the thickness of the walls, the number of electric sockets and their location in the room, the break through the opening for the stairs, the type and color of the plaster. Beside the description he wrote the amounts to be paid as the work progressed. Before signing, she insisted that a final deadline be clearly written, obligating them to finish the work within two months, before Yoel’s return.
Then the three of them stood up at the same time and headed for the door. There, on the threshold, after she thanked him for his assistance, David replied, “Think nothing of it, dear lady. It’s because I can see you’re a fine girl, with an adventurous character. Not many women would do something like this. So here’s to you! And if you need something—ask for David in the Hershkovitz building any time. Good luck! They’re good workers, up on scaffolds from the age of fifteen,” and in her ear softly, “Better than ours, believe me.”
Sitting on the open roof that summer, opposite the sky spread above her with rows of painted white clouds, hearing her baby babble, his voice rising and falling as he tried out his vocal cords, she thought: how did things go so far that those men, whose gaze avoided her eyes, who shrank in her presence with shoulders bowed as though narrowing their bodies, answering her questions with a soft voice as though forever guilty, how did it happen that on that first evening in November they sat on the edge of the chairs, and by December they were already marching through her house like lords of the manor, turning on Yoel’s radio, opening the refrigerator to look for fresh vegetables, rummaging through the cabinet for fragrant shaving cream, and patting her baby on the head?
AT FIRST THEY still seemed to her like a single person, before she learned that Hassan had elongated eyes whose bright color was like the band of wet sand at the water’s edge. Ahmad had a broad nose, sitting in the middle of his flattened face, between his narrow eyes, his lips thick like an African’s. Salah’s ears were pointed and his cheeks were sunken. Only the pimples on his face gave it some thickness, making it look like the pocked, thick skin of an orange.
On the first day, they arrived in an old pickup truck that had once been orange, but now on its dented face there were only islands of peeling paint and its windows were missing. They got out and unloaded gray cinder blocks near the parking lot. Then the
