And the Rat Laughed

And the Rat Laughed - Nava Semel


And the Rat Laughed
Nava Semel (b. 1954, Tel Aviv, Israel) holds an MA in Art History and is an art critic. Semel has worked as a TV, radio and recording producer and as a journalist. She has written poetry, prose for children and adults, television scripts and opera libretti, in addition to translating plays. Semel has received several literary prizes, including the American National Jewish Book Award for children’s literature (1990), the Women Writers of the Mediterranean Award (1994), the Austrian Best Radio Drama Award (1996), the Israeli Prime Minister’s Award (1996) and Tel Aviv Woman of the Year in Literature Award (2007).
Professor Miriam Shlesinger was born in the United States and has been living in Israel since 1964. She completed her BA at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in musicology and linguistics in 1968, her postgraduate diploma in translation and interpreting at Bar-Ilan University in 1978, her MA in the Department of Literary Studies at Tel Aviv University in 1989, and her Ph.D. at Bar-Ilan University in 2000. She is currently chair of the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies at Bar-Ilan University. Professor Shlesinger is also a practising translator of plays, novels and short stories from Hebrew into English, as well as a conference interpreter.



Part One
The Story
A day in Tel Aviv, late 1999
1
How to tell this story?
Things that had been locked inside her have begun showing through lately.
But maybe there’s no need to tell it. The old woman keeps trying to defend her unswerving resolve, and to stick to her silence. For so many years she’s kept the story within her. And now, the question refuses to be muted any longer. It rises out of its grave, egging her on, intrusive.
How should the story be told?
But maybe it’s been told already. Leaking through in moments of distraction, forcing its way to the surface whenever she loosened her grip. And since the thought of that story being jostled about, unattended and vulnerable without her, is too unsettling, it’s as if she has no choice but to assume the role of storyteller.
But she doesn’t know how. And just as she has repressed the story, so too does she now repress the very question of how to tell it. Because if she were to give it a voice, the story would burst through without her being able to contain it, and its severed limbs would scatter in all directions, unfamiliar even to her.
Insofar as it depends on her, she’s not going to tell the story in full.
***


I was their little girl. Father’s and Mother’s. I loved them.
That could be the beginning.
No.
That would put an end to the story even before it began.
***


Even when she pent it up inside her, the story would stab its way through, jabbing its spikes into her. Other spikes dissolved or fell off, and she’d hoped that time would do a good job of covering things up, obliterating whatever should not be remembered, should not be retold even to herself. On rare occasions, when she did manage to summon one particular spike, memory would turn against her, refusing to play along. It was only in distraction, when she had abandoned control, that the unsummoned spike would jab into her, foisting itself on her and dragging her deep into the entrails of the story.
***


I was a little girl.
I did not choose to be born.
I suppose I must have been happy. Not that the question ever arose, of course. Children are not in the habit of wondering about their own happiness.
What would you like to know?
What good will it do?
Why now?
The old woman’s barrage of questions tries to ward off the inevitable. But her granddaughter won’t let up. She insists on getting some answers.
The old woman is having trouble finding a sensible place to begin the story, one that won’t jeopardize the rest of it.
***


As far as she’s concerned, the story isn’t that important to her, and at this late date it doesn’t seem to be important to anyone else either. There are many others like this story, including some that have already been told. She doesn’t think that hers is any more worthy.
On the contrary, she’s convinced that the story will resist her, will become incoherent, and in an effort to disguise its own ugliness will turn into something completely different.
And yet, she is the only one who can tell it. If not all of it or most of it, then at least some parts. A strange sense of urgency overtakes her. Maybe it’s old age. She cannot afford to let the story disappear as if it never happened.
***


I had a mother.
I had a father.
Won’t you make do with that?
I loved and I lost.
That’s the end of the story. The beginning too.
The old woman keeps on grappling to the last minute, when the doorbell rings, causing the walls to shake.
***


It’s not one of those stories that audiences love. Old Woman, give them something airy, upbeat, with an engrossing plot. The hero ought to be larger than life, that’s what her granddaughter tells her. Glamorous, sort of famous, like someone from TV. Despite her age, the old woman knows the new stories, how a story does well precisely when it removes its addressees from their own bleak and compliant place. People have enough on their plate without stories like hers.
The recipients of the new millennium’s stories are quick to pass judgment. They’ve heard enough, so they declare. This story, that story, the world is filled with so many stories. Even those without a story to tell insist on their own snippet. And as long as it’s being told, they want the snippet to ring true.
But her story, rotting away in its drawn-out darkness, couldn’t possibly sound familiar. Which is why its chances of finding a receptive addressee are all the more slim. Deep inside, the old woman is hoping for a hostile reaction that will wipe out the story once and for all.
But to undo it completely would be impossible.
Besides, she knows that in her case just telling it will take a supreme effort. To try not to undermine it. To continue loving even in those places where the story is devoid of love.
Because once she lets go of it, it will be told differently. People will add things, leave things out, twist it out of shape. And all she has to go by is her own version, her own inadequate best. Deliberately, cautiously, the old woman will pry out spikes from the body of her story, hoping for it to work its way to the surface carefully and discreetly.
As for the brutality of it, she’d better just let that be.
For now.
***


The girl sits facing her. Her hands are unclenched.
Grandma, tell me.
The old woman says nothing.
Grandma, it’s me.
She’s still prying out those spikes.
***


She’s not as old as she seems. But since her granddaughter sees her as planted in a world which can hardly have existed, let’s just call her “the old woman”, though age, at least in her case, is an elusive notion.
In her case, in fact, it is her childhood that is fixated. And not out of nostalgia.
The old woman is the little girl who once was. True, it would take a daring leap of the imagination to connect pudgy little hands to the body as it is now, or to visualize the dimples and the baby teeth. But since the reflection of the little-girl-who-once-was has none of that wistful sweetness to it, we will not refer to her as “that little girl”. Whenever the old woman stands in front of the mirror, she searches – and she keeps searching – in the hope of not finding.
***


I lost it.
I lost everything.
Not everything.
Almost everything.
***


Patience, Child. Every storyteller has trouble finding the right words, and this particular storyteller is finding it especially hard, since her spikes and the sudden jabs have never before been translated into storytelling language.
That was an excellent pretext for not telling it to the girl’s mother, whom the old woman also called “the girl”, though it was a long time since she’d been young.
The old woman uses “girl” for all those who’ve been born to her, including those born to the ones who’ve been born to her.
How should she begin? Maybe with the beginning that came before it began.
Once upon a time, there was ... – that’s the usual format, the proper way of starting a story. Well, once upon a time there was a man and a woman. They met. They fell in love. More or less. They had a daughter. A family. A neat and familiar pattern. How’s that for a promising beginning?
Except that the story refuses to be told that way.
***


Why are they doing this to me?
What did I do wrong?
Why?
That’s the whole story in a single word.
***


A story? The old woman protests. Why call it a story anyhow?
The very word implies something fictional, and may even allow the harsh details to be turned into anecdotes.
But the girl who is sitting across from her won’t take no for an answer. It is a story. That was what she was taught. Not just any story, but a first-person account. She’s even brought a notebook along, to take it all down. There’s a sweet angel on the cover, a commercial print that you see everywhere. Its chin is resting on its hand. Its wings are colorful, and its eyes are looking upwards.
The girl sitting across from the old woman is her granddaughter. Knowing that she herself is going to be seen differently by her young listener as the story unfolds, the old woman holds back. She must not cause the child to age prematurely. She’s afraid of changes.
What might have happened if...
What if the girl sitting across from her had been there instead?
It would have been totally different.
Or maybe not.
***


A home. Her room. There’s a window in the wall. A rose-patterned lace curtain. A doll with braids. She’d gone to sleep with the doll under her pillow. In the middle of the night she got up and pulled out the doll, worried that it might suffocate. She told the doll she was sorry.
Her mother laughed.
The granddaughter is disappointed. That wasn’t the beginning she’d been hoping for. Some day, when she retells the story, she’ll choose a different way to begin it. Her own way.
***


I loved them.
They loved me.
Those are the foundations.
No, this story cannot be begun with love.
***


If she’d been asked to give an account instead of telling a story, it would have been simpler. A pre-formatted questionnaire with a clear purpose. She could have given them the dry facts, without having to formulate an argument. The distinct, calculated questions could have helped her remain in control, and anything that she did not want to let out could have been blocked.
As soon as she gave in to her granddaughter’s request, she realized that telling this story meant provoking it. She had no choice now. She’d set herself up.
Unable to break free, defeated, the old woman tries to start all over again.
2
A big city. There are many like it in Europe. Heavy snow in winter. The river is frozen over. For her birthday, they gave her a pair of skates. In her blue cape she skates without going further than she’s allowed, only where the ice is thick. They told her there were fish under the ice, but she didn’t see any.
A five-year-old can’t take in everything with her own senses.
Who was it that had held her hand to make sure she didn’t fall in?
Father. Mother too. Was it the servant? Probably not. Always in uniform: dark blue with a white collar and long sleeves.
Oh yes. The servant. Now there’s a beginning that looks promising. The granddaughter settles into her chair and opens the angel-covered notebook on her lap. That’s just what she had in mind: everything it takes to make a story, even a servant.
***


She screamed. She kicked. She broke things.
Why are you giving me away to people I don’t even know? I’ve been good, haven’t I? I’ve done everything you told me. So why are you making me go? My room. My doll with the braids. The window with the lace curtains. The rose-patterned ones. Mother made them.
I love you. How come you don’t love me back?
I won’t go. I don’t want to. I won’t.
You’re a bad father and mother.
In the end she hit them.
Now she really was a bad girl. She had it coming.
That’s how the story really begins.
***


Her granddaughter cringes. Still, she’s determined to go ahead. A poor beginning doesn’t necessarily mean a bad ending. As far as the young girl is concerned, the story has a happy ending anyway. The old woman is her grandmother after all.
“And it will end with death.” The granddaughter does not record that familiar sentence in her notebook, because that’s not how the story ended. At least not this story.
But the threat of untimely death was passed on from birth-givers to those who were born, and turned into a hereditary deficiency. A challenge to scientists struggling for a breakthrough in genetic engineering. The old woman nods, resigned to the inevitability of hereditary defects. She will not play a part in this rewrite.
***


She continued to resist. Refusing to pack. Not even the doll with the braids. On the last day she wouldn’t even eat. Hunger was her last resort. Even at this late date, the old woman makes a point of stressing that she did not go along with her parents’ plan. She really did become the worst possible girl in the world. Because if you throw someone out of their home, there has to be a reason. All her mother said was: It’s for your own good. And her father told her: It’s just for a short time.
Grown-up lies.
Her granddaughter now looks up from her notebook. Up to this point it seemed that she might have been trying to take it all down.
Grown-up lies. An unnecessary slip.
The old woman stops short. The story is begging for a pause in any case. She’s worried that her granddaughter will suspect her of not telling the truth, and won’t trust her.
She’s a grown-up herself after all.
Without trust, the story is in danger of collapsing.
***


If you throw someone out of their home, there must be a reason.
Such a bad girl.
Unwanted girl.
Too bad she was born.
She had it coming.
***


She had never been away from home without her parents. Her parents never left her. Even in summertime when they went to the seashore, they took her along. Now she’d have to live without them. To be with strangers in a strange place. Why weren’t they taking her with them?
All night long she cried. Her last tears. Her mother sat by her bed, trying to hold her hand. She pushed her away. Anger – that’s the scaffolding of her story. The old woman would try her best to keep the venom from splattering onto the recipient of her story. The old woman hadn’t chosen her, and there was no doubt in her mind that her granddaughter was hardly the ideal addressee. Had she been allowed to choose, she would have preferred someone indifferent, unemotional, far-removed from her and from the threat of her hereditary deficiency. But at her age, it would be foolish to expect a perfect listener.
When they come to judge her story’s tortuous emergence from its darkness, they will dissect the storyteller too. Maybe it could have gone differently. Maybe it would have been enough to tell just the beginning, and to limit the continuation to an innocuous minimum.
Without hearing all of it, her granddaughter’s mother too would question its validity, because to her mind, some stories have to be confined to those who have already crossed the twilight zone separating childhood from whatever follows.
Ever so laboriously, the story moves forward, only to retreat again.
***


In the case of the old woman and others like her, the hereditary deficiency has reached its quintessence. Her daughter had complained, first behind her back and then to her face. And that too is part of the story, though it is probably part of a different one.
The old woman would also have liked her unbridled story with its warped and twisted spikes to be replaced with something more tame. Had the granddaughter’s mother been witness to this conversation as it unfolded on a sunny afternoon in Tel Aviv, she would have been more relentless in her judgment on the art of storytelling than any outside expert.
Don’t lay this on us, Mom, she would have screamed. Spare us. So much for this story. Cut it out once and for all.
***


What is a Jew?
If it’s such a terrible thing to be a Jew, why did you make me one?
Papa and Mama, it’s your fault. You’re to blame that I am what I am. You’re the worst father and mother in the world. I wish I had known. I would have chosen to be born to someone else.
Maybe she’d heard the word Jew before, but five-year-olds don’t give much thought to the words hovering around unless a particular one is repeated over and over again, and begins to hurtle at a frightening pace.
There were other insults. Once she even spat at her father. He wiped off the wet spot and, much to her surprise, did not scold her. She tried to strike a bargain. She promised to be the very best. She’d never ask for anything again. She swore she’d eat cabbage for breakfast, lunch and dinner. They knew how much she hated cabbage.
They rinsed her hair with peroxide. She thrashed about wildly. The servant threatened to tie her hands together, and eventually managed to hold them tight.
It’s so you don’t look too Jewish.
If there’s such a thing as too Jewish, there’s such a thing as not Jewish enough too. She’d already made up her mind: as soon as she could, she would stop being Jewish at all.
If being Jewish was such a terrible thing, then being a Jewish little girl was the worst thing in the world.
***


There was another word she heard for the first time. They spat out War like you spit out a broken tooth. Then they started whispering, as if they’d lost their voices. And even though her lungs were still full of screams at that point, she was already starting to sound like them. First masking her voice, then whispering, and finally utter silence.
If you were going to hand me over to strangers, why did you bring me into the world?
Where is “there”?
Who’s going to help me with my homework “there”?
Whose bed will I go to “there”?
And who will be with me “there”?
Who else will be “there”?
Why isn’t “there” here?
The old woman rattled off the questions one after the other, the way children do to control what comes next. Now she realizes that this had been her way of reducing her fear, though she can hardly bear to admit that the effort was doomed to fail. Would her granddaughter be able to see through the old-woman shell, and perceive the five-year-old child she once was? Her childish voice reaches out through the cracks in the story. Once she’d been forced into the next stage, the child had trained herself never to speak in anything but a grown-up’s voice.
***


When her strength ran out – how much strength can a five-year-old have? –she whispered: Will you come to visit me? And they swore they would.
Just before they left the house, as the servant clasped her hands with fleshy handcuffs, she asked, barely audible: Will you come to take me back when you can?
And again they promised they would.
***


The storyteller is supposed to gain something from the very act of telling the story. Release, after all, according to the experts, is supposed to bring relief. The old woman certainly has a hefty motive then. And yet, no gain seems to present itself in the case of her story. The natural act of returning to the past and rummaging through memories brings solace only to those with very different stories to tell. The growing weight of her own story leaves no room for relief. And there’s no turning back now either.
Don’t turn your back on me, the story seems to be imploring in an almost-human voice. The deeper it was buried, the wilder it grew and the stronger its roots, though the old woman had deluded herself into thinking that she had managed to sever its limbs and eradicate it. Now it is her turn to implore, to beg her memory to set her free. She needs its blessing if she is ever to be able to emerge from her hiding place.
***


They stood with their backs to her.
Her mother did not turn around. Didn’t say a word. Not even good-bye. Didn’t touch her either.
The old woman is almost choking. The story is lodged between her throat and her mouth. She couldn’t know that, had her mother made a move – even the slightest one, like holding out a finger or blinking or twitching – everything would have fallen apart.
The granddaughter gets up. The old woman feels that the girl is about to touch her, but as if on an uncontrollable impulse, she turns her back.
For a moment, that seems to be the end, but it isn’t even halfway through.
3
They lowered her into a pit under the ground. The stranger, the one whom she would come to call the “farmer’s wife”, dragged her down the ladder and said, This is where you stay.
The little-girl-who-once-was thought that only the worst creatures in the world lived under the ground. Moles and snakes and worms. And the worst of all were the rats. She was worse than any of them though, if she had to be hidden away from all the people up above.
That’s what the old woman thinks she must have been feeling then. But instead of adding to the story, she only seemed to be detracting from it.
***


Early afternoon in Tel Aviv is always a difficult time of day. The light is invasive. Only rarely does the old woman let herself take it in. Most of the time, she draws the curtains and shuts the blinds, to let in the darkness, her old ally.
Her mother and father hadn’t told her that “there” was in the darkness under the ground. Even the servant, who had shared their secret, had kept it from her. But if the old woman had known ahead of time what lay in store, would it have been any easier for her? Can a person prepare for the possibility of being lowered into a pit under the ground?
The little-girl-who-once-was thought: Maybe I’m really dead. Because only dead people get pushed so deep down.
***


Why do they call the main character of a story the “hero”? Some people naively assume that it’s because the main character gives the story its strength, but the fact that the character happens to be in the centre doesn’t necessarily mean he or she will be heroic in carrying the story along.
The old woman’s style seems more in keeping with our modern approach – choppy, jumpy, breathless. But it’s not because she doesn’t have enough time, or because she’s eager to get to a point that will be particularly rewarding. Nor does she tell it out of consideration for the reader’s impatience.
Her granddaughter is sitting across from her, confused.
***


Darkness.
This is where the story reaches an impasse. The old woman is finding it difficult to explain darkness to someone for whom it has an obvious meaning, part of the day-and-night cycle, associated with the safety of sleep, of dream life.
At this point in her story-line, she is inclined to give up trying. Her darkness is not about a lack of light nor even a contrast with light. It’s a subcutaneous substance that has mass and weight, and has managed to defy the laws of nature and work its way through every barrier in the human body. Even when she discovered within herself the intention of shedding light on it, especially for the sake of the one with whom she has had children, that intention was short-lived, because she soon discovered that her darkness would not lend itself to reformulations.
This is all she can offer then: I was in the dark. A muddle of time. I don’t know when it began or when it was over.
If it was over.
***


And those are the details of the story, pretending to be ordinary. The creatures who were there in the dark grasped her presence. A rat groped its way in her direction, first sniffing, then biting. She didn’t scream. It was she, after all, who had disrupted his routine. Then they grew used to one another. She petted him and he grew fat. The glimmer in the rat’s eyes was her only light.
She could not make out her hands or feet. To be sure they were there – she fingered herself, and that’s how she discovered the lice, not knowing that’s what they were called, these tiny creatures that had set up home in her hair and on her body, being fruitful and multiplying. She picked them off her body and crushed them – the only sound in the darkness. That and the sound of her breathing, which she also learned to emit ever so softly.
Her senses, which had grown sharp almost instantly, began by grasping the subterranean movement. The rotting of the potatoes. The slow progress of the roots. The groaning of the wood in the ladder leading down to the pit. The wheezing of the seeds as they fought to sprout. The drops of rain percolating through the soil.
She learned to recognize the sounds above ground too. The lowing and the growling. The footsteps of cows. The croaking of frogs in a faraway lake. She concentrated on every murmur, deciphering its effects on the world above. Then she translated the sounds into pictures. The hay being stacked up in the silo. The thrashing of the pitchfork. The neighing of the farmer’s horse as it crossed the wheatfield. The farmer lashing out at his wife: What did we need this for, you fool! And for next to nothing too. Jesus, that little Jew is a danger to all of us.
Birds she didn’t hear even once. Maybe they were too far away. But planes she could hear clearly. Every time she recognized the muffled hum, she couldn’t help thinking of her father and mother, and clinging to their promise. Even if they were the meanest parents in the world, the kind who abandon their daughter, still she wanted to be with them. Every part of her body was aching to be hugged. The anger and the longing blended together. Never would she be able to tell them apart.
The farmer woman was coming down the ladder. She threw down the bowl along with a spoon, and a bucket-toilet, and announced: You’re not coming up until you know.
But the little-girl-who-once-was did not know what it was that she was supposed to know.
***


Twice a day – soup and two slices of bread. That was how she could tell time. Whenever she got very hungry – and she did – she would gnaw at the potatoes. Then she grew worried that the farmer woman would count the potatoes, one by one, and would realize that some were missing. She learned to stick to the moldy ones.
In a rare surge of boldness, she asked: If you hate Jews so much, why did you agree for me to be under your ground?
The farmer’s wife said: Just pray that the money arrives. And spat on the ground of the darkness.
Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.
The little-girl-who-once-was stammered voicelessly, stumbling over the words. In the darkness, the farmer’s wife aimed an expert hand at her cheek and slapped her. You little sinner, she said, say it out loud. How can you expect to learn it unless you say it out loud? We should have asked for more. To think what you cost us.
The farmer’s wife took the little hand and made a cross over her body time after time until she was satisfied.
Up above, the farmer was muttering: I’ve had it. I’m handing her in. Enough of this story.
Muttering – just like her parents. When they spoke about her, they lowered their voices.
She didn’t want to become a grown-up. Ever.
***


The old woman has no illusions. Her story is made of stumps. The chances that it will be mended at this late stage are very slim.
All around her, old people are losing their memory. In her heart of hearts she envies them.
The more the old woman recounts, the more she remembers. And the more she remembers, the less she recounts.
This conversation, on a sunny Tel Aviv afternoon, is becoming intolerable.
***


The little-girl-who-once-was kept shrinking and shriveling, absorbing the darkness into her. She learned to take up less and less space. To behave like a perfect subterranean creature. Hail Mary full of Grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, Amen.
Once a week, the old woman goes to the doctor, hoping that he will not discover the clots of darkness blocking her blood vessels.
***


“Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee,” the one who had had children with her would quote the Psalm to her. Pretty words that even she, or so it seemed, could understand. He had never stopped seeking consolation. She had never called him “husband”.
He had been hoping to find an explanation, or at least some meaning. It wasn’t the old woman who had sent him searching. He went of his own accord. Perhaps he felt that of the two of them, it was in fact he who most needed compassion, because he had chosen a wife predestined to see him as someone who would turn his back.
Again and again, he had tried to prove to her that his promises were not false. Eventually, when the time came, he too was lowered into a pit under the ground, though she had to admit that he had in fact tried to say good-bye.
Had she loved him? She’d had children with him after all.
The old woman hesitates before answering this painful question. Granted, she had borne the burden of love, though there was always that fear that the day would come when he too would get up and leave.
And there were other things that her spouse, whom she had never called “husband”, had said to her: “My substance was not hid from thee when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.” The old woman did not want to hear the Psalm. Supplications to heavenly emissaries are the invention of people who take refuge in light. They haven’t a shadow of doubt.
Still, she did devote her thoughts to the word wrought, which is no longer used. Had she been able to, she would have reinstated it as a key to the stories yet to be written.
***


The little-girl-who-once-was kept thinking that even God, whoever He may be, was ashamed of her. Otherwise He wouldn’t be hiding her in the dark. Maybe He removed her from the light in the process of Creation just to make sure He did not bump into her. She could not tell whether He was the Father or the Son.
And if in fact He does exist – God is a mother who turns her back.
***


Why tell the granddaughter?
Why not her daughter?
The old woman’s daughter, no longer young and not yet old, had been ruled out as a possible listener to the story. It wasn’t clear who had ruled her out. The old woman had kept postponing the storytelling, using a different excuse each time. Somehow it always seemed as if the story could endanger the offspring and maybe even jeopardize the chain of birth-giving. The daughter avoided it too. Maybe she felt that by accepting it, she was liable to be robbed of her mother, who would be superseded by a shattered creature, without a face or an identity. To tell the truth, she attributed otherworldly powers to the story. Anyone who criticized the daughter for shirking the burden of acceptance was ignoring the element of fear that the story contained.
Without fear no story would be what it is.
***


Now the old woman approaches the danger zone, the limits of control, the place where she would no longer be able to hold on to the story-line.
The footsteps of the farmer’s son.
At five she could count already. Up to ten, and one more. Coming down, closer, his legs heavy, the wooden ladder creaking. The ninth rung is shaky. Ave Maria, Holy Mother, make him stumble and crash. But the farmer’s son knows about the weak rung, and he treads carefully. She counts till she runs out of numbers.
She doesn’t know exactly how old he was. To her he was a man. How could she tell? A breed of giants, mean, deceitful, treacherous.
She never wanted to grow up.
***


The granddaughter stops.
That’s not the story I wanted.
It’s not up to you.
But I don’t want this story.
This is the only one there is.
It’s too late to stop now.
***


In all innocence, not realizing what lay ahead, the granddaughter has chosen to be the story’s addressee. Had she known, she would probably not have volunteered to document it, because the very act of committing the story to paper widens its circle of addressees. Throughout the conversation the granddaughter pretends to be writing, but in fact merely stares at the sweet angel on the cover. Since it was first painted, nearly five hundred years ago, it has managed to generate every possible form of replication. But the granddaughter, like most consumers of paper, has no idea about the artist or about the original painting, and all she can think about is whether the notebook will change as a result of the story. Perhaps this is why she refrains from writing anything down.
***


You were lucky, they told the old woman.
Even without hearing the story, they kept comparing. And the old woman too could not help weighing her own story against those of others, especially since new stories keep cropping up. But she never felt lucky. She’d smile, pretend to be grateful, and fine-tuned her deceptive front to a fine art. From that point on, the crack in the scaffolding began to show. How true are they, the details of her story? How true do they have to be for the story to count? Since this is the first time the story is ever being told, there is no yardstick for comparison.
The old woman wants to tell her granddaughter that the truth does not depend on the storyteller’s will.
Even though she is not making up a thing, the old woman is extra-cautious. She confines herself to what is absolutely necessary, to the parts without which the story would collapse, and she is overcome with despair whenever parts that she did not intend to include leak out anyway. Her laconic speech places her at the bottom rung of the storytellers. Or maybe she is one of those who tell their story best by keeping silent.
4
Stefan, that was his name. The farmer and his wife had all kinds of nicknames for him. Stefcho. Stefaniu. Stefanek. They were his parents. She heard them calling him up above. She could detect the affection in their voices. With her sharpened senses she could detect everything from below. He ate pork sausage, worked on the farm, amused himself with the cats and the dogs. On Sundays he went to church in his finest clothes. The village darling. There was a girl who followed him everywhere. One day she got as far as the mouth of the pit.
Let’s climb down, sweet Stefan.
I’ll let you touch me. You can do whatever you want to me.
No!
The village girl broke into tears, she was so disappointed. Stefan pushed her away from the mouth of the pit. She fell.
Janka was her name. The spike of that name juts out, so trivial.
Even though the old woman is trying to let the story unfold as slowly as possible, she knows it is hurtling towards the point of no return.
Stefan, what are you looking for down there?
Stefan, where are you?
Stefan???
The farmer’s wife, his mother, makes do with calling after him. Soon he’ll be married and have children. There will be an heir to the farm and all that goes with it.
***


Jewish skin, so soft, so smooth.
Jewish undies.
Don’t you dare open your Jewish mouth, or I’ll kill you.
How could she tell it now?
Either way, it will end in death.
***


Wrought in the dark. That’s the point where the story implodes.
***


Maybe we should stop?
It’s the last chance.
We don’t have to keep going.
That’s enough for now.
Who said every story has to be told? Who said every story has to see the light of day? Maybe it is precisely the buried stories that are the perfect ones.
The old woman is tempted to rebury it.
But her granddaughter is committed to the story by now.
***


What’s that there between your legs?
Don’t you dare cry, you scum. Jewish scum.
Just you wait, and I’ll show you.
***


Soaked in her own urine, in her own vomit, in her own excrement. Hemorrhaging herself. The tears she’s learned to stifle, because unlike the other bodily discharges, tears can be a giveaway. Her very life depends on her complete control over her body. Quite an insight for a five-year-old. To this day she never sneezes or coughs.
The blood – that’s beyond her control.
Mother in Heaven doesn’t know what they do to little girls under the ground. If she did, of course she’d come down to earth, and if she doesn’t come down – she just doesn’t want to know.
Ave Maria of the Lice.
Ave Maria of the Snakes.
Ave Maria of the Worms.
Ave Maria of the Stefan.
Maria is just like her mother – turning her back.
***


I’ll stick it in your mouth.
Swallow it.
And again, swallow it.
Always swallow.
***


A human blob in the dark, keeping her breathing to a minimum. In the days that followed, or in the nights, to be precise, she started mumbling the Latin words. Ave Maria, turn me into a rat too. The happiest creature in the world.
***


She’d always hoped that old age would bring some relief. Above all she’d hoped it would take the edge off the rage. Time had not kept its promise, and her rage remained as razor-sharp as ever, matched in strength only by the yearning. Every day, every hour, her mother turning her back. Even now, when she is forty years older than her mother had been then.
Had the old woman told her story earlier, she might have been able to stifle her anger just a little. So many times she had wanted to forgive her parents, but the rage wouldn’t let her. Not even the guilt could take the edge off it.
It is rage that is forcing the story off course. How inarticulate and evasive the story sounds to her as it breaks free of her, removing itself from her grip. As the old woman observes it helplessly, the story keeps egging her on, insisting it has been disabled, and refusing to be hers any longer. But the old woman, sobered and perhaps brave too, won’t let it break out of the darkness without a battle. The rage continues to seethe, because without it she would cease to exist.
Her granddaughter is indeed young, but she’s already at an age where people are capable of working out the codes and deciphering the truth. And although she’s decided to get the story, no matter what, the pages of her notebook are blank.
The old woman marks a little victory. The story is missing its target after all.
Because more than she does want to tell it, she doesn’t.
***


Night after night, or day after day, in the shell of her wilting body, with every sense she possesses, the girl who was wrought detects the steps coming down, approaching, and even in their absence – which isn’t to last – she is on the alert, knowing that the Stefan is sure to arrive.
Suddenly the story folds inwards, to its core, where the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
But this is not a Bible story.
***


Even if we assume that the story is not make-believe, it may well be that its time axis has gone awry. Decomposing time into units and rearranging it – that’s no small feat for a child. One night can be an eternity, and what was tagged as the past turns out to be the present. Strange, but only now that old age is gnawing away at her – not simply overtaking her, mind you – does the old woman grow more acutely aware of the twists and turns along the time axis. The elements of the story have been fused into each other, which is why the darkness and the Stefan are liable to take up no more than a small fragment of the story-line, in complete contradiction to their dimensions in reality.
The key points along the way, then, are not shortcuts but time capsules. Darkness. The farmer’s wife. A rat. Ave Maria. The Stefan. Darkness. A rat. The Stefan. Ave Maria.
Darkness.
The Stefan.
Darkness.
***


Open your Jewish legs.
More.
Much more.
A Jewish hole.
That’s what you are.
***


While she was waiting for her granddaughter, the old woman vomited. It’s just the heat, she excused herself. Tel Aviv deifies the light. In this city, light is the be-all and end-all. Her guts were boiling. Even before getting on course, the story is already bursting out of her body.
Her flesh is simply growing slack. Old age, that’s just how it is. Even though she’d sworn never to grow up.
I was an old woman before I was a young one, she tells her granddaughter, and asks her not to put it in writing. When an old woman stabs at the child within her, she wastes whatever resources she has left.
Non-memory – that’s what she ought to have talked about.
Even in earlier times she’d been unable to put a face to the young man climbing down the steps. Couldn’t give him eyes or hair. All that stuck out in the shadows was his name. Stephan. Only with great difficulty did the hazy silhouette of the farmer and his wife appear. She found excuses to avoid the hard labor of remembering, as if the time she’d spent in that hiding place had been excised. Excised? Who was the surgeon who had done such a good job? The storyteller knows the answer; and the listener can only guess.
***


How long did it last? How much time?
The word time had not been part of her vocabulary, and even if it had been, the little-girl-who-once-was would not have known how to cut it down to size. Without understanding what she was doing, she calculated how many “whens” had gone by since her birthday. The one when they’d given her the skates. A doll with braids on the birthday before that one. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t help thinking that if there had really been any skates, or a doll, or a birthday – they must all have been before she was even born.
How long did it go on?
The silence goes on for so long that her granddaughter figures the old woman hasn’t heard the question.
She hadn’t counted. They told her about it later, after the fact. Her guess was a winter, a spring and a summer, based on the calendar of the earth. New grass had grown over the crack that the rat used to slip away.
If time is calculated on the basis of a person’s expectations of change, her own watch had stopped. Anything beyond the darkness, anything that had come before and anything that might come after, became an illusion.
A big city. Her room. The frozen lake. A blue cape. The hand that had kept her from falling. All those things had disintegrated, to the point where one could hardly believe they had ever played a part in someone’s life. All that remained of her mother was her mother’s back. A locked body-door. All her attempts to conjure up even the slightest bit of her face were in vain.
Her parents’ promise was all that remained. Clear and precise. When she asked the farmer’s wife for the Latin again so that she could pray properly, the woman just laughed.
Dead people can’t keep promises.
Now the granddaughter is concealing from the old woman her own joy over memory loss. Her notebook is empty. What a clever girl. It’s the blank spaces that kept the old woman from hemorrhaging to death. Luckily, we don’t really remember.
Perhaps this crossroad in the story could be titled “Thank the Blank”.
***


An eternal outcast from the world. A walled-off existence. When asked, she’d say simply, “I was a child during the War,” to account for the fact that she had nothing to recall. The world keeps insisting on memories, whereas she has a miraculous power of forgetfulness. Even now, there’s a cesspool inside her, and into it she tosses the spikes of evil and ugliness. Meanwhile, far removed from those close to her, the story keeps unfolding secretly, of its own accord.
You could say it’s been wrought inside her.
To think of all the complaints heaped on her by her own child, the one whom she bore and who had given her her share of complaints. The old woman had to be on guard, as if her daughter was the enemy.
The daughter, the granddaughter’s mother, always suspected that her mother was obsessively repeating the story to herself. She claimed that whenever a person becomes immersed in a story, he doesn’t bother to listen to anything around him. Perhaps she was trying to cry that she had a story too, one that was no less important than her mother’s. No one had explained to her that her mother was immersed not in the story, but in the question of how to tell it or to refrain from telling it. If only the old woman really had allowed herself to indulge in self-pity, the story might have come to the fore much earlier. And if a few spikes did somehow come loose nevertheless, the granddaughter’s mother was quick to turn them against the old woman.
You’re a lousy mother.
You should never have had children.
On that day, the daughter came knocking on the old woman’s front door ahead of schedule. The granddaughter who is no longer a girl opened it, and stood facing her, more surprised.
Didn’t I tell you I’d be picking you up? Now there was a mother who kept her promises.
When the daughter discovered the notebook, she lost no time trying to gain possession of it. She tugged at the sweet angel. The granddaughter resisted vehemently. She didn’t want anyone sharing the story. Not even her mother. Especially not her mother.
Gratified, the old woman watched her granddaughter and told herself: It’s the worst traits that are passed on from one generation to the next. That’s what she said but what she really meant was quite the opposite.
The granddaughter’s mother wasn’t the kind of person who gave up easily. If she had not been chosen to hear the story, then no one else should receive it either.
Not everything needs to become known.
Everything has already been written.
Except for what has not been written.
Mother, don’t you go messing up my daughter’s head.
For the first time on a blinding afternoon, the old woman actually cracked a smile. The realization that the one she had given birth to had become such an expert at survival was gratifying.
5
When the farmer’s wife pulled her out of the pit, the little-girl-who-once-was covered her eyes. For a moment, the burning sensation caused by the light reminded her of the illusion of tears, though she would never ever shed any real ones again for the rest of her life.
The farmer screamed to his wife: What a horrible stench! Wash her first.
The girl who once was, was sure she was blind. Couldn’t see a thing. The farmer’s wife said: Cross yourself. Say thank you. And pulled her into the church.
They went in, the farmer’s wife dragging her along like a sack of potatoes.
Her whole body was itching from the lice.
You stink to high heaven. Even Jesus would hold his nose. Ask His forgiveness.
Emerging from a black pit-box was another Stefan. That’s the confessional, the farmer’s wife announced. Six years old, the little girl understood they were about to shove her into another darkness. A black figure stuck a head-spike out of the other side of the pit-box.
It’s his reverence, our priest. Kiss his hand. The farmer’s wife pushed her inside.
The little-girl-who-once-was teetered, stumbled, crawled. Said her first confession to Ave Maria.
Holy Mother, thank you for making me blind. Never again will she see another Stefan intent on doing to her what the Stefan always does.
She didn’t have a name for it.
Back then.
***


The story is between her legs. It must be excised.
Cut it off.
But without giving it a name. Not because she doesn’t know the exact word. It’s just that her granddaughter is so sharp. It would be dangerous to name it. Whatever energy she has left the old woman puts into concealment, because if she utters...
***


“If.” A tough, unrelenting conditional word, which some people squander, almost like, “What if ”.
What if they hadn’t handed her over...
What if there hadn’t been a servant...
What if there hadn’t been the farmer and his wife...
What if they’d been childless...
What if her parents hadn’t promised...
Promise.
That’s a word that ought to be abolished for all eternity, that should never exist in any story, or beyond.
***


Outside the black box, the farmer’s son too was kneeling before a gilt statue of a woman.
The girl prayed: Holy Mary Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Don’t let him turn around. Amen.
His face moved and he invaded the inside of her. Her sense of vision was back to normal. The trembling – between her legs and in her other cavities – made all the lice fall out.
The farmer’s wife said, Confess, you little sinner.
***


Black man, I hope you die.
I hope Ave Maria dies too.
The man in the box pulls some small round wafers out of his habit. Her mouth opens wide with hunger. He puts all of them on her tongue at once.
Little girl, Jesus is your father and your mother now. I don’t want parents, she tells the priest. I hope they die.
She avoids the word Father, to bypass the pain.
When he pulled her out, she’d been soaking in her own urine. Excrement was dripping down to her feet. Her primordial sin. The stench overpowered the church, but the priest did not demand penance. The entire content of her body was seeping out under the gilt mother, but the man in black knelt down and wiped it off himself.
***


A story cannot be stalled indefinitely. It has to draw to a finish. One way or another. When the old woman hears the story being told in her own voice for the first time, she’s glad that it shows neither orderliness nor clarity. By translating the story into words through the use of a part of our body, do we necessarily create a new, distorted version of it? If she could, the old woman would have volunteered to have her memory amputated, just so long as it continued to exist outside of her. The old woman wants the story to be known, but without having to be the one who provides it.
***


There are some things that the old woman does not realize she’s withholding. But one thing she omits deliberately. Whenever the doorbell rings, whether expectedly or not, at any time of day, whether early or late.
She walks to the door. As she faces the closed door, the sharpest spike of all jabs into her. Perhaps they’ve returned. They promised, didn’t they? Even though it’s been nearly seventy years.
That’s something she doesn’t mention to her granddaughter. Maybe she’s too ashamed, or maybe it’s because the rage instantly gives way to unbearable pain. She switches off her eyes, giving in to the darkness. How she hardly breathes as her hand presses the door handle.
***


It’s for your own good.
If only to block the Stefan, her parents should have returned. If they haven’t – from wherever they are – it must mean they’ve shirked their responsibility and don’t deserve to be a father and mother, if anyone ever does.
The spikes of memory keep jabbing. There’s no point in documenting them in a notebook under the auspices of commercial angels, because the time is very near.
It’s for your own good. Prying out that spike would mean destroying the entire fragile structure of the story.
And where was her father when her mother turned her back?
That’s not a random spike jutting out either, but a red-hot blade slashing across the entire story. As she continues talking to her granddaughter, the old woman tries to position her father. Was he standing near the steps, or behind the servant? Or maybe he was hiding behind the rose-patterned lace curtains.
Either way, she’s been spared that memory.
Every time she travelled abroad, she combed the phone directories for her parents’ names.
***


Don’t want to be Jewish any more.
The priest said: Jesus was Jewish too.
The little-girl-who-once-was asked: Is that why they killed him?
The priest did not reply. When he tried to gather her up in his arms, she fled to the cross, bumping into the wood, riveted to the hands bleeding above her. Maybe Jesus throws up too, and urinates or gets so scared he shits. Poor Jesus. His mother’s Jewish. Jews make bad parents. Jesus was the brother she’d never had and never would. Like her, he too stopped being Jewish.
Only Jesus keeps his promises.
***


The old woman learned to control her laughter because it can be a giveaway, like tears. That was why it is so hard to find any humor in her story. And yet, there has to be a smile once in a while. Every story demands its comic relief. Otherwise even the most hardened listener would panic and flee.
In the dark, she chased after the rat. Shared her slices of bread with him. It was only thanks to her that he grew plump. She’d move her lips to summon him, and he never turned his back.
Before letting her come up above ground, the farmer’s wife told her: You Jews, you take up all the places in Heaven. Because of you, we’ll all have to go to Hell.
And she roared with laughter.
Ave Maria tells Jesus: Move aside, Son. Too many Jewish children are coming out of their holes, and we have to make room for them. Ha, ha, ha. Amen.
Humor is the only way of undermining the story, making believe that we’re standing over its ruins. Even now, the storyteller makes fun of herself: an old woman, spending a blinding afternoon in Tel Aviv, in a room with its shutters closed tight. Paralyzed with fear of what she and her story are inflicting on her granddaughter.
Just so long as she doesn’t turn her back on her.
And if it hadn’t seemed so ridiculous, she would have let loose the hint of a smile.
***


Every now and then, on Sundays, she’d sneak out of the house, covering her eyes with oversized sunglasses and take a bus to St Anthony’s Church in Jaffa. Along with the hardworking Filipino laborers who’ve come as far as Tel Aviv for their children’s sake, she opens her mouth to receive the wafer.
Later, as they kneel beneath their Ave Maria and ask for her blessing, the old woman turns her back and leaves.
***


A handful of friends, all of them old like her, are overcome with nostalgia whenever they speak of their childhood, that elusive and magical domain, which people grow ever more wistful about as it grows further away. They wax poetic, and she smiles. To her friends, her smiles confirm that her story, just like their own, justifies all the trite excuses people make for recollections of childhood.
***


A different storyteller – less involved, more distant might have produced a broader narrative, dwelling on the other protagonists too, preparing the groundwork for their individual versions, and giving them the space they deserve.
If only it were possible to have the vantage point of the rat, for example.
The old woman is worried about how the stories are liable to evolve. In a world where stages are glossed over, with no apparent sequence, one must take into account the possibility of changes and reframings. Whatever the next storyteller adds worries her even more than what he may leave out. The Stefan must never turn into the main character, God forbid.
Must never become the hero.
The farmer’s son, who inherited the farm and everything on it, will never divulge the story. If questioned, he will deny it categorically. On autumn evenings, he sits with the offspring that Janka – or some other woman bore him, and thinks fondly of his younger days. Once upon a time in a small village in Europe.
That is what the old man is telling people over there.
***


As for her name, never once did she blurt it out in the muddle of darkness. She was not even allowed to pronounce it, because if she did, that would be end of her. Maybe that is why, even at this late date, she is incapable of divulging it.
***


The story won’t be told by her again, either in part or in full. This is the first and last time. If ever another version is given, the future storyteller will have to dismantle the time capsules and expose their content. But that won’t happen. Dissecting the story into its individual parts under a magnifying glass is not the responsibility of the storyteller but of the listener. From here on in, the story is the listener’s. Whether she likes it or not, the addressee will be the next storyteller. And in the case of her granddaughter, concentrating on a particular part – especially on the Stefan – is liable to bury it forever.
***


For a moment, the old woman feels as if she has not told the story at all, but has merely imagined doing so. And even before her granddaughter gets up to leave, she is overcome with a burning desire to go back and try again, to tell it more smoothly, in a way that would include whatever the little girl hunkering in the pit knows.
Was there any point in telling the story? Could it have been told differently? No matter how it is told, after all, the scaffolding will stand strong. The darkness will remain darkness. The rat will be a rat.
And the Stefan Stefan.
***


When the granddaughter’s mother intruded into the house, the story stopped. The granddaughter insisted on staying. In fact, she just about threw her mother out. And yet, vestiges of the daughter’s presence remain in the room, eavesdropping on the story without actually being there.
At a different time in her life, as late as possible, the granddaughter will arrange the story anew. The scaffolding will be the same, and the wall too, but the house will be a different one.
The old woman smiles once again. In relief.
***


She has a soft spot for the creatures of the night. On summer evenings she sneaks out of the house, crawling on all fours, to look for snails and slugs that have pulled out of their shell. Luckily for her, nobody sees her. She smiles to herself. Don’t worry, she has not lost her mind. It’s nothing more than a private joke.
Once she walked into a pet shop and searched in the cages for a rat. The salesperson wanted to phone the police. Poor man. No sense of humor at all.
***


The addressee was born to the one who was born to her, which is why the old woman keeps hoping that the very first time the story is retold, at least, it will remain faithful to the original. And even if the content of the time capsule is never revealed in full, the spirit of the story will continue to roam. Stories have ghosts too, after all.
When her time comes, the old woman will be lowered into the earth, into the familiar darkness. She’s not afraid. Unlike those who find refuge in the light, she has been there. She emerged from the darkness, and has remained in the darkness.
And pretty soon, she’ll be going back there. If there is one promise that is always kept, that’s the one.
***


The old woman took her chances, and the granddaughter did not turn her back. Which doesn’t mean that there won’t be setbacks, but never mind that for now.
Even if the story is devoid of love, the closer it gets to its inevitable ending, something fills it in nonetheless. To love – a verb which she uses sparingly – is such a heavy burden. But without it the story would have no meaning. At the end of their conversation, the old woman intends to ask her granddaughter to search for her mother and father on the internet. People say that this net is spreading into the world beyond this world.
***


Just before the end, the story poses the most complicated challenge of all: how to overcome old age? Because she, of all people, must not change or turn into an old lady. After all, if she changes, how will her father and mother recognize her when they come back? She couldn’t bear the thought that the promise might be kept for someone else.
Inside her, it is true, time has become fossilized, but on the outside it has taken its toll.
***


Darkness falls. This commonplace natural phenomenon has never ceased to amaze her. Sometimes one side is completely dark while the other retains a pale pink haze. But whether she closes her eyes or leaves them open, the old woman meets up with the darkness all at once.
She is standing in the stairwell of a Tel Aviv apartment building, flicking the light switch again and again to keep it on, until she hears her granddaughter’s voice from below. An echo rises from the entrance hall, over the old bomb-shelter.
Grandma, I’ve reached the ground. Good night.
***


The story should be recorded in full, the old woman hears a voice within her, echoing the public demand to tell it before it’s too late. Those who can tell such stories are numbered. But she and others like her will never be the perfect storytellers. All they can offer is the shell. We’ll have to settle for that. One thing that the old woman’s hands remember well – because a flame burns on in her fingers to remind her, oblivious to the main Memory valve – is the slough of the snakes. Scaly, coarse, refusing to crumble. The little-girl-who-once-was envied the snakes.
A shell of a story, or a slough. No more.
***


The old woman gave in, and agreed to share a small portion of her story. Not because she thought it would be of use to anyone, but because in her heart of hearts she was hoping to uncover something which she herself had not known before.
Now she regrets having been hostage to the story for so long. The rage and the yearning have deprived her of the ability to express what she was feeling. And she is feeling so much. At this very moment, in Tel Aviv, the old woman is slithering into herself.
Despite the story.
***


One time the old woman crossed over and entered the confessional. It happened a few days before her conversation with her granddaughter.
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.
For the first time in her life she had said Father. In her conversation with her granddaughter, she would try to say Mother too.
In St Anthony’s Church in Jaffa the priest sat behind the screen and did not rush her. In talking to his flock – foreign workers who have come all the way to Israel to provide bread for their children – he told her that an evil spirit once attacked St Anthony, patron saint of the poor and the ailing, the brushmakers and the household pets. The saint lay in his black cave, mortally wounded and mistaken for dead. He lay there all night, but in the morning, by some miracle, he was his old self again.
There was a long line outside the confessional, but still the priest waited for the old woman.
Finally she spoke, asking: What happens to all the sinners for whom no confession has been said, the ones still buried in the dark?
The priest at St Anthony’s in Jaffa asked her to switch places. He himself sat behind the screen as a repentant instead of the woman who was wrought. His head came lower than hers, with its hair which had been whitened by old age, not peroxide.
Yigdal Elohim Chai ve-Yishtabach

The living God O magnify and bless,

Transcending time and here eternally.

One Being, yet unique in unity;

A mystery of Oneness, measureless.

Lo! Form or body He has none, and man

No semblance of His holiness can frame.

The priest repeated after her the Jewish confession, recited before death, and begged for forgiveness.
***


Downstairs, above the old bomb-shelter, the granddaughter had the impression that the old woman had said something more.
Stash.
What’s Stash, Grandma?
The old woman fingered the necklace she was wearing and shouted from upstairs: It was just your imagination.
The granddaughter dismissed it, never mind, it really must be her grandma’s old age, and closed the open notebook she’d been holding.
***


The story has subplots and untold portions, but since the afternoon has lost the final vestiges of daylight and darkness is falling over Tel Aviv, the old woman leaves the untold portions suspended in the twilight. This was the hour when she would, if she could, have chosen to die.
There are stories which, like human beings, have a tendency to spill over. This story too contains so many feelings that every tilt, no matter how delicate the angle, is liable to cause it to overflow.
To make sure it doesn’t spill over, the old woman does everything she can to contain herself. She doesn’t want to be left with nothing, after finally managing to have whatever she has.
***


Should I turn on the light, Grandma?
Not yet.
But it’s dark already.
Almost.
Where are you? I can’t see you. Give me your hand.
I need you, Grandma.
***


Someone ought to intervene and tell the old woman: Hug your granddaughter. Don’t ever forget who she is, so you don’t get confused. In darkness which is darkness, and in light which is also darkness. Born of you. This is the right sequence. And as for the timing, there is no other. Face to face, hug her. Don’t turn your back.
And this too is a possible ending to the story.