The Others

by Sarah Blau

  The perps were caught two days later, two boys who were so worked up about the ritualistic murder, about the growing frenzy and mostly, by their own admission, “about the possibility that finally we have a serious, creative killer in Israel,” that they decided to pitch in with their efforts. In the newspaper photo they looked like a couple of Moomins, soft and spongy, and I wondered which of the two had undressed the doll. I’d put my money on the ugly one.

  And Dina was there, everywhere you looked there was Dina, or rather, Dr Kaminer – in those flattering profile pieces, with heavy-handed hints about her private life (under the guise of investigative journalism), in the eulogies by her colleagues and in the familiar press photos. They kept publishing the one in which she was caught grinning, looking ruddy and wild, her smile – revealing the gap between her front teeth – slightly silly, and more than anything, very out of character.

  I have no doubt that if she were still alive, she’d be calling the editor to demand a more appropriate photo, and her demands would be met. She was a master of the art of persuasion: aggressive and charismatic, used to getting her way. But none of that helped her in the end, did it?

  That particular article was also dredged up. One of the newspapers reprinted it, verbatim, and I photographed it and turned the image into my screensaver.

  I noticed that the people who quoted from the article hadn’t actually read it, but merely regurgitated the same inane assumptions that appeared in the papers without variation. “Did the women in the Bible actually choose to be childfree? Could it be that Dr Kaminer encouraged women not to give birth? Should childless women be afraid to walk the streets now? Could our women be in danger? Could it be? Could it??” and more and more could-it-bes, all similarly poorly phrased, and not one able to hide its smugness.

  Tick-tock, tick-tock, no tot, no tot.

  A radio host tried to rev up his listeners with the survey question, “Who would you turn into a mother?” He was suspended immediately, of course, but not before suggesting a few interesting options, including a famous actress who stated she wasn’t interested in having children, a female director who spoke out against childbirth and an emerging young singer who, in her very first interview, announced she had no intention of becoming a mother.

  While reading those three interviews, I already knew that within three years all three women would be smiling at us from magazine covers holding their bundles of joy below the identical caption: “Motherhood has changed me.”

  Because by now I know that if you’re not interested in having children, you don’t go announcing it to the world like that. It’s something private and profound, which slowly boils in the depths of your consciousness before simmering to the surface, and even then it won’t stop fighting you till your very last egg dries up – I should know.

  “Little witch, little witch fell down a ditch. Come out and play! she cried all day. But no one did, and in the ditch she hid…”

  I rush to the window to peek outside, and can’t believe kids still sing that. A few children are standing in a circle around a chubby little girl sprawled on the ground with a scraped knee, chanting at the top of their lungs, repeating the words over and over again. The girl in the middle is confused, not sure whether to laugh or cry. I’d advise her to cry.

  I slam the window shut and pieces of plaster come flying off the crumbling wall. It’s the window facing Ramat Gan, a city east of Tel Aviv. The windows on the other side of the apartment offer completely different vistas.

  This apartment that I have moved back into is located on a curious spot on the map: right on the dividing line between Israel’s ultra-Orthodox epicentre and one of its many nondescript secular cities, an area commonly known as “Bnei Brak bordering Ramat Gan.” Usually it serves as a code name for the residents of Bnei Brak who are more reticent about their background, in which case they’ll say: “I live in Bnei Brak but on the border of Ramat Gan,” even if they live dead in the middle of Rabbi Akiva Street, which is nowhere near Ramat Gan.

  But my apartment really is located in between, so when I’m asked “Where are you from?”, I give whatever answer will serve me best. Efraim, the director of the Bible Museum, who finds the fact that I’m religious – even if only tenuously – a hot commodity, will get the answer “Bnei Brak,” while the occasional taxi driver, all too willing to dole out his opinions about synagogue and state, will get the aloof answer: “Ramat Gan.” An answer made to measure. And in general, it’s not bad for a girl to slightly blur her past. I should know.

  And there’s another advantage, a secret one.

  Whenever I feel the youth draining from my body, feel it on my desiccating skin, my period cut another day shorter, the subtle-yet-palpable slackening of my facial muscles, the bristly hairs sprouting from the tip of my chin, in short, whenever I start doubting my feminine allure, I’ll go moseying along the streets of Bnei Brak, where one always feel lusted after with all those disapproving gazes and reproachful twitches. The slightest bit of cleavage or a skirt cut even an inch above the knee will give you the feeling that you’re Lilith the seductress. It’s a potent youth potion, downright magic.

  Maor hated the fact that I was a former Bnei Brak girl; the city seemed inferior and run down to him. When he heard I was planning to move back there, he grimaced, couldn’t understand how I could give up living in Tel Aviv. Even when I explained that I was presented with the opportunity to live almost rent-free in an apartment that belonged to a relative, he shrugged. “It would really bum me out to visit you there,” he said.

  I guess it really bummed him out. It must have – we broke up even before the move transpired.

  I study the pug-faced doll he gave me back then, during the early glory days of our budding romance, when everything gleamed with promise. I should have seen it for the ominous sign it was. When your boyfriend jokes about the considerable age gap between you, it’s going to end in tears and they’re going to be yours.

  It’s true that I told him right off the bat that I wasn’t interested in having kids, both because it was the truth and because I wanted to clear that sinister cloud that turns every woman in her late thirties into an intimidation.

  He replied that neither was he – a lie! They’re always interested, especially the more selfish ones among them – and he stuck to it for a long time, until he once asked, “Hypothetically, if you did want a kid, who would you have it with?” I, whose sole intention was to compliment him, immediately blurted, “Only with you, my love,” which of course produced precisely the opposite effect. His eyes turned into dark pools of fear. I think that’s when our relationship’s countdown timer started ticking. Tick-tock.

  And now, sitting in my rocking chair the next day in the empty apartment like an idiot, I’m holding an ugly doll and waiting for a call from Maor’s deadly double. Maor’s deadly policeman double.

  Every object in the apartment is screaming at you to watch out, but you’re not listening. The walls are boring into you, watching you waiting for the phone to ring, hovering around the device with that hungry expression while the apartment slowly fills with a familiar sensation. It’s called anticipation, and it’s disgusting.

  I’m supposed to be glad that I got rid of him so easily, he’s no fool, that Micha, so I’m supposed to be pleased that he went on his merry way without asking the hard questions, supposed to lock the door behind him and spin into a little happy dance. So why the hell am I staring at the phone screen, checking that my battery is still alive? Why can’t I concentrate on anything other than that crazed buzzing in my head? Why? Because you’re a brainless baby, that’s why.

  At least good old Google is still waiting for me with open, gift-bearing arms.

  I retype “Dina Kaminer” and wait for the deluge of results. No new hits since the last time I checked (an hour ago), no new suspects, no interesting new theories, and the phony concern (with just a touch of Schadenfreude) for the welfare of the city’s single women has been replaced by a few preach
y articles about the damage women who keep putting off the decision to have kids are causing themselves blah-blah-blah. In other words, no useful information. I scroll down to the bottom, where the dark world of internet commenters is revealed before me.

  It’s incredible how much they hate her. Even like this – murdered, violated, stripped of her dignity and titles – even now they hate her. They always hated her.

  And what’s that? A new article. The headline is sentimental – “Dr Dina Kaminer – the mother of all those who do not wish to be mothers” – not bad, kind of poetic, I’m not sure what Dina would have thought about it, but I find there’s a certain beauty to it. The article was written by one of her research colleagues, and the comments inform me that she too is childless. They’re on a downright rampage of wrath and contempt, from comments like “fuglies like you shouldn’t have kids,” classic, to “who would even want to have kids with a selfish raggedy hag with a stick up her fat arse,” slightly banal, the usual displays of verbal diarrhoea, and there’s also the tasteful suggestion: “You should find someone who’ll inseminate you and along with his semen maybe pump a little sense into your sterile brains.”

  Oh, well, some things never change.

  None of these birdbrain commenters has my way with words.

  Now, obviously, I wouldn’t dare write a single syllable; I have no intention of letting some police prodigy connect certain dots that could get me into trouble, but in the past, oh, I definitely wrote a comment or two.

  Because unlike these Neanderthals with their predictable and limited scopes of knowledge, I knew Dina and knew just where to strike. I knew where it really hurt. Sheila, you little witch.

  In one of her interviews, when she spoke about how “the verbal aggression displayed by internet commenters is owed to their anonymity,” I realized she was on to me; I kept on reading and discovered several other sharpened arrows aimed specifically at me. But I didn’t care, at that point my hatred towards her was far beyond reason.

  You see, I hated everything that had to do with her. The passive-aggressiveness that was really just aggressiveness, the dark oily hair she kept in a bun, her bulging, black cow eyes, the giant breasts she carried with the arrogance of a battleship, her self-righteousness, but more than anything, I hated her voice, deep and purring, a velvety voice that belied the steely punch.

  That’s exactly how she sounded that Wednesday evening, when she opened the door and said to me, “I’m glad you came.”

  4

  “BUT YOU DIDN’T kill her, right?” Only Eli could produce such a sentence so matter-of-factly and calmly.

  “And don’t tell me I sound like a bad thriller,” he adds, reading my mind, as always.

  I sit in front of him in his office, the day after the police visit, drinking from his Coke can without giving it a second thought. Eli’s office is my safe space, Eli himself is my safe space, this faithful, doglike friend. (Actually, he looks more like a hamster. A tall hamster, a handsome hamster, some might even say attractive hamster, but still, we’re talking hamster here.) And if only I was able to fall in love with him, I would be the happiest woman alive. No, that’s not right, I would obviously be an entirely different person, a person who could fall in love with Eli. Regretfully – I am not that person.

  He’s pleasant, Eli, and smart, and his mere presence has a calming effect on me. He’s also patient and has been able to read my mind with uncanny accuracy over the years, but as you’ve probably figured out by now, that’s not the particular set of traits that attracts me in a man. Tick-tock, tick-tock.

  Eli was the one who helped me realize, after hours of conversation, that a major part of my unfortunate attraction to young men lies in the fact that everything is still open before them, still shiny and fresh, even if they don’t end up pursuing any of their options – the power lying in the very promise is overwhelming. With Eli, for instance, just looking at him I can tell exactly how his life (or our shared life) would look in twenty years, down to the returns on our taxes, which obviously he’d fill out himself. On top of his many virtues, Eli is also the accountant for the museum I work for, but even an office romance isn’t quite exciting enough for you, huh?

  About three years ago, after a night of bad dreams featuring all the ghosts of my past, I woke up frightened and dazed and fixed my eyes on the mirror to discover a bristly black hair sticking out from my chin. At that precise moment, the most pointless sentence in the Hebrew language popped into my mind: “Why not give it a try?”

  Why not give Eli a try, Sheila? Why do you have to be that way? He’s been devoted to you for such a long time, and it’s not impossible that somewhere, deep inside you, there’s some kernel of attraction. After all, whenever he tells you he started dating someone, you feel the icy fist tightening around your heart, and you just can’t wait for the budding romance to shrivel and die, right?

  I promised myself that when we next met I’d look at Eli as a serious object of desire, and somehow managed to stoke myself with such romantic ideations that I couldn’t wait to see him. Unfortunately, Eli, utterly in the dark about his new object-of-desire status, showed up in frayed brown slippers, and when I approached him, the smell they gave off was so repulsive that I instantly and permanently gave up all the “why not give it a try” fantasies.

  It was only a few days later that I recalled that Eli wore those slippers often and never before had I given any thought to their particular aroma, so I must have ordered my subconscious to find him repulsive no matter what, and the said subconscious, obedient as ever – mainly to my self-destructive orders – simply honed in on the first thing it found.

  Eli sips from the can without saying a word about my having nearly drunk it dry. It clinks against his teeth.

  “I want to understand something,” he says, “did someone see you arrive at Dina’s on the night of the murder?”

  “God, no,” I reply. “If that were the case I’d be busted by now, but apparently someone heard her opening the door for me.”

  “At 7 p.m.? That detective told you it happened at 10.” I notice the slight change of tone when he says “that detective.”

  “True, but that busybody might have gotten the time wrong.”

  “Sheila, you know perfectly well nosy neighbours never get anything wrong.”

  He’s right, of course, anyone who’s ever read a detective novel knows there is no one more in-the-know than the nosy neighbour. And no one more dangerous.

  I tell him more about Micha’s visit without offering too many details, since I know Eli has it all figured out before I’ve even opened my mouth. He doesn’t ask any questions, knowing he’ll eventually hear more than he bargained for.

  There’s only one thing that bothers him. “Dina called and initiated the meeting herself?” he asks. “After all these years? After everything that happened?”

  “Yes.”

  “So how come she wanted to meet all of a sudden?”

  I sink into my chair, unable to bring myself to tell him how it all went wrong, how such terrible things were said, things that are painful just to think about, and how, after all these years, she still had the capacity to hurt me. And you honed your capacity to hurt her, so stop whining. You’re the one who’s still breathing.

  “So how are you? It’s been years!”

  More than a decade and a half, dear, but who’s counting. I give her the once-over, disappointed to find that her photos in the papers hadn’t been retouched and that she really does look terrific, with all that black hair, the regal forehead and big dark eyes. In college they used to say we looked alike, and back then it was sort of true, but the marks life has left on us removed any resemblance: she looks sated and smug while I project a kind of constant hunger. But at least she seems to have put on a few pounds, crossed that fine line from curvy to chubby. Goody.

  We consider each other, locking eyes like a couple of gunslingers. I’m the first to avert my gaze, and it lands on a wall covered with shiny dip
lomas and certificates of appreciation. And there’s also that one picture I know well, of a figure I know well, all too well, I can’t help myself and read the caption aloud, slowly, “Miriam the prophetess.”

  “It’s not the same picture,” she blurts out.

  “Obviously,” I reply. We both know what happened to the original picture, and neither of us is bent on bringing it up. The picture from that night. The image of young Dina suddenly flits before me, hair dishevelled, big eyes gaping wide, face flushed with excitement, white knuckles clenching the tambourine, pounding on it with all her might, like the palpitations of a big, angry heart, Thrump, thrump, thrump!

  “You still play the drums?” I ask and can’t believe that question came out of my mouth, and before I had even taken a seat in one of her lustrous white armchairs. I must hate her more than I thought.

  “I quit,” she replies, and judging by her tone I can assume when. I collapse into one of the armchairs by the woolly carpet, also white. Without a single child here to change that.

  “Coffee?” Her voice pleasant once more. I once read that hosts feel more at ease when their guests accept their offers to wine and dine you, something to do with mechanisms of control and conciliation.

  “Sure,” I reply and instantly regret it. Why please that bitch?

  “I only have soy milk.”

  “That’s fine,” I say.

  “You know they say it’s loaded with hormones,” she says, while pouring it into two coffee cups. Her hands around the mugs seem tiny. I forgot how small they were compared to the rest of her, with almond-shaped pink nails; it’s the only part of her body that looks vulnerable. All Kaminers have those tiny hands. I recall that time her brother placed his on my shoulder; it was at a Purim party and excusable by the fact that we were all slightly buzzed. His touch was incredibly light, spine-tingling and oddly pleasurable; it was the first time any man had ever put his hand on me and I told him that. He didn’t remove it, and we stayed like that for some time. But after the party I never saw him again. I guess Dina was on guard. There could have been thousands of reasons why she didn’t want her brother to start dating me, but I was interested in the real one.