The Others

by Sarah Blau

  “Have there even been any Jewish witches?” He’s still stirring the coffee with those slow circular motions, like a witch over a bubbling cauldron.

  “There were a few,” I say, “but I promise you, I’m not one of them.”

  “Hypothetically,” he says, stirring even slower now, “strictly hypothetically, what would you have slipped into my drink?”

  I know I’m supposed to say now something like “a love potion,” and I know that if I say it in a seductive, soft enough tone, I’d clear the air between us and maybe even more than that. But that slow stirring, the fact that he’s barely looking at me, not to mention everything that happened with Ronit, who apparently stayed in touch with Dina after everything, everything!, that had gone down, all these result in me blurting out the word “poison,” promptly followed by, “I’d slip poison in your drink.”

  He finally stops stirring, looks up at me and without blinking, draws the mug to his mouth and takes a big gulp. I stare at his Adam’s apple. Yes, that was indeed a big, smooth swallow. Good boy.

  “You know, we used to sing a different song when we were kids,” he says. “Instead of ‘Little Witch’, we sang ‘Old Spinster’. It went something like, Fat old spinster, chin full of whiskers.” He smiles at me while taking another sip of coffee, making me regret not lacing it with a deadly dose of poison.

  7

  MY FIRST ENCOUNTER with Dina oddly resembled our last.

  Both took place in bright spaces, both involved women from the Bible and both certainly included a few “core essences imprinted in our DNA.”

  The first one took place during a Bible course in our freshman year at college. I vividly remember how I scrambled between the confusing auditoriums of Bar-Ilan University, lost, refusing to seek the assistance of the seniors who were stationed in the hallways for precisely that purpose. Don’t you dare show weakness.

  Eventually, I managed to find the right classroom, walking in beside the man who turned out to be our lecturer, a scrawny grey figure (grey from the hair on his head to his washed-out shirt and trousers). Passing him, I slightly brushed against him. He flinched, letting out a disapproving snort. Thinking back on it now, it might have been a snort of disgust, but to be sure, I would have had to see his expression.

  Naama was already waiting for me in the back row, a few seats from Dina. I remember the bubblegum Dina was chewing with slow deliberation (cinnamon!), and the frighteningly intense way she stared at the lecturer.

  Every time he used the expression “our sages of blessed memory,” which he did quite often, she rolled her eyes (those dark, bulging eyes, cow eyes, but the smartest cow in the herd). The grey blob began with a quick overview of the biblical female characters he would be focusing on during the semester, and after he talked about Miriam (“the eldest sister”), Michal (“the king’s daughter”) and Leah (“the dutiful wife”), Dina leaned towards us (a faint whiff of cinnamon) and whispered, “Nothing good can come out of a man who views Miriam the prophetess as merely someone’s ‘sister.’”

  The whisper echoed clearly through the auditorium, and the grey blob fell silent. His eyes cast about for the whisperer. Dina remained upright in her chair, unblinking, and I think that was the moment I realized I was sitting near to a fearless woman. Since I myself happened to be of the fear-riddled variety, I shrunk in my seat, and I think Naama did the same. The lecturer cleared his throat (I imagined it full of grey, cement-like phlegm), and said, “For your information, we will also be reviewing the character of Lilith, which our sages of blessed memory called – ” and right then Ronit burst into the classroom, billowing black hair, mouth painted a fiery red, darting towards our row and collapsing into the last chair with a thud, just when the lecturer said, “ – the unnamed woman, wicked, evil, whore.”

  “Jeez, thanks a lot,” Ronit said in affront. Naama and I burst into laughter, while Dina tried to explain to her in loud whispers that he was talking about Lilith, who was actually an admirable figure. That was the straw that broke the blob’s back, and eventually we were all kicked out of the classroom.

  It was a warm, sun-stricken day, and we squinted at each other with slightly bashful smiles of early acquaintance, as we walked towards the bright grass mounds by the cafeteria. At this point of the story we were all alive.

  “So back in college you were all close friends?” Once again that innocent tone belying more questions, none of them pleasant.

  “The closest,” I reply.

  “How close?”

  “I just told you, the closest.”

  “Lesbians?” While not a single muscle in his face moves, I almost fall off my armchair. You don’t want that, the floor’s sticky and full of hairballs. Obviously, I shouldn’t be surprised; it always lingered in the air around Dina, a subtle but persistent aroma of whispers and rumours. At the bottom of every article about her, in the usual clump of comments, there were always some along the lines of “You disgusting lonely lesbian, you want to make everyone barren like you?” Once I almost informed one of them that most lesbians in fact do become mothers eventually, but it didn’t feel like the right place to pursue that parley.

  “Tell me, why is every strong woman immediately suspected of lesbianism?”

  “Maybe it’s just our way of coping.”

  He lowers his eyes with feigned humility, perfectly aware that he has just spewed out one the most inane psychologisms of all times, our way of coping with it, pfff! The atmosphere in the room shifts again, I just can’t figure out in which direction.

  “We were close friends in the traditional sense of the term,” I say, trying to sound as frank as possible, “what you’re talking about is mostly fantasies inspired by American college movies.”

  “Ulpana isn’t that different,” he says, with surprising insight into the world of the all-girls religious high school.

  He’s right. Girls are the same everywhere, the only difference being the abrupt change forced on you after years of being surrounded by only girls in the cushioning ulpana, when suddenly you’re plummeted into college life where you’re besieged with men. I remember what a struggle it was for me at first; I couldn’t concentrate in class whenever a man happened to sit down next to me. Any male who innocently enquired where the Xerox machine was immediately found himself cast in the role of potential groom. Luckily, Dina and Ronit came along and saved me from all that. I mean, that’s what I thought at the beginning.

  “So why did that beautiful college friendship end?”

  I wonder how much he knows exactly, reminding myself to proceed with caution, like a schoolgirl taking a test, knowing every point counts.

  “I think you know,” I say.

  “You’re right,” he says, “that famous intuition at work.” And he finishes his coffee, puts the mug down and asks in a rather friendly tone if I happen to have anything to eat.

  Caught in the act. I have nothing to offer, neither a nosh nor a nibble. What kind of mother will you be? I open every kitchen cupboard, knowing perfectly well what I’ll find there – that pile of awful candy from the corner store, half a box of stale cookies and a chocolate bar from the Elite kosher line for the ultra-Orthodox, which is barely a step above compound chocolate. A scene from Mermaids flashes before me – when Winona Ryder wants to make sandwiches for her object of infatuation, “a real sandwich, one that a man can sink his teeth into,” and then her mother comes along (Cher, no less), and with the stroke of a cookie-cutter cuts them up into tacky little star-shaped sandwiches. Boom!

  When I step back into the living room, I see he has moved a few things around the table, making room as if expecting a feast. I lower my gaze to the bowl in my hand, which contains two cookies and six squares of chocolate, suddenly noticing its lip is dirty. What kind of mother will you be?

  “I understand you were a group of four,” he says, and sinks his teeth into a piece of chocolate. “And then one of you passed away, and the beautiful friendship dissolved.” He licks his lips when sayin
g “passed away,” and I think, what a pretty expression, “passed away,” reserved, noble: “Naama passed away.”

  He takes another piece of chocolate, so old and stale you can barely see the symbol imprinted on it, shoves it into his mouth and starts sucking slowly, as if he has all the time in the world. We both know what he’s waiting for.

  “Naama committed suicide,” I say. “Went and hanged herself.”

  “Sad story,” he says, but doesn’t sound the least bit sad; in fact, he sounds almost pleased.

  A loud bang from the bedroom makes us jump up; it sounds like a gunshot. Micha sprints towards the bedroom door, not before shooting me a suspicious look. I rush after him, the only thought on my mind is that the room is a desperate, unventilated mess.

  We both fix our eyes on the fallen shelf, and on the nearly empty water glass that is now shards on the floor. Don’t walk in barefoot, Sheila. I stare with horror at the several pairs of pants strewn about; a single frayed bra, yellowing with age, is gaping before him, covered entirely in bits of glass, as if inlaid with precious gemstones. Precious and rancid.

  “How did this happen?” he asks.

  “I’d like to know that myself,” I reply, recalling a similar instance in my old apartment. I had just moved in with Maor when the shelf collapsed with a loud thud in the middle of the night; I woke up screaming. Maybe these shelves are equipped with sensors alerting you to dubious young men.

  “Looks like the suspension mechanism is shoddy,” he says, while examining the shelf up close, his words lingering in the air. Neither of us brings up Naama again, but she’s hanging between us, with the rope she tied around her neck, black, they said.

  I study him as he fixes the shelf back onto the wall. There’s something confidence-instilling in a man labouring for you with his hands; in his case, large, squarish hands, while his movements are gentle, almost feminine, but there’s nothing feminine about a man putting up shelves. He gathers up the bits of glass while I stand by the door, staring at him like an idiot.

  “Say, what did Dina look like?” I can’t help myself.

  “You were her friend,” he replies without meeting my eye.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yes, well, I was hoping I was wrong,” he says drily. That doesn’t stop me.

  “I have to know, when they carved the word ‘mother’ into her forehead, was there a lot of blood?” I picture Dina, her big dark eyes gazing blindly ahead, streams of blood trickling down from the open wound. Becoming a mother always hurts.

  “You’re crazy.”

  “So, was there a lot of bleeding?”

  “Not even a little, actually,” he replies, still not looking at me.

  “Huh. That means they carved it post-mortem,” I say, enlisting one of my many facts acquired through binge-watching hospital shows. “I guess that’s something.”

  But why on her forehead, why? The area reserved for the mark of Cain; since when is motherhood a curse? Motherhood has always been synonymous with valour and virtue, hasn’t it? At least in this neck of the woods. And all this time I’m creeping up behind him, until finally I’m close enough to kick the stinky yellowing bra under the bed and make it disappear.

  Unfortunately, that’s exactly the moment he decides to turn around.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What are you trying to hide there?” And he reaches out and yanks the bra out from under the bed. It stretches, and when he lets go, splinters of glass ricochet onto his hand, grazing his fingers. We both gape at the fine droplets of blood. He takes the filthy bra, shakes it and wraps it around his hand, God help me.

  “The reason Dina didn’t bleed is because they didn’t carve the word ‘mother’ on her forehead, they just wrote it,” he says quietly.

  “Wrote?” I ask, still focused on his hand swathed in my bra like a stuffed cabbage roll. “You mean with a pen?”

  “No.”

  “Marker?”

  “No.”

  “Bodily discharge?”

  “Don’t be a pervert.”

  You ain’t seen nothing yet, my friend, I think to myself and say, “I’m the pervert? What about the person who did that to her?”

  He remains silent.

  “Paintbrush?”

  “No.”

  “Chalk? Eyeliner?”

  “Getting warmer,” he replies.

  “So it has to do with make-up?”

  “Hot, hot, boiling,” he says in a tone that brings to mind the child he once was, which, I remind myself, wasn’t that long ago.

  “Maybe lipstick?” I ask.

  “Good job, Detective,” he says. “They wrote it in lipstick.”

  I’m still processing that “detective,” when it dawns on me that there’s only one colour possible. “Did it happen to be red lipstick?”

  “You’re getting better at this,” he says, waving his bandaged hand. “Blood-red.”

  I close my eyes. “Interesting,” I remark, “Dina was against using lipstick, using any make-up really.”

  Like everything else with Dina, this too was a matter of principle. She had no qualms about buying the finest, most expensive clothes, or grooming that lush dark hair of hers, but she was adamantly against any kind of make-up. Don’t paint on masks, my sisters, but she never had to trick young men about her reproductive viability, did she? She never had to hide her fading youth with layers of make-up. What you see is what you get.

  “We’re certainly aware of all that,” he says, “and we have a few interesting leads.” Almost despite himself, his gaze is drawn to my make-up set, particularly to my collection of lipsticks standing to attention like a row of soldiers. I spare him the need to ask.

  “Blood-red isn’t my colour, Mister Police Officer.” I smile at him and almost – just almost – spew out the rest of the sentence, “but I happen to know whose colour it is.”

  8

  JUST LIKE BACK THEN, in college, all eyes are on Ronit.

  Some linger by our table, trying to figure out where they recognize her from, and there’s a weirdo standing at a distance, taking a photo on his mobile phone. At least he’s not coming over to our table to ask for a selfie.

  Obviously, she’s enjoying every moment of this, Ronit, despite her feeble attempts to pretend she isn’t. She was never good at pretending, never really tried, which is exactly why you hated her. I feel the familiar acid crawling up my oesophagus and quickly bury my face in the menu, only then noticing that it’s the child’s menu. SpongeBob SquarePants is blowing me a puckered kiss.

  Ronit smiles at me with those lush lips of hers, painted with the same old red lipstick down to the garish sub-tone. With those giant, bee-stung lips she could afford that blood-red. I, with my thin lips, stay a mile away from dark shades. They make my mouth look like a shrivelled and shrunken raisin.

  “He’s really cute, that Micha, isn’t he?” she asks and flashes me a smile, which I do not return.

  That liar showed his cards that very evening.

  He stepped out of my bedroom, carrying his bandaged hand like a wounded soldier. On his way to the living room, he paused in the hallway and stared straight ahead. My heart sank. I knew he wouldn’t miss the painting, the one I’d foolishly forgotten to take down before he arrived.

  “The Witch of Endor,” he read the cursive script at the bottom, and his face turned sombre. I doubt any man would be happy with this painting. The Witch of Endor is depicted there at the peak of her power, mid-air, her wavy hair flowing in the wind, with an almost obscenely giant broomstick sticking out from between her legs.

  “Looks a lot like the painting hanging at Dina’s house,” he said, eyes still fixed on the broomstick. “Same painter?”

  “Not at all. And they look nothing alike,” I replied. We both knew I was lying.

  “And doesn’t the woman in the painting look a little like your friend Ronit?”

  “Ronit? She might have looked like that y
ears ago.” Any mention of Ronit’s name ruffled my feathers, not to mention that I didn’t appreciate the comparison. Not one bit.

  “I’m talking about how she looked two days ago, when I saw her.”

  “But you told me you didn’t see her. You lied to me!”

  He just stood there, wearing his smug grin. But he didn’t surprise me, not really. Deep down I knew he met with her, knew it from the way he talked about her, the way his eyes shone.

  Like Lilith before her, Ronit always left a trail.

  And now she’s sitting in front of me, languidly flipping through a magazine, her smile stretching wider with every page she turns. Her teeth are perfectly aligned, giant pearls, as if they were lasered and polished an hour ago. Obviously, her image is splayed across the magazine’s glossy cover under the declaratory headline, “I was Dina Kaminer’s best friend.”

  The deranged photographer decided to photograph her holding a baby doll, and the equally deranged editor chose that photo for the cover. She was sitting on a chair, dressed as a Madonna, her face beaming at the doll in her hands. At least they didn’t have to glue it there. As if shedding her signature seductiveness, her expression is soft and wistful, her eyes radiating fake maternal tenderness. She reminds me of someone, but I just can’t remember who.

  If I was wondering what kind of relationship she and Dina maintained after college, the article provided me with the delightful answer: a tenuous one, if any. The journalist’s sycophantic questions were met with anecdotes and vignettes from our time on campus, including one about our graduation party, not including that particular fancy dress party, and the obvious clichés about “kindred spirits” and “sisters in the struggle.” She looks at her own photos transfixed, holding the magazine closer and further away from her beguiled gaze, as if she would chew and swallow it whole if she could.

  I feel like telling her that not once in her entire lagging career as an actress had she been awarded a cover, and that she had to wait for her “best friend” to be murdered to finally get one. But I remind myself that lurking behind the dark red lipstick are those giant teeth of hers, just waiting to bite.