by Sara Shilo
As soon as the baby comes out, your breasts start working. You’re now his personal fridge and milk store. You can’t begin to understand it. You don’t have time to stand still and understand it. It happens so quickly, just like when we came to Israel. One moment I’m in Morocco, certain my life will end here where it began, just as it will for Maman and Grandma and Grandpa. Then, suddenly, they tell me I’m going to ‘the Land of Israel’. A day later I’m in the car that’s taking me to Casablanca. Now I’m in Casablanca, then in a camp in Marseilles, a week later on the ship, Jerusalem, learning how to dance ‘Hava Nagila’. A thousand times I think about the day Papa explained we were leaving Morocco. A thousand times, over and over again.
If something happens to you so quickly, it doesn’t matter how many times you go over it in your mind: in the morning I did this, and then we travelled there, then they said that. To your last day you won’t understand it. You ate without chewing, and so it comes out the other end whole, just as it went in.
After Kobi was born, what did I wish for? For God to make me a girl again. I felt like my semolina sieve. Full of holes from top to bottom. Water gushing out. The hands of doctors and nurses pushing inside me. The baby appeared, followed by the blood and the placenta. They stitch you. Then you start to leak at the top, too. You didn’t know how many holes you had in your breast. Suddenly you see: three on the right side; four on the left. If the baby sleeps for too long, your milk starts flowing all by itself. Nothing stays inside you.
For the first twenty years, your mother, grandmother and aunts shut you down and close you up. When you pee in the bathroom, do it quietly. Don’t let anyone hear you pee. No one should see your menstrual blood. Put your hand over your open mouth. Your whole life is about closing up. And don’t forget your legs. You should practically sew them together when you sit down, so you feel like a tree. Then your wedding day arrives. The talk changes. It’s like the difference between black and white. Now they want you to open the way for your husband at night. And on the day of the birth, they want you to open everything – and not only for your husband, but also for your baby and for anybody else who might walk into your hospital room.
Three days after you give birth, your eyes also start to leak, without asking permission. You don’t just cry, you drip from the eyes, whether you want to or not. After Kobi’s birth I also thought I was going bald. My pillow was full of hair in the morning. Mas’ud’s mother said to me, ‘Don’t you know what they say? That the baby takes away his mother’s beauty! Don’t cry, binti, everything will come back.’ Was she right? She was. It did come back. Then it disappeared again. Came back and disappeared. After the twins, it didn’t return. But Simona doesn’t care about that. Who looks at her now? Mas’ud from his grave? Etti doesn’t look at me. But then, she doesn’t look at herself in the mirror. Not even Kobi looks in my direction. These days his eyes flick away from me. In our bedroom he turns his back, quickly closes his eyes to me.
And what about men? How do men feel about all this? Only that they got in there, and a baby came out. How puffed up they are! Their chests become so full of air that they can’t let it out. They look as though they’re about to burst. And what happens to their bodies? Nothing. Not a hair out of place. How does that make them feel? That life is a game. They scored a goal, and so they cheer. They hold the baby in their arms at the brit, and wear their tallits. They pick up a glass, drink a lechaim, and they laugh.
4
The ground feels like ice but the air doesn’t seem as cold. I put my bag under my head. Now I’m the ball in the goal: half the crowd is ecstatic I’m here; the other half frantic. And no one else gives a damn whether the ball went into the goal or not. The rest of the world couldn’t care less.
I bring my knees up to my chest underneath my dress, and tuck my face inside, too. I listen to my heart and breathe in deeply. Akh ya rab! The scream even affected my nose. I’ve already forgotten how to smell. I could put my face into a box of turmeric and not smell a thing. The stench of the nail varnish remover won’t go away. It has blocked my nose to new aromas. For six years I haven’t been able to smell or taste anything I’ve cooked.
Ah, how I used to love curling into a ball when I was a girl, tucking myself away from the outside world. Simona became her own world. God gave her ears to listen to her heart, a nose to smell her own body, and closed her eyes, as there was no need to see anything. Her hands brush over her skin, bringing to her nose the scent of places it can’t reach.
Dogs. I can hear dogs. I pull my head out of my dress to listen. No, no dogs. Just the loudspeaker car, sending people down to the shelters. It’s too far away to hear properly but, even so, I know it’s not telling everyone to come out. Now the car is closer, on the road next to the football pitch: ‘All residents are asked to remain in the shelters.’ It’s trying to get through to the old people, the ones sitting at home saying, ‘Everything comes from Allah, and whatever is written in Heaven will be.’ The loudspeaker is trying to scare them into moving. Only Simona and the old people are careless of their lives. What’s the point of protecting them? If you’ve lost everything you leave the door open. All thieves are welcome as there’s nothing to take.
I imagine them all in the shelter. Dudi and Itzik are sitting together. I’m sure Itzik has brought his bird with him. He takes as much care of her as if she were his wife. I hope he’s not annoying the neighbours. I don’t know why Dudi sticks with him. He’d be better off spending time with Kobi, who was a man even before his bar mitzvah. I expect he and Etti are trying to get the little ones to sleep. They might be crying because of the Katyushas, although it isn’t the first time they’ve heard them. But today’s Katyusha, the second one, was the most powerful we’ve ever had.
In my mind’s eye, I see Kobi taking a child in each arm, throwing them in the air and spinning them like a merry-go-round, making them laugh. Kobi loves them. Etti does, too; she’s given them her whole heart. She’ll be OK. She realised their mother had no time for them, so she took over, gave them what they needed.
Etti’s their big sister and Kobi is their papa. But they don’t know he’s not their real father.
Why not? Let them enjoy it. It was their choice. They picked a young, handsome and healthy dad. Who am I to say otherwise, when they’ve already decided. They even call him Papa. He was about fifteen when they started calling ‘Pa-pa, Papa’ as he came home from school. Like two little lambs, they toddled up to him: ‘Pa-pa! Pa-pa!’ Who am I to destroy their dream? I don’t have the heart. What should I do? Take them to the cemetery, knowing their little heads are full of sweetness, full of honey, and say, ‘You see that stone, kids? Well, under that stone, rotting in the ground, is your real father.’ Is that what I should do? Or should I show them a picture and say, ‘Oshri and Chaim, my precious ones, take great care of this picture, and give it a kiss, because it’s your father – Mas’ud.’ What kind of a father is a picture, or a gravestone that you visit once a year? Can a picture or a stone take the place of a real papa?
So that’s how Mas’ud became their grandfather. I told them they were named after him. They know it all: that Mas’ud means ‘happiness’ in Moroccan, just as Oshri does in Hebrew; and that Chaim, which means ‘life’, was an exchange for his death. They know everything about their grandfather Mas’ud, how he was the falafel king of the town, and that one day he died at his falafel shop. They looked at Grandpa’s picture, and heard stories about his life, but nothing about their father. They decided not to be orphans all by themselves.
5
What’s going on? Why is it so quiet? From the day we arrived in this country, we have heard nothing but war. And now that Simona is asking, nicely, to leave the world, they’ve suddenly run out of Katyushas.
Wait, the lights are coming back on. All the mice are sleeping in their dark shelters, and their houses are full of light. The world’s topsy-turvy. When the nursery heard there was an alert, we were sent home straight away. We didn’t sit around in th
e shelters but wandered the streets. So the Katyushas caught everyone hanging out. When did people go down to the shelters? When the attack stopped. Now half the army is standing guard so no one comes out, and they’re suffocating in those shelters, afraid a Katyusha will fall on them the minute they put a foot outside. Simona’s the only one praying for one to fall. Let’s have a few of them in the goal, at least five, to finish her off tonight. I don’t want to see the morning. I don’t want to!
I’m not crying. When I clung to my life, I couldn’t stop crying. I could have filled a bowl with my tears every day. Now that I want to die, there’s no reason to cry.
Why do we hold on to life? What is it, really? What is it made of? Ricki says, ‘For every quarter-cup of sweetness, life gives you five cups of fear, and the fear takes away all the sweetness. So everyone’s afraid of everyone else.’
We work eight hours a day at the nursery. We feed the children, sing to them, tell them stories, run after them to wipe their noses – I carry a toilet roll around all day – cuddle them if they cry, change their nappies, arrange their toys, wash their hands and faces. Eighteen of them, one after the other. We feed them at midday, and change the nappies again, like a factory assembly line. Then we pull out the metal cots, put the children down for their naps, clean the whole room, get them up, change their nappies again, give them an afternoon snack, and get them ready so that when the mothers arrive to pick them up, the children are dressed, with their bags packed, ready to go. The staff that work a split day rush off to do errands.
We work like mules at the nursery. You might think we float around on cloud nine all day, thank yous ringing in our ears. Forget it. We’re all afraid, afraid of everyone: of the mothers, of the nursery inspectors, of Devora the director, who is paid a fortune for answering two phone calls a day and shuffling paper at her desk.
Ricki says that on the days Devora doesn’t have meetings with the inspectors, we should make her lie on the marble worktop in the kitchen and spin her like an egg. If she spins fast, she’s obviously hardboiled and you know the day isn’t going to be good; if it’s a slow spin then she’s soft. On those days, the soft yolk days, we are afraid for no reason; but on the hardboiled days, she goes on the rampage, and God help you then. She grabs hold of the kids who have trouble chewing, squeezes their faces so their mouths open, and shoves the food in with a spoon, right down their throats. So they choke. She doesn’t care. So they vomit. When she leaves, half the room is crying because they’re afraid she’ll come to their table or just because everyone else is crying. And what do we do? We look at each other and don’t say a word. Who could we tell? Who would listen to us? Also, everyone knows she is the way she is because of the Germans, damn them. What can we do to her? You look at the number they put on her arm, and you shut up. You don’t want to know what happened there. That number on her arm is a permit, allowing her to do whatever she likes. She came to Israel with a doctor’s note that will be valid for the rest of her life.
Two women control the nursery.
One is Ricki, who puts her heart and soul into her cooking – as much as is possible with the ingredients she is sent by the cooperative. She often brings trays of eggs from her mother-in-law’s chicken farm, and doesn’t ask for payment. And she cooks as much as she can, in the biggest pots she can find, because the children must leave something on their plates. If we don’t have any leftovers to throw away, how do we know they’ve eaten enough?
The other controller is Devora. When she’s on the rampage, she can’t bear to see a crumb left on a plate. What can we do? She suffered over there, and we’re suffering in the nursery. Poor Miri is not even three, but Devora grabs her mouth and forces the food in, just because she eats slowly. In the end, she does eat well, but Devora doesn’t know who eats quickly and who eats slowly, who likes pudding and who won’t touch it. (And pudding, in any case, is just some thin cream cheese with raspberry juice poured in to make it pink. Not everyone wants to eat cheese in the morning.)
Even when Devora is having a soft egg day, she doesn’t know what to do with the children. She’s got no instinct. She’ll buy a new doll, for instance, telling us to put all the kids on the rug, which is a metre and a half by two. Then we settle eighteen kids on the rug. She wants them to sit like soldiers, absolutely still. Then she sits on a high chair, talks to them in a little girl’s voice, as if they’re retarded, and sings some song with the doll. Then she puts it on a high shelf so it won’t get ruined. How could you give one doll to so many kids? They’ll only fight over it then cry. And all the time, her smile is stuck to her face, as if it’s held in place with clothes pegs.
Until she goes to the bank or on an errand at the Council – invented by Ricki so she’ll leave us to work in peace – we don’t stop trembling. And the worst thing about our fear is: who is she, anyway? We say it all the time: ‘But who is she, anyway?’ She hardly steps foot out of the gate, and we start up, like stuck records: ‘But who is she, anyway?’ Until Ricki sees her from the kitchen window and shouts, ‘Girls, you have a guest!’ Then we start to shake, and immediately begin singing to the kids, really loudly. If one of the girls is sitting down, even for a minute’s rest, she jumps up to show she’s working. Devora hears four songs at once when she comes in, as everyone’s singing something different. Wherever you are, you grab a couple of kids and sing to them.
So when is she happy? When she’s eating our food. She loves the homemade cookies we bring into the nursery after Sabbath. Then, we’re the best staff in the world. Her mouth is full of Sylvie’s peanut cookies as she corrects her Hebrew: ‘It’s “apron” not “aprin”, and I don’t want to hear you saying “I could of” instead of “I could have”. The little children are tabula rasa, blank slates, and they remember everything they hear. Don’t forget it’s our responsibility to teach them correct Hebrew. You say “I could have” not “I could of”, Sylvie. And I don’t want to hear a word of Moroccan in my nursery, either. Tell Lavana to keep her Moroccan for her husband.’ She laughs at her own joke and closes the door of her office. The whole nursery entrance made way for that office, just so she’d have a desk, a telephone with a lock on it, and a noticeboard, where she writes down everything we do. She sits and looks at her diary and the menus for the week, and spies on us through the two windows that overlook the baby and toddler rooms. All so she can see with her own eyes that everything is working as it should, exactly as it is written on the noticeboard.
As soon as she takes a bite of a peanut cookie, she doesn’t listen to a word of what Sylvie’s telling her. She forgets to write down that she needs to order seven ‘aprins’. But so what? At least she speaks good Hebrew. You have to give her that. Ricki says, ‘They mix up all the new immigrants, pour us into a baking tin and into the oven. We don’t even have time to cool before we’re divided in two: one half to correct Hebrew, and the other half to be corrected.’
If you’re the half that is corrected then listen to Simona: you’re better off sitting in the goal of the football pitch on a Katyusha night.
To fear Devora is to fear the temper of one woman. You get to know her rampaging moods. They’re nothing new anyway. At six-thirty in the morning, we have eighteen rampaging mothers, dumping their bags (containing clothes, nappies and plastic bags) and their half-asleep kids, who don’t want to leave Mama. Sometimes the children are crying. Other times they have a bewildered look, as if they don’t want to know where they are: neither asleep nor awake; neither sad nor happy. Just blind, deaf and mute. Your eye is drawn to the quiet one, but you can’t look at him. You’ve got to have eight ears to catch what the mothers are throwing at you: this one can’t eat beetroots; that one didn’t sleep all night; another has nappy rash (there’s cream in the bag); this one has medicine that you have to keep in the fridge and give him twice a day; and this dummy was dropped on the way and has to be rinsed. On Devora’s noticeboard this time is called ‘Reception of the Children’ and it is allotted ten minutes. You don’t know who to li
sten to first. You have no idea which kid you’re holding. They all have to be picked up. Every one has to go from his mama’s arms to yours at six-thirty in the morning. And you have to be a really good, quick listener. At quarter to seven, the factory bus arrives. The mothers don’t have time, either. They have to run.
When the factory mothers go, it’s as if they are still watching us, thinking we’re having a great time. At the factory, they’re not allowed to move. When they’re sewing they have to raise their hand to ask to use the toilet. They sit in the factory, bitterness eating away at their hearts, and imagine us drinking coffee all day long, ignoring the kids and gossiping.
In between Devora’s rampages, we have the mothers’ black days. Without any warning, at perhaps nine or ten in the morning, one of the mothers suddenly appears to take her child to the clinic for a vaccination. She didn’t tell us about it. Why should she? As soon as she opens the door of the nursery, her eyes turn into a camera, taking a picture of everything: who’s crying, whose nose is dripping, whose wet nappy has come undone, what we’re all doing. What she saw the minute she opened the door is the truth, a blueprint in her head. She’ll tell all the factory girls about it later. She won’t leave out a thing. More than that, she’ll exaggerate it, blow things out of all proportion. It’ll be the highlight of her day. The factory girls wait for her to return, just to hear what she’s got to say. She’d better have something good for them. At four o’clock they arrive at the nursery. Devora’s already left for the day. So has Ricki. It’s just us. Us and the kids. We wait, and we know what’s coming. As soon as they walk in, they’re on the attack, like screaming banshees. Someone highly strung like Shoshi can really lash out. And the ones who don’t have a reason to complain help the others to shout.
My hands are so cold they’re hurting. The wind has started up. Why now? Well, as long as it doesn’t change the Katyusha’s course. My legs are cold, too. The wind even managed to get through my black widow’s nylons, which only come up to the knee. Everyone says to me: enough is enough. It’s been six years. It’s time to stop mourning. You can wear any colour you like. But I don’t want to. Who are they to tell me when to wear colourful clothes? Who are they to tell me when I should stop mourning? Listen to me, just for once, as I sit here at night in the football pitch in the middle of a Katyusha attack: Simona is not mourning her husband. She is mourning for her old life, the one that was severed in two. Can’t you get that into your heads? Simona’s mourning isn’t at an end. But in another minute, her life will be over, and so will her mourning.
