by Sara Shilo
I think about the mountain next to my bed. I’ve got nothing against that mountain. It hasn’t hurt me or bothered me. It doesn’t know me. Don’t think it’s Mount Anything Special. It’s not Mount Sinai, a mountain with a name everyone knows. I’d get out of bed just as I am, break that mountain into two pieces with one punch. Then I’d go back to sleep. I’d lie in bed for a while, rest a little, and then get up the way people expect me to.
Everyone in the house wants me to get up like newly-baked bread, which they can mould into any shape they want. When Etti gets up, she looks like a mouse peeking out of its hole. She can’t decide whether to come out or go back to bed. She hasn’t taken off her dreams. She stands still, not moving, her mouth open, as if she was in the middle of a word. Her fingers are wide open, too, as if each one has slept alone. I watch her as she takes two steps, then stops. Then she goes into the toilet, and stays in there so long, you think she might have fallen asleep. And just when you’re about to break the door down, she comes out. She stands still again, next to the bath. Everyone files past her. She doesn’t say anything. When she does open her mouth, even if it’s just to say ‘yes’, a bird-like squeak comes out.
I could look at Etti all morning. I’d like to get up her like her, just once. She looks as though she’s sitting in the cinema, in the middle of a film, and Shushan isn’t around to kick her out because she’s only got half a ticket. I’d love to know what films they’re showing in her dreams. If she’d been born a boy, I’d wander around the wadi with her. She could help me with Delilah, and I wouldn’t need Dudi. I have to explain everything to him a thousand times, and even then I have to check that he has understood.
Since I stopped going to school this year, I only get up in the morning for Etti, just to look at her. The anger I feel when I wake starts to disappear. But then I see her turn into Oshri and Chaim’s mum, remembering she’s got to take them to nursery before she goes to school, and that makes me mad again. It’s not enough for Kobi to have turned into a dad. Now she’s their mum and she has to let go of her dreams. She’s turned into an old woman and starts to run around all day, just like everyone else.
As soon as she leaves, I start to think about what I could do to make her happy. I have an idea: to get her more batteries for her radio. Whenever she doesn’t have something to do, she goes under a blanket with the old radio from the falafel shop, and listens quietly. As soon as she falls asleep, I have a look in her bag and see how long she’s got until the batteries are dead. Two days after they’ve run out, Dudi and I get more batteries. I take the old ones out, put new ones in, and watch her laughing when she sees them in the morning. She has no idea who does this for her. Maybe she thinks elves come when she’s asleep.
Dudi
Every Thursday, in the middle of the night, Itzik and I wait until the last person has gone to sleep, then we quietly go into the bathroom so I can shave him.
First I put water on his face, spread the shaving foam over all the hair that has grown during the week. I know each hair. When you don’t shave someone, you think all hairs lie the same way. It’s only when you are close up that you see there are families of hairs, each with their own side. One family goes to the right, another goes down, another to the left. One hair stands alone, undecided.
You hold the razor and cut the hair in the opposite direction to how it grows, close to the root.
Itzik closes his eyes when I shave him, presents me with his whole face. I can move from side to side, and he doesn’t budge.
I have to be careful, though. I’m not shaving Formica. The razor has to cut the hairs but not the skin underneath. Trouble is, the hairs and the skin are in the same place. The first time I shaved Itzik, he had five or six cuts. That doesn’t happen now. The blade is straight on the skin, and my hand dances to where it’s needed. Neither of us says a word during the shave, and the following week we pretend it didn’t happen. Itzik closes his eyes and his hands, and I close my mouth. It’s as if there is one person alone in the bathroom. The space between the bathroom wall and the sink is only big enough for one person.
If I ever do cut him, he doesn’t move or say a word. I put bathroom tissue on the cut until the blood stops. When there’s a cut, I’m the one to cry out. If anyone was listening, they’d think I’d been cut. When I shave him, the smell of the foam gets up my nose, hiding the other smells: the mildew on the bathroom ceiling, the bleach that Mum uses by the gallon, and the combined whiff of Itzik and Delilah.
The first time he tried to shave himself, he put a rubber band on the handle of the razor, came to my bed at night and woke me, asking me to tie it on to his hand so it wouldn’t move. He thought he’d do it himself. After ten minutes he came back, his face covered with foam and his eyes black and strong, as they are when he’s about to explode, when something hasn’t worked. There was no need to say a thing. We went to the bathroom together and I did it for him. He stood there with his eyes open but unseeing, burning a hole in the mirror. My hand was shaking. I cut him, shouted softly, and wiped his blood with tissue paper. I don’t know how long it took, but finally we finished and went to bed. I didn’t sleep all night. My whole body was a stone and my hands were shaking. I put each one into the opposite armpit to warm them and kept them there until they had pins and needles. I thought: What next? Is this the way it’s going to be? Do I have to shave him every night? Then I cried for myself, that I had a brother who was born that way. All night long, I kept wishing he had died when he was six years old, and then four years old, and then I got to the point where I thought: If only he had been born dead. I would have been born without a brother like that. Sometimes I see Kobi looking at him that way, too – disgusted. Maybe that’s why he didn’t have a bar mitzvah for him. Next year, when it’s my time, I’ll be sure to have one. I’m not Itzik. They’ll have to do it for me.
The morning after the shave I went to school without seeing him, but I just walked the streets all day. I can’t remember what I did. I came home in the evening and went straight to bed. I waited for him to come and wake me, but he didn’t come. Nor the next, nor the next. I kept looking to see if the hairs were starting to grow back, until the next Thursday he came again, and again we went to the bathroom. As soon as we got in, he closed his eyes. He looked as though he was asleep. Suddenly I liked doing it for him. I don’t know what happened or how. I just changed.
Itzik always breathes slowly. I know his breathing well. He takes three normal breaths, and I breathe with him, my belly touching his when we inhale, then I find I’m exhaling by myself. I’m afraid he’ll stop breathing, that the air is stuck inside him. It makes me panic. So while he’s not breathing, I breathe really fast – about three or four times – wondering if it’s me that ran out of air, until I hear him let the air out in one whoosh, and then I can start to breathe normally with him again.
Itzik’s skin and mine are the same; both of us have Mum’s colouring. We have the same nose, too, Dad’s nose. When I see a girl I like, I show her my profile, so she can see how my forehead goes straight down to the end of my nose. Itzik has the same mouth, too, except he keeps it closed, as if someone was coming to steal his teeth. I don’t close my mouth for a minute, and I move my tongue around on my lips, like the way Dad used to clean the Formica worktop of the falafel shop. When I shave him, my tongue pokes out, moves around. You would think it was trying to help with the shaving. The best bits to shave are the bones that lead to the chin. Then I do the chin itself, which is the hardest place to shave, because no two chins are the same. I move the blade in a circle, but I don’t look. My hand seems to trust the razor more when I don’t look at it.
I watch Itzik’s eyes. There’s nothing more beautiful than the skin of a person’s eyelids. It’s like looking at a baby in the womb. The eye moving underneath is the baby in its water, and the eyelid is the mother’s belly. Sometimes I have an urge to touch it, to feel the eye moving.
As soon as I finish the chin, I wash his face with lots of water,
wipe it, look for any forgotten hairs, run my hand over it to check it’s smooth. I always want to use some of Kobi’s aftershave, but he’d kill me. Even if you just say ‘Kobi’, he gets annoyed. Anyway, Kobi hardly talks to us. As soon as he finishes eating, he goes to his room and sleeps with Mum so that Oshri and Chaim will think they have a mum and a dad. Those little ones will believe anything.
After Itzik goes back to bed, I take a good look at my face in the mirror. I have nothing to shave yet. I go to bed, place my fingers on my eyes to feel the mothers’ bellies and the babies inside. Then I move my fingers lower, touch the eyelashes below. I can’t do it for more than a minute. I imagine my hands are blankets, tuck in the mothers and babies, and sleep. I tell Itzik the dream I have after I’ve covered my eyes. But he doesn’t dream about girls. His dreams are twisted. When we slept in the same bed, his tossing and turning always woke me.
Itzik
I give Delilah a feed last thing at night. I’ve caught two mice in the trap. I’ll give her one mouse now and save the other for the morning. I put her into the kitchen cabinet with the live mouse in its trap. Then I hit the stick that opens the trap, pull my hand away and slam the cupboard door. Three mice escaped before I got the hang of this, one biting my hand on its way out. Now it’s just Delilah and the mouse inside, and I’m outside, listening.
I hear her pounce.
People who live on the border have different ears from others. Cats’ ears. We hear everything: our raids over there, Katyushas falling here, sonic booms. We can even tell where the Katyushas fall, and when they’re still buzzing in mid-air. After a few days of Katyushas, my tired ears are confused. If a door slams in the wind two days after a ceasefire, you think it’s a Katyusha. You jump at every little noise. Even the radio or a dog barking sounds like the loudspeaker car sending you down to the shelter. Not to mention Arab villages shooting in the air to celebrate a wedding. You want to send your ears to a mental hospital until they’re back to normal.
Aliza, who works with Mum at the nursery, told us about one night when the cupboard in her living room fell off the wall. All the pretty dishes they were given for their wedding were inside. They didn’t move all night, thinking there was a Katyusha or a terrorist in the house. In the morning they saw the cupboard on the floor and the dishes smashed into tiny pieces.
It’s quiet in the kitchen cabinet. Delilah’s swallowed the mouse in one gulp.
In a while, our building will start its night-time routine.
Until the day of the terrorist attack, we didn’t have a night-time routine. Everyone went to bed whenever they liked. But after the attack, the whole block starts the night together. I sit on my bed and listen.
First the Dahans on the top floor shout from the balcony to Moshe that he should come in now. Then they unplug their fridge and start pushing it up to the front door. It’s a heavy fridge without wheels. Kobi put wheels on ours. Their kitchen floor is the ceiling of my bedroom. Until they started dragging their fridge, I thought my ceiling was the sky, that there was nothing above my head, just God. The terrorists put a stop to that. Whenever I talk to God, it makes me cross that the Dahans are between us. What can you do? You can’t imagine the sky is over your head with that noise going on. The fridge isn’t an easy fit through the kitchen door: I hear breaking tiles or shouts that someone forgot to open the door in time. Each person swears that they’re taking most of the fridge’s weight. Everyone wants to be the project manager, to sit on the kitchen counter and instruct his brothers.
I can hear everything they say. Their voices jump from their kitchen balcony to mine. Then their dad shouts and they all shut up. After ten minutes the dragging of the fridge is over. Now they’re locked in their prison. No one goes out or comes in until the morning. Sometimes I get so cross that I imagine the terrorists shooting down their door, the bullets spraying the fridge and everything inside: blowing up the milk, peppering the matbouha, coming to rest in a cabbage. I imagine lots of different things flying around the fridge, decorating the inside.
After the Dahans’ fridge, which the whole building can hear, Iluz and Cohen put an iron bar across their door. For them the night begins with the pounding of iron. Now they’re in their prison, too. The Bitons are watching television, Albert sitting with the Kalashnikov across his knees for security. There are no bullets, but his mum and sisters don’t know that. Dudi’s the only person he’s told. His mum can’t sleep at night until he takes out the Kalashnikov and sits down with it. As I think about Albert Biton, I know that Kobi’s about to go to the cupboard.
I don’t have to listen to know he’s going. He walks to it as if he’s just passing by, so no one will notice. Then he stands with his back to the door, leaning his weight against it, checking its strength, locking and unlocking it. He thinks he owns the cupboard. As far as he’s concerned, everyone else can just die. At last, without looking at the cupboard, he moves away. Now Etti goes to the window that looks out over the wadi. She stands there like it’s nothing, as if the terrorists hadn’t come from that direction, as if she just feels like looking out into the darkness. As I watch her, I want to tell her to stay calm, that I have plans for the terrorists, but I never say anything. I don’t want to see her fear, her fear of me and Delilah.
I used to stand at the window, too. But I soon realised that if you stand there at that time of night, you can’t leave it. A minute standing there will keep you awake all night. You strain your eyes, trying to spot a terrorist in the dark. Then you start seeing things. A tree transforms itself into a man, and your heart beats faster, before you realise it really is just a tree. Satisfied the wadi’s empty, you move away from the window. But the minute you do that, you convince yourself that terrorists emerged just as you moved. They materialised from nothing. Quickly you return to the window to catch them before they crawl underneath the building with their bombs. Now your stomach begins to churn, working as hard in five minutes as it would do all night. You run to the toilet, then back to the window again, and that’s how it is for the rest of the night. You want to leave the window, but you can’t, and then you have to, just to flush the fear down the toilet.
Since the day I brought Delilah home, I don’t need to stand at the window. I’ve finished with fear. As soon as I hear she’s stopped eating, I take her out of the kitchen cabinet and call Dudi to tie her and clean up what’s left of the mouse. He ties her to the tap, puts the plug into the sink and creates a little river of water, so she’ll have something to drink in the night. Dudi and I made the sink into her place, creating a little forest there so she’d feel at home and still a bird. Who needs another human? There are too many already. We poured cement into the sink, stuck a nice piece of wood into it, and some pretty round stones that I picked up from the stream in the wadi, added some big leaves and acorns. Delilah stands in her sink wadi, cleaning herself. She cleans her beak first, scraping it across the wood from side to side, like Edmond the barber sharpening his leather strap. Afterwards she tucks her wings behind her, looking like Shmuel Cohen, who walks with his hands behind his back after synagogue on Saturday.
After that, she scratches the feathers of her neck with one foot, ruffling them into different directions. When they fall back in place, they look puffy, like Mum’s hairdo in the photo of Kobi’s bar mitzvah. But Delilah’s beauty lasts. It isn’t created by the hairdresser and washed off in the shower. Her feathers are always combed the same way. Her plumage isn’t dyed and she doesn’t have white hairs like Mum. She doesn’t change.
After she puffs her feathers, she starts to arrange them. It’s the best show in the world. Her beak moves quickly over the feathers, missing nothing. Then she raises and lowers her neck – it’s the thing I like to watch best – as if she has a mechanism inside it. Humans can’t do the same thing. Maybe she’s arranging her thoughts, as she’s arranged her feathers, ordering them, making them clean and tidy.
After Delilah’s training, I will put her next to the window that looks out over the wadi
. She‘ll wait there for the terrorists, and I will sleep like God after he finished creating the world.
The last sound of the night-time routine is Biton going down to the entrance and closing the iron front door with a chain and a lock. My grandma’s got the same lock on her chicken coop. The iron door was put in after the terrorist attack. Now we all know the night has begun. No one can enter or leave the building until quarter to six in the morning when the buses to the factories start to run. Fear doesn’t leave, either. We’re trapped inside with it, just like Delilah and her mouse in the kitchen cabinet.
Dudi
As soon as Dad died and the twins were born, which made seven people in the house, the housing department gave us the apartment opposite ours. The Elmakeises, who’d lived there, moved to Ashdod. Everyone in town was moving then, trying to make their homes bigger. In the street I’d see people carrying cardboard boxes and chairs. Kobi said they were only giving people apartments because of the elections, and that for six people, as we were before Dad died, we should have had another 56sqm of space. Trouble was, Dad wouldn’t vote for the right people, so we didn’t get it. After Dad died, Kobi had a quiet word with those people, saying Mum was ‘OK’. Then builders from the housing department came and broke down the wall, making the two apartments into one.
Our apartment is the shape of a butterfly now. We have two of everything – two kitchens, two big rooms and two small – and a long hallway. When you stand at one end of the hallway you think you’re looking into a mirror.
When they made our apartment bigger, we all grabbed a corner. We moved as far away from each other as could, and everyone had their own space. After a month we started sleeping together again. Who wants to look at a bare wall before going to sleep? I can’t sleep without the sound of two or three other people breathing next to me.
