by Sara Shilo
They started to replay the explosions, to compare them with others. ‘There’s no question, this time was the worst,’ someone would throw out, and immediately a reply would bounce back: ‘What about the Katyushas that fell last Lag b’Omer?’ Then another would say, ‘What about the ones that fell on the industrial estate? We all heard those and everyone ran to see where they had landed.’ People joined in on one side or another, like teams in a game. ‘He’s right!’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘It’s true. There’s no comparison.’ But then everyone started putting their own cards on the table – they looked just like card sharps – and comparing anyway. I thought about how old I was when the terrorists came that first time and then what happened the second time, and then where I was and what I was doing in all the bombings and raids and alerts that came after. As I looked around I realised we’d got a new card, a valuable new card that we could use later.
‘Dir balqum, be careful of the candles,’ Yehuda said. ‘I brought some torches with me. Everyone keep an eye on their candles so that nothing catches fire.’ People asked him more questions about the wounded man and about the damage outside, but instead he announced that bread would be given out by the Council first thing tomorrow morning, that everyone needed to be patient, that the chief of staff himself was on his way here, and that the electricity company were working as fast as they could to restore power, and that there was a good chance they’d fix it in three or four hours.
I could see everyone was listening to Yehuda. They were almost relaxed, wanting him to start again, to make something up. Who cared? Let him stand there and tell us anything – dreams, lies, whatever.
We’ll believe you, I vowed with all my heart. No one will stop you. No one will argue with you. We almost died but we didn’t, and here we’re stripped of everything: responsibilities, work, homework, quarrels and troubles. We have all the time in the world, time is sitting here with us on a mattress in a shelter.
Time wasn’t skipping ahead of us for once. We could rest and imagine we were the lead actors in a film about life and death.
The silence Yehuda created was broad and deep, like the Red Sea before Moses split it in two. He stroked his beard, opened his red cave of a mouth, silence flooding it. He coughed a little, maybe skipping over what he didn’t want to tell us, and anyway, none of us wanted to hear where we were and what we did when the second Katyusha fell, or where Yehuda was and what he was doing. A brave man among cowards. I wondered if he would tell other people in other shelters about us, how we shoved against the locked shelter door, how we screamed, and how he was the only one to act like a man and go to find the key. I knew, too, that by tomorrow morning, everyone in town would know that our shelter was locked, and that, when Shmuel Cohen’s family came back from Beersheba, they’d lock themselves in their apartment, as if they were in a shelter, to avoid people’s stares. From today they’d be known as ‘the one whose husband was sleeping with the key to the shelter during the bombing’ or ‘the daughter of Cohen, who locked the shelter of one-twenty-two during the bombing’ or even ‘the one who nearly killed us all during the bombing’.
But Yehuda skipped over that part, taking us instead out of the shelter and into the town centre. We followed him in our minds, as if we too had the courage to wander about outside on such a night. ‘There’s broken glass everywhere,’ he said. ‘The supermarket windows exploded in the blast. The second Katyusha fell a hundred metres from here – eighty metres perhaps. We’re the closest building,’ he added, and the together-monster was happy to hear that, because now it was safe so it wanted death to be as close as possible so it could feel how lucky it was to have been saved by a miracle.
‘It won’t be easy to get the centre back to how it was,’ Yehuda said. ‘It’ll take months and months.’ The army was all over the place at the moment, he told us, but there would be a guard there by early tomorrow morning to stop looting. As soon as the mêlée was over, they’d start rebuilding. ‘The phone booth was hit, too,’ he continued. ‘You wouldn’t think shrapnel could go so far. It’s lucky, really lucky, that the supermarket was closed because of the alert. Just think what could have happened if the second Katyusha had fallen on a normal day when the supermarket was busy! You don’t want to think about it happening on a Thursday night when it’s full of people.’ He paused, leaving us just enough time to picture every detail, before going on to talk about the mayor, who had reached the area first. He had no idea how he got to places so quickly. ‘He pops up every time something happens, wherever it is,’ he said, his voice seeming torn between admiration for the mayor and disappointment that he was never caught out.
Then he turned our minds to Big Amsalam (now everyone knew who he was), who was hit by shrapnel from the first Katyusha, which fell on the pavement of the north side of town – and he was lucky it was only shrapnel. ‘If he’d crossed the street half a minute earlier, he’d be dead now,’ Yehuda said, looking at the mass of people opposite him, the many hands, feet and ears of the together-monster, which looked disappointed, its thirst for his stories still not slaked. He coughed a little and brought death even closer. ‘Did I say half a minute? It wasn’t even a quarter of a minute. He was at most ten seconds away from a direct hit.’ The monster growled in thanks, and edged closer to hear how Amsalam lay in his blood.
‘They tried to treat him on the spot, but it was too dark to see anything. So I got into the car, put my foot to the floor, turned the car around and parked with two wheels on the pavement, shining the headlights on him.’ The picture in the monster’s mind was sharp and clear. We all knew Big Amsalam now, his broad shoulders and neck which looked as though they could carry the whole planet rather than just his head, and we all knew the maintenance department’s pickup truck, too, which Yehuda drives with the door half open, ready to jump out, like a horse that knows the right moment to stop.
‘What can I tell you? I’m looking at him and I can’t see where he was hit because of all the blood. It’s all over his face and legs, too, and his hands, but maybe that was because he touched the blood and spread it around. He was conscious, awake, but in shock. We couldn’t get a word out of him. It was twenty-five minutes before the ambulance arrived. Avi Suissa went with him, his sister Esti’s husband. They didn’t tell his wife because of her condition – she had a miscarriage last time, poor thing. They’ll tell her when they know more.’
In the darkness of the shelter, the together-monster heard the ambulance siren fading into the distance, saw the pickup’s headlights on the yawning crater left by the Katyusha and the scraps of shrapnel scattered everywhere. The electricity pylon was twisted, which was why the town’s electricity had been cut off, the tree next to it sliced in two, and chickens lay dead on the ground. ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes,’ said Yehuda, shutting both of them for some reason, both witnesses, and putting his hand on his heart, ‘but Ziva and Shimi’s chickens had all been slaughtered.’ That word finished his story, like a seamstress fitting a new dress on a client and then tearing off the collar at the end. That one word, thrown into the hollow of the shelter, exploded people’s restraint, and everyone started screaming at once: ‘We won’t keep quiet this time!’ ‘We’ll show them what we’re made of!’ ‘Who do they think they are?’ They wanted a quick and bloody revenge, because what else could they do with their shame? Shame about the way they behaved when the Katyusha fell, the way they screamed and trembled and trampled, they way they only looked out for themselves, they way they became a part of the together-monster.
Yehuda came up to me, leaning over to take the sleeping Asher from me. My arms were revealed – painful, red and damp. He turned back, seeming to remember something. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll get to your shelter in a while and I’ll tell them you’re OK.’ My arms, used to Oshri and Chaim – one twin on the right, the other on the left – were empty.
3
I tried with all my might. I really tried, but I couldn’t remember a thing. I was still trapped within the m
onster, breathing, thinking, being with everyone else.
The first thing that came to me was that I had to go to the toilet. I took a prayer candle with me. As usual, the floor was covered with water. I tried to tiptoe but my feet still got wet. I closed the iron door behind me and bolted it. I managed to pee without sitting on the seat, which looked disgusting even by candle-light, having practised this at school, where the toilet is also filthy. I just put my legs either side of the toilet and moved my hips forward, like a belly dancer.
Afterwards I left the candle on the floor and walked out. Three women were queuing in front of the puddle, their gazes trained to the floor. I lowered my head, too. This wasn’t the time to be sociable. Back in the shelter it was as if I had been gone for hours. A great drowsiness had fallen upon everyone, but then I saw people gathering in little hands that had fallen off mattresses here and there, fixing their hair, hugging their knees, rubbing a cracked heel. Marcelle waved at me from the other end of the shelter. Yasmin and Asher were lying sideways on the mattress, and she’d made a space for me, too.
It was only when I sat down, leaning my back against the wall and closing my eyes – pretending to be asleep so no one would talk to me – that I remembered everything: the sixth anniversary of my father’s death tomorrow, and the memorial that might be cancelled because of the raid; Dudi and Itzik and their kestrel; Mama and Kobi; Oshri and Chaim, who had disappeared and I didn’t know where. And finally – finally, like an unneeded tail that can’t be discarded – I remembered our family’s lie, which has itself become a family member, a lie born after Chaim and Oshri, a lie which changed all of our lives.
The shelter was quiet. Almost everyone was asleep or pretending to be asleep. Husband and wife lay, not touching, one or two children sleeping between them. Coughs were heard here and there. Maybe a speck of dust was happy about the slurry of people that had come its way, and was jumping merrily from one person to the next, bursting out of one mouth and then another, before flying and landing somewhere else, enjoying the chorus of coughs it was causing. Marcelle and her children lay mingled together. She looked like a little girl, too, one who had fallen asleep crying. On her fingers were Asher’s dummy, Yasmin’s hair band, and Yehuda’s wedding ring, as if she had married all three and could hold the whole family in one hand.
The most important thing was to find Oshri and Chaim.
Yesterday we came back from nursery as we do every day – Oshri on my right hand and Chaim on my left. Their soft little hands make me forget everything, the awful mornings, the school – Etti who counts the hours, hoping people will ignore her, will just let her listen and not ask her questions or notice that she finds it hard to read, not ask her to talk, to be their friend, to touch them. All she wants is her radio, and every time someone gets too close, her hand reaches into her bag for it. All this is wiped away when my brothers stick their little hands in mine and ask, ‘Etti, come and play “who’s my twin”.’
I took out Mama’s headscarf, which I also kept in my bag, right at the bottom. She won’t wear it because it’s not widowish enough. It’s been in my bag for six years, along with everything else: notebooks, books, food, handouts, tests, pencils, rubbers, plasters, cotton wool all come and go, but Mama’s colourful headscarf and my radio stay put. I tied the scarf around my eyes, and they made sure I couldn’t see. Then they let me feel their hand or foot, or an ear or some hair. When I touched it, I knew immediately but I felt it for a minute before saying ‘Chaim’ or ‘Oshri’. I was always right. They couldn’t understand how I did it, because everyone in town, with their eyes wide open, gets them mixed up. Even the nursery teacher writes their names on a cardboard label and pins it to their shirts.
Then we played the candle game. I close my eyes and put my fist out, the thumb sticking up like a candle. One of them blows on it to put out the candle, and I have to guess which one it is by the breath that tickles my thumb.
I made three wrong guesses, but the fourth time I noticed that when Oshri blows, tiny droplets as light as air touch my skin, like a distant sprinkler blown by the wind.
Then they climbed the fence behind me for the next game. One jumps onto my back, hugging my neck. I turn him round quickly and lower him on to the pavement. Oshri and Chaim weigh exactly the same. When they were weighed at the baby clinic, the nurse was always amazed. ‘The same weight to the gram,’ she’d say to Mama. ‘Are you sure I haven’t weighed the same one twice?’
I can’t tell which one is which by weight. But Chaim, who is more anxious, almost chokes me when I turn quickly, so I can identify him that way.
4
There in the shelter, I examined our lie. Face to face. No one made it up; it was just born by and from itself. It’s the kind of lie that doesn’t hide inside a secret. It came home, stood up straight, and said, ‘I’m the lie. I believe you invited me?’ Then it got so excited and confused it almost fell down the stairs, so we ushered it into the apartment, closed the door, and stood around it in a circle. ‘Stop making so much noise,’ we said to it. ‘We know you’re not the truth. You don’t have to shout. We all know who you are and why you’re here.’
Then it became a little lie, a small thing, easy to swallow. A one-word lie, that was all. It was like an aspirin, which leaves a bitter taste in your mouth if you insist on chewing it. But no one insists. Why would they? You swallow it and then forget it.
It started when Chaim and Oshri were almost a year old and saying ‘ba-ba-ba’ and then ‘ba-ba pa-pa’. I said, ‘Why are they saying “papa” when they don’t have a papa?’
Babies that don’t have a father should say ‘ma-ma’ first.
But for some reason it took them a long time before they managed to say ‘mama’. They’d purse their lips and say ‘ti-ti’, which is what they called me.
So they said ‘ba-ba-ba-ba’, and when Kobi came home, they’d reach up their hands to be picked up. That’s how it was. He’d come home from school, pick the two of them up together and spin them around and throw them in the air. They were scared but laughing, so he’d do it again, and they’d say ‘pa-pa, pa-pa’ and that was it. From then on he was Papa. Papa’s home.
But Chaim and Oshri grew, and so did the lie. I could see it was getting bigger and bigger, spreading into every corner of the apartment without asking permission, and I started to worry it would try to get into my head, too. I decided to fight it, but I didn’t know how, so I waited and I waited. I saw how the lie was making Mama and Kobi sleep together in the big bed, as if they were bride and groom, how Kobi wasn’t going out with girls like his friends, how he made decisions instead of Mama and how she let him get angry with us, as though he wasn’t just our brother. And she didn’t even organise a bar mitzvah for Itzik. How could she if she gives Kobi all her salary from the nursery?
I spent every day in despair because of the lie. I didn’t know what to do about it. Then in school we learned the story of Jacob, who became tangled in his own lies and those of other people, becoming the first-born because of a lie, and then marrying a first-born daughter because of lie. So I decided to invent a new story for the twins, one that would be strong enough to fight against the lie.
I kept thinking: Why don’t Oshri and Chaim see the lie? Why haven’t they worked it out? They could if they wanted to. It isn’t difficult to see that someone of Kobi’s age couldn’t be my father, or Itzik and Dudi’s. It’s not hard to notice that we don’t call him ‘Papa’. Kobi’s bar mitzvah photo is evidence enough. But when I look at Papa in the photo, I remember he didn’t know about the twins before he died. He felt no excitement or expectation. He never even began to be their father.
I got up from the mattress. I straightened my knees but they hurt. I wanted to walk. My whole body was crying out to move, especially my legs, but there wasn’t room to take a single step. The shelter seemed fuller, suddenly, as if everyone had swollen up mid-sleep, like baking rolls in an oven. I rolled my neck to loosen my neck muscles, then felt dizzy and had to lea
n against a wall. My shirt was wrinkled, and a button had fallen off – the top one, of course. I held onto it to stop it opening. Marcelle, who had woken up, saw me doing this, and, whispering to Ahuva, got a safety-pin from her bag. ‘So there won’t be any trouble,’ Marcelle said, and carefully pinned my shirt together.
I took the rubber band off my plait and spread out my hair. Then I ploughed it with my fingers until it was divided into three long snakes – one in one hand, and two in the other – which I passed from hand to hand, until they were twisted and plaited. I smoothed the plait to the end, to check whether any strands of hair had twisted out, and then I wrapped the band around it. My head felt alive then, and there was a pleasant feeling in the nape of my neck, where my hair was gathered.
I undid it and spread it out again. I made a parting at the back with my fingers and made it into two equal parts. Then I started making two plaits, strand after strand, tightening and tightening again. I borrowed Yasmin’s hair band from Marcelle for the second plait. She smiled a sleepy smile, and I felt a smile rise in my cheeks and eyes, too. Half asleep, Marcelle drank in my smile, like a baby drinking kiddush wine from his father’s fingers. I remembered how Papa used to dip his little finger in the silver cup and put the end of it to Dudi’s mouth for him to suck.
It was very hot yesterday, and Chaim and Oshri had fallen asleep. Itzik was in his room with the bird, and I listened outside the door. He was talking to it the way men in films talk to their lovers. ‘Delilah, Delilah,’ he repeated. He and Dudi gave it a girls’ name, not knowing it was a male. The plumage of a male kestrel looks female when it’s young. By chance I heard Azaria Allon talking about it on my radio, and I turned it off immediately. I didn’t want to hear about kestrels.
I’ve never got close to the bird, not even when Oshri begged me, tugging my hand and pulling me towards the old kitchen. I don’t get close to Itzik, either. Maybe it’s because of his hands, because he makes a show of them, so that people will see how twisted they are. His eyes are like shovels, always turning things over, and I was afraid they’d make him think I was repelled by him rather than his hands.
