She wades into the trees and starts climbing the hill.
Vav
“I. Don’t. Believe. It!” Mother pronounces each word like a slap to the face, and the girl starts to cry, helpless in the face of such injustice. She is cold, and wet, and covered in mud and bruises, and all she wants right now is a bath and a soup and her bed.
“Don’t cry. Don’t.” Mother holds her tight, squatting down so their faces are close. “Don’t. I’m sorry.”
They hold each other for a long moment in silence.
“I’m sorry.”
Zain
She saw nothing that first time.
But now, when she goes to the apple tree, she feels invisible eyes on her, as if someone, something in the wilds about her had noted her presence and was showing discreet interest.
And the next day, there are new marks around the tree, and less apples.
And this time, the footsteps extend beyond the brook, like signposts, just for her.
But she doesn’t follow them. Not yet.
Chet
Nathan is downstairs, helping Mother with dinner. He’s a nice man, really, and he wants them to be there, with him.
Both of them. But he doesn’t understand.
“What have you been up to then?” he says in that way adults have, who are not used to talking to children. “Were you playing a nice game?”
She tries to tell him about the apple tree, about the footmarks, about the lights in the skies, and Nathan nods, and smiles, and winks at her. “She has such a fertile imagination!’ he says to Mother as they sit down to eat, kibbutz-dinner, fried eggs and salad cut into tiny pieces and bread, “such wonderful imagination!”
Mother serves him a fried egg, sunny side up, and scrambled eggs with cheese for her daughter.
“Sometimes I worry about her,” she says quietly to Nathan, later, when they are both curled up together in front of the television, alone. “She doesn’t have friends here. I think it was a mistake to come here.”
Nathan holds her to him. “Give her time,” he says. “Give yourself time.”
“Yes.”
They watch an American movie in silence.
Tet
Hey, stupid!’ the big kid, Oran, holds her down in the mud and slaps her. ‘You can’t even talk, can you! Stuuuu-pid!’
her knee rises, a reflex, connects with something soft.
Oran lets go of her and falls in the mud himself, crying. His hands try desperately to hold something between his legs.
The girl stands and looks at him until he stops twitching and rolling in the mud and then she walks off, towards the apple tree.
Yud
Down to the stream. Cross, shoes again filling up with water. Pass the water tower, pass the blackberry bushes.
The forest, the damp, the scent of pine.
She follows the marks in the ground, the way the other children play Arrow, when one group runs ahead, chalking the way on the pavements.
Someone, something, is chalking the marks.
And she follows.
Kaf
The silver disc lay half-buried in the ground.
She walks around the circumference, looking at it.
It’s large, she can’t tell how large because of the parts hidden in the earth, but it is big; darkened windows are carved into it, evenly spaced.
The forest is silent.
Somewhere nearby there is the hiss of escaping air.
Lamed
She sits on the ground, cross-legged under shifting pine-needles and damp earth.
She sits opposite the green man.
His skin is the color of the trees, dark green changing to brown towards the head, in which two large, narrow eyes are cut into the face. A small nose, a smooth skin, a small mouth. large head. Small ears.
No hair.
He is dressed in a silver suit that looks strange but feels (when she reaches a hand and touches it) like cloth, silky and fine and warm.
They don’t talk.
Just sit there, for a long time, until it begins to get dark.
Then she gets up, turns and makes her way back through the foliage, back home.
When she turns her head to look again, he has disappeared.
But from her window, overlooking the hills, she can catch the sudden flash of silver, moonlight on metal, and she knows they are still there.
Mem
Mother is crying in the kitchen. “Look at my hands,” she says, “look at my fingers!”
Her hands are red, splotchy, the nails worn, the skin coarsened. “I can’t do this anymore!”
The girl comes up to her and puts her arms around her. She tries to tell Mother about the man in the forest, about the silver disc and the quiet that surrounds it.
“Will you never stop? You and your dreaming . . . ” Mother sighs, wipes her hands on a kitchen cloth. “I know it’s hard for you, honey,” she says. She puts the girl on her lap, curls her hair with a finger. “We’ll manage. Nathan is a good man. Everyone says it’s a good place to raise children.”
The girl doesn’t say anything.
“I wish we could go,” her mother whispers, close to the girl’s ear. “I wish there was a spaceman in the woods, and he could take us away in his silver ship, away into the stars . . . ”
“He can’t,” the girl says. “His spaceship is broken.”
Mother smiles. “Go and watch television,” she says.
The girl goes up to her room. She knows Mother is waiting for Nathan.
She waits to here his steps coming up to the front of the house.
She waits to hear his knock on the door, Mother’s voice, the rustle of flowers, the door banging as they go out.
But there is no noise, no sound, only the cries of the hyenas in the hills, and she falls asleep, still waiting for a sound that doesn’t come.
Nun
The spaceman is waiting for her by the apple tree.
Here, in broad daylight, she can see his feet, the curious imprint they make in the ground.
He is eating the apples, quickly, biting all around until only the core remains. Then he drops the core on the ground and starts on the next.
“Why can’t you leave?” she asks.
The smooth, alien face doesn’t move. The narrow eyes blink, once.
Something unexplainable passes from him, to her. Not words, exactly, not thoughts, exactly; a mixture of emotions, a whole palate of them. The girl has never realized how many there were, before, how many shades of each.
The spaceman uses them like speech.
“You need . . . ” she searches for the words.
He nods.
His eyes blink.
She senses desperation, sadness, loneliness.
He drops the last apple core on the ground and walks away, towards the brook.
Samech
Mother has a new job: taking care of the children in the peuton, the pre-kindergarten class.
She finishes early, then comes home and sits outside, looking at the hills and the forest with a king of longing in her eyes, almost like a farmer looks, hoping for rain.
Praying for change.
She drinks in moderation, she says.
The sun sets beyond the hills. In its place comes darkness, one more profound, deeper than the ones they have ever experienced in the city. Stars unveil in the sky, more and more of them, until they cover the darkness like pearls viewed through water.
The girl watches the skies with her mother; sitting out on the veranda, they search the stars together.
Nathan doesn’t come anymore. Mother says he “needed to find himself. Thought that maybe the kibbutz wasn’t for him, that he needed his freedom. He was still searching for his real self.” She said it like it was a fact, just a fact and nothing more.
But the girl knew that it wasn’t. And she thought of what the spaceman in the forest had passed to her, the things he needed for his spacecraft to fly.
But she wasn’t sure it wou
ld be enough.
Ain
There is a circle of children around her, chanting. Pointing fingers. Laughing.
They push her in the puddle and kick water and mud on her clothes and face.
They have bright, colorful boots, with trousers tucked inside into thick socks. She can see them from where she lies, and her feelings are a complex, angry maze through which she runs.
Peh
Down to the stream. Cross, shoes again filling up with water. Pass the water tower, pass the blackberry bushes.
The forest, the damp, the scent of pine.
The ship.
“How come no one sees it” she says. “Sees you?”
Something like fear from the green man. Something like care. And something like pride.
‘You make them not see it?’
An emotion signifying assent.
“What do you do all the time?” she kicks the ground, a little too hard. “How do you cope with it?”
Sadness again. A shade of anger. The scent of hope.
“Will you meet me by the apple tree?’ she says. ‘Tomorrow?”
Again, assent.
She turns away and runs through the forest, her heart beating hard with a mixture of emotions.
Tzadik
Night. They sit on the veranda.
The stars above are like a fractured mirror, slivers of shining glass scattered across the heavens.
Beyond the hills the hyenas laugh.
Kuf
“Can you see him?” the girl demands.
Mother makes a show of looking around. “It’s time you made some real friends.”
“He’s here!” the girl protests, pointing at the green man. He stands by the tree, blinking his eyes rapidly.
“Stop!”
He does.
He envelopes them in a rainbow of emotions. Above them all hope, like a wide ray of light obscuring all others.
“Please,” he says. His voice is uncertain and reedy, like a feather on the wind.
And, “yes,” they say, in unison, mother and daughter, linking hands.
Resh
Alienation and love. Like a mother and daughter, like two refugees in a crowd.
The spaceman walked away from the tree, towards the brook. Cross. Pass the water tower, pass the blackberry bushes.
The forest, the damp, the scent of pine.
The great silver disc, motionless in the ground.
Mother and daughter wait, holding hands.
Shin
There was a deep thrum, a vibration that shook the pine-needles A flash of silver in the sunlight.
A swathe of emotions seen through a prism, where two burn brightest of all, and conquer the spectrum. The quiet hurts, the silent tenderness, the invisible loves and the visible pains.
They channel their being into the silver disc in the woods and the skies dim and night steals on the kibbutz and the stars come out, one by one, until they fill the sky like a map.
Alienation and love; the things that move worlds.
Tav
An apple tree. A little girl standing besides it, holding her mother’s hand.
Somewhere, a chime sounds, a wind blows leaves on the ground.
Somewhere, the hiss of escaping air.
Then silence.
The Problem of Susan
Neil Gaiman
She has the dream again that night.
In the dream, she is standing, with her brothers and her sister, on the edge of the battlefield. It is summer, and the grass is a peculiarly vivid shade of green: a wholesome green, like a cricket pitch or the welcoming slope of the South Downs as you make your way north from the coast. There are bodies on the grass. None of the bodies are human; she can see a centaur, its throat slit, on the grass near her. The horse half of it is a vivid chestnut. Its human skin is nut-brown from the sun. She finds herself staring at the horse’s penis, wondering about centaurs mating, imagines being kissed by that bearded face. Her eyes flick to the cut throat, and the sticky red-black pool that surrounds it, and she shivers.
Flies buzz about the corpses.
The wildflowers tangle in the grass. They bloomed yesterday for the first time in . . . how long? A hundred years? A thousand? A hundred thousand? She does not know.
All this was snow, she thinks, as she looks at the battlefield.
Yesterday, all this was snow. Always winter, and never Christmas.
Her sister tugs her hand, and points. On the brow of the green hill they stand, deep in conversation. The lion is golden, his arms folded behind his back. The witch is dressed all in white. Right now she is shouting at the lion, who is simply listening. The children cannot make out any of their words, not her cold anger, nor the lion’s thrum-deep replies. The witch’s hair is black and shiny, her lips are red.
In her dream she notices these things.
They will finish their conversation soon, the lion and the witch . . .
There are things about herself that the professor despises. Her smell, for example. She smells like her grandmother smelled, like old women smell, and for this she cannot forgive herself, so on waking she bathes in scented water and, naked and towel-dried, dabs several drops of Chanel toilet water beneath her arms and on her neck. It is, she believes, her sole extravagance.
Today she dresses in her dark brown dress suit. She thinks of these as her interview clothes, as opposed to her lecture clothes or her knocking-about-he-house clothes. Now she is in retirement, she wears her knocking-about-the-house clothes more and more. She puts on lipstick.
After breakfast, she washes a milk bottle, places it at her back door. She discovers that the next-door’s cat has deposited a mouse head and a paw, on the doormat. It looks as though the mouse is swimming through the coconut matting, as though most of it is submerged. She purses her lips, then she folds her copy of yesterday’s Daily Telegraph, and she folds and flips the mouse head and the paw into the newspaper, never touching them with her hands.
Today’s Daily Telegraph is waiting for her in the hall, along with several letters, which she inspects, without opening any of them, then places on the desk in her tiny study. Since her retirement she visits her study only to write. Now she walks into the kitchen and seats herself at the old oak table. Her reading glasses hang about her neck on a silver chain, and she perches them on her nose and begins with the obituaries.
She does not actually expect to encounter anyone she knows there, but the world is small, and she observes that, perhaps with cruel humor, the obituarists have run a photograph of Peter Burrell-Gunn as he was in the early 1950s, and not at all as he was the last time the professor had seen him, at a Literary Monthly Christmas party several years before, all gouty and beaky and trembling, and reminding her of nothing so much as a caricature of an owl. In the photograph, he is very beautiful. He looks wild, and noble.
She had spent an evening once kissing him in a summer house: she remembers that very clearly, although she cannot remember for the life of her in which garden the summer house had belonged.
It was, she decides, Charles and Nadia Reid’s house in the country. Which meant that it was before Nadia ran away with that Scottish artist, and Charles took the professor with him to Spain, although she was certainly not a professor then. This was many years before people commonly went to Spain for their holidays; it was an exotic and dangerous place in those days. He asked her to marry him, too, and she is no longer certain why she said no, or even if she had entirely said no. He was a pleasant-enough young man, and he took what was left of her virginity on a blanket on a Spanish beach, on a warm spring night. She was twenty years old, and had thought herself so old . . .
The doorbell chimes, and she puts down the paper, and makes her way to the front door, and opens it.
Her first thought is how young the girl looks.
Her first thought is how old the woman looks. “Professor Hastings?” she says. “I’m Greta Campion. I’m doing the profile on you. For the Literary Chronicle.”
The older woman stares at her for a moment, vulnerable and ancient, then she smiles. It’s a friendly smile, and Greta warms to her. “Come in, dear,” says the professor. “We’ll be in the sitting room.”
“I brought you this,” says Greta. “I baked it myself.” She takes the cake tin from her bag, hoping its contents hadn’t disintegrated en route. “It’s a chocolate cake. I read on-line that you liked them.”
The old woman nods and blinks. “I do,” she says. “How kind. This way.”
Greta follows her into a comfortable room, is shown to her armchair, and told, firmly, not to move. The professor bustles off and returns with a tray, on which are teacups and saucers, a teapot, a plate of chocolate biscuits, and Greta’s chocolate cake.
Tea is poured, and Greta exclaims over the professor’s brooch, and then she pulls out her notebook and pen, and a copy of the professor’s last book, A Quest for Meanings in Children’s Fiction, the copy bristling with Post-it notes and scraps of paper. They talk about the early chapters, in which the hypothesis is set forth that there was originally no distinct branch of fiction that was only intended for children, until the Victorian notions of the purity and sanctity of childhood demanded that fiction for children be made . . .
“Well, pure,” says the professor.
“And sanctified?” asks Greta, with a smile.
“And sanctimonious,” corrects the old woman. “It is difficult to read The Water Babies without wincing.”
And then she talks about ways that artists used to draw children—as adults, only smaller, without considering the child’s proportions—and how the Grimms’ stories were collected for adults and, when the Grimms realized the books were being read in the nursery, were bowdlerized to make them more appropriate. She talks of Perrault’s “Sleeping Beauty in the Wood,” and of its original coda in which the Prince’s cannibal ogre mother attempts to frame the Sleeping Beauty for having eaten her own children, and all the while Greta nods and takes notes, and nervously tries to contribute enough to the conversation that the professor will feel that it is a conversation or at least an interview, not a lecture.
“Where,” asks Greta, “do you feel your interest in children’s fiction came from?”
People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy Page 26
