Waiting Room, The

by Kaminsky, Leah

  ‘Yes, I’m fine. Come on, just let me drive. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

  Yael doesn’t let up. ‘I need to warn you that there’s going to be a mess in the waiting room by the time you get here – more than the usual chaos, that is. The tile guy was supposed to be here an hour ago. I left him the key in case he arrived before me. I hope there isn’t too much noise while you’re seeing patients.’

  The tile in the centre of the waiting room has always been a little crooked, but last month it finally came loose, lifting up all the others around it. Because of the intricate pattern of tiled floors in these Arab buildings, Yael had to search for a specialist in old ceramic parquetry. She finally got hold of some guy in Tamra, a village up in the Galilee. It seems there aren’t many artisans left nowadays. Nilli, the social worker from the Muslim Women’s Shelter down the road, grew up in the apartment on the third floor, right above where the clinic is now. She told Dina that the building had been abandoned in 1948, when Israel was established. The Arab owners fled and never came back. According to Nilli, it is a Muslim custom to set one tile in the centre of a room slightly askew, as a reminder of man’s imperfection in the face of God. When it came loose Yael covered it with the toy box, so no one would trip over.

  Dina pulls up right outside Mary’s Place. As she gets out of the car she feels her heel wobble. It looks like it is about to fall off. She fishes some surgical tape out of her bag and winds it around her shoe, hoping that will hold it together meanwhile. There won’t be any time to visit the old shoemaker today.

  Her mother leans forward, blowing smoke in Dina’s direction.

  ‘You should take better care of those shoes. They are best quality Italian leather, you know. They cost me a small fortune. I saved up half of my ration cards after liberation to buy them.’

  Dina slams the car door. She walks over to the entrance of the noisy cafe and waits for a young mother to manoeuvre a stroller filled with a chubby wheezer out into the street. The security guard waves Dina past. Each time she goes through a security check, whether at the mall, the movies or a cafe, they size her up. What is it about these guards that gives them a sixth sense about who they should check? Some days she is stopped immediately and gets the whole deal – please madam, ID card, unzip your bag, any weapons? – a security guard’s shorthand for screening people who look suspicious. Or else they simply choose someone at random, checking them as part of their routine. Other days they simply let her pass. And how does the guy know there isn’t a pipe bomb in her bag? she wonders. It’s sure as hell big enough to hold one, with all the paraphernalia of motherhood and doctoring in it.

  Mary’s Place is run by a well-known Arab Christian family. They serve fig jam made by Mrs Khayat herself, and apologise for the delay in service when they are busy, a refreshing change from the grumpy waitresses in the trendier joints. Bottles of imported Australian wines and beers line the display cabinet – Wolf Blass, Jacob’s Creek, Foster’s Lager. Dina feels homesick when she sees them, in part because she gave up the drink years ago. She remembers the weekend benders she and her friends used to go on as medical students; in those days their definition of an alcoholic patient was someone who drank more than his doctor.

  Five well-dressed bald men seated nearby flash chunky gold watches at each other as they order a jug of fresh orange juice and a large Israeli breakfast of salad, eggs, olives, cream cheese and pita bread. They alternate between speaking Hebrew to the waiter and yelling at each other in Spanish. At the next table, three middle-aged ladies sip macchiatos and chat among themselves in Italian.

  Hebrew, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Russian, Yiddish, Farsi, Hungarian – all this in one little place. Dina wonders if this babbling cacophony is what actually unites the nation. Maybe Israelis carry some latent gene for disagreement, a trait in which their puppet hands have developed as an evolutionary extension of their mouths.

  A man moving from table to table selling lilies spots Dina as she sits on a stool beside the counter, waiting to order. She’s been trying to avoid thinking about this morning’s scene with Eitan. She really should call him and apologise, patch things up. Just as she starts to dial, the flower-seller approaches. She hits end call before the phone starts ringing and drops five shekels into the man’s palm so he’ll leave her alone. His broad smile shows off gold fillings and a missing front tooth. He thanks her as he hands her a tired lily and moves on. The Spanish men light up cigars and lean back in their chairs, blowing clouds of pungent smoke in Dina’s direction as she flips through the newspaper. She scans an article about the border police killing three Palestinians yesterday, as she waits for a chance to catch the waiter’s attention. Each day seems to bring another incident closer to home. She looks at the display of cakes on the counter and has to laugh – one moment she is terrified the political situation will escalate out of control, and the next she is trying to decide what size coffee to have and whether or not to indulge in a cheese Danish.

  Finally the waiter approaches her. ‘What would you care for, madam?’ He pours iced water into a glass, placing it in front of her. He hovers, wiping the counter with a rag.

  ‘Thanks. I’m actually in a bit of a hurry.’ Dina reaches out to take a sip from the glass but knocks it over, spilling water onto the waiter’s crotch.

  ‘Shit!’ he yells, jumping backwards and dropping his tray.

  ‘Oh! So sorry!’ Dina lunges towards him instinctively, about to rub the wet patch as if it was Shlomi who’d spilt his milk.

  The waiter snatches the napkin from her hands. He looks as though he is about to murder her but, noticing the boss staring at them from behind the counter, quickly gains his composure and mops up the spill.

  He forces a smile. ‘Now, what can we get for you?’

  She feels guilty when all she orders are two regular lattes to go. He snorts. This guy’s livelihood depends on customers’ tips alone and he knows he’s not going to get much more than a wet patch on his pants from Dina. He darts off to order her coffees as she turns back to the newspaper again.

  A mobile phone blares out a ringtone of ‘Hava Nagila’.

  ‘Allo, allo?’ a red-haired lady seated at the next table answers. Dina stares at the woman’s surgically enhanced friends; it is verboten to grow old in this country, no grey allowed, the Red Sea probably deriving its name from all the henna they wash down the sink. Red Hair speaks loudly about her daughter’s ongoing struggles with infertility. Everyone in the cafe can hear her conversation, but no one seems interested, except Dina.

  ‘Dr Mashiach in Tel Aviv is the best.’ His name is Hebrew for Messiah. Red Hair continues to tell the person on the other end it isn’t costing her daughter anything. ‘Because they lost darling Assaf in that tank accident.’

  Dina has heard about this gynaecologist who offers fertility treatment without charge to bereaved parents of soldiers, to help them have another child. Can you replace a dead child with a brand-new one? Dina wonders. But she feels cruel thinking this and distracts herself by focusing on the print in front of her, turning the page of the newspaper and pretending not to eavesdrop on Red Hair’s phone conversation. Dina reads a public notice on page two, advising all citizens to check carefully before getting in their cars, in case something has been tampered with. The notice outlines the recommendations for how to look inside for potential danger; she’s read it a hundred times before. Just last week a bomb was found under a child restraint in a parked vehicle near Ben Gurion airport. Dina’s gut knots up when she thinks of how many ways Shlomi might be killed, anywhere, at any time. How does a mother keep her child safe in this country? Eitan has a point, though, when he says Shlomi reacts to her nervousness, because left alone, the kid seems calm. He is busy inside a world of imagination, always filled with excitement and curiosity, looking forward to what the next day will bring. His lightness helps Dina forget about what’s really going on around them. She wonders how long it will be until a bloated collective history steals his youth away fro
m him. She wants her son to have a childhood free from the hold of dark shadows she was unable to relinquish as a young girl.

  One day last week they were strolling down the back lane together at dusk, past the clearing where Mrs Susskind usually throws scraps of meat to stray cats. Shlomi walked a few steps in front of Dina, confident in where he was going. Veering right, along a narrow path between the bushes, they headed into the wadi.

  Shlomi bent down to pick some leaves of nana and marweh. ‘For Mummy’s tea,’ he said.

  They headed off in search of a mangy skin-and-bones mare Shlomi had nicknamed ‘the Messiah’s horse’. She usually grazed down in the valley between their neighbourhood and Carmel Beach, brushing away flies with her grey tail, flicking her mane with a shake of her old head and snorting every time anyone approached. Sure-footed and determined, Shlomi ran ahead, climbing over rocks and logs, stopping every so often to check his mother was behind him. Dina stood and watched her young son, who waited for her to follow him on his adventures, gripping the herbs in his hand.

  Dina turns to the Epicure section of the newspaper, pulling out a prescription pad and pen from her bag. The recipe of the day is Kugel, something her mother used to make with leftover noodles, sweetening them with a generous sprinkling of cinnamon and sugar. Dina copies down the recipe automatically, all the while thinking about the catastrophes that might befall Shlomi. Even though he is only six years old, Dina already imagines him as a Golani infantryman, walking across fields in southern Lebanon, dressed in khaki, a rifle flung over his shoulder. She is living into his future, stepping out with him onto the battlefield, hovering above him, or creeping along behind, watching as he takes a sniper’s bullet to the chest, reaching for him as he falls to the ground.

  The day after his circumcision Dina did not know how to touch her eight-day-old son, how to clean the blue purple grape that now made him the same as other Jewish boys. Legend has it that a foreskin is worth three points in this land – automatically lowering a Jewish male’s army profile from a perfect score of 100. She would lie about Shlomi’s past medical history in a flash, invent a diagnosis of asthma, high blood pressure, any damned illness, if it would give him a profile of 45, ‘ineligible for combat service’, keeping him from becoming one of the country’s famous dead heroes.

  Chas v’chalilah, Mrs Susskind would say, and spit three times, over her shoulder – tfoo, tfoo, tfoo – to ward off the evil eye at the mere thought of a child dying. It’s as if Dina is somehow creating a golem with her fantasies, which will come to life one day, setting Shlomi’s future in stone. Dina wonders if she has actually been fearful of Shlomi’s death since the very moment he was born, lying on her back in the delivery room, pulsating like a bloated jellyfish as she jettisoned him out onto land, slimy and new. She wonders if she should have bundled him up and taken him away from Israel then.

  Rain tapped on the window. The baby stared at her with huge eyes, as if he was not quite of this world yet; still in the process of being born, labouring to arrive. With his birth, Dina landed with a jolt onto solid ground. The child demanded of her only food, shelter and love. And the woman she had been vanished that day, as she held Shlomi for the first time. The child seemed to ask questions before he knew words.

  Later that night, a nurse pushed a trolley of pills along the corridor outside Dina’s room. Dina held Shlomi to her breast.

  ‘Hide him under the sheet,’ her mother whispered. ‘Don’t let him cry. They will hear him.’

  ‘Mother? What are you doing here? Please leave.’

  ‘I’ve already left,’ her mother replied. ‘You’re the one who wanted me back.’

  ‘Well, I don’t need you here if you can’t even be happy to see your own grandson.’

  ‘Having children is our best revenge against Hitler.’

  Dina’s new son closed his eyes.

  ‘The war has been over for decades, Mother. Be quiet now. He’s asleep.’

  ‘Yes, yes. I know. Exhausted from all the effort pushing his way into this crazy world. And what for? Nothing. He’s already swaddled in battle fatigues. Don’t tell him that one day he is going to die; end up in the ground, like all those before him.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘The day we were rounded up, my sister Mala, who was heavily pregnant, went into labour. We were herded together with a group of other Jewish women and children into a crowded courtyard. Mala lay down on the cobblestones next to us and pushed her baby out between her legs from almost-life, straight into death’s arms. I bent over to help her and as I held the baby, Mala lifted herself up and bit through the umbilical cord, blood dripping from her lips. A German soldier strolled over to us, smiling and cooing. He grabbed the infant and held him up for everyone to see.

  ‘“A baby Jew!” he laughed. “Let’s save the poor thing from his mother who wants to eat him.”

  ‘Grabbing the newborn’s feet and swinging him in a circle above his head, like a discus thrower in an Olympic competition, the soldier jettisoned my tiny nephew into the air. The baby’s bird-like skull smashed against the brick wall of the nearby church, and the other soldiers cheered as they heard his body dropping to the ground with a small thump.’

  ‘Get out of here with your damned stories, Mother!’ Dina shrieked into the stillness of the ward. ‘You’ve gone and woken him now.’

  ‘Babies are supposed to cry. They need to gulp in those who have gone before them.’

  ‘Just go away!’ Dina sobbed loudly, bringing the night nurse running, just as Dina’s mother slipped out the door.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ the nurse asked, taking the baby from Dina and shushing him as she patted his back.

  Tears streamed down Dina’s cheeks. ‘Nothing. It’s nothing.’

  Shlomi settled again and the nurse lowered him into the bassinet beside Dina’s bed. ‘You must have had a bad dream.’

  ‘Yes,’ Dina said. ‘Yes. She’s a nightmare.’

  ‘You’re exhausted. Try and get some sleep now.’

  The next morning, Eitan strutted around the room, cooing like a proud male pigeon as he held their baby son in his arms. Dina never confessed to anyone Shlomi had been an accident, that she’d never really wanted children. When Eitan looked up and smiled at her, all doubt faded.

  The bald men in the cafe stand up as one from their table. Dina would dearly love to stay at Mary’s Place all morning, watching people come and go, but Tahirih and Evgeni are already waiting, and no doubt Sousanne will have arrived by now, plus there will be the inevitable emergency or two to squeeze in, of course. Meanwhile, the women in her waiting room will be reading magazines about nail care and hairstyles and how to arouse a sagging husband.

  Hundreds of used corks lie piled up behind a decorative glass wall that runs the length of the cafe, stacked together like dead bodies in a mass grave. One has a face stamped on it that resembles Dina’s mother. Dina seems to be seeing her everywhere lately, though so many years have passed since she died. And here she is again – this time a human cork floating above the dead of Europe after the war, drifting across oceans, until she finally reached the mouth of Melbourne’s Yarra River. Within a year, she had sunk into her 1950s brick-veneer, three-bedroom home in Caulfield. While suburban, well-mannered Betties and Janes were off to wine tastings and picnics with their jovial Bobs and Berts, Dina’s mother stayed home, softly whining into her eiderdown pillow, the only thing she brought with her from the Displaced Persons’ camp in Germany. It was listed on the inside back cover of her refugee passport, signed and stamped by John Simpson of the Australian Customs Department, 7 March 1949.

  The waiter stands beside Dina, tapping his foot. She pulls some coins from her purse and gives him a hefty tip to make up for the damage she inflicted on his pants. She’s been dawdling far too long. Taking herself in hand, she shoves the prescription pad and the scribbled recipe back in her bag and grabs the coffees on her way over to the door. The bored-looking security guard sits o
n a green plastic chair beside the entrance, playing games on his mobile phone. As far as Dina is concerned, bored is good for a security guard.

  CHAPTER 6

  The clinic is on the ground floor of an old stone building in French Carmel, one of the oldest neighbourhoods in Haifa. Down the road, the Baha’i World Centre boasts a panoramic view over Haifa Bay; that is, on days when an east wind doesn’t blow putrid yellow smoke across from the oil refineries along the Kishon River. By contrast, the immediate view from the clinic’s waiting room window, if Yael forgets to close the shutters, is of white underpants clothespinned to Mrs Radolnik’s washing line.

  Murashka, Evgeni’s dirty-white mutt, is standing in the entrance hall scratching itself, wagging its tail as Dina pushes past. The dog tries to follow her inside but she closes the front door in its slobbering face. She glances across at the waiting room and sees Tahirih sitting there smoothing the creases from her tailored navy skirt, her eyebrows sculpted, her greying hair scraped back into a neat bun. She wears a silk blouse and her pumps are white. Silhouetted against the sunlight bleeding in through the wooden shutters of the waiting room, she looks like she is wearing a halo. Evgeni stands in the hallway, his elbows resting on the reception counter, watching Dina as she wriggles her way in behind the cramped desk. She dumps her bag on the floor and hands the takeaway coffee to Yael.

  ‘At last.’ Yael’s face lights up as she takes a sip, ignoring the phone that has been ringing nonstop. She clears her throat. ‘As you can see, Mr Evgeni has decided to join us again today.’

  Yael flicks a strand of dark hair behind her shoulder. An ice blue Star of David on a delicate gold chain dangles above her cleavage. The buttons of her pink shirt strain to stay inside their buttonholes, and a hint of lacy bra peeks out between gaping edges. Dina tugs on the elastic of her own maternity pants.