Песах Амнуэль - Zion's Fiction - A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature

When the phone vibrates on the kitchen counter, Mor stares at the flashing display and tries to remember who the caller is. Her memory is holed like cheese, some memories willfully expunged, some unaccountably gone. A school friend? A former colleague? Not a relative, certainly. She has none. An only daughter of an only daughter; and her mother’s entire family buried in unmarked graves.

It does not matter. She needs nobody. She has her son.

Stroking her belly, she watches the phone quiver and jump like a living thing. When it finally calms down, she tosses it into the garbage bin.

They met every day for a week. Mor learned a little more about David—enough for her to decide he was the One. He was so reassuringly normal, untainted by the feverish madness of the Middle East. He was an accountant, he said, and indeed, he was very good with numbers. His parents were dead, his numerous siblings scattered over an amazing geographical range, and there was no mention of an ex-wife or significant other. He read all the right books and had all the right opinions. He liked gadgets. Mor, being an adjunct professor in the Department of Life Sciences, listened to his technobabble with an indulgent smile. The only negative she could find was that he was surprisingly indifferent to good food, despite the plethora of culinary temptations on every street corner. Rice-stuffed vine leaves, couscous, creamy hummus, freshly baked pitas, honey-almond cake—he consumed them as dutifully and apathetically as if they were medicine. Mor told herself that was a necessary counterpoint to her own indulgences that were beginning to show in her curves.

One day he told her his return ticket was for tomorrow. The despair she felt was strong enough to frighten her. Did she really need him so much? She had her life, her friends, her job. She might meet somebody local, get married, have a family.

She was thirty-five. All of her school and army friends were married, most had children. The future stretched before her: blank, lifeless, childless.

They ate at the most expensive restaurant in Tel Aviv. David had a lot of money and spent it freely, though never recklessly. He walked her to her apartment block and pecked her on the cheek as he did every evening. Dully, she waited for him to turn around and walk away as he did every evening.

“Can I come up for coffee?” he asked.

The darkened rooms were bathed in the inflamed glow of city lights. Her neighbor’s cat caterwauled in the yard and fell silent. She tangled with her clothes, but his undressing was quick and tidy. Running her hand over his delightfully smooth chest, she was, again, struck by how cool his flesh was: like a porcelain bowl with sherbet inside. Mor felt embarrassed by the drops of sweat gathering under her armpits and in the hollow of her neck. But David’s body remained immaculate. His kisses were sterile; his mouth tasted of nothing.

His regular breathing did not speed up until it suddenly stopped. David’s perfectly groomed hair tickled her lips and pushed back her rising scream.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I cannot die. Not even a little death. So that’s all for me, but don’t worry, I’m satisfied.”

She could see him clearly. His body was glowing in the dark, a bluish glow like candlelight seen through a thick slab of ice. The translucent flesh molded itself around the geometrical beauty of curving ribs and elegantly strung vertebrae, shining with hard, steely light.

“Little death,” she repeated blankly.

He sat up. Now on the left side of his chest, just above the nipple, she could see a neat hole surrounded by petals of flesh that stirred restlessly, opening and closing like a sea anemone. The wound bled more metallic light.

“Orgasm,” he said. “The French call it la petite mort .”

“And you…”

“I am Death.”

In fact, he was only a death, one of many. Over the next couple of days he explained it again and again: gently, patiently, and reassuringly.

There were, he said, a number of deaths (he talked of them in family terms—brothers, sisters, cousins). New ones appeared from time to time and oldsters retired, though, of course, none died. Each death was responsible for a specific mode of mortality, though in emergencies (he was vague as to what those might be) they could take over each other’s domains. David’s own specialty was death by shooting.

How old was he? He did not know; could not remember. Had he ever been human? He did not know that either. Was there a God? This received a blank stare.

And in between these conversations they went for ice cream or swam in the sea or toured the labyrinthine alleys of Old Jaffa or made love. He brought her flowers every day. After a week he moved in, bringing his natty suitcase from the hotel. After two weeks he asked her to marry him.

This precipitated a crisis. She threw him out, yelling at him to go to hell. She cried for hours afterwards, only stopping when she realized that he might have done just that. Next morning he was at her door with a fresh bunch of flowers.

She could not say no. She was in love. And yet she could not say yes, either. She pleaded with him to give her more time.

“Why can’t we just live together?” she cried.

He explained that it would not be right. He wanted her to see how committed he was. And unless they were legally married, he could not give her his wedding gift. She tried to push the thought of the gift away from her deliberations—she was not to be bought, she told herself and believed it—but the magnitude of it was not so easily overlooked.

One afternoon her cell phone rang. Her mother’s officious neighbor Dvora called to tell her she was worried about Mrs. Shalev’s state of mind. She managed to introduce a not-too-subtle remark about Mor’s dereliction of her filial duties, with the unspoken “and the only child, too!” accompanying every word.

When her mother failed to pick up the phone, Mor drove up to Jerusalem. Just as she was rounding the last bend in the highway, the setting sun shone a peculiar golden-mauve light on the bare hills with their clusters of whitewashed dwellings. In such moments Jerusalem seemed not so much a city as a physical state: a lighting flicker of vertigo or a stab of pain.

Her mother was in the living room, softly crying. The usual half hour of useless recriminations followed, with Mor getting so angry with her mother’s drab misery that she felt like slapping her lined cheek. But eventually Mrs. Shalev rallied sufficiently to make tea. Mother and daughter sat at the kitchen table with a bowl of homemade cookies pushed closer to Mor’s side.

“ Ima ,” Mor asked. “ Ima , did you ever see Death?”

Mrs. Shalev, who was stirring her tea, froze and then glanced at Mor with a sly, conspiratorial smile as if they finally got to share a grown-up secret.

“My mother did,” she said. “Your grandmother, God rest her soul! She told me about it. When they were bringing them in, in the cattle cars, she was just a child. They let her stand close to a window so she would not suffocate. There was snow outside. And there was a man standing on top of a snowdrift: an ordinary man wearing an office suit. In the depth of winter. The people pleaded and screamed, and he was writing something in his notebook. He never raised his eyes as the train passed by.”

Mor reminded herself that David never wore office attire.

“But Granny survived!” she remonstrated.

“Yes,” her mother agreed. “For a while.”

Two days later Dvora called again. When Mor came to Jerusalem, she found her mother dead in her bed. The family physician called it a heart failure but privately admitted that an overdose of tranquilizers might have played a part.