Kashua Sayed - Second Person Singular

“My mother is actually an amazing person,” she said, an artist at heart who had worked as a nurse for many years and now also worked in the family business. “What about you?” she would ask now and again. “I don’t know a thing about your family.”

“I don’t have one,” I’d say with a smile. “Somewhere out there I’ve got a mother.”

Noa was my girlfriend. At least that’s how I used to refer to her in front of Ruchaleh, who used to say, “Come on already, when are you going to bring her over?”

But what exactly was I supposed to say to her? Noa, this is my boss, we just happen to have the same last name. And what exactly was I supposed to say about the man in the attic— Meet my brother, we’re twins. Fraternal not identical, and, yes, he was in a terrible accident?

We’d meet up during the day, usually on Saturday mornings if she hadn’t gone back to her parents’ house for the weekend. She didn’t go there often and she would get angry with her mother whenever she forced her to visit, once every few months. The two of us would go on trips together, take photographs, drink coffee, hug when times were tough, hold hands, exchange CDs, download music, and on Thursdays, half days at Bezalel, we’d shop for records and check out photography exhibits. I liked hanging out at her place and she liked having me there. Sometimes she’d get all worked up, visibly furious, and she’d throw me out of the house.

“I need to be alone for a little while,” she’d say, starting to cry, but then she’d calm down, invite me back in, suggest we do something together, maybe a walk around the neighborhood or a stroll through the Old City.

“You look different,” I blurted out when she opened the door that evening. I’d never seen her dressed up before. In school and when I came by on Saturday mornings she always wore jeans or cords and a T-shirt. Now she stood in the doorway in a gray skirt, the kind that the lawyers wear on American TV shows. Instead of a funky T-shirt she wore a red sleeveless blouse that buttoned up the front. There was lipstick on her lips and black mascara on her eyelashes. I’d never seen her made up before.

“What do you think?” she asked, her hands trembling. “Kind of like a babushka doll?”

“Kind of,” I said, laughing. “I feel bad, I’m in my work clothes.”

“Do you want me to change?”

“No, no, not at all. . it’s just. .” I wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence.

“Just what?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on, say it, you bastard.”

“Say what?”

“That I look beautiful.”

“You look beautiful.”

“Yeah, thanks a lot.”

“No problem.”

“Hold on, let me grab a shawl or something,” she said and turned back into the house.

“Are we going out?” I asked, and I checked to see how much cash Ruchaleh had stuffed into my wallet.

“Yeah,” she said, smiling. “You want me to sit around the house like Little Red Riding Hood in this thing? Of course we’re going out. Don’t you want to?”

“Yeah, of course. I’d love to.”

“Good,” she said, and she shut the door behind her.

“Where do you want to go?” I asked as we walked down Nissim Behar.

“Your call.”

“Ahhhh,” I asked, unprepared. “You hungry?”

“A little bit, not really, maybe a little something.”

“Okay,” I said and I took her hand and then turned it over and looked at her watch. She smiled and I felt a surge of desire.

“I think Cavalier is still open.”

“Cavalier?” she asked.

“It’s a great restaurant.” It was one of Ruchaleh’s favorites.

“What are you talking about?” she asked. “How the hell did you get Cavalier into your head?”

“I don’t know, it’s in walking distance. If you want to take a cab we could also go to the American Colony. The food there is pretty good, too.” I knew that those were two of the most expensive restaurants in the city, the kind students walked into only through the staff entrance. One time, when we went to Arkadia, our waiter was a guy in my class. Ruchaleh didn’t hesitate. She shook the guy’s hand and said, “Nice to meet you; I’m Yonatan’s mother.”

I didn’t know much about Jerusalem’s night life but I wanted to impress Noa. I wanted her to know that I was hiding something, that I wasn’t just some loser student, working nights and forgoing any semblance of a social life in order to pay tuition.

“Those are the options you’re giving me?” she asked, laughing. “When I said I was a little hungry, I was thinking that, like, maybe we’d order some fries with our beer, not Cavalier.”

“You know, I have a feeling you know the city a lot better than I do at this point. You decide.”

“Okay,” she said. “Follow me.” And she took my hand in hers, looked for my response, and when I smiled, she tightened her grip and tugged me down the road, saying again, “Where the hell do you have the cash for Cavalier from?”

I had the cash. Ruchaleh had shoved it into my wallet before throwing me out of the house.

“You can go to a hotel, you can go wherever you want, but you’re not staying here,” she had said at first when I begged her to let me stay.

That was the first change in the plan. I wasn’t sure whether she’d known it all along or if it was something she’d decided on when Yonatan’s oximeter started to beep, as it had been doing every night for the past few weeks.

That night, after getting Yonatan ready for bed, we strayed from our usual dinner routine.

“I’m not hungry,” I told Ruchaleh, who sat, inanimate, on the couch.

“I want to sell the house,” she said, looking up at the ceiling. “I don’t want to be in this place anymore.”

We must have sat there in silence for something like an hour, until the gauge started to beep. That was my cue to run upstairs to the attic and connect the plastic contraption bulging out of Yonatan’s throat to the life-support system. Ruchaleh looked at me. I bowed my head and stayed seated. According to her plan, fifteen minutes would suffice. The beeping bounced off the walls, careened inside my head, pinged against the walls of my skull. I envisioned Yonatan gasping, choking, sputtering, his body convulsing, a shocked expression on his face.

“Where are you going?” she yelled, following me as I ran up the stairs. The oximeter, a small device clipped to his finger, beeped hysterically. I stood at the foot of the bed and stared at Yonatan. He looked exactly the same, lying there with the same placid expression on his face, no apparent convulsions or torment wracking his body. Ruchaleh walked over to her son’s side, to the oximeter, and turned down the volume of the beeping.

The plan was that she would wait fifteen minutes and then call an ambulance, pleading, panic-stricken, for a mobile ICU unit. “My son has stopped breathing.” That was her line. While she was on the phone, I was supposed to hook him up to the ventilator so that when the crew arrived they’d find him on life support, even though Ruchaleh said that the doctors wouldn’t be asking any unnecessary questions.

“Doctors tend to encourage end-of-life decisions on far less severe cases,” she said, “but who knows, with our luck, we could get some religious doctor and he could cause trouble.”

She was supposed to meet the ambulance crew outside. I was supposed to wait by the side of the bed. Ruchaleh said that an ICU doctor coming to the big house in Beit Hakerem, seeing Yonatan on his eggshell mattress, surrounded by the best life-support system money could buy, would probably issue a death certificate on the spot, without ordering an autopsy or any other kind of investigation. They’d probably skip the CPR, since he was on life support already, and just confirm his death, at which point she’d burst into tears.