David Grossman - The Book of Intimate Grammar

With eyes like a vulture Giora veered. He forgot the waves. They lapped away. Instantly Aron regretted his betrayal. Of Mama, yet! Giora drew closer: “You mean every morning? You’re kidding. What does she sing?” And Aron sensed he’d desecrated something, but the feeling blurred into limp confusion and his mounting resentment of her for abandoning him. Every morning she comes into our room to raise the blinds, singing, “We’re off to work in the morning.” Giora shook his head like a schoolteacher prompting a dull-witted pupil to try a little harder. “I’m telling you,” said Aron. “That’s what she sings.” “Okay, but if she sings that every morning,” Giora concluded, “it’s not because she’s getting laid.” Aron shuddered to hear his parents spoken of like that. “But!” exclaimed Giora, guiding him toward the treasure, “does she ever sing anything else?” Aron thought awhile, and suddenly thewave inside him was rising again, maybe he’d feel better if he vomited. “Yes … sometimes she sings, nu, what’s that song from the opera … Carmen , it’s called …” “Get out of here!” Giora fumed. “What does she know about opera!?” “She went to see Carmen at the opera house in Tel Aviv,” protested Aron, “before she married Papa.” And the face of his father loomed out of the sea, grinning not at him but at Mama, the way he did when she put on airs, and hard as Aron tried to erase the vision — he needed that like a hole in the head right now — there it was against a background of ruffled seawater, bobbing and sinking below the waves, watching Mama tell how she saved her pennies for the bus fare to Tel Aviv and the ticket to the opera, in the days before she met Papa, who was starving in Jerusalem, and Aron watched him narrow his eyes at her, while she wistfully described the luxurious seats and the plush red curtain, and the gowns and hats of the shlochtas and yekketes; and Papa’s eyes flashed maliciously: “She isn’t just anybody, your mama, she’s a regular inallectual, in case you didn’t realize; who knows, if not for marrying me, she could be a great artiste, a Mozart at least, or a Whozit, the actress … Rovina.” “You wouldn’t understand!” raged Mama. “To you it means nothing, but not everyone’s like you!” “Oh sure, it must have been dandy to sit there for five hours listening to all the heehaa-heehaw! Heehaa-heehaw!” Eyeball to eyeball he brayed into her face, grimacing to remind her of her treachery, of what she really was, and the smile vanished from his eyes, heehaaheehaw! Heehaaheehaw! And he pushed till she yielded, the muscles aquiver in her face, like a savage succumbing to jungle drums. Haw-heehaaheehaw! brayed Papa, heehawheehaaheehaw! Like a donkey with his tail in the air. And Aron watched her, praying, Don’t give in, oh please, not this time, but behind those tears of rage and humiliation she was getting ready to laugh, preparing to surrender her pretensions and abandon her pathetic resolve to defect, and then, forsaking Aron, braying “Heehaw-heehaa,” amid tearful snorts and hiccups of contrition over the treachery of Carmen, “heehaaheehaw,” she sank down beside Papa, their faces moving closer, till for one horrible moment Aron could actually see the frayed heartstring only Papa knew how to pluck. “Are you telling me your mama sings opera”—he heard Giora’s voice from afar—“at seven o’clock in the morning?”

In a flash he understood: Papa’s hands reached out of the waves, dripping with tangled seaweed. They were unmistakably his father’shands, dangling ape-like at his side, and now he imagined them stroking his hair, tending the fig tree, leaving greasy fingerprints on the pictures, yes, oh yes, and Giora, who had been carefully observing Aron’s face, exclaimed with awe: “Your papa sure must know how to bang!”

With a great, bitter howl Aron was upon him. Giora ducked, but soon recovered and began to laugh, pretending to be afraid of little Aron as he hopped around him, blocking his punches, pounding him not very playfully on the head with a heavy fist, teaching Aron a lesson to the rhythm of “Oh, tico-tico-ti, oh, tico-tico-tu.” And Aron reeled like a drunkard, blinded by his tears, the tiny undefeated wrestling champion of his class, who didn’t know the meaning of fear, no one had dared to mess with him before; why, when he was eight years old he’d flattened Zacky in the yard, that was the start of their friendship. Zacky stuck to him like glue after that, but now Giora was showing him what the future held in store, offering him a crash course in the strategies of avoiding danger, groveling to musclemen and reviling yourself with a crooked smile for being a little runt — suddenly Giora hammerlocked him from behind, threw him down on the sand, and sat on his back. Aron stopped breathing, not because Giora was heavy, but because he was crushed by the discovery that a boy his own age could weigh so much. “Say you’re sorry.”

Aron buried his face in the warm sand and choked back his tears.

“Say you’re sorry.”

The pain in his arm was becoming unbearable. He’ll break my arm and they’ll send me home.

“Repeat after me”—Giora’s face loomed over him—“Eef you vant to be a bradher put yoor fadher on yoor madher.” His face was red, filled with loathing. Why does he hate me so much? What did I ever do to him?

“I mean it, I’m going to kill you, now repeat after me.”

Aron lay still as a new emotion welled poisonously up inside him: he was gloating, enjoying his own humiliation, the abuse of his own body. Go on, hurt it. Torture it.

“Eef you vant to be a bradher …”

He deserved this, he deserved this. For telling Giora about his parents, for listening to his silly prattle, for all the mistakes he’d ever made, great or small, like refusing to watch the wrestling with Papa on Lebanon TV at Peretz Atias’s — he might have learned some tricks to usein a situation such as this — because those bloated freaks disgusted him and now they were getting revenge, through Giora.

“Repeat after me or I swear I’ll finish you—”

Aron screamed. His arm felt as though it had been torn out of its socket. Giora jumped back. He approached to make sure Aron was still alive, then ran. Aron lay unmoving, his head in the filthy sand. Empty nylon bags and seaweed tangled with bird feathers splashed up on the shore. Through his open eye he could see the clouds turn pink. Maybe someday he would long for this, someday when he was all alone, fleeing across the icy taiga, going out of his mind in the frozen wastes. He closed his eyes and rested.

Finally, with great effort, he picked himself up and carefully moved his throbbing arm to bring it back to life. At least he didn’t say he was sorry. At least he didn’t repeat the stupid rhyme. He didn’t foul his mouth. He brushed the sand off. He would learn judo, or maybe sumo. Three or four holds would do the trick. Slowly he dragged himself back to Gucha and Efraim’s.

Five weeks later, at the end of a fifty-seven-day-long vacation, Aron left for home. At the central bus station in Tel Aviv he found twenty ticket stubs, and bowed down in resignation to collect them off the filthy floor.

Later, as he watched the fallow countryside roll by, he thought about his bar mitzvah. It would take place a few months from now at the beginning of winter, and there would be a lot of guests around to observe him at close quarters. The bus began to joggle up the narrow slope of Bab-el-wad, and the heavy Orthodox woman in the next seat glanced at him disapprovingly. Open the window, she ordered, it’s stifling in here. He tried to open it, but it was stuck; his strength failed, so the woman stretched her hairy arms out and thrust it open herself. And still he couldn’t breathe. He unbuttoned his shirt collar, but that didn’t help much either. The hills rose up on the roadside and hemmed him in, and rusty auto wrecks with wreaths around them from the War of Independence blurred before his eyes. The woman leaned over and asked loudly if he was feeling sick. The driver watched him in the rearview mirror, scowling under his visor cap, and the passengers began to whisper, accusing him of being disrespectful to our valiant dead. With all his might he tried to prove his patriotism and hold it down, but the bumpy pass got the better of him, and he found the paper bag AuntGucha gave him just in time. The woman beside him stood up, holding her skirt out, and started looking for another seat, and Aron burned with shame. When they arrived at the central bus station in Jerusalem, he hid his face in the paper bag until the last of the passengers got off, and then realized with a sudden start that it had been ages since Mama and Papa mentioned the loan they were going to take out to pay for his grandiose bar mitzvah.