David Grossman - The Book of Intimate Grammar

Another year went by. And nothing. Like egg white folded evenly into batter, so his days were stirred into time. It was a weird winter: icy cold, with storms and piercing winds, but not a drop of rain. They were already talking about a drought. An arctic winter, they said on the radio, and Aron shivered.

One evening he’s sitting on Farouk in the kitchen, peeling potatoes for the Sabbath cholent. The balcony window keeps banging in the wind. It gets dark by five these days, and people stay indoors. The cozy smell of kerosene pervades the house, and if you keep perfectly still you hear the old Friedman heater breathing. Mainly, though, you hear Papa moaning on the sofa. Mama and Yochi are busy on his back, Mama working her way up and Yochi working her way down, so they’ll meet in the middle. It goes faster without Grandma. She always insisted on helping, poking everywhere, giggling like a girl, tickling poor Papa under the arm, and sometimes, recalls Aron, peeling faster, concentrating with all his might because of the chirring sound he’d started hearing lately, and when Grandma was in an especially good mood, she would squeeze in between Mama and Yochi and throw herself on Papa with her cheek to his back, singing a Polish song into his rib cage with a sly peek at Mama, and Papa would start writhing with ticklishness or stifled laughter, maybe it was one of those songs Mama forbade him to sing, from Grandma Lilly’s nightclub days; the chirring sound is shrill and it’s a signal, he knows, he figured out when he gets it, for instance — whenhe’s using a kitchen utensil, holding something in his hands, touching a tool or some other object, even a person, right away he hears the tsss tsss tsss, like an electric discharge, like a warning or a hiss of mockery, and then his fingers slowly open, and go numb, that’s how he broke the glass at supper yesterday, it fell out of his hand; he heard the chirring and gripped the glass, but the sound continued, and his fingers started trembling, getting weaker and weaker, and Mama saw it happening, she stood there, watching his trembling fingers slowly unclench, who knows, maybe she heard it too, and now, with the knife and Papa’s groans, Meirky Blutreich has it under his arm, today Aron saw the third proof in broad daylight, during gym class, and the third proof is final; the chirring is persistent, like a fluttering outside his ear on the left, and inside it, and Hanan Schweiky is clearly entitled to a gergeleh, it’s amazing how fast he developed it, only yesterday Aron noticed it for the first time, and already it’s official, it just hatched overnight, but still, for the sake of protocol, as they say, he would only confirm it after two more sightings, a day apart. Enough already! He lets the peeling knife drop. Thank God. A little quiet. It’s cold in the kitchen. What is this, we have central heating and a radiator in every room, but all the neighbors have been using their kerosene heaters for the past three years to get even with Mrs. Pinkus, the divorcee who lives over the Boteneros and refuses to pay her dues to the Residents Association. Where were we? He quickly counts on his fingers. Seventeen boys in his class have at least one item. The armpit list’s the longest. Though interestingly enough, some boys, like Asa Kolodny or Haim Saportas, for instance, have a lot under the arm, practically a forest, but hardly any on their legs, proving that in these matters too a variety of strategies exists, so maybe there’s a certain, well, arbitrariness, and things sometimes get bungled the way they do in bustling offices, like the office of the army reserves. And think what would happen if someone started tidying up, it would be all over. Oh sure, sure. He stops. Listens. Nothing. Good riddance. Carefully he picks up the red knife, so the knife won’t notice and neither will he. But no cheating. There it goes again, the chirring. There’s no end to the ingenuity of this problem. Sometimes the sound seems to be addressing him. It’s hard to understand what it’s saying, though. Scolding him or threatening. He glances warily into the salon, where Papa lies writhing in ecstasy under one or another pair of feminine hands, signifying by the tone of his groans that the end is near, here itcomes, hmmmm, Aron hums against the chirring, a special hum he has that’s so shrill, it sets the pipes inside him quivering, and then the chirring goes away. Hmmm — he hones the hum, feeling his teeth vibrate; hurry, fill the silence, and how furious Mama used to get whenever Papa and Grandma Lilly spoke Polish together, which she didn’t understand; before she married him she made him promise to speak nothing but Hebrew. But there are some things I can only say in Polish, Papa protested once, during the big fight they had after Yochi’s bat mitzvah. It’s our language! But you promised! She wagged a finger at him, because Grandma sang one of her songs at the bat mitzvah and Papa joined in, and suddenly you could tell they were related, their eyes shone with the same light, and when the song was over they sat in the corner chattering in Polish, loudly interrupting each other as Mama stomped by them at least a hundred times. Aron had never heard Papa talking like that to Grandma Lilly, or anyone else for that matter, so lively and cheerful, and after the guests left there was a big fight, the walls shook; ntzz ntzz ntzz, it hisses like a snake now, and Aron slows down. He nearly cut his finger.

Just then, when Papa got up off the Bordeaux sofa and heaved a sigh, and put on his shorts and the haimish shirt that was accidentally dyed blue in the wash, there was a knock on the door. It was such a muffled knock that at first they didn’t realize it was a knock at all, they thought maybe the pantry window was banging again, that maybe Sophie Atias slammed the door the way Sephardim do, but then came another knock, and then a quick loud rap that shuddered at itself, and the whole family ran to the door and who should be standing there but their upstairs neighbor Edna Bloom, huddling in her enormous overcoat, trying to smile with trembling lips. Aron’s heart froze at the sight of her: Uh-oh, she found out, I left signs, she’s here to tell them. The potato knife was still in his hand. Edna Bloom hesitated in the doorway. Papa, in his spotted haimisheh, stood up straight and suddenly shrank and apologized for the way he looked, and hurried off to change his shirt. A wrinkle of amazement zigzagged over Mama’s right eye. Do come in, Miss Bloom, why are you standing in the doorway, such a rare visitor, of course you’re no bother, a cup of coffee?

Edna teetered in, with little bobs and curtsies at Yochi, at the oval photograph of Mama’s father on the buffet, at the new lamp fixture, at anything and everything in the room. Aron walked behind her. Howwould he explain. Where would he begin. Maybe he should run away before they were ready. Maybe he should faint. What could they do to him if he fainted. Maybe he would stab her with the knife and then kill himself, but just then the chirring started, mocking him, Aron who didn’t even know which way you screw in a screw, let alone how to hold a glass, if he tried to switch off his body, he’d only wind up with another silly defect. Edna cast a wonder-filled glance around the salon, with the reupholstered Methuselah and the Pouritz, and the big new lampshade; they redecorated after Grandma, and she’d never seen their apartment inside, because she didn’t attend the Residents Association meetings, and Mama noticed and showed her the salon with a sweeping gesture, more sweeping than necessary, and apologized for the mess, though everything was shiny clean as usual, it was Thursday night, you could eat off her floor, and she prided herself on the fresh paint job and the new buffet, it had a modern bar, and a light went on behind a red plush curtain whenever you opened the door, the bottles were reflected in the mirrors. Why don’t you take off your coat, Miss Bloom. No no. Edna Bloom shivered, diving deeper into her overcoat and glancing wide-eyed at the modern bar, though maybe she was surprised to see such a grand buffet but no books anywhere.