David Grossman - The Book of Intimate Grammar

Aron is silent. He turns pale. Caught out. The quivering inside him has stopped, the pleasure has vanished.

“Repeat what you just said.”

“Here, take it, Papa.” He holds the saltcellar upside down. He dare not turn it right side up. It trickles into his hand.

“What’s that you call it?”

“It’s … a saltcellar.”

“Now listen here, Mr. Inallectual: you open your ears and hear me good: I say we call it ‘the salt whatzit.’”

“Okay. Here, take it.”

“No. First repeat after me: ‘the salt whatzit.’”

“Please, Papa, take it.” His whiny voice, his boy-soprano shame. He is pouting and the tears well in his eyes. The salt trickles out on the table. Mama is silent. Yochi is silent.

“You say ‘the salt whatzit’ or so help me, I’ll take my belt with the brass buckle to you.”

“Say it already!” shrieks Mama, who only a moment ago was gloating at the sink. “God in heaven! Say it already so we can have some quiet!”

Aron tries. He really does, but he can’t. The words just won’t come out of him. His lips twist and tremble. Let me go, Mr. Lion, and one day I shall help you in return; how can a mouse like you help the king of beasts; I have a plan: I’ll win the lottery, I’ll win the Toto, you won’t have to work so hard at the workers’ council anymore, I’ll save our home, the light will shine again. Yochi watches pityingly. Her mouth is full. Papa cages him in, his face swelling ever larger.

“Let him be, Moshe!” screams Mama, throwing down the drumstick. “Never mind all the food I cooked. What do you want with him? Eat and be quiet!”

“I won’t have him laughing at me! What does he think, he can laugh at me in my own house? He won’t eat his dinner, our food’s not good enough for him! And the way he talks, just like a girl, tatee-tatee-tata! Thinks he can look down on me, like a, like some damned commissar. And I’m supposed to keep my mouth shut. You say ‘the salt whatzit’ right now or else!”

“Nu, Aron, say ‘the salt whatzit’ already, so we can eat in peace!” shouts Mama, and Aron gives her a long look; he really does feel sorry for her, slaving in the kitchen all day to feed him so he can grow up and be normal. He shuts his ears from inside, Aroning slowly down, till suddenly they’re speaking a language he doesn’t understand, these strangers from far, far away, and he vows to stay with them, to helpthem cope, to bring a little sunshine into their trying lives; see them scowl as they tell him the news of some terrible disaster, some evil, hateful person has hurt them. Saltcellar, thinks Aron, somersaultcellar, his heart leaps: what a funny word, but something has happened meanwhile, a wicked emperor captured Mama and Papa, and he’s threatening to execute them unless Aron swallows a bite of the “birdy” in his defiant mouth; he swivels his head from side to side. Locks his lips. A heavy hand, red and hairy, squeezes his cheeks together, forces his mouth open, and thrusts the wing inside. Okay, maybe it’ll accidentally knock out his milk tooth. And his poor, poor parents, tied to the stake, they know he took a vow, they’d never ask him to do such an ignoble thing. His eyes blur with tears. I’ll do it for your sake, he whispers, with the tender flesh between his teeth, and he takes a bite of this once living chicken and chews it and swallows it, and the drum in his tummy spins the yellow meat around. But don’t worry, he bravely reassures his weeping parents as the emperor’s men untie their fetters, they may defile my lips, they may defile my body, but the essence of me will be pure forever. Long live the saltcellar, long live the somersaultcellar, and Aron, with a chicken wing sticking out of his mouth, flies blissful as a light beam, in the radiant splendor of his word.

They ate in perfect silence again. Aron swallowed. But he never betrayed himself, he never said “the salt whatzit.” Papa sat down, growling with malevolence. Staring at the heaping plate. Yochi’s foot touched Aron’s reassuringly. Forks scraped. In a gnarly, tearful voice Mama asked Papa if he wanted more, the chicken came out so good today. With great effort Papa raised his head. He stared at her in horror. Slowly he turned to the clock on the wall. His bull neck reappeared between his shoulders. Shutting his eyes, he nodded in reply.

Two kitchen walls; the wall in the hallway; the little storage loft over the bathroom; the wall between the kitchen and the pantry; half the wall between the hallway and the salon … The neighbors, expert by now at deciphering Papa’s moods, recognized the difference instantly: after a long spell of fatigue, Papa was back to his old self again, smashing the walls with renewed vigor, till they crumbled into dust. He shattered the bathroom and, one by one, knocked out the delicate tiles, cracking the basin in the process as well as the laundry rack and the ornamental mirror where Edna had beheld herself rising from the bath. It was difficult for him to be careful, to curb his ambitions. His flexing smithy muscles twisted over his back and shoulders and ripped through his dark blue work shirt. Once when he needed some wooden beams and Edna pointed to a stack of doors, he sawed up two of them without a moment’s hesitation. During most of the next few days he worked on Og, the giant ladder, demolishing the storage loft in the hallway, indifferent to the peculiar rain of picture postcards and maps of distant lands, high-school papers and university notebooks, gaudy albums and collections of trading cards and silver foil and “gold stars,” and frilly dresses, and broken dolls, and little red shoes, and a cuddly teddy bear with a faint smell of urine, and scores of black-and-white photos pelting down on his back like arrows. For three hours a day the building project trembled, the Boteneros, the Smitankas, the Kaminers, the Strashnovs; the plaster crumbled in their apartments, thefurniture jiggled like herons aflutter in an aviary as the beating wings of their migrant friends pass overhead, and the dust from the ruins of Edna’s apartment fell upon the dying grass and the laundry lines on their balconies, but no one dared complain to Papa, right, that’s all they needed, he looked like a wild beast; poor Hinda, she must be made of steel to put up with a man like that.

And a terrible thing happened in the building one morning: Esther Kaminer, wife of Avigdor Kaminer, did not wake up: she went to sleep a healthy woman and never opened her eyes again. All the neighbors, except for Papa and Edna Bloom, came outside and bowed their heads as the diminutive body was lifted into the ambulance. In the fifteen years since the project was constructed this was the first time anyone had died there. Avigdor Kaminer stood by, arms dangling, and the onlookers watched his hunched figure full of pity and concern: who would take care of him now that she was gone, who would keep him going? She fought like a tiger over him. Mama, who had a soft spot for Esther Kaminer, came home feeling suddenly old. It was a dreadful blow. But she gritted her teeth and baked a torte and a sesame cake so poor Kaminer would have something to serve his guests during the seven days of mourning; he’s as helpless as a baby, doesn’t even know how to fix himself a cup of tea, how will he manage with the laundry, how will he manage with the ironing? She heaved a sigh, remembering Mamchu, of all people, with a vague irritation; maybe there was a link here, between poor Esther Kaminer and Mamchu holding on to life like an animal, to the point of indecency. Some people just don’t know when their time has come, she grumbled, watching the margarine melt in the frying pan, and again with a pang she remembered Grandma Lilly, whose very survival seemed to clog the bowels of death and upset the laws of the universe.