David Grossman - The Book of Intimate Grammar

Mama reached into Aron’s boots and pulled out the wads of newspaper. Aron trudged wearily through the hall, careful to conceal himself from her penetrating eyes, fervently praying for a last-minute reprieve.If only someone would explain it to him, slowly and patiently. Walking like this, in slow motion, he was reminded of David Lipschitz, the albino kid in his class. That’s how David walked, dragging his feet and wagging his head from side to side. Papa was at the front door; he pressed the handle with his elbow and came in, carrying his tools and medicines. “Hey there, Aronchik, why so glum?” Papa smiled at Aron’s startled face, the brush sticking out of the corner of his mouth. Aron panicked, what if he headed for the bedroom now and looked behind the winter-sock drawer. But instead he went to put the palette with the jars and the rags down on a newspaper in the bathroom. I’m going to shave now, Mamaleh, and then we can sit down to eat. At least he didn’t suspect anything. Aron hurried to the bedroom, but changed his mind. Not now. His lips were dry, crusty, how would he get the pictures out of there without his parents noticing? Someone might suddenly walk in and go straight to the closet, and then what?

Mama emerged from the kitchen and found him leaning against the wall. She rushed to his side: “What’s wrong, Aronchik, why are you acting like this?” Everything’s all right; he waved limply. Maybe I got out of bed too fast and it made me dizzy in the head. I’ll be okay in a minute probably. She gave him one of her special hugs and held him so tightly he could feel a worrisome throbbing under her skin, an intense vibration almost like an engine inside her. “Mama, you’re strangling me!” Gently she let him go, and again he pressed himself into her body, into her soft, saggy waistline, her heaving bosom, and the perspiring nest under her arms, and suddenly he tore himself away, afraid to touch her even with his fingertips, and she opened her eyes wide with a strange little laugh: “Too big to hug your mama? All right, go try on the boots, they’re on top of the cans in the pantry.” And she went off giggling to tell Papa.

Aron reached into the old boots and pulled out a few more wads of last year’s newspaper. He spread one over his face to hide from the world, but an item with a squiggly line around it caught his attention, something about a young blacksmith from a village in Armenia who died and was buried in a wooden coffin, but at night the gravekeeper heard the sound of kicking and ran away, and the next morning the police came and pried off the coffin lid and they found the blacksmith, only his face was contorted and his nails were broken, and the lid was covered with scratches. “God in heaven,” said Mama in his ear, “howlong does His Majesty intend to keep us waiting? Would you please try on your boots already?”

Aron slumped down on the benkaleh and leaned over to unbuckle his sandal. Where were we? David Lipschitz’s father works for the Ministry of the Interior, he’s a big shot, that’s why the school authorities let David pass each year. Aron felt benevolent as he contemplated David Lipschitz, as though suddenly he had all the time in the world to pay an old debt. Did David wag his head like that even in his sleep, Aron wondered. Tick-tock! The big albino face with the eyes blinking out like frightened creatures in a cave … and the only thing he cares about is Anat Fish. The cruel and beautiful Anat Fish, who has a “freshie” boyfriend. David stares at her and smiles, he’ll pay a whole sandwich for one of her pencils or a sheet of paper from her loose-leaf notebook, and if you bring him her sweater, he nuzzles it and his eyes get misty. Sometimes in winter he runs out of the classroom, and when the bell rings, you find him in the hallway, rubbing against her coat. But she’s so mean, she never looks back. She has eyes like an Egyptian queen. Aron pulled the sandal strap.

The front door opened and slammed shut: Yochi was home from Madame Nikova’s. She threw herself down on the bed and burst out crying. She often cried these days, especially after ballet class; he could hear Papa humming in the bathroom as he lathered his face. A year and a half from now, it all goes to me, he mused: the shaving soap and the razor and the shiny tray, but the thought of it was not particularly exciting; in fact, the certainty of it only oppressed him, and alienated him from Papa even more, and suddenly he imagined Mama there, all dressed up, with a fat banana hairdo, smiling radiantly at the company as her fingers searched under his chin for the chicken-pox scar. “Didn’t I tell you whiskers would cover it one day?” Aron pulled away indignantly: he remembered the first time she said that, when he was seven years old. He had resented her deeply, she sounded as though she wanted to lock him inside the future and jangle the keys in his face.

“No bread for me, thank you,” said Yochi as she sat down red-eyed.

“What, no bread? You can’t live without bread.”

“I said no bread!” Her lips were quivering. “You should have heard the names Madame Nikova called me.”

“Yocheved,” cooed Mama, wiping her hands on the apron with thekangaroo, “Madame Nikova may be an expert on dancing, but I know something about girls and growing up.”

“Look, just look at this!” screamed Yochi, kicking her leg out and slapping her thigh where it joined the hip. The pink flesh rippled. “It’s because you never sit down properly when you eat,” Mama explained, “I’ve told you a thousand times—” “And today she put me back in the second row!”

“Yochileh,” said Papa quietly, “at your age you’ve got to build your bones. Later on you can reduce if you want to, but now the bones need nourishment.”

Yochi shook her head and squeezed her mouth shut to keep from crying.

“One slice?” asked Mama. “With butter and a little matjes herring?”

Yochi shook her head furiously, then tucked it between her shoulders as though waiting for a blow. Ever so casually Mama opened the jar of matjes herring, swirled it around in the air, and forked out three fat pieces. Then she spread a slice of bread with a thick layer of creamy butter. Yochi turned her face to the wall. From his seat in the pantry Aron could see the yellow-red eruption on her cheeks and forehead; soon she’d get the curse again and everyone would start worrying, that’s what happened every month since the fateful day she flushed her curse down the toilet and there was a big eisseh-beisseh because in the middle of supper Mama raised her knife and pointed, and her face turned pale and she lost her voice, and when they looked around they saw a tiny lagoon spilling out of the bathroom, flowing through the hallway into the kitchen, and Papa ran to get the pliers from his tool chest in the pantry, and the water kept gushing out and Papa stuck his hand with the pliers all the way in to see what was clogging the toilet, which spewed up more and more muck and filth, and finally he fished out a glob of something that looked like a piece of meat, and he stood there gaping at it until Mama grabbed the pliers from him and waved the glob in front of Yochi’s nose. Well well, the princess has the curse, like a million other women, including her mother, and right on time, too, so just keep it to yourself, you don’t have to shout it from the rooftops, and then she waved the pliers in front of her, like a triumphant surgeon, screaming at the top of her lungs; maybe that’s when Yochi developed the whistling in her ears, and Yochi, nobody’s lemaleh, sat perfectlystill this time, red as blood, and after that she was always careful with the curse, and Aron too learned to be careful in the toilet, and Mama said, “Nu, Aron, are you going to stand there gaping all night, can’t you see the table’s set?”