David Grossman - The Book of Intimate Grammar

But suddenly she sighs and he scurries away. He stands in the hall for a minute. Peeps in again. The orange boiler light throws eerie shadows. Papa’s mouth droops open. Snoring like a saw. The driveling red mouth, how it twists when there’s shaving cream around it, like a little animal bleeding in the snow, bait in the trap for other animals. Look at his fillings. Aron doesn’t have a single filling. Aron is pure. He draws nearer. A vague terror of death seizes him as he watches their sleeping bodies. Maybe he’d better scream. To wake them up. But Papa would break his bones for that. Look at his mouth. It never stops moving. Curiously supple. Squirming as though he were talking to Aron. Come here, son, come to Papa, get in quick and let’s be done with it, it’ll only hurt for a minute and then … Aron shudders: if not for the smell inthere he really might have let himself be swallowed up. He steps back. From the foot of the bed their faces are even stranger-looking. Their wrinkles, the mole under Mama’s chin, Papa’s cheek squashed flat on the pillow, his cheekbones standing out from the flesh. Aron leans cautiously over him and sniffs: after his bath Papa’s feet always have that special smell. That sweet, clean smell. Aron to Aron: Now! Hurry! Over. He brings his nose closer and inhales. A good warm smell. Exactly what he was looking for without knowing it! This must be why he woke up and came in here. And now Papa is shifting his position just for him. He lies on his back with his feet spread apart, and they’re long and rounded at the toes like loaves of bread. Aron smells them timidly. Breathes in. The toes are fresh like little rolls. He remembers this smell from when he was little. That is — young. But the Cyclopean eye is slumbering. He sniffs them hungrily. Falls to his knees at the foot of their bed. And a cold wind, black and cutting, blows over the forsaken steppes. And a spent, despondent child creeps over the steppes, and the evil eye, the spiteful eye, rolls slowly under its fatty lid, beware! Papa groans in his sleep. The blanket drops away. The scar is revealed, like a pale hiatus, a silky gap in Papa’s brawn, but maybe at night it opens up, unravels: Come here, child, and a tiny child kneels fearfully, delving into the dust to pull out the bloodlike threads of embroidery, the tatters of slumbering flesh, and he runs along the cracks of the canals, over the palpitating mounds. And a diamond light beacons slowly in his hands, and the Cyclopean eye stirs. An extinguished volcano cracks open. A sardonic smile perhaps. And the child jumps into the anonymous paper boat, quickly, through the veins and the arteries, Aron to Aron, causing the heart to beat faster for you, over; and the heart pounds and the boat with the child inside it and the memories, like the smell of Papa’s feet, sails from room to room, and the heart is pumping, and beating and throbbing, he could have a heart attack like this, and his quick, soft breathing caresses Papa’s feet; now his feet smell a little sharper, a little clearer. A childhood smell. And maybe the true invisible Papa begins at the legs and grows downward from there. Maybe the person growing upward is a different man who is only a friend sometimes, but most of the time an enemy; a man who never looks at Aron anymore. Who has given up on him. Breathlessly he reaches the secret place, the new brain he has endowed himself with below, and he falls over its threshold, stretches out his hand, and delivers this smell. Nowgo back up and bring the rest. Hurry. Time is running out, the straits are closing, they’re strangling us; run, run, bring more and more in and let us breathe, it’s life or death in here. Wait. Have to rest.

And with all his might Aron clings to the smell. If only he could recreate everything out of this good-old-smell. Papa sighs and rolls over voluptuously, like a giant cat, and Aron sniffs and sniffs the naked feet, and in the middle of the blanket a strange little mound begins to grow, and Aron draws into himself and savors the smell of Papa, the smell of Papa’s roots. But suddenly it’s over, run for your life. Like a raging red moon, Papa’s head rose over his feet.

And at the end of the month, after nearly two weeks away at work camp, Gideon returned; Aron knew he was coming home; the night before as he was getting ready for bed, he had this feeling, this hunch, and he took a long bath and washed his hair and tried to comb his eyebrows so they’d connect over the bridge of his nose, and he looked into his eyes in the mirror and silently asked himself the one important question: was Gideon still loyal to him, because the outer Yaeli was fading fast, and Aron acknowledged without too much pain that he no longer cared whether she was loyal or not, it was Gideon who counted; if Gideon had waited for him, that was all that mattered.

He slept deeply and peacefully for the first time in weeks, and when he woke up the next morning he put on clean clothes and left for school, but he took the back path, and between the buildings he caught sight of Gideon, looking very tan, his walk more vigorous, more arrogant than ever, but what did that mean; in itself, nothing.

At Memorial Park Gideon was joined by Meirky Blutreich and Hanan Schweiky and Avi Sasson, who marched alongside him, listening intently as he talked and waved his hands around, and Aron scratched his forehead on a branch; even from this distance he could see Gideon was lecturing about the war, that’s all anyone cares about these days, why doesn’t it just start already so they can get it over with, and it wasn’t hard to guess what he was saying, that we have to smear those Arabs once and for all, he knew Gideon, he knew he would go out andvolunteer today to join the Red Magen David Society, or to fill sandbags, but more important, Gideon hadn’t actually changed that much in all the time he was away, except for the shadow of a mustache over his lip which did appear a little darker and thicker from here, and his eyebrows had just about connected, though not completely yet; maybe he was still taking the pills every day. Aron winced with guilt.

He followed him up to the school gate, unsure whether to go over and show his face and talk to him as if nothing had happened, so what had, and if God forbid it had, Aron wasn’t the one who ought to feel guilty, and there would be one definite answer to a million questions, and there would no longer be any need to ask or to hope, but he didn’t go over to him or show his face, he slinked behind from tree to tree, from post to post, discerning a change in Gideon, after all; he did look sturdier or something, more sure of himself, conceited even, it was hard to say what. At the school gate Gideon turned around, and for a moment there was a troubled look in his eyes, as though he was searching for something, yes, as though he was missing someone, and Aron gasped as a quivering heartstring snapped with pain, he nearly burst out of his hiding place to show Gideon that if he did wait for him, Aron would be there, only at the very last second a viperlike message hissed through his mind, maybe it wasn’t Aron he was waiting for, and he froze and waited for Gideon to disappear into the school, and then, shrinking off, he grabbed a handful of friendship-sugar cubes from his back pocket, popping one after another into his mouth, to hell with his teeth. On his way home he stopped to pick the three leaves on the right from the bottom of the big ficus tree by the path to Gideon’s entrance; I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry, poor things, here they thought it was an ordinary day, they were happy and green in the sunshine, and without any explanation someone came and plucked them. Why? Because, that’s why. And then he went home, to bed, and worked on his laugh glands for a while, just for the record, so they would say he always tried to be cheerful, and then he put a little nylon bag over each of his middle fingers to compare the sweat, for no particular reason, what was the point, he was only running around in circles, breaking himself down, because he needed something new, fresh fuel to burn inside, but he didn’t have strength anymore, he couldn’t go on, and he wondered if Gideon had come home yet and seen it. And at four in the afternoon, not one second earlier, he went down to their rock in the valley andwalked around and around it until seven o’clock, but Gideon never showed up, maybe he took the back way home and didn’t see the leaves missing on the ficus tree; well, that was the first try.