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.Only we know the truth, but go tell him that now, they made him a national hero, like he threatened the police and all, afterward you couldn’t get a day of work out of him.But look, we weren’t bad kids.We left him a shekel for the cigarette, like at a kiosk” (according to the laws of physics, sound waves and all that, the voice couldn’t carry to Motti’s cell throughout this whole story, but in a book it carried well enough, Motti heard every word, the laws are different here, maybe the pages echo or something).Hours later, at night, Motti lay in his cell, listening to the faint noises or snores and moans and sleeping breaths, and was consumed with regret and flooded with fantasies and so forth, and was nevertheless happy.In his way, he was happy.34Edna has a yeast infection.If I wanted to, I could slice her life into strips of realism.But not because she’s a woman.Because she’s a character.She has a yeast infection, this is quite irritating.And on her right leg the veins form the map of a secret land.She loves her children, and even though their constant demands are sometimes more than she can handle, it turns out they aren’t more than she can handle.As evidence: she complies.Even if not always happily.Her brown hair splits at the ends if she doesn’t insist on cutting it regularly, therefore she insists on cutting it at least once a month.And once every two to three months she goes to Chaim’s salon, who implores her to dye it, and once every two to three months she refuses.Except for that time she assented, and afterward regretted it.Chaim offered to dye everything back, but Edna decided to live with the results.When she was younger and single she was happy to hunker down in the bathroom for a half hour to read a book or magazine.Now she doesn’t do this.Over the years her mother’s wrinkles have started to crease the sides of her mouth.At first she did silly exercises with her lips, ten or even twenty minutes each day, but it didn’t help.She gave up.She once suffered from an ingrown toenail on her right foot (Menachem, too, same thing), and when she brushes her teeth too hard her gums bleed.Her stomach, which was flat, has been curving out nicely since the second pregnancy, but this doesn’t bother her.She loves an omelet and bread with cream cheese and olives, like her dad would eat when he got home from work.And once, after their first child, she shaved her genitals entirely, to make them like a little girl’s, but Menachem didn’t care one way or the other, and so she let the hair grow back.It itched horribly.She was a very serious girl and now she’s only a somewhat serious woman.When she was a serious girl she had a cat named Fifi that got lost one day and never came back.Her parents bought her a hamster that ran restlessly in the hopeless wheel in its cage, and after two and a half weeks died from an intestinal virus.She buried him in the garden because she felt that this is what serious girls must do, but she didn’t cry.Her parents praised her, what a strong girl, and she hurried inside and locked herself up in her room, so they’d think she was secretly crying there.The truth is she read a book and gnawed on the nails of her left hand.She slept with four men before Menachem.Not all at once.(One of them was actually a teenager.She too was a teenager then.It didn’t hurt her.She didn’t love him.Or not in retrospect.At the time, when they broke up, she thought she would die.Now she laughs about it, if she thinks about it at all.But laughs with longing.Not for him.For the great drama of adolescence, when everything is so critical.Now it’s hard to take anything so seriously.) At the office she puts on a brave face.At home she’s a bit tired.Five or six years already she hasn’t slept more than five or six hours at night.If they would leave her alone she thinks she could sleep an entire day and wake up fresh as a flower.Actually she would wake up after six hours, maybe six and a half.If she were to survive a plane crash in isolated, ice-capped mountains, she wouldn’t be disgusted by cannibalism.One must survive, that much is clear.Should she not survive, she wouldn’t kick up a fuss if the others were to eat her flesh.What does she care? She would be dead already [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]