Thank you, Ulrike, Nina says and strokes her round belly. Thank you, Shlomith says. Thank you so very much, liebe Ulrike, Polina says tenderly. Obrigado! Rosa Imaculada says. Merrrrrci! Maimuna says, gaily rolling her R. Wlibgis smiles sadly, nods her bald head, and strokes the red artificial fire, her very own poor hair, which at least is permanent unlike some teenage girl’s orgasm—and a feeling resembling stale jealousy wells up in Wlibgis’s mind. No one had ever granted her pleasure. If she had ever panted—and she had, she had given birth to a son an eternity ago—she had gasped with pain and fear, she had panted from the agony, the tearing, and the blows, and after the blows she continued panting. More of them were to come, and she gasped over and over again out of sheer disbelief. How many times does a person have to be hit before she believes that she’s really being hit? That it isn’t a bad dream? The same boy who had ripped her open as he pushed his way out had hit her later in so many ways and in so many tender places that she had lost count. Gradually she had given in and allowed herself to become a woman to whom much evil had been done, who would receive atonement only at the Final Judgement. Was that where she was going now?
Wlibgis’s fingers disappear into the wig. What did that little girl think she knew about life? Ha! But here she was too, beyond the reach of any aid. Gaunt, fleshless schadenfreude fills Wlibgis’s mind.
There is other undeniable evidence for the death theory. Shlomith is doing quite well even though she, like Wlibgis, should be as dead as a doornail. So it’s just beyond dispute! Polina was completely sure and she had said so directly during the stage when only six of them were there, when Ulrike had yet to appear, before they had burst out laughing during the pinch test and Nina hadn’t had the idea about the campfire wig.
It isn’t possible you’re alive, Shlomith, Polina had said. You aren’t morbidly thin; you’re something much worse.
Of course that caused a fight. For Shlomith, thinness wasn’t “something much worse”: it was part of an experiment, an extreme yet controlled test that she had come out of as the conqueror. She had survived, she remembered, and the memory was as sharp as a postcard, a postcard crammed full of words in a fit of emotion. The applause in the auditorium of the Jewish Museum had begun cautiously, probingly, as people had glanced at each other in shock: is it even appropriate to clap now, or should we gather our things and leave quietly as one does after a church service, eyes meekly cast down? But then someone burst out in furious applause and someone else, a man, shouted a choked “Bravo! Bravissimo!” and suddenly the entire packed hall began to tremble at the joints as dozens and dozens of hands came together, sucking up the surrounding oxygen. The air turned thick, too overpowering. Shlomith retreated and sat on a wooden stool. The stool had been placed behind her on the stage as a precaution in case she was unable to stand after all. But it was now, as she accepted her ovation, that she needed the chair. She sat on it in a half-unconscious state. A red cushion had been placed on the stool so her hollow hindquarters would not be damaged by the hard wood (she already had enough bruises). Sitting on the red cushion wearing only panties, she had gulped in the plaudits, the dense, oppressive air that few people ever get to enjoy, and then her mummy-like, parchment-dry body began to react. A cramp doubled her over, and the cry that struggled out of her folded her against her knees, forcing her flat, body part against body part, face against knees, sharp nose between sharp kneecaps. It was no final aria rising from the base of her diaphragm. It was shriveling, huddling, and it had to happen. She had to collapse for all to see, and she allowed herself to finally collapse. Her hardness, the edge (which some have and others don’t) that she had developed over decades, began to crumble. And the more Shlomith crumbled, the more the audience cheered, because everyone in the auditorium knew that Shlomith’s life mission was now complete. Shlomith had said it herself a moment earlier: “This is the last performance I will give. When I recover, I will organize my archives and donate them to a museum. Initial discussions have already taken place. After that I will begin to enjoy life. In a healthy way.” The ambulance stood ready in front of the museum. A place had been reserved for Shlomith in a private hospital where she could gather her strength in peace and regain her lost weight. No calls, no emails, no visitors. She would cease to be an attraction. She would learn to be a human first, then a woman, and finally perhaps even a mother again.
In that beautiful auditorium, in the building the rich Jewish widow Frieda Schiff Warburg had donated to the museum in the fateful year of 1944, Shlomith howled with her bone-hard nose between her bone-hard knees. For the first time in thirty years she shed great, hot tears that tasted the same as the tears in the Kibbutz Methuselah communal kitchen: salty, crushing, but still cautiously foreshadowing a new beginning. Shlomith crouched on the red cushion, amidst the ear-splitting storm of applause, as the waves of thirty years of sorrow and at least as great an amount of loneliness battered her, and not just her but also every
