And once again his green gaze locks behind the thicket of eyelashes, casting about the apartment and lingering on the couch. He’s searching for my doll, I know, but he won’t find it, and the rest of the boxes are carefully sealed.
“I honestly don’t know,” he finally says. I guess that’ll have to do for now.
When I bring him coffee, he’s already sitting leisurely on the couch, one leg folded underneath his youthful body, full of bendable joints. I hand him the mug, and our fingers brush against each other.
“Did you add anything to this?”
“Other than sugar?” I consider him.
“You know what I mean.”
Oh, yes, I definitely do. I felt it the moment he stepped into my house, the way he studied me, that something was certainly there. I never get these things wrong. I have no doubt the blame lies with Ronit, who opened her big painted mouth. “You tell me,” I say. I just can’t help myself, but he refuses to play along.
“Ronit said Dina was scared of you, afraid you cursed her or something.”
Good.
“Then you can tell her from me to stop talking nonsense.”
“She talked about it very seriously. Said that in college they called you the witch.”
“Baloney,” I reply, but suddenly, in what must have been the devil’s work (or a witch’s), the familiar song arises from the street, “Little witch, little witch fell down a ditch!” The small voices sound more menacing than usual, and despite my overwhelming urge to slam the window shut, I obviously won’t do that in front of the suspicious green gaze.
“Are they singing about you?” he asks, feigning amusement, but it only makes him sound more serious.
“Of course not! What are you, crazy?”
“If that was your reputation in college, maybe you carried it into adulthood.”
“Now you listen to me, it was a private joke between me and my friends, nothing serious, I just had… good instincts, intuition, that’s all. Like how I knew the moment I saw you that you used to be religious.”
“You don’t need intuition for that, most religious people would have caught on to it within seconds.”
“Or how I knew you were into more mature women.”
He considers me carefully. “You don’t have to be some gifted psychic for that either.”
True, certainly not with all those looks and innuendoes of yours, which at present seem to have faded without leaving a trace. But I’m not worried: cute ex-Orthodox boys like you are invariably capricious, playing hot and cold with you, expecting you to be the supportive adult, until it blows up in both your faces, because you yourself happen to prefer being the little girl.
He picks up his mug, now cold. His eyes narrow as he studies the inscription, “To the Best Mum in the World.”
And now he’s tinkering with his teaspoon, eyeing it intensely, as if it will reveal to him everything he wants to know. I can’t help but notice he hasn’t taken even a tiny sip, just keeps on stirring.
“Have there even been any Jewish witches?” He’s still stirring the coffee with those slow circular motions, like a witch over a bubbling cauldron.
“There were a few,” I say, “but I promise you, I’m not one of them.”
“Hypothetically,” he says, stirring even slower now, “strictly hypothetically, what would you have slipped into my drink?”
I know I’m supposed to say now something like “a love potion,” and I know that if I say it in a seductive, soft enough tone, I’d clear the air between us and maybe even more than that. But that slow stirring, the fact that he’s barely looking at me, not to mention everything that happened with Ronit, who apparently stayed in touch with Dina after everything, everything!, that had gone down, all these result in me blurting out the word “poison,” promptly followed by, “I’d slip poison in your drink.”
He finally stops stirring, looks up at me and without blinking, draws the mug to his mouth and takes a big gulp. I stare at his Adam’s apple. Yes, that was indeed a big, smooth swallow. Good boy.
“You know, we used to sing a different song when we were kids,” he says. “Instead of ‘Little Witch’, we sang ‘Old Spinster’. It went something like, Fat old spinster, chin full of whiskers.” He smiles at me while taking another sip of coffee, making me regret not lacing it with a deadly dose of poison.
7
MY FIRST ENCOUNTER with Dina oddly resembled our last.
Both took place in bright spaces, both involved women from the Bible and both certainly included a few “core essences imprinted in our DNA.”
The first one took place during a Bible course in our freshman year at college. I vividly remember how I scrambled between the confusing auditoriums of Bar-Ilan University, lost, refusing to seek the assistance of the seniors who were stationed in the hallways for precisely that purpose. Don’t you dare show weakness.
Eventually, I managed to find the right classroom, walking in beside the man who turned out to be our lecturer, a scrawny grey figure (grey from the hair on his head to his washed-out shirt and trousers). Passing him, I slightly brushed against him. He flinched, letting out a disapproving snort. Thinking back on it now, it might have been a snort of disgust, but to be sure, I would have had to see his expression.
Naama was already waiting for me in the back row, a few seats from Dina. I remember the bubblegum Dina was chewing with slow deliberation (cinnamon!), and the frighteningly intense way she stared at the lecturer.
Every time he used the expression “our sages of blessed memory,” which he did quite often, she rolled her eyes (those dark, bulging eyes, cow eyes, but the smartest cow in the herd). The grey blob began with a quick overview of the biblical female characters he would be focusing on during the semester, and
