“Ronit might have been very vocal against childbirth in the past,” Micha says, “but in her last interview, she didn’t mention the subject at all.”
“Maybe because her last interview was after Dina’s murder, and she was afraid to talk about it?” I propose, but then remember her hesitant reaction towards the young woman who approached our table at the café to pay her respects, Ronit’s sudden and uncharacteristic modesty, how she passed on the credit to Dina, and even gave me some, She was the one who gave Dina the idea… Maybe if I’d paid more attention to this oddity at the time, I could have prevented everything that came after. And everything yet to come.
“There could be another reason,” he says, and I can see on his face that he already regrets it.
“What?”
His gaze silently hovers just above my head, lingering on the painting. Still he says nothing, and my spinal nerves respond to his silence by coiling in unimaginable pain again. In an attempt to loosen my crimped muscles, I stand up, accidentally knocking over the bowl of cookies, which hits the floor with a bang. By some miracle, it doesn’t break, and Micha and I stand over it, watching it spin around itself like a dreidel. This is also the moment I realize there’s absolutely no way I can bend to pick it up.
Micha doesn’t bend either. Instead, he looks straight at me. “What is this, some kind of test?”
“What?”
“Why aren’t you picking it up?”
“Why aren’t you being a gentleman and picking it up for me?”
“You answer first.”
My mind strains to find a plausible answer other than the truth, but there doesn’t seem to be any. “My back hurts,” I finally reply, and witness a slight alteration in his expression.
“Oh, poor woman,” he says, “I know what that feels like, really, I do.” He bends over to pick up the bowl and the cookie shards, and I see how his back arches with elegant elasticity, opening out like a folding fan of healthy vertebrae. Healthy and young.
“Believe it or not, when I was young I had to wear a back brace to straighten my spine,” he says, still hunched over the floor. I try to imagine him trapped in a brace, but my mind can’t conjure up the image, certainly not when he’s bending in front of me, all flexible and springy.
“What was wrong with your back?”
“Bad genes.” He rises back up. “My grandmother had a hump.”
I flinch, imagining that hump ticking inside him like a time bomb waiting to explode, if not in the near future then maybe in one of his descendants. Blood never forgets.
“I see that every time I come over I end up working as your cleaner,” he says, straining a smile, and once again he seems like a vulnerable youth while I’m ensnared in my stiff, aching body. He takes a step closer and pauses. I can smell his aftershave, covering the subtle scent of young sweat.
“Where exactly does it hurt?” he asks, and I don’t dare move or even breathe, Is he going to touch you? Remember, it has to come from them, always from them! We’re standing at arm’s length from one another in complete silence. My lips are located directly opposite his neck, but I’m as still as a wax figurine. He isn’t moving either, and for a moment I wonder whether he’s holding back because of his job or because he’s just not interested, and this entire drama is taking place in my own head and nowhere else. I always seem to put myself in these elusive, ambiguous situations, but at the same time I always make sure there’s some secret escape route by which I can explain to myself that it isn’t rejection, It’s not you, of course not, it’s because he’s here in an official capacity, otherwise you’d both be rolling all over your couch, which isn’t white and for that reason can never get dirty.
He takes a step back and sits himself down in the armchair. When he pierces himself into the seat, his back as straight as a board, for a moment there he reminds me of Froggy.
“Let’s review the facts,” he says with a gravelly voice. “You had a big fight with Dina, immediately after which she was murdered. With Ronit you also had a…” He pauses for a moment, “disagreement.”
“I see you’re well informed.” I can barely get the words out, still trying to process this quick shift in his mood. Well, that’s how it always is with these infantile boys, don’t you know that by now?
“In your case it’s not so easy to keep up.” He smiles again, his eyes soften again, my heart leaps in my chest again, until I remember Ronit dragging Eli into her bedroom, Ronit with the red eyes, who, by Eli’s account, lay on her bed and cried her heart out. Ronit who was tied to her armchair, naked and branded with the mark of motherhood, Ronit whose flesh had already started to decay, the baby glued to her hands, Ronit who was drained of all her blood, drained!
“Say, how did they drain her?”
I can’t quite read his expression when he hears my question; it isn’t disgust, but it’s something in the vicinity. “You don’t know?” he asks.
“You know I don’t.”
After a moment’s hesitation, he says, “They slashed her thigh, severed the femoral artery.”
The beautiful Ronit, prancing on the grass, limbs intact… Ronit teaching me how to apply lipstick so it won’t get on your teeth… Ronit that night, her lipstick all smeared… the rage and panic erupting from her body like crushing waves… and
