The sound of footsteps wakes her. She has no idea where she is, but she knows she shouldn’t move. Her senses sharpen. The smell is unfamiliar. Carefully, she opens one eye to a narrow slit and sees soft red slippers, a nightgown hanging above them, moving down the steps toward her. Soundlessly, she curls up in a corner and tries to remember how she ended up in this stairwell. Her flashy minidress is scratchy and she realizes she has no panties, so she presses her thighs together. She has no idea how many hours she’s been here. She tries to open her eyes, but the glare of the fluorescent light is blinding. She closes them again. She wants to sleep some more, a lot more, to rest her head on the step again. To be oblivious. But that won’t get her anywhere. And then she remembers: a place, that’s what she needs. A place to be for the time being.
* * *
He didn’t believe that was what she’d do. And he told her so. “You can’t be without me. You’ll come crawling back,” he said and laughed loudly with his friends, peeling away the last vestiges of her dignity. “But you promised me,” she pleaded, and he just sat there in the front seat, made the music louder and lit a cigarette while the men in the back seat with her touched her, stroked her. “I believed you,” she whispered through her exhaustion even though she knew he didn’t hear, and pleaded again, “Stop, please.” He lowered the volume of the raucous music and told her not to insult them. “They’re not nice enough for you? They didn’t act nice tonight?” he snickered, then turning serious, he rebuked her, “What is it with you?”
The too-much-aftershave guy who always devoured her with his eyes said to him, “Relax, Shmueli, it’s okay, I’ve had tougher bitches than her,” unzipped his fly, and pushed her head down while the other one pulled off her panties. She tried to resist. He tore them. They stopped at a light. She felt like she was going to vomit.
* * *
The light in the stairwell goes out. “Is someone here?” she hears the woman shuffling in the red slippers say in that old lady’s voice that has amassed many years and memories. The light will go on again in a minute so she takes advantage of the brief darkness to open her eyes and calculate the danger. She listens to the old lady dragging her feet to the light switch and tries to hold her breath. She needs more time to decide what to do, to understand where she is and where she’ll go from here. She won’t go back, no matter what. There’s no place to go back to anyway. Definitely not to him, and not back home either. She needs to think quickly about where she can go.
“Is someone here?” the old lady asks again after she switches on the light, dazzling Nina, forcing her to cover her eyes, blinded to everything but the tattered red slippers of the sleepless old lady, and if only she’d go back to her apartment already, back to bed. She feels around for her evening bag or her phone and realizes that she didn’t take anything when she ran away. Stupid idiot, she says to herself. As her eyes begin to adjust to the light, she takes a deep breath and tenses her body. She’ll dash out to the street. And from there, it doesn’t matter where. Just as long as that annoying old lady disappears and lets her wake up and think and decide what to do. But what annoys her most is that her mom was right. “Shit,” she curses.
The light goes out again.
The first rays of sun shatter on the glass door of the building, bathing the silhouette of the old lady in yellow. Now it’s clear that the old lady sees her.
She’s trying to think of something to say when the old lady calls out to her happily, “Dana! What are you doing here?! My mamushka!”
Though Nina evades the sunbeams, she realizes that that’s it, she’s really screwed, now it’s not just the old lady but also some Dana who’ll turn up in another minute. She looks around, trying to figure out where this Dana is supposed to be coming from before the old lady sees she’s not anyone’s Dana and calls the police and she gets even more screwed. She has to get away from here.
But before she can figure out what’s going on and do something, the old lady comes over and throws her arms around her. “Dana,” she says joyfully, and then moves Nina’s face away to examine it close up.
“Dana. My Dana,” she says. “You’re here. You came back to me.”
Nina lowers her head, trying to hide her face with her disheveled hair. Just don’t let this old lady turn on the light again, she wishes silently, her head is exploding.
* * *
“It’ll be the end of you,” Shmueli shouted at her back as she ran away. “You think you’ll manage here without me? And who will you call, eh? Who’ll help you? Just wait, you’ll beg me.” And that was it, she didn’t hear any more. She doesn’t know what hurts her more now, her heart or her cheekbone where he slapped her when she said she didn’t want to sit in the back with them and he told her she didn’t understand how much that disrespected his friends. She’d already seen many slaps in her life, in movies and also in reality. Some of her girlfriends got slapped more than once by their parents. She just never imagined it hurt so much. Soon, when she looks in the mirror, she’ll see the black-and-blue mark on her forehead as well and won’t even remember how she got it, whether someone else hit her or maybe she banged her head on the door trying to get away from them. She curses the day they met. The day she thought was the luckiest day in her life, until now.
She always knew she was beautiful. It was something she grew up with. The way some kids have a blanket or a ball or a dad. Like all girls, when she got to be a teenager, she began to see her flaws and thought all the other girls were more than her. More beautiful or more clever, or their hair was always perfect or their breasts were bigger than her very small ones, but with time, she couldn’t help but feel what happened to people when they looked at her. The older women, the ones who had always hugged her and pinched her cheek when she was a child, or handed her a piece of candy and spit three times against the evil eye, tfu tfu tfu—they stopped touching
her, didn’t go near her anymore. The warmth in their gazes and the smiles on their faces disappeared too. And the more distant they grew, those older women, the closer the girls in her class came, trying to understand, to touch, to feel it close up, to learn how to acquire a bit of that breathtaking thing for themselves. Then the boys came closer, as if she were a bowl of honey, and then the older guys began to buzz around her, at first with puffed-out chests, then with motorcycles, and then the men who got out of cars some kid had polished for a few pennies began to look at her, trying to steal her attention. Some of them attempted to trap her in their shiny, humming webs, to tie her up with their ropes and, for a moment, hold on to the feeling that they could possess that rare thing, and she saw the sweat of their efforts on them.
There were also the men who only looked at her but didn’t try to possess her or get close to her, knowing they didn’t stand a chance. The same way she looked at the expensive brand names displayed in the shop windows at the mall. They looked at her with the knowledge that she would never be theirs. It wouldn’t happen to them. The kind of man who had already suffered enough blows in life and knew his place, who walked behind his wife in the shopping center, sometimes holding her small handbag on his arm. The kind of man who, looking at her, recalled his youth with a sense of having missed out, mostly because of some girl to whom he hadn’t dared tell his feelings a long time ago. They were the men who had the look in their eyes that saw what she tried so hard to hide, the child in her, a look that peeled away the thorns and exposed the vulnerability. The male look that always prompted her mother to use the expression Nina hated so much, “He’s a good man.” Who needs a good man, she would say, laughing at her silently, sometimes out loud, as they sat at the greenish Formica table in the narrow kitchenette that could hold only the two of them, and even that was a tight squeeze. And her mother would say, “I do.”
A good man isn’t so important, Mom, you don’t understand anything, she told her. What you need is a strong man. A man with power. She didn’t tell her how much she dreamed about that man who would come to take her away from here, who would start his car and whisk her away to another place. No, he wouldn’t be a good man, she knew. She had no illusions about that. But she was smart, she already knew something about this world, and she thought she’d use him no less than he would use her. Use him to fly far away from here. And look, he came. She only had to touch him sometimes, and that was okay. Shmueli, whose friends called him Johnny, was so excited that it was over quickly. And she was excited by the intense feeling that she had power over him. How addicted he was to her hands. To her touch. He followed her to school. He would pick her up in the morning to take her there just to have those five minutes with her. He would leave Ofra in front of the TV in the evening and drive over for a quick visit, just come down to the car for a minute,
he’d say. At first he didn’t need a lot. Just her hand, sometimes her mouth a little. Then he began to touch her under her clothes and it took him longer. That’s why he wanted to have her for a whole night.
Her mother sat across from her, rubbing the table with the rough tips of her fingers, cleaning away more and more invisible crumbs. Then she reached up to her head, took out the clips, and let her beautiful, full head of hair land gently on her shoulders. And for the first time, Nina saw how much gray streaked her hair and how much the original wheat color had faded.
It needed to be washed. They both knew.
“It’s not a good idea,” Irina told her in despair, trying to stop a train that had left the station a long time ago.
When Irina was Nina’s age, she too thought she knew better. Better than anyone. In the end, she turned out to be an idiot. Now she’s here, alone with her daughter who thinks she knows better and doesn’t understand that she doesn’t. She only just turned eighteen, and she’s smart, it’s not that she isn’t, but not as smart as she thinks, and for a while now, from afar, you could see the word trouble engraved on her. A large warning sign written on her beauty. Because Nina was much more beautiful than she had been at her age, when she was an idiot.
She’d been a good-looking idiot. Her Nina was more beautiful than her. Too beautiful.
Nina had fought it for years. As a child, she tried so hard to keep people from seeing only that, tried to hide it, to cover her face with her hair. “Let me see you,” Shmueli said, holding her face after he’d pushed away her hair, coming a bit too close. A lot too close. “You promised you wouldn’t touch,” she said.
“Right,” he replied, “and I always keep my promises, so I won’t touch, but maybe you will,” and he pulled her hand toward his groin. “Only if you want to,” he said with a laugh. “You don’t have to.” But in the end, she had to. Not that day, but two days later, when it was almost dawn and she was so tired and she knew she had an exam that morning and was eager to go home and take a shower. She touched his pants there and he pressed her hand down with his own, really, really hard, and she heard his breathing in her ear, and the panting, and the groaning, and she didn’t want to see his face contorting. He told her that now he was dirty because of her. That he had a better idea for the next time. One that would leave him clean.
* * *
“You don’t understand, you just don’t understand,” her mother said angrily during that conversation, after Shoshi at the day-care center told her the name of the person she was running around with.
“You’re a child. What business do you have with that man?”
“He loves me.”
“Loves you? Wants you maybe, not loves you.”
“He loves me.”
“Do you love him?
“He loves me.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Yes. I do.”
“You don’t. And he doesn’t love you either. You’re nothing to him. He’s just using you. He’ll toss you away, like an old rag he’ll toss you away. What do you need that for? You know what kind of reputation you’ll have?”
“You don’t understand,” Nina shouted, clutching her mother’s wrists, forcing her to look at her wrinkled hands with their short nails she’d painted with gel polish for the bar mitzvah their neighbor Michal had made for her son, which now was chipped and peeling. “I won’t be like you,” she said, “I won’t destroy my life, my body, my hands, for just enough money to pay the bills in this shithole. Forget it. I won’t be like you. I’m leaving this place.”
“Don’t talk to me like that,” Irina raised her voice, her anger causing all the letters to explode in that accent she couldn’t shed, that hadn’t softened with the years. Then she switched to Russian, Yob tvoyu mat syka blyat’, she hissed the string of curses, and Nina stopped talking. She wanted to shout, but realized that she’d already gone too far. I’ll show her, she said to herself, I’ll show her yet.
There was a long silence, and Irina got up and walked out of the room, as tall and proud as usual, only her shoulders showing how tired she was. She’d been bearing this burden alone for eighteen years and this was the first time she’d ever felt that she had no more strength. That she wanted someone to take care of her for once. She remembered that birthday of hers, when Nina was five, and how she’d come home from work to a house full of hearts, candles, flowers, things that Nina had collected and cut and arranged for her, how they’d sat together, she and Babushka and Ninotchka, and how she’d blown out the candles with one breath.
“What did you wish for?” Nina had asked.
“You’re not supposed to tell because then it won’t come true,” she’d replied even though she wanted so much to share the joy with her. To tell her that there, in that small kitchen, was everything she wanted. There they were, finally together, the three of them together, and they didn’t need anyone else. Later on, Babushka wasn’t with them anymore, and how hard it was without her, how much Nina tried to make up for that absence. But as the years slowly passed, they were okay, and she didn’t need anything more. The two of them was fine. It was good. And although she knew that in no time at all, Nina would be grown up, she didn’t think it would happen so fast, and not like that. A month earlier, she’d put some money into a small savings plan for students so that her little Nina, her beautiful Nina, would have what she’d never had. She didn’t want anything for herself, only for her little one to soar as high as she could. But not at this cost, not with a man
who would take her and harm her.
* * *
Irina goes into the bathroom and washes her face, looks at herself, remembers how she, like Nina, thought she was so smart, and how she too thought she’d twist them, the men, around her little finger, and she really did. Especially Nina’s father. He loved her so much, but it burned out quickly, so quickly, when she had a belly and wasn’t as happy or beautiful anymore. In the end she found herself somewhere in the middle of a blazing desert, on the second floor, alone with a baby girl. Without a language, without a profession, with a sackful of promises that he took with him to his next woman. And to this day, she’s paying the price for it with her loneliness. Because one day, the beauty betrays you, fades, slowly falls away, and men no longer look at you, and women’s glances no longer linger for that extra second that caresses your body and your face. A battle lost from the outset, its end foretold. Sometimes there’s one galloping horse that might slow down during one of its turns around the track, and for a moment, you’ll feel as if you’ve won, and you’ll believe it’ll stop, but no. And the beauty continues to tire, to erode, in the end collapsing under the weight of the years. And with beautiful women—the years pile on the weight with greater cruelty.
* * *
For the first time, she’s working in one place, not running from house to house to accumulate more and more hours, battling her body’s exhaustion in the face of the need, the necessity. It’ll soon be a year since she started there. And she actually likes it. Finally she’s not alone, but with other people, women. How scared she’d been to work with women and be part of a group, because as a young girl, she didn’t get along with the other girls, with the gossip, with their closed circles and the jealousy and the internal wars, but now there was no longer a reason to be jealous of her, she thought sadly. Over the years, she got used to working alone as a cleaner, going from a four-hour job to a five-hour job, and most of the time, there wasn’t even anyone there to see her. Her body hurt, but she loved being alone, being the one to decide with no one there to mix in. But now she’s discovered how nice it actually is that they see her, that they see what she does, how much she invests in her job, how hard she works. And no matter how hard she works, it’s not as hard as shaking out heavy living room rugs and moving the beds because the women of the house always check behind them. From the first minute on her new job, she made the decision to get along with everyone, to keep out of the assistants’ quarrels and the tension between the staff and the management. She didn’t care. She was in charge of the cooking and cleaning. She’s still surprised at how much she now enjoys the things that once put her off, responsibility and teamwork. She
has a job with vacation days and holidays and things she never thought she’d have, like a pay slip and sick days and pension payments, and she’s not sacrificing her health for more income. Now she wants to become a permanent employee. When that happens, she’ll have peace of mind. Slowly she’s taken on more responsibility, expanding her duties, and it seems as if no one in the day-care center remembers how it was without her. “You put the Lego in the dishwasher?” Shoshi the manager asked in surprise, and Irina said, “When all the pieces are smeared with ketchup and macaroni—then yes,” and Shoshi laughed and said that made sense and she never would have thought of it. And she loves being with the children. They’re happy around her, happy to see her, and their presence brings out a softness in her that she never knew she possessed. She feels confident around them, doesn’t need to worry about what they’ll think or say, doesn’t have to defend herself against those little ones who haven’t been ruined yet, soft and sweet as cactus fruit that still haven’t grown thorns. And she basks in their love. The love of the little boy who runs to her in tears, of the little girl who asks her to put her hair in a ponytail. And how adorable they were yesterday when they checked every inch of the day-care center for leavened food, chametz, before Passover, using the traditional feathers and candles in their search. “Helping Irina making the center kosher for Passover,” they called it.
* * *
She’s sitting at the stop, waiting for the bus to come. Tomorrow’s the Seder night and she’s on her way home from Haviva’s. “Please come help me before the holiday,” Haviva asked. “How can I prepare the Seder without you?” Irina has helped her with the Seder for so many years, and every year Haviva tried to persuade her to stay until after the main course, but Irina wouldn’t do it. It didn’t matter how much money she offered her. She told her she’d be happy to come the next morning. And she did go a few times, but after Haviva’s sons got married, the daughters-in-law helped her. “I really lucked out with them,” Haviva told her.
“Stay to help me tomorrow night and I’ll pay you.” Haviva tried this year too, maybe because it had already become a tradition between them. But Irina knew in advance that she’d want to come home to her Nina, to be with her. And now that the day has arrived, Nina isn’t here. Who would have believed two weeks ago that something like this would happen?
Now, of all times, when she can finally give them the life they wanted, Nina’s not here. She’ll come back in another few days for sure, she reassures herself. There’ll be a lot of tears and it’ll hurt, but they’ll get past it. If only the manager makes her job permanent like she promised. And maybe, she dares to hope as she looks down the street, maybe Nina is home now. It’s been ten days already, enough. Maybe she’s come back and is waiting for her. And suddenly, she feels too impatient to wait for the bus.
Since she met him, Nina has been speaking to her in a way she never dared to before. It never used to be like that between them. She herself never had the nerve to speak to Babushka that way. Chutzpah was never an option. “No culture,” she used to mutter and tighten her grip on little Nina’s hand whenever she saw a girl on the street or in the supermarket yelling at her mother, “No culture.” She also checked the community center ads and if something interesting was coming, she was the first to buy them tickets, even if that woman in the community center gave them a puzzled look, why bring a little girl to a play for adults. Irina couldn’t care less about that, and she would save up more and more money for it, for culture. Twice they traveled to the big city of Beersheba to hear a concert and once to see a performance of the Israeli Russian Theater, Gesher, which they had to leave before the end so they wouldn’t miss the last bus. They sat in the last row, the cheapest seats, but that didn’t bother her, and at the second concert, Irina spoke to the usher, and during intermission, the woman called them over and moved them to the fourth row. “The fourth row is the best,” the usher said with a heavy Russian accent, adding angrily, “Who doesn’t come when they have fourth-row seats? No culture there.” Irina has never forgotten that. Now, thanks to her new job, she’s ordered tickets to the performance of a symphony orchestra conducted by some Israeli everyone loves, two really good seats in the third row on the side. Because she has a new job now. And because she deserves it. But Nina isn’t here. And she’s angry. Angry about the lack of culture, about her Nina talking in the ugly, disrespectful way those sabras talk. It’s a good thing Babushka isn’t alive to hear it. To see it. Her weak heart would have broken. That heart was already cracked from years of cold weather and small apartments, and all she wanted in the last years of her life was the sun. I don’t want a hospital, she said, please, just the sea. The sea. And more than anything, she wanted an orange.
Something else enters, unannounced, into her sadness and anger. It comes like a punch to the chest. Maybe something is wrong with Nina. That’s something she hasn’t thought about until now, that maybe something bad is happening to her. She should have stopped her from going, she definitely shouldn’t have carried on about decency and education. What does decency matter now if her Nina is in danger? And that train is racing through her heart now.
The bus arrives and she replays that day in her mind, how she sat and listened to Nina skip down the steps in her high heels, down the two floors that Irina had climbed wearily so many times. And all she did was go to the window and peer through the shutters to see her daughter get into the car, and that man didn’t even get out to open the door for her. Don’t you see? she wanted to scream at her, don’t you see it’s not love? And when she
finally did shout those words, it was too late. And she’ll never know whether it would have helped if she had shouted them long before then.
* * *
“Dana’le,” the old lady says, takes Nina’s hand, places it on her heart, and begins pulling her along to the stairs. Nina finds the unfamiliar touch strange and unpleasant and she wants to jerk her hand away. Get away from here, she says to herself, get away, but that night with all the running, the drinking, the fear, the way that asshole yelled at her, everything that happened there and what she saw has destroyed all her strength. And she doesn’t have shoes either. She won’t be able to walk far barefoot, definitely not in that short cocktail dress with the plunging neckline.
“Put on some nice clothes, some makeup,” he told her before they left, explaining that this is how it is in the big city and she should get used to it.
She hadn’t been out of the apartment for a few days, she just sat there in front of the TV. Punishment. He even took her phone away after his friend groped her and she fought him off. She tried to tell him that he hurt her, but that didn’t interest Shmueli, nothing about her interested him anymore. “Be a good girl for a week and you’ll get it back,” he said. “And don’t insult my friends anymore.”
He used to show up at the apartment with his friends, unannounced. Suddenly they would all breeze in, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the evening, to watch soccer, to play cards. “Enough with the rags,” he said one day, tossing a short dress at her, and since then, whenever he came in, he would ask, Why aren’t you wearing the dress I brought you? So every night she washed and dried it, and except for that, never took it off. She ate and cleaned and waited in it, never knowing when they would arrive, and in that dress she made them coffee and put the snacks he bought on plates, and she could barely bend over, that’s how short it was. “So they’ll get a little peek, babe, what’s the big deal?” he said, and they laughed. Then he sat her on his lap and she felt his excitement and he closed his eyes and everyone watched and he panted, and she wanted to die of shame, and he took her into the bedroom and she heard them laughing. Later, he just left her there, then yelled at her to come out because they wanted coffee, and when they all got up to leave, he said, “You’re starting to act nice, this is how I love you,” and she replied that she didn’t feel like he loved her anymore, and he asked in a whisper, “Why, baby?” and she said, I just don’t. Then he took her into the bedroom and shouted for his friends to get going, he’d be there in a minute. He closed the door, hugged her, and said, “How can you say that? I never loved anyone like I love you.”
She told him that she was closed up in the apartment all the time.
“You want to come with us?” he asked.
Yes, she said.
And to this day, she regrets it. That was her biggest mistake. Going out that evening.
“Put on a little more makeup,” he told her, and she didn’t argue. “And don’t act stupid,” he whispered, “or else you won’t go out again for a long time.”
* * *
Thank God, the old lady doesn’t switch on the glaring light in the stairwell again, and only the glowing rays of the morning sun spill inside and are caught in the thick, tangled gray hair. “Dana, why didn’t they tell me you were coming?” she says in a soft, pleasant voice. “I’ve been waiting so long for you.”
Nina knows she should say something. It would be better just to take off, but the tiredness prevails and she simply stands there, knowing that now she’ll certainly ask her why she’s barefoot, and what will she tell her? But the old lady doesn’t ask anything, just strokes Nina’s hands with her scrawny fingers and keeps mumbling how good it is that Dana has come, here she is, Dana is here. The old lady starts climbing the steps and Nina follows. Slowly, as slowly as possible. On the first floor, the old lady walks from door to door, peers around, looking for something familiar. Then another floor, and Nina has the feeling that this search will never end, but look, there’s an open door. Second floor, apartment number five. Ben Zion. Remember, Nina says to herself. Memorize.
“Are you tired?” the sweet old lady asks with a smile, ignoring the fact that she’s barefoot and wearing a short, torn, glittery mini.
“Very,” she says, as they walk through the small, messy apartment, the sour smell of mildew and neglect hovering in the air, crying out for someone to open a window. “Here’s your room, waiting for you, sweetheart,” the old lady says, opening the door of the bathroom with a flourish, then laughing, and opening the second door. A soft light floods the room, which is completely pink. Like in a little girl’s dream, a little angel’s room with dolls and curtains imprinted with tiny fairies and even wallpaper with glittering stars. ...
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