Apples from the Desert. Savyon Liebrecht
In Three Days and a Child. New York: Doubleday, 1970.
Yizhar, S. “The Prisoner” and “Hirbet Hiz’ee.” In Modern Hebrew Literature, edited by Robert Alter. New York: Behrman House, 1975.
Yudkin, Leon. A Home Within: Varieties of Jewish Expressions in Modern Fiction. Northwood, Middlesex: Spence Reviews, 1996.
Translated from the Hebrew by Marganit Weinberger-Rotman
THAT SUMMER SHE sat on the patio under the rounded awning of the Italian swing, as the straw fringes intertwined with the edges of the cloth dome rustled softly, sounding like forest noises, her eyes on the red glow flowing from the western horizon at sunset, her baby already standing on his own two widespread legs, his chubby fingers grasping the bars of the square playpen made of interlocked wooden bars. The lilylike hibiscus waved its circlet of toothed leaves bound in an envelope of buds, only their heads peeping out of long, laden calyxes, pouting like the lips of a coquettish girl, the abundant tranquillity all about deluding only the part of her already dormant, not the part that was driven, tensed toward something beyond the apparent silence, knowing the restlessness of someone under eyes constantly prying but always unseen.
That early winter—the mud, the puddles of cement, and the rusty fragments of iron—already seemed distant and impossible, with the three Arab men giving off the stench of wood smoke and unwashed flesh. The men with their bad teeth, with high-heeled shoes that were once fashionable, now looking oversized, with the leather crushed under the heels.
In her dreams they still visited her sometimes, coming too close to her, which, perhaps, where they live too, could be interpreted as what they might have meant to hint, though perhaps it was done inadvertently. For a long time she wondered about it: did Ahmad draw close to her unintentionally, touching her legs with his rear as he dragged a sack of cement, with his back to her? And later, was it by chance that his elbow touched her breast when he passed by her, balancing a bag of lime on his shoulder, while she raised her arms to the lintel of the door to check the concrete rim as it dried? And did Hassan really believe that she would invite him in on that black night when he came back for his coat?
That summer, for a long time after they went off without ever reappearing, she avoided the roof when it was dark, fearing that they might pop up from behind the high potted plants. Sometimes, when she happened to pass the back corner, which was imprisoned within three walls and served, for the moment, as a storage area, and she saw the tools they had left behind and never came back to collect, a chill would climb up her back like a crawling creature with many legs, stirring a column of water in the depths of her belly like the pitching that afflicts you when you’re seasick.
But there was no one else to accuse. She had brought the whole thing down on her own head. And if her baby wasn’t slaughtered, and her jewels weren’t stolen, and nothing bad happened to her—she should bless her good fortune and erase those two winter months from her memory as if they had never been.
Yoel, her husband, had been opposed to the idea from the moment she had brought it up, still just an idle notion in her mouth and still lacking that fervor, that stubbornness, and that unyielding feeling of necessity that were later to possess her.
“A room on the roof?” He twisted his face and took off his glasses as he did when he was angry. “Do you know how filthy construction is? Do you have a notion how many tons of soil and rocks will fall on your head when they break through the ceiling for the stairs? And I don’t see why we need another room. There are already two unused rooms in the house. And if you want sunlight—you have half a dunam of private lawn.” Against her rebelliously pursed lips, which for a long time, until his initial patience broke down, were to convey a defiant silence, he added, “What gave you this sudden notion of building? What do you need that for, with a four-month-old baby?”
“So why did we take the trouble to run to the engineer and the municipality to get a building license?” she countered his argument. “And didn’t we pay all the fees and the property improvement tax and all that?”
“So we’d have it in hand,” he replied, “so that if we want to sell the house one day—it will be more valuable, with the license already in hand.”
But the idea had already taken root, twisting up inside her with its own force, like an ovum that had embraced the sperm and was now germinating, and the fetus was already stretching the skin of the belly, and there was no way of putting that growth to sleep.
All that time she was wrapped up in her firstborn son, Udi, who summoned her from her dreams at night. She would come to him with her eyes almost closed, as though moonstruck, and her hands turning the tiny baby clothes of their own volition. On her walks, pushing the baby carriage across broken paving stones, past piles of sand, she found herself lingering around houses under construction, raising her head to see the men walking with assurance on the rim of high walls, amazed, learning how stories grow, how windows are squared into dark frames, shutters raised panel after panel by an enormous yellow machine with the look of arm-bones scraped free of flesh.
From one of the yawning holes that would be a window, someone shouted at her with an Arabic accent, “You looking for someone to service you, lady?” She blushed as though caught in wrongdoing and pushed her baby away in a panic. Near a building that she often passed, a contractor told her while looking into the carriage, “Excuse me for saying this, but this is no place to wander around with a baby. Dirt and cinder blocks or iron rods sometimes fall around here, and it’s very dangerous.”
After she started leaving Udi with a baby-sitter in the mornings, a woman who looked after a few infants in her home, she would go to those places in her old trousers worn at the knees, climb up the diagonal concrete slabs, supporting herself on the rough rafters, and grope in the darkness of stairwells still floored with sand. Here, she would later say to herself, she saw them face to face for the first time, in the chill damp peculiar to houses under construction. They came toward her from corners that stank of urine, all of them with the same face: dark, scalding eyes, sunk in caves of black shadows, hair cut in the old-fashioned way, shoes spotted with lime and cement, and dusty clothes. Here, too, their peculiar odor came to her nostrils: sweat mingled with cigarette smoke and soot. While she exchanged words with the Jewish foreman, oblique glances would be cast at her by the Arab workers, down on all fours laying floor tiles; panting as they transported sacks of cement or stacks of tiles; running to ease the effort; ripping out hunks of food with their teeth, half a loaf of bread in one hand, an unpeeled cucumber in the other.
Some foremen were irritable, refusing to answer her questions, dismissing her with a contemptuous wave of the hand and continuing to give directions to their workers, ignoring her as she stood behind them, ashamed, sensing how the Arabs were laughing at her inside, in collusion with their Jewish foreman. But sometimes the foremen answered her willingly, watching as she took down what they said in her notebook like a diligent pupil. As she turned to leave, they would say with amusement, “So we have to watch out for you, huh? You’re the competition!”
In her notebook the pages were already densely packed with details about reinforced concrete, the thickness of inner and outer walls, various gauges of iron rods, a sketch of the way the rods were fastened for casting concrete pillars, the ceiling, plaster, flooring, conduits for electricity and water, tar, addresses of building materials manufacturers. She hid her notebook from Yoel in a carton with her university notebooks. Once, when he asked, “What’s going on? Zvika said that twice he saw you coming out of the building they’re putting up on Herzl Street,” she looked him straight in the eye and said in her usual tone of voice, “Probably someone who looks like me.” And he responded, “It’s about time you changed your hairstyle. Last week I saw someone from behind, and I was sure it was you. She even had the same walk and the same handbag.”
Afterward, when everything was ripe, like a girl coming of age, Yoel came back from work one day, his eyes troubled. He said, “They want me to attend a training course in Texas for two months. We’re getting a new computer. I said I couldn’t leave you alone with the baby. Let