The Others by Sarah Blau (best ereader for academics TXT) 📗

her, her chubby cheeks, the way she pronounced my name, “Tila,” with her sweet little voice. I missed her terribly, but couldn’t go see her.

Her father, Naama’s husband, announced that if he caught any of us even in the vicinity of his baby daughter, he wouldn’t be responsible for his actions. So I stayed away. And there was also that awful guilt, which was entirely yours, Sheila.

The door flings open and I find myself, with neither notice nor preparation, standing before Avihu, Naama’s husband. The widower.

We eye each other, and the first thought that pops into my mind is how much he has aged. Avihu looks like a puffier and slouchier version of himself. His face is doughy with bluish-black crescents under his eyes and a mouth so sunken it looks toothless. But the blistering gaze is still there, and perhaps even more fiery than before. I always felt there was a certain violence bubbling inside him, but it was the pent-up, reined-in kind. Looks like the reins are off.

We continue to stare at each other, and I’m wondering what the appropriate greeting is for a person I haven’t seen in sixteen years. Avihu solves that one for me.

“You?” he half asks, half states.

I try to crank out a smile but my mouth keeps flatlining. He takes a step closer to me, and I take a step back.

“What are you doing here?” He takes another step towards me, and I take another step back.

“I came to see Gali,” I reply, and feel like I should have said those words twenty years ago.

“You’re in contact with Gali?”

“No, not really, it’s just that—” I start stuttering.

“Get the hell out of here. Now,” he hisses the exact same words he spewed at us at Naama’s funeral, in the exact same terrifyingly low and hushed tone. Back then everyone told us you don’t judge a person in his time of grief, but I knew that’s exactly when you should judge a person’s character, because that’s when they show their true colours. The truth is I had wanted to get the hell out of there, but Dina grabbed my hand and made me stay until the end of the service, until the last stone was placed on the grave.

And since there’s no Dina here to make me stay, I decide to skedaddle. Just as I turn to walk away, Gali appears in the doorway.

“Sheila! Just in time,” she says, breezes past her father and pulls me in.

I expect him to say something, to show even an ounce of the aggression he directed at me, but he just turns to silently stare at us as Gali drags me to her room and closes the door. I see you even behind the closed door.

“He wasn’t very pleased with that, was he?” she says, flashing me that smile that makes everything look so easy and simple, and I can’t help but smile back. If there’s one trait I’ve always wished I had, it’s that breeziness. But alas, I’m stuck with the gift of making everything more complicated than it has to be.

That was fun. Ha!

I’m surprised to find her room clean and tidy.

Naama was messiness personified; whenever I asked her to keep something for me in her bag, a leather satchel bursting with papers and God knows what else, I’d always get it back stained and grimy. But Gali’s room is spick and span, despite its strange smell.

“Meet Jezebel,” she says, pointing to the source of the smell, a red cage holding a small, trembling hamster. “She’s pregnant, see?”

I approach the cage for a closer look, although I have absolutely no idea what an unpregnant hamster should look like. While I’m not sure what I’m seeing, the anticipation in Gali’s voice gets me going. It always did. Tila! Candy… you brought me candy? I did, but eat it quickly, so your mummy won’t see…

“Look how cute she is,” Gali says.

“She is cute,” I reply, “but I can’t tell that she’s pregnant.”

“That’s because I’m making sure she keeps fit. She’s a new tenant here.”

“What are you going to do with all the baby hamsters?”

“I’ll raise a new family,” she smiles, no, that’s not a smile. “Want to feed her?” She dumps a pile of foul-smelling seeds in my hand. “Put it in her bowl.”

The moment I lift the cage’s lid, Jezebel starts quivering and almost pounces on me. Why is she so hungry? I stare at her digging into the seeds, ravenously stuffing her cheeks, and recall that time when I was young and offered to take the turtle from the school petting zoo home over the summer break. It wasn’t long before I started to feel a niggling anxiety that something wouldn’t live to see autumn.

Even as a child, the unqualified responsibility for the welfare of another living being terrified me.

“I didn’t know your father moved back to Israel,” I say.

“He didn’t, he’s just visiting.”

And of course Murphy’s Law made sure we’d meet. I wonder what I’m supposed to say next, but as always, Gali’s one step ahead of me. “Don’t worry, he won’t do anything to you. Didn’t you just see what a doormat he’s become?”

“Gali!” God knows where this urge to discipline her just came from. “That’s not nice!”

“Whatever. I know you never liked him, so don’t bother pretending.”

It’s true. From the very first moment he and Naama met, I couldn’t stand him. I didn’t even attend their wedding, although that wasn’t because of him. You didn’t get to see her in her white bridal dress, and you didn’t get to see her dangling from the black rope.

When their relationship became more serious, Naama and I started drifting apart. I told myself it was the price a woman pays when her best friend falls in love, but deep down I knew there was more to it. I remember the message she left on my machine, breaking the news of their engagement. Remember it word for word. I can’t believe I’m saying this to your