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

And Dina was there, everywhere you looked there was Dina, or rather, Dr Kaminer – in those flattering profile pieces, with heavy-handed hints about her private life (under the guise of investigative journalism), in the eulogies by her colleagues and in the familiar press photos. They kept publishing the one in which she was caught grinning, looking ruddy and wild, her smile – revealing the gap between her front teeth – slightly silly, and more than anything, very out of character.

I have no doubt that if she were still alive, she’d be calling the editor to demand a more appropriate photo, and her demands would be met. She was a master of the art of persuasion: aggressive and charismatic, used to getting her way. But none of that helped her in the end, did it?

That particular article was also dredged up. One of the newspapers reprinted it, verbatim, and I photographed it and turned the image into my screensaver.

I noticed that the people who quoted from the article hadn’t actually read it, but merely regurgitated the same inane assumptions that appeared in the papers without variation. “Did the women in the Bible actually choose to be childfree? Could it be that Dr Kaminer encouraged women not to give birth? Should childless women be afraid to walk the streets now? Could our women be in danger? Could it be? Could it??” and more and more could-it-bes, all similarly poorly phrased, and not one able to hide its smugness.

Tick-tock, tick-tock, no tot, no tot.

A radio host tried to rev up his listeners with the survey question, “Who would you turn into a mother?” He was suspended immediately, of course, but not before suggesting a few interesting options, including a famous actress who stated she wasn’t interested in having children, a female director who spoke out against childbirth and an emerging young singer who, in her very first interview, announced she had no intention of becoming a mother.

While reading those three interviews, I already knew that within three years all three women would be smiling at us from magazine covers holding their bundles of joy below the identical caption: “Motherhood has changed me.”

Because by now I know that if you’re not interested in having children, you don’t go announcing it to the world like that. It’s something private and profound, which slowly boils in the depths of your consciousness before simmering to the surface, and even then it won’t stop fighting you till your very last egg dries up – I should know.

“Little witch, little witch fell down a ditch. Come out and play! she cried all day. But no one did, and in the ditch she hid…”

I rush to the window to peek outside, and can’t believe kids still sing that. A few children are standing in a circle around a chubby little girl sprawled on the ground with a scraped knee, chanting at the top of their lungs, repeating the words over and over again. The girl in the middle is confused, not sure whether to laugh or cry. I’d advise her to cry.

I slam the window shut and pieces of plaster come flying off the crumbling wall. It’s the window facing Ramat Gan, a city east of Tel Aviv. The windows on the other side of the apartment offer completely different vistas.

This apartment that I have moved back into is located on a curious spot on the map: right on the dividing line between Israel’s ultra-Orthodox epicentre and one of its many nondescript secular cities, an area commonly known as “Bnei Brak bordering Ramat Gan.” Usually it serves as a code name for the residents of Bnei Brak who are more reticent about their background, in which case they’ll say: “I live in Bnei Brak but on the border of Ramat Gan,” even if they live dead in the middle of Rabbi Akiva Street, which is nowhere near Ramat Gan.

But my apartment really is located in between, so when I’m asked “Where are you from?”, I give whatever answer will serve me best. Efraim, the director of the Bible Museum, who finds the fact that I’m religious – even if only tenuously – a hot commodity, will get the answer “Bnei Brak,” while the occasional taxi driver, all too willing to dole out his opinions about synagogue and state, will get the aloof answer: “Ramat Gan.” An answer made to measure. And in general, it’s not bad for a girl to slightly blur her past. I should know.

And there’s another advantage, a secret one.

Whenever I feel the youth draining from my body, feel it on my desiccating skin, my period cut another day shorter, the subtle-yet-palpable slackening of my facial muscles, the bristly hairs sprouting from the tip of my chin, in short, whenever I start doubting my feminine allure, I’ll go moseying along the streets of Bnei Brak, where one always feel lusted after with all those disapproving gazes and reproachful twitches. The slightest bit of cleavage or a skirt cut even an inch above the knee will give you the feeling that you’re Lilith the seductress. It’s a potent youth potion, downright magic.

Maor hated the fact that I was a former Bnei Brak girl; the city seemed inferior and run down to him. When he heard I was planning to move back there, he grimaced, couldn’t understand how I could give up living in Tel Aviv. Even when I explained that I was presented with the opportunity to live almost rent-free in an apartment that belonged to a relative, he shrugged. “It would really bum me out to visit you there,” he said.

I guess it really bummed him out. It must have – we broke up even before the move transpired.

I study the pug-faced doll he gave me back then, during the early glory days of our budding romance, when everything gleamed with promise. I should have seen it for the ominous sign it was. When your