The Others, Sarah Blau [hardest books to read txt] 📗

muscle in my face moves. After a few moments, he leans over and whispers something.

“What was that?” I whisper back, and he mouths, “Tell her to come over.”

“Sheila, you still there?” Gali asks, and I don’t know what to tell her. I’ve got the feeling that if she comes over, she’ll be walking straight into the trap laid out for her, and that’s the last thing I want. I’m already thinking how to turn down his request, but he gently places his hand on my thigh and bores deep into my eyes.

“Please,” he whispers, so close I can feel his breath, “please, trust me,” and he draws even closer, until his warm, muscular thigh is brushing against mine.

“Why don’t you come over?” I ask, and gulp.

“I’m a bit tired,” Gali replies, “I thought we’d meet tomorrow.”

“Come over now, you should,” I cajole, my voice cracking with betrayal. What kind of mother are you?

“There’s someone here I’d like you to meet,” I add, and Micha shoots up and takes a giant step towards the middle of the living room. Sinewy thighs indeed.

“Who?” Gali asks.

“You’ll find out when you get here,” I say, and feel that by mentioning a mystery guest, my act of treachery is a smidgen less treacherous. Now I just have to deal with Micha, who’s looking daggers at me. But he can glare all he wants, I don’t regret coming to my little munchkin’s defence. Oh, so now she’s your little munchkin again?

“Why did you tell her I’m here?” he asks, and his threatening expression fades into an insulted pout, which I’m not buying even for a second.

“I did it for you,” I say with a sickly sweet tone. “So she won’t feel like you tricked her and clam up.”

“I would’ve made her open up without your help,” he says, “and pardon me for saying so, but this overprotective shtick isn’t becoming.”

We sit silently under the Witch of Endor’s gaze, and I have no doubt that if I returned the look, I’d find her expression to be one of complete content. But I don’t look up.

The veil of silence has yet to lift. I remember he once told me that silence is a powerful weapon in interrogations. Very few people can bear it for long stretches, so they start blabbing away, and eventually talk themselves into jail.

I think about Naama, who was never a chatterbox, never one to trip over her tongue, but what point is there being careful with words if you’re just going to end up dangling from the ceiling?

But the eerie glee in Gali’s voice is unnerving, and it makes me wonder again what she remembers from that period. She remembered you, didn’t she. Does she remember anything from those actual moments of horror? From the moments when her own mother turned on her?

Naama picking up a big white pillow, the red lampshade bathing the room in a blood-coloured glow.

I wonder how they took care of her afterwards, if they even sent her to a therapist or preferred to keep all the “unpleasantness” in the family. (I could swear that’s what one of the relatives mumbled during the funeral, “unpleasantness” she called it, and I asked myself whether it was the aunt they brought in from the States to take care of her. I didn’t dwell on it because that’s exactly when Avihu noticed us out of the corner of his eye and lunged with his “Get the hell out of here.”)

Only God knows how Gali turned out to be this impressive young woman, when all she had left was a screw-up like Avihu for a father. His tall, stooped figure flashes before me, with his sunken mouth, the dead look in his eyes, the stale smell of cigarettes surrounding him like a cloud. But he wasn’t always like this, something made him become like this.

“Just an idea, but is it possible that someone went into Naama’s bedroom, saw that she strangled her daughters, and then hanged her? As punishment?” I ask.

“You mean the husband?” Micha immediately replies, as if he’s been waiting for that question. “Avihu Malchin was cleared of any involvement, and believe me, they looked at his alibi from every angle and it was airtight. The husband is always the first suspect.”

Well, duh. The closer he is to you, the more likely to hurt you.

She came more quickly than I expected. We’re sitting there, still entangled in silence, when the doorbell rings. Unlike the Grossmans’ genteel wind chimes, my doorbell produces the grating blast of a train horn. All aboard the midnight train to nowhere!

I open the door gingerly, wanting to at least try to whisper something to her, but she walks right past me inside, a pair of long, slender legs stepping into the apartment. Hey, girlie, what pretty legs you’ve got!

She’s wearing a dark, tight-fitting dress of a fabric too thick and dense for the weather we’re having, and it only reinforces my suspicion that it isn’t part of her everyday wardrobe. No, she wore this little number for me.

Behind me, Micha gets up, stretches out and clears his throat. “Nice to meet you,” he says, “we haven’t had the chance to meet until now.”

Now he’s staring at her, his eyes running the full length of her body: neck, chest, stomach, legs. I’d like to think of it as the usual dirty-old-man eyeing young flesh, but on second, painful thought, I realize they’re too close in age, so close in fact, that if I had started early, they could both have been my children. Yeah, right, as if this is the look a brother would fix on his sister.

“Gali, did you forget you’re coming to Bnei Brak?” I can’t believe my own schoolteacherly tone. “What were you thinking with that dress?” Shut up, you moron!

With the two of them ogling me, I force myself to laugh, and it comes out sounding like an old witch’s cackle. “It was a joke! Come on, you can’t take a joke?”

No, they