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

can assume when. I collapse into one of the armchairs by the woolly carpet, also white. Without a single child here to change that.

“Coffee?” Her voice pleasant once more. I once read that hosts feel more at ease when their guests accept their offers to wine and dine you, something to do with mechanisms of control and conciliation.

“Sure,” I reply and instantly regret it. Why please that bitch?

“I only have soy milk.”

“That’s fine,” I say.

“You know they say it’s loaded with hormones,” she says, while pouring it into two coffee cups. Her hands around the mugs seem tiny. I forgot how small they were compared to the rest of her, with almond-shaped pink nails; it’s the only part of her body that looks vulnerable. All Kaminers have those tiny hands. I recall that time her brother placed his on my shoulder; it was at a Purim party and excusable by the fact that we were all slightly buzzed. His touch was incredibly light, spine-tingling and oddly pleasurable; it was the first time any man had ever put his hand on me and I told him that. He didn’t remove it, and we stayed like that for some time. But after the party I never saw him again. I guess Dina was on guard. There could have been thousands of reasons why she didn’t want her brother to start dating me, but I was interested in the real one.

We sip our coffee in silence.

“At least it tastes better now,” she says. “Remember the disgusting soy milk at college?”

Do I ever. I remember Ronit with her lactose intolerance, always having to add canned soy milk to her coffee. I once accidentally took a sip of her coffee, and to this day I can still feel the awful aftertaste in my mouth, like the liquid that pools at the bottom of a can of mushrooms.

“Are you still in contact with Ronit?” she asks casually. She must have experienced a similar recollection.

“No,” I reply with the same blasé manner. “You?”

She shoots a quick glance at the picture of Miriam, and once again I recall the last time we all met, vividly remember the sound of the tambourine, its beat. How did we fail to notice it was an entirely different rhythm, dark and thick? Thrump, thrump! Blood, blood, the end will come, little hands will never drum!

“I see her every now and then, on the occasional panel,” Dina says, and my mouth instantly fills with the taste of canned mushrooms. Bitter.

Ronit, the third member of our special group – special and then some! – had become an actress. She may not have broken into the top league of actresses in the country, but she has found enough success to pinch my jealous heart. I resent her for her humble achievements, and of course blame Dina for that too.

“You’re still giving lectures at the Bible Museum?” She surprises me.

“How do you know I work there?”

“A few years ago they asked me to give a lecture there, and the director told me you work in my field.”

Her field! For a moment I consider slamming my mug in her face, just hard enough to graze that high forehead, just to wipe that complacency off her face. But I wouldn’t dare, of course, you never did have the courage! Look at us, so civil and pleasant towards each other, sitting here with legs crossed, she with her perfectly filed manicure, me with my hooves, talking like the polite, good friends we once were. And we were friends, weren’t we? She did refuse to come lecture at the museum, didn’t she? At least she has the sensitivity not to rub her success in my face.

“Your director barely agreed to pay a quarter of my usual fee,” she says. Sensitivity, my arse.

“He also sounded like a fuddy-duddy from hell,” she adds.

As always, her observation is spot on.

Efraim, the museum director, was indeed a horrible Conservadox. It seemed as if he dedicated most of his life to battling feminist scholars who tried to desecrate the sanctity of his museum. Since a sizeable portion of the museum’s budget relied on donations from the US, and since a few snappy liberal ladies sat on the board, he had no choice but to display goodwill and open-mindedness to “all movements and denominations.” When donors visited, he’d ask me to conduct the tour and to give free rein to all my subversive ideas, which would normally make him itch all over. But I guess Dina was more than he could bear, since she never gave that lecture.

“At the time I thought it could actually be interesting to bump into each other,” she says.

Yes. Interesting indeed.

“I never understood why you went and buried yourself in that dinky museum.” She takes another sip of her soy-milk coffee, pumping hormones right into her bloodstream, sitting in front of me bloated and glistening, smug and self-satisfied, looking like a heifer about to calve.

“You never understood?” I say, barely finding the strength to speak.

“Yes,” she carries on, “after all, you were brilliant, you had real strokes of genius. I thought you’d break into the big leagues, like me.”

She leans back, sliding her arse further into the white armchair, her small hands still wrapped around her mug. My hands, in contrast, ball into fists. Wanting to injure, but once again failing to work up the nerve. Because what could I possibly tell her? That my biggest stroke of genius was stolen from me? I still remember the shock that ripped through me when I saw that seminal article in the journal. The title was “The Childfree Women of the Bible,” and it caused a fiery wave to wash over me. Horror, shock, surprise, and yes, there was even pride there, I was foolish enough to feel proud of the puny acknowledgement she threw my way at the bottom of the article: “For the inspiration.” I’ll show her inspiration!

But I don’t say a word, not yet, and neither does