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

she, studying my face with mocking scrutiny, searching for something she won’t find, probably knowing I won’t dare come out and say it, just as I didn’t then or during the many years since.

And it’s not as if I wasn’t urged to do something, to say something, for heaven’s sake! Eli headed the persuasion campaign. “You have to call her and demand an explanation, or at least more serious credit,” he kept imploring, but I refused. It’s hard to understand, but I couldn’t bring myself to call her, even to imagine the scenario. (Back then, I mean. Over time the image of me screaming at her on the phone, demanding justice, has become frayed around the edges, worse for wear.)

It’s possible that was ground zero. Yes, there. My inability to face her swelled into an inability to face the world. It was easier to choose avoidance, that slow drifting towards “que sera, sera,” everything slipping through my fingers. But in this life, when you avoid one thing, another (usually revolting) one will come take its place.

And that revolting thing is now sitting in front of me, bloated with satisfaction, wanting to say something but unable to because it’s licking from its tiny fingers the white cream filling from a pack of Oreos that has somehow eluded me. It’s sucking its fingers now, this disgusting thing.

“Maybe I didn’t make the big leagues,” I raise my voice, “because some bitch stole my best idea and turned it into an article.”

She blinks at the word bitch.

“I wouldn’t call it stealing,” she says after some thought.

“Oh, no? So what would you call it?”

“Come on, Sheila, we hung in a group, were together 24–7, you know how it is, ideas get around. Someone came up with the idea that even back in biblical times, it was possible some women didn’t want to become mothers, and I took it from there.”

“Someone came up with the idea?”

“Fine, it was you,” she replies and sips her coffee, a giant gulp that sounds like a burp. “But I gave you credit, didn’t I? I thanked you, told everyone it was an idea I came up with together with a college friend.”

“Who even notices the stupid acknowledgements?” I get up, my feet sinking into the soft white carpet, forever white. “You robbed me, Dina, and you know it! And that’s not even the worst thing you did, and we both know that.”

There. I said it.

“Oh, so now you’re going to blame me for everything?” She kept her voice low, and that made the words sting all the more. “You’re going to blame me for being stuck in some crummy museum no one’s heard of, getting a measly two hundred shekels for some half-arsed lecture about Sarah the matriarch? You’re going to pin that on me too?”

She’s still sitting there, arse-deep in the armchair, while I stand in front of her. The picture of Miriam on the wall before me, my ears pounding with the beat of the tambourine, Thrump, thrump! Thrump, thrump! Only this time it’s war drums, having been silenced for too long.

“You stole my idea, you always stole from me, robbed me of much more than an article. You stole from all of us, from Ronit, from Naama!”

I know the mention of Naama’s name will shut her up. And indeed, she blinks again, doesn’t dare take another sip of coffee, sitting completely still with sticky fingers, staring ahead. I know exactly what’s going through her mind, who’s going through her mind, the corpse exhumed and put on display here on the white carpet.

Unfortunately, Dina could never be silenced for long. She slowly gets up, with her usual air of gravitas, buttocks swaying as she approaches me.

“Now you listen to me,” she says in a tone somewhere between threatening and consoling, “I did you a favour, Sheila, we both know you wouldn’t have done a thing with your half-baked idea, but I sat and researched and wrote and actualized and coincidentally happened to do you the biggest favour anyone has ever done. Now you have someone to blame, an address for all your failures! Must be nice, loser!”

I stare at her in disbelief. Loser?

I can’t believe we’ve sunk so low – loser? That the mask of politeness has been ripped off so quickly; why do we even bother keeping up appearances if they shatter so easily? Loser!

I guess Dina was thinking the same thing, because now she pulls herself together, hands balling into fists, wants to say something but decides against it. She returns to her chair and then slowly leans forward, reaching for her mug, wanting to take a sip, or at least draw the mug to her lips, but the cup is see-through and we can both see it’s empty.

She tucks a loose strand behind her ear – what thick, lush hair! How does a woman her age have such luxuriant hair? And I notice her hand is shaking.

“Look,” she says, “this is really not what I meant to happen when I initiated this get-together, I just…” She searches for words. “Let’s behave like adults, we’re too old to sling mud at each other. It reminds me of an article I once read that people without children preserve some infantile aspect within them, and I think we both proved that just now, acting like two little girls.” She smiles, and it’s her regular, self-assured smile again.

And that smile, the familiar smile of that twenty-year-old student, shatters before me, and Dina, unaware of what’s going on inside me, proceeds to wax poetic that “It’s awfully biblical what just happened here, truly primal, how for a moment we were like two biblical characters fighting over a birthright… it reminds me of an article I’ve been wanting to write about core essences, imprinted in our DNA.”

And she holds forth, unfolding the biblical analogy her mind has conceived, as if she has already forgotten those terrible words uttered only moments ago… she is already someplace else, immersed in her