from The Crime of Writing
by Chaim Lapid
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It took almost a fortnight, would you believe it, before I found him. I returned home every day in a mad rush just before my father, and appeared to be innocently absorbed in my homework. Anyway, it isn't the search that matters, but the fact that, against all odds, I did find him at a hotel on the outskirts of _____. The receptionist didn't ask any questions, just pointed with his hand and mumbled a number. "They're over there," he said, and turned back to the person he was talking to. To my mind there are few things as dreary as a hotel corridor. This is so even in luxury hotels, which this one was not. Well, I stood before the door in a funk. Everything was quiet. My courage vanished and I knocked softly, like a little mouse, afraid to make a noise. I knocked again and again and, when nobody answered and I had a good excuse to leave, I pushed the door open and went in.

I woke from a dream being desperately shaken by both of them. He'd only been out a quarter of an hour, he declared. Had only nipped out to buy something. That was why, he said, he didn't lock the door, so as not to wake her up. But in the meantime I managed, to sink into such a deep sleep—or perhaps a kind of swoon, something like that—that they were beginning to panic, were pulling, pinching and shaking, shouting into the ears of this boy who had appeared out of nowhere, as if left by the stork. That's what she said. A fairly basic association, I'd say, once she calmed down. But then she, unlike him, had never set eyes on me until the moment when his cry of astonishment woke her up to find me, almost as naked as she, lying in her bosom, in her bed.

For some obscure reason in my childish mind, having found the woman—my mother—sprawled naked on her bed, and being very careful not to wake her, I held my breath as very quietly I took off my shoes, socks, shirt and trousers, but stopped there from childish modesty, climbed into the bed and lay down beside her, careful not to wake her. Almost at once, feeling the warmth of my body aginst hers, she turned towards me and laid her arm over me, still fast asleep. Only then did I fall into that profound swooning sleep.

When she heard that I thought she was my mother, she overflowed with murmuring tenderness for me. "No, I'm not your mother, not your mother, my poor boy," she almost sobbed and pressed me, this time deliberately, to her bosom, thereby contradicting herself.

She also protected me from him, because when he realized that I was alive he became very aggressive and suspicious, and shook me by the shoulders: "She sent you, didn't she? He sent you, dammit."

"He doesn't know," I said. "And she's not there. I don't have a mother. She left. I wanted to ask you where she was."

He stared at me but did not reply.

Later he softened and even talked, said a bit more, but did not really answer; nor do I really remember. Memory, like the landscape, has some dead areas. Not because it was so terrible; on the contrary, those were the sweetest hours in my life till a time many years later,which I may yet tell you if strength doesn't fail me. Suddenly they were like a pair of parents who adopted me emotionally—she did, at any rate—and took me out to a restaurant where they insisted on feeding me, although I'd already eaten Father's lunch—watching my meager jaws chewing delicacies with foreign names, as though they had no children of their own, though I suppose they did. But the very sweetness with which they enveloped me, the immense desserts they ordered for me, using long spoons to pinch mouthfuls from my dish and calling each other pig, and with it the dislike, the irritation, the impatience with which he spoke of my mother, exactly like my father, till she too grew angry with him and chivvied and challenged him, all these left me feeling guilty, a traitor to my mother. Especially when he repeated that I ought to forget her, that she'd scooted off to America or some other place, that if she wanted to keep in touch she'd have done so long ago, and that not everyone has two parents, some don't even have one.

But unlike my father, he did not say that she was dead. That much I noticed. And if she was not dead, she must be alive. That much even the boy understood.

In any case, I didn't let up, nor did she. I begged and implored him to tell me about my mother.

"Well yes," he said, "I also remember her hair. That's how your father met her, didn't they tell you? He saw her waiting in line for something, maybe a circus show, or maybe she worked in the circus—makes no difference—and he admired her hair. He was probably half drunk, as usual. Pretty soon there was a wedding. We were all refugees—he from Russia, I from Romania, she'd run away from somewhere in the north, I believe. Ran away from her family—they wanted to put her in a convent, or to send her to some awful job, or to marry her to an old uncle—she told different stories each time, once even that she was nearly drowned in the river and cut somebody with a knife, someone who wanted to do her harm. You see, laddie, your mum's head was full of butterflies, and every time the butterflies came out they told a different story. But pretty soon she had a big belly, which is what you came out of, that much is certain. When you grow up and reach her age—here, just for a moment, one moment, comb your hair like a girl then look in the mirror and you'll see your mother."

He grinned crookedly at the pallid, solemn little face before him, which was undoubtedly me.

"Your dad was a stubborn character, the sort who doesn't know how to lose, and see what came of it! 'A Foreign Legion husband' we used to call him sometimes, to provoke him. It made him mad, and then he could be dangerous."

But he didn't remember the exact place of her birth, or didn't want to remember.

"What difference does it make exactly who and what she is? Anyway, in my experience, whenever there's a question about somebody's identity, they turn out to be a bloody Jew. What is certain is that she was unfortunate and remained unfortunate." He was talking to himself rather than to us. "No one ever taught her how to live, and he himself had no idea. You had to be crazy to understand her mind. But beautiful, extremely beautiful…"

This is an excerpt. To read the rest, please continue your travels in the Republic by purchasing No. 10, September 2004.

Chaim Lapid's bio is forthcoming.