the storm lets up”, and saved her from having to see all those horrors.
I asked what games she’d played and what songs the farmers had taught her, and I hoped the question would help her remember some scenes from the village, which was probably very pretty, with forests all around and snow, and I could even picture her with a red bow in her hair and a white pinafore and a wicker basket, like Little Red Riding-Hood, picking flowers and fruit like the little girls in stories always do. Raspberries or blueberries. Shame we don’t have them in Israel. It’s a scene I even described out loud because sometimes just describing a scene like that can give your memory a kick in the stomach, so it finally wakes up. Smells do it, at least for me, though I couldn’t describe a smell this time.
There was another picture that I tried to describe to her. Of her with the other children.
Did the farmers have sons and daughters?
Did you make friends with them?
Did you play with them?
They were like your own brothers and sisters, weren’t they?
And it didn’t help when I tried names of games like catch or hide-and-seek. I don’t know if they played those games then anyway. Suddenly she seemed so helpless, though I’m sure that if she realized I was feeling sorry for her she’d have been really mad.
And when I saw that she couldn’t even remember the farmers’ children, I realized it was a lost cause. I couldn’t bring myself to ask her when she’d begun to forget her real parents, even though that was one of the questions that I’d written on the first page of my notebook, and I’d even marked it as the most important one.
I hid the notebook from her.
I thought to myself that at that age she must have forgotten really quickly, which was lucky for her, because if anyone stuck me at my age in some godforsaken place I’d never forget it, but maybe that’s because my memory works differently and I never forget anything, which is something I have inherited from my dead grandfather.
I consoled myself: it’s a pretty good story, even though it’s kind of short, without anything horrible, with good characters and with my grandmother who saw the nicer side of life, and it’s just my lousy luck that I can’t write the story and get a hundred, because that’s the grade I would have gotten if I’d been able to produce a story like that after we kept hearing only awful things.
And it was only much later that I noticed that I was the only one who was using the words Mother and Father...
I was about to get up, and then she said: Come, let me tell you a legend.
Why a legend? I asked. I’m not a child, and I’m not some kind of retard who needs to have everything painted rosy, with lots of soft edges that have nothing to do with how things really were.
I’m too old for legends, Grandma, I told her. Besides, our generation doesn’t go for legends. Except maybe for babies who believe in happy endings, and take it in along with “and they lived happily ever after”, which is the biggest lie in the world. So why was she treating me that way?
And then she said that some legends are horrible, and I said: Yes, like Hansel and Gretel with the witch who’s about to eat them up, or the ugly dwarf with the long name who wants to kidnap the miller’s daughter but then she pulls a trick on him. As long as we’re into legends, it should only be the kind that involves retribution and a chance to even the score, because if I’d been Hansel and Gretel, I’d never have forgiven the witch, and I would have run after her and caught her and shoved her in the oven and stood there watching the smoke and even burned down the gingerbread house till there was no trace of memory left of it. And as for the miller’s daughter, she wasn’t that little, so she didn’t forget anything, and she taught her kid – who stayed with her for good – never to believe what people told him, and to watch out for monsters in disguise, and how lucky we are that there weren’t any dwarfs left in the world, because there were more than enough mean people already, so there’s no point in inventing all sorts of nasty creatures