has come back in the form of the crow who arrived in the garden days after her death and stays on, strangely, without its mate. I don’t cheapen her death with little fabrications. The gravel crunched under the wheels of your German car, we glided to a stop, and you cut the motor. The sky above the hills was deep indigo with the last glow of the day, but the house was already closed up in darkness. And listening to the little, dying pings of the engine in the fresh silence, I suddenly remembered the day we moved here from the house in Beit Hakarem. Do you remember? All morning you had been locked up in your room, transferring the fish from your aquarium into plastic bags filled with water—worrying over them, opening and closing the bags. While the rest of us hurried around taping up boxes and moving furniture, you measured out your fish and readied your beloved turtle for the journey. The care you lavished on that reptile! You used to let him stretch his legs in the garden; every day you gave him his moment in the sun. You stared into his little beady eyes for the secret of his soul. When your mother bought the wrong kind of cabbage you got so angry that you cried—screamed and cried because she had been so insensitive as to buy red instead of green. And I screamed back that you were an ungrateful wretch. In my fury, I grabbed your little friend and dangled him above the whirring blade of the blender. Desperately, it tried to wrestle the leg back into the safety of its shell, but I pinched it between my fingers and revved the motor. You screamed a bloodcurdling scream. What a scream! As if it were you yourself I was prepared to sacrifice to the blade. A pleasant tingling spread through the ends of my nerves. Afterwards, once you had fled to your room cradling the pathetic creature in your arms, your mother’s face turned to stone. We fought, as we always did when it came to you, and I told her she was crazy if she thought I was going to indulge such behavior. And she, who since you were a toddler had inhaled every last book of child psychology, had eaten whole every theory, tried to convince me that to you that turtle was a symbol of yourself, and for us to act cavalier about its needs and desires was, to you, the same as disregarding your own. A symbol of yourself, for God’s sake! Following the orders of those ridiculous books, she found a way to contort herself to fit into your little skull, so that she could not only understand but empathize with you in your belief that the purchase of iceberg over romaine constituted an emotional assault. I let her finish. I let her wear herself out, tangling herself up in theories. Then I told her she had lost her mind. That if you saw yourself as a smelly, disgusting, brainless reptile then it was time to start treating you like one. She stormed out of the house. But half an hour later she was back again, clutching a sad little head of green cabbage, and pleading with you, whispering and begging through the crack of your door, to be let in. A few months after that we bought the house in Beit Zayit and you were up all night scheming about how best to transport the turtle. All morning you spent divvying up the fish in bags and counseling the turtle psychologically. You held the tank on your lap as we drove to the new house, and with every turn I took the turtle skid and bumped into the corners. Your eyes welled up with tears, believing I was being cruel, but you overestimated me: even I wasn’t capable of such deliberate torment. In the end, it wasn’t at my hands that your precious pet met its tragic end. One day you left it out in the sun, and when you came back it was lying on its back, its shell cracked open, dying from an assault by a real beast.
IT WAS soon after we moved that you started your nighttime ramblings. You thought no one knew, but I knew. You trusted me with nothing, but I kept your little secret. In those days it often happened that I woke up ravenous in the middle of the night. I would