Cut Throat Dog by Joshua Sobol, Dalya Bilu Page B

glittering in a festival of light in the window, he is sitting on the lavatory, or leaning over the sink, and masturbating, with his face contorted in an expression of bestial stupidity. Apparently she gathers from the sounds on the other end of the line that the guy is about to come, for instead of continuing with her reading, she starts to puff and pant, with an expression of utter boredom and indifference on her face, and if she feels anything at all, it’s presumably an itch under her right elbow, for while her right hand holds the telephone, the fingers of her left hand move to scratch a spot just under the elbow on her right arm, and after they’ve finished scratching there they climb up her forearm and scratch there too, and when she’s done scratching she inserts her skinny pinkie into her left ear and probes inside it, and he watches her from his bubble bath, and steamy vapors cover the big window and turn Manhattan from 12th Street North into a shimmering Milky Way in the darkness, and her pants and moans over the phone grow faster and more frequent the deeper her matchstick pinkie digs into her ear, and now her mouth gapes open in a jaw-splitting yawn, of which she takes advantage to let out a deep groan, as if she has discovered within her a vast reservoir of hidden air, and she cries, now, baby, stick it into me, all of it, oh yes, she roars, go on, shout, she whispers, and afterwards she puts the phone down and opens her mouth in a yawn even bigger than the one before, and she gets up, and stretches in front of the steamy window, and swings her long arms round behind her, making her shoulder joints crack loudly, and then she senses his presence close to her, and she turnsround and sees him standing opposite her, wrapping a white towel round his waist, and she asks him in a businesslike tone if he wants to fuck now, or a little later.
    Not now, he says, infected by her yawn.
    I hope that conversation didn’t bother you, she yawns a third time.
    A job’s a job, he says. We all have to earn a living.
    And suddenly the phone rings. She looks at the display and says:
    It’s him.
    Hanina takes in the number, engraves it in his memory, picks up the phone and says:
    I’m waiting for you, maniac.
    There is silence on the other end of the line, and Hanina returns the receiver to its cradle.
    What did he say? she asks.
    Nothing, he says.
    He wanted to check if you were still here, she says.
    So now he knows.
    I’m living on borrowed time, she says. One day that lunatic will kill me.
    He won’t touch you, he says.
    I can’t take him hitting me anymore. He keeps accusing me of being lazy. However hard I work, it’s not enough for him.
    I can testify that you work even when you’re resting, he laughs, and adds: Or maybe the opposite.
    In the end I’ll kill myself, she says, and that scares me.
    When a person really wants to kill himself, he tells her, he should kill whoever put him in that situation.
    This time they won’t let me off so easily, she says, I’m not a minor any more. Besides, Tony’s not Patrice. He’s a professional killer. He’ll kill me ten times before I can give him a scratch.
    If you permit me, I’ll help you, he hears Shakespeare sharpening a quill.
    You help me just by being here, she says. These days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve are the worst for me. Because anyone who’s lonely all year is doubly lonely then, and the demand for whores goes through the roof.
    Shakespeare is a little taken aback by her casual use of the vulgar word ‘whore’, which comes to English from the German ‘Hure’, which is close to the Arabic word ‘huriyeh’, which reminds him of the Hebrew word ‘hor’, or hole, and the noble one ‘horin’, freedom, which reminds him of the Indo-European root ‘karo’, from which are derived the Italian ‘caro’, the French ‘cher’, the Hebrew ‘yakar’, and the English ‘cherish’, ‘caress’ and ‘charity’, but also the ancient German