Motti by Asaf Schurr Page A

indicates with her hand at the height of her forehead, even higher than that). And she shouldn’t strain her left hand. It starts to hurt very quickly. In the years to come it will get worse, the pain will take much longer to pass. That’s how the body is. Once she got burned by an extremely hot frying pan. She’s burned her tongue many times. She eats quickly, but enjoys it. Work’s fine for her. She believes she can hold on until retirement. When she complains about a stomachache, for instance, and Menachem laughs and says, get out of here, you’ll bury all of us in the end, she gets angry and says, how can you talk like that? What kind of a terrible thing is that to say to a mother? But usually she isn’t dramatic like that, and when her cheek itches, she scratches it absentmindedly. Sometimes she eats falafel while standing. Sometimes she just finishes the kids’ portions. When she was small and her mother would cover her face with both hands in play, she would be terrified. Who knows what kind of face would be there when she removed her hands. After this too some time would pass until she calmed down. Who knows what kind of face was there before she removed them. But now she’s no longer a girl, and in her tummy delicate cells are multiplying. I give the baby eighty-three years at the most. Eighty-seven, on average, if it’s a girl. Eighty-two if an Arab citizen of Israel (though the chances are slim). It will be a boy, in fact, and he will be the one she loves the most, though she won’t admit this to anyone ever, and after two or three years she’ll be pregnant again and he’ll say to her, Mom, I want always to be your littlest, littlest boy,
and within a week she’ll have an abortion, won’t say a word about it to anyone, years later she’ll tell him, not in order to demand anything or hurt him, she’ll just tell him, as a fact, so he’ll know how much she loves him, how much she always loved him, from the beginning. And this abortion won’t result in an infection and there will be no gynecological damage and no feelings of guilt, she won’t have to pay any price of that sort. All it will do is shake up the living boy when she finally tells him, he’ll already be grown up then, he’ll go and tell his spouse, she’ll think that it’s totally screwed up, but all that is no longer our concern.

35
    They’ll clink glasses full of Diet Coke for the New Year. “This is for a sweet year,” she’ll say, “by whatever means necessary,” and they’ll laugh. Every year they’ll do this. They’ll have lots of little jokes like this. They’ll be one of those couples who make other couples jealous, old now, sitting, say, on a bench on a street next to a governmental office and holding hands or him stroking her hair absentmindedly, for fifty years now he’s been stroking her hair absentmindedly, and they know one another inside and out, and after all these years they are still so beautiful in each other’s eyes. And Ariella, she…
    This line of thought, this strand of thought, Guard B cuts off. “You holding up in here, man?” he asks Motti chummily through the barred hatch on the door. We didn’t expect this chumminess. After all: a guard. “It takes some getting used to here, I know,” B smiles at him. “If there’s a problem, if you need something, just say the word. We’re also here to help,” and Motti responds, and means it, “Everything’s fine, uh, man.”
    And when he says this, at the same actual moment, Menachem turns over in bed and turns his back on Edna, so she won’t see his eyes that are suddenly red, so she won’t hear his heart go wild on him because he thought about Motti, because he thought about his great debt, because he thought who knows what’s happening to Motti now, what’s with him there, maybe