Motti by Asaf Schurr Page B

they’re raping him in the ass, stealing cigarettes from him, you know, the kind of things they do in the big house. But Motti is okay. Just fine. And he’s quieter than he was until now. It’s hot in the cell, so hot there, and the food isn’t the kind you get used to, but in his head he takes off and goes, one two and he’s already on his way, a space of infinite possibilities opens up to him like a giant sail and he sails to wherever he wants. Whereas Menachem doesn’t sail anyplace, just gets out of bed slowly and goes down the hallway, and sits down next to Laika who’s breathing deeply in sleep, lying there like her bones were magnetized to the floor, and he pets her—she wakes up and turns her head, then goes back to dozing, disinterested—and he sits next to her for hours on end, he thinks, even though actually only four or five minutes have passed, and then he goes to the bathroom, washes his face, urinates, looks in the mirror, returns to bed, turns over and over, thinks about Motti, what’s with him, what’s happening to him there, must suffer terribly, oh, the debt, this heavy debt, a chain that binds him to the world and there’s no escape, he feels it on his ankles, it fills his lungs until the air is pushed out, this a debt that can’t be paid off, enslavement worse than the mortgage, even, he’s almost angry now, how can you be expected to fall asleep like this, when’s Yom Kippur coming, maybe he’ll fast this year, he turns over and over, eventually falls asleep, in his sleep completely normal dreams visit him, whereas Edna, who’s physically very close to him, the blanket over them like a protective tent, in her dream she’s entirely abandoned in space. Again the same dream: just her in a spacesuit, her spaceship gets farther and farther away, only the glass of the helmet separates Edna from the nothingness. This dream comes to her from that movie they saw together, a man is tossed out among the stars, carried far away from the ship, cord cut, damn Menachem for taking her to such a fucked-up movie in the first place, for years now it hasn’t left her head, in her dream she’s thrown into a black nothingness. And it’s not the suffocating that’s scariest, but rather this drifting, completely alone, in the emptiness and the cold, you can kick and shriek and lash out with your hands, it’s all pointless, soon your air will run out, a few hours all told, and despite this maybe it’s better to just remove your helmet and wait for your lungs to explode from the difference in pressure (in order to not break the cosmic law of the equilibrium of pressure the dreaming Edna will explode from the inside like a hot dog cooked too long; the little bit of air in her lungs will transform into ice crystals and float far away). There isn’t anything anywhere, and the meaning of the dream outside the world of dream may be the reason for her sticking with Menachem and all that. It’s easier, they say, not to drift off alone until death, and it’s not just a matter of comforting or distracting yourself; it’s also sticking a foot in the door to the future we won’t see, here are our faces renewed in the faces of our children. But where does all this get us, where does it get us if Edna is still drifting through the nothingness but now hand in hand with her small family, how fragile everything is, all the time looking each other in the face, waiting to see who would be hurled into space without a suit and who will explode first, she or Menachem, maybe the children, God forbid. But she doesn’t remember them. I don’t mean the children. She remembers them well enough. I mean the terrible dreams. She won’t remember when she wakes up. Lucky.
    â€œYou know,” continues the Guard, who already went away down the corridor after a moment of uncomfortable silence and then returned, leaned against the wall