Abuse, Trauma, and Torture - Their Consequences and Effects (22 page)

On the days that mother washes the house, I
withdraw to a corner and I imagine a mighty army, shooting arrows
from all kinds of cracks and casements and I see a hero and he is
fighting empty-handed in a variety of martial arts and he wins.
Cooped up in an angle, the dirty water churning around me, rivulets
of our effluence, revolting strands of hair and nail clippings.
Then she spreads a tattered blanket in the tiny balcony and turns
on the radio and we listen to the Program for the Mother and Child,
Listen now you lovely kids, our program is complete and she brings
me a big bowl of fruits and I eat them and feed my sister,
too.

When the shoelaces business is over, I turn my
back to her and await the heft of my schoolbag and I exit without
saying goodbye or so long or anything. She yells after me to be
careful how I cross the street, there are cars, and to be wary of
children, don't let them beat you. Once, a stranger lifted me on
his shoulders and asked me to read aloud the names on the
mailboxes. We went through many buildings, him and me. He told me
that he was looking for some family. When I returned home, they
shouted at me something awful and warned me not to associate with
strangers because they are dangerous, this is a fortress and we are
in it. Even our extended family don't visit. Mother and father
don't like it when they do. They set a table with all kinds of
alcoholic drinks and non-alcoholic beverages that we, the children
are allowed to consume but mother's eyes follow everyone to see if
they have touched anything and she doesn't like at all the mess
they make, these guests.

I don't pee at school because the urinals are
not clean or something. I don't remember why, I just know not to
pee. Mother tells me not to hold back, it isn't healthy but I
abstain on purpose. I want to pee at home. When I come back, mother
doesn't let me visit the restroom to get sorted out. That's how we
call it, "sorted out". It's a word the teacher Mina taught us, she
said that it is not nice to pee, better to get sorted out. Mother
adores this word and it became compulsory, because we are not
allowed to use foul language. So I ask permission to get sorted out
and mother takes a broom to me and beats me forcefully on the back
and all the neighbors stand at  the entrance door and watch
and I pee on myself and on the floor is this large yellow puddle in
which I stand. Mummy's broom gets all wet and the neighbors laugh
and mother sends me away to change my clothes, perhaps now I will
learn not to hold back at school. She takes down my trousers and I
am exposed to the jeering crowd, drenched and naked. It isn't a
good day, this one. I read all evening and I read at night and I
read during the morning. I read a lot throughout this not so good
day.

Mother could have been a famous author or an
important actress but instead she had us and did not become one.
She became a housewife. There is a lot of sadness and a lot of
anger when she tells us that and also how once she appeared in a
play as Pook the naughty dwarf and everyone complimented her and
urged her to join a professional troupe. She couldn't do it because
she was working in a shoe store on Mount Carmel to support her
father and her mother who didn't love her at all because she was
boyish. She wore her hair like a boy and dressed like a boy and was
as daring as a boy and she gulped huge quantities of salty soup and
three loaves of bread when she came back from work at the shop
owned by the Yekkes (German-Jews) whom she admired. When I was
born, the radio broadcast the proceedings of the Eichmann trial and
she called me "My Little Eichmann" but that was only in jest. These
Yekkes with their order and efficiency and table manners and how
she studied German and they all admired her in return. And now
this: a wailing baby and the dripping bed sheets of her first born
(you are not a child anymore!) already six years old and must grow
up and her fingernails gouging my veins on the inside of my arm and
all my blood rushing towards her and staining and she stares down
at her hand, a glimmer in her eyes wide open and I slowly extract
my arm from her grasp and she does not resist it. She just sighs
and brings some stinging violet iodine and smears it on the
lacerations. After some time they scar and all that remain are pale
and elongated mother traces.

So now I am reading and am in all my imaginary
kingdoms and writing horror poems that mother finds and stashes on
a towering cupboard to make me stop it because it's sick and she
doesn't want to see it again. She tears the books I borrow from the
public library and flings them out of the concrete bars that frame
our laundry room where we also dine on a tiny wooden table. Through
these bars she tears my realms apart and down to the shriveling
grass and I leave everything and gallop downstairs because I am
afraid that by the time I get to my shredded books someone will
abscond with them or the wind will scatter them or the rain. I find
them prostrate and wounded and I salve them with my spit to heal
them like mother's purple iodine. I think that maybe my saliva will
glue them back thick as it is but they remain the same, only now
their torn pages are also damp. Back at home father and I sellotape
the ruptured leaves and when I go to the library, I say all kinds
of lies or put on an innocent face so that the librarian Shula will
not flip through it and see our shoddy handicraft, my father's and
my own, even tough he has golden hands and fixes everything at
home. But I keep reading, sometimes five whole books a day. I am
completely uninterested in their content. I don't read even one of
them to its end, skip numerous paragraphs, don't even finish
thrillers or mysteries. Just scan the pages, dimly aware of the
words and father says to mother when she curses me under her
breath, what do you want from him, you don't understand him at all
and who can, he doesn't belong to us, he is from another planet. I
weep when I hear these words, my silent tears, not the cries I give
out when I am beaten and not the self-indulgent whimpering and see
how ugly you are when you are like that. No, this is a true release
between me and my pillow and I feel then how poor they are and how
much I should pity them and not the other way around, because I am
not from this world and I don't belong and they have to raise me
all the same. Even though they are proud of me because I am a star
pupil and give the keynote addresses in all the school and
municipal events and declare open and closed all the ceremonies and
from a tender age I had the voice of s radio announcer and am a
prodigy with a bright future. Mother herself tells me that when we
sit around the table and she looks my age she is so young and with
a boyish haircut and pink, taut skin on her high cheekbones. She
says that she is proud of me but not to let it go to my head, but
there is a change in her attitude towards me, like a new fear, like
I am out of the fortress now, unpredictable, from another world and
don't belong.

She used to tell us about Gamliel the Sage and
his adventures that always had an object lesson with his scrawny
and miserable goat and his stupid neighbors that he always tricked
and we would beg, mother mother, more and she graciously consented
and those were afternoons of magic and I felt no need to read, only
to listen to the stories of the Sage and his donkey and his son and
his goat and to sip from that sweetened peach-flavored drink she
made us.

But then she would say enough and ask who
touched the refrigerator and we would say not we but she knew. She
always pointed at us and said that we had touched the refrigerator
and we know we mustn't and how her life is being ruined by the need
to clean after us and then the beatings, the beatings. All our
body.

In the middle of the apartment we have a
floor-to-ceiling metal divider. Father welded it together from
metal leaves and metal vines and stuck a small aquarium full of
teeny fish and water and a plastic diver that gives off bubbles and
all kinds of shells and fine ground sand. Every morning, father
gets up and spreads smelly aquarium food with callused fingers over
the bubble-troubled water, rusty flakes that sink like feathers
straight into the gaping jaws of the frenetic fishes. Every week
one of them would remain stuck at the bottom or float and the
others would snap at it and we know it is dead and it is bloated
too. At night, I sleep across from this divider, on the side that
mother forbids to enter during the day and the flickering light
emitted by the electric all souls candle illuminates the diver and
the inky water and his loneliness and the bubbles and everything
and I watch it all until I fall asleep. Come morning, the room
beyond the divider is off-limits, only mother is scrubbing and
carefully dusting the nightly build-up off the expensive Formica
furniture. I am the only one who sleeps there at night, facing the
television set. Even guests are asked to watch this black-and-white
wonder from the outside. Until my bedtime, I sit overlooking them
all but don't take my socks off not to show my feet like irons and
I hope not to wet the sheets in front of everyone, anything but
that. Mother passes cookies to old Monsieur Yossef from Turkey who
talks incessantly. And so I doze off amidst the sounds of the TV
and of Monsieur Yossef. I have bad dreams and listen to mother and
father arguing I will pack my suitcases and leave you all tomorrow,
feel free, mother says, feel free to go. Tomorrow he doesn't. He
gets up at the middle of the night to go to work and before he
departs he straightens our blankets and I think that maybe he
kisses my cheek or forehead somehow, otherwise how did his stubble
scrape me it must have been a kiss.

The next day father brings me books from the
library of the Union of Construction Workers in Haifa that I never
visit. I do go with him to attend lectures at the Union and I ask
the lecturers smart questions and everyone is amazed and so is dad.
He inflates the way he always does when he is proud of me. Now in
the book he brought me there is a story about a king and clothes
and a kid who has the guts to cry even though it is the monarch and
everything: "The King is Naked". I read it a couple of times like I
don't believe that some kid will shout such a thing about the king
and what happened to him afterwards, surely he was scratched and
pinched at least to death. I contemplate his iron-like feet, petite
and rosy when he ascends to the gallows and how his head rolls
sprinkling gore all over the crowd but everything is frozen and no
one cheers like in the movies about the French revolution. Everyone
gapes at this kid's lips through which he said that the King is
Naked. There is something empowering and hopeful in this, as though
a goodhearted old fellow with long hair bends over me because he
notices that I am small and that I am bleeding profusely from my
arms and he gives me this magic spell, this faith.

I open my eyes and I see that mother has a
kerchief on her head, like she always wears when she is dusting.
She notices my stare but she sings boisterously and I know that I
am unnerving her by watching her do her chores. I know that soon
she will mete out what a child like me deserves.

Return

Night
Terror

1. The Doctor

He inserts the syringe into my jugular and
draws blood, spurting into the cylindrical container. Securely
seated on my chest, he then makes precise incisions around my
eyelids and attempts to extract my eyeballs in one swift motion. I
can see his round face, crooked teeth, and shiny black eyes,
perched under bushy eyebrows. A tiny muscle flutters above his
clenched jaw. His doctor's white robe flaps as he bestrides me and
pins down my unthrashing arms.

There is only the stench of sweat and the
muffled inhalations of tortured lungs. Mine. In my ears a drumbeat
and a faraway shriek, like a seagull being butchered in mid-flight.
My brain gives orders to phantom organs. I see them from the
corners of my bloodshot eyes: my arms, my legs, like beached
whales, bluish, gelatinous, and useless.

I scream.

I strike at him but he evades my thrust and
recedes into the murky background. I won't give chase. The doors
and windows are locked, alarm systems everywhere. He stands no
chance. He turns to vapor and materializes next to me in bed, clad
in his robe, eyes shut, a contented smile on his face.

This is my only chance.

I turn to my side, relieved that motility is
restored. I grab his slender neck. I feel his pulse: it's fast and
irregular. I squeeze. He grunts. And harder. He clasps my forearms
and mewls. Something's not right. The doctor never whimpers. Every
night, as he peels the skin off my face with delicacy and care, he
makes no sound, except belabored breathing. When he extracts tooth
after nail, castrates me time and again, injects detergents into my
crumbling veins, he does so inaudibly and expertly.

I hesitate.

"Max!"

Her voice.

"Max! Wake up!"

I can't wake up as I am not asleep. The
doctor's there, in our bed, a danger to us both. I must exterminate
him finally.

"Max! You are having another nightmare!
Please, you are hurting me!"

The doctor's head turns around full circle and
at the back of his flattened skull there is the face of Sarah, my
lover and my friend.

I recoil. I let go. My heart threatens to
break through rib and skin, its thrumming in my ears, my brain, my
eye sockets, my violated jugular.

I sleep.

2. Sarah