At Night's End by Nir Baram & Jessica Cohen

Author:Nir Baram & Jessica Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2020-08-19T00:00:00+00:00

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When his fever climbed, his mother took him in a taxi to see Dr. Tzitzianov, who treated all the neighborhood children. Dr. Tzitzianov’s face was centered around the most enormous, lumpy nose he’d ever seen, and she always pinched his cheeks and whispered that he should take care of his mother, whose blood sediment levels were too high and who wasn’t as strong as she used to be. Every time he walked into her office, he was struck by his memory of that day in fourth grade, when his parents had rushed him to the clinic early in the morning and she’d listened to his lungs and pronounced: “Get to the hospital immediately, the boy has pneumonia.”

His parents looked at each other and their faces turned pale as quickly as his had reddened. His father, half asserting, half asking, said, “But everything will be all right?” in the loud, throaty voice he sometimes used for political arguments at Yonatan’s grandmother’s house on Friday nights, and he looked like a scolded child. The doctor said everything would be fine, he was a strong boy, but they had to take him immediately. She waved them out of the office, leaving Yonatan to secretly celebrate when he realized he wouldn’t have to go to school for several days.

He listened to his father panting as he carried him down the steps, and saw beads of sweat on his forehead. He put his cheek closer to his father’s face and it stuck to his skin, and he became aware of something he usually did not notice: his father was not as young as most of his friends’ fathers, and he was obviously feeling guilty about not bringing him to the doctor sooner, so he wasn’t going to complain. But he had trouble tolerating his father’s weakness and insisted on walking to the car. His mother and father supported him on either side, and he looked around and amused himself with the idea that he was seeing the skies of Beit HaKerem—always glimpsed through the green manes of trees—for the very last time.

His father honked and cursed and swerved from one lane to the next, and his mother said they should have called an ambulance. She reminded his father of something David Ben Gurion said to his driver: “Drive slowly, I’m in a hurry.”

“May he be buried a thousand times,” his father hissed, “that midget bastard.”

They looked pathetic and funny, and Yonatan wanted to reassure them, because their tone frightened him more than his own frail body. Now that the mask of parenthood had fallen from their faces, he realized he preferred it to this startled expression. “Stop going crazy,” he considered scolding them, “you’re scaring me.” Their extreme concern surprised him, and he was intoxicated by the recognition that he was loved after all, and that he was the center of their being. He considered repaying them in kind but was too tired.

He spent two weeks in hospital, with a needle in his arm attached to “a balloon where the water keeps running out.

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