Motti by Asaf Schurr Todd Hasak-Lowy

Author:Asaf Schurr, Todd Hasak-Lowy
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2008-12-29T16:00:00+00:00

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 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

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