About the Night by Anat Talshir

Author:Anat Talshir
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781503936034
Published: 2016-05-31T23:00:00+00:00

Mano kept his promise and took Nomi in his car for her first visit to Tel Aviv, which was hugely pleasurable for her. On the way home, he picked up a pretty girl he knew from the pharmaceuticals factory, and Nomi took consolation in the conversation they had, two irresponsible adults talking as though a girl was not sitting in the backseat. They discussed someone they knew who had gotten pregnant and someone else who had had an abortion.

That evening, in her bed, Nomi hugged the new shoes Uncle Mano had bought her, and once she’d found the perfect balance between the coolness of the room and the warmth of the bed, she burrowed down and closed her eyes. It was then, as the headlights of passing cars shone light through the slits of the blinds on her window and Nomi had very nearly drifted into sleep, that she suddenly solved the riddle. All at once, and with great clarity, she understood the secret they had all been keeping from her, that her mother had had a miscarriage. The baby in her mother’s womb had fallen out, and Menash had learned about it over the phone from his brother, and Lila had been summoned to look after Margo, whose womb had emptied out. Nomi wondered how the baby had fallen out and what they had done with it.

What this meant was that her mother had been pregnant. Her mother, whom Nomi thought looked too old for that, had had a baby inside her, and nobody had told her a thing about it. So what other things had they kept from her? Suddenly, her world felt uncertain; perhaps she should question everything around her. Perhaps her father didn’t really go to the oil fields, perhaps a baby had actually been born and given up for adoption or had been born too tiny, the kind they keep in incubators. After all, as Lila had told her, wherever there was one lie there were surely more to follow.

She tried to recall exactly how Lila had put it and played with the words until they were more or less as Lila had uttered them: “A lie is like a pain: the first arrives and brings others with it.” Or maybe she’d said it like this: “Lies are as despicable as pain. They never come alone, always with others.”

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