Nati's evening

 

The door of the supermarket swung open, and a tall teenage boy strolled out, pulling his jeans up with his left hand, and carrying two full shopping bags with his right. It was no wonder the jeans kept on sliding off – he was painfully thin, but he did not look pale or weak. In fact, he was quite dark, the kind of skin that comes with tanning, not being born with it. His hair was curly and dirty blond, and bleached by the sun into a cap of cotton wool.

He crossed the road to the bus stop and settled to wait, kicking his flip-flops off for comfort.

Nati was just fifteen, but nobody would have guessed that, including at the garage, where they let him tinker with the engines and help out for a bit of a salary. He got the money in cash, in a long blue envelope, from the owner himself, but then so did half of his workers. Ashi didn’t like to pay tax, and griped on and on about it, as they worked, and he sipped his Turkish coffee. Then he would tip the dregs out onto the mud under a sickly palm tree in a huge pot sitting under the air conditioner, saying, “It’s healthy for it”, stub out his cigarette and go back to watching porn under the cover of his desk. He thought nobody knew; he also thought they had to respect him, because he provided livelihood for a dozen families. Neither was true. The previous teenage worker who manned the “out-of-my-kindness position”, which held not an ounce of kindness, and was in fact not too far removed from actual slavery in terms of hours, had climbed up on the roof, and lowered a camera down on a long cable to a window behind Ashi’s desk. When they had finished laughing, cursing and spitting in the direction of the office, the secretary came out, called them “bad boys”, and threatened to report them. Grudgingly, they dispersed, but nobody had forgotten the secret vice of their benefactor, who was getting ready to trade his BMW for a Rolls Royse. There was only one problem, however: a total and utter absence of any Rolls Royse models in Israel, even the oldest ones.

Nati jumped up when he saw the number fifteen approaching, and settled down in the back, where there was room for his legs, opposite a young Ethiopian mother with a toddler in tow. The child looked up at Nati, and his eyes got bigger and bigger as he took in his height.

“Do you have chewing gum?” – the kid asked.

Nati shook his head. “A pity…” – the toddler drawled. His mom smiled, then turned back to her phone. The kid stuck his tongue out at Nati.

In the front, three older ladies in extravagant clothes, one of them wearing a theatrical hat with a veil on top on jeans dungarees, another – a gypsy-style costume, and the third in strict business attire, but with a pink frilly blouse underneath, were having an animated conversation.

“I am telling you, it was when we came back from Eilat, when he decided he knew the way, the idiot…”

“No, it was after I had my first colon-what-do-you-call it… when you crap like a cholera victim for three days, then they stick a tube up your arse…”

“You’re both wrong. It was after my grandson nearly hung the dog, and my daughter sent him to me, because she was afraid she’d …”

Nati stuck his earphones deeper into his ears, as deep as they would go. He was exhausted after a day at the garage, and was hoping to sleep on his bus, even if it was for fifteen minutes. He still hadn’t decided what was worse – the noisy kids in the afternoons, or these ladies.

“So, Chayim was asking me, karaoke or a movie? Of course it’s karaoke, I said. There’s nothing to drink…”

Their conversation punctured his music so painfully that he caught himself jerking up to go and ask them… but what was the point. He didn’t. He also remembered that he had some homework to finish, and that nearly made him groan. Algebra… dreadful. His school was mercifully minimal, but still not altogether non-existent.  

The summer sun flooded the bus with its slanted rays, making people squint against it. Nati got off, shrugging his shoulders in the sudden swampy heat, feeling the rivulets of sweat starting again between his shoulder blades. Air conditioning inside the bus could make one forget the season… but at least it was air conditioned, unlike home.

The post box was full of letters and bills. He stuffed them inside the shopping bag without looking at them, and ran up to the fourth floor, just to test his resilience. It would serve him well in the army, this ability to sprint from zero to a hundred… “Just kidding, I’m not a car!” – he chuckled to himself, as he opened the door.

He was greeted, as always, with a smell of dirty diapers and an overflowing bin. He sighed. Some things would never change.

“I’m home!” – he announced to the empty living room.

His mom hasn’t gotten out of bed today, he could tell, just by how the dishes sat in the sink, thrown in haphazardly one on top of another. At least now she remembered her pills, most of the time.

Nati poked his door into the kids’ room. Rafi, Aliza and Amit were sitting on his bed and watching cartoons on their mother’s phone. When they saw him, they jumped up, dropping the phone, and surrounded him, Aliza climbing into his arms, and Amit protesting loudly, on the verge of a big tantrum.

“I got you burgers from the supermarket! And dry corn, to make popcorn. But you only get it after you clean up!” – he announced.

“Popcorn! Popcorn!” – Amit started jumping on the bed, but Rafi gently moved him onto the floor. “You’ll ruin the mattress!” – he chided. – “And then what will we do?”

Nati sighed again. His algebra homework was rapidly moving away into the moonlit evening, with its chances of being done today approaching zero. Those women on the bus… she shuddered. They didn’t let him get his nap…

He looked into his mother’s room. The dusty easels still stood by the wall, some with equally dusty canvasses, some – just with clothes, eerily similar to scarecrows. Or alien robots from some Sci-Fi book. The paints were still stern all over the floor, just as they were… No, he is not going to think about that.

Or about the day when his grandma Esther, his father’s mother, drove over all the way from Hadera, just to yell at their mom and hit her with her slipper, yelling at her to “think about the children, you rotten piece of chicken’s innards”, and some more in Arabic, which they didn’t understand. Then she ran the water in the bathroom for the longest time, and someone retched and vomited again and again, until everything went quiet, and his mom lay in bed, so quiet and so pale, and their grandma was shoving pots and pans in the kitchen, muttering to herself in two languages at the same time. Aliza had never stopped being afraid of Grandma Esther since then. “Because she hurt mom.”

“She saved mom, you dumbass”, - Rafi always said, and Amit closed his ears. He didn’t want to know.

The children never went into this room, because their father’s face stared at them from every easel, in oil paints and in acrylics, in pencil and in charcoal, with an army beret and with long hair, in Thailand and in Venice, in wedding attire and as a bar-mitzva boy. And even on the bedroom window, drawn in whiteboard markers, was their father’s profile on a body of a bird.

Only Nati could manage it – because he was the oldest, and frankly – because he had no choice. He lifted his mom, - she weighed almost nothing, especially after a car engine, - and carried her to the living room. It was easier than helping her walk. Something in her pills made her muscles resist moving.

He could not let the younger ones make popcorn in the heavy cast iron pan, so he still had to do that. Nati hated it when the children asked him permission to do things, as if he was the adult. He earned the money, and he did the household things, like laundry and dishes, so he had earned the honour, but it still felt wrong. It’s only because his mom basically checked out when… No. Mustn’t think about that, or shadows would start dancing in front of his eyes again, and then the spirit of madness would claim him, too, like it took his mom. Never, he vowed to himself, never-ever-ever.

Rafi served the burgers in the old plastic plates they all used as children, because all the ceramic plates were in the sink, and Amit squeezed the ketchup for everyone, because he had to prove he was “so strong!”. Aliza turned on the TV, even though Nati hated it. He grabbed the remote, and quickly switched it from the news channel to entertainment, mercifully fast enough for their mom not to realize. She hated the news.

Amit cuddled up with their mother in the big armchair, and she smiled down at him, a sad absent smile. But it was a smile, nevertheless.

Aliza began her daily recital of what each friend had said, and why, and what the teacher did. Nati nodded in all the right places, then got out his algebra, telling the little ones to go shower. Listening “with one ear” to the kids, just in case, he decided to at least to stopper the water in the sink and run it full, to soak the dishes. His mother still gaped at the TV with her regular absent look, a combined effect of the pills and whatever she was suffering from. He tucked the light blanket tighter around her feet, because they looked a bit blue, especially the toes, despite the heat.  Actors sang and danced on the TV, but he paid them no attention. Another day at the garage was coming too soon… he opened the book.

He woke up only when the kitchen window smashed, buckling under the heat. Thick black smoke was pouring out from the kitchen cabinet above the stove, with flames a meter high dancing right under, licking the other cabinets, while someone – someone as tall as him – was batting at it with a blanket, instead of covering it. “Cover it! You’re fanning it higher!” – Nati yelled, as his body propelled him towards the bathroom. The children! He could not carry all three! 

He dropped a wet and slippery Aliza on the bottom stair outside, making her twist her ankle and cry out in pain. She glared at him from inside her towel, tears rolling down her cheeks. “I’m naked!” – she wailed. “Never you mind that,” – he said gruffly, his throat full of smoke. He ran back in for Amit, and nearly collided with Rafi at the door. He was dragging the computer, and bashed Nati painfully on his hip bone with its corner. The neighbours began running up and down the stairs. Someone was pouring water onto the fire in the kitchen, spraying it up with the big bendy tap. Steam and smoke were choking Nati, and he couldn’t see a thing, but he could hear the fire hissing behind his back, being extinguished by the stranger. He carried his mother onto the stairs, even though she had tried to walk. He ran back up. He just had to make sure the fire was fully out, and see who was helping them.

Sirens blared outside.

There was nobody in the kitchen, but the cabinet was just smouldering. The fire was out.

“What an idiot…” – Nati thoughts were sluggish, from waking up in such a shock. “I left the frying pan on after I made popcorn… and I tell the kids they can’t be trusted. Idiot!”

Looking up to inspect the damage, he saw that the top cabinet was actually intact, even though he had seen it burn. So was the window. Even the soot was minimal. Something here didn’t make sense… who was the tall man in the kitchen? Where had he come from, in a house on the top floor with the door locked. This just cannot be right…

A suspicion made him feel cold inside.

Sneaking into his mother’s room, he stood in front of the easel that held the portrait of his father in the army beret. It was empty, a clean white easel with no dust on it whatsoever.

Someone laid a hand on his shoulder. He turned around, and looked into his mother’s grey eyes, absolutely lucid and feverishly bright.

“Don’t tell anyone, or there will be two officially diagnosed mental cases in this family. I know whom we saw… we have a trip to make tomorrow. To give thanks…”

Nati nodded. He just knew. A trip? She hadn’t left the house since…

His mother bent down and picked up a dusty purple army beret off the floor, then shoved it into Nati’s hands. “I don’t want you in combat, when the time comes… but this is yours, anyway.”