The bell rang, and the glass door of the clinic banged, admitting the new visitors. An older Chassidic couple, the father bedecked in long black robe and funny short trousers tucked into white stockings, the mother – with a tightly-wound scarf on a shaved head – escorted a teenager of about fifteen years old. The girl looked worried, her face – puffy from prolonged crying. The mother nudged her towards a cozy couch with green cushions, and the girl sat down heavily. Her shoulders slumped down, and she wrapped one leg around the other, as if to make herself appear smaller. Then she folded her arms on her chest and tucked her chin in. Meirav, the secretary, offered her a cup of water, and caught a glimpse of cloudy blue eyes behind thick glasses in a childish pink frame. The girl shook her head and retreated even further into the depths of the couch.
“We have an appointment with Dr. Jane”, - the father said, extending a pale hand with the health insurance card in it.
“Just one moment, please.” – Meirav got up from her computer again, and peeked around the door.
“Yes, yes, I heard. Let them in.”
The psychiatric clinic was securely hidden in a tangle of bougainvillea, lavender and rosemary, sequestered from the worried eyes of the public in a cozy cul-de-sac somewhere in the middle of Katamon. Should a curious pedestrian leave behind the hustle and bustle of the “Valley of Ghosts” street, aka Emeq Refaim, as well as its curious little shops and restaurants, and walk through a little playground donned with massive prehistoric succulents, then turn right towards Rachel-Our-Mother Street, but not quite reach it, then sneak behind the last working laundromat in the whole of Jerusalem, they would end up right behind the clinic. In the overgrown garden the yearly battle was just beginning at this time of year, fought between the slugs and Meirav the secretary, who hated stepping on them every time she went out for a smoke. She tried every recipe in the book, from a half-buried bottle of beer to heaps of table salt at the door, but the slugs still came back, year after year, clinging to her shoes, and making her yell in frustration at the endless Jerusalem sky.
“It’s from the looney house” – the neighbours would shrug, and hurry on without awarding the clinic as much as a glance, as if just looking at the place where those most unfortunate people go to get help, would infect them with some unknown malady. Meirav would go back in, wipe off the remains of the slugs from the soles of her shoes on the rug the doctor brought from her trip to Norway, with a cute snowman and a cartoony deer, and put away the cigarettes until her next break.
Dr. Jane looked nothing like her name.
Short, plump, and with her hair dyed in that particular scandalous red that only the elderly Russian speakers could muster, she preferred seeing her patients while sitting on a horseshoe-shaped cushion she ordered from a special site for “vertically challenged people” – it made her look taller, and therefore altogether more credible and trustworthy. The pillow was also famous for preventing hemorrhoids, but unfortunately, in the doctor’s case it was already too late for prevention. Dr Jane assumed her throne behind the desk, and Meirav admitted the patient and her parents. The father shook his head and remained immersed in the dark-brown volume with miniscule letters he had brought with him. The mother pushed the girl forward, then almost dragged her into the room, hissing at her in Yiddish. The girl lost her balance, and almost fell into the chair, and Dr. Jane noted that down. Those awkward moves… they were a symptom, too.
For a while, the doctor listened to the story of the girl’s misfortune, being bullied at school, suffering from acne and episodes of vomiting before exams, then, for the last month, seeing things which weren’t there. Dr. Jane was playing with her pen, trying not to look at the tears running down the girl’s face. Feiga, a name from an age long gone and buried, just like her father’s name – Zalman, and mother – Yenta. Seriously? A Yenta? Dr Jane suppressed her curiosity; this was not the time or the place. Then, she ordered the mother out of the room.
At first, Feiga just kept on crying silently. Then, feeling a bit braver, she told the doctor about the red snake she saw moving in her classmate’s hair; it had glowing red eyes and a forked tongue. It was so scary, and the classmate laughed and called her “cray-cray” and “looney”. She also saw hairy worms on her pillow, which only came at night, when nobody was there to see; and the kitchen was crawling with ants. She spoke about the taunting of her classmates, about her being too fat to have friends (the doctor shrugged, thinking, “if that’s fat, I must be a hippo”), and all the girls hoping for a good shidduch had to be really thin, or no good boy would want to marry them. She shared the story of her youngest brother, who was destined to become a great rabbi, she just knew he would, and her older siblings, who were all married, except her 19-year-old brother who lived in the yeshiva. And, of course, she had to mention how the world would change when the Messiah finally comes… “I know he is already here; I just know.” Then, as if a balloon popped inside her, she exhaled, looked at the doctor, and asked directly: “Am I crazy?”
“I don’t think so,” – answered the doctor kindly, “but you will have to take some pills, so the snakes and worms don’t come back, OK?”
Feiga seemed to collapse inside herself even more.
“Nobody must know, doctor. Please… it’s such a shame for my family.”
Then the doctor stopped playing with her pen and wrote down one single word, and with that one word she crossed out Feiga’s hopes of the future, husband and children, education and a job. Well, maybe a husband would come, but he would have to be equally unwell, and the children? Who knows… Then, she wrote a prescription and handed it to the girl.
“If this doesn’t help, we will try something else.” – and she nodded at the door. Feiga tripped over herself again while getting off the chair, and barely regained her balance, then shuffled towards the door in an old woman’s gait.
She was the last patient of the day, so Dr. Jane wrapped herself in her flowery shawl against the evening chill, and floated off towards her old Renault, leaving Meirav to shut down the computers and lock up. There was shopping to be done (online), then a walk by the promenade with her dog, and finally a gusty supper with her balding and bespectacled husband, who could barely disconnect himself from his work at the bank.
The dog took a while, and the steak was overdone, but all in all, it was not a bad day, Dr Jane remarked to herself as she lowered herself into a bathtub. The smell of the cheap imitation of a pine forest filled her nostrils, and she lifted up her glass of wine. Tchaikovsky was streaming in from the built-in waterproof speakers. It was a luxurious enough life, definitely more than she ever hoped for, when she demolished her old life into little pieces to come to Israel in 1993.
She closed her eyes, savouring the crispy clean smell of her pillow. Changing the sheets every other day was one more guilty pleasure of the woman who grew up so deprived that even an ice cream cone had been a rare luxury. In the sixties, her mother had washed the dishes with baking soda and a tiny greasy cottonwool, and they were never quite clean. Her clothes had smelled, too, - washing powder had been too expensive, and they had no washing machine, anyway. Cleanliness was now her motto, her birthright, her reward, her daily excitement and pleasure. Yet, the sleep refused to come.
She sat up and looked at the full moon. Of course… as always. If only her colleagues knew, they would have died laughing, but every month Dr. Jane spent at least one night tossing and turning – the night of the full moon. As if she was some medieval witch, about to be burnt at the stake, or have sex with a black bearded goat. How absurd.
She got out of bed – it was useless to keep on trying – and poured herself a cup of tea. Her son, who grew up as Misha, then briefly became Michael, then Mendel, and now again Michael – was travelling in Thailand. She chuckled to herself, names were a funny thing, and she had been always interested in them. Her own original name, Yevgenia, was too long for her brief American experience, and when she followed Misha-Michael-Mendel to Israel, she decided to still be known as Jane in Israel, too. Then, uninvited, the girl’s name came to her mind. Feiga meant “a bird”. And what a fragile bird she looked, too.
Something was wrong, and she just couldn’t put her finger on it. There was more going on than her usual monthly insomnia. Dr Jane took out her phone and checked her son’s Instagram. His smiling face, framed with curly hair and a beard, together with his boyfriend’s face, filled the screen. She sighed. Once, that was a mental disorder, too, even though she never agreed with the books. Once she got over the shock, she fully accepted them, which is more than could have been said about the boy’s father, snoring now peacefully in the next room, as men usually did. The instinct, which she privately termed “my inner medieval witch” kept on nagging, pinching, whispering inside her. She got up and checked all the electric connections in the house – nothing. The door was locked, the bills -paid, the pills – taken. Her wallet and phone were in place… So what is the warning about this time? A few times in her life those premonitions had saved their lives, like when they went hiking in 1987, and in the middle of the night she woke up sobbing and forced her husband and son back into the car, away, away from that place – only to see a massive pine tree collapse onto the place where their tent had just been at four o’clock in the morning. The “inner witch” had warned her when her parents were about to pass, when her best friend almost got raped on the street in Moscow, (“How, how did you know?” – she had sobbed) - and even when her dog had come over, begging to be adopted. Yet, Jane would never admit to any “sixth sense” or any other unscientific nonsense like that. Still the question remained - what was it this time? Her instinct informed her that she should be warned, but offered no course of action. She reached for her secret, kept under her nightgowns in the bottom drawer, the last packet of cigarettes left over from ten years ago. Then, she had forced herself to stop, leaving this little bit for emergencies, mixed with a generous dose of weed. As she inhaled with relish, the pale face of the girl with a bird name floated in front of her eyelids, pink glasses and all, once again, and she vowed she would investigate it first thing in the morning. Then the sleep took her, as if no warnings ever existed.
“Can I come and observe your daughter at school? I am afraid the diagnosis is incomplete.” – she heard herself say.
There was a long silence on the other side, then the mother said, hesitantly, “I will speak to the teacher, but nobody must know. And…” – she stuttered.
“I know, I have to dress modestly. Don’t worry, I know the rules, my son is… was… religious. His name is Mendel.”
If the change in attitude shocked the mother, she did not let it be known. Already by 11 AM Jane found herself standing by a beautiful building with columns, utterly disfigured by a number of portable classrooms attached to it in the most haphazard manner, and a total absence of any green vegetation. The classroom teacher, a wilting woman of about fifty, with a steel gaze and an upright stance, agreed to cooperate for the benefit of her most miserable student. Jane gave her a brief explanation on the things she was looking for. The teacher nodded solemnly, and promised the truth would be dug out at once.
Then, Jane stopped at the hardware shop, and acquired herself a magnifying glass.
By midday, she was standing in Feiga’s bedroom.
Musty, stuffy air, windows that were last washed for Pesach seven months ago. Piles of dirty laundry left by Shabbat guests were heaped up in every corner. Dark-brown rag doll was sitting on the girl’s pillow… The rotting wood of the cupboard door revealed tiny worms – and they were indeed hairy, and they were indeed spilling over onto her pillow. “Carpet beetles” – the name came to her in English, from another place and time. Dr. Jane nodded to herself, then, her face white with rage, she threw the window open. She fancied throwing the magnifying glass at the woman’s face, as she was mumbling something about the girl’s responsibilities and “training for being a mother”. Indeed, the living room and the couple’s bedroom were in a much better state. She managed to control herself, and asked for a knife. Worried-looking Yenta handed her one, covered in yellow incrustations, which looked like last year’s cheese. Shaking with disgust, Jane sliced the pillow open, and out of it came clumps of decaying cotton wool, covered in a multitude of worms. “Your daughter is not unwell… but maybe you are! I should have known… from how she was quaking in fear of you.” – Dr. Jane demanded her prescription back, then shredded it into tiny pieces. Yenta looked away, wiping her cracked hands on a yellow kitchen towel. She did not speak again until Jane left the house still shaking with rage, and vowing to alert the child protection services at once. She drove home in a hurry, feeling as if those worms were clinging to her own skin, and immediately threw all her clothes into the washing machine on the hottest and the longest cycle, then scrubbed her body in the shower until not a trace of that feeling remained. “Perhaps it’s me who should be medicated” – she chuckled to herself, as she wiped her blazing hair on a deliciously soft towel. The drawer with her guilty secret was beckoning, but she managed to restrain herself that night.
Now, there was nothing to do, but to wait for the school to act. Sitting at her table in the office, Dr. Jane erased the terrible word in the girl’s file, applying the white-out generously, layer after layer, wondering whether the mother had cleaned the room, after all. She decided to wait with that phone call to the social workers… maybe she could sort this out herself.
The phone call came three days later. The classroom teacher questioned, bribed, punished and invited parents over, without the girl ever suspecting that anything was amiss, until she managed to catch them in the act. “Those teachers…” – Dr. Jane jokingly recommended the woman to join the Mossad, to which she replied with a smile that could be felt even over the phone.
She had grabbed the girl with the curly hair – just as she was fixing the snake on with thin rubber bands. The used batteries were still rolling around on the grey stone counter in the school toilet. A highly sophisticated Japanese robot had been purchased online by the girl’s older brother for a Purim costume. He then forgot all about it, but his sister tormented Feiga daily, in the full knowledge of her friends. It was enough to lift a strand of her curly hair for the snake to become visible, hissing and sticking out a forked tongue at Feiga. She was not hallucinating…. She was being gaslighted. But what about her tripping up? New glasses were definitely in order, she thought, remembering how hazy the girl’s gaze looked. She simply could not see where the chair legs were… The mother was hopefully intimidated enough by now to even invest in proper glasses, perhaps even something stylish enough for a teenage girl. She made Meirav call the family again and insist, doctor’s orders. No wonder the snake had looked real to her…a wave of sizzling anger flooded Dr. Jane’s body all the way to her cheeks, then receded. “Damned hormones”, - she thought. “Or is it the red hair?” When her son was still walking the world as Mendel, he told her that in Judaism red heads were seen as people with a tendency for anger, and even King David himself was a red head. Yet, it was not necessarily a bad thing… “Tell them I will be making a visit again in a month,” – she told Meirav. “And they better keep her room clean!”
That night, Dr. Jane smoked
again, almost emptying her secret stash of weed. The “inner witch” was a force
to be reckoned with, and today she demanded a reward for playing detective. Dr.
Jane inhaled the scratchy smoke, coughing and thinking of her grandma, a simple
woman who also “just knew”. She knew when the bread was fully risen and had to
be baked at once, she knew which boy was good to date and which wasn’t… and she
even knew that the Nazis were not coming to be nice and friendly, and saved her
entire family with that premonition. Dr. Jane wished – for the millionth time –
that she could have had a daughter, to share this intuition with, to pass on everything
she had, body and soul. If only… from socks with pink bows to long hair to making
cookies together, a granddaughter would have been such a miracle. These days,
many things were possible… her family name would not live on, but at least the
genes might. Dr. Jane had the same grandma to thank for her
original hair hue, the colour of Jaffa oranges they were occasionally able to buy in
the USSR. People are really somewhat alive for as long as at least someone remembers them, and for as long as someone carried their genes.
Her phone flashed, and she picked it up. “Mama, you’re never going to believe this…” – her gay son had written her a long message, which she had to keep on clicking on to read until the end. “Screw the genes,” – she replied. – “I am buying a ticket first thing tomorrow.”
