Free The Remains of Love by Zeruya Shalev

they are huddled together, clinging to each other like twins in their mother’s womb, and while she dithers in the doorway, stunned, the boy’s eyes open and scan her awkwardly, and then in response to the smile that has congealed on her lips, a smile is transmitted to her over her daughter’s back.
    Taking small steps she moves out of there, her gaze fixed on his face, and without turning her back on him, as if this were a holy place, she retreats stumbling to the kitchen and stands again by the window, her elbows on the cool marble. With shaking hands she washes her face in the kitchen sink, full as it is of dirty utensils, her hair dipping in a greasy frying-pan, and while it’s still shedding fetid liquids on her blouse she goes back there, clutching the door-frame and peering in, her eyes scanning the short legs of the bed, the colourful sheet decorated with figures from fairy tales, the feet lying side by side, like two pairs of twins, her daughter’s slender ankles beside the boy’s thighs, and her cut-off jeans against his flanks, her smooth and milky back, her angular shoulders, her arms hugging his chest, while his arms are laid now at the sides of his body and his eyes are closed again, as if the vision that he saw, of a grey-haired woman staring at him in horror, was a marginal interlude in an otherwise pleasant dream, but even with his eyes closed it seems to her he’s watching her, and even when his lips are closed it seems to her, with the same crazy certainty that she identified this morning in her mother, he’s repeatedly mumbling, Mum.
    Gideon, she whispers from the bedroom next door, putting the phone to her lips and he’s tense at once, has something happened? She says no, everything’s fine, forgetting even to mention her mother’s admission to hospital, but Nitzan, she adds and hesitates, wondering how to dress it up for him, Nitzan is here with someone, they’re asleep in her bed, it’s so strange . . . She tries to steer him cautiously towards the simpler extreme of the experience she’s had, and Gideon chuckles, oh, yes? Great, so she’s finally bringing him home, I told her she could take the initiative and not wait for him, and Dina seizes on this scrap of raw information, hard to chew though it is. What, she told you she had someone? She didn’t tell me anything, Gideon says. She met some guy called Noam not long ago, a friend of Shiri’s brother.
    Shiri’s brother? she repeats irritably, then he must have done his army service, at least five years older than her, is that acceptable to you? she sneers, hiding behind the tiresome details which aren’t the main issue for her; she knows precisely how old he really is, after all he’s Shiri’s twin. In the background she hears Gideon telling someone, I’ll be with you in a moment, it’s Dina, pronouncing her name in a somewhat meaningful tone. Who are you with? she asks, feeling suddenly suspicious, and he replies, I’m in the middle of a photo shoot, Dini, is there anything else? and she adds, yes, my mother’s in hospital, she fell over and knocked herself out, and this time he sounds more alarmed than she is, demanding to know the details. I’ll call in there on my way home, he promises her, although this isn’t the promise she was hoping for.
    Oh, Gideon, she sighs, putting down the phone and stretching out on the bed fully clothed. The warm breath that she detected in his voice arouses longing in her, and a sour taste in her throat as if she’s been drinking something contaminated, a drink she put a lot of time and effort into preparing, what a waste, and already too late, and it seems she herself doesn’t know what she’s referring to: too late to fall in love with each other, too late to bring a child into the world, too late for new life, but this contamination, wasn’t it always there? Oh, Gideon, if only we could start again, I’d do everything differently.
    Like a blank canvas the past is spread out before