Free Motti by Asaf Schurr Page A

their names are like, anyway we called him Jimbo and that’s that, he was lying there under a tree in Grandma’s yard may she rest in peace, sleeping like he was dead, worked hard, poor guy, but if you took your eyes off him for a second he disappeared, you have to put those ones on a short leash, the agency told us that too, they said, if we had a Filipino we’d send him over, you can get an honest day’s work out of them, the Filipinos, but this one, look, keep a good eye on him and he’ll do the work, and he really did the work, all in all, but Grandma, her voice would cut out on her, she could lay in bed for an hour calling him, he would laze around in the yard or something, he once showed me a picture of his wife and kids, cute kids, who knows what’s with his wife, no way could I sleep quietly like that with my wife in another country, who knows what she’s doing there, and with who, but I’m still not married, don’t want to jinx it, may it come quickly, you know, and maybe with them it’s fine, a little on the side like that, because here, it’s a fact, he would sleep like a baby, and we ourselves were kids then, we didn’t think about stuff like that. In short, what was I saying, he was sleeping there under the tree with a Golani beret and one of those end-of-basic-training shirts, I think they make them especially for guys like him, no idea where he got his hands on it. In short, we came to get a cigarette off him, we came quietly, like little elves, and when we pulled out his bundle his passport fell out, and let me tell you, we stuck it in the tree with his hat two meters up, man, what a mess that was, two days he didn’t find it, what a mess, we only heard about it later, he turned the whole house upside down, for two whole days he wouldn’t leave the house, Grandma went nuts, but in the end he found it” (the voices get weaker and weaker now, at the end of the corridor is another corridor, at its end the dining hall), “told all his friends how the immigration police screwed with him, all over town they took it, in the end they stuck it in the tree, his passport, because they were afraid to hand it over to him, that’s what he told everyone, said he told them they’d better watch out for him, he’d fuck them over, to the police he said that. Only we know the truth, but go tell him that now, they made him a national hero, like he threatened the police and all, afterward you couldn’t get a day of work out of him. But look, we weren’t bad kids. We left him a shekel for the cigarette, like at a kiosk” (according to the laws of physics, sound waves and all that, the voice couldn’t carry to Motti’s cell throughout this whole story, but in a book it carried well enough, Motti heard every word, the laws are different here, maybe the pages echo or something).
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    Hours later, at night, Motti lay in his cell, listening to the faint noises or snores and moans and sleeping breaths, and was consumed with regret and flooded with fantasies and so forth, and was nevertheless happy. In his way, he was happy.

34
    Edna has a yeast infection.
    If I wanted to, I could slice her life into strips of realism.
    But not because she’s a woman. Because she’s a character.
    She has a yeast infection, this is quite irritating. And on her right leg the veins form the map of a secret land. She loves her children, and even though their constant demands are sometimes more than she can handle, it turns out they aren’t more than she can handle. As evidence: she complies. Even if not always happily. Her brown hair splits at the ends if she doesn’t insist on cutting it regularly, therefore she insists on cutting it at least once a month. And once every two to three months she goes to Chaim’s salon, who implores her to dye it, and once every two to three months she refuses. Except for that time she assented, and afterward