Free Motti by Asaf Schurr Page B

regretted it. Chaim offered to dye everything back, but Edna decided to live with the results. When she was younger and single she was happy to hunker down in the bathroom for a half hour to read a book or magazine. Now she doesn’t do this. Over the years her mother’s wrinkles have started to crease the sides of her mouth. At first she did silly exercises with her lips, ten or even twenty minutes each day, but it didn’t help. She gave up. She once suffered from an ingrown toenail on her right foot (Menachem, too, same thing), and when she brushes her teeth too hard her gums bleed. Her stomach, which was flat, has been curving out nicely since the second pregnancy, but this doesn’t bother her. She loves an omelet and bread with cream cheese and olives, like her dad would eat when he got home from work. And once, after their first child, she shaved her genitals entirely, to make them like a little girl’s, but Menachem didn’t care one way or the other, and so she let the hair grow back. It itched horribly. She was a very serious girl and now she’s only a somewhat serious woman. When she was a serious girl she had a cat named Fifi that got lost one day and never came back. Her parents bought her a hamster that ran restlessly in the hopeless wheel in its cage, and after two and a half weeks died from an intestinal virus. She buried him in the garden because she felt that this is what serious girls must do, but she didn’t cry. Her parents praised her, what a strong girl, and she hurried inside and locked herself up in her room, so they’d think she was secretly crying there. The truth is she read a book and gnawed on the nails of her left hand. She slept with four men before Menachem. Not all at once. (One of them was actually a teenager. She too was a teenager then. It didn’t hurt her. She didn’t love him. Or not in retrospect. At the time, when they broke up, she thought she would die. Now she laughs about it, if she thinks about it at all. But laughs with longing. Not for him. For the great drama of adolescence, when everything is so critical. Now it’s hard to take anything so seriously.) At the office she puts on a brave face. At home she’s a bit tired. Five or six years already she hasn’t slept more than five or six hours at night. If they would leave her alone she thinks she could sleep an entire day and wake up fresh as a flower. Actually she would wake up after six hours, maybe six and a half. If she were to survive a plane crash in isolated, ice-capped mountains, she wouldn’t be disgusted by cannibalism. One must survive, that much is clear. Should she not survive, she wouldn’t kick up a fuss if the others were to eat her flesh. What does she care? She would be dead already. She thinks that the people at work don’t know that everything could be otherwise with her, that she easily could go mad or scream, that she could fill her life with wonderful adventures whose nature she doesn’t bother to imagine now, but if they were to happen to her, she would enjoy each and every moment. Or she thinks that perhaps the people at work know her very well, actually, and there aren’t hidden things like these in her, her life is the only life she could choose. Then she gets a bit sad, then she mocks herself for her pretensions, for her childishness, for these hidden aspirations that aren’t appropriate (she thinks) for a woman of her age. But without doubt she could fly to Africa to hunt elephants, only she’s not interested in this, and what kind of person wants to kill elephants in the first place. So maybe she couldn’t after all. Sometimes she shaves her armpits. Her legs every week. And bleaches her facial hair. And visits her parents once every few days, even without the children. In the evening her back hurts a bit and her legs hurt. In the morning she drinks strong coffee, to shake off sleep and her secret dreams, and only then