Fima

12. THE FIXED DISTANCE BETWEEN HIM AND HER

IN HIS DREAM HE SAW HIS MOTHER. THE PLAGE WAS A GRAY, neglected garden that extended over several low hills. There were parched lawns overgrown with thistles. And there were a few bare trees and traces of flower beds. Below him on the hillside was a broken bench, and next to it he saw his mother. Death had transformed her into a schoolgirl from a religious boarding school. From behind she looked very young, a pious girl in a modest long-sleeved dress that came down over her ankles. She was walking alongside a rusty irrigation pipe. At fixed intervals she stopped and bent down to turn on a tap. The sprinklers did not revolve, but merely released a thin spray of brownish water. Fima's task was to follow her down the hill and turn off each tap she'd turned on. So he saw her only from behind. Death had made her light and lovely. It had endowed her movements with grace but also with a certain childlike awkwardness. The sort of mixture of agility and clumsiness that is seen in newborn kittens. He called after her, using her Russian name, Lizaveta, her nickname, Liza, and her Hebrew name, Elisheva. To no avail. His mother did not turn around or react. So he began to run. After every seven or eight strides he had to stop, crouch down, and turn off a tap. The taps were made of something soft and slimy to the touch, like a jellyfish, and it was not water that dripped from them but a sticky liquid that felt like jellied fish stock. For all his running, breathlessly, like an overweight child, for all his shouts that echoed dimly in the gray distance, mingled at times with a sharp sound reminiscent of a snapping cord, it was impossible to reduce the fixed distance between him and her. He was overcome by the desperate fear that the pipe would never end. But at the edge of the wood she stopped and turned toward him. Her lovely face was the face of a slain angel. Her forehead glowed in the moonlight. A skeletal pallor covered her sunken cheeks. Her lipless teeth gleamed. Her flaxen plait was made of dry straw. Her eyes were hidden by the dark glasses of the blind. On her religious schoolgirl's uniform he could see dried blood where the wires had pierced her: her knees, her belly, her throat. As though she had been made into a stuffed hedgehog. She shook her head sadly at Fima and said, Look what they've done to you, stupid. She reached up with her dry fingers to remove the dark glasses. Terrified, Fima turned away. And woke up.