Zion's Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature

In the Mirror ^{Rotem Baruchin}

On Thursday, Mika, who was my cat, mine and Liron’s, got killed. One of us, we didn’t know who, left her carrier open on the way to the vet, and in one moment Mika busted loose, bolted out of the cage and onto the street. She was run over immediately.

When we got home, Liron headed straight to the sink to do the dishes. There were no dirty dishes in the sink, so she got all the nice dishes from the top shelf and scrubbed them. After that, she went on, working through the bottom shelf, even though the bottom shelf dishes were sparkling clean. She emptied the saltshaker and washed it. She cleaned all the spice jars and the egg tray in the fridge. She washed the dishes for two and a half hours, crying the whole time.

Mika was originally Liron’s cat, not mine. When we moved in together, I adopted her, and Liron used to say that “now she has two mommies.” Mika liked scaring us to death by sneaking into bed between us and by licking our toes during breakfast. She loved toppling glasses from the edge of the table. She loved playing with Liron’s chains until they got completely tangled. She loved being petted behind the ears and scratched under the chin. She loved attention of any kind.

Liron went to the nearby hardware store and came back with the expensive salad serving bowls I wanted to buy last week before she had said, “Danielle, we don’t have three hundred shekels, and we hardly ever eat salad.” It was only when she unpacked them and started washing them with hands already red and wrinkled from water that I realize that I would have to crack the mirror.

The thought made me feel tired. The last time I cracked the mirror was only two years before, and it took me over a week to get over the terrible fatigue. I lay in bed with red eyes, staring at the ceiling, getting up only to go to the bathroom. Fortunately, Liron didn’t see the cuts on my hand. It took her physically carrying me to the doctor’s—I was too weak to walk—and his not finding anything wrong before she could be persuaded that all I needed was some rest.

When night fell, and Liron’s weeping from the den finally died down, I stood in front of the mirror, trying to delay the inevitable while examining the oh-so-smooth spotless surface, the ancient gilded frame, my own familiar reflection.

Liron hated the mirror. She thought it was ugly and old fashioned. I didn’t like it either, for completely different reasons. At first I loved looking at it, especially after cracking it. The first time I did it I was ten years old, after destroying—in a fit of rage—the doll Nana Chana left me, the only thing she gave me other than the mirror. Now, I wouldn’t crack the mirror for something as silly as that. I did it then, and for months after I would sit in front of the mirror holding the doll, enchanted, looking at the other Danielle who put the fragments in a small jug by her bed and would occasionally take them out and touch them. Once, she cut her finger on one of them. When she grew up and would look in the mirror, I would study her reflection, comparing it to my own. Same red hair, same green eyes, but something in the eyes was different, and it wasn’t just that she couldn’t look right back at me.

I stopped watching that Danielle. I had thought she would grow up to be much like me, and it would be boring to look at her. But things turned out differently. She went to a different high school, studied nursing, and married a doctor. A man. I stopped looking at her because I could no longer see myself in her cold eyes when she put her hair up in a tight bun every morning. It bothered me, seeing how different from me she became over such a small thing. I didn’t look much at the others, either, since I had Liron.

Liron, I reminded myself. I’m doing this so Liron won’t be unhappy. I thought about one more minute, gathering my strength. And then I made a fist. I hit the mirror hard, concentrating on Mika, thinking about her fur, white with gray spots, about her quivering whiskers, a soft purr under the blanket. The mirror cracked. The sudden pain in my hand followed the sharp sound of breakage. But the little crack didn’t stay on my side. It faded into the mirror. And then a different Danielle looked at me from the other side. Yet she wasn’t looking at me, but at the small crack in her mirror. Her hand wasn’t bleeding, and there was a confused expression on her face. She was wondering what had happened, I knew, wondering what she is doing there. And then she heard Liron cry louder again from the other room, confusion turned to sorrow, and she left the mirror and went again to hug and comfort and pack.

On my side, Liron had stopped crying, and a small white cat with grey spots stood for a moment in the door, licking herself before making her way to the bed. I looked at her for a long moment, smiling, until Liron appeared in the doorway. I quickly hid my bleeding hand.

“Whatcha doing?” she asked, coming up behind me. She put her arms around my waist and looked at our reflection in the mirror. She didn’t see what I saw on the smooth surface—the empty room, the sounds of crying and begging from the other room, followed by shouts, a door being slammed shut.

“Looking at my pretty girl,” I answered, and turned into her hug, turning my back on the mirror. Liron smiled against my lips. “Flattery won’t get you anywhere. It’s your turn to do the dishes.”

I would spend more time looking before Liron became mine. I was curious to know if the mistakes I fixed, the errors I erased, were justified for me. I looked at them often, as if to make certain, with evil satisfaction, that they were miserable, so that I could be happy. I would look at the Danielle who made the mistake of choosing biology instead of communications as her major in high school, so she never ended up getting close to Shiri Rosenstein, never kissing her on the lawn. She lived with a man and would often look at the mirror to avoid looking at him. He hugged her at night while he slept and she would lie awake, looking at the mirror, and I knew that she couldn’t understand why she wasn’t satisfied. I would look at the Danielle who decided to study gender instead of literature. She was a little plumper than I and lived with an angry woman who’d shout at her. I would look at the Danielle who had refused the job offer at the new publishing house because she was afraid it would be too big a risk. She, like me, met Liron, but Liron left her six months later after yet another fit of rage. She would edit, mostly at nights, sitting bleary-eyed in front of the computer, drinking a lot. I was certain that she would get fired soon.

The need I hated in myself, to always make sure the other Danielles were unhappy, disappeared when Liron came into my life. It was a month after we moved in together, and right after we hung a sign with our names on it over the door, she wouldn’t stop complaining about it. “Why do we need a mirror in the bedroom?” she complained. “Why this mirror? It’s so ugly.” I told her that it was a family heirloom and that it had sentimental value—which was true, so I felt only slightly guilty.

On the evening when she broke the mirror, Liron waited for me in the kitchen when I got home, and when I saw her face, I immediately knew she did something to the mirror. But she was so pale and frightened that I also knew that it wasn’t on purpose. Liron said that she tried to get some cardboard boxes she realized she would never unpack onto the top shelf, and one of them fell, hit the mirror, and broke it. “The broken remains are there,” she said. “I didn’t know whether to clean… maybe you want, I mean, to patch it up… or maybe keep them in a box and put a new mirror in the frame. I’m sure we can fix the frame….”

My suspicion was confirmed when we entered the bedroom. The mirror was on the floor, next to the cardboard box that had broken it, where it fell. It was intact. There were no shards on the carpet and not a single crack on its smooth face, which reflected Liron’s astonished expression. She looked at me, confusion and fear on her face, and rubbed her eyes. Her hands went, on their own, to wander on the mirror’s smooth, perfect, surface.

“You must have only thought you broke it,” I tried.

“No, no….I’m sure, it was here… and there were shards all over the floor.” She pointed, afraid. “And the frame, it was here, in two pieces….”

“You dreamed it.”

“I did not dream it.”

It took me a long time to calm her down.

At night we lay with Mika snuggled between us, her back to my belly, her soft paws resting on Liron’s chest. Liron claimed that was uncomfortable. “I have scratches on my boob,” she complained, inspecting her body in the mirror in the morning. I smiled when she went to shower and I went to examine myself in the mirror. The weakness was not as bad this time—Liron barely noticed, but I still saw the unnatural pallor of my skin, the fatigue in my motions. Pain still pulled in my hand. Liron bandaged it earlier—I had to break a plate while washing the dishes to explain the cut. Cracking the mirror took so much energy. I hoped I wouldn’t have to do it again soon.

A need I didn’t understand led me back to the other Danielle, the latest one. She was standing in front of the mirror, looking at her expression with eyes red with tears. The bed was made—apparently, Liron had not come back that night. Suddenly, I felt the full weight of the guilt, as I have never felt it after cracking the mirror. I didn’t understand why I felt that way. She was just another Danielle, a mistake. And it was my right to fix my mistakes. It wasn’t my fault Liron wasn’t with her now. “There are so few people who can change their lives, choose their options,” Grandma said when she gave me the mirror. “You should be proud to be one of them.”

I touched the mirror, its perfect smooth surface, looking at a crack that only existed on her side. “Sorry,” I said, even though I knew she couldn’t hear me.

I sorrowfully turned my eyes from the other Danielle, who kept looking at the mirror. Suddenly my back tingled, and I froze, turned around slowly. The other Danielle wasn’t looking at her reflection. She was looking at me. I was sure of it. Her eyes focused on me with pure hatred. I stared at her, frozen, stunned, trying to understand how she could look back at me. Her look was cold and furious, and she balled her hand into a fist. Fear suddenly ran in my veins, and I reached out to stop her, screaming, “No!”

She was smiling at me while she broke the mirror.

Liron lies so close, but there’s a wall between us. Her back is to me, stiff and upright. She’s been so cold to me since Mika, and I can’t help but wonder whether one day she’ll look at me again with love in her eyes. We don’t know which of us left the carrier open, but I know she blames me. I want to hug her and erase the pain she’s feeling, to be happy and to make her happy. But instead I cry silently, and my tears fall on the sheets, soak into the mattress, disappear into the night.

And as I stop looking at her and turn around, refusing to sleep facing the frozen back, I wonder if it all could have been different. If only I could change it, the brief, stupid moment when the cage opened and Mika darted out of the cage and into the street. I think about it as I fall asleep, while my eyes rest on the crack that suddenly appeared, only two days ago, on the old mirror that my Grandma left me.