Small Change – Yehudit Hendel
Nobody on the street could believe he’d sold his magnificent stamp collection. They said he must have bought land, houses, shops, diamonds. There were stamps worth four carats, they said. Maybe five, they said. Afterwards, when his only daughter, Ruthie, whom he called Rutchen, disappeared, they said that with one stamp she could have taken a trip around the world; and when she came back, her eyes white and her skin green—it seemed a little strange to come back like this, with white eyes and green skin, after a trip around the world—they said maybe it was disappointment in love, maybe she went looking for a husband and didn’t find one, maybe a trip around the world wasn’t such a big deal. He welcomed her with a growl and Mrs. Klein, who saw her come home, said she went in without a purse, without a suitcase, her coat over her shoulders, and she suddenly seemed shorter in the shoulders, as if her shoulders had caved in. As it happened, I saw her too, hunched, wrapped up like a parcel, holding her raincoat with both hands, as if she were naked under the coat, dragging lopsidedly along the street in the wind and standing outside the house for a long time, leaning on the stone fence without going up. And then she pushed herself forward as violently as if she were pushing a freight car.
And then we heard the growling and it was clear that they weren’t expecting her, that they didn’t know. Afterwards we kept on hearing it from our window night after night—long, strange, unending, like a moan, or like the sound of his bus in the morning when it wouldn’t start. We couldn’t hear what he said, only Gerda’s silences moving back and forth in the window all the time, while he hardly stood up, just sat there bent over with his chin on his belly and the growl coming out of his belly.
As for the true story, it broke into the street in small, low waves, accompanied by little laughs from Mrs. Borak and Mrs. Klein and Mr. “Everything Cheap” and the rest of the neighbors. By then the growling had already stopped, and Gerda—a sticklike woman who stood for years leaning against the door, until she became part of the door itself—now sat at the table for hours, picking at the little pink flowers on the oilcloth. He said that soon there would be nothing left to pick at, and what she would pick at would he her fingers. Yeah, my fingers, my fingers, she yelled.
And then came the evening when all the lights suddenly went out and only her scream rose from the dark house: Small change doesn’t burn, doesn’t tear, what burns is a human being. That’s what Mrs. Borak said, but Mrs. Klein said she screamed that it was all because of the small change, all because of the small change. To tell the truth, I was at home then and what I heard was a kind of dry crackle spilling into the darkness, and when I went to the window he was standing there, on the balcony, in the dark, grunting like an empty barrel.
Have you ever seen an owl’s eyes? said Rutchen. He was cursing, that was a curse. You couldn’t even make out his body in the dark, only his voice and his eyes, as if his voice were coming from his eyes. She smiled a pale smile. Have you ever felt as if someone’s voice was coming out of his eyes? she smiled again a pale smile. And do you know what he said? she said. He said small change is like a human being, you have to bury it, he said, you can only finish with it in the ground. The pale smile spread over her whole face, making it suddenly look small. His eyes never moved, she said, and in the night they were white, you understand? She looked at me with her head thrown hack, her hand moved up to her throat. Her face took on a stubborn look, as if trying to understand but not coming anywhere near understanding. Of course you can’t burn small change, she said.
This was already after everything and after the funeral, and Gerda was already sitting on the balcony in the evening again, picking at the green oilcloth, her face the color of roasted coffee. We sat on a bench in the park at the end of the street. It was a nice evening. There were hardly any people in the park, and it was quiet, with the slow pulsing of the revolving sprinklers and the water spreading in big, expanding circles. She said: It was like him, what drove me mad was the small change. I told her that for years we had watched every night. She didn’t even smile. What can you see from the window, you can’t see it from the window, she said. I said that for years we had watched him wrapping the stacks and sorting. Oh she said, that’s nothing, not even the beginning. She spoke slowly. There was fear in her voice.
Yes, I said, we would watch him from the kitchen window wrapping the small change in tinfoil. Every night we saw the little columns wrapped in tinfoil.
Oh, the towers, she said, there were towers of fives, towers of tens, towers of ones. He said it wasn’t the size that counted or the amount, what counted was something else, and that’s what he said about the stamps, too, and about life, too, really. She suddenly drew in her head and her face was suffused with dark spots like inkspots. They looked transparent, spreading into her skirt like ink into paper.
She looked at me for a long time.
It’s not what you think, she said.
I didnt say anything. I didn’t know what she meant. She looked at me for a long time again and laughed a quiet, violent laugh that made the inkspots under her skin grow bigger. That’s where I first saw the monster, she said. Her words sounded familiar and I said that everyone had a little monster in some window or other. She laughed quietly, violently, not listening. The truth is, it was there long before that, the monster was there long before that, she said and looked at me for a long time, as if looking through me at some empty, unidentified place behind the bench. I said there wasn’t any monster in the window. And then I said that he was simply counting small change. When he met me in the street he said so. He said that in the morning a man needs small change.
Her laughter expanded now, making the inkspots under her skin grow even bigger.
Yes, she said, in the morning a man needs small change, every day he said that to me, when I was still a little girl he said that to me, he said that the most expensive stamp in the world was a penny stamp.
Her face turned purple, cross-hatched like a rash of thorns. She was silent for a moment, then she laughed dryly. He couldn’t have guessed, she said, he couldn’t have guessed that it coiled like a snake, that it glittered all the time, it moved all the time, he couldn’t have guessed, he thought that all at once the riddle had been solved.
I didn’t ask which riddle.
And that’s what killed him, she said. Her voice sounded depressed. You think it was my revenge, oh no, but then what was it? You think I know what it was? The depression in her voice increased. Look at the trees, she said.
I looked at the trees. There was a magnificent light on the trees on the slope, wrapping them in ribbons of radiance that broke up into a thousand coins of silver and gold, cascading in long trains down the tree trunks and the mountain, and all at once the mountain turned into a moving heap of coins, the ground and the trees and the walls of the houses and the roofs and the car bodies and the high greenness of the treetops further down along the line of the boulevard. Everything gleamed. Everything moved. Everything came apart in one mad rush as if it was spilling out of some huge basket, and in the radiant, dazzling light all you could see were the holes of the net from which this hail of coins was pouring, a hail of silver and gold that became a molten surface, turning the mountain into a steep wall of coins, a gleaming dancing wall of faces and branches and masks and letters. It lasted a moment. Maybe an hour. The wall swayed. The mountain shook. Above the mountain, the horizon line was sharp, rigid, petrified, and the sky was narrow, alien, compressed into a long rectangle, into a closed box, and for a moment I nearly panicked, for a moment I said to myself that I too had caught the disease. The sky, looked closed, stood apart from the celebration. But the mountain was still full of coins, everything was still rushing down, everything merged, everything ran together, gleamed in wildly scribbled lines and crooked contours, everything flew. And then suddenly the gold turned to brass, the silver to lead, and the huge leaden coins came pelting down on the mountainside as at the beginning of winter, as in a terrible storm.
You see? said Rutchen. She sounded excited. You see? she said.
It seemed to me that I understood what she meant, it seemed to me that the light waves were turning into sound waits, and I said to myself: Look, look, I’ve caught the disease. It seemed to me that some mechanism had broken down into vague elements, everything that belonged to earth, fire, air and water, that belonged to thoughts and fears, and I said to myself: The mountain’s full of coins, Rutchen. Oh Rutchen, how quickly the gold turns to lead, how quickly it turns to zinc. I said to myself: Of course, I saw the hail, the faces, the people, the tree trunks, the gold scales on the tree trunks, the snakes, the old letters, the old kings, suddenly I remembered her, a little girl, walking round the room opposite us, saying short nervous words, words without endings, swallowing the ends of words. I remembered: To go to another country, to go to another country. I remembered: And I was left naked and bare. I wanted to tell her that you couldn’t just pack up your things, that it was a bad idea. But it was quiet now. The light calmed down. The radiation began to shrink, became infrared. Among the trees there were only a few matches burning now, and afterwards floating on top of the mountain a small dark copper stain turned blood red.
Terrible, she said.
Her face was swollen and you could feel the slow burning blush of shame.
Yes, he loved it, she said, to see how it shone, to see it in piles, he arranged it in piles, the whole home was full of piles, he called them towers, maybe they really were towers.
I didn’t ask towers of what.
That’s what I understood before I left, she said.
I looked at her leaning against the arm of the bench. Now too I didn’t ask what. The light was going down, falling on the roots of the tree, making them glow at the bottom of the trunks, at the meeting point with the earth. It was hard to tell which way the wind was coming from, if it was blowing from the mountain or the sea, but you could clearly see how it was shaking the trunks right down to the bottom, shaking the grass and the tops of the bushes and the leaves and the black tunnels between the bushes with a loud commotion. But we were alone there in the park. That’s what I understood before I left, she repeated. She asked if I knew the story about the cat. I said that I hadn’t known the cat. She said: And he blamed mother, he said she loved the cat too much, that’s why the cat took liberties and that’s what happened in the end. It jumped onto my stamps, he said.
I asked what kind of stamps he had collected.
She said he had collected stamps with faces, with birds of prey, and anti-Semitic stamps. Later on he exchanged the faces for birds of prey. Later on he exchanged the birds of prey too and he was left with only the anti-Semitic stamps. He had the biggest collection of anti-Semitic stamps.
I asked what anti-Semitic stamps were.
He had rare ones, she said.
I asked for an example.
She said he had a postcard with a stamp of a Nazi horse stamping on the globe and she remembered the date, he looked at the date every day, it was on the nineteenth of October 1942, and there was a postmark without an address, Europische Post Kongress, and he said, that was before you were born, Rutchen, but it will go on to the end of the world, it will go on as long as there are people in the World.
She was speaking fast.
Those were his words, you understand? Then she said that he had a copper-colored stamp of Hitler with the postmark April 20, 1944, Grossdeutsch Reich General Gouvernment, and a stamp with Stalin’s head, a beautiful green-black stamp, Stalin’s head in the middle and on the right the English crown, on the left the hammer and sickle, and 1939 written on top of the English crown, 1944 on top of the hammer and sickle, and at the bottom it said: This is a Jewish war.
She was still speaking fast.
This is a Jewish war, get it? Then she said that he had a bright red stamp, really blazing red, also with Stalin on the left and the King of England on the right, and he looked at this stamp too every day, he turned that page every day, he couldn’t go to sleep without looking at that page, she said. Then she added that she always looked at his hands when he was holding this page, she didn’t know why she did it, but that’s what she did.
She was still speaking fast.
After he sat with this stamp he closed the album and put it in the cupboard. And then he began preparing the small change.
Suddenly her eyes filled with tears.
It’s just incredible, she said.
I asked what other stamps he had.
Anti-Semitic ones you mean, she said gleefully. She said he had a stamp issued by Khomeini in honor of Sadat’s assassin, and the Egyptians quickly bought up all the stamps from all the collections in the world, the whole series, so that there wasn’t one stamp like it in the world, and then he decided that he had to have one, and he searched for a whole year long, and after a year he found one in Canada, in Montreal and he bought it from Montreal, a black-and-white stamp, the murderer in a white robe in a window of black sky, laughing inside the black sky, and when he got that stamp he said again that it’s a story without an end, it never ends, and he began talking about the English penny stamp again, the most expensive stamp in the world worth three million dollars, a penny stamp.
She rubbed her forehead, making signs as if to a deaf-mute, pressing against the back of the bench. That’s it, she said, and then he sold them, he traded them for small change.
All at once her face turned white, fixing me with a glittering, violet eye, and now I clearly saw him sitting on the balcony, half naked, hairy as an animal; I remembered his strong, tyrannical hands, the wine color of his eyes, the little squares with swift horses in the wind, winged horses, naked archers shooting at the sun and birds choked by snakes, and I remembered him, a short man with a rounded head sitting all summer, every summer, bent over the bright pages as if sharing in some hidden secret, as if drawing closer to the pulse of the world, and by then the formica table had long ago been transformed into extraterritorial ground, long ago become an island in international waters, and he, as keeper of the seal, cataloging, sticking, removing, transferring, sometimes peering up close without moving, sometimes slapping his knees in excitement, and it gave off a sweet smell, said Rutchen, it gave off a faraway smell, the page looked like a big map of the sky, and bent over, without raising his head, without a word-sometimes arranging the pages by subject and sometimes by place, sometimes according to generations that suddenly seemed shortlived, the continents shrunken, Cuba next to Mecca, Titus’s arch next to the black stone, and you could find Genghis Khan next to Jesus, Napoleon next to Cyrus the Great, and it gave off a sweet smell, said Ruthen, it gave off a faraway smell, and what was fascinating were the teeth and the corners, she said.
I looked at her. She too had short clumsy hands and the same wine-colored eyes, and I suddenly felt a kind of compassion. She looked at me. Her face said something about the wolf never changing his ways, and that was what I thought all the time she looked at me. She said that Gerda thought they should keep them in a safe, it was enough to steal one stamp, she said, but he said that stamps were like bread, you have to have them on the table every day.
Suddenly she looked at me suspiciously. What were you just thinking of? she said. Her eyes were on me, empty, very close, and I told her I had just remembered the story about how some people were buying a plot of land from an Indian and he asked them, how high and how deep are you buying? She smiled painfully. I told her that the Indians wrote the word Earth with a capital letter. She stared at me with dark eyes and smiled painfully again, and I told her that I had once met an Indian in Arizona next to the big crater, near the red cave city, and he was naked and he was red, and instead of a fig leaf he had marvelous blue turquoises hanging between his legs, strings of marvelous little blue rocks instead of a fig leaf, and he told me the story, Earth with a capital letter, he said.
She didn’t take her red, swollen eyes off me. A strange smile, more like a grimace, crossed her face. That’s it, she said as if she were saying something terrible.
* * * * *
He was a bus driver. Since he always worked the morning shift he got his small change ready every evening. First thing in the morning, he said, a man needs small change. No one was surprised that he always worked the morning shift, and for years, at four o’clock in the morning, we heard him turning on the light in the stairwell. Then we heard him go downstairs. And then we heard footsteps in the empty street and the bus engine groaning, and then came the silence, and we knew that Mr. Shlezi had driven off. Sometimes, in the summer, when the windows were open, we also heard the bread popping out of the toaster. He always wore sunglasses, even in winter, in the rain, and I sometimes saw him trudging down the street in the rain, short, small, the two round black spots dripping on his face, walking holding his hands on his stomach, his broad hands putting a strange kind of pressure on his stomach, or suddenly stretching his body, swelling, and making a dash for the huge waiting machine. He liked distances without horizons, said Rutchen, he liked to see up close, what was happening on the road up close, the telegraph pole was far enough, drivers who looked too far ahead were accident prone, he said, and to tell the truth in forty years he never had an accident. Like in the New Testament, the innocent had to die guilty, he said, that was what happened on the road, the innocent died guilty on the road.
But the bus no longer stood in the street then, and it was already after he had sold the stamp collection and the whole house was filled with small change in little stacks wrapped in tracing paper and thin tinfoil, in all the cupboards and all the tables and all the drawers and in the kitchen too, it was in boxes and in suitcases, and by then he wasn’t doing anything, only transferring the stacks, smoothing the paper and turning it over, and then closing and folding, and then pressing it down. He smoothed the paper and pressed it down on every stack, and then he wrote it down. He had a special notebook where he wrote everything down. The size, and the amount, and he never counted, said Rutchen, he knew with his eyes without counting, he could see in the dark and he knew, and nobody was allowed to come near, she said, mother never went near, and they didn’t talk about it, she said, they didn’t ask, mother never asked, she only looked, and gradually her face swelled up, gradually her eyes grew small and she turned blue, she said she had ants in her fingers, afterwards she said it was the rustling of the paper that had got into her fingers, and at night they really did swell up, she said, and they looked exactly like the stacks, round, swollen, with transparent skin the color of silver, but he said that there was nothing to be afraid of and it was shut up in the cupboards, it was all shut up in the cupboards, he said.
The idea came to her by chance, of course. By chance she heard in the street that the Israeli lira was the size of a two-franc piece, and in Zurich there were automats that turned two francs into small change. There were some Israelis, they said, who put liras into the automats and got out two francs in small change. It looked good. It was after the currency was changed, but she was sure he hadn’t thrown out the liras, she was sure even before she went looking. And then she went home and looked into the cupboards. And after that in the linen boxes under the beds. And in the chest. And behind the books. And in the vases. There were rolls of half-shekels. Of shekels. But in the end she found the liras. She identified them without opening the paper. There was nothing simpler, she said.
On the first day it worked perfectly. She did it in the automat of a giant department store. The store was crowded. There were people rushing around her all the time, there was no waiting line for the automat. The people rushing around apparently didn’t need small change, and in the evening she strolled along Lake Geneva and ate a fat sausage with mustard. Afterwards she sat in a cafe on the lakeside and licked a huge helping of ice cream. And then she went right down to the bank of the lake and sat. It was a silvery night. It was already quite late. Swans floated on the water, illuminated in the transparent silver light. They had no heads or necks, only bodies moving in the water, floating quietly in a quiet movement, like shining black coats moving over the waves. Their silky feathers gleamed, their heads so enfolded in their bodies that they looked the wrong way round, floating in the direction opposite to their bodies. The man sitting next to her said: There’s nothing to be afraid of, they fold their heads into their bodies to go to sleep. He was sitting with a box of pears and she gave him a bit of small change and he gave her a few long slender pears dripping with golden juice, and she sat and looked at the headless swans and ate the golden pears, and the next day she went back to the automat and the next day too there was a lot of traffic and people dragging boxes of merchandise from the storeroom and back again, but she inserted a lira into the slot and pressed and then she inserted another lira and pressed again and then she inserted another lira and pressed again, and in the end her hand was full and sweating slightly and she put the money in her purse, but her hand, empty now, was still sweating. The purse suddenly felt a little heavy on her shoulder, dragging her shoulder down, but she inserted a lira into the slot and pressed and instead of a faded old lira, her palm was full of small change again, pretty shining Swiss money, really pretty, only her palm was a little sweaty and she thought that perhaps she should stop, perhaps she was a little tired and she would go and buy herself something to drink. She opened her purse and put a little scent on her sweaty palm and emerged front the corner where the automat was, and two women came walking very quietly on either side of her, coming very quietly closer to her body until she almost felt their bodies pressing against her on either side and she said excuse me I’m in a hurry and they squeezed her body a little and said please come with us and pushed her slightly forward, very slight pushes close to the walls which were painted a quiet pale green color and the air in the long quiet corridor was warm and pleasant and there was pleasant music playing and she wanted to ask where they were going, what they wanted, but she didn’t ask, urged forward by the slight pushes of the very quiet women who didn’t say a word and pushed her slowly with little movements of their elbows into a side room at the end of the corridor. A nicely furnished room, which was also painted a quiet pale green color with an executive desk and an executive chair with a lightly rocking man on it whose head turned in all directions as if he was a strange gigantic doll and the two women said please sit down. But they didn’t wait for her to sit and they sat her down with little movements of their elbows, with the same light imperceptible pressure on a pale green leather chair, and remained standing very quietly on either side of the chair, leaning on her lightly, on her body, and isolated voices were heard here and there in the long corridor and the sound of pleasant music reached her ears.
It was very pleasant music, she said.
There was a pause. I waited for her to go on but she was silent, staring right into my face. Her voice was pale, monotonous, as after years of silence, the sentences more and more unfinished, more and more erratic, more and more absurd, and it was impossible to tell if her story was about to end or had just begun. Her face, which was white, looked thin now, and she held her head pressed hard against the bench, elongated, thrust rigidly backward, like a person standing with his back to the wall.
After all, she said in a loud, sudden voice, without continuing.
Now too there was silence. I didn’t ask her after all what. She said: And then I remembered the packets in the hotel, the stacks rolled up in silver foil with a twist at the top, the way he did it.
The corners of her lips rose as if to smile, but instead of smiling they twisted into an ugly grimace, stubbornly examining my face. Her own grew sharp and venomous.
Suddenly I understood, she said.
She looked at me again, still examining my face.
I mean I thought I did, she said. Her speech was still sudden, abrupt, as if a petrified stratum of memories had suddenly been jolted.
Now too there was silence. The two of us were alone to the park. Lines of lire were still running over the lawn, down where the air had reddened on the snakeskin at the bottom of the tree trunks. Then a wind blew up, tossing among the dark bushes. There was a strong smell of grass and wilted blossoms, a smell of cut-down trees and gouged trunks, of rotting roots. Then the air turned into smoke creeping over the ground. The backs of the benches were the color of marble and behind every bench stood a barrel of dynamite. Rutchen did not take her eyes off me, examined me suspiciously. Her pupils dilated with a solemn light, the kind of light where everything suddenly splits open, the world splits open, is torn apart inside, lit low down like a low fire, full of patches and ropes and pieces of iron, and in every voice a mighty orchestra sounds. Suddenly I remembered how in Nesher, in the factory, I once brought a huge thermos to my uncle, my father’s sister’s husband, on the night shift. It was a hot night, and he was standing in the furnace room, covered with dust, leaning on the iron bar attached to the furnace, barefoot in the heaps of iron, his curly black head a pile of dust and his face too, slowly opening the thermos and slowly gulping down the cold lemonade and explaining something about life to me between gulps, and that life is like an iron bar, at first the bar gets hot but it doesn’t glow, its rays are infrared. When the temperature rises it begins to glow, at first the glow’s dark red, then light red, then yellow, then it turns white-hot, and after the white comes the blue, the violet comes at the end. What comes after the violet is invisible, it’s like the stars, he said, red stars are cold, and I’m an electrician, he said. I’ll die of an electric shock. He died of an electric shock.
I told her. She asked me why I had told her. I said I didn’t know. She studied me suspiciously again.
Naturally, she said. She asked what his name was.
I told her.
She asked what he was like.
Nice, I said.
So was papa, really, she said. She asked me if I knew his name.
I said no.
She gave me a shocked look.
Naturally, she said again. Then she asked me what we called him.
Shlezi, I said.
She said: That’s a pet name you know.
I said that we were fond of him.
She gave me a shocked look again. Ma never called him by his name, she said.
I didn’t ask what she called him.
Can you understand that? she said. Her eyes, which looked tired, suddenly filled with blood, as if there were nothing left there but a scar, like a brand, and after a minute she went on with her story, speaking at the same rhythm as before, as if she had never stopped. The man on the executive chair asked her where she was from. She said from Israel. He said he knew. She felt she had said something wrong. Close to her, very close, on the chair revolving next to her, rocked a woman whose face was in different places all the time, and surname from somewhere at the side said: Ja, aus Israel. The woman on the swivel chair, whose face kept revolving in the air, sniggered Ja, aus Israel, and then she sniggered again, and her snigger grew smaller and smaller, narrower and narrower, the wider the revolutions on the giddy chair. The man whose voice was coming from somewhere on the side said: Ja, immer aus Israel, das wissen wir schon, and the woman on the revolving chair sniggered an even smaller and narrower snigger, revolving on the chair in the same monotonous and merciless rhythm that slightly twisted her lips, and Rutchen kept watching her lips. She said to herself: She has dark narrow lips, dead lips, that was what she kept saying to herself over and over: She has dark narrow lips, dead lips, and from the crowded department store came the sound of doors opening and pleasant music. She tried to reconstruct what had happened but she was absolutely unable to reconstruct what had happened. There was a sound of movement from the execitive chair facing her and she said to herself: He’s talking to me, he’s asking me something, but she heard only the sound of the doors opening and the pleasant music, she felt the soothing pale green of the walls touching her skin, the quiet steady vicious hatred and a kind of absolute emptiness inside her body, inside the deep memory of her body, but opposite her on the chair the revolving head kept on with the immer aus Israel, and she heard her own voice asking how long it would take. The man’s voice coming from somewhere on the side said: That we don’t know. Next to her, close to her, very close to her, in the air next to her, the woman’s head revolved, decapitated, floating in the air above the soothing pale green of the chair and the soothing pale green of the walls and the absolute emptiness inside her body inside the deep memory of her body, and still it was all just a bad joke but already she heard her own voice in a low terrified shriek: How long? She shrieked in terror, and close to her even closer to her pressing even closer to her body the woman’s decapitated head went on revolving on the chair in the same slow monotonous merciless rhythm and the man’s voice coming from somewhere on the side said: That we don’t know, the decapitated head was revolving right in front of her now and terrified she shrieked again: But how long? The man on the executive chair repeated with his quiet smile: That we don’t know, and by now she couldn’t see him either only his face floating detached over the chair as if in a horror movie and the quiet steady vicious hatred the absolute emptiness inside her body inside the deep memory of her body, and she had no time to think yet but time enough to feel the fear, light and weightless, sinking inside her body.
They asked for her purse. She put it on the table. A moment passed. The man waited. Then he opened it. Then he turned it upside down on the table and the small change piled up on the table, gleaming Swiss coins, coins of ten and coins of twenty. He counted them in silence. He asked if that was all. She said that was all. He asked for her shoulder bag. She gave him her shoulder bag. Her hands shook. A sound stirred on the chair opposite and she sensed her hands shaking and the man on the chair looking not inside the bag but at her shaking hands. She looked at her hands too. They looked big, they looked bigger every minute, shaking as if they had Parkinson’s, like her father’s father shook with Parkinson’s and they couldn’t stop the shaking till he died. She saw him lying on the floor shaking after he died. She saw it clearly now. Suddenly her hands looked to her like his hands. She remembered his hands as if they were alive. She remembered them shaking alive on his corpse. Suddenly a terrible idea struck her, it struck her forehead and pierced her skull and came out the other side like a savage drill boring into her head deep down inside her skull. She couldn’t stop shaking.
The man held the shoulder bag and looked at her hands.
Ja, he said and overturned the bag.
First the folding umbrella fell out. The little make-up bag. The red comb. The packet of colored pencils she had bought there that day. The round green mirror. And then there was a clattering sound and a pile of one lira coins fell out.
The man in the chair opposite her didn’t move. He raised his eyes. Then he dropped his eyes. Then he put the coins down one by one on the table and counted aloud. There were twenty-one. He asked if that was all. She said that was all. He asked what she was doing with them. She said her father collected coins. He asked why her father collected coins. She said she didn’t know. He looked at her. He waited.
That I don’t know, she said, sitting without musing, the Parkinson’s hands on her knees. She lifted them into the air, so that they wouldn’t be stuck to her knees, but they went on shaking in the air, alien, big, almost gigantic, detached from her body, immense uncontrollable hands, like two long swollen stuffed hands hanging there on her body. She tried to stop the shaking, which only increased the wild twitching. Suddenly she remembered inserting a coin into the slot and then the click. And again a coin and again the click. And the metallic chill on her palm and the sweat.
The man on the executive chair kept his eyes on her Parkinson’s hands all the time. He asked again why her father had collected coins.
He said that a man needs small change, she said.
She didn’t know how she said it. She felt as if a horse had kicked her when she said it.
Natürlich, said the man on the chair.
He spoke to me without turning his head in my direction and he was very quiet all the time, he didn’t look at me to hear what I said, and I didn’t hear what he said only his voice and afterwards a different voice in the opposite direction of his voice, and when I turned round the voice stopped talking, and the hunt began.
And maybe I didn’t turn round, she said.
Suddenly she fell silent.
My head aches, she said.
I said maybe we shouldn’t talk about it.
She looked at me in astonishment.
What? she said.
I said maybe tomorrow.
Oh no, she said, pressing her eyelids as if she had only just realized that there was a terrible pain there. Her eyelids were inflamed. The things I dream, she said. I said everybody dreams. She said: And the places I go. I said everybody does, everybody, the sense of falling, the giddiness, the monstrous roads, and I said that everything runs in steep tunnels, hangs from cliffs, and the birds of prey. She said: What do you mean, the birds of prey? I said that last night, for example, I dreamt there was a bird of prey on the lintel of our door behind the wall. I saw it clearly coming out of the wall and I wanted to scream: There’s a bird of prey in the house, there’s a bird of prey in the house, and then the wall closed up.
She looked at me in astonishment.
Last night? she said. She asked if I’d read about it. I said that once I read that contrary to what most people thought they didn’t fly swiftly when hunting their prey, the hunting was done in slow flight, and I told her that I’d read that the most impressive hunting method was the one where the prey was caught in mid-flight, in the middle of the sky, in this hunting method the prey was totally exposed, it had no place to hide and nowhere to escape to. The hawk, for example, I read was good at pursuing birds in open spaces and it fed on songbirds, so it was very active early in the morning, because that was when songbirds were found.
She looked at me in excitement. Songbirds? she said. There was passionate desire in her voice. She asked about the speed. I said: Three hundred miles an hour. The gold eagle, for example, dived on its prey at a speed of three hundred miles an hour. She asked about the vulture. I said that the vulture, which fed on carrion, circled its prey like a huge butterfly. It advanced in hops with its shoulder feathers bristling and its wings spread as its thick beak prepared to tear the skin.
She was still looking at me passionately. You’ve forgotten that papa collected stamps with birds of prey, she said in excitement, stealthily wiping her eyes, and then pressing her eyelids hard, examining me to see if I was listening. He had a wonderful collection of birds of prey, she said. Her white face was now illuminated by the light from the lamp that had gone on behind the bench-thin, childish, very like the face I had seen for years in the gold light of the room facing our window. And for a moment the years were wiped out, the dramas, catastrophes, screams and fear, the lost albums, and all that was left was a little girl sitting alone in a room illuminated by lamplight, asking about birds of prey, staring at me and saying: Songbirds? Songbirds? Lifting her little girl’s face, looking out of the window. And the courtyard was swarming with pimps, prostitutes, respectable lawyers, respectable businessmen, swarming with cats and dogs, shoe-shop owners and furniture-shop owners, groaning, coming, going, buttoning, unbuttoning, and I wanted to say to her: yes, at a speed of three hundred miles an hour, Rutchen, a speed of three hundred miles an hour. I wanted to say to her: Vultures, Rutchen, because of the wind, are attached to mountainous regions, and they have very keen sight, eagle-eyes, they can locate carrion thirteen miles away, from thirteen miles away their eyes can trap a dead bird.
* * * * *
They were waiting for Herr Zutter. It took time. The man in the armchair laughed contemptuously. He said: How slow the machine of justice is. The woman on the chair laughed too. Just then Herr Zutter came. His eyes were alert and he looked straight at the table. Her shoulder bag was lying there, open and empty, and the money was in a neat pile. He asked something. She repeated that her father said a man needs small change; in the morning, he said, in the morning a man needs small change. Herr Zutter sniggered. Then he said that she must be careful, she should be careful because from now on everything would be written down. She didn’t answer. He waited a minute. She didn’t answer. Her feet were sweating in her shoes, but she sat still, frozen, without moving. It seemed to her that she heard the sound of footsteps dragging slowly in the corridor, but nobody in the room said anything and nobody moved and only the quiet soothing pale green walls began turning round and round as if powered by a machine. She felt she had to stop the machine, but the heads on the chairs were also turning round and round, her own gigantic hands, the backs of the chairs, the curtains, the ashtrays, the comb on the desk, the pile of coins, and other hands in other corners of the room, other walls behind the chairs. She pressed her hands hard against her knees. Anyway, anyway, she said. She said it in Hebrew, frightened because she said it in Hebrew, and suddenly the walls stopped turning, the emptiness in her body gripped like a vice, the pale green color quieted down, the man in the armchair opposite turned up the volume of the radio, smoking, and she felt the light touch of terror, sitting as if in a dream, sliding silently and surely into the abyss. And then she heard Herr Zutter. He said she should hurry up, it was late and it was a long drive, and she really should hurry up.
It was raining, she said, but my throat was full of dry crystals like beads of hail.