‘Did you see the sign the old bat made!’
This time Dafna Pehfogl was fortunate in her misfortune. The bullet hit her in the heart. Perhaps she expired convinced that there was just a brief interval, a short pause before her life crossed from the unlucky to the happier track. In the big room, the children ended one living tableau and quickly arranged themselves to form another.
Dafna Pehfogl lay in the middle of the bridge. To the guards looking at her from each bank, she seemed like a large, strange bird hit by a stray bullet and there was no hunter to claim it.
They carried her over after a lengthy, difficult procedure. The woman who was giving her the ritual wash, paused for a moment. Passing the wet sponge over the shrivelled old body, she came to the ring finger of the left hand, vulgarly crooked and stiff. Like the finger of a man trying to make a rude gesture.
‘Whatever next,’ muttered the woman who washed the dead and went on with her work.
No wedding ring had ever found its way to this finger, yet it, the second to last finger on Dafna Pehfogl’s left hand, had found its way into an electric coffee grinder. That day in the big house one of her beautiful nieces was getting married. Wanting to be useful but avoiding glass and china, Dafna had offered to grind the coffee. As she held the electric mill in her right hand and pressed the red button with her thumb, her eye was caught by the pattern on a porcelain dish which someone had put down on the kitchen table. With her left hand she absentmindedly removed the lid of the grinder and in an instant, along with the half-ground coffee beans, her ring finger slipped inside the mill. She was taken to the clinic half-conscious in the car intended for the bride and groom.
The wedding somehow came to an end. The young couple left in a more modestly decorated car. After two years of bad marriage, the niece was divorced. Her sister-the-beauty said:
‘Dafna was a pehfogl again.’
From that day, Dafna had a vulgarly bent finger on her left hand. When she was laying out cards, it looked like a strange ill-fated hook.
They buried her on a day that was, amazingly, quiet. No shots reached them from the other side. It was autumn, and the day bright and warm, as though it had strayed into the calendar. Family members wept over the freshly dug grave. The women sighed and pressed handkerchiefs to their noses and eyes. It was only on the way back from the cemetery that someone noticed that on the announcement of her death, from which her large fat eyes looked out, alongside her surname with the two in-breaths, instead of Dafna, it said Danfa.
‘How can you expect people in this chaos not to get such a strange name wrong!’ someone else responded.
They sat in the large room of the family house. They drank tea instead of coffee which had not been available for a long time, ever since the town was divided into there and here. After taking their first sip, they set their cups down on the tray together. They clinked in the old, long since forgotten way. And there was a special, solemn silence. Had anyone entered, they would have thought they were looking at a living tableau. Then there were two or three long sighs.
‘Poor Pehfogl!’
Her sister-the-beauty glanced at the little bag lying in the corner. The day before she had found the little silver spoon in it, an anchor left over from a long-since sunken ship. It was like the last act before the scene in which the extra with the halberd and bushy sideburns was supposed to rush in. A plush curtain hung over their heads.
And there was silence in the large room for a long time after that. As though in apprehension and evil foreboding. Who was the extra to look at now when he shouted Pehfogl in his booming voice? Now that the unfortunate Dafna bird had expired on the bridge between there and here?
GREETINGS FROM THE BESIEGED CITY
Thirteen for ten!
If twenty years had passed since that evening, rather than two, I would still have been certain that this was the offer he had chanted in his sing-song voice. He had a face that would have inspired titles such as Boy in Blue, Boy with a Tear in his Eye, Boy with Rose ... It was hard not to be sentimental about a face like that.
But we both recoil from such emotions. We know all too well how awkward one feels when they subside. Even on summer beaches we read serious books. When the sun’s star paints the sky orange, purple, violet, red, one of the two of us says drily (we seem to take turns from one evening to the next, like conscientious watchmen):
‘Well, have we had enough Greetings from the Adriatic?’
We mean the picture postcards of sunsets inscribed Greetings from the Adriatic. In the evenings tourists buy them at street stalls and send them inland, to cities where the asphalt is melted by the heat of summer and women’s thin heels sink helplessly into it.
We don’t buy postcards like that, even if, in the absence of any others, it means not writing to our friends and family at all. We did not succumb until that evening when we caught sight of those awful postcards in the hands of a boy standing at the beginning of the main street in Dubrovnik, near the Onofrio Fountain. He had arranged the thirteen cards, all identical, in two unequal fans. Cooling his flushed face with the larger one, he held out the other with the full length of his thin arm, like an outdated traffic signal. He was the Boy with Postcards, Boy by the Onofrio Fountain. Boy at the Entrance to Dubrovnik. Boy Leading one into the First Temptation!
In fact, there had already been similar temptations. Like the one to which I had ingloriously succumbed several months before. At that time, our little boy was already very good at distinguishing letters but he steadfastly refused to read. He would press up against me, thrust a favourite book into my hands and mutter:
‘Read it!’
He maintained a dedicated silence. While I read aloud and my mouth grew dry, he would gaze calmly at a fixed point, without turning his head towards the book.
That spring before Dubrovnik (it was an unhealthy, sickly spring which instead of luring the buds out of the old trees, turned sensible people sentimental!), I had been reading him a little book by Paul-Jacques Bonzon, The Seville Fan, a remnant of my own childhood reading. The original title was L’Eventail de Seville. Those were the first foreign words I had memorised, never having managed before that to reproduce the little Czech songs my father used to sing as he shaved. That was how he daily revived the language of his four-year bachelorhood in the country with the prettiest sound for the letter c. I remembered the French title of Bonzon’s book because my romantic younger aunt, who had been born an old maid, used to come up to me while I was reading it, and ask, expressing her agreeable surprise each time by a movement of her eyebrows:
‘Oh, so is my little fair-haired girl reading L’Eventail de Seville? Little fair-haired girls ought to read L’Eventail de Seville. L’Eventail de Seville ...’
She would lean over me and I would be suddenly overwhelmed by the scent of lavender and heather. I would close my eyes and whenever my aunt repeated L’Eventail de Seville, I would feel on my cheeks and eyelashes the caress of fresh air, as when you wave a fan briefly and rapidly in front of your face. Ever since then, when it is stuffy and oppressive (more under my skin than on it) I repeat two or three times in a half-whisper:
‘L’Eventail de Seville. ’
Oh God, will I manage it at the final and irrevocable ... at that moment when no earthly language any longer has power? When all fans are forever closed?
But, that question has nothing to do with the day when I was reading The Seville Fan to my son. If it has, it will be established without words. So, it happened that the now grown up, former little fair-haired girl was reading her son a book whose main character was called Pablo. The poor young man sold orchito, a kind of Spanish boza, a millet drink, and he fell in love, youthfully innocently, with Juanita who