KIN
DROR BURSTEIN
TRANSLATED BY DALYA BILU
Series Editor: Rachel S. Harris
Contents
Title Page
OTHER WORKS IN DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS’S HEBREW LITERATURE SERIES
I
LEAH
[ ] AND [ ]
THE CITY
[ ]
YOEL
THE CITY
[ ] and [ ]
YOEL
[ ]
YOEL
YOEL
YOEL
YOEL–[ ] AND [ ]
THE CITY
[ ], [ ], Yoel
[ ]
YOEL
[ ]
YOEL
II
THE CITY
LEAH–YOEL
YOEL
YOEL–EMILE
[ ]
EMILE
YOEL–EMILE
[ ]–EMILE
EMILE–LEAH
THE CITY
[ ]
[ ]
EMILE
THE CITY
YOEL–EMILE
[ ]
EMILE–YOEL
EMILE
YOEL–EMILE
YOEL–LEAH–EMILE
YOEL–LEAH–EMILE
YOEL
LEAH–YOEL
THE CITY
EMILE–YOEL
EMILE
[ ]
[ ]
THE CITY
YOEL
III
YOEL–EMILE
LEAH
YOEL–EMILE
THE CITY
EMILE
HEBREW LITERATURE SERIES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Copyright
OTHER WORKS IN DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS’S HEBREW LITERATURE SERIES
Dolly City
Orly Castel-Bloom
Heatwave and Crazy Birds
Gabriela Avigur-Rotem
Homesick
Eshkol Nevo
Life on Sandpaper
Yoram Kaniuk
Motti
Asaf Schurr
Once there was a big white house, and we went to the white house, and in the house there were lots of little children, teeny little children, and it was a big house, and we went inside the big house, and there were lots of children there, and one of the children had a nose like a potato, full of lumps, like some kind of old uncle, an uncle, not a child at all, an uncle; and there was a child with green snot smeared over her face, and a child who screamed and cried, and a child with lips the color of bitter chocolate, bitter chocolate gone bad, yuck, and a child with an ugly sore, and there were other children too. And I don’t remember the other children, and your father definitely doesn’t remember them, and I can hardly remember the child with the potato nose and the child with eyes like glass marbles, and the child who barked like a dog, and the child who crept into the stove to hide, and the uncle, we forgot the uncle a long time ago, the uncle is already dead, because there’s only one child I remember, and this child was quiet as can be, and he had a little nose, and he breathed quietly, he didn’t grunt or whistle, and we said at once: this is the child, and we pointed to this child straightaway, and we didn’t take our eyes off him until they came and took him out of his cot and gave him to us and put him in our arms. And we took him in our arms and we didn’t take anyone else, and we knew right away that it was you.
They were sixteen. Both of them. And their parents, all four of them, like a clenched fist with only a stump left of its thumb, aged overnight. One said, “No, no.” One said, “What’s this? What’s this?” The third said, “Out of the question. Not as long as I have any say in the matter.” And the fourth spat on the floor and then bit his finger. They didn’t want to hear anything. Or see anything either. So the two of them ran away to Jaffa a few weeks before the date. The journey north on the bus in her ninth month, alone, she would never forget. How she threw up next to the Ramon Crater out in the desert and all the passengers in the bus stared at her. How the driver got out and stood behind her with a glass bottle of water in his hand and asked, “Should I pour a little water on your head?” and turned to look back at his passengers with a long look. Now he really saw them. Window after window he surveyed them. Window after window. Window after window they looked back at him. Closed faces. Squashed against the windowpanes. Glinting glass. All the seats were taken except for one.
They looked again at the crumpled note, from which the sound of waves rose as from a shell. Tomorrow they were going to meet the father.
In two hundred and fifty million years’ time the continents will be all rolled up and compressed