A Butterfly and Phantoms
A short story by Corinna Hasofferett
Translated from the Hebrew by Michal Sapir

I've been walking around today and yesterday with a feeling that that was it, Orna has died. I would come into the house from the garden and Raoul would say, "You had a phone call."

A minute under the drug she said, "What have I done, why did I agree to change rooms." She made an effort so that I, who knew about clothes, would understand: "Imagine, Anna, that you went to the store to buy a dress, and were pleased, and came home and the dress was narrow, and short, and didn't fit you."

"You can still go to the store and exchange the dress, Orna. Right?"

She tried to smile and nod. I think she stopped eating in order to die. To come back home from her, it's not easy. In the doorway Raoul moves shoulder and body to avoid contact.

Tonight, I sat on a chair in the dark, clenched the glass in my hand and threw it down. I too can break, not just you. He jumps up: What happened? And back to sleep. I gathered the splinters with the broom. Raoul lifted his head from the pillow and said, "You alreadyswept today whatareyoudoing gotosleep…broken?" (At noon the boss had decided to fire the assistant and he, Raoul, asked permission to tell her himself first, so she wouldn't get hurt). In the street the sky was filled with lightning. Later it became quiet. The rain came down and chilled my eyes. Maybe there'll be a miracle. A miracle can always still happen. The nurses in the hospice nodded their heads, "Yes, a miracle can always still happen."

Raoul still wants my body. Withdraws as if hating himself for having given in to hunger. I massaged her face with oil, the jaw bones, the neck, and she, like a baby, was glad to be touched, calmed down a little. The blue eyes looked as if sunken inside black tires that someone would soon set fire to in protest. A few months ago she came to me to help her sew a dress, looked at the garden and laughed, "All this you are growing? Eggplants as well? And tomatoes?"

I showed her the Cosmos, Zinnias, Celosia.

Perhaps you want me to write down what it is I am trying to learn from the plants: To see that there is a cycle in nature. Did you know that a hedgehog is born without any thorns?

***

I was in Europe, and when I came back Nitza telephoned that Orna fell sick and had been hospitalised. The next day, driving there, she wanted to know what I was reading. I was holding the Victor Frenkel book about the soul. The meaning of suffering and the meaning of death. Nitza heard the interpretation and got angry. "Our suffering is spared from the dead? How does that change anything? In the final reckoning the suffering exists, where is the meaning in this, the justice?!" I don't know what Victor Frenkel would have answered to that. Orna was lying in bed and to anyone coming in she announced, "Today they brought me the most expert doctor. He said it's only a back infection. When the infection heals, everything will be fine." The men sat apart discussing the situation in the Party for Change. Someone asked Orna if she had any pain and she said, "When it hurts it's at least good, it means you can feel." Until the doctor came in on his round, because she was covered with a sheet, you couldn't remember that the lower half of her body was paralysed. Every sick person's face shrivels, black rings around their eyes. Through the window the blossoming of the Callistemon tree lit up the sky and died out. We got up to leave.

Orna seized my hand, "Anna, I'm pessimistic."

"Why this pessimism," I said, "You don't need it, it doesn't do you any good. Throw it away." Like throwing unnecessary objects from a boat at a time of disaster. Like from a hot-air balloon.

She said, "Yes, I swear you're right. So keep in touch with Nitza. She is organizing the shifts."

"What shifts?"

"Shifts of guarding me."

In the Bauhinia row the ringed turtledoves flew about inside purple and white. Nitza cried, "Is it right to suffer like this? I'd rather be dead!"

In the morning I was late for my shift. Grey crows screeched from the tops of the eucalyptus trees beside the gate and Orna said, "I was waiting for you. There's nothing worse than loneliness, Anna."

"Alone or among people?"

For a moment she didn't understand. For a moment I distracted her. The summer heat was at its peak and oppressed the room. She lay, a burning body plastered in damp diapers, nostrils attached to oxygen tubes. I said, "Did you know that so many people loved you?" She smiled cautiously so the tubes in the nostrils wouldn't move: "No, I didn't know. That's what's holding me." I told her about Victor Frenkel. In lungs full of cancer-lumps the sigh is whispered: Believe me, I would have preferred not to be sick and not to know

***

For a short time she dozed off. I leafed through the book to see what Victor Frenkel would have responded to that. Her daughter came from school. We stood on both sides of the bed and talked, so that Orna could hear: "Everybody here says about your mother, 'What a beautiful woman, what a gentle woman'."

"So what do I get from this," protested Orna.

"Yes," said the daughter, "Everybody says to me too, 'You are beautiful, but your mother is even more beautiful'."

Raoul still wants my faceless body. Practical, withdraws without a caress. I came to see Orna only five or six times, for two-three hours, once a week. I would bring Chrysanthemums, Snapdragons, Dahlias - a Harvest holiday basket-full, and surround her with colours and fragrance. I would say, do you know how many people would be willing to suffer if only they found out that at least one person loved them? And Orna, with her ascetic smile, answers: "That's what's holding me, Anna."

In the evening before my last visit to see her I lingered in the garden, watering in darkness. From the yard you can't hear the phone ringing and when I got back in Nitza called: "Is your telephone out of order? You're the only one she wants. You have patience for her. You are her favourite."

I wanted to run away.

In the morning, a minute after I entered, came a doctor and a paramedic, to conduct the weekly examination. A nurse who was standing near the door began speaking in a low voice: There's nothing we can do. The doctors are giving up.

I hushed her so Orna wouldn't hear.

We went out to the corridor. I said, "Maybe there'll be a miracle." The nurse looked at me with a pitying glance: "Yes, a miracle can always still happen."

That same day, for the first time, after two sentences she forgot what she wanted to say. Her absolute dependence, Death wreaking havoc on the spirit, at home I cried. Raoul, locked himself in silence. She would eat from my hand, as if for my sake, a crumb from the patty. "You are sure to go to paradise, Anna." She introduced me before a visitor: "This is my angel." I , who am a hunter of meanings, who stayed with her against...coerced. I would say, "Every time you feel bad, Orna, look at the sky, see what an amazing blue. And look at the Snapdragons, special seeds, I got them from England, pastel colours as if painted, sculpture in nature. I put them on both sides of the bed for you, on any side they turn you to, you will see Chrysanthemum, Impatiens, so you won't forget me until I come back again."

Near the door I said, "Bye Orna." She turned her face from the nurse who was treating her, looked into my eyes and whispered, as if correcting, "See you Anna." I lowered my eyes. The love that died between me and Raoul like the flower seeds drying out in the garden will germinate in another plot a new love, albeit, naturally, a mutation, different colours, but still, a love will sprout. And Orna, the beauty she sowed around her - will another bird sound it, from the olive tree next to my window, from the loose soil calming bare feet in the summer, the smells of Mint and Salvia, the honeyed scent of the Alyssum inflating the chest with desire, to live…to live… You asked me to write down everything. It hurts that once a week I hire your friendship for an hour.

Once Orna called out, she was already drugged: "Humour, Anna, need humour," she didn't have the strength to utter, A sense of humour. She called the male-nurse: "Tell him to come, he has humour." And the paramedic, smiling to hide the pain contorting his lips, said, "In a little while, honey."

And didn't come in, receded.

***

Once, when Raoul was still sleeping in my bed, one night he shouted in stifled utterances. I said, "it's only a dream, calm down." He shouted twice: "Police! Police!"

Like a little boy he turned to me. I asked, "What did you dream?"

"Thieves."

"What did they steal?"

"You wouldn't believe it, the shutters. The thief laughed in my face and took it apart piece by piece. And the annoying thing…they stood and covered him."

He hates when the shutters are open.

Yesterday, after making love, I asked, "You, why did you choose me?" He said, "What do I know, who wasn't I fooling around with at the time."

What would you have told him, as a soul doctor? Like you asked me to, I'm writing down everything. I resent having to hire understanding with money.

I can sit on a stone for hours, looking at the flowers and the light. Maybe it's true what I read in the book, There is a realm where it is possible to move from place to place without being between the two places, without needing time, like the plants. In a monoculture of aggressive, proliferating species, a deviant growth fights for its life.

In the magazine Garden & Landscape I read, If we presuppose that there is no ideal in our world, neither among human beings nor in all that surrounds us, we will understand that what we have to do is learn from the plants.

Raoul says, "I tried, but you can't be bent down." Before he got married I came over with him to his parents' place. They were having a house-warming party and the apartment was humming with talk in their language. I sat in the corner of the balcony between two old men who laughed above my head at a joke. Raoul was communing in the courtyard with a red-headed girl, his cousin. I could have gotten up and left right then and there.

Tonight I said, "I want to have a child." And he, laughing at the pun, spurted: "I want to have a life." Then he went to comb his hair. I heard Ronen saying,

Daddy, I dreamt about creatures who live inside mirrors. You can take them out of the mirrors when you set up one mirror in front of the other