We gathered close around the bed, each of us snatching with his eyes a rag of the white covers to hide behind!
The bed is barren...
And the night surges... and surges... beating against the windows of our house. Planting an abject cold in our bones. Washing the threshold of our outer gate. Scattering the footprints on our sidewalk.
And my mother rasped out a wish:
Would that the rain might purify this bed! Would that the rain might purify our eyes!
And the little girl wept...
The little girl understood that the bed was deserted, and that the fair-haired young woman had left it to us: to tear with our teeth and our nails. And our knives. And with bullets if we wished! She left it to us — so let us empty into it, then, our penitence. Let us wash our rancor in it. Let us strangle upon it the pride of our customs!
And my mother spat out red words, torn loose from her entrails:
Would that... would that I had never carried her nine months in my belly!
We fixed — all of us — our gazes on the mother's belly: on the soil that had brought forth a beauty who once filled a whole season with perfume. And courtship. And murmurs of approval. And covetous threats... Then we climbed to my mother's breast: to the bosom withering under the thick woolen dress; we longed to tear it off and rend it, and to dry up the white liquid that had passed on to the
girl the traits of the ancient female whom Eve invented!
The mother writhed where she sat.. and moaned under the cruelty of the whips of our stares.. and my little sister rushed to her rescue, flinging her own self, naked, into the blaze of the battle of thoughts and glances:
Why was she not vaccinated against smallpox? Why did she run away? She ran away because the bed is a den where dangerous germs swarm! Why did you not vaccinate the bed for her?
And the boy, our brother, pounced upon her, thundering:
Be quiet! Be quiet! She did not fall sick, and she did not die! And would that she had fallen sick and died! Be quiet, you little wretch like her! You are all of you vile!
The little girl drew back in terror and shrank into the corner.. a cloud of weeping gathering in her throat, while pride busied itself with scattering its traces.. And the father, in another corner, dry-lipped, his eyes crucified. Swaying on the chair, without strength to leave it, and without wish to leave it — for on this very seat moist lips had once whispered in his ear, 'I am with child!'..
The father freed his crucified eyes to steal back toward those same moist lips.. and then in the mother's belly another stab of pain went through her, and she moaned and shifted in her place anew, and drew the two happenings back into her hell.. And the father returned to a night in March.. the night when the silence of the dawn was torn by a woman's screaming.
And her wailing. And the familiar measured rhythm of the scissors and the surgical gloves. And the murmuring of fingertips reciting a prayer. Then the whimpering of a baby girl flooding the loveliest morning of the loveliest day in March...
And we all hung upon the boy's arm as he raved:
Where is the dagger? Let me kill her! Or.. or.. I shall kill myself!
And the little girl wept...
And the eldest sister screamed: The shame of it! The shame.. the.. We refuse him as a husband for her: let him drift through the alleyways, chasing after riches and failing! For his inherited sickliness, from two ailing parents! For the sins clinging to his bedchamber — he, the former adolescent paramour of a ripe, practiced foreign woman!
At that,
the yellow of our faces grew sharper, and more choked with grief!
At that,
the voices came together, and the thoughts mingled, and they went forth leaning tenderly upon one another:
Where is the dagger?
The little girl's weeping...
Screaming: The shame! The shame!
The mother's wanton sobbing.
The father's muteness, and his drifting through the nights.. through the nights of the nineteen years.
And the eldest sister troubled the harmony of the chorus, adding:
We refuse him — and she yields, humbled...
Then the father hurried to utter a miracle:
I did not regret, then, that my bones crumbled into the morsels I fed her: that she might grow, and my body waste away. That she might be healed, and the ailments storm my body. That her