Read Motti for Free Online Page B

will hug and calm them down like no one else. A reinforced wall, that one. She won’t let anyone harm the girls, not difficult parents, not boyfriends who are bad influences. And once every few weeks, maybe even every Friday evening, one of the girls will come over to Motti and Ariella’s place. Their own foster child, a tough life she’s had, and Ariella will make her into an artist or a concert pianist, and they’ll collect newspaper clippings of deeply sympathetic reviews and in-depth interviews, and the foster child will say in them, I owe everything to that woman, her name is Ariella, she believed in me when no one else would. The girl will be like their daughter when she grows up, and if they move, withered, to an old-folks home on the edge of town, that girl (who will of course already be grown up by then) will come to visit with her family, because she won’t be ungrateful, she’ll know that one should never deny an obligation, and that debts must be repaid, and with love too, maybe even primarily with love. She also won’t be ashamed of her past. She’ll say to her spouse, to their children (maybe there will even be grandchildren), look, this is Ariella and this is Motti, without them none of this would have happened, and who knows what would have happened to me otherwise, maybe I’d be dead already if the two of them hadn’t gotten me out the way they did. Her own children will already be pulling at her dress or her shirt or whatever she’ll wear then (there’s nothing to get mad about, they’re children, their patience is short), and they’ll ask to go home, and he and Ariella will walk the whole family to her car (if the two of them can still walk, aging is a cruel thing after all). Then they’ll return to their room and he’ll put the kettle on and hand in hand they’ll sit down, let’s say, to watch television.
    And maybe, thinks Motti, maybe her hair won’t be tied up like that in the first place. Maybe she’ll have a long braid, a thick, smooth one that will rest lazily on her back. A dark braid that she’ll nurture as long as the two of them are still relatively young. At night she’ll brush her hair in long strokes, every morning he’ll braid it for her beautifully. From time to time perhaps she’ll be lazy, she’ll keep the braid up and get into bed like that, to sleep, and if they make love then, he could, with the braid, c’mon, really, he could do what he could do. There are some things that we don’t have to know.

19
    He wanted their first time to be very special, and sometimes thought about a regular sort of special, a routine special, like satin sheets and flower petals that a woman from room service could scatter around for twenty shekels an hour, without benefits, without any employer contributions to her retirement fund.
    Sometimes he thought otherwise. Thought about a special that would be truly unique, the two of them in a moment of passion in the stockroom of the houseware or clothing store that Ariella will maybe be working at one day (just a student job, only a temporary job, bigger things than this will still await her), and each thing that pokes one of them in the butt will be special, every strange contortion forced upon them by a surprising caprice of architecture, every sharp metal corner that scratches his or her bare leg (even a knock on the head from a ceiling that slopes downward toward the back wall).
    And then, sometimes he thought about special in a car. The two of them will go on a vacation to the mountains, the two of them know what’s coming and look forward to this first, exciting act of love, many more of which are to come, even that same night. And then, on the side of the road, the carburetor will die. The car will get stuck, but they won’t call to get towed. They’ll take out a thermos from the bag they packed in advance, sit on the side of the road and