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before he managed to close his hand. Papa Luigi nodded his head appreciatively. “Now there’s only one test left,” he thundered, “the test of suppleness. You must touch yourtoes with your legs straight.” I relaxed my body, took a long breath, and closed my eyes, exactly as Italo, my brother, had done in the performance that evening. I bent down and reached with my hands. I could see the tips of my fingers at a distance of a few millimeters from my shoelaces, almost touching. My body was as taut as a rope about to tear at any minute, but I didn’t give up. Four millimeters separated me from the Santini family. I knew that I had to cross them. And then, suddenly, I heard the sound. Like the sound of wood and glass breaking together, so loud it was deafening. Dad, who was apparently waiting in the car outside, was alarmed by the noise and came rushing into the caravan. “Are you all right?” he asked, and tried to help me up. I couldn’t straighten my back. Papa Luigi lifted me in his sturdy arms and we all drove together to the hospital.
    In the X-rays they found a slipped disk between the L2–L3 vertebrae. When I held the photograph opposite the light I could see a kind of black spot, like a drop of coffee, on the transparent spine. On the brown envelope the name “Ariel Fledermaus” was written with a ballpoint pen. No Marcello, no Santini—just crooked, ugly writing. “You could have bent your knees,” whispered Papa Luigi and wiped one of the tears from my eyes. “You could have bent them a little. I wouldn’t have saidanything.”

Korbi’s Girl
    K orbi was a punk like all punks. The kind that you don’t know whether they’re uglier or stupider. And like all punks he had a beautiful girlfriend, who no one could understand what she was doing with him. She was a tall brunette, taller than him, and her name was Marina. And whenever I passed them on the street with my big brother, Myron, I would get a kick out of seeing him move his head from side to side in a kind of slow “no” movement. As if he was saying to himself, “What a waste, what a waste.” Korbi’s girlfriend must have gotten a kick out of these head movements too, because whenever we came down the street opposite her and Korbi she would smile at my brother. Until at a certain stage it turned into more than smiling, and she began coming to our house, and mybrother began kicking me out of the room. At first she only came for a little while, in the afternoon. Afterward she would stay for hours, and everyone in the neighborhood began to know about it. Everyone, except for Korbi and his dumb friend Krotochinsky, who spent all day sitting on upturned crates outside the Persian’s grocery shop, playing shesh besh and drinking Sprite. As if apart from these two things there was nothing else in life. They could sit opposite the board for hours, and add up thousands of points of wins and losses, which didn’t interest anyone but them. When you walked past them you always had the feeling that if the Persian didn’t shut the shop in the evening or if Marina didn’t show up, they would stay stuck there forever. Because apart from Marina, or the Persian pulling the crate out from under him, nothing would make Korbi get up.
    A few months had passed since Korbi’s girlfriend began visiting our house. And my brother’s kicking me out of the room already seemed so normal to me that I thought it would go on like that forever, or at least until he went to the army. Until one day my brother and I went to Youth City. It was quite far from our house in Ramat-Gan, something like five kilometers. But my brother insisted that we walk instead of taking the bus, because he thought it would be a good warm-up for him for the Youth City ball bouncing championship. It was already evening, and the two of us were wearing tracksuits, and when we passed the