Brigitta’s Man
Published in Issue #4 Translated from Hebrew by Evan Fallenberg(Excerpt from a Novel)
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One Saturday it seemed to me I had succeeded in teaching my father seven new words in English, but two days later only one was still hanging on in his memory.
“Your father’s head is drying up,” he announced loudly, raising his hands accusingly to the ceiling, his attempt at preempting an attack.
I tried in vain to plaster over the disappointment. I sat with him in the living room and the two of us counted and rehearsed the words he already knew: baby (his hands formed the shape of a large ball in the air); rose (“Like Rosa Luxemburg, Rosa the Red,” he said, two fingers tracing the stem of a flower); one, two, three (“Little Indians,” he said, quoting from a ditty he knew and smiling, his upper dentures loose against his receding gums); goodbye (he raised his hand as if taking leave of someone waving from a distance, and a shadow passed over his eyes); old man (he pointed to his own body, to his navel, as though that was where the essence of his being resided); good (“Tov,” he repeated in Hebrew, pointing his finger at me and smiling mischievously).
After that we reviewed the six words he had forgotten: morning (he spread his fingers into a shining sun); evening (pulled his fingers into a fist); to eat, to sleep, to wash, to sit (he had grown tired of demonstrating).
But by the time I came to him with the Filipina, about a month later, he had forgotten all the new words and received her with leftovers from the old stockpile: “Old-man-goodbye.”
She did not understand what he wished to say to her, this man in the wheelchair, and for a moment she stood without moving, trying – like a student faced with a particularly knotty exam – to decipher what he had said, her face in full concentration and the slits of her eyes, like a cat’s, nearly shut tight with exertion. Perhaps she was alarmed at the thought that she had not...
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