She had the dead countenance of the
introspective. We tiptoed around her and soothingly vilified her former
husband to her face.
At first, she clung to life. She raised a son and daughter in the
squalid quarters of her parents. But when her daughter succumbed to
leukemia, she was a broken vessel. She shipped her son to a foster
family in a Kibbutz and sought employment in a hospice for the
terminally ill. There, among the dead and dying, she spent most of her
time, often napping, in between shifts, in a bed still sweating of its
former, now deceased, occupant. Or she would sprawl on an operating
table, among blood spattered bandages and slabs of sanguinary flesh in
overflowing buckets.
She rarely returned to her parents now, to assume her tiny chamber,
with its monastic bed, and ramshackle dresser. She has not dated,
neither has she been with a man since her divorce.
And now, this, into the night with the deranged and violent Janusz, who
wastes his time on books, on public benches in twilight parks. What
could he do to her?
"A beautiful woman is only trouble" - someone said and everyone hummed
in consent.
"Poor Dinah" - sighed another aunt, summing in these three syllables
her entire shrivelling misery.
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