Dolly City

Orly Castel-Bloom, Dalya Bilu

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781564786661
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

" Dolly City —a city without a base, without a past, without an infrastructure. The most demented city in the world." In the midst of a futuristic-primitive metropolis, the accumulation of all our urban nightmares, Doctor Dolly (certified by the University of Katmandu) finds a newborn baby in a black plastic bag, and decides to become a mother. Overcome by unfamiliar maternal urges, Dolly dispenses with her private lab of rare diseases and turns all her surgical passion onto her son. Ceaselessly cutting and sewing, Dolly is the scalpel-wielding version of the all-too-familiar Jewish Mother archetype, forever operating upon her son with destructive, invasive love. In this grotesque satire of war and the defensive measures taken to survive it, Orly Castel-Bloom, one of Israel's most provocative and original writers, turns her own scalpel upon that most holy of institutions, the myth of motherhood—and its implications in the life of a nation.

PART ONE

Before goldfish die, they swim for a few hours on their sides, turn over, sink into the shallow water, and float up to the surface again. I once had a little orange goldfish that spent the whole day dying like this, until at dusk it sunk to the bottom of the bowl, its eyes open and its body twisted into a question mark.

I took a plastic cup and fished out the corpse. I went to the kitchen with the cup and poured the water carefully into the sink. I laid the fish on the black marble counter, took a dagger, and began cutting it up. The little shit kept slipping away from me on the counter, so I had to grip it by the tail and return it to the scene of the crime. For about an hour and a half I worked on that fish, until I’d turned its body into little strips you could measure in millimeters.

Then I looked at the pieces. In very ancient times, in the land of Canaan, righteous men would sacrifice bigger animals than this to God. When they cut up a lamb, they would be left with big, bloody, significant pieces in their hands, and their covenant would be a real covenant.

I seasoned the strips of goldfish, put a bit on my finger, lit a match, and brought the flame up to the flesh of the fish until it was a little charred, and my finger too began to smell like a steak. Then I threw my head back, opened my mouth wide, and let the first strip of fish fall straight into my digestive system.

I did the same thing with the rest of the fish, and when I was finished I sat down to contemplate my dying dog, a fourteen-year-old cocker spaniel bitch who was suffering from heart failure. For fifteen days I sat on the armchair and looked at her, at her dry, lolling tongue, her rapid breathing, her dulling eyes. During the course of these fifteen days I gave her food and water, and, of course, medication. She ate and drank next to nothing, and she threw up the medicine. I hooked her up to an IV, into which I injected the drugs, and this helped a little.

I was sorry that I hadn’t treated the fish to an IV too, but I immediately dismissed this thought on the grounds that it didn’t seem possible to find a vein in such a tiny goldfish. Altogether, it didn’t seem possible to find a vein in any fish, even a herring.

After fifteen days of continuous dying, when she no longer ate, stopped drinking, and the medication too became worthless—I allowed myself to open the medicine cabinet and prepared an anesthetic injection from which she’d never wake up.

I went up to her, I stroked her. She licked my fingers with her cleft, sore tongue. She licked my face, her sores scratched my skin, but I didn’t mind.

I laid her on my desk, rolling gentle words around on my tongue, murmuring them to her and stroking her orange head while in my other hand was the hypodermic needle.

Even before I’d finished injecting her, my dog closed her eyes and fell asleep. I stroked her and released her neck from the collar bearing all her metal immunization tags, each of them engraved with my address and the promise of a reward for her safe return.

I sat down on my barstool and looked at my fat dog, wondering how long it would take from the moment of the injection for sleep to change into death, and how exactly this changing of the guard took place.

My pet’s breathing grew increasingly heavy, deep, and full of significance. Each breath thought itself the last, but another one would always follow to steal away its title. Until…It was finished. The dog had had its day.

I called the vet. It was the middle of the night and I woke him up. A few days earlier, when I’d gone to consult him, he’d mumbled something about a man who buried pets for seventy shekels. I asked him for the phone number. He grumbled, “Can’t it wait till morning?” and immediately read out the number.

I spoke to the gravedigger and said what I had to say and was just about to hang up when he suddenly broke in:

“I hope you don’t think you’re coming with me, Miss…”

“Excuse me?” I said in astonishment. “Why not? It’s my dog you’re burying after all. I have every right to be present at the event. What have you got to hide?”

“Listen, lady,” he barked, “your seventy shekels is no big deal. Dogs die every other minute. I bury them in the dunes, near the sea. I do it at night, quietly, by myself. Take it or leave it.”

The window was wide open, and beyond it, the dark sky was visible, dotted with stars. I was busy working. There was a ring at the door and I cut myself. Blood dripped from three of my fingers. I wrapped them in a little towel and hurried to the door. In front of me stood a short man with a large face and a sagging stomach. He introduced himself by his full name, which immediately evaporated from my mind, and noticed my blood-soaked towel.

“Allow me,” he said and came closer.

“No, there’s no need,” I said. “Really.”

But the guest noticed my pallor and shaking knees, led me to the green velvet sofa, and laid me down on it. Then he hurried to the bathroom, took the first-aid kit out of the medicine cabinet, and as he cleaned my wounds with the gentleness of a medical intern, he joked that if he’d come any later, I would have had to pay double, both for the cocker and for myself.

He bandaged my fingers, went into the other room, put the cocker spaniel into a black garbage bag, hoisted it onto his back, and asked for the money in cash. I took the notes out of my pocket. I felt like rolling them up into a tight wad and shoving them horizontally between the gravedigger’s upper lip and his nose, like a moustache, but all I did was hand them over and say good-bye, thinking that I would never see him again.

Scarcely a minute had passed, however, before I did—in the distance, from the heights of my thirty-seventh-floor apartment. He tossed the bag with the dog into the trunk and sat down to start the car. But he couldn’t get it going, and I thought to myself, here’s your chance, Dolly. I ran outside, got into the cylindrical glass elevator, which moved up and down in a series of unnecessary spirals in order to save energy, and made it to the ground floor in time. In a crouched run I made my way across the asphalt, slowly opened the back door, and crawled inside. The little criminal hadn’t succeeded in starting the engine yet and was spewing out a sea of curses. It was ten minutes before the charmless solo of the motor was heard, and we set out. I glanced at my watch, it was eight minutes past two, while my compass showed that he was driving west, just as I’d thought.

Twenty minutes later the car signaled a right turn and we drove onto a dirt road full of humps and potholes, on either side of which garish prostitutes displayed themselves. The driver, who apparently had an erection, muttered something to himself, swerved sharply to give one of them a fright, and laughed a wheezing laugh that only subsided some minutes later, when he had turned off the road and receded from the prostitute’s view.

The car stopped abruptly and he jumped out with a spade in his hand. I too stole out, into the damp, salty wind blowing from the sea. I hid behind a hillock covered with yellow evening primroses, which didn’t remind me of anything, and settled down to watch.

The round pit was dug, and all that remained for this crook to do was drop the bitch into it and cover her up. But instead of finishing his business, he started a whole new ball game. He took the cocker spaniel out of the bag, pulled a pitchfork from the trunk of his car, and began mutilating the corpse, stabbing it, decapitating it, amputating its legs, throwing whatever was left of my dog into the pit and hastily covering it up.

I trembled all over, enraged, a battle cry on my lips. The man turned in surprise and I, in my grief, snatched the pitchfork from his hand, and instead of sticking it into the ground in a civilized manner, I drove it into the gravedigger’s stomach with all the strength I’d accumulated over my years of manual labor.

He doubled up in pain. I went berserk and finished him off in a couple of minutes.

Puffing and panting, I stood there for one minute longer. Then I caught my breath, gathered up the pieces of my dog, and buried them in the light of the crescent moon. Finally, I wiped my damp and itchy brow.

I started the car and abandoned myself to a sense of peace I hadn’t felt for ages. In this state of serenity I drove that box on wheels back to the main road.

A few seconds after I’d passed the deserted, brightly lit gas station, noticing and not noticing the wavering human silhouette next to the petrol tanks, I began to hear sounds that were incompatible with my surroundings. I couldn’t locate these sounds anywhere in the landscape, they seemed to be coming from inside the car itself. I pulled up to the side of the road, and my eyes came to rest on a black plastic bag lying at the back of the car, on the ledge between the backseat and the rear window.

Little cars, mostly Volkswagen Beetles, drove past me in both directions. I waited until the road was momentarily clear, knelt on my seat, and leaned over toward the sound. I opened the plastic bag, and there, wrapped in Health Department diapers, lay a blue, hungry baby.

I rummaged in the bag for documents, looking around for some clues as to the dead man’s identity, and in the end, underneath the driver’s seat, I found some old income tax forms for a shoe store.

The baby screamed and made sucking motions with his lips. I didn’t know what to do to calm him down. I undid the diaper and found a festering hole, two centimeters wide, in the middle of his stomach, surrounded by dried blood. I picked him up and placed him in the passenger seat.

Cars flashed past, all of them Volkswagen Beetles. I threw a glance at my companion. I began to drive, the street lights flickering across his face. The headlights of the cars opposite me dazzled my eyes. I took another peek at the pit in his stomach and remembered coming across the story of a man who’d lived a not inconsiderable number of years ago, and who had agreed, in the interest of medical science, to have a hole left in his stomach, which enabled his physicians to study the functioning of his digestive system. I’d read about this man when I was in my twenties in Katmandu, while I was studying medicine there. I was the only Jew in the university.

I parked the car in the building’s underground parking lot. In the cylindrical elevator, which was made of thick, transparent glass, I pressed 37, and within seconds I was in my official residence. It was already morning. I knew that I had to act quickly and efficiently.

I took some anesthetic from one of my cupboards, and consulted my medical books to check the correct amount for anesthetizing a newborn baby. The frogs in the glass aquariums croaked in alarm, thinking I was about to use it on them. I laid the blue, naked baby on my operating table. He screamed. His little mouth gaped like a gondola. I silenced him with the injection, disinfected him, sewed up his stomach, and bandaged the wound. While he was sleeping in the recovery room, hooked up to an IV of drugs and minerals, I walked the streets, and within half an hour I was back in my apartment with everything a baby could need. I prepared a soft, padded room for him, and went out onto the balcony for a cigarette.

I pleaded with myself, I tried building a logical case for postponing the execution for a while, but instead of the voice of reason making itself heard, the situation took control of my eyeballs. They kept looking up, higher and higher, as if there was always something to see up there—more and more sky, a stairway of sky, a Tower of Babel of sky, instead of one deep, blue, unambiguous heaven.

There was no alternative: I injected myself with a sedative that calmed me down, and for the time being the infant’s life was spared.

I tried to get my mother on the phone, but the line was busy. When I was a child this woman told me about a mother who’d put her baby in the washing machine and switched it on. The judge sentenced her to life plus hard labor in the prison laundry, as a laundress. So deeply did my mother imprint this story in my mind that even now, while putting the baby’s clothes into the washing machine, I imagined seeing the baby in there too, and I fainted.

The baby woke me with his screams, and again—because the influence of the sedative had worn off by now—I wanted to strangle him. But I said to myself: Why waste your energy, Dolly? In any case, that weakling’s going to die in a few days’ time, of an infection or neglect or carelessness, and even if he does get himself murdered in the end, so what? He should have been dead already anyway.

Nevertheless, my brain started working overtime thinking of a name for the infant. I thought of “Kid.” I assumed that he wouldn’t survive the age of three. I went on racking my brain for names, but all the while the baby was screaming so hard he nearly burst. I injected an anesthetic into his spine, and he shut up.

I lay down on my giant bed and watched the TV shows picked up by the satellite dishes on the roof, smoking like a chimney as I did so. For a moment I caught myself whistling for the dog, and a string snapped in my body, C sharp, then I closed my eyes, and decided to call him Son, so that if anyone ever called him a son of a bitch, he’d take it personally and beat them up for the both of us.

During the first days of Son’s life, I turned thirty, and it was also five years since I had moved into the four hundred story tower. During these years I hadn’t made a single friend among my neighbors, except for Itzik, the magician from the forty-seventh floor. When I’d run out of brown sugar or guinea pigs or antidepressants, I would go up to see him.

About a week after I became an unwilling mother, at midnight, I was all ready to go to sleep, but sleep eluded me like a toddler hiding from his parents between the concrete pillars of a parking lot in Ashdod.

There was a heat wave blowing in and it was hot as hell. The air-conditioners weren’t working, the lab animals were restless. Only the baby was sleeping—like a corpse.

I realized while still in the elevator that Itzik was throwing a party, no expense spared, no questions asked. Every few weeks this guy would invite all the magicians in town, male and female, to one hell of a party.

The host opened the door. Behind his back appeared the heads of his colleagues, men and women heavily made up.

“Excusez-moi,” I simpered, “I wonder if you have a packet full of yellow pills?”

“Pardonnez-moi,” said Itzik, “is the shoemaker barefoot?”

“Just say yes or no,” I urged him.

“Pardonnez-moi,” he said, bowed, and retired into the room, leaving the rectangular space of the door full of dozens of faces examining me with interest. After ten minutes the host reappeared with only twenty pills and a glass of water.

“The stock’s finished, Doctor. All I can offer you is an invitation to come in and join us.”

He handed me the pills and I swallowed them all on the spot. For almost ten years I’ve been taking yellow antidepressant pills, which have had no effect on me at all. They were recommended to me by a Thai computer science student I fucked about ten times. I don’t know for sure why I go on swallowing more than twenty of these pills a day. I swallow them, they have no taste and no effect either.

In Itzik’s living room the magicians were performing that trick where they put some female into a box with three compartments and stick swords into her, and in the end she comes out without a scratch. But this time something went wrong, and terror swept across the magicians like a jet of water from a revolving sprinkler.

“Ai, ai,” screamed the model-magician, swords cleaving her body at all kinds of sharp angles without shedding a single drop of blood.

Itzik looked at me, white as an angel. I knew that as a doctor I had to act quickly, but at the same time, as a human being, I didn’t really care if the girl died.

“I’m begging you, Dolly, do something.” He went down on his knees in a theatrical pose, taking my hand and tenderly kissing my knuckles, which he knew would be hard for me to resist. His lips were dry and cracked from all the forced smiles he smiled at the children’s birth...