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Dora B
By Josiane Behmoiras

My mother wakes up in the middle of the night, rolls over until her shoes touch the ground, grabs her handbag, which doubles as her pillow, and out of it produces a fold-up clock and a broken biscuit. She opens the clock, presses a button to illuminate the time, then closes the clock and puts it back in her bag. She eats the biscuit for her midnight snack, wiping the crumbs from her mouth, then gets up from her bench and walks across the small square on King Saul Street until she reaches a telephone booth at the edge of a deserted footpath. Out of her handbag she takes a magnetic plastic card, puts it into the slot and with her finger composes a long number she has stored in her head.

            In Australia it’s eight o’clock in the morning when the telephone rings. My daughter rushes to the phone, like children often do. As soon as she has answered the call she waves both arms, one holding a peanut-butter toast and the other holding the receiver, which she hands to me as if it were a hot brick. I immediately know it’s my mother calling and I brace myself for the usual shriek, “Allô, allô! C’est toi, ma fille?” I will reply with a feeble “Oui maman, c’est moi” I call her maman, but I think of her as Dora, not as my mother. I will hold the receiver away from my head, letting her curse this or that enemy, keep silent and hear nothing but from time to time her voice calling, “Allô, allô!” can you hear me? I will answer “Oui, maman,” and listen to the crooked fan creaking inside our gas heater, the news from around Australia coming from the radio, the old man next door whistling in his back yard, teaching his budgerigar the same old song that the bird won’t sing.

            But this time, as soon as I take the receiver I sense distress in the familiar forceful tone. Dora’s voice is shakier than usual. “Ma fille, oh, you don’t know what happened to me!”

            “What, maman?” I am alarmed.

            “They have stolen my suitcase,” she says.

            “Where, how did it happen?”

            “Yesterday, on the beach,” she says in an apologetic voice, as if she had been frivolous. “I was tired; the suitcase was heavy with all my belongings in it.”

            I am angry with her for carrying a suitcase instead of wheeling a jeep. “The cursed thieves! Now I have nothing left.” Her voice is trembling but she doesn’t cry. “I pulled the suitcase and then I sat on the beach, my back against it. I fell asleep. I woke up sleeping on the sand and it was gone.”

            All I can say is “Oh, maman…”

            “Don’t worry, my darling” she says. “I will get another suitcase and fill it up again. Allô, allô, do you hear me? Dora checks that I am still on the line, still listening, before continuing with her monologue of rage. “The cursed thieves! My stolen possessions will bring them bad luck, amen!”

            “Oui,” I answer, for lack of other words.

            “Now listen, you have to help me. Did you do what I told you?” Her voice recovers; she is back to her normal tone. On and on she will go, begging me to write to this or that world leader to ask for help, and as always I am already escaping. I revisit the beach in Tel-Aviv I saw twelve years ago. She would have gone there in the late afternoon, it would be too hot during the day under the harsh sun of August. By now most of the bathers would be home, cool, showered, sitting on their balconies in clean white cotton vests, careful with the juice of their fresh watermelon. The air on the beach would be still and warm. The sun would be descending on the water, tilting the atmosphere toward melancholy. Maybe a few girls in bikinis would still be lying on colourful beach towels licking icy-poles, and one or two hopeful young males would be making passes at them: “Excuse me, I think I know you from somewhere, did you every work at the Discount Bank?” The echo of a rubber ball thudding between two wooden rackets would fill the temporary silence of the day’s end, two pairs of feet running on the edge of the water where the sand is firmer. My mother would enter that scene dragging a heavy suitcase, stopping and starting again, undecided about the best spot to have a rest; leaving behind her an uneven groove in the sand, her suitcase resisting the pull of her eighty-five-year-old hands.

            “Allô, are you there?”

            “Oui,” I answer.

            “Did you hear what I said?”

            “What?....”

            “Ecoute!” she says. “Listen carefully to what you have to do. Listen, this time. You have to ask your husband to ring Bill Clinton. I sent a letter to Bill Clinton. He knows all about you. All, all. He is a kind man and he understands my case. He will help me and all and all. Allô, are you there?”

            “Clinton will like your husband, they will be friends, you will see. Allô? Let me talk to your hus-“ beep beep beep beep beep…. It’s my sound of salvation. Her credit is consumed and I hang up. She will clench the plastic card in her hand as she walks back to her bench. She will sit down under the shadow of a twenty-storey building, eat another biscuit and look up, knowing that only the sky is her limit. She won’t give up the Clinton idea. Not just yet.

            It eases my mind, knowing she is already recovering from this latest loss of her belongings, back on her usual quest for the attention of world leaders.

            I can imagine her walking along the affluent streets of Tel-Aviv, holding a letter addressed to François Mitterand or to Queen Elizabeth. Her hair matted, her clothes mismatched layers, crumpled and stained dresses, shirts, cardigans, coats. Two pairs of looking glasses are held together with string; one eye blind, cloudy, the other in need of a thicker lens. Her face tense with confusion and her step heavy with exhaustion. Her skin diseased from lack of washing.

            But sometimes I see her the way she was in those warm summers of bliss. If I try hard, I can picture her standing in a creek, her body illuminated by the first light of morning. She is bowing to scoop me from the water. I let go of a snail and she lifts me high above the stream. My head is nestling against the curve of her neck and I inhale her freshness. I wrestle with my memory to catch a glimpse of the butterflies and dragonflies that used to fly around her, gleaming against the shade of the blackberry bushes. I know the name of that place. The word is warm and velevety in my mouth, like my mother’s breasts when they were full of milk: Chevreuse.

Josiane Behmoiras is interviewed by Matthew Reisz on Sunday 5th March at 5.00pm
Click here to view this session

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