High Tide
By Orly Castel-Bloom
Something was wrong with my and Alex’s way of life. The pace was frantic, there wasn’t a drop of air. He left home at seven and came back at ten, eleven at night. I left quarter of an hour after him and came home at about the same time. We had different-coloured diaries, in which we wrote down where we would be and when. Our diaries were full up a month and a half in advance. I don’t know how he managed with meals, I always ate fast food: sandwiches which I ate while waiting for the green light.
We had a number of advantages. Like two fast and very comfortable cars each with air-conditioning, and a double bed with a special orthopedic mattress to soothe the cramps in our back and leg muscles. We always had hot water in the bath, there were always cold soft drinks in the fridge, and our bar was always full. I had someone in three times a week to clean and take care of the housekeeping for me. For an extra pittance she also ironed and did the shopping, and that really made my life easier.
We worked at weekends too. Each of us has a study furnished in his own personal taste. We would sit there, summing up the week and making plans. Alex is an importer. He imports whatever he feels like, he has a sixth sense that tells him what will sell. Naturally he travels a lot, but his trips are short. I’m in clothing. I own a quality chain that everybody’s heard of . I have twelve shops in the centre, five in the north and another three in Beer-sheba and its suburbs. I go from shop to shop, travel abroad for the shows, and buy more clothes for the chain. Sometimes I meet women who want me to design a dress for them like this and like that. I always say to them: You’re the customer, but I’m what I am. You want to tell me what’s running through your head, I’m prepared to listen, but I’m not some little dressmaker. I don’t take orders from anybody, and the money makes no difference to me. I have something to say in the matter too, and a lot.
Once I did much more designing. Today I only design bridal gowns, and if they pay me well, I might agree to run up something for the mother of the bride or the mother of the groom as well.
My prices are probably the highest in the country, and only those who can afford it walk into Sisi’s shops. A lot of women stand outside looking at the window displays and dreaming of the day when they’ll be able to buy one of our creations for themselves. Dream on, girls, dream on.
Above each of my shops is a sign with the name of the owner: Ronit, Simone, Shirlee, Ofra, and so on, and underneath in different letters, in my opinion letters of different class entirely, Sisi One, Sisi Two, Sisi Three, and so on. They actually belong to me, all these shops, I only rent them to Ronit or Ofra or Pazit or whoever, and they pay me a fortune for the name Sisi, and also give me a share of the profits.
So what was I saying before? –when I start talking about my shops there’s no stopping me – yes, the tempo of our lives was frantic. Alex had already begun feeling aches and pains in all kinds of places, and my back was giving me problems. We decided to take a few days vacation. Alex said: Haifa.” I said: “Haifa? What kind of a holiday is that? I’ll drive down the streets and bump into one or another of my shops, suddenly I’ll see something not right, I’ll go in and start reorganizing the place? I haven’t got the strength for it.” He said: “Eilat.” I said: Eilat’s the same story.” He said: “So let’s leave the country.” I said: “What for, so I can walk round the streets and do shopping? That sounds to you like a proper holiday for me? Europe and the United States are the same story for me as Givatayim or Jerusalem or any place you care to mention.” Alex said: “Okay, Sisi, okay. So what do you suggest? Kenya? Or how about the Far East – you’ll come back with kimonos from there too, you know.”
At that moment he slayed me with laughter. After I recovered, I must have laughed for about five minutes flat, that Alex is a real joker sometimes, I said: “Let me arrange a place where there’s nobody and nothing to disturb us.”
A friend of my cousin’s has a house on a cliff in Normandy, not far from La Havre. There are steps carved in the cliff going down to the sea. I was there once, twenty years ago. I remember thousands of seagulls and dark ocean waves breaking on the cliff. I was there with my cousin and her friend. This was before I married Alex, when I was still going out with Benny, who I married afterwards and divorced three years later. There was a lot of publicity at the time in the gossip columns. They said he cheated on me, and I kept repeating that we didn’t get on, and that was all there was to it.
I don’t remember having a whole lot of fun on that visit to Normandy, except for before we arrived back in Paris when my cousin suddenly let out an exclamation of alarm and cried: “The fish! I forgot the fish in the fridge! Boy, will that fish stink in another day or two. Will it stink!” After that we laughed for a kilometer or two.
I phoned her. She’s my age, still with the same boyfriend, and I asked her about the country house in Normandy. She said she had no problem with letting us stay there, we didn’t even have to come through Paris to pick up the keys, we could go straight there, and she described the hiding place under the big flowerpot standing at the entrance to the house.
What was left but to pack, say goodbye, issue instructions to the girls, and fly.
We hired a car at the airport and a few hours later Alex was already moving the flowerpot. We turned it over, we crumbled clods of earth to powder, we dug up the flowerbeds, our hands and clothes were full of the brown dirt. It was a real drag.
“It’s a scandal,” I said. “Go rely on your family.”
“Yes,” agreed Alex.
We returned to the village and phoned my cousin.
“Under the flowerpot, under the flowerpot,” she kept repeating.
“But there’s nothing there,” I said.
“How can that be? Jean-Piere Jean-Pierre!” she called her boyfriend. “Where are the keys to the house? Under the flowerpot, right?”
“Under the flowerpot. Yes yes. Exactly so,” I heard him in the distance.
“Under the flowerpot, Sisi.”
“Well, it’s not there. Okay? I’m telling you it’s not there.” I tried to control myself. If it had been Simone Nurit Pazit or Ofral I would have told her a long time ago to go find herself another Sisi.
“I don’t know what to tel you. It was under the flowerpot. Nobody’s been there for ages. It’s been under the flowerpot ever since we bought that house. I thing we even bought the flowerpot specially so we could put the key under it. Right, Jean-Pierre?”
“Right right, exactly so.”
“Okay. What do we do now?”
“Break down the door and get a new lock. It’ll cost next to nothing. I’ll pay you back. Just don’t forget to put the new key under the flowerpot.”
“Never mind the money,” I said to her and put the phone down. “Now go find a break-in expert and a locksmith in this hole.”
Okay, we found them. When we finally got into the house it was late in the evening. We brought in the luggage, and I took the car back to the village to buy a few groceries. An hour later I was back with baskets of crabs and other seafood, cheeses and a freshly baked baguette. I went inside and made for the kitchen to put the groceries away. When I opened the fridge I saw a fat shiny fish lying on a wooden plate.
“Alex,” I called in alarm.
“What’s up? I’m in bed taking a little rest.”
“When the hell is this fish? Where did this fish come from?”
“What fish?”
“The big fish in the fridge.”
Aha, there are a few more in the freezer. I caught them. There’s a rod here with a long line. I was bored and I threw it into the sea. Suddenly I felt that I’d caught something. There must be a lot of fish in the ocean here, if you can catch fish from this height, no? I thought we could grill them. Did you bring lemons?”
“I did.”
“Excellent.”
I arranged the groceries in the fridge, and on one of the bottom shelves I encountered the skeleton of the fish that my cousin had forgotten years ago. I picked it up and it disintegrated almost immediately. Disgusting. I laid the table. I looked for candles in the cupboards and lit them. We sat down to eat and I cut the fish in half and each of us received his portion.
“Mmmm – delicious,” said Alex. “What an exceptional fish. And the shellfish? Have you tasted them? Why aren’t you eating? Your know what I feel like? Scorpions. Tomorrow we’ll go and get some. What a meal you made. Fantastic!”
“There’s a salad too.”
“Perfect. With a lot of lemon?”
“Yes.”
We ate in silence. We opened clams and sucked them out, seafood shells piled up on our plates.
Suddenly the house rocked slightly. The lamp rocked. The table rocked. The fishbones fell.
“What is it? What is it?” asked Alex and stood up. “An earthquake.”
“What,” I trembled and held onto the swaying table.
“An earthquake, let’s get out of here.”
He seized my hand and ran for the door. The elite fashion designer Sisi and her husband Alex die in an earthquake in Normandy. Tens of thousands of others perish too. Two hundred thousand left homeless. These were the headlines I saw in the seconds that passed before we reached the path where the car was parked. I looked towards the village.
“Look, everything seems stable there.”
“Yes,” he said. “It must have been a minor earthquake. Still, I don’t think we should stay in the house.”
“Hey, Alex, look,” I pointed to the white foam that looked very close to the house.
“Aha, it’s just the tide.”
“Aha.”
“It affects the foundations of the house. Rots them. Would you like to go to a hotel?”
“Yes.”
We went back into the house to pack. From time to time a wave rocked the house.
“What am I going to do with all these shellfish?” I asked.
“Throw them into the sea.”
I opened the window and threw out the shellfish the salad and the baguette. Down below everything was black with only a bit of white foam on the water here and there. I heard the fish leaping and snatching crumbs from the meal and disappearing again beneath the surface of the deep water.
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