11/17/2023 0 Comments Long story short cafeLugassi, the new owner of the café and the tall girl’s father, itemized all these things to himself time and again. What more can you say about the appearance of a place whose ugliness stands out like a silly curl jumping out of a bobble hat? And how could someone or other who was wearing a bobble hat turn down a café whose ceiling was covered in wood, on its walls, facing one another, two florescent lamps a place where the seats of the chairs were made of crimson plastic, where the screen separating the café itself from the toilets was nothing more than a word? Mr. ![]() With the calculated cleverness of peddlers, they saw before them the bubble of impeccable-boredom that she offered at her café, which was, if to tell the truth, a pretty shabby place and nothing more. And despite all this, pedestrians and some especially sharp-eyed drivers know that the place she is sitting in isn’t indecent. Her school shirt was actually quite tight and the top buttons unbuttoned, her jeans were flare shaped, four zippers and a Bakardi label, and one onlooker, one in a hundred, maybe one in a hundred thousand, would appreciate the way her long earring brushed first against her cheek and then against the lock of hair tucked behind her ear. A book lay before her, half on the counter half across her lap, her round eyes moving casually from the pages, which had the public library stamp imprinted on them, to the street, fixing on like a fishhook in an unexpected motion and lingering, slanted gaze: maybe they’ll come in, and what will be the desired ratio of coffee and milk in their cappuccino, and should the teabag be served on the side or in the cup. Only fourteen years old and already knew how to cross her legs properly on the high chair behind the counter: her socks were pulled up to her knees, hating the irritating tickle of a loose sock. Sometimes, maybe once a week, she would polish the glazed beady eyes with Ritzpaz, to make them glisten. Then she would move a soft brush over the bottom of the cage and the feathers, which were glued unprofessionally and easily plucked. In those days of loud cheers by the dwellers, shards of chocolate-coated waffles, bread crusts, bus fare tickets and dirty, crumpled napkins, the tall girl, the owner’s daughter, would carefully unlatch the door – she also believed for just a second that the colorful stuffed animal might bite her finger off – lowered her hand in and collected the various foods. A month ago the glass cover still wasn’t installed there, a sort of large bell-shaped cover that was meant to stop people from throwing food into the cage while totally ignoring the fact that this parrot was, after all, an artificial animal. ![]() The animal could say: ‘My name is Samson’, ‘How are you?’ and ‘Watermelon’ and ‘Have some coffee’. The café customers dropped chips they had bought from the tall girl behind the counter inside, making the animal with the clipped beak and the blue and yellow down feathers talk. A green cage with a domed top, a swing fixed inside it, and a slot and small drawer at the front. In the corner café that had recently changed owners stood a parrot’s cage. This is how Matalon concludes her story: “Because by his speech alone he’s distancing her chance of giving him form, like one fluffs pillows, placing them on top of each other so that they won’t stick out, and from the blanket tucked tightly under the mattress, the clean fringes of a bed sheet are suggested.” ![]() And indeed, in works of great literature, nothing ever stays in its place for long, but is destined to be rephrased time and again and remain unfrozen, unbound and wild. The words, Matalon knows, are a blazing sword that can be pierced in human states of consciousness that are never whole, never coherent and never omniscient, and kill them. And indeed, nothing in Matalon’s story is of “the department of education.” The girls in the story, Mazi and Ruhama, one who does not know and one who thinks she knows, move inside a world in which their consciousness is outside the reach of an adult consciousness able to tame or civilize this consciousness on behalf of any kind of “department of education.” Their world is the world of a pre-conceptual stage in which the concept is obtained, as in life itself, only after actual experience and even then the concept evades that which is ultimately determined by words and becomes language, culture and law. “Do you have a cigarette? He opened the pack in front of her: Aren’t you too young for this? She gently removed the cigarette from between his fingers and lit hers: What are you, the department of education?” This question is directed by one of the two girls in Ronit Matalon’s story, “Girl in the Café”, at the clerk in the clothing store they enter.
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