Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 12 of a new online serial novel, If Anyone Is Listening, by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every week. Click here for previous chapters.
Copyright © Israel Bookshop Publications.
It’s not you who is important. It’s a glitch of sorts.
Shimmy looked at the note that the clerk at the reception desk handed him, and raised a pair of questioning eyes.
“What is this?” he asked, rather impatiently. The robotic bat had completely frustrated and unnerved him. It had croaked in Chinese over and over, had taken pictures of him from every angle, and had then flown off, leaving the feeling that it would be back.
It wasn’t a pleasant feeling to know that someone had put an irritating surveillance device on you. Too bad he didn’t know Chinese!
“What is this?” The clerk looked at the paper he had just handed over. “I don’t know—that’s what they told me on the phone.”
“Who told you?”
“They just called here,” the clerk tried to explain in decent English, “and said to give you this message.”
“Oh.” Shimmy studied the note again. It’s not you who is important. It’s a glitch of sorts. A very irritating and annoying glitch—and a repulsive one, at that. And it had invaded his privacy! And taken pictures of him! And thrown cookie pieces at him!
At least this time, the bat hadn’t been quite as impolite as the time before.
“Who was the caller?” he asked the clerk.
“I don’t know.”
“Did he ask to speak to me?”
“No, he just said to tell you this message.”
“That this bat is a glitch of some sort?”
“I don’t know anything about a bat.” Confounded, the clerk turned again to read the words that he’d written down, his lips mouthing each one. “I wrote what they said to me. They didn’t say anything about a bat.”
“Did they leave a phone number?”
“No.”
“So annoying,” Shimmy muttered. A glitch. This was what a glitch-ridden robot bat looked like. Interesting to know what it was supposed to look like in its planned version, if not like this. More irritating or less?
I’ll have a fascinating story to tell Gedalya, who is always curious about developing industries in China, he thought. Not that I have any idea who owns this disgusting robot.
And he wasn’t even certain that the bat had photographed his contract with Sun Jang; he was just assuming so. But he did know clearly that he himself had been photographed and recorded in the last few minutes. And then, this strange message was a direct answer to his question.
But if he wasn’t important, and they didn’t want anything from him, they wouldn’t have made the effort to contact him and answer him.
So what do they want from me?
A minute after Shimmy retreated from the front desk, the phone behind the clerk rang. The man picked up with a standard greeting and then listened. In light of the stare he fixed Shimmy with, it was clear that the same caller was on the line.
“He says to tell you to wait for him in your room,” the clerk said to Shimmy, appearing very uneasy. “To go upstairs and wait for him, now.”
“Is he serious?!” Shimmy felt his fury rising. “I should wait for him?! Now?! What about refreshments—does he also want that? Tell him he’s certainly not getting any cookies!”
The reception clerk said something into the phone and then looked at Shimmy. “He says to please wait for him—he’s coming to apologize.”
“To apologize, uh-huh.” Shimmy shook his head. “I can accept his apology by phone.”
“No, he wants to come here,” the clerk insisted, with that annoying Chinese obstinacy.
“First he should say who he is.”
“He said his name is Yang Yang.”
“Another common Chinese name. I’m sure there are thousands of Yang Yangs—it doesn’t tell me anything. Does he know English?”
“A bit, yes.”
“I’m calling my interpreter to be here when he comes.”
The clerk conveyed the response: “Call whomever you want, but it’s in your best interest to keep it secret.”
“So we’ll meet here in the lobby,” Shimmy said firmly. He was starting to panic. Was someone setting a trap for him? In the open lobby, with people passing by, it would be safer than in his closed room.
***
Ruchi is crying in her room—I hear it all the way from where I am, in the bathroom. Should I say something to her mother? Nah, I should probably ignore it, like she is doing. The sound of the running water helps me focus on my task at hand, at least externally, but when I return to our basement forty minutes later, I am exhausted.
“If this is the beginning…” I tell my husband, “I don’t know what to tell you. I hope her parents understand that she needs emotional support for the foreseeable future.”
He suffices with his favorite response: a skeptical nod of the head. Usually, it satisfies me, but today it does not, at all. And I have no one to talk to about this because of the close proximity of these apartments, and because of my daily study of the halachos of shemiras halashon.
So I talk to Yudi. He comes down to us in the afternoon and asks when we are coming up for lunch. I really have no interest in eating lunch there.
“I’m a bit tired,” I say, and yawn impressively. “I’m also uncomfortable about Ruchi’s mother being so busy catering to us. I don’t want to add to her load.”
“Oh,” my son says.
“Do you want to eat here with us?”
“No, I’ll go back,” he says, and I’m happy for his clarity.
“Ruchi is probably also very tired.”
“Yes. She also isn’t so happy anymore.”
“Why?” I ask one of the most foolish questions on earth. But to Yudi, it’s probably a very wise question, because how could the mother of such a sweet baby not be happy?
“Because she says that the baby has a crooked leg.”
“A crooked leg!” I exclaim, not finding a better response.
“Yes.” He nods with resignation. “So he’s probably going to limp.”
“Who told you that?”
“No one.”
“So why does she think that way?”
“Because they told her mother in the hospital that the baby has…” he groped for the precise term—“…something wrong with the bones in his leg. Or the muscles there. I don’t know. And that maybe it will sort itself out, but maybe not.”
“You mean hip dysplasia? That’s not such a big deal!” I breathe a sigh of relief, not knowing whether or not to be angry at the foolish nurse who went and made these comments to someone like Ruchi. On the other hand, what did the nurse know? Ruchi looks amazing, for the most part, and I have no idea what her medical records say about her. “Do you know who had that? Sara’le’s Chaim, and he had to wear a leg brace, and they did some physical therapy exercises with him, and now he is fine. I mean, do you know how he runs and gets wild? So what does that tell you, huh?”
“Ruchi doesn’t know Chaim,” Yudi says, clearly distraught. “I can’t tell her that.”
“Then you have to think about someone who she does know. Surely her parents can find out about a child who once had this condition, and today is totally normal. She needs to know that this isn’t a big deal at all!”
“Right…” he murmurs somewhat blankly.
“So find someone that she knows, and she’ll see how well he walks and does everything, and it will all be great, b’ezras Hashem.”
“But what if not?” my son asks, to the point.
“You mean, what if you can’t find someone like that?
“No, what if it won’t be great? And if the baby limps?”
“Why should he limp?”
“Because she says he has a crooked leg!”
I suppress a sigh. “And what do you think, Yudi? Does your cute baby have a crooked leg or not?”
“I don’t know. I’m just so confused.”
“What you need to do now, Yudi, is to go and eat lunch, and then go to sleep,” I say. “You need a good nap, the type of sleep that’ll make you forget all these problems. After that, when you wake up, we’ll think about what to do. Maybe we should call a doctor about this?”
“Yes, I’ll tell my shvigger.”
Three minutes after we part, my phone rings, and my mechuteiniste is on the line. She sounds almost normal, and I try to figure out how many situations like this she’s been through since Ruchi was born. Had she also been told, back then, that everything was fine? After she saw that something was—I don’t know—“off”?
“You don’t want to come up for lunch?” she asks cheerfully. “I actually wanted you to pop in again, so you could try to calm Ruchi down.”
“Is everything…okay?” I ask carefully.
“Yes. I’m talking about the baby’s right leg.”
“It looks crooked to you?”
“Yudi told you about the issue? That it might be hip dysplasia or something similar?”
“Yes.”
“So they told me in the hospital that he’ll need some treatment and follow-up for it.” She sighs. “Nothing serious, but you know how it is, just another something. I didn’t tell it to them, but maybe Ruchi overheard something, or maybe she really does see something different about his leg.”
“Can you see it?”
“I don’t see anything. Look, maybe you, with your intelligence and your logic, will be able to explain to her that everything is fine?”
My intelligence and my logic. Sure.
“Maybe call a doctor to come and explain that to her?” I suggest. Then, hearing loud sobbing in the background, I hurry to emphasize, “A pediatrician.”
“The very idea is making her hysterical. If you call a doctor, then something is for sure wrong. The mohel was here today, and he says the baby is healthy, baruch Hashem. But that’s not enough for her, because she claims he’s not an orthopedist, so what does he know?”
She’s displaying some pretty good debating skills, my daughter-in-law.
“Fine, I’ll come up,” I say. “Does it work for Ruchi for me to come now? I don’t want to embarrass her…”
“I’m not exactly going to ask her,” her mother says, and there are suddenly thin cracks in her voice. “And if her shame from you causes her to stop crying a little, I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all.”
***
Every person has flaws. Borei nefashos rabbos v’chesronan—Hashem creates many living beings and their imperfections. But some people’s flaws are more obvious, and others are hidden. Either way, there is no perfect person.
If someone hears me, he recognizes my voice, my style of speech, my tone. If he thinks a bit into the content, he also recognizes that I’m a Jew who is shomer Torah u’mitzvos. But does he know that I limp? Does he know that since the accident I had when I was a young man, my leg has remained crooked?
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