The Genogram

She's always standing waiting for me at the entrance to the house; her face is lined with wrinkles, devising evil. She is miserly, bitter. More than anything, Mas'uda reminds me of the wicked witch from Hansel and Gretel, except that her house is not one of chocolate and candy.

With her at home, in a large iron bed in the middle of the hall, is her husband, Yitzhak. On an air bubble mattress donated by a medical charity organization, he is curled up in a diaper, his stiffened hands and feet bent. A plastic feeding tube is attached to his stomach. She injects porridges and soups into his tube. She possibly pats, possibly slaps her husband's silent, fallen mouth. Her movements when tending to him are wooden. She sighs and holds her waist when she turns him over, hurting him when she pulls the foul-smelling diaper from under him, not forgetting to mention how much the diaper costs and how little support she receives from the welfare agencies, the Health Fund, and from the cruel world at large. A world that had her, a pretty virgin from a good family, marry Yitzhak at the age of 14 in Marrakech, a world that had left her, after she had borne and buried Yitzhak's children with this heap of bones.

Aliza, the village nurse, still remembers Yitzhak from 7 years ago, before he became a lump of rigid flesh, before the stroke that split his brain and paralyzed his body and stemmed the source of his speech. She claims that Mas'uda is taking revenge on Yitzhak for her bad years with him, that she is reviving his body so that he can hear her cursing and abuse, so that she can tyrannize him and this body of his, which took possession over …