140. The Baguette I

The Baguette

She was one of his oldest and dearest friends in Paris, a Jewish actress by the name of Avital. Her mother was a failed dancer from Austria, and her father, a failed writer from Poland. In 1939, the two of them had managed to escape to London, where Avital was born. When the war finally ended and they returned to Paris, so many of their friends and neighbours had been deported that they never again quite managed to believe in the reality of their lives. They lived in a hotel near the Luxembourg Gardens, ate out in restaurants, and paid only the scantest attention to the so-called necessities of life; both were more or less anorexic and insomniac; neither did housework.

Time passed, Cosmo went on. Once Avital had grown up and begun to life on her own, her parents move to Israel and settled down in Tel Aviv.

That's practically the anagram of their daughter's name! Elke pointed out.

Since that time, they'd sunk into a sort of harmless lunacy. As the mother had health problems (phlebitis and a zona, if I remember correctly), the father did all the shopping and cooking. Whereas he himself ate almost nothing for supper (two yogurts were plenty), he went to the supermarket every day and bought his wife a half chicken, she gave most of it to the dog. Ah yes, I forgot to tell you they had a dog. Storytelling is not my forte, I apologize. Anyway, it was a very cute dog when they first got it, but by this time it had grown neurotic and obese; Avital's mother kept it on a leash even inside the house; she would lead it into the kitchen and force-feed it with a spoon, and when it couldn't swallow another mouthful she'd empty the contents of its tins directly onto the kitchen floor; the apartment reeked of dogfood, and when the father got up barefoot in the middle of the night for a glass of water, he would step in squishy stuff. Moreover, the mother was worried the dog might catch acold so, even in teh summer, even in ninety-degree weather, she would cover it with blankets, mountains of blankets, until all you could see was its poor little nose sticking out. She fretted and fussed about the dog so much that her husband finallaly exploded -- I'll KILL that dog! He roared. I swear, I'm going to KILL it! And he would pretend to step on the dog and crush it beneath his feet...