{"id":10597,"date":"2025-12-01T18:18:22","date_gmt":"2025-12-01T18:18:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vidgop.co.il\/?page_id=10597"},"modified":"2025-12-25T10:35:54","modified_gmt":"2025-12-25T10:35:54","slug":"the-firemans-wife","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/vidgop.co.il\/en\/books-2\/the-firemans-wife\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fireman’s Wife"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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The Fireman’s Wife<\/h3>\n

Translated by Leo Shtutin; Published\u00a0in\u00a0Antae<\/strong><\/p>\nSmall-statured Master Zet is dressed in blue knee-highs, burgundy breeches and thin-soled sandals. Master Zet\u2019s frock coat is well tailored, and a dark green bow, knotted neat by the hand of a mute maid, constricts his slender neck. Master Zet is twelve, and he is permitted to stroll beside the flowerbeds laid out along the house that is home to his father, fat, moustachioed Mister Zet, his mother, wiry, peculiar Missus Zet, a maid, an aunt, a dog and a cat. Little Master Zet harbours a quiet hatred for cat and dog, aunt and maid, wiry lady and moustachioed gentleman. His neat-sandaled feet trace imbecilic figures of eight between the flower beds. His desires are modest: all he wants is to leap out of his sandals and wrench off his blasted knee-highs.\n\nThe mute long-nosed maid eagle-eyes him from a window. Flowerbeds are made to be trampled<\/em>\u2026 Savage thoughts give Master Zet no peace. His sandals carry him past the flower beds and trace yet more confounded figures of eight. The long-nosed maid\u2019s lopsided smirk follows him from the window.\n\nMaster Zet\u2019s dream is to find himself in the rear yard, if only just the once. And open that soot-besmirched door.\n\nThe rear yard is where the boiler house stands. All firemen\u2014of this Master Zet is convinced\u2014belong to some mysterious caste. Naturally, they worship fire; their rituals are enigmatic and frightful, and the sacrifices they must offer to their insatiable god are without measure.\n\nThe family of the resident fireman is three-strong. There is the fireman himself, a lank, dirty-faced, red-palmed man. There is his wife, a lady whose impossible proportions have\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 extinguished the young gentleman\u2019s imagination. And there is their daughter, a wizened, diminutive creature, all crooked legs and orange batiste dresses.\n\nMaster Zet is scarcely acquainted with them. They do no more than bow to one another from afar before turning aside in discomfiture. Master Zet is too timid to make the first approach. Which is why he is so enticed by a fantasy: that of flinging open their soot-besmirched door and bursting into their world. No one knows what awaits him there: the anguish of a purposeless existence, or rituals replete with ignorance, incantations and passion.\n\nThe fireman\u2019s daughter buries her wizened little face in the hem of her batiste dress. Her crooked legs trot her over to the soot-besmirched door, with her father in great-strided pursuit. \u00a0The fireman\u2019s wife looks round, and Master Zet sees her large face, her discomfited grimace, her red, half-open mouth.\n\nThe door, as always, slams shut.\n\nThe maid leans half her length out of the window and cranes her neck hither and thither to see what has drawn little Master Zet\u2019s notice. From the depths of the house comes the piercing voice of Missus Zet. Clambering down from the broad marble sill and gathering up her voluminous skirts, the maid hastens to answer her mistress\u2019s summons.\n\nThe time is now, thinks Master Zet. He takes an enormous leap, trampling the flowerbed, and flattens himself against the wall as hard as he is able. Now the maid won\u2019t see a thing, however far she pokes her nose out. Body flush with the wall, frock coat snagging on its brown brickwork, Master Zet darts on tiptoe towards the corner of the house.\n\nHe rounds the corner, and freezes.\n\nNothing can prevent him from making a break for the fireman\u2019s dwelling. There is no time for anyone to call out a warning, seize him by the coat-sleeve or block his path. Perhaps Master Zet\u2019s dream has already come to pass: this is the moment he\u2019s awaited for so long. He is so free he can turn back without regret.\n\nAll at once he is overtaken by a lassitude of sorts, seeming harbinger of endless ills. Ought he to carry this adventure to its conclusion? But the strange sense of duty he feels before his own fancies impels him onward.\n\nThe soot-besmirched door swings open in front of him.\n\nThe fireman palms his forehead. His daughter sinks into a clumsy curtsey. His wife\u2019s large face is aflame with discomfiture. Master Zet makes his way down the stairs. The fireman bows and begins to withdraw. His daughter snatches up his red hand, and, nodding ceaselessly, they retreat together behind a dusty velvet curtain which separates the room from a world of boilers, coal and infernal flame.\n\nThe fireman\u2019s wife sits in her armchair, eyes downcast, furious fingers worrying at an openwork doily. Master Zet looks about him, and sees only a wooden stool standing solitary in the middle of the room. Nasty little tremors take hold of Master Zet\u2019s legs, and he flops onto the stool.\n\nGuest and hostess remain silent, not venturing to utter a word of conversation. How to conduct themselves neither has the faintest. Master Zet has been too well drilled in the brick house, while the hostess is too meek to engage in genteel chit-chat with a distinguished guest.\n\nThey scrutinise one another. Master Zet adjusts his frock coat. He makes to pull up his socks. He thinks better of it and sits erect, hands darting to his knees. The hostess straightens her skirts on her immense hips, but Master Zet\u2019s movements freeze her into stillness. Bolt upright and statue-still, they continue to scrutinise one another.\n\nThe tension is such that the telltale tremors resume in Master Zet\u2019s leg, and he clutches at it with both hands. She notices, and smiles, and leaves her mouth ajar. He leaps up. Her impossible gargantuan breasts billow out at him as she rises from her seat in a deliberate, almost ceremonious motion, pillar-like legs planted firmly apart on the floor. He snatches for breath, hands groping downward like a blind man\u2019s. She stands there before him, her boundless, behemothic, absurdly bedizened body swaying back and forth. Master Zet leaps out of his sandals and wrenches off his blasted knee-highs. For the first time in his life he is bare of foot.\n\nIn a languid, infinitely drawn-out movement, the fireman\u2019s wife raises her blouse. Her skirts slide half way down her elephantine hips, exposing her immense insatiable belly. Its extraordinary pink bulk overhangs her salad-green bloomers. Master Zet hurls himself forward and presses his cheek to this orb, hot to the touch and aquiver with life. Keeping her breasts in check and digging her heels into the floor, she leans back. Tears streaming down his cheeks, body atremble, he takes fast hold of her belly. She screams with joy as she cradles his head.\n\nSobs convulse Master Zet\u2019s twelve-year-old frame. He throws back his head and looks up at the fireman\u2019s wife. In the brick house the dog begins to howl. Master Zet finds himself gripped by a sensation of higher truth.\n\nThe fireman and his daughter re-enter the room and freeze in a wordless bow. The door growls open, and the maid materialises wide-eyed on the threshold. In the brick house the wiry lady collapses in a swoon. Her moustachioed spouse tumbles into a flowerbed, crushing the cyclamens. The cat yowls. Master Zet is barefooted and free.\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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\u00a9 Jonathan Vidgop\u00a0 | Artist A. Gorenstein<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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