Escorpión

The scorpion that stings Shmuel Ash on a walk in the Carmel hills becomes the unlikely center of one of his rare warm childhood memories. Its venom brings him close to panic, but the emergency gathers his parents and sister around him; the tenderness he receives, and the imagined grief he briefly savors, outlast the pain. In memory, the animal marks a short-lived opening in the bleakness of family life, one that continues to shape Shmuel’s longing for affection and his wish to forgive the world.

The encounter on the Carmel slopes

Shmuel sets out before dawn with his friend Menahem, whose family came from Transylvania, to wander a green ravine on the western slopes of Mount Carmel. They carry walking sticks, canteens, and packs with blankets, food, and the means to make a fire. After hours of walking under the hot sun, they stop among scrubby oaks and struggle to pitch a tent, taking turns holding the stakes and hammering them into the stubborn ground with a stone. As Shmuel bends to pick up a larger stone, a scorpion stings him on the wrist.

At first neither boy understands what has happened. Menahem takes Shmuel’s swelling hand and tries to find what he thinks might be a splinter of glass, then pours water from the canteen over the sting. The pain intensifies. When a yellow scorpion crawls among the dry leaves, Shmuel thinks it may be the one that stung him—or another—and becomes certain he is going to die. Terror takes over: clutching his burning hand, he runs down the ravine, stumbling over stones and dead branches, falling and scrambling up again. Menahem follows, unable to catch him, and cries for help as though he himself were injured.

From panic to temporary family closeness

The boys reach an unfamiliar new road, exhausted and shaken. A woman stops and drives them to the emergency department, where the two are separated: Shmuel receives an injection, while Menahem is given a glass of cold water. Shmuel faints, then wakes to find his mother and father leaning over him, their faces close together. Their frightened attention makes the moment feel like an unusual, fragile calm between them, and Shmuel is proud to think that he has brought it about.

With his hand bandaged and the pain easing, Shmuel tries to reassure his parents that a scorpion sting is not fatal. Yet his relief is mixed with disappointment: while he feared death, he had also pictured his parents mourning him and regretting the harm they had done him throughout his childhood. The episode exposes a divided wish—to be safe, and to be loved with a force he has not ordinarily felt. After a few hours, a doctor discharges him with instructions to rest, eat little, and drink plenty of fluids; his parents take Menahem home before returning with Shmuel to their own house.

Care, touch, and the memory of imagined grief

At home, Shmuel is put in his sister Miri’s bed in the small room, while Miri is moved to his corner in the passage. For two days his parents lavish him with hot chicken soup, chicken livers with mashed potatoes, white rice, and vanilla pudding. Then the indulgence ends: he is told to return to his own bed that night and to school the next day, followed by reproaches and reprimands. Menahem visits, ashamed and feeling responsible, and gives Shmuel a rare, expensive stamp he has long wanted—a Nazi stamp bearing a swastika and Hitler’s portrait.

What remains most vivid is not the treatment of the sting but the attention gathered around it. Shmuel remembers his parents and sister crying over his imagined grave, and two beautiful classmates, Tamar and Ronit, standing together beside his tombstone in tears. He also remembers Miri’s hand on his forehead and in his hair as she bends over him in bed. She has never touched him that way before, and will never do so again. In a family where people rarely touch, that brief caress becomes as lasting as the fear of the scorpion.

A rare sweetness in childhood

The sting is one of the few memories Shmuel carries as sweet from his childhood. He had spent his years in the gloomy passage where he slept, between the kitchen and bathroom doors: its walls were blackened by the kerosene lamp used during power cuts, and its ceiling was low and moldy. Against that confinement, the two or three days of illness feel, in retrospect, like a crack opening in a wall. Through it came care he had scarcely known, including Miri’s singular touch and the focused concern of his parents.

The memory does not resolve the distance between Shmuel’s parents or erase his resentment toward them. Its force lies instead in its brevity and contradiction: the sting frightens him with death, but the imagined funeral lets him picture himself finally mourned; the injury confines him to bed, but brings the family close. Even as an adult, recalling the scorpion fills him with a nebulous desire to forgive the whole world and love everyone he meets. The animal’s place in his recollection is thus inseparable from the human tenderness that its sting, for a few days, made possible.