Shu Mu Er's childhood was stung by a scorpion

Shmuel Ash’s childhood scorpion sting is a small physical crisis that opens a brief breach in his family’s emotional walls. The pain and fear send him fleeing down the Carmel slopes, but the episode also brings his parents close to his bedside and his sister Miri’s hand to his hair. What Shmuel remembers most is not simply the danger: it is the warmth of being cared for, and the secret pleasure of imagining that his family might grieve for him and repent of the hurt he believed they had caused.

The hike and the sting

One Saturday morning, Shmuel went walking with his friend Menahem, whose family came from Transylvania, in a vegetated ravine on the western slopes of Mount Carmel. They set out before sunrise equipped for a day outdoors: boots, caps, walking sticks, a canteen and a backpack carrying blankets for a tent, bread, hard-boiled eggs and potatoes to roast over a fire. After hours climbing beneath the hot sun and trying, with little success, to pitch their tent among the oaks, they struggled to hammer a stake into the ground with a stone.

As Shmuel bent to pick up a larger rock, a scorpion stung his wrist. At first, neither boy understood what had happened. Menahem examined Shmuel’s swelling hand, searched for what he thought might be a splinter or shard of glass, and poured water from the canteen over the wound. The pain only intensified. When Menahem suggested that Shmuel wait on a blanket while he ran for help, Shmuel saw a yellow scorpion crawling among the dry leaves. He could not know whether it was the creature that had stung him or another, but he became certain that he was going to die.

Fear drove Shmuel downhill before help could be fetched. Holding his burning hand, he ran, fell among stones and dry branches, got up, and kept going. Menahem chased him, unable to catch him; then, not knowing what else to do, he began shouting for help as though he were the injured boy. Shmuel ran ahead without shouting, trembling and increasing the distance between them. Their flight ended at an unfamiliar new road, where they stopped, breathless and shocked.

Rescue and a brief family reunion

A woman passing on the road took the boys to an emergency room. There the two friends were separated: Shmuel received an injection, while Menahem was given a glass of cold water. Shmuel fainted after the injection. When he woke, his mother and father were bent over him, their faces close to his. To him, the sight suggested that a temporary calm had finally taken hold between them. He felt proud that his own crisis had brought it about.

The parents who looked down at him seemed weak and confused, watching him with frightened eyes as if, for that moment, they depended on him and he had to look after them. His hand was bandaged and the pain had eased. Shmuel murmured, «No es nada, solo es una picadura de escorpión, nadie se muere por eso». Yet saying that nobody died from a scorpion sting brought a faint disappointment: he had already imagined his parents mourning him and bitterly regretting all the harm he felt they had done since his childhood. The episode’s comfort was therefore inseparable from a darker, private fantasy—not only that his family might gather around him, but that his death might make them understand what had been missing.

The doctor discharged Shmuel a few hours later, advising rest, light meals and plenty of fluids. His parents called a taxi, took Menahem home, and then brought Shmuel to their own house. They settled him in the small bedroom, in his sister’s bed, while Miri was moved to Shmuel’s usual place in the passage between the kitchen and the bathroom. For two days his parents lavished food on him: hot chicken soup, chicken livers with mashed potatoes and white rice, and vanilla pudding. Then the indulgence ended abruptly. They told him it was time to return to his own bed that night and to school the next day; scolding and reproaches followed.

Care, touch, and the family’s ordinary distance

Menahem visited feeling guilty and ashamed, as if he himself had stung Shmuel. He brought him a rare and expensive stamp Shmuel had long wanted: a Nazi stamp bearing a swastika and Hitler’s portrait. The inflammation eventually disappeared and the bandage came off, but the gift and the visit did not displace the memory of what the emergency had briefly changed at home. During his childhood, Shmuel’s family rarely touched one another. His father sometimes gave him a hard slap; his mother only rarely laid her cold fingers on his forehead, apparently to check for a fever. He had never seen his parents touch each other.

Miri’s tenderness stood out precisely because it was so exceptional. While Shmuel lay in bed recovering, she leaned over and stroked his forehead and hair—a caress he had never received from her before and would never receive again. He remembered her hand alongside the imagined image of his family weeping at his grave. The sting had made him picture not only his parents’ regret but two pretty girls from his class, Tamar and Ronit, standing together beside his tombstone in tears. These imagined mourners reveal the longing underneath the fantasy: Shmuel yearned to be held in others’ attention, and could picture that recognition most vividly as an aftermath of his own death.

The family’s separation was not usually expressed through open quarrels. Shmuel’s parents were polite and restrained, and seldom raised their voices in his presence, but his mother carried what he perceived as persistent resentment while his father seemed to suppress a tense grudge. They spoke mostly about practical matters—plumbing, forms and shopping—and his father’s mouth tightened when he addressed his wife. Shmuel did not know what lay behind their estrangement and did not want to know. He had sensed the distance for as long as he could remember, perhaps from the age of two or three. Sometimes he saw his mother with red eyes; sometimes his father went out to the terrace to smoke alone for fifteen or twenty minutes, then returned to hide behind his newspaper.

That history helps explain why the two days of attention became such a durable memory. Shmuel was often angry with his parents, though unsure whether he resented their weakness, their constant contained hostility, their frugality, or the affection they could not give because they seemed to have so little of it. He also felt guilty about his anger, as though it amounted to concealed disloyalty—as if he were a spy inside his own family. The sting does not resolve that history. Instead, it creates a short-lived counterimage: frightened parents close to his face, food brought to his bed, and a sister’s hand resting on him.

The memory’s lasting meaning

Shmuel carried the scorpion sting as one of the few sweet memories of his childhood. Much of that childhood had been spent in the gloomy passage where he slept, with blackened walls from the kerosene lamp used during power cuts and a low, moldy ceiling. Against that constricted setting, the two or three days of care felt like a crack opening in a wall. The image makes the episode matter beyond its immediate danger: a moment of bodily vulnerability briefly lets warmth enter a life otherwise marked, in Shmuel’s memory, by distance and unspoken resentment.

Even as an adult, recalling the sting stirred in Shmuel a hazy desire to forgive the whole world and love everyone he met. That tenderness does not erase the self-serving fantasy of being mourned, or the disappointment when he realized the imagined death would not occur. The memory holds both impulses together. Terror makes him feel acutely alive and dependent; the care that follows gives him a glimpse of belonging; and the thought of losing that care turns into an enduring, if nebulous, generosity toward others.