Motti Read Online Free

a positive sense, actually): there’s an order to things, flexible to a certain extent; in other words, first one can be up and then the other can too, but there must always be both an up and a down. Only this keeps us moving. Only this lets us touch.

9
    At night Laika woke up. Small movements passed through Motti’s hand resting on her head during sleep, as if a small motor there had started up, and he woke as well. Each one lay in his or her place and listened. He heard nothing, and said to her, drowsy, Laika, enough. Quiet, Laika, quiet down. But she didn’t quiet down. Her ears stood up. She growled. She listened for a moment and then jumped from her spot and rushed to the door. He wanted to go back to sleep, but she started to bark, and it’s the middle of the night now, what about the neighbors. Stepped after her in the dark. Next to the door she wouldn’t give him even a glance. Barked and barked at the door, maybe out of anger, maybe out of excitement, he doesn’t know. Froze in her place for a moment and then once more, barking and barking like crazy and attacking the door, then she stops again and brings her snout close to the floor, as if she’s trying to dig there, to squeeze through the sealed slit at the bottom of the door. What’s there, Laika? (He asks her, but knows that she can’t answer, since she’s a dog, and not a person.) What’s there, Laika? Quiet, Laika (he’s scolding her). Quiet! It’s the middle of the night.
    She doesn’t quiet down, and through the peephole there’s only darkness. His cheek is up against the door and his eye to the eyepiece, and Laika sits down and fixes him with a glare. Who’s there Laika? (He’s asking again, and when she doesn’t answer, he cautiously opens the door.) No one’s there. Laika goes out and busily sniffs up and down the stairs. What is it, Laika? he asks her in a whisper in the stairwell and turns on the light. Who was here, girl?
    Laika raises her eyes to him and crouches to urinate a bit next to the welcome mat. Afterward she goes inside with a drooping tail and heads to her place in the bedroom. Not giving him so much as a glance. He looks at the stairs for another moment, and then goes inside, locks and bolts the door. You have to be careful; outside, the world gapes wide open.

10
    Perhaps he’d wronged Laika when he turned on the light, he thinks as he lies in bed and doesn’t fall asleep. He pets her and looks at her. She averts her eyes, perhaps seeking in this way not to register her complaint, perhaps seeking in this way to minimize his presence to her senses, to negate in this way the wound lurking inside her. Perhaps (he wants to laugh dismissively, but the thought already has a hold on him), perhaps until he himself looked, until that moment the King of the Dogs was there, on the other side. He can’t be seen through a peephole, and he, Motti, instead of letting Laika be, scolded her and opened the door and ruined everything. That’s the problem with relationships between species so different, biologically speaking: you simply can’t know with any certainty. The great god of the dogs was there—Motti makes up a story for himself before falling asleep. The King of Dogs materialized there all by himself and then, just like that, melted away. Didn’t use the stairs. And actually, Laika urinated as a sign of mourning.
    Or else, she smelled a ghost, let’s say (forgive him, Motti…his thoughts are wandering through the strange regions of pre-sleep). Once there was a woman in England who said this about her dog, and people from all over England came to see. Either he read this once in a newspaper, or he’s dreaming it up now, hard to know. And beside this, the British, you know. Even if he only thought of it just now, there’s no reason that this foggy story should be any less reliable than a newspaper. Stranger coincidences have