Five Seasons

Part I AUTUMN

MOLKHO’S WIFE DIED AT 4 A.M., and Molkho did his best to mark the moment forever, because he wished to be able to remember it. And indeed, thinking back on it weeks and even months later, he was convinced that he had managed to refine the instant of her passing (her passing? he wasn’t sure the word was right) into something clear and vivid containing not only thought and feeling but also sound and light, such as the maroon glow of the small electric heater, the greenish radiance of the numbers on the digital clock, the yellow shaft of light from the bathroom that cast large shadows in the hallway, and perhaps, too, the color of the sky, a pinkish ivory set off by the deep obscurity around it. He would have liked to think he recalled the dark morning sky because it added a stirring, elemental touch of nature, but he could not be sure of it, any more than he could be of the whisper of the wind and the rain; yet he was certain that there had been music—yes, real music he himself had turned on hesitatingly but convinced that if she wished to hear anything at all as she died, it was the music she had cared for so much in those last months when reading had become such a chore for her. Like the radio operator of a military vehicle heading into battle, she would adjust the small stereo earphones in the dead, painful twilight hours between the visits of her friends, her talks with her children, and her various treatments and pills; choose one of the cassettes by her bedside; and switch on the tape machine. She discussed this music with him and even once hinted that when the end came (so they referred to her death), she would like him to play some of it for her: if he saw it wasn’t too much for her, she said, he should let her have music—and he was happy to be able to oblige, for she had trained him well during those last months and he had learned to do exactly as she told him, taking everything with the utmost seriousness. And so now, too, he remembered to flip the switch, though he didn’t dare put on the earphones but rather left them dangling by her head as he cranked up the bed, so that from the two pillows came the sound of wind instruments, distant and muffled but assertive, the solemn, aerial flourish of the breathless, staccato hunting horns in the Mahler symphony that he had inserted in the deck three days ago, for though he did not know if its throbbing strains were really the most suitable, he was afraid to surprise her with anything new, no matter how peaceful and simple.

It was thus that he remembered the moment of her death, by its exact bars, the repetition of which could recreate at will that final scene in the silence of the night. He had no way of knowing which of the undulating notes had entered her consciousness as she breathed her last, no way (nor did he seek to find one) of telling if she heard them at all. Never taking his eyes off her, ardent with pity and zeal, he had let himself be led through a black forest in the light of a damp, chill dawn, struggling past heavy branches toward a lit valley or hollow and the soft, tawny doe that stood there, pursued and yet summoned by the throbbing horns.

Just then her breathing had stopped. He didn’t touch her, afraid to wake her or hurt her—and yet that was it, the moment she never would know, though of all the moments in the world it was the one most intimately and individually hers, presided over by that invisible hand that tells us thus far and no further. He had never thought much about such things as life after death or reincarnation, had indeed thanked her mentally for shying away from all that mysticism, whose dark unreason would only have been swept away anyhow by her aggressive, bitter intellectuality. It suited him perfectly to be alone with her now, alert, quiet, and wholly concentrated, with no one to distract him or share his thoughts with and, above all, with no doctor or nurse to try some new tube or drug, but rather all by himself, exclusively in control and in charge—alone with the lights, alone with the sounds, alone with Death, the same Death he once had imagined in the form of the black shot put he was made to throw in gym class, the ball of Death that had rolled into her room several days ago and lain silently beneath the furniture or the bed, despite all his efforts to heave it back even a few feet. That Death was now right by him, astonishingly piercing and bursting forth from her at once, while his only thought was to keep her from feeling any pain—yes, that had been his sole mission in recent months, to ease her pain, so that even now, at the last moment, a whole battery of remedies and devices was available for the task: cranks, handles, crutches, a wheelchair, a washbasin, a fan, medicines, drugs, an oxygen mask, an entire field hospital in one small room, all to lessen her pain, all to help her soul exit gently.

Yes, always, even when sitting at his desk, even when walking in the street, erect, slow, and preoccupied, his head already gray yet his body still youthful, even when eating or sleeping, he had thought all the time of her pain and how to cope with it, had listened continually to her disease-eaten, scalpel-scarred, drug-swollen hulk of a body, which, stewing in the inflorescence of its poisons, had lain for weeks on end in the same giant, ultramodern hospital bed standing like a chariot in the middle of the room, with its jellylike water mattress and its cranks, bars, and wheels, in the hope that her last journey might take place at home and that all those ministering to it—her mother, her children, her family, her friends, and above all, he himself, its general manager—might get her safely past her rampaging illness to the competent quietude of an inevitable death. Lying next to her like a loyal staff officer on the plain, narrow bed that had replaced the old king-size one they had shared since their marriage until the day it was moved out of the room, half beside and half beneath her, he had listened intently, on call to fight her pain, sleeping in snatches, waking up and dozing off so quickly that it seemed to happen automatically, though not without dreams—no, not without dreams. For even on that last, fearful night, he had suddenly dreamed that he was a child again and that someone was whistling for him, looking for him in some street or field, perhaps his wife, perhaps someone like her. At once he awoke as usual, only to realize that the sound, which had frightened him by not stopping and had made him sit up in bed, was simply the wheezing of her breath.

THIS TIME, though, he was not mistaken, and in full possession of himself, he acted sensibly and calmly, careful not to repeat his error of three days ago when, awoken by the same wheezing in the middle of the night, he had agitatedly sought to do something and had called out to her, sitting her up in bed when she answered, hugging her and trying to wake her, giving her tea and then wine, even phoning his elder son to come at once from his college dormitory. Together, in the hours before dawn, they had made her put on her glasses and get out of bed to wash her mastectomized body, unthinkingly forcing more life on her by propping her almost upright against the pillows, pale, groggy, and breathing weakly as she listened to the news and the morning jingles on the radio. Only later, when her mother and the doctor dropped by and he told them with pride what had happened, did he understand from their silence and lowered, averted looks that they quite failed to see the point of it.

There followed two excruciating days in which the vestige of the death he had repelled caused her great pain. And yet she had chatted, listened to music, and even laughed when shown old home movies of their youngest son as a chubby little tot rolling in the sand on the beach. Why, her laughter is a gift, Molkho thought, scanning her face greedily; I’ve raised her from the underworld! Does she have any idea where she’s been, any memory or keepsake from there? He even enjoyed it greatly when she argued with him about some trivial matter. It’s like quarreling with a ghost, he thought—and indeed, that evening she lost consciousness and then became delirious, so that he gave her a shot of morphine in case the pain started up again. But it didn’t. She simply faded rapidly, and he disconnected the telephone by her bed and took her friends’ calls in the next room, repeating the same bulletin over and over with infinite patience while her old mother sat with her through the next day, moistening her lips from time to time and trying to get her to talk, though in fact she would not even eat, pushing away the food she had always swallowed heartily until now.

In the evening his mother called from Jerusalem and friends arrived, all walking about on tiptoe—but eyelids fluttering, she heard them and knew who they were, now and then murmuring a word or phrase that assumed for them all an intense and ceremonial significance. At exactly 7 P.M. Death appeared in her hand with a fanning, uncontrollable tremor and they all knew the end was near, that it was imminent; yet, though several people offered to spend the night with him, he stubbornly, firmly refused. “There’s time yet,” he said, believing his own words. “We have to save our strength.” And he sent them all home, even her mother, who didn’t want to go, even the student to his dormitory. Later, his daughter arrived from her army base, sat up with the dying woman a while, and then went off to her room, too fatigued to stay awake any longer. His younger son, a high school boy, was in his room too, studying for a history exam, and at ten o’clock Molkho turned off the lights, collected the scattered sections of the newspaper, replaced the books on their shelves, and consulted the calendar, on which the next two days’ visits were already written down, purposely staggered to keep too many people from coming at once and exhausting her. At midnight he put on his pajamas and lay down in his bed beneath hers. Soon afterward his son left his room, passed hesitantly by the open doorway, afraid to enter, and asked if he was needed. “No,” said Molkho. “Go to bed.”

Then he, too, dozed off, only to awaken at 3 A.M. with the knowledge that he would sleep no more that night. He rose, fiddled with the heater, boiled water to sterilize a hypodermic that he knew would not be needed, and drank the last of the cognac from the little bottle they had bought on the airplane two years ago on their last trip to Europe. His wife was restless. “What, what did you say?” he called softly to her when she murmured something, but there was no answer. He went over to her bed, arranged the blankets, and even decided to raise the bars, as though she were a baby who might fall out; then he went to the living room and sat down in the darkness on the couch, inviting Death to come and finish what it had begun. Suddenly, though, remembering the music, he went back and switched on the tape machine. How odd it was, he thought, that after so many years of so many doctors and nurses, now, at the moment of her death, there was no one left but himself—yet he felt sure he had room in him even for Death, and sticking his hands beneath the blankets, he grasped her two feet, which were soft, smooth, and still there. Once again she murmured something that sounded like “Isn’t that so?” “What?” he asked gently, bending down to her after a moment. “Isn’t what so?”

She didn’t answer now either. Slowly she opened her large, heavy, amber eyes, the eyes of a weary animal from which the light had fled, leaving in them neither anger nor pain, but only ultimate defeat. He smiled at her, spoke her name, tried encouraging her as always, but she failed to respond, for the first time not recognizing him, her moist yellow glance spilling out emptily. He had never imagined that Death could be so damp, and when her breathing stopped, he rearranged the blankets and kissed her lightly on the forehead, imbibing her scent. “You’re free now,” he whispered, switching off the little twenty-four-hour night-light and opening the window, though he did not believe in such freedom at all, only in nothingness. A deep, urgent need to look at the world made him step out on the terrace: this was the moment, this was their last farewell. It was late fall, and the first rains had cooled the earth without sating it. His eye followed the line of the ravine in the darkness below the house, looking for some unfamiliar sign of life, but the night was gray and silent, with a slight, motionless mist hanging over the sea. It was, he thought, his last quiet hour before the bustle of condolence calls began, leaving him no time for himself. Meanwhile, however, the exclusivity of his knowledge made him feel advantageously strong. A car sped along the highway by the coast. Soon he, too, would be free.

UPON RETURNING to the room, he realized he should never have turned off the night-light. Suddenly he felt a twinge of fear. The border between Death and Life should be clearer, he thought, the shock of crossing it should be greater: why, if I look at her now in the darkness, I may imagine I see her move. And indeed, he seemed to detect a slight movement as he peered back through the glass door of the terrace, which he vigorously opened, however, refusing to believe in yet another resurrection, striding silently back through the room with his eyes on the floor until, by the hallway door, he turned to look at her again. Now he could see her face clearly, defeat still written on it. For seven years she had fought her illness; four years ago she was actually sure she had triumphed. Yet now the same hand that hours ago had moved with a slow, fanning motion hung lifelessly down from the bed. He glanced at the clock. It was 4:15. All at once he thought with emotion that not only she but her illness, too, that cruel cousin that had moved in with them, was gone.

He walked swiftly out, shut the door behind him, collapsed on the living room couch, and tried to sleep, to rest up for the ordeal ahead, his knowledge like a warm blanket covering him; yet the thought of all the people he was at liberty to wake was too much for him, and rousing himself, he went to phone his mother-in-law, who, perfectly clearheaded, answered at once in her slow, soft, irrepressibly German-flavored Hebrew. “It’s all over,” he said quietly, tersely, flinging her the death in one throw. For a heartbreaking moment she said nothing. Then, though, she asked, “When?” And now it was he who couldn’t speak. With a thickening lump in his throat, he began to sob and shake, the unseen sorrow of the eighty-two-year-old woman stirring up his own grief with unexpected force. The receiver fell in his lap while, with her accustomed restraint, she waited patiently for him to get a grip on himself and answer, “Ten, fifteen minutes ago.” “I’ll be right over,” she said. “Why rush?” he asked. “You may as well wait for it to be light out. You have a long hard day ahead of you.” But she wouldn’t hear of it. “No, I’ll be right over. Are the children still sleeping? Don’t wake them. I’ll call a cab.” And she hung up.

He went to the bathroom and sat doggedly on the toilet until he passed a few drops of urine, washed his hands and face without shaving, and walked down the darkened hallway past the children’s rooms. For a second his daughter opened her eyes and saw him, but as he said nothing, she closed them again, while his younger son, deep in sleep, did not stir. They had been bracing themselves for this death, almost angry with it for taking so long.

He opened the front door and turned on the stairway light. It was damp outside. A soft, noiseless rain fell furtively into the world, slicking the front steps with a bright coppery gleam. It occurred to him that in her agitation the old woman might slip coming down the garden stairs. All I need now is for her to take a fall on me, he thought bitterly. His wife had been her only daughter. Throughout her illness she had continued to look after her mother, and now, he thought, all that burden would be his, even if she was a responsible old woman who took good care of herself. Deciding to meet her downstairs, he put on his shoes, an old sweater, and a coat, took an umbrella, and stepped out into the rain, first waiting for her by the entrance, from which he had a view of the street, and then stepping into the garden, treading on the dead leaves that strewed the wet path, all the while thinking of the funeral arrangements. He had already reached the street when the gruesome thought occurred to him that his son or daughter might awake and discover their dead mother, and so he ran worriedly back upstairs, where he locked the bedroom door after a quick glance at her lying in the dark sheen of night flowing through the open window. Relieved to have everything under control again, he stuck the key in his pocket and hurried back down, feeling the light spray of the rain, which, scarcely hitting the ground, seemed to have as its sole mission the cleansing of the air.

The sky had cleared, but the rain, as though coming from elsewhere, kept falling. With an unfamiliar freedom he paced up and down the sidewalk, fingering the key in his pocket, secure in the knowledge that from this moment on, there were no further claims on him. For a moment, as though looking down on her from above, he imagined his wife, utterly alone now, dressed in an old coat among a crowd of dead people in front of some clinic or office that they were waiting to enter, though it was only their first stop. The thought that never again could he help her made him shiver with grief, the hot lump swelling in his throat and sticking there, refusing to overflow, until slowly it dissolved again. By now his mother-in-law should have arrived from her old-age home on the next flank of the mountain—and indeed, approaching the curve in the street, he saw a small light that bobbed in midair like a drunken little star, slowly groping its sinuous way, faltering, flickering, and then flaring up again. Molkho rubbed his eyes. Could she have decided to come by foot? She actually had a small flashlight—he had seen it more than once—yet he was sure this wasn’t it. Stopping short to let the Death-propelled world spin on dizzily without him, he suddenly realized that what he saw was the headlight of a bicycle whose rider, a large, cumbersome newsboy, kept dismounting, leaning his vehicle against the curb, disappearing into buildings with his papers, coming out again, and pedaling on. And yet, when he finally rode by, Molkho saw, he was not a boy at all, but rather a heavily dressed woman, her head wrapped in scarves and the cuffs of her pants clipped with clothespins. Though passing quite near him, she failed to notice him; her eyeglasses glinting beneath the streetlights, she rode on as far as his own house, entering it with an armful of newspapers to stuff into the mailboxes. Soon she emerged and straightened her bicycle—but now Molkho saw she was a man after all, varicose and heavyset, who threw him a resentful glance, remounted the sagging bike, and rode off.

But the taxi was coming down the street now too, chuffing and billowing exhaust. Preceded by the cane that for some obscure reason she had taken to carrying in the past month, his mother-in-law stepped briskly out of it, paid the driver, and stood there talking to him. There was something about her that inspired confidence in people, with whom she knew how to get along. Had she told the man where she was going so early in the morning or would she have thought that undignified? The taxi departed, leaving her standing by herself on the opposite curb. Deftly slipping her change into her purse, she glanced in both directions, as if waiting for an invisible flow of traffic to stop, before crossing the street. She was, he noticed, warmly dressed in a raincoat, boots, and gloves, and she was wearing for the first time the red woolen cap they had bought her in Paris two years ago. He stepped toward her, wary of the cane that advanced through the air as if tracking an unseen target, careful not to scare her—and in fact, head bent in sorrow, she took him at first for a stranger and sought to make a detour around him. Gently he blocked her way and held out his hand. Though she had shrunken in recent years, she still held herself upright, and her skin, despite its wrinkled, slightly liverish patina that gave off a faint smell of old scent, had a morning freshness.

“The driver lost his way; he misunderstood,” she said in her German accent, which was always strongest in the morning, after a night of German dreams. “I hope you weren’t too worried,” she added, looking away from him. He stared down without answering, surprised by her matter-of-factness, seeking to help her by the elbow down the garden stairs. But she did not want to be helped. Her ancient body was alive and agile beneath its layers of clothing as she shone her little flashlight on the wet stone stairs of the garden that were strewn with autumn leaves, descending them with her cane hooked over one arm, then transferring it to the other while ascending the house stairs with him hurrying after her, plucking a wet newspaper from the mailbox as he passed it. She all but ran to the bedroom when he opened the front door, her face hard and pale, her lips trembling. “Just a minute,” he whispered while she struggled with the doorknob, taking the key from his pocket and trying to explain. But he saw she wasn’t listening. Without removing her large coat and hat, and holding her cane and lit flashlight, she burst inside as if she still might not be too late. The room itself had grown quite stuffy, and the face of the limp-handed woman actually seemed flushed. Yet, poignantly, everything was just as he had left it. He remained standing in the doorway, returning his wife of thirty years to her mother, detachedly watching the old woman throw herself without a word on the corpse, fondle it, kiss it, cross its two arms on its chest, lie a while beside it, and emit a piercing sob like the blast of a distant, sinking ship, so that Molkho, whose newspaper was still under his arm, felt the lump in his throat again and wished the strange sound might sweep him away on a wave of wished-for tears, though he knew that it wouldn’t, that it was only, after all, a sob.

His mother-in-law was a cultured, educated woman who read books and went to concerts. In Israel, to which she had come shortly before World War II, she had run an orphanage, and during her daughter’s illness she and Molkho had become quite close. Despite all the hired nursing help, the real burden of caring for his wife had been shouldered by the two of them, and while they had never talked about Death itself, only about practical things, he felt sure she held the same opinion of it as he did—namely, that it was the absolute end of everything and that the two of them, he and she, were alone by themselves now in this room. And so, going over to her, he laid a light hand on her shoulder, which was something he had never done before, helped her out of her coat, took her hat, and led her to the small armchair in which she had spent so much time in recent days.

She sank into it, her old face deeply creased beneath its shock of gray hair, her heavy glasses misted over, so like and unlike her dead daughter, while he, seeing her stricken and bewildered, began to pace up and down, choking back his emotion. “The end was very peaceful,” he said. “I don’t think she suffered at all. I’m sure she wasn’t in pain, and I know what pain is. I’m quite sure she wasn’t,” he repeated, carried away by his own conviction as if it were he, rather than she, who had died an hour ago, the old woman hanging on every word and nodding all the time. “Yes, she’ll be quiet now,” she said, as if the deceased were a troublesome child who had finally fallen asleep, and he felt so touched by her flushed, bewildered face with its glasses halfway down its nose that he burst into tears himself, feeling equally sorry for the two of them, while she regarded him with quiet sympathy until, finishing crying, he went to the bathroom to wash, taking off his shirt and jacket and deciding this time to shave.

When Molkho emerged from the bathroom he found his daughter wide-awake and tearful, her arms around her grandmother, and he nodded to her across the room as if to say, “Yes, now you know too,” as though the knowledge were an object that could be passed from hand to hand. Glancing again at the dead body, he felt as overwhelmed by its immobility as if the earth’s very orbit had stopped. And yet, the morning paper, lying forgotten at the foot of the bed, reminded him with a pang that it hadn’t, and looking out at the sky, he saw a soft white streak that was the dawn.

HE PHONED his elder son, the college student, and went to wake the high school boy, which was no easy task in the dark. During the last year the boy had taught himself to sleep soundly, dead to the world, but Molkho forced him out of bed, throwing off the blankets (beneath which his son had slept in his clothes again to save time dressing in the morning) before breaking the news to him. He was prepared for it, had been in fact for quite a while. Over the past month he had detached himself from his mother, so impatient with the slowness of her death that if, asking about her on coming home from school, he was told she had had a good day, he frowned involuntarily. Now his father took him for a last look at her, steering him by the shoulder, though stiff with sleep he stood there so dazed and dry-eyed that Molkho wondered if it wouldn’t be better for him to take his exam in school than stay home and get in everyone’s way. Meanwhile, pale and haggard, the college student had arrived with the speed of light and was showering kisses on his grandmother while lightly holding his mother’s hand. Next he’ll start kissing her too, Molkho thought, sensing himself grow more remote, more coldly calculating, from minute to minute.

The telephone rang. It was 5:15. His mother was calling from Jerusalem. Though how was beyond him, she already knew everything; all night long she hadn’t slept a wink, thinking about it. She had wanted so badly, she wept, to say good-bye to her. She had loved her so much. Could someone fetch her from Jerusalem? When could they come? Could they keep the body at home until she got there? He heard the distant, muffled sound of her tears and parried her lamely, exhaustedly, ignoring her pleas, for he knew she had always been afraid of her daughter-in-law, whose corpse he preferred she not see in its bed. Finally he hung up and dialed a close friend, the doctor who had treated his wife in recent years. He, too, answered at once and quite lucidly, as if he had been expecting the telephone to ring. Meanwhile, an aroma of coffee filled the house, and Molkho greedily drank the large, hot mug of it poured him by his son, feeling drunk with the sweetness of Death, pacing back and forth in the room, though never too close to the bed, listening to his daughter’s endless sobs—she, of all people, who had never gotten along with her mother at all.

His mother-in-law still sat by the bed, guarding it without moving. The doorbell rang. It was the doctor and his wife, both grim-looking. Brushing past Molkho, the doctor went straight to the corpse and examined it thoroughly, as if to make sure it was dead, which made Molkho fear that it wasn’t, that maybe it was merely unconscious, while at the same time feeling angry at not being believed. But at last the examination was over; gently the doctor drew the sheet over the dead woman’s face, and Molkho told him about the end, imitating her wheezing and the tremor in her hands, though just then the flood of morning light pouring in the window made the two-hour-old death seem something that had happened long ago. The doctor listened and dialed the hospital to order an ambulance, while several neighbors knocked and entered, all of whom—the women, too—had to kiss Molkho. Odder yet, it seemed to him, was how one of them burst out wailing bitterly, starting off the day with a good cry at the corpse’s expense, though she and his wife had never done more than say hello on the stairs. Her husband stood by concernedly, conversing with Molkho’s mother-in-law, who still sat by the side of the bed as if she were the living half of the dead person and empowered to carry on in her behalf.

Molkho felt exhausted. Desiring to be alone, he went and sat in the living room, from where he listened to the college student telephoning all their friends in his toneless drawl, rousing them from bed without even an apology. No doubt, Molkho thought, they, too, would come running to pay their last respects—an idea that aroused in him such profound resistance that he sat stubbornly brooding in the corner, thinking how much better it would be for no one to see her at all. What did her dead body matter? All along he had taken good care of her, everyone knew that he had, and now all at once he was to blame for her death, for which he was being held accountable.

Time passed as in a waking dream. More and more people, surprisingly quick to arrive, rang the doorbell, all wanting to be with him, just as once, long ago (for so last night already seemed), they had wanted to be with her. Then his mother was on the phone again; but this time, refusing to rise, he asked his son or daughter to take the call. Where, he wondered bitterly, was he to find the strength for it all? He had always imagined that his wife’s death would set him free, yet now he felt newly shackled, and when someone removed the sheet from her face, which looked pale and ugly in the strong light, he suddenly had enough and snapped, “What do you think this is, Lenin’s tomb?” Just then, though, the ambulance arrived, and two men carried her out of the house. It wasn’t even seven; it was like one of those distant days long ago when she left for school ahead of time because her class had an early homeroom.

THEY WERE ALL AFRAID that the rain would spoil the funeral, but at noontime, some two hours beforehand, the sky cleared and a warm breeze blew in from the sea. The procession left the funeral parlor on time and covered without incident the short, straight distance to the cemetery, where, the hour being convenient and the news having spread, the crowd turned out to be a large one. All eyes were on him, following him to the grave, and he did his best to look about and remember who was there, asking his children to remember too. A light, delicate mist swirled about them, whitening the tombstones, and they walked in its midst with an unhurried crunching of feet: his mother-in-law, without her cane and surrounded by all her old friends, stepping slowly and supporting each other; his children with their friends; and he himself with his mother in tow, tottering after him in a black fur coat like a cart missing a wheel, stopping in front of all the people she knew to cast them a disconsolate glance. The grave had already been dug that morning in a new section of the cemetery on a low rise of the mountain, and now he stood dutifully beside it, looking down at the fresh earth and observantly up again at the murmuring crowd, pleased to see not only his friends from the office but many secretaries and colleagues too. The woman doctor who had once treated his wife was there also, as were her fellow teachers and many others he couldn’t place—teenagers, college students, young soldiers, high school pupils in their uniforms, his children’s teachers, even several cousins from Jerusalem, heavy, balding Sephardim of the old school, bundled in scarves, their eyes, unused to the sight of it, fixed on the stormy sea nearby with a look of astonished concern. He had never been such an attraction before, besieged by so many people—who were thinking mainly of her, of course, but no doubt also of him.

The rabbi beside him was an impeccably dressed, distinguished-looking man of German origin who had presided two years ago at his wife’s uncle’s funeral to the satisfaction of the entire family, at which time her mother had had the presence of mind to jot down his telephone number. Quickly, expertly, he tore the lapel of Molkho’s shirt while Molkho looked at him hopefully, trusting him to guide them just as smoothly through the rest of the ceremony. Surrounded by his children, friends, and family, he stood there certain of the acknowledgment in their warm, approving looks, for he knew that they knew how devotedly he had cared for his wife, doing everything he could to nurse her at home until the end—yes, even the rabbi, in brief but eloquent words, was now speaking in his praise. Raising his eyes to the somberly listening circle of women, his wife’s friends, now regarding him contemplatively, Molkho wondered if any of them knew things he didn’t, intimate secrets she might have shared with them during the long hours they had sat with her, strange fantasies even, the product of her illness, against which he was unable to defend himself. Why, even though she had refused to make love to him since that day seven years ago when her first breast was removed, he had never been unfaithful, had never protested even once!

AFTER THE FUNERAL WAS OVER and he had cried a bit, the mourners filed by to shake his hand. He could tell that they wished him to remember their presence, and trying not to sound too doleful, he promised them all that he would. In the last twenty-four hours he had even perfected a sad nod that was at the same time not so grief-stricken or hopeless as to suggest only Death, for as drained of vitality as he felt, he needed to demonstrate that he was someone still worthy of love. The crowd kept filing by, mostly couples, yet sometimes a lone man or even woman who managed to convey her singleness, such as the legal adviser of his office, a senior official who, three years ago, had lost her husband, whose funeral he had attended with some of his friends, even though he was not on close terms with her. In those days he had already begun to practice going to funerals, and indeed, he now remembered that her husband was buried not far from his wife’s fresh grave. In recent months he had even thought of her as of a definite postmortem possibility.

IT RAINED all during the week of mourning, and the weather turned so cold that everyone began to wonder if an early winter hadn’t already set in. The heater was turned on in Molkho’s living room, where he sat on the couch with his three children, across from their grandmother, who occupied the large armchair facing them. Molkho’s daughter took off her shoes and wrapped her feet in a blanket, and it was warm and cozy sitting there together, watching the rain fall and greeting the constant flow of visitors, with whom they talked about the weather, and the deceased, and the funeral, and who had been there and what they had said, and the distinguished rabbi and his elegy, which was short but to the point, so that he wasn’t at all as tiresome as he might have been. They sat like that all morning, lay down to rest after lunch, rose at four o’clock, sat again until supper, and then sat some more into the night. At first, Molkho had thought of excusing his younger son and sending him back to school, of which he had already missed enough in recent months, but the boy insisted on joining them and sat there alertly as though feeling much better now that his mother was dead, curiously regarding the old people who came to visit his grandmother, odd octogenarians whom Molkho had never seen before and who now filled his living room, carrying on long conversations in German, of which he understood not a word, though he made a point of smiling whenever they did. Acquaintances and relations came from all over, and Molkho rose immediately to greet them, kissing even those he hardly knew, even those who hadn’t meant to kiss him. Dressed in a soft black turtleneck sweater, unshaven as was the custom, he was perfectly ready to kiss anyone; in fact, all the kissing on sight rather pleased him, and even though most lips did little more than graze his cheek, sometimes a woman from work hugged him tightly, tickling his forehead with her hair and pressing her breasts (or so he assumed them to be) against him. Yet there were some he was wary of touching, such as the young teachers his wife had supervised, the attractive, manicured woman accompanying the fat old lady who came to see his mother-in-law, or the legal adviser from the office, who paid a condolence call with the head of his department and several other colleagues, in whose company she seemed so ill at ease that she even refused to take off her coat, despite the heat in the apartment.

Later at night, at about ten o’clock, after the college student had accompanied his grandmother to her old-age home and returned to his dorm and the two younger children had settled down to watch the late show on television, Molkho would retire to the bedroom—which, in perfect order, still looked like a little hospital waiting for its next patient. True, the large bed was now a bare metal frame, its mattress, for which they had been charged a daily rate, having been returned on the first day; yet everything else, whether borrowed, rented, or bought, was still in place: the intravenous drip, the bath basin, the wheelchair, the oxygen mask, the hypodermics, the drugs, the books she had read, the books she had planned to read, the music she had listened to over and over, his bed lying next to hers. He undressed and got ready for bed while wondering what to keep and what to sell, especially of the drugs, one of which—an expensive medicine called Talwin, which he had bought in bulk months ago, fearing the drugstores might run out, but which was hardly used in the end, because it was contraindicated by something else—lay in stacked boxes on a shelf. Could he find a buyer for it, he wondered, and if so, how? Once in bed, he left the night-light on as he had done for his wife, making a mental note to replace the bulb with a weaker one. He still slept very lightly, rising four or five times in the middle of the night to wander about the apartment or to sit in the living room listening to music with the earphones on, thinking of all kinds of things, such as the big newspaper deliverer who had ridden by that morning as though he were part of her death. Suddenly, as if the man’s clothing, his headlight, his newspaper pouch, his bicycle wheels, were the last tidings from Molkho’s dead wife, he longed to see him again. He missed her lying beside him, even sick and unconscious, missed even her water mattress, as if it were part of her too. Did she still exist somewhere, was someone else taking care of her now? Soon, however, wrung dry as a sponge by fatigue, he went slowly back to bed, glancing on his way at the pile of unpaid bills on his desk. And he would have to register her death with various government offices too. Although he hoped that having to deal with such practical matters would help put him back on his feet, he still felt too weary to tackle them.

ON THE SEVENTH DAY, at the crack of dawn, they went to visit the grave. The rain had stopped, but it was still rather cold. The likable rabbi had set the occasion for 6 A.M., because he had a prior engagement in Tel Aviv the same morning, and though he had offered to find them a substitute, they declined. “It’s all right,” they told him. “We’ll get up at five,” which was indeed far better than risking an unknown who might decide to ask all kinds of questions and deliver all kinds of sermons. Yet there were barely the ten men needed for a prayer group and they had trouble finding the grave, though as soon as the rabbi appeared he led them straight to it. By seven they were back home again, alone for the first time in months. The college student went off to his classes, the soldier returned to her base, and the high school boy, after a moment’s hesitation, was persuaded to go back to school too, leaving Molkho by himself to shave off his beard in the empty house he had been confined to for a whole week, waiting for the movers to pick up the large hospital bed.

At eight-thirty the morning help arrived. Molkho did not know the woman well, especially because whenever he had called from the office, it had always been his wife who had answered the phone. Now she had come to return the key and be paid; she was, after all, a practical nurse, not a housekeeper, and she had already found a new job elsewhere. “Where?” asked Molkho, feeling a twinge of envy. “Not far from here,” she replied. “Just a few blocks away.” He looked at her, a short, dark-haired, presumably divorced woman of about thirty, reasonably efficient though never overly dedicated to her job—but his wife had given her exact instructions and she had carried them out well enough. Perhaps, he suggested after a moment’s thought, afraid of being saddled with the housework just when he had been finally set free, she might remain a while until he got organized. She had the key, she knew where things were; why not stay on to cook and do some light cleaning? Perhaps she could even work at both places, since he didn’t need her every day. “Sit down,” he said, feeling her dark eyes on him. Could she possibly suspect him of some ulterior motive? She looked at him uncertainly and then said a few feeling words about his wife, whose body she knew as well as he did and whose death-smell still clung to her too, so that for a moment he almost believed that she might be a bridge to something whose nature was unclear to him. Except that again she repeated, “I’m a practical nurse, not a housekeeper.” “Of course, you are,” he said. “It’s just that meanwhile the boy should be given a hot lunch and the house needs cleaning now and then. I can do a lot myself, but I’m not organized yet.” The woman thought it over and agreed. “But only for the time being,” she insisted.

Just then there was a knock on the door, and a brash young moving man in blue overalls appeared for the bed, grinning at them both and addressing the woman as Mrs. Molkho, an error that Molkho was not sure how to correct. Hurriedly he ushered the man into the bedroom, where he first checked the bed from all angles for damage and then produced some papers to sign. The deposit would be returned in a month or two, he told Molkho, who began at once to protest, having assumed that the sizable sum would be refunded right away. “Why, it’s not even indexed,” he said. “It will just go on losing its value!” The mover did not disagree. Still, he said, those were the rules, it wasn’t up to him, and in any case, Molkho didn’t stand to lose much; there were people who had kept such beds for years and had their deposits wiped out by inflation. Molkho barely argued for a minute before feeling too tired to go on. Why quarrel over money with someone who had no say about it anyway? All that mattered was getting rid of the bed, in fact, of everything in the room. But unfortunately the moving man was in no hurry, he was a garrulous type who seemed eager to stage a colloquium, and worse yet, he had come by himself and in a small car, so that the bed had to be disassembled and carried out piece by piece.

Meanwhile, before going to wash the dishes piled high in the sink, the new housekeeper had changed into an old smock hanging by Molkho’s towel in the bathroom, which—though he could have sworn it was his wife’s—she had apparently decided to expropriate. As for the moving man, he was now in the bathroom, where he remained for quite some time, leaving Molkho anxious and impatient. “What should I cook?” asked the housekeeper. “What would you suggest?” parried Molkho, opening the refrigerator and peering into it. But instead of one suggestion, she made several, forcing Molkho, whose wife had always dealt with such things, to decide. “I could make a chicken with olives and tomato sauce,” she proposed, “but it’s a bit on the spicy side.” “Let it be on the spicy side,” said Molkho. “I like hot food myself.” The moving man, having finished washing up, now came to the kitchen to ask a question that had been evidently bothering him on the toilet; “Who,” he wanted to know, “was the bed for, your father or your mother?” “For neither,” hissed Molkho angrily. “It was for my wife.” The moving man nodded. Without batting an eyelash, he asked the housekeeper for some tea for his sore throat and then sat down at the table and began to banter with her. Molkho left the room quickly, as though in search of something. Why indeed stay with them? He told the woman to lock up when she was done, went to the bedroom, seized the wheelchair, the oxygen mask, and the intravenous drip, and dragged them downstairs to his car.

HE RETURNED ALL THREE ITEMS, received his deposits back, and barely had time to get to the bank and withdraw his wife’s last monthly paycheck. It was the first time all week he’d been out of the house by himself, and though he’d hoped to accomplish a lot and even enjoy it, there were long lines everywhere and nothing went smoothly. Moreover, hardly anyone seemed to know his wife had just died. The silent, empty house was depressing to return to, yet there was also something promising about it, for the kitchen was spotless, the bathroom was clean, and several pots stood on the table with their lids on. The little hospital had a new look too: the large sickbed was gone and in its place stood his own bed, which for some reason had been moved against the wall, leaving an odd vacuum in the room. Suddenly he had the feeling that the two of them had made love on it. The moving man had had a roving eye,...and indeed, it rather pleased Molkho to think that sex, even that of two strangers, had returned to his house and left its imprint. Sitting down on the bed, he sniffed its linen. Was that tobacco he smelled? Perhaps, though he couldn’t be sure.

He went to take lunch in the kitchen. The chicken was good, if full of strange tastes, and there was another dish made with some unfamiliar purple vegetable. Checking the refrigerator, he found more pots there too. Had he really told her to cook that much or had she gone and done it on her own? It was three o’clock. He dialed his mother-in-law to see how she was and to ask if she knew the where abouts of the high school boy, who still wasn’t home from school and sometimes went straight to the old-age home to lunch with her, but there was no answer in her room. Nor was there any at the college student’s dormitory. The end of the week of mourning, so it seemed, had been taken by them all as a signal to kick over the traces. There was a deep, strange silence in the house. Molkho drew the bedroom blinds and lay down to take a nap, as he had done regularly when his wife was sick and he had had to get up at all hours; yet, though awake since dawn, he couldn’t fall asleep, for all at once he felt worried about his son. He rose, switched on some classical music on the radio, and began to go through the medicines, of which there was a great pile, throwing some out, returning others to the cabinet, and leaving the twenty boxes of Talwin on the shelf, where he built a colorful wall of them. It was madness, he thought, to throw out anything so new and expensive. Next, turning to the room itself, he slowly began restoring it to its former state, before its paramedical conversion. Dragging back the chairs and table that had been moved out of it, he tried them in different places, pausing to decide where they looked best and were most sensible. Arranging the furniture had always been his wife’s job. The double bed alone still remained on the terrace, covered with a large sheet of plastic, its mattress hopelessly rotted. Picking up the special bath basin he had bought, he leaned it against the doorway: it was brand-new and could surely be sold, perhaps even to his mother-in-law’s old-age home. It was best not to involve her in it, though, because she might expect him to donate it and he was not about to lose all that money.

His son was still not home, and Molkho realized that he didn’t know the name or even the telephone number of a single one of the boy’s friends. He went downstairs to wait for him, but a cold, dull wind drove him back up to the apartment, where he made the boy some coffee and put a plate of cookies by the cup. Then, sitting down at his desk, he began going over the bank statements that had lain neglected since his wife’s death. He had already drawn up a list of the sums still owed her by the Department of Education.

HIS SON TURNED UP at half past five, without a key naturally, since he had grown accustomed in the last half-year to someone always being at home. “We’re under new management,” Molkho told him. “From now on you better take a key; I’m not going to sit around all day waiting for you like a nursemaid!” He set the table for supper, and they sat down to eat the new dishes, whose spiciness the boy did not like. Molkho, too, had no appetite. A new worry on his mind, he dutifully dialed the old-age home; yet again there was no answer, and inquiring about his mother-in-law at the switchboard, he was told she had gone out at noontime and not returned. Since he could feel himself coming down with a cold, which he must have caught in the cemetery, he decided to go to bed. Meanwhile, his son had sat down in front of the television. “Don’t you have another history exam tomorrow?” Molkho asked him. The boy wasn’t concerned: the later at night he studied for it, the better he would remember in the morning. “Well, then,” said Molkho, “I’m going to bed. If your grandmother calls, tell her I’m sleeping.” Reflecting on the events of recent days, which seemed to have happened not close together but rather at great intervals of nebulous time, he went to the bedroom, now its old self again. Turning off the night-light, he was plunged at once into unfamiliar darkness and fell asleep; yet shortly after midnight he sat up in a fright, for he had suddenly heard wheezing close by. Quickly he jumped out of bed. The light was on in the kitchen, and the kettle was steaming on the stove. At first, he thought it must be morning and that the housekeeper was back; it was, however, still night, and fully dressed, his son strolled casually into the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee, his hair falling over his face. “Are you crazy?” asked Molkho. “What are you doing up at this hour?” The boy, it seemed, was still studying. Molkho sat down beside him, made himself a cup of tea to soothe his aching throat, and leafed through the last week’s newspapers, which he had barely had a chance to glance at. Among the condolence notices he was touched to find a large one addressed to him by the Ministry of the Interior, one that he had overlooked before.

The next day he went back to the office. Whoever hadn’t been to the funeral or paid a call on him at home now came by to express his sympathy. Yet the hours dragged and the prickle in Molkho’s throat grew so bad that he decided to quit ahead of time. On his way down the stairs he spied the legal adviser, looking quite elegant in a brown knit dress and unaware that he was behind her, which enabled him to study her at leisure. Around her pale neck she wore a metal chain that was rather heavy and crude for his taste. Was she in good health? The odd thought occurred to him that she, too, might be incubating some illness. And yet she seemed robust enough, her heels clicking gaily as she quickly descended the stairs. Though his job in the office rarely brought him into contact with her, she was considered, he knew, to have a first-class legal mind. Suddenly, as though sensing his presence, she turned and halted in a fluster, blushing at his sad nod, her cheeks reddening in curious blotches. Molkho, who was wearing a rather old sweater and whose sore throat and cold were getting worse, was not at all eager to encounter her, but already she was hurrying back up the stairs and pressing his hand warmly. “Is the week of mourning over? I also went back to work right away. It’s good that you did.”

YET HE DID NOT GO TO WORK the next day, which was rainy and dreary, his cold having gotten even worse. Feeling he had a fever, he phoned his mother in Jerusalem, hoping to be told by her to stay home, as indeed he was. “Don’t go out,” she pleaded. “Take the day off.” Shortly before nine, which was the hour the housekeeper came, he dressed and sat down in the living room, loath to have her think he was ambushing her in bed. But she was late, and after poking about the house for an hour, tired and runny-nosed, he left a note in the kitchen with instructions for cooking and cleaning, added the postscript that he was sick, and returned to the bedroom, where he shut the door behind him and began to doze off. At eleven he heard her come in. Evidently she hadn’t found the note, because at once she turned the radio on full blast to an Arab station, listening to its trilled music while rattling about with the pots. Not that he had anything against Arab music. It was melodic enough, and lately, he had noticed, the accompaniments had improved and become more sophisticated. Still, it was too loud—though afraid to frighten her by a sudden appearance in his pajamas, especially since she was now singing lustily herself, he remained lying in bed, pretending to sleep while waiting to be discovered, or at least for his note to be found. And in the end it was. At once she switched off the radio and opened the door to his room in amazement. “I have a bad cold,” he nodded to her from his pillow. “I didn’t go to work today.” “It’s good you didn’t,” she answered. “Would you like a cup of tea?” “If it isn’t too much trouble,” smiled Molkho. Oddly misaligned, her bottom too heavy for her girlishly thin arms, she walked out of the room. Household help had never lasted long with his wife, who was very critical, and this one—who was it who had told him she was divorced?—had only been with them a few months. When she brought him the tea, along with some cookies he hadn’t asked for, he coughed a few times to let her know his cold was real; yet even after he had thanked her, she remained standing by his side, as if waiting to see if he would drink. And he did, sitting up in bed. “If you’d like,” he said, “I’ll get up so you can clean the room.” But she had cleaned it just two days ago, she explained, looking at him with a new freedom and confidence, and there was no need to clean it again. “Would you like me to bring you a glass of brandy?” “Later,” said Molkho softly, anxious not to hurt her feelings. Yet, as though mesmerized by the thought of what else she could do for him, she didn’t budge or take her eyes off him. The nursing instinct was clearly strong in her. Smiling uncomfortably, he swallowed the burning tea in little sips. “You can turn the radio back on,” he said. “Just make it a little lower. And I really don’t mind the music. You can listen to whatever you want. You can sing too. Please, I like it.” She reddened but said nothing, and immediately he regretted the remark, afraid she had taken it amiss.

And yet, Molkho realized all at once, from now on, whatever he said to a woman could be misconstrued, for it would be like a little box in which anything you wanted could be put. The thought of it made him feel foolish and undignified. “I can do without music,” said the housekeeper, still scrutinizing him. “You need to rest. If you want any more tea, let me know.” And she left the door open behind her, the better to keep an eye on him.

Molkho finished his tea, put down the cup, and lay looking up at the ceiling and then out into the hallway, catching glimpses of the furniture, the rug, the lit floor of the kitchen, the slippered feet of the housekeeper by the sink, and thinking how this was the view his wife had had during the last months of her life. Once again he felt pride at having managed her death at home. “Here,” said the housekeeper, coming back with a small glass of brandy, “this is just what the doctor ordered.” Though he wasn’t at all in the mood for it, he sat up again, drank it, and thanked her. This time she shut the door when she left. Was he about to become a sexual object, he wondered, even though sex itself was but a dim and distant memory of a bondage cast aside for a more compassionate love, for the greater subtleties of affection, for the finer complexities of human relationships? Must he struggle now to rearouse himself? Certainly this woman of dubious status would be glad to help him out. And yet he wished to prolong the truce a little longer, without knowing exactly with whom. It was quiet in the house. A gray drizzle fell silently outside. He had to go to the bathroom, yet while he did not wish to be seen in his pajamas, getting dressed for no other purpose seemed oddly unnecessary. Finally, he rose and padded noiselessly off to the toilet, noticing the many new pots on the table as he passed the kitchen. And still more was cooking on the stove. Alarmed to think they were being inundated with food, he went irritably off in his pajamas to look for the woman and, finding her mopping the floor in the room of the high school boy, to ask her not to cook so much, because it was more than he knew what to do with. Huffily she muttered something back, but he was already off to the bathroom and thence to his room, locking its door and falling asleep at once. When he awoke, she was gone. On the back of his note she had written that he should buy more spices, because they were almost all out.

WHENEVER HIS WIFE HAD RAISED THE POSSIBILITY of his remarrying one day, he had put her off with some joke or sarcastic remark that denied her approaching death. One Saturday in summer, however, when they had awakened from their afternoon nap and were still lying in the double bed beneath light blankets, the dim Sabbath light agreeably striped by the warm, sweet rays of the sun creeping through the slats of the blinds, she brought up the subject without warning, calmly making him face up to it, despite his attempt to play dumb. “You won’t stay a widower all your life,” she had said. “Why not?” he had asked. “Who would want me?” “Believe it or not,” she had answered, “someone might want even you”—to which, hurt and baffled, he had made no reply. “Just don’t have any more children,” she cautioned. “Don’t marry too young a woman, because she’ll want babies and you’ll regret it.” His heart skipped a frightened beat; yet making a joke of it, he had said, “But why should I? Babying is my specialty.” Now it was she who fell silent, as if no more words were necessary. He looked at her; her face was hard and gloomy. “I don’t want to hear any more about death,” he said petulantly, afraid of her ire. “Tomorrow I can get run over in the street and die too.” “But why should you get run over?” she asked logically. “You only have to be careful.” Taken aback, he burst out laughing. He imagined her death as a sudden burst of light but also as the threat of solitary confinement hanging over him in this house.

SOMETIMES HE HAD THE FEELING that, without bothering to pack her things, she had set out before him for some destination, where she had arrived and was truly at peace, leaving him behind in the empty house to care for the children, worry about meals, and look after her old mother. As if his only attractive feature had been his proximity to illness and Death, he rarely heard anymore from old friends, and his children, too, had become distant and apathetic, no longer hastening to do his bidding or seek the reassurance of his glance. And yet the first Sabbath after the week of mourning, when his daughter came home on leave and the college student was there too, and they all set the table together, and he asked her to light the candles and she did, tears came to his eyes, as was so often the case, he had noticed, in the wake of unexpected little things. Afterward, he wished his mother in Jerusalem a good Sabbath on the telephone and drove to the old-age home to pick up his mother-in-law.

She was not yet downstairs when he came, and so, opening the large glass door with its flowery curtain, he waited for her in the spotless, elegant lobby, studying the old German books on the shelves of the mahogany cases donated by one of the residents. Each time he visited the home he was impressed again by its order and cleanliness. In easy chairs sat several old men, washed and combed for the Sabbath, in distinguished three-piece suits, chatting politely in German, still sipping pleasure from Life as if they had made their private peace with it and all the hard times they had lived through had softened into sweet pablum. Several of them had skullcaps on their heads and were waiting for Sabbath services to begin in the small, curtained-off chapel, where Arab help ran back and forth arranging the ark, the lectern, and the chairs. Though not all of them were aware that he was Frau Starkman’s son-in-law, they followed his every movement, their watchful, age-burnished eyes shining like black olives. Furtively he entered the darkened dining room, which, set for the festive meal, had about it something almost sacramental. Fresh slices of artfully cut hallah lay so lusciously white in their straw baskets that it was all he could do to keep from taking one. It was odd, though, that his mother-in-law wasn’t down yet, because he had called to say he was on his way. Some of the old men had begun to enter the chapel, parting with a nod from their less-observant companions, who chose to stay in the lobby. Molkho liked everything about the place, its flowers, its greenery, even the shiny red emergency buttons in the corners. At last his mother-in-law stepped out of the elevator, apologizing for being late, erect, energetic, and all there, despite her eighty-two years. An old friend she had known in Germany before the war, she told Molkho, had recently arrived from the Soviet Union with her daughter and they had spent a long time talking on the telephone. The other old people, Molkho noticed, were looking at her with sympathy and respect; her bereavement, so it seemed, had enhanced her stature in their eyes, as though, having managed to deflect onto her daughter the death intended for herself, she had joined the ranks of the immortals. He was already holding the front door for her when she stopped and turned back, remembering that she had forgotten her cane. “Never mind,” he reassured her. “You have me, and there’s a cane at home too, the one I bought her.” She wavered for a moment, but then gave in. In the car, he told her about the children and the new housekeeper, whose cooking, he confided worriedly, might not be to her liking.

And indeed, it wasn’t. Not that she said anything, but he could see the food was too hot for her. Though his wife’s chair still stood at the table, the plates were spaced differently now. At first, they discussed the new housekeeper, after which the college student told some story that made the high school boy burst into laughter. Good-humoredly, for their political views were alike (only those of his wife, who saw everything through dark glasses, had been different), they discussed the events of the week. After dinner Molkho’s mother-in-law asked to see the refurbished bedroom, and he showed it to her, wondering as she squinted brightly at it through her thick lenses what she would think of his remarrying. Before leaving she reminded him that the concert season was starting next week. She had asked the office of the old-age home to find someone to take her ticket, though most of the residents had subscriptions of their own. “Would you like them to find someone for yours too?” she asked. But Molkho knew this meant giving the tickets away and was loath to lose the money. “No,” he lied, “I already promised them to two friends at the office.”

On the night of the concert a cold, jarring wind blew on the mountain, sweeping dead leaves across the pavement. He arrived fifteen minutes early, parked his car on a sidewalk near the concert hall, and hurried coatlessly to the entrance to sell his tickets. For some reason, however, there were no buyers. The audience entered quickly, among them many old folks bundled up in warm clothes, helping each other into a lobby of pulsing light. Spying a couple that had been at the funeral and paid a condolence call on him at home, he edged away beneath the marquee and turned his back on them, hoping not to be seen. The crowd in front of the building did not linger there long. A musician in tails, a small black case in one hand, scurried roachlike through a back door of the building. The only people still outside were trying to get rid of their tickets too. He would have parted with his own for nothing by now, but there were no takers even for that. The warning bell rang in muffled tones and ushers in khaki urged the audience to take its seats. Within minutes the lobby was deserted. He stood by the entrance reading the program, which began with some piece by an unfamiliar composer, followed by Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, which he could not recall ever having heard either. All at once he felt a longing for live music. What harm would it do? he wondered, thinking of his two empty seats while glancing up at the sky, where faint stars were fleeing an onslaught of racing clouds. In the end, he decided to enter, assuring the ticket taker, who cautioned him to stay outside the hall until the intermission, that he knew the rules. “You may as well take both tickets,” he added, but the man took only one. Climbing the stairs, Molkho halted outside the closed door of the auditorium, his heart quickening as he heard the horns and drums. It was a complex modern piece, yet not without its haunting, melodic parts. Through the shut doors he heard only the music; not a stir came from the audience, so that for a moment he imagined that it was somewhere else, that behind the orchestra was a further space in which people were promenading or dancing, his wife too—yes, she had arrived and was waiting for him, she had entered from an entirely different direction while he stood forlornly outside. Meanwhile, all out of breath, a pretty young woman in a short fur wrap, her car keys still clutched in one hand, joined him with a smile by the door and stood listening too. As soon as a solemn wave of applause announced that the piece was over, she darted inside, but Molkho, who suddenly realized that he was not properly dressed for the occasion, stayed behind: some old person in the audience was bound to tell his mother-in-law, and he did not wish to cause her more sorrow. Walking quickly back to his car, he found a traffic policeman writing out an expensive parking ticket. A bitter sense of humiliation welled up in him. “At night too?” he cried, losing his temper. “But why? Whose way am I in? Why can’t a person be allowed to live? Why can’t a person...” But the policeman, in his slicker with the yellow glow-stripes down the back, was not in the least impressed and quietly but firmly asked Molkho for his license.

NOT THAT MONEY WAS A PROBLEM. True, the illness had set him back a large sum, but there were benefits too, such as life insurance policies, some savings accounts that had accrued in his wife’s name, and various pension plans that were now explained to him. One day he sat with two accountants from the school system who tallied up in hushed tones, flushed with the drama of it, the funds released by her death, as though it were a secret investment that had yielded a handsome dividend or some rare achievement on her part that deserved a special prize. Slowly he went over their figures; carefully he double-checked them; obsessively, exhaustively, he reviewed them a third time, jotting down sums, rereading clauses, checking tables, photographing documents to take home. It was, after all, his profession; he was an auditor himself. For a while, transferring the money to his name, consulting how best to invest it, and giving the bank instructions what to do with it were all he thought about. “It’s for the children,” he told himself. “They’ve been through so much, and I’m only thinking of their future.”

There was also a remittance of German marks, not a particularly large sum, to be sure, but one that had arrived in her name every month. Both she and her mother received this money as reparations for the property abandoned by them when they left Germany before World War II, after her father’s suicide; and indeed, when Molkho’s mother-in-law came to dinner that Friday evening with a gift of strudel for the children, she asked if he had informed the German embassy that the payments should be stopped. “I haven’t gotten around to it yet,” he replied. “I’m swamped with things to do; I never imagined there was so much to take care of after a person’s death. If it was me who had died, she would never have managed to cope with all the paperwork.” “Would you like me to do it for you?” asked his mother-in-law. “I’ll call the lawyer who arranged it and he’ll have it stopped.” “You needn’t bother,” said Molkho. “I’ll see to it myself. I just have to make a few inquiries.” Yet stubbornly, as if suspecting him of defrauding the German government, she insisted on knowing what inquiries there could be, forcing him to explain that he wished to find out if there wasn’t a last, lump sum to close the account. “After all,” he said, “she could have gone on living for years, and they would have had to pay her for each one of them. If she saved them all that money by dying, maybe there’s a special grant for the children.” “There’s no such thing,” declared his mother-in-law adamantly, and so he dialed his own mother in Jerusalem to wish her a good Sabbath, calling the children to the phone. Then they chatted with their grandmother, who seemed to enjoy their confidence, while complaining in unison about the food. Why did it have be so spicy? After the meal they watched the news on television. The old woman joined them, but when an entertainment program followed, she rose to go. “There’s something I wanted to ask you,” Molkho told her, taking her to the bedroom and showing her his wife’s clothes. “I’ll see if anyone wants them,” she said. “And how about all this medicine?” he continued, pointing to the expensive boxes of Talwin, now stacked in the form of a high tower, and slipping one into her hand. “Do you know anyone who might want them at half price? They cost twenty dollars apiece, and it’s a shame to lose the money. How about someone on the medical staff?” he persisted when she didn’t answer. Yet (rather surprisingly, he thought, for someone who was always so polite) she merely glanced at her watch as if late and walked slowly out of the room, helped by him into her coat, from whose pocket she took out the red woolen cap she had last worn on the night of the death. “I’ll see what I can do about the clothes,” she announced at the top of the stairs, and then they climbed down them and up the garden stairs to the street, where it was drizzling, while Molkho recalled how she was the first person he had phoned on the night his wife died. Though she now seemed preoccupied and in a hurry, a bond had formed between them in the three weeks that had passed since then. “You needn’t bother,” she told him when he stepped out of the car to walk her to the entrance of the home, and so he watched from a distance as she walked down the street cloaked in greenery and slowly opened the large glass door to the lobby, in which a little old lady, who appeared to have been waiting for her, rose quickly with an odd sort of bow.

The television was off when Molkho came home, the dishes in the sink were washed, and the children were preparing to leave. “Why didn’t you say you were going out?” he asked them. “You could have taken your grandmother with you.” The silence in the house enveloped him like a soft cocoon. Opening a window, he peered into the dark ravine, down which he sometimes primitively imagined his wife to have vanished that night. The rain had stopped, and he felt a sudden thirst for human company. How quickly I’ve been abandoned, he thought. Granted, in recent years their social circle had grown less active, but the last months had seen such a steady flow of visitors that they had had to be booked in advance. Head propped high and cheeks feverish, his wife had lain in her hospital bed talking openly, almost avidly, about her death with a black irony that extended to things in general, to the whole country, for which she prophesied gloom and doom, while he bustled about her like an impresario, occasionally uttering a few soothing words to keep her mockery from becoming too aggressive.

He switched on the television, turned it off again, put on some music, and immediately toned down the volume, feeling at loose ends. Should he try phoning someone in the hope of being invited out? Unfortunately, he had napped that afternoon and now was wide awake—so much so, in fact, that he could feel his wakefulness like a lump in his chest. During the first year of his wife’s illness, he had had such feelings often. Several times he was sure he had found some malignancy of his own, and once or twice he had even rushed to the doctor, making it difficult to determine who the real patient was, until her illness finally gathered such momentum that it devoured his own complaints too.

Deciding to go for a walk, he put on his coat and went downstairs, where it was calm but cold. He glanced at the windows, the terraces, the doorways of the houses, and followed a woman walking a dog while the moon rose above the rooftops into a cleared, pacific sky, returning to his unlit apartment with a feeling of wonder that soon changed to pleasure at his freedom. For months, even at night, the apartment had not been this dark, and so, curious to see how it looked from the ravine, he descended to the backyard, turning by its mesh fence to look up at the house suspended above him on columns. When they had bought the apartment four years ago, it was already with this green gully in mind—that is, with the thought of the view she would have from her deathbed. Now, staring into its blackness, which was only heightened by the luminous sky, he walked carefully along the path he knew well and had followed often to the bottom. The ground was very wet. Puddles of water lay about, and broken branches and building debris obstructed his progress. Once again he pictured her leaving this way—yes, this was the direction she had gone in that night—and absconding with part of him.

All at once the telephone rang loudly in his apartment. Was it some friends calling to ask him over for a drink? He started back up, refusing, however, to run, while the phone kept ringing stubbornly, only to fall silent as he reached the door of the apartment. Now, he thought, everyone will say that I’m never home at night! There were no doubt people who envied him his new freedom without realizing how lonely it could be. And yet he was glad his wife’s death was behind him. A year ago the thought of it had terrified him, but it had gone easily enough in the end.

He poured himself a glass of brandy, opened the clothes closet, and surveyed his wife’s wardrobe, which was hanging there. Just then the telephone rang again. It was a woman who introduced herself as Ruth, a friend of his wife’s who never had met him, though she knew all about him and kept tabs on him even now. Her voice was warm and cheery, like a self-assured schoolteacher’s. Did he mind having a personal chat with her? “No,” Molkho said. Was he sure? “Yes,” Molkho said. Well, then, she wanted him to know how sorry she was and how full of admiration for him. “For me?” he asked, knowing perfectly well what she meant. “For taking such good care of her,” explained the woman. Was he really sure she wasn’t intruding? Perhaps he would rather she called some other time. “No, go ahead,” replied Molkho, his heart suddenly beating faster. “Please don’t misunderstand me,” said the woman ... although, on the other hand, no one could possibly suspect her of ... and especially since it had dragged on so much longer than...“Than what?” Molkho asked. Than it usually did: that’s why she had decided not to wait any longer. Though he wished she would stop beating about the bush, he was startled by her boldness. The idea of her dialing him just like that! “What are you getting at?” he asked, regretting the question at once, because now he heard the hesitation in her voice, as if it were about to beat a retreat. But it didn’t. “What I’m getting at,” it plunged on, “is that I know someone you might want to meet, a lovely woman who’s just your type”—although if he thought the subject was premature, he only need say so. Secretly thrilled, he did his best to sound casual. Was it anyone he knew? No, she didn’t think so, though, of course, she couldn’t mention any names; the person in question had not been consulted and didn’t know Molkho herself. For the moment, it was just a thought in the minds of some well-wishers. Were those their voices that he heard in the background? Molkho wondered. Could she actually be speaking to him with all of them right there? Suddenly it occurred to him that it was perhaps she herself who wished to meet him. “I bet it’s you,” he said jokingly into the phone. She laughed. “I thought you’d say that, but no, it isn’t. I’m just trying to be helpful, to do what I can.” Was she a professional matchmaker? he inquired appreciatively. No, it was more of a hobby with her, replied the woman with a friendly chuckle. Receiver in hand (they had bought a cordless telephone when his wife became bedridden), Molkho walked about the apartment, gazing out the windows at the moon-bright sky. “How old is she?” “Six years younger than you. You’re fifty-three, aren’t you?” “What? I’m only fifty-one!” He felt injured, a vague fear forming inside him, as if a graying, overweight, infirm woman was about to move in with him. “I’m afraid that it’s a little too early for this,” he said curtly, sounding offended. “It’s not even a month yet. You can’t just expect me to ... why, it’s a matter of simple decency!” In the silence at the other end of the line, he thought he could hear people talking, although perhaps it was only a television. “What, not even a month yet?” they were saying in shocked whispers. Oh dear, she was terribly sorry. She had been misinformed. “Oh dear, please excuse me,” said the woman and hung up.

He hadn’t expected her to ring off so quickly. Flushed and excited he kept walking about the apartment, the telephone still in his hand. The idea! Who could it have been? And yet it touched him that someone was thinking of him, that he was already on somebody’s list. Why let it upset him? She had meant well; her warm, reliable voice still echoed in his ears as though it were now his own. He went over to the television, but didn’t touch it, having watched enough of it in the past year, and went instead to the bathroom, in which there were still more things to sort out—lotions, salves, and all kinds of bottles and tubes that had had nothing to do with her illness. It was ages since he had last sat in the bathtub, which had become her exclusive domain, her own private little sanatorium, in which, all alone, she could look without fear at her body, talk to it, soothe it, cry over it, comfort it under suds, her scarred and tortured body whose ruins he was a witness to, at first the only one, later joined by the nurses who bathed her and once a week by his elder son, who had helped lift and lower her into the greenish water. Only during the last month of her life, when this body already had turned into another creature, into some fossil of a species that had become extinct long ago or would perhaps not evolve for another million years, did she not want to see it anymore (nor did he let her, wrapping her in a huge bath towel before his son could fish her out of the tub in the special rig that she sat in), not even in the small hand mirror by her bed, which she abandoned in favor of the glass strip in her compact that reflected only her eyes, the one part of herself she could bear to look at toward the end.

He turned on the faucet and started to undress, yet noticed that the water was a brownish color, and was trying to decide whether to wash or not when the doorbell rang. Quickly donning a bathrobe and going to see who it was, he found his friends, the doctor and his wife, all dressed up on their way to a party. They had decided to drop by without warning, they explained, because his telephone was always busy; they hoped it wasn’t too late and apologized for having been out of touch. “Thank you for coming,” said Molkho, genuinely happy to see them. “It’s just for a minute,” they cautioned. “Then, thank you for coming for a minute,” he replied. They entered and headed automatically for the bedroom, realizing their error only by the door and halting there awkwardly, uncertain whether to sit down. But he made them, only then answering their questions, telling them a bit about the children and a little more about his mother-in-law, who was managing very well. “Rather too well,” he added with a smile, describing how healthy and independent she was: why, even her cane was just for show! They seemed to listen with interest, like the good and loyal, if somewhat dull, friends that they were. Despite his overoptimistic diagnoses, the doctor had been a great help to them in dealing with the hospital staff. Though Molkho had an urge to tell them about the phone call and to ask if they knew the woman who made it, he changed his mind at the last minute, not wanting them to think it gave him pleasure. When the two of them rose to go, he could feel the doctor’s wife being drawn back to the bedroom, as if she had a need to see it. It was dark and untidy, and his clothes were lying all over. “Why, it’s completely different,” she whispered in amazement after silently regarding it. “Yes,” sighed Molkho. “Even the bed is gone,” she added sadly, as if the least he could have done was continue sleeping in it himself. The doctor put an arm around him. “If you need any help,” he said, “just ask.” “I’m fine, really I am,” said Molkho, the thought crossing his mind that the man might want to buy the Talwin. Though something warned him it would make a bad impression, he wanted to be rid of the tablets so badly that he couldn’t restrain himself. “Just a minute,” he said, running to bring a box of them; he had thrown out all kinds of drugs, but this was brand-new, it had cost twenty dollars a box, perhaps the hospital might like to buy it at half price. The doctor weighed it in his hand, holding it at arm’s length while giving his wife a look that plainly said that Molkho had made a mistake. Hospitals, he explained politely, were not allowed to buy secondhand medicines, even if unopened, but if Molkho would give him a box as a sample, perhaps a private buyer could be found. “Never mind,” said Molkho, reaching out for the Talwin, which he knew he never would see again once the doctor took it. “Never mind. I’ll find a buyer myself.”

He walked them to the street. A flood of light, as if the moon had been turned up to full amplitude, poured down from the cloudless sky. A solemn beauty filled the world. Now that they, dressed in their best, were about to vanish into the wonderful darkness and leave him all by himself, it was hard to part with them. And yet it irked him to be pitied. His unhappiness, he feared, would only alienate them more, and so on the spur of the moment, he told them about the phone call, concluding with a wry smile, “So you see, I’m already an eligible bachelor.” They didn’t smile back, though. The woman was aghast: “But how could she? How awful!” The doctor said nothing, regarding Molkho with curiosity. “And not even a month gone by!” added his wife bitterly. Wrathful and incredulous, she made him regret having mentioned it. Why, you would think he had secretly arranged that telephone call himself! Suddenly all the years of devotion to his wife meant nothing anymore, and he was being stared at as though he were her murderer.

THE NIGHT GREW BRIGHTER and colder, and he slept fitfully, turning from side to side and waking up every two hours as though to boil water, to give an injection, to check the intravenous, to fetch pills or tea, to say something comforting—instead of which he went to the bathroom and then plunged back into his bed, over which loomed the triumphal moon while fresh, enormous stars drifted upward from the horizon. In the middle of the night, he turned the bed to the window to get a better view of the spectacular sky. His two youngest children were not yet home, and he decided to wait up for them. The first to arrive was his daughter; he chatted with her for a while until she went to bed and then talked with the high school boy, who had meanwhile come home too, while the moon sank into the ravine. At last, after the boy had gone to sleep also, Molkho retired himself, waking the next morning to find a bright sun shining in. It was, he decided, the perfect day to wash the car, which had not been cleaned in months, and he scrubbed and waxed it for a long time while talking to his neighbor, who had come down with the same idea. The weather, though chilly, was crisp and clear, and remembering last night’s message that there were people thinking of him, planning for him, Molkho felt suddenly happy. Not, of course, that he needed their help. He could manage quite well by himself, he was sure, but meanwhile they could point him in the right direction, provide him with warmth, restore his faith in the lost power of desire.

The old clothes he had on made it seem a good time for the walk in the ravine he’d been thinking of, and so he headed some hundred paces down the path until he found himself standing on a large, smooth boulder and looking into the branch-entangled gully, over whose trees and bushes played a milky light, as if the moon that had vanished there during the night were still slowly in the process of dissolving. Back in the house, he set about vigorously organizing a wash of dirty linen, waking the children and pulling the sheets out from under them, after which he started cleaning up in the kitchen. When the dishes were done, he tried persuading his son and daughter to pitch in and make lunch with him: “if you don’t like the housekeeper’s cooking,” he told them, “let’s try to do better ourselves.” The children, however, were unresponsive, his daughter getting involved in a long phone conversation, while his son went off to tinker with his bicycle. When the girl hung up at last, Molkho phoned the college student to invite him over too, and though at first he tried begging off, the disappointment in his father’s voice made him promise to come. True to his word, he appeared before noon, and the meal they cooked up was a good one; they sat talking intimately about this and that while looking at the calendar to choose a day for the unveiling. Gradually the children began reminiscing about their mother as they never had done before. Even the youngest, who kept silent at first, spoke up in the end, his wet eyes glistening, and it made them all glad to see him cry a bit. It’s the end of another chapter in our lives, thought Molkho, feeling strong.

But he also felt his lack of sleep now. “At least wash the dishes,” he told them. “I’ve done everything else.” And shutting the bedroom blinds, he lay down with the Friday papers and soon fell into a short but delicious sleep. When he awoke the house was quiet. The dimming, brackish light made him realize how short the days had grown. The kitchen and the table were just as he had left them, with dirty dishes lying all about. The college student was reading in the living room, the soldier was embroidering in her bedroom, and the high school boy was contentedly doing his homework. Irritably Molkho went from room to room. “How could you have left the dishes like that when that was the one thing I asked you to do?” he asked, but they barely glanced up at him, as if he were a ghost. Why, it had all begun on just such an afternoon seven years ago, in early spring, when he and she had gone together to the doctor, who wrote them out an urgent referral for a biopsy. There was no hiding the grim truth from themselves, and he remembered how, on emerging from the office into the soft, balmy air that contrasted sharply with the sudden terror they were gripped by, he had felt less frightened by the illness than by his wife’s fear of it, or perhaps by her anger. He had talked on and on while she walked silently beside him, trying to be logical, to point out all their options, to find comfort in the doctor’s words, each one of which he had parsed like Holy Writ, though all the time, numbed and ashen, she said nothing. “Even if they have to remove a breast,” he said, “even if they do, we’ve caught it in time, it’s still not the end of the world, it’s not as if you were a fashion model. You can get along without it, and I can too, without them both in fact. It will just leave me more love for the rest of you.” That’s what he had told her, calling on reserves of humor and imagination that he never knew existed, even though, absorbed in her own slow plodding, she was only half-listening and not even looking at him. It was only when they were already in the entrance of their old building and he paused by the mailbox to take out the letters and quickly tear open their envelopes that she looked at him angrily in the warm, enveloping dusk and said, breaking her silence, “Just remember, whatever happens I’m dying at home, nowhere else.” He smiled at her, a shiver running down him at what he knew was only her first salvo. Why, he started to protest, she shouldn’t even think about dying! “No, promise me,” she interrupted earnestly, a look of desperation on her face, “promise me you’ll pay whatever it costs, because I’m not dying anywhere else.” Again he tried humoring her, but this time she turned on him with her full, fearful strength, so that he said at once, “1 promise; of course, I do. How could you even imagine...”—a promise he would have to repeat a thousand times right up to the moment of her death. Grimly she climbed the stairs and waited for him to open the door for her. It was almost dark in the house. All three children were still in grade school. Quiet and strangely peaceful, they sat doing their homework together, knowing nothing but already guessing all.

A MONTH AFTER HIS WIFE’S DEATH, they all gathered again for the unveiling, the family and its many friends, some of whom had missed the funeral. Though it was a rainy day and they all had umbrellas, not a drop fell during the short ceremony. The mood was calm and peaceful; several of his wife’s fellow schoolteachers spoke briefly but movingly, and there was a feeling of closeness among them all. The new tombstone stood in its place. Molkho was rather sorry that it had only his wife’s name and the dates of her birth and death, but the children had said that anything else would be false and sentimental. To his surprise, the legal adviser from the office was there too, along with one of her coworkers, dressed in a smart suit and blue raincoat, an umbrella in one hand and a wreath of flowers in the other. He caught his breath, feeling himself turn red: she must have come to look over his family, he thought, and her appearance with the wreath—she, who hadn’t known his wife and hardly even knew him—seemed to him as daring as a striptease. When the ceremony was over, he watched in amazement as she laid the wreath on the grave, and afterward, stopping to shake the hands of those present and say a few words to them with his tottering mother hanging on to him, he paused to thank her warmly too. “We’re here on behalf of the whole office,” she said a bit uncomfortably, though looking straight at him, which touched Molkho, so that he almost choked with gratitude, unable to find the right words. “The office couldn’t have chosen a better representative,” he said at last. “I thank you, I really do.” “Who was that?” his mother-in-law inquired in the car, nodding when he told her and saying, “Oh, yes. That widow from work.”

HE KNEW THEN that it was only a matter of time before they struck up a relationship. Was it perhaps too soon? he wondered. Was he ready for it? What would she expect of him physically? He hadn’t made love to a woman in years. Might she be in too much of a rush? He made a few discreet inquiries, yet though his informants spoke freely and willingly, there was little new they had to tell him apart from the matter of her rank, for whereas he had always believed her to be a single civil service grade above him, he was now shocked to discover she was three. How, and by whom, had she managed to be promoted so quickly? Late one night, while out walking, he stopped by her house on the West Carmel, an unassuming building with only four apartments of a type built in the early 1960s. Noiselessly he stepped inside and scanned the names on the mailboxes to see who her neighbors were; none of them was familiar, though the fact that one was a doctor rather pleased him. Stepping back outside, he circled the building, noticing the old garbage cans and the neglected little garden and lawn; the house committee, it was evident, had been falling down on the job.

And yet he wished to put off seeing her again, which, as they worked in different departments, could easily be accomplished by his not venturing into the hallway or downstairs to the cafeteria, something he rarely would have done anyway, because ever since his wife’s death the daily loaf of bread from the grocery was too much for them to finish at home, so that he had begun taking two large sandwiches to work, washing them down with coffee from a thermos. After all, he told himself, it’s not as if I were in any hurry.

ONLY NOW that he had time on his hands did he realize how busy his wife’s illness had kept him; how many hours he had put in every week talking to her or her visitors and dealing with all the endless problems, how on guard he had been day and night, how many difficult decisions had been left to him, how tense he had been made all the time by the Unknown that awaited him, mornings, evenings, at work, on the telephone, in his long talks with the doctors and the nurses. He was the male lead in a drama, strutting about on a stage with a big hospital bed in the center, whispering, shouting, crying, for she had reduced him to tears—yes, she had done that too. Wistful for those lost days, he thought of them with nostalgia. Now it was over with, the audience departed, the sets disassembled, the stage itself a pile of old boards; and bathed in a yellowing glow, time stretched out endlessly and wearily before him like a flat road. He came home from work each day, napped for a while, shopped at the little supermarket nearby, stopped in at the bank to check on his stocks or transfer funds from one account to another, and then took a short walk and came home to listen to music, the sound of which on his records and tapes seemed suddenly flat to him. One day his daughter brought home a Hebrew translation of Pride and Prejudice, and slowly he began to read about the adventures of the five Bennet sisters and to think, Why, I’m like Lizzy and Jane: it’s time I was married off too. First, though, there had to be a way of arousing his lost desire, of assuring he would not be found wanting when the day arrived. Perhaps he should buy some pornographic magazines. Meanwhile, he leafed through them in the bookstores, staring with cold revulsion at the perfect, pinkish bodies they displayed.

IN THE END, when he began to look for her in the cafeteria, she was nowhere to be found; indeed, she had as much as vanished from the building. He would have to find a professional pretext to meet with her, he thought, since he needed a closer look to decide if she was or wasn’t his type. Yet he mustn’t let it seem unnatural. And he would have liked to obtain her personal file, too, if only to find out how old she was. True, women sometimes lied about their age, but such fibs were usually not great. Though he guessed she was in her forties, she might also be pushing fifty, might conceivably already have passed it. Even assuming that a young woman was not for him, that didn’t mean he wanted an old one. I’m in no hurry, he told himself. Yet he kept returning to the cafeteria, where one day he spied her surrounded by some members of her staff. From behind, he felt sure that her short, straight auburn hair was dyed, for he had seen its coppery tint before, had even helped his wife mix a solution of it in the days before she wore a wig. A gray sky was visible through the window. She was saying something assertively, gesturing firmly with both hands, her face well chiseled despite its lines, her small, almost oriental eyes giving her a squirrelish look. Though he nodded as he passed her, she did not respond or seem to know who he was, which made him wonder whether she was nearsighted. It was odd, he thought, sipping his strong black coffee, that she should be too busy talking to recognize him. Just then, though, she caught sight of him and flashed him a smile ... and yet she went on talking. If she’s been a widow for three years and has time, he thought, so do I. He could feel the strong coffee perking him up and worried that it might spoil his nap.

FOR THERE WERE HABITS from before his wife’s death that were hard to break, such as his afternoon nap. Was it really worth the effort of taking it? Once he had needed that hour of sleep to be fresh for the sleepless night ahead, and his wife had made sure he had gotten it; in fact, it had been his favorite hour of the day, one in which, lying curled beneath a blanket in the quiet apartment, the afternoon light filtered by the blinds, even his wife’s illness had seemed to him remote and unmenacing. Now, however, he sought in vain to recapture its sweet sensation; his naps grew progressively shorter, losing their inner tang, and after fifteen or twenty minutes of them he would wake up feeling cross. Not even leaving work early, at one o’clock, when he was at his most tired, could restore those lost sleeps to him.

The arrangement made with his department head that he could leave the office early by taking work home was still in force. Even after his wife’s death, he had kept it up, for he had wanted to give the high school boy his lunch, the preparation of which was no easy matter, in light of the quantities of food in the refrigerator. The new housekeeper was hyperactive; no matter how clear his instructions, she simply kept cooking more and more. Besides, the boy was beginning to follow in her footsteps; opening all kinds of cans when he came home, he had taken to concocting private dishes of his own while ignoring the leftovers that were crying to be eaten and filling up the house in pots and pans. Sometimes, thinking while at work about the overflowing icebox at home, Molkho fell into a rage; reaching for the phone, he would shout at the housekeeper to stop her cooking at once and would hang up, leaving her out of sorts and hurt. Worse yet, his daughter was away at an officers’ course and no longer came home from her base, making them one mouth less. Only now did Molkho realize how voraciously his wife had eaten, despite her illness. The refrigerator had never been too full while she was alive.

But it was his younger son who was the problem. If only he would stop his solo experiments! It was impossible to get the housekeeper to make what he liked, because the boy kept changing his tastes; yesterday’s favorite was today’s bugaboo, and so Molkho made a point of getting home in time to be in charge of promoting the leftovers. “Just tell me what you like,” he would plead for the tenth time with the long-haired boy in his blue uniform, who, besides being totally uncommunicative, was having a hard time at school, though Molkho hoped it was only a phase. “We have to finish what we started yesterday. I can’t be expected to eat this for a whole week by myself,” he would say, dumping the cold potatoes back in the frying pan and trying to resuscitate the dry rice with a slab of margarine and some tomato sauce. Once his son brought home a lanky friend, and Molkho invited him to stay for lunch. The youngster wolfed down everything on his plate and even asked for seconds, and Molkho, who was waiting on both boys with an apron, was encouraged to see that his son ate more too. He asked the guest for his name and inquired about his parents, who, he was told, were often away. “Then why not have lunch with us more often,” he said.

HIS YOUNGER SON had always worried him. Several times in recent years he had barely escaped being left back a grade, and it was only because of the illness of his mother, who taught in the same school, that he had been given the benefit of the doubt. Often he answered his parents impatiently, even rudely and with unprovoked anger, getting up and stalking out into the rain in a short-sleeved shirt without a sweater. While he had always been more hostile to his mother and closer to his father, his antagonism now seemed transferred to Molkho, who had even thought of sending him to a psychologist, though his friends had counseled waiting until the boy was older. Moreover, now that they spent long hours alone together, Molkho discovered that his son was a heavy masturbator; sometimes, opening the door to his darkened room, he found him in bed on his stomach, his face buried in the pillow, pretending to be asleep. Poking through the laundry bin, Molkho came across wet underpants whose young, animal smell assailed him, and once, rummaging in his son’s bed, he found beneath the mattress a photo of a nude, ripe-breasted, no longer young woman. His first reaction was to tear it up, yet on second thought he reflected, So what?

TWO MONTHS HAD PASSED since his wife’s death, the second of which, Molkho noticed, went by particularly slowly. The days turned warm and clear, and the cold, rainy weather of the premature winter was forgotten. Though each time the telephone rang he still ran excitedly to get it, he had no idea whom he hoped it would be. Sometimes the call was from distant acquaintances who had only now heard the news, either because they didn’t read the obituaries or because they had been abroad, and he enjoyed being able to describe his wife’s last weeks again and to hear their sincere expressions of regret. Gradually, though, there was less of this. And galloping inflation notwithstanding, his own telephone bill had shrunk too, quite extraordinarily so; his wife, he realized, must have been on the phone constantly during her last, bedridden months. Calling whom, though? Out-of-town friends, no doubt, perhaps even her cousin in Paris. In any event, he himself used the phone sparingly, though he still called his mother in Jerusalem every morning with news of the children and himself. Slyly she would ask him how he felt and whom he was seeing, always with the same advice: “Don’t go to the movies yet, don’t go to any concerts. It’s too early for that. Just see a lot of people, keep in touch with your old friends before they forget you, and find new ones,” she would warn him again. “But don’t go to the movies. You have a TV at home; that’s enough for you. When your father died, I didn’t even have that, and I had to stay home a whole year doing nothing.” Grumbling, he would try to hang up, but it was impossible to get a word in edgewise; she simply repeated over and over, “Don’t go to any concerts. You know what people will think. You’ve done the right thing until now. Just have patience a little longer. Isn’t that what her mother says too?”

Nevertheless, when it was time for the next concert, he decided that enough was enough, though he did not, of course, say so to his mother-in-law over dinner that Friday. As usual, having arrived early at the old-age home, which he found himself liking more with each visit, he wandered about it. With sympathy he regarded its clean, bald German Jews who sat in their Sabbath best in the lobby, talking politely and looking at him affably, a stoutish man with curly gray hair and dark Levantine eyes that scanned the bulletin board with wary tedium, reading up on the cultural programs being offered that week. Perhaps, Molkho mused, he should put up a notice about the Talwin. Sometimes, his heart beating faster, he rode the elevator up to the fifth floor, curious to see the dying patients in the medical ward and the apparatus by their sides; yet each time, intercepted at the door by an elderly nurse who asked him where he was going, he stammered an excuse and rode back down.

He spoke in praise of the home to everyone, jocularly adding that the only thing wrong with it was its being exclusively for German Jews. “I can become a Christian,” he protested, a note of seriousness creeping into his voice, “even a Moslem, but there’s no way I can become a German Jew and get in there one day myself.” His mother-in-law liked the place too, though she had resisted moving into it for years, being used to her apartment near her daughter’s in which she had continued to lead an independent life, even after turning eighty. It was only when the illness took a turn for the worse that Molkho’s wife insisted that she move. “What will we do if anything happens to you?” she asked her mother. “Who will take care of you?” And even then the old woman put up a fight: she had two rooms in her apartment and would have only one in the home, and besides, she was in perfect health, there wasn’t anything wrong with her. But his wife refused to back down. “We can’t be responsible if anything happens to you,” she persisted. “What can happen?” asked the old woman with a quiet smile. “Suppose you fall and break something,” suggested Molkho. “But why should I fall?” asked his mother-in-law, amused by the thought. Then his wife said in desperation, “But can’t you see, you’re not letting me die in peace,” and her mother’s resistance crumbled. The old woman moved into the home while her daughter was still well enough to visit her there in her small but dignified room, and in fact, she got on famously with everyone, a little old, lucid, 100 percent German Jewess who could read Hebrew and had even once run an orphanage, so that she was soon elected to the social committee—which gave Molkho, now waiting impatiently for her in the lobby filled with potted plants, a feeling of having a personal stake in the place. Recently she had begun to remind him more and more of his wife. Smiling at him as she emerged from the elevator, her cane hooked over one arm, she looked as chipper as ever and carried the usual box of strudel that was her contribution to the Sabbath meal, whose chef he now was, though he refused to run any risks, playing it safe with a salad, french fries, and some frozen, codlike fish on which he had practiced all week, even burning it once or twice in the frying pan before getting the hang of it. And indeed, at first it was a great success with everyone, though after a while it, too, began to pall.

Their meals were not talkative. His wife had been the conversationalist in the family. “Without me,” she used to say to them, “you’d just gobble your food like animals,” and in fact, though it did not make them feel particularly bestial, that was how they now ate. Sometimes one of them would groan in despair over the political situation, but fatalistically, as one despairs of the incurably ill; and sometimes Molkho’s mother-in-law would tell the children about their dead mother, relating some childhood story about her from the age of ten or eleven. None of them had ever heard these anecdotes, which the old woman evidently rehearsed during the week; but though Molkho would listen to them with interest, feeling a bittersweet pain, the children would sit through them bored and fidgety. Soon the college student would return to his dorm (he had fallen behind in his studies and had a lot to make up), the soldier would pick up the telephone and begin dialing her friends, and the high school boy would slip off to his room, leaving Molkho and his mother-in-law to watch the news by themselves until, as soon as the entertainment programs started, she would rise from her chair and put on her coat and scarf. Sometimes, driven by habit, she first went to her daughter’s bedroom and stood looking at it from the doorway, casting Molkho a kindly glance. Though she had never thought particularly highly of him, he knew that she felt a subtle affection for him, which had grown stronger in recent months. “Is there anything I can do for you?” she asked. “Perhaps you’d like me to invite the boy for a meal now and then.”

He would have liked to ask if she was going to Tuesday’s concert, but he thought better of it. Driving her back to the home, he parked near the entrance and watched her step out of the car, her feet groping weakly for the sidewalk, then quickly recovering and striding firmly down the path between flowerbeds and bushes surrounding a small pool until she reached the large glass door, on the other side of which the postprandial light was an almost blackish violet. He waited to make sure she passed safely through it, watching her gaily say hello to the old folks chewing their cud in the lobby and the little old lady who greeted her, rising quickly from her corner with an old-fashioned bow.

THAT TUESDAY NIGHT he went to the concert. The program featured Haydn’s Creation and rumor had it that the performance was a good one, Sundays and Monday’s audiences having only the highest praise for it. Though at first the college student had promised to join him, Molkho found a note from him that afternoon saying that he couldn’t make it, and so he asked the high school boy instead. “What’s there to lose,” he cajoled him. “Try it one time. It’s wonderful music. You can always leave in the intermission if you don’t like it.” “Ho, ho, ho,” said the boy, rejecting the offer disdainfully. Molkho did not make a point of it. This time he was sure his wife’s ticket could be sold. His last Philharmonic concert had been over half a year ago, in early summer, before his wife, who had come leaning on a cane, took to bed for the last time; later on in the season, when he had wanted to bring her again, she had asked him, practically begged him, to go by himself, and he almost did, until suddenly she began to throw up and he was forced to stay home with her.

He washed, put on a dark suit, and arrived earlier than he had meant to. Yet the mall was already crowded, and its festive mood was infectious. There were numerous people he knew, many of whom came over to shake his hand earnestly, and he wished the college student were with him so that the blame, such as it was, could be shared. The concert was sold out; quite a few youngsters circulated among the crowd in search of extra tickets, but none were to be had. He himself was approached in a friendly manner by an attractive young lady in glasses; she seemed to be alone, perhaps even available, and seeing her bright, beaming face, he thought, Why not, who knows what may come of it? Yet he wavered, afraid how it might look, and then feebly shook his head. Soon after a young man in jeans came up to him too. No, said Molkho decisively after starting to take a step toward him, making up his mind to forfeit the price of the ticket. Entering the auditorium, he took his customary seat. The two old men on his right, who were partners in an optometrist’s shop, greeted him diffidently, not quite sure it was he, while quickly he sought out his mother-in-law’s seat a few rows ahead of him and saw it was empty. The musicians began coming onstage, taking their places and warming up deftly on bars of the opening piece. The hall hummed with people, more of whom kept streaming in, though it looked almost full already. Students were sitting in the aisles. Now and then, someone stopped to ask Molkho if the seat beside him was taken, to which he testily replied, “Yes, it is.” Still tuning up, the orchestra was now wildly improvising on all kinds of themes. He kept staring at the empty seat ahead of him, hoping to see his mother-in-law appear, but instead, an usher arrived with a little old lady in an old velvet dress who, anxious and flustered, bowed to her neighbors with a timid smile and sat in Frau Starkman’s place. Just as he recognized her, a hand on his shoulder made him jump. It was some old friends from Jerusalem, who helped him to his feet and sorrowfully embraced him. “We heard about it,” they said in low voices. “We’re so sorry. We wanted so much to come see you. Was it very hard in the end? Did she suffer much?” They wanted some preconcert consolation, and he gave it to them warmly. “No, she didn’t suffer at all. Not a bit. I know, because it happened at home.” “At home?” they asked astonishedly, their arms still around him. “Yes,” he said proudly, “at home. She hardly suffered at all.” The old men on his right listened open-eyed, regarding him sympathetically when he sat down again. No doubt they had suspected as much, from the moment they saw her last summer with the cane, and now they put two and two together. Still, they didn’t seem to mind his being there. They even seemed about to speak to him, but just then the conductor made his entrance.

The first piece was Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, which was new to him. In general, Molkho’s knowledge of classical music, which had come to him via his wife, was sketchy. Both his parents had been bom into Orthodox families in the old walled city of Jerusalem, and what little musical education he possessed was the result of his wife’s patient efforts. He still preferred compositions with plenty of trumpets and drums, although he couldn’t deny that the strains of the first violin now washing over him tugged at his heartstrings too. Suddenly, glancing at the empty seat beside him, he missed his wife acutely, as if he had left her at home and was now needed by her there, hobbling about on crutches in the dark apartment. Why did he have to say she hadn’t suffered, what made him need to be so comforting? A light cough from somewhere behind him sounded like hers. Reassuringly he laid a hand on the soft plush of the open seat beside him.

During the intermission the two of them used to join her mother in the lobby, where they would arrange to meet after the performance. Now, elbowing his way through the resplendent crowd past elegant women whose bare, perfumed flesh-scent he inhaled, he craned his neck to get a better look at the old lady. She was still seated in her place, her big, clear eyes wide with wonder. Tiny, dressed in old clothes, her gloved hands in her lap and her white hair streaked with dull gold, she looked like someone out of the pages of a fairy tale, shyly smiling at her surroundings with an aura of faraway lands, at him, too, although she did not appear to recognize him. Returning from the lobby, he found the seat next to him occupied by an aloof young man and made him change places, giving him his own and moving over to sit in his wife’s. Meanwhile, a choir had filled the stage. Surprising him with a beauty that struck a chord deep within him, the music began on a powerful note.

HE STILL HAD NOT FOUND the meaning of his new life, its deeper rationale. During the illness, each day had been a recurrent test whose ultimate goal was Death itself. His task, he had known, was to prevent, or at least to forestall, suffering, while at the same time hastening it along. As evening jelled outside the windows and he finished his last preparations for the night’s vigil, having already given her a shot of morphine, or sometimes even before that, he felt that he had vanquished the day and that this victory had not only a physical but also a spiritual dimension, so that Death, which he sometimes imagined as a distant and soon-to-appear relative dressed in black, regarded him from afar with approval, the hidden observer of his resourcefulness; whereas now, his lunch already eaten, the dishes washed, and nothing left to do around the house, the day still stretched half unfinished before him with no apparent reason for its being there.

He still hadn’t disposed of the Talwin, which was beginning to weigh on him. It was worth some four hundred dollars all in all, and it was a crime to throw the money away, especially as he had broken a fixed-time deposit at the bank for it. He had known even then that he was overpurchasing, but the lady pharmacist had warned him that her stock was low and his wife had made him buy it all. In fact, the drug hadn’t even been prescribed by her regular doctor, who was abroad at the time, but by an elderly stand-in whose promise that it would relieve her pain she had believed implicitly, though in fact it turned out to be contraindicated by another, more crucial drug and had to be discontinued. Who, he wondered, would take it off his hands now? Standing on the shelf across from his bed, the white boxes with their neat blue stripes were the first thing he saw on getting up in the morning and the last thing he saw at night. There were drugstores that hadn’t even heard of it, and though by now he was almost willing to give it away, he knew of no one who needed it. Finally, one night, he called the old doctor who had prescribed it. The doctor, it so happened, was sick himself; when asked by the man’s wife what he wanted, Molkho’s first inclination was to hang up, but before he knew it, he was telling her the whole story. What was the drug called? she inquired. Apparently she had heard of it, because she asked how much he had, and when told twenty boxes, she said, “Bring them over. We’ll see what we can do.” “When?” asked Molkho. “Right now if you’d like,” the woman told him. And so, stuffing the medicine into a plastic bag, he set out for the doctor’s house, a small stone building on top of the Carmel.

The doctor’s wife met him at the door, a small, sprightly woman in a smock who led him down a hallway lined with books and bric-a-brac. Charmed by the old-world ambience, his wife, Molkho remembered, had believed in the man from the start. Now he lay with a bad cold on a leather couch in his office covered by a plaid woolen blanket and surrounded by a disorderly pile of papers, folders, instruments, books, and medicines. Indeed, there were drugs everywhere, glutting the shelves and filling the spaces between and above the books. Pointing at Molkho, who suddenly regretted coming, the wife said something in German to her husband. “I hope I’m not intruding,” Molkho apologized, observing the old man’s pale face and bloodshot eyes as he stepped into the overheated room whose blinds were lowered halfway. The doctor simply nodded. “When did it happen?” he asked, questioning Molkho about the last stages of the illness, listening morosely to his answers and nodding again, this time with annoyance, as if, despite the inevitability of it all, he felt let down by the outcome.

All at once he asked Molkho about his own health. Throwing off his blanket and sticking his thin, sinewy feet into a pair of slippers, he began, cold, pajamas, and all, to give the visitor a checkup, taking his blood pressure and peering into his eyes with a little flashlight, his dry, hot hands giving Molkho such a fright that he felt his heart skip a beat; quickly, however, the old man lost patience, spoke to his wife again in German, picked up the boxes of Talwin, and held them up to the light. They had stopped using the drug, Molkho stammered, because it was contraindicated by something else whose name he felt he was mispronouncing, though the doctor said nothing to correct him but merely ran a hand over the boxes. At last he said crossly, “There was no contraindication,” and turned again to his wife. “I hope it’s still in use. Lots of drugstores have never heard of it,” said Molkho, shifting the blame back to the doctor. “Of course it is,” replied the old man, his feathers ruffled now. “It’s the best painkiller there is.” “And can a normal person take it too?” asked Molkho. “What do you call normal?” asked the doctor. “Someone healthy,” Molkho replied. “Why should someone healthy need medicine?” smirked the doctor. “I mean someone healthy who’s in pain,” explained Molkho. “Of course,” said the doctor, consulting his wife again in German and mentioning several names, apparently of patients who might need the Talwin. “Well, all right,” he said to Molkho, as if doing him a special favor. “You may as well leave it all here.” By now, though, Molkho was having second thoughts: suppose the medicine disappeared among the many piles on the shelves and he never got a cent for it? Perhaps the old man and his wife were illegally trafficking in pharmaceuticals. “Are you sure you can find a buyer?” he asked. “I might” shrugged the doctor. “In that case,” said Molkho, “why don’t I leave you my address and you can give it to whoever is interested.” Getting only hurt silence for an answer, he wrote down his address, took the Talwin, and left. Back home, having returned it to its place, he wondered if he had done the right thing.

MORNINGS HE ROSE EARLY. By six he was already out of bed and in the bathroom, where he sat drowsily on the toilet for a long time, tearing off the day’s page from the memo pad and making lists of shopping, of things to do around the house, and of people to be phoned. Then he checked his stool for blood. Sometimes he even talked to it. “What’s with you,” he might ask it, or else, “What do you want from me?” When it was finally flushed down the drain, he washed, shaved, and studied himself in the mirror, a fifty-one-year-old man with gray but still thick curly hair and dark, deeply set eyes, at loose ends in a freedom whose nature was not yet clear to him. Sometimes, shutting those eyes, he would think of her. “Where are you?” he asked wonderingly, picturing her for a moment in the ravine by the house, whose stone path he had followed that night not long ago until forced to turn back by the slippery mud. Then he would turn on the heater, put a kettle up to boil, think of what to have for breakfast, and wake up the high school boy, something that was easier said than done, especially on days when school started early, so that he had to raise the blinds, turn on the radio, and wait for these measures to take effect while glancing at his son’s school things. Next there was breakfast to prepare and sandwiches for work and school, after which Molkho made the beds and gathered the scattered sections of the newspaper. At times, recalling the rules laid down by his wife, he followed his son around the house to make sure he combed his hair and brushed his teeth. “Do it for your mother,” he would beg the boy, who always seemed most estranged from him in the morning. Then he washed the dishes, shut the windows and blinds, picked out a tie that he was never sure matched his jacket, and left for the office. There, striving to snap him out of his slump and up his output, which had dropped sharply in the last year, his superiors handed him files and summoned him to conferences about the budgets of several small northern municipalities that were on the verge of financial collapse. At ten he went to the cafeteria for coffee, on the lookout for the legal adviser, whom he occasionally ran into. Sometimes they chatted a bit or exchanged smiles on the stairs. He knew she was waiting for a sign from him; yet, afraid to do anything impulsive that he might later regret, he preferred to bide his time. Perhaps, he thought, the best time would be in early spring, with the fifth or sixth concert in the series, which he had already marked down on his calendar. He would ask her to come with him: it would be a good way to begin, because he was sure she liked classical music. Meanwhile, he’d have a chance to look her over and decide if he liked her tailored wardrobe, whose different outfits he already was familiar with. She can wait a bit, he thought; if she hasn’t found a man in the three years her husband has been dead, another month or two won’t hurt her. It wasn’t as if she had been waiting just for him. True, he had informed the office of his wife’s illness several years ago, at which time she might have been consulted about his request for a flexible schedule that would allow him more time at home, but she could scarcely have had her sights on him then, especially as the illness was not yet clearly fatal and his devotion to his wife was public knowledge. Even now, what did she see in him? He thought of himself as a gnarled old tree, so unlike this vivacious woman with her clipped hair and small, brown oriental eyes, whose look was that of an intelligent pointer or, better yet, of a sagacious squirrel. Could she be harboring a fatal illness herself that she wished him to nurse for her? Her husband, a travel or insurance agent, had died of a sudden heart attack—hence her buoyancy, Death having gone easy on her, making no demands and teaching no hard lessons. That much he knew about her, even if he rarely saw her, just as he knew her perfume, which had a special, subtle fragrance. His wife’s illness had sharpened his sense of smell too.

He would wait. He had time. Setting the pace, he thought pleasurably, was a male prerogative. Meanwhile, he went for long walks about town, and one day he took off from work, packed a suitcase with his wife’s clothes, and drove to Jerusalem, where he accompanied his mother to the cemetery on the tenth anniversary of his father’s death. Amid the old, crumbling tombstones of the ancient graveyard he stood with her and the other members of the family, aristocratic old Sephardim who shook his hand gently and commiserated with him on the loss of his wife. He had not been in Jerusalem for half a year, and the city he grew up in now seemed to him excessively wintry and religious. He brought his mother home, attended to some business in town, and returned to eat the large lunch she had cooked for him, which consisted of his favorite greasy foods. Then, cozily sleepy, sitting with his shoes off on the old couch in the heart of the city’s dilapidated downtown, he listened to her talk on and on. What, she kept asking him, did he think? “Think about what?” he parried innocently. “About what?” she echoed, sitting there large and multicolored like a big cockatoo and peering at him intently as if for the first time. “About your future.” “I really haven’t thought about it yet,” he answered lamely, stretched out comfortably on the couch. “I feel too drained.” Ever since his wife had taken ill, his mother’s presence in their life had become far less intrusive; the illness frightened her, so that her visits with them grew more subdued and were marked by a reluctance to interfere. “Don’t be in any hurry,” she cautioned him now. “Have a good look around. Just remember, though, that you’re not a young man anymore. Don’t be caught napping.” The house was ill heated and cold. Through the glass door of the terrace he watched the sun shoot apocalyptically out of a black tunnel of clouds. His mother refused to drop the subject. “Maybe you should think of coming back to live in Jerusalem. You have plenty of friends here who can help you find the right woman, the kind that you’re used to. Maybe even someone from your old high school class. There must be some divorcées and widows among them.” He opened his eyes wide, staring fondly at this woman who never failed to surprise him, silently shoveling peanuts into his mouth from a bowl and chewing them vigorously. The thought of marrying someone from his graduating class of thirty-five years ago struck him as being so wildly original that for a moment he pictured the classroom, with its four rows of seats, many occupied by young girls in black dresses. “How am I supposed to find them?” he asked in a feeble attempt at a joke. “If you came back here, you’d find all your old friends. You’re the only one who ever left. Ask for a transfer.” “I can’t,” he whispered exhaustedly. “I can’t leave her.” “Leave whom?” his mother demanded. “Her mother,” he said. “It wouldn’t be fair.”

He went to nap in his old bedroom, yet even wrapped in a large woolen blanket he was unable to keep himself warm. The roar of the city, which was the sound of his childhood, and the cold beneath the high ceiling kept him awake, his thoughts wandering from his children to the legal adviser, and then to his mother-in-law. Lately, the old woman had been hard to reach on the phone; it was as if she no longer needed him, as if she, too, had been set free by Death. And then, too, she was busy with her little friend from Russia who had arrived in Israel with her daughter, having taken them under her wing and made herself not only their counselor but their handyman; just the other day, for example, while stuck in a traffic jam, he had seen her dart out of a hardware store with a long metal pipe in one hand.

At last he fell into a troubled sleep, hearing his mother opening the suitcase he had brought and making bundles of his wife’s clothing for some woman’s charity, while he dreamt he was standing in the yard of his old high school among a pack of Boy Scouts, though his tie was not Scout blue or green but rather bright red, as were the ties of the smaller boys lined up on either side of him. He lay in his old bed listening to the city rhythmically pound and churn, as if he were inside the drum of a big washing machine that kept filling and draining, spinning, stopping, and filling again. From time to time, his mother tiptoed in to see if he was awake and tiptoed out again, annoyed at him for sleeping away his visit with her. Shivering with cold, he watched her through slit eyes until she gave up and returned to her pots in the kitchen, bursting with maternal compassion and impatience to talk with him.

Finally, she came and woke him, unable to keep her latest idea to herself any longer: he should take off his wedding ring; that way, at least, no one would get the wrong idea. “What difference does it make?” he asked, still flat on his back, enjoying her concern for him. “I’ll be dead soon myself.” He could feel her protest ripple through her. “How can you say such a thing! You have children!” “They don’t need me any more,” he answered, getting up to eat the early supper that was lavishly laid out for him on the dining room table. His wife’s clothes were already sorted, folded, and neatly tied with string. A purplish green light glinted off the plates and silverware. He went over to the window to gaze at the sky, which had grown dark and frothy, as though it were being brought to a boil. “Just look at that sky,” he told his mother, who suggested that he spend the night with her and return to Haifa in the morning. Molkho, however, declined. As soon as supper was over, he began gathering his things, hoping to beat the storm, his mood so improved that when she mentioned the wedding ring again, he answered, “Why not?” and tried pulling it off his finger. He did not succeed, however, for the finger had grown thicker, and his mother had to bring a bar of soap and slowly, painfully, work it off. With a glance at its grimy inner curve he stuck it in his wallet. “We’ll see,” he said, bending to kiss her good-bye.

A strong wind was blowing as he drove out of Jerusalem in a ghostly yellow light, its sudden gusts making the car swerve. He slowed down by the line of hitchhikers waiting at the city’s edge and stopped by a cluster of soldiers, some of them still wet with rain they had brought with them from elsewhere. On the spur of the moment he made up his mind to take only women. The soldiers crowded around him like bees on a honeycomb, but slowly, determinedly, he winnowed out four north-bound girls, who all removed their army berets as soon as they got in the car, filling it with the scent of their hair. Gingerly he fastened the seat belt of the passenger beside him and then smiled in the rearview mirror to the three girls in the back. All this young femaleness will do me good, he thought, carefully taking the sharp curves of the road that ran westward toward the setting sun, which glowed like a hot coal through a tattered curtain of sky and fog. Within minutes, however, it was gone from sight and was followed by a furious cloudburst, through which the car chuted downhill between two vast sheets of rain. He slowed down, turning on the windshield wipers, the heater, and the radio all at once, hunched tensely over the wheel in the torrential downpour while trying to make out, above the music and the sound of the motor, the soft, childish chatter in the rear. From time to time, he scanned the mirror for the pretty eyes and smooth, youthful faces behind him, waiting for some expression of feminine interest, for some sign; but the rain kept up, flooding the sides of the road, and he had to concentrate on the fogged-up windshield, turning the defroster on and off and opening the window a crack to let in cold air. It grew dark out. Soon the headlights of the oncoming cars were all he could see; the girls behind him fell silent, and the music on the radio faded away into a fuzzy drone, leaving him on edge with a coalescing blob of passengers, their faces obscured in the mirror by the encroaching darkness. With his fingers he felt the white circle left on his skin by the missing ring. It was a long, nerve-racking drive; the traffic lights took forever to change, the tense motor threatened to overheat, and the silence deepened with the night. Once on the coastal highway, he thought of stopping at a diner, but the car plunged on of its own accord and the head of the soldier next to him fell back in deep slumber. He felt as if he were transporting a single, giant woman, a sleeping, shallowly breathing, tetracephalous female pudding whose separate heads kept banging against the windows, opening and shutting pairs of eyes until Haifa, when suddenly it awoke and squirted off in four thin tentacles that quickly vanished beneath the streetlights into the wet night.

He arrived home at eight o’clock, retrieved from the rear seat the crushed morning paper, which was still warm from female flesh, and dashed through the rain to his house. As soon as he entered he noticed that the living room door was closed. His youngest son came accusingly out of his room. “Someone’s here to buy medicine,” he said. “He’s been waiting for an hour and wouldn’t go away. He even threw up in the bathroom.” Molkho opened the door to the living room. The man was still in his wet coat, a tall, thin fellow who jumped to his feet as if seeing a ghost. The symptoms of his condition were obvious: the puffy face, the unnatural redness, the thin, limp hair like the bristles of an old brush, the eyes bulging with the effort of his struggle. Why, it’s like a family reunion, thought Molkho, who hadn’t realized until now how he had missed all these things. But the man was impatient, self-involved in his illness; sent by the old doctor, he wanted to pay for the medicine and go, so that Molkho quickly took the boxes from their shelf, showed him they hadn’t been opened, and told him the price. “Exactly half what they cost in the drugstore,” he said, removing his coat while describing the rain to the visitor, who, however, had not the slightest interest in either the weather or Molkho’s adventures. I wonder what’s been carved out of him beneath that coat and what’s rotted away by itself, wondered Molkho, smelling vomit as he approached him, trying to befriend him a bit, to tell him about the Talwin. But the stranger did not need to have the drug explained, for he had been taking it for years, and hurriedly counting the boxes, he did a mental sum and wrote out a check. And still Molkho clung to him. The man, something told him, was at the climax of his drama. Did he have a wife? Children? Yet already he was on his way, the blue-and-white boxes stuffed into the pockets of his coat. “It’s raining out,” Molkho warned, making one last effort to detain him. “Don’t you have an umbrella?” But he was already gone.

In the bathroom Molkho thought he could still smell the man’s puke. He took a look at the day’s mail and, feeling suddenly fatigued, lay down in bed, where he could not find a comfortable position. All at once he felt sorry he had sold the medicine. He had parted with it too cheaply; he should have asked for more. And besides, he was used to seeing the colored boxes before going to sleep; he should at least have left himself one. He glanced at the check to see who had written it, but it was the old-fashioned kind, without a name at the top, and he couldn’t make out the signature. Getting up, he poured himself a nip of brandy and then, though he was exhausted, paced restlessly around the house, feeling the four girl soldiers’ sleep instead, which had rubbed off slimily on him. He had a moment of panic and even after dozing off kept waking up again, as in the days when his wife was ill. It was after midnight when he suddenly felt the presence of a stranger in the house. It was a woman. A light was on, and in it he saw a girl soldier stepping out of the kitchen—but it was only his daughter, whose officers’ course had just ended. He called her name. She looked just like her mother. He held her hand.

AND THEN THE INVITATION CAME. The legal adviser was tired of waiting. There had indeed been prior indications, but he had read them wrong, had not been at all sure she had anything to do with them or with the sudden flurry of activity in the office that seemed meant to wake him from his trance. Suddenly he had been bombarded with documents and memos about the state comptroller’s report on the finances of townships in the north and his department head’s insistence that these be more closely audited, several cases of corruption having already been uncovered. Long meetings were held, and of all times, on Fridays, when all he could think of was planning a nice Sabbath meal. During one such conference a note was slipped into his hand. “I’m having a few people over tonight,” it said. “If you feel up to it, you’re invited. It’s not RSVP.” Underneath was written her address. Turning around, he spied her behind him, studying him quietly with her oriental eyes. Blushing, he nodded his agreement, pleased to feel everyone looking at him understandingly.

After lunch that day he tried to nap, but within ten minutes he awoke and took a bath. Then he called his mother-in-law to arrange to pick her up for dinner, noticing a hesitancy in her voice. “No,” he replied when she inquired if he had a cold. “What makes you think I do?” “You just sound like it,” she said. “Well, I don’t,” he repeated, asking, “Why not?” when she wondered aloud whether he should come for her on such a rainy night. In the end, she broke down and confessed that she had forgotten to bake her strudel. “Don’t even think of it,” said Molkho, insisting that she come, especially since his daughter would be there too. He set a time and arrived early as usual to watch the Arab help arrange the chapel, read the menu in the dimly lit dining room, and look at the old folks, scrubbed clean for the Sabbath and glad it was storming outside, lounging with their German magazines. Once again he thought of ways to visit the fifth floor, where the terminal cases lay dying.

The down elevator arrived, and his mother-in-law stepped out of it, bundled up in a large, old fur coat. “You really didn’t have to come for me on a night like this,” she said, which made him answer in protest, “but when would we see you if I didn’t?” She smiled at him. The secrets they had shared during the illness belonged to them both, and they were aware of an unspoken bond between them, although sometimes he still had to dispel her suspicion that he was only being nice for his wife’s sake. The old people in the lobby rose to greet her, saying something in German (perhaps to dissuade her from venturing out into the rain), but his umbrella was already open and his arm was gripping hers. “Why don’t I carry your cane for you,” he suggested. “There’s no need to,” she replied—and there wasn’t, because it remained hooked on her arm while he led her between puddles to the car. “How was the concert?” she asked as they drove off. “Wonderful,” he said, feeling a hot flush. “Haydn’s Creation was magnificent, and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons was perfect too.” “Who went with you,” she asked, “the boy?” “No,” he answered, “no one.” The old folks who told on him, so it seemed, had mistaken the young man sitting next to him for his son. “Won’t you go to any concerts at all this season?” he asked. “Most likely not,” she replied.

For dinner, he served a new dish he had made from a package of frozen food, couscous with vegetables and gravy, which seemed a great success until he noticed that no one wanted a second portion. His mother-in-law asked him for the recipe, listening to his explanation with a rather pitying look and chiding his daughter for not helping him. As soon as the television news was over, she rose to go. “Stay a while,” said Molkho. “I’m going out soon, and I’ll drop you on my way. I was invited by the legal adviser at the office,” he went on, curious to test her reaction, which turned out to be one of perfect calm. “She’s a widow,” he added, letting her see that he was keeping nothing back, but she simply sat unperturbedly down again. For the second time that evening he shaved and changed clothes, taking his time because he did not wish to be early. In the car his mother-in-law gently pointed out that he had some soap behind his ear, and he wiped it away. The rain had stopped, and he let her off in front of the home without waiting to see if her little friend was there to bow to her.

It was already late. He drove to the West Carmel, losing his way but finally finding the house. As he climbed the poorly lit stairs he felt a pressure on his bladder and realized he had neglected to relieve himself. For a moment he considered using the backyard, but afraid he might be mistaken from a window for a pervert, he quickly dismissed the idea. Outside the slightly peeling door of the legal adviser’s apartment, he paused in a vain attempt to hear voices, and then rang the bell, whose sound was followed by a laugh and a woman’s quick footsteps. Her hair looked more rumpled than it did at work and her heels were not as high; indeed, he thought, there was something childlike about the way she stood in the doorway, staring at him with her crinkly, oriental eyes as if trying to make out who he was. Behind her, at the end of a hallway, was a living room clouded by cigarette smoke in which stood several men. Two women, he saw when he entered it, were there too; yet it was the men, of whom there were five, whose warm camaraderie set the tone. In one corner of the smallish room, which was furnished in a modem, minimalist style, a fireplace burned with an exquisitely pure orange flame.

His hostess introduced him to her guests, all but one of whom were members of her family: her father, a straight-backed, sturdy-looking man; her younger brother, whose small, narrow eyes were like hers; the two brothers of her late husband; and an elderly lawyer from abroad whose relation to the others was unclear. They were all friendly, cultured Haifaites of Central European origin, balding and a bit on the thin side, lawyers and travel agents—in short, people whom Molkho’s own wife might have dismissed as superficial and beneath her. Though at first it made him nervous to be so unexpectedly put to the test of the family’s approval, they did their best to set him at ease, and the legal adviser, far from clinging to him, soon left him to his own devices. With perfect naturalness she led him to a seat by the fireplace beside the two women, who professed surprise that he had come coatless in such cold weather, and brought him a whiskey and a tray of hors d’oeuvres, from which he chose some vividly candied fruit peels.

The conversation rambled intimately. Though he had prepared a few subjects to talk about, especially several of a legal nature, he saw at once that he needn’t make the effort, for everyone appeared harmoniously acquainted and he, it seemed, was passed back and forth among them in a discreet and unaffected fashion. Afraid of being suspected of some organic problem if he went to the toilet too soon, he sat with his legs together to ease the pressure on his bladder while one by one the men came up to him, introducing themselves once again and steering the talk to safe topics that all could agree on without seeming overly bland. One of the brother-in-laws’ wives, who had met Mrs. Molkho in a teachers’ course, spoke about her warmly and sincerely, moving him with her appreciation of the devotion he had shown in nursing his wife at home while comparing it with other cases, in Haifa and elsewhere, some of which he knew about too. Then one of the brother-in-laws mentioned seeing Molkho at the last concert and asked him what he thought of it. The man himself, so it seemed, was highly critical of the performance, especially of the soloists, who, he claimed, were often flat and left out whole bars of the score. Molkho was shocked; he had no idea that whole bars could be skipped in a concert—and in such a well-known work! Who would have thought that there was fraud even here, he reflected resentfully. Meanwhile, the conversation was getting heated. The names of orchestras, conductors, choirs, soloists, were bandied about, one after another, making him realize with amazement how highly musical and well traveled the legal adviser’s family was. They spoke of hotels and restaurants all over Europe, but especially of operas and concerts; it seemed that there wasn’t an opera house they hadn’t been in, even behind the Iron Curtain. And, to his surprise, they apparently considered him their equal, because they spared him none of the details and fell respectfully quiet when, after listening attentively, he expressed an opinion of his own. Until twenty years ago, he confessed, he had never been abroad at all. “I’m a fifth-generation Sephardi in this country,” he told them, “and Europe is another world to us.” The five generations impressed them. “In that case,” joked someone to the laughter of them all, “your family has served its time here and is free to live where it wants!” The legal adviser, Molkho noticed, let her family do the talking while she served the food and drinks, after which she sank down on an embroidered leather hassock, where she sat like a well-trained dog. And yet whatever she said met with general approval, so that Molkho, struck by her keen intelligence, wondered again what she saw in him. Was it simply his good looks, his curly hair and fair eyes, or perhaps, too, his being a concertgoer whom her family could talk music with? Already nettled by her outranking him, he felt a pang of envy when, half just to him and half to them all, she mentioned being sent next month to a legal conference in Germany. No one, he asserted aggrievedly, had ever sent him abroad at the taxpayers’ expense! “Nor us, and it’s her third such trip too. How she gets them to foot the bill is beyond us,” chimed in everyone fondly. When, they asked Molkho, had he last been in Germany himself? “Never,” he answered, although his wife was born in Berlin and spent her childhood there. She and her mother had managed to leave just in time, after her father, a pediatrician, had taken his own life, and she had refused on principle to go back. He and she had been in Europe several times, especially in Paris, where she had a favorite cousin, but never in Germany.

Suddenly—it was no doubt the fault of the cup of tea he’d just drunk—the pressure on his bladder grew worse, yet he still did not wish to be the first to use the bathroom. There was a momentary silence in the room, though by no means a disapproving one. They could understand his late wife’s feelings; they themselves, however, looked at it differently, and in any case, he was now free to travel there himself. It was well worth it if he loved music. Paris was Paris, of course, but for music there was no place like Germany. And there were special opera flights now too, with the price of the tickets included in the airfare; in fact, it was the rage all over Europe, where opera was back in fashion. “You say there are flights like that all over Europe?” Molkho asked. “Of course.” “From Paris too?” From Paris too—but why did he ask? Because, he told them, suddenly inspired, he had been thinking of going there next month. “When next month?” asked the legal adviser’s family with great interest. He wasn’t sure yet, he said. Perhaps he would wait a little longer, because Europe in the winter rather scared him. But why should it scare him? they asked. It was at its best then! Who was his travel agent? He mentioned an agency that, of course, they all knew of, adding with a knowing smile, because he expected them to pooh-pooh it, “I hope you don’t think too poorly of it.” They smiled back sympathetically. “It’s not fair to ask us,” they said, “because we can’t be objective.” “But I’d like to know anyway,” he persisted. “Well,” they smiled, “it’s not such a bad agency; it’s just a very simple one, a bit unsophisticated. A man like you, of your age, deserves something more cosmopolitan.” Of course, he thought, listening good-naturedly, they were out for his business; they were simply waiting for a hint—but he was not about to drop one. From across the room the legal adviser flashed him a smile. “You have a nice place here,” he said appreciatively, rising from his chair with an air of freedom, because he had to go to the bathroom at once. Yet attracted to the fireplace, he approached it instead and exclaimed, “What a lovely fire. And it draws so well—there’s no smell of smoke at all!” The guests exchanged embarrassed glances while the legal adviser explained that the fire wasn’t real but electric. “Electric?” he marveled, grinning foolishly at his ignorance. “It certainly had me fooled!” Red-faced, he asked her in a whisper for the toilet. She rose from her hassock to show him, and he slipped away at once, cursing himself for not having gone at home.

Molkho shut the bathroom door behind him, quietly slid home the bolt, and inspected the little room, which, compared to the rest of the house, had a rather neglected look, a strict and nonaesthetic functionality: the paint was peeling above the toilet and in a web in one corner hung a large spider, which he felt he should kill. His own bathroom, which boasted a shelf with some books, an illustrated calendar received each year from the bank, and a large poster of three monkeys wearing clothing, was much livelier. Sighing with relief, he carefully aimed a silent jet of urine at the side of the toilet bowl and waited for the last concluding dribble while straining to hear the voices in the living room. Yet when he tried flushing as quietly as he could, the water burst from the tank with a roar. Quickly he switched off the light and went to the separate washroom, which was equally Spartan but clean. He soaped his hands thoroughly, musing about Death and whether some part of the legal adviser’s late husband was not still grappling with it on these walls, and then peeked at the medicine cabinet, hoping for some insight into her condition. It was, however, poorly stocked: a few tubes of makeup, some old aspirins, a box of Band-Aids, the usual antacid preparation, and a paper bag from the drugstore with some little red pills that he could have sworn he had seen before. Slowly he inspected himself—his Levantine curls, his handsome eyes—in the mirror. If he was not just a guest in this house, if he was really an official suitor, he had the right to take his time.

The conversation in the living room was still flowing naturally, no advantage having been taken of his absence to discuss him behind his back. Slowly he walked back up the hallway, peering into a darkened bedroom whose faded wallpaper needed to be changed. Outside the window were the dotted lights of houses and a dark ravine. Did it merge with his own somewhere? A pair of kicked-off pink slippers lay by a bed. There was an awkward lull in the living room: so they were following his progress after all. Yet he did not rejoin them but rather glanced into a lit room to his right in which, on a junior-sized bed, lay a girl of about thirteen who looked like her mother, having the same straight, smooth hair and slanted eyes. She was reading a book, and suddenly, Molkho felt a great pity for her. Why, she’s an orphan too, he told himself, thinking of his own children and stepping with unforeseen boldness into the room. There was a hush behind him in the living room. He introduced himself to the girl—who, her head on a pillow, might have been either sick or just resting—and struck up a friendly conversation, sitting on the edge of her bed and looking around while asking her about herself and the book, reassured at being able to make out through the window the tall building of his mother-in-law’s old-age home on the opposite flank of the mountain. The girl struck him as bright but rather sad, and returning to the living room with his eyes cast somberly down, he felt a new warmth directed toward him and even made out tears in the eyes of her grandfather. Indeed, the whole family spoke of her lovingly, after which he told them a bit about his own children. And so the evening passed pleasantly until it was time to go home and he left in the company of a brother-in-law and his wife. Still chatting, the two walked him to his car, surprised all over again that he wasn’t wearing a coat. “It must be my Asiatic blood,” he said, watching them in the mirror as they turned around and walked back to the legal adviser’s apartment, no doubt to take part in the postmortem.

THE WIND HAD DIED DOWN and the sky was clearing. Dark, fallen leaves lay in the street. He felt pleased with himself, even joyful, at having passed the test, whatever it was for. Most of all, he was proud of his initiative with the girl. That’s what really won their hearts, he told himself. How odd it was that barely two and a half months after his wife’s death he was already on the matrimonial circuit! He did not go straight back to his apartment but rather drove past the sleeping old-age home, from which he strove to make out the legal adviser’s house, but the night proved too dark and at last he gave up and went home. It was after midnight. Suddenly parched, as if by his own inner excitement, he opened the refrigerator to look for a drink, settling in the end on a big dish of strawberry ice cream. Then, remembering how as a boy in Jerusalem he had never been allowed to eat ice cream in winter, he went to bed.

In the morning he awoke in a triumphant yet anxious mood. The next move was up to him, and not only she but her whole family would expect him to make it; the smallest gesture on his part would have all kinds of meanings read into it. It had happened too quickly, before he was ready, before he had even heard again from the matchmaker who had phoned him two weeks ago. It was unimaginable that he should already be permanently linked with this woman. Why, his children, to say nothing of his mother-in-law, would be sure she’d been there all along, that he had simply waited for his wife to die to bring her out of the woodwork! The whole next day, even while hanging out the wash and hoeing the little garden that he kept behind the house, he thought of nothing else. In the afternoon the college student came for lunch, and he and his sister decided to make a feast for all their friends. At first, Molkho hovered over them to make sure they didn’t cook too much, not wanting to eat leftovers again all week long; but in the end, laughing merrily, they threw him out of the kitchen, and he went for a walk in the neighborhood, thinking of his wife while glancing up at the sky in which a new storm was brewing. What, deep in earth, was still left of her? Her body must have rotted completely by now, its vanished outlines surviving only in his own frail mind and memory. He tried imagining its weight, lifted and carried by him so many times, now lighter than the flight of dust. And then a strong wind blew up, and he returned home to a kitchen frill of steaming pots and bowls heaped high with food to say, “Take it easy, kids, don’t overdo it,” but they were all in a fabulous mood, and soon friends came, and everyone let down his hair, and he saw how quickly they had forgotten her. That’s how they’ll forget me too, he thought quietly. The party lasted all afternoon. More and more youngsters kept coming, and in the evening they all decided to go to the movies, where a new comedy was playing, and he felt like going too and said jokingly, “Maybe you’ll take me along,” but he saw at once how upset they were, as if certain he would spoil all the fun. Why, they don’t even feel sorry for me, he marveled, and indeed, they saw no reason to. “Never mind,” he said out loud, “it doesn’t matter. Go without me. I’m too tired anyway.”

HE KNEW THE NEXT MOVE with the legal adviser was his, yet he kept putting it off. What move can I make. It’s too early. Why can’t she wait. For two days he deliberately avoided her at the office, keeping to his room, but that Tuesday afternoon, as luck would have it, he met her in the street, practically running right into her. For a moment he hardly recognized her, for she was wearing a short, broad-shouldered fur coat of a yellowish, leopard color and her face glowed ruddily from the cold. “I’m so glad to see you,” he said warmly, his hand lightly grazing the soft fur. “I’ve been looking for you. I wanted to thank you for a lovely evening. I enjoyed it so much. And what a darling your daughter is!” “Everyone liked you too,” she said—which set him off on a blue streak, especially about her daughter, as if it were the girl he were thinking of marrying, after which he asked if she was really going to Germany. “Of course,” she replied, thus leading him to inquire, as though seeking his good offices, about her brother-in-law the travel agent and where he worked. She gave him the information at once, writing down the address and several telephone numbers while standing in the street. “You’ll find him useful,” she confided. “I’m sure he’ll be glad to help.” Though Molkho would have been happy to end the conversation right there, he could feel her impatience, her expectation of something more. Three years had passed since her husband’s death, and she wasn’t getting any younger. He glanced at her small, almost miniature face, her darting, Tatar eyes, and her body, the sharp angles of which stirred his anxious compassion. Just then, though, an acquaintance of hers happened by, and Molkho was given a chance to excuse himself.

That evening he ached all over and his eyes began to smart. Soon he noticed shooting pains in his back, and when the television news was over, he climbed into bed and took his temperature, surprised to see it was high. Along with a small flash of pleasure, this produced a shiver of fear, for he had not run a fever in years, whereas now, as though he were a small boy again, he suddenly had one. Although he waited for the symptoms of a cold to appear, there were none; the trouble, he reasoned, must be something else, as yet unidentified, as if a last squall of the tropical storm that had raged in this room were now brewing inside him. The next morning his son was alarmed to find him in bed with the lights off, unshaven and listless. Aspirin had not brought down the fever. “What’s wrong?” asked the boy, who never had had to worry about his father before. “Just a little temperature,” Molkho reassured him. “It’s nothing. Go to school.” He tried phoning his mother-in-law, but she was out. And though he was sure the fever would pass during the day, it did not; on the contrary, it knocked him out totally, dropping each time for an hour or two only to return as though bubbling up from some mysterious source deep within him. Still, capped by a pleasurable stupor, he felt it was under control. For hours on end, he lay fetally beneath the blankets in a darkness real or delusory, rising only to go to the bathroom, and though his urine seemed to have turned a greenish color, this, too, may have been only imagined. He was too weak to make lunch, yet when his son, who had meanwhile come home from school, wanted to call the doctor, Molkho refused. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Just bring me some tea and crackers and make something for yourself. And don’t forget to do the dishes.” From under the blankets he watched the boy move about, enjoying a bed’s-eye view of the house, his glance sweeping over the floors and the bottoms of doors and furniture.

After the boy had eaten he went off to do his homework, the radio playing softly in his room, from which he emerged now and then to look in on his father and ask how he was feeling. “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine,” said Molkho. “Just don’t come too close—I don’t want you to catch it,” though he had no idea what precisely there was to be caught.

When evening came, he asked the boy to call his grandmother and tell her that he was sick. “What did she say?” he asked him when he came back from the phone. “Nothing,” said his son. “She hopes you’ll feel better.” In the middle of the night he awoke as if on fire; his temperature was nearly one hundred and four and he felt as dry as a desert, though still not unpleasantly so. Now it’s me who’s dying, he told himself with a smile, contemplating, as he put on the earphones to listen to music, a brief expiration followed by a more lasting resurrection.

It was late when he awoke the next morning. The house was empty, the high school boy’s room neat and orderly. At noon the concerned college student arrived, and Molkho, speaking feebly from under the blankets, dictated a shopping list. Perhaps, suggested the student before going out with it, he should ask his grandmother to come. “What for?” Molkho asked. “She’ll just catch it from me.” But the student called her anyway, talking in hushed tones on the telephone. “What did she say?” “That you should call a doctor.” “And what else?” “Nothing.” But Molkho did not want a doctor; deep down he wanted his mother-in-law to come sit by his side, as she had sat by the side of his wife. However, no one came at all, and the telephone was silent all day; his temperature stayed as high as if an internal combustion engine were working away inside him. The old woman, he told himself, must be angry.

The hours went by indistinguishably. The reddish, wintry light of a cloudless sunset poured through the west, seaward window. Another night passed and then another morning, and still his mother-in-law did not come or even call to ask how he was. His fever was down a bit, yet he kept to his bed, unwashed and unshaven between the crumpled sheets, enjoying a detached convalescence, his main link with the world the soft music that he played on the tape machine. Though he phoned his mother each morning as usual, he did not inform her of his illness, keeping the conversation to a minimum to prevent her from becoming suspicious.

When he awoke early on the morning of the fourth day, the fever was gone. Pale, weak, and slightly thinner, he opened all the windows to air out the house, made himself two eggs, and was leafing through the newspapers in bed when suddenly he heard his mother-in-law opening the front door with the key she still had in her possession. She had come to see him at last, and now she sat facing him in the armchair from which she had watched her dying daughter, her cane between her legs and her coat still on as if already eager to depart, regarding him more severely than worriedly through her thick lenses with a look that was, except for its slight squint, genetically coded just like his wife’s. And yet, as they talked—and not at all about his illness—it struck him again how close they had grown, how much they had in common. He had been thinking, he told her, of visiting their cousin in Paris, but now, having just read in the newspaper about the latest economic decrees, including a new travel tax, he had his doubts. The new taxes, for some reason, interested her; she wanted to know all about them. One might think, Molkho thought, that she were planning a trip herself—and indeed, why shouldn’t she? She certainly could afford one: there were new sums all the time from Germany, where her husband’s suicide must have put her in a lucrative category. Two years ago, in fact, upon turning eighty, she had astonished everyone by going on an archaeological tour of Turkey sponsored by the Geographical Society. Soon, though, the talk shifted to more practical concerns, such as the high school boy, who should perhaps eat lunch with his grandmother at the home and sleep at a friend’s house until Molkho recovered. The idea seemed a good one; he even envied the boy for being able to dine with all the old folks. Outside the sun was shining. His mother-in-law rose, made a quick tour of the apartment with her cane, and was already on her way out, apologizing for having an appointment. He put on his bathrobe to walk her to the street. “I see you’re all better already,” she said, as if realizing she had wasted her time on him. Forced to confess that he was, he opened the front door of the building and was blinded by the sudden winter light. It was a cold morning, scrubbed clean by the rain. Slowly he walked her to the street, where, sitting in an ancient fur coat at the bus stop like a peasant in an old painting, was the little old woman from the concert. She rose smiling to greet them, as round-cheeked and rosy as if fed on a diet of potatoes, bowing genially to them from afar. “Who is that?” Molkho asked. “Stasya,” said his mother-in-law. “She’s the friend from Russia I told you about, the one who arrived a few months ago.” Molkho smiled back at her. “Why didn’t you bring her up to the apartment?” he asked, already on his way to introduce himself in his bathrobe and floppy slippers, lured onward by the crisp morning. “No, don’t,” his mother-in-law warned him. “It’s too cold for you. You have to take care of yourself.” “So I do,” Molkho said, turning to go back upstairs.