Five Seasons

Part III SPRING

DURING THE THREE-HOUR WAIT at Orly for his flight to Tel Aviv, Molkho bought some perfume for his mother-in-law and a large bar of chocolate for his mother while trying every half-hour to phone his cousin, whose home didn’t answer. Once in the air, above the Alps, dinner having already been served, he took out a large sheet of paper, wrote “Paris” on one side and “Berlin” on the other, extracted the receipts he had saved from his wallet, and began to calculate his expenses, racking his memory for every cup of coffee, piece of cake, gift, or taxi he had paid for while thinking of his days abroad, which now seemed to have passed with a sort of muddled intensity. Yet though the Berlin figures tallied to the mark, he was unable to account for three hundred and thirty francs spent in Paris. No matter how hard he shut his eyes and tried reliving every moment in the French capital, the missing sum continued to elude him, until finally, somewhere over the Aegean, he gave it up and went for a stroll in the aisles to see if there were any passengers he knew.

In Israel, stepping out of the terminal, he was assailed at once by a hot, dry wind that heralded the onset of spring, and noticed that the rows of oleanders were already in bloom. The winter, he saw, was gone for good, though the harassed-looking Israelis running back and forth seemed not to have realized it yet and might take several weeks to do so. He telephoned his mother to inform her of his arrival and then looked around for a cab, half-hoping that the college student would be there to meet him, although he had expressly told him not to bother. And indeed, the young man did not.

At the taxi stand Molkho was approached by a woman who asked if he wished to share a cab to Haifa, and he agreed. The woman, who had just returned from a shopping spree in London, was in the best of spirits, having managed to slip through customs without paying a cent of duty. Unabashedly she told Molkho about all the money she had saved and about the weakness of the British pound, and all the while, their driver, who had never been abroad at all, listened to her recite the bargain prices in London with resentful amazement, all but ready to set out for there himself. Molkho listened sleepily, glancing now and then at his vivacious fellow passenger surrounded by her bundles and feeling thankful he hadn’t surrendered his single status in Berlin. Halfway to Haifa, after they had heard the 11 P.M. news, he made a few discreet inquiries about her own status, only to find out that she had a husband who was very much alive, a Sephardi from Jerusalem, like him. “There’s no place like Jerusalem,” she exclaimed, telling him how she and her husband missed it. “Don’t you?” she asked. “Not especially,” answered Molkho. And whenever he did, a single visit was enough to cure him.

The taxi let him off by his house. The street was deserted, and he felt as though a hundred years had passed since he had waited in it for his mother-in-law on the night of his wife’s death. The apartment was dark. Oddly, though, the double bed, piled high with blankets, was back in his bedroom, the single one having been pushed aside to make way for it. The high school boy was asleep in his room, and Molkho woke him and kissed him. “Who moved the double bed in from the terrace?” he demanded. “Some friends who slept over,” answered the boy. “And how is grandma?” asked Molkho worriedly. “She’s fine,” his son said, recoiling a bit when caressed. In fact, he had had several meals with her in the old-age home, and last Friday night his brother and sister had joined them. “I missed you,” said Molkho, a lump in his throat, suddenly thinking of the shabby man drunk on the music of the opera. He wanted to talk, to tell about his trip, but the boy was too sleepy and had an early class in the morning.

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING Molkho called his mother-in-law to say that he was back. He told her about her niece in Paris, but only briefly because he wished to save the rest for a visit that afternoon, even though she did not seem too keen on it. “Why bother?” she asked. “You must have lots to do, and you’ll see me on Friday anyway; you can tell me everything then.” But Molkho was not to be dissuaded. “I have some gifts for you,” he informed her happily. “Gifts?” she asked, a note of worry in her voice.

He went the next afternoon. It was a warm, bright day. The teacups, sugar, and the crackers were already set out in a corner of her spic-and-span room. As usual, she seemed in good health, although a trifle thinner, and her squint had gotten slightly worse beneath her heavy glasses. Without further ado, he took the gifts from a plastic bag: a white nightgown with a lace collar and the collapsible cane that folded in four like a magic flute. “It’s perfect for you,” he told her, “because you don’t generally need it, so you can take it out of your bag when you do.” She seemed quite bewildered, even slightly distressed, and had no end of trouble opening and shutting it, despite all his efforts to show her how simple it was. Finally she thanked him, laid the cane aside, and promised with a smile to practice. That was the moment for the last present, a bottle of perfume from Orly—the same scent, explained Molkho, that she had liked so much when he brought some from Paris on his last visit there with his wife.

The old woman blushed, took off her glasses, and gripped the vial of perfume in her veiny hands, staring at the label. She seemed to want to say something but, with that deep inner control of hers, refrained; instead, putting down the bottle, she thanked him perfunctorily, and he turned to his tea and crackers, telling her about Paris and her niece, who seemed so contented and full of life, not at all bitter or hypercritical like his wife. The old woman nodded understandingly, her stiff white hair falling forward. He told her about the snow too—in fact, about each single day, even the visit to the opera—while she did her best to follow, glancing from time to time out the window at the sun setting into the clear, mild evening above the bushes turning red at their branch tips. “To think that winter is already over here and that there I ran into a blizzard!” he exclaimed. “Don’t be so quick to bury the winter,” retorted his mother-in-law; and so, changing the subject, he asked her about the high school boy, how he had been and what he had eaten, and about her old-age home. Had anything happened there in his absence? Yet though he inquired about several residents whose names he had heard mentioned by his wife, all were still alive and well.

Perhaps, Molkho found himself hoping, the old lady would invite him to have dinner with her at the home. But she gave no indication of it, and if anything, seemed eager for him to depart—something, however, that he was not in any hurry to do. The two of them, after all, had shared the same adventure, and even if it was over now, the deep bond between them remained. Sinking deeper into his armchair, he watched the dusk fall on her wrinkled old face and suddenly confessed, as if he had done it just for her sake, “I was in that Berlin of yours too.” “In Berlin?” she asked, astonished, perhaps even upset. “Yes,” he said. His wife never wanted to go there with him, so now he had seized the opportunity. “All those countries are so close anyway,” he added breezily, as though to prove that he was free now and that the rules had changed. “You went by yourself?” she queried. “Yes,” he said, not wanting to distress her, “by myself,” and he told her about the travel agency that arranged opera tours of Europe. The idea of his becoming an opera buff clearly seemed bizarre, if not perverse, to her, for at once he felt her hostile reaction, though controlling herself she held her peace and waited for him to go on; but instead, he asked about her memories of Berlin, and especially about the house she had lived in, which she was not at all eager to recall, mentioning only that it had had an elevator, the only one on the street. Producing from his pocket the hotel map of Berlin, Molkho asked her to show him where it was. “You mean the street?” she asked with an unsure laugh, holding the map upside down, still unable to fathom his being there. She turned the map around, tried taking off her glasses, complained about the small print, went to bring her reading glasses, and announced that they were no better, while Molkho patiently sought to help her, pointing out his hotel, which was circled in red, and the Berlin Wall, though he could see she wasn’t really listening. “Nothing is left of it anyway,” she said to him. “It’s all been destroyed and rebuilt.” At last, she laid the map on the table and compromised by promising to ask one of her friends and perhaps even to try remembering herself.

Out in the street the last rays of daylight lingered on. The hot spring wind grew stronger, oblivious of the rain clouds still drifting slowly in the west, and Molkho thought, Here I am free to choose any woman I want, even two, and all I lack is the desire. He stared at the sexy model in an illuminated bus-station ad and recalled with a smile how the little old squirrel had said to him, all excited by her discovery, “You killed her little by little.” Did his mother-in-law think so too? And yet she had been his faithful partner, even if lately she had been acting rather coolly toward him. He remembered how, eight or nine years ago, his wife had wanted to leave him, how she even had run away for a few days, only to return in the end, and how, knowing that she would, he had managed not to panic. The children were small then. Once again he felt how much he missed her. He pictured her lying gloomily in bed, listening to music and reading. “What’s left of her now?” he mused, clenching his fists, imagining her rotting like the binding of an old book.

He noticed a brand-new supermarket and went in to have a look at it, having no end of time at his disposal; but returning to his car, he spied his mother-in-law sitting by herself at the bus stop in her winter coat and red cap, her glasses glinting in the sun and her old cane gripped in one hand. Why, he wondered indignantly, hadn’t she asked him for a ride? He stood staring at her hypnotically, listening to her bus climb the hill until it appeared and stopped. Quickly, erectly, as if she intended to live forever, her ticket in her other hand, she boarded it and disappeared. I should see a little less of her, thought Molkho. Maybe I scare her. It wasn’t as if his wife had asked him to take special care of her.

AFTER THE SABBATH DINNER that Friday night, when the table had been cleared, his mother-in-law reached for her reading glasses and handed Molkho the map of Berlin, on which the conjectured location of her house had been marked beside the name of the street, written in an unfamiliar hand. Her recently arrived friend from Russia, who had been her neighbor back in the prewar days when her husband had worked in the Soviet embassy in Berlin, had helped find it for her. It was far from Molkho’s hotel—in fact, in the eastern part of the city. So much for his sixth sense of being near it! But why, asked the old woman, did it matter? Did he intend to go back? Of course not, he replied, he was simply curious. In fact, the whole thing was unimportant; he just thought she would be happy to know he had been near his wife’s birthplace. She looked at him suspiciously, her eyes a dark velvet. Since his return from abroad, she seemed to harbor some resentment against him, and so he placatingly asked about the new friend from Russia she had been spending so much time with. The fact of the matter was that there seemed something strange, even slightly absurd, in the intensity of this relationship, which had resumed after a break of close to fifty years. Could it simply be a way for his mother-in-law to distance herself from him, or even from her grandchildren, for whom she also seemed lately to have so little patience? Why, tonight she had not even wanted to watch the news with them, rushing home as quickly as she could when the meal was over.

THE NEXT MORNING he set out to visit his mother in Jerusalem, almost stopping on the way to pick a branch of regal white almond blossoms. He went to see some old friends first, arriving at his mother’s in time for lunch, which was already waiting on the table. Though she scolded him for his lateness, his German crew cut pleased her greatly. “It’s very becoming,” she declared while refusing to accept the scarf he had brought as a gift. “I told you not to bring me anything!” She even declined the bar of Swiss chocolate he had bought her until he finally prevailed on her to take it. He ate the peppers she had stuffed for him, listening to her stories, complaints, and opinions, while praying—in vain, as it happened—that she would not refill his plate. Afterward, he tried napping in his childhood bed, but no sooner had he dozed off than he became aware of her lurking behind the door. At last, he rose and went out to sit lethargically on the dusty terrace, looking down on decrepit old Jaffa Road below and breathing the heavily accented Jerusalem air. He drank the coffee he was served, munching almonds and walnuts while his mother, a corpulent woman whose fallen face was painted like a savage’s, questioned him about his trip, how much it had cost and whom had he met, crudely trying to ferret out everything, especially if there had been a woman. “Yes and no,” he replied. “How yes and how no?” “Just for part of it.” “For which part?” “The opera part, in Berlin.” “Which opera?” “I suppose you’d know if I told you,” he laughed. “Why, I’d never even heard of it myself!” “Then why go so far for it?” “To see what it was like.” “And where’s this woman now?” “Out of my life,” he answered patiently. “But who was she?” probed his mother. “Someone from the office,” he answered, refusing to name names. “All right then,” she said, “just don’t be in any hurry.” “I’m not,” replied Molkho. “You mean it’s just sex?” she inquired. “Why, I don’t believe you know what that is any more!” Flabbergasted, he laughed, popping nuts into his mouth so fast that they seemed to fly into it, stealing a glance at this berserk woman while doing his best to keep his temper. “I suppose you know all about that too,” he said, trying to keep calm. “Well then, tell me if I’m wrong,” she persisted, “tell me if you feel like having sex.” “What on earth are you talking about?” he snapped, turning red. “Forget it, it doesn’t matter,” said his mother. “For my part, you can have all the sex you want. Just don’t be in any hurry. Take a good look around. You suffered enough these past years. You cared for her enough, it’s time someone cared for you. You’ll see, you’ll have women running after you, they’ll be knocking on your door. Your children are grown up and you’re financially secure. Just don’t get involved too quickly. Try them out first. Try out a whole lot of them before you make up your mind.”

He listened in silence, amused by her unself-conscious brutality, gazing down the hallway that led to the twilit rooms of the apartment and imagining a woman reclining in each, waiting to be tried out. Gazing down at the triangle formed by the three old streets of King George, Ben-Yehudah, and Jaffa and at a group of children off to some activity in the blue shirts and ties of a youth movement, he recalled the British policeman who had directed traffic there and the green tie he himself had dutifully worn when he had gone to such activities too. “There aren’t as many women as you think,” he said with sudden bitterness. “There’s no one out there but desperate divorcées, psychotic spinsters, and widows who’ve murdered their husbands.” “What kind of crazy thing is that to say?” she asked, shocked by his attitude, her anxiety only increasing when he wouldn’t answer. If only he would come back to live in Jerusalem, he would be sure to find someone—someone from his old class or school, for example, whom he had grown up with and who would be more like him, perhaps even a cousin of theirs. After all, all of Jerusalem remembered him and asked about him. “Who?” he challenged. Her friends, said his mother. “They’re always interested when I tell them about you.” “What, those old biddies of yours?” The idea was so daft that he laughed out loud with sheer delight. “A penny for your thoughts,” coaxed his mother. “I have no thoughts,” he retorted. “She’s only been dead for half a year, and I still need time to get over it.” But his mother was relentless. He should visit her more often, once every two months was not enough; did he think she could find him a new wife over the telephone? “The gas alone costs a fortune,” he said gently, looking back down at the deserted Sabbath streets; in fact, he had neglected her in recent years, for his wife had sapped all his strength. “And no one pays my car expenses, either.” “Then take a bus on Friday and stay over. You can sleep in your old bed and go home on Saturday night.” The idea, however, did not appeal to him: taking buses was not his idea of travel, especially as he was planning to buy a new car. Naturally, his mother was against this too. She rose, went to fetch a brown paper bag, and refilled the empty plate of nuts against his protests. “That’s enough,” he begged. “Don’t give me any more. I can’t stop eating and lately I’ve been putting on weight.” “That’s from your trip,” said his mother. “People don’t notice, but they put on weight abroad.”

NIGHT CAME and Molkho seemed in no hurry to leave Jerusalem. After rejecting the idea of calling several old school friends, fearful of the disinterest he might hear in their voices, he agreed to go over some recent bank statements of his mother’s to make sure there were no mistakes in them. Down below, the ugly old shopping district began filling up with people, many of them fresh from the Saturday soccer match. A desert chill was in the air. Feeling his meal burble inside him, he padded off to the bathroom for relief. It was a room that he liked, generously proportioned and high-ceilinged in the old style, with a tall bathtub, its elaborate feet of reddish iron resembling the claws of a peacock. He kept the light off, preferring to sit in the dark room, which was faintly lit by a purplish glow trickling through the window. From here the view was different, more cheeringly picturesque, with its red roofs of the old quarters of Jerusalem and its distant, partly wooded hills. Visible too were the backyards of the buildings on the street, which had mostly been converted into offices and banks. Breathing in the clean night air with a sigh of pleasure, Molkho peeked into the tall straw laundry basket that was covered with a cracked enamel bowl, the same bowl that had been the steering wheel of bus number 9 when, sitting on the toilet as a child, he had driven it all around town, handing the passengers tickets of tom toilet paper. He finished, rose, and bent down to peer into the still fizzing bowl for signs of blood; then, yanking the long chain that reminded him of the emergency brake of a railroad car, he watched the water gush from the tank, smiling with pleasure at the train wreck once again averted in the nick of time. He still did not pull up his pants, however. Bare-bottomed he leaned out the window, ravenously drinking in the night, eyes combing first the aging old neighborhood and then the sky for three stars, which meant he could run tell his father that the Sabbath was over and that he was permitted to smoke. Below, in the white glare of a streetlight, he made out his old car, dry and dusty-looking; yet as sorry as he felt for it, he knew he did not want it anymore. His pants still down around his ankles, he was a little fat boy again, his parents’ only child, his thirty years of married life vanished like a dream. Had she, he wondered, been taken by, or given to, someone else by now? Was her spirit finally at peace, quiet and resting somewhere, her compulsive criticizing over at last? Or was she still carrying on in the heavenly spheres, going from one to another and finding fault with each? Was the universe not good enough for her even now? Did she remember him?

BECAUSE SUDDENLY THERE WAS NO ONE to criticize him anymore, it had stopped all at once, though he woke up in the morning and went to bed at night still expecting it: “Just look at yourself! How can you eat like that? Stand straight! Don’t twist your hair! The idea, stop being ridiculous!” Her voice lived on in him, and he listened all the time, so that—“You must shower at least once a day!”—if he sometimes forgot to, or was so tired at night that he skipped it, he felt guilty and positively unwashed. The days came at him out of nowhere, one after another, blanketing him in a spongy morass through which he had to burrow his way to freedom. As if sated by his trip to Europe, he hardly listened to music any more, nor were there any concerts, for the Philharmonic was on a foreign tour. He passed the days by reading Anna Karenina, starting this time with Volume I, the old library copy giving him the odd feeling that he would be tested on it. As for Volume II, it arrived in the mail two days after his return in a brown office envelope bearing the motto “Pay Your Taxes on Time.” Though in it was a thank-you note expressing the hope that his flight had been a pleasant one, its sender was not to be seen in the office, neither in the cafeteria nor on the stairs; she must have been avoiding him while reporting on her conference in Berlin, not to mention itemizing her expenses, which no doubt included the opera tickets. What had she told her family about him? A dud. The sooner forgotten, the better. He even tried killing me there. Killing you? Yes, killing me. The thought of it made Molkho smile. I’d better be more careful, he told himself. True, I’m in no hurry. I’m only fifty-two, but I’d better do a little research and find out what my type is. And I’d better take off a few pounds too. He even resumed his evening walk, remembering how he had forced himself to go out each night for a slow, short turn around the block during the last months of his wife’s illness.

Like most intellectuals, she had never cared for Nature, which had bored her. Now he again walked by himself, sometimes still flicked by the damp, raw tail of winter, whose fog drifting in from the sea shrouded the mountain and sprayed him with drops of fragrant rain. He roamed the streets of different neighborhoods, sometimes stopping in front of a window lit by the ghostly glare of a television and listening to the laughing voices of the women within, or else sitting down on the bench of a deserted bus stop beside its illuminated ad, stared at by German shepherds selling dog food, huge boxes of detergent, or the faces and bodies of shapely women, against which he would occasionally lean his head, feeling their chill incorporeity. Mainly, though, he kept an eye on the new cars, pausing to peer at their interiors and dashboards while trying to guess what each knob and button was for. His own car, when he came home to it, seemed gray and tired-looking; and though his trip to Europe had eaten into his savings, the high school boy was a prodigal spender, and the German reparations had stopped coming, he was still determined to buy a new one, especially as the market was jittery and there were rumors of fresh automobile taxes. He had to act fast, he admonished himself, choosing a Citroen. “It’s a more feminine car than my old one,” he told the salesman with a grin, finally signing the order form after circling the floor model for several hours. The salesman took offense. “What do you mean ‘feminine’? Just because it’s French?” “Feminine and French,” insisted Molkho. “Just look at those curves, how she bellies down below, the flare of that rear of hers...”

GETTING RID OF HIS OLD CAR, however, was far from easy. There were no buyers at the price he was asking; mechanical problems kept turning up that he had no idea existed; and in the end he began to fear that he would not be able to sell it. Finally, after bringing it back a few times to the garage for repairs and bodywork, he lowered the price and found a buyer at once, only to discover that his new car had not arrived from France yet. Forced to travel by bus, he began coming late to work, so that, though he still had special status as a widower, he was summoned one day to the office of the director, an affable man who had both been to the funeral and paid a condolence call on Molkho at home. He shook Molkho’s hand, asked how he was, and inquired about his children and mother-in-law. “Is that old lady still alive? How is she getting along? And how are your kids coping? You have to let them let it all out!” He seemed relieved to hear that Molkho had riot five children but only three and that the youngest was a junior in high school. Well, then, it wasn’t so bad; he himself had an aunt who spent a whole year of her life attending to practical arrangements after her husband passed away. Though at first Molkho thought that the purpose of the summons was to fix him up with the director’s aunt, this roundabout opening was simply a way of popping a different question—namely, was he prepared to resume a full work load, since the director had a special job for him? The deadline for the state comptroller’s report was rapidly approaching, and it was imperative to check the books of certain small northern townships that were being run by inexperienced officials, several of whom were suspected of fraud. Most suspicious was a village called Zeru’a, the council manager of which, a young semistudent, had recently filed an annual statement of such irregular character that it was impossible to know which he was—hopelessly naive or cunningly corrupt. Both he and the village treasurer would have to appear before the comptroller, but perhaps Molkho should pay them a visit first and spot any malfeasances before they could be covered up. Naturally, the office would pay his expenses, and the work was sure to be interesting. How about it? Did he feel up to it, or was he still too busy with personal matters in consequence of his wife’s death?

At first, Molkho balked; psychologically he did not yet feel ready for the task, especially as the responsibility was great; yet the more the director pressed him with bureaucratic geniality, the more he began to reconsider. After all, why not? The office had gone out of its way, in recent years, to be nice to him. In fact, his wife had been shocked to hear that upon discovery of her illness he had gone at once to ask his boss for special consideration. Was he already, she had wanted to know, feeling as desperate as that? So that now, seeing the file waiting for him on the director’s desk, or rather several files banded together, he took them and left. Passing the legal adviser’s door, he decided to stop in and say hello. She was sitting behind her desk in her large, sunny office with a pair of glasses perched on her nose, talking on the phone; yet she smiled at him and he smiled back, waited for her to hang up, and said, “I was just passing by and thought of you. How was your trip back? How’s your ankle?” Holding a pencil, she rose amusedly to greet him, her squirrel eyes squinting in the sunlight looking slantier than ever. Her hair, too, Molkho saw, had been cropped even shorter and more girlishly. They stood there for a while chatting like old acquaintances, paring down their shared adventure into little particles of nothing. His heart aching for his lost wife and his own empty solitude, Molkho clutched the files to his chest.

CURIOUS AND APPREHENSIVE, he took the files home with him. At once, he saw they were a mess. Though the documentation of government budgets and loans, adding up to millions of shekels, seemed in order, the village’s records of how the money had been disbursed were pitifully inadequate. Most of them were handwritten and had pinned to them a small number of unacceptable receipts scribbled on loose notebook paper and signed with illegible scrawls. Despite his initial reaction that it was a clear case for the police, he tried going over the material, even attempting to telephone the council manager in Zeru’a the next morning. But it was impossible to get through; either there was no answer or for long periods the phone rang busy. Finally, it was picked up by a boy who said something incomprehensible in a gruff accent. “Let me talk to Ben-Ya’ish,” Molkho said, but he was left waiting for a long time on the line, over which he heard the voices of playing children and something that sounded like a schoolbell. Then there was silence, and after waiting in vain for the boy to return, he hung up.

An hour later he called again; once more the line was busy. At two o’clock, before quitting work, he tried a last time; now the phone was answered by a girl who spoke clearly. “Tell me,” Molkho asked her, “is the phone you’re speaking from in a school?” “Yes,” she said. “Then let me talk with the principal or one of the teachers,” he requested. “They’ve all gone home,” said the girl, “but the janitor’s here.” “Then give me the janitor,” said Molkho. But the janitor was hard of hearing and apparently none too bright. “No Ben-Ya’ish,” was all he kept saying, eager to hang up. “Then let me talk to the girl again,” said Molkho, loath to give up after having gotten this far, but the janitor had no idea whom he meant.

The next morning he phoned again and got through to a secretary, who was apparently also a teacher. “Ya’ir Ben-Ya’ish isn’t here today,” she said in a pleasantly husky voice. “He’s in Tel Aviv.” Molkho explained who he was and that it was urgent, and the woman promised to tell the council manager, who would be sure to call back the next day. “What about the treasurer?” asked Molkho. The treasurer, however, was indisposed and had no home telephone.

The next day there was no call from the village, so Molkho phoned again. Once more it took forever to get the secretary, who, though sounding more suspicious, promised that Mr. Ben-Ya’ish would be in the next morning and would return the call. Outside the window a warm spring shower fell briefly, evoking a pungent smell of blossoms from the gray streets. The director’s office called to see what progress Molkho had made. “Then drive up there yourself,” he was told when he mumbled an inconclusive answer. “What, in my own car?” he asked, thinking of his new Citroen. “Yes, don’t worry,” was the answer. “We’ll cover all your expenses.”

THAT EVENING he consulted a map to see exactly where Zeru’a was and discovered that it was way up in the Galilee, surrounded by Arab villages. In the morning he rose to find the streets wet, as if a heavy but silent rain had fallen all night. The northbound roads were packed with huge army trucks bringing tanks, prefabs, and other equipment back from Lebanon, where the Israeli pullout was in full swing. Once again, Molkho thought of his wife. She had been bitterly opposed to the Lebanese war and now it was ending.

On the highway to Acre the traffic was backed up. A prefab had fallen from a truck and blocked the road, and soon after there was an accident; by an overturned car, surrounded by police, a large, disheveled woman sat screaming on a stretcher. When Molkho slowed down to get a look at her, the policemen waved him on. “Step on it, step on it,” they shouted angrily at the passing vehicles, “this isn’t a sideshow here.” And so he drove on, not turning on the radio, so as to listen to the motor, which was still being broken in, and even passing up a female hitchhiker so as not to overload the car in the hills ahead. The light drizzle stopped, a fierce sun emerged cocksurely from behind the tattered clouds, and the asphalt was suddenly dry.

At Karmiel he stopped, took off his jacket, and entered a diner for a second breakfast. Through the window of the restaurant a chain of limestone hills formed an unbroken wall leading north. He could see the same mountains from his own house in Haifa, yet only as an abstract blue line; now, however, they loomed solidly and massively before him. When he rose to pay, he made sure to ask for a receipt. Fancy me an investigator with an expense account.

Several kilometers out of Karmiel, after consulting his map, he left the highway and headed north on a narrow old road that began an abrupt climb into the mountains. He drove slowly on the steep curves, sticking to second gear and keeping an eye on the RPMs, which appeared on a special indicator; but the road seemed endless, pressing on past forests and tangled gullies along the narrow, rutted asphalt, on which the only traffic was an occasional army vehicle or Arab tractor that forced Molkho, afraid for his new car, onto the shoulder before continuing his steady ascent to dizzying heights. Halfway to his destination he stopped at the top of a rise to rest the engine, which was air-cooled and had no heat gauge. This car is too sophisticated for me, he thought, although perhaps he would appreciate it more on the easier drive to Jerusalem. Meanwhile, he parked it beneath a big pine tree and went to relieve himself in the bushes, examining his penis, which here, in the clear, pure air, amid the murmur of leaves and the flowers and rocks of the Galilee, resembled a dark little animal, rather comic in the loyal arching of its spume onto the thick carpet of dry pine needles that absorbed it without a sound or trace. She was the first and only woman I ever slept with, he thought. It would be easier if there had been others, but I was too faithful. He shook the last drops, which looked rather greenish to him, into the air, regretting not having urinated on one of the stones, against whose light background the color would have stood out. Zipping his fly, he turned to face the wind, reminded of the country near Jerusalem: the same light asphalt dating back to British times, the same black curbstones, the same pine and cypress trees—just fresher and moister, not powdered with desert aridity like the Judean Hills. A sharp feeling of déjà vu told him he had been here before, yes, on this very hilltop, where he had perhaps stopped to rest or even spend the night, for he had been here on foot, on a Scout or army hike many years ago, brought to see one of the scenic ravines of the Galilee, and the memory flowed sharply through him, the adventure of a sheltered boy from Jerusalem whose parents never ventured beyond Tel Aviv. Once he could depend on his wife, who was better at it than he was, to remember times and places, but now he was on his own.

But when, soon after, he reached the village, which was little more than an overgrown farming cooperative of the type established for new immigrants in the 1950s, the feeling of familiarity faded quickly, yielding to a dreary sense of desolation. It was a place in which nothing seemed to have changed in thirty years: the same peeling little houses on the same concrete columns, with here or there a new story or wing; the same little orchards on the same rocky, rust-colored earth; the same chicken runs and sheds, with the same untended fields between them dotted by the same scraggly trees; the same narrow approach road passing through an antiterrorist perimeter fence and suddenly, for no apparent reason, turning into a broad thoroughfare that led to a center boasting several shops and a deserted bus stop. Molkho stopped by a tall electric pole to which was nailed a bulletin board plastered with posters from the last elections, one of them bearing the repeated picture of a smiling, stubbly young man. A heavy silence hung over the place, as if it were abandoned, though somewhere in the distance the chug of a tractor was drowned out by the clunk of a water pump.

A woman leading a fat sheep on a rope showed him the way to the school, and Molkho, taking out his files and locking the car, headed toward it into the wind, noticing the snowy peak of Mount Hermon between two houses, so big and near that his heart leapt. Crossing a playground and passing a water fountain, where again he had the sensation of someplace revisited, he climbed a short flight of stairs to the school, hearing schoolchildren singing old Passover songs with the same gruff accent as the boy’s on the phone. A passing teacher pointed out the council manager’s office at the end of a hallway. The room itself, however, was empty and dark; its blinds were lowered, an obsolete map of the country hung on a wall beside photographs of long-dead presidents and prime ministers, an accordion case leaned against a chairless desk, and several baskets of vegetables stood by a table on which lay an electric heating fork. There was no file cabinet or evidence of an office in sight, and Molkho felt instantly depressed. What am I doing here? he asked himself.

Just then the bell rang, and the children rushed out of their classes with a war whoop. Footsteps approached; no doubt word of his arrival had spread, and perhaps the children had been let out early because of it. But it was only the overweight and out-of-breath secretary, who, it seemed, was also the music teacher, for a bright red accordion was strapped like a baby sling to her chest. Standing on ceremony, he introduced himself with glum formality. “So you came after all,” she said. “But Ben-Ya’ish isn’t here yet. He must be on his way.” “Didn’t you tell him I was coming?” asked Molkho. “Of course,” said the secretary, “and he suggested that meanwhile you go over the books with the treasurer.” “Then the treasurer is feeling better?” asked Molkho. “More or less,” said the secretary. “I’ll find someone to take you to his home.” She hurried back out of the room, the accordion still strapped to her chest, and returned a minute later with a dark-skinned girl, who—such, later on, was Molkho’s first memory of her—stood in the unlit hallway surrounded by a crowd of children. She was so thin and straight, as though delicately carved out of ebony, with such painfully large steel-rimmed glasses that at first he mistook her for a boy, even though she was wearing a black leotard. “Take this man to your father,” the secretary told her. She stared seriously up at him with her dark, exotic eyes and turned at once to guide him with the pack of children on her heels.

Outside the soft wind licked at their faces, and the afternoon light stretched tautly over the mountains. “I wouldn’t advise it,” said the secretary as he started to lead the girl to his car. “It’s not a long way, but it’s muddy and rocky. Why not just follow the girl.”

The girl, however, had come to a halt and was arguing with the other children, who wanted to come with her. “She said just me,” she stated firmly. “He’s here to see my father. She said just me.” But the secretary was no longer there and the children were so adamant that, after trying briefly to fend them off, the girl turned to Molkho and said, “Let’s go.” They left the schoolyard through an opening in the fence and walked quickly along a muddy path, Molkho following behind her with his files, stepping on new tufts of bluish grass while watching her spindly legs and little buttocks, which bounced inside her black leotard like rubber balls. She bounded along like a fawn or, rather, like a bespectacled bunny, and it was all he could do to keep up with her, breathing the high mountain air while treading the winding path that circled behind the houses, cowsheds, and chicken coops over the terra rossa earth of the Galilee that turned even the rain puddles red.

Every now and then she stopped to let him catch up, though she failed to return his smile but simply stared at him somberly through her funny glasses. “What’s wrong with your father?” he asked, and when she did not understand him, “What’s he sick with?” “He’s got something in his blood. He was in the hospital,” she answered warily, continuing to lead him past old farm tools and rusting plows and cultivators half-buried in earth. They kept turning into new side paths and finally passed through a dark shed under the anxious eyes of a large cow and into the backyard of a little house standing on the hillside, falling straight into an ambush set by the children from school, who burst suddenly out of their hiding place. “We got here first!” they shouted merrily.

The girl ignored them. Proud and reproachful, she ushered Molkho into a kitchen, where dressed in pajamas stood a tall, young, dark-skinned Jew of Indian extraction, wearing glasses just like those worn by the girl, whose height and ebony fineness clearly derived from him. She ran to him and hugged him, while he gently patted her head, and Molkho had the eerie thought, this man is going to die and she doesn’t know that she knows. He felt drawn inside the house, as if Death, having parted from him in the autumn and run ahead like a mad dog to the far end of the Galilee, now lay drowsing there beneath a table. “So it’s you,” he whispered to it warmly, stepping into the kitchen and introducing himself to the lanky Indian, who seemed to blanch slightly, despite his dark skin. “I was told you were the treasurer,” he said.

“Treasurer?” The man smiled uncertainly. “Not exactly. I only help Ben-Ya’ish a bit with the accounts. But come in.” He whispered something to the girl and disappeared, and quickly clearing a pile of books from a chair, she led Molkho into a small, clean, simply furnished room and asked him to sit down. He did, his eyes glued to her lithe body with its black leotard and pink slippers, and the steel-rimmed glasses on her ebony face, wanting to reach out and touch her, to verify that she was real. “Where’s your mother?” he asked, and was told that she worked in a shoe factory in Kiryat Shmonah. “A shoe factory?” he murmured, watching her as, with an unchildlike assurance, she tidied up quietly. “Do you take ballet in school?” “Not everyone,” she said, “only me.” Just imagine, he thought, right here, in this country, at the far end of nowhere, are people like this, and we don’t even know they exist. Why, you never even hear about them.

The father returned to the room, still unshaven but wearing pants and a black sweater that made him look even darker. Like a stranger in his own home, he looked hesitantly around before sitting down stiffly. At once the girl sat protectively nearby him, unconsciously imitating his movements. She was slightly cross-eyed, Molkho realized, once again failing to get a response to his smile. With a glance out the window at the towering mountains, he opened his files and spread them out on a little table, suddenly feeling a great fatigue. “How old is this village?” he asked the thin Indian, who was observing him curiously. “Something tells me I’ve been here before, maybe on some army bivouac.” The village, the Indian told him, was first built for new immigrants back in the early 1950s but had twice been abandoned; the present population dated from several years later, when, in addition to some Jews from North Africa, several Indian families arrived. The girl, Molkho saw, was listening too, straight-backed and flat-chested, her head framed by the window against a background of mountains and clouds. She’s certainly a strange one, he thought, unless I just don’t know what little girls are like anymore.

“Who lives here now?” he asked the Indian. “Are they still traditional Jews?” Not as much as all that, he was told; on Sabbaths most people still attended synagogue, but some preferred to sleep or work. “And what sort of work,” he asked, “do they do?” Most used to raise laying hens, said the Indian, but in the egg glut of 1982 the coops were abandoned, and now the women worked in Kiryat Shmonah, while the men farmed as best they could, though some did nothing at all. In fact, times were so hard that the only thing keeping people in the village was their having nowhere else to go. “And were these financial statements drawn up by you?” inquired Molkho, spreading out his papers and leafing through them impatiently, afraid the man’s dirge was simply a cover-up for the faked accounts. No, they weren’t, said the Indian; he had only helped Ben Ya’ish with his arithmetic. That is, he was an arithmetic teacher not a treasurer, but since his illness, which had forced him to stop teaching, he had been employed by the council manager in a part-time capacity.

Yet, when Molkho inquired about the man’s illness, he answered quite apathetically and knew so little about it that even its name was a mystery. From time to time he went for treatments to Rambam Hospital in Haifa. “In what ward? With what doctors?” asked Molkho, now fully alert. But the Indian was unable to enlighten him: he arrived, he lay down on a bed, he had some blood taken, he was given a shot, and he went home again—that was all he knew. “I know that hospital well,” Molkho told him, fishing for more information. “My wife died of cancer six months ago.” Yet the Indian said nothing, forcing Molkho to keep talking about his wife, while the girl jiggled her thin, dark leg in wonder. Indeed, he couldn’t stop; it had been a while since he’d last shared his wife’s illness with anyone, so that he quite enjoyed telling about it now, right down to the drama of those final months and the little field hospital he had set up at home to ensure a comfortable death. “And she really died there?” asked the girl, staring hard at him. “Of course,” Molkho said. “It happened early in the morning. She hardly suffered at all.” Could he have met this child in the army thirty years ago too, he wondered, feeling the sense of déjà vu again. “How many children do you have?” he asked the Indian. “So far, only one,” said the man, hugging his daughter with a smile. “But we hope to give her a little brother or sister soon.”

Molkho gazed at them for a moment and asked for some water. “Gladly,” said the Indian. “Or would you prefer a glass of juice?” “Juice will be fine,” answered Molkho, and the girl glided out with dancelike steps to fetch it. “She’s a lovely child,” remarked Molkho. “How old is she?” “Eleven,” said the Indian. “That’s all?” marveled Molkho. “And she needs glasses already?” “Not exactly,” said her father. “She wants to wear them, because she is slightly cross-eyed, and thinks they hide it.”

The girl returned with a large glass of watery yellow liquid. “You forgot to stir it,” said her father. “Never mind,” Molkho told him, still wanting to touch her ebony skin, no matter how lightly, though she seemed too grown-up for him to risk a paternal pat. He took a sip of his drink, which was very bitter, and said to the Indian, who was sitting stock-still and ignoring the papers on the table, as if it were just a matter of time before they went away by themselves, “I’m afraid we’re going to make things difficult for you. You won’t get another penny of government money. We can cut you off without a cent.” “But why?” asked the Indian innocently. “Because you haven’t done anything right here, that’s why,” said Molkho, quietly sifting the papers. “What isn’t right?” asked the Indian wearily. “Everything,” said Molkho. “Nothing is even close to being right. This looks like a criminal case to me, and it will end up with the police.” Although he knew he sounded angry, he felt perfectly calm inside. “Who does this Ben-Ya’ish of yours think he is? I came all the way up here to see him today, and he doesn’t even bother to show up!” “But he will,” said the Indian. “He has to. You can wait for him right here. You can see his house from this window. We’ll know the minute he gets home.” He pointed further up the rocky hillside to a gardenless hut that had not a single patch of green around it. “Maybe I should go talk to his wife,” suggested Molkho. “He doesn’t have any,” said the Indian. “No wife?” “No, he’s still young. He’s only twenty-three.” “Twenty-four,” corrected the girl, who had been listening to every word. “It’s his birthday soon.”

Her father smiled at her. “He has a way with kids. They’re very fond of him,” he explained, telling Molkho that the young man had arrived in the village two years ago as a substitute teacher, had taken a liking to the place, and had done such a good job as an organizer and fund-raiser that he was elected council manager. In fact, he obtained all kinds of things for next to nothing, or even for nothing at all, which was a great help, since everyone had debts and times were so hard that no one could have managed without him. “What kind of things?” Molkho asked. “Everything. Seed. Fodder for the animals and chickens. Cheap clothes.” “And food too,” the girl reminded her father. “Yes,” he nodded, “food too.” “Food?” queried Molkho. “What sort of food?” “Why, canned goods and meat.” “And cake and ice cream too,” said the girl, who appeared to love Ben-Ya’ish dearly. “But where does he get it all from?” asked Molkho anxiously. “From all kinds of organizations and agencies in Tel Aviv,” said the Indian. “He’s there all the time studying, because he’s still working on his BA.” “But not a word of that’s written down here!” exclaimed Molkho in exasperation. “That’s true,” explained the Indian. “It isn’t, but that’s only because it comes from outside funds, not from the village budget.” Molkho felt himself losing his temper. “All right, fine,” he declared, “outside funds are his own business; but here he lists a road that cost ten million shekels, and here he says he’s planted a park. Where is this park of his? I’d like to see it!” And when the Indian said nothing, casting a worried glance at his daughter, he continued sarcastically, “And here it says he bought himself a tractor! Where does he get off buying unauthorized tractors? Doesn’t he know he has to go through proper channels? Look here, the reason I’m here is to get your side of the story before we hand this over to the police.” But still the Indian was silent, his head bowed languidly. “Where’s the road?” demanded Molkho. “Where’s the park? Nothing in these accounts makes any sense!” “He’ll explain everything,” insisted the Indian with dogged obstinacy. “All I did was add up the figures for him. He’ll explain them to you himself.”

All at once, as if the mountain opposite the window had caved in on the house, the bright sunlight faded and Molkho felt as hungry as if he had not eaten all day. Gathering up his papers, he returned them to his briefcase. In the sudden gloom the girl looked as dark as if a black night were under her skin and he jumped to his feet with a start. “Where are you going?” asked the Indian. “Why don’t you wait? He should be here any minute.” “I’m going to have a look at the village,” said Molkho. “But won’t you have lunch with us?” asked the man. “No, thank you,” said Molkho, thinking of his expense-account meal. “If you’ll be so kind as to show me the bathroom first, I think I’ll have a look around.”

Yet, when the girl led him to a room that at first glance looked clean and comfortable, he was shocked to discover that it had no door, just a curtain over the entrance. He relieved himself as quietly as he could, his face toward the open window, through which there was a breathtaking view of a snowcapped Mount Hermon. So the snow is still after me, he thought with a smile, washing his hands. Controlling himself, he kept from peeking at the medicine cabinet and emerged with a friendly glance at the Indian, who, as though lost in thought, had not budged from his place. “If you’E just let your daughter show me the way back to my car,” Molkho told him, “I’ll have myself a little look around.”

And so, again he strode behind her, this time along the main street, her body, thin as a rail, growing longer in the soft, grayish light that seemed a throwback to winter. As they passed beneath a huge pylon that hummed electrically, apparently the relay of a regional grid that seemed to come from and continue to nowhere, he asked her for her name and the name of the cow in the shed, after which, his supply of questions exhausted, he continued to trail after her through the ghostly silence, falling a little behind. There was not a sign of human activity anywhere, let alone a paved road or park, not even the sound of a farm vehicle, though three workers were standing by a fire in a distant field, from which the moist scent of burning brush was wafted on the air. His hunger growing, he kept his eyes on the little bottom bouncing firmly in its tight leotard. What, he wondered, did he find so infatuating about her? Why, it was sheer madness! Suddenly, the horrendously funny, frightening, ghastly thought occurred to him that he could quite unsexually eat her like an animal, literally chew her flesh. Fortunately, she did not seem to guess what the wintry man lagging behind her with his briefcase was thinking and went on leading him with proud but fragile determination past the schoolhouse to his car, around which a crowd of children was swarming like flies, touching the shiny paint and sprawling on the ground to peer up at the chassis. Sternly he made his way among them, aided by the girl, who imperiously began driving them away, though soon she vanished in their midst.

Molkho opened the trunk, laid his briefcase in it, started to drive off, realized he did not know to where, and decided to stop in the little shopping center, where perhaps he could buy some expense-account groceries. He circled the square, which housed a wool store, an appliance store, a stationery store, a vegetable store, and a grocery, coming at last to a small café with a sign that featured a spit of shishkebab, his progress followed by every one of the shopkeepers. Apparently they had heard all about him, and the thought of his new prominence rather pleased him as he stepped out of the car.

He made his way past some scattered tables and entered the cafe, where he was greeted by an Indian even darker than the first. “Do you serve meals or just snacks?” Molkho asked him. “Meals too,” said the man. “And you’ll give me a receipt?” Molkho asked. “No problem,” said the man. “What do you have to eat?” Molkho asked. “What would you like?” asked the man. “But tell me what there is,” insisted Molkho, looking around to check if the place was clean. Someone sat in a far corner eating something out of a bowl. “What’s that?” Molkho asked. “Organs,” said the man. “Whose?” asked Molkho worriedly. “It’s a lung-and-liver stew,” replied the cafe owner quietly, looking deferentially at his new customer. “It’s real good.” “Do you have steak?” Molkho asked. “Whatever you like,” said the Indian. “Perhaps then,” said Molkho somewhat officiously, “you can show it to me.” Leading him into a dirty kitchen that Molkho’s wife would have fled from, the man passed a big pot simmering on a burner, opened a refrigerator, and took out a drooping piece of meat clotted with old, purplish blood. Molkho regarded it doubtfully; it was certainly not very hygienic-looking. In the end, they’ll poison me here, he told himself, still feeling a craving for meat. “Do you have sausages?” he asked. But the man did not. And so, after thinking it over, he ordered the organ stew, left the kitchen, and sat down irritably at a table, keeping an eye on his car while recalling the times his wife had made him go from restaurant to restaurant until she found one clean enough to suit her. But all that was past history. Now he would eat what and where he wanted. And his car seemed quite safe. Most of the children had gone off somewhere else, and those remaining now sat by the front wheels, among them the Indian girl, who crouched licking a popsicle like a little grasshopper with folded wings.

A pickup truck pulled up in the square and a young man climbed out of it. Could that be Ben-Ya’ish? wondered Molkho—but the young man was an Arab and his thoughts returned to his wife. No, he hadn’t killed her—the idea was obscene and insane. He had simply helped her to die when she was ready. And yet, had he not perhaps been too quick to resign himself to her death? From the very beginning, bending down that spring night to kiss the nipple of her white breast and cautiously, tenderly saying, though the words cracked like a whip, “Yes, there’s some kind of a lump here,” he hadn’t believed in her chances. And now here he was, sitting in this unsavory spot in this God-forsaken Galilean village, watching the women shoppers—all of whom, even the young ones, still looked like immigrants—as they came and went, and thinking, How cold they all still leave me. A tractor emerged from an alleyway, tried climbing the steps of the shopping arcade, and came to a sudden halt. Some children passed by. Abandoning himself to the tranquillity, he let the cool breeze fan his appetite. The place did not look as if times were as hard as all that. It was just talk. If you believed half you heard, the whole country had been falling apart for years, and yet everything was still there. In fact, wherever you went, there was a tractor clearing new ground.

The group of children by the car had disappeared. While the café owner set the bare table and brought a plate of pita bread and a small bowl of olives, Molkho queried him about the village. Had any new roads been paved lately? Not that he knew of. How about a park or public garden? He knew nothing about them either. Meanwhile, several men, looking freshly awakened from sleep, approached Molkho in a friendly manner. “Are you the fellow who’s waiting for Ben-Ya’ish? He left a message saying he’ll be here soon. What did you come to check out—the accounts? There’s nothing wrong with them! He’ll explain everything. We’re all behind him.” “I heard your wife died,” said one of the men, reaching out to shake Molkho’s hand, “I’m very sorry to hear about it.” Before he knew it, he was shaking hands with them all, startled by their knowledge, as if the wind had carried the news. He was about to ask them about the road and park, too, when the steaming bowl of stew arrived, full of dark, smooth, slightly rubbery chunks of meat swimming in a bright brown gravy and giving off a funky odor like his father’s sweat, and shaking from hunger, he pitched in before it got cold. The meat, when speared with a fork, was of various spongy consistencies, apparently because it came from different organs, and had a strange sweetness that caused him a brief moment of anxiety before he attacked it in earnest, dipping his bread in the gravy between bites. “This mountain air gives a man an appetite,” he apologized to the café owner, who sat there watching him eat. “Where’s this meat from?” he asked. “It’s all kinds of organs,” answered the man. “Don’t you like it?” “Yes, I do,” Molkho said, “it’s delicious. I was just wondering if you took it from a cow.” “I took it from a cow?” The Indian seemed alarmed, though in the end he caught on. “Oh, you mean beef!” “Yes,” said Molkho, chewing away, his face lit by the sun, which had come back out of the clouds. All around him was silence, as if the whole village were hiding, except for the café owner sitting nearby, who rose now and then to bring a cold drink or more bread, which Molkho dipped ravenously in the gravy. “It’s this mountain air,” he said again with a smile, and this time the man smiled back and said, “Yes, the one thing we’ve got here is air.” Then he cleared the table and made Molkho some coffee to wash down the gamy-tasting stew. “Should I list everything you ate?” he asked when Molkho rose to pay, tearing a page out of a notebook. “No,” Molkho said. “Just the date and what it cost.”

It was 2 P.M. and the sun was beating down as if in anticipation of summer, the rainy morning a thing of the past. Passing a pay phone, he thought of calling home or maybe his mother, but then changed his mind. So what if I don’t? I’ve got a right to disappear if I want to, he told himself while walking to his car, which stood baking in the sun. If I don’t keep it covered, it will fade and lose its value, he thought. Yet, catching sight of the complicated dashboard, his hand resting on the fresh-smelling seat, he was conscious of getting less pleasure from it than from new cars in the past. He took off his jacket and sweater, loosened his tie, settled himself behind the wheel, and opened the window, through which the wind came whooshing down from the mountains, whistling straight toward him as though somewhere in the distance a giant fan were aimed at him. Well, that’s that, he thought, that little swindler can look for me, now. But suddenly, as the wind shrieked high overhead, his eagerness to take off faltered, perhaps because the stew was weighing him down. Should he move the car into the shade and rest a bit? But he had lost all sense of direction and wasn’t sure which way the sun was heading. In the end, locking the gear shift and flicking the hidden switch disconnecting the ignition, he stepped out of the car and started back toward the girl’s house to tell her father he was leaving.

Once more he followed the muddy path among fields stippled with yellow flowers whose name he didn’t know. Far-off, the mountains were turning purple. A rusty silence still hung over the village. The natives are taking their siesta, thought Molkho. The field with the fire was empty now, though thin wisps of grayish smoke still spiraled up from it and hot ashes writhed like ribbons of quicksilver on the moist, coppery ground. He noticed to one side a trail running off into a deep, jungly ravine, which lay between high, sawtoothed cliffs looking like ancient cadavers that had died clinging to the hillside. Fierce colors flashed there, green, blue, and claret, cut by the bold brown slash of the path. That’s it, then! thought Molkho. It’s a place that’s hiked in; I must have been here with the Scouts. He stood gazing into it, listening to the wind gather strength, and musing that were he to die in there, no one would discover his traces. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” he told himself out loud. “At least I’d rest in peace then.”

He turned and headed on toward the girl’s house, passing it, however, and continuing on to Ben-Ya’ish’s hut, where he knocked on the door and received no response. Through an open shutter he caught a glimpse of the interior: an unmade bed, a television, a video, a set of speakers, and a pile of dirty dishes on the table, which indicated that the occupant had left not long ago. Circling the dwelling through tall, thorny weeds, he glanced up the hillside and made out an old wooden outhouse that looked like an upended coffin. It still had a door, though, he saw as he approached it, clearing his way through the dense undergrowth. The ceiling was low, no higher than a man’s head, and more weeds sprouted from the cesspit. Shutting the door behind him, the wind moaning dully through the dry wooden planks as though through a stifling hand, he unzipped his pants and tried relieving himself, but the trickle that came out only increased his sense of debility. Why, a person might think I was in love with that little dark girl, he thought, that I meant to wait right here for her to grow up! Walking back down the hill, he knocked on the door of her house.

The Indian opened it. “Ben-Ya’ish isn’t here yet,” said Molkho with a show of calm. “It looks like I’ve wasted my time, and so I’ll be heading back. Just please tell him that I was here and that I’m sore as hell,” he continued, not feeling sore in the least. “If he wants to tell me his side of the story—if he has any story to tell—he can try looking for me, because I’m through looking for him.”

The Indian listened earnestly, at his back the shadowy room full of books. “But what’s the rush?” he demurred. “He’ll come. He has to. You can rest here while you wait.” “What for?” asked Molkho. “I’ve waited long enough.” “But you have to have patience,” said the Indian. “Why don’t you come in. I’ll give you a bed to lie down in.” “Your wife isn’t home yet?” asked Molkho. “My wife? She doesn’t come home until five.” And when Molkho said nothing, he set about persuading him again. “Why don’t you come in? He’ll feel bad if he knows you didn’t wait.”

Molkho felt himself waver, wondering where the girl was. Hopelessly he looked around the room full of books and at the kitchen table with its unwashed lunch dishes, hearing the wind whistle behind him. “I don’t want to impose,” he said. “But it’s no imposition at all,” said the Indian. “I’ll be keeping you from your work,” explained Molkho, still in the doorway. “You won’t be keeping me from anything,” insisted the Indian. “Perhaps I could lie down in another room,” suggested Molkho; it could even be the girl’s. “Right here in the living room will be fine,” said the Indian. “I was just arranging some books I brought home.” But seeing that Molkho was unyielding, he said, “All right, come on in. I’ll find you someplace else.” Entering the girl’s room, he emerged a minute later with her, still in her leotard and big glasses, her books and homework in her arms. “Come this way. You’ll have all the quiet you want,” he cajoled, pointing to the girl’s bedroom, though Molkho was disappointed to see that it did not look like a schoolgirl’s room at all and was full of heavy old furniture, even a fourposter bed.

The Indian laid a gentle hand on his arm, as one might do to a tired old man. “But I don’t want to impose on your daughter either,” murmured Molkho weakly, already sinking into the soft bed. Dismissing the objection out of hand, the Indian brought a pillow and a blanket, lowered the blinds, and declared, “Now you wait for him here. He’ll feel bad if you don’t,” as if making clear that what mattered most was not the accounts or even the pains taken by Molkho, but rather the tender feelings of the young council manager. “But it’s totally inconsiderate of him,” said Molkho, smiling wryly from the bed, on which he sat with an air of noblesse oblige, though in fact it surprised him how happy and peaceful he felt. “He had an appointment with me!” “Why don’t you take your shoes off,” said the Indian.

But Molkho left them on, remaining seated on the bed until the man had left and shut the door behind him. She wouldn’t have liked this one bit, he reflected, thinking of his wife, who was always careful to observe the proprieties, of which imposing on strangers was not one. Taking a volume of a children’s encyclopedia from the girl’s desk, he placed it on the blanket, lay down with his shoes on it, and shut his eyes, abandoning himself to the wind that shrieked and stopped, shrieked and stopped, like some infernal machine. It’s a rockaby-baby wind, he thought happily, dozing off, only to awake with a start ten minutes later to discover that he had been in a deep sleep. The only sound in the house was the purr of the refrigerator through the kitchen wall. He rose, went to the window, raised the blinds, and stood looking out at the mountains and the cowshed, inhaling the clean country air. What am I doing here? he wondered. You’d think I had no house or children of my own. But his tiredness welled irresistibly inside him, like a firm but gentle hand that wrestled him down, and taking off his shoes, he plumped the pillow and lay deliciously down again on the honey-sweet bed. Just look where you’ve landed me this time, he whispered mournfully to his wife, falling asleep in an instant.

Several times he sought to rouse himself, yet each time he only plunged deeper into sleep, wetting the pillow slightly with his drool, so that when he awoke at last, the room was dark. Water was dripping somewhere in the house, and the reddish tongues of the sunset licked at the slats of the blinds. It was six o’clock; he had been sleeping for over three hours. Aghast, he sat up, yet at once sank exhaustedly back onto the pillow. Then, more slowly, he sat up again, put on his shoes, folded the blanket, returned the book to the desk, donned his jacket, smoothed his hair, and cautiously opened the door.

There, crouched at his feet and mopping the floor with a rag, was a young and very pregnant woman of Middle Eastern appearance—the mother who worked in the shoe factory. Molkho reddened. She looked up at him suspiciously, almost hostilely, as if his sleep were an act of impertinence. Behind her, in the kitchen, the Indian was cooking in an apron, while the girl knelt on the living room rug doing homework with ink-stained fingers, her glasses tinted a smoky color as if by virtue of the effort she was making. All three of them had apparently been doing their best to let him sleep. But before he could apologize for his thoughtlessly long nap or blame it on the mountain air, the Indian announced dolefully, “He still isn’t back from Tel Aviv, he wasn’t on the last bus, and we don’t know where he is. Maybe he got the date wrong.” “More likely he’s just scared of me,” said Molkho, standing there grumpily unkempt, as if his sleep had been a particularly strenuous form of exercise. “And I don’t blame him either.” The girl’s mouth dropped and suddenly it struck him that these people were scared of him too. “If you could just wait a little longer,” said the Indian. “He may have caught a ride with someone.” Molkho smiled at him sardonically. “Only the Messiah is worth waiting that long for. But it’s not your fault, and I see your wife’s tired,” he said, “so I won’t disturb you anymore.” In fact, the woman, who was standing in a corner, seemed less tired than alarmed; despite her youth, she looked rather worn and remote from her husband and daughter. “I’ll be off, then,” said Molkho. “It’s dark out already, and I’m running in a new car and can’t drive fast.” “All right, I’ll walk you to it,” said the Indian, wiping his hands on his apron.

The girl jumped up from the rug like a dog following its master and the three of them stepped outside. There was a sharp, dawnlike chill in the air, so that Molkho, setting out for his car with his two escorts following him, imagined for a moment that the dying evening light would soon begin to grow brighter. The cow mooed sadly in its shed, and he remembered hearing the same sound in his sleep. It was a perfect spring evening, free of all dross of day. Refreshed and rested, he arrived in the shopping center, which was now full of life; in fact, such a crowd was gathered around his car, in its midst many children, that it almost seemed as if the whole village had been waiting for him to awake from his prodigious slumber, which had produced in them an uneasy, though by no means unhopeful, expectancy. “What, you’re going?” they asked, pressing around him. “Of course,” he smiled. “But he’s coming! We’ll find him! If you’ve already gone to the trouble...” Yet Molkho just went on smiling at the crowd, which did all it could to detain him, afraid of what he might say about the council manager, whom it wanted so badly to protect. “It’s not as bad as all that,” he promised. “I’ll put off writing the report a little longer. Tell him to call me for an appointment in the morning.” And stepping into his car, he unlocked the gear shift, reconnected the ignition, fastened the seat belt, started the engine, and sat there letting it warm up, the beam of the headlights sweeping over the mass of children, among them the strange, tall girl. Can I really be in love with her? wondered Molkho.

He was given directions to reach the main road and drove off. After a few kilometers he stopped to wipe the front windshield. Back in the driver’s seat, with the ceiling light switched off, he suddenly imagined his wife sitting next to him in her seat belt, leaning against the headrest as she had done last spring, when the vertebrae in her neck were already rotted by her illness and he had to drive with great care to keep from jarring her. It can’t go on like this, he told himself, not daring to glance at her, laying his head hopelessly on the steering wheel. It’s not my fault. This loneliness will be the death of me.

THE TRIP HOME took less time than he thought, because he knew the way and drove quickly on the empty roads without stopping. Within forty minutes he was on the Safed-Acre highway with the lights of Haifa Bay twinkling in the distance, speeding by the Karmiel turnoff without giving a lift to the lone soldier who tried desperately to flag him down, for he had not yet bought seat covers and was afraid the man’s rifle might poke a hole in the upholstery. For a change, he arrived home to find his youngest son doing homework rather than sprawled in a stupor before the television. The boy, so it seemed, was getting used to spending long hours at home by himself. Better yet, not a single new can had been opened in the kitchen and the leftovers had been eaten from the pots. He’s beginning to shape up, Molkho thought; he even talked freely to his father about school and friends, and later got out of bed because he had forgotten to give him the message that his grandmother had called. “What about?” asked Molkho anxiously. About whether Molkho knew anyone in the immigration department of the Jewish Agency, his son told him. “The immigration department?” repeated Molkho in a puzzled voice. “What on earth does she want with them?”

He walked about the dark, quiet house, patiently carrying his wakefulness around with him. The stew he had eaten for lunch was a distant memory now, but the delicious afternoon nap tingled on in the cells of his body, which felt as if rubbed down with liniment. Going to bed was out of the question. He drew up a list of the day’s expenses to present to the office in the morning and then began leafing through the family albums, looking at pictures of his children when they were little, at his wedding pictures, at pictures of himself as a young man, at pictures of his parents and cousins, and finally, with a sense of incredulity, at himself as a baby lying on a white sheet. It was 1 A.M. when he got into bed, and even then, he lay for a long while without shutting his eyes before falling asleep.

Upon arriving in the office the next morning, he was told by his secretary that the council manager of Zeru’a had called and wished to speak to him. Swearing under his breath, he called back and once again heard children singing to the strains of an accordion at the other end of the line, over which the quickly summoned music teacher informed him that Mr. Ben-Ya’ish had arrived half an hour after his departure and had been very sorry to miss him. “I’m very sorry too,” said Molkho quietly. “He wants to explain everything,” said the music teacher. “Then he can do it right here in my office,” answered Molkho dryly. “No, he can’t,” said the music teacher. “He wants to show you what the money has been spent on. You have to see it yourself.” “Where is he?” asked Molkho after a moment’s hesitation. “Let me speak to him.” The council manager, however, was not available just then, though the music teacher promised that he would be there whenever Molkho wished to come, and would even send a car for him. “He’ll send a car for me?” “Yes, that’s a promise!” “In that case,” said Molkho over the phone, calculating the profit he could make by still claiming car expenses, “call me again tomorrow.”

He hung up and put the file aside. Later that morning he was buzzed by the director’s office. Had he gone to the village? What was the story there? He phrased his answer carefully. The case indeed looked suspicious, just as they had thought: the council manager, a young student of questionable experience, had apparently diverted funds earmarked for public projects to the inhabitants of the village, using the money to buy them food and clothing at wholesale prices. There was no indication that he had bothered collecting taxes either. But the fellow himself hadn’t been there, and perhaps he deserved a chance to clear himself.

Several days went by without a call from the village. That weekend, daylight saving time began, and the days seemed suddenly endless. One evening, just as Molkho had decided to hand the file over to the legal department, the music teacher called him at home. She was sorry for the late hour, but could he tell her what his answer was? “You know what?” said Molkho. “If he wants me up there so badly, let him send that car for me.” And so it was decided that on Thursday, between 10 and 11 A.M., the car would pick him up at home. He had already hung up and was wandering distractedly about the house, excited by the thought of revisiting the village, when he realized that he had forgotten to ask if there would be a ride back to Haifa too.

THE NEXT DAY he informed the office that he was making one more trip to the Galilee and received permission and authorization for expenses. On Thursday morning, which proved to be muggy and overcast, he went to do some shopping, returning home to find the cleaning woman, whom he had not encountered in weeks. At first, he tried keeping out of her way by shutting himself in his room, but she seemed in a particularly gay mood, singing while she beat the rugs and coming in to talk to him, pleased to find him at home. “You’re looking better, Mr. Molkho,” she said in the end. “Much better.” When she finally departed, leaving a silent, sparkling house, it was already twelve o’clock. The promised car had not arrived. At one he went to the kitchen to make himself something to eat. If I want to claim lunch expenses, he thought gloomily, I’ll have to write myself out my own receipt. As soon as he finished eating, he decided, he would summarize the file and get rid of it.

At two the doorbell rang. It was the driver, a burly Arab of about Molkho’s age who came from a village near Zeru’a. “How come you’re so late?” Molkho scolded him. Despite the man’s explanation that he had lost his way for two hours and couldn’t find the address, he debated whether to go; but in the end, the thought of the girl and the car expenses prevailed. “You’ll have to bring me back, though,” he warned the driver, who, however, disclaimed all knowledge of any such responsibility. His job was to drive Molkho to Zeru’a; perhaps someone else would return him. Again Molkho hesitated; then he went to get the file, put it in his briefcase, added a pair of pajamas and some slippers wrapped in a newspaper just in case, and put on some old, heavy shoes. “Let’s go,” he grumpily said to the Arab, locking the door of the house.

The car turned out to be an old pickup with a load in the back and the Arab’s wife, a large peasant woman dressed in black, in the front. Before Molkho could protest, he was made to sit between them, and they started out, driving slowly and with a great clatter of the engine in the heat of the day. Every now and then, they turned off the main road to make a delivery to some remote Arab village that Molkho had never even heard of. Sweatily squeezed between the driver and his wife and dismally cursing his fate, he watched the road go by while throwing hostile glances at the man shifting gears, an operation that was conducted each time with great caution but little sign of expertise. After asking where the man knew Ben-Ya’ish from and being told that the council manager had close ties with the nearby Arab villages and even helped them with their books, there was nothing left to talk about and they drove on in silence, the Arab’s wife dozing with her head resting lightly on Molkho’s shoulder. By the time they began the climb into the mountains, his eyes, too, began to close; periodically he nodded off, found himself tilting against the peasant woman’s heavy breasts, and sat up again with a start. The trip took three hours and included a stop in the driver’s village—which looked like something from the wilds of Anatolia—where the woman got out, took off her shoes, and slipped into her house while her husband unloaded the remaining crates and invited Molkho, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes, to come in for a cup of coffee. He went to the bathroom, which surprised him by its cleanliness, and returned to the sitting room to find the coffee waiting there. “I understand you lost your wife,” said the Arab. Molkho was nonplussed. Was it written all over his face? But no, the man had heard of it in Zeru’a. What else had he heard there? Molkho asked. Nothing. They just told him to bring Molkho in his truck.

It was 5 P.M. when he reached the school building. Though he saw at once in the mild afternoon light that it was locked and deserted, he did not feel at all surprised; on the contrary, something had told him all along that Ben-Ya’ish would not be there. The fields had yellowed a bit in the ten days that had passed, but here and there he saw summer flowers he hadn’t noticed the last time, and on the whole, the place seemed more livable. He walked between the houses, feeling watched by dark silhouettes of Indians. “It’s that man from the ministry again,” he heard someone say. Slowly he crossed the shopping center, where this time, as though out of compassion, people avoided his eyes.

He walked on to the little house on the hillside, passing under the tall, humming pylon and once again experiencing the sense of déjà vu, though this time it was possible that his previous visit was the cause of it. Ben-Ya’ish’s house was locked and silent, the lowered blinds preventing a glimpse inside, but when he knocked on the door, he thought he heard a sound there. “Mr. Ben-Ya’ish?” he called out. “Mr. Ben-Ya’ish?” But the sound stopped, and Molkho, all but trembling with anticipation, walked back down the hill to the house of the treasurer, whose daughter opened the door. “Where’s your father?” he asked, feeling himself turn as red as her polka-dot dress. She seemed to have grown smaller since last he had seen her, but her gaze was as pure and earnest as ever. Her father, she said, was in the hospital. “In the hospital? How long has he been there?” he asked, his heart sinking. But he had gone only that morning and would soon be back, she informed him, her thin, finely wrought hand on the door, uncertain whether Molkho wished to enter, perhaps even concerned that he might sleep in her bed again. Nor was he at all sure himself how proper it was to be alone with her in the house. He felt unsteady, as if squatting inside him were a sexless little gnome who had fallen in love with a nymph. Behind her he could see her bedroom with one end of her antique bed, its blanket thrown off, and the heavy furniture. She followed his gaze earnestly, a joyless, humorless, somber little Indian, just like her father. “Do you want to wait here for him?” she asked. “No,” Molkho said, “I’ve come to see Ya-ir Ben-Ya’ish. Do you have any idea where he is?” “He was waiting for you all morning at the school,” said the girl, raising an arm as if to fend Molkho off. “You should look for him there.” “But the school is locked,” he said patiently, “I just came from there,” and when she said nothing he continued, “Why don’t you show me where the secretary lives, that music teacher.” She glided outdoors in her bare feet, explaining to him how to get there; yet touching her so lightly that he barely felt her, as though she were made out of air, he said, “Take me there yourself, please. Just put on some shoes first.” And so again he followed her between the houses, looking at her matchstick legs in their sneakers while trying to carry on a conversation, first asking her about her mother and when the new baby was expected, then about the cow, and finally about the wild ravine, the name of which he had forgotten. But she did not know it either and was not even certain that it had one. All she could tell him was that if you walked a ways down it, you came to a waterfall. “What waterfall is that?” Molkho asked. “Oh, just a waterfall.”

The music teacher turned pale when Molkho arrived with the girl. “It’s you? You came after all? But when? We’d already given up on you.” “You’d given up?” he snickered. “Yes, we waited for you all morning. Ya’ir was beside himself. An hour ago he took the bus to Fasuta to look for the driver.” While Molkho related what had happened, she hurried to give him a chair and a drink, and told the girl she could go. Molkho, though, did not want to stay in her house either, for it was noisy with children and too full of cheap bric-a-brac and glassware. He had a deep urge to stroll in the honeyed spring light, vigilant though forbearing in the knowledge, which both pleased and touched him, that the council manager was afraid of him, but determined to meet the young man and do what he could to console him. “Never mind. I’ll take a walk around and wait for him at their house,” he said to the music teacher with a nod toward the girl, who stood frozen for some reason in a corner. “Is your father back?” the music teacher asked her. “He will be soon,” said the girl. “Then find Mr. Molkho a place to rest,” said the teacher, happy to get rid of him.

And so once more Molkho walked behind the girl along the path between the houses, aware of the surreptitious stares cast his way. “Where’s the trail leading to that waterfall?” he asked her. She guided him to it, leading him across a field to a broad dirt track. “Well, then,” he said, “I’ll go down and have a look and come right back.” She was reluctant to leave him there, though. “You’d better let me show you the way.” “There’s really no need to,” answered Molkho, not trusting himself alone with her in the ravine. “I’ll find it by myself. Just please take my briefcase back to your house.” And indeed, the request reassured her, so that she stood there watching him set out, squinting through her comic glasses with a sudden, sweet flutter of her eyes. The broad trail soon narrowed and grew rocky, bushes and boulders blocked the way, and moisture from an unseen source softened the earth beneath his feet, which glistened a turfy green. And yet the more tangled and difficult the path became, the more lustrously vibrant grew the light. The far side of the ravine was hidden by the thick bushes, and from time to time he had to slide down a steep rock on his bottom. Should he stop and turn back? But the winding trail lured him on, the damp earth giving off new smells, joined now by a metal pipe, no doubt for sewage or irrigation, which snaked downward through the lush undergrowth, in which it seemed strangely out of place. Molkho followed it, treading on it now and then to make sure he could find his way back through the thickening brush. He skirted little puddles of water and crossed other paths joining this one, trodden grassless by hikers. It grew darker, there was a pungent smell of dust and rushing water, the walls of a little canyon rose on either side of him, and then all at once he was standing in a clearing of golden light and there was the waterfall.

It was not nearly as small as he had thought it would be. Falling gilded by the sunlight into a gray-green pool that trickled off in an unseen direction, the water burst forth from mosses that concealed a lipped groove in a boulder. He sat on a rock facing it, enjoying the coolness of the air and gazing at some unfamiliar purple flowers and at a weeping willow whose little leaves were like delicate ferns, the sharp scent of artemisia riveting his senses. Here was a place of eternal wakefulness, and though he failed to remember it, he felt sure he had been here as a boy, for the Scouts would never have missed it. How his wife would have liked it too! Places like this made her fall profoundly silent, her judgmental nagging briefly stilled. How sad to think of the lost peace this cascade would have given her! And yet it was years since they last had taken a pleasure trip, and then, too, they never went on foot. Even before she fell ill, she had always been too tired to go anywhere on Saturdays and had passed the time irritably glancing at the weekend papers and uttering her jeremiads. “Stop reading all that junk,” he would say to her. “It’s all a lot of lies and exaggerations. Why let it get to you.” But she simply saw in this one more sign of the dangerously Levantine, apolitical naivete that was leading the country to catastrophe. Now she was rotting slowly, decomposing in the earth, and he was by himself, squatting comfortably on his heels in Levantine fashion across from the marvelous waterfall, overcome by sorrow and longing. He picked up a pebble and chucked it into the pool.

Just then he heard a rustle of branches and the sound of children, and a minute later the children themselves appeared, staring down at him from further up the ravine, having followed him apparently from the village. He beckoned to them. At first, they hesitated; then, the bigger ones first and the smaller ones after them, they descended like a herd of dark goats and stood with an unwashed smell in a circle around him while he chatted with them easily and patted their heads and backs, until suddenly, green with envy, the girl appeared and drove them away, her father having returned and sent her to look for him, afraid he might be lost. Molkho laughed. “Has Ben-Ya’ish come back too?” he asked. But the girl hadn’t seen him.

And so, yet another time, he found himself walking behind her, his eyes on her thin, skimming legs as he climbed arduously up the steep path with the children scrambling in his wake like a pack of nimble monkeys. At the entrance to the ravine, he found her father waiting in the company of two or three other anxious men, all apparently afraid he had taken leave of his senses. “What were you looking for down there?” they asked. “Nothing,” said Molkho, brushing off his clothes, “just the waterfall. Your daughter told me about it, so I went down to have a look.” “You walked all the way to the waterfall?” they marveled, making him wonder how old a man they took him for. “Yes, is that so unusual?” he replied before asking them about Ben-Ya’ish. But Ben-Ya’ish, it appeared, was still being looked for. “Never has a bureaucrat been given such a runaround by a citizen,” sighed Molkho pensively with something like inner satisfaction, basking in the mild, clear light that made the whole world look transparent. “Well, I suppose there’s nothing to do but wait for him,” he added, turning to go to the Indian’s house.

Though the Indian seemed unprepared, he had little choice but to join Molkho, who was already striding purposefully toward the house, in front of which he found his briefcase. Perhaps they’ll offer me the girl’s bed again, he thought, but instead he was ushered into the familiar living room and asked if he wanted some coffee. He accepted and sat drinking it, trying once more to elicit the details of the man’s illness, at least the names of the drugs that he took. But the Indian was no more forthcoming than before, and perhaps he really knew nothing about it, as if his illness were someone else’s that he had merely borrowed for a while. Remembering with longing his sleep of ten days ago, Molkho stole a tender glance at the girl’s room. “He’s playing a game with me, this Ben-Ya’ish of yours,” he sighed, tired from the trip and his hike in the ravine but doubtful whether he could fall asleep so late in the afternoon, especially since the soporific wind was no longer blowing. “Maybe he’s just afraid of me, but he’s playing with fire,” he continued, trying to make the Indian feel a measure of guilt or, at least, responsibility. But the Indian too, so it seemed, had despaired of understanding the council manager; sitting straight-backed on the edge of his chair beside his daughter, who appeared, with the light glinting off her glasses, to imitate his movements with unconscious precision, he said sulkily, “I told him he had nothing to be afraid of, that you were a reasonable man and would give folks like us a fair hearing. But I guess he’s afraid you won’t understand his method of bookkeeping and there’ll be trouble.”

There was a long silence in the room. The cow mooed longingly in her shed, and Molkho sat back in the little armchair, surprised at his inner serenity, which the Indian, perhaps because he feared another session of sleep, appeared to regard with apprehension. “So you really think he won’t show up?” asked Molkho. “I honestly don’t know,” said the Indian. “But where is he now?” asked Molkho. The council manager, replied the Indian, was last seen departing for the Arab driver’s village; since then, he hadn’t been heard from and the music teacher had gone to look for him. “He promised me a ride back to Haifa too,” Molkho said. The Indian, however, had no idea how such a promise might be kept. “When is the last bus out of here?” Molkho asked. In fifteen minutes, was the answer. Yet he made no move to rise from his chair, too entranced by the silent aura of the girl to tear himself away. I must be going crazy, he thought, gazing at her bare arms and legs, on which, near the ankle, there was a fresh, thin scratch. “Your daughter cut herself,” he told the Indian. “Perhaps you should put on a Band-Aid.” “It’s from the ravine,” explained the girl, rubbing the dried blood off with some saliva. “Well, then,” said Molkho, reaching for his briefcase, “I guess I’ll be on my way.” He stepped out into the charmed evening, cut behind the house, paused to regard the big cow in her shed, and continued along the path that skirted the village, which he now seemed to see for the first time in all its pathetic decay: the unwatered fields, the untended hothouses, the abandoned chicken coops, the half-empty cowsheds, the tractors rusting beneath their tattered tarpaulins, the forlorn wildflowers in a sea of yellowing thistles. The whole place, he thought, was like a dying patient who lets the doctor do what he wants with him. The villagers he passed looked at him unseeingly, sometimes keeping in step with him awhile before falling behind or forging ahead. The dead keep giving us orders, he thought, not without satisfaction, recalling, while continuing his tour of the village, how his wife would send him out for such walks to perk him up from the long hours of sitting by her bed, mechanically making small talk—but just then he froze, for there, in the little shopping center, a bus had just pulled in and was disgorging weary-looking passengers returning from work, among them the Indian’s pregnant wife, who started out for home on her short, knobby legs. Why, it’s the last bus, he realized with a panicky yet oddly happy sensation, watching it pull out past the perimeter fence while feeling how, bright but invisible in the lingering light, someone was shadowing him, perhaps Ya-ir Ben-Ya’ish himself, who, in the most childish case of corruption Molkho had ever encountered, had used government money as a slush fund for the local inhabitants.

He continued to describe a large circle, following the perimeter fence from point to point, leaving nowhere unexplored, not even the distant spot on the hillside where another huge pylon shunted its lines into town. Though the sun had already set, it was still bright out, as if, by fiat of the Ministry of the Interior, for which he worked, daylight saving time had stopped the earth in its tracks and kept the long, glimmering twilight afloat. How his wife would have loved this slow, light-drenched evening, she who was always so afraid of the oncoming night! He had now reached the northern limits of the settlement, where the fence began doubling back, still without finding the least trace of a park or paved road that might allow him to file a less incriminating report, and so he turned and headed southeast, watching his shadow grow longer and thinner in the dimming reddish light until it became a faint specter. A large, heavy woman, none other than a very red-faced and out-of-breath music teacher, was running after him, shouting and waving her hands. He stopped and regarded her sternly while listening to her news, uncertain whether the catch in her voice was from heartbreak or hilarity. Ben-Ya’ish, it seemed, had just called. “Where is he?” Molkho asked. “You won’t believe this,” said the music teacher, “but he’s in Haifa. He never went to Fasuta at all. He went straight to Haifa, because he was sure that the Arab had never picked you up. He just called from somewhere on the Carmel. Isn’t that where you live? Then he must be right near your house! But he’s already started back, so you may as well wait for him here.”

“Wait for him?” whispered Molkho, almost amused by the infinite impudence of the man. “You want me to wait some more?” he asked, staring at her half-menacingly and half-comically while the light behind her went on dying, flattening the children in the playground near the shopping center into black paper cutouts. The music teacher, however, did not seem to see the irony of it. “Yes,” she said, matching him stare for stare, “that’s what he told me to tell you. He’ll feel terrible if you leave now.” Once again Ben-Ya’ish’s feelings were being flaunted as though they were those of an innocent child who must be prevented from suffering at all costs! “First of all,” said Molkho sharply, with the smile of a man who has seen everything, “first of all, I want a telephone. A real one on which I can talk. After that, I’ll tell you my decision.” Apparently the music teacher had had just such a contingency in mind, because jingling in her hands were the keys not only to the office but to Ben-Ya’ish’s house, which was now offered to him as a sanctuary. And so together they walked back to the school, by which children were still playing soccer; there she unlocked the front gate and the office, switched on the light, and hurried off with the excuse that she had left something cooking at home, flinging the keys on the desk of the disorderly room like a title deed.

His first call was to his younger son, whom he informed that he might not be coming home that night, grateful that his children were already grown up and no longer dependent on him. Then he phoned his mother in Jerusalem to say hello, and was asked where he was calling from and why he sounded so distant. “I’m in the Galilee,” he said. “The Galilee? What are you doing there?” “I’m here on business,” he told her. “But it’s already night,” she remonstrated. “So what?” he asked. “So be careful.” “All right, I’ll be careful,” promised Molkho, wondering whom to call next. Perhaps his cousin in Paris, to whom he had not spoken or even written a thank-you note since he got back? It was a tempting thought, but fearful the call might be traced to him, he refrained. He glanced again at his files, which seemed suddenly quite pointless, locked the office door behind him, and wandered down the dark corridor, wondering whether compositions were still hung on the walls as they were when he was a boy and even entering several classrooms, turning on the light in each; but there were no compositions, just pictures of flowers and animals. Which class was the girl in? Unless she had skipped a grade, he guessed, she must be a fifth-grader, and finding her classroom, he spent a long while there and even sat in one of the seats. In general, the school surprised him by being so clean and orderly that he considered praising it in his report as the single bright spot in the village. Even the bathrooms were well kept, and he was especially impressed by the little child-size toilets. Now there’s creative thinking, he mused, sitting on one of them and trying to imagine how a child would feel on it.

At last he locked the front gate of the school and put the keys in his pocket. Many eyes, he felt, were on him in the darkness, wondering about the long-suffering but persistent ministry whose loyal representative he was. He walked back to the shopping center, which was now crowded with people and brightly lit by neon lights. In the café, which was doing a brisk business, small children ran back and forth between the tables. People looked at him warmly now, their former reserve gone, as if by virtue of the keys he was no longer the outside inspector but a local, if still temporary, resident, and he sat down at a table, nodding to people he knew, while the dark-skinned café owner, as unshaven and unkempt as ever (did he ever wash his hands? Molkho wondered), hovered silently behind him like a shade. If he wants to serve me more cannibal stew, thought Molkho, I’m afraid I don’t have an appetite. In fact, his hike to the waterfall and his evening walk had so satisfied him that he didn’t feel like eating anything, not for all the receipts in the world, and all he asked for was a cup of tea, unsweetened, please. Meanwhile, a small crowd had gathered approvingly around him, praising his patience in waiting for Ben-Ya’ish, who was sure to arrive and set everything to rights, since he had only their good in mind. Why, if Molkho hadn’t stayed, Ben-Ya’ish would have been disappointed—they all would have been!

From that, they passed to other things. What did Molkho think about the situation in Lebanon? And what did he believe would happen now that the army was withdrawing? He should know that just because they lived near the border and had suffered from PLO attacks was no reason to blame them for the frightful war. They felt for the soldiers who were killed in it, yet there was no denying it had given them three years of peace, without a single shot or shell fired at them. What would happen now? Would they have to go back to living in shelters? They talked on and on, about the present prime minister and the former prime minister and the prime ministers before him and who was better and what was good and bad about each and life in general, and even asked Molkho about himself. Why, these people are folks just like me! he thought. When the television news came on, they all fell silent, watching the pullout from Lebanon with its loaded trucks and tank carriers. Just then a flame-faced boy came running up to him: Ben-Ya’ish had phoned! He was already in Acre and hoped that Molkho would wait.

The report was received with satisfaction, and when the news was over the cafe dimmed its lights and the customers rose and drifted out. “There’s a movie now. Why don’t you come?” they said to Molkho, who decided to join them, wondering whether he could put in for overtime. He was led to a part of the village he hadn’t been in before and shown into the local cinema, apparently a renovated chicken run, which was soon packed with more people than he would have guessed lived in the place, many of them young couples. The natives are stirring, he thought, looking up at the high corrugated-tin ceiling on its wooden rafters and down at the seats, which seemed to be ordinary house chairs spread in a semicircle on the dirt floor, which still smelled of chicken manure. A large sheet hung at one end of the hall and a projector occupied a table in the middle, while in a far corner mint tea and sunflower seeds were being served to the audience, which stood around joking and laughing at the children who were caught sneaking in. The Indian girl’s mother was there too, seated with a peaceful look on her face, wet wisps of freshly washed hair sticking out from under a black kerchief, her large belly protruding and her eyes already glued to the makeshift screen. Molkho sat near her and waved a friendly hello, which she returned with a smile after a brief hesitation. All in all, he now felt welcomed by the villagers, who seemed content with him as well as curious.

The lights had gone out and the reel was being wound when he felt a hand on his arm. It was the music teacher. “I’ve got good news,” she said. “Ben-Ya’ish just called from Karmiel. He’s halfway here!” By now, Molkho had the feeling that Ben-Ya’ish was less an actual person than a collective identity passed from one villager to another, but making no comment, he stretched out in his chair, sipping slowly from his mint tea. The movie, which was in Turkish or Greek, was amateurishly made and promised from the outset to be a rather erotic, if not out-and-out pornographic, film about high-society sex in a luxury hotel on some Mediterranean coast The female lead was a dark-haired, buxom woman, not pretty but vivacious and bold, even oddly maternal, to whom the audience responded with a buzz of whispers and a cracking of sunflower seeds while Molkho scooped up some dirt from the floor and let it trickle through his fingers until only a few crumbs were left, raising them to his nose and inhaling the aroma of chicken dung flavored with poultry feed. Meanwhile, the actors on the screen having dramatically stripped and begun making love, the audience fell quiet, its every breath audible, its eyes narrowed as though with somnolence—Molkho’s, too, though he was also beginning to feel hungry. Idly he sat watching the passionate embraces, wondering whether they were real or shammed, his head lolling heavily; but suddenly, as if a rusty old motor inside him had suddenly turned over, he felt his member grow stiff, and he frowned deeply, sickened and titillated at once.

The lights were kept dimmed when it was time for the reel to be changed, leaving people to whisper unseen in the dark. Someone knelt in front of Molkho. It was a young woman who said, “Ben-Ya’ish called again! He caught a ride to Kiryat Shmonah.” “Kiryat Shmonah?” echoed Molkho mirthfully, for the council manager, it seemed, had overshot his mark and now had to travel back the other way. “Yes, but he’ll try to get back here tonight. You may as well stay.” As if by now he had anywhere to go!

The movie ended at eleven. Heavily the audience rose and stretched itself, yawning disappointedly. Molkho exited behind the Indian’s pregnant wife, who waddled on her short, crooked legs like a big duck; she was, he noticed when she smiled at him, slightly cross-eyed, like her daughter. The moon was just rising in the starry sky, and it was very cold. Briefcase in hand he walked silently by her side, adjusting himself to her slow pace. The audience began to disperse, and she, too, chose a path and struck out on it, quickening her tiny steps as if pursuing the stomach that preceded her. It takes guts to go to the movies when you’re so close to giving birth, Molkho thought. Not that there was any reason for concern, for even if she were to deliver right here and now, in the middle of the path, there were still lights in many houses and the village showed no signs of going to bed. On the contrary, the later the hour, the livelier things seemed: shadowy figures could be seen carrying work tools, a tractor chugged somewhere nearby, and there was an overall sense of definite, if rather vague, activity.

The lights were on in the Indian’s house too. He was waiting up and did not seem surprised to see Molkho appear with his wife, as if it had been clear to him all along that the visitor was fated to sleep there. Did he want to eat anything? asked the man, who was wearing pants and pajama tops, in a low but wakeful tone of voice. Molkho, though, did not want to bother his host—who, surrounded by his piles of books, appeared at this midnight hour to be full of intellectual vigor—and agreed only to drink a glass of wine with him. “Ben-Ya’ish is on his way. Everyone says so,” Molkho whispered, and the Indian nodded, though the whereabouts of the council manager did not seem to concern him unduly. While his wife took out fresh sheets and cleared the living room couch, he went to his daughter’s room, lifted her in her sleep, and carried her out like a folded ebony bird. Molkho tried to help, catching hold of the girl’s leg and feeling a wave of warmth when her large, sleepy eyes, without their glasses now, opened for a moment to regard him. The woman spread the child’s sheets on the couch, and the Indian laid her down and covered her. Then her bed was remade with fresh sheets for Molkho, who was given a towel too. “I’m sorry to be such a nuisance,” he said happily, “but what could I do? This Ben-Ya’ish of yours is playing games with us all.”

The door shut behind him. Shut, too, were the windows and blinds of the room, which still was warm from the girl’s sleep. He put his briefcase on the desk and paused to look at the schoolbooks scattered there, careful not to touch the glasses that lay opened on top of them and stirred his pity in some unclear way. He debated whether to put on the pajamas he had brought or to lie down in his underwear and decided in the end that he needed the pajamas to sleep. Why, he thought, full of wonder at himself, she hated sleeping in other people’s houses and this is the second time this week I’m doing it!

There was a knock on the door. It was the woman, who had come to bring him an extra pillow, her eyes on the floor as if embarrassed to see him in pajamas. “I know I’m inconveniencing you,” whispered Molkho again, “but it’s not my fault. He pulled a fast one on all of us. He’s playing games with me.” Slowly he stretched out on the child’s bed, not feeling at all tired, convinced he would never be able to sleep. In his mind he replayed the scenes of the movie and once more smelled the manure, and then thought of the pregnant woman hurrying on crooked legs down the moonlight-spangled path, of the cow in its shed, and of his sexual desperation, picturing the girl being carried like an ebony bird, the kernel of pure desire hidden in her folded wings. Why here? he began to argue bitterly with his wife. What do you want from me? How can you say that I killed you? But he knew she wouldn’t answer and that the silence surrounding him would never be broken, for the days were gone when there was someone to know whatever was on his mind, even at a distance: as soon as he phoned her from the office, she knew just what he was feeling and thinking. Now he was free to do as he pleased, and so he rose barefoot in the dark, carefully lifted the glasses from the desk, held them up, kissed them, fogging the lenses with his lips, wet them slightly, dried them, folded them, and put them back in their place. I’ve never been so exhausted in my life, he thought, lying down again in preparation for a sleepless night while listening to the crickets and the sound of a tractor.

And yet, despite himself, he fell asleep, waking up five hours later with a feeling of amazement at having gotten through the night. As in his distant days of army service, he rose at once and dressed, made the bed, and put on his shoes in a jiffy. Then, returning his things to the briefcase, he opened the window and leapt straight out into the grainy light of the thick mist swaddling the mountain. Soon the sun would be up. Shivering with cold, he stopped to relieve himself by the cowshed before stepping inside to look at the cow, who stood there alertly as if expecting company. Wondering if cows had feelings, he took a friendly step toward her, tapping her bony forehead with his fist and folding her ears in two like cardboard. No, they didn’t, he concluded, stepping back outside with his briefcase. The rim of the sun appeared over the hill, directly above Ben-Ya’ish’s house, the windows of which, he noticed, were open. And indeed, hurrying up to it, he found its bed occupied and woke the sleeper at once.

It was Ben-Ya’ish himself, a young man in heavy flannel pajamas who resembled a student more than a politician and lay beneath a pile of quilts surrounded by electrical appliances. “I’m so terribly sorry,” he said, smiling at Molkho guiltily, already apologizing before he was awake. “Please, please forgive me. We kept getting our signals crossed. Why, I went all the way to Haifa just to see you, and getting back from there wasn’t easy. Why didn’t you sleep here? I told my secretary to give you the keys, and all the account books too. You’ve got me wrong and I’ll prove it. I know, I know, you looked for the road and the park and couldn’t find them, but I’ll show you all the plans. There were just so many out-of-work men who had used up their unemployment checks that I had to dip into the budget to help them, but we’ll balance the books yet; everything will add up in the end. Maybe you can show me the best way to do it, because I’m really not very experienced. I mean, I know the money was budgeted for development, but how can you develop a village that’s starving to death?”

Molkho sat there listening quietly, incapable of anger, resigned to defeat by this sleepy, stubble-cheeked, bright-eyed young man, toward whom he was feeling increasingly sympathetic. In the end, he knew, he would not even be able to scold him, especially not now, when he had just seen the sun rise in its glory on men in need of mercy. And so he waited for him to dress and drink his coffee, and followed him outside into the still chilly but now clear morning, feeling slightly feverish as he was led to a field with some saplings and bushes that had apparently been planted the night before in lieu of a park and, thence, greeted by cheerful good-mornings, to the other end of the village, where some fresh piles of sand and gravel dumped on a path beside an oil drum full of bubbling tar were meant to signify a road. There was even a steamroller, painted green like a picture from an old children’s book. Ben-Ya’ish talked on and on, waving documents and plans. “Just show me the best way to state the facts,” he begged Molkho, “the best way to keep us out of trouble, because more trouble is the last thing we need.” And in the end, that was just what Molkho did.

THEY WORKED TOGETHER all morning in the office, besieged on all sides by the sound of children practicing Passover songs for a school assembly. The music teacher, Molkho had to admit, was a force to be reckoned with; the singing, coming from all the classrooms, filled every cranny of the building and inspired him to fill in the missing gaps in the accounts. By eleven, the job was finished and he knew that it was time to leave; but first he asked to see the Indian girl, who was taken out of class for him to remind her to thank her parents. She nodded, darkly solemn behind her big, funny glasses, dressed in her leotard again, and Molkho, who felt sure that hard times were in store for her, was overcome by pity. Damp-eyed, he could not restrain himself from bending down and giving her a kiss. “You’re a fine girl,” he said to her. “I’ll never forget you. Would you like a little brother or a sister?” “Whatever comes,” she murmured by rote, as though the answer were rehearsed. By now, it was nearly twelve, and he was being warned not to miss the last bus, which left early on Friday, if he did not want to be stuck in the village again.

The bus took two-and-a-half tiresome hours and seemed to stop in every town in the Galilee, and though evening was still far away when he arrived in Haifa, there was already a Sabbath quiet in the air. At home he was surprised to find his three children happily eating together in the kitchen, his daughter still in her officer’s uniform and the college student in high spirits because he had done well on an exam that morning. “You got a nice tan up there,” they told him, and he described the village, with all its Indians, for them and even said a few words about the girl. He peered into the pots, emptied food from one to another, ordered the college student to do the dishes, and went to run a bath, shave, and nap, feeling worn out but satisfied, as if after a long but happily ended ordeal.

It was evening when he awoke and found the three of them eating again in the kitchen. “Why didn’t you wait?” he scolded them. “It’s Sabbath eve!” Even when they explained to him that their grandmother had called to say she wasn’t coming, because she had guests of her own, her Russian friend and the friend’s daughter, Molkho was not mollified. “So what? That doesn’t mean we needn’t have a Sabbath dinner! What’s the matter with you?” Brooking no objections, he made them stop eating, move their plates to the large table in the dining room, and light the Sabbath candles.

After dinner some friends he had long been out of touch with phoned to invite him over, which pleased him greatly, because he had felt abandoned by their social circle since his wife’s death. He had known, of course, that she was more popular than he, for he was considered a dull conversationalist. Still, he had kept telling himself, you would think they’d feel an obligation—toward her, if not toward me.

He dressed his best for the occasion, arrived at his hosts’ home to find several couples already there, some of whom he knew, and was seated next to an overweight, heavily bejeweled woman, a divorcée who had come all the way from Tel Aviv and stared at him with liquid, bovine eyes he did not like. Though at first the situation amused him, he soon lapsed into indignant silence. The woman, it seemed, knew a great deal about him and asked him many well-informed questions, to which his answers were short and laconic. Did he ever get to Tel Aviv? she inquired at last. Hardly ever anymore, he replied; the gas simply cost too much. “You could take a bus,” she said, blushing. “Yes, I know,” answered Molkho. “I took one from the Galilee for three hours today, and I hope I never take another.” The guests sitting close to him snickered, and he felt sure that his hostess was offended. Suddenly he feared they might give up on him.

Though he rose early the next morning, it was already very hot. He put on old clothes, did a wash in the machine, and went down to wash his car and hoe his little garden plot. At ten, he called his mother-in-law, but her room did not answer and the information desk did not know where she was, so he sat down to itemize his Galilee expenses, which seemed far too small, no matter how long the list grew. He then hung the wash on the line, cleaned the storeroom, throwing out some old cans of dry paint, and was about to shower when, loath to take off his work clothes so soon, he went about energetically looking for something else to do. Finding nothing, he said to his younger son, “Come on, let’s take a walk in the ravine. That’s something we haven’t done in ages.” The boy, however, was too lazy to move, so that Molkho, though reluctant to go by himself, changed his shoes and headed down the familiar path. At first, he had to traverse an obstacle course of building debris, old cement sacks, rusting boilers, and even an intact washing machine, all indisputable evidence of his neighbors’ economic progress; but the farther down he walked, the more nature reasserted itself with rank lushness, and a deep silence descended on the path, which wound in and out among bushes. The sea below him vanished from sight, as did the houses above, leaving him as alone as if he were in the heart of a jungle. Conscious of his quickened heartbeat, he stopped and considered turning back, knowing that the climb up would be even harder; but the last few days had given him new strength and he kept on going to the bottom, where the winter rain had unfurled such a carpet of curly grass that he could have lain down and rolled in it were it not for all the detritus, which included the bleached bones of a large animal. The sea was back in sight now, and deciding not to retrace his steps but rather to ascend the opposite slope, where the vegetation was thinner, and from there to telephone his children to pick him up in the car, he set out in that direction, passing three merrily picnicking women drinking tea. He exchanged a few friendly words with them and started up the path, which was less overgrown but very steep, heading toward a row of houses crowning the hill. The sun was beating down now, and the unfamiliar ascent was fatiguing, especially as it ended at a barbed-wire fence surrounding the backyard of the first house. By the time he managed to get through it, he had tom his pants, cut his leg, and come to regret the whole adventure. Dirty and thirsty, he came out on a little street that did not seem to have a pay phone, only a synagogue, from which some men were just emerging. He would be better off, he decided, going to his mother-in-law’s nearby old-age home, slipping unnoticed up to her room, and tidying up there.

Head down, he passed quickly through the big glass entrance and crossed the spic-and-span lobby, whose occupants, dressed in their Sabbath best, looked approvingly at the figure in tom work clothes, no doubt a repairman come to fix something. Taking the slow, solid elevator up to the ninth floor, he walked down the dim hallway and knocked on his mother-in-law’s door. Though there was no answer, the door opened when he tried the handle. Surprisingly, the room was in a state of great disorder: an open suitcase lay on the floor with a dress half-thrown over it, and pillows and pillowcases had been hung out to air on the railing of the little terrace. He was still bewilderedly taking it in when the sheets rustled on his mother-in-law’s bed and up sat a stranger in pajamas, a plump, sturdy woman of about thirty-five with big bright eyes.

Molkho saw at once by her resemblance to her mother that she was the daughter of the little old Russian, the young lady who was unhappy in Israel and wished to return to the Soviet Union. At first, roused from her beauty sleep by an unexpected intruder, she seemed terrified, even hysterical; yet before many seconds had gone by, he began to suspect that she was in fact drunk. And on a summery day like this, he marveled, startled by the strong scent of alcohol. She knew almost no Hebrew, let alone English or French, and the few words she uttered between giggles sounded odd indeed.

Through the open window the sky seemed very blue. He tried explaining who he was while the plump woman tried telling him where his mother-in-law had gone to, laughing over each Hebrew word as if it were a particularly funny joke. Finally, despairing of communicating, she led him out on the terrace and pointed at the lawn below, where, near the rosebush-ringed swimming pool, sat his wife’s mother and her Russian friend, sunbathing on flowery blankets. Molkho nodded, weighed going to the bathroom for a drink of water, ruled against it, and strode quickly back out to the elevator. Yet he did not ride it all the way down but got out on the fifth floor, where the usual solemn silence prevailed in the medical ward, though because of the heat the doors of the sickrooms were open, revealing grave oldsters who sat leafing through magazines beside their moribund friends. Molkho thrilled to the sight of the familiar equipment, the white intravenous bottles, the wheelchairs, and the gray tanks of oxygen, and was about to sit down to rest when a nurse blocked his way. Rolling up his ripped pants, he showed her the cut on his leg. “I’m Mrs. Starkman’s son-in-law,” he explained, “and I thought you might give me first aid.” At once he was ushered into a sunny little office, where, after he washed, the cut was disinfected, treated with a yellow, pollenlike powder, and bandaged with gauze. It must be a welcome change for the nurses to deal with something nonterminal, he thought, eagerly examining the apparatus around him and happily concluding that, allowing for his modest budget, the care received by his wife had been quite state-of-the-art.

He descended to the lobby with his bandaged leg. As usual, he reflected, summer had come all at once, bursting through every window. Head high, he made straight for the lawn, where he found his mother-in-law, drugged by the sun, in a state of brazen nirvana, fast asleep in a house frock that bared her veiny old legs, while her Russian friend sat silently guarding her, a bit fearful of the unaccustomedly strong sun, her white hair tinged with a few last strands of gold. Recognizing him at once, she rose and executed her odd little bow, then introduced herself in a pleasant voice as Stasya, and chatted in a Hebrew that wasn’t bad at all. Molkho, for his part, speaking in a whisper so as not to wake his mother-in-law, whose profound slumber seemed slightly worrisome to him too, explained why he was there and even displayed his new bandage. He had just asked the Russian woman why her daughter didn’t like Israel when his mother-in-law, hearing his voice, awoke and opened her faded gray, sun-softened eyes with surprise and a hint of annoyance. Yet, though Molkho began telling her at once of his adventures, rolling up his pants to show the bandage again, she did not appear to listen. Even when he switched the subject to her grandchildren, she seemed too weak from the sun to respond, barely able to keep her eyes from shutting. Why, in a minute she’ll melt away right in front of me! he thought. It grieved him to see her so springlike and peaceful on this blue Saturday afternoon, as if she had already forgotten all about her daughter’s death.

THE NEXT MORNING, he asked to see the director. At ten o’clock he was summoned, laying his report on the desk with a solemnity that took his easygoing boss by surprise. “I was there twice and even stayed over one night,” Molkho told him. “I had a look around and checked things out as best I could. I don’t claim to have it figured out down to the bottom line, but I did see quite a lot, and my impression is that there may be a lot of confusion up there, but there’s no corruption. There’s a road being built and a park being planted, and while the village council doesn’t own a tractor, I did see a steamroller. I helped them put their accounts in order and insisted that they itemize everything and attach receipts. If they do, I think we can pass the file on to the state comptroller’s office. Maybe there are still dark secrets to unearth; that’s their job. But I think we’ve done what we could. Of course, it’s up to you.”

The director leafed through the file, asked a few questions, and thanked Molkho profusely, as if he had done something heroic, after which he inquired about the health of his children and his mother-in-law, whom he remembered well. And that was the end of it. Or, at least, so Molkho thought until later that day he was again called to the director’s office, where, to his alarm, he found the legal adviser sitting in a sleeveless knit dress, her high-heeled shoes crossed, turning the Xeroxed pages of the file. She looked pale, and he suddenly feared that she was about to exact her pound of flesh for his failure to go to bed with her. Why, oh why, couldn’t he at least have kissed those lily-white arms, which certainly deserved some consideration? Greeting him with a faint smile, she made no attempt to conceal the coolness with which she had already written him off. She had been invited, explained the director, to ask Molkho a few questions, which he proceeded to answer as best he could. Yes, work on the road had begun; he had seen it himself. And the park, too; the trees and bushes had already been planted. Not that he knew what they needed a park for with all that natural magnificence around them, but of course, it was their prerogative to have one. As for the tractor, yes, it was in his report—that is, it was not exactly a tractor: it was a secondhand steamroller, but it did exist and a copy of its registration was included. And though there was no denying that Ben-Ya’ish was a rather muddled young man who had taken administrative liberties with unemployment checks, this was not the first such case come across by their office, which had always looked the other way in the past. After all, times were hard up there.

The legal adviser stared at him intently, her freckles pale in the afternoon sunlight. Did she still roam the world for opera? wondered Molkho, who had himself given music short shrift in recent months. Looking down at the desk, he phrased his defense of Ben-Ya’ish carefully while the director sat listening in silence. “So you think everything is just fine up there?” the legal adviser interrupted mockingly, as though he were a clearly hopeless case. “You found no problems? No irregularities?” I didn’t say that, answered Molkho patiently. “I was there twice and even stayed over one night, but I can’t say I went into it thoroughly.” “That’s obvious,” she laughed snidely, continuing to leaf through the file. But the director, though noncommittal, seemed to be on Molkho’s side; with a kind look in his direction he picked up the original file and began to thumb through it too. All at once Molkho’s fears vanished. Casually, as though the rest no longer mattered, he rose and crossed the large room to the open window, from where he watched the two of them studying the file. For a moment he just stood there. Then, feeling the need to make some overture to her, or perhaps to them both, he declared, “Why, it’s really summer!” Startled by the sound of his voice, he pointed out the window by way of illustration. “It’s always the same,” he explained. “Spring is over before you even know it.”