The Lover

ADAM

And in the last war we lost a lover. We used to have a lover, and since the war he is gone. Just disappeared. He and his grandmother’s old Morris. And more than six months have passed and there has been no sign from him. We are always saying it’s a small, intimate country, if you try hard enough you’ll discover links between the most distant people — and now it’s as if the man has been swallowed up by the earth, disappeared without trace, and all the searches have been fruitless. If I was sure he had been killed, I would give up the search. What right have we to be stubborn about a dead lover, there are some people who have lost all that is dear — sons, fathers and husbands. But, how can I put it, still I’m convinced that he hasn’t been killed. Not him. I’m sure that he never even reached the front. And even if he was killed, where is the car, where has that disappeared to? You can’t just hide a car in the sand.

There was a war. That’s right. It came upon us a complete surprise. Again and again I read the confused accounts of what happened, trying to get to the bottom of the chaos that ruled then. After all, he wasn’t the only one who disappeared. To this day there is before us a list of so many missing, so many mysteries. And next of kin are still gathering last remnants — scraps of clothing, bits of charred documents, twisted pens, bullet-ridden wallets, melted wedding rings. Chasing after elusive eyewitnesses, after the shadow of a man who heard a rumour, trying in the mist to piece together a picture of their loved one. But even they are giving up the search. So what right have we to persist. After all, he’s a stranger to us. A doubtful Israeli, a deserter in fact, who returned to the country for a short visit to sort out some inheritance and stayed, perhaps also on our account. I don’t know, I can’t be sure. But I repeat, he hasn’t been killed. Of that I’m convinced. And that is the cause of the unease that has been eating at me these last months, that gives me no rest, that sends me out on the road in search of him. More than that: strange ideas occur to me on his account, that in the thick of the battle, in the confusion and disorder of units disbanding and regrouping, there were some — let’s say two or three — who took advantage of this confusion to break off and disappear. I mean, they simply decided not to return home, to abandon their old ties and go elsewhere.

It may seem a crazy idea, but not to me. You could say I’ve become an expert on this subject of missing persons.

Boaz, for example. Again and again since the cease-fire there has been that announcement in the papers about Boaz, who disappeared. Something like this: Mom and Dad are looking for Boaz. And a picture of a young man, a child almost, with short hair, a young soldier in the Tank Corps, and some astonishing details. At the beginning of the war on such and such a date he was seen in action in his tank in the front line in such and such a place. But ten days later, towards the end of the war, a childhood friend, a trusted friend, met him at a crossroads far from the front. They had a short conversation, and parted. And from that point on, Boaz’s traces have vanished.

A real mystery –

But we have hardened, reading announcements such as these in the papers, pausing for a moment and continuing with a weary glance to flick through the pages. This last war has made us numb.

But Boaz’s parents persist, and why shouldn’t they? For years they brought up a son, walked with him to the nursery, ran with him to the doctor, made sandwiches for him in the morning when he went away to the youth camp, waited for him at the railway station when he returned from a school trip. They washed and ironed and worried the whole time. Suddenly he disappears. And nobody can tell them where he is, what has happened to him. The whole system, nation, society, which absorbed him so voraciously, now begins to falter. And when the parents persist, and why shouldn’t they, a young officer is sent to them, well meaning no doubt but lacking experience. He arrives in a jeep and takes them, on a bright winter’s day, on a journey to the middle of the desert, driving long hours in silence deep into the wilderness, on roads that are not roads, through the dust and the desolation to a bare unmarked little mound of sand, vast emptiness all around. This officer boy goes red, stammers, here is where he was seen for the last time. See, even the dry rocks are broken in mourning. How is it possible …

And I say, these parents who do not give up, who are not content with this sandy conclusion beside a lonely hill, who glare with hatred at the young officer, who from sheer anger and disappointment are ready to attack him, these parents demand further explanation, for who can assure them that their Boaz, Boaz their son, is not sitting at this very moment, in summer clothes, with long hair, on a distant beach, in the port of a far-off country, watching the landscape that lies open before him and sipping a soft drink. Perhaps he had reasons for not returning home, even at the price of his parents’ misery. He grew suddenly disgusted by something, or something scared him. And if his parents would only study the problem from such an angle, instead of scurrying from one army office to another, there might be a chance of picking up his trail.

But how could they –

I too once visited such an army office, searching for him, and I saw how hopeless it was, in spite of the smiles and the willingness and the sympathy. But that was only after two months or more, when we realized that the lover had really disappeared, that he wasn’t going to return. Until then we had said, he must still be on the move, caught up in new experiences, confused by encounters with unfamiliar things. What does he know about the real Israel. Besides, we were so busy that we hardly had the leisure to think about him. Asya was at the school all the time, filling in for teachers who had been called up, running around in the evenings between meetings of the emergency committees, visiting the parents of pupils from the senior grades who had been killed or wounded. At night she used to come home exhausted, collapse on the bed and fall asleep right away. And I had a heavy load of work also, the garage was full of cars already in the first days of the war. Some of my customers were on their way to the front, already in uniform, and they brought their cars in for major repairs, thinking that the war would be a short one, a quick journey of adventure, a good opportunity to have the engine overhauled or the bearings changed, or get a new coat of paint, and in a few days they would be returning home, picking up their cars and going back to their business.

But they didn’t return so quickly. My parking lot filled up. One of my customers didn’t return at all. I had to return the car personally to his parents’ house, to shake hands with the mourners, to mumble some words of condolence and, of course, to cancel the fee, which amounted to several hundred pounds. The other cars were taken away by the wives, those of them who knew how to drive. I never had so much to do with women as in those weeks immediately after the war. They took the cars over, and slowly but surely they ruined them. Driving without water, without oil, even forgetting to look at the fuel gauge. In the middle of the night the phone would ring, and a woman’s voice appeal for my help. And I would drag myself out in the middle of the night, roaming the darkened city to find in a narrow side street a young woman, a child really, standing panic-stricken beside a huge luxury car with an empty fuel tank.

But that disruption also came to an end, and life began to return to normal. The men came back from the army, wandering about in the mornings in their khaki clothes and heavy boots, buying supplies in the grocers’ shops, dust in their eyes, looking dazed, stammering a little. They came and collected their cars and postponed payment. A hard winter was setting in. Dull days, sodden with rain. It became harder and harder for us to sleep at night. Waking in the middle of the night to the sound of thunder, going to the bathroom, switching on the radio for a moment. So it was that I discovered the extent of Dafi’s insomnia. The lover’s disappearance began to penetrate. Yearning for him, wondering where he is. Asya knows no peace, running to the phone every time it rings. She says nothing, but I catch her look –

In the mornings I have taken to driving to the garage by a roundabout route, by way of the lower city, passing his grandmother’s house, looking for a sign of life behind the sealed shutters with their peeling paint. Sometimes even parking the car for a moment and running up the deserted staircase to examine the broken letter box that hangs there precariously, to see if there’s a letter or a message for him, or from him. Can we abandon him, forget him? After all, who but us could know he is gone?

DAFI

Dafi, my dear, it’s a white night, there’s no point in trying. You’ll only end up crying again, kid. I know you, I heard you whimpering under the blanket. It’s only when you try too hard to sleep that all these things get on your nerves — the faint snoring of Daddy or Mommy, the noise of a car in the street, the wind rattling the shutter in the bathroom. It’s already past midnight. You thought you’d get away with it, pudgy, but tonight is a night without sleep. There’s no choice. Stop, enough turning the pillow and tossing from side to side, playing dead. No more fooling. Who are you trying to kid? Open your eyes, please, pull yourself together, sit up and put on the light and make a plan for killing the time that’s left between now and morning.

I knew this afternoon that tonight there’d be problems, that I wouldn’t be able to sleep. It’s a strange thing, this premonition. Tali and Osnat came around this afternoon and stayed until the evening. We had a good time, chatting and laughing and gossiping, about the teachers to begin with, but about the boys most of all. Osnat’s completely crazy, she’s been like this since the beginning of the year, she’s got nothing else to talk about, just boys. Every few weeks she falls in love with someone new, goes right off her head. Usually boys from the seventh and eighth grades who don’t even know they’ve been fallen in love with. But that doesn’t stop her from making a fantastic story out of it, every time it happens. I really love her. She’s ugly and thin, wears glasses, and she’s got a tongue like a sharp knife. Tali and I roared with laughter at her descriptions, we made such a row that Daddy opened the door to see what was going on, but he closed it again in a hurry because Tali had taken off her shoes and her sweater, opened her blouse, let her hair down and lay down on my bed. Wherever she goes she’s always taking something off and getting into other people’s beds. Completely unbalanced. A real looker and a good friend.

We had fun. Osnat was standing in the middle of the room with her glasses pushed down on her nose, imitating Shwartzy, and suddenly in the middle of all the fun and excitement, beyond Osnat’s head, outside the big window, there’s a little purple cloud, a night cloud, floating very low, actually touching the rooftops. And a little lightning flash ignites inside me, deep inside my head, a physical sensation. Tonight I won’t be able to sleep, a prophetic warning. When Tali and Osnat are fast asleep, I shall be tossing about here on my bed. But I said nothing, I went on chatting and laughing, and there was just that obstinate little flame burning away inside me, like the little pilot flame that’s always alight in our oven. No sleep for you, Dafi. Afterwards I forget about all this, or I pretend to forget. In the evening they went away and I sat down to do my homework, still expecting a normal night. I did a quick analysis of the two prophecies of wrath in Jeremiah and compared them. I soon polished off the images of death and destruction in The City of Slaughter. Stupid questions. But as soon as I opened the maths book, I started yawning. I suddenly felt terribly tired. Maybe I should’ve laid down on the bed and slept, made the most of it.

But I was silly and went on trying to understand the questions, and then Daddy called me to come and eat supper. When he gets the meal ready and I don’t come straightaway it always puts him in a foul mood. He’s in such a hurry to eat that he finishes off the meal before he’s finished preparing it.

Mommy hasn’t come in yet –

I sat beside him even though I wasn’t hungry, just to make him feel that he wasn’t alone. We hardly talked because it was the evening news on the radio and he was glued to it. He cooked me some scrambled eggs that I didn’t want. The food that he cooks never has any taste to it, although he’s sure he knows how to cook. When he saw I wasn’t eating the eggs, he ate them himself and left the kitchen. I threw some of the food in the rubbish, put the rest back in the fridge, promised to wash the dishes and went to watch TV. It was a programme in Arabic, but I sat and watched it, rather than go back to my room and find the maths book waiting for me there. Daddy tried at first to read the paper and watch TV at the same time. In the end he got up and went off to bed. A strange man. Deserves a close look, sometime. Who is he really? Is he just a garage boss who doesn’t talk and goes to bed at 9.30 in the evening?

Mommy still hasn’t come in –

I switched off the TV and went to have a shower. When I’m naked under the running water I really feel as if I’m drugged, time becomes sweet and shapeless, I could stand like this for hours. Once Daddy broke down the door because Mommy thought I’d fainted or something. I’d been standing there maybe an hour and I hadn’t heard them calling me. Now the water slowly goes cold. I’ve emptied the tank. Mommy will be mad at me. I dry myself, put on my pyjamas and switch off the lights in the house. I go into their bedroom, put out Daddy’s bedside lamp and pull the newspaper from underneath him. His beard is big and bushy, there are white hairs in it, glinting in the light from the passage. I feel sorry for him as I watch him sleeping, and it isn’t natural for children to pity their parents. I go into my room, take another look at the maths homework, perhaps inspiration will come from heaven, but the sky is dark, without a single star, and there’s a light rain falling. Since our maths teacher was killed in the war and they brought in that kid from the Technion I’ve lost all interest in the subject. It isn’t for me. I can’t even begin to understand the questions, never mind the answers.

I pull down the blinds and switch on the transistor, it’s that crooner Sarussi. Slowly I pack my school bag, leaving out the maths book on purpose. I’ll say I forgot it, that’ll be the fourth time this month. Next time I’ll have to think up a new excuse. At the moment Baby Face doesn’t say anything, he blushes as if he’s the one who’s lying, not me. He’s still a bit nervous, scared of getting involved, but he’s beginning to gain some confidence — there are disturbing signs. Mommy still hasn’t come home. Such a long teachers’ meeting. They must be hatching great plots against us.

It’s quiet in the house. Deep silence. And then the phone rings. I run to it but Daddy answers before I get to it. Since that man disappeared I’ve never been able to get to the phone first, Mommy or Daddy always pounce on it, they’ve even got an extension beside their bed.

I pick up the receiver in the study, and I hear Daddy talking to Tali. She’s startled to hear his sleepy voice. I join in the conversation at once. “What happened?” She’s forgotten what the history test tomorrow is about. That’s what she and Osnat came around for this afternoon, to learn some history, and somehow they forgot all about it. Me too. But I’m not worried about history, maybe it’s the only subject that I’m pretty sure about, a talent I got from Mommy; all sorts of pointless and trivial facts stick to me. I tell her the page numbers and she starts to protest, as if I’m the history teacher. “That’s far too much, what’s the big idea? Can’t do all that.”

Then she calms down, starts whispering something about Osnat, but a strange whisper rises from the phone, like heavy breathing. Daddy’s fallen asleep with the receiver. Tali shrieks. The girl’s a total hysteric. I put the phone down, hurry to Daddy, take the receiver from the pillow and put it back in its place. If only I had a fraction of his ability to sleep.

“Go to sleep …” he says suddenly.

“Yes, right away … Mommy hasn’t come in yet.”

“She’ll be home soon. Don’t wait up for her. You’ll be worn out in the morning.”

Back to my room. I start to sort it out, to turn over the day, scraps, feelings, words and laughter, all are like a thin layer of rubbish that I gather up and throw into the basket. I start tidying up the bed, airing it, I find Osnat’s purse and a tampon in a nylon bag that must be Tali’s, she carries it around with her everywhere. At last the room has some sort of shape. I put out the main light, switch on the bedside lamp. I pick up the book on the Age of Enlightenment and get into bed with it, to prepare for the test. The letters go blurred, my head goes heavy, my breathing heavy too, the moment of grace, grab it, wonderful, I’m asleep.

And then Mommy arrives, her footsteps so quick on the stairs sound as if she’s returning from an orgy, not a teachers’ meeting. The door opens. At once I call out, “Mommy?” She comes into my room, her coat is wet, a stack of papers under her arm, her face grey, she’s very tired.

“Asleep yet?”

“Not me.”

“What’s happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Then go to sleep.”

“Mommy?”

“Not now … you can see I’m exhausted.”

Lately that’s been her constant refrain. A terrible exhaustion. You can’t talk to her, she’s always busy, as if she were running the whole world. Now her quick footsteps in the house, moving about in the dim light, taking something out of the fridge, undressing in the bathroom, tries to shower but turns it off immediately. Quickly I switch off the light so she won’t come in and shout at me for using all the hot water. She goes into the dark bedroom, Daddy mutters something, she answers, and they are silent.

A quiet married life –

The last light in the house has gone out. I close my eyes, still hoping. Everything is quiet. My mind at rest, my school bag packed, the house locked, the shutters closed. The street is quiet. Everything is right for sleep and maybe I really have slept for a minute or two and then time passes, and I understand that I’m really not asleep, that the little flame burning down inside the soul won’t leave me alone. I begin to stir restlessly and the strange wakefulness gets stronger. I turn the pillow over, change position every quarter of an hour, then every few minutes. An hour passes. The luminous hands touch midnight. That’s it. You might just as well get up, my dear. Poor Dafi, it’s a white night and there’s no point in fighting it, get up and wake up.

The path of light on sleepless nights. First the small light beside the bed, then the main light in the bedroom, the light in the passage, and the white light in the kitchen and last of all the light inside the fridge.

Midnight feast. What use is a diet during the day if at night you gobble up four hundred calories on the quiet? A slice of cake, cheese, a piece of chocolate and the last of the milk. Then, heavy and drowsy, I sink down on the sofa in the dark sitting room, facing the big window, opposite me is a mighty ship, a brightly lit palace, under the mountain on the invisible sea. A wonderful vision of people awake. I go to fetch a pillow and a blanket, I come back and the ship has already vanished, she’s gone before you even realize she’s moving.

Once I managed to get some sleep on the sofa in the sitting room, but not tonight. The upholstery scratches me. I lie there for a quarter of an hour, half an hour. I reach out for the radio. What language is this? Greek? Turkish? Yugoslav? The songs are nice. And the disc jockey has a sexy voice, chattering away. Old women are talking to him on the phone, their voices shaky, they make him laugh, he’s in fits of laughter, quite uninhibited. I almost join in. Well, it seems not everyone’s asleep. Suddenly he fades out, there’s an ad for Coca-Cola, for Fiat, a last song, an announcer’s voice, she sounds half asleep, seems to be saying good night. A whistle. The station’s closed down. It’s already after one o’clock.

The clock creeps on, five hours at least until first light. I sit in the chair, I can’t even lie down, I’m close to tears. What about the man who types? I almost forgot him. The man who types at night in the house across the wadi. I go to the bathroom and through the little window that looks out across the wadi I search for his lighted window. There he is, that’s him. Three cheers for the man who types at night. Sitting at his desk and working hard, my nocturnal friend.

I discovered him by chance a few weeks ago. A bachelor? Married? I know nothing about him. In the daytime the curtains are drawn, he appears only at night, alone there in the light, working at something, writing without a break. Every time I see him I’m determined to visit the neighbourhood across the wadi, find out which is his house and what his name is. I’d phone him and say, “Mr. Typist, I watch you at night from the other side of the wadi. What are you writing? A thesis? A novel? What’s it about? You should write about insomnia, a subject that hasn’t been studied enough. The insomnia of a fifteen-year-old girl, for example, a student in the sixth grade, who lies awake every fourth night.”

Tears in my eyes –

I get dressed in a hurry, changing into a thick pair of woollen trousers, putting a big scarf over the pyjama top, taking an overcoat and Daddy’s fur hat. I put out the lights in the house and open the front door, holding the key in my clenched fist, going down the dark steps into the street. A little night stroll, I won’t go far. A hundred metres down the hill to the roundabout where Yigal was killed and back again. If Mommy and Daddy knew about this going for walks at night they’d kill me. It’s two-thirty. I’m in bedroom slippers, my feet are cold and shivering. I walk down a street that’s dead and damp, looking at the stars. Suddenly a car with lights full on comes racing down the slope, passes me and stops about five metres from me. I freeze. The car jerks backwards. A powerful torch flashes on, searching for me. Maybe they think I’m a little hooker. I’m seized by panic, the key drops into a puddle, someone jumps out of the car, a tall smiling figure. I pick up the key and run, hurrying up the steps, into the house, panting, I lock the door, undress in a hurry, get into bed and pull the blanket over my head.

How will it end, this night life? What’s eating me? Everything’s fine, after all. Good friends, comforts at home, boys starting to love me in secret, I know, they don’t say anything but they can’t hide it, those furtive glances in the classroom, those eyes following my legs. Someone from the eighth grade even tried to get off with me. A big boy with a dark face and pimples on his forehead grabbed me once by the school fence and kept me there for a whole hour, and talked. I don’t know about what. Crazy. Until I got away from him.

So why is it that I can’t sleep, even now at half-past three in the morning after I’ve gone through the whole programme of night activities and I’m exhausted, and tomorrow I’ve got seven hours in school and a test in history and maths that I haven’t prepared for.

I throw the blanket off again, getting out of bed heavily and clumsily, putting on the light, stumbling over the furniture, meaning to make a noise. I go to the bathroom for a drink of water, looking bleary-eyed at the man who types. He isn’t typing now, he’s sitting there resting his head on the typewriter. Even he’s asleep. I go to their bedroom, stand in the doorway. They’re fast asleep, like little children. I begin to wail softly, “Mommy, Daddy,” and then I go away.

At first, when I started having sleepless nights, I used to wake them up, Mommy or Daddy, whichever one I chose, sometimes both of them. Not really knowing why, in despair, wanting them to stop sleeping and to think about me. Mommy used to answer me at once, as if she’d been awake the whole time waiting for me. But it wasn’t like that. She’d just finish the sentence and fall straight back to sleep.

It takes time to wake Daddy up. At first he grunts and mumbles nonsense, he just can’t understand who is talking to him, you’d think he had a dozen children, I have to shake him to wake him up. But once he wakes up, he’s wide awake. He gets out of bed and goes to the bathroom and then he comes into my room, sits down beside me on the chair and starts asking questions. “What’s up? What’s the trouble? I’ll sit with you now until you go to sleep. He covers me up, puts out the light, puts a small pillow behind his head and slowly drops off to sleep. I feel sorry for him. After a quarter of an hour he wakes up and whispers “Are you asleep, Dafi?” I’m wide awake but I don’t say anything. Then he waits a little longer and goes back to his bed, stumbling like a sleepwalker.

I don’t wake them up anymore. What’s the point? Once when I went in to wake him, he said, “Go away, I told you to get out of here.” It was in such a clear voice. I was startled and hurt. “What?” I said, but then I realized he was talking in his sleep. I whispered, “Daddy?” but he didn’t answer.

Tears. Good morning. The tears again. Under the blanket I cry, out of self-pity, weary, bitter tears. It’s four o’clock in the morning. What’s going to happen?

I raise the blind, opening the window a little. The night lies cruel and endless on the world. The sky clears a bit, heavy clouds shift slowly, piling up on the horizon. Morning breeze. But I’m getting hotter and hotter. I throw off the blanket completely, undo the buttons of my pyjama top, baring my aching chest to the cool wind. I throw the pillow down on the floor and lie there like a corpse, arms outstretched, legs spread-eagled, and slowly, with the smell of the rain as the sky grows pale, I start to doze. Not really asleep, just feeling myself grow lighter. My limbs disappear one by one. Leg, arm, back, the other arm, hair, head, I shrink into a tiny crystal, into my essence. What refuses to disappear is that cruel flame, no bigger than a dry little coin.

And when Mommy wakes me in the morning her voice is vigorous, she draws the blanket from my face (Daddy must have covered me up before he left the house) saying, “Dafi, Dafi, get up now. You’ll be late.”

I search for my eyes. Where are they? Where did my eyes disappear to? I roll about in a cauldron of lead, searching for my eyes to open them. I hear Mommy in the shower and the hiss of the kettle.

When at last they are wrenched open, cracks in white-hot steel, the window is open to the light, to the high grey winter sky. Between the sky and the earth, hovering like a hit space ship, is the little purple cloud, the hateful cloud that robbed me of my sleep.

Mommy comes in, dressed, her bag in her hand.

“Dafi, are you crazy? How much more can you sleep?”

ASYA

What sort of a trip? A school trip but more than that in a camp near a big mountain city, a mixture of Safad and Jerusalem, a big lake visible in the distance. And a crowd of young people, grey tents full of schoolchildren not only from our school but from others too, former pupils from the senior grades of my old school dressed in khaki, eternal youth training with sticks, standing and beating in long lines. For it seems there was a war and there were soldiers on the hills around us. Midday and I’m walking through this crowded camp looking for the teachers’ room, stepping over tent ropes, among thorns and rocks and smoke-blackened camp cauldrons till I see the faces of children from Dafi’s class and I see Sarah as well and Yemimah and Vardah in long broad khaki skirts and the janitor and Yochi and the secretaries; the entire staff of the school has moved here complete with typewriters and filing systems. And there’s Shwartzy dressed in a khaki British uniform looking young and sunburned and impressive with a stick in his hand.

“Well, what’s the matter? The bell is ringing.” Yes, it really is the bell, as if from the sky, like the ringing of cowbells. And I have no books and no notes and I don’t know what I’m supposed to be teaching or which classroom I’m supposed to be in. I say to him, “This is a real revolution …” and as always he echoes my words:

“A revolution … precisely, a revolution …” He laughs. “People don’t understand that … come and see …”

And suddenly he has time to spare despite the bell, leading me to a little cave, a crevice really, and there under a pile of stones is a bundle of page proofs for a book. There the true revolution is written. But the text itself I recognize as the text of his old handbook for the matriculation exams in Bible studies. Simplified explanations of passages set for the exams.

And meanwhile there is silence all around. The great camp is still, students sitting in tight circles and the teachers knitting in the centre and someone reading from a book. I feel tense and excited. The word “revolution” will not leave me alone. I want to find my class. I want desperately to teach. Such a pain in my chest from wanting to be with my pupils. I know that they are beside the little acorn tree. I go in search of them but now I can’t remember what an acorn tree looks like, I’m staring at the ground searching for acorns. Going down a hill slope to a big wadi. It seems the enemy lines are not far away. Not children patrolling here but grown men, soldiers. Grey-haired men with helmets and firearms. Advance positions among the rocks. The sky clouding over towards evening.

I ask about the little acorn and they show me a little acorn on the ground, light brown. “We are your class.” They laugh. I don’t mind talking to adults. On the contrary. And the faces are familiar, fathers of children in the seventh and eighth grades who come to parents’ meetings. And they are sitting on the ground but not looking at me, their backs are turned and their eyes are on the wadi. They are so uneasy. And I want to say something of general significance about the importance of studying history. Someone stands up and points to the wadi. A suspicious movement there. It’s an old man wearing a hat and he’s walking down the wadi with such determination, receding in the distance towards the enemy lines. My heart stands still. He looks like my father. Is he here too? Does he belong here or not? Walking erect and excitedly down the rock-strewn ravine. What sort of a revolution is this, I wonder, what are they talking about? It’s a war, it’s only a war.

VEDUCHA

A stone laid on a white sheet. A big stone. They turn the stone wash the stone feed the stone and the stone urinates slowly. Turn the stone clean the stone water the stone and again the stone urinates. The sun disappears. Darkness. Quiet. A stone weeping why am I only a stone weeping stone. She has no peace begins to stir rolls without sound hovers over a dirty grey floor a great desert there is nothing a giant swamp a dead burned land. Wanders till she stumbles on tight ropes cables in a dark tent touching a spade. A stone halting a stone sinking. A root stirs in the stone, embracing crumbling entwining within. A stone not a stone dying and sprouting a stone sprouting a stone a plant among plants among stillness burrowing in the dust rising from darkness a strong branch and more branches. Strong growth a plant clad in leaves among leaves. A great sun outside. Day. A great old plant on a bed. They turn the plant clean the plant give tea to the plant and the plant still lives.

ADAM

Actually it was us who sent him to the army, he received no orders, nor could he have. Two hours after the alarm was sounded he was already with us. Apparently we didn’t hear his knock and instead of waiting he opened the door with a key that Asya had given him. So he’s already got a key to the house, I thought, but I said nothing, just watched him as he came into the room, confused, agitated, talking in a loud voice. As if the war that was breaking out was directed personally against him. He asked for explanations, and when it became clear that we had nothing to tell him he seized the radio and began frantically searching for news, for information, going from station to station, French, English, even pausing for a while over a Greek or a Turkish broadcast in his attempt to put some facts together.

He was growing pale, his hands shaking, he couldn’t relax.

For a moment I thought, he’s going to faint, like that time in the garage.

But there was also the freedom with which he behaved in the house. The way he touched things, going to the kitchen and helping himself to food, raiding the fridge. He knew exactly where to find the big atlas when he wanted to look at a map. And there was the way he behaved towards Asya, interrupting her in mid-sentence, touching her.

In recent months pictures of that evening have come into my mind again and again. The last pictures of him before his disappearance.

The twilight hour, him standing in the middle of the big room, his white shirt straggling out of his black trousers, his thin delicate back a little exposed. The big atlas open in his hands and him standing there explaining something to us, and she, her face flushed with embarrassment and fear, nervously watching, following his movements as if afraid that he’ll break something. This is a real lover, I thought, she’s really fallen for him.

And in the middle of all this, the war breaking out with such force. The certainty of a new reality overtaking us, there would be no going back. The evening came down quickly and we put no lights on in the house so we could leave the windows open. Every plane flying overhead sent him rushing out to the balcony. Was it one of ours or one of theirs, he had to know. He even gave me a piece of paper and asked me to draw a MiG and a Mirage and a Phantom, and he would take the miserable sketch outside with him, his eyes fixed on the sky.

“What do you mean one of theirs?” growled Dafi, who was sitting all the time in a corner, scowling, not taking her eyes off him.

“But their air force hasn’t been destroyed,” he explained with a grim smile. “This time it will be a different story.”

A defeatist? Not exactly. But there was something strange about him. He was interested only in peculiar practical questions. What was the range of their missiles, could they blow up the ports from sea, would there be food rationing, how soon would he be able to leave the country? He had been abroad for more than ten years, he had no idea what goes on here in wartime. He had old-fashioned, European ideas.

I was patient towards him. I answered his questions, tried to reassure him. Watching Asya, who sat on the edge of the sofa under the lamp, which had an old straw hat for a shade, a stack of exercise books on her lap, a red pencil in her hand, trying to calm herself, I know, but not succeeding, a grey woman with white streaks in her hair, wearing an old dressing gown and flat slippers, her face drawn and the tension filling it with light and power. In love despite herself, against her will, confused by her love, ashamed perhaps. Saying hardly a word, just getting up from time to time and fetching something to eat or drink, coffee for me, fruit juice for Dafi, a sandwich for Gabriel, and all the time the endless stream of garbled information — reports from correspondents, television interviews, foreign stations, news pouring out from all directions but obstinately repeating itself. The phone rings. It’s the garage foreman, telling me he’s been called up. I myself phone several of the mechanics at home, it turns out they’ve all been called up, some of them as long ago as yesterday afternoon.

I return from the study and find him sitting in the kitchen. The blinds are closed, he’s drinking soup, she sits beside him, watching him.

Establishing himself among us –

He smiles at me apologetically, fear makes him hungry, he admits. He’s always been that way, and he scoops up the rest of the soup into his mouth.

It seems that he’s decided to spend the night here, if we don’t object. He’s prepared to sleep on the floor, or on the sofa, wherever we put him. It’s just that in his grandmother’s house there’s no radio, and the house is directly opposite the port, the classic target for a first attack. In the First World War they always attacked the ports first….

He turns to Asya, as if asking for confirmation. But she doesn’t respond, she looks anxiously at me.

There was something laughable about him, but something pathetic as well, like a lost child. He will spend the whole war in this house, I thought, without anger but with a kind of excitement, a feeling that anything was possible now. I kept my distance.

Nearly midnight. A phone call from Erlich, the old cashier at the garage. He’s in high spirits, informs me that he’s been called up. He starts to explain to me where the accounts are kept, what our bank balance is, how much is owed to us, what to do about the wages, you’d think he was going away to fight on the other side of the world. A fussy, tiresome old yeke, though not without humour. “It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter,” I try to reassure him but he isn’t reassured. In financial matters he doesn’t trust me. Finally he announces that he’ll come into the garage himself tomorrow morning, he’s being posted not far away, near the refineries.

“They’re drafting the entire population … really …” I announced. They were sitting in the dark. “And what about you?” I turned to him, not meaning to imply anything.

But he started to mumble, he doesn’t know, obviously he has no unit to go to, it’s true that at the airport they gave him a certificate to take to an army depot within two weeks, but he had no intention of staying for two weeks, he hadn’t known then that his grandmother wasn’t dead but had only lost consciousness. He hopes there’ll be no problems about leaving the country …

“There will be,” snapped Dafi. She had been strangely silent since he came into the house. “Why shouldn’t there be? They’ll think you’re a deserter …”

And he burst out laughing, in the dark, I couldn’t see his face, he laughed and laughed, but when he realized that we weren’t laughing he stopped, got up from his chair, lit a cigarette and started pacing about.

“Wait a few more days,” said Asya, “maybe it’ll all be over.” I say nothing. Something in the tone of her voice fascinates me. The midnight news. Nothing new. Reports we’ve already heard. At ten to one the music starts, marching songs. “Let’s go to bed,” I say, but it’s a crazy night, how can anyone sleep? Dafi goes and shuts herself in her room. Asya draws the curtains in the study, switches on the light, makes up a bed for Gabriel. I take the transistor, undress, get into bed with the radio. The window is open. The door to the balcony is open. Radios whisper from all the dark houses. Asya is taking her time, I get up and go out into the passage. I see him standing half naked beside the door to the study and she’s talking to him in a whisper, excitedly. She sees me and breaks off at once. A few minutes later she comes into the bedroom, undresses quickly, lies down beside me.

“What’s going to happen?” I ask suddenly, referring to the war.

“For the time being he can stay here … do you mind?”

I look at her, she closes her eyes. I do the same. The radio whispers beside me, from time to time I wake, turn up the volume, put it to my ear, listen, and go back to sleep. In the house there’s a constant movement of bare feet. Dafi is the first to start pacing about, then there’s the sound of his footsteps, Asya gets out of bed and I hear her moving about, there are whispers, a mixture of fear and stifled desire. Sweetness mixed with distant blood and fire.

Suddenly weakness overcomes me –

I rise at first light. Asya and Dafi are asleep. From the study comes the sound of lively singing. Another last picture of him, engraved deep in my memory. He’s half sitting, half lying, a sheet over his head, the transistor under the sheet playing marching songs. Has he gone mad?

I touched him lightly. He pulled the sheet away, revealing his face, no sign of surprise, but his eyes still closed.

“Are they advancing? Eh? What’s happening there?”

He was wearing my old pyjama trousers. I stood beside him in the heavy silence that is mine, that I know, that I control, the silence that calms the people around me.

“You’d better go,” I said quietly, almost gently.

“Where?”

“To clarify your position … you may have problems leaving the country.”

Deep anxiety in his eyes. He’s cute, I thought, this lover, this poor shaken lover.

“Do you think they really need me … haven’t they got enough men to be going on with?”

“They won’t send you to the front … don’t worry, but you must get your documentation sorted out, show yourself willing.”

“Perhaps in a few more days … tomorrow …”

“No, go right now. This war may end suddenly and it’ll be too late, you’ll be in trouble …”

“The war may end suddenly?” He was amazed.

“Why not?”

Asya was standing behind me, listening to our conversation, bare-footed, her hair in a mess, her nightdress unbuttoned, forgetting herself completely.

I touched his bare shoulder. “Come and have something to eat, and make an early start, there’ll be crowds of people there today.”

He looked stunned, but he got up at once and dressed, and I went and dressed too. I lent him my shaving kit, he washed and came into the kitchen, I made breakfast for him and for Asya, who was pacing about nervously. The three of us ate in silence, bread and cheese, coffee and more coffee. It was six o’clock. The radio began to broadcast a morning prayer, and then the day’s chapter from the Bible.

He was most surprised, listening with close attention, with fear almost. He didn’t know that this is how the day’s broadcasting starts here.

“Is this because of the war?”

“No, it’s like this every day.” I smiled. He smiled back at me, sometimes he could be quite charming.

I went outside with him. The blue Morris was parked close behind my car, like a puppy clinging to its mother. I asked him to open the hood, I checked the oil, the fan belt, examined the battery. I told him to start the engine. The sound of the little old engine, vintage 1947, which over the years had developed an odd little whine. The heartbeat of a child, but a healthy child.

“It’s O.K.” I closed the hood carefully, smiled at him. He suddenly seemed more cheerful. There was a lot of traffic in the street for such an early hour.

“Have you got any money?”

He hesitated for a moment, then said, “Yes, it’s O.K.”

“If you return today, come here. You can still stay with us. If they detain you for any reason, don’t forget us. Keep in touch.”

He nodded, absently.

And a last picture engraved on my memory — his cheerful wave through the window as the car drew away down the slope.

I went back to the house. Dafi was sitting in an armchair, dozing, her hair dishevelled, Asya was already dressed and sitting in the study marking exam papers. “He’ll be back this evening, I’m sure, what could they do with him?” She smiled at me, a relaxed smile, and went on with her work.

He didn’t come back that evening. We sat up late waiting for the phone to ring, in vain. For several days his sheets lay folded on the pillow in the study, we were still convinced he’d be coming back. More days passed, not even a postcard. It seemed that they’d called him up after all. The war grew and he was gone.

There was no sign of him at his grandmother’s house, evidently he’d passed that way before going to the depot and had closed the shutters. The days of madness pass slowly. The first cease-fire, the second. Peace returning. But he has disappeared, and those last hours with him become so important. Another week goes by. Still no sign. It’s as if he’s playing games with us. I went to the local office of the army, but there was such a crowd there that I left at once. More days pass. The first reservists are discharged. The first rain falls. I went again to the army office, waited patiently for my turn to speak to the receptionist. She listened to me in astonishment, thinking I’d come to cause trouble. She refused even to write down his name. Without an army number, a military address or the name of his unit she wasn’t prepared to start a search.

“Anyway, how do you know that he was drafted?”

How, indeed –

“Who is he? Your cousin? A relative?”

“A friend …”

“A friend? Then approach his family. We deal only with relatives.”

More days pass. Asya says nothing, but I become deeply uneasy, as if I’m to blame, as if his disappearance is aimed at me. How little we really know about him, we have the name of no other person to whom we can turn. Erlich had a friend in the border police. I passed the name on to him, to find out if he had left the country, perhaps he just went off. Two days later I received an official reply, which was negative. I went to the hospitals to check the lists of casualties. The lists were long and confusing, there was no distinction between wounded and sick. One evening I went to one of the big hospitals, began walking up and down the corridors, glancing into the wards, sometimes wandering among the beds, watching the young men playing chess or eating chocolate. Finding myself sometimes in unexpected places, a big operating room or a dark X-ray room. Going from ward to ward. There was so much confusion in the hospitals in those days that nobody challenged me, in my overalls I passed for a resident technician.

I spent a whole evening checking the floors, combing the place thoroughly. Sometimes I thought that I heard his voice, or saw someone resembling him. In one of the corridors they were carrying a wounded man on a stretcher, he was completely covered with bandages, his face too. He was taken into a room. I hesitated for a moment and then followed. It was a small room, full of instruments, with only one bed. The wounded man, his whole body burned it seemed, lay unconscious, like an ancient wrapped mummy. There was just one small table lamp alight in the room.

Perhaps this is him, I thought, and took up a position by the wall. A nurse came into the room and connected him to a machine.

“Who is he?” I whispered.

She didn’t know either, he had been brought in from the Golan just a few hours before. There had been an exchange of fire there at noon.

I asked for permission to remain, I had been looking for some time for a man who had disappeared, perhaps this was him. She gave me a puzzled look, shrugged her shoulders wearily, she had no objection, in the last few weeks they had got used to all kinds of lunacy here.

I sat near the door, staring at the shape of the body blurred beneath the sheets, watching the bandaged face. There wasn’t a sign, but anything was possible.

I stayed in that darkened room for an hour, perhaps two hours. The hospital grew quieter, from time to time someone opened the door, looked at me and went away again.

Suddenly there was a groan from the injured man. Had he regained consciousness? I stood up, went close to him: “Gabriel?” He turned his bandaged face towards me, trying to locate the voice, but his groans grew louder. It seemed that he was dying in this lonely place, writhing, trying to tear the bandages from his chest. I went out into the corridor and found a nurse. She came, went out again hurriedly and returned with two doctors and another nurse. They put an oxygen mask on his face and tore the bandages from his chest. I was still unable to identify anything. I stood among them, watching. The injured man continued to die. I touched one of the doctors lightly on the shoulder, asked them to remove the bandages from his face. They did as I asked, sure that I was a relative. I saw a fearful sight. His eyes blinked at the light, or at me. It wasn’t him. I knew it.

A few minutes later his breathing stopped.

Someone covered his face, pressed my hand and left the room.

I went out, looked through the big windows into the gloom of the day. I still hadn’t searched the top floor. I hesitated for a moment, then turned and left the building.

DAFI

We of class six G of Central Carmel High School lost our maths teacher in the last war. Who would have guessed that he’d be the one to be killed? We didn’t think of him as a great fighter. He was a little man, thin and quiet, starting to go bald. In the winter he always had a huge scarf trailing behind him. He had delicate hands and fingers that were always stained with chalk. Still he was killed. We worried rather about our P.E. teacher, who used to visit the school from time to time during the war in uniform and with his captain’s insignia, a real film star, with a real revolver that drove all the boys mad with envy. We thought it was marvellous that even during the war he found the time to come to the school, to reassure us and the lady teachers, who were wild about him. He used to stand in the playground surrounded by children and tell stories. We were really proud of him and we forgot all about our maths teacher. On the first day of the war he had ceased to exist for us, and it was days after the cease-fire that Shwartzy suddenly came into the classroom, called us all to our feet and said solemnly, “Children, I have terrible news for you. Our dear friend, your teacher Hayyim Nidbeh, was killed on the Golan on the second day of the war, the twelfth of Tishri. Let us stand in his memory.” And we all put on mournful faces and he kept us on our feet for maybe three full minutes, and then he motioned with a weary gesture that we shouldn’t stand, glared at us as if we were to blame and went off to call another class to its feet. I can’t say that we were all that sorry at once because when a teacher dies it’s impossible to be only sorry, but we really were stunned and shocked, because we remembered him living and standing beside the blackboard not so long ago, writing out the exercises with endless patience, explaining the same things a thousand times. Really it was thanks to him that I got a pretty good report last year because he never lost his temper but went over the same material again and again. For me someone only has to raise his voice or speak fast when explaining something in maths to me and I go completely stupid, I can’t even add two and two. He used to make me relax, which was boring, it’s true, deadly boring. Sometimes we actually went to sleep during his lessons, but in the middle of all this drowsiness, in the cloud of chalk dust flying around the blackboard, the formulas used to penetrate.

And now he was himself a flying cloud –

Naturally, Shwartzy used his death for educational purposes. He forced us to write essays about him, to be put into a book which was presented to his wife at a memorial ceremony that he organized one evening. The students that he’d taught in the fifth and sixth grades sat in the back rows, in the middle the seats were left empty and in the front rows sat all the teachers and his family and friends, even the gym teacher came especially, still in his uniform and with his revolver, although the fighting had ended long ago. And I sat on the stage where I recited, with great feeling and by heart, the poems that are usual on these occasions, and between the poems Shwartzy preached a fawning and flowery sermon, talking about him as if he was some really extraordinary personage that he’d secretly admired.

And then they all went and stood beside a bronze plaque that had been put up by the entrance to the Physics Department. And there, too, somebody said a few words. But those we didn’t hear because we slipped away down the back steps.

Shwartzy was a quick worker. In Israel they hadn’t yet finished counting the dead, and he’d already got the memorials out of the way.

Meanwhile we not only forgot the maths teacher, we forgot the maths as well, because for two months we studied Bible instead of maths. We had eight hours of extra Bible studies every week and we went at such a pace that we did ten out of the twelve Prophets. The joke went around that there’d be nothing left of the Bible for us to study in the seventh and eighth grades, and we’d have to study the New Testament.

At last the replacement arrived. A young man, a student from the Technion, a bit fat, very nervous, a doubtful genius who decided to try the new maths on us. Right away I felt that what little I knew was fading fest because of him.

At first we tried to annoy him, at least until he came to know our names. I dubbed him Baby Face and everybody called him that because he really was a baby face, he hardly shaved at all. But he soon made a record of names and he used to put down marks all the time. We weren’t much impressed by this record, because usually the teachers themselves get tired of this stupid system long before they broke us. But for some reason he picked on me from the first moment. For almost every second lesson he called me up to the blackboard, and when I didn’t know the answers he kept me there and went on being cruel to me. I wasn’t particularly bothered, I have no great pretensions in maths, but suddenly he began being rude to me as well. He took my name right at the start but he didn’t seem to know my surname and he certainly didn’t realize that my mother taught history in the senior classes of the same school. Not that I expect any special treatment but I just like it to be known. Just that it be known. But he was determined not to grasp it, although I tried various hints at it.

Only towards the end of the year, when we were really at war with each other, when I said to him in front of the whole class “It’s a pity you weren’t killed instead of the last teacher” and he went running to the headmaster, only then did he grasp the fact, and then it was too late. Both for him, and for me.

ADAM

Where did I not wander in my quiet persistent search for him. One morning I even went to the Bureau of Missing Army Personnel. It was a bright morning, a spring-like winter’s day. Something about the garage was getting on my nerves. All those Arab workers sitting under the shade for their breakfast with their flat loaves of bread, joking, singing to the Arab music from the car radios. And in the morning paper I found an announcement about the bureau, how it functioned, the means at its disposal, its achievements. And before long I was there, sitting in the waiting room beside a silent old couple. I thought, it’ll take only a few minutes, to give his name, just to try.

This was after all the great confusion, the return of the prisoners, the notorious scandals. Lessons had been learned and a whole new machinery set up. Three large offices in a secluded suburb of Tel Aviv. Most of the clerks were officers. There was a first-aid room with a doctor and nurses. There were telephones on the desks and outside on the square there were at least a dozen army vehicles. I hadn’t waited long when an officer led me into a room that was furnished not like an office but like a room in a private house. Behind the desk sat a very attractive woman, a charming major. Beside her sat a young lieutenant. The entire team listened attentively to my story.

And my story was a little odd.

Of course, I couldn’t tell them that I was looking for my wife’s lover. I said, “A friend.”

“A friend?” They were a bit surprised, but it was as if it made it easier for them. “Just a friend?”

“A friend. A good friend.” They didn’t ask me what the hell I was doing looking for a friend here. By what right. The second lieutenant took out a fresh form and handed it to the major, there were already a number of forms there ready for use. Efficiency and sympathy and much patience.

I gave his name and address, told them how he’d come to Israel a few months ago, I mentioned the problem of the legacy and the grandmother lying in a coma in the hospital. They wrote down every word. But only ten lines were filled by the round, feminine handwriting. What more could I tell them, I had no photograph, I didn’t know his army number, nor his passport number, nor his father’s name, and of course I had no idea to which unit he’d been sent. I said again, “Perhaps he didn’t get to the front, perhaps he wasn’t even called up. It was us, actually, who sent him to the army. But since the second day of the war he’s disappeared. Can it be coincidence? Perhaps I’m wasting your time.”

“Oh no,” they protested. “We must investigate.”

The young officer was sent away with the details to the computer building, and the other two took out a special form for recording physical details and characteristics. Colour of hair, height, weight, colour of eyes, distinguishing marks. I began to describe him. Of course I’d never seen him naked. I was only a friend. I said something about his smile, his gestures, his manner of speech.

They listened. The major’s hair fell over her face, she was always brushing it away from her eyes with a delicate movement, she was radiant, very beautiful. Talking in a quiet voice, little computer cards in her hands, asking me strange questions. Did he have a scar on his right cheek perhaps, or a gold tooth in his lower jaw? Conferring in a whisper with the lieutenant, who supplied her with more computer cards. Suddenly I understood, they had particulars of unidentified corpses, they wanted to give me a corpse in his place.

But nothing fit.

I wanted to leave. It seemed madness to search for him here. But the process had been started, and there was no way of stopping it. Meanwhile the officer who had been sent to the computer returned with a long list of all the Arditis recorded by the computer as having served in the army in recent years. There was only one Gabriel Arditi, fifty-one years old, a citizen of Dimona, discharged from the army five years ago for health reasons.

Obviously they didn’t think he was the man I was looking for, but if I wanted to see him a vehicle and a driver would be immediately at my disposal to take me to Dimona.

I must get out of here –

Perhaps I should make inquiries at the hospital, perhaps his grandmother could tell me something.

They wouldn’t let me go.

Heavy rain falling outside. The brightness of the morning turned to heavy gloom. I sat sprawled in a comfortable armchair, three girl-officers listening to me attentively. Every word I said, every thought, was taken and written down. The empty file was not so empty now.

Voices rose from the next room. A man’s voice shook the partition between us. He was protesting, in a clear voice, with stubborn logic. He couldn’t accept the explanation, of course he had no illusions, but he knew for a fact that his son was never in sector (he gave a long number) nor in tank number (another number with a lot of figures). He repeated the numbers with speed, it seemed he’d been studying them for weeks, he knew them by heart. He’d spoken to his friends, he’d spoken to the officers, he had no illusions, he only wanted another sector and another tank number, that was all he wanted to know. He broke down and wept, and slowly, in the silence, embarrassed voices began to console him.

Listening in silence in the next room, we exchanged glances. I stood up, determined to leave, but I was asked to fill out another half page with my own personal details, leaving an address, taking a document bearing the address of the bureau, the phone number, the major’s name, promising to get in touch if I heard anything new.

The strange thing is that I did visit the bureau again, not once but twice. When I was in Tel Aviv to buy spare parts I passed that way. The bureau had shrunk in the meantime. Two of the shacks had been taken over for other purposes and the vehicles had gone, but the girl-officers were still there. The second lieutenant had become a lieutenant, the lieutenant was a captain and the major was in civilian clothes and several months pregnant. She was even more beautiful than before. She had cut her hair and what I saw of her soft bare neck was a most alluring sight. They smiled at me and took out the file, to which nothing much had been added except the name of another Arditi who’d come to light. We discussed him briefly, to make sure that he wasn’t the man we were looking for. Then they offered me one or two unidentified corpses, but forcefully I turned them down.

At the beginning of spring I passed that way again. The bureau had gone, there was just one room left in a wing that was now used as a recruiting centre. The major had given birth and been discharged, the captain had gone too, there was just the lieutenant left with the files. She was reading a magazine. She remembered me at once.

“Still looking for him?”

“Sometimes …”

I sat down. We chatted a little about her work. She too was due to be discharged in a few days. Before I left she took out the familiar file, just as a formality, and we were both amazed to find a new document in it, an armoury receipt for a bazooka and two containers of bombs, signed by Gabriel Arditi on the seventh of October.

She herself didn’t know how this document had got there. It was possible that the clerk had filed it in her absence.

But I shuddered suddenly. If, then, he had gone somewhere after all, if he had been issued a bazooka and ammunition, if all this was so, was it possible then that he had been killed?

But this was another blind alley. Where could I go with this document? The lieutenant had already been discharged, the bureau was closed, the files had been transferred to the archives, and I, searching for him again on the road, said not a word to Asya.

ASYA

I was going around and locking door after door, pulling down the blinds. Adam was in the bathroom, screwing a large bolt on the door to the balcony. It was dark in this house to which two rooms from our previous home had been added, furniture that we had sold or thrown away had come back to us. We switched on the lights. A fine clear day outside, blue sky, and through the cracks in the blinds I saw a double view, the views from both our houses, the open sea, the wadi, the harbour with its cranes, and the houses of the lower city. I was uneasy, waiting for Dafi to come home from school. There was a wave of murders in the city. See, there on the table is a newspaper, banner headlines, underlined for emphasis, printed in an antiquated script. A wave of murders in the city, a gang of murderers settling private scores, pursuing one another. And even law-abiding citizens who are not involved and have nothing to fear must take precautions, lock their houses. The people have imposed a curfew upon themselves, of their own free will. And I am waiting for Dafi, furious with myself that on a day like this we sent her to school, on a day when murderers are roaming the streets, settling their private feuds in our neighbourhood. I look out into the street, it’s empty, no man, no child. But there she is, at last, walking alone in the empty sun-drenched street, the satchel slung over her shoulder, wearing the yellow uniform of the primary school, and she really does look smaller, as if she’s shrunk, and now she’s standing at the street corner with a man, a short man with reddish hair. She’s talking to him intimately, calmly, smiling, without fear. And again I fall into a dreadful panic, I want to shout but I hold back. The man looks dangerous to me, though there’s nothing special about his appearance. He’s wearing a broad summer suit. I run to another window to get a better view of them and they’ve disappeared, both of them. But I hear her footsteps, she comes into the house. Running to her, bending over her, she really has grown smaller, unfastening the broad straps of her satchel, giving her a drink, taking her to her room, undressing her, putting her in her pyjamas, treating her like a little child. She protests, “I can’t sleep.” “Just for a few minutes,” I plead with her, putting her to bed, covering her up, and she sleeps. I feel relieved, I close the door of her room, go out into the hallway and see Adam standing looking at the front door, which has been left open. Dafi forgot to close the door after her. Suddenly I understand. He has come in after her, that man, he has got inside, he is here. I don’t see him, but I know. He is here. Adam knows it too and he starts searching for him. I run back to Dafi’s room, she’s fast asleep, breathing deeply. Again she seems to me very young, seven years old perhaps, and growing smaller, the bed with its big blanket is half empty. I hear Adam’s footsteps in the hallway. “It’s all over,” he whispers, smiling.

“What is?”

And I follow him, stumbling, to the other, extra rooms, the rooms of the old house, the old nursery, the toys, the cars, the big teddy bear on the blue dresser, and under the old cradle with its peeling paint, with its bird pictures and broken beads, someone is lying, a body under a blanket. The head is visible. I recognize the reddish hair cropped short on the thick neck. A white hair here and there. Adam has killed him, as you kill a bug. For this was one of the murderers roaming the streets. Adam identified him at once. Killed him with a single blow, there is not a sign on his body. For a moment I feel a stirring of pity for the man who lies there, dead. Why? Who asked Adam to get involved? Without asking questions, without consulting me, why did he kill him in such haste, how did he do it? And now we too have joined in the chain of murders. Oh God what has he done? The great distress, my heart stops beating. Who asked him to do it? A fearful mistake, our lives are ruined. How shall we explain it, justify it, we shall never be free of the weight of that heavy corpse. What an idiot you are, I want to shout as I look at him, the smile has faded from his face, he’s become serious, horrified, beginning to grasp what he has done. Trying to hide the big screwdriver among the toys. Oh what have you done to us.

DAFI

Does she dream sometimes? Does she allow herself to waste good sleeping and resting time just on some silly, meaningless dream?

At night I quietly go into their bedroom, to look at the sleepers. My parents! My good bearers! Daddy lies on his back, his beard spread on the pillow, his hand stretched out feebly over the edge of the bed, the fist lightly clenched. And Mommy with her back to him, curled up like a foetus, her face pressed into the pillow, as if she’s hiding from something.

Is she dreaming? What does she dream about? Not about me, that’s for sure, such a busy woman, laden with obligations.

Mommy isn’t here, I’ve begun to realize over the last year, Mommy isn’t here even when she’s at home, and if you really want a quiet, heart-to-heart conversation with her, you have to book a week in advance. Between 3.00 and 3.45 in the afternoon or between 8.10 and 8.42 in the evening. Mommy is chasing time.

She works full-time in my school, teaching history in the upper grades, preparing three senior classes for the matriculation exam. On her worktable there are always piles of homework and test papers. All day she’s correcting papers. I don’t envy her pupils. She gets a real kick out of writing “Not good enough” in red pencil at eleven o’clock at night.

But she doesn’t spare herself either, she too is always writing tests and projects. She hasn’t finished studying yet, and she never intends to finish. She’s always running off to the university, to seminars, public lectures, teachers’ conventions. She’s registered for a doctorate, writing essays, being tested.

A woman forty-five years old, with a bird’s face, sharp but delicate, lovely eyes. No make-up on principle, there are streaks of grey in her tied-back hair, but she won’t dye it on principle. She likes clothes that are out of fashion, broad and absurdly long skirts, dark woollen dresses with a monastic look about them, flat-heeled shoes. With her lovely long legs she could make herself look really attractive, but she’s not interested in distracting people from their important business just for the pleasure of looking at her. That’s a principle too.

We live here according to a number of principles.

For example, not to employ a maid, because it isn’t reasonable that outsiders should clean our house and cook our meals, even in return for wages. So Mommy does the housework as well, energetically and aggressively.

Is there any house where the floor is washed at nine o’clock in the evening? Yes, ours. Daddy and I are sitting in front of the TV relaxing in armchairs and enjoying this bald man Kojak after the depressing news and she suddenly appears, wearing an apron, with a rag and a bucket, and orders us to lift up our feet so she can wash the floor beneath us. Working quietly but with a sort of restrained ferocity, not asking for help and not getting it either, bending down to scrub the floor.

“A revolutionary woman,” Daddy once said with a laugh, and I laughed too, even if I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant.

When she cooks it’s for several days at a time. At ten o’clock at night she comes home from a teachers’ meeting, goes into the kitchen, takes a big saucepan, slices up two chickens and cooks them. Two weeks’ food for the family. Lucky for her she’s only got one daughter who doesn’t much like the food she cooks.

In the morning, when I go into the kitchen for breakfast, I have to pick my way between test papers of pupils of the eighth grade (which of course I’m forbidden to touch or to look at) and headless fish dipped in flour and stuffed with onion, ready to be fried for supper. Such efficiency.

No wonder she suddenly stops working and falls fast asleep at eight o’clock, most of all she likes to sleep in front of the TV screen. In the armchair, all curled up. On the TV there’s a gun fight and she sleeps peacefully for an hour, two hours. Until Daddy wakes her, to get up and go to bed. She opens her eyes, rouses herself a bit and goes to correct exam papers. Sometimes we try to help her with the housework, even I make an effort, but by the time I’ve picked up a cup, or washed a spoon, the work’s all done. We simply have different rhythms, the two of us.

So in principle I’m on his side, even though there’s something a bit reserved and primitive about him. He hardly ever talks. Wanders about in overalls and with dirty hands. At least that beard of his is something remarkable, growing wild, making him look like an ancient prophet or an artist. Something special, not like all the others, not like a labourer anyway. When I was at the primary school I was ashamed because he didn’t look like all the others. When they asked me “What does your Daddy do?” I used to say innocently “Daddy works in a garage,” and at once I felt that they were a bit disappointed. Then I started saying “My Daddy has a factory.” “What kind of a factory?” they’d ask. “A garage” I said and then they’d explain that a garage isn’t a factory. Then I used to say “My Daddy has a big garage” because it really was a very big garage. Once during the vacation I went down there with Tali and Osnat and they were amazed to see all the cars standing there, and the dozens of workers rushing about. A hive of activity.

But then I thought, oh, to hell with it, why should I need to apologize, why add “big,” as if I’m defending him. And I used to say simply “Daddy has a garage,” and when somebody particularly irritated me with this question I used to say “My Daddy is a garage hand” and look him full in the eyes, enjoying his astonishment. Because in our class most of the pupils’ parents are professors at the Technion or the university, architects, scientists, executives in major companies, army officers.

And what’s wrong with a garage? Not only are we never without a car, we’re the only family with two cars, some of the children in the class don’t even have one car at home. And Daddy has a lot of money too, though you don’t see much evidence of it at home. This is something that I’ve realized in the last few months. I don’t think even Mommy realizes how much money Daddy’s got. For all her education it seems there are some things that just aren’t clear to her.

A strange couple. I wonder why they ever got together. What do they want? I don’t remember ever seeing them embracing or kissing. They hardly talk to each other.

But they don’t quarrel either –

Like two strangers –

Is this what they call love?

Again and again I used to ask them, together and separately, how it was that they met, and it was always the same story from both of them. They were in the same class at school for many years. But surely that’s no reason to stay joined until death, to have children.

In their school they weren’t particularly friendly. Daddy finished studying in the sixth grade, as he makes a point of reminding me whenever I ask him for help with my homework. Mommy of course went on studying. After a few years they met again and got married.

As if someone forced them –

When do they make love, for example, if they make love at all?

On this side of the wall I don’t hear so much as a whisper –

And at night I walk around the house a little –

Strange thoughts, maybe, sad thoughts.

Sometimes I’m terrified they might split up and leave me all alone, like Tali, whose father disappeared years ago, leaving her with her mother, who can’t stand her.

I hear their breathing. Daddy moans softly. At the window faint signs of dawn. Accustomed to the darkness, my eyes pick out every detail. My legs feel weak. Sometimes I wish I could go and crawl in between them under the blanket, like when I was a child.

But it’s no longer possible –

The faint, early chirping of an early bird in the wadi –