Zion's Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature

A Good Place for the Night ^{Savyon Liebrecht}

In the fourth year, the funnel of air passed frequently over the house, teasing, descending to the garden of wooden monsters where the child used to wander. Every few days, Gila would hear the distant whistle grow shriller, like the siren on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day or on the eve of Memorial Day for the Fallen in War, and she’d run out and pull the boy home. She was almost late once, and at the last minute, as she grabbed him from the sucking flow, she saw the opening of the funnel up close for the first time, damp and quivering, like an elephant’s trunk. And once she was late. The boy’s arm had been sucked in, but he struggled, flapping at the mouth of the funnel, swinging his short legs and his free arm, moving away and rising, and Gila ran under him, screaming, until he was dropped on the other side of the fence into the area of the epidemic over which birds were flying in circles. He was caught in a tree, then fell to the contaminated earth along with some branches, bruised all over. Later, frightened and exhausted, he let her isolate him in his room for three days and smear his body with an ointment she made from the bark of a tree that burned the skin and its fruit, which was shaped like cats’ heads. Sometimes, when he cried and Gila was too tired, the nun would come out of her room and lovingly tend to him. But when he’d recovered from his mysterious illness and grew calm, he insisted on going out again, especially to the garden of monsters, as if he were heeding the call of his parents beckoning him to their burial place.

When the boy was outside, Gila would coax and threaten and plead with him to come in, but he, recalcitrant and rebellious, his body sturdy for a two-year-old, would slip away from the windows to the garden of warped tree trunks, and she became accustomed to straining her ears for the sound of the whistling air that heralded the coming of the funnel.

Not until he was asleep in his bed and she was secure in the refuge of the house did she stop the constant straining to hear. Then she waited for the funnel with forbidden excitement, occasionally seeing objects fly past like lightning and remembering how she had once seen a remarkable spectacle. It was as if the funnel had decided to tease her—like a naked young girl in a dark window, waiting to tease a neighbor across the way. The streams of haze rising from the ground began to move slowly, drawn in a single direction to form a clear diagonal curtain, curled at the edges and with a long, hollow space in the center, and one end of it moving lustfully, seeking prey. A large tree complete with its roots appeared suddenly at one end of the channel of clear air, flew like a shot arrow to the other end, and disappeared instantly. She stood there terrified and enthralled by the haze that was now flattening, returning to its former state, as calm as an animal whose appetite has been satisfied.

But then, the boy had already been a year old.

The first time she saw the funnel, she still hadn’t known the boy existed. As soon as she walked into the house with the man, even before they saw the five dead people, before they found the boy sleeping in his bed, they suddenly heard the noise of a storm, and a tube of bright air cut through the smoke that had already begun to darken outside. Inside the illuminated tube of space, stretched parallel to the horizon and twice the height of a person, numerous objects sailed around slowly, becoming entangled in gentle circles: stools and a bookshelf, babies’ clothes, frying pans, a mattress, a straw lampshade, landscape paintings, a tapestry of harem women, a bouquet of flowers and the vase that had once held them, pillows embroidered with silver and purple birds, a blue enamel kettle, a carpet, a woman’s purse, newspaper pages. Gila looked in horror at the contents of the ghost house hovering in front of her: not too long ago someone had read that newspaper and had drunk tea brewed in that kettle; a dog had lain on that carpet; a woman had worn the straps of that purse on her shoulder; babies had soiled those clothes. Where were they now?

The graying smoke had once again subdued the channel of air, but still she stood at the window, waiting, as if she had been told part of a story and wanted to know the ending. Then the man had come out of one of the rooms and said, “There are five dead adults here and one live baby.”

Two of the dead people had been guests, an elegant couple of Indian descent sitting in the garden on a wrought iron bench, he smoking and she brushing her hair. The three other dead people had been employees of the inn: a very tall, thin young man doing accounts at a desk in the office; an older man with gray sideburns bent over the stove in the kitchen; and a girl wearing a frilled chambermaid’s apron lying like a contortionist at the foot of a half-made bed in one of the rooms on the top floor.

Elated, Gila stood beside the sleeping baby’s bed and recalled a children’s story one of her little girls had liked and the other had loathed: the three bears come home after an evening stroll to find Goldilocks sleeping in the small bed.

The man scrutinized her, pondering, watching this unknown woman glow at the sight of the sleeping child, reach out and cover his exposed shoulder, take pleasure in something familiar amidst the chaos they had been thrown into, holding on to the temporary ordinariness of a child breathing peacefully in his bed.

Then they began a search of the inn together. Stepping noiselessly from room to room, they looked into the gleaming bathrooms, examined the beds, were drawn to the windows that looked out onto a landscape of thin columns of dust that covered the earth.

Once, when the child still obeyed her and didn’t go out into the garden, the funnel of air stopped in front of the house and tossed a cloth-wrapped bundle onto the doorstep. From the window, Gila looked at the package of rags that had been spit out at the door and saw it begin to move. A head emerged from it, the head of a very old woman. The child, who had never seen such an old person, screamed in fright. This wasn’t the first stranger he’d seen. Although he’d known the nun and the sick man from the time he was a baby, occasionally someone would stumble upon the house, speak an incomprehensible language, look pleadingly at Gila, and wolf down the food she offered. Sometimes the stranger would fall asleep in one of the armchairs, and the man would sit beside him holding a stick, and when he woke up, the man would send him on his way. Once, three wild-looking women appeared, their hair and their nails grown long. One of them reached out to touch the child, and he drew back with a cry. Then time passed, and no one came to the house until the funnel spit out the old lady. Gila went out to her and, her hand covered with cloth, looked for the signs but didn’t find even one: the backs of the old lady’s hands were not covered with brown spots, there was no swelling behind her ears and no pus leaking from her eyes. Gila dragged the old lady into the house, sat her down in an armchair, and gave her some water, which she drank slowly. The old lady sat in that armchair for three days, sipping water, taking bites of a biscuit, relieving herself in her clothes. The child stood beside her all his waking hours, studying her from every angle, imitating the sounds of her strange language. On the fourth day she spit up black blood and died. The child cried when they buried her in the yard where—this he did not know—his parents were buried along with the three employees of the inn.

One time, the child had been close to discovering his parents. Driving rain had poured down all night, washing away the dirt that covered the bodies and scattering fragments of skeletons over the yard. From his room the child saw the bones first, and the man hurried outside to rebury them. Gila watched from the window, recalling the beautiful Indian woman they had found dead in the garden, wearing an orange sari edged with gold embroidery. Even if she had been preserved whole in her grave, the child would not have recognized her. Gila would sometimes wonder, and ask the man, whether a four-month-old baby had memories, whether he might know that the people raising him were not the ones who had given birth to him, whether they would tell him one day about the circumstances that had brought the three of them together, whether they should wait until he himself discovered how different his appearance was from theirs.

They agreed that, one day, they would tell him the whole truth, they would show him his parents’ passports and his name and date of birth written in one of them. Meanwhile, the days passed, one following on the heels of the other according to the clock, but never revealing the secret of time. From the first day and through all the years they were never able to unlock the secret of the changing seasons, and only the chart they kept of the days helped them mark off time. The weather seesawed from day to day like a bad-tempered person; the sun blazed not like a ball of fire, but like formless lava spreading like a puddle over half the sky; rain fell not in a downpour, but like an entire cloud being hurled down, exploding on the ground with a crash that made the tree roots quake. Sometimes it would be dark and stormy for days at a time; sometimes the primeval landscape was bathed in a blinding, phosphorous light that flooded the enormous desolation, as flat as a tray, devoid of forests, grooved with fissures that spread in straight lines to the horizon like the furrows of a plowed field, spitting jet-streams of transparent dust from its grooves—a magnificent and menacing stage set. But sometimes Gila would wake and see, as if it were an ad for a tourist site, the kind of pristine, clear, fresh world you see after the rain: bare trees exposed to the pleasant sun; and above them, a sky beautiful with baby blue clouds, as if it had not witnessed the scenes of horror that had raged under it on that cataclysmic day; and in the distance, in a uniform shade of green, pastures as smooth as lake water; and on the horizon, a row of trees with densely tangled foliage, a kind of tree she had never seen before. Her gaze traveled over the clouds, assembled like a mountain ridge, as if they were the repository of memories from other landscapes that had sailed onward over the flat, bright countryside, and she felt suddenly calm: the sky was in its place and the earth was in its place. It was impossible that, beyond the distant trees, there were no roads or cities of living people now planning their day, which had just begun.

“Do you think the train might be working again?” she kept asking those first few months.

The man would look at her, saddened that she had once again been carried away by the deceptive landscape and that she would once again have to travel the path to the knowledge that the world she knew had vanished while she was in the train’s smoking car, and he said, “The train is stuck in exactly the same place.”

On evenings reminiscent of summer, the three of them would go out into the garden, or walk, or ride their bicycles far from the house until they got tired, sometimes heading toward what had been the train station and sometimes toward the corpses of the railroad cars that, before the catastrophe, had crossed Europe. Sometimes they’d pass the charcoal shepherd and his charcoal flock and see the three skeletons in the station and the skeletons of the passengers crumbling inside their tattered clothes. From the day he learned to walk, the child, used to the sight, would go into the ticket seller’s booth, move the skeleton that had once been the ticket seller to the edge of its chair, squeeze in beside it, and play with the equipment and the money, but Gila and the man gazed at the skeletons and remembered how they’d looked on the day of the cataclysm. Then the child, hoisted up to the windows, would look at the skeletons in the train, his glance lingering on the skeleton of the little girl holding the book he would know by heart in another year, Alice in Wonderland, a birthday present from her teacher, who had written in it the false prophecy, “To the talented Mary Jane, who will write books like this herself one day, when she grows up.”

In her dreams she would relive the moment the car shook suddenly, like a ghost train in an amusement park, and she opened the door of the smoking car and saw the sleeping people who, an instant before, had been awake. The brazen young couple who had been making love on the bench across from her (the girl’s panting had embarrassed the other passengers, who shot glances at each other) were embracing, deeply asleep—she arched backward, her hair hanging over the seat, and he bent over her, his face buried in her neck; the frenetic young man’s head was pressed against the window, as if he were kissing the cracked glass goodbye; the older man who had been flashing surreptitious glances of longing at the couple making love was tilted back, his hands crossed on his groin, his gaze fixed on the ceiling; the two strangers who had become friends during the trip, one explaining that he had come from a conference of ecology experts, the other proffering pieces of choice tropical fruit wrapped in cellophane, were sitting mummified, staring at each other; the little girl who had been engrossed in reading Alice in Wonderland was bent forward as if bowing deeply, her forehead touching the open book. Many of the train’s windows were shattered, and splinters of glass glinted on the dark floor; objects and packages that had fallen from the overhead rack were scattered in the aisle; one travel case that had not been completely closed was now open, and meticulously ironed shirts were spread around it as if they’d been arranged for display. A suitcase had fallen, burying a redheaded young man so that only a clump of his hair stuck out over the handle of the suitcase and a pair of new jeans showed at the other end of it.

From where she was standing at the end of the car, Gila’s eyes darted about, taking in the sight with the utmost clarity in incandescent, diamondlike brightness. She felt a momentary stirring of the hopeful suspicion that the passengers had conspired to pretend they were asleep to see how she would respond, and the whole thing—the artificial light, the unnatural positions—had been staged for a television show that tortured people for the enjoyment of other people, and in a minute the famous director would suddenly appear and the sleeping people would open their eyes and delight in her embarrassment. But the astonishing silence in the car, broken by the strange sounds of the earth cracking and the bubbling flow of dust from outside gave her gooseflesh, and the scene visible through the windows completely ruled out the idea of a hidden camera. The flat surface of the earth was now covered with a thick veil that flowed from it and billowed up to the sky, as if the earth’s belly were boiling.

She tried to get a sound out of her throat to wake up the sleeping people, and a low, unintentional croak emerged, like the sound made by a mute trying to scream. Nothing moved in the car, and she stood mesmerized, refusing to acknowledge what she saw, refusing to think about what lay behind what she saw. Her legs began to move of their own volition over the shards of glass and articles of clothing scattered in the aisle, and she pressed her handbag, which held her passport and the pearl rings she’d bought for her daughters in the art museum, against her body. The people in the next car were sleeping too. The headrests, which were not covered with white doilies—she could see through the glass of the door that was stuck halfway open in its track—gave away the fact that it wasn’t a first-class car, but it appeared that the passengers who had bought cheaper tickets had seen a more splendid show: feathered hats, lacy shawls, colored scarves, fur stoles, and bridal veils that had fallen from the trunk of a troupe of actors were scattered over the people, the seats, and the aisle.

“Hello, hello,” Gila shouted into the car, but nothing moved. “Is anyone here? Is there anyone here?” she added in English, in a braver, more desperate voice inflamed by the fear that had begun to creep into her mind, by the knowledge that she could not ignore for long what she was seeing, and that she was not dreaming, but witnessing a dreamlike reality.

Her ears, which had already adjusted to the sounds of the splitting earth and had accepted them as background noises, suddenly seemed to absorb a new sound in the distance, as abrupt as a dog’s bark. She hurried to one of the broken windows, stuck her head out between the sharp peaks of glass protruding from the window frame, listened hard, and screamed to the smoke-filled world outside, “Hey! Hey! Hello! Hello!”

A very faint voice sounded from the depths of the thick whiteness, “Hey, where are you?”

“Here, inside the train!” she shouted toward the human voice and stretched her neck even further, putting it in danger of being slit. “Where are you? Where are you?” Her throat swelled with the effort.

“Here,” a distant voice echoed.

“I’m inside the train,” she shouted excitedly. There was no doubt: a man’s voice. “Don’t go in the wrong direction! Come this way!”

“It’s okay.” The voice crossed the diminishing distance, and now the owner of that voice could hear that hers was a woman’s voice. “Wait for me. I’m coming in your direction.”

“I’m waiting for you, I’m waiting,” she called, her excitement overcoming her embarrassment. She was seized by a strange feeling, as if she were in a movie she’d seen a long time ago and now she herself was the heroine, calling to a man she didn’t know, the hero of the movie, quoting lines from a script that bore some sort of insane similarity to the present situation.

“Where are you?” she asked, frantic with worry.

“I’m getting closer to you,” the voice said. “Keep on talking. I’ll find you through your voice.”

Now she no longer doubted the reality of the voice, and as nervous as a girl about to go on a blind date, she wanted to impress the stranger and to recall a song she’d learned by heart in English class, to assure him that she was worth the effort.

“Hey, are you still there?”

“Yes. I’m waiting for you in the same place.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I’m trying to think of something interesting…”

“That doesn’t matter, the important thing is to keep talking.”

“I don’t know…”

“Maybe you should sing something, that’s easier.”

The words of the Israeli anthem came into her mind automatically and she pulled her head back inside and started to sing, and as she did so, she straightened like the encyclopedia illustrations of the evolution of monkey into man, “Our hope is not lost, the hope of two thousand years….” She sang standing tall, like an instructor in a youth movement standing before his charges and singing with them, her head held high and her heart threatening to overflow. The words of the anthem suffused her with a sense of brotherhood and strength, and she heard her clear, lone voice, separate from the host of sounds around her, “To be a free people in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem. To be a free people….”

A man’s head suddenly appeared under the window behind a thin covering that looked like a transparent scarf, his damp hair speckled with white dust, dark crescents under his eyes, and he asked, “What language is that?”

Panting as if she had asthma, she gave silent thanks to whoever had brought her that man, who looked robust and spoke sensibly, and said, “Hebrew.”

He reached up to the window and she reached down through it, and their hands met, crushing the dust between them.

Many times afterward she tried to re-create that moment, the first touch of their fingers, and couldn’t remember anything special that might have made it one of those moments whose fateful nature is perceived only after it has passed. He turned to come onto the train, tugged at the stuck door to open it, and stopped there, stunned by what he saw. Through his eyes—like a child seeing for the first time the amazing sights of his country through the eyes of a tourist—she saw the inside of the car, and before she could ask what had happened to the people in his car, he said, “We have to get out of here right away.”

“Where to?” She didn’t doubt for a minute that she had to go with him.

“We passed a station a few kilometers back. I assume there’s a telephone there. The cell phones are dead.”

On cold nights they’d sit in front of the fire, and the boy, from the day he began to speak, always asked to hear stories. They didn’t tell him about their lives before they’d come there, leaving that for when he grew up and could understand. They spoke as if life had begun the moment the train stopped, and Gila—as if she could look into his mind—understood how the fairy tale was taking shape in his imagination, how it would be magnified as time passed and one day would be told as a creation story: the story of how the train had stopped at an unknown place between Odessa and Frankfurt; the story of reaching the inn, which was surrounded by a network of intertwined, bare branches like a malignant tumor entrapped by blood vessels, an inn whose frightening façade enclosed an amazing interior, as in the fairy tales of wanderers who enter a lost wonderland and find a child asleep in his cradle.

After they found the boy and discovered that the telephone was dead and the electricity cut off, they went to bury the dead. The back garden was burned, and beyond it was a garden of misshapen, severed tree trunks that had screaming, evil-looking faces and grooved tongues, roaring with pain or hunger, and beyond that were gaping, smoking pits and earth that seethed, as if to show that even sand could boil. Every time the man dug a hole to bury the dead in, Gila stood guard, facing the trunks as if she feared that malevolent spirits dwelling in the evil shapes were plotting to leap out and tear the dead and the living to bits.

Later, they sat down to eat in candlelight that illuminated and shadowed their faces. The bread, the cheese, the olives, the homemade jam lent things a deceptive air of normalcy, but she couldn’t identify the sweet liquid in a pitcher whose flavor reminded her of a Columbian spread she had bought in the neighborhood supermarket during its South American Festival.

“Are you American?” she asked, as if now, after they’d been saved from the catastrophe and had walked half a day together and found the baby and buried the dead, the time had come for a personal conversation.

“Yes.”

“I’m Israeli.”

“You live in Israel?”

“Yes. And you?”

“Near New York. A little north.”

“Where exactly?”

“Do you know the area?”

“I have a sister in New Rochelle.”

“So we’re neighbors. I live in Scarsdale.”

“Ah—” She was speechless with surprise.

“Yes,” he replied, as if he knew exactly what she meant.

“What happened today….” Just as she had given the signal to start their personal conversation, she now gave the signal to stop it and realized that she didn’t have a name for what had happened.

“A new kind of catastrophe,” he said. “Probably radiation that decayed immediately.”

“Did you see how it started, how it happened?”

“No. I was in the smoking car….”

“I was in the smoking car, too!” The coincidence excited her, the discovery that within the incomprehensible reality surrounding her so inexplicably, like a nightmare, there was suddenly a certain order, and now she was beginning to catch on to its logic.

“The walls of the smoking car must have been made of a material that stopped the radiation. The window faces upward, and that probably has something to do with it, too. The boy was in a closed room, which is probably what saved him.”

“It’s like what happened in Chernobyl, isn’t it? I once saw a TV program.”

“This seems much worse than Chernobyl. But it might also be some kind of natural disaster.”

“How long do you think it’ll take them to get the trains moving again?” she asked, as if she hadn’t heard the terrifying things he’d said.

He gave her a sideways look of astonishment, as if at that very moment, as she was carefully spreading cheese on her slice of bread, he’d learned something important about her.

“That’ll probably take some time,” he said cautiously.

“They must already know in Frankfurt that something went wrong. After all, the train didn’t arrive on time, and they’re very precise there.”

“Maybe they don’t know. Maybe things went wrong there, too.”

“They’ll send someone to find out what happened,” she promised.

“Who will they send, your army?”

She seemed to be picking up a tone of derision, and she bristled. Over the last week she’d been hearing a lot of teasing about the Israeli army. “And why not the American army?” she shot at him, “We don’t have any weapons that you don’t have too.”

He laughed. For the first time since they met so many hours ago, she saw him laugh. His laughter seemed strange to her, wolfish. “Why are you laughing?”

“Because this sounds like a conversation between generals,” he said. “And besides, I like to hear women talk about the army.”

She fell silent. Something new, a faint hint of courtship, the feeling of tension familiar from other places, infused his voice when he specified what he liked in women.

She was so embarrassed by the subject of the conversation that she changed it. “Do you think the baby is healthy?”

“There are things we’ll be able to see when he wakes up, and there are things that might appear much later on,” he said, the tone of his voice now restrained, as if it were a dangerous animal rounded up to be put back in its cage.

“What will we feed him?”

“I imagine his mother must have had a supply of food for him that would last a while. We’ll find something.” His voice was already as soothing as it had been earlier.

That night, lying on the sofa bed in the baby’s room, wearing her underpants and the Indian woman’s lovely nightgown, hearing the man in his double bed in the adjoining room, Gila was free to think about her home in Israel, which seemed as imaginary as a previous life viewed from the distance of the month she had spent in Odessa and the new reality that had assailed her that morning. Maybe they already knew about the catastrophe. She tried, in her imagination, to bring a picture of the house closer. Maybe, in the early evening, they’d called the hotel in Frankfurt she was supposed to be staying in and found out that she hadn’t arrived. At this very moment her husband was probably making urgent calls to his brother, a brigadier general; his cousin, the ambassador to Switzerland; and her sister in New Rochelle, speaking in a whisper from his study, trying to keep his concern from the girls for the time being. Maybe the evening news had already reported on the train that had disappeared in an area where a mysterious catastrophe had occurred; maybe they’d listed the names of the Israelis who were on the train, her name among them. At a certain point, they would have to tell her parents. Her mother would get into bed like she had when told of the death of her son in Lebanon, pull the blanket over her head, and refuse to eat or drink. How happy they’ll be when they find out she was one of the survivors! What a welcome she’d get, with flowers and a banner the girls would paint, covered with hearts pierced with arrows.

The baby suddenly began crying, and, thrust from the joys of the future to the nightmare of the present, she got up and groped her way to him in the dark. The touch of her hands or her smell, which were new to him, caused him to cry harder when she picked him up carefully, took him into her bed, held him close, and put into his mouth the nipple of the bottle she had prepared earlier according to the instructions on the box. And she said to the man who appeared in the rectangle of the door, “It’s okay. This is how I used to calm my girls,” and she didn’t realize until after he’d gone that she had mentioned her daughters to him for the first time.

Right then, before she felt the movement deep inside her, as if her body alone had recognized it first, she reached down as she had when she was pregnant, and with her fingers spread she would draw circles, soothing the fetus that was moving toward the wall of her womb. She thought she felt a movement in her belly, and suddenly, a small limb bulged from her body like a sharp fin sent to take a quick look around and then withdraw immediately. She continued to move her hand, searching for the limb that was teasing her, scorning her efforts, urging her groping fingers in one direction, disappearing into her body in another. So she lay there in the dark, her heart pounding, and pressed the unknown baby to her body, one hand holding the bottle, the other lying in wait at the bottom of her stomach.

On the day after the catastrophe, when they went back to the train station, about an hour’s walk from the inn, they met the nun who looked like a girl and the sickly, bad-tempered man she was tending to. On the previous day they had been too worn out to look around the station office and storeroom. As soon as they’d discovered that the phone line was dead, they had turned and walked in the direction indicated by the large sign advertising, in pictographs, a place to sleep and eat: a bed and an X formed by a knife and fork. On their way back to the station, they came upon a group of bronze statues: a flock of sheep, some of them pushed up against each other and some of them standing alone, and at the head of the flock, a shepherd with an army backpack slung over his shoulder. They didn’t wonder what a piece of art was doing in that remote place. They knew that ten hours earlier the man and his flock had been living creatures, and now they were frozen in time in the smoky expanse. Gila stood motionless and let her eyes register the incredible sight, and she discovered that the sights she’d seen on the previous day had blunted her sense of amazement. He touched her arm and they continued walking, their eyes growing more accustomed to a new visual language.

They found the cashier sitting in his booth, squashed against the window, his eyes gaping. The woman on the bench was also sitting as she had been the day before, her face sunk into the fur of her coat, clutching her travel case to her chest the way a mother clutches her baby. Standing up, leaning against the wall as if he’d fallen asleep on duty was a railroad employee wearing an elegant uniform covered with buttons and buttonholes. A nun suddenly appeared at the door to the office looking like a child dressed up as a nun. Agitated, she hurried over to them, sentences in Italian pouring out of her mouth. She grabbed Gila’s hand and pulled her inside the office, where an old man sat shrunken in a chair. He looked at them and cursed in German, and to the man’s question, he replied that he spoke English, and promptly began cursing in that language.

At the beginning of the third year, when she’d stopped dreaming about her girls, Gila dreamed that the rusted cars had been removed from the tracks and a sparkling new train was waiting in the station, all its doors open invitingly, its flickering lights signaling that it was about to move. By then she was sleeping in the man’s bed, and she awoke with a start. Once, she’d managed to slip out of the bed without waking him and left the house before dawn. She rode there on her bicycle, a part of her going over and over the news that the world had returned to its former state, a part of her already afraid of the moment she would part from the man. At the station, the woman stroking her tattered bag and the cashier’s skeleton bent over, counting its treasures, were still there. On the train, two skeletons had already begun to disintegrate. The passionate girl was almost completely bald; the nose of the man who had hidden his genitals had fallen off. Gila stood at the door, opposite the skeletons, and was almost relieved: and if she did manage to leave the man, who knows what she would find at home when the trains were back in operation again. Maybe the Arabs, the former owners, had come back to reclaim the house with its turquoise shutters and open balconies where she had lived since her marriage. Seventeen years ago her husband had carried her over the threshold as if she were a baby, and five years after that, he carried their two baby girls into the house in the same way. Maybe the house was deserted and the turquoise shutters had rotted and her beloved family was sitting motionless like the train people. Yet here, in the haze, life was beginning to stabilize: within a ten-minute walk from the inn, they’d discovered a treasure of flints, and two days ago they’d found another well. The tree in front of the door had begun to bear sweet, figlike fruit, and the boy had succeeded in writing another three letters in Hebrew in a handwriting similar to the one that had filled her daughters’ first-grade notebooks. On her way back to the inn, like someone who had been in a coma and had regained consciousness, she scolded herself: the house in Jerusalem was still standing, and her dear ones were alive and healthy and very worried about her.

Several months after the catastrophe, at night, panting into his neck after making love so passionate that it never ceased to surprise her, she would say to herself: this is real life. This is real life with the distinct feeling of a new kind of happiness, lived on the edge, as it sometimes is in childhood, with the intriguing sense of danger and the thrilling pulse of life that had been absent from her former life, the sort that stirs people to climb mountains of ice and race cars across the desert like a storm. But in the morning those trembling moments were forgotten, and she’d again ask him when the trains would start operating.

At the time, she regretted having taken the nun and the sick man to the inn. The nun secluded herself in her chosen room, rarely coming out and rarely eating, but the sick man, aggressive and quick to shout, would seek her out instead, lie in wait for her, taunt her. Later he would taunt the boy, too. He would draw her into conversations in which she found herself helpless, impelled to ask questions she hadn’t intended to ask, giving answers she hadn’t intended to give, as if she’d lost control over what she said; later on, he’d do the same with the boy.

“Will you miss me when they find us?” he asked her on one of the first days.

“I don’t think so.” She took the opportunity for revenge.

“But we’ll never know!” The roaring laugh exposed his dark palate. “You’ll never have the chance not to miss me!” He slapped his knees, “You know why?”

“Why?” Once again, she felt that helplessness of having fallen into an invisible trap.

“Because no one will ever rescue us. We’ll be stuck here together.”

“Till when?” the trap snapped shut around her.

“Till we slaughter each other.” He threw his head back with the shrill laugh of an asthmatic.

“You’ll slaughter each other” was also one of the things the Pole had said too, his eyes riveted on the nun, who had come out of her room for a moment.

One day, on the morning she’d seen orange water spouting from a hidden spring in the pestilent area paint a stripe of wild, orange grass on the scorched earth, Gila decided to tell the man about the limb growing in her belly. But that was the day the Pole came riding to the inn on a new bicycle, clutching a huge sack in his arms. Muscular and energetic, bubbling over with ideas and speaking broken but understandable English, the Pole infused her with sudden hope: here was the man who would put things back the way they had been.

He’d learned English, he said reluctantly, from his dealings with tourists. On the nature of those dealings he refused to elaborate, as if there was still a danger he’d be extradited by the authorities, but she guessed: speculating with foreign currency, maybe pimping prostitutes.

They were happy to see him, gave him food and sat down to listen to him. This was their first encounter with an English speaker who could explain to them where they were and describe what was happening in the surrounding villages. He’d been on the road for months, he said, going from village to village on his way to his own village to see what had become of his family. His home was five hundred kilometers from there. He’d covered most of the way on foot. He’d found the bicycle at the train station and he already knew, to his regret, that he would have to leave it behind because of the poor condition of the roads. Meanwhile, he’d passed through ten villages.

He got up suddenly, grabbed the sack he’d brought with him, spread its contents on the floor, and showed them a priest’s robe, statuettes of Jesus and his mother, bouquets of flowers made of painted clay, boxes of incense, candlesticks—objects he’d found in ruined churches.

Gila wanted to know the name of the inn and pointed to the sign outside.

“A Good Place for the Night,” the Pole said. “A very strange name.” He pointed toward the pestilent area and told them that near a distant train station he’d happened upon an inn called Katarina. He’d stayed there until he’d finished the supply of food.

The man wanted to know the condition of the villages he’d passed through, and the Pole used hand movements in place of the words that did not exist in his vocabulary to describe what he’d seen: one village was sunk in mud up to the roofs of the houses; in other villages, most of the houses, made of wood, had been razed down to their foundations; in three villages, even the church, which was made of stone, had collapsed; in the fields and houses he found only dead people. On the second day after the catastrophe he’d heard a baby crying, but he couldn’t get to it, and then the crying stopped, and once he saw a young girl, who ran away from him and disappeared among the ruins.

“No more,” he spread his hands to the sides as if to encompass all the horizons, “No more people in the world.”

“And animals?” the man asked.

“Animals there are.” The Pole counted on his fingers: horses, dogs, cats, mice. All hungry, all dangerous.

“Where exactly are we?” the man asked.

“In Poland, near the Austrian border.”

“But the people we met don’t speak Polish,” the man said. “Around here, they speak a different language. The people from the village speak…”

In the middle of the sentence the Pole froze. The nun had come out of her room and walked through the hallway on her way to the sick man’s room.

“There is a nun here?” He rubbed his eyes.

“Yes.”

“How many are you?”

“Five.”

“And there are more women?”

“No. Only a sick man and a baby.”

“I must go to my family,” the Pole said, as if he were giving up the chance of a better life for the sake of his family.

They told him they hoped he would find his village still standing and his family alive, supplied him with edible leaves, a bottle of water, a jar of jam from the pantry, and accompanied him to the path. Outside, the Pole tied the sack, his eyes roving constantly from window to window searching for the nun, and then he mounted his bicycle and rode off, waving to them until he disappeared.

The first few days, which turned into the first few weeks, Gila was still expecting to hear the sound of a car or a motorcycle: a representative of the local authorities come to inform them that the train was running again; a representative of the UN sent to the area of the catastrophe who might perhaps bring some sign that all was well at home. But in the meantime, life began to take on the form of a routine. She stayed at home to watch the baby; washed clothes in the river (a five-minute walk from the inn), whose water was not good for drinking; sifted through the things they’d brought from the train; boiled leaves and roots the man brought; and then checked in a laboratory of sorts he’d set up in the kitchen. The man came back from his wanderings every evening like a man returning to his home in the suburbs to tell his family about his day in the city.

Despite the family pattern that was taking shape, throughout the first few months Gila and the man kept their previous lives to themselves. She knew he was a chemist, married to a musician, a harpist, and the father of a son who was also planning to be a musician; he knew that she illustrated children’s books, that she was the mother of twelve-year-old twin girls, married to a businessman. She knew he had gone to Odessa to attend an international conference on ecology; he knew she had gone there to copy illustrations from an ancient book of legends kept in a museum.

The horror outside bound them together; within the cramped togetherness they maintained their independence. He put his shirts and pants on the pile of her clothes, which was separate from the pile of cloth diapers cut from sheets, but his underwear and socks he washed himself, as if he were drawing a boundary line.

Around the time the boy started to smile, Gila was once again seized by restlessness. For a few days now, she’d seen the funnel lower like a plane in an air force flyover, dipping and raising its nose, then mockingly disappearing in a climb, sending out unclear, anxiety-provoking signals.

One evening, before the nun and the sick man came down from their rooms, as she was eating a tasty new dish and the child was jabbering to himself in his cradle (which had probably been a gift to celebrate his birth from a relative he would never know), she suddenly asked the man, “Is it possible that the world’s been destroyed? That we’re the last people left?” And she herself was shocked at the question.

The man raised inquisitive eyes from the calendar he was making on a wooden tablet, as if he were assessing her ability to face the truth. But even before he replied, she understood—for the first time since she came out of the smoking car—that she might never again see her daughters or her husband or her mother or her childhood friends or the other people who had populated her life, from the woman who cleaned the stairwells to the elderly lady with the girlish braid who sold her flowers on the street corner every Friday, and for the first time she was struck with the profound awareness that her girls and her husband and all the other people in her life probably no longer existed, and she burst into tears, immediately smothered them with her hands, and lowered her head to her knees, her hands still covering her eyes. A picture flashed through her mind of her daughters standing shoulder to shoulder, waiting to be photographed, then switched rapidly into a picture of the girls sitting opposite each other at the dining room table, illustrating the invitations to their bat mitzvah party.

Feeling the man’s warm hand sending currents of calmness along her back, she straightened up, and even though she knew that her eyelids tended to swell and redden when she cried, making her face ugly, she raised her head.

“It’s because of my daughters.”

“I can imagine,” he said.

“I have no idea how this will sound to you,” she dared to say, completely vulnerable, “but I’m so glad you were in the smoking car.”

“It’s mutual,” he said.

And she thought that this was probably the new, flexible vocabulary that adapted itself to the time and the place and although what they’d said entailed no commitment, it nonetheless signaled a potential alliance.

“So what does it mean—the world has been destroyed?”—she repeated the incredible words. “That no one is looking for us, that there is no place to go back to, that we’ll stay here forever without electricity, without water….” Her voice emerged in a childish singsong, an intonation appropriate to the words, “without home, or books, or paintings….”

He suddenly hugged her tightly, pulling her out of her chair and pressing her to him, burying her head in his chest, shielding her like a parent protecting his child from all the dangers lying in wait for her, dangers she cannot imagine, as if he were trying to compensate her for the things she would not have—the loss of which was only now beginning to seep into her awareness—a list of things that she had only just begun to enumerate and that would grow longer. She sank into the consoling embrace, trying to subdue her renewed sobbing—about the electricity and the water and the terror of the funnel of air and the fact that she would probably never know the fate of her daughters.

Suddenly she felt his hand resting inquiringly on her stomach, and she understood immediately that this was not the touch of a lover, but the pressure of a doctor’s hand feeling some worrying symptoms in the body of a patient, and like an obedient patient, she let him lift her blouse and run his expert hand, pleasant to the touch, over her belly. The tips of his fingers felt the edge of the limb slightly above her navel, and in the momentary battle between the lump in her belly and his fingers searching for it from outside, she felt a digging movement as the limb flipped over and slipped away into the depths of her stomach like an agile diver.

She expected him to recoil from her, from her strange body in which growths were sprouting, but he did not pull his hand away, he simply held it there as if to soothe the troubled spot and said, “I have two of them.”

Without a word spoken, she went to his bed that night and found him waiting. As she approached in the darkness, he lifted the blanket over the place he had made for her, and when she slipped in next to him, she was immediately trapped in his embrace, her face close to his. She stopped breathing, waiting for the first movement that would dictate the movements to follow, but he remained quiet and tensed, locking her in his embrace and still waiting. She reached up to his face, trying to learn the features she knew by sight but not by touch, which was strange and new, a treasure of surprises, and she ran her fingertips over his chin, stubbly because of the blunted razor; over his jaws, his cheeks, his eyes, which closed under her touch; over the side of his nose, his lips, which opened like a trap in the darkness and caught her thumb in his teeth. She drew back in alarm and he, as if his plan had succeeded, laughed gently and reached down to the backs of her thighs and raised her nightgown over her shoulders, her arms and her hair pouring out of the neck opening. Then he bent over and pulled her under him, and they both stopped for a moment, his stomach lying against hers, before he began to move. The memory of the limbs wandering about in their bodies flickered through her mind, and though she pushed it away immediately, it left behind a faint, persistent fear. Her movements became suffused with despair when, from beneath him, as if she were verifying their existence, she moved her caressing fingers over each part of his body: his nape, his shoulders, the long back, the line of his spine swallowed up by the rise of his buttocks, the muscles of his thigh down to the back of his knee at the farthest reach of her fingertips, all of which swayed together until the movement of their bodies took on a life of its own, absorbing currents from the ground that turned it into a timeless rocking, a reminder of the soothing rocking of an earlier life, until the sweeping, protracted moment of climax that sent ripples to the edges of the body, subduing the storm, also calming the untouched place where the quivering source dwelled, and she wondered as she always did about the mysterious riddle of the body’s ability to forget and its ability to remember. And within that remembering—like everything that had happened from the moment she’d walked out of the smoking car—the echo of distant sensations rose inside her, reminiscent of the maelstrom that had begun in her body when the man entered her, and she fell backward like someone collapsing into an abyss, knowing that his body too had memories of other places that were stirring now and filling him with longing, knowing too that as long as there was the promise of this moment, always surprising in its generosity, it would be possible to bear the horror outside that bed.

Many days passed, and their life was channeled into a routine somewhat reminiscent of the routine of the life she had left in the previous world, and yet it did not resemble it at all.

Sometimes she heard distant voices that aroused a faint memory of a house bordered by pitango bushes, a guava tree that bore so much fruit in the spring that its heavy fragrance spread to the inner rooms, and an almond tree at the edge of the garden that dotted the earth with its fallen fruit; of a little girl building a Lego tower in her room, the walls covered with pictures of parents and two little girls, a host of parents and girls, and in another room, another little girl seen from the back, giving milk to a cat, and a man sitting in his room leafing through his papers. Sometimes the images vanished suddenly, as in a magic show, and sometimes the picture became so clear that she could dive inside it and see up close the fabric of the girl’s blouse, the cat’s whiskers twitching in the milk. The reincarnation of her previous life would alternately awaken in her and then become dormant. Sometimes a familiar smell would arouse it, sometimes a touch. Sometimes it was aroused by the light of dusk that would appear at a random moment, a faint, expectant light that even in her former life had stirred in her a mysterious longing for something unclear, a feeling of certainty that she had missed out on something, and she felt burdened by an oppressive helplessness. If only she knew what that feeling referred to, she would rally and act to change it, but her inaction and the knowledge of missed opportunity saddened her so deeply that she cried now, as she had then.

At the beginning of the second year, turbid water fell from the sky day and night, and Gila was filled with restlessness. Now that they had a roof over their heads, a constant supply of food, a clear picture of the near future, and now that her feelings for the man were growing stronger, nightmares assailed her. She woke at night in a bloodbath. Her two girls had drowned right before her eyes, and she herself, handless, had tried to get them out by pushing and poking at them with her head, then had dived in after them, kicking her feet to raise them up, but they sank into the dark water, and she watched with desperate eyes as their hips, their shoulders, their faces, the ribbons in their long hair vanished. Dripping blood, she went into her bedroom and saw the large light fixture fall from the ceiling onto her husband sleeping in the double bed, the copper prong of the fixture directed at his head like a spear, and to the sound of bones being crushed, she woke with a shriek and found the man leaning over her, brushing her hair away from her face, whispering, “Sshh…” the way she once had whispered to her daughters.

“Don’t you dream about them?” she dared to ask him one peaceful night.

“I don’t have to dream; I think about them all the time.”

“All the time?” she asked, almost insulted.

“Yes. And I know that I’ll never see them again. I hope that if they survived, they’ll find good people the way I found you.”

Astonished, she rebelled, refusing to accept his brand of mourning, and she kept having nightmares filled with feelings of rage and helplessness for many more days. But in the end, she surrendered, and a short while before the Pole returned, she could already think of the man as if he were her husband, even though the two were different in appearance and character, in their thoughts and actions, in the way they made love to her, and she taught herself to believe that everything she told him she could have told her husband if he had been beside her. Months later, she’d stopped dreaming about her girls and imagined them part of a large group of children their own age, studying and spending their days as if they were in the camp they used to go to every summer from the time they were eight, and becoming teenagers and young women and finding husbands as much like their father as possible. One day she noted with astonishment that her nightmares had become rare, and all of her strength was invested in worrying about the man’s safe return from his searches and about the child wandering in the garden of wooden monsters, exposed to the ravenous funnel of air. She was amazed at how old forces continued to operate like a well-oiled machine forever and how the senses were now tuned toward new people, remembering their old movements, like ancient springs forging their way along a map of channels that had altered, struggling in the depths of the earth, bearing the memory of that earlier flow, directing it toward a place that had suddenly changed. And how, after a period of paralysis when certain functions of the body had stopped, they awaken like a tree sprouting buds and continue along their path, blind to what is going on outside the shell of the body, assailed by stirrings of desire as often as in the past, causing people to grope their way to each other to find refuge, shelter, and repose; to seek affection and grace in a child, the heart opening to him when he smiled or learned something new; taking pleasure in the warmth that rose at the sight of the nun, in the sweet friendship.

In the midst of this newly forming serenity, the Pole came back long after he had left, waving his arms in the distance like a voyager returning home, and brought turmoil with him. His wild eyes in constant search of the nun, his hands flapping every which way, he told them about the destruction he’d found in his village. In the direction of the sunrise, on the ridge, several buildings were still standing, probably a military base, strewn with rifles and equipment and soldiers’ uniforms, but everything else was in ruins. The village was located high on the mountain—he waved his hand upward—chasms and a valley below. In the place where the church used to stand only blackened stones remained. And everything was shrouded in fog. He hadn’t met another living soul on the road, only hungry animals. He’d stopped in other villages on his way back. In one of them he’d found an undamaged house, but he didn’t take anything from it, “Except for this,” he said and pulled an antique ring inlaid with stones from his pocket and put it on the table in front of Gila, then returned his hand to his pocket, took out a plainer ring, and put it down next to the first, “And this is for the other woman.”

The church—he continued speaking as if he hadn’t noticed that his gifts were not received with thank-yous—the church had collapsed and the wind had blown everything away, leaving only the foundation stones. His house and his brothers’ houses had been swept away, trees had been uprooted, even corpses of people and animals had been carried off. He’d seen some of the dead lying on the mountain slope, unidentifiable. Those, he’d buried. The bodies that had been swept into the chasm, he was unable to reach.

Silence fell after the Pole stopped speaking, as tired as if he’d just made the journey again. Even the sick man didn’t snigger. Then the Pole asked, his eyes blazing, whether anyone had come to the inn in his absence. The man told him about the old woman who’d been tossed out onto their doorstep and asked if the funnel of air had also reached the distant villages. The light in the Pole’s eyes died when he heard the reply. Several times, he said, he’d seen the funnel. Once, it had almost thrown him into the abyss; another time, it almost snatched him up, but he flattened himself on the ground and held onto rocks; and three times he’d seen it from afar, twice completely empty and once sucking up a pretty, live girl, he said, fixing mesmerized eyes on the nun, who pressed her shoulders closer together, shrinking under his gaze.

The nun refused to touch the ring the Pole had put on the table in front of her. The next day he blocked her way on the stairs and tried to kiss her, but her shouts summoned Gila, who came running and managed to push him down the steps.

Frightened that the Pole might attack her, too, Gila begged the man to send him away, but the man claimed that the Pole had apologized to the nun and that they really needed the help of another man. And in fact, the intrepid Pole, with his highly developed senses and knowledge of the secrets of the place, would sometimes discover treasures, and in the end his presence in the room he chose for himself, next to the child’s room, was accepted as permanent. Again and again he’d offer the ring to the nun, which she refused, and because of that, or perhaps despite it, he would lie in wait for her, trap her in the pantry, where one day he managed to rip her dress, and one night he sneaked into her room and stroked her breast as she slept. The nun was terrified of him. For days after that night, she trailed after Gila like her shadow, barricaded the door to her room with heavy furniture, prayed out loud, murmuring the name Mary over and over again, and sought the nearness of the child, who would soon be three, sitting beside him as he studied Hebrew, writing square words on pieces of flat leaves that were as strong as cloth with a pipe stuffed with the peel of a black fruit, as hard as lead.

On clear mornings the two men would go out together, and whatever they brought back was received with cries of joy: wild chickens, edible fruit, a kitten they gave to the child as a gift that made him glow with happiness. Those days brought with them an awakening of new life, and Gila discovered in herself hidden desires she hadn’t known before. They further helped to delineate the borders of her new world, and just as, in the past, she used to long for new clothes she saw in shop windows, she now longed for a hat she’d seen in the passenger car of the train lying in the aisle among the theatrical clothes strewn there.

One day a golden-tailed bird appeared and built a nest in one of the trees, and a few days later, two more birds arrived, one white with a crown that resembled a bridal veil and the other covered with blue spots. On mornings when there were wind storms, Gila stayed under the covers beside the man, luxuriating in the ordinariness and the tranquility of the birds’ chirping, and she would feel her stomach and find the limb that had sprouted overnight, then shift her hand to the man’s stomach and hear him say, “It’s still there.” Sometimes the child would squeeze in between them, and the three of them would lie together in a tangle of arms and legs. One day the Pole succeeded in igniting a large flame by rubbing two bits of metal together, and they immediately replaced the rare flints, which required expertise to kindle. When the wild wheat ripened, they refrained from touching it because it reminded the man of a poisonous plant, but the Pole explained that it was edible and they went out into the fields the way people did in biblical times, and Gila had a memory from her previous life, the story of Ruth and Naomi and a play in her elementary school in which she played the part of Ruth, for which her cousin had lent her an expensive white nightgown she’d bought in Paris. That memory, like so many others, no longer caused her severe pain or longing, but merely tugged gently at her heart, as if she’d received regards from a distant lover. And there was a joyous day when the man found a bush whose leaves were excellent for making cigarettes. He kept the process a secret but allotted a generous number of cigarettes to the others, and in the evening they sat together and smoked, all except the nun, filling the air with yellowish smoke that smelled as sharp as eucalyptus. And one day Gila and the nun walked as far as the strange trees at the edge of the plain and saw that they had turquoise orbs, like amulets against the evil eye, hanging from the tips of their branches, and they found wild berries. The nun taught Gila a children’s song in Italian about children picking wild berries. The whole way they spoke in the new language they had created, a mixture of English and Italian, and before they reached home the nun had gotten Gila to swear twice that she would protect her from the Pole.

When the boy turned three, the sick man’s condition worsened. Now it was difficult for him to climb the stairs, so they emptied out the office for him, and he slept there. The nun brought a tub of water there every morning and helped him wash and dress, as devoted as a daughter. The sick man spent most days sitting and looking at the back garden. On cold days he looked out at it from inside the house, and during warmer hours he sat in the garden with his eyes closed or else he stared at the mounds of earth that marked the graves of the dead. Gila would occasionally go out and sit down beside him, fearing conversation with him and fascinated by it. And he, aware of this, openly amused himself with her.

“What do you look at all the time?” she asked.

“The question is not what we look at, but what we see. You, for example, look but you don’t see.”

She knew he was talking about the man, whom both of them had once seen staring at the nun.

“What do you see?” She would not allow him to drag her where he wanted.

“The question is not what I see, but whether what I see actually exists.”

“And how can we know?” She was still thinking about those looks.

“We can’t. Kant asked whether our consciousness has the tools to decipher the reality outside of us. And what, in your opinion, did he think?”

“What?”

“That we don’t!” He celebrated his victory over her lack of knowledge. “But Heidegger, yes, Heidegger thought that the question was irrelevant, that we are inside reality, we know it. Oh, Heidegger, I would love to know what he’d say about the reality here.” He closed his eyes and cut himself off from Gila with deliberate cruelty, leaving her determined not to think about the man looking at the nun.

Later on, as if the Pole had infected everyone with his own delirium, came a time that was as feverish and overwrought, as strident and unpredictable, as adolescence. Something in the air signaled calamity, and even the child felt it, never leaving the woman’s side throughout that time. The Pole tried again to attack the nun, and she managed to escape to Gila’s room. The old man, overtaken by rage, destroyed the fence in the back garden before he calmed down. The man, Gila knew without his saying a word about it, thought constantly about the woman who played the harp and about the son who was planning to be a musician. Restlessness permeated the air, as if the era of unexpected disasters had passed and dozens of signs were heralding the arrival of the next disaster.

During one of their nocturnal conversations, her head on his shoulder and her eyes on the moon that linked the worlds of time, the man suggested setting up a place for prayer in one of the empty rooms, because it was now—after they had a place to sleep and bread to eat and they knew of the treasures and traps the world around them held—now that they might begin to ask themselves the questions the ancients had asked after natural disasters had occurred, about good and evil, about crime and punishment, and it seemed right to prepare a place where they could draw strength from God.

“But you don’t believe in God,” she said in astonishment. “And besides, what kind of God could we create that would be good for me and for the nun, too?”

“As a nonbeliever, it’s clear to me what isn’t clear to believers: that they all believe in the same thing. But we won’t make a revolution, we’ll split Him up. We have at least two Catholics and one Jew, and the child’s parents were probably Buddhists.”

She chuckled in the darkness, “Look, you’ve created a new religion.”

The next day, the two women emptied out the small room with tiny windows, took down many of the paintings from the walls of the house, and hung them in the room as crowded together as if they were stamps in an album, next to each other and above each other, wall to wall and floor to ceiling. They put small tables in the corners and assigned a different religion to each. The nun, radiating an aura of light, put a picture of Jesus and the small wooden cross the boy had made for her on one of the tables and decorated it with flowers and leaves. Gila took off the chain and Star of David she had bought for herself on Rosh Hashana and put it on the table across from the Christian corner. The child put on his table one of the cars from his toy train, which had once belonged to a child who himself had been a passenger on a train. The old man, ridiculing the entire idea, put on the fourth table an empty pillbox and a cane that he hadn’t used in months, and the Pole put the ring the nun had refused to accept beside them. Then chairs were brought to the room, and the child dragged them this way and that to form a circle.

After supper, everyone went up to the prayer room. Gila was excited by the smell of the boiled apple leaves and the special tranquility that reminded her of the synagogue on Rosh Hashana eve, permeated with holiness and splendor and the fear of God, who was looking into people’s souls. And that spirit, she imagined, had wandered from the synagogue on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea to the inn whose owners had given it its name in a moment of prophetic inspiration, and the spirit pervaded the room with its two small windows, enveloping the random, everyday objects as if they were holy vessels. Gila looked at the cane and remembered the watercolor that had hung next to the blackboard in her first-grade classroom: a group of people and a flock of sheep led by Abraham, his expression determined, walking toward the Promised Land, and the walking stick in his hand was the cane lying on the table in front of her.

The nun began praying in a hushed voice. They joined her until she whispered “Hallelujah,” to which they responded like a practiced, many-voiced choir, and all the while a splintered, striped light filtered in through the small windows, softening their features. Gila looked at the Pole, wondering if he was sorry for what he’d done to the nun, then shifted her gaze to the man and saw that he was looking at her. A flood of feelings rose in her, and for some reason she recalled the excitement that had made her knees weak on the day of her bat mitzvah, and she reached out to put her hand in his, which she found waiting and welcoming.

The old man watched them from the side, his malicious gaze fixed on their joined hands. For a moment she caught his glance, and he did not hide from her the laughter in his eyes.

“Why did you come to the room yesterday?” she asked him the next day.

“I couldn’t pass up the entertainment.”

“So you came to laugh at us?”

“I like to watch people. I’m interested in their need to look for a reason for something that has no reason.”

“So what is all this,” she waved her hand around at the evidence that stretched as far as the eye could see, “Isn’t there a reason for it?”

“That is the external manifestation, not the reason.”

“What’s the reason?”

“No one knows, not even a scientist who studies it for a million years.”

“But there has to be reason!” She fought for the last remaining bit of logic.

“No.”

“So what is it the result of?” she persisted.

“A whim.”

“Whose whim?”

“That’s the whole point: no one’s whim.”

Once again, she was annoyed after the conversation with him, but she could see clearly that something had changed in the group from the minute they’d begun praying, joining them to each other with the force of destiny as she had been joined to the man in that miraculous moment she’d met him on the train of the dead. The man, like someone with a detailed plan who bases his actions on intelligent logic, said later, “The time has come to start thinking about the future.”

“What do you mean, the future?” she asked, remembering how, in another world, she had been proposed to.

“I mean the next generation.”

She looked at him in surprise. She had mentioned her infertility problems to him many times and had told him about the many years of treatment she had endured before she became pregnant with the twins. “And who will give birth to it?”

“Not you,” he said as if it were a promise.

“But she’s a nun!” she said, horrified.

“She’s the only one who can do it. She’ll have to understand.”

“And who will the father be?”

“Whoever she chooses.”

She needed a long minute to digest this new situation and also to absorb the fact that he had made his plan secretly, without including her, and the seed of suspicion planted in her by the sick man began to sprout.

“And if she chooses you?”

“Then it’ll be me,” he said like a soldier volunteering for a mission.

“Have a good time,” she said, anger rising in her at his plot, his pretense. “And who’s going to tell her about this interesting plan?”

“You, of course.”

“Not me, and not of course,” she said, revealing how offended she was.

But the idea insinuated itself into her until it gained a foothold and would not let go, and the thing she was supposed to be fighting ambushed her, and against her own wishes Gila set out to fight a new war—to convince the nun to have a child—a war that was lost before it began, where her victory would also be her downfall, where she might lose more than she possessed. But she didn’t give in to logic, and in a short time she had thrown herself into her mission as if she were obsessed. Again and again, the image of a baby girl flashed through her mind, the image of her daughters when they were babies, a baby that was crawling on all fours around the furniture in the room, holding on to the back of the armchair and rising up onto her feet, rocking in her cradle, sleeping between her and the man in their bed; sleeping between the nun and the man in the very same bed, and Gila was shocked at the sight.

On one of their fruit-gathering walks, after scrutinizing her constantly from every angle, Gila asked the nun if she liked babies, and the young woman nodded happily. Gila asked if she wanted a baby of her own, and the nun looked at her inquisitively. Gila pointed wildly at the nun’s stomach, and the nun looked at the feverish eyes in front of her, embarrassed and blushing deeply. Gila did not mention the idea again for several days; she let herself calm down, let the possibility sink into the young woman’s awareness. One day, while they were preparing a meal in the kitchen, Gila looked at her and, as if the matter had been settled, asked which man she’d choose to make a baby with. The nun gave her a penetrating look, suspecting that her only ally was about to betray her, and Gila, as if the name Judas Iscariot had not passed through her mind, spoke the name of the man as if it were a question. The nun shook her head firmly, her eyes terrified, perhaps recognizing the signs of an evil spirit that had taken possession of the woman who had sworn to protect her, perhaps frightened by the menacing persistence and by what lay beyond the menacing persistence.

But the thought of the nun’s pregnancy—sometimes separate from the man—gave Gila no rest, and a few weeks after the idea had first been raised, as if she were thinking logically, she convinced herself that there was no choice: the child was already three years old. In another fifteen years he’d be ready to be a father himself. Who could guarantee that he’d find a bride then? Now, now was the time to arrange for a wife for him with whom he could continue the next generation.

She schemed for hours about how to convince the nun how imperative the act was, to describe to her in simple words, in her basic Italian, that there was no choice and she had to choose one of the men because she was the only one who could guarantee that life would continue, and there was no doubt that both Jesus and his mother would understand and permit it, because after all, Jesus too was born in an unusual way. Over and over again, with growing excitement, she told the man of her musings and imagined she saw a look of amazement in his eyes. His look, like a mirror, made it clear to her that he had been a part of her life for only a few years, and that she would never know whether it was his desire for the nun that had spawned the idea. She pursued the relentlessly intractable young woman the whole month, kept the child away from her, punished her with prolonged silences, and did not soften even when she heard the sounds of weeping coming in from the nun’s room at night. Every morning, in a voice that grew colder and colder, she asked again which man she would choose, and the nun again burst into tears that made Gila feel relief and also an unfamiliar wrath.

She would never remember who came up with the idea of giving her to the Pole. During moments of self-awareness or when she was on the verge of sleep and less able to keep secrets, she suspected that the idea had been born in her own brain, imagined that she remembered some hesitation on the part of the man, but she wouldn’t allow the memory to come. She did remember—but perhaps it was only after he brought up the idea and she objected—that the man had suggested waiting until the nun matured and maternal feelings developed naturally in her, and maybe, in the meantime, a man would appear who didn’t frighten her; or maybe another young woman would come in another few years who could be the child’s bride. Gila remembered herself becoming furious, but perhaps that was only after he had planted the idea in her brain; no man the nun might want would suddenly appear, she had said heatedly. The girls who survived after the cataclysm had probably been devoured by animals or sucked up into the funnel of air. Finally, she told him angrily of her suspicion that he hoped the nun would choose him in the end and that he wasn’t trying to protect the young woman, but to keep her from the Pole. Several weeks afterward, he grew tired and surrendered to the madness that had gripped her, and he agreed to her idea, not so he could implement his plan but to put an end to her suspicions. But she took as a good sign the fact that he agreed on that particular day, because that very morning it had occurred to her that the funnel of air hadn’t been seen for quite a while. On the calendar they had marked, she counted forty days. A good rain was falling outside, the sign of a blessing, not a lashing rain and not a rain that uprooted bushes, but one that fell generously and quietly, fertilizing the earth.

Gila also began to prepare the Pole with hints, with movements he was quick to grasp, with a quick, conspiratorial smile he understood well, and inflamed by the fire burning in her, the passion that had already begun to wane in him ignited into a surprising blaze. One night, as if by chance, after she had quieted the child and the sick man with a fruit extract that would keep them asleep for half a day, she and the man went out to the wrought iron bench at the far end of the garden.

The distant slam of a door came first, and they fell silent, stunned, the way it sometimes happens when events are expected. The man withdrew into himself and dropped his chin down to his chest, a sign that she was familiar with. Then they both tried unsuccessfully to shut out the sounds that assailed their ears, sounds that seemed to be shattering bone and penetrating veins and poisoning the body from within; spreading over house, the back garden, the garden of monsters, and the pestilent area to beyond the row of trees in the east and beyond the low mountain ridges in the west; echoing to the edges of the horizon: first the shrill, surprised cries of fear, and then the determined attempts to regain composure, the wild, courageous but futile rebellion; then the horrifying, despairing comprehension and the beginning of the body’s surrender, the shift to a stream of explaining, scolding, pleading words; and suddenly the sobbing, the screaming that shook the blood vessels, the persistent pounding that sought to break through the imprisoning wall, the continual weeping like a siren, the harsh sounds of scraping like iron combs plowing the walls, the animal groans coming not from her throat but from the depths of her loins, the desperate sobs and then the wailing, slashing shrieks, the choking roars that make the throat swell; then the sudden silence of choked breathing and the submissive, sinking whimpering, feeble grunting, the squeaking of the door to the Pole’s room as it opened and closed when he went to his bed.

And then silence prevailed: deep, dark, full of fear and guilt. They did not go up to their room that night. From the moment they heard the sounds blaring from the house and restrained themselves for the sake of the future, they sat in silence, cut off from one another, looking inward, trying to formulate for themselves their individual stories about what had taken place. Even after the long, mournful sobbing subsided, they did not go to their bed but continued to sit silently until the sun, surprising in its splendor, rose over the heavy treetops and so generously illuminated the wide sky and the fields—made them gleam in the first light—and she suddenly remembered a school trip and the breathtaking sunrise that had turned the Judean Hills pink.

In the morning, wrapped in the sweetness of slumber, silent and sleepy, the child slipped between them, and they made room for him. “I dreamed that the nun was screaming,” the child said.

“In dreams, everyone is always screaming,” the man said and wrapped the child’s small, bare feet in the edge of his shirt.

Gila stroked his disheveled hair and said, “Look, sweetie. Look at what a beautiful sunrise we have today.”