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WHENEVER HIS WIFE HAD RAISED THE POSSIBILITY of his remarrying one day, he had put her off with some joke or sarcastic remark that denied her approaching death. One Saturday in summer, however, when they had awakened from their afternoon nap and were still lying in the double bed beneath light blankets, the dim Sabbath light agreeably striped by the warm, sweet rays of the sun creeping through the slats of the blinds, she brought up the subject without warning, calmly making him face up to it, despite his attempt to play dumb. “You won’t stay a widower all your life,” she had said. “Why not?” he had asked. “Who would want me?” “Believe it or not,” she had answered, “someone might want even you”—to which, hurt and baffled, he had made no reply. “Just don’t have any more children,” she cautioned. “Don’t marry too young a woman, because she’ll want babies and you’ll regret it.” His heart skipped a frightened beat; yet making a joke of it, he had said, “But why should I? Babying is my specialty.” Now it was she who fell silent, as if no more words were necessary. He looked at her; her face was hard and gloomy. “I don’t want to hear any more about death,” he said petulantly, afraid of her ire. “Tomorrow I can get run over in the street and die too.” “But why should you get run over?” she asked logically. “You only have to be careful.” Taken aback, he burst out laughing. He imagined her death as a sudden burst of light but also as the threat of solitary confinement hanging over him in this house.
13
SOMETIMES HE HAD THE FEELING that, without bothering to pack her things, she had set out before him for some destination, where she had arrived and was truly at peace, leaving him behind in the empty house to care for the children, worry about meals, and look after her old mother. As if his only attractive feature had been his proximity to illness and Death, he rarely heard anymore from old friends, and his children, too, had become distant and apathetic, no longer hastening to do his bidding or seek the reassurance of his glance. And yet the first Sabbath after the week of mourning, when his daughter came home on leave and the college student was there too, and they all set the table together, and he asked her to light the candles and she did, tears came to his eyes, as was so often the case, he had noticed, in the wake of unexpected little things. Afterward, he wished his mother in Jerusalem a good Sabbath on the telephone and drove to the old-age home to pick up his mother-in-law.
She was not yet downstairs when he came, and so, opening the large glass door with its flowery curtain, he waited for her in the spotless, elegant lobby, studying the old German books on the shelves of the mahogany cases donated by one of the residents. Each time he visited the home he was impressed again by its order and cleanliness. In easy chairs sat several old men, washed and combed for the Sabbath, in distinguished three-piece suits, chatting politely in German, still sipping pleasure from Life as if they had made their private peace with it and all the hard times they had lived through had softened into sweet pablum. Several of them had skullcaps on their heads and were waiting for Sabbath services to begin in the small, curtained-off chapel, where Arab help ran back and forth arranging the ark, the lectern, and the chairs. Though not all of them were aware that he was Frau Starkman’s son-in-law, they followed his every movement, their watchful, age-burnished eyes shining like black olives. Furtively he entered the darkened dining room, which, set for the festive meal, had about it something almost sacramental. Fresh slices of artfully cut hallah lay so lusciously white in their straw baskets that it was all he could do to keep from taking one. It was odd, though, that his mother-in-law wasn’t down yet, because he had called to say he was on his way. Some of the old men had begun to enter the chapel, parting with a nod from their less-observant companions, who chose to stay in the lobby. Molkho liked everything about the place, its flowers, its greenery, even the shiny red emergency buttons in the corners. At last his mother-in-law stepped out of the elevator, apologizing for being late, erect, energetic, and all there, despite her eighty-two years. An old friend she had known in Germany before the war, she told Molkho, had recently arrived from the Soviet Union with her daughter and they had spent a long time talking on the telephone. The other old people, Molkho noticed, were looking at her with sympathy and respect; her bereavement, so it seemed, had enhanced her stature in their eyes, as though, having managed to deflect onto her daughter the death intended for herself, she had joined the ranks of the immortals. He was already holding the front door for her when she stopped and turned back, remembering that she had forgotten her cane. “Never mind,” he reassured her. “You have me, and there’s a cane at home too, the one I bought her.” She wavered for a moment, but then gave in. In the car, he told her about the children and the new housekeeper, whose cooking, he confided worriedly, might not be to her liking.
And indeed, it wasn’t. Not that she said anything, but he could see the food was too hot for her. Though his wife’s chair still stood at the table, the plates were spaced differently now. At first, they discussed the new housekeeper, after which the college student told some story that made the high school boy burst into laughter. Good-humoredly, for their political views were alike (only those of his wife, who saw everything through dark glasses, had been different), they discussed the events of the week. After dinner Molkho’s mother-in-law asked to see the refurbished bedroom, and he showed it to her, wondering as she squinted brightly at it through her thick lenses what she would think of his remarrying. Before leaving she reminded him that the concert season was starting next week. She had asked the office of the old-age home to find someone to take her ticket, though most of the residents had subscriptions of their own. “Would you like them to find someone for yours too?” she asked. But Molkho knew this meant giving the tickets away and was loath to lose the money. “No,” he lied, “I already promised them to two friends at the office.”
On the night of the concert a cold, jarring wind blew on the mountain, sweeping dead leaves across the pavement. He arrived fifteen minutes early, parked his car on a sidewalk near the concert hall, and hurried coatlessly to the entrance to sell his tickets. For some reason, however, there were no buyers. The audience entered quickly, among them many old folks bundled up in warm clothes, helping each other into a lobby of pulsing light. Spying a couple that had been at the funeral and paid a condolence call on him at home, he edged away beneath the marquee and turned his back on them, hoping not to be seen. The crowd in front of the building did not linger there long. A musician in tails, a small black case in one hand, scurried roachlike through a back door of the building. The only people still outside were trying to get rid of their tickets too. He would have parted with his own for nothing by now, but there were no takers even for that. The warning bell rang in muffled tones and ushers in khaki urged the audience to take its seats. Within minutes the lobby was deserted. He stood by the entrance reading the program, which began with some piece by an unfamiliar composer, followed by Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, which he could not recall ever having heard either. All at once he felt a longing for live music. What harm would it do? he wondered, thinking of his two empty seats while glancing up at the sky, where faint stars were fleeing an onslaught of racing clouds. In the end, he decided to enter, assuring the ticket taker, who cautioned him to stay outside the hall until the intermission, that he knew the rules. “You may as well take both tickets,” he added, but the man took only one. Climbing the stairs, Molkho halted outside the closed door of the auditorium, his heart quickening as he heard the horns and drums. It was a complex modern piece, yet not without its haunting, melodic parts. Through the shut doors he heard only the music; not a stir came from the audience, so that for a moment he imagined that it was somewhere else, that behind the orchestra was a further space in which people were promenading or dancing, his wife too—yes, she had arrived and was waiting for him, she had entered from an entirely different direction while he stood forlornly outside. Meanwhile, all out of breath, a pretty young woman in a short fur wrap, her car keys still clutched in one hand, join
ed him with a smile by the door and stood listening too. As soon as a solemn wave of applause announced that the piece was over, she darted inside, but Molkho, who suddenly realized that he was not properly dressed for the occasion, stayed behind: some old person in the audience was bound to tell his mother-in-law, and he did not wish to cause her more sorrow. Walking quickly back to his car, he found a traffic policeman writing out an expensive parking ticket. A bitter sense of humiliation welled up in him. “At night too?” he cried, losing his temper. “But why? Whose way am I in? Why can’t a person be allowed to live? Why can’t a person...” But the policeman, in his slicker with the yellow glow-stripes down the back, was not in the least impressed and quietly but firmly asked Molkho for his license.
14
NOT THAT MONEY WAS A PROBLEM. True, the illness had set him back a large sum, but there were benefits too, such as life insurance policies, some savings accounts that had accrued in his wife’s name, and various pension plans that were now explained to him. One day he sat with two accountants from the school system who tallied up in hushed tones, flushed with the drama of it, the funds released by her death, as though it were a secret investment that had yielded a handsome dividend or some rare achievement on her part that deserved a special prize. Slowly he went over their figures; carefully he double-checked them; obsessively, exhaustively, he reviewed them a third time, jotting down sums, rereading clauses, checking tables, photographing documents to take home. It was, after all, his profession; he was an auditor himself. For a while, transferring the money to his name, consulting how best to invest it, and giving the bank instructions what to do with it were all he thought about. “It’s for the children,” he told himself. “They’ve been through so much, and I’m only thinking of their future.”
There was also a remittance of German marks, not a particularly large sum, to be sure, but one that had arrived in her name every month. Both she and her mother received this money as reparations for the property abandoned by them when they left Germany before World War II, after her father’s suicide; and indeed, when Molkho’s mother-in-law came to dinner that Friday evening with a gift of strudel for the children, she asked if he had informed the German embassy that the payments should be stopped. “I haven’t gotten around to it yet,” he replied. “I’m swamped with things to do; I never imagined there was so much to take care of after a person’s death. If it was me who had died, she would never have managed to cope with all the paperwork.” “Would you like me to do it for you?” asked his mother-in-law. “I’ll call the lawyer who arranged it and he’ll have it stopped.” “You needn’t bother,” said Molkho. “I’ll see to it myself. I just have to make a few inquiries.” Yet stubbornly, as if suspecting him of defrauding the German government, she insisted on knowing what inquiries there could be, forcing him to explain that he wished to find out if there wasn’t a last, lump sum to close the account. “After all,” he said, “she could have gone on living for years, and they would have had to pay her for each one of them. If she saved them all that money by dying, maybe there’s a special grant for the children.” “There’s no such thing,” declared his mother-in-law adamantly, and so he dialed his own mother in Jerusalem to wish her a good Sabbath, calling the children to the phone. Then they chatted with their grandmother, who seemed to enjoy their confidence, while complaining in unison about the food. Why did it have be so spicy? After the meal they watched the news on television. The old woman joined them, but when an entertainment program followed, she rose to go. “There’s something I wanted to ask you,” Molkho told her, taking her to the bedroom and showing her his wife’s clothes. “I’ll see if anyone wants them,” she said. “And how about all this medicine?” he continued, pointing to the expensive boxes of Talwin, now stacked in the form of a high tower, and slipping one into her hand. “Do you know anyone who might want them at half price? They cost twenty dollars apiece, and it’s a shame to lose the money. How about someone on the medical staff?” he persisted when she didn’t answer. Yet (rather surprisingly, he thought, for someone who was always so polite) she merely glanced at her watch as if late and walked slowly out of the room, helped by him into her coat, from whose pocket she took out the red woolen cap she had last worn on the night of the death. “I’ll see what I can do about the clothes,” she announced at the top of the stairs, and then they climbed down them and up the garden stairs to the street, where it was drizzling, while Molkho recalled how she was the first person he had phoned on the night his wife died. Though she now seemed preoccupied and in a hurry, a bond had formed between them in the three weeks that had passed since then. “You needn’t bother,” she told him when he stepped out of the car to walk her to the entrance of the home, and so he watched from a distance as she walked down the street cloaked in greenery and slowly opened the large glass door to the lobby, in which a little old lady, who appeared to have been waiting for her, rose quickly with an odd sort of bow.
The television was off when Molkho came home, the dishes in the sink were washed, and the children were preparing to leave. “Why didn’t you say you were going out?” he asked them. “You could have taken your grandmother with you.” The silence in the house enveloped him like a soft cocoon. Opening a window, he peered into the dark ravine, down which he sometimes primitively imagined his wife to have vanished that night. The rain had stopped, and he felt a sudden thirst for human company. How quickly I’ve been abandoned, he thought. Granted, in recent years their social circle had grown less active, but the last months had seen such a steady flow of visitors that they had had to be booked in advance. Head propped high and cheeks feverish, his wife had lain in her hospital bed talking openly, almost avidly, about her death with a black irony that extended to things in general, to the whole country, for which she prophesied gloom and doom, while he bustled about her like an impresario, occasionally uttering a few soothing words to keep her mockery from becoming too aggressive.
He switched on the television, turned it off again, put on some music, and immediately toned down the volume, feeling at loose ends. Should he try phoning someone in the hope of being invited out? Unfortunately, he had napped that afternoon and now was wide awake—so much so, in fact, that he could feel his wakefulness like a lump in his chest. During the first year of his wife’s illness, he had had such feelings often. Several times he was sure he had found some malignancy of his own, and once or twice he had even rushed to the doctor, making it difficult to determine who the real patient was, until her illness finally gathered such momentum that it devoured his own complaints too.
Deciding to go for a walk, he put on his coat and went downstairs, where it was calm but cold. He glanced at the windows, the terraces, the doorways of the houses, and followed a woman walking a dog while the moon rose above the rooftops into a cleared, pacific sky, returning to his unlit apartment with a feeling of wonder that soon changed to pleasure at his freedom. For months, even at night, the apartment had not been this dark, and so, curious to see how it looked from the ravine, he descended to the backyard, turning by its mesh fence to look up at the house suspended above him on columns. When they had bought the apartment four years ago, it was already with this green gully in mind—that is, with the thought of the view she would have from her deathbed. Now, staring into its blackness, which was only heightened by the luminous sky, he walked carefully along the path he knew well and had followed often to the bottom. The ground was very wet. Puddles of water lay about, and broken branches and building debris obstructed his progress. Once again he pictured her leaving this way—yes, this was the direction she had gone in that night—and absconding with part of him.
All at once the telephone rang loudly in his apartment. Was it some friends calling to ask him over for a drink? He started back up, refusing, however, to run, while the phone kept ringing stubbornly, only to fall silent as he reached the door of the apartment. Now, he thought, everyone will say that I’m never home at night! There were no doubt people who envied him his new f
reedom without realizing how lonely it could be. And yet he was glad his wife’s death was behind him. A year ago the thought of it had terrified him, but it had gone easily enough in the end.
Five Seasons Page 4