He poured himself a glass of brandy, opened the clothes closet, and surveyed his wife’s wardrobe, which was hanging there. Just then the telephone rang again. It was a woman who introduced herself as Ruth, a friend of his wife’s who never had met him, though she knew all about him and kept tabs on him even now. Her voice was warm and cheery, like a self-assured schoolteacher’s. Did he mind having a personal chat with her? “No,” Molkho said. Was he sure? “Yes,” Molkho said. Well, then, she wanted him to know how sorry she was and how full of admiration for him. “For me?” he asked, knowing perfectly well what she meant. “For taking such good care of her,” explained the woman. Was he really sure she wasn’t intruding? Perhaps he would rather she called some other time. “No, go ahead,” replied Molkho, his heart suddenly beating faster. “Please don’t misunderstand me,” said the woman ... although, on the other hand, no one could possibly suspect her of ... and especially since it had dragged on so much longer than...“Than what?” Molkho asked. Than it usually did: that’s why she had decided not to wait any longer. Though he wished she would stop beating about the bush, he was startled by her boldness. The idea of her dialing him just like that! “What are you getting at?” he asked, regretting the question at once, because now he heard the hesitation in her voice, as if it were about to beat a retreat. But it didn’t. “What I’m getting at,” it plunged on, “is that I know someone you might want to meet, a lovely woman who’s just your type”—although if he thought the subject was premature, he only need say so. Secretly thrilled, he did his best to sound casual. Was it anyone he knew? No, she didn’t think so, though, of course, she couldn’t mention any names; the person in question had not been consulted and didn’t know Molkho herself. For the moment, it was just a thought in the minds of some well-wishers. Were those their voices that he heard in the background? Molkho wondered. Could she actually be speaking to him with all of them right there? Suddenly it occurred to him that it was perhaps she herself who wished to meet him. “I bet it’s you,” he said jokingly into the phone. She laughed. “I thought you’d say that, but no, it isn’t. I’m just trying to be helpful, to do what I can.” Was she a professional matchmaker? he inquired appreciatively. No, it was more of a hobby with her, replied the woman with a friendly chuckle. Receiver in hand (they had bought a cordless telephone when his wife became bedridden), Molkho walked about the apartment, gazing out the windows at the moon-bright sky. “How old is she?” “Six years younger than you. You’re fifty-three, aren’t you?” “What? I’m only fifty-one!” He felt injured, a vague fear forming inside him, as if a graying, overweight, infirm woman was about to move in with him. “I’m afraid that it’s a little too early for this,” he said curtly, sounding offended. “It’s not even a month yet. You can’t just expect me to ... why, it’s a matter of simple decency!” In the silence at the other end of the line, he thought he could hear people talking, although perhaps it was only a television. “What, not even a month yet?” they were saying in shocked whispers. Oh dear, she was terribly sorry. She had been misinformed. “Oh dear, please excuse me,” said the woman and hung up.
He hadn’t expected her to ring off so quickly. Flushed and excited he kept walking about the apartment, the telephone still in his hand. The idea! Who could it have been? And yet it touched him that someone was thinking of him, that he was already on somebody’s list. Why let it upset him? She had meant well; her warm, reliable voice still echoed in his ears as though it were now his own. He went over to the television, but didn’t touch it, having watched enough of it in the past year, and went instead to the bathroom, in which there were still more things to sort out—lotions, salves, and all kinds of bottles and tubes that had had nothing to do with her illness. It was ages since he had last sat in the bathtub, which had become her exclusive domain, her own private little sanatorium, in which, all alone, she could look without fear at her body, talk to it, soothe it, cry over it, comfort it under suds, her scarred and tortured body whose ruins he was a witness to, at first the only one, later joined by the nurses who bathed her and once a week by his elder son, who had helped lift and lower her into the greenish water. Only during the last month of her life, when this body already had turned into another creature, into some fossil of a species that had become extinct long ago or would perhaps not evolve for another million years, did she not want to see it anymore (nor did he let her, wrapping her in a huge bath towel before his son could fish her out of the tub in the special rig that she sat in), not even in the small hand mirror by her bed, which she abandoned in favor of the glass strip in her compact that reflected only her eyes, the one part of herself she could bear to look at toward the end.
He turned on the faucet and started to undress, yet noticed that the water was a brownish color, and was trying to decide whether to wash or not when the doorbell rang. Quickly donning a bathrobe and going to see who it was, he found his friends, the doctor and his wife, all dressed up on their way to a party. They had decided to drop by without warning, they explained, because his telephone was always busy; they hoped it wasn’t too late and apologized for having been out of touch. “Thank you for coming,” said Molkho, genuinely happy to see them. “It’s just for a minute,” they cautioned. “Then, thank you for coming for a minute,” he replied. They entered and headed automatically for the bedroom, realizing their error only by the door and halting there awkwardly, uncertain whether to sit down. But he made them, only then answering their questions, telling them a bit about the children and a little more about his mother-in-law, who was managing very well. “Rather too well,” he added with a smile, describing how healthy and independent she was: why, even her cane was just for show! They seemed to listen with interest, like the good and loyal, if somewhat dull, friends that they were. Despite his overoptimistic diagnoses, the doctor had been a great help to them in dealing with the hospital staff. Though Molkho had an urge to tell them about the phone call and to ask if they knew the woman who made it, he changed his mind at the last minute, not wanting them to think it gave him pleasure. When the two of them rose to go, he could feel the doctor’s wife being drawn back to the bedroom, as if she had a need to see it. It was dark and untidy, and his clothes were lying all over. “Why, it’s completely different,” she whispered in amazement after silently regarding it. “Yes,” sighed Molkho. “Even the bed is gone,” she added sadly, as if the least he could have done was continue sleeping in it himself. The doctor put an arm around him. “If you need any help,” he said, “just ask.” “I’m fine, really I am,” said Molkho, the thought crossing his mind that the man might want to buy the Talwin. Though something warned him it would make a bad impression, he wanted to be rid of the tablets so badly that he couldn’t restrain himself. “Just a minute,” he said, running to bring a box of them; he had thrown out all kinds of drugs, but this was brand-new, it had cost twenty dollars a box, perhaps the hospital might like to buy it at half price. The doctor weighed it in his hand, holding it at arm’s length while giving his wife a look that plainly said that Molkho had made a mistake. Hospitals, he explained politely, were not allowed to buy secondhand medicines, even if unopened, but if Molkho would give him a box as a sample, perhaps a private buyer could be found. “Never mind,” said Molkho, reaching out for the Talwin, which he knew he never would see again once the doctor took it. “Never mind. I’ll find a buyer myself.”
He walked them to the street. A flood of light, as if the moon had been turned up to full amplitude, poured down from the cloudless sky. A solemn beauty filled the world. Now that they, dressed in their best, were about to vanish into the wonderful darkness and leave him all by himself, it was hard to part with them. And yet it irked him to be pitied. His unhappiness, he feared, would only alienate them more, and so on the spur of the moment, he told them about the phone call, concluding with a wry smile, “So you see, I’m already an eligible bachelor.” They didn’t smile back, though. The woman was aghast: “But how could she? How awful!” The doctor said nothing, r
egarding Molkho with curiosity. “And not even a month gone by!” added his wife bitterly. Wrathful and incredulous, she made him regret having mentioned it. Why, you would think he had secretly arranged that telephone call himself! Suddenly all the years of devotion to his wife meant nothing anymore, and he was being stared at as though he were her murderer.
15
THE NIGHT GREW BRIGHTER and colder, and he slept fitfully, turning from side to side and waking up every two hours as though to boil water, to give an injection, to check the intravenous, to fetch pills or tea, to say something comforting—instead of which he went to the bathroom and then plunged back into his bed, over which loomed the triumphal moon while fresh, enormous stars drifted upward from the horizon. In the middle of the night, he turned the bed to the window to get a better view of the spectacular sky. His two youngest children were not yet home, and he decided to wait up for them. The first to arrive was his daughter; he chatted with her for a while until she went to bed and then talked with the high school boy, who had meanwhile come home too, while the moon sank into the ravine. At last, after the boy had gone to sleep also, Molkho retired himself, waking the next morning to find a bright sun shining in. It was, he decided, the perfect day to wash the car, which had not been cleaned in months, and he scrubbed and waxed it for a long time while talking to his neighbor, who had come down with the same idea. The weather, though chilly, was crisp and clear, and remembering last night’s message that there were people thinking of him, planning for him, Molkho felt suddenly happy. Not, of course, that he needed their help. He could manage quite well by himself, he was sure, but meanwhile they could point him in the right direction, provide him with warmth, restore his faith in the lost power of desire.
The old clothes he had on made it seem a good time for the walk in the ravine he’d been thinking of, and so he headed some hundred paces down the path until he found himself standing on a large, smooth boulder and looking into the branch-entangled gully, over whose trees and bushes played a milky light, as if the moon that had vanished there during the night were still slowly in the process of dissolving. Back in the house, he set about vigorously organizing a wash of dirty linen, waking the children and pulling the sheets out from under them, after which he started cleaning up in the kitchen. When the dishes were done, he tried persuading his son and daughter to pitch in and make lunch with him: “if you don’t like the housekeeper’s cooking,” he told them, “let’s try to do better ourselves.” The children, however, were unresponsive, his daughter getting involved in a long phone conversation, while his son went off to tinker with his bicycle. When the girl hung up at last, Molkho phoned the college student to invite him over too, and though at first he tried begging off, the disappointment in his father’s voice made him promise to come. True to his word, he appeared before noon, and the meal they cooked up was a good one; they sat talking intimately about this and that while looking at the calendar to choose a day for the unveiling. Gradually the children began reminiscing about their mother as they never had done before. Even the youngest, who kept silent at first, spoke up in the end, his wet eyes glistening, and it made them all glad to see him cry a bit. It’s the end of another chapter in our lives, thought Molkho, feeling strong.
But he also felt his lack of sleep now. “At least wash the dishes,” he told them. “I’ve done everything else.” And shutting the bedroom blinds, he lay down with the Friday papers and soon fell into a short but delicious sleep. When he awoke the house was quiet. The dimming, brackish light made him realize how short the days had grown. The kitchen and the table were just as he had left them, with dirty dishes lying all about. The college student was reading in the living room, the soldier was embroidering in her bedroom, and the high school boy was contentedly doing his homework. Irritably Molkho went from room to room. “How could you have left the dishes like that when that was the one thing I asked you to do?” he asked, but they barely glanced up at him, as if he were a ghost. Why, it had all begun on just such an afternoon seven years ago, in early spring, when he and she had gone together to the doctor, who wrote them out an urgent referral for a biopsy. There was no hiding the grim truth from themselves, and he remembered how, on emerging from the office into the soft, balmy air that contrasted sharply with the sudden terror they were gripped by, he had felt less frightened by the illness than by his wife’s fear of it, or perhaps by her anger. He had talked on and on while she walked silently beside him, trying to be logical, to point out all their options, to find comfort in the doctor’s words, each one of which he had parsed like Holy Writ, though all the time, numbed and ashen, she said nothing. “Even if they have to remove a breast,” he said, “even if they do, we’ve caught it in time, it’s still not the end of the world, it’s not as if you were a fashion model. You can get along without it, and I can too, without them both in fact. It will just leave me more love for the rest of you.” That’s what he had told her, calling on reserves of humor and imagination that he never knew existed, even though, absorbed in her own slow plodding, she was only half-listening and not even looking at him. It was only when they were already in the entrance of their old building and he paused by the mailbox to take out the letters and quickly tear open their envelopes that she looked at him angrily in the warm, enveloping dusk and said, breaking her silence, “Just remember, whatever happens I’m dying at home, nowhere else.” He smiled at her, a shiver running down him at what he knew was only her first salvo. Why, he started to protest, she shouldn’t even think about dying! “No, promise me,” she interrupted earnestly, a look of desperation on her face, “promise me you’ll pay whatever it costs, because I’m not dying anywhere else.” Again he tried humoring her, but this time she turned on him with her full, fearful strength, so that he said at once, “1 promise; of course, I do. How could you even imagine...”—a promise he would have to repeat a thousand times right up to the moment of her death. Grimly she climbed the stairs and waited for him to open the door for her. It was almost dark in the house. All three children were still in grade school. Quiet and strangely peaceful, they sat doing their homework together, knowing nothing but already guessing all.
16
A MONTH AFTER HIS WIFE’S DEATH, they all gathered again for the unveiling, the family and its many friends, some of whom had missed the funeral. Though it was a rainy day and they all had umbrellas, not a drop fell during the short ceremony. The mood was calm and peaceful; several of his wife’s fellow schoolteachers spoke briefly but movingly, and there was a feeling of closeness among them all. The new tombstone stood in its place. Molkho was rather sorry that it had only his wife’s name and the dates of her birth and death, but the children had said that anything else would be false and sentimental. To his surprise, the legal adviser from the office was there too, along with one of her coworkers, dressed in a smart suit and blue raincoat, an umbrella in one hand and a wreath of flowers in the other. He caught his breath, feeling himself turn red: she must have come to look over his family, he thought, and her appearance with the wreath—she, who hadn’t known his wife and hardly even knew him—seemed to him as daring as a striptease. When the ceremony was over, he watched in amazement as she laid the wreath on the grave, and afterward, stopping to shake the hands of those present and say a few words to them with his tottering mother hanging on to him, he paused to thank her warmly too. “We’re here on behalf of the whole office,” she said a bit uncomfortably, though looking straight at him, which touched Molkho, so that he almost choked with gratitude, unable to find the right words. “The office couldn’t have chosen a better representative,” he said at last. “I thank you, I really do.” “Who was that?” his mother-in-law inquired in the car, nodding when he told her and saying, “Oh, yes. That widow from work.”
17
HE KNEW THEN that it was only a matter of time before they struck up a relationship. Was it perhaps too soon? he wondered. Was he ready for it? What would she expect of him physically? He hadn’t made love to a woman in y
ears. Might she be in too much of a rush? He made a few discreet inquiries, yet though his informants spoke freely and willingly, there was little new they had to tell him apart from the matter of her rank, for whereas he had always believed her to be a single civil service grade above him, he was now shocked to discover she was three. How, and by whom, had she managed to be promoted so quickly? Late one night, while out walking, he stopped by her house on the West Carmel, an unassuming building with only four apartments of a type built in the early 1960s. Noiselessly he stepped inside and scanned the names on the mailboxes to see who her neighbors were; none of them was familiar, though the fact that one was a doctor rather pleased him. Stepping back outside, he circled the building, noticing the old garbage cans and the neglected little garden and lawn; the house committee, it was evident, had been falling down on the job.
And yet he wished to put off seeing her again, which, as they worked in different departments, could easily be accomplished by his not venturing into the hallway or downstairs to the cafeteria, something he rarely would have done anyway, because ever since his wife’s death the daily loaf of bread from the grocery was too much for them to finish at home, so that he had begun taking two large sandwiches to work, washing them down with coffee from a thermos. After all, he told himself, it’s not as if I were in any hurry.
18
ONLY NOW that he had time on his hands did he realize how busy his wife’s illness had kept him; how many hours he had put in every week talking to her or her visitors and dealing with all the endless problems, how on guard he had been day and night, how many difficult decisions had been left to him, how tense he had been made all the time by the Unknown that awaited him, mornings, evenings, at work, on the telephone, in his long talks with the doctors and the nurses. He was the male lead in a drama, strutting about on a stage with a big hospital bed in the center, whispering, shouting, crying, for she had reduced him to tears—yes, she had done that too. Wistful for those lost days, he thought of them with nostalgia. Now it was over with, the audience departed, the sets disassembled, the stage itself a pile of old boards; and bathed in a yellowing glow, time stretched out endlessly and wearily before him like a flat road. He came home from work each day, napped for a while, shopped at the little supermarket nearby, stopped in at the bank to check on his stocks or transfer funds from one account to another, and then took a short walk and came home to listen to music, the sound of which on his records and tapes seemed suddenly flat to him. One day his daughter brought home a Hebrew translation of Pride and Prejudice, and slowly he began to read about the adventures of the five Bennet sisters and to think, Why, I’m like Lizzy and Jane: it’s time I was married off too. First, though, there had to be a way of arousing his lost desire, of assuring he would not be found wanting when the day arrived. Perhaps he should buy some pornographic magazines. Meanwhile, he leafed through them in the bookstores, staring with cold revulsion at the perfect, pinkish bodies they displayed.
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