2
HE SAT UP in the middle of the night, unable to sleep comfortably. In the neighboring houses lights were on too, for the heat kept everyone awake. He stepped out on the terrace and gazed up at the yellow halo around the moon, musing—no longer fearfully, but with a deep sorrow—on how his wife was pared down to a last, nameless cell that still fought to preserve its identity. The thought that it, too, would soon be snuffed out in some vast, dark emptiness made him shiver. I must fall in love, he told himself before climbing back into bed, because otherwise this longing will destroy me.
In the morning he spoke as usual to his mother, who complained bitterly about the heat, which was even worse in Jerusalem. Suppose, she asked suddenly, that she came to stay with him for a while and spent some time on the beach? Horrified, he tried to talk her out of it. “The humidity here is ghastly,” he explained. “You’ll never fall asleep at night. At least in Jerusalem there’s a breeze. Why don’t you buy yourself an air conditioner? I’ll even come and pick it out for you.” But his mother did not want an air conditioner. She wanted to stay with him, and there was nothing he could do about it.
And so, that Friday, he pulled her, damp and sweating, out of the taxi that brought her to his house, helped her hang her dresses in the college student’s old room, and sat silently across from her on the terrace facing the sea. In the evening, playing host to two old women, he muttered the blessing over the Sabbath wine and ate the meat loaf brought by his mother, who talked nonstop, taking advantage of his mother-in-law’s patience, behind whose expression of eager interest lay concealed a thin mockery like his wife’s. At last, sapped by the humidity, his mother trundled off to bed, from where he heard her snoring lightly.
On Sunday, after work, he took the little beach chair and went with her to the seashore, making sure to find an isolated spot where no one was likely to see her. Depositing her there, a large, heavy, funny-looking woman with bared fat legs, he went for a swim and a walk, heading first up the beach and then down, until finally, toward sunset, when the shore was nearly deserted, he ventured to sit beside her in the wet sand, absentmindedly digging a trench by her chair while letting her ramble on about her financial worries and his father and her childhood in Jerusalem and her neighbors and her friends and their children and their grandchildren and everyone who asked about him, happy to hear that his praises were being sung in his hometown, where ghostly figures from his past kept running into her, old friends and not-even-friends from school and the army, all eager to know how he was faring. And it was there, by the sea, a molten sun grazing the horizon, that Molkho first heard about his old youth-movement counselor, Uri, who together with his wife, Ya’ara, seemed to take an avid interest in him.
3
BUT WE’VE BEEN THINKING and talking of you ever since last summer!” said his old counselor to him, lightly resting a hand on his shoulder. “Since last summer?” Molkho asked, touched to be so unexpectedly thought of after so many years, even if it did seem rather odd. “But why since last summer? My wife was still alive then.” “Yes, I know,” said his old counselor, “but all of Jerusalem already knew that it was terminal.” “It did?” asked Molkho with a shiver of excitement. “Yes,” replied his counselor. “There are always people who make it their business to spread bad news; even if they don’t know who it’s about, it makes them feel better. There were all sorts of rumors about you, and your mother talked a lot too; she had to tell everyone all the medical details, even when she didn’t understand them. You have no idea how well informed we were, especially about how you took the whole long, hard death on yourself. So that when we heard that it was over, I said to Ya’ara, ‘Who knows, perhaps this is the very man God has in mind for us. What actually do we remember about him, though? Was he really once in love with you?’”
They were standing on the long stone steps of the Jerusalem Theater on a broiling Saturday afternoon, hugging the thin line of shade by the closed box offices. A fiery silence reigned all around. Not a soul was to be seen in the empty white plaza. The shutters of the aristocratic old houses of the neighborhood were all shut. Further up the hill they could see the stone wall of the Presidential Mansion, and further down, where the street slanted steeply, the mysterious building of the old Turkish leper colony in its dusty copse of trees. As soon as he had stepped out of his car in the parking lot, Molkho had spied his former counselor’s tall, thin figure walking back and forth in the shade along the top step, a wide-brimmed black hat clutched in one hand, looking down like a lone actor waiting impatiently onstage for his supporting cast. Solemnly Molkho had ascended the steps and greeted him with a timorous smile, heartened by the confidence radiating from the strong, bony frame in the black pants and sweaty white shirt of an Orthodox Jew, his dusty, broad-brimmed hat rather reassuringly resembling a cowboy’s, for Molkho had been afraid of this reunion after nearly thirty years and was relieved to find he still liked the man. The old-fashioned garb; the heavy, slightly graying beard; even the ritual fringes of the undershirt sticking untidily out from the shirt—to Molkho these seemed but the latest disguise of this eternal Kierkegaardian-Buberian truth-seeker who had come to them in those days from some left-wing kibbutz and was now (as he had informed his ex-youth-grouper the week before on the telephone) an observant Jew. Molkho had remembered him well, had in fact always admired him, though he himself had never been a “Schechterite,” as his counselor’s group of sensitive, if sometimes strange, friends were called, after the Haifa Bible teacher who was their guru. Indeed, it had never occurred to him to join them, having no interest in their way of life, which involved drifting from one kibbutz to another, only to be expelled from each in the end for what was considered their elitist factionalism, not to mention their mysticism and talent for attracting the prettiest girls while disdaining socialist goals, preferring to search their navels for the Meaning of Life while composing odd hymns and prayers. Ultimately they had founded a kibbutz of their own called Yodfat in the Lower Galilee, where some settled down but most eventually left, scattering in all directions, though a few, like Uri Adler, who had been one of their leaders, continued their religious quest.
Thus, Molkho was not totally surprised by the strange telephone call he had received, the purpose of which he had guessed at once. Why, he thought, warmly shaking the hand held out to greet him, it’s kind but only natural that someone should want to cook me up a woman in this bake-house of a summer. And yet he blushed with embarrassment, as though it were undignified to have agreed so readily to such a rendezvous. “How did you hear about me?” he asked. “From whom?” “But we’ve been thinking and talking about you ever since last summer!” answered his old counselor, heartily returning his handshake.
4
MOLKHO LET OUT A LITTLE LAUGH and blushed again, feeling an odd happiness. It was still too much to absorb. Had he really once been in love with her? he asked himself candidly, trying his best to remember. Thirty-four years had gone by, and even then Ya’ara and he hadn’t been in one class for long; that is, she had been a grade ahead of him until their junior year, which she was forced to repeat—a tall, blonde, quietly attractive, academically unsuccessful girl who drifted back to her old classmates during recess. Had he really been in love with her? The fact of the matter was that he was constantly falling in love in those days, each time with a vague and secretive passion that he strove to inflame, in order to break free from his dominating mother, whose only child he was.
Clearly, though, he couldn’t leave it at that. “Did she ever finish high school?” he asked his old counselor, whose every gesture, smile, intonation, and burst of enthusiasm seemed to erase the lapsed years, despite Molkho’s suspicion that the love in question was purely imaginary. “Was I actually in love with her?” he wondered aloud again, afraid of the deterrent effect of too staunch a denial, so that, standing there in the torrid sun with the Sabbath peace all around them, he was quite prepared to fall in love retroactively if only it would prove helpful. “It’s b
een so long,” he laughed. “Maybe I was a bit, but she was older than I was.” “Just by a year,” his counselor hurried to correct him. “In fact, not even. She’s August and you’re May. It’s only a few months’ difference, and after all, you were in the same class, you sat next to each other, you even once wrote her a love letter. That was the year I was your counselor—or have you forgotten that too?”
“Of course not,” protested Molkho. “How could I forget you? You were the best thing to happen to us, even if there was all kinds of gossip about you.” “Yes,” said his counselor, as though recalling it with relish, “and not all of it was pure gossip, let me tell you. But you yourself were never really one of us. Ideas didn’t interest you—not just ours, but anyone’s. I can still remember you sitting quietly through our meetings like a well-brought-up little boy.” “Yes, I’ve never been an intellectual,” confessed Molkho, trying to make the best of it. “I was always too realistic.” “And in the end you dropped out of the movement without even trying life on a kibbutz, didn’t you?” asked his counselor. “Yes,” admitted Molkho, marveling how this ancient transgression could still be held against him. “And what did you do in the army?” inquired Uri. “I was a medic,” Molkho said. “That’s where I met my wife.”
They walked back and forth in the fringe of shade by the box office, Molkho first speaking about himself, amazed that Uri already knew so much about him, and then listening to the story of his old counselor’s life with Ya’ara, over which hung the misfortune of a childless marriage. “That’s been our great tragedy,” said Uri, “though it took us a long time to accept it.” There had been, he told Molkho, a long series of painful miscarriages, terminated pregnancies, and endless treatments, during which they had gone from place to place in search of better luck: from the kibbutz in the Galilee to a farming village, and then to the city, and then to South America (where Uri worked as an agricultural adviser, saving money for more visits to the doctors), and then to the Far East for a fling at meditation and Oriental healing. Finally, ten years ago, they had returned to Israel with the realization that they had gotten nowhere.
It was his despair of having children that made Molkho’s old counselor turn to Judaism and become a disciple of an Orthodox rabbi. At first, he thought of this, too, as merely a stage; yet gradually he came to see that the process was a long one, and indeed, there was still no end to it in sight, because the wisdom he was seeking could not be found in books but only through contact with those who lived it. True, he refused to be labeled “a penitent Jew,” a fundamentalist expression he abhorred; in the last elections he had actually voted for a left-wing candidate. But the fact remained that if he was to make any spiritual progress at all he had to be accepted by the rabbi and his followers, which was far from easy, since an outsider like himself was always under suspicion. They were difficult people, and for several years they had been urging him to remarry and have children, a childless man being religiously incomplete. At first, he hadn’t wanted to hear of it; yet the longer he spent with them, the more he saw the inner logic of the demand, spiritually if not psychologically. He felt torn in two, because his love for his wife, whom it wasn’t simple to live with under such circumstances, was as great as ever; but the years were going by, he wasn’t getting any younger, and his craving for children, which was only aggravated by his situation, kept growing. In fact, he had even been offered a match, and Ya’ara was ready to divorce him. “It’s my fate to be childless,” she had told him, “but you can still have a family. Just don’t imagine that I can go on living with you and watching you suffer.” He had been agonizing about it for a year now, for how could a professionless woman of over fifty (her life having passed in travel and trying to become pregnant, so that to this day she was only an assistant in a kindergarten) get along on her own, especially as he himself earned precious little from his job as a public-school teacher, most of his time being devoted to study? Naturally, the rabbi’s followers were willing to find a match for her too; but she had no desire to join their community, while he refused even to consider a divorce before her future was taken care of. Yet whom could they find for her when they were socially so out of touch? The only old friends they ever saw were those they ran into by chance, from one of whom they had heard about Molkho. They had actually looked him up in an old photograph from the movement, a chubby, friendly-looking boy. “But what do we remember about him?” Molkho’s old counselor had asked his wife. “Was he really in love with you?”
Molkho walked beside him in the shrinking line of shade, listening in a turmoil. “So you want me to marry your wife?” he asked at last, looking at his old counselor, who stood staring palely into space. “Yes,” replied Uri, returning an anxious glance. “It would be a way of keeping it in the family. After all, we were once all so close.”
5
THAT EVENING, when it was already dark and the sky was strewn with clear summer stars above a city flapping in the hot desert wind like a woman awakened from her afternoon nap and crossly dragging her bedclothes, Molkho stood waiting for his counselor by the entrance to the Edison Cinema on the corner of Isaiah and Rabbi Isaac of Prague streets, along which ran the unofficial border between observant and nonobservant Jerusalem, watching some moviegoers decide whether to buy tickets for the first show. Although he hadn’t been in this spot for years, everything was as he remembered it from his childhood, which had passed unhappily a few blocks away. The large white building, a teenage haunt of his, was unchanged too; nostalgically he surveyed its three marble steps and long vitrines, with their pictures of movie stars, while recalling the many hours he had spent in its front rows, the cheapest seats available, his eyes tearing from the flickering screen and the sad fate of Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind, with whom he had fallen so madly in love that he had spent weeks imagining how, despite his tender age, he might become her beau.
The last undecideds outside the theater made up their minds at last and vanished into its darkened hall while the old ticket-taker locked the glass doors, switched off the lights in the lobby, and retired to a comfortable corner. His counselor’s lateness, by now considerable, was beginning to annoy Molkho. Was he waiting in the wrong place? Could he have been such a flop that morning that the whole thing had been called off? And I still have to drive all the way back to Haifa, he grumbled to himself, striding moodily down the dark street that led to the Orthodox North Side, which lay spread out before him in a great puddle of light. He should at least have thought of taking down their address, since they hadn’t any telephone. But, just then, up the street swung a nearly empty, brightly lit bus, inside of which he made out his old counselor, dressed the same except for the black hat, which now rested on his head, though tilted back with a jaunty defiance. Angry at having been kept waiting, he remained standing on the dark street, but his counselor, stepping quickly off the bus at the stop opposite the theater and spotting Molkho at once, was already striding toward him apologetically; the rabbi’s weekly sermon, he explained, had run on past the end of the Sabbath and there had been a long wait for the bus. “I was afraid we had gotten our signals crossed,” confessed Molkho, the words scarcely out of his mouth before he regretted sounding overeager. Uri made no reply. His breezy manner of the morning gone, he regarded Molkho with a worried look. Both felt the awkwardness of the situation. “I should have gone straight to your house,” Molkho said. “You never would have found it,” said his counselor. “You may have grown up in this city, but in the neighborhood I live in, even a native could get lost.”
They walked to Molkho’s car, which seemed to arouse his counselor’s interest. “It’s considered quite feminine,” Molkho chuckled, pointing out its special features. “A feminine car?” marveled Uri. “Do cars have sexes, then?” “Only if you want them to,” answered Molkho, pleased with his witty rejoinder. “It’s amazing,” declared his counselor, removing his hat and settling into the front seat, “how refined the anatomy of human pleasure has become.” At the first corner
, they turned left toward a neighborhood where Molkho’s grandfather had lived years ago, in whose empty streets the desert heat of the day seemed transmuted into a sad solitude. “I was born near here,” Molkho said, stopping for four black-coated Talmudists to cross the street with unreasonable slowness. “I wouldn’t recognize the house, though. I haven’t been here for ages and everything’s changed.” “I suppose it would be,” said his counselor, guiding them through a maze of streets that were full of dead ends and no-entrances. “The ultra-Orthodox have taken over here too,” he added, telling Molkho to bear right at a traffic light onto a northbound highway and then right again toward a project that seemed to grow vaster the further into it they drove, so that Molkho, who had lost his bearings completely, felt as if they had left dark Jerusalem behind them and were now in another city lit by thousands of bulbs like a gigantic power plant. “This is Kiryat Mattersdorf,” explained his counselor while piloting him through a large, full parking lot to an empty space in a far corner that seemed reserved just for them.
They struck out down a dark alley past some tanks of cooking gas and emerged in a square where children were running back and forth among young mothers pushing baby carriages. On one corner several men in white shirts were engrossed in lively conversation. Uri walked quickly, his head slightly bowed, looking up now and then to greet some passing acquaintance, while Molkho trailed behind him, vaguely troubled by the strange surroundings. Suddenly he stopped, reaching out to touch his counselor’s shoulder. “You’d better know now,” he whispered, “that I’m not a believer at all. Far from it.” But his counselor was undaunted. “Nothing is far from it,” he answered sharply, the hint of a rebuke in his voice. “It’s enough to say you don’t believe. Neither do I. Come, let’s cut through here.” They passed a row of garbage pails and climbed a few steps to a building, inside of which some tots and pregnant women were waiting for two elevators. “What, you have elevators?” asked Molkho in surprise. “And why not?” smiled Uri, weaving his way through the crowd of toddlers with a respectful glance at his neighbors, who all wished him a good new week. The elevators seemed to be stopping at every floor, where more crowds of children were no doubt waiting, and indeed, when one finally arrived, a horde of merry youngsters burst out of it. Though scratched and battered, it was large enough for a department store and everyone fitted easily into it. In no time, pressed by eager little hands, every button was lit, and they were stopping at floor after floor, on each of which more children got on and off under the eyes of the good-naturedly chiding adults, and Molkho, slightly alarmed by so much teeming life, glimpsed men and women lounging outside their apartments.
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