Their shared hour of paperwork had renewed the old bond between them, and she looked so pale, old, and tired in the blinding afternoon light that he went to open her car door and walked her to the lobby while she continued to thank him for his efforts. “Don’t mention it,” he said. “I admire your energy, but if you had just bothered to explain it to me on the phone, I could have saved you the trouble of coming down in person.” Why, though, he asked, advancing with her across the lobby, was her friend’s daughter so eager to return to Russia? But he barely listened to her answer, for he was busy peering through the open doors of the dining room, in which at the tables, with their starched white cloths, a mere handful of oldsters sat in silence, as if all their companions had died overnight. “What’s happened?” he demanded. “Where is everyone?” Some of the residents, his mother-in-law explained, were vacationing abroad, while others were visiting their children. “And they keep the dining room open for so few of you?” he marveled, watching the waitresses come and go with trays of soup. His mother-in-law countered with a question of her own: Was his housekeeper still on vacation too? “Yes,” Molkho said. “I gave her the whole month off. That’s what she asked for. As a matter of fact, I think she’s pregnant, though I’m not even sure if she’s married.” The old woman nodded fretfully. “Perhaps you should find someone else,” she advised. “But what will you do for a hot meal today?” And before he could tell her that he would open a can, she had invited him to lunch in requital for his pains. “Don’t you have to notify the management?” he asked. “Not in summer,” she replied, taking off her shapeless hat and leading him to a table at which a little old man was eating soup.
The food was not as good as Molkho had imagined; indeed, it was overdone, saltless, and cooked with almost no oil. Judging by the curious looks he received, the other diners were pleased to have his company, no doubt flattered to be joined by such a youngster. What’s happening to me? he asked himself gloomily, politely chewing his meal in the large, quiet hall, with its white tablecloths and polished silver. Instead of finding myself a woman, here I am sitting with my dead wife’s mother among a lot of old German Jews, practically ready for an old-age home myself!
27
AFTER A BRIEF NAP at home, he took out some stationery and began to write. “Dear Friends, I’m writing you both together. I’m too confused to know how to feel. You must admit that this whole thing is very strange. I don’t know what marks you’ve given me, but the days together left me with a nice feeling. But I feel that I still need more time and that you must have patience with me. Perhaps we should try again next month. Ya’ara and I could take a trip abroad, because here at home you’re always running into the wrong people.”
He put down his pen. The word “nice” seemed inadequate and he tried to think of something better while crossing out “abroad” and writing over it, “to some hotel.” But after composing a few more sentences he gave up, paced restlessly up and down, and then put on a pair of old work pants and took a can of black paint from the closet. Prying the can open with a screwdriver, he stirred the sticky dark mixture, brought a small ladder, spread some newspapers on the floor, and began painting the bars on the window. “It’s just temporary,” he explained to the high school boy, who came to watch. “When I get around to it, I’ll order new bars like you want, with room for flowerpots, but meanwhile these may as well be painted.”
28
HE STILL JUMPED whenever the telephone rang, hoping it might be them. As it never was though, he finished his letter, made a clean copy, and was about to put it in an envelope when he realized that he didn’t know their address and had no way of finding it out. And so, deciding to drive to Jerusalem that Saturday, ascertain what it was, and drop the letter in the nearest mailbox, he called his mother to tell her he was coming. “Good,” she said. “Come Friday and we’ll visit your father’s grave. It’s about time we did.” “But I can’t take the day off,” he explained. “I’m the only senior person left in the department. After all, think how nice they’ve been to me.”
He arrived in Jerusalem late Saturday morning, just in time for the heavy lunch she had cooked. “Never mind,” she said to him, sensing at once that something had gone wrong with his new relationship. “At least you tried, that’s all anyone can do.” But when she tried pumping him for more details, he suddenly cried out, “For God’s sake, leave me alone!”
In his old room he couldn’t fall asleep. A new family with a baby that cried all the time had moved in next door, and not even the thick stone walls were able to shut out the noise. Having decided it was safest to visit his counselor’s building during the afternoon siesta, he drove there at two-thirty, when the city was deep in Sabbath slumber, parking a distance away from the religious neighborhood to avoid the risk of being stoned. I mustn’t get on their wrong side, he told himself.
The housing project seemed larger by day than it had on his two nighttime visits. Apart from a few children at play, it was indeed deserted. The day was hot, and the sweat stung his eyes. When he came to where his counselor lived, there was no house number anywhere, and the building itself, he now noticed, was but part of a much larger complex. Stopping a young woman on her way out the front door, he asked for the address. “Which house are you looking for?” she asked. “For this one,” he replied. “Then you’ve found it,” she said. “So I have,” smiled Molkho, “but suppose I want to send someone a letter?” She paused to consider and then said, “There is no address. Just write the name of the project and the family. It will reach them. We’ve never used house numbers.”
Nevertheless, deciding it was safer to leave the letter underneath his friends’ door, he thanked her and slipped inside, hearing the groan of the elevator as it started and stopped overhead. Finally it arrived with a creak, smelling of pot roast and boiled carrots. It was a Sabbath elevator that stopped automatically at each floor; the door would open and Molkho would remain standing in silence, awkwardly waiting for what seemed forever, until it buzzed and shut again as slowly as if designed for paraplegics. When at last he reached his destination, a pregnant woman in a doorway informed him that the Adlers lived a floor below. He descended the stairs and was about to slip the letter beneath their door when it struck him that they might think it a cowardly thing to do. Besides, he missed their little apartment. If only he could have made love to her there! In his own home it simply wasn’t possible.
He knocked lightly. Someone came to the door. It was a drowsy-looking Uri, dressed in an undershirt and gym shorts, his beard shiny in the sunlight. “Oh, it’s you,” he said drily, looking neither glad nor annoyed. “You don’t have a telephone, you don’t have an address, a person can’t even get in touch with you!” exclaimed Molkho defensively as he entered. “I felt we couldn’t just leave things the way they were. I had to talk to you, to know what you think.” “Who is that?” called a husky voice from the bedroom. “It’s me,” Molkho called back. “It’s me, Ya’ara. I just thought I’d drop by.” Uri went to the bedroom to put on a shirt, and Molkho heard them whispering, after which they came out together. Ya’ara, too, must have been sleeping, the last traces of her Galilee suntan still visible on the once beautiful face that was now past its prime. Why does she seem so much more desirable to me here? he wondered.
“We had no idea you were coming,” they said in a reserved but not unfriendly tone. “Neither did I,” he apologized wanly. “I wrote you a letter but had no address to mail it to, and so I brought it myself. Tell me, though, what exactly is the rationale for that weird Sabbath elevator of yours?” But his attempt at humor only made his counselor frown. “I’m sure you didn’t come here to discuss the religious ontology of elevators,” said Uri so sharply that Molkho cringed. “Talking to a nonbeliever about such things simply makes them seem ridiculous.” They all sat down. Too downcast to talk, Molkho nervously took out his letter and handed it to the two of them. They read it together with a new sense of solidarity, as if the sole purpose of Ya’ara’s vi
sit to Haifa had been to return her to this overpopulated Orthodox world more dependent on her husband than ever. Automatically she reached out for the cigarettes on the table, and gently Uri’s hand closed over hers to remind her that she musn’t smoke on the Sabbath.
“Well?” asked Molkho from the edge of his chair as they silently put the letter down. “Well,” said his counselor. “I agree that all this may have been a bit premature for you. We had no idea that you were like this.” “Like what?” asked Molkho in a whisper. “Why, so inhibited,” said his counselor. “So depressed over your wife’s death. You haven’t begun to confront your guilt for having killed her.” There were steps outside in the hallway. Molkho looked up in puzzlement. Was Uri trying to keep his hopes alive? “Yes,” he said. “Yes, it is a bit premature. I’m on the slow side, and you yourselves do everything so quickly, so almost ... anarchistically. You really are anarchists,” he complained. Uri smiled, content with the description. “I don’t know myself very well,” confessed Molkho, preferring to look out the window rather than meet their eyes. “And suppose I should want to have more children,” he continued, pleased and alarmed by the unexpected thought. “It’s true my wife warned me not to, but she couldn’t have thought that far ahead or known what would be best for me.”
They sat in weary silence. A light breeze blew the food smells of the elevator through the open window. In the afternoon light, the white rocks on the hillside were turning copper. He glanced involuntarily at Ya’ara’s smooth, bare feet, sorry he hadn’t ever kissed them. She and Uri seemed to be growing steadily more distant, as if regretting the involvement and wishing he would go away.
He walked back to his car like a sleepwalker, down streets whose Sabbath silence only made him feel worse. Once behind the wheel, he drove to the Old City, where he strolled through the narrow lanes of the souk until twilight, thinking it was a good thing Jerusalem had Arabs to give it some life on Saturdays. Passing the house where his father was born, he felt weak and wished he were dead. The stars were already out when, hot and tired, he reached his mother’s apartment, carrying bags of fruit from the market, grapes and fresh figs and fragrant apples and pomegranates, just like his father used to do. “The weather here is unbearable,” he told her. “But look how cool the evenings are,” she soothed him. “Summer is over. It’s already autumn now.”
“No, it isn’t,” cried Molkho in despair, expertly dividing the fruit between them. “They may call it that, but it isn’t any such thing.”
Part V
AUTUMN
1
AND INDEED it wasn’t autumn, just a mellower summer, with days so wonderfully clear that Molkho felt he was looking at the world with new eyes. There were mornings when, driving to work down the Carmel, he could see clear to the white cliffs of the Lebanese border twenty miles away, the shoreline along the soft curve of Haifa Bay traced in precise detail. How little we’re aware of what the smogs and mists hide from us, he mused. Why, if one more veil were to fall away, I might see all the way to Turkey! In the evenings the air glimmered like a golden wine, which was perhaps the reason for his hearty appetite, which had caused him to put on a few pounds again. And yet, as guilty as the orgies of food on his terrace made him feel, he kept returning to the refrigerator for more.
He had begun Volume II of Anna Karenina, vaguely recalling his counselor’s warning that it ended with Anna’s suicide, though forgetting the reason why. They were telling the truth, he thought. I was really in love with her my whole junior year. Why couldn’t I at least have allowed myself a kiss or two? I’m sure her body is still young. Maybe some people never grow old, because the cells of their bodies keep changing. There were spots, he remembered, where even his wife had remained lusciously youthful to the end—around her hips, for instance, and in the curves of her thighs and insteps. They never gave me a chance, he thought dejectedly. Or had they simply used him to shore up their childless love in their little apartment in fertile Jerusalem?
He felt thankful that his own children had been brought into the world easily and long ago, and that they were no longer small. The problem was that he was seeing less and less of them. Though his daughter was back from Europe, she had enrolled in the psychology department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and rarely came home, even on weekends, while the college student now spent his free time with his older girlfriend. Molkho had once seen her at the movies, a pinched-looking woman with ferrety eyes that aroused his instinctive hostility. “But what does she want from you?” he angrily asked his son, who seemed unable or disinclined to tell him and didn’t seem to think it mattered. “She doesn’t want anything,” he answered uncomprehendingly. “We’re just good friends who like to get together.” Even the secretly consulted computer of the Ministry of the Interior could supply Molkho with no more than the woman’s date of birth, her marital status (she had been divorced ten years ago), and an address that proved incorrect.
One Saturday he emotionally discussed the matter with his daughter, who didn’t seem troubled at all. Omri, she told her father straightforwardly, was probably just looking for a mother figure. “A mother figure?” Molkho was dumbstruck. “What is that supposed to mean?” In grim silence he listened to her explanation, suddenly persuaded that the woman in fact resembled his dead wife. “But what an awful thing to happen!” he exclaimed. “The boy needs to see a psychiatrist! Please talk to him! Just the thought of that woman being in this house is too much for me!” “But why, Dad?” smiled Enat. “It’s only a superficial relationship.” “All right,” he said resentfully, trying to smile back. “If you say so.”
The child he felt sorriest for was the high school boy, who, after long, soul-searching discussions with his principal and teachers, had been left back a grade. “It’s for his own good,” explained the principal after patiently listening to Molkho’s fears. “It’s really not such a tragedy.” Molkho nodded, thinking how he too might have liked to be left back, though in a different way.
2
THE SAVAGE SUMMER was still mellowing when the government overcame months of indecision to announce a bold new economic program that called for drastic wage cuts, shortly after which daylight saving time ended and the early darkness brought home the changing seasons. The approaching autumn made Molkho nostalgically recall the anxious days of a year ago. Premature though it was, he took out the calendar, sat staring at it for a long while, and finally circled a date for visiting the cemetery that fell several days before the anniversary of his wife’s death. After all, he told himself, if I’m free to remarry, I’m free to move a date around. “Make sure you have no commitments or exams then,” he warned his children. “Later it will be too late to change, because I intend to invite that nice rabbi again.”
That Friday night, after the usual frozen fish served up with the inevitability of Fate, he told his mother-in-law. “What, you’ve already decided?” she asked, removing her glasses and bending over to pinpoint the day on the calendar, taken aback by his haste, despite her own penchant for orderliness. Molkho glanced mildly at the old woman, of whom there seemed to be less and less, as if her daughter’s death had sprung a leak through which she herself was gradually escaping. Somehow she seemed to him like a burden he had to carry or like a barrier standing in his way. If only she had remarried and had had more children when she first came to this country, he thought, I wouldn’t be saddled with her now. Had she ever had a lover after her husband’s death? He found it hard to meet her eyes; lately, he felt, she was constantly appraising him, as if taking his measure for something. Before her mother entered the old-age home, his wife had sometimes sent him to her apartment to tighten a screw, change a light bulb, or drive a new nail in the wall, all of which he took his time doing, as if to put her patience to the test; after all, she had already bought the materials at his request and possessed her own little hammer, screwdriver, and box of nails and screws, so that she could easily have done the repair herself instead of waiting for him. Yet the fact was t
hat he liked using her tools, even though he sometimes had to go back for a drill or wrench of his own, which led to yet further delays. “She has more patience than God,” he would say with a smile to his wife, who never suspected him of deliberately procrastinating. Now, though the home had a janitor for such things, she sometimes still looked at Molkho as though sizing him up for some job.
Five Seasons Page 31