Authors: A. B. Yehoshua
She didn't answer now either. Slowly she opened her large, heavy, amber eyes, the eyes of a weary animal from which the light had fled, leaving in them neither anger nor pain, but only ultimate defeat. He smiled at her, spoke her name, tried encouraging her as always, but she failed to respond, for the first time not recognizing him, her moist yellow glance spilling out emptily. He had never imagined that Death could be so damp, and when her breathing stopped, he rearranged the blankets and kissed her lightly on the forehead, imbibing her scent. “You're free now,” he whispered, switching off the little twenty-four-hour night-light and opening the window, though he did not believe in such freedom at all, only in nothingness. A deep, urgent need to look at the world made him step out on the terrace: this was the moment, this was their last farewell. It was late fall, and the first rains had cooled the earth without sating it. His eye followed the line of the ravine in the darkness below the house, looking for some unfamiliar sign of life, but the night was gray and silent, with a slight, motionless mist hanging over the sea. It was, he thought, his last quiet hour before the bustle of condolence calls began, leaving him no time for himself. Meanwhile, however, the exclusivity of his knowledge made him feel advantageously strong. A car sped along the highway by the coast. Soon he, too, would be free.
U
PON RETURNING
to the room, he realized he should never have turned off the night-light. Suddenly he felt a twinge of fear. The border between Death and Life should be clearer, he thought, the shock of crossing it should be greater: why, if I look at her now in the darkness, I may imagine I see her move. And indeed, he seemed to detect a slight movement as he peered back through the glass door of the terrace, which he vigorously opened, however, refusing to believe in yet another resurrection, striding silently back through the room with his eyes on the floor until, by the hallway door, he turned to look at her again. Now he could see her face clearly, defeat still written on it. For seven years she had fought her illness; four years ago she was actually sure she had triumphed. Yet now the same hand that hours ago had moved with a slow, fanning motion hung lifelessly down from the bed. He glanced at the clock. It was 4:15. All at once he thought with emotion that not only she but her illness, too, that cruel cousin that had moved in with them, was gone.
He walked swiftly out, shut the door behind him, collapsed on the living room couch, and tried to sleep, to rest up for the ordeal ahead, his knowledge like a warm blanket covering him; yet the thought of all the people he was at liberty to wake was too much for him, and rousing himself, he went to phone his mother-in-law, who, perfectly clearheaded, answered at once in her slow, soft, irrepressibly German-flavored Hebrew. “It's all over,” he said quietly, tersely, flinging her the death in one throw. For a heartbreaking moment she said nothing. Then, though, she asked, “When?” And now it was he who couldn't speak. With a thickening lump in his throat, he began to sob and shake, the unseen sorrow of the eighty-two-year-old woman stirring up his own grief with unexpected force. The receiver fell in his lap while, with her accustomed restraint, she waited patiently for him to get a grip on himself and answer, “Ten, fifteen minutes ago.” “I'll be right over,” she said. “Why rush?” he asked. “You may as well wait for it to be light out. You have a long hard day ahead of you.” But she wouldn't hear of it. “No, I'll be right over. Are the children still sleeping? Don't wake them. I'll call a cab.” And she hung up.
He went to the bathroom and sat doggedly on the toilet until he passed a few drops of urine, washed his hands and face without shaving, and walked down the darkened hallway past the children's rooms. For a second his daughter opened her eyes and saw him, but as he said nothing, she closed them again, while his younger son, deep in sleep, did not stir. They had been bracing themselves for this death, almost angry with it for taking so long.
He opened the front door and turned on the stairway light. It was damp outside. A soft, noiseless rain fell furtively into the world, slicking the front steps with a bright coppery gleam. It occurred to him that in her agitation the old woman might slip coming down the garden stairs. All I need now is for her to take a fall on me, he thought bitterly. His wife had been her only daughter. Throughout her illness she had continued to look after her mother, and now, he thought, all that burden would be his, even if she was a responsible old woman who took good care of herself. Deciding to meet her downstairs, he put on his shoes, an old sweater, and a coat, took an umbrella, and stepped out into the rain, first waiting for her by the entrance, from which he had a view of the street, and then stepping into the garden, treading on the dead leaves that strewed the wet path, all the while thinking of the funeral arrangements. He had already reached the street when the gruesome thought occurred to him that his son or daughter might awake and discover their dead mother, and so he ran worriedly back upstairs, where he locked the bedroom door after a quick glance at her lying in the dark sheen of night flowing through the open window. Relieved to have everything under control again, he stuck the key in his pocket and hurried back down, feeling the light spray of the rain, which, scarcely hitting the ground, seemed to have as its sole mission the cleansing of the air.
The sky had cleared, but the rain, as though coming from elsewhere, kept falling. With an unfamiliar freedom he paced up and down the sidewalk, fingering the key in his pocket, secure in the knowledge that from this moment on, there were no further claims on him. For a moment, as though looking down on her from above, he imagined his wife, utterly alone now, dressed in an old coat among a crowd of dead people in front of some clinic or office that they were waiting to enter, though it was only their first stop. The thought that never again could he help her made him shiver with grief, the hot lump swelling in his throat and sticking there, refusing to overflow, until slowly it dissolved again. By now his mother-in-law should have arrived from her old-age home on the next flank of the mountainâand indeed, approaching the curve in the street, he saw a small light that bobbed in midair like a drunken little star, slowly groping its sinuous way, faltering, flickering, and then flaring up again. Molkho rubbed his eyes. Could she have decided to come by foot? She actually had a small flashlightâhe had seen it more than onceâyet he was sure this wasn't it. Stopping short to let the Death-propelled world spin on dizzily without him, he suddenly realized that what he saw was the headlight of a bicycle whose rider, a large, cumbersome newsboy, kept dismounting, leaning his vehicle against the curb, disappearing into buildings with his papers, coming out again, and pedaling on. And yet, when he finally rode by, Molkho saw, he was not a boy at all, but rather a heavily dressed woman, her head wrapped in scarves and the cuffs of her pants clipped with clothespins. Though passing quite near him, she failed to notice him; her eyeglasses glinting beneath the streetlights, she rode on as far as his own house, entering it with an armful of newspapers to stuff into the mailboxes. Soon she emerged and straightened her bicycleâbut now Molkho saw she was a man after all, varicose and heavyset, who threw him a resentful glance, remounted the sagging bike, and rode off.
But the taxi was coming down the street now too, chuffing and billowing exhaust. Preceded by the cane that for some obscure reason she had taken to carrying in the past month, his mother-in-law stepped briskly out of it, paid the driver, and stood there talking to him. There was something about her that inspired confidence in people, with whom she knew how to get along. Had she told the man where she was going so early in the morning or would she have thought that undignified? The taxi departed, leaving her standing by herself on the opposite curb. Deftly slipping her change into her purse, she glanced in both directions, as if waiting for an invisible flow of traffic to stop, before crossing the street. She was, he noticed, warmly dressed in a raincoat, boots, and gloves, and she was wearing for the first time the red woolen cap they had bought her in Paris two years ago. He stepped toward her, wary of the cane that advanced through the air as if tracking an unseen target, careful not to scare herâand in fact, head bent in sorrow, she took him at first for a stranger and sought to make a detour around him. Gently he blocked her way and held out his hand. Though she had shrunken in recent years, she still held herself upright, and her skin, despite its wrinkled, slightly liverish patina that gave off a faint smell of old scent, had a morning freshness.
“The driver lost his way; he misunderstood,” she said in her German accent, which was always strongest in the morning, after a night of German dreams. “I hope you weren't too worried,” she added, looking away from him. He stared down without answering, surprised by her matter-of-factness, seeking to help her by the elbow down the garden stairs. But she did not want to be helped. Her ancient body was alive and agile beneath its layers of clothing as she shone her little flashlight on the wet stone stairs of the garden that were strewn with autumn leaves, descending them with her cane hooked over one arm, then transferring it to the other while ascending the house stairs with him hurrying after her, plucking a wet newspaper from the mailbox as he passed it. She all but ran to the bedroom when he opened the front door, her face hard and pale, her lips trembling. “Just a minute,” he whispered while she struggled with the doorknob, taking the key from his pocket and trying to explain. But he saw she wasn't listening. Without removing her large coat and hat, and holding her cane and lit flashlight, she burst inside as if she still might not be too late. The room itself had grown quite stuffy, and the face of the limp-handed woman actually seemed flushed. Yet, poignantly, everything was just as he had left it. He remained standing in the doorway, returning his wife of thirty years to her mother, detachedly watching the old woman throw herself without a word on the corpse, fondle it, kiss it, cross its two arms on its chest, lie a while beside it, and emit a piercing sob like the blast of a distant, sinking ship, so that Molkho, whose newspaper was still under his arm, felt the lump in his throat again and wished the strange sound might sweep him away on a wave of wished-for tears, though he knew that it wouldn't, that it was only, after all, a sob.
His mother-in-law was a cultured, educated woman who read books and went to concerts. In Israel, to which she had come shortly before World War II, she had run an orphanage, and during her daughter's illness she and Molkho had become quite close. Despite all the hired nursing help, the real burden of caring for his wife had been shouldered by the two of them, and while they had never talked about Death itself, only about practical things, he felt sure she held the same opinion of it as he didânamely, that it was the absolute end of everything and that the two of them, he and she, were alone by themselves now in this room. And so, going over to her, he laid a light hand on her shoulder, which was something he had never done before, helped her out of her coat, took her hat, and led her to the small armchair in which she had spent so much time in recent days.
She sank into it, her old face deeply creased beneath its shock of gray hair, her heavy glasses misted over, so like and unlike her dead daughter, while he, seeing her stricken and bewildered, began to pace up and down, choking back his emotion. “The end was very peaceful,” he said. “I don't think she suffered at all. I'm sure she wasn't in pain, and I know what pain is. I'm quite sure she wasn't,” he repeated, carried away by his own conviction as if it were he, rather than she, who had died an hour ago, the old woman hanging on every word and nodding all the time. “Yes, she'll be quiet now,” she said, as if the deceased were a troublesome child who had finally fallen asleep, and he felt so touched by her flushed, bewildered face with its glasses halfway down its nose that he burst into tears himself, feeling equally sorry for the two of them, while she regarded him with quiet sympathy until, finishing crying, he went to the bathroom to wash, taking off his shirt and jacket and deciding this time to shave.
When Molkho emerged from the bathroom he found his daughter wide-awake and tearful, her arms around her grandmother, and he nodded to her across the room as if to say, “Yes, now you know too,” as though the knowledge were an object that could be passed from hand to hand. Glancing again at the dead body, he felt as overwhelmed by its immobility as if the earth's very orbit had stopped. And yet, the morning paper, lying forgotten at the foot of the bed, reminded him with a pang that it hadn't, and looking out at the sky, he saw a soft white streak that was the dawn.
H
E PHONED
his elder son, the college student, and went to wake the high school boy, which was no easy task in the dark. During the last year the boy had taught himself to sleep soundly, dead to the world, but Molkho forced him out of bed, throwing off the blankets (beneath which his son had slept in his clothes again to save time dressing in the morning) before breaking the news to him. He was prepared for it, had been in fact for quite a while. Over the past month he had detached himself from his mother, so impatient with the slowness of her death that if, asking about her on coming home from school, he was told she had had a good day, he frowned involuntarily. Now his father took him for a last look at her, steering him by the shoulder, though stiff with sleep he stood there so dazed and dry-eyed that Molkho wondered if it wouldn't be better for him to take his exam in school than stay home and get in everyone's way. Meanwhile, pale and haggard, the college student had arrived with the speed of light and was showering kisses on his grandmother while lightly holding his mother's hand. Next he'll start kissing her too, Molkho thought, sensing himself grow more remote, more coldly calculating, from minute to minute.