Authors: A. B. Yehoshua
T
HE LAST STRANDS
of light were still glimmering in the summer night when they returned after nine. From the stairs, he saw with a sinking feeling that his note was still there, and hurriedly unlocking the door, he found the apartment dark and empty. “But what's the matter with him!” he cried out in despair, overcome by fresh worry. “Where is he? He said he'd be home tonight! He's been gone since Saturday morning; how long can a hike last?” Going to the boy's room, which looked like a foreign land in the yellow lamplight, he began rummaging among piles of papers on the desk, fumbling through drawers of old notebooks, even turning inside out the pockets of the dirty jeans on the bed, looking for some sign, some Scout circular, some name of a friend, that might be a clue to the boy's whereabouts. “It's ridiculous to have to be doing this,” he yelled irately, grabbing the phone book and searching for the number of his son's classmate's parents who had called the night before. “Did your boy turn up in the end?” he asked them over the phone. It took them a while to remember that he had ever been lost. “Now it's my turn to be worried,” he said to them. “My son still isn't back from his hike. I thought perhaps you might know the names of some of the boys in the class.”
He jotted down some names and numbers and dialed them one by one, yet no one could tell him anything. Wide-eyed, he looked at Ya'ara, who was sitting in front of the silent television, calmly watching him panic. “But I can't have this!” he wailed, pacing frantically. “I want to know where he is and who he went with! Maybe I should go to his Scout den.” “Why don't you,” said Ya'ara. “I'll wait here.” “No, come with me,” he insisted. “He'll have the shock of his life if he comes home to find a strange woman in the house. Let's go.”
They drove the few blocks to the den, a green cabin that stood at the bottom of some stairs. “Don't bother,” he said to her as she opened her car door, “I'll be right back.” He all but ran down the dark steps, but the cabin was locked and lifeless. In an empty lot nearby, some children were standing around a small fire, and he went to have a word with them; though they too knew nothing about any hike, they were at least able to give him the name and address of one of the Scout leaders. “That's the best I could do,” he told Ya'ara when he rejoined her in the car. “Maybe I'm being hysterical, but I feel I should go there.”
Again he told her to wait for him in the car. “I won't be a minute,” he said, dashing into the building, where he quickly scanned the mailboxes, bounded up the stairs, and rang a doorbell. The Scout leader was not home.
Although she was waiting obediently in the car when he returned, she gave him a searching look. “I know I'm overdoing it,” he apologized, boyishly out of breath, “but I have to clear this up. It doesn't make sense that no one knows anything. Maybe he went off somewhere on his own. Why don't we drop by his school? Of course, it's closed for vacationâbut still...”
Indeed, the school was dark and abandoned. “Wait here,” he said once more to Ya'ara, who clearly hadn't thought of doing anything else. “I'll have a look around and see if there are any notices up. Here, let me turn on the radio for you.” He found her a station that played music, unsuccessfully tried the locked gate, and then worked his way along the fence until he came to a hole. It was small and nearly at ground level, but after a moment's indecision, he knelt and wriggled through it into the schoolyard, ducking volleyball nets and dodging backboards until he came to the main building, where he passed a bare bulletin board in a hallway and tried in vain to force the door of the principal's office. Ya'ara was smoking thoughtfully when he came running back. “I couldn't find a thing,” he shouted through the fence. “The place is dead. But I think there's a janitor on the premises, and if you'll just wait a while, I'll try to find him.” He ran back into the building and down a staircase, passing from wing to wing, through the high school, the junior high school, the elementary school, losing his way in the eerily silent corridors with their inexpungible smells of rotten bananas and old sneakers, and even entering an open classroom, through whose windows the thin moon that shone on the desks stacked with chairs made him feel all over again the stomach-knotted sorrow of youth. Damn him! he thought, weeping inwardly. And I'm to blame, I'm to blame too.
It was nearly ten by the time he returned to the car, pale and anguished. “Let's listen to the ten o'clock news,” he said. “If anything happened, we'll hear about it.” But there was nothing. “Maybe he's home by now,” suggested Ya'ara softly. “Yes,” Molkho agreed, “and here we'll have been going out of our minds with worry! There's a pay phone up the street by the post office; we can call from there. Now you see what children are like! Sometimes they're nothing but trouble.”
But there was no answer when he called. He laid his head on the steering wheel, feeling his fear get the better of him, and then decided to look for the college student. “I know he's studying for an exam,” he told Ya'ara, “but it is his brother.” He drove to the campus and parked by the library. “If you don't mind,” he said gently yet another time, for it was premature to introduce her to the family, “wait for me here. You can stretch your legs on the lawn if you'd like. I want to see if Omri knows anything.” He entered the large reading room with its windows looking out on the lights of the city and its air-conditioned atmosphere, which felt like that of another planet, passing down the rows of students hunched by their lamps until he found the college boy sitting drowsily beside a pile of books and laid a gentle hand on his shoulder. But tall, thin Omri, when told in a whisper what had happened, did not seem at all upset. “He must be delayed somewhere, Dad. What are you so worried about?” “But what hike was he on?” demanded Molkho. “No one knows a thing about it.” “Maybe he went with a different Scout pack,” drawled Omri. “Why don't you wait for him at home?” “No, I'd better call the police,” said Molkho inconsolably. “But it's too early for that,” objected his son with a baffled look. “They won't understand what you want from them.” “You're right,” whispered Molkho, turning the pages of a book “I'm at my wits' end. It's a good thing your mother is dead. If anything's happened to him, I'll want to die too!” The college student shut his eyes, his head full of formulas and numbers. “Would you like me to sleep at your place tonight?” he asked wearily. “No, there's no need,” answered Molkho. “If he's not home by midnight, I'll let you know. I just hope he knows what he's doing.”
He rose, leaned over his son's crew-cut head, patted it lightly, and stepped out into the night, where Ya'ara's silhouette through the dark window of the car looked like a smoke-wreathed ghost. He thought of Gandhi and of millions of Indians and then tried picturing the cosmos flipping over and his son falling out of it. “You smoke too much,” he said, brushing against Ya'ara as he slipped into the car. “You're poisoning yourself for no good reason.” Annoyed, she huddled in her seat without answering. Naturally, Omri knew nothing, Molkho told her. “Since my wife's death, it's been every man for himself in our family. Let's drive to Carmel Center. Maybe he's waiting for a bus.” He cruised slowly past the bus stops in the Center, but the boy wasn't there, and he swung around and started home, driving slowly downhill in low gear. “Maybe he decided to walk. You look on your side and I'll look on mine. If you see a teenager with curly hair just like mine, that's him.”
She quickly opened her door when they pulled up by the house, exhausted and eager to get upstairs. “Just a minute, you wait here,” he ordered, jumping out first and stopping short when he saw that the apartment was still dark. And the note was still on the door, an air of permanency about it. Unthinkingly he grabbed it and hurried back to the car, where her thin, pale arm was resting in the window. “He's not there,” he said. “I can't just sit up waiting for him. He's only sixteen. Suppose something happened? His mother would murder me! We'd better look some more. I know you're tired, but what if he missed the last bus from the Central Station and can't get home? I'm worried,” he said with a lump in his throat. “If he's not there, I'll call the police.”
This time he insisted that she come with him, leading her through an underground passage and up to the silent ramps that stood between the deserted fast-food stands and the parked rows of dusty buses. She followed him in silence, lagging behind a bit, yellow in the dim, fluorescent light. By some pay phones they watched the last buses whoosh up and discharge a few rumpled passengersâred-eyed soldiers with rifles, yeshiva students with bags of books, young vagabonds with backpacks. All vanished quickly, as if into the thick concrete walls, while Molkho went off to dial his apartment and stood listening to the telephone ringing in the darkness.
They returned to the car and drove past the bus station toward the traffic lights at the corner. But, instead of continuing straight, he instinctively turned left toward Rambam Hospital, in front of which, despite the late hour, there was the usual commotion of shiny ambulances slipping in and out the gate. Security guards stood talking to visitors, including entire families with baskets and pots of food. Over the main entrance shone the green light that meant the emergency room was functioning normally. A car pulled up and out of it stepped a young woman in an advanced state of pregnancy, a gay grimace of pain on her face; plucked away like a large, ripe fruit, she slowly advanced toward the lit entrance without waiting for her husband, who, having parked, was now running after her with a small suitcase. For a moment Molkho sat there transfixed, feeling the old fear rise from his gut and bear him off on a sweet wave of longing. He glanced up at the cloudless midnight sky, in which large, splendid stars stood silent sentinel. “As long as we're here anyway,” he almost begged, seeing the disbelief on Ya'ara's face, “why not take a look inside? I know it's irrational, but I'll feel better if I check the emergency room. Won't you come too? There's no point in waiting out here.”
A
LTHOUGH THE APARTMENT
was still dark, there was nothing to do but return to it. At the top of the stairs, however, he saw a new note on the door, which bore a message from the neighbor: Molkho's mother-in-law, it said, had called to announce that the high school boy was with her, having arrived home at ten-thirty with no key. His sleeping bag was by the fence behind the house. “Didn't I tell you he'd forget his key?” exclaimed Molkho triumphantly. “What can you do with such a child!” He let Ya'ara inside, switched on the lights, and went down for the sleeping bag, which was dirty and covered with burrs, hugging its campfire smell to his chest with untold relief and exhaustion. She was out on the terrace when he returned, her face turned to the night as if away from him. Should he embrace her gratefully? But no, that might prove awkwardâand so he laid a limp hand on her shoulder and stared down with her at the ravine, which lay bright and vital in the moonlight. “Well, we had a nice day,” he said. “I'm sorry if Gabi and I spoiled the evening for you.” “But you didn't,” she answered earnestly. “It's not your fault. I could see how worried you were.” “Yes,” he said swallowing hard, the waves of tiredness that were breaking within him threatening to carry him away. “He always makes me feel so guilty. I've never had an easy time with him. He's taken everything the hardest in this family, and he still hasn't accepted the fact of his mother's death. But it's awfully late. Go to bed. It's time you got some rest. Go to bed,” he repeated with the last of his strength, feeling as if an impersonator within him had taken over to keep him from collapsing.
In the morning he was pleased to find her still obediently sound asleep. He phoned his mother-in-law, who listened to him berate her grandson, speaking up only to ask that he bring the boy some fresh clothes. The house seemed to bask in Ya'ara's slumber, as once it had done when his wife was peacefully sleeping off a hard night, and glad to be by himself, he ate breakfast, washed the dishes, went downstairs for the paper, hung his son's sleeping bag out to air on the terrace, made himself a sandwich for work, and put it in his briefcase. Lastly, he packed some fresh clothes for his son in a shopping bag, taking two of everything just to be on the safe side. He was almost out the door when he recalled his wife's insistence that he always say goodbye to her, no matter how fast asleep she was, and so he knocked lightly on Ya'ara's door and opened it. She did not feel him enter. He sat on the edge of her bed and touched her shoulder, surprised to encounter the soft, round warmth of her breast beneath her flannel nightgown, as if it had changed places during the night. “You really were bushed,” he said with a bright smile. Disconcerted by the sight of him, she sat up and apologized for having been up until dawn. “Go back to sleep,” he said, gently restraining her, as if her insomnia were medically indicated. “I'm going to the office. If you want to go out, the key is on the kitchen table by the newspaper. Feel at home. Take what you want from the refrigerator and use the stove too if you wish. I think there's a morning movie on TV. I'll be back by one.”
He drove with the clothes to the old-age home, where he found his mother-in-law alone by the garden pool, her cane beside her and a crumpled straw hat spangled with glass cherries on her head. Looking pale and drawn, she said she had come downstairs to intercept him before he woke the sleeping boy to scold him. “But I wouldn't have done that at all!” he objected. “I'll give him hell later, but now he can sleep all he wants. You should have seen what he did to us,” he added, wondering if she had guessed that he had spent the last few days with a woman. Still, he was sorry not to have warned her about the boy in advance, since they both knew he had a habit of going off without his key. “And without enough money,” declared the old lady. “What do you mean?” asked Molkho indignantly. “That's what he told me,” she insisted. “He said you didn't give him enough.” “But that's ridiculous,” protested Molkho. “I always give him exactly what he needs, because he just loses the rest of it anyway.”