Authors: A. B. Yehoshua
The doctor's wife met him at the door, a small, sprightly woman in a smock who led him down a hallway lined with books and bric-a-brac. Charmed by the old-world ambience, his wife, Molkho remembered, had believed in the man from the start. Now he lay with a bad cold on a leather couch in his office covered by a plaid woolen blanket and surrounded by a disorderly pile of papers, folders, instruments, books, and medicines. Indeed, there were drugs everywhere, glutting the shelves and filling the spaces between and above the books. Pointing at Molkho, who suddenly regretted coming, the wife said something in German to her husband. “I hope I'm not intruding,” Molkho apologized, observing the old man's pale face and bloodshot eyes as he stepped into the overheated room whose blinds were lowered halfway. The doctor simply nodded. “When did it happen?” he asked, questioning Molkho about the last stages of the illness, listening morosely to his answers and nodding again, this time with annoyance, as if, despite the inevitability of it all, he felt let down by the outcome.
All at once he asked Molkho about his own health. Throwing off his blanket and sticking his thin, sinewy feet into a pair of slippers, he began, cold, pajamas, and all, to give the visitor a checkup, taking his blood pressure and peering into his eyes with a little flashlight, his dry, hot hands giving Molkho such a fright that he felt his heart skip a beat; quickly, however, the old man lost patience, spoke to his wife again in German, picked up the boxes of Talwin, and held them up to the light. They had stopped using the drug, Molkho stammered, because it was contraindicated by something else whose name he felt he was mispronouncing, though the doctor said nothing to correct him but merely ran a hand over the boxes. At last he said crossly, “There was no contraindication,” and turned again to his wife. “I hope it's still in use. Lots of drugstores have never heard of it,” said Molkho, shifting the blame back to the doctor. “Of course it is,” replied the old man, his feathers ruffled now. “It's the best painkiller there is.” “And can a normal person take it too?” asked Molkho. “What do you call normal?” asked the doctor. “Someone healthy,” Molkho replied. “Why should someone healthy need medicine?” smirked the doctor. “I mean someone healthy who's in pain,” explained Molkho. “Of course,” said the doctor, consulting his wife again in German and mentioning several names, apparently of patients who might need the Talwin. “Well, all right,” he said to Molkho, as if doing him a special favor. “You may as well leave it all here.” By now, though, Molkho was having second thoughts: suppose the medicine disappeared among the many piles on the shelves and he never got a cent for it? Perhaps the old man and his wife were illegally trafficking in pharmaceuticals. “Are you sure you can find a buyer?” he asked. “I might” shrugged the doctor. “In that case,” said Molkho, “why don't I leave you my address and you can give it to whoever is interested.” Getting only hurt silence for an answer, he wrote down his address, took the Talwin, and left. Back home, having returned it to its place, he wondered if he had done the right thing.
M
ORNINGS HE ROSE EARLY
. By six he was already out of bed and in the bathroom, where he sat drowsily on the toilet for a long time, tearing off the day's page from the memo pad and making lists of shopping, of things to do around the house, and of people to be phoned. Then he checked his stool for blood. Sometimes he even talked to it. “What's with you,” he might ask it, or else, “What do you want from me?” When it was finally flushed down the drain, he washed, shaved, and studied himself in the mirror, a fifty-one-year-old man with gray but still thick curly hair and dark, deeply set eyes, at loose ends in a freedom whose nature was not yet clear to him. Sometimes, shutting those eyes, he would think of her. “Where are you?” he asked wonderingly, picturing her for a moment in the ravine by the house, whose stone path he had followed that night not long ago until forced to turn back by the slippery mud. Then he would turn on the heater, put a kettle up to boil, think of what to have for breakfast, and wake up the high school boy, something that was easier said than done, especially on days when school started early, so that he had to raise the blinds, turn on the radio, and wait for these measures to take effect while glancing at his son's school things. Next there was breakfast to prepare and sandwiches for work and school, after which Molkho made the beds and gathered the scattered sections of the newspaper. At times, recalling the rules laid down by his wife, he followed his son around the house to make sure he combed his hair and brushed his teeth. “Do
it for your mother,” he would beg the boy, who always seemed most estranged from him in the morning. Then he washed the dishes, shut the windows and blinds, picked out a tie that he was never sure matched his jacket, and left for the office. There, striving to snap him out of his slump and up his output, which had dropped sharply in the last year, his superiors handed him files and summoned him to conferences about the budgets of several small northern municipalities that were on the verge of financial collapse. At ten he went to the cafeteria for coffee, on the lookout for the legal adviser, whom he occasionally ran into. Sometimes they chatted a bit or exchanged smiles on the stairs. He knew she was waiting for a sign from him; yet, afraid to do anything impulsive that he might later regret, he preferred to bide his time. Perhaps, he thought, the best time would be in early spring, with the fifth or sixth concert in the series, which he had already marked down on his calendar. He would ask her to come with him: it would be a good way to begin, because he was sure she liked classical music. Meanwhile, he'd have a chance to look her over and decide if he liked her tailored wardrobe, whose different outfits he already was familiar with. She can wait a bit, he thought; if she hasn't found a man in the three years her husband has been dead, another month or two won't hurt her. It wasn't as if she had been waiting just for him. True, he had informed the office of his wife's illness several years ago, at which time she might have been consulted about his request for a flexible schedule that would allow him more time at home, but she could scarcely have had her sights on him then, especially as the illness was not yet clearly fatal and his devotion to his wife was public knowledge. Even now, what did she see in him? He thought of himself as a gnarled old tree, so unlike this vivacious woman with her clipped hair and small, brown oriental eyes, whose look was that of an intelligent pointer or, better yet, of a sagacious squirrel. Could she be harboring a fatal illness herself that she wished him to nurse for her? Her husband, a travel or insurance agent, had died of a sudden heart attackâhence her buoyancy, Death having gone easy on her, making no demands and teaching no hard lessons. That much he knew about her, even if he rarely saw her, just as he knew her perfume, which had a special, subtle fragrance. His wife's illness had sharpened his sense of smell too.
He would wait. He had time. Setting the pace, he thought pleasurably, was a male prerogative. Meanwhile, he went for long walks about town, and one day he took off from work, packed a suitcase with his wife's clothes, and drove to Jerusalem, where he accompanied his mother to the cemetery on the tenth anniversary of his father's death. Amid the old, crumbling tombstones of the ancient graveyard he stood with her and the other members of the family, aristocratic old Sephardim who shook his hand gently and commiserated with him on the loss of his wife. He had not been in Jerusalem for half a year, and the city he grew up in now seemed to him excessively wintry and religious. He brought his mother home, attended to some business in town, and returned to eat the large lunch she had cooked for him, which consisted of his favorite greasy foods. Then, cozily sleepy, sitting with his shoes
off
on the old couch in the heart of the city's dilapidated downtown, he listened to her talk on and on. What, she kept asking him, did he think? “Think about what?” he parried innocently. “About what?” she echoed, sitting there large and multicolored like a big cockatoo and peering at him intently as if for the first time. “About your future.” “I really haven't thought about it yet,” he answered lamely, stretched out comfortably on the couch. “I feel too drained.” Ever since his wife had taken ill, his mother's presence in their life had become far less intrusive; the illness frightened her, so that her visits with them grew more subdued and were marked by a reluctance to interfere. “Don't be in any hurry,” she cautioned him now. “Have a good look around. Just remember, though, that you're not a young man anymore. Don't be caught napping.” The house was ill heated and cold. Through the glass door of the terrace he watched the sun shoot apocalyptically out of a black tunnel of clouds. His mother refused to drop the subject. “Maybe you should think of coming back to live in Jerusalem. You have plenty of friends here who can help you find the right woman, the kind that you're used to. Maybe even someone from your old high school class. There must be some divorcées and widows among them.” He opened his eyes wide, staring fondly at this woman who never failed to surprise him, silently shoveling peanuts into his mouth from a bowl and chewing them vigorously. The thought of marrying someone from his graduating class of thirty-five years ago struck him as being so wildly original that for a moment he pictured the classroom, with its four rows of seats, many occupied by young girls in black dresses. “How am I supposed to find them?” he asked in a feeble attempt at a joke. “If you came back here, you'd find all your old friends. You're the only one who ever left. Ask for a transfer.” “I can't,” he whispered exhaustedly. “I can't leave her.” “Leave whom?” his mother demanded. “Her mother,” he said. “It wouldn't be fair.”
He went to nap in his old bedroom, yet even wrapped in a large woolen blanket he was unable to keep himself warm. The roar of the city, which was the sound of his childhood, and the cold beneath the high ceiling kept him awake, his thoughts wandering from his children to the legal adviser, and then to his mother-in-law. Lately, the old woman had been hard to reach on the phone; it was as if she no longer needed him, as if she, too, had been set free by Death. And then, too, she was busy with her little friend from Russia who had arrived in Israel with her daughter, having taken them under her wing and made herself not only their counselor but their handyman; just the other day, for example, while stuck in a traffic jam, he had seen her dart out of a hardware store with a long metal pipe in one hand.
At last he fell into a troubled sleep, hearing his mother opening the suitcase he had brought and making bundles of his wife's clothing for some woman's charity, while he dreamt he was standing in the yard of his old high school among a pack of Boy Scouts, though his tie was not Scout blue or green but rather bright red, as were the ties of the smaller boys lined up on either side of him. He lay in his old bed listening to the city rhythmically pound and churn, as if he were inside the drum of a big washing machine that kept filling and draining, spinning, stopping, and filling again. From time to time, his mother tiptoed in to see if he was awake and tiptoed out again, annoyed at him for sleeping away his visit with her. Shivering with cold, he watched her through slit eyes until she gave up and returned to her pots in the kitchen, bursting with maternal compassion and impatience to talk with him.
Finally, she came and woke him, unable to keep her latest idea to herself any longer: he should take off his wedding ring; that way, at least, no one would get the wrong idea. “What difference does it make?” he asked, still flat on his back, enjoying her concern for him. “I'll be dead soon myself.” He could feel her protest ripple through her. “How can you say such a thing! You have children!” “They don't need me any more,” he answered, getting up to eat the early supper that was lavishly laid out for him on the dining room table. His wife's clothes were already sorted, folded, and neatly tied with string. A purplish green light glinted off the plates and silverware. He went over to the window to gaze at the sky, which had grown dark and frothy, as though it were being brought to a boil. “Just look at that sky,” he told his mother, who suggested that he spend the night with her and return to Haifa in the morning. Molkho, however, declined. As soon as supper was over, he began gathering his things, hoping to beat the storm, his mood so improved that when she mentioned the wedding ring again, he answered, “Why not?” and tried pulling it off his finger. He did not succeed, however, for the finger had grown thicker, and his mother had to bring a bar of soap and slowly, painfully, work it off. With a glance at its grimy inner curve he stuck it in his wallet. “We'll see,” he said, bending to kiss her good-bye.
A strong wind was blowing as he drove out of Jerusalem in a ghostly yellow light, its sudden gusts making the car swerve. He slowed down by the line of hitchhikers waiting at the city's edge and stopped by a cluster of soldiers, some of them still wet with rain they had brought with them from elsewhere. On the spur of the moment he made up his mind to take only women. The soldiers crowded around him like bees on a honeycomb, but slowly, determinedly, he winnowed out four north-bound girls, who all removed their army berets as soon as they got in the car, filling it with the scent of their hair. Gingerly he fastened the seat belt of the passenger beside him and then smiled in the rearview mirror to the three girls in the back. All this young femaleness will do me good, he thought, carefully taking the sharp curves of the road that ran westward toward the setting sun, which glowed like a hot coal through a tattered curtain of sky and fog. Within minutes, however, it was gone from sight and was followed by a furious cloudburst, through which the car chuted downhill between two vast sheets of rain. He slowed down, turning on the windshield wipers, the heater, and the radio all at once, hunched tensely over the wheel in the torrential downpour while trying to make out, above the music and the sound of the motor, the soft, childish chatter in the rear. From time to time, he scanned the mirror for the pretty eyes and smooth, youthful faces behind him, waiting for some expression of feminine interest, for some sign; but the rain kept up, flooding the sides of the road, and he had to concentrate on the fogged-up windshield, turning the defroster on and off and opening the window a crack to let in cold air. It grew dark out. Soon the headlights of the oncoming cars were all he could see; the girls behind him fell silent, and the music on the radio faded away into a fuzzy drone, leaving him on edge with a coalescing blob of passengers, their faces obscured in the mirror by the encroaching darkness. With his fingers he felt the white circle left on his skin by the missing ring. It was a long, nerve-racking drive; the traffic lights took forever to change, the tense motor threatened to overheat, and the silence deepened with the night. Once on the coastal highway, he thought of stopping at a diner, but the car plunged on of its own accord and the head of the soldier next to him fell back in deep slumber. He felt as if he were transporting a single, giant woman, a sleeping, shallowly breathing, tetracephalous female pudding whose separate heads kept banging against the windows, opening and shutting pairs of eyes until Haifa, when suddenly it awoke and squirted off in four thin tentacles that quickly vanished beneath the streetlights into the wet night.