“No. But we’ll meet two weeks from now at the usual time.”
“But who told you to take a vacation… I mean…’’
“Next week is the Passover holiday.”
“You don’t work on Passover? Don’t tell me you’re religious…”
“No. I’m just taking a vacation.”
“But you’ll be in Tel Aviv?’’
“I don’t know yet.”
“Can’t you fit me in somewhere? Even at a different hour… on a different day… it doesn’t matter…”
“I’m afraid it won’t be possible.”
“I mean any time that you want… any day… I’ll manage to make it…”
“We’ll meet again in two weeks.”
“I see. Just a minute, I wanted to pay you…”
“There’s no hurry about it. Next time.”
“But I have the money with me now. I owe you…”
“Next time. It can wait.”
“Excuse me… just one more thing…”
“Yes?”
“If I want to talk to you next week, just to say a few words, can I phone?”
“I don’t think the telephone would be very convenient. Let’s wait till we meet again. It won’t be long.”
“I just… I don’t know, but… I feel that something is going to happen next week. Maybe I’ll want to tell you about it… doesn’t it surprise you that I totally forgot that that teacher had died?…’’
“We’ll talk about that too, of course.”
“In a way I feel I’ve become closer to you today… I like you more. I didn’t want to tell you, but at first you were very off-putting. I mean physically… your being so short and heavy… and those muttonchop sideburns of yours… why do you let them grow? The style is much shorter these days…”
“We can talk about that next time too. Right now I suggest that…’’
“Yes. I understand. Suddenly I see you in a new light. You really do want to lead me somewhere… there’s a method to it all… a direction… you aren’t so passive…”
“Yes. Today you started to work in earnest. But seriously…”
“You felt it too?”
“Yes. But now isn’t the time for this. We’ll talk about it next time.”
“I’m sorry we can’t continue now. I just wanted to ask you…”
“Perhaps…”
“… just one more thing that’s been bothering me. Is insanity genetic? Will I go crazy like her? What do you know about that?”
“We’ll talk about it all next time. Here, don’t forget your scarf.’’
“I get it… I wanted to leave you something in order to have a reason to come back… all right then, I’ll be on my way. Just one last question: do you really believe that every single detail has significance… that there is no such thing as random, meaningless events… just the chaotic surge of life…?”
“No, Tsvi. Really. Not now.”
“Just one sentence from you. Please.”
“In a sense, there’s always a matrix to which the accidents attach themselves…. But I promise you that we’ll talk about it next time. We still have a long way to go.”
“I can’t wait. Today was fascinating. What should we start with next time? What would you like me to think about? You must be planning it already… no doubt that dead teacher. Although maybe we should go back to the beginning of the dream… to that thicket of bushes…. and the watering hose. You know, you’re right. One must never give up…’’
“We can start with whatever you’d like. Let’s leave it open. Whatever is on your mind. Even that dog…”
“The dog?”
“Why not? He’s part of the story too. But really now, goodbye. If you don’t mind leaving this way…”
“Someone is behind the door there… so I’m not the last, after all…”
“Goodbye, Tsvi. Have a good holiday…”
“Refa’el, is that you? What are you doing here? I told you to wait for me downstairs.”
“Doctor?”
“Excuse me, please.”
“Refa’el, not now.”
“I wanted to know if you could take me on too. Did you ask him, Tsvi?”
“Not now, Refa’el… not now… you have to get out of here…”
“Please, this really is not the time for it. But you can get in touch with me next month. Tsvi will give you my phone number.”
“Thank you so much… it’s been my pleasure… happy Passover… I’ll wait for you below… begging your pardon…”
“You see, I told you. But here I am clinging to you the same way… it really isn’t like me. I’m so sorry… I’ll go now. How did he put it last night? The boundaries are gone… but I’d really better go. Thank you. Thank you so much. And I’ll be seeing you soon…”
SATURDAY?
This is the first time, only lately
Time has not behaved sedately.
Saturday? Saturday? Suddenly, halfway through the story, I’m stuck and can’t go on. What happened on Saturday three years ago? I hadn’t even remembered that there was such a day. It vanished without a trace, without even leaving behind its own phantom pain. Saturday? Somehow I lost it — I, who tended each one of those days like a priestess at the altar; who stubbornly salvaged them, forever frozen in clarity, from the passage of time; who zealously assembled and preserved their story person by person and day by day down to its last detail, color, smell, fragment of conversation, article of clothing, shift of mood and of weather — those last, horrible days of his beamed on a screen in their impossible, in their inevitable unfolding to the distant soundtrack of a faint yet persistent score; who, though none of you ever noticed, have gone on to this day collecting snatches of memories like the last feathers from a tom quilt: from you, Kedmi, from mother, from Tsvi, from Asi, from Dina… even poking up the last embers in Gaddi and asking whoever was in the hospital that last dreadful night over and over about it (yes, if only I could find him I would ask the dog too, I would beg him to talk, to join me in my exact, relentless search for those days in their impossible, in their inevitable unfolding from that first moment in the airport when he stepped out to greet us on the rainy, floodlit pavement to the last one on that final night when we arrived too late at the hospital gate to find him already taken away and the whimpering dog pawing madly at the ground… yes, for me that was the end); who have not forgotten — who will never forget — who will remember for all of you; who was the only one to love him unconditionally; who was neither for him nor against him but simply quietly there with whatever warmth and assistance I could give. You can do what you want, Kedmi; all of you can; I’ll always be with you. And instead of thinking… yes, instead of thinking, Kedmi, I’ll remember. I’ll leave the thinking to you, to Asi, to all of you, but you leave the remembering to me, because there is no one else to do it. Only what happened to that Saturday? My God, can I have lost a whole day without having been aware of it, can my stubborn, insatiable memory have run right over it on its way to the accident? But how? Like a fool I sat here this morning and told her about each day, all in its slow, orderly sequence, in its impossible, its inevitable unfolding, as though listening to that faint score bring back each minute of it, as if all the stubborn remembering of the past years had been solely for this moment and I had known all along that one day some stranger would walk in out of the blue and demand it all back from me: someone with a hunger for the tiniest facts and the need to know everything, so that, if at first I wasn’t sure what to tell her and what not to, not only could I keep back nothing once I began to talk, I was in an absolute frenzy to cough it all up. Things came back to me that I had never dreamed I still remembered. At last there was someone to milk me dry, to turn me over like a bottle and empty me of every word, sound and movement, to plumb our thoughts and motives, to keep track of even the most minor characters in my account, refusing to part from them, clinging to them for dear life. For a while I was actually alarmed by her passion to know. A small woman in a bonnet with a big feather, holding a long pencil and a notebook on her knee, chain-smoking, hanging on every word, jotting down each new expression, nodding incessantly at a fever pitch, in a primitive Hebrew, while I gave it back to her day by day: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday… following him from place to place and from person to person… from Haifa to Jerusalem and back again, from there to Tel Aviv… morning, afternoon and night… everything I knew, whatever I had garnered from him, from you all… wherever I had been myself and wherever my imagination had gone for me… and yet as soon as I reached Saturday I drew a blank, I blacked out completely, the music stopped, and I stood there saying idiotically, “Saturday? Saturday? I don’t remember there being a Saturday at all.” My mind wouldn’t work. “Are you sure that there was one?” I kept asking. “Maybe that was the first day of Passover, it sometimes happens that way. We’ll have to look it up in an old calendar.” But she just looked at me with a momentary smile of bewilderment before blushing offendedly, as though I were trying to hide something from her. Where were we on that Saturday? What happened on it? Could I really have forgotten — I, who tended each one of those days like a priestess at the altar, who salvaged them, forever frozen in stubborn clarity, from the passage of time? I almost called you at the office, Kedmi, or else Tsvi. But you, what do you still remember? Why, even what you think you remember is a shadow of the memory itself.