We came home. Kedmi’s mother was gray from the strain and the tension. Father took out his laundry and began to do a wash. Kedmi paced the room again like a beaten dog until he phoned the police and was told to his great joy that the search had been called off. Then he began tidying up around the house and helped me put the children to bed, after which he talked gently to father and even made him some coffee. He couldn’t do enough for us now, he was all sweetness and light…. And then he suddenly disappeared, only to return an hour later in a state of high excitement. He had, it turned out, paid a call on his murderer’s parents — who, though insisting they had no knowledge of their son’s escape, seemed definitely to Kedmi to be waiting for him. And poor Kedmi, unable to bear the thought of all his efforts going down the drain, cornered me and begged me to accompany him there again and to wait while he tried one more time.
That Saturday dragged on and on, it seemed to have no end. Who was it who threw a gray blanket over it afterwards? It was almost midnight when Kedmi finally persuaded father and me to go with him again to that working-class quarter, whose streets were deserted now. He sat us on the same unearthly bench, beneath a yellowish streetlight, and drove off to wait around the corner. Father was amused by it all. He was wide awake and kept joking while he toyed with the murderer’s photograph in his hand, relating old memories, telling me of his plans for the future, to which I listened drowsily, silently, passively, half dead from exhaustion, smelling his sweat as I leaned on him, forgetting immediately what he said like a bottle that hasn’t room for one more drop, letting my glance wander slowly over the tall chimneys of the cement works that glowed with an unnatural, ochroid smoke, over the small, empty street, over the entrance to one of its houses, where I saw Kedmi’s murderer detach himself from a wall as though it were the wall itself that had moved: a short, wiry young man, gliding along the housefronts with slow, catlike strides, keeping away from the light. I rose at once. Head down, hands in his pockets, he didn’t even look up at me. I stood peering into his unshaven face, into his beady eyes, while father jumped up to join me. “Just a minute,” I said. “I’m Mr. Kedmi’s wife. He’s around the corner, and he wants to talk to you. That’s all he wants. It’s for your own good. There are no policemen with him.”
He froze where he was and studied me and father. He didn’t seem frightened. “I have nothing to say to him,” he said drily, in a cold voice. “All he ever wants to do is talk. But he doesn’t believe what I say. Let him find a real criminal to play with. I’ve had it with him.”
He turned to go with hesitant steps, no longer knowing where to. And then, like a teacher lightly grasping a pupil, father laid a hand on his shoulder and began to talk to him, gesturing broadly with his other hand while the listening man kept walking with his eyes on the ground. They disappeared into the next street and I ran to get Kedmi, who had dozed off again at the wheel. “Kedmi,” I said, waking him, “father is talking to him right now.” He jumped groggily out of the car and started to run, shouting in the empty street, but the murderer took off again as soon as he saw him, scaling the fence of the cement works and vanishing among its tall chimneys. Father reached for a cigarette and lit it coolly, wide awake and collected. “He promised to come to you after the seder,” he told Kedmi, who was in total despair. “He swore he’d turn himself in then. He gave me his word and I believe him. So can you.” And Kedmi, perhaps for the first time in all the years I’d known him, stood speechless as a statue, unable to get out a single word.
Now he’s fallen asleep, a newspaper over his face, the child looking down on him among the pillows and blankets. He has a funny way of standing, the child, almost hunched, toes dug in, his eyes searching for the moon behind the curtain flapping in the breeze. A tall, skinny little boy who still hasn’t spoken to me, who regards me with a suspicious look. I try out my broken English on him again while he cocks his head in wonder.
“That’s enough of your Shakespearian diction,” grunts Kedmi in his sleep. “Would you kindly put Moses to bed now? He’s taking a walk on my head.”
I pick him up, carry him to the freshly made but still wet crib, lay him down in it, and cover him up, his sweetness rubbing off on my fingers. And again I try talking to him. Rakefet rolls over on her back, entering a new, more relaxed stage of sleep. Gaddi stirs in bed too, still not sleeping deeply. The room is dark except for the small night light. I’m already on my way out the door when the child stands up again, gripping the crib bars tightly, eyeing me. What does he want? Such a strange, quiet, inward creature. I try laying him down again but he clings defiantly to the bars, grimacing with determination. Where can she be? Has she really gone and left him with us? Can it be, are such aberrations possible too? A portrait of father as a small child.
All at once something makes me recoil, as if father himself had just entered the room from the hallway and left it again via the window. I’m shaking all over, my heart skips a beat and then pounds even faster. How could we have let him go back there? What possessed him to do it? Why did I forget that Saturday, what was I trying to repress? Perhaps meeting that escaped prisoner had some meaning for me… only how did we fail to sense it, to know it, to prevent it? What made us leave him like that, looking like he did that Saturday when he stepped out of the taxi, so old, his hair sheared beneath his hat, his valise full of dirty underwear. We had it in for him. Asi despised him. Tsvi wanted vengeance. And I had no opinion. “And you — what do you think?” And I–I didn’t answer. “The one person who was genuinely happy to see me was Dina. The rest of you have been hostile, even Gaddi.” And still I passively said nothing — I, who identify vicariously with everyone, I, who always will. Indiscriminately I go from one of them to another: Kedmi, Gaddi, mother, even the dog, even that murderer, even Connie the minute she walked in the door. Yes, I identify with whoever comes close to me, I adopt them without thinking, without judging. And so drive them away from me too. And yet did I really drive him away then with my silence… with my refusal to say the one thing he wanted to hear… back into the horror of that final night?