He walked them to the street. A flood of light, as if the moon had been turned up to full amplitude, poured down from the cloudless sky. A solemn beauty filled the world. Now that they, dressed in their best, were about to vanish into the wonderful darkness and leave him all by himself, it was hard to part with them. And yet it irked him to be pitied. His unhappiness, he feared, would only alienate them more, and so on the spur of the moment, he told them about the phone call, concluding with a wry smile, “So you see, I’m already an eligible bachelor.” They didn’t smile back, though. The woman was aghast: “But how could she? How awful!” The doctor said nothing, regarding Molkho with curiosity. “And not even a month gone by!” added his wife bitterly. Wrathful and incredulous, she made him regret having mentioned it. Why, you would think he had secretly arranged that telephone call himself! Suddenly all the years of devotion to his wife meant nothing anymore, and he was being stared at as though he were her murderer.
THE NIGHT GREW BRIGHTER and colder, and he slept fitfully, turning from side to side and waking up every two hours as though to boil water, to give an injection, to check the intravenous, to fetch pills or tea, to say something comforting—instead of which he went to the bathroom and then plunged back into his bed, over which loomed the triumphal moon while fresh, enormous stars drifted upward from the horizon. In the middle of the night, he turned the bed to the window to get a better view of the spectacular sky. His two youngest children were not yet home, and he decided to wait up for them. The first to arrive was his daughter; he chatted with her for a while until she went to bed and then talked with the high school boy, who had meanwhile come home too, while the moon sank into the ravine. At last, after the boy had gone to sleep also, Molkho retired himself, waking the next morning to find a bright sun shining in. It was, he decided, the perfect day to wash the car, which had not been cleaned in months, and he scrubbed and waxed it for a long time while talking to his neighbor, who had come down with the same idea. The weather, though chilly, was crisp and clear, and remembering last night’s message that there were people thinking of him, planning for him, Molkho felt suddenly happy. Not, of course, that he needed their help. He could manage quite well by himself, he was sure, but meanwhile they could point him in the right direction, provide him with warmth, restore his faith in the lost power of desire.
The old clothes he had on made it seem a good time for the walk in the ravine he’d been thinking of, and so he headed some hundred paces down the path until he found himself standing on a large, smooth boulder and looking into the branch-entangled gully, over whose trees and bushes played a milky light, as if the moon that had vanished there during the night were still slowly in the process of dissolving. Back in the house, he set about vigorously organizing a wash of dirty linen, waking the children and pulling the sheets out from under them, after which he started cleaning up in the kitchen. When the dishes were done, he tried persuading his son and daughter to pitch in and make lunch with him: “if you don’t like the housekeeper’s cooking,” he told them, “let’s try to do better ourselves.” The children, however, were unresponsive, his daughter getting involved in a long phone conversation, while his son went off to tinker with his bicycle. When the girl hung up at last, Molkho phoned the college student to invite him over too, and though at first he tried begging off, the disappointment in his father’s voice made him promise to come. True to his word, he appeared before noon, and the meal they cooked up was a good one; they sat talking intimately about this and that while looking at the calendar to choose a day for the unveiling. Gradually the children began reminiscing about their mother as they never had done before. Even the youngest, who kept silent at first, spoke up in the end, his wet eyes glistening, and it made them all glad to see him cry a bit. It’s the end of another chapter in our lives, thought Molkho, feeling strong.
But he also felt his lack of sleep now. “At least wash the dishes,” he told them. “I’ve done everything else.” And shutting the bedroom blinds, he lay down with the Friday papers and soon fell into a short but delicious sleep. When he awoke the house was quiet. The dimming, brackish light made him realize how short the days had grown. The kitchen and the table were just as he had left them, with dirty dishes lying all about. The college student was reading in the living room, the soldier was embroidering in her bedroom, and the high school boy was contentedly doing his homework. Irritably Molkho went from room to room. “How could you have left the dishes like that when that was the one thing I asked you to do?” he asked, but they barely glanced up at him, as if he were a ghost. Why, it had all begun on just such an afternoon seven years ago, in early spring, when he and she had gone together to the doctor, who wrote them out an urgent referral for a biopsy. There was no hiding the grim truth from themselves, and he remembered how, on emerging from the office into the soft, balmy air that contrasted sharply with the sudden terror they were gripped by, he had felt less frightened by the illness than by his wife’s fear of it, or perhaps by her anger. He had talked on and on while she walked silently beside him, trying to be logical, to point out all their options, to find comfort in the doctor’s words, each one of which he had parsed like Holy Writ, though all the time, numbed and ashen, she said nothing. “Even if they have to remove a breast,” he said, “even if they do, we’ve caught it in time, it’s still not the end of the world, it’s not as if you were a fashion model. You can get along without it, and I can too, without them both in fact. It will just leave me more love for the rest of you.” That’s what he had told her, calling on reserves of humor and imagination that he never knew existed, even though, absorbed in her own slow plodding, she was only half-listening and not even looking at him. It was only when they were already in the entrance of their old building and he paused by the mailbox to take out the letters and quickly tear open their envelopes that she looked at him angrily in the warm, enveloping dusk and said, breaking her silence, “Just remember, whatever happens I’m dying at home, nowhere else.” He smiled at her, a shiver running down him at what he knew was only her first salvo. Why, he started to protest, she shouldn’t even think about dying! “No, promise me,” she interrupted earnestly, a look of desperation on her face, “promise me you’ll pay whatever it costs, because I’m not dying anywhere else.” Again he tried humoring her, but this time she turned on him with her full, fearful strength, so that he said at once, “1 promise; of course, I do. How could you even imagine...”—a promise he would have to repeat a thousand times right up to the moment of her death. Grimly she climbed the stairs and waited for him to open the door for her. It was almost dark in the house. All three children were still in grade school. Quiet and strangely peaceful, they sat doing their homework together, knowing nothing but already guessing all.