During the intermission the two of them used to join her mother in the lobby, where they would arrange to meet after the performance. Now, elbowing his way through the resplendent crowd past elegant women whose bare, perfumed flesh-scent he inhaled, he craned his neck to get a better look at the old lady. She was still seated in her place, her big, clear eyes wide with wonder. Tiny, dressed in old clothes, her gloved hands in her lap and her white hair streaked with dull gold, she looked like someone out of the pages of a fairy tale, shyly smiling at her surroundings with an aura of faraway lands, at him, too, although she did not appear to recognize him. Returning from the lobby, he found the seat next to him occupied by an aloof young man and made him change places, giving him his own and moving over to sit in his wife’s. Meanwhile, a choir had filled the stage. Surprising him with a beauty that struck a chord deep within him, the music began on a powerful note.
HE STILL HAD NOT FOUND the meaning of his new life, its deeper rationale. During the illness, each day had been a recurrent test whose ultimate goal was Death itself. His task, he had known, was to prevent, or at least to forestall, suffering, while at the same time hastening it along. As evening jelled outside the windows and he finished his last preparations for the night’s vigil, having already given her a shot of morphine, or sometimes even before that, he felt that he had vanquished the day and that this victory had not only a physical but also a spiritual dimension, so that Death, which he sometimes imagined as a distant and soon-to-appear relative dressed in black, regarded him from afar with approval, the hidden observer of his resourcefulness; whereas now, his lunch already eaten, the dishes washed, and nothing left to do around the house, the day still stretched half unfinished before him with no apparent reason for its being there.
He still hadn’t disposed of the Talwin, which was beginning to weigh on him. It was worth some four hundred dollars all in all, and it was a crime to throw the money away, especially as he had broken a fixed-time deposit at the bank for it. He had known even then that he was overpurchasing, but the lady pharmacist had warned him that her stock was low and his wife had made him buy it all. In fact, the drug hadn’t even been prescribed by her regular doctor, who was abroad at the time, but by an elderly stand-in whose promise that it would relieve her pain she had believed implicitly, though in fact it turned out to be contraindicated by another, more crucial drug and had to be discontinued. Who, he wondered, would take it off his hands now? Standing on the shelf across from his bed, the white boxes with their neat blue stripes were the first thing he saw on getting up in the morning and the last thing he saw at night. There were drugstores that hadn’t even heard of it, and though by now he was almost willing to give it away, he knew of no one who needed it. Finally, one night, he called the old doctor who had prescribed it. The doctor, it so happened, was sick himself; when asked by the man’s wife what he wanted, Molkho’s first inclination was to hang up, but before he knew it, he was telling her the whole story. What was the drug called? she inquired. Apparently she had heard of it, because she asked how much he had, and when told twenty boxes, she said, “Bring them over. We’ll see what we can do.” “When?” asked Molkho. “Right now if you’d like,” the woman told him. And so, stuffing the medicine into a plastic bag, he set out for the doctor’s house, a small stone building on top of the Carmel.
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.
MORNINGS 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 attack—hence 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.