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.
He arrived home at eight o’clock, retrieved from the rear seat the crushed morning paper, which was still warm from female flesh, and dashed through the rain to his house. As soon as he entered he noticed that the living room door was closed. His youngest son came accusingly out of his room. “Someone’s here to buy medicine,” he said. “He’s been waiting for an hour and wouldn’t go away. He even threw up in the bathroom.” Molkho opened the door to the living room. The man was still in his wet coat, a tall, thin fellow who jumped to his feet as if seeing a ghost. The symptoms of his condition were obvious: the puffy face, the unnatural redness, the thin, limp hair like the bristles of an old brush, the eyes bulging with the effort of his struggle. Why, it’s like a family reunion, thought Molkho, who hadn’t realized until now how he had missed all these things. But the man was impatient, self-involved in his illness; sent by the old doctor, he wanted to pay for the medicine and go, so that Molkho quickly took the boxes from their shelf, showed him they hadn’t been opened, and told him the price. “Exactly half what they cost in the drugstore,” he said, removing his coat while describing the rain to the visitor, who, however, had not the slightest interest in either the weather or Molkho’s adventures. I wonder what’s been carved out of him beneath that coat and what’s rotted away by itself, wondered Molkho, smelling vomit as he approached him, trying to befriend him a bit, to tell him about the Talwin. But the stranger did not need to have the drug explained, for he had been taking it for years, and hurriedly counting the boxes, he did a mental sum and wrote out a check. And still Molkho clung to him. The man, something told him, was at the climax of his drama. Did he have a wife? Children? Yet already he was on his way, the blue-and-white boxes stuffed into the pockets of his coat. “It’s raining out,” Molkho warned, making one last effort to detain him. “Don’t you have an umbrella?” But he was already gone.
In the bathroom Molkho thought he could still smell the man’s puke. He took a look at the day’s mail and, feeling suddenly fatigued, lay down in bed, where he could not find a comfortable position. All at once he felt sorry he had sold the medicine. He had parted with it too cheaply; he should have asked for more. And besides, he was used to seeing the colored boxes before going to sleep; he should at least have left himself one. He glanced at the check to see who had written it, but it was the old-fashioned kind, without a name at the top, and he couldn’t make out the signature. Getting up, he poured himself a nip of brandy and then, though he was exhausted, paced restlessly around the house, feeling the four girl soldiers’ sleep instead, which had rubbed off slimily on him. He had a moment of panic and even after dozing off kept waking up again, as in the days when his wife was ill. It was after midnight when he suddenly felt the presence of a stranger in the house. It was a woman. A light was on, and in it he saw a girl soldier stepping out of the kitchen—but it was only his daughter, whose officers’ course had just ended. He called her name. She looked just like her mother. He held her hand.
AND THEN THE INVITATION CAME. The legal adviser was tired of waiting. There had indeed been prior indications, but he had read them wrong, had not been at all sure she had anything to do with them or with the sudden flurry of activity in the office that seemed meant to wake him from his trance. Suddenly he had been bombarded with documents and memos about the state comptroller’s report on the finances of townships in the north and his department head’s insistence that these be more closely audited, several cases of corruption having already been uncovered. Long meetings were held, and of all times, on Fridays, when all he could think of was planning a nice Sabbath meal. During one such conference a note was slipped into his hand. “I’m having a few people over tonight,” it said. “If you feel up to it, you’re invited. It’s not RSVP.” Underneath was written her address. Turning around, he spied her behind him, studying him quietly with her oriental eyes. Blushing, he nodded his agreement, pleased to feel everyone looking at him understandingly.