“Well?” asked Molkho from the edge of his chair as they silently put the letter down. “Well,” said his counselor. “I agree that all this may have been a bit premature for you. We had no idea that you were like this.” “Like what?” asked Molkho in a whisper. “Why, so inhibited,” said his counselor. “So depressed over your wife’s death. You haven’t begun to confront your guilt for having killed her.” There were steps outside in the hallway. Molkho looked up in puzzlement. Was Uri trying to keep his hopes alive? “Yes,” he said. “Yes, it is a bit premature. I’m on the slow side, and you yourselves do everything so quickly, so almost ... anarchistically. You really are anarchists,” he complained. Uri smiled, content with the description. “I don’t know myself very well,” confessed Molkho, preferring to look out the window rather than meet their eyes. “And suppose I should want to have more children,” he continued, pleased and alarmed by the unexpected thought. “It’s true my wife warned me not to, but she couldn’t have thought that far ahead or known what would be best for me.”
They sat in weary silence. A light breeze blew the food smells of the elevator through the open window. In the afternoon light, the white rocks on the hillside were turning copper. He glanced involuntarily at Ya’ara’s smooth, bare feet, sorry he hadn’t ever kissed them. She and Uri seemed to be growing steadily more distant, as if regretting the involvement and wishing he would go away.
He walked back to his car like a sleepwalker, down streets whose Sabbath silence only made him feel worse. Once behind the wheel, he drove to the Old City, where he strolled through the narrow lanes of the souk until twilight, thinking it was a good thing Jerusalem had Arabs to give it some life on Saturdays. Passing the house where his father was born, he felt weak and wished he were dead. The stars were already out when, hot and tired, he reached his mother’s apartment, carrying bags of fruit from the market, grapes and fresh figs and fragrant apples and pomegranates, just like his father used to do. “The weather here is unbearable,” he told her. “But look how cool the evenings are,” she soothed him. “Summer is over. It’s already autumn now.”
“No, it isn’t,” cried Molkho in despair, expertly dividing the fruit between them. “They may call it that, but it isn’t any such thing.”
Part V
AUTUMN
AND INDEED it wasn’t autumn, just a mellower summer, with days so wonderfully clear that Molkho felt he was looking at the world with new eyes. There were mornings when, driving to work down the Carmel, he could see clear to the white cliffs of the Lebanese border twenty miles away, the shoreline along the soft curve of Haifa Bay traced in precise detail. How little we’re aware of what the smogs and mists hide from us, he mused. Why, if one more veil were to fall away, I might see all the way to Turkey! In the evenings the air glimmered like a golden wine, which was perhaps the reason for his hearty appetite, which had caused him to put on a few pounds again. And yet, as guilty as the orgies of food on his terrace made him feel, he kept returning to the refrigerator for more.
He had begun Volume II of Anna Karenina, vaguely recalling his counselor’s warning that it ended with Anna’s suicide, though forgetting the reason why. They were telling the truth, he thought. I was really in love with her my whole junior year. Why couldn’t I at least have allowed myself a kiss or two? I’m sure her body is still young. Maybe some people never grow old, because the cells of their bodies keep changing. There were spots, he remembered, where even his wife had remained lusciously youthful to the end—around her hips, for instance, and in the curves of her thighs and insteps. They never gave me a chance, he thought dejectedly. Or had they simply used him to shore up their childless love in their little apartment in fertile Jerusalem?
He felt thankful that his own children had been brought into the world easily and long ago, and that they were no longer small. The problem was that he was seeing less and less of them. Though his daughter was back from Europe, she had enrolled in the psychology department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and rarely came home, even on weekends, while the college student now spent his free time with his older girlfriend. Molkho had once seen her at the movies, a pinched-looking woman with ferrety eyes that aroused his instinctive hostility. “But what does she want from you?” he angrily asked his son, who seemed unable or disinclined to tell him and didn’t seem to think it mattered. “She doesn’t want anything,” he answered uncomprehendingly. “We’re just good friends who like to get together.” Even the secretly consulted computer of the Ministry of the Interior could supply Molkho with no more than the woman’s date of birth, her marital status (she had been divorced ten years ago), and an address that proved incorrect.
One Saturday he emotionally discussed the matter with his daughter, who didn’t seem troubled at all. Omri, she told her father straightforwardly, was probably just looking for a mother figure. “A mother figure?” Molkho was dumbstruck. “What is that supposed to mean?” In grim silence he listened to her explanation, suddenly persuaded that the woman in fact resembled his dead wife. “But what an awful thing to happen!” he exclaimed. “The boy needs to see a psychiatrist! Please talk to him! Just the thought of that woman being in this house is too much for me!” “But why, Dad?” smiled Enat. “It’s only a superficial relationship.” “All right,” he said resentfully, trying to smile back. “If you say so.”
The child he felt sorriest for was the high school boy, who, after long, soul-searching discussions with his principal and teachers, had been left back a grade. “It’s for his own good,” explained the principal after patiently listening to Molkho’s fears. “It’s really not such a tragedy.” Molkho nodded, thinking how he too might have liked to be left back, though in a different way.
THE SAVAGE SUMMER was still mellowing when the government overcame months of indecision to announce a bold new economic program that called for drastic wage cuts, shortly after which daylight saving time ended and the early darkness brought home the changing seasons. The approaching autumn made Molkho nostalgically recall the anxious days of a year ago. Premature though it was, he took out the calendar, sat staring at it for a long while, and finally circled a date for visiting the cemetery that fell several days before the anniversary of his wife’s death. After all, he told himself, if I’m free to remarry, I’m free to move a date around. “Make sure you have no commitments or exams then,” he warned his children. “Later it will be too late to change, because I intend to invite that nice rabbi again.”
That Friday night, after the usual frozen fish served up with the inevitability of Fate, he told his mother-in-law. “What, you’ve already decided?” she asked, removing her glasses and bending over to pinpoint the day on the calendar, taken aback by his haste, despite her own penchant for orderliness. Molkho glanced mildly at the old woman, of whom there seemed to be less and less, as if her daughter’s death had sprung a leak through which she herself was gradually escaping. Somehow she seemed to him like a burden he had to carry or like a barrier standing in his way. If only she had remarried and had had more children when she first came to this country, he thought, I wouldn’t be saddled with her now. Had she ever had a lover after her husband’s death? He found it hard to meet her eyes; lately, he felt, she was constantly appraising him, as if taking his measure for something. Before her mother entered the old-age home, his wife had sometimes sent him to her apartment to tighten a screw, change a light bulb, or drive a new nail in the wall, all of which he took his time doing, as if to put her patience to the test; after all, she had already bought the materials at his request and possessed her own little hammer, screwdriver, and box of nails and screws, so that she could easily have done the repair herself instead of waiting for him. Yet the fact was that he liked using her tools, even though he sometimes had to go back for a drill or wrench of his own, which led to yet further delays. “She has more patience than God,” he would say with a smile to his wife, who never suspected him of deliberately procrastinating. Now, though the home had a janitor for such things, she sometimes still looked at Molkho as though sizing him up for some job.