NOT THAT MONEY WAS A PROBLEM. True, the illness had set him back a large sum, but there were benefits too, such as life insurance policies, some savings accounts that had accrued in his wife’s name, and various pension plans that were now explained to him. One day he sat with two accountants from the school system who tallied up in hushed tones, flushed with the drama of it, the funds released by her death, as though it were a secret investment that had yielded a handsome dividend or some rare achievement on her part that deserved a special prize. Slowly he went over their figures; carefully he double-checked them; obsessively, exhaustively, he reviewed them a third time, jotting down sums, rereading clauses, checking tables, photographing documents to take home. It was, after all, his profession; he was an auditor himself. For a while, transferring the money to his name, consulting how best to invest it, and giving the bank instructions what to do with it were all he thought about. “It’s for the children,” he told himself. “They’ve been through so much, and I’m only thinking of their future.”
There was also a remittance of German marks, not a particularly large sum, to be sure, but one that had arrived in her name every month. Both she and her mother received this money as reparations for the property abandoned by them when they left Germany before World War II, after her father’s suicide; and indeed, when Molkho’s mother-in-law came to dinner that Friday evening with a gift of strudel for the children, she asked if he had informed the German embassy that the payments should be stopped. “I haven’t gotten around to it yet,” he replied. “I’m swamped with things to do; I never imagined there was so much to take care of after a person’s death. If it was me who had died, she would never have managed to cope with all the paperwork.” “Would you like me to do it for you?” asked his mother-in-law. “I’ll call the lawyer who arranged it and he’ll have it stopped.” “You needn’t bother,” said Molkho. “I’ll see to it myself. I just have to make a few inquiries.” Yet stubbornly, as if suspecting him of defrauding the German government, she insisted on knowing what inquiries there could be, forcing him to explain that he wished to find out if there wasn’t a last, lump sum to close the account. “After all,” he said, “she could have gone on living for years, and they would have had to pay her for each one of them. If she saved them all that money by dying, maybe there’s a special grant for the children.” “There’s no such thing,” declared his mother-in-law adamantly, and so he dialed his own mother in Jerusalem to wish her a good Sabbath, calling the children to the phone. Then they chatted with their grandmother, who seemed to enjoy their confidence, while complaining in unison about the food. Why did it have be so spicy? After the meal they watched the news on television. The old woman joined them, but when an entertainment program followed, she rose to go. “There’s something I wanted to ask you,” Molkho told her, taking her to the bedroom and showing her his wife’s clothes. “I’ll see if anyone wants them,” she said. “And how about all this medicine?” he continued, pointing to the expensive boxes of Talwin, now stacked in the form of a high tower, and slipping one into her hand. “Do you know anyone who might want them at half price? They cost twenty dollars apiece, and it’s a shame to lose the money. How about someone on the medical staff?” he persisted when she didn’t answer. Yet (rather surprisingly, he thought, for someone who was always so polite) she merely glanced at her watch as if late and walked slowly out of the room, helped by him into her coat, from whose pocket she took out the red woolen cap she had last worn on the night of the death. “I’ll see what I can do about the clothes,” she announced at the top of the stairs, and then they climbed down them and up the garden stairs to the street, where it was drizzling, while Molkho recalled how she was the first person he had phoned on the night his wife died. Though she now seemed preoccupied and in a hurry, a bond had formed between them in the three weeks that had passed since then. “You needn’t bother,” she told him when he stepped out of the car to walk her to the entrance of the home, and so he watched from a distance as she walked down the street cloaked in greenery and slowly opened the large glass door to the lobby, in which a little old lady, who appeared to have been waiting for her, rose quickly with an odd sort of bow.
The television was off when Molkho came home, the dishes in the sink were washed, and the children were preparing to leave. “Why didn’t you say you were going out?” he asked them. “You could have taken your grandmother with you.” The silence in the house enveloped him like a soft cocoon. Opening a window, he peered into the dark ravine, down which he sometimes primitively imagined his wife to have vanished that night. The rain had stopped, and he felt a sudden thirst for human company. How quickly I’ve been abandoned, he thought. Granted, in recent years their social circle had grown less active, but the last months had seen such a steady flow of visitors that they had had to be booked in advance. Head propped high and cheeks feverish, his wife had lain in her hospital bed talking openly, almost avidly, about her death with a black irony that extended to things in general, to the whole country, for which she prophesied gloom and doom, while he bustled about her like an impresario, occasionally uttering a few soothing words to keep her mockery from becoming too aggressive.
He switched on the television, turned it off again, put on some music, and immediately toned down the volume, feeling at loose ends. Should he try phoning someone in the hope of being invited out? Unfortunately, he had napped that afternoon and now was wide awake—so much so, in fact, that he could feel his wakefulness like a lump in his chest. During the first year of his wife’s illness, he had had such feelings often. Several times he was sure he had found some malignancy of his own, and once or twice he had even rushed to the doctor, making it difficult to determine who the real patient was, until her illness finally gathered such momentum that it devoured his own complaints too.