Leaning forward in his chair, Oded rested his chin on his thumb and rubbed one eyebrow with the tip of his forefinger. “Look, it’s like this: running empties your head, it’s a physiological thing. When you indulge in intensive physical exercise — you can’t really think. Often this is helpful. But for me at this moment in time not thinking would be like running away.” I licked my finger and tidied the wayward hairs of his eyebrows, but a moment later his hand went up to push them out of place again. He looked impatient to me, and somehow it was clear that his impatience was not directed at me but at himself.
“So at the moment your exercise is getting up early in order to sit here in the garden and not run away,” I said.
“You should know that I don’t have any new thoughts or perceptions regarding what happened, believe me, that’s for sure: no new thoughts and no new conclusions. Only without any thoughts my mind somehow insists on going back and replaying the film. It simply runs the scenes over and over, and at this stage it seems to me that I have no option but to let it. In any case my idea is that if this is what needs to be, in other words if I already have to let the film run, it’s better to try and do it in an orderly way: to get it over first thing in the morning, before I begin the day.
“Don’t worry. I’m okay. In the end everything will be fine,” he added, and I crouched down in front of him like a Bedouin and peered into his eyes.
“In the end?”
“It’s already fine. And as soon as I’m finished playing the movie I’ll go back to exercising.”
“You’ll do exactly the right thing, always, I have no doubt,” I said eagerly. For some reason I was ashamed to tell him what he would probably have been happy to hear: that I was not haunted and that I didn’t see any pictures. That with me it was perhaps the exact opposite. For a considerable part of the day I still felt shaky. But within this shakiness it happened that I sometimes stopped with a sudden sense of wonder, and with every stop I needed a moment to grasp the thing that filled me with wonder was the new cleanness of my mind. Perhaps it was also because of the novelty of this cleanness that I felt shaky. I needed to rest. I needed time to get used to the existing restfulness. But somehow I knew too that soon, really soon, when I recovered my strength, my eyes would be cleared to see whatever I wanted to look at, and I was already beginning to feel a little curious about what things I would see when I went out to look: the garden was big and there was much to see in it.
“Everything you do is right,” I said to my beloved, whose suffering I did not share. Because what could I say that had not already been said? And who would I help by repeating to him what he already knew? I knew very well that no words and no arguments would help against pressing pictures. “Would you like me to make us an omelet? To put on more coffee?”
I believed him when he said that he was okay. I believed what I said to him too, that he always knew the right thing to do. I believed, and at the same time for a certain period I went on watching him for signs of any subcutaneous wounds. I knew that the blue-black of subcutaneous bleeding does not appear at once. And I thought that if there was indeed an injury, I had to make sure that the dawn watches to which he had sentenced himself were not making the bleeding worse. Oded went on sitting in the garden until almost the end of summer, but no blue-black bruises made their appearance. And all this time he remained clear to me.
In my concern for him, watching over his sleep and food, and showering him with positive reinforcements, I was close to becoming a mother and sister to him. For moments we came close to it, it almost happened, but my husband wouldn’t permit it. My husband wouldn’t permit it, and even as I worried about his well-being, he insisted on behaving toward me with a gentle and slightly weary authority, and as if he had appointed himself to be my big brother he would repeatedly say things like: “Are you eating lunch?” “Let me, I’ll peel it for you,” and “Careful with that armchair, it’s heavy”; to which I would reply in sentences like: “What’s the matter with you? It’s not at all heavy and I’m not an invalid.”
And so we worried about each other until, in time, reality showed us that all our worries and concerns were superfluous.
Eight days and nights passed until two newspapers printed brief items on the disappearance of the professor, and almost a week more until one of the weekend papers ran a longer article: about eight hundred words under the headline “The Mystery of the Missing Professor.” Not-man was described as an “enigmatic figure” and once more presented as “a controversial figure both among historians and in the Jewish community in the United States.” One historian interviewed anonymously defined him as “a intellectual with bold intuitions tending to over-hasty conclusions” and another said that he was “an impetuous charlatan and dangerous populist.” The police, the article said, were still groping in the dark.
Oded and I had heard abut the disappearance even earlier. We heard abut it from my mother-in-law, after she and Menachem returned from the dinner which took place in the steak house at Ramat Rachel and not in a vegetarian restaurant on Keren Yayesod Street: “The meal was excellent but your uncle didn’t come. Mordechai says that he didn’t even get in touch with him to say he couldn’t come. It’s a pity we didn’t get to meet him.”
No dish fell and smashed, and no red sauce splashed on my mother-in-law’s dress. Oded folded his arms on his chest and without blinking an eye said “Maybe it isn’t a pity at all. In the end Elinor and I went to listen to his lecture and both of us felt that he wasn’t the kind of person we would want to have any connection with.”
“May I ask why?” inquired Menachem.
“He was disgusting. The whole thing was nothing but a piece of self-advertisement. He didn’t even come close to understanding his mistake.”
Accustomed to treating the sensitive subject of “Elinor’s family” with kid gloves, and somewhat shocked by the rare tactlessness of their son, my in-laws let the matter drop, and the conversation turned to other participants in the conference, serious and interesting people, who had come to the dinner.
I have no idea when Not-man was officially recognized as a missing person. Perhaps when he was supposed to check out of the Hyatt.
Presumably he had other appointments for which he failed to show up: encounters of one kind or another with people who saw him as a “bold intellectual,” coffee with a journalist writing up the conference, meetings with other lecturers; perhaps his son came up to Jerusalem to put a note in the Western Wall and took the opportunity to try and get in touch with his father. Perhaps on his way back from the Wall he passed the hotel and left a note there too. In any case, the First Person wasn’t important enough for anyone to search for him in earnest. Messages like the one Oded’s secretary left for him presumably piled up at the reception desk of the hotel, in the pigeon-hole where there was no key to the room; but the addressee was no longer there. He had vanished into thin air.
Alice had once investigated the fate of notes fallen out of the Wall, and on one of her first expeditions she had accompanied the sacks of these fallen notes to a dignified burial on the Mount of Olives. My computer contains no trace of this column, but people read it and I still remember. And this, in short, is the story:
As she stands and watches the burial of the sacks a faded note flies straight up to Alice, and when she dares to open it she discovers a letter from a little girl with cancer. Without knowing why, she puts the decorated exercise-book page into her pocket, and only on her way back from the cemetery an inner voice tells her to return the lost wish to the Wall. Someone who landed in our city to seek for desert light will always follow her inner voice. And she does so this time too. And as the sun sets and Alice stands on tiptoe to reach for a crack in which to insert the letter, a little girl comes up to her and offers to put the note in one of the relatively empty cracks lower down. The child says that this is what she did with her own note a moment ago, and adds that she came to thank God for curing her of leukemia. She completed her last treatment a week ago.