— Yes, bleeding…
— The hell it was! It was not my imagination… absolutely not… and as soon as he saw it was only me he smiled like a naughty boy with this sheepish sort of smile, although maybe it was also a little mocking — I don’t think it was, but it wouldn’t have mattered if there was a bit of mockery in it — and he said, “Honestly, young lady, I was beginning to worry what was taking you so long…” And, Mother, I was so thrilled by that new tone of his, which was so much freer and easier, and especially by that darling “young lady,” that I walked down that hallway in a trance and grabbed his hand and said quietly but firmly, “Please, don’t do it again.” Well, Mother, this shocked look came over him. He was completely taken by surprise. He ran his hand over his face and throat and was alarmed by all the blood on it — and all at once, Mother, I stopped being angry with him, the truth had finally dawned on me, which was that he couldn’t control this impulse he had to do away with himself every evening, because he had no reason for doing it, Mother, he only thought that he did, and even that thought wasn’t his own but came from someone or somewhere else…
— Maybe that grandmother had left something behind in her room that was haunting him without his knowing it…
— No, listen, Mother, please. Don’t just laugh off everything I say. Listen to me…
— Yes, from someone or somewhere else… shhh… shhh… don’t move…
— No, wait… don’t move…
— No, don’t open the door… not now…
— You can always say we were sleeping… you’ve a right to…
— You don’t have to lie… but you can’t just open that door automatically for this whole kibbutz as if it were the door of a bus…
— Shhh… shhh…
— What’s not nice about it?
— There, thank God, they’re gone… Who could it have been?
— Then I’m turning out the light… Are you listening?
— Yes, a real mystery, that’s what I felt. Except that instead of getting all uptight, which is what you would have done, I did just the opposite and began to feel this great calm…
— Impossible. His mourner’s beard, Mother, was just an excuse…
— To go on cutting himself…
— I do know… I do know…
— I saw it… and I know…
— You don’t believe me, Mother, because you don’t want to believe. You have this great mass of collective wisdom behind you, and maybe here in the desert you need it to bolster you, but you’re so pitifully spooked by the least hint of mystery, which is why you have to root it out so ruthlessly with the iron logic of broad daylight… But it doesn’t spook me, Mother, any more than Mr. Mani and all his real or imaginary suicides. I found some towel to staunch the blood with, and we sat in the kitchen while waiting for it to stop, and I lit some more little candles and we drank some milk, because we couldn’t boil water on account of the power being off, and we had a real face-to-face talk at last, and suddenly I realized, Mother, that over the past three days we had made a secret pact, it wasn’t anything written or clear, but it was enough to make me tell him what had happened to me in the cemetery, and how I got to Augusta Victoria, and he sat there hanging on each word. I could see that the idea of someone’s seed inside me didn’t bother him in the least, not even if it was his own son’s, which was why he didn’t rush to turn everything into a hallucination like you do, because psychology is just a parable for him and not reality itself. He simply sat there daubing the blood on his throat and looking at it now and then on the towel, and we began to be friends. He told me all about Augusta Victoria, and the German Kaiser’s visit to Jerusalem, and how and why the place was built — and when I told him about my ride in the ambulance and all those neighborhoods I never knew about, he said how sorry he was that I was going back to Tel Aviv without seeing the real Jerusalem, by which he meant the Jerusalem of his ancestors, and he mentioned how he goes every Friday to the marketplace in the Old City, because the courts aren’t in session then… and I was so touched, Mother, by his faith in my ability to extricate myself from Jerusalem in the end and get back to the coast or the desert without compulsively walking in on him every night that I said to him on the spot, “As a matter of fact, I’d love to see the Old City with you tomorrow morning, because not only don’t the courts sit on Fridays, the university has no classes either…”
— Nothing special. We waited for the lights to come back on, but they didn’t until eleven, and meanwhile there was no television and no radio and no hot water to drink or wash with. We just sat and shivered in the dark, wrapped in blankets like in some tent city, reading the newspapers by candlelight. From time to time I tried getting him to talk about his childhood in Crete, and he showed me some photographs of his family, and of Efi as a little boy, and in the end he put me to sleep in that grandmother’s bed, the same one I slept in the first night…
— No, the room was perfectly normal. Maybe now that he was into razor blades, he didn’t need scaffolds anymore…
— I’m not laughing, Mother… I didn’t laugh once in the course of those three days, and I’m perfectly serious now too. It’s all I can do to keep myself from running to the dining hall this minute and phoning to see if he’s dead or alive… shhh… shhh… I swear, there’s someone outside the window… it’s unbelievable… maybe it’s me they’re looking for, not you…
— A couple of people saw me get off the bus.
— Oh. Yes, of course. Anyway, it must have been toward midnight, I had been tossing and turning, because I couldn’t fall asleep after spending most of the day in bed. I kept thinking of that wonderful view of the desert with the blue scoop of the Dead Sea and that flock of black goats trooping into my window. In the middle of the night the phone rang, and this time Mr. Mani was good enough to answer it, and I realized at once, just from hearing his end of it, that it was my poor darling Efi, who’d had a visit from the mobile telephone unit at that checkpoint he’s stuck in outside Beirut. I listened to his father tell him about the unveiling, but he didn’t say a word about me, not one single word about my having telephoned or come to Jerusalem or stayed over or gone to the cemetery. It was as if he were afraid to admit that I was there on the other side of the wall, afraid of being suspected of trying to be his own son — and I was devastated, Mother, not by him but by myself, by what this terrible need for a father has done to me…
— Yes… yes…
— It’s true… I admit it…
— Yes, yes…
— Maybe you’re right, maybe it was just some fantasy of mine… there, are you happy? Does that make you feel better?
— For me? For me? Do you really have doubts about my sanity?
— Yes, you do… why don’t you admit it.
— No, I’m not crying. I’m really not…
— It’s nothing…
— Dearest Mother… Mother…
— The next morning? Nothing. I couldn’t go back on my promise to let him take me to the marketplace, and it was a bore. He put on these old clothes, not even a tie, just a sweater and an old jacket, which made him lose all his presence and his charm, and we went with these baskets to buy all sorts of things for a few shekels less in the alleys of the Old City. After that he took me to the Wailing Wall, as if I hadn’t already been there, and then he wanted to visit some Arabs he knew in Silwan. The more he talked about them, the less I knew what he was saying about them, whether they hated us or loved us or wanted to get rid of us or were attached to us or were peaceful or were up to no good. I couldn’t tell what he needed them for, and by then Jerusalem was getting me down. You could already smell that awful Sabbath of theirs coming on, and I was afraid that the bus station might shut down early and leave me stranded there again, so I tried tactfully telling him not to get too carried away with all those back alleys of his. “Don’t forget my bus,” I said, “I have to get home,” and he finally got the hint and brought me to the station and put me in line for the bus to Tel Aviv, and I jumped the railing at the last second and caught the bus to Beersheba, because I wanted to be with you, my one and only mother, and to say, Hey, Ma, it’s me, listen to this, even though I knew you’d say, There goes Hagar, looking for a father again, and you’re right, you’re always right, Mother, what can I say, I know you are, but I also know there’s something deeper than your psychology, maybe even something astounding, why is it that you never remarried all these years, what made you stay faithful to that man over there whose photograph glows in the dark, more peaceful than the bookcase that it’s standing on, never moving, never changing, our impossible, our dead hero, who exists more than any of us in a single photograph, which follows us everywhere like some ultimate test, staring out with me into the darkness like a ghost, and that’s not my imagination, maybe he’s inside me right now, straddling, how do I know, the thin line between life and death…