— I don’t suppose he really heard me the first time.
— No, Mother. Just wait. It was not my imagination…
— Wait, Mother, wait… hold on…
— Not every detail, but still… the details are important…
— But for God’s sake, why can’t you be patient…
— No. I’ll make the other days shorter.
— No. No, there wasn’t a word about our little wrestling match. You would have thought we’d never touched each other… Anyway, I gave him Efi’s message and this time it got through to him, although he didn’t seem particularly disappointed to hear that his son couldn’t make the unveiling. He began asking me all kinds of things about Efi, as if it were obvious that I knew more about him than he did, and so I told him about his breaking his glasses, and he was so concerned that he wanted to look for another pair. And so perfectly naturally, as if nothing at all had happened, he invited me back into the same bedroom he had thrown me out of before, only now the room was neatly arranged and looked more or less normal. The bed was made, the sheets were folded, the papers were in a neat pile, and most of all, the blinds were opened and raised, so that I could see the trees tossing in the wind outside. The blinds box was closed and the belt with its noose was back inside it. He began rummaging through the drawers of his desk until he found a few pairs of glasses and asked me if I thought they were Efi’s, because he didn’t know whose they were. In the end he put them all in a little cloth bag and said, “Here, send these to him in Lebanon, maybe he can get by with them until he comes home.” By now he didn’t seem in such a hurry to get rid of me anymore. He gave me a long look and asked, “But where do I know you from? Where can I possibly remember you from?”—and when I told him with a little smile that I had been in his apartment a month ago to pay him a condolence call, he didn’t seem satisfied with the answer. I don’t think he even remembered it, because he kept trying to discover where else we might have met. He was all full of this sudden curiosity and wanted to know if I had ever lived in Jerusalem, and all about my family, and about you, Mother, and about father, and about who your parents were, and about where they came from, and if there weren’t some Jerusalemites among them. It was so strange, Mother, this family interrogation that he suddenly began with great patience in the middle of the night, as if there were no clocks in the world and time itself didn’t exist. And since I really don’t know much about our family history, and I was very tired, in the end — but only in the end, Mother — I blurted out that… I mean… I did it again… I just couldn’t help myself…
— Right. Yes. That I lost my father in a war…
— I knew you’d say that. But this time I didn’t mean to do it. I’d sworn to myself to stop mentioning it all the time.
— That’s easy to say. It’s very easy.
— Naturally. You always know everything.
— No…
— No, no, but it’s beginning to get on my nerves how you’re always so sure that you know just what I’m going to say and just what I’m going to do. Well, hang on, because you’ve got a surprise in store for you tonight…
— Hang on. Have a little patience.
— Yes. A surprise.
— Then? Naturally, Mother, it wasn’t my fault. He started gushing with compassion like they all do…
— That’s what you think. I might have liked it once, but I don’t anymore. It aggravates me the way everyone feels they have to be so protective, him too. Not that he wasn’t tactful about it, but you could see how worried he was about my going back to Tel Aviv in such weather, especially since he was sure it was going to snow. It was his idea that I spend the night there and let him take me to the train or bus station in the morning — and though I knew it made sense, I took my time answering because I wanted to be sure he really thought so himself and wasn’t just trying to be nice… only before I could make up my mind, he was already making the grandmother’s bed for me and primping the room in whose doorway we had wrestled like two savages, as if trying to prove to me that that scaffold had never existed…
— No. Efi doesn’t have his own room there. It was that dead grandmother’s. You could tell the minute you walked into it.
— By everything, you name it. By the furniture. By the pictures on the walls. By this weird old doll of a Turkish dancer with shiny pants and a fez on her head. By the dresses and slips still hanging in the closet. Even by the sheets he made the bed with, which were yellowed from so many laundries He took a nightgown from a drawer and handed it to me, this heavy old flannel antique covered with hand-embroidered red flowers no two of which were alike, and for a minute, Mother, it gave me the creeps, not so much because it was that grandmother’s as because I felt sure that seeing me in it was what made him so glad to have me stay for the night…
— You’ve got to be kidding!
— What an idea, Mother. He only came back into the room once to lower the blinds when I was already under the blankets and to ask me if the nightgown fit, and I could see how happy I made him. He was actually glowing, and with one easy yank he lowered the open blinds, no doubt to prove that there had never been any scaffold but just some blinds that needed fixing…
— It was not a figment of my imagination.
— Because I saw it.
— I know exactly what I saw…
— But just wait a minute. Why can’t you have a little patience?
— So what? We have all night.
— But you agreed to skip the New Year’s Eve party.
— Then what are you so tense about?
— That?
— Suppose I did? So what?
— Yes, that’s right, Mother. It didn’t bother me in the least… why should it have? If Efi didn’t mind getting into my grandmother’s bed, why should I have minded getting into his grandmother’s bed?
— Suppose she did? What of it? That was a month ago… you don’t think something was still left of it, do you? Death isn’t something slimy and catching like life. It’s not like you, Mother, to suddenly start believing in ghosts!
— Never. It was perfectly natural. You know I always had a thing about grown-up’s beds, maybe because of that disgusting children’s dorm I had to sleep in on the kibbutz… and in fact I climbed right into it and fell asleep at once, without any problems, even though he was still fussing about in the apartment and the wind was blowing harder outside. But after an hour or two, Mother, I woke up, not just totally disorientated, but starving, as if he were beginning to eat out my insides down there. I had to get up and look for something to eat, and so I groped my way up the hallway of that dark railroad flat, tiptoeing past Efi’s father’s closed door and into the kitchen, where I didn’t turn on the light or even open the fridge but just found a loaf of bread and cut a few slices and poured a little oil on them and sprinkled them with salt and some spices lying there and wolfed down half the loaf before I was full. As I was heading back down the hallway I saw his door open slightly, as if he had been waiting for me. And so I stopped for a second, Mother, and I heard him drowsily calling my name in this low voice, as if I were already a member of the family. He wanted to know if it was snowing already — and all of a sudden, don’t ask me why, I had this terrible fear of him…