“But in the meantime he’s changed them all back again,” she said sharply, and smiled with obvious enjoyment at my discomfort.
The old folks’ home was in darkness, even though it was only ten o’clock at night, but the old lady didn’t seem in the least upset. She thanked me warmly, allowed me to extricate her from her seat belt, put on a white beret to protect her head from the persistent drizzle, and stepped carefully out of the car. I got out too and offered to accompany her inside. In her excellent physical and mental condition, she was in no need of an escort, but with her sharp wits she sensed that I was eager to continue the conversation, and she therefore thanked me gratefully, as if I were doing her a great favor. We walked slowly across the deserted terrace. I asked her a question or two about the place, and she answered briefly. Now we were standing in front of a big glass door, behind which the doorman was sitting opposite a television screen on which the two of us flickered like a couple of ghosts. Suddenly she shivered, as if she too had finally recognized the lost soul of her son-in-law in some movement of my head or hand, or even in the tone of voice that I had just adopted. The glass door did not open immediately. The old lady looked straight at me, but without realizing that it was my very presence which now forced her to speak of him. “Poor Lazar, my heart aches for him,” she said sadly, and she tugged at the white beret to protect at least one side of her face from the blustering wind. As if she wasn’t sure whether I shared the intensity of her emotion, she added, “Do you know how fond he was of you, and how well he spoke of you?” I nodded my head painfully, as if everything I had felt since my return from England had now been confirmed. “But what’s going to happen to Dori now?” I asked. She shrugged her shoulders. “It will be very hard for Dori. Very hard.”
I saw that she still hadn’t grasped the crux of the matter. “But how will she stay by herself?”
“How?” Dori’s mother sighed, still not understanding what I was getting at. “I don’t know how. She’ll have to find a way. It will be very hard for her. As it is for everyone else.”
“But what way? In what sense?” I pressed her, refusing to let her evade the issue. “She’s incapable of being on her own for a minute. It’s impossible for her.” I saw that my insistence was beginning to confuse her. Her eyes wandered, and she hugged the door for shelter, afraid to meet my eyes lest she admit that I knew something nobody was supposed to know, something that even she refused to acknowledge. But I pressed on, oblivious to her discomfort in my fervor. “How, for example, will she stay by herself at night? Who’ll be there with her?” Finally she understood that she could no longer evade my questions, which sprang from a deep inner source, perhaps prompted by Lazar himself. “Don’t you worry your head about that,” she said, smiling in relief. “She’ll find a way not to be by herself. She’ll find someone to be with her. Even when she was a child and we sometimes left her alone in the evening, she would run to find some little friend to spend the night with her. She always knew how to find people to look after her, so that she wouldn’t have to stay by herself for even a minute.” I was flooded with sweetness at the thought of the little girl running in the pleasant evening streets of childhood to find a little friend to spend the night. I suddenly felt as if the worry had been removed from my heart and, more significantly, as if a new horizon had opened before me, full of a reassuring promise. I pressed the button next to the door and asked the doorman over the intercom to open it. He checked his list for the old lady’s name, and after he found it he pressed the buzzer and I left her. But I didn’t leave the place before calling Michaela on a pay phone to apologize for my lateness and to tell her that I was on my way home.
Michaela was indifferent to this announcement, but Amnon, who was still at the apartment and eagerly waiting for my return, wasn’t. Nevertheless, I couldn’t resist passing Dori’s house again, and after checking that Hishin’s car was no longer there, I climbed softly up the dark stairs, and stood holding my breath outside the door, with my hand on the lock, to give my beloved the feeling that even if her mother had already gone home and her daughter was asleep in her room and her son had not yet returned, she was not alone.
Seventeen
Has the time come to reflect on love, so that what was impossible will become possible? The solitary bird — which broke into the room in the dead of night and underneath the bed, among the clay fragments of the broken statuette, pecked crumbs from the heart of an ancient sandwich, which had been prepared for a school lunch and for some reason had found its way there and been forgotten — mayspread itsgreat wings at dawnand flyaway to find where she has disappeared to, the curly-haired little girl in the blue uniform with the school badge fastened to her chest with a safety pin, who was left to do her homework at the kitchen table many years ago.