No! I said, almost reluctantly. His mouth was gaping open a little, a bird of death I saw, a spasm I saw, invisible blood flows. A blasted cheek, a bandage on an arm, the bold clear colors before sunset, spots of color on the back, was he hit hard? The sight of the scars reminded me again of the sight of Boaz. Back then, when I didn't recognize him, the sight of a captured jackal, and the man talked and straightened up again and I said what I regretted afterward and after you say it there's no way back, I said: This garden belonged to my son, Menahem, he fell in battles in Jerusalem, for him I replanted the garden. But he didn't pay attention to the seriousness I tried to give that moment and he said: Surely you're going to the party this evening, Mr. Henkin, Menahem's been dead a long time…
Before I could digest the words, I said: I'm supposed to go out this evening, but I'm not yet sure I will and once again I wanted to gain time, to understand how he knew what he knew, how he knew my son's name, how he knew I would go out that evening, was he spying on me; his face was shriveled now, as if he had just been taken out of the grave, his hands didn't shake, he held the hose with a certain cunning and only his torso was seen moving a little, as if he were praying and even laughing a laugh pieced together of tatters of pain and seeking a foothold, assembled, and stitched together again, he even demonstrated some insolent shyness. His ear turned red, and his cheek drooped toward a strong and handsome chin and a dimple was hollowed in the cheek, and suddenly out of the blue, in an improvised but wonderfully measured formulation he said: Go, go. It's important to us that you go!
And the hose surely granted me freedom of maneuver and I did aim it at another bush, I started filling the hollow and I thought: Is his pain really more than my pain, can pain be learned? Had he lost more than I? I recalled how Noga visited us suddenly, that was about two or three months ago. She came into the house as if she were hopping on air and not on the ground, as usual, so delicate and yet something solid in her as always. She sat next to Hasha Masha and was silent. Her eyes were fixed on the album of the one who had been her lover.
My wife got up, went to the kitchen, and brought tea. She put on the water in the kitchen in silence, her hands holding the kerosene stove and not seared. My wife touched Noga's forehead with a finger, maybe measuring her son by the love of his youth, by my total incomprehension. Noga sat, more beautiful than ever even though she looked scared that day. Uneasy, she put on her shawl and took it off again with hands that were almost shaking. Every now and then she looked in the mirror and sat next to my wife and then Hasha Masha gave her a black comb and Noga combed her hair and then she gave Hasha Masha some small tweezers she pulled out of her purse. The tweezers were silver plated and capered for a moment in the room whose light came between the slats of the slightly open shutters, and Hasha Masha plucked out two or three hairs from her left eyebrow and then returned the tweezers to Noga and went to the kitchen and put on another kettle of water and came back and let the water steam and when the kettle (I didn't dare do a thing) was empty and about to turn to carbon, Noga got up slowly, almost deliberately, put the hairs carefully into the ashtray, and the hairs that Hasha Masha had plucked were mixed in the water from the vase that was poured into the ashtray and Noga put down the ashtray, touched my wife's head lightly, walked to the kitchen, filled the kettle with water, and the kettle fizzed and groaned, and Hasha Masha, with a certain arrogance, took out her new reading glasses and sat frozen with the reading glasses on her face and then Noga held out a sheet of paper and said: That's what I wrote to the judge about Boaz, and I wondered how Hasha Masha knew that Noga intended to show her a letter she had written to the judge about Boaz, and my wife read the letter and nodded her head and glanced mutely at Noga and Noga didn't lower her eyes but smiled and Hasha Masha said: You know how to condemn scoundrels, Noga, and you also know how to sleep in their beds, and Noga didn't say a thing but took the letter from Hasha Masha and folded it up carefully and put it back in the purse and then with the delicate movement of a tame eagle, she took the glasses off Hasha Masha's eyes folded them up and put them into the case waiting for them on the table and Noga measured the room again as she used to do on hundreds of evenings when I sat with her here when she still lived with us, looked through me and saw a wall and on it, as always, still hung the yellow landscape by the painter Shot, a picture whose frame had been shattered for years now, and after she drank the tea and Hasha Masha put the glasses on Noga's eyes and measured her with a look and took off the glasses and Noga blinked like somebody who isn't used to reading glasses, Noga took out some chewing gum, folded the paper, delicately put the gum into her mouth, chewed it with her mouth closed for a minute or two, went into the bathroom, threw it in the toilet, flushed it, and returned to the table and sat down. Her hand reached forward and in it was the strip of paper that wrapped the chewing gum. Hasha Masha carefully folded the strip of rustling paper and put it in the ashtray, waited until Noga gave her a box of matches and lit a match, burned the paper along with the handful of hairs and then Noga got up, kissed me on my forehead and said, I love you, old Henkin, caressed Hasha Masha, who shut her eyes, giving her face an expression of pleasure and regret, and left the house.
I went outside, I looked at the brilliant sea, I found an old teacher looking at a wall he had painted with his own hands and he was ludicrous in his own eyes, superfluous vis-a-vis the silence of Noga and Hasha Masha, I said to myself, utter a song! Hasha Masha lived the moment and every moment was final, a tumult that begins and ends. Menahem is a foundation, not a display window…
My neighbor is smiling now, maybe he's also reading my mind, this moment is his! The water flows in the hose and I watch the stream of water, blended in it, flowing with it and then I'm finished on my neighbor's contours of pain and my pain is suddenly opaque, as if a miracle happened to it. But it doesn't let me flee from myself.
Go, he said, go, Mr. Henkin, it's important for all of us.
Who's all of us? I asked.
He didn't answer. His stream was sharper than mine. His water was more concentrated, and he enjoyed the sight of the water flowing from him, absorbed in the hollows, mixing with the organic mulch, annihilating the desolation the Giladis had left behind. There was an arrogant and malicious meekness in him, I thought, as if he were protecting himself, even from me, as if he were connected to the deed he was doing and to a possible escape from himself, he was routed and protesting at the same time.
All of us is a lot of people, he said, all of us is me, it's the woman who lives with and is married to me… here in the north, he said, the wind is humid, rusts, in the south the air is dry and purer.