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When the boat docked they drove off in the little red car. ‘Purpose of your visit?’ said the customs officer as he looked at Boaz-Jachin’s passport.

‘Holiday,’ said Boaz-Jachin. The customs officer looked at his face and his black hair, then at the blonde woman. He stamped the passport, handed it back.

It was raining, drumming on the canvas top. Numberless splashes leaped up from the road to meet the rain coming down. Red tail-lights blurred ahead of them. Yes, no, yes, no, said the windscreen wipers. The woman put a cassette in the machine. Where the morning sees the shadows of the orange grove there was nothing twenty years ago, sang the tape in the language of Boaz-Jachin’s country. Where the dry wind sowed the desert we brought water, planted seedlings, now the oranges grow. A woman’s voice, harsh and full of glaring sunlight.

Benjamin, thought Boaz-Jachin. Forgive. ‘You can buy that on a cassette?’ he said.

‘Sure,’ she said.

Boaz-Jachin shook his head. Why not thought cassettes too? Any kind. What an invention. A slot in the head and you just put in the cassette for the mood you wanted. Lion. Yes, I know, thought Boaz-Jachin. You’re in my mind. I’m in your mind.

‘Oranges,’ said the woman. ‘Oranges in the desert.’ She looked straight ahead into the darkness and the red tail-lights and drove on through the rain. For an hour they said nothing.

She turned off the main road, drove two or three miles to a half-timbered cottage with a thatched roof. Boaz-Jachin looked at her.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Houses. Houses I have. Three of them in different countries.’ She looked at his face. ‘Last time in the car you were thinking of a hotel, weren’t you?’

Boaz-Jachin blushed.

She lit lamps, took covers off the furniture in the living room, went into the kitchen to make coffee. Boaz-Jachin took kindling from a basket, coal from a scuttle, started a fire in the fireplace. The books on the shelves came and went in the firelight, red, brown, orange, all their pages quiet. Thin gleams of gold showed in the insets of picture frames. Boaz-Jachin smelled coffee, looked at the couch, looked away, looked at the fire, sat in a chair, sighed.

They drank coffee. She smoked cigarettes. The silence sat down with them like an invisible creatures with its finger to its lips. They looked at the fire. The silence looked at the fire. The fire seethed and whispered. They were both sitting on the floor, on an oriental carpet. Boaz-Jachin looked at the pattern, the asymmetry of the endings of rows and the border. He covered the asymmetry between them by moving close to her. He kissed her, feeling as if he might be struck dead by lightning. She unbuttoned his shirt.

When they were both naked her body was surprising. It was as if not being allowed to be a wife had kept her flesh firm and young. Boaz-Jachin was staggered by the unbelievable reality of what was happening. Again, said the backs of the books, the golden gleams in the picture frames.

My God, thought Boaz-Jachin, and led her to the couch. She turned and hit him in the jaw. She was strong, and it was not a woman’s blow. She pivoted athletically, like a boxer, and hit him with her feet planted solidly and all of her weight behind her fist. Boaz-Jachin saw shooting coloured lights, then everything went black for a moment as he flew across the room and fetched up in an armchair. He was speechless.

He stood up shakily. Naked she came towards him and hit him in the stomach. All the breath went out of him as she brought up her knee. Blackness and coloured lights again, pain and nausea. Boaz-Jachin, rolling on the floor, caught her ankle as she tried to heel-kick him. He pulled, and she came down hard with a thump and a little scream. He crawled over to her on his hands and knees, struck her hard across the face with a backhanded blow. She rolled over on to her side, drew up her knees and lay there crying while her nose bled.

Boaz-Jachin lay beside her until the pain and nausea went away. Then he got up, stirred her with his foot, helped her up, led her to the couch, mounted her as one who had arrived with chariots and spears, and took his pleasure.

‘You,’ she said into his ear. ‘Oranges in the desert.’

In the morning there was sunlight. He felt deathless, invincible, the initiate of mysteries, blessed.

30

It would be better for me not to open this letter, thought Jachin-Boaz as he opened the letter. Fading, fading, said the afternoon sunlight slanting down the wall, slanting on the red curtains, on the yellow, on the blue of the flowers. See how tactfully I die! said the sunlight. Twilight follows. Fade with me.

Jachin-Boaz began to read. In the next bed the letter writer was hard at work. Violet’s face, for instance, he wrote. Is there, in all justice, any necessity for that? She married the young lieutenant to whom I’d introduced her. Everyone said the baby looked exactly like him. Yet only this morning there was Violet’s face in a spoon. Not a silver spoon either. Not even a clean spoon, mind you.

On the other side the tightly furled man was looking at a magazine in which girls in black suspender belts and stockings achieved difficult juxtapositions. He was quietly singing Oft in the Stilly Night in a high falsetto.

The letter writer looked up. The tightly furled man put down his magazine, left off singing. Jachin-Boaz had put the letter in the drawer of his bedside table, flung himself back on his bed, and lay looking up at the ceiling in a silence that filled the air with waves of terror. The two men on either side felt as if they had been fused with the sounding metal of some monstrous bell that was rhythmically annihilating them.

‘Stop clanging, can’t you?’ said the tightly furled man. ‘It’s driving the very marrow out of my bones.’ He doubled up in his bed and covered his ears.

‘Really,’ said the letter writer to Jachin-Boaz, ‘I think you might have the civility not to indulge in effects like that. I can hear mirrors shattering for miles around. Do make an effort, won’t you?’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘I didn’t know that I was doing anything.’ Bad heart, she said. His father had died of a bad heart and he had a bad heart too. He had had twinges now and then, and his doctor had pointed out that he was a cardiac type and would do well to be careful. Suddenly he felt his heart clearly defined in his body, totally vulnerable and waiting for the inevitable. Angina pectoris. Had the doctor said anything about that? He’d looked it up once. Something associated with apprehension or fear of impending death, said the dictionary. He must remember not to be apprehensive or fearful of impending death. He closed his eyes, and in his mind he saw the map of his body with the organs, nerves and circulatory system illuminated in vivid colour. The heart pumped, drove the blood through the branching veins and arteries. Around went the blood on the animated map, and around again. It seemed miraculous that the heart kept pumping. How had it continued twenty-four hours a day for forty-seven years? It could never stop for a rest. When it stopped that was the end of everything. No more world. Only a few years left, suddenly they will all be gone, the last moment will be now. Intolerable! Father died at fifty-two. I’m forty-seven. Five more years? Less, perhaps.

You will want to come back to me.

Yes, I do want to come back. Why did I want to go away? What was so bad? Certainly I never felt this bad before.

The letter writer and the tightly furled man got up and went to the lounge. Jachin-Boaz went to one of the nurses, asked for something to calm him down. He was given a tranquillizer, went back to his bed and reasoned with himself.

She can’t actually make my heart stop, he thought. That kind of magic doesn’t work unless you believe that the other person has the power. Do I believe she has the power? Yes. But she doesn’t really have any special power. She didn’t have the power to keep me, did she? No. Then could she have the power to kill me? Of course not. Do I believe that? No.