Netta did not go to the funeral. Nor did Le Patron. Not because he was busy somewhere else but because, as usual, he had changed his mind at the last minute and decided to stay behind in the apartment and wait with Netta for them to come back from the cemetery. When the family returned with a few acquaintances and neighbors who had joined them, they found the man and Netta sitting facing each other in the living room, playing checkers. Nakdimon Lublin and the rest of them did not approve, but they took Netta's condition into account and chose to be indulgent. Or at least to say nothing. Yoel could not have cared less. While they were away, the man had taught Netta to make strong black coffee laced with brandy, which she served to all of them. He stayed till early evening. Then he got up and left. The acquaintances and relations dispersed. Nakdimon Lublin and his sons went to stay somewhere else in Jerusalem, promising to return in the morning. Yoel was left alone with the women. When it grew dark outside Avigail began to sob in the kitchen, a loud, broken noise that sounded like an attack of hiccoughs. Lisa calmed her with valerian drops, an old-fashioned remedy that nevertheless brought her some relief after a while. The two old women sat in the kitchen, with Lisa's arm around Avigail's shoulders and the two of them wrapped in a gray woolen shawl that Lisa must have found in a closet. Every now and again it slipped off, and Lisa bent down to pick it up, then raised it like a bat spreading its wings to wrap them in it again. After the valerian drops Avigail's crying became quieter and more even. Like a child crying in its sleep. But outside there suddenly rose the wailing of cats in heat, a strange, evil, piercing sound at times like barking. He and his daughter sat in the living room on either side of the low table that Ivria had bought in Jaffa ten years before. On the table was the game board, surrounded by checkers and a few empty coffee cups. Netta asked if she should make him an omelette and a salad; Yoel said "I'm not hungry" and she replied "Neither am I." At 8:30 the phone rang, but when he lifted the receiver he heard nothing. Out of professional habit he asked himself who would be interested in simply knowing if he was at home. But he could make no guess. Then Netta got up and closed the shutters and the windows and drew the curtains. At nine o'clock she said, "If you want to watch the news, suit yourself." Yoel said, "Fine." But they remained sitting; neither of them approached the television. And again by dint of professional habit he remembered the phone number in Helsinki and it occurred to him to call the Tunisian engineer now, from here. He decided not to because he did not know what to say to him. Soon after ten he got up and made them all open sandwiches with some cheese and sausage he found in the refrigerator; the sausage was the spicy kind coated with black pepper that was Ivria's favorite. Then the kettle boiled and he made four glasses of lemon tea. His mother said: "Leave all that to me." He said: "Never mind. It's all right." They drank the tea but nobody touched the sandwiches. It was nearly one o'clock in the morning before Lisa managed to persuade Avigail to take a couple of Valium tablets and put her to bed fully dressed in the double bed in Netta's room. She lay down next to her without switching off the bedside lamp. At 2:15 Yoel peeped in and found them both asleep. Avigail woke up three times and cried, then stopped, and all was quiet again. At three Netta suggested a game of. checkers to help pass the time. Yoel agreed, but tiredness suddenly overcame him, his eyes were burning, and he went off to have a doze in his nursery. Netta went with him as far as his bedroom door, and there, as he stood and unbuttoned his shirt, he told her that he had decided to exercise his right to take early retirement. He would write a letter of resignation that same week, and would not wait for them to appoint his successor. At the end of the school year they'd leave Jerusalem.
Netta said: "Suit yourself." And left it at that.
Without closing the door he lay down on the bed, with his hands under his head and his burning eyes on the ceiling. Ivria Lublin had been his only love, but that had been a long time ago. Sharply, in every detail, he recalled a time they had made love many years before. After a violent argument. From the first caress to the final shudder they had both been weeping, and afterward they had lain huddled for several hours, less like a man and a woman than like two people freezing in the snow at night. And he had stayed inside her body even when there was no more desire left and almost for the whole of that night. Now with the recollection there stirred in him a desire for her body. He placed his broad, ugly hand on his organ, as though to calm it, careful not to move either his hand or his organ. Because the door was open, he put out the light with his other hand. When he had put the light out he realized that the body he desired was encased in earth and would always remain so. Including the childlike knees, including the left breast that was slightly fuller and more attractive than the right one, including the brown birthmark that was sometimes visible and sometimes hidden in the pubic hair. And then he saw himself imprisoned in her cell in total darkness and saw her laid naked beneath the slabs of concrete beneath the little mound of earth in the rain that fell in the dark and he remembered her claustrophobia and reminded himself that the dead are not buried naked and reached out again and switched on the light in alarm. His desire had vanished. He closed his eyes and lay motionless on his back and waited for the tears. But the tears would not come, nor would sleep, and his hand groped on the bedside table for his book. Which had been left behind in Helsinki.
Through his open door, to the accompaniment of the wind and the rain, he saw far away his daughter, plain, spare, stooped, picking up the empty coffee cups and glasses and putting them on a tray. She took them all out to the kitchen and washed them unhurriedly. The dish of cheese and sausage sandwiches she covered with plastic wrap and carefully put away in the refrigerator. She turned most of the lights out and made sure the apartment was locked. Then she knocked twice on the door of her mother's study before opening and entering. On the desk lay Ivria's dip-pen and the inkwell, which had been left open. Netta closed the inkwell and put the top on the pen. She picked up from the desk the square frameless glasses that suggested a stern family doctor of an earlier generation. She picked them up from the desk as though intending to try them on. But she restrained herself, polished them lightly with the bottom of her blouse, folded them, and put them away in their case, which she found under the papers. She picked up the coffee cup that Ivria had left on the desk when she went out to fetch the flashlight, turned the light out, left the study, and closed the door behind her. Having washed this last cup she returned to the living room and sat alone in front of the checkerboard. On the other side of the wall Avigail was crying again and Lisa comforted her in a whisper. So deep was the silence that even through the closed and shuttered windows there could be heard the sound of cocks crowing in the distance and dogs barking; then the long-drawn-out sound of a muezzin's call to morning prayer insinuated itself indistinctly. And now what? Yoel asked himself. How ridiculous, how irritating, how unnecessary to have shaved in Le Patron's car on the way home from the airport. The cripple in the wheelchair in Helsinki had been young, very pale, and Yoel seemed to remember that he had had delicate, feminine features. He had no arms or legs. From birth? An accident? It rained in Jerusalem all through the night. The electricity had been restored less than an hour after the disaster.