In the late afternoon of a summer day, Yoel was standing barefoot in a corner of the lawn, trimming the hedge. In the little street in Ramat Lotan there were agricultural smells, mown lawns, manured flower beds, and a light soil that soaked up the water from the sprinklers. There were many sprinklers revolving in the little front and back gardens. It was quarter past five. Occasionally a neighbor would come home from work, park his car, get out unhurriedly, stretch his arms, and loosen his tie even before reaching his paved garden path.
Through the garden doors of the houses opposite could be heard the voice of the man reading the news on television. Here and there neighbors were sitting on the lawn staring indoors at the television in their living room. With a small effort Yoel could catch the man's words. But his thoughts were distracted. At times he would stop clipping and watch three little girls playing on the street with an Alsatian they called Ironside, perhaps after the detective in a wheelchair in a television series a few years back, which Yoel had happened to watch by himself in hotel rooms in various cities. Once he had watched an episode dubbed into Portuguese, and had still managed to follow the plot. Which was a simple one.
All around, birds were singing in the treetops, hopping along the walls, flitting from one garden to the next as though they were intoxicated with joy. Even though Yoel knew that birds do not flit for joy but for other reasons. Far away like the sighing of the sea sounded the din of heavy traffic on the highway that ran below Ramat Lotan. In a hammock behind him lay his mother, wearing a housecoat, reading the evening paper. Once, years before, she had told him how when he was three years old she had trundled him, in a squeaking carriage, completely buried and hidden under packages and bundles hastily thrown together, for hundreds of miles from Bucharest to the port of Varna. Most of the way she had fled along remote side roads. Nothing remained in his memory, but he had a faded image of a dark dormitory in the bowels of a ship, packed with tier upon tier of iron beds crammed with men and women groaning, spitting, perhaps vomiting over each other, or over him. And a vague picture of a fight, scratching and biting till the blood ran, between his shrieking mother and a bald, unshaven man on that same terrible voyage. His father he could not remember at all, even though he knew what he looked like from the two sepia pictures in his mother's old photograph album and he knew, or had inferred, that his father was not a Jew, but a Christian Romanian who had walked out of his life and his mother's even before the Germans arrived. But in his thoughts the father took on the appearance of the bald, unkempt man in the ship who had hit his mother.
On the other side of the hedge, which he was trimming slowly and precisely, his neighbors, the American brother and sister who occupied the other half of the double house, were sitting on white garden chairs drinking iced coffee. Several times during the weeks since their arrival the Vermonts had invited him to drop in with the ladies one afternoon for iced coffee or else to watch a comedy on their VCR one evening after the nine o'clock news. Yoel had said: "We'd like that." Meanwhile he had not done so. Vermont was a fresh-looking, pink, heavy man, with the rough manner of a farmer. He looked like a healthy, wealthy Dutchman in an advertisement for expensive cigars. He was jovial and loud. Loud perhaps because he was hard of hearing. His sister was at least ten years younger than he, Annemarie or Rosemarie; Yoel could not remember which. A petite, attractive woman, with childlike laughing blue eyes and pointed breasts. "Hi," she said cheerily when she noticed Yoel eyeing her body over the hedge. Her brother repeated the same syllable, a split-second later and a touch less cheerily. Yoel wished them good afternoon. The woman came over to the hedge, her nipples visible under a light cotton blouse. When she got close to him, delightedly intercepting the look that was fixed on her, she added in English, speaking quickly in a low voice: "Tough life, huh?" Louder, in Hebrew, she asked if she could borrow his shears later so that she could trim the ligustrum hedge on their side too. Yoel said: "Why not?" And after a slight hesitation he offered to do it himself. "Careful." She laughed. "I might say yes."
The late-afternoon light was gentle, honeyed, casting a strange golden glow on a few semitransparent clouds that were passing overhead on their way from the sea to the mountains. For a slight breeze had blown up from the sea, bringing a salty tang and a faint shade of melancholy. Which Yoel did not reject. The breeze rustled in the foliage of the ornamental and fruit trees, caressed the well-kept lawns, and splashed his bare chest with tiny droplets from a sprinkler in another garden.
Instead of finishing his side of the hedge and going next door, as he had promised, to trim the other side, Yoel put the shears down on the edge of the lawn and went for a little stroll, as far as the point where the street was blocked by a fenced citrus grove. He stood there for a few minutes, staring at the dense foliage, vainly straining to decipher a silent movement that he imagined he could discern in the depths of the grove. Until his eyes ached again. Then he turned around and walked home. It was a tender evening. From a window of one of the other houses he heard a woman saying, "So what; tomorrow is another day." Yoel checked this sentence in his mind and found no error in it. At the entrances to the gardens were stylish, occasionally even ostentatious, mailboxes. Some of the parked cars still gave off residual heat from the engine and a faint smell of burned gasoline. Even the street, made of precast squares of concrete, radiated a warmth, which was pleasing under his bare feet. Each square bore a stamp in the form of two arrows flanking the inscription SCHARFSTEIN LTD RAMAT GAN.
Some time after six o'clock Avigail and Netta returned in the car from the hairdresser's. Avigail, despite her mourning, struck him as healthy and applelike: her round face and sturdy body suggested a prosperous Slavic peasant woman. She was so unlike Ivria that for a moment he had difficulty remembering what his connection was with this woman. His daughter had had her hair cut boyishly short, bristly like a hedgehog, as though to defy him. She did not ask what he thought, and Yoel decided not to say a word this time either. When they were both indoors, Yoel went over to the car, which Avigail had parked sloppily, started it, reversed out of the drive, turned around at the bottom of the street, and backed into the drive so that the car now stood precisely in the center of the carport, facing the street, ready to go. He stood for a few minutes at the gate of his house as though waiting to see who else would turn up. Softly he whistled an old tune. He could not remember precisely where it came from but he vaguely remembered that it was from a well-known musical, and he turned to go indoors to ask but recalled that Ivria was not here and that was why they were here. Because for a moment it had not been clear to him what he was actually doing in this strange place.
By now it was seven o'clock. Time for a brandy. Tomorrow, he reminded himself, was another day. Enough.
He went inside and had a leisurely shower. Meanwhile his mother-in-law and his mother prepared the supper. Netta was reading in her room and did not join them. Through her closed door she answered that she would eat something later.
By half past seven the dusk was beginning to spread. Shortly before eight he went outside to lie on the glider, clutching a transistor radio and a book and the new reading glasses that he had been using for a few weeks now. He had chosen a pair of ridiculous round black-framed glasses that made him look like an elderly French priest. In the sky strange reflections were still flickering, the last remnant of the day that was ending, while a cruel red moon suddenly rose beyond the citrus grove. Opposite, behind the cypress trees and tiled roofs, the sky reflected the glare of the lights of Tel Aviv and for a moment Yoel felt that he must get up and go there now, right away, to bring his daughter back. But she was in her room. The light of her bedside lamp shining through her window into the garden cast a shape onto the lawn, which Yoel, contemplating it for several minutes, attempted in vain to define. Perhaps because it was not a geometric shape.
The mosquitoes were beginning to bother him. He went indoors, remembering to take with him the transistor, the book, the round black-framed glasses, aware that he had forgotten something but unable to recall what it was.
In the living room, still barefoot, he poured himself a brandy and sat down with his mother and his mother-in-law to watch the nine o'clock news. It would be possible to sever the predator from its metal base with a single moderate jerk, and so, if not to decipher, at least to silence it, but afterward, he knew, he would have to mend it. And that he could do only by drilling into the paw and putting a screw through it. Perhaps it would be better not to touch it.
He stood up and went out onto the terrace. Outside the crickets were already chirruping. The breeze had dropped. Choruses of frogs filled the grove down the street, a child was crying, a woman laughed, a mouth organ spread sadness, water roared in a bathroom. The houses had been built very close together and the gardens between them were small. Ivria had had a dream: when she completed her thesis and Netta finished school and Yoel was discharged from the service, they could sell the apartment in Talbiyeh and the grandmothers' apartment in Rehavia and buy themselves a house at the edge of a village in the Judaean Hills, not too far from Jerusalem. It had to be an end house; that was important. So that at least on one side the windows would look out only onto wooded hills with no sign of life. Now he had managed to realize at least some of the components of this plan. Even though the two apartments in Jerusalem had been rented, not sold. The income was sufficient to pay the rent of this house in Ramat Lotan, and there was even a little to spare. There was also his monthly pension and the old ladies' savings and their National Security money. And there was Ivria's inheritance too, an extensive plot of land in the township of Metullah on which Nakdimon Lublin and his sons grew fruit, and had recently also built a small guesthouse. Every month they transferred a third of the proceeds to his account. It was among those fruit trees that he had first had Ivria, in 1960, when he was a soldier who had lost his way on an orienteering exercise during a section commander's training course and she was a farmer's daughter two years older than he who had gone out in the dark to turn off the irrigation taps. Both of them were startled, but, total strangers to each other, they had barely exchanged ten words in the darkness before their bodies suddenly clung, groping, rolling in the mud fully dressed, panting, burrowing into each other like a pair of blind puppies, hurting each other, finishing almost before they had begun and then fleeing almost without a word and going their separate ways. And it was also there among the fruit trees that he had had her for the second time, when, as though bewitched, he had returned to Metullah a few months later and lain in wait for her for two nights by the irrigation taps, until they met and fell on each other again and he asked for her hand and she said, Are you out of your mind. After that they used to meet at the cafeteria in the bus station at Kiryat Shmonah and make love in an abandoned tin shack he had discovered in a place where there had once been an immigrant transit camp. After six months or so she gave in and married him without reciprocating love but devotedly, honesdy, determined to give her full share and to try hard to give more. They were both capable of compassion and gentleness. When they made love they no longer hurt each other but strove to be attentive and generous. Teaching and learning. Getting close. Not pretending. Yet there were times, even after ten years, when they made love again fully dressed in some field in Jerusalem, on the hard earth in places from which they could see only stars and shadows of trees. So whence this feeling that had been with him all evening that he had forgotten something?
After the news he tapped gently on Netta's door again. There was no answer, so he waited and tried again. Here too, as in Jerusalem, it was Netta who had been given the master bedroom with its double bed. Here she had hung her pictures of poets and installed her musical scores and vases of thistles. It was he who had decided on this arrangement, because he had difficulty getting to sleep in a double bed, whereas it was good for Netta, with her condition, to sleep on a wide bed.
The two grandmothers had settled into the two children's bedrooms, which were joined by a communicating door. And he had taken for himself the room at the back of the house that had been Mr. Kramer's study. There was a Spartan sofa bed and a desk and a picture of the graduation parade of the Armored Corps School, class of '71, with tanks drawn up in a semicircle and colorful pennants on the ends of their antennas. There was also a photograph of the landlord in uniform, wearing the bars of a captain, shaking hands with the Chief of Staff, David Elazar. In the bookcase Yoel found some books in Hebrew and English on business management, commemorative picture books of the victories, a Bible with Cassuto's commentary, a set of the World of Learning, the memoirs of Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan, travel guides from several countries, and a whole shelf of thrillers in English. In the built-in wardrobe, he hung up his clothes and some of Ivria's, whatever he had not donated after her death to the leper hospital next to their apartment in Jerusalem. He put his safe in this room too, without bothering to fix it into the floor, because there was almost nothing left in it now. when he retired from the service he had been careful to return the guns and the rest of the stuff to the office. Including his own handgun. The lists of telephone numbers he had destroyed. Only the town plans and his real passport remained, for some reason, locked in the safe.
He knocked a third time and, receiving no answer, he opened the door and went in. His daughter, angular, gaunt, her hair cropped almost to the skull, with one of her legs dangling to the floor as though she meant to stand up, exposing her bony knee, was lying asleep with her open book concealing her face. He carefully removed the book. He managed to take off her glasses without waking her, folded them, and put them down on the bedside table. They had transparent plastic frames. Gently, very patiently, he raised the dangling leg and laid it straight on the bed. Then he covered the frail, angular body with a sheet. He lingered for a moment to inspect the pictures of poets on the wall. Amir Gilboa offered him the ghost of a smile. Yoel turned his back and put out the light and left the room. As he did so he heard her drowsy voice in the darkness. She said: "Turn the light out, for God's sake." And although there was no light left in the room to turn out, Yoel did not remonstrate, but soundlessly pulled the door to behind him. Only then did he remember what it was that had been bothering him vaguely all evening: when he had stopped clipping the hedge and gone out for his walk, he had left the garden shears outside on the edge of the lawn. It would not do them any good to be out all night in the dew. He put his sandals on and went out into the garden and saw a pale ring around the full moon, whose color now was not purply red but silvery white. He could hear the chorus of crickets and frogs from the direction of the citrus grove. And the bloodcurdling shriek that burst simultaneously from every television set on the street. Then he noted the swish of sprinklers and the hum of distant traffic on the main road and a door slamming in one of the other houses. Quietly he said to himself, in English, the words he had heard from his neighbor: "Tough life, huh?" Instead of going back indoors he put his hand in his pocket. Because he found the keys there he got into the car and drove off. When he returned at one o'clock in the morning the street was quiet and his house too was dark and silent. He got undressed and lay down, put on the stereophonic earphones, and until two or half past listened to a sequence of short baroque pieces and read a few pages of the unfinished thesis. The three Brontë sisters, he discovered, had had two older sisters, who both died in 1825. There was also a consumptive, alcoholic brother by the name of Patrick Branwell. He read until his eyes closed. In the morning it was his mother who went out to pick up the morning paper from the garden path and put the shears back in their place in the shed.