When she was older, Yoel started to take his daughter with him on long journeys over the detailed world map he had bought in London and hung on the wall above her former bed. When they reached Amsterdam, for example, he had an excellent street plan that he opened out on the bed so as to take Netta to the museums, to sail down the canals, and to visit the other attractions. From there they went on to Brussels or Zurich or sometimes as far afield as Latin America.
So it was until one day, after a short attack in the hall on the evening of Independence Day, Ivria managed to beat him to it; she darted up to the girl almost before she opened her eyes. For an instant Yoel was terrified that she would hit her again. But Ivria, calmly and solemnly, merely picked the girl up in her arms and carried her to the bath. Which she filled with water. And the two of them locked themselves in and had a bath together for nearly an hour. Maybe Ivria had read something of the sort in the medical literature. Throughout those long years of silence Ivria and Yoel had never stopped reading medical material on subjects related to Netta's problem. Without talking about it. They would silently deposit clippings from the medical pages of the newspapers, articles that Ivria had photocopied in the university library, medical journals that Yoel bought on his trips, on each other's bedside tables. They always left these documents in sealed brown envelopes.
From then on, after each attack Ivria and Netta shut themselves away in the bathroom. The bath became a sort of heated swimming pool for them. Through the locked door Yoel could hear giggles and sounds of splashing. That was the end of the cruises in the bed-linen chest and the flights over the world map. Yoel did not want any quarrels. All he wanted in his home was peace and quiet. He began to buy her dolls of all the nations in traditional costume in airport souvenir shops. For some time he and his daughter were partners in this collection, and Ivria was forbidden to so much as dust the shelves. So the years went by. From about the fourth grade Netta began to read a lot. Dolls and towers of dominoes no longer interested her. She excelled in her schoolwork, especially in arithmetic and Hebrew, and later in literature and mathematics. And she collected sheet music, which her father bought for her on his trips abroad and her mother at shops in Jerusalem. She also collected dried thistles as she wandered in the wadis in summer, and she arranged them in vases in the double bedroom, which continued to be her room even after Ivria left it and migrated to the living-room sofa. Netta had hardly any girlfriends, either because she did not want any or because of rumors about her condition. Even though the problem never occurred at school, or in the street, or in other people's homes, but only within their own four walls.
Every day, after doing her homework, she would lie down on her bed and read until supper, which she was in the habit of eating alone whenever she felt like it. Then she would return to her room and lie down and read on the double bed. For a time Ivria tried to wage a campaign about the time she turned her lights out. Eventually she gave up. Sometimes Yoel would wake up at some indeterminate hour of the night, grope his way to the refrigerator or the bathroom, and be drawn half-asleep toward the strip of light that filtered under Netta's door, but he chose not to approach. He would patter to the living room and sit for a few minutes in an armchair facing the sofa where Ivria was sleeping.
When Netta reached the age of puberty her doctor asked them to send her to a therapist. Who after a while requested to see both parents together and then each of them separately. Under her guidance both Ivria and Yoel were compelled to give up spoiling the girl after her attacks. That was the end of the ceremony of cocoa-without-the-skin and there were no more joint mother-daughter bathing sessions. Netta started to help sometimes, unenthusiastically, with the housework. She no longer welcomed Yoel with his slippers in her hand, and she stopped making her mother up before they went out to the cinema. Instead they began to have weekly staff meetings in the kitchen. At the same period Netta began spending long hours at her grandmother's apartment in Rehavia. For some time she persuaded Lisa to dictate her memories to her: she bought a special notebook and used a little tape recorder that Yoel had brought back from New York for her. Then she lost interest and dropped the project. Life calmed down. In the meantime Avigail too moved to Jerusalem. For forty-four years, ever since she left her birthplace, Safed, to marry Shealtiel Lublin, Avigail had lived in Metullah. There she had brought up her children and taught arithmetic in the primary school, lending a hand with the chickens and the fruit and vegetables, and reading nineteenth-century travel books in the evenings. After she was widowed she had volunteered to look after the four sons of her elder child, Nakdimon, who was widowed himself a year after she was.
Now her grandsons had grown up and Avigail had decided to start a new life. She rented a small apartment in Jerusalem, not far from her daughter, and enrolled for a BA in Jewish Studies at the university. It was the same month that Ivria resumed her studies and began her MA thesis on the Shame in the Attic. Sometimes they would meet for a light lunch at the cafeteria in the Kaplan Building. Sometimes the three of them, Ivria, Avigail, and Netta, would go out together to a literary evening. If they went to the theater, Lisa joined them too. Eventually Avigail decided to leave her rented studio and move in with Lisa in her two-room apartment in Rehavia, about a quarter of an hour's walk from their children's home in Talbiyeh.