As for the pale cripple he might have seen twice in the street in Helsinki on the sixteenth of February, the day of Ivria's death, either he was born without limbs or it was in an accident that he lost his arms at the shoulder and his legs at the groin.
At quarter past eight in the morning, after taking Netta to school and Lisa to the physiotherapy center, and driving home and handing the car over to Avigail, Yoel shut himself in Mr. Kramer's study that served as his bedroom. He examined the question of the cripple again under a magnifying glass, under a focused beam of light; he carefully studied the plan of Helsinki, scrutinized his route from the hotel to his meeting with the Tunisian engineer at the railroad station, and he found no error. It was true that the cripple looked familiar to him. And it was true that during an operation it is your duty to stop everything while you discover the meaning of any familiar face you have seen, even if it is only vaguely familiar. But now, with careful hindsight, Yoel agreed with himself almost beyond any doubt that he saw the invalid in the street that day in Helsinki not twice but once only. His imagination had deluded him. Once again he broke his memory of that day into its smallest details, reconstructing the segments of time on a large sheet of squared paper that he ruled off into units of a quarter of an hour. He concentrated on this work until half past three in the afternoon, internalizing the plan of the city, working calmly and stubbornly, bent over the desk, straining to rescue one crumb after another from oblivion, to piece together the sequence of events and places. The smells of the city almost came back to him. Every couple of hours he made himself a cup of coffee. By midday the tiredness of his eyes had begun to impede his work, and he made use alternately of his Catholic priest's intellectual glasses and the pair that suggested a family doctor. Finally there began to emerge a working hypothesis that he could live with: at five past four, by the electric wall clock over the counter of a branch of the Nordic Investment Bank, he had changed eighty dollars and walked out onto the esplanade. Consequently the crucial time was limited to between four-fifteen and five-thirty. The place was, apparently, the corner of Marikatu and Kapitaninkatu, outside a large ochre building in the Russian style. He could visualize almost with certainty a newsstand nearby. That was where he had seen the poor wretch in the wheelchair. Who seemed familiar because he may have reminded him of a figure he had seen once in a museum; it might have been the one in Madrid, a portrait that had also seemed familiar to him at the time because it reminded him of a face he knew.
Whose face? Here there was a danger of slipping into a vicious circle. Best to concentrate. To return to Helsinki on the sixteenth of February and to hope that the logical conclusion was that it was apparently a case of a reflection of a reflection. Nothing more. Let us suppose a crescent moon is reflected on a patch of water. And let us say that the water projects the reflection of the moon onto a darkened window in a hut on the edge of the village. So it happens that the glass, even though the moon rises in the south and the window faces north, suddenly reflects something that is apparently impossible. But in reality it is reflecting not the moon-in-the-clouds but only the moon-in the-water.
Yoel asked himself whether this hypothesis could also help him in his present investigations; for example, in connection with the African beam guiding the migrating birds? Could a patient, protracted, systematic examination of a reflection of a reflection reveal a hint, a crack through which you could peer at something that was not accessible to us? Or was it, rather, the opposite: do the contours become fainter from reflection to reflection, as in a copy of a copy, the colors fading, the shapes becoming blurred, the whole being darkened and distorted?
One way or another, at least in the matter of the cripple, his mind was at rest for the time being. Only, he observed that most forms of evil are out of the question for somebody with no arms or legs. The invalid in Helsinki really did have the face of a girl. Or, rather, of something gentler still, gentler than a child, shining and wide-eyed as though he knew what the answer was, and quietly rejoiced over its unbelievable simplicity, though here it was, before your very eyes.