As the festival of Hanukkah approached, Lisa made doughnuts and latkes, bought a new Hanukkah menorah and a pack of colored candles, and asked Yoel to find out the order of lighting the candles. When Yoel protested in astonishment, his mother, in the grip of a powerful emotion that almost made her shoulders shake, replied that always, every year, poor dear Ivria had wanted this, to celebrate the Jewish festivals a little according to the tradition, but you, Yoel, you were never at home, and whenever you were, you never let her say a word.
Yoel, taken aback, began to remonstrate with her, but for once his mother interrupted him and rebuked him forgivingly, in a tone of faint sadness: You always remember only what suits you.
To his surprise, Netta chose to take Lisa's side for once. She said:
"So what, if it makes somebody feel good. For all I care, you can light Hanakkuah candles or even bonfires for Lag B'Omer. Whichever." Just as Yoel was about to shrug and give in, Avigail stormed onto the battleground with fresh forces. She put her arm around Lisa's shoulder and said in her warm, patiently pedagogical voice:
"Excuse me, Lisa, but I am a little surprised at you: Ivria never believed in God, and she had no respect for him either. She could never tolerate all that religious ceremonial. We cannot understand what you are talking about all of a sudden."
Lisa, stubbornly repeating the expression "poor dear Ivria," fought pugnaciously for her view, with a ferocious expression on her face and a captiously sarcastic tone in her voice:
"You should all be ashamed of yourselves. It's not even a year yet since the poor dear died, and already I can see you want to kill her again."
"Lisa. Stop it. That's enough for today. Go and have a rest."
"All right then. I'll stop it. There's no need. She is not here any more and I'm the weakest one here, so all right. Let it be. I'll give in to you. Just like she always gave in about everything. Only don't you think we've forgotten already, Yoel, who didn't say kaddish for her. Her brother had to say it instead of you. Only from shame I thought I would die on the spot."
Avigail gently expressed an anxiety that since the operation, and of course because of it, Lisa's memory was going. These things did happen and the medical literature was full of examples. Even her specialist, Dr. Litwin, had said that there might be some mental changes. On the one hand, she couldn't remember where she'd just put her duster or where the ironing board was, and on the other hand, she could remember things that never happened. This religiosity must be yet another disturbing symptom.
Lisa said:
"Myself, I'm not religious. On the contrary. It revolts me. But poor dear Ivria always wanted to have a bit of tradition in the house and you always laughed in her face, and now you are spitting on her. Less than a year she's been dead and you're trampling on her grave already."
Netta said:
"I don't remember her as a religious freak. A bit spaced out maybe, but not religious. It could be my memory's gone too."
And Lisa:
"All right then, why not. So let them bring the biggest medical specialist and he can examine everybody one after the other and decide once and for all who is mental and who is normal and who is senile already and who wants to banish the memory of poor dear Ivria out of this house."
Yoel said:
"That's enough. The three of you. We're through now. If it goes on like this they'll have to call in the border patrol."
Avigail remarked sweetly:
"In that case, I give in. There's no need to quarrel. Let it be as Lisa wishes. Let her have her candles and her unleavened bread. In her present condition we must all give in to her."
So the argument was brought to an end and peace reigned until that evening. Then it became clear that Lisa had forgotten her original wish. She dressed up in her black velvet party dress and laid out her homemade doughnuts and latkes. But the menorah, unused, was silently placed on the shelf over the fireplace in the living room. Not far from the figurine of the tormented predator.
Three days later, on the same shelf and without asking anyone, Lisa suddenly placed a small photograph of Ivria that she had fitted in a dark wooden frame.
"So that we should remember her a bit," she said, "so that she should have some memorial in this house."
For ten days the photograph stood at the en of the shelf in the living room and none of them said a word. Through her glasses that suggested a stern family doctor of an earlier generation Ivria looked out of the photograph at her ruined Romanesque abbeys, which hung on the wall opposite. Her face looked even thinner than it had when she was alive, her skin fine and pale; her eyes behind her glasses were bright and long-lashed. In her expression in the photograph, Yoel deciphered, or thought he could decipher, an unlikely mixture of melancholy and slyness. Her hair streaming down over her shoulders had turned half gray. Her fading beauty still had the power to compel Yoel to avoid looking that way. Almost to avoid going into the living room. Several times he even missed the nine o'clock news. More and more he found himself glued to the biography of Chief of Staff Elazar that he had found in Mr. Kramer's bookcase. The details of the judicial inquiry fascinated him. He spent long hours shut in his room, bent over Mr. Kramer's desk, arranging various details on charts he had drawn on graph paper. He used the fine-nibbed pen, and derived a certain satisfaction from the need to dip it in the inkwell every ten words or so. Sometimes he imagined he had sniffed out a certain inconsistency in the findings of the Commission of Inquiry that had found the Chief of Staff guilty, even though he knew well that without access to the primary sources he could produce nothing more than guesses. Nevertheless, he strained to dismantle what was written in the book, down to the finest details, and then to piece them together again, first in one sequence and then in another. Facing him on the desk stood Mr. Kramer in his neatly pressed uniform adorned with badges of rank and decorations, his face radiant with self-satisfaction, clasping the hand of Lieutenant General Elazar, who looked tired and withdrawn, his attention held by something far beyond Kramer's shoulder. There were moments when Yoel imagined he could hear from the living room the strains of ragtime or quiet jazz. He did not hear it with his ears but through the pores of his skin. For some reason, the result was that he went often, almost every other evening, into the forests of Annemarie and Ralph's living room.
After ten days or so, since no one had said anything about the picture of Ivria that she had put up, Lisa placed next to it a photograph of Shealtiel Lublin, with his bushy walrus mustache and British policeman's uniform. It was the picture that had always stood on the desk of Ivria's study in Jerusalem.
Avigail knocked at Yoel's door. She entered and found him hunched over Mr. Kramer's desk. His priest's glasses lent him a scholarly or monkish air. He was copying key passages from the book about the Chief of Staff onto his grid.
"Sorry to intrude, but we must have a little talk about your mother's condition."
"I'm listening," said Yoel, putting his pen down on the sheet of paper and leaning back in his chair.
"We can't brush it aside. It would be quite wrong to pretend that she's entirely normal."
"Go on," he said.
"Haven't you got eyes, Yoel? Can't you see that she's getting more and more scatterbrained by the day? Yesterday she swept the garden path, and then she just went on and started sweeping the street. She was twenty yards from the gate before I stopped her and brought her back. If it hadn't been for me, she would have gone on sweeping all the way to the city center."
"Is it the pictures in the living room that are bothering you, Avigail?"
"It's not the pictures. It's everything. All sorts of things that you, Yoel, insist on not noticing. You insist on pretending that everything's entirely normal. Just remember that you've already made that mistake once before. And we all paid a heavy price for that."
"Go on," he said.
"Have you noticed what's been happening to Netta these last few days, Yoel?"
Yoel replied in the negative.
"I knew you hadn't. Since when have you noticed anybody aside from yourself? It saddens me to have to say that I am not in the least surprised."
"Avigail. What's the matter? Please."
"Ever since Lisa started, Netta hasn't set foot in the living room. I'm telling you that she's starting to go downhill again. And I'm not blaming your mother; she's not responsible for what she does; no, the person who's responsible, apparently, is you. At least that's what the whole world thinks. Only she didn't think so.
"All right," said Yoel, "we'll look into the matter. We'll appoint a commission of inquiry. But the best thing would be if you and Lisa simply patched up your differences and that's that."
"Everything is so simple with you," Avigail said in her headmistress's voice. Yoel interrupted her:
"Can't you see, Avigail, I'm trying to get on with some work."
"I'm so sorry," she said icily. "Don't mind me with my little nonsense." She left, closing the door gently behind her.
Sometimes, after a fierce argument, late at night, Ivria used to whisper to him: "But just remember that I understand you." What had she been trying to communicate to him with those words? What had she understood? Yoel knew very well that there was no way of knowing. Even though right now the question was more important to him than ever, was almost urgent. He was smitten with a sharp longing for the cool touch of her fingers across his naked back and he also yearned to enfold those fingers in his clumsy hands and try to warm them, like reviving a frozen chick. Was it really only an accident? He almost jumped into the car and rushed straight to Jerusalem, to the block of apartments in Talbiyeh to inspect the electric wiring inside and outside, in order to decipher each minute, each second, each movement of that morning. But in his thoughts the block of apartments seemed to be floating among the notes of the melancholy guitar of that Itamar or Eviatar, and Yoel knew that the sadness would be more than he could bear. Instead of driving to Jerusalem he went to the truffle- and mushroom-laden forest next door, to Annemarie and Ralph's, and after supper and a Dubonnet and a country-music tape, Ralph escorted him to his sister's bed and Yoel didn't care whether Ralph stayed or left and he slept with her that evening not for pleasure but for warmth and pity, like a father stroking away his daughter's tears.
When he got back after midnight the house was dark and quiet. For an instant he was alarmed by the silence, as though sensing the closeness of a calamity. All the doors were closed inside except the living room's. He went in and, switching on the light, discovered that the photographs had disappeared and so had the Hanukkah menorah. And he was alarmed, because for an instant he thought that the figurine was gone too. But no, it had merely been moved slightly. It was standing at the end of the shelf. Yoel, fearing its fall, replaced it gently in the middle of the shelf. He knew he ought to find out which of the three had removed the pictures. And he knew that that investigation would not take place. Next morning at breakfast not a word was said about the disappearance of the photographs. Nor during the following days. Lisa and Avigail had made their peace again and went out together to the local keep-fit class and to meetings of the macramé circle. Sometimes they remarked sarcastically and in unison on Yoel's absentmindedness or on his never doing anything from morning to evening. Netta went out in the evenings to the Cinémathèque or the Tel Aviv Museum. Sometimes she went window-shopping to pass the time between two films. As for Yoel, he was compelled to drop his little investigation into the affair of the condemnation of Chief of Staff Elazar, even though he now had a strong suspicion that something had gone wrong with the proceedings at the time and that there had been a serious miscarriage of justice. But he recognized that without access to the actual evidence and the classified sources it would be impossible for him to discover how the blunder had occurred.
Meanwhile the winter rains had started up again, and one morning, as he went out to pick up the newspaper from the garden path, he found the cats on the kitchen veranda playing with the stiff corpse of a small bird which had died, apparently, of the cold.