On the television news there was a detailed report on a national strike in the hospitals. Old people and chronic invalids were shown lying on urine-soaked beds, and the camera dwelt on signs of filth and neglect all around. One old woman was moaning continuously in a shrill monotonous voice, like a wounded puppy. A feeble, bloated old man, who looked as though he would burst from the pressure of the fluids building up inside him, lay motionless, staring vacantly. There was also a shriveled old person, his skull and face covered with stiff bristles, looking exceedingly filthy, yet constantly grinning and giggling and brandishing at the camera a teddy bear whose belly was ripped open, its floppy innards of grubby cotton wool pouring out. Yoel said:
"Don't you think this country is going to the dogs, Netta?"
"Look who's talking," she said, pouring him a brandy. And went back to folding paper napkins into careful triangles and arranging them in an olivewood holder.
"Tell me," he said after taking a couple of sips, "if it was up to you, would you prefer to be exempted or to do your service?"
"But it is up to me. It's a question of telling them my story or not. Nothing will show up in the physical."
"So what will you do? Will you tell them or won't you? And what'll you say if I tell them? Just wait a minute, Netta, before you say 'Suit yourself.' The time has come to find out for once what suits you. You know I could fix the whole business up for you with a couple of phone calls, either way. So let's find out what you want. Though I'm not saying that what you want is necessarily what I'll do."
"You remember what you said to me when Le Patron was putting pressure on you to go away for a few days to save the Homeland?"
"I said something. Yes. I believe I said I'd lost the ability to concentrate. Or something like that. But what's that got to do with it?"
"Tell me something, Yoel. What's biting you? Why are you beating around the bush? What difference does it make to you whether I do my military service or not?"
"Just a moment," he said quietly. "Sorry. But let's hear the weather forecast."
The announcer said that tonight would see the end of the letup in the winter rains. A new trough of low pressure would reach the coastal plain before dawn. The rain and wind would resume. In the inland valleys and on the highlands there was a risk of frost. And now two final news items: An Israeli businessman has lost his life in an accident in Taiwan. His next of kin have been informed. And in Barcelona a young monk has burned himself to death to protest the increasing violence in the world. And that's all for tonight.
Netta said:
"Listen. I can be out of the house by the summer even without going into the army. Or even earlier."
"Why? Are we short of rooms?"
"So long as I'm in the house, could be you've got some problem about bringing the woman next door here? Or her brother?"
"Why should I have a problem?"
"How should I know? Thin walls. It's the same with the wall between us and them—this wall, here—it's as thin as paper. My last exam is on the twentieth of June. After that, if you like, I can rent a room in town. And if you're in a hurry I can do it sooner."
"That's out of the question," said Yoel, in the tone of cool, tender cruelty he had used at times in his work to nip in the bud any spark of malice in his interlocutor. "Full stop." But as he spoke the words he had to struggle to release the sudden grip of rage in his chest, a feeling such as he had not experienced since Ivria went away.
"No rented room. Forget it. That's that."
"You mean you won't give me the money?"
"Netta. Let's be logical. First, because of your condition. Second, when you start at the university we're just around the corner from the campus here, so why should you drag yourself all the way from the center of town?"
"I can pay for a room myself. You wouldn't have to finance me."
"How?"
"Le Patron is nice to me. He's offered me a job in your office."
"I wouldn't count on it."
"And anyway, Nakdimon is holding lots of money for me until I'm twenty-one, and he's told me he couldn't care less about starting to let me have it right away."
"I wouldn't bank on that either, Netta, if I were you. Anyway, who said you could talk to Lublin about money?"
"Hey, why are you staring at me like that? Take a look at yourself. You look like a killer. After all, I'm only trying to clear out for you. So you can start living."
"Look here, Netta," Yoel said, attempting to inject into his voice a measure of intimacy he was not feeling, "about the woman next door. Annemarie. Let's say—"
"Let's say nothing. The most pathetic thing to do is have it off over there and then come running home to explain. Like your friend Krantz."
"OK. All there is to it really is—"
"All there is to it really is, just let me know when you need the room with the double bed. That's all. Who on earth bought these napkins? Must have been Lisa. Look, how kitsch. Why don't you lie down for a while, take your shoes off; there's a new British series starting in a few minutes. Something about the origins of the universe. Shall we give it a chance? When she moved into that study of hers in Jerusalem and all that, I got the idea it was because of me. But I was too young to move out on my own then. There's a girl in my class, Adva. At the beginning of July she's moving into a two-room apartment she inherited from her grannie. It's on a roof on Karl Netter Street. For a hundred and twenty dollars a month she'll rent me a room with a view of the sea. But if you're anxious for me to push off sooner than that, there's no problem. Just say, and I'll make myself scarce. I've switched on the TV. Don't get up. Two minutes till it starts. I feel like some cheese on toast with tomatoes and black olives. Shall I do some for you? One? Or two? Do you want some hot milk? Or an herbal tea? You got so sunburned today, you ought to drink plenty of liquids."
After the late news, when Netta had taken a bottle of orange juice and a glass and gone to her room, Yoel decided to arm himself with a large flashlight and check what was going on in the shed in the garden. For some reason he had a feeling the cats had moved in there again. But on the way, on second thought, he reasoned that it would be more logical to suppose that the mother had had another litter. The air outside was very cold and dry. In her bedroom, Netta was getting undressed, and Yoel could not banish from his mind the image of her angular body, which always looked hunched, strained, even neglected and unloved. Although there might well be a contradiction there. It was almost certain that no man, no ravenous youth, had ever set eyes on that pitiful body. Perhaps they never would. Even though Yoel reckoned that in another month or two, a year at most, that transmutation into a woman of which the doctors had spoken once to Ivria would take place. And then everything would change, and some broad hairy chest and muscular arms would come and take possession of her and that penthouse in Karl Netter Street, which Yoel that instant decided to go and check out for himself one of these days. Alone. Before he made up his mind.
So dry and crisp was the cold night air that it seemed it could be crumbled between the fingers with a faint, brittle sound. Which Yoel so longed for that for a moment he could somehow almost hear it. But apart from bugs that fled from his light, he discovered no signs of life in the shed. Just some vague sense that everything was not really awake. That he was walking around, thinking, sleeping, eating, "having it off" with Annemarie, watching television, working in the garden, putting up new shelves in his mother-in-law's bedroom, all in his sleep. That if he had any hope left of deciphering something, or at any rate of formulating a searching question, he must wake up at all costs. Even at the cost of a disaster. An injury. An illness. A complication. Something must come and shake him until he woke up. Thump and smash the soft, greasy jelly that had closed around him like a womb. Blind panic seized him and he almost leaped out of the shed into the darkness. Because the flashlight got left behind. On a shelf. Switched on. And Yoel was totally unable to force himself to go back inside and pick it up.
For a quarter of an hour or so he walked around the garden, around the house, feeling the fruit trees, treading down the soil in the flower beds, trying in vain the hinges of the gate in the hope that they would squeak and he would be able to oil them. There was no squeaking, so he resumed his wandering. Eventually he was struck by a decision: tomorrow, the day after, or maybe at the weekend, he would go into Bardugo's Nurseries at Ramat Lotan junction and buy some gladiolus and dahlia tubers and some sweet pea and snapdragon seeds and some chrysanthemum plants, so that when springtime came everything would flower again. He might erect a pretty wooden pergola over the place where the car stood, and train vines over it, instead of the ugly corrugated-iron roof supported on iron columns that had rusted and would go on rusting however much he repainted them. Perhaps he would take a trip to Qalqilya or Kafr Kassem, buy half a dozen huge pots and fill them with a mixture of red soil and compost and plant them with different varieties of geranium that would spill over and trail around them and blaze in a riot of brilliant color. The word "brilliant" once more afforded him a sort of vague thrill; he felt like someone who has despaired of some endlessly protracted dispute when suddenly his vindication arrives unshakably from some totally unexpected quarter. When the light finally went out behind Netta's shutter he drove to the seashore and sat at the wheel very close to the edge of the cliff to wait for the trough of low pressure that was creeping in off the sea and was due to hit the coastal plain tonight.