At the end of May the very same cat had another litter of kittens on the same old sack in the garden shed. There was a fierce quarrel between Avigail and Lisa; they did not speak to each other for five days, until Avigail nobly undertook to apologize to Lisa, not because she admitted she was in the wrong, but purely out of consideration for Lisa's condition. Lisa in her turn consented to a truce, but not before she had a slight attack and was taken to Tel Hashomer Hospital for two days. Although she did not say it, and even said the contrary, it was clear that she believed the attack had been caused by Avigail's cruelty. The middle-aged doctor took Yoel into the consulting room and told him that he agreed with Dr. Litwin's opinion that there was a certain, not very significant, deterioration. But Yoel had long since despaired of understanding their language. The two old ladies, after their reconciliation, resumed their joint voluntary activities in the mornings as well as their evening yoga classes, and they also took on a new involvement, with the Brother to Brother Association.
Then, in early June, right in the middle of the matriculation examinations, Netta and Duby moved together into the rented room in the penthouse apartment on Karl Netter Street. One morning the closet in the master bedroom was empty, the pictures of poets were gone from the walls, Amir Gilboa's skeptical smile stopped provoking in Yoel a constant urge to repay the face in the picture in its own coin, and the collections of thistles and sheet music had vanished from the shelves. If he had trouble sleeping at night and he found himself making his way to the kitchen in search of a glass of cold milk, he was reduced to drinking it standing up and going right back to bed. Or picking up the big flashlight and going outside to see how his plants were growing in the dark. After a few days, when Duby and Netta had settled in, Yoel, Lisa, and Avigail were invited to see the sea from their window. Krantz and Odelia came too, and when Yoel happened to see, under a vase, the check that Krantz had left for Duby, in the sum of two thousand shekels, he locked himself in the bathroom for a moment and wrote a check made out to Netta for three thousand and slipped it underneath Krantz's when no one was looking. Later that afternoon, when he got home, he moved his clothes, papers, and bedding from the stiflingly small study to the empty master bedroom, which also had the benefit of air-conditioning, like the grannies' bedrooms. The unlocked safe was left behind in Mr. Kramer's study. It did not make the move with him to his new bedroom.
In the middle of June he learned that Ralph had to return to Detroit in the early autumn but that Annemarie had not yet made up her mind. Give me another month or two, he said to the brother and sister, I need a little more time. He could barely conceal his surprise when Annemarie replied coolly, Sure, you can decide whatever you like whenever you like, but then I have to ask myself if I am interested in you, and if so, in what capacity. Ralph is dying for us to get married and then to adopt him as our child. But I'm not so sure right now that it's my cup of tea, a setup like that. And you know, Yoel, you're the opposite of a lot of men: you're very considerate in bed but out of it you're rather boring. Or else you're beginning to find me a little boring. And you know that for me the most precious man is Ralphie. So let's both give it some more thought. And then we'll see.
It was a mistake, thought Yoel, to see her as a child-woman. Even though she, poor thing, obediently acted out the role that I imposed on her. And now it turns out that she's really a woman-woman. Why is it that this realization makes me recoil? Is it really too difficult to reconcile desire with respect? Is there really a contradiction between the two, which is why I could never have had that Eskimo mistress? Maybe, in point of fact, I was lying to Annemarie, without lying to her. Or else she was lying to me. Or we both were. Let's wait and see.
Sometimes he remembered how he had received the announcement that winter night in Helsinki. When precisely did it begin to snow? How he broke his promise to the Tunisian engineer. How he disgraced himself by failing to notice whether the cripple was coming toward him in a motorized wheelchair or whether there was someone pushing him: he had made a fatal and irreparable slip by failing to discover who, if anyone, was moving the wheelchair. Only once or twice are you granted a special moment that everything else depends on, the moment for which you have been trained and prepared throughout those years of activity and cunning, a moment that might allow you, if you seize it, to discover something about the matter without knowledge of which your whole life is merely a sterile sequence of arrangements, organization, evasions, and troubleshooting.
Sometimes he thought about his eye fatigue and attached to it the blame for that missed opportunity. About why he had stumbled for two blocks in the snow that night instead of simply phoning from his hotel room. And how the snow showed blue and pink like a skin disease wherever the glow of the street lamps fell on it. And how he could have lost the book and the scarf, and what foolishness it was to shave while climbing Mount Castel in Le Patron's car, merely to arrive home without stubble. If he had insisted, if he had been really stubborn, if he had had the courage to risk a fight, even a rift, Ivria would probably have given up and agreed to name the child Rakefet. Which was the name he had wanted. On the other hand, there are times when you have to give up; Not every time, though. How much, then? What is the limit? "A good question," he suddenly said aloud, as he put down the hedge clippers and wiped away the sweat that was running into his eyes from his forehead. His mother said: "There you go again, Yoel, talking to yourself. Like an old bachelor. You will end up going mad if you don't do something with your life. Or else you'll be sick, heaven forbid, or you'll start to pray. The best thing is, you should go into business. For business you do have some talent, and I give you a little money to get started. Should I bring you some soda water from the refrigerator?"
"Idiot," Yoel said suddenly, not to his mother, but to Ironside, who had burst into their garden and started to run around ecstatically, describing rapid loops on the lawn, as though the joy-producing sap had overflowed inside him. "Silly dog! Get away with you!" And to his mother he said:
"Yes. If it's not too much trouble, get me a big glass of ice-cold soda. Better still, bring the bottle out here. Thanks." And he went on clipping.
In the middle of June too, Le Patron telephoned: Not to tell Yoel what had come to light about the disaster in Bangkok, but to ask after Netta. No difficulties, he trusted, about her call-up? Had she had any more medical examinations recently? At the recruiting center, for example? Should we—htat is to say, should I—get in touch with the manpower branch of the military? Well, do you mind telling her to get in touch with me? At home, in the evening, not at the office. I've had a thought about giving her something to do here. In any case, I'd like to see her. Will you tell her that?
Yoel nearly said, without raising his voice, Go to hell, Cordovero. But he controlled himself and refrained. He chose to replace the receiver without saying a word. Then he poured himself a brandy, followed by another, though it was only eleven o'clock in the morning. Maybe he's right—that I'm just a refugee kid, nothing but soap fodder, and they rescued me and created a state and built this and that, and even took me into the heart of the heart. But he and they will not be satisfied with less than my whole life, with everybody's whole life, including Netta's, and I'm not giving them that. And that's flat. If your whole life is devoted to the sanctity of life, then that's not life, it's death.
At the end of June, Yoel ordered garden lighting and a solar water heater, and at the beginning of August, even though negotiations with Mr. Kramer, the El A1 manager in New York, were still under way he hired workmen to widen the living-room window that looked out on the garden. He bought a new mailbox. And a rocking chair to place in front of the television. And a second television set, with a small screen, for Avigail's room, so that the old ladies could spend the evening there while he and Annemarie made themselves a dinner a deux. Ralph had started visiting the Romanian neighbor, Ironside's master, who, Yoel discovered, was also some kind of chess genius. Or the Romanian neighbor would visit Ralph for a return game. Yoel examined all these things several times, and could find no error in them. By the middle of August he knew that what he could get from selling the apartment in Talbiyeh would be almost exactly enough to buy Kramer's house in Ramat Lotan, provided the man agreed to sell it. Meanwhile he was beginning to behave proprietorially. Arik Krantz, whose duty it was to keep an eye on the house on behalf of Mr. Kramer, eventually found the courage to look Yoel in the eye and say: "Listen, Yoel, in a word, I'm your man, not his." As for the self-contained one-room apartment he had been thinking of renting, with a separate entrance and guaranteed privacy, so that he and Annemarie would have some space for themselves, he decided that he might not need it now after all, because Avigail had been invited to return to Jerusalem the following year to serve in a voluntary capacity as secretary of the Society for the Promotion of Tolerance. He put off the actual decision almost to the eve of Ralph's departure for Detroit. Maybe because one evening Annemarie said to him: Instead of all this, I'm going to Boston to lodge an appeal and put up one last fight for my daughters by my two lovely marriages. If you love me, why don't you go with me? You might even be able to help me. Yoel had not replied, but, as usual, had run his finger slowly between his neck and his shirt collar and held his breath for a while before releasing it slowly through a narrow gap between his lips.
"That's not easy."
And also:
"We'll see. I don't think I'll go." That night, when he woke up and padded toward the kitchen, he saw clearly before his eyes, in his mind, with all the details of the colors, an English country gentleman of a century earlier, slim, pensive, tramping in boots along a winding muddy path, holding a double-barreled shotgun, walking slowly, as though deep in thought, and running in front of him a flecked gundog, which suddenly stopped and looked up at its master with its doggy eyes so full of devotion, wonder, and love that Yoel was filled with pain, longing, the grief of eternal loss, because he realized that both the pensive man and his dog were now enclosed in earth and would remain so forever, and only the muddy path still wound to this day, empty of people, between gray poplars under a gray sky with a cold wind and a drizzle so fine it could not be seen, only felt. And in a moment the whole scene vanished.