His mother said:
"In your blue shirt with the checks, you lost a button."
Yoel said:
"OK. I'll sew it on this evening. Can't you see I'm busy now?"
"You won't sew it on this evening, because I've already done it for you. I'm your mother, Yoel. Even if you've forgotten that a long time ago."
"That's enough."
"The same like you forgot her. Like you forget that a healthy young man needs to work every day."
"All right. Look. I've got to go now. Shall I bring your medicine out for you?"
"No, bring me some poison instead. Come. Sit next to me. Tell me something: where are you going to put me? Outside in the garden shed? Or in an old people's home?"
So he carefully put the pliers and the screwdriver down on the table, wiped his hands on the seat of his jeans, and after a moment's hesitation sat down on the end of the glider, next to her feet.
"Don't get worked up," he said. "It doesn't help you to get better. What's happened? Have you had another fight with Avigail?"
"What did you bring me here for, Yoel? What do you need me for at all?"
He looked at her and saw her silent tears. It was a mute, babylike weeping that took place only between her open eyes and her cheeks, without her making any sound, without her covering her face, without contorting her face into a crying expression.
"That's enough," he said. "Stop it. No one's going to put you anywhere. No one is abandoning you. Who on earth put that ridiculous idea in your head?"
"Anyway, you can't be so cruel as to do it."
"Do what?"
"Abandon your mother. Already you abandoned her when you were so big. When you started to run away."
"I don't know what you're talking about. I've never run away from you."
"All the time, Yoel. All the time running away. If I didn't grab first thing this morning your blue check shirt, even a button you wouldn't let your poor mother sew on for you. There's this story about little Yigor, who has a hunch growing on his back. Coconut. Don't interrupt me in the middle. Silly little Yigor starts to run to escape from his hunch what is growing on his back, and so he is running around all the time. Soon I will die, Yoel, and then afterward you'll want to ask me all sorts of questions. Wouldn't it be better you should start asking now already? Things what I know about you, nobody else knows."
So Yoel, by a concentrated effort of willpower, laid a broad, ugly hand on the skinny, birdlike shoulder. Just as in his childhood, disgust was mingled with compassion and other feelings, which he did not know and did not want to, and after a moment, in an invisible panic, he withdrew his hand and wiped it on his jeans. Then he stood up and said:
"Questions. What questions? Good. All right. I'll ask questions. But some other time, Mother. I haven't got time now."
Lisa said, with her voice and face suddenly old and shriveled, as though she were his grandmother or great-grandmother rather than his mother:
"All right then. Never mind. You go."
When he had gone a little way in the direction of the back garden, with a kind of internal wringing of hands, she added, with only her lips moving:
Toward the end of August it emerged that he could buy Kramer's house right away, but that he would have to add nine thousand dollars to the price Krantz would get for him for the apartment in Talbiyeh, which the heirs of their old neighbor Itamar Vitkin were interested in buying. He therefore made up his mind to go to Metullah and ask Nakdimon for this amount, either as an advance on his and Netta's share of the income from the property that Lublin had left them, or through some other arrangement. After breakfast he took his travel bag, which he had not used for a year and a half, down from the top shelf in the closet. He packed shirts and underwear and shaving things, because he thought that he might have to stay over in the old stone house at the northern end of the town if Nakdimon raised difficulties or placed obstacles in his way. Indeed, he almost discovered a desire to spend a night or two there. When he unzipped the side pocket of the bag, he found an oblong object and was startled for a moment; was it an old box of chocolates that he had absentmindedly left to rot there? Cautiously he pulled it out and found it was wrapped in yellowing newspaper. When he placed it gently on the table, he saw that it was a Finnish newspaper. After a moment's hesitation he decided to open it by a special method he had been taught during a course he had taken. But it turned out to be nothing more than Mrs. Dalloway. Yoel placed it on the bookshelf next to its double, which he had purchased in the shopping center in Ramat Lotan the previous August, erroneously supposing that this copy had been left behind in his hotel room in Helsinki. So it happened that he abandoned his intention of going to Metullah that day and contented himself with a telephone conversation with Nakdimon Lublin, who, after a moment, grasped the sum he was talking about and the purpose for which he required it and at once interrupted Yoel with the words: "No problem, Captain. It'll be in your bank account in three days' time. I know the account number already."