I went out to the ploughed streets of Dolly City, to the indifferent streets, to the fountains pissing in an arc. I pulled down my pants and peed into the fountain, I spilled out whatever I had and made my contribution to the art of sculpture. When I was finished, I looked at the statue of the little boy. It was a boy of about four years old hugging a tree trunk. I touched the statue with my soft fingertips. Then I felt better and turned in the direction of the main post office on Allenby Street, where I found a letter sent by my son from his marine-combat academy.

Like his other letters, this one was a short missive of five lines at the most. He wrote that the Pacific Ocean, like a lot of other myths, was not pacific at all, but stormy, and the water was red with all the battles being fought there. Every two minutes they saw a booby-trapped dolphin, and schools of hungry sharks were chasing their ships. When it came to waging war, the French knew no bounds, just as they knew no bounds when it came to cooking themselves a good meal.

The boy was thrilled by the whole affair, it had completely gone to his head. He told me about all the different weapons. His letters suffered from a piratical incoherence, he jumped from subject to subject, his handwriting was sloppy, but at the same time as clear as daylight. It was often difficult to decipher his letters because some of them were stained with blood. He wrote to me on Pan-T notepaper, and this killed me. I racked my brains: what was the national airline’s real interest in teaching my son selected passages of battleship doctrine and brutal seamanship? What, in the name of all the years my father had devoted to the company, were they looking for in the sea? And why had they chosen my son? Why?

I didn’t believe they really wanted him to find them new destinations to fly to. Pan-T was full of workers who were dying for the chance to go abroad at the company’s expense. Workers much more qualified than my sister’s soldiers, who with all due respect, however battered they were, had never eaten chicken, rice, and carrots at the Pan-T canteen. They had never shown their name tags to the guard when they entered the company offices at the Ben Gurion Airport. They didn’t even have name tags.

I couldn’t phone Pan-T and ask them right out what they wanted with my son because all the public phones in Dolly City were out of order, apart from which I didn’t have a phone token. Phone tokens in Dolly City are rare, and there are people who are prepared to kill for one, on the chance that one fine day the phone booths might be fixed once and for all, and they would finally be able to make a single direct call.

I decided to beg for money. I thought that maybe someone would throw me a token by mistake, but in vain. Pennies and gobs of pustular spit were all I got for my pains. I realized that if I wanted a phone token, I would have to steal it. I picked the pockets of passersby left and right, but none of them had a token. Their pockets were full of used bus tickets and punched train coupons, but nothing else. I could, ostensibly, have gone to the Pan-T building on Ben Yehuda Street, or driven to the airport, banged on tables, done my own version of the Intifada, and demanded that somebody tell me what was going on here—but I wasn’t cut out for it. I could only do it by telephone, with twenty handkerchiefs to disguise my voice, and the option of disconnecting at any moment.

One day I read a short item in the newspaper to the effect that there were a lot of phone tokens in the women’s prison. The prisoners threaded them onto nylon strings and the prison authorities sent them to all kinds of international congresses, as if they were traditional works of art made by ancient Assyrian women, so and so years ago.

I went to the railway station, collected my instruments from my locker, and took an express streetcar to the Neve-Tirza prison. They put me in a glass cell and left me there for ten minutes while they ran all kinds of security tests on me, which reminded me vividly of that time I went to the Pan-T offices in Paris and asked them to move my flight back a few days.

When they’d finished with me, a buzzer sounded, and a warden, who actually seemed like a nice lady, came up to me in her uniform and asked me what I wanted. I said that I was a gynecologist, and I’d come to assist one of the prisoners give birth. I assumed that the statistical odds were overwhelmingly in favor of one of the prisoners or female wardens being in labor at that moment. In Dolly City female prisoners get mysteriously pregnant without leaving the prison walls, and nobody knows who knocked them up. I once read somewhere that it was the female wardens themselves who got the prisoners pregnant, but it never said how.

The nice warden led me into the prison and told me that all the women were doing time because they’d murdered their children, either through criminal neglect, insanity, or cold-blooded stoicism. From the way she spoke it appeared that child-murder in Dolly City was folklore, and she went on to ask me if I too had murdered my children, but I didn’t answer her. She inquired on tactfully, asking if any such thought had ever crossed my mind, and I nodded.

The eyes of the little murderesses stared at me as I passed them with my bag in my hand. Some of them swore at me, one of them begged me to give her an abortion. On principle, I wouldn’t have minded, but the warden told me that she wasn’t even pregnant, she was simply addicted to the anesthetic from all the abortions she had in the past.

On a disgusting bed in a stinking room, one leg here and one leg there, lay the prisoner. She cursed her mother and her father for copulating and bringing her into the world.

Things moved fast, and twelve hours later she gave birth to a son with his umbilical cord coiled round his neck. I wanted to release him, but his mother begged me to let him suffocate in peace, she’d already been sentenced to life anyway for murdering her six children.

The child changed color, and departed this world as he had come into it.

I sewed the lady up and casually asked the warden:

“Have you got a phone token?”

“A phone token?”

“You want a token?” I heard a male voice behind me. I turned round and saw a hermaphrodite.

“Yes,” I said.

“Where do you want to phone to?” inquired the warden who’d led me to the woman in labor.

“Out of town.”

“Quickly, okay?”

“Okay.”

I shall never forget the echo of her footsteps in the dim corridors of the prison. I looked right and left and said to myself, pay attention, Dolly, there’s always someone deeper in shit, so shut up and be grateful that you’re free to walk the streets instead of rotting here like this gang of lesbians. Suddenly the warden opened her mouth and gave out a few random bits of information, but I had no idea what to do with them. For example, she said that the prison wardens, including herself, were the daughters of old prisoners who’d managed to survive.

We went into the prison directress’s office. The walls were lined with monitors, incubators containing premature babies, and glass jars in which fetuses floated in formalin, just as I’d seen thirty-five years earlier in the Museum of Human Anatomy in Ramat-Gan.

On a black, peeling desk stood two horses of dull gold, rearing up on their hind legs in a dueling position, their forelegs locked. Next to them a black telephone, dating back from the sixties, stood silently.

“Hurry up,” my friend the warden urged me, “any minute now the directress will be coming out of the Jacuzzi with a white towel on her head and a white towel round her body.”

I dialed the number which was so deeply etched in my memory, and the switchboard operator answered: “Pan-T at your service, good afternoon.”

I didn’t open my mouth.

“Pan-T at your service, good afternoon.”

I put the receiver down on its cradle.

“Is there something wrong?” asked the warden.

Suddenly the prison directress emerged from the Jacuzzi with her two towels, just as my friend had warned me. She looked at me curiously.

“I’m looking for my roots,” I said quickly, “I mean, the roots of my child. It’s very probable that there’s a certain pilot whose daughter is my child’s real mother. The one who studied medicine at the Technion. I haven’t managed to verify that yet, I’ve been trying for thirteen years,” I said.

The directress let her towel drop to the floor, and hurriedly wrapped herself in a kimono.

“Sit down,” she said and indicated the rusty chair opposite her, and she sat down herself, her hair dripping.

“Most of my prisoners,” she said and wrung her hair, “are sure that their children aren’t theirs. That’s how they justify their murders. We work on them for years until they admit that they murdered their own children, and for years after that to convince them that it had nothing to do with mercy. Their guilt is really something else. The interesting thing is,” she stuck a menthol cigarette in her mouth and lit it, for a moment losing track of what she was saying, “what’s interesting is that even the women who perform abortions on themselves with knitting-needles are sure that it wasn’t theirs. Before they leave the prison—if they ever do—I send my prisoners to psychological treatment, to see if there are any dark corners left that need sweeping out. Everyone, in my humble opinion, before any turning point in his life, if he leaves a town, or a village, or a neighborhood, or a prison, or anything else, should examine himself thoroughly to see if he hasn’t got a few cobwebs somewhere, covering up a dirty secret code.”

She combed her hair, and braided it in a Japanese plait. Then she began putting on makeup, and I asked myself who she was dolling herself up for like this, who was going to fuck her tonight.

“Even if the child is mine,” I said, “it doesn’t solve the problem of who in Pan-T is pulling strings and why.”

“But it’s one step forward.” She stubbed out the half smoked cigarette in an ashtray. “Would you like me to find out for you?”

“Why should you do me such a service?”

“For no reason, I imagine. I do such things for fun, I like helping my fellow men to rehabilitate themselves. It’s my pleasure.”

“Do you have connections in Pan-T?”

“My stepmother, Roberta, works for the income tax authorities.”

“So?”

“She knows people from all the companies in the country.”

She made a series of phone calls but to no avail. In the meantime I drank coffee with sour milk, and eventually she apologized a thousand times and said that she felt she had misled me, that it made her feel terrible, and that she was going to give me two phone tokens, and hoped that I would forgive her for all the distress she had caused me. After I’d already gone, she called out and wished me good luck.

 

I walked the streets of Dolly City for a few hours, I ate eight grade F croissants, and sixty grade D wafers, and I was still hungry. I was dying for something sweet. I walked aimlessly, I didn’t know what to do with myself. The thirteen public phones I passed were all out of order, and the exact phrasing of the question I was supposed to ask Pan-T grew increasingly hazy in my mind. I knew that there was no point in my opening my mouth until I had things a bit more in focus.

Suddenly I saw my sister, the social worker, walking down the street with a train of battered children trailing behind her. From a distance I noticed her agitation. My little sister was amazingly like my father—despair oozed from their every step, like wax dripping from a candle.

She recognized me and quickened her pace, she had bad news clearly written on her face. The closer she came to me, the worse the catastrophe grew. Her whole face twitched convulsively, and as we reached each other my heart pounded ferociously.

“What…what…what’s wrong? Where’s my child?”

“He’s fine. It’s Mother.” She wiped away a tear. “Dead?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Do you think I’d make up a thing like that?”

“Have you buried her?”

She sighed.

“Don’t we all bury our parents? We ourselves grind them into dust! Children kill their parents, and the parents, in exchange, beat them bloody.”

She stroked a battered child with cigarette scars and an iron-shaped burn across his face.

“Where have you been?” she said in a different tone and narrowed her eyes to white slits. “Your son wrote to me and said that you don’t answer his letters. And our mother, poor thing, was looking for you. She wanted you to go and have an electrocardiogram. She was hysterical, she thought there was something wrong with your heart. Is it so hard for you to get hold of a phone token?”

I clutched the two phone tokens in my hand and kept quiet. I assumed that my sister had opened our mother’s will. She’d probably left half her property to my son, when he turned eighteen, on condition that he didn’t, on any account, live in Dolly City, but only in Tel Aviv, in north Tel Aviv, nowhere south of Bugrashov Street at least, otherwise he wouldn’t get a penny. The other half she donated to my sister’s shelter.

My sister had a sealed airmail envelope in her hand.

I grabbed the envelope. It said “to be opened after my death.” She was dead, so I opened it, and found an open check made out to Pan-T.

“Oh my God,” I said.

In the letter attached to the check she wrote in French that for years she’d known that the Pan-T airline company was plotting against me, but she couldn’t say anything, because she didn’t have enough money. Now that she’d died and donated her body to science (Oh my God, she’d donated her body to science!), she was ready to donate some of her money so that I could pay Pan-T back for all those free flights I’d taken when my father was alive. As long as the debt was still standing, she wrote, the company would go on persecuting me, and they’d never let me be. She concluded her letter with a bundle of abusive insults for a certain accountant who’d confronted my father once in their apartment building’s stairwell, and instructed me again to add up all the times that I and the rest of the family had traveled abroad at the expense of the airline, as part of the benefits bestowed upon company employees and their families, add interest in arrears, and write the sum on the check.

I didn’t have the least desire to return the money, but my mother was no longer alive for me to argue with her.

 

I managed to find a functioning telephone, and with my precious token I called one of the top directors of Pan-T and asked him straight out to what extent the company was involved in my son’s naval training, and what their real interest was in making him a seaman.

He asked to me wait and accessed my son’s personal file on the Pan-T database. Yes, my son had a file in the Holy of Holies, the central computer room in the company offices at B.G. Airport. For twenty minutes he kept me waiting on the line until he informed me that he was unable to access the details because his code wasn’t confidential enough. I asked him if by any chance his seventeen-year-old daughter had become unintentionally pregnant, and he admitted that this was the case. I told him that I would perform a pirate abortion on her, on the condition that he supplied me with potentially relevant information. We arranged to meet at the dead of night in the underground parking lot of the building where I used to live. His daughter was already in the car, her legs open, and there was nothing I could do but confirm her death. Since she was dead, her father refused to give me the confidential information, but my blood was boiling and I screamed into the dark, dank parking lot:

“I’ve had it already with all this philanthropic mystery! Who’s behind it?”

The man did not reply, he was looking at his daughter’s purple face. I shook him the way you shake somebody when you just can’t take it any more—he was really getting on my nerves.

“Out with it, or I’ll smash your face in,” I said.

“Give me five minutes,” he said eventually and went to hide behind one of the parking lot’s numbered pillars, as if I couldn’t see him, where he said something into a two-way radio. A few minutes later he came up to me and said dryly:

“The man, the connecting link, the person in charge of Pan-T business in Dolly City, is at this moment playing squash in the Dolly City Squash and Billiard Club.”

I put my hands in my pockets and broke into a quick run in the direction of the club, which was located in the city’s aesthetic quarter.

At the entrance to the club they asked me if I was a Kurd.

“Why?” I asked.

“No Kurds allowed.”

 

One of the experiences provided by life on this planet is the “floor-rag effect.” Sometimes you see something in the distance, from a certain crooked angle, and it looks like an eagle, like a stuffed God-knows-what, like a sketch of the devil’s insides—but when you come closer you see that it’s only a floor-rag or a shred of rubber tire or a squashed, rotten lump of cardboard. In Dolly City it often happens that you think something is something, and in the end it turns out that it isn’t.

To someone like me, who can be driven crazy by the fact that parallel lines meet in infinity, because it’s beyond her comprehension, someone who thinks it makes sense to call the fire brigade nonstop because of the mere possibility that the house might burn down, someone who hears the alert and the all-safe signals sounding simultaneously—encountering the floor-rag effect is routine, and she experiences it dozens of times a day.

Over the course of the years, I gained experience. I learned that in most cases there was no real point in trying to unravel the true nature of the mystery. With the passing of yet more years, I developed a firmer grip on reality, and often I no longer bother to come closer in order to get to the bottom of things. In other words, I don’t advance towards the eagle, but simply say to myself: There you are, eagle or old floor rag—and continue on my way.

When I went into the squash club, I knew in advance that you couldn’t even call it unraveling a mystery, but at the most checking something out, on the scale of checking out the state of your bank balance. I wasn’t mistaken, and as I got closer it became clear: indeed, a floor-rag.

The Third Man was a lawyer, an old and conceited friend of my parents, Egyptian in origin like them, and an ex-member of the same kibbutz that they were members of for a few months, when they first came to this country in the early fifties.

At that moment I felt so chagrined that I was no longer even interested in tying up the loose ends. What good will it do you? I asked myself. Sometimes just knowing some fact or other, even if that fact leads somewhere, is fifty times more depressing than not knowing it. It’s like the feeling you get when you’re forced to listen to something. In Dolly City people have understood this, and so they keep their big mouths shut, they spare each other their troubles—and rightly so!

 

Even though lawyers and doctors are more or less the same species—both of us belong to those concerned with the maintenance of the human race—I don’t like lawyers, or as my late mother used to say, I’m not in sympathy with them. To tell the truth, I loathe lawyers. All that act of theirs, with their black gowns as if they’re some kind of handsome vampires, knights of justice—as far as I’m concerned, you can shove it up your ass.

In Dolly City the lawyers aren’t made of rubber, or of chewing gum either—they’re just lawyers, and like lawyers everywhere they keep on saying, And inasmuch as…and inasmuch as…and it makes me sick. The way they build up a whole case on that and inasmuch as of theirs—it’s utterly nauseating. Those black cloaks of theirs and those casserole-dish hats on their heads are fifty times more ridiculous than any doctor’s white coat. As far as I’m concerned, a lawyer screwing a doctor is a horror movie. Him in his black gown, and her in her virginal white coat, they fuck, and it’s a chessboard. Ha, ha. Apart from which, with all those gowns and coats, how do they manage to penetrate each other at all? Ha.

The day before my father died, this lawyer came into his room in oncology at Ichilov, held his vein-riddled hand, and said to him:

“It’ll be all right, you’ll get better.”

“God is great,” replied my father, who’d never so much as glanced at the sky in his life, except when Pan-T planes were flying overhead. His loyalty to the national airline was sky-high—it broke all records. When a TWA plane flew overhead, or even an Arkia plane, he would sense, with a sixth sense, that it wasn’t one of ours, and wouldn’t throw it a glance. The calendars we had at home were always the huge colored ones printed by Pan-T. On the rear window of our green Fiat 127 my father stuck a sticker: Support Pan-T flights on the Shabbat. On the cupboard, where the china dolls acquired on family trips all over the world once stood, was a two-sided sign, with Pan-T in English on one side and Hebrew on the other.

My father was active in the union during the workers’ strikes. This man, who never opened his mouth at home except to say hello when he came in from work at a quarter to five, fought with the fervor of a militant revolutionary for the rights of the workers, who in the depths of their hearts despised him.

If he got a phone call at home, it was sure to be from Pan-T. My sister and I would watch him giving those people everything he had. It wasn’t a ritual, that whole Pan-T thing, far from it, it was in our blood, a matter of life and death. It’s no coincidence that we, my sister and I, both chose professions that demand self-sacrifice and total commitment. With my father it was out of idealism, with her it was out of altruism, and with me—out of madness.

The lawyer sat in a white towel-robe and asked me if I needed anything. I didn’t answer him, but my mind was working overtime. I guessed that during that last visit to my father the dying man had asked him to take charge of the education of my children, if and when I had any. Apparently he just didn’t trust me.

Like all my parents’ friends and relatives, the lawyer too had felt nothing but contempt for my way of life and my studies. He belonged to the large group of Egyptian Jews who refused to believe that I was a doctor, and who were convinced that for all eight years of my studies in Katmandu I’d been busy screwing everyone in town, or at least going down on them.

He lit a cigar as fat as his face and said that he was now at liberty to reveal to me: my father had not left all his money to the Society for the War against Cancer, but also to the naval training of my son, when and if he were born, and if it were a girl—to her training as a professional dancer. The lawyer said that at the time when he died, the airline company agreed—on condition that the family wouldn’t take my father’s compensation money at once—to invest the money on the stock market, take the profits for itself, and dole out the sums necessary to cover the expenses of the child’s education from time to time, as well as a token donation once a year on the annual fund-raising day of the Cancer Society. In other words, my father preferred to let Pan-T juggle his money, as long as it didn’t land in my lap. The dead man didn’t know that I’d become a doctor, and he’d kept me from getting my hands on the money.

I returned to the street, multiplying and dividing, extracting roots from all kinds of numbers, and getting more and more confused. My feet carried me to the Pan-T offices in Dolly City again. I went up to the accounting department and sat down with the clerk to calculate. We took the sum total of the compensation money that was composed of my father’s last salary times 150 percent, times thirty-two years that he worked for Pan-T, and added the small sum which I wrote on my mother’s blank check—the good woman hated open checks and I hurried to close it for her. The sum total, minus open brackets (a donation of fifty shekels a year to the Cancer Society, times fifty-six, my father’s age, plus the cost of Son’s education at the Academy for Brutal Seamanship, plus the cost of a simple fishing boat, for the purpose of ensuring his income, plus all the family’s free flights during the years of my father’s employment at Pan-T, close brackets), the sum total was…

The resulting sum was supposed to be invested in the stock market, with Pan-T acting as the broker—but in the end it came out minus a very large sum—in other words, I still owed them.

“Minus seventeen million five hundred and forty-six shekels,” said the clerk in the end.

“Are you sure?” I mumbled.

“There’s nothing in this world more decisive than numbers. A pistol with a nine-millimeter bullet is a pistol with a nine-millimeter bullet. There’s no two ways about it.”

Among my possessions was an old checkbook from the days when I had an account at the Bavly Housing Estate branch of the Discount Bank.

“Can you divide it into…three payments?”

She made a face, as if her father owned the company.

“What can I say,” she said, and I scribbled the sums on the checks and gave them to her.

When I walked away from the beige building I felt calm. Although the checks had nothing to back them up, it was all completely theoretical, I felt that at long last I’d been relieved of a heavy burden. I strolled over to the Yarkon River to go for a sail, and behind one of the eucalyptus trees I suddenly thought I saw my mother crying, but it was only an old scarecrow. When all was said and done, the woman had donated her body to science, not to me, I thought, trying to picture her face in my mind. In her last days her face was as furrowed as a field ravaged by some demented plough. All my madness was reflected in the old woman’s face.

For the first time since her death I felt something approaching sorrow. At the same time, I couldn’t stand the thought of some medical student digging into her appendix, but she asked for it—so she better enjoy it!

 

Time passed like it always does. First the years, then the months, the days, the hours, the minutes, and last but not least—the seconds. I was already resigned to living with this cancer I had in my soul, yes, you could certainly say that I was suffering from cancer of the soul, with possibilities multiplying inside me instead of cells, and parts of the whole turning into essences in and of themselves. True—and this must be said, there are things that are better said than left unsaid, you have to spew them out and not keep them bottled up—my mental state had improved since the period of my hospitalization. When I walked down the street, the path, or wherever, I no longer felt that I was insane, and I’d also learned to live with my fractured memory.

My only son was already fifteen, or so he claimed in his frequent letters. He also sent me Polaroid snapshots of himself waving the Israeli flag on the open sea, or standing to attention at morning roll call on the floating school. I shoved all the snapshots inside my locker at the railway station. Maybe one day, I said to myself, I’ll make him an album, who knows.

I could have been proud of him, his letters showed more than a spark of sanity. The boy was happy—he was chosen as outstanding cadet. I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel. I knew that life was tricky, it would outsmart you in a jiffy, you had to watch out for it—it could happen that after the kid was made outstanding cadet, he’d suddenly die of cancer, just like that, for the sake of nature’s equilibrium. I knew that nature had to go on, and that it didn’t let anyone off, we were all its obedient drones, and that if we didn’t resist it the most we could expect was to come up for air once in a while—and whenever I detected a note of happiness in my son’s letters my heart filled with anxiety.

Every now and then I wrote him letters in which I encouraged him and concluded by telling him to keep a stiff upper lip and giving him a lot of advice about how to avoid illnesses and what to eat at sea in order not to throw up. But my main advice concerned how to cope at school and how to keep from letting the pressure get him down and upset his peace of mind.

I knew that the Academy of Brutal Seamanship wasn’t Tel Aviv University, or the University of Katmandu either. I knew, although he never said a word about it, that he had to hide his many scars from the eyes of his officers and fellow cadets. I said to myself—the scars are one thing, he can say that he once tried hara-kiri, but what about the map of the Land of Israel on his back? It’s obvious that somebody else put it there. Apart from which—he’d returned to the ’67 borders, and that’s nothing to brag about in a military academy these days.

Interestingly enough, by the way, I’d never, never heard or read even the faintest, tiniest hint of complaint from the boy about the fact that I’d cut him up so often, and all for nothing—after all I could have killed him, and had exposed him to terrible dangers.

In the insane asylum I’d asked what I should do, what I should say if and when the child asked what I’d performed on him. They told me that I should explain that I had a problem with aggression, that my aggressions took control of me, instead of my common sense. They told me to ask his forgiveness and to “let time do the rest.”

The kid was okay. He accepted it all naturally, as if it was all part of some distant childhood. He was open and uninhibited. He sent me a bunch of rude and rollicking sea shanties and claimed that he’d composed them himself—but I doubt it.

 

One day, maybe it was April, maybe May, I’m fed up with remembering dates all the time, I freaked out because I couldn’t remember the boy’s face. That’s it, I’ve lost him, I thought and sunk into an unbearable depression. I was here, and he—there. And what could I do about it? Nothing. What kind of a thing is motherhood if you can’t take care of your child nonstop, one hundred percent? Motherhood is when a mother bends down and whispers into her child’s ear: “Be careful when you cross the street! Be careful, the streetcar drivers are maniacs. Don’t go swimming in the pool in winter, watch out for child molesters. Don’t eat junk food—it gives you cancer.”

I went to the Hilton Beach to blow a kiss, maybe it would reach my son, but deep down I know my kiss wouldn’t get far. Otherwise there would have been dozens of other mothers standing on the shore and sending kisses to their loved ones. To myself, I began to admit that my whole conception was wrong. I’d worked like a dog, in vain. I’d built dams in places where there wasn’t even a river, and persuaded myself that flashes of light were rushing waters I’ve successfully trapped.

 

The globe revolved, and I was dizzy with hunger because I was barely eking out a living. People discovered bran, prunes, glycerin suppositories, and I, as an enemaist, had no more work. What a miserable time it was. I spent a lot of time sitting in parks and looking at the bushes, at the couples in the bushes, at the birds, at two bulls fucking.

Winds blew, the trees behaved like a gang of clowns having their hair pulled. On the news they said that a lot of people were now going to Nagasaki, that Nagasaki was now the safest place in the world, because according to sacred Probability, the youth’s golden idol, an atom bomb isn’t dropped on the same place more than once every hundred years.

One twilight hour I was sitting in the park, the sun was in the west, red and sinking like an ancient culture. Darkness gradually descended on Dolly City, and swallowed all its colors.

Suddenly a light flashed in the black sky and I thought, here goes, Dolly, gallons of water will come pouring down on your head again. But I was wrong. Additional flashes of light revealed a cloudy sky covered with hundreds, maybe thousands of gray and black French Air Force planes. The descendents of the Gauls, the comrades and successors of Saint-Exupery, had arrived with their most up-to-date weapons to wipe out the inhabitants of Dolly City, and thousands of animals were parachuted down, dogs and jackals and foxes infected mainly with rabies, but also with typhus and other serious diseases. The animals spread through the city like swarms of locusts, and people began to vomit and fall twitching to the ground, and all kinds of youth movements began setting up field hospitals, and heralds walked around requesting doctors from all ethnic communities to present themselves for job interviews. I said to myself, Dolly, this is your big day, everyone’s sick, everyone’s dying. I ran to the job interview. I got the job.

Again I found myself in a laboratory with quite decent equipment, mixing wine with blood, battle rations with blood units. The town was full of rumors that the French were only the tip of the iceberg, that they were only German vassals, and that it was the Germans who were actually behind all these air attacks—since if a German told a Frenchman to jump off the roof, he’d jump off the roof. They said that the French mercenaries wanted to wipe out the entire population of Israel, filling the whole of the coastal plain with gleaming white lavatories of the finest export quality.

People talked about the Germans and cursed them all the time, it really turned them on. In the closed wards of the many insane asylums in Dolly City there was a big demand for German POW’s, to show them who’s their daddy. It got out that a certain POW, Friedrich, had fallen into the hands of a few manic-depressives who sodomized him, vomited on him, and then went through his pockets where they found American chewing gum, and ate it all up.

I hardly got any sleep. I worked round the clock. I even agreed to go to the post office and buy stamps, so that the wounded soldiers arriving in droves from the battlefield could send letters home to their mothers.

The air raids grew heavier, and the French began dropping shit-bombs on us, there was so much shit flying around that it was hard to understand where they were getting it all from.

I heard someone say they simply liked eating, they were a nation that just loved to eat, and it was all down to their superior metabolisms.

Every few days people arrived, soldiers and civilians, who’d been hit by an atom bomb. Then everyone stopped working, a hush fell on the hospital. The performance of the atom bombs was truly amazing. Sometimes people came in without heads, but with eyes. Some of them came in without legs, but walking, with shoes full of mud. And the funniest of all were the ones without waists, whose upper and lower halves were connected by association.

My contact with my son was completely cut off. It was months since I’d received a letter from him. I repressed it. I commanded myself: Forget, Dolly, forget. But one day I said, enough, I asked for a pass from the head of the department, and I went to see the city’s military magistrate. I asked a crop-haired secretary for information on the location and well-being of the destroyer on which my son’s school was situated. She didn’t know.

“So what do you suggest I do?” I asked. “Really, I’m asking you. Tell me.”

“I don’t know what to say. Look at the map of the world, and try to find your son according to your maternal instincts.”

“Thank you,” I said, disappointed, and headed for the door.

“Listen,” she called after me, “maybe you should wait for the military magistrate after all, maybe he’ll finish quickly. He’s with the mayor, you know.”

“Okay,” I said.

I waited for a quarter of an hour until the door opened, and the mayor of Dolly City, who’s also the owner of a detergent factory, came out, buttoning up his fly. I went into the dark room. On the floor lay the magistrate, naked and limp, staring at the concave plastic ceiling. I asked him to help me.

 

I sat for five hours in the magistrate’s room, while he put on his underpants, lit a cigarette, and sat in front of the computer trying to find some information according to the boy’s identity number. I sat next to him and waited quietly, drinking cup after cup of coffee with sugar and sweetener, until my head was bursting from the pressure.

The magistrate did everything humanly possible, I know that. He sweated, he asked me to give him a shot of Benzedrine in the ass, he couldn’t keep his eyes open. The guy was exhausted, he fell asleep on his desk and I covered him up. I waited.

The sun sank. I must have run to the toilet twenty-five times to rid myself of all the coffee I drank.

The military magistrate’s offices in Dolly City are located in a very high building erected on the ruins of the Shalom Tower department store. The whole of Dolly City in all its ugliness was spread out below me. I glanced up—there were no planes in the sky, and I remembered that today was the 14th of July, and the French were all going down on each other and dancing in the streets to commemorate the Bastilles. Those characters think that if they gave humanity all that crap about the separation of powers, the innate goodness of man—all that saccharine bullshit—then they’ve left their mark and done their part. But as far as I’m concerned they didn’t do a thing except invent Napoleon who thought he was Napoleon, and all that ridiculous pretense of the Gardens of Versailles and the powder on Marie Antoinette’s nose.

I returned from the summery balcony to the magistrate’s room. He’d woken up and gone back to work at full steam, his piercing eyes fixed on the computer screen.

“Anything new?” I asked him, coming in with another cup of steaming coffee in my hands. His face was clouded. He looked as if he’d just taken a punch to the jaw that hadn’t yet turned his face blue.

“The destroyer was sunk,” he said, “I’m terribly sorry.”

“Sunk?” My hand was shaking, the coffee spilled on the carpet.

“Who did it?” I asked, as if it mattered.

“The Belgians.”

“The Belgians? I thought they stayed out of this.”

“They did it by mistake, they thought it was a French ship. A tragic mistake. I don’t know how to console you, I really don’t know.”

I took the cup of coffee and smashed it on the screen. I sank to the depths of hell in my grief.

The magistrate asked me to spend the night with him, but I preferred committing suicide.

I stood on the bridge about to put an end to it all. I thought about all the operations and vaccinations I’d given him, and how he’d gone and died on me so senselessly. The Belgians! Of all people!

I opened my mouth like in The Scream by Munch. I set one foot on the balustrade of the bridge, then the other, I was about to jump, but at that instant I saw a man dressed in rags running towards me and shouting:

“No! Don’t do it!”

Isn’t God sick of that gimmick yet? I wondered, and jumped.

 

The water was a catastrophe. The crocodiles slapped me with their wagging tails. I said to myself—this is the last straw, soon this chapter will come to an end, and after that an eternal interlude, and indeed, something under the water’s surface was pulling me down to the depths, and I was sure that I was already dead, but when we touched bottom I saw that it was a diver dressed in a black diving-suit. The diver pulled off his mask, and before my eyes floated my son, my own Son, flesh of my flesh, from head to toe.

A crowd of onlookers gathered on the bank. My son got out of his suit, and both of us sat on the grass to get a bit of sun. My teeth chattered. What an amazing coincidence, I thought, that precisely the most improbable thing from a statistical point of view—happened.

On the bank I asked my son:

“So, the story about the destroyer going down wasn’t true?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was lucky—I volunteered. I went out on a raft to look for mine-bearing fish.”

“Aha, so the destroyer was sunk and you were saved?”

“Something like that.”

His face was burnt by the sun, scarred and ripped apart. He looked a mess. I wanted to fix him up, to give him a total make-over, but I no longer felt capable of cutting him up. He was no longer a child, and he probably wouldn’t have agreed anyway. I concentrated on a deep gash on his left cheek. On no account could I remember when I’d cut him there, or why.

“What are your plans?” I asked him.

“What are my plans?”

“Yes.”

He looked at a woman jumping into the river, and said:

“I think I’ll go and rescue her. I belong to the river police, a new secret police that saves suicides from drowning.”

“Really?” I didn’t know how to take this at all.

He jumped into the water and swam towards the woman. The crocodile tails lashed at him too, but he tied them together in a granny knot, just as I’d tied the rabbits’ ears together during my days of glory. For a long time he struggled with the woman, who tried to drown them both and to throw herself into the crocodiles’ jaws. He succeeded in overcoming her, but très bizarre—a few meters before reaching the bank he let the woman go, and she drowned. He came out of the water and smiled at me.

“What happened? Did you get fed up halfway through?”

“Yes,” he replied. “She was too desperate. Maybe it’s because of the weather. The weather’s been lousy lately.”

 

My son hospitalized me in a shelter for the elderly in Dolly City, even though I was only forty-five and in full control of myself and never wet my bed. He told me that he was hospitalizing me out of a sense of poetic justice. He himself tried for a time to get a job in the F.B.I. but it didn’t work out. We were almost out of touch. He’d freed himself of me, no doubt about that, he was his own master, and I no longer troubled myself about him. I concluded that whatever would be would be, what more could I do.

One fine day, to tell the truth it was on my forty-ninth birthday, I saw one of the old women holding a newspaper with a picture of my son on the front page, looking serious as hell.

“Let me have a look at the paper for a minute,” I asked her, but she refused.

“Ma’am,” I said, “I’ll give it back to you straight away.”

“I don’t believe in mankind,” she shouted, “I don’t believe you.”

“Then you hold it, okay?”

She turned the front page towards me and I read: “Attempt by young crank to hijack Pan-T plane to Luxembourg foiled.” I glanced quickly through the item in the newspaper, which the old woman was holding in her trembling hand. The investigators couldn’t understand how the young man had succeeded in overcoming the strictest security measures in the world. I went on reading, eager to find out what had happened to him. I understood that he’d been caught, that he’d escaped, that they’d shot him, that he’d been wounded in the back (they never said where in the back—the Jezreel Valley? Or maybe it was bang on Dolly City), that he’d gone on running, that helicopters were searching for him in all the craters and valleys of the Gobi Desert, but the chances of finding him, they said, were extremely slim. It didn’t bother me one little bit that the kid hadn’t succeeded in hijacking the plane. That was all nonsense. My heart pounded in my breast with excitement, I could really feel it expand and contract, and my brain danced inside the receptacle of my skull. I was worried about the boy, but I wasn’t hysterical. I knew that after everything I’d done to him—a bullet or a knife in the back were nothing he couldn’t handle.