Well, I wonder what you would have done, if it had been up to you?

Yaël and I had our backpacks ready. We’d turned off the water and electricity, per the decree. All we had to do was go and get Saba. I’d told him that we’d come by and pick him up around one o’clock. Yaël came with me. You know how well Saba got on with her. He used to call her ‘my sweetheart’.

When we arrived at his place, at one o’clock, we found him settled into his armchair, reading Molloy. In English. He jumped up to get us a drink. Lukewarm vodka. All the while talking about Samuel Beckett and James Joyce.

So we let him keep wandering off in his musings on Ulysses and the stream of consciousness and Beckett and ‘the ambivalent relationship of his characters to reality’. We didn’t dare interrupt. We understood, you know?

There’d been no air-raid sirens that day. No missile attacks. So he’d forgotten there was a war on.

We didn’t have the courage, right then, to remind him.

Not because we were frightened of being pushy. Not at all! But because it did us good to listen to him, to hear him declare that writers talk too much about death. To enjoy his tasteless vodka. It did us good, too, to forget the war.

Have you never done that, pretended you’re not part of what’s happening around you? As if you were a character out of Beckett. To experience that feeling of insignificance. About everything.

As if you were Molloy.