Matti looked at the door mistrustfully, wanting to knock again, but his hand remained suspended in midair for a while. From the living room or the kitchen he heard Nadia’s voice, high-pitched and almost screechy, lying on the phone: “No, no, Margie’s fine. Fine. She’s a little bit under the weather. Yes, I gave her an aspirin. She’s laying down, yes, I told her to lay down awhile, so she’ll get her strength back this evening.”

His stomach started murmuring, contracting and dizzying in ominous swirls, and he abandoned the door and ran to the toilet. There, with his thighs on the seat that felt cool and calming, he found himself preoccupied by counting the blue porcelain tiles on the wall over the bathtub. He got mixed up and started over again, wondering if he should begin with the row of tiles at his eye level or at the top row, where the shower head protruded. As he voided himself and simultaneously counted and recounted the tiles, there began to arise in his mind, level upon level, a structure that was both paralyzed and paralyzing, which he called “the practical aspect of the situation,” or rather the long and bothersome line that represented its various embodiments: first, his parents, then the wedding hall that had been booked and the wedding hall’s owner, the large financial deposit his parents had given the owner, the hundreds of guests who couldn’t possibly be notified of the wedding’s cancelation, the photographer they had paid in advance, the band, the bed-and-breakfast that had been reserved in the Galilee for that night, the decorated car (not his, a friend from work’s), and various other tedious details that branched out from these. For some reason, the image now branded in his mind (he zipped up his pants and buckled his belt) was of Gramsy, and it popped out and rose up insistently from the crowded mass of anxieties and tasks. Her radiant yet absent face (an absence that, strangely, was extremely full and not at all a void), the fold at the bottom of her chin that touched the collar of her festive white dress, which sat quietly in its place, wondrously and innocently unknowing, and which almost brought tears to Matti’s eyes at this moment.

He went back to the shut door, infused with a surprising energy derived from the memory of that white collar, and knocked firmly. “Margie!” he called. He waited a moment and added a note of charm to his voice: “Honey? Answer me. Say something.” He heard a rustle in the room, from behind the door, or at least he thought he did. There was a sound that resembled padding feet, followed by silence. “Margie,” he tried again, fixing his look on the door’s smooth brown veneer, but he could feel the desire and the capacity to produce words dying inside him, rotting right in front of his eyes with astounding speed, like summer fruit in a bowl. He looked away from the door and his eyes wandered down the dark hallway to his right, finally settling on a framed tapestry of three roses embroidered in faded red that hung on the wall. “Is this because of what happened last night, Margie? That we fought yesterday? But we made up in the end, that’s what I can’t understand. When I left you at night we made up and everything was okay and you walked me to the car and then you ran and woke up Yaron to get his cables ’cause my car wouldn’t start, so what happened? What happened since then? Would you please come out of there and tell me what exactly I’m supposed to do now? Margie! Do you hear me? Do you want this to end up with a locksmith? Do we have to get a locksmith here to break open the door? Is it going to end up with a locksmith? I demand that you come out now and tell me to my face what you want to say! To my face. I have a right to know, do you hear me? It’s my right to at least hear it from you. Can you even imagine what I’m feeling right now? Do you even care what I’m going through with this whole mess you’ve made?” He spun around and leaned his back against the door, his knees slightly bent from weakness. “I’m thinking over what happened and I can’t understand it,” he went on. “I can’t. Not that I understood your reaction yesterday, but by the end of it I didn’t care that I couldn’t understand, because we made up. But could you maybe explain to me what that fight was about? What were we fighting about? You sat there for two hours without saying anything. Two hours. With a face like someone died or was sick or something. Until you finally said something. I didn’t get it and I don’t get it now either, how someone can go off the deep end like that, but at least you said something. And what was that all about—what? Margie, do you hear me? If I told someone what that whole thing was about they wouldn’t believe me, I swear they wouldn’t; I don’t believe it either when I tell it to myself. What would I say? That my girlfriend, the girl I was going to marry the next day, drove herself and me crazy because while we were watching a movie on TV about Leah Goldberg, I said it was too bad I never knew her or met her, and that maybe I would have loved her for real and been able to rescue her from that difficult life she had with men who didn’t love her? That’s all I said! Margie, she’s dead! Leah Goldberg’s been dead for years already! Do you get that? How can you throw a jealous fit over a poet who’s been dead for years, and not just that but also tell me we’re not right for each other and we have to call the whole thing off? Margie!” He turned to the door again and pounded on it with his fists. “Listen to me carefully now, because I’m only going to say this once. If you don’t come out now, right now, and talk to me, then I’m the one who doesn’t want to get married, not you. Understand? I don’t want to marry you—not now, not ever.” He stopped speaking, suddenly stunned by the total silence on the other side of the door. A frightened pallor washed over him all at once, galloped up from his feet to his forehead as though a solution had been injected into him. “Margie, are you okay? Just tell me you’re okay, Margie. Are you?” He leaned down to his right shin and scratched it hard, as if something had stung him. He pulled his pant leg up to his knee, exposing a red, stinging rash on his skin, and kept scratching, digging his nails in until it was covered with dark red lines.