Matti looked at the shadowy hallway: the door was still there. It was. His hand reached out and slid over it, stroking, up and down in a caress, smoothing down the sides, then finally gripped the chrome-plated plastic handle. The thick brown color of the door and the deep silence that stood there (Was she asleep? he wondered. Maybe she was asleep) trickled through the pores of his body, seeped inside, and seemed to recharge and colorize his blood cycle, creating a new weather pattern in his entire being. It was not his despair that had changed (he told himself) but the weather of the despair. He put his forehead against the door. Strangely, but not unpleasantly, he felt he had come home. This was home: the locked door, behind which was Margie (Margalit, he remembered. Her name was Margalit). There was a gradual dissipation of the fog inside him, the fog of insult, the violence and astonishment that his mother’s words had aroused. The toxic color in her words and her tone (“Toxic,” he repeated to himself, as though memorizing something, “Toxic, toxic”) had also vanished almost completely, and now a certain transparency arose, a fascinating lucidity of water, at which he dared to look and into which he wanted to gaze so that he could find his own reflection, or Margie’s reflection, or both of their reflections together (he could not decide): Margie didn’t love him. Maybe. Maybe she didn’t love him.

He collapsed onto the floor and sat there with his back to the door, resting his cheek on his knees, which were folded into his chest, and suddenly he seemed small, very small, like a boy who’d lost his key and was waiting in the stairwell for his mother to come home from work. He went back to his thoughts, making progress (“I’m making progress,” he told himself), appearing in his mind’s eye as that knight who thrashes his sword through the thicket of trees and bushes and cuts away a path for himself. How had he not thought of that? How had he not even considered that possibility, the worst of them all (“And not an unlikely one,” he reproached himself), during the hours in which Margie had locked herself in the room and said she wasn’t getting married? How?! The complaining voice inside him abruptly quieted down and a different one flickered, then broke through: of course the possibility had not occurred to him. Of course it hadn’t. Because she’d said she wasn’t getting married, not that she didn’t love him. Not getting married. And since when was “not getting married” synonymous with “not in love”? Matti made fists with his hands and listened to the grating of a third voice, a stubborn and diligent and extremely monotonous one, which drowned out the previous ones: but she’s the one who wanted to get married in the first place. Not him. She wanted to get married. Margie. Because of Nadia, she wanted to. She did want to. He rubbed his eyes hard, until they stung. Through the stinging, he tried as hard as he could to conjure up Margie’s image before his eyes (he’d suddenly forgotten what she looked like) and project it onto his eyelids: Margie rinsing out her mouth with mouthwash, spitting out the strong green liquid too loudly, proud of herself and full of self-pity (“This stuff is horrific.”); Margie putting together a TV stand from Ikea, losing two screws and finding them under the fridge (how they’d fought at first over deciphering the assembly instructions, and how they’d laughed when they dragged the fridge out and its wheels broke); Margie opening the front door for him, standing there with tears streaming down her face (he never imagined anyone could have so many tears) after she’d finished reading the last page of Chekhov’s biography (“He died, Matti. Chekhov died,” she informed him through her tears); Margie munching crackers in bed, scattering crumbs on the sheet; Margie gravely explaining, as she polished her toenails, that they had to do the wedding pictures (at least part of them, if not all) with “those poor Africans, the foreign workers” (“If we’re going to get married, Matti, we have to share our joy with the most unfortunate ones, you understand? Otherwise it won’t be real joy”); Margie falling silent for long hours, becoming air, turning ashen (everything turning ashen: her olive skin; her greenish-brown eyes that got duller and duller as though someone had covered the pupils with thimbles; her dark hair tied sloppily at the back of her neck, with a few gray flyaways that seemed to reproduce themselves in a geometric sequence under the light of the reading lamp; her gnawed fingernails); Margie sitting cross-legged on the concrete railing in the university courtyard the first time he met her, wearing a blue-and-white checkered dress buttoned up to the neck (“the orphanage dress,” he called it), smoking half a cigarette and tossing it, lighting another, praising him excessively (he thought at the time) and perhaps artificially (he suspected at the time) for his choice of majors (philosophy and political science) and saying, “I’m not talented with ideas, unfortunately. All those ideas fall apart on me when I cook them, like a curdled sauce.” Margie naked.