When the parking area near the apartment window was finally cleared, Adnan started the truck up and drove at a crawl to the side of the building (trampling the sparse hedges). Two long, parallel metal tracks, with a small lift attached to them, emerged from the body of the truck and began to extend upward. Adnan got out and opened the side of the lift for the doctor. “Please, Madam,” he said with a slight nod.

She hesitantly put one foot, clad in a blue, high-heeled pump, on the metal platform. “Is this thing safe?”

“Of course, don’t worry,” Adnan promised.

The doctor looked down, pulled her foot back, stood with her legs straight and close together, and bowed her head. “I can’t get on it. I have a fear of heights,” she whispered to Ilan, who was standing very close on her right side.

“I’ll come with you, don’t worry. I’ll go up with you,” he reassured her.

“No, no, that’s impossible,” she said, shaking her head. “No one can be with me while I’m talking to her. No one. That’s not allowed in a therapeutic situation.”

“But I’m no one. I swear, I’m no one. Nobody is more no one than me, and I won’t hear a word of what you say, and what I do hear I won’t understand anyway, I’m telling you,” Ilan insisted eagerly.

She looked wanly at his face, at the turquoise sash tied around his head with a butterfly knot on the side. “All right,” she agreed.

They stepped onto the platform. The small lift shuddered, barely rose up from its base, then began climbing slowly to the third-floor window, went straight past it—to everyone’s astonishment—and kept going to the fourth floor, where it stopped. Ilan and the doctor were swallowed up behind large, damp sheets that had just been hung out to dry.

“That’s not the right window, it’s not the right one!” Arieh growled at Adnan. “Where are you taking them—to God Almighty?” Adnan hushed him with a wave of his hand, pressed the left button, and the elevator began to descend again, stopping outside Margie’s window.

From afar and below, from the edge of the parking lot where everyone rushed to get a better look (Gramsy was left alone on the bench. A fat, black-and-white stray cat sprawled out next to her, squinting with the heavy weariness of one who’s seen it all), the doctor could be seen stretching her arm toward the windowpane, trying to knock on it, unable to reach. She consulted with Ilan and then removed one of her blue pumps, held it out, and used the heel to bang on the window. There was a moment’s silence. The high-pitched, slightly squeaky voice of a girl suddenly came from the crowd: “Which of my clothes are new and what’s already been washed?”

The doctor rapped on the window with her shoe again. “Let’s hope she doesn’t break the glass and make people get hurt. That’ll be the end of this,” Arieh fretted, and was immediately silenced by an elbow from Peninit, who was staring up expectantly. The glass pane slowly rolled along its tracks and the window opened. The bride, with her head behind a transparent veil that plunged to her shoulders and hovered like thick steam around her dark hair, stood at the window wearing dark sunglasses (a glaring sun still blazed from the east). Nadia’s hand reached up to her gaping mouth, which sought to unleash an involuntary yelp of joy (she could not remember if she’d ever broken out in a yelp of joy, or whether she even knew how to produce such a sound, which always aroused in her a tinge of discomfort and embarrassment), but she tamped it down with her hand. Margie spoke. With their hands shielding their foreheads against the sun, everyone saw her arms moving while she talked to the doctor for several minutes. She vanished from the window for a moment and then reappeared, holding out a large piece of thick, unrolled paper that filled the rectangular window frame. In the same curly lettering from the poem, the word “Sorry” was written on the paper. The crowd looked up. “What does it say?” Nadia asked, unable to see clearly. “Sorry,” said Peninit in a miserable, defeated voice. “She says sorry.”