They drove for almost ten minutes in a darkness that grew thicker and thicker until the cars honking at them conveyed to Peninit that she’d forgotten to turn her headlights on. “What do they want? What . . . ” she mumbled angrily, glancing in the rearview mirror. “I look terrible. When you see a person looking like this, they don’t need to say much.”

Arieh receded into himself like an unused glove puppet, occupying less and less space in his seat. When he looked at Peninit for a moment, he anxiously noticed that the pierced hole in her earlobe was stretched down, reaching almost to the edge of the lobe, tearing under the weight of her earring. “We left all the bags at Nadia’s,” he said, apparently to himself.

Peninit passed a garbage truck that was dallying in front of her. “I want you to call your brother now,” she said to Arieh.

“My brother? Why would I do that? We don’t talk, I haven’t talked to him in months!”

She looked straight ahead and sped up. “Call him, tell him what happened, and settle with him quickly about your mother’s house. No lawyers. Call him now.”

“But you were against it, all this time you were against the arrangement. What happened now that you’re not against it? What happened?”

“What happened?” She screeched to a stop at a pedestrian crossing where a biker suddenly popped out onto the street. “A hundred thousand shekels happened. That’s what happened. Our debt to that character from the catering hall, Mano Dvir, that’s what happened. Will you be able to sleep at night if we take money from Nadia? Because I won’t.” She took a deep breath, looking around for something. “Where are the cigarettes?”

“What cigarettes?” Arieh asked boldly, in a soft voice. “You don’t smoke.”

“I’ll pay for it,” came Matti’s voice from the backseat. “I’ll pay you back the money.”

“With what?” Peninit bellowed with false laughter, tilting her head back. “With what exactly will you pay us back? From your job at the phone company?”

No one said anything. Arieh gave a cautious glance at Peninit’s tensely limp yet dense profile hunched over the wheel, at her fleshy lower lip, drooping and flaccid, which gave her the appearance of a child who’d been irredeemably insulted. His eyes were moist, stinging with tiredness, and an unfamiliar longing for something he could not identify suddenly washed over Arieh, filling him with new tenderness toward himself and this woman. “Maybe I should drive?” he said. “You rest a little, I’ll drive.” But Peninit merely tightened her grip on the wheel.

Hours later, when Matti woke up on the living room couch in Nadia’s apartment (the cognac-colored, imitation leather perspired beneath him) it was one a.m., and as he looked at his watch twice, to make sure, he had the lazy thought (he was still climbing out of a bad sleep) that this hour was quite suited to itself. That it was entirely, and unusually, located in its appropriate age and date.

He kept lying on the couch, looking at the big dark window across the room, listening to the silence (Nadia had taken two sleeping pills) that strangely heightened the unique, undefinable, evocatively rich smell of the apartment. It was a blend of aromas that contained allusions and hints, mere hints and allusions at different smells, which slipped away and evaporated the moment they were defined: musk, fried eggplant, pungent cleaning solvents, dampness, lavender-scented air freshener, blossoming jasmine or magnolia (“What is magnolia?” he wondered.), vinegar, muscle rub, boiled milk, nail polish remover, the sour sweat of shoes, turmeric, rose water, and another element that sometimes reminded him of the smell of fresh printing and sometimes of the lucid, frozen no-smell of snow.

Matti shut his eyes, forced himself to shut them so he could concentrate, so he could finally figure out that smell, dig and dig all the way to its bottom, until he reached it, until his comprehension reached it and clarified it once and for all. He forged ahead, tensely accompanied by a feeling of something hugely fateful, as though cracking the code of this smell was tantamount to the locked door, to the most essential essence of the bedroom door that was still, to this moment, locked. What had Margie eaten all this time? He wondered what food she’d had, if any. He smiled in the darkness and the waffle-weave blanket tickled his nostrils: Margie eating a sandwich.

He ran the scene before his eyes in slow motion and in black and white, for some reason. Margie eating a sandwich she’d bought at the cafeteria on campus. First, with slender and cautious fingers, she slowly unwraps the thin plastic, then separates the two slices of bread. Then it all starts, the meticulous process of removing, cleaning, and exterminating. She removes the slices of tomato—throws them into the plastic bag next to her. Picks off the strips of lettuce smeared with mayonnaise, one by one—throws them in the bag. Takes out the sliced, pitted olives—tosses them. Removes the slices of cheese to reveal the cucumber underneath, picks them off—tosses them. Finally, with great attention, she uses a paper napkin to wipe off the edges of the sandwich and remove any trace of mayonnaise, examines the remaining object from all angles, slaps the two halves of the sandwich back together and begins to eat, looking up with her lustrous eyes to find his astonished look. And she says: “A person who eats a sandwich like that can do anything. Anything, right?”

Matti shook the blanket off, sat up, gathered the blanket and pillow in his arms and padded barefoot down the hallway to the locked door. He dropped the blanket and pillow to the floor, stood with his forehead on the door, eyes closed. A slight whiff of furniture polish (he added it to the list of components) and something else, reminiscent of vanilla and not unlike candy (marshmallow?) reached his nostrils. He felt a sharp pang in his chest, but it was on the right side, and it passed after a few seconds, leaving a trail of anxiety and emptiness. “Margie,” he said very quietly, not to be heard but rather to make sure his throat and vocal chords were producing a sound, that they were capable of producing sound, even though the sound was full of strangeness to him now, strangeness upon strangeness, which reached out and joined up with the strangeness of that woman behind the door, who was his beloved—of course she was. Of course. Because it was thanks to her, or thanks to the strangeness actually, that she had become his beloved, and that was exactly what he loved about her, actually: her strangeness. He wriggled the toes of his bare feet, lifted them up, and put them back down. His loneliness was immeasurable. He bent down, arranged the pillow on the floor tiles, adjacent to the locked door, lay down and covered himself with the blanket, curled up on his side. The floor’s hard, cold touch on his ribs was strangely pleasing. It felt right. For a moment it occurred to him that this slumber on the floor was the only one of all the slumbers that he hadn’t stolen, that he didn’t have to steal now, didn’t have to earn dishonestly since it was being given to him justly, with precisely the right measure of generosity and justice, because it contained precise coordination, an appropriate suitability, between what was inside and what was outside.