Mr Mani E-Book

A.B. Yehoshua

• Herausgeber: Halban
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Five conversations, each centring on the fate of a different member of the Sephardi Mani family, make up this profound, far-reaching and passionate Mediterranean novel which tells of six generations of the family, but in reverse chronology. In each conversation the responses of one person are absent, thus drawing in the reader as the story reaches back into the past, creating one of the most extraordinary reading experiences in modern literature. On a kibbutz in the Negev in 1982, a student tells her mother about her strange meeting in Jerusalem with Judge Gavriel Mani, the father of her boyfriend whose child she is expecting. On the occupied island of Crete in 1944, a German soldier relates to his adoptive grandmother his experiences there with the Mani family, whom he hunts down. In Jerusalem, occupied by the British in 1918, a young Jewish lawyer serving with the British army briefs his commanding officer on the forthcoming trial for treason of the political agitator Yosef Mani. In a village in southern Poland in 1899, a young doctor reports to his father his experiences at the Third Zionist Congress and his subsequent trip to Jerusalem with his sister, who falls in love with Dr Moshe Mani, an obstetrician. In Athens, in 1848, Avraham Mani reports to his elderly mentor the intricate tale of his trip to Jerusalem and the death there of his young son. 'Mr Mani is conceived on an epic scale as a hymn to the continuity of Jewish life. This formulation sounds pat and sentimental, but Yehoshua's achievement is the opposite: it always suggests even more complex worlds beyond the vignettes of which the novel is composed. 'Stephen Brook, New Statesman and Society 'Suffused with sensuous receptiveness to Jerusalem -its coppery light, its pungent smells, its babble of tongues, its vistas crumbling with history -Yehoshua's minutely researched novel ramifies out from the city to record the rich and wretched elements that have gone into the founding and continuation of the nation whose centre it has once again become. 'Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times 'Adjectives come racing to mind to describe Mr Mani, for instance 'rich, complex, exotic, creative, informative', but 'easy' is one that does not fit. On finishing it, this reader had the reaction that he had to turn back to the beginning in order to grasp more firmly the sources of his admiration...It is extraordinarily skilful to have captured the Jewish mixture of suffering and revival, despair and messianic hope, without in any way spelling out such heavy themes. 'David Pryce-Jones, The Financial Times 'A.B. Yehoshua has created a historical and psychological universe -nearly biblical in the range and penetration of its enchanting 'begats' -with an amazingly real Jerusalem at its centre. It is as if the blood-pulse of this ingeniously inventive novel had somehow fused with the hurtling vision of the generations of Genesis. With Mr. Mani, Yehoshua once again confirms his sovereign artistry; and Hillel Halkin's translation has a brilliant and spooky life of its own. 'Cynthia Ozick

Leseprobe

Five conversations, each centring on the fate of a different member of the Sephardi Mani family, make up this profound, far-reaching and passionate Mediterranean novel which tells of six generations of the family, but in reverse chronology. In each conversation the responses of one person are absent, thus drawing in the reader as the story reaches back into the past, creating one of the most extraordinary reading experiences in modern literature.

On a kibbutz in the Negev in 1982, a student tells her mother about her strange meeting in Jerusalem with Judge Gavriel Mani, the father of her boyfriend whose child she is expecting.

On the occupied island of Crete in 1944, a German soldier relates to his adoptive grandmother his experiences there with the Mani family, whom he hunts down.

In Jerusalem, occupied by the British in 1918, a young Jewish lawyer serving with the British army briefs his commanding officer on the forthcoming trial for treason of the political agitator Yosef Mani.

In a village in southern Poland in 1899, a young doctor reports to his father his experiences at the Third Zionist Congress and his subsequent trip to Jerusalem with his sister, who falls in love with Dr Moshe Mani, an obstetrician.

In Athens, in 1848, Avraham Mani reports to his elderly mentor the intricate tale of his trip to Jerusalem and the death there of his young son.

The Continuing Silence of a Poet:The Collected Stories of A.B. Yehoshua

“It seems typical of this highly talented Israeli writer that we are left with more questions than answers after reading what he has to tell us and that the most urgent and disturbing questions are always more suggested by his work than stated in it.”

Robert Nye, The Guardian

“Yehoshua … is very much the enfant terrible whose stories evoke the dreadful silence of a people who live on the edge of destruction. Paradoxically, Yehoshua — like his literary Doppelgänger Amos Oz — is today a Grand Old Man of Israeli letters.”

Bryan Cheyette, TLS

“The originality of these stories, their characters, and the emotions they express so precisely and movingly have remained so clearly in my mind that I feel justified in taking risks. I was as moved and impressed by them as when I read Mann’s Death in Venice and some of Chekhov.”

Susan Hill, New Statesman

“Yehoshua makes great art out of seemingly unpromising characters and situations.”

David Aberbach, The Jewish Quarterly

“…for Yehoshua has found a way of writing inside that no-man’s land where the perception of objective reality and private dream or hallucination jostle for position. Reading his stories you realise that this shifting between real and unreal is not peculiar to his characters. It is actually what goes on in our heads most of the time. I don’t know any writer who has transcribed this phenomenon so economically.”

Victoria Glendinning, The Sunday Times

“Yehoshua himself emerges through the collection as a writer of borderline states: he describes near-madness, near-death, near-sadism. People living under continual threat of war toy with their fantasies until they bring them to life. They succumb to a detachment that verges on cruelty or to a love that verges on masochism. They regard their lives with restrained despair, while secretly longing for tragedy and resolution. Yehoshua explores all this with understated formality and a difficult and moving honesty.”

Nicci Gerrard, The Observer

“…a considerable œuvre.”

Andrew Sinclair, The Times

“Even at his most prosaic, Yehoshua’s vision remains dark and menacing but this can be conveyed to powerful and haunting effect, as in “The Last Commander”, an offering to rank with the greatest of war stories. A welcome and far from silent collection.”

Seamus Finnegan, The Jewish Chronicle

The Lover

“It is a disturbing, brilliantly assured novel, and almost thirty years after its first appearance it retains a startling originality.”

Natasha Lehrer, TLS

“In place of the unifying and optimistic passions of Zionism, [A. B. Yehoshua’s] skilful, delicate prose depicts a darker country of insomnia, claustrophobia and disconnectedness, while the clever contrast of perspectives emphasises the vast gulf that can exist between people who supposedly love one another.”

Francesca Segal, Jewish Chronicle

“In this profound study of personal and political trauma, Yehoshua … evokes Israel’s hallucinatory reality.”

The Daily Telegraph

“There is no scarcity of books about the Yom Kippur War but few have attempted to chart the inner human landscape as painstakingly as The Lover.”

Christopher Wordsworth, The Guardian

“…a more vivid sense of the country than most documentaries would provide.”

Paul Ableman, The Spectator

“It is greatly to the credit of A.B. Yehoshua, that his major novel, The Lover, manages to convey in both breadth and depth the traumas of the Yom Kippur War without in any sense being a war novel.”

Mira Bar-Hillel, The Jewish Quarterly

“Like Amos Oz, Yehoshua is proposing that the true realities of Israeli life are nighttime ones – dreams, nightmares, wishes and hopes – while the piercing light of day reveals only the mundane surface.”

Murray Baumgarten, The Jerusalem Post

“…a work of genuine distinction.”

Leon I. Yudkin, Modern Hebrew Literature

“The Lover is a truly modern novel, filled with irony, ambiguity, inconclusiveness and images of the wasteland. It is an acute criticism of Israel, the Diaspora and contemporary values – it deserves our attention.”

Esther Safer Fisher, Middle East Focus

A Late Divorce

“… thank goodness for a novel that is ambitious and humane and that is about things that really matter.”

New Statesman

“Anyone who has had experience of the sad and subtle ways in which human beings torment one another under licence of family ties will appreciate the merits of A.B. Yehoshua’s A Late Divorce.”

London Review of Books

Five Seasons

“Molkho’s adventures are quietly hilarious in the way Kafka is hilarious.”

The New York Times Book Review

“The novel succeeds in charting the ways in which grief and passions cannot be cheated…”

Financial Times

“A wonderfully engaging, exquisitely controlled, luminous work.”

Washington Post Book World

“In this finely observed and oddly moving comic novel…Yehoshua makes us feel [Molkho’s] humanity – and deftly wins him our sympathy.”

Kirkus

“…a gentle comedy of manners about a widower in want of a wife.”

Clive Sinclair, The Sunday Times

“…[a] sad, emotionally convincing comedy.”

Robert Alter, The New Republic

“This novel is all that a novel ought to be: comic, sad, human, and above all, with the ring of truth.”

The Minneapolis Star Tribune

“…Yehoshua fashions a totally absorbing work of art. So subtle is his skill that even scenes of brilliantly realized comedy are executed with such dry understatement that they catch the reader totally unaware.”

The Jerusalem Post

“In the opinion of one grateful reader, he has written a masterpiece.”

Aram Saroyan, Los Angeles Times

“Yehoshua’s poetic images conjure up bursts of dense Oscar Kokoshka color, the savage comedy of George Grosz’s caricatures, the playful humor of Paul Klee and even the stately gravity of the black-and-white illustrations of biblical legends. And all this is held together by the author’s murmuring irony and wisdom, which makes us hope that maybe, sometime, Molkho will fall in love after all.”

The Toronto Globe and Mail

“… a meditation on the cycles of change and renewal, and a portrait of a middle-aged man, glimpsed at a transition point in his life.”

Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“…a fiction that matters.”

Sanford Pinsker, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Mr. Mani

“Mr Mani is conceived on an epic scale as a hymn to the continuity of Jewish life. This formulation sounds pat and sentimental, but Yehoshua’s achievement is the opposite: it always suggests even more complex worlds beyond the vignettes of which the novel is composed.”

Stephen Brook, New Statesman and Society

“Suffused with sensuous receptiveness to Jerusalem – its coppery light, its pungent smells, its babble of tongues, its vistas crumbling with history – Yehoshua’s minutely researched novel ramifies out from the city to record the rich and wretched elements that have gone into the founding and continuation of the nation whose centre it has once again become.”

Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times

“Adjectives come racing to mind to describe Mr Mani, for instance ‘rich, complex, exotic, creative, informative’, but ‘easy’ is one that does not fit. On finishing it, this reader had the reaction that he had to turn back to the beginning in order to grasp more firmly the sources of his admiration…It is extraordinarily skilful to have captured the Jewish mixture of suffering and revival, despair and messianic hope, without in any way spelling out such heavy themes.”

David Pryce-Jones, The Financial Times

“A.B. Yehoshua has created a historical and psychological universe – nearly biblical in the range and penetration of its enchanting ‘begats’ – with an amazingly real Jerusalem at its centre. It is as if the blood-pulse of this ingeniously inventive novel had somehow fused with the hurtling vision of the generations of Genesis. With Mr. Mani, Yehoshua once again confirms his sovereign artistry; and Hillel Halkin’s translation has a brilliant and spooky life of its own.”

Cynthia Ozick

“The one-sided dialogues not only give this complex novel a much needed simplicity of form but they also engage us. We begin to fill in the missing words until each of us becomes the silent partner. For this is more than just a tale of one eccentric family; it has the relentlessness of the Old Testament, the contentiousness of Job. The Manis not only pass down their sense of guilt, the source of their quixotic and often tragic fate, they ask in each generation what it means to be a Jew: are we not all from the same seed, are we not all ‘Jews forgetful of being Jews’?”

Wendy Brandmark, The Independent

“In Yehoshua’s rich, grave fictions, private and public lives cannot be separated; the tale of a flawed individual or disintegrating relationship is simultaneously an emblem for a country in crisis. Literature is history, an event a symbol, writing a way of exploring the world. Yehoshua is a marvellous story teller but also a profoundly political writer, always arguing for uncertain humanism rather than zealous nationalism in a country where everyone lives on the front line.”

Nicci Gerrard, The Observer

“…Yehoshua has here produced his own version of an epic chronicle, a homecoming in which the present is fulfilled in the past, the seed implicit in the future growth. The novel has something of the quality of a modern prophecy, of the still small voice in the wilderness.”

John Bayley, The New York Review of Books

“Mr. Mani is one of the most remarkable pieces of fiction I have ever read, and convinces me more than ever of Yehoshua’s very great gift”.

Alfred Kazin

“Mr. Mani, lucidly translated by Hillel Halkin, is Mr. Yehoshua’s most ambitious, wide-ranging novel. It is a literary tour de force that broadens the author’s vision and the novel’s boundaries beyond Israel.”

Herbert Mitgang, The New York Times

Open Heart

“To read A.B. Yehoshua is to submit oneself to the turmoils of the human heart. His are the type of books…I hesitate to start, because I find it impossible to put them down.”

Ilan Stavans, TLS

“The novel flows powerfully in fluent, confident yet simple prose: it has a compelling story line and vividly drawn characters, and it is infused with a big and serious theme, the nature of love and the mysteries of the human soul.”

The Washington Post

“At times literary and mannered, at times incantatory and magical, sometimes disturbing and often astonishing, Open Heart never fails to entertain the mind while it captivates the soul.”

The Seattle Times

A Journey to the End of the Millennium

“Wherever this innovative, erudite, suggestive, mysterious writer—a true master of contemporary fiction—points us, there can be no doubt, it is essential that we go.”

The Washington Post

“Yehoshua is so graceful and eloquent that his work’s timeliness also succeeds, paradoxically, in making it timeless.”

James E Young, New York Times

“This is a generous, sensuous narrative, in which women adroitly manoeuvre within their inherited role, and theories of irrevocable Arab-Jewish hatred are obliquely refuted.”

Peter Vansittart, The Spectator

“One of Yehoshua’s most fully realized works: a masterpiece.”

Kirkus Reviews

“Above all, Yehoshua is a master storyteller, who coaxes his readers far into an alien landscape, allowing him to question familiar orthodoxies—that moral codes are universal, that jealousy governs every personal relationship, and that religious boundaries are set in stone.”

Jewish Chronicle

The Liberated Bride

“The Liberated Bride seethes with emotions, dreams, ideas, humor, pathos, all against a backdrop of violence, conflict, and terror.”

Robert Rosenberg, The Sun (New York)

“Yehoshua seeks to present two worlds, those of Israel’s Jewish majority and its Arab minority. He has done it rather as Tolstoy wrote of war and peace: two novels, in a sense, yet intimately joined. Paradoxically – and paradox…is the book’s engendering force – the war is mainly reflected in the zestfully intricate quarrels in the Jewish part of the novel. The peace largely flowers when Rivlin finds himself breaking through the looking glass into the Arab story.”

Richard Eder, The New York Times

“The Liberated Bride is tinged with the kind of innate, unavoidable suspense that the threat of bus bombs brings.”

International Herald Tribune

“The boundaries that are broken down in The Liberated Bride include those within the self and others; mystical boundaries between self and God; political and cultural boundaries and finally, the stylistic boundaries of the novel itself, which Yehoshua is constantly stretching in different directions.”

International Jerusalem Post

A Woman in Jerusalem

“This novel has about it the force and deceptive simplicity of a masterpiece…”

Claire Messud, The New York Times

“There are human riches here. The manager moves from a man who has given up on love to one who opens himself to it. And there are strange and powerful scenes – of the morgue, of the coffin, of the Soviet base where the manager passes through the purging of body and soul.”

Carole Angier, The Independent

“Mr Yehoshua’s A Woman in Jerusalem is a sad, warm, funny book about Israel and being Jewish, and one that has deep lessons to impart – for other people as well as his own.”

The Economist

“…a small masterpiece, a compact, strange work of Chekhovian grace, grief, wit and compassion.”

The Washington Post

“Wonderfully dark humor gradually emerges from the ironies that occur… This is one of the most satisfying novels I’ve read this year.”

Mary Whipple, Amazon.com

Friendly Fire

“an excellent, nicely tuned translation by Stuart Schoffman.”

Ethan Bronner The New York Times Book Review

“Mr Yehoshua, Israel’s most distinguished living novelist, is a dove. But he is one who, like his fellow writers Amos Oz and David Grossman, joins love for the unique qualities of his people with despair over their failure to make room politically and economically – but above all imaginatively – for the Arabs among them. With Mr Oz and Mr Grossman this despair comes out as a fine anger. With Mr Yehoshua … it comes out as a finer and ultimately more shattering Talmudic questioning.”

Richard Eder, Books of the Times, The New York Times

“Friendly Fire goes beyond Israeli and Jewish issues to touch on universal issues affecting all of humanity. Intensely realized, thoughtful, and stunning in its unique imagery and symbolism, this unusual novel deals with seemingly everyday issues, offering new insights into the human condition – life, love, and death …”

Mary Whipple, Amazon.com

“… these lives haunted by loss are powerfully evoked.”

David Herman, Jewish Chronicle

MR. MANI

A. B. YEHOSHUA

Translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin

To my father, a man of Jerusalem and a lover of its past

THE ORDER OF THE CONVERSATIONS

Title Page

Dedication

FIRST CONVERSATION:Mash’abei Sadeh, 1982

SECOND CONVERSATION:Heraklion, Crete, 1944

THIRD CONVERSATION:Jerusalem, Palestine, 1918

FOURTH CONVERSATION:Jelleny-Szad, 1899

FIFTH CONVERSATION:Athens, 1848

About the Author

By A.B. Yehoshua

Copyright

THEConversationPARTNERS

HAGAR SHILOH, Student (1962– )

YA’EL SHILOH (née KRAMER), Agricultural Worker (1936– )

EGON BRUNER, Feldwebel (1922– )

ANDREA SAUCHON (née KURT MAIER), Former Nurse (1870–1944)

IVOR STEPHEN HOROWITZ, Lieutenant (1897–1973)

MICHAEL WOODHOUSE, Colonel (1877–1941)

EFRAYIM SHAPIRO, Physician (1870–1944)

SHOLOM SHAPIRO, Estate Owner (1848–1918)

AVRAHAM MANI, Merchant (1799–1861)

FLORA HADDAYA (née Molkho) Housewife (1800–1863)

SHABBETAI HANANIAHA HADDAYA, Rabbi (1766?–1848)

MR. MANI

FIRST CONVERSATION

Mash’abeiSadeb7 p.m. Friday, December 31, 1982

THEConversationPARTNERS

HAGAR SHILOH Born in 1962 in Mash’abei Sadeh, a kibbutz thirty kilometers south of Beersheba that was founded in 1949. Her parents, Roni and Ya’el Shiloh, first arrived there in 1956 in the course of their army service. Hagar’s father Roni was killed on the last day of the Six Day War as a reservist on the Golan Heights. As Hagar was five at the time, her claim to have clear memories of her father may well have been correct.

Hagar attended a regional high school in the nearby kibbutz of Revivim and finished her last year there without taking two of her matriculation exams, English and history. She began her army service in August 1980 and served as a noncommissioned counseling officer with a paratroop unit stationed in central Israel. Because her base was far from her kibbutz, she spent many of her short leaves in Tel Aviv, where she stayed with her paternal grandmother Naomi. She was very attached to this grandmother, from whom she liked to coax stories of her father’s childhood. The old woman, who enjoyed her granddaughter’s lively presence, sought repeatedly to persuade her to register at the University of Tel Aviv after the army. And indeed, upon finishing her military service, the last months of which were highly eventful because of the outbreak of the war in Lebanon in 1982, Hagar flouted the wishes of her mother, who wanted her to return home for at least a year before beginning her higher education, and persuaded a general meeting of the kibbutz to allow her to continue her studies. This decision was facilitated by the fact that, as the daughter of a fallen soldier, Hagar stood to have her tuition fully paid for by the ministry of defense.

Hagar hoped to study film at Tel Aviv University. However, lacking a high school diploma, she was not accepted as a fully matriculated student and was first required to register for a year-long course to prepare her for the exams she had missed. She was also asked to take courses in Hebrew and mathematics to upgrade her academic record.

In early December of that year, at the urging of her son Ben-Zion Shiloh, Hagar’s uncle and the Israeli consul in Marseilles, Naomi decided to take a trip to France. In effect this was in place of her son’s intended visit to Israel the previous summer, which was canceled when the consulate was forced to work overtime to present Israel’s case in the Lebanese war. Although loathe to leave her beloved granddaughter for so long, she could not refuse her only son, a forty-year-old bachelor whose single state worried her greatly. Indeed, she was so determined to help find him a suitable match that she stayed longer than she had planned in order to attend the various New Year’s receptions given by the consulate.

Hagar, a short, graceful young woman with the dark red hair of her late father, looked forward greatly to having her grandmother’s large, attractive apartment to herself. At first she thought of asking her friend Irees, whom she had met at the university, to stay with her. Irees’s father had also been killed in battle, in the Yom Kippur War, and she had an amazing knowledge of the various benefits and special offers that the Ministry of Defense made available to young people like themselves. In the end, though, she was unable to accept the invitation, which was just as well for Hagar, since at the beginning of that month she had struck up a relationship with an M.A. student named Efrayim Mani that could now be pursued in her grandmother’s apartment. Her new boyfriend taught Hebrew in the preparatory course, and their romance got off to an intense start before he was called up on December 9 for reserve duty in the western zone of Israeli-occupied Lebanon, a far from tranquil area despite the newly signed “peace treaty” between Jerusalem and the government in Beirut.

YA’ELSHILOH,néeKRAMER Born in a suburb of Haifa in 1936, Ya’el was highly active in a socialist youth movement and left high school in 1952 for a year of training in a kibbutz as a youth counselor, as a result of which she never graduated. In 1954 she began her army duty, serving with a group from her movement in the kibbutz of Rosh-Hanikrah near the Lebanese border. It was there that she met her future husband Roni Shiloh, a movement member from Tel Aviv. Trained as a paratrooper like the other boys in the group, he saw action in a number of border raids and in the 1956 Sinai Campaign. In their final months in the army Ya’el and Roni were stationed in Mash’abei Sadeh, a young kibbutz in the Negev desert. They liked it well enough to stay on and become members after their discharge, and in 1958 they were married. Both of them were employed in farm work, Roni in the grain fields and Ya’el in the fruit orchards. In 1962, after returning from a tour of Greece sponsored by the Israel Geographical Society, they had their first child, a daughter to whom they gave the biblical name of Hargar, as seemed fitting for a girl born in the desert. Four years later, in 1966, they had a second baby, a boy, who died several weeks later from acute hepatitis caused by his parents’ incompatible blood types, which the hospital in Beersheba had neglected to test them for. With proper precautions, the doctors assured them, all would go well the next time. However, there was to be no next time, because Roni was killed in the Six Day War along the Kuneitra-Damascus road.

Despite the pleas of her own, and especially, of Roni’s parents that she leave the kibbutz for Tel Aviv, Ya’el remained with her five-year-old daughter in the desert, which she more and more felt was her home. She knew of course that in a place so small and remote her chances of remarrying grew poorer from year to year, but she liked her work and was eventually put in charge of a special project to develop new methods of avocado growing. During the Yom Kippur War, when the general secretary of the kibbutz was mobilized for a long period, Ya’el was chosen to fill in for him. Although some of the members found her overly rigid ideologically, she stayed in the position for several years to the satisfaction of nearly everyone. Her relations with her daughter Hagar were intense but far from easy. Now and then, encouraged to get away by her friends, she attended kibbutz-movement workshops in education and psychology. Sometimes she even traveled to Beersheba for special guest lectures in the psychology and education departments of the university. In 1980, although by now a woman of forty-four, she let herself be persuaded to sign up for a singles encounter group, at the end of which she swore never again to do such a thing.

Ya’el feared that the close ties developed by her daughter with her grandmother, a widow since the mid-1970s, would entice her to leave the kibbutz, which was why she opposed Hagar’s studying at the university immediately after finishing the army. Indeed, when Hagar applied to the kibbutz for a leave of absence, Ya’el secretly lobbied against her. In the end, however, Hagar was granted her wish in accordance with the liberal policy then prevalent in most kibbutzim of giving young members just out of the army ample time to “find themselves” before pressuring them to return. The stipend offered her by the defense ministry was also a factor in mustering a majority in her favor. After settling in Tel Aviv, she kept in close touch with her mother via her grandmother’s telephone. The two made a point of talking twice a week even though the members of Kibbutz Mash’abei Sadeh did not yet have private phones in their rooms in 1982.

Ya’el’s half of the conversation is missing.

—But even if I disappeared, Mother, I didn’t disappear for very long. You needn’t have worried …

—But I did phone you, Mother. I most certainly did, on Wednesday evening from Jerusalem.

—Of course. I was still in Jerusalem Wednesday evening. Yesterday too.

—Yesterday too, Mother. And this morning too. But I left you a message.

—How could you not have gotten it?

—Oh, God, Mother, don’t tell me that another message of mine got lost!

—How should I know … whoever picked up the phone …

—Some volunteer from Germany.

—But what could I have done, Mother? It’s not my fault that no one in his right mind on the whole kibbutz will pick up the telephone in the dining hall after supper, because no one wants to have to go out in the cold and run around looking for whoever it’s for. Why don’t you try getting the kibbutz some winter night, to say nothing of talking in English to a foreign volunteer who’s too spaced out to hold a pencil. If you did, you’d understand what a mistake you made when you led a crusade against private telephones as if the future of socialism depended on it. Lots of other kibbutzim have had private phones for years. They take them for granted as a necessity of life …

—I’ve yet to see the kibbutz that went bankrupt from its phone bills, Mother. That’s just your fantasy.

—But I didn’t disappear, Mother. I simply left Tel Aviv for three days.

—With him? Fat chance of that! He’s still with the army in Lebanon. But it was because of him that I went to Jerusalem to see his father, and I was stranded there until this morning.

—I stranded myself.

—But that’s the whole point, Mother. That’s the whole point of the story …

—No. It started snowing there Wednesday afternoon, but by yesterday it had all melted.

—No. That old coat was given me by his father. Mr. Mani.

—That’s how I think of him. Mr.Mani. Don’t ask me why.

—But that’s the whole point of my story. That’s the only reason I came home today, because it’s crazy to be sitting here with you when I should be in Tel Aviv studying for an exam …

—I told you. I have an English exam on Monday, and the last thing I want is to flunk again.

—No. I left all my books and notebooks in Grandmother’s apartment in Tel Aviv. I didn’t take a thing with me to Jerusalem on Tuesday, certainly not any books. I thought I was only going for a few hours, to do Efi this favor. But once I was there I felt I couldn’t leave, and so I stayed for three whole days …

—No. I didn’t come via Tel Aviv. I came straight from Jerusalem. It was a last-minute decision. I was waiting in the bus station for the Tel Aviv bus when all of a sudden I saw this middle-aged redhead standing on the next platform. He was someone I recognized from around here, I think from Revivim, and it made me so homesick that I just couldn’t wait to get back to our own darling little boondocks and tell you everything, Mother. I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I was always like that. Don’t you remember what you’ve told me about myself? I could be in the nursery, or at school, and if some child fell and hurt himself, or if the drawing I was working on tore, I had to tell you so badly that I would run outside to look for you and shout the minute I found you, “Hey, Ma, listen to this!” …

—Right. I always got away with it, because I had this knack for latching onto … how did you used to put it?

—Yes. Right. That’s it …

—Yes, that’s it. To some surrogate father who would do anything

I asked, maybe—it’s a pet theory of mine you’re sure to like—because he felt guilty that it was my father and not him who was killed. And so everyone took me in tow and passed me on, from the dining hall to the laundry, from the chicken coops to the cowshed, from the stables to the fodder fields, and on to the orchards and to you, Mother, who I threw myself on and told everything. Which is just how it was in Jerusalem today, standing in line in that station among all those wintry, depressive Jerusalemites when suddenly the bus for Beersheba began pulling out and I saw that redhead looking out the window at me—maybe he was trying to guess who I was too—and suddenly I couldn’t stand it any longer, I missed you so badly that I jumped over the railing and was on the steps and inside the bus before I knew it. But the first thing tomorrow morning, Mother, I have to get back to Tel Aviv and to my books, or else it’s another F for sure. You’ll have to find me someone who is driving there, and if you can’t think of anyone, think again …

—All right.

—No, wait a minute. Take it easy. I didn’t mean this second …

—But what’s the rush? I feel so cold inside. Let me warm up a little first.

—It will take more than just hot water.

—Don’t be annoyed at me, Mother, but for my part I can skip the Sabbath meal in the dining hall.

—I’m not at all hungry. Whatever you have in the fridge will be fine.

—That’s okay. Whatever you have. I’m really not hungry.

—If you’re so starving that you must go, then go. I’m staying here. I’m sorry, Mother, but I’m just not up to sitting in the dining hall and smiling at everyone all evening. Followed by that New Year’s Eve party with all its phony revelry … I absolutely will not take any chances and dance …

—All right, all right. Go. What can I say? Go. What more can I say?

—Go …

—Go. I’m already sorry I came here instead of going straight home … I mean to Tel Aviv …

—Because I didn’t think of it as coming to the kibbutz tonight, Mother. I thought of it as coming home. To you. To tell you about what happened in Jerusalem …

—I’m not being mysterious. Stop being so critical …

—All right, fine, so I am a little mysterious … maybe mysterious is even the best word for it … but so what? What’s wrong with a mystery? Suppose you open the door of a strange house and are so horrified by what you see there that your soul, yes, your soul, Mother, is sucked right out of you … but the mystery, you see, isn’t the horrifying part, because anything really horrifying has to be obvious and isn’t mysterious at all. The mystery is in the encounter, even if it just seems like a coincidence. And that’s what happened to me, that’s what I went through in Jerusalem, even if you’re not going to believe it …

—Because you’re not, Mother. You’ve been educated all your life not to believe in mysteries, and you’re certainly not going to believe in mine. In the end I know you’ll tell me that I just imagined it all …

—But there isn’t any quick version. There’s no quick way to tell it, Mother.

—Because if I did, it really would sound like a figment of my imagination …

—You know something, it doesn’t matter. Let’s forget it, it’s not important. Go have dinner, and I’ll take a shower. The whole thing really doesn’t matter, Mother. I was wrong and now let’s forget it … Just do me a favor and ask around in the dining hall if anyone is driving to Tel Aviv in the morning and has room for me …

—No, I’m just not in the mood anymore to tell you about it. Maybe you’re even right and I did imagine it all …

—I know. You may not have said it yet, but it’s not my fault that I always know what you’re going to say.—I’m sorry.

—All right. I’m sorry, Mother.

—I said I’m sorry.

—No, I really thought you didn’t feel like hearing about it now …

—Are you sure?

—But maybe you shouldn’t miss the Sabbath meal in the dining hall. It’s a ritual you’re so attached to …

—Are you sure?

—Well, then, Mother, if you think you can skip it, how about doing it properly, so that we can sit here in peace and quiet? Let’s draw the curtains to keep the light in, and let me lock the door for once … Where’s the key?

—Please, just this once. I beg you, Mother, let’s shut out the world to keep it from knowing we’re here, so that no one comes and bothers us. We’ll put some water up to boil … and tum the heater on … but where’s that key?

—Later. I said I’d take one later … I’m bursting too much to tell you my story to take time to shower now … Why must you always make such a fuss about showering?

—So my dress is a little sweaty … it’s no tragedy …

—Fine.

—No, Mother, it’s the same.

—Maybe a little nausea now and then.

—No, it’s the same.

—Is that what you’re still hoping?

—But why? I’ve already told you, Mother, I knew right away it was real. I’m absolutely certain. I can feel it encoded inside me …

—This thing … the embryo, the baby … whatever you want to call it …

—You can do the arithmetic yourself. My last time was on the nineteenth of November. I’m exactly two weeks overdue … there’s nothing else it can be …

—But what do I need some doctor poking around inside me for? What more can he tell me? And anyway, I already saw a doctor in Jerusalem …

—An internist.

—I’ll get to that.

—Soon, Mother. Why can’t you be more patient?

—He did … just a minute …

—No. Just a quick checkup.

—Just a minute …

—Don’t kid yourself, It’s not psychological. It’s absolutely real … and I am pregnant. You’ve been so brainwashed by all those courses you’ve taken that you think everything is psychological …

—Right now I’m not doing anything. I already told you that. There’s plenty of time to decide.

—First of all, for Efi to come back from the army.

—In ten days. It’s not just his decision, though.

—There’s time … there’s time …

—It’s not up to me whether he wants to be a father or not, Mother … as far as I’m concerned, I can have the child without him, if that’s what I feel like doing …

—Because the defense ministry, I already told you, helps out in such cases, even if there’s no legal father. You’ll be surprised to hear that they’re very liberal …

—Well, they are about this kind of thing. Maybe they also have guilt feelings … who knows …

—Irees told me. Irees knows. She checked it all out.

—She knows everything, Mother. She’s become an expert on our legal rights. She keeps going back to talk to more officials, and each time she comes up with some new right. There are all kinds of rights for war orphans that you and I never even heard about …

—I know it annoys you terribly, but what can I do about it? It wasn’t me who raised the subject.

—Revolting? That’s going a bit far. What’s so revolting about it?

—But so far I haven’t asked anyone for anything and I haven’t gotten anything. What are you so worked up about?

—But I’ve already told you. It’s all in my story. You simply aren’t letting me tell it.

—No. Yes. It’s as if you were afraid of it and didn’t want to hear it. That’s why you’ve kept putting me off since I phoned that morning a month ago to tell you that I’d gone to bed with him … that I’d gone to bed with somebody … I mean that I’d finally done it. It’s as if something had snapped in your trust in me. You seem, oh, I don’t know, confused like, up in the air, as if you’d finally lost the reins to your pet colt …

—Yes, the reins. You always held me by these subtle reins …

—Subtle. Invisible.

—It doesn’t matter.

—Of course.

—Don’t get angry again. I really didn’t come here to anger you.

—Fine. Let’s suppose that what alarmed you, Mother, was not what happened but the hurry I was in to tell you about it the next morning. What was wrong with that? What was even so wrong about paging you from the orchards to break the news? Ever since then, Mother, it just kills me to see how threatened you are by all kinds of things that you used to like hearing about. I’ve even begun wondering if it’s fair to burden you with them and to tell you everything I’ve been thinking and doing without keeping anything back, as if we still had to obey that lady, that ridiculous psychologist sent by the army when father was killed, who said that you had to get me to talk, that you had to make me get it all out. How did she put it? Tokeepthepusofrepressedthoughtsfromfestering, ha ha. Ever since then, Mother, I swear, I have this fear of pus in my brain. That’s why I keep blabbing away and you have to hear it all … because if you don’t, who will …

—Efi? We’ll have to wait and see … who knows? What really do I know about him … and now, after this trip to Jerusalem, I seem to know even less …

—But I did mention him to you. Didn’t I mention him to you?

—How could I not have told you that two weeks after the semester began two of his classes were suddenly canceled? And I certainly mentioned him at the beginning of the semester when you asked me about my teachers and I told you how I liked him the minute he stepped into the classroom. He stood there looking hardly any older than we were, all flustered and curly-haired, and it was almost touching how hard he worked to convince us that we really needed his course in Hebrew expression, because some of the students were up in arms and even insulted at having to take it, as if we were some kind of disadvantaged children … so that when they told us that two of his classes had been canceled, I decided to go to the office and see if he was sick, because I thought that if he was I might visit him, and they told me that his grandmother had died in Jerusalem and that he had gone there to be with his father for the week of mourning. That’s when … but how could I not have told you …

—Well, to make a long story short, I wrote down his father’s address and went that same day to Jerusalem to pay a condolence call or whatever you call it in the name of our class, although “our class” is not exactly a feeling you have at the university. You can imagine how startled he was to open the door and see this four-week-old student of his whose name he hardly remembered coming all the way from Tel Aviv to express her sympathy for his grandmother. Once he got over his bewilderment, though, he got the point right away, which was that my condolence call wasn’t exactly a condolence call but a little signal I was putting out. And since he wasn’t used to being pampered with signals from women …

—Because he’s not especially good-looking or anything just a plain-looking guy who’s nice inside … and he was so thrilled by the rope I had thrown him that he decided—after I had sat for a while, feeling like a fool, next to his father, who really did look pretty mournful, not like all those middle-aged people who become so much lighter and livelier the minute their parents die—to return with me that evening to Tel Aviv. As soon as we were on the bus we began to talk, and after he had asked me all about myself and my plans and the kibbutz and the Negev and seen how open I was, he began to open up too and tell me about himself. At first he told me about his dead grandmother, whom he really had loved, and then about being worried about his father. It seemed nice to me that he was, because his father had been very attached to his mother, I mean to Efi’s grandmother. He had lived with her since he was a child and had been saved by her during the war …

—Just imagine, they lived in Greece then. On that island, you know, Crete …

—Really?

—Of course I know about that trip you took with Father … it was before I was born …

—No, Efi’s parents were separated long ago, after his barmitzvah. He and his mother moved to Tel Aviv and she married again. He has a younger stepsister, but they’ve all been living in London for the past few years and it looks like they’re on their way to settling there for good. He lives by himself … he told me all this on the bus ride, although mostly he talked about having to serve soon in Lebanon. I could feel how frightened that made him, and how angry he was at the university for not helping to get him a deferral …

—No, he’s just a plain reservist, a corporal at most. He’s a medic … And that, Mother, is how we began getting close on that bus ride from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. I found myself liking him more and more, and I could feel myself falling in love again, but this time so much more sensibly. By the time we reached Tel Aviv I knew that if I didn’t find some way of hanging onto him then and there all the effort I had put into going to Jerusalem that day would be wasted, because we would lose touch the whole month he was in the army, after which the semester had just one more month, and it was only a one-semester course, and he didn’t have any more grandmothers left to die for another condolence call. And so, although it wasn’t that late at night, I asked him to see me home, I mean to Grandmother’s apartment. Maybe it was the difference between the two grandmothers—one who had just died at the age of sixty-eight and one who had just flown off to France at the age of seventy-four like a young lady-that made him curious to come upstairs. At most I thought we might neck a little, but suddenly we grabbed hold of each other, and he was so gentle and yielding, even if he did undress in this awful hurry, and it was all so natural and hardly hurt a bit that I asked myself, Mother, what was I waiting for all this time? What was I so afraid of? Unless maybe there was just something special about him, although to tell you the truth, you’ll see what I mean if you ever meet him, he’s not at all handsome or anything, just this slim, curly-headed type with glasses and nothing spectacular about him. But anyway, that’s why in the morning, as soon as he left, I ran to the telephone to tell you …

—Why?

—I just wanted to make you feel good, Mother. What did you think?

—Yes, Mother, it was just to make you feel good. Even if I knew you would have to walk two kilometers from the orchard to the phone and back, I thought it was worth it, because I could feel how anxious you were beginning to get about my staying a virgin …

—I thought …

—But what do you mean, you never knew? Don’t act so innocent, Mother!

—You would have known the minute it happened. Haven’t I told you that I always tell you everything?

—Yes, everything. So far.

—No. There were four more times before he went to Lebanon. Five altogether.

—He didn’t take any precautions. He must have thought that I was taking them. And I already told you that I got the dates confused, and besides, I thought that if you douched right away with hot water …

—Naturally. Don’t you always know exactly what’s going on in my subconscious?

—Yes, in Grandmother’s apartment. It was the most obvious place, and if you must know everything, it was even in her room, that is, hold on tight, in her big double bed …

—But what’s wrong with that?

—Deceitful? Toward who?

—Not at all … I’m sure Grandmother would be thrilled …

—Something drew us there … right into her bed …

—No, not especially. I just thought it might interest you.

—Oh, I don’t know … maybe psychologically … you must have some interpretation of it …

—But if I don’t mind telling you everything, why should you mind hearing it?

—Are you out of your mind? Who else could I tell? Only you, Mother, there’s no one else. You’re the only person in the whole world …

—But in what way …

—What doesn’t matter?

—I want you to tell me. What doesn’t matter?

—Coffee for me. But what doesn’t matter? Tell me!

—No. 1 don’t think I was making a fool of myself.

—No.

—No.

—Are you back to that again? Why must you keep rushing me off to the shower? I’ll take one later. It’s as if you kept trying to head me off …

—From telling you my story.

—But what are you afraid of? I didn’t do anything bad in Jerusalem, Mother. I only did good.

—Because that’s where my story begins. The rest is ancient history by now. Eli left for Lebanon two weeks ago, and I didn’t hear from him again until the beginning of this week …

—No. I couldn’t have told him before he left.

—Because I wasn’t sure myself yet.

—Of course. But late Sunday night he suddenly called from some mobile phone unit they had brought to this checkpost he’s manning near Beirut, and before I could make up my mind if and how to tell him, he asked me to get in touch with his father, because he couldn’t get through to Jerusalem to tell him he wasn’t coming to the unveiling, which the army wouldn’t give him leave for. Of course, I promised him to do it, and I even felt good that he was asking me so casually, as if I were the person he was closest to. But when I started dialing Jerusalem, it was the strangest thing, one minute there was no answer and the next the phone rang busy, although I kept trying all evening. The next day, which was Monday, I had a full schedule at the university and could only try dialing three or four times, and then Monday night Eli called again to ask if I had gotten hold of his father and how was he. I told him the phone seemed out of order, and then, Mother, he started up in this imploring tone, but really anxious like, begging me not to give up until I contacted his father, because he was very worried about him …

—No, I didn’t tell him anything. How could I? I could see how tense he was about his father, and there he was in Lebanon, standing out in the wind and the rain without even his glasses, because he told me he had broken them and wasn’t able to read … which is why I thought, why hassle him even more, what kind of a time is this to scare him with the news that he’s about to become a father himself? For the time being lowered him that much quiet … and so that same night, which was Monday, I began dialing Jerusalem again, but really thoroughly, nonstop. I kept it up until midnight, only so did Jerusalem. Either it was busy or else there was no answer, and the same thing happened the next morning, which was Tuesday, when I got out of bed especially early and started in on the phone immediately. In the end I called the telephone company to ask if the line was out of order, and they told me that no one had reported it and that to the best of their knowledge it was not, but they suggested I try information to see if the number had been changed, because sometimes, it seems, numbers get changed without notice. Well, I called information, and the number hadn’t been changed. And then, Mother, don’t ask me why, I felt that I just had to get through to that father, whom I actually remembered quite well from my brief visit the month before, unshaven and in his socks on the living room couch, this stocky, pleasant, Mediterranean-type man sitting next to two little old Sephardic ladies who had come to pay their respects and looked straight out of some Greek or Italian movie, and I went on dialing him from the university between classes, I even left my last morning class in the middle and dialed and dialed, because like I say, by now it was a matter of principle …

—No, Efi didn’t leave me a clue where else to look for him. I knew vaguely that he worked in the court system as a judge or a prosecutor, but I had no idea where or for what court, and when on a whim I tried calling the Supreme Court, the switchboard operator had never heard of him. All morning long I went on dialing like an uncontrollable madwoman—it was as if Efi’s sperm inside me was transmitting its anxiety around the clock. I couldn’t stop thinking of that apartment in Jerusalem with its three rooms connected by a long hallway like an old railroad flat. I kept imagining the telephone ringing away there, drilling down the hallway from room to room, and by two o’clock I was so beside myself that I decided to cut English and go to Jerusalem to see what was happening. After all, what is it to Jerusalem from the coast these days, barely an hour in each direction. And so I went home to return my books and change clothes, and it was a lucky thing that I took this heavy sweater with me at the last minute, because even in Tel Aviv I could feel a cold wave coming on. And Mother, I really did mean to call and tell you I was going, so that you wouldn’t worry if I got back late at night, but I knew the kibbutz office was closed and that no one but the cats would be by the dining-hall telephone at that time of the afternoon, and so I didn’t bother trying. I was halfway out the door when something told me to take my toothbrush and a spare pair of panties, and so I put them in my bag and started out for Jerusalem …

—I don’t know … I just did … I mean …

—Yes, yes, I know you’ve been taught that no one “just” does anything. Don’t get carried away, though. I’ve kept a spare pair of panties in my bag for the last two weeks just in case I got my period, although that still doesn’t explain the toothbrush. What did that mean? Well, I’ll leave that to you, you’ve learned all about psychological symbols in those courses of yours. Just don’t tell me that subconsciously I meant to stay in Jerusalem, because in that case I should have taken along some pajamas too, and I didn’t … unless my subconscious is dumber than I think … or maybe it has a subconscious of its own and that’s what made it screw up …

—Don’t take me so seriously.

—No, but it’s starting to annoy me, because you’re turning it into a religion.

—All right, all right, never mind … it’s not important. The point is, Mother, that I upped and went to Jerusalem that Tuesday, and that while I left Tel Aviv in broad daylight, it was pitch black when I arrived. It was foggy and raining with this thin, sleety sort of rain, and I was so confused by the darkness that I got off the bus a stop too soon and ended up in this neighborhood called Talbiah. Not that I regretted it, because it was like being in some city in Europe. I was in this big plaza surrounded by beautiful stone houses that looked absolutely splendid and magical in the light of the street lamps with their arcades and columned porticoes and courtyards full of cypress trees … it was just fantastic …

—Yes, exactly, how did you know? But it’s not just the President, Mother. It’s the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister too, they all live near that big, beautiful plaza, although I could have walked right by it without knowing if not for this policeman sitting in a little hut who I asked for directions. I also asked him what he was guarding, and he showed me the President’s house and even let me peek past the gate, and I had this most wonderful feeling, Mother, of having entered the true heart of the city …

—No, you’re wrong. I was never there. As far back as I can remember, I was always brought to Jerusalem in groups of schoolchildren or soldiers, always for some ceremony or field trip that took place in some museum or archaeological site, or else on the walls of the Old City, which we had to run around on in this sweltering heat after some nuisance of a tour guide. And if we spent the night there, it was always in some youth hostel on the outskirts of town, either next to the military cemetery on Mount Herzl or in that frightening forest near the Holocaust Museum, never in the city itself, in the true inner heart of it. And so with the help of that policeman who was guarding the President, I didn’t have to get back on the bus but took a shortcut to this neighborhood called Ghost Valley through an empty field and a little woods that led me straight to Efi’s father’s street, which I entered contrariwise …

—I mean from the wrong end.

—You don’t know it. It’s called The Twenty-ninth of November Street. You have to walk down a hill behind the old leper hospital. It’s a long, narrow street you’ve never been on.

—The German Colony?

—I don’t think that’s its name, Mother. On the map it clearly said Ghost Valley. When I first looked up the address I had been given at the university, I thought that only a Jerusalemite could live in a place with such a scary name, because no Tel-Avivian would ever stand for it-and now this fog was drifting all around and it took me forever to find the building because I was coming from the wrong end of the street, and when I did I was so wet and cold from the rain, and my shoes were so full of mud, that I just stood there in a corner of the entrance, pulling myself together. And then, Mother, right there in that dark stairwell, it suddenly began, do you hear me? Do you?

—This strange feeling, which I kept having all the time I was in Jerusalem … as if, Mother, I wasn’t there just by myself but … how can I put it … as if someone had put me on the opening page of a book …

—A book. Some novel or story, or even a movie, for that matter. Mostly it was the feeling of eyes being on me all the time, even my own eyes, which kept watching me from the side as though tracking me. I don’t mean in reality, but in a book … as if I were being written about on the first page of some story, where it said … something like … something like … an old book that began like this: “One winter afternoon a fatherless student left her grandmother’s apartment in the coastal metropolis on an errand for her boyfriend, who had asked her to find out what had happened to his father in the inland capital, all contact with whom had been lost …” Something simple- and innocent-sounding that was about to become very complicated. Next you see her step into the entrance of a plain but respectable apartment house on a cold winter evening—where, after a few seconds, the light goes out, so that the camera shooting her from outside has to grope its way in after her and finds her standing before a greenish door on which is the single word: Mani. That’s how it starts, this story or movie or whatever you call it, Mother, with a light knock and a quick ring, and then a second ring and a third. But the man inside doesn’t want to open up, even though our heroine, the young lady from the metropolis, will make him do it in the end, and by forcing her way into his apartment, Mother, will save his life …

—Just a minute … listen …

—Just a minute …

—One minute.

—One minute. No, there was no answer. And maybe, Mother, it was that feeling I had on the stairs that I was in a story and not in real life that kept me from giving up, because I was sure that he was hiding there inside the apartment and not coming to the door for the same reason he hadn’t answered the telephone. In the end, after ringing and knocking in every possible way for a good ten minutes, I pretended to leave by walking back down the stairs, and then I tiptoed up again as quietly as I could and stood pressed against the door in the darkness, almost hugging it while holding my breath, just like in one of those thrillers, until I heard faint steps and realized that he was coming to the door, that he was standing right on the other side of it. And then, in this soft, friendly voice that wouldn’t scare him, I said, “It’s me, Mr. Mani, I’ve brought you an important message from your son Efi”—at which point he had to open up …

—Just a minute. Listen …

—Will you wait one minute!

—Not at all, Mother. He’s only your age, maybe even a little younger, somewhere in his middle forties. He could look pretty good if he wanted to. But when he opened the door that evening he was scary-looking, like some kind of depressed animal coming out from deep in its burrow, with this month-old mourner’s beard and a raggedy old bathrobe, all red-eyed and wild-haired. He was in his socks, and the apartment behind him was dark but heated like a furnace, and he seemed so surprised and upset by my having gotten him to open the door that all he could do was stand there blocking it and looking hostile. I could see there was no point in reminding him who I was, or in telling him I had been in his apartment a month ago on a condolence call, because he was so into himself that a month might have seemed to him like a hundred years or more. And so I just mentioned Efi again and gave him the message as quickly as I could before the door was shut in my face, and he stood there listening without a word, just shaking his head absentmindedly while beginning to close the door. But as luck would have it, Mother, just then the telephone rang—you would have thought that part of myself had stayed behind in Tel Aviv to keep on dialing. He looked around as if pretending not to notice it, or at least hoping I would go away so he could answer, but when he saw I had no intention of doing that and that the telephone wasn’t stopping, he went to pick it up in the living room—and then, Mother, perhaps because of the book I was in now, or because I knew I’d be protected by the photographer and the director and the whole camera team that was following my every movement, I decided not to take that head shake of his for an answer and I slipped inside uninvited, because I knew I had to find out what was going on in there …

—Because there must have been something if he was that determined to keep me out when I had come all the way from Tel Aviv with a message from his son and was standing there on the landing, soaking wet and half-frozen …

—You don’t say! I was waiting for that, Mother.

—I was waiting for it. I was wondering when you’d get around to that, so why don’t you just spill it all now … I’ve been expecting it for the last quarter of an hour, so if you must say it, this is the time …

—Yes, yes, why don’t you say it, go right ahead. TheregoesourHagarlookingforafatherfigureagain … asusual,she’slatchedontosomeolderman … I know that routine by heart … every time I would tell you when I was in the army about some officer a little older than me whom I happened to like, you’d get that pitying smile of yours right away …

—Yes, I know you didn’t, but it’s what you wanted to say, why not admit it, goddamn it? It follows logically from all those trite, pathetically shallow clichés you’ve been taught about the psychology of orphans …

—You mean there’s no special field of Orphan Psychology?

—How come?