Five Seasons (28 page)

The director leafed through the file, asked a few questions, and thanked Molkho profusely, as if he had done something heroic, after which he inquired about the health of his children and his mother-in-law, whom he remembered well. And that was the end of it. Or, at least, so Molkho thought until later that day he was again called to the director's office, where, to his alarm, he found the legal adviser sitting in a sleeveless knit dress, her high-heeled shoes crossed, turning the Xeroxed pages of the file. She looked pale, and he suddenly feared that she was about to exact her pound of flesh for his failure to go to bed with her. Why, oh why, couldn't he at least have kissed those lily-white arms, which certainly deserved some consideration? Greeting him with a faint smile, she made no attempt to conceal the coolness with which she had already written him off. She had been invited, explained the director, to ask Molkho a few questions, which he proceeded to answer as best he could. Yes, work on the road had begun; he had seen it himself. And the park, too; the trees and bushes had already been planted. Not that he knew what they needed a park for with all that natural magnificence around them, but of course, it was their prerogative to have one. As for the tractor, yes, it was in his report—that is, it was not exactly a tractor: it was a secondhand steamroller, but it did exist and a copy of its registration was included. And though there was no denying that Ben-Ya'ish was a rather muddled young man who had taken administrative liberties with unemployment checks, this was not the first such case come across by their office, which had always looked the other way in the past. After all, times were hard up there.

The legal adviser stared at him intently, her freckles pale in the afternoon sunlight. Did she still roam the world for opera? wondered Molkho, who had himself given music short shrift in recent months. Looking down at the desk, he phrased his defense of Ben-Ya'ish carefully while the director sat listening in silence. “So you think everything is just fine up there?” the legal adviser interrupted mockingly, as though he were a clearly hopeless case. “You found no problems? No irregularities?” I didn't say that, answered Molkho patiently. “I was there twice and even stayed over one night, but I can't say I went into it thoroughly.” “That's obvious,” she laughed snidely, continuing to leaf through the file. But the director, though noncommittal, seemed to be on Molkho's side; with a kind look in his direction he picked up the original file and began to thumb through it too. All at once Molkho's fears vanished. Casually, as though the rest no longer mattered, he rose and crossed the large room to the open window, from where he watched the two of them studying the file. For a moment he just stood there. Then, feeling the need to make some overture to her, or perhaps to them both, he declared, “Why, it's really summer!” Startled by the sound of his voice, he pointed out the window by way of illustration. “It's always the same,” he explained. “Spring is over before you even know it.”

 

 

 

 

 

Part IV

 

SUMMER

 

 

 

 

B
UT THAT FIRST SUMMER
gave birth to a supersummer, so brutally torrid that even the nights were blistering. It started halfway through July; a firm but invisible hand blocked the sea with a wall of grimy white haze, turning the temperately hot Mediterranean coast into a brutal miasma. No matter how early you rose in the morning, a scorching wind was already blowing. The thermometer zoomed upward and stuck there. The weather was often the lead item on the news, the forecasters being called upon to explain the inexplicable in half-menacing, half-apologetic tones. Worse yet, the travel tax was suddenly doubled, forcing mass cancellations by those planning to seek relief abroad. Despairingly people flocked to the beaches, among them Molkho, who hadn't been to the seashore for years and was only halfway through a diet meant to enhance his romantic prospects. For days on end, he ate nothing but blotchy, seedless watermelons, staring angrily every morning at the stubborn scales that registered his weight loss with agonizing slowness. The thought of all the good food that he was missing or sometimes reluctantly left on his plate enveloped him in a thin web of gloom. He was still not used to the shy promptings of sex that, having first stirred faintly in the spring, now accompanied him with gingerly steps like a stray but thoroughbred cat that had adopted him, its stiff, velvety tail sometimes brushing his thighs.

It's high time, he thought, making his way among the bodies scattered in the sand and scrutinizing some that he hardly would have glanced at until recently. Rarely did they interest him, for nearly all seemed badly flawed and limp with the humidity, though now
and then he caught a glimpse of some almost painfully attractive feature. Best of all, he liked the young mothers, who had a harried-looking glow, so different from the better-groomed singles, with their hard-bitten lust to be tanned. Stepping into the water, which toward evening resembled a salty, tepid bath, he thought, if only I could make a collage—a leg from here, a head from there, a shoulder or smile from somewhere else—I might construct someone lovable. Wading through the breaking surf, which pounded so hard at this time of year that he swallowed whole mouthfuls of it, he pushed on into deeper, calmer water, where he swam beside lone figures like himself, mostly brawny old women with helmetlike bathing caps, sometimes peeing silently while staring innocently up at a sun that seemed never to set but simply to dissipate in a white curtain of haze, after which he swam slowly back, letting the breakers cast him ashore like a corpse. Resurrected and still dripping water, he strolled through the crowd feeling like a sandwich board: See for Yourself! This Is My Body! Untouched by Death! Find Me a Woman! Often he ran into people he knew—colleagues from work, former neighbors, friends of his wife's, doctors and staff from the hospital—and stood over them, patting his chest and chatting about the crazy weather, this second, superhot summer begotten by the first. Whether smiling or serious, they lay looking up at him as though conscious that it was not the weather but his uncontrollable lust that had brought him down to the beach, and then inquired about his children and mother-in-law, shaking their heads upon hearing how well the old woman was doing, as if amazed that her daughter's death hadn't done her in too. Sometimes, to cheer him, they would tell him the latest news about who else was dying of cancer, which was often no news at all, since he had already seen the victim in the hospital, slipping with a frightened look through the doors of the oncology ward, so that he stood there inattentively glancing at the mountains, from which the gray smoke of forest fires had been rising all summer long, aware of their trying to guess whether he had gotten over his wife's death—since which, incredibly enough, less than a year had gone by. At last, feeling them weary of him, he unobtrusively went off to dry himself and dress, returning home to a cruelly long and too brightly lit evening of Volume I of
Anna Karenina,
which he would have put down long ago, were it not for the pleas of his daughter, now discharged from the army and vacationing in Europe. “Don't give up, Dad. It's a really good book. Why don't you try to finish it?”

And then, in the first week of August, the supersummer begat a superbaby of its own, the whitest and most devilish of them all: the air rolled over and died, the sun approached meltdown, and a livid sky shut out the world while hordes of newly arrived black Jews from Ethiopia staged protest marches on the roads that sent the mercury shooting even higher. You're lucky to be out of this hellhole, Molkho whispered through parched lips to his dead wife upon rising each morning. There was talk of mysterious sunspots, yet Europe was deluged by rain, and most likely the culprit was a stubborn high-pressure front that refused to budge from the Turkish-Iranian frontier. Shown on television, it resembled a shapeless, odorless, irregularly formed amoeba, and for a moment, thinking that it might be connected to her too, that it was perhaps her last signal from galactic space before streaking to her final annihilation, Molkho was gripped by the transcendent fear that this strange, abstract blob was all that was left of his wife.

H
E SAT UP
in the middle of the night, unable to sleep comfortably. In the neighboring houses lights were on too, for the heat kept everyone awake. He stepped out on the terrace and gazed up at the yellow halo around the moon, musing—no longer fearfully, but with a deep sorrow—on how his wife was pared down to a last, nameless cell that still fought to preserve its identity. The thought that it, too, would soon be snuffed out in some vast, dark emptiness made him shiver. I must fall in love, he told himself before climbing back into bed, because otherwise this longing will destroy me.

In the morning he spoke as usual to his mother, who complained bitterly about the heat, which was even worse in Jerusalem. Suppose, she asked suddenly, that she came to stay with him for a while and spent some time on the beach? Horrified, he tried to talk her out of it. “The humidity here is ghastly,” he explained. “You'll never fall asleep at night. At least in Jerusalem there's a breeze. Why don't you buy yourself an air conditioner? I'll even come and pick it out for you.” But his mother did not want an air conditioner. She wanted to stay with him, and there was nothing he could do about it.

And so, that Friday, he pulled her, damp and sweating, out of the taxi that brought her to his house, helped her hang her dresses in the college student's old room, and sat silently across from her on the terrace facing the sea. In the evening, playing host to two old women, he muttered the blessing over the Sabbath wine and ate the meat loaf brought by his mother, who talked nonstop, taking advantage of his mother-in-law's patience, behind whose expression of eager interest lay concealed a thin mockery like his wife's. At last, sapped by the humidity, his mother trundled off to bed, from where he heard her snoring lightly.

On Sunday, after work, he took the little beach chair and went with her to the seashore, making sure to find an isolated spot where no one was likely to see her. Depositing her there, a large, heavy, funny-looking woman with bared fat legs, he went for a swim and a walk, heading first up the beach and then down, until finally, toward sunset, when the shore was nearly deserted, he ventured to sit beside her in the wet sand, absentmindedly digging a trench by her chair while letting her ramble on about her financial worries and his father and her childhood in Jerusalem and her neighbors and her friends and their children and their grandchildren and everyone who asked about him, happy to hear that his praises were being sung in his hometown, where ghostly figures from his past kept running into her, old friends and not-even-friends from school and the army, all eager to know how he was faring. And it was there, by the sea, a molten sun grazing the horizon, that Molkho first heard about his old youth-movement counselor, Uri, who together with his wife, Ya'ara, seemed to take an avid interest in him.

B
UT WE'VE BEEN THINKING
and talking of you ever since last summer!” said his old counselor to him, lightly resting a hand on his shoulder. “Since last summer?” Molkho asked, touched to be so unexpectedly thought of after so many years, even if it did seem rather odd. “But why since last summer? My wife was still alive then.” “Yes, I know,” said his old counselor, “but all of Jerusalem already knew that it was terminal.” “It did?” asked Molkho with a shiver of excitement. “Yes,” replied his counselor. “There are always people who make it their business to spread bad news; even if they don't know who it's about, it makes them feel better. There were all sorts of rumors about you, and your mother talked a lot too; she had to tell everyone all the medical details, even when she didn't understand them. You have no idea how well informed we were, especially about how you took the whole long, hard death on yourself. So that when we heard that it was over, I said to Ya'ara, ‘Who knows, perhaps this is the very man God has in mind for us. What actually do we remember about him, though? Was he really once in love with you?'”

They were standing on the long stone steps of the Jerusalem Theater on a broiling Saturday afternoon, hugging the thin line of shade by the closed box offices. A fiery silence reigned all around. Not a soul was to be seen in the empty white plaza. The shutters of the aristocratic old houses of the neighborhood were all shut. Further up the hill they could see the stone wall of the Presidential Mansion, and further down, where the street slanted steeply, the mysterious building of the old Turkish leper colony in its dusty copse of trees. As soon as he had stepped out of his car in the parking lot, Molkho had spied his former counselor's tall, thin figure walking back and forth in the shade along the top step, a wide-brimmed black hat clutched in one hand, looking down like a lone actor waiting impatiently onstage for his supporting cast. Solemnly Molkho had ascended the steps and greeted him with a timorous smile, heartened by the confidence radiating from the strong, bony frame in the black pants and sweaty white shirt of an Orthodox Jew, his dusty, broad-brimmed hat rather reassuringly resembling a cowboy's, for Molkho had been afraid of this reunion after nearly thirty years and was relieved to find he still liked the man. The old-fashioned garb; the heavy, slightly graying beard; even the ritual fringes of the undershirt sticking untidily out from the shirt—to Molkho these seemed but the latest disguise of this eternal Kierkegaardian-Buberian truth-seeker who had come to them in those days from some left-wing kibbutz and was now (as he had informed his ex-youth-grouper the week before on the telephone) an observant Jew. Molkho had remembered him well, had in fact always admired him, though he himself had never been a “Schechterite,” as his counselor's group of sensitive, if sometimes strange, friends were called, after the Haifa Bible teacher who was their guru. Indeed, it had never occurred to him to join them, having no interest in their way of life, which involved drifting from one kibbutz to another, only to be expelled from each in the end for what was considered their elitist factionalism, not to mention their mysticism and talent for attracting the prettiest girls while disdaining socialist goals, preferring to search their navels for the Meaning of Life while composing odd hymns and prayers. Ultimately they had founded a kibbutz of their own called Yodfat in the Lower Galilee, where some settled down but most eventually left, scattering in all directions, though a few, like Uri Adler, who had been one of their leaders, continued their religious quest.