He listened in silence, amused by her unself-conscious brutality, gazing down the hallway that led to the twilit rooms of the apartment and imagining a woman reclining in each, waiting to be tried out. Gazing down at the triangle formed by the three old streets of King George, Ben-Yehudah, and Jaffa and at a group of children off to some activity in the blue shirts and ties of a youth movement, he recalled the British policeman who had directed traffic there and the green tie he himself had dutifully worn when he had gone to such activities too. “There aren’t as many women as you think,” he said with sudden bitterness. “There’s no one out there but desperate divorcées, psychotic spinsters, and widows who’ve murdered their husbands.” “What kind of crazy thing is that to say?” she asked, shocked by his attitude, her anxiety only increasing when he wouldn’t answer. If only he would come back to live in Jerusalem, he would be sure to find someone—someone from his old class or school, for example, whom he had grown up with and who would be more like him, perhaps even a cousin of theirs. After all, all of Jerusalem remembered him and asked about him. “Who?” he challenged. Her friends, said his mother. “They’re always interested when I tell them about you.” “What, those old biddies of yours?” The idea was so daft that he laughed out loud with sheer delight. “A penny for your thoughts,” coaxed his mother. “I have no thoughts,” he retorted. “She’s only been dead for half a year, and I still need time to get over it.” But his mother was relentless. He should visit her more often, once every two months was not enough; did he think she could find him a new wife over the telephone? “The gas alone costs a fortune,” he said gently, looking back down at the deserted Sabbath streets; in fact, he had neglected her in recent years, for his wife had sapped all his strength. “And no one pays my car expenses, either.” “Then take a bus on Friday and stay over. You can sleep in your old bed and go home on Saturday night.” The idea, however, did not appeal to him: taking buses was not his idea of travel, especially as he was planning to buy a new car. Naturally, his mother was against this too. She rose, went to fetch a brown paper bag, and refilled the empty plate of nuts against his protests. “That’s enough,” he begged. “Don’t give me any more. I can’t stop eating and lately I’ve been putting on weight.” “That’s from your trip,” said his mother. “People don’t notice, but they put on weight abroad.”
NIGHT CAME and Molkho seemed in no hurry to leave Jerusalem. After rejecting the idea of calling several old school friends, fearful of the disinterest he might hear in their voices, he agreed to go over some recent bank statements of his mother’s to make sure there were no mistakes in them. Down below, the ugly old shopping district began filling up with people, many of them fresh from the Saturday soccer match. A desert chill was in the air. Feeling his meal burble inside him, he padded off to the bathroom for relief. It was a room that he liked, generously proportioned and high-ceilinged in the old style, with a tall bathtub, its elaborate feet of reddish iron resembling the claws of a peacock. He kept the light off, preferring to sit in the dark room, which was faintly lit by a purplish glow trickling through the window. From here the view was different, more cheeringly picturesque, with its red roofs of the old quarters of Jerusalem and its distant, partly wooded hills. Visible too were the backyards of the buildings on the street, which had mostly been converted into offices and banks. Breathing in the clean night air with a sigh of pleasure, Molkho peeked into the tall straw laundry basket that was covered with a cracked enamel bowl, the same bowl that had been the steering wheel of bus number 9 when, sitting on the toilet as a child, he had driven it all around town, handing the passengers tickets of tom toilet paper. He finished, rose, and bent down to peer into the still fizzing bowl for signs of blood; then, yanking the long chain that reminded him of the emergency brake of a railroad car, he watched the water gush from the tank, smiling with pleasure at the train wreck once again averted in the nick of time. He still did not pull up his pants, however. Bare-bottomed he leaned out the window, ravenously drinking in the night, eyes combing first the aging old neighborhood and then the sky for three stars, which meant he could run tell his father that the Sabbath was over and that he was permitted to smoke. Below, in the white glare of a streetlight, he made out his old car, dry and dusty-looking; yet as sorry as he felt for it, he knew he did not want it anymore. His pants still down around his ankles, he was a little fat boy again, his parents’ only child, his thirty years of married life vanished like a dream. Had she, he wondered, been taken by, or given to, someone else by now? Was her spirit finally at peace, quiet and resting somewhere, her compulsive criticizing over at last? Or was she still carrying on in the heavenly spheres, going from one to another and finding fault with each? Was the universe not good enough for her even now? Did she remember him?
BECAUSE SUDDENLY THERE WAS NO ONE to criticize him anymore, it had stopped all at once, though he woke up in the morning and went to bed at night still expecting it: “Just look at yourself! How can you eat like that? Stand straight! Don’t twist your hair! The idea, stop being ridiculous!” Her voice lived on in him, and he listened all the time, so that—“You must shower at least once a day!”—if he sometimes forgot to, or was so tired at night that he skipped it, he felt guilty and positively unwashed. The days came at him out of nowhere, one after another, blanketing him in a spongy morass through which he had to burrow his way to freedom. As if sated by his trip to Europe, he hardly listened to music any more, nor were there any concerts, for the Philharmonic was on a foreign tour. He passed the days by reading Anna Karenina, starting this time with Volume I, the old library copy giving him the odd feeling that he would be tested on it. As for Volume II, it arrived in the mail two days after his return in a brown office envelope bearing the motto “Pay Your Taxes on Time.” Though in it was a thank-you note expressing the hope that his flight had been a pleasant one, its sender was not to be seen in the office, neither in the cafeteria nor on the stairs; she must have been avoiding him while reporting on her conference in Berlin, not to mention itemizing her expenses, which no doubt included the opera tickets. What had she told her family about him? A dud. The sooner forgotten, the better. He even tried killing me there. Killing you? Yes, killing me. The thought of it made Molkho smile. I’d better be more careful, he told himself. True, I’m in no hurry. I’m only fifty-two, but I’d better do a little research and find out what my type is. And I’d better take off a few pounds too. He even resumed his evening walk, remembering how he had forced himself to go out each night for a slow, short turn around the block during the last months of his wife’s illness.