The next morning he phoned again and got through to a secretary, who was apparently also a teacher. “Ya’ir Ben-Ya’ish isn’t here today,” she said in a pleasantly husky voice. “He’s in Tel Aviv.” Molkho explained who he was and that it was urgent, and the woman promised to tell the council manager, who would be sure to call back the next day. “What about the treasurer?” asked Molkho. The treasurer, however, was indisposed and had no home telephone.
The next day there was no call from the village, so Molkho phoned again. Once more it took forever to get the secretary, who, though sounding more suspicious, promised that Mr. Ben-Ya’ish would be in the next morning and would return the call. Outside the window a warm spring shower fell briefly, evoking a pungent smell of blossoms from the gray streets. The director’s office called to see what progress Molkho had made. “Then drive up there yourself,” he was told when he mumbled an inconclusive answer. “What, in my own car?” he asked, thinking of his new Citroen. “Yes, don’t worry,” was the answer. “We’ll cover all your expenses.”
THAT EVENING he consulted a map to see exactly where Zeru’a was and discovered that it was way up in the Galilee, surrounded by Arab villages. In the morning he rose to find the streets wet, as if a heavy but silent rain had fallen all night. The northbound roads were packed with huge army trucks bringing tanks, prefabs, and other equipment back from Lebanon, where the Israeli pullout was in full swing. Once again, Molkho thought of his wife. She had been bitterly opposed to the Lebanese war and now it was ending.
On the highway to Acre the traffic was backed up. A prefab had fallen from a truck and blocked the road, and soon after there was an accident; by an overturned car, surrounded by police, a large, disheveled woman sat screaming on a stretcher. When Molkho slowed down to get a look at her, the policemen waved him on. “Step on it, step on it,” they shouted angrily at the passing vehicles, “this isn’t a sideshow here.” And so he drove on, not turning on the radio, so as to listen to the motor, which was still being broken in, and even passing up a female hitchhiker so as not to overload the car in the hills ahead. The light drizzle stopped, a fierce sun emerged cocksurely from behind the tattered clouds, and the asphalt was suddenly dry.
At Karmiel he stopped, took off his jacket, and entered a diner for a second breakfast. Through the window of the restaurant a chain of limestone hills formed an unbroken wall leading north. He could see the same mountains from his own house in Haifa, yet only as an abstract blue line; now, however, they loomed solidly and massively before him. When he rose to pay, he made sure to ask for a receipt. Fancy me an investigator with an expense account.
Several kilometers out of Karmiel, after consulting his map, he left the highway and headed north on a narrow old road that began an abrupt climb into the mountains. He drove slowly on the steep curves, sticking to second gear and keeping an eye on the RPMs, which appeared on a special indicator; but the road seemed endless, pressing on past forests and tangled gullies along the narrow, rutted asphalt, on which the only traffic was an occasional army vehicle or Arab tractor that forced Molkho, afraid for his new car, onto the shoulder before continuing his steady ascent to dizzying heights. Halfway to his destination he stopped at the top of a rise to rest the engine, which was air-cooled and had no heat gauge. This car is too sophisticated for me, he thought, although perhaps he would appreciate it more on the easier drive to Jerusalem. Meanwhile, he parked it beneath a big pine tree and went to relieve himself in the bushes, examining his penis, which here, in the clear, pure air, amid the murmur of leaves and the flowers and rocks of the Galilee, resembled a dark little animal, rather comic in the loyal arching of its spume onto the thick carpet of dry pine needles that absorbed it without a sound or trace. She was the first and only woman I ever slept with, he thought. It would be easier if there had been others, but I was too faithful. He shook the last drops, which looked rather greenish to him, into the air, regretting not having urinated on one of the stones, against whose light background the color would have stood out. Zipping his fly, he turned to face the wind, reminded of the country near Jerusalem: the same light asphalt dating back to British times, the same black curbstones, the same pine and cypress trees—just fresher and moister, not powdered with desert aridity like the Judean Hills. A sharp feeling of déjà vu told him he had been here before, yes, on this very hilltop, where he had perhaps stopped to rest or even spend the night, for he had been here on foot, on a Scout or army hike many years ago, brought to see one of the scenic ravines of the Galilee, and the memory flowed sharply through him, the adventure of a sheltered boy from Jerusalem whose parents never ventured beyond Tel Aviv. Once he could depend on his wife, who was better at it than he was, to remember times and places, but now he was on his own.
But when, soon after, he reached the village, which was little more than an overgrown farming cooperative of the type established for new immigrants in the 1950s, the feeling of familiarity faded quickly, yielding to a dreary sense of desolation. It was a place in which nothing seemed to have changed in thirty years: the same peeling little houses on the same concrete columns, with here or there a new story or wing; the same little orchards on the same rocky, rust-colored earth; the same chicken runs and sheds, with the same untended fields between them dotted by the same scraggly trees; the same narrow approach road passing through an antiterrorist perimeter fence and suddenly, for no apparent reason, turning into a broad thoroughfare that led to a center boasting several shops and a deserted bus stop. Molkho stopped by a tall electric pole to which was nailed a bulletin board plastered with posters from the last elections, one of them bearing the repeated picture of a smiling, stubbly young man. A heavy silence hung over the place, as if it were abandoned, though somewhere in the distance the chug of a tractor was drowned out by the clunk of a water pump.
A woman leading a fat sheep on a rope showed him the way to the school, and Molkho, taking out his files and locking the car, headed toward it into the wind, noticing the snowy peak of Mount Hermon between two houses, so big and near that his heart leapt. Crossing a playground and passing a water fountain, where again he had the sensation of someplace revisited, he climbed a short flight of stairs to the school, hearing schoolchildren singing old Passover songs with the same gruff accent as the boy’s on the phone. A passing teacher pointed out the council manager’s office at the end of a hallway. The room itself, however, was empty and dark; its blinds were lowered, an obsolete map of the country hung on a wall beside photographs of long-dead presidents and prime ministers, an accordion case leaned against a chairless desk, and several baskets of vegetables stood by a table on which lay an electric heating fork. There was no file cabinet or evidence of an office in sight, and Molkho felt instantly depressed. What am I doing here? he asked himself.
Just then the bell rang, and the children rushed out of their classes with a war whoop. Footsteps approached; no doubt word of his arrival had spread, and perhaps the children had been let out early because of it. But it was only the overweight and out-of-breath secretary, who, it seemed, was also the music teacher, for a bright red accordion was strapped like a baby sling to her chest. Standing on ceremony, he introduced himself with glum formality. “So you came after all,” she said. “But Ben-Ya’ish isn’t here yet. He must be on his way.” “Didn’t you tell him I was coming?” asked Molkho. “Of course,” said the secretary, “and he suggested that meanwhile you go over the books with the treasurer.” “Then the treasurer is feeling better?” asked Molkho. “More or less,” said the secretary. “I’ll find someone to take you to his home.” She hurried back out of the room, the accordion still strapped to her chest, and returned a minute later with a dark-skinned girl, who—such, later on, was Molkho’s first memory of her—stood in the unlit hallway surrounded by a crowd of children. She was so thin and straight, as though delicately carved out of ebony, with such painfully large steel-rimmed glasses that at first he mistook her for a boy, even though she was wearing a black leotard. “Take this man to your father,” the secretary told her. She stared seriously up at him with her dark, exotic eyes and turned at once to guide him with the pack of children on her heels.