Outside the soft wind licked at their faces, and the afternoon light stretched tautly over the mountains. “I wouldn’t advise it,” said the secretary as he started to lead the girl to his car. “It’s not a long way, but it’s muddy and rocky. Why not just follow the girl.”
The girl, however, had come to a halt and was arguing with the other children, who wanted to come with her. “She said just me,” she stated firmly. “He’s here to see my father. She said just me.” But the secretary was no longer there and the children were so adamant that, after trying briefly to fend them off, the girl turned to Molkho and said, “Let’s go.” They left the schoolyard through an opening in the fence and walked quickly along a muddy path, Molkho following behind her with his files, stepping on new tufts of bluish grass while watching her spindly legs and little buttocks, which bounced inside her black leotard like rubber balls. She bounded along like a fawn or, rather, like a bespectacled bunny, and it was all he could do to keep up with her, breathing the high mountain air while treading the winding path that circled behind the houses, cowsheds, and chicken coops over the terra rossa earth of the Galilee that turned even the rain puddles red.
Every now and then she stopped to let him catch up, though she failed to return his smile but simply stared at him somberly through her funny glasses. “What’s wrong with your father?” he asked, and when she did not understand him, “What’s he sick with?” “He’s got something in his blood. He was in the hospital,” she answered warily, continuing to lead him past old farm tools and rusting plows and cultivators half-buried in earth. They kept turning into new side paths and finally passed through a dark shed under the anxious eyes of a large cow and into the backyard of a little house standing on the hillside, falling straight into an ambush set by the children from school, who burst suddenly out of their hiding place. “We got here first!” they shouted merrily.
The girl ignored them. Proud and reproachful, she ushered Molkho into a kitchen, where dressed in pajamas stood a tall, young, dark-skinned Jew of Indian extraction, wearing glasses just like those worn by the girl, whose height and ebony fineness clearly derived from him. She ran to him and hugged him, while he gently patted her head, and Molkho had the eerie thought, this man is going to die and she doesn’t know that she knows. He felt drawn inside the house, as if Death, having parted from him in the autumn and run ahead like a mad dog to the far end of the Galilee, now lay drowsing there beneath a table. “So it’s you,” he whispered to it warmly, stepping into the kitchen and introducing himself to the lanky Indian, who seemed to blanch slightly, despite his dark skin. “I was told you were the treasurer,” he said.
“Treasurer?” The man smiled uncertainly. “Not exactly. I only help Ben-Ya’ish a bit with the accounts. But come in.” He whispered something to the girl and disappeared, and quickly clearing a pile of books from a chair, she led Molkho into a small, clean, simply furnished room and asked him to sit down. He did, his eyes glued to her lithe body with its black leotard and pink slippers, and the steel-rimmed glasses on her ebony face, wanting to reach out and touch her, to verify that she was real. “Where’s your mother?” he asked, and was told that she worked in a shoe factory in Kiryat Shmonah. “A shoe factory?” he murmured, watching her as, with an unchildlike assurance, she tidied up quietly. “Do you take ballet in school?” “Not everyone,” she said, “only me.” Just imagine, he thought, right here, in this country, at the far end of nowhere, are people like this, and we don’t even know they exist. Why, you never even hear about them.
The father returned to the room, still unshaven but wearing pants and a black sweater that made him look even darker. Like a stranger in his own home, he looked hesitantly around before sitting down stiffly. At once the girl sat protectively nearby him, unconsciously imitating his movements. She was slightly cross-eyed, Molkho realized, once again failing to get a response to his smile. With a glance out the window at the towering mountains, he opened his files and spread them out on a little table, suddenly feeling a great fatigue. “How old is this village?” he asked the thin Indian, who was observing him curiously. “Something tells me I’ve been here before, maybe on some army bivouac.” The village, the Indian told him, was first built for new immigrants back in the early 1950s but had twice been abandoned; the present population dated from several years later, when, in addition to some Jews from North Africa, several Indian families arrived. The girl, Molkho saw, was listening too, straight-backed and flat-chested, her head framed by the window against a background of mountains and clouds. She’s certainly a strange one, he thought, unless I just don’t know what little girls are like anymore.
“Who lives here now?” he asked the Indian. “Are they still traditional Jews?” Not as much as all that, he was told; on Sabbaths most people still attended synagogue, but some preferred to sleep or work. “And what sort of work,” he asked, “do they do?” Most used to raise laying hens, said the Indian, but in the egg glut of 1982 the coops were abandoned, and now the women worked in Kiryat Shmonah, while the men farmed as best they could, though some did nothing at all. In fact, times were so hard that the only thing keeping people in the village was their having nowhere else to go. “And were these financial statements drawn up by you?” inquired Molkho, spreading out his papers and leafing through them impatiently, afraid the man’s dirge was simply a cover-up for the faked accounts. No, they weren’t, said the Indian; he had only helped Ben Ya’ish with his arithmetic. That is, he was an arithmetic teacher not a treasurer, but since his illness, which had forced him to stop teaching, he had been employed by the council manager in a part-time capacity.
Yet, when Molkho inquired about the man’s illness, he answered quite apathetically and knew so little about it that even its name was a mystery. From time to time he went for treatments to Rambam Hospital in Haifa. “In what ward? With what doctors?” asked Molkho, now fully alert. But the Indian was unable to enlighten him: he arrived, he lay down on a bed, he had some blood taken, he was given a shot, and he went home again—that was all he knew. “I know that hospital well,” Molkho told him, fishing for more information. “My wife died of cancer six months ago.” Yet the Indian said nothing, forcing Molkho to keep talking about his wife, while the girl jiggled her thin, dark leg in wonder. Indeed, he couldn’t stop; it had been a while since he’d last shared his wife’s illness with anyone, so that he quite enjoyed telling about it now, right down to the drama of those final months and the little field hospital he had set up at home to ensure a comfortable death. “And she really died there?” asked the girl, staring hard at him. “Of course,” Molkho said. “It happened early in the morning. She hardly suffered at all.” Could he have met this child in the army thirty years ago too, he wondered, feeling the sense of déjà vu again. “How many children do you have?” he asked the Indian. “So far, only one,” said the man, hugging his daughter with a smile. “But we hope to give her a little brother or sister soon.”