He made his way past some scattered tables and entered the cafe, where he was greeted by an Indian even darker than the first. “Do you serve meals or just snacks?” Molkho asked him. “Meals too,” said the man. “And you’ll give me a receipt?” Molkho asked. “No problem,” said the man. “What do you have to eat?” Molkho asked. “What would you like?” asked the man. “But tell me what there is,” insisted Molkho, looking around to check if the place was clean. Someone sat in a far corner eating something out of a bowl. “What’s that?” Molkho asked. “Organs,” said the man. “Whose?” asked Molkho worriedly. “It’s a lung-and-liver stew,” replied the cafe owner quietly, looking deferentially at his new customer. “It’s real good.” “Do you have steak?” Molkho asked. “Whatever you like,” said the Indian. “Perhaps then,” said Molkho somewhat officiously, “you can show it to me.” Leading him into a dirty kitchen that Molkho’s wife would have fled from, the man passed a big pot simmering on a burner, opened a refrigerator, and took out a drooping piece of meat clotted with old, purplish blood. Molkho regarded it doubtfully; it was certainly not very hygienic-looking. In the end, they’ll poison me here, he told himself, still feeling a craving for meat. “Do you have sausages?” he asked. But the man did not. And so, after thinking it over, he ordered the organ stew, left the kitchen, and sat down irritably at a table, keeping an eye on his car while recalling the times his wife had made him go from restaurant to restaurant until she found one clean enough to suit her. But all that was past history. Now he would eat what and where he wanted. And his car seemed quite safe. Most of the children had gone off somewhere else, and those remaining now sat by the front wheels, among them the Indian girl, who crouched licking a popsicle like a little grasshopper with folded wings.
A pickup truck pulled up in the square and a young man climbed out of it. Could that be Ben-Ya’ish? wondered Molkho—but the young man was an Arab and his thoughts returned to his wife. No, he hadn’t killed her—the idea was obscene and insane. He had simply helped her to die when she was ready. And yet, had he not perhaps been too quick to resign himself to her death? From the very beginning, bending down that spring night to kiss the nipple of her white breast and cautiously, tenderly saying, though the words cracked like a whip, “Yes, there’s some kind of a lump here,” he hadn’t believed in her chances. And now here he was, sitting in this unsavory spot in this God-forsaken Galilean village, watching the women shoppers—all of whom, even the young ones, still looked like immigrants—as they came and went, and thinking, How cold they all still leave me. A tractor emerged from an alleyway, tried climbing the steps of the shopping arcade, and came to a sudden halt. Some children passed by. Abandoning himself to the tranquillity, he let the cool breeze fan his appetite. The place did not look as if times were as hard as all that. It was just talk. If you believed half you heard, the whole country had been falling apart for years, and yet everything was still there. In fact, wherever you went, there was a tractor clearing new ground.
The group of children by the car had disappeared. While the café owner set the bare table and brought a plate of pita bread and a small bowl of olives, Molkho queried him about the village. Had any new roads been paved lately? Not that he knew of. How about a park or public garden? He knew nothing about them either. Meanwhile, several men, looking freshly awakened from sleep, approached Molkho in a friendly manner. “Are you the fellow who’s waiting for Ben-Ya’ish? He left a message saying he’ll be here soon. What did you come to check out—the accounts? There’s nothing wrong with them! He’ll explain everything. We’re all behind him.” “I heard your wife died,” said one of the men, reaching out to shake Molkho’s hand, “I’m very sorry to hear about it.” Before he knew it, he was shaking hands with them all, startled by their knowledge, as if the wind had carried the news. He was about to ask them about the road and park, too, when the steaming bowl of stew arrived, full of dark, smooth, slightly rubbery chunks of meat swimming in a bright brown gravy and giving off a funky odor like his father’s sweat, and shaking from hunger, he pitched in before it got cold. The meat, when speared with a fork, was of various spongy consistencies, apparently because it came from different organs, and had a strange sweetness that caused him a brief moment of anxiety before he attacked it in earnest, dipping his bread in the gravy between bites. “This mountain air gives a man an appetite,” he apologized to the café owner, who sat there watching him eat. “Where’s this meat from?” he asked. “It’s all kinds of organs,” answered the man. “Don’t you like it?” “Yes, I do,” Molkho said, “it’s delicious. I was just wondering if you took it from a cow.” “I took it from a cow?” The Indian seemed alarmed, though in the end he caught on. “Oh, you mean beef!” “Yes,” said Molkho, chewing away, his face lit by the sun, which had come back out of the clouds. All around him was silence, as if the whole village were hiding, except for the café owner sitting nearby, who rose now and then to bring a cold drink or more bread, which Molkho dipped ravenously in the gravy. “It’s this mountain air,” he said again with a smile, and this time the man smiled back and said, “Yes, the one thing we’ve got here is air.” Then he cleared the table and made Molkho some coffee to wash down the gamy-tasting stew. “Should I list everything you ate?” he asked when Molkho rose to pay, tearing a page out of a notebook. “No,” Molkho said. “Just the date and what it cost.”
It was 2 P.M. and the sun was beating down as if in anticipation of summer, the rainy morning a thing of the past. Passing a pay phone, he thought of calling home or maybe his mother, but then changed his mind. So what if I don’t? I’ve got a right to disappear if I want to, he told himself while walking to his car, which stood baking in the sun. If I don’t keep it covered, it will fade and lose its value, he thought. Yet, catching sight of the complicated dashboard, his hand resting on the fresh-smelling seat, he was conscious of getting less pleasure from it than from new cars in the past. He took off his jacket and sweater, loosened his tie, settled himself behind the wheel, and opened the window, through which the wind came whooshing down from the mountains, whistling straight toward him as though somewhere in the distance a giant fan were aimed at him. Well, that’s that, he thought, that little swindler can look for me, now. But suddenly, as the wind shrieked high overhead, his eagerness to take off faltered, perhaps because the stew was weighing him down. Should he move the car into the shade and rest a bit? But he had lost all sense of direction and wasn’t sure which way the sun was heading. In the end, locking the gear shift and flicking the hidden switch disconnecting the ignition, he stepped out of the car and started back toward the girl’s house to tell her father he was leaving.
Once more he followed the muddy path among fields stippled with yellow flowers whose name he didn’t know. Far-off, the mountains were turning purple. A rusty silence still hung over the village. The natives are taking their siesta, thought Molkho. The field with the fire was empty now, though thin wisps of grayish smoke still spiraled up from it and hot ashes writhed like ribbons of quicksilver on the moist, coppery ground. He noticed to one side a trail running off into a deep, jungly ravine, which lay between high, sawtoothed cliffs looking like ancient cadavers that had died clinging to the hillside. Fierce colors flashed there, green, blue, and claret, cut by the bold brown slash of the path. That’s it, then! thought Molkho. It’s a place that’s hiked in; I must have been here with the Scouts. He stood gazing into it, listening to the wind gather strength, and musing that were he to die in there, no one would discover his traces. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” he told himself out loud. “At least I’d rest in peace then.”