It was not nearly as small as he had thought it would be. Falling gilded by the sunlight into a gray-green pool that trickled off in an unseen direction, the water burst forth from mosses that concealed a lipped groove in a boulder. He sat on a rock facing it, enjoying the coolness of the air and gazing at some unfamiliar purple flowers and at a weeping willow whose little leaves were like delicate ferns, the sharp scent of artemisia riveting his senses. Here was a place of eternal wakefulness, and though he failed to remember it, he felt sure he had been here as a boy, for the Scouts would never have missed it. How his wife would have liked it too! Places like this made her fall profoundly silent, her judgmental nagging briefly stilled. How sad to think of the lost peace this cascade would have given her! And yet it was years since they last had taken a pleasure trip, and then, too, they never went on foot. Even before she fell ill, she had always been too tired to go anywhere on Saturdays and had passed the time irritably glancing at the weekend papers and uttering her jeremiads. “Stop reading all that junk,” he would say to her. “It’s all a lot of lies and exaggerations. Why let it get to you.” But she simply saw in this one more sign of the dangerously Levantine, apolitical naivete that was leading the country to catastrophe. Now she was rotting slowly, decomposing in the earth, and he was by himself, squatting comfortably on his heels in Levantine fashion across from the marvelous waterfall, overcome by sorrow and longing. He picked up a pebble and chucked it into the pool.
Just then he heard a rustle of branches and the sound of children, and a minute later the children themselves appeared, staring down at him from further up the ravine, having followed him apparently from the village. He beckoned to them. At first, they hesitated; then, the bigger ones first and the smaller ones after them, they descended like a herd of dark goats and stood with an unwashed smell in a circle around him while he chatted with them easily and patted their heads and backs, until suddenly, green with envy, the girl appeared and drove them away, her father having returned and sent her to look for him, afraid he might be lost. Molkho laughed. “Has Ben-Ya’ish come back too?” he asked. But the girl hadn’t seen him.
And so, yet another time, he found himself walking behind her, his eyes on her thin, skimming legs as he climbed arduously up the steep path with the children scrambling in his wake like a pack of nimble monkeys. At the entrance to the ravine, he found her father waiting in the company of two or three other anxious men, all apparently afraid he had taken leave of his senses. “What were you looking for down there?” they asked. “Nothing,” said Molkho, brushing off his clothes, “just the waterfall. Your daughter told me about it, so I went down to have a look.” “You walked all the way to the waterfall?” they marveled, making him wonder how old a man they took him for. “Yes, is that so unusual?” he replied before asking them about Ben-Ya’ish. But Ben-Ya’ish, it appeared, was still being looked for. “Never has a bureaucrat been given such a runaround by a citizen,” sighed Molkho pensively with something like inner satisfaction, basking in the mild, clear light that made the whole world look transparent. “Well, I suppose there’s nothing to do but wait for him,” he added, turning to go to the Indian’s house.
Though the Indian seemed unprepared, he had little choice but to join Molkho, who was already striding purposefully toward the house, in front of which he found his briefcase. Perhaps they’ll offer me the girl’s bed again, he thought, but instead he was ushered into the familiar living room and asked if he wanted some coffee. He accepted and sat drinking it, trying once more to elicit the details of the man’s illness, at least the names of the drugs that he took. But the Indian was no more forthcoming than before, and perhaps he really knew nothing about it, as if his illness were someone else’s that he had merely borrowed for a while. Remembering with longing his sleep of ten days ago, Molkho stole a tender glance at the girl’s room. “He’s playing a game with me, this Ben-Ya’ish of yours,” he sighed, tired from the trip and his hike in the ravine but doubtful whether he could fall asleep so late in the afternoon, especially since the soporific wind was no longer blowing. “Maybe he’s just afraid of me, but he’s playing with fire,” he continued, trying to make the Indian feel a measure of guilt or, at least, responsibility. But the Indian too, so it seemed, had despaired of understanding the council manager; sitting straight-backed on the edge of his chair beside his daughter, who appeared, with the light glinting off her glasses, to imitate his movements with unconscious precision, he said sulkily, “I told him he had nothing to be afraid of, that you were a reasonable man and would give folks like us a fair hearing. But I guess he’s afraid you won’t understand his method of bookkeeping and there’ll be trouble.”
There was a long silence in the room. The cow mooed longingly in her shed, and Molkho sat back in the little armchair, surprised at his inner serenity, which the Indian, perhaps because he feared another session of sleep, appeared to regard with apprehension. “So you really think he won’t show up?” asked Molkho. “I honestly don’t know,” said the Indian. “But where is he now?” asked Molkho. The council manager, replied the Indian, was last seen departing for the Arab driver’s village; since then, he hadn’t been heard from and the music teacher had gone to look for him. “He promised me a ride back to Haifa too,” Molkho said. The Indian, however, had no idea how such a promise might be kept. “When is the last bus out of here?” Molkho asked. In fifteen minutes, was the answer. Yet he made no move to rise from his chair, too entranced by the silent aura of the girl to tear himself away. I must be going crazy, he thought, gazing at her bare arms and legs, on which, near the ankle, there was a fresh, thin scratch. “Your daughter cut herself,” he told the Indian. “Perhaps you should put on a Band-Aid.” “It’s from the ravine,” explained the girl, rubbing the dried blood off with some saliva. “Well, then,” said Molkho, reaching for his briefcase, “I guess I’ll be on my way.” He stepped out into the charmed evening, cut behind the house, paused to regard the big cow in her shed, and continued along the path that skirted the village, which he now seemed to see for the first time in all its pathetic decay: the unwatered fields, the untended hothouses, the abandoned chicken coops, the half-empty cowsheds, the tractors rusting beneath their tattered tarpaulins, the forlorn wildflowers in a sea of yellowing thistles. The whole place, he thought, was like a dying patient who lets the doctor do what he wants with him. The villagers he passed looked at him unseeingly, sometimes keeping in step with him awhile before falling behind or forging ahead. The dead keep giving us orders, he thought, not without satisfaction, recalling, while continuing his tour of the village, how his wife would send him out for such walks to perk him up from the long hours of sitting by her bed, mechanically making small talk—but just then he froze, for there, in the little shopping center, a bus had just pulled in and was disgorging weary-looking passengers returning from work, among them the Indian’s pregnant wife, who started out for home on her short, knobby legs. Why, it’s the last bus, he realized with a panicky yet oddly happy sensation, watching it pull out past the perimeter fence while feeling how, bright but invisible in the lingering light, someone was shadowing him, perhaps Ya-ir Ben-Ya’ish himself, who, in the most childish case of corruption Molkho had ever encountered, had used government money as a slush fund for the local inhabitants.