The lights had gone out and the reel was being wound when he felt a hand on his arm. It was the music teacher. “I’ve got good news,” she said. “Ben-Ya’ish just called from Karmiel. He’s halfway here!” By now, Molkho had the feeling that Ben-Ya’ish was less an actual person than a collective identity passed from one villager to another, but making no comment, he stretched out in his chair, sipping slowly from his mint tea. The movie, which was in Turkish or Greek, was amateurishly made and promised from the outset to be a rather erotic, if not out-and-out pornographic, film about high-society sex in a luxury hotel on some Mediterranean coast The female lead was a dark-haired, buxom woman, not pretty but vivacious and bold, even oddly maternal, to whom the audience responded with a buzz of whispers and a cracking of sunflower seeds while Molkho scooped up some dirt from the floor and let it trickle through his fingers until only a few crumbs were left, raising them to his nose and inhaling the aroma of chicken dung flavored with poultry feed. Meanwhile, the actors on the screen having dramatically stripped and begun making love, the audience fell quiet, its every breath audible, its eyes narrowed as though with somnolence—Molkho’s, too, though he was also beginning to feel hungry. Idly he sat watching the passionate embraces, wondering whether they were real or shammed, his head lolling heavily; but suddenly, as if a rusty old motor inside him had suddenly turned over, he felt his member grow stiff, and he frowned deeply, sickened and titillated at once.
The lights were kept dimmed when it was time for the reel to be changed, leaving people to whisper unseen in the dark. Someone knelt in front of Molkho. It was a young woman who said, “Ben-Ya’ish called again! He caught a ride to Kiryat Shmonah.” “Kiryat Shmonah?” echoed Molkho mirthfully, for the council manager, it seemed, had overshot his mark and now had to travel back the other way. “Yes, but he’ll try to get back here tonight. You may as well stay.” As if by now he had anywhere to go!
The movie ended at eleven. Heavily the audience rose and stretched itself, yawning disappointedly. Molkho exited behind the Indian’s pregnant wife, who waddled on her short, crooked legs like a big duck; she was, he noticed when she smiled at him, slightly cross-eyed, like her daughter. The moon was just rising in the starry sky, and it was very cold. Briefcase in hand he walked silently by her side, adjusting himself to her slow pace. The audience began to disperse, and she, too, chose a path and struck out on it, quickening her tiny steps as if pursuing the stomach that preceded her. It takes guts to go to the movies when you’re so close to giving birth, Molkho thought. Not that there was any reason for concern, for even if she were to deliver right here and now, in the middle of the path, there were still lights in many houses and the village showed no signs of going to bed. On the contrary, the later the hour, the livelier things seemed: shadowy figures could be seen carrying work tools, a tractor chugged somewhere nearby, and there was an overall sense of definite, if rather vague, activity.
The lights were on in the Indian’s house too. He was waiting up and did not seem surprised to see Molkho appear with his wife, as if it had been clear to him all along that the visitor was fated to sleep there. Did he want to eat anything? asked the man, who was wearing pants and pajama tops, in a low but wakeful tone of voice. Molkho, though, did not want to bother his host—who, surrounded by his piles of books, appeared at this midnight hour to be full of intellectual vigor—and agreed only to drink a glass of wine with him. “Ben-Ya’ish is on his way. Everyone says so,” Molkho whispered, and the Indian nodded, though the whereabouts of the council manager did not seem to concern him unduly. While his wife took out fresh sheets and cleared the living room couch, he went to his daughter’s room, lifted her in her sleep, and carried her out like a folded ebony bird. Molkho tried to help, catching hold of the girl’s leg and feeling a wave of warmth when her large, sleepy eyes, without their glasses now, opened for a moment to regard him. The woman spread the child’s sheets on the couch, and the Indian laid her down and covered her. Then her bed was remade with fresh sheets for Molkho, who was given a towel too. “I’m sorry to be such a nuisance,” he said happily, “but what could I do? This Ben-Ya’ish of yours is playing games with us all.”
The door shut behind him. Shut, too, were the windows and blinds of the room, which still was warm from the girl’s sleep. He put his briefcase on the desk and paused to look at the schoolbooks scattered there, careful not to touch the glasses that lay opened on top of them and stirred his pity in some unclear way. He debated whether to put on the pajamas he had brought or to lie down in his underwear and decided in the end that he needed the pajamas to sleep. Why, he thought, full of wonder at himself, she hated sleeping in other people’s houses and this is the second time this week I’m doing it!
There was a knock on the door. It was the woman, who had come to bring him an extra pillow, her eyes on the floor as if embarrassed to see him in pajamas. “I know I’m inconveniencing you,” whispered Molkho again, “but it’s not my fault. He pulled a fast one on all of us. He’s playing games with me.” Slowly he stretched out on the child’s bed, not feeling at all tired, convinced he would never be able to sleep. In his mind he replayed the scenes of the movie and once more smelled the manure, and then thought of the pregnant woman hurrying on crooked legs down the moonlight-spangled path, of the cow in its shed, and of his sexual desperation, picturing the girl being carried like an ebony bird, the kernel of pure desire hidden in her folded wings. Why here? he began to argue bitterly with his wife. What do you want from me? How can you say that I killed you? But he knew she wouldn’t answer and that the silence surrounding him would never be broken, for the days were gone when there was someone to know whatever was on his mind, even at a distance: as soon as he phoned her from the office, she knew just what he was feeling and thinking. Now he was free to do as he pleased, and so he rose barefoot in the dark, carefully lifted the glasses from the desk, held them up, kissed them, fogging the lenses with his lips, wet them slightly, dried them, folded them, and put them back in their place. I’ve never been so exhausted in my life, he thought, lying down again in preparation for a sleepless night while listening to the crickets and the sound of a tractor.
And yet, despite himself, he fell asleep, waking up five hours later with a feeling of amazement at having gotten through the night. As in his distant days of army service, he rose at once and dressed, made the bed, and put on his shoes in a jiffy. Then, returning his things to the briefcase, he opened the window and leapt straight out into the grainy light of the thick mist swaddling the mountain. Soon the sun would be up. Shivering with cold, he stopped to relieve himself by the cowshed before stepping inside to look at the cow, who stood there alertly as if expecting company. Wondering if cows had feelings, he took a friendly step toward her, tapping her bony forehead with his fist and folding her ears in two like cardboard. No, they didn’t, he concluded, stepping back outside with his briefcase. The rim of the sun appeared over the hill, directly above Ben-Ya’ish’s house, the windows of which, he noticed, were open. And indeed, hurrying up to it, he found its bed occupied and woke the sleeper at once.