The legal adviser stared at him intently, her freckles pale in the afternoon sunlight. Did she still roam the world for opera? wondered Molkho, who had himself given music short shrift in recent months. Looking down at the desk, he phrased his defense of Ben-Ya’ish carefully while the director sat listening in silence. “So you think everything is just fine up there?” the legal adviser interrupted mockingly, as though he were a clearly hopeless case. “You found no problems? No irregularities?” I didn’t say that, answered Molkho patiently. “I was there twice and even stayed over one night, but I can’t say I went into it thoroughly.” “That’s obvious,” she laughed snidely, continuing to leaf through the file. But the director, though noncommittal, seemed to be on Molkho’s side; with a kind look in his direction he picked up the original file and began to thumb through it too. All at once Molkho’s fears vanished. Casually, as though the rest no longer mattered, he rose and crossed the large room to the open window, from where he watched the two of them studying the file. For a moment he just stood there. Then, feeling the need to make some overture to her, or perhaps to them both, he declared, “Why, it’s really summer!” Startled by the sound of his voice, he pointed out the window by way of illustration. “It’s always the same,” he explained. “Spring is over before you even know it.”
Part IV
SUMMER
BUT THAT FIRST SUMMER gave birth to a supersummer, so brutally torrid that even the nights were blistering. It started halfway through July; a firm but invisible hand blocked the sea with a wall of grimy white haze, turning the temperately hot Mediterranean coast into a brutal miasma. No matter how early you rose in the morning, a scorching wind was already blowing. The thermometer zoomed upward and stuck there. The weather was often the lead item on the news, the forecasters being called upon to explain the inexplicable in half-menacing, half-apologetic tones. Worse yet, the travel tax was suddenly doubled, forcing mass cancellations by those planning to seek relief abroad. Despairingly people flocked to the beaches, among them Molkho, who hadn’t been to the seashore for years and was only halfway through a diet meant to enhance his romantic prospects. For days on end, he ate nothing but blotchy, seedless watermelons, staring angrily every morning at the stubborn scales that registered his weight loss with agonizing slowness. The thought of all the good food that he was missing or sometimes reluctantly left on his plate enveloped him in a thin web of gloom. He was still not used to the shy promptings of sex that, having first stirred faintly in the spring, now accompanied him with gingerly steps like a stray but thoroughbred cat that had adopted him, its stiff, velvety tail sometimes brushing his thighs.
It’s high time, he thought, making his way among the bodies scattered in the sand and scrutinizing some that he hardly would have glanced at until recently. Rarely did they interest him, for nearly all seemed badly flawed and limp with the humidity, though now and then he caught a glimpse of some almost painfully attractive feature. Best of all, he liked the young mothers, who had a harried-looking glow, so different from the better-groomed singles, with their hard-bitten lust to be tanned. Stepping into the water, which toward evening resembled a salty, tepid bath, he thought, if only I could make a collage—a leg from here, a head from there, a shoulder or smile from somewhere else—I might construct someone lovable. Wading through the breaking surf, which pounded so hard at this time of year that he swallowed whole mouthfuls of it, he pushed on into deeper, calmer water, where he swam beside lone figures like himself, mostly brawny old women with helmetlike bathing caps, sometimes peeing silently while staring innocently up at a sun that seemed never to set but simply to dissipate in a white curtain of haze, after which he swam slowly back, letting the breakers cast him ashore like a corpse. Resurrected and still dripping water, he strolled through the crowd feeling like a sandwich board: See for Yourself! This Is My Body! Untouched by Death! Find Me a Woman! Often he ran into people he knew—colleagues from work, former neighbors, friends of his wife’s, doctors and staff from the hospital—and stood over them, patting his chest and chatting about the crazy weather, this second, superhot summer begotten by the first. Whether smiling or serious, they lay looking up at him as though conscious that it was not the weather but his uncontrollable lust that had brought him down to the beach, and then inquired about his children and mother-in-law, shaking their heads upon hearing how well the old woman was doing, as if amazed that her daughter’s death hadn’t done her in too. Sometimes, to cheer him, they would tell him the latest news about who else was dying of cancer, which was often no news at all, since he had already seen the victim in the hospital, slipping with a frightened look through the doors of the oncology ward, so that he stood there inattentively glancing at the mountains, from which the gray smoke of forest fires had been rising all summer long, aware of their trying to guess whether he had gotten over his wife’s death—since which, incredibly enough, less than a year had gone by. At last, feeling them weary of him, he unobtrusively went off to dry himself and dress, returning home to a cruelly long and too brightly lit evening of Volume I of Anna Karenina, which he would have put down long ago, were it not for the pleas of his daughter, now discharged from the army and vacationing in Europe. “Don’t give up, Dad. It’s a really good book. Why don’t you try to finish it?”
And then, in the first week of August, the supersummer begat a superbaby of its own, the whitest and most devilish of them alclass="underline" the air rolled over and died, the sun approached meltdown, and a livid sky shut out the world while hordes of newly arrived black Jews from Ethiopia staged protest marches on the roads that sent the mercury shooting even higher. You’re lucky to be out of this hellhole, Molkho whispered through parched lips to his dead wife upon rising each morning. There was talk of mysterious sunspots, yet Europe was deluged by rain, and most likely the culprit was a stubborn high-pressure front that refused to budge from the Turkish-Iranian frontier. Shown on television, it resembled a shapeless, odorless, irregularly formed amoeba, and for a moment, thinking that it might be connected to her too, that it was perhaps her last signal from galactic space before streaking to her final annihilation, Molkho was gripped by the transcendent fear that this strange, abstract blob was all that was left of his wife.
HE SAT UP in the middle of the night, unable to sleep comfortably. In the neighboring houses lights were on too, for the heat kept everyone awake. He stepped out on the terrace and gazed up at the yellow halo around the moon, musing—no longer fearfully, but with a deep sorrow—on how his wife was pared down to a last, nameless cell that still fought to preserve its identity. The thought that it, too, would soon be snuffed out in some vast, dark emptiness made him shiver. I must fall in love, he told himself before climbing back into bed, because otherwise this longing will destroy me.
In the morning he spoke as usual to his mother, who complained bitterly about the heat, which was even worse in Jerusalem. Suppose, she asked suddenly, that she came to stay with him for a while and spent some time on the beach? Horrified, he tried to talk her out of it. “The humidity here is ghastly,” he explained. “You’ll never fall asleep at night. At least in Jerusalem there’s a breeze. Why don’t you buy yourself an air conditioner? I’ll even come and pick it out for you.” But his mother did not want an air conditioner. She wanted to stay with him, and there was nothing he could do about it.