And so, that Friday, he pulled her, damp and sweating, out of the taxi that brought her to his house, helped her hang her dresses in the college student’s old room, and sat silently across from her on the terrace facing the sea. In the evening, playing host to two old women, he muttered the blessing over the Sabbath wine and ate the meat loaf brought by his mother, who talked nonstop, taking advantage of his mother-in-law’s patience, behind whose expression of eager interest lay concealed a thin mockery like his wife’s. At last, sapped by the humidity, his mother trundled off to bed, from where he heard her snoring lightly.
On Sunday, after work, he took the little beach chair and went with her to the seashore, making sure to find an isolated spot where no one was likely to see her. Depositing her there, a large, heavy, funny-looking woman with bared fat legs, he went for a swim and a walk, heading first up the beach and then down, until finally, toward sunset, when the shore was nearly deserted, he ventured to sit beside her in the wet sand, absentmindedly digging a trench by her chair while letting her ramble on about her financial worries and his father and her childhood in Jerusalem and her neighbors and her friends and their children and their grandchildren and everyone who asked about him, happy to hear that his praises were being sung in his hometown, where ghostly figures from his past kept running into her, old friends and not-even-friends from school and the army, all eager to know how he was faring. And it was there, by the sea, a molten sun grazing the horizon, that Molkho first heard about his old youth-movement counselor, Uri, who together with his wife, Ya’ara, seemed to take an avid interest in him.
BUT WE’VE BEEN THINKING and talking of you ever since last summer!” said his old counselor to him, lightly resting a hand on his shoulder. “Since last summer?” Molkho asked, touched to be so unexpectedly thought of after so many years, even if it did seem rather odd. “But why since last summer? My wife was still alive then.” “Yes, I know,” said his old counselor, “but all of Jerusalem already knew that it was terminal.” “It did?” asked Molkho with a shiver of excitement. “Yes,” replied his counselor. “There are always people who make it their business to spread bad news; even if they don’t know who it’s about, it makes them feel better. There were all sorts of rumors about you, and your mother talked a lot too; she had to tell everyone all the medical details, even when she didn’t understand them. You have no idea how well informed we were, especially about how you took the whole long, hard death on yourself. So that when we heard that it was over, I said to Ya’ara, ‘Who knows, perhaps this is the very man God has in mind for us. What actually do we remember about him, though? Was he really once in love with you?’”
They were standing on the long stone steps of the Jerusalem Theater on a broiling Saturday afternoon, hugging the thin line of shade by the closed box offices. A fiery silence reigned all around. Not a soul was to be seen in the empty white plaza. The shutters of the aristocratic old houses of the neighborhood were all shut. Further up the hill they could see the stone wall of the Presidential Mansion, and further down, where the street slanted steeply, the mysterious building of the old Turkish leper colony in its dusty copse of trees. As soon as he had stepped out of his car in the parking lot, Molkho had spied his former counselor’s tall, thin figure walking back and forth in the shade along the top step, a wide-brimmed black hat clutched in one hand, looking down like a lone actor waiting impatiently onstage for his supporting cast. Solemnly Molkho had ascended the steps and greeted him with a timorous smile, heartened by the confidence radiating from the strong, bony frame in the black pants and sweaty white shirt of an Orthodox Jew, his dusty, broad-brimmed hat rather reassuringly resembling a cowboy’s, for Molkho had been afraid of this reunion after nearly thirty years and was relieved to find he still liked the man. The old-fashioned garb; the heavy, slightly graying beard; even the ritual fringes of the undershirt sticking untidily out from the shirt—to Molkho these seemed but the latest disguise of this eternal Kierkegaardian-Buberian truth-seeker who had come to them in those days from some left-wing kibbutz and was now (as he had informed his ex-youth-grouper the week before on the telephone) an observant Jew. Molkho had remembered him well, had in fact always admired him, though he himself had never been a “Schechterite,” as his counselor’s group of sensitive, if sometimes strange, friends were called, after the Haifa Bible teacher who was their guru. Indeed, it had never occurred to him to join them, having no interest in their way of life, which involved drifting from one kibbutz to another, only to be expelled from each in the end for what was considered their elitist factionalism, not to mention their mysticism and talent for attracting the prettiest girls while disdaining socialist goals, preferring to search their navels for the Meaning of Life while composing odd hymns and prayers. Ultimately they had founded a kibbutz of their own called Yodfat in the Lower Galilee, where some settled down but most eventually left, scattering in all directions, though a few, like Uri Adler, who had been one of their leaders, continued their religious quest.
Thus, Molkho was not totally surprised by the strange telephone call he had received, the purpose of which he had guessed at once. Why, he thought, warmly shaking the hand held out to greet him, it’s kind but only natural that someone should want to cook me up a woman in this bake-house of a summer. And yet he blushed with embarrassment, as though it were undignified to have agreed so readily to such a rendezvous. “How did you hear about me?” he asked. “From whom?” “But we’ve been thinking and talking about you ever since last summer!” answered his old counselor, heartily returning his handshake.
MOLKHO LET OUT A LITTLE LAUGH and blushed again, feeling an odd happiness. It was still too much to absorb. Had he really once been in love with her? he asked himself candidly, trying his best to remember. Thirty-four years had gone by, and even then Ya’ara and he hadn’t been in one class for long; that is, she had been a grade ahead of him until their junior year, which she was forced to repeat—a tall, blonde, quietly attractive, academically unsuccessful girl who drifted back to her old classmates during recess. Had he really been in love with her? The fact of the matter was that he was constantly falling in love in those days, each time with a vague and secretive passion that he strove to inflame, in order to break free from his dominating mother, whose only child he was.
Clearly, though, he couldn’t leave it at that. “Did she ever finish high school?” he asked his old counselor, whose every gesture, smile, intonation, and burst of enthusiasm seemed to erase the lapsed years, despite Molkho’s suspicion that the love in question was purely imaginary. “Was I actually in love with her?” he wondered aloud again, afraid of the deterrent effect of too staunch a denial, so that, standing there in the torrid sun with the Sabbath peace all around them, he was quite prepared to fall in love retroactively if only it would prove helpful. “It’s been so long,” he laughed. “Maybe I was a bit, but she was older than I was.” “Just by a year,” his counselor hurried to correct him. “In fact, not even. She’s August and you’re May. It’s only a few months’ difference, and after all, you were in the same class, you sat next to each other, you even once wrote her a love letter. That was the year I was your counselor—or have you forgotten that too?”