Men of every shape and color-tall, short, thick, supple, crude, neglected, handsome, elderly, refined, boyish, feminine, muscular, limp, chickenlike-a massive flow of masculinity in all its guises pours out toward him down the main street of the desert market. It is a hairy, sinewy, grumbling, throaty human throng, and the more he watches it, the more it loses its separate features and congeals into a mass of silt that fans out over a wide river, moving here and there, thick furrowed peels of skin with nervous looks darting around, excited and suspicious, and frizzy bushes of hair sprouting on the stump of a leg or a large arm, oversized lumps of mud from which reliefs of swollen arteries spring out, and sideburns and bald spots in a multitude of shapes, and sweat stains, and a convex skull and a molded forehead and a nervous muscle that tightens in the jaw, and throbbing biceps, and beneath the thick sludge a throng bubbles up toward him, like the permanent rumble of a river, the hum of covetousness and disquiet and short barks of deterrence, and also a deep comradeship, noisy, like in barracks or a stadium. Strange men and semi-familiar men, and men who look like men he knows, hurrying, rushing, touching, smelling the goods, haggling over a green wool glove, from which Elisheva's reddish fingers used to peek out during winter, or bickering over the gray-white pullover his mother knitted for her years ago, or holding up a thrilling little pair of underwear to the light, dancing drunkenly in the brilliance that shines through them, and in their bru-
talization they become beautiful for a moment through their contact with the splendor that enveloped her, refined as they touch the flimsy fabric-
When she had almost reached the door, after paying the guy at the counter for the phone call, she turned and went back to the phone and stood staring for a moment, as if wondering what she was doing there. Beyond two panes of glass she saw Shaul in the car, with his head leaning back, and she guessed that his lips were moving. Of their own accord, her fingers dialed the digits, and she knew the music the buttons produced from any telephone she'd ever been at. He lifted the receiver immediately, just as Micah had done before, and it was as if he'd been waiting for her by the phone all these years.
His voice was quick, even when he'd been sleeping: a low, penetrating "Hello." She froze. He was quiet for a long time, did not breathe, surrounded her with deep, dense quiet, then just said "Hello" again, a completely different one this time, almost defeated, and she hung up quickly and only then grasped what she had done. She stood with weak knees and didn't know what to do or where to go. She almost dialed the number again, her fingers seemed drawn to the buttons, but then she clutched the handset with both hands and pressed her mouth hard into the receiver, which stank from the saliva of strangers. Over the sound of the dial tone, she poured herself into him wordlessly. Unable to stop, she emptied her very core into him, and yelled and sobbed and laughed and promised and begged, and explained why and why not, and why they must and why they couldn't, and why there was no life without and how everything is always ripped in the same place and how she curses the moment and is resurrected over and over again endlessly
The most difficult times are when she comes home after being with him, Shaul said later, with a sigh, and Esti shook herself awake with fright and almost swallowed the candy she was sucking. It's not easy then, for me or for her, he said. She's always refreshed when she gets back, from the swim, of course, and her hair is a little damp, but she never looks me in the eye. It's not. and he laughed glumly, sliding pleasantly like a sleepwalker into their conversation, which was full of silences and deep valleys alongside each other, as in a prayer where everyone stands together but each person is on his own-and each of them, Esti thought, prays to a different God.
She was still quiet, barely holding her body up straight at the wheel. What had happened at the inn had exhausted her more than the long drive. She tried to guess what he was going through now. Saw him lying awake with his eyes open and sparkling in the dark, his tongue clicking between his cheeks, in his thinking position. She wondered whether he guessed it was her. Or perhaps he knew straightaway, as soon as he heard her silence. She kicked herself too, of course: maybe he thought it was someone else, a lover he had after her, whose call he had been waiting for. But she held her head up straight and shook it firmly: No.
Part of her brain repeatedly turned over his "hello," playing both instances of it again and again, the sigh and his voice, which was so old now, and the tiredness, which may not have been simply because it was late, and which sounded to her as if he were announcing that he was giving up something precious. How could he give up like that? she thought. He mustn't give up. And she answered herself, What gives you the right to even …? She was frightened to think that he could be that way without her having known about it. Here you go again, she scolded herself, writing dissertations on the crumbs of his life. She drove around a bend and thought of how for years she had tried to imagine their reunion. It would be an accidental one, and she smiled because for some reason she was always convinced it would happen in a supermarket, that their eyes would rapidly scan the produce in each other's shopping carts, their families' tastes in breakfast cereals, dairy products, and meat. And more than that: the plenty and the abundance, which she always thought seemed a little defiant in her cart, a little too prepared for waving in front of his eyes. She knew she would be disoriented and stutter, that her legs would melt, and she knew how she would consume his face and his new wrinkles with her eyes, and try to guess which of them belonged to her.
She tormented herself with the memory of the one meeting she had agreed to after they broke up, at a little cafй on the banks of the Yarkon River. He looked ill, his fingers trembled, and he mumbled things that horrified her-that he had told her a thousand times she was the love of his life, but now it was clear to him that she was even more than that, that she was his life itself. He looked at her, frightened, and she alienated him with all her strength, with a cruelty she never imagined she possessed, so determined was she to finally start living her own life, unhidden. She sat opposite him, foreign and cold, trying to prove to him that there was no point, that he was completely wrong about her, and the more he begged, the more she hardened, like a heartless warden who keeps sending the wrong prisoner into a visitor's booth.
She still couldn't comprehend how it had even happened that she'd called him. How she had shattered years of restraint, of sometimes daily battles, and the regular torture of birthdays, his and hers, and their anniversaries, and when Shira went into the army, and when Na'ama was about to have surgery, and when there was a big terrorist attack on his street-she almost lost her mind that time, but she didn't call. She exhaled in amazement and a smile escaped, and she felt that perhaps even the dialing was enough for her, perhaps she did not need any more than that after so many years, because he raged within her now exactly as she remembered, with no partitions, just as it had always been, body and soul. She remembered with a smile how he had inquired euphorically as to whether he'd reached her pancreas yet; and again the breathless silence of them both, the electricity of mutual knowledge, and the sensation that never deadened in her that their love continued to exist as it was, in all its pu-