— Yes, that was all. He wrapped the underpants back up in the newspaper to take them for a lab test and pointed to the west and snapped rudely, “Why don’t you go back there? Go back to your mother, go back to your father, go back to your health fund, you people have health funds,” he pronounced the word, Mother, with this really weird hatred, you would have thought that the whole trouble with us was our health funds, and not even them but the word for them. Afterward, though, he became a little kinder. He said I could stay and rest a while if I wanted, and then he said something to the nurse in Arabic and they left, and a while later she came back with some lunch…
— I don’t know. I wasn’t in any rush. I wanted to rest some more, and I had already warmed up the bed so nicely, and outside that arched window was the desert with this lovely blue patch of the Dead Sea, and I knew that I’d never again in my life have such a private view of it…
— Yes, Mother, the desert, of all places… the good old desert… I’ve always loved it and I always will, take my word for it. And now it had this fabulous patch of blue right in the middle of it…
— But I was under a blanket, Mother, taking in a desert just like the one we have here, with this extra scoop of blue that we always used to dream about, and all of a sudden it had this flock of black goats in it too, a huge flock of them on a hilltop flowing on and on, you couldn’t see the goatherd for the goats, they kept moving toward my window and disappearing beneath it as if they were entering the hospital…
— Around five or six. It was already getting dark. Some patients began drifting in, these elderly Arab women, and I hurried to put on my shoes and get out of there. I walked to the street, which was dimly lit by a street lamp, and there on that fading horizon, Mother, were the blurred, jagged skylines of the two cities, the Arab and the Jewish, all jumbled up with each other, and men were selling vegetables and groceries from stands, and I saw them all look at me and point to someone who was calling to me from an ambulance that was taking some hospital staff home, and it was the same nurse who had taken care of me, she had just come off her shift and was in her street clothes, wearing makeup and all spiffed up. She must have felt guilty for not wanting me in her hospital because now she offered me a ride, or maybe she was worried that one of those men might start up with me. But anyway, she said she would be happy to take me “to Jerusalem”—as if we weren’t in Jerusalem already but somewhere else, on our way there, and there were no other place in the world I could hope to get to. And really, right then and there on that hill, looking out on those two cities stewing in the same twilight, Tel Aviv, Mother, seemed as far away as could be, it seemed unreal, and so I started back down into Jerusalem from the opposite direction, and it was the most wonderful ride, Mother, through all these places you’ve never been in, all these Arab neighborhoods and villages inside the city. We kept crossing these empty wadis that still had bits of snow in them and coming out in these dark streets full of potholes and puddles that suddenly opened up into these lively little village centers full of people and children and shopping baskets and donkeys. It all looked so nice and cozy, Mother, as if they really had themselves a good life, and had maybe even gotten used to us, and the driver, who was driving as slowly as he could up and down these narrow streets, kept sticking his head out the window to talk and joke with all the people. He brought all the passengers home to their front door, making this big circle until he dropped the last nurse off by Jaffa Gate. I thought I would get off with her, but he said he would take me to the Jewish part of the city, he even asked the address to show me he knew his way around there, only I didn’t want him to have to look for it, so I said, “It doesn’t matter, just drop me off by the Jerusalem Theater,” and for the first time in three days I felt that I wasn’t going against the current anymore but flowing right along with it. We drove through the same streets that had been so empty early that morning, and now they were full of life. And even though there wasn’t a snowflake left in them, Mother, you could see that the memory of the snow was making everyone happy, it was as if they had survived some great ordeal of nature. And so I was back at the Jerusalem Theater again, and at the exact same time of day too, because it was exactly six-thirty. But this time the theater was all lit up and people were waiting outside it, and without thinking twice about it, Mother, as if it were something I did every evening, I cut across the field behind the parking lot by the old leper hospital like an ordinary person going home. The day had made a real Jerusalemite out of me, an old-time Sephardi with a touch of Arab! I wasn’t even thinking of his suicide anymore. I only wanted to say good-bye and make sure he hadn’t been hurt by my leaving him so abruptly that morning. As soon as I turned into his street, though, I saw there was a power failure there. Everything was blacked out, the houses, the streetlights, everything — and so I climbed the stairs in the darkness and knocked on the old door, and as usual, Mother, there was no answer, but I thought, he’s just forgotten how to open it, and so I took out the neighbor’s key that I still had and opened the door, and this time the apartment wasn’t hot, it wasn’t dark either, because these little candles were burning everywhere, and I saw him come out of the bathroom, all pale and frightened in his pajamas. He was holding a big razor blade and his face, Mother, was shaven. The beard was gone from it, but it was all cut up too, and he was bleeding from the throat…