“Yes.” She smiled to herself in satisfaction. “I already warned you. Even though I’ve already forgotten what it was.” I told her the sum. She remembered and looked slightly disappointed, sunk in thought, her face appearing and disappearing in the darkness flowing from the bedroom and coming to join the darkness in the living room. “If we add ten percent to your present rent — would that be fair?” She asked me in her clear voice, which always contained a natural assertiveness. “I still feel guilty that you didn’t get anything for the trip to India.”
“But I did,” I protested, bitterly but also with a feeling of inner satisfaction, since I had feared a far higher rent. “The trip itself, and meeting the two of you. And now this apartment. And you,” I added softly, “as my landlady.” She didn’t answer, only withdrew into the protection of the darkness that she had gone to so much trouble to surround us with, perhaps precisely because of an embarrassing moment like this. I didn’t know what to do with it either, except to let it sink into her soul like a little warning from me, like the warning she had given me about the rent, which she had raised by just ten percent. I didn’t dare add anything to clarify my feelings, I only knew that in the silence now filling the room, the tension stemming from the age difference between us was slowly, and for the first time, melting, and the fact that she was apparently only nine years younger than my mother and ten years younger than my father, and her daughter was only four years younger than me, had lost its power.
This too could be the meaning of A Brief History of Time, I reflected as she finally stood up and went to the kitchen to switch on the light, illuminating the living room only indirectly. Without looking at me and without smiling, she announced that tomorrow or the next day, she would prepare a standard lease in her office, and she wrote down my ID number in a little notebook and asked me to get my parents to sign a guarantee, and we agreed that I would call her tomorrow or the next day to set a date for signing the contract and handing over the key. In the meantime, she promised, her maid would come to clean the apartment for me. “Do you by any chance remember where the valve is that connects the apartment to the water main?” I asked when I was already standing at the door, and a faint tremor of anxiety ran through me at the thought that I was leaving her alone. She tried to remember, going to look for it first under the kitchen sink and then in the bathroom, but she couldn’t find the valve, which as in all old apartments was apparently hidden in some unexpected place. “I’ll ask my mother; perhaps she knows. And if not, Lazar will find it,” she said, and she flashed me one of her automatic smiles, impossible to read, and thus we parted without any response on my part, apart from uttering the word “wonderful,” which was all I had to attach this woman to me until our next meeting — at which, I vowed to myself as I slowly rode my motorcycle through the bustling, wintry Tel Aviv evening, I would definitely confess my feelings.
I knew that I should put the confession off until after the lease was signed; otherwise I might be left without an apartment. And even though my current landlady kept putting pressure on me to leave, I was in no hurry to contact my beloved. This time I wouldn’t make things easy for her, I told myself. If she wanted to nip everything that had begun between us in the bud, all she had to do was tell her secretary to summon me to the office in her absence, in order to sign the lease and take the key. If she didn’t want any further contact with me, if she saw my falling in love with her as something absurd and superfluous, all she had to do was keep away, or set Lazar on me, on the pretext that only he was capable of showing me the plumbing.
But after a few days she called me, and with a new friendliness and none of the hostility she had shown at our previous meeting, she asked me how I was and whether I was enjoying my enforced leisure; she knew, of course, that Professor Levine had not yet recovered from his depression. “If only we had known that you would have to sit here twiddling your thumbs”—a merry laugh came from the other end of the line—“we would have left you to wander around India. Because of us, you didn’t even get to see the Taj Mahal.”