The Continuing Silence of a Poet: The Collected Stories of A.B. Yehoshua

Past Praise for A.B. Yehoshua

The Tunnel

The Tunnel [is] one of [Yehoshua’s] finest achievements… sharp, carefully sculpted, fully controlled by the sure hand of an expert artist.

Dan Miron, Haaretz

A quirky, deeply affecting work by a master storyteller.

Kirkus

"[Yehoshua’s] masterful use of language, expertly rendered in Stuart Schoffman’s translation, evokes both compassion and admiration. The Tunnel is a worthy addition to the long esteemed Yehoshua literary canon."

Jewish Book Council

Yehoshua’s distinctive gift as a novelist is demonstrated yet again in his ability to turn [dementia] into an occasion for absurd comedy as well as for fear.

Jewish Review of Books

The Extra

Yehoshua’s masterful portrayal of a female musician at a pivotal moment in her life is deep, unpredictable, and, in the end, surprisingly suspenseful.

Kirkus

His gift is to present life just as it is lived, without showing off, without forcing conclusions, without literary self-consciousness.

The Jewish Chronicle

The Retrospective

Yehoshua achieves an autumnal tone as he ruminates on memory’s slippery hold on life and on art.

The New Yorker

A compelling meditation on art, memory, love, guilt. A hugely pleasurable read, it shows that in his seventies, A.B. Yehoshua is still producing some of his best work.

The Independent

Friendly Fire

… these lives haunted by loss are powerfully evoked. The questions Yehoshua raises are deeply moral.

The Jewish Chronicle

Part of Yehoshua’s genius lies in his ability to weave broader and narrowerswatches of a seemingly straightforward story into an almost seamless tapestry filled with weighty symbolism, yet enriched with personal pursuits and colorful threads of sexual tension.

Haaretz

A Woman in Jerusalem

There are human riches here. The manager moves from a man who has given up on love to one who opens himself to it. And there are strange and powerful scenes – of the morgue, of the coffin, of the Soviet base where the manager passes through the purging of body and soul.

Carole Angier, The Independent

Mr Yehoshua’s A Woman in Jerusalem is a sad, warm, funny book about Israel and being Jewish, and one that has deep lessons to impart – for other people as well as his own. The Economist This novel has about it the force and deceptive simplicity of a masterpiece …

Claire Messud, The New York Times

The Liberated Bride

Yehoshua seeks to present two worlds, those of Israel’s Jewish majority and its Arab minority. He has done it rather as Tolstoy wrote of war and peace: two novels, in a sense, yet intimately joined. Paradoxically – and paradox … is the book’s engendering force – the war is mainly reflected in the zestfully intricate quarrels in the Jewish part of the novel. The peace largely flowers when Rivlin finds himself breaking through the looking glass into the Arab story.

Richard Eder, The New York Times

The Liberated Bride seethes with emotions, dreams, ideas, humor, pathos, all against a backdrop of violence, conflict, and terror.

The Sun (New York)

The boundaries that are broken down in The Liberated Bride include those within the self and others; mystical boundaries between self and God; political and cultural boundaries and finally, the stylistic boundaries of the novel itself, which Yehoshua is constantly stretching in different directions.

International Jerusalem Post

A Journey to the End of the Millennium

Yehoshua is so graceful and eloquent that his work’s timeliness also succeeds, paradoxically, in making it timeless.

The New York Times

This is a generous, sensuous narrative, in which women adroitly manoeuvre within their inherited role, and theories of irrevocable Arab-Jewish hatred are obliquely refuted.

Peter Vansittart, The Spectator

A.B. Yehoshua is an old-fashioned master, without stylistic pyrotechnics or needless experimentation. His chief asset is his belief in a powerful story deftly delivered.

Times Literary Supplement

Wherever this innovative, erudite, suggestive, mysterious writer – a true master of contemporary fiction – points us, there can be no doubt, it is essential that we go. The Washington Post One of Yehoshua’s most fully realized works: a masterpiece.

Kirkus

Above all, Yehoshua is a master storyteller, who coaxes his readers far into an alien landscape, allowing him to question familiar orthodoxies – that moral codes are universal, that jealousy governs every personal relationship, and that religious boundaries are set in stone. The Jewish Chronicle Open Heart … the work of a superb novelist: haunting and annoying by turns, with considerable emotional payoff at the close.

Kirkus

Mr Mani

Mr Mani is conceived on an epic scale as a hymn to the continuity of Jewish life. This formulation sounds pat and sentimental, but Yehoshua’s achievement is the opposite: it always suggests even more complex worlds beyond the vignettes of which the novel is composed.

Stephen Brook, New Statesman and Society

Suffused with sensuous receptiveness to Jerusalem – its coppery light, its pungent smells, its babble of tongues, its vistas crumbling with history – Yehoshua’s minutely researched novel ramifies out from the city to record the rich and wretched elements that have gone into the founding and continuation of the nation whose centre it has once again become.

Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times

A.B. Yehoshua has created a historical and psychological universe – nearly biblical in the range and penetration of its enchanting ‘begats’ – with an amazingly real Jerusalem at its centre. It is as if the blood-pulse of this ingeniously inventive novel had somehow fused with the hurtling vision of the generations of Genesis. With Mr Mani, Yehoshua once again confirms his sovereign artistry; and Hillel Halkin’s translation has a brilliant and spooky life of its own.

Cynthia Ozick

In Yehoshua’s rich, grave fictions, private and public lives cannot be separated; the tale of a flawed individual or disintegrating relationship is simultaneously an emblem for a country in crisis. Literature is history, an event a symbol, writing a way of exploring the world. Yehoshua is a marvellous story teller but also a profoundly political writer, always arguing for uncertain humanism rather than zealous nationalism in a country where everyone lives on the front line.

Nicci Gerrard, The Observer

Five Seasons

… [a] gentle comedy of manners about a widower in want of a wife.

Clive Sinclair, The Sunday Times

… a meditation on the cycles ofchange and renewal, and a portrait of a middle-aged man, glimpsed at a transition point in his life.

Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Molkho’s adventures are quietly hilarious in the way Kafka is hilarious.

The New York Times Book Review

The novel succeeds in charting the ways in which grief and passions cannot be cheated …

 Financial Times

A wonderfully engaging, exquisitely controlled, luminous work. The Washington Post Book World one of Israel’s world-class writers

Saul Bellow

A Late Divorce

In his fiction, Mr Yehoshua is subtle, indirect and sometimes visionary, even phantasmagoric. Harold Bloom, The New York Times … thank goodness for a novel that is ambitious and humane and that is about things that really matter.

New Statesman

Anyone who has had experience of the sad and subtle ways in which human beings torment one another under licence of family ties will appreciate the merits of A.B. Yehoshua’s A Late Divorce.

London Review of Books

… there is something Chekhovian about Yehoshua’s affectionate impartiality toward his characters, who like Chekhov’s, combine hopeless, maddening egotism with noble impulses and redeeming outbursts of affection.

Gabriele Annan, The New York Review of Books

He is a master storyteller whose tales reveal the inner life of a vital, conflicted nation.

The Wall Street Journal

The Lover

Mr Yehoshua’s inventiveness and hallucinatory intensity should be vividly evident. He is a writer who exhibits the rigorous fidelity to his own perceptions that produces real originality.

Robert Alter, The New York Times

We see an Arab and an Israeli locked into a debate of proximity, alikeness, mental hatred, that Yehoshua’s superb ability to render both presences relieves of all sentimentality. What I value most in The Lover is a gift for equidistance – between characters, even between the feelings on both sides.

Alfred Kazin, The New York Review of Books

Delicate shifting tensions between political surface and elemental depths … elusive, haunting.

The New York Times Book Review

It is a disturbing, brilliantly assured novel, and almost thirty years after its appearance it retains a startling originality.

Natasha Lehrer, TLS

In this profound study of personal and political trauma, Yehoshua … evokes Israel’s hallucinatory reality.

The Daily Telegraph

The Continuing

Silence of a Poet

THE COLLECTED

STORIES OF

A. B. YEHOSHUA

CONTENTS

Title Page

1 The Continuing Silence of a Poet

2 Three Days and a Child

3 A Long Hot Day, his Despair, his Wife and his Daughter

4 The Yatir Evening Express

5 Galia’s Wedding

6 Flood Tide

7 Facing the Forests

8 The Last Commander

9 Early in the Summer of 1970

10 Missile Base 612

11 A Day’s Deep Sleep

12 The Old Man’s Death

About the Author

Also by A.B. Yehoshua

Copyright

The Continuing Silence of a Poet

He was late again last night, and when he did come in he made no effort to enter quietly. As though my own sleep did not matter. His steps echoed through the empty apartment for a long time. He kept the lights in the hall on and fussed about endlessly with papers. At last he fell silent. I groped my way back towards the light, vague sleep of old age. And then, the rain. For three weeks now this persistent rain, sheets of water grinding down the panes.

Where does he go at night? I do not know. I once managed to follow him through several streets, but an old acquaintance, an incorrigible prose writer, button-holed me at a street corner and meanwhile the boy disappeared.

The rains are turning this plain into a morass of asphalt, sand and water. Tel Aviv in winter–town without drainage, no outlets, spawning lakes. And the sea beyond, murky and unclean, rumbling as though in retreat from the sprawling town, sea become back­ground.

Not five yet but the windows are turning grey. What was it? He appeared in my dream, stood there in full view before me, not far from the seashore, I think, dark birds were in his lap, and he quelled their fluttering. His smile amazed me. He stood and faced me, looked hard at me and gave a feeble smile.

Now the faint sound of snoring reaches me from his room and I know I shall sleep no more. Another boat sails tomorrow or the day after and I expect I shall board it at last. This anguish will dissolve, I know. I have only to preserve my dignity till the moment of parting. Another twenty hours or so, only.

Though I do not see him now, I know he is asleep, hands over heart, eyes shut, mouth open, his breathing clear.

I must describe him first. What he looks like. I can do that for, though not yet seventeen, his features appear to have settled. I have long regarded him as unchanging, as one who will never change.

His slightly stooping figure, fierce frame craned forwards in submission. His flat skull. His face—coarse, thick, obtuse. The pimples sprouting on his cheeks and forehead. The black beginnings of a beard. His close-cropped hair. His spectacles.

I know very well—will even proclaim in advance—that people think he is feeble-minded; it is the general opinion, and my daughters share it. As for myself, I am ready to concede the fact, for it contains nothing to betray me, after all, nor to reflect upon the soundness of my senses. I have read scientific literature on the subject and I assure you: it is a mere accident. Moreover, he does not resemble me in the least, and barring a certain ferocity, we two have nothing in common. I am completely unafraid therefore, and yet for all that I insist he is a borderline case. He hovers on the border. The proof? His eyes. I am the only person to have frequent occasion for looking into his eyes and I say at times (though rarely, I admit), something lights up in them, a dark penetrating vitality.

And not his eyes alone.

And yet …

He was born late in my life. Born accidentally, by mistake, by some accursed miracle, for we were both, his mother and I, on the threshold of old age by then.

I have a vivid recollection of that time, the time before he was born. A gentle spring, very long, very wonderful. And I, a poet with five published volumes of verse behind me, resolved to stop writing, resolved with absolute, irrevocable conviction, out of utter despair. For it was only during that spring that I had come to admit to myself that I ought to keep silent.

I had lost the melody.

My closest friends had already started to taunt and to discourage me, dismissing everything I wrote. The young poets and their new poetry bewildered, maddened me. I tried to imitate them secretly and managed to produce the worst I ever wrote. Well then, I said, I shall keep silent from now on … and what of it? As a result of this silence, however, our daily routine was disrupted. Sometimes we would go to bed in the early hours of the evening, at others spend half the night in crowded cafés, useless lectures or at gatherings of aged artists gasping for honours at death’s door.

That long, wonderful spring, filled with gentle breezes, bursting with blossoms. And I, roaming the streets, up and down, swept by excitement and despair, feeling doomed. Vainly I tried to get drunk, proclaim my vow of silence to all, repudiating poetry, jesting about poems computed by machines, scornful, defiant, laughing a great deal, chattering, making confessions. And at night writing letters to the papers about trivial matters (public transportation, etc.), polish­ing my phrases, taking infinite pains with them.

Then, suddenly, this unexpected pregnancy.

This disgrace.

We found out about it in early summer. At first we walked a great deal, then shut ourselves up at home, finally becoming apologetic. First we apologized to the girls, who watched the swelling figure of their elderly mother with horror, then to the relatives come to cast silent looks at the newborn infant.

(The birth occurred one freezing day in midwinter. The tufts of grass in our garden were white with frost.)

We were imprisoned with the baby now. (The girls would not lift a finger for him and deliberately went out more than ever.) We two wanted to speak, tell each other: What a wonderful thing, this birth. But our hearts were not in it, quite clearly. Those sleep-drunken night trips once more, the shadow of the tree streaking the walls, damp, heavy nappies hanging up through all the rooms, all of it depressing. We dragged our feet.

Slowly, sluggishly it grew, the child, late in everything, sunk in a kind of stupor. Looking back now I see him as a grey fledgling, twitching his weak limbs in the cot by my bed.

The first suspicion arose as late as the third year of his life. It was the girls who broached it, not I. He was retarded in his movements, he was stuttering badly, unprepossessing–hence the girls declared him feeble-minded. And friends would come and scan his face, looking for signs to confirm what we dared not utter.

I do not remember that period in his life very well. His mother’s illness took up most of my time. She was fading fast. Nothing had remained of her after that late birth but her shell. We had to look on while she withdrew from us into the desert, forced to wander alone among barren, arid hills and vanish in the twilight.

Each day marked its change in her.

The child was six when his mother died. Heavy, awkward, not attached to anyone in the household, withdrawn into himself but never lost in dreams–anything but a dreamy child. Tense, always, and restless. He trembled if I ran my fingers through his hair.

If I could say with pity: an orphan. But the word sticks in my throat. His mother’s dying left no impression, even though, due to my own distraction, he trailed behind us to her funeral. He never asked about her, as though he understood that her going was final. Some months after her death, moreover, every one of her photo­graphs disappeared, and when we discovered the loss a few days later it did not occur to us to question him. When we did, finally, it was too late. The light was fading when he led us to the burial place; in a far corner of the garden, beneath the poplar, among the traces of an old abandoned lime pit, wrapped in an old rag—the slashed pictures.

He stood there in front of us a long time, stuttering fiercely, his small eyes scurrying.

Yet nothing was explained …

For the first time our eyes opened and we saw before us a little human being.

I could not restrain myself and I beat him, for the first time since he was born. I seized his wrist and slapped him hard in the face. Then the girls beat him. (Why did they beat him?)

He did not understand …

He was startled by the beating. Afterwards he flung himself down and wept. We pulled him to his feet and dragged him home.

I had never realized before how well he knew the house, how thoroughly he had possessed himself of every corner. He had collected his mother’s pictures out of obsolete albums, had invaded old envelopes. He had even found a secret spot in the garden that I did not know of. We had lived in this house for many years and I had spent many troubled nights pacing up and down this small garden, but I had never noticed the old extinguished lime—pale, tufted with grey lichen.

Were these the first signs? I do not know. None of us, neither I nor the girls, were prepared to understand at the time. All we feared was the shame or scandal he might bring down on us. Hiding him was impossible, but we wanted at least to protect him.

You see—the girls were single still…

In September I entered him in the first year of a school in the suburbs; and during his first week at school I left work early in order to wait for him at the school gate. I was afraid the children would make fun of him.

Noon, and he would be trudging by my side under the searing September sky, his hand in mine. The new satchel lashed to his back, cap low over his forehead, lips slightly parted, the faint mutter of his breathing, his eyes looking at the world nakedly, without detachment, never shifting the angle of his inner vision.

Acquaintances waved their hats at me, came over, shook my hand, bent over him, took his little hand, pressed it. They tried to smile. His dull upward glance froze them. Imbecile, utter imbecile.

After a week I let him come home by himself. My fears had been uncalled for. The children did not need to take the trouble to isolate him—he was isolated to begin with.

The girls were married that year. On the same day, hastily, as though urged on to it, as though they wished to flee the house. And they were so young still.

A year of turmoil. Not a week went by without some sort of revelry in the house. With tears in their eyes the girls would demand that I hide him, and weakness made me comply. I would take him out and we would wander through streets, fields, along the beach.

We did not talk. We watched sunsets, the first stars; rather, I watched and he would stand by my side, motionless, his eyes on the ground. But then the rains came and turned the fields into mud and we were forced to stay indoors. The two suitors had appeared on our horizon, followed by their friends and by their friends’ friends, and the whole house went up in smoke and laughter. We tried hiding him in the maid’s room, but when he could not sleep we would sneak him into the kitchen. There he would sit in his pyjamas and watch people coming and going, then get up and wipe the cutlery; just the spoons at first, then they let him do the knives as well.

Gradually he gained access to the drawing room, the centre of commotion. Serving sweets or biscuits to begin with, then filling glasses and offering lighted matches. First, people would draw back at the sight of him. A brief hush would fall upon the room, a kind of sweet horror. One of the suitors would start up angrily from his seat to go and stand by the dark window, seeking refuge in the gloom. Nothing would be audible in the silent room but the child’s excited breathing as he moved from one to another with a hard, painful solemnity, his tray held out before him. No one ever refused to take a sweet or a biscuit.

People became used to him in time. The girls softened towards him and tolerated his presence. His small services became indis­pensable. And when, late in the evening, everybody would be overcome with lassitude, his own face would assume a new light. One of the guests, flushed with drink, might show a sudden interest in him, pull him close and talk to him at length. The child would go rigid in his grip, his eyes dumb. Then he would go to empty ashtrays.

By the end of that summer we two were alone in the house.

The girls were married one afternoon in mid-August. A large canopy was put up in our garden beneath a deep blue sky. Desiccated thorns rustled beneath the feet of dozens of friends who had gathered there. For some reason I was suffocating with emotion. Something had snapped within me. I was tearful, hugging, kissing everybody. The child was not present at the wedding. Someone, one of the bridegrooms perhaps, had seen to it that he be absent, and he was brought back late in the evening. The last of my friends were tearing themselves from my embrace when my eye suddenly caught sight of him. He was sitting by one of the long tables, dressed in his everyday clothes except for a red tie that someone had put around his neck. A huge slice of cake had been thrust into his hand, the soiled tablecloth had slipped down over his knees. He was chewing listlessly, his eyes on the yellow moon tangled in the branches of our tree.

I went over and gently touched his head.

Flustered, he dropped the cake.

I said: That moon … To be sure, a beautiful moon …

He looked up at the moon as though he had not seen it before.

Thus our life together began, side by side in the quiet house with flasks of perfume and torn handkerchiefs still strewn about. I—a poet fallen silent, he—a feeble-minded, lonely child.

Because it was that, his loneliness, that he faced me with.

I understand that now.

The fact that he was lonely at school goes without saying. During his very first week at school he had retreated to the bench at the back of the classroom, huddling in a corner, a place where he would stay for good, cut off from the rest of his class, the teachers already having considered him hopeless.

All his report cards were inscribed no evaluation possible, with the hesitant scrawl of a teacher’s signature trailing at the bottom of the sheet. I still wonder how they let him graduate from one class to the next. For though occasionally he would be kept back in a class for a second or even a third year, he still crawled forwards, at the slow pace they set him. Perhaps they were indulging me. Perhaps there were some teachers there who liked my old poems.

Mostly I tried to avoid them.

They did their best to avoid me too.

I do not blame them.

If we were nevertheless forced to meet, on parents’ day, I always preferred to come late, to come last, with the school building wrapped in darkness and the weary teachers collapsing on their chairs in front of empty classrooms strewn like battlefields and illuminated by naked bulbs.

Then I would appear stealthily at the door, my felt hat crumpled in my hand. My long white mane (for I had kept my mane) would cause any parent still there—a young father or mother—to rise from their seat and leave. The teachers would glance up at me, hold out a limp hand and offer a feeble smile.

I would sit down and face them.

What could they tell me that I did not know?

Sometimes they forgot who I was.

Yes sir, whose father please?

And I would say the name, a sudden throb contracting my chest.

They would leaf through their papers, pull out his blank card and, closing their eyes, head on hand, would demand severely: How long?

Meaning, how long could they keep him since it was a hopeless case.

I would say nothing.

They would grow angry. Perhaps the darkness outside would increase their impatience. They insist I take him off their hands. Where to? They do not know. Somewhere else.

An institution perhaps …

But gradually their indignation would subside. They admit he is not dangerous. Not disturbing in the least. No, on the contrary, he is always rapt, always listens with a singularly grave attention, his gaze fixed on the teacher’s eyes. Apparently, he even tries to do his homework.

I crumple my hat to a pulp. I steal a look at the classroom, floor littered with peel, torn pages, pencil shavings. On the blackboard—madmen’s drawings. Minute tears prick my eyes. In plain words I promise to help the child, to work with him every evening. Because we must not give up hope. Because the child is a borderline case, after all.

But in the evenings at home I yield to despair. I spend hours with him in front of the open book and get nowhere. He sits rigidly by my side, never stirring, but my words float like oil on the waves. When I let him go at last he returns to his room and spends about half an hour doing his homework by himself. Then he shuts his exercise books, places them in his schoolbag and locks it.

Sometimes of a morning when he is still asleep I open the bag and pry into his exercise books. I look aghast at the answers he supplies—remote fantasies, am startled by his sums—outlandish marks traced with zeal and beyond all logic.

But I say nothing. I do not complain about him. As long as he gets up each morning to go mutely to school, to sit on the bench at the back of the classroom.

He would tell me nothing about his day at school. Nor would I ask. He comes and goes, unspeaking. There was a brief period, during his fifth or sixth year at school, I think, when the children bullied him. It was as though they had suddenly discovered him and promptly they began to torment him. All the children of his class, the girls not excepted, would gather around him during break and pinch his limbs as though wishing to satisfy themselves that he really existed, flesh and blood, no spectre. He continued going to school all the same, as indeed I insisted that he do.

After a few weeks they gave it up and left him alone once more.

One day he came home from school excited. His hands were dusted with chalk. I assumed he had been called to the blackboard but he said no. That evening he came to me on his own and told me he had been appointed class monitor.

A few days went by. I inquired whether he was still monitor and he said yes. A fortnight later he was still holding the post. I asked whether he enjoyed his duties or whether he found them trouble­some. He was perfectly content. His eyes had lit up, his expression became more intent. In my morning searches of his bag I would discover, next to bizarre homework, bits of chalk and a rag or two.

I have an idea that from then on he remained monitor till his last day at school, and a close relationship developed between him and the school’s caretaker. In later years they even struck up some sort of friendship. From time to time the caretaker would call him into his cubicle and favour him with a cup of tea left by one of the teachers. It is unlikely that they ever held a real conversation, but a contact of sorts was established.

One summer evening I happened to find myself in the neighbourhood of his school and I felt an impulse to go and get acquainted with this caretaker. The gate was shut and I wormed my way through a gap in the fence. I wandered along the dark empty corridors till I came at last upon the caretaker’s cubicle, tucked away under the stairs. I went down the few steps and saw him.

He was sitting on a bunk, his legs gathered under him, darkness around. A very short, swarthy person deftly polishing the copper tray on his knees.

I took off my hat, edged my way into the cubicle, mumbled the child’s name. He did not move, did not appear surprised, as though he had taken it for granted that I would come one night. He looked up at me and then, suddenly, without a word he began to smile. A quiet smile, spreading all over his face.

I said: You know my son.

He nodded, the smile still flickering over his face. His hands continued their work on the tray.

I asked: How is he? A good boy …

His smile froze, his hands drooped. He muttered something and pointed at his head.

Poor kid … crazy …

And resumed his calm scrutiny of my face.

I stood before him in silence, my heart gone cold. Never before had I been so disappointed, never lost hope so. He returned to his polishing. I backed out without a word.

None of this means to imply that I was already obsessed by the child as far back as that, already entangled with him. Rather the opposite, perhaps. I would be distant with him, absent-minded, thinking of other things.

Thinking of myself.

Never had I been so wrapped up in myself.

In the first place, my silence. This, my ultimate silence. Well, I had maintained it. And it had been so easy. Not a line had I written. True, an obscure yearning might well up in me sometimes. A desire. I whispered to myself, for instance: autumn. And again, autumn.

But that is all.

Friends tackled me. Impossible, they said … You are hatching something in secret … You have a surprise up your sleeve.

And, strangely excited, I would smile and insist: No, nothing of the kind. I have written all I want to.

First they doubted, at last they believed me. And my silence was accepted—in silence. It was mentioned only once. Somebody (a young person) published some sort of résumé in the paper. He mentioned me en passant, disparagingly, calling my silence sterility. Twice in the same paragraph he called me that—sterile.

Then he let me off.

But I did not care. I felt placid.

This wasteland around me …

Dry desert …

Rocks and refuse …

In the second place, old age was overtaking me. I never imagined that it would come to this. As long as I move about town I feel at ease. But in the evenings after supper I slump into my armchair, a book or paper clutched in my lap, and in a while I feel myself lying there as though paralyzed, half dead. I rise, torture myself out of my clothes, receive the recurring shock of my ageing legs, drag myself to bed and bundle up my body in the clothes, scattering the detective novels that I have begun to read avidly of late.

The house breathes silence. A lost, exhausted tune drifts up from the radio. I read. Slowly, unwittingly, I turn into a large moss-covered rock. Midnight, the radio falls silent, and after midnight the books slip off my knees. I must switch the silent radio off and rid myself of the light burning in the room. It is then that my hour comes, my fearful hour. I drop off the bed like a lifeless body; bent over, racked by pain, staggering I reach for the switches with my last strength.

One night, at midnight, I heard his steps in the hall. I must mention here that he was a restless sleeper. He used to be haunted by bad dreams that he was never able to relate. He had a night light by his bed, therefore, and when he woke he would go straight for the kitchen tap and gulp enormous quantities of water, which would calm his fears.

That night, after he had finished drinking and was making his way back to bed, I called him to my room and told him to turn off the light and the radio. I still remember his shadow outlined at the darkened doorway. All of a sudden it seemed to me that he had grown a lot, gained flesh. The light behind him silhouetted his mouth, slightly agape.

I thanked him.

The following night he started prowling through the house again about midnight. I lay in wait for his steps and called him to put out the light once more.

And every night thereafter …

Thus his services began to surround me. I became dependent upon them. It started with the light and sound that he would rid me of at midnight and was followed by other things. How old was he? Thirteen, I think …

Yes, I remember now. His thirteenth birthday occurred about that time and I made up my mind to celebrate it, for up till then I had passed over all his birthdays in silence. I had planned it to be a real party, generous, gay. I called up his class teacher myself and contacted the other teachers as well. I invited everybody. I sent invitations in his name to all his classmates.

True, all the children in his class were younger than he. Hardly eleven yet.

On the appointed Saturday, in the late morning, after a long and mortifying wait, a small band of ten sniggering boys showed up at our place waving small parcels wrapped in white paper. Not a single teacher had troubled himself to come. None of the girls had dared.

They all shook hands with me, very much embarrassed, very much amazed at the sight of my white hair (one of them asked in a whisper: That his grandfather?), and entered timidly into the house which none of them had visited before. They scrutinized me with great thoroughness and were relieved when they found me apparently sane.

The presents were unwrapped.

It emerged that everyone had brought the same: a cheap pencil-case worth a few pennies at most. All except one curly-headed, rather pale boy, a poetic type, who came up brazenly with an old, rusted pocket-knife—albeit a big one with many blades—which for some reason excited general admiration.

All the presents were accompanied by more or less uniform, conventional notes of congratulation. The little poet of the pocket-knife had added a few pleasing rhymes.

He accepted his presents silently, terribly tense.

It surprised me that no one had brought a book.

As though they had feared he might not be able to read it …

I waited on them myself, taking great pains with each. I served sandwiches, cake, sweets and lemonade, then ice cream. They sat scattered around the drawing room, embedded in armchairs and couches, munching sweets, not speaking. Their eyes roved around the room incessantly, examining the place as though suspicious of it. Occasionally tittering among themselves for no good reason.

My boy was sitting forlornly in a corner of the room, more like a visitor than the guest of honour at his own party. He was munching too, but his eyes were lowered.

I thought my presence might be hampering the children and left them. And indeed, soon after I had gone, the tension relaxed. Laughter began to bubble up in the room. When I returned after a while I found them all with their shoes off, romping on the carpet, jumping up and down on the couch. He was not among them. I went to look for him and found him on the kitchen balcony, cleaning their shoes.

He said: I am the monitor.

Thus ended his birthday party. Their clothes in wild disarray, stifling their laughter, they put on their shoes, then rose to face me, shook my hand once more and were off, leaving nine pencil-cases behind them. As for the old pocket-knife that had aroused so much admiration, the little poet who had brought it asked there and then to borrow it for a week and apparently never returned it.

It is in self-defence that I offer these details, since before a fortnight had passed he was polishing my shoes as well. I simply left them on the balcony and found them polished. He did it willingly, without demur. And it became a custom—his and mine. Other customs followed.

Taking my shoes off, for instance. I come back from work late in the afternoon, sink down on the bench in the hall to open my mail. He appears from one of the rooms, squats at my feet, unties the laces, pulls off my shoes and replaces them with slippers.

And that relieves me to some extent.

I suddenly discover there is strength in his arms, compared with the ebbing strength in mine. Whenever I fumble with the lid of a jar, fail to extricate a nail from the wall, I call upon him. I tell him: You are young and strong and I am growing weaker. Soon I’ll die.

But I must not joke with him. He does not digest banter. He stands aghast, his face blank.

He is used to emptying the rubbish bin, has done it since he was eight. He runs my errands readily, fetches cigarettes, buys a paper. He has time at his disposal. He spends no more than half an hour on his homework. He has no friends, reads no books, slouches for hours in a chair gazing at the wall or at me. We live in a solid, quiet neighbourhood. All one sees through the window are trees and a fence. A peaceful street. What is there for him to do? Animals repel him. I brought him a puppy once and a week later he lost it. Just lost it and showed no regret. What is there for him to do? I teach him to tidy up the house, show him where everything belongs. He catches on slowly but eventually he learns to arrange my clothes in the cupboard, gather up the papers and books strewn over the floor. In the mornings I would leave my bedclothes rumpled and when I returned at night everything would be in order, strictly in order.

Sometimes I fancy that everything is in readiness for a journey. That there is nothing to be done but open a suitcase, place the curiously folded clothes inside, and go forth. One day I had to go on a short trip up north, and within half an hour of informing him he had a packed suitcase standing by the door with my walking stick on top.

Yes, I have got myself a stick lately. And I take it along with me wherever I go, even though I have no need of it yet. When I stop to talk with people in the street I insert it in the nearest available crack and put my whole weight on its handle. He sharpens the point from time to time to facilitate the process.

To such lengths does he go in his care of me.

At about that time he also learned to cook. The elderly cleaning woman who used to come in now and then taught him. At first he would cook for himself and eat alone before I came back from work, but in time he would prepare a meal for me too. A limited, monotonous menu, somewhat lacking in flavour, but properly served. He had unearthed a china service in the attic. It had been a wedding present, an elaborate set containing an assortment of golden-edged plates decorated with flowers, cherubs and butterflies. He put it into use. He would place five different-sized plates one on top of the other in front of me, add a quantity of knives and forks, and wait upon me with an air of blunt insistence.

Where had he learned all that?

It transpired that a story about a king’s banquet had been read in class.

I am roused.

What king?

He does not remember the name.

Other heroes?

He doesn’t remember.

I ask him to tell the story, at least.

He starts, and stops again at once. It has become muddled in his head.

His eyes cloud over. The first pimples have sprouted on his cheeks.

A thought strikes me: viewed from a different angle he might fill one with terror.

At night he assists me in my bath. I call him in to soap my back and he enters on tiptoe, awed by my nakedness in the water, picks up the sponge and passes it warily over my neck.

When I wish to reciprocate and wait upon him in turn, nothing comes of it. Arriving home I announce: tonight I am going to prepare supper! It appears supper is served already. I wish to help him in his bath, and it appears he has bathed already.

I therefore take him with me at night to meetings with friends, to artists’ conventions, for I still belong to all the societies and unions. I have accustomed people to his presence and they notice him no more, much as I do not notice their shadow.

He always sits in the last row, opening doors for latecomers, helping them out of their coats, hanging them up. People take him for one of the attendants, and indeed, he is inclined to attach himself to these. I find him standing near a group of ushers, listening grim-eyed to their talk. At times I find him exchanging words with the charwoman who stands leaning on her broom.

What does he say to her? I am never able to guess.

Does he love me? How can one tell. Something in my behaviour seems to frighten him. Perhaps it is my age, perhaps my silence. Whatever it is, he carries himself in my presence as one expecting a blow.

Strange, for there is peace between us. The days pass tranquilly, and I imagined this tranquillity would last out our