taxi passed the clinic where Leah had gone for tests. Now there was a florist there. And when she emerged from the clinic with a look that was ashamed but aimed apologetically at him, he understood that the problem wasn’t with her. Bunches of flowers burst forth from the shop. And suddenly he remembered stories from the Bible. All the barren women. And the prayers. And God heard them and made them fruitful. Leah came up to him and took both his hands. Suddenly her dress took on different colors in his eyes. Now it turned black. All his adult life Yoel had feared sterility, and now, at the age of seventy, he couldn’t avoid the thought that his obsessive thoughts about sterility, which had started at the age of fifteen or a little earlier and accumulated in his head and body during all those years, had turned in the end into a self-fulfilling prophecy. From the thought to the brain and from the brain to the body, in other words to the reproductive system, to the sexual organ. Because it accumulates. Whenever they had sex, Yoel looked at the bride who bent down to pick up a long glove, and for some reason it didn’t go well, he would think to himself, now I’m going to get my punishment, I failed, it will show in the results. He didn’t really believe this, which is to say he was afraid of it, which is to say he didn’t know, after years of brooding about it, what the truth was. But he always took care to laugh to himself at his thoughts. The main thing is not to take it seriously, said Yoel, and everything will be all right. But it wasn’t all right. The mother and daughter got into the taxi and squeezed into the back seat. Both of them, Yoel noticed, had enormous, erect breasts under their T-shirts, and big, prominent nipples, really swollen, and the size of their breasts, he noticed with his engineer’s eye, was without a doubt absolutely identical, although in the case of the daughter, who was very thin, they looked larger. An optical illusion, he thought. The mother tapped him on the shoulder and he turned round. She pushed ten one shekel coins into his hand and said, “Can you pass this to him? Two. And a receipt for the ten.” He measured her body with an ostensibly indifferent eye, ignoring her face and the big bandage covering the bridge of her nose, which was just like her daughter’s. At least she was hers, no doubt about it. That is, the daughter. She was hers and they would grow more and more alike. The daughter would become more womanly, the mother would grow younger and younger. They would have the same nose, the same breasts, they would go to the gym together and their bodies would be the same body. And he thought: maybe we should do the same thing too. I’ll get a tan on a tanning bed, we’ll go down to the Golden Ratio plastic surgery clinic—get your eyelids done— leg shortening without anesthetic—ingrown toenails—and it will hurt, and they’ll cut us up, and there’ll be disinfectant, harsh but necessary, but they’ll cut according to plan, and when we come out and get into a share-taxi and I pay with two five-shekel coins we’ll be a proper father and son at last. And people will see it, too. You’ll see it, he wanted to say, but to whom.
Far behind, in Dizengoff, a little bit of cold breathed out of the open shops. The street itself stank like a dump.
The mother and daughter were swallowed up under the trees in Balfour Street, and Yoel thought that he had better get off before the avenue came to an end and the taxi reached the area of the central bus station. On no account did he want to end up there. In other words, that was where he was supposed to end up. And he said, “Nachmani Street please,” and the driver pretended not to hear because he wanted to catch the green light and he said, “What?” and Yoel said, “I want Nachmani, please,” and the driver said, “What, here?” and stole another few meters, for no reason, and then stopped after turning into Bezalel Yaffe Street. Which was where he liked to stop.
It was very quiet in Tel Aviv on that day. There was no explanation for this.
Yoel stood up to get out and suddenly, for no particular reason, he turned to the driver and said, “I want to say something to you, sir,” and the driver looked at the green light and said in a Bukharan accent, and with obvious impatience, “Well, what,” and Yoel said, “I wanted to thank you for the ride, I had a very comfortable ride. Anyone can see that you’re a professional driver.” And the driver looked at him for a moment, trying to decide if the white-haired passenger was setting a trap for him, and his right hand gripped the handle attached to the nickel rod that opened and closed the door. And his short thick fingers opened and closed on the worn nickel handle, and he said to Yoel, after some hesitation and a long look, “You know what?” and there was a long pause, and he stared though the front window at the traffic light, which turned orange and suddenly red, “Seven years I’m driving this taxi, seven years, and nobody ever said anything like that to me before. Not ever.” And he went on staring at Yehuda Halevi Street for a few seconds, and Yoel raised his hand in embarrassment. And when he raised his hand the taxi began to drive very slowly, as if reluctantly, and Yoel sensed the driver’s eyes fixed on his back. And he thought, if I lower my hand he’ll stop and reverse towards me. For sure. And he lowered his hand.
Ten years after she gave him away the idea of having another child came up. They were twenty-six, both of them. “The difficult period” was already ostensibly behind them. They wanted to turn a new page. There was a smell of cigarettes in the house, the walls breathed in the smoke day and night. Breathed it out. They decided to quit. They quit. For a month or two. They painted the walls white. And she tried to get pregnant. But the walls coughed. The walls were giving up smoking. Black walls. Suffocating walls. Black lung-walls. Coal. They had various copper vessels full to the brim. Ashtrays. The house wouldn’t let her.
Every day she went downstairs and tipped all the stubs into the garbage. Knocked the copper against the bin. But when she went up again the stench would hit her in the stairwell.
No, he wanted to go on working, without a break, even on the long nights, that’s what he said to the company director, how did the word “long” get out, damn, a mistake, a mistake . . . but in his heart he tried to be glad about being forced out, and he saw himself, his wallet bursting with pension money and severance pay exchanged for foreign currency, traveling the world with a light bag and a light coat and a pocket camera, looking at airplane and train schedules, not in a hurry, falling asleep on a train on a cold night in Budapest and waking up the next morning in Venice opposite boats and big lit canals and the water of the Great Canal rippling in front of his opening eyes. Two months after his retirement Yoel was still trying to realize this freedom, for the first time after decades of work under elevated roads, a yellow helmet on his head, shouting at foremen, holding blueprints, always mistakes the minute he turned his back. In his dream he drives on his own over highway interchanges he was responsible for building, like the Netanya interchange, driving alone in his new jeep, in daylight, knowing that the bridge is about to collapse, sticking his arm out of the top of the vehicle in order to hold onto something when he falls, a tree branch or laundry line, and he knows that there’s nothing there but nevertheless he stretches his arm through the open roof, even though he knows, in his dream, that the jeep isn’t a convertible, but the roof opens and he feels the strong wind on his hand, and he goes on driving a little longer and he counts, one, two, three, and goes on counting more and more until he hears the bridge crumbling under his wheels, and for a second he sees the blueprint in his mind’s eye and identifies the fault, and it was his mistake, and he knows it. His mistake. And then the car begins to lose height and tip forward toward certain destruction, he’s already stopped counting but he hears his voice going on as if on a soundtrack, and he stretches his arm a little further and utters a long kind of aaahhhh until someone takes his hand and pulls him out of the car. Now too, in the spring of 2007, after his retirement, a few days before his seventieth birthday, the dream sometimes came back, and he would wake up in the morning and look at the apartment, which now seemed emptier, and he would go outside to the avenue and get onto a no. 5 share-taxi and ride to the south of the city, sometimes even at five in the morning, while Emile was still sleeping, and he’d get off mostly between Nachmani and Balfour Streets and walk around there, showing his pensioner’s card to an invisible audience, walking slowly down the avenue or in the
