himself never mind, some great idea would grow out of this idleness, perhaps a story, and he would write it all down at once, in a café, and publish it. When he was a child Yoel could draw the coastline of the Mediterranean Sea with astonishing accuracy. And now, in the café, he tried to draw it again. His pen rose north from the Haifa Bay and already he’s in Greece, and already he stops to put in Cyprus, goes back up, to Italy, adds the islands. And the more sea and harbors appear, the younger he grows. And joyfully he reaches the Straits of Gibraltar, and skips a little lower down, how he had imagined swimming across these straits as a child, with his parents standing on either side leaning down and applauding him, shouting, over the sea, as indeed they did, but it was over his desk. And he begins his return journey, stopping at Djerba, Tripoli, Alexandria, the smell of fish, and suddenly a great desire to sit opposite the sea and eat olives and honey.
He stood up and sat down again. He went to the ATM. Withdrew a large sum. And put it in an envelope. He would count it at home. The exact amount.
And he wrote down, in another notebook, lists of things he noticed, for example, the tendency of young girls to wear very low-slung pants and tattoo something in a triangular pattern on their lower backs, a tattoo that called for a whole new wardrobe, low trousers and high tops, which of course called for a radical diet and the tanning of ordinarily hidden areas, and mainly, thought Yoel, a boundless readiness for sexual adventurism. He made notes on the subject of cellular telephones, and remembered how when he was a child there was a man who talked to himself out loud on the street until one day an ambulance stopped next to him and took him away, whereas now it was the people who didn’t talk to themselves who were the minority. Going past on the avenue were more and more young, energetic men and women, all of them suddenly thin, Yoel noticed and wrote down, tall and muscular and shaven headed. All the men shaven headed in skinny pants, all the women with big breasts, he noticed, and a tattoo on their lower backs or on their shoulders. All of them suddenly making money, all suddenly healthy and young, all in fast new cars, all sitting in cafés. Above all he was astonished by the number of people in cafés in the middle of the day, young people who would once have been at work and now they were drinking coffee and talking on cell phones and not sweating even in the middle of August. They never left the air-conditioning. Big breasts and a little blue light in their ears where once they would have stuck a flower. And he didn’t understand what they were saying. As if Hebrew had been changed into some other language. He was sure that it was Hebrew, but he didn’t understand much of anything that the young people said, they spoke so fast, and the accents sounded foreign. Attached to their ears they had instruments flickering with blue light and they talked loudly and walked with brisk steps, waving one hand in the air, and to Yoel it seemed a spectacle of utter madness, apocalyptic, even though he knew very well that there was nothing more natural, that a person from the eighteenth century would look at him in exactly the same way, if Yoel were standing under an overpass or talking on the phone at home. A wind swept dry leaves onto the asphalt path between the houses. He went into a stairwell and sat down. He opened the notebook with his story, wrote the date carefully on the first page and put the notebook back in his bag.
In the first days after his retirement he would sit at home facing the avenue and stare at the treetops. Birds screeched, quarreling in the foliage. Music. It was hard to concentrate. Books. A page, two pages. And suddenly he stood up. Thinking about the city and its future. Worried by the summer in December. And once the taxi driver said, “We have to really fuck ’em, the Arabs, not only in Lebanon,” and Yoel suddenly rose furiously to his feet and moved to the door and got out and was nearly run over. And he knew that he was waiting in unacknowledged suspense for a phone call from the office, and the telephone that didn’t ring somehow seemed to ring anyway, there was a silent ringing in the house. And he turned away from the tree and looked at length at the old black telephone, a heavy rotary-dial phone that he insisted on using even though it made so much noise and in spite of the new telephones with their buttons and short cuts and then those cell phones with all their memories and cameras. The telephone was silent and Yoel got up and went to check if it was connected to the wall, but he checked nonchalantly, as though absentmindedly, as if to show that it didn’t really bother him. He pushed the plug, but the plug was firmly in place. During his last weeks at work, when his young replacement had already started running around both the office and the building sites with his two telephones and his palm computer, Yoel had imagined his retirement as a great convalescence, but in its first days he actually felt like someone who had just fallen ill, not a severe illness but a bout of flu, throat a little sore, lower-back pains too, no need to stay in bed, no high fever, but something not right nevertheless, something out of joint, a slight pressure in his head. As if after swimming in the Amazon all your life, one morning you found yourself in the Yarkon. Now you’re in the Yarkon, he thought, and wrote in his notebook, “Go for a row on the Yarkon,” “Suggest it to Emile,” because you won’t be able to row the boat alone. And he knew that he wouldn’t suggest it, and he knew that Emile wouldn’t agree. And he felt his arms and said to them,“What a pair of sticks.” And he remembered how they’d sailed on the Yarkon, he and Emile and Leah, in a wooden boat, when was it, maybe the beginning of ’74, after they returned from the three-month trip they’d begun the night of Yom Kippur. And Yoel rowed and Emile fell asleep at the bottom of the boat, and Yoel stopped rowing for a minute and let the boat move of its own accord, and both of them looked at him lying there in the sunlight as the air moved through his green shirt. And he heard Leah’s voice saying to the water, “What a boy,” and suddenly he picked up the phone.
He didn’t look like him, he was a brown baby. Yoel said to Leah: Yes, we’ll take him, look at his fingers. And his eyes, look how he’s examining you. And they decided on the child in less time than it would take them to decide on the Peugeot or the new apartment on the eighth floor they would buy a few years later “on paper.” We made up our minds quickly, thought Yoel, because we knew that if we started to hesitate we’d be lost. Our doubts would have destroyed us and we wouldn’t have been able to decide, because every minute another reason would come up for or against. And, altogether, the looks of the other children, those eyes, all of them deserved to be taken, all of them were good children, we couldn’t have gone on standing there more than a few minutes, you could go crazy if you tried to take in all of them, to think of their futures. But he thought too: They must grow into monsters there. When time passes and nobody comes to take them. After a year. After five years. And some of them probably have to be strapped to their beds. And what did you expect, he said quietly to the hospital logo on the curtain, that we would adopt sixty, seventy children?
Yoel buttoned his shirt. Behind the curtain the doctor typed something with one finger on his new, cordless keyboard, the tip of his tongue sticking out, his glasses on his forehead, his eyes narrowed with effort under a plastic sculpture of a very big, open eye, and next to it a smaller relief of the digestive system. In his mind’s eye Yoel saw a picture of an interchange with a tangle of streets leading right and left, tied up into itself with a butterfly bow. The stabbing came again. He let out a brief cry, Oh! The doctor didn’t hear him. Yoel stepped out from behind the curtain.
“Sit down, Zisu . . . have a look at this graph, I’ll turn the screen toward you . . . technology today is really something, I’m connected to the central computer on the Internet . . . all the patients are connected to me . . . today everybody’s seriously ill, I’m seriously ill myself, my leg is killing me, as a doctor I’m supposed to have a different attitude, but just look at the kind of leg I was given, one healthy leg and one very sick one, they give me injections straight into the sick leg, you know, Zisu, and once they injected the healthy leg, and then the healthy one got sick too . . . who can trust doctors today . . . as a doctor I . . . what? What? Speak clearly, don’t mumble.”
And then Yoel saw this picture: he, Yoel, on a cold metal surface, naked and dead, eyes closed, lying there limply, but he looks at him, at himself, through a kind of round netted window, and he feels ashamed of
