once they celebrated his birthday. No, it was more than once. When he turned five and when he turned ten. When he turned five, [ ] baked him a cake, they lit candles. There was an empty chair. They sat and chewed the cake. There was a kind of damp in the house.
And when he turned ten there was a cake again. The same chair. The same cake, to tell the truth. She kept the recipe. But they brought out a kind of doll and put it on the chair. The hot candles dripped onto the chocolate icing. They threw the whole cake into the garbage. With the candles and all those disgusting candies.
The next day the doll disappeared.
And over the years the lack of resemblance between Emile and his parents became more pronounced. If when he was a baby it was still possible to pretend that his skin color was still changing, that it was a temporary infantile darkness that would pass, at the age of three Emile walked between them and everyone who saw them noticed the contradiction. And the children pointed, and parents bent down to explain. No, don’t point . . .
There was an internal contradiction in their home. A guest had entered the family on a permanent basis.
And one day Yoel went to the barber and dyed his hair coal black. But the fairness of his stubble exposed the deception on the very same day, and he started shaving twice a day to stop it from growing.
Leah was silent, she stood in the doorway of the barbershop, half of her outside. She averted her face from the strong smell.
The next day he got up again and went down to the avenue and crossed Yehuda HaMaccabi Street, and got into a no. 5 share-taxi again. He rubbed the five-shekel coin. A tin coin, he thought, definitely, a tin coin, and he paid the driver with the five shekels, and although he was entitled to a reduction of one shekel as a senior citizen he didn’t ask for it, and for a moment he was gratified by the fact that the driver, this time too, didn’t offer him a reduction and didn’t give him a shekel back, as most of the drivers did (in fact the reduction had been canceled in January, but he didn’t know this, and it would be some time before he asked, aren’t you going to give me a reduction for seniors, and the driver would look at him, by then it would be August already, and say, are you joking? It was canceled in January, now there aren’t any seniors/ non-seniors anymore, now everyone’s a senior). He sat on his seat, his face turned to the window, when the taxi recklessly passed a bus and got on Dizengoff. He could easily have closed his eyes and seen, sometimes even without closing them, the orange grove that once stood in the place where a number of bridal shops were now crowded, but he wasn’t interested. How he hated the sinking into memories common to all his friends in his age group, they sank further and further into the past, always and immediately dragging him into conversations about what had already happened, looking at the streets and teasing out images from the past, before the city existed, when everything was still open and “ours,” living in their memories as much as possible, thought Yoel nodding glassy-eyed at a funny story. And every word led to bygone days, mostly to wars, to the establishment of the state, he was eleven then, remember how we were children when Ben Gurion spoke, you remember the declaration of independence, do I remember, I was there, I stood on an orange crate, they would sink into reminiscence and reminiscence would give way to invention, and Yoel would keep quiet and wait for them to disperse, until he stopped going to meet the “old crowd,” he couldn’t stand it, how after a few greetings and perfunctory questions someone would throw some ancient code word onto the table, next to the sunflower seeds, for instance the name of a commanding officer in the Six Day War (Yoel, of course, had dodged the draft, run away to Holland, and they knew it, which was why they kept coming back to it, he thought, asking him innocently, “So you parachuted to the Western Wall did you?” and laughing themselves sick inside), and so immediately dive backward in time, looking away and sinking into the “good old days,” you remember the waitress at the Hungarian blintzes place, do I remember, what was her name, Paula, Polina? didn’t we eat there after Yoshua married Tzipa? Yoshua from the overseas mobilization, what are you talking about, Yoshua left the country right after the Yom Kippur War, he left the country but he left his arm behind him in the sands of Sinai, no, I’m talking about the Yoshua from Kfar Yoshua, so, what about him, he married Tzipa Wilensky at the blintzes place, that’s what about him, so, what’s the connection? We were talking about the blintzes, that’s the connection, but I’m talking about Yoshua Ben Meir, Haika’s platoon commander from the overseas mobilization, ah, that’s another Tzipa completely, you’re mixing them up, I’m talking about “Tzipa harmonica,” what are you talking about, she married that millionaire, the Persian, what’s his name, the arms dealer, who was in the “Mahanot Olim” youth movement . . . Yoel, you kept in touch with Yoshua’s Tzipa, didn’t you? After he left the country? After he bought the coal cargo?
And Yoel said: No. No, I don’t remember anything.
The taxi crawled along Dizengoff. Or perhaps the taxi stopped and the street crawled backward.
Suddenly, the thought of heavy snow. Heavy snow, heavy snow. He closed the window.
Brides-to-be stood in front of big mirrors and examined their breasts and the way they fitted into the cut of their dress. Grooms stood aside and measured them with eyes in which a hint of disappointment could already be read. They look at themselves the way their men would look at them, he thought, and he looked at the enormous breasts of one of the brides, which appeared duplicated in the mirror like the stuffing for a leather sofa, until the taxi took off and drove away while the bride searched the street with her eyes and met the gaze of another man replacing that of Yoel, who looked at her and licked his lower lip, and she stuck out her tongue at him. On the second floor of one of the bridal shops he saw a sign: “The aesthetic bride—enlargements!!—liposuction—lips now at bargain prices,” and from the entrance to the building a mother and daughter emerged, both with their faces bandaged, supporting each other, looking frightened. He tried to recall Leah’s bridal gown but he couldn’t remember anything except that it was white. And he wasn’t really sure of this either. The rabbi held a glass of wine to his lips. The 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