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question is: Could it be that I still carry that smell inside me, that it spurts out of me at certain points? Does my own body produce it to compensate for some deep-seated need? I analyze the ingredients: the dean smell of Grandma Henny’s cheeks; the thick smell of animals, fur and sweat; the sour smell of Grandfather Anshel; the sweat of a young boy, not the familiar locker room smell but a ranker smell, evoking embarrassment and disagreeable thoughts of glands more ancient than a boy, secreting—

Sea? Are you sleeping?

Sea?!

She’s sleeping. Back in Narvia and here, too. Whenever I start talking to myself, she takes the opportunity to fall asleep, saving her strength for later, when I talk about Bruno. Hell, why do I let that frivolousness, that childish egocentric superficiality of hers, make me so—angry, so infuriated without a way—

Ah, there I go again.

Listen, sea. I don’t care if you are asleep.

The first time we met, Ayala told me about the White Room at the end of one of the subterranean corridors of Yad Vashem. I told her that I had never come across such a room, though I spent a certain amount of time there, and none of the staff had ever mentioned it to me. And Ayala, who even then smiled indulgently at my limitations, explained that it wasn’t designed by an architect, Shlomik, or built by a builder, and the staff, it’s true, knows nothing about it—“A kind of metaphor, then?” I ventured, and immediately felt stupid, and she, patiently: “Exactly.” With each ensuing moment I could see in her eyes the growing conviction that a very grave error had been committed here, that her keen intuition had let her down for once: I was definitely not the man to entrust with such a secret, or any secret, for that matter. This was the night we met, at a lecture about the last days of the Lodz Ghetto, which I had attended out of habit, and Ayala because she never misses lectures or happenings of this sort (her parents are survivors of Bergen-Belsen). She was the one who took the initiative right away, and—that night which turned out to be the first since my marriage that I didn’t go home to sleep—I made the discovery that, my many limitations notwithstanding, I had an amazing and quite thrilling power to transform Ayala into an urn, a strawberry, and even, in surpassing moments, a woolly mess of pink cotton candy, the kind they sell at fairs. It likewise turned out that, despite my regrettable limitations, the mere touch of my hands on her taut, warm brown skin could launch a thousand strange shivers that seeped through and tensed her soft, comfortable body like a bow and released us both from our frozen, anxious expectations, when at last from her unplumbed depths came the sharp sound, mournful and high-pitched, like a gull being pierced by an arrow, and presently we could resume our cultured conversation for another spell. We repeated this many times throughout our first night together.

“And this White Room,” explained Ayala in one of the lulls, “was squeezed into being. It isn’t a room at all, in fact, but a kind of tribute, yes”—she shut her large, delicately rounded eyelids, enraptured with herself—“a tribute from all the books, all the pictures and words and films and facts and numbers about the Holocaust at Yad Vashem to that which must remain forever unresolved, forever beyond our comprehension. And that’s the essence of it, Shlomik, isn’t it?”

I didn’t understand. I looked at her with sad fascination, because it was becoming clear to me that we shared a rare, ill-fated “backward love,” you might say, now in its last throes, and as Ayala woke up and discovered how utterly different we were, she was certain to banish me from her magic castle. She knew nothing about me. She had read my first book of poems and thought it “not a bad start.” This annoyed me somewhat, because people generally liked the first book even better than my later three, and several critics had praised its “controlled inner tension” and all that, but Ayala said that you could sense in my writing how scared I am of myself and of what I have to say about life in general, and Over There in particular. She asked me to promise to be more daring in future, and when I promised, she told me about the White Room.

I was enchanted with her body, so lithe and free, so self-contained, rolling and rippling with carnal pleasure; I was enchanted with her small apartment, with her tiny bedroom, which was—you might say—illusive. I don’t know why I say it was illusive, but it was somehow, I don’t know, illusive. I had never gone to bed with a woman so quickly before: two hours and twenty-five minutes from the moment we met (I know that exactly, because I kept looking at my watch wondering what I was going to tell Ruth when I got home). Two hours and twenty-five minutes went by from the moment we left the lecture, distressed by what we’d heard there, until we fell into each other’s arms (and I mean literally) with a passion I had never known before. It was only after we cooled down that I remembered I didn’t even know her name! I felt like a real Casanova: having sex with a woman before she even told me her name! And at that moment she drew the palm of my hand to her mouth and whispered, “Ayala,” which I swear I heard “through my hand.” I know it sounds suspicious: I wouldn’t believe something like that either, but with Ayala, anything can happen.

From the ceiling in the corner hung cobwebs so thick they looked like tangled balls of hair, and when she explained what it was (she wasn’t about to destroy this creation out of self-righteous notions of cleanliness), I wondered what my mother would have to