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me crazy with your Jesuit naivete.” “You know very well it isn’t naïveté. How could I stay naive living with you? This is a decision. And besides—you can always punish me: the day the stampede starts and I’m there with my two babies and one on the way, you’ll run off all by yourself and I won’t be able to say you didn’t warn me.” “That’s a deal,” I say. “Did you turn off the gas?” “I think so. Who cares? Now come to me. Admit I won you fair and square tonight.” And I turn to her, our faces touching in the dark, but only our faces, slowly, in resignation, like old letters reread, and then I burrow into her with all my might, and for one moment I have peace, I have a home, there is someone I can touch, there is someone I’m not afraid of, and we move together cautiously, conserving tenderness, rising and falling like a long, tired caravan, but when Ruth bites my lip and quivers, I return to a land devoid of love, I see those pictures on the tattered screen of my brain. Mankind. And when I come, I remember to make the right noises, though for the past few weeks I haven’t really enjoyed it: it’s meaningless. Like spitting.

Life was slowing down. I had turned into a sloughed skin. Even channels previously open to me were closed now and nothing flowed. Around this time I stopped writing the story of Grandfather Anshel and took up another project: collecting material for a young people’s encyclopedia of the Holocaust. The first of its kind. To spare our children having to guess or reconstruct it in their nightmares. I had a list of some two hundred main entries already: murderers and victims, the main extermination camps, literary works on the subject written during that period and later. I discovered that filing, writing, and editing the material in this way was helpful.

But I dropped the idea because I couldn’t find a backer. I couldn’thandle the PR work myself. It annoys me and I start shouting at people, and they ask me to leave. At home, too, I was becoming unbearable, but I couldn’t help it. I felt awful. Ruth went to meet Ayala, and they talked for four hours. I guess they decided what’s best for me. This was disturbing: neither one would tell me what they had discussed. Was I a child or something? At exactly the same time (why does everything happen synchronously), my mother’s sclerosis took a turn for the worse. I refused to drive her to the hospital for those disgusting tests. I couldn’t bring myself to go with her. Ruth went. I reminded myself cynically that my mother never took care of Grandfather Anshel either, and that when Papa lay dying, she wouldn’t touch him, and now it was her turn. The disease—like a beast of prey—had isolated the weakest animal in the herd, and closed in fast: the rest of the animals ran on, their eyes on the horizon. The way of the world, I told myself, but that wasn’t the truth. Actually I was afraid something bad would happen to her. I was afraid of what would happen to me once she was gone. For a few years now I had lost all patience with her. I became annoyed after five minutes’ conversation. Everything she said, all her primitive notions and suspicions, drove me crazy. But now that I felt I was losing her, I was filled with anxiety and remorse and a sense of loss and injustice.

The doctors released Mama from the hospital and said everything would be okay, meaning there was nothing they could do. They recommended that she come live with us. This time it was Ruth who put her foot down. She told them things were so bad it was all she could do to take care of me and Yariv. So you admit it, then, I screamed at her, wickedly rejoicing in my own calamity, you admit it’s just as I always said: even in families you find nothing but petty opportunism and egotism? Yes, said Ruth serenely, but, Momik, this is a problem money can solve: my father will help out and we can hire a nurse for her. Don’t lose your sense of proportion, and do me a favor, admit it isn’t the gas chamber every time somebody swears at you at an intersection!

So said my gentle wife.

Hey, you’re getting impatient. You’re finally starting to react: you snort and spit in all directions. No doubt you think I’m drawing this out interminably, that I’m dwelling on the details out of disgust for the story. You mustn’t be so hard on me. But you don’t care. I’m sure you don’t: you, too, protect yourself from pain. Isn’t that why they build breakwaters?

And then one day there was a knock on the door and in walked Ayala. Summery as ever, her hair wild, smelling of sea and sunburn. Ruth met her with a smile, rather tensely. How nice to see you. They touched each other. I went to the bedroom and lay down. My head was splitting. They sat in the kitchen and spoke in whispers. My mother used to whisper in Yiddish with Grandma Henny when she was saying things about Papa. Later I heard Ayala approach and rolled over on my stomach with my eyes closed. “Get up and stop feeling so sorry for yourself,” said Ayala. “If you really want to pull yourself out of this, start making an effort. Don’t poison the atmosphere. You don’t know how good you have it.” She spoke casually, with the mild contempt that used to make me double over. “We think you should rent a room somewhere,” said Ruth, turning in the doorway. “And you can stay there quietly on your own and write. No excuses. You can’t keep torturing everyone around you like this. World War II only lasted six years, yours