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 his exposed flesh, and he sees that his genitals are visible too, shrunken and pathetic, and people walk past indifferently, the people who work in the morgue, a nurse, doctors, the security guard, the janitor, and he realizes that he doesn’t feel at all sorry for this death, no sorrow at all, only shame, a kind of disgrace, why don’t they cover him with a sheet.
A few days later they sat on the balcony of the apartment that overlooked the synagogue in Smuts Avenue. The child lay in a cradle. “We did well,” said Yoel, and Leah said, “He chose us.” The sterile Yoel Zisu. And suddenly he stood up, went to the front door with a marker in his hand, and added Emile’s name to the little sign. And then he wrote over their two names as well. And hastily, like a thief, he drew a cloud to frame the three names.
A solitary old neighbor peered at him small-faced through the peephole on the far side of the hall.
He remembered now, sitting on a bench in Rothschild Boulevard, how he imagined then, on the balcony, his sperm pouring out of his penis and seeping into the baby’s body, and soaking into it, or how during the night he would pick the baby up and set him carefully between his wife’s legs, and the baby would slide in easily, and he would wait for him there until daybreak, until he came out and was born.
Passersby cast doubt on the child.
And so he would draw him into a secluded garden, so they wouldn’t keep looking all the time. And they would be hidden among the trees. It was a botanical garden in the north of the city. And he thought of it as a secret garden. And once they saw a blind man in the garden, groping his way along the paths with his white stick. And Yoel wanted to go up, to help, and in the end he called out to him, “Hey, Mister, do you need any help there,” and the blind man answered him, “Stay with the child, Baba, there’s no problem, I just have to take a piss, don’t look.” And he stood next to a big oak. Yoel averted his eyes. But he heard the sound of the piss on the fallen leaves.
And he thought suddenly of the sea, how he once sat facing the Pacific Ocean, when he was an engineering student in California. Fields of flowers. And he looked round and there was nobody there, and at first he felt afraid, and afterward he spread out his arms and shouted, full of joy, and he didn’t look to see if anyone had come in the meantime, and he didn’t care if anyone saw him. On the contrary, he wanted people to see. Cars streamed along the expressway on the other side of the garden’s low wall. You have to look at every road as the distant continuation of some junction or other, he thought, some interchange, and then everything becomes clear, the picture becomes a big picture. At the