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the
entrance to her house, she unexpectedly ran into the back of a man.
Because it could not possibly be a woman. Not only because of his
size, his smell, and the sound that his feet made as if he were
dragging them … above all, because she had run into him.
    Women learned from when
they were small to walk in the world confidently —but also
delicately. As if they flowed through the vast space that
surrounded their existence.
    Of course there were surprise encounters
from time to time and the occasional blow, but not as if they were
running into a wall, which was what bumping into a man resembled
most. Men stood still, stiff, with a firm foothold on the ground as
if their lives depended on it instead of giving way to the blow and
letting themselves move.
    “ I’m sorry,” Charni
immediately said.
    If there was one thing that her mother had
taught her, she should always, always be the first to excuse
herself when she ran into a man, and if necessary, take the blame.
Otherwise she might remind him that he had lost his sight and could
never return to the other world, and men did not like that.
    Besides, men had a feeling called pride that
was fairly easily activated when they were made to feel stupid or
weak in some way, however absurd the reason seemed to women.
    “ Are you entering or
leaving?” she asked next.
    Of course the man meant to enter, but one
way to lessen his pride, for example after running into a man like
that, was to make them feel that she was at least as lost as they
were.
    Charni sometimes wondered
why there was this sense of danger whenever she was told about
men’s pride, but something inside her said it was better to never
find out.
    “ I’m going in, inside,” he
answered promptly.
    From the sound that his feet made when he
walked and what little she could perceive when she touched his
skin, Charni was sure that he was one of those men called elderly.
This, together with his unique scent and the sound of his voice,
made him seem familiar.
    “ Then,” Charni added to
finish off the strategy to calm this feeling called pride and at
the same time reinforce his confidence, “if it doesn’t bother you,
I’ll enter behind you.” She put her hand on the back of the elderly
man as if that were necessary to walk safely into her own
house.
    “ I see that,” he said,
using that strange word that men liked so much. “Don’t let go of
me.”
    Charni felt the back of the elderly man
become straight, tense, as if he were on guard, as if he were
protecting the most valuable thing in the world. And that, in spite
of the irony and the falsehood, filled her with happiness and a
strange sense of … security.
    Maybe blind men were clumsy and useless in
that world, but when they were not upset over some foolish thing,
they could transmit pleasant sensations that only men knew how to
make. Emotions that not even her mother, as protective as she was
at times, could manage to create.
    “ Kesha?” he called a
little uncertainly. “Kesha!”
    Charni felt sorry for him. Of course her
mother was at home. She was the queen, where she needed to be. Was
it true that men could not perceive that the noise or the mix of
scents in a closed space was more intense when there were other
beings in it?
    She shook he head. She did
not want to think about it. Although she could not understand how
men’s fifth sense worked and what it meant to them to lose it, the
mere idea that she might suffer something similar with one of her
four senses made her feel terrified.
    “ Qjem?” her mother
answered, also worried. “Is that you?”
    “ Yes, it’s me.”
    “ Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t
expect you so soon. Come in, come in.”
    What a lot of lies in just one moment. How
did her mother make it sound so natural to imply that she was
clumsy and foolish?
    To begin with, if she had
called him by name, it meant that she had recognized him. If not,
she would have asked Who are you? or simply have said Identify yourself if it