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him. There are two things I need to find in the apartment, he told himself. The first relates to her life before the announcement, what she was doing and what she was hiding. The second needs to be some indication of herintentions. What she left and what she took with her once it was clear to her he wasn’t around, and never would be again.
    Ehud sat down at the desk, glanced at the landline phone, which already had a thin coating of dust, and tried to imagine Rachel sitting like him on a small chair or at the edge of the bed, staring at the phone before dialing his number. He didn’t know why she decided to call him, and reckoned she would have no answer either. He remembered what she said to him and thought she had delayed the conversation until the
shivah
was behind her. Ehud counted the days on his fingers and made a note on the small pad that he kept in his pocket, a reminder to discuss with Joe the gap of two days.
    And there was something else. She spoke to him in English. She, who loved to revert to Hebrew whenever possible. “That way I feel like an Israeli,” she used to explain, and she wasn’t ashamed of her accent, which she was unable to shake off.
    He raised the receiver, listened for the dial tone, and wondered what she meant to say when she fell silent. He wanted to ask her why her last sentence sounded decisive and determined, a metallic tone with the seal of finality, what compelled her to announce that her father was dead for the second time and what accounted for the defiance in her voice, the thin shading that said to him: You’re to blame.
    He knew he needed to link this conversation with that time when he phoned her with the news that her father was on his deathbed and she should return at once. That was only a code phrase, Rachel, he wanted to say to her now. Your father was waiting for you. You could go to him, be with him, tell him as much as you were allowed to tell, and rebuild the connection.
    Suddenly he remembered their conversation. “I’m not telling him anything,” she said, and tried to convince him it was better that way.“He’ll understand,” he said to her in a final attempt to persuade her that every father loves his daughter, but she was silent, and it was obvious she had nothing to add.

    â€œW HEN I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO look for I just wait,” he said to the team commander, who stood by the door, arms folded, and looked at him with a question mark. “Okay,” the commander confirmed, “you have all the time in the world. Our instructions are clear; we’re here to help and not to hinder. If you need anything, just ask. We can also find documents, even drugs, if you want to incriminate her. Everything is possible, and the photo lab will process the proofs. That’s the way it is in the twenty-first century. There is no longer any meaning to the past or the future. Reality is imaginary. But why am I talking so much instead of letting you think in peace?” He told Ehud to let him know if he needed anything, and left the bedroom.
    Ehud opened one of the drawers, looked at the folded bras and underwear, and remembered the first time he was confronted with Rachel’s clothing, touching one item after another. He slid his hand under the pile and felt the delicacy of silk. There were no letters at the bottom of the drawer, just the soft underwear, smaller than Rina’s, which he had packed up with all his wife’s clothes once it was clear to him she wasn’t coming back. Many months passed before he dared to stand and face her closets and her drawers and take her belongings out. It was like killing her memory, taking her out of his world and making space for someone else. He tried to rid himself of the feeling that this was what he wanted now, that the underwear and the other clothes and personal items laid out before him in a kind of order that was hard to fathom would move over to his house and fill