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first time in years shed a tear, although it wasn’t for her you were weeping?
    Embarrassed, he wipes the sweat from his brow as the doctor walks away, giving rapid instructions to the nurse as he goes. What is this, what’s happening to me, he glances around furtively, afraid that the expression on his face, his tone of voice, his posture – all these are betraying him, and the whole of this assemblage, doctors and nurses who aren’t drinking coffee and aren’t playing cards, patients and their visitors, technicians and maintenance staff, all are watching him and they know that sitting there in their midst, at this very moment, is a son who doesn’t love his mother.
    Through the curtain which is only half closed he notices a man of about his own age who has also been brought in here, stretched out on the narrow bed with eyes closed, breathing heavily, and a woman with her straight back turned to him, wrapped in a glossy red satin blouse, pulling up a chair and sitting down beside him, in a hurry to hold his hand. Concealed behind the curtain, he peers, fascinated and alarmed, at his mother’s new neighbours, because it seems to him suddenly that through them reality is transmitting its dire warnings to him, hailing destruction, the end of all flesh! It isn’t that he doesn’t know that people of his own age and even younger fall ill and die, and yet he has never seen this with his own eyes, and he always felt protected from death by the very existence of his mother. Now he feels a pang of fear at the thought that his mother might be going to the world hereafter some time in the next few hours, leaving him without so much as a morsel of the supposed protection that she has provided. A man without parents is more exposed to death, he thinks, and for a moment he longs to turn to his neighbour and check with him urgently, find out if he still has parents, and he peers at the pleasant, yellowing face, drawn to the eyes, which open suddenly, and their expression is young, clownish almost, as if he’s only pretending and in a moment he’ll get up and walk out of the building, arm-in-arm with his statuesque wife.
    Is this really his wife? Their gestures are still fresh, without the ennui that accumulates over the years between partners in a couple, like dust on furniture that hasn’t been moved often enough, but on the other hand, they are about the same age, an observation that makes interpretation a little difficult, since it seems to him that new love in mid-life tends to involve an age-gap, like for example that between him and the young intern who’s waiting for him now in the office, and when he sees her in his mind’s eye he sighs, wiping the sweat from his brow again. Anati, who introduced herself straightaway by her nickname, and he blurted out, Avni, although nobody except his mother and his sister called him that, and since then her pretty lips have launched his childhood name into the ether unabashed: Avni, the client has arrived, Avni, the office is trying to contact you, and all in good heart and without ulterior motive, arousing in him heavy and sad desire, sacks of desire he carries on his back like a weary porter, and she doesn’t even notice.
    Strange, once the heat of passion would have put a spring in his step, whereas now it’s an infusion of lead into his bloodstream, forming clots of blood that roam around the body and threaten its survival. Is he really lusting after her, Anati, with the full body which she actually finds rather tiresome, the prim coiffure and the lovely eyes? So predictable, the lawyer and his junior clerk, and yet this had never happened to him.
    Through the curtain he hears soft speech, a melodious laugh, almost devoid of anxiety, sees his neighbour’s yellowish hand reaching out to the woman’s dark hair, smoothing it slowly, and when she turns towards him Avner catches sight of her aristocratic profile, and he sees her laying her head on the man’s chest, her fingers