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been feeling that the forces beneath the surface are much stronger than the logic that once regulated them; if there was an opportunity it has been lost, but perhaps there never was one.
    I’m trapped, he wants to tell the woman in the red satin blouse. At twenty-three I found myself married to the first girlfriend I ever had, to this day I don’t understand how I was seduced into that. For many years my work was a refuge but recently I’ve lost the strength, the hope, but the man beside me still has hope, it turns out, because in a low and pleasant voice he says to his wife, I know, and for a moment it seems that this knowledge of his is set to confound what the doctors know, what the research and the statistics say, I know there’s no cause for concern, I know I’ll soon be feeling better.
    Resplendent on his finger is a thin wedding ring, identical to his wife’s ring, and both of them sparkle on their hands as if they married only yesterday, and their eyes sparkle too. Is it the proximity of death that enlivens their love, or is this indeed a newly wed couple, plucked at the very outset? Even if they aren’t young, it seems their love is young, and already he’s trying to construct their story: for years they lived in isolation until they met in miraculous fashion, or alternatively, two families were dismantled to form this brief love that is being curtailed before his eyes. His heart has always been in the theatre, and if he hadn’t taken it on himself to fulfil his father’s dream and study the law, he might well have found himself there, and now he consoles himself with the delusion that these two partners are merely hollow ciphers awaiting the biography that he will invent for them, but then he sees the woman turn her head and wipe away a tear with the ringed finger, and in the process her eyes meet his. It seems she is noticing him for the first time, although he has been moving the curtain aside, gradually but persistently, eager to cancel absolutely the partition between them, and it wasn’t out of interest that she turned to face him but in an effort to hide the sudden onset of weeping, restrained indeed but visible to the eye, and she raises her shoulder to wipe away the tears on the fabric of the short sleeve, and when this doesn’t work she bends down and dabs at her eyes with the hem of her blouse, in the process exposing a smooth midriff, and on the blouse there is a rapidly spreading stain, the moisture of tears blended with black mascara. Avner takes from his pocket a somewhat used tissue, the one that absorbed his bizarre weeping this morning, in his mother’s bed, while she was stretched out on the floor by the window, and holds it out with a shaky hand to the woman facing him. She tries to smile at him gratefully, but her lips tremble, and after thoroughly mopping up her tears, almost damaging the delicate skin under her eyes, she tucks the tissue into the pocket of her trousers and turns to the invalid’s bed, her back to him, and he stares at her and thinks wonderingly of their tears blending on the paper tissue, of her piercing, sharply focused pain meeting his own, inexplicable pain.
    And if I were the one about to die, with my wife sitting beside me, he wonders, in our case too would the approaching end generate such tenderness? Apparently not, since already he could feel in his flesh the intensity of the anger that would flood the corridors of the hospital like a mighty whirlpool. His anger at her for not letting him break free from her until the last day, anger at himself for always yielding in the end, and even when he imagines her and not himself on the deathbed, his anger is undiminished, since both her illness, if she were to fall ill, and her death, if she were to die, would be directed against him, to destroy what remains of his life with bitter memories and guilt, with untimely orphans. Yes, as far back as he could remember, he had always been trapped, at too young an age he