about him? she asked, incredulous. I looked across the table at Adam drinking a bottle of beer and felt a yearning and also the special warmth of knowing I had come with him, and it was me he would leave with. I smiled at the girl and helped myself to olives and salted cheese. They seemed nice, those kids, people who would not have tolerated a liar and a thief among them; Rafi had been unfair to him. Dessert was brought out, then tea, and eventually Adam motioned to me that it was time to leave. We said goodbye to the others and walked out with a boy who had long blond dreadlocks and delicate glasses. He ducked into an old silver Mazda, rolled down the window and waved for us to follow. But when we arrived at his apartment the desk in question was not there either, and I waited while Adam and the dreadlocked boy passed a joint back and forth in the tiny, stained kitchen under last year’s calendar showing views of Mount Fuji. They discussed something in rapid Hebrew, then the boy went away and came back jingling a set of keys on a Mogen David key chain which he tossed to Adam. Then he showed us out, waving a cloud of hashish out into the hall, and we drove to a third place, a group of tall apartment buildings overlooking Sacher Park, hewn of the same sallow stone as everything else in the city. We rode up to the fifteenth floor, thrown together in the tiny mirrored elevator. The hallway was dark and as he groped for the switch I felt a throb of longing and almost reached out and pulled him to me. But the fluorescent lights buzzed and flickered awake in the nick of time, and with the keys dangling from the little metal Mogen David Adam unlocked the door to 15B.
Inside it was dark as well, but I’d lost my nerve and so waited with arms wrapped around my waist until the lights came on again and we found ourselves in an apartment stuffed with heavy, dark furniture incongruous with the blinding desert light: mahogany vitrines with leaded-glass cabinets, Gothic high-backed chairs with carved finials, their seats upholstered with tapestry. The metal blinds were drawn over the windows as if whoever lived there had gone away for an uncertain amount of time. There was hardly a foot of exposed space left on the walls, so cluttered were they with thickly impastoed fruit and flowers, pastoral scenes so dark that they seemed to have survived the smoke of a fire, and etchings of little humped beggars or children. Improbably mixed in with the rest were cheap Plexiglas frames with blown-up panoramic shots of Jerusalem, as if the inhabitants were unaware that the real Jerusalem lay just on the other side of the blinds, or as if they had made a pact to refuse the reality outside the windows and chosen instead to go on yearning for Eretz Yisrael just as they had when they dwelled in whatever part of Jewish Siberia they’d come here from, because they had arrived too late in life and did not know how to adapt themselves to this new latitude of existence. While I studied the faded colored photographs of children that colonized the sideboard—smiling, rosy-cheeked toddlers and gawky bar-mitzvahs who by now probably had children of their own—Adam disappeared down a carpeted hall. After a few minutes he called to me. I followed his voice to a small room whose shelves were lined with paperbacks on whose cumulative surface a thick layer of dust had settled, visible even in the lamplight.
This is it, Adam said with a sweep of his hand. It was a desk of blond wood whose rolltop had been drawn back to reveal an intricate inlaid pattern whose gleam, protected all this time from the democratizing blanket of dust, was unnerving, as if the person who had been sitting at it had only moments ago gotten up and walked away. Eh, he said, you like it? I ran my finger along the pattern of wood which felt as smooth as if it were one piece, not the many hundreds from how many different varieties of trees it must have taken to produce the revelatory geometry of cubes and spheres, collapsing and expanding spirals, of space folding in on itself before suddenly expanding to reveal a glimpse of infinity, that hid some meaning the maker