go down to the kitchen and stand in front of the fridge and tear meat from the roasted chicken, too hungry to take a plate or sit or even turn on the light. One night, I was standing there eating in the dark and I saw a figure crossing the front garden, a kind of stick figure who had been lent some kinetic energy moving across the grass. It stopped for a minute as if it had seen or heard something that pricked its interest. There was a little moonlight, and from what I could see the stick figure looked like neither a man nor a woman, and not a child either. An animal, maybe. A wolf, or a wild dog. Only when the figure began to move again around the side of the house, and a moment later I heard the door open softly, then the quick, solid movements of one who knew exactly where he was—only then did I realize it was you.
I remained still in the kitchen until I heard you disappear upstairs to your bedroom. I went to study your muddy sneakers lying exhausted on their sides by the door in order to guess what your stealth little outing had been about, what trouble you had gotten up to, and with whom—though if it involved anyone it could only have been Shlomo. Whatever happened to him? Shlomo, whom you were attached to like a Siamese twin, with whom you communicated under the radar of others in a private, ingrown language of grimaces, eye-rolls, and tics. Yes, I was almost certain your midnight outing involved some half-baked scheme you two had wordlessly cooked up with a few twitterings of the facial muscles you’d somehow managed to send and receive in class while with pained expressions the Mrs. Kleindorfs hammered into your heads the two thousand years, always the two thousand years, and sent you to sit at opposite corners of the room. I intended to confront you about it the next morning, but when you appeared at breakfast nothing on your face gave away even the slightest hint of your adventure, and I began to wonder whether it was possible you had been sleepwalking. But four or five nights later I was up at 2 a.m. devouring the last of the schnitzel when I saw you come up the front path again. The moon was bright and I caught a glimpse of your face bathed in the most peaceful expression.
NOW YOU walked me up the same front path and waited as I fumbled with the keys, and for once I was glad I had forgotten to leave on a light so that you couldn’t see that suddenly my hands were shaking. At last I got the lock open and turned on the lights. I’m fine, I said. You can go now. And only then did I look down and see that you were holding a small suitcase in your hand. I looked at the suitcase and then I looked back at you. At your face, which I hadn’t looked at, truly looked at, for a long time. You’ve gotten old, it’s true, but there was something else there, something in your eyes or the tilt of your mouth, a kind of pain—but not just pain, more than that, a look as if you had been beaten down by the world, like you had finally been defeated. And something happened in me. A kind of ravaged feeling entered. As if now that your mother was gone, now that she was no longer there to absorb your pain, to tend to it, to feel it as her own, it had been left to me. Try to understand. All your life your pain infuriated me. Your stubbornness, your determination, your inwardness, but most of all your pain that always made her come running to your rescue. And at that moment, looking at you in the light of the hall, I saw something in your eyes. She was gone, she had finally abandoned us, left us alone with each other, and I saw something in your face and I was overwhelmed.
I looked from your suitcase to your face and back to your suitcase. And I waited for you to explain.
WHEN YOU were a boy your mother told me she would kill to save you. You would kill another so that he could live, I repeated. Yes, she said. And would you let five die so that he could live, too? I