I imagined her sitting aloft it in flooded waters. Standing there I suddenly knew that it, too, must have been a gift from her father, one that carried the same subtle message about the sort of life he expected her to live. She never brought home friends, though surely she must have had some at the college. Nor had I ever heard her make reference to a boyfriend, past or present. The demands her father and brother made on her loyalty and love left any outside relationship with a man almost impossible. I thought of the birthday party Leah had invented the night before. I hadn’t understood the point of such a gratuitous lie, but now I wondered whether it was her only way of resisting her father.
Yoav was still asleep in his bed on the floor below. My fury from the night before had abated and with it my confidence. I wondered again how long our relationship could last. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before Weisz won. I’d forced Yoav into the first battle with his father over me and no sooner had he entered it than he had forfeited, grown pliant like a little boy, and then come at me in the dark with teeth and claws. The image of the hanging Weisz returned to me. Does one ever get free of such a father?
I wrote Yoav a note and left it on his desk, eager to get out of the house before I ran into Weisz. It was still drizzling outside, the fog low and heavy, and by the time I reached the station the damp had seeped through the coat my mother had bought for me. I took the Tube to Marble Arch, and from there I caught the bus back to Oxford. As soon as I unlocked the door of my room a crushing sadness descended on me. Away from Yoav, my life in Belsize Park took on the uncertain quality of a play whose stage could be dismantled, its players disbanded, and the heroine left alone in her street clothes in the darkened theater. I crawled under the blankets and slept for hours. Yoav didn’t call that day or the next. Not knowing what else to do, I dragged myself to the Phoenix where I watched Wings of Desire twice. It was dark by the time I walked home along Walton Street. I fell asleep waiting for the phone to ring. I hadn’t eaten all day, and at three in the morning the gnawing in my stomach woke me. All I had was a bar of chocolate, which only made me hungrier.
For three days the telephone didn’t ring. I slept, or sat immobile in my room, or dragged myself to the Phoenix where I sat for hours in front of the flickering screen. I tried not to think, and lived on a diet of popcorn and candy that I bought from the incurious punk anarchist who ran the concession stand, to whom I felt gratitude for possessing principles that approved of whiling away one’s days alone in a cinema. Often he gave me free candy or a large soda when I’d only paid for a small. If I’d really believed things between Yoav and me had come to an end I would have been in far worse shape. No, what I felt was the torment of waiting, stuck between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next which might or might not bring a hail storm, plane crash, poetic justice, or a miraculous reversal.
At some point the telephone finally did ring. One sentence ends and another always begins, though not always in the place the last one left off, not always continuous with the old conditions. Come back, Yoav said in something close to a whisper. Please come back to me. When I unlocked the door in Belsize Park, the house was dark. I saw his profile illuminated by the bluish glow of the television. He was watching a Kieślowski film we’d seen at least twenty times. It was the scene where Irène Jacob goes to Jean-Louis Trintignant’s house for the first time to return the dog she’d hit with her car, and finds the old man eavesdropping on his neighbors’ telephone calls. What were you, she asks, disgusted, a cop? Worse, he says, a judge. I slid onto the couch next to Yoav, and he pulled me to him without a word. He was alone in the