house. Later I found out that their father had sent Leah to New York to retrieve a desk he had spent four decades searching for. In the week that she was gone, Yoav and I fucked all over the house, on every imaginable piece of furniture. He said nothing more about his father, but there was a violence in the way he wanted me, and I knew that something painful had taken place between them. One night, always a light sleeper, I woke suddenly with the feeling that a shadow had passed over us in silence, and when I crept down the stairs and turned on the hall light Leah was standing there with the strangest look on her face, a look I’d never seen before, as if she had cut the fraying ties to whatever had moored us. We had underestimated her, but no one more so than her father.
II
TRUE KINDNESS
WHERE ARE YOU, DOV? It’s past dawn already. God knows what you do out there among the grasses and nettles. Any moment now you’ll appear at the gate covered in burrs. For ten days we’ve lived together under the same roof as we have not for twenty-five years, and you’ve hardly said a thing. No, that isn’t true. There was the one long monologue about the construction down the road, something about drainpipes and sinkholes. I began to suspect it was a code for something else you were trying to tell me. About your health, perhaps? Or our collective health, father and son’s? I tried to follow but you lost me. I was thrown from the horse, my boy. Left behind in the sewage. I made the mistake of telling you as much, and a pained look gripped your face before you reverted back to silence. Afterwards I began to suspect that it had been a test you’d concocted for me, one for which the only possible outcome was my failure, leaving you free to curl back into yourself like a snail, to go on blaming and despising me.
Ten days together in this house, and the most we’ve done is stake out our territories and inaugurate a set of rituals. To give us a foothold. To give us direction, like the illuminated strips in the aisles of emergency-stricken planes. Every night I turn in before you, and every morning, no matter how early I rise, you are awake before me. I see your long gray form bent over the newspaper. I cough before entering the kitchen, so as not to surprise you. You boil the water, setting out two cups. We read, grunt, belch. I ask if you want toast. You refuse me. You are above even food now. Or is it the blackened crusts you object to? Toasting was always your mother’s job. With my mouth full, I talk about the news. Silently, you wipe the sputtered crumbs and continue to read. My words, to you, are atmospheric at most: they come through vaguely, like the twitter of birds and the creak of the old trees, and, as far as I can tell, like these things they require no response from you. After breakfast, you retire to your room to sleep, exhausted from your nighttime rambling. Close to noon you appear in the garden with your book to stake out the only lawn chair whose seat has not broken. I claim the easy chair in front of the TV. Yesterday I followed the news report of an obese woman who died in Sfat. She hadn’t moved from her sofa for over a decade, and when they discovered her dead they found that her skin had grafted to it. How it was possible for things to have gotten so far—this they didn’t get into. The report was limited to the fact that she had to be cut loose from the sofa, and hoisted through the window with a crane. The reporter narrated the slow descent of the enormous body wrapped in black plastic because, as a final humiliation, there was no body bag in all of Israel big enough to fit her. At two sharp you reenter the house for your solitary monk’s meal: a banana, a cup of yogurt, and a meek salad. Tomorrow, perhaps, you will appear in a hair shirt. At two-fifteen, I fall asleep in my chair. At four, I wake to the sound of whatever odd job you have chosen for yourself that day—clearing out the shed, raking, mending the roof gutter—as if to