The dog watched me from her place in the corner as I got up to return the Hebrew dictionary to the shelf. She had sat there all through my fever, whining only when she had to go outside to relieve herself. Otherwise she didn’t leave my side. I won’t soon forget the look in her dark, wet eyes: as if she understood what I myself didn’t. But now she seemed to know that the fever had broken, and began to stretch and move about, and even thump her tail against the floor, as if she also sensed that time was returning to us. When I went to the kitchen to get her some water, she leaped up and trotted after me with a new spring in her step, as if in the course of my fever she had shed many years. There was nothing left to eat, the kitchen was bare. I had no interest in discovering what it felt like to starve, or to watch the dog starve. All night I’d heard her stomach bubbling with hunger.
The suitcase was still waiting by the door. The moment I laid my fingers on the handle, the dog began to pant with excitement. I pulled it across the empty room while she watched. It was far lighter than I’d expected. So light that for a moment I wondered whether the army had left the wrong suitcase, or whether Friedman had really taken anything from Spinoza Street at all.
I filled some large jars with water and put them in the musty canvas backpack I’d found in the closet. I was still wearing the coat that might have been Kafka’s coat, but instead of returning it to the hanger, I buttoned it up to my chin. Then I took one last look around the room, which seemed to hold no more memory of his time here than it did of mine. I drew the thin curtains, which did little to keep out the light. Kaddish for Kafka. May his soul be bundled in the bundle of life. He might have lived there, but I never could. I had children who needed me, and whom I needed, and the time when I might have been able to live confined to what was unquestionably within myself had passed when they were born.
I opened the door, and the dog didn’t hesitate. She ran out thirty or forty paces ahead, then turned to wait for me. She seemed to want to show me that she knew the way, and could be trusted to lead. The furniture was still laid out under the sky. The slippers stood waiting side by side on the dusty ground for whoever would come. Soon the rain would arrive and come down on everything. I looked back on the house, which seemed even tinier from the outside.
The dog hurried ahead, alternately sniffing the ground and turning back to be sure I was following. The suitcase bumped along behind me over the rocky ground. What at first seemed light soon became heavy, as is always the way. If I lagged too far behind, the dog circled back and trotted at my heels, and when I stopped and sat down on the ground, she whined and licked my face.
We walked for hours. The sun began to fall toward the west, sending our shadows ahead of us. The skin of my palms became raw and blistered, my arms had lost their feeling, and by then my belief in the dog’s preternatural ability to guide me had been worn thin by exhaustion and fear that I would die out there, and never see my children again because I’d been foolish. It was not without disgust with myself that I abandoned the job of wheeling a suitcase that I was afraid to find out was empty across the floor of a desert that once had been the bottom of a sea. The dog looked at it pitifully for a moment, then raised her nose to the sky and sniffed the air, as if to demonstrate that she was already on to other things.
It was late by the time we reached the road. I wanted to get down on my knees and cry into the tarmac that someone had taken the trouble to lay down there. I shared out the last of the water with the dog, and we curled against each other for heat. I slept intermittently. It must have been nearly six in the morning when we heard the rising hum of an engine approaching from the other side of the hill. I jumped to my feet. The taxi came tearing around the bend, and I waved frantically at the driver, who slammed on the brakes, glided slowly toward us, and lowered his window. We were lost, I explained, and not in good shape. He turned down the Mizrahi music coming from the stereo and smiled, revealing a gold tooth. He was on his way back to Tel Aviv, he said. I told him that’s where we were headed, too. He looked skeptically at the dog, whose body had become tense and rigid. She seemed prepared to spring forward and sink her teeth into his jugular, if necessary. She looked nothing at all like a shepherd, neither German nor any other, but in the end Friedman was right, that’s what she was. She was an extraordinary dog; to think that I almost gave her up to the soldier. After I got out of the hospital, I tried to find her. I’d half expected her to be waiting on her haunches exactly where I left her outside the entrance to the emergency room. But she must have been long gone by the time I was released. She’d done her part, and had gone off in search of her master. Later I looked for him, too. But there was no trace of Friedman. At the offices of Tel Aviv University, they told me that they had no record of any Eliezer Friedman—no one by that name had ever been employed by the department of literature, or any other department, for that matter. I’d lost the card he’d given me. I checked the telephone listings, too, but though there were hundreds of Friedmans in Tel Aviv, there was no Eliezer there, either.
Lech Lecha
When the photos came through, they showed neither rubble nor flames. The first was a foot next to what looked to be colored plastic bags. The second was of the same foot, blurred. The third was only a streak of colors. And so on, until the sixth photo finished downloading and popped open on his screen, and Epstein found himself looking into the eyes of a child. A boy of no more than eight or nine; eleven if one took into consideration the way malnutrition can keep a child small. His impish face was smudged with dirt, and beneath the arches of his brows his dark eyes shone. His mouth was closed, and yet he seemed to be laughing. Mesmerized, it took a minute for Epstein to realize that the navy collar from which the delicate neck protruded was his own, the coat his own. He pictured the boy picking his way through the rubbish, leaping over tires, and scurrying down an alley with the tattered hem trailing like a cloak. Then the face on his screen was abruptly replaced by an incoming call from Schloss. He hit the red button, sending his lawyer through to his voice mail, which was already full.
It was four in the morning. Epstein sat on the toilet, letting the hot water from the shower drive the chill from his bones. The roll of toilet paper had to be kept outside the door, but once he’d made this small adjustment, he began to appreciate the convenient situation of the showerhead, with its ready seat below. He washed himself, soaping between his toes as his mother had taught him to do. The mirror above the sink became fogged. He stood and rubbed the glass, and his eyes appeared under his fingers. Vanishing again under the steam, he repeated the trick. Then he went to find his clothes, shivering in the cold and leaving a trail of wet footprints across the floor. Naked before the wardrobe mirror, he saw his thin, veined legs and the folds of loose skin around his belly. Stepping away, he hurried into his clothes.