Apples from the Desert. Savyon Liebrecht

which well up inside you. Udi, resting tranquilly on his chest, reached out toward Hassan’s dark face, and Hassan put his head down toward the little fingers and kissed them. She, stunned by the sight, stood where she was and looked at them, as the tremor inspired by fear gradually died down, and another, new kind of trembling arose within her, seeing something that, even as it happens, you already yearn for from a distance, knowing that when it passes nothing like it will happen again. And, as though dividing themselves, her thoughts turned to Yoel, whose eyes examined his son with a certain remoteness. Since the baby’s birth he had never clasped him to his body and was careful not to wrinkle his clothes or have them smell of wet diapers.

      Hassan looked up at her and said, “Hassan have like this at home in Gaza.”

      “You have a baby?” She was astonished. “You’re married?”

      “Also like this. Four years,” he said proudly, placing his hand parallel to the floor to measure the height of his son.

      “You okay,” Hassan said in his soft voice, turning his face to the baby. “You big—you doctor like daddy, yes?”

      With the bottle of tea in her hand, she was shaken as though by a distant alarm. Troubled by the suspicion that he knew more than he should, she said, “You can read Hebrew?”

      He laughed. “I read one word, another word. I see ‘Doctor’ on door in English.”

      “You can read English?” There was some mockery in her voice, like an adult talking to a child about grown-up things.

      “I can,” he answered in English, for the first time smiling another smile, a hidden one, without the forced humility she was familiar with.

      “Where from?” she asked, also in English.

      “From the university.”

      “Which one?”

      “The American University of Beirut.” She recognized his proper accent from having heard it on television when Arabic-speaking intellectuals were interviewed. She hadn’t been able to shake off her Israeli accent in the two years she had lived in Texas, while Yoel finished his degree.

      “Really?” She returned to Hebrew.

      “Really, lady. I in Beirut two years. Maybe I be doctor that way, of babies.”

      “Why didn’t you complete your studies?”

      “Hard. Can’t talk.” He looked down at this hands, whose nails were free of lime. “Life like that.”

      Shortly after he left, joining his comrades who were waiting for him and watching him from the door, also scrubbed, she thought: They’re nameless and ageless to me, in their faded black sweaters and their dirty elbows and stocking caps. They had a single face and uncouth words came from their mouths. Suddenly they were different: in white collars and jackets, their cheeks shaven, with a wife and baby and a child of four at home.

      Even before she heard the bell ring she knew he had returned.

      “My jacket, lady,” he said, and went to take his jacket, folded carefully on the back of the chair. And at the door, his back to her, he turned around with a carefully planned motion that made itself out to be spontaneous. “If lady want I stay now.”

      “Where?” she asked in astonishment.

      “With lady,” he answered seriously. “Mister of lady no here. Maybe need something . . .” And she, stunned at the very words and frightened that he knew of her husband’s absence, wondered if he meant what she thought she had heard. She said, “But you’re going to a wedding, aren’t you?”

      “Going to wedding. But if lady want—I can be here . . .”

      After she had locked the door behind him, still staggered by his suggestion, she suddenly noticed: Yoel’s scent had emanated from them—the delicate odor of the cologne in the right-hand cabinet next to the mirror. They had used her husband’s toiletries, dried themselves on her towels. She gingerly set Udi down in the crib and hurried to the bathroom.

      With jerky movements, like a madwoman, she gathered up the towels and threw them all, averting her head with a bilious sensation, into the washing machine, throwing the new soap into the garbage pail. She began polishing the faucets and sink and scouring with disinfectant the floor which their bare feet had trod on.