The Remains of Love Read Online Free PDF

kibbutz, which has become the natural habitat of cruelty and lies, where all sensibilities are trampled down, especially for the males. Masculinity is a perverse invention too, since sometimes it seems to him that for years he’s been living underground, and not only he but all men, like war criminals afraid of exposure, like state’s witnesses, they all unwittingly wasted the best years of their lives, and not to realise some lofty target or other, but just to survive.
    In recent years it seems the stress has eased a little, when half of your life is behind you discipline starts to waver, as with an apprenticeship when the end is approaching, and then it happens that men become more feminine and women more masculine, but now in confrontation with her it is aroused again, his old tension, seeing the wreckage of this person who brought him into the world, the last witness to his infancy, his delicacy, his loneliness, his heartbeat, the whole nightmare of concealed emotions, his great shame.
    A flowery sheet covers her tiny body, and she used to be such a big, clumsy woman, in colourful and tasteless garments that she started to wear by way of contrast after leaving the kibbutz. Like a crumpled robe her skin has sunk, wasting away to nothing around her bones, wafer-thin and mottled, and he peers furtively at his own hands, inspecting his skin. How meagre is the dignity left here, how cruel the transformation, only with us is it so, since in animals old age doesn’t create such a radical change. They become a little slower, and the sheen of their fur is dimmed, and yet they remain themselves, whereas this old crone, whose hair is sparse and whose chin is sharp and whiskery, whose lips have disappeared into the void of her mouth, her dentures smiling at him from the top of the closet, has changed beyond recognition from the big-limbed woman who used to search for him in the grounds of the kibbutz, calling his name as if only he could save her from some terrible disaster that was about to engulf her. Avni, Avni! Where are you?
    Where has all the flesh disappeared to, he wonders, confronting the hollow skin of her arms when she holds out her hands to greet him, the skin hanging from them like bat’s wings. People grow smaller, it emerges, grow steadily smaller, and the space they take up in the world is reduced, likewise the space that the world takes up in them, and unconsciously he strokes his stomach, which has expanded recently, and then withdraws his hand as if it’s been burned because, it seems to him suddenly, that is where her flesh is hiding, all the flesh that was hers has migrated in recent years into his body, a kind of vengeful enchantment that his mother has succeeded in casting as a means of cleaving to him at the end of the day, just as she carried him in her womb so she has forced him in her last years to bear the flesh that has peeled off her, and so the world is not diminished, since their combined weight is unchanged.
    What a scary idea, he grimaces, seeing an involuntary spasm pass over her face, like the spasm on a baby’s face which is mistaken for a smile, what nonsense, it is all the fatty foods that the Bedouin are feeding him there, in their tents, brass plates heaped with yellow rice, and hot pittas and strong cheeses, sometimes even strips of mutton, seeking to show him their gratitude with the dishes that they serve him, whole sheep of gratitude are bleating inside him, flocks of them, trying to silence with their voice the echoes of the old disdain.
    What an anarchic place, he glances at his watch and sighs, he’s been here an hour and no doctor has come anywhere near, an hour has elapsed and there’s no sign of his sister. Not that he’s at all eager to see her, the arrogant face that has grown leaner in recent times, the unfriendly stare, but he wants to get out of here and this is the only way. Excuse me, he tries to attract the attention of one of the nurses, what’s with the doctor? How