The Remains of Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

much longer will he be? But she rebukes him as she walks past him. It will take as long as it takes, believe me, the doctor isn’t playing cards now or drinking coffee, and he falls silent, chastened, lowering his gaze to his stomach. Just a few years ago, he had a different kind of prestige in public places, and even if they couldn’t identify him by name, his face would provoke some reaction. I know you, they would say, flashing hesitant smiles at him, and sometimes memory brought clarity, ah, I saw you on TV yesterday, you’re the attorney who works for the Bedouin, right?
    Not only for the Bedouin, he would correct them pedantically, for anyone whose rights are being trampled on, and immediately he would be rewarded with appreciative looks, and it was only his wife who never missed an opportunity to mock him. Champion of the rights of man, she sneered, Robin Hood no less, and what about my rights? In her eyes, he was always in the wrong.
    What anarchic times these are. Only yesterday he returned humiliated from the courthouse. He was appealing for an order to restore the situation as it had been before, and the judge sent him packing without even looking at the documents. The petition had expired, she declared, the facts had already been decided on the ground and there was no way of changing them. When he left the building his forehead was burning, and he could barely drag himself to some bar to relax a little before confronting Shlomit and the boys. So much effort going to waste so easily, but how foolish it was, really, seeking an injunction to restore the status quo ante . Is there any such possibility on the face of the earth, to put things back as they were before?
    Even under the former dispensation the situation had been intolerable: ramshackle tents alongside the winding road to the Dead Sea, a few corrugated iron shanties. These were no longer proud shepherds roaming the desert with their flocks and living lives of freedom, moving in the summer to Shechem and in the winter to the Judean Desert. There was freedom no more, there was penury instead, territory shrinking and people forced to live like gypsies on the fringes of towns, cleaners and sanitation workers, thieves and ghosts, and he sits among them and eats, and can do precious little else.
    Hemda Horowitz, he’s awakened suddenly from his reverie when a man’s voice calls his mother’s name, as if inviting her up on the stage. Yes, he hurries to answer, as if his name has been called. He stands up from his seat for some reason, that’s my mother, he explains, and the doctor glances at him without interest. Tall and handsome, younger than him, his look proclaiming an unbridgeable distance. What’s happened, he asks, and Avner finds himself detailing, as if pleading a case in court, the entire sequence of ailments affecting his mother in recent years, but the doctor interrupts him, what happened this morning?
    She contacted me, although I bet she tried my sister first, he adds unnecessarily. The call was a total blank, I mean she didn’t say anything, but I heard her breathing and when I got there I found her on the floor by the window, and for a moment I was afraid she wasn’t alive. I called an ambulance straightaway. She was already unconscious although somehow she managed to dial my number before collapsing. He’s speaking on her behalf, and it seems to him it’s the judge who’s listening to him now, peering at him from behind the doctor’s back, trying to trip him up. Did you really hurry there? she sneers. You didn’t stop off on the way, not even for a moment, to drink an espresso perhaps? And when you saw her lying there by the window you didn’t feel the slightest twinge of relief, a warm infusion that spread through your body, much to your shame, and after calling the ambulance you didn’t by any chance get into her bed, cover yourself with her blanket, bury your face in the pillow, saturated with her smell, and you didn’t for the