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"But not you, dear mother-in-law of my daughter!"

The others are not back yet from the Tel Arza woods and I am still on my back on the concrete, which seems to have become a little less cold and hard. The evening light is growing cooler and grayer above the points of the cypresses. As though someone is surrendering there, on the awesome heights above the treetops, the rooftops, and everything that is stirring here in the street, the backyards and kitchens, high above the smells of dust, cabbage, and rubbish, high above the twittering of the birds, as high as the sky is above the earth, above the wailing sounds of prayer coming in ragged tatters from the synagogue down the road.

Lofty, clear, and indifferent it is unfolding now above the water heaters and the washing hung out on every roof here and above the abandoned junk and the alley cats and above all sorts of longings and above all the corrugated iron lean-tos in the yards and above the schemes, the omelettes, the lies, the washtubs, the slogans pasted up by the Underground, the borscht, the desolation of ruined gardens and remains of fruit trees from the times when there was an orchard here, and now, right now, it is spreading and creating the calm of a clear, even evening, making peace in the high heavens above the garbage cans and above the hesitant, heartrending piano notes repeatedly attempted by a plain girl, Menuchele Schtich, whom we nicknamed Nemucheleh, Shortie, trying over and over again to play a simple ascending scale, stumbling over and over again, always in the same place, and each time trying again. While a bird replies to her, over and over again, with the first five notes of Beethoven's Für Elise. A wide, empty sky from horizon to horizon at the end of a hot summer day. There are three cirrus clouds and two dark birds. The sun has set beyond the walls of the Schneller Barracks, though the firmament has not let go of the sun but has seized it in its claws and managed to tear the train of its many-colored cloak and now is trying on its booty, using the cirrus clouds as a dressmaker's dummy, putting on light like a garment, removing it, checking how well necklaces of greenish radiance suit it, or the coat of many colors with its golden glow and its halo of bluish purple, or how some fragile strips of silver curl along their length, shivering like the broken lines sketched underwater by a fast-moving school of fish. And there are some flashes of purple-tinged pink and lime green, and now it strips quickly and dresses in a reddish mantle from which trail rivers of dull crimson light and after a moment or two puts on a different robe, the color of bare flesh that is suddenly stabbed and stained by several strong hemorrhages while its dark train is being gathered up beneath folds of black velvet, and all at once it is no longer height upon height but depth upon depth upon depth, like the valley of death opening up and expanding in the firmament, as if it were not overhead and the one lying on his back underneath, but the opposite, all the firmament an abyss and the one lying on his back no longer lying but floating, being sucked, plunging rapidly, falling like a stone toward the velvety depth. You will never forget this evening: you are only six or at most six and a half, but for the first time in your little life something enormous and very terrible has opened up for you, something serious and grave, something that extends from infinity to infinity, and it takes you, and like a mute giant it enters you and opens you, so that you too for a moment seem wider and deeper than yourself, and in a voice that is not your voice but may be your voice in thirty or forty years' time, in a voice that allows no laughter or levity, it commands you never to forget a single detail of this evening: remember and keep its smells, remember its body and light, remember its birds, the notes of the piano, the cries of the crows and all the strangeness of the sky running riot from one horizon to the other before your eyes, and all of this is for you, all strictly for the attention