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By Root 578 0

looks fair-haired, smiling, with beautiful white teeth and lots of lovely little lines at the corners of his eyes. Not sad, just tired. And he's holding a cat. I wonder if he suffered from unrequited love too. My mother would never talk to me about him. The only thing she said was: He didn't think about us either. Then she'd change the subject. She had a lover, a tall Australian captain with a wooden arm and a Russian name, Serafim. They explained to me once that it comes from the Hebrew word 'seraphim.' Then she had a weepy banker who took her to Canada and dropped her. In the end she wrote to me from Toronto in Polish. I had to have the letter translated; she never managed to learn to write Hebrew. She said she wanted to come back to Nes Tsiyona to start a new life. But she never made it. She died of cancer of the liver. I was brought up in an institution run by the Working Women's Council. About Alterman: tell me, Fima, is it true what they say—that he has two wives?"

"He died," Fima replied, "about twenty years ago." He was on the point of launching into a crash course on Alterman when Dr. Eitan's door opened, a pungent hygienic odor wafted out, and the doctor poked his head out and said to Tamar:

"Hey, Brigitte Bardot. Bring me an ampule of pethidine chop-chop."

So Fima was obliged to postpone his lecture. He unplugged the boiling kettle and decided to put a heater on in the recovery room. Then he had two phone calls, one after the other: he booked an appointment for Mrs. Bergson for the end of the month and he explained to Gila Maimón that they never gave out the results of tests over the telephone; she'd have to come in and be told the answer by Dr. Wahrhaftig. For some reason he addressed them both sheepishly, as though he had done them some wrong. He agreed in his mind with Annette Tadmor when she'd made fun of the clichés of mysterious womanhood, Greta Garbo, Beatrice, Marlene Dietrich, Dulcinea, but she was wrong when she tried to place the cloak of mystery on the shoulders of the male sex. We are all steeped in falsehood. We all pretend. Surely the plain truth is that each and every one of us knows exactly what pity is and when we ought to show it, because each and every one of us aches for a little pity. But come the moment when we should open the gates of compassion, we pretend we know nothing. Or that compassion and mercy are merely a way of patronizing others, something too old-fashioned and sentimental. Or that that's the way it is and what can be done about it and why me of all people? That was presumably what Pascal meant by "the death of die soul" and about human agony being that of a dethroned king. His efforts not to imagine what was happening on the other side of the wall struck him as cowardly, ignoble, and ugly. As was his attempt to turn his thoughts from the death of Tamar's father to the gossip about Alterman's life. Surely it was the duty of all of us at least to look suffering in the eye. If he were prime minister, he would make each member of the Cabinet stay for a week with a reserve unit in Gaza or Hebron, spend some time inside the perimeter of one of the detention camps in the Negev, live a couple of days in a run-down psychogeriatric ward, lie in the mud and rain for a whole winter's night from sundown to dawn by the electronic fence on the Lebanese border, or join Eitan and Wahrhaftig without any intervening barrier in this abortion inferno, which was now once more filled with the sounds of piano and cello from upstairs.

A moment later he was disgusted by these reflections, because on second thought they struck him as the embodiment of nineteenth-century Russian kitsch. The very term "abortion inferno" was an injustice: after all, there were times when life was actually created here. Fima recalled a patient by the name of Sarah Matalon who had been advised by leading specialists to give up and adopt a child, and only Gad Eitan persevered single-mindedly for four years, until he finally opened her womb. The whole staff of the clinic was invited to the circumcision of her son. The father