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By Root 244 0

were piled one on top of another from the floor almost to the ceiling. According to Yardena, it was her great-grandfather, Gedalya Rubin, who had dug out and made this cellar, before he built the house. The cellar was part of the foundation, and in the early years the family had lived here until the house itself was built above it. And as she'd told me earlier, the house wasn't built all at once; it had taken many years, with each generation adding its wings and extensions, which might be why it looked as though it had no plan. It was this muddle, Yardena said, that was for her one of the secret charms of the house: you could get lost, you could hide, and in moments of despair you could always find a quiet corner to be alone. "Do you like being alone?" she asked.

I was surprised, because I couldn't imagine how anyone would need a quiet corner to be alone in such a huge, rambling house, which was inhabited just by two old women, or sometimes by two old women and a barefoot student. Still, I felt good in the cellar. Its cool darkness was connected in my mind with the strange figure of that woman traveler who had appeared and promptly disappeared in the dusty little garden behind the Village Hall, and with Benny Avni's odd invitation, and the heavy parcel I had found on a bench and had neglected to report to someone as I should have done.

I asked Yardena if there was a direct way of going from the cellar out to the garden, but she told me there were only two ways out, the way we had come in or by some steps that led straight up to the living room. Did I want to go back? I said yes, but instantly regretted it, and said that, actually, no, I didn't. Yardena took my hand and sat me down on a packing case, then sat down opposite me, smoothing her dress over her crossed legs. "Now," she said, "you and I aren't in a hurry to go anywhere, are we? Why don't you tell me what's really going to happen to our house once you've bought it."

6

SHE PUT THE FLASHLIGHT down with its beam pointing up. A circle of light appeared on the ceiling, and the rest of the cellar was in darkness. Yardena became a silhouette among the shadows. "If I wanted to," she said, "I could switch off the flashlight and slip away in the darkness. I could lock you in the cellar and you'd stay here forever, eating olives and sauerkraut and drinking wine and groping at the walls till the battery runs out." I wanted to reply that in my dreams I'd always seen myself locked in a dark cellar, but I chose to say nothing. After a silence Yardena asked me whom I would sell the house to. Who would buy an old warren like this?

"Let's see," I said. "Maybe I won't sell it. Maybe I'll move in here. I like the house. And the tenant, too. Maybe I'll buy the house with a resident tenant."

"I sometimes like to undress slowly in front of the mirror," she said, "imagining I'm a voracious man watching me undress. Games like that excite me." The flashlight flickered for a moment as though the battery were low, but then the circle of bright light on the ceiling came back. In the silence I thought I could hear a vague sound of running water, water flowing slowly, quietly in some lower cellar underneath this one. When I was five or six my parents took me on a trip, to Galilee I suppose, and I dimly remember a building made of heavy, moss-covered stones, perhaps an ancient ruin, where you could also hear a distant sigh of water flowing in the darkness. I stood up and asked Yardena if there were other parts of the house that she wanted to show me. She aimed the beam of light at my face, which dazzled me, and asked mockingly why I was in such a hurry.

"The thing is," I said, "I don't want to take up your whole evening. And I've got to finish my income tax return this evening too. And I've left my cell phone on my desk, and Etty may be trying to get hold of me. And I'm going to have to come back anyway to talk to your mother and maybe your grandmother. But no, you're right, I'm not really in a hurry."

She stopped dazzling me and pointed the flashlight at the floor between us. "I'm