The Collected Stories

looking for someone, as if she had an appointment. I noticed everything at once: the dyed hair, the bags under her eyes, the rouge on her cheeks. One thing only had remained unchanged—her slim figure. We embraced and uttered the same lie: “You haven’t changed.” And when she sat down at my table, the difference between what she had been then and what she was now began to disappear, as if some hidden power were quickly retouching her face to the image which had remained in my memory.
    I sat there listening to her jumbled conversation. She mixed countries, cities, years, marriages. One husband had perished; she had divorced another. He now lived nearby with another woman. Her third husband, from whom she was separated, more or less, lived in Paris, but he expected to come to Israel soon. They had met in a labor camp in Tashkent. Yes, she was still painting. What else could she do? She had changed her style, was no longer an impressionist. Where could old-fashioned realism lead today? The artist must create something new and entirely his own. If not, art was bankrupt. I reminded her of the time when she had considered Picasso and Chagall frauds. Yes, that was true, but later she herself had reached a dead end. Now her painting was really different, original. But who needed paintings here? In Safad there was an artists’ colony, but she had not been able to adjust herself to the life there. She had had enough of wandering about through all kinds of godforsaken villages in Russia. She needed to breathe city air.
    “Where is your daughter?”
    “Carola is in London.”
    “Married?”
    “Yes, I’m a
sabta,
a grandmother.”
    She smiled shyly, as if to say: “Why shouldn’t I tell you? I can’t fool you, anyhow.” I noticed her newly capped teeth. When the waiter came over, she ordered coffee. We sat for a while in silence. Time had battered us. It had robbed us of our parents, our relatives, had destroyed our homes. It had mocked our fantasies, our dreams of greatness, fame, riches.
    I had had news of Dosha while I was still in New York. Some mutual friends wrote to me that her paintings were not exhibited; her name was never mentioned in the press. Because she had had a nervous breakdown, she had spent some time in either a clinic or an asylum.
    In Tel Aviv, women seldom wear hats, and almost never in the evening, but Dosha had on a wide-brimmed straw hat which was trimmed with a violet ribbon and slanted over one eye. Though her hair was dyed auburn, there were traces of other colors in it. Here and there, it even had a bluish cast. Still, her face had retained its girlish narrowness. Her nose was thin, her chin pointed. Her eyes—sometimes green, sometimes yellow—had the youthful intensity of the unjaded, still ready to struggle and hope to the last minute. How else could she have survived?
    I asked, “Do you have a man, at least?”
    Her eyes filled with laughter. “Starting all over again? The first minute?”
    “Why wait?”
    “You haven’t changed.”
    She took a sip of coffee and said, “Of course I have a man. You know I can’t live without one. But he’s crazy, and I am not speaking figuratively. He’s so mad about me that he destroys me. He follows me on the street, knocks at my door in the middle of the night, and embarrasses me in front of my neighbors. I’ve even called the police, but I can’t get rid of him. Luckily, he is in Eilat at the moment. I’ve seriously thought of taking a gun and shooting him.”
    “Who is he? What does he do?”
    “He says he is an engineer, but he’s really an electrician. He’s intelligent, but mentally sick. Sometimes I think that the only way out for me is to commit suicide.”
    “Does he at least satisfy you?”
    “Yes and no. I hate savages and I’m tired of him. He bores me, keeps everybody away from me. I’m convinced that someday he’ll kill me. I’m as certain of that as that it’s night now. But what can I do? The Tel Aviv police are like the police everywhere. ‘After he kills you,’ they say, ‘we’ll put him in jail.’ He should be committed. If I had somewhere to go, I would leave, but the foreign consulates aren’t exactly handing out visas. At least I have an apartment here. Some apartment! But it’s a place to sleep. And what can I do with my paintings? They’re just gathering dust. Even if I wanted to leave, I don’t have the fare. The alimony I get from my former husband, the doctor, is a few pounds, and