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…And then there were trains, cold and steeped in hostility. The faces reflected indifference and obsession, becoming a gray blur. I quaffed a bottle of vodka, so time first shrank and then passed away. I sensed it back again late at night when I opened my eyes and saw her. She was gazing on me in my drunken stupor, with tears streaming down her cheeks.

Now we were going somewhere in a first class carriage packed with people from the third world. I experienced waves of nausea and could hardly manage to get to the toilet stepping over the tired bodies and legs blocking the corridor.

Then a new February day dawned and a taxi driver took three bottles of vodka instead of the fare. Later three plates of sour soup revived my torpid brain and body that at first didn’t seem to belong to me.

Then life resumed with pride and shame equally distributed for me. At this moment I dozed off to awaken next morning with its emptiness resounding within this outlandish vastness.

Now we were inside a tram. Rattling and screeching it radiated fear and grief for miles. At this point in the nightmare I fell asleep again.

The block looked both flat and proud, its dark gray appearance never responding to the external light. It was always on my right on the way to the centre and on my left on the way back. It stood there lonely and bare like a telegraph pole. I never saw anyone entering or leaving it, though one could see curtains in the windows. Gradually all the surrounding structures disappeared, one after the other they were torn down by builders who had rather regular but sometimes erratic contours and were amenable to demolition and construction, construction and demolition.

It was left there, enduring its fate with humble resignation. Time was passing; March arrived with its dankness and then, April, sodden with rain and cold. The house was still there as if resigned to the deferred death penalty. The curtains in the windows had not been removed, so some vague hope was stimulated. Once, passing by it in a tram, I suddenly noticed a new service station behind it, painted red and black. It looked so unreal that I got off at the stop and wandered around the intact house towards this red-and-black monster to make sure that all this existed in reality beyond my wild imagination. I saw neither human beings nor cars nearby, nor were there any builders, so I decided to calm down. Every chip of plaster coming off my house had a profound loathing for this brand new service station gleaming with fresh paint. This hatred emanated from the acme of one’s experience and arrogant impotence to effect the slightest change in the world around. I did not have my camera about me at that moment and this has been persistently provoking self-hatred since then.

Then we found ourselves in an underground passageway among some Latinos playing music. She was beside me, but it never entered my mind then that I was in love with her. They were playing their exotic drums and pipes of various lengths glued together, creating an incredible sound mixture of sadness and joy. The busker’s hand would beat the tightly stretched skin of his drum, the very first sounds instantly inducing a love of his music in me. I could understand none of the words in their songs and I did not need to, because a truly sincere song is inevitably about love.

Again there were the people. They were always about and in great numbers, extremely great numbers. I knew that nothing could be changed. I was conscious of my disease, but there was nobody around to help. Nobody except her. The idea had not occurred to me yet and therefore the disease continued to progress. The sun would rise every morning to stimulate some activities whilst I tried hard not to think about their senselessness.

Now to God. Sometimes I used to ask Him about something. But then, much later, it dawned on me that all my prayers had been in vain. He did not hear me. I do not remember what I was asking about, but I know for sure that nothing came of it.

Next I sensed my God was ill. So was I. I would not recognize it, but otherwise there could be no explanation of what was happening to people, to me, to Him.

Then my wife died. I say “then”, but, actually, eighteen months had passed since “then”. She had still been dying. It would happen every day, sometimes several times a day.

Later God died. His disease appeared too grave and mortal. I did not get to know what it was yet, but understood that it was there that the secret reason for everything lay. Well, god died, but the prayer persisted.

That prayer, indeed, was still with me.

Then I sold my camera. It had been too good to take acceptable pictures. I was walking along a street, taking out the roll of folded banknotes from my pocket now and again, savouring the deal. I had another camera left at that time and I decided not to sell it to convince myself that I was still a photographer.

A railway bridge appeared with us standing beneath it, the slanting rays of the sun leaving crisscrossed patterns on our faces. Suddenly a roar of an approaching train was heard and I shouted just like Lisa Minnelli in her gorgeously foul “Cabaret”. Then I gave her the camera (the one left) to take a picture of myself or rather of what had been left of myself. My wife would not die that day; she just kept on speaking Hebrew in her delirium, the language she had not managed to teach me. “I wish she would die today”, I thought, “at least, I’m starting to get accustomed to it”.

I can vaguely remember what ensued. I only remember a beggar with five dogs around him on the steps of the underground passageway, that very passageway where I had fallen in love with the broad-faced Latinos and their music. I raised the camera to my eyes and saw through the viewfinder that one of the dogs bared its teeth at me. I pressed the button and felt half of my self-hatred (for not having a picture of the flat block) subside.

Then the month of May arrived. Hot midday hours were painted yellow and orange. Magnolias were recklessly dissipating their huge petals with a generosity close to folly.

I would buy vodka from my drowsy fellow countrymen descending from the train and sell it at double the price. I used to like counting up the money I had extorted and dreaming about another life. I was thirty-three then and I was often immersed in thought about my age, the age when Christ had been put to death. But another life would not begin and the sun kept on rising regularly, or, rather, was it the earth slipping down below the feet?

I did not stop thinking about the future, but could only see the past. My wife was not dying any longer. I only used to dream of her. There was a sort of anguish in her face resulting from approaching death. I woke up to see ashen rays of light penetrating through the window.

We bought a canary-yellow car. I liked the smell of it and I liked to feel the black end of its key in my pocket. There was almost no time left and I felt the desire to be patterned with those slanting rays as had happened before under the bridge.

Then came an illusion — the plane and the ocean imbued with fish, dolphins, ships, and seaweed, impatiently extended in serpentine motion in search of prey — drowned sailors. While one’s self-delusion is triumphant, the Devil is anticipating the bargain.

There was a huge city, a baby, a woman, subway, a daydream, a camera, some Californian wine, a candle, poems, a feeling of sorrow… There were also some other people, a dawn, a white dress, a brick wall, that intense heat, a horse with a fair longhaired policewoman on it.

A church with a christening followed; she was in white; an old prayer book, and a clergyman as ancient as the church itself.

Another clergyman appeared. He was young, barefoot, and wearing shorts. He put on his cassock, opened the door of the newly built church, and started boasting of it as if it were his new car. He refused to marry us. It was her idea to get married in church. I was staring at her and felt unable to make head or tail of it all.

Then I realized that for the first time I was busy writing late at night. Noiselessly my dream approached from behind and put its heavy hand of velvet on my shoulder.

There were somebody else’s hands, eyes, lips, thick jet-black hair with a gray streak in it, and a feeling of something inaccessible so close to one.

Another life began with a beautiful old pear-tree in it. There was a hill, a smell of grass in the air, bees, the amber-coloured sky above, the sun passing out of sight and a short sense of happiness.

There was a road, a succession of cars in it, night, cold, hostility and fury, ending up next morning that quietly burst into pieces.

Water flowed in from the forest and flooded the whole of the city. People were pottering around with the industriousness of ants and my son was just about to be born. When he was brought out for me to see him for the first time, I thought that he was myself, for at that moment he appeared a clone of me, which brought home to me a thorough comprehension of immortality.

Then my wife, my son’s mother, was wheeled out from the operating room. She had just shed the first veil of anaesthesia and asked me to wipe away a blob of saliva from her lips. I was not allowed to stay beside them that night and this was the worst thing the doctors were capable of doing at that moment.

Now there were a lot of people again…

Once I rang her on her birthday. She was having a cigarette and said that was busy doing the washing-up. She sounded happy and I could hear the word “husband”. The flatness of the park swelled up and the scales lost their balance.

Then I scooped out the remains of the coffee from the packet.

In case you are in love with two women… at one time… in different ways… in case you are still in love with everyone you used to love, but differently,.. should you consider it a sin? How can one say, “I used to be in love…”? The verb is not to be used in the past tense — because true love is as eternal and wonderful as the Latinos’ music in the underground passageway.

Slush appeared and a door… I entered and saw my father sitting beside the stove and my mother. She gave me a glance and I saw sorrow emanating from her eyes flooding the whole of the room. My father lit the fire, turned to me, and smiled. Then I realized that they existed no longer.

I saw how mountains could irradiate scorn, and went mad.

There was a smell of an alien city, my three-year-old son, my wife, endless rain, cold, fire that could give no warmth, fear and helplessness.

He woke up to find his dream stuck to his palate like a tiny bit of a newspaper. There were birds singing on the other side of the window, a rose bush had burst into blossom for the second time, his son called him and said he wanted wee-wee. Then he remembered that he had the clergyman and the girl sleeping in his room. His wife wrapped in a sheet, morning dreams and a web of saliva. He made tea, placed the cup to the left of his notebook, where a darkish end of the last phrase could be discerned, “…its heavy hand of velvet…”

The alarm clock beeped six in the morning. Besides his cup of tea getting cold on the table covered with a pink cloth, there was a plastic bottle of water, his wife’s sun glasses, his own spectacles, an obsolete 1977 coin of fifty lire, a piece of cardboard, which spoilt the harmony of the composition and was immediately thrown away. He came out onto the balcony, greeted his limping neighbour, cast a glance at the rosebud about to open, breathed in some air, fresh after the night rain, returned to his room and added:

“Then he opened his eyes and it suddenly occurred to him that he had been living somebody else’s life…”