fund the committee, and nobody knew, least of all she herself, what precisely she did with the money. Nevertheless I did not bother. I merely said: Look. These receipts. They're printed anyway. Here they are, on the table, I'm leaving them and you can do whatever you like.
Benizri, she hissed suddenly, that obsequious, brilliantined Levantine, calls you an angel of a man. You know what you are, Theo? A tombstone. It doesn't matter. I've got a headache.
I went back to the hall and continued my ironing. Inwardly I agreed with her: It's hopeless. There won't ever be a clinic for drug addicts in Tel Kedar. Or if there is, it'll close within a month. Nevertheless, it's something she's got to find out for herself, without my help. I've got to be invisible. Although maybe, on the other hand, maybe what I ought to do is locate the Orvieto man and say a few words that'll take this nonsense away from Noa once and for all, making certain she never discovers how I managed to find the crook, what I told him or what I saved her from. But no. I'll wait.
S ATURDAY . Three p.m. Theo was lying in his undershirt on the floor of his room with the fan blowing next to him. I was sitting at the kitchen table, with grapes and coffee in front of me, reading an American monograph entitled
The Chemistry of Addiction.
There has been a debate for several years between two opposing schools of thought about whether drug addiction is an illness or whether it is a congenital tendency to be dependent on so-called psychoactive substances, including those found in tobacco, alcohol, coffee, aphrodisiac plants; in fact in a certain sense one might say that substances that cause dependency can be found in almost everything. A parallel was then drawn, albeit with certain reservations, between drug addiction and known diseases, such as diabetes, that display hereditary factors and environmental conditions that accompany the development of the disease or impede it. An addict who has been weaned off the drug still carries with him a chronic latent problem, that is, he is more exposed than other people to the danger of a relapse, qualified in brackets by the Hebrew expression "liable to return to his evil ways", an expression that I find unfair, as I noted on a slip of paper on which I was collecting questions and objections that occurred to me in the course of my reading. Suddenly Muki Peleg appeared: excited, out of breath, dishevelled, with the flowing locks of the young philosopher from the brandy advertisement, in trendy baggy trousers, with an artistic silk scarf at the opening of his crisp red shirt, a fifty-year-old teenager; with dazzling sky-blue shoes, bearing a pattern of little ventilation holes in the form of the letter B. He begged my pardon a million times over, but he had something really urgent to say. He always has something really urgent to say about everything. If it's not one thing it's something else, but always unpostponable. I sometimes enjoy his utterly unquenchable enthusiasm.
I reached up to button the light dress I was wearing and found that it was already buttoned up. Seating Muki across the kitchen table from me I closed my book, using the page of notes as a bookmark. Despite his protestations I poured him a cold Coke and passed him the grapes. Where's Theo? Resting? Sincere apologies for bursting in at such an unsocial hour, I normally hold Saturday afternoon sacrosanct. But something's cropped up that we've simply got to make a decision on today. By the way, in that green dress you look just like a flower on its stalk. Except that any flower would look like a weed next to you. To cut a long story short, if it weren't for the urgent problem he would go down on his knees here and now, if I would only stroke him, as the legless man said to the armless woman. Jokingly he raised his six-fingered hand and put a finger pistol-like to his temple to illustrate the hopelessness of unrequited love. He was probably trying to be
Benizri, she hissed suddenly, that obsequious, brilliantined Levantine, calls you an angel of a man. You know what you are, Theo? A tombstone. It doesn't matter. I've got a headache.
I went back to the hall and continued my ironing. Inwardly I agreed with her: It's hopeless. There won't ever be a clinic for drug addicts in Tel Kedar. Or if there is, it'll close within a month. Nevertheless, it's something she's got to find out for herself, without my help. I've got to be invisible. Although maybe, on the other hand, maybe what I ought to do is locate the Orvieto man and say a few words that'll take this nonsense away from Noa once and for all, making certain she never discovers how I managed to find the crook, what I told him or what I saved her from. But no. I'll wait.
S ATURDAY . Three p.m. Theo was lying in his undershirt on the floor of his room with the fan blowing next to him. I was sitting at the kitchen table, with grapes and coffee in front of me, reading an American monograph entitled
The Chemistry of Addiction.
There has been a debate for several years between two opposing schools of thought about whether drug addiction is an illness or whether it is a congenital tendency to be dependent on so-called psychoactive substances, including those found in tobacco, alcohol, coffee, aphrodisiac plants; in fact in a certain sense one might say that substances that cause dependency can be found in almost everything. A parallel was then drawn, albeit with certain reservations, between drug addiction and known diseases, such as diabetes, that display hereditary factors and environmental conditions that accompany the development of the disease or impede it. An addict who has been weaned off the drug still carries with him a chronic latent problem, that is, he is more exposed than other people to the danger of a relapse, qualified in brackets by the Hebrew expression "liable to return to his evil ways", an expression that I find unfair, as I noted on a slip of paper on which I was collecting questions and objections that occurred to me in the course of my reading. Suddenly Muki Peleg appeared: excited, out of breath, dishevelled, with the flowing locks of the young philosopher from the brandy advertisement, in trendy baggy trousers, with an artistic silk scarf at the opening of his crisp red shirt, a fifty-year-old teenager; with dazzling sky-blue shoes, bearing a pattern of little ventilation holes in the form of the letter B. He begged my pardon a million times over, but he had something really urgent to say. He always has something really urgent to say about everything. If it's not one thing it's something else, but always unpostponable. I sometimes enjoy his utterly unquenchable enthusiasm.
I reached up to button the light dress I was wearing and found that it was already buttoned up. Seating Muki across the kitchen table from me I closed my book, using the page of notes as a bookmark. Despite his protestations I poured him a cold Coke and passed him the grapes. Where's Theo? Resting? Sincere apologies for bursting in at such an unsocial hour, I normally hold Saturday afternoon sacrosanct. But something's cropped up that we've simply got to make a decision on today. By the way, in that green dress you look just like a flower on its stalk. Except that any flower would look like a weed next to you. To cut a long story short, if it weren't for the urgent problem he would go down on his knees here and now, if I would only stroke him, as the legless man said to the armless woman. Jokingly he raised his six-fingered hand and put a finger pistol-like to his temple to illustrate the hopelessness of unrequited love. He was probably trying to be
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