Matisse Has the Sun in His Belly

The car with the lovers inside it raced to the edge of the bridge, overturned, and plunged into the river. The title ‘FIN’ appeared, white against the background of the graveyard. The scratched rectangle of light flickered and went out. For a moment she panicked at the darkness, like when she was eight or nine years old and woke in the middle of the night, her hand groping for the light switch, and the lamp failed to go on, and she knew that she had gone blind for the rest of her life, but she didn’t leave the room or call anyone, she sat up in bed and planned how she would learn to read Braille, and how she would graduate from the university in spite of everything, and write a book about her life, like Helen Keller, until the long lines of eyes between the slats of the shutters peeped at her, dark blue, a shade lighter than the blackness of the room, and she laughed at herself in a relief diluted with a drop of disappointment, and ever since then she had slept with the little light in the passage on.

            Now too, already twenty-two years old and living alone in a rented apartment in Yohanan Hasandlar street, she left the lavatory light on at night, even though it was wrong to waste electricity, and whenever her mother gave her the check for the rent and the utilities she said, ‘I don’t know why you have to live in Tel...