Milano Square

Ten days after her husband’s death Ilana went to bed with Mahmid. When her husband Nahum lay dying Ilana saw a documentary on the television set suspended over his hospital bed, about women who had fallen in love with murderers serving life sentences, and devoted their lives to them. She watched the film on mute, in order not to disturb the patient, even though he was unconscious most of the time. The night before her meeting with Mahmid she saw the movie again in a dream, an almost perfect replica of what she had seen in the hospital room. Except that the muteness imposed on the movie due to the circumstances under which she had viewed it, now infected its characters. Therefore they had used a lot of vigorous hand gestures which the cameras had shot in close-up. Jewish talk, her father had called it, mostly with a dismissive wave of his hand.

In the morning Ilana woke with a feeling of oppression and guilt and decided to cancel the meeting. Should she text him on her cell phone or talk to him? In the end she sent a text message. He himself had sent her a number of text messages during the days of the shiva. In one of them he had spelled the word ‘condolences’ wrong. She had sent him a correction and this had silenced him for a while. Perhaps that was my secret intention, she said to herself, although habit had played a role here too. Before Nahum made money, not to the extent of some Russian oligarch, but becoming a well-off, even a rich man, she had worked as a science teacher in a high school, and correcting her students’ spelling mistakes had become second nature to her. Mahmid actually made few spelling mistakes. He wrote poetry in both languages, and his Hebrew was no less rich than hers, but there were some basic things that were hard to change. Apart from which, she told herself, judging by her experience – richness was no guarantee of accuracy. On the contrary, the more limited the vocabulary, the less risk there was of making mistakes.

In reply to her short message canceling the meeting, Mahmid sent her a long text message – which could be summarized with the claim that being excluded from a circle of mourners, as he was sentenced to be, was even harder than being excluded from a...