Free Light Fell by Evan Fallenberg Page A

more under-standing than I about all this.”
    “We are divorced,” he said without emotion, “as of this morning.”
    “She is divorced, I am widowed, and all of our children are orphans. You and my late husband, may his memory be wiped clean from the hearts of the pure, deserve an eternal hell together. Now go, Monsieur Licht, without your precious book, and do not return to this house, or I will tell my father you have been plaguing me and he will see to it that your punishment begins in this world, not the next.”
    Out on the street, in fresh air, Joseph found himself surprisingly lighthearted. He felt mischievous and daring; he’d even thought of sticking out his tongue at Yoel’s widow or dashing to the library at the back of the house and stealing the book before bolting for the front door. While his colleagues at the university tried to make him feel better than he thought he ought to, she was the first person he had encountered who thought less of him than he did himself, and that liberated him somehow. He spent the rest of the afternoon aimlessly wandering the streets of Jerusalem, peering at his reflection in shop windows. He saw there a divorced man, a man once married but no longer, a bachelor again at thirty. From here, where?
    The following Friday was Joseph’s first outing with the boys, nearly three months since he had left home. He dipped into his meager savings to rent a car. His hands shook as he pulled away from the rental agency but as the roads opened up before him he relaxed, grateful for the wind that slapped and revived him. He had rarely been out of the city in all that time and now the smells of the farms he passed soothed him. About a mile before he reached Sde Hirsch the fist headache suddenly punched its way into his consciousness, but he banished it successfully and felt this was a good omen for the day.
    Daniel, Ethan, and Noam were waiting for him at the bus stop at the entrance to the village. They wore sandals and white shirts and plaid shorts of different colors. All wore baseball caps, Noam’s turned backward. He was eating cereal from a sandwich bag. A canteen hung against Daniel’s hip and Ethan held a misshapen wooden box reverently in front of him with both hands. “Daddy, look!” he shouted as Joseph came around the car toward them. “I made this from Popsicle sticks!”
    Joseph could barely stand, his legs were wobbling so badly. He leaned on the warm car for support but was choking on his tears and could not speak. Noam reached his hand up with an offering, one licked cornflake. Joseph tried to laugh, but a moan escaped instead. They had changed, his sons, in tiny, imperceptible ways; nothing he could pinpoint, just a graceful, gradual metamorphosis toward the young men they were becoming. He tried to study them all at once, to concentrate on each feature. But there was so much to look at and his eyes were blurring with tears. He breathed deeply and looked at the sky.
    “Hey, what’s that?” he cried, pointing at the top of the grain silo, relieved he had found his voice.
    Daniel and Ethan turned to the silo but Noam stared at Joseph’s outstretched finger. Ethan spoke up. “On Independence Day they lit it up. It says, ‘Happy 28th Birthday, Israel’ in different colored lights! Amos Kriegman made it with his dad.” Asmall stab. What projects had Joseph carried out with his boys even when he had lived with them?
    “I thought we would go for a ride, maybe over to the ruins at Caesarea.”
    “Oh,” Daniel pouted. “We went there on a field trip last week. It was boring.”
    “Well,” Joseph drawled, “we could take a tour of the winery in Zichron Yaakov. . . .”
    Just then Miriam Wolloch—a childhood classmate of Joseph’s—and her daughter Leah rounded the corner and nearly fell on top of Joseph and the boys. A breathless “Oh” flew out of her, then she took Leah firmly by the hand and marched on.
    The Lichts could hear Leah as her mother pulled her