Free Five Seasons by A. B. Yehoshua

might also be pushing fifty, might conceivably already have passed it. Even assuming that a young woman was not for him, that didn’t mean he wanted an old one. I’m in no hurry, he told himself. Yet he kept returning to the cafeteria, where one day he spied her surrounded by some members of her staff. From behind, he felt sure that her short, straight auburn hair was dyed, for he had seen its coppery tint before, had even helped his wife mix a solution of it in the days before she wore a wig. A gray sky was visible through the window. She was saying something assertively, gesturing firmly with both hands, her face well chiseled despite its lines, her small, almost oriental eyes giving her a squirrelish look. Though he nodded as he passed her, she did not respond or seem to know who he was, which made him wonder whether she was nearsighted. It was odd, he thought, sipping his strong black coffee, that she should be too busy talking to recognize him. Just then, though, she caught sight of him and flashed him a smile ... and yet she went on talking. If she’s been a widow for three years and has time, he thought, so do I. He could feel the strong coffee perking him up and worried that it might spoil his nap.
20
    F OR THERE WERE HABITS from before his wife’s death that were hard to break, such as his afternoon nap. Was it really worth the effort of taking it? Once he had needed that hour of sleep to be fresh for the sleepless night ahead, and his wife had made sure he had gotten it; in fact, it had been his favorite hour of the day, one in which, lying curled beneath a blanket in the quiet apartment, the afternoon light filtered by the blinds, even his wife’s illness had seemed to him remote and unmenacing. Now, however, he sought in vain to recapture its sweet sensation; his naps grew progressively shorter, losing their inner tang, and after fifteen or twenty minutes of them he would wake up feeling cross. Not even leaving work early, at one o’clock, when he was at his most tired, could restore those lost sleeps to him.
    The arrangement made with his department head that he could leave the office early by taking work home was still in force. Even after his wife’s death, he had kept it up, for he had wanted to give the high school boy his lunch, the preparation of which was no easy matter, in light of the quantities of food in the refrigerator. The new housekeeper was hyperactive; no matter how clear his instructions, she simply kept cooking more and more. Besides, the boy was beginning to follow in her footsteps; opening all kinds of cans when he came home, he had taken to concocting private dishes of his own while ignoring the leftovers that were crying to be eaten and filling up the house in pots and pans. Sometimes, thinking while at work about the overflowing icebox at home, Molkho fell into a rage; reaching for the phone, he would shout at the housekeeper to stop her cooking at once and would hang up, leaving her out of sorts and hurt. Worse yet, his daughter was away at an officers’ course and no longer came home from her base, making them one mouth less. Only now did Molkho realize how voraciously his wife had eaten, despite her illness. The refrigerator had never been too full while she was alive.
    But it was his younger son who was the problem. If only he would stop his solo experiments! It was impossible to get the housekeeper to make what he liked, because the boy kept changing his tastes; yesterday’s favorite was today’s bugaboo, and so Molkho made a point of getting home in time to be in charge of promoting the leftovers. “Just tell me what you like,” he would plead for the tenth time with the long-haired boy in his blue uniform, who, besides being totally uncommunicative, was having a hard time at school, though Molkho hoped it was only a phase. “We have to finish what we started yesterday. I can’t be expected to eat this for a whole week by