Mr. Mani by A. B. Yehoshua Page A

sense of it...
    â€”Wait ... just wait ... why are you in such a hurry tonight...
    â€”You needn’t worry, nothing bad happened to me. Anyway, when I finally got up and peeked into his office to see what was doing there, all I found was a neat, quiet room. His coat and briefcase were gone, which meant that he had given me the slip again, this Mr. Mani of mine. But I didn’t give up this time either, Mother. I hurried back out into those dark corridors and began looking for him, asking all the black-robed people if they had seen him, until finally I found him standing in a large entranceway, bundled up in his heavy coat with his robe folded over one arm while having a friendly chat with a young prosecutor who had argued a case before him. He must have been waiting for it to stop hailing, and at first I didn’t know if I should approach him, but as soon as he saw me he turned to me warmly and even took my hand and said, “Well, Hagar, how was I?” He wanted to know what I thought and if I liked it, he even introduced me to the young lawyer standing next to him as his son Efrayim’s girlfriend—and I, Mother, don’t ask me what came over me, I actually had tears in my eyes. Maybe it was his calling me Hagar and maybe just his being such a darling, but I wanted so badly to cling to him and snuggle up against that big, hairy coat of his that if there actually was a minute, Mother ... I mean a moment when maybe ...
maybe
the thought crossed my mind ... yes, I admit it ... that he could have ... just for a second ... maybe...
    â€”I mean ... that he could have soothed that deep sense of loss that maybe I really do go around with all the time...
    â€”Yes, like a kind of father ... but it was only for a minute, no more than that, believe me...
    â€”But he didn’t. That was the confusing part, Mother. Because all this time I had the feeling that he too was sending these hidden distress signals, as though he were whispering to me,
Yes, you’re right, what you saw last night was no mistake but something that almost happened, don’t leave me,
while at the same time I had the feeling that he wanted to get rid of me. Anyway, he offered to drive me to the bus station again—it was
as
if he wanted to make sure that this time I really left Jerusalem. He walked me under his umbrella to his car and opened the door for me like a gentleman to make up for jilting me and even stopped in some little street in the marketplace and took me to a tiny joint where he ordered this special Jerusalem hummus for me with a hard-boiled egg diced into it and behaved really sweetly, even if he did fade out from time to time as though the lights had gone out inside him and there was a power failure there. But each time they came on again and he asked some new question, whose answer didn’t really interest him, about Efi, who he seemed to think I knew more about than he did. There was a point in all that noise and winter weather when I had an urge to tell him what was in store for him in this little stomach of mine that he was stuffing with hummus, but I controlled myself and didn’t. And when we left the restaurant, he not only drove me to the station, he went out of his way to buy me a ticket and bring me to the platform and stand me in line as if I were a retarded child—and even then he didn’t say good-bye but waited patiently until I got on the bus and it began to pull out, which was actually very nice—I mean, all that being taken care of and being chaperoned, especially since I really did want to get home and out of the cold and the rain, even if it was also a little humiliating to see how he was manipulating me back to Tel Aviv, as though I were a mental case that had walked into his life instead of a perfectly innocent messenger on a mission of good will...
    â€”Wait.
    â€”No, just a minute, Mother, wait...
    â€”Yes, it was two days ago, on Wednesday afternoon. I actually