Early December 1959
Shmuel’s Winter Collapse
In [Jerusalem](entity:location-recall-location-695056030a63), [Shmuel Ash](entity:character-recall-character-shmuel-ash-6603e016fd28)'s life nearly collapsed completely: Yaldina left him, returning to her former boyfriend; his father's business went bankrupt; his socialist group split; and his research on [Jesus](entity:character-recall-character-4e427eab6364) also stalled. He gave up his studies, wandering aimlessly in the rain, exhausted and
Early December 1959
A Job in the Old House
After informing [Gustav Yom-Tov Eisenschloss](entity:character-recall-character-gustav-yom-tov-eise-47091c02e6ea) that he is quitting his studies, Shmuel notices an advertisement seeking a sensitive humanities student to keep company with an elderly invalid. The position offers lodging and a modest wage, with a strict promise of confidentiality.
He goes to the stone house at the end of Rabbi Elbaz Lane, where the disabled and sardonic [Gershom Wald](entity:character-recall-character-gershom-wald-a5ed12ab2458) receives him. [Atalia Abravanel](entity:character-recall-character-atalia-abravanel-9157133f15a7) arrives and interviews him; Shmuel learns that she runs the household and that [Shaltiel Abravanel](entity:character-recall-character-shaltiel-abravanel-162467ae9341), the controversial figure he remembers from political history, was her father.
A few days after the interview
Shmuel Moves In
Shmuel accepts the position and moves his books, typewriter, records, and revolutionary posters into the house’s cramped attic. [Atalia](entity:character-recall-character-atalia-c23a4200c19d) lays out his limited duties: spend the evenings talking with Wald, tend the stove and fish, serve food and medicine, and keep the household’s affairs secret.
She warns him not to seek her out and tells him that previous young lodgers have fallen in love with her and left. When Shmuel asks whether she is related to [Shaltiel Abravanel](entity:character-recall-character-shaltiel-abravanel-162467ae9341), she quietly confirms that he was her father. Their guarded arrangement establishes the house as both refuge and emotional trap.
The first weeks of winter 1959–1960
The House’s Daily Silence
Shmuel settles into a repetitive life of late mornings, solitary walks, goulash at a neighborhood restaurant, and evening conversations with Wald. The older man’s talk ranges from religion and evolution to Jewish history, while his ironic speeches repeatedly reveal an underlying grief.
Shmuel resumes reading his abandoned research on Jewish accounts of [Jesus](entity:character-recall-character-4e427eab6364). Wald rejects vulgar polemics against Jesus and argues that religious and revolutionary movements promising universal salvation often lead to bloodshed. Their exchanges turn the job into an intellectual refuge, even as Shmuel’s attention increasingly drifts toward [Atalia](entity:character-recall-character-atalia-c23a4200c19d).
About three weeks after Shmuel moves in
The Paper Boat
Shmuel finds [Atalia](entity:character-recall-character-atalia-c23a4200c19d) alone in the kitchen and invents the excuse of needing bread, though he mainly wants her company. He folds a scrap of paper into a boat and offers it as a surprise; she accepts it and recognizes that his chosen solitude is already becoming difficult for him.
When Shmuel begins speaking about [Yardena](entity:character-recall-character-yardena-8c980ed85018)’s departure, Atalia’s momentary warmth gives way to restraint. She tells him he may speak if he wishes, then leaves him alone with the knife and the paper boat. The small encounter confirms his growing attachment and her careful control of closeness.
Later in the first month at the house
Wald’s Warning
Wald probes Shmuel about women and learns that [Yardena](entity:character-recall-character-yardena-8c980ed85018) has left him. He says [Atalia](entity:character-recall-character-atalia-c23a4200c19d) attracts lonely young men, then coolly draws them close and sends them away once they cease to be strangers.
Shmuel’s fascination deepens despite the warning. Wald’s observations give the attraction a pattern: the house has seen this before, and Shmuel may be repeating the emotional history of the former lodgers.
Midwinter 1959–1960
The Jerusalem Dream
Wald tells Shmuel a parable about crusaders who abandon their search for [Jerusalem](entity:location-recall-location-695056030a63) after discovering a peaceful valley and naming it their promised city. The story turns the holy city into an ideal that travelers may mistake for a place they can possess.
Shmuel understands that Wald is asking him not to flee the house and his unsettled feelings. He admits that he may love only [Atalia](entity:character-recall-character-atalia-c23a4200c19d)’s shadow, while Wald observes that Shmuel has always lived among shadows.
After several weeks at the house
A Night at the Cinema
[Atalia](entity:character-recall-character-atalia-c23a4200c19d) invites Shmuel to spend an evening with her. They walk at her pace, see a Jean Gabin film, and eat together at an inexpensive restaurant. Shmuel learns that she was married to Wald’s son [Mija](entity:character-recall-character-mija-7b7efe1f19dd), who died in the war, making Wald her former father-in-law rather than her husband.
Shmuel tries to turn their closeness into a romantic opening, but Atalia’s remarks about men’s dependence on success leave him feeling that she is inaccessible. Still, she does not reject his company, and the evening gives their relationship a tentative new intimacy.
During the same evening, after the film
Shmuel’s Childhood Wound
[Atalia](entity:character-recall-character-atalia-c23a4200c19d) asks whether Shmuel was spoiled, and he begins describing his childhood in [Haifa](entity:location-recall-location-a96564f18129): a cramped family apartment, a bed in the hallway, and parents who were dutiful but emotionally distant. His account wanders through stories of his sister [Miri](entity:character-recall-character-miri-7bf1329d1a52), his father’s immigrant past, and the family’s strained silences.
A childhood scorpion sting had once brought his family together around his hospital bed, and he remembers the brief tenderness as a rare sweetness. The memory helps explain his hunger for care and his habit of seeking comfort through elaborate talk rather than listening.
After Shmuel asks about Mija
The Father’s War Grief
Shmuel asks Wald when and how [Mija](entity:character-recall-character-mija-7b7efe1f19dd) died. Wald gives the date and location—April 2, 1948, near Shaar HaGai—then breaks off and sends Shmuel to tend the fish. The brief answer reveals how difficult it remains for him to speak of his only son.
Shmuel goes upstairs wondering whether the house has become a prison and whether Wald and [Atalia](entity:character-recall-character-atalia-c23a4200c19d) have replaced the parents from whom he once wanted distance. The question marks a shift: the household’s sorrow is no longer merely an atmosphere but a personal history Shmuel has begun to touch.
Midwinter 1959–1960
A Letter from Home
Shmuel receives a rain-damaged letter from his parents. His father regrets the abandoned degree and urges him to find additional work so that he can resume his studies, comparing his situation with [Miri](entity:character-recall-character-miri-7bf1329d1a52)’s demanding life in [Rome](entity:location-recall-location-f3877a21016f). His mother quietly encloses a small sum and asks him to write more often.
The letter makes plain both the family’s financial distress and Shmuel’s estrangement from them. He remains reluctant to explain his new household or his own state of mind, reinforcing the secrecy and isolation that define his winter.
Midwinter 1959–1960
The Debate over Force
Shmuel and Wald argue over [Israel](entity:location-recall-location-e1a1566e26c9)’s alignment with Britain and France, the consequences of the Sinai campaign, and the danger of a larger Arab assault. Shmuel warns that military superiority cannot turn an enemy into an ally or extinguish the desire for revenge.
Wald asks whether [Mija](entity:character-recall-character-mija-7b7efe1f19dd) died merely to postpone a disaster. Shmuel cannot offer comfort and turns instead to the fish and the evening meal. Their political argument becomes inseparable from grief, exposing the human cost beneath abstract claims about security and necessity.
Late January 1960
Shmuel Investigates Abravanel
Shmuel begins searching newspaper archives for information about [Atalia](entity:character-recall-character-atalia-c23a4200c19d)’s father. In the National Library’s periodicals room, he finds reports that [Shaltiel Abravanel](entity:character-recall-character-shaltiel-abravanel-162467ae9341) sought to present a dissenting view to the [United Nations](entity:organization-recall-organization-e95d8c5557b2) committee considering [Palestine](entity:location-recall-location-cdbda353b3fa)’s future and was later removed from the Zionist leadership after opposing the course toward a bloody war.
The discoveries sharpen Shmuel’s curiosity but do not explain why Abravanel’s position was suppressed. He turns from speculation to the historical record, beginning an investigation that will connect the house’s private grief to the founding of [Israel](entity:location-recall-location-e1a1566e26c9).
November 29, 1947, recalled during Shmuel’s research
The Partition Vote
While reading old copies of [Davar](entity:object-recall-object-davar-f07abb898964), Shmuel revisits the [United Nations](entity:organization-recall-organization-e95d8c5557b2) vote to partition [Palestine](entity:location-recall-location-cdbda353b3fa) into Jewish and Arab states, with [Jerusalem](entity:location-recall-location-695056030a63) placed under international control. The headline and the details of the vote stir him as if the decision were happening in the present.
He also finds a report that Abravanel was removed from the Zionist Executive and the [Jewish Agency](entity:organization-recall-organization-773e10956dc8) leadership after warning that the chosen path would lead to a bloody conflict. The newspaper record offers fragments, but no public debate or full explanation of Abravanel’s dissent.
Late winter 1960
The Archive Refuses Access
Shmuel visits the State Archive seeking confidential minutes of the [Jewish Agency](entity:organization-recall-organization-773e10956dc8) leadership during the decisive months before independence. The archivist explains that the records remain sealed for decades and directs him elsewhere for public Zionist Executive transcripts.
At the door, the archivist asks what Shmuel hopes to learn and then says Abravanel was a traitor. The judgment frustrates Shmuel’s search while showing that the official label has outlasted the man and obscured the substance of his argument.
Late winter 1960
Wald Falls Ill
A severe influenza confines Wald to his bedroom with a high fever and a dangerous cough. [Atalia](entity:character-recall-character-atalia-c23a4200c19d) asks Shmuel to care for him, change his clothes, give him tea and medicine, and keep him from talking too much.
For the first time, Shmuel enters Wald’s private room and sees [Mija](entity:character-recall-character-mija-7b7efe1f19dd)’s photograph. Wald explains that Mija was an orphan whom he raised alone, his closest friend as well as his only son, and admits that he helped lead him toward the war. The intimate disclosure changes the bond between caregiver and patient.
April 2, 1948, recalled during Wald’s illness
Mija’s Last Battle
Wald recounts how [Mija](entity:character-recall-character-mija-7b7efe1f19dd), despite having lost a kidney and despite pleas from [Atalia](entity:character-recall-character-atalia-c23a4200c19d) and Shaltiel, falsified his medical papers to join the fighting. He was killed during the convoy battle near Bab al-Wad, where he had gone up the hillside to attack enemy positions.
Wald recognizes his own part in Mija’s decision: he had taught his son to answer the call of a supposedly sacred war. He doubts the familiar claim that the dead did not die in vain and repeats Shaltiel’s view that every death is, in the end, in vain. Shmuel reaches out and holds the grieving father’s hand.
During Wald’s recovery
Atalia’s Account of Mija
[Atalia](entity:character-recall-character-atalia-c23a4200c19d) tells Shmuel that [Mija](entity:character-recall-character-mija-7b7efe1f19dd) was a gifted mathematician who seemed destined to become a young professor, but joined the 1948 fighting despite his disability and the family’s opposition. She condemns the founding of a Jewish state as a project purchased through blood, displacement, and lasting hatred.
She explains that her father believed Jewish and Arab communities could share the land without separate sovereign states. Shmuel disagrees about the necessity of the war, yet recognizes the force of her grief and the moral challenge in her account.
After Wald recovers, February 1960
The Father’s Political Vision
Wald fills in Abravanel’s political position: he opposed partition and a separate Jewish state, favored shared Jewish-Arab civic life, and imagined communities living across borders rather than a world divided into armed nation-states. He believed Jewish and Arab children should learn one another’s languages and that cooperation might build trust.
Wald admits that he had opposed Abravanel before [Mija](entity:character-recall-character-mija-7b7efe1f19dd)’s death, believing that conflict with the Arabs was unavoidable. After the loss, the two men stopped arguing. Abravanel’s warnings now reach Shmuel through the man who once rejected them, colored by political defeat and private remorse.
During Wald’s account of Abravanel
The Golem Warning
Wald recalls Abravanel’s warning that [Zionism](entity:concept-recall-concept-7333e507abc6) had harnessed the Jewish people’s messianic and religious energies for a secular political project. One day, Abravanel feared, the golem would turn against its makers and destroy what the founders intended to build.
He did not leave the Zionist institutions because he had ceased to identify as a Zionist; he believed their leaders had abandoned the movement’s path. His dissent was ignored, his resignation letter disappeared, and his isolation deepened as the conflict unfolded.
Through the winter of 1959–1960
Shmuel Reconsiders Jesus
Shmuel returns to his research, reading Jewish polemics, medieval arguments, and accounts of [Jesus](entity:character-recall-character-4e427eab6364) as a Jew who never intended to found a new religion. He is disturbed that Jewish writers often attack miracles or birth stories while avoiding a serious encounter with Jesus’s moral message.
He also notices how rarely Jewish writing addresses Judas. Shmuel begins to wonder whether the disciple condemned as the archetypal traitor may have been Jesus’s most faithful believer, and whether the silence around him reflects shame and fear.
Late winter 1960
The Moonlit Walk
[Atalia](entity:character-recall-character-atalia-c23a4200c19d) takes Shmuel on a long nighttime walk through [Jerusalem](entity:location-recall-location-695056030a63). She tells him that she was married to [Mija](entity:character-recall-character-mija-7b7efe1f19dd) for only a year and a half before his death, and she allows Shmuel to put an arm around her without returning the gesture.
The city’s moonlit quiet intensifies his desire and his sense of distance. Atalia speaks of the moon as bloodied rather than white, and only later answers his earlier question about her father: he belonged to another time. Their walk brings them close without resolving what either can offer the other.
A later winter night, before dawn
The Dawn Surveillance
[Atalia](entity:character-recall-character-atalia-c23a4200c19d) asks Shmuel to accompany her on a covert assignment: she plans to photograph a married couple meeting at dawn on Mount Zion. They climb through the empty streets and reach the area around David’s Tomb, where a reservist blocks entry to the site.
No couple appears, and Atalia’s explanation may have been a pretext for having company. In the cold before sunrise, Shmuel asks what their relationship means; she answers that it is not yet anything, perhaps it might become something, or perhaps never. Before parting, she puts two of his frozen fingers in her mouth and says they will see.
Late winter 1960
Miri’s Letter from Rome
[Miri](entity:character-recall-character-miri-7bf1329d1a52) writes from [Rome](entity:location-recall-location-f3877a21016f), describing her medical studies, two jobs, and her relationship with Emilio and his daughter. She imagines Shmuel’s life as a lonely retreat and reproaches him for giving up his studies and shutting his family out.
Her memories of their childhood reveal how long Shmuel has preferred speeches and inward thoughts to ordinary conversation. She urges him to stop searching for an ultimate meaning and begin living, but the letter does not immediately bring him back to his family or his academic work.
Late winter 1960, during an all-night writing session
Shmuel’s Judas Theory
Reading a Jewish defense of [Jesus](entity:character-recall-character-4e427eab6364) by Rabbi Yehuda Arie of Modena, Shmuel drafts a radical account of Judas. In his version, Judas begins as a wealthy, educated emissary sent to investigate Jesus, but becomes a devoted disciple who believes Jesus is divine.
Convinced that a public miracle in [Jerusalem](entity:location-recall-location-695056030a63) will reveal Jesus to the world, Judas persuades him to go there and arranges the crucifixion, expecting him to descend from the cross. Jesus dies, and Judas, realizing that his faith has helped cause the death of the man he loves, hangs himself. Shmuel calls him the first, last, and only Christian.
The night of Shmuel’s dawn outing
Wald’s Second Warning
As Shmuel hurries to meet [Atalia](entity:character-recall-character-atalia-c23a4200c19d), Wald calls him into the library and again warns him not to fall in love with her. He immediately acknowledges that the warning comes too late and says that Shmuel has become another person he will lose.
Shmuel leaves with Atalia, while Wald’s brief farewell exposes the attachment forming between the two men. The old invalid’s loneliness now stands alongside Shmuel’s, binding them through the household’s repeated pattern of love and departure.
Late winter 1960
The Borrowed Money Dispute
[Atalia](entity:character-recall-character-atalia-c23a4200c19d) asks Shmuel to accompany her to the Atara cafe, where she is trying to recover money owed by Hiram Nehoshtan to a former comrade. Nehoshtan denies the loan, insults the contractor, and then asks for an additional loan of his own.
Atalia says a witness, Ester Levi, can testify that the money changed hands. Nehoshtan storms out, denouncing their cruelty and warning Shmuel to beware of falling for Atalia. The encounter shows Atalia’s investigative work and gives Shmuel a public role beside her, though he struggles to define their connection.
After the cafe meeting
Shmuel Asks for Friendship
On the walk home, Shmuel asks [Atalia](entity:character-recall-character-atalia-c23a4200c19d) whether they can be friends rather than strangers. She says she is tired of sentiment and that feelings tend to end badly, but concedes that she can tolerate him and sometimes feels more than that.
Atalia then invites him to join her that night at Fink’s bar, where she must observe a person for work. She promises that he can talk about [Jesus](entity:character-recall-character-4e427eab6364) and Judas while she watches. For once, she explicitly calls him her companion, even as she continues to keep emotional distance.
That evening, near ten o’clock
The Fall at the Door
Shmuel sets out for Fink’s bar but catches his weight on the unstable wooden step at the house entrance. He falls backward, cuts his head, and injures his ankle; Wald hears the crash, calls an ambulance, and stays beside him.
The accident prevents Shmuel from reaching [Atalia](entity:character-recall-character-atalia-c23a4200c19d). He is taken to Shaarei Tzedek Hospital, where the ankle is found to have a small fissure and is placed in a cast. Atalia visits the next morning, touches his face, and explains that she waited for him at the bar until nearly midnight.
The day after the fall
Shmuel Moves into Abravanel’s Room
[Atalia](entity:character-recall-character-atalia-c23a4200c19d) brings Shmuel home and settles him in her father’s long-locked bedroom because his cast prevents him from climbing to the attic. The room contains a map of the Levant, a bare writing desk, old books, and the photograph of [Shaltiel Abravanel](entity:character-recall-character-shaltiel-abravanel-162467ae9341).
Atalia feeds Shmuel and tells him about the final months of her father’s life: after [Mija](entity:character-recall-character-mija-7b7efe1f19dd)’s death, the household withdrew from the world, and Abravanel eventually stopped speaking publicly and destroyed his papers. The room becomes a literal and emotional center of the house, opening Shmuel to the history he has been trying to reconstruct.
Atalia’s childhood, recalled during Shmuel’s convalescence
Atalia’s Mother Leaves
[Atalia](entity:character-recall-character-atalia-c23a4200c19d) tells Shmuel that when she was ten, her mother left the family and went to Alexandria with a Greek merchant who had visited their home. Shaltiel responded to the departure by turning his daughter’s room into a place for lectures, speaking at her rather than asking about her life.
The story reveals another source of Atalia’s distance: she grew up with a father who could be intellectually brilliant and politically courageous but emotionally absent and controlling. Her memories complicate Shmuel’s idealization of Abravanel and show how family silence has shaped her as well.
A few days after the first fall
Shmuel and Atalia Become Lovers
While Shmuel is recovering, he falls again in the kitchen and ends up on the floor, covered in spilled preserves. [Atalia](entity:character-recall-character-atalia-c23a4200c19d) helps him into bed in her father’s room, then unexpectedly initiates sex, telling him to be quiet and covering the photograph of her father.
Shmuel is overwhelmed by the encounter and hopes it signals a mutual relationship. Atalia refuses to discuss it afterward and frames the moment as a woman giving a young man an experience. The intimacy brings them together physically while preserving the imbalance and uncertainty between them.
The following night
A Second Night Together
[Atalia](entity:character-recall-character-atalia-c23a4200c19d) returns to Shmuel’s room after dark, turns her father’s photograph face down, and begins a more deliberate encounter. This time she guides Shmuel through intimacy and stays with him, allowing him to respond to her as well.
Before leaving, she says he may be the only one she remembers. In the morning she behaves as though nothing has changed, helping him dress and leaving without explanation. Shmuel is left with tenderness and longing but no assurance that their closeness will continue.
During Shmuel’s convalescence
Wald Explains the Traitor
Wald describes how Abravanel was branded a traitor for maintaining friendships with Arabs and opposing the creation of a separate Jewish state. Abravanel had imagined a shared civic life and believed nationalism, borders, and armies would perpetuate conflict.
Wald admits that he once argued against him, convinced that a Jewish state could not be established without confrontation. He says Abravanel was politically isolated, forced out of the Zionist leadership, and left without an audience. The account reframes betrayal as the name a majority gives to dissent it does not want to hear.
During the same convalescence
The House’s Unfinished Manuscripts
Wald says that Abravanel wrote obsessively after his political defeat but destroyed every page before his death, leaving only his will. He remembers a man who once hoped for Jewish-Arab friendship and later withdrew into silence, while the house itself retained the atmosphere of his frustration.
[Atalia](entity:character-recall-character-atalia-c23a4200c19d) tells Shmuel that Abravanel died alone in the kitchen, and Wald recalls finding him after his head collapsed onto the table and overturned his coffee. The loss of the papers leaves Shmuel with a historical mystery that cannot be solved by simply entering the room or searching its furniture.
Late winter 1960
The Cat in the Night
Unable to sleep, Shmuel walks through the divided city and finds a starving stray cat. After an earlier burst of gunfire, the animal approaches him and rubs against his fingers; Shmuel strokes it and regrets not bringing food.
The encounter echoes his own desire for warmth and his habit of feeling compassion without knowing how to act on it. On the way home, he thinks again about [Mija](entity:character-recall-character-mija-7b7efe1f19dd)’s lonely death and asks himself why he did not join the fighting, a question [Atalia](entity:character-recall-character-atalia-c23a4200c19d) had already put to him.
Late winter 1960
Wald and the Christian Accusation
Wald recounts meeting a young nun who asked how Jews could have harmed [Jesus](entity:character-recall-character-4e427eab6364), treating Shmuel’s historical inquiry as part of a much older Christian accusation. He argues that Judas’s name became synonymous with both betrayal and Jewishness, while antisemitism would not have vanished even if Christian tradition had honored Judas instead.
Shmuel reads the episode beside his own reinterpretation: Judas may have been the only disciple who remained with Jesus to the end. Wald urges him to finish his research and perhaps write separate books on Jesus and Judas, giving his abandoned scholarship a renewed purpose.
The final days before Shmuel leaves Jerusalem
The Crucifixion in Judas’s Voice
Shmuel writes a sustained first-person account of Judas’s final day. Judas believes [Jesus](entity:character-recall-character-4e427eab6364) is divine, persuades him to go to [Jerusalem](entity:location-recall-location-695056030a63), and engineers the crucifixion in the expectation that Jesus will descend from the cross and inaugurate a kingdom of love.
As Jesus dies, Judas recognizes that his confidence and devotion have helped destroy the man he loved. He feeds a starving dog, gives his money to a poor pregnant servant, and walks toward a fig tree, haunted by the possibility that Jesus’s curse on an ordinary tree exposed his human limits too late. The imagined Judas hangs himself, and Shmuel’s theory reaches its bleak conclusion: the betrayer may have been the most faithful believer.
Early March 1960
A Departure Is Arranged
As winter ends, [Atalia](entity:character-recall-character-atalia-c23a4200c19d) packs Shmuel’s belongings and tells him that three months in the house are enough. She says he has grown old there and must return to life among young people, while he admits he will leave more hungry than he arrived.
She gives him a small blue glass jar as a keepsake, then covers his eyes and says he has lived blind in her house all winter. Her tenderness does not become a promise; she tells him not to write or call and insists that he turn the page.
The morning Shmuel leaves
Wald’s Farewell Kiss
Before Shmuel departs, Wald comes to Abravanel’s room and sees the packed bag. He says he has already lost a son, calls Shmuel closer, and kisses him on the forehead.
The gesture is a rare, direct expression of affection from the talkative but guarded old man. Shmuel’s departure is no longer simply a young man leaving a job; it is another separation in a household shaped by bereavement and repeated abandonment.
Early March 1960
Shmuel Leaves Jerusalem
Shmuel leaves the house with a packed bag and the [fox-headed cane](entity:object-recall-object-6df36ce85fc8), after waiting outside the door for a call that never comes. He considers returning to his parents in [Haifa](entity:location-recall-location-a96564f18129) but feels that the winter household has become his family.
He takes a bus toward [Beersheba](entity:location-recall-location-a03db61132f3), intending to continue to the new settlement at [Mitzpe Ramon](entity:location-recall-location-ae71a8336e67) and find work as a night watchman or in a library. As [Jerusalem](entity:location-recall-location-695056030a63) recedes, he feels released from its stone streets and suffocating history, though he knows that [Mija](entity:character-recall-character-mija-7b7efe1f19dd)’s death and the winter he spent in the house will travel with him.
Near the end, in Beersheba
The Unanswered Question
The last bus to [Mitzpe Ramon](entity:location-recall-location-ae71a8336e67) has already departed, leaving Shmuel to wander through [Beersheba](entity:location-recall-location-a03db61132f3)’s uniform new housing blocks with his bag, cane, coat, and cap. He sees a young woman at a window and considers asking her where to go, but she disappears before he can speak.
Shmuel sets down his belongings in the empty street and is left with the question of what he is seeking. The novel ends not with a new destination secured but with his familiar hesitation exposed: departure has not yet taught him how to choose or how to ask for help.
