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fragile, shaggy thing whom we called Zulu—had died unexpectedly in the winter. I’d suggested to Kostya that we take in a cat, but my brother said he preferred pets who could be trained not to scratch furniture or jump on tables. The minute your back was turned, he said, a cat did what it wanted to do. All the same, the cats on our street knew me. I liked giving them treats, and when I sat outside they generally found their way to me. But today they were either busy or asleep.
    I was suddenly filled with desire. I longed to have a lover, for example, or to find an ancient coin buried in the earth, or watch a turtle moseying along. These waves of desire came over me regularly, in varying degrees of intensity. When they were at their most persistent, I felt that nothing short of a miracle would satisfy me: a goose laying golden eggs or angels hovering amid the yellow roses, which swelled against the blue sky like expensive gifts. I touched the silky petals brushing my knees and contemplated my virginity, a subject that was never far from my thoughts—especially in recent years, as I was getting ridiculously old for a virgin.
    Technically I was not a virgin, of course. I was one of the few people in this country who, without being famous or dead, had made the front pages twice, and my sexual status was known to anyone who cared to remember the story. Stories never die here because people keep them alive. No one seems to have any secret tragedies and sorrows, except maybe my brother.
    But since I’d never had a lover, I considered myself as chaste as a lily in May. I’d say as chaste as the driven snow, but we don’t get much snow here and I’ve seen snow only twice in my life. My brother was constantly urging me to travel, visit other countries, broaden my horizons. He wanted me to see Venice and Paris and Buckingham Palace. But I didn’t want to go alone, and if I had to travel with Kostya I’d end up strangling him within two days. My brother is fine when his life proceeds according to a fixed routine, but when he’s away from his routine his obsession with order becomes extremely trying. How a person like my mother, who was vague and easygoing, managed to give birth to my brother was always a bit of a mystery. He most likely takes after his father, a married man whom my mother left behind in Russia when Kostya was eleven. Impossible to imagine, but my mother had once wanted to be a physicist; the married man, Kostya’s father, was her teacher. She was forced to abandon her studies after only one year because she’d slept through two exams, and she ended up on the stage instead. It was mostly for Kostya’s sake that my mother decided to tear herself away from her lover and attempt an escape from the Soviet Union. She was a well-known actress by then, and she managed to get away while performing in Vienna. She decided to try her luck in Israel, where there were subsidies for immigrants and which she pictured as a land filled with palm trees and quaint sunny villages.
    I contemplated my virginity as usual, came to no conclusion as usual, and then noticed that I was running late. If I wanted to walk to the university I would have to leave right away.
    I took a bottle of ice water out of the fridge, strapped my briefcase to my back, put on a Lydia Bennett hat decorated with blue ribbon and silk flowers, and set out. I may be the only person in this country who willingly walks anywhere in the August heat. But I like the heat because of its solid physical presence. It surrounds you and presses against you; this makes me feel safe, as if I were in a womb. And I like the blinding white light that turns the world into a vast child’s room, filled with sunlit toys: very bright light, like intense cold, shrinks objects. Another reason I don’t mind walking is that I don’t sweat much, and if I do it’s only between my breasts, where drops of sweat form and begin to trickle down slowly to my stomach. When that happens, I