Page 50 of The Collector
“I know,” he said firmly.
The doctor addressed his next words to the window. “I’ve never judged you, Gabriel. But at this stage of her life—”
“And what about my life?”
“Is there something you want to talk about?”
“Like what?”
“Anything at all.”
“I have a wife. I have two young children.”
“You want to lead a normal life? Is that what you’re saying? Well, some of us aren’t meant to. You’re not normal, Gabriel Allon. You will never be normal.”
“Surely there’s something I can take for that.”
The doctor emitted a dry, quiet laugh. “Your sense of humor is a defense mechanism. It prevents you from facing the truth.”
“I face the truth every time I close my eyes. It never goes away, not for a single minute.”
“That’s the healthiest thing I have ever heard you say.” The doctor placed his cup and saucer on the desk, spilling the remnants of his tea in the process. “You should know that when the bomb exploded in Givat Shaul this morning, it was very loud here at the hospital. I’m afraid she didn’t react well.”
“How is she now?”
“Five minutes ago, when I told her that you were coming to see her, she was overjoyed. But with Leah...” The doctor smiled sadly and rose to his feet. “Well, one never knows quite what to expect.”
She was seated in her wheelchair in the sunlit garden, a blanket round her frail shoulders, the twisted remnants of her hands knotted in her lap. Gabriel kissed the cool, firm scar tissue of her cheek and sat down on the bench next to her. She stared sightlessly into the middle distance, as though unaware of his presence. He had endured periods of catatonia like this before. Her first had lasted thirteen years—thirteen years without so much as a word or a flicker of recognition in her dark eyes. It had been like communing with a figure ina painting. He had longed to restore her but could not. The woman in a wheelchair, oil on canvas, was beyond repair.
He opened her sketchpad and leafed through its pages.
“What do you think of them?” she asked suddenly.
He looked up with a start.What do you think of them?They were some of the first words she had ever spoken to him, long ago, when they were students together at Bezalel. Then, as now, he had been turning the pages of her sketchbook with unconcealed admiration—and perhaps even a trace of envy. She was eager to hear his opinion of her work. After all, he was Gabriel Allon, the talented only son of Irene Allon, perhaps the finest Israeli painter of her generation.
“Well?” she prodded him.
“I’m overwhelmed.”
“It took some getting used to.” She raised her contorted right hand. “Holding a pencil again, that is.”
“It doesn’t show.”
He turned the pages. Landscapes, Jerusalem cityscapes, still lifes, nudes, portraits of her fellow patients, of her doctor, of her ex-husband at the age of thirty-nine. That was how old Gabriel had been the night a Palestinian master terrorist named Tariq al-Hourani concealed a bomb beneath his car in Vienna. It was Leah, with a turn of the ignition, who had detonated the device. The explosion had killed their young son, Daniel, whom Gabriel had strapped into his car seat a moment earlier. Leah, despite suffering catastrophic burns and injuries, had somehow survived. The final minutes of their life together played ceaselessly in her memory like a loop of videotape. She was trapped in the past with no escape. And Gabriel was her constant companion.
Her eyes traveled over him, as though she were searching for a lost object in the cluttered closets of her memory. “Are you real?” she asked at last. “Or am I hallucinating again?”
“I’m real,” he assured her.
“Where are we, my love?”
“Jerusalem.”
She lifted her eyes to the cloudless sky. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
“Yes, Leah,” he answered, and waited for the familiar refrain.
“The snow absolves Vienna of its sins. Snow falls on Vienna while the missiles rain on Tel Aviv.” She came back to him. “I heard an explosion this morning.”
