Yehudah burned all night on the way home, fires of fury consuming him on the subway filled with overheated lovers. The city’s grime squirmed along the tracks, fueling his rage like rags stuffed into a burning gaslight. When he reached their apartment, he turned the key in the lock slowly, deliberately, and pushed the door with his fingertips, inching it open. He had to do everything in tiny motions, in inches. Otherwise he would have burst into his own apartment and shouted at the top of his lungs, the way he had once seen a client who represented a big jewelry store burst into the diamond office, raving mad, screaming: “You ripped me off!”

Rivka was in the kitchen, cooking dinner. Something was boiling in a large pot, and she stood at the tiny counter space next to it, her back to him, chopping vegetables. The sound of the water boiling ruffled the air in the apartment, like waves at the seashore caressing dry land. He watched her for a moment from behind, following the imaginary curves of her body with his eyes beneath her long dark skirt. He had dated prettier girls. But there was something solid about Rivka, something stately, a firmness and a density of valor that made her rise above them all, with her feet still on the ground. As if she were a sturdy, unbending column, holding up the sky.

She noticed that he had entered the room. He saw the slight stiffening of her spine, the ripple of movement through the back of her shirt, the thousandth-of-a-second pause at her elbows before the next stroke of the knife. She knew something was wrong; that he saw right away. Still, she stood at the kitchen counter chopping peppers, refusing to turn around.

“Rivka?”

He restrained himself, slightly too much. She continued her chopping, even stepping up the pace of the knife on the cutting board. He tried again, with less restraint.

“Rivka, I have a question for you.”

She still did not turn around, nor even pause in her chopping. The knife fell with rhythmic regularity, the pace quickening exponentially. Stepping a bit to the side, Yehudah watched as the blade became a blur between her hands, beating against the cutting board faster, faster, faster. And then he asked the question.

“Rivka, do you want to have children?”

The knife kept flying between her fingers, its tempo hurtling forward, faster, uncontrolled. In a flash the blade fell, and Yehudah, watching at an angle, saw it land on the side of her finger. She screamed.

“Rivka!”