Her father. I never met him, although we lived in the same town for sixteen long years. He never tried to contact his daughter, nor did he ever show any kind of interest in her. That was all important to me, of course, but I didn’t ask, I left it up to her to talk about it, or not. And she rarely mentioned him. So I know nothing about him, apart from her incidental, sparse anecdotes. One was from her early childhood. Somewhere near the coast, they had a caravan. During the night he came with an unknown woman, woke his daughter, and took her outside, forcing her to spend the night in the rain. A little girl at night, in the rain. Nothing connects me to him, apart from the fact that he marked my life indirectly, influenced it, and altered my personality over time. Through his relationship with his daughter, he formed her hostility toward the whole male species. We have lived together for thirty years, and all that time she has been wary of me. I never saw him, but I bear that man as my personal burden. I’m tired of him. And I’m used to him. The other image is connected with Libya. Her memory of Africa, where she lived on the sensitive cusp between childhood and youth was quite bright and consoling. She would often say: “I’d like to go back to Africa.” That was where she spent her last summer with both her parents. Remembering Libya, she would always mention her father: “He immediately felt at home there, he quickly learned Arabic, and began to make friends with the local people.” Then she’d talk indifferently, as though describing a stranger. Later, when he left, she didn’t miss him. We’re now on the verge of old age, but one doesn’t stop being a child at fifty. All these years, she hasn’t missed him, that concrete man, but a father, one who ought by biological imperative to be on her side, when a daughter needs protection and security.

She woke up a little while ago as a little five-year-old girl who had blamed herself fifty years earlier because her daddy hadn’t come home for days.

I keep finding her white tennis shoes in different places. Maybe the nurses move them? I haven’t moved them. Or else they move around the ward on their own, impatient to get out of here as soon as possible. Yesterday, with her bag and white tennis shoes, I came through the transparent hospital door that opens in a circle, asked directions to the emergency room, where she’d been taken, intending to wait for the medication that would cure the pain in her arm, and then help her to tie the laces on her white tennis shoes, hold her hand as we crossed the parking lot to our car, and we’d drive home slowly, return to our everyday concerns, finish the tasks we’d begun in the kitchen: turn on the coffee machine, into which I had already poured water, spooned the coffee . . . But that wouldn’t happen, the doctors would meet us with bad news, she’d be settled into the oncology ward, and I’d stay beside her all night, like a loyal dog.