She launches right into the story about their mother, but he cuts her off to say that he knows all about it, and that this guy, the Husband, seems quite nice, very refined, not to mention excellent with children.

It is then that she feels the first pang of bewilderment—bewilderment mixed with annoyance. What do you mean, you know all about him? she asks. He stayed? The Husband? That’s how you’re referring to a stranger that Social Services scraped up from God knows where, from the bottom of some barrel?

From Netanya, in fact, Shlomi says, but she ignores him and continues.

The Husband? And Mom! She had me on the phone for half an hour and didn’t even mention the fact that she’s accepted into her life a man that someone she doesn’t know from Adam showed up at her door and told her belongs to her? The way she told it made it sound like she thought the whole thing was crazy.

To which her brother replies: Maybe she felt uneasy telling you the truth.

It feels like a slap in the face. There is no malice in it, that isn’t Shlomi’s way, but, following from his freedom from worry, he has a talent for frankness.

Why would she be uneasy? asks Tamar, still stinging.

She can almost hear her brother shrug on the other end.

Because she knew you’d react like this.

Like what?

Prickly. Suspicious. A little defensive, even.

Defensive! Why would I be defensive? My response to a stranger being presented as her lost husband, when we all know that she never had any husband except for Dad, seems like the only sane reaction around here. What possessed her to take him in just like that, a perfect stranger?

Maybe because of that.

What?

That he seems perfect.

We don’t even know the first thing about him, Shlomi! He might be a psychopath. Or at the very least a con artist.

Maybe she knows enough.

I mean, does he even speak Hebrew?

It sounded to Tamar as if they’d found him far away, maybe even at sea. An image comes to her of the old man in the brown hat clinging to a broken plank and bobbing in the waves. For a moment, she almost feels sorry for him. But only a moment, because, also, who does he think he is? Going along with Social Service’s crazy idea, or maybe even cooking it up himself; sitting there in his dapper suit on her mother’s chair like the picture of innocence itself, opening his arms to accept babies?

He speaks it like a poet, Shlomi says. Like he stepped right out of an Alterman poem, the kind Mom used to read us when we were young.

Now he’s stepping out of Alterman poems!