I swim thirty lengths, then walk back to the apartment. The door of the stranger’s bedroom is still closed. I make some toast and afterward go out to read at a nearby café, where the waiter in skinny jeans with a lazy eye smiles at me while he squeezes my orange juice. Afterward I wander through the market. A man tries to sell me a hat, but I don’t want a hat. What do I want? the man wants to know. I go to the beach and watch the hairy men playing paddleball. By the time I return to my father’s apartment, it’s already late in the afternoon, the shadows on the sidewalk grow away from the sea, and the municipal engineer is in the kitchen baking stuffed peppers. Only at that moment, the moment I come through the door and see him peering into the oven, does it occur to me that my father might have arranged this. That just as he had prepared his will, given Koren the keys, and made sure his wish for me to come here was communicated, my father might also have gone to the trouble of asking his old friend to watch over me, or to pass something on to me, however discreetly, some message or sign of what to do now that he was gone.

“You’re back,” he says, lowering the volume of the news from the radio. “Good. Dinner is almost ready. You like cherries? The grocer had cherries today.”

I want to ask him where he was last night. I want to ask about the undertow that pulled me out with him into fathomless sleep. But what would be the question? Instead I set the table and wonder which chair my father used to sit in. I decide it must have been the one closest to the stove, facing the window—the one Boaz sat in yesterday. This time when we sit to share the meal he has prepared, he in his chair and I in mine, I make a point of being more friendly. Something has changed, and he knows it. His nimble eyes, even lighter than I’d remembered, regard me with a questioning look, and something else, too, a kind of sad patience. I wish he would talk, but he carries on eating in silence. It’s up to me to speak, so I tell him that I’m not in fact a student, that I’ve been working in an architecture firm for three years, but that I don’t like it. When I wake up in the morning, I tell him, I don’t look forward to the hours in front of the computer, the architect’s bad-tempered outbursts, and the complaints of his rich clients.

“So why do you stay?” he asks, wiping his mouth.

After dinner he takes a bath, and in my room I hear the water ripple each time he moves on the other side of the wall. Twenty minutes later he comes out of the bathroom dressed in the same clothes, freshly shaved, his wet hair neatly slicked back.