Nechami holds back. She doesn’t ask. She doesn’t hint. Inwardly, she screams please, get them into the bath! Put them to bed!

Y
affa’le walks through the door with Avital in tow and a ringing phone in her bag.

She sheds the bag and her jacket, and asks the toddler to bring her slippers and the small water bottle from the kitchen. Avital runs, slips, wails for a moment and gets up. Her clothes are sopping wet. There’s a puddle on the kitchen floor. The ceiling is dripping. Again! Those neighbors upstairs, Hashem should help them repent for their selfish behavior, are ignoring the problem. They’re doing renovations, making a palace for themselves up there, and if other people are suffering, what do they care?

Yaffa’le scoops up Avital and presses Talk. “No, Tzippy, I can’t talk now,” she says to her manager. “Yes. I worked nine hours today. No. I haven’t had a chance to breathe. Fire me if you want. How will I pay the mortgage? I don’t know. We’ll go live in a tent. At least a tent won’t have a leaky ceiling. No, Avital, not your bottle, my bottle!”

“Hello, family.” Dudi walks in, smiling. “How’s everything?”

Yaffa’le takes a sip of water. “There must be a law that every balagan will only get worse,” she says.

“You mean a law of physics?” He’s trying to understand her. Some papers fly out of his hands, straight into the puddle. “It’s wet here,” he remarks.

“Yes, a law of physics — but what law? And of course it’s wet here.”

“Well, there’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but balagan isn’t the exact term. It would be better to define it as randomness. Or disorder. In physics, it’s called entropy….”

“Why is it called entropy?” Yaffa’le is getting irritated. “That’s a pretty fancy word for the dirty water that’s dripping down merrily from Leidman’s kitchen.”

Dudi is confused. “You asked me about a law of physics, a law of general messiness.”

“I wasn’t asking you! What I meant, Dudi, was that if there is such a law — and of course there has to be, because whenever I say anything, it always turns out that you know some scientific formula for it — so if there is such a law, I really don’t want to hear about it right now.”

She stops for air, takes a ragged breath. Dudi can’t help laughing. “Okay, I won’t say anything,” he promises.