When you live within the babble of other people, it is harder to hear the voices of the people inside you

Late at night, when Yannai is snoring gently, Eliyahu walks to the cave entrance, grasps the rock, and hoists himself up. He looks back down; it’s like staring into a black hole — nothing to see, but doing so gives the sensation of falling, plunging into nothingness. He closes his eyes and wills away the sudden dizziness.

With his injured leg, Yannai is trapped inside, unable to heave himself up without Eliyahu’s helping hand. Eliyahu shivers in the night air. He could just walk away, here and now, and leave him. Leave the man and his questions. Leave the man who has invaded his life, his tranquility. He will go and find somewhere else to live, another cave, another stream, somewhere even more concealed.

What are you, a murderer? A demon? Some dark nameless creature that somehow survived Noach’s deluge and snakes up now, to hurt a poor man who seeks help?

Come, come. The man will find a way out eventually. He will stack Eliyahu’s pots one on top of the other, and he will unify his will until it fills his body and then he will climb out.

Leave him? Or stay?

Eliyahu walks over to the stream and plunges his hands in. The water falling over the stones is freezing. Just a few weeks ago, icicles formed on the rocks: sharp, jagged knives that made him feel as if all the world had turned its back on him. But in the lushness of spring, when the sun is hot, the water is cold. When he sips, it gives him pleasure and for a moment, the world is kind to him, and he can be, well, not happy, but something inside him soothes. Now, the cold touches his skin and calms him, even as it pierces and snaps.

Yannai, looking around, told him that he was strange. That he was running away from the world.

But it is not that. It is just that others are occupied with a leaking winter roof and finding money to pay the taxes and buy a bolt of wool for the blankets that are thinning — they don’t last forever, you know.

And he cannot think of these things, none of them. They scrape up against his soul and chafe at it until it is raw and he feels forgotten in a world that has gone on, that is determined to go on, even when everything is destroyed.

He climbs up the hill and past the small pen that holds his sheep. Two ewes will be lambing soon; spring has already come, and they are growing agitated.

It is not just that, he realizes, as the sheep trot out toward him, moon shining on their light coats. When you live within the babble of other people, it is harder to hear the voices of the people inside you. It is harder to hear Tzipora’s murmured Tehillim, her hum, the way her words were held in for so long and would suddenly rush out, like a sudden burst of summer rain. And harder to hear, too, the weak wail of the baby who made him into a father, but whose face has blurred and faded.