Lev ben Zadok — Part I: Break in the Cloud (Maastricht & Zutendaal)

The Departure from Maastricht

The zip stopped two fingers from the corner, and Lev sat back on his heels with the blue shirt in one hand and the open bag between his knees, looking from the collar he had folded so carefully to the book jammed underneath it; he had put both there himself and could not remember why either now seemed less negotiable than the other.

He folded the collar in and tried again. The bag shut around the book.

Amsterdam, then: several days of training in rooms with low ceilings, coffee in paper cups, men who called a worksheet a conversation. He had packed as if he might be asked to leave early, and had noticed this only after the zip gave way.

Beyond the windows, the Maas was darkening from the banks inward; on the table, the folder of old drawings had worked itself half an inch out of line, and he pushed it back without opening it. He found his charger, checked twice that he had found it, watched the training company's message appear on the screen, then laid the phone face down as though the glass itself had become too bright.

At the door he remembered the keys. Back in the kitchen, he saw the tangerine in the bowl, its skin loosening around the stalk, and put it in his coat pocket. On the stairs he took it out again, considered it with mild surprise, then put it back.

Outside, rain still held in the joins between the stones, and he set off toward the station with the leather handle slipping against his fingers and the bag brushing his knee; a bicycle came close behind him, its bell sounding once, belatedly, and he moved aside without looking back.

At a café, someone dragged chairs across the floor while a woman in an apron held the door open with her hip and took a tray of glasses to the back. Lev passed the brief square of warmth and felt the cold find the gap at his collar.

A family came toward him along the narrow pavement, the two small children already several paces ahead, one carrying a branch stripped bare except for wet leaves, the other repeating something at a volume that made listening unavoidable. Lev stepped down from the curb to let them pass. The branch knocked the railing, hollow as wood against metal, and he stopped.

In Zutendaal, the cottage door had swollen whenever it rained, and the children learned that one push would not do it: they came home from the woods with their shoulders against the wood, their boots full of leaves, while his partner followed with coats over one arm and asked for towels before the water reached the hallway rug.

Lev had been upstairs in the study with a work document open on the screen, reading the same paragraph until its words would no longer keep their order. Beside the keyboard stood a glass of wine. He had poured it before the front door opened.

His older daughter ran down the hall and stopped at the study door.

“Papa. Look what we found.”

Lev kept looking at the screen.

“Just a minute.”

“It has a face.”

“What has?”

“The branch.”

He heard her put it down in the hall. From the kitchen, his partner asked where the wet clothes should go, and Lev called back, “Over the radiator,” because it was the kind of question that could be answered from a chair. He took another drink and told himself he would go down once he had finished the paragraph.

When he did go down, the house had already changed tasks: a boot stood by the radiator, towels lay across the chairs, and the branch was on the kitchen table with its pale broken end pointing at the window. Lev moved it aside to make room for his glass.