It is the season for persimmons.  He cured one for me in a paper bag for a week, came to see me armed with a slicing knife.  He is thirsty, climbs the staircase in stages because the cancer in his thigh is growing itself a formidable pouch.  The sac ruptures twice, lands him in the hospital, where they pretend that it will get better once the pus is completely drained.  But of course in the meantime he needs rest and it is I now who comes to his room.  I hand him a glass of water.

"I want more life, that's what I want." He always asks me to draw the curtains, to see me better, he says, because of the glare at my back, and I feel guilty every time because he is missing the radiant spring outside.  But he is more interested in hearing, and I must fish out the batteries for his hearing aid amidst the rubble and bottles of medication.  One day they disappear for good.  I am reminded that in his dream the strap for his saxophone breaks and he cannot play anymore, so we might as well stop pretending that we understand each other and sit quietly together, listening to the stirrings of my pregnancy, which, when all is said and done, is drowning all the noise of the outside world anyway.  We are both sick and exhausted with the conceivings of a new life, panicked, in fact, in need of painkillers and tranquilizers just to keep the gaping yawn of infinity at bay.

At last his hallucination grows a black box on my head and he commands me to remove it.  I obey, careful not to let the lid fly open as I balance it between my fingers.  This would have been the ultimate disaster but we avoid it.  I never learn what is inside and I am glad: the season for persimmons is here, as it always is, and I must yet taste their sweetness.

Our feet were wont to stand in thy courts, O Jerusalem: Jerusalem, which is built as a city at unity with itself.