As I’m driving home from the doctor’s I hear the world news – one country after another closing down again because of the sharp spike.  I park and as I’m climbing up to my apartment,together with the stray cat that is still conquering her terror of human beings, and has agreed to come to our place for her daily lunch. And I hear my neighbor (a Mengele graduate) banging on her door and begging her daughter to open.  Her daughter isn’t home and not in good relations with her mother but our neighbor has lost her keys and is quite hysterical.  I try to get her to come to my place and figure out what to do, but she begins to scream she wants to die – she can’t take it anymore.  She has a son but she can’t remember anyone’s phone number and is way beyond being comforted.  She asks the teenager next door if she knows anything about where her keys have disappeared, and is told that a man knocked on her door and then took keys with him.  We look up the number of a locksmith and Ezi calls him.  He’ll be there in half an hour, I’m happy to report, and I take her outside to a nearby bench to wait.  (the cat has gone into hiding nearby, clearly disturbed) I promise to wait with her and she tell me more stories about the Holocaust – stories I haven’t heard in the more than 40 years I’ve known her.  It helps her calm down.   In the meantime Ezi has reached her son who is on his way, and she is even quiet, almost relaxed.  And then another neighbor comes by and says to her casually, “I’ve been looking for you.”  And he holds out the keys he found attached to her postbox.  By now she is beaming.  She has her keys and she has her loving neighbors around her.  She is 84, she tells us, and she tells the neighbor – “But you, you look like you’re getting older.”  He is eighty, but is in great shape, and he realizes she’s just trying to turn an embarrassing situation for her around to him, and makes a joke of her accusation. 

The catastrophe is over.  I realize that my pulse has been racing for the entire hour, the cat has given up on eating for the day, and the whole world outside my building has been forgotten.