The Last Supper

The small box of sleeping tablets had been lying on the table by the window all day now. Andrei had been collecting them for over a year. He knew that fifty would suffice. But he thought it would be better to have a hundred. That would be more certain. He had began to accumulate them already in Moscow, right after the death of Katya. And then in Milan. There he complained of insomnia, and Paolo, a doctor acquaintance, had written him a prescription. And by now here in Jerusalem, where he had been living for two months, he had more than a hundred. But Andrei had still not made up his mind. It was the beginning of December. By evening the entire room was flooded by the sun as it set behind Mordecai Hill. On the summit of the hill grew pines and cypress trees, needles pointing into the rose-colored evening sky. The flat roofs of the houses on the hill looked like white stone terraces. "Precisely like the ancient Jewish cemetery in Gethsemane, if you view it from the Old City, from the side of the Golden Gate," thought Andrei. "Yes, and what is the difference? Stones are, after all, stones. Under some of them, the living, under some others, the dead. The dead – they are a majority. Death – that simply means uniting yourself with the majority." He turned away from the window. At the stove, he poured a cup of hot water and placed it on the table, next to the tablets. Now he needed to dissolve them in the water.

Once more he thought of the painting. He had seen it several times in a dream. Christ was seated at the table, at the very center. He had lowered his eyes, and seeming to be lost in thought had placed his hands palms up on the table. There was no halo around his head. Behind him through a window was a patch of light blue sky. Below the sky stretched a color of darker blue. What was that? The sea? The disciples sat around the table in groups of three, and each group was discussing the words that had been spoken by Christ. He had said, "One of you will betray me." These words had stunned the disciples, for they had not understood them.

Andrei had seen Leonardo's picture in Milan the fall of last year, a month after the death of his wife. In Moscow, his son and daughter-in-law had come and taken care of him as best they could. But he knew he would lose his mind if he did not get out of his cold, empty apartment. In Milan at the Refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie he had stood in front of the painting a full sixty minutes. He could just make out the depiction of Judas in the rather dark left-hand section of the painting.

But now the thought suddenly struck him: "No. It is not about betrayal. It is about loneliness. Christ is lonely. We are alone when we arrive and alone when we depart. And not at all because we are somehow betrayed. Rather it is because that is the human condition." Andrei was amazed that this thought had not occurred to him before, and looked again at the cup of water.

He was sixty-five years old, a mathematician at a leading Moscow institute. As a Jew and non-party member, he had formerly not been allowed to travel abroad. So it was only in 1991, in the fall, that he and Katya first arrived in Paris, the result of an invitation from the Institute in Sacle. He still could remember every day of their life in Paris. He recalled how Katya had stopped for a long time before Renoir's painting, The Swing, in the Musée d'Orsay. "Come and look. There is an entire novel here," she said. "It is somewhere in a garden. There is a wife, husband, and child. Facing them, but with his back to us, stands a man. I can see only...