Black Box (31 page)

And I am not talking about metaphoric bells but real ones. Boaz has fixed up in an upstairs room a kind of chime made of bottles suspended from the ceiling. Every gust of wind from the sea produces a desolate, repetitive tune. Sometimes it drives me out of my bed of planks. Last night, with the help of a walking stick that Boaz made for me, I managed to get up and make my way downstairs to the darkening garden. The eight young people who are staying here have pulled up the thistles and couch grass, scattered goat dung (whose piercing smell brings me back something of the smells of my childhood), and dug the ground up. In place of the exotic strains of roses that my father used to cultivate here there are now beds of vegetables. Ilana has volunteered to make scarecrows (it seems to me that the birds are not particularly impressed). While your daughter waters them twice a day with a watering can that I sent someone to buy for her in the town.

Among the flower beds, beside the restored marble pool now restocked (with carp instead of goldfish), I found two wicker chairs. Ilana brought out coffee for herself and an infusion of mint for me. If you are interested in the details, we sat together with our backs to the house and our faces toward the sea until it got dark. We exchanged only necessary words. Ilana may have been shocked by the pallor of my sunken cheeks. And I no longer find anything to say to her, except that her dress is pretty and her long hair suits her. I cannot deny that during our marriage it never occurred to me to speak to her like that. Why should I? Do you, Mr. Sommo, compliment her on her dress? Do you expect her to praise your trousers?

She covered my knees with a blanket. And when the wind got up I spread it over her knees too. I noticed again how her hands have aged, even though her face is young. But I didn’t say a word. We sat in silence for about an hour and a half. Far away, near the goat shed, your daughter was laughing and shrieking because Boaz was hoisting her up on his shoulders, his head, and then onto the donkey. Ilana said to me, Look. And I said, Yes. Ilana said, Don’t worry. And I said, No. With this we returned to our silence. I had nothing to say to her. Do you know, sir, this is how she and I use language now: No, Yes, It’s cold, The tea’s good, I like the dress, Thank you. Like two small children who can’t speak. Or like the shell-shocked soldiers I saw after the war in a rehabilitation center. I am lingering over this detail so as to stress once more that your suspicions are absurd. Between her and me there is not even a real bond of words. On the other hand, I had an urge to write you these pages. Even though I have no idea what the reason is. Your letter, which may have been intended to hurt me, did not. On the contrary, it pleased me. Why should that be? I have no idea.

At seven o’clock the sun set and a slow twilight set in. The sound of a mouth organ came from the kitchen. And a guitar. And smells of baking. (They bake their own bread here.) And at eight o’clock or a little later a barefoot girl brought us a kerosene lamp, pita still warm from the oven, olives, tomatoes, and yogurt (also homemade). I forced myself to eat a little so that Ilana would eat too. And she nibbled without enthusiasm so as to encourage me. At a quarter past nine I said, It’s getting chilly. Ilana said, Yes. And she said, Let’s go in. And I said, All right.

She helped me up to my room, out of my clothes (jeans and a sweatshirt with a picture of Popeye the Sailor-man), and onto my bed of planks. As she left the room she extracted a promise to call her if I had any pain in the night. (Boaz has rigged up a rope by my bedside. If I pull the end it rings the tin mugs he has tied at the head of her bed on the ground floor.) But I did not keep this promise. Instead I got up and dragged a chair and sat on it for several hours by the darkened window, whose panes have been mended with bandage tape. I was trying to absorb the night and to check what the moon was doing to the Hills of Menasseh to the east. This was how my mother used to sit during her last summer. Can you imagine to yourself what it is like to toss three hand grenades into a bunker full of Egyptians? And then burst in with submachine gun spraying, amid shrieks, howls, and groans? To get splashes of blood and brains on your clothes, your hair, your face? And have your shoe sink into a burst stomach, which emits a viscous bubbling?

I sat at the window until two o’clock in the morning and heard the sound of Boaz’s commune. Around the glowing embers of their bonfire in the garden they were singing songs which were unfamiliar to me. A girl was playing the guitar. Boaz himself I did not notice, nor did I hear his voice. Perhaps he had climbed on the roof to be alone with his telescope. Perhaps he had gone down to the sea. (He has a little raft, made without a single nail, which he carries on his back to the coast three miles away. When he was a child I taught him to make a
Kon-Tiki
from balsa tied with string. It appears that he has not forgotten.)

At two o’clock the house was wrapped in darkness and deep silence. Only the frogs continued. And some faraway dogs. And the answer from the dogs in the farmyard. The fox and the jackal, with which the place was infested when I was a child, have disappeared without trace.

I sat beside that window until the early hours, wrapped in a woolen blanket like a Jew at his prayer. I imagined I could hear the sea. Although probably it was nothing but the wind in the palm trees. I pondered on the complaints in your letter. If I had more time left I would take you out of your sentry box. Make a general of you. Give you the keys. And go and philosophize in the desert. Or perhaps take your job at the cinema. Would you like to change places with me, Mr. Sommo?

And around me the little hippie commune carries on its routine, even in the daytime, as it were in whispers, on tiptoe. As if I were a ghost that had emerged from the cellar and nested in the rooms of the house. And rooms there are in plenty. Most of them are still abandoned. Fig and mulberry branches grow through their windows. I find it charming the way Boaz officiates here—no, not officiates; exists—in the role of first among equals. I enjoy their singing in the kitchen or when they work or around the bonfire in the farmyard into the middle of the night. The strains of the mouth organ. The smoke of their cooking. Even the peacock that marches around like a brainless, arrogant supreme commander among the troops of pigeons in the passages and staircases. And the telescope planted on the roof (I want to climb up there. I want to ask Boaz to invite me for a little star trek. Even though I have almost no understanding of the host of heaven, except as an aid to desert navigation at night). The principal difficulty is that the rope ladder is now beyond my strength. I get dizzy easily. Even during my attempts to move by myself between the bed and the window. Apart from that, Boaz avoids conversation with me, except for Good morning, How are you, What do you need from the shop in town. (This morning I asked for a table to place my Baby Hermes on so that I could write this letter. An hour and a half later he brought up a table he had made for me out of packing boxes and eucalyptus branches, with a slanting footrest. And he also bought me on his own initiative an electric fan.) Most of the time he works apparently in the jungle that covers what was once the gardens: hacking at roots, sawing branches, removing rocks, carrying baskets of stones on his bare shoulder like Atlas the Titan, digging, pushing wheelbarrows of manure. Or standing in the wing mixing cement and gravel and sand with shovel and hoe, pouring the concrete onto a network of iron rods that he has interlaced, to lay a new floor. Sometimes I spy him at the end of the day high up in one of the old eucalyptus trees that my father planted here fifty years ago, hanging in a hammock that he has fixed up for himself at a height of twenty-five feet, and to my surprise reading a book. Or counting the clouds from close up. Or speaking to the birds in their own language.

Once I stopped him outside the toolshed. I asked him what he was reading. Boaz shrugged his shoulders and replied reluctantly: “A book. Why?”

I asked what book.

“A language book.”

Namely?

“Grammar Made Simple.
To finish with spelling and all that.”

Is it possible to read a “language book” as though it were reading matter to pass the time with?

“Words and that”—he granted me his slow smile—“is like knowing people. Where they come from. Who’s related to who. How each one behaves in all sorts of situations. And in any case”—pauses; sends his right hand on a long journey around his large head to scratch his left temple, an illogical and yet almost regal gesture—“in any case, there’s no such thing as ‘passing the time.’ Time just doesn’t pass.”

Doesn’t pass? What did he mean?

“How do I know? Perhaps it’s the opposite: we pass in time. How do I know? Or else time passes people. Do you feel like sitting down and helping me sort some seeds? They’re in the shed. In the shade. Only if you want to do something. Or maybe you could fold up empty sacks?”

That was how I was introduced, more or less, into their work roster (half an hour or so every morning, sitting down, if the pains are not especially bad. And sometimes I doze off there).

The girls who live here: two or three Americans. One French. One who looks to me like an Israeli schoolgirl from a good home, perhaps on a romantic escape from her family, perhaps “fulfilling herself.” Or maybe as an alternative to suicide? All of them seem to be his mistresses. Maybe the boys too. What does a man like me understand of all this? (When I was his age I was still a masturbating virgin. I imagine you were too, Mr. Sommo. I was even a virgin when I married. Were you, too, sir?) Boaz, as far as I can estimate, is close to six feet five and must weigh at least two hundred pounds. Yet he is lithe and feline, walking around all day barefoot and naked aside from a sort of faded loincloth. His dull golden hair descends in waves to his shoulders. His soft blond beard, his half-closed eyes, his lips, which do not close but hang slightly open, all give him the look of Jesus in a Scandinavian icon.

And yet he looks dreamy. Not quite here. And silent. Despite his physical size I do not find him at all reminiscent of my father, who was thick and bearlike. But, rather, somehow, of Ilana. Perhaps in the softness of his voice. Or his long, supple strides. Or his drowsy smiles, which strike me as childish and shrewd at the same time. “Are you going to restore the fountain, Boaz?” “Don’t know. Maybe. Why not?” “And the weather vane that used to be on the roof?” “Maybe. What’s a weather vane?”

From the window of my room: rows of onion and green pepper. Hens wandering around and pecking, as in an Arab village. A few mongrel dogs that were attracted here from far away and found food and affection. Eucalyptus trees. Cypresses. Olives. Figs and mulberries. Then the overgrown fields. Red roofs on the hill opposite, five hundred yards away. The Hills of Menasseh. Woods. And a mist or slight haze on the eastern horizon. Even the bottle chimes in the upstairs room where, forty-one years ago, my mother died seem precise and on target. Even though the only target of their strange sounds is me. If you have conjured up the image of a robbers’ den in whose half-light your wife cavorts day and night in the arms of a cruel demon, the simple truth is that there is no half-light: there is either harsh summer light or darkness. As for the demon, he dozes most of the time under the influence of painkilling drugs he brought with him from America. (Apart from them, his Baby Hermes, pajamas, and pipe, everything is still packed in his suitcases, which are stacked in a corner of the room. Even the pipe serves for biting rather than smoking—smoking makes him feel sick.) And when he is not asleep? He lies on his bed of planks and stares. Sits at the window and stares. Sorts some seeds in the cool shed in the yard until his strength gives out. A deposed demon serving out his sentence. Fuzzy from pills. A polite, quiet demon, making an effort not to become a burden, and almost pleasant-mannered. Perhaps like his father, who changed from a bear to a lamb in his sanatorium on Mount Carmel.

Or dragging himself around a little, leaning on his new walking stick, wearing the sandals his son has made him from strips of tire and string, faded jeans and a child’s shirt with Popeye on it, padding gaunt and threadbare from room to room. From entrance to hall. From the restored wing to the garden. Stopping to talk to your daughter. Trying to teach her to play five-stones. Strapping his wrist watch on her. And continuing on his way to count and catalogue to himself the shades of his childhood and his adolescence. Here he reared silkworms. Here he slaughtered and buried the parrot. There he ran (and subsequently blew up with gunpowder taken from cartridge cases) the electric train his father brought him from Italy. Here he hid once for two days and a night after his father kicked him. Here he used to come to masturbate. There he conquered with pins and arrows the map of western Europe. Here he burned a live mouse in a trap. And here he displayed his member and groped, half fainting, the crotch of the Armenian servant’s granddaughter. Here he helped the Martian invaders to land, and here he secretly tested the Israeli atomic bomb. There he cursed his father one day and received a fist in the nose and lay bleeding like a pig. And here he hid the fine sandals he found among his mother’s effects (and two days ago he actually discovered their rotten remains under a loose floorboard). There he shut himself up with Jules Verne and conquered desert islands. And here, in the low space under the back stairs, he huddled and wept unseen for the last time in his life: when his father killed his rhesus monkey. For this was the house where he grew up. And now he has come back to die here.