Cafe Nevo (19 page)

He opened his eyes, and there before him was the sea, calm, deep, blue. Small boats crossed slowly to and fro over its surface, as fishermen cast their nets. Rising shakily, Sternholz shuffled into the kitchen. He lit the gas ring with a match and placed a blue enamel kettle on the fire. When the kettle whistled, he measured a spoonful of Nescafé into a chipped ceramic cup, added the boiling water, and stirred. He carried the cup back to the window, blew on it, and sipped. That hot and bitter brew was the demarcation of his day and night. Insomniacs cannot avoid their dreams, which will visit them awake if denied access to their sleep; and yet, like ghosts, they avoid the glare of day. The act of exorcism worked. Even as the hot liquid washed down his gullet, Sternholz felt the room lighten and clear, freeing him to lift his head and look about. Empty. The room was as empty as his life.

 

 

 

Chapter Twelve

 

Caspi sat on the toilet, his jeans around his ankles, straining and groaning mightily. He was constipated. In some way not yet clear to him, this, too, was Vered's fault.

After twenty minutes without result, he gave it up and returned to his study. The desk was piled high with books but empty of papers, except for a looseleaf notebook opened to a blank page. Caspi glared at the page for a while, fiddling with a pen. He took a bottle of whiskey from the bottom drawer and poured some into a glass. As he drank, he doodled a series of skulls and crossbones at the top of the page; when that was full, he moved into the left margin. Caspi's mind was blank, he wasn't thinking; but as the skulls grew darker and the crossbones more ominous, anger played across his face. When the margins were all full, the blank white interior of the page mocked up at him. He held his pen, poised to write, but the words wouldn't come. The apartment was too quiet, and the clocks were too loud. “
Damn
the woman,” he whispered.

He walked down the hall and into Vered's study. Her desk chair was a delicate-looking concoction of wicker and cloth, unexpectedly comfortable and strong enough to handle even Caspi's bulk without a murmur. He yanked open the passport drawer and checked the white envelope, replacing it carefully when he had done. A half-finished draft of her column lay across the typewriter; Caspi read it, penning in a few corrections and stylistic improvements. It would tell her he had been in there, but she would know that anyway; she always did, even when he had done no more than to lie down on her couch for a moment.

And who had a better right to lie on that divan than he, who had bought it for her on their first anniversary? Scouring the city for the perfect sofa for a left-handed writer who liked to work reclining. Finding at last, hidden in the eaves of a Jaffa antique junk store, an old leather chesterfield, covered with dust; the leather cracked and scratched but restorable, one end curving up to form a padded backrest, the other stretching out long enough—here was his error, witness his naïveté—to sleep on. Too late he learned that couches were anathema in a married home, for, like new weapons systems, they demanded use.

Poor Caspi: little did he know, then, how spitefulness and petty jealousy can lead a woman astray. For the sake of his bride he had broken off half a dozen actual or pending affairs, confining his wenching to married women with reputations to preserve, a far cry in his eyes from the young girls he preferred, but for her sake he did it; and was she grateful? Did she appreciate the sacrifice?

She was not; she did not. Her behavior disappointed him sadly. One day the irate husband of one of his women phoned Vered. Instead of doing the decent thing and blasting the tattletale for impudence, she came to
him
, carping, complaining, and crying, “Was it true? Was it true?”

“Yes, it's true, goddamn it!” he finally exploded. “Did I join a monastery when I married you? Did I become a castrato? You're a charming girl, Vered, but if you really believe all that crap about a man cleaving only to his wife till the end of his days, et cetera, then I've married a fool.” He'd blustered on until the matter of his infidelity was lost among the verbiage, and the only remaining issue was whether or not she would ever regain the esteem she had lost in his eyes, through her scene-making and carrying-on.

Caspi sighed, remembering her malleability in the good old days. When had she grown so hard? It must have been a gradual process, though for the life of him he could not recall the stages. (There had been that rather unpleasant little contretemps about the birth control pills—but that thought no sooner presented itself to Caspi than he slapped it down.)

Perhaps, reflected Caspi, it was not entirely Vered's fault. Perhaps there was some natural force at work here. They seem to have got caught up in some kind of marital whirlpool, sucked into a downward spiral. Struggling only increased the rate of descent; but passivity didn't help either and was harder to endure. The more women he pursued, the more Vered rejected him; the more she rejected him, the more frequent and public his outside pursuits. She punished his offenses by withdrawing to her studio, where, though forbidden entry, he gravitated whenever he was alone in the flat. He liked to finger her things, read her letters and drafts; he liked to lay her books on their spines and see where they fell open, to find out what she was reading. Vered hated it. She said he violated her privacy, and she stressed the word “violated.”

“What do you want from me?” she demanded, one stormy afternoon. “What are you trying to find out?”

“What makes you tick,” he said. “The
womanness
of you. The female soul.” Thereafter, whenever he pictured his wife in his mind, he saw her eyes looking at him as they did then: dark, remote, judging eyes that for all their criticism really
saw
him—something Caspi was convinced that no one else did.

“It's spying,” she said finally. “I won't have it.”

“Fool, you should be flattered I care; instead you accuse me of espionage! I am not spying! It is not information that I seek, but intimacy.”

“You have an abundance of intimacy,” she'd coldly replied. “Keep out of my room.” She put a lock on the door, but he tore it off.

On her desk was a portrait of Daniel, taken when he was two. In it the child gazed at the camera with a serious look in his eyes, which were neither blue like Caspi's nor black like Vered's. They were a speckled green, and they reminded him of someone he could not put a name to. Mother, father, a sibling perhaps; Caspi remembered none of them.

He crossed to the bookshelf and read the titles there. They were Hebrew, English, and French in roughly equal measure, organized by genre rather than language: poetry, essays, political memoirs, and a respectable collection of first novels from which his own was conspicuously absent. Indeed none of his books appeared on her shelves, though he had given her handsome leather-bound copies of each. Perhaps, he thought, the titles were
not
in the best of taste; they had certainly sounded cheap in Sternholz's mouth. But at the time they had seemed right. And Rami had approved. And they sold.

They would not sell forever, however, not without new books to bolster them and keep his name in the public eye. Three years had passed since his last book was published, and during that time Vered's career had blossomed. In addition to her weekly column in
Yediot—
she was the youngest columnist on the paper by eight years—she now edited the literary section. She, who had been “Caspi's wife” for the first seven years of their marriage, had achieved a position of power in his world that rivaled his own. If he didn't start producing soon, he was going to wind up being known as “Caspi's husband”—a fate worse than death.

All of which raised certain questions. Caspi had glimpsed something, a pattern, a structure. He lay on the divan with his sneakers on the lilac afghan to consider. If marriage was a microcosm, might it not be governed by the same physical and economic laws as the macrocosm? Conservation of energy, for example: perhaps marriages possessed a finite quantum of energy, or good fortune, that migrated from partner to partner. Was Vered's success linked casually or causally to his own inactivity? Did her energy level increase as his decreased? Was he, in fact, on a seesaw with Vered?

A pity if it were so, for though the obvious solution in such a case was to dismount, Caspi could no more disengage himself from her than he could cut off his writing hand. Vered was the only creature on earth who really saw, heard,
knew
him. Without her he would be thrown back on himself—that is, truly lost.

Yet Vered, by what Caspi persisted in thinking of as her flirtation, was tampering with the marital ecology, a dangerous tinkering that could lead to cataclysmic upheaval. A lesser man than Caspi might blame himself for the disaster his marriage had become; but Caspi rose above temptation and blamed Vered.

He blamed her unfeeling heart and her petty obsession with his peccadilloes. She had mastered the art of remote proximity; frequently whole days and nights passed by with no more communication on her part than blank stares when they passed in the hall. For Daniel's sake she pretended to talk to him when they met over breakfast, but always with a little smile on her face that seemed to say, I don't really mean this. As soon as Daniel left the room, she fell silent and would not look at him.

He felt the withdrawal of her eyes more than of her voice. It affected his work and made him feel insubstantial, an invisible man. Oh, she had much to answer for, and wasn't it terrible (thought Caspi) that a man should most desire the very thing that he could never have? Especially when it was in constant view. Caspi felt like Moses on Mount Nevo, overlooking the forbidden Promised Land. Moses held the lease on the land, and Caspi a license to the woman, but neither of them would ever realize his own property.

Caspi was only a man, ungraced by God, silenced by a mysterious affliction, unlike Moses, whose stammer was miraculously circumvented. God had grown stingy in his old age, or weak of limb. Had He but seen fit to cure Caspi's inexplicable silence, releasing that dense cloud of thoughts, images, dreams, phrases, and names which, blocked, exerted such unbearable pressure on his heart, then Caspi could have mimicked His magnanimity by freeing Vered.
Free her first, and see what happens,
said a voice inside his head; but Caspi was nobody's fool. Who dared ask that sacrifice of one who had never, in his remembered life, known a mother's love or a father's embrace?

The Jewish Agency had brought him from Europe at the end of the war, clothed by its charity but bereft of identity. First the Agency sent him to a kibbutz, where he lived for three years until the members, with the serene cruelty of idealists, rejected him. They sent him back to the Agency with a satchelful of clean, pressed clothes and a note (written in English so he could not read it, but he took it to an older boy who translated it for him) calling him incorrigible. Then Caspi was sent to an orphanage outside Holon, where he lived out the rest of his short childhood. He was hungry and he was smart; he got the best education he could under the circumstances, read a lot, and won a scholarship to Tel Aviv University. A self-made man who had never loved anyone until he met Vered.

Moses led his people onward toward the Promised Land, knowing all the while that he himself would never enter, but Caspi had had none of his advantages. If he could not have Vered, no one would.

Caspi needed a cigarette but found none in Vered's room. He returned to his study. There, sprawled on his desk like a woman with her legs splayed open, lay his notebook. Caspi threw himself into the chair and seized his pen, holding it poised to stab. His mind coughed, sputtered, and went dead.

He tried to squeeze the words out, like toothpaste from a tube, but nothing emerged. Something inside labored fruitlessly to come forth; he had constipation of the brain, a massive inner blockage that exerted unbearable pressure. Caspi, who by now felt very sorry for himself, thought: if only there were surgery for writers, surgeons who could open up his mind and lift those words out whole. If only one could deliver a book the way Athena was delivered, by cranial Cesarean.

Then the telephone rang, and Caspi jumped, banging his knee on the desk.

“Oh, it's you,” he growled. “No, it's all right. I've been meaning to call. I'm having second thoughts about the anthology.”

Rami Dotan squealed over the wire. With an expression of distaste Caspi moved the receiver further from his ear.

“Shut up,” he said. “Don't get hysterical. I haven't made up my mind definitely yet.”

“We can't cancel it now,” Rami cried. “We've already announced it.”

“So worse comes to worst you'll unannounce it.”

“Why are you doing this to me?”

“I'm not doing it
to
you, dear boy,” said Caspi. “I'm doing it
for
you. I just don't believe that friend Khalil is going to turn out a creditable performance. We don't want to humiliate the cousins, do we?”

“Aha!” said Rami.

“What does ‘Aha' mean?”

“I see!”

“What do you see, you moron?”

“I can't let you do it, Caspi.”

“Do what?” he roared.

“Make such a tactical error. If you pull out now, you'd just be confirming the rumors.”