Cafe Nevo (27 page)

She was tired. She had so much work to do, and never, since taking this putative lover, enough time to do it in. Daniel needed new shoes, and his booster shot was overdue. She felt guilty at leaving him so often with Jemima; her mother loved the child dearly but was overworked herself and too nervous to deal with a three-year-old. Caspi was no help, almost never home, and when he was, shut up in his study, pounding away at his typewriter.

She took some pleasure, strange under the circumstances, in Caspi's having once again begun to write, and some pride in being the cause, though it was hate, not love, that had loosened his tongue. He was writing his introduction to Khalil's half of the anthology, as Khalil (she surmised by his glee) was to Caspi's. It seemed that everyone but she had time to write; and with that in mind she glanced at her watch, and a surge of irritation swept her to her feet.

At the sound, Khalil whipped around. “Where are you going?” he said, more sharply than he'd intended.

She stared at him.

“Just a few more moments and I'll be done.” He flashed an ingratiating smile. “I count on your generosity as a fellow writer.”

“I find it easier to be generous with my body than with my time. I suddenly realized that I don't have enough of it to spend listening to you write when I should be working myself. I count on your understanding as a fellow writer,” she said as she dressed.

“You're angry with me.”

“Not at all; only maybe next time we could meet in a library, so we could both get something done.”

Crowing, Khalil crossed the room swiftly to stand before her.

“I love it when you show your vixen teeth, my delightful Mrs. Caspi.” His hands went to her dress; hers rose to deflect them.

“Did it give you a thrill,” she asked, “to write about Caspi while his wife lay there naked?”

“Of course it did.” He laughed, and putting his arms around her, he tumbled her to the bed with a force that straddled the line between lust and coercion. Vered pushed him away, averting her face. The struggle was silent and lasted two or three minutes. Then, with a curse, Khalil let go.

Vered smoothed her dress, glanced in the mirror, and left without a word.

 

His enemy's turf was the worst possible place for a confrontation, but Khalil was too angry to be wise.

Vered Caspi would not be back. That bird had flown, and it was no comfort to know that his own stupidity had done it; indeed, that knowledge only aggravated his anger. His wrathful eyes parted the hordes of Jews out for their Sabbath stroll; more than one soldier touched his weapon as Khalil passed, and he, who usually passed unchallenged, was stopped no less than three times by police and civil guards, forced to submit to the indignity of having his identity card checked and his business questioned. These coals of humiliation fueled the fire that was burning bright by the time he reached Nevo, but Khalil, having grown up in occupied territory, was incapable of showing his true face to the oppressor. He stepped into Nevo and looked distastefully about the crowded room, with the manner of an English don entering a den of undergraduates.

The old waiter hobbled over purposefully, clawing at Khalil's arm. “Go away,” he muttered, “Caspi's here.”

“What's that to me?” said Khalil.

Rami Dotan spotted him and wailed. “Oh, my God. Caspi, be cool,” he pleaded as the Arab approached their table. A murmur of anticipation, like the hum in a theater when the lights go down, swept through the café. Khalil ignored Caspi and addressed the publisher.

“I thought I'd find you here. I was in town on”—he paused, smilingly seeking the right word—”personal business and thought I'd bring you this.” He tossed a slim manuscript onto the table before Rami.

Caspi snatched it up. He read the first page; then, slowly, his eyes rose to meet Khalil's.

Khalil smiled.

Caspi read another page. Then he ripped the manuscript in half.

Rami cradled his head in his arms. The two girls slipped away.

“The truth is never easy to take,” Khalil said sympathetically. “Don't worry, Dotan. I have plenty of copies.”

Rami pulled himself together with a visible effort “If we could just discuss this calmly, I know we could work it out. Sit down, Khalil.”

“Don't sit down,” growled Caspi, “and if you value your jackal hide, you'd better get the hell out of here.”

“That's enough from you, big mouth,” said Sternholz, coming quickly to Caspi's side. “No use making a bad thing worse. As for you,” he told Khalil, “you get while the going's good. Now. Go. Goodbye.
Salaam Aleichem.”

“The hell I will,” said Khalil.

“I mean it. I'll have no fighting in my café. Caspi, you shut your mouth. And you, Mr. Big Shot Poet, get out.”

Khalil sneered at the old man. “You want me out? Throw me out.”

Puffing his cheeks out furiously, Emmanuel Yehoshua Sternholz bore down on the interloper. He was blocked by Caspi's rising bulk.

“We don't talk that way to Mr. Sternholz,” Caspi said with gentle menace. “I know life is crude where you come from, my little baboon friend, but when you visit Nevo you must act like a man.”

“Stop it, stop it,” moaned Rami Dotan. He took a calculator from his pocket and set to figuring frantically.

“I wouldn't give advice about manhood, in your position,” Khalil said. “From what I hear you're not much of an expert.”

“You're dead meat,” Caspi roared. “You're history.”

Khalil laughed scornfully. “Scratch a liberal and find a racist. You're proving that every word I wrote about you is true.”

“It's not your race I'm insulting. It's you, and your syphilitic bitch mother, and your ass-licking father, and your whore sisters and their whore sons, and—”

Khalil swung at him. Caspi ducked. Rami, dancing ineffectually in the background, caught the blow squarely on the jaw. He crashed to the floor, where he lay still for several moments before scampering away on hands and knees.

Nevo's patrons scrambled for safety and a view.

Caspi lunged for Khalil, but the younger man skipped out of the way. Seizing a chair, he wielded it like a lion tamer while he taunted Caspi. “You call me animal names because you envy my virility. You pathetic old cuckold!”

Charging, Caspi wrenched the chair out of his grip and tossed it aside. They closed on one another in a flurry of fists, elbows, and knees.

Women screamed. A crowd gathered outside, but no one tried to intervene. Someone spoke of the police; but the only phone was behind the bar, and Sternholz made no move toward it but stood morosely with his arms folded, watching fatalistically. The fight was silent and vicious, as each man tried to inflict maximum damage in minimum time. For some time they traded blows, but Caspi had fifty pounds on Khalil, which he used to advantage. Though the Arab was wiry and surprisingly strong for a pen-pusher, Caspi had him pinned to the ground and was beating his head against the floor when three men finally stepped in and pulled him off.

“I'm going to get you, you lying Arab bastard prick,” Caspi bawled as they hustled him toward the back. “I'm going to destroy you. You're a lousy poet!” he screamed as they shoved him out the door.

 

 

 

Chapter Seventeen

 

There is no more intimate meeting place than a gynecologist's waiting room, for the range of reasons for being there is so limited, and those reasons so very personal. Dr. Steadman's specialty, fertility and its various effects, further narrowed the range of possibilities and increased their sensitivity.

Fertility is a tricky commodity for a doctor to deal in. Most women wish they had either more or less of it, and it was a matter of continual distress to Dr. Steadman that half his patients seemed desperate to abort what the other half so desperately sought to conceive. The doctor had a Sabra's fine disdain for the law. When he agreed with a patient's decision to abort, he obliged without submitting her to the indignity of appearing before the requisite abortion committee of three. But when he disagreed, and especially when he sensed she had been pressured into a decision, he adamantly refused to perform even legal abortions, citing no reason but his own peace of mind.

Despite his habitual bluntness, Dr. Steadman respected his patients' privacy by spacing appointments so that only one woman at a time would have to wait. But today an emergency had backed up his schedule. Ilana Maimon had been waiting for forty minutes when the outer door opened and Vered Caspi walked in.

Both women were surprised. Vered, the first to recover, said hello; Ilana smiled in return. After some hesitation, Vered took a seat two places away from Ilana. They smiled at one another again; then Ilana looked down at her magazine, and Vered opened a book.

No sound came from the doctor's office, and the nurse was nowhere to be seen. Several minutes passed in uncomfortable silence. The two women had a degree of acquaintance which called for casual conversation, but under the circumstances they were shy. Finally Ilana cast her magazine aside. “I didn't know you use Rafi Steadman,” she said lightly. “He's a good man.”

“As men go,” Vered said morosely, closing her book but leaving her finger in place. “I like him. He delivered my first baby.”

“And now you've come about your second,” Ilana said without thinking. Vered flushed, and Ilana hissed in self-contempt. “I'm sorry,” she said, to pass it off. “I have babies on the brain.”

“Do you?” Vered said thoughtfully. Their eyes caught and held. Suddenly, with the sixth sense that pregnancy bestows in such matters, each discerned the other's secret.

The door to the doctor's office opened, and the nurse stepped out with a harried air.

“Dr. Steadman is sorry, but he's got to go to the hospital,” she said. “Would you ladies like to reschedule?”

They did, then walked out together and stood on the pavement, reluctant to part.

Ilana said nervously, “Would you like some coffee?”

“Yes, I would,” said Vered.

On Dizengoff Circle they both paused to gaze at a very pregnant woman sunning herself on a bench by the fountain, and again their eyes rose to meet in mutual understanding. Ilana laughed under her breath, and they continued in unspoken agreement along Dizengoff until they came to Café Nevo. Vered glanced inside and, seeing that Caspi was absent, led Ilana to a table in the back, far from the chess players. Sternholz gawked when they came in together; when they sat down, his jaw sagged. He attended them with unusual precipitance.

“Cappuccino,” said Ilana, adding to Vered: “I've always found cappuccino to be the most consoling drink in the world.”

“Then I'll have one, too,” Vered said.

“Cappuccino,” sighed Sternholz, and hobbled off.

“Silly old man,” Ilana said fondly. “Why doesn't he get some help in here?”

“He says the owner won't let him.”

“I wonder why he keeps up the pretense. He knows that everyone knows that he's the owner.”

Sternholz lingered for several moments after serving the drinks, but as they did not speak, he gave up and stalked away, puffing his cheeks indignantly as if he had been thwarted in the performance of some natural duty or function.

Then their heads came together, and Ilana murmured bravely, “You, too?”

“Yes,” Vered said.

“You're sure?”

She nodded. “Are you?”

“Oh, yes. For almost two months now.”

“Two months!” Vered said wonderingly. “Then you're having it.”

“No... yes... I don't know.” Ilana laughed a little shrilly. “I still don't know. It's crazy. You are, I suppose?”

“I don't know either.” Their hands met across the table and for a moment they were almost like lovers, lost in a world of their own.

 

Sternholz could not fathom it. What had Vered Caspi to do with Ilana Maimon, or Ilana with Vered? They were birds of a very different feather, Ilana a peacock, Vered a hawk; all they had in common was beauty, but their types of beauty were exclusionary. No one man (Sternholz did not count himself in that category) would see it in both.

Though perhaps there
was
some resemblance in character, he thought. Vered was a loner, and so, despite her professional gregariousness, was Ilana. It was, perhaps, not the friendship itself which was so strange, but the fact that it had come about outside his auspices, for where else could those disparate lives touch?

Muny approached the bar and burped beerily into Sternholz's face. “What's the story with those two?” he asked.

“Mind your own business,” Sternholz growled. “Stay away from them.”

“Maybe Ilana's giving Vered some pointers,” said Muny with a nasty laugh.

“That's some dirty mouth you got there.”