Cafe Nevo (30 page)

“All right then,” he murmured.

“All right what? I know what you're thinking. ‘Ask not what your country can do for you,' and all that jazz.”

“I believe that,” Uri said quickly.

“So do I, goddamn it!” Arik bawled; then he raised his eyes to the ceiling and laughed. “Why do I feel like I'm standing on the edge of a precipice and everyone is yelling, ‘Jump!'?”

“You don't get to choose your time.” Uri pulled his chair closer and reached across the table. “Your duty is to retard the progress of the right until the pendulum swings back.”

“Will it swing back?”

“It always does,” he said. On bad nights Uri lulled himself to sleep by counting the scars on his body, which were many and various. Now, in his son's face, he saw one he himself had been spared: the scar of fighting in a foreign war. They studied one another intently, like strangers assigned to the same tank crew.

“When you quit the army,” Uri said, with obvious effort, “I consoled myself with the thought that you were doing it to get closer to the source, to get into politics. You would have been welcome in the party. I know they approached you.”

“Because I was your son.”

“You are what you are, regardless of whose son you are.”

“Are you suggesting that I turn the file over to your comrades?”

“You could do worse things with it.”

“Like what?” Arik said scornfully.

“Like nothing.”

“Nothing isn't exactly what I had in mind. Perhaps,” he said with a wily look, “I should hand it over to you. You'd know just how to use it. Who knows more about blackmail than a politician?”

Uri crossed his arms over his chest and sat upright, staring through hooded eyes at the young man, who returned his gaze unflinchingly. After some moments he said, “You're tempting me. Fair enough; I tried you, too. People do, when they have to get to know each other quickly. But let's not waste any more time on it.” He leaned back, tilting his chair perilously.

“When you were thirteen,” he said, “we had the first bar mitzvah ever on the kibbutz. Neither Rina nor I gave a damn about the religion, but I couldn't offend my religious colleagues. It turned into a big deal: to avoid any appearance of partiality, we had to have both Chief Rabbis officiate jointly. When the day came, you went up to the improvised
bima
and read your Torah section. The Rabbis spoke in turn, and then I blessed you. Today you are a man,' I said, but I didn't see you as a man. I never did, until today.

“You were my wayward shadow. Everything you did reflected on me. But now, suddenly, I see a man who has stumbled into a position of extraordinary power, and I wonder what he will do with it. And because I'm not quite sure what he'll do, I take a long, hard look at him. At you. And I see what you are.”

“What do you see?”

“I see a man who knows the score, even if he doesn't like it. You know damn well that you have the means to influence Brenner, and through him his party, the fulcrum of the coalition. And you know that since you can, you must.

“Maybe I don't know you well; in fact”—Uri laughed— “I feel like I never knew you at all, until you stood before me as a stranger. And yet something in me knows your heart. Listen, Arik. I don't give a damn that you stole that file. Your mother does, but I don't. I only care how you use it. Politics is the business of life,” he said, raising a finger, as if he were back in the orchard, lecturing the biddable trees. “A man is not a man if he's not engaged.”

A smile tugged at the corner of Arik's mouth, struggling to break loose. “Are you finished?” he asked.

“Yeah I'm finished,” Uri growled, noticing his upraised finger and lowering it.

“Sure?”

“I said all I have to say.”

“That's too bad. I was hoping for your comments on a little list I drew up.” He produced a sheet of paper from his shirt pocket.

“Give me that!” Uri snatched the paper, which was covered with close handwriting. He scanned it quickly, then reread it, and finally looked up, his face split by a huge grin.

“Any comments?” Arik asked blandly.

“This is audacious.”

“I thought you'd like it. Will he go for it, do you think?”

“Not all of it. Maybe not even most. But some.” Beaming, Uri leaned over to catch Arik's neck in the crook of his arm. “You had this up your sleeve all the time. You came here knowing just what you were going to do. Oh, man, you had me going.” He mimicked Arik's voice. “‘What should I ask for?' ‘I don't know if I want to play the game.' I should have known.” Sitting back, he laughed heartily.

They heard a disembodied cackle. “You should have,” Rina gloated from the bedroom. “He's
your
son.”

Both Arik and Uri jumped. They'd forgotten she was in there.

 

 

 

Chapter Nineteen

 

Inspiration was an overrated commodity, thought Sarita, who had never tried working without it. The muse's signal, being remote, was often distorted and always incomplete; and between the static-marred vision and its realization lay an impassable jungle, through which the painter must hack her way. The labor was grueling, and made more so by the heat, which by mid-July had grown quite unbearable. She could no longer paint on the roof, for the tar had melted into hot sludge, and her little room was like a broiler lit by the sun. More and more Sarita took to working in Nevo, under the watchful eye of Sternholz.

But she had another reason, even more compelling than the heat, for working in Nevo. The vision that had come to her just before Arik's intrusion left with him but returned later. When she tried to capture it on paper, the composition flowed freely and fluently. After two hours of intense effort she turned away from the easel, yawned, stretched, rubbed her eyes, went into the bathroom, and splashed water on her face—then went to look at the draft. The painting quivered with motion. People were twisting in their seats, standing, conversing, playing chess, laughing with heads thrown back, arguing with balled fists, pointing, shoving, and shouting; but they all had one thing in common, and that was their facelessness. They had heads, but no features, distinguishing or otherwise.

This gave the draft an eerie, Magritte-like surrealism that was far from Sarita's intent; it implied a sameness and interchangeability that directly contradicted her experience of Nevo. Of course, Nevo's patrons were all or nearly all Jews, but that similarity served only to set off their essential differences. The ingathering of the interbred exiles had brought the whole world together under one roof, as it were, and that grand disparity was well represented in the real Café Nevo, of which hers was but a woefully inadequate representation.

The relationships, composition, and flow were all right. The observing eye followed the action in an inward spiral, coming to rest in the center of the painting on its only identifiable figure: Emmanuel Yehoshua Sternholz, who seemed larger than life in his great white apron. But what was Nevo without its faces?

Sarita took up her brush and closed her senses to the world, willing her mind to go blank and her fingers to take over. She called on her muse, but as usual there was no reply (muses being notoriously hard to reach, far more often out than in). Her hand remained still, her subjects' faces stubbornly obscure.

Thrown back on reason, she decided that since the problem was one neither of conception nor of understanding, it must be one of information. The faces remained blank because she lacked the necessary information to fill them in. Garbage in, garbage out: too little data were reaching her muse, and she had only herself to blame.

She had huddled in Nevo like a little mouse, scared to death that someone would speak to her, not daring to look at people lest they look back. While the café surged and seethed around her, she clung to her little boat, all adrift. Those blank canvas faces reproached her timidity, a slothful habit and one that had long outlived its usefulness.

She began going daily to Nevo, varying her times and sitting at different tables for different perspectives. The regulars knew her now and signaled their acceptance, each in his own way. The old chess players acknowledged her comings and goings by a slight raising of their bent heads, Muny paid court with an exaggerated but by no means unfelt deference, and Caspi (who had much on his mind) had at last rewarded her unrelenting blindness with resigned indifference. The regular women, Vered Caspi and Ilana Maimon among them, smiled and said hello, while the transient women, mostly groupies attached to Caspi's crowd, continued generation after short generation to stare at her suspiciously.

People
did
look at her, and Sarita learned she could look back without blushing and even answer with composure when addressed. She began to feel at home in Nevo. The old waiter watched but no longer hovered; in sketch after sketch his craggy face stared out at her with crusty approval.

As she surrendered to the rhythm of the café, Sarita acquired the twin Nevo knacks of selective eavesdropping and brazen staring. By focusing her attention on one table, she found that she could eliminate almost all interference; and as she looked and listened, she also drew. Between what she overheard and what her sketches later told her, Sarita penetrated a score of secrets.

She was the first, after Sternholz, to guess what Vered and Ilana had in common, a guess confirmed by a second look at her sketch of the two together. The presence of the unseen child was explicit enough to arouse suspicion in others, and Sarita had a few moments' compunction about using that scene in her final picture; but her callousness in the service of her art was that of the true practitioner and far outweighed her discretion. The scene fit, it was true, it was intrinsic; therefore she would use it.

 

Sarita's blooming was noted by Sternholz, who attributed it to other factors, one in particular.

One slow afternoon, he lowered himself ponderously into a chair and gave a preparatory cough. Sarita turned toward him with a smile.

“You should pardon the intrusion,” the waiter said, with that elaborate sarcasm that served him as courtliness, “but all these pictures you've been making, are they for posterity or are you planning to show them?”

“They're just studies,” she said, closing her pad.

“Studies for what?”

“For a painting of Nevo.”

“And when do we get to see this masterpiece?”

“I don't know. I'm not doing it for myself. It was commissioned.”

“Commissioned!” scoffed the waiter. “Who would want a picture of this dump?”

Sarita smiled. “Someone who is attached to it, maybe. Or someone who wanted to help. Or both.”

The old man harrumphed and changed the subject. “How's young Arik doing?”

“Who?” she said, chipping with a fingernail at the cracked linoleum table top.

“I haven't seen him for a while,” he said slyly.

“That's too bad.”

“No, it's good. It's about time he got off his bum. What's he up to, and why is Pincas Gordon looking for him?”

“How should I know?”

Sternholz linked his hands behind his head and leaned back. “Only that the last time I saw him, he asked for your address,” he said innocently.

Sarita chewed the inside of her lip, not answering. After a moment she began flipping rapidly through her sketch pad. When she found the drawing she was looking for, she held it so that only he could see.

Sternholz sucked in his breath. He brought his chair down with a thump and leaned closer, his eyes darting from one side of the sketch to the other, as if he were reading rather than scanning a picture. Sarita watched him anxiously, though not without amusement. When Sternholz finally looked up, his face was white, with vivid red patches on his cheeks.

“How do you do it?” he whispered.

“It just happens. Not on purpose. I look at one thing and draw another.”

Sternholz pushed away the hand that held the drawing. “It's a heavy burden,” he muttered.

“It's no burden at all.” She shrugged. “I don't care how I do it. It's not important. I thought you could tell me if I got it right.”

The drawing, which lay open on her lap, showed Nevo on a wet winter day. Though the café, whose furnishings have not been changed in thirty years, looks the same, the people in the drawing are dressed in an old-fashioned style. At a center table sits a youthful Yael Blume, surrounded by young men and girls. Across the room, the waiter Sternholz leans against the bar, his great white apron dangling limply from his shoulders, like melted wings. Believing himself unobserved, he gazes with unguarded longing across a sea of heads toward the beacon of Yael's fair, unconscious countenance. Neither she nor anyone else in Nevo regards the waiter.

“What I particularly wondered”—Sarita broke into his reverie— “was whether she knew how you felt about her.”