Cafe Nevo (39 page)

“This is foolishness,” Sternholz cried, casting his eyes upward. “This is utter nonsense.”

“Why? Because nothing is owed to the dead? Just moments ago you were arguing for some kind of survival after death.”

“But not of debts,” he said quickly. “Not of accounts to be settled.” The words reverberated strangely in his head.

Vered looked at him, willing to believe but not quite able. “I'll never be rid of him now,” she said. In her voice was a discernible plea for contradiction.

“He acted without thinking,” the old man answered sternly. “He acted through love. No one ever said that Caspi couldn't love, but he surpassed himself at that moment. You've no right to take that from him.”

“I wish to God I could believe that.”

“Believe it, child,” he said. “Come here.”

Vered slipped out of her seat and stepped forward, but her legs would not support her; she fell to her knees before him. Sternholz leaned forward, pressing her head to his chest and wrapping his strong arms around her. “Just mourn for him,” he whispered. “Poor fool: I know you loved him.” Vered began to sob. Her thin body shuddered convulsively. The old man tightened his hold and rocked her back and forth, back and forth, crooning a German lullaby.

 

Three weeks after he died, Emmanuel Yehoshua Sternholz donned his white apron and descended to Nevo. His doctor had forbidden it, but what do doctors know? Sternholz was a man of manifold responsibilities. When his time came again, he wanted to go out with his apron on.

He said he meant to slip in without fanfare, as if he'd never been away, but if that is really what he wanted, would he have told Muny? Who knew better than Sternholz that telling Muny anything was like announcing it on the evening news?

Precisely at noon, Sternholz descended the rickety steps leading from his apartment to the back door of the café. When he appeared in the doorway, a great mass of people arose, cheering and crying out his name as if he were Moses descending from Mount Sinai. Sternholz flapped his apron to clear a path to the bar, where Muny awaited him. The little man fell to his knees, covering his eyes as one stricken by the presence of the Lord. “Hail to Sternholz, who has arisen from the dead!” he cried.

“Get up, you idiot,” growled the waiter, shoving him aside. From his sanctuary behind the counter Sternholz began to distinguish faces. Ilana in smart maternity clothes, arm-in-arm with Vered Caspi; Sarita, Arik and Uri Eshel, and Rina in a wheelchair; the old chess players in their nattiest rags; Mr. Jacobovitz, wide-awake for once and smiling toothlessly; even Minister Brenner had turned up, like a bad penny.

“All right; all right,” Sternholz shouted irritably over the din, “don't you people have any work to do? Drinks on the house.” Another cheer arose, this one from the ranks of the chess players.

One by one, customers stepped up to shake his hand or embrace him. Sternholz set his mouth in a disdainful grimace, but his eyes sparkled like a bar mitzvah boy's.

When Uri Eshel began to wheel Rina toward him, Sternholz hurried forward to greet them. Despite the heat, Rina was wrapped in a woolen shawl.

“Nu?”
he said to her, squatting creakily beside her chair, and indicating Arik and Sarita with his eyes. The two stood nearby, side by side, fingertips touching.

Rina nodded and squeezed his hand. Sternholz sighed from joy and planted a kiss on her head. “So. We'll dance at their wedding, you and I.”

“In spirit, anyway,” Rina replied, without a mote of bitterness.

Then Arik came to him while Sarita hung back, and he said, “You finally get your wish, old man. I won't be coming around much anymore. I've got a job in Jerusalem.”

“Nu, mazel tov.
Sold out, have you?” growled Sternholz.

Arik grinned. “Wait and see.”

The old man grunted, like a workman who's finished a job, then turned his beady eyes on Sarita. Though she was as always effortlessly lovely, she no longer reminded him of Yael; he could see hardly a trace of that former resemblance. Either her face had changed over the past few months or his vision had improved; or was it simply that Sarita was her own woman now? She returned his look with one as steadfast, perceptive, and engaged as his own.

“You didn't come,” he said, getting to the heart of the matter.

Sarita stepped forward into the light. “I called the hospital. I made sure you were all right.”

“But you didn't come.”

“No. I was angry with you,” she said simply.

“I let you down?”

“You almost got killed.” Her lower lip jutted out like an angry child's.

“But you've forgiven me,” Sternholz said, frowning at Arik to keep him quiet.

“Yes. But if you'd died, I wouldn't have.”

“Someday I'll die. Everybody does.”

“But not like that. And not in front of me,” she said, very seriously. Sternholz nodded, and Sarita relaxed and smiled at him. “I finished your painting,” she said.

“Good.” (It never occurred to Sternholz to deny that it was his. That little stratagem had eroded into nothingness.)

“Do you want it now, or later?”

“Now,” said the waiter, who had waited long enough.

Sarita fetched the painting, covered with brown wrapping paper, from a corner. Sternholz stood it on top of a table, leaning against the bar. He stepped back. Sarita unwrapped the canvas and came to stand beside him. Everyone else lined up behind them in a semicircle four people deep. There was silence in Nevo.

The painting was actually two paintings, one superimposed on the other. Drawn from the perspective of someone standing behind the bar, Café Nevo was reproduced realistically, down to its cracked linoleum tables, dusty photos mounted on the walls, dirt-colored walls, and peeling ceiling; and so too Nevo's people, living and dead. There were cries of pleasure from the crowd as, one after another, people recognized themselves and old friends.

In a detail almost identical to the sketch Sarita had done, Vered and Ilana shared a table. Hands clasped, heads bent in conversation, they seemed oblivious to the importunate child who, not content to beg, had drawn a chair up to their table and was clambering aboard. Muny, dressed in his floppy bum's shoes and old army jacket, sat just behind Ilana, leaning toward her at a perilous angle, cupping his ear. Behind and to one side of Vered, Peter Caspi stood alone, gazing at his wife with uncharacteristic tranquility.

A young Uri Eshel sat between Yael and Yehuda Blume. Their glasses were raised in celebration, and the men had their arms around one another's shoulders. Yael met the viewer's eyes, as she had the painter's, with a smile of benediction.

All about the café's perimeter were the tattered chess players, like a decrepit palace guard. At the very center of the painting stood Emmanuel Yehoshua Sternholz, tall and white, his apron wrapped around him like a
tallith
, his face stern and his gaze turned outward. It was at this point that the inner picture broke through the outer, for Sternholz seemed to tower above the heads of his customers. He did not float above them like a Chagallian angel but stood with his feet planted firmly on unseen ground. Sternholz's elevation provided a secondary perspective on the painting, all of whose characters could now be seen to occupy different levels, as if the café were not built on flat land but set upon a mountain.

The vision of the mythical Mount Nevo that had visited Sarita when she first received the commission had endured to inform the portrait. In this underlying, half-seen painting, Sternholz the waiter stood at the summit of Mount Nevo; and beyond the periphery of Café Nevo's low-life praetorian guard, at the top of the painting, one could dimly see not Dizengoff but” a vast, shining expanse of golden land, the Promised Land; and everyone who gazed upon the painting felt the promise, its pathos and its hope, as if it were made to him.

Thus the present mingled with the past, reality with vision, and the painting said, as a thousand words could not, that the one was forever immanent in the other.

Tears came to Sternholz's eyes, but they were tears of joy, not sorrow. It seemed to him suddenly that he was blessed, that an angel watched over him, that there was meaning and purpose and a cohesion in life. But then his old skepticism asserted itself, and he thought, It's the painting that makes me feel this way; it's art, not truth. But clearsighted Sarita tugged at his arm and said firmly, “I only paint what I see,” and Sternholz remembered Greta's face and Jacob's, and their expressions of joy untrammeled by any need for forgiveness; and in that moment of grace he perceived the universe as mysterious and hard but ultimately benign. He felt a great movement of charity, a loosening of bonds, the exultation of a prisoner set free, if only for a day. “God bless the child,” he said, and taking Sarita's face into his hoary old hands, he kissed her brow.