Don't Call It Night (12 page)

So it came about that at the age of thirty-two she left the house that had been her home, packing all her belongings in three suitcases, and sending the collection of picture postcards as a gift to the Mahatma Gandhi Sanatorium, and went to study literature at Tel Aviv University surrounded by students who were ten years younger. After that she became a secondary school teacher in Bat Yam, lived once or twice with older men, had an abortion with complications and finally, for six months, lived with a famous professor, originally from Prague, who in his retirement was devoting himself to preparing a revised edition of an
Essence of Judaism
in six large volumes. This professor was a sour, sarcastic man, and his hobby, from his youth on, had been piano-tuning. Whatever the time, whatever the weather, he was always ready to set off for anywhere, with his little bag of instruments under his arm. He was not a young man, nor a well man, and he would tune a piano for nothing. So long as it was a real, pre-war piano. One day the professor accepted an invitation to spend the remaining years of his retirement in the guesthouse of the Catholic University of Strasbourg, where he hoped to discover afresh, peacefully, the essence of Judaism. Noa felt she, too, ought to leave the country for a year or two, to find out whether some other kind of life were possible. Friends arranged a part-time job for her in Venezuela. It was there, in Caracas, thanks to some concert tickets, that we met. Since then we have been tied to each other.

A
FTER
the nine o'clock news and the weather forecast, Theo said, Let's switch off and go out for a bit. I changed out of the dress I wore around the house and put on jeans, a red top and white walkers. Theo was wearing walkers too, and jeans with a broad belt. Going down in the elevator we hugged and I buried my face in his shoulder. His body was warmer than mine and the belt gave off a smell of old leather and sweat. I said: You're always so warm.

Theo said: You're on holiday as from yesterday. What are you going to do, Noa?

I said: The clinic. Immanuel House. Only I wish we hadn't had to take your money. That wasn't good. I mean, I don't feel good about it. Avraham's going to repay it all next week.

Theo said: Avraham: who's that?

And a moment later: Oh yes. Your African. It's not urgent.

There was no one in the street. A row of parked cars and a row of streetlights, some of them not working. Some pathetic trees, Indian beech, eucalyptus, tipuana, grew as though they had difficulty breathing. The trees, in fact the whole street, suddenly looked to me like an amateur stage set. The windows of the apartments were open and from almost every one came the voice of Housing Minister Sharon shouting at his interviewers. A dry breeze blew from the hills to the east. A startled cat suddenly slunk out from the trash cans and almost tripped us. I put my arm round his waist and laid it on the broad belt, which was rough to the touch. The metal buckle gave my fingers a cold thrill. Shabby staircases showed in the entrances to the buildings in a murky light that seemed to infect the mailboxes, too.

Theo said: The Mayor. Batsheva. The dinosaur. You ought to try and speak to her, not in her office, privately, about your fantasy. I don't suppose you'd let me speak to her? Would you?

This business will go better without you.

And without you, Noa.

Don't take everything away from me.

Everything. What's everything? There's nothing there.

On the corner of the street, at a point the streetlight could not reach, a couple stood in a motionless embrace, like a sculpture, with lips joined, frozen in a kiss that in the darkness resembled mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. As we walked past it seemed as though the border between them had been erased. I fancied the girl was one of my Talis from class 12, and hoped I was mistaken, though I didn't know why. So I couldn't prevent myself from staring like someone at an identity line-up. For some reason I was blushing in the dark.

From a first-floor window came a sound of regular, even crying, the crying of a satisfied baby who would grow into a calm child. Theo hugged my shoulders and for a moment I had a feeling his squinting left eye was scheming something in the dark. Two streets further on the town suddenly stopped like a ship whose bows were stuck in the sand on the shore. And the desert began. Theo leading, we went down the path that led into the wadi. His shadow covered me and my shadow, because I was walking so close. Black flints cast dark conical forms behind them that seemed to be cut with a knife because of the silvery sharpness of the moonlight. Scattered bones whitened here and there among the stones. From down below in the wadi came a gust smelling of dried thorns. It was as though the pale rocks, the slope, the hills to the east, even the sharp starlight, were all waiting for a change. Which would come at once, in another moment, and then everything would be clear. But what the imminent change was or what needed to be clarified I had no idea.

Theo said: It's night here, too.

I fancied I heard a slight hesitancy in his deep, calm voice, as though he were unsure of his ability to convince me that it was night here, too, as if he doubted whether I could understand.

Once this summer's over, I said, we'll see what comes next.

Theo said: What comes next?

I don't know. Let's wait and see.

At a bend in the wadi a shadow stained the road: a fallen rock. No, not a rock. A wreck. An abandoned car.

It wasn't abandoned. It was a Jeep. Silent. Lights out. From close up we could see the shadow of someone, a head drooping onto the steering wheel. A man by himself, bent, huddled, his coat collar turned up, uttering smothered laughs at irregular intervals. Theo put his hand in front of me to halt me. In three strides he had reached the Jeep and bent over the huddled man. He may have asked if he could help. The man raised his head and stared, not at Theo but at me, motionless, then slowly sank back onto the steering wheel. Theo stayed for a moment, his dark back hiding from me whatever it was he was asking or doing, then he took my hand and pulled us further on towards the lonely poinciana. What was the matter, I asked, but Theo didn't answer. Only when we'd passed the poinciana, as though he'd invested a lot of thought in his reply, he said:

It was nothing. He was crying.

Shouldn't we have stayed a bit? Or else—

It's not a crime to cry.

We had reached the top of the hill known as Hyena Hill. Yellow, sparse, scattered in the darkness, the lights of the town flickered as if they were vainly trying to answer the stars in their own language. On the southern horizon a blinding light flared up then died in a dull explosion. Look, I said, fireworks. Soon there'll be music too. Theo said:

A flare. It wasn't a firework, Noa, it was a flare. From a plane. Their night training. They're firing at dummy targets.

And suddenly, perhaps because of the words "dummy targets", I remembered with a pang the poet Ezra Zussman, and the bereaved father, Avraham, their shy smile shining and dying away in an instant, fine, melancholy smile, like autumn clouds parting. The boy's downcast eyes behind the long lashes, and the father's face furrowed with lines of subdued affection, like a weary retired metalworker. What did he have left now? In Lagos? Waiting for the return of the chimpanzee he abandoned in a clearing in the forest? What was keeping him there, and what did he want from me, really, deep down inside? By means of what spell was that humble man managing to transmit his dim wish to me through the silvery summer night stretching between Tel Kedar and Lagos across deserts and plains, over thousands of moonswept mountains and peaks and valleys and expanses of shifting sands from here to there?

For a quarter of an hour or more we stood at the top of Hyena Hill and I hardly felt him take my hand in his and stroke it with his other palm. We saw patches of milky mist slowly creeping and massing in the bottom of the wadi and rolling towards the unlit Jeep. The sorrow of the darkness and the desolation, the man sitting there huddled over the steering wheel of the Jeep in the mist, the policeman at the Ashkelon junction with blood dripping from his nose and dusty sweat rolling down his face and neck, all of it is on me. But why on me? What have I to do with the suffering of strangers I have met only by chance or strangers I haven't met and never shall? And if it has to be me, how can I distil from myself that essential combination of compassion and detachment? How to bring disaster under control like that policeman, not with a panting heart but with a surgeon's hand? "And where are we meant to be shining, and by whom is our shining required?"

Noa.

What?

Come.

Where? I'm here.

Come closer.

Yes. What?

Listen. Last Friday when I was waiting for you at the California Café a funeral procession crossed the square with a stretcher covered in a tallit and yeshiva students and a Charity Saves from Death box. Schatzberg the pharmacist's gaga old man has died. Elijah. Only his name wasn't Elijah. I've forgotten what it was. It doesn't matter. They buried him opposite Bozo's wife and baby, among the pine trees, just past your pupil and his aunt. Shall I go on? You're not too cold?

I don't understand what you're trying to say.

Nothing. Let's go on a trip. Let's get married. Let's decorate the apartment. Or buy a CD player. Just tell me for once what you really want.

Get married for what?

For what. For you. You're not happy.

And then quickly: Actually, I don't know.

I said: Let's go home. I'm a bit chilly. The kid who died, the clinic, the Alharizi house, and the grieving father I don't know how it got into me. Something's going to happen, Theo. Don't you have a feeling too, as if the overture has ended?

We started back. And we chose not to return by way of the Jeep and the wadi but to make a detour past the cemetery at the bottom of the cliff that conceals the forbidden valley. Crickets and darkness and the scent of a distant campfire on the breeze. For a moment I felt a vague desire to turn my back on the sparse lights at the top of the hill, to leave the road, to head much further south towards the real wilderness, to cross a threshold and leave. What was the poet trying to say? That words are a trap? If so, why did he not resort to silence? Suddenly, it was as if a mountain had moved, and I recalled in a flash of illumination the pencil that Immanuel really did receive from me one winter's day during a power cut, when I went to the nurse's room to get some aspirin and the nurse wasn't there, but like a shadow he was sitting there by the bed, looking at me with downcast eyes from behind his feminine eyelashes. And yet he seemed to be sorry for me. For some reason I spoke sharply to him, as though it was my job to discipline him on the spot. I asked him gruffly what precisely he was looking for and who had given him permission to go into the room when the nurse wasn't there. I was aloof and entrenched at that moment and irritable like my father in his wheelchair on the roof for days on end while life passed by in a procession through the lens of his telescope. The boy nodded, almost sadly, as though he could read my mind and was trying to minimize the embarrassment he was causing me, and asked if by any chance I had on me anything to write with. Did he blink? Or was it just my imagination? With rough movements, keeping my back to him, I opened one drawer after another in the white medicine closet until I found the broken tail-end of a pencil. Before I left, or rather fled, I growled at him sarcastically: I'm afraid you'll have to look for a sharpener yourself. He had a talent for literature, Avraham Orvieto said, he might even have been planning to become a writer, whether or not he had any ability to write only you can judge, it was only with you that he found any sense in studying, and he even told me in his letter about the pencil you gave him, and he said he was writing the letter with that very pencil. I could not believe what I was hearing. Like a woman receiving by mistake a declaration of love intended for someone else. If we hadn't decided to come back the long way, if we had come up the path through the wadi to the Jeep with its lights out and discovered that the man had vanished, then I could have sat in the driver's seat, with my head on my arm on the wheel, mourning for the child who had been, and I shall never have another. He plummeted to his own seabed. When we got home we locked the balcony door and made some herbal tea and put on the TV to see if there was anything worth watching, and as it happened there was a programme of excerpts from Artur Rubinstein's last concert before he died. Then I went to have a shower and Theo shut himself up in his room to listen to the news on the World Service from London.

T
HERE
is a God after all, chortled Muki Peleg, in baggy burgundy trousers and a sky-coloured shirt, with a violet silk scarf round his neck, as he opened the door of his new Fiat for Noa. Come and see for yourself what's fallen down from heaven for us, as the carpenter said to his virgin wife. Noa put her straw handbag down by her feet, then changed her mind and put it on her knees. And they set off for the Josephtal district to look for the apartment that had belonged to Immanuel Orvieto's aunt. Ron Arbel from the law firm of Cherniak, Refidim and Arbel had received instructions in a wire from Lagos to clear up the deceased's estate. That morning he had announced on the phone that his client authorized Muki Peleg's agency to sell the aunt's apartment and its contents and to use the money to repay Theo part of the loan he had advanced to the Immanuel Orvieto Memorial Fund for fear that the opportunity to buy the building might be missed.

On the way, he told Noa about a red-headed beautician who he was a hundred percent sure was attracted to him, more than attracted, wild about him, and he asked her advice about which of four possible approaches to adopt so as to get her into his bed. Noa suggested he try scenario number three. Why not? And would the same approach work, for instance, with her? Noa said sure. As he described to her what he termed the tactical scenario, and went on to tell her about eleven thousand dollars he had just put into a new partnership for importing ties from Taiwan, sexy fluorescent ties that glowed in the dark like cat's eyes, she detached herself and tried to imagine what it is like when you are dead: a dark non-being where eyes that are no more see nothing, not even the total darkness because they are no more, and the skin that is no more does not feel the cold and the damp because it, too, is no more. But all she could imagine was at most a feeling of cold and silence in darkness, sensations, and sensations are life, after all. So this too has vanished. Plunging to its own seabed.