Don't Call It Night (13 page)

Elazara Orvieto's apartment had been shut up and locked since her death. They were met by a faint smell of dusty books and unaired wool. The blinds were closed so they had to switch on the light. In the living room there was a sofa and a coffee table and two wicker chairs, all in the style of the austerity years, and a reproduction of a landscape in Galilee by the painter Rubin. In a blue glass vase a bunch of oleander flowers had already withered and started to disintegrate, and beside it, face down and open, was a book on the last ten days of Jewish Bialystok. A pair of brown glasses lay on top of the book and beside it was an empty cup, also brown. On a shelf were a Bible with commentary, some novels and books of poetry and picture books, among which stood a china figurine of a young pioneer holding a tiny stringed instrument that Noa was unable to identify for certain as a lyre. At the bank she had sat on the left, behind the last window, at the savings schemes counter, a woman in her fifties, efficient, desiccated, freckled, with flat-heeled shoes, her short hair fixed close to her head with a plastic bow. Noa could almost hear the flat tone of voice in that set phrase with which she ended every conversation: "That's one hundred percent okay."

In the low-ceilinged bedroom there was an iron bedstead covered with a plain rug and a dark cupboard of a type that Noa seemed to remember from her childhood used to be called a "commode". Dried desert thistles were turning grey in a Bedouin earthenware pitcher that stood on the floor in a corner of the room. On a stool beside the bed stood another empty brown cup and a little jar of pills, and a work about Baha'ism with a photograph of the temple in Haifa and a partial view of the bay.

From the bedroom they reached the balcony, which had been closed in to make a tiny room, little more than a storeroom. Here, there was only an iron bedstead, a shelf, a map of southern Israel on the wall and a wooden packing case, on its side, in which, meticulously folded, lay Immanuel's clothes: four shirts, two pairs of trousers, one khaki and one corduroy, underwear, handkerchiefs and socks. And also a brand-new leather bomber jacket with a mass of zippers and buckles that Noa could not recall ever seeing the boy wearing. On the top surface of the packing case that apparently also served as a desk were various textbooks and exercise books, a ballpoint and a small electric lamp with a blue shade. A few paperback novels in translation, a dictionary, a dried-up sprig of pine in a glass whose water had evaporated, and some poetry books. The green sweater that she remembered from last winter was lying on the bed. And at the foot of the bed an old, tattered blanket that Noa peered at for a while before she realized that it was where the strange dog used to sleep. This was where they both slept. This was where they sat indoors on winter days. Rolling up the blind and opening the window, she saw in front of her only a grey concrete wall, depressingly close, almost within touching distance, the wall of the next block. She nearly wept. Muki Peleg hesitantly laid his hand on the back of her neck, not quite stroking her, his nostrils quivering at the faint scent of honeysuckle, and said to her gently: Noa?

She reached up to push away his hand but changed her mind halfway and clutched it; she even leaned against him for a moment with her eyes closed.

As though releasing a repressed tenderness that he normally struggled to keep under control, Muki Peleg whispered to her: Okay then. There's no hurry. I'll wait for you in the other room.

He touched her hair and left.

Bending over she picked up the sweater and pressed it to her breast to fold it properly. She did not manage to fold it right, so she laid it out on the bedspread and folded it on itself like a diaper, then carried it slowly over to the packing case and placed it among the other clothes. Then she closed the blind and the window and was about to leave, but instead she sat down on the bed for a few moments, drained. She closed her eyes and waited for the tears. They refused to come. All she felt was how late it was. Rising to her feet she wiped the top of the packing case with the back of her hand and smoothed the bedspread, straightened the pillow, drew the curtain and left. In the next room she found Muki, in a wicker chair, with his glasses on, waiting for her, quietly reading the book about the end of the Jews of Bialystok. He got up and fetched her half a glass of water from the kitchen. Then, in his Fiat, he told her how much he hoped to sell the apartment for: naturally he wouldn't dream of taking a commission for this sale either, but the fact was that the money from the apartment would not be enough to repay Theo, and on top of that we still had to make what we wanted of the Alharizi house, though actually that depended on what we did want, and in fact we had never really discussed what we were going to do, as the Empress Catherine said to her pet Cossack.

Noa said: All right. Listen. It's like this. Bear in mind that if this inheritance turns out not to be enough, I had an aunt of my own and there might be another inheritance, hers, mine, that went to some ultra-Orthodox cousin in Brussels and I gave it up even though I didn't have to and I was wrong to do it. Maybe I could still put up a fight for it. Now take me to the California and treat me to an iced coffee. Iced coffee, Muki, that's what I want right now.

I
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late 1971 or early 1972 Finkel was appointed head of the Agency. As a consolation prize or to soften the blow, Head Office offered to send Theo to Mexico on behalf of the Planning Authority to serve as a special adviser for regional planning. After all, you're single, you're more mobile than a family man. A change of air will do you good, you'll see the world, shall we say a couple of years, maybe three, you've heard all about Latin women, well, there are blacks, too, and Creoles, mulattos, Indians. And professionally speaking, too, you're sure to find ample scope. You'll be able to revolutionize things. You can devise new structures. When you've had enough you can come home, by then there may have been some kind of reorganization. In principle everything is wide open and anything may still be reversed.

Within two and a half weeks he had dismantled his bachelor apartment in Hyrcanus Street, near the River Yarkon. He found the phrase "ample scope" vaguely exciting. And the word "mobile", too. This may have been the reason why he decided to travel with nothing more than a single suitcase and a grip. From year to year his contract was extended, his work expanded from the state of Veracruz to Sonora and Tabasco and eventually to other countries as well. Within a few months his superficial ties with his circle of acquaintances in Tel Aviv were dissolved. One or two women wrote to him via the office but he did not bother to reply, not even with a picture postcard. He saw no reason to exercise his right to home leave every six months. He did without Israeli newspapers. After a while he realized that he had no idea who the Minister of the Interior was back home or the dates of the Jewish festivals. From so far away all the wars, and the rhetoric that separated them, seemed to make up a vicious circle of self-righteousness and hysteria: kicking out at everything that stood in the way and at the same time pleading for mercy and demanding to be loved. A tacky cocktail of destiny, arrogance and self-pity, that was how Israel appeared to him from his vantage point in a hammock strung in a remote fishing village on the Pacific coast. Although he did not neglect to ask himself if all this was simply because that scum Nimrod Finkel had landed the top job in the Bureau. And the answer he gave himself, occasionally, was that that had merely been the last straw.

He felt an urge not to go back home. He tackled his work with a kind of quiet zeal. He managed to design a few models of rural areas that suited the tropical climate and were not at odds with the existing way of life. After the Nicaragua earthquake two districts were rebuilt along lines that he had put forward. New offers started coming in. In 1974 he wrote to the Planning Authority asking for indefinite leave. Nimrod Finkel granted it immediately.

Year after year he migrated from hotels to village inns, from air-conditioned offices to baking townships and Indian villages, carrying everything he needed in a modest shoulder bag, and he learned to speak six dialects of Spanish. Regimes rose and fell, but he steered his way through unscathed because he refrained from forging friendships. When he came across cruelty, corruption, barbarity or grinding poverty he passed no judgment but merely concentrated on his work: he had not come here to combat injustice but, so far as possible, to attain professional perfection and thereby perhaps, however minutely, to reduce disasters. Honour, the labyrinth and death were ever-present here, and life itself sometimes flared up like a festive firework display or a salvo of shots in the air: ruthless, spicy, noisy and cheap.

Women were easy to find, like food, like a hammock to spend the night in, all lavished on him everywhere out of curiosity or hospitality. His hosts expected him to join in conversations late into the night, under the dome of the sky, in village inns, in development-company encampments, in isolated farmyards, in the company of strangers or chance acquaintances. And again, as he had done around campfires in the youth movement and the army, he drew close to the fire and listened. Here, too, they talked halfway through the night about things like the ravages of time, family, honour vicissitudes of fate, the hypocrisy of society, the atrocities that people inflict on themselves and each other because of excessive appetites or, on the contrary, from excessive indifference. Theo drank little and hardly joined in the conversations. Only very rarely did he contribute a small anecdote from one of the Israeli wars or a biblical text that struck him as appropriate. When close to dawn the men dispersed and he headed for the darkness there was generally a woman who wanted to join him.

Sometimes he mingled with the crowd and from within it watched all night long the lascivious carnival, the Fiesta of Our Lady of Guadalupe, General Saragossa's feast day, the screaming festival, with dancing, carousing, horrific and seductive diguises, and salvos of flares and shooting in the rancid air and the throbbing of the drums accompanying desperate music that writhed till dawn in horrendous, violent desire.

He despatched most of his monthly salary to a bank in Toronto, because his expenses were negligible. Like a travelling artisan he wandered in those years from one godforsaken place to another that was even more so. He stayed in wretched villages at the foot of extinct volcanoes and once he saw one of them erupting in flames. Sometimes he journeyed under thick canopies of ferns and creepers through sensuous jungles. Here and there he would befriend for a while a desolate river or a steep mountain range that the forest seemed to be invading with the savage claws of its roots. Here and there he would stop for a couple of weeks and surrender to total idleness, lying in a hammock all day watching birds of prey in the depths of the empty sky. A girl or a young woman would come in the night to share his hammock, bringing huge earthenware cups of coffee from somewhere for them both. Past and future appeared to him on such nights as two common diseases, slow, destructive plagues that had infected most of mankind and were gradually causing all sorts of strange frenzies in their victims. And he rejoiced that he was not afflicted, and considered himself immune.

Even the present tense, that is to say the given moment that you are at, here and now, travelling, dozing, having sex, or the moment when you are sitting huddled, wide awake and quiet in your battered leather jacket in a window seat on a long night flight in a near-empty plane, even the present moment appears not to demand anything of you beyond being present in it and being as receptive as possible to what you are shown and what is being done to you. Like water running slowly down the inside of eyelids closed with fatigue.

Occasionally he felt fear, or rather a vague apprehension, that in the absence of suffering he might be missing something that would never return. Without having any idea what it was that was being missed, if indeed anything was being missed. Sometimes he had a feeling that he had forgotten something he should remember but when he collected his thoughts he found that he had forgotten what it was he thought he had forgotten. In Trujillo, in Peru, one night he jotted down on a sheet of hotel notepaper four or five questions in Hebrew: Is this a contraction of the life force? Barrenness? Atrophy? Exile? After an hour or two he wrote under these questions a reply: Even if we suppose it really is atrophy etc., why not? What's the harm in that?

And with that he seemed to snuggle down again into his tropical torpor.

But in his work he was as alert as a thief in a treasure chamber. For instance, when he happened to spend three or four days on end in a low-ceilinged broom closet of a room in some village inn, or occasionally in a splendid city office put at his disposal by the company, drawing, writing, altering, calculating, he was electrically sharp, needing neither sleep nor company, not raising his head from the paper even when a petite beauty slipped in with coffee and a tray of food and stood looking at him for a moment, waiting, tense, as though receiving the capering sparks of his energy on the skin of her nipples, until she gave up and left. Or sometimes during a meeting, when he presented his proposals to the decision-making authorities, a cold, sharp inner flame might beam out from him and make others yield to his will. At such times he felt a powerful, delightful upsurge of professional pleasure: the force of invention and perfection glowed white-hot in him like the filament of a powerful light bulb. It was as though deep in the forest, in a hidden cut-off place, there pulsed intermittently a kind of spring that existed independently of you and from moment to moment it bubbled up and vanished, bubbled up and again carved itself a predetermined course, by the force of laws that you were unable to understand but that had you entirely in their power.

And again on long journeys to godforsaken districts in the mountains or on the Caribbean coast, studying the locality, supervising the construction stage, introducing the odd improvised alteration, on the inspiration of the moment, he would sometimes be smitten suddenly with fatigue and lie down for days and nights in a hammock behind a hut. Sometimes he would rise at midnight and walk barefoot to join a conversation round a fire about love, betrayal and the vicissitudes of life. And so, in the courtyard of a miserable tavern, over glasses of native liquor, in the company of workers, technicians, vendors and comfort girls, under a strange night sky that might be suddenly illuminated by the momentary ecstasy of falling stars, he came to learn more and more about episodes full of lust and despair. As though these two were a pair of strolling players who appeared evening after evening before an audience gathered in taverns or in the courtyards of remote inns, never wearying of repeating endlessly the same fixed passion play, watched by Theo time and again without his ever being bored but without his being particularly impressed either.