Soumchi (6 page)

And how my foolish heart ran wild; it beat inside my T-shirt, inside my vest, inside my skin and bone. Esthie will be glad—oh, Esthie will be glad.

 

Pomegranate scents waft to and fro
From the Dead Sea to Jericho.

 

Esthie will be glad.

I must never lose it; my pencil sharpener, my perfect, lucky pencil sharpener that I held in my hand that I held inside my pocket.

 

How only he who has lost everything may sue for happiness. "If a man offered for love all the wealth of his house And how we were not ashamed.

 

So there we sat at supper together, Engineer Inbar and I, discussing the state of the country. Esthie's elder brother was away building a new kibbutz at Beit she an, while her mother must have eaten before we came. Now she set before us on a wooden dish slices of some peculiar bread, very black and strong-tasting, together with Arab cheese, very salty, and scattered with little cubes of garlic. I was hungry. Afterwards we ate whole radishes, red outside, white and juicy inside. We chewed big lettuce leaves. We drank warm goat's milk, (At our house, that is to say the house that used to be mine, I'd get a poached egg in the evening, with tomato and cucumber, or else boiled fish, and afterwards yoghourt and cocoa. My father and mother ate the same, except they finished up with tea instead of cocoa.)

Mrs. Inbar gathered up the plates and cups and went back to the kitchen to prepare lunch for the next day. "Now we'll leave the men to talk men's talk," she said. Mr. Engineer Inbar pulled off his shoes and put his feet up on a small stool. He lit his pipe carefully, and said, "Yes. Very good."

And I tightened my fingers round the pencil sharpener in my pocket and said, "Thank you very much."

And afterwards we exchanged opinions on matters of politics. Him in his armchair; me on the sofa.

The light came from a lamp the shape of a street lamp on a copper column, which stood in one comer beside the desk and between one wall covered in books and maps and another hung with pipes and mementoes. A huge globe stood in the room too, on a pedestal. At the slightest touch of a finger I thought it could be made to spin round and round. I could hardly take my eyes off it.

All this time Esthie remained in the bathroom. She did not come out. There was only the sound of running water sometimes from behind the locked door at the end of the corridor, and sometimes, also, Esthie's voice singing one of the popular songs of Shoshana Damari.

"The Bible," said Engineer Inbar amid his cloud of smoke, "the Bible, quite right, no doubt, of course. The Bible promises us the whole land. But the Bible was written at one period, whereas we live in quite another."

"So what?" I cried, politely furious. "It makes no difference. Perhaps the Arabs called themselves Jebusites or Canaanites in those days, and the British were called Philistines. But so what? Our enemies may keep changing their masks, but they keep persecuting us just the same. All our festivals prove it. The same enemies. The same wars. On and on, almost without a break."

Engineer Inbar was in no hurry to reply. He grasped his pipe and scratched the back of his neck with the stem. And afterwards, as if he found an answer difficult, he began gathering up from the table every stray crumb of tobacco and impounding them carefully in the ash tray. When the operation was complete, he raised his voice and called:

"Esther! Perhaps it's time you made harbour and came to see who's waiting for you here. Yes. A visitor. A surprise. No, I'm not going to tell you who it is. Come to dry land quickly and you'll see for yourself. Yes. The Arabs and British. Certainly. Canaanites and Philistines, from the day that they were bom. A very intriguing idea. Only you'll have to try to persuade them to see matters in the same light. The days of the Bible, alas, are over and done with. Ours are a different matter altogether. Who on earth nowadays can turn walking sticks into crocodiles and beat rocks to make water come out? Look, I brought these sweets back last week, straight from Beirut, by train. Try one. Go on. Enjoy it. Don't be afraid. It's called
Rakhat Lokoom.
^*
Eat up. Isn't it sweet and tasty? And you—I assume you belong to some political party already?"

"Me? Yes," I stammered. "But not like Father ... the opposite..."

"Then you support the activities of the Underground absolutely and resist any suggestion of compromise," stated Engineer Inbar, without a question mark. "Very good. Then we are of different minds. By the way, your school satchel, with all your books and exercise books must be locked up at home in your flat. That's a pity. You'll have to go to school tomorrow with Esthie, but without your satchel. Esther! Have you drowned in there? Perhaps we'd better throw you a life-belt or something."

"Please could I have another piece?" I asked politely; and boldly, not waiting for a reply, pulled nearer to me the jar of
Rakhat Lokoom.
It really was delicious, even if it did come straight from the city of Beirut.

It was so good to sit here in this room, behind closed shutters, and between the walls covered in books and maps and the wall hung with pipes and mementoes, immersed in frank men's talk with Engineer Inbar. It seemed miraculous that Engineer Inbar did not snub or ridicule me, did not talk down, merely remarked, "Then we are of different minds"-—-how I loved that expression, "We are of different minds." And I loved Esthie's father almost as much as I loved Esthie, only in a different way; perhaps I loved him more. It began to seem possible to open my heart and confess just how badly I'd lied to him; to make a clean breast of today's shame and disgrace, not even keeping from him where I was journeying to and the roads I intended to take. But, just then, at last, Esthie emerged from the bathroom. I almost regretted it—this interruption to our frank men's talk. Her hair was not in its plaits now—instead, there fell to her shoulders a newly-washed blonde mane, still warm and damp, still almost steaming. And she wore pyjamas with elephants all over them, large and small ones in different colors; on her feet her mother's slippers, much too big for her. She threw a quick glance at me as she came in, then went straight over to where her father, Engineer Inbar, was sitting. I might have been yesterday's newspapers left lying on the sofa; or else I stopped there every evening on my way to the land of Obangi-Shari; there was nothing whatever in it.

"Did you go to Jericho today?" Esthie asked her father.

"I did."

"Did you buy me what I asked?"

"I didn't."

"It was too expensive?"

"That's right."

"Will you look again for me when you're in Bethlehem next?"

"Yes."

"And was it you brought him here?"

"Yes."

"What's it all about then? What's up with him?"

(I still didn't merit one word, one glance from Esthie. So I kept silent.)

"His parents are away and he lost his key. Exactly the same thing happened to me when I was a student in Berlin. We bumped into each other on Geula Street and I suggested he come to us. Mama has already given him something to eat. He can spend the night on the sofa in the living room, or else on the camp bed, in your room. It's up to you."

Now, all at once, suddenly, Esthie turned towards me. But still without looking at me directly.

"Do you want to sleep in my room? Will you promise to tell me crazy stories before we go to sleep?"

"Don't mind," muttered my lips, quite of their own volition because I was still too stunned.

"What did he say?" Esthie asked her father a little anxiously. "Perhaps you heard what he said?"

"It seemed to me," answered Engineer Inbar, "it seemed to me that he was still weighing up the possibilities."

"Weighing-schneighing." Esthie laughed. "O.K., that's it, let him sleep in here, in the living room and be done with it. Good night."

"But Esthie," I succeeded in saying at last, if still in a whisper only. "But Esthie..."

"Good night," said Esthie, and went out past me in her cotton elephant pyjamas, the smell of her damp hair lingering behind her. "Good night, Daddy."

And from outside, in the passage, she said, "Good. My room then. I don't mind."

Who ever, before, saw a girl's room, late, towards bedtime, when the only light burns beside her bed? Oh yes, even a girl's room has walls and windows, a floor and a ceiling, furniture and a door. That's a fact. And yet, for all that, it feels like a foreign country, utterly other and strange, its inhabitants not like us in any way. For instance: there are no cartridge cases on the windowsill, no muddy gym shoes buried under the bed. No piles of rope, metal, horseshoes, dusty books, pistol caps, padlocks and India rubber bands; no spinning tops, no strips of film. Nor are there subversive pamphlets from the Underground hidden between the cupboard and the wall and, presumably, no dirty pictures concealed among the pages of her geography book. And there aren't, wouldn't ever be, in a girl's room, any empty beer cans, cats' skulls, screwdrivers, nails, springs and cogs and hands from dismantled watches, penknife blades, or drawings of blazing battleships pinned up along the wall.

On the contrary.

In Esthie's room, the light was almost a color in itself; warm, russet-colored light, from the bedside lamp under its red raffia lampshade. Drawn across its two windows were the blue curtains that I'd seen a thousand times from the other side, and never dreamed I'd see from this, all the days of my life. On the floor was a small mat made of plaited straw. There was a white cupboard with two brown drawers in it, and, in the shadowy gap between wall and cupboard, a small, very tidy desk on which I could see Esthie's school books, pencils and paint-box. A low bed, already turned down for sleep, stood between the two windows; a folded counterpane, the color of red wine, at its head. Another camp bed had been placed ready for me, as close as possible to the door.

In one comer, on a stool covered with a cloth, there nestled a tall jug filled with pine branches and a stork made out of a pine cone and chips of colored wood. There were two more chairs in the room. One of them I could scarcely take my eyes off. But the bedside lamp bestowed its quiet light on everything alike. Russet-colored light. You are in a girl's room, I thought. In Esthie's room, I thought. And you just sit and don't say anything because you are just a great big dummy. That sums it up, Soumchi, absolutely sums it up. Which thought is not going to help me find the right words for starting a conversation. With much agony, I managed to squeeze out the following sentence, more or less:

"My room, at home, is quite different from this."

Esthie said, "Of course. But now you're here, not there."

"Yes," I said, because it was true.

"What do you keep staring at all the time?" asked Esthie.

"Nothing in particular," I said. "I'm just sitting here ... just sitting. Not looking at anything in particular." That, of course, was a lie. I could scarcely take my eyes off the arms of the second chair on which she'd laid the beloved white jumper, the very same jumper that, at school, I'd stuck time and again to the seat of her chair with chewing gum. Oh, God, I thought. Oh, God, why did you make me such an idiot? Why was I ever bom? At this moment it would be better not to exist. Not anywhere. Not anywhere at all, except perhaps in the Himalaya mountains or the land of Obangi-Shari, and even there they don't need such an idiot as me.

And so it was, after scraping those few words together, I sat dumb again on the folding bed in Esthie's room, my right hand still gripped tightly round my pencil sharpener and sweating a little in my pocket.

Esthie said, "Perhaps, after all, you'd rather sleep in the living room."

"It doesn't matter," I whispered.

"What doesn't matter?"

"Nothing. Really."

"O.K. If that's what you want. I'm getting into bed now and I'm going to turn round to the wall until you've got yourself quite settled."

But I did not think of settling myself quite. Still fully dressed in my very short gym shorts and Hasmonean T-shirt, I lay under the light blanket, taking nothing off but my gym shoes, which I threw as deep as possible beneath the bed.

"That's it. All clear."

"If you want, now you can tell me about the mutiny of the great Mahdi in the Sudan, just like you did to Ra'anana and Nourit and all the rest of them the day Mr, Shitrit was ill and we had two free periods."

"But you didn't want to listen then."

"But now is not then. It's now," Esthie pointed out quite correctly.

"And if you didn't listen to the story, how do you know that it was about the rebellion of the Mahdi in the Sudan?"

"I do know. Generally I know everything."

"Everything?"

"Everything about you. Perhaps even the things you think I don't know."

"But there's one thing you don't know and I won't ever tell you," I said, very quickly, in one breath and with my face to the wall and my back to Esthie.

"I do know."

"You don't."

"Yes."