The Rainy Day Man: Contemporary Romance (Suspense and Political Mystery Book 1) (24 page)

             
A different and contrasting role could be described for each of the characters in my story, but the real mystery was my role.  Of one thing I was sure, it went far beyond the declared position of explosives expert supposed to create a provocation in a tiny border village.  There was something else, obscure.  I remembered the way the Head had intertwined his fingers, defining me as, "essential for the general scheme."  His fingers had expressed entrapment rather than unification.  Suddenly, Dura was not only representative of amazingly interconnected events, but also part of a scheme.  I got up and peered agitatedly out of the window.  I knew the shadows I had seen were unreal.  But at the same time I realized that they were signals of a deep, inner realization which was now formulating itself in my mind: they are going to put the blame on me.

I could see the whole scenario.  Intentionally or not, something had happened to Anton
Khamis which was more terrible and strange than anything that could happen in war.  Someone had taken care to keep me for the time when this would have to be explained.  I would be the person who had had the tools, the opportunity and the motive:  I had arrested him, I had taken the letter and had visited the woman who lived with him.  I went rapidly over how I had played into their hands. I had no receipt from the detention camp, I had lied to Yvonne.  There were my visits to the priest and even the incident of the blind girl in the cellar, which could indicate my aggressive tendencies.

             
Overcome by the injustice of it all, I moved towards the telephone, to contact the Head, or to call a taxi and go to the old man.  The memory of my last conversations with each of them cooled me down.  The Head, to the extent that he was involved, would not retreat from his plans.  My father-in-law could do nothing.  His only advice had been to keep my eyes open and react with agility.

A wave of lassitude swept me back to the armchair.  What should I look out for?  What should I beware of?  How could I be agile?  If I could dislodge even one of the components in the tight web which had been woven around me, find someone who had seen Anton
Khamis at the detention camp and would agree to testify, lay my hands on the original arrest warrant, find the medical file, the clothes he had been wearing or something else which had not been through the perverted, distorting prism of Dura. 

The accordion fell silent. 

"Hallo, Paul," a woman's voice said in French above my head.

I jumped up.

              "Hallo, Eugenie," a man's voice answered from the other loudspeaker.  "Shall we begin the lesson?"

"Let's begin," Eugenie said.  I sat down again.  Paul asked, "Do you live in Paris?" 

Eugenie replied, "Of course, in my old flat in Boulevard Saint Germaine." 

Paul laughed.  "I had to move to Boulogne.  The prices there are cheaper..."

              "In that case," Eugenie declaimed, "I'll send you a postcard."

             
"A postcard is a good idea," Paul said.  "And you can also phone..."

             
How had I failed to think of it before?  I hurried to Hannah's bedroom.  The phone lay in the middle of the bed.  I dialed: first the international code, then the dialing code for France, for Paris, and finally the phone number of my flat there.

It rang once, twice, three times, four times.  I tried to reconstruct the time needed to get to the phone from the furthest point in the flat. 
Seven, eight, nine rings.  No answer.  When I put my hand out to hang up the receiver was lifted and someone said, "Hallo, oui?"

"Monsieur," I began, "you don't know me.  I'm the previous tenant."

"What?"

"I lived in your flat before you."

"I don't live here.  I'm the painter."

"Can you call the concierge?"

"Who?"

"Madame
Joubert, the concierge."

"Will you wait?"

"I'll wait," I promised impatiently.

I could hear his footsteps going off.  They had taken up the carpet.  What had they found underneath it? 
Ancient floor-tiles?  Concrete?  Wooden planks?  My mind drank in the few background noises which the phone could transfer: church bells chiming, the sound of cars passing the open window and the creak of a door opening. 

"Hallo," a woman's voice lilted. 
"Madame Joubert speaking."

"It's Vincent, Madame
Joubert.  How are you?"

"Vincent?"

"I lived in flat number 4."

"Ah, yes, Monsieur Vincent..."

"Could you do me a favor...?"

She hesitated.

"I'll cover all the expenses..."

She consented to listen and three times I repeated the address, the questions she was to ask and the message she was to give. 

"The Alley of the Iron Chick?" she asked again.  "Are you sure that's what it's called?"

"Yes, yes."

"And are you sure that she'll give me the letters, that aunt of...how do you spell his name, with a C?"

"
Khamis," I shouted, "Khamis with Kh.  Tell her that his life depends on it...  And if she doesn't have letters, then anything else she received from him in the last few years..."

As I put the receiver down there was a faint click behind me.  The door to the room moved slightly.  I went into the corridor and to the living room.  The record was still going round beneath the Perspex lid. 

"Have a pleasant flight," Eugenie said.  Then there was a pause during which the pupils were supposed to repeat what had been said.  Hannah was sitting in silence in the green armchair. 

"Thank you," Eugenie said in the left loudspeaker.  "You have been very kind."

***

             
For me Saturday nights in Tel Aviv are particularly difficult.  The awakening pace represents a renewed victory of tension over tranquility.  I see a calmness mingle with a collective frenzy, and sense in the air the first electric currents of a hard, unkind and routine week.

And so I retreat to books, thoughts and solitude, moments which Hannah hated in particular.  She claimed she could see me sinking into a different world, one that was mine alone.  That Saturday evening, after she had returned from the club to a long afternoon nap, she closed herself in her room and watched television.  I stayed in the kitchen, where I could think and read in the comforting presence of homemade food and the warmth of the cooker.  I heard Jonathan's footsteps echoing as he ran home from the bus-stop.  I put some milk on the burner.  When he came in, panting, through the back door, I already had two cups of cocoa on the table.

"Sit down," I said.

He looked around.  "What's happened?"

"We haven't talked for ages."

"That's all right," he put out his hand, turned my book round and glanced at its binding.  "I can live with that.  Where's Mother?"

"In her room."

He sank onto one of the chairs and pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket.  "Why are you suddenly showing an interest in me...?"

“It's you who's been avoiding me the whole weekend..."

"Now you've noticed," he grumbled and lit a cigarette with movements which delighted me.  They were masculine, confident and indicated the start of an experiment. 

"Doesn't smoking affect your fitness?"  I asked.

"...As if you care about my fitness."
  Bitterness and hostility emanated in his voice.

"I care about everything you do, everything that happens to you," I said in an even voice.

"Stop talking rubbish, okay?"

Gently I removed the skin in my cup.  "I mean every word I say."

"I told you to stop, okay?"  The anger that was churning inside him was now very near the surface.  "I hate it when you begin with all that ingratiating stuff."

"It's not ingratiation..."

"So how come you're suddenly showing an interest in me?" he burst out.  "Why just today and not two months ago, when I failed English, or last week, when I was scared to register for the tennis tournament..."

"Don't shout."

"I will shout," his voice rose excitedly, "if I want, I'll go berserk too.  You've got no right to tell me what to do after having deserted me."

"Who told you all those things?"

"What things?"

"That I'm ingratiating, that I deserted you..."

"No one needs to tell me.  Do you think I don't see for myself?  I always understood what was happening!  Kids understand everything, they just don't say...  Ever since I can remember it's been clear to me that a father is someone who comes and goes, someone who's busy with all kinds of mysterious things outside the home."  His hands gripped the warm cup.  They were large and square, possibly the heritage of the old man.  Tufts of hair fell on his forehead.  I half expected him to shake his head to toss them back, but he put them back in place with a gentle movement of his hand.

"Correct," I said.  "I was far away, but that doesn't mean that I didn't love you."

"So why weren't you with us?"

"Among other things, because I couldn't live with your mother."

              "Why?"  A recalcitrant muscle which twitched in his arm emphasized the contrast between his physical strength and a certain fragility under the skin.

"It's complicated," I hesitated.  "We have different expectations of one another and of life."

"You could have compromised and stayed if I was so important to you..."

I wavered for a moment.  He calmed and leaned his elbow on the table as he licked drops of cocoa off his downy upper lip.  Suddenly his features were completely alien to me.  Who was my son, in fact?  I compared his fresh skin with my own wrinkled one, his abundant mop with my thinning hair, his innocent passion with my practiced indecisiveness.  I wondered whether his youthful experience was anything like the one I remembered, what he thought about at night before he fell asleep and what the future looked like to him.  All this was a preliminary to the bigger question: how much compassion had he for me beneath the layer of tension?  Would he be able to understand what I was going to say to him, appreciate its frankness and resist the temptation to be insulting? 

"I suppose," I began, "that I couldn't love you at the price of a compromise that would have made me miserable.  If I had stayed here only because of you, I would have borne you a grudge for every day of tedium and humiliation, for every quarrel with your mother, for every night of dreariness."

For a while he said nothing and examined me intently. 

Then he asked, "And when you chose the other way and lived in all those distant places, how did your love for me express itself?"

"In the fact that I was always happy to come back to you, that I thought about you, phoned and wrote and felt close to you."

His lips were pursed, like Hannah's when she was about to say something harsh.  "And to Mother?"  I remained silent.  "Doesn't the knowledge that you made her miserable bother you?"

"Mother made herself miserable."

"It's easy to blame her."

I looked at him.  "I'm not blaming your mother for anything, just saying that I had nothing to do with her bitterness.  No one can be responsible for someone else's happiness."

"Happiness is always connected with other people," he said in that voice of young people when they think they have formulated some essential truth.

"It's connected with other people but can't be obtained from them, only from oneself.  Other people merely participate in a process but it's basically yours alone.  That's why one can't blame others when one's unhappy either..."  His cocoa had grown cold and turned pale.  Absent-mindedly, he stirred the drink with a spoon, arresting the descent of the chocolate particles to the bottom. 

"You mustn't put yourself in the same trap which your mother has been in all these years," I added, "feeling that you were the price of my freedom.  It's tempting to blame me.  In the short term you might manage to rid yourself of the need to cope and even cause me guilt feelings, but in the end it will only destroy you.  If you get used to seeing the failures of your life as the result of what people around you did or did not do, you'll lose your own ability to create happiness..." His expression was confused and I could see it turning into aggressiveness.  I thought of Michel and the difference between them - the one tormented and bitter, the other confused and demanding...

The phone rang with a volume which made me jump. 

"Mother will answer," Jonathan said.  He stretched his arms and, with the movement of a basketball player, threw the kitchen towel at the phone.  Under his arms white salt stains had accumulated in the fabric of his shirt.

"With all that wisdom of yours," he challenged me, "are you happy?"

"Not always," I said tensely.  One compartment of my mind was counting the number of times the phone was ringing.  "In many respects I'm at the beginning of the road.  I hid for too many years.  I invested in means, not ends.  I was good at all kinds of unimportant things..."  A murmur came from Hannah's room.  Jonathan was bound to me with a springy kind of concentration.  "Now," I continued, "I think that I'm capable of developing, of changing... among other things," I chose my words carefully, "if we have the strength, Mother and I will separate..."