Don't Call It Night (22 page)

Avraham Orvieto said that what he wanted to do was to save young lives. He said that his son Immanuel had loved Tel Kedar and that he himself was beginning to understand the personal reasons for this love. He also said that Immanuel had been fond of Noa and now he himself had become fond of her and Theo.

Towards the end of the afternoon Theo drove the visitor to see the empty building.

I've got a headache, I said, I'll stay at home.

After ten minutes I really did have a headache.

I took two aspirin and went and sat in the air-conditioned reading room of the public library, which was deserted. I found a book in English about the history of colonial rule in Lagos and I read it for a couple of hours, then I read about chimpanzees until someone came and touched my shoulder gently and said, Noa, sorry, it's closing time. When I got home I found that Avraham Orvieto had already left for Tel Aviv, asking Theo to pass on his thanks and good wishes. Theo himself was sitting in one of the white armchairs, as usual, patiently waiting for me to get home, waiting quietly yet unrelentingly, unyieldingly, with his bare feet propped up on the coffee table and his undershirt showing off his tough shoulders, his wide belt smelling of leather that has soaked up male sweat, but for once he was not sitting in the dark, he had put the light on so that he could read a book about addiction that he had picked up from my bedside table, called
Youngsters in the Trap.
As I came in he took off my glasses that he was wearing and asked how I was feeling, was my head better?

Absolutely wonderful, I answered.

F
IVE
to one in the morning. Through the wall the grating of the elevator; with groaning cables it continues without stopping to a floor above. Noa is in her bed, she has washed her hair, she is wearing a white T-shirt and her glasses, her head is ringed with a halo of light from her bedside lamp, she is absorbed in a book,
The Rise and Fall of the Flower Generation.
Theo is lying down in his room listening to a broadcast from London about the expanding universe. The balcony door is open. A dry wind coming from the east from the empty hills slowly rustles the curtain. There is no moon. The light of the stars is cold and sharp. The streets of the town are long since empty and dead but the traffic lights in the square have not stopped rhythmically changing colour, red amber green. Alone in the telephone exchange Blind Lupo, on night duty, listens to the shrill of a cricket. His dog is dozing at his feet but from time to time it pricks up its ears and a nervous twitch ripples its fur. When is Elijah coming? The man who used to ask is dead, now perhaps he knows the answer. At the ultimate limit of hearing the blind man listens to the rustling of the night because he feels that behind the layer of silence and beneath the grating of the cricket the howls of the dead are stirring, faint and heartrending, like mist moving through mist. The weeping of the newly dead who find it hard to adapt sounds feeble and innocent, like the cry of a child abandoned in the wilderness. Those longer dead sob with a continuous, even wail, women's crying, as though muffled in the darkness under a winter blanket. While the long-forgotten dead of bygone ages, Bedouin women who starved to death on these hills, nomads, shepherds from ages past, send up from the depths a desolate hollow howl more silent than silence itself: the stirring of their yearning to return. Deep and dull beneath it breathes the groaning of dead camels, the cry of a slaughtered ram from the time of Abraham, the ashes of an ancient campfire, the hissing of a petrified tree that may once have flourished here in the wadi in springtime eons ago and whose longings still continue to whisper in the darkness of the plateau.

Lupo stands up, trips on his dog, apologizes, feels his way and closes a window in the exchange. Noa turns out her light. Theo, barefoot, goes to check that the door is locked and turns to investigate the refrigerator. What is he after? Again he has no idea. Maybe just the pale light filtering through the food, or the sensation of cold inside. He gives up and goes back to his bedroom. Forgetting to switch off the radio, he goes outside to sit for a while facing the empty hills.

A
FTER
the meeting Theo went out to fetch a pizza from Palermo, instead of lunch, to save time. He wanted to be able to take our visitor on a tour of Tel Kedar and also to show him the Alharizi house.

As the door closed behind him, I said: I don't have much to contribute to an argument about the fighting in the Negev in '48. You won that war and all the wars, the few against the many, with or without Pini Finkel's flanking movement, or somebody else's. So now I'm going to bring you the correspondence, the receipts and the accounts, so that you can see what we've done with the money you insist on sending us every month.

Avraham Orvieto said there was no need for that. First of all, for the time being almost all the investment had come from Theo. He would repay him in the coming weeks. There had been a delay in realizing the cash. And in any case it was becoming clear that there were many more obstacles ahead and you might say that the purchase of the building had been a little premature.

But I didn't give up. I had to present to him the accounts and receipts that I had put together, it wasn't all properly sorted out yet, and show him the paperwork and the exchanges of correspondence. He was the one who had given me this job to do, and he was the one to whom I had to report. I'll just go and bring everything I can find. Or rather, I took his hand, let's go to my room, that's where the papers are, and it's cooler there because I don't open the blinds in the morning.

The only chair in my room was occupied by the clothes and underwear that Theo had stripped off me in the night. I sat Avraham down on my bed and placed myself between the bed and the bedside table, trying to hide from him with my body what was on the chair; I put my glasses on and handed him the papers one by one. Avraham Orvieto peered at each document, his warm face radiating sympathy, curiosity and perhaps mild astonishment, and piled the papers in his lap. After a while I did sit down next to him on the bed, because I felt odd standing like that, with my shadow falling on him, almost covering his ascetic form, in this room where the noonday light filtered in softened and distorted between the slats of the blind. When I sat down I found it was even odder to be sitting knee to knee with the father of the boy on the bed where Theo and I last night had made love, lingering on every note, gently holding each other back.

I said, as though I were speaking to an inattentive schoolchild: Are you checking those papers, Avraham? Or are you just browsing? Are you dreaming?

Look, he said, you were the only teacher he liked, and he may have had an ear for literature. If you like I'll try to tell you a story. During the last winter, in December, after his first trip to Elat, I was here for two and a half days. I stayed at the Kedar Hotel. On the last evening after sunset he came to the hotel to take me for a walk. Every time I came on a visit we used to stroll for an hour or two, even though we didn't talk much. He was wearing warm corduroy trousers and a brown leather jacket, a stylish bomber jacket that I'd bought him on my way here, at Rome airport. I was wearing a coat, too. We walked shoulder to shoulder, because we were both about the same height. It was a cold evening and a strong wind was blowing off the hills. If I am not mistaken we went round the smart residential district, crossed the neglected little park behind the health clinic, and came out by Founders' House, whose front was lighted up by floodlights hidden in the bushes. Suddenly it started to rain. You're not comfortable, Noa. Why don't you lie back on the pillow? Yes, like that. Rain in the desert on a winter's night, you know, there is something about it that makes you feel sad. Even more than rain falling at the usual season in places that are not desert: it afflicts you like a deliberate insult. It was half past nine, and the streets were already deserted, and they seemed even more deserted because they were so wide. By the light of the street lamps we could see how the wind lashed the rain diagonally, every drop piercing like a needle, and a smell of wet dust came up from the ground. All the blinds were down everywhere. It looked like a ghost town. Two or three figures, perhaps Bedouins, with empty sacks on their heads for protection from the rain, ran across the square. And vanished. Immanuel and I sheltered under the corrugated metal awning of the box office of the Paris Cinema. The awning was groaning from the onslaught of the rain in the wind. Then we saw some distant lightning that made the slope of the desolate hills to the east flash white. The diagonal rain became heavier and turned into a thunderstorm. The square seemed to be turning into a dark river in the mist in front of our eyes, and the buildings seemed to be floating away from us. The roar of the flood came to us from the direction of the wadis, although on second thoughts it may have been just the shaking of the metal awning overhead. For some reason I found this deluge interfered with my perception of the desert. When I said this to Immanuel he gave a kind of twisted grin, though it was hard to tell in that wet yellow light that could not break free of the faint lamp over the shuttered ticket office. I don't even know if it was after he got caught up with drugs, or how deep he was in by then. That's something I'll never know. Once you said to me that he was very careful and sparing with words, and you were right, that's how he always was, and that's how he stood by my side inside that cage of cold railings under the awning that rattled and creaked in the rain. In that manly bomber jacket that I had chosen for him, with its zippers and pockets and metal buckles, he looked less like a tough airman than an emaciated refugee child who had been saved from drowning and dressed in his rescuers' clothes. So there he stood, looking frail and torpid, and as he leaned back against the emergency exit of the cinema it suddenly opened wide under his weight. Presumably they had omitted to lock it that evening. The rain was getting heavier so we took shelter inside the empty auditorium, which was quite dark apart from the emergency lighting that glowed faintly behind the word
EXIT
above the locked doors on either side. Below and facing us was the pale screen. In here the rain sounded dull, as though it were a long way away, and the thunder seemed to be under water. So there we were, my son and I, sitting side by side, like you and me now, in one of the back rows. And we realized how wet we were. And even though I could feel the warmth of his knee with mine, I suddenly had a strong sense of longing, as if he were not there next to me but, how should I put it, beyond the dark mountains. There used to be an expression like that. Though in fact on a rainy night all mountains are dark. Immanuel, I said to him, listen, now that we're sitting here, why don't we try to have a little chat. He grinned. And asked what about. About your schoolwork? About your mother? Or maybe we should talk about the future? A slight, indeterminate movement of the head. And so, from me, another two or three questions, and from him just a phrase or a mumble. Can you understand that, Noa? There I was, alone with my son on a winter's night in a cold, deserted auditorium, with our shoulders touching, or more accurately with our coats touching. And nothing was said. There was no verbal contact. None. Whereas I belong to a generation that is a very verbal one, if I can put it like that. Even if during my African years I've forgotten what there is to say when it isn't a matter of getting things done. Suddenly he blinked at me, as he did when he was little, took a deep breath, as if to say wait a minute, and pulled out of one of his pockets a magnetic game of checkers, a miniature set that I bought for him once in an airport somewhere. In that gloomy light we played three games, one after the other almost in silence, to the sound of the pounding rain. I won all three. Telling you the story now, I believe this was a mistake. I shouldn't have won all three games. What good were those victories? On the other hand, what use would it have been if I had let him win by lying and pretence? What do you think, Noa? As a teacher? As a sensitive person? Wouldn't it have been better to let him win on our last night together?

Instead of answering Avraham's questions I put my arm round his shoulder. I withdrew it at once because he turned and fixed his weary blue eyes on me and smiled his bright warm-room smile, a smile that flared up and at once faded away among those charming wrinkles, like a curtain being opened and then drawn shut. Then, he said, with his roughened hands moving in front of him as if he were trying to mould into a ball an object that did not want to be moulded, the rain slackened off and my son stood up and walked all the way back to the Kedar Hotel with me. Next morning I flew back to Lagos. I thought of writing him another letter. But there's Theo at the door now; let's go back to the sitting room and eat the pizza he's brought us, and then let's go and look at whatever he cares to show us, even though I have my doubts whether in the last analysis they'll let us build a refuge here. I do find it hard to believe they will, and in fact would it be so terrible if we decided to give up and commemorate him with some other good cause? I'm sorry for making you sad, Noa. It would have been better if I hadn't spoken; you were the one who told me that my son called words a trap, and that we didn't take care. Pity.

I
T
will cost me six thousand shekels to repair the fence. And it would be worth having a gate put in, to prevent people wandering around there at night. I still think that there won't be a drug treatment centre here, and yet I'm forever trying to devise some sort of compromise. What am I after? I don't know. Batsheva Dinur has called twice to ask where the detailed paper I promised her is. At night I sit and read the pamphlets and books that Noa leaves scattered around, open face-downwards, on the kitchen table, in the passage, on the settee, on the armchair on the balcony, in the toilet. I have already learned a thing or two, but the heart of the matter still eludes me. And meantime I have to protect the property against neglect and against the dubious characters who apparently bivouac there at night. I am starting to like the derelict building itself. I spend half an hour or so there every day with a sketchbook and pencil. Noting possibilities: the north window could be either here or there, and it could be made three times bigger. In the centre of the building, in the hall, if the plaster ceiling were demolished, the distance from floor into roof space would be almost twenty feet and it would be possible, for example, to suspend a gallery with a platform all around, with a spiral staircase and a wooden balustrade.