Don't Call It Night (23 page)

To Noa I said: Just give me a few more days.

It's not long ago that she begged me, Don't take everything away from me, Theo, yet now she has stopped interfering. As if she's lost interest. When I suggested she come with me to Jerusalem she said, I've got a bit of a temperature, and my head ... you go and sort it out by yourself. When I got home in the evening and began to explain to her what I had achieved she said: Skip the details, Theo, I really don't care who else still remembers you from the days when you were the gleam in their eye, or what the Palmach got wrong in the War of Independence. Now that there seems to be at least a chance, she has lost that radiant joy that always seemed to well straight up from the core of life. She has lost that sparkle she had in her eye whenever she declared my judgment to be hot or cold, good or bad, or phony, or entrenched, as though she were grading the whole world. Instead of that flash of excitement there's a sort of abstraction that I've never seen in her before: she leaves home in the morning, comes back at midday, grabs something to eat standing up in front of the open refrigerator, leaves me the washing up and goes out again. Where does she have to go to now that the school is closed for the summer holidays and the staff have all vanished to their refresher courses and conferences? I take care not to ask. Or the opposite: she sits the whole morning watching children's programmes on TV, then vanishes in the evening till eleven o'clock. I might have suspected that she's got herself a lover at last, but it's just on these nights that she appears in my bedroom, smelling sweetly of honeysuckle, floating towards me barefoot and silent, in her demure nightdress that makes her look like a girl from a religious boarding school. I stand and kiss the brown birthmark beneath her hairline. My whole body strains to listen to her, like a doctor making a diagnosis, or as if she were my daughter who had suffered an unknown misfortune. I take hold of her hands that have aged ahead of her, and I am filled with a desire that is not made of desire but of a tender affection. I cup her breasts and run my fingers down the front of her thighs like a healer gently seeking to locate the pain. After the love, she falls asleep immediately, with her head in the hollow of my shoulder; the sleep of a babe, while I lie awake half the night, carefully attentive, breathing evenly so as not to disturb her. Though she sleeps deeply.

Sometimes I have found her sitting in the kitchen, or on the balcony, or once even in the California Café, with a dark-haired girl called Tali or Tal, apparently a pupil or ex-pupil of hers. She is a slim, finely sculpted girl, who looks like a little red Indian in her patched and faded jeans. I would have dressed her in a flame-red skirt. From a distance they seem to be immersed in a lively conversation, but as I get closer they stop talking as though they are waiting for me to go away and leave them alone. But in fact I have no desire to go away and leave them. I find there is something spellbinding about that Tali, perhaps precisely because she seems a little afraid of me, retreating to the edge of her chair, looking me up and down apprehensively, like a threatened animal. This has the effect of making me insist on joining them. Their conversation instantly dries up. An unwilling silence descends. A brief interrogation elicited the information that Tal was due to be called up for military service in November. She still had to face the matriculation exam in math, and that bitch Gusta Ludmir was giving her private tuition, but what a drag, logarithms, she wouldn't be able to pass that bit in a million years. I also discovered that she is the daughter of Paula Orlev from Desert Chic, where 1 almost bought Noa a folksy dress recently. What brought her here? Nothing special. And what did she think about the situation in the Occupied Territories? Or about the future of Israel? Or about life in Tel Kedar? About permissiveness? About life in general? Her replies were wishy-washy, lukewarm. Nothing that sticks in my memory. Except that her cat has had kittens and she wants to give us one. Can I get you a cold drink? No thanks, we've just had one. Some grapes? No thanks. Then I suppose you'd like me to leave you alone? You've left your keys on the table. And take your paper. 'Bye.

But I was in no hurry to leave them. On the contrary. What was the rush? I settled back in my chair and asked what people were saying in town about, say, the new string quartet. Or about the expansion of the parking lot in the square? And what plans did Tal have for the summer? From now till she was called up? Didn't she feel like getting away from the logarithms, getting to see something of the wide world, like the rest of them? Why not? What was wrong with the wide world? Would she be interested in some information about Latin America?

Noa intervened: Batsheva Dinur was trying to get you on the phone.

I caught the hint, and replied: So she was looking for me. Fine. In that case I'll just sit here with you till she calls again. Don't let me disturb you. Carry on. I'll just read my paper.

Once, jokingly, I asked Noa over our morning coffee what exactly she was scheming about for all those hours with her Indian princess. Does she bring you her love problems? Is there another story with drugs? Is there another memorial project in the offing? Noa flushed and said: Theo. That's enough. This is going to end badly. And when she saw that I wasn't letting go, she stood up and started ironing. Even though normally the ironing is my department.

So I decided to retreat, to effect a temporary withdrawal. I might have a chance some time to have a t£te-£-t£te with Tal. Or I might go to her mother's boutique by myself and buy Noa a surprise present of a light skirt in a colourful geometric print.

Meanwhile I have had worries of my own. Natalia, the young Russian woman who has been cleaning the office on Fridays, sent me the keys and said she couldn't go on. This time I made up my mind not to give in. A little detective work brought me the phone number of the grocer in the prefab complex and they agreed, not without coaxing, to go and call her to the telephone. After a determined struggle against shyness, politeness, apprehension and language difficulties, it turned out that apparently her unemployed husband, in another fit of jealousy, had forbidden her to go on working for me. So I got into the Chevrolet and spent a good half-hour wandering around the prefabs trying to find where exactly the husband hung out. I planned to talk him round, but it transpired from what the neighbours said that Natalia had run away from him and was staying with his father, who lived in a rented room near the square, less than two minutes from my office. A couple of days later the husband also moved into the old man's miserable room. By the time I found the place, Natalia had pulled out and moved back to the prefab. The father and the husband shouted suspicious questions through the locked door for five minutes before they consented to slide the chain and let me in. It turned out I had interrupted them in the middle of a game of cards, two strong, slightly balding men, who resembled each other like brothers, both of them round-headed and big-boned, with hefty weight-lifter's arms, baring rows of sharp teeth when they smiled, both with stubble-covered faces and wearing black T-shirts. For some reason, when I tried to talk to them about Natalia they burst into wet, noisy laughter as though I had been caught in the act, slapped my back, explained something in Russian and in another language I did not recognize, and in Russian again, then they had another good laugh, revealing their predatory teeth, and begged me with enthusiastic gestures and almost violent heartiness to join them in a game of poker. I stayed an hour or so, in the course of which I drank two vodkas and lost forty shekels.

Since then I sometimes drop in on them in the early evening, when Noa is out, of course, and as for poor Natalia, she has apparently gone, or escaped, to her sister in Hazor in Galilee. That much I managed to get out of them after two more lost games. I enjoy spending an hour or two in the company of these rambunctious men. I can hardly understand their language, but I like their thunderous laughter their shoulder-slapping, their roars, their elbows jabbing me in the ribs, the shabby, low-ceilinged room with the greasy smell of frying coming from the tiny kitchen For some reason it reminds me of the fireside nights with strangers, in the courtyards of country inns in remote regions near the shores of the Caribbean. They treat me to spicy, wonderfully tasty pickled fish and a glass of vodka, I lose fifty or eighty shekels, and sometimes I am caught up in their raucous laughter over some joke that I cannot understand. I forget that my initial object was to try to dissolve their jealousy, to get the husband to take Natalia back and to get Natalia to come back to me and clean my office on Fridays. I had the impression they were trying to show me with roars and comical rounded gestures that Natalia was pregnant, so there was no point in my running after her and that her sister in Galilee was expecting a baby, too. But it is hard to know if I understood correctly or if I simply put together a story of my own on the basis of their gestures and laughs. And, in fact, what business was it of mine?

At certain moments I can almost see her: hardly more than a girl, about seventeen, golden-haired, slim, shy, silently fearful, her waist and breasts are those of a woman but she has a smile of sweet confusion or childlike wonder on her face, even when she thinks I am not looking at her. Between smiles her lips purse as if to weep. Whenever I put a perfectly simple question to her, such as whether she has parents, or whether there is any water left in the electric kettle, she turns white and trembles, as if she has committed a serious breach of polite behaviour, or as if I have made an obscene suggestion, and she whispers a faint apology and makes me give up on the answer and regret asking her in the first place, and turn my back to hide the lust that has suddenly transformed me into a rhinoceros. When I found out that her husband and his father had both been mechanics back in Moldavia, and that they had both been unemployed since arriving in Israel, I rang Muki Peleg and asked him, as a personal favour, to see if he could find them something temporary at least. Perhaps with one of the earth-moving contractors he sat with every day at the Council of Torah Sages in the California Cafe. Muki promised to fix it for me, what a question, like a rocket, even if I didn't really deserve it after throwing him and Ludmir off the committee; in fact, he wouldn't do it for me but for the sake of the Ingathering of Exiles, as the air hostess said to the Jewish passenger who begged her to lock herself in the toilet with him on the jumbo. And he went on to offer me a story about a little ballpoint pen factory that he was planning to set up here in partnership with Dubi Weitzman and Pini Bozo from the shoe shop, something really pioneering, the pens have an electronic device in them so that if you forget where you've put them all you have to do is whistle and they chirrup back at you, and Batsheva was finding them another investor—perhaps Orvieto and would I like to come in on it? We would double our money in three years, maximum, that was being cautious, because in fact the chances were we could double it in two and a half years.

On Saturday I started to jot down the headings for my paper. I found out from one of Noa's pamphlets that in Scandinavia they have had residential centres for under-eighteen-year-olds for some time, and precisely in small towns, far from the big cities, and there were mounting indications that they were successful, even representing a social and educational challenge that focused the life of the host population and sometimes produced a "thriving example of a therapeutic community", a supportive milieu that developed a sense of purpose and a feeling of local pride. The framework that seemed to me best suited to Tel Kedar was that of a social experiment coupled with an academic study, not just another supply station for drug substitutes like adolan or methadone. As for the economic aspect, of course we can't be Scandinavia, but it made sense to begin with kids from wealthy families in central Israel, and, as I had suggested to Noa, we would do well to add in two or three locals, from needy families, for a token payment. That should clear the ground here a bit. It might strengthen our public opinion rating. But when I asked Noa to go over these notes she said, Don't give me drafts to read. Don't give me anything to read right now. Not just now, Theo. Can't you see that I'm trying to listen to some music quietly. Do me a favour and start the record over again, would you?

For a moment I had an urge to remind her that she was still getting a check for three hundred dollars every month from Orvieto, via his lawyer Arbel; it would be interesting to know what for actually, and somebody might well ask one day just exactly what she did with the money. She spends half her time nowadays with her Indian princess, Tal or Tali. From my office window, I can see them going to the hairdresser together, coming out of an afternoon showing at the Paris Cinema, sitting whispering at the lovebirds' table behind the pillar at the California Café. Sometimes I get up and lock the office, buy a
Ma'ariv
at Gilboa's, and go to the California myself. I do not join them but secure a lookout post on one side near the cash desk. Dubi Weitzman, if he has no work on, arrives a few minutes later paunchy, hairy, sweaty, with dusty sandals, always wearing a peaked cap like a Greek sea-captain's with gold braid all round it and a shiny anchor at the front; he sits down, orders us cold Cokes and a plate of cheese and olives, sighs and declares:

A casino, Theo, that's what'll save us here. Stop Tel Kedar from being a graveyard. A casino will bring us tourists, holidaymakers, girls, the big money will come pouring in and culture will follow. For me, you understand, the casino is just a means to an end. Culture, Theo, that's the object. Without culture we're living here like animals. Don't take it personally. Take it as food for thought.

A couple of days ago he said to me: Every time I go to Tel Aviv I notice the city has moved a bit closer to us. Holon is attached to Rishon Le-Zion. Rishon is creeping towards Ashdod. Ashdod will link up with Qiryat Gat. In another hundred years Tel Aviv will reach all the way to here, it'll knock on our door at five o'clock one morning and say, Good morning, dear friends, wake up, I'm here, and that's that, the exile will be over. But in the meantime we are stuck here beneath the mountains. Blast them. You could choke because of those mountains. Forget it. Let's have a game of chess. Don't you get fed up sometimes, Theo? Take it as food for thought.