Mr. Mani (5 page)

—No. No, there wasn't a word about our little wrestling match. You would have thought we'd never touched each other ... Anyway, I gave him Efi's message and this time it got through to him, although he didn't seem particularly disappointed to hear that his son couldn't make the unveiling. He began asking me all kinds of things about Efi, as if it were obvious that I knew more about him than he did, and so I told him about his breaking his glasses, and he was so concerned that he wanted to look for another pair. And so perfectly naturally, as if nothing at all had happened, he invited me back into the same bedroom he had thrown me out of before, only now the room was neatly arranged and looked more or less normal. The bed was made, the sheets were folded, the papers were in a neat pile, and most of all, the blinds were opened and raised, so that I could see the trees tossing in the wind outside. The blinds box was closed and the belt with its noose was back inside it. He began rummaging through the drawers of his desk until he found a few pairs of glasses and asked me if I thought they were Efi's, because he didn't know whose they were. In the end he put them all in a little cloth bag and said, “Here, send these to him in Lebanon, maybe he can get by with them until he comes home.” By now he didn't seem in such a hurry to get rid of me anymore. He gave me a long look and asked, “But where do I know you from? Where can I possibly remember you from?”—and when I told him with a little smile that I had been in his apartment a month ago to pay him a condolence call, he didn't seem satisfied with the answer. I don't think he even remembered it, because he kept trying to discover where else we might have met. He was all full of this sudden curiosity and wanted to know if I had ever lived in Jerusalem, and all about my family, and about you, Mother, and about father, and about who your parents were, and about where they came from, and if there weren't some Jerusalemites among them. It was so strange, Mother, this family interrogation that he suddenly began with great patience in the middle of the night, as if there were no clocks in the world and time itself didn't exist. And since I really don't know much about our family history, and I was very tired, in the end—but only in the end, Mother—I blurted out that ... I mean ... I did it again ... I just couldn't help myself...

—Right. Yes. That I lost my father in a war...

—I knew you'd say that. But this time I didn't mean to do it. I'd sworn to myself to stop mentioning it all the time.

—That's easy to say. It's very easy.

—Naturally. You always know everything.

—No...

—No, no, but it's beginning to get on my nerves how you're always so sure that you know just what I'm going to say and just what I'm going to do. Well, hang on, because you've got a surprise in store for you tonight...

—Hang on. Have a little patience.

—Yes. A surprise.

—Then? Naturally, Mother, it wasn't my fault. He started gushing with compassion like they all do...

—That's what you think. I might have liked it once, but I don't anymore. It aggravates me the way everyone feels they have to be so protective, him too. Not that he wasn't tactful about it, but you could see how worried he was about my going back to Tel Aviv in such weather, especially since he was sure it was going to snow. It was
his
idea that I spend the night there and let him take me to the train or bus station in the morning—and though I knew it made sense, I took my time answering because I wanted to be sure he really thought so himself and wasn't just trying to be nice ... only before I could make up my mind, he was already making the grandmother's bed for me and primping the room in whose doorway we had wrestled like two savages, as if trying to prove to me that that scaffold had never existed...

—No. Efi doesn't have his own room there. It was that dead grandmother's. You could tell the minute you walked into it.

—By everything, you name it. By the furniture. By the pictures on the walls. By this weird old doll of a Turkish dancer with shiny pants and a fez on her head. By the dresses and slips still hanging in the closet. Even by the sheets he made the bed with, which were yellowed from so many laundries He took a nightgown from a drawer and handed it to me, this heavy old flannel antique covered with hand-embroidered red flowers no two of which were alike, and for a minute, Mother, it gave me the creeps, not so much because it was that grandmother's as because I felt sure that seeing me in it was what made him so glad to have me stay for the night...

—You've got to be kidding!

—What an idea, Mother. He only came back into the room once to lower the blinds when I was already under the blankets and to ask me if the nightgown fit, and I could see how happy I made him. He was actually glowing, and with one easy yank he lowered the open blinds, no doubt to prove that there had never been any scaffold but just some blinds that needed fixing...

—It was not a figment of my imagination.

—Because I saw it.

—I know exactly what I saw...

—But just wait a minute. Why can't you have a little patience?

—So what? We have all night.

—But you agreed to skip the New Year's Eve party.

—Then what are you so tense about?

—That?

—Suppose I did? So what?

—Yes, that's right, Mother. It didn't bother me in the least ... why should it have? If Efi didn't mind getting into my grandmother's bed, why should I have minded getting into his grandmother's bed?

—Suppose she did? What of it? That was a month ago ... you don't think something was still left of it, do you? Death isn't something slimy and catching like life. It's not like you, Mother, to suddenly start believing in ghosts!

—Never. It was perfectly natural. You know I always had a thing about grown-up's beds, maybe because of that disgusting children's dorm I had to sleep in on the kibbutz ... and in fact I climbed right into it and fell asleep at once, without any problems, even though he was still fussing about in the apartment and the wind was blowing harder outside. But after an hour or two, Mother, I woke up, not just totally disorientated, but starving, as if
he
were beginning to eat out my insides down there. I had to get up and look for something to eat, and so I groped my way up the hallway of that dark railroad flat, tiptoeing past Efi's father's closed door and into the kitchen, where I didn't turn on the light or even open the fridge but just found a loaf of bread and cut a few slices and poured a little oil on them and sprinkled them with salt and some spices lying there and wolfed down half the loaf before I was full. As I was heading back down the hallway I saw his door open slightly, as if he had been waiting for me. And so I stopped for a second, Mother, and I heard him drowsily calling my name in this low voice, as if I were already a member of the family. He wanted to know if it was snowing already—and all of a sudden, don't ask me why, I had this terrible fear of him...

—I don't know. Maybe that he was going to start wrestling again. I couldn't say a word, and so I slipped back to bed and tossed and turned until I finally fell asleep again. In the morning, when he came in to wake me at seven-thirty, he was in a hurry. He was very nattily dressed, in this black suit and black tie, because he really is a judge, a justice of the peace. I even saw him presiding...

—In a minute. I'll get to that too. Just let me tell it in my own sweet time...

—Don't rush me, Mother. He woke me by letting some light into the room and tapping me lightly on the shoulder, and the first thing he said was, “Forgive me. It's my fault you were hungry last night. I forgot to give you supper...”

—I hadn't breathed a word of it, Mother. Heavens, no, not a word yet...

—Because I didn't want him to suspect me or to think, who knows, that maybe I didn't come to Jerusalem to bring him Efi's message but with some secret plan to extort...

—Oh, I don't know ... some promise having to do with the baby ... or maybe money...

—How should I know what he might have thought? For a doctor maybe ... or an abortion ... that's why I was so careful not to say anything. Even though he was very quiet and in control of himself, standing there and spreading a slice of whole-wheat bread with goat cheese for me while looking out the window to see if the rain had turned to snow yet, I kept reminding myself not to forget for a minute that this was the same man who had tried ending his life the night before like some kind of stricken animal...

—No, just a subtle hint, to keep him on his toes ... I only said, real innocently, “I see you managed to fix the blinds and unknot that belt,” because I wanted to make sure that he knew that not only had I seen it all, I had understood everything I saw...

—No. He didn't react. He just nodded and kind of smiled to himself, and then he began prodding me to leave—and suddenly, Mother, I felt sure that all his being so nice and polite was just a ruse to get me out of Jerusalem and make sure I didn't stick around to keep an eye on him, which must have been why he invented some important business he had to see to not far from the bus station, so that he could drop me off there. For a minute I thought that that was good-bye and that I had better get back to Tel Aviv. I had already missed enough classes because of the whole crazy adventure. But in the car on the way, which was crawling through the rain in this terrible traffic, I began studying his profile in the silence that had come over us, and what I saw was this depressed Sephardic gentleman with breath that smelled like old wine who seemed all alone in the world—and suddenly I thought, Mother, why, this is the only grandfather that the little formula swimming in my fluids will ever have, shouldn't I get to know him a little better? And so I began
asking him about himself. I even mentioned that book on old neighborhoods in Jerusalem next to the figurine of the horse that I diagonally read a page of, and he brightened up right away and started telling me about it, and about how he enjoyed reading it, and about this neighborhood he was on his way to now, which was called Abraham's Vineyard, where he rented out an old house that he had inherited from his great-grandfather, a famous gynecologist who ran a maternity clinic ninety years ago in which all the women of Jerusalem, Jews and Arabs, came to give birth. Well, no sooner had he told me that, Mother, than something seemed to burst inside me. I was actually red with emotion, because despite the traffic jam and all that annoying gray rain dripping down the windows, there was such a marvelous fatedness about having met him and about driving with him now to this place where women gave birth a century ago that it seemed the most natural thing to want to go with him and see it for myself. He was a little taken aback by that. There was nothing to see there, he said. It was just a house with a few small apartments whose tenants' leases he had to renew, because that was the money that paid for Efi's studies. I didn't back down, though, I almost begged him: if I didn't go with him to the house, couldn't I at least take a look at the neighborhood? He kept trying to convince me that it wasn't worth it, that it was just another neighborhood of super-religious Jews in black coats. But I stuck to my guns, Mother. Suddenly it mattered terribly to me, and in the end he had no choice, he couldn't just throw me out of the car—and so he didn't stop at the bus station but drove straight to this crowded neighborhood, which really was full of Jews in black clothes. It seemed very colorful, though, and we parked in a street by an old stone house that didn't look small at all, it had two stories and a red tile roof. But he must have felt very embarrassed, because he said, “This is the house, you can see there's nothing to see”—and he politely asked me to wait outside while he went in, because the tenants were very religious and wouldn't approve of me or my being there ... Well, Mother, that made me laugh, as if they had any idea who I was, but I agreed to wait outside, and he said, “It may take a while. If you get tired of waiting you can take a bus to the central station.” He began warning me about the snow again, how it would cut the road to Tel Aviv if it started falling, and then he shook hands and apologized for all
the trouble he had caused me by leaving the telephone off the hook and disappeared through this big iron door. I went for a stroll around the neighborhood, trying to imagine what it had been like a hundred years ago. It must have had nothing but empty space all around it, just like the kibbutz does today. After a while I began to think about the baby, because once it was born that house would belong to it too, and through it to me, a whole big house with a red roof when here on the kibbutz we don't even have a shack we can call our own. All around me religious men were walking in stiff, straight lines with these transparent plastic covers on their hats and these black umbrellas that they carried like rifles, and the raindrops were becoming long and sticky, all smeary-like, although I knew they weren't snow yet, even though I had never seen snow in my life, and so I went back and stepped into the house, which had these mailboxes without lids and these dark, narrow stairs with lots of baby carriages tied to the banister. I climbed them to the second floor, where there was a corridor that you could see had once been the veranda of the original building, part of which had been torn down and redone in a whole hodgepodge. There were doors there that might have belonged to apartments or maybe just to some sort of storerooms, and for a second I had the strange thought that perhaps this Mr. Mani of mine had gone off into one of those little rooms to finish killing himself quietly, but I kept walking along the hallway to a back stairway that led down to a little courtyard paved with stones and surrounded by more small rooms and apartments, at one end of which was a patch of earth where some dear soul was trying to get something to grow—it was touching, Mother, to see how these city people had planted pepper bushes and tomato vines in some big old basins and potties. By now I felt lots of eyes on me. Windows were opening and heads were sticking out of them, and finally a pregnant young woman stepped into the courtyard and tried tactfully finding out what I was doing there. She seemed very worried when I said that I was waiting for the landlord. She must have thought I wanted to rent something, and so right away she began explaining that I must be mistaken and that there was nothing for rent. It was obvious, Mother, that the idea of someone like me wanting to live there was too much for her, which made me so mad that I said, “But maybe something will become available,” and she said, “Oh no, there's a long waiting list and no one ever moves out”—and all at once, Mother, I realized how uncomfortable I made her feel. She couldn't stand the thought of my even looking for an apartment there. I saw her signal some neighbors to come help persuade me that it was hopeless, and so I told them angrily, “I'm waiting for Mr. Mani, I came with him,” and they said, “But the judge has already left,” and so I hurried back out to the street and saw that his car was really gone. Well, I thought, at least he hasn't killed himself, he's just run away—and at that point, Mother, I don't know what got into me, but I decided I was going to go after him...