The Inbetween People (19 page)

C
HAPTER
26

I
t is early February, the air is cold, the house dark. Sahar doesn’t turn the heating on, or the lights, she is too sick, she forgets, she says, she doesn’t feel cold. You stand before her, it is evening; she turns to you and regards you, her eyes black against her white skin. Change your clothes please, she says, I can’t stand the smell of the fish. She shudders.

The heating, you say, why don’t you use it, you have to try to remember. She rubs her hands against her arms. I forgot, she says, and anyway I am not cold. She turns away from you, your clothes, change them please, she says.

After your shower you approach her, stand in front of her, so that her eyes fall on you. She is not having an easy pregnancy, the sickness never leaves her. The vase, you say, I want to bring it back. What vase? she says. It is on the table, you nod towards it, her eyes follow your gaze, she looks at you, why, she says, why now? All of this, you say, all of this that’s happening, I want to give it back, I want it to be back in that house. Will you come with me?

Yes, she says, I will come with you. She splashes cold water on her face so that the colour returns to her cheeks, runs the hairbrush through her hair, it shines ebony black. You pick up the vase, almost without moving, reach your hand towards her, her hand is cold against your skin, but it remains there, and you clasp it gently, so that you almost don’t feel it.

You drive through the darkness, the same road you drove with your grandmother as a child, for you have never gone back, it is just the same: the white chalk dusty road, carved out of the mountainside leading to the house, the same sturdy door, the olive tree, glowing silver in the February night, the weeping willow trees, three of them to the right of the house. A dim light glows from the room where you sat with the Jewish woman, the light just visible through the vast darkness where you and Sahar stand. Below you the lights of distant Galilee villages glisten like rough diamonds. The view, Sahar says, what a view. You knock on the door, the same sound all these years later, ringing out into the night, an intrusion into the regular noises of a Galilee night, the same footsteps approaching the door. Who is it? she calls out in a low voice. You don’t know me, you say, at least we met only once, you may not remember. I have something I need to return to you.

What is it? she says, as the heavy door opens in front of you, and so it is you find her once again, standing in the doorway, as she stood once all those years ago, the same face, the same eyes. The years have taken a cruel toll: the skin is no longer young, the hair grey, there are tired creases across her forehead, and a certain madness in her eyes. She doesn’t look at you but at the vase in your hands, her eyes rest on it, until she raises them to regard you—you are that boy, she gasps, the little boy. You nod. Her lips curl at the corners, twist into an ugly grimace, an effort of a smile, but her eyes remain remote, guarded. She glances at Sahar and back to you, I gave you that vase, she says, I don’t want it back.

Take it, you say.

Why now? she says; she looks behind her, into the dark hallway, come in, she says, come inside. She turns back into the hallway of the house and you follow her inside. She pauses before entering the room where you sat that day with her and Grandmother. It’s different now, she says. I’m sorry, you’ll notice it is not the same room.

You follow Sahar inside, the Jewish woman leans against a table, not the same table that rested here before, it is not by the window, it has been placed against the wall, where the couch used to be, the couch where Grandmother sat that day.

After you came I changed it, rearranged everything, she says, it is not the same room you remember, I changed everything. Sit, she says, and there is no couch this time, there are three leather recliners surrounding the fireplace.

You must see there is no place for your vase here now, she says, the words tumble from her, it is not the same as it was. What can I get you to drink? Sahar shakes her head, nothing, she says, I don’t want anything at all. The Jewish woman turns to you, not Coca-Cola this time, she says and there is a smile in her voice, but her face is sad, crazed-looking, and her eyes are distant. You shake your head, nothing thanks, you say, and she sits then, as if relieved. With trembling hands she reaches for the packet of cigarettes placed in front of the fire, and lights one, leaning back in her recliner.

Your grandmother, she says. Dead, you say, dead for some years now. I’m sorry, she says. She raises the cigarette to her mouth. I often thought about her, she says, I often wondered if she would come back. She leans forward in the chair, moves her hand towards you and the cigarette is close to your cheek, you can feel the heat against it. I believed for a long time that she would come back, that perhaps she needed to, she says, but then the years passed and she never did.

Can I leave the vase here, you say. Why, she says, the past is the past, that’s all it is, it’s only a room, she says, a house, bricks and mortar. My husband, she says, my husband passed away three years ago, and my son is dead, he died in Lebanon five years ago. Blown to bits, she says, and she laughs, a harsh, humourless sound. The ironic thing, she says, and she moves the cigarette against her mouth and holds it there. You watch the ash dangling in front of you, you know it will fall and when it does it brushes against her thigh, but she doesn’t notice. The ironic thing, she says, is that I have no one left, there is no one left for this house. She rubs her thumb against an ash stain on her black trousers, there is no one left for this house, she says. What do you think about that?

You finger the vase, stare at it, the way the colours merge against each other, and then you lean back and place it on the table. You must drink something, she says, but you shake your head, all those years, she says, I kept that vase, I kept it because I felt I should, because it seemed to belong, not because I wanted to. I never particularly liked it.

But you really must drink something, she says, and in a rush she departs from the room, returning with three glasses of sherry. Sahar shakes her head, raises her hand to her nose to block the fumes from the alcohol.

The sherry is sweet, the fire is warm, the heat drifts towards you and you see that Sahar has closed her eyes. I’m sorry about your son, she says to the Jewish woman, and the woman smiles and nods and throws her cigarette in the fire where it burns brightly before disappearing in the flames. She raises the sherry to her lips.

We must go, you say, we will leave the vase here, she nods, if you must, she says. You drink the sherry in one gulp, rise to your feet and reach your hand to Sahar. There is nothing for this house the woman says, if there ever was any happiness here it died with him, my son, there is nothing now. You leave her then, staring into the flames of the past, the house and her own private tragedy. Sahar’s hand is warm against you, I’m glad you brought it back, she says, it is nice to leave something behind that belongs there now that it has changed.

You walk out into the cool night, it is clear, and the view is before you, around you, you breathe it, she breathes it and squeezes your hand tighter, the view that Grandmother could never recreate, you say, and she cries then, Sahar, she cries and you hold her against you, behind you the woman, the Jewish woman, stares into what remains of her fire and you believe in that moment, perhaps just for that moment, that there is a certain grace in going back, in facing up to things.

C
HAPTER
27

W
hen she has finished her story, a silence descends amongst us and David looks away, towards the windows, and continues to smoke his cigarette.

She rummages in a scarlet leather bag. The ticket, she says, and she pushes a plastic package under the gauze. The words come in a rush, it’s for you, Avi, she says, the ticket to London. I open the package, stare at the print. Seven o’ clock, she says, next Thursday evening. I’ll be there at half past four. I’ll wait for you in the main terminal, outside the bookshop. She raises her eyes to me, daring me to be there, and I see then that the confidence is gone, and her eyes are again filled with doubt.

And if I’m not there, I say. If I don’t come?

She resents the question, scrapes her chair backwards along the ground, opens and closes the clasp on her bag. You want to know how he died, don’t you, she says. I saw it in the newspaper, I say. The newspaper, she says, and a coarse laugh escapes from her.

But first, I say, if I don’t come. What happens then?

She raises her eyes to mine, and they are dark, there is just a shimmer of light in them, but panic too; she finds it difficult to think about this, what happens if you don’t come, she says. What happens. She rubs her finger along the length of the wooden pane that separates us. What happens is that I go home, she says. She turns her face away so that I can’t see her eyes. I will wait until six, if you are not there by six, I will go home; in any case we’d never make it through security at that stage, and the weight of the world is upon her shoulders when she says this, but then she raises her eyes to mine and they are full of the consistency that is her, brimming with resolution.

Karim will marry me, she says. She shrugs and I see her returning home with a heavy heart, settling into the solitude, somehow managing to tolerate her life, abandoning her tales of study in Tel Aviv, her Thursday trips to the prison, a kind of certainty absorbing her over the months, years, the certainty that old age would descend upon her, slow and relentless. I could imagine the marriage, to a man she loathed, the slow suffocation, a marriage lived out in the very home in which she had found such happiness. I saw her again on the beach, the vitality in her eyes, and I saw the life ebbing out of them, slowly over the months and years that followed, the dust of all the summers, the heavy air, the weight of her grief.

And after that no more lies, she says, no more stories about studying. She holds the box of cigarettes to her lower lip, it turns white. If you don’t come, she says, if you don’t come I’ll face up to my life.

She stares at the clock. I don’t have long she says, and there’s more to tell. She looks directly at me. That night with the jackals, she says, jackals know about survival. I look around me and she is the last of the visitors. They have helpers who stay on with the parents after new cubs arrive so that the family will survive. Did you know that? I don’t speak, I take a cigarette and I light it. After all, she says, they live in such a harsh place. What else can they do?

There is the ticket in my hand, and she is before me, Sahar, this girl who found me here, discovered me, who sought me out in this place full of nothingness and broken people, I breathe in her beauty and the open-hearted passion for living that is hers, the instinct she carries inside her to survive. I marvel at her ability to leave: to gather her belongings and leave her entire world behind her, and her belief that the dead simply slip from the room and tiptoe softly away, closing the door apologetically in their wake.

I stare at the grey oppressive sky, and I feel the night that lives inside me bubbling to the surface, dragging with it the knotted mass of roots accumulated over the years, attaching me forever to this boundless land, the years that I’ve spent here, and more than that, my father, the white hills of Galilee. I remember everything about it all at once, or so it seems: the despair and solitude of my childhood, the homely smell of the children’s house where I slept at night with my peers, the whir of the fan in the darkness, the click of Yefat’s knitting needles when I awoke in the night, the stench of the crowded chicken coops where I was forced to labour one burning summer, the thick heat of the orchards where I toiled other summers, the sweet heavy taste of the apples that grew there, the delicious cold water of the irrigation system on the kibbutz, the cool perfume of the honeysuckle that descended every summer evening in my father’s gardens, the smell of salt that lived on my skin through all those summers, summers of sweat and dust and football, but mostly the sea, the odour of earth on Father’s hands. It all bubbles to the surface, overpowering my senses and it seems impossible to leave.