About the Night (12 page)

Now both of them were drowsy but awake. The train pressed on into the dark expanses, on occasion giving the illusion that the engineer did not know where he was leading them. They slept with open eyes and were awake with eyes closed. He wished the dawn would not come, since the first ray of light would signal the end of the journey.

And what was there, at the end? he asked himself. What if all those traditions so zealously kept were shattered? What if they were to come up with a new formula for maintaining their mutual existence without her leaving her faith or him giving up his identity? He would have to fight not only his clan but also the entire street, the neighborhood, the eastern part of Jerusalem, the Arabs—all those who, in their hatred, would prevent him from being with her.

His mother had once told him there was no sorrow that an enlightened mind could not solve, no limit to what strength of will could accomplish. But what if he was unable to break the chains binding each of them? He imagined them as two prisoners on the lam, their ankles hampered by a ball and chain. How far could they actually run like that?

He rose from his seat, his body stiff, his legs asleep, to bring her a cup of coffee.

“Sugar?” asked the attendant in the dining car.

“Please,” said Elias, already missing her.

Lila looked up at him when he returned to the compartment with two steaming, pleasant-smelling mugs.

“I can tell you missed me,” he said.

“Very much,” she said.

He waited for her to drink before sipping from his own mug.

“Elias,” she said with hesitation, “maybe it’s possible.” She gazed into his face, prepared to catch his first reaction.

He placed his mug on the table, and it jiggled to the rhythm of the train. “Perhaps,” he said, pensive.

On November 29, 1947, she was at home, alone; he was at home with his parents and Munir. Once in a lifetime, Elias thought, do people have the chance to watch the birth of a nation. And once in a lifetime do they have the chance to watch the birth of a nation that is not their own even though they, like their forefathers, were born in it and would be buried in its earth.

Even dogs did not roam outside, and strong winds made their way from the northern neighborhoods to hers in the west. The windows of the buildings cast weak light on the wintry pavement outside. Every single person who lived behind the thousands of windows that separated him from her was listening to the radio, as tense as they had ever been in their lives.

The decision had been made: the General Assembly of the United Nations divided the Land of Israel into two nations, one for Jews and one for Arabs. Lila let out a shout that resounded between the walls of her apartment; then she burst into tears. She thought about her father, who had waited his entire life for this moment but was no longer alive to experience it. She recalled the names of the nations that had opposed the founding of the state—all the Arab nations, of course, but also Turkey, India, and Greece. She threw on a sweater and a pair of trousers and descended one floor to her neighbors’, where everyone was gathered around the radio. They hushed her, but she was agitated, fuming: about the Turks, about the distance between Elias and her, about the tension and the suspense.

“Don’t take it so much to heart,” her neighbor Albert said as he waved the slip of paper with the results, 33 to 13. “Who cares who voted what?”

Albert’s wife served tea and cookies, which no one sampled. Even the glasses of tea remained full and were taken that way, now cool, to the sink. Lila sat wondering with whom he was sitting at that moment, with whom he was sharing his anger. What would this decision mean for people like them, those hiding behind such uncertainty?

And what, she thought, would I say to him on a night like this, when my people’s joy is his people’s disaster, our victory their downfall? Jerusalem had been declared international territory, and to everyone it was clear there was no force in the world that would stop a war. She had no way of knowing what was happening with him: no telephone, no telegram, no messenger, no homing pigeon. They were so united in their souls but so divided at this moment. It took mere minutes to travel between them, but this evening the distance felt like that between two riverbanks that had been severed one from the other, the bridge between them having collapsed.

The people in the Rianis’ living room sat stupefied under a cloud of smoke from George’s pipe. “The cemetery is a happier place than this house,” Elias’s mother complained as she set down a tray with date cake she had baked. No one paid the slightest attention to the cake, and Nadira did not bother with slicing and serving it. She, too, fell into stunned silence along with the rest of them.

George looked at his watch and said, “It’s a matter of hours before the shooting starts.”

Nadira searched for something positive to hang on to; at least her daughters, Elias’s older sisters, were married and safe in their comfortable homes in faraway Riyadh. The war they were talking about would not catch them there. The heating stove was dying out, but no one rose to revive it.

Munir, normally incessantly busy and never one to let the flame extinguish, sat staring numbly into space, plucking wisps of wool from his vest.

Elias paced the room, his slippers clacking on the floor, his gaze on the darkness outside. His heart wandered to Lila, to the dim lights shining in the western part of the city. His longing turned painful, and he felt utterly helpless. He did not care who would do the shooting and who would be found shot, who would be first to fire and who would lock his weapon, so long as the bullets passed over her head. He wondered if she was alone, if she was as elated as he imagined; she surely had the need to share with others this world drama delivered over the radio. And what would it mean to them, that their country was changing?

He was not thinking about the business of tea or about the dastardly effect these events would have on finance and commerce, but about her, about them. Things would not be getting better, so it was necessary to prepare for worse.

In the time that passed after their return from Turkey, they had managed to meet quite often. It was a crazy, burning autumn that no power could cool, not the bomb that exploded on Jaffa Street a few minutes’ walk from her home, not the daily incidents, the dangers. Sometimes they would steal a morning together: he would arrive at six with fresh bread and cheese and butter and a bottle of milk and would prepare breakfast for her before climbing under the sheets with her for an hour of joy. Then they would go their separate ways for the long day ahead, he in his office across from the Damascus Gate, she at Salon Hubert.

Mornings like these, he told her, strengthened them against the trials of the day, sent them out in protective gear that warded off disaster. “I see the world through our eyes,” he said. “Everything happening out there—people, warehouses, ships, policemen, snipers—everything goes through a filter, yours and mine. The things that are good for us, the things that endanger us, what we need to stay away from.”

He had never before imagined that the entire roiling, spinning world could shrink to the size of a cotton ball, or that that cotton ball could be their world, his and hers, the world they had built in Istanbul and which still existed for them.

On evenings when he was able to extricate himself from his family’s clutches, he took her to buy records at the Zamir shop on Jaffa Street. He had bought her a gramophone, the biggest present she had ever received in her life. On an evening with a full moon, he waited for her at the corner and picked her up on her way home from work and spent an hour with her that was as satisfying as a week. Together in his car, they ate a meal of hot meat that he had brought in pita bread. On other occasions, he brought her to Augusta Victoria, to an observation point in Abu Tor, to a hill in Yemin Moshe—all hidden corners where he felt as though he was the victor of a war, since they were managing to keep their love alive in spite of the conflagration around them. At night, Jerusalem looked more mysterious, full of secrets and teeming with zealots; it seemed as though behind every wall someone was waiting to accost you and convince you to obey his organization.

He felt like someone who would not yield to the difficulties of their existence—even when he taught her how to drive. In spite of her fears, when she sat in the driver’s seat, with him beside her, she squealed with delight and did not wish to give up the wheel. At Café Savoy they had their own table, hidden from view, and at the Regent, they escaped miraculously when the businessmen he knew suddenly entered. She saw him tense up, gathered her purse and her drink with its rim of lipstick, and dashed to the ladies’ room. When she left, she passed by his table without a glance in his direction and walked home alone. He caught up with her in the car, hating every minute he was forced to hide her from his world.

That evening was a disaster. She sobbed bitter tears before they parted, tears that could not be appeased. “Inside our dream world,” he told her, “we sometimes are hit with reality, but in fact it strengthens what we have between us.”

But on the evening of the vote about the future of a Jewish state, Elias realized it was no ordinary reality blow but a revolution. In an instant, life had changed completely, and nothing would go back to the way it had been. In the passing months, the base for their impossible love story had been built on the knowledge that beneath them was earth and above them was sky and everything else was in their hands, in the hands of their instinct for survival and their ability to maneuver. He had been certain it was possible, had even divided his world into good guys and bad guys: the good were those who enabled them to be together, the bad were those who stood in their way.

Now, however, the ground had fallen away and a huge storm was darkening the sky that threatened to fall on them. He, in his nature quiet and stable, went looking for a bit of solid ground where he could rest his foot, but found none. So his intellect and good sense told him to relate to the dimension of time with patience and forbearance, not to portion it out or stand clenched before it, not to give in to counting the days.

On the morning following the partition, he trudged to his office in search of stability on the street he knew so well. He thought that perhaps the previous night’s experience had been intensified by the radio, which brought those dramatic voices into the room. Here was the bakery, emitting its usual, welcome heat, the scent of doughy rolls rising in the air. In the coffee shop, they were grinding beans and pouring the powder into brown paper bags. The butcher was slicing fresh red strips of lamb and placing them on a clean tray. At the banana and date stand, the hawker was hiding the bruised fruit and featuring the beautiful ones. A steaming cart of
sakhlav
pudding gave off a scent of cinnamon and a feeling of winter. Everyone wanted to wake up in the morning in a place that was familiar, and they all opened their businesses in order to exist in the shadow of some sort of stability, real or imagined. Newspapers were snatched up one after the other from the arms of the boy who sold them.

Elias caught sight of his banker in a dark-blue suit, though he was not quite as clean-shaven as usual, with several whiskers left untended on his neck. He wondered if his own face looked like that this morning, preoccupied and restless.