About the Night (14 page)

When they left the restaurant, the street was cold and empty.

“You are the love of my life,” he told her as the metal blinds of the restaurant were lowered noisily behind them. She closed her eyes at the power of the words.

Elias drove her home but took his leave as always at some distance from her building.
“Je t’embrace,”
he said, and this time she managed to feel embraced even though he had remained behind the wheel of the car. He waited there until he saw the light go on in her apartment.

Through the driving rain that fell that winter, Jerusalem looked dark and gloomy. The sun had decided to abandon the city, as had the flocks of birds rushing to distance themselves from the battle areas. Lila’s days were exhausting and joyless, her nights lonely. Signs of the war, which had infiltrated their lives, beginning on the very evening of the partition, governed their lives. She rarely saw him. Traveling from one side of the city to the other became nearly impossible, if not because of the barriers erected by the British, then because of the curfews, and if not because of the curfews, then because of Arab attacks on the roads. Mortar fire rained down on her neighborhood from the eastern part of the city. Sirens, ambulances, police motorcycles, and machine-gun fire became the usual background noise of the city.

The “Rescue Army” of the Arabs disrupted life throughout the country and managed to take control of roadblocks. West Jerusalem was cut off from the rest of the country. Everyone was mobilized, including her coworkers’ husbands and her neighbors, European refugees. The men were recruited to defend the neighborhoods, secure the water and electricity facilities, guard the convoys, and help stage raids and ambushes on Arab populations.

Jerusalem was under siege. While food and water were supplied to residents of West Jerusalem by convoys whose drivers risked their lives, in the east, where Elias lived, the supply from Jordan was uninterrupted, and the residents were less strapped. Still, Elias was limited to his neighborhood; he could no longer cross to her part of town. When he tried to cut through, he was stopped by Arabs, Jews, and the British. As far as he was concerned, they were all his enemies, all armed, irritable, and preventing him from getting to her.

Lila could not reach him, either. Had she fallen into the hands of the Legionnaires, she would have been shot on the spot. Telephone lines were mostly severed. The letters Elias sent via a friend in London were stopped by the censor or lost in the general chaos. He wrote them in a language that hinted at their shared experiences in a way only she could understand. When he received no reply, he concluded that they never arrived.

One morning, an explosion so close to Salon Hubert shook its three rooms as though they had been moved from one place to another. Clients were pulled out from under dryers and made to lie on the floor, curlers still in their hair. Monsieur Hubert leaned on a doorpost muttering curses against the oppressors, while Lila and Rita, the cosmetician, held hands until things settled down. Rita, who was always the first to recover from everything, handed out sugar cubes to everyone. It was clear that something terrible had happened nearby. Heads were washed quickly, polish applied to the nails of pale hands, and several women left the salon without the final touches. Hubert went out into the street to ascertain where the ambulances were headed.

In the midst of it all, the telephone rang.

“Salon Hubert,” Rita answered. Everyone fell silent, all eyes on the black instrument that was miraculously working and would now bring some sort of news.

From the other side of the line, a woman asked for Mademoiselle Lila in French.

Rita said,
“Un moment,”
and signaled to Lila to hurry to the phone.

With all eyes on her, Lila said,
“Allo?”

The woman asked, “Mademoiselle Lila?”

“Oui,”
she said.

“Un moment, s’il vous plait,”
she said, and suddenly Elias was on the line.

She heard his voice and melted, relieved and excited to hear his actual voice after so many weeks of anticipation. She turned her back to the curious onlookers in the salon.

“Lila,” he said, “continue speaking French as if you were still talking to that woman.”

“Bien sûr,”
she replied.

“Are you all right?” he asked, his voice trembling. “Nothing happened to you? There was an explosion near the salon.”

“Yes, madame, everything is fine. And how are you?”

“You know what I want to tell you, don’t you?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

“Do you promise you’ll be strong, you’ll hold on?” he asked.

“When can I see madame?” she asked.

“I am trying,” he said.

The line went dead.

Rita asked whom she had been talking to, and Lila told her it was a client from the Belgian embassy.

“Are you crying?” she asked Lila.

Lila shook her head and ran to the bathroom. Only behind the locked door could she let the tears flow.

Monsieur Hubert returned to the salon full of news, according to the expression of importance on his face. All the women gathered around him, except for Lila, who remained in the manicurists’ corner, pretending to rearrange her tools.

“It was a booby-trapped car, those bastards,” he told them. “The car had an American flag on it, and it was allowed into the courtyard of the National Headquarters building, where dozens of people were in the offices. There were quite a few fatalities and injuries.”

While he was gone, Rita had ordered bottles of orange soda, at his expense, for everyone who had remained in the salon. The boy from the kiosk came in with a tray and opened the bottles, one after another.

“Now they’re looking for the driver who brought the car in with the American flag,” the boy from the kiosk told them.

“It’s an Arab they’re looking for,” Hubert said. “If the British find him, then I’m the pope.”

Lila, however, was lost in her own thoughts. A booby-trapped car in the middle of Jerusalem, ambulances, sirens, everyone up in arms—and she was still thinking about her conversation with Elias. It was short and contained only hints, but she was grateful for what she could get.

All that evening she tried reliving it, looking for clues she had not noticed. The sound of a teleprinter in the background, the click of a typewriter. Clever Elias knew what to say and how to transfer through his voice the storm in his heart.

The weeks passed. For Elias, time was measured in different units; the enforced distance from Lila was nerve-racking. At times, it seemed to him that it had been years since he had seen her last. Munir tried to reach the western part of the city by bicycle, with a letter from Elias that he was meant to hand over to the owner of the bakery across the street from the post office, but he was turned back by the Legionnaires.

The next day, he pedaled up the hill and nearly made it there, when he ran into a surprise roadblock that members of the Haganah had erected there. One of them said, “He looks innocent, but who knows? He could be a spy.”

Another said, “Let’s interrogate him at headquarters.”

A third said, “Let him be.”

Elias was beside himself, with every path to her closed off. Even the British major responsible for purchasing and supplies, with whom he was friendly, ignored his pleas for arranging a meeting with her in his office.

The Riani warehouses emptied out. Shipments of tea did not reach the Haifa port, and supplies from Jordan were delayed. Shipping bills carried invalid dates, bonds had no value, the thriving commerce of the Jews was going under. Everything was coming loose, falling apart.

George Riani sank into apathy. He would rise in the morning and shave and shine his shoes and walk to the office, but he was unable to employ himself gainfully.

Nadira Riani filled her pantry with food she had preserved: olives, jams, citrus peels. Each day she baked bread and fried croquettes made from the herbs of her garden, believing with all her heart that food rich in iron would keep them safe from whatever came their way.

Munir, who was prepared to do absolutely anything for her, ran among the markets looking for a chicken, eggs, and radishes. On occasion, he would find something fresh, like the pumpkin he brought home one day. Nadira placed it on the table and danced around it, clapping her hands. The pumpkin rolled to the edge of the table, and Munir, in the tradition of the greatest soccer players, ran to catch it, slipping on the floor and skidding under it so that it landed squarely on his chest. Nadira made him tea and would not let him rise from the sofa since he had suffered a blow to his ribs. She prepared golden pumpkin pancakes from the meat, and she washed the seeds and dried them on sheets of newspaper.

She asked Munir how things were in the office and complained that her men told her nothing. She was quite worried.

“Business isn’t so good,” he told her. “We have nothing to sell, and nobody is buying anyway.”

“And what does Elias do with himself?” she said as she spread the seeds onto a baking sheet and sprinkled sea salt over them before baking.

“He does everything in his power,” Munir said. “He’s trying to find people and connections who can help us.”

“His head is in another place,” Nadira noted.

Munir sensed that he should turn the conversation in a different direction. He told her that he would return in the evening with the newspapers for George.

Nadira said, “I wish he would stop reading those papers, but he simply can’t manage without them.”

Nadira kept busy with her plants. They knew nothing of war, and with the advent of spring, they conquered the garden in a frenzy of green. She succeeded even with the chamomile, which had refused till then to take root, along with rue leaves, geranium, anise, and a stalk of Moroccan tarragon that Munir had brought from a potted plant tended by one of the clerks at the post office.

Miraculously, they all held on. The delicate plantings and the fruit trees and all members of the Riani family. Only Elias was weakening, fading. Nadira knew that in the spring he would grow stronger and blossom, but now he was stooped, had no appetite, and had taken up smoking—he puffed on his cigarettes as though they would build his muscles—and the dark circles under his eyes turned purple. He was absentminded, his nerves were frayed, his driving was neglectful. He ate like someone required to do so and made tea sloppily, no longer with the ceremony he once employed. His exacting nature turned clumsy, and the fluidity that once characterized his movements disappeared. The man whose eyes once missed nothing could no longer see through the fog.

Everything was on his shoulders: the well-being of his clan, the sinking business, his sisters in Saudi Arabia, his earthbound mother, and his father, who was clinging to earlier, better times. On the worst of days, Elias felt as though someone had poured cement into his shoes and planted him there to root. He realized that very few rights remained in his own hands. He could no longer flee with her. She had not said anything about it when they’d met at Fink’s restaurant, but he knew that was what she was hoping they would do. And because she had said nothing, her supplication seemed even more correct, more just, and all the more painful.