About the Night (3 page)

He had not been prepared for that.

It was not only what she had said but also the way her lips moved when she said it. He had no idea that it would catch him in the belly. A slight tremor, unfamiliar and uncontrollable, spread from deep inside him. Her voice, her beauty, the lemony scent that rose from her. He wished to say to her, “Your lips are beautiful when you speak,” but instead, he remained silent.

“You’re a foreigner to this city, no?” she asked, her gaze stating what she did not: What does he care about what’s happening here? Soon he’ll return to the comfortable place from which he came. But when his eyes spoke to her, she became doubtful. Usually, she was confident in her assessments of people, so it came as a surprise to her that she was wrong.

“I was born two kilometers from here, in Sheikh Jarrah,” he said with a smile that apologized for ruining her theory, “as were my father and his father and his father before him, for generations. All of us, here in Al-Quds, Jerusalem.”

A shadow passed over her eyes.

He thought to change the course of their conversation, and the first thing that crossed his mind was a story about English housewives who soak mismatched socks in tea to dye them the same color. And he told her how his mother burned tea leaves at the entrance to their home to repel mosquitoes. It seemed to her that when she smiled, his own smile broadened.

She did not know, however, that her smile was melting him. When her laughter rose, she blushed, too shy to burst into true laughter in the presence of a stranger and bewildered at the familiar manner in which they were speaking to each other.

A light breeze carried her fresh lemon scent, and at that moment, he felt an excited throbbing in his chest.

To her, he seemed princely yet reticent. He spoke to the waiter in French and to an art dealer in fluent Hebrew. When she asked, he told her he had studied at the Collège des Frères. Some of what he was saying went missing in the dizziness she was feeling. She forgot his name, or maybe she had not learned it, but his clever brown eyes and his strong but delicate hands and his bronzed skin and the warm timbre of his voice were etching themselves onto her.

She did not recall exactly which words he chose, but suddenly he was in a rush and said he had to leave. She was surprised; he had not even glanced at his watch, yet he knew it was time to go.

Still, it was better that way, she thought. It ended the maelstrom taking place inside her and what might have happened. It had been a long time since she had felt this way—even longer since she had felt so flustered. Ever since the disaster with Pardo, who had left her and broken her heart, she had not let any man come too close.

He thought about this encounter as he drove home, how she had honored him with her gracious smile.

“Lila,” she had told him when he asked her name.

“It reminds me of lilacs,” he had said, and she nodded. He could have stayed longer, but something told him to leave. When he excused himself, he saw the surprise in her eyes.

“No apologies necessary,” she had said. “Make sure you detour around the parade route; otherwise you’ll get stuck behind the barricades they’ve set up.”

“It was a pleasure to have met you,” he’d told her.

“Mine, too,” she’d said with a smile.

The streets were adorned with the Union Jack, children stood at the sides of the road in anticipation, and British traffic police stopped the flow of vehicles.

He tried to use his charm on one of them and said, “God bless your king,” but the policeman did not let him pass. He decided to leave his car beside a grove of trees and walk the rest of the way home. He tried to disperse the thoughts he was having about her, to no avail. The background noises that fell mute while they were speaking, her smile, the warmth in her eyes, her delicate hands, the aloofness looking for kinship, her beautiful posture. Did she have freckles? he wondered. Could it be that there were freckles on her nose?

He was not sorry he had left the balcony in such a hurry. Sometimes it happened that he simply fled. After all, that small talk nonsense in the presence of strangers was not something he engaged in regularly. But a tea merchant with aspirations of becoming the best in the business must make an effort to take part in such events and with such people of influence.

He also cut things short with her because he preferred to remain in control. There were forms to fill out, shipments to arrange. He needed to sit with his bank manager. His ordered life suited him. He had no need for complications, and certainly not the kind that would come with the woman he had just met, the woman with the seductive scent.

He did not like perfumed women. He was, after all, a man of hints, of mere suggestions of aromas, something that reaches the nose, then slips away at once, returning and disappearing with each light breeze. He kept his distance from smells that forced themselves on him, proclaiming their presence. He was intrigued by scents that made him search after them, preferring the concealed and the veiled to the pronounced and prominent.

On the way up the stairs into his home, he caught the scent of a dish his mother was cooking: white rice, carrots, and slices of chicken browned in nutmeg and cinnamon. In another minute, she would be serving him a small plate of tahini with mint and diced tomatoes topped with a dab of cumin, and she would sit facing him while he ate. His father would come home from his office, revive himself with a splash of cold water, and join them at the table. They would talk about the British parade and how, because of it, the shops were empty. They would speak, too, of the tension in the city and the the heat of May and June, which at times in Jerusalem could be worse than July. Elias would shut the metal blinds to cool off the house.

In his attempts to forget Lila, he managed to blur the memory of her appearance and her voice. Still, in spite of the time that passed—several weeks—he was left with a memento of their meeting, an involuntary wave that heated up his belly whenever he thought about her but which could be ignored as soon as it appeared. He had other matters and worries that preoccupied his time and attention, like the container that had arrived from Aqaba with two hundred kilos of tea that disappeared during unloading. Perhaps, as his mother suspected, the Jordanians had sequestered it.

Elias thought it was in his power to get the missing goods back. He went to the headquarters of the British Mandate for Palestine in the Mamilla neighborhood, where, where, thanks to his fine suit and his serene gait, he was sent upstairs rather than having to stand in the line that snaked its way through the lobby. He knocked on the door of the clerk handling commercial affairs and entered when summoned.

To the clerk he explained the story of the missing shipment and presented documentation.

“I’m sorry,” said the decisive Englishman, “but we’ve looked into the matter, and there is nothing we can do about it. I suggest you turn to the police.”

The color drained from Elias’s face. Some people redden when angry, but not Elias.

He left the office and walked briskly toward the entrance of the building, nearly exploding with anger at the English clerk’s insouciance. He had been certain that the matter, which had already caused them damage, would be resolved, and he was disappointed not to have gotten any assistance. As he walked down the corridor, he passed by the office of a clerk dealing with local population issues. He was portly and fussy and clearly very intent on pleasing the woman sitting across from him. Elias only caught sight of the back of her, the chestnut hair that nearly reached the clasp of her string of pearls. He slowed his gait, as a fresh and familiar scent reached his nose. He stopped, and stood rooted. The woman was listening as the clerk took pains to impress her.

“You’ve done what you could,” she said in the end as she stood to leave. She said she would be back soon and hoped he would have news for her then.

Something in Elias’s chest thumped. It was her voice, her posture, her thin arms, her narrow shoulders.

When she turned around, her back to the English clerk and her face to the door, she looked exasperated. Then she noticed Elias watching her, and she blushed. A smile blossomed on her face, one that seemed to be asking if the time had come to stop being angry. The fans whirled overhead. Someone lit a pipe, and the scent of tobacco wafted from one of the offices. They were the only two people in the corridor, but the way he felt, they were the only two people in the entire world.

“It’s nice to see you,” he said simply. Not like the English said it, to be polite.

She said, “How odd to run into you. Are they driving you mad, too, with their ‘rules and regulations’?” She uttered the last three words with a mocking and exaggerated British accent.

“They made me furious,” he said. “But now I can’t remember why.”

She gazed at him at length through narrowed eyes.

Because I saw you, he wanted to say. He noticed that with her he was a bit slow, in search of words.

They exchanged a few pleasantries that remained scattered and disconnected, not a proper conversation, grating, even. He was feeling his way while she became sardonic, and this continued until they reached the main entrance to the building, where they were met by the strong afternoon sunshine. It was shaping up into a bad day for them both, lousy timing that was leading nowhere. But then he asked if he could offer her a ride, which she declined in favor of walking.

“Fine,” he said. “So perhaps I’ll escort you on foot.”

“And what about your car?” she asked, surprised.

“It will wait here,” he said.

It happens slowly with him, at his own pace, and if someone tries to speed things up, he lets himself be pushed to the back. Precisely because she refused him, he felt at ease. Without knowing it, she had navigated him toward the place where he felt best, where there was no urgency.

They walked next to each other, close but far enough apart. He noticed that she was confident about her body and it showed in the way she walked, and that she wore an olive-colored dress with gold buttons.

She asked his name.

He laughed, embarrassed. “I thought I gave it to you on the reviewing stand,” he said. “Elias.” After a beat he added, “Elias Riani.”

It took her a moment to grasp the significance of his name. The way he pronounced it gave her something of him. In order to cover up the silence between them, he asked why she needed the assistance of the English clerk.

She explained that she had property in Istanbul that had belonged to her parents. Not an estate or a company, she was careful to point out. Just a small shop in the market.

He told her about the missing shipment of tea that had left his firm in the Old City empty for the coming weeks. “The hotels and cafés and ambassadorial residences I promised to supply with Ceylon, Indian, and British teas will find themselves a different supplier,” he told her. “I can’t afford to lose what we’ve been cultivating for years.”

She said she wished to receive some sort of compensation, since the street had been requisitioned, razed, and rebuilt.

As she spoke, he felt compelled to discover whether there were indeed freckles on her nose, but he decided to look only when he was certain she would not catch him. He was an expert at that, though she did not yet know it. He would break down every part of her face and her body with his eyes and file it in his memory, and she would never know that he was hoarding her to himself. Those perfect lips, wide and painted and prominent and divine and absolutely unattainable.

He was surprised to find that the anger he had felt at the government office had very quickly disappeared, and he told her so.

“There must be something good about the English,” she said.

“Policemen drink tea every day,” he told her, “and the criminals as well.”

Her laughter was free and natural. Her arm brushed against the palm of his hand, and for a moment his heart beat faster.

“What is it about tea that attracts you?” she asked.

“Its taste evokes memories,” he said. “The feeling of something familiar that you’ve already experienced but not yet tasted.”

Even though he was only speaking of tea, her heart trembled.