About the Night (4 page)

“Bitter and sugary,” he added. “And the keeper of secrets.”

“Whose?” she asked.

“The people who grew it and harvested it and dried it and selected the one particular leaf that stores all the aroma, the rarest and most precious.”

The cart of an iceman stopped beside them, and two children in berets fought to see who would reach the frozen block wrapped in jute cloth first.

She said, “I’m lucky to have found an iceman willing to climb the five flights of stairs to my apartment.”

“Five,” he said, astonished. “I would climb fifty. For you.”

“With a block of ice on your back?” she asked.

He laughed and did not tell her that in his house an electric refrigerator had been installed.

Girls were playing Three Sticks on the sidewalk. “The last one to jump,” she explained, “moves the stick farther each time, and the winner is the one who manages to skip over it without touching it with her foot.”

“The farthest one can go,” he said dreamily.

At the top of the street, she told him she had lost a day of work and that her petty boss would deduct it from her wages. Before saying good-bye next to the iron gate by her building, she said something about the serendipity that had brought them together in the same corridor at the same hour, and then she held out her hand to him.

He said nothing, but he tarried a moment before releasing her fingers.

Windows, blinds, sills—she cleaned like a storm, emptying cupboards and polishing glass shelves and the valuables drawer and the wooden cabinet. Every book was removed and dusted on all sides, with especially delicate treatment for the leather-bound Bible. She changed the white linens and washed the used ones and hung them to dry on the roof. When they finished drying in the breeze and had been sterilized by the sun’s rays, she would sprinkle rosewater on them and iron them.

Wearing a simple cotton dress for the cleaning operation, she stopped on occasion to sip tea, its cooling an indication of the rate of her progress against the dust. And each time that she finished one of these “cleaning storms,” as she referred to them, she washed herself with pleasure and removed the polish from her nails in order to do them again.

Just at that moment, when everything stood spotlessly shining in its place, there was a knock at her door. No one came unannounced; even people collecting for charity or salesmen did not bother to climb all the steps to the top of the building—nearly one hundred of them. They did not know that a very small apartment stood hidden there, a white pearl that contained all the belongings—few, exact—needed by a single woman.

She approached the door on tiptoe. Tense and alert, she jumped when the knocking grew louder.

The young man who stood on her doorstep handed her a wicker basket. She was confused, and looked around for a place to put it—not on the starched linens, not on the gleaming countertop, not in the kitchen sink. She found a coin in her purse, handed him a cup of cold water, and said, “Thank you for making your way all the way up here.”

The young man softened, his grumpiness subdued. “I was told not to leave until you opened your door,” he said.

She closed the door behind him and sat down in the kitchen. Slowly, she removed the linen cloth that covered the basket, revealing Swiss chocolate—bitter, of course—roasted coffee, and a tin of Ceylon tea, all her favorite aromas. Her nose hovered above these treasures. Hidden inside the tin of tea, modest and cautious, was a note:
Will you join me for dinner this Thursday? I will pick you up at 6 p.m.
The note was unsigned.

What luck that I’m done cleaning, she thought, because her knees were knocking and her hands had turned to jelly and everything kept dropping from them. She felt clumsy, with sieves for hands, and she tried to gain control of herself. She sniffed at the note and examined the handwriting, looking for clues in the short text. A few days earlier, when they had walked from the British Mandatory headquarters, she had shown him where her apartment was, way up at the top.

“On the roof?” he had asked, surprised.

“Where the white blinds are,” she told him.

“What’s the view like from there?”

“You can see the walls of the Old City,” she said, “and part of the Old City itself. Where you live.”

“I live outside the walls,” he told her.

Something in his simple statement made her hold her breath. He was talking about the place he belonged to, nearby but quite far. She said nothing. The thought that she would never see his home ran through her mind. But why was she having such thoughts before anything at all had happened?

She enjoyed the fact that he was astonished to discover she spoke Turkish, English, some Spanish, French, and a smattering of Arabic. “I use them all,” she said with a laugh. “That’s the way it is with us Jews. Since we have been exiled and wander from place to place around the world, we have come up with our own funny language, Jewish, built from shards of languages.”

“But you yourself haven’t wandered so much, have you?”

“Only from Istanbul to Jerusalem,” she told him. “But my father always tried to speak with every customer in his shop in her own language.”

Elias smiled. “And you went to him in the middle of the day?”

“Yes, to bring him hot food and watch him as he worked. I am capable of taking apart and reassembling any Primus stove.”

“And when mine breaks down?”

“Bring it to me,” she said with a laugh, as a flicker of warmth sparked between them.

All at once, her face grew serious. She surprised herself by revealing a secret to him. “I’ve kept only one thing that belonged to my father,” she said. “The needle he would use for opening clogs in the burner head.”

He was only slightly taller than she was, and when they walked side by side, he adjusted his steps to hers. She took in his quiet and pleasant voice, the touch of his hand as it passed by chance over her arm when he stooped to pick up a printed sheet from the curb. “Orient Cinema Presents
The Best Years of Our
Lives,” it read. He rolled up the flyer and held onto it as if trying to preserve a particular moment.

Lila put a kettle on the stove to boil. On the shiny tea tin was a picture of women picking tea leaves, with wicker baskets hanging from their backs. Behind them were rows and rows of green leaves and a turret adorned with flowers against an orange backdrop. This tin of Orange Pekoe had made its way all the way from Ceylon and gave off a deep and wonderful aroma. As she poured the hot water, she recalled Elias’s winning description of the way Asians held their mugs. She held hers with two hands in an embrace and felt the warmth in her palms.

Precisely at these moments, when the mind does not comprehend what is happening because a huge wave has gathered everything in its wake and tossed it all around, lucidity takes over. She had not felt so clear-headed in a long while. And the train of thoughts that caused her to soar high was the one that brought her to earth as well.

When she first laid eyes on him on that reviewing stand, she had not known he was an Arab. Had she known, she might have moved away before his charm could envelop her. After all, Jews were experts at identifying Arabs, and Arabs were experts at identifying Jews. They could smell one another out like members of primitive tribes that no costume could ever hide. Where were her sensors, her faculties? She had always kept her distance, felt a certain enmity toward them, harbored deep-seated reservations about them, Arabs as a nation, Arabs as people, that it was simply best not to have anything to do with them. This had been inculcated in her since her childhood in Istanbul. Many times at home, she had heard her parents mention the enmity between Jews and Arabs. But in Elias, she saw nothing to raise her suspicions. She had to work hard to remind herself that he was an Arab. And perhaps she could not even see what she was supposed to see, the difference between them, the fact that they had nothing at all in common but the attraction between a man and a woman.

As long as they maintained a distance between them, she thought, trying to allay her worries, there was nothing to fear. She had to protect herself. In her world, such a relationship was unthinkable; it was nothing that could ever be explained.

When Elias was preoccupied with something, his tried-and-true method for dealing with it was to ignore it. Over the coming days, he busied himself with trips from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv and the Haifa port and Ramallah and Bethlehem. He was trying to expand his roster of clients and signed contracts with Ginati Café in Tel Aviv and Sapir Café and Margoa Café on the Carmel. With speed and vigor deriving from the very energy deflected from his thoughts, he was broadening his base as exclusive supplier to many large hotels and managed to push aside a number of upstart competitors, Jews recently arrived from Europe.

To Elias, commerce was the personal connection, the chemistry. That was what his father had taught him. It was not the price, not only the quality of the tea or even the service. It was the feeling that you implanted in the people across the table from you. In a world in which an empire, with all its laws and its sultans, fell and in its place rose a new one, you become someone reliable and solid. In Palestine, inundated with a wave of refugees and survivors, his successes were with the Jews, who appreciated his refinement, his facility with languages, his humor, his direct but earthy gaze, his trustworthiness. He was no longer thought of merely as George Riani’s son; he had built his own reputation and made his own connections and enriched the family coffers. He was the scion of a dynasty of merchants, and this was something everyone admired: continuity, legacy, the secrets that passed from father to son. These ethics are learned around the family dinner table, not necessarily at universities or in the markets. He got along well with everyone, the veterans and those new to the country, and although he was young, he was referred to by one and all as “Mr. Elias.” The Riani family business flourished. Firms from overseas made offers to expand their business to include sugar and coffee and cocoa, but Elias and his father were hesitant, and decided to reject these offers.

In the midst of this whirlwind of activity, he was surprised by the sudden and intense rush of passion that engulfed him. She is different, he reminded himself before he fell asleep. Whatever happens with her will be different, too. And there was his impossible situation, his family, his entire life and surroundings. If this was not something passing—if this woman herself was not something passing—then it would carry him off, all of him.