About the Night (45 page)

1967

Ever since that evening at the Yasson Tomb when he told her about his wife and children, she did not wish to see him—and she meant it. The longing for him that had built up over the years of anticipation had blackened into a bitter and muddy fury. The face of the man who had dealt her the most fatal blow of her life was piteous. Her vulnerability and pride made her stubborn and contentious, and the gap that opened between them was the widest since the day they had met, wider still than those nineteen years of forced separation.

Elias tried to find his way to her through her disappointment in the fact that of all people in the world, it was he who had let her down. He did not know whether to let her be or stay by her side, come to her, knock at her door. He sat in his car by the entrance to her building and waited, but the woman from the rooftop apartment did not descend. He handed envelopes to Nomi almost every day and made her promise to leave them in Lila’s mailbox. When he inquired about her at the salon, he was told she was recovering from an operation.

“Who’s asking?” Monsieur Hubert wanted to know, obviously curious.

“A relative,” Elias told him.

During long nights when sleep turned out not to be as restful as his body wished for but merely a refuge from the noises of the day, he imagined himself standing before her locked door, asking to come in. He pictured himself speaking to her, but his voice could not be heard since there was no life, no noise of any kind from the other side of the door. It was at these times that he feared losing her forever or something terrible happening to her, absurdly just when he had gotten her back. He decided to pass by her apartment at odd hours—six in the morning, eleven at night—but still he did not catch sight of her and began to believe she was not there. She had been expunged from the world as if she had waited all these years just to disappear.

He had no trouble interpreting the results of the war. He and his family and neighbors and friends were now conquered subjects while she was a member of the conquerors, the ones who had everything going for them: God, victory, law, power, national pride. But he sensed that she would feel vanquished and weak as though she herself had fallen to an invading force. He, on the other hand, felt alert and charged, his senses sharp, and he was filled with determination to change what had been decreed.

In his worst moments of despair, he felt that by disappearing she had handed down a sentence on his life: death by worrying. After a week of clashing mainly with his own thoughts, he decided he should stop running and let the carousel he was riding slow to a stop. He would give her time; an abundance of time was all she had had during the long years she had waited, and yet here she was still in need of more time. Nomi had told him that the letters she placed in the mailbox had been removed and that her mother thought Lila had gone to a rest home. She had told Nomi that Lila knew how to look after herself, and that is what Nomi passed along to Elias. Still, in his heart he knew that it was he who had created this tangled mess, and it was he alone who could make it right.

At home, he walked around angry and uncommunicative. No one approached him—not his wife, not his son. Munir chalked it up to his moodiness. His mother thought it had to do with the fact that Elias hated to have his freedoms curtailed, and here he was under occupation and had passed from being a Jordanian citizen with status to a conquered man without rights under a military government. His father figured it was a matter of money, since people were already speaking of them as people who had once had a fortune and were now destitute. Elias heard their worries and thought it was true: without her, he was destitute.

In the darkness he lay on his back and spoke to her. He wanted her to be angry with him, hurl her fury at him, spend her disappointment. But she did not empty herself; the insult was amassing and hardening in her body. He could feel that her pain was intolerable and that somehow it would pass to him. He wished to hurt down to the marrow of his bones so that she could be relieved. God knew how he had been punished, that he was finished, that he would pay up. But that was all he was asking, to have the chance to pay.

He did not know to whom to turn, who could give him advice. Like a love-struck boy, he visited all the places they had been together so many years earlier—the cinemas, the cafés—only to discover that nothing was as it had been. He believed in his ability to get her back but at the same time was crumbling and losing hope.

After twenty-one days of hell, Elias went to the doctor, who prescribed sleeping pills.

“So many people these days are taking them, because of the war,” the doctor said reassuringly.

The moment he placed a pill on his tongue and tasted its bitterness, he spit it into the toilet, where it floated like a pink life preserver in the open sea. But it was there, standing over the toilet, that he found his answer.

He waited for daylight, then left the house. His gas tank was nearly empty, but he drove out of Jerusalem believing that whatever was in the tank would suffice for getting him to where he needed to be. He caught sight of the new neighborhoods that had sprung up at the edges of the city, but he had no time to stop and marvel at their ugliness. Vistas appeared in his window, then disappeared. He was very nearly blind to the beautiful morning blooming before him. He was alone with the supply trucks on the road.

Anyone unfamiliar with the road would no doubt miss the turnoff to the Garden of Eden. Even Elias did, since it had been years. He turned around and found the path, of which there was none more beautiful, and his chest expanded. It was holy, he thought, this small piece of nature, a gift of the creator of the universe. Christians believed it was where Rabban Gamliel resided, Hillel the Elder’s grandson and the teacher of the apostle Paul before he became a Christian.

Now, Elias was no longer in a hurry. He parked his car at a distance from the monastery and began to walk. He took in the astonishing view, which had only grown more beautiful: the hills dotted with olive trees, the valley wrapped in soft light, the ancient stone building that exuded splendor. He sat beneath the very tree under which he and she had taken shelter, on a bed of carobs that seemed to have been pulled from the heat of the day, and he crushed them between his fingers, remembering how they had once burst open with fresh sweetness. Now they lay on the ground, rotting.

Elias took his time; because he felt her presence nearby he hesitated: What would he say? How could he make sure to make the most of the moment? Sated sheep labored up the hill, and a group of monks rose from the fields in a line, nodding as they passed. Elias was grateful for the silence of nature and man.

It took courage to reach the monastery, but his knees felt like bricks of lead. He told himself it was all or nothing, that he had lost her in any event so what did he have to lose? He heard the sound of his own breathing and the crunching of dry brush underfoot, and from the cloistered stone building he discerned the voices of small children singing. This surprised him. They were singing in Italian, it seemed—a song that broadened his heart with its innocence and lack of uniformity. The song drew closer, and he drew closer to it. Their singing stirred him, but he did not see the children at all even though they were standing in plain view.

It was only she whom he saw.

She was standing with her back to the gate. From any angle and at any spot the world over, from any distance and in any lighting, he would recognize the nape of her neck. The nape from which he had been estranged and that had once leaned gently into him. He stopped, perhaps to give her a moment, and just then, for no clear reason, she turned around, toward the gate. She faced him now, though he was at a distance, and the two stared at each other without moving. He no longer heard the children’s choir nor even the sound of his shoes on gravel when he started moving closer to her. Her gaze never left him and remained astonished even when they were face-to-face.

Lila was the first to break the silence. “I didn’t tell a soul where I was going.”

“I found you,” he said, as if apologizing for discovering her hiding place.

“How?”

“I searched for you.”

“I didn’t want to be found.”

“Not even by me?”

“Especially by you.”

“I think we need to talk,” he said.

“What more is there to say?”

“If you’re willing, come with me, just for a few minutes.”

“I can’t leave the children.”

Only then did he notice them, even though they had been there the whole time. What had been moving dots at the edges of his line of vision came into focus as a group of crop-headed boys in matching blue-and-gray uniforms, all gazing with curiosity at the man standing there. These children, whom he had never met before, were now standing between him and the conversation of a lifetime, the most difficult he would ever have. Suddenly, a robed monk appeared in the garden as if sent from heaven or at least from Elias’s prayers.

Elias told him he had come from afar to meet this woman, that he needed to converse with her urgently. “A matter of life and death,” he said, so that everything would not dissolve before him.

The monk cast him a sidelong glance, then gathered the boys together like chicks and marched off with them. Lila thanked the monk with a nod of her head and followed after Elias, away from the monastery. He felt her resistance like a shadow.

She walked carefully among the rocks and boulders, as though he were not there at her side, as if afraid to fall because there was no one there she could rely on if she did. Her loneliness grieved him, and they exchanged no words; the silence of the hilltop and the trees and the monks had hushed them as well on their walk to nowhere.

He would ask her to sit when he found just the right place, and he would sit as well, though not too close. Face-to-face, but she would not look into his eyes. He was familiar with her resistance and watched it grow stronger as she walled herself inside herself like a shield against what was causing her such terrible pain. He reminded himself that the person she loved most in the world had been the very same person to deal the cruelest blow to her. And that person was none other than he himself.

They were left alone, the man and the woman, at the top of the hill. Even the signs of modernity had been wiped clean by some unseen hand, and the view was as pristine as it would have been during Crusader times. From where they sat, no roads or electricity poles or water heaters were visible. Their silence was oppressive, but Elias had no reason to end it so long as he did not know what to say or how to say it. Words were meant to be spoken from one’s heart and heard in black and white, words were meant to drip pleasant drops, but they could also be a barrage of glass shards. Words can destroy. They need to be measured. They must express only what is essential.

He did not tell her that he had been searching for her for twenty-one days like a sleepwalker, climbing to the roofs of buildings trying to catch a glimpse of her. He did not ask how she was because he could see it on her face. Her expression was blank, broken; there was no flicker of light—no anger, no wonder, certainly no joy. He asked that she look him in the eye for a moment, and she obliged, but without desire, merely to avoid embarrassing him. She stopped gathering twigs from the nearby bush that had gone dry.

“I was wrong,” he told her. “I made a terrible mistake that I wish I had not made.”

Her eyes followed a red beetle, and he understood how hard it was for her to listen to him.

“I didn’t wait for you,” he said. “I didn’t believe that there was a chance something would change. It seemed so . . . final. Forever. Who could have guessed that the day would come when all this would blow up? I got swept away by a wave that was too strong for me, these powerful forces that shook out our country like crumbs on a tablecloth after a meal. I never thought our reality would change within this century, during our lifetimes. There is nothing I regret more in life. There is nothing I wish to change more than this.”

“Too late,” she said.

“It’ll take me an entire lifetime to understand and set things right. I’m only asking one thing of you: to give us time.”

“Time for what?” Her voice was cracked, fatigued. There was so much vulnerability in her question that his stomach folded inward with pain.

“Time to regain your trust,” he said.

“You came all the way out here to offer me time? What if I tell you that all the time I had I wasted? That I don’t want a thing from you?”

“I don’t know any other remedy,” he said. “We both need a period of time to recover. What we share is too precious for us to give up on it.”

“You mean what we
shared
,” she said.

“Give it a chance, Lila. If you waited this long, it may be because you never experienced another love like this. Well, I haven’t, either. I never have, and I never will.”

She rose to her feet. He remained seated.

“I have to get back to the children,” she said, pointing to the monastery.

The window of time that had been given to Elias closed. He had not had any wild delusions; he’d known she would not fall into his arms. But he felt he had not done his best. All he knew was that he had spoken candidly and had not made any promises he could not keep. Perhaps his deep sorrow for the lost years, the hurt he had caused her, and this whole terrible letdown had gotten through to her. And then again, perhaps it had not.