About the Night (46 page)

“I love you, Lila,” he said just before they reached the path. It simply burst out of him even though he had no intention of saying so. It was like a wave rising from the depths that had to be expressed.

She did not respond. She merely turned her head from the path to gaze at him for a moment.

“Will you be staying here much longer?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Whose children are those?”

“No one’s. They’re orphans.”

“They’re lucky they have you. Is there a chance you might be willing to write to me?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I’ve been writing to you,” Elias told her. “And I’ve been giving the letters to Nomi. You’ll find them when you return.”

“Nomi,” she said, and in her voice, he could hear a kind of longing.

“She can be trusted,” he explained to her questioning eyes. “She puts the letters in your box. That girl is my only connection to you.”

“Where do you meet her?”

“Near the salon or her school,” he said.

Elias sensed that Nomi was a safe place, a bridge between Lila and him where they could converse with relative ease. But Lila fell into her tortured silence once again.

“I let you get away once,” he said the moment before they parted. “It won’t happen again.”

She passed through the gate of the monastery, which was the sign for him to leave her alone. He hoped she would turn around for one last look at him, but he was not surprised when she did not.

In the car on the way back to Jerusalem, he thought about this woman who had never left his life. He knew everything with her was absolute, a death sentence without pardon. But there were still moments in which he dared to believe her love for him had not expired.

He thought about how soft she was with the children. He had never heard her utter the word
orphan
before, perhaps because she herself was one. Even he, who had been family to her, had jilted her and created a different family from which he now felt estranged.

He recalled how he felt when she told him she needed to return to the children, since these were words she had never uttered, words she would never utter about their own children—children he had kept her from having because she had pledged exclusivity to him. And these were words he himself would have to utter to her from now on: “I must return to the children. My children. Children born to another woman from my seed, a woman I never loved a single day of my life.” But he was their father, and he would return to them.

He had found her. And now he was going to have to find himself.

The car was traveling without gasoline, was coasting on fumes from the meeting in the fields of Beit Jamal and, with its final drops, managed to reach the entrance to a gas station and came to a stop. The station, however, had no gasoline for sale; the supply truck had been waylaid. Elias pushed the car into a strip of shade, opened all the windows, lowered the seat, and fell asleep, the best sleep he had had in weeks.

Lila stayed another month with the children. She did not write from the monastery, nor did she telephone. Every time she thought of him, she felt a sharp pain. Her thoughts carried her far away, to the stone house in which he lived with his three children and a wife she knew nothing about and did not wish to know anything about. She felt far from forgiving as she sat each evening outside the monastery after putting the children to bed. The hills changed shapes at night; the voices from the forest grew familiar to her even though she still grew tense on occasion from the howling of a distant jackal or the whisper of a fox’s tail in the underbrush or the beating of a barn owl’s wings. During long moments of silence, the moon’s light was painful to her, since it was the very light that had been reserved for magical moments they had shared in the past.

She had succeeded in stepping away from her life so thoroughly that she did not even know the date or listen to the news. Judging by the shortening days and the cool evenings, she figured it must be Elul, the month of asking forgiveness before the Jewish New Year. Spending her days between walls that held statues of the Virgin Mary was no simple matter for her, and even repelled her, but she knew that for this she would be pardoned. With all her heart and being she felt she was with the God of the Jews; it was only by chance she had found refuge there, in a monastery.

2006

Nomi’s hand remained resting in Elias’s in the glassed-in room in the Emergency ward. His eyes, like hers, were damp.

“Elias?” she called out to him though she was quite near.

“Yes, my dear,” he said.

“Let’s get you out of here. This place is not for you. You got yourself worked up, and you relived those awful days when you two were separated. But now you’re fine. Come on, let’s leave this bed for someone else. You see the guy over there? He was changing a lightbulb, fell from the ladder, and broke his neck. The man next to him is a prison guard who was stabbed by some inmates, and his chances are nil, and the one who keeps smiling at us, all happy to be alive, just had a liver transplant. These are the mortally ill, Elias. You’re not one of them. Let’s get you to a regular ward. I’m going to call the nurse.”

By the time Nomi left the hospital feeling light as a feather, Elias had been rescued from the glass refrigerator. He was moved to Internal Medicine and placed in a bed next to a balcony. The color returned to his face, and he had a craving for carrot juice. She suspected that his life was actually in danger only as long as he was in the Emergency ward with all the deathly ill and constantly changing beds. The very sickest enter there, the dead are the ones to leave, and only the lucky few in between are transferred to other wards. She went out to find carrot juice for him even though she would have preferred to be on the road back to Tel Aviv already, free of the trapped feeling she always experienced in Jerusalem.

She passed through West Jerusalem, empty and quiet on this Sabbath day, to the eastern side of the city, to Elias’s stomping grounds, where Nomi felt a proximity to him and to his love. These were the streets through which he passed and where he loved Lila, where he pined for her, the streets that separated them. And here she was, Nomi, driving down these same streets, their secret still hidden inside her. For weeks now, Elias had been sharing his story with her, enlightening her so that all the missing pieces were finally coming together. These streets, Elias’s streets, and the sights and the sounds and the smells, were filling in what was missing.

She suddenly recalled a day when Elias was waiting for her outside her school. He was preoccupied and did not notice her when she was standing next to his car. He offered to give her a ride, and without hesitation, she opened the door and sat next to him, the back of her legs scalded by the black leather seats. An Arabic song was playing on the radio, and Elias turned the volume down. He made small talk, but she preferred to divert the attention from herself and asked him whether he, too, had bought his car from Arabs.

He smiled. “You mean, you don’t know that I’m . . .” Elias did not complete his sentence.

At that moment, as the tingle of astonishment spread through her, she suddenly understood why his existence had to be kept secret. He was one of the tens of thousands of Arabs who overnight had become part of her city but was the first she had spoken with. He was the one to whom Lila’s heart was sworn, the one whose noble presence determined Nomi’s appreciation and respect for Arabs in general and annulled any animosity she might otherwise have maintained.

The Mercedes stopped beside the Ratisbonne Monastery. “Is here okay?” he asked her as he handed her an envelope for Lila.

“Sure,” Nomi said as she tucked the envelope into her schoolbag.

She put the carrot juice in the cup holder near the gearshift and not a drop spilled on the drive back to the hospital. She would share with Elias a warm pita spread on one side with olive oil and hyssop seasoning, and she would make him happy by telling him how there was something in the streets of East Jerusalem that preserved his story: a rustling wind, a cottony cloud, a whiff of some scent. Not everything had vanished; something of him and his story had remained.

1967

On her first morning back at the salon after all those weeks at the monastery, Lila did not feel like someone returning to a familiar and beloved place. She did not have the feeling she used to get when she was away for even a day. The salon had kept her clients for her and had not brought a replacement, but Lila sat in her chair, wearing her pressed white robe, and wished for the day to end.

“We missed you so much,” Rita told her, placing a hand on her shoulder.

She spoke with gravity, more serious than Lila was accustomed to, as though she had taken over as leader of the women, a role once reserved for Lila.

At the end of the day, the bookbinder, whose shop was on the ground floor of Lila’s building, handed her the mail he had collected from her box. Elias’s letters were saturated with the smell of glue from the bookbinder’s factory. She placed the stack of letters on her dining room table and opened and read them one after the other, allowing the emotions contained in them to seep inside her.

She liked what she found there, what Elias had written: the restraint, the brevity, the respect he had for her, the understanding of her need for distance and separation after such a heartbreaking rendezvous. She even liked his handwriting and the fact that there were no signs that hinted at the place from which these words were being written.

A client at the salon had asked Lila where she had returned from, and suddenly Lila herself wondered the same thing. Her answer was that she had been in mourning. For the two of them, for what they had shared. She had let go of the hope she had nurtured through the years, had mourned the anticipation, the expectations. Instead of the father and mother and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles she did not have, these had served as her family, but now they were gone as well; they perished in the tragedy and left her alone. She was a woman with no longing, no desire, which she felt was worse than being barren. She felt utterly empty, a person in which nothing could bloom and grow, as though hope had been cut from her body.

She went to look at herself in the mirror and saw a pale, faded woman, a woman with no spark in her eyes and dark circles below them. She moved her hair from side to side and noticed the gray flickering at her temples. She pinched her skin and felt its flabbiness, saw how her lips had lost their natural color. These were all temporary and could be corrected; she knew she could restore her face to beauty when she felt better; there were magic remedies for all these. She washed herself in hot water and wrapped herself in her bathrobe.

Hot cocoa, she thought. That’s what I need. And if she was craving something sweet, she knew that she must be starting to heal. In her home, hot cocoa meant one small step on the way to recovery.

Lila gathered Elias’s letters and climbed into her neatly made bed. On the nightstand stood a candle in a dish, just as she had grown accustomed to at the monastery. The candle gave off a dull, protective glow. She thought about the long nights when sleep and alertness had engaged in power struggles at her expense, how every morning brought with it greater pain, the moment of awakening into forgetfulness only to be struck sharply, every day, by memory. It was just like when her parents died: crazed nights of fitful sleep and waking up in the morning quite certain that all was well only to be slapped back to the reality that she had no mother and no father. That she was alone.

The same feeling hit her every morning at the monastery. He had taken another woman to be his wife. He slept nights with her; maybe he curled up next to her in his sleep. A different woman was calling him “my husband,” a woman who would be known as Mrs. Riani. Their children had grown in her womb, little Rianis created from their bodies connecting, his genes and hers, so that there would forever be proof that he and that woman had married and slept together and given birth to children and raised them and wept with joy.

He was her whole life, her heart’s desire, the purpose for her existence, the hope for happiness. That she had waited for him had fed the small fire that would sustain them both. She had thought that he, like her, was waiting and would tolerate no compromises. Now it had become clear that all those years she had been holding on to an illusion, relying on a deception, so that when the hope vanished she found herself alone and ashamed at her own stupidity. Layer upon layer of sadness weighed heavily on her chest.

The candle was burning down and wax filled the dish. She blew it out and lay in the darkness thinking about the following day at the salon. She would go there without desire or joy or the sense of satisfaction she used to derive from doing something she knew she did well. If she had what it took to make others happy, then why should she suppress it? She would go to visit the boys in the orphanage every week, as often as she could. She had begun to notice the distress of others all around her, and not just that of those boys, like when she was a girl and the tears of another child invariably touched her.

She wished desperately to forget the pain that Elias had caused her, but each time she tried, something proud and stubborn stood between them like a knight in armor. She stretched out her legs, then pulled them in toward her chest and rocked herself from side to side. And all at once, she found herself able to think of his distress as well.

She realized that he could not have hurt her without harming himself too.

A pain passed through her as she considered his grief and how her reaction had caused him great anguish. To forgive him, she thought, thanking God for opening this up inside her, would mean understanding that he is not perfect as I am not perfect.

Sleep, which was meant to be peaceful and comforting, revealed itself to be a villain, and in the morning, she awakened angry and exhausted. She wore a sweater for the first time after the summer, a cream knit that she matched with a camel skirt, and set out on foot to the salon. King George Street was blocked with traffic and angry motorists idled, tooting their horns. As she rounded the corner, she discovered the reason why: a truck carrying cement slabs had crashed, tipping the top layers of stacked slabs into the street. Lila saw the accident just moments after it happened and thought it was a miracle that no one had been crushed beneath a cement slab. Another thought occurred to her as well: that if you let the top layers fall, there is a chance that the bottom layers will hold fast. Thus, she imagined that she might remove one layer of her own grief, and then another.

She had sworn an oath to herself: if Elias were returned to her, she would pay a debt of gratitude by changing the purpose of her life and doing for others. Indeed, Elias had been returned to her, though not as she had envisioned. Still, he was once again in her life, sane and healthy, tormented but warm and loving. He was back, body and soul. Would it have been better had he never reentered her life at all? If the wall dividing the city had remained standing? If he had simply disappeared forever? If he had died in an explosion in Sheikh Jarrah? Her thoughts boiled and bubbled, and not one of them lasted for more than a moment.

He passed by her building every day like a bus driver on his regular route until finally he caught sight of white laundry drying on the roof, and he knew she had returned from the monastery. He found a scrap of paper in the car and, breathless, he scribbled, “And I need you, too.” He put the note in an envelope and handed it to Nomi.

For days afterward, he drove past Nomi’s school at twelve thirty, just as school let out.

“Do you have something for me?” he asked, full of hope.

Nomi shook her head and squinted into the car against the midday sun. It wasn’t until the sixth day after Lila’s return and the sun was hiding behind a cloud that he looked at Nomi without asking the question, and she rummaged through her schoolbag and pulled out a lined envelope. She drew near the car window and handed it to Elias.

“You’re a good girl,” he told her.

Nomi went on her way, and he sat in his car feeling as anxious as a person expecting the results of a medical exam. Would his illness kill him, or did he have more years to live? He parked near an empty kiosk feeling like the whole world had emptied out. He opened the envelope.

I have returned to the city but not to myself. I still have no answer and maybe never will.

Perhaps it will come to me when we meet again. Saturday morning opposite the King David Hotel.

He lifted his eyes from the page and saw Nomi making her way up the street, small and gaunt, her schoolbag strapped to her back, her blue gym shorts accentuating her too-thin body. He considered running after her and hugging her and telling her she was a special girl like no one else in the world.

Lila had left an opening for him, a slit wide enough for a convoy of ants, no more. But for the first time in a long time, he felt they had a chance. He would not crowd her; he would start with her as if from the beginning, with caution, without rushing things. He would have to win her trust all over again. And in any event, he knew her well enough to know that she was not punishing him; in fact, she was in shock.

There was a certain foreignness to their relationship, and flammable topics they would have to avoid. His home and his children and what he had built in the years of their separation would be suppressed and perhaps would never come up in their conversations. He imagined it might take months for them to patch things up, and several months more for them to become one again. And there would always be a scar. He thought of her like a sailor abandoned by his shipmate on the open sea, then forced to sail with him again.

At ten o’clock on Saturday morning, he waited for her across the street from the King David Hotel. When she suddenly appeared from the alley behind the YMCA building, he felt she would overcome their difficulties, that she was determined and bold and had the capacity for healing them both. God, he thought, how I love her.

Lila sat next to him in the car, and he simply drove, hoping the healing would begin because they were in the same place, together. It had been so long since they had shared a space. He peered inside a box she had brought and saw chocolates and gummy bears, and he thought, I’m so happy to see her, happy that she’s sitting next to me and I can look at her.

In a soft voice he said, “The tank is full. Tell me where you want me to take you.”

She smiled. “To my children,” she said.

“Tell me about them,” he said.

The bastard, she thought. He knows exactly what will cut the tension.

Lila told him about the boys at the monastery. “They come from Arab families in Ramle and Lod, orphans, children that no one wants. The priest agreed to take them in so long as he could raise them as he saw fit. So in addition to math and religion lessons, he engages them in meaningful dialogue, takes them on hiking trips, and has them work the fields. He gives them music lessons and kitchen duty. The atmosphere isn’t strict, since their lives are hard enough as is. They came to him lost and neglected, and in the space of a year, he turned them into a family, with him as its head. There were thirteen boys to start; now there are thirty-three.

“I went there without knowing about them, but as often happens with miracles, it simply happened. The children needed a nanny, a mother figure. At first I couldn’t stand the noise they make, and I would sit in the courtyard just watching them run and fall and get scratched up and hurt. They fought and cried a lot. I made food for them and washed their clothes, and by taking care of them, we grew close. I taught them words in Hebrew. We even made a game of Monopoly from cardboard, and I played dominoes with them.

“It bothered me that their knees were always dirty. I scrubbed and scrubbed, but that’s the way it is with boys. Finally, I gave up. They’ll just have to grow up with dirty knees.”

Lila talked and Elias listened. His hands were on the wheel, and his eyes on the road. A miracle had happened to those children, and a miracle was happening to him as well: she was with him. Her longing for the children was bringing her back there, and her longing for him was returning her to him, too. The topics of their conversation were limited and cautious, but Elias was somehow certain that he and she would progress. It was like the aftermath of a landslide: you couldn’t see the path anymore, and you had no choice but to pick up stone after stone until you could.