Don't Ask Me If I Love (15 page)

“O.K.,” I said. “I'll be going.”

“O.K.”

I started toward the door, then turned back.

“I am interested,” I said. “What did your parents say when you decided to come here or did they just not give a damn?”

The curiosity went out of her eyes. They were just cold. I was instantly sorry about what I had just said.

“Maybe they didn't.”

She picked up a newspaper from the table in front of her and looked at it.

I hesitated for a moment, and then I said, “I think I hurt your feelings.”

“That's right,” she agreed, her voice like the sound of ice cubes rocking in an empty glass. “But you don't have to feel sorry about it. You probably wouldn't anyway.”

She turned a page.

I put my hand up to my forehead and rubbed it, then I put it down on the doorknob and pushed.

“The joke is,” I said, “that I really am sorry.”

Going at forty miles an hour through some of the narrower streets in town, it was hard keeping the car on the road, but I managed it. Beautifully handled evening, I thought, mentally patting myself on the back. Almost no mistake omitted. Beautifully done.

From the radio, a soft mellow voice blurred out sentimentally.

Once I had a pretty girl
I loved her as my wife
I put my hands around her neck
And choked away her life.

The audience burst out laughing. It was a recording of a live show.

I turned the radio off.

I drove home.

IN the next few weeks I busied myself writing my novel, studying as little as possible, and cutting my social life to nothing at all.

I wrote nearly a hundred pages, typed in the best English I could master, and then I sat one evening and read the entire thing. I panicked. It didn't seem right. For the first time, the possibility occurred to me that there might be more to it than hammering with my two forefingers on the keys. I couldn't rely on my judgment but I knew of no one I would like to have read it. Except Joy, to whom I couldn't give it. I ended up by locking the pages in a drawer, and pulling my Hebrew typewriter out of the cupboard.

I typed an eighteen-page short story. It took me eight hours. The sun was rising when I was through. I was tired and fed up, unable to force myself to read what I had just written. I placed the pages in a large envelope and went to the post office to mail it. I sent it to the editor of the one literary monthly magazine I knew of. I asked him to drop me a note if it would be published. Then I drove back home and went to bed, telling the ever critical voice in my head to shut up and do the same. The hero of the story, whom I named Evyatar, was a young man studying to be a physician and about to be married to his high school girl friend. Then, one morning, bright and clear, taking a hard look at his future, Evyatar concludes that he doesn't want any of it.

He doesn't leave it at that. He quits the university, calls off the wedding and leaves his wealthy home. He rents a small, dirty room in one of the poorer quarters and finds himself a job in a garage. He waits for his boredom to pass away and for enthusiasm and new interest to take over.

But nothing happens. Instead he grows more and more apathetic. His life falls into a monotonous routine, and stays in it. Evyatar does not feel like a new man, as he thought he would after the change in his life. He feels like the same man he was before, only a lot older. Life is not interesting, he thinks. You can't do what you can't do, and what you can do has been done before. Any effort is just a waste of energy. It can't get you anywhere new. One rainy day, a young American girl knocks on his door. She has nowhere to go, and is looking for a room. It is raining very hard. Evyatar can't be bothered to kick her out so he puts her up, and tells her to be quiet, because he needs silence in order to think. Evyatar is good at thinking, but it never gets him anywhere, it only helps him find more flaws in things.

The girl, Angela, who is beautiful and all heart, stays in his room for one week—long enough for her to fall in love with him. He is so indifferent that this is inevitable. But the guy is not the cooperative type. He won't even sleep with her when she tries to seduce him one night, despite the fact that she is rather sexy. By that time, Evyatar realizes that all he wants from this world is to go to hell, and he tells the girl that she can go to the same place, in so many words. Afterward, satisfied that he has expressed himself clearly, he goes to sleep on the floor, since his bed is still occupied, and he dozes off immediately. He is not awakened once by her sobs the whole night.

He realizes, of course, that Angela is by far the best thing that ever happened to him but he ignores her because he doesn't think he really cares. The only reason he lets her stay is that she is paying twenty pounds per week, all she can afford.

After four days he has to leave for a week's training in the army. Coming back he finds the room empty and the bird gone. This is a surprise to him, because he is not used to having girls leave him in spite of the way he treats them. Sitting in his room, that evening, he decides that he really doesn't give a damn. Evyatar signs up as a career officer in the army, thinking that since he doesn't care about anyone, he might just as well. It takes him two months to receive his first decoration for bravery. Fortunately, by that time, he has already been dead seven weeks.

After I woke up, late that afternoon, I called my father in his office. His secretary told me to hold on. After a few minutes I heard his voice over the line.

“Hello.”

“I'm game for anything,” I said. “You just name it.”

There was a short pause.

“All right,” the clear, calculating voice said finally. “I will let you know.”

He hung up.

Later on that week, I found myself sitting in the party secretary's office, reading through a huge heap of uninteresting papers about this and that, and nothing in particular.

I reminded myself that my father had never said the work would be exciting, he just said it would be useful.

My working hours were from eight till two-thirty, but it was made clear that I could leave during that period if lectures in the university and other such urgent matters demanded it. My job was not clearly defined. I was to assist the party secretary, Mr. Barak, in any manner he found helpful. It wasn't a very complicated task, but I didn't like it. I didn't like the party secretary either. He was a Russian-type Jew, who liked to talk slowly, at length, and about little. I got no kick out of my job. By the end of the first week, I was ready to leave, but I thought it would be unwise, so I stayed.

A few days later I received a long letter from the monthly's editor. It surprised me. It said that he, as well as his colleagues, thought the story was rather good and that it would be published in the next issue of their magazine. It said I should keep writing. I had a future (so it said).

I was a bit disturbed by their enthusiasm because I didn't sincerely think the story was any good, but I told myself that one cannot expect things to be perfect.

Many of my evenings were occupied with meetings, in which the party secretary and other party workers and political figures made speeches. Watching them and their audiences, I came to the conclusion that politics wasn't promising for people who weren't either forty-five or former members of the Haganah, which amounted to the same thing.

The reasonable way to get into politics for a person like me, if at all, is from the outside. Not by starting from the bottom in the party, and climbing slowly up, waiting my turn, but by making a name and a career in another field, and then joining in, already at the top. Otherwise, your best years will also be the most boring ones, and that is no way to handle life.

I decided to keep the job for one month and then quit.

I thought of Joy often.

I didn't go to see her. I regarded that as an achievement. One had to know one's priorities.

Never get hooked.

But a guy did get lonely. One evening I found myself driving to Ruthi's place on the outskirts of town with the sole intention of making her.

It was around ten when I arrived there, wondering if she would be home, and if her roommate would be out. Both possibilities seemed highly unlikely, especially as a combination.

As it turned out, Ruthi opened the door and she was all alone. She didn't look very happy; she just looked tired.

Ruthi had on a robe, which was buttoned only halfway up, revealing a piece of tanned skin and a white bra. Her hair was untidy and her eyes a bit wild, which led me to the conclusion that she had been sleeping.

“Hello,” she said.

I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.

“I am surprised at you,” I said disapprovingly, sitting on her bed. “Napping at such an hour of the day.”

She came over and sat on the bed near me, very wearily.

“I wasn't napping.”

“You look a bit like a dead banana, for an unnapping broad,” I said.

“You missed the nine o'clock edition of the news,” she said drily. “It's rather inefficient of you. I'm surprised.”

“O.K. So who got killed?”

“Remember Amnon?” she asked, a slight edge to her voice.

“From our company? You mean the redheaded one?”

“That's the man.”

I shook my nead slowly.

“Well, what do you know. Wasn't a friend of mine though. Was he a friend of yours?”

“No. I knew him though.”

“Yes.”

I was wondering, far away in the back of my mind, if this was going to mess up my seduction plan. That would be just too much.

“How did it happen?” I asked, not really wanting to know. “Come on, tell me.”

“Oh,” she said, “chasing some Fatah someplace. One was left alive when they thought they had them all. Half dead, actually, but he had his Kalashnikov by him, so he took a few shots when they were advancing. It was a damned lucky thing he didn't kill more. Yoav got him.”

Yoav, the company commander.

“How do you know all that?”

“I spoke to Yoav over the phone,” she said wearily.

“I called the camp after I heard the news. I still remember the number. He was in the mess hall, but they sent for him and he came to the company's office and we talked. He had been hit himself in the left arm, but he says it's only a scratch. There weren't any other casualties.”

“Just Amnon.”

“Just Amnon.”

“Wasn't in my platoon,” I said apologetically. “I almost didn't know him.”

“They had been after them for seven hours,” she said. “Yoav said it had been very tiring. He said he was going right to bed, after he had his coffee.”

I leaned my chin on my hands and looked gloomily at the floor.

“Is Yoav a special friend of yours?”

“What? No, no.”

She seemed a little surprised.

“Not especially,” she added, lighting a cigarette absent-mindedly. “I was in the company for five months, that's all.”

“Where's your roommate?”

“In Tel Aviv. Miss her?”

“Not at all. I had been hoping she would be out.”

She looked at me speculatively, dropping a small roll of gray ash on the floor.

“Oh, really?”

“Sure.”

She shrugged and went on smoking, staring at me with no particular expression.

I was looking up at her, my face still resting in my palms, and thinking how pretty she was. There was a hardness in her features I had never been aware of before, but she really was a pleasant sight. Her figure was slim and curved and the best parts of it emerged, somewhat exposed, from the loose robe she had on. Her face was flawless, except for the lack of tenderness in her expression. The untidy flow of her hair made her look younger.

I leaned closer and put my arm around her, and started kissing her the best I knew how. She sat motionless for a moment, her warm lips pressed drily on my mouth. Then she sighed quietly, and I felt her dropping the cigarette on the floor and stepping on it. She put her arms around my neck, nestling in my grip, and drew me down to her. Her tongue rubbed gently against my teeth, and wriggled through, deep into my mouth. I found the ribbon that tied her robe and pulled. The softness of her body pressed hotly against my chest.

“I thought you were going to ask me to the movies first,” she said huskily.

“Noooo,” I said softly, pushing her down on the bed.

She rolled on her stomach and wriggled away from underneath me.

“There might be visitors coming,” she said. She went to the door and turned the key in the lock. I started peeling my clothes off, folding them primly and laying them neatly on a chair, a thing I never did at home. She turned and stood leaning on the door, watching me curiously.

“Self-confident, today,” she said, but not disapprovingly.

I kicked off my shoes.

“Easy come, easy go.”

She laughed thickly, then, putting one hand behind her, she loosened her bra.

It dropped on the floor in front of her.

“Any more proverbs for the occasion?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I heard it in a movie actually. Goes like this: ‘If you gotta shoot, don't talk, shoot'.”

“Yes,” she said, indistinctly. “Yes, why not?”

She moved slowly forward and sat next to me on the bed. She put her arms around me again, and closed her eyes. I gently put my hands on her small, firm breasts. Her breath came hastily, deeply. Her breasts moved delicately against my fingers, and sent a quiver through my arms. I moved one of my hands to her thighs and we sank down on the mattress. Her eyes opened briefly.

“I hope you like me,” she said coyly.

I buried my face in her perfumed hair and pulled her fiercely to me.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

“Actually,” she said about half an hour later when we were lying quietly in bed, “I don't know why I did it.”