Don't Call It Night (2 page)

T
HIS
time it did not go straight past on the other side of the wall, up to the next floor, but stopped with a faint scratching sound, and at once slammed and continued on its way. Cold and silent, a gecko, stony-eyed in the darkness, watching a colourful insect fluttering in the light, that is how I receive her: the swish of her skirt, the electrical impulse of her will before she moves, then the motion itself, the rumour of her heels between the door of the elevator and the door of the apartment the lock already turning: as always, with no fumbling, the key slips straight into the slot.

She went from room to room, talking in full spate, voice young and bright, abandoning the ends of her sentences, she crossed the apartment from one end to the other, turning on lights one after another in the hall, the kitchen, the toilet and above my head in the living room, wafting a trail of honeysuckle scent and setting up a row of electric lights in her path as though to illuminate the runway for her landing. The whole apartment screwed up its eyes, dazzled.

When she reached me she dropped her shopping basket and her briefcase and two overflowing plastic bags on the coffee table and asked: Why are you sitting in the dark, Theo? And she answered herself: You fell asleep again, sorry I woke you, actually you should thank me, otherwise how would you get to sleep tonight?

She bent over me and gave me a hasty comradely kiss on my hair, then removed my bare feet from the coffee table and made as if to sit down next to me, but no, she kicked off her shoes, whirled round in her light skirt with the blue pattern of diamonds, and flounced off to the kitchen, came back with two tall glasses of mineral water saying, Dying of thirst, drank, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand in a childlike gesture and said, What's new? She leaped up again to switch on the TV and only then did she sit down for a moment on the arm of my chair, almost leaning on me but not really leaning, she pulled her blonde hair away from her eyes as though drawing back a curtain, and said, Let me tell you what a crazy day I've had.

She stopped. She suddenly slapped her forehead and leaped away from me to the other armchair, saying, Sorry, Theo, just a minute, I must just sort out a couple of quick phone calls, do you feel like making a salad? I've had nothing to eat since this morning apart from a falafel, I'm starving, I'll only be a minute or two, then we'll talk. She pulled the telephone over onto the curve of her lap and held it there for an hour. While she was talking she wolfed down the supper I made and served her without noticing, alternating suggestions, feelings and snap judgments, munching the food only in the pauses when she permitted her interlocutors to defend themselves. I noticed that she said several times, Come off it, You're joking, and also, What the hell, Come on, Don't make me laugh, and Great, Perfect, Grab it with both hands. Her hands are much older than the rest of her, her labourer's fingers wrinkled, the skin shrivelling, the back of her hand with its crisscrossed blue blood vessels and patches of pigment resembling a clod of earth. As if her true years have been temporarily driven back from her body to her hands, where they are patiently building up their reserves of decay in readiness for some weakening.

Then through the bathroom door for twenty minutes I could hear the jets of water and her young voice singing a song from years back, about a white rose and a red rose, followed by the sounds of the hairdryer and a drawer being opened. She eventually emerged scrubbed and scented, in a light blue cotton bath robe, and said, I'm whacked, I'm knocked out, let's talk in the morning. She did not seem tired to me, but lithe and fetching, her thighs alive and breathing under the light bath robe, as she said, Good night, Theo, don't be angry, don't stay up late yourself. And again she said: What a crazy day I've had. And she closed the door behind her. She rustled the pages of a book in there for a few minutes and apparently she came across something amusing that made her laugh softly. A quarter of an hour later she switched the light off.

As usual she had forgotten to turn the shower faucet right off. I could hear water running from where I was in the hall. I went and turned the faucet as hard as I could, put the cap back on the toothpaste, turned the light off in the toilet, and went right round the apartment turning off the lights after her until there were none left on.

She has this gift of falling fast asleep in a moment. Like a popular little girl who has done her homework, tidied her desk, remembered to brush her hair and confidently believes that everything is all right and everybody is happy with her and tomorrow is another day. She is so much at peace with herself, with the darkness, with the desert at the end of the garden beyond the two thick cypresses, with the sheet that she has wound round her and the embroidered cushion that she clasps tightly to her chest in her deep sleep. Her sleep arouses a sense of injustice in me, or perhaps it is just plain jealousy; in the midst of the anger it is clear to me that there is no reason to be angry, but this knowledge does not quell my resentment and simply irritates me all the more.

I sat in my undershirt at the desk in my bedroom and tuned my transistor to London. Between news bulletins there was a programme about the life and loves of Alma Mahler. The presenter said that the male world was incapable of understanding her heart and saw in her a different character, not who she really was; then she began explaining what Alma Mahler was really like. I cut her off in mid-sentence, to show her that the male world has not improved, and went barefoot to the kitchen to raid the refrigerator. I was only after a sip or two of cold water but the soft light inside the refrigerator ambushed me like a caress. So as not to lose it and be left in the dark I poured myself some cold wine and peeled a triangle of cheese and meanwhile I found that I was tidying up the shelves. I sniffed the open carton of milk a couple of times, suspicious both of the milk and of my own sense of smell. I dropped a cluster of sausages in the garbage can because their colour looked off. I drew up the yogurts in a rear line in order of date and closed the ranks of the eggs in the plastic trays. I hesitated before a jar of tuna, but compromised by covering it in plastic film. I pulled down some bottles of juice from a cupboard and slotted them into the door of the refrigerator to plug some gaps in the line. I arranged an orderly display in the vegetable tray and again in the fruit basket. It was only with difficulty that I fought off the temptation to attack the freezer compartment. I advanced on tiptoe to the door of her bedroom: I'm here if I'm called for. If not, at least I can try to catch a whiff of her slumber; perhaps I will absorb some of her surplus sleep.

From there, to the balcony, and the faded, old-fashioned chair.

The night is almost transparent. The whole world is bathed in a cold silvery light. It is not breathing. The two cypress trees seem to be carved out of basalt. The moonlike mountains look swathed in lunar wax. Hazy creatures crouch here and there, and they too look moonlike. In the valleys there are shadows within shadows. There was a single cicada that I notice only when it stops. What did the men mistakenly see in Alma Mahler and what was she really? If an answer to this question was possible, I missed it. It is almost certain that the question is meaningless, that it is framed in an empty fashion, and that no answer is theoretically possible. The presence of the barren hills in the darkness cancels words like "almost certain" or "theoretically possible", and empties out the question, What did I see in you, Noa, or what do you see in me? I shall stop. Let's suppose that you see in me what I sometimes see when I look at the desert. And how about me? Let's say: a woman who is fifteen years younger than I am with a pulse like that at the core of life itself, a protoplasmic, rhythmic pulse, from before words or doubt existed in the world. Sometimes, without meaning to, she suddenly touches your heart. Like a cub, or a chick.

Years ago I learned to find my way around the map of the stars. It was something I learned in the army, or even earlier, in the youth movement. On clear nights I can still identify the Great Bear and the Little Bear and the Pole Star. As for the planets, I can still locate them but I forget which one is Jupiter, Venus or Mars. Right now in the total silence everything seems to have stopped and even the planets seem to have ground to a halt. It seems as though the night will go on forever. All the stars look like tiny pinholes in the floor of the upper storey, droplets of luminosity from the light of the sky shining on the other side. If the curtain is drawn back, the world will be flooded with radiance and everything will become clear. Or be burned up.

There is a good telescope indoors, behind the bed linen on the second shelf on the left. I could go inside and get it so I can see better. Maybe Nehemia left her the telescope that used to belong to Peeping Gorovoy. Or to Yoshku, her cousin. There are still three or four such objects lurking around the house. The rest have gone. Disposed of. Even more spoiled than he was, she once said during a row, even more of a Neanderthal male. She stopped short. She never repeated it. Even when we fight she keeps tight control of herself, and of me, her foot always firmly on the brake pedal. I am careful too, I know the limits: like touching glass with glass and drawing back just in time.

From the east, from the mountains, comes a gust of piercing desert wind. Like a cold sharp scythe. The wilderness is secretly breathing. The dust and stone look like an expanse of calm water in the dark. It is even, suddenly, cool. Nearly two o'clock. I'm not tired but I'll go to my bedroom without switching the light on, I'll get undressed and go to bed. Radio London will tell me what is not known here yet. How is the world tonight? Tribal clashes in Namibia. Floods in Bangladesh. A big rise in the number of suicides in Japan. What's coming next? Let's wait and see. What comes next is punk music, merciless, penetrating, rough and bloodthirsty, from London, at a quarter past two on Wednesday morning.

I
WOKE
up at six and managed to write the memorandum. Muki Peleg will go over it and Linda has offered to type it out. At lunchtime I'll send it to Avraham Orvieto, with copies for the Mayor and the Treasurer. Who else should I send it to? I must find somebody who has some idea. Perhaps I should get hold of a copy of the official regulations and learn them all. Should I consult Theo anyway? That's all he's waiting for, like a hunter. He knew from the start that I'm not up to the challenge. He knew that after one or two slip-ups and failures I'd come running straight to him. Meanwhile, he's tactful enough to say nothing and not interfere. Like a grown-up who allows a toddler to climb wherever he likes but keeps a close watch and holds his hands out, where the child can't see him, to catch him if he falls.

I began the memorandum with an account of the "development of the idea". I found this expression unsuitable, but I couldn't find a better one. One of our students died in an accident "consequent upon drug-taking". There are various conflicting accounts circulating in the staff room about the circumstances of the incident. I was interested in the young man in question, even though I never actually managed to exchange more than a few words with him. Immanuel Orvieto was a quiet pupil. One of three boys in a literature class containing thirty girls. In recent years shy pupils have disappeared, they are all noisy during break and drowsy during literature lessons. Tired, disconnected, they stare blankly at Flaubert and me with a stubborn expression of amused contempt, as if we were trying to sell them fairytales about storks and babies. But there was something about Immanuel that always reminded me of winter. Once he was late handing in an essay on Agnon. I stopped him in break and asked why. He lowered his eyelashes, as if he had been asked a question about love, and answered softly that the story in question was not particularly relevant to him. I interrupted sharply, Who's talking about relevance, we're talking about an obligation. He found no answer to this, even though I kept him there cruelly for a whole minute before I said coldly, All right, let me have it by next week.

He handed me the essay ten days later. It was a fine, carefully reasoned, understated piece of work. After the concluding sentence he had added a personal line in brackets: In the end I did find some relevance in the story, despite the obligation.

Once I asked him on the stairs why he never put his hand up in class, surely he had things to say, I'd have liked to hear him talk occasionally. Again he had to pause before he answered hesitantly that he found words a trap. Not long before Pesach, I voiced the opinion in class that Yehuda Amichai wanted to express his opposition to war, and suddenly there was Immanuel's introverted voice, as though talking in his sleep, and with an interrogative note at the end of the sentence: Whatever the poet did or didn't want to say gets in the way of the poem?

I decided I should find the time to get him to talk.

But I didn't find the time. I forgot. Put it off. I have three classes and two literature sets, including the special set for recent immigrants. Each one has close to forty pupils most of whom have a tortured look. I'm rather fed up myself, after all these years. Now I don't even bother to remember their names. They're almost all girls; they mostly wander around all through the summer in bright-coloured shorts with a tear at the very edge of the crotch; they're almost all called Tali. Actually, there's always one in every class who keeps correcting me, it's not Tali it's Tal, or vice versa.

The truth is that until after it happened I didn't even know as much about Immanuel Orvieto as his class teacher and his counsellor did: that he had been living here in Tel Kedar from the age of ten with an unmarried aunt who worked in a bank. That his mother was killed a few years ago in the Olympic hijack. That his father is in Nigeria as a military adviser. There was a vague story circulating in the staff room that the boy had fallen in love or got involved with some girl in Elat, several years older, who was a junkie and might even be a pusher. Before the incident, I listened to this with only half an ear, because the staff room is always full of all sorts of gossip. So is the whole town, for that matter.