Mr. Mani (8 page)

—It would seem so.

—Yes, it's very odd ... you would think it was this intimate thing that you said whenever you felt like it, but that isn't the case at all. He even tried explaining it to me ... but suddenly—he was talking about it and I was looking out at that field by the old leper hospital, which was covered with these white splotches of snow—suddenly he said something, Mother, I don't remember what, that affected me so that I got this big lump in my throat and burst into tears, don't ask me why, right there on that little terrace between the brooms and the laundry rack...

—Yes, real tears. They came from deep down and kept coming. I couldn't stop them even though I knew they were making me look ridiculous. He didn't say a word, though. He just stood there listening to me cry and calmly smoking another cigarette, as if I were getting what I deserved for hounding him and intruding on him...

—No, Mother. He was not right.

—No, he was not, and neither are you. Because what you think of as presumption, or even total irresponsibility, was simply my duty, Mother, a duty that was being spun out of me like the thin web of a spider...

—The spider inside me right now.

—The one made by the formula.

—That's what we learned in school about the development of the embryo...

—I'm telling you we did ... I remember ... there was even a chart with all these pictures...

—You must have forgotten. Or else you never studied it.

—Don't worry.

—There is nothing the matter with me.

—I'm imagining that too? You're certainly making life easy for yourself tonight!

—Why hunt for what doesn't exist?

—There's nothing beneath the surface but what you put there.

—Maybe beneath the avocado trees in your orchard, but not beneath the surface of my story...

—I didn't mean to hurt your feelings ... Good God, Mother...

—I'm sorry ... I'm sorry...

—I know perfectly well what I said.

—I don't care. That's not what I meant.

—What?

—What did you say?

—No, what an idea! You're too much...

—Of course not. How could you even think it?

—So that's what's been bothering you...

—Then why didn't you say so?

—You can calm down then ... not in my wildest dreams...

—Incredible!

—Although I must say in parenthesis—and only in parenthesis—that Mr. Mani's charms are considerably greater than his son's...

—I can't easily explain it. You'll see what I mean when you meet them...

—No. Just in passing. As we were walking back up the hallway past the grandmother's room, I said, “I see that the blinds belt is broken again, it looks like a hangman's rope.” He let out a big laugh and reddened and said, “So it does, and the room's a mess too, because I've been looking there for something I can't find. You'll sleep in the living room. The couch folds out into a bed ... that's where Efi always sleeps when he visits.” And without another word we passed that self-destructing room and went to the living room, where he pulled out the bed and brought me that old, embroidered nightgown again and all those half-torn sheets—I couldn't tell if I or someone else had last slept on them—and quietly and not at all angrily went about setting me up for another night's stay...

—No. We hardly spoke. We didn't even bother to wrestle, because we had arrived at what seemed like a temporary alliance, or maybe it was more of a truce. He pulled out the telephone plug and left me in the room with the warning that we had to rise very early, and I told him not to worry. “I'm a kibbutznik from the Negev,” I said, “and we're the world champions at early rising.” Well, he just smiled at that and shut the door and left me all by myself in what was beginning to seem by then like home. I turned out the lights and opened the window to let in some air, and I could see that it was getting clearer and calmer outside. I moved the pillow to the other end of the bed and tried reading something, but I was too tired, and so I switched on the television without the volume until the news was over, and then I turned it up a bit to watch the movie, I don't know if you saw it, it starts out nicely and then gets worse and worse...

—You did? I thought it started out nicely.

—No. I didn't want to bother him with another request, and I didn't know if there was hot water or if I would have to wait for it to heat. I knew I'd be on my way back to Tel Aviv early in the morning, straight from the cemetery, and I thought I'd take a big bath and wash my hair when I got there, because I was getting tired of living like a nomad...

—Soon ... in a minute ... I'll wash up soon...

—If the water's so hot, why don't you turn off the boiler?

—Soon ... in a minute ... there's plenty of time. And so, Mother, I slept over there another night, and at 5
A.M.
I looked up to see him standing over my bed all in black. He had this black suit and this black tie and this black beard—only his eyes were red from not sleeping. I had no idea why he was in such a hurry to get to the cemetery—you might have thought he didn't want to keep his dead mother waiting. Breakfast was already on the table, a loaf of bread and some olives and these different goat and sheep cheeses, but he was looking awfully worried, and suddenly he said to me, but really serious, as if he were sounding some kind of a warning, “If anyone asks who you are, tell them the truth, I mean that you're Efi's girlfriend, and that you were supposed to come with him, and that at the last minute he couldn't get away from the army...”

—Yes. It was such a weird thing to say, “Tell the truth”—as if otherwise I might tell some lie that would get him into trouble...

—How should I know? Maybe that I was his new mistress and that he wanted to do it with me in the graveyard...

—No, I didn't say anything. I didn't know what he was talking about I was too taken aback to do anything but nod. I was sleepy too, and I was having this new kind of cramps, which went from my stomach down into my knees...

—No. Yes. Cramps like when you have your period, only worse. We left the house at about six. It was very cold out, but dry and clear, with just a little snow left on some of the cars and fences. And then I realized what the rush was about, because two big taxis were already waiting in the street to drive behind us and pick up all the others...

—No. I asked him about them afterward. They weren't relatives at all.

—Yes. He belongs to an old Jerusalem family that moved to Crete and back again, but he doesn't have much family in Jerusalem. Mostly he stopped for a lot of old women, all these widows who were friends of the grandmother and didn't want to miss the ceremony, weather permitting, which it was. They looked like something out of a Greek movie, all these quiet little early birds all bundled up and dressed in black, waiting like lonely crows on the corners for Mr. Mani to pick them up and usher them tenderly, respectfully, into one of his taxis. A few of them were accompanied by old men wrapped in scarves, who made Mr. Mani so happy that he hugged them for joining his prayer group. Everyone kept saying how lucky it was that the snow had stopped, and after an hour of cruising the streets, which were just beginning to wake up, Mr. Mani had filled his taxis with old women and put the rabbi and the tombstone carver in his own car, plus the young lawyer who had argued the case before him in court. He was very worried, though, because he was still short three men. No matter how much the rabbi and the stone carver promised him he would find them in the cemetery, he couldn't relax. “You're forgetting,” he kept saying, “that it's such an old cemetery that it's hardly seen a funeral for forty years...”

—It seemed strange to me too. You would have thought he'd have had some friends he could bring instead of depending on taxi drivers and stone carvers. I wasn't sure if he was really such a loner, or if he just didn't want his friends to have to get up so early and travel all the way to the east end of Jerusalem, beyond the walls of the Old City...

—No, it wasn't on the Mount of Olives, it was beneath it. To get there, Mother, you don't go by way of Mount Scopus. You have to travel through the Arab part of the city and start out on the road to Jericho, which dips down to a bridge over a wadi in this lovely valley with olive trees, after which you turn into a big, beautiful church that has this bright relief over its entrance...

—He told me its name, but I've forgotten ... It's a church with another church above it, farther up the hillside, full of turrets and little golden domes that look like flowers or onions. You have to drive down this narrow, awfully steep lane with stone walls on either side that's hardly any wider than the paths between houses on the kibbutz, only—I swear, Mother—it's, like, tilted in midair, I've never seen such a street. You could feel the cars go tense with fear but also pick up speed, honking warnings to each other until suddenly we'd squeezed through and were in this old, old cemetery...

—No, I just told you, it's not on the Mount of Olives, it's below it. It's much farther down, a huge expanse of old graves on this bare, pinkish hill. There's a fantastic view from there. You can see the whole Old City with its big mosques in their huge squares, and the church spires, and David's City, and the white towers of Jewish Jerusalem in the background. It was such a clear, clear day, Mother, and we had the sun at our backs. It's this terribly old cemetery, without paths, without flowers, without a single tree, perfectly bare and full of broken tombstones. It's a really captivating place...

—No, you were never there.

—You couldn't have been. You're wrong. I can't believe you ever were there...

—No. It's not a place tourists get to. There's something unworldly about it. I'll take you there some day and you'll realize you've never been there. It's awfully captivating...

—Captivating ... you'll understand when you see it. Even that young lawyer, who was born in Jerusalem and knows the whole city, was so excited to be there that he couldn't thank Mr. Mani enough for drafting him into his prayer group. We began moving forward in this slow little line with the stone carver leading the way, because there are no signs there or anything. The rabbi ran up the hill to look for some more men, and the lawyer and Mr. Mani and me lent the old ladies a hand and helped them past the broken tombstones, some of which still had a little snow on them, because we didn't want them to slip and break their necks...

—It was an experience, Mother. If only those cramps in the pit of my stomach hadn't kept getting worse...

—Just a minute, wait ... that's part of the story...

—No ... yes, like the cramps when you have your period, but not exactly. Listen, though. In the end we came to this new tombstone, and the old women stood around it all agog to read the inscription, one of them even started sobbing a little to herself, and we waited for the rabbi to find two more men while the stone carver tidied up around this grave where there were bits of cement and gravel—not Efi's grandmother's grave but the one next to it, an old headstone half-buried in the ground that Mr. Mani had asked him to uncover. He even cleaned it and made a mound of dirt to prop it up on and started explaining something to Mr. Mani and the lawyer, who bent down to get a better look. I went over to look too, but I could hardly read what was written there. I couldn't even figure out the dates. All I could make out was the name
Yosef Mani
in big letters. Meanwhile, Mr. Mani was explaining to the lawyer, who was so fascinated that he was practically face-down on the headstone, how he had found it and intended to restore it, and so I asked him if the grave was his father's. He gave this startled laugh and said, “Good lord! Can't you see how old it is? Look carefully, it's from the nineteenth century. It may even be my grandfather's grandfather's...” When he said that, I actually felt for a moment that that stone
was
his grandfather's grandfather, who had turned into a pink slab that was rounded at one end...

—No. I don't remember any other graves there belonging to his family. He would have showed them to me if there were any, so that must have been the only one. Still, Mother, standing there off to one side, because I didn't feel like mingling, I had this feeling of taking part in a ceremony like you see in one of those family graveyards in the movies. These little old ladies in black were all around, and Mr. Mani started reading from some book in his natty black suit and hat, and I thought, I must be crazy to have imagined he wanted to kill himself, why, just look at all these people who are here in his honor! You could see they thought a great deal of him, even the two workers I first mistook for Arabs that the rabbi had come back with, who already had skullcaps on their heads and were holding these little prayerbooks he had given them and rocking back and forth in prayer. And even if I was keeping my distance, by now I felt like one of the family, although it wasn't exactly a family yet but only a formula for one ... at which exact moment, Mother, without turning around, I knew that
they
were back, that author or director or cameraman or whoever. I had thought they had left me for good, but they had been following me from a distance, or from high up, and now they took charge of me again. The rabbi sang the prayer for the dead real rhapsodically, in this oriental scale, and Mr. Mani finally got to say his mourner's prayer, his voice catching and then breaking without warning into these sobs that made all the old ladies burst into tears too. One of them began calling out some name—it must have been the grandmother's—and screaming something. But she seemed more moved by duty than by grief, as if she were only trying to get us into the spirit of things, and meanwhile the rabbi was crooning away again—and I, Mother, I stood there entranced by it all, intrigued by all those ancient Sephardim, although it was really that little thing inside me that felt that way, because by now I was dizzy and had a headache, and I felt that not only was I getting my period but that something more serious was going on. Something down there was squirming to get out, I was sure of it now. All the exertion of running after Mr. Mani to keep him from killing himself was making Mani Junior flop around like a fish on dry land—and, Mother, I was so afraid that I was going to lose him right there and then in front of everyone that I sat myself down on a grave to hold him in or at least to keep everyone from seeing...