The Lover (18 page)

She doesn’t answer, she stares at the ground, can she still fall in love?

“We shall have to think about it … perhaps I should give him back the car.”

“Already?” Softly it slips from her mouth.

“But if he’s really making himself useful of course we can continue … is he helping you?”

“Yes … he’s helping me … do you mind?”

This fear of me, that frightened look my way.

Pity stirs in me for the little woman gripped by desire. I smile at her, but she’s still serious.

“What else was there in your dream?”

“The dream?” She’s forgotten it already. “That’s all.”

I drink the rest of my coffee, bring my boots out to the balcony to put them on. She watches me uneasily. I stand up, comb my hair, smooth my beard, put my keys and wallet in my pocket, she gets up and follows me, accompanying me to the door like a faithful dog, not knowing what to do with herself, as if suddenly she can’t bear to be parted from me.

At the door I say, “Now I remember … you said something like, ‘… my love, my love’ …”

“What? ‘My love’?” She laughs, astonished. “I said ‘my love’? That’s impossible.”

I just didn’t understand, I didn’t realize at first that the door was locked on the inside, because I’m the only one who locks doors in this house. I pressed the handle hard and started to turn it, trying to force the door open thinking someone was trapped in there, I don’t really know why I tried so hard. I was a bit giddy, the sudden change from the sunlight to the darkness in the house confused me. Because today I left the beach at midday and came home, suddenly I got tired of that Nirvana by the sea, and myself too. Osnat stopped coming with us last week and just Tali and I have been going down there. The last days of the vacation and there’s a change in the air, a mixture of
hamsin
and autumn, the sky clouding over. And I see that Tali doesn’t want to go into the water, doesn’t even want to run, just lying there in the sand, studying her brown, shapely body, which attracts more and more furtive glances from passers-by. She hardly talks, just smiles her weary, enigmatic smile. The beach is getting empty and I look across at the houses of the city, at the road and the speeding cars, feeling suddenly alone, seeing that if I go on just being with her I’ll begin to be as bored as she is. Today I jumped up and said, “I’m going, I’ve had enough of this, I’m bored.” But she didn’t want to come with me, I left her, took the bus and went home, I had to talk to someone, I went straight to the study, because Mommy’s always there, and suddenly the door was closed.

I went and fetched my own key and tried to fit it in the lock, then I saw a key in the lock on the other side.

“Mommy?” I shouted. “Mommy?”

But there was no answer, not even a whisper, and suddenly, what a fool I am, I was sure something had happened to her, she’d been murdered, I don’t know why the idea of murder suddenly came into my head, perhaps it was all the movies I’d seen in the vacation, I couldn’t think of anything less than
murder, and I started to wail, thumping the door fiercely – “Mommy! Mommy!”

And suddenly I heard her voice, clear and soft, not the voice of somebody who’s just woken up.

“Yes Dafi what is it?”

“Mommy? Is that you? What’s happened?”

“Nothing, I’m working.”

“Then open the door.”

“In a moment, I’m just finishing something, don’t bother me now.”

I still suspected nothing, I was so confused, all hot from the sun. I went to the kitchen for a drink of cold water, came back to the living room, waiting, I don’t know what for. After a few minutes the door opened, and Mommy came out, closing the door behind her, she was barefoot, wearing a thin dressing gown, her hair in a bit of a mess, she came and sat down beside me, there was something odd about her but I couldn’t think what, she was all attention.

“What’s the matter?”

“I just didn’t know if you were in the house …”

“Have you been down at the beach?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you come back so early?”

“I just got tired of it, I suddenly got bored with the sea.”

“Perhaps you should go and rest for a while, the vacation will be over soon and you haven’t had any rest at all, you’ve been rushing about everywhere … Are you going to the movies again today?”

“Maybe.”

“Come on then” – and she lifted me up – “go and rest, you look really worn out.”

She was gentle, inscrutable, her eyes darting about anxiously, and I still didn’t understand, I let her lead me to my room, watched her as she tidied up the bed that was still in a mess from the night before, straightening the sheets and the pillows, helping me to unfasten the buckle of my swimsuit, stripping me naked, gently brushing the sand from my shoulders.

“Should I take a shower?”

“Take a shower later … you’ll be all right … you’re really
burning.”

And I didn’t understand, hell, I didn’t understand anything, letting her put me to bed, covering me up, pulling down the blinds, making the room dark for me, her movements brisk and agile.

She smiled at me, closing the door behind her, and I lay there under the blankets, at midday, shutting my eyes, as if really trying to sleep, as if she’d hypnotized me, and suddenly I jumped out of bed, put on my clothes in a hurry, and barefoot, without a sound, I went to the study, stood by the closed door. It was quiet in there, just the faint rustle of papers. Then I heard her say in a low voice, “I’ve put her to bed” – a soft chuckle – “she doesn’t suspect anything.” I shuddered, I thought I was going to faint, and just as I was I fled, going out again into the sunlight, running to Osnat’s house, I had to talk to somebody, but there was nobody at her house, I ran to Tali’s house, perhaps she’d come back. Her mom opened the door, in her dirty stained dressing gown, a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, a big knife in her hand.

“Tali’s not at home,” she said and she was about to close the door but I clutched the handle, pleading with her.

“Can I wait for her here?”

She looked at me with surprise, but she let me come in, I went to Tali’s room to wait there, but I was in such a state of nerves, pacing about the room, stumbling against the walls, in the end I went into the kitchen. Tali’s mom was busy cooking, all the burners of the stove were alight, she was slicing onions, meat, vegetables – great confusion.

“Could I sit here for a while … just to watch …” I asked, my voice shaking.

She was surprised, but she found a little stool and put it in the corner, I sat there huddled up, watching her, a big woman, sure in her movements, banging the saucepans about angrily,
impatiently
, impulsively, rushing about the kitchen with a wet cigarette in her mouth, among the piles of vegetables and headless fish streaming blood, the smell and the smoke made my head spin. Tears rose to my eyes, I started to cry a bit. If she’d asked me about Mommy and Daddy I’d have told her everything, but she said nothing. Finally she went out and changed her dressing
gown for a broad embroidered skirt with a little white apron, hastily she set the table, looking at me again, a huge woman, her hair combed, a strange, beautiful goy, the knife still in her hand. She touched me gently, raised my head.

“What is it, Dafi?”

My eyes full of tears, I started to tell her but there was a ring at the door and people were arriving, local tradesmen, a tailor, a grocer, I didn’t know she was having a lunch party.
Conversations
began in Hungarian, in Polish, there was laughter. She sat them around the table, scolding them, ran out to bring in the first course, some of them followed her into the kitchen, full of high spirits, sniffing at the saucepans, winking at me. Some of them I knew and I never realized they could be so friendly and cheerful. Tali’s mom gave me a plate of meat and potatoes, and I sat there on the stool in the corner, the plate in my lap, my eyes dry now, eating among the crowd, the stampede, the clatter of knives and forks, leaving the empty plate in the sink and slipping away, without saying a word.

In the street I met Tali, walking slowly, she passed me by without seeing me, I went on home. There was nobody there, the study was empty, they’d gone. In the afternoon I went to the movies, and then home in the evening, Mommy and Daddy were there but Mommy didn’t look at me, nor I at her, instead a conversation about technical matters, you’d think we were in the garage. I take a shower, watch TV, go to bed with a book, the letters start to go dim, I doze off, and suddenly, with a shock, as if someone’s shaking me from inside, I wake up. I go on reading, taking nothing in. Daddy’s already asleep, Mommy’s pacing around the house, she stops at my door, not looking at me. “Shall I put the light out?” I nod my head. She puts it out. I close my eyes, sure that I’ll sleep but I don’t sleep. I get up, start to roam around the house, going from room to room, drinking water. The magic of a night at the end of the summer. The dark sea far away. Two more days and it’ll be back to school and for the first time I have no desire to study, nor any desire for the vacation to go on, I have no desire for anything. I go back to bed, try to sleep, get up again, the tension’s like electricity in my veins. Nothing like this has ever happened to me. I call softly to Daddy and Mommy but they don’t wake up. I go to the
bathroom, wondering if I should take another shower. I sit on the edge of the bath, exhausted, I’ve never felt so lonely in my life. Through the window I see in the distance, on the slope across the wadi, an open lighted window. For years now they’ve been building a house there, and now at last the occupants have moved in. A man sitting in a room almost bare of furniture, in a T-shirt, his hair tousled, a pipe in his mouth, typing feverishly, every now and then he stands up, paces about the room and sits down again, attacking the typewriter with deep concentration. I watch him for a long time. I somehow feel relieved by watching him. I’m not as alone as I thought.

Everything’s upside down. The long vacation’s over, the house full of Dafi’s books and note pads, wrapping paper, new writing materials, and Dafi herself is an unhappy black woman,
wandering
about distracted, going from room to room, baffled by the masses of homework that she has to get through. In her room the light stays on after we’re asleep. Asya has gone back to work, and on Sunday, without consulting me, she cut off her hair, standing in front of the mirror, an ageing child looking at herself in despair. It looks like Gabriel has disappeared, but he hasn’t really, occasionally I find traces of him in the house, the beret, sunglasses, a cigarette stub in the bathroom, the imprint of his head in a cushion, a French magazine. Once I phoned home during working hours and he lifted the receiver. I didn’t say who I was, I just asked for her, he said, “She’s not at home, she’s at the school, she’ll be back soon.”

“Who is that, if I may ask …?”

“I’m just a friend of the family.”

Is he already a lover, how can I tell, it’s all a mystery, nothing is said openly, nor do I want things to be said, I know that I must make myself scarce, not show any special interest. I told them to move the Morris out of the storeroom, to clean it, to fit a new battery and fill the fuel tank. Erlich protested, “What about the bill?” “Tear it up,” I said. He didn’t tear it up. I found it in a new file, marked in red ink “Not paid, consult the tax people.”

I brought the car home, gave the keys to Asya and told her to
hand it back to him, and I added a thousand pounds as payment for his work. She took the keys and the money and said nothing. The car stood outside the house for a few days and then
disappeared
.

Are they meeting all the while in secret? I still don’t know, the very idea rouses a sweet pain within, but those days were confused and moved quickly. The festivals were beginning, no, not exactly the festivals, just Yom Kippur. Nineteen hundred and seventy-three.

And if this is a human lying in the bed and humans passing by looking at him then why should he be silent? Let him say something he should speak and indeed he has begun to speak without pause hearing his voice a soft voice a broken voice the babbling of an old woman talking and talking perhaps she will grasp some thought. For in her is deep sorrow she has lost much perhaps she will find a little. Smiles all around but no
understanding
moving the pillow adjusting the blanket turning from side to side saying it’ll be all right. Soon. Sleep a little. But if she must sleep better to die and who is this walking about? Dear, familiar, important, going and coming, standing and
disappearing
. Where is this? Bring me this! Show me I want so much. This, this, crying from the pillow, the mouth hurts from the shrieks.

And this suddenly comes. Suddenly goes. Suddenly stands. Suddenly disappears. Staring darkly always in a hurry hands in pockets and it’s night.

He had one word to transform the world but the world is in hands in pockets pacing indifferently, forgetting everything, ready for nothing.

Stars at the window. This, she whispers a word, spits a word, throws off a blanket kicks the pillow rolls to the floor rises and falls crawls rises walks rolls, pushes a door and another door into the sky field orchard. Thorns in the feet and a chill in the head, pushing branches sinking to the ground digging to find a word that will open it all.

PART FOUR

They’re getting themselves killed again and when they get themselves killed we have to shrink and lower our voices and mind not to laugh even at some joke that’s got nothing to do with them. This morning on the bus when the news was coming over the radio Issam was talking in a loud voice and laughing and the Jews in the front of the bus turned around and gave us a dry sort of look, and at once Hamid, who’s always so serious, who reckons he’s responsible for us even though he’s not our boss officially, touched Issam, nudged him with his finger, and Issam shut up right away.

Knowing where to draw the line, that’s what matters, and whoever doesn’t want to know had better stay in the village and laugh alone in the fields or sit in the orchard and curse the Jews as long as he likes. Those of us who are with them all day have to be careful. No, they don’t hate us. Anyone who thinks they hate us is completely wrong. We’re beyond hatred, for them we’re like shadows. Take, fetch, hold, clean, lift, sweep, unload, move. That’s the way they think of us, but when they start getting killed they get tired and they slow down and they can’t
concentrate
and they suddenly get all worked up about nothing, just before the news or just after, news that we don’t exactly hear, for us it’s a kind of rustle but not exactly, we hear the words but we don’t want to understand. Not lies, exactly, but not the truth either, just like on Radio Damascus, Amman or Cairo.
Half-truths
and half-lies and a lot of bullshit. The cheerful music from Beirut is much better, lively modern Arab music that makes your heart pound, as if your blood’s flowing faster. When we’re working on the cars that they leave with us the first thing we do is switch off Radio Israel or the army wave bands and look for a decent station, not a lot of talking, just songs, new and attractive songs about love. A subject that never tires. The main thing is to have none of that endless chattering about the rotten conflict that’ll go on forever. When I lie under a car tightening brakes the music in the car sounds like somebody walking over my head. I tell you, sometimes my eyes are a bit wet.

I don’t exactly hate the work. The garage isn’t such a bad one, big enough not to be always tripping over one another and
getting on everybody’s nerves. My cousin Hamid isn’t far away, he pretends to ignore me but he makes sure they don’t pester me too much. But how can I tell them, I wanted to go on studying, not work in a garage. I finished in primary school with very good marks. The young student teacher was very pleased with me. In Hebrew classes I even used to think in Hebrew. And I knew by heart maybe a dozen poems by Bialik, though nobody ever told me to learn them, something catchy about their rhythm. Once a party of Jewish teachers came to the school to check up on what we were doing and the teacher called me up in front of the class and I stood there and recited by heart two verses from
In
the
City
of
Slaughter,
they nearly dropped dead on the spot, they were that impressed and maybe that’s what the teacher intended, he wasn’t exactly a great lover of Jews. Anyway, I could have stayed on at school, the teacher even went to my father to try to persuade him, “It’s a pity about the boy, he’s got a good brain.” But my father was stubborn, “Two studious sons in the family are enough for me,” as if we’re tied together with a rope and if one goes to college it makes the others educated too. Faiz will be finishing medical school in England soon, he’s been studying there for ten years already, and Adnan’s going to the university next year, he’ll be studying medicine too, or electronics. And I’m the youngest so I have to work. Somebody’s got to earn a bit of money. Father’s decided to make me a master mechanic like Hamid, who earns lots of money.

Of course I wept and cried and pleaded but it didn’t do any good. My mother kept quiet, she didn’t want to get into a quarrel on my account, she couldn’t tell me why it was Adnan and Faiz and not Na’im, she couldn’t say it was because they were the children of another woman, an old woman who died years ago and Father gave her his word before she died.

It was so hard at first getting up in the morning. Father used to wake me up at half-past four, afraid I might not wake up by myself, and I really didn’t want to wake up. Darkness all around and Father touching me, pulling me gently out of bed, sitting there and watching me getting dressed and eating breakfast. Leading me to the bus stop through the village that’s just beginning to wake up between electric lights and firelights through side streets full of mud and puddles among donkeys and
sacks. He turns me over to Hamid like a prisoner. They put me on the cold bus with all the other workers, Mother’s homemade bread in a plastic bag in my hand. Slowly the bus fills up and Muhammad, the driver, takes his seat and starts running the engine and shouting at late comers. And I look out through the steamed-up window and see Father sitting there hunched up under the awning. A wrinkled old man wrapped in a black cloak raising his hand to everyone who goes past, starting to talk to somebody but all the time watching me sideways. And I used to get really angry with him, laying my head on the rail in front of me and pretending to be asleep and when the bus started moving and Father tapped on the window to say goodbye I’d pretend not to notice. At first I really did sleep the whole journey and I used to arrive at work dead tired. Yawning all the time and dropping things. Always asking the time. But after a while I began to get used to it. In the mornings I woke up on my own and I’d be one of the first to arrive at the bus stop, sitting down not far from the driver, no longer feeling sleepy. At first I tried taking a book with me to read on the way but they all laughed at me, they couldn’t understand it, me going to work in a garage with a book, and a book in Hebrew at that. They thought I was crazy. So I gave it up. I couldn’t concentrate anyway. Reading the same page over and over again but not taking it in. So I just look out at the road, seeing the darkness disappear, the flowers on the mountains. I never tire of this route, the same route day after day, an hour and a half there and an hour and a half back.

At four o’clock in the afternoon we’re already standing at the bus stop waiting for Muhammad’s bus and from all over the city the people of our village and villages nearby are assembling, construction workers, gardeners, bin men, kitchen workers, manual labourers, domestic help and garage hands. All of them with plastic bags and identity cards ready at hand in shirt pockets. Jews get on the bus too, Jews of all kinds with heavy baskets, most of them get off at the Acre Road. And in Acre more Arabs get on and some Jews as well, a different kind, immigrants from Russia, and Moroccans too. They hardly understand Hebrew. And on the way the Jews thin out and the Arabs too and in Carmel the last of the Jews leave the bus and only Arabs are left. The sun on our backs is nice and the road flies. Haifa disappears
from the horizon, Carmel is swallowed by the mountains, the electricity pylons thin out. No smell of Jews now. Muhammad tunes the radio to a Baghdad station that broadcasts verses from the Koran, to entertain us. We go deeper into the mountains, driving among orchards on a narrow road twisting among the fields and there’s nothing to remind us of the Jews, not even an army jeep. Only Arabs, barefooted shepherds in the fields with their sheep. Like there never was a Balfour Declaration, no Herzl, no wars. Quiet little villages, everything like they say it used to be many years ago, and even better. And the bus fills with the warbling of that
imam
from Baghdad, a soft voice lovingly chanting the
suras.
We sit there hypnotized, silent at first and then crooning softly along with him.

One of those Friday night debates, fruitless conversations among the plates of nuts and the dripping olive oil, when they start on that political crap about the Arabs, the Arab character, the Arab mentality and all the rest of it, I get irritable, start grumbling, lately I’ve lost patience with these debates. “What do you really know about them? I employ perhaps thirty Arabs in my garage and believe me, every day I become less of an expert on Arabs.”

“But those Arabs are different.”

“Different from whom?” Getting up from my seat angrily, not knowing why I’m so agitated. Asya blushes, watching me tensely.

“They depend on you … they’re afraid of you.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

But how can I explain? All entangled in my ideas. I sit down again, saying nothing.

Hamid, for example –

My own age perhaps but with the body of a youth, very thin. Only his face is wrinkled. The first worker I ever had, he’s worked with me nearly twenty years. Silent, proud, a lone wolf. He never looks at you straight, but if you catch his eye you’ll see that the pupils are very black, like coffee grounds in an empty cup.

What’s he thinking to himself? What does he think about me, for example? He hardly ever says a word, if he does speak it’s always to do with work, engines, cars. Whenever I try to draw him out on other subjects he refuses to talk. But his loyalty is really unique, or maybe it isn’t loyalty. In all these years he hasn’t been absent a single day, and not through fear of getting sacked. He’s a permanent employee with full rights. On the first of the month Erlich gives him four thousand pounds in cash, which Hamid stuffs into his shirt pocket, without counting it, saying nothing. What he spends this money on I can’t imagine, he always appears in scruffy clothes and worn shoes.

An expert and senior mechanic. These last few years he’s worked in a small shop that he built for himself in a corner of the garage, and that’s his kingdom. He restores old cars. A
complicated
professional job requiring precision, imagination, golden hands and infinite patience. He dismantles old engines, some of them completely wrecked, drills and cuts out new parts and breathes life into them. He works without rest, no radio beside him, no casual conversation or joking with the other workers, no teasing the customers. He’s the first to return to work after meal breaks but he also stops working the moment it’s time to go, he’s never been prepared to work overtime, he washes his hands, picks up his empty plastic bag and goes.

Two or three years ago he suddenly became religious. He brought from his home a dirty little prayer mat and every now and then he’d stop work for a few minutes, strip off his shoes, go down on his knees and bow towards the south, towards the lathe and the tool racks on the wall. Reciting passionate verses to himself, to the Prophet, who knows? Then putting on his shoes and going back to work. A strange kind of piety, grim somehow. Even the other Arabs in the garage used to stare at him darkly.

Because in spite of his solitariness he is a kind of leader to them, even if he doesn’t try to have too much to do with them. He walks among them aloof and silent. But when I need a new worker he brings me a boy or a youth within two or three days, as if he’s the chief of a whole tribe. Eventually I realized that most of the Arabs in the garage are in fact his relations, close or distant cousins.

I asked him once, “How many cousins have you got?”

A lot, he’d never bothered to count them.

“And how many of them work here?”

“How many?” He tried to evade the question. “There are a few …”

In the end he admitted to at least ten, in addition to his two sons. This surprised me very much because I never imagined that those were his sons, he didn’t seem to have any special tie to them.

“How many children have you got altogether?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Just … curious.”

“Fourteen.”

“How many wives?”

“Two.”

He was really upset by questions like these, fidgeting nervously all the time with a screwdriver, turning his back to me, impatient to get rid of me and go back to his work.

To his credit, although he used to provide me with new workers, he never interfered later on and if I was forced to sack them he didn’t say a word, only bringing me a few days later some new cousin or relative from his endless supply.

On the first day of the war he arrived of course, but only a few others came with him. They were afraid to leave their villages, they didn’t know what was going to happen. I grabbed him at once.

“Where are the others?”

He said nothing, not even looking at me, what did I want from him? But I wasn’t letting him off that easily.

“Hamid, you tell them all to come to work. What is this? This war of ours isn’t a holiday for you. There are cars here that need repairing, people will come back from the front and expect to find their cars repaired. Do you hear?”

But he didn’t reply, looking at me with hatred, his hands in his pockets, as if all this had nothing to do with him.

“You should really be fighting with us, you should’ve been called up too. Anyone who doesn’t come in tomorrow will be fired. Tell all your relations.”

He shrugged his shoulders, as if he didn’t care.

But for the whole of that day I didn’t let him work on his
engines, I gave him dirty, menial jobs, tightening brakes,
changing
flats, charging batteries. He said nothing but it was obvious that his pride was hurt. The next day all the Arabs came in and he went back to his workshop. During the entire war not a single worker was absent. Hamid even made it his business to bring in workers to take the place of Jews who’d been called up.