The Lover (19 page)

But beyond this I don’t get involved with him, nor with the others. I’ve always refrained from visiting their villages and being a guest in their homes, as some of the employers in the neighbourhood do. It always ends in trouble, it gets out of hand sooner or later. In general I’ve rather kept my distance in recent years, convinced that the business runs itself quite smoothly without me. Already there are many workers whose names I don’t know, what with such a turnover. The garage has become full of boys over the last few years, sometimes even children. The Arabs bring small boys with them, brothers, cousins, or just waifs from the villages. They are quiet and obedient, dragging the boxes of tools around, fetching keys, opening hoods, tightening brakes, wiping black handprints from the doors, changing stations on the radio. The Arabs love little personal servants like these, they like having somebody they can shout at, give orders to. It gives them a sense of importance and security. The more the garage grew in size, the more little boys ran about in it.

Once I asked Erlich, “Tell me, is this kindergarten costing me money?”

But he smiled, shook his head. “Don’t worry, they’re saving you tax, you’re profiting from them.”

Some of the boys were given the job of cleaning the garage, sweeping up, scrubbing the floor. The garage began to look clean and respectable. One day I was standing by myself in the yard, deep in thought, and suddenly somebody pushed a broom between my feet and said rudely, “Do you mind moving?” I looked down, a little Arab boy with a big broom, looking at me steadily and insolently. I felt a little stab of pain in my heart. I was reminded of Yigal, I don’t know why, something about those dark eyes.

“Who brought you here?” I asked him, wondering if he knew I was the boss.

“My cousin, Hamid.”

Hamid, of course. Every other man here is his cousin. It won’t be long before I discover that I’m related to him too. These Arabs, they don’t spare their children. They’d be better off at school than sweeping up the rubbish and picking up screws here.

“How old are you, boy?”

“Fourteen years and three months.”

“How is this? Didn’t you want to stay on at school?”

He blushed, in a panic, afraid I was going to throw him out. He started to mumble something about his Either, who wouldn’t let him … little liar.

And he went on sweeping around me. And suddenly I was moved, I put out my hand and lightly touched his tousled head, covered with dust from his work with the broom. This little Arab, my employee, what’s he thinking about? What’s his business? Where’s he from? What’s happening to him here? I’ll never know. He told me his name a moment ago and already I’ve forgotten it.

In the early days it was very interesting in the big garage. New faces all around me, coming and going, all kinds of Jews bringing their cars in, laughing and shouting. Some of the mechanics were Jewish bastards, some were local Arabs, corrupt as hell with their complicated jokes. Noise and confusion. On the walls in every corner there were pictures of naked girls, showing nearly
everything
, maddening, breath-taking, Jewish and non-Jewish blondes and brunettes, black women and redheads. Amazing.
Unbelievable
. Lying with eyes closed on new tyres, opening the doors of smart cars, resting tits and asses and long legs on engines or screws or sets of spark plugs. On the ass of one of these gorgeous chicks they’d drawn the whole year’s calendar, it was that big. These pictures drove me crazy. I was afraid to look at them and I couldn’t keep my eyes off them. Sometimes I got so hard it hurt. In the noise and the dirt among the cars and the workers I used to wander about in the first few weeks daydreaming. Several times my underpants got wet. In bed at night I was squeezed by desire, remembering the girls and not letting them go. Coming all over the place, a fountain of come I was. Leaping from one to
the next, unwilling to do without any of them, kissing and burning and coming and getting horny again. In the morning I used to get up exhausted and pale and Mother and Father were worried about me. But then slowly I began to get used to the pictures and after a month I could stare at them indifferently, like at the other pictures on the wall, the two presidents, the live one and the dead one, and that old woman who’s the prime minister, all hanging there among the girls. I stopped getting excited.

At first I wasn’t really doing anything. Fetching tools for the mechanics and taking them back to the toolboxes, cleaning dirty fingermarks off the cars. I tried to keep close to Hamid but of course he didn’t need an assistant because he didn’t work on the actual cars, he stood at a workbench taking engines apart.

After a week they gave me a broom and a rag and a bucket and I spent all my time sweeping the floor, picking up old screws, spreading sawdust on patches of oil, it was my job to keep the garage clean. An impossible job and terribly boring. Everybody ordered me around, Arabs, Jews, anybody who felt like it. Even strangers who just happened to be passing. Fetch, boy, lift, boy, grab this, boy, clean that, boy. Anybody who felt like giving orders used to catch me and order me around. And they called me “boy” on purpose to annoy me. But I kept quiet, not wanting to argue. I was really fed up. I hated the work. I had no enthusiasm for anything, even the cars didn’t interest me. When will I get to be a mechanic, when will I learn something and what’s it all for anyway? Luckily the garage was so big I could disappear sometimes without being missed. I’d take the broom and looking at the floor I’d sweep and sweep towards the back exit until I was right outside the garage, go into the backyard of some empty house and sit down on a box watching the street, seeing children in school uniform going home with their school bags. So miserable. Thinking about the poems and stories they read and how I’m going to end up really dumb with this broom and these rusty screws. I’d cheer myself up a bit whispering a few lines from Bialik, once I knew so much of it by heart and now every day I remember less and less. In the end I’d get up and take the broom and start sweeping around me and slowly go back to the garage, still sweeping, going inside and mixing with the people, who hadn’t noticed that I’d gone or that I’d come back.

Who’s our boss anyway? It was a long time before I figured out who the boss of the garage was. At first I thought it was the old clerk who sits there all day in the little office, the only place where there’s no pictures of naked women. But they told me he was only the cashier, just a clerk.

Then I had my eye on one of the Jewish mechanics who was in charge of the work and gave out orders, he was the one who dealt with the customers, testing their cars for them. But they told me he was the foreman. In the end they pointed him out to me, the real boss, the one that everything belongs to, his name’s Adam, about forty-five years old, maybe more than that, with a big beard. Maybe it was because of the beard I didn’t realize he was the boss. I didn’t think he belonged to the garage at all, I thought he was some kind of artist or professor. What’s the beard for? How should I know? I never guessed that everything belonged to him.

He wears partly working clothes and partly not working clothes. A white shirt or a nice clean sweater and blue working trousers. Most of the time he isn’t in the garage but driving around in a big American car, an old car but very quiet. Uses the car to fetch a new engine or some complicated bit of equipment for the garage. When he arrives he’s surrounded straightaway by a bunch of mechanics, they follow him, talking to him, asking him questions, consulting him. And he looks all the time like he’s about to drop, he always looks tired, thinking about something else that’s got nothing to do with the garage. But in the end the circle closes around him and he stands there in the middle, listening and not listening. Standing there patiently, looks like all he wants is not to touch them and not to be touched. If he talks at all it’s quietly, with his head a bit bent, chewing the end of his beard like he’s ashamed of something. He’s not even interested in women and sometimes we get some really attractive high-class chicks coming into the garage with neat little cars and they spend half the day wandering about and getting in the way. We’re so busy watching them we start dropping tools. Even the ones lying underneath the cars watch them. And they run after Adam as well, trying to talk to him, trying to make him laugh, but he isn’t the type that laughs easily. He hardly notices them. He looks through us ordinary workers like we’re air. He doesn’t really care
about the work in the garage anyway. But when he walks around the place we all start to move faster and we even turn the radios down, though he’s never said anything against Arab music. Sometimes when there’s a difficult problem they ask him to look at an engine or listen to it or bring him some part that they’ve taken out, showing it to him and asking if it’s any good or if it should be changed. He looks and listens, his hands in his pockets. And then, so sure of himself, without hesitation, he tells them what to do.

But sometimes he can spend the whole morning standing at the lathe cutting out some missing part. Consulting Hamid, who seems to be the only one he really respects.

He doesn’t concern himself with the accounts. He goes into the office only when an argument starts there, when some customer gets a nasty shock because of the price they’re asking. He checks the bill again but he’s as stubborn as a mule and he doesn’t knock off a single cent. I sometimes sweep the office at the end of the day and I overhear the arguments. They say to him “You’re the most expensive in town.” And he answers “It’s up to you. Nobody’s forcing you to come back. Do you want me to show you the price list?” And he smiles, partly at them but mostly to himself.

Once, just before work was over, when I was sweeping the garage for the second time I came to a place where he was standing talking to somebody and I waited quietly for him to move. The workers were already changing their clothes and washing their hands and the garage was nearly empty. He stood there talking and just didn’t notice me standing there with the broom. I’m sure he didn’t know who I was, or that I’d been working in his garage for more than a month.

I stood there leaning on the broom and he stood on a pile of dirt listening to some important-looking guy who talked and talked. It’d been a crazy day and I’d already cleaned the garage maybe five times. All the time they’d been bringing in cars that wouldn’t start, cars that had been driven too fast and had skidded in the rain. There was no end to it. At last the important-looking guy in the suit who’d been talking about politics went away, but Adam stayed where he was, thinking hard. I was afraid to say anything to him. Suddenly he noticed me standing just a few feet
away from him waiting with the broom. “What do you want?” I got all confused. He scared me staring at me like that.

“Would you mind moving a bit? I must sweep under you …” And he smiled and moved a bit and I started sweeping where he’d been standing in a hurry so he could move back there if he wanted to. But now he was watching me, staring at me like I was some kind of freak. Suddenly he asked:

“Who brought you here?”

“My cousin, Hamid,” I said at once, trembling and blushing and not knowing why. What could he do to me anyway? After all he gives me only a tiny wage that one way or another goes straight to my father. And he doesn’t really scare me that much, it’s just that big bushy beard of his.

“How old are you, boy?”

Him too – “boy” – damn him.

“Fourteen years and three months.”

“How is this? Didn’t you want to stay on at school?”

I couldn’t believe it. How was it he knew about the school? I started to mumble “Yes, of course … but my father didn’t want …”

He was about to say something but he kept quiet, still staring at me. And I started carefully moving the broom and cleaning around him, piling up the dirt in a hurry. And suddenly I felt him touching me, laying his hand lightly on my head.

“What’s your name?”

I told him. My voice was shaky. No Jew had ever touched my head before. I could’ve recited a poem for him. Just like that. If he’d asked me to. He really hypnotized me. But he didn’t know such a thing was possible.

And since then he’s smiled at me every time he sees me. Like he remembers me. And a week later they took me off sweeping and taught me another job, tightening brakes. Not too difficult. I started tightening brakes for them.

So tired. What do you think? At night I lie awake, snatching maybe one hour of sleep in the morning when Mommy’s already dragging me out of bed. And until she sees me sitting at the table
drinking my coffee she doesn’t leave the house. It’s odd, but at first the tiredness isn’t so bad and I’m not even late for school. In the first class I’m fairly lucid, anyway most of them are asleep, including the teacher. But the crunch always comes in the third class, just then, at around quarter past ten, I feel all empty inside, my heart sinks, my breathing gets heavy, I feel dead. At first I used to go outside by myself, to wash my face and try to sleep on a bench somewhere. Near the outhouse I found a sort of alcove and I tried to catch some sleep there, but it wasn’t safe because Shwartzy’s always snooping around (what the hell does he think he’s doing patrolling the girls’ toilets?) and once he caught me there, the sneaky bastard, and sent me back into class on the double. I started looking for other places to sleep but it wasn’t any use, the school wasn’t designed to furnish sleep for its pupils. It really was depressing, after all I needed only a quick doze, quarter of an hour maybe, to bring me back to life. At last I had a wonderful idea, I’d sleep in the class during the lesson, and I even found a suitable place, at the end of the fourth row a pillar sticks out and this makes an ideal hiding place, especially if you push the desk right up against the wall. That way you can escape the teacher’s notice, present but not present.

Once during break when the classroom was empty I sat down there and Tali and Osnat came in looking for me and went out again without seeing me.

Then I had to work on Yigal Rabinovitch to get him to change places with me, without telling him the real reason. But he didn’t want to change, it seemed he’d discovered the
advantages
of his place too. So I started buttering him up, smiling at him, chatting with him during break, walking home with him after school and even touching him as if by accident. He found all this a bit confusing, the dumb cluck, I saw it wouldn’t be long before he started falling in love with me. He took to waiting for me outside the house in the morning to walk with me to school, even skipping basketball practice before class. I didn’t want to overdo it, just enough to persuade him to change places. He refused and refused but in the end he gave in. Poor devil, his marks are so bad he could be in real trouble, he’s got a good reason too for not wanting to be too conspicuous. I really wanted to kiss him but I had to be careful not to give him the wrong
idea. We went to the teacher and told her we were changing places and I brought in a cushion that I’d prepared especially, it fit into the corner nicely, in just the right position for keeping me out of sight, putting the cushion against the wall, laying my head on it and going to sleep, yes, really going to sleep. It’s winter now, the sky’s grey and it’s dark in the classroom, to save energy we’re not allowed to switch on the lights, and we sit there in our overcoats because Shwartzy’s taken the heaters away, he’s taking the energy crisis seriously and he thinks we must save fuel in the national interest.