The Lover (33 page)

And the chatter of the people around us, the advice, they never stop giving advice, everybody’s an expert. The Jews are real professionals when it comes to talking. Sometimes other cars stop just to give advice. First they ask how many dead and how many wounded and then they start telling us what to do. And the guys who are hurt, standing there covered in blood, they’re worried about the car, how much will it cost, whether the insurance company will cover it. There’s nothing the Jews care about more than their cars.

But Adam says nothing, pretending he doesn’t hear. I get impatient but he just doesn’t seem to care. But when the crunch comes and it’s time to fix the price, he hits hard. His prices are tough. He sends them to Dafi, she’s in charge of the money. She sits there in the cab with the money box in her lap, looking so sweet, taking cash, cheques, the lot. Writing receipts and sticking pretty blue stamps on them, they all ask for receipts. Some of them put them away in their pockets to show them to someone else who’s going to have to pay, but there’re some who throw them away in the road, taking them only out of spite, so we’ll have to pay the tax.

And the money piles up. Sometimes we made five hundred pounds a night.

We made, I didn’t. I went for days at a time without a cent. My wages go straight to Father, I don’t know anything about it. Every night I decide that this time I shall ask him for money, but at the last moment I always lose my nerve.

In the daytime I used to walk the streets, looking in shop windows and wanting to buy all sorts of things, wishing I could go to the movies, but not a cent in my pocket.

One night after I’d been working really hard, before he put me down outside the house, I said, “Can I have a word with you?” and then I started mumbling, embarrassed at having to talk in
front of Dafi, saying that my wages went straight to my father, and if I could have something … a loan maybe …

And Dafi began to laugh. “A loan?”

And he told me to come to the garage next day, he’d tell Erlich to transfer the wages to me, but I didn’t want them to take the money away from Father.

“It doesn’t matter … doesn’t matter …” I was getting all mixed up. “It’s just … I thought …”

And he didn’t understand but Dafi opened the money box and took out two hundred pounds.

“What’s the point of a loan? You’ve been working so hard … do you want more?”

“No, that’s quite all right,” I whispered, and pulled the notes out of her hot hand.

I ran off home with the two hundred pounds, which I was sure was going to last me a long time, but after two or three weeks I was broke again, so on the sly I asked Dafi for more and she smiled and gave me more.

Every evening I say to myself, that’s enough, time to stop, it’s madness trying to find him in these night excursions. But even so I can’t stop. At midnight the phone rings and appeals for help come flooding in. I’ve already given up answering the phone, Dafi always gets there first and eagerly she writes down the details, with an enthusiasm that I don’t understand, already she knows the names of the duty clerks in the control room and she swaps jokes with them. Dafi – every day I have less control over her, Asya is powerless too. I made a mistake that first night when I let her come out with me. Since then there’s been no opposing her, she’s got to come out with me, if I don’t take her she’ll go out walking in the streets. And Asya’s asleep, you can’t have a proper conversation with her, when I wake her up she answers me, oh yes, she talks, but she doesn’t get out of bed, I just turn my back and she’s fast asleep again.

And so we go out in the night, picking up Na’im and driving off to look for the nightlife Israelis who’ve broken down on the road. Strange work and very profitable, especially as I usually tow
the cars to my own garage, picking up a flood of new customers.

Nights at the end of winter, a mixture of heat and rain, scents of blossoms. And Israel in a fitful, dreamless sleep, a moment’s slumber. Looking suddenly enormous, all lit up, little villages turning into cities. And on the roads the endless roar of traffic, army convoys, private cars, trucks, hitch-hikers, soldiers
appearing
suddenly in the middle of an empty road, some dirty, some immaculate, returning home or to the depot. Adventurers, kibbutz volunteers from abroad, labourers from the occupied territories. Four months have passed now since the end of the war and the land is still uneasy, men wandering about in a vague search for something, for some account that remains to be settled.

And I’m in the middle of all this with the tow truck, the two children chattering happily beside me, driving along, the light flashing above my head, looking for a little old Morris, 1947 model, blue. Looking for a man who disappeared. Absurd.

And the work is hard. It’s many years since I’ve been involved in such basic mechanical work. Repairing split rubber tubing, clearing fuel blockages, fixing loose clutches, replacing fan belts, reviving burned-out generators. Work under difficult conditions, in the dark, in the pouring rain, by flashlight, without proper spare parts, trying to improvise with steel wire, with old screws. Lucky that Na’im’s there to help me, he works hard and he’s learning fast. All the time I’m more and more pleased with him, he brings me the right tools and crawls under the car to attach the cables. Already there are jobs that he can do by himself and I let him. Why not? I begin to feel a new kind of exhaustion, when I have to loosen a rusty screw I breathe heavily. Contact with the forgotten nuts and bolts.

These nightlife Israelis are a people in their own right. Burly taxi drivers, young men who’ve smacked up their parents’ cars, a tired lecturer returning from a lecture at a kibbutz, angry party officials. And women too, alone, in the small hours of the morning, coming home from a protest meeting or an adventure. And you’re always liable to find a bleary-eyed soldier, a tired hitch-hiker, left to doze in the crashed car, his rifle between his knees.

And always a crowd of people gathers around you to give
advice. You need nerves of steel to work in silence. They’re all experts. Dafi soon gets into conversation, the girl has a light and provocative tongue. The young men swap jokes with her, attracted to her.

A girl –

Her squeals of laughter in the silence of the night and when at last I’ve succeeded in starting the engine and I’m surrounded by grateful faces, I fix the price without hesitation. Special night rates. They protest at first. But I send them to Dafi, who has written out a price list in big letters, with coloured crayons, shining a flashlight on it and showing it to them with a little smile, carefully counting the money, writing down particulars on the backs of cheques, taking identity card numbers, all with such solemnity, with a strange sort of happiness.

But sometimes there’s nobody to take money from. Last night we were called out to a crashed car lying in a ditch at the side of the freeway not far from Hadera. A lone soldier standing beside it, waiting for us. He was witness to a ghastly accident, two parents and a child, the child killed, the parents in the hospital. The police have been there, they have taken all the details, all we are asked to do is take the car away. I flash the light on, see the smashed windows, the torn upholstery, bloodstains on the seats, a child’s shoe, a little sock. Dafi and I freeze, paralyzed, but Na’im, without me saying a word to him, starts playing out the cables, crawling on the ground under the wreckage of the car, running to the winch, setting it in motion, going back to fix the coupling, back to the winch and gradually dragging the car out of the ditch. I watch him and think, how quickly he’s learning, it’s incredible.

And so without speaking we go back, the smashed car hanging behind us, almost airborne, just one wheel bouncing on the road. We drive slowly, a long journey, the soldier dozing beside me and the children sitting silent on the back seat, watching the car slung on the back, the rain lashing it and pouring in through the broken windows, and I drive wearily, no longer looking out at the passing traffic, forgetting to search for him. I must give him up.

A giant black man, very elegant, wearing a bright green suit and a fashionable tie of the same colour, is leading the way. Leading me into a huge gallery full of light, the roof made of glass. He talks and explains to me the pictures hanging far apart in niches on the wall. Pictures of lush landscapes, fields, forests, villages, European landscapes but in a bracing African light. Did he paint these pictures? I ask, my eyes fixed on him, he’s so tall. No, his bright, assured smile, but they are pictures of his homeland and that is why he speaks of them with such love. “How wonderful it is, how beautiful, see, the new settlements that we have built, a renewed land.” And I go closer to look, seeing that these are not pictures but reality, real things, movement clearly visible, men with little carts, a plump and placid farmer ploughing the earth, walking behind a beast with curved horns, a sort of roebuck. Dark people in old clothes, children in turbans at play.

“Come and see this picture,” he calls to me from the end of the hall, and I go to him with a sense of exaltation, I’m at such a height and see so far, like looking down at the universe. It’s a picture of fields stretching away to the blue horizon, empty of people, cut in half by a long straight channel, meandering away to the skyline. And from its centre springs a bubbling mass of white foam, lava from the depths of the globe. And without a word being said I understand – this is the equator itself. I catch my breath, as if I’ve seen a mysterious vision. This long, obstinate and definitive line.

The Arab returns at the end of the night, dirty, his boots full of mud. He’s already learned to take them off in the hall and come into the apartment in his socks. He treads softly but I wake up.

“Well, did you find anything?”

“What?”

“What do you mean what? God in heaven, what are you doing out there all night?”

But he hardly understands what I’m saying. At first I used to
run to the telephone to talk to Adam and he would say, “What do you think? If I knew anything I’d come to you.”

I stopped questioning the Arab and stopped telephoning.

He’s always in a good mood, this Arab, quite content, whistling a tune, pleased with himself. God, what’s he so happy about? Walking around the house a little, eating a slice of bread, intending to go to bed just as he is. But I soon cured him of that.

“Shame on you, boy, we aren’t in Mecca, wash first.”

He was offended, going pale with anger. I had profaned the Muslim holy of holies.

“What has Mecca to do with it? Mecca is cleaner than all Israel …”

“Have you been there?”

“No, but neither have you.”

What nerve. How does he know I haven’t been to Mecca, at my age I could have been anywhere. But I said nothing, I didn’t want to start a quarrel, shame on an old woman who would quarrel with a child like him, and what would Adam say, the wonderful man who is wearing himself out at night looking for Gabriel. Anyway he learned to go and wash first while I prepared him an early breakfast, and he ate and drank, thank God he didn’t lose his appetite at night, wearing his strange red pyjamas that always remind me of the pyjamas that my late grandfather used to wear in the summer, in the Old City, when he sat on the balcony in the afternoon to look at the Western Wall.

Then he’d go to bed, tossing about for a while and making the bed creak, and then settling down. After two hours I’d go quietly into his room, covering him up well, taking his underclothes and throwing them in the laundry basket, examining his trousers to make sure there were no bombs or hashish in them. I have to keep a close watch on him. So sad. At first I used to find nothing in his pockets, not even a handkerchief, and I put in a
handkerchief
and a few pounds too so he could buy sweets. Later I began finding money, fifty, a hundred pounds. Adam is giving him money, he deserves it, but he’s such a spendthrift, after a week it’s almost all gone. Once he bought himself a big penknife. Without thinking twice I threw it away, flushed it down the toilet. We know what happens when Arabs go about with knives.

At twelve noon he wakes up, eats again, takes the rubbish out, fixes a dripping tap or clears a blockage in the sink or the toilet and goes out for a walk in the city, goes to the movies. Comes back at six o’clock full of life, his eyes sparkling, sits down to read to me from the papers for a while, reading in a sceptical, scornful sort of tone, but at least he pronounces the tough letters correctly.

He eats supper now without much appetite and goes out again for a short walk, every day he comes home later, needing less and less sleep. And so the time passes. The tow truck comes in the night, returns early in the morning, and there’s no sign of my Gabriel. I weep on the telephone to Adam, “What’s going to happen?”

A different tiredness now, real tiredness, no longer the empty and nervous tiredness of sleepless nights. The sweet tiredness of limbs aching from a long journey at night.

We used to arrive home at two or three in the morning and go to bed. Mommy was the first to get up and she’d rouse the two of us and prepare breakfast. It was a novelty having Daddy at home in the mornings, three of us sitting down to breakfast.

At school I moved about slowly, during break sinking down on a stone in the playground, Tali beside me. Since what happened with Arzi they made me change places and now somebody else is sleeping there. They put me at the third desk in the middle row, right in the centre of the class, exposed and helpless. I was asked questions and expected to answer, or at least to sit quietly and look at the teacher with warm puppy eyes, to smile at feeble jokes, to pay attention. The other children in the class began to bore me a bit, because at night I was seeing real life at a time when they were only playing with dreams, all of them. Even Osnat began to annoy me a bit with her constant
excitement
. Tali was the only one I still got on well with, she doesn’t say much and keeps things to herself, doesn’t get on your nerves. She always falls in with any suggestion.