The Lover (35 page)

“As from tonight.”

I phone the old lady.

“Where is Na’im?”

“He’s gone to the movies.”

“Good. When he comes back tell him he can go back to his village and come to the garage tomorrow as usual. I don’t need him at night any more, I’ve finished with that.”

Silence –

“Mrs. Ermozo?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll tell him …?”

Silence again. Suddenly I feel sorry for her. Her last hope. She starts to mumble.

I understand at once.

“If you’d like him to stay at your house I can leave him with you and there’s no need for him to come to the garage, he can carry on helping you …”

Like handing over a piece of property –

Her voice shakes, as if she’s about to cry.

“Thank you, thank you, let him stay a little longer, until I’m used to being alone again …”

“As long as you like …”

“Thank you, thank you, it won’t be for long. God bless you. You really are a wonderful man.”

Late at night. Everyone’s asleep. The house is dark. Rain and high winds outside, the wind beating at the shutters. I’m in the kitchen, cooking busily, preparing fish. Cutting off the heads, scraping off the scales, slicing the white bodies to remove the inner organs, my hands covered with blood and guts. And the fish are unusually revolting, wild fish, big fish, their dead eyes yellow, scales like feathers, hard and sharp, greenish. The pan is on the stove and the water is boiling. I must hurry.

Someone is sitting behind me at the table, I know who it is. I turn around slowly, the knife in my hand, he’s reading a
newspaper
and eating a thin slice of bread, he’s in army uniform, on his face the bristles of a black beard.

“What happened, Gabriel? Where have you been?”

He doesn’t look up from the paper, turns the pages.

“But the war isn’t over yet. You sent me away …”

“What isn’t over?” I cry desperately. “It’s all over and you gave us no sign. Adam searches for you at night.”

“Where is he searching?”

“Look, listen …”

And we are silent, hearing him, hearing the heavy footsteps of someone moving about the house, opening the doors of
cupboards
, moving drawers.

Gabriel smiles ironically, something in his face has matured, become riper, more self-assured. He folds the paper and comes towards me, looks into the bubbling pot, turns up the flame.

“What are you cooking here?”

“Fish.”

“Fish?” He’s surprised. “Fish?”

I tremble, hoping perhaps he’ll touch me. Should I embrace him? But he’s already turning to go.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going back.”

“But the war is over …” I’m almost shouting.

“What’s over?” he says angrily. “Look at the calendar.”

And on the wall calendar the date really is still the tenth of October. “But that’s a mistake, we forgot to change it.” I’m laughing now. I go to the calendar and with my bloodstained hands wildly tear off the pages, crushing them savagely in my fist, but he’s already gone.

Suddenly I feel restless and I go down to the centre of town to look for a swimsuit for the summer. And sitting next to me in the bus is a man with a familiar face. At first I drive myself crazy trying to identify him, it’s as if he’s come out of one of my dreams, a huge man with long unruly hair, forty perhaps, eagerly leafing through an evening paper. At last I get it – the man who types at night, across the wadi, he and no other.

He gets off at a bus stop and I follow at once. At last I shall find out something about him. The man who types, my night accomplice, in rumpled clothes and faded jeans, walking slowly, looking in the shop windows, the paper tucked in his back pocket. He goes into a bank and I follow, I stand in a corner and fill in some forms, depositing a million and drawing out two million. Waiting while he draws out some money (only two hundred), dropping the paper in the rubbish basket and following in his tracks. He goes into a stationery shop and I follow him, he stands there, eyes sparkling, examining wads of paper. The
saleswoman
asks, “Yes, young lady?” “This gentleman is before me,” I reply. He looks at me kindly. “The younger generation. What manners! It’s quite all right, you can go first.”

“I’m in no hurry,” I say. “A line is a line.”

“Then what can I do for you, sir?”

A typewriter ribbon, I whisper to myself.

“Typing paper.”

But he’s looking for a special size and a special kind, he sends the assistant climbing up ladders and running down to the basement until she finds what he wants. He goes out. Hurriedly I buy a rubber and run after him. Fuck it. He disappears into a barber’s shop.

To wait or not to wait?

What can I do? Pity to lose him so soon. I find a fence with a good view and sit down on it to wait. Five minutes pass and Tali and Osnat appear, sit down beside me and start gossiping. And then he suddenly emerges from the barber’s, just as tousled as before, maybe they’ve taken off two hairs. I jump at once, breaking off in midsentence, and hurry after him. Now he goes into a tobacconist, I stand beside him, brushing against him. He buys tobacco, pipe cleaners, cigarettes and coffee. He touches me lightly. I tremble. He looks down at me, I smile but he looks away, absent-mindedly, not connecting me with the girl that he saw in the stationery shop. He pays and goes out. I buy one cigar and I’m on his trail again.

Now he’s standing beside the fence where I was sitting, waiting for someone, pacing about idly. Watching the girls walking past, you can see how he turns his head slowly, changing his position to get a better look at their legs. I remember his bowed head, falling on the typewriter at three in the morning, nestling against the machine. He takes a little notebook from his pocket and writes something in it, some idea, I suppose, smiling to himself in satisfaction. I’m afraid he may notice me standing at the side watching him and I decide to walk in front of him. This time he stares at me intently, a penetrating look, passionate almost, the dirty old man. Suddenly he smiles a sweet smile, his face lights up, not at me, at a little old man with a white hat, a well-known Haifa poet whose name I’ve forgotten. They talk for a while and then part. And he’s alone again, looking at his watch all the time, until a pale young woman arrives with a little girl in a stroller. He comes to life at once, kissing the child, arguing with the woman. The three of them cross the road, stand at the bus stop.

And I follow –

Should I give up? At least let’s see where he lives. Where it comes from, the light that shines on me at night. I climb on the bus behind them, but the bus is going down to the lower city, I just hope they’re not going to visit somebody. They get off, start to wander about the streets, looking for a table or a cupboard, going into all the furniture shops. Leaving the child outside in the stroller and going in to look at the furniture. And all the time I’m standing in doorways and at street corners, spying on them secretly, there’s a moment when I almost lose them but I find
them again. They don’t notice me, only the child dragged along behind them in the little folding stroller watches me in silence, with a friendly look, she’s just like him.

In the end they don’t buy any furniture, all they’ve done is confuse the salesmen. They go into a grocery and buy a kilo of garden peas, hop on another bus, going home at last I hope. The little girl must sleep sometime.

Three hours now I’ve been on his trail. It’s evening. I no longer have the energy to hide and I sit down not far from them, tired. They’re exhausted too, talking quietly, glancing at me every now and then, shelling the raw peas and eating them, giving some to the child as well, putting the empty hulls back in the bag. The bus drives into a mountain suburb that I don’t recognize, though it can’t be far from our neighbourhood. Every hundred metres it stops and people get off, slowly the bus empties. At the terminus they get out and I follow. The street is empty, few houses. They ignore me completely, leaving the bag in a dustbin and walking fast, polling the stroller behind them, the little girl sits there half asleep, her head nodding from side to side. I look around trying to find our house but I can’t pick out anything that’s familiar. An ordinary street without a view. I follow in their footsteps as if in a trance, bound closer and closer to them, really scared now, it’s all growing dark around me. Streetlamps coming on. What am I doing? How shall I get home from here? Maybe at night he writes in a different house, maybe he leads a double life, maybe this isn’t him but his twin brother. But suddenly the street bends sharply and they disappear into a big new apartment house that stands there alone. And all at once the view opens out, the sea appears, more housing developments, straightaway I pick out our neighbourhood and I can even see our house, so close, across a narrow wadi. There’s the window of my room, all dark.

I stand there looking, full of a silly joy at finding the right place. I start climbing the stairs, just to find out his name and then go. Maybe he’s a famous writer. But there’s somebody moving there in the darkness, a giant shape. It’s him. Waiting for me. His voice is full of bitterness, fear almost.

“What do you want, girl? What have we done to you? Who sent you to follow me? Get out of here … go …”

And before I can say a word he disappears up the stairs, fleeing from me.

A normal day. In the morning I get up at nine because if even at nine I’ve got nothing to do why should I get up at eight? Breakfast on the table but I’ve got no appetite, I eat a slice of bread, drink some coffee, all this in my pyjamas, not shy anymore in front of this old woman, I’ve got so used to her I sometimes forget she’s there, watching me and whining, “Why aren’t you eating, you won’t grow if you just eat bread.” But I laugh. “No child stays a child forever.”

Then she’s interested in what I saw at the movies yesterday and I give her a summary of the plot. She asks questions, mainly she’s interested in the actors, there’re a few names that she remembers – Clark Jable, Humphrey Gumbart, somebody Dietrich, she wants to know if I’ve seen them and how they are and if they’re still as handsome as they used to be. A real character this grandmother. But I’ve got no head for the names of actors, the main thing is the plot, what happens, that’s what’s important. One actor today, another tomorrow, what does it matter?

And she says, “You’re wasting your money, you don’t understand films. They’ll be the ruin of you.” And I laugh –

Already I’m so used to her, I don’t understand how I could ever have been scared of her, like I was that first evening when she looked like a witch. I sprawl on the chair with my pyjamas unbuttoned, when she tries to get at me I just laugh, what’s the point in getting worked up?

Then I get dressed, take a piece of paper and write down the day’s shopping list. So many instructions it’s like an army
operation.
Every vegetable has to be bought from a different grocery store. Tomatoes here, olives there, this kind of cheese here, another kind there. She explains exactly what I’ve got to buy and how much and especially how much I should pay. I take the baskets and make the rounds and come back, put the shopping down on the table and the cabinet meeting begins. She examines everything, sniffs everything, puts the bad fruit aside, goes over the bill, cursing me, the storekeepers and the government, and
then sends me out again to take the bad stuff back. They already know me well in the neighbourhood, the storekeepers know that all this nonsense isn’t my idea but hers and they don’t mind me pestering them a bit.

So the morning goes by without any excitement and
lunchtime
comes around. I eat lunch, eat everything on the plate. Then I go out and fetch
Yediot
Aharonot,
wait awhile and go out and fetch
Ma’ariv
, and then it’s quiet because she sits down in an armchair, puts on her reading glasses and buries herself in the papers. I do the washing up in a hurry and go out to the movies. Luckily most of the cinemas in Haifa show movies that suit me fine. But sometimes it happens that the pictures outside give me the wrong idea and I find myself watching something really complicated, and when I come out, my eyes not yet used to the daylight, I go back to the box office and buy a ticket for the same movie, for the evening show, because there’re some things I didn’t understand and I’ve got to get it right. Why did I think he was the good guy, why did he get killed in the end?

I come back and find her dozing in the armchair, newspapers over her face and she’s hardly breathing. I move the papers off her to give her room to breathe. She opens her eyes like she’s being roused from the world to come, like she doesn’t know me. I ask her if she’d like some tea and she nods her head. I make tea for her and for myself and without her asking me I tell her all the nasty things that happened in the movie, to cheer her up. And she listens and starts to cry. She doesn’t understand anything, she thinks she does but she doesn’t really. When she starts crying I take the empty tea cups to the kitchen and go to my room. This blubbering of hers isn’t for me, I’m really too young for things like that. In the end she calms down, goes to the kitchen to make supper, I hear her moving the pans and the dishes around so slowly it’s like her arms and legs have gone to sleep.

I don’t have much appetite for supper, it’s like her tears have fallen in the food and I’m swallowing them. The thought of that gives me the shivers. I take out the rubbish, mend something in the house, a tank or a tap, all the pipes here are mouldy. A mouldy old Arab house. Then I sit down to read the papers to her, the bits in small print that her eyes are too weak for. Who’s died, who’s got married, who’s been born, and then I throw in
an article on the Palestinian problem, with my comments, and the big row begins, I get up and leave.

Now it’s nighttime. I’m living alone, all my life I’ve never been so alone. Sometimes I get really homesick for the village and the fields, but I get over it in the end. I miss Dafi a lot. Some days I go up to Carmel and walk around near her house but there’s no sign of her. Maybe Adam’s worried about her, sorry that he let her come out with us at night. I haven’t seen him for three weeks now. It was the old woman who told me that we were stopping the night work for a bit but we’d be taking it up again later and for the moment I ought to stay here, and she gave me three hundred pounds from him for pocket money.