The Lover (36 page)

So why should I ask too many questions?

It’s a good life, really good. For the moment –

I’m independent, I don’t have to work and I’m well looked after –

So long as I’ve got money for the movies –

I’ve got movies on the brain now –

I go into the first show, come out with my head in a whirl. Where’s Bialik, where’s Tchernikhovski, what good are they to me when the real world’s so different and the real problems are so difficult?

I return home, thinking about the movie, trying to whistle the theme music. This is the quiet time in our neighbourhood, the in-between time, after the traders have gone and before the hookers arrive. I ring the bell, she opens the door, her face is grey, neither of us says anything. We’ve done enough talking already today. I go straight to my room, count the money I’ve got left. Oh God, what am I doing in this house, in this strange city?

I start undressing and suddenly she comes into the room, creeping in quietly, wearing a different dress and looking all fresh, sits down on the bed. What the hell does she want?

“Well, Na’im, how are things?”

I’m here, dammit, what do you want now?

“What was the film?”

“Don’t worry. The good guys won in the end and got married too.”

She sighs. “You’ve been getting cheeky this last month.”

She picks up my trousers and examines them, gets up and goes into the other room, pokes around in the drawers and comes back with an almost new pair of trousers. “Put these on, let’s see if they fit you. They were my grandson’s when he was your age.”

I put them on. Why should I care? Put my hands in the pockets and pull out mothballs, sniff at them.

“These are for you,” she says. “I was going to keep them for his son, but he isn’t here and he has no son.” I wonder if maybe I should say something nice to her, say maybe he’ll come back and have a son, but I just say, “Thank you very much,” think for a moment and then go to her and quietly kiss her hand, that’s the only place where you can kiss old people and that’s what they do at home in the village.

She smiles, she really likes it, you can tell.

She starts telling me stories about the Jews who used to live in the Old City of Jerusalem and how they were kind to the Arabs, who murdered them in the end. She groans and groans, then at last she shuts up and goes out.

I undress in a hurry, I get into bed but I’m not really tired. What have I done today? Nothing much. I toss around in bed for a while, remembering the movie I saw, a horrible hunchback, a magician with a burned face. Suddenly I start trembling.

I’m alone. What kind of a life is this? Stuck here in this hole. Adam’s forgotten me, Father and Mother and Hamid and all the rest of them have forgotten me. I get out of bed, go to the window to watch the ships in the bay, I already know how to tell destroyers and missile ships apart. The first hookers arrive and take up their positions. A patrol car draws up, the cops get out and talk to them. It’s warm outside. The window’s open.

I stand there watching till my eyes start to close and I fall on the bed. 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?

I’ve noticed before, this isn’t the first time, that I’m capable of really scaring people, even grownups, it isn’t only the maths teacher who’s started to be afraid of me, there are others too –
this disturbance gives me strength. Sometimes I follow somebody in the street. I just pick somebody out, an adult, an old man, and I follow him everywhere, relentlessly, for half an hour, an hour, until he turns pale and gets angry. It drives Tali and Osnat crazy. I can even scare myself.

Once we were sitting in the cinema at a matinee and it was a boring movie, kids’ stuff. In the row in front of us there was a bald old man with a sort of beret on his head and I wondered what on earth he was doing watching a children’s movie and I whispered to Tali and Osnat, “Do you think I ought to pull his ear?” and before they had time to understand what I was saying or ask why, I’d already grabbed hold of his nasty ear by the soft and hairy lobe and given it a sharp tug. This is what frightens me. I just thought of it and it was done. So quickly, no hesitation between thinking it and doing it. The old man turned around on us at once as if he’d been waiting to have his ear pulled, because he wasn’t concentrating on the movie either, and he started cursing loudly in Rumanian or Hungarian in the silence of the dark cinema. He was sure Osnat had done it, he wanted to kill her. The three of us got up and fled before the manager arrived.

All that evening I was depressed. Osnat was furious with me, she didn’t want to talk and she went home, only Tali, silent as usual, followed me through the streets, she didn’t care about missing the film, didn’t ask me why I did it, what came over me.

Anyway, what could I have said? This restlessness that’s got hold of me lately, I can’t sit still in one place, like Mommy, who’s always rushing about, from teachers’ meetings to seminars at the university, God knows what she’s doing. But I don’t do anything, just wander around from place to place, touring the city by taxi. Yes, lately I’ve started riding around in taxis. I’ve got plenty of money, at night I raid Daddy’s wallet, he’s got so many hundreds of pounds he can’t tell anyway. There isn’t much I can do with the money, if I bought a blouse or a skirt they’d notice straightaway. So I’ve started taking rides in taxis. I bought a street map and because it was impossible to stop a taxi, they just wouldn’t stop for me, the drivers thought I wanted a free lift, I used to go to the taxi rank, get into the first one, give the name of a street and drive off. That way I started taking trips around the place, going to some hill not far away, walking about among
the pine trees looking at the view or at the sunset and returning to the city. The whole round trip wouldn’t cost me more than thirty or forty pounds.

At first the drivers were mostly amused, surprised at a girl going around alone like this, but in the end they got used to me. Once someone asked me before I got in, “Have you got any money?” so I showed him the hundred-pound note and said, “Yes, but I’m not going with you if you don’t trust me,” and I went to look for another taxi.

I always sit in the back seat, on the right-hand side, making a note of the driver’s name and the number of the cab in case he tries to start something or make trouble, holding on tight to the strap and going downtown until the meter shows twenty-five pounds. Sometimes I go down to the docks, walking for a while by the gate and watching the ships, buying nuts or Swiss chocolate, eating in a hurry and taking the bus home.

Once Mommy nearly caught me. The taxi stopped at a traffic light just half a metre from Mommy’s Fiat. I curled up at once. She was sitting there at the wheel, staring up at the light as if it were a flag, awfully tense. Her face hard, thinking deeply, for a second she closed her eyes, but as soon as the light changed she jerked forwards ahead of the rest and disappeared in the traffic, in a real hurry to get somewhere.

The days are getting longer, the nights crawl. Things are hard at school. Since that business with Baby Face it’s as if I’m in limbo, all the time they’re considering my fete, they want to throw me out. In the meantime it seems the teachers are ignoring me, even in the subjects that I’ve done some work for they no longer ask me questions, it’s as if they’re not bothering with me anymore.

And I’m beginning not to bother too. Leaving the school at three in the afternoon, getting into a taxi and going down to the lower city, no longer looking for a view but just a crowd to move about in, among the sweaty, noisy people, going into shops to finger clothes or crockery, to touch fruit and vegetables. Always being jostled, swept along in the crowd, wanting to be sick but walking on, and suddenly somebody touches me lightly, says softly, “Dafi …”

It’s Na’im. Him I haven’t forgotten.

All right then, they’ve forgotten me. It’s six weeks now since we stopped doing the towing and he’s forgotten me. Two weeks ago I went to see him at the garage, to clarify my position. I didn’t want to go inside, I didn’t want the Arabs to see me and start asking questions. I waited outside, sitting on a big stone, till he came out. He stopped his car at once.

“Has something happened, Na’im?”

“No … I just wanted to know how much longer I’ll be staying with her … with the old woman …”

He was embarrassed, I could tell, he took my arm and walked with me around the car, explaining that it was important to stay with her, it counted the same as working in the garage. What was wrong with the place? If I was short of money he’d give me some more, and he took out his wallet and gave me two hundred pounds. That’s always the easiest thing for him, giving money, just so long as I don’t ask awkward questions. He gave me a little hug, said, “Don’t worry, I’ll phone you, I’ll be in touch, I haven’t forgotten you,” and he got into his car.

What could I say? “How’s Dafi?” I said quickly before he moved away.

“She’s fine … she’s fine … she hasn’t forgotten you either.”

And he smiled and drove away.

That was a long time ago and since then he hasn’t been in touch with me or given any sign. He’s forgotten.

And the winter’s over and now I spend all my time walking the streets, I’ve tired of the movies. Walking around the city, going up to Central Carmel, among all the Jews. Walking a lot. Once I even went as far as the university but I didn’t go to the registrar’s office, I went into one of the lecture halls and heard a young man talking eagerly about the habits of mice. I spent a while at the bulletin board, looking at the lecture lists. One evening I even went to a poetry recital in the basement of the Community Centre. There wasn’t much of an audience. Three middle-aged men, a few old women and me. We sat in a dark room and listened in silence to two young men in old clothes reading poems without rhymes, all about death and suffering. And after each poem they explained what it meant. The two
men fascinated me and after they’d finished I followed them to a café and sat down not far from them, hearing them complain to the organizer about there being only old women in the audience. They were looking around them kind of hungrily.

And I listened. They didn’t realize I was an Arab, nobody does these days, not Jews anyway. Only the Arabs are still not quite sure about me. Has something about me changed? Am I not exactly myself any longer?

Sometimes, not often, I go back to the village, to see Mother and Father, taking them presents. Once it was an umbrella, once two pairs of pyjamas that I bought at a closing sale at the same shop in the lower city where I got my pyjamas. And they’re always pleased with me and the presents and they treat me with respect, inviting uncles and aunts to come and see me. “A great engineer,” Daddy tells them all. I daren’t tell them that for more than a month I haven’t touched an engine, I’m just looking after an old Jewish woman.

And I carry on wandering about, sometimes getting up at six and going out into the streets, sometimes lying in bed till lunchtime. I’ve started sitting around in cafés, ordering beer, smoking a cigarette and listening to the conversations around me. Getting older all the time.

Sometimes I feel I’m old enough to slip unnoticed into some seedy bar late at night, sitting beside a painted woman and smiling at her politely. Until the waiter comes along, a man with an evil face, and turns me out – “Run away, little boy, and bring your sister here or your mother if she’s still any good.”

Filthy bastards –

There are some people I feel drawn to. Arabs from the occupied territories, real Palestinians, dim-witted labourers walking around the city looking lost, not understanding anything and not settling down. And I help them, interpret for them, show them the way. They’re very surprised, they don’t realize I’m an Arab too. Telling me about their problems, about the cost of living, saying something about the great Palestinian problem and crossing the road or boarding a bus. Sometimes a girl or a young woman smiles at me, saying something or other, and I think maybe the time has come to fall in love with somebody else, and I take a good look around …

The old woman’s getting quieter all the time. A smell of death around her. Sitting all day in a chair without moving, becoming more and more dependent on me. I asked her once, “Haven’t you got any friends or relations?” but she didn’t answer. Soon she’ll die and I’ll have to run away, they’ll say I caused her death. I think of phoning Adam, but at the last moment I change my mind.

It’s not so good now, I’m not enjoying it anymore. They’ve forgotten me. So what am I supposed to do? I go and wander about in the crowd. Not looking in the shop windows anymore, just watching the people, getting pushed around by them, studying them. Sometimes I follow a man or a boy or a little girl, walking behind them, just to see what happens to them. Sometimes I follow somebody who’s following somebody else. Like today, when I started following a girl with soft legs and after a few minutes I realize – it’s Dafi, she’s following somebody. I hurry after her and catch up with her by a street crossing. I touch her gently. A wild sort of happiness takes hold of me.

At first she doesn’t notice that I’ve touched her, standing there waiting for the light to change. Then she’s confused, like I’ve wakened her from a dream. She’s grown a bit taller, got very thin, her face is pale, black rings under her eyes.

“Na’im” – she grabs my hand – “what are you doing here?” I don’t want to say I’m just wandering about.

“I’m going to visit somebody.”

“Who?”

“A friend.”

“You’ve got friends here already?”

“Yes.”

The light changes to green but she hesitates to cross, a stream of people pushes us aside. Suddenly we’ve got nothing to talk about, we’re staring at each other, you wouldn’t think we’d travelled together at night and been friends. The light changes to red.

“Are you still living with the old woman?”

“Your father asked me to …”

“You two are in love.”

Mocking, unpleasant, her eyes glaring at me strangely. People
crowding together beside us, waiting for the light to change. She seems distant, proud. My heart sinks.