The Lover (8 page)

In the middle of the sixth grade she disappeared. Her family moved to Tel Aviv. Her father’s name sometimes appeared in the papers as one of the leaders behind the scenes, a security chief. The months leading up to the establishment of the state were
upon us, there was turmoil in the land. I tried to study in the evenings, to prepare at least superficially for the matriculation exam, but I gave it up.

At the beginning of the War of Independence my father died and I joined the army as a mechanic, maintaining armoured vehicles. It was years since I’d seen her.

It wasn’t until after the war that we met again, at a school reunion. It was impossible to invite only those who had
completed
their schooling, many like me had left halfway through, had taken up employment, had joined the army or the Palmach. Some had fallen in the war.

It was supposed to be a big occasion. An assembly, parties, speeches, an all-night barbecue. At first I didn’t recognize the girl who approached me. In the years since we’d last met I’d grown taller, and she suddenly seemed small to me.

“How’s the revolution?” I asked with a smile.

She was surprised, then she smiled.

“It’ll come … it’ll come.”

And from that moment she didn’t leave me. We both felt a bit out of place there. We’d both left the school in the sixth grade. Many of the people there were strangers to us. Some of them were married and had brought wives and husbands with them. We sat apart from the others at the back of the hall and listened to the long speeches, she was whispering in my ear all the time, telling me about herself, about her studies in the teachers’ seminary. When we stood up to remember the dead, listening with bowed heads to the long list, and Yitzhak’s name was mentioned, I glanced at her. She stood there, her head bowed, not batting an eyelid. I didn’t know what to do, she stayed at my side all evening, going with me from place to place, unwilling to enter into long conversation with other friends. Her father’s name was in the news at the time, something to do with some obscure episode, a hasty decision taken with unpleasant
consequences
. Her father had been dismissed from office and there had been demands that he be brought to trial, but in the end they let him alone on account of his past service.

Perhaps this was the reason for her oversensitivity with the others, for her decision to leave in the middle of the party and return home to Tel Aviv. She asked me to accompany her to the
bus station and I took her there in my car, my father’s old Morris, the back seat full of tools, automobile parts, oil cans. We stood and waited for a bus in the deserted bus station in the lower city. She grew closer and closer to me, talking about herself, asking me about my work. She remembered the night watch that we’d shared, and what I’d said then. The bus was late in coming. I decided to drive her to her home in Tel Aviv. We arrived there after midnight. A small, modest house with a neglected garden in south Tel Aviv. She insisted that I spend the night there. I agreed, I was a little curious to see her father. It was dark inside the house, huge piles of newspapers lay in every corner. Her father came out to meet us, a hairy man, older and smaller than he looked in the newspaper photographs, with a hard face. She told him a little about me, he nodded distractedly and
disappeared
into another room. I thought that we’d sit for a while and continue our conversation, but she made up a bed for me on the sofa in the living room, lent me some of her father’s old pyjamas and left me. At first I had difficulty getting to sleep, still thrown by the sharp transition from the noise of the party, the speeches, the meetings with old friends to this dark and quiet house among the sparse orchards of Tel Aviv. But finally I slept. At three in the morning I heard somebody moving about beside my bed. It was her father, in khaki trousers and a torn pyjama top. He was bending over the radio and fiddling with it, going from station to station, the B.B.C., broadcasts in Russian, Hungarian, Romanian, languages that I couldn’t even identify. All the stations of the awakening east. Listening for a while and then passing on to another station, his eyes tightly closed, perhaps it was a habit that he couldn’t shake off from the period when he was in charge of the Ministry of Information, or perhaps he was searching for something affecting him, some commentary on his case from a foreign and distant source. He ignored me, as if I didn’t exist. He didn’t care that he’d roused me from sleep, that I was exhausted, sitting beside him in silence, listening with him.

At last he switched off the radio. His face looked serious, severe.

“Do you study in a seminary too?”

I told him what I did.

“What is your father’s name?”

I told him.

He knew at once that he had died about a year and a half before, even though we hadn’t published an obituary in the newspapers because of the war. He added some dry, precise details about my father.

“Did you know him personally?” I was amazed.

No, they had never met, but he knew all about him, as if he had a personal file in front of him.

And he left me to myself – I couldn’t sleep anymore. At five in the morning I got up, folded the sheets, I had to return to Haifa to open the garage at seven. It was only a few months since I’d reopened the garage, which had been closed during the war. Competition was tough at the time and one had to work very hard not to lose customers.

I went outside. A hazy summer morning. I strolled about the neglected garden, hungry, drowsy after my uncomfortable night, watching the newspaper delivery boys arriving one after another and throwing at the doorstep all the morning papers, in all the languages. I wanted to leave, but not without saying goodbye, and I didn’t know which was her room. In the end I tapped lightly on one of the windows.

It wasn’t long before she came out to me, her hair combed, wearing a light morning dress, her face radiant. She came close to me and said seriously, almost solemnly, “I dreamed about you.” And she described a dream that was clear, orderly, logical, almost impossibly so. A dream that could be taken to mean that she was telling me directly – “I am willing to marry you.”

The old cabin of the movement, but a little larger. The time early evening, winter twilight. They seemed to be preparing for a play, some of them were wandering about in patchwork
costumes
, straw hats, coats made from blankets, rope belts. Someone paced about with make-up on his face. One of the young men was writing the music for the play, and the girls crowded around him as he sat on the floor in an oriental position, bent over an exercise book, writing the words at great speed. They hummed a tune and he wrote words that were not just words, but words in
which music was hidden. From the corner where I stood I could see above the heads of the girls the melodious words that were written at such haste. But they were still waiting for somebody to arrive. The star? The producer? Somebody important, somebody precious, without whom the play could not go ahead. Listen, the sound of a train approaching, stopping for a moment and continuing on its way. We rushed outside to meet him. And he really had arrived. The train that had stopped for a moment and disappeared again, leaving only the shining tracks behind it, had put down a big hospital bed on the platform. Somebody was lying in it. We crowded around him, he was sick, not actually sick, exhausted rather. Something had really exhausted him. Postnatal exhaustion, he had sired sons, but he was happy as well, proud of himself, a weak smile of triumph on his pale face, a combination of Zaki and somebody else, lying there in khaki clothes, under an army blanket.

And the group began to fuss around him, carrying the bed into the cabin, happy all, a collective happiness, because the babies were there too, like a pile of sacks. Piled to one side, quiet and smiling. They were little people already, not newborn infants, they had hair and teeth, and were dressed in little romper suits with buttons and buckles. They put them up on a wooden stage, under a baggage canopy, and there was general confusion and happiness, and only this solitary, independent childbearer was perplexed, sad even. And I stood to one side, feeling deserted. Did he not love me once? Lying now supported on a pillow, watching the crowd dance around the children born of no mother, the children borne by him for the sake of all, that was the point. I approach him cautiously, without looking at him, watching instead the children, who lie there immobile, their lower limbs tied tight. I know that they have some terrible, hidden defect. The people pick them up and put them back, choosing them, urging me too to take one of them, and I see there lying in the corner a child almost fully grown, an aged foetus, a cataract in his eye, stretching out his little hands to me.

“Quickly, quickly,” I hear around me –

So at least I understood. Disturbed and excited, standing there in the withered, neglected garden, on a crisp summer morning, leaning on the wing of my little car, watching the girl who stood there in front of me, both strange and familiar, watching her serious face, the sharp face of a bird, the thick lock of hair falling on her breast, studying her body, her sandalled feet, the shape of her legs, while listening to a clear and vivid dream, which for a moment I was sure that she’d invented as a means of declaring her love. I didn’t know then what became clear to me after I married her, that such are her dreams, clear and lucid, that she always remembers them, to the smallest detail. So different from my dreams, which are rare and unfathomable.

We agreed to keep in touch –

But I returned to her that same evening, this time bringing pyjamas, shaving gear, a toothbrush and a change of shirt. Already in love with her, as if by secret orders, my love required no effort. It was enough for me to remember the girl whom I roused that night in the tent, who seemed to me infinitely more beautiful than this girl. In love not with her, nor with the other, but with something between the two.

She was a little surprised to see me returning that same day. Her father, who was pacing about like a caged lion, stopped for a moment and looked at me, then resumed his pacing. (He paced around the house like this for many years, hardly ever stepping outside, not wanting to see his friends. He was proud and angry with the world, sure that he was right, that an injustice had been done to him.) Only her mother, a gentle, delicate old woman with weak eyes, came to me and shook my hand lightly. Most of that evening we spent in her room. She talked about her studies and her plans and what was going on in the world. She was interested in politics, in equality, in socialist policies, she
mentioned
the names of leaders and events, in possession of all kinds of secret, unknown information which seemed to her of the highest importance. Then I realized how those long years of hard and solitary work in the garage had diminished my curiosity. At last I touched her, took her in my arms, kissing her lips and her breasts, tasting the bitter taste of soap.

That night once again a bed was made up for me on the old sofa in the living room. At two or three in the morning again the deposed leader came in, in his torn pyjamas, his face on fire, bending over the old radio set and turning the knobs, passing from station to station, searching for the mention of Israel or his own name in the distant void. I curled up silently, pulling the sheet over my head, asking myself if I really loved her. When he finished and went back to his room I couldn’t sleep anymore. In the end I got up, dressed quietly, shaved and went to her room to wake her, but she was in a deep sleep, curled up, probably dreaming. Do I really love her, I never stopped wondering, wouldn’t it be better to escape from here before it’s too late? I left a brief note and drove with the first light back to Haifa.

At noon she arrived at the garage. Her father must have given her the address. I was lying under a car changing the exhaust pipe and suddenly I saw her standing nervously in the doorway. I got up at once and went to her, oily and dark, but without speaking she signalled to me to carry on with my work. She looked at me with a scared look that pleased me and put me at my ease. It seemed appropriate. I lay down again under the car, working quickly and with concentration, to be rid of the owner of the car, who was watching her now as she paced around among the heaps of junk, glancing at the tools that were scattered about, examining a picture of a nude girl that I’d cut out from a newspaper and put up on the wall. She examined everything carefully, with great interest, even putting her head inside an old engine that lay on the workbench. At last I succeeded in fixing the exhaust pipe and the customer disappeared with his car. I went to her. She didn’t explain why she’d come so suddenly, nor did she ask why I ran away in the morning without saying goodbye. She just wanted to know how an engine works. I explained it to her. She listened gravely, her eyes sad, her voice shaking a little, on the verge of tears. But she asked intelligent questions and let me talk of nothing else. And I talked, I even dismantled an old carburettor to show her its parts, explaining and explaining. I never thought it possible to say so much about the workings of a simple gasoline engine.

Three months later we were married –

She transferred her studies to Haifa and we lived for the first few years in my mother’s house.

I didn’t know if it would last long, sometimes I was sure that in a while she would leave me, would regret it, find someone else to take her in. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if she’d betrayed me within a short time. But our life went smoothly from the start. She was engrossed in her studies and we lived an orderly life. In the mornings she went to college, then to the library. And when my day’s work was done I went there to pick her up. With my old invalid mother she got on splendidly, attentive to her endless chattering, going shopping with her, sympathetic to all her silly ideas, heedful of her advice. When my mother and I realized that she was a very poor cook we gave her other chores around the house, the washing of the dishes or the scrubbing of the floor, tasks she performed with great efficiency, not turning up her nose at any work. Even then I noticed her strange liking for older women. She had several elderly aunts in Haifa to whom she was devoted and frequently visited.