The Lover (9 page)

And studying, studying. Always with books, note pads and files. While at the seminary she also enrolled for evening classes at the university. She seemed to be taking an exam almost every fortnight, preparing for it with her fellow students. She would leave me an address where I could pick her up at the end of the day: a library, a private house, a café, sometimes even a public park. And I would arrive there after work, grimy, my clothes dirty, walking heavily through the reading rooms of the library, between the tables, drawing the attention of the readers, finding her and touching her lightly on the shoulder. She would nod her head and whisper, “Just let me finish this page.” I would sit down beside her and leaf through a book lying open on one of the tables, reading and understanding nothing. Once I said to her with a smile, “Perhaps I ought to study something too, change my profession, it isn’t too late.” She was astonished. “Why you?” Why me, indeed. Nothing in her world attracts me particularly.

Although she suggested we abandon these meetings, that she was quite prepared to make her own way home, I insisted on always going to meet her. I wanted to know where she was, who she was seeing, what her daily routine was. Sometimes I was
gripped by a strange jealousy, hurrying to close the garage before my work was done, leaving early, deliberately arriving an hour or two before the time we’d agreed on, lying in wait for her on the stairs, or spying on her from a corner of the library. But all in vain. She had no intention of leaving me, it never occurred to her to fall in love with anyone else. Now that she’d found herself a husband and a home, she could be free for the things that really interested her, she could even take a mild interest in public affairs. She was a member of the Students’ Committee and once she organized a successful strike.

In the second year of her studies she’d already found herself a part-time job, teaching in a primary school. At first she had a difficult time there. The children drove her mad, although she never said exactly what the trouble was. She used to come home a little dazed in the evenings. But she tried very hard, preparing for her lessons with care, sometimes even shutting herself up in the bathroom and reciting the lesson aloud, asking questions and answering them. She used to draw illustrations and charts as well, painting big sheets of cardboard, sticking them with dried flowers and making cheerful patterns. As in all practical matters, she had two left hands, and I used to help her a little with these preparations.

All in all, as I saw at once, a complacent and agreeable woman. At pains not to argue with me, treating me with respect, even with a trace of fear. Perhaps a little too talkative, but since I had a habit of subsiding into prolonged silences it was only natural that she should sometimes talk on my behalf as well. We used to make love almost every day or every other day, but for some reason I was usually the only one who was satisfied. Mother was with us all the time, and since we were both out all day, she used to look forward very much to the evenings when she could talk to us. She never left us alone. She used to come into the room without knocking, while we were undressing. If I tried to lock her out she hammered on the door, calling to me in panic. At night she left the lights on in the house, she was a light sleeper and we were sometimes visited in the middle of the night. Sometimes I was forced to wait until the early hours of the morning before waking Asya.

She obeyed me. Sometimes she would whisper in her sleep,
her eyes still closed, “One minute, just let me finish this dream,” and I would sit on the end of the bed waiting for her to wake up by herself, and she would smile a final smile, open her eyes and help me to undress her. In the second year, when she started working, it became harder and harder for me to wake her early in the morning before I went out to work. I made love to her while she was still asleep, interfering with her dreams. Then I hired my first Arab worker, Hamid, and I gave him the key to the garage so that he could open up in the morning and receive the first customers. He was the first worker I ever employed, on a temporary basis of course. I paid him a daily wage and could dismiss him if I found him too expensive, but business began to prosper and it wasn’t long before I took on another worker. So we could take our time in the mornings, and listen to her dreams, which were becoming for me
increasingly
strange. Sometimes we talked about ourselves, how and why we had got married, if we regretted it. She was shocked. “Do you regret it?”

No, of course not, why should I regret it. But sometimes when it seemed to me that I no longer loved her I became terribly depressed. Still, as I say, she was an agreeable woman, she did what I wanted, but I wanted nothing special. That’s it – she aroused in me no special wants. I worked very hard in those days, difficult physical work, but it wasn’t for that reason alone that I was so tired in the evenings.

Something in her fatigued me, something unclear. I’m not talking about the little speeches that she used to make to me, it wasn’t that, I was quite willing to listen to them, though there did seem to be something unreal about them, not because she inhabited a reality different from mine, no, it wasn’t that … something else … something that I didn’t know how to express, and so I said nothing. More and more it seemed to me that she was missing the real world, drifting away from it, but what the real world was of course I couldn’t say. And clearly she was no dreamer. She organized, worked, studied, rushed about, had contacts with all kinds of people. She tended to walk quickly, decisively, with a slight hunching of her shoulders. Elderly movements. No, not elderly, greyish, not greyish, something else, these aren’t the right words. But how to describe her? I
want to describe her. Where to begin? It seems to me that I still haven’t begun.

But do I complain? Lately they’ve both been leaving me alone, in their different ways. Osnat’s always telling me “They leave you alone, your ageing parents.”

Your old parents?

I was a bit surprised, but I didn’t say anything. Is it true? Poor Osnat, she gets no peace. Her ten-year-old sister shares a room with her, she’s exactly like her, only uglier, and apparently more intelligent. She gets on Osnat’s nerves, prying in her drawers, trying on her clothes, butting into every conversation. There’s no getting away from her. Then there’s the little baby, who was born a year and a half ago, causing a lot of excitement in the class because we were all invited to the circumcision to see what they’d do to him. Such a sweet little baby, already starting to walk on his twisted little legs, getting everywhere, Osnat calls him a moving disaster. Always catching colds, wiping his runny nose on blankets, on sheets, on the clothes of guests. His hands covered in black ink, and if they try to get it off him he shrieks so loud you’d think someone was murdering him. He scribbles on the walls, on books and note pads. And always howls and tears and confusion. Bedlam, this house. In addition to all this they have guests from all over the world coming to stay with them, and Osnat has to give up her bed and sleep on a mattress in the living room.

“It’s so quiet in your house. Dafi, let’s switch places.”

True, it is quiet in our house. In the afternoon when Mommy’s not at home and Daddy’s still at work, it’s so quiet in the dark, tidy house you can hear the ticking of the thermostat. It’s not natural. It’s lucky that I’ve got a room of my own, my kingdom, where I can be as untidy as I like. My bed’s always in a mess, my clothes scattered about, books and note pads on the floor and posters on the walls. There was a time when they tried to force me to keep my room in order but they gave up in the end. This is my order, I said, my rhythm, and I took to shutting myself in, so they wouldn’t come in and look for disturbed things.

In general this trick that I’ve adopted over the last year of shutting myself in my room has proved a great success. When guests arrive I can ignore them. But we don’t have many guests visiting us. Sometimes when the bachelor uncle from Tel Aviv is passing through Haifa he stays to eat supper and then goes. Now and then, on a Sabbath eve, four or five couples come to eat with us, dull people usually, with fixed expressions, their childhood friends or teachers from the school, sometimes even the ones who teach me. Once they even invited Shwartzy to the house on a Sabbath eve. I came out to see how he behaved in his natural surroundings, and I saw that there wasn’t much difference – pompous and bossy as usual. These evenings are so boring, they never really talk about themselves or discuss personal things, they argue about politics or the price of apartments or the trouble caused by children. There’s always one of them who dominates the others, who bears down on everyone. Daddy’s very quiet, passing around the plates of biscuits and nuts and sitting there not saying a word. Working in the garage dulls him a bit. Sometimes I used to go in quietly and sit down among them, making sure to eat a cake that I’d had my eye on since lunchtime, before everything got eaten. But lately I’ve decided that I see enough of the teachers in the morning at school, I don’t have to meet them in the evening at my home as well. So I’ve taken to shutting myself away in my room and showing no sign of life. Sometimes a guest opens the door cautiously, thinking it’s the bathroom, and he’s surprised to see me sitting there quietly, thinking thoughts. He smiles at me ingratiatingly, starts talking to me, asking questions. They’re always amazed at how much I’ve grown, listening to them you’d think I’d grown right there in front of them.

Then I took to locking the door, sometimes even in the daytime. But there are times in the afternoon when Mommy knocks loudly on the door, Aunt Stella, Grandfather’s sister, has come to visit us with one of her friends, she wants to see me. So I go out to meet them, kissing her, sometimes kissing the other old woman, who I don’t always know. Sitting with them and answering questions. Aunt Stella, erect and tall, with a long mane of white hair and a wrinkled face, beside her another old woman, a dried-up midget, with dark sunglasses and a thick, short cane.
And the interrogation begins. She knows a lot about me, she even nursed me when I was a baby, when Mommy was studying. She asks me about my marks in school, she knows I have problems in maths, she remembers the names of Tali and Osnat, she even knows something about Tali’s father, who left home. I answer her quietly, smiling. I listen as she interrogates Mommy as well, asking her what she’s been doing over the last month, scolding her for being involved in so many activities, she’s interested in the back pains that Daddy had years ago, she passes on the good wishes of friends of hers who’ve had their cars repaired in his garage. Hardly saying anything about herself, interested only in us, or in others. Mommy sits all tensed up on the edge of the armchair, blushing like a little girl, laughing an unnatural laugh, running to show them a new dress that she’s bought, all the time fetching biscuits, sandwiches and salads from the kitchen, but Stella doesn’t touch anything, only the other old woman sits there, munching away. She really admires these old women, waiting on them humbly and eagerly, and when at last they get up to leave, she pleads with them to let her drive them home.

At last they go. Mommy drives them to the centre of town. I open the little box of chocolates that Stella brought, very superior chocolates. Mommy comes back half an hour later in an agitated mood, sits down in the chair that Aunt Stella sat in, dazed from the experience, incapable of doing anything. I take a good look at her, her hair that’s going grey, the wrinkles in her face, the slight hunching of her shoulders, she’s ageing happily, soon she’ll get herself a cane.

But how to describe her? Where to begin? With her feet, the graceful legs of a girl set in solid, low-heeled shoes that hide most of the foot, comfortable shoes perhaps but lacking style, even a bit shabby.

She had strange taste in clothes. A taste that became depressing. In the Carmel Centre she found a shop belonging to a pair of fussy little old women who dressed her in grey woollen dresses with white poloneck collars and half-length sleeves. Pretty masculine-looking clothes with padded shoulders. They used to
give her a discount and this delighted her, even though
sometimes
she had to take a dress with some slight fault in the material. When Dafi was little the old ladies used to bring her little dresses of the same design and the same material, and Dafi looked like a little old woman.

I don’t know much about these things but it always seemed to me there was something wrong with the match of the colours in the clothes she wore, apart from the fact that she had a number of old dresses that she was fond of, that she was always lengthening or shortening, according to her notion of what fashion
demanded
. She would even set to work on the new dresses that she would buy, trimming and adjusting, and all this with hands that weren’t all that skilful.

For some reason it was important to her to save money. She had an obsession with money. Her tightness amused me, she was almost miserly, and especially hard on herself.

I’d noticed this years ago in her house, seeing them dividing up the food at meals into exactly equal portions, eating up the leftovers, frying them up a second time. Seeing the way they used old envelopes, the way her Ether filled up notebooks with his memoirs, writing on both sides of the page, filling up the margins, even writing on the cover. But in that house there was perhaps a good reason for such an obsession, because since the establishment of the state her father hadn’t worked and they lived on a small pension from the Ministry of Defence. Such was his pride that he refused to accept any employment after his
dismissal
.

But in recent years we’ve had money, more and more each year. It’s true that in the early years we went short of things, it was a struggle to keep the little garage going. And to make things worse my father’s partner, Erlich, decided to leave and I had to buy out his share and so I was plunged into debt. When the first profits began to come in I invested every cent in new equipment, in enlarging the site. She didn’t understand the business, she was content with what I gave her. She never asked for more and when she started working her salary went straight into the bank and became mixed up in the garage’s assets. I doubt if she herself knew how much she was earning. It’s strange, but the topic of money didn’t generally interest her, she just continued with her
frugalities as if it was her duty. After a few years she began supporting her parents a little. I of course said nothing and she was so grateful she went even further with her frugality and her self-denial.