The Pacific and Other Stories (51 page)

Annalise and Shoshanna—a young woman so beautiful that half of life
was closed to her, as she was always the object, and never the observer—worked together to keep the records. Their registry was the literary repository of jeeps and half-tracks, tanks and recoilless rifles, submachine guns and fuel tankers, water trailers and field kitchens. All these inanimate things had an inflow of parts and a history of checks and maintenance. Done in Annalise’s splendid hand, and then in Shoshanna’s seductive scrawls that, once, Annalise had seen a mechanic bend to kiss, the records filled ledger after ledger on a wall of shelves.

This work the size of an encyclopedia would never be read, and it proceeded according to its own strategy, as if it were alive. But nonetheless the two clerks—one who excited men like a drug, the other almost invisible to men—labored carefully to make their writing beautiful. After all, not that far back in their families were scribes like those of Sfat and Jerusalem who worked not to make something permanent, or vainly so, like stone, but who labored because, as they did, nearly motionless, eyes riveted, thoughts disciplined, pen tip rolling across the page like a boat on the waves, they felt the presence of God.

Annalise could take down a volume and see in handwriting that was on occasion her own and more often that of other clerks, both regular and reserve, something like the hypnotic work that adorned Asian temples, or the eye-crossing design of an Iranian mosque. It was not decoration to which the religious craftsmen were devoted, but rhythms and intervals that, with practice, could shut out the earthly life.

Even Shoshanna knew, Shoshanna who, Annalise understood, was so beautiful that she was sexually infatuated with herself. This, in turn, put men in an almost uncontrollable state. Annalise found the delirium that Shoshanna inspired difficult to fathom, as she was never the object but always the observer. In anything but desire she was far happier than her friend, but in the presence of her friend, desire seemed to take up all the space in the world. The armorers in particular were intoxicated with Shoshanna, and at the four o’clock break when they, the mechanics, and the clerks gathered for tea, sparks flew. They fought among themselves sometimes, or seemed as dejected as mental patients, or breathed like wounded animals. Perhaps it was that they were almost all conscripts, and therefore
both young and unduly confined. Or perhaps it was that they spent their mornings and afternoons pumping cleaning rods back and forth in the slick oiled barrels of the weapons in their charge. No matter what the reason, at four o’clock they were fierce.

But never for Annalise, who was too old, too incisive, and not quite pretty. They tried to use her to get to Shoshanna.

“Annalise,” one once said, “you and Shoshanna must get so cold being still all the time, and, with your hands so full of ink, do you take a shower at the end of the day?”

“Ask Shoshanna,” Annalise had snapped, although she would indeed have loved to have been under a warm shower even with that young armorer, had he embraced her with something even vaguely close to love. But he wouldn’t have had it in him, because, among other things, he hadn’t had the courage to ask Shoshanna the question meant for her.

Tea with the armorers, however, was something that Annalise always liked. They were men, after all, and not a single one was married. For years, even after Shoshanna came, Annalise had looked forward to her reserve duty for this, and other reasons, because the men with whom she associated at the hospital had families, and by the stove in the armory she found flirtation and youth, things that were closing off in her life, and the liveliness of sexual embarrassment and shame, and what she could imagine, briefly, might take place on the empty beaches south of Haifa.

It would all end on the ninth of October, when even the army would admit that she was too old.

A
NNALISE
’
S FATHER ROSE
from the dinner table and stepped to the rail of the terrace. “Look,” he said, “the season is over, and he’s out in the distance, like a seal. Perhaps it is a seal.” He went to get his binoculars, leaving Annalise, seemingly annoyed, to eat alone.

The light, which changes more by the sea than anywhere else, had moved into the autumnal tranquillity of October. Even in summer the north light that spreads out upon the sea off Haifa is sober and deep, a courtly lover of color that quietly brings out its richest hues. But in the fall, the light
is greatest as it struggles with shadow, of which there is suddenly so much that the beaches empty even though the water is warm.

Only the old women whom everyone called the whales would stay down at the beach, in their usual position, sitting at the water’s edge so that the waves ran up their legs and around their balloonlike buttocks, burying them slowly in the sand like the foundations of a pier. For some reason, they wore rubber bathing caps for this ritual, though not a drop of foam ever touched their hair.

“It’s him,” Annalise’s father said, focusing. “Come see.”

“I saw,” Annalise said.

“Look close up,” her father insisted, as people do when they have binoculars (and then they won’t give them to you).

She sighed in irritation, but, to humor him and because it certainly seemed safe to glance at someone almost a mile away, out at sea, beyond reach, she took the binoculars.

Lifting them to her eyes, she began to turn the focus wheel even before the eyepieces made contact with her face: she knew how different her father’s vision was from her own.

At first she saw only a blur of empty sea, crystalline in the barrels of the binoculars, the motion of the waves nauseating in and out of focus. Then, as she turned the wheel, she began to see the lines we tend to forget are in water, the shapes, the patches, and the texture.

The sky came level at the horizon and she now had her bearings, sweeping like the ray from the Stella Maris Light, slewing like the guns of one of her armorers. She caught him, she inadvertently swept past, returned, and locked him in.

“He doesn’t look like a monkey,” Annalise said. “He doesn’t look like a monkey at all.”

“That’s what I told him.”

Annalise hesitated for a moment, a moment that because of its brevity she knew would be entirely private. The Australian was sitting astride an air mattress, riding the swells. His body was hard and muscular. Even from a great distance she could see the changing definition of his shoulders, arms, and abdomen as he moved to stay balanced. He kept his back straight and
his head erect as he and his air mattress swayed from the peaks to the troughs of the waves, and the wind sometimes blew spray at his face.

Annalise put down the binoculars, suddenly overcome with the same kind of slow pleasure she had sensed so strongly in her beautiful friend, Shoshanna.

“He’s out there every day,” her father said. “I’ll find it interesting to see if he makes it to December.”

O
N
S
ATURDAY
, on her leave, Annalise’s father made his own dinner, and at five o’clock she stood alone on the beach, in shadow, in a brisk wind. Refusing to shiver in the breeze, she kicked off her shoes, dropped her robe on the sand, and straightened as she entered the water.

Though she had expected the sea to be cold, it was far warmer than the air, and even the spray that tangled in her hair as she swam still held the warmth of six months of Middle Eastern sun. Soon she found herself in the belt of water between the chaos of the breaking waves and the wide, deepening sea. This narrow layer of green water was warmer and not as lonely as the blue. She knew that she would cross it quickly and that after she did she would no longer be able to hear the noises from shore. The wind would drown out the sound of the surf and of crows cawing rhythmically in palms on the quay.

In fear of the deep, of ships, of drowning, and of the wind that could silently sweep her away, she swam stiffly, with the tension of a trespasser. But as soon as she could no longer hear the surf and the crows, she relaxed, abandoning herself entirely to the sea. Her exertion, her arms reaching ahead in the water, and the huge rolling of glassy and gleaming waves brought her to a different world.

Though far from shore, the water seemed warmer and more buoyant. With Haifa compacted and Bat Gallim miniaturized, the sea was the master of the world. In less than half an hour she had come so close to the Australian that she could make out his face. She stopped swimming and let her feet sink as she surveyed the space before her.

He was very interested in the prospect of someone swimming to his station, particularly a woman, perhaps because no one had ever been out there
with him except for a few Americans, and they had always accompanied him from the start.

He paddled toward her, and the waves did the rest, pushing them together with inexplicable rapidity. She could see his face quite clearly. He looked like a yeshiva boy, or maybe an unusual Englishman, an eccentric, an adolescent.

On the other hand, he looked strong and decisive, even if his history seemed to indicate otherwise. Something in his eyes and in the hard strength of his body said that he would come through like a man, that if he were a husband he would be faithful, that if he were a father he would be true.

When they were close enough, he asked, “Did you mean to swim out here?”

“Of course I did,” she answered, smiling as she had never smiled in her life, a soft, alluring smile that shut out the past and had nothing in it but the possibilities of the future. Turning as red as a burn victim, he was for a while unable to speak.

“May I come onto the raft?” she asked.

“Come,” he said, extending his arm. When she took it he held fast, giving her something solid and unmoving to hold as she pulled herself up.

“I suppose it’s like being stuck in an elevator,” she said, “but I won’t be long.”

“Stay as long as you’d like,” he told her. “I was just about to go in, though it won’t be dark for a while, and even if it were dark the lights on Mount Carmel can be seen for fifty miles at sea. We could always swim for the lights.”

“What about the currents?” she asked, mindful of their distance from shore.

“Oh, the currents,” he answered. “If they wanted, they could take us all the way to Al-Arish.”

In, strangely enough, the most sexually provocative words she had ever uttered, and yet modestly, she said, “That would be very uncomfortable, wouldn’t it?”

He didn’t answer. Her smooth and solid limbs were still half in the water—as the raft bobbed on the swells, the sea would run up her thighs,
and down, and when it sank deep into the crest of an oncoming wave the water went all the way up to the base of her neck, and then washed away, perfectly outlining her breasts in the wet tank top. Taking his eyes from her body, he surveyed her face. She was not the kind of woman for whom men would turn as they walked on the street, but in her expression were great beauty and grace. In her expression, in her imperfect, somewhat too heavy features, he could see experience, and suffering, and strength, and love.

A face like hers, if held differently, if set off by different eyes, if shaped by bitterness or greed, would not be beautiful. But the way she smiled was all beauty, suddenly, as if he were the first to see. Never had she been so buoyant or so lovely. Perhaps it was the sea. God knows what she took from the sea.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, late in the afternoon when the light was heaviest with color, the Australian sat in a deserted classroom on the second floor of an academic building at the language academy. Looking toward the sea, the slopes of Mount Carmel to his left, he saw alley upon alley of palms and other trees of waxen leaves, filtering the beginnings of the sunset and slightly davening in the wind. Everything was green and rich and red.

In front of him lay a Hebrew notebook, in which he now had little interest and upon which he could not concentrate. Normally, he came in from the sea, redid his exercises and lessons so that he would know them with absolute certainty, and then pushed ahead. Not for an hour, but for four or five, he would read the newspapers in his new language, poetry, and even a textbook of chemical engineering, his dictionary well exercised, his notebook filling steadily.

He knew that within a year his fluency could be more than just a tour de force, that industries were developing with great momentum, that his skill might take him far. The place felt open. It was growing. People embarked upon new things, taking immense risks. Agricultural settlements lured in doctoral engineers and in six months were manufacturing transistors and medical instruments. Who knew what might happen?

But this was not why he was unable to concentrate. He was distracted, he thought, because, in the courtyard below, several classes were singing. For
people who had just begun to learn the language, they sang with surprising beauty. Perhaps it was the acoustics, or the mix of voices of many different languages. Perhaps it was the presence of the sea, the metronome of the waves, the counterpoint of the surf. Perhaps it was the lightness they felt, having floated free from where they had been born, with few connections now except to things like the beauty of song.

He could not concentrate. He closed his books and removed his glasses. The music swelled below, a lovely, hopeful ballad,
“Ha Yom Yavoe,”
“The Day Will Come,” and they sang it over and over again because it lent itself to subtle variations that they introduced to it in unison and almost as if by magic.

If he had anything at all, he had great discipline—physical, intellectual, and moral discipline. “Why is it that I can’t concentrate?” he asked himself. “Why can’t I?” Well, he knew.

A
S CLERKS
, mechanics, and armorers broke for their tea they could hear the singing, at a distance, of
“Ha Yom Yavoe.”
It crossed rooftops of corrugated iron and drifted through the palms, sweeter because, in the main, it was faint. As the vagaries of the breeze muted it or sometimes made it loud, the song itself, beyond its own rhythm and melody, had the rhythm and melody of the wind.