The Rainy Day Man: Contemporary Romance (Suspense and Political Mystery Book 1) (29 page)

Once again there was too thin applause, coming, as expected, from only the Israelis seated on the benches.  The Prime Minister nodded as if accepting the verdict.  The Minister of Defense smiled with unfounded confidence.  The man in civilian clothes took a step back and signaled to someone with his finger.

Profuse applause suddenly flowed from some rich, unknown source.  The loudspeakers amplified it inexplicably, bringing it to a mass enthusiasm which swept up the people on the benches, the soldiers at the barriers and even some of the villagers.  The television cameras clattered.  The eyes of the Prime Minister shone.  Only the smile of the Minister of Defense betrayed the boredom of someone who knows the end of the joke at the beginning.  The finger of the man in civilian clothes moved again and the applause died down slowly, until it stopped. 

It was then that I saw Yvonne.

She had climbed the steep, less guarded side of the wadi and was standing a little way away from the crowd.  Michel was not beside her and I assumed that he was returning from having placed the suitcase.  For a moment she looked ridiculous.  She was wearing a black dress cut in an old-fashioned way and her shoes were high and clumsy.  The man in civilian clothes appeared from behind the stage and called out to her.  She moved obediently over to the audience.

I continued to watch her.  Her narrow, fragile, black back appeared and disappeared among the others.  I moved to get a better look.  A soldier reprimanded me and a bodyguard pushed me away to allow for the Prime Minister, who was on his way to cut the ribbon in front of one of the houses which had not been rigged to explode.  I crossed the barbed-wire fence into the mass of bodies smelling of spicy food, tobacco and village sweat.  For a moment I was gripped by anxiety, of the kind I had felt that morning in the blind girl's cellar, but it was groundless.  All the eyes were turned toward a family group which appeared from somewhere carrying bundles and ceremoniously entered the first house.  The father was carrying a little girl. His wife, accompanied by two well-dressed teenage boys, was dragging some cardboard boxes effortlessly over the ground.  They repeated the routine again and again, and then once more, until the last cameraman had finished.

When I was preparing myself to return to the other side of the barbed-wire fence I saw her again, passing carefully behind a soldier.  I felt again that tremendous, unexplained need to get near to her, the urgency of hurrying home to release a shut-in pet or to turn off the gas left alight under a saucepan.  It was then, in the false reality around me, that awareness of the cleansing, purging power of the truth, together with readiness to tell all to her, ripened fully within me.  Why had I not told her until now?  What could be simpler than to relate the story of the change that had taken place in me, the role she had played in that development?

She mingled with a family chewing biscuits from an oily bag.  They offered her one and she lingered briefly.  I pushed a group of children aside and hurried forward.  The father of the family stared at me, then offered me the bag as well.  I put two fingers in and drew out a lump of uncooked dough.  Yvonne backed away, wobbling dangerously on the edge of the wadi.  Her anxiety, and perhaps her revulsion, too, made her face so ugly that for a moment the certainty of my attraction, even my love for her, was replaced by the feeling that she was not worth all this bother.  She turned and disappeared behind another family.  Then her movements acquired their usual grace and my thoughts fell into place.  With the same clarity that had illuminated my previous experience, I knew that I longed for her, for some matter in her which I had never managed to define. 

"Yvonne," I called after her.  My voice hovered over that place like the magic that could not turn a single mouse into a noble horse or a pumpkin into a carriage.  She turned to me momentarily, emitted a short cry and limped rapidly away.

The ceremony was over.  The guests rose from the benches and flooded into the square in front of the houses like the conclusion of a comic opera.  The local residents remained where they were standing, closed in by the soldiers.  Yvonne climbed the other side of the wadi and disappeared behind the branches of the sycamore tree.  I could hear the pips for the one o'clock news from a transistor radio in the pocket of one of the soldiers.  The meeting with Michel was close.  I remembered my promise to go straight to the garage.  But I did not have the strength to restrain myself.  I ran to the wadi and climbed up the other side behind her.

From the other side the gouged-out shoulder of the mountain looked like a bite out of an enormous apple.  The earth had lost its rich color, and had acquired the dusty-yellow hue of something bleached.  The man in civilian clothes appeared from nowhere and ran over to watch me.  I waved reassuringly.  He did not react.  I turned to descend the path to the vegetable garden, strewn with empty tins, paper bags and the remains of camouflage cloth.  The barbed-wire fence had been trampled and cots were no longer visible in the garden.  The water-channel was blocked with earth and the dogs were all tied to a rope wound round the trunk of the sycamore.  Three soldiers lay in a trench, studying the horizon through binoculars. 

"Erja, Erja.  Go back," one of them reprimanded me in Arabic. 

"It's all right," I replied in Hebrew and he kept quiet.

The windows of the house were blocked by wooden planks which had obviously been hastily put there.  I went over and peeped through one of the cracks.  Yvonne was sitting on her bed, reading.  Her hair was loose and fell around her face in brown waves, the color I would always connect with warmth, the kind warmth of walnut wood furniture, chocolate and earth.  It seemed natural to me that the robe she was wearing should also be brown, as was her look, her face, her hands holding the book and the objects untidily scattered around her, an empty cup, books, clothes, two or three French magazines, sewing things.

I tapped the wooden frame with my hand.  She looked up and stared, unseeing, at the shutters. 

"It's me," I said softly, ready for anything.  She remained sitting, her head extended in a movement which embodied acceptance and very little interest.

I walked around the outside of the house with a growing sense of unease.  The kitchen door was locked.  The bent end of a line of barbed-wire lying nearby opened the lock easily. Dishes were floating in the sink in a mixture of water and vegetable peelings.  The tap was dripping and the floor was stained with damp footprints.  A heavy sorrow hung in the house.  However much it was my fault, I could not help thinking only of my own, private misfortune.  How did one bring a lost chance back to life?  How did one regain the right to embrace another?

I stood in the doorway to her room.  The soft light from the lamp gave it the sacred appearance that all the ornaments of the church could not create.  I saw that two drawers had been placed on the floor, that one of the doors of the cupboard was open and that inside it everything was jumbled. 

"Are you leaving?" I asked.

She looked from me to the open cupboard and back to me. 

"The soldiers.  When I was out they came in and poked around."

I took one step forward.  "Did they take anything?"  I asked.  Attempted pillage, however doubtful, could become an excuse for a new beginning...

"They only poked around."

There was a small brooch on a silk blouse lying at the end of the bed.  I bent down to examine it.  It was a delicately-worked gold cross.  I looked again at the open cupboard and the drawers beside it.  The tension within me shifted to another direction.  Soldiers do not poke around, they take things.  Whoever had been here had not come to take anything but had been looking for something.  I looked into the corridor.  The footprints which had not yet dried showed three pairs of shoes: my rubber-soled pair, Yvonne's and one other, a relatively small pair with worn-out heels.  I went over to the cupboard.  A search interrupted in the middle is like a fingerprint.  Lots of little details are revealed, characteristics emerge.  Only the door on the left was open and the drawers had also been pulled out with someone's left hand, their handles leaning to the left. 

"You're poking around in my cupboard," Yvonne said.

"It wasn't soldiers.  Someone was here searching..."

"That doesn't interest me," she burst out.  "Fight your wars outside..."

"Don't you want to know who it was...?"

"I don't want to know anything.  What I want most of all now is never to see you again, to forget that you exist."

I could not go, nor did I know how to stay.  She sat on the edge of the bed and waited.  The silence deepened and we could hear the sound of a wood-worm somewhere in the furniture.

"I can understand what you feel..."  I began.

"I don't think you can," on her face hovered a smile which was far harder than the most bitter of the priest’s.

"I wanted to help," I said quietly.

She rejected this with a shake of her head.

The movement was too severe a punishment for a sinner wavering on the brink of penitence.  Once again the need arose to tell her everything, the whole truth.  Where should I begin?  I was ready to spill out my secrets and my truths all at once, to confess the one, basic lie which stood between us.

Instead I said, "I love you."

She leaned back against the wall, her legs tucked up beneath her.  I could imagine every detail of her body, beneath the robe.  I felt soft, ready and expectant, like an alchemist who has unleashed a magic formula on reality. 

But she only said angrily, "Don't use that word - you don't know anything about love..."

"Do you think you understand what I feel better than I do?"

"I'm more experienced than you are," she said, more with weariness than hostility.  "For years I've been wandering beside love, around the wall of paradise.  True love cannot arise in circumstances where there is falsehood.  It needs time, space, a chance..."

I knew what she was talking about, and even about whom.  On what her experience was based, I wondered bitterly.  On an unattainable man who was so engrossed in being perfect that he had condemned her by endless waiting to a slow death?  I stepped forward and held my hand out to her. 

"There's so much readiness in me..."

She did not take my hand.  "What is that readiness made of?  Tricks, little, well-oiled devices..."  Her eyes were damp.  I let my hand fall and stood there, clumsy and superfluous.  I could feel my detachment mechanism readying itself.  God, I requested, not now, don't cut me off this time.  How does one part from a disaster in whose course one has had a share? 

"If you need anything..."  I stammered.

She remained silent. 

'Go,' said the walls, the objects on the floor, the little worm chewing away in the cupboard.  So I did.

I stopped in the doorway to the house.  The Rolls was in the garage.  Its back had been damaged like a crushed tin of beer.  The dogs were licking their testicles noisily, happy with their new chains.  The loudspeakers in the village once again emitted terse, military commands and a row of low clouds indicated that the festive Israeli day would give way to a perilous, starless Lebanese night.

Michel came out of the garage door, the suitcase in his hand.  As I walked towards him I had the feeling of a circle being closed.  The look on his face was as confused and awkward as if he were being arrested.  The faint light which came through the clouds gave him a strange, pimply chin and a greasy, lifeless forelock which hung over sad eyes.  It suddenly occurred to me that something might have gone wrong that summer's night in Beirut and the basket which Yvonne had found on the hospital steps was not the one she had left.  At the same time I realized that only two of my meetings with this young man who was so alien to me had been in full daylight, and the others, which had taken place at night, had left me with a vague memory of another youngster, one who was very different, handsome and energetic.

When he saw me he turned, lay the suitcase on the boot of the Rolls and stood beside it, waiting.  It was rectangular and yellow with a large stain the color of dried blood.  I touched it with my fingertip, then scratched at it with my nail.  As far as I could tell, it was dried blood.

The door of the house opened and Yvonne stood there.  I tugged at the locks hastily, before she could stop me with a shout or a rebuke.  The objects were those with a daily use.  Their existence, in a bloodstained suitcase and far away from their owner indicated only one thing: they belonged to a dead man.

A folded towel covered everything.  Underneath I found a shaver, a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, a shaving brush, two bars of Syrian-made soap, a thin wallet containing a Lebanese identity card and some bills, a folded shirt which had already acquired a dank smell, a box of pills for heartburn and a book, "The Pastoral Symphony" by André Gide; the first, original edition, Gallimard, 1919.

André Gide again.

I went through the pile once more, knowing that I did not understand anything.  Like the letter Anton had left, like his character and his actions, the remains of his life were also an enigma, just as they appeared to be clear and open.  The shirt was of Italian manufacture.  The toothbrush was a Jordan Superfine, millions like it could be found in drugstores from Karachi to New York.  I tore the wrapper off one of the bars of soap.  Just soap.  What now?  It was twenty-three minutes to two.  The Butyllithium, and that was the only thing I was sure of, had already formed a boiling hot puddle on the fiberglass.  In a little while, when the napalm was ignited, I would become the most unnecessary being in the village.  What would they do with me?  The mail room?  An even more inferior position?  Home?