The Rainy Day Man: Contemporary Romance

  As usual, when speaking about him, her voice became soft and warm. Something within me melted and then rebelled.

  "There's nothing to be done."

  A hard, cold expression returned to her face.

  I was frightened of her coolness. I said quickly, "One can try to improve the conditions: better accommodation, food, medical care..."

  The sound of banging on a tin came from outside. Our eyes met. "It's just the dogs." She spoke with difficulty. The midday heat encased her face in a damp, sleepy film. She stood up and turned on a switch awakening a ceiling fan with a buzz. After that she stood next to the window, opened it a crack and looked out. Her shoulder moved beneath her blouse. Between us was my fear of being rejected, the sluggish child of the guilt and helplessness which seemed ever closer.

  What should I say now? What would he have said in the evenings when she came to him here? I got up clumsily, holding onto the armrest of the chair for a moment. When I reached her, I could see a fat crow flying off from the top of the sycamore into the sky.

  "That's the first bird I've seen here," I said.

  My fingers were on her shoulder, touching the fabric, pinching it, pulling the blouse which lay on her shoulders. My heart pounded wildly when I saw her flesh. An immensely delicate touch flowed from me. She put out her hand with a sudden movement, closed the window and continued standing in front of it, frozen.

  In the hot room, by the changing afternoon light, I slowly discovered the silky skin of her neck, her shoulders, her arms, all the way down to her thin fingers with their dark knuckles. I unloosed her hairband and held her heavy hair in my hand. I bent my head and inhaled the basic essence of her smell: the scent of a village and summer. After that I gradually brought my lips nearer and gently kissed the point where her shoulder met her neck.

  She was trembling. Not with desire, nor with disgust. It was a kind of shudder at the thought of something difficult. I remembered the disgrace which the priest had attributed to her. Gently, I turned her round to me. Deep in her eyes I imagined a tiny, mocking flame. With my fingertips I touched her face, the source of her expressions. I wandered along the laughter lines at right angles to her mouth and the tiny creases which continued the line of her eyes. I followed the slope of her cheeks, her temples, the dimple on her chin, up to her hairline. Then I pulled open the knot which tied her house-robe and looked into her eyes. Her expression froze, as if she was asleep with open eyes.

  Already I knew that there would be no miracle here, not even a fleeting and illusory one like I'd had with Lisa. But the remains of any wish to retreat died away. Something within me derived a strange pleasure from the changing expressions in her eyes, from the shift from challenge to coercion. With the back of my hand I touched her breasts, which were large and soft. The rest of her was amazingly slight, almost childlike. The sweet heat that emanated from her made me angry, a wave sent over my head to someone else far away.

  I bent to pick her up. For a moment her body was in my arms, solid and light. But the next moment she evaded me and would not even let me lead her, walking on her own to the treatment couch, where she lay down on the cold oilcloth with her face to the wall. I undressed quickly and lay down beside her. I caressed her body with hands that were charged with everything I knew about women's bodies, about the things they liked to have done to them. The estrangement of the alien flesh, which was so close to my own, intensified the hunger in me. I writhed beside her until the oilcloth squeaked, I moved beside her, rubbed myself against her. Eventually I put my hand out and turned her head so that her face looked into mine.

  "Touch me," I whispered in entreaty. "Please."

  There was a movement at the corners of her mouth. I clung to her and wound her arms around my body. I could feel her fingertips, as cold as ice, on my back. I felt her body, seeking its center, and then I encountered the scar.

  For a moment it all stopped. My fingertips recoiled, blind and fearful. In her face, too, was the expression of retreat. That expression somehow brought back the ardor, hope nourished by a wild trust. I forced her onto her back. The room turned red. The couch was a cushion of sweet air and I gathered myself into her with a final, invasive vitality, as if fixing an elusive butterfly with a pin.

  Suddenly I noticed. We were both moving. I looked down at her face, which was electrified. Her eyes changed their hue and she looked away from me to the side, licking her lips, which had swelled, trying unsuccessfully to quash the shudder which was born in her body and which increased with each second, until it became a great convulsion which engulfed her, bringing my release with it.

  After that she extricated herself from beneath me and left me exposed on the white surface, which was slippery from our sweat. I put out my hand to touch her as she dressed. She hobbled aside, tied up her hair and turned to go. By the door she turned her head and looked at me. For a quick, fleeting moment a very human smile, from beyond the time and beyond the place, passed from her lips.

  And I knew that I would do anything to bring that smile to her lips again.

  ***

  Later, on the road down to the village, sobriety gnawed. A bothersome sun, too hot for the dusk, stung the nape of my neck, a reminder of all my accumulated failures: the contact not made, the attacks not solved, the doctor not located. In the last was there a ray of hope. I thought about Scheckler and the results of the clarification he had sought at Nabatiya.

  In front of the gate to the Athenaeum the guards were cleaning the road with jets of water. I lingered in the kitchen doorway sniffing the bitter smell of coffee. Then I could hear a honking and someone calling my name. I turned around, a smile on my face. Scheckler waved back with the complacent look of a puppy that has won a competition.

  "I told you," he pointed behind him. "Scheckler always keeps his promises..."

  Behind him, in a clatter of weapons, wearing flak-jackets and helmets, a company of paratroopers was spilling out of trucks.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  What made them so alike? Not the uniforms, nor the slight, undeviating sloppiness they managed to maintain in the gap between army regulations and reality. Something else showed: the surprised look of young people who have discovered how simple the world can be if you are on the right, powerful side.

  From dawn to dusk they toured the village, gripping their weapons with the joy of belonging. Their shoes left a false imprint, too heavy and deep for their youthful feet, in the dust of the alleys. In an almost uniform expression, they stared into the houses and shops, silent partners in the lives of others. When people greeted them they answered politely. To those who cursed or ignored them they did not reply in kind but merely twisted their rifle-straps in embarrassment.

  They were not alone. As a result of the same logic by which everything was planned, lines of trucks laden with equipment and men came to Dura in the following days. They moved south and north along the line of no man's land, to secret, armed encampments. Sometimes they paused for a break. The main road darkened with the khaki stream of soldiers. Dura's merchants, descendants of an infinite dynasty of people experienced in being conquered, stretched out in the wicker chairs in front of their shops, winked secret messages at one another and supervised their assistants in serving the soldiers. Among the piles of smuggled American cigarettes and pop bottles they stuck up notices in Hebrew: "MONEY CHANGED," "FIXED PRICES," and "ALL MERCHANDISE FRESH." The soldiers liked the familiar, square characters. Sales increased, adequate recompense for the five dollars they had paid to a sergeant-major from the Athenaeum for each notice he had written.

  The notices were only part of Scheckler's business. In the carnival-like atmosphere, and in return for an unknown payment he permitted various dawn visitors to unroll their mats and display their wares along the outer side of the Athenaeum's wall. The commander of the paratroops fired in the air to drive them away. The guard at the gate was sensible enough to call Scheckler, who calmly sent someone to summon me from my room.

  "This is our Intell
igence officer," he gripped my arm with hard fingers. "And all these people work for him..."

  The captain looked at me inquiringly, interrogating eyes. Scheckler let my arm go, as though he were setting free a trained animal.

  "That's correct," I recited confidently. "I need them here..."

  The captain thought for a moment.

  "They're too close," he decided. "They'll have to move to the other side of the road."

  My role, deep within the secret defense pact between Scheckler and me, did not allow me to give in. "They're our insurance policy, a living barrier against terrorist attacks..."

  "There's no need for that now that we're here..."

  I drew closer to him. "Things here have a logic of their own," I said persuasively. "Let things take their course, don't endanger these people..."

  The difference in our ages or the tone of my voice made him decide to trust me.

  "Alright," he said, "But I'll have to forbid the soldiers from buying anything. It will all be confiscated at the border anyway..."

  After he had gone Scheckler pulled me joyfully to the row of mats and began, as usual with, "Choose something..." The vendors smiled. Deep in their eyes I saw the dullness of hatred. "Well, take something..." Scheckler urged me. "Go on..."

  His momentary good nature accentuated the lopsided structure of his face, which turned his broadest smile into a leer. The confident way he stood, ridiculous but tyrannical, wearing a vest, in the middle of the great market which was subject to his discipline, aroused my old suspicion of him once more. When I crossed the Athenaeum courtyard a new hypothesis was added to it: maybe he had gone to Nabatiya in order to report and receive fresh instructions? Maybe now, within the great commotion all around us, things were no longer happening according to the plan whose details I had been given in Tel Aviv, but were proceeding on the basis of a different set of rules which only he knew?

  The relative relief I had felt since his return - nourished by the fact that the soldiers' hostility towards me had abated or had perhaps merely been diluted by the indifference of the paratroops - evaporated quickly. I thought about the can in my cupboard, oxidizing at a steady pace, sending to the surface a revolting layer of fatty matter. A pencil I had stuck in it as a gauge had sunk in slowly. How many cubic inches of napalm were disintegrating and being lost to me for each day of waiting? Beside it was the box of ointment, bulky and sealed. Thinking about making the detonator no longer filled me with the thrill of creation.

  From the entrance to the communications room new cables had been connected to an antenna the paratroops had set up outside. Inside the room a battery of recently-installed transmitters buzzed, linking large numbers of distant field stations with one another. Only the duty officer had not changed. Permanently sour-faced, he bent over one of the transmitters, tightening an unruly cable with a screwdriver.

  "Lovely equipment," I tapped the transmitter battery. "Do you know their frequencies?"

  "Whose business is it?" he growled. "We just make sure that they're connected to the electricity. All the rest is automatic..."

  "And supposing a frequency suddenly goes wrong? What if the Syrians get onto it..."

  "They get onto it all the time anyway. We get onto theirs too. The air's so crowded here..."

  "You mean, you know all their frequencies?"

  "Why are you asking?"

  "That's my field, isn't it? Knowing that everything's safe..."

  He looked at a shelf beside him. "It's all written down here." He gestured towards a frequency notebook. "You can read it, but don't take it out of the room..."

  The first few pages of the notebook detailed communications procedures and gave the numbers of the stations. Then came a list of the frequencies used by the various army units in the area. The next chapter was "Frequencies Used by the Syrian Army: August 1982." This was followed by the transmission frequencies of the various militias, the different groups of terrorists and the U.N. forces. The frequency I was looking for was not mentioned in any list.

  "You won't find it here," the duty officer said suddenly.

  For a moment I stared at him, confused. "What are you talking about?"

  "Your frequency. Do you think it's so secret?" He put the screwdriver into his shirt-pocket and came over to me. "There are many quiet hours here, so I added up all the frequencies in use and subtracted the frequencies of the Syrians and all the rest. It turns out that we all use all the possible frequencies except for three. I submitted a request to use them, to ease the overcrowding. Two of them were approved immediately. For the third the order was explicitly to keep off it..."

  "When was this?"

  "When we got here, about two months ago..."

  "Are you sure that that's our frequency?" I asked warily.

  He gave a mocking smile, took a piece of paper and wrote three numbers on it. "Don't say anything if you're not allowed to." He slid it over to me. "But don't think that I don't understand what's going on..."

  I read the three numbers -165 - put the piece of paper back in his hand and went out.

  ***

  At night I asked myself how much I wanted to understand all the contradictory facts that place contained. Every answer, from every direction, contained injury and confusion, possibly confirming the impotence which had been born in me that winter in Paris and from which I came here to escape. All that remained was a yearning for the woman, for her voice, for another encounter with her soul.

  The next day, and the one after it, I climbed up the mountain several times, slowly passing the sandy square. I saw her, working in the vegetable garden, as usual, or sitting beneath the sycamore with a book in her hand. Her son was always there. Not evident in person, but indicated by a series of signals: the back part of the yellow Rolls protruding from the garage entrance; the sound of hammering; a pile of logs and twigs piled up behind the house in preparation for rainy days.

  The combination of Michel and rainy days started off a thought process in me. I re-read the copy of the doctor's letter. How could I have ignored the last phrase, "…keep calm when the rainy days come"? In my mind everything fitted together wonderfully: Anton worked for one of the sides - Syrian, Palestinian or maybe even local. He had somehow, perhaps because of their long friendship, managed to bring the priest, our agent, over to his side. They could both know that the calm on the Dura front was temporary, and so had hatched a plan to be implemented when the "rainy day" came and forces crossed no man's land. After Anton was arrested, Michel took over his path, sharing his pain with the priest, with the general animosity and with some kind of heritage which the doctor, so he believed, had left behind him.

  As I thought about it, my doubts about the set of assumptions disappeared, as they did about the urgent need to inform Tel Aviv of the erosion which had taken place in its local agent's allegiance. I wondered how to do it. Should I compose a cable full of hints which would be sent in the general network, or break into the secret frequency, 165, and send more explicit details? Should I restrict myself to listing my assumptions one by one, or should I provide proof?

  It is difficult to know whether I would have delayed matters to find proof had it not been for a new thought which occurred to me. The idea combined my private need with the general one: to ascertain the link between the priest and Michel and at the same time to provide another encounter with Yvonne. I remembered a book I had read, maybe by Conrad. "Onward!" it said, "Snatch success from the jaws of failure!" The memory enthused me, and enthusiasm itself was a good sign as far as I was concerned.

  The following afternoon I hid myself in the pine wood near the priest's house, and from a distance watched the thickset back bent over the table. Was he reading holy books, writing letters, dreaming about women? I was particularly confident. There was an air of complacency and power. From the streets came the sound of army lorries, drowning out the noise of the village and the market. In the Athenaeum courtyard rows of bare chested paratroops exercised. A loudspeaker issued orders i
n a loud, clear voice that commanded pride and respect. Something professional and loyal within me rebelled, claiming that the proof I sought was not important, that I was going further and further off course, that because of a passing whim I was endangering my affiliation, my mission, and that my real motive was not to reveal the priest's betrayal and Michel's actions but something else, something foreign. Another part of me remembered only the smile, and that led me along the path to the church door. As I knocked the metallic sound echoed in the silence once. I returned to the path and looked towards the window. He was still sitting there, behind the opaque glass. Maybe he had fallen asleep in the room, wrapped in the oppressive heat of late August, or perhaps something worse had happened.

  "Hallo," I called to him. "Hey." He did not answer.

  I went back to the wood and sat down to smoke on a fallen tree from which I could watch the house. I was ready to wait half an hour, an hour, two hours, even more. After all, at some point he would have to come out.

  By the end of the first cigarette I saw him. He did not come out of the house but arrived from the opposite direction, from behind my back, from the heart of the wood. Rapidly, I slid backwards, behind the fallen tree-trunk. He stopped at the crackle of the needles and listened. After that he walked over to the path and looked right, left and right again, as though he was crossing a busy road. When he was convinced that the path was empty he crossed it with three large steps and vanished behind the hedge which surrounded his garden.

  There were two vantage points: I could choose either the edge of the wood, where I could observe the window with the priest sitting at the table, or the garden gate, where I could see the front door and the same priest stealing into his house. I was not prepared to forego either of them: I ran along the path, quickly enough to see the priest take a huge, ancient key from his habit, open the door and walk straight in. By the time I returned to the fallen tree the curtain had been drawn across the window.