The Rainy Day Man: Contemporary Romance

  "I want to go."

  I straightened up quickly.

  "Tomorrow?" I asked. "Here, at the same time?"

  She bent to do up the plastic sandals she was wearing. I held her ankle. "Will you come?"

  Her fingers lingered on the buckle of her sandal. "Are you going to see him?"

  "Tomorrow," I lied eagerly. "In the morning."

  She straightened up and stood over me, wobbling. "Bring me a letter from him, even a note or just regards on a piece of paper..."

  ***

  I lay there on my own, naked, lighting one cigarette with another, until it got colder and the dome of stars was obscured by a black haze. The tree in the middle of the room assumed the shape of every fear. Far away, the night fires began. Once again all was frozen in a moment of silence. The old, familiar unease returned, a longing for an explosion to rent the silence swelling towards me, that threatened to envelop and drown me within it.

  But there was no question of an explosion. All that remained was to report to Tel Aviv, which would doubtless cancel all the plans and withdraw me from Dura just as Yvonne began to open up.

  And if I did not report, if I stayed here, I would have no choice but to go to the detention camp to meet him.

  How did one get there?

  I rolled up the bedding and stowed it away in the hollow trunk of the tree. I would have to ask Scheckler. Who else? As I walked slowly along the dirt track I had the uncomfortable feeling of another presence. Was it just a sense of oppression or was I being watched? A nearby clump of bulrushes rustled ominously. A section broke away from it and walked towards me. Its features were too familiar for me to make any mistake: a thick vertical structure from whose center emerged a smaller, deadly offshoot: an armed man.

  "Irfa Idak. Hands up."

  I recognized the voice. Slowly, with a sense of inevitability, I put my hands in the air. He came closer, his blond forelock bouncing nervously on his forehead. In his hand was the rifle which had been stolen from the guard who had been attacked. The noise cast a charmed calm over me, together with surprise at my body's acceptance and my mind's recognition of the appropriateness of the punishment. Which of my various crimes did he know about and was going to repay me for? My meetings with his mother, the doctor's arrest, the way I had threatened the priest? I relaxed my position and closed my eyes in readiness.

  When I opened them he was no longer there. The path stretched out in front of me, long and empty, and the clump of bulrushes merely bent apologetically.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  From afar it looked like a scene from a fairy-tale: a crown of high mountains, a valley as flat as a pancake and a wheat field flowering with hundreds of brown tarpaulin cones. The notice at the entrance ("Military Police, Stop your vehicle, turn the engine off and wait") enforced a sobering delay. Scheckler, beside me, showed a grumpy-looking officer the documents he had prepared early that morning: a letter of appointment, a movement pass, warrants. Only three of the five accompanying soldiers, who were sitting behind us in the command car cabin, were included in the entry pass. Scheckler had foreseen everything.

  "You've got to give them something to latch on to," he had explained when we set out, "otherwise they'll really start looking at the papers..."

  "Two have to stay outside," the officer growled.

  Scheckler bowed his head in submission. Two soldiers jumped over the side and the barbed-wire barrier was dragged aside so that we could enter. The road was fenced in on both sides. Along it flowed an open sewage ditch. "The MPs call this Shit Road," Scheckler said, with the same pride as he had introduced me to Dura long before that, when we had gone to arrest the doctor. The soldiers behind us laughed. An unseen loudspeaker, deep inside the camp, responded with a croak.

  Another barrier was drawn aside. An MP wearing a helmet studied the instructions his superior officer had scribbled on our wad of permits.

  "You won't be able to go into the actual camp, only as far as the offices."

  "As far as the offices is enough," Scheckler said.

  After a few minutes journey came the smell: the sourness of urine and sweat, the fecundity of drying excrement and the poison of disinfectants. Then, a long way behind the network of internal fences, the first inmates. Wearing army trousers and light colored T shirts, they were gathered around a cooking pot set on an open fire. When they noticed us they began waving their open hands, forming the V-sign. I narrowed my eyes. From a distance they all seemed to of be the same height and to share the same unshaven face, as though they were playing a trick in order to look like one another and the doctor. All at once, I realized that behind these few, in a network of square pens, there were many, many more, stirring, moving and producing that smell. From their throats came shouts which reached us in the form of broken, taunting syllables, somewhere between a curse and a slogan. The armored troop carriers patrolling the road aimed their gun barrels upwards, like admonishing fingers. The noise merely increased.

  "Instead of being finished off," Scheckler complained, "they've been brought here, and still they're insolent."

  I remembered two or three prisons in which I had spent some time, always on my own, never with any feeling approaching the power and comradeship of these people.

  "I've been somewhere like this before," I said in a low voice.

  "Me too. In Seventy-Three. I was guarding Egyptian POWs. Five thousand, would you believe it? Five thousand POWs in one camp the size of a small town, and all of them disciplined..."

  The rumor of our appearance travelled faster than we did in the command car. At every turn in the road they were waiting for us, clustered together, various shades of gray. At one spot there was a small enclosure, perhaps for specially privileged prisoners. Its inmates stood and watched us in silence. Their expressions were not hungry, not even pained, just, at the most, impatient. They wore the priest's arrogance together with Yvonne's experience of suffering. How would the doctor look at me when I met him? Unobtrusively, I sniffed my hands and my body, to see if the morning's shower had erased the scents of the night.

  A large fan was humming in the office hut. The pages of the logbook fluttered in the breeze.

  "We left him here," Scheckler said, putting his documents on the counter. A bored clerk looked them over.

  "Okay," he said eventually. "Khamis, Anton, Dura. Second of August, Nineteen eighty-two. So what do you want?"

  "To talk to him."

  He looked at us suspiciously. "It's not customary, we don't have arrangements."

  "It's a special case. It says so here..."

  The clerk studied the papers again. "Right, but..."

  "There's no but about it," Scheckler raged at him. "If it says so, you've got to do it, right?"

  The clerk pulled the logbook along the counter. "They've gone completely crazy at Nabatiya," he muttered. "How am I going to get him out of there?" His damp finger, its nail badly bitten, wandered across the entries. The second of August, you said..."

  "In the afternoon."

  "Then maybe they registered him on the third..." He turned a page. His lips moved soundlessly. After a moment he looked up and said with relief, "Nope. He's not registered."

  "Try Kamis, Kumis, Hamis..." I contributed from my experience.

  He turned the logbook round towards me. I looked down the cramped lines. The names were meaningless and could equally have represented machine parts or the ingredients needed for an enormous cake.

  "Perhaps he had two names..." I suggested.

  The clerk shrugged his shoulders. "Maybe."

  "No," Scheckler said suddenly. "He was registered as Khamis. Now I remember."

  The clerk pointed silently at the logbook.

  "Not here. In the stores, where they leave their things," Scheckler said.

  "So find out there. Bring me his number..."

  We jumped over paving stones between which the dying wheat-field stubbornly sent yellow fingers of stubble.

  In a huge, dim tent which smelt
of compressed heat and unaired clothing the quartermaster shouted, "Why on earth should I show you my book?"

  Scheckler led him aside, to confer in secret. His arms flailed like a windmill as he described something big, maybe a reward. The quartermaster glanced at me then dived into the piles of clothes.

  "I told him that you were an examiner for the Efficiency Prize committee," Scheckler whispered. "So say something nice when you've finished reading..."

  The quartermaster's book was bound in a decorated cloth wrapping, the product of a great deal of boredom. I leafed through it. I remembered some of the names on the page for the third of August from the logbook. I turned another page and read the names from the second of August. When I got to the first of August I closed the book with a dissatisfied bang.

  "Impossible," Scheckler said.

  The quartermaster looked at us suspiciously. "Has something happened?"

  With a sudden understanding I took back the book and looked through it quickly. The war passed before me in the details of its provisions, the weights of people and the size of their clothes. Each page was divided. On the right-hand side was information about the prisoner when he entered the camp. On the left, when he was released. The pages were numbered: 210 pages, and 57 lines on each. Not one was crossed out, except the eighth line from the bottom on the page for the second of August, which was covered with a thick line of black ink.

  I showed it to the quartermaster. "Whose name was here?"

  "How can I remember...? They're all alike."

  "Why did you cross it out?"

  He snatched the book away from me and held it to his chest. "Who are you, anyway? The Efficiency Prize committee never checked that kind of thing..."

  "They've changed the rules this year," Scheckler said drily. "Come on, let's go."

  "No," I insisted. "I want to understand."

  He gripped my arm and led me around the tent. The loudspeakers came to life: "Pen leaders, get the men away from the fence..."

  "Don't be stupid, Simon," Scheckler said. I shook his hand off. "Calm down," he beseeched. "Don't make a fuss..."

  A lorry maneuvered between the barbed-wire fences and spat out a fresh group of men. They were tied to one another by strips of plastic that allowed an embarrassingly limited range of movements. A youngster with a pockmarked face expectorated onto the ground. A short, balding man looked at him with disgust through a pair of thick glasses.

  An MP led the first man in the row to the stores. The others followed behind, like sausages on a string. A door opened in a prefabricated building nearby. A figure wearing a white coat stood in the doorway.

  "I want to eat, so bring them here for their injections first."

  "What do you think, Doctor," the quartermaster shouted through the opening of his tent. "Don't I need to eat too?"

  The caravan stopped abruptly. The MP calmly cut the plastic ropes and divided the men into two groups.

  "Wait a sec," I said to Scheckler and attached myself to the end of the line making its way to the clinic.

  A medic ordered them to form a row facing the front and interviewed them jointly: "Syphilis, tetanus, typhoid fever," he read out in Arabic from a form, "ringworm, trachoma, mental disease..."

  "I'm from HQ," I said to the doctor, who was sorting through blue index cards, "and I need the medical file of a prisoner..."

  "Detainees," he said without looking at me. "They're called detainees here."

  "I've never heard that..."

  "That's just the idea. There's no such thing, and what doesn't exist can't violate the Geneva Convention," he peered at me with a bitter look. "If you're from HQ you should have known.

  "I'm new."

  "You'll learn. Which file do you want?"

  "Khamis, Anton."

  He wrote the name down on a piece of paper and pulled out a drawer in a nearby cupboard. "When was he arrested?"

  "The second of August."

  "Diabetes, stomach ulcer, piles, varicose veins," the medic recited.

  The files hung in clusters on a rail and he began moving them one by one.

  "He's a doctor too."

  He stopped, closed the drawer and turned round to me. "Are you guys never going to stop pestering me about that affair? First you wanted his file, then his card, in the end someone found out about the blood sample and I was reprimanded..."

  "What sample?"

  "I don't want to talk about it..."

  "Maybe the reprimand can still be cancelled..." I said, surprising myself with my spontaneity. I had never told so many lies in one month.

  "You really don't know a thing yet..." His mouth twisted disapprovingly. "That's according to the Convention too. We aren't allowed to keep sick people in a camp. In the beginning we took samples of blood, excrement and urine from everyone. After a few days, when the clinic was stinking and completely clogged up, some legal adviser in Tel Aviv discovered that we'd also be covered if every detainee signed a health declaration instead of being checked. But when that doctor of yours arrived I was ashamed to make him sign, so I told the medic to take blood from him for examination..."

  "Do you remember anything? What he said, how he behaved, where they took him?"

  He shook his head in negation and watched the medic, who had finished reading out the list of diseases and was going along the row. He was holding a pencil and a pack of blue cards for the men to sign their names on. The door opened. An MP led in the second group already wearing camp clothes. Scheckler gestured to me through the open door.

  "Let's get out of here," he said when I went out. "They're starting to ask questions..."

  The clerk was waiting beside the command car. "Did you find him?"

  "No," I said. "You've lost him."

  He smiled tensely. "We've never lost anyone yet. He simply didn't get here. Try the other camps..."

  "Ask him," I gestured towards Scheckler.

  Scheckler gave a mollifying smile. "If he's not registered, that means he wasn't here," he said without even turning his face away from me.

  The clerk agreed complacently. From the other side of the network of fences, prisoners called to me, beckoning me over.

  "They cause problems the whole time," the clerk said. "Anyone who isn't in uniform gets them going. They're sure you're a journalist or a Red Cross representative." Maybe there, inside the camp, I could find an explanation? The clerk followed my gaze. "If you go near them," he warned, "there'll be an uproar."

  A moment later he was gone and the loudspeaker demanded again, "Pen leaders, pen leaders..." We sped down Shit Road. In one of the encampments beyond the fences there was a new commotion. The group around the campfire, the one we had seen on our way in, had swelled to the size of a platoon. They were drawn up in what was almost military formation and were throwing whatever they could lay their hands on at a fire truck, which was replying with jets of water too short and too weak. The remains of other campfires, improvised stoves and mud cookers, were thrown around. It was hard to decide which side more deserved sympathy - those who were cooking themselves a meal or four young soldiers, who were struggling with the water-hoses.

  "Jews," Scheckler said bitterly, "always manage to be on the side that gets fucked. In the stories my father told me about the German camps, they were always inside and the power was outside, with the guards. Now, when we're the guards, the power is inside..."

  The barbed-wire barrier was moved aside for us. The two soldiers we had left behind hopped into the command car. The MP at the gate passed a large mirror beneath the vehicle and looked under the hood. The events of the morning stuck in my throat like the taste of regurgitated food. The evening, which till then had seemed far off and predictable, was now nearby and uncontrollable.

  "Tell her that you saw him," Scheckler said suddenly.

  My hand, which was about to wave to the MP, froze in mid- movement. Scheckler engaged the gears and laughed silently.

  "There are no secrets in Dura."

  ***

/>   Things had changed during our absence. The road at the entrance to the village was blocked by a long curl of barbed wire with three paratroopers in charge of it. Scheckler's vendors had vanished from the Athenaeum wall. The large building was empty and the air too clear and transparent.

  Dura was afflicted with uncertainty, oppressed by a mysterious, ghostly force, into which Scheckler and his five soldiers immediately disappeared. Alone in my room, I tapped my ear with my hand. Had I gone deaf? The sound reverberated in my eardrum. Had the others all vanished? I peered through the window into the garden, where refugee families were silently packing up their belongings.

  Then I noticed, that the captain, the commander of the paratroops, was there too. One of the refugees,an old man with a few days' growth, which gave his face the dark, prickly look of a poisonous fruit, went over to him and appealed to him about his heap of unnecessary objects: cooking utensils for which there was no stove, toys with which there was no room to play, electrical appliances for which it was doubtful whether a socket could be found. I suddenly wondered what appeal Anton had made to the people who had spirited him away.

  The old man called to a woman in black and, without a word, pulled a bundle out from beneath her clothing. When he opened it something gold scintillated brightly in the sunlight. It was as if the war had burst into that playground all at once. The captain's head wobbled in consternation. His hand shot out to reject the gift.

  One has to stand on a summer's day at the window of a requisitioned hotel and watch a group of refugees being expelled from a garden in which the tired remains of flowerbeds and paths are then revealed, to realize how little personal integrity counts. If, on that morning of the second of August, we had stood Anton up against the wall we would at least have been spared the hypocrisy and dissembling. In the hearts of his relatives there would have been a clear memory, something to recoil from, to cling to and on the strength of which to continue with their lives.