The Rainy Day Man: Contemporary Romance

  "I know!" I suddenly shook Hannah by her shoulder. "Your father!"

  She turned over, offering her mouth for a kiss.

  "Hell!" I jumped off the bed. "Now I understand it all."

  Her eyes were open by then. Her night cream had left a damp stain on the pillow. "What are you talking about?"

  "About my coming back to Israel, the job that was arranged for me... Your father fixed it all, didn't he?"

  She raised herself, leaning back on her elbow and giving me her most placatory smile. "I asked him to."

  I got dressed quickly, without washing. She was waiting for me by the door.

  "What's got into you, what's wrong? Every holiday you said that you'd like to stop travelling, to live quietly..."

  "I just said that. We all say things..."

  She put a freckled hand on my arm. "Apart from that, you deserved the promotion. Daddy just gave things the final push..." Through the wide sleeve of her nightgown I could see her breast. She noticed. "We could be so happy..."

  I pulled the door-handle.

  "I know you, you'll calm down and understand that it was all for your own good..."

  She was right. By midday everything was alright again. Around two o'clock Jonathan phoned my office and suggested that we go to a film. Those were the consolations which Hannah in her wisdom offered. How could I decline them?

  Later, as we left the early show, we bought an evening paper. A fuzzy picture took up a quarter of the front page: the Israeli ambassador in London had been shot two nights earlier.

  "I knew him," I told Jonathan. He examined the picture, narrowing his eyes, an expression he had inherited from Hannah.

  "It's a good thing you're home," he said suddenly. "It's safer here." Were those his own thoughts or had they been planted in him? One way or another, I stroked his head quickly, gripped by the well-known mixture of regret and a sense of having missed something. When we got home I was seized by restlessness again. Without turning the engine off I explained that I had to arrange something. Jonathan got out, his face expressionless. As I waited for the traffic lights to change I saw the back of his flannel shirt vanishing into the darkness. I put the car into gear and drove to Lisa.

  That meeting was as good as the previous one and this time I paid her double the usual fee. She raked the bills into her purse without looking at them. I was afraid that she had not realized their value, but I kept quiet. As we got dressed I asked if we could have the next meeting in her flat. She refused. I did not insist.

  Next day, the first day of the war, I went to her again. The streets were empty and she was not in her usual place. I parked on the pavement not far from there, by a flower shop. For the first time it occurred to me that she might be with another client. I did not feel hurt, or even offended. A trained mechanism in my mind knows when to regulate the stream. After waiting for ten minutes I persuaded myself that the whole thing was not worth the effort. Then I got out of the car, bought a bunch of flowers and drove home.

  On Saturday we drove to visit the old man, my wife's father, at his kibbutz in the north. He welcomed us in his room, surrounded by mementos and medals, which he collected with the same enthusiasm his daughter displayed for the gifts of grateful bedwetters. In what would Jonathan invest the family mania for collecting things? With a trembling hand the old man extracted some aging oranges from a wooden bowl and cut them up. The serenity in his face dispelled the old lion image which he carefully maintained through his terse sentences and brisk movements.

  "How's work?" he grated at me in a voice once considered stentorian.

  "There is no work. I'm completely unnecessary there..."

  "There will be. You have plenty of experience and the war has just begun."

  On the way back we were pushed onto the shoulder of the road several times by tank transporters crawling in the opposite direction. By the time we got to the entrance to the city we had relaxed into the friendship and solidarity of people travelling together, away from roads leading to war.

  All the same, I returned to Lisa in the days that followed. Our meetings always ended in the usual place - on the quay. Her attitude did not change. Her sympathetic passivity and her readiness to be swept into behavior which may have been genuine or just a very professional imitation of the truth were stable and available. But the taste of the experience was also limited and predictable. That was the moment to expand things. One evening I phoned Hannah from the office and said I would be home late. Then I drew money out of the automatic cash machine and drove to the usual place. When she sat down beside me I placed the bills on the dashboard, in front of her, and asked her to spend a few hours with me. She agreed with a nod of her head and pushed the bills into her purse, as usual without counting them.

  We had dinner at a remote spot. Lisa talked about the prices of flats and things. Her face flushed as she described a quarrel between neighbors. I answered her briefly, unwillingly. The lights were too dim, the waiters negligent, the band out of tune.

  After, as usual, we drove to the quay, made love and smoked cigarettes. In the end we sat in the car, half-dressed, and looked at the moon, which was sinking into the sea, large and imperfect, like a sore eye. I was tired and restless. This was the moment when, in my previous job, I wanted to move on. I rested my head on her lap, longing to feel her touch my hair. Mechanically she put out her hand to bring me to a fresh erection. It was not difficult. I was still aroused and she was practiced. When I was in her my thoughts wandered to other places.

  "I can tell that you've got problems," she said. "Is it your work?"

  I said nothing. There was something embarrassing and touching in her attempt to encourage me or, perhaps, to give me value for my money. She brought my hand to her face.

  "I know what work people do by the smell of their hands." Her nostrils, as delicate as an animal's, sniffed my fingertips: "You're a clerk..."

  I shook my head in disagreement.

  "Then what do you do?"

  "Materials," I said unwillingly. "All kinds of materials..."

  "A chemist or something like that?"

  "Something like that." I got out and threw the condom onto a gray pile floating in the water. Nearby, a restaurant ship sailed slowly by. The echoes of music aroused longings in me. Further away, on the horizon, the masts of a pirate radio ship gleamed. Lisa turned on the car radio and listened to the broadcast from the ship. The music was soon replaced by a newscast. A constant, recurring series of place names seemed to contain a message. The war was in its sixth week then, and I was sorry that I had not been in at its birth.

  I got back into the car and dressed quickly. Lisa pulled her miniskirt down over her thighs and did up the buttons of her blouse. Detached, gripped by the idea which had seized me, I drove wildly between damp crates and salt-eroded walls. Lisa remained indifferent and quiet. When we parted she kissed my cheek. I sent her off with a quick caress of her hair.

  The next day I sent a long letter to the Head. He met with me in his room, beneath a picture of the Prime Minister, who watched us gravely.

  "I know that there are opportunities now..." I said.

  "It's a war, Simon, we need soldiers."

  "I'm a soldier."

  "Of a different kind."

  "There must be another place where they need a man with experience, someone who can operate alone."

  He laughed drily. The friendliness he had displayed at the party in Paris was missing now.

  "Don't take this personally. As a citizen, you should even be pleased; we've grown from that stage when a few pioneers could found a town in the desert and a solitary agent could settle accounts with a bomb. We have an army which can provide a solution for every situation."

  I squinted at the set of pens at the center of the desk, the files, the outgoing mail tray.

  "You've got to get me out of here." Those words were a kind of code, touching a very basic collegiality which was the only thing we shared after all those years.

  He l
ooked at the tip of his pencil as if seeking advice. A crease appeared in his forehead.

  "Maybe... Maybe there'll be something..." I was already nodding my assent. "I'm not promising anything..."

  Another nod. A handshake. My gratitude, the pride of a benefactor in his eyes and, primarily, the exultation which overcame me on the way home: I was about to regain something I had almost lost.

  ***

  That night, in the thickness of the dark, I tried to speak to Hannah's alienating back. At dawn I awoke to the sound of her voice.

  "Why are you really going?" she asked.

  "It's my job.

  She put her warm hand on my cheek: "You have another job now, less dangerous; a second career."

  I turned over onto my back. "Do you know what I do there?"

  "You've never told me."

  "I hand out mail," I said in a low voice.

  Her eyes were open wide, her hair tousled, revealing a small, shell-like ear which once, in my distant youth, I had admired.

  "There's a room there through which all the mail, every scrap of paper sent within the system, passes. The people who send and receive it have no names, only numbers. The people sitting in the room have lists of correspondents from one to sixty. Those are the less secret ones. I sort the telegrams for correspondents from sixty to one hundred. In the next room sits someone who knows the most secret ones: one hundred and above..."

  "It sounds like a very responsible job, more responsible than running around the streets of all kinds of cities all over the world..."

  "I shrivel when I read the telegrams of the people who are running around all kinds of cities all over the world..."

  "It'll pass, once you get used to it..."

  "You don't understand," I said, with a feeling of growing despair. "It's my identity, the only way I can identify myself when I wake up in the morning and ask, Who am I?"

  "And then," her face wore her psychologist's look and her voice changed accordingly, "what do you reply to yourself?"

  I touched my chest. "I am a veteran, the coolest and most experienced sapper in the service..."

  "Coolest," she smiled. "Daddy said that in the office they doubt whether you have any emotions or feelings. He said that..."

  I turned my back on her and took a book from the bedside table to read in the bathroom.

  She pulled it away from me: "Don't hide behind your books. At least admit that I have nothing to offer compared to the fantasy of cops-and-robbers and the books you take with you everywhere..." Her voice dropped. She moved into a personal world of bitterness and pain.

  "I have invested in you, Danny Simon, I have invested my youth... my soul. I've learned to manage and run a house and raise kids alone, and when you were kind enough to show up, given you all the little secrets of my body too... Those were my savings, which you emptied from one holiday to the next, from one year to the next, in order to spend it on the bombs you make in miserable flats, hotel rooms and all kinds of places that no one else goes to. I've known for quite a while that I won't get any profit from it, but all the same, I keep hoping I'll get something back, a tiny, shrunken remnant of the capital..."

  On the other side of the wall Jonathan's alarm clock rang. She buried her head deep in the pillow. "They won't let you," she comforted herself in a hard voice.

  I rummaged through the cupboard, looking for socks: "They can't stop someone who wants to so badly..."

  "In order to advance you need more than to want..."

  Now would come the usual conversation, a kind of regular ceremony in which I would be stripped of my rank. I dressed quickly, but not quickly enough. Hannah sat up straight in the middle of the bed:

  "It wasn't by chance that you were passed over for promotion." Her flesh was bursting out of all the apertures of her nightdress, like a soufflé which had gotten out of the cook's control. "It wasn't by chance that you were passed over for promotion all those years, in spite of Daddy's help..."

  "Perhaps because of your father's help..."

  "It's easy for you to blame him," she gasped malevolently, "but it's not his fault, it's something in you. Once, when you had just started working there and I went to cry on his shoulder, he said to me, 'There are two kinds of people doing that work: people with ability and those with lost souls. If your husband is one of the first he'll advance and be a wonderful success. If he's one of the others, another restless adventurer, take consolation that they get burned out quickly. The system tires of them...' "

  Jonathan passed the door, a shadowy figure through the dim glass. I hopped on one foot, putting my shoes on standing up.

  "They haven't tired of me," I murmured.

  As if to prove it, the mail crossing my desk contained a telegram from the Manpower Department that gave Daniel Simon a posting to a village in Lebanon. The same afternoon the person who was to replace me arrived carrying an evening paper and an auricula plant. At four I was summoned for a briefing.

  Right from the start there was something abnormal. I was summoned to the Head's office, and not, as might have been expected, to the Briefing Room. On his desk, which had been cleared of all its usual objects, lay two large envelopes. Around the desk stood the Head and two other people I did not know. When I came in they all looked me over. The Head smiled. His smile had regained the warmth which had been missing in our previous meeting and which had probably been stored somewhere since the burial in Paris.

  "This is Simon," he said with a sweep of his hand. "Come in, sit with us."

  The moment my behind made contact with the hard seat the two others turned round and left the room.

  We were left alone. The Head peeled the glue off the flap of the first envelope.

  "So, we've found you something," he said half to himself. He shook the envelope and a folded map fell out. When it was spread out it revealed a mountainous area crisscrossed at the center by a network of black pencil lines. The Head passed his hand over them as if stroking a scar.

  "No man's land," he said regretfully. "We couldn't go on from here, all our forces were diverted to Beirut."

  "Dura," I deciphered out loud the tiny letters which encircled a tiny, almost invisible, point of habitation.

  He didn't hear, or perhaps it was not yet time to refer to it.

  "...But we'll be back. We must straighten the line." The pen in his hand drew a blue path on the paper. "We'll just get ourselves organized in the coastal area and further forward, as far as this road..." He bent to examine a fragile line which wound between the peaks. "Of course, it's almost certain that at the crucial moment, when it'll be necessary to move, there'll be opposition. People will preach at us that war is a terrible thing and that we mustn't attack without being attacked..." He looked at me with a sudden movement. "And here," he said, rousing himself, "you can help."

  I waited tensely until he found his place on the map again.

  "Dura," he pointed ceremoniously, "as you said..." He had the talent of making his ideas seem as if you'd been waiting for them to happen all your life. "Something small, the kind of thing you do so well. Not harmful but impressive, not painful but convincing. Slightly primitive, a little rural, an impression that it's been done by a local underground... And, most important," he raised his finger, "there should be something left that can be shown to journalists..."

  "Do you think the world will buy that...?"

  "The world will buy anything that's in the right wrapping. We'll take care of that. We'll add some schmaltz here and there, one or two human interest stories..."

  "I've never been involved in something like this, blowing up something in our territory..."

  His face froze in mid-expression between friendliness and reprobation. "What's the difference?" he asked sharply. "In the past you hit the enemy directly. Now you'll convince other people that they have to be hit."

  "I'm really harming our people, cheating them..."

  "I'd call it guidance, maybe even education. A kind of help we give to those who are mist
aken and can't see the threat in the distance..." The look in his eyes was one of complete sincerity, almost a sense of mission. "Why should we wait for a tragedy when it's too late to react? Better a small, harmless bomb, a convincing disturbance at the moment which suits us best..." He folded up the map thoughtfully. "If there is some deception involved, it's no different to what one does to prevent someone committing suicide..." He fell silent. The map rested securely in the envelope in his hand. His other hand was at his desk drawer. The way he stood indicated expectancy, an invitation to a decision.

  "I don't know," I said. "I've got to think."

  With a gentle, suggestive movement, his head moved in negation. "This thing has got to be finalized now. When you leave here you'll either be in it or out of it, but not in the middle."

  I had one brief minute. But instead of thoughts all I had were sensations. I felt the concrete beneath the carpet, behind the white plaster on the walls, above the ceiling. It moved around me as if in a constant shrinking process. On its surface hovered his proposal: a path of light along which I could fly out before complete darkness came. What reason did I have for not doing it? To what extent had I known the overall picture, the true results of the things I had done in the past? Wasn't that always how things had been, and I had paid by deliberately ignoring them and refraining from knowing the high price of freedom, of life far away from Hannah and home?

  I nodded in assent.

  He jerked into life and turned to the other envelope. It contained several large photographs of an imposing two-story building surrounded by a well-tended garden.