In one comer, on a stool covered with a cloth, there nestled a tall jug filled with pine branches and a stork made out of a pine cone and chips of colored wood. There were two more chairs in the room. One of them I could scarcely take my eyes off. But the bedside lamp bestowed its quiet light on everything alike. Russet-colored light. You are in a girl's room, I thought. In Esthie's room, I thought. And you just sit and don't say anything because you are just a great big dummy. That sums it up, Soumchi, absolutely sums it up. Which thought is not going to help me find the right words for starting a conversation. With much agony, I managed to squeeze out the following sentence, more or less:
"My room, at home, is quite different from this."
Esthie said, "Of course. But now you're here, not there."
"Yes," I said, because it was true.
"What do you keep staring at all the time?" asked Esthie.
"Nothing in particular," I said. "I'm just sitting here ... just sitting. Not looking at anything in particular." That, of course, was a lie. I could scarcely take my eyes off the arms of the second chair on which she'd laid the beloved white jumper, the very same jumper that, at school, I'd stuck time and again to the seat of her chair with chewing gum. Oh, God, I thought. Oh, God, why did you make me such an idiot? Why was I ever bom? At this moment it would be better not to exist. Not anywhere. Not anywhere at all, except perhaps in the Himalaya mountains or the land of Obangi-Shari, and even there they don't need such an idiot as me.
And so it was, after scraping those few words together, I sat dumb again on the folding bed in Esthie's room, my right hand still gripped tightly round my pencil sharpener and sweating a little in my pocket.
Esthie said, "Perhaps, after all, you'd rather sleep in the living room."
"It doesn't matter," I whispered.
"What doesn't matter?"
"Nothing. Really."
"O.K. If that's what you want. I'm getting into bed now and I'm going to turn round to the wall until you've got yourself quite settled."
But I did not think of settling myself quite. Still fully dressed in my very short gym shorts and Hasmonean T-shirt, I lay under the light blanket, taking nothing off but my gym shoes, which I threw as deep as possible beneath the bed.
"That's it. All clear."
"If you want, now you can tell me about the mutiny of the great Mahdi in the Sudan, just like you did to Ra'anana and Nourit and all the rest of them the day Mr, Shitrit was ill and we had two free periods."
"But you didn't want to listen then."
"But now is not then. It's now," Esthie pointed out quite correctly.
"And if you didn't listen to the story, how do you know that it was about the rebellion of the Mahdi in the Sudan?"
"I do know. Generally I know everything."
"Everything?"
"Everything about you. Perhaps even the things you think I don't know."
"But there's one thing you don't know and I won't ever tell you," I said, very quickly, in one breath and with my face to the wall and my back to Esthie.
"I do know."
"You don't."
"Yes."
"No."
"Yes."
"Then tell me and we'll see."
"No."
"That means you're only saying you know. You don't know anything."
"I know. And how."
"Then tell me. Now. And I swear I'll tell you if you're right."
"You won't tell,"
"I swear I'll tell."
"Good then. It's this. That you love some girl in our class."
"That's rubbish. Absolutely,"
"And you wrote her a love poem."
"You're nuts. You're mad. Stop it!"
"In a black notebook."
I would steal a thermometer from the medicine cabinet, I decided there and then. And I would break it. And, at the ten o'clock break, I'd let the mercury run out and mix a little of it with Aldo's cocoa and a little with Goel Germanski's. So that they'd die. And also Bar-Kochba's and Elie's and Tarzan Bamberger's. So that they'll all be dead, once and for all.
Esthie repeated:
"In a little black notebook. Love poems. And also poems about how you'd run away with this girl to the Himalaya mountains, or some place in Africa—I forget the name."
"Shut up, Esthie, Or I'll throttle you. This minute here. That's enough,"
"Don't you love her any more?"
"But it's all lies, Esthie. It's all lies invented by those bastards. I don't love any girl."
"Good," said Esthie, and all at once turned out her bedside light. "That's O.K. If that's how you want it. Now go to sleep. I don't love you either."
And afterwards, while the street light slid through the cracks in the shutters and painted the room with stripes, on the table and on the chairs, on the cupboard and on the floor, on Esthie herself in her elephant pyjamas, lying at the other end of the straw mat at the foot of my bed, we talked a little more. In a whisper, I confessed almost everything. About Uncle Zemach and me; about how I was like him, a crazy boy, and for all anyone knew, a spekulant too in the end; about what it felt like to get up and leave everything, to go in search of the source of the River Zambezi in the land of Obangi-Shari. About how I'd left all of it, the house, the neighborhood, the city, and how, in one day, I'd managed to lose a bicycle, an electric railway, a dog and even my own home. How I'd been left without anything, except the pencil sharpener I found. Till late, very late at night, perhaps about eleven o'clock, I went on whispering to Esthie and she listened to me without a single word. But then, during the silence that fell, when I'd finished my story, she said, very suddenly:
"Good. Now give me this pencil sharpener."
"The pencil sharpener? Why give you the pencil sharpener?"
"Never mind. Give it me."
"Here you are then. Will you love me now?"
"No. And now be quiet."
"Then why are you touching my knee?"
"Will you be quiet. Why does he always have to say things and make trouble? Don't say any more."
"O.K." I said. But was forced to add, "Esthie."
Esthie said, "Enough. Don't say another word. I'm going away now to sleep on the sofa in the living room. Don't say anything. And don't say anything tomorrow either. Good night. And anyway, there's no such place as the land of Obangi-Shari. But it's marvellous all the same that you've invented a place for just us two alone. Good-bye, then, till tomorrow."
For six weeks Esthie and I were friends. All those days were blue and warm and the nights were blue and dark. It was full, deep summer in Jerusalem while we loved each other, Esthie and I.
To the end of the school year, our love continued, and a little after, over the summer holidays. What names our class called us, what stories they told, what a joke they found it. But all the time we loved each other, nothing could worry us. Then our friendship was over and we parted, I won't say on account of what. Haven't I already written, in the prologue, how time keeps on passing and that the whole world changes? In fact, this brings me to the end of my story. In a single sentence I can tell you all of it. How once I was given a bicycle and swapped it for a railway; got a dog instead; found a pencil sharpener in place of the dog and gave the pencil sharpener away for love. And even this is not quite the truth, because the love was there all the time, before I gave the sharpener away, before these exchangings began.
Why did love cease? That is just one question. But there are many other questions I could ask if I wanted. Why did that summer pass, and the summer after? And another summer and another and another? Why did Engineer Inbar fall ill? Why does everything change in the world? And why, since we happen to be asking questions, why, now that I'm grown up, am I still here and not among the Himalaya mountains and not in the land of Obangi-Shari?
Well then; but there are so many questions and among them some so very hard to answer. But, as for me, I've reached the end of my story—so, if anyone else can provide us with the answers, let him rise to hi
s feet and give them to us now.
EPILOGUE
All's Well That Ends Well
Which may be skipped altogether. I only wrote it because it is expected.
At midnight, or perhaps just after midnight, Mother and Father arrived at the Inbar family house, looking pale and frightened. Father had been searching for me since half past nine. First he had gone to inquire for me at my Aunt Edna's in the Yegia Capiim neighborhood. Then he had returned to our own neighborhood and inquired equally vainly at Bar Kochba's and Elie Weingarten's. At a quarter past ten he had arrived at Goel Germanski's; they had waked up Goel and interrogated him closely, Goel claiming that he knew absolutely nothing. By which Father's suspicions had been aroused; he had cross-examined Goel briefly himself, and, in the course of that, the agitated Goel swore several times that the dog did belong to him and that he even had a licence from the city council to prove it. Father had dismissed him at last, saying "We are going to have another little chat some time, you and I," and continued his search through the neighborhood. But it was nearly midnight before he learned from Mrs. Soskin that I had been seen sitting on the steps of Mr. Bialig's grocery, in tears, almost, and that half an hour later, Mrs. Soskin had happened to peer through her north-facing shutter and seen me still sitting there, and then, "All of a sudden, Mr. Engineer Inbar had appeared and enticed the boy away with him, by kind words and promises."
His face very white, his voice very low and quiet, Father said:
"So, here's our jewel at last; asleep in his clothes, the crazy boy. Get up please, and kindly put on your sweater that your mother has been toting round for you all evening from house to house till twelve o'clock at night. We'll go straight home now, and leave all accounts to be settled tomorrow. Forward march!"
He made polite apologies to Engineer Inbar and his wife, thanked them and begged them in the morning to thank dear Esther also (whom, as we departed, I saw briefly a long way off through the open living-room door. She was tossing from side to side in her sleep, disturbed by the voices and murmuring something, probably that it was all her fault and they should not punish me. But no one besides me heard and I did not really).
Back in my bed, at home, I lay all night awake and bright and happy until the crack of day. I did not sleep. I did not want to sleep. I saw the moon depart from my window and the first line of light start gleaming in the east. And, at last, the sun setting early sparkles on drainpipes and windowpanes, I said out loud, almost:
"Good morning, Esthie."
And indeed a new day was beginning. At breakfast, Father said to Mother, "All right. As you want. Let him grow up a Wetmark, I'll just keep my mouth shut."
Mother said, "If it's all the same to you, my brother's name is Zemach, not Wetmark."
Father said, "That's all right by me. Good. So be it."
At school, by the ten o'clock break, this had already appeared on the blackboard:
In the midnight, under the moon
Soumchi and Esthie start to spoon.
And the teacher, Mr. Shitrit, wiped it all off with a duster and calmly implored as follows:
"Not a dog shall bark. Let all flesh be silent,"
On his return from work on that same day, at five o'clock, the turn of the evening, Father went alone to the Germanskis' house. He explained; apologized; made frank and complete statement of the facts; took possession of the electric railway and turned his footsteps, steadily and without haste, to the house of the Castelnuovo family. There, Louisa, the Armenian nanny, ushered him into Professor Castelnuovo's aromatic library and Father made an impartial statement of the facts to Mrs. Castelnuovo in her turn. He apologized; received apologies; handed over the railway and took possession of the bicycle. And so, at last, everything was restored to its rightful place once more.
The bicycle itself, of course, was confiscated and locked up in the cellar for three months. But I have already written how, by the end of the summer, everything had changed; how nothing stayed the same as before. How other concerns took over. But they, perhaps, belong to some other story.
Footnotes
*Black marketeer
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* Pounds
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* Turkish Delight
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Amos Oz, Soumchi
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