Theo said: The Mayor. Batsheva. The dinosaur. You ought to try and speak to her, not in her office, privately, about your fantasy. I don't suppose you'd let me speak to her? Would you?
This business will go better without you.
And without you, Noa.
Don't take everything away from me.
Everything. What's everything? There's nothing there.
On the corner of the street, at a point the streetlight could not reach, a couple stood in a motionless embrace, like a sculpture, with lips joined, frozen in a kiss that in the darkness resembled mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. As we walked past it seemed as though the border between them had been erased. I fancied the girl was one of my Talis from class 12, and hoped I was mistaken, though I didn't know why. So I couldn't prevent myself from staring like someone at an identity line-up. For some reason I was blushing in the dark.
From a first-floor window came a sound of regular, even crying, the crying of a satisfied baby who would grow into a calm child. Theo hugged my shoulders and for a moment I had a feeling his squinting left eye was scheming something in the dark. Two streets further on the town suddenly stopped like a ship whose bows were stuck in the sand on the shore. And the desert began. Theo leading, we went down the path that led into the wadi. His shadow covered me and my shadow, because I was walking so close. Black flints cast dark conical forms behind them that seemed to be cut with a knife because of the silvery sharpness of the moonlight. Scattered bones whitened here and there among the stones. From down below in the wadi came a gust smelling of dried thorns. It was as though the pale rocks, the slope, the hills to the east, even the sharp starlight, were all waiting for a change. Which would come at once, in another moment, and then everything would be clear. But what the imminent change was or what needed to be clarified I had no idea.
Theo said: It's night here, too.
I fancied I heard a slight hesitancy in his deep, calm voice, as though he were unsure of his ability to convince me that it was night here, too, as if he doubted whether I could understand.
Once this summer's over, I said, we'll see what comes next.
Theo said: What comes next?
I don't know. Let's wait and see.
At a bend in the wadi a shadow stained the road: a fallen rock. No, not a rock. A wreck. An abandoned car.
It wasn't abandoned. It was a Jeep. Silent. Lights out. From close up we could see the shadow of someone, a head drooping onto the steering wheel. A man by himself, bent, huddled, his coat collar turned up, uttering smothered laughs at irregular intervals. Theo put his hand in front of me to halt me. In three strides he had reached the Jeep and bent over the huddled man. He may have asked if he could help. The man raised his head and stared, not at Theo but at me, motionless, then slowly sank back onto the steering wheel. Theo stayed for a moment, his dark back hiding from me whatever it was he was asking or doing, then he took my hand and pulled us further on towards the lonely poinciana. What was the matter, I asked, but Theo didn't answer. Only when we'd passed the poinciana, as though he'd invested a lot of thought in his reply, he said:
It was nothing. He was crying.
Shouldn't we have stayed a bit? Or else—
It's not a crime to cry.
We had reached the top of the hill known as Hyena Hill. Yellow, sparse, scattered in the darkness, the lights of the town flickered as if they were vainly trying to answer the stars in their own language. On the southern horizon a blinding light flared up then died in a dull explosion. Look, I said, fireworks. Soon there'll be music too. Theo said:
A flare. It wasn't a firework, Noa, it was a flare. From a plane. Their night training. They're firing at dummy targets.
And suddenly, perhaps because of the words "dummy targets", I remembered with a pang the poet Ezra Zussman, and the bereaved father, Avraham, their shy smile shining and dying away in an instant, fine, melancholy smile, like autumn clouds parting. The boy's downcast eyes behind the long lashes, and the father's face furrowed with lines of subdued affection, like a weary retired metalworker. What did he have left now? In Lagos? Waiting for the return of the chimpanzee he abandoned in a clearing in the forest? What was keeping him there, and what did he want from me, really, deep down inside? By means of what spell was that humble man managing to transmit his dim wish to me through the silvery summer night stretching between Tel Kedar and Lagos across deserts and plains, over thousands of moonswept mountains and peaks and valleys and expanses of shifting sands from here to there?
For a quarter of an hour or more we stood at the top of Hyena Hill and I hardly felt him take my hand in his and stroke it with his other palm. We saw patches of milky mist slowly creeping and massing in the bottom of the wadi and rolling towards the unlit Jeep. The sorrow of the darkness and the desolation, the man sitting there huddled over the steering wheel of the Jeep in the mist, the policeman at the Ashkelon junction with blood dripping from his nose and dusty sweat rolling down his face and neck, all of it is on me. But why on me? What have I to do with the suffering of strangers I have met only by chance or strangers I haven't met and never shall? And if it has to be me, how can I distil from myself that essential combination of compassion and detachment? How to bring disaster under control like that policeman, not with a panting heart but with a surgeon's hand? "And where are we meant to be shining, and by whom is our shining required?"
Noa.
What?
Come.
Where? I'm here.
Come closer.
Yes. What?
Listen. Last Friday when I was waiting for you at the California Café a funeral procession crossed the square with a stretcher covered in a tallit and yeshiva students and a Charity Saves from Death box. Schatzberg the pharmacist's gaga old man has died. Elijah. Only his name wasn't Elijah. I've forgotten what it was. It doesn't matter. They buried him opposite Bozo's wife and baby, among the pine trees, just past your pupil and his aunt. Shall I go on? You're not too cold?
I don't understand what you're trying to say.
Nothing. Let's go on a trip. Let's get married. Let's decorate the apartment. Or buy a CD player. Just tell me for once what you really want.
Get married for what?
For what. For you. You're not happy.
And then quickly: Actually, I don't know.
I said: Let's go home. I'm a bit chilly. The kid who died, the clinic, the Alharizi house, and the grieving father I don't know how it got into me. Something's going to happen, Theo. Don't you have a feeling too, as if the overture has ended?
We started back. And we chose not to return by way of the Jeep and the wadi but to make a detour past the cemetery at the bottom of the cliff that conceals the forbidden valley. Crickets and darkness and the scent of a distant campfire on the breeze. For a moment I felt a vague desire to turn my back on the sparse lights at the top of the hill, to leave the road, to head much further south towards the real wilderness, to cross a threshold and leave. What was the poet trying to say? That words are a trap? If so, why did he not resort to silence? Suddenly, it was as if a mountain had moved, and I recalled in a flash of illumination the pencil that Immanuel really did receive from me one winter's day during a power cut, when I went to the nurse's room to get some aspirin and the nurse wasn't there, but like a shadow he was sitting there by the bed, looking at me with downcast eyes from behind his feminine eyelashes. And yet he seemed to be sorry for me. For some reason I spoke sharply to him, as though it was my job to discipline him on the spot. I asked him gruffly what precisely he was looking for and who had given him permission to go into the room when the nurse wasn't there. I was aloof and entrenched at that moment and irritable like my father in his wheelchair on the roof for days on end while life passed by in a procession through the lens of his telescope. The boy nodded, almost sadly, as though he could read my mind and was trying to minimize the embarrassment he was causing me, and asked if by any chance I had on me anything to write with. Did he blink? Or was it just my imagi
nation? With rough movements, keeping my back to him, I opened one drawer after another in the white medicine closet until I found the broken tail-end of a pencil. Before I left, or rather fled, I growled at him sarcastically: I'm afraid you'll have to look for a sharpener yourself. He had a talent for literature, Avraham Orvieto said, he might even have been planning to become a writer, whether or not he had any ability to write only you can judge, it was only with you that he found any sense in studying, and he even told me in his letter about the pencil you gave him, and he said he was writing the letter with that very pencil. I could not believe what I was hearing. Like a woman receiving by mistake a declaration of love intended for someone else. If we hadn't decided to come back the long way, if we had come up the path through the wadi to the Jeep with its lights out and discovered that the man had vanished, then I could have sat in the driver's seat, with my head on my arm on the wheel, mourning for the child who had been, and I shall never have another. He plummeted to his own seabed. When we got home we locked the balcony door and made some herbal tea and put on the TV to see if there was anything worth watching, and as it happened there was a programme of excerpts from Artur Rubinstein's last concert before he died. Then I went to have a shower and Theo shut himself up in his room to listen to the news on the World Service from London.
THERE is a God after all, chortled Muki Peleg, in baggy burgundy trousers and a sky-coloured shirt, with a violet silk scarf round his neck, as he opened the door of his new Fiat for Noa. Come and see for yourself what's fallen down from heaven for us, as the carpenter said to his virgin wife. Noa put her straw handbag down by her feet, then changed her mind and put it on her knees. And they set off for the Josephtal district to look for the apartment that had belonged to Immanuel Orvieto's aunt. Ron Arbel from the law firm of Cherniak, Refidim and Arbel had received instructions in a wire from Lagos to clear up the deceased's estate. That morning he had announced on the phone that his client authorized Muki Peleg's agency to sell the aunt's apartment and its contents and to use the money to repay Theo part of the loan he had advanced to the Immanuel Orvieto Memorial Fund for fear that the opportunity to buy the building might be missed.
On the way, he told Noa about a red-headed beautician who he was a hundred percent sure was attracted to him, more than attracted, wild about him, and he asked her advice about which of four possible approaches to adopt so as to get her into his bed. Noa suggested he try scenario number three. Why not? And would the same approach work, for instance, with her? Noa said sure. As he described to her what he termed the tactical scenario, and went on to tell her about eleven thousand dollars he had just put into a new partnership for importing ties from Taiwan, sexy fluorescent ties that glowed in the dark like cat's eyes, she detached herself and tried to imagine what it is like when you are dead: a dark non-being where eyes that are no more see nothing, not even the total darkness because they are no more, and the skin that is no more does not feel the cold and the damp because it, too, is no more. But all she could imagine was at most a feeling of cold and silence in darkness, sensations, and sensations are life, after all. So this too has vanished. Plunging to its own seabed.
Elazara Orvieto's apartment had been shut up and locked since her death. They were met by a faint smell of dusty books and unaired wool. The blinds were closed so they had to switch on the light. In the living room there was a sofa and a coffee table and two wicker chairs, all in the style of the austerity years, and a reproduction of a landscape in Galilee by the painter Rubin. In a blue glass vase a bunch of oleander flowers had already withered and started to disintegrate, and beside it, face down and open, was a book on the last ten days of Jewish Bialystok. A pair of brown glasses lay on top of the book and beside it was an empty cup, also brown. On a shelf were a Bible with commentary, some novels and books of poetry and picture books, among which stood a china figurine of a young pioneer holding a tiny stringed instrument that Noa was unable to identify for certain as a lyre. At the bank she had sat on the left, behind the last window, at the savings schemes counter, a woman in her fifties, efficient, desiccated, freckled, with flat-heeled shoes, her short hair fixed close to her head with a plastic bow. Noa could almost hear the flat tone of voice in that set phrase with which she ended every conversation: "That's one hundred percent okay."
In the low-ceilinged bedroom there was an iron bedstead covered with a plain rug and a dark cupboard of a type that Noa seemed to remember from her childhood used to be called a "commode". Dried desert thistles were turning grey in a Bedouin earthenware pitcher that stood on the floor in a corner of the room. On a stool beside the bed stood another empty brown cup and a little jar of pills, and a work about Baha'ism with a photograph of the temple in Haifa and a partial view of the bay.
From the bedroom they reached the balcony, which had been closed in to make a tiny room, little more than a storeroom. Here, there was only an iron bedstead, a shelf, a map of southern Israel on the wall and a wooden packing case, on its side, in which, meticulously folded, lay Immanuel's clothes: four shirts, two pairs of trousers, one khaki and one corduroy, underwear, handkerchiefs and socks. And also a brand-new leather bomber jacket with a mass of zippers and buckles that Noa could not recall ever seeing the boy wearing. On the top surface of the packing case that apparently also served as a desk were various textbooks and exercise books, a ballpoint and a small electric lamp with a blue shade. A few paperback novels in translation, a dictionary, a dried-up sprig of pine in a glass whose water had evaporated, and some poetry books. The green sweater that she remembered from last winter was lying on the bed. And at the foot of the bed an old, tattered blanket that Noa peered at for a while before she realized that it was where the strange dog used to sleep. This was where they both slept. This was where they sat indoors on winter days. Rolling up the blind and opening the window, she saw in front of her only a grey concrete wall, depressingly close, almost within touching distance, the wall of the next block. She nearly wept. Muki Peleg hesitantly laid his hand on the back of her neck, not quite stroking her, his nostrils quivering at the faint scent of honeysuckle, and said to her gently: Noa?
She reached up to push away his hand but changed her mind halfway and clutched it; she even leaned against him for a moment with her eyes closed.
As though releasing a repressed tenderness that he normally struggled to keep under control, Muki Peleg whispered to her: Okay then. There's no hurry. I'll wait for you in the other room.
He touched her hair and left.
Bending over she picked up the sweater and pressed it to her breast to fold it properly. She did not manage to fold it right, so she laid it out on the bedspread and folded it on itself like a diaper, then carried it slowly over to the packing case and placed it among the other clothes. Then she closed the blind and the window and was about to leave, but instead she sat down on the bed for a few moments, drained. She closed her eyes and waited for the tears. They refused to come. All she felt was how late it was. Rising to her feet she wiped the top of the packing case with the back of her hand and smoothed the bedspread, straightened the pillow, drew the curtain and left. In the next room she found Muki, in a wicker chair, with his glasses on, waiting for her, quietly reading the book about the end of the Jews of Bialystok. He got up and fetched her half a glass of water from the kitchen. Then, in his Fiat, he told her how much he hoped to sell the apartment for: naturally he wouldn't dream of taking a commission for this sale either, but the fact was that the money from the apartment would not be enough to repay Theo, and on top of that we still had to make what we wanted of the Alharizi house, though actually that depended on what we did want, and in fact we had never really discussed what we were going to do, as the Empress Catherine said to her pet Cossack.
Noa said: All right. Listen. It's like this. Bear in mind that if this inheritance turns out not to be enough, I had an aunt of my own and there might be another inheritance, hers, mine, that went to some ultra-Orthodox cousin in Brussels and I gave it up even th
ough I didn't have to and I was wrong to do it. Maybe I could still put up a fight for it. Now take me to the California and treat me to an iced coffee. Iced coffee, Muki, that's what I want right now.
IN late 1971 or early 1972 Finkel was appointed head of the Agency. As a consolation prize or to soften the blow, Head Office offered to send Theo to Mexico on behalf of the Planning Authority to serve as a special adviser for regional planning. After all, you're single, you're more mobile than a family man. A change of air will do you good, you'll see the world, shall we say a couple of years, maybe three, you've heard all about Latin women, well, there are blacks, too, and Creoles, mulattos, Indians. And professionally speaking, too, you're sure to find ample scope. You'll be able to revolutionize things. You can devise new structures. When you've had enough you can come home, by then there may have been some kind of reorganization. In principle everything is wide open and anything may still be reversed.
Within two and a half weeks he had dismantled his bachelor apartment in Hyrcanus Street, near the River Yarkon. He found the phrase "ample scope" vaguely exciting. And the word "mobile", too. This may have been the reason why he decided to travel with nothing more than a single suitcase and a grip. From year to year his contract was extended, his work expanded from the state of Veracruz to Sonora and Tabasco and eventually to other countries as well. Within a few months his superficial ties with his circle of acquaintances in Tel Aviv were dissolved. One or two women wrote to him via the office but he did not bother to reply, not even with a picture postcard. He saw no reason to exercise his right to home leave every six months. He did without Israeli newspapers. After a while he realized that he had no idea who the Minister of the Interior was back home or the dates of the Jewish festivals. From so far away all the wars, and the rhetoric that separated them, seemed to make up a vicious circle of self-righteousness and hysteria: kicking out at everything that stood in the way and at the same time pleading for mercy and demanding to be loved. A tacky cocktail of destiny, arrogance and self-pity, that was how Israel appeared to him from his vantage point in a hammock strung in a remote fishing village on the Pacific coast. Although he did not neglect to ask himself if all this was simply because that scum Nimrod Finkel had landed the top job in the Bureau. And the answer he gave himself, occasionally, was that that had merely been the last straw.