Don't Call It Night

  The only way I can help her is by avoiding any attempt to help. I have to hold back, as if to diminish a pain by regulating my breathing—and that I have no difficulty doing. Her strange project is becoming precious to her, "the gleam in your eye", as Shlomo Benizri says.

  As though she had got herself a lover.

  What about me? I followed her here, to her world's end, because I wanted only to be with her. Instead of the peace of the desert, all I have now is a sense of approaching danger. Which I can't prevent because I have no idea which direction it's coming from. Once, before all this, in the army, I volunteered to serve for six months in a small reconnaissance task-force in the desert, dashing around the Ramon Mountains in a couple of Jeeps, because I had turned down the command of an engineering platoon. It was before the road was built, before there were even dirt tracks here. Sometimes we would spot the silhouette of a hyena in the moonlight or a group of ibexes seemingly frozen on the line of the hills in the first light of dawn. Mostly we slept all day in hollows in the rocks and came out in the evening to give chase or to lie in ambush at night for caravans of smugglers crossing the Negev Mountain on their way from Sinai to Jordan. It was in 1951, or maybe 1952. We had a Bedouin tracker with us, a gruff, taciturn man, no longer young, dressed in the tattered uniform of the British Border Police, who knew how to read footprints even on rocky ground. He could sniff sun-dried donkey or camel dung and tell us who had passed this way, when, whether heavily laden or not, and even from which tribe. He could say on the basis of the dried-up dung what the beasts had eaten and where, and that is how he could work out where they were coming from and where they might be going and whether they were smuggling. He was a small, wiry man, and his face was not tanned but the colour of the cold ashes of a nomad campfire. It was said that his wife and daughter had been murdered in some tribal vendetta. And that he hopelessly loved a young cripple in Ashkelon. Even on nights when clouds blotted out the stars and the mountaintops he would bend down and pick up a rusty cartridge case, a faded buckle, a dry crust, traces of human excrement on the black scree, a gnawed bone thrown in a crevice, and decipher it with the tips of his fingers. We never let him have a gun, perhaps because he was always awake when we were asleep. It was only when we were all wide-awake and starting up the Jeeps full of the thrill of the chase, making the wadis re-echo in long rolls of dull thunder to our salvos of machine-gun fire, that he would detach himself from us and doze sitting down on the floor at the back of a filthy Jeep, with his foxlike chin between his knees, and his eyes neither open nor closed, waiting for silence to return and cover everything with a veil of greyish dust. Then he would wake without a sound and set off barefoot, stooped and crouching, as though straining to lick the soil, pattering away from us on his own to sniff out a cave or pit whose opening we had not even noticed as we drove past. Aatef was his name, but behind his back we called him "Night" because the night was as bright to him as if he had the characteristics of a nocturnal creature.

  But we were careful never to use this name in his presence because, we reminded ourselves, in Arabic the Hebrew word for night, laila, is a woman's name.

  I SNATCHED Muki Peleg from a raucous taxi drivers' reunion at the California Café, at the table they call the Council of Torah Sages: he had forgotten that we'd arranged to have a committee meeting this evening at Linda's. Look, men, feast your eyes, just see who's come to pick me up, he said to his friends, with the broad smile of someone having his picture taken with the President.

  Walking westwards into the sunset, we crossed the square by the traffic lights. At the Paris Cinema they had a thriller on: so the British comedy had not been a success here. A lefty comedy, Muki said, Linda dragged me off to see it but I talked her into walking out in the intermission. We went back to my place instead to listen to some groovy music, the sort that turns you on, if you know what I mean.

  I said I knew what he meant.

  Then he told me he had invested thirty-three thousand dollars in a third share of a travel agency that specialized in sending groups of "floating" youngsters on trips to Latin America. Maybe Theo would like to join in, he knows a bit about sombreros, I caught them with their pants down literally seconds before the liquidator arrived, realistically my third is worth at least forty or fifty grand, and if Theo puts another thirty in we'll clear a cool hundred grand inside a year.

  It was evening calm in the square. A westerly breeze was blowing, as though it was trying to bring the sea here. An occasional car drove past the line of parked cars. A flock of swallows was swirling to and fro above the streetlights, veering abruptly eastwards then changing its mind and settling in a huddle on the power lines again. I like this square that does not pretend to be what it will never be. The shops, offices and eating places, the simple window displays, everything is made with modesty. The Monument to the Fallen and the drinking fountain in front of it seem to suit each other and both seem to suit the centre of Tel Kedar. And the square seems right for itself, the way weekday clothes are right for a weekday. When Theo suggested seven years ago that they should put up a black basalt fountain surrounded with palm trees and black rocks I thought it was a cold idea. But there was no point in saying so, and anyway the suggestion wasn't accepted and there was never any chance it would be. It's not that he's short of ideas, they say here, the trouble is he's up in the clouds, old Sombrero, he's several sizes too big for our little town. It's some time since they've even said that because Theo has long since stopped making suggestions.

  Muki Peleg said: It's a beautiful evening. And you're beautiful too.

  Thanks, I said. I liked your expression "floating youngsters". By the way, listening to groovy music at your place and all that, try not to hurt Linda. She's not that strong.

  Nothing but love, Muki exclaimed, laying his hand on his chest in a gesture of offended probity. Love and nothing but love, that's what she gets from me. And there's plenty to go round, so if you happen to need some you know where to come. I'll make you float too.

  Most of the shops were closed by now. The shop windows were sparingly lighted. People were strolling unhurriedly up and down the square, couples, parents and children, mothers with baby carriages, and four tourists in casual clothes, baked by the desert sun. Pretty Limor Gilboa, in red trousers and high heels, was walking between two suitors, who were both talking to her at once. Anat and Ohad, a young couple, she was in my class not long ago, were standing whispering in front of Bozo's shoe shop. In the window Pini Bozo has hung a photo of his wife and baby son in a black frame decorated with coral. In a fit of unrequited love, a soldier aged seventeen and a half shot them and everyone else in the shop.

  A few old people were sitting on the municipal benches near the beds of petunias conversing in low voices. Among them I could see Blind Lupo, sitting at the end of the bench, surrounded as usual by a flock of pigeons that were bold enough to perch on his knees and shoulders and eat maize from his outstretched hand. His Alsatian dog was dozing at his feet, oblivious to the massed pigeons. The blind man's foot struck the dog's back and the man hastily apologized. Meanwhile, every minute the traffic lights changed colour, even though there were no cars waiting. In front of Ecstasy Boutique, Women's Lingerie, an army officer from Ethiopia in a Givati Brigade beret was staring into the window with his mouth half-open.

  As we were crossing Ben Gurion Boulevard the streetlights came on. There was no need for them yet, because the daylight was still fading very slowly. Half the sky was lighted by a red glow broken by wispy clouds. Behind the usual evening sounds, a woman calling a child to come in this minute, sentimental music from the Palermo, the murmur of metal signboards shaken by the westerly breeze, there was a deep, wide silence. At the place where Ben Gurion Boulevard ends and the greying expanse commences, two bulldozers, one of them enormous, were parked, and next to them the night watchman had lighted a smoky brushwood fire and he and his three dogs were motionless on the ground staring into the fire. Overhead a gliding raven made a black stain aga
inst the cloud-strewn blaze of the twilight. Here came another. And two more.

  Twenty years ago there was still a bare plateau here hemmed in by grey hills. It was crossed only by a vague dirt track leading to the military installations in the valley behind the cliff. Now there are nine thousand inhabitants, a draft of a real town, flat, not entirely clear to itself, and already beginning to expand slowly over the plateau. There are some fifteen thoroughfares, perpendicular or parallel to each other, and all of them lead to the desert. People from thirty different countries live in five symmetrical districts, go to work or to the café, put their money in savings accounts, change the baby's diapers, change their curtains or their solar water-heaters, make an extra room by walling in the rear balcony. As if this has always been here. And there is a health clinic, a library, a hotel, a little industry, and henceforth there is also a string quartet that arrived only a fortnight ago from Kiev. A miracle, Avraham Orvieto said the first time he came after the death, sometimes, for an instant, you could see it as a miracle, a minor one at least. And he added: Immanuel loved Tel Kedar. It was his home.

  The soil for the little gardens has been brought from far away by the residents, in trucks, and they have covered the dusty flint gravel with it as if they were dressing a wound. The dust constantly makes its way back from the open expanse, straining to reconquer its original terrain. And yet the gardens hang on and refuse to be dislodged. In a few places the treetops have grown higher than the roofs. Swallows have found their way here from far away, and perch in the treetops. Peaceful, homely, almost gentle, that's how President Shazar Street seems to me at seven o'clock in the evening, at a time when the day is departing and the sky is still on fire. In every flowerbed the hoses start their dripping at the same moment, operated by a tiny electrical impulse from the municipal irrigation computer. As the sun goes down the sprinklers begin to revolve in the little park and the façade of Founders' House is illuminated by beams from a floodlight concealed among the hibiscus bushes.

  On a balcony we saw a handwritten cardboard placard: "for sale or to lett". That's the new estate agents, Bargeloni Bros, Muki said: They're such morons it's a wonder they didn't write sail. I said that actually I quite enjoyed living in a place that was twenty-five years younger than me, you could watch the life evolving. Muki said with a laugh: Nought out of ten for arithmetic, Noa, what do you mean twenty-five years, you don't look a day over thirty-three and a half, and you're getting younger every day—if it goes on like this you'll be ten soon. Blushing again, are you? Or is it just my imagination? After a minute or two, when he took in what I had said, he added in a different voice: Listen, one of these days I'm going to take things into my own hands and rig up some device with my own eleven fingers that'll hide or change those awful solar panels and TV aerials. Make it look a bit nicer round here.

  I said: And the cypresses will grow taller, and we'll have a pretty skyline against the background of the mountains and the cliffs.

  Muki said: And then they'll build Notre-Dame here and the Eiffel Tower; they'll fix us up with a river through the middle, with boats and anglers and everything, I'll be the building contractor and take charge of the lot, on condition that you'll kiss me on the bridge at night.

  I nearly kissed him on the spot, in President Shazar Street, such a frantic, dishevelled boy; I restrained myself, and only said: It's almost pretty as it is. That is, so long as you remember when it started and what it was like before. A barbed-wire army camp in the middle of nothing. It started from sand and fantasies, where have I heard that?

  Hardly started, and now there's no stopping her, as the empress's hussar said when they asked him how he got so thin, Muki said. Sorry. It just slipped out. Don't be angry.

  And what sort of groovy music was it that he played to Linda whenever they walked out of the film halfway through and went back to his apartment?

  Music for the soul. The Sword Dance.Bolero. He had loads of tapes that all kinds of girls had given him over the years. If I went, he'd leave the choice to me, and he'd make me a really explosive cocktail, out of this world. A couple of days ago Linda dragged him to a concert in a private house, at Dr. Dresdner's. That quartet from Russia played something sad and then they put on a record, even more depressing, the song of the dead children. It must have been Mahler, I said, Kindertotenlieder. One of them, called "When thy mother dear", gives me the shivers whenever I hear it, or even just think about it. Muki said, Look, I'm not really into all this stuff, Mahler, Germany, philosophies, but the honest truth is, I almost felt like crying there the other night from the music about dead children. It seems to get right inside you through your skin, not your ears. Through your hair even. If there's one really bad thing in the world, worse than bad, terrible, it's children dying. I'm against children dying. That's the only reason I'm on the committee. What did you think? That's why I'm going to this meeting now.

  Linda served coffee in little decorated Greek cups. A regular glass menagerie filled three shelves: delicate tigers, transparent giraffes, shiny blue elephants, elegant lions that caught and reflected the light of the lamps, a tiny illuminated aquarium containing a single goldfish and a collection of miniature vases in whose glass little droplets of air are trapped forever like tears. Four years ago her husband the insurance agent left her because he had fallen in love with her sister. For years she has worked part-time as secretary in the little washing-machine factory here. She plays the piano at the rehearsals of the local choir. She signs up for every trip organized by the Workers' Council, takes part in voluntary activities for the Immigration Absorption Committee, art and craft groups, the panel for promoting the art gallery, the support group for the day centre for the elderly. A shy, asthmatic woman in her forties, with an old-fashioned plait coiled round her head, a whispery voice, and the thin, angular body of an adolescent. At our meetings she serves drinks and nuts, and then curls up quietly in a corner of the settee as though her forehead is being drawn towards her knees.

  At the beginning of the meeting we asked Ludmir to take the minutes. Ludmir is a tall, suntanned man of seventy, long and thin and slightly stooped; reminiscent of an oddly proportioned ornamental camel made of wire and raffia, he gives the impression that his long, veiny tanned legs in their threadbare khaki shorts and battered flip-flops are attached directly to his chest. He has a prophetic mane of grey hair. Armed only with bitterness and angry pathos, he has been jousting year after year with one dragon or another. And still he never forgets his catch phrase: "Noa smoke without a fire". Ever since they moved to Tel Kedar in the days of the pioneer camp he and his wife Gusta have lived in a small, immaculate shack, overgrown with passiflora, behind Founders' House. Gusta Ludmir, a tall, severe, bespectacled woman with grey plaits wound round her head like rope, gives private math lessons. In her old-fashioned dresses, secured at the neck with a gloomy silver beetle, she sometimes reminds me of an aristocratic English widow from times gone by. Once, four or five years ago, a short while after he retired from the electricity company, Ludmir told me that his only grandchild, a girl of sixteen, whom he and his wife were bringing up, suddenly determined to leave home and go and live on her own in a rented room in Tel Aviv so she could study in a special school of dancing. Ludmir insisted that I speak to her "and prevent her throwing away her young life in the maelstrom of the big city, where all that lies in wait for a youngster like herself is ugliness and degeneracy disguised under the blandishments of a glittering career". So I invited Lailach Ludmir, a nervous, suspicious girl with the eyes of a hunted gazelle, her head sunk in her shoulders as though it had been hammered in forever, for a cup of hot chocolate at the California Café. And I tried to understand her dreams. But when I laid my hand for an instant on her tense shoulder she started, turned white and ran away. That was how I learned to take care not to touch children. Ludmir stopped talking to me, having come to the conclusion that I had ruined everything and that it was all my fault that he would die lonely. Two years later he forgave me, having come t
o a different conclusion, that in the last analysis we are all condemned to loneliness. "Noa smoke without a fire" were the words with which he first removed the interdict. But every now and then he shoots me a long wounded glare from those blue, childlike eyes of his that suddenly fill with pain.

  Linda went to her kitchen to make another round of coffee and to prepare some fruit and shop-bought crackers. She told us to start the meeting without her, with the door open she could hear everything from the kitchen. I went out too to give her a hand and by the time we returned Ludmir had already erupted and was shouting furiously at Muki—how had we dared to purchase that filthy ruin, on our own initiative, without convening the committee, that whorehouse, that vipers' nest of drug-crazed criminals, without taking the trouble to ask ourselves what the public implications might be: "Not for me redemption's message if it issues from a leper," he quoted, attributing the line to Lea Goldberg. When I pointed out it was actually by Rahel, the molten lava changed course from Muki Peleg to me—such condescension, such arrogant pedantry, what are we here for, an operation to rescue young lives or an academic seminar? Are we a lifesaving team, or mere puppets in the provincial drama of a bored lady who is laying yet another trap to catch herself a new father in the form of a shady arms-dealer whom she will reduce in his turn to a baby for her own amusement?

  So saying he threw the minute book down on the table and walked out, slamming the door behind him. He was resigning. Leaving in disgust. Abandoning Sodom and Gomorrah to their fate. A couple of minutes later he rang the bell and returned. He picked up the minute book in resentful silence and sat for the rest of the evening with his back to us in the corner near the aquarium. It turned out later that he nevertheless made a faithful and accurate record of the whole proceedings, confining himself to adding at certain points in the minutes"sic"in square brackets, accompanied by an exclamation point.