Don't Call It Night

  Batsheva Dinur, the mayor, a woman of my own age, strong, pink-faced, with short-cropped silvery hair, a solidly built, oddly proportioned figure, sitting deep in this armchair, looked like a range of mountains with extensions piled up in every direction, as though she had more than four limbs. Her large horn-rimmed spectacles had slid down her nose. Her solid red arms looked rough, like old bookbindings. She always reminds me of a plump Dutch grandmother, or an innkeeper's wife ruling with a firm hand all those around her.

  When she spotted me, she stopped playing. She shot me a wry look over the top of her spectacles, as though she could see right through me before I had said so much as a word. She said: Look who's come to see us. Come over here, fetch a chair from the veranda and bring it over. Not there. Here.

  I took a stool like the one her old mother was sitting on, stiff and unmoving. I remembered to say, Good evening.

  Batsheva said: Be quiet, Theo. Let me finish.

  She went on playing a tune that I could not identify yet that sounded vaguely familiar and even moving.

  After playing for ten minutes she suddenly had enough, stopped, and let out a braying sound, like an impatient mule. She slipped the mouth organ into a pouch formed by the folds of her skirt between her heavy knees.

  It won't come right, she said, I keep trying to play it like geometry, to dry the feeling out of it, otherwise it goes all sticky like plum jam, which I hate by the way. You look terrible.

  She peered at me for a while, still over the top of her glasses, curiously, thoroughly, without the slightest embarrassment, a redoubtable woman whom no adversary has ever got the better of. And yet at the same time she is generous and vigorous, with an occasional wicked twinkle in her eye, as if someone has just whispered a juicy obscenity in her ear and she is savouring it in her mouth, and putting off swallowing it, deliberately prolonging the pleasure.

  I said: Look here, Batsheva. I'm sorry to butt in out of hours. The thing is, I've got a problem I can't really talk to you about at work.

  Her old mother said: Here comes that poor Seriozha. He's in love. He's looking for his Anyushka.

  Batsheva said: A problem. Yes. So I've heard. Your wife. That clinic of hers.

  I pointed out that Noa and I aren't married.

  Why ever not? You should get married. Noa's a sweetie.

  She winked at me merrily, her broad face lighted up with affectionate, knowing shrewdness.

  Give me two minutes to explain.

  I know, I know. You've bought Alharizi's ruin and now you're stuck with it. You've come to ask me to meet you halfway. Forget it.

  The old woman remarked sadly: Love. They don't eat. They don't drink. Phoo—and the brains go out.

  Batsheva said: Ah, thanks for reminding me. I'll put the kettle on in a minute and make us all some tea.

  She did not move from her armchair.

  I said: There's no need. Don't get up. I've only come for a few minutes.

  Batsheva said: Right then. Please, talk. We don't let him get a word in and we keep saying talk. Now you can talk.

  Batsheva Dinur's husband was killed in the battle for Jerusalem in 1967. She brought her four children up by herself while working as an electrical engineer specializing in transformers. Nine years ago, not long before we came to Tel Kedar, she put in a successful application to manage the washing-machine factory. Two years ago she was elected Mayor, and since then she has fought valiantly to, as she puts it, clean up the bloody shambles. Her children have grown up and married. She has grandchildren all over the country. Every Saturday evening she goes out with her old mother to stroll up and down the square by the lights. Or else the pair of them sit in the California Cafe for an hour or so, and a queue of favour-seekers lines up at their table. She is an indefatigable, straightforward woman, always armoured with a casing of witty practical gruffness. Her enemies detest her and her friends would go through fire and water for her. The Tough Old Truck, they call her in the town.

  Look, I believe that with proper preparation of public opinion and on whatever conditions you lay down for us, a small medical clinic, something pioneering, experimental, with all appropriate supervision arrangements, could be a boon. It would attract researchers. It would act as a useful focus for voluntary communal activities. There would be a favourable press. And in fact it's just the hook you've been looking for to bring us a university extension or the first nucleus of a hospital. Think it over.

  The old woman added: In winter the thermometer drops to forty below, the wolf howls at the door of the hut, aaaoooo, like an abandoned baby.

  Batsheva said: Drop it, Theo. It'll never happen. But I'll tell you what, there's some iced mint tea in the refrigerator. Why don't you help yourself, and bring us some too. The glasses are in the dryer.

  Batsheva. Wait. Try to see it like this. A man who has lost his son turns up here and pledges to give us seventy thousand dollars, with the promise of more to come. He gets together a committee. He's within his rights. A funny committee, admittedly. The committee purchase an abandoned property that was hanging around here like a pain in the backside. They register as a memorial foundation. The people involved show enthusiasm. Dedication. Naturally there are doubts in the town. Some of which are justified. That's perfectly understandable. But with you on our side the doubts will be dispelled.

  Who needs it, Theo? For heaven's sake. An opium den. Besides which, he still hasn't repaid you a penny. Do me a favour, bring your chair round to the other side. That's right. Now I can see you without getting the light in my eyes. You really do look terrible.

  The old woman intervened: On the stove sweaty peasants with fleas are sleeping in their clothes, and outside the wolf goes aaaoooo. And what of compassion? Has it vanished? Disappeared?

  I didn't say a drug clinic.

  Ah. Something else? Definitely, why don't you set up a memorial in the form of, let's say, a workshop for desert sculpture? The rocks are on me. For free.

  But it's got to be connected with the problems of young people, I said. It's in memory of a dead schoolboy.

  And Seriozha shivers all night long. Everybody is asleep and he has none.

  Young people. By all means. Computers. All you have to do is persuade your donor. Let's say for instance a centre for young computer wizards. It mustn't be called that, of course. Isn't that right, Mama? Or else what about a hothouse for young researchers on subjects related to high-tech industry? You'd need to get at least another hundred and fifty thousand dollars out of your benefactor for equipment and operating costs, and that's without even thinking about a scholarship fund. If you can come up with some academic patronage then we're talking business. Why not?

  That's not what the donor is after.

  Well make it so it is, then. Or else get hold of someone else who's lost a child.

  I don't think Noa will buy it. Or the donor. It's hard to know.

  You take care of it, Theo. Cleverly. Then come back to me. Mama, you've talked enough. And what happened to our iced tea?

  Not for me, thanks. I'm off. I'll try to talk to Noa. It won't be easy.

  Seriozha will be ill.

  Won't you stay a little, Theo? Take it easy? Only don't stop me playing. Just sit quietly, no, why not? You're not a nuisance, is he, Mama? Not a nuisance, is he? On the contrary, you're lovely. Stay.

  How about a compromise, Batsheva? Kids with a talent for computing who have got mixed up with drugs?

  She didn't answer. She merely puffed out her cheeks, like an elderly baby determined to amuse at all costs, and blew into her mouth organ. She played a tune I remembered from the fifties, "He didn't know her name, but all the same, that pigtail went with him all the way..."

  As I got up to leave, on tiptoe so as not to disturb her; she stopped playing and said: One more thing, Theo. You've got to be in charge. It's got to be your baby. Be quiet, Mama. Drive carefully. And remember: I've promised you nothing.

  MEANWHILE the summer is intensifying. The daylight oppresses us, murky
and wearing, and even though the windows are closed tight, the powdery dust manages to get between my sheets. The asphalt road surface melts in the blast, and in the evening the walls release the residue of the heat. A southerly wind from over the hills brings a whiff of burning rubbish from the municipal dump, a sourish, scorched smell like a puff of bad breath. From the balcony I can sometimes see a Bedouin shepherd sprawled on the nearest hillside, a black figure among black goats, and the faint sound of his piping reaching me in broken snatches breeds peaceful detachment. What is he dreaming of, lying there motionless for hours on end in the shade of a sloping mass of rock? Some day I'll go across and ask him. I'll trail him to the caves in the mountains to the place where they say there is a nocturnal smugglers' route between Sinai and Jordan.

  My class 12 graduates have started to disperse. Some have been called up early, others are drifting around the town, racing their parents' cars along the deserted streets. Or prowling backwards and forwards in groups across the square by the lights. Five of them turned up in Theo's office to ask his advice, not in his professional capacity but to do with their plans for backpacking in Latin America. There's a story going around in the town about him living alone among the Indians in the jungle for ten years. Some people call him Sombrero behind his back. Although everybody here keeps a respectful distance from him.

  The battery and the oil pump of our rusty blue Chevrolet packed up within two days of one another. Jacques Ben Loulou from Ben Elul's Garage said, That's it, you should get rid of her. Theo screwed up his left eye, with a suspicious, peasant-like smile lurking in his grey moustache, and replied, What's the hurry? There's still some life in the old girl.

  Some Tali or another came to see me one morning to show me some poems she'd written. She didn't know whether to call me miss or Noa. I was surprised because I didn't imagine that she or her friends would still be writing poems. I found the poems themselves thin, anemic, and I was looking for a way of saying so without hurting her.

  Then I decided that I had no reason to discourage her: let her write. There was no harm in it. Who knew? Had Immanuel written poetry too? She had no idea. She didn't suppose so. But maybe he did actually—before he fell for that addict from Elat who taught him to sniff, he was in love with you up to here, so he might have written poems to you. With me? In love? What? Where did you get that idea from, Tali? Listen, Noa, first of all it's not Tali, it's Tal. Secondly, everyone knew. Knew? Knew what? How did they know? With an embarrassed, or perhaps disbelieving, smile on her lips: That's easy: it was written all over him. The whole class knew. What do you mean, did you really not notice, Noa? Seriously? Didn't you feel his love?

  I said no. And I could see she didn't believe me. When she had gone I remembered the wall of the concrete apartment block, so close to the window of the boxed-in balcony that was his tiny bedroom in Aunt Elazara's apartment: a grey, dusty, depressing wall. And I remembered the brown mug. And his clothes. Folding the sweater. The torn blanket at the foot of his bed, where the mute dog slept at night. And the upside-down open book about the end of the Jews of Bialystok.

  A couple of days later she turned up again, shy but excited, bringing me a new poem, and this time she agreed to have a cold Coke and some grapes with me on the balcony. She had written this poem under the inspiration she'd received from me the last time she came. She hoped she wasn't really bothering me. She found it quite tricky, this poetry thing, because she didn't have a lot of people she could show them to but on the other hand it is rather strange, isn't it, writing and writing and not showing them to anyone because there aren't a lot of people here to show them to. Apart from me, that is. She hopes it's not too heavy. Is she the only one in the class who tries to write poems? I dunno. I think so. We don't talk all that much. I mean, we talk lots, but not about that kind of thing. No way. So what do you talk about? All sorts of things. It's really hard to say. A bit about the army, about going abroad, about clothes and money, gossip, nothing special, this and that and that's it. Like on Friday evenings, after the disco, sometimes we get round to talking about what we're living for, there's this thing about the Far East and that, but that's just a few of us. Most don't. The boys are hooked on how to get into the real-action units, and what's cooler than what. Even though they're quite frightened about the army, and where it's screwing up most effectively—in the Territories or in South Lebanon, that sort of thing. Then there's the stuff about AIDS. We get to talk about that a bit too. And computers. And motorbikes.

  I asked her about drugs. Tal said that they were actually quite in favour of this project, the refuge, that Muki Peleg and I were going to bring here. It'll be a real monument, so people will remember Immanuel, not like just any old pillar with a nameplate on it. We're all really keen on it. But most of the parents are jittery, they're nervous about the image of the town and property values and all that. I asked her if, so far as she knew, there was a real drug problem in the school. Well, it's like this. There aren't many real addicts, but there are one or two who have a smoke on Friday evening. Yes, she said, she had experimented herself, slightly, but so far she hadn't managed to get really high, because she always got a headache right away. There weren't a lot of real junkies. At least, not in the circles she moved in. Maybe down in the Josephtal Estate they snort a bit. It's hard to tell. What about Immanuel? Well, it's like this, more or less. At the beginning there was this thing in the Hanukkah break when some of the guys took off and hung around in Elat. He went back there a few times after that by himself, but nobody really knows what happened with that girl, Martha. There are stories going round. That's true. I don't know what really happened and I think that nobody really knows because Immanuel was so withdrawn. It got worse after he fell for you. Maybe there's someone that knows more than I do, but the thing is, actually I'm not so sure that anyone really truly knows anything about anybody. At all. In the whole world. How can you? Everyone's on their own private island. There's lots of gossip. That's true. There's stories going round about you too. And about Theo and Muki. And Linda. You must have heard them. People talk. No, I don't want to go into all that now. It's just irritating. Are you saying you truly never picked any of it up, Noa? Didn't you spot that he was in love with you? Nothing at all? Never mind. Nobody knows anything about anybody. Specially about love. Love is a really destructive condition, she said. Two strangers who suddenly see each other, or they don't really see each other, they smell each other, and in no time at all they get more attached to each other than a brother and sister. They start sleeping together in the same bed, even though they're not from the same family. And very often they're not even friends, they don't even know each other, they just get hooked on each other, and the rest of the world can go jump. Just look how destructive it is, really. More people probably die from love than from drugs. They ought to fix it so there's some way of treating that too. Every time she thought about how little one person knew about another she felt like laughing and crying. And the weirdest thing was that it was impossible to change it. It didn't make any difference how much you invested in somebody, you could invest a hundred years day and night without a break, you could sleep in the same bed as him, it didn't help, in the end you wouldn't know the first thing about him. If she had any more poems, could she keep coming? And anyway in a few days Nira was due to have her first litter of kittens, Nira was her cat, she was ginger, quite kittenish herself, really funny, had the mannerisms of a countess, but she was so aloof, even if everybody pleaded with her, made a fuss over her, adored her, it wouldn't make a bit of difference—with beautiful stripes like a tigress, she was so lovely, dreamy, and sometimes she sort of smiled, grinned to herself in a superior kind of way. And to let her parents have the kittens put down, it really upset her; so she thought maybe she could bring us a kitten as a present? After all, you haven't got any children, maybe your husband would say yes.

  I told her that Theo wasn't my husband, that is, we weren't really married. Tal said, I've heard people talking about it, it doesn't
matter; they say all sorts of things, bla bla bla, anyway I feel like giving you a kitten. Well, 'bye then. About Theo, I really wanted to ask you something, I dunno, actually it doesn't matter.

  What about Theo?

  Nothing. It doesn't matter.

  What did you want to say about him?

  It doesn't matter. He's a special kind of person.

  Special in what way, Tal?

  Hard to say. A bit frightening.

  She put down the poem and left.

  Theo sat the whole evening mending the old typewriter, a forty-year-old Baby Hermes that I found after the second accident in one of my father's drawers. I'd never seen him using it. My aunt sometimes used it to tap out harsh letters to the paper against violence, cruelty or meat-eating. When the house was packed up I took it with me. He sat up till nearly midnight taking it apart and oiling it and putting it all back together again, with the tiny springs that join the arms of the keyboard to the battered keys. He had put on my glasses to help him see better. For an instant he looked to me like a patient Jewish watchmaker from an earlier generation: his slightly cocked head, his partly closed eye that looked larger through the lens of my glasses, his pursed lips under his grey moustache, his greying hair with its military cut, the set of the thick shoulders supporting the powerful neck, everything testified to the immense concentration that he was devoting to his work. I stood quietly behind his back, barefoot, for a few minutes, fascinated by the skill of his fingers. As if generations of fiddlers and scribes had a share in it.

  When he had finished repairing the typewriter I made us some herbal tea. Theo said he remembered the clever coffee with which I used to make men's heads spin in Caracas. Clever? Heads spin? Well, he was referring to the cognac and the Indian powder I laced men's coffee with to bewitch them so that they couldn't resist me. And the cactus essence I used to cure us both of relapsing fever. Listen, Theo, we could go to Galilee this summer instead. Why Galilee? Scandinavia. We could hire a red open-topped sports car and drive around the fjords. Or get a new car? Or adopt a kitten?