Don't Call It Night

  He took off the glasses, lowered his head as if to butt, and slowly scratched his neck. He squinted at me obliquely, as though he had managed to decipher a dangerous plot. After a ruminative silence he declared that he had a shopping list in his head. First, a small desk for the corner of my bedroom. Second, a high-powered reading lamp. Third, how about a word processor instead of that wreck of a typewriter that would soon break down again, because its term of office was long since over. Although actually there was life in the old girl yet. And by the way, what did Benizri say when you went to see him yesterday? Same as last time? Or was he prepared to meet you halfway? Sorry. Question abandoned.

  I hugged him from behind and enjoyed the warmth of his shoulders against my breasts and the way I made the bristles stand up on the back of his neck. For your information, I said argumentatively, Benizri is beginning to soften. If Batsheva Dinur gives him the green light he is willing to recommend setting up a fact-finding team. If I were you, Theo said, putting his arm round my waist, I would look for a compromise. I might go for a modular concept, a gentle start-up period, with, say, something like seven or eight patients in the first year, not more, running the place as a residential centre, with good fences, and, at least in the first phase, with hardly any link with the community. That way the opposition would die down. And another thing: if I were you I'd insist on putting it on a sound businesslike basis, at least a thousand dollars a month per patient, starting with kids from well-to-do homes, and to keep the town happy we should take in an addict or two from local families, with an eighty percent reduction. And the whole thing has to be subject to rigorous public scrutiny, with a business licence that could follow on a legally binding agreement between the foundation and the Town Council. I would write into the agreement that the Council should reserve the right, on the grounds of public interest, not to renew the licence at the end of the year. What's more, I'd be willing to renounce from the outset, in writing, the right to take legal action if the licence were not renewed. This concept seems to me to be the only chance of making any headway. Let's say, to gain a bridgehead here. That's the way I would couch the proposal if I were in your shoes. And even then it's pretty chancy.

  But Theo, you're not in my shoes, I said.

  Theo said: Yes. No.

  Yes and no?

  I meant yes, Noa, I'm not in your shoes.

  A girl said to me today that she thinks nobody can know anything about another person.

  Know. What does knowing mean?

  The water's still boiling. Let's have some more tea. Knowing means getting outside yourself. At least trying to. Now and again.

  Do you remember once, in Caracas, you said that a couple of teachers without children would spend their whole time correcting each other. And you said it wouldn't be easy but it wouldn't be boring. That's what you said, Noa. Even so, there are moments when I really am in your shoes and I wish you were in mine.

  That's enough talking. Let's make love.

  What here? In the kitchen?

  Come on. Right away.

  I switched off the overhead light and undid his wide leather belt that smelled of old leather and sweat, and snuggled into his hairy chest. My fingers tried to do the same to him as his fingers had done when he was mending my typewriter. Afterwards we stood outside on the balcony in the dark and saw the quicksilver river that the moon was sketching across the hills all the way to the horizon. We were standing very close but without touching or talking, and that is how we slowly sipped herbal tea and listened to the sound of a night bird that we could not name.

  AND once she told me about a young traveller from Ireland whom she picked up in the car on the way to a conference of literature teachers near Tiv'on. It was at four o'clock in the afternoon on a rainy December day a year and a half ago. Because it was foggy and the days were so short she had to turn her headlights on early. The moment she did so they picked out a long-haired figure who looked from a distance like a girl, standing by the roadside weighed down by a huge backpack, making a waving sign that is not usual in Israel. When the young man climbed into the car she noticed his boots were full of water. They were large, clumsy boots that reminded her of the lace-up boots that her Aunt Chuma used to wear as she charged around the house or went out to gather medicinal herbs on the slopes of Mount Carmel. As he sat down beside her with his backpack on his lap she noticed a strip of cloth sewn across it bearing the words: "ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE". Both the youth and the backpack were drenched.

  He had set out from his home in Galway the previous evening and hitchhiked across Ireland overnight, then flown from Dublin to Birmingham, from where he had arrived two hours earlier on a charter flight. He was on his way now to look for a girl called Daphne who was apparently working as a volunteer in a kibbutz somewhere in Galilee. He did not know her surname, or the name of the kibbutz. Daphne. She was from Liverpool. They had recently spent a single night together. As they were parting she had told him that she was off to Galilee soon. He had not seen her since. She loved sheep and wide open spaces. Her dream was to be a shepherdess. He had never been in Israel before, but he had a map and you could see on it that Galilee was not a very big area. He could go from one kibbutz to another until he found her. He wasn't short of time. In fact, he claimed, being short of time was self-defeating and went against the secret of life. If his money ran out, he would try to get some temporary work somewhere, whatever turned up, he didn't care, back home he was a carpenter's mate, in Portugal he had put up telephone lines, in Copenhagen he had once appeared in a small cabaret singing folksongs from the west of Ireland. Anyone who has some goodwill can find goodwill everywhere. So he said. Noa suddenly noticed that he was ill. He looked feverish. When he stopped talking his teeth chattered even though she had put the heat on. Two winters ago the heater in the Chevrolet still worked. Excuse me, she said sternly, as though reprimanding a lazy pupil, but do you happen to know how many kibbutzim there are in Galilee? Where exactly are you planning to begin this search for this Daphne of yours? He did not reply. He may not even have heard her. The movement of the windshield wipers may have hypnotized him and put him to sleep. It was twenty-four hours since he had left home, he probably hadn't slept all night, yesterday he had had a soaking in Ireland and before he had had a chance to dry out he had got soaked again here. And he looked to her as though he had a high temperature. His head slumped forward on his backpack and his sodden fair hair flopped over his face. She thought he looked like a girl again.

  As they entered Qiryat Tiv'on she stopped the car. She woke him up and told him, for some reason, that in the northern tip of Galilee there was a kibbutz called Dafna, and she showed him on his map where it was. Then she dropped him off, with his backpack that looked like a wet mass of rock. After a moment she stopped and looked in the rearview mirror, but she was dazzled by the lights of an oncoming truck, and all she could see behind the car was an unlighted telephone box in the rain.

  After registering, she left her things in the bedroom, where two teachers twenty years younger than herself, one of them very pretty, had already settled in, and went to the opening lecture, which was on the subject of whether there is such a thing as women's literature or feminine literature and, if so, what its particular characteristics are. After a quarter of an hour she got up suddenly and went outside to the parking lot in the rain, started the car and went to look for her hitchhiker at the spot where she had dropped him off, just before Qiryat Tiv'on, because she felt she ought to take him to see a doctor. Perhaps she also wanted to ask him how shortage of time is self-defeating and what he had meant when he said that anyone who has some goodwill can find goodwill everywhere. But when she got there she didn't find the boy, only the unlighted telephone box in the mud by the roadside.

  Instead of going back to the conference she turned northwards at the T-junction and drove through the thickening fog along roads she did not know, until she noticed that she was almost out of gas and pulled into a filling station near the village of Maj
d el-Kurum. The filling station was closed, but a couple of young men were sitting inside under a bright neon light, apparently totting up the day's accounts. Seeing her silhouetted at the locked door they hesitated and whispered to one another, then one of them got up and opened the door, jokingly remarking that they had taken her for a robber and filled the tank for her. His companion offered her coffee and said, You're not the first visitor we've had tonight, lady, look what we've got here. In a corner of the office, on the greasy floor, curled up and swaddled like a fetus in a grubby blanket, she saw the shock of flaxen hair and she woke him and said, Let's go and find you a doctor.

  He trailed after her to the car, drowsy, silent, feverish, and not at all surprised to see her: as though he had not doubted that she was destined to find him and pick him up again that night. He sat down next to her again, his teeth chattering, his backpack with its love slogan dripping into his lap, and after two minutes he fell asleep. He may not even have waked up when she dragged him out of the filling station. His head landed on her shoulder and his blond hair fell over her chest. His heat penetrated through her sweater and wet the hollow of her neck. At the junction after Majd el-Kurum she turned right, because she had made up her mind to go back to the conference centre, wake up a doctor or a nurse, and in the morning sit down at the telephone and try every kibbutz in turn until she found his Daphne or at least located a place where they would take him in and give him some work. But she lost her way, fog and water obscured the windows on the outside and the inside misted up with their breath, and close on midnight she passed Kibbutz Mazzuva and noticed an illuminated sign indicating a hostel in a few miles. She decided to get them a room for what was left of the night. After a few bends the engine died. She parked in a turnout under tall eucalyptus trees lashed by the winds and sat waiting for morning. His head was in her lap by now. She pulled the blanket off the back seat and spread it over him and over herself, so that he should not freeze to death. Then she fell asleep too. When she was awakened by the grey light of dawn she found that the rain had stopped and the hitchhiker had vanished with his backpack. For a moment she feared for her handbag, which contained her papers, keys and cash, but a short search revealed it in the space between her seat and the door. At half past six a police patrol car drew up. A middle-aged Arab policeman flashed his gold teeth at her, reprimanded her for taking risks, and managed to get the engine started. At eight o'clock, back at the conference centre, she called me at the office and told me her story, and asked me to try to find her sick passenger. Maybe there was a girl from Liverpool called Daphne, working with sheep, on the register of kibbutz volunteers? Or maybe the Ministry of the Interior would have a record of a young Irishman from Galway who had landed in Israel yesterday?

  I thought the chances were remote, but something in her voice on the phone made me promise to try. I spent the morning dialling all over the place, I even located a couple of highly placed acquaintances I hadn't had any contact with for twenty years and called them on her behalf, but naturally it was useless. All I got at the other end of the line was perplexity or bewilderment barely disguised as polite surprise. She got home that evening, having abandoned her conference, surprised me in the kitchen, dishevelled, feverish, trembling, seized me, hid her face in my shoulder and started to cry. I took her frozen, veiny, old woman's hands in mine and tried to warm them. Then I ran a hot bath, took off her clothes and put them straight in the laundry basket, soaped and rinsed her, dried her in a thick bath towel and wrapped her in a warm dressing gown. I almost carried her to her bed. I made a pot of tea and poured her a cup, leaving the rest in a Thermos by the bed. Then I rang for the doctor. Noa slept for sixteen hours. When she woke up she stared at me blankly for ten minutes, looking distant and forlorn. I gave her some herbal tea with honey and lemon. She only took a sip, then suddenly she exploded in a rage at me, with a kind of strident hatred she had never displayed before, except perhaps on rare occasions when she tried to amuse me by imitating her father's fits of fury, because I had added a spoonful of cough syrup that the doctor had prescribed and that she had obstinately refused to take. She raised her voice and shouted painfully that I was trying to baby her again, that I was a dead weight on her life, oppressing and depressing her so that she would age prematurely, this apartment was just a cage, Tel Kedar was a penal colony, and I shouldn't be surprised to wake up one morning and find myself alone like an old dog, and maybe that was exactly what I wanted.

  By next morning she felt better. Her temperature was down and her joints were less painful. She asked me to forgive her. She apologized. She sat down in front of the mirror and made herself up carefully, much more than usual, and, still facing the mirror with her back to me, told me again about the Irish hitchhiker she had lost. Then she put on a green pantsuit that suited her very well and went to school so as not to have to put off a test. I had intended to stop her, because the doctor had ordered several days' rest, but on careful reflection I decided to say nothing. Still, as she stood in the doorway I couldn't stop myself saying, almost in a whisper, Maybe you ought to stay here. For a moment she looked at me, amused, and suddenly she said, not angrily, Don't worry, I'll come back to you. You took lovely care of me.

  Since that December morning a year and a half ago she has never said a word about her hitchhiker. And I haven't mentioned him either. A week after she recovered she called me at work one day and asked me to come home late, at seven instead of five. I got back at seven fifteen to find that she had made us a splendid three-course dinner with sparkling wine and a dessert. But I still had to put the car in for major repairs. Jacques Ben Loulou from Ben Elul's Garage said, Look here, she's really been in the wars, somebody's been driving her over stones and rocks and then got stuck in the mud, and after that she's got bent, here, here as well, because she wasn't towed properly. It's none of my business, Theo, but you can take it from me that whatever the true story is, it isn't a nice one.

  At one or two in the morning, alone on the balcony facing the silent plain, I sometimes imagine her solitary traveller wandering still among the empty hills of Galilee. Looking for his Daphne in the sheepfolds, or maybe he's abandoned the search and still travels on slowly, aimlessly, along deserted roads. Anyone who has some goodwill can find goodwill everywhere. I still haven't the faintest idea what this means, but the music of the words pleases me more and more. And now he's falling asleep, his breathing is light and even, he looks like a pretty girl, with his head on his heavy backpack, and his flaxen hair falling like a fine veil over his face that I have never seen, alone in the evening light in an uninhabited place, in a remote and pleasant valley where there are birds and a wood and a spring. Or it's not the carpenter's apprentice from Ireland but me lying there, at the foot of the trees, sleeping in the light breeze among peaceful shadows in a valley where there is nothing but a spring and a wood and a bird, and why should I ever want to wake?

  IN the morning when he left for his office I went back to the kitchen and continued reading Youngsters in the Trap. I jotted down various details that I intended to follow up. There are three public rehabilitation centres in the Tel Aviv area: one in the Hatikvah district, another in Jaffa, and the third in Neve Eliezer. None of the three is actually a residential centre. Hashish and opium are mainly smuggled from Lebanon. Recently the use of crack, an impure form of cocaine, has become widespread. The hard drug that is most readily available on the market is Persian coke. Most users need one dose in the morning and another in the evening, and its advantage is that its effects continue for several hours and the addict under its influence can continue to function apparently normally. Up to a point at least. As for rehabilitation, some undergo it in prison, whereas other people are actually exposed to drugs for the first time during extended periods of imprisonment. The attempt to keep those undergoing treatment in the company of others who have been cured, and isolated from their usual surroundings, has pros and cons. The dramatic phase of the cure is the "withdrawal", which lasts on average ten days o
r so but can be as brief as a week and sometimes extends for three weeks or more. The ordeal usually reaches its peak on the second or third day, and is marked by pains, nausea, convulsions and fits of depression or aggression. In extreme cases suicide can occur. Sleeping pills and painkillers as well as intensive massage can alleviate, but do not remove, the withdrawal symptoms. It is recommended to spend the period of withdrawal at home, under constant supervision, with the involvement of the family and an expert team and occasionally also a support group of former addicts who have successfully kicked the habit. This is on condition the family home constitutes a supportive environment and not an aggravating factor, in which case a clean break is preferable. Withdrawal is followed by a period of detoxification lasting six months to a year. During this period it is advisable to keep track of the patient's progress by means of frequent urine tests, although it is possible to cheat the tests by bringing specimens of someone else's urine. It is best not to incarcerate youngsters who have started using drugs but to put them under the supervision of a probation officer and compel them and their families to commit themselves to a custom-built programme of treatment. In the following chapter I read that the heavy addict is someone who lives exclusively on the emotional level, which is why any emotional injury is liable to make him backslide into his old ways. I found the expression "make him backslide into his old ways" wrong and even offensive, while "emotional level" struck me as a crude expression.

  Should I go to Elat tomorrow?

  Should I look for a girl called Martha?