Hang on a minute, Theo, I said.
Besides which, the money, if there is any, isn't yours, Noa. A big girl doesn't go shopping for toys with money which isn't hers. Besides which, you need to get through four or five committees for the change of use of the building, and I'm telling you seriously that you'll get a negative reply from all five. You also need to get local planning approval, and then -
All right. We understand. But why not go along and take a look anyway?
Besides which, there's the Town Hall. The administration. The Local Council. The District Council. Deposit and processing of plans. Hearing of objections. Appeals. Public opposition. Political opposition. Three years at least. Besides which, the Health Department, the Welfare Department, the Education Department. Another two years. Besides which, who owns the land? Besides which, the unanimous opposition of the neighbours, including court proceedings. Minimum five more years of legal hearings. Besides which, who exactly is the purchaser? Whose name is the property registered in? And how do you define the purpose? Besides which—shall I go on? Oh? Why not?
Muki Peleg mumbled softly: But there aren't that many neighbours.
Ah, welcome, Mr. Peleg Agency. So you're here, too. Bride's side or bridegroom's? Very well, give me a definition of neighbour. A legal definition, please, if that's not too hard for you. Go ahead: what is a neighbour precisely? And I'm not talking about a neighbour's wife.
Thank you, Theo. I think that'll do.
As you wish, he sniggered, with one eye contracted, as though peering at an insect through a fine lens, or as though looking at us through the viewfinder of a camera. Besides which—haven't I said that before?—didn't I promise not to interfere with your party? I forgot. Expunge it from the record. Sorry. See you. Carry on.
Having said this, he went on sitting, relaxed, his back resting against the side of the refrigerator, staring fixedly at his coffee cup, systematically plucking grapes from the bunch, his smaller left eye suddenly making him look like a miserly peasant who has managed to put a creditor off the scent.
Come on, angel, I said, Theo's absolved. Let's pop over there just the two of us and have a look, and then we'll call a meeting of the committee and make a decision.
Muki asked: Aren't you coming, Theo? Just for ten minutes?
Theo said: What for?
It was around nine p.m. when we finally managed to contact the lawyer, Arbel, on Muki's office phone. He arrived at midday the following day from Tel Aviv, bringing with him a surveyor and an assessor. We went back to the building four times that Sunday, with builders, roofers, fencers, plumbers, to compare estimates. I felt I was in a trance.
After the nine o'clock news Theo said: Right. I've been. I've seen it. Not bad. Your African can buy it if he likes. His decision. On condition you take care not to sign any document, Noa. No signature. Remember.
During Sunday night there was a telephone conversation between Arbel in the Kedar Hotel and Orvieto in the Ramada Hotel in Lagos. He was prepared to authorize the purchase, he had confidence in the people on the spot, but was unable to transfer the promised sum because there was not enough time. On Monday the school year ended and before the distribution of certificates there was a little ceremony in the School Hall. The Matriculation literature class had bought me a black wooden bowl with a bonsai orange tree in it. And on Tuesday the broken-tiled Alharizi house standing near the entrance to the industrial zone across from Ben Elul's garage was sold for the shekel equivalent of eighty-one thousand dollars, and registered in the name of the Immanuel Orvieto Memorial Fund, whose official address was henceforth do Cherniak, Refidim and Arbel, Lawyers, 90 Rothschild Boulevard, Tel Aviv. Theo advanced us most of the money on the surety of Ron Arbel in the name of Avraham Orvieto, and on condition that neither his name nor mine would appear in any connection in the deeds of sale or ownership. And since we went to Tel Aviv that Tuesday to be present at the signing of the contract, we were able to go together and compare various possible options at our leisure. It was in Ben Yehuda Street of all places that we finally found a pretty, light summer dress that delighted us both: the colour was somewhere between blue and green, it had a simplified pattern reminiscent of wide tropical leaves, and it left the shoulders almost bare. We were home before dark, and together from the balcony we saw that the moon was still waning.
BECAUSE once she told me about her mother, who went off with a soldier from New Zealand when Noa was four. They were both torn to pieces by an enraged tigress whose cubs had been killed by an English hunter, so her aunt used to tell her when she was little on winter nights after lights out and before she fell asleep. This aunt, Chuma Bat-Am, was a Tolstoyan vegan, a resolute enemy of any act of violence, a determined woman in thick orthopedic shoes who used to fast every Wednesday, so as to remind her body that it was only a servant, and a pretty lazy, loathsome one at that, an unworthy servant who must not be left alone for a moment. Noa's father, Nehemia Dubnow, a retired employee of the water company, a stocky, hirsute individual, melancholy, always negligently shaved, shut himself up at home from the day her mother ran off with the soldier. Every day when he came home from work at dusk he would shut the gate, lock the front door on the inside, and withdraw to the inner room where he lived in the evening surrounded by his albums of picture postcards. All in a determined silence punctuated by occasional fits of blind rage. Each evening, summer and winter alike, after an omelette and salad, he would sit down and write postcards with views of the Tower of David in Jerusalem or of Bethlehem, which he sent to collectors in other countries. In exchange they sent him postcards from Haiti, Surinam, New Caledonia and other places where the sky is not blue but almost turquoise and the sea at dawn looks like beaten gold. He would sit up till close on midnight sorting and cataloguing the collection according to an organizing logic that changed every month or two. With the passage of the years he became heavier, like an ageing sumo wrestler; he grew fleshy protuberances, his eyes sank under layers of fat, and his occasional attacks of rage were followed by prolonged bouts of sullen apathy. Noa received the duplicate postcards: her task was to arrange a kind of shadow collection between the pages of the telephone directory, parallel to the main collection and subject to the same ever-changing logic. Apart from the aunt and her weird son, Yoshku, not a soul came to the house. Its shutters were closed in winter because of the wind and in summer because of the dust. It was a small house that stood at the eastern extremity of a remote village in the Hefer Valley, facing a ruined synagogue dating from the time of the first settlers. Beyond the house there was nothing but a forsaken henhouse, some remains of cultivation, rusty railway lines and a fence marking the armistice line, on the Jordanian side of which stretched rocks and olive trees. Two years ago we went to look at the spot and found the house had been demolished and a gaudy water park had been built on the site of the house and the synagogue, with a souvenir shop and a kiosk. The border fence had been erased. In 1959 when Noa was fifteen Nehemia Dubnow fell down a disused well and broke his spine. He was permanently consigned to a wheelchair. From that time on she looked after him. She did not want to marry because she did not see how he could live without her and because he did not remarry after his wife left him. During her army service the cripple was cared for by his elder sister, Aunt Chuma, who was opposed on principle to all heating in the winter and banished frying as well as most other forms of cooking. Under her rule the house was run to a strict timetable and in absolute obedience to a rota of household chores, three copies of which were posted at various points around the place. There was a clinging smell of mint, summer savoury and garlic in the rooms. Even when the aunt went off for a day or two in her thick orthopedic shoes to hunt for mysterious roots in the Carmel range, the smell of spices still lingered. Digestive, medicinal and rejuvenating herbs grew in pots and basins on the roof and on every windowsill. When Noa returned from the army she had to fight for three years for her right to care for the invalid whose body was swelling like a soaked sponge. Eventually at t
he end of a murky day during a heatwave, the aunt bit the secretary of the Local Council during a clash about digging up a lemon tree; the next day she lay in wait for him and poured boiling oil over him, and she was about to do the same to Noa when a neighbour, Peeping Gorovoy, who claimed the title of weightlifting champion of Lodz in the 1910s, ran across from his garden and, after a struggle, managed to overpower her. After undergoing various treatments, Aunt Chuma was put in a private institution devoted exclusively to vegans afflicted with emotional disturbances, that had been set up by a pacifist family from Holland. Noa got her father back, and in addition to doing the cooking and cleaning she took over responsibility for the postcard collection and the correspondence with collectors around the world. She pulled up the medicinal and rejuvenating herbs and planted flowers in the pots instead. Every Wednesday she went to see her aunt in the Mahatma Gandhi Sanatorium and took her untreated fruit and vegetables that had never encountered a grain of chemical fertilizer. At the end of her life Chuma Bat-Am was overcome by a particular hatred of potato crisps, mustard and stuffed intestines, and denounced all kinds of roast meat in detailed and highly coloured language. She died in the garden of the clinic at ten o'clock in the morning, of a knitting needle thrust through the right eye into the brain by a fellow patient, just as the inmates were being served with their morning tea and its accompaniment of three rusks and a tangerine. As for Nehemia Dubnow, the more he aged and grew fatter, till he looked like a beaten wrestler, the more Noa had the impression that he became jollier, as though his anger had run out or he had completed his share of self-mortification. He sang in his hoarse voice, told jokes, imitated politicians, entertained Noa with gossipy stories about the leaders of the third wave of immigration and the founders of the water company. He lost interest in his picture postcards. More and more he saw life, ideas, words, human doings in general, as ridiculous, self-contradictory things that revealed only foolishness and hypocrisy. Every morning Noa took him up on the roof in his wheelchair. He had a powerful telescope and the old man enjoyed spending hours on end watching the road below. Sometimes a tractor went past, or a girl on a donkey, or a group of Arab workers on their way home from the orchards. Like Peeping Gorovoy, Nehemia Dubnow too began to use his telescope to explore the neighbours' lives through their windows that were left open all summer long: a lone, amused spectator of a farce involving everyone bar himself. Seventeen years after the first accident he had another. Noa popped out to the grocer's one evening to buy some oil and onions, and when she came back in the last glimmer of daylight she found that her father had fallen from the roof terrace in his wheelchair. Turning the wheels of the chair with his strong hands, he had been propelling his mountainous body as usual like a charging tank from one end of the roof to the other when he had burst through the railings and fallen over the edge. When she discovered that her father had put the house in the name of her cousin Yoshku, she took it as a sign that the last chance had arrived for her to break free and start living, which for her meant primarily going to a university. This Yoshku, Noa's only relative, was the son of Chuma Bat-Am by a violinmaker from Leipzig who had ended up as an officer in the fire brigade in Hadera. Their affair lasted, according to her father, three and a half weeks. By the time Yoshku was born, the violinmaker-turned-fireman was in Brussels, married to a musician in the Flemish Ensemble. For several years the aunt and the child lived in a rented room in Haifa, with two iron bedsteads, a packing case for the clothes, and a washbasin in the corner hidden by a plastic curtain. Islands of mould were spreading over the pale blue of the curtain. The aunt worked two days a week as a secretary for the League of Pacifists and she also had a part-time job with the Vegan Association. Every evening she went out, in battle order, like a frigate dispatched to relieve a besieged port, to a meeting of the Council for the Advancement of Understanding Among Races and Creeds. Yoshku was brought up for several years on the Tolstoy Youth Farm, until he ran away to his mother, and subsequently he sneaked away on occasion to his crippled, irascible uncle and his cousin in whose presence he either talked and talked without stopping or else said nothing all day long. Then he disappeared from Haifa, lived for three months in an Arab village in Galilee from where he sent Noa a passionate twenty-eight-page love letter, took part in strikes and demos, had two poems published in a magazine, and at seventeen made it into the newspapers, which published detailed accounts of the boy from a pacifist home who undertook conversion to Islam to avoid military service; one leading article even called on the leftist camp to stop and do some soul-searching. Eventually the young man made contact with a small Hasidic sect, or maybe the sect's emissaries made contact with him. Once the army had released him on account of his nerves, the Hasidim took him to Brussels. This was in 1961, when Noa was called up and started serving in the headquarters of Army Education. Aunt Chuma, who was alone now, left her rented room in Haifa and went to look after her crippled brother in his house at the eastern extremity of the village on the east side of the Hefer Valley. Until she was killed by a knitting needle in a private clinic. When Noa's father died it turned out that the reason he had left the house not to her but to Yoshku was "in the hope that he will return from the malignant Diaspora and strike new roots in the soil of the Sharon". Yoshku neither returned from the Diaspora nor struck new roots in the Sharon but instead hired from Brussels a lugubrious ultra-Orthodox lawyer resembling a well-mannered coffin salesman, who explained to Noa regretfully in a pleasant tenor voice that the only way she could appeal against the will was to go to court and declare coram publico that her late father was not of sound mind when he made it, or that it was intended as a joke, or, alternatively, that at the time he was under pressure from an extortionist, namely his sister Chuma Zamosc Bat-Am, and therefore the bequest was not valid. However, the lawyer declared, you have hardly any chance of establishing either of these claims with evidence that will satisfy a court of law, and you are liable to end up covered in shame and confusion as well as empty-handed, having moreover represented yourself publicly as a daughter who groundlessly reviles the memory of her late father may he rest in peace and also that of her late aunt peace be upon her, and adds one sin to another in an unprovoked offence against your only relative, who only wants to rescue you or at least to assist you. In sum, the family will come out of it covered in mire from head to foot, and you will end up gaining nothing, not a single penny, whereas if you are wise enough to refrain from a lawsuit, I shall sign here and now, here is my power of attorney, in the name of my client Yoshiahu Sarshalom Zamosc, a statement to the effect that he grants you, of his own free will and through no legal requirement, as a gift and not as an obligation, a quarter of the value of the property, as a goodwill gesture and in obedience to the commandment not to abandon one's own flesh and blood.
So it came about that at the age of thirty-two she left the house that had been her home, packing all her belongings in three suitcases, and sending the collection of picture postcards as a gift to the Mahatma Gandhi Sanatorium, and went to study literature at Tel Aviv University surrounded by students who were ten years younger. After that she became a secondary school teacher in Bat Yam, lived once or twice with older men, had an abortion with complications and finally, for six months, lived with a famous professor, originally from Prague, who in his retirement was devoting himself to preparing a revised edition of an Essence of Judaism in six large volumes. This professor was a sour, sarcastic man, and his hobby, from his youth on, had been piano-tuning. Whatever the time, whatever the weather, he was always ready to set off for anywhere, with his little bag of instruments under his arm. He was not a young man, nor a well man, and he would tune a piano for nothing. So long as it was a real, pre-war piano. One day the professor accepted an invitation to spend the remaining years of his retirement in the guesthouse of the Catholic University of Strasbourg, where he hoped to discover afresh, peacefully, the essence of Judaism. Noa felt she, too, ought to leave the country for a year or two, to find out whether some other kind o
f life were possible. Friends arranged a part-time job for her in Venezuela. It was there, in Caracas, thanks to some concert tickets, that we met. Since then we have been tied to each other.
AFTER the nine o'clock news and the weather forecast, Theo said, Let's switch off and go out for a bit. I changed out of the dress I wore around the house and put on jeans, a red top and white walkers. Theo was wearing walkers too, and jeans with a broad belt. Going down in the elevator we hugged and I buried my face in his shoulder. His body was warmer than mine and the belt gave off a smell of old leather and sweat. I said: You're always so warm.
Theo said: You're on holiday as from yesterday. What are you going to do, Noa?
I said: The clinic. Immanuel House. Only I wish we hadn't had to take your money. That wasn't good. I mean, I don't feel good about it. Avraham's going to repay it all next week.
Theo said: Avraham: who's that?
And a moment later: Oh yes. Your African. It's not urgent.
There was no one in the street. A row of parked cars and a row of streetlights, some of them not working. Some pathetic trees, Indian beech, eucalyptus, tipuana, grew as though they had difficulty breathing. The trees, in fact the whole street, suddenly looked to me like an amateur stage set. The windows of the apartments were open and from almost every one came the voice of Housing Minister Sharon shouting at his interviewers. A dry breeze blew from the hills to the east. A startled cat suddenly slunk out from the trash cans and almost tripped us. I put my arm round his waist and laid it on the broad belt, which was rough to the touch. The metal buckle gave my fingers a cold thrill. Shabby staircases showed in the entrances to the buildings in a murky light that seemed to infect the mailboxes, too.