Scenes from Village Life

  3

  SHE WALKED FASTER, feeling more certain with each step that Gideon had indeed fallen asleep on the back seat and was now locked in the dark bus, parked for the night in front of Mirkin's house. She imagined him, woken by the cold and the sudden silence, trying to get out of the bus, pushing at the closed doors, thumping on the rear window. He had probably forgotten to bring his mobile phone, as usual, just as she had forgotten to take hers when she left home to go and wait for him at the bus stop.

  A fine rain had begun to fall, and the breeze had dropped. Crossing the dark clump of pines, she reached the faint streetlamp at the Olive Street exit of the Memorial Garden. Here she almost tripped on an overturned trash can. Carefully avoiding the can, Gili Steiner walked briskly up Olive Street. The shuttered houses were shrouded in a murky mist and the well-kept gardens seemed to be sleeping in the winter chill, surrounded by hedges of privet, myrtle or thuja. Here and there a splendid new villa, built on the ruins of an older house, leaned out over the street, covered in climbing plants. For some years now wealthy city people had been buying up old single-story houses in Tel Ilan, razing them to the ground and replacing them with larger villas adorned with cornices and awnings. Soon, Gili Steiner thought to herself, Tel Ilan would stop being a village and become a holiday resort for the wealthy. She was going to leave her own home to her nephew Gideon, and had already drawn up a will to that effect. She could see Gideon clearly now, wrapped in his warm overcoat, sleeping fitfully on the back seat of the locked bus, parked in front of Mirkin's house.

  She shivered in the cold as she crossed the corner of Synagogue Square. The drizzle had stopped now. An empty plastic bag billowed in the breeze and blew past her shoulder like a pale ghost. Walking faster, Gili Steiner turned from Willow Street into Cemetery Road, at the end of which Mirkin lived, across the road from the teacher Rachel Franco and her old father, Pesach Kedem. Once, when he was about twelve, Gideon had turned up alone at his aunt's house in Tel Ilan because he had quarreled with his mother and decided to run away from home. His mother had locked him in his room because he had failed an exam, and he had taken some money from her handbag, escaped by the balcony and come to Tel Ilan. He had a little bag with him, containing socks and underwear and one or two clean shirts, and he asked Gili to take him in. She hugged the boy, made him lunch, gave him the battered kangaroo he had played with when he was little, and then she rang his mother, even though relations between them were frosty. Gideon's mother came the next day and picked the child up without saying a single word to her sister, and Gideon gave in, sadly said goodbye to Gili, and was dragged away in silence, his hand tightly clasped in that of his furious mother. And another time, some three years before this evening, when Gideon was about seventeen, he had come to stay with Gili to shut himself away in the peace and solitude of the village while preparing for his biology exam. She was supposed to help him prepare, but instead, like conspirators, they had played endless games of checkers, most of which she won. She never allowed him to beat her. After each defeat he said to her in his sleepy voice, "Let's have just one more game." They sat up late every evening watching films on television, side by side on the sofa with a blanket over their knees. In the morning Gili Steiner went off to work at the clinic, leaving him some sliced bread, salad, cheese and a couple of hard-boiled eggs on the kitchen table. When she got home she found him asleep, fully dressed, on the sofa. He had tidied and cleaned the kitchen and neatly folded his bedclothes. After lunch they played checkers again, one game after another, almost without a word, instead of preparing for his exam. In the evening they watched a witty British comedy on television until nearly midnight, sitting shoulder to shoulder, wrapped in the blue blanket even though the heater was on, both laughing for once. The next day the boy went home, and two days later he managed to pass his biology exam despite the fact that he had hardly studied. Gili Steiner lied to her sister on the phone, saying that he had studied, that she had helped him, and that he was wonderfully organized and hard-working. Gideon sent his aunt a book of poems by Yehuda Amichai and thanked her on the flyleaf for her help in preparing for the biology exam. She replied with a picture postcard showing the view of Tel Ilan from the top of the water tower. She thanked him for the book and added that if he felt like coming to stay with her again, for instance if he had any more exams, he shouldn't be shy to ask. His room was always there for him.

  4

  MIRKIN, THE BUS DRIVER, a widower in his sixties with a broad rear end, had changed into casual clothes, a baggy pair of tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt advertising some company or other. He was surprised when Dr. Steiner suddenly knocked on his door and asked if he would come outside and check with her whether there was a passenger asleep on the back seat of his bus.

  Mirkin was a large, heavily built man; he was cheerful and chatty. His broad smile displayed big, uneven incisors and a tongue that protruded slightly over his lower lip. His guess was that Dr. Steiner's nephew had probably got off the bus at some stop along the way by mistake and was now hitchhiking to Tel Ilan. In his view Dr. Steiner should go home and wait for her nephew. Nevertheless, he agreed to get a flashlight and go with her to make sure that no passenger was trapped in the parked bus.

  "He's not there, for sure, Dr. Steiner, but if it'll make you happy, let's go and check. Why not?"

  "You don't happen to remember a tall, thin young man wearing glasses, a rather vague young man, but very polite?" she repeated.

  "I had several young lads on board. I think there was one clown with a backpack and a guitar."

  "And none of them came all the way to Tel Ilan? They all got off on the way?"

  "I'm sorry, Doctor. I don't remember. I don't suppose you've got some wonder drug to improve the memory? Recently I've been forgetting everything. Keys, names, dates, wallet, documents. If it goes on like this, I'll soon forget who I am."

  He opened the bus by pressing a hidden button under the step and climbed on board, stirring jerkily dancing shadows with his flashlight as he searched each row of seats. Gili Steiner got on after him and nearly crashed into his broad back as he advanced down the aisle. When he reached the back row he let out a low exclamation of surprise as he bent down and picked up a shapeless bundle. He spread out an overcoat.

  "That's not your visitor's coat, is it, by any chance?"

  "I'm not sure. Maybe."

  The driver flashed his light on the coat, and then on the doctor's face, her short gray hair, her square glasses, her thin, stern lips, and suggested that the young man might have been on board the bus, got off at the wrong stop and forgotten his overcoat.

  Gili felt the coat with both hands, sniffed it, then asked the driver to flash his light on it again.

  "I think it's his. I'm not sure, though."

  "Take it," the driver said magnanimously. "Take it home with you. After all, if another passenger comes along tomorrow asking for it, I know where you live. Can I give you a lift home, Dr. Steiner? It's going to start raining again soon."

  Gili thanked him and said there was no need, she would walk home, she had already bothered him more than enough on his time off. She got off the bus and the driver followed, lighting the steps for her with his flashlight. As she got off she put the coat on, and felt absolutely certain that it was Gideon's. She could remember it from the previous winter. A short, brown, shaggy coat. She enjoyed wearing it, and for an instant she had the impression that it held the young man's smell, not his smell now but when he was little, a faint smell of almond soap and porridge. The coat was only a little too big for her, and it was soft and pleasant to the touch.

  She thanked Mirkin again, and he repeated his offer to drive her home, but she assured him there was really no need, and left. The almost full moon emerged once more from the clouds to shed its pale, silvery light on the tips of the cypresses in the nearby cemetery. A wide, deep silence descended on the village, broken only by the lowing of a cow somewhere near the water tower, answered by distant dogs whose long, dim barkin
g subsided into a howl.

  5

  BUT PERHAPS IT wasn't Gideon's coat after all. It was quite possible that he had canceled his trip and forgotten to let her know. Or maybe his illness had got worse and he had been rushed back to the hospital. She knew from her sister that he had contracted a kidney infection in the middle of one of his courses at the Armored Corps training school, and had spent ten days in the nephrology department of the hospital. Her sister had forbidden her to visit him. The two sisters had been on bad terms for a very long time. It was because she had no information about the details of his illness, and was very anxious, that she had asked him on the phone to bring his medical records with him for her to take a look at. When it came to a diagnosis, she definitely did not trust any other doctor.

  Or perhaps he wasn't ill, but had boarded the wrong bus and fallen asleep, and woken up at the final stop in the dark in some strange village and was now wondering how on earth he would get to Tel Ilan. She must hurry home. What if at this very moment he was trying to phone her? Or perhaps he had managed to make his own way here and was sitting waiting for her on her front steps. Once, when he was eight, his mother had brought him here to stay during the winter holidays. She would bring him to stay with her sister during the holidays despite the long-standing rift between them. The first night he had nightmares. He groped his way in the dark to her room and crawled into bed with her, trembling with fear, his eyes wide open: there was a chuckling devil in his room that was reaching out to him with ten long arms and black gloves on its hands. She stroked his head and pressed him to her thin chest, but the child refused to be comforted and kept on making loud gasping sounds. So Gili Steiner decided to get rid of the cause of his fear, and forcibly dragged him, silent and paralyzed with terror, back to his bedroom. The child kicked and struggled, but, undeterred, she held him firmly by the shoulders and pushed and pulled him into the room. Switching on the light, she showed him that the source of his fear was merely a coat stand with some shirts and a sweater hanging from it. He did not believe her and struggled to get free, and when he bit her, she slapped him twice, once on each cheek, to put an end to his hysterics. At once, regretting what she had done, she hugged him and pressed his cheek to hers, and then let him sleep in her bed with his battered kangaroo.

  The next morning he seemed absorbed in his thoughts, but he did not ask to go home. Gili told him that he could sleep in her bed for the two nights that were left before his mother came to fetch him. Gideon made no mention of his nightmare. That night he insisted on sleeping in his own room, merely asking her to leave his door open and the light on in the hallway. At two o'clock in the morning he crawled into her bed, trembling, and slept in her arms. She lay awake, breathing in the smell of the gentle shampoo she had washed his hair with the previous evening, knowing that a deep, wordless bond tied them to each other forever, and that she loved this child more than she had loved any other being in the world, and more than she would ever love anyone else.

  6

  THERE WAS NOT another living soul to be seen in the village, apart from the alley cats gathered around the trash cans. The anxious voice of the TV newscaster made its way through the shuttered windows. In the distance, a dog barked as if under orders to shatter the peace of the village. Gili Steiner, still wrapped in the overcoat Mirkin had given her, tripped hurriedly past Synagogue Square and along Olive Street, and unhesitatingly took the shortcut across the darkened pinewood in the Memorial Garden. A night bird screeched out of the darkness, followed by the guttural croaking of frogs from the pond. She felt certain now that Gideon was sitting waiting for her in the dark on the steps in front of her locked front door. But then how could the coat she was now wearing have been left in Mirkin's bus? Perhaps she was wearing a stranger's coat after all. She began walking even faster. Gideon must be sitting there wearing his own coat, wondering what had happened to her. As she came out of the little wood, she was startled to see a figure sitting bolt upright, motionless, collar turned up, on a bench in the garden. After a moment's hesitation she boldly decided to get closer to have a look. It was merely a fallen branch, lying slantwise across the bench.

  By the time Gili Steiner got home it was close to nine o'clock. She switched on the light in the entrance hall, turned off the water heater and hurried to check for messages on the phone and also on her cell, which she had forgotten on the kitchen table. No messages, though somebody had rung and hung up. Gili rang Gideon's cell, but a recorded voice told her that the person she was calling was not available. She therefore made up her mind to swallow her pride and phone her sister in Tel Aviv to find out if Gideon had actually left or if he had decided to cancel the trip without telling her. The phone rang repeatedly, but there was no reply apart from the answering machine inviting her to leave a message after the beep. She decided not to leave a message, because she could not think of anything to say: if Gideon had got lost and was on his way now, having hitched a lift or taken a taxi, there was no point in alarming his mother. And if he had decided to stay at home, he would surely have told her. Or he might have thought it wasn't important enough to ring her about tonight, in which case he would ring her at work tomorrow morning. But maybe his condition had deteriorated and he had had to go back to the hospital? Maybe his temperature had shot up, the infection had recurred? At once she made up her mind to ignore her sister's veto and go to visit him in the hospital after work tomorrow. She would go to the staff room and have a word with the head of department. She would ask to be allowed to look at the results of his tests and form her own opinion.

  Gili took off the overcoat and looked at it under the kitchen light. The color was about right, but the collar seemed slightly different. She spread the coat out on the table, sat down on one of the two kitchen chairs and examined it carefully. The meal she had prepared for them, baked fish with baked potatoes, was ready to be reheated in the oven. She decided to wait for Gideon, and in the meantime switched on a little electric heater whose coils made soft popping sounds as they warmed up. She sat motionless for a quarter of an hour. Then she stood up and went to Gideon's room. The bed was made, at its foot was the warm rug, and on the bedside table were the newspapers, magazines and books that she had chosen for him. Gili lit the bedside lamp and plumped up the pillows. For an instant she had the feeling that Gideon had already been there, that he had slept the night, got up, made his bed and left, and she was once more on her own. Just as she remained alone in her empty house after each of his visits.

  She bent over to tuck the bottom corners of the blanket under the mattress. Going back to the kitchen, she sliced some bread, took the butter and cheese out of the refrigerator and put the kettle on. When the water boiled, she turned on the radio that stood on the kitchen table. Three voices were arguing about the continuing crisis in agriculture, interrupting one another rudely. She turned it off and looked out of the window. Her front path was faintly lit, and above the empty street the moon floated among broken low clouds. He's got a girlfriend, she suddenly thought, that's it, that's why he forgot to come and forgot to let me know: he's found himself a girl at last, so he has no reason to come and see me anymore. The thought filled her with nearly unbearable pain. As though she had been completely emptied and only her shriveled husk continued to hurt. He hadn't actually promised to come, he had just said that he would try to catch the evening bus, and she mustn't wait for him at the stop, because if he did decide to come tonight, he would make his own way to her house, and if he didn't come tonight, he'd come sometime soon, maybe next week.

  Nevertheless, Gili Steiner could not shake off the thought that Gideon had lost his way, that he had got on the wrong bus, or got off at the wrong stop, and was now probably stuck on his own in some godforsaken spot, shivering with cold at a deserted bus stop, huddled on a metal bench behind an iron railing, between a closed ticket office and a locked newsstand. And he didn't know how to reach her. It was her duty to get up and go, now, this very minute, into the darkness, to search for him and find
him and bring him safely home.

  Around ten o'clock Gili Steiner said to herself that Gideon would not come this evening and that there was really nothing for her to do except to warm up the fish and potatoes in the oven and eat them on her own, then go to bed and get up tomorrow before seven and go to the clinic to look after her irritating patients. She stood up, bent over, took the fish and potatoes out of the oven and threw them in the trash can. Then she switched off the electric heater, sat down in the kitchen, took off her square, frameless glasses and cried, but after a minute or two she stopped, buried the battered kangaroo in the drawer, took the laundry out of the dryer, and until almost midnight she ironed and folded everything and put it away. At midnight she undressed and got into bed. It had begun to rain in Tel Ilan, and it rained on and off all night.