"Sorry for what?"
"It's time for me to go," he said.
"Out of the question," Vermont erupted, as though offended beyond his powers of forbearance. "You're not walking through that door. The night is still young. Sit down. Let's watch something on the VCR. What do you like? Comedy? A thriller? Maybe something a little racy."
Now he remembered that it was Netta who several times had urged him to call on these neighbors, and almost forbidden him to stay in by himself. And to his own surprise he said: "All right. Why not." He sat down again in the armchair and stretched his legs out comfortably on the footrest, and added: "I don't mind. Whatever you choose will be fine for me." Through the webs of tiredness he noticed a hurried whispering between brother and sister, who stretched her arms so that the sleeves of her kimono opened out like the wings of a bird in flight. She left the room and came back wearing a different kimono, a red one, and affectionately rested her hands on her brother's shoulders as he bent over and tinkered for a moment with the VCR. When he finished he straightened up heavily and tickled her under her ears the way one pets a cat to make it purr. They poured Yoel another Dubonnet, the lighting in the room changed, and the television screen began to flicker. Even if there is some simple way of liberating the predator in the figurine from the torment of its trapped paw without breaking it or hurting it, there is still no answer to the question how and where a creature will leap if it has no eyes. The source of the torment, after all, is not in the point of fusion between the base and the paw, but somewhere else. Exactly as the nails in the Byzantine crucifixion scene were delicately fashioned and there was not a drop of blood exuding from the wounds, so that it was clear to the observing heart that it was not a matter of liberating the body from its attachment to the cross but liberating the youth with the feminine features from the prison of the body. Without breaking or causing further pain and torment. With a slight effort Yoel managed to concentrate and to reconstruct in his thoughts:
Boyfriends.
Crises.
The sea.
And the city at your fingertips.
And they shall be one flesh.
And rest in peace.
Shaking off his thoughts he saw that Ralph Vermont had softly left the room. Perhaps at this moment by secret agreement with his sister he was peeping through a crack in the wall, perhaps through a tiny pinhole in the boughs of one of the conifers in the sylvan backcloth. Silent, childlike, flushed, Annemarie sprawled on her back on the rug at his side, ready for a little love. Which Yoel was not ready for at that moment, because of the tiredness or because of the sadness that was inside him, but he was ashamed of his limpness and decided to lean forward and stroke her head. She took his ugly palm between her own hands and placed it on her breast. Pulling at a copper chain with her toes, she dimmed the forest lights still further. As she did so her thighs were exposed. Now he had no doubt that her brother was watching them and taking part, but he did not care, and in his heart he repeated the words "Itamar or Eviatar, what difference does it make now?" The leanness of her flesh, her hunger, her sobbing, the projection of her fine shoulder blades under the thin skin, unexpected nuances of little modesties within her eager yielding—there flickered through his head the shame in the attic, the thistles that surrounded his daughter, and Edgar Linton—Annemarie whispered in his ear: You're so considerate, so compassionate. And indeed from moment to moment he no longer considered the thrill of his own flesh, as though he had taken leave of his flesh and clothed himself in the flesh of the woman he was attending to, as though he were bandaging a tortured body, soothing a tormented soul, healing a little girl's suffering, attentive and precise to his fingertips, until she whispered to him: Now. And he, flooded with mercy and generosity, for some reason whispered back: Suit yourself.
When the comedy on the VCR was finished, Ralph Vermont returned and served coffee with special little mint chocolates wrapped in green foil. Annemarie left the room and returned this time wearing a burgundy blouse and baggy corduroy pants. Yoel looked at his watch and said, Well, comrades, it's the middle of the night, time for bed. At the door the Vermonts urged him to come and visit them again whenever he had a free evening. The ladies were all invited too.
Feeling limp and drowsy he walked across from their house to his, humming an emotional old Yaffa Yarkoni song. He stopped for a moment to say "Shut your trap, Ironside" to the dog, then went on humming and remembered Ivria asking him what had happened, why was he suddenly so happy, and answering her that he had found an Eskimo mistress, and her laughter and almost at that very moment his own discovery of how eager he was to deceive the Eskimo mistress with his own wife.
That night Yoel collapsed on his bed fully dressed and fell asleep almost as soon as his head touched the pillow. He only managed to remind himself that he had to return the yellow sprayer to Krantz and that it might after all be a kindness to make a date to see Odelia and listen to her troubles and complaints, because it's pleasant to be a good man.
23
At half past two in the morning Yoel was awakened by a hand on his forehead. For a few moments he did not stir, but went on pretending to be asleep, enjoying the gentle touch of the fingers that smoothed the pillow under his head and stroked his hair. But suddenly panic hit him and he sat up abruptly. Hurriedly switching on the light he asked his mother what the matter was and clasped her hand in his.
"I had a horrible dream. They were getting rid of you and the Arabs came and took you."
"It's all because of your quarrel with Avigail. What's the matter with the two of you? Just you make your peace with her tomorrow, and put an end to it all."
"Inside a sort of carton they put you. Like a puppy."
Yoel got out of bed. Gently but firmly he maneuvered his mother to the armchair, sat her down in it, and wrapped her in a blanket from his bed.
"Sit here for a while. Calm down. Then go back to sleep."
"I never slep. I got pains. I got bad thoughts."
"So don't sleep. Just sit here quietly. There's nothing for you to be frightened of. Do you want to read a book?"
And he got back into his bed and switched the light out. But he was quite unable to get back to sleep with his mother in the room, even though he could not even hear her breathing in the darkness. He imagined she was walking around the room without making a sound, peering into his books and notes in the dark, reaching into the unlocked safe. He turned the light on again quickly and saw his mother asleep in the armchair. Reaching out for the book by his bedside he remembered that Mrs. Dalloway had been left behind in the hotel in Helsinki and the woolen scarf that Ivria bought him had got lost in Vienna on the way back and his reading glasses were on the table in the sitting room. So he put on the square frameless glasses and began to study the biography of the late Chief of Staff Elazar that he had found here in the study among Mr. Kramer's books. In the index he found Teacher, his superior, who appeared neither under his real name nor under one of his nicknames, but under this assumed name. Yoel leafed through the book until he came to the praises that were heaped on Le Patron because he was one of the few who gave warning in time of the attack of Yom Kippur 1973. For purposes of emergency contact from abroad, Le Patron had been his brother. But Yoel found no brotherly affection in his heart toward the cold, needle-sharp man who was at this moment attempting, so Yoel suddenly deduced close to three in the morning, to set a cunning trap for him in the guise of an old family friend. A strange, piercing instinct like an alarm bell inside him started to warn that he must change his plans for tomorrow and not go to the office at ten o'clock. What were they going to use to catch or trip him? The promise he had made to the Tunisian engineer but not kept? The woman he had met in Bangkok? His negligence in the matter of the pale cripple? And because it was obvious to him that he would not get back to sleep tonight, he decided to devote the coming hours to preparing a line of defense for the next morning. When he began to think calmly, point by point, as was his habit, the room was suddenly f
illed with the sound of his mother's snoring. He turned the light off, pulled the bedclothes over his head, and tried vainly to block his ears and to concentrate on his brother, on Bangkok, on Helsinki. Finally he realized that unless he woke her up, he could not stay here. As he got up he felt that it was getting colder, so he covered his mother with a second blanket from his bed, stroked her brow, and went out into the hall carrying his mattress on his back. He stood there wondering where to go, except to the feline predator in the living room. He decided to go to his daughter's room, and there, on the floor, he laid out his mattress, covered himself in the single light blanket he had withheld from his mother, and promptly fell asleep till morning. The moment he woke up he glanced at his watch and knew at once that he was too late: the paper had already come and been thrown onto the concrete path from the window of the Susita despite the request outside to put it in the mailbox. When he got up he heard Netta muttering in her sleep in a provocative, challenging tone of voice, "And who isn't?" Then she fell silent. Yoel went out into the garden with no shoes on to feed the cat and her kittens in the shed, to see how the fruit trees were doing, and to watch the migrating birds for a while. Shortly before seven he went in and called Krantz to ask him to lend him his little Fiat for the morning. Then he went from room to room and woke the ladies. He returned to the kitchen just in time for the seven o'clock news and prepared breakfast while his eyes were ranging over the headlines in the newspaper. Because of the newspaper he did not concentrate on what the newscaster was saying, and because of the radio he did not manage to take in what was in the headlines. As he was pouring his coffee he was joined by Avigail, as fresh and fragrant as a Russian peasant who had spent the night in a haystack. She was followed by his mother, with a grumpy expression and sunken lips. Netta arrived at half past seven. She said: Today I'm really late. Yoel said: Have something to drink and let's go. I'm free today till nine-thirty. Krantz and his wife are coming in convoy and bringing their Fiat, so that our car can be here for you, Avigail.
Then he started to clear away the breakfast things and wash them up in the sink. Netta shrugged and said quietly:
"Suit yourself."
24
"We've tried offering her someone else," said the Acrobat, "but it doesn't work. She won't bestow her favors on anyone but you."
"You fly out in the early hours of Wednesday morning," Teacher recapitulated, his after-shave lotion smelling like ladies' perfume; "you meet on Friday, and by Sunday night you'll be home again."
"Just a moment," said Yoel. "You're going a little too fast for me." He stood up and walked over to the only window, at one end of the long, narrow room. The sea showed green-gray between two tall buildings, with a motionless bundle of clouds pressing down on it. That's how autumn begins here. Six months or so had passed since he left this room for the last time intending never to return. He had come to hand over his job to the Acrobat, to say good-bye, and to return the things he had kept all those years in his safe. Le Patron had said, "with a final appeal to your head and heart," that he could still withdraw his resignation, and that, insofar as it was possible to glimpse into the future, one could see that Yoel, if he agreed to continue, was marked out as one of three or four favorite candidates, the best of whom would be sitting in a couple of years' time on the southern side of this desk, when he himself went off to settle in a vegetarian village in Galilee, to devote himself to observation and longings. Yoel had smiled at this and said, Sorry, but it seems I'm not cut out for your southern side.
Now, as he stood at the window, he noticed the shabbiness of the curtains and a certain sadness, almost an elusive air of neglect, that hung over the Spartan office. So contrary to Le Patron's scent and manicured nails. The room was neither large nor well lit, and in front of the black desk flanked by two file cabinets there was a coffee table with three wicker armchairs. On the walls there was a reproduction of a landscape of Safed by the painter Rubin and another of the walls of Jerusalem by Litvinowsky. At the end of a bookshelf laden with legal tomes and books about the Third Reich in five languages there was a pale-blue Jewish National Fund collection box with a map of Palestine from Dan to Beersheba more or less, not including the triangle of the Negev, and like flyspecks scattered here and there on the map were the blotches that the Jews had managed to purchase from the Arabs up to 1947. The inscription on the box said: "Bring Redemption to the Land." Yoel asked himself if there had really been years when he had ached to inherit this gloomy office, to bring Ivria here on the pretext of asking her advice about changing the furniture or the curtains, to seat her facing him across the desk, and, like a child showing off to his mother who had misjudged him and underestimated him all these years, let her digest the surprise in her usual way: Look, from this unpretentious office he, Yoel, now controlled a secret service said by some to be the most sophisticated in the world. It might occur to her to ask him, with her delicate, forgiving smile playing around her long-lashed eyes, what the essence of his work was. To which he would reply modestly, Well, when all's said and done, I'm just a sort of night watchman.
The Acrobat said:
"Either we arrange a meeting for her with you, she said to our contact man, or else she won't speak to us at all. Obviously you managed to win her heart at your previous meeting. And she also insists that it should be in Bangkok again."
"It's been more than three years," said Yoel.
"A thousand years in your sight are as a day," declared Le Patron. He was stocky, podgy, cultivated, his thinning hair neady groomed, his fingernails impeccably rounded, his face that of an honest man who inspires confidence. And yet there glimmered at times in those placid, slightly clouded eyes a certain courteous cruelty, as of an overfed cat.
"I should like to know," Yoel said quietly, as though from the depth of his thoughts, "precisely what she said to you. What words she used."
"Well it's like this," replied the Acrobat, ostensibly with no connection to the question. "It turns out that the lady knows your first name. Would you happen to have some explanation for that?"
"Explanation," said Yoel. "What is there to explain? Evidently I must have told her."
Le Patron, who had hardly spoken so far, now put on his reading glasses, picked up from his desk, as though handling a sharp splinter, a rectangular note, a piece of a card, and read in English infected with a slight French accent:
"Tell them I have a lovely present that I'm prepared to hand over in a personal meeting with their man Yoel, the one with the tragic eyes."
"How did it come?"
"Curiosity," said the Acrobat, "killed the cat."
But Le Patron ruled:
"You're entitled to know how it came. Why not? She passed the message via the Singapore representative of an Israeli construction company. A clever chap. Plessner. The Czech. You may have heard of him. He was in Venezuela for a few years."
"And how did she identify herself?"
"That's precisely the nasty side of the story," said the Acrobat. "It's the reason you're sitting here now. She identified herself to this guy Plessner as 'a friend of Yoel.' How do you account for that?"
"Evidently I must have told her. I don't remember. Of course I realize it's against the rules."
"Of course," the Acrobat hissed, "some people are above the rules."
He shook his head several times, uttering four times, with long pauses between, the word "tsk."
Finally he snorted viciously:
"I just can't believe it."
Le Patron said:
"Yoel. Do me a personal favor. Eat Tsippy's cake. Don't leave it on the plate. I fought like a tiger yesterday to make sure they left you a piece. She's been in love with you for the past twenty years, and if you don't eat it she'll murder the lot of us. You haven't touched your coffee either."
"All right," said Yoel, "I get it. What's the bottom line?"
"Just a minute," said the Acrobat. "Before business I've got another little question. If you don't mind. Apart from your name, w
hat else—how shall I put it?—slipped out of you in Bangkok?"
"Hey," said Yoel, "Ostashinsky. Don't overdo it."
"I only ask it," said the Acrobat, "because it turns out, lover-boy, that this chick knows that you're Romanian, that you're fond of birds, and even that your little girl's called Netta. So maybe it would be better if you took a deep breath, thought hard, and then explained to us nice and sensibly who's overdoing what here precisely, and why, and what else the lady knows about you and about us."
Le Patron said:
"Children. Please. Behave yourselves."
He fixed his eyes on Yoel. Who did not speak. He remembered the games of checkers between the man and Netta. And remembering Netta, he tried to understand the point of reading sheet music if you can't play an instrument and don't want to or intend to learn. And he saw in his thoughts the poster that used to hang in her old room in Jerusalem, which had become his room, showing a cute little kitten snuggling in its sleep against an Alsatian dog with the responsible look of a middle-aged banker. Yoel shrugged, because the sleeping kitten gave no hint of curiosity. Le Patron addressed him gently:
"Yoel?"
He concentrated and directed his tired eyes at Le Patron.
"So I am being accused of something?"
The Acrobat, rather formally, declared:
"Yoel Rabinovich wants to know if he's being accused."
And Le Patron:
"Ostashinsky. That will do. You may stay, but strictly in the background, if you please." Turning to Yoel he continued: "After all, you and I are—how should I put it?—more or less brothers. And quick on the uptake too. As a rule. So the answer is definitely negative. We're not accusing. Not investigating. Not muckraking. Not poking our noses in. Pouf. At most we're a little surprised and saddened that such a thing should have happened to you of all people, and we trust that in future, et cetera. In a word: we are asking a very great kindness of you, and if, heaven forbid, you refuse—but surely you couldn't refuse us a tiny little favor."