"Did your father send you over to bring me the sprayer?"
"Well, it's like this," said Duby, drawing out the syllables as though he had difficulty parting with them, "if you need the sprayer, I can go back and get it. No problem. I've got my parents' car here. They're away. Mum's abroad and Dad's gone to Eilat for the festival and my brother's gone to stay with his girlfriend in Haifa."
"What about you? Have you locked yourself out?"
"No. It's something else."
"Like what?"
"The fact is, I came to see Netta. I was thinking, maybe tonight—"
"It's a pity you were thinking, friend." Yoel burst out laughing, surprising himself and the boy. "While you were busy thinking, she went off to the other end of the country with her grannies. Can you spare five minutes? Come and help me unload these trees."
For three-quarters of an hour they worked without talking, apart from essential words like "Hold this" or "Straighter" or "Pack it down well but carefully." They cut away the metal containers and managed to release the saplings without disturbing the ball of earth around the roots. Silently and meticulously they performed the burial ceremony, including filling in the holes and tamping down the soil, building a ring of earth around each tree for irrigation water. Yoel was pleased with the young man's work, and he began to appreciate his shyness or reticence. One evening at the end of an autumn day in Jerusalem—it was a Friday evening and the sadness of the hills was filling the air—he had gone out for a walk with Ivria, and they had gone into the Rose Garden to watch the sunset. Ivria said, You remember when you raped me under the trees in Metullah? I thought you were dumb. And Yoel, who knew that his wife rarely joked, at once corrected her and said: That's not right, Ivria. It wasn't rape; if anything, it was the opposite: seduction. That's point number one. But then he forgot to say what point number two was. Ivria said: You always file every detail away in that awesome memory of yours, you never lose the slightest crumb. But you always process the data first. After all, that's your profession. But on my side it was love.
When they had finished, Yoel said, Well, what does it feel like planting trees at Passover as if it were Tu Bishvat? He invited the boy into the kitchen for a cold orangeade because they were both pouring with sweat. Then he made some coffee too. And quizzed him a little about his army service in Lebanon, about his political views, which according to his father were extremely left-wing, and about his current activities. It turned out that the boy had served in field engineering, that he thought Shimon Peres was doing quite a good job, and that right now he was studying mechanics. It happened to be his hobby, and now he'd decided to make it his career too. He believed, though he had not had a lot of experience, that the best thing that could happen to a man was when his hobby filled his life.
Yoel intervened here, jokingly:
"Some people say that the best thing in life is love. Don't you agree?"
And Duby, intensely serious, with an emotion he managed to overcome so successfully that all that remained was a glint in his eye, said:
"I don't pretend to understand all that yet. Love and so on. When you look at my parents—you know them, after ail—you might think the best thing is to keep feelings on a back burner. No. The healthy thing is to do something that you do well. Something that somebody needs. That's the two most satisfying things. Anyway, the two most satisfying things for me: to be needed, and to do a good job."
And since Yoel was in no hurry to reply, the boy made a further effort and added:
"Excuse my asking: is it true you're an international arms dealer, or something like that?"
Yoel shrugged, smiled, and said: "Why not?" Suddenly he stopped smiling and said:
"That was a joke. The fact is, I'm nothing more than a government employee. On a kind of extended leave at the moment. Tell me something: what exactly are you looking for in Netta? An introduction to modern poetry? A crash course on the thistles of Israel?"
With this, he managed to embarrass and frighten the boy. Duby hurriedly put the coffee cup he was holding down on the tablecloth, then picked it up again and put it carefully on the saucer, chewed his thumbnail for a moment, instantly thought better of it, and stopped, and said:
"Nothing special. We just chat."
"Nothing special," Yoel said, spreading on his face for a moment the stony, frozen-eyed feline cruelty he had employed at will to frighten punks, small-time crooks, creatures crawling out of the dirt. "If it's nothing special, you've called at the wrong address, friend. You'd better try somewhere else."
"All I meant was—"
"Anyway, you'd better keep away from her. Haven't you heard? She's not a hundred percent. She has a minor health problem. But don't you dare breathe a word about it."
"I did hear something like that," said Duby.
"What!"
"I heard something. So what."
"Just a minute. I want you to repeat it. Word for word. What did you hear about Netta?"
"Forget it." Duby spun the words out. "All sorts of rumors. Trash. Don't get upset over it. I had the same thing once. Rumors buzzed around, something about nerves and so on. Let them buzz; that's what I say."
"You have a problem with your nerves?"
"Hell, no."
"Listen carefully. I can easily check, you know. Do you or don't you?"
"I did once. I'm OK now."
"That's what you say."
"Mr. Ravid?"
"Yes."
"Can I ask you what you want with me?"
"Nothing. Only don't start filling Netta's head with all sorts of nonsense. She's got enough of that already. So have you, by the sound of it. Have you finished your coffee? So there's nobody at home? Do you want me to make you a snack?"
Afterward the boy said good-bye and drove off in his parents' blue Audi. Yoel got under a very hot shower, soaped himself twice, rinsed in cold water, and got out muttering: Suit yourself.
At four-thirty Ralph arrived to say that he and his sister realized that he wouldn't be celebrating the festival, but seeing that he was all alone, would he like to join them for supper and watch a comedy on the VCR? Annemarie was making a Waldorf salad, and he was trying an experiment with veal stewed in wine. Yoel promised to come, but when Ralph came over to get him at seven o'clock, he found him sleeping, fully dressed, on the living-room sofa surrounded by pages from the special supplement of the newspaper. He decided to let him sleep. Yoel slept long and deeply in the empty, dark house. Only once, after midnight, did he get up and grope his way to the bathroom without opening his eyes and without switching on the light. The sounds of the television or the VCR next door were mingled in his sleep with the balalaika of the truck driver who might have been a kind of lover of his wife's. Instead of the bathroom door, he found the kitchen door, and he groped his way out into the garden and pissed with his eyes closed; returning to the sofa in the living room with his eyes still closed, he wrapped himself in the checked bedspread and sank back into sleep, like an ancient stone sinking into the dust, until nine o'clock the following morning. So that night he missed a mysterious sight taking place right overhead: vast flights of storks, in a broad stream, one after another without a break, sailing northward under a full spring moon, in a cloudless sky, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of lithe silhouettes floating over the earth with a silent swishing of wings. It was a long, relentless, irrevocable, yet delicate movement, like masses of tiny white silk handkerchiefs streaming across a vast black silk screen, all bathed in a luminous silvery lunar-astral glow.
44
When he got up at nine o'clock on Passover morning he padded to the bathroom in his crumpled clothes, shaved, took another long, thorough shower, put on clean white sports clothes, and went outside to see how his new plants, the pomegranate, the two olive trees, and the date palm, were feeling. He gave them a light watering. He plucked out, here and there, tiny tips of new weeds that had apparently sprouted during the night, after his careful search of the previous day. While the co
ffee was percolating he dialed the Krantzes' number to apologize to Duby for possibly treating him rather rudely. At once he realized that he would have to apologize twice, the second time for waking him up from his holiday sleep-in. But Duby said, It's nothing, it's only natural you should worry about her, it doesn't matter, though you ought to know that actually she's quite good at worrying about herself. By the way, if you need me again for the garden or anything, I've got nothing special to do today. It was nice to you to call, Mr. Ravid. Of course I'm not angry.
Yoel asked when Duby's parents were due back, and when he learned that Odelia was expected back from Europe the following day and that Krantz was returning from his sortie to Eilat that same evening in order to be home in time to turn over a new leaf again, Yoel thought that the expression "a new leaf" was unsatisfactory, because it sounded flimsy, like paper. He asked Duby to tell his father to give him a call when he got back; there might be a little something for him.
Then he went into the garden and looked at the bed of carnations and snapdragons for a while, but he could not see what else he could do there, and he said to himself: Enough. On the other side of the fence the dog Ironside, sitting in the street in a formal pose, with his legs together, was trying to follow with a speculative gaze the flight of a bird whose name Yoel did not know but which thrilled him with its brilliant blue color. The truth is that there can be no new leaf. Only perhaps a prolonged birth. And birth is a form of parting, and to part is hard, and anyway who can part all the way? On the one hand you continue being born to your parents for years upon years, and on the other hand you start giving birth even before you have finished being born, and so you get caught up in disengagement battles to the front and the rear. It suddenly occurred to him that there was reason to envy his father, his melancholy Romanian father in the brown striped suit, or his unshaven father in the filthy ship, both of whom had vanished without a trace. And what was it that stopped you from vanishing without a trace too, during all those years, assuming the identity of a driving instructor in Brisbane or living as a trapper and fisherman in a forest north of Vancouver, in a log cabin you built for yourself and the Eskimo mistress who so annoyed Ivria? And what is it that prevents you from vanishing now? "What a fool," he said affectionately to the dog, who had suddenly decided to cease looking like a china ornament and become a hunter, standing on his hind legs and resting his front paws on the fence, presumably in the hope of catching the bird. Until the middle-aged neighbor opposite whistled to him and took the opportunity to offer Yoel the season's greetings.
All of a sudden Yoel felt sharp hunger pangs. He remembered that he had eaten nothing since lunch the previous day, because he had fallen asleep fully dressed. And he had had nothing but coffee this morning. So he went next door and asked Ralph if there was any of last night's veal left, and if he could have the leftovers for breakfast. "There's some Waldorf salad left too," Annemarie said cheerfully, "and some soup. But it's very highly seasoned, and it might not be a good idea to have it first thing in the morning." Yoel chuckled, because he remembered right then one of Nakdimon Lublin's rhymes, "Muhammad said: Make no mistake, When my belly's empty I could swallow a snake." Without troubling to reply he simply gestured Bring out whatever you've got.
It seemed as though there was no limit to his eating capacity on that festival morning. Having demolished the soup and the leftover veal and salad, he did not hesitate to ask for breakfast as well: toast and cheese and yogurt. When Ralph opened the door of the refrigerator for a moment to get out the milk, Yoel's well-trained eyes spotted a pitcher of tomato juice and he shamelessly asked if he could demolish that too.
"Tell me something," Ralph Vermont began. "Heaven forbid that I should try to rush you, I just wanted to ask."
"Ask ahead," said Yoel, with his mouth full of cheese on toast.
"I wanted to ask you, if you don't mind, something like this: Are you in love with my sister?"
"Right now?" Yoel muttered, startled by the question.
"Now too," Ralph specified, calmly but with clarity, like a man who knows where his duty lies.
"Why are you asking?" Yoel hesitated, as though playing for time. "I mean to say, why are you asking instead of Annemarie? Why isn't she asking? Why does she need a go-between?"
"Look who's talking," said Ralph, not sarcastically, but blithely, as though amused by the sight of the other's blindness. And Annemarie, almost devoutly, with her eyes nearly closed, as though in prayer, whispered:
"Yes. I am asking."
Yoel ran his finger slowly between his neck and his shirt collar. He filled his lungs with air and let it out slowly. Shame, he thought, shame on me, for not gathering any information, not even the most basic details, about these two. I haven't got a clue who they are, where they sprang from or why, what they're after here. But he refrained from telling a lie. The true answer to their question he did not know yet.
"I need a little more time," he said. "I can't give you an answer right away. It needs some more time."
"Who's rushing you?" Ralph asked, and for a moment Yoel thought he saw a swift flash of paternal irony cross his middle-aged schoolboy's face, which life's sorrows had left no trace on. As if the placid face of an aging child was only a mask, and for an instant a bitter or sly expression had been revealed underneath it.
Still smiling affectionately, almost stupidly, the overgrown farmer took Yoel's broad, ugly hands, which were brown as bread with garden soil under the fingernails, between his own pink, abundantly freckled hands, and placed each of them slowly and gently on one of his sister's breasts, so accurately that Yoel could feel the stiffened nipple in the exact center of each hand. Annemarie laughed softly. Ralph sat down clumsily, with a chastened air, on a stool in a corner of the kitchen, and asked sheepishly:
"If you do decide to take her, do you think I ... that there'll be some room for me? Around the place?"
Then Annemarie released herself and got up to make the coffee, because the water was boiling. While they were drinking it, the brother and sister suggested that Yoel watch the comedy that they had seen the previous evening on the VCR, and he had missed because he had fallen asleep. Yoel stood up and said, Perhaps in a few hours' time. I've got to go and take care of some business right now. He thanked them and left without explaining, started the car, and drove out of the neighborhood and the city. He felt good, well, inside, within his body, within the sequence of his thoughts, as he had not for a long time. It might have been because he had satisfied his huge appetite by eating a lot of delicious things, or because he knew exactly what he had to do.
45
On the way along the coast road he recalled the various details he had heard here and there over the years about the man's private life. He was so deep in thought that the Netanya interchange caught him by surprise, heaving suddenly into view barely past the northern exit from Tel Aviv. He knew that his three daughters had been married for some time; one was in Orlando, Florida, one was in Zurich, and the last was, or at least had been a few months ago, on the staff of the embassy in Cairo. It followed that his grandchildren were scattered over three continents. His sister lived in London. His ex-wife, his daughters' mother, had been married for upward of twenty years to a world-famous musician, and she too lived in Switzerland, not far from the middle daughter and her family, perhaps in Lausanne.
The only member of the Ostashinsky family left in Pardes Hanna, if his information was correct, was the old father, who must now, Yoel calculated, be at least eighty. Perhaps closer to ninety. Once, when the two of them had waited all night in the Operations room for a message that was supposed to be coming in from Cyprus, the Acrobat had said that his father was a fanatical, mad chicken breeder. More than that he had not said, and Yoel had not asked. Everyone has his own shame in the attic. Although now, as he drove along the coast road north of Netanya, he was surprised to see how many new houses were being built with pitched roofs and storage space in the attic. Until a little while before, cellars and
attics hardly existed in Israel. Yoel reached Pardes Hanna soon after hearing the one o'clock news on the car radio. He decided not to visit the cemetery, because the village was already subsiding into the calm of a festival-day siesta, and he did not want to cause a disturbance. He asked twice before he discovered where the house was. It was set apart somewhat, near the edge of an orange grove, at the end of a muddy track overgrown with thistles that reached up to the car's windows. After parking, he had to force his way through a thick hedge that had run wild and almost grown together from each side of a path of broken and uneven paving stones. He therefore prepared himself to encounter a neglected old man in a neglected old house. He even entertained the possibility that his information was out of date, and that the old man had passed away or been moved into an institution. To his surprise, when he emerged from the overgrowth he found himself standing before a door painted psychedelic blue surrounded by standing, hanging, and hovering pots of petunias and white cyclamens blending into the bougainvillea that trailed over the front of the house. Among the flowerpots masses of little china bells hung from intertwined strings, making Yoel think he detected the hand of a woman, and a young woman at that. He knocked five or six times, pausing between knocks and knocking harder each time, because it occurred to him that the old man might be hard of hearing. And all the time he felt embarrassed to be disturbing the still, small silence of the vegetation that filled the place by making such an impertinent noise. He even felt, with a pang of longing, that he had been in a place like this once before, and that it had been good and pleasant. The memory was heartwarming and dear to him, though in fact there was no memory, since he was unable to focus his feeling and locate the place.