To Know a Woman (Harvest in Translation)

  The mosquitoes were beginning to bother him. He went indoors, remembering to take with him the transistor, the book, the round black-framed glasses, aware that he had forgotten something but unable to recall what it was.

  In the living room, still barefoot, he poured himself a brandy and sat down with his mother and his mother-in-law to watch the nine o'clock news. It would be possible to sever the predator from its metal base with a single moderate jerk, and so, if not to decipher, at least to silence it, but afterward, he knew, he would have to mend it. And that he could do only by drilling into the paw and putting a screw through it. Perhaps it would be better not to touch it.

  He stood up and went out onto the terrace. Outside the crickets were already chirruping. The breeze had dropped. Choruses of frogs filled the grove down the street, a child was crying, a woman laughed, a mouth organ spread sadness, water roared in a bathroom. The houses had been built very close together and the gardens between them were small. Ivria had had a dream: when she completed her thesis and Netta finished school and Yoel was discharged from the service, they could sell the apartment in Talbiyeh and the grandmothers' apartment in Rehavia and buy themselves a house at the edge of a village in the Judaean Hills, not too far from Jerusalem. It had to be an end house; that was important. So that at least on one side the windows would look out only onto wooded hills with no sign of life. Now he had managed to realize at least some of the components of this plan. Even though the two apartments in Jerusalem had been rented, not sold. The income was sufficient to pay the rent of this house in Ramat Lotan, and there was even a little to spare. There was also his monthly pension and the old ladies' savings and their National Security money. And there was Ivria's inheritance too, an extensive plot of land in the township of Metullah on which Nakdimon Lublin and his sons grew fruit, and had recently also built a small guesthouse. Every month they transferred a third of the proceeds to his account. It was among those fruit trees that he had first had Ivria, in 1960, when he was a soldier who had lost his way on an orienteering exercise during a section commander's training course and she was a farmer's daughter two years older than he who had gone out in the dark to turn off the irrigation taps. Both of them were startled, but, total strangers to each other, they had barely exchanged ten words in the darkness before their bodies suddenly clung, groping, rolling in the mud fully dressed, panting, burrowing into each other like a pair of blind puppies, hurting each other, finishing almost before they had begun and then fleeing almost without a word and going their separate ways. And it was also there among the fruit trees that he had had her for the second time, when, as though bewitched, he had returned to Metullah a few months later and lain in wait for her for two nights by the irrigation taps, until they met and fell on each other again and he asked for her hand and she said, Are you out of your mind. After that they used to meet at the cafeteria in the bus station at Kiryat Shmonah and make love in an abandoned tin shack he had discovered in a place where there had once been an immigrant transit camp. After six months or so she gave in and married him without reciprocating love but devotedly, honesdy, determined to give her full share and to try hard to give more. They were both capable of compassion and gentleness. When they made love they no longer hurt each other but strove to be attentive and generous. Teaching and learning. Getting close. Not pretending. Yet there were times, even after ten years, when they made love again fully dressed in some field in Jerusalem, on the hard earth in places from which they could see only stars and shadows of trees. So whence this feeling that had been with him all evening that he had forgotten something?

  After the news he tapped gently on Netta's door again. There was no answer, so he waited and tried again. Here too, as in Jerusalem, it was Netta who had been given the master bedroom with its double bed. Here she had hung her pictures of poets and installed her musical scores and vases of thistles. It was he who had decided on this arrangement, because he had difficulty getting to sleep in a double bed, whereas it was good for Netta, with her condition, to sleep on a wide bed.

  The two grandmothers had settled into the two children's bedrooms, which were joined by a communicating door. And he had taken for himself the room at the back of the house that had been Mr. Kramer's study. There was a Spartan sofa bed and a desk and a picture of the graduation parade of the Armored Corps School, class of '71, with tanks drawn up in a semicircle and colorful pennants on the ends of their antennas. There was also a photograph of the landlord in uniform, wearing the bars of a captain, shaking hands with the Chief of Staff, David Elazar. In the bookcase Yoel found some books in Hebrew and English on business management, commemorative picture books of the victories, a Bible with Cassuto's commentary, a set of the World of Learning, the memoirs of Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan, travel guides from several countries, and a whole shelf of thrillers in English. In the built-in wardrobe, he hung up his clothes and some of Ivria's, whatever he had not donated after her death to the leper hospital next to their apartment in Jerusalem. He put his safe in this room too, without bothering to fix it into the floor, because there was almost nothing left in it now. when he retired from the service he had been careful to return the guns and the rest of the stuff to the office. Including his own handgun. The lists of telephone numbers he had destroyed. Only the town plans and his real passport remained, for some reason, locked in the safe.

  He knocked a third time and, receiving no answer, he opened the door and went in. His daughter, angular, gaunt, her hair cropped almost to the skull, with one of her legs dangling to the floor as though she meant to stand up, exposing her bony knee, was lying asleep with her open book concealing her face. He carefully removed the book. He managed to take off her glasses without waking her, folded them, and put them down on the bedside table. They had transparent plastic frames. Gently, very patiently, he raised the dangling leg and laid it straight on the bed. Then he covered the frail, angular body with a sheet. He lingered for a moment to inspect the pictures of poets on the wall. Amir Gilboa offered him the ghost of a smile. Yoel turned his back and put out the light and left the room. As he did so he heard her drowsy voice in the darkness. She said: "Turn the light out, for God's sake." And although there was no light left in the room to turn out, Yoel did not remonstrate, but soundlessly pulled the door to behind him. Only then did he remember what it was that had been bothering him vaguely all evening: when he had stopped clipping the hedge and gone out for his walk, he had left the garden shears outside on the edge of the lawn. It would not do them any good to be out all night in the dew. He put his sandals on and went out into the garden and saw a pale ring around the full moon, whose color now was not purply red but silvery white. He could hear the chorus of crickets and frogs from the direction of the citrus grove. And the bloodcurdling shriek that burst simultaneously from every television set on the street. Then he noted the swish of sprinklers and the hum of distant traffic on the main road and a door slamming in one of the other houses. Quietly he said to himself, in English, the words he had heard from his neighbor: "Tough life, huh?" Instead of going back indoors he put his hand in his pocket. Because he found the keys there he got into the car and drove off. When he returned at one o'clock in the morning the street was quiet and his house too was dark and silent. He got undressed and lay down, put on the stereophonic earphones, and until two or half past listened to a sequence of short baroque pieces and read a few pages of the unfinished thesis. The three Brontë sisters, he discovered, had had two older sisters, who both died in 1825. There was also a consumptive, alcoholic brother by the name of Patrick Branwell. He read until his eyes closed. In the morning it was his mother who went out to pick up the morning paper from the garden path and put the shears back in their place in the shed.

  8

  Because the days and nights were empty and vacant Yoel fell into the habit of watching television almost every evening until the programs ended at midnight. Generally his mother sat opposite him in an armchair, embroidering or knitting, with her narrow gray
eyes and her tight sunken lips making her look hard and resentful. Wearing his shorts, he would sprawl on the living-room sofa with his bare feet up, resting his head on a mound of cushions. Sometimes Avigail would join them, though she was observing the period of mourning, to watch the news magazine, with her strong Slavic peasant's face radiating brisk, uncompromising good nature. The old ladies took care to set out cold and hot drinks and a dish brimming with grapes, pears, plums, and apples on the low table in the living room. It was the end of the summer. In the course of the evening Yoel would pour himself two or three glasses of imported brandy, a present from Le Patron. Sometimes Netta would emerge from her room and stand for a minute or two in the doorway of the living room before leaving. But if it was a nature program or a British drama she would occasionally decide to come in. And sit down, angular, gaunt, her head held high in a kind of unnatural extension, not in an armchair but always on one of the dark high-backed dining chairs. She would sit stiffly until the end of the broadcast, away from the others. At times it appeared as though her gaze were fixed on the ceiling rather than the screen. But this was just the peculiar tilt of her neck. She generally wore a plain dress with large buttons down the front. It emphasized her slight build, her flat chest, and her (rail shoulders. Sometimes she seemed to Yoel to be as old as her two grandmothers, if not older. She spoke little: "They showed that one last year." "Could you turn it down, it's blaring." Or: "There's some ice cream in the freezer." When the plot thickened, Netta would say: "The cashier is the killer." Or: "He'll go back to her at the end." "That's stupid. How can she know that he already knows?" In the summer they watched a lot of films about terrorist gangs, espionage, secret-service exploits. Yoel generally fell asleep halfway through and woke up only for the news just before midnight, by which time the two old women had quietly gone off to their bedrooms. He had never taken an interest in such films; he had no time for them. He saw no point in reading spy stories or thrillers. When the whole office was talking about a new book by le Carré, say, and his colleagues made him promise to read it, then he would deign to give it a try. The complications struck him as ridiculously implausible, or, conversely, transparently simple. After a few dozen pages he would put the book down and not pick it up again. In a short story by Chekhov or a novel by Balzac he found mysteries which, so far as he was aware, did not exist in any spy thriller. Once, years before, he had toyed with the idea of writing a little spy story himself when he retired, describing things as he had known them during his own years in the service. But he had dropped the idea because he could not find anything remarkable or exciting in his own doings. Two birds on a fence on a rainy day, an old man talking to himself at the bus stop on the Gaza Road, these and similar events seemed to him more fascinating than anything that had happened to him in his work. In fact he saw himself as a kind of valuator and purchaser of abstract merchandise. He would go abroad to meet a stranger in a café in Paris, for example, or Montreal, or Glasgow, have a conversation or two, and then come to a conclusion. The important things were sensitivity to impressions, intuitive judgment, character assessment, and patient bargaining skills. It had never so much as occurred to him to jump over walls or leap from roof to roof. He saw himself as a long-established merchant with many years' experience in bargaining, arranging deals, building mutual confidence, outlining guarantees and securities, but over and above all, forming an accurate impression of the people he talked with. True, his own dealings were always conducted with a certain secrecy, but Yoel imagined that so it was in the business world, and that if there was a difference it was mainly one of setting and background.

  He had never raided a safe house, tailed anyone through a maze of alleyways, wrestled with tough guys, or planted listening devices. Others did that. His business was to establish contact, to arrange and prepare meetings, to allay fears and lull suspicions, without dropping his own guard, to convey to his interlocutor a relaxed, good-humored intimacy, like an optimistic marriage counselor, and in the meantime to penetrate sharply and coolly under the stranger's skin: was he a fraud? an amateur fraud? Or an experienced, cunning deceiver? Or perhaps merely a petty crank? A German overwhelmed by historic guilt? A world-reforming idealist? A deranged person, sick with ambition? A trapped woman bent on a desperate act? An overenthusiastic diaspora Jew? A bored French intellectual hungry for excitement? Or simply bait cast at him by a hidden adversary chuckling somewhere in the dark? Or an Arab driven to the other side by lust for revenge against some private enemy? Or a frustrated inventor with no one to appreciate his genius? These were the crude headings. Behind them lay the really complex and delicate work of classification.

  Always and without exception Yoel insisted on deciphering the person opposite him before he would take so much as a single step. The most important thing for him was to know who was talking to him and why. What was the weak point that his interlocutor was trying to conceal from him? What sort of satisfaction or recompense was he after? What sort of impression was the man or woman seeking to make on him? And why that impression in particular? What was the person ashamed of, and what, precisely, was he proud of ? Over the years Yoel had formed the conviction that shame and pride were generally stronger than other famous urges that figured more prominently in literature. People were eager to fascinate or charm others so as to fill some void in themselves. A widespread void that Yoel termed love. He had never revealed this to anyone, except once to Ivria. Who had replied, unimpressed, "But that's a well-worn cliché." Yoel had agreed with her at once. Perhaps that was why he had dropped the idea of the book. The wisdom that he had accumulated during his years at work did indeed seem trite to him. People want such and such. They want what they do not have and what they will never be given. And what is attainable, they take for granted.

  What about me? he had thought one night traveling in an almost empty train between Frankfurt and Munich; what is it I'm after? What is it that drives me from hotel to hotel across these expanses of darkness? It's duty, he had answered himself, in Hebrew and almost aloud. But why me? And if I suddenly drop dead in this empty train, will I know a little more, or will everything just go blank? It would seem that I have been here for forty-some years and I still haven't so much as begun to work out what's going on. If anything at all. Perhaps something is. At times you can almost sense here and there some hints of a pattern. The sad thing is that I'm not managing to figure it out and it looks as though I never will. Like last night in the hotel in Frankfurt, when the stylized petals printed apparently at random on the wallpaper opposite my bed almost hinted at some shape or form. But if you moved your head slightly or squinted or your attention wandered for a second the impression dissolved; it took an immense effort to make out some islands of set pattern, and you couldn't be entirely certain if it was the same pattern as was hinted at before. Perhaps there was something there, but you were not destined to decode it; or maybe it was only an illusion. Even that you will never know, because your eyes are burning, so that if you try with all your strength to look through the train window perhaps at the very most you can guess that we are traveling through a forest though what you can see is little more than the reflection of the familiar face that looks pale and tired and actually rather stupid too. Best close your eyes and try to snatch some sleep: whatever will be will be.

  All the people he had ever confronted had lied to him. Except in the Bangkok case. Yoel found himself fascinated by the quality of lies: how does each person build his own lies? By a flight of fancy and imagination? Negligently, offhandedly? With a systematic, calculated logic or, on the contrary, casually and with a studied lack of system? The way a lie is woven he saw as an unguarded peephole that sometimes allows a glimpse inside the liar.

  In the office he was known as the Walking Lie-Detector. Occasionally they tried lying to him deliberately about some trivial matter such as a pay slip or a new telephone operator. Again and again they were astonished to witness the working of the inner mechanism that made Yoel receive the lie in silence
, sink his head on his chest mournfully, and eventually remark wistfully: "But Rami, that's not true." Or: "Drop it, Cockney, it's no use." They were trying to be funny but he could never see the funny side of a lie. Or of an innocent practical joke. Not even the usual April Fools' Day pranks in the office. Lies seemed to him like viruses of an incurable disease that even between the four walls of a secure laboratory must be treated with extreme care. Handled only with rubber gloves.

  He himself lied only when he had no alternative. And only when lying seemed to him to be the last and only way out, or an escape from danger. In such cases he always chose the simplest, most uncomplicated lie, never more, so to speak, than two steps away from the facts.

  Once, he had traveled on a Canadian passport to sort out some business in Budapest. On arrival the uniformed passport officer asked him what the purpose of his visit was, and he answered her in French, with a mischievous smile: "Espiottttage, madame." She burst out laughing and stamped his passport.

  Occasionally he had to meet strangers with someone covering him. His guardian angels always kept their distance, remaining invisible. Only on one single occasion, one wet night in Athens, was he compelled to draw a gun. Without, however, pressing the trigger. Just to frighten a fool who tried to pull a knife on him in the crowded bus terminal.

  It was not that Yoel maintained principles of nonviolence. His confirmed opinion was that there was only one thing worse than the use of violence, and that was submission to violence. He had heard this notion once in his youth from Prime Minister Eshkol, and he had held it dear ever since. He had been careful all these years not to be drawn into violent situations, because he had reached a decision that an agent who uses a gun has failed in his job. Chases, shoot-outs, reckless driving, all forms of running and jumping, belonged in his view to gangsters and their like, but definitely not to his own work.