Since then I sometimes drop in on them in the early evening, when Noa is out, of course, and as for poor Natalia, she has apparently gone, or escaped, to her sister in Hazor in Galilee. That much I managed to get out of them after two more lost games. I enjoy spending an hour or two in the company of these rambunctious men. I can hardly understand their language, but I like their thunderous laughter their shoulder-slapping, their roars, their elbows jabbing me in the ribs, the shabby, low-ceilinged room with the greasy smell of frying coming from the tiny kitchen For some reason it reminds me of the fireside nights with strangers, in the courtyards of country inns in remote regions near the shores of the Caribbean. They treat me to spicy, wonderfully tasty pickled fish and a glass of vodka, I lose fifty or eighty shekels, and sometimes I am caught up in their raucous laughter over some joke that I cannot understand. I forget that my initial object was to try to dissolve their jealousy, to get the husband to take Natalia back and to get Natalia to come back to me and clean my office on Fridays. I had the impression they were trying to show me with roars and comical rounded gestures that Natalia was pregnant, so there was no point in my running after her and that her sister in Galilee was expecting a baby, too. But it is hard to know if I understood correctly or if I simply put together a story of my own on the basis of their gestures and laughs. And, in fact, what business was it of mine?
At certain moments I can almost see her: hardly more than a girl, about seventeen, golden-haired, slim, shy, silently fearful, her waist and breasts are those of a woman but she has a smile of sweet confusion or childlike wonder on her face, even when she thinks I am not looking at her. Between smiles her lips purse as if to weep. Whenever I put a perfectly simple question to her, such as whether she has parents, or whether there is any water left in the electric kettle, she turns white and trembles, as if she has committed a serious breach of polite behaviour, or as if I have made an obscene suggestion, and she whispers a faint apology and makes me give up on the answer and regret asking her in the first place, and turn my back to hide the lust that has suddenly transformed me into a rhinoceros. When I found out that her husband and his father had both been mechanics back in Moldavia, and that they had both been unemployed since arriving in Israel, I rang Muki Peleg and asked him, as a personal favour, to see if he could find them something temporary at least. Perhaps with one of the earth-moving contractors he sat with every day at the Council of Torah Sages in the California Cafe. Muki promised to fix it for me, what a question, like a rocket, even if I didn't really deserve it after throwing him and Ludmir off the committee; in fact, he wouldn't do it for me but for the sake of the Ingathering of Exiles, as the air hostess said to the Jewish passenger who begged her to lock herself in the toilet with him on the jumbo. And he went on to offer me a story about a little ballpoint pen factory that he was planning to set up here in partnership with Dubi Weitzman and Pini Bozo from the shoe shop, something really pioneering, the pens have an electronic device in them so that if you forget where you've put them all you have to do is whistle and they chirrup back at you, and Batsheva was finding them another investor—perhaps Orvieto and would I like to come in on it? We would double our money in three years, maximum, that was being cautious, because in fact the chances were we could double it in two and a half years.
On Saturday I started to jot down the headings for my paper. I found out from one of Noa's pamphlets that in Scandinavia they have had residential centres for under-eighteen-year-olds for some time, and precisely in small towns, far from the big cities, and there were mounting indications that they were successful, even representing a social and educational challenge that focused the life of the host population and sometimes produced a "thriving example of a therapeutic community", a supportive milieu that developed a sense of purpose and a feeling of local pride. The framework that seemed to me best suited to Tel Kedar was that of a social experiment coupled with an academic study, not just another supply station for drug substitutes like adolan or methadone. As for the economic aspect, of course we can't be Scandinavia, but it made sense to begin with kids from wealthy families in central Israel, and, as I had suggested to Noa, we would do well to add in two or three locals, from needy families, for a token payment. That should clear the ground here a bit. It might strengthen our public opinion rating. But when I asked Noa to go over these notes she said, Don't give me drafts to read. Don't give me anything to read right now. Not just now, Theo. Can't you see that I'm trying to listen to some music quietly. Do me a favour and start the record over again, would you?
For a moment I had an urge to remind her that she was still getting a check for three hundred dollars every month from Orvieto, via his lawyer Arbel; it would be interesting to know what for actually, and somebody might well ask one day just exactly what she did with the money. She spends half her time nowadays with her Indian princess, Tal or Tali. From my office window, I can see them going to the hairdresser together, coming out of an afternoon showing at the Paris Cinema, sitting whispering at the lovebirds' table behind the pillar at the California Café. Sometimes I get up and lock the office, buy a Ma'ariv at Gilboa's, and go to the California myself. I do not join them but secure a lookout post on one side near the cash desk. Dubi Weitzman, if he has no work on, arrives a few minutes later paunchy, hairy, sweaty, with dusty sandals, always wearing a peaked cap like a Greek sea-captain's with gold braid all round it and a shiny anchor at the front; he sits down, orders us cold Cokes and a plate of cheese and olives, sighs and declares:
A casino, Theo, that's what'll save us here. Stop Tel Kedar from being a graveyard. A casino will bring us tourists, holidaymakers, girls, the big money will come pouring in and culture will follow. For me, you understand, the casino is just a means to an end. Culture, Theo, that's the object. Without culture we're living here like animals. Don't take it personally. Take it as food for thought.
A couple of days ago he said to me: Every time I go to Tel Aviv I notice the city has moved a bit closer to us. Holon is attached to Rishon Le-Zion. Rishon is creeping towards Ashdod. Ashdod will link up with Qiryat Gat. In another hundred years Tel Aviv will reach all the way to here, it'll knock on our door at five o'clock one morning and say, Good morning, dear friends, wake up, I'm here, and that's that, the exile will be over. But in the meantime we are stuck here beneath the mountains. Blast them. You could choke because of those mountains. Forget it. Let's have a game of chess. Don't you get fed up sometimes, Theo? Take it as food for thought.
Ludmir sometimes intercepts me in the square or outside the post office, promising to move worlds and to fight to the death against the nest of maggots that I am scheming to plant here, Sodom and Gomorrah, he is utterly ashamed of succumbing to the temporary blackout that made him join our committee, and he warns me, as though from pity, that there's "Noa smoke without a fire". Several times, in the kitchen, I've felt an urge to say something that would really hurt her, like a slap in the face. Something like, Tell me, have you ever actually seen a drug addict? Just one? From a distance? Through a telescope, perhaps? Like your father who used to sit in his wheelchair on his roof keeping an eye on the world through his telescope? And, as a matter of fact, tell me truly, could you actually tell the difference between someone who was drugged, sleepy or just plain moronic? How did you have the gall to take on a project you understand less about than I do about Eskimo cosmetics? And which has never really interested you for a moment, deep down? Was it just a pretext for getting out of the house? Was it just because you were fed up with teaching literature all day? What got into you to make you drive the whole town crazy and, the moment it was time to roll your sleeves up and get down to work, decide to change games and leave me to put your toys away after you?
I restrained myself.
No point in getting into an argument.
Particularly since I've abandoned her, too. I spend my time with the husband and his father over the pickled herring and vodka that I've got into the habit of taking with me. I wolf thick borsch and s
tuffed dumplings. Suddenly I find myself presenting a survey, in orderly instalments, without language, in pantomime and broken words, of the history of the Zionist endeavour, the swamps, the underground, the illegal immigration, the British, the Nazis, the victories, the Western Wall, Entebbe, the West Bank settlements. The two of them look at me without surprise but without much interest either, without interrupting their steady munching, occasionally bursting into fierce laughter that I am unable to relate to my exposition. Last time I went I managed to win fifty shekels from them at poker, and they both choked with laughter, slapping their knees and the back of my neck, thumping my back, they could hardly stop. Nevertheless, on Tuesdays I still settle down in the California for a couple of hours, playing chess with Dubi Weitzman, as I've done for years. And almost every afternoon I walk round the ruin on my own. Though I don't carry the sketchbook and pencil any more. As if I've lost the thread.
Muki Peleg phoned excitedly: he'd managed to secure a trial period for my two muzhiks, a week, with Jacques Ben Loulou from Ben Elul's Garage, that saint, admittedly for nominal wages, so they could show what they could do, as the Queen of Greece said to her three Turks. You don't know that one, Theo? Okay. I'll teach you some time. Just bear in mind that a Turk and a Greek woman is a bit like Ludmir and a quarry. The point is, tell them to be there at seven o'clock tomorrow morning. What do you think of me? Aren't I just Albert Einstein disguised as a village saint?
I said: There's no one else like you, Malachi.
And Muki: Just as well.
Despite the cracked tiles, the cobwebs and the thick dust, the missing windows, the broken cabinets, the smashed or stolen washbasins and toilet bowls, the roof groaning under the ravages of the desert wind, the dirty syringes and bloodstained wads of cotton wool and the stench of urine and the dried damp patches, I am gradually becoming convinced that the house was an excellent buy because it was built honestly. Solidly and generously. The rooms are spacious and tall. The walls are thick. All the rooms open onto a central space, a fairly extensive hall in the middle of the building. This central space is dark and pleasant, storing a gentle coolness even in the worst heatwave. Something in the way it is built reminds me of an Arab or Armenian house from before the wars. Or the German Colony in Jerusalem. The depth of the arched windows. The curve of the corridor. The flagstones. In the big garden a score of tight-packed pine trees grow, their trunks bent northwards by the southerly winds. The trees overhang the tiled roof and besiege the house with their shadows. Every breath of wind makes the shadows quiver slightly. A subdued light filters through the pine needles, a hushed murmur behind your back, and an ever-changing stream of shadows dappled with patches of light, plays on the walls. Sometimes this movement gives you the tense feeling that there is somebody walking around on tiptoe in the next room. All round the pine wood the white-hot summer light beats down, but the garden and the house stand separated in shade, like an enclave of winter. Plunging to his own seabed, Noa said, and Avraham Orvieto felt the windowsill and said nothing.
Yesterday at six o'clock in the morning I loaded a shovel, pruning shears and a saw into the Chevrolet, borrowed my two Russian weight-lifters from Ben Elul's Garage, and for seven hours we cleaned all the filth out of the pine wood and trimmed the trees. When Linda and Muki appeared after lunch, saying that they had just heard I was planting a tower-and-stockade settlement here and were enlisting to help, everything was finished. We had even propped up the trunks of the trees that I thought were too bent. On Thursday a Bedouin contractor is coming, a friend of Dubi Weitzman's, to start putting up the new fence and to fix a wrought-iron gate.
Then I shall have to renovate the whole structure and adapt it for its new purpose.
But what is its purpose? I don't have a clear idea any more. I haven't finished writing the memorandum either. I've lost the thread.
Linda still types on a voluntary basis the letters I dictate to her at the office, and we send them off to various authorities. But the idea is becoming vague, as though the meaning has faded. And meanwhile we have attracted the wrath of the volcanic Ludmir. In his column in the local paper. "A Voice in the Wilderness", he calls me a shady character. He terms Avraham Orvieto's benefaction the tainted money of a pedlar of weapons of destruction. I should have published a rejoinder; but I couldn't think what to write. I've lost the thread again. As for Orvieto, he has vanished. He may have gone back to Nigeria. This time he has apparently taken his lawyer with him. The money still hasn't materialized. Perhaps it never existed. But Natalia suddenly came back to us from Galilee, pregnant and even prettier than I remembered her; with that expression of innocence and wonder she served me a glass of very strong, very hot tea, which for some reason made her husband and his father choke with laughter, which this time, to my utter astonishment, carried me away, too, and she burst into tears. But instead of getting involved, instead of trying to protect her or comfort her, I was smitten with desire. For some reason I was reminded of the broadcast I'd heard from London, about the life and loves of Alma Mahler. The presenter was going to explain to listeners what she was really like. This notion of "reality" seemed to me ridiculous but I couldn't decide what to replace it with. How can one know?
On a scrap of paper I jotted down: Furnishings. Equipment. Problem of heating in winter. Kitchen or catering? Interior alterations. Plumbing. Wiring. Drainage. Water supply. Roof. Floor tiles. Bars on the windows? Fitted cabinets. Telephone line. A treatment room? A classroom? A space for TV and video? Computers? Clubroom? Library?
All this before we get to the actual plan of operations. But what operations? And who with? Here a curtain comes down inside me, like a monsoon. As if the empty building has become an end in itself. Maybe it's time to sit down for a tete-a-tete with Orvieto. To try to fathom his aims once and for all. In Tel Aviv? Or perhaps in Lagos? Maybe very soon I'll fly out to see him for a couple of days. Without telling her. But for some reason I still shrink from this thought. If I try to imagine the two of us meeting behind her back, the picture arouses in me a mixture of dread and shame. As if I were plotting to deceive her. As if I had woven a tissue of lies so as to be alone with another woman.
So I rang Dubi Weitzman and told him to put off the Bedouin contractor and the workmen for the time being. Thursday is too soon. Even next week is too soon. What's the point of putting up a fence round something that doesn't exist? Round a dream? Still, I haven't forgotten her paralyzed father sitting on his roof in a wheelchair for years on end, getting heavier and heavier, like a defeated wrestler, and following what went on in the world through the lens of his telescope. If only that roof had had a proper parapet, the old man might have been alive today. The bulldozers wouldn't have demolished the house on the edge of the village. The collection of picture postcards would not have been donated to the Tolstoyan farm. And she would still be there, not here, still looking after him no doubt, worrying about him, singing to him, feeding him, putting him to bed, changing his diaper, five times a day.
The new dress we bought her in Tel Aviv the day we signed the contract has a tiny defect: it doesn't hang straight over the hips. We shall have to ask Paula Orlev to alter it after all. For some reason the thought that her fingers will touch this dress disgusts me. I wonder whether the Indian girl Tal has learned from her mother how to straighten a waistline. Or maybe by some miracle Natalia, my pregnant virgin, can handle a needle.
But Noa didn't notice the fault when she wore the dress this evening. We went to hear the new quartet in a private recital at the home of Dr. Dresdner in the chic residential district. As we were setting out, I nearly stopped her and pointed out that the waist was not straight. I finally decided to say nothing, so that we wouldn't be late but also because there was something delightful and touching in this almost invisible defect. And it's possible that I'm the only one who can see it. If it really exists. Never mind, let it go until Noa notices it. And if she doesn't, it doesn't matter.
HE wears a rough elastic bandage on his left knee, b
ecause of an old injury. At midnight, when we got home from the musical evening at Julia and Leo Dresdner's, the pain started up again. It's only midsummer, yet he is already picking up signals from the distant winter. I sat him down in an armchair, removed the bandage and tried to disperse the pain with massage. He laid his fingers on my shoulder and said, Yes, go on, it's working. Theo, I said, this knee is a little warm, warmer than the other one, you should pop into the health clinic tomorrow. What's the hurry, he said, it comes and goes.
He got up and made us some herbal tea, and switched off the overhead light. We stayed sitting for a quarter of an hour by the soft glow coming from the kitchen. The windows and the balcony door were open to catch the night breeze. From the direction of the hills to the east came the dim sobbing of a fox and at once self-righteous dogs began howling around the buildings. Then I washed the elastic bandage in warm soapy water, confident that in the desert air it would be dry by morning. After that I took a shower, and Theo took one after me, then we went our separate ways to sleep. When I was almost asleep, or even already sleeping, a hushed woman's voice, suppressing a vague excitement, came to me from his bedroom: the late-night news from London.
Next day I went to an afternoon showing at the Paris Cinema with Tal. The film was about treachery and revenge. Afterwards we sat in the California for an hour and a half drinking iced coffee. Then I took her to Bozo's shoe shop, because I had made up my mind to buy her some new sandals, with heels. Sometimes she looks just like a ten-year-old child, especially when you look at her from behind. That Indian princess, Theo says, what are you scheming about all day long, hasn't she got any friends her own age?