AT quarter past seven in the morning, when we were drinking our coffee in the kitchen, I said: I've got to go to Beersheba again after school today. I've got to see Benizri from the Department. If they won't help I don't know which way to turn. Don't tell me what you think. Not yet anyway. Maybe this evening when I get home I'll want you to. We'll see.
He looked up from his paper, still in his undershirt, those tanned shoulders, he's sixty and his body's still so spare and fit. He shot me a look of affectionate curiosity. The way people sometimes look at a child who refuses to go to nursery school and complains of a tummy ache. Should you believe him, or be strict with him? A flicker of suspicion or irony twitched his immaculate military moustache. Suddenly he laid his broad hand on mine and said, You're a big girl now. You'll find a way.
Theo, I said, I'm not a half-wit. If you want me to drop this project, then just say, Noa, drop it. Try. See what happens.
You asked me not to get involved. Request granted. End of story. Another cup of coffee?
I didn't answer. I was too afraid of a row.
With his grey hair, his experienced face, his silvery, precisely trimmed moustache, his half-closed left eye, he sometimes reminds me of a prosperous peasant, a suspicious landowner, a man whom life has schooled in how to confront an adversary, a woman or a neighbour: with a combination of generosity and toughness.
Meanwhile, as though deriving incidental pleasure from the situation, he rolled a ball of bread between his fingers and said:
Let's go to the movie this evening. There's a sexy comedy on. It's ages since we had an evening out together. Drive carefully to Beersheba, it's okay, I can manage without the car today, only watch out for potholes and those juggernaut trucks. Don't pass them, Noa. The less you pass the better. And remember to fill up with gasoline. Wait a minute, I know your Benizri. I trained the people who trained him. Shall I give him a call? Have a word with him before you see him?
I asked him not to.
He went on reading Ha'aretz. He muttered something about those Japs. I snatched my briefcase because I'd have to run if I wasn't to be late for my first lesson. I stopped at the door and came back to give and receive a cousinly kiss on the head, on the hair. 'Bye. And thanks for the car. Again this morning I didn't manage to ask him what was new at work. Not that anything ever is: Theo long ago lost interest in new things. This evening after Beersheba I'll go out to eat with him and we'll see a film at the Paris. He's always following me around. Though he's not really, just being sympathetically anxious. If he didn't worry about me I'd be bound to get hurt. I'm the one who's unfair to him. Maybe that's the reason almost everything he says irritates me now. And what he makes a point of not saying. And that overwhelming considerateness of his.
At ten o'clock, during the main break, I'll phone him at work. I'll ask him what's new. I'll thank him for doing without the Chevrolet all day. I'll say I'm sorry, I'll promise to remember to fill up the tank and to go to the movie with him this evening as he suggested.
Sorry for what, though?
Anyway, the staff-room telephone always has a long queue during break, and they always prick up their ears, and then they'll be saying they heard Noa apologizing to Theo, who knows what for. Such a small town. And it's all my fault we're here. This is the place I chose, and Theo gave in and agreed. If only he'd stop giving in and stop making a note of it each time in the debit column of his accounts.
What accounts? There aren't any. There, I'm being unfair to him again.
Muki Peleg was standing at the school gate waiting for me. What's up? Nothing's up, as the virgin said to the carpenter when he asked her why her belly was so big. He just wanted to let me know that as from today he was looking for an architect who would draw up plans for us for nothing. Theo would have done that for us, if I had asked him, or if only I hadn't said no. When did I say no? And who said anything about plans? When did I give Immanuel a pencil and forget about it? It was all a dream. A strange boy, alone, he thought words were a trap, his eyes lowered, shy, plunging down to his own seabed, and that ghost dog of his waiting for him on the sidewalk outside the school. He must have invented the story about the pencil. But why should he have invented it? Have I started forgetting what's happened? Did I give it to him without noticing?
Six weeks after the funeral, when Avraham Orvieto had come to ask me to agree to put together an informal task force to examine the possibility of setting up an experimental boarding school for the rehabilitation of addicts, the two of us sat together in the California Café towards evening. We ordered iced coffee in tall glasses, and in his soft voice he described to me how the town and the desert might be able to facilitate the process of rehabilitation, could even inspire various reflections. As he spoke his rough hands had seemed to be trying to encircle an invisible object that did not want to be moulded into a ball. I watched them, fascinated. Take my sister for example, Immanuel's aunt, she lived here for about ten years, and she also found something soothing in this special combination of great light and silence. Immanuel, too, who was hoping to be a writer, and maybe he really did have a talent for it, you probably know more about it than I do, but how did I end up talking about him again? He's always here. He stands in front of me, pale, hugging his shoulders, it's a habit he has, to hug his shoulders all of a sudden, as if he's not warm enough. As if he hadn't left me but had come to me from far away to be with me and share my grief. Not a memory of him, not thinking about him, but him. In an old green sweater. He stands in front of me, pale, unsmiling, not saying anything, with his hands round his shoulders, leaning against some wall, with all his weight on one of his legs and the other one slack. Perhaps you can understand it: present.
He himself, Avraham Orvieto, had visited several times during those years, hiking among the hills with his son, who spoke little, or they would stroll around the streets together for an hour or two at sunset, silently observing how the town was growing, another park, another lane paved, another bench. Sometimes they even walked at night, between visits new lights appeared up the hill, the avenues were extended, a new housing development was being opened up to the east. He belonged to the generation that still found it exciting to see buildings creeping out over the wilderness, though Immanuel was apparently more on the side of the wilderness. Yet they both seemed to enjoy those nocturnal strolls, along empty streets, hardly speaking to each other. They were both about the same height by then. If it had not been for his commitments he would have stayed longer: the desert suited him. He might have stayed permanently. It was hard to say what was the truth in such matters, because who knew what was true and what was wishful thinking. Anyway, what was the point, now? As he said this he looked up from the tablecloth and offered me his bright smile that rose quickly from the depth of his blue eyes in his wrinkled brown face and then at once withdrew and sank back, like the head that was lowered again. I laid my lingers on his hand without meaning to, like touching rough soil, and at once I reconsidered and withdrew them, almost unable to refrain from apologizing for touching him without permission.
He said, you see, it's like this, then he thought better of it and said: It doesn't matter. I was so embarrassed that I asked: Are you short of deserts in Africa then, in the part where you live? I immediately regretted the question, which seemed at once foolish, rude and indirectly critical of him, when I had no right to criticize. Avraham Orvieto ordered us each a mineral water to wash away the sticky taste of the sweet iced coffee and said: Deserts in Africa. Well, the fact is that in the part of Africa where I work there really aren't any deserts. On the contrary. It's dense forest. If you've got another few minutes I'll tell you a little story. Well, I'll try to anyhow. During our early years in Nigeria we rented a colonial house that belonged to an English doctor: No, not in Lagos, but in a small town on the edge of the forest. The town wasn't much bigger than Tel Kedar, only very poor. A dilapidated British post office, a generator, a police station, a church, a score of wretched shops, and a few hundred huts made of mu
d or branches. Immanuel was only three. He was a dreamy boy in a tartan tam-o'-shanter, who blinked whenever anyone spoke to him. Erella, his mother, my wife, had a full-time job as a pediatrician in an immunization centre, a sort of clinic, that had been set up by the Mission in a nearby town. She had always dreamed of being a doctor in the tropics. Albert Schweitzer had conquered her imagination. And I was away travelling most of the time. The house was looked after by maids, one of them Italian, and a young local gardener. In the yard there were goats, dogs, some hens, a whole menagerie, there was even a schizoid parrot that I'll tell you about another time. In fact, there's nothing to tell. We also adopted a baby chimpanzee that we had discovered one weekend in the forest, apparently lost, or an orphan. It was Immanuel who noticed him, peering at us with heartrending eyes from a discarded tire by the roadside. He targeted us at once. It's a known phenomenon, I think it's called imprinting, but I'm not an expert. That ape became a little member of our family. We were so taken by him that we would compete to see whose arms he would go to sleep in. Immanuel fed him at first with canned milk from a bottle with a teat. When Erella sang a lullaby to Immanuel the baby ape would wrap himself up in a tiny blanket. In time he learned to set the table, hang out the washing and take it down when it was dry, and even to stroke the cat until he made it purr. He was particularly good at ingratiating himself. Kisses, caresses, embraces, there was no limit to his thirst for receiving and giving signs of affection. Much more than us, perhaps because he felt he had to maintain and intensify the physical contact between us. Although in fact it is rather hard to tell. He was such an emotional creature that he could tell or sniff when one of us was sad or lonely or hurt, and would outdo himself to entertain us: he would put on little parodies, Erella making herself up in the mirror, Immanuel staring and blinking, me at war with the telephone, the gardener bullying the cook. We laughed till the tears came. And Immanuel was inseparable from him. They ate from the same plate and played with the same toys. Once he saved Immanuel from being bitten by a venomous snake, but that's another story. Another time he presented Erella with a magnificent scarf that he had stolen from somewhere and we never discovered to whom we should return it. Whenever we went to visit acquaintances and had to leave him behind, he would run after the Jeep sobbing heartrendingly, like a small child that has been unfairly treated. Whenever he was reprimanded he would take umbrage and disappear, climb a tree, or go on the roof, as though he had made up his mind to hand us his final resignation, but then he would come back to make peace, with transparent attempts to make friends all over again, to compensate us with all kinds of endearing efforts, polishing Erella's glasses and putting them on the cat, until we had no choice but to forgive him and stroke him. On the other hand, he was also capable of going on strike when he felt that we had been unfair to him. For instance, once when I smacked him because of some fruit that had vanished from the storeroom. On such occasions he would stand with a chastened air in a corner of the room eyeing us reproachfully, as if to say, How could you sink so low, the world will judge you as you deserve, until he forced us to feel that we had wronged him, and the only way to make amends, he indicated with an unmistakable gesture, was to open the sealed can where we kept the sugar lumps. When Immanuel was ill with jaundice, the ape taught himself how to fetch a cold drink from the refrigerator and how to hand over the thermometer, he even took his own temperature non-stop, as if he were afraid he'd caught the disease. Well, after a few years this chimpanzee reached the age of puberty, he grew a hermit-like thatch of white hair on his face and chest. The first thing he did was to fall in love with Erella. He clung to her. He hardly left her for a moment. That is, I must explain, he courted her in a rather touching way, combing her hair, blowing on her coffee to cool it, handing her her socks, but also in sexual ways that became harder and harder to take. He would feel her skirt, pick at it, cling to her back when she bent over. And so forth. I won't go into detail. When we locked ourselves into our bedroom at night he was overcome with jealous rage and stood outside our window groaning as though he'd been wounded. At first it seemed amusing and even charming, soon he'd be serenading her under her window, but it wasn't long before we realized we had a serious problem on our hands. For instance he took to biting me and Immanuel if we so much as touched her in his presence or if she touched one of us. Immanuel was so startled he began blinking and fluttering his eyelids again. You have to understand, Noa, if you want to follow the rest of the story, that a chimpanzee is a strong, fast-moving animal, and when he's angry or aroused he can be quite dangerous. Once or twice he got her into a clinch from which she couldn't break free and I had to prise her loose by force. It was the merest chance I happened to be at home. Suppose I'd been away? The vet occasionally gave him shots of estrogen, but it didn't cool his ardour. We didn't know what to do: we couldn't get rid of him and we didn't want to hurt him, he'd become one of the family. Can you understand: we'd raised him almost from birth. Once when he swallowed some broken glass we flew him to Lagos for treatment. We sat watching over him in a shift system for four days and nights to make sure he didn't rip off his dressing. After the incidents with Erella, the vet advised neutering, and I was in a torment of indecision, almost as if I were the intended victim. I came to the conclusion that the least terrible solution would be to return him to the wild. So the weekend before Christmas I put him in the Jeep, he was always eager to go with me on one of my long trips, and to be on the safe side I drove more than sixty miles into the forest. I didn't tell Erella or Immanuel. It was better they should think he'd just vanished. That he'd heard the primeval call of the forest and been drawn back to his roots. It's a recognized phenomenon, but I'm not an expert and I can't say for sure. We stopped for gasoline on the way, and as usual he put the nozzle in the tank for me and worked the pump by himself. We stopped for a meal, and afterwards he ran to the Jeep and brought me some paper tissues, he must have sensed something of my distress, or got a whiff of treachery, I can't tell you how attentive he was during that last journey. I looked at him over and over again thinking, Like a sheep being led to the slaughter. He picked up my thoughts, and throughout the journey, for nearly three hours, he sat huddled on the seat next to me with his arm round my shoulder, like a couple of childhood buddies going off together on holiday, and at first he chattered childishly, as though guessing what was in store and trying to secure a reprieve. But as we drove deeper and deeper into the forest he fell silent. He shrank down in his seat and started shivering violently and gazing at me with wide eyes just like the day we first found him in the forest, an abandoned baby looking at tis trustingly from inside a ripped tire that had been jettisoned by the roadside. I drove the Jeep with one hand and stroked his head with the other. I felt like a murderer about to plunge a knife into the back of an innocent soul, who was also dear to me. But what other way out did I have? Less than a year later Erella was killed in the Olympic hijack, but then, on that journey of abandonment, I could not possibly imagine the succession of disasters. Well, I finally reached a small clearing. I switched off the engine. There was a dreamlike silence. He climbed onto my Jap and laid his cheek on my shoulder. I told him to get down and gather me some sticks. He understood the word "sticks", but nevertheless he hesitated. Still shivering, he stayed where he was on the seat next to mine. Perhaps he didn't entirely trust me. He fixed me with a mute stare that to this day I can't find the right word for. I had to rebuke him roughly before he obeyed me and got out. As I shouted at him I was hoping that he wouldn't believe me, that he would be stubborn and refuse to go. When he was twenty yards away I started the engine, turned round quickly, stepped on the pedal and made my escape. So the last thing he heard from me was not a word of kindness or affection but a harsh reprimand. At that moment he realized that I was not playing hide-and-seek. That he had been tricked. That this was it. He chased me as hard as he could for hundreds of yards, in stooping apish bounds, with loud piercing shrieks: I have never heard such heartrending cries in my life, and I have c
arried wounded men on my back in wartime, and even when I could no longer see him in my side mirror desperately running after me I could still hear that shrieking receding in the distance behind me. For weeks afterwards I couldn't stop hearing it. Immanuel, who had stayed at home, maintained that he could also hear it, although that was absolutely impossible over a distance of sixty miles. But his blinking, which the doctors from Erella's clinic had not been able to do anything about, disappeared after a while and did not return even when his mother died. For a long while we all used to creep out sheepishly, at different times, to the garden gate, hoping or perhaps fearing that he might have found his way home. And if he did suddenly turn up, how could we make it up with him and would he ever forgive us? We did not open the can of sugar lumps for ages. Then when Erella was killed I put it to Immanuel that we should get another ape, but he would not hear of it and just said, Drop it. But the question is, Why did I tell you about the chimpanzee? What was the connection? Can you remember how we got on to it? What were we talking about before?
I said that I couldn't remember. That we had been talking about something else. And again without noticing I laid a finger on his hand and at once removed it, and I said: I'm sorry, Avraham.
Avraham Orvieto said that he wanted to ask a small favour of me. He was sorry he had told me the story. If it's not too hard, Noa, please let it be as if I hadn't told it. Then he asked me if I would like another iced coffee, and if not he asked my permission to accompany me wherever I was going, that is to say, unless I felt like being alone right now? He smiled hastily, as though he already knew what I was going to reply, and as hastily wiped away his smile. We walked awkwardly, almost in silence and somewhat out of our way, along a deserted avenue of tipuana trees that were slowly dropping a fine rain of withered yellow blossom on the sidewalk. It was getting dark outside, and we may even have slowed down unconsciously between one street lamp and the next, not talking, until we parted twenty minutes later on the steps of my school, as I had remembered that I had a staff meeting of some sort that evening. The meeting was already over when I arrived, and I hurried out again after Avraham Orvieto—to my surprise I suddenly sensed that sometimes I, too, couldn't stop blinking—but of course he was no longer on the school steps. He must have gone to his room at the Kedar Hotel, or somewhere else.