Don't Call It Night

17

I SNATCHED Muki Peleg from a raucous taxi drivers' reunion at the California Café, at the table they call the Council of Torah Sages: he had forgotten that we'd arranged to have a committee meeting this evening at Linda's. Look, men, feast your eyes, just see who's come to pick me up, he said to his friends, with the broad smile of someone having his picture taken with the President.

Walking westwards into the sunset, we crossed the square by the traffic lights. At the Paris Cinema they had a thriller on: so the British comedy had not been a success here. A lefty comedy, Muki said, Linda dragged me off to see it but I talked her into walking out in the intermission. We went back to my place instead to listen to some groovy music, the sort that turns you on, if you know what I mean.

I said I knew what he meant.

Then he told me he had invested thirty-three thousand dollars in a third share of a travel agency that specialized in sending groups of "floating" youngsters on trips to Latin America. Maybe Theo would like to join in, he knows a bit about sombreros, I caught them with their pants down literally seconds before the liquidator arrived, realistically my third is worth at least forty or fifty grand, and if Theo puts another thirty in we'll clear a cool hundred grand inside a year.

It was evening calm in the square. A westerly breeze was blowing, as though it was trying to bring the sea here. An occasional car drove past the line of parked cars. A flock of swallows was swirling to and fro above the streetlights, veering abruptly eastwards then changing its mind and settling in a huddle on the power lines again. I like this square that does not pretend to be what it will never be. The shops, offices and eating places, the simple window displays, everything is made with modesty. The Monument to the Fallen and the drinking fountain in front of it seem to suit each other and both seem to suit the centre of Tel Kedar. And the square seems right for itself, the way weekday clothes are right for a weekday. When Theo suggested seven years ago that they should put up a black basalt fountain surrounded with palm trees and black rocks I thought it was a cold idea. But there was no point in saying so, and anyway the suggestion wasn't accepted and there was never any chance it would be. It's not that he's short of ideas, they say here, the trouble is he's up in the clouds, old Sombrero, he's several sizes too big for our little town. It's some time since they've even said that because Theo has long since stopped making suggestions.

Muki Peleg said: It's a beautiful evening. And you're beautiful too.

Thanks, I said. I liked your expression "floating youngsters". By the way, listening to groovy music at your place and all that, try not to hurt Linda. She's not that strong.

Nothing but love, Muki exclaimed, laying his hand on his chest in a gesture of offended probity. Love and nothing but love, that's what she gets from me. And there's plenty to go round, so if you happen to need some you know where to come. I'll make you float too.

Most of the shops were closed by now. The shop windows were sparingly lighted. People were strolling unhurriedly up and down the square, couples, parents and children, mothers with baby carriages, and four tourists in casual clothes, baked by the desert sun. Pretty Limor Gilboa, in red trousers and high heels, was walking between two suitors, who were both talking to her at once. Anat and Ohad, a young couple, she was in my class not long ago, were standing whispering in front of Bozo's shoe shop. In the window Pini Bozo has hung a photo of his wife and baby son in a black frame decorated with coral. In a fit of unrequited love, a soldier aged seventeen and a half shot them and everyone else in the shop.

A few old people were sitting on the municipal benches near the beds of petunias conversing in low voices. Among them I could see Blind Lupo, sitting at the end of the bench, surrounded as usual by a flock of pigeons that were bold enough to perch on his knees and shoulders and eat maize from his outstretched hand. His Alsatian dog was dozing at his feet, oblivious to the massed pigeons. The blind man's foot struck the dog's back and the man hastily apologized. Meanwhile, every minute the traffic lights changed colour, even though there were no cars waiting. In front of Ecstasy Boutique, Women's Lingerie, an army officer from Ethiopia in a Givati Brigade beret was staring into the window with his mouth half-open.

As we were crossing Ben Gurion Boulevard the streetlights came on. There was no need for them yet, because the daylight was still fading very slowly. Half the sky was lighted by a red glow broken by wispy clouds. Behind the usual evening sounds, a woman calling a child to come in this minute, sentimental music from the Palermo, the murmur of metal signboards shaken by the westerly breeze, there was a deep, wide silence. At the place where Ben Gurion Boulevard ends and the greying expanse commences, two bulldozers, one of them enormous, were parked, and next to them the night watchman had lighted a smoky brushwood fire and he and his three dogs were motionless on the ground staring into the fire. Overhead a gliding raven made a black stain against the cloud-strewn blaze of the twilight. Here came another. And two more.

Twenty years ago there was still a bare plateau here hemmed in by grey hills. It was crossed only by a vague dirt track leading to the military installations in the valley behind the cliff. Now there are nine thousand inhabitants, a draft of a real town, flat, not entirely clear to itself, and already beginning to expand slowly over the plateau. There are some fifteen thoroughfares, perpendicular or parallel to each other, and all of them lead to the desert. People from thirty different countries live in five symmetrical districts, go to work or to the café, put their money in savings accounts, change the baby's diapers, change their curtains or their solar water-heaters, make an extra room by walling in the rear balcony. As if this has always been here. And there is a health clinic, a library, a hotel, a little industry, and henceforth there is also a string quartet that arrived only a fortnight ago from Kiev. A miracle, Avraham Orvieto said the first time he came after the death, sometimes, for an instant, you could see it as a miracle, a minor one at least. And he added: Immanuel loved Tel Kedar. It was his home.

The soil for the little gardens has been brought from far away by the residents, in trucks, and they have covered the dusty flint gravel with it as if they were dressing a wound. The dust constantly makes its way back from the open expanse, straining to reconquer its original terrain. And yet the gardens hang on and refuse to be dislodged. In a few places the treetops have grown higher than the roofs. Swallows have found their way here from far away, and perch in the treetops. Peaceful, homely, almost gentle, that's how President Shazar Street seems to me at seven o'clock in the evening, at a time when the day is departing and the sky is still on fire. In every flowerbed the hoses start their dripping at the same moment, operated by a tiny electrical impulse from the municipal irrigation computer. As the sun goes down the sprinklers begin to revolve in the little park and the façade of Founders' House is illuminated by beams from a floodlight concealed among the hibiscus bushes.

On a balcony we saw a handwritten cardboard placard: "for sale or to lett". That's the new estate agents, Bargeloni Bros, Muki said: They're such morons it's a wonder they didn't write sail. I said that actually I quite enjoyed living in a place that was twenty-five years younger than me, you could watch the life evolving. Muki said with a laugh: Nought out of ten for arithmetic, Noa, what do you mean twenty-five years, you don't look a day over thirty-three and a half, and you're getting younger every day — if it goes on like this you'll be ten soon. Blushing again, are you? Or is it just my imagination? After a minute or two, when he took in what I had said, he added in a different voice: Listen, one of these days I'm going to take things into my own hands and rig up some device with my own eleven fingers that'll hide or change those awful solar panels and TV aerials. Make it look a bit nicer round here.

I said: And the cypresses will grow taller, and we'll have a pretty skyline against the background of the mountains and the cliffs.

Muki said: And then they'll build Notre-Dame here and the Eiffel Tower; they'll fix us up with a river through the middle, with boats and anglers and everything, I'll be the building contractor and take charge of the lot, on condition that you'll kiss me on the bridge at night.

I nearly kissed him on the spot, in President Shazar Street, such a frantic, dishevelled boy; I restrained myself, and only said: It's almost pretty as it is. That is, so long as you remember when it started and what it was like before. A barbed-wire army camp in the middle of nothing. It started from sand and fantasies, where have I heard that?

Hardly started, and now there's no stopping her, as the empress's hussar said when they asked him how he got so thin, Muki said. Sorry. It just slipped out. Don't be angry.

And what sort of groovy music was it that he played to Linda whenever they walked out of the film halfway through and went back to his apartment?

Music for the soul. The Sword Dance.Bolero. He had loads of tapes that all kinds of girls had given him over the years. If I went, he'd leave the choice to me, and he'd make me a really explosive cocktail, out of this world. A couple of days ago Linda dragged him to a concert in a private house, at Dr. Dresdner's. That quartet from Russia played something sad and then they put on a record, even more depressing, the song of the dead children. It must have been Mahler, I said, Kindertotenlieder. One of them, called "When thy mother dear", gives me the shivers whenever I hear it, or even just think about it. Muki said, Look, I'm not really into all this stuff, Mahler, Germany, philosophies, but the honest truth is, I almost felt like crying there the other night from the music about dead children. It seems to get right inside you through your skin, not your ears. Through your hair even. If there's one really bad thing in the world, worse than bad, terrible, it's children dying. I'm against children dying. That's the only reason I'm on the committee. What did you think? That's why I'm going to this meeting now.

Linda served coffee in little decorated Greek cups. A regular glass menagerie filled three shelves: delicate tigers, transparent giraffes, shiny blue elephants, elegant lions that caught and reflected the light of the lamps, a tiny illuminated aquarium containing a single goldfish and a collection of miniature vases in whose glass little droplets of air are trapped forever like tears. Four years ago her husband the insurance agent left her because he had fallen in love with her sister. For years she has worked part-time as secretary in the little washing-machine factory here. She plays the piano at the rehearsals of the local choir. She signs up for every trip organized by the Workers' Council, takes part in voluntary activities for the Immigration Absorption Committee, art and craft groups, the panel for promoting the art gallery, the support group for the day centre for the elderly. A shy, asthmatic woman in her forties, with an old-fashioned plait coiled round her head, a whispery voice, and the thin, angular body of an adolescent. At our meetings she serves drinks and nuts, and then curls up quietly in a corner of the settee as though her forehead is being drawn towards her knees.

At the beginning of the meeting we asked Ludmir to take the minutes. Ludmir is a tall, suntanned man of seventy, long and thin and slightly stooped; reminiscent of an oddly proportioned ornamental camel made of wire and raffia, he gives the impression that his long, veiny tanned legs in their threadbare khaki shorts and battered flip-flops are attached directly to his chest. He has a prophetic mane of grey hair. Armed only with bitterness and angry pathos, he has been jousting year after year with one dragon or another. And still he never forgets his catch phrase: "Noa smoke without a fire". Ever since they moved to Tel Kedar in the days of the pioneer camp he and his wife Gusta have lived in a small, immaculate shack, overgrown with passiflora, behind Founders' House. Gusta Ludmir, a tall, severe, bespectacled woman with grey plaits wound round her head like rope, gives private math lessons. In her old-fashioned dresses, secured at the neck with a gloomy silver beetle, she sometimes reminds me of an aristocratic English widow from times gone by. Once, four or five years ago, a short while after he retired from the electricity company, Ludmir told me that his only grandchild, a girl of sixteen, whom he and his wife were bringing up, suddenly determined to leave home and go and live on her own in a rented room in Tel Aviv so she could study in a special school of dancing. Ludmir insisted that I speak to her "and prevent her throwing away her young life in the maelstrom of the big city, where all that lies in wait for a youngster like herself is ugliness and degeneracy disguised under the blandishments of a glittering career". So I invited Lailach Ludmir, a nervous, suspicious girl with the eyes of a hunted gazelle, her head sunk in her shoulders as though it had been hammered in forever, for a cup of hot chocolate at the California Café. And I tried to understand her dreams. But when I laid my hand for an instant on her tense shoulder she started, turned white and ran away. That was how I learned to take care not to touch children. Ludmir stopped talking to me, having come to the conclusion that I had ruined everything and that it was all my fault that he would die lonely. Two years later he forgave me, having come to a different conclusion, that in the last analysis we are all condemned to loneliness. "Noa smoke without a fire" were the words with which he first removed the interdict. But every now and then he shoots me a long wounded glare from those blue, childlike eyes of his that suddenly fill with pain.

Linda went to her kitchen to make another round of coffee and to prepare some fruit and shop-bought crackers. She told us to start the meeting without her, with the door open she could hear everything from the kitchen. I went out too to give her a hand and by the time we returned Ludmir had already erupted and was shouting furiously at Muki — how had we dared to purchase that filthy ruin, on our own initiative, without convening the committee, that whorehouse, that vipers' nest of drug-crazed criminals, without taking the trouble to ask ourselves what the public implications might be: "Not for me redemption's message if it issues from a leper," he quoted, attributing the line to Lea Goldberg. When I pointed out it was actually by Rahel, the molten lava changed course from Muki Peleg to me — such condescension, such arrogant pedantry, what are we here for, an operation to rescue young lives or an academic seminar? Are we a lifesaving team, or mere puppets in the provincial drama of a bored lady who is laying yet another trap to catch herself a new father in the form of a shady arms-dealer whom she will reduce in his turn to a baby for her own amusement?

So saying he threw the minute book down on the table and walked out, slamming the door behind him. He was resigning. Leaving in disgust. Abandoning Sodom and Gomorrah to their fate. A couple of minutes later he rang the bell and returned. He picked up the minute book in resentful silence and sat for the rest of the evening with his back to us in the corner near the aquarium. It turned out later that he nevertheless made a faithful and accurate record of the whole proceedings, confining himself to adding at certain points in the minutes" sic" in square brackets, accompanied by an exclamation point.

Spreading out the notes I had previously prepared before me on the table, I put on my glasses and proceeded from one point to the next. There were various possible ways of calming the suspicions that were brewing in the town. For example, we could offer to treat, at no cost, local youngsters who became addicted. We could agree to give the Education Committee, the managers of the school and the teachers permanent representation on the Board of Governors of the clinic. Or, rather not so much a clinic as a therapeutic community. It was worth stressing the intention of offering fellowships to some prominent specialists in the areas of drugs and young people, so that Tel Kedar would gradually become a prestigious research centre, attracting up-and-coming scholars and scientists from all over the country. It would make sense to harp on the pioneering theme and on the idea of community involvement. We should try to emphasize the creation of employment for teams of educators, psychologists, social workers, people who would be able to make a contribution to the life of the town. Scientific opinion on the treatment of addiction was divided between a biological and a psychological approach, and here we would be able to combine the two. And why shouldn't we try to involve the local police chief, who could issue a statement recommending that we grapple openly with the problem of addiction among the young instead of sweeping it under the carpet? It would be to our advantage if it was the police who explained to the public that the creation of a closed institute would reduce rather than increase the crime rate in the town. Above all, we must stress the motifs of communal responsibility, civic pride, an initiative that would make Tel Kedar into a model and example for other towns.

Ludmir broke his offended silence to hiss: Stress the motifs, did you hear that?

And when he looked at me, the repressed pain welled up in his eyes again.

Meanwhile, Muki Peleg was dozing on the settee, his artistically tousled head burrowing into an embarrassed Linda's bony lap; he had removed his shoes and put his feet on my knees, as though forming a bridge between her body and mine. He muttered something in his sleep about the need for a personal approach. Ludmir erupted, again, his cracked voice rattling the glass menagerie and the collection of dewdrop vases:

Hypocrisy shall not prevail!

I realized it was time to bring the meeting to an end. I proposed that we should reconvene in a week's time, after I had had a meeting with the chief of police. As we were getting up to go, Linda shyly asked if we would stay for a few minutes longer, she had a little piece she'd like to play for us, it wasn't anything special, we shouldn't expect too much, it was really very short. She sat down at the piano with her head bent, as though trying to touch the keys with her forehead. In the middle of her piece she had an attack of asthma and coughed so badly that she could not breathe and had to stop playing. Muki Peleg fetched her little Ventolin inhaler from her bedroom; then, before our eyes, he put a teaspoon in the pocket of his pink shirt and a moment later produced it laughingly from Ludmir's hair. He was the only one to laugh; apologizing, he stroked the gasping Linda with one hand and me with the other.

Linda said, almost in a whisper: We didn't make much progress today.

And Ludmir: Out of the frying pan into the fire.

Tomorrow night I'll go and talk to the police chief at his home. If I can manage to bring him round to our side, I'll try to get him to come to a special meeting with the parents' committee and the members of the Education Committee and I'll ask Batsheva too. And one weekend soon we'll have an open study day with professors, public figures, artists, we'll invite a panel of personalities from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The promise of a weekend at the Kedar Hotel will entice them to come, and the promise of well-known guests will entice the Kedar Hotel into making a nominal charge for their stay. I'll type out a concentrated fact sheet for the study day. If the public mood changes, we may be able at least to — At least to what? What's got into you, Noa?

Should I ask Theo to have a word with Batsheva privately?

In actual fact there's nobody in Tel Kedar better qualified than Theo to spearhead this initiative, to allay apprehensions, to influence public opinion. After all, over the years in Latin America he managed to plan and build vast settlement areas, industrial zones, housing schemes, new towns several times larger than Tel Kedar. Two and a half years ago he politely turned down a deputation of teachers, engineers and doctors who came one winter weekend to beg him to agree to stand for the local elections at the head of an independent slate: his qualifications, his record, his confidence-inspiring appearance, his professional expertise, his image. But Theo cut them short with the words: It's not what I want. And he closed his left eye even more, as though he were winking at me above their heads, Thank you, he said, getting to his feet, it was nice of you to ask.

Bitter and hard. Gleam in a blind eye. Or is he simply confined to an invisible wheelchair?

What about me? A bored schoolteacher starting a new chapter? Putting herself to the test? Or am I just provoking him, making a fuss to force him to wake up, if you can say that about a man who suffers from insomnia.

As we left, Muki Peleg made it clear that Linda, apparently, had virtually insisted he stay the night. Perhaps he was hoping I would be jealous. I walked Ludmir back to his immaculate shack overgrown with passiflora, behind Founders' House. On the way the old man said: That Muki is nothing more than an ill-mannered buffoon, and that Linda of his is a sentimental fool. There was once a godforsaken village at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, a village with thirty hovels and only two clocks. One belonged to the Starosta, who was the headman of the village, and the other belonged to the deacon. One day one of the clocks stopped and the other got lost. Or it may have been the other way around. The whole village was left without the time. So they sent a boy — he was nimble, literate too, beyond the mountain, to the town of Nadvornaya, to bring them back the time and reset the clock that had stopped. Well, the boy rode for half a day or more, he reached Nadvornaya, he found the clock in the railway station, he made a careful note of the right time on a piece of paper, folded the precious piece of paper, hid it in his belt and rode back to his village. Forgive me if I offended you, Noa. I'm sorry. I couldn't stay silent back there and restrain my anger at our futile prattle.

At once he embarked on a muddled apology for using the adjective "futile": he had tried to put things right and he had only made them worse, he had wanted to make peace and he had rubbed salt in the wound. Fire and brimstone is raining down on us all the time, Noa, because compassion itself is tainted with arrogance. There is Noa smoke without a fire. If you can, please forgive me. I cannot forgive myself, but you are still young. Good night to you. Pity on us all.

I got home at ten. I found Theo lying on the white rug in the living room, in undershirt and tracksuit bottoms as usual, barefoot, not reading, no television, he may have been dozing with his eyes open. He kissed me on the cheek and asked how it went and I kissed him on his bristly grey hair with its military cut and said: It was terrible. Ludmir is mad and Muki is a baby and that Linda is pathetic. So am I probably. There's nobody to work with. Insignificant. Nothing'll come of it all.

By the time I'd had a cold shower he had made us some supper, a geometric salad with radishes cut like rosebuds, cheeses and freshly sliced wholemeal bread on a wooden board, the frying pan with a cube of butter in it was waiting on the gas, and there were two eggs and a knife beside it, at the ready for the omelette-making. This is a ritual with its own invariable rules. I poured us both some mineral water. We sat down to eat opposite each other. His heavy, bare shoulders leaned against the side of the refrigerator. I was facing him and the window behind him that was full of desert stars. Theo told me that he'd been out too this evening, he'd been to see Batsheva, he just had a feeling I was going to ask him to talk to her.

I haven't asked anything of you yet. Least of all that you should go opening doors for me.

That's quite true, still, you ought to listen to me: I have the impression that, granted certain conditions, we might have a chance of getting this thing through.

We?

All right. You. I'm sorry. Even so, I think you ought to listen.

I got up in the middle of supper and shut myself in my bedroom. After a moment he knocked on the door. Noa, I'm very sorry, I only thought—

I forgave him. I went back to the table. The omelette was cold, so Theo got up, put a tea towel round his waist as an apron, and started to make me a fresh one. I told him to stop, there was no need, I wasn't hungry, we could drink some herbal tea and see if there was anything tolerable on the television tonight. We switched on, and turned off almost at once because they were broadcasting an interview with the Minister for Energy, who managed to say, Surely it is unthinkable… before we silenced him. Theo put a record on and we sat in the armchairs for a while without talking. Maybe at that moment we really did resemble each other as Muki once said about childless couples after years together. Suddenly I got up and went over to Theo, snuggled on his lap, buried my head in his shoulder and whispered, Don't talk. I remembered Tikki, the religious typist from Beersheba that I'd never seen, the one who fell in love with a basketball player and had a "Mongolian" baby by him that he refused to recognize. A live baby, I thought, so what if it's handicapped, it's alive, and just because it's handicapped it needs and deserves much more love. What was Immanuel doing all alone in the dark nurse's room on that grey winter's morning? How and why had he got there? Was he ill? Or had he slunk in to help himself to something from the medicine cabinet that he couldn't do without? How little I knew. Even now I didn't know anything. If I bumped into an addict right now, how would I be able to tell from a distance of four or five feet whether he was drugged or sleepy or simply had the flu? When Immanuel suddenly spoke and asked me, with his shy voice crossing the valley of silence in that room, whether I happened to have anything to write with, what had he really wanted? What was he after? To write something? Or was he just adrift, trying to communicate? And I pushed him away. I barricaded myself in. I failed to grasp that it was a plea for help.

Theo. Listen to me. Kushner the bookbinder wants to give us a two-week-old puppy. Don't worry. I've told him you're not interested in pets. Wait. Don't answer yet. Listen to something else, listen to this farce, Linda is in love with Muki Peleg and apparently he's already sleeping with her but he's still quite keen on me and I still love you. How about you?

Me, Theo said, well, it's like this, and instead of continuing he suddenly raised his undershirt and drew my head inside and enfolded me in the dark hairy cave of his chest as if he were pregnant with me.