Don't Call It Night

2

IT'S only in the evening you can breathe a bit, when the heat lets up. Another crazy day is over. I've spent all my time just running after time. From eight o'clock till one forty-five, at school: two hours' general literature, two hours' matriculation revision, and an extra hour for Russian immigrant kids whose minds were definitely not on the Exile of the Godhead. A pretty girl called Ina or Nina said in a lesson about Bialik: His words are Biblical, the sentiment he took from Lermontov, the poesy is anachronistic. She went on to recite some lines of poetry in Russian, perhaps to demonstrate the sort of poetry she liked. I silenced her. Even though I was not entirely captivated with the subject and had difficulty restraining myself from saying that, as far as I was concerned, the Godhead could stay in exile.

During my break, at eleven fifteen, I sat down near the air conditioning in the reading room to prepare for my next lesson, but almost at once I was called to the Deputy Head's office for a meeting with a younger teacher who had taken umbrage at something an older one had said. I agreed to some extent with both of them and suggested they forgive and forget. It's a miracle how this kind of cliche, and especially words like forgive, provided they are used at the right moment and with impartiality, can make tears flow and bring about a truce. Such petty words can soothe the hurt, perhaps because it was petty words that caused it.

I skipped lunch and ate a falafel on the hoof to make a meeting at twelve fifteen at the Workers' Council office. We were going to try to stir up some sympathy for the idea of the refuge. The square was empty and sunscorched. In the middle of the mangy bed of rosemary stood a pudgy bespectacled immigrant with a black beret, leaning motionless on a hoe as though he had passed out. The sun above him was cloaked in a fiery haze. At four o'clock, an hour late, Avraham Orvieto's lawyer, Ron Arbel, arrived from Tel Aviv, a spoiled child whose mother had made him dress up as a businessman. We sat in the California Cafe with him and listened to a complicated explanation about the finances. By quarter to five, when I took him to meet the Town Treasurer, the perspiration had turned sticky and my armpits smelled sour like a strange woman's; from there to a consultation with Muki, who had promised to write a memorandum but hadn't, instead of which he spoke for half an hour about himself and what the government hadn't got the hang of. Across his T-shirt was a loud print of a new rock group called Devil's Tear. Then to the Education Centre and the pharmacist's in the square and I just made it to the supermarket a quarter of an hour before it closed, and managed to get some cash from the machine and collect the iron which was being repaired. It was dark when I got home, wiped out by the heat and exhaustion, and I found him sitting in an armchair in the living room, with no light on and no sound. Another sit-in to remind me that the cost of my activities is his loneliness. It's a ritual that has more or less fixed rules. I am, on principle, to blame for the difference of fifteen years in our ages. He, on principle, forgives me because he's such a thoughtful person.

He prepared supper by himself: You're tired, Noa, sit down, watch the news. He made an onion omelette, produced a geometrical salad, sliced some black bread and served it on a wooden board with some cheeses, and radishes that he had carved in the shape of rosebuds. Then he waited for my admiration as if he were Count Tolstoy who had once again deigned to light the stove in the hovel of one of his serfs.

After the news he put the kettle on, made us some herbal tea, placed a cushion under my head and another one under my feet and put a record on. Schubert.Death and the Maiden. But when I picked up the phone and called Muki Peleg to ask if the memorandum was typed yet, and Ludmir and then Linda to sort out something to do with the planning permission, his generosity ran out and he got up, cleared and washed the dishes, and shut himself in his room, as though I were liable to chase after him. If it hadn't been for this demonstration I might have had a shower and gone to him, to tell him what had happened, ask his advice. On the other hand, I'm not sure I would have done. He's hard to take when he gets going — he knows exactly what's wrong with our project and what I should never have said to whom — and even harder when he says nothing and listens, trying not to let his attention wander, like a patient uncle who has decided to devote some precious moments to listening to a little girl explaining what it was that frightened her doll.

At quarter past ten, after I had taken a cold shower and then a hot one, had collapsed on my bed and was trying to concentrate on a book about the symptoms of addiction, I half-heard from his room the sound of the BBC. The World Service. Recently, like Menachem Begin in his years of seclusion, he has taken to tuning in to London every night. Is he on the lookout for some item of news that they're keeping from us here? Or searching for a different perspective? Or using the broadcast to talk to himself? Maybe he's only trying to get to sleep. His insomnia infiltrates my sleep and robs me of the few dreams I might have had.

Later, groggy with tiredness, when I'd abandoned my glasses and the light and the book, I could still catch the underwater sound of his bare feet in the passage, no doubt on tiptoe so as not to disturb me, and the refrigerator opening and the faucet running and the lights being systematically switched off, and the apartment being locked up, his stealthy nocturnal wanderings that year after year have made me afraid a stranger has broken in. Some time after midnight I thought I sensed his touch on the door and I was so exhausted that I nearly submitted to his sadness and said yes, but he was already tiptoeing away down the passage — perhaps he had gone out onto the balcony without turning a light on. He likes the balcony on the summer nights. Or perhaps there was nothing, the footsteps, the touch on the door, his wall-piercing sadness, it may all have been mere fog, because I was already asleep. I had had a hard day and tomorrow after school there's another meeting at Muki Peleg's and I may have to go to Beersheba to try to finalize the planning permission at long last. I must get some sleep and try to be even more wide-awake tomorrow than I was today. Tomorrow is another hard day. And there's the heat. And the way time flies.