Don't Call It Night

22

FIVE to one in the morning. Through the wall the grating of the elevator; with groaning cables it continues without stopping to a floor above. Noa is in her bed, she has washed her hair, she is wearing a white T-shirt and her glasses, her head is ringed with a halo of light from her bedside lamp, she is absorbed in a book, The Rise and Fall of the Flower Generation. Theo is lying down in his room listening to a broadcast from London about the expanding universe. The balcony door is open. A dry wind coming from the east from the empty hills slowly rustles the curtain. There is no moon. The light of the stars is cold and sharp. The streets of the town are long since empty and dead but the traffic lights in the square have not stopped rhythmically changing colour, red amber green. Alone in the telephone exchange Blind Lupo, on night duty, listens to the shrill of a cricket. His dog is dozing at his feet but from time to time it pricks up its ears and a nervous twitch ripples its fur. When is Elijah coming? The man who used to ask is dead, now perhaps he knows the answer. At the ultimate limit of hearing the blind man listens to the rustling of the night because he feels that behind the layer of silence and beneath the grating of the cricket the howls of the dead are stirring, faint and heartrending, like mist moving through mist. The weeping of the newly dead who find it hard to adapt sounds feeble and innocent, like the cry of a child abandoned in the wilderness. Those longer dead sob with a continuous, even wail, women's crying, as though muffled in the darkness under a winter blanket. While the long-forgotten dead of bygone ages, Bedouin women who starved to death on these hills, nomads, shepherds from ages past, send up from the depths a desolate hollow howl more silent than silence itself: the stirring of their yearning to return. Deep and dull beneath it breathes the groaning of dead camels, the cry of a slaughtered ram from the time of Abraham, the ashes of an ancient campfire, the hissing of a petrified tree that may once have flourished here in the wadi in springtime eons ago and whose longings still continue to whisper in the darkness of the plateau.

Lupo stands up, trips on his dog, apologizes, feels his way and closes a window in the exchange. Noa turns out her light. Theo, barefoot, goes to check that the door is locked and turns to investigate the refrigerator. What is he after? Again he has no idea. Maybe just the pale light filtering through the food, or the sensation of cold inside. He gives up and goes back to his bedroom. Forgetting to switch off the radio, he goes outside to sit for a while facing the empty hills.