Don't Call It Night

25

HE wears a rough elastic bandage on his left knee, because 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?

We chose a pair of light-coloured sandals with a buckle on the side in the form of a butterfly. Tal refused to let me pay for them but I insisted.

Pini Bozo said: I've got something terrific for you, too. Try these on. Never mind, just for size.

In the end I bought myself a new pair of sandals too. They were flat and cream-coloured, with plaited straps.

A little later we met Theo in the square. He offered to treat us to iced coffee at the California. We burst out laughing and said, You're too late, that's where we've just come from. I asked him what he thought of our new sandals. Theo shrugged his shoulders, said, Nice, great. He screwed up his suspicious eye, just like a miserly peasant: Where are you going now? Then he shrugged again and summed up, All right. I'm sorry. I didn't ask. Only don't neglect your math exam. Logarithms. Actually I could prepare you for that exam myself sometime. I think I can still remember a thing or two. 'Bye.

What does he do all day long? He hardly seems to get any new commissions. It's summer. He still has a few old jobs to complete. Every morning at half past eight he opens the office, switches on the powerful light and sits down alone at his drawing board under a photograph of Ben Gurion staring resolutely into a desert landscape. He scribbles geometrical shapes. Or stands at the window watching the life in the square. At ten o'clock he goes down to Gilboa's to buy the paper. Then he walks round the square and returns to his office. Not long ago he told me that he had offered to take care of a family problem for his cleaner: he fixed up her husband and also her father-in-law with temporary jobs. In fact, all he did was to pick up the phone, it was Muki Peleg who arranged it. I didn't ask about the details even though I wanted to know, so that he wouldn't have the feeling I was watching him.

In the mornings I sit for an hour or two at my corner table in the library, facing the air conditioning, while the old librarian, Amalia, dozes behind her counter, shrivelled, grey, wrinkled, her lips sucked into her jaws as if she is mocking me; every now and again she lets out a faint snore, wakes up, gives me a wistful glance and then her chin sinks again and her eyes close with an expression of repressed pain. Once she was the director of the municipal gardening department, it was she who planted the avenues of palm trees and initiated the Founders' Garden; she adopted a Bedouin orphan who eventually grew up and emigrated; she got into an argument with Batsheva and took early retirement, fell ill with diabetes, and at the beginning of the year she volunteered to help refurbish the library. But the numbers of readers are declining. Amalia has filled the neat, well-lit reading room with dozens of well-tended indoor plants in hydroponic containers full of fine, brilliant gravel, watered by test-tube drippers with a mixture of fertilizers and minerals, as though the place is gradually changing from a library into a hothouse or a dense tropical forest, with creepers and ferns branching out, climbing in and out of the shelves, pushing their way among the volumes, translating the neon light into dark vegetal sap. But nobody ever comes here except for me and some pensioners and a handful of weird youngsters. Empty. Most mornings there is just the ailing librarian and myself.

The books about drugs, addiction and treatment that were kept on a special shelf for me all these weeks have been dispersed and returned to their places. Now I have to prepare for the coming school year. But what's the hurry? Instead of the poems of Bialik I have selected a few books about the lives of musicians. Maybe because Julia and Leo Dresdner from the dental surgery telephoned to ask me to serve on a committee for helping immigrant musicians from Russia to settle in. There are plans to found a small music school with the co-operation of the high school, the Workers' Council and the municipality. It may be possible to bring in the Ministries of Absorption and Culture too. A meeting has been scheduled for next week with Batsheva. I have been asked to draft a letter addressed to a handful of classical-music lovers, to find out who will contribute. Linda has volunteered to type it, and Ludmir and Muki Peleg will distribute fifty copies.

I sit in my comer near the window at the end, wearing a flowery summer dress, leafing through the books and stopping here and there to read two or three pages about the strange love of Brahms for Clara Schumann, the illness and death of Mozart, and plump, shy Schubert, whom it is doubtful any woman ever loved except his mother and who described his own compositions as mediocre and ephemeral; he appeared in a public concert only once, before dying of typhus at the age of thirty-one. My eyes stray from the book to the shady plants. I remember my father's collection of postcards. Amalia is staring straight ahead with hollow eyes, huddled as though in pain. Her hair is thin and dry and her cheeks in the neon light are sunken like the face of a corpse. Muki Peleg told me that once, in the fifties in Beersheba, she was the beauty queen of the desert, she divorced, remarried, separated, danced on a barrel in a bathing suit at the wine festival procession, turned all the men's heads, seduced the drilling workers, lived with a well-known poet. The years passed and illness ravaged her and now behind her back they call her "the witch".

The air conditioning hums and grates a little. From far away, in the direction of Sharett Street, comes the rumble of heavy road-digging machinery. Despite which, miraculously, the reading room is full of a deep and total silence: when I leaf through a book you can hear the rustle of each separate page. Outside the drawn curtains the sun is blazing fiercely. A tyrannical light lies over everything. The ring of mountain peaks faints in the scorched dust. In a book called Words to Music: The German Lied from Mozart to Mahler I came across a poem entitled "Moonlit Night" by Joseph von Eichendorff that was set to music by Schumann in 1840:

The breeze was lightly straying

Thro' cornfields waving light;

The forest leaves were sighing,

And starlit was the night.

And my rapt soul her pinions

In eager joy outspread,

And over Earth's dominions

As homeward on she sped.

I close the book, lay my arms on the table and cover my face. Noa: smoke without a fire. Amalia the librarian comes across, bends over me, touches my shoulder, looking like a dying bird, with a sort of floppy crop hanging under her chin, but her voice is gentle and anxious: Are you not feeling well, Noa? Shall I make you some coffee?

I say: It's nothing. Don't bother. It's over now.

She grins at me without lips, the grin of a skull, and I have to remind myself that it is not a contemptuous grimace of irony beyond despair, but simply the shrivelling of the cheeks owing to illness and old age. Tal will join the army Avraham will vanish in Africa Theo will close his office and give himself over to Radio London day and night, the days speed past the summer will end years will pass and I shall be in her place behind that desk in the deserted library which will have turned into a jungle whose foliage will gradually swallow everything up.

In the meantime Linda and Muki came back, suntanned and giggling, from a short holiday near Safed. Muki has cut down on his jokey pursuit of me. Perhaps he finally fell in love with Linda there. Or am I beginning to lose whatever it was that attracted him? The change saddens me, even though I never liked his courtship. I joked about it to Tal, who said, Rubbish, Noa, forget it, it was all just a little game, still it's a pity you've had your hair cut so short. Before, when your hair used to fall to one side of your face sometimes, it was much prettier.

What about her? Why did she decide to have her hair cut short?

Because she didn't "go a whole load on that whole thing any more". All she wanted was peace and quiet. She had split up with someone barely two months ago; one morning she woke up and found she was attracted to an ass—"just like when we studied A Midsummer Night's Dream with you". Now she was simply tired of it. She felt like taking time out at least until the army. It'd be good if she could find part-time work in the meantime, like half a day in some office. She was turned off by boys who have nothing in their heads but combat reconnaissance and cars and motorbikes. And that's more or less all there is in stock here. The truth, since we're talking, is that what she finds really attractive is a more mature kind of male. More along the lines of someone who knows how to give a lot and wants to receive a lot. Somebody like Theo, only not so old, if I didn't mind her saying so. Theo struck her as someone who was inward-looking and sad. And that's what she found most beautiful and attractive in a man. Only with him it comes with the cold, indifferent bit, sort of, sorry to be blathering on.

I said: Look here, Tal, with Theo, and I stopped. Even though actually I wanted to go on and on.

But not now. It's too soon.

Muki grabbed me as I was coming out of Schatzberg's pharmacy, which still had a faded notice of the death of the late Gustav Marmorek: Listen, lovely. A consultation. Have you got five minutes to talk to me in the California? When Linda and I went on holiday to the Mount Meron Hostel, the first day she got sick on me. Food poisoning. Serious. I'll spare you the details. At first I thought, that's it, you've really landed in it; that's all you need, pal, changing her diapers instead of having fun, rushing to fetch her hot tea, boiled potatoes, medicine from the clinic in Safed, washing her underwear because naturally she hadn't packed enough. But in the end, you'd be amazed, I even ended up enjoying it. Perhaps I've become a masochist. It's not that we didn't have fun, don't get me wrong, by the third day she was as fit as a tigress and then I started striking sparks off her, if you know what I mean. Only, it's a funny thing, while she was sick I suddenly felt really close to her. How do you explain that?

That evening I told Theo about it. I reminded him that he'd offered to take me to Galilee. How about us going north too? To Safed? Or the Golan Heights? Mount Hermon? Not in your beat-up Chevrolet. This time let's hire a car. We'll share the driving. And shall we take Tal with us? If she wants to come?

Theo said: It's possible.

But the days are passing and neither he nor I has raised the subject of our trip to the north.

Last weekend we went to the funeral of Batsheva Dinur's mother. She died in her sleep. She was buried in the last plot in the row underneath the pine trees, past old Elijah and beyond Immanuel Orvieto and his maiden aunt Elazara. Kushner the bookbinder gave the address, and he mentioned that before she fell seriously ill she had served for decades as a history teacher and a devoted educator in the school for workers' children in Givatayim and indeed was a regular contributor to the Education Echo. He sketched her later years delicately, by means of hints, and joining together two halves of two different verses of the psalms he said, Cast me not away in the time of mine old age and take not thy holy spirit from me. Most of his words as well as the prayers were swallowed up in the roar of jet planes that circled low overhead, chasing each other in the dusty-looking sky.

A couple of days later we went to offer our condolences to Batsheva. We had difficulty squeezing in. The house and the garden were packed with visitors, her children, grandchildren, daughters-in-law, brothers-in-law, friends, cousins. Through the door that was permanently open flowed the whole of Tel Kedar, and Bedouins from round about, and neighbours, like a huge wedding. Women I did not recognize controlled the kitchen and dispatched convoys of refreshments into the garden and the various rooms. We had a job pushing our way through to Batsheva herself; we found her sitting on her throne in the garden, in the shade of the dense fig tree, surrounded by a turbulent throng of relatives and friends. There were large numbers of children running around in the garden, chasing each other noisily, but Batsheva looked as if she enjoyed the commotion. A bearlike, freckled woman, in a threadbare velvet-covered armchair. She was calmly conducting four or five different conversations simultaneously, in every direction, about roads, births, party politics, her mother's childhood in Smolensk, budgets and recipes. When our turn came to express our sympathy, she said: Hey, look who's here, my pair of addicts, grab a couple of chairs, and hold the cake for a minute, you must try these olives that a good friend brought me today from Galilee, from Deir el-Asad. Come, come here, Nawwaf, show yourself, these aren't olives, they're pure ecstasy, soul olives. If Mama could only taste them she'd eat a whole jar in no time. She was simply addicted to spicy crushed olives, with some fancy cheese and a glass of wine. Anyway, we ought to have parties like this for people before they die, not afterwards, so they realize what a silly idea it is to go — so people start dying less. By the way, the project, I had a phone call the day before yesterday from Avraham. What a noble, tragic, enchanting man, I'm already in love with him. Didn't you know that he was involved in rescuing the prisoners from Syria? And gathering information about soldiers missing in action? We chatted to each other for half an hour on the phone, and I think I persuaded him to drop the drug addicts and computerize the school instead, and that'll be his memorial to his son, such a pity I never knew him, I might have managed to get hold of him and prevent him killing himself. The problem is that you're stuck with the Alharizi house. You can't swallow it and you can't spit it out. But don't worry, it'll resolve itself; I think I've found a way of getting you out of it without leaving you out of pocket. We'll talk about it next week. Not that cheese, Noa, Theo, try the salty one first, my grandson from Rosh Pinna made it himself. It's not a cheese, it's a symphony. Where's the sweet boy who made it for me? Etam? Call him to come and take a bow. And here's Ludmir, come and sit down, Voice in the Wilderness, sit on the ground, you deserve it, and first of all you must try these olives that a good friend of mine brought me from Deir el-Asad.

That's how the fencing of the Alharizi house came off the agenda. There won't be any renovations either. A new dental surgery called Ivory has opened in the aunt's apartment, but it turns out that it's Dr. Dresdner and Dr. Nir again: they've moved out of their old premises next to Theo's office. And old Kushner has hung a sign outside his place, "SHOP FOR SALE", they say he's decided to leave Tel Kedar, he hardly has any customers left, and that he's going to go and live with his daughter and his grandchildren in Gedera, though others say he's moving into the Golden Age Home there; he put his name down for it ten years ago and now his turn has come.

Heavy bulldozers are roaring from six in the morning to nightfall and raising a cloud of dust at the end of Eshkol Street: they're connecting it at last to Ben Zvi Boulevard by a new road that runs round to the west. A whole throng of crows is hovering over the cloud of dust. In the square by the traffic lights they're putting up pillars for a new lighting system, like the ones they have in big cities. Julia Dresdner is calling the first meeting of the Public Committee for the Absorption of Immigrant Musicians. Violette and Madeleine, the hairdressers who are sisters-in-law, are expanding the Champs-Elysées Salon which henceforth will include a sophisticated beauty parlour. A snack bar is opening soon in Founders' House, and they may decide to have a permanent display of minerals in glass showcases. In the autumn there'll be a shop for musical instruments by the lights. So there are new things happening in the town. And Theo and I received a registered letter from Ron Arbel, the lawyer: in view of the opposition and the complications, it has been decided to put the memorial project on ice for six months. Alternative options are being examined concurrently. Mr. Orvieto will write separately. The project has not been shelved. As for the financial matter that remains open between us, it will be settled very soon, in a mutually satisfactory fashion. The various parties concerned will soon convene with a view to a revised appraisal of the situation and a comprehensive assessment of the various possibilities and alternatives. And we were warmly thanked and congratulated for our efforts.

Meanwhile Muki Peleg has been talking to an ultra-Orthodox group from Beersheba, who it turns out are keen to buy the Alharizi house for a boarding school to inculcate Jewish values in the children of the Russian immigrants. They are willing to pay us a sum identical to the original purchase price. Naturally the whole business has not been finalized, Muki explained. In the meantime, everything is open, and the negotiations with the Men in Black are only in case it turns out that our God is truly repenting, there in Africa, of all that He has decided to create here and is leaving us hanging between heaven and earth. As things stand at the moment, we are in a bit of a fix: the building is registered in the name of our fund, the money is yours, Theo, all we've got from Avraham is a verbal commitment, there's a letter from his lawyer but I really don't know what it's worth from a legal point of view. If we decide to sell to those holy men, I won't take any commission for this deal either, even though I'm actually quite short of cash at the moment, because Linda and I are planning a pleasure trip round Italy in the autumn. Why don't you two get married too? Then the four of us can paint Rome red and show them over there what dolce vita really means. Flowing with milk and honey under the Arch of Titus, if you get my meaning. The truth is, hand on my heart, if the three of us, four of us, decided not to give up, come what may, I believe the refuge would happen, whatever. Shall I tell you something straight from the heart? We ought to push it all the way. We ought to fight for it. We ought to turn the town upside down. It's needed a thousand times more than a holy boarding school that will start drugging our youngsters with the coming of the Messiah, and all that, instead of rescuing them from drugs. We ought to be looking for investors. Or donors. Organizing public pressure on Batsheva and the bureaucrats. Not giving up. Enlisting good people. Of whom there is actually no shortage here. And shall I tell you something else from the heart? Our real tragedy is that we're not truly desperate to do anything. That's the real disaster. When you're not burning to do anything any more, you cool down and start dying. That's what Linda says and I think I agree with her. We've got to start wanting things. To hold on with both hands so life won't run away, if you get my meaning. Otherwise it's all over.

Theo said: Meanwhile don't sell yet. If Avraham Orvieto drops out your trust will find another buyer.

What buyer? How much for?

Me. And we'll agree on the price.

When I got home in the evening Theo said, It's odd I said that to him. I don't know what I was thinking of. We're attracted by the house but what'll we do with it? Can you understand it, Noa? Because I haven't got the faintest where I got the idea from.

I said: Wait. We'll see.

On Saturday, at seven o'clock in the evening, as the light was softening and turning blue, we felt like going there. The groaning Chevrolet wouldn't start again. So we walked. Not through the square by the lights but the roundabout way, along the dirt track, along the foot of the cliff that shuts off the forbidden valley. A few dark, windswept bushes were stirring on the hilltops, because a fierce southerly wind blew up every now and again and filled the world with millions of sharp specks. As if it was about to pour with rain. Violent gusts periodically shook the bushes at the top of the line of hills, forcing them to bend, wriggle and stoop in a contorted dance. The piercing sand penetrated to our skin under our clothes, filling our hair, grating between our teeth, hitting us straight in the eyes as if it was trying to blind us. From time to time a low howl crossed the empty plains. And stopped. And started whipping and tormenting the long-suffering bushes again. We progressed slowly southwards, as though fighting a way upstream. We made our way round the cemetery. The wail of pine trees shaken by the wind rose from the direction of the graves. It is a small, new town, and the dead are still few, a few dozen, perhaps a hundred, and apart from Bozo's baby none of them was born here or buried with their parents. My father and Aunt Chuma, his sister, are buried among the nettles under dark cypresses in the neglected cemetery at the edge of the village where I was born. My mother is presumably in New Zealand, where it's winter when it's summer here and night when it's day here, and maybe the drizzle drips on her grave in the dark, and trees I do not know the name of whisper to each other and stop. One Saturday, when we went for a walk in a wadi on the northern side of town, we came across a Bedouin burial ground, heaps of grey stones that the sand was gradually covering. They may have been the remains of ancient nomads who lived and died here exposed between the mountains and the sun long before the Bedouin came.

When we reached the turning for the quarries we took the path to the west among the rocks. The wind, which had been blowing in our faces, now struck us from the left, pushing us towards the edge of the ravine whose bottom was already dark. The light faded and grew murky; curtains of dust obscured the sun and painted it with a strange grey redness tinged with purple flares; it sank until we could look at it without being dazzled. A glimmering, lethal mantle was spreading across the west, looking like burning chemicals. Then it sank and was swallowed up beyond the edge of the plain.

We reached the ruin as the remains of the light were still flickering. There was a sour, damp smell, even though the building was open to the four winds. We groped our way from room to room, stepping over heaps of rubbish until we imagined we could see shadows flitting in front of us: the reflection of the wind-lashed treetops in the garden on the walls in the remains of the light. But no: this time we really did seem to have disturbed a pair of uninvited guests, a girl and a boy, blurred, slow, we had apparently woken them from a deep sleep; they stared at us for a moment as if we were ghosts, then they slipped out through a window frame on the eastern wall and disappeared silently among the trees in the darkened wood.

Theo touched my back with outstretched fingers: Look here, Noa, you must understand, that boy is dead. I answered in a whisper, I know. Know? Then say it. But why? Say it, Noa, so that it is in your own voice.

And we stood there waiting for it to get cold.

We got home at ten o'clock. We went back through the town, crossing the square that was completely empty by now and lashed by the wind with tattered newspapers and salvos of sharp sand. I put my arm round his wide belt and sensed the smell of old leather and sweat. We hurriedly closed all the blinds and windows against the dust storm. Theo made a fine salad with a radish cut in the form of a rosebud. He made an omelette and put out sliced bread and various cheeses on a wooden board. I made two glasses of herbal tea. We put a record on, Schubert's Mass in B Flat Major, and we sat in the kitchen till late. We did not speak. Maybe we'll hire a car and go for a trip to Galilee. We'll stay in village inns and go and see the sun rise through the dense tangle of vegetation near the sources of the Jordan. When we come home Tal can bring us the little kitten she has promised us. Theo will give her a part-time job filing in his office, until she joins the army, and meanwhile he will prepare her for her math exam. We'll buy her a pretty blouse and skirt instead of the worn jeans with the rips at the knees. I thought about the shadows we had disturbed this evening in the ruin. They might have gone down into the wadi under the cover of thick darkness, and by now they'd have got as far as the flank of Hyena Hill. Or they might have taken shelter in the wood. Or they might have sneaked back inside after we'd gone and now they'd be lying in the gloom under the crumbling wall, head on thigh, drowsing in the peace of a silent dream, far from themselves, far from pain and sorrow, listening to the gusts of the southerly wind that blows and fades and rustles again through the tops of the twisted pine trees in the garden of the ruin from where it carries on to sweep the whole of the town and gropes at the outside of the shutters we have closed. If you like, you can hear it whistle through the low bushes. If you don't, you don't have to listen. In another two and a half weeks the summer holiday will be over. Whoever has some goodwill can find goodwill everywhere. Maybe this year I'll agree to be a form teacher. Meanwhile, tonight, I'll make him give up London because I'll have a shower and go to him in the darkness.