Don't Call It Night

4

I WOKE up at six and managed to write the memorandum. Muki Peleg will go over it and Linda has offered to type it out. At lunchtime I'll send it to Avraham Orvieto, with copies for the Mayor and the Treasurer. Who else should I send it to? I must find somebody who has some idea. Perhaps I should get hold of a copy of the official regulations and learn them all. Should I consult Theo anyway? That's all he's waiting for, like a hunter. He knew from the start that I'm not up to the challenge. He knew that after one or two slip-ups and failures I'd come running straight to him. Meanwhile, he's tactful enough to say nothing and not interfere. Like a grown-up who allows a toddler to climb wherever he likes but keeps a close watch and holds his hands out, where the child can't see him, to catch him if he falls.

I began the memorandum with an account of the "development of the idea". I found this expression unsuitable, but I couldn't find a better one. One of our students died in an accident "consequent upon drug-taking". There are various conflicting accounts circulating in the staff room about the circumstances of the incident. I was interested in the young man in question, even though I never actually managed to exchange more than a few words with him. Immanuel Orvieto was a quiet pupil. One of three boys in a literature class containing thirty girls. In recent years shy pupils have disappeared, they are all noisy during break and drowsy during literature lessons. Tired, disconnected, they stare blankly at Flaubert and me with a stubborn expression of amused contempt, as if we were trying to sell them fairytales about storks and babies. But there was something about Immanuel that always reminded me of winter. Once he was late handing in an essay on Agnon. I stopped him in break and asked why. He lowered his eyelashes, as if he had been asked a question about love, and answered softly that the story in question was not particularly relevant to him. I interrupted sharply, Who's talking about relevance, we're talking about an obligation. He found no answer to this, even though I kept him there cruelly for a whole minute before I said coldly, All right, let me have it by next week.

He handed me the essay ten days later. It was a fine, carefully reasoned, understated piece of work. After the concluding sentence he had added a personal line in brackets: In the end I did find some relevance in the story, despite the obligation.

Once I asked him on the stairs why he never put his hand up in class, surely he had things to say, I'd have liked to hear him talk occasionally. Again he had to pause before he answered hesitantly that he found words a trap. Not long before Pesach, I voiced the opinion in class that Yehuda Amichai wanted to express his opposition to war, and suddenly there was Immanuel's introverted voice, as though talking in his sleep, and with an interrogative note at the end of the sentence: Whatever the poet did or didn't want to say gets in the way of the poem?

I decided I should find the time to get him to talk.

But I didn't find the time. I forgot. Put it off. I have three classes and two literature sets, including the special set for recent immigrants. Each one has close to forty pupils most of whom have a tortured look. I'm rather fed up myself, after all these years. Now I don't even bother to remember their names. They're almost all girls; they mostly wander around all through the summer in bright-coloured shorts with a tear at the very edge of the crotch; they're almost all called Tali. Actually, there's always one in every class who keeps correcting me, it's not Tali it's Tal, or vice versa.

The truth is that until after it happened I didn't even know as much about Immanuel Orvieto as his class teacher and his counsellor did: that he had been living here in Tel Kedar from the age of ten with an unmarried aunt who worked in a bank. That his mother was killed a few years ago in the Olympic hijack. That his father is in Nigeria as a military adviser. There was a vague story circulating in the staff room that the boy had fallen in love or got involved with some girl in Elat, several years older, who was a junkie and might even be a pusher. Before the incident, I listened to this with only half an ear, because the staff room is always full of all sorts of gossip. So is the whole town, for that matter.

He was found not far from the abandoned copper mine near Elat, after he had disappeared from his aunt's home and been missing for ten days. He had fallen off a cliff. Or jumped. He had broken his back and apparently lay dying at the foot of the cliff for a day and half a night before he finally expired. It was to be hoped that he had not been conscious all that time, but there was simply no way of knowing. He had previously been taken there and been drugged, or drugged himself, or been tempted. I tried not to listen to these things, which here always come accompanied by excitable voices and gestures of stunned self-righteousness and a hint of secret glee: Look, what do you mean a backwater, look, we've made it to the national news, real-life excitement has come to us, too, and there's a well-known journalist and a photographer, they've been prowling around outside since this morning but the executive have decided that none of us must be interviewed, we have to answer No comment.

The funeral was postponed twice because the father was delayed. A couple of days later the aunt died too, and the talk in the staff room was of a stroke, guilt feelings, the hand of fate. All kinds of cackle that I tried not to listen to. The fact is, I loathed the father even before seeing him. An absentee father, an arms-dealer, in Nigeria, probably foil of complaints, probably only blaming us. It isn't difficult to pass judgment from a distance, on the basis of a few hints that converge into a conclusion. I imagined the father as a kind of ex-stormtrooper, prosperous, judgmental and self-righteous. I made up my mind not to participate in the delegation from the staff room that went to see him in his room at the Kedar Hotel even before the funeral. From the African jungle, here he was at last condescending to come here only to blame us for the awful fate of his son, how did we fail to see, why did we ignore, surely it was inconceivable that the entire teaching staff? In the end I went anyway, maybe because I recalled the boy's way of standing, quiet yet nevertheless disturbing, shy, as though plunging to his own seabed before surfacing and telling me almost in a whisper that words are a trap. There was a quiet plea for help in these words that I either didn't catch or caught and ignored. And so, refusing to recognize and recognizing and rejecting the recognition that if I had chatted with Immanuel, if only I had tried to get a little closer to him, and shrugging what the hell, drop it, you're crazy, I went along with the other teachers to meet Avraham Orvieto a few hours before they buried the boy and his aunt. There, in the hotel, in the father's room, this thing began that has filled the whole of my being ever since.

There was also the episode of the dog. Immanuel Orvieto had a dog, a depressive creature that always kept its distance. From the morning to the end of lessons he would lie and wait for the boy in the sparse tamarisk grove which grew, or rather decayed, opposite the school gate. If you threw stones at him he would get up wearily and pad a few yards away and lie down again to wait. After the calamity, this dog started coming into the classroom each morning, oblivious of the chaos in the corridors, mangy, floppy-eared, his drooping muzzle almost touching the dusty floor. Nobody dared to shoo him away or bother him during the days of mourning. Or even afterwards. He lay there the whole morning, with his sad, triangular head resting, motionless, on his front paws. He had selected a regular spot in a corner of the classroom next to the wastepaper basket. If anyone threw him half a roll or even a slice of salami in break, he did not bother to sniff it. If he was spoken to, he did not react. He had a pitiful, brown, bewildered look that forced you to look away. At the end of lessons he would slink out abjectly with his tail between his legs, and vanish until the eight o'clock bell the next morning. A Bedouin dog, not young, the colour of the earth hereabouts: a faded grey. Dusty. Now, in hindsight, I think he may have been dumb, because I don't recall him ever uttering a bark or even a whine.

Once he made me want to take him home with me, to bathe and feed him and make him happy: his undying devotion to a boy who would never return suddenly touched me. If I fed him milk from a spoon and got the vet to take care of him and made him a bed in the hall, he might eventually get used to me and let me stroke him. Theo detests dogs but he'd be bound to give in because he's the giving-in sort. If only I knew how to make him understand how oppressive I find his overwhelming consideration. I could see him screwing up his small eye, the left one, with his silvery retired British army major's moustache concealing a slight quiver: Look here, Noa, if it really matters to you, and so forth. So I gave up the dog. He was a pretty repulsive creature and the truth is that he showed no sign of needing a new attachment.

One morning he was run over. Nevertheless, he still arrived in class precisely on the first bell. His hind legs were smashed and looked like broken twigs. He dragged himself to his regular spot and lay there as usual. There was not so much as a whimper. I made up my mind to call the Public Health Department vet to come and take him away, but at the end of the day he vanished and the next day he didn't come back. We thought he must have dragged himself away to die in some secluded place. A couple of months later, the evening of the class party, after the greetings and the sketches and the refreshments and the headmistress's speech, when we left at one o'clock in the morning, the dog appeared again, bony, misshapen, cadaverous, wriggling along on his forelegs and dragging his paralyzed hindquarters, crossing the light of the lamp in front of the grubby tamarisk grove opposite the school gate, creeping from darkness to darkness. Unless it was another dog. Or just a shadow.

Avraham Orvieto stood to greet us, leaning back against the door of the balcony from which the mountaintops to the east could be seen shimmering in the heat haze. A small suitcase was lying shut on the hotel double bed. Two lemons on the table. A lightweight summer jacket draped over the back of the chair behind it. He was a small, frail, narrow-shouldered man, his thinning hair was turning white, his wrinkled face was suntanned, he looked like a retired metal worker. This was not the image I had of a military adviser or an international arms-dealer. I was especially surprised when he started talking to us, without waiting for the formal condolences, about the need to prevent other schoolchildren from falling victim to drugs. Speaking in a colourless voice, with a kind of hesitancy, as though he were afraid of making us angry, he asked whether Immanuel was the only one of our pupils to succumb. And he asked us to tell him how long we had known about it.

There was an embarrassed silence, because the truth is that we knew nothing until afterwards, discounting the staff-room gossip. The Deputy Head, stammering with tact, pronounced the opinion that Immanuel started taking drugs only at the end, in Elat, after he disappeared, that is to say more or less in the last days perhaps. Even the aunt had not noticed any problematic changes, although it was hard to tell. To which the father replied that we would probably remain in ignorance forever. There was another silence. This time it was protracted. Avraham Orvieto put his two wrinkled hands to his face, brown peasant-like hands with scaly fingers, then he laid them back in his lap, and the Deputy Head began saying something, and at the same moment Avraham Orvieto asked which of us knew Immanuel best. The Deputy Head resorted to vague mumbling. There was a silence. A young Bedouin waiter, dark-skinned and slender like a pretty girl, wearing a white bow tie, wheeled in a trolley covered with a white cloth and holding fruit and cheeses and a selection of soft drinks. Avraham Orvieto signed the bill and added a folded banknote. Help yourselves, he said, twice, but nobody touched the refreshments. Suddenly he turned to me and said quietly: You must be Noa. He liked your lessons, he had a talent for literature.

I was so startled I did not deny it. I muttered a few banalities, a sensitive boy, withdrawn, rather, um, reserved. The father smiled in my direction like someone who is not used to smiling: like someone opening a crack in a shutter for an instant to reveal a beautiful room with a chandelier and bookcases and a fire burning in the grate, then closing it as though it had never opened.

Six weeks later Avraham Orvieto turned up one morning in the staff room during the mid-morning break to ask our help in realizing an idea: he was considering giving some money to set up here in Tel Kedar a small rehabilitation centre for young people, schoolchildren, perhaps from other parts of the country, who were addicted to drugs. He wanted this centre to be a memorial to his son. Tel Kedar was a quiet little town, the desert itself might help: seeing the wide open spaces could inspire various reflections, it might be possible to rescue one or two. Of course there would be local opposition which he could well understand, still, why not try to sort out some basic terms that would allay the fears.

I was startled when he chose to ask me, who was not Immanuel's class teacher to agree to put together a sort of informal team whose task would be to make a preliminary study and jot down on a sheet of paper what the difficulties would be and what aspects were liable to antagonize the local residents. He himself came to Israel only every few months, but he had a lawyer; Ron Arbel, who would be at my disposal whenever I needed him. If I refused, he would understand and would look for someone else.

Why me in particular?

Look, he said, and again he smiled at me as though momentarily opening that shutter a crack to reveal the fireplace and chandelier; you were the only one he was fond of out of the whole school. Once he wrote me a letter and told me you had given him a pencil. He wrote the letter with the pencil you gave him.

I couldn't remember any pencil.

Still, I agreed to do it. Perhaps because of a vague urge to maintain a link with Immanuel and his father. What link? And why maintain it? When Avraham Orvieto talked about the nonexistent pencil, there flickered a fleeting resemblance, not between him and his son, but to a man I met many years ago. His face, his sloping shoulders, and particularly his gentle voice and the way he chose and put together his words, like the phrase "inspire various reflections", reminded me of the poet Ezra Zussman, whom I met once in a Health Fund rest house on Mount Canaan. We used to sit in the late afternoon, my father and Zussman and his wife and Aunt Chuma and I, on the sloping lawn while the evening colours were changing and an invisible breeze played around the hills. Father in his wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down, looked like a boxer or a wrestler who had grown old and put on weight, his face rough and craggy, the weight of his body pressing down on the taut seat, his black transistor clasped in his huge hand like a grenade ready to throw, a dark woollen blanket covering his useless knees, his hunched shoulders expressing violent fury as though he had been turned to stone in the middle of delivering a blow. We sat round him on deckchairs facing the light of the Galilean mountains on the rim of the sky that was yielding to the evening twilight. Ezra Zussman showed us hand-written poems that seemed far removed from the sort of poetry then prevalent in Israel and touched me like the sound of harp music. One evening he said: Poetry is a kind of spark trapped in a piece of glass, because words are pieces of glass. He hurriedly gave a sad smile and regretted the metaphor. Then the holiday came to an end, the Zussmans said goodbye humbly, as though wordlessly apologizing for abandoning us, and went on their way. Next day Father smashed his portable radio in a fit of blind anger, and Aunt Chuma and I took him home in a taxi. When a few weeks later I came across a short announcement of the death of the poet Ezra Zussman I went to a bookshop in Netanya to buy his poems. I didn't know what the book was called and the bookseller had not heard of it. Aunt Chuma bought Father a new transistor radio, which lasted about a fortnight.

I made it a condition with Avraham Orvieto that I should not receive any payment for my work in the fact-finding group. He listened and said nothing. Three weeks later I received a first check in the post. Since then he has sent me three hundred dollars each month via his lawyer, and leaves me to decide how much of this sum should be allocated to office expenses and to reimbursing travel, and how much should be a recompense for the time I spend on the project. Four times in vain I have asked the lawyer, Ron Arbel, to stop the checks coming.

Theo warned me, You're getting sucked in, girl, a financial arrangement like this is just asking for unpleasantness and trouble. It's difficult to believe that a hard-headed businessman would do such a thing out of absentmindedness. If all he really wants is to give some money for a memorial to his son, why doesn't he simply set up a trust? With a treasurer and proper accounts? If on the other hand what he wants is to set up a business venture, a private clinic for rich kids, an exclusive cuckoos' nest, three hundred dollars is peanuts for what you're worth to him by way of softening up public opinion, and you haven't even begun to realize how you're being used, Noa. Anyway, since when have you been into setting up institutions or refuges for junkies? There isn't a chance of getting the residents to agree to it — who wants an opium den in their backyard?

I said: Theo, I'm a big girl now.

He screwed up his eye and said nothing more.

He went back to the hall to continue ironing his shirts.

Of course he was right. The whole town is against it. Somebody wrote anonymously in the local paper that we won't let ourselves be turned into a rubbish dump for the whole country. There are so many things I'll have to learn from scratch. Things I've sometimes half-heard on the radio or skipped in the paper, operations, costs, capital fund, association, board of directors, budgeting; it's all still very vague but I'm already finding it exciting. Woman of forty-five finds new meaning in life: possible headline for a colour feature in one of the weekend supplements. Actually I've already been approached for an interview in an evening paper. I turned it down. I wasn't sure if such an interview would help or harm the project. There are so many things I've got to learn. And I will.

I sometimes say to myself in the third person: Because Noa can do it. Because it's a good thing to do.

There are three more members of the team, apart from me: Malachi Peleg (known to the whole town as Muki), Ludmir, and Linda Danino. Linda is an asthmatic divorcee, an art lover; she volunteered for the team so as to be near Muki. Her contribution is typing on a word processor. Muki Peleg came because of me: he would have joined even if I had been setting up a finishing school for carrion crows. As for Ludmir, a retired employee of the electricity company, he is a rambunctious member of a number of protest committees: an enemy of the quarries and the discotheque, denouncer of defective signposting, and writer of an impassioned weekly column under the title "A Voice in the Wilderness" in the local paper. He roams around the town in summer in a pair of baggy khaki shorts, with battered flip-flops on his veiny, sun-browned feet, and every time he sees me he greets me by saying, There's Noa smoke without a fire, and then apologizes with a smile: Don't take offence, my lovely, I was only joking.

In practice I have all the responsibility. I've been caught up in it for several weeks now: running around the southern offices of the Departments of Social Security, Health and Education, tugging at the sleeve of the League Against Drug Abuse, besieging the Agency for Young People in Distress, coaxing the Parents' Committee and the Education Committee, begging the Development Agency, responding to the local paper and chasing after the Mayor, Batsheva, who has so far refused even to put the idea on the agenda. I've been four times to Jerusalem and twice to Tel Aviv. Once a week I make the pilgrimage to the regional government offices in Beersheba. Here in Tel Kedar friends and acquaintances have taken to eyeing me with a sort of worried irony. In the staff room they say, What do you want with all this extra bother, Noa? What's biting you? Anyway, nothing'll come of it. I answer: We'll see.

I have no complaint against these friends and acquaintances. If one of the other teachers suddenly started agitating to set up, let's say, a laboratory for infectious diseases here, I suspect I'd be bewildered or angry myself. Meanwhile, the Mayor shrugs her shoulders, the Workers' Council is noncommittal, the parents are hostile, Muki Peleg keeps trying to distract me with his stories about what women give him or the things only he knows how to give a woman, and Ludmir coaxes me to join the campaign to close the quarries as well. In the public library the librarian has collected all the literature on treating addiction on a special shelf for me. Somebody has stuck a label on the shelf: Reserved for Noa the Addict.

Theo keeps his mouth shut because I've asked him to.

As for me: I'm learning.