Don't Call It Night

8

IT turned out in Beersheba that there had been some sort of misunderstanding about my appointment with Benizri. An obnoxious secretary with little earrings like drops of blood was delighted not to find my name in his diary: the woman who made my appointment is, according to her, a half-witted typist who comes in twice a week and does nothing, and has no authority to deal with the public. Mr. Benizri is in a meeting. All day. Okay so I heard you the first time, you've come specially all the way from Tel Kedar. What a pity. I'm sorry.

When I insisted, she agreed, with a gesture of vague loathing, to check on the intercom and see if he could spare me a quarter of an hour anyway. As she replaced the receiver with her crimson nails, she said, Not today, miss, try again in something like two-three weeks like, when Mr. Benizri gets back from the conference. And remember; give me a tinkle first, I'm Doris, if someone called Tikki answers, you're wasting your time. Poor kid, she had a child by a basketball player who doesn't want to know, and now it turns out her baby's a Mongolian. And She's religious too. If it was me that was religious, I'd be tempted to drive on Saturday. Who are you, then? What do you want Mr. Benizri for, maybe I can do something for you in the meantime?

At this point I gave in. I asked her to bother Benizri again and tell him that Theo's Noa is here.

A minute or two later he shot out of his office, all excited, oozing charm, waggling his hips, his paunch, Come in, wazzat, sure, and how's our dear friend? Healthwise? And workwise? Did he send you with the findings? That's nice. He's a great man.

And so forth.

But about your business, see here, Mrs. Noa, quite frankly, how should I put it: so you've got yourself a nice generous donor, the best thing you can do is send him to us. We'll put him on the right track. Never heard of any drugs in Tel Kedar. Insignificant. What, have we fallen on our heads? Are we going to attract all the you-know-whats of Greater Tel Aviv here? Better he should invest the money in, let's say, an old people's home. The Golden Age as they say. That's one thing we could really do with and it would work a treat. But as for importing a truckload of junkies… You know, drugs these days don't come on their own, they come with crime, with AIDS, with violence, with all sorts of kinkiness, if you'll excuse me. How does a nice girl like you come to get mixed up in a story like this anyway? You could even land Theo in the dirt too, heaven forbid. You know how it is these days, everything leads straight to the media, the local rags, in-depths, filth, God preserve us. Still, we can't waste a donor. Just you bring him to me. Generous givers don't grow on trees nowadays. It's because of the bad image of the State, which is thanks to the mess the Arabs in the territories have got us into, damn them. What does Theo have to say about the situation? He must be really teed off. The State is his life's blood. How long have you been with Theo now? Eight years? That's nothing. Insignificant. Just you listen to someone who knew Theo in the old days, when this country was nothing but sand dunes and fantasies. We still admire him from the times he used to blow up British police stations and radar installations. He's a really effective guy. More than effective: exemplary. If only he'd gone on running Development, we wouldn't have had all the foul-ups that have happened since. What a shame it's all gone up the spout. Just you remember you've got yourself a national treasure there, make sure you look after him like the gleam in your eye. Whatever happens, don't forget to give him a big hug from Benizri. And as for your junkies, just you drop them, before the dirty business starts. And your donor: send him to me and I'll put him on the right track. Goodbye.

I drove back from Beersheba to Tel Kedar in the wide old Chevrolet like a terrorist, hooting madly as I passed, cutting corners, all tense inside, seething with a cold rage that beat with a pulse of triumph. As if I'd already had my revenge. Drive straight to Muki Peleg's instead of going home, sit down with crossed knees on his low bed, a record, dim lights, shoes, a glass of wine, blouse, bra, without desire or any feeling except a destructive throbbing. Lips, shoulders, breast, then gradually southwards, by the book, twenty minutes more or less, without any passion on his part either, just collecting points in a catalogue of achievements that will never be full. Afterwards I'll have to hand him his points — sweetheart, how was I, you were great, sensational — and have for myself the satisfaction of getting the better of old "Gleam in Your Eye". I'll have a shower at his place and while I'm buttoning up my blouse he won't be able to resist asking me again, how was it, and I'll reply with Benizri's favourite phrase, Insignificant, thanks. I'll start the car and drive home with my terrorist rage defused. I'll say to Theo that tonight I'm doing the cooking. No reason. Just because I feel like it. With a white tablecloth and wine. In honour of what? In honour of Noa, who has decided to reconsider and climb down. In honour of her belated return to her natural dimensions. And tonight there'll be no jackal padding in the hall and no BBC from London. Tonight I'll put him to bed in my bed and I'll settle myself in his lookout post on the balcony. My turn now to sit facing the dark. In the morning, before going off to teach the poetry of Bialik, I'll write to Avraham Orvieto and tell him to find another sucker. Ezra Zussman's posthumous poems are entitled Footprints Lost in the Sand—they finally found me the book in the University Library in Beersheba — and on [>] I came across a poem that I liked the first half of. Instead of creating refuges I'll volunteer to collect warm winter clothing for immigrants. Or gift parcels for soldiers. I'll find some minor good cause within the limits of my ability, without biting off more than I can chew. Maybe I'll take it upon myself to edit a memorial volume for Immanuel Orvieto on behalf of the school, try to collect some material, though it'll probably turn out that no one has anything to say because who actually knew him — not even his class teacher or his counsellor.

I find it pathetic the way good people tend to volunteer to do good things for sentimental reasons. The right way is to serve the Good like that overworked middle-aged policeman, with an undistinguished round face and a small pot belly, whom I saw at the Ashkelon junction crawling on all fours to help the injured people trapped in an overturned truck while they waited for the ambulance to arrive. It was several years ago but I remember every detail: he was lying on the ground, giving the kiss of life to an unconscious woman through the crushed door. But the moment the rescue team arrived on the scene and a doctor or paramedic crawled up and took over, the policeman stood up, turned his back — there was nothing he could do now to help the injured so he set to work getting the traffic moving again: That's right, straight ahead, miss, keep moving please, the show's over.

Drily. Gruffly even. In a smoke-roughened voice. Oblivious of his mud-caked hair, his flattened cap and the rivulet of grimy blood trickling from his nose. He had sweat patches at his armpits and dusty sweat running down his face. Several years have passed, but I have not forgotten that peculiar combination of gruffness and grace. It is still my ambition to serve the Good in the way I learned from that policeman: not with gushing emotion but with supreme precision. With that air of just doing a job that verges on callousness. Confidently. Surgically. "And where are we meant to be shining, and by whom is our shining required," as Ezra Zussman wrote in the opening poem of his collection.

By the time I reached the traffic lights in the centre of Tel Kedar the poem and the policeman had helped me to get over my humiliation and dispense with revenge. Muki Peleg must find himself someone else. He would have to make do with Linda Danino. What would it achieve if yet another humiliated woman offered herself, between seven o'clock and twenty past, on a hot, damp evening in a small town in the desert, to the music of Ravel's Bolero, on a bed still covered with its dusty counterpane, to a boastful, rather shabby lecher, drenched in loud aftershave, so as to punish a man who meant her no harm and who would never discover what she had done? What good would it do? What benefit would it bring her?

None at all. Insignificant.

Muki Peleg once said to me, after his usual perfunctory spate of compliments and endearments, that actually he rather likes the pair of us. Theo and me. Not likes: admires. That's not it either. He never quite manages to say what he really means.

That's his problem. Over the years, he said, Theo and I had come to resemble each other in some indefinable way. Not in our characters, or outward appearance, or gestures, but something else, if I could only understand what he was getting at. You often notice that a sort of resemblance gradually appears in a couple who can't have children. Never mind. Forget it. He'd put his foot in it again. And I was blushing, all because of him, prattling on without sense or sensitivity. Sorry. He always ended up saying the opposite of what he meant. Similar vibes, maybe. No. What the hell. That wasn't it either.

I drove slowly past Muki's office, estate agents and investment consultants, did a U-turn at the lights and returned towards President Ben Zvi Avenue. I stopped there for a moment, trying to remember what I hid forgotten, and made up my mind that Noa was not going to climb down after all but would continue working to set up the Immanuel Orvieto Remedial Centre. At least until someone better qualified turned up who was willing to take over from her. That's right, straight ahead, miss, keep moving please, the show's over.

I did, however, park the battered great Chevrolet outside the supermarket. I bought various cold meats and salads, wine, an avocado, an aubergine, some spicy olives, and four kinds of cheese: the sin may have been called off but the ceremony of atonement was on. I found Theo sitting in the living room, his feet bare on the white rug, dressed in undershirt and tracksuit bottoms. He was neither reading nor watching television. Perhaps, like yesterday and the day before, he was dozing with his eyes open. After taking a shower I put on a flowery skirt, a blue summer blouse and a scarf. I unplugged the phone, even though I still had to sort out one thing I hadn't managed to remember to do. I forbade Theo to help me get supper ready, and when he asked what the occasion was I laughed and answered: Gleam in Your Eye.

He sat down at the kitchen table and while I sliced and warmed and poured he carefully folded green paper napkins and fed them into the special holder. In any physical activity, even something as simple as opening an envelope or putting the needle on a record, I observe a sort of precise manual dexterity that he may have inherited from generations of clockmakers, butchers, fiddlers and scribes. Though he once told me that his maternal grandfather was actually the last of a long line of gravediggers in some Ukrainian shtetl. He worked for thirty-two years as a planner, most of the time as a senior planner, in the Development Agency, They say he invented some new concepts, that he led some campaigns, some claim he left his mark. When I met him in Venezuela he was already detached, almost cold. He never wanted to talk about the conflict, the defeat, the collision with the Minister, things I learned about from vague snatches of rumours, dismissal, maybe an intrigue, followed by transfer to a dead-end department. Whenever I tried to ask, he took cover behind remarks like, My time there had come to an end, or, I'd already given them everything I had to give. That was all. About his present work he did not speak. Nor did he want me to meet his acquaintances from back then. When I first suggested that we go to live in Tel Kedar he agreed after a couple of days. When I found a teaching job in the secondary school, he opened a small office called Planning Ltd. Within a few months he had severed his links with his old acquaintances like someone opting for a deep retreat. In any case, he said, in a few years he would be due for his pension. Some evenings he goes to the California Café for an hour or two, and sits in a corner near the window overlooking the square, reading Ma'ariv or playing chess with Dubi Weitzman. But most days he gets home from the office at ten past five and stays in till the following morning. As though he is turning his back on something. He has gradually sunk into a perpetual hibernation, winter and summer alike, if one can use the word "hibernation" about a man who suffers from insomnia.

While I wrapped potatoes in foil preparatory to baking them, I told him about Benizri and I almost told him about what I almost did on my way home. I didn't want to talk about the image of the good policeman, even though I knew Theo wouldn't mock me. Slowly, intent as though on an intellectual effort, he folded the last napkin and tucked it into the holder. As if this one were more special or more complicated than the others. He said calmly: He's quite a little genius, that Benizri. He also said: It's not easy for you, Noa. These words made me hold back my tears.

After ice cream and coffee I asked him what he wanted us to do this evening. We could catch the second showing of the sexy comedy at the Paris Cinema. Unless he had a better idea. Whatever. He turned his head and squinted at me, and his broad, peasant head at that moment conveyed an amused blend of affection, suspicion and shrewdness, as though he had discovered some detail in me that had eluded him up to now, and decided that it actually worked in my favour. Glancing at his watch he said: Right now I could take you out and buy you a new dress, for instance. Only the shops are closed.

Instead we left the dishes on the table and hurried to catch the second show at the cinema. The street lamps in the square by the traffic lights were feeble; only the Monument to the Fallen was lighted up, by a pale yellow beam from the bushes. A solitary, skinny soldier sat on the iron railings, drinking beer out of a can. His eyes were riveted to the legs of a girl in a red miniskirt who had her back to him. As we walked past, he turned to look at me. It was a desperate look of desire held in check by cowardice. I put my arm round Theo's waist. I said: I'm here, how about you? He laid his hand on my hair. That supper you made for us, he said, wasn't a meal, it was a work of art. I said: What do you think, Theo? Muki Peleg said to me once that you and I are like each other in some way. I found that quite funny: In what way are we like each other?

Theo said: Muki Peleg. Who's that? You mean that agent. The clown with six fingers on his left hand. A bit over the top, isn't he? A downmarket Casanova? Wanders around in a T-shirt that says Devil's Tear? Or am I mixing him up with someone else? Stop summing up, I said; you're always doing it.

It was a British film, ironic and too clever, about an intellectual woman publisher who gets worked up about a Ghanaian immigrant. After giving herself to him once out of curiosity she falls for him so passionately that she becomes his slave, physically and financially, and then she becomes enslaved to his two violent brothers as well. The comical side was mainly in the relations between her family, who are radical Third-World-lovers and supporters of downtrodden races, and the boyfriend and his brothers: under a thin layer of broadminded tolerance the most ordinary, base prejudices kept bubbling up. There were some telling visual cuts from elegant modern bohemian drawing rooms to run-down kitchens in the slums, and back to book-lined rooms with displays of African art. Halfway through I whispered to Theo, Love will win, you'll see. A quarter of an hour must have elapsed before he whispered back: There isn't any love here. It's just Frantz Fanon and the downtrodden rebelling and getting their sexual revenge.

When we got home he went to the kitchen and came back ten minutes later with a jug of mulled wine and glasses. We drank almost without talking. Something in his eye made me cross my knees. Theo, I said, there's something you ought to learn. You don't put honey in mulled wine, you put it in tea. In mulled wine you put a little lemon. And why did you bring these glasses? They're for cold drinks. We've got different glasses for mulled wine, the smaller ones. You don't care any more. It's all so insignificant.

In bed we didn't speak. I put on my demure white nightie, like a girl from a religious boarding school, he said once, and he came to my room naked apart from an elastic bandage round one knee because of an old injury. I imagined I could feel with my fingertips the progressive lightening of the hair on his arms and chest, from dark black to grey to ash to silver; his body was tough and compact but his desire tonight seemed almost separate from him, as if what he really wanted was to enfold or encircle all of me, as if he longed to comprehend or include me, to have me in his debt, and he was so intent on reaching all of my skin that he hardly cared what his own body would receive, if anything, as long as I was curled up in the fetal position and wrapped in his body like a chick under a wing. I wanted and yet didn't want to surrender to him, to obey him, to give him the power to give and give and give, and yet I slid out of his embrace, from his delicious pampering, and I made him lie on his back and not interfere in what was being done to him, until the point when we were quits, and from then on to the end we were both for each other, like a duet for four hands, we may even for a moment have resembled two devoted parents bending over a cot, intently, heads touching, playing with a baby who returns love for love. Afterwards I covered him with a sheet and ran a finger across his strong peasant brow and his greying military haircut until he fell asleep and I stood up and walked with bare feet to the kitchen and cleared away the supper things and washed and dried the dishes and the mulled-wine glasses that were really cold-drink glasses and where did he get the idea of putting honey in, strange, old Gleam in Your Eye, what did he mean when he said it's not love, it's the downtrodden rebelling? I put everything away and changed the tablecloth. Theo did not wake up. As if tonight I had passed him all my own powers of sleep. Then I went out and took over his place on the balcony facing the desert. I remembered Benizri saying that at first it was all sand and fantasies here and I remembered the religious typist, Tikki or Rikki, the one who had a baby by a basketball player who didn't want to know now, and the baby turned out to be a mongol, or as the crimson woman said a Mongolian. And I thought about the lovesick chimpanzee, and the can of sugar lumps, and the boy who was once a child with blinking eyelids and who seemed to live inside a bubble of winter even in summer, perhaps because I dimly remembered him in a green sweater and brown corduroy trousers in a class where everyone else wore shorts. Although I was not entirely sure now about the corduroy trousers. Whatever the poet did or didn't want to say gets in the way of the poem? I should have tried to initiate a conversation. I should have invited him here, home. I should have got him talking. All I did was flit across his loneliness without stopping. Another time he said he thought words were a trap. I don't understand now why I didn't realize what he was saying was virtually a cry for help: "And over all there hangs a smile, fading and faint and painful", as Ezra Zussman wrote in a poem about autumn evenings.

Above the hills rose a saracen crescent moon that bathed in pallor the waste plots and apartment blocks. There was not a single lighted window. The street lamps still shone unnecessarily and one of them kept flickering: insignificant. A cat passed beneath my balcony and vanished among the bushes. Beyond the hills there was a faint salvo of shots, followed by an echoing rumble, and again a cold silence, which touched my skin. I also remembered the aunt who worked in the bank and died just two days after they found the boy. A plain, desiccated woman with short coppery hair secured with a kind of plastic bow. And she had a funny habit, when you sat down facing her in the bank and talked to her, of covering her mouth and nostrils with her freckled hand, as though she was always anxious that she might have bad breath, or more likely that you did. She used to end every conversation by saying, "That's one hundred percent okay", which she always uttered in a monotone. A rustling passed through the darkened garden as though my thoughts about the dead had left me and gone down there to crouch among the oleanders. As though the twisted remains of a dog were crawling down there. For a moment I thought the old bench under the bougainvillaea bower was broken: the moonlight had altered the angles, the shadows of the struts of the bench had got jumbled up with the struts themselves, and the bench now looked like the broken reflection of a bench in rippling water. What did Avraham Orvieto mean when he said in the staff room, as though referring to a fact known to everyone except me, that I was the only one the boy liked? Maybe I should have asked him to show me his son's letters, especially the one where he mentioned the pencil that never existed.

I was awakened at a quarter to seven by Theo, brisk, freshly shaved, stocky, wearing a smartly pressed blue shirt with epaulettes, looking like a retired colonial soldier with his broad shoulders and his short grey hair, with the morning paper under his arm, bringing me some very hot strong black coffee that he had ground himself as usual by hand and percolated, as though he were trying to conjure up a scene in that cruel British film. Apparently in the middle of the night, instead of going to bed, I had fallen asleep on the white couch in the living room. I took the coffee from him and said, Listen, don't be angry, I promised you yesterday I'd fill the Chevrolet up on the way back from Beersheba but in the end I clean forgot. Never mind, Theo said, I'll do it myself, later, on my way to the office after I've taken you to school. It's not time I'm short of, Noa.