The Lover

NA’IM

They’re getting themselves killed again and when they get themselves killed we have to shrink and lower our voices and mind not to laugh even at some joke that’s got nothing to do with them. This morning on the bus when the news was coming over the radio Issam was talking in a loud voice and laughing and the Jews in the front of the bus turned around and gave us a dry sort of look, and at once Hamid, who’s always so serious, who reckons he’s responsible for us even though he’s not our boss officially, touched Issam, nudged him with his finger, and Issam shut up right away.

Knowing where to draw the line, that’s what matters, and whoever doesn’t want to know had better stay in the village and laugh alone in the fields or sit in the orchard and curse the Jews as long as he likes. Those of us who are with them all day have to be careful. No, they don’t hate us. Anyone who thinks they hate us is completely wrong. We’re beyond hatred, for them we’re like shadows. Take, fetch, hold, clean, lift, sweep, unload, move. That’s the way they think of us, but when they start getting killed they get tired and they slow down and they can’t concentrate and they suddenly get all worked up about nothing, just before the news or just after, news that we don’t exactly hear, for us it’s a kind of rustle but not exactly, we hear the words but we don’t want to understand. Not lies, exactly, but not the truth either, just like on Radio Damascus, Amman or Cairo. Half-truths and half-lies and a lot of bullshit. The cheerful music from Beirut is much better, lively modern Arab music that makes your heart pound, as if your blood’s flowing faster. When we’re working on the cars that they leave with us the first thing we do is switch off Radio Israel or the army wave bands and look for a decent station, not a lot of talking, just songs, new and attractive songs about love. A subject that never tires. The main thing is to have none of that endless chattering about the rotten conflict that’ll go on forever. When I lie under a car tightening brakes the music in the car sounds like somebody walking over my head. I tell you, sometimes my eyes are a bit wet.

I don’t exactly hate the work. The garage isn’t such a bad one, big enough not to be always tripping over one another and getting on everybody’s nerves. My cousin Hamid isn’t far away, he pretends to ignore me but he makes sure they don’t pester me too much. But how can I tell them, I wanted to go on studying, not work in a garage. I finished in primary school with very good marks. The young student teacher was very pleased with me. In Hebrew classes I even used to think in Hebrew. And I knew by heart maybe a dozen poems by Bialik, though nobody ever told me to learn them, something catchy about their rhythm. Once a party of Jewish teachers came to the school to check up on what we were doing and the teacher called me up in front of the class and I stood there and recited by heart two verses from In the City of Slaughter, they nearly dropped dead on the spot, they were that impressed and maybe that’s what the teacher intended, he wasn’t exactly a great lover of Jews. Anyway, I could have stayed on at school, the teacher even went to my father to try to persuade him, “It’s a pity about the boy, he’s got a good brain.” But my father was stubborn, “Two studious sons in the family are enough for me,” as if we’re tied together with a rope and if one goes to college it makes the others educated too. Faiz will be finishing medical school in England soon, he’s been studying there for ten years already, and Adnan’s going to the university next year, he’ll be studying medicine too, or electronics. And I’m the youngest so I have to work. Somebody’s got to earn a bit of money. Father’s decided to make me a master mechanic like Hamid, who earns lots of money.

Of course I wept and cried and pleaded but it didn’t do any good. My mother kept quiet, she didn’t want to get into a quarrel on my account, she couldn’t tell me why it was Adnan and Faiz and not Na’im, she couldn’t say it was because they were the children of another woman, an old woman who died years ago and Father gave her his word before she died.

It was so hard at first getting up in the morning. Father used to wake me up at half-past four, afraid I might not wake up by myself, and I really didn’t want to wake up. Darkness all around and Father touching me, pulling me gently out of bed, sitting there and watching me getting dressed and eating breakfast. Leading me to the bus stop through the village that’s just beginning to wake up between electric lights and firelights through side streets full of mud and puddles among donkeys and sacks. He turns me over to Hamid like a prisoner. They put me on the cold bus with all the other workers, Mother’s homemade bread in a plastic bag in my hand. Slowly the bus fills up and Muhammad, the driver, takes his seat and starts running the engine and shouting at late comers. And I look out through the steamed-up window and see Father sitting there hunched up under the awning. A wrinkled old man wrapped in a black cloak raising his hand to everyone who goes past, starting to talk to somebody but all the time watching me sideways. And I used to get really angry with him, laying my head on the rail in front of me and pretending to be asleep and when the bus started moving and Father tapped on the window to say goodbye I’d pretend not to notice. At first I really did sleep the whole journey and I used to arrive at work dead tired. Yawning all the time and dropping things. Always asking the time. But after a while I began to get used to it. In the mornings I woke up on my own and I’d be one of the first to arrive at the bus stop, sitting down not far from the driver, no longer feeling sleepy. At first I tried taking a book with me to read on the way but they all laughed at me, they couldn’t understand it, me going to work in a garage with a book, and a book in Hebrew at that. They thought I was crazy. So I gave it up. I couldn’t concentrate anyway. Reading the same page over and over again but not taking it in. So I just look out at the road, seeing the darkness disappear, the flowers on the mountains. I never tire of this route, the same route day after day, an hour and a half there and an hour and a half back.

At four o’clock in the afternoon we’re already standing at the bus stop waiting for Muhammad’s bus and from all over the city the people of our village and villages nearby are assembling, construction workers, gardeners, bin men, kitchen workers, manual labourers, domestic help and garage hands. All of them with plastic bags and identity cards ready at hand in shirt pockets. Jews get on the bus too, Jews of all kinds with heavy baskets, most of them get off at the Acre Road. And in Acre more Arabs get on and some Jews as well, a different kind, immigrants from Russia, and Moroccans too. They hardly understand Hebrew. And on the way the Jews thin out and the Arabs too and in Carmel the last of the Jews leave the bus and only Arabs are left. The sun on our backs is nice and the road flies. Haifa disappears from the horizon, Carmel is swallowed by the mountains, the electricity pylons thin out. No smell of Jews now. Muhammad tunes the radio to a Baghdad station that broadcasts verses from the Koran, to entertain us. We go deeper into the mountains, driving among orchards on a narrow road twisting among the fields and there’s nothing to remind us of the Jews, not even an army jeep. Only Arabs, barefooted shepherds in the fields with their sheep. Like there never was a Balfour Declaration, no Herzl, no wars. Quiet little villages, everything like they say it used to be many years ago, and even better. And the bus fills with the warbling of that imam from Baghdad, a soft voice lovingly chanting the suras. We sit there hypnotized, silent at first and then crooning softly along with him.

ADAM

One of those Friday night debates, fruitless conversations among the plates of nuts and the dripping olive oil, when they start on that political crap about the Arabs, the Arab character, the Arab mentality and all the rest of it, I get irritable, start grumbling, lately I’ve lost patience with these debates. “What do you really know about them? I employ perhaps thirty Arabs in my garage and believe me, every day I become less of an expert on Arabs.”

“But those Arabs are different.”

“Different from whom?” Getting up from my seat angrily, not knowing why I’m so agitated. Asya blushes, watching me tensely.

“They depend on you … they’re afraid of you.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

But how can I explain? All entangled in my ideas. I sit down again, saying nothing.

Hamid, for example –

My own age perhaps but with the body of a youth, very thin. Only his face is wrinkled. The first worker I ever had, he’s worked with me nearly twenty years. Silent, proud, a lone wolf. He never looks at you straight, but if you catch his eye you’ll see that the pupils are very black, like coffee grounds in an empty cup.

What’s he thinking to himself? What does he think about me, for example? He hardly ever says a word, if he does speak it’s always to do with work, engines, cars. Whenever I try to draw him out on other subjects he refuses to talk. But his loyalty is really unique, or maybe it isn’t loyalty. In all these years he hasn’t been absent a single day, and not through fear of getting sacked. He’s a permanent employee with full rights. On the first of the month Erlich gives him four thousand pounds in cash, which Hamid stuffs into his shirt pocket, without counting it, saying nothing. What he spends this money on I can’t imagine, he always appears in scruffy clothes and worn shoes.

An expert and senior mechanic. These last few years he’s worked in a small shop that he built for himself in a corner of the garage, and that’s his kingdom. He restores old cars. A complicated professional job requiring precision, imagination, golden hands and infinite patience. He dismantles old engines, some of them completely wrecked, drills and cuts out new parts and breathes life into them. He works without rest, no radio beside him, no casual conversation or joking with the other workers, no teasing the customers. He’s the first to return to work after meal breaks but he also stops working the moment it’s time to go, he’s never been prepared to work overtime, he washes his hands, picks up his empty plastic bag and goes.

Two or three years ago he suddenly became religious. He brought from his home a dirty little prayer mat and every now and then he’d stop work for a few minutes, strip off his shoes, go down on his knees and bow towards the south, towards the lathe and the tool racks on the wall. Reciting passionate verses to himself, to the Prophet, who knows? Then putting on his shoes and going back to work. A strange kind of piety, grim somehow. Even the other Arabs in the garage used to stare at him darkly.

Because in spite of his solitariness he is a kind of leader to them, even if he doesn’t try to have too much to do with them. He walks among them aloof and silent. But when I need a new worker he brings me a boy or a youth within two or three days, as if he’s the chief of a whole tribe. Eventually I realized that most of the Arabs in the garage are in fact his relations, close or distant cousins.

I asked him once, “How many cousins have you got?”

A lot, he’d never bothered to count them.

“And how many of them work here?”

“How many?” He tried to evade the question. “There are a few …”

In the end he admitted to at least ten, in addition to his two sons. This surprised me very much because I never imagined that those were his sons, he didn’t seem to have any special tie to them.

“How many children have you got altogether?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Just … curious.”

“Fourteen.”

“How many wives?”

“Two.”

He was really upset by questions like these, fidgeting nervously all the time with a screwdriver, turning his back to me, impatient to get rid of me and go back to his work.

To his credit, although he used to provide me with new workers, he never interfered later on and if I was forced to sack them he didn’t say a word, only bringing me a few days later some new cousin or relative from his endless supply.

On the first day of the war he arrived of course, but only a few others came with him. They were afraid to leave their villages, they didn’t know what was going to happen. I grabbed him at once.

“Where are the others?”

He said nothing, not even looking at me, what did I want from him? But I wasn’t letting him off that easily.

“Hamid, you tell them all to come to work. What is this? This war of ours isn’t a holiday for you. There are cars here that need repairing, people will come back from the front and expect to find their cars repaired. Do you hear?”

But he didn’t reply, looking at me with hatred, his hands in his pockets, as if all this had nothing to do with him.

“You should really be fighting with us, you should’ve been called up too. Anyone who doesn’t come in tomorrow will be fired. Tell all your relations.”

He shrugged his shoulders, as if he didn’t care.

But for the whole of that day I didn’t let him work on his engines, I gave him dirty, menial jobs, tightening brakes, changing flats, charging batteries. He said nothing but it was obvious that his pride was hurt. The next day all the Arabs came in and he went back to his workshop. During the entire war not a single worker was absent. Hamid even made it his business to bring in workers to take the place of Jews who’d been called up.

But beyond this I don’t get involved with him, nor with the others. I’ve always refrained from visiting their villages and being a guest in their homes, as some of the employers in the neighbourhood do. It always ends in trouble, it gets out of hand sooner or later. In general I’ve rather kept my distance in recent years, convinced that the business runs itself quite smoothly without me. Already there are many workers whose names I don’t know, what with such a turnover. The garage has become full of boys over the last few years, sometimes even children. The Arabs bring small boys with them, brothers, cousins, or just waifs from the villages. They are quiet and obedient, dragging the boxes of tools around, fetching keys, opening hoods, tightening brakes, wiping black handprints from the doors, changing stations on the radio. The Arabs love little personal servants like these, they like having somebody they can shout at, give orders to. It gives them a sense of importance and security. The more the garage grew in size, the more little boys ran about in it.

Once I asked Erlich, “Tell me, is this kindergarten costing me money?”

But he smiled, shook his head. “Don’t worry, they’re saving you tax, you’re profiting from them.”

Some of the boys were given the job of cleaning the garage, sweeping up, scrubbing the floor. The garage began to look clean and respectable. One day I was standing by myself in the yard, deep in thought, and suddenly somebody pushed a broom between my feet and said rudely, “Do you mind moving?” I looked down, a little Arab boy with a big broom, looking at me steadily and insolently. I felt a little stab of pain in my heart. I was reminded of Yigal, I don’t know why, something about those dark eyes.

“Who brought you here?” I asked him, wondering if he knew I was the boss.

“My cousin, Hamid.”

Hamid, of course. Every other man here is his cousin. It won’t be long before I discover that I’m related to him too. These Arabs, they don’t spare their children. They’d be better off at school than sweeping up the rubbish and picking up screws here.

“How old are you, boy?”

“Fourteen years and three months.”

“How is this? Didn’t you want to stay on at school?”

He blushed, in a panic, afraid I was going to throw him out. He started to mumble something about his Either, who wouldn’t let him … little liar.

And he went on sweeping around me. And suddenly I was moved, I put out my hand and lightly touched his tousled head, covered with dust from his work with the broom. This little Arab, my employee, what’s he thinking about? What’s his business? Where’s he from? What’s happening to him here? I’ll never know. He told me his name a moment ago and already I’ve forgotten it.

NA’IM

In the early days it was very interesting in the big garage. New faces all around me, coming and going, all kinds of Jews bringing their cars in, laughing and shouting. Some of the mechanics were Jewish bastards, some were local Arabs, corrupt as hell with their complicated jokes. Noise and confusion. On the walls in every corner there were pictures of naked girls, showing nearly everything, maddening, breath-taking, Jewish and non-Jewish blondes and brunettes, black women and redheads. Amazing. Unbelievable. Lying with eyes closed on new tyres, opening the doors of smart cars, resting tits and asses and long legs on engines or screws or sets of spark plugs. On the ass of one of these gorgeous chicks they’d drawn the whole year’s calendar, it was that big. These pictures drove me crazy. I was afraid to look at them and I couldn’t keep my eyes off them. Sometimes I got so hard it hurt. In the noise and the dirt among the cars and the workers I used to wander about in the first few weeks daydreaming. Several times my underpants got wet. In bed at night I was squeezed by desire, remembering the girls and not letting them go. Coming all over the place, a fountain of come I was. Leaping from one to the next, unwilling to do without any of them, kissing and burning and coming and getting horny again. In the morning I used to get up exhausted and pale and Mother and Father were worried about me. But then slowly I began to get used to the pictures and after a month I could stare at them indifferently, like at the other pictures on the wall, the two presidents, the live one and the dead one, and that old woman who’s the prime minister, all hanging there among the girls. I stopped getting excited.

At first I wasn’t really doing anything. Fetching tools for the mechanics and taking them back to the toolboxes, cleaning dirty fingermarks off the cars. I tried to keep close to Hamid but of course he didn’t need an assistant because he didn’t work on the actual cars, he stood at a workbench taking engines apart.

After a week they gave me a broom and a rag and a bucket and I spent all my time sweeping the floor, picking up old screws, spreading sawdust on patches of oil, it was my job to keep the garage clean. An impossible job and terribly boring. Everybody ordered me around, Arabs, Jews, anybody who felt like it. Even strangers who just happened to be passing. Fetch, boy, lift, boy, grab this, boy, clean that, boy. Anybody who felt like giving orders used to catch me and order me around. And they called me “boy” on purpose to annoy me. But I kept quiet, not wanting to argue. I was really fed up. I hated the work. I had no enthusiasm for anything, even the cars didn’t interest me. When will I get to be a mechanic, when will I learn something and what’s it all for anyway? Luckily the garage was so big I could disappear sometimes without being missed. I’d take the broom and looking at the floor I’d sweep and sweep towards the back exit until I was right outside the garage, go into the backyard of some empty house and sit down on a box watching the street, seeing children in school uniform going home with their school bags. So miserable. Thinking about the poems and stories they read and how I’m going to end up really dumb with this broom and these rusty screws. I’d cheer myself up a bit whispering a few lines from Bialik, once I knew so much of it by heart and now every day I remember less and less. In the end I’d get up and take the broom and start sweeping around me and slowly go back to the garage, still sweeping, going inside and mixing with the people, who hadn’t noticed that I’d gone or that I’d come back.

Who’s our boss anyway? It was a long time before I figured out who the boss of the garage was. At first I thought it was the old clerk who sits there all day in the little office, the only place where there’s no pictures of naked women. But they told me he was only the cashier, just a clerk.

Then I had my eye on one of the Jewish mechanics who was in charge of the work and gave out orders, he was the one who dealt with the customers, testing their cars for them. But they told me he was the foreman. In the end they pointed him out to me, the real boss, the one that everything belongs to, his name’s Adam, about forty-five years old, maybe more than that, with a big beard. Maybe it was because of the beard I didn’t realize he was the boss. I didn’t think he belonged to the garage at all, I thought he was some kind of artist or professor. What’s the beard for? How should I know? I never guessed that everything belonged to him.

He wears partly working clothes and partly not working clothes. A white shirt or a nice clean sweater and blue working trousers. Most of the time he isn’t in the garage but driving around in a big American car, an old car but very quiet. Uses the car to fetch a new engine or some complicated bit of equipment for the garage. When he arrives he’s surrounded straightaway by a bunch of mechanics, they follow him, talking to him, asking him questions, consulting him. And he looks all the time like he’s about to drop, he always looks tired, thinking about something else that’s got nothing to do with the garage. But in the end the circle closes around him and he stands there in the middle, listening and not listening. Standing there patiently, looks like all he wants is not to touch them and not to be touched. If he talks at all it’s quietly, with his head a bit bent, chewing the end of his beard like he’s ashamed of something. He’s not even interested in women and sometimes we get some really attractive high-class chicks coming into the garage with neat little cars and they spend half the day wandering about and getting in the way. We’re so busy watching them we start dropping tools. Even the ones lying underneath the cars watch them. And they run after Adam as well, trying to talk to him, trying to make him laugh, but he isn’t the type that laughs easily. He hardly notices them. He looks through us ordinary workers like we’re air. He doesn’t really care about the work in the garage anyway. But when he walks around the place we all start to move faster and we even turn the radios down, though he’s never said anything against Arab music. Sometimes when there’s a difficult problem they ask him to look at an engine or listen to it or bring him some part that they’ve taken out, showing it to him and asking if it’s any good or if it should be changed. He looks and listens, his hands in his pockets. And then, so sure of himself, without hesitation, he tells them what to do.

But sometimes he can spend the whole morning standing at the lathe cutting out some missing part. Consulting Hamid, who seems to be the only one he really respects.

He doesn’t concern himself with the accounts. He goes into the office only when an argument starts there, when some customer gets a nasty shock because of the price they’re asking. He checks the bill again but he’s as stubborn as a mule and he doesn’t knock off a single cent. I sometimes sweep the office at the end of the day and I overhear the arguments. They say to him “You’re the most expensive in town.” And he answers “It’s up to you. Nobody’s forcing you to come back. Do you want me to show you the price list?” And he smiles, partly at them but mostly to himself.

Once, just before work was over, when I was sweeping the garage for the second time I came to a place where he was standing talking to somebody and I waited quietly for him to move. The workers were already changing their clothes and washing their hands and the garage was nearly empty. He stood there talking and just didn’t notice me standing there with the broom. I’m sure he didn’t know who I was, or that I’d been working in his garage for more than a month.

I stood there leaning on the broom and he stood on a pile of dirt listening to some important-looking guy who talked and talked. It’d been a crazy day and I’d already cleaned the garage maybe five times. All the time they’d been bringing in cars that wouldn’t start, cars that had been driven too fast and had skidded in the rain. There was no end to it. At last the important-looking guy in the suit who’d been talking about politics went away, but Adam stayed where he was, thinking hard. I was afraid to say anything to him. Suddenly he noticed me standing just a few feet away from him waiting with the broom. “What do you want?” I got all confused. He scared me staring at me like that.

“Would you mind moving a bit? I must sweep under you …” And he smiled and moved a bit and I started sweeping where he’d been standing in a hurry so he could move back there if he wanted to. But now he was watching me, staring at me like I was some kind of freak. Suddenly he asked:

“Who brought you here?”

“My cousin, Hamid,” I said at once, trembling and blushing and not knowing why. What could he do to me anyway? After all he gives me only a tiny wage that one way or another goes straight to my father. And he doesn’t really scare me that much, it’s just that big bushy beard of his.

“How old are you, boy?”

Him too — “boy” — damn him.

“Fourteen years and three months.”

“How is this? Didn’t you want to stay on at school?”

I couldn’t believe it. How was it he knew about the school? I started to mumble “Yes, of course … but my father didn’t want …”

He was about to say something but he kept quiet, still staring at me. And I started carefully moving the broom and cleaning around him, piling up the dirt in a hurry. And suddenly I felt him touching me, laying his hand lightly on my head.

“What’s your name?”

I told him. My voice was shaky. No Jew had ever touched my head before. I could’ve recited a poem for him. Just like that. If he’d asked me to. He really hypnotized me. But he didn’t know such a thing was possible.

And since then he’s smiled at me every time he sees me. Like he remembers me. And a week later they took me off sweeping and taught me another job, tightening brakes. Not too difficult. I started tightening brakes for them.

DAFI

So tired. What do you think? At night I lie awake, snatching maybe one hour of sleep in the morning when Mommy’s already dragging me out of bed. And until she sees me sitting at the table drinking my coffee she doesn’t leave the house. It’s odd, but at first the tiredness isn’t so bad and I’m not even late for school. In the first class I’m fairly lucid, anyway most of them are asleep, including the teacher. But the crunch always comes in the third class, just then, at around quarter past ten, I feel all empty inside, my heart sinks, my breathing gets heavy, I feel dead. At first I used to go outside by myself, to wash my face and try to sleep on a bench somewhere. Near the outhouse I found a sort of alcove and I tried to catch some sleep there, but it wasn’t safe because Shwartzy’s always snooping around (what the hell does he think he’s doing patrolling the girls’ toilets?) and once he caught me there, the sneaky bastard, and sent me back into class on the double. I started looking for other places to sleep but it wasn’t any use, the school wasn’t designed to furnish sleep for its pupils. It really was depressing, after all I needed only a quick doze, quarter of an hour maybe, to bring me back to life. At last I had a wonderful idea, I’d sleep in the class during the lesson, and I even found a suitable place, at the end of the fourth row a pillar sticks out and this makes an ideal hiding place, especially if you push the desk right up against the wall. That way you can escape the teacher’s notice, present but not present.

Once during break when the classroom was empty I sat down there and Tali and Osnat came in looking for me and went out again without seeing me.

Then I had to work on Yigal Rabinovitch to get him to change places with me, without telling him the real reason. But he didn’t want to change, it seemed he’d discovered the advantages of his place too. So I started buttering him up, smiling at him, chatting with him during break, walking home with him after school and even touching him as if by accident. He found all this a bit confusing, the dumb cluck, I saw it wouldn’t be long before he started falling in love with me. He took to waiting for me outside the house in the morning to walk with me to school, even skipping basketball practice before class. I didn’t want to overdo it, just enough to persuade him to change places. He refused and refused but in the end he gave in. Poor devil, his marks are so bad he could be in real trouble, he’s got a good reason too for not wanting to be too conspicuous. I really wanted to kiss him but I had to be careful not to give him the wrong idea. We went to the teacher and told her we were changing places and I brought in a cushion that I’d prepared especially, it fit into the corner nicely, in just the right position for keeping me out of sight, putting the cushion against the wall, laying my head on it and going to sleep, yes, really going to sleep. It’s winter now, the sky’s grey and it’s dark in the classroom, to save energy we’re not allowed to switch on the lights, and we sit there in our overcoats because Shwartzy’s taken the heaters away, he’s taking the energy crisis seriously and he thinks we must save fuel in the national interest.

And this way I snatch some sleep. In Bible or Talmud or Citizenship. Of course not in maths, because I’m too scared of Baby Face, who stalks around like a fat cat, always picking on me. But in the subjects in which I’m strong I don’t care.

Best are Arzi’s Talmud classes. For one thing, he’s shortsighted, and then, he hardly ever moves from his chair, he comes in and sits down and doesn’t get up until the bell rings, one of these days the chair will catch fire underneath him and he won’t budge, also, he talks in a sort of quiet drone that’s just great for sending you to sleep. Finally, and most important, in his lessons I don’t miss much by sleeping. Even if I sleep right through till the bell goes the class has only learned two lines in the meantime.

The others in the class have got used to the idea of me catching up on my sleep like this, and Tali, who sits in front of me, is always having to wake me up if anyone comes near. But today there was bright sunlight and I was dead tired. I got into my corner, put the pillow in place and leaned against the wall (where the plaster had already peeled right off) and went to sleep straightaway. Suddenly Arzi stood up, something made him excited or maybe the sun went to his head, and he started walking about among the benches. He saw me at once and when Tali tried to warn me he said, “Sh … sh …” and the others all held their breath, grinning as they watched the little old man creeping towards me. He stood there beside me for a few seconds (so I was told later) and suddenly he began to sing, “Sleep, sleep little girl,” and the class started laughing. But I still didn’t wake up, I think I was actually dreaming, I was that tired. In the end he touched me, thinking maybe I’d fainted or something, and I opened my eyes and saw his kindly, smiling face. Lucky that it was him. And he began to intone like a proper Talmudist, “And what do we learn from this?” And his answer: “That they are repairing the beds at your house!” The old man had a sense of humour. And everyone roared with laughter. What could I say? I just smiled back at him. Then he said, “Perhaps you should go home and sleep, Dafna.” And I really should have refused and told him I wanted to learn Talmud, but the idea of more sleep appealed to me so much that I stood up, shoved my books and note pads into my school bag and left, slipping away through the empty corridors before Shwartzy could get on my track. I walked home quickly.

At first I was so bleary I thought I’d come to the wrong house, because when I opened the door I saw a boy I didn’t recognize standing in the kitchen trying to drink something. But it really was our house and the boy was just one of Daddy’s workers who’d come to collect a briefcase that Daddy had forgotten. I startled him, he picked up the briefcase and left in a hurry. I undressed, in midmorning, put on my pyjamas, pulled down the blinds and got into bed. Bless Arzi, a real teacher, so considerate. But this damn bed of mine. I just lay down, and closed my eyes and again sleep fled.

NA’IM

And one morning they pulled me out from under a car and said, “Go to him, he wants you.” So I went to this Adam. He looked at me and said, “What’s your name?” I told him again, “Na’im.”

“Good, take this key and go to my house and on the little cabinet on the right in the hall you’ll find a black briefcase. Bring it here. Do you know Carmel?”

“Yes,” I said, I didn’t really know it at all but I just felt like wandering around the city for a while. He wrote the address on a piece of paper, told me which bus to take, took out a fat wallet full of notes, gave me ten pounds and sent me off.

And I found his house on my own without asking anyone. A three-storey house in a nice quiet neighbourhood, full of trees and gardens. And from everywhere you could see the sea, really beautiful, a slice of blue between the houses. I kept on stopping to take another look at it. I’d never seen the sea from so high up. Not many people in the streets, just a few old women with baby carriages, feeding the fat babies. These Jews spoil their children like hell and then send them off to war.

I went into the building. The staircase was brightly polished, I went up to the second floor like he told me and found the name on the door. I rang the bell first so if there happened to be anyone at home I wouldn’t be accused of breaking in.

I waited a moment and then opened the door myself. The apartment was a bit dark but very tidy. Chaos in the garage and here everything’s tidy, everything in its place except for his briefcase, which wasn’t on the cabinet on the right or on the cabinet on the left but was on the dining table. I picked it up and was about to go because this was all he’d asked me to do but suddenly I didn’t want to go, I liked the look of this dark apartment. I went into the living room, treading on the soft carpets. I looked out through the window and saw the sea again. I even sat down to rest for a moment in an armchair beside a green potted plant. I looked at some of the pictures on the wall. Beside the radio, in a black frame, there was a picture of a boy, about five I’d say, I could tell right away it was his son. I really ought to have gone, it isn’t nice to walk around like this, touching things, but suddenly I wanted to have a look inside their kitchen. What do the Jews eat? I’d never looked inside a Jewish fridge. The kitchen was very clean. The table sparkled. In the sink there was just one unwashed cup. I opened the fridge. There wasn’t much food in it. Some cheese, a few eggs, some yogurt, a bottle of fruit juice, a piece of cold chicken on a plate, a few medicines and about a dozen different kinds of chocolate. I guess they eat chocolate for lunch.

That’s enough, I thought, I’d better go. But a big jug with a thick red drink in it looked interesting. I’d never seen a drink like that before. I decided to have a taste of it, though I wasn’t at all thirsty. I found a cup and poured out a little bit, and I was drinking it, it had a funny taste like turnips, when I heard a key turning in the lock. Quickly I emptied the cup into the sink, turned on the tap and washed the cup. A girl about the same age as me in school uniform came into the apartment and threw down her school bag inside the doorway. Suddenly she noticed me and stood there looking confused, like she thought she’d come into the wrong house. I walked a few steps towards her, feeling myself blushing, waving the black briefcase and before she could scream or anything like that I said, “Your father sent me to pick up this briefcase that he forgot and he gave me the key as well.” She didn’t answer but she gave me such a sweet smile. I knew straightaway that she was his daughter, she was very pretty with big black eyes and fair hair. A bit short but very pretty, a bit tat but very pretty. It’s a pity I’ve seen her because I won’t ever be able to forget her. She’s one of those girls that I only have to see and I know I loved them even before I saw them. And she said, “Would you like something to drink?” and I said, “No,” and walked past her taking care not to touch her, holding the briefcase tightly under my arm, and I fled.

Half an hour later I was already downtown on the way to the garage. But suddenly I had an idea. I went into a hardware shop and got a copy of the key to the flat. I went back to the garage and personally gave him the briefcase and the key and the change from the ten pounds. And in my shoe I could feel the duplicate key against the sole of my foot.

But of course he didn’t suspect anything, smiling at me like his daughter.

“Thank you. That’s fine. And very quick.”

And he let me keep the change.

That was all.

ADAM

The end of December already. More than two months have passed since the end of the war. Every day I still hope for some sign of him, but there’s no sign. Did he just get tired of us? But where is he? Asya hardly ever mentions him but it seems to me that she thinks I should be out looking for him. I spend a lot of time driving around the streets, searching for the little Morris at least. How can a car disappear without a trace? Once I caught sight of a blue Morris and followed it through the streets until finally it stopped outside the Technion and a tall old man, smartly dressed, got out of it, looking at me angrily. Naturally hardly a day passes without my going down to the old house in the lower city to see if a shutter or a window has been opened there. But the apartment on the second floor is just as he left it on the first day of the war. Sometimes I’m not content with looking from the outside but I go inside and up the stairs to knock on the door itself. On the first floor there’s a clothing store. It’s always closed. And on the second floor, aside from the grandmother’s flat, there’s another apartment and an old widow living alone. She’s watched my investigations with great suspicion. I had only to walk up the stairs and the door of her flat would open a crack and she’d peer out at me, watching in silence as I knocked on the door, waited for a while and then went down again. At first I used to ignore her, after a while I decided to try getting some information out of her.

She was very suspicious of me –

Had she seen Gabriel Arditi? No. Did she know of any change in the old lady’s condition? She didn’t. Which hospital was she in, by the way? Why did I want to know? I explained that I was a friend of Gabriel and since the war I’d had no news of him.

She thought for a moment, then gave me the name of the institution to which the old lady had been taken. A geriatric hospital not far from Hadera.

She was a heavily built woman, with bright eyes, a little moustache sprouting from her lip. Still she looked at me dubiously.

“Do you happen to have a key to the flat?”

No, she had no key, she gave hers to Gabriel.

“I suppose I shall have to break down the door,” I whispered to myself, thinking aloud.

“In that case I think I’d better call the police at once,” she said without a moment’s hesitation.

“Who?” I smiled.

“The police.”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you mean coming here and breaking the door down? It’s not even your friend’s house.”

She stood in her doorway immovable as a rock. There was no doubt she would call the police.

I went away.

A few days later I arrived there late at night. Slowly I climbed the stairs and in the dark I began quietly trying to open the door with a bundle of keys I’d brought from the garage. But after only a few minutes the other door opened and the old neighbour appeared in a nightdress and with a kerchief on her head. She looked at me angrily.

“You again.”

I decided not to answer, to ignore her, continuing my vain attempt to open the door with my keys.

“I shall call the police.”

I didn’t reply. She watched my unsuccessful efforts.

“Why don’t you go and see the old lady herself, perhaps she’ll let you have the key.”

I said nothing, didn’t respond. But the idea seemed to me a good one. Why not, after all? I went on trying the keys. In the end I went away slowly in the dark.

Two days later I was at the geriatric hospital. An old building but painted green, between the orchards, on the edge of one of the older settlements. I went into the office and told them I was a relative of Mrs. Ermozo and I’d come to visit her. They sent for the matron, an energetic, vivacious woman about my age. She greeted me with enthusiasm.

“At last somebody has come. We were afraid she’d been completely forgotten. Are you her grandson too?”

Strange, thinking I was her grandson.

“No … I’m a more distant relation … has Gabriel Arditi been visiting here?”

“Yes, but for a few months now there’s been no sign of him. Come and see her.”

“How is she? Still unconscious?”

“Still unconscious but in my opinion there’s been some improvement. Come with me, watch them feeding her.”

And she took my arm and led me into one of the wards. She pointed to the bed where the old woman lay.

So this grandmother really does exist. Wrapped in a white smock, like a big ball. Sitting up in bed apd looking around her wildly. Her long hair, still dark, scattered over her shoulders, a big napkin tied around her neck and a dark-skinned little nurse, probably a Mexican from the immigrants’ settlement, feeding her with endless patience, with a wooden spoon, giving her a grey porridge that looked like soft mud. It wasn’t easy to feed her because she seemed quite unaware of the fact that she was being fed, and every now and then she’d suddenly turn her head to one side, looking for something on the ceiling or at the window. Sometimes she spat out the food and the grey liquid trickled down her face. The nurse took a sponge and wiped her carefully. There was something very sad in the empty eyes moving backwards and forwards about the room, sometimes pausing on some random object.

There were several old women in the ward, they got up from their beds and approached us with great curiosity, standing around us in a little circle.

“Every meal takes nearly an hour,” the matron said with a smile. I was staring at her as if hypnotized.

“How old is she?” I asked suddenly, forgetting that I’d introduced myself as a relative.

“I’m sure you don’t know … even though you are one of the family … guess …”

I mumbled something.

“Well then, you won’t believe it … but we’ve seen her Ottoman birth certificate. She was born in 1881. ’81. You can do the arithmetic yourself. She’s ninety-three years old. Isn’t it wonderful? 1881 … Do you know any history? That was when the first Bilu settlers arrived in the country … Hibbat Zion … the beginnings of Zionism … to say nothing of world history. Isn’t it amazing? She was alive then … a lady of history … a real treasure … perhaps she concealed her age from you? And her hair is still black … her skin is smooth … only a few wrinkles … it’s a wonder … and that’s the truth, although we’re used to old people here, that’s what the place is for, after all. We’ve never had such an old lady before.”

And the matron went to her, took out from the old lady’s hair a little comb that was hidden there and started to comb her hair, smoothing it over her cheeks, pinching them gently. The old lady didn’t look at her, feeling nothing, staring at the window.

“I tell you, if she hadn’t gone into a coma she could have carried on for years … or perhaps it’s the opposite … it’s because she’s gone into a coma that she will carry on for years … come and see … come closer … don’t be afraid … perhaps she’ll recognize you … perhaps something in you will revive her …”

“You still have hopes for her?”

“Why not? She’s changing all the time. You don’t know, but I’ve been watching her, and seeing her progress. A year ago they brought her here and she was like a vegetable. A vegetable? Worse than that … a stone … a big silent stone. And very slowly she began to change. She began to move like a plant, like some primitive creature, do I know. But these last few months there’s been a dramatic change. You’re smiling? Of course you can’t know. But she’s a human being again, her eyes are alive, her movements are human. She doesn’t speak of course but she’s already thinking, speaking her first syllables. One night she even tried to get away, they found her outside in the orchard. Of course we have hopes. Have you given up hope, in the family? That Mr. Arditi, her grandson, he seems to have disappeared.”

Hesitantly I went closer to the bed, and suddenly the old woman turned her head and looked at me, screwing up her eyes as if trying to remember something. From the corners of her mouth, still full of porridge, two thin streams began to ooze.

“No, she doesn’t recognize me … I’m a distant relation … it’s many years since she’s seen me …”

“But even so you came to see her … that was very nice of you.”

The old woman was staring at me, simply staring, she couldn’t take her eyes off me, she even began to murmur. Strange sounds came from her mouth.

“The beard … the beard …” the old women around us began calling out excitedly. “The beard reminds her of something.”

The old woman’s hands were shaking, something was troubling her, she was fascinated by my beard, as if she wanted to grab it.

I felt a stab of panic, I started to retreat, afraid she might wake up and I’d get involved here. The dark-skinned nurse wiped away the streams of porridge.

“You’re doing a wonderful job here.”

“I’m glad you think so.” The matron’s face lit up. “Perhaps you’d like to have a look around … see the other wards … do you have time?”

She, at any rate, seemed to have plenty of time. For the sake of public relations she led me from ward to ward, to see the old men and women lying there, playing cards, eating a second breakfast. She stopped to talk to them, touching them as if they were pieces of furniture, adjusting their clothing, even combing the hair of some of them. And they smiled at her, a little frightened. Meanwhile she explained to me some of the problems of the institution, the rising cost of laundry, the cut in the government subsidy, fruitless attempts to interest benefactors. Nobody’s prepared to invest in a geriatric hospital.

“I’m prepared to,” I said suddenly, already at the door.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m prepared to make a small donation to the hospital.”

She was stunned, and blushing she clutched my hand.

“Perhaps we should go to my office …”

“No need … I’m in a hurry … but …” And standing there at the door I took out my wallet and gave her five thousand pounds.

She took the notes hesitantly, unable to disguise her joy, amazed at the size of the gift.

“Sir … sir …” she mumbled. “But what is to be done with the money? I mean, do you have any special requests?”

“The money is in your hands … you can buy games for the old people … or some piece of equipment … the only thing I ask is that you look after that old lady, don’t let her die …”

“Of course … naturally … you’ve seen for yourself …”

“I’ll be in touch again to find out how she is … and if anyone else comes here … Mr. Arditi …”

“You’re always welcome, we shall do all we can … even without the money.”

She was holding the notes in both her hands, confused, and very grateful.

“Perhaps after all some kind of receipt … I don’t even know your name …”

But I didn’t want to give her my name, didn’t want him to know I’d been there, looking for him. I shook the matron’s hand and said with a smile:

“Write in your books — an anonymous gift.”

VEDUCHA

The black hand wants to feed the eyes, to move the head and give ear. Caress of soft little white worms trickling down. Bitter milk that once was sweet. Sounds of orchards and smell of people. Wet below, a secret pool, a gushing fountain. And sunlight at all the windows. Count the people. Four six one three. But why has a walking broom come in a confusing man, an upturned broom moving about the room walking alone anxious and now approaching the radiant laughing woman wants to sweep her face. Wants too to sweep an old woman in her bed. Oh, oh, oh, come heavy broom, bearded face. I know this broom, there were many such brooms walking the narrow streets full of black brooms there there in the old place in these ruins. Suddenly not orchards but thorns, little bushes rocks and strong sunlight houses upon houses and slopes. What is this called? What is the name? Oh, oh, an unknown woman, a woman without a name, oh, oh, what is the name of the place? Must know the name quickly must think the name. A blank wall has fallen here, grey stones with little clumps of moss. How did they say? How did they say it? How did they say it? — Usalem. Oh, I have it — Usalem, that’s it, Usalam. No, not that, something else — Rusalem. Yes, Rusalem. An important place, a hard place — Rusalem.

But that’s not the name. Something very close. Find it find it. Oh, oh, inside all is shaking but find it, it’s important, think, oh, oh, find it inside, inside is a little light, a distant light. Oh, oh, little light.

Usalem? Usalam? But not so heavy, not lam, lighter, humbler — Usalim. Oh, Usalim. I have it. No, not that again? Rusalim. Rusalim. I’m sure they called it Rusalim. That’s the place, the rocks, the thorns, quiet now.

The broom has gone. What? The sun at another window. What? Yes, Usalem, Usalem again. What does Usalam want. Usalam has returned. A mistake, sorry, Rusalem. Now it’s clear. Where was she born? — Rusalem. Where are they from? — Rusalem. Next year where? — in Rusalem. But did they really say — Rusalem? Not that. Just like it, but a little different. I’ve forgotten. Must rest.

Black hands turning me. Pulling a sheet spreading a sheet. Light has gone, no sun. Dark at the windows. That place with wall and towers, with brooms, that place with a desert at the end. Suddenly a desert. What’s its name? Not Usalem — Rusalim. But there was something at the beginning. Gerusalem, Sherusalem, Merusalem, Jerusalem. Oh, oh, oh, Jerusalem. Jerusalem, Jerusalem. Exactly, but no. I weep. Great pain. Jerusalem. Simple. Ah, that’s it. Jerusalem.

NA’IM

And since then I had my eye on him all the time. Even without looking I could tell when he was in the garage and when he wasn’t. Like a dog almost I could sniff him out. I could tell the sound of his American car apart from all the other cars. Even though now I spent most of the time on the floor under a car tightening the brake cables and I saw the world mostly between the legs moving about beside my head. I carried the key to his house around with me all the time, passing it from pocket to pocket, at night putting it under the pillow. I was very aware of this key, it was like carrying a gun without a licence. I watched him a long way off standing in a crowd of people and I was underneath a car thinking about his house, the dark rooms and the blue sea through the big window. The clean and tidy kitchen and the chocolate in the fridge, the door opening suddenly and the pretty girl coming in from the sunlight, throwing down her school bag and smiling at me.

I smile back, to myself, feeling the key in my shirt pocket. Whenever I want I can get in there again, I go there in the mornings for reasons of my own, quietly opening the door and wandering about the rooms, eating chocolate or taking something as a souvenir, money even, and if she comes back from school and opens the door again she’ll stand there and stare at me and I’ll say quietly, “Your father sent me to take you to the garage, he needs you.” And she’s surprised at first. “To the garage? What’s up? Maybe I ought to phone him first.” “No,” I’ll say, “the phone there’s out of order, that’s why he sent me here.” And then she’ll obey me and follow me going down the stairs with me and I lead her to the bus station, pay for her ticket, sit her down beside me and proud and serious I talk to her, asking her what she’s studying in school, and she’s impressed seeing I’m not just a thick labourer but a guy with a bit of education, I can even recite her a whole poem by heart. She takes a real fancy to me. And then we get off the bus and walk side by side through the street to the garage. Going in through the gate and straight to her father, who’s standing there with a bunch of people, he’s surprised to see me bringing him his daughter in the middle of the day. And before he has time to think I take out the duplicate key and give it to him, saying softly, “You see I could’ve raped her but I took pity on you.” And before he can catch me I flee the garage forever, leaving the city and going back to the village, become a shepherd, let them send the cops after me, we’ll show them.

And I’ll weep in front of Father and say, “I can’t stand it any more. Send me back to school or I’ll bring you even greater shame.”

I was so busy dreaming that instead of sealing the brake cable I let go of it and it flew out of my hand, springing back and cutting my face and hand open. I felt a burning pain and blood started to flow. Slowly I dragged myself out from under the car and the fat Jew who owned the car and was standing there waiting for me to finish the job got quite a shock seeing me crawling out all black with oil and grease and my face covered in blood.

Seems like I was pretty well cut and the blood was pouring all over the place. Adam was talking to somebody but he stopped and came running to me in such a panic you’d think he’d never seen anyone bleeding before. He took me into the office, sat me down on the chair and shouted at the old man to bandage me. I didn’t know the old man was the garage medic as well. He opened a little first-aid box and took out all kinds of dirty little bottles and started pouring stinging stuff all over my cuts. He took out absorbent cotton and bandages as well and started to bandage me with his hard dry fingers. It hurt like hell. And Adam didn’t move from there. His face was pale. They finished patching me up and left me to rest for a while in the office, but the bandages began to go red and blood was dripping on the bills on the table. And then they decided maybe they’d better take me to the Red Cross after all. A car that was just going out on a test drive was called in to take me there. And Adam led me to the car himself. And again he took out that famous wallet of his, stuffed full of notes, and gave me twenty pounds so I could come back by taxi. The man’s just loaded with money. They took me to the Red Cross and sent me in to the nurse. And she unwrapped the bandages lightly and laughed. “Who put these bandages on you?” and then she started to clean the cuts and put on ointments and all kinds of stuff that didn’t sting at all. And they gave me an injection too and put my arm in a sling. They weren’t at all stingy with their materials. Then they sent me away.

It was eleven o’clock in the morning. And I was alone in the big city wandering about with twenty pounds in my pocket. I didn’t feel like going back to the garage right away. I wouldn’t be able to work anyway. So I looked around the shops a bit, bought some chocolate. Then I got on a bus heading for Carmel, not knowing why, maybe I wanted to look at the sea again. But of course I went to his house, maybe I wanted to check if he was still living there. I went in and up the stairs, just to look at the door and then go away. In the end I knocked on the door softly and rang the bell too, though I knew there wasn’t anybody there. Silence. I took the key out of my shoe and put it in the lock. The door creaked a bit but it opened smoothly. And there I was in the apartment again, like in my dream, trembling a bit, suddenly seeing myself in the mirror beside the door, covered in bandages, bloodstains on my face and shirt like some war hero in the movies.

This time it might be dangerous but I couldn’t stop myself. The apartment was still dark and tidy, like it hadn’t been used in the weeks since I’d been there. I didn’t go into the living room but headed straight to the bedrooms to see the places I hadn’t seen before. First his and his wife’s room, very tidy. Again I saw that picture of the little boy. Their son? No sign of him anywhere, maybe he’s dead or he disappeared. I left the room in a hurry, meaning to go away, but I couldn’t stop myself and I went into the other room. I knew right away it was the girl’s bedroom. No doubt about it. I really trembled, I was that curious. Because this was the only room that wasn’t tidy, like it didn’t belong with the other rooms. A room full of light, blinds open and all kinds of posters on the walls. Lots of bright colours. And books and papers scattered around on the table. And the bed, the bed all messed up, a pillow here and a pillow there and some thin pyjamas lying there in the middle. I felt all weak and I sat down on the bed for a moment, lying back and leaning my head on the dip in the middle, kissing the sheet.

I must be crazy.

It’s like I’m really in love with her –

God, got to get out of here before they really call the cops. But I’m not going till I’ve taken something. A book maybe. Nobody ever reckons on thieves if a book is missing. I started looking through her books. I opened one — Bialik. Bialik again, the same textbook we had in school. I opened another book — arithmetic. The next one was by some guy called Nathan Alterman. Never heard of him, let’s give him a try. I put the book inside the big sling on my arm and left the apartment in a hurry, feeling faint and very weak. The key was still in the lock on the outside. I’d make a lousy burglar. Quietly I started down the stairs but on the first floor a door opened and an old woman with a face like a witch was standing there like she was waiting for me.

“Who are you looking for, boy?”

“Er … the Alterman family …”

“Alterman? There’s no Alterman here … who sent you here?”

I didn’t say anything. She stood in my way, if I pushed past her she’d scream. I know these witches. We’ve got a few in the village.

“Who sent you, boy?”

I still didn’t say anything. I had no idea what to say.

“Are you from the supermarket?”

“Yes …” I whispered.

“Then come and take some empty bottles.” I went into her kitchen and took a dozen empty bottles and some jars and gave her ten pounds. She was delighted. She didn’t seem to notice I was all bandaged up.

“Come back again next week.”

“O.K.”

And I went away in a hurry. They’re quick enough when it comes to taking money back, these Jews.

Three blocks farther on I threw everything into a dustbin. I went back to the garage. My cuts were starting to hurt again, the bandages were dirty. In the garage they were worried about me. They’d even sent a car to the Red Cross station to find out what’d happened to me.

“Where have you been? Where did you disappear to? How are the cuts?”

“Fine … just fine …”

I was careful not to look him in the eye. If he knew where I’d been he wouldn’t stroke my head again. I could’ve given him his neighbour’s compliments.

In the bus when we’d got past Carmel and there was just us Arabs left I took the book out of the sling. I opened it at the first page. Stars Outside, And in round handwriting — Dafna. I put the name to my lips. Like I said before I must’ve been a bit crazy. I turned another page.

The tune you idly forsook still remains and the roads still open lie and a cloud in the sky and a tree in the rain still await you passer-by.

Not bad. I can understand it –

I had three days holiday in the village while the cuts healed. Quiet days full of sun. I lay in bed the whole time and Father and Mother looked after me. I read the book through maybe a dozen times. Though there was a lot I didn’t understand, I could learn some of it by heart. But I said to myself — what for? Who for?

ADAM

You’re sure now that the garage can get along without you, and all you have to do is call in the afternoon and collect the money. Over the years you’ve built a machine that works perfectly, you’ve trained a staff of capable and experienced mechanics, some of whom hardly touch a screwdriver now but take care that others work, giving good advice and carefully checking every car when the repairs are done. Not to mention Erlich, who works wonders with the accounts. And you walk about the garage in the morning and see the foreman taking charge of the cars as they’re brought in, directing them to the different workshops according to the different problems — cooling systems, batteries, brakes, engine tuning, electrical transmission, body work and painting. And we have our own expert on vehicle licensing who renews customers’ licences, and Hamid is there too in his dark little corner renovating his engines. So you wander about in the middle of all this activity, beginning to feel you’re not needed, and even if they are always coming and asking you to listen to an engine or look at some component or other they don’t really need your advice, they’re just informing you of decisions that they’ve already taken.

Until suddenly something happens and you see how helpless everyone is. One of the workers gets hurt. One of the boys. You see a boy crawling out from under one of the cars covered in blood. His face and hands dirty with soot and grease, and a lot of blood. And he stands there quietly, nobody taking any notice of him, they walk past him without a word or even joking among themselves and if you don’t do something nobody will move a muscle. Erlich seems surprised when you lead him into the office. “He can wait outside,” he says, “I’ll come right away, I just want to finish sorting out this bill.” You have to scream your head off before Erlich makes a move.

It may be I’m exaggerating. The cuts aren’t deep, but all that blood scares me. And after all this is the boy who a week ago was sweeping up here, already he’s being allowed to lie under cars and fix brakes. What do you know about him? Suppose he gets killed — no matter, tomorrow Hamid will bring you a replacement. They’re a bit surprised at your sensitivity but this isn’t the first time you’ve seen a boy lying in a pool of blood.

Now I watch Erlich bandaging him, bringing out little old bottles of iodine and pouring it over the cuts. The boy’s as white as a sheet, eyes popping out of their sockets, groaning with pain but not saying a word. And Erlich brings out narrow bandages and starts to fold them in a strange manner.

Meanwhile I examine the first-aid box. Completely inadequate. It’s been here since the days when my father and I worked alone in the garage. I take five hundred pounds from my pocket and tell Erlich to buy a new box and equipment tomorrow. He waves the money aside brusquely, he’ll get the stuff for next to nothing from a customer who manages a firm that produces surgical equipment and he’ll claim the rest from taxes.

Now the boy’s all bandaged up, sitting there beside the cash register, looking at me with those dark eyes of his, not realizing that the blood’s escaping through the badly tied bandages and dripping on the papers.

Of course Erlich yells at him –

I send him to the Red Cross station, giving him money so he can come back by taxi.

And I stay behind in the garage, wandering uneasily around the various workshops, starting to get involved in all kinds of things. Suddenly all sorts of minor scandals come to my notice. One of the workers who doesn’t have a driver’s licence is moving cars around and collides with one that was just standing there. Another tries to start the engine of a car that’s got a broken fan belt and he ruins the pistons. Another nearly sets fire to an engine putting in the wrong kind of oil. They’re all angry and on edge. They’re used to being without me. They don’t know why I’m hanging around here and taking charge.

But I’m waiting for the boy to come back and there’s no sign of him. I send a car to the Red Cross station and it doesn’t return.

I have an argument with the foreman, who’s been rude to a customer, I even have a go at Hamid when I find him taking parts for the car that he’s renovating from an old car parked at the side. At last when it’s almost time to go home the boy comes quietly into the garage, all covered in bandages. The little bastard’s been wandering around the town. And I was worried about him. I touch him.

“Where have you been? How are the cuts?”

“Fine … just fine …”

Hell, why am I so worked up? I get into my car and drive off in a hurry.

NA’IM

He applied to study medicine in Tel Aviv and was turned down, he applied to study medicine in Haifa and wasn’t accepted, he tried Jerusalem and got rejected, he went to the Technion and failed the entrance exam, he wrote to Bar-Ilan and got a negative answer. He had a chance of getting into Beer-Sheba but was late with his application. All the time we thought of nothing but him and his studies. The whole house revolved around him. Father couldn’t sleep at night from worry. People came and advised him to apply here, to write there. Somebody knew so-and-so and so-and-so knew somebody else. They began working on their connections. They even wrote a letter to the Citizen’s Advice Bureau. They sent an old sheik to the Registration Department. Father even went to the Ministry of Defence and said, “For twenty-five years I’ve informed on whoever I’m supposed to and when my son wants to study medicine they slam all the doors in his face.” And they really did try to help. They told him they’d found him a place to study Arabic language and literature and Adnan turned it down, he didn’t want to be a teacher, everybody’s a teacher. They found him a place to study the Bible, he said, “I must be crazy.” They offered him a course in Hebrew literature, he said, “You want to bore me to death?” He was so stubborn and proud. It had to be medicine or electronics or something like that. He drove us all crazy. In the mornings he got up late and did nothing. Father didn’t want him to tire himself with work, just to study and prepare for the entrance exams. They gave him the best room in the house and made sure he wasn’t disturbed. They bought books and note pads and spared no expense. But he shut himself up in his room and paced around nervously all the time, he went whole days without eating. He was desperate right from the start. On nights before exams Father sat and prayed outside his door. In the morning Adnan left the house as white as a sheet, trembling all over. Wearing a new suit that they’d made for him and a little red tie, Father’s old tie from Ottoman times, but with dirty old shoes, going to some university or other to fail, and coming back in the evening exhausted and hardly saying a word. He’d sleep for two or three days and then start wandering around the village in the same suit but without the tie, sitting in a café with the other young men of the village and waiting for the results to arrive by post. And meanwhile his hatred grew and grew. He hated them all and the Jews especially. He was sure they were failing him on purpose. One evening at the supper table after he’d got another rejection slip he started to curse and went on and on. They sat there eating and drinking and hearing him curse the whole country. Suddenly I got fed up with listening to him and said quietly, “Could it be that you’re just not smart enough and it isn’t Zionism that’s to blame?” and before I’d finished the sentence Father hit me across the face with all his strength. The old man nearly tore me apart. And Adnan jumped up, knocking over the dishes. I fled and he fled and Father was yelling and howling. For a whole week I slept at Hamid’s house. I was afraid he was going to kill me, even then I got the feeling he was dangerous.

In the end, after we hadn’t spoken to each other for maybe a month, Father forced me to make up with him. I went and asked his forgiveness because I was younger. I kissed his thin hand and he patted my shoulder like patting a dog and he just said, “You … Bialik, you.” And he smiled a bit.

Nuts –

But when the university term started and he still hadn’t found a place I too began to hurt. Faiz sent papers from England to try to enrol him at some university there but Adnan had no strength left. He really began to think that maybe he wasn’t college material. He thought maybe he had a talent for something else. Now when I left the house in the morning I sometimes met him in the alleyway beside the house. He looked very thin, his clothes were crumpled, returning from nights spent prowling around Acre and the other villages. He’d found himself new friends. We’d stand and talk for a while, I in my working clothes and he still wearing his suit and the white shirt with the black collar. I already felt more friendly towards him. I didn’t know that he’d decided to leave us, that at night he was already checking out the roads and the gaps in the border fences. Some time later he disappeared. Somebody said he’d been seen in Beirut. Although we were sorry he’d gone and Father was terribly worried about him we thought maybe it was a good thing for him to get away for a while from the Jews, who bothered him so much.

We never imagined that suddenly he’d want to return.

ADAM

It’s a real art, you don’t appreciate it, to live this kind of double life among us, to live our world and to live its opposite. And when you’re talking again in your Friday-night armchairs, unable to keep off the subject, quibbling about elite groups and voluntary suicides and frustrated fanatics, I want to laugh or cry (but in the end I say nothing, just angrily stuffing another handful of nuts into my mouth). What are you talking about? Today he’s a worker in my garage, humble and patient, smiling and reliable. And tomorrow — a savage beast, and it’s the same man, or his brother, or his cousin, the same education, the same village, the same parents.

There, for example, was this ghastly terrorist attack starting at the university, and I watch my workers closely. I employ thirty Arabs and I have time to watch them, because I no longer concern myself with cars, only people. You ask yourself, what are they thinking? Does anything matter to them? Do they have any idea what’s happening?

They know. The news spreads fast. In the garage there’s a fussy old yeke, Erlich, the cashier, who hates music during working hours. He thinks it’s barbaric. And Arab music irritates him most of all. He’s already started coming to work with cotton stuffed in his ears, because sometimes there’re as many as twenty radio sets in the garage blaring Arab music at full blast. And when this nasty business starts he takes a little transistor out of his briefcase and, trembling with irritation and tension, shouts “Turn that music off, bloody murderers” and within a few minutes all Arab music is gone from the garage. They know where to draw the line, they tune their sets back to Radio Israel or the army wave bands. They’re on our side after all, you say to yourself. But after a while you see that something in the tone of the newscasters and commentators makes them nervous, they switch the radios off, preferring not to hear the news, working quietly, a little closer together perhaps, in no hurry to take the cars out on road tests. The boys are uneasy. They stop laughing. And someone working by himself in a dark corner quietly tunes in to a foreign Arab station, and a few others go over to him to hear the story, a sort of thin smile on their faces.

So, then, they’re on the other side.

But during the lunch break they sit in a corner eating their bread, starting to laugh a little, and this at a time when we’re crazy with suspense, they talk among themselves about trivial things, it doesn’t concern them at all. And as the gunfire of the shoot-out comes over the radio they come to me with practical questions, do the tyres of the Volvo need changing or just repairing?

They’re in a different world, they don’t even ask how it’s ended.

But when it’s time to go, after they’ve put away the tools and washed their hands, they wait for one another, which is unusual for them, and they leave the garage and go to the bus stop in a tightly knit group.

And next day I understand why. A first cousin of Hamid, a brother of one of the workers, related to most of them, led the terrorists there. And it seems they knew this from the start, they sensed it. And yet they gave no sign, didn’t bat an eye. Perhaps at home, when they’re alone, they’ll weep for themselves.

NA’IM

And suddenly the nervous voice of a newscaster breaks into the music and the singing. Something’s happened. The Jews start to huddle around the radio. Hamid gives us a look and all the Arab music is switched off. We too begin to hear the details. Something at the university. An attack on the registrar’s office at the university. They’ve taken hostages.

My heart stands still. That’s him.

Adnan has returned. The whispered curses of the Jews. The bright ideas. Everybody has ideas about what should be done. And we make ourselves small. Walk about quietly, we have nothing to do with all this. Trying to behave naturally, only working feverishly.

At ten past twelve they threw the body of a clerk out the window. Such cruelty. One of the Arabs smiles to himself, a thin, faraway smile. I slip down under one of the cars and try a thousand times to tighten a screw that keeps slipping out of my hand. I’m not here.

All around the usual talk about the death penalty and revenge. Our brother. What’s he doing? Where does he get the guts? This cursed pride. And why don’t the damn Jews take better care of themselves?

A cabinet meeting. The army. The Ministry of Defence. The same old story. Time for our lunch break. Drying our hands, taking our bags and sitting down on the floor to one side. I sit beside Hamid and keep close to him. He doesn’t say anything. As silent as usual. The others talk in low voices about other things, arguing about the new Volvo, about automatic gear boxes. I have no appetite, I want to cry but my eyes are dry.

Negotiations begin. Declarations. Conversations through a bullhorn. The arrogance. The usual descriptions. Just one novelty. One of thefedayeen is walking about in a suit and tie like he’s at a party.

I throw my bread to a stray dog that’s always wandering around the garage. Go back to work with the others. Everything’s as usual. The Jews come to take away the repaired cars, arguing over the price, but with anxious eyes, listening to the songs on the radio in great agitation. One of the Arabs quietly tunes in to Radio Damascus. It’s a different story there. A great battle, the university in flames. The lies. The fantasy.

And all the time I’m thinking only of Adnan.

We start closing the toolboxes and changing our clothes. And suddenly everything’s happening at once. The newscaster starts shouting like a commentator at a football game. They’re attacking. The sounds of gunfire come over on the radio like the rattle of a broken drill. They understand nothing. They’re killing him. Right now, they’re killing my brother. His eyes are seeing the light for the last time. Goodbye. Madman. Curse him. What he is doing to us. The shame. The cursed pride. My poor brother.

The Jews start to breathe more easily, even though a few of their own people have been killed. Suddenly they stop answering our questions, they’ve remembered to be angry with us. And we walk to the bus stop a bit closer together than usual, there are cops on the street to stop anyone having a go at us. But nobody wants to touch us, they don’t even look at us. On Radio Damascus the battle’s still raging. They’ve brought in tanks and fighter planes. We get on the bus. I sit beside Hamid on the back seat. Nobody says a word. Now Hamid takes out his transistor and puts it to his ear. And I look up at the hill, at the university sitting there like a flat white stone, like a tombstone. God, how long will this go on? Suddenly Hamid bows his head. On Radio Damascus they’re reading out the names. Hamid nudges me gently. It’s him. But I knew already, right from the start I knew it. Attacking the registrar’s office at the university in a suit and a tie and with a Kalashnikov. That could only be his idea. Only his.

In the village they know already. News travels fest. We don’t need the radio to tell us. A crowd of people outside the house. Women crying. I go inside the house and it’s full of chairs. They’ve brought in chairs from all the other houses, brought them here for the mourners. And Father has shut himself up in his room and isn’t speaking to anyone. And relations arriving all the time from other villages. And the women all in one room, their eyes red. What good is crying? To hell with it all.

And the house fills up with people. All sitting quietly and waiting. What for? In the evening somebody switches on the television, no sound, just to see if they’ll show the corpses. But they show only the room where the hostages were kept, the files scattered on the floor, the mess and the wreckage. They sit there in silence. Nobody speaks. Just now and then somebody groans “O God.” And at midnight the security forces arrive. In their innocent-looking Escorts. Welcome back sweet little bird. More like dogs than birds. Fat, with black moustaches. They’re tired and unhappy too. No blame, no threats. Wishing peace on everybody. They know all of us by name, hell. Shaking hands. The strange Iraqi Arabic they speak. People make space for them in the middle of the room but they decline and go stand in a corner. Drinking coffee. In the end Father’s brought out to meet them, he looks a hundred years older. Bit by bit they start telling the true story of what happened. Silence in the room, they’re all holding their breath. And the village outside is hushed as well, like the whole village is listening to the story in the dark. They tell us the facts we don’t want to hear but must. Hearts beating fast eyes closed. We hear of the cruelty, the heroism, the madness. Already the bombers are roaring overhead.

Father listens and listens. His eyes closed like he’s asleep. And when they finish he starts to speak. Softly, going around and around in circles. First about the fields, about the rain and what the Koran says about brotherhood and peace. And then he starts to curse. Weeping and cursing. Better that the boy had never been born.

And they listen to the curses, the words of loyalty and abuse. Nodding their heads but not believing. Not believing that we believe in what we say, but not wanting to hear other things from us.

Nobody goes to bed. All night we sit there in the big room and people come and go and in the morning the journalists arrive. With cameras and microphones. There’s no getting rid of them. They corner us and ask questions, they want photographs of him. Where did he go to school? Who were his teachers? How did he behave? Who were his friends? And Father with his Hebrew full of mistakes sits like a baby in a highchair, a microphone tied around his neck as they focus the lights on him, trying to smile. Again and again they ask him the same questions. And he says, “He was just mad, that’s all. Look at his little brother, he’s a good boy.” And he hugs me hard, hurting me. All this in front of the cameras. The shame. Adnan’s no longer his son. We’ve forgotten him. And that’s what we say, over and over again. The relations, the cousins, they all smile into the cameras. He was just crazy, off his rocker, even though we know he wasn’t.

ADAM

Rainy days. A heavy winter. I wake up as usual at five o’clock in the morning, a habit that I can’t change now. Lately I’ve been the first to go to sleep and I find a different house when I wake up in the morning. The leftovers of supper in the dining room. Pillows and blankets on the chairs. Dafi’s night struggles. Asya curled up beside me like a foetus. Her grey hair on the pillow. Wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. Behind the lids her eyes are moving. Dreaming again. Dreaming all the time.

“Asya,” I whisper, as if trying to penetrate her dream.

She moans, turns over quickly.

I drink coffee, eat a slice of bread, then drive through the empty streets, sometimes stopping by the seashore, parking the car and starting to walk along the wet beach. Very cold. The sky clouding over. A strong wind rising from the sea. But there’s always somebody there. An elderly couple in swimsuits running slowly hand in hand along the water line, chattering happily. A woman, not young, emerges from the stormy breakers and slowly walks towards me. She picks up a towel that was lying almost at my feet and covers herself with it. Taking off her bathing cap, shaking out her hair and spraying cold drops of water on my face. She smiles at me, perhaps she wants to start a conversation. Not a pretty face, but a superb figure. I stand beside her, wrapped in my big fur coat, watching her change her bathing suit for a dress, watching her white breasts in the freezing wind. Without interest. Deep in thought. Somebody touches my shoulder.

My heart stops — Gabriel.

But it’s Erlich, the old yeke, in swimming trunks, laughing, thin and strong, his silver body hair reeking of salt and sand.

“Erlich! Do you still swim in the sea in the morning, even on days like this?”

“For thirty years now. I used to swim with your father. Every day before work. Come on now, strip off and get into the water.”

“I’m an old man …” I reply with a smile. We talk for a while, Erlich running on the spot to keep warm. Then he leaves me and goes running away to climb on some horizontal bars. A light rain falling. All kinds of weird people turning up. Friendly fishermen. It’s nearly seven o’clock. Time to go. Driving out towards the main road I see the woman who came out of the water, whose breasts I caught sight of for a moment, walking on the left-hand side, in a short coat, stopping and turning to look at me, slowly raising her hand. For a moment I think of stopping and picking her up, I hesitate, slow down, but then drive on, feeling defeated, a light nausea rising in me.

On the way to the garage once again I pass by the old house. Although I know I won’t find anything I can’t resist stopping there, getting out of the car to look up at the closed shutters. It’s four months now since he disappeared.

If only I could break into this house –

I examine the pipes on the outside of the building. A long drainpipe leads up to the second floor, uneven bricks protrude on the outer wall, the shutter up there is still a tiny bit open.

Whistles behind me. A girl traffic cop comes walking up to see what’s happening. I move, drive to the garage. Erlich’s already sitting over the accounts, looking fresh and invigorated. If he had been in my shoes he could have climbed that wall long ago. At night that alleyway’s deserted. Perhaps I could ask Hamid to find me somebody to break in there. If he had a terrorist among his relations, surely he could find me a professional housebreaker, but afterwards it might be tricky.

No, I need to find a boy, some boy who can climb quickly, somebody who wouldn’t understand exactly what he was doing, a stranger, but not a complete stranger, somebody who trusts me a little, perhaps somebody employed temporarily in the garage.

I watch the workers closely, moving about among them, they pretend not to notice me but I’m conscious that the chattering stops when I approach, the music is turned down slightly. I know very few names here. But there’s one fellow who looks up, staring back at me. It’s that boy again, the one who was hurt and has recovered now. Smiling a sincere understanding smile at me. He picks up a big screwdriver and swaggering like a veteran mechanic he walks over to a large plump woman standing beside a little Fiat with a raised hood. He says boldly, “Get in, lady, and start the engine. Keep your foot on the throttle and do exactly as I tell you.”

And she smiles, looking around her with embarrassment, gets into the car and starts the engine. The boy climbs onto the bumper and starts tuning. Scandalous. Only two months ago he was sweeping the floor and now he’s got the nerve to tune engines. But I say nothing, I just stand there watching him, and he knows that I’m watching him and he carries on tuning, raising and lowering the revolutions of the engine, with no idea what he’s doing. In the end one of the Jewish mechanics comes along and shouts at him, pushing him aside. But the boy isn’t offended, watching me from a distance, with a smile as if to spite me.

This, it comes to me in a flash, is the boy who’ll climb that wall, and perhaps he’ll keep quiet about it too.

NA’IM

It was like a dream that Friday. A sweet dream. Because I slept in her house and ate breakfast and supper with her, and even if I had maybe done something criminal still I was happy.

As soon as I arrived at the garage that morning he grabbed me like he’d been waiting for me. He took me into a quiet corner and told me he needed me for a small job that night, if it was all right for me not going home to the village. I said that was all right, no problem, I didn’t mind sleeping at the garage. He said, “No, you don’t need to sleep at the garage, you can sleep at my house. I’ll look after you.” I was so happy I thought I was going to faint. My head went fuzzy. But I just smiled at him. And he said, “Only don’t talk about it, can you keep a secret?” “Of course I can,” I said. “I’ll keep as quiet about it as you like.” He looked at me like he was checking some bit of machinery. “Can you climb?” “Climb on what?” I asked. “It’s not important.” He was embarrassed. “You’ll see. What have you got in that bag?” He didn’t give me a chance to reply but snatched it out of my hand and looked inside it, seeing the bread and the book of poems by Alterman. I thought I was going to die. He took out the book and asked me what it was. “It’s a book,” I said. “But whose is it?” “It’s mine, I’m reading it.” “You’re reading this?” He was surprised, he laughed and he put his hand on my head again like he did the first time. In the distance I saw the other workers watching us curiously. He flicked through the book but he didn’t look at the first page. He just asked, “Do you understand this stuff?” “Sometimes,” I said, and snatched it back in a hurry. He was thrilled, really impressed, and he touched me again, he was always so careful not to touch the other workers but it was like with me it was O.K. Then he took out his wallet again, the one that was always stuffed full of money like it was weighing him down and he wanted to get rid of it. He took out a hundred-pound note and said, “Go and buy yourself some pyjamas and a toothbrush and come back here at four o’clock after the others have gone and I’ll pick you up. I’ll tell Hamid you won’t be going back to the village tonight.” “But I can go straight to your house,” I said. He was surprised. “Do you know where it is?” I reminded him that he’d once sent me to his house to fetch a briefcase, he didn’t remember but he said, “All right, come straight to the house at four o’clock.” “O.K.,” I said, “but what kind of pyjamas do you want me to buy?” He laughed. “The pyjamas are for you, not for me.” I knew that but I only asked him because I was getting all mixed up I was so happy. How happy I was suddenly.

And I went straight out into the city with the hundred pounds. At first I wandered around the streets, walking in the middle of the road and nearly getting run over. All the time feeling the hundred pounds in my pocket, stopping in the middle of the road and fingering it. I’d never had so much money all at once. And though it was a cold and rainy day I was free, like in holidays from school. And I walked among the people aimlessly, looking in the gloomy faces of the Jews, always so worried about their Jewish destiny. And though the sky was dark I was already sniffing the smell of spring. I wanted to shout out loud I was so happy. Because all the time I was thinking I’d be seeing that girl in a little while and I’d be able to fall in love properly and not just in my imagination. I walked and walked and nearly came out the other side of the city and turned back and this time started looking in the shops. Going in here and there to look at things, because aside from the pyjamas I wanted to buy a whole lot of things for myself. This time I wasn’t giving any change back. And they realized I was an Arab right away and they started looking in my bag, feeling the loaves of bread to check if there were bombs hidden inside them. So I ate some of the bread in a hurry and threw the rest away with the bag so they’d leave me alone and I just kept the book, tucking it under my arm. I felt lighter that way.

In the end, after I’d looked in the windows of toy shops, bookshops, radio and TV shops, I began to look for a pyjama shop, but there weren’t any pyjamas in the windows and I didn’t know exactly which shop to enter. Anyway, why did he insist on pyjamas? I could sleep in my underwear and buy something more important with the money. Suddenly I saw a high-class clothes shop that had pyjamas in the window but didn’t show any prices. I went inside and wanted to go straight out again because it was dark in there and there was nobody about. But as soon as I turned to go a thin old man came out from a dark corner. “What do you want, boy?” I said, “Pyjamas.” He asked, “Have you got any money?” and I took out the blue bill and showed it to him.

Then he grabbed my hand, he didn’t seem to mind that I was wearing dirty working clothes. He didn’t even realize I was an Arab. All he wanted was to get his hands on that little blue bill that I’d been stupid enough to show him and he did take it off me in the end. He started taking all kinds of pyjamas out of boxes, fine silk pyjamas with tassels and fancy embroidery. He showed me pair after pair, spreading them out in front of me. And I stood there and couldn’t say a word because they really were nice. In the end he came over to me, took my measurements and told me to undress. I took off my shirt and sweater and he put a pyjama top on me and turned me towards the mirror to see if it suited me. Then he took it off and tried another on me, and every set of pyjamas was crazier than the last one, gold buttons and coloured tassels. When he saw I was struck dumb he chose some red pyjamas for me and said, “Look, these suit you best,” and folded them up and packed them in a box and wrapped the box in soft paper and put it in a new plastic bag and then gently but firmly he took the blue bill that I still held in my fingers and said softly, “That’s it.” I saw he didn’t mean to give me any change and I asked him in a feeble voice, “Do these cost a hundred pounds?” He said, “More than that, I’ve given you a discount.” I didn’t move, I felt stunned. And he smiled at me and said, “Where are you from, boy?”

And suddenly I was afraid he might be angry if he knew he’d been dealing with an Arab.

“From here … from this neighbourhood.”

“And your parents? Where are they from?”

“From Poland,” I replied, without even thinking, because they’d told us in school that all the Zionists came from Poland.

And I still didn’t move, weeping in my heart for the hundred pounds that had gone on just one pair of pyjamas. And still I didn’t touch my pyjamas, which were lying there before me in a bag. At last I said, “But I’ve still got to buy a toothbrush, I need a toothbrush as well, I can’t take such expensive pyjamas.” And then he went through a door into a back room and came back a few seconds later with a toothbrush, which was red and not exactly new. He put it into the bag and said, “There you are, boy, I’ve given you a toothbrush as well, I’ve made a deal with you.” But when he saw I was still rooted there, in a panic over the money I’d lost, he put the bag in my hand, took my arm and led me out into the street, closing the door behind him.

And so I was left without a cent, just with a set of crazy pyjamas wrapped in a plastic bag. Heavy rain started falling. I still had five hours to go till four o’clock and I didn’t even have the money for the bus. I walked up to Carmel and arrived at his house, still with three hours to go before four o’clock. I didn’t want to wait on the stairs so I found a little shelter opposite and sat down there to wait, until somebody came along who didn’t even live there and said, “Move, get out of here.”

So I moved. I circled the streets of the neighbourhood, which was nice even in the rain, and went back and sat under the shelter opposite the house and waited for the time to pass. And again two men came along and said, “What are you doing here? What are you waiting for?” I didn’t answer, just got up and started walking around again. I’ve noticed before that as long as we’re moving, working or walking they don’t take any notice of us, it’s only when we stand still in some place that they start getting suspicious. And so I walked about, very tired and completely wet and even though the sun came out now and then it couldn’t dry me because I was as wet as a rain cloud. And I went back again to my shelter and it was already halfpast two and the children were coming home from school, first the younger ones and then the older ones. And I saw her arriving, the last of all maybe, running along without a raincoat, without galoshes, just in a short coat, soaking wet. I watched her disappear into the house. The sun came out again.

I threw Stars Outside, that Alterman book, into a dustbin, it was like dough it had got so wet. Then his wife arrived. I recognized her right away by her green Fiat 600. Once I’d tightened the brakes and changed the oil for her. And she took out a whole lot of baskets and then stood and fumbled for a long time in the letter box, though I’d already checked it out and I knew there wasn’t any mail for them. Ten minutes later she came out again and drove away and came back with some milk and after half an hour she drove away again and came back with bread.

Slowly the street emptied and there was a strange sort of silence. People were arriving in their cars and disappearing into their houses with baskets, closing the shutters. And I was still sitting there opposite the house waiting for him to come. I was already sick of the whole thing. The door to the balcony was open and the girl came out to look at the sky. I tried to huddle up small so she wouldn’t see me, but she stared down at me like she was trying to remember something. And the rain started again. Her mother shouted something and she went back inside. And now it started raining really hard and I thought I was going to be swept away, off the pavement, down the hill and into the sea that you couldn’t see because of the mist.

Already I was feeling miserable as hell, the rain was getting inside my head, driving me crazy. I was regretting the whole thing now, even love. Sitting alone in the street watching the sealed shutters, it was already after four o’clock and he hadn’t arrived yet and I was afraid I’d be stuck there all night in the street with the pyjamas. Perhaps he’d forgotten me and the job he wanted me for. But at last I heard his American car coming down the hill. Before he’d even had time to turn off the engine I’d opened the door for him. He smiled at me like we’d only just parted, and he asked, “Have you just arrived?” “Just now,” I lied. He said, “Good, come and give me a hand,” and he started unloading flowers and cakes and bread and nuts. Looks like everybody here cooks and eats his own food.

We climbed the steps to his house, he rang the bell and the girl opened the door and he said:

“This is …”

“Na’im,” I said, just moving my lips, The girl looked at me in surprise. And again I was stunned by her beauty. And the woman came out straightaway to meet us and when she saw me she took the flowers and the bread from me and said, “Why didn’t you come in before? Why did you wait outside all the time?” Adam was amazed. “You waited outside? In all this rain? You must be crazy.” I didn’t say anything, just wiping my feet all the time on the brown mat beside the door. And they said, “It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, come inside,” but I went on wiping my feet, staring at the floor. In the end Adam took hold of my arm and pushed me into the house like he’d only just realized how wet I was. And I went inside and maybe they were sorry they’d said it didn’t matter because straightaway I made their carpet all dirty with mud. Then I took my shoes off and that made things worse because my socks were wet and torn and my feet were black, there was a black puddle under my feet and wherever I went in the house the puddle went with me. It was only then they began to realize how much water I’d absorbed during the day. And so frozen and trembling before the girl’s stares, I started messing up their nice clean house.

There was nothing to do but shove me into the bathroom. It was the woman who realized the state I was in. She went and filled the bath with hot water and insisted on me getting in. The three of them started fussing around me, fetching towels, shifting the laundry out of the way. The woman was the most friendly, more than him, he was horrified at the dirt I’d brought into the house and maybe he was even sorry he’d asked me to help him with his job.

Before long I was alone, lying there in the hot bath with scented bubbles. In the hot water I slowly warmed up. It was nice lying in the Jews’ bath, in a little room full of coloured towels and all kinds of bottles. I don’t think anybody from the village has ever had a bubble bath like this in a Jewish house. Meanwhile they were looking around for clothes for me in place of the wet things that I’d taken off, but they didn’t find anything because they’d never had a son of my age, only a daughter, and they didn’t want to put me in a dress. In the end the woman, who was standing all the time on the other side of the door talking to me, suggested I put my pyjamas on while my clothes were drying on the radiator. I said, “Fine,” what else could I say, but I was so ashamed I could have drowned myself in the bath and to hell with this night job. I went on lying in the water, washing and scrubbing myself, at last I pulled out the plug and started cleaning the bath that I’d made very dirty. I dried it with a towel and I cleaned the floor as well and I even polished the sink, and I cleaned other things that I hadn’t made dirty but I didn’t know if they’d remember it wasn’t me. Already it was dark and I couldn’t find the light switch and so in the dark I put on the pyjamas, which were really crazy, and I thought of escaping through the window but there wasn’t a proper window there. I was scared to go out and I just sat there quietly in the dark. But they were getting worried about me and Adam opened the door and saw me in my pyjamas and burst out laughing, and the girl came running in to see me and she burst out laughing and the woman started laughing too, even though she came and took me by the hand and led me out of the bathroom. And I tried to laugh too so they wouldn’t be embarrassed because they were laughing but somehow the laughing changed to tears. This was the end. I broke out sobbing. It was awful. It was all the weariness, all the excitement, I cried bitterly, it was years since I’d wept like that, not even when they buried Adnan. I couldn’t stop, like a baby, like an idiot, tears pouring out like the rain was still inside me, weeping and weeping before three strange Jews, before the girl I love who’ll never be my love.

DAFI

Mommy and Daddy both said at once, “It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, come inside,” but he was scared and confused, so serious, all the time wiping his feet on the door mat. A little Arab, one of Daddy’s workers, just think, Daddy’s got thirty workers like this and they’re all afraid of him. The poor kid had been waiting outside in the rain. But suddenly I recognized him, I’d seen him before, the boy who came here once to fetch Daddy’s briefcase. A nice kid. At last they got him inside, almost by force, they suggested he take his shoes off and he took them off, standing there in his torn black socks, still spreading dirt all around him. Such a silly boy, why did he have to wait outside in the rain? It isn’t a very nice thing to say but I was reminded suddenly of something that happened a few years ago. One day Daddy brought me a puppy that had been wandering around in the rain near the garage, it came rushing inside in high spirits (it didn’t think of wiping its feet outside) and immediately dirtied the floor and the carpet. And we washed it and combed it and fed it chopped meat, and we even bought it a leash and took it to the vet for injections, and the puppy was in the house for a month maybe until we saw he was growing fast and getting hard to control and somebody who knew about dogs told us “You’re rearing a donkey here, not a dog” and Mommy got scared and decided to give him away, even though I wanted to see how big he’d grow in the end.

And this time — it’s a boy, that is, a young man. Daddy’s brought him here to supper because he needs him tonight to break into the house of that man who disappeared.

Mommy took charge of him straightaway, took him under her wing, because Daddy didn’t know what to do with him. Helpless ones like this are right up her alley, she waves a red flag and charges into battle. She took him by the hand and led him to the bathroom, he took off his wet clothes, she put them on the radiator to dry and sent him straight in to have a bath.

It seemed so strange having a guest in the house on a Sabbath eve in winter. It’s always so quiet here. We hardly ever have guests. Sometimes in the summer there’s some distant relative from Jerusalem who stays overnight but these last few years there hasn’t even been that.

Meanwhile, Mommy started looking around for clothes for him. But where do we have clothes for a boy of that age? You could put three of him in Daddy’s clothes. But Mommy went on looking, she even came into my room and started rummaging about in the wardrobe. I said to her, “Why don’t you give him a skirt? Why not, in Scotland they wear skirts.” But she got really angry, didn’t think it was funny at all. She began yelling at me, “You be quiet now, how dare you laugh at an unfortunate Arab? Keep your jokes to yourself.”

So what if he was an Arab, and why was he unfortunate all of a sudden? Not because he was an Arab. Just like that … even if he was a Jew, and what’s the difference? Hell … she really offended me. Meanwhile, Daddy found a solution, he could put on the pyjamas that he brought with him, because Daddy gave him money this morning to buy pyjamas (what a weird idea!) and they didn’t even ask him if he was ready to put pyjamas on in the late afternoon, they just threw the pyjamas into the bathroom and now we were all waiting for him to come out. But he didn’t come out, five minutes passed, ten minutes, a quarter of an hour and he still didn’t come out. He must be preening himself like some grand duchess. It seems he didn’t realize we have only one bathroom and Daddy would need a shower before supper. At last Daddy opened the door and we saw him sitting there in the dark on the edge of the bath like a frightened animal, wearing pyjamas like I never saw before in my life. The bastard, to think Mommy was worried about him. He went and chose something really special, and expensive too I’ll bet, elegantly trimmed, with wide sleeves and a sash and shining buttons.

We were stunned, and looked at one another in amazement. And then I began to smile, and such a silly embarrassed grin appeared on Daddy’s face I felt I was starting to shake inside, for some reason it struck me as awfully funny. My famous laugh that breaks out like a clap of thunder followed by a trail of hee … hee … hee … and it’s always infectious because anyone who’s nearby, whether he likes it or not, starts laughing and can’t stop, he’s carried along by it. And Daddy started laughing and Mommy with a solemn face started to cackle and I broke out with another thunderclap, not laughing at the pyjamas any longer but at their silly laughter. And the little Arab was blushing bright red, he tried to smile but suddenly, all at once, without warning, he began to cry. So bitterly, so deeply, an ancient Arab moan. Suddenly I stopped laughing. Honestly, I felt heartbroken. I knew how he felt. How could he stand it? In his place I’d have been wailing long ago.

NA’IM

But in the end I stopped crying because they were so embarrassed. And I let them take me into the living room and sit me down in an armchair and so there I was talking to them quietly, actually only to the woman, who began talking to me and asking questions right away to take my mind off what had just happened. And I’d never spoken to a woman like her. Not young at all, with a sharp face, chain-smoking but very friendly and clever too, knowing how to get on with people. Sitting facing me, her legs crossed, and behind her the sunset through the window, the sea spread out and the rain falling on the horizon like a rosy fan. It was nice and warm in the room, all around it was clean and tidy. And they didn’t know that I’d been there before, I knew all the little objects on the shelves. My bare feet on the carpet, sitting on the edge of the chair and answering questions. She asked me so many questions you’d think she worked for the Secret Service. What does my father do and what does my mother do and what exactly is Faiz doing in England and what do we think about it, and what did we learn in school, how many hours of Arabic, how many hours of Hebrew, how many hours of maths, how many hours of history and what kind of history. How long has my family lived in this country, for how many generations that is, how many people live in the village, how many go outside to work and how many work in the village. And what do I know about Jews, have I heard of Zionism and what do I think it means. All the time she’s so serious and friendly like it’s really important to her. Looks like this is the first time she’s spoken to an Arab about things like this because till now she’s talked only to Arabs bringing her things from the supermarket or cleaning the steps.

And I answer her quietly, the tears are already dry. Making a great effort. Not moving from my seat, afraid of breaking something. I’ve done enough damage already. I tell her everything I know, everything I haven’t forgotten, careful not to annoy her. Looking only at the woman, not daring to look at the girl, who now I know is called Dafi not Dafna. She sits beside me all the time, staring at me hard, her eyes covering me like a hot wind, sitting and listening and smiling a bit. And so the conversation goes on and on and I see they really know nothing about us, they don’t know that we learn a lot of things about them. They don’t realize that we really are taught Bialik and Tchernikhovski and other saints and we know all about the Bet Midrash and the destiny of the Jews and the burning shtetl and all that.

“Poor things,” said the girl suddenly, “what have they done to deserve that?”

But the woman told her to shut up and laughed and I didn’t know if I was allowed to laugh as well so I just smiled a little twisted smile and kept my eyes on the floor. And suddenly it was quiet and I was afraid there’d be nothing more to talk about so I went on in a low voice without even being asked.

“We learned poetry by heart as well and I can remember … would you like to hear?”

And quietly I began to recite — “No pride of young lions shall hide there the eye of the desert nor the glory of Bashan and his choicest oaks fallen in splendour by the sombre tents sprawl angry giants amid the golden desert sands.”

And they were so impressed they nearly fell off their chairs. I knew they’d be surprised, I don’t know myself why I suddenly had to start reciting. I just felt like it. I wanted them to know that I’m really not stupid. And Dafi jumped up out of her seat and ran to call her father to come and hear and he came straight out of the bathroom in a dressing gown with his beard wet and stood there staring with his mouth open like I’d grown another head.

Because I carried on, all excited — “We are heroes! The last generation to bondage and the first to deliverance our hand alone our mighty hand did cast off from our neck the heavy yoke and we raised our heads to the heavens and they were narrowed in our eyes … and who shall be our master?”

And the girl Dafi shook with laughter, running to her room to fetch the book to check if I’d got it right. Then in a cracked voice I went on a bit further — “In spite of heaven and its wrath see we have risen in the storm.”

Already it was dark outside, and in the room it was warm and quiet. I saw now how quietly they lived. And they played with me like I was a toy. And I can tell when people like me just by the way they look at me. I’m not exactly ugly and the girls in the village sometimes look at me for no special reason, thinking that I don’t see them looking. But in those red pyjamas with the tassels and the imitation gold buttons I didn’t know if I was just weird or a bit cute as well.

The girl fetched her slippers and put them down beside my bare feet. And they all smiled at me happily.

“What did you say your name was?” the girl asked suddenly. She hadn’t caught it the first time.

“Na’im,” I said.

DAFI

Mommy of course could’ve killed me even though she was laughing herself but she quickly turned serious and took him into the living room, the tears still streaming down his face, made him sit in a chair and started asking him questions to distract him, an old trick from the days when I used to cry. Asking him about his village and his family, about his school and what he’d learned there and he answered seriously, his head bent, sitting on the edge of the chair.

I sat behind him and didn’t take my eyes off him. This little Arab really took my fancy. Daddy had brought us some entertainment for the Sabbath, Friday nights in our house are usually so boring with all the heaps of newspapers. Sitting there in his pyjamas, combed and clean and fragrant, his cheeks rosy. Suddenly he looked small, reminding me of someone, not ugly, there’s lots of boys uglier than him.

Mommy frowned at me, because when she saw me staring at his face like that she was afraid I might be trying to annoy him or make fun of him, like sometimes when I sit and stare at one of the old women who come to visit us. But I didn’t mean to do anything like that, this Arab really interested me. He soon recovered himself and started giving clear answers, talking about himself, about his village, his family, about what he’d learned in school, they’d taught him Bialik and Tchernikhovski and all that boring stuff of ours, how strange, the swine, inflicting that crap on them as well.

Then I said quietly, “Poor things … what have they done to deserve it?”

And Mommy scolded me and the Arab was a bit puzzled too, because it seemed he really enjoyed Bialik, and straightaway, without anyone asking him, he began to recite some lines from Bialik’s Dead of the Desert. I nearly fell off my chair. A young Arab, an assistant in Daddy’s garage, reciting Bialik, unbelievable. If that’s the general standard in the garage no wonder business is booming.

I ran to my room to fetch the poems of Bialik to see if he was reciting it properly or just making it up. I called to Daddy too to come out from the bathroom and listen, maybe he’ll give him a raise. And Mommy was impressed too. All three of us stared at him. And he decided to impress us some more and quietly and without a mistake he began reciting that bit that Shwartzy’s crazy about and sneaks in at every opportunity whether it’s appropriate or not. “We are heroes, the last generation to bondage and the first to deliverance, our hand alone …” sitting on the edge of the chair with head bowed, still not looking at us straight, in a low voice. And I watched Mommy and Daddy seeing how they stared at him open-mouthed and suddenly it hit me, it came to me in a flash. Of course. This boy looks a bit like Yigal, there’s something about him, some similarity, and they don’t realize it, they don’t understand. They don’t see what it is that draws them to him. Daddy doesn’t know why of all his workers he decided to send this boy here to fetch the briefcase, or why he chose him for the job tonight. And if I tell them they’ll say, “Nonsense, what do you know about Yigal, you never saw him.”

And so in the stillness and the darkness of early evening I watched the quiet little Arab, his eyes bright with happiness. Now we were the ones who bowed our heads, seeing his swarthy bare feet on the carpet. And suddenly I felt like giving him something and I went and fetched my bedroom slippers and put them down beside him. Just for one evening let him wear a girl’s slippers. Then I realized that I didn’t actually know his name and I asked him and he looked at me straight, no longer evasive, and told me.

I didn’t know they have such simple names.

NA’IM

At last we sat down to eat. Since morning I hadn’t eaten anything and I was weak with hunger and maybe that was why I got a bit mixed up in the poem as well. And there was a white cloth on the table and two candles and a bottle of wine. I didn’t know they were religious. But they didn’t even pray, just started eating right away. I sat beside the girl, being very careful not to touch her, and the woman brought in the food. To start with it was sort of grey meatballs, so sweet they made me feel sick. Looks like this woman doesn’t know how to cook, she puts in sugar instead of salt, but nobody else noticed or maybe they thought it wasn’t polite to mention it. And I forced myself to eat it too so she wouldn’t be offended like my mother, who’s offended if you don’t eat everything. I just ate a lot of bread with it to try and kill the sweetness. And that Adam ate so fast, I hadn’t had time to look at the food and he’d already finished it all. They brought him some more and he gobbled that up too. And I was eating slowly because I had to be careful to eat with my mouth closed and luckily the girl was eating slowly too so the grownups didn’t have to wait only for me.

At last I finished those disgusting meatballs. I’ve never eaten anything like them before and I hope I never will again. I asked them what they were called so I could avoid them if ever I fell into a Jewish house again. They smiled and said, “It’s called gefilte fish. Would you like some more?” I said, “No thank you,” in a hurry. And the woman said, “Don’t be shy, there’s plenty more,” but again I said quickly, “No thank you, I’ve had enough,” but she’d already got up and gone to the kitchen and fetched a full plate and again I said, as firmly as I could without offending her, “No, really, I’m full, no more, please.”

And she gave up and took away all the plates and I thought that was the end of the meal but since I was still hungry I quietly ate more and more slices of bread, too damn sweet also. And the woman was in the kitchen busy with the dishes and the girl was watching television, it was an Egyptian film with belly dancers, she was interested but she didn’t understand what they were saying, and Adam was reading a paper and I was eating slice after slice of bread and suddenly I saw that I’d eaten all their bread.

And then the woman came in with new plates and a dish of meat and potatoes. So the meal wasn’t finished after all, but what a mixed-up way, every man for himself. And I’d noticed that Adam and his wife, who now I knew was called Asya, never really looked at each other when they were talking.

So we sat down to eat again and this time the food was better, there weren’t enough spices in it but at least it wasn’t sweet, and there was brown bread as well. The girl ate only a little bit and her mother said something to her. Adam filled his plate and started eating in such a hurry you’d think he hadn’t eaten anything all week, taking a look every now and then at the newspaper that was folded on the table. This silence at meals. Such loneliness.

Suddenly he remembered something and turned to me.

“Tell me, somebody was saying in the garage that one of the terrorists in the attack on the university was your brother, or something like that …”

The woman and Dafi put down their knives and forks looking like they were really shocked. I blushed bright red, trembled, now everything was going to be ruined.

“What terrorist?” I pretended I didn’t quite understand. “The one who killed himself at the university?”

And they smiled a bit at the idea that Adnan might really have gone to the university just to do away with himself quietly.

“He was a distant cousin of mine,” I lied. “I hardly knew him, he was a bit sick, crazy I mean.” I smiled at them but they didn’t smile.

I picked up my knife and fork again and began to eat, staring down at the plate, suddenly seeing Adnan lying under the ground with his eyes closed in the rain. The other three looked at one another and went back to their food. The meal went on. Dafi said something about a friend of hers and her parents and what the maths teacher said to her today. And again the plates were changed and they brought in little dishes of ice cream, left over from the summer maybe. I ate this too, what the hell, with a slice of bread.

And then the meal was over and Dafi sat down in front of the television and they sat me down too in one of the armchairs in my pyjamas and the girl’s slippers. I’d already forgotten to be shy. I felt like one of the family. I even went to the bathroom and came back on my own. Now it was Jewish programmes on the television, first they sang songs and after that there was a discussion and then more songs, songs for old people this time. And still I didn’t know anything about the job tonight, you could say I’d forgotten about it, maybe he’d forgotten about it too. That’s the way it seemed. Adam was watching television and reading the paper, actually he wasn’t doing either, he was dozing a bit. And the girl was talking on the phone, she’d already been there half an hour and the woman was in the kitchen washing dishes and so there was just me sitting by myself in my pyjamas in front of the television that was playing old songs from the Second Aliyah, there was one of them I knew the words to.

I could hardly keep my eyes open, in the end I dropped off to sleep, I was so tired after this strange and wonderful day. At eleven o’clock I saw their smiling faces in front of me and the television was already dark and the lights in the house had been turned down. They helped me up and led me like in a dream to a room full of books, put me in a soft white bed and Adam said, “Soon I shall wake you and we’ll be off,” and he covered me with a blanket.

So there is a job tonight after all, I thought, and went back to sleep.

At about two o’clock he woke me. The house was all dark. At first I was so confused I spoke to him in Arabic. He laughed and said, “Wake up, wake up,” and he gave me my clothes, which were dry and stiff. And I got dressed in the dark while he watched me. He wasn’t wearing his working clothes but clean clothes and he had a woolly hat on his head and a big fur coat, he looked just like a bear. We left the dark house where there were just the two candles still there on the empty table and even then I began to suspect there was going to be something criminal about the job.

The street was empty and it was a cold night, a light rain was falling and I didn’t know where he was driving to but I guessed we were going down all the time towards the lower city. In the end he pulled up in a little side street, stopped the engine and got out of the car telling me to wait inside, he disappeared for a moment and then came back and told me to get out. I followed him and he seemed tense now, looking from side to side like a thief or something, I didn’t know he went breaking into houses at night, I thought he made enough profit from the garage, and then we went into a little deadend street and he stopped opposite an old Arab house that was all dark, then he grabbed hold of me, pointed to a window on the second floor and whispered, “Climb up there and open the shutter and get inside the apartment, don’t put a light on, go to the outside door and open it for me.”

So this is what it was all for, the meal and the pyjamas and all the nice talk. I could have wept from misery, if my father could see me now. One son abroad, the other a terrorist and the youngest a housebreaker. A fine family. But I didn’t say anything, what could I say? Too late now. He gave me a big screwdriver to bend back the bolt of the shutter and said, “If anyone comes I’ll whistle and you must try to escape.”

“What will you whistle?”

“Some little tune … what do you know?”

“‘Jerusalem of Gold.’”

He laughed. But I was serious, standing there rooted to the spot and not saying anything, watching him nervously. Then he said, “Don’t be afraid, there’s nobody here, this is the house of a friend of a friend of mine who went to fight in the war and I must find some papers of his …”

Still I didn’t say anything because the lie was so stupid I felt really embarrassed. Then he said sternly, “Go on …”

And I went. He stood on the other side of the street watching. I started searching the wall for crevices for my hands and feet. The wall was wet and slimy. A crumbling old Arab house. After I’d gone a little way I caught hold of a rusty old drain pipe and began to climb it, slipping back a bit but making progress. It wasn’t easy at all, I could have slipped and fallen and broken something and the rain was getting heavier but after yesterday rain won’t ever scare me again. And so at last I reached the window and stood up on a little ledge. I looked down at him and he was watching me. I thought maybe he’d call it off at the last moment but he signalled to me to carry on. I tried to open the shutter that was the same kind as the ones in our house. I pushed in the screwdriver and easily lifted the bolt but as soon as I started moving the shutter there was a loud creaking noise, like an alarm going off, maybe it was a thousand years since they’d oiled the hinges. Slowly the shutter opened. The window was closed but not locked, looked like they’d closed it in a hurry. Another second and I was inside the dark apartment. I looked down into the street but there was no sign of him.

The stink of a place that hasn’t been aired for years, spiders’ webs tickled my face. Slowly my eyes got used to the dark. A man’s clothes were scattered on the bed, there was a heap of old socks in a corner. The door of the room was closed. I opened it and found myself in a little corridor. I opened another door and went into a kitchen that was big but dirty, full of pans and sacks. Something was cooking on a low flame. I began to panic. There was somebody here. I went out of the kitchen in a hurry and opened another door, it was a storeroom, I opened another door that was the toilet, another door that was the bathroom, another door led onto the balcony, bringing me out again into the night, the sea was close by, quite a different view.

I was baffled. Everything looked old and neglected. There wouldn’t be much loot here. I tried another door and it was a big room with a bed in the middle and on the bed there was something wrapped in a blanket, like an old woman lying there. I went out of there and at last I found the main door. The lock was broken. Somebody had beaten us to it. The bolts were fastened. I pulled them back. Adam was waiting outside, smiling, he came in quickly, closed the door behind him and switched on the lights.

“The bolts were fastened.”

“The bolts?” He couldn’t believe his ears.

“It looks like your friend has come back.”

“What?”

But at that moment one of the doors opened and an old lady, small and plump and wearing a nightdress even crazier than my pyjamas, came out, looking at us. She stood there not saying anything, not a bit frightened. I saw right away that she could tell I was an Arab.

Now I really wanted to run away. I’d had enough of this night job that still might end in murder. I’m only a kid, I wanted to shout, even if I have finished school, he just doesn’t see that.

But the strange thing is that neither of them was a bit scared. The opposite, they smiled pleasantly.

“I see you have begun collaborating in housebreaking.”

He bowed.

“Mrs. Ermozo … grandmother of Gabriel Arditi … correct?”

“That being so, are you the bearded man?”

“The bearded man?” He was so surprised you’d think he’d never had a beard.

“Where is Gabriel?”

“I am always looking for him.”

“Then he really has come back.”

“Certainly.”

“Where is he?”

“That’s the question I ask myself all the time.”

They talked quietly, without fear. There was a silence. They were both excited. Suddenly they both spoke at once.

She said, “But why on earth should you be looking for him?”

He said, “When did you come back from the hospital?”

“I came home yesterday.”

“But I thought you had lost consciousness.”

“I found it again.”

VEDUCHA

And how did this begin? With the smell of a market. Yes, with the smell of a market. A long time now I have been saying, what do you smell? What is it? And then I understand, the smell of the market in the Old City. Smell of Arabs, smell of tomatoes, green onions and eggplants, smell of roast meat spluttering over the fire and smell of baskets, fresh hay, smell of rain too. And after the smells come the voices, little sounds, muffled, but I’m dragging myself up out of the well, clutching at Grandma’s skirt, Grandma Veducha, wrapped in a black scarf, erect and tall, walking about the dim alleys tapping with a long cane, her face white and mist floating among the domes. I jump from puddle to puddle looking up into the faces of the Arabs with their brown cloaks. On the churches, mosques and synagogues is a layer of white wool, a fall of snow, and I want to show myself to Grandma but she takes no notice, her face very pale, looking for something all the time, her basket still empty, but not stopping. I tug at her cane, wanting to stop her beside a sweet seller, but she pushes me away, walks on, from alley to alley, passing by the Western Wall as it used to be, old and small, the houses closing it in, climbing up to the Jewish quarter by steep and twisting steps, this must be before the War of Independence and I am full of wonder, for even when I was small I had the mind of an old woman. Everything isn’t in ruins yet. But Grandma pays no attention to me, it’s as if by chance that I come to be clinging at her skirt. From time to time she goes to one of the stalls, to finger a small tomato, to sniff an eggplant, grumbling in Arabic to the traders who laugh. Asking questions but buying nothing. Suddenly I understand, it’s not vegetables she’s looking for but a person. Arab? Jew? Armenian? And then I start to cry, from weariness, from the cold, from the mist, I’m very thirsty but Grandma doesn’t hear me, or if she hears me she doesn’t care, it’s like walking with a corpse. I’ve irritated her with my crying. And the bells start to ring and there’s a light rain falling, the sound of gunfire, people running, Grandma is hurrying too, laying about her with the cane to clear a path, striking at the heads of the Arabs who run before her shouting, and in the confusion she slips away from me, her dress slips out of my hand, and I’m still whimpering, not in the alley but in the corridor of a house, weeping softly, not the weeping of a child but the stifled weeping of an old woman, melting in tears. But I’m not unhappy, on the contrary, such pleasure, through my tears I am free of something from which I should have parted long ago, the world becomes lighter. Then I open my eyes, seeing the window beside the bed a little open, a black night and rain falling outside, heavy rain but very quiet, as if it doesn’t reach the ground but just hovers. And it’s cold but the mist has gone, I notice this at once, the mist that all the time has covered everything — gone.

I rose from the bed and drank a cup of water.

Still weeping –

Later they told me that for a day and a half I had wept without pause and the people around me were most concerned, they held my hand, caressed me, did not understand. This is how it began, this how consciousness returned. Only consciousness? More. The light itself. More light than I thought existed. Still consciousness without knowledge. Illumined consciousness, slowly breaking out, opening up. At noon on the second day I stopped crying as if the crying machine had broken. And when the nurse brought my lunch I knew already what they did not yet know. I have returned. I am here. I can remember it all. Everything is ready. All that is missing is my name. Someone has only to remind me of my name and the rest will fall into place. I smiled at the dusky nurse and she smiled back, a little scared and a little astonished to find me smiling now and no longer weeping.

I said to her, “What is your name, my child?” and she told me. “And what is my name?” I asked. “Your name?” She was utterly bewildered, thought I was playing games with her. “Your name …?” and she came closer to the bed, searching for a piece of paper down there among the latticework, glancing at it and saying in a shy whisper, “It says here Veducha Ermozo.”

That was all that was missing, I heard the name and at once my head opened. The card with my name had been hanging there on the bed all the time and I, foolish woman, had not seen it. Now I knew who I was and I remembered other things too. All at once I understood everything. I felt dizzy with all the knowledge returning to me. Mother, Father, Hemdah and Gabriel, the State of Israel, Golda, the house, the bay, Galilee, Nixon. My neighbour Mrs. Goldberg, Yediot Aharonot, my little Morris, the Jewish people. It all flooded over me. One thing only I did not know, what is this lovely place in which I am lying, the white room and the beds, the orchard outside, and who are these charming girls who walk around me? Surely I’m not dead, this isn’t the world to come.

Quickly I got out of bed and asked for my clothes and a little nurse brought them. And two old women in gowns came into the room and when they saw me dressing they almost screamed. I frightened them. They realized that something had happened to me. Later they described the change — the light had returned to my eyes. Every look of mine was different.

How happy I was! Freedom and joy, I was dressing myself and singing. And everything around me interested me. The names of the old ladies who introduced themselves. An old copy of Ma’ariv lying on the chair. I wanted to devour it. At once I began to read. For I am well known as an avid reader of newspapers. I saw new and wonderful things, the world has not been slumbering in the meantime.

My head was spinning –

The news of my awakening had spread quickly. The matron and the secretary came hurrying into the room, very excited, they hugged me, led me straight to the matron’s office. They called the doctor to come and examine me. They were laughing and I laughed too. “That’s it, I’ve woken up,” I said. “Now tell me everything.”

And they told me, a frightening story. How they brought me here nearly a year ago, unconscious, they lost all hope for me. For ten months perhaps I had been lying there like a stone, like a vegetable, like a mindless animal, not knowing anyone, not even myself. Talking like a baby, nonsense, dreams, all meaningless.

On the table there was a pack of cigarettes and I remembered that I used to smoke and that I used to enjoy it very much and I asked permission to take a cigarette and so I sat facing them in the armchair, smoking cigarette after cigarette, a real resurrection from the dead. Hearing the confused stories about myself and the country. First of all — the war. I did not know that there had been another war and that the bastards surprised us on Yom Kippur. And they enjoyed telling me about the war, one interrupting the other and the doctor too adding his bit. Describing the suffering, terrible things, the treacherous government too, to think that all this happened while I lay senseless in bed. More stories, more sorrows, more deaths, I take them all in. Not yet satisfied, and the smell of cigarettes blending with the smell of gunpowder. The news that I had come to life had taken wing. Nurses, cleaners and clerks peered at me through the door, smiling at me pleasantly, some of them introducing themselves, shaking hands like old friends. People who had known me all the time, who had washed me, who had fed me, I knew nothing about them. Friendly and devoted people. And I all the time discovering more facts, even though they were beginning to tire of me. Now I was asking them about prices. How much had prices risen. How much did a kilo of tomatoes cost, for example, how much must you pay for good eggplants. What the war did to the market.

And so passed two days of happiness and awakening. I embraced the whole world in the joy of my second birth. Walking about the wards, making new friends, old men and old women, doctors and nurses. Asking questions and getting answers. Gossiping all the time, as if I have an empty sack to fill. And at night too I used to wander about, chatting to the attendants and the night nurses. I hardly slept, just dozing for a while and waking with a start, for I was afraid of losing consciousness again.

The doctors scolded me, but smiled –

And already they were hinting that I might go home –

Then they took out my file and hesitantly, cautiously began to tell me about him. My grandson — Gabriel. I did not know that he had suddenly returned to Israel. A month after they brought me here he apeared. Oh, God, for what?

My head felt weak. It seems I went pale as well. They gave me a sedative, even wanted to put me to bed.

Gabriel has returned! For ten years now he’s been wandering around the world not wanting to return, and suddenly he is back. I just lose consciousness and here he is. Even bringing a doctor, an expert on comas, to examine me, bringing a lawyer to take instructions from me. Conferring beside my bed. A consultation. It seems he’s interested in the legacy, my poor bewildered grandson.

Now I am going crazy. The details aren’t clear, it’s as if they have all lost consciousness. Everything is so confused. At first he used to come here every week. Sitting beside my bed, trying hard to talk to me, waiting for the doctor’s visit, glancing at the medical reports and going. Then he came seldom and for short visits, he did not even come to my bed but used to go straight to the office, take out the file himself, look at it grimly and disappear. But since the war he has not been here at all, he has disappeared. He got scared and fled.

There had been a phone call to check if there had been any change in my condition, but they didn’t know if it was him or someone else. Just a few weeks ago another man appeared, older, with a big beard, they all remembered his beard. (But who was it? Who was it?) He said he was related to me, he spoke hesitantly, he stood beside my bed and looked at me for a long time, he wanted to know if Gabriel had been here. More than caring about me he was looking for Gabriel.

A detective story –

They’ll make a film of it yet –

Suddenly I’m sad. No longer the joy of awakening of the first few days but worry and depression. The newspapers full of dark news. Now I realize how hard the war was. Gabriel came back from Paris and I didn’t know him and it seems he lost hope and went away. Now I must think about returning home, paying my bills, going out into the world again, I must vacate my bed, there are other old people going into comas all the time, and not only old people. I phone my house but the line’s been disconnected. Phone my lawyer but he’s away on army service. I order a taxi and drive home, a terrible fog outside, rain and mud and darkness. I arrive at my house and the heavy door is closed. My neighbour Mrs. Goldberg, the Ashkenazi bitch, comes out to see who it is, almost faints when she sees me.

I go into her apartment and hear her story. It was she who found me unconscious, sitting at the table, a plate in front of me, motionless as a stone. She called a doctor who took me to the hospital. She looked through my papers and found Gabriel’s address in Paris and wrote to him telling him about my illness, told him that I was dying. And a few weeks later the young man actually appeared, and stayed in the house until the war. But on the first day he disappeared and hadn’t been seen since. Some time later a man with a beard came, that beard chasing me again, he came looking for Gabriel, wanted to get inside the apartment, to break down the door, but she threatened to call the police, she stood on guard, she even moved her bed closer to the door, to hear him if he came.

I had to call a locksmith to break down the door of my apartment. For I had no key, neither did Mrs. Goldberg, Gabriel took them all. He worked for a quarter of an hour and charged a hundred pounds, thief. But at least I was able to get inside. A neglected house, full of spiders, in the kitchen dirty dishes and filthy scraps of mouldy food. Tins of preserves everywhere. And a lot of pans. He’s taken all the cutlery out of the cupboards so as not to have to wash up every day. Beetles scuttled about under my feet, as if I’m the intruder. And a little mouse that was born in the rubbish there stares at me insolently from a corner, making no attempt to run away.

Signs of my grandson everywhere. He always was an untidy boy but now he’s lost control. His shirts hanging on top of my dresses, dirty linen on the chairs, socks in the bathroom. French newspapers and magazines from before the war. An open suitcase on one of the beds. Everything laid out as if he’s just gone out for a short walk.

Well, then, where is he?

Mrs. Goldberg brings me something to eat, gefilte fish that she cooked for the Sabbath. It’s Sabbath eve, I forgot. For a whole year I have been outside time. She looks in silence at the chaos in the room, dying of curiosity, she would have liked to stay for a while but I get rid of her politely. The evening falls quickly and I’m still looking for a piece of paper, some message, to help me understand. The light bulbs are all burned out and I have to light a candle to find my way from room to room.

And suddenly I feel again the loneliness of the last years. Now I understand how I lost consciousness. I wish I could lose it again. I should never have left Jerusalem, even though there was not a single member of my family left. It was wrong to break away. Sin and iniquity. I tried to taste the gefilte fish and it’s so sweet it makes me sick. When will the Ashkenazim learn to cook? Sitting there in the kitchen among the dirty dishes, among the mouldy scraps of food, forcing myself to eat, not to weaken, eating and tears falling on the plate. And outside — storm, destruction.

So, he was here. What did he look like? Oh, Lord of the Universe. Where did he go? Perhaps he is dead, perhaps he too is lying somewhere unconscious. And how am I to find the man with the beard? I must start searching every corner of the house. Perhaps I will find some trace. I leave the dirty dish in the sink, I don’t have the strength to wash it. How dirty he’s made the house, he’s learned dirty habits from the French. I take the candle and roam around the half-lit house, examining the cupboards, and the beds, searching under the sheets, he’s slept in all of them.

In the end I feel tired, put on a nightdress and get into my bed. He’s slept in this one too. The sheets are soiled, but I don’t have the energy to change them.

The first night at home after a year. Who would believe that it would be like this? Better I had died. The rain lashes the windows. A hard winter. The doors in the house creak and a draught blows in, from where I don’t know. I lie there with my eyes open. I have never been afraid of loneliness, people know me as a solitary person, but never have I felt so uneasy in my bed. And then I hear a rustle from the shutter in the next room, as if someone is climbing in through the window. At first I thought it was just the wind, but then I hear light footsteps. He’s come back, I say to myself. And the door of my room really does open and a boy appears in the doorway, looking in. What is this, has Gabriel turned into a boy once more, and is he wandering about the house as he used to twenty years ago, when he was having a bad dream and walked about the house making noises on purpose to wake me up?

Oh, help, I’m sinking back again. Farewell old lady. This time there’ll be no awakening. But the boy is real, standing there in the doorway, in the light of the candle that I left in the passage, not a dream, he closes the door and goes away, opening more doors and closing them again. Finally drawing back the bolts of the front door.

Hurriedly I get out of bed, and just as I am in my nightdress I go out into the passage, seeing there a middle-aged man, a total stranger, wrapped in a big fur coat, with a big blond beard, the bearded man has descended from heaven again, talking to the boy who opened the door of my room, I know right away that he’s an Arab, I can sniff them out. Smell of eggplants, green garlic and fresh straw, the very smell that returned me to consciousness.

ASYA

I really trembled. For so many years I hadn’t seen him. And there he was, riding a bicycle outside the house. I must not lose him again. I clung fast to the dream. Yigal. He was riding back and forth on the broad pavement, so serious, on a big bicycle, he was tall and thin and I thought, he is alive, what happiness. I didn’t dare say a word. And he was riding around and around in a circle, very serious, concentrating on his riding, so intense, I couldn’t see his eyes. The bicycle looked very colourful, shining, loaded with gears, cog wheels and coils of wire. But most of all I was impressed by the brakes. Thin cables led from them directly to his ears, as if he must listen to the brakes. Some kind of safety precaution.

“Do you see?” said Adam, smiling, standing behind me on the steps, I hadn’t seen him, he was in the dark. It seemed he had arranged this. But I didn’t reply, only looked with longing at the boy on the bicycle. Slowly I began to realize that this wasn’t Yigal but some kind of replacement that Adam had brought here for me. But I didn’t mind this, it seemed wonderful and right to bring me a substitute. I just waited for him to grow tired of cycling around and around so I could see him close up, touch him, embrace him. But he didn’t look, didn’t hear, continuing gravely with the endless ride. “Yigal,” I said in a whisper, “come here for a moment.” And I thought, perhaps he can’t hear, perhaps he too can’t hear, but he heard and understood, he just took advantage of his deafness to ignore me.

And then we were in a big hall, Adam and I, a big hall flooded with sunlight, it was a party, a bar mitzvah or a wedding, long tables laden with salami sandwiches, and Adam pounced on them in his usual way and started to munch, ravenously hungry, and I was worried about Yigal, whom we had left there on the pavement. I left the party in the middle without touching the food and went back home in the afternoon, Sabbath, the streets deserted, the pavement outside the house empty. I started walking the streets searching for the “replacement,” growing more and more dispirited, whimpering to myself. Until beside a half-built house, on the hillside, on a heap of sand I saw the bicycle, slightly damaged, smaller than I had thought, less ornate than it looked before, but still those cables coiling out of the brakes, and at the ends, like little boxes, the earpieces of a transistor. They were quivering, something rustled in them. I picked them up, I heard a man talking, like a newscaster, someone saying, “Life … she has come to life.”

ADAM

Suddenly I felt so happy I laughed. I had thought I was so clever breaking in here in the middle of the night, and here she was — erect, small and vigorous. The grandmother come to life. And that blank face down which the porridge had trickled was gazing at me, alert and inquisitive. Oh, she’s found her lost consciousness all right, every last bit of it.

I wanted to embrace her –

The amazing thing was that she didn’t look afraid, didn’t try to cry out or call for help, on the contrary, she looked calm, as if she’d been expecting this night-time intrusion. She looked at me with trust, even held out her dry little hand. I gripped it firmly in both my hands.

“I hear that you are related to me, sir, I would like to know your name.”

And she winked at me. I was puzzled. It seemed she even knew about my visit to the hospital. Her hand was still in mine, what could I tell her — that I had spent months searching for my wife’s lover?

First of all I got rid of Na’im, who was still standing there staring open-mouthed, quite baffled. I sent him out to the kitchen and the old lady went with him and gave him sweets. Then I followed her to her bedroom. She moved a heap of clothes from a chair and invited me to sit down. Then she got into her bed. The bedroom was dim, the candle was burned down, only in the passage was there a small light. And so, sitting facing her in the dark, seeing her silhouette like a giant ping-pong ball, I heard her say, “I am listening …”

And I began to tell her all that I knew. From the moment that the little Morris appeared in the garage to the morning of the second day of the war. About my search for him, about the army authorities who knew nothing about him, and more personal details, how he looked, how he dressed, what he used to say, how he spent his time. And she listened in silence, for a moment I thought she was asleep, I stood up and went closer to her. She was weeping quietly, clawing desperately at her hair, yearning for him, afraid he might be dead.

Meanwhile my eyes were becoming accustomed to the gloom and I saw his possessions scattered about me, his clothes, his shirt and trousers, an open suitcase, illustrated newspapers, the cigarettes he used to smoke, all lying there just as he had left them. Again his presence seemed so poignant.

I said, “He hasn’t been killed, that’s impossible.”

“Then something frightened him. He is hiding. We must search for him. Especially at night.”

“At night?”

And then she began telling me about him, how she brought him up after his mother was killed and his father deserted him. A lonely, bewildered child who couldn’t sleep, a creature of the night. She remembered the names of some relations on his father’s side, an uncle living in Dimona, another uncle in Jerusalem, a friend or two with whom he had been in contact many years ago. It was five o’clock in the morning, my head felt dizzy from all these stories, but there had been a breakthrough in the quest for him.

The telephone in the house had been disconnected, I promised to have it restored. I gave her my phone number, we agreed to meet again.

Outside the rain had stopped, the sky was clearing. Time to leave. Na’im was asleep in the kitchen, I roused him, we said goodbye to the old lady and drove back up to Carmel. The streets were wet and deserted. The first signs of daylight. It was quiet in the house. Asya and Dafi were fast asleep. I put Na’im to bed in the study and went to the bedroom. I felt no weariness at all, watching Asya, who went on sleeping, the morning light falling on her face. I touched her lightly. She was dreaming again, I could tell by the movements of her eyes behind the closed lids. Strange, knowing that at that very moment she was engrossed in a dream, evidently a painful dream, because her face was twisted. My ageing wife, caught up in her dreams. I bent over her cautiously, almost on my knees, tugging at her gently. But she didn’t want to wake up, so strange, clutching at the pillow with a pathetic, almost desperate gesture, whimpering. I caressed her, smiling.

“Asya, wake up, there’s news. It’s incredible, but the grandmother, the old woman, she has come to life.”

NA’IM

And they went into one of the rooms really pleased with themselves and they put me in the kitchen among the tomatoes and the eggplants to wait for them. And the old woman gave me some old sweets, probably left over from the time before she went bananas, and I sat there until they finished chattering, chewing the sweets, half asleep in the chair. And after maybe two hours Adam came in to fetch me and we went back to his house through the empty streets and the sky was clear and the rain had stopped. There wasn’t any left, it had all fallen on me.

It was dark in the house and he put me back to bed and went to his bedroom, started talking to his wife, who’d woken up. They talked excitedly but I didn’t have the strength to listen. I went to sleep right away. I slept a lot. I was really tired and I didn’t mind just sleeping and sleeping. It was so nice in the soft bed in that lovely room with all the books, deep down among the Jews.

It must have been the end of the morning already and I began to wake up, stretching lazily in the bed. Once or twice the door opened and the girl’s pretty head peeped in at me. The phone rang and the radio was on at full blast. The girl was walking around the whole time. I heard her footsteps and she peeped into the room again, looks like she wanted me to wake up but I didn’t want to. I’d done a professional job that night and I deserved a bit of rest. Through the window I saw blue sky and heard the voices of children. On the radio it was the usual chatter, they never get tired of it, even on the Sabbath. The girl was standing at the door now and tapping softly. I closed my eyes in a hurry and she came in quietly and went to the bookcase pretending to look for a book, making little noises to wake me up. She was wearing jeans and a very tight sweater and I noticed that she had firm little tits, yesterday I was sure she hadn’t had any and here they were like they’d grown overnight.

In the end, when she saw I wasn’t moving, she came closer and touched my face with her warm hand. I was really pleased that she touched me and didn’t only talk. At last I decided to open my eyes so she wouldn’t think I was dead.

And she said quickly in her hoarse voice, “you must get up. Mommy and Daddy have gone out. It’s eleven o’clock already. I’ll make breakfast for you. How do you like your eggs?”

She was all flushed and very serious.

“I don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind either.”

“Whatever you make.”

“But I don’t mind … tell me what you want.”

“Whatever you’re eating.” I smiled.

“I’ve eaten already … do you like scrambled eggs?”

I didn’t know what scrambled eggs were but I didn’t mind trying, then suddenly with an audacity that surprised even me I said, “Fine, but no sugar, please.”

“Sugar?”

“I mean, like yesterday,” I mumbled. “I thought there was some sugar in the food.”

And suddenly she understood and burst out laughing, awfully amused.

And I smiled a bit too. And she went out, I got dressed quickly and tidied up the bed and went to the bathroom and washed my face and cleaned my teeth and combed my hair with their comb and cleaned the sink. And I went out to the kitchen and found the table covered with all sorts of things. You could see she’d taken everything out of the fridge and put it on the table. Maybe this was the first time she’d ever made breakfast for a guest. And she was wearing an apron and frying something on the stove in a great hurry and then she brought me a very messy half-burned egg and gave me toast and cereal. She sat tensely, opposite, watching me eat and all the time offering me something else. Cheese, salted fish, chocolate. She wanted me to finish off all the food in the house. She buttered the bread for me herself, changing plates the whole time, fussing around me like she was my wife or my mother, playing some part and enjoying it.

And I ate with my mouth closed, slowly. Sometimes refusing what she offered me and sometimes not. And she watching me closely like I was a baby or a puppy being fed. And I just now and then looked at her straight, seeing her all fresh, so different from yesterday, sort of brisk, not dreamy. Her hair tied up on top of her head, her eyes darting about, wide awake. She didn’t touch the food.

“Aren’t you eating?” I asked.

“No … I’m fat enough already.”

“Are you fat?”

“A bit.”

“I don’t think so.”

And again she burst out laughing. Really frightening the weird noises she can make, like a mare in heat. Something about me makes her laugh. Laughing and going quiet again. Getting serious. And then again, smiling a bit and without warning and for no reason breaking out into a great shriek of laughter.

And I eat and eat and as I eat I fall deeper and deeper in love, falling in love for real with all my heart and soul, I could kiss that white foot of hers that’s swinging there in front of me all the time.

“The food wasn’t too sweet for you?”

“No … it was fine,” I go red all over.

“But you drink coffee with sugar?”

“Coffee, yes.”

And she goes out to make coffee for me.

Such a clear day, it’s like the winter’s over. Music on the radio now, waiting for the new talkers to come and take over from the old talkers who’ve gone away for a rest. And I’m head over heels in love already. No longer any need even to look at her. She’s there in my heart. Drinking coffee. A crazy life. Like it’s not me. And she watching me and watching me like she’s never seen a man eating before.

“Do you hate us very much?” I suddenly heard her say.

“Hate who?”

Of course I knew what she meant but it was weird, her of all people starting to talk politics.

“Us, the Israelis.”

“We are Israelis too.”

“No … I mean the Jews.”

“Not so much now.” I tried to give her a straight answer, seeing her pretty face, her fair hair. “Since the war, after they beat you a bit, we don’t hate you so much now …”

And she laughed, she liked what I said.

“But that cousin of yours … that terrorist …”

“But he was a little crazy …” I interrupted her in a hurry, I just didn’t want her to talk about Adnan.

“And do you hate us?”

“Me? No … never.” It was a lie because sometimes the Jews do get on my nerves, they never pick you up when you’re hitchhiking, they pass you by even in the rain when you’re alone on the roadside.

And then the phone rang. She ran to answer it. Must have been a friend of hers because she stood there talking for maybe half an hour. Laughing and talking, she suddenly started talking in English so I wouldn’t understand, talking dirty maybe. I heard her too, “A sweet little Arab” she said, and she said more things about me that I didn’t catch. And I sat still in my chair, not moving. Eating some more salted fish and chocolate, staring at the empty candlesticks, wondering if it was all right to get up. Looking at the furniture, at a newspaper lying on a chair, reading the headlines.

At last she came back, surprised to find me still sitting there.

“Have you finished?”

“A long time ago.”

“Then you can go. Daddy said he wouldn’t need you any more. He said you should have a meal and go home. He’ll see you at the garage.”

So, that’s it, all over. Give the labourer a meal and send him home. I stood up quickly, took my pyjamas and went to the door. “Have you got money for the bus?”

“Yes”— though I hadn’t.

“Do you know where the bus station is?”

“Yes. But I’ll walk.”

I felt so sorry it was all over, even though I had no idea how it could go on.

“Would you like me to walk with you?”

As if she understood, as if she was sorry too.

“If you like,” I said casually, though I could’ve fallen at her feet and kissed them.

“Then wait a moment.”

And she went to put her shoes on. And we set off together, a really strange pair. People turned to look at us, because she was pretty and nicely dressed and I was in my working clothes, all dirty and crumpled by the rain. Walking fast and not talking much. We started going down the hill. She showed me some steps going down the hill in the middle between flowers and trees and bushes and grass like a path in the Garden of Eden. She went down first and I followed. We hardly talked. Just once she stopped me and asked me when we Arabs get married, that is, at what age. And I said, “The same as you,” and we carried on walking. But halfway down the hill she met two boys, friends of hers who were really pleased to see her. She told them, “This is Na’im.” And they didn’t understand who I was but they told me their names, which I didn’t catch, and it was like she realized only then how different I was, all dirty, and she said, “You can find your own way from here.”

“That’s O.K.,” I said.

And I left her chatting with her friends, and I remembered I hadn’t thanked her for the meal but I didn’t go back, just looked up and saw her still talking to them and they turned and she started climbing back with them. They disappeared. The air all around full of scents. A spring Sabbath, people in their best clothes and little children running about.

There was no bus at the bus station. A van from the next village took me to within a few kilometres of my village. I walked the rest of the way, waving to the men working in the fields as usual. Where we live, they work all the time, they never rest. And suddenly I felt a lump in my throat, from happiness or misery I don’t know which and I started to cry, out loud, like an engine switched on. So much excitement the last two days. I cried on the empty road, collapsing on the wet earth like I was sorry I was an Arab and even if I’d been a Jew still nothing would have come of it.

DAFI

He’s fast asleep and here I am, stuck in the house because of him. A beautiful day outside. I phoned Tali and Osnat in the morning, telling them not to come around, they might have found him entertaining but I didn’t want him to be bothered by a lot of girls all at once. Mommy and Daddy got up early and went off somewhere leaving me here, to give him his breakfast and send him home. It’s all ready, I’ve taken everything out of the fridge and put it on the table and I’ve opened a can of sardines too and a can of beans so he can choose what he wants and not grimace like he did yesterday when they gave him gefilte fish. I don’t want any trouble with him and I don’t want him to think he’s being kept without food because he’s an Arab. The pan on the stove, oil, matches, two eggs, water in the kettle. He’s only got to place his order, I’ll light the stove and the meal will be there, like a short-order service. If Mommy saw how good I am at organizing things she’d make me cook breakfast every Sabbath. But he just goes on and on sleeping, does he think this is a hotel? I’m getting all worked up. I’ve changed my clothes twice. First I put on a dress but I’m never sure if it makes me look fat from behind. Then I put on my long kaftan but then I took it off because it really looked a bit much, and I put on the jeans that I wore yesterday with a thin sweater, no point in trying to hide what can’t be hidden anyway. I switched on the radio at full volume, maybe the music quiz will wake him up. But he’s about as lively as a corpse. I’m not going to sit at home all day. At eleven o’clock I knocked softly on the study door a few times and in the end I decided to go in as if I was looking for a book. There he was, sleeping peacefully, in his wonderful pyjamas, dead to the world. He’s had quite long enough, I decided. He can catch up on his sleep at his mother’s house. I went to him and touched him, right there on the face. Why not? After all he’s one of Daddy’s workers and I too have a bit of authority here. At last he opened his eyes.

“Mommy and Daddy have gone out and they told me to make breakfast for you. How do you like your eggs?” I said in a hurry.

And he lying there with his head still on the pillow, I was already wishing I hadn’t made that offer. In the end I persuaded him to eat a scrambled egg because that’s what I cook best. And the little bastard, still lying there in bed, asked me not to put sugar in it, because it seems yesterday the gefilte fish was too sweet for him. He made me mad.

What can I say? People get used to anything. He didn’t seem a bit impressed when he came out of the bathroom and saw the table covered with good things, all for him. Yesterday he was crying and wailing like a stray dog and now he sits there upright and proud, eating like a gentleman with his mouth closed. Congratulations. Taking this and refusing that. He’s got a mind of his own. And I fuss around him, buttering his bread for him, changing the dishes. I don’t know why I’m doing all this. I don’t know any other person who’s had service like this from me and it’s not going to happen again either. I feel tense as hell. I’ve already forgotten the resemblance to Yigal. That really was an absurd idea. Now in his dirty overalls he looks older, there’s even the first signs of a moustache and a beard on his face. Eating at great speed, it’s all right for him because he’s so thin. There’s something relaxed about him, even though he blushes every two minutes for no reason. Saying “Very nice, thank you” but really hating us of course, like all of them. Buy why? Hell, what have we done to them? Surely things can’t be that bad. So suddenly I asked him, to his face, how much they hate us. He didn’t know what to say, started to mumble, explaining that since the war, after they beat us a bit, it wasn’t so bad. Beat us a bit? They must be out of their minds.

But I decided I wasn’t going to be content with a general answer. It was important to me to know if he personally hated us and what he was really thinking. Then he said he didn’t hate us at all, and he looked me straight in the eye, blushing bright red.

Of course I believed him –

The phone rang. It was Osnat. She was worried because I told her she couldn’t come around to our house. She started asking questions and in the end she dragged the whole story out of me, and she was really surprised when she heard I had a little Arab in the house, one of Daddy’s workers, even though I told her he was really sweet.

In the meantime he’d finished his breakfast and he was sitting there motionless in his chair. I’d noticed before that he always stays wherever you put him until you move him to somewhere else. Now it’s about time he started moving by himself and taking on some personal responsibility, as Shwartzy’s always telling us. I said to him, “You can go now, Daddy doesn’t need you anymore. Go home now and he’ll see you in the garage.”

He jumped up from his seat in a hurry, grabbed the bag with his pyjamas in it and was about to go, I didn’t mean for him to rush off so fast. I was sorry I hadn’t invited Osnat along to hear him recite poetry. I asked him if he knew where the bus station was but he said he’d walk. Suddenly, I don’t know why, I felt sorry for him, he looked so forlorn in his dirty overalls, having to walk alone down Carmel on the Sabbath, on the way back to his village, wherever that is. Suddenly I was sorry he was going and I’d never see him again, he’d turn into a big stupid Arab like all the Arab workers that you see around the place and he’d marry some stupid Arab woman. So I said to him, “Just a moment, I’ll come with you,” because I wanted to show him how to get down Carmel by the steps in the middle of the hill, where it’s nice to walk on a day like this.

A bit strange walking with a labourer on the Sabbath in Carmel Centre beside the busy cafes and the people in their best clothes, my luck that he was taller than me. I showed the steps going down and even went a little way with him. Suddenly I got the crazy idea that maybe he was married after all, who knows when they get married. I asked him, indirectly, and I understood that he wasn’t. We carried on walking down among the bushes and the flowers till we met Yigal Rabinovitz and Zaki coming up the hill. They were a bit surprised to find me with him. And then I thought, how far am I going to walk with him? To his village? And I parted from him. He could look after himself now. And he disappeared down the slope straightaway, into the wadi. I stood there for a while chatting to them and we went back up the hill. I thought maybe they’d like to come to a café with me but they were on their way to a basketball game. Such babies. I went to Tali’s house but she wasn’t in and her mom as usual didn’t know where she was and didn’t care. I went from there to Osnat’s house but there the whole crowd were just sitting down to their lunch. I wouldn’t have minded being invited to eat with them, but they didn’t invite me. I went home and the house was suddenly terribly quiet, his sheets and blankets folded in the study, everything still in its place. People just don’t realize how depressing it is to be an only daughter. I felt exhausted and miserable. All my energy had gone into that ridiculous breakfast. Outside it was starting to cloud over, the brightness of the day had gone and it was getting darker. I sat down at the table and ate all the chocolate that was left, looking at the huge pile of dirty plates and pans. I went out of the kitchen in a hurry so as not to make my depression worse. I wanted to read something, something real and not the depressing newspapers again. I remembered how yesterday he sat on the edge of the armchair in the dark and quietly recited Dead of the Desert. I looked for a poetry book to read. I used to have Alterman’s Stars Outside always on the desk but for a few weeks now it’s been missing. So I picked up the Bialik, what else could I do, the book was open at Dead of the Desert, maybe at last I’ll understand why it’s so important.

I heard Daddy and Mommy coming in, I took off my shoes in a hurry and got into bed with the book, covering myself with the blanket so they wouldn’t bother me. They were tired and irritable, they’d found nothing. Mommy saw the mess in the kitchen and came right to my room.

“Why did you leave all those dishes in the kitchen! Couldn’t you have washed them?”

“Nothing to do with me. That Arab boy of yours …”

“Did he need that many plates for his breakfast?”

“Picture to yourself … he’s a growing boy, you know, you were there last night.”

She looked at me with hatred but I held up the book to cover my face, and went on reading.

And silence returns as before and barren the desert stands.

ADAM

I was full of hope. I felt that I was finding him, that I was now on his trail. I didn’t want to lose a moment. Asya got dressed, Na’im was still asleep, when Dafi woke up I told her what to say to him and what to do with him, and the two of us set off for Dimona to look for his uncle. It was a bright Sabbath day, the roads full of traffic. It was five years perhaps since we’d been down in the Negev and it was pleasant to discover new roads, unfamiliar settlements. I had no address in Dimona, just the name — Gabriel Arditi. The same name that the army computer stubbornly kept producing all the time — not without reason, it now appeared. This man was his uncle, perhaps he was hiding in his house. I had always thought of Dimona as a small town and here it was, a booming desert city. We didn’t know where to start, we could see no end to the blocks of apartment houses. But the inhabitants turned out to be friendly and co-operative and they took the trouble to help us. This man knew one Arditi and that man knew another. They took us from one to another until at last we found him. He was in the middle of lunch and he opened the door with a fork in his hand. It was a disappointment. I told the story briefly. He looked at us suspiciously. First of all he didn’t believe that the grandmother was still alive. “You’re mistaken,” he insisted, “Gabriel’s grandmother, his mother’s mother, died just after independence.” He was certain of that. Even then she was a very old woman. We must be thinking of another grandmother, or an old aunt. About Gabriel he knew very little. He had heard that he went away to join his father in Paris. He hadn’t heard that he’d come back.

“Are you part of the family too? Surely you are Ashkenazim …”

In vain. He didn’t even invite us into his house. He just gave us the name of another relative, Gabriel’s father’s cousin, who had kept in touch with that side of the family, perhaps he would know.

It was too late now to drive to Jerusalem. The sky was beginning to cloud over, we returned to Haifa. Na’im had already gone, Dafi was in a foul mood. For some reason I was worried about the old lady so I drove to her house, told her about my visit to Dimona, of course I didn’t mention what he’d said about her supposed death, I mentioned the new name that I’d been given, that cousin of Gabriel’s father. She remembered him. “Oh, that silly old man. Try him, why not?”

The next day at noon I drove to Jerusalem to look for him. This time I had a clear address. But a different family was living there. They told me that the old man used to live there but he had gone to live with his daughter in Ramat Gan. It wasn’t easy to find him because his daughter and her husband had changed houses three times in the last few years, each time moving to a more luxurious apartment. Eventually I found the right address. He wasn’t at home, he’d gone out to an old people’s club. I waited a long time, in the meantime I talked to his grandchildren. From my conversation with them it soon became clear to me that there’d been no sign of Gabriel here. Even so I wanted to talk to the old man. He arrived at last and he was delighted to find somebody waiting for him. I began to tell him the story, he too insisted that I was wrong about the grandmother being alive. The information that she’d gone into a coma and recovered made no impression on him. He argued with me, I was confused, I was mistaken, he was positive that she’d died back in ’48, just a few days before the Declaration of Independence. He even thought he remembered attending her funeral in Jerusalem during the siege. He was convinced, there was no persuading him. I said, “I can take you to her right now,” but he laughed hysterically — “No thank you, at my age I don’t go visiting corpses at night.”

He remembered Gabriel as a boy. Sometimes his father brought him to visit them. But then they went to Venezuela. They may have got only as far as Paris, but the intention was to go to Venezuela, to join a wealthy branch of the family that had settled there in the middle of the last century.

Anyway, he was very friendly and didn’t want to be parted from me. He insisted on me staying for supper and told me stories about the whole family, about his grandchildren.

It was late at night when I left his house. Although my efforts so far had been fruitless, I was more and more convinced that he hadn’t been killed, that he was alive, wandering about the land. The stories that I’d heard about this adventurous family convinced me that perhaps there was some truth in what the old lady had said and that I should try searching for him at night. I turned off the main highway and continued heading north by old side roads, looking around me, surprised to see so much traffic on the roads so late, nearly midnight. At one intersection I saw a little car parked at the roadside, its hood raised. My heart thumped wildly. I was sure it was the little Morris that I was looking for, but it was an Austin, a similar model, 1952. Somebody was pacing about beside it. Something in his profile caught my attention, I stopped at once, got out to have a look. No it wasn’t Gabriel, I must have been imagining things, but he was about the same age and something about him really did remind me of Gabriel. Coincidences like this increase my conviction that Gabriel is close by, that he is wandering about this very neighbourhood perhaps, that right here, on these little side roads in the night hours I shall find him.

I pulled up beside the parked car. “What’s the problem?” The boy explained, some kind of blockage in the engine, he doesn’t understand these things. He called for a tow truck and he’s been waiting for it three hours. I glanced at the engine. “Start it up,” I said. But he looked at me suspiciously, my heavy beard misled him.

“Do you know anything about engines?”

“A little … start it up.”

He started the engine. A fuel blockage. I took a small screwdriver out of my pocket and dismantled the carburettor, cleaned the cup and released the jammed needle. A ten-minute job. The young man looked on anxiously all the time, afraid I was damaging something.

“Start it up.”

The car sprang easily to life. He was amazed. “Is that all it was?” He was so grateful. At least he’d be able to drive to the nearest garage. “No need to drive to a garage,” I said. “It’s O.K. now.”

Midnight. Looking around me all the time. Cars passing by in an endless stream. I had no idea there was so much traffic about at night. He got back into his car, thanked me again and drove off. It seemed strange to me, doing a repair job and not getting paid for it.

I continued on my way, ten kilometres farther on, and then another vehicle parked at the roadside. This time it was a tow truck, presumably the one that went out for the Austin that I’d repaired. It had broken down itself. I was tired but I stopped nevertheless.

The driver was dozing on the seat, under a blanket. I roused him. “Do you need help?”

He woke up, confused, a heavy, bony man, his hair going white, his face wrinkled.

Oh, it doesn’t matter, he’ll wait till morning. There’s a fuel blockage that he can’t shift. One of the petrol stations in this area is clogging up everybody’s engines selling dirty fuel.

“Let me try.”

“You won’t do it.”

“Let me try, it can’t do any harm.”

He opened the hood, I probed in the dark at the dirty and neglected engine, unscrewing the fuel pump. It was years since I’d done jobs like this.

Meanwhile we talked. He told me about himself. He came originally from a moshav not far from here, after the Six Day War he got tired of working on the land, he sold his land and bought this tow truck, now he did towing jobs at night. But this work too was beginning to bore him. His eyesight wasn’t good, and he knew nothing about modern cars, he didn’t even try to identify the fault, he just used to hitch up straightaway and start towing. His boss had doubts about him.

“What goes on around here at night? Is there enough work for you?”

“Plenty of it. The Jews are always speeding.”

He watched me cleaning the fuel pump and fitting a new screw, giving me strange advice. His knowledge of mechanics was hopelessly vague.

“Have you perhaps in the last few months come across an old Morris, 1947, coloured bright blue?”

“You get them all here. Morris, Volvo, BMW, Volkswagen, Ford, Fiat. All the models there are. The more they raise the road tax, the more crowded the roads are.”

“But a little Morris, blue …”

“Morrises too, the lot.”

What a fool the man was.

I got his engine going for him. He was most impressed. He could go home now and sleep. Perhaps I’d like to work for him, he’d give me a percentage.

I smiled, the idea amused me.

“No, but I’d be prepared to buy this tow truck from you.”

“Buy it?”

“Yes, why should you be driving around at night at your age?” He scratched his head.

“How much would you give for it?”

“Bring it around to my garage tomorrow and we’ll make a deal.” At noon the next day Erlich said to me, “What’s going on, did you invite someone around here to sell you a tow truck?” I went out to meet him. He stood there, squat and heavy, an old farmer beside his tow truck. Something about the way he talked reminded me of my father, the same habits of pronunciation, the same way of putting his sentences together. He looked around him, astonished and impressed by the giant garage and the dozens of workers.

“Is all this yours?”

“Yes.”

“And I wanted to employ you …” He said, partly in bitterness, partly in amusement.

I examined the vehicle. It was in a thoroughly neglected state. I called Hamid to inspect the engine and told Erlich to check the market price. An hour later they both reported to me. I said to Erlich, “Right now, give him the money and buy the truck.”

Erlich wasn’t keen on the idea.

“What do you want a tow truck for?”

“We’re going to start towing at night, it’ll bring in more customers.”

“But who’s going to do the driving?”

“I am.”

“You?” He didn’t believe me.

“Yes, why not? I know you think I’ve forgotten what work is …”

NA’IM

The next day he didn’t come to the garage. The Arabs didn’t ask me any questions, it was like they really didn’t care about me sleeping at his house. Only Hamid asked me what job I’d been doing that night and I told him Adam was repairing a rusty old water tank in his house and I was passing him the tools. So I lied quite calmly though he never asked me to lie.

The next day Adam came to work but he didn’t say a word to me, another day went by and it was like he didn’t see me, and then another day and then another. Once he saw me and smiled and said, “How’s the poetry?” but before I could answer he was called away to the phone and disappeared. Maybe two weeks had gone by since that night and it was like he’d forgotten me. Forgotten that I’d slept in his house, washed in his bath. And I don’t know why, it made me sad, even though I didn’t really expect anything from him.

I didn’t feel like reading poetry either. I tried as hard as I could to keep close to him, so he’d say something to me, give me a job to do, but he ignored me. I got to be like a little hound, I could sniff him out anywhere, follow his tracks. But he was busy, running backwards and forwards all the time. He’d bought a second-hand tow truck and he spent all his time on it, he wasn’t interested in the garage. He overhauled it, painted it, fixed all kinds of gadgets on it.

The days are getting longer. It’s light when we leave for the garage in the morning and it’s light when we go home. I’m bored stiff already. Tightening brakes all the time. Lying underneath the cars and shouting to the Jews “Press, let go, harder, ease off, slowly, press.” The Jews do exactly what I tell them.

And the days go by and they’re all pretty much the same. Nothing happens. They’re talking about war again and the radio’s buzzing all the time. We start listening to what the Jews are saying about themselves, all that wailing and cursing themselves, it pleases us no end. It’s nice to hear how screwed up and stupid they are and how hard things are for them, though you wouldn’t exactly think so seeing them changing their cars all the time and buying newer and bigger ones.

Late one afternoon he brought in his tow truck to have the brakes tightened. He himself got down underneath and I pressed on the brake pedal, it was like he didn’t trust me to do the tightening for him. By now we were sick of that machine of his, all of us, he messed around with it all the time, like a kid who’s never seen a car before. Then he finished tightening the brakes and crawled out and stood there beside the truck, drooling over it and wondering if there were any more fancy things he could do to it. Just the two of us there. I was afraid of him slipping away from me again and suddenly I came out with:

“How is the grandmother?”

I’d meant to say “How is Dafi?” but it came out as — the grandmother. I blushed.

“Whose grandmother?” He didn’t understand.

“The grandmother we visited that night, the one who went into a coma and got better.”

“Oh … that grandmother? …” He roared with laughter. “Grandma … ha ha … she’s fine, she sends you her regards.”

And he started working the winch, raising it and lowering it. Suddenly he turned and looked at me, staring at me so hard you could tell he’d just had an idea.

“Listen, I need you for night work with this tow truck. Would your father let you sleep in town?”

“No problem …” I got all excited. “My father doesn’t care where I spend the night …”

“Good, bring your things here tomorrow, your pyjamas and the rest … you’ll be starting to work nights with this tow truck … we’ll tow cars in … tour the roads … you and me …”

My heart beat fast, I lit up inside.

“Fine … but where shall I sleep? At your house again?”

He looked at me a bit surprised.

“We’ll find you a place to stay … don’t worry … we’ll fix something for you here at the garage … or perhaps even at Mrs. Ermozo’s … Grandma’s …” And he started to laugh again. “Perhaps you should sleep at her house … an excellent idea … she can look after you and you can look after her a bit.”

ADAM

And the next day Na’im came in carrying a big suitcase, wearing a winter coat too big for him. The Arabs watched him from a distance as he came towards me. I’d noticed before that they were very interested in our relationship, the association seemed to them suspicious and strange.

“What did you tell your father?”

“I said you were going to take care of me.”

“And what did he say?”

“Nothing.” He blushed. “He said you’d look after me as if you were my father.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

They don’t seem to care much about giving the boy up.

“Good. Sit here and wait.”

And all day he sat there at the side in his big overcoat, the suitcase beside him, waiting quietly, already apart from the other workers, watching me, wherever I went those dark eyes followed me. Suddenly I had a boy at my disposal, as if I’d adopted a son.

At midday I decided to have a word with Hamid.

“I’m taking Na’im with me to help with the night towing, he’ll be staying with an old lady. It’ll be all right, don’t worry.”

But he had no intention of worrying, hardly even looked up, went on tightening a nut in the engine in front of him, not understanding what I wanted from him.

After work I took him to the old lady’s house, I rang the doorbell, heard her shuffling little footsteps.

“Who’s there?”

“It’s me, Adam. I’ve brought the boy.” And then she began shifting the bolts, drawing back one after the other. At first I hardly recognized her. Standing there small and upright, in a flowery pink dress, wearing glasses, her face full of life. And this was the old lady who a few weeks before was lying unconscious in the old people’s home, a nurse pouring porridge into her mouth. I put my hand on her shoulder.

“How are you, Mrs. Ermozo?”

“Fine, fine … as long as my brain is in the right place everything is fine, even though I’m working all the time, cleaning, tidying … please don’t look, everything’s in such a mess …”

“What do you mean, a mess … I hardly recognize the place … it’s all so clean …”

But she interrupted me.

“Do you call this clean? This is nothing. You should have seen the place forty years ago, you’d have seen what cleanliness is. You could have eaten off the floor.”

I pushed Na’im forwards.

“I’ve brought Na’im here. Do you remember him? He came with me that night.”

She looked at him closely.

“Yes … yes … this is the Arab who climbed in through the window … How are you, boy? You can come in through the door from now on.”

She addressed him in Arabic and he blushed bright red, looking at her with hatred.

“He can stay here for a while, during the night he’ll help me look for Gabriel.”

She groaned when she heard Gabriel’s name. “Come on, come inside … what’s he got in that suitcase?” And, again, to him in Arabic: “Come on, let’s have a look. You haven’t brought me any bugs, have you?”

He was still speechless and she bent over the suitcase, opened it and began examining the contents. On a heap of folded clothes there were eggs, peppers and eggplants.

“What’s this? The Turks left this country long ago.”

He was embarrassed, angry.

“I don’t know who put them in … maybe my mother.”

She started taking out the vegetables, examining the eggs by the light from the window.

“Very good. Fine eggs these. Take all these clothes out and hang them up to air. Thank your mother very much but tell her next time not to mix clothes with food, you’ll get egg yolks in your pockets …. Where did you steal these pyjamas from? … You won’t need the towel, put it in the laundry basket … we’ll look at these clothes later. In the meantime you go and have a wash. Do you hear? Off you go. The water will go cold. I lit the boiler this morning when I heard that you were coming, He should wash before he eats, not good to bathe on a full stomach … But don’t make a mess, this isn’t a hotel and I’m not cleaning up three times a day … I’ve prepared a separate room for him … a wardrobe … all for him … You’ll sleep on your own here, without donkeys and goats and chickens.”

And she led the bewildered Na’im into the bathroom, the poor fellow was getting used to being sent into the bathroom every time he entered a Jewish house. She sat me down in the big room and brought in plates full of biscuits, nuts and almonds. She made coffee and brought it to me.

“Don’t bother.”

“I’ve already bothered. I’m not going to throw it all away.”

The coffee was excellent and she charmed me with her courtesy, with her thin smile. I explained to her my intention of patrolling the roads at night, towing in cars and looking for Gabriel. I told her that of course she could make use of the boy, he could help with the cleaning, go shopping, do minor repairs if necessary. “A good boy,” I said. “You’ll see.”

“When they’re young, perhaps, before they join Fatah.”

I laughed.

Then she put on her reading glasses and picked up a heap of newspapers, most of them copies of Ma’ariv and Yediot Aharonot of the last few weeks, and she began leafing through them excitedly. After a while she took off her glasses and turned to me with a question.

“Perhaps you can help me?”

“By all means.”

“Tell me, what is this Kissinger?”

“What?”

“What is he? Who is he? Before I went into the hospital I’d never heard of him. Now that I’ve recovered the papers are full of him, they never mention anyone else. Why?”

I told her about him.

“A Jew?” She was amazed, didn’t believe it. “That’s impossible! An apostate, perhaps … how could they let him? What do you say? Isn’t he ashamed to make so much trouble?”

“It’s not so bad …” I tried to calm her.

“What’s not so bad?” she protested. “Read what the papers say about him. Somebody ought to talk to his father.”

Na’im came out of the bathroom, scowled at us.

“What’s this!” she said, in Arabic. “So quickly? You’ve just been playing with the water. Come here … let’s see how well you’ve washed … behind your ears, isn’t that part of you? Next time I shall wash you … Don’t look so surprised, I’ve washed bigger boys than you … now sit down and eat.”

She was a real live wire. Drowning in newspapers and politics, all the time pumping me for information about politics and parties, complaining that she’d missed the election, she’d never missed one before. Even unconscious she would have known how to vote.

“How would you have voted?” I asked with a smile.

“Not for the Communists anyway … perhaps for that slut … what’s her name? The one who sticks up for women … perhaps for someone else … but that should be a secret, shouldn’t it?” And she winked at me.

Na’im sat there in silence, eating biscuits and drinking coffee. I’d noticed before how relaxed he could be, he had an astonishing ability to adapt himself to new surroundings. Watching her suspiciously but calmly, picking up the paper that lay in front of him and starting to read it with deep concentration, trying to ignore us.

She looked at him in astonishment, whispering to me, “What’s this? Can he read Hebrew or is he just pretending?”

“He knows Hebrew yery well … he’s been to school … he knows poems by Bialik by heart …”

She was furious.

“What does he want with Bialik? What use is it to him? Oh, we’re ruining these Arabs of ours … they’ll stop working and write poetry instead … but if he can read then he can read to me a little … my eyes get tired so quickly. And there are so many interesting things in the newspapers …”

She took the paper from him, leafed through it and handed it back to him.

“Leave off the pictures now. Read the article by Rosenblum on the first page. He’s a wicked man but he knows the truth.”

I stood up from my seat. I was charmed by her.

“You see, Na’im, you’ll have interesting work here.” But he didn’t smile.

“Are you going already?” She was disappointed, didn’t want me to leave. “What’s the time? Drink some more coffee … eat some supper perhaps … your wife won’t have cooked anything for you yet … when should I put him to bed?”

I laughed again.

“Oh, he’ll go to bed by himself. He’ll be fifteen soon … he can look after himself.”

“But all the same … will you be coming to fetch him tonight?”

“Perhaps.”

And suddenly she clutched at me, unsteady, weeping.

“I wish I could come with you to search for him … so kind of you to care about me, not turning your back on me, like all the others.”

I put my hand on her shoulder, she smelled of baby soap.

And Na’im was sprawled in his chair, ignoring us, sipping his coffee, turning the pages of the newspaper one after the other.

NA’IM

I told Father and Mother, “He wants me again, the garage boss. I’ll be staying with an old woman because he wants me at night for special work, but he can’t say when he’ll be bringing me back.”

“Is his boiler out of order again?” Mother asked, because I’d told them too that I’d helped him repair his boiler that Friday night, not that I’d broken into the house of an old woman who turned out to be at home.

“No, he’s starting to tow in broken-down cars, he wants to catch new customers when their cars are smashed up, looks like he’s expanding the garage. And I’m helping him with the tools and things like that.”

And they were very impressed, really proud. And Father said right away, “You see, Na’im, you wanted to stay on at school, wasting your time, it’s not yet five months since you started working for him and already he can’t do without you.”

“He can do very well without me, he just wants me there.”

And Father went straightaway to Aunt Isha’s and came back with a big old suitcase, and Mother started folding up my clothes and putting them in, putting in more and more clothes like I was never coming back. But I don’t have that many clothes, the suitcase was still only a third full. Then Father looked inside the case and called Mother aside and they went into the room that used to be Adnan’s and whispered a bit, then they called me in and I went in and saw Adnan’s clothes lying there on the bed and they told me to undress and I undressed, and they tried some of his clothes on me, shirts and trousers and sweaters, and Mother marked with pins the places that needed shortening, and Father looked at me with tears in his eyes and started to moan, “Adnan, Adnan,” and Mother said, “Perhaps we shouldn’t do this,” but he said, “No, who else should we give his clothes to, the security police?” And so they put some of Adnan’s clothes into the case too, and they gave me his overcoat, which had once belonged to Faiz as well, and even then the suitcase wasn’t full so Mother went out into the fields and came back with peppers, eggplants and garlic and she even put some eggs in at the top — “These are for the old lady that you’re going to live with, so she looks after you properly and feeds you.”

And they were all excited and confused and anxious but they were pleased as well that I was getting to be a real expert mechanic. And Father took me aside and said solemnly, “Wait two more weeks and then ask for a raise. Promise me.” And that night I had a bath. And in the morning they were all awake extra early and Father fetched a wheelbarrow and he put the suitcase on it and we went to the bus stop.

I saw on the bus that morning that the workers were looking at me in a shifty sort of way. The news had already gone around the village that I was going to do a special job and they were all a bit jealous of me because is there anyone who wouldn’t like to leave the village and sleep in the town and not be awakened by the cocks crowing in the morning? The only one who didn’t care at all was Hamid. He just gave me a dry sort of look, didn’t say it was good or bad, just indifferent.

I got to the garage late because I had to carry the suitcase by myself and it really slowed me down. And he saw me and told me to wait on the side. And I sat there with my suitcase the whole day, it seemed strange to me that they were all working and I was sitting there on my own, and all of them watching me from the side. And I looked at the pictures of naked women, not many changes. Only the picture of that old woman who used to be Prime Minister was torn and dirty, someone had drawn glasses on the President’s face, only the ex-President was left as he was.

After work he took me to the old woman’s house and this time we went up the stairs and she opened the door, at first I thought it was someone else, she was so clean and nicely dressed and the apartment was clean and tidy, but it really was the same woman and right from the start I saw I was going to have problems with her, that, like I heard one of the Jewish workers in the garage say about somebody, she was going to fuck my mind up, and my spirits fell.

First of all, she started talking to me in Arabic and I don’t like it when Jews speak Arabic, they make so many mistakes and it always sounds like they’re making fun of us. Those are the Jews who think they know us best, damn them. The only things they know about us are the things they can make fun of and they never have any respect even when they’re pretending to be good friends.

Straightaway she opened up the suitcase to see what was inside it and she found the eggs and the vegetables on top of the clothes. I almost wished the ground would swallow me up for the shame that Mother was causing me in front of Adam, who thought I’d brought these things to sell. And then she told me to have a bath, even though I was very clean. Only dirty people need to wash all the time, Adnan used to say. And she seemed to think I might be bringing bugs into the house, though the last time I saw fleas was in her kitchen that night and there’d been a mouse too.

But I didn’t say anything and I went to have a wash, I’d had a bath in a Jewish house before and I wasn’t afraid but I felt offended all the same. Then I went and saw the room that she’d fixed up for me and it really was a nice room with a bed and a wardrobe and a view of the bay, nothing to complain about. But I knew I wouldn’t get any peace here, she’s such an old windbag, a real political old lady, every other word she says is something about politics, she’s a newspaper nut. Can’t understand how she ever went into a coma, her mind is the only part of her that works, the rest of her is like a big ball of fat, she can hardly move.

And Adam liked her, laughing at everything she said, laughing happily. And that irritated me, I didn’t see anything special about her. In the meantime she brought in coffee and some cookies that were really good. These Oriental Jews know how to cook, they learned it from us Arabs.

I decided I wasn’t going to have too much to do with her, it wasn’t for her that I came to live in the city but for Dafi. I want to see her again and get to know her and fall in love with her. And I wasn’t going to get too friendly with this old woman so I sat there quietly reading Ma’ariv and that surprised her, she thought it was odd an Arab reading a newspaper in Hebrew. Pity she never knew Adnan, he knew the papers by heart and he had answers to everything they said.

I’ll have to keep on my guard here, sit quietly and not get into arguments, otherwise things will be unbearable. I’m not here for politics but for love. And so I sat there quietly, pretending I didn’t care about anything, like Hamid, looking out of the window, thinking maybe I’d go to the movies if only I had some money. And at last Adam got up to go and the old woman went with him to the door and suddenly she started crying. Hanging on to him. Damn her.

So the evening began and she went into the kitchen to get a meal ready and I didn’t know if I ought to take the dirty plates off the table or not. I didn’t want her to get the idea that I was here to help with the housework, I’m just a mechanic lodging with her, but I saw she really was terribly old, hardly able to walk, and groaning with every movement, and the evening light made her look all white, like a corpse. She must be over seventy, Father is seventy, and I was afraid she might suddenly drop dead so I quickly got up and picked up the dishes and took them to the kitchen and she smiled at me, a dead smile, and said:

“Sit down quietly and read the paper and I’ll make you some supper.”

I asked, “Do you have any repair job that needs doing?”

She began to think, then she bent down, nearly crawling on the floor, opening cupboards and looking for something, then she got out a small stepladder and started climbing up it. I almost shouted, “Tell me what you want and I’ll do it for you.”

And she smiled with her toothless mouth.

“You really are a good boy.”

But I didn’t want her to start talking Arabic again and I said straight out, “You can talk to me in Hebrew, no need for you to make an effort.”

She laughed. “But then you’ll end up forgetting your Arabic and your father will be angry with me.”

“I won’t forget, there’re plenty of Arabs even in Haifa.”

Then she smiled her dead smile again and told me to climb up the ladder and look in the top cupboards to see if there was a good bulb to put in the socket in the dining room so we’d have more light and we’d be able to see what we were eating. And I went up the ladder right away and looked in the cupboard and there were maybe twenty bulbs there, all of them burned out. I don’t know why she kept them, maybe she thought she’d get a refund on them at the supermarket. I had to try them all before I found one that worked.

In the meantime she was cooking supper, mutton with rice and beans, great stuff, really tasty, Arab food. And she fussed around me all the time, not eating herself, going and fetching salt, pepper, pickled cucumber, bread. I kept telling her, “I’ll fetch it myself,” but she said, “You sit there quietly and eat.”

The last course was sweet sahalab. And she was walking slowly, dragging her feet. When the meal was finished I took the dirty dishes off the table and said to her, “All right, I’ll wash them.” But she wouldn’t let me, like she was afraid I’d break something. So I said, “O.K., at least let me take out the rubbish.”

And I went out to empty the rubbish and it was already dark in the street, and I walked along with the empty can to have a look at the street, to see what there was, who the neighbours were, what the shops were like.

When I got back she was sitting in her chair, everything was clean and tidy, she looked at me angrily.

“Where have you been?”

“I was just walking in the street.”

“You must always tell me where you’re going. I’m responsible for you.”

I felt like shouting, What do you mean you’re responsible? but I didn’t say anything.

And she picked up Ma’ariv and I picked up Yediot Aharonot because that was all there was, she didn’t have a TV or a radio for listening to music, and we sat there opposite each other like a pair of old people, quietly reading. It was really boring. And every five minutes she asked me what the time was. In the end she got tired of reading, took off her glasses and said, “Read me what Rosenblum says on page one.”

And I read it to her, I can’t remember all of it, the main thing was that all the Arabs want to destroy all the Jews.

She groaned, nodding her head.

Then I couldn’t stop myself and I asked, “Do you think I want to destroy you?”

She smiled and muttered, “We’ll see, we’ll see. What’s the time?”

“Seven o’clock,” I said.

She said, “Off you go to bed, he may be coming to fetch you tonight, we don’t want him to find you tired out.” I wasn’t a bit tired but I didn’t want to argue with her on the first evening so I stood up to go to bed. And I looked at her, she really scared me, with her pale face and red eyes she looked like a witch. Staring at me so hard. I started trembling inside. She was really scary. And then she said something weird, crazy, whatever could have put the idea in her head?

“Come here, give me a kiss.”

I thought I was going to faint. What was the big idea? Why? I cursed myself and her but I didn’t want to quarrel with her the first evening so I went up to her and quickly brushed my lips against her cheek that was as dry as a tobacco leaf. I made a kissing noise in the air and ran off to my room, wishing I was dead. But then I cheered up a bit because through the window I could see the lights of the harbour coming on, really beautiful. I undressed slowly, put on my pyjamas and got into bed, thinking maybe tonight I’d see the girl I love in a dream and I really did see her but not in a dream.

VEDUCHA

At the time of the siege of Old Jerusalem, just two years after the cursed World War, I realized that God had lost consciousness. I didn’t dare say he no longer existed, because it’s hard for an old woman of sixty-seven whose father was a great Jerusalem rabbi to start fighting against God and those who believe in Him, but when my daughter Hemdah, Gabriel’s mother, was killed by a bullet and I went with the child and his strange father to the New City and they put us up in a monastery in Rehavia, I used to say to all the people around me, whether they wanted to hear or not, “He is unconscious,” and they thought I meant the child, or his father, but I said, “No, up there,” and they would look up, searching and not understanding, and I said, “Don’t seek Him, He isn’t there.” And the people cursed me, for to lose Him at such a time was the last thing they wanted. It was then that my love for Jerusalem died. It was a city of madness, and when they offered me a deserted Arab house in Haifa I accepted it at once and moved there with the child Gabriel, whom I had to bring up. And his strange father didn’t want to go to Haifa, but he didn’t care in the least that I was taking the child, he wasn’t much interested in him, he spent all his time wandering about trying to remarry and not succeeding. And the child loved his father greatly, pined for him all the time. And when at last his father went to Paris to try his luck there, because his prospects in Israel were very bleak, Gabriel never stopped thinking about Paris, collecting pictures of it, reading books about it, and the more I tried to make him forget his father, the more he remembered. I bought an old car and after taking the test seven times I learned to drive. I used to take the boy with me on little trips, to Galilee and other parts of the country, but he had only one idea in his head, how to get to Paris to be with his father, he wrote letters, made plans. As soon as he finished his army service he went to Paris. And so for the last ten years I have been alone, no family around me, they’re all in Paris, dying off one by one, I can’t even get to the funerals. And the world has become strange, but it’s still here and it’s not so bad, it could be much worse. I said to myself, perhaps it’s a good thing that He is still lying there unconscious, if He wakes up then the troubles will begin. Please, good people, speak softly, don’t wake Him. But I began to yearn and my yearning was so great that in the end I lost my wits, I don’t even remember how it happened. It was in the middle of lunch, because Mrs. Goldberg came in that evening and found me still holding the fork. And I lay unconscious for maybe a year and if I met Him I do not know, for every meeting was unconscious. But in the end I woke up, and still I don’t know why. For now I feel no yearning for anyone. Perhaps Gabriel’s return did touch me after all. And I go home, an old woman of ninety-three, that’s the truth, and this loneliness again. What will become of me? But mercy and grace are still with me. On the first night that I’m alone in the house, a thunderstorm outside, that bearded man breaks into the house — Gabriel’s friend, kindred souls they are, he will search for him on my behalf. A wonderful man. He reconnects my telephone, takes care of everything, and one afternoon he even brings along a little Arab boy to stay with me. It’s a little sad that it should end like this. The second generation of a great Jerusalem family, every other Sephardi who walked the streets of the Old City at the turn of the century was somehow related, and now at the end of my days I have nobody in my house but an Arab. Better if he had brought me a Jewish orphan and I could have performed a mitzvah before my death, but what can you do, there are no more Jewish orphans on the market, only Arabs, at least they do not flee the country. God is having a joke at my expense, that at the age of ninety-three I must look after a little Arab, send him to the bathroom to wash himself, give him food, I know, he’ll grow up an ass like all the rest of them, you can’t trust them an inch, but for the time being it’s a pretty boy that I see, a typical Arab face but intelligent, sitting on the chair beside me, like the little grandson that I once had years ago, and there’s light in the house again, I can hardly conceal my joy. He brought vegetables and eggs from his village in a suitcase, like the good Arabs, the Turks. He really makes me happy, I can give him little jobs to do. I held his hand and led him to his room, gave him a good meal. He cleaned his plate. Thank God he has an appetite, now I shall have to cook proper meals. A little man. He may be an Arab, but he’s somebody at least. A quiet boy, knows what he wants, looking at me suspiciously but without fear, on his guard, knows how to defend himself, even though he doesn’t respond to my teasing, I talk to him in Arabic to make him feel at home, but he answers in Hebrew, that’s how far they’ve infiltrated us.

He cleared the table by himself, without being told, went out with the rubbish and suddenly disappeared, I was afraid he might have run away but he came back. He offered to do some work in the house, I asked him to change a light bulb and I watched him as he worked, quietly, without giving himself a shock, without a lot of noise. If he stays with me till Passover he can help me remove the hametz and we shall make the place very kosher. He can read newspapers too. Adam has brought me a real treasure.

But when evening came and darkness filled the house, I saw that the two of us were alone here for the night and panic seized me. Suddenly I thought, he’s not a little child, he’s a big boy, he has a dark and dangerous face. He could steal my gold coins, attack me, if not he then his brothers, these people always have big brothers. He will open the door to them in the night. This boy has already broken into the house once. Why did I have to be so foolish, wasn’t it better before, when things were quiet? Four bolts I put on the door and Mrs. Goldberg has perfect hearing. I was well protected and now I have let the enemy inside.

Strange thoughts began to confuse me.

I asked him to read me something from the paper, to see how he would read, perhaps his voice might reveal something of his intentions. I gave him the article by Dr. Rosenblum, who uses short sentences and simple ideas. He began to read, reading very clearly, and the gist of the article that we hit upon was something I have known for years, that the Arabs have no thought other than to destroy us all. That was all I needed now, to put the idea into his head. And he actually paused, thought for a moment, looked up at me and said, “Do you think I want to destroy you?”

“Of course,” I wanted to say, “but you can’t, thank God.” But I said nothing. He was so sweet when he asked that question, full of sweetness. Again I remembered Gabriel and how he disappeared, all so quickly. Then the idea occurred to me of asking him to kiss me. Once he’d kissed me he couldn’t use violence against me in the night and I’d be able to sleep peacefully, he might perhaps steal something small, but nothing worse than that. I watched him, sitting there, brooding, plotting. I said, “Come here, give me a kiss.” The little bastard couldn’t believe his ears, but he controlled himself, he couldn’t refuse an old woman like me and he came and touched my cheek with a flutter of his hot lips. Perhaps my first kiss in fifteen years. So sweet. I sent him off to bed. I’d hidden the key to his room beforehand, so he couldn’t lock himself in and make plans. He put on his pyjamas, got into bed and went to sleep. I washed, put on a nightdress, switched off the lights and sat down in the dining room, listening to his breathing. Eight o’clock, nine, ships’ sirens in the harbour. I went into the bedroom to look at him. He lay sprawled there on the bed, flushed with sleep. I tidied his clothes a little. Ten o’clock, eleven, and I’m still dozing in the armchair in the dining room, waiting, perhaps the telephone will ring. At eleven-thirty the lights in the bay go out, I go to his room. He’s in a deep sleep, the blanket slipping off the bed. I cover him up. Suddenly I bend down and kiss him lightly. What can I do? So sad.

I go back to the dining room, still hoping for a call.

DAFI

What’s the time? Nearly midnight. I’ve slept two hours and wakened. Dark in the house. A light and simple wakening, that’s what’s been frightening me lately. My sleep is like straw in the wind, leaving no traces.

Daddy’s going out to work tonight, between midnight and two he must be on call. I heard it all yesterday, I know all about it. Looking for the lover at night and through the window I see the tow truck parked at the kerb, the yellow crane like a finger pointing at the sky. I get out of bed and put on the clothes that I got ready during the evening. Corduroy trousers, woollen vest, warm sweater. I’ve decided to go with him. Hiking boots, a scarf. Winter clothes that I’ve never worn in winter. Just pray that some car will have an accident, or break down.

I get dressed in the dark, outside the moon moving fast against broken clouds. The water sounds in the gutters but you can’t see the rain. I think of a car on its way from Tel Aviv to Haifa. I even see its shape. Its colour — bright blue. I think of the driver and I see him, a young man, very sexy, in a black golf shirt, looks a bit like a gym instructor. Beside him a small woman, his wife or his mistress, very sweet. They’re coming home from a play or a party, the radio plays soft dance music, he lays a hand on her shoulder, caressing her, the other hand rests lightly on the wheel. I see the speedometer — a hundred and twenty kilometres. He leans towards her and kisses her, but the lady isn’t content with a kiss, she leans over and lays her head on his shoulder, distracting him. They’re talking about themselves, about how charming they are, and meanwhile the rain sets in (I see it, the moon is hidden, the sky grows dark, rain lashes the windows) and he simply misses the bend, crash, the car smashes through the iron fence between the lanes, the bumper is crushed, the door caves in, the lights shatter, the woman screams, the brakes squeal, the car nearly overturns but ends up on its side. They’re alive. Just a few scratches and bruises. I go on quietly dreaming as I lace up my shoes. I see the man climbing out through the window and helping his lady friend to get out. Running and flagging down a car coming the opposite way, giving the details, a few minutes later the phone rings in the control room. The bored duty clerk takes down the details, looks in the register to see who’s on call. I see it there, Daddy’s name, and beside it our phone number. She lifts the receiver and dials.

My heart misses a beat. At this very moment the phone rings. I freeze. This is crazy. The dream is becoming reality. I run to the phone in the study. I pick up the receiver and say, “Yes?” but Daddy has beaten me to it with the receiver beside his bed. I hear the particulars. BMW, 1972 model, registration number so-and-so, three kilometres south of the Atlit intersection. Daddy writes it all down in the little notebook that I put beside the phone for him yesterday. I go into the bathroom right away, wash my face, clean my teeth and come out expecting to give Daddy a surprise but the house is in darkness, as if he’s already gone. I go quickly into their bedroom, God Almighty, he’s asleep again, the bedside lamp’s switched off. I rouse him, shaking him roughly. “Daddy, are you crazy, have you forgotten? You’ve got a tow job to do.” He sits up in bed, confused, bleary with sleep, he suddenly looks old. “What’s the matter? What is it?” He thought he dreamed it. “Lucky that you’re awake.” Mommy stars under the blanket. He starts taking off his pyjamas in a hurry, stripping almost naked in front of me, completely befuddled. I run to the kitchen, put water in the kettle to make some coffee. Daddy goes into the bathroom, comes out dressed.

“Come on, Daddy, the coffee’s ready.” He smiles. “Dafi, you’ll make a wonderful wife.” I phone the old lady’s house to wake Na’im, curious to see how he’ll react to the sound of my voice, but it’s the old lady who answers.

“Good evening, could you wake Na’im, please? Daddy is on his way to collect him.”

“But who are you?”

“I’m his daughter, my name’s Dafi.”

“Dafi? What sort of a name is that?”

“Short for Dafna. Sorry, it’s so late. We’re on our way.”

“Who is we?”

“Daddy and I … please hurry … wake him up and tell him to wait outside.”

“All right, all right, no need to get excited, young lady.”

Daddy still doesn’t realize that I intend to go with him, he looks at the details written on a page torn from the notebook, his eyes half closed, you can tell it’s years since he’s seen what the world looks like at midnight. Drinking his coffee, smiling at me affectionately. Doesn’t realize that I’m sitting beside him in an overcoat, drinking coffee, ready to leave. He puts the dirty cup in the sink, bends down and kisses me hurriedly. “There now, I’m off. Thanks for the coffee.”

I stand up at once.

“I’m coming with you.”

“What?”

“What difference does it make to you? I can’t sleep. I’m coming with you. I want to see how the towing is done.”

He’s baffled.

“You’ve got school tomorrow. What is there to see? You want to see the towing? What are you, a baby?”

“Why should you care? Better that than wandering around the house. I won’t get in the way, I promise. I’ll be company for you too.”

He hesitates. I know how things are, they lost control of me years ago.

“At least let’s tell Mommy …”

“She won’t wake up, she won’t know.” He shrugs his shoulders, defeated.

“I warn you, we’ll be back very late.”

“What’s so terrible about that?”

We go down to the tow truck. It’s very cold outside, rain. He starts the engine, warming it up.

“Aren’t you cold?”

“No.” We drive down first to the lower city, going into a little side street in the heart of the deserted market. We see a shadowy figure in a funny long overcoat. Na’im the night owl. He hurries towards us, opens the door and climbs aboard, nearly falling out again when he sees me. Even in the dark I can see his face light up, his eyes opening wide.

“Hello,” I say.

“Hello,” he whispers.

And he sits down beside me. Silence. Daddy drives fast down the empty streets. The traffic lights are stuck, flickering on amber. Na’im curls up beside me, watching me furtively. Suddenly he whispers:

“How are you?”

“Fine. How’s Grandma?”

“She’s all right.”

And we drive on in silence, joining the Tel Aviv highway, Daddy turning his head now and then to look at the cars passing by. We pass the Atlit intersection. Daddy starts to slow down, a few kilometres farther on we see red lights beside the steel fence between the lanes and I see a car lying on its side. My heart thumps. We pull up on the roadside and climb out to look. I can’t believe my eyes — a blue car. It’s as if I’ve created this accident. The bumper and the front of the car are crushed. On the opposite side of the road two cars are parked, lights dimmed. A little crowd has gathered.

The people are surprised to see Na’im and me.

“What’s this, have you brought your children along?” somebody shouts but Daddy doesn’t answer.

The driver, a young man, some kind of student, starts to explain what happened, making excuses, he’s not entirely to blame, of course. Beside him a middle-aged woman in trousers paces around nervously, her eyes red. She’s involved in this too. “What matters is that nobody’s been hurt,” says the young man. “What matters is that we’re not hurt,” he repeats in a loud voice to the little crowd of onlookers, as if he wants us to confirm what he says and share in his happiness.

Daddy still says nothing, very grim, as usual, in fact he hardly looks at the car but watches the road, watches the cars passing by, looking for something else.

At last he sets to work. Getting back into the truck, driving forwards a few hundred metres till he finds a gap in the fence and crossing to the other side. Na’im strips off his coat, takes out triangles and a flashing lamp and sets them out on the road. Daddy starts giving instructions, Na’im gets out the tools and slowly they start unwinding the cable. The driver watches anxiously, the little crowd looks on with interest, I don’t know why we don’t sell tickets for the show. From time to time somebody shouts out a piece of advice.

I go and stand beside the woman.

“Whose is the car?”

“Mine.”

“Yours? And is that your son?”

She looks at me angrily.

“Why do you want to know?”

“Just … I thought … where have you come from?”

“Why?”

“Just curious.”

“From Tel Aviv.”

She snaps out her answers, my questions irritate her.

“Have you been to see a play?”

“No.”

“Then where have you been?”

“We are returning from a protest meeting.”

“Protest against what?”

“Against all the lies.”

“Who’s been lying to you?”

She stares at me, can’t decide if I’m trying to provoke her or just being thick.

“What are you doing wandering about at night, at your age? Don’t you go to school?”

“I’ve skipped a grade,” I say quietly. “I can afford to wander about a bit.”

She doesn’t know what to say, she leaves me and goes to watch Daddy working on the car. I follow her. Very interesting. Na’im crawling on the road and Daddy playing out the cable, telling him how to make the connection. Now very, very slowly they start raising the car. Splinters of glass and fragments of buckled metal fall on the road. Terrific.

The young man covers his face.

“A real smack-up,” I say to the woman.

She’s furious.

Now Daddy climbs into the truck and starts the engine, dragging the car away from the fence and towing it to the side of the road. Meanwhile Na’im is picking up the tools, folding up the triangles, taking the flashing light and hanging it on the back of the truck. Working quietly and energetically. Daddy wipes his oily hands, his face is covered in sweat, there’s a tear in his trousers. It’s a long time since I’ve seen him so out of breath. He tells me to take a piece of paper and write down the details. He asks them where they want the car to be towed. The woman asks his advice.

“I can tow it to my garage.”

“How much will the repair cost?”

“I shall have to examine it, I can’t tell you now. In the meantime there’s the towing charge.”

“How much?”

Daddy sends me to fetch the list of prices that the towing firm gave him, I crouch over it, lighting the pages with a flashlight. It has to be calculated according to the distances involved and the size of the damaged car. It takes me a while to work it out.

“A hundred and fifty pounds,” I announce triumphantly.

Daddy checks it and agrees.

The man starts to argue, Daddy listens in silence, chewing his beard. But I get impatient.

“It’s written right here, sir, what do you want us to do?”

“Shut up, girl,” the woman hisses.

But Daddy says, “There’s nothing you can do about it, she’s right.”

A police car pulls up. Two tired cops get out, start sniffing around, the man gets desperate, stops arguing. He just wants a receipt.

“Why not?” says Daddy and he tells me to write a receipt and take the money.

I take out a receipt at once, enjoying this work very much. Na’im has finished collecting the tools, he stands watching me with his mouth open. The young man holds out the money. I count it. Ten pounds short. The lady has to make it up. I’d love to know what’s between them. Now the cops are in charge. We leave them to it. The money’s in my coat pocket. Daddy switches on the flashing beacon on the roof of the cab and a red light flickers over the road like something supernatural. Na’im and I sit on the back seat of the truck bed, facing the hanging car, watching it and making sure we don’t lose it on the way. We talk, I say something funny and he’s surprised and laughs, his eyes sparkling.

Daddy drives calmly, once he stops beside a car parked at the roadside, gets out to take a look at it and then drives on. We arrive at the garage. It’s huge, the cars are like horses in a stable, each one in its stall. Daddy and Na’im unhitch the damaged car, leaving it at the side. We drive on, putting Na’im down outside his house. When we get home it’s already four in the morning.

Daddy says, “I’m worn out.”

“I’ve never been more wide awake.”

“How are things going to work out with you?”

“It’ll be all right, don’t worry.”

He goes to take a shower because he’s very dirty, I go and peep at Mommy, who’s still lying there in the same position as when we left her, she’s got no idea how busy we’ve been these last four hours. From there I go to the kitchen to put the kettle on for tea. Through the window, across the wadi, I see the man who types, slumped in his chair, his head thrown back, he’s not usually still at it this late.

Daddy has put on his pyjamas, his face is pale, he’s worn out, he comes into the kitchen to put out the light and finds me sitting there, still dressed, quietly drinking tea.

“Come and drink some tea before you go to sleep,” I suggest. But for some reason he’s angry.

“This is the last time I take you with me. You have to make such a big party out of everything.”

“But that’s life — a party…”

Four in the morning philosophy –

He turns away and goes to bed. In the end I go to bed too, stripping off by the open window, watching the clouds, a thin stream of light showing through. I’m not cold, the opposite, I’m all boiling hot and low down in my stomach there are dull twinges of pain, it’s nearly time for my period. In the pocket of my coat, crushed, I find the money. I go quickly into Daddy’s bedroom, he’s under the blankets trying to sleep.

“Daddy, what shall I do with the money?”

“Put it in my wallet,” he mumbles, “and for God’s sake go to sleep … this is the last time …”

“All right … all right …”

I take the wallet out of his trouser pocket. It’s stuffed full of bills. I count them — two thousand one hundred pounds. Why does he drag so much money around with him? I put in the night’s takings, then think again, you shouldn’t exploit workers even if they are members of the family, and I take out thirty pounds for myself, secretarial fees. I go to take another look at the man who types and he’s disappeared. I put out the lights and disappear under the blanket, me too.

NA’IM

It isn’t me who answers the phone but her, she’s always awake, wandering around the house, dozing in armchairs. I’ve never seen her properly asleep. “How much longer do I have to live?” she says sometimes. “It’s a shame to sleep.”

She comes into the room and switches on the light and starts waking me up with her strange Arabic.

“Na’im, child, get up, on your feet, time to leave your dreams.” And I get up, I always keep my underwear on under my pyjamas because she doesn’t go out of the room while I’m dressing, you just can’t get her to budge. “Don’t be silly,” she said once when she saw me trying to get dressed hiding behind the wardrobe door, “I’ve seen it all before, why should you be shy or scared?”

How did I ever get mixed up with this old woman? But I’ve got used to it, a guy gets used to anything. I get dressed, clean my teeth, put some nice scent on my face, drink some coffee and grab a slice of bread and then run downstairs to wait for them. I don’t like hanging around too long in the street at night. Once I nearly got picked up by the cops, luckily Adam arrived just in time. I see the lights of the tow truck in the distance and run towards it, jump up as it’s still moving, climb up, open the door and crawl in, smiling at Dafi, who makes room for me. We’re like a trained team, like firemen or a tank crew. Every time I say to myself — tonight she won’t come, but she doesn’t miss a single night, she has such control over her father, she does what she wants.

But exactly what she wants I don’t think she knows herself.

I sit down beside her, always excited, always happy like it was the first evening when I opened the door and saw her and nearly fell back into the street.

Though the seat’s big and we’re both small we can’t help touching each other, I just pray it’ll be a long journey. She’s wrapped up in an overcoat, a woolly hat on her head, she’s all bright and fresh. But Adam sits there at the wheel all gloomy, his heavy beard hanging down in front of him, shining in the light from the dashboard, he’s tired, not saying a word, looking out at the cars passing by. Once he stopped and stared for a long time at a little Morris parked near the sea, stared and stared and in the end left it and drove on.

Dafi asks me about the old woman and what I do in the daytime and I tell her and she laughs, her mouth smells nice because she brushes her teeth before she leaves. And through her clothes I start to feel her body, I am sure to come wearing just a few clothes, trousers, a thin shirt and an open-necked sweater, so I’ll feel her.

Talking and chattering, sometimes about politics, I say something about the Arab problem and she starts to argue. Neither of us knows much about it but even so we argue until Adam says, “That’s enough, be quiet … don’t make so much noise … watch the road and look out for a little blue Morris.”

But there’s no such car, I know, it’s all a dream.

At last we get to the broken-down car. There were a few times when we didn’t find it, because it had towed itself away and left no traces behind. But we always found a substitute on the way, we weren’t short of work.

These nights I learned a lot about cars, I wouldn’t have learned so much in years at the garage. Because in the garage everybody does only one job and here every car is a different problem. How to treat a fuel blockage, change broken fan belts, fix a clutch that’s come loose, how to take out a thermostat that’s choking the engine, how to fix torn water lines. He’s got golden hands and he knows how to teach me. “Come here and see, look, come and take hold of this, tighten this, unscrew that.” And I get so interested in the job I even forget Dafi, who goes and stands at the side, chatting to the driver’s wife or playing with the children, entertaining them.

Sometimes I used to say to him, “Let me, I’ll do that,” and he let me, relying on me. Especially when it came to crawling under the car and fixing the cable, I saw that at his age this was an effort, he wasn’t a young man and I used to do the crawling instead of him, I’d already learned the places to fix the cables. The first few times he used to bend down to check if I’d joined it up properly, but then he started relying on me.

And the chatter of the people around us, the advice, they never stop giving advice, everybody’s an expert. The Jews are real professionals when it comes to talking. Sometimes other cars stop just to give advice. First they ask how many dead and how many wounded and then they start telling us what to do. And the guys who are hurt, standing there covered in blood, they’re worried about the car, how much will it cost, whether the insurance company will cover it. There’s nothing the Jews care about more than their cars.

But Adam says nothing, pretending he doesn’t hear. I get impatient but he just doesn’t seem to care. But when the crunch comes and it’s time to fix the price, he hits hard. His prices are tough. He sends them to Dafi, she’s in charge of the money. She sits there in the cab with the money box in her lap, looking so sweet, taking cash, cheques, the lot. Writing receipts and sticking pretty blue stamps on them, they all ask for receipts. Some of them put them away in their pockets to show them to someone else who’s going to have to pay, but there’re some who throw them away in the road, taking them only out of spite, so we’ll have to pay the tax.

And the money piles up. Sometimes we made five hundred pounds a night.

We made, I didn’t. I went for days at a time without a cent. My wages go straight to Father, I don’t know anything about it. Every night I decide that this time I shall ask him for money, but at the last moment I always lose my nerve.

In the daytime I used to walk the streets, looking in shop windows and wanting to buy all sorts of things, wishing I could go to the movies, but not a cent in my pocket.

One night after I’d been working really hard, before he put me down outside the house, I said, “Can I have a word with you?” and then I started mumbling, embarrassed at having to talk in front of Dafi, saying that my wages went straight to my father, and if I could have something … a loan maybe …

And Dafi began to laugh. “A loan?”

And he told me to come to the garage next day, he’d tell Erlich to transfer the wages to me, but I didn’t want them to take the money away from Father.

“It doesn’t matter … doesn’t matter …” I was getting all mixed up. “It’s just … I thought …”

And he didn’t understand but Dafi opened the money box and took out two hundred pounds.

“What’s the point of a loan? You’ve been working so hard … do you want more?”

“No, that’s quite all right,” I whispered, and pulled the notes out of her hot hand.

I ran off home with the two hundred pounds, which I was sure was going to last me a long time, but after two or three weeks I was broke again, so on the sly I asked Dafi for more and she smiled and gave me more.

ADAM

Every evening I say to myself, that’s enough, time to stop, it’s madness trying to find him in these night excursions. But even so I can’t stop. At midnight the phone rings and appeals for help come flooding in. I’ve already given up answering the phone, Dafi always gets there first and eagerly she writes down the details, with an enthusiasm that I don’t understand, already she knows the names of the duty clerks in the control room and she swaps jokes with them. Dafi — every day I have less control over her, Asya is powerless too. I made a mistake that first night when I let her come out with me. Since then there’s been no opposing her, she’s got to come out with me, if I don’t take her she’ll go out walking in the streets. And Asya’s asleep, you can’t have a proper conversation with her, when I wake her up she answers me, oh yes, she talks, but she doesn’t get out of bed, I just turn my back and she’s fast asleep again.

And so we go out in the night, picking up Na’im and driving off to look for the nightlife Israelis who’ve broken down on the road. Strange work and very profitable, especially as I usually tow the cars to my own garage, picking up a flood of new customers.

Nights at the end of winter, a mixture of heat and rain, scents of blossoms. And Israel in a fitful, dreamless sleep, a moment’s slumber. Looking suddenly enormous, all lit up, little villages turning into cities. And on the roads the endless roar of traffic, army convoys, private cars, trucks, hitch-hikers, soldiers appearing suddenly in the middle of an empty road, some dirty, some immaculate, returning home or to the depot. Adventurers, kibbutz volunteers from abroad, labourers from the occupied territories. Four months have passed now since the end of the war and the land is still uneasy, men wandering about in a vague search for something, for some account that remains to be settled.

And I’m in the middle of all this with the tow truck, the two children chattering happily beside me, driving along, the light flashing above my head, looking for a little old Morris, 1947 model, blue. Looking for a man who disappeared. Absurd.

And the work is hard. It’s many years since I’ve been involved in such basic mechanical work. Repairing split rubber tubing, clearing fuel blockages, fixing loose clutches, replacing fan belts, reviving burned-out generators. Work under difficult conditions, in the dark, in the pouring rain, by flashlight, without proper spare parts, trying to improvise with steel wire, with old screws. Lucky that Na’im’s there to help me, he works hard and he’s learning fast. All the time I’m more and more pleased with him, he brings me the right tools and crawls under the car to attach the cables. Already there are jobs that he can do by himself and I let him. Why not? I begin to feel a new kind of exhaustion, when I have to loosen a rusty screw I breathe heavily. Contact with the forgotten nuts and bolts.

These nightlife Israelis are a people in their own right. Burly taxi drivers, young men who’ve smacked up their parents’ cars, a tired lecturer returning from a lecture at a kibbutz, angry party officials. And women too, alone, in the small hours of the morning, coming home from a protest meeting or an adventure. And you’re always liable to find a bleary-eyed soldier, a tired hitch-hiker, left to doze in the crashed car, his rifle between his knees.

And always a crowd of people gathers around you to give advice. You need nerves of steel to work in silence. They’re all experts. Dafi soon gets into conversation, the girl has a light and provocative tongue. The young men swap jokes with her, attracted to her.

A girl –

Her squeals of laughter in the silence of the night and when at last I’ve succeeded in starting the engine and I’m surrounded by grateful faces, I fix the price without hesitation. Special night rates. They protest at first. But I send them to Dafi, who has written out a price list in big letters, with coloured crayons, shining a flashlight on it and showing it to them with a little smile, carefully counting the money, writing down particulars on the backs of cheques, taking identity card numbers, all with such solemnity, with a strange sort of happiness.

But sometimes there’s nobody to take money from. Last night we were called out to a crashed car lying in a ditch at the side of the freeway not far from Hadera. A lone soldier standing beside it, waiting for us. He was witness to a ghastly accident, two parents and a child, the child killed, the parents in the hospital. The police have been there, they have taken all the details, all we are asked to do is take the car away. I flash the light on, see the smashed windows, the torn upholstery, bloodstains on the seats, a child’s shoe, a little sock. Dafi and I freeze, paralyzed, but Na’im, without me saying a word to him, starts playing out the cables, crawling on the ground under the wreckage of the car, running to the winch, setting it in motion, going back to fix the coupling, back to the winch and gradually dragging the car out of the ditch. I watch him and think, how quickly he’s learning, it’s incredible.

And so without speaking we go back, the smashed car hanging behind us, almost airborne, just one wheel bouncing on the road. We drive slowly, a long journey, the soldier dozing beside me and the children sitting silent on the back seat, watching the car slung on the back, the rain lashing it and pouring in through the broken windows, and I drive wearily, no longer looking out at the passing traffic, forgetting to search for him. I must give him up.

ASYA

A giant black man, very elegant, wearing a bright green suit and a fashionable tie of the same colour, is leading the way. Leading me into a huge gallery full of light, the roof made of glass. He talks and explains to me the pictures hanging far apart in niches on the wall. Pictures of lush landscapes, fields, forests, villages, European landscapes but in a bracing African light. Did he paint these pictures? I ask, my eyes fixed on him, he’s so tall. No, his bright, assured smile, but they are pictures of his homeland and that is why he speaks of them with such love. “How wonderful it is, how beautiful, see, the new settlements that we have built, a renewed land.” And I go closer to look, seeing that these are not pictures but reality, real things, movement clearly visible, men with little carts, a plump and placid farmer ploughing the earth, walking behind a beast with curved horns, a sort of roebuck. Dark people in old clothes, children in turbans at play.

“Come and see this picture,” he calls to me from the end of the hall, and I go to him with a sense of exaltation, I’m at such a height and see so far, like looking down at the universe. It’s a picture of fields stretching away to the blue horizon, empty of people, cut in half by a long straight channel, meandering away to the skyline. And from its centre springs a bubbling mass of white foam, lava from the depths of the globe. And without a word being said I understand — this is the equator itself. I catch my breath, as if I’ve seen a mysterious vision. This long, obstinate and definitive line.

VEDUCHA

The Arab returns at the end of the night, dirty, his boots full of mud. He’s already learned to take them off in the hall and come into the apartment in his socks. He treads softly but I wake up.

“Well, did you find anything?”

“What?”

“What do you mean what? God in heaven, what are you doing out there all night?”

But he hardly understands what I’m saying. At first I used to run to the telephone to talk to Adam and he would say, “What do you think? If I knew anything I’d come to you.”

I stopped questioning the Arab and stopped telephoning.

He’s always in a good mood, this Arab, quite content, whistling a tune, pleased with himself. God, what’s he so happy about? Walking around the house a little, eating a slice of bread, intending to go to bed just as he is. But I soon cured him of that.

“Shame on you, boy, we aren’t in Mecca, wash first.”

He was offended, going pale with anger. I had profaned the Muslim holy of holies.

“What has Mecca to do with it? Mecca is cleaner than all Israel …”

“Have you been there?”

“No, but neither have you.”

What nerve. How does he know I haven’t been to Mecca, at my age I could have been anywhere. But I said nothing, I didn’t want to start a quarrel, shame on an old woman who would quarrel with a child like him, and what would Adam say, the wonderful man who is wearing himself out at night looking for Gabriel. Anyway he learned to go and wash first while I prepared him an early breakfast, and he ate and drank, thank God he didn’t lose his appetite at night, wearing his strange red pyjamas that always remind me of the pyjamas that my late grandfather used to wear in the summer, in the Old City, when he sat on the balcony in the afternoon to look at the Western Wall.

Then he’d go to bed, tossing about for a while and making the bed creak, and then settling down. After two hours I’d go quietly into his room, covering him up well, taking his underclothes and throwing them in the laundry basket, examining his trousers to make sure there were no bombs or hashish in them. I have to keep a close watch on him. So sad. At first I used to find nothing in his pockets, not even a handkerchief, and I put in a handkerchief and a few pounds too so he could buy sweets. Later I began finding money, fifty, a hundred pounds. Adam is giving him money, he deserves it, but he’s such a spendthrift, after a week it’s almost all gone. Once he bought himself a big penknife. Without thinking twice I threw it away, flushed it down the toilet. We know what happens when Arabs go about with knives.

At twelve noon he wakes up, eats again, takes the rubbish out, fixes a dripping tap or clears a blockage in the sink or the toilet and goes out for a walk in the city, goes to the movies. Comes back at six o’clock full of life, his eyes sparkling, sits down to read to me from the papers for a while, reading in a sceptical, scornful sort of tone, but at least he pronounces the tough letters correctly.

He eats supper now without much appetite and goes out again for a short walk, every day he comes home later, needing less and less sleep. And so the time passes. The tow truck comes in the night, returns early in the morning, and there’s no sign of my Gabriel. I weep on the telephone to Adam, “What’s going to happen?”

DAFI

A different tiredness now, real tiredness, no longer the empty and nervous tiredness of sleepless nights. The sweet tiredness of limbs aching from a long journey at night.

We used to arrive home at two or three in the morning and go to bed. Mommy was the first to get up and she’d rouse the two of us and prepare breakfast. It was a novelty having Daddy at home in the mornings, three of us sitting down to breakfast.

At school I moved about slowly, during break sinking down on a stone in the playground, Tali beside me. Since what happened with Arzi they made me change places and now somebody else is sleeping there. They put me at the third desk in the middle row, right in the centre of the class, exposed and helpless. I was asked questions and expected to answer, or at least to sit quietly and look at the teacher with warm puppy eyes, to smile at feeble jokes, to pay attention. The other children in the class began to bore me a bit, because at night I was seeing real life at a time when they were only playing with dreams, all of them. Even Osnat began to annoy me a bit with her constant excitement. Tali was the only one I still got on well with, she doesn’t say much and keeps things to herself, doesn’t get on your nerves. She always falls in with any suggestion.

In history, literature, and Bible, and even in Talmud, it wasn’t too bad. Although I didn’t always follow exactly what was being said and I didn’t manage to do all the homework I still had good ideas, original questions to ask, and now and then I’d put my hand up and say something so interesting that the teacher was impressed and forgot all my other shortcomings. But in maths I didn’t have anything to say though I tried hard to think of something original. Baby Face was ruling the class now with a heavy hand and there were some of the boys who actually liked him because he used to bring along all kinds of mathematical puzzles that really annoyed me, why complicate things that are complicated enough already? We were racing through the syllabus. Before I’d managed to understand one set of exercises we were already moving on to something completely different. They’d all forgotten the teacher who was killed in the war, they betrayed him in no time. And of course I remembered him, or at least I remembered the memorial service that Shwartzy organized for him, and the poem that I recited with such feeling, in a low voice in the silent hall — Behold our bodies laid in line, we do not breathe. I missed him terribly, even though I wasn’t sure why.

Once when I was walking arm in arm with Tali in the corridor (I was so tired I had to lean on her during break) we came to the little sign by the entrance to the Physics Department and stopped to read the writing. The sign had already got tarnished and dirty. I went up to Shwartzy right there in the corridor and told him the sign needed cleaning, it wasn’t to the credit of the school, and he was so surprised, he thought I was making fiin of him but he couldn’t think of anything to say and he really did send the janitor to polish the sign.

Baby Face knew exactly what I was worth in maths but even so he wouldn’t leave me alone, and when he needed some victim to amuse himself with he used to call me up to the blackboard. I’d stand up and say, “I don’t know why you bother, you can give me a bad report right now if you like,” but he forced me to go up to the blackboard and I was so angry I made silly mistakes that had the class in fits of laughter, and I was on the verge of tears but I just smiled a stupid smile.

Once I couldn’t resist asking him what was the point of learning how to do all these sums when there are those little pocket calculators that you can take around with you anywhere, even to the desert, and he got mad, as if I were trying to do him out of a job, and he gave a long and complicated answer, not an answer at all.

And today I wasn’t in a fit state for anything because last night we towed in a car in which a child had been killed and we saw the blood and the little shoe lying on the seat. I thought of skipping the maths lesson to avoid any unnecessary trouble but Shwartzy was on patrol outside and in the first-aid room they were giving injections. So in the end I stayed in the classroom and Baby Face arrived, as arrogant as usual, and attacked me straightaway, as if there weren’t another forty children that he could have picked on. Sometimes I think Tali’s right, maybe he’s a bit in love with me and he just doesn’t know how to handle it. I went up to the blackboard and the trouble started. And suddenly I saw him take a familiar notebook out of his briefcase, the notebook of the teacher who was killed, with all the names and the marks written in it, they must have passed it on to him so he could compare notes. I recognized the dead man’s handwriting, faint handwriting, very slanted. I felt weak, leaned against the blackboard. Terrible feelings of pity swept over me.

And Baby Face said, “I can’t understand how the last teacher gave you a ‘fairly good’ in your report …”

I interrupted him.

“Don’t you dare talk about him like that.”

He blushed bright red, shocked. There was a deathly silence in the classroom. I should’ve stopped there, if I’d stopped there nothing would’ve happened. But I didn’t stop, I rather liked the silence all around me. If I ever get to be a teacher like Mommy, there’ll always be silence like this in my classes.

“Anyway, it’s a pity you weren’t killed instead of him …”

The class held its breath.

Then the silence scared me, I burst into tears and fled from the classroom, ran straight home. And they told me that Baby Face was so stunned he could hardly carry on with the lesson, he started making stupid mistakes himself. In the end he couldn’t stand it any longer, he stopped the lesson before the bell and ran to the headmaster and told him everything, and the headmaster sent for Mommy at once, and then at last Baby Face found out the connection between us, and maybe he regretted being so hasty, but it was too late for regrets, both for him and for me.

NA’IM

It’s great, I’m so lucky. So free. I’m not sorry anymore that I didn’t stay on at school. Things couldn’t be better. I’m doing real work at night, getting to be a professional. Dafi looks at me with respect when I operate the winch. Already we’re real friends.

Coming back in the morning, washing, putting on my pyjamas, and the old woman brings me my breakfast, waits on me like I’m a king, then going into my room and looking at the marvellous view of the bay coming to life, lying down, can’t sleep for happiness and lust, jerking off and then going to sleep, I get up at midday fresh for new adventures.

Money in my pocket and I’m as free as a bird. First of all I go to a movie, a good Western, to wake me up properly. Going to look in the shops, wandering in and out looking at the goods, the prices. Sometimes buying something, a big penknife or an umbrella. Buying nuts and drinking fruit juice to build up my appetite. Coming back for supper, sitting down and making a clean plate so she won’t think the food she cooks isn’t good, because it is good.

I read her a bit out of Ma’ariv, a bit out of Yediot Aharonot, about how everything’s getting worse, and go to bed. But lately I haven’t been able to sleep in the evenings, I need less and less sleep. So what I do is take the rubbish out, leave the bin in the hall and go out to the movies again, looking for a film with less shooting and more music, and love. I’m tall enough to get into films barred to the under-sixteens without any problem, the only ones I don’t manage to see are the ones where you have to be over eighteen, I get turned away by the manager or the cashier. At nine-thirty I’ve had enough wandering around and go home. She’s already worried about me. Taking off my shoes and lying down on the bed in my clothes, waiting for the phone that I never manage to get to first, she always beats me to it.

And so I lie there in the dark, half asleep, looking out of the window and seeing the city quiet down. Even in the bay the lights go dim, there’re fewer cars. The old woman peeps in at me and I close my eyes so she won’t think there’s something the matter. Sometimes I have a dream, like yesterday, for example, when I dreamed I was walking into the university. I’d never been there but I knew it was the university. Big lecture halls and students sitting there in white coats like in a hospital. I asked where the registrar’s office was and they showed me, it was like Erlich’s office only a hundred times bigger, it was huge and there were maybe a hundred Erlichs sitting at little tables busy with bills. And I walk around quietly, examining the walls, noticing that where the bullets hit them there aren’t holes but swellings, like wounds that’ve healed over and swelled up a bit. One of the clerks looks up at me, like he’s asking me who I am and I answer him confidently, even though I haven’t heard the question.

“I’m a Jew as well.” And I go on wandering about, touching the little swellings, like I’ve been sent by the security forces to check the place out. More people come into the hall and I’m beginning to feel nervous, because one of them’s an Arab and he winks at me and says in Arabic, “Wake up, Na’im, the telephone has rung, they’re coming, enough dreaming.”

The old woman —

ADAM

The weariness gets worse. How much longer? I ask myself. Sometimes when we arrive home the dawn is already breaking. The nights are growing shorter. I get hardly an hour or two hours’ sleep before Asya wakes me gently. She sees how hard it is for me to wake up and she asks, “Why don’t you sleep a little longer?” but I’ve always been an early riser and I can’t lie in bed in the morning. Strange that she never says anything about these expeditions by night, as if they’re none of her business, she doesn’t seem bothered by the thought of Dafi joining in the search for her mother’s lover.

At first Dafi used to share with her the details of what had happened at night, and Asya listened with a frozen face. Whose car we’d towed in, what we’d seen, conversations we’d had, but after a while Dafi stopped doing this and now she just sits beside me, her head in her hands. I arrive at the garage late and everything’s in chaos. I too have work to do now. The owners of the cars that we towed in during the night are waiting for me, agents from the insurance companies, sometimes the police as well. I have to fill in forms, give evidence, answer the phone, give instructions for continuing the repair work that was begun during the night. My head droops, my eyes are sore, I get confused, hurrying between the office and the workshops, my hands covered in grease and oil, explaining things to the workers. And business is booming, Erlich looks at me with love, in the repairs department we shall have to take on more workers. Night customers arrive and they refuse to speak to anyone but me, and I see the workers looking at me with awe, as if I did the towing by hand. And I’m tired and dizzy, I’ve split open a volcano and the lava is pouring out. What’s it all for? Sometimes I go to see the old lady and she trembles, thinking I’ve got news for her. But there’s no sign of him. Sometimes I think perhaps he never existed, it’s all a delusion. I see that even she knows very little about him.

“Where’s Na’im?”

“He’s gone to the movies.”

“Is he helping you here?”

“He’s all right … he’s all right …”

And the weariness grows, already I’m getting only a few hours’ sleep a day. At night the phone starts ringing at ten o’clock, there are some people who phone me on their own account, they’ve heard from their friends about the night tow man and they approach me directly.

Must put an end to all this –

This morning I arrive at the garage exhausted. Last night we towed in a car smashed up in an accident. A child was killed in it. I’ve hardly got inside the garage when the foreman comes running up to me, all excited. He’s had a wonderful idea. He shows me the smashed car that’s already hanging on a sling in one of the workshops. He wants to cut it in half and join the half of it that’s still intact with half of another car of the same model that we bought for scrap some time ago on his advice. A crazy and daring idea for producing a whole new car. He talks and talks, leading me around the car and showing me the possible cutting points, explaining how from two halves of two wrecked cars he’ll make a new car, he’ll paint it and polish it and nobody will know the difference. His eyes sparkle, there’s something a bit shady about the project but a lot of imagination and clear profit, he’s already had a quiet word with the insurance company, all he needs is the go-ahead from me. And I stand and listen, I can hardly keep my eyes open. The weather has suddenly turned warm, the workers walk about in T-shirts, I’m the only one still wearing an overcoat, as if I’m in another world.

I run my fingers over the wrecked car, seeing the broken windows, the bloodstains on the seats, a child’s shoe and beside it a toy car of the same model and colour. My head spins, my stomach turns over, I nearly faint. “Do whatever you like,” I say and get into my car and drive home.

It’s ten o’clock. The house is quiet. I pull down the blinds, strip to my underclothes, get into bed and try to sleep. A dim memory of a distant childhood disease stirs in me. Me, who never indulged myself this way. I lie there, my eyes closed, feeling feverish. Outside I hear the singing of children from a distant garden, the beating of carpets, somebody playing a guitar, a woman laughing. An Israeli morning. Desire growing slowly, dim, unclear, unwittingly. Outside the smell of blossoms. Something is happening to me, the exhaustion of the last few weeks is breaking something inside me, dissolving the strain of many years. I throw off the blanket, strip naked, studying my heavy body in the mirror. The front door opens. Dafi. She’s on my trail too, the last few nights have turned her into an insomniac. She goes into the kitchen, opens the door of the fridge, walks about the house, comes into my room. I’m naked under the blanket.

“Daddy? You startled me. What’s happened? Are you ill?”

“No, I’m just very tired.”

She sinks down on the bed. Just like a little girl. Her face is sad, drawn, her eyes red as if she’s been crying. I must put an end to these night trips.

“School finished already?”

“No, I just came home … I had an argument with the maths teacher.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing important. It doesn’t matter.”

“We aren’t going out at night anymore.”

“Why?” Her voice is feeble but she looks surprised.

“Enough. It’s over. No point in searching anymore.”

“Have you given up hope of finding him?”

“Almost.”

“And Mommy?”

“She’ll give up in the end too.”

The seriousness and maturity of her questions –

She’s silent, thoughtful. Something is troubling her very much.

“The car that we towed in last night … that child who was killed … do you know yet what happened exactly? Who it was?”

“I don’t know.”

She’s very tense, staring into space. A new wrinkle at the corner of her mouth. Hiding something. Lately she’s been getting more and more like Asya.

“Go and get some sleep.”

“I can’t. Too tired …”

“Then do some homework … What happened with the maths teacher?”

She smiles sadly, doesn’t answer, goes out of the room. I phone the towing firm and cancel our contract. “As from when?”

“As from tonight.”

I phone the old lady.

“Where is Na’im?”

“He’s gone to the movies.”

“Good. When he comes back tell him he can go back to his village and come to the garage tomorrow as usual. I don’t need him at night any more, I’ve finished with that.”

Silence –

“Mrs. Ermozo?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll tell him …?”

Silence again. Suddenly I feel sorry for her. Her last hope. She starts to mumble.

I understand at once.

“If you’d like him to stay at your house I can leave him with you and there’s no need for him to come to the garage, he can carry on helping you …”

Like handing over a piece of property –

Her voice shakes, as if she’s about to cry.

“Thank you, thank you, let him stay a little longer, until I’m used to being alone again …”

“As long as you like …”

“Thank you, thank you, it won’t be for long. God bless you. You really are a wonderful man.”

ASYA

Late at night. Everyone’s asleep. The house is dark. Rain and high winds outside, the wind beating at the shutters. I’m in the kitchen, cooking busily, preparing fish. Cutting off the heads, scraping off the scales, slicing the white bodies to remove the inner organs, my hands covered with blood and guts. And the fish are unusually revolting, wild fish, big fish, their dead eyes yellow, scales like feathers, hard and sharp, greenish. The pan is on the stove and the water is boiling. I must hurry.

Someone is sitting behind me at the table, I know who it is. I turn around slowly, the knife in my hand, he’s reading a newspaper and eating a thin slice of bread, he’s in army uniform, on his face the bristles of a black beard.

“What happened, Gabriel? Where have you been?”

He doesn’t look up from the paper, turns the pages.

“But the war isn’t over yet. You sent me away …”

“What isn’t over?” I cry desperately. “It’s all over and you gave us no sign. Adam searches for you at night.”

“Where is he searching?”

“Look, listen …”

And we are silent, hearing him, hearing the heavy footsteps of someone moving about the house, opening the doors of cupboards, moving drawers.

Gabriel smiles ironically, something in his face has matured, become riper, more self-assured. He folds the paper and comes towards me, looks into the bubbling pot, turns up the flame.

“What are you cooking here?”

“Fish.”

“Fish?” He’s surprised. “Fish?”

I tremble, hoping perhaps he’ll touch me. Should I embrace him? But he’s already turning to go.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going back.”

“But the war is over …” I’m almost shouting.

“What’s over?” he says angrily. “Look at the calendar.”

And on the wall calendar the date really is still the tenth of October. “But that’s a mistake, we forgot to change it.” I’m laughing now. I go to the calendar and with my bloodstained hands wildly tear off the pages, crushing them savagely in my fist, but he’s already gone.

DAFI

Suddenly I feel restless and I go down to the centre of town to look for a swimsuit for the summer. And sitting next to me in the bus is a man with a familiar face. At first I drive myself crazy trying to identify him, it’s as if he’s come out of one of my dreams, a huge man with long unruly hair, forty perhaps, eagerly leafing through an evening paper. At last I get it — the man who types at night, across the wadi, he and no other.

He gets off at a bus stop and I follow at once. At last I shall find out something about him. The man who types, my night accomplice, in rumpled clothes and faded jeans, walking slowly, looking in the shop windows, the paper tucked in his back pocket. He goes into a bank and I follow, I stand in a corner and fill in some forms, depositing a million and drawing out two million. Waiting while he draws out some money (only two hundred), dropping the paper in the rubbish basket and following in his tracks. He goes into a stationery shop and I follow him, he stands there, eyes sparkling, examining wads of paper. The saleswoman asks, “Yes, young lady?” “This gentleman is before me,” I reply. He looks at me kindly. “The younger generation. What manners! It’s quite all right, you can go first.”

“I’m in no hurry,” I say. “A line is a line.”

“Then what can I do for you, sir?”

A typewriter ribbon, I whisper to myself.

“Typing paper.”

But he’s looking for a special size and a special kind, he sends the assistant climbing up ladders and running down to the basement until she finds what he wants. He goes out. Hurriedly I buy a rubber and run after him. Fuck it. He disappears into a barber’s shop.

To wait or not to wait?

What can I do? Pity to lose him so soon. I find a fence with a good view and sit down on it to wait. Five minutes pass and Tali and Osnat appear, sit down beside me and start gossiping. And then he suddenly emerges from the barber’s, just as tousled as before, maybe they’ve taken off two hairs. I jump at once, breaking off in midsentence, and hurry after him. Now he goes into a tobacconist, I stand beside him, brushing against him. He buys tobacco, pipe cleaners, cigarettes and coffee. He touches me lightly. I tremble. He looks down at me, I smile but he looks away, absent-mindedly, not connecting me with the girl that he saw in the stationery shop. He pays and goes out. I buy one cigar and I’m on his trail again.

Now he’s standing beside the fence where I was sitting, waiting for someone, pacing about idly. Watching the girls walking past, you can see how he turns his head slowly, changing his position to get a better look at their legs. I remember his bowed head, falling on the typewriter at three in the morning, nestling against the machine. He takes a little notebook from his pocket and writes something in it, some idea, I suppose, smiling to himself in satisfaction. I’m afraid he may notice me standing at the side watching him and I decide to walk in front of him. This time he stares at me intently, a penetrating look, passionate almost, the dirty old man. Suddenly he smiles a sweet smile, his face lights up, not at me, at a little old man with a white hat, a well-known Haifa poet whose name I’ve forgotten. They talk for a while and then part. And he’s alone again, looking at his watch all the time, until a pale young woman arrives with a little girl in a stroller. He comes to life at once, kissing the child, arguing with the woman. The three of them cross the road, stand at the bus stop.

And I follow –

Should I give up? At least let’s see where he lives. Where it comes from, the light that shines on me at night. I climb on the bus behind them, but the bus is going down to the lower city, I just hope they’re not going to visit somebody. They get off, start to wander about the streets, looking for a table or a cupboard, going into all the furniture shops. Leaving the child outside in the stroller and going in to look at the furniture. And all the time I’m standing in doorways and at street corners, spying on them secretly, there’s a moment when I almost lose them but I find them again. They don’t notice me, only the child dragged along behind them in the little folding stroller watches me in silence, with a friendly look, she’s just like him.

In the end they don’t buy any furniture, all they’ve done is confuse the salesmen. They go into a grocery and buy a kilo of garden peas, hop on another bus, going home at last I hope. The little girl must sleep sometime.

Three hours now I’ve been on his trail. It’s evening. I no longer have the energy to hide and I sit down not far from them, tired. They’re exhausted too, talking quietly, glancing at me every now and then, shelling the raw peas and eating them, giving some to the child as well, putting the empty hulls back in the bag. The bus drives into a mountain suburb that I don’t recognize, though it can’t be far from our neighbourhood. Every hundred metres it stops and people get off, slowly the bus empties. At the terminus they get out and I follow. The street is empty, few houses. They ignore me completely, leaving the bag in a dustbin and walking fast, polling the stroller behind them, the little girl sits there half asleep, her head nodding from side to side. I look around trying to find our house but I can’t pick out anything that’s familiar. An ordinary street without a view. I follow in their footsteps as if in a trance, bound closer and closer to them, really scared now, it’s all growing dark around me. Streetlamps coming on. What am I doing? How shall I get home from here? Maybe at night he writes in a different house, maybe he leads a double life, maybe this isn’t him but his twin brother. But suddenly the street bends sharply and they disappear into a big new apartment house that stands there alone. And all at once the view opens out, the sea appears, more housing developments, straightaway I pick out our neighbourhood and I can even see our house, so close, across a narrow wadi. There’s the window of my room, all dark.

I stand there looking, full of a silly joy at finding the right place. I start climbing the stairs, just to find out his name and then go. Maybe he’s a famous writer. But there’s somebody moving there in the darkness, a giant shape. It’s him. Waiting for me. His voice is full of bitterness, fear almost.

“What do you want, girl? What have we done to you? Who sent you to follow me? Get out of here … go …”

And before I can say a word he disappears up the stairs, fleeing from me.

NA’IM

A normal day. In the morning I get up at nine because if even at nine I’ve got nothing to do why should I get up at eight? Breakfast on the table but I’ve got no appetite, I eat a slice of bread, drink some coffee, all this in my pyjamas, not shy anymore in front of this old woman, I’ve got so used to her I sometimes forget she’s there, watching me and whining, “Why aren’t you eating, you won’t grow if you just eat bread.” But I laugh. “No child stays a child forever.”

Then she’s interested in what I saw at the movies yesterday and I give her a summary of the plot. She asks questions, mainly she’s interested in the actors, there’re a few names that she remembers — Clark Jable, Humphrey Gumbart, somebody Dietrich, she wants to know if I’ve seen them and how they are and if they’re still as handsome as they used to be. A real character this grandmother. But I’ve got no head for the names of actors, the main thing is the plot, what happens, that’s what’s important. One actor today, another tomorrow, what does it matter?

And she says, “You’re wasting your money, you don’t understand films. They’ll be the ruin of you.” And I laugh –

Already I’m so used to her, I don’t understand how I could ever have been scared of her, like I was that first evening when she looked like a witch. I sprawl on the chair with my pyjamas unbuttoned, when she tries to get at me I just laugh, what’s the point in getting worked up?

Then I get dressed, take a piece of paper and write down the day’s shopping list. So many instructions it’s like an army operation. Every vegetable has to be bought from a different grocery store. Tomatoes here, olives there, this kind of cheese here, another kind there. She explains exactly what I’ve got to buy and how much and especially how much I should pay. I take the baskets and make the rounds and come back, put the shopping down on the table and the cabinet meeting begins. She examines everything, sniffs everything, puts the bad fruit aside, goes over the bill, cursing me, the storekeepers and the government, and then sends me out again to take the bad stuff back. They already know me well in the neighbourhood, the storekeepers know that all this nonsense isn’t my idea but hers and they don’t mind me pestering them a bit.

So the morning goes by without any excitement and lunchtime comes around. I eat lunch, eat everything on the plate. Then I go out and fetch Yediot Aharonot, wait awhile and go out and fetch Ma’ariv, and then it’s quiet because she sits down in an armchair, puts on her reading glasses and buries herself in the papers. I do the washing up in a hurry and go out to the movies. Luckily most of the cinemas in Haifa show movies that suit me fine. But sometimes it happens that the pictures outside give me the wrong idea and I find myself watching something really complicated, and when I come out, my eyes not yet used to the daylight, I go back to the box office and buy a ticket for the same movie, for the evening show, because there’re some things I didn’t understand and I’ve got to get it right. Why did I think he was the good guy, why did he get killed in the end?

I come back and find her dozing in the armchair, newspapers over her face and she’s hardly breathing. I move the papers off her to give her room to breathe. She opens her eyes like she’s being roused from the world to come, like she doesn’t know me. I ask her if she’d like some tea and she nods her head. I make tea for her and for myself and without her asking me I tell her all the nasty things that happened in the movie, to cheer her up. And she listens and starts to cry. She doesn’t understand anything, she thinks she does but she doesn’t really. When she starts crying I take the empty tea cups to the kitchen and go to my room. This blubbering of hers isn’t for me, I’m really too young for things like that. In the end she calms down, goes to the kitchen to make supper, I hear her moving the pans and the dishes around so slowly it’s like her arms and legs have gone to sleep.

I don’t have much appetite for supper, it’s like her tears have fallen in the food and I’m swallowing them. The thought of that gives me the shivers. I take out the rubbish, mend something in the house, a tank or a tap, all the pipes here are mouldy. A mouldy old Arab house. Then I sit down to read the papers to her, the bits in small print that her eyes are too weak for. Who’s died, who’s got married, who’s been born, and then I throw in an article on the Palestinian problem, with my comments, and the big row begins, I get up and leave.

Now it’s nighttime. I’m living alone, all my life I’ve never been so alone. Sometimes I get really homesick for the village and the fields, but I get over it in the end. I miss Dafi a lot. Some days I go up to Carmel and walk around near her house but there’s no sign of her. Maybe Adam’s worried about her, sorry that he let her come out with us at night. I haven’t seen him for three weeks now. It was the old woman who told me that we were stopping the night work for a bit but we’d be taking it up again later and for the moment I ought to stay here, and she gave me three hundred pounds from him for pocket money.

So why should I ask too many questions?

It’s a good life, really good. For the moment –

I’m independent, I don’t have to work and I’m well looked after –

So long as I’ve got money for the movies –

I’ve got movies on the brain now –

I go into the first show, come out with my head in a whirl. Where’s Bialik, where’s Tchernikhovski, what good are they to me when the real world’s so different and the real problems are so difficult?

I return home, thinking about the movie, trying to whistle the theme music. This is the quiet time in our neighbourhood, the in-between time, after the traders have gone and before the hookers arrive. I ring the bell, she opens the door, her face is grey, neither of us says anything. We’ve done enough talking already today. I go straight to my room, count the money I’ve got left. Oh God, what am I doing in this house, in this strange city?

I start undressing and suddenly she comes into the room, creeping in quietly, wearing a different dress and looking all fresh, sits down on the bed. What the hell does she want?

“Well, Na’im, how are things?”

I’m here, dammit, what do you want now?

“What was the film?”

“Don’t worry. The good guys won in the end and got married too.”

She sighs. “You’ve been getting cheeky this last month.”

She picks up my trousers and examines them, gets up and goes into the other room, pokes around in the drawers and comes back with an almost new pair of trousers. “Put these on, let’s see if they fit you. They were my grandson’s when he was your age.”

I put them on. Why should I care? Put my hands in the pockets and pull out mothballs, sniff at them.

“These are for you,” she says. “I was going to keep them for his son, but he isn’t here and he has no son.” I wonder if maybe I should say something nice to her, say maybe he’ll come back and have a son, but I just say, “Thank you very much,” think for a moment and then go to her and quietly kiss her hand, that’s the only place where you can kiss old people and that’s what they do at home in the village.

She smiles, she really likes it, you can tell.

She starts telling me stories about the Jews who used to live in the Old City of Jerusalem and how they were kind to the Arabs, who murdered them in the end. She groans and groans, then at last she shuts up and goes out.

I undress in a hurry, I get into bed but I’m not really tired. What have I done today? Nothing much. I toss around in bed for a while, remembering the movie I saw, a horrible hunchback, a magician with a burned face. Suddenly I start trembling.

I’m alone. What kind of a life is this? Stuck here in this hole. Adam’s forgotten me, Father and Mother and Hamid and all the rest of them have forgotten me. I get out of bed, go to the window to watch the ships in the bay, I already know how to tell destroyers and missile ships apart. The first hookers arrive and take up their positions. A patrol car draws up, the cops get out and talk to them. It’s warm outside. The window’s open.

I stand there watching till my eyes start to close and I fall on the bed. In the morning I get up at nine, because if even at nine I’ve got nothing to do why should I get up at eight?

DAFI

I’ve noticed before, this isn’t the first time, that I’m capable of really scaring people, even grownups, it isn’t only the maths teacher who’s started to be afraid of me, there are others too — this disturbance gives me strength. Sometimes I follow somebody in the street. I just pick somebody out, an adult, an old man, and I follow him everywhere, relentlessly, for half an hour, an hour, until he turns pale and gets angry. It drives Tali and Osnat crazy. I can even scare myself.

Once we were sitting in the cinema at a matinee and it was a boring movie, kids’ stuff. In the row in front of us there was a bald old man with a sort of beret on his head and I wondered what on earth he was doing watching a children’s movie and I whispered to Tali and Osnat, “Do you think I ought to pull his ear?” and before they had time to understand what I was saying or ask why, I’d already grabbed hold of his nasty ear by the soft and hairy lobe and given it a sharp tug. This is what frightens me. I just thought of it and it was done. So quickly, no hesitation between thinking it and doing it. The old man turned around on us at once as if he’d been waiting to have his ear pulled, because he wasn’t concentrating on the movie either, and he started cursing loudly in Rumanian or Hungarian in the silence of the dark cinema. He was sure Osnat had done it, he wanted to kill her. The three of us got up and fled before the manager arrived.

All that evening I was depressed. Osnat was furious with me, she didn’t want to talk and she went home, only Tali, silent as usual, followed me through the streets, she didn’t care about missing the film, didn’t ask me why I did it, what came over me.

Anyway, what could I have said? This restlessness that’s got hold of me lately, I can’t sit still in one place, like Mommy, who’s always rushing about, from teachers’ meetings to seminars at the university, God knows what she’s doing. But I don’t do anything, just wander around from place to place, touring the city by taxi. Yes, lately I’ve started riding around in taxis. I’ve got plenty of money, at night I raid Daddy’s wallet, he’s got so many hundreds of pounds he can’t tell anyway. There isn’t much I can do with the money, if I bought a blouse or a skirt they’d notice straightaway. So I’ve started taking rides in taxis. I bought a street map and because it was impossible to stop a taxi, they just wouldn’t stop for me, the drivers thought I wanted a free lift, I used to go to the taxi rank, get into the first one, give the name of a street and drive off. That way I started taking trips around the place, going to some hill not far away, walking about among the pine trees looking at the view or at the sunset and returning to the city. The whole round trip wouldn’t cost me more than thirty or forty pounds.

At first the drivers were mostly amused, surprised at a girl going around alone like this, but in the end they got used to me. Once someone asked me before I got in, “Have you got any money?” so I showed him the hundred-pound note and said, “Yes, but I’m not going with you if you don’t trust me,” and I went to look for another taxi.

I always sit in the back seat, on the right-hand side, making a note of the driver’s name and the number of the cab in case he tries to start something or make trouble, holding on tight to the strap and going downtown until the meter shows twenty-five pounds. Sometimes I go down to the docks, walking for a while by the gate and watching the ships, buying nuts or Swiss chocolate, eating in a hurry and taking the bus home.

Once Mommy nearly caught me. The taxi stopped at a traffic light just half a metre from Mommy’s Fiat. I curled up at once. She was sitting there at the wheel, staring up at the light as if it were a flag, awfully tense. Her face hard, thinking deeply, for a second she closed her eyes, but as soon as the light changed she jerked forwards ahead of the rest and disappeared in the traffic, in a real hurry to get somewhere.

The days are getting longer, the nights crawl. Things are hard at school. Since that business with Baby Face it’s as if I’m in limbo, all the time they’re considering my fete, they want to throw me out. In the meantime it seems the teachers are ignoring me, even in the subjects that I’ve done some work for they no longer ask me questions, it’s as if they’re not bothering with me anymore.

And I’m beginning not to bother too. Leaving the school at three in the afternoon, getting into a taxi and going down to the lower city, no longer looking for a view but just a crowd to move about in, among the sweaty, noisy people, going into shops to finger clothes or crockery, to touch fruit and vegetables. Always being jostled, swept along in the crowd, wanting to be sick but walking on, and suddenly somebody touches me lightly, says softly, “Dafi …”

It’s Na’im. Him I haven’t forgotten.

NA’IM

All right then, they’ve forgotten me. It’s six weeks now since we stopped doing the towing and he’s forgotten me. Two weeks ago I went to see him at the garage, to clarify my position. I didn’t want to go inside, I didn’t want the Arabs to see me and start asking questions. I waited outside, sitting on a big stone, till he came out. He stopped his car at once.

“Has something happened, Na’im?”

“No … I just wanted to know how much longer I’ll be staying with her … with the old woman …”

He was embarrassed, I could tell, he took my arm and walked with me around the car, explaining that it was important to stay with her, it counted the same as working in the garage. What was wrong with the place? If I was short of money he’d give me some more, and he took out his wallet and gave me two hundred pounds. That’s always the easiest thing for him, giving money, just so long as I don’t ask awkward questions. He gave me a little hug, said, “Don’t worry, I’ll phone you, I’ll be in touch, I haven’t forgotten you,” and he got into his car.

What could I say? “How’s Dafi?” I said quickly before he moved away.

“She’s fine … she’s fine … she hasn’t forgotten you either.”

And he smiled and drove away.

That was a long time ago and since then he hasn’t been in touch with me or given any sign. He’s forgotten.

And the winter’s over and now I spend all my time walking the streets, I’ve tired of the movies. Walking around the city, going up to Central Carmel, among all the Jews. Walking a lot. Once I even went as far as the university but I didn’t go to the registrar’s office, I went into one of the lecture halls and heard a young man talking eagerly about the habits of mice. I spent a while at the bulletin board, looking at the lecture lists. One evening I even went to a poetry recital in the basement of the Community Centre. There wasn’t much of an audience. Three middle-aged men, a few old women and me. We sat in a dark room and listened in silence to two young men in old clothes reading poems without rhymes, all about death and suffering. And after each poem they explained what it meant. The two men fascinated me and after they’d finished I followed them to a café and sat down not far from them, hearing them complain to the organizer about there being only old women in the audience. They were looking around them kind of hungrily.

And I listened. They didn’t realize I was an Arab, nobody does these days, not Jews anyway. Only the Arabs are still not quite sure about me. Has something about me changed? Am I not exactly myself any longer?

Sometimes, not often, I go back to the village, to see Mother and Father, taking them presents. Once it was an umbrella, once two pairs of pyjamas that I bought at a closing sale at the same shop in the lower city where I got my pyjamas. And they’re always pleased with me and the presents and they treat me with respect, inviting uncles and aunts to come and see me. “A great engineer,” Daddy tells them all. I daren’t tell them that for more than a month I haven’t touched an engine, I’m just looking after an old Jewish woman.

And I carry on wandering about, sometimes getting up at six and going out into the streets, sometimes lying in bed till lunchtime. I’ve started sitting around in cafés, ordering beer, smoking a cigarette and listening to the conversations around me. Getting older all the time.

Sometimes I feel I’m old enough to slip unnoticed into some seedy bar late at night, sitting beside a painted woman and smiling at her politely. Until the waiter comes along, a man with an evil face, and turns me out — “Run away, little boy, and bring your sister here or your mother if she’s still any good.”

Filthy bastards –

There are some people I feel drawn to. Arabs from the occupied territories, real Palestinians, dim-witted labourers walking around the city looking lost, not understanding anything and not settling down. And I help them, interpret for them, show them the way. They’re very surprised, they don’t realize I’m an Arab too. Telling me about their problems, about the cost of living, saying something about the great Palestinian problem and crossing the road or boarding a bus. Sometimes a girl or a young woman smiles at me, saying something or other, and I think maybe the time has come to fall in love with somebody else, and I take a good look around …

The old woman’s getting quieter all the time. A smell of death around her. Sitting all day in a chair without moving, becoming more and more dependent on me. I asked her once, “Haven’t you got any friends or relations?” but she didn’t answer. Soon she’ll die and I’ll have to run away, they’ll say I caused her death. I think of phoning Adam, but at the last moment I change my mind.

It’s not so good now, I’m not enjoying it anymore. They’ve forgotten me. So what am I supposed to do? I go and wander about in the crowd. Not looking in the shop windows anymore, just watching the people, getting pushed around by them, studying them. Sometimes I follow a man or a boy or a little girl, walking behind them, just to see what happens to them. Sometimes I follow somebody who’s following somebody else. Like today, when I started following a girl with soft legs and after a few minutes I realize — it’s Dafi, she’s following somebody. I hurry after her and catch up with her by a street crossing. I touch her gently. A wild sort of happiness takes hold of me.

At first she doesn’t notice that I’ve touched her, standing there waiting for the light to change. Then she’s confused, like I’ve wakened her from a dream. She’s grown a bit taller, got very thin, her face is pale, black rings under her eyes.

“Na’im” — she grabs my hand — “what are you doing here?” I don’t want to say I’m just wandering about.

“I’m going to visit somebody.”

“Who?”

“A friend.”

“You’ve got friends here already?”

“Yes.”

The light changes to green but she hesitates to cross, a stream of people pushes us aside. Suddenly we’ve got nothing to talk about, we’re staring at each other, you wouldn’t think we’d travelled together at night and been friends. The light changes to red.

“Are you still living with the old woman?”

“Your father asked me to …”

“You two are in love.”

Mocking, unpleasant, her eyes glaring at me strangely. People crowding together beside us, waiting for the light to change. She seems distant, proud. My heart sinks.

The light changes to green, but she doesn’t cross. People crush us hard against the iron railing at the side. No manners. She scowls at me.

“You’ve changed a lot.”

And she doesn’t say if the change is good or bad. She isn’t friendly, isn’t laughing. Serious.

I light a cigarette, so many things I want to say to her but I don’t know how to begin. We stand there in this strange place, opposite the changing light, pushed around by the crowd crossing from side to side. I don’t want to scare her, to look like I’m trying to put the make on her, though I could invite her to have something to drink, to sit quietly and talk. She’s pressed hard against the railings, sad and pale. I feel dizzy with love. I’m afraid she’ll go away and leave me.

“And are you still in school?” I smile.

“What can I do?” she says angrily, like I’ve insulted her. “I can’t wander around free like you … without any worries … they’ve forgotten you, you’re lucky …”

Talking so bitterly, like she wants to hurt me. What have I done to her? Why am I to blame? I feel helpless.

A taxi stops by the crossing, she grabs my hand.

“Come on, I’ll take you to your friend’s house.”

And without asking, like I’m a baby, she opens the door and pushes me inside. I have to think quickly, make up an address, stammering a bit as I tell the driver where to go, I’ve never ridden in a taxi before. In the end I stop the taxi outside a house, get out, wanting to say something to her, I can see she wants to say something too, she’s sorry she was so hard on me, wants to go on being with me but the taxi’s starting to move, it can’t stop here, and she pulls the door shut, nodding her head to say goodbye. I’m left standing on the pavement. Miserable. I’ve lost her.

DAFI

I clutch at his hand, as if at freedom itself.

“Na’im, what are you doing here?”

That mysterious smile on his face, full of confidence. Not the same Na’im, he’s taller, wearing new clothes, his shoes shiny. A handsome hustler. Pleased with himself, free of worries. No longer that awkward country boy. A different person, unbelievable, standing there by the crossing, hands in his pockets, in a hurry, going to visit a friend, he’s made friends already, settled down well. Suddenly, I don’t know why, I feel so sad.

He doesn’t really do anything. Living with that old woman, he’s got himself a meal ticket. A strange kind of work for a healthy boy. He walks around town all day. No worries. They’re not throwing him out of school. He’s lucky. They’ve forgotten him. I feel sorry for myself. He leans up against the railings, looks me up and down. I must look like a child to him now. Where’s the little wet boy who came to our house that Friday night? And I was sure he was in love with me. Poor Dafi.

“You’ve changed …” I can’t resist saying.

And he doesn’t reply. He knows he’s changed, of course. He holds his head high. He’s got nothing to say to me now. He’s climbed so high. He’s learned a lot these last months, prowling about in dark corners, smoking earnestly. They’re all of them breaking out of their shells and coming to life, to freedom, and I’m left stumbling along at the end of the line.

And what a silly place to stand, impossible to talk here, with the light changing and rude people pushing against us. I want to say to him — take me with you to your friend’s house, but I bite my tongue, I don’t want him to think I’m trying to put the make on him. And already he wants to get away from me, he’s got nothing to say. He asks coolly, in a mocking tone, “And are you still in school?”

That really annoyed me, he found just the place to dig, my weak spot.

“What can I do? I can’t wander about free like you … they’ve forgotten you … you’re lucky …”

He knows he’s lucky. Bows his head, wants to break off contact. And suddenly I begin to wish this silly meeting never happened, why’s he so proud and puffed up? I’d take him with me, if he could forget about his friend for a bit. His freedom fascinates me. A taxi stops at the crossing and straightaway I grab his hand — “Come on, I’ll take you to your friend’s house” — and I push him inside. He’s a bit stunned at first but he recovers himself quickly, sitting there on the edge of the seat, all excited, explaining to the driver where to go. Seems it isn’t a friend but a girl friend, he’s got himself a little Arab chick. We drive down a few streets and then he asks the driver to stop. He looks at me, blushing. He’s hiding something. But there’s something gentle about his eyes. He wants to say something, he’s not proud and mysterious anymore. But the taxi can’t stop there, he gets out, stands on the pavement, staring at me, looking sorry about something, maybe he doesn’t want to leave me, but the taxi moves off. I’ve lost him.

VEDUCHA

They’ve forgotten him. They’ve forgotten me too. I’m alone here with a little Arab and that’s how it will end. Strange. No family, no relations, no husband, and this is the last face I shall see before I die. For this is death, I know. A heaviness such as there has never been before. Standing is difficult, walking is difficult. Hardly eating but swelling all the time. Only the mind is clear and lucid. The body is a rag.

Na’im is a good boy. A real stroke of luck. Cleaning the floor, washing the dishes, taking out the rubbish, going shopping, helping with the cooking. That’s what the Arabs are really good at — housework. And the men are better than the women. They don’t make a lot of noise, they’re clean workers. In the days of the Turks we had a servant in the house, an old sheik, a real sheik, Masiloan. The whole house, all ten of us, he held together. But Hebrew newspapers he didn’t read, no, that he didn’t do.

But this little fellow reads newspapers too, entertains me. I can no longer go to the movies, he tells me about the ones that he sees. Through him I see the films. But it’s not really the same thing because he doesn’t understand. He gets confused, you can tell. What interests him most are the gun fights, who killed whom, who drew a gun on whom, who came up from behind, who jumped down from the tree, who fired back, and all the love interest in the film he forgets. Sometimes I listen as he tells the story and when he comes to the end I take five pounds from my purse and send him out to see the film again, this time at my expense and for my sake, so he’ll get it right, who loved and who betrayed, who kissed and who disappointed, and who married in the end.

He spends long hours walking by himself in the streets. Who does he see, who does he talk to? He tells me, “Just … just people.” What is this just? Just is how a boy turns into a fatah from too much idleness, too much thinking. The most dangerous are the ones who are forgotten.

But I can’t do without him, I’m more and more dependent on him. I who was once well known as a courageous woman, a lone wolf. For ten years I was alone in this house and felt no fear, and now I begin to be afraid.

My body does not move, but my mind, thank God, is still working, working so hard it almost hurts. It’s hard for me to sleep, to dream dreams. I can’t allow myself to lose consciousness again. I lost it once and a war broke out and the government changed.

The situation is bad. I’m not talking now about prices, to hell with money, we’ll eat onions instead of meat, but the newspapers, the pleasure has gone out of newspapers. Darkness in the eyes and where is mercy? There are too many villains, the mistakes are too great, the dead are too young. He sits there in the armchair facing me, the young Arab, the damned dog, reading quietly, and I sense his enjoyment, how can he help taking pleasure in our sufferings? He breaks off, looks up, watching me quietly as if he doesn’t care and perhaps he really doesn’t care. I want to weep for all the troubles, for the isolation of the state, but I control myself, why add to his pleasure? Sometimes I nearly go to the telephone to call Adam — take him away from here, let him go back to his village, I’m better alone. But at the last moment I relent. Not yet. There is time.

For he has some movements that remind me of my Gabriel. Especially when he wanders around the house at night, when he stands at the window, silent and earnest, gazing into the distance. Young and sturdy, shining white teeth. When he sits at the table with knife and fork quietly finishing his food, I think — God, here I am raising a young terrorist who will slaughter me in the end.

Adam has forgotten him and he doesn’t care. They’ve dumped him here and he’s his own boss. He’s forgotten his mother and his father and his village and taken root here. He’s settled down here very well, it’s as if he was born here and I’m his grandmother. They also lose their roots so easily. He isn’t short of money and all day he searches for entertainment. What is he thinking deep inside, sometimes I really wish I could get inside his head. In the middle of the night I go into his room, sit on his bed and look at him hard, even in his sleep he’s a savage.

The beginning of summer already and it’s warm outside. He still goes about in old winter clothes. I found in a wardrobe a few clothes that were Gabriel’s when he was that age. I offered him a pair of trousers and a shirt. I was sure he’d refuse. But he said nothing, took it all. He didn’t mind wearing somebody else’s castoffs. He took off his own clothes, put on the clothes that I gave him and walked up and down in front of the mirror, smiling, pleased with himself. My heart ached at wasting good clothes like these on him, I had other dreams. Suddenly he came to me and kissed my hand. His own idea, I said nothing. I expected nothing, not even thanks. I almost died, it was so sweet. He touched me to the heart. So did we, as children, at the beginning of the century, used to kiss the hands of the old men as a mark of respect. Where did he learn to do this? The young lips on my skin, a pleasing sensation of freshness. The next day I gave him a jacket the colour of Bordeaux wine. Again he kissed my hand. Ah, God, a little comfort in my last days. I almost wanted to say to him, Don’t call me Mrs. Veducha Ermozo, call me Grandma. But that would have been going too far.

DAFI

Today in the class that was supposed to be history suddenly Mommy came into the classroom as a substitute. Our history teacher went off to do his reserve duty two weeks ago and usually we play basketball instead of learning about the history of Jewish settlement.

Everybody looked at me and I went red, I don’t know why. Mommy has never come into my class before. I thought she’d ignore me completely but the woman turned to me straightaway and asked me which page of the book we were on. I said at once that we hadn’t brought any books with us because we knew the teacher was away. But it turned out that a lot of the children had brought their books along anyway. Little suckers. And then somebody told her the page and somebody else lent her a book and she looked at it for a while and went straight into the lesson.

At first she asked questions and the pupils answered. It was amazing how well she coped with the lesson, even though she hadn’t prepared for a lesson with us. She ran it at first like a question and answer session and there was some noise and chattering going on, some of them tried to annoy her even though they knew she was my mother. Anyway we didn’t feel like doing any work, we were a bit rusty in history. But slowly the class quietened down.

I’ve never seen her so friendly, so good-natured. Sure of herself, keeping control easily. Making jokes, not very funny in my opinion but the others in the class were in fits of laughter. She knew the names of some of the girls and she addressed them by name, asking them questions. She got on particularly well with Osnat, who for some reason was full of excitement, as if there was nothing that interested her more than early Zionism. Her hand was in the air all the time and that pleading voice of hers, “Teacher, teacher.” And Mommy let her do nearly all the talking. Even Tali came to life a bit. The whole class was ecstatic, answering questions, making guesses, and Mommy walked about in front of them, smiling at everybody, even when someone was talking bullshit and she knew it, disagreeing politely, without giving offence.

Wearing the old skirt that I’ve known maybe since I was born, her hair grey, a bit ruffled. The shoes with the worn heels that Daddy’s told her so many times to throw out. And I thought to myself — they’re lucky they don’t have to eat the tasteless food she cooks. If anyone in the class knew about her having a lover they’d drop dead on the spot. I don’t mind her being so friendly in the classroom, she probably thinks she’s doing it for my sake, but then why’s she always so stern at home?

Anyway for half the lesson I sat there saying nothing, even though I did have things to say, because I really love history, but I decided not to get too involved with her. But in the second half I got carried away as well and I put my hand up several times but she never turned to me, as if she wanted to punish me for not bringing the book, though I wasn’t the only one.

The lesson was about the period of the Second Aliyah, and Mommy was trying to explain how few and isolated were the Zionists among the Jewish people, and why they thought that the only option they had was immigration to Palestine. And then I put my hand up because I wanted to say something but she wouldn’t let me, she turned to others, even the ones who put their hands up after me. And I started getting really irritated, all the rest were joining in, even Zaki opened his mouth and said something silly, but she looked right through me as if I wasn’t there. What’s going on here? Mommy was talking about other national movements, about the differences and the similarities. Towards the end of the lesson she asked fewer questions and talked more herself. And I looked at the clock, nearly time for the bell, amazing how quickly the time had passed, and I was the only one with my hand up, I was even supporting it with the other hand so it wouldn’t get tired. I was determined not to give up. Hell, what had I done to her?

“Yes, Dafi?” She gave in at last, smiling, looking at her watch. Silence in the classroom. And suddenly the bell rang and there was the usual uproar from the other classrooms, and I waited for the ringing to stop, and they were all getting edgy now, nobody likes carrying on into break time.

And then I started to say something and suddenly I got all tongue-tied, the voice wasn’t mine, it sounded thick and the words came out all mixed up. I’d waited so long to speak I was awfully nervous. And Mommy’s face went white. She was frightened, came closer to me. All eyes in the class were on me. And in the end I managed to speak.

“I don’t understand,” I said, “why you say that they were right, I mean the people of the Second Aliyah, thinking that was the only choice, after so many sufferings how can you say there wasn’t another choice and that was the only choice?”

I could see she didn’t understand.

“Whose sufferings?”

“Our suffering, all of us.”

“In what sense?”

“All this suffering around us … wars … people getting killed … generally … why was that the only choice?”

It seemed nobody understood what I meant. Mommy smiled and dodged the question.

“That is really a philosophical question. We have tried to understand their thinking, but now the bell has rung and we won’t be able to solve that question during break, I’m afraid.”

The others all laughed. I wished I could bury myself. The idiots. What was there to laugh at?

ADAM

Starting to live in real and total isolation. The family falling apart. Coming home for example on the first day of spring and finding the house deserted. Asya isn’t at home, she’s busy, running around and leaving no trace behind her. Her fondness for order has in recent weeks become an obsession. She washes the dishes from lunch, dries them and puts them back in the cupboard. Sometimes to know if she’s eaten lunch I have to look for scraps in the dustbin. Dafi’s traces are clearer, a school bag thrown down in the hall, a maths book on the kitchen table, a blouse and a bra in the study. But she isn’t at home either, lately she’s been out walking the streets. Eating my meal in loneliness, in exile. A combination of lunch and supper. Lately the food has been tasteless, quite insipid. I’ve already told Asya, half in jest and half seriously, that I’m going to employ a cook. I strip off my clothes, at least that’s something you can do in an empty house. I start wandering about naked, going from mirror to mirror, seeing a gloomy man, the hair greying on his chest and arms. Going into the shower and giving myself up, motionless and eyes closed, to the streams of water. Once more I’m coming home from work with my hands as clean as an office worker’s hands.

I come out of the shower without drying myself. Such a blazing hot day. I put on old khaki shorts, walk about barefoot, looking for the morning paper. Going into Dafi’s room and stopping on the threshold in astonishment. The room is dark, the shutters closed, on the bed a girl lying asleep. A friend of Dafi’s, called Tali or Dali or something. And there was I wandering around the house naked, thinking the place was deserted. What’s going on here? What liberty — taking off her sandals and stretching out like that in gym shorts and an open blouse. No longer a young girl. I catch my breath at the sight of those long shapely legs lying on the morning paper. Sleeping so soundly, and I was thinking I’d have to change Dafi’s mattress because she finds it so difficult to sleep at night.

She’s unaware of my presence, I retreat slowly, full of excitement. She’s supposed to be really disturbed. Dafi tells stories about her, stories that I listen to attentively. Those complicated stories that Asya is always eager to hear. Broken homes, families splitting up. At least that’s something we’ve spared Dafi.

I pace restlessly around the hallway, put on a shirt. The sight of those smooth legs laid on the morning paper gives me no peace. Fever rises in me, a choking in my throat. I go back to her, touch her shoulder gently. Her eyes open, blue, reddened by sleep.

“Excuse me” — as if I’m the intruder who must apologize — “may I take the paper?”

But she doesn’t realize she’s lying on the paper, and with a swift movement I lift both her slender legs and pull out the paper, still warm from the touch of her body, show it to her with an awkward smile. She smiles, closes her eyes and goes back to sleep.

I could die. I go out of the room, the paper in my hand, pace about choked with desire, it’s years since I’ve felt anything like this, something turning over inside me, burning inside me, my eyes growing dark. I take off the shirt, crush the paper violently till it turns to a soft dough and collapse on the bed, shaking, wishing I was dead, a sensation of death mixed with desire. I must see her again, catch a glimpse of her. I get up off the bed, put on the shirt, not fastening the buttons, go back into Dafi’s room not knowing what to say. She lies there thinking, her eyes open, I ask her where Dafi is.

“Dafi went out with her mom to buy a skirt and she told me to wait here.”

“When?”

“An hour ago, two hours maybe. What’s the time now?”

“Nearly six. Are you going to wait for her any longer?”

She sits up, her hair straggling over her face, through the open blouse I see her little breasts. She thinks I’m trying to get rid of her.

“Yes, I’ll wait … what else can I do?”

“Are you that tired?”

“No, but I always lie down like this.”

“Would you like something to drink, to eat …?” The inspirations born of desire.

“Yes … a little cold water.”

“Fruit juice?”

“No, just water …”

She speaks slowly and strangely, as if she has difficulty putting words together.

I go out. Passing from the dark room to the dazzling light in the apartment. I’m mad. It’s as if I’m in love with her. Oppressed by sudden desire. A dozen times before she’s walked around the house and I never paid any attention to her. I begin to feel afraid, perhaps I should just leave the house.

I open the fridge and take out a jug of cold water, fill a glass, look for a tray to put the glass on, the glass drops from my hand, the fragments scattering on the kitchen floor. I gather up the pieces with trembling hands. My heart beating fast. Death is upon me. Desire and death. I fill another glass and take it to her.

“Here …” My voice fails me.

She sits up and takes the glass, drinks half of it with her eyes closed, wipes her mouth, gives me the glass. Lies back again, as if she’s sick.

“You’re so kind …”

She fascinates me. I can’t leave her now. Standing over her, trapped by desire, without shame.

“Have you done your homework yet?”

As if I care.

“That’s what I came to see Dafi about …”

“Would you like the light on?”

“What for?”

“What do your parents do?”

“My father isn’t around …”

Without realizing what I’m doing I drink the rest of the water from the glass in my hand, lick the rim of the glass. She watches me in silence, as if my lust shows.

“At first when you woke me I was scared … I thought a big wild animal had come into the room … I never saw such a hairy man as you …”

Her quiet voice and the slow intensity of her speech. This is scandalous. To die at last. I crouch over her, I can’t take it any longer, my eyes going dim, wanting to bite and kiss and weep. Knowing that any moment Asya or Dafi may arrive. She puts out a thin hand to my beard and touches it. My eyes are closed. Just don’t touch. The pain of not touching. Sweat breaks over me, I clench my fists, starting to come sharply, in pain, semen spurting like blood from an opened wound, without touching her, without touching me, to myself and within me without sound or movement, out of control. Death departs. I open my eyes. Her face is troubled. Realizing something has happened to me but not understanding what.

I must get out of here –

I try to smile, going to the window and opening the shutters, letting light into the room, going out in silence, into my room and locking the door, collapsing on the bed, burying my head in the pillow.

Time passes. I hear her get up, start moving about the flat looking for me. She knocks softly on the door, turns the handle, but I don’t move. After a while she leaves the house.

I take off my trousers, the sharp forgotten smell. Like a growing boy. I put on clean underwear, long trousers, go to the window and look out at the reddening sky, at the street, the passing cars. She’s sitting there on the step of the tow truck, small and huddled.

Waiting for Dafi, or for me –

I hesitate, but in the end I get dressed, go downstairs and outside to the truck. She stands up, blushing.

“May I ride with you?”

“Where to?”

“I don’t mind.”

Does she really understand? A little girl, so pretty. I can study her now coolly. She looks up at me in submission, in love. I open the door for her, she climbs in and sits there, staring at me all the time. We begin to drive in silence through the streets of the darkening city, joining a stream of heavy traffic, driving aimlessly through the streets.

“Look, there’s Dafi,” she cries suddenly.

And yes, that’s Dafi standing there on the pavement, looking dejected. I stop. Tali leaps down and embraces her.

DAFI

Of course I can’t let this pass in silence, I must get my own back. I run to the teachers’ room to look for her, picking my way among the teachers drinking tea and knitting, the room full of cigarette smoke. I ftnd her standing in a corner talking to Shwartzy and I go barging straight in, standing between them, interrupting their conversation, clutching at her skirt like a one-year-old.

“Mommy …”

She frowns at me.

“Just a moment, Dafi, wait outside.”

But I pretend not to hear, acting stupid, not leaving her alone.

“Mommy …”

Shwartzy turns his back on me in disgust. Since that business with Baby Face he hasn’t so much as said hello to me in the corridor, he wants to have me expelled.

Mommy draws me aside, pushes me out of the way.

“What’s happened? Why are you bursting in here like this?”

“I just wanted to remind you that at four o’clock today we’re going to meet downtown to buy me a skirt. So you won’t forget again … like you always do …”

She’s only forgotten once, but I haven’t forgotten that.

She goes red with anger, she’d like to thump me, but she must keep her dignity before the other teachers.

“Is that why you came bursting in here?”

“Why not? You’ll be leaving the school soon and we won’t be meeting at home.”

“Why does it have to be today?”

“Because that’s what we arranged … how much longer are you going to put it off? You know I haven’t got a single skirt I can wear … everything’s too small and too old …”

“All right … all right … stop whining.”

“I’m not whining.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“What’s the matter with me?”

“Why are you being so unpleasant?”

“What do you mean unpleasant?”

I know how to annoy her, how to be nasty.

“What was the question you were asking in class? What exactly did you mean?”

“Nothing.”

But she takes hold of me firmly, pushes me into a corner, she isn’t bothered about the other teachers seeing.

“What suffering were you talking about? What did you mean?”

“There’s no suffering. I was wrong. I thought there was a bit of suffering in this country but I was wrong, everyone’s terribly happy I … just made a misatake …”

She’d like to tear me apart. Her lips tighten.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing …”

The bell rings and I run away.

Of course we didn’t buy a skirt in the end. I just wanted my revenge. Anyway shopping has become a nightmare lately. She takes me to her old women’s shop and the old women choose me something ancient, some shade of grey, old-fashioned length and breadth, and put great pressure on me to buy. And at the last moment when they’ve already put in the pins and marked it with chalk and Mommy’s starting to argue over the price I object and call the whole thing off, taking her to another shop, a trendy shop, picking out of a basket some rag with patches on it that costs twice as much and insisting on it. And then she objects, and there’s no way of knowing which annoys her more, the patches or the price, and so we go to a compromise shop and buy a compromise thing that neither of us likes and in the end it just gets left in the wardrobe.

And that’s the way it was this afternoon too. She didn’t know that really I wasn’t interested in a skirt but in her, I wanted to get revenge for the way she treated me in that lesson, because she kept me asking permission to speak for a quarter of an hour and because she didn’t realize that there was another possibility aside from Zionism.

We met downtown and I was a bit late, not really my fault. Tali suddenly appeared at the house to do some homework with me, I had to persuade her to wait in my room till I came back. Mommy asked me solemnly which shop I’d like to go to, to avoid arguments from the start. And I said softly, “I don’t mind going to the shop you use.” And this was just a trap. But she said, “Really?” and I said, “Yes, I’ve seen a few things in their window that aren’t bad.” And there really were some nice things there. Those old women have opened out a bit lately, they’ve realized that everything doesn’t have to be the same dull colour and not everything in life is symmetrical. And we really did find a nice skirt there and they were all excited. Mommy was very pleased, and then I said, “No.” And there was a great fuss and an hour went by, and the old women were already falling off their feet from so much effort. And we left the shop with both of us nearly in tears and went to another shop, a new one, with red lights in the window like a whorehouse, and there I found something very expensive and said, “This one,” though it was very long and made for a woman not a girl. And then she dug her heels in, and when at last she agreed and took out her wallet I decided I didn’t want it after all, and she wanted to go home but then I started to whine, right there in the street, saying I was the only one in the class who could never go to parties. So we went down to Hadar and spent ages looking for a place to park, she’s always afraid of getting a parking ticket. Then we walked along one of the streets in silence, going in and out of maybe a dozen shops. She stood to one side, grey and glowering, while I went and examined the dresses and skirts, not really looking at anything, just fingering the material like a blind woman. It was evening already, we’d wasted hours for nothing. The streetlamps were coming on. Exhausted and silent, we returned to the car and there was a parking ticket on the windscreen and she went raving mad, nearly in tears, she tore up the ticket first, then picked up the pieces and started running after the traffic cop to argue about the twenty-pound fine. And I stood there feeling miserable and suddenly Daddy came past in the tow truck with Tali sitting beside him. Looks like Tali got bored with waiting and as Daddy was driving downtown he brought her with him. Tali jumped down and Daddy parked the truck, he always parks just wherever he feels like it.

“Where’s Mommy?”

“Arguing with a traffic cop about a parking ticket.”

He smiled.

That calmness of his –

Mommy came back, furious.

“I haven’t the energy to cope with your daughter, you take her and buy her a skirt.”

She climbed into her Fiat and disappeared.

The calming influence that he always has over me. And having Tali with me as well. Both of them looked relaxed and beautiful in the darkening street.

“What kind of skirt do you want?”

“Actually it’s not a skirt I need but a blouse, I’ve just realized …”

And the three of us went to a shop that was about to close and there was a great blouse that cost hardly anything. And he took out his wallet, again I saw how swollen it was, and he handed over a hundred-pound note and said, “Perhaps we should buy one for Tali as well.”

And I hugged him, it’s wonderful when he’s so generous, and now the two of us will look like twins. And Tali blushed bright red.

And he bought one for Tali as well and we put them on right there. And then he bought falafel for the three of us. And we climbed into the truck and he switched on the flashing light on the roof so the other cars would treat us with respect. Sitting there like three Afghan chiefs, eating falafel and looking down at the people.

Mommy —

ADAM

The look she gave me when I bought a blouse for her like Dafi’s. A Russian blouse with old-style embroidery. Dafi hugged me affectionately, it’s so easy to make children happy. And Tali looked at me as if I’d confessed to her. And I looked at her as if I’d already made love to her. Did she understand?

And the next day at four-thirty when I left the garage after work I saw that she understood. She was waiting for me. Sitting on a big stone outside the gate, wearing shorts and the new blouse that I bought her, reading a book. Drawing attention, excitement almost, with her beauty, her silence, sitting there so passively. Workers waiting for the bus, from my garage and from other garages, can’t take their eyes off her, joking and whistling at her. And she doesn’t look up, absorbed in her reading, in a sort of serene abandon. I know this abandon of hers. She doesn’t even look to see if I’m coming out of the garage, she knows I’ll stop beside her.

And I do stop. She looks up, the book still open in her hand, gets up from her seat, climbs into the car in silence, not saying a word, sits down, glances at me solemnly and returns to her book.

The blood rushes to my head. The looks and the smiles of the workers, understanding what I still refuse to understand. I start to drive, not towards home but out of town, to the open road. Driving slowly, almost paralyzed with fear and excitement, saying nothing. It’s forbidden. It’s madness. Take her home at once, or put her down here, in the middle of the road. But I carry on driving along the shore road, looking for a quiet beach. In Atlit there’s a little bay where you can drive almost to the shore. I drive to the shore.

And she reading all the time, turning the last pages. I switch off the engine, get out and stand there, my face to the sea. A day of hamsin. The smell of the salt washes over me. My face is drenched with sweat, I bend down and wipe my hands in the sand. She’s still absorbed in her reading, motionless. Not even looking to see where we are. I stand watching the waves, the sun sinking in the west. I must cool off quickly, return to my senses, but I don’t want to. I look at her thin shoulders, her braids. So pretty. “Come here,” I say at last in a voice that even I don’t hear. I open the door. She steps out, the book still in her hand, reading the last page, suddenly moaning. Then she holds out the book to me with a movement that sets my head spinning, bending down to take off her sandals, if only I could come again without touching her.

The book is warm in my hand, I flick through it, a thin, worn volume. A tale of magic or witchcraft, a children’s book. I give the book back to her, but she drops it in the sand with a weary gesture. What can I say to her? How can I explain? How can I start to speak against the murmur of the sea? A girl fifteen years old, her head reaches my chest. What am I doing? To speak would be more ludicrous than to take her in my arms and kiss her. I take her. My trembling hands caress her hair, with a false fatherly movement I kiss her face, embrace her. She’s silent, a lifeless thing. I remove her blouse, stunned by the vision of purity that is revealed, the ungrown bosom of a girl just beginning to blossom. I close my eyes and bury them in this child flesh, move my lips over her hard little breasts, not believing that this is so, destroying myself. And she says nothing, she doesn’t understand, she doesn’t resist. The smallest shadow of resistance and I would leave her alone at once. She’s staring at my beard. I hurl her down on the sand, fierce with lust, whispering, “Tali, Tali,” and I see that she’s listening not to me but to other voices, she says nothing but I hear them too. The laughter of children, the engine of a launch, people talking, a car starting up. There are people nearby.

Hastily I pull her to her feet, put on her blouse and tie it up, and bend down and put her feet in her sandals, fastening them for her as if she’s a little girl. And all the while not daring to look her in the face. Bundling her into the car and driving inland, looking for a quiet place. But there is no quiet place. This crowded land. Roads, houses, bare fields or fenced orchards. Army units, tents, people in motion. Give up. From time to time I lead her from the car, beating a path among thorns, and she follows me obediently. Once again there is someone in my power. Once it was Gabriel, once an Arab boy, now it’s a girl. People put themselves so willingly into your hands.

Wait until dark –

I stop at a little roadhouse at a moshav. Order cake and fruit juice for her and coffee for me.

She sits facing me, eating slowly, sucking the juice from the glass. I swallow her with my stare, my desire stretches to the sky. Twilight. Like an animal I watch my prey, her white hands, her face. This silence is unbearable, must say something. But what?

“Have you done your homework?”

“Not yet.”

Silence. Again I ask her about her father. Again the same story. He disappeared years ago, they know nothing about him. I ask her about Dafi, what do they think about Dafi in the class. And she starts talking about Dafi with love, almost with admiration. A tough girl, awfully tough, the toughest. Tells everyone the truth, to his face, even the teachers. She isn’t afraid of anyone.

She talks slowly, something not quite developed, almost retarded, in her manner of speech. That vague disturbance, origins unknown. My redemption will come from her?

Twilight. We sit at a broken iron table in a diner, no, in a filthy general store in some remote moshav.

“Won’t they be worried about you?”

“No.”

“Perhaps you should call your mother, tell her you’ll be back late.”

“No, she doesn’t care anyway.”

“Even so, you should phone her.”

She doesn’t move. She looks lost.

I go to the phone and ring home. Dafi answers. Asya isn’t at home. I tell Dafi I’ll be home late, I’ve driven to Tel Aviv.

“Still looking for him?”

“No, this is something else.”

“When will you be back?”

“I’ll be back. What does it matter when? What are you doing now?”

“Nothing. I’ve been waiting for Tali but she hasn’t come.”

“She’ll be there soon …”

“Don’t be late, Daddy.”

A childish plea, it doesn’t become her.

It’s already dark. The air growing cold. I pay the bill and we’re on the road again. I don’t know where to drive to, just wandering about in the darkness. Still meaning to turn and drive home, but I’m trapped in something stronger than myself. Something in the surroundings looks familiar. I drive on a few more kilometres down a narrow road. From a distance I recognize the old people’s home, the old hospital where the old lady was kept. I drive around the building, park some distance away. I leave the girl in the car and go into the hospital. I ask for the matron. They tell me she may still be about and I find her locking the door of her office. She recognizes me at once, her face lights up, she almost leaps at me.

“Did you hear about the miracle?”

“Of course.”

She’s so sorry I refused to leave my name, or an address. She wanted to give me the news herself. Just a few days after I was there.

“I know.”

“And how is she? I haven’t had time to contact her.”

“She’s fine.”

She starts telling me what she’s done with the money I gave her. After a lot of thought she decided to buy some pictures by a young, very promising Israeli artist. She takes me around the wards to show me the pictures hanging there, hoping I approve of them, even though I told her to do exactly as she liked with the money.

“Of course.”

I walk beside her, tired, worn-out, distracted, looking at the grey, surrealistic pictures, listening to her explanations with half an ear.

At last she falls silent. I explain my request. A room for the night, or for a short rest. I’m doing some work not far from here.

The request seems a little strange to her but how can she refuse me? She’ll give instructions to the Arab watchman. No problem. They’ll give me supper too.

“No need.” I walk with her to her car. She shakes my hand. Only one request, that I reveal my identity.

“Never …” I smile. “I intend to make you another donation in the future.”

She laughs, moved, shakes my hand again.

I go back to the car and find that Tali has disappeared. I start searching for her. After a few minutes I see her emerge from behind a stone wall, walking slowly back.

We wait in the car until the hospital grows a little quieter, until the evening meal is over. The lights go out. My head is bent over the wheel, sweaty, sticky. Outside a cool breeze. She still sits quiet beside me, not moving. Nothing gets through to her. An hour passes. We leave the car. The Arab watchman opens the main door, doesn’t even look at Tali. He leads us down long corridors past dimly lit wards, the old people dozing after their supper, some of them moving about in their striped dressing gowns, like twisted slow-moving monsters.

The girl shudders.

At last something has got through to her. He shows us into a room, not large, an operating room or intensive-care unit. In the centre a big iron bed fitted with little pulleys, beside it a big cylinder of oxygen, some surgical instruments. A sink on one wall. He doesn’t even ask if I want another bed. I thrust ten pounds into his hand but he refuses to accept it.

She stands in the corner like a trapped animal, terrified, not moving. But I can’t stop myself, not now, one thought only in my heart. I go to her, draw her to me, suddenly she tries to resist. I lift her, she’s very light, sand falls from her hair. I kiss her face, her neck, gently at first, softly, fearing the violence overtaking me. I lay her on the bed. A voice tells me to stop but I can’t. I’ve gone too far. I take off her sandals, the soles of her feet are dirty. I go to the sink, dip a towel in water and wash her feet, her thighs, wipe her face. Then I strip her, and lie on the little naked body. She doesn’t understand, she starts to cry, I kiss her until she stops. I make love to her. She begins to understand, folding her arms around my neck, closing her eyes, starting to kiss me slowly. Lying still at her side. Beginning to hear the sounds of the world around me. The voices of the old people in the nearby wards. Somebody is praying, reciting psalms. An old woman laughs. Someone groans, starts weeping. She’s already asleep.

After a while I rouse her and while she still dozes I dress her, wrap her in a blanket and carry her in my arms like an invalid. The watchman opens the gate for me, I put her on the back seat. Just before midnight I arrive at her house.

Will it be possible to deny all this? I want to tell her to say nothing, but I can’t. What I’ve lost I’ve lost. I watch as she disappears through the door of her house.

A small car passes me slowly. I turn to look at it, my habit these last few months. Perhaps it’s him. And I too have become a lover, a lover in search of a lover.