Asi wavered.
“Go to her, Asi,” I encouraged him. “She'll be very happy to see you.”
“All right.”
“And Dina?”
“She'll stay here. There's no point in taking her with us.”
“When will you be back?”
“By six. We have plenty of time. Your flight doesn't leave until midnight.”
Calderon made his way into the circle. “So, what have you decided?”
“We're going to the hospital. Can you drive us?”
“Certainly.”
“Your wife in Tel Aviv must be going out of her mind.”
He shut his eyes in anguish, the flicker of a smile on his thin lips. “So supposing I've changed families for the holiday?”
The waiter came over with the bill and said something to him in a whisper.
“How about splitting it,” I suggested.
“Absolutely not. It's my pleasure.”
Tsvi smiled. “It's his pleasure.”
I looked him in the eyes. “Are you really trying to sell the apartment?''
He blanched and turned to Calderon.
“You have to blab about everything, don't you, you old tattletale!”
“I beg your pardon ... forgive me ... I was sure your father already knew ...”
“You want to own our minds too, it's not enough that ...”
“Don't ... I ... just a minute ... Tsvi ...”
“That's enough out of you, you traitor!”
Gaddi tugged at my clothes. “We're waiting for you.” Kedmi honked his horn.
Dina and Ya'el were already in the car with the baby, who was still screaming. Dina hadn't said goodbye to Asi. The motor started up. I got in.
“What is it, Rakefet? What?”
The car backed out through the gate. For a second I caught sight of the three of them standing there, Asi holding on to Calderon, who was struggling to go down on his knees before Tsvi.
“He fell down,” said Gaddi.
What time was it?
Suddenly, just like that, Rakefet grew still. All at once.
“That's just how it was then!” exclaimed Gaddi, unable to get over it.
Kedmi stopped the car. “
Now
she quiets down. She just didn't want me to have my dessert. It was damned nice there. Maybe we should go back.”
“For God's sake, Kedmi,” shouted Ya'el, “drive home!”
“You call him Kedmi too?” asked Dina in surprise.
“No one likes to call me by my first name ... one Israel is enough. That old fellow is damned nice too ... why does he torture him like that?”
“Let's not talk about it now, Kedmi.”
But that failed to put a damper on his mood. He whistled merrily, the car's shadow darting from curb to curb as he drove. The streets were deserted. A quiet holiday afternoon. The weather was changing again and looked like rain. Rakefet sat without a peep, staring straight ahead with dry, wide-open eyes.
“What's wrong with her?” asked Ya'el anxiously.
“Not a thing.”
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Almost time for you to fly off into the wild blue yonder, Yehuda. You're a lucky man. The rest of us will be left behind here with Begin ...”
“But didn't you vote for him?'' asked Ya'el, puzzled.
“What does that have to do with it?” He burst out laughing, his hands dancing on the steering wheel.
The apartment was growing dim. Rakefet slept with her head thrown back. Ya'el seemed less worried now. “What did she want?” she asked. “What was the matter with her?” She put her to bed. Gaddi entered the children's room too and lay down on his back, one hand on his chest. All at once the place seemed so untidy. The dirty teacups. Tsvi's open suitcase. Kedmi went to the refrigerator and took out some chocolate to eat. “Have some,” he said. “Sweets to the sweet.”
“Dina and I will be in my bedroom for a while,” I said to Ya'el. “She wants to show me something.”
Ya'el and Kedmi went off to their room. Dina sat on my bed, kicked off her shoes, and tucked her legs, golden in their silk stockings, beneath her. She sat upright, her slender shadow a blur on the wall. My head was still spinning from the wine. She took a thick packet of closely written pages from her bag and looked at me glowingly.
“You're the first,” she said softly.
“How come? Hasn't Asi read it?”
“No.”
“But why not?”
She shrugged. A strange girl. Like a black candle burning with a bluish flame.
“Has something happened between the two of you?”
“What makes you ask?”
“I can feel it. It's like there's a tug-of-war between you. You haven't said a word to each other all day.”
“That's true. We haven't been talking much.”
“Why not?”
“It's just one of those things.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“Not in this case.”
“But how long have you ... not been talking?”
“Since Wednesday.”
“Of last week?”
“Yes.”
“But that's the day he went with me to the hospital!”
“Yes.”
“He must have come back in a bad mood. He had a hard time there. It wasn't his fault.”
“Yes. I know. He told me that he hit himself in front of you.”
“He told you that?”
“Yes. I know all about it. But it isn't that.”
“Then what is it?”
“I can't tell you now.” She was suddenly impatient. “Are you ready to listen?”
“To listen?”
“Yes. To what I want to read.”
“Ah, you want to read it out loud....All right, that's not a bad idea. If that's what you'd prefer, fine. I'll sit here. What's the story called?”
“It has no name yet. But that's not important ... you just have to promise to tell me what you really think...”
She took a pair of glasses from her bag and put them on, accenting her beauty even more. Solemnly she began to read in a slow, barely audible, slightly husky voice, her eyes glued to the text, a soft crease appearing in her pale forehead. Her prose was complex, its sentences long and involved. An eclectic style. Sometimes nouns without verbs. A Jerusalem evening seen through the eyes of a woman, a not so young secretary on her way home from the office, walking down a street, going into a bank, thinking of having a baby. Long descriptive passages that occasionally repeated themselves but had a definite sensuous tone of their own and a steady cadence, three or four beats to the phrase. Outside the window the sky was turning grayer. A cozy silence reigned in the apartment. Dina kept her thin, almost matchlike legs tucked beneath her and didn't take her eyes off her manuscript, from which she read slowly and quietly, enunciating each word clearly, never once looking up, as though afraid to catch my glance.
“Excuse me, Dina. Perhaps we should turn on the light.”
She shook her head and went on reading.
I struggled to concentrate. The thought of the Tel Aviv apartment bothered me. If Asi let him sell it she would be left without a home, and then I'd be sent for again. There wasn't a sound in the house. Suddenly I heard a hoarse gasp through the wall next to me ... was it Kedmi's? I froze. They were making love, I could hear his voice whispering, “What are you doing to me?” No doubt of it ... and the passionate one, so it seemed, was Ya'el ... well, at least they had that much between them. I rose uncomfortably from my chair and went to stand by the window. Dina glanced up at me, annoyed at the interruption, her voice quivering in a light rebuke.
“Are you still listening? Should I go on?”
“Of course.”
And she did. The secretary, a nameless woman of about thirty who had once been briefly married, was planning to kidnap a baby and took a bus to some new section of Jerusalem to look for one. A description of it that sounded very much like the neighborhood in which Dina and Asi lived. She attached herself to a woman with a baby carriage and followed her into a supermarket. The descriptions grew more and more detailed.
On the other side of the wall the noises grew louder. Kedmi was snorting now. How like him to come like an animal. Had we not always felt, though, that Ya'el, for all her docility, had in her a tough, dark kernel of passion? She never even got through high school. The snorting sounds reached a comical crescendo. A lunatic scene. Afraid that Dina would hear, I crossed quietly back across the room and leaned my body against the wall to cushion the sound.
But she was too absorbed in her own bizarre story to hear anything. The flow of words didn't stop. Descriptions of counters, of foods, of shopping lists. There was something undeveloped, held in, still juvenile about the emotions she was expressing but she definitely did have talent. The power to titillate with language, to let a plot slowly unfold. Only what was this fantasy of hers really about? What was she getting at?
Beyond the wall I heard Ya'el's soft sobs and Kedmi's devilish laugh. Dina took off her glasses and glanced up with a troubled look. I felt myself go red. She studied me severely, puzzled to find me standing with my back to the wall.
“Is something wrong?”
“No.”
“You're still with me?”
“Of course I am.”
But my thoughts strayed. Don't pin your hopes on me I said to her I'm not a stand-in for the man you don't believe in and never will. And I can't love the second woman any more than I do the first. A waste of time. And out of guilt you let her have it. Out of fear that you'd make a dreadful mess. Disgrace yourself. The tears formed a lump in my throat.
The woman quickly paid for two liters of milk and went to the checkroom, by the counter of which stood the baby carriage. With one motion she lifted the infant and hurried outside to the bus stop, where she boarded the first bus. A description of the sky. She changed buses, got off again, and climbed the stairs to her apartment. A thorough description of a stairwell, on which stood a bucket and a mop. She laid the kidnapped baby in her bed. More straightforward narrative, the pace quickened. But what a weird plot!
I sat down again in the chair. A small tuft of absorbent cotton lay on the floor and I picked it up absentmindedly and rolled it between my fingers. Strange as it was, Dina's story moved me. She continued to read, her blue eyes deepening a shade, her soft breast rising and falling with her breath, her cheeks rosy with color, her voice growing stronger and more intense. A description of the night passed by the woman in her apartment with the crying, kidnapped child. Suddenly a knock on the door. An unexpected visit from her father, an old pest in a fedora, a slightly bohemian type. With a start I realized that he was partly modeled on me. The woman hid the baby in the bathtub. She turned the radio on full blast and finally managed to get rid of the old man.
My fingers were coated with slime. I stared at them. The absorbent cotton oozed a living, sticky jelly that might have been a squashed butterfly or a worm. I shuddered. One of Gaddi's cocoons must have fallen on the floor and was now crushed between my fingers. I hurried to throw it in the wastebasket and to wipe my hand on a piece of paper.
But Dina hadn't even noticed. She went on with her obstinate narration, continuing the story. Days went by and the woman remained imprisoned in her little apartment, afraid to leave it for anything. Only at night did she venture out to get food. Time passed, no one came to look for the child, and little by little the suspicion dawned on her that it might be slightly retarded. An odd, messy denouement. Possibly symbolic. An ending that didn't really end.
It was getting darker out. The day had turned. The pages rustled in Dina's hands as she collected them, still avoiding my glance. She took off her glasses and stretched herself, a feverish glow in her cheeks.
“You were bored.”
“I most certainly was not!”
“Then talk!”
Confusedly I began to relate my impressions, analyzing the story like a student before a professor, telling her what I thought of it. She listened tensely, hanging silently on every word, her fingers playing with the edge of the blanket. I tried to be honest while also being careful what I said. “I'm overwhelmed.... Awfully moved.... You have great power.... I need to read it again.... The end isn't clear.... Still unresolved....It needs more thought.... A slightly childish fantasy, but complex.... It's true that there are repetitive passages, but there are also unforgettable descriptions, such as the one of the bucket and mop at the bottom of the stairs. ...And at the same time there's something frightening about it. ...That moment when the father arrives and she puts the child in the bathtub....I was scared of her then, of what she might do...”
She looked up, intrigued. “You were scared of her? How odd!”
“Yes. For a moment I thought that she was going to kill the child.”
“Kill it?” She seemed amused. “And you never once felt sorry for her during the entire story?”
“Sorry? No ... something else ... I'll have to think about it ...”
All at once she stood up radiantly, very satisfied, even blissful. She hugged and kissed me, pressing herself against me.
“And I was so afraid of what you would say...”
“You were afraid of me? But why, silly girl?”
“We'll miss you a lot ... Tsvi was right ...”
I stood there distractedly stroking her cropped hair. Yes, parting was going to be harder than I'd thought. You've made a happy man of me today.
“The only one who doesn't care is Asi...”
“Oh, no, he does too. He's just too proud to admit it.”
All of a sudden she let go of me, ran to her bag, pulled out her pad, leafed through it, and wrote something down. So infantile. I looked down at my stained fingers, on which was smeared something shaped like a wing. I went to the bathroom to wash my hands. A few more hours. And I had let Naomi have my share. Soon she would be free, might even remarry. Where does the thought keep coming from? On again off again. I washed my hands thoroughly, looking at myself in the dark mirror: the tired face, the dry, gray hair, the bloodshot eyes. I took my toothbrush and cleaned my teeth. Phantasmagoric. A few more hours. Perhaps I should shave, the flight would be a long one. And there dawn had broken by now. Connie was counting the hours. Not a young woman anymore and soon to have a child. And me with my bridges burned. Disinherited. Homeland why weren't you a homeland. I left the bathroom and passed down the hall, peeking in on Gaddi, who lay open-eyed in bed with a suffering look on his face. I kissed him without a word and returned to my room. Dina was still on the bed in stockinged feet, her glasses back on, rereading her story, pleased as punch with it. An ambitious little thing. One of your do-nothing won't-work don't-want-children scribblers. He'd have his hands full with her. Fantasies. I went to the living room. The house like the still echo of a no longer thrumming bowstring. Outside it really was gray now. Maybe it would rain. I went to the bathroom to pee. My face shook and was gone in the dim toilet. What really do you want? Five million just like that as though it weren't mine. Back in the hallway I bumped into Kedmi in his undershirt, drowsy, sour-smelling, sleep-disheveled, smiling to himself as he stepped into the bathroom.