Time Ages in a Hurry (13 page)

He opened his eyes and in a firm voice asked: when are you leaving? On Wednesday, Dad, he answered, but I’ll come back to see you in a month. Don’t throw your money away, said the old man, I bet the airfare from Rome is really pricey. Dad, he said, getting ready to go, don’t be the cheap old Jewish man, please. I am a cheap old Jewish
man, said the old man, what else could I be if not a cheap old Jewish man? Before you go, open the window, please, if the nurse smells the stink of smoke, she gets angry.

Fortunately he had only a carry-on bag, enough for a weekend, otherwise he’d have lost who knows how much time waiting at the luggage carousel, he knew that. When he emerged from the arrivals lounge into the main airport hall, he was hit by a glaring light much fiercer than the one in Rome, and above all he felt the heat, which was almost shocking to him, as though he’d forgotten that the end of April in Tel Aviv is practically summertime, and he sniffed some familiar scents that piqued his appetite. There must have been a cart nearby of some street vendor frying falafel, he looked around because he had the idea of buying a bagful to bring to his father, he knew well that he’d be told the falafel didn’t stand comparison with the Romanian
covrigi
his mother had cooked all her life, but at the Ben Gurion Airport one couldn’t expect to find
covrigi
, he could find them at a Romanian bistro near the Carmel Market, but who knows how much time he’d lose because of the traffic. He spotted the falafel vendor, bought a small bagful, and got in line for the taxi. A cab turned up, driven by a young Palestinian, a beardless guy with a tentative mustache on his upper lip, who at first sight didn’t even seem to be of age. He spoke to him in Arabic, so as not to force him to speak Hebrew. A driver’s license, d’you have one? he asked. The young guy looked at him, wide eyed. Do you think
I’d like to get myself arrested, sir? he answered, these people arrest everybody, you go to jail for even less. The answer disturbed him: these people arrest everybody, these people who? His country, he thought, “these people” were his country. He gave his destination imprecisely. Around Ben Yehuda, he said, then I’ll tell you exactly where. An elegant place, observed the young guy with a shrewd smile. Very elegant, he answered, it’s a home for old people. The car had just slipped into the traffic when he had an idea. Do you know a good Palestinian bakery? The falafel he had, the
covrigi
he didn’t feel like looking for, why not bring his father a Palestinian specialty? All during his childhood he’d heard his father say that Romanian Jews were the other Palestinians of Israel. I know a great one, the young man answered enthusiastically, my brother works there, they even make a baklava like you can’t find anywhere these days. Baklava isn’t Palestinian, it’s Iraqi, he replied, sorry, it’s Iraqi, no offense intended. No way it’s Iraqi, said the young guy, that’s a good one.

The nurse at the lodge told him his father was probably on the common terrace, at that hour tea was served to the guests. He found him sitting at a small table with three friends. Next to the cup there was a pack of cards, perhaps they’d played a game. He was almost surprised to see the old man get up and head toward him, arms spread wide, cheerful.

They sat at a small table to the side, he put the two little bags on the table, had no time to say a word since his father was already asking if he wanted tea or coffee, he’d never seen his father so courteous. How
are you feeling? he asked. Very well, answered the old man, I’ve never felt so good. He had a shrewd look in his eyes, he was practically winking, almost seeking complicity in something. Are you sleeping well? he asked, and the old man answered, better than a child. The terrace extended around the building on the top floor, but from the table where they were seated the sea wasn’t visible, the city was resplendent under the afternoon sun. They were silent. His father asked him for a cigarette. He himself didn’t smoke, but he’d bought a pack at the airport, like he always did when he came to visit. The old man leaned back in his chair, inhaled a mouthful of smoke with pleasure, and then made a sweeping gesture with his arm, like someone showing a visitor something he owns, pointing to the city spread out at their feet. I’m glad you came back to my country, he said, it was time you did. He made the same sweeping gesture. In all these years Bucharest hasn’t changed a bit, he said smiling, don’t you agree?

It’d gone like this:

The man had boarded at an Italian airport, because everything began in Italy, and whether it was Milan or Rome was secondary, what matters is that it was an Italian airport where you could take a direct flight to Athens, and from there, after a brief stopover, a connecting flight to Crete on Aegean Airlines, because this he was sure of, that the man had traveled on Aegean Airlines, so in Italy he’d taken a flight that let him connect in Athens for Crete at around two in the afternoon, he’d seen it on the Greek company’s schedule, which meant this man had arrived in Crete at around three, three thirty in the afternoon. The airport of departure is not so important, though, in the story of the person who’d lived that story, it’s the morning of any day at the end of April of 2008, a splendid day, almost like summer. Which is not an insignificant detail, because the man taking the flight, meticulous as he was, gave considerable importance to the weather and would watch a satellite channel dedicated to meteorology around the world, and the
weather in Crete, he’d seen, was really splendid: twenty-nine degrees Celsius during the day, clear sky, humidity within normal limits, good seaside weather, ideal for lying on one of those white beaches described in his guide, for bathing in the blue sea and enjoying a well-deserved vacation. Because this was also the reason for the journey of that man who was going to live that story: a vacation. And in fact that’s what he thought, sitting in the waiting lounge for international flights at Rome-Fiumicino, waiting for the boarding call for Athens.

And here he is finally on the plane, comfortably installed in business class – it’s a paid trip, as will be seen later – reassured by the courtesies of the flight attendants. His age is difficult to determine, even for the person who knew the story that the man was living: let’s say he was between fifty and sixty years old, lean, robust, healthy looking, salt-and-pepper hair, fine blond mustache, plastic glasses for farsightedness hung from his neck. His work. On this point too the person who knew his story was somewhat uncertain. He could be a manager of a multinational, one of those anonymous businessmen who spend their lives in an office and whose merit is one day acknowledged by headquarters. But he could also be a marine biologist, one of those researchers who observe seaweed and microorganisms under a microscope, without leaving their laboratory, and so can assert that the Mediterranean will become a tropical sea, as perhaps it was millions of years ago. Yet this hypothesis also struck him as not very satisfying, biologists who study the sea don’t always remain shut up in their laboratory, they wander beaches and rocks, perhaps they dive, they perform their own surveys,
and that passenger dozing in his business-class seat on a flight to Athens didn’t actually look like a marine biologist, maybe on weekends he went to the gym to keep fit, nothing else. But if he really did go to the gym, then why did he go? To what end did he maintain his body, stay so young looking? There really was no reason: it’d been over for quite a while with the woman he’d considered his life companion, he didn’t have another companion or lover, he lived alone, stayed away from serious commitments, apart from some rare adventures that can happen to everybody. Perhaps the most credible hypothesis was that he was a naturalist, a modern follower of Linnaeus, and he was going to a convention in Crete along with other experts on medicinal herbs and plants, abundant in Crete. Because one thing was certain, he was going to a convention of fellow researchers, his was a journey that rewarded a lifetime of work and commitment, the convention was taking place in the city of Retimno, he’d be in a hotel made of bungalows a few kilometers from Retimno, and a car service would shuttle him in the afternoons, but he’d have mornings to himself.

The man woke up, pulled out the guide from his carry-on, and looked for his hotel. What he found was reassurring: two restaurants, a pool, room service, the hotel had closed for the winter and had only reopened in mid-April, and this meant very few tourists would be there, the usual clients, the Northern Europeans thirsty for sunlight as the guide described them, were still in their little boreal houses. The pleasant voice from the loudspeaker asked everyone to buckle their seat belts, they’d begun the descent to Athens and would land in about twenty
minutes. The man closed the folding tray table and put his seat upright, replaced the guide in his carry-on, and from the pocket of the seat in front of him pulled out the newspaper that the flight attendant had distributed, to which he’d paid no attention. It was a newspaper with many full-color supplements, the usual weekend ones, the economics-financial supplement, the sports supplement, the interior-design supplement, and the weekend magazine. He skipped all the supplements and opened the magazine. On the cover, in black-and-white, was the picture of the atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud, with the title:
THE GREAT IMAGES OF OUR TIME
. He began leafing through, somewhat reluctantly. First came an ad by two fashion designers showing a young man naked to the waist, which at first he thought was a great image of our time, but then there was the first true image of our time: the stone façade of a house in Hiroshima where the heat from the atomic bomb had liquefied a man, leaving only the imprint of his shadow. He’d never seen this image and was astonished by it, feeling a kind of remorse: that thing had happened more than sixty years before, how was it possible he’d never seen it? The shadow on the stone was a silhouette, and in this profile he thought he could see his friend Ferruccio, who for no apparent reason, on New Year’s Eve of 1999, shortly before midnight, had thrown himself from the tenth floor of a building onto Via Cavour. Was it possible that the profile of Ferruccio, squashed into the soil on the thirty-first of December in 1999, looked like the profile absorbed by stone in a Japanese city in 1945? The idea was absurd, yet that’s what passed through his mind in all its absurdity. He kept riffling the magazine,
and meanwhile his heart began beating erratically, one-two-pause, three-one-pause, two-three-one, pause-pause-two-three, the so-called extrasystole, nothing pathological, the cardiologist had reassured him after an entire day of testing, only a matter of anxiety. But why now? It couldn’t be those images provoking his emotions, they were faraway things. That naked girl, arms raised, who was running toward the camera in an apocalyptic landscape: he’d seen this image more than once and it hadn’t made such a violent impression, and yet now it produced in him an intense turmoil. He turned the page. There was a man on his knees, palms together, at the edge of a pit, a kid sadistically pointing a gun at his temple. Khmer Rouge, said the caption. To reassure himself he made himself think that these things were also from faraway places and distant times. But the thought wasn’t enough, a strange form of emotion, almost a thought, was telling him the opposite, that the atrocity had happened yesterday, it’d happened just that morning, while he was on this flight, and by sorcery had been imprinted on the page he was looking at. The voice over the loudspeaker stated that the landing would be delayed by fifteen minutes due to air traffic, and meanwhile the passengers should enjoy the view. The plane traced a wide curve, banking to the right, from the little window opposite he could glimpse the blue of the sea while in his own, the white city of Athens was framed, with a green spot in the middle, no doubt a park, and then the Acropolis, he could see the Acropolis perfectly, and the Parthenon, his palms were damp with sweat, he asked himself if it weren’t a sort of panic provoked by the plane going round in circles, and meanwhile he
looked at the photo of a stadium where policemen in riot gear pointed submachine guns at a bunch of barefooted men, under it was written: Santiago de Chile, 1973. And on the opposite page was a photo that seemed a montage, surely retouched, it couldn’t be real, he’d never seen it: on the balcony of a nineteenth-century palazzo was Pope John Paul II next to a general in uniform. The pope was without doubt the pope, and the general was without doubt Pinochet, with that hair full of brilliantine, that chubby face, that little mustache, and the Ray-Ban sunglasses. The caption said: His Holiness the Pope on his official visit to Chile, April 1987. He began quickly leafing through the magazine, as though anxious to get to the end, barely looking at the photographs, but he had to stop at one of them, it showed a kid with his back turned to a police van, his arms raised as though his beloved soccer team had scored a goal, but looking closer you could see he was falling backward, something stronger that he was had struck him. On it was written: Genoa, July 2001, meeting of the eight richest countries in the world. The eight richest countries in the world: the phrase provoked in him a strange sensation, like something that is at once understandable and absurd, because it was understandable and yet absurd. Every photo was on a silvery page as though it were Christmas, with the date in big letters. He’d arrived at 2004, but he hesitated, he wasn’t sure he wanted to see the next picture, was it possible the plane was still going around in circles? He turned the page, it showed a naked body collapsed on the ground, a man apparently, though in the photo they’d blurred the pubic area, a soldier in camouflage extended a leg toward the body as
though he were kicking a garbage can, the dog he held on a leash was trying to bite a leg, the muscles of the animal were as taut as the cord that held it, in the other hand the soldier held a cigarette. The caption read: Abu Ghraib prison, Iraq, 2004. After that, he arrived at the year he found himself in now, the year of our Lord 2008, that is he found himself in sync, that’s what he thought even if he didn’t know with what, but in sync. He couldn’t tell what image he was in sync with, but he didn’t turn the page, and meanwhile the plane was finally landing, the landing strip was running beneath him with the intermittent white bands blurring to a single band. He’d arrived.