Cafe Nevo

by Barbara Rogan

  Arik groaned in exasperation. When he looked at his father’s face, his heart softened, and he reached out a hand, palm up.

  “All right, maybe not hopeless, but why should I take it on myself? I’ve given ten years to the army—I’ve paid my dues.”

  “Dues, what dues? What are you talking about, boy?”

  “I’m talking about the fact that I am not prepared to devote my life to the service of my country. I’m talking about freedom of choice!”

  Uri cast himself back in his chair, gaping at his son’s face.

  “The country has changed,” Arik said more softly. “It’s not what you think it is, not anymore. Lebanon—”

  “Lebanon is over. We’ll be out of there soon. We’ll put it behind us.”

  “Never,” Arik said.

  “Listen, son. Every country has its stinking mistakes. Lebanon was ours. So we’re not perfect.”

  “Perfect?” Arik laughed. “Lebanon was just a symptom. Lebanon is just the tip of the iceberg. What about the West Bank and Gaza? What about the Palestinians? It’s like gangrene: you can cut off the limb, but if the rot’s already spread...”

  “That’s a disgusting and unjust analogy,” Uri said with dignity. “But if that’s the way you feel, all the more reason to act.”

  “Where is it written that it’s on my head?”

  “It just is. We’ve had our day. Now it’s up to you.”

  “Sorry. Not interested.”

  Uri shrugged eloquently.

  “I’ve only got one life.”

  “So what are you wasting it for?” sneered Sternholz.

  “There are other places besides Israel.”

  “Name one,” Uri snapped.

  “America.”

  “America!” The father’s eyes met Sternholz’s. “That degenerate cesspool.”

  Arik smiled, shaking his head.

  “You want America?” Uri said. “Go on, try it. Try living abroad. You’ll be back in six months.”

  “Shut up,” hissed Sternholz.

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Because you’ll find out what I already know: you don’t choose your country any more than you choose your parents. You’ll see. You’ll never breathe freely, never be yourself in a foreign land.” He pointed a finger (none too clean, stained with earth, tobacco, and ink) at Arik’s face. “Choosing exile isn’t freedom; it’s self-annihilation. Don’t you know anything? I’m beginning to think your mother was right.”

  “About what?”

  Just recalling her words, and the quarrel that had preceded them, sent the blood rushing to Uri’s head. His eyes bore traces of wounded astonishment, the look of a lion bearded in his den or a toddler when the world stands firm against his wishes. “She said it was my fault. She said that I was so busy playing soldier, statesman, and super-farmer, I let my only child slip away. She blamed me.”

  Sternholz sighed and shook his head, but sat on as if in penance.

  “Maybe you think I don’t understand what you’ve been saying. Maybe you think that I don’t realize my good fortune in having lived my youth when I did, in a time and place where the efforts of a relatively small group of men and women were enough to tilt the scales. But I do. God gave me strength, and the State gave me the opportunity to use it, and for that I am profoundly and humbly grateful.” As he spoke, he examined his hands, turning the palms in, then out. They were large brown hands, with little tufts of white hair at the knuckles, lines of sinews like tree roots just under the skin of the earth. Then he threw out his arms in a gesture that encompassed all of Nevo, Dizengoff, Tel Aviv, and beyond. “Do you think this is what we wanted?” he demanded. “Do you think this is what we meant?”

  “Are you saying you failed?”

  Uri laughed unhappily. “How can I say that? We got what we fought for, a homeland. But look what it’s become: an isolated city-state, plagued by enemies without and within.... All we built was the framework, the scaffolding. And I tell you, Son, that if you give it all you’ve got, if you spend your whole life working, and working well, to shape this country according to your vision, in the end you are going to hand it over to your children and say, ‘This isn’t it at all. This isn’t what we meant. Take it—it needs work.’“

  “Then why do it?”

  “Because it needs to be done.”

  “Is that all you can say?”

  The father ran his fingers through sheaves of white hair, tugging at the ends. “We’re better off now than when we started. What else can a man say for himself? The most you can do is to keep on working, keep on trying, and if you can’t hold on to the hope of Zion, hold on to the vision.”

  They fell silent. Then Uri crossed his thick arms over his chest and muttered truculently, “She said I never talked to you.”

  Arik shifted uneasily. “True enough,” he said.

  “But don’t you remember all the walks we took, through the orchards and the forests? When I came home from Jerusalem or the army and the two of us would go out hiking? Am I the only one who remembers?”

  “I remember,” Sternholz murmured, and they stared at him, for how could he? But it was another father he remembered, and another son.

  “Don’t you?” Uri demanded.

  Without answering, Arik looked past his father toward the bright street. His eyes tracked a girl clad in scanty shorts and a tee shirt, but in his mind he sat with his mother in the little house, full of the aroma of cake warm from the oven, waiting for his father’s return from Jerusalem. Outside, the shouts of the boys playing ball drifted past on a warm breeze. The clock ticked over Uri’s armchair; his mother whittled at a little figurine of wood (she hated knitting but also idleness, and had taken up whittling during her pregnancy with Arik). Uri’s arrival was heralded by loud cries from the boys; then more waiting, the clock ticking, for Uri to arrive. He made slow progress crossing the kibbutz, as he paused to talk with the Secretary, chat with friends, shoot a few balls with the kids. Suddenly he was there, filling the doorway, blocking the light with his huge head atop massive shoulders; framed by the setting sun, he cast a tree-like shadow. Rina was swept forward for his kiss. Then Uri approached Arik and shook his hand.

  “What are you doing indoors on such a beautiful day?” he boomed. “You should be out playing with your friends.” And then, at a prompting look from Rina: “Well, as long as you’re here, you might as well come for a walk before dinner. I have some things to discuss with you.”

  In silence they crossed the breadth of the kibbutz, walking, as men do, in parallel lines that never touched. Arik pretended not to notice the other boys, embarrassed by their envy.

  Just beyond the cowsheds they came to the first and oldest orange grove, planted by Uri Eshel and his comrades during Ein Hashofet’s first year, when the kibbutz was no more than a jerry-built collection of shacks where the dining room now stood. It was in this gentle orchard, under the soft autumnal sky, the dry, earthy air spiked with a tantalizing hint of the coming rains, that Uri and Rina held Arik’s brit. Here, Uri knew every tree from its sapling days; and as they walked he sometimes brushed the back of his hand against a trunk, the way Arik had seen housemothers in the children’s houses move rapidly from bed to bed, pausing here to touch a sleeping brow, there to adjust a blanket.

  Uri Eshel was silent as they crossed the first grove, silent as they entered the next. At first his silence suggested conspiracy, promising matters of import and secrecy to be imparted in certain privacy. Protracted, his speechlessness took on the character of distraction; he did not forget his son but was engrossed in an inner dialogue that excluded him. Arik, with no such interior discourse to occupy him, could only wonder at his father’s thoughts. He did not venture to speak first, for what had he to say worthy of his father’s attention? There was no common ground. The small affairs of Arik’s life—friendships and rivalries, school and work and children’s politics—were his mother’s province; he would have blushed to speak of such childish thing
s with his father, no matter how much he longed for his advice.

  And yet the silence was companionable; despite his disappointment it was something to know that his father felt easy enough with him to drop his social mask and indulge himself in this way. Certainly Arik preferred their quiet walks to the hortatory kind, wherein Uri planted himself in the midst of a grove and lectured, as if Arik and the trees that stood about them in respectful rows were his pupils, and his task were to convey necessary information as clearly and economically as possible. Topics ranged from history to botany to military strategy to politics, and though the material was invariably interesting, Arik’s comprehension was hampered by the feeling that he was liable to be tested on it.

  They returned to the kibbutz in unbroken silence. As they entered the populated center, Uri’s eyes cleared. He turned to Arik and said, with no sense of irony, “Good talking to you, Son,” perfectly unaware of the fact that not a word had passed between them in the hour since they had set out.

  “All those walks,” Uri now mourned, “all those talks. You, my only son. I taught you everything I knew. How could this thing happen?” (“How?” echoed Sternholz.)

  “I’m trying to tell you. The things that were possible in your day are no longer possible. A lot of options have been closed off.”

  “A lot remain,” Uri said promptly, in the voice of experience. “And every time you do something, new ones arise. That’s what politics is all about; it is a field of constantly changing possibilities.” The father’s eyes shone with diehard hope. “I’ve always felt you’d make a good practitioner of the art. I looked forward to seeing what you could do.”

  Arik’s mouth twisted, as if in regret, but he said, “It’s you I’m sorry for. You gave it everything you had, and look what you got back.”

  “A country!” Uri barked. “A homeland! That’s your idea of a small return?”

  “What kind of country?”

  “That’s for you to determine.” Arik did not respond. “Look, I’m not telling you what to do with your life. All I’m saying is, do it where you belong.”

  Arik was reduced to silence, but not concurrence. He shook his head sadly but firmly.

  Uri turned to Sternholz and appealed to him. “Did I leave something out? What more can I say?”

  “You could say you love him anyway, whatever he does,” the old man suggested. (Groaning, Arik put his head in his hands.)

  “Why the hell would I say a thing like that?”

  “Did you ever tell him you love him?” Sternholz asked.

  “In so many words?” Uri looked and sounded shocked.

  “Yes, in so many words. I, love, you. Did you ever say that?”

  (“Please, Sternholz, you’re making me sick.”

  (“Shut up, Arik.) Did you?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “I just wondered,” the waiter said mildly.

  “Good God, old man, you’re worse than Rina.” But slowly, Uri turned to his son and asked, “Would that make a difference? Is that what it takes, to make you stay?”

  Arik writhed in his seat “No! What are you listening to that fool for? Leave me alone, both of you. Just leave me alone.”

  The father passed a hand over his eyes and pushed back his chair. Suddenly, the discreet clamor of Nevo, which had continued unabated during their talk, even rising, with exquisite tact, to cover the noisier altercations, stilled to a gentle buzz. As the three men looked up, Sarita Blume came into Nevo.

  Arik leapt to his feet, intercepting her. “Hello, Sarita,” he said.

  She smiled uncertainly.

  Uri Eshel inspected her face, first with dispassionate appreciation, then with closer attention. He shot a questioning glance at Sternholz, who blinked, then looked back at the girl. Pushing back his empty glass, he rose expectantly.

  Arik reluctantly performed the introduction. “My father, Uri Eshel. Sarita Blume.”

  “It’s a pleasure,” he said, and, despite her reserve, he seemed prepared to stand and chat; but Arik gave him an unmistakable glare, and Sternholz took his arm and drew him away. Arik placed his hands on the girl’s shoulders and gently pushed her into a chair. He sat close beside her.

  As they walked toward the door, Uri bent his head to Sternholz’s. “Yael Blume’s daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Amazing resemblance. And she and Arik... ?” He waggled a hand back and forth.

  Sternholz shrugged and looked heavenward. Uri laughed, his sad face brightening. “That’ll be something to tell Rina, anyway. Maybe I’ll escape with my life.”

  They walked out to the pavement and shook hands. “Thanks anyway, Emmanuel,” Uri said.

  Sternholz sat by his window, watching the dappled sea in the early dawn light. Forty-five years ago he had crossed that sea for the first and last time. His body had been washed ashore, emaciated, torn, and bruised; he had arisen, and yet it was but a partial resurrection, a sullied miracle at best, for the reins of his life had been wrested from him, and he never regained control.

  Thus Sternholz saw with a dead man’s clarity, and understood everything but the motives and consequences of his own behavior. Uri’s mute love for his son, and Arik’s longing for his father, were transparent to him. But was he right to speak to Uri? Had his interference done any good, or had it merely deepened the rift? He could not tell. He was a man who did not know himself, and believed, moreover, that there was nothing there to know.

  For he was the keeper of Nevo, no more, no less. If Nevo was a stage, and all his customers protagonists in their separate dramas, then Sternholz’s roles were manifold but uniformly subsidiary. He was the propman, the janitor, the Greek chorus, and the machinist of the deus ex machina; he was everything to others and nothing to himself.

  Even his insights came from outside. It was not until Sarita showed him her drawing that he admitted to himself having loved Yael Blume, and it was only when she questioned his silence that he realized, far too late, of course, the possibility of speech.

  But Sternholz shied away from even that retroactive taste of freedom, which had no place in his present half-life. The memory of love undeclared and unconsummated was galling to him, as it brought to mind other loves, insufficiently declared, inadequately consummated, and but for the reminding presence of Sarita in Nevo, he would have put it from his mind.

  When he crossed that sea (brightening now, struck by the first oblique rays of the sun), he left his past behind. For many years now he had not thought of Greta, or of Jacob. Now, suddenly and for no known reason, long-buried memories were rising from their grave, disturbing his already restless nights. His hand twitched and Sternholz moaned in pain as a small, confiding fist closed around his fingers. “Papa,” said his son, “let’s go to the park. Bring the ball, Papa.” Sternholz wrenched his hand away and covered his ears. “Come on,” the little voice piped impatiently. “I’ll pick a flower for Mama and one for you. Let’s go to the park.” Tears streamed from beneath tightly closed lids. “Mein kind, mein kleiner kind,” the old man cried.

  He opened his eyes, and there before him was the sea, calm, deep, blue. Small boats crossed slowly to and fro over its surface, as fishermen cast their nets. Rising shakily, Sternholz shuffled into the kitchen. He lit the gas ring with a match and placed a blue enamel kettle on the fire. When the kettle whistled, he measured a spoonful of Nescafé into a chipped ceramic cup, added the boiling water, and stirred. He carried the cup back to the window, blew on it, and sipped. That hot and bitter brew was the demarcation of his day and night. Insomniacs cannot avoid their dreams, which will visit them awake if denied access to their sleep; and yet, like ghosts, they avoid the glare of day. The act of exorcism worked. Even as the hot liquid washed down his gullet, Sternholz felt the room lighten and clear, freeing him to lift his head and look about. Empty. The room was as empty as his life.

  Chapter Twelve

  Caspi sat on the toilet, his jeans around his ankles, straining and groaning mightily. He was c
onstipated. In some way not yet clear to him, this, too, was Vered’s fault.

  After twenty minutes without result, he gave it up and returned to his study. The desk was piled high with books but empty of papers, except for a looseleaf notebook opened to a blank page. Caspi glared at the page for a while, fiddling with a pen. He took a bottle of whiskey from the bottom drawer and poured some into a glass. As he drank, he doodled a series of skulls and crossbones at the top of the page; when that was full, he moved into the left margin. Caspi’s mind was blank, he wasn’t thinking; but as the skulls grew darker and the crossbones more ominous, anger played across his face. When the margins were all full, the blank white interior of the page mocked up at him. He held his pen, poised to write, but the words wouldn’t come. The apartment was too quiet, and the clocks were too loud. “Damn the woman,” he whispered.

  He walked down the hall and into Vered’s study. Her desk chair was a delicate-looking concoction of wicker and cloth, unexpectedly comfortable and strong enough to handle even Caspi’s bulk without a murmur. He yanked open the passport drawer and checked the white envelope, replacing it carefully when he had done. A half-finished draft of her column lay across the typewriter; Caspi read it, penning in a few corrections and stylistic improvements. It would tell her he had been in there, but she would know that anyway; she always did, even when he had done no more than to lie down on her couch for a moment.

  And who had a better right to lie on that divan than he, who had bought it for her on their first anniversary? Scouring the city for the perfect sofa for a left-handed writer who liked to work reclining. Finding at last, hidden in the eaves of a Jaffa antique junk store, an old leather chesterfield, covered with dust; the leather cracked and scratched but restorable, one end curving up to form a padded backrest, the other stretching out long enough—here was his error, witness his naïveté—to sleep on. Too late he learned that couches were anathema in a married home, for, like new weapons systems, they demanded use.

  Poor Caspi: little did he know, then, how spitefulness and petty jealousy can lead a woman astray. For the sake of his bride he had broken off half a dozen actual or pending affairs, confining his wenching to married women with reputations to preserve, a far cry in his eyes from the young girls he preferred, but for her sake he did it; and was she grateful? Did she appreciate the sacrifice?