Cafe Nevo

by Barbara Rogan

“Oh my God.”

  Khalil chortled. “Wait till you read it.”

  “Rami Dotan won’t publish anything critical of Caspi. Why should he? Caspi’s still his meal ticket.”

  “He has no choice. It’s covered in the contract. If he cuts my piece, I can have the edition taken off the market.”

  “Then he’ll drop the anthology.”

  Khalil’s face was gleeful. “If he doesn’t publish on time, I have the right to take the whole package to a West Bank publisher.”

  “I can’t believe Rami would sign a contract like that!”

  “Caspi made him!” Khalil crowed. “Caspi, the great liberal, patron of the primitive arts, twisted his arm. I can’t wait to see his face when he reads my piece; can you, Mrs. Caspi?”

  “Why do you keep calling me ‘Mrs. Caspi’? You know my name.”

  “Ah, but I prefer Mrs. Caspi,” he said. “It’s so much more erotic.”

  Caspi stood stiffly in the doorway of his study, arms by his side. His bulk filled the narrow space. “Where were you?” he said.

  “The same place you always go. Out.”

  “Don’t spar with me. Where were you?”

  Vered raised her head defiantly, glancing over his shoulder as she did. The blank white pages of his notebook glimmered in the lamplight. Crumpled balls of paper littered the floor. An impulse of pity raced through her and was gone before she noticed. “It’s none of your business. Good night.” She turned toward her room.

  Caspi’s arm shot out. He gripped her shoulder and spun her around. Softly, he said, “Come in. I want to talk to you.”

  He sat at his desk; she, legs curled beneath her, roosted in the armchair. Caspi stared into the space between them, working his jaw. In the harsh glare of the lamp he appeared, for the first time, his full age and more. He also looked sober, though she’d smelled whiskey on his breath. Vered devoured a cigarette, saying nothing.

  “Were you with that Arab?” His loud voice startled both of them.

  “What Arab?”

  “Is there more than one Arab in your life?”

  “No,” she said, “only one.”

  Caspi sucked in his cheeks and chewed on them. After a while, during which all that could be heard was a ticking clock and Vered’s mammoth inhalations, he said, “Were you with him?”

  “I don’t have to account to you.”

  “Yes, you do. I always tell you.”

  “Yes, that’s the best part for you, isn’t it? You really have no right to jealousy, Caspi.”

  “My wife is shtupping an Arab, and I have no right to jealousy?”

  “Why do you keep calling him ‘that Arab’?” she asked uneasily. “He has a name.”

  “His name’s not important. His race is.”

  “I can’t believe I’m hearing that from you.”

  “Face it, baby, if he weren’t an Arab, you wouldn’t be screwing him. You knew you could never beat me in numbers, so when you saw a chance to even the score qualitatively, you jumped at it.”

  Vered shuddered. “God, that’s disgusting. Caspi, what’s come over you?”

  “You,” he said, “you’ve come over me. God,” he sobbed, hiding his face, “why don’t you just get out of my life?”

  “Gladly,” she said, on her feet, heading for the door.

  Caspi jumped up and cut her off at the door. “Sit down!” he roared. She backed into her chair, and Caspi loomed over her, gripping the arms of the chair until his knuckles showed white. He’s going to hit me, thought Vered, although he never had. In their quarrels it was always she who flailed out, with all the effect of a sea gull dive-bombing a schooner. His size and strength were so much greater than hers that they had imparted a kind of security: he would not dare.

  Caspi looked at her eyes and then down at his hands. He moved away, put the desk between them. “You worked it out,” he said, more in sorrow than in anger. “One Arab dick outweighs a thousand Jewish cunts.”

  “So the great liberal Caspi is a closet racist,” Vered taunted wildly. She wished he had hit her; at least it would have ended things; she would have had no choice.

  Caspi said, “If liberalism means agreeing to share the land, I’m a liberal. But if it means sharing our women, then fuck, yes, I’m a racist, and proud of it.”

  “This is horrible. I don’t have to listen to this.” But she sat on, fascinated, her back pressed against the chair.

  “You’re playing with fire,” Caspi said gently. “I’m not the man to sit back and let some primitive wog cuckold me. He’s probably laughing up his sleeve all the time he puts it to you. Do you make it in his car?”

  “What?”

  “Do you? Do you make it in his car? I need to know.”

  Vered made a disgusted face. “Now you’re getting a taste of what I’ve felt all these years.”

  “It’s not the same thing!” he declared, moving his chair closer to hers. “How do you expect me to swear off women when my wife has sworn off sex? And why should I? Why should I give up my greatest, nay, my only source of pleasure?”

  “I thought that was writing,” she said, and he gave her a wounded look.

  “I adore women. Women in motion, women doing household things: pulling on stockings, lifting a child, glancing into mirrors, reaching for things. Women nursing babies!

  “And by God,” said Caspi, “I have a talent for them, a gift of discernment, like less fortunate men have for wine or food. No mere connoisseur, I am a pioneer of women, seeking out beauty in places where other men fear to tread. Why, I married you, didn’t I?”

  She laughed helplessly. “You bastard.”

  “And the work I put in,” he wailed, encouraged, “doesn’t that count for something? What devotion, what sacrifice! Do you think you are the only one who suffers for my art? What arrant nonsense, what nauseating banalities, what sentimental sludge I have endured from the mouths of beautiful women! What excruciating boredom, hour after hour of twiddle twaddle for the sake of a relief which is always paltry compared to my expectations! You should pity me, Vered; indeed you should. I am a disappointed man.”

  “Poor Caspi,” she sneered, but he hardly heard her; he was rapt in contemplation of his tormented soul.

  “I don’t know why it is,” he mused. “I don’t know where it comes from. Maybe it’s hereditary; I wouldn’t know. Or perhaps it comes from never having had a mother and so having missed those things that other men had in full measure when they were young.”

  “Give it a rest, Caspi. Remember, I’ve seen your orphan act before.” As many times as she’d thought these words she’d never said them. Caspi looked genuinely hurt.

  “Never mind, then,” he said. “The point is, do you really think you are woman enough to compensate for all the other women in the world? Ha! If you were, you could never have stayed out of my bed so long.

  “Besides,” he said, winding down, reaching for a cigarette, “I need them for my work.”

  “Your work, yes. You’re really touching all the bases tonight, Caspi.”

  “Cynicism does not become you, Vered. Yes, I need them for my work. How do you expect me to create women if I don’t know women? Those girls, they are just my research, required reading if you will. You were the only one I wrote about. I never betrayed you.” His voice trembled with wounded sincerity.

  Vered, torn between laughter and tears, remembered nights and nights of lying sleepless and alone, listening for the car door, his foot on the steps, his key in the latch. Remembered him coming in at dawn, whistling and singing off key; dancing into the bedroom, smiling in pleased surprise, and saying, “Vered! Up so early?” Remembered him once coming into the bathroom while she was bathing, perching on the toilet seat, and confiding, as if to his best friend, “I think I’m in love.” She had thrown a bar of soap, followed by everything else she could lay her hands on. Caspi had been hurt and offended that she would not rejoice in his good fortune.

  She felt the old bitterness slip through her v
eins like poison. That much of her anger was self-directed took nothing away from the portion directed at Caspi; toward him her wrath was like a mother’s love, bottomless.

  “You never betrayed me?” she said.

  Caspi raised his hand, palm outward. “I swear to God. Those girls had nothing to do with us.”

  “Then try,” she said, “to think of Khalil as having nothing to do with us.”

  Caspi fell back in his chair, clasping both hands to his heart like a mortally wounded man. To Vered, who knew him well, the theatricality of the gesture was no indication of falseness. In Caspi much that seemed sham was actually a twisted mode of self-revelation—as if Caspi could not deal with emotions on a human scale but had to project them onto a large screen in order to respond. Looking at his shaggy misery, she felt a thrill of pity, which she sternly repressed. She was only doing what had to be done. Caspi staggered to his feet.

  “Don’t taunt me,” he said. “Don’t play with me. I’m giving you fair warning. I’ve thought it all out and I’ve nothing to lose. Know, Vered, that I will never divorce you. What I will do, if you continue to see this wog, is to destroy him.”

  She laughed. Her eyes were watchful. She said, “You’re not stupid enough to kill your wife’s purported lover.”

  “He’s an Arab. No one would look twice.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I will do it in a way that makes it look like the work of one of the Jewish terror gangs. A random killing.”

  “Then why tell me?”

  “My dear,” he said, with civil astonishment, “I don’t want to do it. I’m hoping to avoid the necessity.”

  “You’re being ridiculous. You know very well that if you harmed him, I’d go straight to the police.”

  “You couldn’t prove it.” Caspi beamed, inviting her to share his delight in his own ingenuity. “I don’t mind if people guess, so long as no one can prove it. I’d have an alibi, of course.”

  “Dory?” she said grimly.

  He shrugged. “It would work, Vered. I hope for both our sakes that you believe me.”

  She stared at him and he returned her gaze. He saw the very moment that disbelief changed to belief. Vered licked her lips and said, “You haven’t thought it all out.”

  “No? What have I overlooked?”

  “Picture yourself with a gun, Caspi, aiming it at Khalil. Will you shoot him in the back?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Then you’ll have to face him. He’s unarmed. He’s done nothing to you that you haven’t done to dozens of other men. He’s defenseless, at your mercy. Can you murder him in cold blood?”

  Caspi made a gun of his fist and pointed it at Vered. He cocked his thumb. “Bang,” he said, and pulled the trigger.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Just outside Afula, the bus’s air conditioning broke down, and at once the atmosphere turned close and malodorous. Ilana struggled unsuccessfully with the window beside her seat. Her seatmate, a wizened Yemenite woman of anywhere between fifty and seventy-five, whose black dress exuded an odor of sweat and cumin, reached over and with a flick of her wrists released the latch and raised the heavy glass.

  “Thanks,” Ilana said.

  The woman clicked her tongue. “In your condition,” she said reprovingly, “you shouldn’t strain yourself.” Ilana’s hand flew down to her flat abdomen, and the old woman cackled. “Forty years a midwife,” she boasted. “No one can fool me. I know before the rabbit does. Visiting someone, dear?” Her eyes glittered with good-natured curiosity.

  “My family.” Ilana stumbled over the word.

  Groaning slightly, the Yemenite bent down to the aisle and extracted a white packet from her voluminous straw bag. Immediately, as she unwrapped the paper, a strong smell of garlic rose into the air.

  “Care for a bite?” Ilana shook her head and swallowed hard, tasting bile. “Got to keep your strength up, dear.”

  “No, thank you.”

  The woman nodded sympathetically. “You’ll get over that part soon.” She bit into the pita and sausage sandwich, then wiped her mouth daintily on her sleeve. Ilana turned to the window.

  They had left the coastal plain behind and were traveling through rough terrain. The hills around them were scantily clad in a thin layer of topsoil, through which the bare white rock extruded like a broken bone through skin. Scrawny pines dotted the landscape, and the road twisted upward ahead, glistening with melted tar. It was the hottest day so far. She could have driven up in half the time, in air-conditioned comfort, but for the folly of appearing in a brand-new snow-white Porsche in the village of her childhood. She had dressed carefully for this visit, choosing a simple cotton blouse and an old denim skirt, cinched at the waist by a leather belt that her uncle, the shoemaker, had made for her on her sixteenth birthday.

  The belt fit as usual, for she had not yet begun to show. How, then, had the Yemenite known? (Sternholz, that sharp-witted old meddler, had guessed her secret, but that was no mystery; she oughtn’t have ordered milk.) The Yemenite’s effortless perception worried her. Was it written somewhere? Did it show on her face, in her eyes? And if her condition was so obvious, was not its precariousness equally perceptible? Perhaps the old woman’s profession rendered her clairvoyance selective, for though the two weeks prescribed by Rafi Steadman had come and gone, then another week and yet another, Ilana had not decided, but merely postponed.

  David called her nearly every night, never pressing the issue but, skillful negotiator that he was, assuming a positive outcome. He asked her how she felt, discussed his work, made plans for a visit which they both knew without saying was predicated on her continued pregnancy.

  Still, she could not make up her mind, or rather could not assert mind over matter, for there was every rational reason in the world to seek an abortion. Having the child would destroy a way of life which Ilana (before) had thought perfect. If she had the child, she would have to raise it herself—giving it up for adoption was unthinkable—and that meant an end to travel and career and the onset of loneliness. She would lose a world to gain this baby, with nothing to replace that which she had lost, for where would she fit in? One can live without friends if one has family and without family if one has friends. But to live and raise a child with neither friends nor family: that was a daunting prospect.

  Who would help her? Who would teach her? None of her women friends, ladies of the demimonde, had children. They would think her mad, or wicked, and even the kindest of them would be torn away, finally, by the different style of their lives and that secret envious gnawing that Ilana herself had experienced in proximity to young mothers. Children, it was tacitly understood, were one of the things one renounced, the greatest part of the price one paid. Having a baby at this late stage would strike them as cheating, perhaps even tempting fate. Had they known of David’s proposal, and on what irrational grounds she had refused it, they would have cast her off in horror as a kind of Jonah.

  To whom, then, could she turn? In desperate hope she set out one sunny morning to visit a nearby park where, driving by, she had often seen groups of young mothers and babies congregating. She managed to approach a couple of women sitting on a bench in the playground, close enough to overhear their conversation. “Poor Ilana’s teething. She cries all night. I don’t know what to do.” “Try ointment on her gums. It worked for Anati.” “Look, there’s Nira. Can you believe her big boy’s still in diapers!” But the moment they noticed Ilana they fell silent and stared, breaking into excited whispers as she hurriedly strode past, pretending she had a destination. Those women would never accept her, save as a curiosity and a subject of gossip. “Guess who I talked to today, in the park with her little love child?”

  Certainly the men in her life would drop her, terrified of being tagged as the father of her child, and without them, her past, present, and future lovers, whom did she have? Her family, who took her money but wanted nothing to do with her? There was only Sternholz, who nagged her, �
��Go home.”

  “ ‘Go home,’ “ she mimicked. “Do you know what you remind me of, Emmanuel? Those toy crystal balls that kids used to play fortune-teller with, remember? Ask a question, shake the ball, and read the answer in the little window. Of course, it’s always one of the same four answers, no matter what you ask.”

  “Nu, so what are my four answers?” he grumbled.

  “Go home, get married, have a baby.” She thought a moment, then concluded: “Sei gesunt.” Go in health.

  Sternholz cackled, slapping the table in his mirth; then, shaking the tears from his runny eyes, he bent his old head down to hers. “They all apply to you,” he whispered.

  And despite her mockery she listened; for when Sternholz spoke only fools shut their ears. Marry she would not; but the rest of his advice had a cohesive logic she could not deny and an attraction she could scarcely resist. Sternholz spoke to her dreams, her fantasies. He spoke to that part of her that overran her waking and sleeping hours with visions of the sentient fetus growing and moving inside her; of herself, big with child, breasts bursting with milk; of that moment when she would behold her child for the first time, press it to her heart, and kiss its soft cheek. The harsh landscape faded from her sight, and Ilana sat in a rocking chair, in a bright nursery, singing to an infant who sucked at her breast. Its slight, resilient body shifted in her arms, and she smelled its sweet, milky breath as the babe broke off nursing to peer upward at her face.

  The familiar beeping tones sounded, introducing the hourly news broadcast At once the bus quieted. Passengers leaned forward in their seats, and the driver turned up the volume.

  “In Lebanon today, the Israeli Defense Force spokesman reported two attacks on Israeli troops. In the area south of Sidon, a platoon on patrol was ambushed from the hills. Two soldiers were wounded, and a third was killed. In the second incident, an IDF jeep ran over a land mine on a routine patrol north of the border. The mine exploded, killing the driver and all three passengers. The names of the casualties have been withheld pending notification of the families. The IDF is searching for the terrorists.”