Cafe Nevo

by Barbara Rogan

  Despite his habitual bluntness, Dr. Steadman respected his patients’ privacy by spacing appointments so that only one woman at a time would have to wait. But today an emergency had backed up his schedule. Ilana Maimon had been waiting for forty minutes when the outer door opened and Vered Caspi walked in.

  Both women were surprised. Vered, the first to recover, said hello; Ilana smiled in return. After some hesitation, Vered took a seat two places away from Ilana. They smiled at one another again; then Ilana looked down at her magazine, and Vered opened a book.

  No sound came from the doctor’s office, and the nurse was nowhere to be seen. Several minutes passed in uncomfortable silence. The two women had a degree of acquaintance which called for casual conversation, but under the circumstances they were shy. Finally Ilana cast her magazine aside. “I didn’t know you use Rafi Steadman,” she said lightly. “He’s a good man.”

  “As men go,” Vered said morosely, closing her book but leaving her finger in place. “I like him. He delivered my first baby.”

  “And now you’ve come about your second,” Ilana said without thinking. Vered flushed, and Ilana hissed in self-contempt. “I’m sorry,” she said, to pass it off. “I have babies on the brain.”

  “Do you?” Vered said thoughtfully. Their eyes caught and held. Suddenly, with the sixth sense that pregnancy bestows in such matters, each discerned the other’s secret.

  The door to the doctor’s office opened, and the nurse stepped out with a harried air.

  “Dr. Steadman is sorry, but he’s got to go to the hospital,” she said. “Would you ladies like to reschedule?”

  They did, then walked out together and stood on the pavement, reluctant to part.

  Ilana said nervously, “Would you like some coffee?”

  “Yes, I would,” said Vered.

  On Dizengoff Circle they both paused to gaze at a very pregnant woman sunning herself on a bench by the fountain, and again their eyes rose to meet in mutual understanding. Ilana laughed under her breath, and they continued in unspoken agreement along Dizengoff until they came to Café Nevo. Vered glanced inside and, seeing that Caspi was absent, led Ilana to a table in the back, far from the chess players. Sternholz gawked when they came in together; when they sat down, his jaw sagged. He attended them with unusual precipitance.

  “Cappuccino,” said Ilana, adding to Vered: “I’ve always found cappuccino to be the most consoling drink in the world.”

  “Then I’ll have one, too,” Vered said.

  “Cappuccino,” sighed Sternholz, and hobbled off.

  “Silly old man,” Ilana said fondly. “Why doesn’t he get some help in here?”

  “He says the owner won’t let him.”

  “I wonder why he keeps up the pretense. He knows that everyone knows that he’s the owner.”

  Sternholz lingered for several moments after serving the drinks, but as they did not speak, he gave up and stalked away, puffing his cheeks indignantly as if he had been thwarted in the performance of some natural duty or function.

  Then their heads came together, and Ilana murmured bravely, “You, too?”

  “Yes,” Vered said.

  “You’re sure?”

  She nodded. “Are you?”

  “Oh, yes. For almost two months now.”

  “Two months!” Vered said wonderingly. “Then you’re having it.”

  “No... yes... I don’t know.” Ilana laughed a little shrilly. “I still don’t know. It’s crazy. You are, I suppose?”

  “I don’t know either.” Their hands met across the table and for a moment they were almost like lovers, lost in a world of their own.

  Sternholz could not fathom it. What had Vered Caspi to do with Ilana Maimon, or Ilana with Vered? They were birds of a very different feather, Ilana a peacock, Vered a hawk; all they had in common was beauty, but their types of beauty were exclusionary. No one man (Sternholz did not count himself in that category) would see it in both.

  Though perhaps there was some resemblance in character, he thought. Vered was a loner, and so, despite her professional gregariousness, was Ilana. It was, perhaps, not the friendship itself which was so strange, but the fact that it had come about outside his auspices, for where else could those disparate lives touch?

  Muny approached the bar and burped beerily into Sternholz’s face. “What’s the story with those two?” he asked.

  “Mind your own business,” Sternholz growled. “Stay away from them.”

  “Maybe Ilana’s giving Vered some pointers,” said Muny with a nasty laugh.

  “That’s some dirty mouth you got there.”

  “Is that any way to talk to a customer?” Muny whined.

  The two women were oblivious to the curious stares and comments they attracted. No one actually intruded, and engrossed in a conversation that seemed to have had no beginning and promised to have no end, they paid no heed to the ebb and flow of the café around them.

  It was not an altogether pleasant feeling, this uninvited, unbridled intimacy, but it was powerful. Vered was frightened by its suddenness; in general her life, which had been as placidly bitter as a poisoned well, was now moving with dizzying speed—her affair no sooner started than ended and on its heels this pregnancy, this biological booby trap into which she had fallen. As for Ilana, though she had heard numerous (male) confessions, she’d never made one of her own to man or woman, never opened her heart to another living soul. The sensation was something like riding a roller coaster, rising to dizzying heights, then plummeting with stomach-jolting speed.

  Once begun, they could not stop talking, but held each other’s hand for courage.

  “But why shouldn’t you have it?” Ilana whispered. “You’re married.”

  “To Caspi,” Vered said darkly.

  “He doesn’t want it?”

  “He doesn’t know! But no, he wouldn’t much care for the idea.”

  Ilana maintained a delicate silence. Like everyone in Nevo, she knew about Vered’s affair with the Arab Khalil; Caspi had ensured that with his grandstanding. Though inexperienced in friendships with women, Ilana knew the general limits of intimacy far too well to trespass here.

  “It’s not his,” Vered murmured, to her own intense surprise. “It was someone whom I don’t see anymore. Someone... unreliable.”

  Ilana thought it served Caspi right; the trouble was, serving Caspi right could cost a woman dearly. She knew his type, much better than she knew him. But what she said, bluntly, was, “It’s your baby now. Do you want it?”

  “Do I want it? I didn’t, but that doesn’t seem to help. It’s in me. I’ve carried a child; this is very real to me. I didn’t want it, but can I kill it?”

  “Can you?”

  Vered laughed harshly. “What choice do I have? The poor thing has no chance. Caspi would murder me.”

  “Then leave him. Walk out right now. You’re not his prisoner.”

  “It’s not that easy.”

  “Not that easy? Do you hear yourself, woman? First you say the man is going to kill you; then you say it’s not easy to leave him? How much easier could it get?”

  “He would fight me for Daniel. And I’ve given him just the ammunition he needs to win.” Suddenly Vered hid her eyes behind her hand. “I know Caspi will kill me if I try to have this baby, and then what would become of Daniel?”

  Ilana did not answer. She reached across the table to press Vered’s shoulder, her face tense with thought.

  Vered regained her composure and looked levelly, with a touch of defiance, across the table at Ilana.

  Hesitantly Ilana asked, “Would you leave the country?”

  “To go where, do what?”

  “Work. Live.”

  Vered laughed incredulously. “I’m an Israeli political columnist and a Hebrew book reviewer. Neither profession is particularly viable outside.”

  “I could help you find a good job, if you wanted. I have friends in industry and communications... but perhaps you wouldn’t wa
nt to leave.”

  Vered thought about it for a few seconds. “I wouldn’t,” she said. “Not that way. It’s not hopeless. I’ll find another way. I’d rather have the abortion than take my son into exile.”

  “Exile,” squealed Muny. “I distinctly heard her say exile. Whose exile? What is she talking about; Sternholz?” The little man could not contain himself but jerked in his seat like a marionette. “Look at them, crying into their cups, holding hands like a couple of dykes. What’s going on?”

  “Pipe down,” Sternholz muttered. “I can’t hear a thing over your heavy breathing.”

  “I don’t know,” Ilana was saying. “My head tells me one thing, my heart another. I dial Rafi’s office to schedule an abortion and catch myself doodling names on the telephone pad.”

  They shared a painful laugh.

  “But why not, if you want it? You’re a free woman,” Vered said enviously.

  “Oh, yes. Free as a bird.”

  “And not poor.”

  “Not in money.”

  Vered looked at her but did not speak.

  “It wouldn’t be fair to the child.”

  “As opposed to abortion,” said Vered.

  Sarita looked but did not see. She drew as if her eyes fed directly into her fingers. On her sketch pad the forms of two women were taking shape. Leaning together, looking intently into each other’s eyes, one talking and the other listening, they did not notice the little beggar standing silently beside their table, palm outstretched. He—she?—was a barefoot little urchin of four or five, dressed in a short gown of coarse cotton like those worn by peasant children in Egypt. But where were its people? Where did the child spring from, and why wasn’t Mr. Sternholz doing something? Sarita looked up from her pad and saw the waiter standing unconcernedly by the bar. She glanced over at Vered and Ilana. The child was gone.

  “I’m not fit to be a mother,” Ilana said. “I don’t know the first thing about babies.”

  “Were you an only child?”

  Ilana hesitated. “I have four younger brothers, but my mother never let me touch them.” She paused, frowning. Vered waited in sympathetic silence. “Would you believe,” Ilana said with a laugh, “that I actually went back home, when I found out....”

  “What happened?”

  “They threw me out on my ass. I can’t blame them,” she added quickly. “They have their own problems.”

  Vered thought of Jemima and how she would suffer if Vered had the baby. Or tried to.

  “It was sad,” Ilana said after a while. “I’d imagined it for years: the prodigal daughter returns, bearing gifts.... Stupid fantasy.” She dabbed at her eyes furtively with a lace handkerchief.

  “Thomas Wolfe was right. You can’t go home again.”

  “Have you tried?”

  “Once. I left Caspi and went home to my mother.”

  Ilana raised her head and stared. “You mean you left him and went back?”

  “I was weak,” said Vered. “I was incredibly stupid. I thought the world consisted of my mother and Caspi, and if I couldn’t live with one, I had to live with the other. Living in my mother’s house made me feel like a child again, and act like one, too, I’m afraid. Caspi said he needed me, and I thought I needed him.” She laughed, shaking her head. “I was such a patsy. The wonder is not that I went back to him; it’s that I ever had the guts to walk out.”

  “Why did you?”

  “I had no choice.” Remembering, Vered felt her chest fill with liquid rage, her heart beat like subterranean thunder. The wretched memory, fetid with betrayal, had long lain dormant in her body, like a spot of cancer, quiescent but threatening, or a killer virus biding its time. She knew it was there but practiced avoidance, on the principle that tampering makes things work. But Ilana’s clear gray eyes bore down on her with magnetic force.

  “He promised me a child,” Vered murmured, staring stonily past Ilana’s shoulder. “We tried for a year, but nothing happened. I got very depressed, but, for the first time since our marriage, Caspi was wonderful: he comforted me; coddled me, brought me coffee in bed. The one thing he absolutely refused to do was to see a doctor with me, so finally I went by myself.”

  “To Steadman?”

  Vered nodded. Her face was pale. “All it took was one blood test. I was sitting in his office when he came in with the results. He was smiling, but he seemed angry. ‘What’s the verdict?’ I asked him.

  “He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. ‘Generally,’ he said, ‘when women want to get pregnant, they quit taking the pill.’“

  “Oh, my God,” Ilana breathed.

  Vered nodded wildly. “In the coffee,” she cried, as if that were the ultimate betrayal. She rummaged blindly through her bag, then accepted a slightly damp handkerchief from Ilana. “You see what an ass I was, going back to a bastard like that? This whole thing is my fault; I really and truly made my bed.”

  Ilana clicked her tongue impatiently. “That is the dumbest proverb. It’s not even true; if you had to lie in every bed you made, chambermaids would never finish working.”

  Pincas Gordon stopped by Nevo as he had several times a day since the robbery. He looked around, then walked up to Sternholz and Muny at the bar.

  “Seen Arik?” he greeted Sternholz.

  “I would tell you if I did?”

  “What do you want him for?” asked Muny.

  The Prince of Judea smiled unpleasantly. “I have a job offer for him. Seen him around, Muny?”

  “What’s it worth to you?”

  “A whiskey?”

  “Make it a double.”

  Pincas nodded, and Muny served himself. He drained the glass, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and belched.

  “Arik who?” he said.

  Sternholz guffawed.

  Looking around to see who else had noticed Muny’s little joke, Pincas espied Vered and Ilana. “What’s with those two?”

  “They’re an item,” Muny said. “They’re doing it.”

  “No kidding!”

  “Idiot,” Sternholz said, jabbing Muny with a swizzle stick. “You should wash your mouth out with soap.”

  “Vered’s looking fetching these days, isn’t she? Almost womanly.” Pincas leered distractedly. “Ever since she let the gates down for that—”

  “Why don’t you try hitting on her, Gordon?” Muny cut in. “See what happens.”

  “I just might do that, when I get a moment.” Pincas Gordon sighed and turned to the waiter. “Where is he, Sternholz? Where’s the punk hiding out?”

  But Sternholz did not seem to hear. He was staring at Vered with a grave new look in his eye.

  “I’m afraid to go through it alone,” Ilana said.

  “Every woman does that. No matter who’s with you, you’re alone with the pain.”

  “You didn’t take any painkiller?” Ilana asked eagerly. She had been longing for just this sort of conversation, but the only person she could talk to was Rafi Steadman, and what did he know? He’d never had a baby.

  “No, nothing. The pain is endurable, and it’s good to feel it happening.”

  “But didn’t it help to have your husband with you?”

  Vered was startled into laughter. “You don’t think Caspi would stay with me? He threw me into a nurse’s arms and bolted. I didn’t see him for three days.”

  “Bastard,” Ilana said with feeling.

  Vered shrugged to show that Caspi was irrelevant. “When the baby comes out and you touch him and hold him next to your heart, and he looks into your eyes, that moment —oh, God, Ilana, it’s worth a lifetime of labor.”

  Ilana sat still for a moment, a wistful look on her face. Then she shook herself. “It’s not just the giving birth alone part that frightens me. It’s what comes after, raising the child alone. I have no family or friends to help.”

  “No friends?”

  “None who’ve raised children.”

  Shyly, Vered said, “I would help you.”

 
“You?”

  “I mean, if you needed advice, or someone to talk to... or someone to hold your hand during labor.”

  “You would do that for me?”

  Vered smiled. “What are friends for?”

  “I don’t know, but I’ve heard they’re for helping each other.” Suddenly Ilana was shaking with excitement. She reached across the table and grasped Vered’s hand. ‘‘We could do that,” she said. “We could help each other have these babies.”

  Vered’s reply was lost when a great white heron swooped down upon their table.

  “Vered Caspi,” said Sternholz in a sepulchral voice, “I want a word with you.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  When Uri Eshel dealt with matters of state, party, or kibbutz—in other words, when he was most himself—he exuded an air of determination, acuity, and confidence bordering on arrogance. But when he met with his son, a sort of diffusion of personality occurred: his thoughts wandered, memories surfaced, old wounds and guilt appeared on his face, and a general aura of self-doubt surrounded him.

  If the Eshels had produced other children, Arik would have made a perfectly suitable black sheep, but as an only child he seemed to Uri woefully deficient. Looking at his son was like glancing into a mirror and seeing a reflection that was subtly, disturbingly wrong. Was the mirror distorted, or was it his self-perception? When Arik quit the army and there was all that fuss—reporters swarming over the kibbutz, buttonholing members, whose loyalty lay in praising Arik to the cameras while savaging him in kibbutz meetings—then Uri had suffered and suffered deeply. Arik could not hate that war any more than he, who had watched it approach, fought against it, and lost the last great battle of his career; but there were things you did and things you didn’t do, and deserting your post during wartime was one of the things you did not do.

  Rina urged him to talk to Arik, to hear his explanation, and for the sake of peace he agreed. Arik came twice to speak with him, but each time it ended badly, with raised voices and slammed doors. So great were Uri’s anger and vicarious shame that he could not spend five minutes in a room with Arik without losing his temper, but so great was his love that he could not bear to lose his only son. Thus he did what he had to do: he found a justification he could live with. All wars, but particularly this one, had two fronts, the military and the political. Arik had not dropped out; he had merely transferred from one front to another. Uri’s theory seemed confirmed when Arik took the job in the Welfare Ministry and immediately began organizing the local youths. He was disappointed when Arik joined Sheli instead of Labor, but it was a warm kind of disappointment: choosing the radical over the practical program was a mistake, but the right mistake for a young man to make.