Cafe Nevo

by Barbara Rogan

  But she had another reason, even more compelling than the heat, for working in Nevo. The vision that had come to her just before Arik’s intrusion left with him but returned later. When she tried to capture it on paper, the composition flowed freely and fluently. After two hours of intense effort she turned away from the easel, yawned, stretched, rubbed her eyes, went into the bathroom, and splashed water on her face—then went to look at the draft. The painting quivered with motion. People were twisting in their seats, standing, conversing, playing chess, laughing with heads thrown back, arguing with balled fists, pointing, shoving, and shouting; but they all had one thing in common, and that was their facelessness. They had heads, but no features, distinguishing or otherwise.

  This gave the draft an eerie, Magritte-like surrealism that was far from Sarita’s intent; it implied a sameness and interchangeability that directly contradicted her experience of Nevo. Of course, Nevo’s patrons were all or nearly all Jews, but that similarity served only to set off their essential differences. The ingathering of the interbred exiles had brought the whole world together under one roof, as it were, and that grand disparity was well represented in the real Café Nevo, of which hers was but a woefully inadequate representation.

  The relationships, composition, and flow were all right. The observing eye followed the action in an inward spiral, coming to rest in the center of the painting on its only identifiable figure: Emmanuel Yehoshua Sternholz, who seemed larger than life in his great white apron. But what was Nevo without its faces?

  Sarita took up her brush and closed her senses to the world, willing her mind to go blank and her fingers to take over. She called on her muse, but as usual there was no reply (muses being notoriously hard to reach, far more often out than in). Her hand remained still, her subjects’ faces stubbornly obscure.

  Thrown back on reason, she decided that since the problem was one neither of conception nor of understanding, it must be one of information. The faces remained blank because she lacked the necessary information to fill them in. Garbage in, garbage out: too little data were reaching her muse, and she had only herself to blame.

  She had huddled in Nevo like a little mouse, scared to death that someone would speak to her, not daring to look at people lest they look back. While the café surged and seethed around her, she clung to her little boat, all adrift. Those blank canvas faces reproached her timidity, a slothful habit and one that had long outlived its usefulness.

  She began going daily to Nevo, varying her times and sitting at different tables for different perspectives. The regulars knew her now and signaled their acceptance, each in his own way. The old chess players acknowledged her comings and goings by a slight raising of their bent heads, Muny paid court with an exaggerated but by no means unfelt deference, and Caspi (who had much on his mind) had at last rewarded her unrelenting blindness with resigned indifference. The regular women, Vered Caspi and Ilana Maimon among them, smiled and said hello, while the transient women, mostly groupies attached to Caspi’s crowd, continued generation after short generation to stare at her suspiciously.

  People did look at her, and Sarita learned she could look back without blushing and even answer with composure when addressed. She began to feel at home in Nevo. The old waiter watched but no longer hovered; in sketch after sketch his craggy face stared out at her with crusty approval.

  As she surrendered to the rhythm of the café, Sarita acquired the twin Nevo knacks of selective eavesdropping and brazen staring. By focusing her attention on one table, she found that she could eliminate almost all interference; and as she looked and listened, she also drew. Between what she overheard and what her sketches later told her, Sarita penetrated a score of secrets.

  She was the first, after Sternholz, to guess what Vered and Ilana had in common, a guess confirmed by a second look at her sketch of the two together. The presence of the unseen child was explicit enough to arouse suspicion in others, and Sarita had a few moments’ compunction about using that scene in her final picture; but her callousness in the service of her art was that of the true practitioner and far outweighed her discretion. The scene fit, it was true, it was intrinsic; therefore she would use it.

  Sarita’s blooming was noted by Sternholz, who attributed it to other factors, one in particular.

  One slow afternoon, he lowered himself ponderously into a chair and gave a preparatory cough. Sarita turned toward him with a smile.

  “You should pardon the intrusion,” the waiter said, with that elaborate sarcasm that served him as courtliness, “but all these pictures you’ve been making, are they for posterity or are you planning to show them?”

  “They’re just studies,” she said, closing her pad.

  “Studies for what?”

  “For a painting of Nevo.”

  “And when do we get to see this masterpiece?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not doing it for myself. It was commissioned.”

  “Commissioned!” scoffed the waiter. “Who would want a picture of this dump?”

  Sarita smiled. “Someone who is attached to it, maybe. Or someone who wanted to help. Or both.”

  The old man harrumphed and changed the subject. “How’s young Arik doing?”

  “Who?” she said, chipping with a fingernail at the cracked linoleum table top.

  “I haven’t seen him for a while,” he said slyly.

  “That’s too bad.”

  “No, it’s good. It’s about time he got off his bum. What’s he up to, and why is Pincas Gordon looking for him?”

  “How should I know?”

  Sternholz linked his hands behind his head and leaned back. “Only that the last time I saw him, he asked for your address,” he said innocently.

  Sarita chewed the inside of her lip, not answering. After a moment she began flipping rapidly through her sketch pad. When she found the drawing she was looking for, she held it so that only he could see.

  Sternholz sucked in his breath. He brought his chair down with a thump and leaned closer, his eyes darting from one side of the sketch to the other, as if he were reading rather than scanning a picture. Sarita watched him anxiously, though not without amusement. When Sternholz finally looked up, his face was white, with vivid red patches on his cheeks.

  “How do you do it?” he whispered.

  “It just happens. Not on purpose. I look at one thing and draw another.”

  Sternholz pushed away the hand that held the drawing. “It’s a heavy burden,” he muttered.

  “It’s no burden at all.” She shrugged. “I don’t care how I do it. It’s not important. I thought you could tell me if I got it right.”

  The drawing, which lay open on her lap, showed Nevo on a wet winter day. Though the café, whose furnishings have not been changed in thirty years, looks the same, the people in the drawing are dressed in an old-fashioned style. At a center table sits a youthful Yael Blume, surrounded by young men and girls. Across the room, the waiter Sternholz leans against the bar, his great white apron dangling limply from his shoulders, like melted wings. Believing himself unobserved, he gazes with unguarded longing across a sea of heads toward the beacon of Yael’s fair, unconscious countenance. Neither she nor anyone else in Nevo regards the waiter.

  “What I particularly wondered”—Sarita broke into his reverie— “was whether she knew how you felt about her.”

  “What was to know?” muttered Sternholz, not looking at her. “Everyone loved her.”

  “But were you a suitor? Did you try?”

  The old man scrunched up his lips. “It would have been stupid to try. I’d only have embarrassed her; she’d have stayed away, and I’d have lost her. Besides—damn it, girl, it’s none of your business. You’re not your mother, no matter what you think.” He cranked himself upright and loomed threateningly over her. “You should mind your own p’s and q’s and not muddle about with what did or didn’t happen before you were born. Your mother is dead, rest her soul. You’re alive: and what are you plann
ing to do about that?”

  “I plan to work,” she said. It sounded hollow to her own ears.

  “Work,” sneered Sternholz, “that’s very nice. I’m all for work. What else? Don’t give me that wide-eyed look; I’m talking turkey here. What are you going to do about Arik? That’s what I want to know.”

  “I hardly even know him.”

  “Know, shmow. Do you like him?”

  “Yeah,” she muttered, “I like him.”

  “So?”

  “So what?”

  “This is like pulling teeth,” Sternholz complained heavenward. He pulled his chair up close and leaned forward confidentially. “So, what are you going to do about it? You think boys like Arik grow on trees? I’ve watched him grow up, I know that boy like my own—” He started to say “son” but, remembering that he’d hardly known his son, substituted, “like my own hand. He’s bright, he’s hard-working, and he comes from a fine family. What more do you want?”

  “You sound like a shadchan.”

  “So?” he snapped. “Someone has to do it.” Smoothing his ruffled apron, he added more calmly, “Even for a beautiful girl like you Arik is a good match. He’s got a great future, if he marries wisely, like his father did.”

  “I’m not ready,” she said; Sternholz snorted rudely.

  “If you were any more ready, you’d burst your britches,” he blurted, then blushed and mumbled an apology. “But you’re a grown woman now; it’s high time you started living your life.”

  “Is it?” she asked doubtfully.

  “Yes,” insisted Sternholz. “And Nevo is no place to live it, commission or no commission.”

  Suddenly her face lit up with that teasing smile that so reminded Sternholz of Yael. “I can’t help that,” she said. “I took the money.”

  “The money doesn’t matter,” the old man said, waving his hands in agitation.

  She laughed. “Ah, but it might to whoever paid it.”

  “I wouldn’t know. You mark what I say, Sarita Blume. Nevo is a good place to visit but a bad place to put down roots. What you need, little Miss Head-in-the-Clouds, is grounding.” He turned his back on her deliberately and surveyed his domain. The natives were restless and clamoring for service. As he walked toward the bar, Sarita’s voice followed him.

  “I wondered”—it teased— “how you happened to know my address.”

  Sternholz pretended not to hear.

  So he never even tried, thought Sarita, following his indignant back. Would it have mattered if he had? Was he always so odd and cranky, or had he become like that after Yael was-gone? Was there ever a time when Sternholz might have had a chance?

  Somehow she doubted it. The waiter was so much a fixture of Nevo that she could not conceive of his ever having been (or being) otherwise. Sternholz was that which remains the same, whereas Yehuda Blume and Uri Eshel and the other young men whom Yael had met in Nevo must have seemed fatally dashing, with their male friendships, gallantries, secret meetings, midnight forays, and skirmishes.

  It had, perhaps, been a little wicked to show him the drawing, not least because it portrayed him as an old man, obviously a refugee, whereas Yael was young, vibrant, and native-born. In fact, he could not have been more than twelve or fifteen years older than Yael, yet for some reason, all of her sketches, regardless of their time frame, showed Sternholz as his current crotchety and faintly decrepit self.

  She had not, however, meant to startle him, but only to change the subject and satisfy her curiosity at the same time. Sarita took her strange ability so much for granted that she sometimes forgot how unsettling it was to others. She judged her own work by its inner integrity: the tightness of the composition; the flow of color and form. Though she was a painter of people, her people mattered primarily for their relationship to the whole, not as individuals. She had heard that there were correlations between her imagined people and real ones of an earlier time; this claim was made too frequently for her to dispute the correlation, but she could and did disregard it. When pressed, she would declare that like most artists, she drew on her imagination; what fed her imagination was beyond knowing and therefore uninteresting. Further pursuit of the subject would meet with sullen dismissal.

  Even she was startled, though, by the frequency with which Yael cropped up in her studies of Nevo. Her method of blind sketching certainly contributed to the phenomenon. Free of the constant check and correction provided by the critical eye, Sarita’s hands seemed plugged into her imagination, or whatever faculty it was that informed her work. While she drew, she looked only at her subject, never at the pad; and sometimes she was jolted at the end to look down and discover that she had grafted Yael’s head onto someone else’s body.

  Sarita was not a superstitious girl (though some might say she had reason to be); she did not believe in spirits, or automatic writing, or automatic drawing for that matter. She did not, therefore, conclude from this odd manifestation that Café Nevo was haunted by Yael; indeed, she drew no conclusions, preferring not to question, not to know. For if she harbored any superstition at all, it was the fear that if she understood the phenomenon, it would cease to exist, and Sarita was too dogged in pursuit of her craft to welcome such impoverishment.

  She decided—and it was a measure of her as yet unrealized but dawning emancipation that she made the decision—that since Yael was so insistent on being in the picture, she would put her in, center stage, as befit a star; let people say what they would, when the painting was seen. (They would say, of course, that she was fey; but they wouldn’t say it to her face, and that was all she cared about.)

  The odd thing, even by her liberal standards of oddity, was that by admitting one ghost, she seemed to have opened the door to a host of others. Strange faces began appearing in her sketch pad; some she didn’t know at all, others she recognized as younger versions of Nevo’s current clientele. A few of the old chess players cropped up as younger men, and in one sketch she made, an old chess player was pitted against himself, thirty years younger; by their faces the younger man was winning, and cocky about it. A young Muny turned up here and there, and Arik’s father appeared as his contemporary. Sternholz himself remained ageless and unchanging.

  The silver sea beckons, the moon lights the way, and soft sea breezes carry the scent of distant forests, green beyond imagining, in a land where water flows like sorrow. That land Emmanuel Yehoshua Sternholz has forsworn, and faithfully kept his vow: never, since his homecoming, has he left the borders of Israel. He has kept even his thoughts from straying.

  Memories buried by the force of disaster are like petrified wood, perfectly preserved in form, albeit changed in substance. The sea beckons; the old man is weary but cannot sleep. Seductive sirens sing to him, their rippling voices carried on the breeze. Sternholz closes his eyes; he surrenders.

  The memory comes clothed in a young man’s senses. Sternholz smells the majestic scent of living pine and feels the moist earth slip through his fingers as he crouches by a stream. He tastes water: clear, running brook water, a lovely taste and a great wetness to his parched mouth. (Slouched in his armchair, the old man runs his tongue over his lips.) He hears—oh, treacherous memory: like a broken projector it rattles on, unstoppable—he hears a volley of shots; screams and moans; a second round of scattered gunshot; then silence.

  He was far away, a kilometer or more. It was not possible for him to distinguish voices. Yet he heard then and hears now the voice of his small son, screaming, “Papa! Papa!”

  Weeping, the old man covers his ears.

  He has not thought of that night since he reached the shores of Palestine. Though he retained the bare knowledge that his wife and son were rounded up and shot, he had succeeded in forgetting that he heard them die.

  Amnesia is bliss, for what is memory but a comet with a tail of guilt? Sternholz ought to have been home when the Nazis came; instead, he was out searching for work. Not that he could have saved them; but at least they would not have died alone. A man who
lets his wife and baby die alone has no right to exist, and Sternholz, an educated man, a former schoolteacher, knew that in a deterministic universe, that which has no right to existence cannot exist. If it was a matter of pure chance that he had survived, then to dl intents and purposes he was dead, buried in the same mass grave in the forest where Greta and Jacob lay.

  Being dead has its disadvantages, sleeplessness chief among them, but it is peaceful. Thing happen around Sternholz, not to him; he is the unmoved mover, a material ghost. No wonder so many ghosts are poltergeists; with opportunities for mischief so plentiful and tempting, the wonder is that any refrain. In his public life Sternholz sees himself as a deus ex machina—not a deviser, but a device. His personal life barely exists; he is just marking time, serving out a life sentence without parole.

  Lately, however, Sternholz has noticed some cracks in his prison walls. That sly girl, Sarita, with her insinuations like constant drops of water chiseling through rock: what was her interest in unsettling the dead, himself included? What was it to her, how he felt and how he acted toward Yael Blume? Must he account to that little slip of a girl?

  Yael Blume was dead, like everyone else he had ever loved; she was dead nearly twenty years. What spell had Sarita cast on him to reopen that old wound? And what right had she to reproach him with inaction, she who was no less ghost-ridden than he? How could she mistake him for a man capable of acting on his feelings?

  “We’re alike, you and I,” she’d said to him, in this very room. He denied it then and denies it now. “Live your own life,” he told her; who would dare say that to him, who has none? Yael is dead; Greta and Jacob are dead; and so is he.

  But dead men don’t love, he thinks suddenly. Dead men don’t cry. He wipes his eyes with his sleeve and shuffles to the bathroom. Dead men don’t piss, either, he thinks as he relieves himself. A peculiar sound escapes his throat: Sternholz is laughing.