Cafe Nevo

by Barbara Rogan

  His window faces west; he cannot see the downing of the sun, but he feels it nonetheless. The silver sea turns a steely, opaque gray, the moon loses its sway, and the wind shifts, coming from over the land. Sternholz drinks his morning coffee and smacks his lips. He has been drinking coffee all night, but this cup is different. The long night is almost over.

  Chapter Twenty

  In his heart, Caspi knew himself for a family man. He saw himself surrounded by children young and old, half a dozen kids all looking up to him, whispering outside his study door, shushing each other, vying to bring him bottles of beer and cups of coffee while he works. He saw them all together at table, himself at the head and Vered at the foot, as he carves a joint of meat and passes down the serving plate. He saw Vered walking with him in the garden (which they don’t have) like Beauty with the Beast, and when they quarreled, he saw his eldest son lead his mother aside and say to her, “Come on, Mom, you know how Dad is. You know he loves us.” He saw Vered smile fondly and hug the boy and say, “Yes, I know.” In this context she could forgive his little peccadilloes, knowing that nothing could cleave the rock of such a family.

  Over the years Caspi had nurtured this fantasy in secret, giving names to the children, inventing escapades for them, binding their wounds, solving their little crises. And this was odd because when Vered wanted children, then he, Caspi, had resisted with all the strength and guile at his command. Somehow he had conceived the notion that children drain the creative juices of men, while stimulating those of women; every child borne, he declared, is a book unwritten.

  As Caspi’s creativity waned, his fantasy solidified, becoming more real for him than the angry woman and frightened little boy who were his true family. His fantasy children were far more unruly than Daniel, who would not dream of troubling his father for a glass of water or help in tying shoes. Sometimes these naughty children went so far as to tug on his arm while he was writing and to whisper in his ear while he was trying to concentrate, destroying his train of thought. They seemed determined to prove the very antithesis of Caspi’s theorem by demonstrating (or ensuring) that every unborn child was a book unwritten.

  Caspi had a mental morgue for unwritten books, like the back room of an abortion clinic where the poor rejected “products of conception” lie awaiting burial. His lost masterpieces, he called them, his miscarriages. Every time a book broke away from him before it was viable, achieving independence at the cost of life, Caspi felt a sharp ting inside him; he wept and raged, but the process was irreversible.

  He mourned these books as a mother mourns a stillborn child: he gave them titles; he held them in his heart. His sorrow was cumulative and invasive: after so many fruitless attempts he could not sit down to start a book without a foreboding of failure. In his youth Caspi had worked joyfully, with unflagging endurance and unquestioning confidence, but somewhere along the line he had sinned and been expelled from Eden. Henceforth, like Adam, he would toil for what had once come effortlessly; like Eve, he would give birth in pain and suffering. And though he had worked conscientiously these past three years, sitting at his desk for hours each day even if he produced nothing more than a doodle or a dirty limerick, Caspi had had no success. Everything he touched turned to ash.

  That is why when he finished his introduction to Khalil’s section of the anthology—a mere twenty pages of polished vituperation, a bauble in comparison with the tomes that used to pour out of his typewriter—Caspi was ecstatic. He threw the pages up in the air and let them shower down on his head and shoulders; he kissed his image in the small mirror on the wall and said, “Good morning, Sleeping Beauty”; he opened his study door and bellowed, “Vered!”

  There was no reply. His voice echoed down the hall. Daniel was at nursery school; Caspi had no idea where Vered was. Since she moved into her study, they met only in passing.

  His muscles ached from sitting so long. He went out into the hall. Vered’s door was open. She looked up from her desk and said, “Come in.”

  Caspi looked behind him, then cocked his head and pointed at himself questioningly.

  “Come in, I said.”

  The room, having no closet, was strewn with clothing. He shoved aside a pile of dresses and sat on the sofa, crossing his legs. Since Vered no longer shared his bed, and bristled whenever he came within three feet of her, Caspi had been reduced to divining her activities and mood by omen and augury. Bags under her eyes? She was losing sleep over him. Snappishness at the breakfast table? She’d been talking to Jemima. A queasy look about the mouth? Remorse and guilt. Her craving for solitude, the mysterious silences that emanated from her room, so unlike the familiar sounds of her working (pen scratching on paper, the sigh of the settee and the creak of the chair as she migrated restlessly between them): these betokened secrecy and strong emotion, rigorously contained. Was she plotting his demise? Did she know something he didn’t know? Or was her distraction related to his miraculously regained concentration? Caspi remembered his theory that he and Vered were on a seesaw. Here was evidence for it.

  Today Vered wore an apple green cotton smock that he had given her before they married. It had been a favorite until she grew too large with Daniel; then she put it away, and he hadn’t seen it since. For one elated moment Caspi imagined that its resurrection signaled a desire to return to the time of courtship, but Vered’s stem face killed that train of thought and suggested another, more ominous interpretation: she had forgotten the giver.

  Vered turned her chair to face him and sat bolt upright, hands folded in her lap. “I want a divorce,” she said.

  Caspi began to whistle. He picked up a book from the night table and thumbed through it, then settled back to read.

  “Look at me.”

  His eyes rose; he smiled. “What, darling?”

  “I want a divorce. I’m leaving you.”

  “If you must, you must,” he said genially. “Just give me a few days’ notice, so I can make arrangements for the boy.”

  “I’m taking him with me.”

  “Over my dead body,” said Caspi, smiling no longer.

  “That would be my first choice, but in any case I’m leaving and taking my son with me.”

  “I can’t let you do that,” he said quietly, looking across at her. “You knew when you married me that I was an orphan. You don’t give an orphan a family, then take it away.”

  “You threw it away. I’m just picking up the pieces.”

  He stood and lumbered toward the door, where he looked at her without aggression but with steadfast determination. “You want to sleep in here,” he said, “fine, sleep in here. I don’t understand why I’m being punished for your infidelity, but hey” —he placed an expansive hand on his heart —”I don’t claim to be the perfect husband.

  “There’s no scarcity of cunts,” he said. “I don’t need yours.

  “But don’t even think about leaving,” he said. “I couldn’t allow that, Vered. You push that far and somebody’s bound to get hurt.”

  Shaking, less with fear than with anger, Vered stood in the doorway and shouted down the hall: “If you mean Khalil, it won’t work. I don’t care about him.”

  Caspi stopped and looked at her. “I mean anyone who tries to take my son away.”

  “If you gave a damn about Daniel, you wouldn’t try to take him away from me.”

  Caspi came toward her slowly, with nothing in particular on his face. Vered felt like a trapped animal watching the trapper’s approach. In a clear, cold voice she said, “I’ll never let you have him.”

  “I’m not a monster. I’m his father. I love the little bastard.”

  “You never wanted him. You tried everything to keep me from getting pregnant.”

  “Not everything, evidently,” said Caspi, with a flash of his old humor. Vered hissed at him. “Maybe I didn’t want a kid,” he said, “but now that he’s here I’m keeping him. He’s my family.”

  “If you love him, then let him go. He needs me.”

&
nbsp; “I need you,” Caspi whispered, and reached for her. Recoiling, with a cry of disgust, Vered slammed the door in his face.

  Caspi had attached an 8 x 10 photograph of Khalil Mussara, which he had filched from the offices of Dotan and Weiner, to a corkboard in his study. The poseur was wearing tweeds, smoking a pipe. “This is all your fault,” he said to it, weighing the darts in his hand. He selected one and threw it; it sliced through Khalil’s left eye.

  “You brought this on yourself,” he said, placing a second in his right temple.

  “You can’t write,” he sneered, skewering the Arab’s throat.

  He had seen Vered’s fear and it shamed him. In fact, Caspi blamed her far less than he blamed Khalil, whose dismissal as Vered’s lover did nothing to assuage his wrath. As his marriage deteriorated, his anger grew and attached itself, naturally, to the interloper. Politically, Caspi understood the Arab’s tactic—understood it all the better for having used it himself on occasion. It was a form of sexual terrorism, and like all terrorism, it struck at the strong through the weak. Vered’s seduction had nothing to do with her, it was addressed to Caspi, like a letter bomb intended to blow up in his face. And so it had.

  Caspi was not a religious man. He did not believe in God, but he did believe in Biblical-style vengeance: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. It was his only form of observance, the essence of his faith. If Khalil went unpunished, the sin was on Caspi’s head.

  But he would go about it in his own way, in his own time. If private vengeance was sweet, public vengeance was sweeter still. The hatchet job he’d done on Khalil’s work in the introduction was just one level of a multi-tiered plan.

  He’d thought with no particular repugnance of murdering Khalil. He wouldn’t be the first Arab Caspi had killed. Of course, that had been during war, but wasn’t he at war with Khalil? He could have killed him that day in Nevo and gotten away with it, or as near as made no difference. Witnesses would have sworn that the fight was provoked by the Arab, and Caspi had been drinking. The judge would have slapped his wrist and sent him home.

  Killing him now, in cold blood, would cost much more while offering but a paltry return. Khalil Mussara was, most undeservedly, a prominent West Bank figure; Peter Caspi, an internationally known Israeli writer. The murder of one by the other would not pass unnoticed by the press. Though Arab lives weren’t generally worth much in Israeli courts, in this case the judge would have to make an example of Caspi.

  Besides, death was too light a punishment. Caspi had no truck with an afterlife. He’d seen enough men die to know that when a person dies, he’s dead and that’s it; no consciousness survives. The Arab would suffer for a few moments before the end; and what did that amount to, compared to the weeks and months of torment he’d inflicted on Caspi?

  Khalil deserved the torments of Job, but Caspi didn’t have God’s stomach. He might have settled for a simple assassination—were it not for his fear of losing Vered and Daniel.

  According to Jewish and Israeli law, women cannot divorce their husbands on any grounds without their consent. Since no force in heaven or on earth could make Caspi consent, he ought to have felt safe. But Khalil’s invasion of his home had overthrown Caspi’s hard-won security; he felt like an invaded country, spread-eagled before an advancing, rampant army.

  All his adult life Caspi had championed the underdog. “I’m a Palestinian,” he declared at every opportunity, to the confusion of his audience, and though this statement was generally interpreted as an expression of sympathy for the underdog, what it really meant was that since Caspi didn’t know who he was, he might as well be an Arab as a Jew.

  Khalil had done him the service of exploding this delusion. When the conflict came home, when his bedroom became the battlefield, Caspi knew exactly where he stood. If a man doesn’t fight for his family, he’s not a man. If you love him, let him go, Vered had said, but what bosh! What an absurd demand, meaningless and cruel. Vered ought to know better. Half an orphan herself (the better half), did she not possess half an orphan’s wisdom? In the courtyard of the orphanage the children had chanted: eeny, meeny, miny, mo; if you love her, don’t let go.

  “The first time I laid eyes on you, drunk in Nevo, you demanded that the Jaffa Youth Center be reopened. Today you want that plus an appointment to a senior government position which does not even exist but is to be created expressly for you. This suggests to me,” Minister Brenner said, bridging his hands and resting his chin on them, “a touch of megalomania.”

  “I see your point,” Arik said cheerfully.

  “Why on earth should I help you?”

  “You’re not obliged to. I didn’t ask you to. I came to interview you for an article I’m writing, and in the course of conversation you asked about my plans. That’s all.”

  “Not quite all,” said the Minister. Both men avoided glancing at the small stack of photocopied documents that dominated the desk between them.

  After a silence the Minister said, “You are trying to blackmail me.” His face and voice were expressionless; he might have been talking about the weather.

  “God forbid,” said Arik. “I am confident that you’ll come out smelling like a rose from any possible investigation.”

  “Your father put you up to this,” Brenner said.

  “No.”

  “No; on second thought, he would have advised you better. What you ask is impossible.”

  “I have asked for nothing. I have made a few suggestions, none of which is inconsistent with your party’s policy.”

  There was a knock on the door. The Minister’s secretary peeked in. “Sir, your two o’clock is here.”

  Arik rose at once, reaching for the pile of papers.

  “Sit down,” Brenner growled. “Postpone it,” he told the secretary, who withdrew.

  Arik resumed his seat. Though his posture remained respectfully erect, he somehow gave the impression of having his feet up on the desk. Brenner’s expression when Arik stood up had been that of a souk merchant pursuing an escaping customer: capitulation.

  “Who has seen these?” Brenner asked, poking distastefully at the papers with a pudgy manicured finger.

  “No one but myself,” Arik said. Brenner’s eyes tore into him, disbelieving.

  “And what would become of this article of yours should you find more pressing matters to pursue?”

  “I would have to put it aside,” Arik said regretfully.

  “And the originals of these documents... ?”

  “Will remain in my safekeeping.”

  “Unacceptable!” snapped the Minister, shaking his head so forcefully that the knitted skullcap slipped off his bald pate. He caught it in midair and replaced it. “The papers must be returned to their owner, who, I understand, is considering pressing charges. Apparently a considerable sum of money was stolen. I might be able to persuade him to hold off, if all his property was returned intact. In view of your mother’s state of health—”

  “Leave my mother out of this.”

  The Minister’s eyes gleamed maliciously behind his thick glasses. “Poor Rina. What would it do to her to see her only son charged as a common thief?”

  Arik said with effortful calm, “Rumor has it that Pincas Gordon had a considerable quantity of foreign currency. I don’t have to remind you, sir, of the penalties for illegal possession of foreign currency. Rumor also has it that he donated some money to Peace Now. I doubt that, under the circumstances, Gordon will press charges against anyone.”

  “I believe he will follow my recommendations, whatever they may be,” Brenner said. They regarded one another thoughtfully.

  He’s a clever man, Uri said, the night they talked till dawn. He’s also a proud man. He will be angry. Let him have his anger. Let it wash over you. Don’t fight him. And don’t discuss politics. When his anger subsides, explain the advantages. He’ll listen then.

  Arik did not know if that time had come. Behind his calm exterior the Minister still looked furious, as if a
ny moment now his hand would dart out to the buzzer on his desk, and men would swarm into the room, drag Arik out, and shoot him in the courtyard. If he had the power, Arik thought, he’d do it.

  “I think, Mr. Eshel,” said the Minister after some thought, “that you leave me no choice but to send you to the devil. Publish and be damned.” But this was said in a probing voice, and Arik heard it and was heartened.

  He said, “Regardless of what happens to me, Minister, I hope you’ll consider establishing the commission we discussed. Since questions have arisen, and will no doubt continue to arise, about the provenance of many of these land transactions, would it not be to your Ministry’s benefit to have some impartial body overseeing these transactions? Wouldn’t that take the heat off, as it were?”

  Brenner is a world expert in cover-your-ass, Uri had told him in their all-night session. Talk to him in those terms, and he will respond. Arik saw it happening before his eyes. The Minister’s face changed. His thoughts turned inward. He had the look of a man who has accepted a disaster and is now contemplating damage control.

  “Is your appointment as head of this ‘impartial body’ an integral part of this proposal?” he asked brusquely.

  “It would be to your advantage,” Arik said carefully.

  “There are a thousand men more qualified than you.”

  “By appointing someone known to have no sympathy for speculators, you would demonstrate your impartiality and further distance yourself from any hint of... irregularities.”

  “My integrity has never been questioned,” the Minister put in angrily.

  Arik smiled.

  The Minister picked up a pencil and examined it in detail, turning it this way and that. “What you seem to be asking for,” he said, “is carte blanche authority to allow or disallow all land purchases in Judea and Samaria.”