“This was my window,” she told him, taking off her glasses to peer inside. “I lay in bed beneath it for four months.” “Was it winter?” he asked, rather oddly. She didn’t turn to look at him. “Yes, it was winter,” she answered, as if the question were perfectly natural. “And autumn. And once, for three months, summer. And there was another time too, right before we left. It was every year and every season,” she said, standing on tiptoe to get a glimpse of the house she had felt happy and loved in, despite her great anguish, because she still had had hope. “But why not go inside?” he suggested. She threw him a grateful look, stepped down from the crates, circled the house to a locked door, and groped for a rusty key above the lintel. With a squeak it turned in the lock. Pushing the door open with her little belly, she stepped unhesitatingly inside. Molkho remained in the doorway, peering curiously into the house, which looked surprisingly tidy, with its plain furniture, straw mats, and shelves full of books and clay figurines. Who last had lived here? he wondered. Had they had children? Ya’ara stood looking around her, tall against the low ceiling. She looks best in this gray light, he thought as she led him to her old room, though I’ll never know her if I don’t make love to her. If she would only cry now, it would melt me so fast that sex would be no problem. Yet, though he waited patiently, she did not. Eagerly she prowled about the room, handling things, forgetting she was not in her own house, even opening an old closet as if hoping to find her dead babies there.
There was a crackle of dry grass. Someone was coming up the path. It was the curly little bookkeeper, determined to speak to her after all. Oblivious of Molkho’s presence, he began plaintively inquiring about Uri, while Ya’ara fended him off with polite but evasive replies. Now and then she tried asking him about himself, but each time he returned to Molkho’s counselor. Why had he never come to visit? How could he have forgotten them? He had to come, he had to, if only to explain himself! Ya’ara nodded, bending down to the little man, apparently a bachelor, who was perhaps once in love with her too. “We’ll come again,” she promised, looking her most majestic, so that Molkho, half in shadow in the corner, felt comforted too.
21
IF YOU’D LIKE TO HAVE LUNCH in a really unusual restaurant, let me take you to that little town called Zeru’a that I was telling you about,” said Molkho as the car silently took the curves back down to the main road. “It’s a bit far but well worth it.” He stopped to check the road map, then took the next turnoff, made a right onto the Acre-Safed highway, and turned left soon after at Rama, heading north on the climb toward Peki’in. They drove slowly up the winding mountain road, recalling the hikes taken by their youth group, a new feeling of intimacy between them. Had she ever thought of going back to Yodfat by herself? he asked. “No, I could never live without a man,” she answered, her frankness startling him again. “And certainly not there.”
It was nearly two o’clock when they reached Zeru’a, which was as quiet as a ghost town. He drove past the shopping center and along the dirt road that led to the Indians’ house, telling her whimsically about the dark-skinned girl he had all but fallen in love with. Yes, she said earnestly, you can fall in love even with a child. Wait here, he told her, parking near the house and going to knock on the door. But it was locked and the windows were shuttered, the only sign of life being the cow, which stood sadly chewing her cud in her shed, her face crawling with flies. He went to ask at the house of some neighbors, who recognized him at once. The Indians, they said, had gone to visit some cousins down south; in fact, they were thinking of moving there. “Did they have a boy or a girl?” he asked. “Another girl,” they said. “And how is the father?” asked Molkho. “Oh, he’s fine now,” they told him, causing him to feel a sudden pang. “He’s all better.”
They drove back to the shopping center, which was abandoned for the afternoon siesta. The little restaurant was open, however, its tall, dark owner sitting shadelike in a corner. He, too, remembered Molkho and rose to shake his hand warmly, as did the handful of customers; he had made, it seemed, quite an impression. They shook Ya’ara’s hand too, though blind, Molkho sensed, to her old beauty and disappointed she wasn’t younger. Moreover, the Indian was all out of organ stew. “If only I had known,” he lamented upon hearing how far Molkho had come for it. If they didn’t mind waiting a few hours, he would be glad to whip up a new batch, but to Molkho’s chagrin, they made do instead with dry steaks and soggy french fries, though the friendly crowd that formed around the table was compensation of sorts. Soon Ben-Ya’ish himself arrived, smiling, unshaven, and heavier than Molkho remembered him. “Whatever happened to that report of yours?” he asked, shaking hands with a conspiratorial grin. “It’s on the state comptroller’s desk,” Molkho told him. “We tried putting things in the best light, but it’s up to him now.” Satisfied that he had come just to show off his new girlfriend, a much-appreciated gesture despite their doubts about her, the locals grew even friendlier. When he rose to ask for the bill, the Indian owner flashed him a dark smile. “Don’t worry about it—it’s on the house!” called out voices. “The pleasure was ours!” They were offended when Molkho, loath to be suspected of venality, insisted on paying. “You’re insulting us,” they told him, pointing out that in any case, the Indian having suddenly vanished, there was no one to pay.
On their way back to Haifa, Molkho felt that he and Ya’ara had been together for weeks. She, too, seemed more relaxed, and once out of the mountains, after stopping to buy a watermelon at a roadside stand, she shut her eyes and fell asleep. Just then, though, the engine began to knock, and glancing sideways at her tired face, Molkho felt depressed by the thought of coming home and having to explain her to the high school boy, who, hungry and dirty, would no doubt be back from his hike.
She awoke at the outskirts of Haifa, lit her last cigarette, and asked him to stop for a new pack, reading the movie ads on a signboard while he entered a grocery. Though his anxiety grew worse as they neared home, he was relieved to discover that the boy wasn’t there yet. Ya’ara rushed inside uninhibitedly, beating him to the bathroom, as if she were no longer a guest but a roommate. Had she perhaps really decided to move in with him? Before he knew it, she had gone to the kitchen, taken out the big cutting knife, split the melon in half, sliced each half lengthwise, and put the pieces away in the refrigerator. The miracle is happening, thought Molkho, watching her move freely around the apartment, turn on the television, take out some cake, and put water up to boil. “How’s your head?” he asked. “Oh, it’s fine,” she laughed.
He went to shower and emerged to find her eating melon on the terrace with her dusty shoes and socks off, her toes stuck through the railing of the terrace. How worn and raw they looked, so different from the delicate cut-glass ones he had seen in Jerusalem! It can’t be that she’s fallen in love with me, he thought, gazing westward at the sun struggling out of the afternoon haze, feeling groggy from his missed nap. All summer long the sun had seemed to rise several times a day, each sunrise hotter and more brutal. The red juice of the watermelon trickled down her chin. She wiped it with the back of her hand and went off to shower and wash her hair, which was wrapped in a red-striped towel when she returned.
It was 6 P.M., though the light still glared fiercely. Suddenly the house seemed full of her: there wasn’t a corner where she hadn’t left some part of her, some item she had touched or used. Through her thin house frock, her breasts looked small and weak. It would have been different if I’d found her myself, he thought, instead of having her served up to me. She was leafing through the newspaper, drops of water dripping from her hair, still eating slice after slice of watermelon. “That lunch made me terribly thirsty,” she apologized, glancing at the movie section. Had he decided what film he wanted to see? Molkho hesitated. If he knew his son, the boy hadn’t taken a key; perhaps they should wait for him, after which he would be glad to see Carmen. The music, he smiled, would be livelier than last night’s chamber concert, although if she wasn’t in the moo
d for opera, Gandhi was recommended too.
All at once he found himself telling her about his trip to Berlin. She listened tensely while he described the Voles Opera, which were the latest thing in Europe, where the opera houses were as full as the theaters were empty; the performance of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which the male lead had astoundingly been sung by a woman; and—but why was he doing this; and with a grin yet!—his conversation in the beer cellar with the legal adviser. What an absurd idea that woman had sprung on him—and yet, as if it made perfect sense, he hadn’t stopped thinking of it since! From time to time, Ya’ara turned her bowed head to stare at the sea, which glittered with the rays of the slowly setting sun. “How could she have said such a thing?” he demanded resentfully. “Maybe I could have done more to keep my wife alive. I wouldn’t have minded her telling me that. After all, she had a husband who died too. If I killed my wife, then you killed him, I told her. But that didn’t faze her one bit. Maybe I did, but not like you, she said to me.”
He sniffed glumly. There were sounds outside the apartment. Suddenly fearing that his son might arrive and find Ya’ara in a house frock with his wife’s towel like a turban on her head, he rose impulsively. “Come,” he said, “let’s catch the first show. We’ll leave the key with the neighbors and put a note on the door. I honestly can’t remember what time he said he’d be back—if he said anything, because lately he doesn’t say much to me.”
22
THE LAST STRANDS of light were still glimmering in the summer night when they returned after nine. From the stairs, he saw with a sinking feeling that his note was still there, and hurriedly unlocking the door, he found the apartment dark and empty. “But what’s the matter with him!” he cried out in despair, overcome by fresh worry. “Where is he? He said he’d be home tonight! He’s been gone since Saturday morning; how long can a hike last?” Going to the boy’s room, which looked like a foreign land in the yellow lamplight, he began rummaging among piles of papers on the desk, fumbling through drawers of old notebooks, even turning inside out the pockets of the dirty jeans on the bed, looking for some sign, some Scout circular, some name of a friend, that might be a clue to the boy’s whereabouts. “It’s ridiculous to have to be doing this,” he yelled irately, grabbing the phone book and searching for the number of his son’s classmate’s parents who had called the night before. “Did your boy turn up in the end?” he asked them over the phone. It took them a while to remember that he had ever been lost. “Now it’s my turn to be worried,” he said to them. “My son still isn’t back from his hike. I thought perhaps you might know the names of some of the boys in the class.”
He jotted down some names and numbers and dialed them one by one, yet no one could tell him anything. Wide-eyed, he looked at Ya’ara, who was sitting in front of the silent television, calmly watching him panic. “But I can’t have this!” he wailed, pacing frantically. “I want to know where he is and who he went with! Maybe I should go to his Scout den.” “Why don’t you,” said Ya’ara. “I’ll wait here.” “No, come with me,” he insisted. “He’ll have the shock of his life if he comes home to find a strange woman in the house. Let’s go.”
They drove the few blocks to the den, a green cabin that stood at the bottom of some stairs. “Don’t bother,” he said to her as she opened her car door, “I’ll be right back.” He all but ran down the dark steps, but the cabin was locked and lifeless. In an empty lot nearby, some children were standing around a small fire, and he went to have a word with them; though they too knew nothing about any hike, they were at least able to give him the name and address of one of the Scout leaders. “That’s the best I could do,” he told Ya’ara when he rejoined her in the car. “Maybe I’m being hysterical, but I feel I should go there.”
Again he told her to wait for him in the car. “I won’t be a minute,” he said, dashing into the building, where he quickly scanned the mailboxes, bounded up the stairs, and rang a doorbell. The Scout leader was not home.
Although she was waiting obediently in the car when he returned, she gave him a searching look. “I know I’m overdoing it,” he apologized, boyishly out of breath, “but I have to clear this up. It doesn’t make sense that no one knows anything. Maybe he went off somewhere on his own. Why don’t we drop by his school? Of course, it’s closed for vacation—but still...”
Indeed, the school was dark and abandoned. “Wait here,” he said once more to Ya’ara, who clearly hadn’t thought of doing anything else. “I’ll have a look around and see if there are any notices up. Here, let me turn on the radio for you.” He found her a station that played music, unsuccessfully tried the locked gate, and then worked his way along the fence until he came to a hole. It was small and nearly at ground level, but after a moment’s indecision, he knelt and wriggled through it into the schoolyard, ducking volleyball nets and dodging backboards until he came to the main building, where he passed a bare bulletin board in a hallway and tried in vain to force the door of the principal’s office. Ya’ara was smoking thoughtfully when he came running back. “I couldn’t find a thing,” he shouted through the fence. “The place is dead. But I think there’s a janitor on the premises, and if you’ll just wait a while, I’ll try to find him.” He ran back into the building and down a staircase, passing from wing to wing, through the high school, the junior high school, the elementary school, losing his way in the eerily silent corridors with their inexpungible smells of rotten bananas and old sneakers, and even entering an open classroom, through whose windows the thin moon that shone on the desks stacked with chairs made him feel all over again the stomach-knotted sorrow of youth. Damn him! he thought, weeping inwardly. And I’m to blame, I’m to blame too.
It was nearly ten by the time he returned to the car, pale and anguished. “Let’s listen to the ten o’clock news,” he said. “If anything happened, we’ll hear about it.” But there was nothing. “Maybe he’s home by now,” suggested Ya’ara softly. “Yes,” Molkho agreed, “and here we’ll have been going out of our minds with worry! There’s a pay phone up the street by the post office; we can call from there. Now you see what children are like! Sometimes they’re nothing but trouble.”
But there was no answer when he called. He laid his head on the steering wheel, feeling his fear get the better of him, and then decided to look for the college student. “I know he’s studying for an exam,” he told Ya’ara, “but it is his brother.” He drove to the campus and parked by the library. “If you don’t mind,” he said gently yet another time, for it was premature to introduce her to the family, “wait for me here. You can stretch your legs on the lawn if you’d like. I want to see if Omri knows anything.” He entered the large reading room with its windows looking out on the lights of the city and its air-conditioned atmosphere, which felt like that of another planet, passing down the rows of students hunched by their lamps until he found the college boy sitting drowsily beside a pile of books and laid a gentle hand on his shoulder. But tall, thin Omri, when told in a whisper what had happened, did not seem at all upset. “He must be delayed somewhere, Dad. What are you so worried about?” “But what hike was he on?” demanded Molkho. “No one knows a thing about it.” “Maybe he went with a different Scout pack,” drawled Omri. “Why don’t you wait for him at home?” “No, I’d better call the police,” said Molkho inconsolably. “But it’s too early for that,” objected his son with a baffled look. “They won’t understand what you want from them.” “You’re right,” whispered Molkho, turning the pages of a book “I’m at my wits’ end. It’s a good thing your mother is dead. If anything’s happened to him, I’ll want to die too!” The college student shut his eyes, his head full of formulas and numbers. “Would you like me to sleep at your place tonight?” he asked wearily. “No, there’s no need,” answered Molkho. “If he’s not home by midnight, I’ll let you know. I just hope he knows what he’s doing.”
He rose, leaned over his son’s crew-cut head, patted it lightly, and stepped out into the night, where
Ya’ara’s silhouette through the dark window of the car looked like a smoke-wreathed ghost. He thought of Gandhi and of millions of Indians and then tried picturing the cosmos flipping over and his son falling out of it. “You smoke too much,” he said, brushing against Ya’ara as he slipped into the car. “You’re poisoning yourself for no good reason.” Annoyed, she huddled in her seat without answering. Naturally, Omri knew nothing, Molkho told her. “Since my wife’s death, it’s been every man for himself in our family. Let’s drive to Carmel Center. Maybe he’s waiting for a bus.” He cruised slowly past the bus stops in the Center, but the boy wasn’t there, and he swung around and started home, driving slowly downhill in low gear. “Maybe he decided to walk. You look on your side and I’ll look on mine. If you see a teenager with curly hair just like mine, that’s him.”
She quickly opened her door when they pulled up by the house, exhausted and eager to get upstairs. “Just a minute, you wait here,” he ordered, jumping out first and stopping short when he saw that the apartment was still dark. And the note was still on the door, an air of permanency about it. Unthinkingly he grabbed it and hurried back to the car, where her thin, pale arm was resting in the window. “He’s not there,” he said. “I can’t just sit up waiting for him. He’s only sixteen. Suppose something happened? His mother would murder me! We’d better look some more. I know you’re tired, but what if he missed the last bus from the Central Station and can’t get home? I’m worried,” he said with a lump in his throat. “If he’s not there, I’ll call the police.”
Five Seasons Page 29