“Yallah, ila l-amam.”* He rose and touched her bony shoulder. “Ta’ali nitdafa shwoy bil-kabu.”†
For the third time, he found himself walking through the hotel kitchen. In the between-meals silence, the carving knives and cleavers gleamed above the big, clean vats and the empty tables and cutting boards. They passed the large freezer and came to the little door whose concrete steps led to the underground corridor with its broken bicycle, torn tire, and bucket of hardened whitewash. A new broom was the one addition to this display. In the space at the corridor’s end the baby crib stood beside the old boiler, whose chimney was rammed into the ceiling like the tooth of an ancient, petrified mammoth that still gave off its secret heat.
Rivlin watched the tall woman search in vain for the key to the accountant’s room beneath the oilcloth mattress of the crib. The door to the dark room was open. Sound asleep on its bed was the protean driver-messenger-brother-cousin-uncle — displaced citizen — and-dybbuk for a day. Undressed, he lay dead to the world with his face to the wall, the splendid rear of his dark, smooth, naked body pointed at the door.
The proprietress was startled by the liberty taken by the maître d’. Yet touched by the sight of the naked Arab, who had instinctively availed himself of the freedom offered by this subterranean grotto, she asked Rivlin for his name, knelt by his side, and gently poked him as if he were a soldier being awakened for guard duty. “All right, Rashid,” she said. “You’ve slept enough. Give someone else a chance.”
His name spoken by an unfamiliar woman, followed by her gentle touch, caused the sleeper to bolt to an upright position and wrap himself in his sheet, the hot coals of hastily extinguished sleep still glowing in his eyes. As if he were in the midst of a dream whose interpretation they were, he groped with a beseeching hand toward the two Jews. Before he could utter an apology, if not for his sleep itself, for which he had permission, then at least for his nakedness, he was fully clothed and holding a folded sheet beneath his arm, with which he departed, to return it to Fu’ad.
“Wait. Don’t turn on the light,” Rivlin told the proprietress, who had shown no sign of doing any such thing. In the gloom pierced by a few murky rays coming from the direction of the staircase, he moved the accountant’s chair to the desk and sat down with his arms on his chest. He did not look at his Circe — who, instead of remaking the evacuated bed for him, sank onto it like a white ghost. It’s hopeless, he told himself, and there’s no time for it anyway, but if I don’t ask her now I never will. And although she had still made no move to do so, he said again, “Don’t turn on the light. Maybe it will be easier in the dark to tell me what you know about your sister. You can see how I’m suffering. Be kind just once.”
She said nothing. Unable to make out her expression in the dark, he did not know what she was thinking. One after another, her shoes dropped to the floor. The bed creaked. Only then did she say:
“You’re a hard man, Yochanan Rivlin. Really hard. Your Ofer was much nicer. What a pity you didn’t make a career in the police or the secret service instead of wasting your time teaching. You would have felt at home there, looking for the truth in all the wrong places. It’s too bad, because I thought you wanted something else from me — something I could have given you.”
A shiver went through him.
“Come to think of it, why not ask my sister? You can go on giving her the third degree. If anyone knows what happened to her, she does.”
“She refused twice,” Rivlin said. “I couldn’t get anything out of her.”
“And so you’ve decided to pick on me?”
“You’re a liberal woman. You’re open for a relationship. And you’ve chosen, if I may say so, an uninhibited single life that lets you be frank and do what you want despite your loyalty to your family and the hotel… or am I wrong?”
She sat up on the bed. His eyes, now accustomed to the dim light, discerned the shadow of a smile as she pulled off her sweater, unfastened her apron, and opened the linen drawer beneath the bed. She took out a sheet, spread it on the mattress, and lay down again.
“Thank you for telling me how liberal and open I am. But it won’t do you any good, because I really know and understand nothing about my sister and Ofer.”
“But you must!” he burst out, placing professorial hands on his heart.
She laughed out loud. “You don’t believe me, do you?” she said easily. “And maybe you’re right not to. In a family, after all, everything is connected, even what no one understands. But there has to be some closeness before one can talk about such things. And if you’re really such a big-time sleuth, I have a proposal, or rather a condition, to make… yes, a condition. That’s the right word for it. Before I can loosen up with you, I need some love. I don’t suppose you would mind a secret little bedtime adventure, would you? We might as well start now. After all, you’re a busy man — and you must realize by now how uninhibited I really am….”
His arms stayed crossed. Although he wasn’t sure whether he was being challenged to a test of his determination or a battle of wills, he knew deep down that he had expected this — that his unforeseen visit had been made with it in mind.
“If such is your condition,” he said with mock formality, “I am prepared to surrender my precious faithfulness to my wife. But what is it you look forward to in an old man like me?”
She smiled. “Leave that to me. You already made me curious at the bereavement, when I saw how lovingly you embraced my mother. That’s why I insisted you wait for Galya. And when I saw you pleading with her in the garden, I said to myself, this is a man who will come back. And you did….”
“But curious about what?”
“About what you’re like when you’re turned on.”
“But what good to you is my pretending to be turned on?”
“As good as my pretending to know something is to you.”
“Then you don’t?”
“Don’t know and don’t care. I’m not like you. I respect other people’s boundaries and wills. I’ve never understood how you dared snoop on your son’s life, poking into his affairs while pretending to save him. If I were your daughter I’d have murdered you long ago.”
“Murdered me?”
“With my own hands.”
“Then how lucky I’m not your father.” But the feeble joke fell flat. Her hard face jutting with disappointment, she turned to the wall, curled up her long body, and withdrew. At that moment he knew that, in a basement full of files, he had lost his last link to a world that would forever keep his son’s secret. Reluctantly he rose, wanting to touch the long body one last time. But he lacked the courage to do so and only said a weak good-bye that was not acknowledged. He walked past the silent stove, running his fingers over the crib, then traversed the corridor and climbed the stairs to the kitchen, in which a solitary chef was concentrating on beheading a large fish.
The two Arabs were in the smoking lounge, talking quietly like old friends. Fu’ad was smoking a cigarette while Rashid twirled a cigar between his fingers as if uncertain what to do with it. They looked at him accusingly as he entered. For the first time he felt that neither of them liked him. “Shu hada, ya Brofesor?” Rashid asked in a cold voice. “Kul halkad b’sur’ah hillis nomak?”*
12.
IT WAS CLEAR AND getting frostier outside. The snow had been cleared from the streets. Here and there, in the afternoon sun, rosy icicles gleamed on the roofs.