His silence only deepened as he tried remembering the black doll. He had no wish to rage with his sister against their mother. He hadn’t seen her ghost for ages. Would he end up having to eulogize her too?
Two hours ago he had been speaking in honor of Tedeschi. The lights in the auditorium had come on, the light switch behind Rashid having been discovered, just as he was describing in a tremulous voice how the translatoress of the Age of Ignorance, that pre-Islamic period so crucial for understanding the Arabs, had combined scholarship with her love of poetry and devotion to her husband’s health. But had it been fair to say what he had about Tedeschi’s illnesses, or had this been cheap psychologizing on his part? Before he could answer that, his son’s dreary solitude again pierced the twilight of his mind. For the first time, he felt no sympathy for Ofer, only anger. That’s it, my boy, he addressed him in his thoughts. I’ve failed just as you hoped I would. There’s no more hotel and no more Arabs to help me.
As in a dream, this, too, quickly faded. Now he saw his pale, lanky Circe, curled on the basement bed like a long fetus, osmosing into her own freedom.
“Listen,” he said to his sister. “I’m getting hungry. Shall I bring you something to eat too?”
“I’m too worried to eat. But I can feel how edgy you are. Why don’t you go home? It’s late.”
“It’s all right. Hagit made me promise to stay until Ayal comes.”
His sister smiled, reaching out a blind hand toward him.
The corridor outside was empty. The visitors had gone home. The nurse on duty sat reading a book. There was no telling whether the patients, lying in their rooms with bandaged eyes, were awake or asleep. A large figure was blocking his path.
“What’s up, Professor?”
To his amazement, he found himself looking at his sister’s former husband, a tall, thin, balding ex-playboy. Hearing from his son that Raya was in the hospital, he had come to have a look. Although he was a strange, difficult man who had given his wife a hard time, Rivlin felt a nostalgic affection for him.
“Look who’s here!” he said, giving him a friendly slap on the shoulder. “I don’t believe it! Come, say hello to Raya. She’ll flip when she sees you.”
“Shhh,” his ex-brother-in-law said. “If she does see me, she’s liable to detach her other retina.”
“But isn’t that what you’re here for?” For some reason, his encounter with this man, whom he had not run into for years, had improved his mood.
“To see Raya? What a thought! The head eye doctor is my tennis partner. Ayal asked me to speak to him.”
“But as long as you’re here,” Rivlin persisted. “why not look in on her? Don’t be childish. What are you afraid of? She won’t even know it’s you. Her eyes are covered.”
“They are?” The temptation to be invisible in his wife’s presence was too great to overcome. Silently, he followed Rivlin to Raya’s room.
She was still lying on the couch, small and thin. A lamp, buzzing softly on the table, lit her face. The black patches over her eyes gave her the look of an airplane passenger trying to get some sleep. For a moment, Rivlin thought she was drowsing. But sensing her ex-husband, who was standing in the doorway with a crooked smile, she raised her head and asked anxiously:
“Yochi, is that you?”
“What’s up?” Rivlin asked quietly.
“Did you eat so fast?”
“It seems I did…”
“But there’s someone else with you,” she said worriedly. “Who is it?”
He dodged the question. “Who could it be?”
“But there is!” She sounded fearful. “Someone is with you! Is it your driver?”
“My driver?”
The unseen husband smiled ironically. His blue, froggy eyes darted with amusement, as if reconfirming the oddness of the woman he had married and suffered with. Putting a finger to his lips, he turned and left.
Ayal arrived at last, tired but in full possession of himself. When told of his father’s visit, he said angrily to Rivlin, “You shouldn’t have let him come near her,” as if he were talking about two disturbed children.
It was ten o’clock when, back in a wet, glittering Tel Aviv street full of strollers taking the air after the storm, he climbed into the jeep and woke Rashid — who, having filled the vehicle with smoke from one of Fu’ad’s cigars, now lay fast asleep beneath a blanket.
“Look here, Rashid,” he said. “It’s turned into such a long day that I’m not driving back with you unless you let me pay you.”
“Pay me?” The messenger’s coal black eyes regarded him blearily. “You couldn’t afford what a day like this costs.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” the Orientalist said, offended. “I’m not a charity case. I can afford whatever you would normally take. Just tell me honestly what that is.”
“Normally?” Rashid smiled to himself, as if at a new thought. “For a long, hard day like this with a four-wheel drive vehicle, I’d take… at least… at least fifteen hundred shekels.”
“Fifteen hundred?” Though unable to conceal his shock, he quickly recovered and laughed derisively. “If that’s the going price, fine. Why not?” Grandly he pulled out a checkbook and wrote a check, while promising Rashid that his wife would read up on the immigration laws dealing with the reunion of families.
The Arab jammed the check in his pocket and replied in a half hopeless, half newly dismissive tone:
“You can tell the judge not to try too hard, Professor. Laws have got nothing to do with it.”
15.
I have a strange pet, half kitten, half lamb. It’s a hand-me-down from my father, but only now has it begun to grow.
— Franz Kafka
THE HEAVY RAINS, WHICH went on falling in the north for another week, turned the dirt roads of the Israeli security zone in southern Lebanon into treacherous bogs. After a Bedouin tracker was killed by a mine concealed in the mud, Central Command suspended all foot patrols and kept the roads open with armored vehicles. The Commanding Officer of the trackers’ platoon, a lieutenant whose name was Netur Kontar, hurriedly applied for leave and was granted it.
The CO was a Druze of about forty, a heavy man with a big mustache. Before leaving his base, he informed his family on the Carmel that he was going first to the village of B’keya in the Galilee, where he had promised to let his Christian dentist friend Marwan pull an infected wisdom tooth. If the weather improved, he might also join him and his friends for a night of hunting.
Kontar had been an avid hunter since he was a small boy. His father, discovering early that he had a natural instinct for finding his way at night without getting lost, took him along on his hunting trips, during which young Netur sometimes spent entire nights perched silently in the treetops. It was so hard to wake him the next morning that he was almost expelled from school. If it hadn’t been for his older sister, who did all his homework, he would never have graduated.
It was in the army, however, that his abilities became fully appreciated. As a recruit in boot camp, he so impressed his officers with his navigational skills that they vied to take him on their nighttime maneuvers. When his three years of conscripted service were over, the Northern Corps, loath to lose an ace tracker, made him the unusual offer of a commission, without requiring him to take an officers’ training course, and immediate command of a platoon in southern Lebanon.
The young Druze accepted, not only because the conditions were good and the job was a feather in his cap, but also because the army was a first-rate base from which to pursue his life’s passion. Throughout his long years of daily exposure to mines, bayonet charges, and booby traps, he took comfort in the regimental armory, out of which he enhanced his collection of weapons with an array of silencers, telescopic lenses, starlight sensors, and other devices, to say nothing of camouflage nets, which made excellent snares, and stale bread from the kitchens, which was good bait for wild boars. After losing his right thumb to a mine blast, he was afraid he had impaired his trigger finger, and for a while he suffered from depression. But the impediment was overcome, and the old army jeep that he was given in compensation, which he quickly filled with the equipment that now went with him everywhere, made him a legendary figure among the hunters of northern Israel and even of southern Lebanon.