And Dafi began to laugh. “A loan?”
And he told me to come to the garage next day, he’d tell Erlich to transfer the wages to me, but I didn’t want them to take the money away from Father.
“It doesn’t matter … doesn’t matter …” I was getting all mixed up. “It’s just … I thought …”
And he didn’t understand but Dafi opened the money box and took out two hundred pounds.
“What’s the point of a loan? You’ve been working so hard … do you want more?”
“No, that’s quite all right,” I whispered, and pulled the notes out of her hot hand.
I ran off home with the two hundred pounds, which I was sure was going to last me a long time, but after two or three weeks I was broke again, so on the sly I asked Dafi for more and she smiled and gave me more.
ADAM
Every evening I say to myself, that’s enough, time to stop, it’s madness trying to find him in these night excursions. But even so I can’t stop. At midnight the phone rings and appeals for help come flooding in. I’ve already given up answering the phone, Dafi always gets there first and eagerly she writes down the details, with an enthusiasm that I don’t understand, already she knows the names of the duty clerks in the control room and she swaps jokes with them. Dafi — every day I have less control over her, Asya is powerless too. I made a mistake that first night when I let her come out with me. Since then there’s been no opposing her, she’s got to come out with me, if I don’t take her she’ll go out walking in the streets. And Asya’s asleep, you can’t have a proper conversation with her, when I wake her up she answers me, oh yes, she talks, but she doesn’t get out of bed, I just turn my back and she’s fast asleep again.
And so we go out in the night, picking up Na’im and driving off to look for the nightlife Israelis who’ve broken down on the road. Strange work and very profitable, especially as I usually tow the cars to my own garage, picking up a flood of new customers.
Nights at the end of winter, a mixture of heat and rain, scents of blossoms. And Israel in a fitful, dreamless sleep, a moment’s slumber. Looking suddenly enormous, all lit up, little villages turning into cities. And on the roads the endless roar of traffic, army convoys, private cars, trucks, hitch-hikers, soldiers appearing suddenly in the middle of an empty road, some dirty, some immaculate, returning home or to the depot. Adventurers, kibbutz volunteers from abroad, labourers from the occupied territories. Four months have passed now since the end of the war and the land is still uneasy, men wandering about in a vague search for something, for some account that remains to be settled.
And I’m in the middle of all this with the tow truck, the two children chattering happily beside me, driving along, the light flashing above my head, looking for a little old Morris, 1947 model, blue. Looking for a man who disappeared. Absurd.
And the work is hard. It’s many years since I’ve been involved in such basic mechanical work. Repairing split rubber tubing, clearing fuel blockages, fixing loose clutches, replacing fan belts, reviving burned-out generators. Work under difficult conditions, in the dark, in the pouring rain, by flashlight, without proper spare parts, trying to improvise with steel wire, with old screws. Lucky that Na’im’s there to help me, he works hard and he’s learning fast. All the time I’m more and more pleased with him, he brings me the right tools and crawls under the car to attach the cables. Already there are jobs that he can do by himself and I let him. Why not? I begin to feel a new kind of exhaustion, when I have to loosen a rusty screw I breathe heavily. Contact with the forgotten nuts and bolts.
These nightlife Israelis are a people in their own right. Burly taxi drivers, young men who’ve smacked up their parents’ cars, a tired lecturer returning from a lecture at a kibbutz, angry party officials. And women too, alone, in the small hours of the morning, coming home from a protest meeting or an adventure. And you’re always liable to find a bleary-eyed soldier, a tired hitch-hiker, left to doze in the crashed car, his rifle between his knees.
And always a crowd of people gathers around you to give advice. You need nerves of steel to work in silence. They’re all experts. Dafi soon gets into conversation, the girl has a light and provocative tongue. The young men swap jokes with her, attracted to her.
A girl –
Her squeals of laughter in the silence of the night and when at last I’ve succeeded in starting the engine and I’m surrounded by grateful faces, I fix the price without hesitation. Special night rates. They protest at first. But I send them to Dafi, who has written out a price list in big letters, with coloured crayons, shining a flashlight on it and showing it to them with a little smile, carefully counting the money, writing down particulars on the backs of cheques, taking identity card numbers, all with such solemnity, with a strange sort of happiness.
But sometimes there’s nobody to take money from. Last night we were called out to a crashed car lying in a ditch at the side of the freeway not far from Hadera. A lone soldier standing beside it, waiting for us. He was witness to a ghastly accident, two parents and a child, the child killed, the parents in the hospital. The police have been there, they have taken all the details, all we are asked to do is take the car away. I flash the light on, see the smashed windows, the torn upholstery, bloodstains on the seats, a child’s shoe, a little sock. Dafi and I freeze, paralyzed, but Na’im, without me saying a word to him, starts playing out the cables, crawling on the ground under the wreckage of the car, running to the winch, setting it in motion, going back to fix the coupling, back to the winch and gradually dragging the car out of the ditch. I watch him and think, how quickly he’s learning, it’s incredible.
And so without speaking we go back, the smashed car hanging behind us, almost airborne, just one wheel bouncing on the road. We drive slowly, a long journey, the soldier dozing beside me and the children sitting silent on the back seat, watching the car slung on the back, the rain lashing it and pouring in through the broken windows, and I drive wearily, no longer looking out at the passing traffic, forgetting to search for him. I must give him up.
ASYA
A giant black man, very elegant, wearing a bright green suit and a fashionable tie of the same colour, is leading the way. Leading me into a huge gallery full of light, the roof made of glass. He talks and explains to me the pictures hanging far apart in niches on the wall. Pictures of lush landscapes, fields, forests, villages, European landscapes but in a bracing African light. Did he paint these pictures? I ask, my eyes fixed on him, he’s so tall. No, his bright, assured smile, but they are pictures of his homeland and that is why he speaks of them with such love. “How wonderful it is, how beautiful, see, the new settlements that we have built, a renewed land.” And I go closer to look, seeing that these are not pictures but reality, real things, movement clearly visible, men with little carts, a plump and placid farmer ploughing the earth, walking behind a beast with curved horns, a sort of roebuck. Dark people in old clothes, children in turbans at play.
“Come and see this picture,” he calls to me from the end of the hall, and I go to him with a sense of exaltation, I’m at such a height and see so far, like looking down at the universe. It’s a picture of fields stretching away to the blue horizon, empty of people, cut in half by a long straight channel, meandering away to the skyline. And from its centre springs a bubbling mass of white foam, lava from the depths of the globe. And without a word being said I understand — this is the equator itself. I catch my breath, as if I’ve seen a mysterious vision. This long, obstinate and definitive line.