VEDUCHA
The Arab returns at the end of the night, dirty, his boots full of mud. He’s already learned to take them off in the hall and come into the apartment in his socks. He treads softly but I wake up.
“Well, did you find anything?”
“What?”
“What do you mean what? God in heaven, what are you doing out there all night?”
But he hardly understands what I’m saying. At first I used to run to the telephone to talk to Adam and he would say, “What do you think? If I knew anything I’d come to you.”
I stopped questioning the Arab and stopped telephoning.
He’s always in a good mood, this Arab, quite content, whistling a tune, pleased with himself. God, what’s he so happy about? Walking around the house a little, eating a slice of bread, intending to go to bed just as he is. But I soon cured him of that.
“Shame on you, boy, we aren’t in Mecca, wash first.”
He was offended, going pale with anger. I had profaned the Muslim holy of holies.
“What has Mecca to do with it? Mecca is cleaner than all Israel …”
“Have you been there?”
“No, but neither have you.”
What nerve. How does he know I haven’t been to Mecca, at my age I could have been anywhere. But I said nothing, I didn’t want to start a quarrel, shame on an old woman who would quarrel with a child like him, and what would Adam say, the wonderful man who is wearing himself out at night looking for Gabriel. Anyway he learned to go and wash first while I prepared him an early breakfast, and he ate and drank, thank God he didn’t lose his appetite at night, wearing his strange red pyjamas that always remind me of the pyjamas that my late grandfather used to wear in the summer, in the Old City, when he sat on the balcony in the afternoon to look at the Western Wall.
Then he’d go to bed, tossing about for a while and making the bed creak, and then settling down. After two hours I’d go quietly into his room, covering him up well, taking his underclothes and throwing them in the laundry basket, examining his trousers to make sure there were no bombs or hashish in them. I have to keep a close watch on him. So sad. At first I used to find nothing in his pockets, not even a handkerchief, and I put in a handkerchief and a few pounds too so he could buy sweets. Later I began finding money, fifty, a hundred pounds. Adam is giving him money, he deserves it, but he’s such a spendthrift, after a week it’s almost all gone. Once he bought himself a big penknife. Without thinking twice I threw it away, flushed it down the toilet. We know what happens when Arabs go about with knives.
At twelve noon he wakes up, eats again, takes the rubbish out, fixes a dripping tap or clears a blockage in the sink or the toilet and goes out for a walk in the city, goes to the movies. Comes back at six o’clock full of life, his eyes sparkling, sits down to read to me from the papers for a while, reading in a sceptical, scornful sort of tone, but at least he pronounces the tough letters correctly.
He eats supper now without much appetite and goes out again for a short walk, every day he comes home later, needing less and less sleep. And so the time passes. The tow truck comes in the night, returns early in the morning, and there’s no sign of my Gabriel. I weep on the telephone to Adam, “What’s going to happen?”
DAFI
A different tiredness now, real tiredness, no longer the empty and nervous tiredness of sleepless nights. The sweet tiredness of limbs aching from a long journey at night.
We used to arrive home at two or three in the morning and go to bed. Mommy was the first to get up and she’d rouse the two of us and prepare breakfast. It was a novelty having Daddy at home in the mornings, three of us sitting down to breakfast.
At school I moved about slowly, during break sinking down on a stone in the playground, Tali beside me. Since what happened with Arzi they made me change places and now somebody else is sleeping there. They put me at the third desk in the middle row, right in the centre of the class, exposed and helpless. I was asked questions and expected to answer, or at least to sit quietly and look at the teacher with warm puppy eyes, to smile at feeble jokes, to pay attention. The other children in the class began to bore me a bit, because at night I was seeing real life at a time when they were only playing with dreams, all of them. Even Osnat began to annoy me a bit with her constant excitement. Tali was the only one I still got on well with, she doesn’t say much and keeps things to herself, doesn’t get on your nerves. She always falls in with any suggestion.
In history, literature, and Bible, and even in Talmud, it wasn’t too bad. Although I didn’t always follow exactly what was being said and I didn’t manage to do all the homework I still had good ideas, original questions to ask, and now and then I’d put my hand up and say something so interesting that the teacher was impressed and forgot all my other shortcomings. But in maths I didn’t have anything to say though I tried hard to think of something original. Baby Face was ruling the class now with a heavy hand and there were some of the boys who actually liked him because he used to bring along all kinds of mathematical puzzles that really annoyed me, why complicate things that are complicated enough already? We were racing through the syllabus. Before I’d managed to understand one set of exercises we were already moving on to something completely different. They’d all forgotten the teacher who was killed in the war, they betrayed him in no time. And of course I remembered him, or at least I remembered the memorial service that Shwartzy organized for him, and the poem that I recited with such feeling, in a low voice in the silent hall — Behold our bodies laid in line, we do not breathe. I missed him terribly, even though I wasn’t sure why.
Once when I was walking arm in arm with Tali in the corridor (I was so tired I had to lean on her during break) we came to the little sign by the entrance to the Physics Department and stopped to read the writing. The sign had already got tarnished and dirty. I went up to Shwartzy right there in the corridor and told him the sign needed cleaning, it wasn’t to the credit of the school, and he was so surprised, he thought I was making fiin of him but he couldn’t think of anything to say and he really did send the janitor to polish the sign.
Baby Face knew exactly what I was worth in maths but even so he wouldn’t leave me alone, and when he needed some victim to amuse himself with he used to call me up to the blackboard. I’d stand up and say, “I don’t know why you bother, you can give me a bad report right now if you like,” but he forced me to go up to the blackboard and I was so angry I made silly mistakes that had the class in fits of laughter, and I was on the verge of tears but I just smiled a stupid smile.
Once I couldn’t resist asking him what was the point of learning how to do all these sums when there are those little pocket calculators that you can take around with you anywhere, even to the desert, and he got mad, as if I were trying to do him out of a job, and he gave a long and complicated answer, not an answer at all.
And today I wasn’t in a fit state for anything because last night we towed in a car in which a child had been killed and we saw the blood and the little shoe lying on the seat. I thought of skipping the maths lesson to avoid any unnecessary trouble but Shwartzy was on patrol outside and in the first-aid room they were giving injections. So in the end I stayed in the classroom and Baby Face arrived, as arrogant as usual, and attacked me straightaway, as if there weren’t another forty children that he could have picked on. Sometimes I think Tali’s right, maybe he’s a bit in love with me and he just doesn’t know how to handle it. I went up to the blackboard and the trouble started. And suddenly I saw him take a familiar notebook out of his briefcase, the notebook of the teacher who was killed, with all the names and the marks written in it, they must have passed it on to him so he could compare notes. I recognized the dead man’s handwriting, faint handwriting, very slanted. I felt weak, leaned against the blackboard. Terrible feelings of pity swept over me.