In the dusky light of late afternoon the right bus stopped and the right people got off: he a short young man with a mustache, she in her last months of pregnancy, holding on to his elbow, bearing her huge body with difficulty on white, swollen legs. It took time for them to arrive, advancing with extraordinary slowness from the bus stop in the direction of our house. At the foot of the hill they stopped, paused, and considered for a moment. “Is your father at home?” the man finally asked. I shook my head. “Where is he?” he asked. “I don’t know,” I replied. “And your mother?” asked the woman. “Is your mother at home?” I covered the fourth or fifth hole with sand and didn’t answer. I peeked at them out of the corner of my eye: the woman was sweating, she was dripping with sweat. The neck of her dress, from which a strip of gathered cloth stuck up, like a clown’s ruff, was soaked through, plastered to the top of her chest. Anxiety trembled in the damp, still air between us like vapors. I wallowed luxuriously in the warm stream wetting my pants again, all the way down to the back of my knees. In the end they would leave. Again the woman took hold of his elbow; again she tottered on her swollen legs, giving him her handbag to hold. I waited a moment or two, watching their receding backs, and then I got to my feet, passed them, and ran as fast as I could toward the shack. I stood at the end of the path, hiding behind the garbage can, and waited. They reached the shack, this time for some reason via the neighbors’ yard, and stood next to the low wooden fence separating the two houses.
“Maurice, Maurice,” they called loudly, in chorus, the man in a deep baritone and the woman accompanying him in a rather squeaky voice, stressing the last syllable. Corinne came out of the shower, wrapped in a yellow bathrobe, her hands digging deep into the pockets; in a minute they would make a hole. The mother came out, too: “Why have you come again? He isn’t here, I told you he wasn’t here,” she said in a lowered, almost confidential voice. “We were told that he’s here, that he’s been seen around here,” the man insisted. “Who told you?” Corinne rushed into the fray. “Who’s the liar who said that? Go look somewhere else. When you find him tell us, we want to know, too.” The pregnant woman burst into tears and wiped her red face with the sleeve of her dress: “He took all our money, all of it. He talked and he talked and he talked, and my husband gave him all the money for the business deal. I haven’t got anything to buy a bed for the baby, a bed for the baby.” She smacked her stomach, rattling the gold bracelets on her wrist. The man came closer. He almost stuck his face into the mother’s face: “I’ll go to the police, let the police come and take you, thieves.” I saw Corinne leap: she flew to the end of the porch, her robe came open, exposing her thighs, snatched up the broom, and began to hit — the man, the woman wailing behind him, the man again, the mother who placed herself between them, the neighbors’ dumb dog who ran around them in circles, barking without stopping. The man seized Corinne by her hair and neck, while the wailing woman suddenly bent down and stuck her teeth into my sister’s arm. The mother pulled the broom out of Corinne’s hands and began to beat them herself. All the way to the road she chased them with the broom, yelling: “He’s gone, gone, gone.”
HE’S GONE (1)
WHERE WAS HE when he wasn’t there? He was never “there,” he flickered on and off, in the lives of others and in his own life, too.
HE’S GONE (2)
“WHAT DO YOU think? Was he a spy?” asked my brother, closing one eye, the good one, with a half smile, dying to take off, he just needed a bit of gas. “Who?” I made myself un-knowing, deliberately putting off what was coming anyway, with or without gas. “Maurice. In the neighborhood they said he was a spy.” I laughed. He laughed, too, but only halfway. As a professional, he knew not to laugh with the audience. “Listen, I’m being serious now, he acted like a spy. Disappearing like that, where did he disappear to?” My brother creased his brow, settled down: “And the way he talked, too. He had that way of talking in hints. He never stopped hinting. Hints, hints, all the time hints,” said my brother, covering his fourth banana with chocolate spread and taking a bite. “Eating all those bananas will make you sick,” I warned him. He took no notice, carried on: “But the interesting thing is, who was he spying for?” “For himself,” the mother contributed, “only him, him, and him.” My brother leaned his elbows on the table, pressed his hands hard against his cheeks, and went on: “I, for instance, would break in a second. The minute they put me in the dungeon with the ropes to hang you from your feet, I’d tell them everything, spill all the secrets. Even before the dungeon I’d tell, just for a piece of chocolate or something.” He stopped, reflecting for a minute: “But not him, he had a strong character, he wouldn’t be broken by torture,” said my brother, dwelling enjoyably on the word “torture.” The mother wiped the table with a cloth, removed the basket of bananas from under his protesting eyes: “He wasn’t a spy,” she said, “he was a crook.” “So how come they said he was a spy?” my brother persisted. “So what if they said?” She waved her arm. “People say all kinds of nonsense. If I listened to everything they said, hairs would grow on the palms of my hands.” “So you, in other words, never sensed anything suspicious in his behavior?” “Anything suspicious?” she snorted contemptuously. “What are you talking about, anything suspicious? Everything about him was suspicious, he was suspicious from head to toe,” she said. She might as well have been talking to the wall. My brother suddenly grinned from ear to ear: “What a character, that Maurice. Remember you told us how in Egypt, in the war, he and your brother bought silk parachutes from the British soldiers at bargain prices and went into business with about a thousand shirts they’d sewn, remember?”
A PORTRAIT OF MAURICE BY THE MOTHER
“YOU COULD SAY he grew up in the street, from a child he hung out in the streets of Cairo. Cafés and cafés. His mother, poor woman, was an aristocrat, half-mad, the whole house was at sixes and sevens: you went in and saw everything heaped up in piles on the floor. His father would take women into her bed; he drove the poor thing crazy and then left. He was a lawyer, his father. His mother would send Maurice to his father’s office to ask for money. He’d let him wait outside for days until he let him in. He’d sit there like a pauper with all the other paupers and wait for his father to give him money. His sister was highly educated and a bit off her rocker, too. What a life, with that mother and brother. She tried to kill herself once, the sister, she was as beautiful as Laila Mourad, the actress. He studied, didn’t study, worked, didn’t work, who knows what he did? He learned in the street, he learned in the cafés from those people who were communists, all day long politics, he didn’t want to come here to Israel. I wanted to because of my brothers, and he came. As soon as we got off the ship in Haifa he got that obsession with the Mizrahim into his head, from the minute we landed. Discrimination. He was right, but he didn’t do anything sensibly, he spoiled everything. Who didn’t come to our house to talk to him? Yigal Allon himself, the minister of labor. But Maurice couldn’t take the high road. Not him. They gave him a great job in the Labor Ministry, put him at the top, with his education and fine talk. So what did he do? Protested outside the Labor Ministry, ‘Bread and work.’ So they fired him. How could you do such a thing? I asked him. Doesn’t the bread you bring home come first? ‘My principles,’ he says. His principles. Nothing was good enough for him except for prime minister. Prime minister, that’s what his majesty wanted to be. With all the fancy jobs they gave him, the respect people paid him in the beginning. And the papers. The whole house full of papers and more papers. No day and no night, the coffee and the cigarettes and the papers, the papers.”