She waited for him from five in the morning, on the Friday he came and on the others when he didn’t come. The mother said: “Why are you waiting for him at five in the morning? How do you think he’s going to get here so early?” The child hated her, secretly she kicked the flowerpot in the corner of the hall and knocked it over on its side, pretended to bend down to pick up the broken pieces, but kicked them farther away with the toe of her shoe, toward the carpet. “Get out of the way”—the mother pushed her with the broom—“you’re just making a mess.” The child looked at the floor tiles, at the dirt collected in the cracks: “I’ll go and live in Tel Aviv, too, and make a newspaper with him,” she said. “With who? Who will you make a newspaper with?” asked the mother, going on to wipe the frame of the bathroom door. The child followed her: “With Maurice. I’ll live with Maurice and we’ll make a newspaper together.” “Go, salamat, we’ll cry over you, too,” said the mother. “What are you waiting for? The door’s open.”
Dressed in her Tel Aviv clothes, the ones he had once brought her from Tel Aviv, she went to stand at the turn, to look in both the directions from which he could come: on the bus from Petach Tikva into the neighborhood, or the one from Tel Aviv that stopped at Kiron, and meant a long walk to the shack. He said: “I hate Petach Tikva, I’d rather walk than pass through Petach Tikva.” She remembered those words now—“I hate Petach Tikva”—and what stood behind them and before them, the firm back of the words, what he called the “point of view,” or “my point of view”: that a human being, elbani-adam, did or didn’t do things without any connection to efficiency or saving time, that the distress involved in “I hate Petach Tikva” rightly overcame petty considerations of efficiency. But he didn’t say “petty,” he said: “Petach Tikva isn’t a town or a village, it’s nothing. The only people who live there are the petit bourgeoisie who I can’t stand.” She walked at his side, on the gravel verges of the asphalt road, and tried to adapt herself to the rhythm and tone of his progress, which was neither slow nor fast, but something else, sideways, striving sideways. “What do they do, those people in Petach Tikva?” she asked. He wasn’t listening. He had to have his coffee: “I have to have a cup of coffee,” he said. They were almost there; they could see two-thirds of the cypress tree in front of the shack. The mother was waiting on the porch but she pretended that she wasn’t waiting — she was busy sewing something and she didn’t look up. He stood there, his briefcase under his arm, the plastic bag with a few dirty shirts for washing in his other hand: “I came to take the child for the day. I’m taking her to the Hilton,” he said. “Ya farhati,” she replied, still not raising her eyes, “A real treat. Enjoy yourselves.” When the two of them left, returning to the asphalt road leading to the Tel Aviv bus stop, it was nearly ten o’clock, but Maurice said there was no hurry, he wasn’t worried. He bought her a falafel at the commercial center opposite the bus stop, and he didn’t see or pretended not to see her throwing away the bits of pickled cucumber from the salad, scattering a trail of cucumber slices behind them. “Am I allowed to throw them away?” she asked, and after a couple of minutes, with great satisfaction: “Am I allowed?” He shrugged his thin, hunched shoulders: “How can you order a person what to like and what to eat? Love isn’t an order.”
On the bus, sitting side by side, he told her where they were going and why. He said, “A friend of mine,” stressing the words with imposing dignity, and repeating “A great friend of mine.” His friend was a special doctor, called Dr. Berger, who had come to the Hilton from France, who cured people with special herbs and drugs of his own invention. He had only come for a few days, and Maurice translated what the patients said to him, and what he said to the patients. The child looked at him from the side as he spoke, at the narrow strips of his eyes, packed tight with shining sparks of radiance and flashes of lightning that rubbed against each other and ignited more sparks and flashes, especially when he said “my friend.” “My friend,” she knew, was the moment of his investiture, of his anointing with the priestly oil.
And what a place it was, the Hilton he took her to, walking quickly now, and the sea! At the bottom of the hill was the sea, the greenish blue of the sea — so alive and at the same time passive, spread out, full of vitality in its passivity, ceaselessly changing in its unchanging stillness, ordinary and at the same time mysterious, containing in some strange way the sense of the words “a great friend of mine,” the dignity and the majesty, not of the friend but of the one who said “friend.”
Maurice left her in the lobby, next to the windows that were walls looking out on the sea, more and more sea, saying that he would be back at lunchtime, when the doctor took a break.
She looked at the sea, she walked along the marble tiles of the lobby and looked at the sea, and even when she glanced at the people going in and out in their quiet, elegant clothes, she looked at the sea, and when she measured the wide corridors and sat on the velvet chairs in the lobby and on the long windowsill she still looked at the sea, visible at every moment and from every corner, filling the great room, the voices, the movements, the clatter of glasses and silver forks in the dining room (Maurice didn’t return during the doctor’s lunch break), the quiet fall of the blue satin curtains, the tapping of the high crystal heels of a woman covered in crystal who bent down to her when she fell asleep on the windowsill and stroked her cheek, the hunger, because at half past three she was hungry. Now a dusty glare covered the surface of the sea, the glare of the dust and the dazzle of the windowpanes and the silvery-white glare of the late afternoon sun on the water. Maurice emerged together with Dr. Berger. The child stared at the enormous signet ring on the doctor’s finger. For some reason he examined her hands, the tips of her fingers, when Maurice said “la petite,” this is my little one, and then the doctor thought for a minute, went back to the office where he received his patients, and gave her a present, notepaper and a ballpoint pen. Maurice stood straight, suddenly he straightened at the doctor’s side, beaming like a bridegroom. And then they left the hotel, to make it on time to catch the last bus to the neighborhood, but also to drop in to “a friend’s house” on the way, said Maurice, walking at her side, stopping every fifteen minutes to light a cigarette. They walked south, the sea on their right, but different, not communicative, withdrawn into itself and almost murderous in the sense of nothingness it prompted in her heart. Maurice sank, withdrawn into his shoulders, confined by the thoughts that trapped him like a fisherman’s net; he didn’t say a word. Among the stalls of the Carmel market, which were already beginning to close, they looked for the friend. Maurice thought he remembered something, but he didn’t remember. In the end they found not the friend but a friend of his, the owner of a stall selling children’s pajamas and underwear. Maurice took him aside, waving his arms and twisting his face, especially his wide mouth that twisted and gaped, pulling the rest of his face after it. Again they walked, this time down the side alleys of the market and farther south, to a broad commercial street with dark, hidden entrances to residential buildings. At one of them he stopped, said, “This is a friend’s house,” asked her to wait for him downstairs, in the street. The child waited. Once she went into the stairwell, looked up into the darkness, but the dark and the stench sent her back outside again. When he came out, his hair slightly mussed and with a new bundle of papers in a red file under his arm, with his briefcase, it was five o’clock. He gave the child a vegetable patty in a paper napkin, which the friend’s wife had fried. “It’s very tasty,” he said. “Perhaps you’ll think it’s very tasty, too.”