Black Box (19 page)

Ilana

Regards to the children and Yoash and thanks for the invitation.

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GIDEON MIDWEST UNIV CHICAGO

FORGIVE YOU AND WILLING TO MAKE A FRESH START PURCHASER OFFERS TWELVE NOW FOR ZIKHRON PROPERTY WILL LET BOAZ STAY SAY YES AND I WITHDRAW RESIGNATION WORRIED ABOUT YOUR HEALTH MANFRED

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PERSONAL ZAKHEIM JERUSALEM ISRAEL

NEGATIVE ALEX

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GIDEON MIDWEST UNIV CHICAGO
I WONT LEAVE YOU MANFRED

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PERSONAL ZAKHEIM JERUSALEM ISRAEL

REPORT ON BOAZ DITTO SOMMO MAY COME OVER IN FALL DONT PRESS ME ALEX

***

Prof. A. Gideon
Midwest University
Chicago, Ill., U.S.A.

9.8.76

Dear Alec,

Yesterday morning I went to Haifa to visit your father in the sanatorium on Mount Carmel. But on the way, on a momentary impulse, I got off at Hadera and got on a bus to Zikhron. What could I want from our son? I didn’t try to imagine how he would receive me. What I would do if he threw me out. Or made fun of me. Or hid from me in some abandoned storehouse. What would I say to him if he asked why I had come?

Try to see the picture: a blue-white summer’s day (not blazing), and me in jeans and a thin white blouse, with a straw bag hanging from my shoulder, looking perhaps like a student on holiday, standing hesitantly before the rusting iron gate fitted with rusting padlocks on rusting chains. Underneath my sandals the old grey gravel scrapes; thistles and weeds are growing through it. Wasps are buzzing in the air. Through the twisted ironwork I can see the great house in dark Zikhron stone. The windows gape like toothless jaws. The tiled roof has collapsed, and from inside the building, like a flame, shoots an unruly mass of bougainvillea, which meets the honeysuckle clinging to the outside walls.

I must have stood there for a quarter of an hour or so, my eyes searching unconsciously for the bellpull that used to be there a thousand years ago. Not a sound was heard from the house or the yard, except the soughing of the wind in the crests of the old palm trees and a different, fainter, whispering in the needles of the pines. The gardens in front of the house were smothered by brambles and couch grass. Overgrown oleanders, flowering as red as pirates, had completely buried the ornamental fish pool, the fountain, and the mosaic terrace. Here there once stood strange shapeless stone sculptures by Melnikoff. Presumably long since stolen. A faint smell of decomposition reached my nostrils. A panic-stricken field mouse shot past my feet like an arrow. And who was I waiting for? Perhaps for the uniformed Armenian servant to come and open the gate for me with a deferential bow?

Over the years the town of Zikhron has moved closer to your house but it has not quite reached it. Down the slope stood modern houses embellished with tasteless turrets. Their ugliness seemed to relieve somewhat your father’s pretentious architecture. Time and ruin have bestowed a certain charm on the melancholy ogre’s castle.

An unseen bird startled me for an instant with a noise that sounded like barking. Then the silence returned. To the east I could spy the Hills of Menasseh, wooded, flickering with passing flashes of capering green radiance. And to the west, as grey as your eyes and shrouded in mist, the sea stretched from the edge of the banana plantations. Among these plantations flashed the fish ponds of the neighboring kibbutz, against which your father waged a fierce crusade until you and Zakheim succeeded in defeating and confining him. An unfamiliar hand had painted on the rust of the gate the old-fashioned warning
PRIVATE PROPERTY
/
STRICTLY NO ADMITTANCE
/
TRESPASSERS WILL BE
PROSECUTED.
This warning too had faded in the course of time.

How deep the silence of the place was! The emptiness. And all at once I was overcome with sadness for things gone that can never be brought back. A sharp longing, as piercing as a physical pain, for you and for your son and for your father. I thought about the childhood you spent on this gloomy estate, without a mother, without brothers or sisters, without a friend except your father’s little rhesus monkey. Your mother’s death one winter’s night at three in the morning, when she was inadvertently left alone in her bedroom, which you showed me once, a boxlike attic room with a view of the sea from the window. The day nurse had gone home, the night nurse had not arrived, while your father had gone off to fetch a boatload of iron girders from Italy. I remembered her face in the sepia Russian-style photograph that always stood, flanked by two white candles, on a bookcase in your father’s library, with a vase of everlasting flowers in perpetual attendance behind it. No doubt they have all perished—the photograph, the vase, the candles, and the flowers.

The memory of the photograph brought back to me the smell of tobacco, sadness, and vodka that always surrounded your father and his many rooms. It was like the smell of the sea and the desert that our son exhales now. Am I really your disaster? Or is it the other way around? Has disaster made its home in you and was it hopeless of me to try to bring back what could not be brought back and to put right what could never be put right?

I started to walk along the fence until I found a gap, and by bending down managed to force my way through the barbed wire. I circled the house at a distance through a thicket of wild vegetation. Again I was startled by the barking bird. Thistles as high as my shoulders pierced my clothes and my skin as I forced my way through them to reach the rear courtyard. Beside the garden shed in the shade of the twisted eucalyptus in which you built a tree house as a child I found a cracked bench. Scratched and dusty I collapsed onto it. From the house came silence. A pigeon flew in at one window and out another. A snakelike lizard darted under a heap of stones. At my feet a dung beetle struggled to push its tiny ball. The barking bird sounded a stone’s throw away but I could not see it. A pair of wasps locked in a life-or-death struggle or in furious copulation traced a winding line in the air before landing with a thud on the bench. Crash landing? Reconciliation? Fusion? I did not dare lean over them. The place seemed deserted. Had Boaz disappeared again? I was seized by panic. There was a faint smell, tinged with scents of eucalyptus. I made up my mind to rest for a few minutes longer and then to leave.

In front of the shed I noticed a rusty plow in a heap of rotting sticks. There was also a dismantled rake. And a pair of large wooden wheels half buried in the ground. Among the debris I discovered the garden table around which we once sat, joking, drinking iced pomegranate juice from shapely Greek goblets and nibbling olives. What was left of that old table? A broken slab of marble resting miraculously on three tree stumps, stained green with pigeon droppings. Overhead feathery clouds traveled dreamily eastward. A thousand years had passed since that summer day when you brought me here for the first time to show me off to your father or to impress me with his magnificence. On the way here, in your arrogant army jeep with the antenna and the machine-gun mount, you had already jokingly warned me not to fall in love with your father. And he did indeed stir a kind of vague maternal tenderness in me: he was so like an overgrown dog, a giant dog, not very clever, baring his teeth to amuse and barking tumultuously and wagging not just his tail but half his body, pleading for an affectionate caress, dancing to make friends, leaping off with great commotion and returning to lay at my feet a twig or a rubber ball.

Yes, I did become fond of him. Affection, you know, maybe you’ve heard about it? Even though it has nothing in common with your area of specialization? Look it up in the dictionary, or in an encyclopedia. Try looking under A.

I found his crudeness touching. His clumsy advances. His melancholy masquerading as merriment. His rough voice. His appetite. His old-fashioned courtly manners. His tempestuous attentiveness. The roses he made a great fuss of presenting to me. The role of Russian landlord that he overacted. I was enchanted by my power to gladden his boisterous barrenness, as though I were soberly participating in a child’s excited game. And you were green with envy. You never stopped fixing the two of us with your icy inquisitorial stares. In the catacombs of your imagination, as in a Dürer drawing, no doubt you were thrusting me into his arms. And slaying us both with your dagger. Poor, miserable Alec.

Limp, caressed by the sea breeze, I sat on that bench and recalled another summer, our summer in Ashkelon after the ’67 war. The improvised raft you constructed out of wooden posts tied together with rope, without using any nails. The
Kon-Tiki,
you called it. You told Boaz all about Phoenician seafarers who sailed to the end of the world. And Vikings. And Moby Dick and Captain Ahab. The voyages of Magellan and Vasco da Gama. You taught him to tie sailors’ knots, your steady hand guiding his little fingers. And then the panic of the whirlpool. The only cry for help I have ever heard you utter. And then those fishermen. Your strong arms carrying me and the boy ashore under your armpits, like a ewe and a lamb, from the fishermen’s boat. The tears of defeat I thought I saw in your eyes as we escaped from the sea and you deposited us with the last of your strength on the sand. Unless it was just sea water, running down onto your face from your hair.

From the direction of the wing came a woman’s voice in a melodious question. After a moment your son answered her in his quiet bass with four or five words, which I could not make out. How precious to me is his slow voice. How like yet how unlike your own. What should I say to him if he discovered me? Why had I come here? I was content with the sound of his voice. At that moment I made up my mind to slip away unnoticed

But in the yard two girls in sandals appeared, one, wearing shorts, dark and round, her nipples showing dark beneath a damp T-shirt, and her comrade slender, petite, sprouting like a cornstalk from her long dress. With hoes, they began to attack the couch grass, bindweed, and squirting cucumber that spread at the foot of the steps. They spoke to one another in soft, melodious English, and did not notice me at all. I still hoped to vanish unseen. From a window of the wing came an aroma of frying and the smell of green eucalyptus branches burning. A little goat came out of the house, followed closely by Boaz himself, holding the string: he was sun-tanned, even taller than when I had seen him last in Jerusalem, his luxuriant mane tumbling down like molten gold below his shoulders and licking at the curls on his chest, barefoot, and naked apart from tiny blue bathing shorts. Mowgli the wolf boy; Tarzan king of the jungle. The sun had bleached his eyelashes and eyebrows and the yellow bristles on his jowl. He secured the goat to a branch and stood with his arms folded and a shadow of a smile on his lips. Until one of the girls raised her glance and gave a Red Indian yell. Her comrade threw a small stone at his chest. At that moment the dauphin turned his head and caught sight of me and blinked. He slowly scratched his head. Slowly your amused, cynical smile appeared on his face and he remarked calmly, as though identifying a common bird: “Look, Ilana’s here.”

After a moment he added, in crude English, “This is Ilana Sommo.
My
beauty mother.
And these are Sandra and Cindy,” he continued. “Two more beauties. Anything the matter, Ilana?”

I stood up and went toward him. After two steps I stopped. I stood like a confused schoolgirl, twisting the strap of my straw handbag. With my eyes on a level with his chest, I managed to mutter that I had just stopped off, that I was actually on my way to visit Rahel in Beit Avraham, and I didn’t want to be a nuisance.

Why did I lie to him from my very first words?

Boaz stuck his finger behind his ear, scratched himself again unconsciously, pondered for a while, then said: “You must be thirsty from the journey. Cindy will fetch you some water.
Cindy, bring water.
But it’s not cold, because we don’t have electricity. We didn’t have any water, either, but yesterday I discovered the pipeline to the national park among the thistles and I fitted a tap to it. How’s the little one? Still as flirtatious as ever? Still eating candy? Why didn’t you bring her with you?”

I said that Yifat was at the nursery. Michel would collect her and take her home. And that they both sent their greetings. This too, of course, was a lie. To cover it up or out of embarrassment I held out my hand to him. He bent over slightly and squeezed it unhurriedly. As though weighing a chick. “Here. Drink. You look parched. I got hold of these two lovelies at Pardes Hanna Junction. They were volunteers on some kibbutz or other, but they’ve finished now and they were hiking around, so I brought them here to help build the country. Tell Sommo it’s okay, he needn’t worry, they’re both more or less Jewish.”

I drank some tepid water from a tin mug that Cindy brought me.

Boaz said: “We’re eating some pigeons soon. I catch them in the upstairs rooms. Today you’re my guest. There’s bread and salted fish, and I’ve got some beer, but it’s not cold either.
An omelette, Sandra, for guest.
What’s up? What’s so funny?”

Apparently I had smiled unconsciously. And I stammered an apology for not bringing any provisions with me. I would never make a good mother, I said. “That’s true,” said Boaz, “but it doesn’t make any difference.” And he placed his hand on my hip and steered me toward the house. He held my body carefully but firmly. When we came to a broken step he said: “Watch out, Ilana.”