Black Box (22 page)

When he finally stopped and his eyes roamed from me toward the view of the bay in the blaze of sunset, I asked him if there was anything he needed. If he wished me to see him back to his room. Or to fetch him a glass of tea.

But he only shook his magnificent head, and muttered: “Two. More than that I will not pay.”

“Volodya,” I said, “do you remember who I am?”

He withdrew his hand from mine. His eyes brimmed with tears of sadness. No, to his shame he had to confess that he could not remember, that he had omitted to inquire who the lady was and why she had asked if he would agree to see her. So I settled him back in his chair, kissed him on the forehead, and told him my name.

“Of course.” He smiled with childlike cunning. “Of course, you are Ilana. My son’s widow. At Simferopol they were all killed. Not one of them was left alive to observe the beauty of the fall. Soon the snow will start and we—
dayosh!—
we shall ride on. Out of this vale of tears! Away from rotting generals who drink and play cards while the women are dying. And who are you, my lovely lady? What is your name? And your business? Abusing the male sex? And for what purpose did you request that I should grant you an audience? Wait! Do not tell me! You came about the gift of life. Why did we defile it? Why did we curdle our mother’s milk? You may have done, madame, but not me. Me, my revolver—down the drain. I threw it away and that is the end of that. So, may God be with us, and may we rest in peace.
Liu liu liu.
Is that one cradle song? Or deathbed song? So, be off with you now. Go. Only this do for me: Live and hope. That is all. Look at the beauty of the fall in the forest before the snow. So? Two kopecks and that is all? I shall even give you three.”

With these words he rose, bowed low before me, or rather bent down and picked up one of my chrysanthemums, dirty with dust and yogurt, and delicately proffered it to me: “Only do not get lost in the snow.”

And without waiting for an answer or saying good-bye he turned his back and strode toward the building, as upright as an old Red Indian. My audience was at an end. What more was there for me to do but pick up my sticky chrysanthemums, put them in the trash can, and take the bus back to Jerusalem?

The last of the daylight was still glimmering in the west between serrated clouds on the sea horizon as I sat on the half-empty bus on my way back from Haifa. The memory of his brown hand, gnarled like a volcanic slope, would not leave me: how like yet unlike your own stiff, square hand. I had an almost tangible feeling that his hand was resting on my knee all the way from Haifa. And I found its touch consoling. When I got home, at quarter to ten in the evening, I found Michel asleep on a mattress at the foot of Yifat’s bed, fully dressed and with his shoes on. His glasses had slipped onto his shoulder. I woke him in alarm and asked what had happened. It transpired that in the morning, after I had left, when he had dressed Yifat and was on the point of taking her to the nursery, on a sudden suspicion he had taken her temperature, and it turned out he was right. So he decided to call and cancel at the last minute the meeting he had arranged with the deputy minister of defense, a meeting for which he had been waiting for almost two months. He took Yifat to the clinic and waited for an hour and a half before the doctor examined her and pronounced that she had “a slight ear infection.” On the way home he stopped at the pharmacy and bought some antibiotics and ear drops. He made her some chicken soup and mashed potatoes. By cajoling and bribery he managed to get her to drink some warm milk and honey every hour. At midday her temperature rose, and Michel decided to call a private doctor. Who confirmed his colleague’s diagnosis, but charged Michel ninety pounds. He sat till evening, telling her one story after another, and then he managed to make her eat a little chicken and rice and afterwards he sang to her, and when she was asleep he went on sitting beside her in the dark with his eyes closed, measuring her breathing with his stopwatch and singing hymns. Then he dragged a mattress in for himself and lay down at the foot of her bed in case she coughed or her bedclothes fell off while she was asleep. Until he fell asleep too. Instead of thanking him, admiring his devotion, kissing him and undressing him and making it up to him in our bed, I asked irritably why he hadn’t telephoned for help to one of his innumerable female in-laws or cousins. Why had he canceled his appointment with the deputy minister? Was it really just to make me feel guilty for going away? Was any means justified to cause guilt feelings? What the hell made him think that he deserved a hero’s medal just for spending a single day in the home that I was stuck in for the whole of my life? And why did I have to report to him on where I had been? I wasn’t his maid. And while we were on the subject, it was high time he realized how I despised the way the male members of his community and his family treated their poor wives. I refused to give him a report on where I had gone and why. (In my blind fury I had overlooked the fact that Michel had not even asked. No doubt he was intending to ask me and tell me off, and I was merely anticipating him.) Michel listened in silence as he made me a salad and poured me a Coke. He switched the water heater on so that I could take a shower if I wanted to. And made our bed. Eventually, when I stopped, he said: “Is that it? Have we finished? Shall we send a dove out to see if the water has subsided? We’ve got to wake her up at one o’clock to give her her medicine.” As he spoke he bent over her and touched her forehead lightly. And I burst into tears.

In the night, while he slept, I lay awake, thinking of the rhesus monkey which was your only childhood friend inside the fences of the empty estate, and which you and your father dressed as a waiter, with a bow tie, and trained to serve a tray of pomegranate juice. Until one day it bit you in the neck, and you still carry the scar. The Armenian servant was ordered to shoot it, and you dug its grave and wrote an epitaph. And since then you have been alone.

And I thought about the fact that you never asked to hear about my childhood, in Poland and here, and that I was too ashamed to tell you about it. My father, like my husband, was a schoolteacher. We lived in a cramped apartment, whose gloominess even on summer days is engraved on my memory as the gloom of a cavern. There was a brown clock on the wall. I had a brown coat. From the ground floor rose the smell of the bakery. The narrow street was paved with stone, and streetcars ran along it every now and again. At night there was my father’s asthmatic coughing fits. When I was five we received a permit to go to Palestine. For seven years we lived in a wooden hut by Nes Ziona. Father got a job as a plasterer in a building cooperative, but he never lost his short-tempered teacherly manner until he was killed falling from a scaffold. My mother died less than a year later. She died of a children’s disease, measles, on the festival of the trees, Tu Bishevat. Rahel was sent away to be educated in the kibbutz where she still lives, while I was enrolled in an institution of the Working Women’s Council. After that I was a platoon clerk in the army. Five months before I was discharged you were put in charge of the platoon. What was it about you that caught my heart? To try to answer the question I’ll write down here for you our son’s ten commandments, in random order but in his own words: I. Pity them all. II. Take more notice of the stars. III. Against being bitter. IV. Against making fun. V. Against hating. VI. Bastards are still human beings, not shit. VII. Against beating up. VIII. Against killing. IX. Not to eat each other. X. Cool it.

These halting words are the exact opposite of you. As far as the stars are from a mole. The icy malice that radiated from you like a bluish arctic glow and made the other girls in the battalion hate you to the point of hysteria was what caught my heart. Your air of indifferent mastery. The cruelty that you exuded like a scent. The greyness of your eyes, like the smoke from your pipe. The murderous sharpness of your tongue at any hint of opposition. Your wolfish glee at the sight of the terror you spread. The contempt you could emit like a flamethrower, and shoot like a searing jet at your friends, your subordinates, or the gaggle of secretaries and typists who were always petrified by your presence. I was drawn to you as though bewitched from muddy depths of primeval female subservience, ancient servitude from before words existed, the submission of a Neanderthal female whose survival instinct and fear of hunger and cold make her throw herself at the feet of the roughest of the hunters, the hairy savage who will tie her hands behind her back and drag her, captive, to his cave.

I remember the crisp hail of military words that you fired from the corner of your mouth: Negative. Affirmative. Roger. Rubbish. Full stop. Scram.

You delivered this barrage almost without parting your lips. And always on the verge of a whisper, as though you were sparing not only with words but also with the use of your voice and your face muscles. Your predator’s jaws, which on rare occasions bared your lower teeth in a bitter, condescending grimace that served you as a smile: “What’s going on here, sweetie? Nothing better to do than sit on the stove and warm your holy places at the army’s expense?” Or: “If you only had in your head ten percent of what you’ve got in your bust, Einstein himself would sign up with you for evening classes.” Or: “That inventory report you drew up for me looks like a recipe for strudel. Why not write me a report instead about what you’re like in bed. Maybe there at least you’re good for something?” Sometimes your victim burst into tears. And then you would ponder, look at her as at a dying insect, and hiss: “All right, give her a candy, somebody, and explain to her that she’s just been saved from a court-martial.” Then you turned on your heel as though on a spring and slipped pantherlike from the room. And I, driven by a blind impulse, used to provoke you sometimes, despite the danger or because of it. I would say, for example, “Morning, sir. Here’s your coffee. Perhaps you fancy a little belly dance with it?” Or: “Sir, if you’re really dying to see what I’ve got underneath my skirt, don’t bother to peep, just give me the order and I’ll draw up an inventory report for you on everything there is to see there.” Every wisecrack of this kind cost me confinement to barracks or loss of leave. Several times you punished me for insolence. Once you made me spend twenty-four hours in the guardroom. Next day—do you remember?—you asked: “Well, have you got rid of your urge, cutie?” I smiled provocatively and answered: “On the contrary, sir. I’m all aflame.” Your wolfish jaws gaped as though to bite, and you snarled through your teeth: “Do you want me to teach you what to do in a condition like yours, sweetie?” The girls started to snicker. They had giggles behind their hands. And I gave as good as I got: “Should I wait for an order to report, sir?”

Until once, one rainy winter night, you offered me a lift into town. A thunderstorm accompanied the jeep along the coast road, we were battered by sweeping rain, and you subjected me to the ordeal of your icy silence. We drove for half an hour without exchanging two words, our eyes fixed hypnotically on the rhythmic struggle of the windshield wipers against the deluge. Once, the jeep skidded, traced a loop on the road, and without saying a word you managed to regain control of the steering wheel. Twenty or thirty kilometers later you suddenly said: “What’s up? You suddenly been struck dumb?” And for the first time I imagined I caught a hint of hesitation in your voice and was filled with childish glee. “Negative, sir. I simply thought you were working out a plan for the conquest of Baghdad in your head and I didn’t want to disturb you.”

“Conquest, sure, and how! But what’s all this about Baghdad? Is that your pet name?”

“Tell me something, Alex, while we’re on the subject of conquests. Is it true what the girls say, that you’ve got a bit of a problem in that department?”

You ignored my daring to call you by your first name. Looking as though you were about to punch me in the face, you turned toward me and hissed: “What problem?”

“You’d better keep your eyes on the road. I don’t want to get killed with you. Rumor has it in the platoon that you have a problem with girls? That you’ve never had a girl friend? Or is it maybe just because you’re wedded to your tanks?”

“That’s not a problem”—you chuckled in the darkness—“that’s the solution.”

“Then it might interest you to know that the girls are of the opinion that your solution is our problem. That what we ought to do is pair you off with one of us who will volunteer to sacrifice herself for the sake of the others.”

In the half-light of the jeep as it tore through the curtains of rain, by the beat of your foot on the accelerator, I could sense the pallor spreading on your face. “What’s going on here?” you asked, struggling unsuccessfully to conceal from me the tremor in your voice. “What is this, a panel discussion on the commanding officer’s sex life?”

And then, at the first traffic light as we entered Tel Aviv from the north, you suddenly asked dejectedly: “Tell me something, Brandstetter, do you . . . really loathe me?”

Instead of replying, I asked you to stop the jeep after the traffic light, and pull off the road. And without another word I drew your head to my lips. As I had already done a thousand times in my imagination. Then, maliciously, I burst out laughing and said that I could see that you really did have to be taught everything from scratch. Because apparently you’d never even managed to kiss. And the time had come to show you which was the butt and which was the trigger. That if you would just give the order, I’d put you on an intensive training course.