Five Seasons (22 page)

Several kilometers out of Karmiel, after consulting his map, he left the highway and headed north on a narrow old road that began an abrupt climb into the mountains. He drove slowly on the steep curves, sticking to second gear and keeping an eye on the RPMs, which appeared on a special indicator; but the road seemed endless, pressing on past forests and tangled gullies along the narrow, rutted asphalt, on which the only traffic was an occasional army vehicle or Arab tractor that forced Molkho, afraid for his new car, onto the shoulder before continuing his steady ascent to dizzying heights. Halfway to his destination he stopped at the top of a rise to rest the engine, which was air-cooled and had no heat gauge. This car is too sophisticated for me, he thought, although perhaps he would appreciate it more on the easier drive to Jerusalem. Meanwhile, he parked it beneath a big pine tree and went to relieve himself in the bushes, examining his penis, which here, in the clear, pure air, amid the murmur of leaves and the flowers and rocks of the Galilee, resembled a dark little animal, rather comic in the loyal arching of its spume onto the thick carpet of dry pine needles that absorbed it without a sound or trace. She was the first and only woman I ever slept with, he thought. It would be easier if there had been others, but I was too faithful. He shook the last drops, which looked rather greenish to him, into the air, regretting not having urinated on one of the stones, against whose light background the color would have stood out. Zipping his fly, he turned to face the wind, reminded of the country near Jerusalem: the same light asphalt dating back to British times, the same black curbstones, the same pine and cypress trees—just fresher and moister, not powdered with desert aridity like the Judean Hills. A sharp feeling of déjà vu told him he had been here before, yes, on this very hilltop, where he had perhaps stopped to rest or even spend the night, for he had been here on foot, on a Scout or army hike many years ago, brought to see one of the scenic ravines of the Galilee, and the memory flowed sharply through him, the adventure of a sheltered boy from Jerusalem whose parents never ventured beyond Tel Aviv. Once he could depend on his wife, who was better at it than he was, to remember times and places, but now he was on his own.

But when, soon after, he reached the village, which was little more than an overgrown farming cooperative of the type established for new immigrants in the 1950s, the feeling of familiarity faded quickly, yielding to a dreary sense of desolation. It was a place in which nothing seemed to have changed in thirty years: the same peeling little houses on the same concrete columns, with here or there a new story or wing; the same little orchards on the same rocky, rust-colored earth; the same chicken runs and sheds, with the same untended fields between them dotted by the same scraggly trees; the same narrow approach road passing through an antiterrorist perimeter fence and suddenly, for no apparent reason, turning into a broad thoroughfare that led to a center boasting several shops and a deserted bus stop. Molkho stopped by a tall electric pole to which was nailed a bulletin board plastered with posters from the last elections, one of them bearing the repeated picture of a smiling, stubbly young man. A heavy silence hung over the place, as if it were abandoned, though somewhere in the distance the chug of a tractor was drowned out by the clunk of a water pump.

A woman leading a fat sheep on a rope showed him the way to the school, and Molkho, taking out his files and locking the car, headed toward it into the wind, noticing the snowy peak of Mount Hermon between two houses, so big and near that his heart leapt. Crossing a playground and passing a water fountain, where again he had the sensation of someplace revisited, he climbed a short flight of stairs to the school, hearing schoolchildren singing old Passover songs with the same gruff accent as the boy's on the phone. A passing teacher pointed out the council manager's office at the end of a hallway. The room itself, however, was empty and dark; its blinds were lowered, an obsolete map of the country hung on a wall beside photographs of long-dead presidents and prime ministers, an accordion case leaned against a chairless desk, and several baskets of vegetables stood by a table on which lay an electric heating fork. There was no file cabinet or evidence of an office in sight, and Molkho felt instantly depressed. What am I doing here? he asked himself.

Just then the bell rang, and the children rushed out of their classes with a war whoop. Footsteps approached; no doubt word of his arrival had spread, and perhaps the children had been let out early because of it. But it was only the overweight and out-of-breath secretary, who, it seemed, was also the music teacher, for a bright red accordion was strapped like a baby sling to her chest. Standing on ceremony, he introduced himself with glum formality. “So you came after all,” she said. “But Ben-Ya'ish isn't here yet. He must be on his way.” “Didn't you tell him I was coming?” asked Molkho. “Of course,” said the secretary, “and he suggested that meanwhile you go over the books with the treasurer.” “Then the treasurer is feeling better?” asked Molkho. “More or less,” said the secretary. “I'll find someone to take you to his home.” She hurried back out of the room, the accordion still strapped to her chest, and returned a minute later with a dark-skinned girl, who—such, later on, was Molkho's first memory of her—stood in the unlit hallway surrounded by a crowd of children. She was so thin and straight, as though delicately carved out of ebony, with such painfully large steel-rimmed glasses that at first he mistook her for a boy, even though she was wearing a black leotard. “Take this man to your father,” the secretary told her. She stared seriously up at him with her dark, exotic eyes and turned at once to guide him with the pack of children on her heels.

Outside the soft wind licked at their faces, and the afternoon light stretched tautly over the mountains. “I wouldn't advise it,” said the secretary as he started to lead the girl to his car. “It's not a long way, but it's muddy and rocky. Why not just follow the girl.”

The girl, however, had come to a halt and was arguing with the other children, who wanted to come with her. “She said just me,” she stated firmly. “He's here to see my father. She said just me.” But the secretary was no longer there and the children were so adamant that, after trying briefly to fend them off, the girl turned to Molkho and said, “Let's go.” They left the schoolyard through an opening in the fence and walked quickly along a muddy path, Molkho following behind her with his files, stepping on new tufts of bluish grass while watching her spindly legs and little buttocks, which bounced inside her black leotard like rubber balls. She bounded along like a fawn or, rather, like a bespectacled bunny, and it was all he could do to keep up with her, breathing the high mountain air while treading the winding path that circled behind the houses, cowsheds, and chicken coops over the terra rossa earth of the Galilee that turned even the rain puddles red.

Every now and then she stopped to let him catch up, though she failed to return his smile but simply stared at him somberly through her funny glasses. “What's wrong with your father?” he asked, and when she did not understand him, “What's he sick with?” “He's got something in his blood. He was in the hospital,” she answered warily, continuing to lead him past old farm tools and rusting plows and cultivators half-buried in earth. They kept turning into new side paths and finally passed through a dark shed under the anxious eyes of a large cow and into the backyard of a little house standing on the hillside, falling straight into an ambush set by the children from school, who burst suddenly out of their hiding place. “We got here first!” they shouted merrily.

The girl ignored them. Proud and reproachful, she ushered Molkho into a kitchen, where dressed in pajamas stood a tall, young, dark-skinned Jew of Indian extraction, wearing glasses just like those worn by the girl, whose height and ebony fineness clearly derived from him. She ran to him and hugged him, while he gently patted her head, and Molkho had the eerie thought, this man is going to die and she doesn't know that she knows. He felt drawn inside the house, as if Death, having parted from him in the autumn and run ahead like a mad dog to the far end of the Galilee, now lay drowsing there beneath a table. “So it's you,” he whispered to it warmly, stepping into the kitchen and introducing himself to the lanky Indian, who seemed to blanch slightly, despite his dark skin. “I was told you were the treasurer,” he said.

“Treasurer?” The man smiled uncertainly. “Not exactly. I only help Ben-Ya'ish a bit with the accounts. But come in.” He whispered something to the girl and disappeared, and quickly clearing a pile of books from a chair, she led Molkho into a small, clean, simply furnished room and asked him to sit down. He did, his eyes glued to her lithe body with its black leotard and pink slippers, and the steel-rimmed glasses on her ebony face, wanting to reach out and touch her, to verify that she was real. “Where's your mother?” he asked, and was told that she worked in a shoe factory in Kiryat Shmonah. “A shoe factory?” he murmured, watching her as, with an unchildlike assurance, she tidied up quietly. “Do you take ballet in school?” “Not everyone,” she said, “only me.” Just imagine, he thought, right here, in this country, at the far end of nowhere, are people like this, and we don't even know they exist. Why, you never even hear about them.

The father returned to the room, still unshaven but wearing pants and a black sweater that made him look even darker. Like a stranger in his own home, he looked hesitantly around before sitting down stiffly. At once the girl sat protectively nearby him, unconsciously imitating his movements. She was slightly cross-eyed, Molkho realized, once again failing to get a response to his smile. With a glance out the window at the towering mountains, he opened his files and spread them out on a little table, suddenly feeling a great fatigue. “How old is this village?” he asked the thin Indian, who was observing him curiously. “Something tells me I've been here before, maybe on some army bivouac.” The village, the Indian told him, was first built for new immigrants back in the early 1950s but had twice been abandoned; the present population dated from several years later, when, in addition to some Jews from North Africa, several Indian families arrived. The girl, Molkho saw, was listening too, straight-backed and flat-chested, her head framed by the window against a background of mountains and clouds. She's certainly a strange one, he thought, unless I just don't know what little girls are like anymore.

“Who lives here now?” he asked the Indian. “Are they still traditional Jews?” Not as much as all that, he was told; on Sabbaths most people still attended synagogue, but some preferred to sleep or work. “And what sort of work,” he asked, “do they do?” Most used to raise laying hens, said the Indian, but in the egg glut of 1982 the coops were abandoned, and now the women worked in Kiryat Shmonah, while the men farmed as best they could, though some did nothing at all. In fact, times were so hard that the only thing keeping people in the village was their having nowhere else to go. “And were these financial statements drawn up by you?” inquired Molkho, spreading out his papers and leafing through them impatiently, afraid the man's dirge was simply a cover-up for the faked accounts. No, they weren't, said the Indian; he had only helped Ben Ya'ish with his arithmetic. That is, he was an arithmetic teacher not a treasurer, but since his illness, which had forced him to stop teaching, he had been employed by the council manager in a part-time capacity.

Yet, when Molkho inquired about the man's illness, he answered quite apathetically and knew so little about it that even its name was a mystery. From time to time he went for treatments to Rambam Hospital in Haifa. “In what ward? With what doctors?” asked Molkho, now fully alert. But the Indian was unable to enlighten him: he arrived, he lay down on a bed, he had some blood taken, he was given a shot, and he went home again—that was all he knew. “I know that hospital well,” Molkho told him, fishing for more information. “My wife died of cancer six months ago.” Yet the Indian said nothing, forcing Molkho to keep talking about his wife, while the girl jiggled her thin, dark leg in wonder. Indeed, he couldn't stop; it had been a while since he'd last shared his wife's illness with anyone, so that he quite enjoyed telling about it now, right down to the drama of those final months and the little field hospital he had set up at home to ensure a comfortable death. “And she really died there?” asked the girl, staring hard at him. “Of course,” Molkho said. “It happened early in the morning. She hardly suffered at all.” Could he have met this child in the army thirty years ago too, he wondered, feeling the sense of déjà vu again. “How many children do you have?” he asked the Indian. “So far, only one,” said the man, hugging his daughter with a smile. “But we hope to give her a little brother or sister soon.”

Molkho gazed at them for a moment and asked for some water. “Gladly,” said the Indian. “Or would you prefer a glass of juice?” “Juice will be fine,” answered Molkho, and the girl glided out with dancelike steps to fetch it. “She's a lovely child,” remarked Molkho. “How old is she?” “Eleven,” said the Indian. “That's all?” marveled Molkho. “And she needs glasses already?” “Not exactly,” said her father. “She wants to wear them, because she is slightly cross-eyed, and thinks they hide it.”

The girl returned with a large glass of watery yellow liquid. “You forgot to stir it,” said her father. “Never mind,” Molkho told him, still wanting to touch her ebony skin, no matter how lightly, though she seemed too grown-up for him to risk a paternal pat. He took a sip of his drink, which was very bitter, and said to the Indian, who was sitting stock-still and ignoring the papers on the table, as if it were just a matter of time before they went away by themselves, “I'm afraid we're going to make things difficult for you. You won't get another penny of government money. We can cut you off without a cent.” “But why?” asked the Indian innocently. “Because you haven't done anything right here, that's why,” said Molkho, quietly sifting the papers. “What isn't right?” asked the Indian wearily. “Everything,” said Molkho. “Nothing is even close to being right. This looks like a criminal case to me, and it will end up with the police.” Although he knew he sounded angry, he felt perfectly calm inside. “Who does this Ben-Ya'ish of yours think he is? I came all the way up here to see him today, and he doesn't even bother to show up!” “But he will,” said the Indian. “He has to. You can wait for him right here. You can see his house from this window. We'll know the minute he gets home.” He pointed further up the rocky hillside to a gardenless hut that had not a single patch of green around it. “Maybe I should go talk to his wife,” suggested Molkho. “He doesn't have any,” said the Indian. “No wife?” “No, he's still young. He's only twenty-three.” “Twenty-four,” corrected the girl, who had been listening to every word. “It's his birthday soon.”