Hold on to the Sun (12 page)

It was cool in the courtyard. Now and then streaks of light broke through the clouds and rushed across her face. They would light up the wall of the house for a moment and then dissipate, leaving a patch of paled light on the limestone hills. Fallen leaves, earthworms, splintered ice-cream sticks, and cigarette stubs were scattered around the foot of the birch tree. She lay her hand on its naked trunk, but weak with joy she could not bring herself to climb it. For that she would have to take off her shoes and the woolen socks her mother had folded down, and fuss with the folds of her skirt that flapped between her knees. Finally, the sun’s warmth pulled her legs out from under her, and she sat cross-legged, spreading her skirt over clods of earth. She stared at the vein of a yellowing leaf until it became blurry. But after a moment, eyes that had refused to blink so as not to miss a single detail of the intoxicating sights were stabbed with a sharp pain. Or maybe it was the smell of manure rising from the sacks of the gardener who was then approaching the tool shed that swept the girl away from her reveries.

The gardener’s heavy boots thudded on the stones that paved the path between the tall blades of grass. He wore coarse blue work clothes, his shirt carelessly tucked into his belt, black rubber baskets filled with gardening tools on his back. His dark face shone with a gentle kind of gaze that only deepened the darkness of his curls and mustache.

Whenever he rode down the garden paths on his rusty bicycle, he would fix his dark smile and black eyes upon her. Slow and quiet. When she lagged downcast behind the bigger children, the gardener, popping up suddenly behind the bushes with his shears, was like a wave of warmth softening the moment’s stings. It was clear to her that the warmth was directed at her, the smile at her, and that he passed through the corner of the garden only to look at her. She tried to look pretty. Not to run around. To keep her skirt from blowing up. She was afraid that the other children would notice the gardener’s glances.Without anyone saying so, it was clear to her that the looks would then stop. That the warmth would immediately cool. That it was forbidden.

So after what was to happen, on days when she would be woken by the noise of the lawn mower, or when the stunning smell of mounds of mowed grass would get tangled between her legs on her way home, she would take the long way, roundabout the building, so as to avoid the tool shed and the glance of the gardener darkening the doorway.

But now, when the gardener approached, her body was
so weak that she could not get up and leave, or turn her head, or even lift her lingering gaze from the figure clad in coarse blue, advancing with measured tread between the flowering shrubs. Even when it became clear that the gardener was coming straight toward her, she could not turn her eyes away.

When he stopped, her eyes were glued to his belt. The bottom of his shirt rose and fell over it as he breathed.

“How much do you weigh?”

The thick silence in which she was stuck was shattered by the gardener’s voice, a rough voice, like that of a man who has for some time not moved his tongue. She shrank back slightly and tried to hide her body with a hesitant smile.

“How much do you weigh?”

This time the heavy smile returned to the gardener’s eyes, and they shown with a soft, dark, warmth. In vain, she tried to remember the scale covered with glossy oilcloth in the nurse’s room.The pictures evaporated even before they were formed.

“Do you want me to weigh you?”

Now the gardener’s gaze lay gently on the nape of her neck, as if he were rolling her on the lawn against her will. She drew her legs under the outspread skirt. Clods scratched her knees, and small, hard bits brushed into her socks. When she stood beside the gardener, she took care to straighten her skirt. And for some reason the grass, the
few flowering shrubs trying to grow between the foam of the laundry water and the puddles of sewage—and the tree receding into the distance—all of them seemed to be taking leave of her with great ceremony. But because of her weakness, she could not cough up the lump of unease that stuck in her throat.

She had never before entered the tool shed. Even its outsides were no more than a vague memory of her slipping past its door. Now she suddenly found herself inside it, surrounded by darkness, and the smell of soil mixed with the stench of mouse droppings made her knees even weaker than before.

“Wait here, I’ll put on the light.”

The iron door slowly creaked closed. In the darkness she heard only the sounds of boards banging and slats snapping; no doubt they blocked the gardener on his way to the fuse box on the opposite wall. The nearly pitch-black shed was filled with broken furniture, cement planters, and tattered books. More light filtered in past the sandbags left on the windows since the last war than came from the painted blue bulb that spewed shadows from its depths. It never occurred to her to ask where the scales were, or why. And even if she had tried to ask, the hard lump in her throat would have stifled the syllables. Still, despite the dark, she felt she had to be good, the way she always felt when the gardener passed by. She found it hard to rouse her body from its languor, but tried nevertheless to stretch her limbs.
Straining to keep her eyes open, she saw nothing but dark shapeless lumps.The stench, the darkness, and the snapping sounds swelled about her until she very nearly stumbled. She clenched her fists.

Cracking wood carried the gardener’s steps from the other side of the shed. She smiled her good-girl smile in the dark, so that it would be all over and he would continue on his way on his bicycle.

“I’ll lift you onto the scale.”

A cold touch under her skirt, and she was lifted from the ground. Her limp legs seemed detatched from her body, and her head drooped. The gardener’s grip enclosed her, holding her tightly to himself. A coarse chill sent a shudder through her spine and her curls.

“Soon I’ll know how much you weigh.”

The gardener hummed.

“ . . . how much you weigh.”

He bent himself above her head, again.

She still smiled the good-girl smile fixed on her lips. In the gardener’s strong hands, her body seemed to have already floated away and abandoned her. Only the chill remained.

Somehow, she did not collapse when the gardener put her back on the ground and her legs, not his hands, bore her weight. The smell of mouse droppings and putrid rubber slapped her, like a sudden wave. For a moment, she stood still in the dark with the smile still fixed on her face.

“Would you like to know how much you weigh?” She heard these words somewhere behind her when, like a wind-up doll, she suddenly began to run across the planks, the black rubber baskets, the rakes, and burst through the iron door which opened with a whine when she pushed it. In the sudden flood of afternoon light, the shrubs, the puddle of sewage, and the mouse holes were blind to her. She gasped, and the gulp of breath froze transparent and bottomless in her stomach. Her sight returned to her only on the second floor, next to the neighbor’s door, which smelled as usual of frying burgers and radishes. With thunder in her heart that shook the whole stairwell, she took out her key hanging on a string around her neck. As she guided the trembling key to the keyhole, everything went dark again. It was as if all her body had emptied itself and flowed out through her eyes. Suddenly, without remembering exactly how, she found herself within the walls of her room.

 

The parents arose, and the home awoke, and the kitchen filled with the kettle’s steam and the smell of squeezed oranges. Stern doors were abruptly thrown open, and the girl’s room was overwhelmed by the clatter of pots slammed back into their places and by the father’s cigarette-filled coughs. But on that day, the self-confident sounds that ordinarily melted the void in her stomach were shunted aside by a shivering that would not let her be.

The mother’s calls hurried her into the kitchen. For a
moment longer she found refuge in the dimness of the hallway, and then she dropped onto her chair in the warmth and steam of the kitchen. She sat opposite a window that opened onto grey skies.

Even after the chocolate and orange juice she stuffed down her throat mixed their sweet and sour into a queasy mash, she went on pulling at her panties underneath the table. She gazed out far beyond the bare arms of the tree in the window, and her gaze was shattered only when the damp cloth wiped away the cake crumbs and drops of juice that trembled on the table top.

The little girl dragged herself unconsciously to the big, flung open window in the parents’ room. A draught of air and the smell of mattresses soaked with strangeness and the sourness of cigarettes floated in and out.

The shouts of children rose up to the window and drifted down without disturbing her gaze, still entangled in the arms of the tree and the raindrops of denial.

ELIJAH’S SABBATH DAYS

Although Elijah returned to Jerusalem a few hours before sunset, he didn’t get in touch with Hila before the Sabbath had begun. The sun was nearing the strip of haze above the ridge of buildings on the horizon; the bedspread on his couch was disappearing into the dark blue shades of its pattern, and he was still busy cleaning the dust that had accumulated during the week in his room which faced the valley. He quickly plumped the cushions on the couch, cleaned the sink, and gave thanks silently for the fact that the plants had survived without water until his return. As the west facing room settled into the deepening light, he hastily completed his washing up. And only when he emerged from the bathroom with his hair wet and combed did he feel some relief, as if the weight of the whole week had been lifted—his studies at the technical institute in Tel Aviv, his room in the south of that city, his textbooks and diagrams, and the jolting of the bus trip which had finally brought him back here again, at noon. When he turned to spread the
white napkin, which served as the tablecloth, over the desk, he was struck by a ray of light piercing the curtains. He straightened up and quickly drew them open. Then he saw that the sun was already cutting through the red band above the rooftops, and in another moment it would sink behind the mountain.

He was late. In Hila’s house they had already disconnected the telephone for the Sabbath.

From the low cupboard in the kitchen he removed two candles and the copper candlesticks. He could not go to dinner at her parents’ house without letting them know beforehand, so he wouldn’t be able to see Hila this evening. He hadn’t even finished readying himself. And he was glad that he had not yet arranged to see her.

He prepared his meal carefully, laid the table, and once again felt how these acts calmed him, brought him closer to her world, which was perhaps out of his reach, but nevertheless existed.

 

When Elijah emerged from the little synagogue in the Orthodox quarter, where he always went in order to protect himself from the danger of running into one of his many acquaintances and their mocking looks, he thought he saw Hila’s silhouette in the street, emerging from the valley on her way back with her father from the big synagogue. He couldn’t have said with any certainty that it was really her. The headlights of a passing car illuminated the two receding
figures for only a moment—the man in the hat with the slightly stooped back, and the girl’s pulled-back brown hair. But in any case, the time had not yet come to speak to her. And he hurried up the stairs to his room, as if she were sitting at the table and waiting for him there.

 

Later the same evening Elijah left his room again and went to the Center for Modern Judaism to hear a lecture by the Diaspora scholar, Rabbi Stern, about apostasy and faith in contemporary Jewish thought. He didn’t consider himself a real disciple of Rabbi Stern, but in an earlier time, when he still aspired to devote himself to the study of philosophy, he never missed any of the Rabbi’s lectures given on his visits to Jerusalem.

It was hot in the wood-paneled auditorium, and the seats were mainly filled with organized Diaspora youth groups, who all burst out laughing at certain of the Rabbi’s remarks, as if they were the jokes of a paid entertainer. Elijah tried hard to concentrate and follow the speaker’s train of thought, the crosscurrents of ideas leading to opposing and contradictory conclusions, the controversies ensuing from certain of the hypotheses balanced against the superficial attempts to find compromise solutions, the retreat into general gloom, and within the darkness—the blazing trail of the speaker’s comet, leading his audience beyond paradox to the power latent in us, yes! latent in spite of all the doubts!

Elijah was bathed in sweat, both because of the heat and because of his inability, that evening, to follow with his usual enthusiasm the Rabbi’s arguments. He tried to concentrate on the speaker’s face, his neatly trimmed and squared beard and his upper lip rapidly parting from the lower one leading into his pruned bush; and his thoughts whirled about without his being able to bring them into line with the flood of words. For a moment Hila’s image floated before him and again he stared blankly at the wagging beard. Once he even joined unconsciously in the general burst of laughter, without noticing to which of the Rabbi’s remarks it related.

At the exit in front of the steps Elijah stood on the marble plaza; his back bent like a slender branch in the air of the early summer night. The groups of listeners swept into the street chattering loudly and he lifted his head, as if he were listening to the warm touch of the air. For a moment he was tempted to approach Rabbi Stern and congratulate him as usual, but before taking the first step he changed his mind and stayed where he was.

In the street, Duvidel and Nehama, his friends from the youth movement, walked past. As always, Nehama’s arm was linked in her husband’s, who was no longer a clumsy, ginger-haired youth but a tall, solid man of substance. When they saw Elijah standing outside the Center of Modern Judaism, Nehama nudged Duvidel, and he proclaimed, “Look who’s here!”