Scenes from Village Life (3 page)

Meanwhile, Dr. Steiner inhaled the cool night air at the end of this cold, dry winter's day. Dogs were barking, and above the roof of the council offices hung an almost full moon that shed a skeletal white light on the street, the cypresses and the hedges. The tops of the bare trees were wrapped in mist. In recent years Gili Steiner had joined a couple of classes run by Dalia Levin at the Village Hall, but she had not found what she was looking for. What she was looking for she didn't really know. Perhaps her nephew's visit would help her to make some sense of things. For a few days the two of them would be alone together, sitting by the electric heater. She would look after him as she used to do when he was small. A conversation might start up, and she might be able to help this boy, whom she had loved all these years as though he were her own son, to recover his strength. She had filled the fridge with goodies and made his bed, and she had spread a throw rug at the foot of the bed, in the room that had always been his, next to her own bedroom. On the bedside table she had placed some newspapers and magazines, and three or four books that she liked and that she hoped Gideon would like too. She had switched the boiler on so that there would be hot water for him, left a soft light and the heater on in the living room and put out a bowl of fruit and some nuts, so he would feel at home as soon as they got in.

At ten past seven the rumble of the bus could be heard from the direction of Founders Street. Dr. Steiner stood up in front of the bus stop, wiry and determined, with a dark sweater over her angular shoulders and a dark woolen scarf around her neck. First, two older women alighted from the back door; Gili Steiner knew them slightly. She greeted them, and they greeted her in return. Arieh Zelnik got off slowly, from the front door of the bus, wearing fatigues that were a little too big for him and a cap that came down over his forehead and hid his eyes. He said good evening to Gili Steiner and asked her jokingly if she was waiting for him. No, she said, she was waiting for her nephew who was in the army, but Arieh Zelnik had not seen any soldier on the bus. Gili Steiner said she was referring to a soldier in civilian clothes. In the meantime, another three or four passengers had alighted but Gideon was not among them. The bus was almost empty now, and Gili asked Mirkin, the driver, if he hadn't noticed among the people who got on in Tel Aviv a tall, slim young man with glasses, a soldier on leave, quite good-looking but rather absent-minded and perhaps not in the best of health. Mirkin could not recall anyone answering to that description, but said with a laugh:

"Don't you worry, Dr. Steiner, whoever didn't arrive this evening will certainly turn up tomorrow morning, and whoever doesn't arrive tomorrow morning will come tomorrow lunchtime. Everyone gets here sooner or later."

Gili Steiner asked the last passenger, Avraham Levin, as he got off, if there mightn't have been a young man on the bus who got off at the wrong stop by mistake.

"There may have been. And then again there may not have been," said Avraham Levin. "I wasn't paying attention. I was deep in thought."

And after a moment's hesitation he added:

"There are a lot of stops along the way. And a lot of people got on and off."

Mirkin, the driver, offered to drop Dr. Steiner off on his way home. The bus spent every night parked outside Mirkin's house and left for Tel Aviv at seven o'clock in the morning. Gili thanked him and said she preferred to walk home; she enjoyed the winter air, and now that it was clear her nephew hadn't come, she had no reason to hurry back.

After Mirkin had said good night and closed the door of the bus with a sigh of compressed air and was on his way home, Gili Steiner had second thoughts: it was quite possible that Gideon had fallen asleep lying on the back seat without anyone noticing, and now that Mirkin was parking the bus in front of his house, turning off the lights and locking the door, he would be a prisoner till the next morning. So she turned toward Founders Street and strode energetically after the bus, with a view to cutting across the Memorial Garden, which stood cloaked in darkness touched by the pale silver light of the moon.

WITHIN TWENTY OR
thirty paces Gili Steiner had made up her mind that, in fact, she should go straight home and phone Mirkin, the driver, to ask him to go outside and check if anyone had fallen asleep on the back seat of the bus. She could also phone her sister to find out whether Gideon had actually set off for Tel Ilan or if the trip had been canceled at the last moment. On the other hand, what was the point of causing her sister unnecessary anxiety? It was enough that she herself was worried. If the boy had indeed got off at the wrong stop, he must be trying to call her from one of the other villages. Another reason to go straight home and not run after the bus all the way to Mirkin's house. She would tell Gideon to take a taxi from wherever he was, and if he did not have enough money, she would of course pay the fare. She could see the boy in her mind's eye, arriving at her home by taxi in another half hour or so, smiling his usual shy smile and apologizing in his soft voice for getting muddled, and she would pay the taxi driver and hold Gideon's hand the way she used to when he was a child and calm him down and forgive him, and take him indoors to have a shower and to eat the supper she had prepared for them both, baked fish with baked potatoes. While he finished showering, she would take a quick look at his medical records, which she had asked Gideon to bring with him. When it came to diagnosis, she trusted only herself. And not necessarily even herself. Or not entirely.

Though she had made up her mind that she should definitely go straight home, Dr. Steiner continued walking with small, firm steps up Founders Street toward the Village Hall, turning off to take a shortcut through the Memorial Garden. The damp winter air made her glasses mist up. She took them off, rubbed them hard with the end of her scarf and thrust them back on her nose. For an instant, without the glasses, her face had looked less severe, taking on a gentle, offended look, like a little girl who had been scolded unfairly. But there was no one around in the Memorial Garden to see her. We all knew Dr. Steiner only through the cold sheen of her square, rimless glasses.

The garden lay peaceful, silent and empty. Beyond the lawn and the bougainvillea bushes a clump of pines formed a dense, dark mass. Gili Steiner breathed deeply and quickened her pace. Her shoes grated on the gravel path as though they had picked up some tiny creature that was letting out truncated shrieks. When Gideon was four or five years old his mother had brought him to stay with his aunt, who had recently started working as a family doctor in Tel Ilan. He was a dozy, dreamy child who could entertain himself for hours on end with a game that he played with three or four simple objects: a cup, an ashtray, a pair of shoelaces. Sometimes he would sit on the steps in front of the house, in his shorts and grubby shirt, staring into space, motionless except for his lips, which moved as if they were telling him a story. Aunt Gili was worried by his solitude and tried to find playmates for him, but the neighbors' children found him boring and after a quarter of an hour he would be on his own again. He made no attempt to make friends with them, but sprawled on the swing chair on the veranda, staring into space. Or lining up nails. She bought him some games and toys but the child did not play with them for long before returning to his regular pastime: two cups, an ashtray, a vase, a few paper clips and spoons that he arranged on the rug according to some logic that only he knew, then shuffled and rearranged them, his lips moving the whole time as though telling himself the stories that he never shared with his aunt. At night he fell asleep clutching a faded toy kangaroo.

Occasionally she attempted to break through the child's solitude by suggesting a walk in the countryside, a visit to Victor Ezra's shop to buy sweets or a climb up the water tower that stood on three concrete legs, but he simply shrugged his shoulders, as though surprised at her sudden and inexplicable access of activity.

On another occasion, when Gideon was five or six and his mother brought him to stay with his aunt, Gili had taken a few days off work. But when she was called out urgently to visit a patient on the outskirts of the village, the child insisted on staying in alone, to play on the rug with a toothbrush, a hairbrush and some empty matchboxes. She refused to let him stay at home alone, and insisted that he should either go with her or wait at the clinic under the supervision of the receptionist, Cilla. But he stood his ground: he wanted to stay at home. He was not afraid of being alone. His kangaroo would look after him. He promised not to open the door to strangers. Gili Steiner suddenly flew into a rage, not only at the child's stubborn insistence on staying on his own and playing his lonely games on the rug, but at his constant strangeness, his phlegmatic manner, his kangaroo and his detachment from the world. "You're coming with me right now," she shouted, "and that's that." "No, Aunt Gili, I'm staying," the child replied, gently and patiently, as though surprised she was so slow on the uptake. She raised her hand and slapped him hard on the cheek and then, to her own amazement, she continued to hit him with both hands, on his head, his shoulders, his back, with fury, as though in a fight with a bitter enemy or teaching a lesson to a recalcitrant mule. Gideon curled up silently under the hail of blows, with his head hunched between his shoulders, waiting for the onslaught to end. Then he looked up at her with wide eyes and asked, "Why do you hate me?" Startled, she hugged him with tears in her eyes, kissed his head and allowed him to stay at home on his own with his kangaroo, and on her return, less than an hour later, she said she was sorry. "It's all right," the child said, "people get angry sometimes." But he redoubled his silence and hardly spoke a word until his mother came to collect him a couple of days later. Neither he nor Gili told her about their quarrel. Before he left, he picked up the rubber bands, the bookend, the salt shaker and the prescription pad from the rug and put them away. He put the kangaroo in its drawer. Gili leaned over and kissed him lovingly on both cheeks; he kissed her politely on her shoulder, with clenched lips.

SHE WALKED FASTER
,
feeling more certain with each step that Gideon had indeed fallen asleep on the back seat and was now locked in the dark bus, parked for the night in front of Mirkin's house. She imagined him, woken by the cold and the sudden silence, trying to get out of the bus, pushing at the closed doors, thumping on the rear window. He had probably forgotten to bring his mobile phone, as usual, just as she had forgotten to take hers when she left home to go and wait for him at the bus stop.

A fine rain had begun to fall, and the breeze had dropped. Crossing the dark clump of pines, she reached the faint streetlamp at the Olive Street exit of the Memorial Garden. Here she almost tripped on an overturned trash can. Carefully avoiding the can, Gili Steiner walked briskly up Olive Street. The shuttered houses were shrouded in a murky mist and the well-kept gardens seemed to be sleeping in the winter chill, surrounded by hedges of privet, myrtle or thuja. Here and there a splendid new villa, built on the ruins of an older house, leaned out over the street, covered in climbing plants. For some years now wealthy city people had been buying up old single-story houses in Tel Ilan, razing them to the ground and replacing them with larger villas adorned with cornices and awnings. Soon, Gili Steiner thought to herself, Tel Ilan would stop being a village and become a holiday resort for the wealthy. She was going to leave her own home to her nephew Gideon, and had already drawn up a will to that effect. She could see Gideon clearly now, wrapped in his warm overcoat, sleeping fitfully on the back seat of the locked bus, parked in front of Mirkin's house.

She shivered in the cold as she crossed the corner of Synagogue Square. The drizzle had stopped now. An empty plastic bag billowed in the breeze and blew past her shoulder like a pale ghost. Walking faster, Gili Steiner turned from Willow Street into Cemetery Road, at the end of which Mirkin lived, across the road from the teacher Rachel Franco and her old father, Pesach Kedem. Once, when he was about twelve, Gideon had turned up alone at his aunt's house in Tel Ilan because he had quarreled with his mother and decided to run away from home. His mother had locked him in his room because he had failed an exam, and he had taken some money from her handbag, escaped by the balcony and come to Tel Ilan. He had a little bag with him, containing socks and underwear and one or two clean shirts, and he asked Gili to take him in. She hugged the boy, made him lunch, gave him the battered kangaroo he had played with when he was little, and then she rang his mother, even though relations between them were frosty. Gideon's mother came the next day and picked the child up without saying a single word to her sister, and Gideon gave in, sadly said goodbye to Gili, and was dragged away in silence, his hand tightly clasped in that of his furious mother. And another time, some three years before this evening, when Gideon was about seventeen, he had come to stay with Gili to shut himself away in the peace and solitude of the village while preparing for his biology exam. She was supposed to help him prepare, but instead, like conspirators, they had played endless games of checkers, most of which she won. She never allowed him to beat her. After each defeat he said to her in his sleepy voice, "Let's have just one more game." They sat up late every evening watching films on television, side by side on the sofa with a blanket over their knees. In the morning Gili Steiner went off to work at the clinic, leaving him some sliced bread, salad, cheese and a couple of hard-boiled eggs on the kitchen table. When she got home she found him asleep, fully dressed, on the sofa. He had tidied and cleaned the kitchen and neatly folded his bedclothes. After lunch they played checkers again, one game after another, almost without a word, instead of preparing for his exam. In the evening they watched a witty British comedy on television until nearly midnight, sitting shoulder to shoulder, wrapped in the blue blanket even though the heater was on, both laughing for once. The next day the boy went home, and two days later he managed to pass his biology exam despite the fact that he had hardly studied. Gili Steiner lied to her sister on the phone, saying that he had studied, that she had helped him, and that he was wonderfully organized and hard-working. Gideon sent his aunt a book of poems by Yehuda Amichai and thanked her on the flyleaf for her help in preparing for the biology exam. She replied with a picture postcard showing the view of Tel Ilan from the top of the water tower. She thanked him for the book and added that if he felt like coming to stay with her again, for instance if he had any more exams, he shouldn't be shy to ask. His room was always there for him.