Scenes from Village Life (9 page)

IT WAS A HOT
, humid evening, the trees in the garden were wrapped in a damp vapor, and the stars seemed to be immersed in dirty cotton wool. Rachel Franco was sitting on the veranda with her old father, reading an Israeli novel about the residents of a block of flats in Tel Aviv. The old man, his black military beret pulled down over his forehead, his baggy khaki trousers held up by braces, turned the pages of the supplements of
Haaretz,
mouthing angry rants as he did so. "Poor wretches," he mumbled, "they're really out of luck, lonely to the marrow of their bones, abandoned from their mothers' wombs, no one can stand them. No one can stand anyone anymore. Everyone is a stranger to everyone else. Even the stars in the sky are alien to one another."

Thirty yards away from them Adel was sitting on the top step of his hut, smoking as he calmly repaired a pair of pruning shears whose spring had come loose. Two cats lay on the parapet of the veranda as though fainting in the heat. From the depths of the hazy night came the chugging sound of a sprinkler and the drawn-out grating of crickets. Every now and again a night bird uttered a piercing shriek. And in faraway farmyards dogs were barking, with a sound that sometimes descended to a sad, heart-rending howl, answered occasionally by the wail of a solitary jackal from the orchards on the slopes of the hills. Rachel raised her eyes from her book and said, to herself rather than to her father:

"Sometimes I ask myself what on earth I am doing here."

"Of course," said the old man. "I know I'm a burden on you."

"I'm not talking about you, Pesach, I'm talking about my own life. Why do you bring everything straight back to yourself?"

"So please, go off." The old man chuckled. "Go and find yourself a new life. I'll stay on here with the little Arab to look after the garden and the house. Until it falls down. It won't be long before it collapses on top of us."

"Falls down? Until what falls down?"

"The house. Those diggers are undermining the foundation."

"Nobody is digging. I'm going to buy you some earplugs so you don't wake up in the night."

Adel put down the shears, stubbed out his cigarette, pulled out his mouth organ and played a few hesitant notes, as if he couldn't decide which tune to play. Or as if he were trying to imitate the desperate wailing of the jackal that came from the direction of the orchards. And the jackal really did seem to respond from the darkness. A plane flew high above the village, its wing lights flashing. The suffocating air was damp and warm and dense, almost solid.

"That's a lovely tune," the old man said. "Heart-rending. It reminds us of a time when there was still some fleeting affection between people. There's no point in playing tunes like that today. They are an anachronism, because nobody cares anymore. That's all over. Now our hearts are blocked. All feelings are dead. Nobody turns to anyone else except from self-interested motives. What is left? Maybe only this melancholy tune, as a kind of reminder of the destruction of our hearts."

Rachel poured three glasses of lemon squash and called to Adel to come and join them on the veranda. The old man asked for Coca-Cola instead, but this time he didn't insist. Adel came over, with his little boy's glasses hanging on a cord around his neck, and sat down to one side, on the stone parapet. Rachel asked him to play for them. Adel hesitated, then chose a Russian tune, full of longing and sorrow. His friends at Haifa University had taught him these Russian tunes. The old man stopped grumbling and extended his tortoise neck at an angle, as though trying to move his good ear closer to the source of the music. Then he sighed and said:

"Oh, to hell with it. What a pity."

But he didn't bother to explain what was a pity this time.

At ten past eleven Rachel says she is feeling tired, and asks Adel some question about the next day, something about sawing off a branch or painting a bench. Adel softly promises and asks a couple of questions. Rachel replies. The old man folds his newspaper: in two, in four, in eight, until it makes a little square. Rachel stands and picks up the tray with the fruit and biscuits, but leaves them the glasses and the bottle. She tells her father not to go to bed too late, and reminds Adel to switch off the light when he leaves. Then she wishes them both good night, steps over a couple of sleeping cats and goes indoors. The old man nods a few times and mutters after her, into empty space rather than to Adel:

"Well, yes. She needs a change. We tire her out so."

RACHEL GOES TO HER
bedroom. She switches on the ceiling light, then turns on her bedside lamp. She stands in front of the open window for a few moments. The night air is warm and close and the stars are surrounded by patches of haze. The crickets are in full voice. The sprinklers are swishing. She listens to the sounds of the jackals in the hills and the answering barks of the dogs in the yards. She turns her back to the window, without closing it, takes off her dress, scratches herself, finishes undressing and puts on a short cotton nightdress printed with little flowers. She pours herself a glass of water and drinks some. She goes to the toilet. When she returns she stands at the window again for a while. She can hear the old man on the veranda talking angrily to Adel, and Adel replying briefly in his soft voice. She can't catch what they are saying, and she wonders what the old man wants from the youth this time and also what it is that keeps the youth here.

A mosquito buzzes beside her ear. And a moth dances drunkenly around her bedside lamp, crashing into the bulb. She is suddenly sorry for herself and feels sad for the days that go by so aimlessly and pointlessly. The school year is ending, then it will be the summer holiday, and then another year will begin, no different from the one that is ending. More marking, more staff meetings, more Micky the vet.

Rachel switches on the fan and gets under the sheet. But she is not tired anymore; instead she feels wide awake. She pours some more water from the bottle on her bedside table, drinks, turns restlessly, puts a pillow between her legs and turns again. A faint, almost inaudible grating sound makes her sit up and switch on her bedside light. Now she can hear no sound except the crickets, the frogs, the sprinklers and the distant dogs. She turns out the light, pushes off the sheet and lies on her back. And then something starts grating again, as though the floor tiles are being scraped with a nail.

Rachel turns on the light and gets out of bed. She checks the shutter, but it is open and firmly anchored. She checks the curtain, too, in case the noise came from there, and the door of the toilet, but there is no breeze. Not even a faint one. She sits on a chair for a while but hears no sound. As soon as she gets back into bed, covers herself with the sheet and turns off the light, the gnawing sounds again. Is there a mouse in the room? It's hard to imagine, because the house is overrun with cats. Now she has the impression that someone is scratching the floor under her bed with a sharp instrument. She freezes and holds her breath, straining to listen. Now the scratching is punctuated with faint knocking or tapping sounds. She switches the bedside light on again and gets down on hands and knees to look under the bed: there is nothing there apart from some dust balls and a scrap of paper. Rachel does not get back into bed, but stands, alert, in the center of the room, after switching the ceiling light on too. Now, even with the light on, she can hear the gnawing and scratching sounds, and she decides that someone, perhaps Adel, or more likely her terrible old man, is bending down outside her window and deliberately scraping the wall and tapping on it lightly. Neither of them is entirely sane. She takes the flashlight from the shelf beside her wardrobe and prepares to go around to the back of the house. Or should she go down to the cellar?

First, though, she goes out on the veranda to see which of them is not sitting there, so that she will know whom to suspect. But the veranda is in darkness and the old man's window is dark too. So is Adel's hut. Rachel, in her sandals and nightdress, goes around to the side of the house, stoops between the pillars that support the house and shines the flashlight into the space under her floor: it lights dusty cobwebs and alarms an insect that scuttles away into the darkness. She straightens up and stands, surrounded by the deep stillness of the night.

Nothing stirs the row of cypresses separating her yard from the cemetery. There is no hint of a breeze. Even the crickets and the dogs have momentarily fallen silent. The darkness is dense and oppressive, and the heat hangs heavily over everything. Rachel Franco stands there trembling, alone in the dark under the blurred stars.

I HAD A PHONE
call yesterday from Batya Rubin, the widow of Eldad Rubin. She didn't beat about the bush. She simply asked if she was speaking to Yossi Sasson, the real estate agent, and when I replied, "At your service, ma'am," she said, "It's time for us to talk."

I've had my eye for a long time on the Rubins' house in Tarpat Street, behind the Pioneers' Garden, the house we call The Ruin. It's an old house, built not long after the village was founded, more than a century ago. The other old houses that used to stand on either side of it, the Wilenski house and the Shmueli house, have been demolished and replaced by villas several stories high. These villas are surrounded by well-kept gardens, and one of them has an ornamental pond, complete with artificial waterfall, goldfish and fountain. The Ruin stands between them like a black tooth in a row of white teeth. It's a big, rambling house with all sorts of wings and extensions, built of sandstone, and most of the plaster has peeled off. It has a withdrawn air, standing back from the road, turning its back to the world and surrounded by an unkempt yard full of thistles and rusting junk. A blocked well stands in the middle, topped by a corroded hand pump. The windows are always shuttered, and the paved path leading from the gate to the house is overgrown with convolvulus, prosopis and couch grass. A few blouses and items of underwear that can occasionally be seen hanging from the clothesline at the side of the house are the only signs of life.

For many years we had a well-known writer here in Tel Ilan, Eldad Rubin, an invalid in a wheelchair who wrote long novels about the Holocaust, even though he had spent all his life in Tel Ilan, apart from a few years studying in Paris in the late fifties. He was born here in this old house on Tarpat Street, he wrote all his books here, and it was here that he died about ten years ago, at the age of fifty-nine. Ever since his death I have been hoping to buy the house and sell it for demolition and rebuilding. As a matter of fact I have tried to read Eldad Rubin's books once or twice, but they weren't my sort of thing: everything in them seems so heavy and depressing, the plots are so slow and the characters so wretched. I mostly read the economic supplements of the paper, political books and thrillers.

Two women live in The Ruin and so far they have refused to sell at any price: Rosa, the writer's ninety-five-year-old mother, and his widow, who must be in her sixties. I've tried phoning them a few times, and it's always the widow, Batya, who answers. I always begin by expressing my admiration for the late writer's books, which are a source of pride to the entire village, continue with some hints about the dilapidated condition of the property, suggesting that there's no point in patching it up, and end with a polite request to be invited for a brief discussion about the future. The conversation invariably ends with Batya Rubin thanking me for my interest but stating that as the matter is not currently on their agenda, there would be no point in my going round to see them.

Until yesterday, when she telephoned of her own accord and said, "It's time for us to talk." I made up my mind immediately not to start bringing clients to her but to buy The Ruin myself. Then I'd have it demolished, and I'd get more for the site than I'd paid for the house. I was inside the house once when I was little. My mother, who was a registered nurse, took me with her when she was called out to give an injection to the writer Eldad Rubin. I was nine or ten. I remember a spacious central room furnished in oriental style, from which a lot of doors opened off, as well as some stairs that appeared to go down to a cellar. The furniture looked heavy and dark. Two of the walls were lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling, and another was covered with maps studded with multicolored thumbtacks. A vase on the table contained a bunch of thistles. And the ticking of a grandfather clock with gilded hands beat time.

The writer himself was sitting in his wheelchair, a tartan rug covering his knees and his big head framed by a mane of gray hair. I can remember a broad red face sunk between his shoulders, as though he had no neck, and his large ears, and bushy eyebrows that were also turning gray. There were gray hairs protruding from his ears and nostrils, too. There was something about him that reminded me of a hibernating bear. My mother and his mother hauled him from the wheelchair to the sofa, and he didn't make it any easier for them by grumbling and growling and struggling to escape, but his muscles were too weak and they got the better of him. His mother, Rosa, pulled down his trousers until his swollen buttocks were exposed, and my mother bent over and gave him the injection in the top of his white thigh. Afterward the writer joked with her. I can't remember what he said, but I do remember that it wasn't very funny. Then his wife, Batya, came in. She was a thin, nervous woman with her hair gathered in a little bun. She offered my mother a glass of tea and gave me some sweetish black-currant juice in a cup that seemed to me to be cracked. My mother and I sat for about a quarter of an hour in the sitting room of the house, which was already referred to in the village as The Ruin. And I remember there was something about the house that captured my imagination. Perhaps it was the fact that five or six doors opened off that central room, straight into the rooms surrounding it. That wasn't the way the houses in our village were built. I have only ever seen this style of building in Arab villages. The writer himself, though he wrote books about the Holocaust, didn't seem at all gloomy or mournful but radiated a sort of forced boyish gaiety. He tried hard to entertain us in his sleepy way, telling us anecdotes, amusing himself with plays on words, but I remember him from that single meeting not as a charming man but as someone who was making a huge effort to ensure everything went off as pleasantly as possible.