About the Night
Authors: Anat Talshir
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2010 Anat Talshir
Translation copyright © 2016 Evan Fallenberg
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Previously published as
Im Eshkahekh
by Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir in Israel in 2010. Translated from Hebrew by Evan Fallenberg. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2016.
Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503936034
ISBN-10: 1503936031
Cover design by Shasti O’Leary-Soudant
For my beloved family
Contents
Part 1
2006
She said nothing, and neither did he. What was there to add after what he had said?
Even the machine hooked up to his heart silenced its beeping. It was as if all the background noise—the bustling corridor, the heavy footfalls of the patients, the squeaky wheels of the beds, the nurses’ voices—had been muted.
She sat facing him, her hands holding her arms, her fingers digging into her flesh. When she rose too quickly from her chair to open a window, she felt a slight dizziness, but the burst of cool air tempered it. She remained there, at the window, awash in the fresh air and wishing to forget what she had heard. He, too, was breathing deeply, his eyes closed like someone who had only just found a moment of repose.
Several minutes earlier, she had been sitting by his side, still astonished that he had called for her after so many years. She knew that he was still living in the same house in Jerusalem, his children were grown and living in different parts of the world, and almost nothing was left of his wealth, massive as it had once been. The backdrop of Hadassah Hospital did not suit him in the least, and still, despite its ugliness, he was as noble and dignified as ever, his prominent features reminiscent of the charismatic man she recalled from her childhood. Just hearing his name—Elias Riani—was enough to stir her. The brown eyes, the gray hair combed back, the beautiful neck—everything was intact; it had merely grown older. She wished to see if the laugh lines would appear around his eyes as she remembered them, as if the sun in all its glory were lighting his face and spreading warmth to everyone in the vicinity.
He asked her to pour them tea from the thermos standing on the small cabinet. “In the glass cups,” he said. “Munir comes every morning. He brings me hot tea, washes the cups, changes my pajamas, shaves me. I tell him, ‘Don’t come anymore,’ and still he comes. You remember Munir, don’t you? He worked for us for many years.”
She remembered him, the man devoted to serving Elias’s family, just as she remembered the trembling she felt each time Elias’s car pulled up and he gave her an envelope to deliver. Whenever he asked, she was excited to carry out his wish, and now, gazing at the tender expression on his face, she recalled the covenant between them, real and sturdy. It had not weakened with the years. And it was precisely thanks to this covenant that Elias had summoned her.
Nomi took the empty cup from his hands. It was still hot; dark and hot was how he drank his tea. The ceremonious way he had drunk tea his whole life now seemed far removed from his present life, even though the fragrant bergamot from the thermos brought from home offered at least a paltry consolation. Elias was wearing dark-blue pajamas and a blue-and-green plaid flannel robe. A man like Elias Riani could not be expected to wear the wrinkled nightshirt provided by the hospital.
“I asked you to come,” he had said.
Instead of saying she had honored his request and come at once, Nomi nodded.
“You’re probably wondering why.”
Still she said nothing.
“I need you to do something for me,” he said.
“Whatever you want,” she said.
“Will you give me your word?” he asked.
Nomi gazed at him, tense.
He said it in a quiet voice, his brown eyes watching her and at the same time drifting away to a different place.
“I wanted to ask you”—he stopped for a moment until he found the words he was searching for—“I wanted to ask you to bring something for me.”
“What?”
“Something that’s in my house,” he said.
“No problem,” Nomi said.
“It’s hidden in a closet.”
“Tell me where, and I’ll find it,” she said.
“I think I need to explain a little more than just where you’ll find it.” He rubbed his chin. “An apothecary from Jaffa, someone I’ve known for years, agreed to prepare something for me.” Elias stopped speaking for a moment, as if waiting for her to absorb what he was telling her.
Rooted to the spot, Nomi still understood nothing.
“I want to join her where she is now,” he said.
In the silence that engulfed the two of them, she began processing what she thought she heard. The way he had expressed it was not as a wish but as something practical, immediate, and willful. Could it be there was not even a tremor in his voice?
She exhaled deeply, slowly and audibly releasing the air that had gathered in her lungs. It seemed as though the supply of air hidden within was endless.
And so it was that they sat, he on his joyless bed, she on the armchair facing him, while the entire floor around them froze for a moment and the morning din was hushed and fresh air blew in on a day when the sun was hesitant to appear. He closed his eyes and slept for a few minutes, then opened them and looked at her, surprised she was still there.
“I gave you the chance to slip away,” he said, bringing a smile to her lips. “But I’m glad you’re still here.”
A dark-skinned nurse with a nametag that read “Dassy” entered the room, her curls bouncing along with her. She drew near him and asked how he was feeling, then noticed Nomi on the chair. “Are you the daughter?” she asked.
They answered together, in the same second: He said, “Just like a daughter.”
She said, “Not really.”
Dassy stuck a thermometer under his tongue and looked from one to the other several times, clearly amused.
“What matters is that he’s happy you’re here,” Dassy said. “I haven’t seen him smiling for a long time.” She wrapped a blood pressure cuff around his arm and inflated it. She jotted down the results on the clipboard hanging from the end of the bed. “The doctors will be making their rounds soon,” she said. With a hesitant look in Nomi’s direction, she added, “But you can stay if it’s okay with him.”
Nomi began to rise, but his eyes told her to stay seated. Those eyes have so much power, she thought, even when he’s lying there incapacitated in a hospital bed.
Suddenly, his body convulsed, shifting in the bed. He tried hiding the pain, but his face grew ashen, and his nose was dotted with perspiration.
“What are you feeling?” Nomi asked.
“It’s like a pulse of poison spreading through the bones and weakening the body,” he said.
“Are you cold?”
“Cold? Yes,” he said, and he pulled the sheet up to his chin. “In the cabinet, you’ll find a hot water bottle. Would you be kind enough to fill it for me?”
Nomi entered the doctors’ room without asking and filled the water bottle with hot water from the urn. Back in the room, she found him curled up, suffering from the cold. She placed the hot water bottle under his feet where, she knew, a pleasant flow of warmth would spread upward to the rest of his body. He would enjoy at least an hour of heat before the water cooled.
“I’m sorry you saw me in one of my difficult moments,” he said. “I have them every day.” His eyes suddenly shone, and he gathered the bottle to his breast and held it close. “But that’s not why I want to put an end to this.” He was gazing out the window at the enormous cranes moving outside.
She bit her lower lip in anticipation of what he might say.
“The pains,” Elias told her, “only started when she died.”
“There’s still time,” she told him. “You’ll get better, regain your strength. In this place, everything seems like a lost cause. But you’ll be fine. And then you’ll be happy you came out of it and had the patience to wait.” She was speaking rapidly so he could not cut her off.
He waited. “Look,” he said, without a trace of bitterness, “I’ve had a full life. But now I’m half-dead, and I can’t find the half-living part anymore. I have no taste for such a life.”
Elias fell silent the moment he noticed the swarm of doctors and their entourage descending on his small room. They entered in a rush and surrounded his bed, a silver-haired doctor in the front. They appeared hurried and decisive.
“How are you, Mr. Riani?” asked the doctor in charge.
“The same, thank you,” Elias said, sitting up in bed.
“The same bad or the same good?” asked one of the residents.
“The same nothing,” Elias said.
“Eighty-six years old, here three weeks already,” one of the residents declaimed. “CT scan and MRI normal, chest and stomach pains, complaining of difficulty breathing, EKG normal, weight loss, high blood pressure.”
The doctor in charge regarded his patient. His voice was authoritative but pleasant. “We need you to help us, Mr. Riani,” he said, “so that we can help you. Tomorrow we’ll repeat the gastro tests to negate that possibility, too.”
The entourage moved on to Elias’s roommate, but Elias remained silent. Nomi thought about how he was making it tough for them and how they were oppressing him. Doctors do not like patients who fail to get well; they want instant success and beds that empty out.
“They don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Elias explained.
She stood in order to raise the pillow behind his back and asked if he needed anything else. He held out his hand to ask for hers in return. His perfect hands were now weak and pale, their grip feeble and cold to the touch.
A little sun would do him good, she thought as she bent down to hug him good-bye. She remembered him tanned, his skin full of life, nourished by the healthy sun that his face had absorbed and colored in that beautiful hue reserved for the people of the Middle East.
How light was her step as she left the hospital, how quickly she passed the crowded rooms in which pallid old men and women groaned; how cloying were the smells that accosted her nose: the smell of watery lunches on stainless steel carts, the smell of cleaning solutions, the smell of illness and desperation and bouquets of flowers jammed into plastic vases.
Only outside did she allow the fresh air to reach her nostrils. I promised him I would come again, she thought, but I can’t handle another visit. I can’t bear to watch him decline.
But she could not abandon him to that entourage of clueless residents trying out new cures on his body, to the wretchedness that did not become him. It was up to him to choose the manner in which he would leave; that was his prerogative. But what did he want from her? And why her, of all people? Where were his children? Where had all the people in his life disappeared to, people about whom she knew next to nothing?
She stopped the car at a corner kiosk and asked for freshly squeezed carrot juice; the vitamins galloped away to their respective targets, and the sugars revived her.
“All that in one sip,” the juice man said, surprised. “Come every day.”
The next day, she went looking for a buckwheat-filled heating pad covered in felt that would provide Elias with uniform and moderate heat and the pleasant scent of baked grains. In the natural foods store, she bought carob and sesame snacks, grateful for the refuge that could be found in simple purchases.
She found a round neck pillow and a red heart-shaped one, and a third in tiger-striped velvet. She settled on a plaid not unlike the bathrobe he had been wearing in the hospital, in that ward of patients whose maladies were not yet understood or would never be understood. The buckwheat pillow rustled in the bag. She was worried about who would heat it up in the microwave for him; after all, he was too polite and guarded to ask anyone for help. She would do it for him when she was there, but what would happen after she left? She found a book by Jhumpa Lahiri in large print and bought it for him.