About the Night (11 page)

“Stay close to me,” Elias shouted over the terrible din, but she could not hear him. He moved his arm to the back and pressed her close. “Exactly,” he yelled. “That’s it. Hold on to me.”

Gradually, he increased their speed, excited by her grasp and the vibrating Benelli and this sudden freedom they had. The sun was about to set, and the wind caressed their faces. Lila’s chin rested on Elias’s shoulder, and from a certain angle, they appeared as one body. Her thighs pressed his, her arms clasped his chest. They drove along a winding road among low hills, olive trees, and grapevines, now and again passing a country cottage where the blinds would billow in the breeze. They were alone on a motorcycle at the edge of a bumpy Turkish road, and the aloneness was intoxicating, with wide-open spaces and the illusion that everything lay ahead of them, as free as the galloping Benelli.

“Do you want to know where I’m taking you?” he shouted.

“No!” she cried out in a voice that overcame the roaring motor.

She felt him smiling even though she could only see his back. The bike skipped across dirt paths and stopped in a spot that seemed like the end of the continent. He turned off the motor.

“Here we are,” he said, “the end of the world. There’s nowhere left to go.”

Even on steady ground, her body continued to throb to the rhythm of the motor. Her face was beautiful and charged with excitement from the drive and his touch and the freedom. It was hard to say what astonished her more—the absolute silence that had suddenly descended on their little empire, or the view, a virginal piece of earth that seemed always to have looked just as it did, and always would, simply as it had been created.

“This is where I want to live,” he told her in a still and quiet voice. “And from here, I want to set out into the world with you.”

This did not seem like folly to her. He said these words as though his plan were about to be realized at any moment.

At a certain distance, small and alone, like a woodsman’s cottage, stood a church. Its white dome was like a scoop of ice cream, its sole window facing the field. They came upon it suddenly, there in the middle of nowhere, with only wild nature surrounding them. A stone path lay before it, and he took her hand and led her there. The silence was delicate, the color of the sky full of softness as ancient trees stood firmly in their earth, their tops swaying in the breeze. It was as if they had been awaiting the footsteps of Elias and Lila for thousands of years.

A monk popped out from behind the building as if he were the only person left here, at the end of the world. He was sweeping dry leaves from his garden with a straw broom, an act that looked comical and clumsy against the backdrop of this holy place.

He bowed his head in welcome.

Elias told him they had come from a great distance. The monk nodded but said nothing. The three of them were standing in the small garden of the church, a metal cross hanging above them with an inscription in Latin.

“Can you marry us?” Elias asked as if he were asking for directions to the nearest bus stop.

The monk looked back and forth between Elias and Lila. She was stunned.

Elias pointed to himself, then to Lila, and then mimed an imaginary ring. The monk merely smiled and remained silent. He went inside and returned with two glasses of water, which they drank in silence. The monk did not open his mouth, but he drew near them, placing one hand on Elias’s head and the other on Lila’s. Lila was certain she was hallucinating this unification ceremony that was taking place at what Elias had referred to as the end of the world.

Evening was falling and a velvety light colored the heavens at this crucial moment they were sharing. But no star sparkled more than Elias’s eyes.

They took their leave of the monk and returned to the Benelli, which awaited them at the side of the road. There, Elias kissed her, a kiss filled with emotion, a kiss that cast aside, for the moment, their secrecy, a kiss that contained all that was not stated: that on this evening, in their perfect world, which was created solely in their honor, this was how things should be.

As they parked the motorcycle at the inn, a flock of birds circled overhead. The young man refused payment from Elias and acted peeved when he slipped a few bills into his pocket. Elias smiled and clapped him on the shoulder.

Kuchon was standing at the entrance, a camera hanging around his neck. “Stand there for a moment,” he called to them.

Elias and Lila stood still.

He paused for a moment, then clicked the shutter. They stood close together but did not touch, still wearing their morning travel clothes. Their hair was tousled, their white shirts slightly crumpled, their eyes sparkled, and into the photograph there crept, like a thief climbing a drainpipe, that very photogenic moment of a secret, the place from which they had just returned.

Kuchon the pest, Elias thought, had just justified his existence in the world without knowing it by becoming a wedding photographer. Or, rather, the photographer of a single wedding.

“If only it were possible,” Lila said, “not to drown in my own tears.”

“You won’t cry,” he told her. “We still have two days left, the whole trip back. So long as we’re together, it doesn’t matter where. Look at me. Do you see sadness in my eyes? No, because I’m filled with joy.”

She nodded, fearful that if she opened her mouth a flood of tears would pour from her eyes. Elias ordered raki on the rocks and drank two rounds with her. They drank in silence, bursting with love, struggling against their time together drawing to a close. Her eyes were damp from fighting back tears; his were warm and focused on her like a heat lamp meant to cure pain. In a moment, they would cross the street and reach the train station, where they would board a train against their will. It would insist on swallowing railroad tie after railroad tie, many miles of them all the way back to Istanbul, where they would catch their ship back to Haifa. The train would swallow all that distance and return them to their homes: she to her small and fragile world on the roof, he to his parents’ fortified home on the ground. There would be no mishap along the way, no accident, no reason to stop, no tree fallen on the tracks, no engine that had run out of steam.

Only after two glasses of raki was she ready and able to start the journey home. The miracle that people around the world chase after had occurred between them: the realization that they were two people perfectly suited to each other. It was a knot that came to be naturally, an interweaving of loops that had joined them without effort, an embroidery of love that was theirs alone and in which were mixed the depths of soul and the heights of bodily pleasure, creating a perfect garment that was as light as silk and strong as canvas.

And all this, Lila thought as she walked behind her man through the carriage of the train, all this had taken place in only ten days. Two worlds, two strangers, two people woven together like the strips of dough that form a challah bread, placed next to each other in the heat of an oven. These ten miraculous days were units of time different from the usual ones, ten days overflowing and earthshaking, like ten months or ten years. She recalled Ezra, the janitor at Salon Hubert, who would explain that the ways of the Lord were as simple as shining the mirrors each morning.

“When big things happen,” he told her, “time flows differently. For instance, who says the world was created in six days? Maybe a day was like sixty years. Or even a thousand or a million, like it says in Psalms: For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past.”

Elias slipped a bill into the pocket of the attendant, who understood exactly what was expected of him: to leave them alone in their compartment on the train, send a waiter every once in a while, and find a pillow and blanket for Madame. At first she sat facing him in order to draw courage from his eyes. Then she moved to his side, her head on and off his shoulder. She would not sleep for even a moment as the train raced into the darkness, stealing away from the villages and towns that had given them refuge. Her eyes were closed, but he knew she was not sleeping.

All doors had opened to them, locks and bolts fell away, chefs wished to cook for them, waiters hummed in their presence, drivers and merchants and peddlers fought to serve them because their presence was blinding. Elias removed his vest, a sign that he had made his peace with this journey and its outcome. He was wide-awake, alert with a feeling of awe.

Their trip could have ended in failure, he realized. They could have returned home strangers; nothing significant could have happened between them, as nothing ever had before Lila entered his life. Anything before Lila only seemed like love or was mixed with confusion and proved false in no time.

I’ve fallen in love with her, he said to himself, marveling at the words he had never practiced or thought about. They came to his lips like a sailor on the threshold of a new land, and everything hidden inside him—everything he did not know existed, all his longing and desire—flooded him, so that each time this discovery that he had fallen in love with her entered his mind, a flash of heat made its way through his body.

He tried to organize the sheaf of memories that had amassed during their trip, to find the moment this had occurred, to isolate it from all the days of exhilaration. Was it at the candlelit restaurant where he built her a house of dozens of matches? Was it before dawn after a sleepless night when they were drunk and sated with bodily pleasure, and they talked until the sun rose and he did not wish to sleep because it meant he would have to stop gazing at her? Or perhaps it was their first dance together, when they had danced for hours as if they were the only people on the dance floor?

I’ve fallen in love with her, he thought. My molecules love hers and connect one to the other in physical perfection. Now it was his turn to plunge into fatigue after hours of staring into the darkness. If only he could sleep a little, to escape from the sadness that was stealthily laying claim to him. It seduced him into paging through the album of their journey, bestowing a feeling of elation but abandoning him when he was finished, leaving him to ponder the nature of this train trip, the outcome of which was unavoidable.

They did not speak about what was separating them; to them it was clear that the barrier was artificial. It had been forced on them by their environment, their cultures. What did it matter that they had been born to different peoples? She was closer to him than any Arab he had ever met. The same blood flowed through their veins, the same sweat, the same touch of the body, the same palate, the same taste, the same desires, the same wishes. Even the color of their skin was similar; if he passed through every nation on the Mediterranean, he would not find a woman whose skin was so like his own and gave off the same scent.

Lila opened her eyes at the very moment he wished to see them. She needed strength to absorb into herself this new man who had turned her life upside down. Until only a few weeks earlier, he had been a stranger, and now she and he were one. Their return journey on the train of darkness was teaching her that her life would change immeasurably even though it would be the very same life with the very same patterns. She realized she would find it hard to endure without him. Reality would not allow them to continue the dream that had taken shape in the Kaçkar Mountains. It would demand its share, levy taxes on all those hours of happiness, and make them pay for the freedoms they had stolen by pushing aside his pedigreed Arab clan and her traditional, conservative, utterly Jewish way of life.