About the Night (13 page)

“A black day,” said the banker.

Elias tried to find words, but before he could, the banker continued. “The Jews have power and influence,” he said. “They control the world.”

“No one can know what will happen,” Elias said. With all his heart, he believed that uncertainty was better than a bad decree.

The banker shook Elias’s hand and assured him that his family’s money was safe with him.

In his office, Elias found Munir. “I’ve been here since six this morning,” he said, almost apologetically. “I couldn’t sleep, so I came in and tidied things up. I filed, opened the mail. Should I run errands in the western part of the city?” His tone was hesitant.

“Yes.” Elias was impatient. He wanted Munir to go and leave him alone. Let him ride his bicycle to her city and bring back his impressions. What was happening with the Jews? What were they planning? And how would this affect him and his secret love?

Munir left and George entered, in low spirits and worried. “I feel as though I drank too much,” he said, rubbing his brow. “My head is splitting.” George tried to be a help in the office, but he was too dejected and announced he was going out to get his shoes polished. Elias hoped that when finally alone he would be able to think clearly.

Munir returned two hours later. He found Elias stooped over his desk, exactly as he had left him. Elias straightened up and began leafing through papers, as though interested in what they contained. He looked at Munir inquisitively.

“Celebrations,” Munir told him. “On Jaffa Street. As quiet as it is here, that’s how noisy it is over there.”

Elias looked surprised.

“They danced all night,” Munir told him. “Till morning.”

“The hora,” Elias said. He recalled that in Istanbul Lila had taught him the steps. “Is that all?” he had asked her. “Is that all there is to this hora of yours?”

“That’s all,” she had said. “A peasant dance, steps that repeat themselves.”

“The tango is far more exciting,” he had said.

“The tango is more exciting because it’s with you.” In that spirit she demonstrated the steps to one hora dance, The Little Shepherdess, and Elias understood it was a matter of pride, that every nation had its dance and that the hora was not just a dance of joy at weddings and holidays. It was a ritual of sorts that brought enormous strength to the participants.

“Did their newspapers come out this morning?” Elias asked. Normally, George was the one who awaited the Jews’ newspapers like some desperate addict.

“Only later, this afternoon,” Munir told him.

Elias’s jaws hurt. The tension was taking hold of him.

“The guy from the bakery on Jaffa Street,” Munir told him, “was handing out free cakes. I didn’t take one. Who could eat cake on a day like today?”

“They could,” Elias said. “They’re happy.”

“People were standing in line outside Eisenkot’s travel agency,” Munir said. “Not only Jews. Arabs, too.”

They want to run away from here, Elias thought. Where are they going, and why aren’t I going with them? He wanted to hear more, but Munir was trying to calm himself down by dealing with small chores that gave him a feeling of purpose and accomplishment: he changed the ribbon on the typewriter, oiled the drawers, and polished the kettle until the copper blazed. After that, he cleaned the telephone receiver with alcohol and cotton wool. The germs in the mouthpiece were apparently more dangerous than the war about to break out at any moment.

Elias felt exhausted. His body was dragging him down, sending signals of pain to his legs.

Quite a bit later than usual, Munir served him a sandwich of salty cheese and a mug of coffee. “Eat up,” Munir urged him. “It’s good.”

Later, as night descended early and the wind had kicked up and he was locking the office, Munir noticed the sandwich on Elias’s desk, dry and untouched.

Elias had no idea how this day had ended. Parts of it had crept by while other parts had flown by, sucking him into nightmares. He returned home on foot, barely able to drag himself up the incline, a walk he normally made lightly. His body was weak, and in his ears there was a ringing that spread through him.

“A middle ear infection,” his mother proclaimed. “You’re losing your sense of balance.” He lay in bed. He could hear his father leafing through newspapers in the living room, trying in his own way to piece together reality from what the Jews and the Arabs were writing, melding the reports and the lies and the testimonies, wishing for one distinct truth to emerge from the mix.

Elias fell asleep shivering and wrapped in a heavy sweater.

Lila, too, went to bed early. The cold and darkness seemed like enemies that could only be confronted with a kerosene heater, a warm blanket, and a cup of tea. This was not the first time she had not heard from him in a day or two. But she had been waiting for him to find his way to her since the day before. Several times he had told her that when something undermined them, they would find something to protect them against upheavals. Well, yesterday was an earthquake, she thought, so where was he? Absent, hiding out.

He, who only several weeks earlier had said, “We can overcome all the differences: religion, culture, society. First and foremost, it’s you and me, then all the rest.”

“I’ll always remain a Jew,” Lila had said, unbending.

“Yes,” he said. “You have what’s yours and I have what’s mine, and nothing will be stamped out. But our relationship creates a new religion, our own.”

“My parents brought me up to believe that I am a descendant of the chosen people,” she told him.

“And you needn’t change that,” he said. “But try to find what we have in common, not what’s different between us. You’re a patriot, and I respect you for that. But we’ve found something that is ours and isn’t dependent on any other idea.”

The beginning of December crept by as Elias lay in his sickbed.

Each time he tried to rise from his bed, he grew dizzy and wobbled, done in by black spots that appeared before his eyes, and he lay back down, drained and weak. The pain in his ears spread to his throat and then his chest and was sometimes unbearable. He heard his mother tell his father that he had lost his sense of balance. As the days passed, he began to understand that he needed this time to absorb what had transpired, to comprehend the enormity of the change.

However, Lila interpreted this silence of his as a severing. The silence from his end was insufferable, and she struggled with terrible thoughts that did away with all that they had built together.

The days grew shorter, the nights longer, and Istanbul and the staggering love that had burst out between them seemed like a memory too painful to bear. Eight days had passed since a gale had come along and destroyed everything, and still not a sign of life from him. On the ninth day, a messenger boy entered Salon Hubert with a letter for Miss Lila. Rita pointed her out at the far end of the salon. Lila plucked the letter from his hand and began to tremble. She locked herself in the bathroom.

His handwriting was strained but hopeful, and careful lest the letter fall into the wrong hands. They would meet five hours later at Fink’s.

Monsieur Hubert knocked at the door. “Miss Lila,” he called out, peeved, “we’re already behind today.”

She came out, pale and barely able to finish her shift. Time passed slowly until she could grab her coat and rush out. Monsieur Hubert’s nitpicking pursued her right out into the street, but it was swallowed in the din of the warning alarms to which everyone but the pigeons had already grown accustomed.

He was waiting for her, thinner and paler, in a black sweater and scarf. She was surprised to see him in black—it was a first. At the sight of her face, warmth passed through his body and brought light to his eyes. He rose to greet her, removed her coat, and sat facing her, his elbows on the table, his fingers linked, and his chin resting on them. A waiter asked what they would like to drink. Elias looked at her as if asking a question.

She could see he was not at his best. “Cognac, please, to warm up,” she said.

“The same for me,” he said.

British officers drained glasses of beer at the bar. The owner muttered that the following winter they would no longer be there to polish off every last keg. The cook poked his head in from the kitchen to say that the goulash was ready. Elias knew him and the rest of the staff at Fink’s. They bought tea from him.

He and Lila had not yet exchanged a single word, until, after a sip and then another of cognac, Elias asked, “Where were you on that night?”

“At home,” she said, “and then I went down to the neighbors’. I wanted to be with people. What about you?”

“I was at home,” he said. “And I’ve been ill ever since. I only just made it out of bed today.”

Something inside her softened when she heard his feeble, insecure voice.

“You people were dancing,” he said politely.

“There was dancing in the streets,” Lila told him. “Even right outside my building.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Did you dance, too?”

“I wasn’t able,” she said. “But I was awake all night. Hubert the miser opened a bottle of champagne. I drank, but I didn’t know what I was drinking to. They tell me I fainted, and they laid me down on the cosmetician’s treatment bed. When I opened my eyes, I had hoped to find myself somewhere else, but I understood it hadn’t happened.”

“I think I fell apart, too,” he said. “I fell into illness.”

“I’m frightened, Elias,” she said. “Tell me everything will be all right.”

The owner sent over a plate of goulash and several slices of bread on the house. “Watch out for the paprika,” he said with a wink. “The cook went nuts.”

“Eat,” Elias told her, and he put a piece of bread into his mouth so that she would eat as well. “We’ll find a way,” he said. “There’s no way we won’t.”

“Did you have a fever?” she asked.

“A high one,” he said. “I was almost unable to sleep. I dreamed that cockroaches were running around in my head, attacking every cell. I’ve never had such nightmares in my life.”

She wanted to hug him, wrap him in her robustness, nursing him to health and strengthening him. But all she could do was sit across from him and love him with her eyes.

“I should have found a way to let you know I was ill,” he said. “You were right to be cross with me even though you haven’t said you were.”

She tried to swallow a piece of bread dipped in sauce.

“With each passing day, I hope the solution will present itself,” he said, lowering his voice, “and that we’ll know what to do.”

She nearly said, “Maybe we should leave this place,” but she did not. She was waiting for him to say it.

Three men sat down at the table next to theirs and scrutinized them. Something in their presence was disturbing, and Elias squirmed.

He is not a man for flight, she thought; he could never be a refugee and would never roam vanquished Europe with her. Like him, she had no gut feelings about what was right and what was not.

As if reading her thoughts, Elias said, “It’s so difficult when you just don’t know what to do.”

The bar emptied out at around nine o’clock, and the owner sent the waiter and the cook home. Elias invited him to sit with them. He poured cognac into their glasses and brought the feeling of a nearly normal winter evening to their table.