About the Night (17 page)

“An acquaintance,” Elias said. Suddenly, he felt a kinship with the young woman, perhaps because he was afraid the same thing could happen to Lila, and since no one had come showing any interest in her.

“She’s coming around,” the nurse said. “A few broken bones, but she’ll mend like new.”

He felt relief knowing this stranger would grow strong and healthy.

He had not slept the night before. The city had been rumbling with indiscriminate British gunfire the whole night through, and life in the Old City did not resume in the morning because people were afraid to come out of their homes. If only she could know what an effort he had made to keep their date, what farfetched explanations he had given to his father, the bribe he had paid to the British supply officer for a laissez-passer, or the simple khaki clothing he had been loaned by a kibbutz friend, even the biblical sandals and gray wool socks the friend had provided without knowing for what purpose. He could stupefy any interrogator with gardening stories. He figured a person should always have a good story ready for interrogators, no matter which interrogators or which story.

If only Lila would walk in now and see him in his khaki clothes, how funny and baggy and shabby they were on his body, he would signal to her to speak Hebrew, and they would step out into the garden.

But she never came.

That afternoon, as she left her building, she ran into her inquisitive neighbor, the one who kept track of the tenants’ comings and goings. She had bought slabs of orange putty to line the windowpanes against the constant rattling of gunfire. While others were fortifying their apartments, Lila, exposed up on the roof, was preoccupied only with carrying on the life she shared with Elias. When she finally got rid of the neighbor, two men approached and asked if her name was Lila Cassuto. She told them it was.

“You’ll have to come with us,” said the bespectacled one.

“Where to?” Lila asked.

“You’re not the one to ask questions here,” said the second one, a man with steely eyes who gave her a once-over from top to bottom, his expression cold and arrogant. She noticed he tarried around her breasts even longer than the most vulgar of men.

“I’m on my way to work,” she told them.

“This is your day off,” said the one with glasses.

She feared they might be able to hear the pounding at her temples. Should she run? Return home? Try to buy time? Yes, she would try to buy time.

“Get in the car,” he told her.

“Where are your headquarters?” she asked. “I’ll get there myself.”

Their presence was threatening. The arrogant one opened the door of the car and motioned for her to enter.

“I will not get in that car with you,” she told them. “I’ll go on foot.”

She picked up her pace. Her image was reflected in the car windows.

Strangely enough, it was there, at headquarters, that her fear disappeared. She had been clever to refuse to enter their car, since it had given her a chance to think. Walking made her breathing return to normal and pumped blood through her body. By the time she passed by the roaring lion on Jaffa Street, Lila had prepared herself for their questions. She figured they were members of the Haganah determined to reveal the only secret she had: the nature of her relationship with an Arab man. What idiots, she thought; they could never understand.

And that was how she came to appear self-assured as she sat facing them, confident and safe in her covenant with Elias.

By the time she emerged two and a half hours later, the temperature had dropped, and night had come to cloak her in anonymity. From the time the interrogators had stopped her outside her home, she had not looked at her watch, since she understood that whoever did so had lost the game. For his sake, she had spent the time honorably. She had not groveled.

“We forbid you to meet with him,” was their concluding statement.

“Fine,” she had said.

The corridor of the Cardiology ward was empty; Elias was no longer there, but on the wooden bench there was a small branch from a fig tree. She had no doubt he had left it there for her, as if to say, “I waited.” She picked up the branch, with its perfectly shaped leaves, and thought about their secret, how what they had between them was and would remain clandestine so that even the language surrounding it was of necessity secretive. It was a language of people with so much to lose. An entire world.

Each time they upended the world in order to see each other and were blocked by tremendous opposing power, she thought it was the last time she would ever see him. It felt like the months before she had sailed from Istanbul with her parents. An overwhelming sense of mourning had accompanied her everywhere, and even though she was only nine years old, she held little farewell ceremonies for everything she was leaving or was not permitted to bring with her: the red-leaved trees on their street, the bus stop, the cinema she only knew from the outside, the window of her room, the dancer in the glass ball with the snowflakes, and her collection of coins and conch shells.

During those months, she practiced taking her leave from people as well, especially her friend Rachelle, with the thick braid and the thumb that lacked a nail. Their fathers sat beside each other in the synagogue, and Rachelle’s father had decorated flags for them for the Simchat Torah holiday.

In Istanbul, the city of her birth, she had learned to conceal the fact that she was a Jew, to never stand out or anger the gentiles, as her mother explained it. In their neighborhood, Jews and Arabs lived one next to the other, side by side. And still, the distinctions were clear between “them” and “us.” It had been implanted in her even before words were. Even the language they spoke, Ladino, was different from the Arabic of the Arabs and the Turkish of the Turks. The chosen people, her father said, high above the other nations. There was to be no mixing with others.

In Jerusalem, too, she had seen how thin and fragile the relationship between Jews and Arabs was, and how easily it could be shattered. There was a mutual existence between them until the flames broke out and destroyed everything that had been built. Two years before Elias entered her life, all Jerusalem had been aflame with a love affair between the Jewish daughter of a banker and the Arab son of a wealthy merchant. In spite of the fervent opposition of both families, the two decided to marry. The woman’s family disowned her and sat shiva over her, mourning her as if she had died. The Arab family accepted her into their lives, and the children grew up in their home. Now that war was about to break out between Arabs and Jews at any moment, the love shared by Lila and Elias was viewed with enmity, to the point that it could endanger their lives.

On the morning following the meeting that did not take place, Lila awakened from a nightmare in which Elias had appeared with another woman, aboard a ship and sailing off to sea while Lila remained on the pier; no one had waved to her, not even Elias. She decided that coffee would improve her mood, but there was not even a drop of water in the faucet. The kettle was empty, too.

The neighbor from downstairs knocked at her door. “Open up, Lila,” she called out. “I’ve brought you a little water from what I had left. They’re saying we won’t have water for quite a while.”

“How long is quite a while?” Lila asked, taken aback as she thought about all the showers and house-cleanings and mugs of tea she would have to forgo.

“A while,” the neighbor said. “Those damn Arabs blew up the pumps at Latrun.”

“How much worse is this going to get?” Lila shouted. “They’re going to dry up this entire city!”

“But your place is clean,” the neighbor said, looking around.

Lila began to wake up now, in earnest. She was sobering up slowly thanks to that first cup of coffee that her neighbor provided, a cup that would not be followed by a second. Without water, Salon Hubert would cease to operate. Salon Hubert! She was startled by her shallow selfishness: there would be no water for hospitals, no water for children. She wondered about Elias’s house as well, but for that, she had no answer.

A black crow whose cawing she recognized beat his wings and cried out as though bringing a message. He, too, would soon be hungry, she thought. The crow flew from his lookout point on the water barrels and returned to the roof railing, where Lila and her neighbor were standing in their bathrobes. To their surprise, he opened his mouth and out dropped a gray lump with feathers.

“Look,” Lila said, “it’s a dead bird.”

“He’s brought you a gift,” said the neighbor. “You know, it’s good fortune when a crow brings you a gift.”

She wondered what it was that the crow wished to tell her, but even more, she wondered about her neighbor. She was a woman who knew everything and was ready for every situation. She had the resourcefulness of a man and a woman rolled into one: she had collected water in a pail; she knew how to drive a truck and change a tire and fix leaky faucets and electricity that had gone out. She knew how to fire a rifle and how to cure bodily ailments, and she kept dried food and first-aid equipment in her apartment. The Kings Hotel employed her as a masseuse, and she kept a close watch on everything that happened there. Lila supposed she was an excellent source of information for the Haganah: who came and who went, who was whispering with whom, and who had disappeared. Now she and Elias were unable to see each other, but during the months they had managed to meet often, Lila began to wonder if her neighbor had caught sight of him.

Lila washed her face and arms in the water her neighbor had brought and felt much better.

On the glass door of Salon Hubert there hung a sign that read “Closed until Further Notice.” Lila went to the Mahane Yehuda market to walk around the stalls and to feel better. Men sat playing backgammon in a café at the edge of the market, but that was a male stronghold and Lila continued walking, though she wondered how there was water for coffee there.

Give me a sign, she said silently, so that I know what to do about the forced separation from Elias.

The market had never looked so empty and sad. She thought that only a hot shower might save her, help her put aside her bad thoughts.

She left her grocery basket at the seamstress’s shop, which was filled with wedding dresses. “Even with the shortages and the dry faucets,” the seamstress complained, “people are marrying like there’s no tomorrow.”

Lila told her she would be back soon for her basket.

A tremor of longing passed through her. She wanted to look at his eyes as he watched her. Only that. It was not such a big request.

Once, she recalled, they were driving in his car, and he’d said, “Your beauty. It is surprising all over again, each time.”

“In your eyes, I’m beautiful,” Lila said, smiling.

Elias said, “A beautiful woman is not just a pretty face, nice clothes, her walk, her gestures.” He stopped for a moment, then continued. “A beautiful woman is the moment when a man who is looking at her imagines the silky touch of her skin.”

When she entered the Kings Hotel, she was greeted by a young man behind the reception desk. He immediately disposed of the sandwich he had been eating and quickly swallowed what was in his mouth.