About the Night (18 page)

She asked where she would find the hotel masseuse.

“In the basement,” he told her. “Second door on the left.”

The shower was one of the best imaginable: an abundant stream of hot water, a white towel, and a small bar of Olivia soap wrapped in paper.

“Make it fast,” her neighbor told her, “before the floor manager shows up.”

Lila dressed and slipped out of the employees’ entrance smelling wonderful. Those stolen waters, she thought, had certainly sweetened her day.

The voice of the radio announcer resounded from a jewelry store: The Jordanians had bombed the water pump at Latrun and had tried to do the same to the one at Rosh HaAyin; a ship carrying thousands of Jewish refugees from Europe had arrived at Haifa, but the British would not allow them to approach the port. Lila refused to let the news sully the cleansing effect of the shower.

It was noon by the time she arrived at her building, tired, angry, and hungry—a trinity that guarantees despondence.

But in his eyes, she was so beautiful that she took his breath away.

He rose from the stair outside her door, where he had been sitting.

She placed her basket on the floor, and as she looked at him, all her hardships vanished. Elias went down a few steps to carry her basket up, as if he had always done just that.

“I’ll make tea for us,” she said, completely forgetting the drought that awaited them. She placed the kettle under the faucet but not a drop came out. “We don’t have water,” she said dejectedly. “We’ve been cut off.”

“I know,” he said. “I brought two jerricans that will hold you over for the next few days.”

Her eyes gave notice that they were about to fill up, first the salty sting and then the dampness. Elias went down and hauled the two jerricans filled with the precious liquid up to her apartment, sweating and breathing heavily. He removed a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face.

“How did you manage to make it here?” she asked. Her question resonated in his chest as they stood, embracing.

“Don’t ask,” he sighed. “For every twenty attempts, one succeeds.”

“Were you waiting long?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I try to develop our own time, different from other people.”

She kissed his hands, the hands that had brought her water, that had worried about her, that embraced her. He continued: “It’s a time that has no connection to reality here, to the days that pass and I don’t get to see you. Take these minutes that we’re here together, for example. They’re more powerful than a few days. The evening that we traveled to Jaffa was worth a month. And Turkey? That was good for ten years.”

“I feel like the richest woman in Jerusalem,” Lila said with a smile, “with jugs of water.”

“You’re certainly the most loved woman in Jerusalem,” Elias said.

She served him Blairmond tea, rich in flavors cultivated in the fields of Ceylon. “Our water,” Elias told Lila with a laugh, “is tastier than yours.” The cup was still warm as he rose to his feet. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

“You’ve done so much already,” she said.

“If I could, I’d bring a whole river here so that you would never be thirsty.”

Neither of them said a word as he descended the stairs; she assumed he had no choice but to hurry back.

His short visit, which he had tried to project as long and meaningful, was over. After he left, she considered what he had given her: he was attempting to create a different time, a time zone of their own, like Greenwich mean time, a time zone with different units from the rest of the world and known only to the two of them, a time independent of the sun that ticks not according to sixty beats a minute but to a completely different meter. She fell asleep fully clothed on the unmade bed, and when it began to grow dark and an evening wind started to blow, she sensed the cool air and awakened, far more tranquil than before.

Her first thought was that this was the man her father sent to look after her. The scene from that afternoon seemed almost biblical to her: a man had crossed the dry city to bring water to his woman.

“Freezing weather!” Lila said to the bookbinder whose shop was at the front of the building. He opened the door a crack to ask her to hold a place for him in line, but it slipped from his fingers and slammed shut. “One more bang like that and the windows will shatter,” she said, but he did not hear her; he was running around his shop chasing the loose leaves of paper flying around. She joined the line that snaked its way toward the well, hoping she would have some luck and find a sturdy young man who would be willing, for a coin or two, to carry her bucket of water up the stairs to her flat. The wind whipped and dust scratched her eyes, the dry cold torturing the parched citizens of Jerusalem.

As she stood in line, she concocted a plan for the bucket of water she would be holding in her hands in just an hour or two, when she reached the head of the line. First she would take out a little for vegetable soup and a pot of rice, which would last her at least three days. Next, she would heat the water and crouch down to wash her body in a basin so that not a drop would be wasted. After that, she would use her bathwater to rinse her clothes and wash the floor, and she would use the dirty water left after completing all those chores, pouring it down the steps to attempt to clean the flight of stairs that led up to her apartment. And a kettle of tea. Before everything, tea.

She was surprised at how many people were standing in line, and in such cold weather. She stood behind a woman who jumped from foot to foot in order to keep herself warm. It took only twenty minutes for the people in line to become friendly and to get angry, together, at the line-cutters and the ones who filled two buckets instead of one. The woman in front of her introduced herself as the maid of Dr. Herman and his wife. Mrs. Herman had sent her to bring water, shop for food, and then clean and cook. She continuously reported on the line that grew longer and longer as they waited and on how their own situation was improving.

A girl dressed in the uniform of a high school student—blue skirt that met her socks at the knees, a hand-knitted sweater—stood behind Lila. Her skin was nearly translucent, and the serious expression on her face gave her a much older look. She was very cold, rubbing and blowing on her reddened hands. There was a shorthand textbook in her bucket.

A van passed by the line. Its logo of a local chocolate manufacturer made the onlookers dream of what was inside as they futilely sniffed the air for traces of chocolate. A bus stopped for a woman who entreated the driver to let her on, even though she was not standing at a bus stop.

The Hermans’ maid said, “The driver stopped for her. Our people, we’ve got a heart.”

Torn flyers on a bulletin board advertised a play from Tel Aviv. On the opposite side of the street, a British soldier chased the hat that had blown off his head.

“He caught it,” the maid reported.

A black car pulled up and drove slowly by, even though there were almost no other cars around. Suddenly, two shots were fired, as close and loud as if fired into the line of people waiting for water. Lila started, as did the schoolgirl behind her.

“Bastards!” the maid muttered.

A woman near the front of the line was screaming in fear. The black car disappeared with squealing tires and a plume of smoke from its exhaust pipe.

Someone was lying on the sidewalk across the street.

“The Brit,” said the maid.

His hat flew up from the pavement like a kite and became part of the wind’s domain. Lila watched until it came to rest on the street. A van with several yeshiva students drove over it, but it looked untouched. The younger people standing in line dropped their buckets and ran into the surrounding alleyways so as not to be there when the British came storming onto the scene of the crime. Everyone else remained in line as though nothing had happened, hoping they would quickly receive their allocation of water. The pale schoolgirl covered her mouth in shock.

“First time you’ve ever seen such a thing?” Lila asked her.

The girl nodded.

“It’s not something you get used to,” she told her, “even if we’ve seen blood in the streets before.”

“I was a hundred yards away from where they bombed the officers’ club,” the maid said. “The noise was terrible. What destruction! The Brits up on the roof were buried under the ruins, and we could hear their shouts all nights. That and their death rattles. I saw the whole thing from Dr. Herman’s balcony.”

The scene of the British soldier’s murder in broad daylight and in front of dozens of witnesses became a forum for swapping stories of trauma: who had seen the biggest explosion, who had watched an assassination, who had heard a booby-trapped car explode, and who knew someone who had. It is the same all over the world as people find the thread that connects them to the fate of others.

Minutes passed, but no one went near the man who had been shot. He was left there, splayed on the sidewalk, and from a distance, it was impossible to tell whether he was injured or dead. “Anyway, there’s nothing we can do,” said the maid.

“The poppies will be here soon,” Lila pointed out, referring to the British soldiers in their red berets.

She fished a candy from her purse and handed it to the girl. “Here,” she said, “you need something sweet right now.”

The girl peeled back the wrapper and thanked Lila in a voice that was mature and pleasant. Because of the incident, the line had grown shorter, and there were only ten people separating them from the head of the line. Just then, a truck pulled up and came to a screeching halt. British policemen with rifles drawn jumped out at a run; three evacuated the soldier who had been shot, others erected barricades and closed off the adjacent streets, and the remaining officers were occupied with finding eyewitnesses. Men standing in the line were herded into the police truck.

“You,” said one policeman to Lila, “down to the station.”

She gave him an inquisitive look.

With a booming voice he said, “Take your stupid pail and come at once. And you, too,” he said, gesturing to the two women standing beside her in line.

In a police van, they stood pressed together with other detainees. People wanted to know what they were supposed to do with their water pails.