About the Night (20 page)

“So there’s no water,” Vicky said.

“No,” said Margo apologetically.

“I haven’t mopped the floor real good, with soap, for three days,” said her mother.

“Perhaps you’ll be able to tomorrow,” Lila said. “What’s important is that your daughter is safe and sound.”

Vicky shrugged and pursed her lips. It was clear to Lila that something was wrong with this woman. She did not hug her daughter, who had witnessed her first murder. All she did was get angry because she did not get the water she wanted.

Vicky went to the bathroom, and when she came out, Lila noticed she had changed out of her bathrobe and into a dress and had combed her hair. Her hands were small and white. She looked young to be the mother of a fifteen-year-old.

Margo looked at her mother, and her mother answered the question she had not asked aloud: Margo put the kettle on to boil. Everything was in its place—the beds were folded and placed behind the cupboard—but there was no heater, no flowers, no cake, no books, no pictures, not a single sign of warmth or hominess.

“This room, just the way you see it,” Vicky said after noticing Lila’s gaze, “houses six people. Every day, I clean it real good and make a dish that barely feeds six people. Today it’s rice with lupin beans.”

Margo served tea with sugar cubes to Lila.

“Aren’t you two drinking?” Lila asked.

“Drink, drink,” Margo said at once.

Something in this house made Lila feel very uncomfortable. She wanted to make excuses and leave but she didn’t, aware that Margo was not sufficiently safe from her mother’s anger over the water she had failed to bring home.

Lila drained her cup and said, “I really needed that. There is nothing better than a cup of tea on a day like today.”

“To your health!” Vicky said as she rose to her feet and snatched the mug from the table. Margo did not appear in the least flustered when her mother wiped clean the spot on which the mug had been standing.

Vicky washed the mug and asked, “Who are your parents?”

Lila said, “My parents passed away.”

“Terlas buenas!”
Vicky said, using a Ladino expression of sorrow and sympathy. “Do you have brothers and sisters?”

“No.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“Probably engaged, right?”

“Not yet.”

“For a girl like you,” Vicky said craftily, “men stand in line.”

Lila stood up.

“Don’t think I’m trying to flatten you,” she said, “it’s just that, touch wood, you’re really beautiful.”

“Flatter,” Margo said, correcting her.

“Thank you so much for the tea,” Lila said as she moved toward the door.

“I’ll walk you out,” Margo said quickly.

“Nice to meet you,” Vicky said, parting her lips in an artificial smile. A moment later she added, “You wouldn’t happen to have some spare water you could give us for today, do you?”

“I don’t have a drop,” Lila said.

Down in the street, Margo said, “Now she’ll sweep the house because she thinks we brought in filth. And when she dishes out food, she’ll give me less than everyone else, and she’ll stand over me and snatch up my plate. I wanted to offer you some rice, but I knew that would make her mad because she makes just enough for everyone so that nothing’s left and nothing gets wasted and she can wash the pot.”

Lila said, “It’s not so bad. You have a home, a mother and father. That may not look like anything special, but it’s a lot.”

Crows cawed overhead, first one and then many, a noisy chorus. Margo said they sounded like they were shouting, “Do it! Do it!” but she couldn’t figure out what it was they wanted her to do. Then she asked Lila, “Do you work for the Foreign Ministry? Because you look like you do.”

“I work at Salon Hubert. Come visit me there sometime.”

“The beauty parlor on King George Street?” Margo asked. She was as excited as if they were talking about Hollywood.

“Yes,” said Lila, “but for the time being it’s closed because of the water shortage. I hope things will settle down in the next few days.”

“You know what I want more than anything?” Margo asked. “To have a boyfriend.”

“You’ll have one,” Lila said with a smile. “Of course you will.”

“Someone handsome and strong, with experience. Someone who will take me out of here. Do you have someone?”

“Someone,” Lila said. Someone. It was the first time she had said it aloud.

Margo was excited. “What’s it like?” she asked. “What’s it like when someone loves you?”

Lila thought for a moment about what she should say to the girl. “There’s nothing else like it,” she said at last.

“I’m not sure that really tells me what it’s like,” Margo said. “Does he buy you presents?”

“Sometimes,” Lila said, taken aback at the flow of questions.

“Do you get to see him often?”

“No,” Lila said, impatient. “He lives far away.”

“Far away,” Margo repeated, enchanted with what lay hidden there.

Far away, Lila reflected, uncomfortable with having had to retreat from the truth. She thought that distance was not just a geographical term. “Now turn back,” she told Margo, her hand on the girl’s shoulder. “I’m going home.”

No one had imagined that the war in Jerusalem would last so long, but finally, in the winter, it came to an end. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs abandoned their homes or were expelled. The city was divided in two; on the east side, the Arabs fell under the control of the Jordanians, who annexed the territory, while on the west side, Jews lived in the fledgling Israeli state that was just seven months old. The new reality was determined by two generals—one Israeli, one Arab—who drew the new borders on a map. Between the two halves of the city was a no-man’s-land.

Jordanian snipers ambushed Jewish passersby from hidden shooting positions on the east side of the city, including one on a wall dividing the city into its two halves. It was a gray wall seven or eight feet tall and had been built carelessly of exposed concrete. It made the street ugly from one sidewalk to the other, facing it like a dam between two banks of a river.

On both sides of the wall, stone buildings stood taller than the slab of concrete and were exposed to the snipers. Clotheslines stretched from balcony to balcony all along the wall, the innocent-looking underwear and pajamas giving the impression that tranquil life was being conducted here in this place teeming with danger.

In this neighborhood, right on the border, lived the Ben-Bassat family. Their home had a single room with an arched roof made of tin, and it housed five souls and some chickens. It was a home like every other on the street, like Margo’s—crowded, dark, exposed to peeping neighbors’ eyes. The water used to wash the floors in Margo’s flat made its way to the asphalt that connected the two buildings, flowing down the slope until it reached the entrance to the Ben-Bassat family home.

Hezi, the youngest member of the family, admired Margo. His heart leaped when she passed by and deigned to flash him one of her tight smiles that no other child in the neighborhood ever merited. Hezi wished she were his aunt or connected to him in some other way. Such things happened, he knew, like when somebody discovered a long-lost relative. It happened with the people who came from the Holocaust; aunts and uncles suddenly turned up and joined the family. Hezi was smarter and weaker than the other kids his age, and his brother Mano, nine years older, had to protect him on occasion, going out into the street in a show of force against the conspirators.

Mano noticed Margo as well—her curves, her milky skin—and he was determined to subdue that arrogant look on her face. But Margo had eyes for someone else, Menasheh, whom everyone called Menash. Menash was a twenty-four-year-old truck driver and a heartthrob, tanned and handsome, the older brother of Mano and Hezi and the one she wanted.

He left for work for Raskin the contractor at five o’clock in the morning and returned from the building sites at five in the afternoon, full of dust and smiling in his unbuttoned khaki shirt. From her window, she could see him washing himself in a basin in the courtyard, then putting on his good clothes for his boisterous evenings out, rumors of which had reached her ears.

Margo told Lila that he had a whole collection of women, someone different every evening: the contractor’s daughter, her nanny, the contractor’s wife’s niece, the niece’s neighbor, the clinic nurse, the doctor’s secretary, the waiter’s aunt.

“And me? What am I to him? Just a baby in a high school uniform, the daughter of a lousy plasterer. I don’t have a chance with him. Don’t you have any kind of recipe?” she asked Lila. “Womanly wiles? You’ve never seen a man like this before, a real Humphrey Bogart with a cigarette in his mouth. When he walks down the street, he whistles to himself like somebody who can get any woman he wants. I’m going mad, Lila!”

“Make do with his brother,” Lila said. “Didn’t you say he was crazy about you?”

“Mano?” Margo said, scrunching her nose. “Menash sends him to break dates with girls when he discovers he’s scheduled two on the same night. Mano is second best. From our balcony, you can see it all.”

Margo got a job for Mano at the pharmaceuticals company. She had heard from Lila that Helga Westfried, one of the owners, was looking for a driver, someone “clean and organized, not wild, with respect for an older woman, someone who doesn’t slam the brakes, and of course, a bachelor.” He would be responsible for ferrying Mrs. Westfried around to her various appointments and errands in the city. Margo hoped that she could reach the man she loved through his brother.

Mano’s ring of keys signified the importance of his job and set him apart from the others, most of whom could only dream of having a car at their disposal. In his free time, Mano made the green Ford shine inside and out, and still he had enough time to run around the different sheds where the pharmaceuticals were produced, flirting with the young women in their work smocks and listening to the advice of the well informed. He always knew—as he put it—which way the wind was blowing. He was also the one who made sure his parents’ home was never without kerosene in the winter, ice in the summer, and bread all year-round, the one who decided that, now that he had a regular income, his mother would no longer clean the homes of rich people.

“Enough,” Mano said. “Our mother won’t be a servant.”

When Margo entered the dimly lit Ben-Bassat home, where candles were extinguished to save on wax, all heads turned in her direction.

“Wow!” said Mano. “The fairest of them all has just lit up our house.”

Her pale cheeks turned pink, and her eyes shone.

Mano’s mother served her tea and invited her to sit with them. Like all girls in Jerusalem, Margo had lost weight because of the food shortage. She told them that in school they called it “the modern look.”

“Skin and bones,” Mano’s mother complained. “They’re as thin as knitting needles.”

“Remember these times,” Mano said, his eyes dreamy, “because after them there’ll be abundance, and they’ll be forgotten.”

Margo looked around for the one who wasn’t there, Menash. According to her observations, he should be arriving home at any time. Her eyes hid her passion. Mano lowered his eyelids in order to gaze at her ankles, marveling at how thin they were. He could not look at her wondrous breasts without them having an immediate effect on him. They were ample, and full of vitality, and he found himself awash in pleasurable thoughts like the ones he had when looking at the white and naked women bathing in the classical paintings that adorned the walls of the Westfried home.