About the Night (21 page)

Mano suggested that they step outside for a walk, and when it was clear that Menash was nowhere to be found, Margo agreed.

She captivated him with her femininity, set him on fire. He realized that it would do no good to take things too fast with her. He would take his time until she became his girl.

“I’ve started working,” she boasted. “Near Salon Hubert, where Lila works. In a wool-and-button shop. The owner doesn’t know it yet, but pretty soon I’m going to run the place.”

“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked.

“I’ve got lots of suitors,” she said.

“Isn’t one enough?”

“That way I can choose,” she bragged.

“Tell me about them,” he said as if he were an advisor on such matters.

“One’s the son of an Iraqi accountant, another’s a certified electrician, and there’s a Hungarian from the ice-making plant whose factory was destroyed during the bombardment. There’s this idiot from the bank who won’t leave me alone, and another who thinks that if he’s a lawyer, I must be falling all over myself, just like all the girls who run after him all the time.”

“But not a single one of those guys really interests you,” he said, as though reading the secrets of her heart.

She shrugged, leaving the matter unclear.

“I know what kind of man you need,” he told her.

“And what kind is that?” she teased him, in order to cover up the fact that it was his older brother whom she desired.

“The kind of guy who you’ll never know if he’s really yours or not,” Mano said.

She was wearing narrow black trousers with a slit above the ankle, a white button-down blouse, a red sweater, and black ballerina slippers on her feet. She told him she was learning to knit in the shop because she already knew how to sew and that she hoped to find work in a hotel, which seemed to her like a great place to settle into and establish herself.

“To find yourself some millionaire,” he said, then corrected himself. “Or until some tourist snatches you up.”

“What about you?” she asked. “You have a girl?”

“Here and there,” he told her. “Nothing serious.”

“How about Menash?” she asked nonchalantly.

“Menash?” he said with a smile. “The one to catch him still hasn’t been born.”

She refused the cigarette he offered, and he lit one for himself. He drove them with quiet assurance around the neighborhood, which had only just begun to recover from the war. The car’s headlights shone on bulldozers and steamrollers parked overnight so that work could begin first thing in the morning. People watched as they passed, since private cars were rare, and Margo felt a surge of pride of the privileged for a moment.

There were still destroyed homes along the border, mounds of ruins, the stumps of poles that once supported buildings, trees that had been uprooted, and deep pits that opened in the road after mortar shells hit them. At this late hour and from his car, the city appeared gloomy and downtrodden, but the tension throbbing between the desirer and the desired lent charm to the streets.

“It’s all going to change,” Mano said in his rich, warm voice. “Pretty soon everything’s going to be renovated. It’s going to blossom here, and we’ll forget the war.”

She smiled.

“And then the next war will come along,” he said.

Mano stopped the car and turned off the engine in front of the little shop where they mended blankets. “Do you know why I understand you so well?” he asked.

“Let’s say that’s true,” she teased.

“Because you and I are similar. We’re never happy. There’s always a shadow, something missing.”

2006

Nomi dressed for the Jerusalem cold in a soft knitted sweater and a scarf, a coat, and boots. It was a cold that only rain would appease, but the rain would not come. Everyone was waiting for it—the farmers, the animal breeders, the allergy sufferers, the boot sellers, the people who measure the level of the Sea of Galilee. The decision to visit him again was swift and immediate, even though she had seen him just the day before. She realized she’d grown attached to him, that he opened her eyes and caused her to rethink things she had not bothered to notice before, like stooped old people she had looked away from, sick people, the handicapped, and the wretched. Now she felt she was really seeing them: their weaknesses, and through their weaknesses their days of greatness as people tall and proud and beautiful, people who loved madly and were loved in return. Once, they, too, raced up stairs easily like she did, danced, and even preferred not to look at old people, all under the guise of if you don’t look, you won’t grow bent and shriveled like they had.

Elias had opened the door for her to people who loved and sick people and old people and dead people and live people. Elias showed her that in the withered bodies of the aged, there was a whole world, the memory of love and accrued wisdom and acceptance of things to come.

If only she had not chosen to distance herself from him and from Lila when she left Jerusalem; if only he had contacted her earlier and not now, when she was forty-nine; if only she had been aware of his wisdom; if only the two of them had a little more time together. If only he did not wish to die. Time with him was passing too quickly. In the background there stood this threat of his to shorten his stay on earth.

More than once she thought that he could asphyxiate himself with the exhaust pipe of his car. But Elias would do no such thing. He wanted to die clean, to make it look like the kiss of death, while he was clean-shaven and in a pressed gray suit.

Why was it that she, who had acted according to his wishes as a little girl, was unable to do so now? Wasn’t it fitting that she give in to him, that she honor his wishes and help him reach that island of peace? She had kept his secret, the secret of the love of his life, and when its great weight emptied out of him, he became light.

She stopped at a bookstore on the way to the hospital. What she had absorbed during her time with him was becoming clear to her now: that she had never loved or been loved like they had, with this most present, alive thing in their bodies and souls. Elias had mentioned a Sufi poet who had written about the religion of love with words that had captivated her when she heard them.

The bookseller knew what she was talking about. “Do you want it wrapped?” she asked.

Nomi said she didn’t. Out on the Jerusalem street, she leafed through it.

“Don’t let me disturb you,” she said to the two old roommates as she entered. “Just keep talking as if I weren’t here.”

“You bring beauty and the scent of the outside world with you,” Elias said, beaming. “All that is healthy and young.”

Nomi sat on a chair next to his bed and held his hand as he spoke. “I was just telling my dear neighbor Herschlag that my children don’t live here. The girls are in Birmingham. They send me photos of their children by post. I am a grandfather,” he said, “whose grandchildren live far away. And my son lives in Riyadh, with his wife and children.”

His roommate said simply, “My children live here, but who sees them?”

“Are they anything like you?” Elias asked.

“They’re strong and handsome,” he said seriously, then smiled, and Elias and Nomi laughed along with him. “One of them has vineyards, and the other climbs mountains. One’s rooted to the earth, and the other likes heights. As for me,” he said, after a pause, “I was always in search of open spaces.”

“We want our children to be like us,” Elias said. “We want them to perpetuate us and our dynasty by name and appearance. They carry pieces of us in their personalities. They walk among us like mirrors, our x-rays. In them we see what we love but also what we’d like to forget about ourselves. Our shortcomings are forever enshrined. Nomi, what do you think about children, I mean the ones you act as mother for over a period of time?”

She thought for a few moments before answering. “That they’re better than we are,” she said. “And innocent. But they carry inside them the bits of the bad parenting they experienced.”

Elias explained to Herschlag, with evident pride, that Nomi was responsible for children being adopted. “She saves them,” he said. “Finds mothers for them. Like a midwife. Such important, merciful work.”

“It doesn’t always work out,” Nomi said. “There are failures. And moments of sadness and terrible pain.”

“But always with an eye to the hope of bringing a better life to people,” Elias said, suddenly happy. “For them to get a second chance.”

“Little ones aren’t the only people who need a second chance,” Herschlag said, his gaze on Nomi. “There are plenty of adults who wish that one day they’d get a new set of parents.”

Nomi’s face burned. Was sharp old Mr. Herschlag referring to her?

“That’s true,” Nomi said, her voice weaker now, but she recovered quickly. “Once I gave a lecture on the connection between hope and loss. People who want to adopt have lost their fertility, their hope, something that others have and they won’t, not ever, a baby of their own flesh and blood that carries their DNA. The child being adopted is also in that position because of a loss—he’s lost his parents. So the connection between them is built on losses incurred on both sides. And loss,” she concluded, “is a feeling that never goes away. It’s always there, like a scar.”

Herschlag smiled at her. “You’re making our brains work,” he said, and with that he rescued them from a sense of doom and gloom. “It’s important to keep our brains working so we don’t turn into a couple of potted plants. So we remember, and miss things. That’s something, too.”

Elias was quiet and contemplative, and then he said to Herschlag, “Neither you nor I will be senile.”

A wonderful silence fell upon them. No one wished to break it until Elias explained. Finally, he said, “Whoever has a secret will never have Alzheimer’s.”

“You don’t say!” said Herschlag.

“When your mind is tense,” Elias said, “you don’t sink, and you don’t float around. You’re alert all the time. Something watches out for people like that: their secret. I’m willing to bet that if you did a study on Alzheimer’s among old spies, you’d find a pretty low rate of it.”

“A secret,” Herschlag said. “And it doesn’t matter what kind?”

“A deep one,” Elias said, opening another crack. “The kind you don’t forget for a minute.”

Nomi sat thinking about her own secrets, but she did not have one, a single one, that could last an entire lifetime. Sure, there had been a few men she’d thought she’d loved, her decision to remain alone, the children she did not wish to give birth to, and other children whose destinies she helped shape, like Lila, who also looked after girls not her own. These were open wounds with Nomi.

Herschlag was taken away in a wheelchair, smiling and happy, for a bone scan.

“Talk to me,” Elias said.

“I failed,” she admitted. “I’m trying to find a home for a child. I set him up with parents three different times, and this week he’s back again. Incompatibility between the parents and the child. I don’t know what I was thinking when I made this match.”

“I’m sure you’re very good at what you do,” Elias said.

Nomi relaxed the worry lines on her forehead. She had never felt good enough at anything she did. She wasn’t pretty enough as a little girl; she didn’t know how to run or jump or shoot a basket. Any games played with balls were a nightmare for her. She was the one who couldn’t catch them as they sped toward her, either losing them to the other team or receiving them, hard, in the stomach. The one who was sent off to root on the sidelines rather than be chosen for one of the teams.

Elias asked her to open the drawer. He put his hand in and pulled out a bag. “This is for you,” he said. “I asked Munir to buy them.”

“Toffees!” Nomi said. “And licorice squares. And jelly beans!”

“I imagine you still like these,” Elias said. “All the candies you liked best, and they could only be bought on our side of the city.”

“They’re still my favorites,” she said, overjoyed. “Even after tasting truffles and petit fours and all the best chocolates.” She peeled the wrapper from a caramel toffee and handed it to Elias. He bit into it, his strong teeth managing fine with the sticky chewiness.

“Listen to what Herschlag told me,” he said. “In the old age home where he lives, there are all kinds of aggravating activities for old people, and he ignores most of them. Brownie-baking class, water aerobics, Plasticine sculpting. But one day he happened to catch a lecture given by a visiting psychologist. She spoke to them about being free of the fear of death, about the ability to know the quality of death, which means also knowing the quality of life. Life and death, he told me, they’re like daylight and nighttime. Night gives birth to day; death gives birth to life. Knowing about death means knowing how to live.”

Nomi listened. He sounded different from the Elias who had asked to die, as if the man facing her had found something hidden from others.

“And that’s not all,” Elias told her. “This psychologist took them, all these people at the old age home, on a trip. You’ll never guess where.”

“To the forest,” Nomi guessed. “To the zoo. Outer space. A nuclear reactor.”

“To a cemetery,” he told her. “Without tears and without burying anybody. A trip to the cemetery. She sat with them once a week among the new graves and the old ones.”

Nomi’s eyebrows shot up in amazement.

“This woman taught them to say good-bye to everything they had. Their belongings, other people, their bodies. To say good-bye in order to allow something else to be born. A few of the old people complained and asked to have her removed, but others said she was working miracles with them. So she stayed on, with a small number of the most daring among them. She taught them to live every day as if it was their last. Herschlag isn’t suffering because he’s here in the hospital; he’s suffering because he’s missing the sessions with the psychologist. I don’t know if this has anything to do with it,” he added, dead serious, “but he says she wears dresses, never a bra underneath. He says he wants to sit facing her on his last day on earth staring at the straps on her dress.”

Nomi thought that when she got home she would write something. A mini will on her computer to prepare herself in advance. What kind of funeral she wanted, where to bury her, who should eulogize her, what should be written on her grave.

Clouds dominated the skies with their grayness, but the rain refused to come. A guiding hand was sending the drops to cleanse other places. Rome was flooded, Venice was drowning, Naples was under water, and here in Israel, a dry December. Poor farmers. Elias looked on as Nomi gazed worriedly at the skies—another dry year, more withering crops.

“How can a person think about his last day on earth?” Nomi asked.

Elias said, “Let’s imagine we’re walking through a cemetery. That is the last cloud we will ever see. And skinny cypress trees, the peeling bark from eucalyptus trees, a cracked gravestone, damp earth, a trimmed bush, the exhaust fumes from a car, a passing train, an airplane climbing into the distance, some wood-sorrel growing near the grave—which I chew on my last day—almonds in my pocket, the mewling of a cat that I’m hearing for the last time, a song that makes me cry, my last tears.”

“Last laughter,” Nomi added.

“You know what?” Elias held on to her words like a basketball player who’d just been thrown the ball. “I noticed that I don’t laugh any longer. I got old.”

“What’s the connection?” Nomi protested. “What’s the connection between laughter and old age?”

“When you’re old,” he said sagely, “you don’t stop laughing, but when you stop laughing, you grow old. Lila and I laughed a lot,” he continued. “Sometimes we laughed so hard we choked. We didn’t have enough air. When she died, I found myself laughing less and less. That’s when I grew old. Now there’s no more laughter in my life.”

“Do you want to hear something that will make you laugh?” Nomi asked.

He nodded.

“I’ve made an appointment for you with a hairdresser.”

“A hairdresser? Here?”

“She’ll be here in a few minutes.”

“But I don’t know her,” Elias said, taken aback. “Alien scissors!”

“You’ll sit on this chair and get your hair cut, and we’ll sweep up afterward,” Nomi told him.

“Malouna!”
he said. “You crazy, wild woman!”

“She rides a motorcycle and has a small tattoo of an olive branch on her arm.”