About the Night (22 page)

Nurse Dassy entered the room with the smile she saved for Elias. “I had to see what’s going on in here,” she said, “the parade of young women. So I brought this one here myself.”

Elias smiled. The hairdresser was holding a helmet in her hand and offered the free one to Elias, who kissed it.

When the Songstress of Abu Dis wheeled Herschlag back to his room, she caught sight of Elias’s shorn hair piled on the linoleum floor and stopped singing. She gazed in astonishment at everyone in the room and said, “
Allah Yis’adkum
, may God help you all!”

Elias turned to Herschlag. “Would you like the young lady to cut your hair, too? My treat.”

Herschlag laughed. “In my wildest dreams,” he said, “I never imagined this is what we’d be doing today.”

Katy trimmed the hair of both residents of room number eight of the Internal Medicine ward at Hadassah Hospital. She worked on Herschlag in his bed, a towel around his neck, while Nomi held a mirror, a tiny compact, for him to see, according to his wishes.

“I can’t stand the prickly little hairs,” Elias said. “I need to take a shower.”

The Songstress of Abu Dis, who had not hurried back to the nurse’s station, offered to accompany Elias to the shower. But he refused, and Nomi noticed the resentment in his eyes.

“That’s his pride,” the nurse explained to Nomi while Elias showered. “He won’t let anyone bathe him. Doesn’t matter if it takes him an hour, he’ll do it himself. Don’t lock the door!” she shouted amicably.

They heard the click of the lock, and Nomi smiled at her. The nurse returned a knowing smile. “He’s a prince,” she said before she went back to her work.

“Not bad for a last haircut,” Elias said as he emerged from the shower. Herschlag smiled at the two women in the room.

“Ne’iman,”
Nomi said, using the Arabic blessing for someone who has bathed.

His eyes filled with softness and warmth.

Katy returned from the canteen and snuck four bottles of beer into the room, a look of mischief on her face. Elias and Herschlag drank and had fun like a couple of boys, while Nomi and Katy emptied their bottles as well.

That evening, Nomi phoned the nurses’ station to ask after Riani and Herschlag. “They had a blast today, I’ve heard,” said the nurse. “So tonight they’re probably sleeping like babies.”

In the morning, when the nurse phoned, Nomi was reading the paper and drinking Turkish coffee with milk. Her feet were bare on the heated floor.

“Riani isn’t feeling well,” the nurse said. “His pains are back. He was awake all night long.”

Nomi said, “Those were moments of mercy he had yesterday.”

“He’ll have them again,” said the nurse.

1950

Behind the curtain, in the fitting room, the zipper closed to the sound of metal teeth enmeshing. The skirt clung to her body and was, according to proprietress Mary Babayoff as she pressed her palms together in a gesture of wonder, “Breathtaking. Parisian chic.” The city’s finest gowns hung from the white satin hangers in Babayoff’s shop. “First, try it on, and then we’ll see,” she’d said.

Lila stood looking at her figure in the mirror. Although the red chiffon made her face glow, she thought it too dramatic. She never thought she would set foot in the place, owned as it was by a member of such a prestigious family.

“Like the Rothschilds,” Margo said, part scornful, part envious, “but from Bukhara. To marry one of them is to sink into a bathtub full of champagne.”

The red dress was returned to its place among the imported dresses kept out of view of prying eyes; Lila’s salary could just about cover the cost of the seams. Babayoff offered her a Benson & Hedges cigarette from a gold packet. She wanted to know what occasion the dress was meant for and did not give up until Lila made up a story of some housewarming party, a lie that continued to grow and clog her throat even when she had already left the shop with a suffocating feeling of disgust. But that was how she was forced to act if she wished to keep her secret.

For some reason, most people felt it was acceptable to milk Lila for information. It was easier to infiltrate the life of a single woman than the life of a married one. Married women have a fortress that protects them; they belong. Even divorced women have something to back them up: the husband’s family name, financial support, children, someone who was once hers. Widows are protected by the aura of loss. But unmarried women have nothing to protect them. They are exposed to every evil element. Lila’s status as a woman on her own was an ongoing threat to her surroundings: to the married women whose husbands had roving eyes and to the divorced women who saw her as someone who had not compromised and therefore had not failed.

At the age of twenty-nine, she was not yet considered a hopeless case but rather an unattainable woman. Her solitude was thought a choice and not inevitable. There was an unclear gap between her pronounced femininity and the lack of men in her life.

In the two years that had passed since she and Elias were separated by their cleaved city, she spent more time blocking the inquisitive people than anything else. And now, with the sweetish taste of an English cigarette on her tongue given to her by a nosy boutique owner, she knew that she would sacrifice everything so as not to risk botching what was about to happen.

On Christmas Eve, she stepped into the backseat of the Citroën of the UN representative in Jerusalem. If it were possible to freeze time, there is no doubt that she would choose this evening. A layer of ice covered the tree branches and the roofs. The driver, in a hat and black gloves, held the door open for her, a puff of vapor rising from his mouth as he said, “Please, Madame.” She pinched the palm of her hand to assure herself that she was really sitting in a car making its way to Government House just as another car, from the forbidden part of town, was making its way to the very same place and that, thanks to the United Nations, a miracle might occur.

She wore a dazzling metallic pale-blue gown that accentuated her waistline and had a slit in the back that extended from the knee downward. Its beauty was in the simplicity; she had left the red gown in the boutique and found this one instead, which she had taken on loan for a modest deposit. In an embroidered evening bag, she carried a lipstick, a compact, a key, and a little money. She was wrapped in a brown wool coat. The streets changed scenery, and the passersby changed as well. Lila wished to preserve every sight, everything that the car encountered as it sailed through the city. If this was going to be an evening painful for its singularity, then she had to remember every minute of it.

Several weeks earlier, a Belgian woman by the name of Lorraine Tapieux had placed her hands in Lila’s care thanks to recommendations she had received from the wives of several diplomats. She said she’d heard that Lila was “unique,” which caused Lila secret pride. Mrs. Tapieux then happened to mention to Lila that she was in a hurry because she had to cross the border to the eastern side of the city. Lila was immersed in her work when suddenly the words of this foreign woman struck her like a cement wall.

“What do you mean, cross the border?” she asked.

“To the Jordanian side,” Mrs. Tapieux answered serenely, as though she were explaining how to thicken a béchamel sauce. “That’s how we get to East Jerusalem,” she added, stifling a yawn.

“We?”

“People from the United Nations.”

All at once, this client sitting opposite her had lost her face. She was only lips, and they were talking. Lila’s heart was pounding wildly, and her mouth was dry.

“Pardon me,” Lila muttered, and she went to the kitchenette, where she drank three cups of tap water in rapid succession. She’s from the United Nations, Lila said to herself, trying to make sense of her thoughts. She has free access to the other side of town, where Elias may be. There must be only a few dozen people with such a permit in the entire world, and here she is sitting across from me. How is it that I never thought of this before? Her stomach began sending distress signals.

“Do you feel all right?” Mrs. Tapieux asked when she returned to her station.

“I’m fine, thank you,” Lila answered as she continued rubbing the palms of her client’s hands with grains of coarse salt.

Now the secret was weighing heavily upon her. If only she could bring Mrs. Tapieux into her confidence, perhaps even ask her for help. It would not be easy to reveal what she took such pains to conceal; there were words she had never uttered to a soul. Her hands trembled, so to cover up for them, she worked faster massaging Mrs. Tapieux’s palms. She realized she had nothing to lose and had to take advantage of a moment that might never return. If she didn’t ask, she would spend years in anguish. But how could she even say his name? Keeping her secret had been a matter of life and death. Finally, she decided she would say it fast, before her courage waned.

“Do you think I could ask a favor of you?” she said. “This is very uncomfortable for me.”

“It’s easier when you don’t know someone,” Mrs. Tapieux said.

Lila switched to French, ensuring secrecy in the busy Salon Hubert. “There is a man, someone . . . ,” she said.

“Yes?” the Belgian diplomat said, encouraging her to continue.

“He lives on the Jordanian side of the city,” Lila said quietly. “I haven’t seen him since the war. It’s been two years.”

The pretzel man called out from the doorway of the salon, offering hot pretzels with grains of salt that hung on a string dangling from his elbow. Before Lila could continue, he was standing at their side. “Two,” she told him. “With lots of salt.”

When he’d left, Lila carried on in French. “He was . . . we were . . .”

“I think I understand,” Mrs. Tapieux said, coming to her rescue.

Lila sighed deeply. Her big secret was out, and it did not feel so awful. It didn’t even hurt.

“I was thinking that perhaps you could bring a letter from me over there,” Lila sputtered.

The Belgian diplomat’s expression was blank, official looking, the typical response of Europeans to Levantine brazenness.

“That is,” Lila added, “if you’ll agree to it.” Her voice trembled, and she lowered her gaze. Her eyes were moist.

“I am not allowed,” the woman said in a manner that sounded as though she had said this many times in her life.

“I understand,” Lila said, making an effort to control the tears that were about to flow. Is there any moment more painful than the rare opportunity that presents itself, then disappears?

“However,” Mrs. Tapieux said suddenly, “I’ll do it.”

Contrary to the rules of the salon and to her own strict principles, Lila rose from her chair, walked to the other side of the table, and embraced Mrs. Tapieux, who could not respond in kind because her nails were smeared with silver polish that had not yet dried.

“On one condition,” she said. “And that is that no one is to know about this.”

The next day, Lila baked cinnamon rolls and brought them in a jar to Mrs. Tapieux’s office. “I don’t know if you’ll manage to find him,” Lila said, “and I don’t know if his family is there or perhaps they’ve all left the city and gone to live elsewhere. But I’ve written a letter.”

“You’ll have to tell me what’s in it,” Mrs. Tapieux said. “And you’ll have to trust me that I’ll be discreet.”

“I wrote that I could not miss this miraculous opportunity, that this is a rare and precious moment, and”—she said, her voice dropping—“that I’m thinking about him.”

“How can I be certain this is a romance when the world is full of spies and people out for their own interests?”

Lila was surprised by this outburst, but she said, “Look at me. Look at how I’ve been trembling ever since yesterday.”

A long moment passed as Mrs. Tapieux gazed into Lila’s eyes, as if trying to find a lie. Finally, she said, “I apologize for the questions, but I must be cautious.” She placed the letter deep in her handbag. “I’ll be crossing over this evening,” she said, “returning in two days’ time.”

Lila took herself to the Corner Café for a bowl of barley soup. The puffy-cheeked cook waved to her from the kitchen window. She fed five children from her paltry wages at the café and still there was always a smile on her face, a smile that Lila found to be pure and joyous while her own happiness was fragile and now in the hands of a woman who was a complete stranger.

As the sadness in her spread, her world grew smaller and smaller so that the only thing that mattered was whether the woman would find him, whether the separation that had been imposed upon them would be made up for with an act of kindness, or whether she would have to deal with the diplomat’s return from East Jerusalem empty-handed. Mrs. Tapieux’s failure would be Lila’s loss.