About the Night (25 page)

Lila imposed restraint upon herself and did not make contact with Mrs. Tapieux. True, as a UN representative, she could not be interrogated, but Lila worried about the price she might have to pay for her actions. At home, over a simple meal, she felt pursued, unprotected, as if the eyes of Mr. Arrogant were watching her. She kept the apartment dark and looked out the window at the street below, where no one stirred. It was a cold night suited to pajamas and thick woolen socks, and she dozed fitfully, her scattered thoughts jumping between sweet, receding memories of her wonderful evening with Elias and the ugliness introduced by the interrogators. He would keep an eye on her, she mused about that horrible man with the meaty gums, but what exactly would he find in his searches? A woman living alone and hurting alone and pining alone. He would die of boredom.

Three weeks after the Christmas ball, Mrs. Tapieux returned from a holiday in Europe. She brought only bad tidings with her.

Elias, too, had been taken into custody for interrogation and was held for four days by the Jordanian authorities. They wanted to know what he had been doing at the ball and who he had met with and for what purpose and whether he had endangered his homeland. They asked, and when their questions went unanswered, they turned to violence. His answers did not please them, and they labeled him a Zionist spy. Elias was severely beaten; they broke two fingers and dislocated his arm. Would he have gone to the ball had he known about the terrible blows he would receive afterward? Absolutely. He mentioned nothing of his love for her, not even her name. They disgusted him, these interrogators, but the secret police of the royal family were dangerous, and they threatened to bring his father in for interrogation as well, and torture him. Elias consoled himself by thinking that at least Lila was safe.

The house always wins, he recalled as he lay on the floor of his cell. The thought that they would humiliate and beat his father weakened him. He took another blow to his mouth, and blood pooled there. He was cold and sweating at the same time; his suit was crumpled.

“How much money did you get from the Zionists?” they asked him. “You’re in the employ of the Mossad,” they accused. “What else have you done for the Jewish spy?” they said, referring to Lila.

He shut his eyes and drifted out of consciousness, though he knew he needed to stay in control.

“We’ll keep you here for years,” they threatened.

His head was submerged in a bucket of ice water, and he awakened. He despised their violence, their cowardice, and he loathed them more than he feared them.

“You will rot in jail. You are an abomination to the Arab nation, a disgrace to your family. We have the power to wipe out your dynasty.”

No protocol of Elias’s interrogation was recorded by the Jordanian secret services. No forms were filled out. He was not granted release. A car ferried him to a side street near the Armenian ceramics workshops, where he was dumped like a sack of garbage. With the last of his strength, he dragged himself home.

“Did you see him?” Lila asked as they strolled through the beautiful UN gardens at twilight, just as a flock of white birds landed to drink from the fountain.

Mrs. Tapieux nodded. “He looked terrible. Bruised and cut, and barely able to walk. It’s good that you didn’t see him like that.”

“And how were his spirits?” Lila asked.

“Low. Extinguished.”

“What do you mean?”

Mrs. Tapieux turned her eyes to the flowers in the garden. Lila did not repeat her question.

“He asked me not to come again,” Mrs. Tapieux said at last. “They threatened to force his family into exile, take everything they have, beat his father.”

“So, he doesn’t wish to meet me anymore?” Lila asked, hoping against hope that this was not the case.

“No meetings, no letters,” Mrs. Tapieux said, the words as sharp as an axe to Lila’s neck.

Lila’s legs seemed to have sprouted nails that rooted her to the ground. What had once been given as a wish was now being taken as a payment suddenly due, like her beautiful gown. What had shined and glowed in her life was now dark, the beacon extinguished. She resorted to petty tabulations: a single night, six letters, a crate full of gifts—these were all that were left of him for her to continue her life.

“Forever?” Lila asked, intent on hearing Mrs. Tapieux’s answer.

“He didn’t say.”

Lila dropped heavily to a bench, and Mrs. Tapieux joined her.

She stifled her tears and asked, “Which is worse? No connection to him and no hope, or hope that he is giving up on?”

“This was his choice,” Mrs. Tapieux said, “but under the duress of blackmail and torture. Try to imagine what you might do in his place, if they told you they would imprison your father. They broke him, Lila.”

The air was cold and dry. Lila said, “We’ve been thrown back to square one, where there is nothing to grasp on to.”

“Let’s go drink a glass of cognac,” Mrs. Tapieux said, pulling Lila’s arm, “and warm our throats.”

She had had two loves in her life. Both had become reality for a while, and both were cut short.

These two men left her no offspring, only memories. Her past was filled not with events or things spoken or what she felt but with her preservation of their memories. Her love for Pardo had become the fruit of her imagination; she even called him that in her memory, never by his name, Nissim, just as she had called him when he was the center of her life. His parents lived in the Yemin Moshe neighborhood of Jerusalem, his parents’ fine house was only forty-seven steps from her own, and they sold phyllo dough pastries baked according to a Balkan grandmother’s
bourekas
recipe from a tiny shop on Agrippas Street that supported three families in good style. They considered themselves to be above their neighbors, perhaps because their children lacked nothing: overcoats, a kerosene stove, meat every day.

From the time they were ten years old, Lila and Pardo were friends, a bold and open covenant in the innocent world of children. Her eyes sparkled when they turned fifteen, and he took her hand and promised that one day he would make her his wife and love her forever.

“They’re like those cookies with chocolate smeared in the middle. You can’t get them apart,” joked Pardo’s mother. “That’s the way those two are, together from morning until night, Siamese twins.”

By the time Lila was seventeen, his mother called them carpenter’s glue and began to worry that her son might marry this daughter of a Primus stove repairman and his sickly wife who coughed through the summer and winter.

There are poor homes in which the occupants are unaware of their poverty; in Lila’s house, the poverty was kept hidden, unmentioned, and for her part, Lila never asked for something that could not be provided. She had heard that there were stories about her mother that circulated in the neighborhood claiming that she placed a pot of water with stones in it on the burner to make her neighbors believe she was cooking soup. She had never seen such a thing in her home, but through the clean windows nothing could be kept a secret, certainly not Pardo’s strong feelings of love for her. His parents had no choice but to confer with Lila’s parents to hear what they could provide in terms of a dowry.

To them it was clear she would bring with her a wardrobe full of clothes and a sewing machine, but even that was beyond the means of Lila’s father. For that, he could take out a loan, but Pardo’s mother also insisted on a washing machine for the young couple.

“The girl’s delicate hands,” she said, her pleasantness shot through with malice, “were not made for scrubbing diapers,” a point she made by rubbing her hands vigorously together.

The wedding between Pardo and Lila was called off because of a washing machine. That’s what everyone in Yemin Moshe said, and for some time Lila, too, believed that this was the reason. It was only much later that she understood they simply did not want her for a daughter-in-law: she was too poor and too beautiful. Pardo and Lila were forbidden to meet or speak. His mother ordered a mustard-colored jacquard curtain for the window by the alleyway where Lila passed each morning.

Pardo was distraught. Letters smuggled to her told how he refused to give her up. He protested; he beat the walls with his fists. One evening, his eyes burning, he watched through the window of Lila’s apartment as her parents betrothed her to someone else, a young man and his parents from Haifa who arrived with a ring. Pardo went crazy, running through the streets and threatening to kill himself. Lila gave the ring back and sent away the young man she had never wanted in the first place.

Pardo’s mother sought a way to keep him away from the girl and sent him to relatives in Alexandria, assuming that time and distance would take their toll. And she was right: his letters from Egypt slowed to a trickle, and a year after his exile, Lila saw the street strung with lights in honor of Pardo’s return home with his fiancée.

His eyes brimmed with tears of shame when he caught sight of her out on the street with all the neighbors, and on the day of his wedding, which took place at Café Rehavia, where he and Lila were meant to be wed, she fell ill and took to her bed.

For days on end, she cried silently into her pillow, and when at last she rose she was startled to see what a ghost she had become, with ashen skin and puffy eyelids. Her chestnut hair had lost its luster. “The abandoned bride,” they called her in the neighborhood. She hid out in her parents’ home, withering, growing thin and pale.

Her parents were helpless, eventually seeking the aid of an Arab woman from the Gei-Hinnom valley who paid a visit to Lila and announced that she was crumbling to ash. She lit a fire under a large pot filled with branches and herbs that poured gray smoke into the room. Lila’s body was smeared with the hot ashes, and then the Arab woman washed her in spring water and spread lavender oil on her skin. Lila, who had not uttered a word in days, suddenly announced that she was hungry, and what she desired was a round, flat Iraqi pita baked in a
taboon
oven. She ate six of them, shredding the bread into little pieces and stuffing the crispy brown bubbles into her mouth.

The Arab woman pulled a lit candle close to Lila, looked into her eyes, and said, “All these houses around here, it is not good for you. Go to another place.”

It was inevitable; there was no way for Lila to remain in the neighborhood, especially since Pardo and his bride, the daughter of a cloth merchant, came every Friday night to dine at his parents’ home.

The stone house on Narkis Street in which Lila’s family set up residence was colder and grittier than their previous home. Lila’s mother grew more and more infirm, so that it seemed she had given up on this new home and on life in general. Lila went out to work for the first time in her life, sorting pencils in a factory. She handed over her salary to her father and never walked home down Metudela Street, where Pardo had built a home for his pampered wife, who employed a laundress, a maid, and a cook.

When she came and went, Lila covered her head in a silk scarf like the women in films who rode in convertibles. Her hair grew healthy again, but by year’s end, Lila and her father were left alone. A stonecutter—taller and more muscular than Pardo—offered to prepare a gravestone for Lila’s mother. He told Lila and her father they could pay when they were able, and he never took his eyes from Lila. In the meantime, they placed a wooden plaque on the grave with her mother’s name and date of death. A few months later, they set the stone, on which Lila had had engraved “Born in Istanbul,” a hint of happier years gone by.