About the Night (26 page)

Pardo had been broken away from her by his mother; Elias was taken away twice: first, when Jerusalem was severed into half and then again two years later, when their foreign mediator informed her that he had been forced to pull apart what they had only begun to stitch together. In the face of Pardo’s family’s ruthlessness, Lila was powerless to do a thing, while in the case of Elias, she had taken action, found him, and discovered great longing on his part. Now she was condemned to immobility and impassiveness. To sit and wait. Perhaps to give up on him. But to give up on Elias was to give up on the very air that she breathed.

Her closet was filled with choice clothing and thin nylon stockings and her pantry was bursting with delicacies, but all this abundance meant nothing without Elias in her life. To wrap herself in a sweater picked out by him was a reminder that Elias had asked to be rendered to the past.

Thus passed the slowest, most difficult winter of her life—long, insistent, dark. Snow covered the city. Where others were charmed, to Lila the snow merely heightened her loneliness, its weight and blinding brilliance a burden to the trees and roofs. She was especially grateful for the spring that year when it appeared.

Lila was summoned urgently to the home of Mrs. Cassel, an old client who lived in the luxurious Rehavia neighborhood and who since the winter had been confined to her bed and was dying a prolonged death. That day Mrs. Cassel had asked to have her hair dyed royal purple and her nails manicured. Lila powdered the old woman’s face and painted her lips a soft pink, but when she took her hands, she understood why she had been brought there. Mrs. Cassel’s hands told the whole story: there was not a single age spot, but they had given up the will to live. Lila’s face fell.

“My time has come,” Mrs. Cassel told her, as if consoling her.

Lila stared at her at length, grateful to be a partner to this final ceremony of hers on earth.

“I want to leave in style,” the old woman said as she lay tranquilly in her canopy bed, wrapped in a blue silk robe, waiting to die. Lila held her feeble hand, brought it to her lips, and kissed it.

The next day, a telegram was received at Salon Hubert informing them that Mrs. Cassel had departed this world in the manner she had wished, and her son thanked Lila for making her beautiful in her life, even during her final hours. This news greatly saddened her, and she left the salon early. For some reason, she did not walk her usual route home but turned down a narrow side street lined with jacaranda trees in full bloom.

A noisy truck passed by, its roof shaving the undersides of the trees and dropping foliage onto the street. Lila, the only passerby, was showered with flowers. It was a rare and singular moment of beauty: the truck disappeared, the street was utterly silent, and Lila stood covered in tiny violet petals. She did not shake them from her hair or clothing, but let them fall to the ground of their own accord, one after the other.

At the end of the street, she turned around. Before her lay a carpet of violet that covered the street. She was astonished to realize that everything is transient: Mrs. Cassel’s life, the flowers, even being cut off from Elias.

2006

Munir comes to the hospital every morning at the seam between night and day, just as it awakens from its nighttime silence and all its rooms are flooded with neon lights and a buzz of activity but before the pulse changes to what those entering feel: the urgency of bringing succor. The new day gladdens those who will be rescued from the place and leaves the rest in despair.

Munir passes by the security guards lazily waiting for their shifts to end. He is tall and energetic, his clothing is always pressed and well selected, his face shaven down to the last whisker, and the little hair left on his head reduced to nothing by a Remington shaver. The guards wave him through, impressed with the appearance of this seventy-two-year-old man who looks at least a decade younger, with his firm, thin body; his athletic footfalls; and his calm blue eyes.

On occasion, one of the security staff shows initiative and searches his bag, overturning the contents on the counter and picking through his belongings: a green tube of shaving cream, a brush for lathering, a white washcloth, talcum powder, aftershave lotion, a styptic pencil. A pair of clean pajamas neatly folded. A thermos of tea in a cloth warmer.

More than once, a shaving blade was discovered on him, and security guards from around the hospital were alerted and came running. Munir was dragged to a side room and his hands were cuffed, the guards certain they had apprehended a terrorist who had come to slit the throats of Jewish patients. Sometimes his vest set off the security scanners, and a small metal container of breath mints was found in a pocket.

In case the security guards bothered him, he kept the number of the nurses’ station on Elias’s ward in his pocket. When they saw his name on his identification card, he could discern a tension in their faces, a cloud of suspicion that descended the moment an Arab stood facing them.

In fact, he did not mind them checking him. They checked the Jews, too, who opened their bags for inspection. And the scenario of a terrorist passing from bed to bed slitting the throats of helpless victims was not farfetched, certainly not in Jerusalem. Their cries would probably go unnoticed in a place where people moaned from pain all the time. Such a monstrous thing could happen, Elias pronounced one morning, because Jerusalem is a city in which all nightmares come to pass. He lowered his voice as he said that it would take only one such incident to rupture—for a while, or permanently—the miraculous daily routine in which Jewish doctors save the lives of Arab patients and Arab doctors save the lives of Jewish patients.

That morning as he entered the building, several incoming patients were being pulled from an ambulance, and Munir looked away. He knew himself, knew that it would keep him awake at night and affect his capacity to function during the day. He kept his gaze level as he walked through the halls so as to see as few of the aged and infirm as possible, in order to avoid revisiting their images later and because he did not wish to know who among them were still there and who had been covered in a sheet and brought to the basement of the hospital. If there was something that Munir feared as much as death, it was sickness and old age. People told him he was one of nature’s wonders—ageless, trim, able to walk five miles a day, his teeth his own—but even he knew that good health could not keep sickness and death at bay.

Elias was sitting up and staring at the door when Munir entered, prepared for the day’s opening rituals. They greeted each other, and Munir rolled his sleeves up and washed his hands as he did every morning, soaping them to the elbows like a scrub nurse. After drying them on paper towels, he filled a stainless steel bowl with hot water and placed his instruments on the nightstand next to Elias’s bed in the order in which he would use them. A clean scent wafted through the room, overcoming what Munir referred to as the overpowering “medicinal smells” of disinfectant and illness.

The whiteness of the shaving cream mask contrasted with the red of Elias’s sleepless eyes. Munir brought the blade down his neck like a skier on a slope, then wiped away the foam and dipped the blade in the hot water. Elias moved his tongue in his mouth to create flat surfaces in the space between his mouth and nose and below his mouth, making his barber’s job easier and outwitting the slackness of his aging skin. Munir wiped Elias’s face clean with the towel and finished up with drops of Acqua di Parma, which left a hint of a lemony scent, tapping lightly on Elias’s face until it was absorbed into his skin.

Upon finishing, he waited for Elias to say
“Salaam idk,”
may your hands be blessed, before he gathered his instruments and placed them in the leather bag. He would disinfect them at home. Now Elias’s face seemed momentarily to glow. Ever since Munir had read in the hospital library that daily shaving removed the top layer of skin and made a person look younger, he never skipped a day of shaving with a blade, using the shaver only for his head.

He dressed Elias in ironed pajamas, fluffed his pillows, and helped him sit comfortably. He rinsed the glass mugs of tea in boiling water to keep them hot, and just as he was about to pour tea for the two of them, Nomi entered, smiling broadly and smelling fresh, her heavy, curled mane of hair still wet from the shower. She held a few verbena and lemongrass leaves in her hand.

“Is this a bad time?” she asked.

“It’s never a bad time,” Elias said, smiling. “We’re just having our tea.”

“So this is the ward for hardcore tea addicts, eh? Do you take new members?”

“Al ha’eini,”
Elias said, which made Munir smile sheepishly. “With all my heart.”

“Munir,” Elias said, “this is Nomi. She and I have known each other since Nomi was a girl. Nomi, Munir. I’ve known him since he was a boy.”

Nomi and Munir said in unison, “Nice to meet you.”

The room was silent for a moment, until Elias said to Nomi, “You came early today.”

“Yes,” she said as she arranged the fresh garden herbs she’d brought with her in a jar of water, “I haven’t been sleeping well lately.”

She kept from him her suspicion that her insomnia had something to do with her visits to the hospital. Patients on the ward were appearing in her sleep, her conversations with Elias raged inside her, her dreams were fitful, and, before dawn, her body awakened sharply, all at once. This was very different from what she was used to; it had always been hard for her to wake up in the morning, and it took time for her to reach complete wakefulness and the ability to think or talk. Since she had gone back to living alone, she regained her morning quiet time, her uninterrupted muteness, no longer having to engage in conversation over her copy of the daily
Haaretz
newspaper. Even the aftershave her man wore, a field of lemongrass compressed into a bottle and stored in quantities in the bathroom cabinet, had not turned him into what she expected to find in him. He was not Elias, or even her father. He was strong and determined and headstrong, and she became both highly dependent on him and competitive at the same time. On your marks, get set, go: who’ll start the morning first, who’ll shine most, who’ll excel. He beat her on many fronts, but only one made her jealous. His family, unlike hers, was normal and nice, its tales told simply and lucidly and without contradictions or omissions.

Beside him, she could not rest her head or be weak for even a moment, and her existence in the world was affected by his brief kiss in the morning and his knitted brow, already focused on deals that would be made during the day ahead. He almost never passed his hand over her in a caress, and never once did he regard her with wonder at the fact that she was his. A colleague from Adoption Services once told her that the way people sleep together is the way they live together: If they embrace in their sleep, then they are close over their morning coffee, and if they sleep in a wide bed under separate blankets, then something needs fixing.

Then one day he gave her an ultimatum: have children or end the relationship. As she packed his belongings in sturdy Samsonite luggage, she was surprised at the sight of thirty long-sleeved khaki oxfords, just like the ones her father used to wear every day of his life, only more expensive. Those shirts hadn’t made her ex-husband the man she wished he had been, either.

“Sleeping four hours a night instead of eight,” Nomi told the two men, “is ongoing damage.”

“Tell me about it,” Elias said, claiming expertise.

Munir wished to look at her but was too timid. He took pleasure in her voice, and her skin was smooth and free of makeup. She recounted that she had cooked okra that she had washed and cut and left to dry in the sun on a newspaper, exactly as Elias had instructed her. She seared the okra at a high temperature, stirred it by moving the pot, not using a spoon, and added a few sliced tomatoes, the juices of which would pad the bottom, then added salt, pepper, and lemon to be cooked no longer than twenty minutes. What was important was not to split their pods so the juices would not leak out.

“Munir is crazy about okra,” Elias said when Munir was about to leave the room to wash the tea glasses.

“I’ll bet you eat it with white rice, yeah?” she asked. “But . . . you’re not leaving because of me, are you?”

“No,” Munir protested. His cheeks reddened at her direct appeal to him. “I have to go.”

He waited for Elias to give him a sign, but instead, Elias said, “Wait a little longer and leave with Nomi.”

Munir nodded and announced he would go sit in the hospital library. He told them he liked the wood paneling and the index cards filed in drawers because it was one place where the computer had not destroyed everything good in the world. He felt lucky to be able to page through scientific magazines without having to ask permission from a computer.

“He comes here every morning,” Elias explained after Munir left. “I told you that.”

“Yes,” she said, nodding. “He really does look younger than his age.”

“He takes good care of himself,” Elias said. “He visits the dentist twice a year, eats very little, and what he eats is healthy. He doesn’t even wear glasses yet. That man,” he said, suddenly emotional, “is more than a brother to me.”

“Does he have a family?” Nomi asked.

“He has lived with his sister for years,” Elias said. “That was how they chose to live.” Elias coughed a little. “Come, sit over here on the edge of the bed.”

The atmosphere in the room became suddenly heavy and gloomy. Once Munir left the room, there was no more need for pretense. Elias’s grief showed on his face, which a moment earlier had looked fresh. She hoped he would not speak to her again about that matter.

“How is your mother?” he asked.

“We held the annual memorial for my father, and she didn’t show up again,” Nomi said. “She said she was off in Cyprus.”

Elias nodded in a way that showed he knew exactly what she was talking about. “He died young, didn’t he?”

“At fifty-one,” she said. She was silent for a moment, then continued. “He had a weak heart, which is why Little Genius and I live in fear that we’ll suddenly keel over or live under the threat of heart disease. He was actually happy—he had a new love interest—it’s just that his heart couldn’t take those swings.” Nomi searched for a tissue in her purse. “I miss him. For years I didn’t want to hear a thing about him, but now every crumb of information has meaning. It teaches me about myself as well. I’ve been discovering that there are a lot of things I don’t know about him or my mother, things they didn’t wish to tell. Every event had several versions, and they were all murky. I’m not even sure that I know how they met.”

“But everyone knows how their parents met,” Elias said, surprised.

“It’s actually not clear,” Nomi said. “I asked my father, and he hemmed and hawed. My mother had various versions of the story. And when there is more than one version, you can’t believe any one of them in its entirety.”

“You want me to tell you the little I know?” Elias did not wait for an answer. “I’ll tell you, but first open the window and pour me some more tea.”

Nomi did as he asked. Elias said, “Their families lived near one another, and she set her sights on him. Menash had other girls, beauties. But Margo played him off against his brother Mano, and in the end she told him she was pregnant. That’s what got him to marry her.”

“But she wasn’t,” Nomi said, counting the months.

“With Margo, nothing was certain,” Elias said with a smile. “She was as dense and complex as a rain forest. Lila met your mother not long before that, and when your mother started seeing your father, it was in secret, because he was older. Your grandmother—Margo’s mother—thought there was a man in the picture, so every time Margo went to meet him, she told her mother she was with Lila.”

“She spent her whole life with him being bitter,” Nomi said, “and never able to understand what it was she had seen in him.”

“Margo was crazy about him,” Elias said. “He was a truck driver with the charm of a movie star.”

“All I have,” Nomi said sadly, “is a few wedding photos. That’s all that’s left of the story. A few lousy photographs that nobody cared about. They’re not even in an album. Where did they go to be together?”

“Where? Where was there to go? A palace ball? A cruise ship? There was war and hunger and the period of austerity. All they had was a truck that belonged to the contractor Menash worked for. He was already experienced with women, and she was a girl dreaming of escaping home.”

“So . . . they did it in the truck?” Nomi asked.

“I wasn’t there,” Elias said, smiling.

“Where were you at that time?”

“I was with Lila. Well, not exactly with her, since we were barely able to meet each other. It had become dangerous.”

Nomi felt the cold creeping into her socks and boots as if she had been walking for hours on a frozen lake.

“Are you cold?” Elias asked as if he could feel her feet. When she told him she was fine, he continued.

“You can’t even imagine what it was like to keep a secret like ours quiet in this city. I don’t know how we managed it. No place was safe for us, and the danger wandered from place to place without advance warning or any prescience of the pitfalls. Buildings were targeted, the streets were quiet and empty; there was shooting at night, a curfew, sharpshooters. A Jewish woman and an Arab man during those months—it was insane. Tossing us into a pool filled with famished crocodiles would have been less dangerous. We had no telephone communication, no letters; the mail service was barely operating. My car drew attention, so we could barely ever go anywhere in it. People began to talk.”