About the Night (32 page)

The widower’s son showed up with batteries for the transistor radio, and the old man continued to drink in every word from the little holes in the brown plastic cover, keeping it all to himself. The war was now being played out on several fronts, more reserve units had been called up, tanks and planes were taking part in the fighting, and residents of the north and even the Negev were now in shelters as well. Thousands of shells had fallen on Jerusalem in the past twenty-four hours. The broadcaster called out code names of units being mobilized: Stage Lights and Pure Crystal and Open Window and Bull Fighter and Gold Paper and Deep Roots. These names were both mysterious and convivial.

But even the broadcasts that reached the cellar with disruptive static could not really present a full picture of what was happening outside. Lila knew that. Voice of Thunder from Cairo, Voice of Israel, Radio Damascus, Radio Amman—they gave contradictory information, so that even if the people sitting in the shelter put together all the censored news flowing from all the stations, the result was still something muddled and meaningless. The truth was taking place quite near the shelter.

She felt the helplessness of people on the home front, the last to know, the ones shrouded in darkness and hungry for fresh air and nourished by rumors. Information was more precious than any merchandise that could be bought or bartered. The great, obedient, silent mass of the population survived in the blackened-out city by maintaining the lone mission assigned it, namely keeping up morale, though if it had been dependent on Lila, she would have shaken off this responsibility and made a beeline for the truth.

Only Menash could offer her salvation. Of all the people she knew, he was the only one traveling through the blighted streets of the city, because all the traffic lights were down. His job was transport between the bunker and the operations room, between the ammunitions warehouses and the food supply stations, with his arm out the window and a cigarette in his mouth, as complacent and as focused and as fearless as a cowboy in a Western. Only he would be able to tell her what they were saying about the eastern side of the city and its Arab inhabitants. But that evening he did not return, and not the following day, either. The routine in the shelter began to seem like something permanent, as if there had been no other life beforehand: the Germans, the Hungarians, the Czechs, the old people, two women, two children.

In the evening, when everyone was dozing in their seats, the tall son of the German couple arrived at the shelter carrying a special edition newspaper: The Old City of Jerusalem had been conquered by the Israel Defense Forces. The Israeli flag was flying on the Temple Mount. Soldiers were weeping with joy. Jordanian snipers were continuing to fire. He left the paper and took off in a hurry.

Only Lila was wide-awake, as alert as a watchman on duty. She never fell asleep on a bus or a train, on a chair or the floor, no matter how tired she was. She preferred to pass the night awake, dreaming of a sweet night’s sleep in her own clean bed on ironed white sheets. It was her ritual, after a hot shower, to check the bed to make sure there was not a single crumb. Only then could she climb into bed and give sleep its proper respect. Only in her own bed could she find true repose.

The gloomy cellar seemed like Noah’s Ark to her, except instead of sailing the sea, the ark was buried deep in the earth. This was how the creator of the universe had arranged them, the omnipotent one who controlled the outcome of the war: two by two in a moldy refuge, leaning on one another, breathing on one another, lightly snoring, sleeping with the knowledge that there was someone on whom to rest one’s head. And in this ark, her friend Margo, with whom she had already endured another war, lay sleeping open-mouthed, and the baby slept on his back in a stroller, and, at the foot of the stairs, Nomi lay wrapped in a blanket on a thin mattress. Only Lila stood out in this scenery: alone, alone, again alone.

Alone in wartime is another story altogether, a total distortion of regular life. The life of an independent woman who had secretly managed to preserve her youth as she waited for something to happen, something that should have happened years earlier.

It was not all that long ago.

Wasn’t it all living inside her and simmering, waiting to boil over? All this emotion, bottled up for years, stifled and well packaged. To the untrained eye, it seemed distant and forgotten, but inside her, there was a throbbing that never weakened. She could not speak with others. It was a silence she was condemned to years earlier when everything began in secrecy, and they had to protect themselves. There was no one she could tell that her heart was forever his, this man’s and no other’s.

Who could have known that their love would be severed one day precisely at the spot where the city was severed between east and west, between Arab and Jew? Who had determined that this was the way it must be? Who had asked her on which side she preferred to be? She had been given no such opportunity to choose.

In May 1948, when the country was burning in a fire of hatred, it had never occurred to Lila that this could happen, that one morning they would awaken to a sickening, monstrous, enraging barrier that meant here-is-us and there-is-you.

How she hated that border, the Mandelbaum Gate, that otherwise insignificant building that UN soldiers used to signify that from here forward there was no passage, from here forward two lives would carry on without mixing, that there would be a complete severing of communication, that a dream within reach had been trampled.

He and she no longer lived in the same city even though neither had moved from their previous homes. She did not know that for certain, but she imagined that Elias had stayed in his family home in Sheikh Jarrah, so that overnight they found themselves separated into two different political entities. She paid taxes to Israel, he to Jordan; she was subject to Israeli laws, he to Jordanian; she bought bread with Israeli liras, he with Jordanian dinars. The stamps affixed to letters she sent featured anemones; his featured the likeness of the king. Their kitchens were separated by a fifteen-minute drive, and yet they occupied two distant universes that could not mingle. She could not sense his world, nor could he sense hers.

And it was not all that long ago. Only nineteen years.

What are nineteen years when love abounds and thrives and cannot be conquered? It depends who is asking and who is answering. For others, it is an eternity, an entire lifetime during which they have lived and married and taken out mortgages and brought children into the world and raised them and sent them to the army, a strong army now fighting on three fronts, struggling against a united bloc of armed Arab nations. In nineteen years, people built businesses, grew rich, lost their money, learned and forgot what they learned, traveled and came back, built and destroyed—while Lila had remained exactly where she was.

She had chosen, clear-headed, to remain thus. What if he came looking for her? She had to do everything in her power to make it easy for him. And so it was that she continued hanging her white laundry on the same roof atop the same building; and so it was that she continued taking care of the hands of women from around the city; and so it was that she went to synagogue wearing white and sat in the same seat, praying with all her heart, and bought from the same fruit and vegetable stands in the Mahane Yehuda market, sniffing the melons and grapes, and read French and English magazines to keep up those languages and listened to Arabic on the radio in order to remember him, to be connected to the language in which he lived his life, a flimsy bond that held her to him.

She had a tiny circle of friends, few obligations, free time for thinking and for longing. The fewer connections to others, the lighter she would be on that day when at last he would come for her. There would be less weight on her shoulders and little to bind her arms. Even if she never thought these thoughts, it was how she lived her life. One day and then another.

What kept her in a state of expectancy and anticipation all those years? Not his words of encouragement or promises or oaths: “No matter what,” he had said, “you and I will be together. I don’t know when, but it will happen.” Rather, it was the look on his face, that look without which she felt a chill in her bones and a desire for him to regard her that way again, which kept her in hopeful waiting.

And it wasn’t all that long ago. Neither of them could have predicted that their journey to Nazareth would be their last trek, that the Christmas party at Government House would be their last lovemaking, that the day he brought water to her home would be his last visit there.

A tremor passed through her, her skin turned to gooseflesh, and she passed her hand over her arms to warm them and ward off the nighttime chill of the reinforced walls buried deep in the earth. How she detested places like these, warrens for mole-like creatures. Her thoughts drifted to that trip to Nazareth. Elias walked around like a king, his gait regal and his smile full of charm, and even people who had never met him treated him with honor and dignity, every merchant bowing to him as he entered and exited their shops, while she, at his side, felt like the first lady of some tiny princedom.

“Because you’re so beautiful,” he whispered in her ear, “the men do not dare look you straight in the eye.” They were showing their respect to the man in the suit, staring only when the couple had moved on.

They stayed at an inn at the foot of the Hill of the Annunciation. Elias slipped a rolled-up bank note to the reception clerk, who showed up a little while later with a gramophone, a record, some hot food, and a bottle of red wine. Night fell in their honor, softening the daytime backdrop for lovemaking, and dressed the window in a curtain of mystery.

“In this light,” he told her, “your beauty is breathtaking.” He was regarding her like a painter who had found his angle.

He fed her chunks of pita with kebab and wine straight from the bottle. That night they made love for hours, wandering about in the mysteries of pleasure, hovering between bodily passion and the craving of lovers, astonished at the heights they had reached. And after this particularly slow and quiet and continuing storm they created had abated, they waited for morning to rise.

He placed his hand on her belly.

His touch was so sweet there, and so surprised were they to wake up and find each other, and so hungry were they for the memory of the previous night, that he found his way to her, to her joyous warmth, and he awakened her in his quiet manner, his belly to her back. And when the sun came up behind the curtain, he came to her as only he knew how.

After that hallowed evening at the foot of the Hill of the Annunciation, Lila’s period was late in coming and her breasts grew full and her appetite increased, though there were days when any kind of food at all nauseated her. Then the State of Israel was proclaimed, the war asserted itself on the citizens of the land, Jerusalem was divided in two, and in her womb the scion of the Riani dynasty was growing, a child conceived in love on a Nazarene hill. She thanked God that her parents were no longer living to see her have an Arab man’s child. As time passed, she grew less fearful and began wanting this baby more than she had ever wanted anything in her life. She would find a way to tell Elias, she would control her panic, she would not give up the child. If necessary, she would travel far away to give birth and return with a story that would satisfy people.

During those weeks, she blossomed. Suddenly, she noticed round, pregnant women in the streets, or others pushing strollers. Now she was one of them. Her body grew full and round.

But one day after several weeks of this budding pregnancy, to her complete surprise and disappointment, she began to bleed, and the arrival of this blood crumbled the hope that had taken root in her body and sent her crashing. Afterward, she felt embarrassment, humiliation. She had heard of the pseudo-pregnancies of women who desperately wanted children for themselves or for their men. And this is what had happened to her, she thought: the physical changes, the emotional reality. When she believed she was pregnant, it filled her whole being, but when she knew she was not, she emptied out entirely and remained hollow, just another woman in heels. It took her long weeks to come around after feeling such emptiness. She waited for the day when she could tell Elias.