About the Night (33 page)

In the middle of the night, in the shelter, the baby began breathing heavily. Lila took him outside in his stroller. She knew that when he had such fits of asthma they took him outside into the fresh, cold air or seated him near steam. She wondered which was the greater danger, that he would suffocate or that a shell would land on the building. With a flashlight in hand, she lit the way as she climbed the stairs to the top floor with him in her arms. In the distance, she could hear the wailing of rescue vehicles.

She held him tight and was surprised to realize that she felt no fear. She, who was afraid of spiders and snakes and trucks barreling down the street and the sound of shutters lowered at night with a bang, now found herself completely fearless. How strange it felt not to be afraid, how empowering. She understood it was because of the baby: ensuring his safety made her immune to all the world’s ills, made them all disappear.

She did not turn on any lights in the apartment. She simply heated water and spoke to the baby, who was now panting and wheezing, his mouth open as if hoping for more air.

“Here we go, sweet little boy,” she cooed, “Lila’s going to make choo-choo train sounds for you.”

She sat with him in the kitchen in the light of a small flashlight, their heads under a thin white cloth diaper, and together they breathed the steam rising from a bowl.

The baby was curious about the mysterious night lighting. Slowly, his breathing relaxed, and air entered and exited his lungs freely. He smiled at her as if now free of his affliction and eager to show his gratitude. Her eyes brimmed with tears. If only she herself had a baby like this, full of life, someone to care for, someone to keep her mind off her pain; if only Elias had left something of himself with her; if only she knew what he was doing at that very moment, perhaps thinking of her, perhaps enshrouded in darkness in his home like she was, and she wondered if he was sheltered and who he was protecting on this night.

But the baby had recovered and was shouting for his porridge. Lila wiped his face, dampened from the improvised steam tent, and while he was still in her arms, tugging at her pearl earrings, she made some hot porridge for him and fed him in the little kitchen, and she grew stronger with every bite of his, enchanted by the simple act of feeding him. How much strength it gave her to nourish him, how much consolation his tiny hands offered as they fluttered over her face. She had driven off his attack just as she would drive off some cruel infiltrator come to endanger his life. She had nursed him to health and had satiated him.

In turn, he drove off her fears and strengthened her, and even, for a moment, made her heart glad. She sneezed, and the baby burst out laughing. Again she sneezed, and he laughed harder. Lila kept on producing less authentic sneezes.

Lila left her Pepita court shoes in the apartment and stepped into a pair of soft and comfortable slippers. “They’ll be more practical on the stairs,” she whispered to the sated baby.

During the first two days of the war, the Riani family sat in the cellar, growing accustomed to the sound of the bombardment. They listened to Jordanian radio; the broadcaster goaded the city’s residents to fight and take part in the huge victory over the Jews. Elias did not wish to rely solely on propaganda, however, and tinkered with the radio until he found the Egyptian station Sa’ut El Arab. There, too, broadcasters reported stunning victories scored by the brave Egyptians over the Zionists along Israel’s southern border, and they ignored Jerusalem entirely. Even from the cellar, they could hear the shooting outside quite clearly. There were barrages of fire and then quiet.

By the third day, Elias was a bundle of nerves. If one thing could drive him crazy, it was a lack of information, especially when his freedom had been curtailed as he sat suffocating like a prisoner in his own spacious home.

“There is nothing worse,” he muttered to Munir, “than sitting like a helpless fool in the cellar, exposed to shelling, waiting for who knows what.”

Munir said, “I’ll go prepare tea.”

Elias went up the stairs with him, taking advantage for a moment to escape the quarantine imposed on him. He had spent more time upstairs than with the others in the cellar; time was moving slowly, and it grated on his nerves as he stood looking outside his windows for hours. The streets were empty and dark. Heavy shooting could be heard at first, then lighter.

On the fourth day, a rumor passed from house to house, and Elias fiddled with the dial on the radio until he found Voice of Israel in Arabic: “The Israel Defense Forces have captured the Old City of Jerusalem, the Temple Mount, and Ammunition Hill.” Elias and Munir looked at each other.

After ascending from the cellar and breathing fresh air, they ate rice with yogurt that Nadira had prepared. The household was returning to itself. The women did the washing while Elias and Munir remained glued to the radio. They listened to whatever there was from the BBC, from Radio Ramallah, thirsty for news.

After the meal, Elias prepared tea—Grand Yunnan Imperial, a blend that symbolizes freedom and refuge, tea leaves that grow high on foggy mountaintops, the inspiration of mountain climbers and explorers. It was strong, this first cup of tea Elias prepared after the war, slightly sharp and smoky.

Night would fall late that evening as it did every night in June. People would go to bed late, grateful that the war had ended and that they had survived without harm and that they had food and water and were lacking nothing. Elias needed time to himself. He had spent too many hours and days in the company of others. He moved through the house, turning off lights. At the end of his rounds, he came to his son’s room.

The boy pulled an unfinished model car from under his bed. He’d built the body from wire, the steering wheel from wood, and the tires from the tops of Kiwi shoe polish tins.

Elias said, “Sleep well; it’s all over.” He kissed the boy’s head and left the room. He took in a deep breath and went to sit in the living room. In the dark he removed his shoes and socks and raised his legs to the ottoman and sank into the armchair. In the silence that ensued, he allowed himself to think of her.

This came at the right time to overwhelm him, not earlier, when everything around him was going up in flames, when his family was threatened, when the world had stopped for several days. The radio of the Jews reported that the wall had fallen, that the severed city had been reunited. People from both sides of the city would look for one another; how many would find each other? For the first time in days, he could hear crickets chirping and frogs croaking, all of them silent during the war. She would not look for him; he knew her. She would wait for him to find her.

Or perhaps she had not waited. Was she in danger? Who had protected her? Was she still up in that apartment on the roof? Was she thinking of him? Would she be able to understand? The longer he sat in the darkness, the more clearly he could see it: nothing had happened to her during the war. Like him, she would emerge without a scratch. He had always told her she was safe and nothing bad would happen to her.

What had been there between them nineteen years ago had not dissipated. It had merely been set aside, wrapped in cloth and preserved for the proper moment. He knew what he felt, but he was not certain that he knew what to do. He needed more time.

That evening he drank many cups of water, drank and urinated, drank and urinated, cleansing his body from the filth of war, from the self-restraint, from the anger. At six in the morning, he entered his bedroom. Nasreen was sleeping, and he could sense that her sleep was tranquil and restorative. He took a blanket for himself from the cupboard because he did not wish for them to breathe under the same blanket.

Elias slept for only two hours, but when he awakened he was filled with vitality, an energy for life. Something inside him had stirred for the first time in a long, long time.

Six days after the eastern half of the city was conquered, a map of unified Jerusalem was included as a free insert in the daily papers. Monsieur Hubert’s entire face was a map, too—of scorn. “All of a sudden, everyone’s in a hurry. Full-color maps, ‘One Jerusalem.’ It’s too bad they aren’t so swift about the filthy streets or the boys who loiter about.”

To Monsieur Hubert, “they” were a single authoritative entity, lazy and corrupt. It included the state, its institutions, the party, the string pullers, the people with connections.

“Monsieur Hubert,” the proprietress of a café who had come to have her hair done pointed out, “now you are a capitalist, but in your soul you remain an Austro-Hungarian anarchist.”

The eastern part of the city held no fascination for him whatsoever, and his business intuition told him that the Arab women there would not become a new cadre of clients. The Western Wall and the Citadel, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and Gethsemane were indeed historical sites that would bring tourists and tourism, but these tourists, he explained to his employees, were beatniks with wild hair and could not be counted on.

He loathed the onslaught of Israelis that thronged to the Old City, and he saw no hidden magic in the labyrinthine alleyways that to him were crowded, noisy, and too Levantine for his tastes. But at the same time, he understood that that was what everyone was doing. So, in order to hold his staff together—even though he loved to remind them that not one of them was irreplaceable—and to sniff out something for himself, if there was in fact something to be had, he decided to take them all on a trip.

He gathered all his staff members together—stylists, hair washers, cosmeticians, pluckers, and Lila, the only one he referred to as “Miss” and whom he did not think of as part of the group—and to their astonishment informed them that he was taking them on a bus trip. “A whole day, a fortune, at my expense.”

They awaited him at seven in the morning, as excited as schoolgirls. They brought egg salad sandwiches and cucumbers and sweets and pretzels and cookies and a thermos of instant coffee with milk. Lila did not like such organized tours, where one was not informed about the schedule, but the bus driver, who was sitting in the driver’s seat in short pants and sandals, put her right out of her early morning bad mood when he whistled at the women and said, “I don’t know if it’s legal to have so many beauties in a single bus. I’ll have to ask permission from headquarters.”

The girls were enchanted; even Lila’s lips pulled into a smile. The guide took up his position in front of the microphone beside the driver. They were sharing the bus with a group of travel agency employees; Rita had already flashed her sweet smile at the manager, which would be followed by a more promising smile, and after that, who knew?

Lila went to sit at the back of the bus. Rita teased her, “Your royal highness, forgive us for making you ride in a bus and not a royal carriage.”

Lila said, “My stomach hurts, and I didn’t sleep well.”

She was tense. Her stomach, which always expressed her worries, was bothering her. She wished she could simply enjoy herself, like the others. Traveling to Bethlehem upset her; it had been years since she had met Arabs or spoken with them. Suddenly, to come to a city where people were, like him, Christian Arabs, felt like drawing near to him, closer and closer.

Six days had passed since the end of the war and many new opportunities were opening up, and still she had not even begun to make an effort at finding out what had become of him. Menash had come up with nothing and in any event had reassured her that the general population had not been harmed. Was he alive? Where was he living? Beyond that, she did not allow herself to think. With every passing moment, she felt a prick of pain that he had not come looking for her. After all, she was not hard to find; she was in the same place. So as the hours and days passed, her anxiety grew: perhaps he was unable to look for her; perhaps he did not wish to. She tortured herself wondering which was worse.

More than once the idea had occurred to her to go to the place that had been his office. She remembered the building at the intersection of two streets. There was a bank on the ground floor with two floors above it, the top one Elias’s office, with very large windows through which a lovely light was refracted at night. But anytime she considered it, a force stronger than she put a stop to it. Once she had stood in her doorway but turned back, and another time she was on her way on foot, then stopped in her tracks and went home, and a third time she took a taxi from the salon but en route told the driver to take her back to work. There were other “almost” moments, too, that tormented her with helplessness.