About the Night (47 page)

The children jumped on her and hung from her dress. Elias appreciated that that was how it was with children: they did exactly what they were feeling. He, too, would like to cling to her, embrace her, bury his head in her bosom.

They stayed for an hour and a half, and then she asked him to drive her back to Jerusalem. They maintained a pleasant silence, and Elias thought they were mending. He did not ask if she would like to eat with him. She found him gentle and considerate; sharing a meal would feel too intimate for her right now at this very early stage.

“I watched you with the children,” Elias said. “You were beaming.”

“I didn’t know that could be seen.”

“You have so much to give.”

“Lately,” she told him, “I don’t feel right at the salon anymore. Time crawls by. I don’t have the joy I once felt there.”

“Perhaps,” Elias said as he closed his window against the wind, “you need to think about making a change.”

“What kind?”

“Something gradual,” he said softly. “Something slow—unlike your temperament.”

He stopped in front of her building and turned off the engine. Her eyes were telling him something.

“Don’t think about it,” he said.

“About what?” she asked.

“About where I’m going from here. Think about the fact that I’m with you even when I’m there.”

“I’ll try,” she said. “Even though it’s really difficult.”

“Je t’embrace,”
he said without moving a muscle.

She turned toward him and smiled. For a moment before she stepped out of the car, she felt that the sadness that had filled her soul for weeks was beginning to disappear. She thought about the word
change
and hoped it would continue to resonate for her with the same potential as when she heard it from his mouth. How was it not possible to see the enormous change that was taking place? The world was changing, the Middle East, her country, its borders, the map, the people, the language of the street, the national anthems, the parades, the tunes, the contents of people’s refrigerators—everything around her. She and Elias as well. She was not the same woman he had promised to love forever nineteen years ago, and he was not the same man she had waited for all those years. And yet, the marrow, the glands, the body scent, the skin tissue, the hair follicles, everything under the skin—they were all still absolutely suited.

Elias regarded her with astonishment. She was certain he had read her mind because the next thing he said was, “Just think: all these momentous changes have taken place just so you and I could be together once again.”

Rain made its way between the metal sheeting and pooled in puddles on the floor of Lila’s apartment. The buckets and pails she placed beneath the damaged roof each morning were full by evening, and even overflowed. It rained so hard and so often that the fields and orchards were flooded, and Jerusalem was able to store water for the dry spells to come. The children from the orphanage sent her a letter in which they recounted stories of flooding the likes of which no one had ever seen before. For weeks they had not been allowed outside the cold stone building, as if under siege by the river. Lila thought that that was how it always was in Jerusalem and the surroundings: either too much or too little, drought or flooding, terrible heat or terrible cold, nothing ever in the proper measure.

“At least let me fix your roof,” Elias pleaded.

“It will pass,” Lila said. “The rain will stop. How long can it keep coming down like this?”

Only after several weeks, when her walls were soaked through and her good health had given way to coughing and flu, did she concede.

“I know why you didn’t want me to come and fix your roof,” he said as he stood atop a ladder investigating the source of the leak.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because you don’t want to feel dependent on me. You don’t want to give me a clear sign that we’re back together. You think you can go it alone. And you’re probably right. You can manage on your own.”

“You’re wrong,” she said as if she had understood nothing. Then a moment later she said, “Well, maybe.”

“Now that it’s all clear,” he said, “may I do what I know how to do?”

She looked at him, surprised.

He climbed down the ladder in his elegant clothes, dusted the imaginary grains of dust from his hands, and said reluctantly, “I’ve never in my life fixed a roof or a car or a leaky faucet.”

“I thought you knew everything,” she countered. “I thought you could take things apart and put them back together.”

“You were wrong,” he said. “There are things that men do that I don’t claim to have any knowledge of.”

“You were never taught,” she said, helping him find an excuse. “There was always someone to do it for you.”

He stopped himself from placing a finger on three freckles that formed an arrow near her nose.

“So, what do we do?”

“We call my roofer. I told him to wait in the car until I can convince you.”

Elias was out the door in a second, and when he returned, he introduced Khaled, an older man, thin and athletic. “Khaled knows exactly what to do,” Elias said. “Grab a coat and we’ll go out.”

“Where to?” she asked when they were in the car.

“Another country,” he said. “Wherever it’s warm and dry.”

Without thinking, she put her hand on the nape of his neck. Just a single touch, one soft touch after an eternity of longing, and it felt like a miracle to Elias, a cure. He felt her touch throughout his body, and not necessarily in a sexual way. It’s like rediscovering our secret language
,
he thought. From the moment she learned he had a wife, she had kept her distance. But at that particular moment in the car, when she removed her hand from his body as if she had touched a pile of burning coals, he actually felt tranquil and levelheaded, and he continued driving as though nothing had happened. He did not even glance at her.

Jaffa was indeed warmer, and the streets were dry. “I missed this city,” Elias said. At a café he ordered tea and cookies covered with pistachios and thin brown noodles dipped in honey.

“Lila,” he said, pronouncing her name with such intensity that it seemed he had been chosen to be the sole person in the world allowed to utter it. She lifted her eyes to look at him. He knew those eyes, from which tears threatened to flow at any second. “I need to explain what you may not be willing to accept,” he said.

She bit the inside of her lip and nodded.

He put his elbows on the simple wooden table, leaned toward her, and said, “Maybe we should try to understand what happened to us.” He paused before continuing. “I thought it was over between us. Finished. That there was no chance, then or ever. I was weak and I had no faith. So I gave in. When you give in, you can mourn. When you mourn, you can live with the nothingness, the lack.”

Lila leaned back into her chair, widening the space that separated them.

“I said good-bye to us, took my leave. I sent our love to its past, and at some stage it became part of my memory—painful, but lifeless. You, on the other hand,” he said, feeling as though his vocal cords were weakening, “you continued. For you it was alive and on fire. You managed to keep that flame going all those years.”

Her eyes reddened, but Elias did not stop.

“At a certain important juncture, we each told ourselves different stories. Good, bad, disappointing, true—who can tell? Your story. My story. The tragedy is that there were two stories. I built a whole life and layers of defense on top of mine. You built mounds of hope on yours. If researchers were to conduct an experiment on the two of us, lovers forced into separation, you know what they would find?”

Waves of her tears were stopped only by the supreme effort she was making.

“They would find that hope nourishes while loss empties a person out,” he said. He took a sip from the sweet tea because the Arab waiter stood waiting to fill his cup with more hot tea poured from a gold-plated teapot. “Lila, my Lila, my love,” he said, sounding like someone who knew how to find his way out of a maze, “lay down your weapons. Don’t punish us because I told myself a different story from the one you told yourself.”

The wooden chair was cutting into her back, but she remained as she was so as not to lean toward him. She looked cool and beautiful in her gray flannel skirt. The flecks of red-and-white in the scarf around her shoulders gave her a look of festivity she did not feel.

“Hit me every day,” he said. “Make me miserable, settle scores with me. So long as we’re together.”

She was in one of those quiet moods that could catch fire. The world seemed like a threatening, oppressive place. The rain, the damp walls, the series of colds that was plaguing her, the low spirits. A carousel of sad thoughts nourished by hidden demons that gnawed at her and burrowed in under her skin. His words seemed sincere and brave to her. Of the two of them, she thought, only he could save them from drowning. Still, something inside her protested.

“You know it. You know we were meant for each other,” he said. “You know we’ll always be together, that there’s nothing like what we have anywhere in the world. And I don’t care how long I have to wait for you, even if it takes another twenty years.”

“It’s so difficult,” she said at last, feeling as though a lump of brimstone were clogging her throat.

“Give it up, Lila,” he said. “Let your anger go. If you’ll only stop struggling, then the insult and the fury will subside, because there won’t be anything to fan the flames.”

Lila breathed heavily, as though she were climbing mountains, but she sat motionless in that Jaffa café and closed her eyes for a long moment so that the two of them remained silent together. The smoke from hookah pipes curled over their heads. Briefly, she appeared to him as though she was burning her anger before the anger could burn her instead. The sounds of the other diners seemed like a chorus answering a prayer left unspoken. Rain began to fall outside. Lila opened her eyes and looked into his, those eyes that imparted softness and that were amazed and enthralled at her beauty, her sweetness, her very existence.

“The rain followed us down here to Jaffa,” Elias said. “It must be dry in Jerusalem already.”

On the way back to Jerusalem, she laid her hand on his as it moved the gearshift. Her touch was light, but it grew firmer as they drove along, and she interlaced her fingers with his until they nearly whitened. She thought, I hurt him. And I hurt myself. If I can forgive him, I’ll be able to forgive myself as well.

For the first time in weeks and months and years, she felt she was returning to him and he to her, like two people marching toward each other from two sides of a long rope bridge suspended between dark skies and rushing water. At a certain moment, they stand on the same spot. And he could feel it, too, that they were softening, coming together and reuniting in that soft and flexible circle that contains lovers, returning as one to dry land.

The roof that had been leaking and had made her feel so vulnerable was fixed. “Now you’re safe and protected,” Elias told her, looking at the ceiling. “These new tiles will stay put for another hundred years.”

Her head remained on his shoulder with the submission of one who has stopped putting up a fight. He moved her head away to gaze at her at length, then started the phonograph. In the cozy little apartment, the voice of Nina Simone was playing as he gathered Lila in his arms, and they began moving with subtle gestures that strengthened as thigh touched thigh and heat rose from secret places in their bodies. It was in the narrow space between their bodies that the real dance occurred, the one that carried them along like a wave. It came and went, touching and pulling back, into their coming together as if they had been poured into each other.