About the Night (48 page)

They danced to Simone’s smoky hoarseness, Lila’s breathing matching Elias’s breathing in the most natural manner possible, as if it had always been this way, as if this is what the creator of the universe had intended when he made man and woman. Their faces touched, and his scent was the same wonderful aroma that had been imprinted on her memory, but now it was close and painful in its proximity.

The touch of her skin was like velvet. And so was his virility, throbbing its way to the secret places inside her where he found his joy in her lush warmth and the dance beneath him, moving with him, stopping with him, vanquished, beloved, moving to his tempo and to the power of the tremor born of their fusion, tranquil and stormy and earthshaking and incendiary. The very spot where their passion met was the place of their greatest, most supreme longing, and they climbed toward it, remaining on high for as long as possible, testing their restraint, how long they could hold out. And with his fingers in her flesh, he released his breath, first compressed, then gushing and powerful, the echoes dissolving into her neck.

Even their heartbeats became one, resonating together. Their common scent, the scent of lovemaking, was intoxicating. His hands continued to flutter over her back as if they had not just finished their lovemaking. Every part of her body, every limb, was aflame and throbbing.

He whispered into her hair, “A person should ask himself every day, Am I alive? Do I love? Most people at the end of their lives could claim to have lived: until they died, they lived. But how many could say they’d really loved? Really and truly loved?

“Very few,” he said, answering himself. “And what about me? I lived and I loved. And even if this was my last day on earth, I would know that I lived and I loved.”

He wanted to take her scent, the scent of both of them together, with him. He refused her offer of a shower.

Before leaving, he told her he was soaring, and her eyes lit up. And before the joy in them could be replaced with sadness, she looked away, hoping their parting by the door would be easy. This time, now that they were back together, there would be a slight feeling of abandonment: he would rise, dress, step out the door and shut it, turn his back to her, disappear, travel elsewhere, while she would remain. Several hours ago, she was still trying to adjust to his presence; now she would have to adjust to his absence again.

As he cruised down lovely Agron Street, alone in his car, he felt both remarkably peaceful and inflamed with passion. If he could, he knew he would have stayed with her, drowsy and sated, beneath the comforter, and that her velvety touch would reawaken him and draw him once again between her thighs.

She, alone in her flat, lay in bed thinking about how when Elias had reentered her life, her aloneness had become loneliness, and that loneliness had become oppressive. In the light of the candle flickering next to her bed, she tried to ascertain whether her situation had now improved or worsened. When they were lovers—when Jerusalem was still operating under the guise of being a multicultural city under British rule—they were indeed not meant to have anything to do with each other, but they were of equal status, both unwed, unencumbered people in their twenties. Now, he was the head of a family, chained to a wife and children and burdened with the responsibility for their health and well-being. She, on the other hand, was free and light but was about to become “the other woman.” And what sort of freedom was that, to become the other, the one who waits, the secret lover? What was the difference between that and the “anchored women,” the ones whose husbands had abandoned them without divorcing them, thus destroying their chances of finding love again. The difference, she felt, was that back in 1948, their situation was hopeless, while now, with Elias’s return, something would change. Some miracle would befall him, the circumstances of his life might become more flexible, and their love could flourish.

She closed her eyes and tried to imagine life once again without him, what would happen if she returned to those years of waning memories and hope. And when she did, she began to feel a prickly pain spreading through her body and sending signs to the wounded part of her from which Elias had only just removed himself. She was surprised to realize that since he had come back into her life that pain had disappeared—the very same pain that had plagued her for years during their separation. Until now, she had not noticed.

Just before turning to her favorite position for sleeping, Lila understood that her anger had abated and that while she knew she might lose her balance by giving up her anger, she was doing so willingly and was feeling stable and unshakable. In fact, she felt lighter without the extra weight of animosity, without bearing a grudge against the man who had abandoned her in his thoughts or against the woman who had won him or against her own naïveté, the years lost, opportunities missed.

Once a month Lila received a pot of exquisitely stuffed grape leaves prepared by Rosa, Ezra’s wife, for helping her get a job as a seamstress in Mrs. Westfried’s home. On this particular day, the salon was empty and quiet, the only sound that of Monsieur Hubert’s grumbling about a new salon in town that was supposedly full all the time. Since she knew that Mrs. Westfried was out of town with her loyal driver, Mano, Lila decided to take advantage of the opportunity and bring the empty pot back to Rosa. She took off her smock, applied lipstick, grabbed her bag, and announced that she would return later in the afternoon.

She enjoyed the walk to the quiet Talbieh neighborhood, and she was preoccupied thinking about something a client had told her a few days earlier: that a pregnant girl was living with her, far from the ire of her parents, until she gave birth and the baby would be given up for adoption.

Lila found Rosa working on her new Brother sewing machine, turning pieces of cloth into sleeves. She thought about Mrs. Westfried and how her life was full and busy. She was off at the moment meeting with the prime minister; he wanted her help in making the desert blossom. Sure, she had a driver, a maid, a gardener, and a seamstress, but ultimately, she was alone—sixty-eight years old, very rich, and alone.

We both live alone by choice or not, Lila thought, though if I worked every day for the rest of my life I would never have what she has. One of us does for others; the other only does for herself. The comparison did not put Lila in a good light, and she wondered if the moment had not arrived for her to leave the den of her own making and see what she could do for those in need, just as Elias had suggested during their drive to the monastery. She wondered if it was possible to aspire to change even without knowing what that change will bring. She had listened to him without knowing if he was prophesying something about her or directing her toward that turning point.

The Brother sewing machine fell silent. Rosa was marking a piece of blue cashmere with tailor’s chalk.

Lila said, “Rosa, do you think that Mrs. Westfried might take an interest in unwed pregnant girls?”

Rosa hung a tape measure around her neck and said, “There’s no knowing with her. But you know, her sister died during an abortion. There’s a photo of her in the living room.”

“I’m thinking of talking to her about an idea I have,” Lila said.

“Unwed pregnant girls,” Rosa said, echoing popular opinion, “are an embarrassment to the family. They should get married.”

As she left the Westfried home, Lila felt certain that on her way to carrying out this plan she would come up against brick walls, ignorance, and the shock some people would feel at hearing an unplanned pregnancy referred to as a problem that needed fixing. On her walk back to the salon, Lila hatched a plan to learn the subject inside and out and then present it to Mrs. Westfried. There would always be unwanted babies, but perhaps it would make more sense to go to the root of the problem, to take care of the girls while they were still pregnant, to prepare them and stay with them, giving them support. Perhaps Mrs. Westfried would open her heart to these girls who had erred. Instead of letting one mistake ruin their lives, they would be rescued by women with experience, warmth, and an open mind.

After work that day, Lila went to the home of the client giving refuge to the sixteen-year-old pregnant girl. The apartment was in an out-of-the-way neighborhood; the girl’s room was nothing more than an enclosed balcony. She was dark-haired and slightly cross-eyed, with an enormous belly. She was lying on a cot, and when Lila entered she sat up at once, worried for a moment that she was from welfare services, the people who had scolded her for her indiscretion when they had placed her in this temporary home.

Lila was aghast to see that she was being kept like a cow in quarantine until calving, after which she would be returned to her herd, where she would forever be in danger of her secret being discovered. Lila’s salon client told her that such babies sometimes found themselves on the black market, where they would be sold and then disappear, snatched away in an instant. Middlemen had already approached the girl’s father, but the authorities did not always know about such machinations. It might be an easy solution for a family with a pregnant daughter and even those who would receive a child. The secret would be buried, the humiliation suppressed. But no one thought about the girl who had been ostracized or about the emptiness inside her.

Several months later, Mrs. Westfried paid a visit to Lila. Mrs. Westfried was wearing a bell-shaped cream angora coat with gloves, while Lila wore trousers tucked into rubber work boots and a pair of heavy-duty gloves. In honor of Mrs. Westfried’s visit, she climbed down from the ladder on which she was standing and wiped her forehead with her forearm. The building was filled with scraping and scrubbing noises, sounds of joy and renewal. The women from the salon were singing the songs of Salvatore Adamo quite beautifully, passing a red shampoo bottle from one to the other as a microphone. They had all been brought in to help, one to paint, one to scour, one to beat the mattresses, one to brush away cobwebs from the doorways.

The entrance of Mrs. Westfield brought everything to a halt. She said, “Please carry on as if I weren’t here.”

But in the doorway waited yet another quandary, in the form of Monsieur Hubert in his striped suit, a cardboard box in his arms. The women from the salon figured he had come to register a complaint about their temporary absence from their workplace.