About the Night (50 page)

Afterward, he would leave her, and he would go to sleep in his own home.

“It’s hard to understand,” he would tell Lila whenever she would press him gently on the subject, “but with us Arabs, a man can come and go, and his wife will not say a word. She’ll notice the length of his absences, but she won’t press him or ask for explanations. For his part, so long as he acts modestly and doesn’t show off his lover in plain view, then he will not bring shame to his family.”

His father never said a word, behaving as though he knew nothing. His mother, whose eyes took in everything and whose thoughts were lucid, would struggle with herself but said nothing. Only the expression on her face when she looked at him revealed that she understood his heart was not there, in their home; beyond that, she wished to know nothing.

He explained to Lila that instead of a bitter and crushed Elias, they had received in return a man who sometimes spread his softness over all the members of the household.

2006

“Let’s go outside,” Elias said, pleading with Nomi like a little boy. Nomi, overcome with affection for him, was reminded of one of the children entrusted to her care, a boy who had bounced between institutions for years. Every evening at the same hour, he would stand at the door and ask to be let outside, no matter what the weather. He could not stand the walls that contained him for even another second. Finally, a wonderful mother was found for him, a forty-year-old beekeeper, single and childless. When he tested the beekeeper’s patience, she informed him—at Nomi’s suggestion—that this was his last stop, that there were “no take-backs, no returns.”

Nomi and Elias strolled arm in arm through the hospital gardens. They walked compatibly for several minutes in silence, Elias using a cane, as they accustomed themselves to the other’s pace. They encountered patients whose uniqueness was swallowed up by their identical hospital gowns. A man in a wheelchair, his legs severely damaged, looked as though he were waiting for something—tidings? a visitor?—his gaze fixed on the gate that stood between him and the world of the healthy beyond.

“Don’t let appearances fool you,” Elias told her. “He’s the national marathon champion. Or was.”

Suddenly, a tiny white poodle raced in through the electronic gate and charged toward the man in the wheelchair, looking as though it might lift off the ground and fly. The man encouraged her: “My sweetheart, my funny girl, come on . . .” The poodle landed on the man’s damaged legs and bounced around as if on a trampoline. “I haven’t seen her for months,” said the man to everyone standing nearby, as if he owed them an explanation.

Under the clouding winter skies and near a plaque naming staff members of the hospital who had been killed in Israeli wars, Elias let out a sigh as he lowered himself onto a wooden bench. “My old roommate, Mr. Herschlag, asked how I would like to be buried,” he said.

“How?” Nomi asked, concealing her surprise.

Elias was silent for a moment before answering. “I’d like a grave that’s flat as the earth, without any religious signs or symbols. No cross. Just a stone, my name, date of birth, date of death.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s enough, don’t you think?”

They did not speak for a while. Then Elias took a packet of licorice from his pocket and offered Nomi a piece.

Nomi asked, “When did you know? When did you know that Lila was the one, and nobody else?”

“People always ask themselves that question,” he said as he watched a small child fascinated by the poodle.

“Still,” Nomi persisted, as if Elias was in possession of some secret formula.

“It was all in the breathing,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“When I realized she was in every breath I took,” he said.

Nomi tried to understand what he was saying: How many breaths did a person take during the course of a day, maybe a hundred thousand? And she was there in every one?

“When you find it, you just know. It’s as simple as that child running after the dog.”

Nomi gazed at him without comprehending.

“When you forget yourself,” he explained. “When your own wishes shrink. Forgetting yourself is a wonderful feeling, and with Lila, I forgot myself all the time.

“Once,” he said, continuing, “we were meeting in Ein Karem. This is when we were already in our fifties. Lila arrived by taxi, and at a traffic light we found ourselves next to each other. When I saw her, I don’t know what happened to me. It was like my chest was bursting, I had to say it. I leaned out my window and said to the driver, ‘Tell her that I love her.’ He did. She blushed like a girl. Then the driver called back to me: ‘She loves the way you love her.’

“With her, I saw everything I did in a wonderful light that was sweet and bright: going to the market, filling the tank with gas, sitting in a movie theater. Whenever we came out of the long narrow hallway they always make you exit cinemas from, I would think that with her I’m forgiving; I always want the heroes of the film to fall in love and overcome their challenges and continue their love story. With her I was prepared to be taken anywhere and everywhere.”

Nomi trembled. “That means,” she said, “that if I had experienced such a love I would have known it. So, in other words, I haven’t.”

“Not yet,” Elias said, correcting her.

“And Lila knew what you do?”

“It happened to us at the same time. It can only happen to two people that way or it doesn’t work. And the moment you experience it, it’s yours forever. There’s no taking it away from someone.”

“But aren’t there any bad times?” she asked.

“Oh ho, there are and how! Disappointments, falling-outs. Unlike me, Lila did not forget a thing. And she was capricious and had a flair for the dramatic. Every few weeks she would sink into sad thoughts, a whole heap of horror stories that would choke her. She’d confront me with things like, ‘What if your wife needed to be taken to the hospital and I needed you as well? What would you do? Who would you save?’”

“And what did you answer?” Nomi asked.

“What could I answer? That I hoped life wouldn’t dish up impossible situations like that. It took years before we found a sort of happy medium that got us past her depression. Even though we shared a great love, she sometimes put it to the test to see if it would hold up through crises. She tried hurling it against the wall to see if it would shatter.”

He blew on his hands to warm them up and rubbed them together. “At first,” Elias said, “there was the stage of falling in love, which happened like it happens with others, I suppose. A kind of drunkenness that makes you groggy about what’s happening to you. You feel like you’re up in the clouds, floating. For us, that period lasted until the wall was built and we were separated.”

“And then?”

“I never stopped loving her, but I thought it was a lost cause. There was nothing left for me to believe in. In effect, I took leave of her in my heart, I let it fade out and die while she was nurturing our love. We were only able to close that gap when we met up all those years later and it was clear that we had no choice in the matter. And when it happened, the feeling just wanted to grow and expand, and I let it spread through me without being afraid. I think that was when I understood that we had something rare, something that was forever. Or as forever as forever can be.”

“Still,” Nomi said, “it took a while until you came to her and lived with her as a couple.”

“We were together while I was still living in my house, but I felt like Lila was my wife and Lila was my home, and my home in Sheikh Jarrah was a temporary shelter.”

“So you two were in hiding?”

“For some reason it didn’t seem that way. Sure, we kept things secret, but I didn’t feel like I was keeping her hidden. She was my whole world. She was my reality. Life itself. And everything else was superfluous. Things I was forced to keep doing even though I didn’t want to, like making sure there was food and heat at home, holding on to what was left of our property, sustaining others so that I could keep on living in peace with Lila. Over the years, she and I needed less and less. Fewer things, fewer clothes, less food and travel. We needed little gratification and had greater peace of mind.”

“But how did Lila agree to being kept from public view?”

“She wanted to live a transparent life without having to hide anything from view. In her own words, she said, ‘You can’t build true love on false foundations.’ She was afraid that living in secret would be soul-destroying for us. But I knew where my heart was and where truth was, and since there was no distance between the two, no gap, I knew there was no room for fear.”

Nomi asked, “What about your children?”

Elias took a deep breath. “From the time that Lila returned to my life, something opened up and grew warmer between them and me. I was capable of loving them more easily, like a limb that has grown strong again. I was more connected; I could listen to them. I was the parent they could talk to about loneliness and love. What I had with Lila didn’t only enrich me. And I say that with scientific certainty.”

“Did your children know?” Nomi asked.

“You’re asking me if I had the courage to tell them about being with another woman, not their mother, a woman I went to be with every day for years? I think you can guess the answer to that question. By the time of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, you were already a young girl. You remember the danger, the fear people walked around with—the fear for their lives, or that life itself was dangerous. That was the third war of our lifetimes, Lila’s and mine. What would happen if the city were divided again? What would happen if the world were destroyed? My children were already in school, studying in England. I phoned to tell them I was moving out of the house to live with a woman named Lila. I told them they could meet her whenever they wanted. They never did.”

The doors swung open and a man stepped outside. “That’s Dr. Englemeyer,” Elias said. “He’s out here every hour for a smoke. I don’t like to see him.”

“Is he one of your doctors?” Nomi asked.

“No,” Elias said, “he was the one who pronounced Lila dead. He recorded the time of her death, you know, he scribbled something on a form and signed it. He was only doing his job, but still . . .”

“What did she die of?” Nomi asked.

“You don’t know?”

“Not exactly,” Nomi confessed.

“She was in the building across the courtyard from here,” Elias said, trying to bring a sudden tremor in his voice under control. “She’d been hospitalized with pneumonia. But no one really knows how she died.”

“Was it sudden?”

“She’d gotten out of bed on her own,” Elias told her. “Usually, she needed the help of a nurse. The balcony door was open, and she stepped outside to sit and look at the view. One of her roommates was sitting out there, too. She must have been the last person to see her alive.”

Elias gazed up at the balcony. “Bad things happen in hospitals,” he said.

Nomi and Elias sat for a while in silence. Then Elias, like the lord of the manor, suggested they drink tea upstairs.

“You’re killing yourself,” Nomi said, feeling that the picture was becoming clear. “You’re punishing yourself because you weren’t with her during her final moments.”

“I’m not killing myself,” Elias told her. “I’m dying slowly. Can’t you see how long it’s taking?”

A convoy of ambulances made its noisy way to the hospital and, as always, people began whispering about whether it was a terrorist attack or a fatal accident. The child, now tired of the poodle, was standing in front of Elias, asking for his cane. Elias handed it to him, and the child dragged it behind himself like a toy train.

Nomi sank into her own thoughts. Elias is not a difficult man. It’s easy to make him happy and grant his wishes. But deep down, he is angry. He feels he’s been deceived. Lila’s perfection was a sort of immunity against death, in his eyes. He believed nothing would harm her. And if there must be death, then they should do it together. It didn’t matter how—a stray bullet, a hurricane, a careening car. He had no fear as long as they were together. He thought they were safe since they were united and whole together. And then he discovered he was wrong.

“They found her on the floor of the balcony,” Elias told her. “There was a step there; maybe she stumbled and fell. Maybe she was dizzy, or she had a stroke or cardiac arrest. A single moment when everything stopped functioning.”

“Where were you that day?”

“It was Yom Kippur Eve,” Elias told her. “That afternoon I came to her room at the hospital, and all her things were still there, but I knew. I could feel that she . . . wasn’t there. Just like I could feel her presence, I could feel her absence. It was a terrible feeling of nothingness. Like a shout that can’t escape. Then the doctor came in and told me.

“I went to my car and plugged my ears so I wouldn’t hear myself, but no sound came out. A bus stopped next to me, and the driver opened the door and looked at me. ‘Hey, buddy,’ he said, ‘are you okay? You’d better get moving; it’s almost Yom Kippur.’ And so I pulled out and followed the last bus before the holiday.”

Nomi hugged his shoulders and wrapped his wool scarf tightly around him. “Imagine, Elias,” she said as she gazed at the sky, “that you had died before her, and she was left alone. Can you picture what kind of suffering she would have endured? It would be like all those times you were taken from her, and she was on her own. Only this time it would be final. Nobody would be bringing you back. So think about it. She died before you and took your joint happiness with her, and it was you who stayed behind to drown in grief, not her.

“So here’s your discovery: by letting her die first, you saved her from the terrible pain she would have experienced if it had been the other way around. Now you’re alone, suffering and missing her. And part of you simply has to keep suffering, and you know why? Because of those years in which you didn’t wait for her. You need that portion of suffering.”

“It’s cold,” he said. He crossed his arms over his chest as if building a wall between the two of them.

“Let her go, Elias,” Nomi heard herself saying. “And know that you kept her from experiencing the endless grief she would have felt without you. You rescued her from torment, from widowhood, from loneliness, from longing, from mourning for years. Only someone who loves the way you love Lila could do something so inspired. And you know what? She died happy. Waiting for you, knowing you were on your way to her.”