About the Night (52 page)

That evening the family drank Yunan Imperial tea and sat together in the living room until late. No one knew it would be the last time they would enjoy her company, listen to her speak, eat her food. Nothing heralded what was to come. Nadira went to bed that evening after taking a hot shower and combing out her hair. She fluffed the pillow and lay down with a feeling of great serenity. She could still feel the touch of her children’s and grandchildren’s faces, and she drifted sweetly into a sleep from which she would never arise. She left the world in deep sleep, free of pain and illness and after parting from her dear ones. This was the precisely the ending to her life that she would have asked for herself.

After Nadira’s death, Nasreen no longer wished to remain in the empty house or the flowering garden that no one knew how to care for. She traveled often to visit her children until finally she decided to move her life to England to be near them.

Care of the empty house fell to Munir. Only the fruit trees survived Nadira’s death. Her medicinal plants and herbs slowly died away.

In a single year, Elias had lost both his parents. “Now we’re both orphans,” he told Lila.

She embraced him from behind as if trying to protect him from the world, and then she sat down next to him.

“I found the place to rest my head,” he told her. “I know that I’ll always be able to rest my head on you.”

He could see that this reminded her of something. She told him, “Not long after we first met, and it was difficult for us and everything around us was in an uproar and I felt insecure, you sat me down and said, ‘I will take care of you,’ but it was hard for me to trust you since I’d always been on my own. Then you said, ‘Repeat after me: I am your woman and you love me.’ You made me say it again and again, like an oath. And every time I got lost, you told me to say it.”

“And it worked, didn’t it?” Elias asked with a naughty smile.

“It did,” Lila said, “even during the years when I was waiting for you. There were days when I felt myself drowning, Elias, and I couldn’t find a speck of happiness in my life. Events passed by me. I wasn’t living; I was merely existing. At my worst times I said it. ‘I am your woman and you love me. I am your woman and you love me.’”

Lila placed a small bowl of warm, soapy water in front of Elias and instructed him to dip one hand in. He did so without protest. She took care of his nails and massaged his palms for the first time since they had met, and he watched her quick fingers as they performed the task nimbly. She was particularly attentive to the ring and pinky fingers of his left hand, the ones broken by the Jordanian interrogators after the Christmas ball they had attended at Government House. These she massaged with particular gentleness, bearing no grudge as she once did that they had managed to break his spirit.

He noticed they had no need to converse, that she had islands of silence during the day, that there was time for talking and time for being still and allowing themselves to absorb their pleasure together. He did not wish to wear her out with words.

“I can imagine you on the job at Salon Hubert,” he said pensively. “Twenty-four years. How many hands! How many deep conversations and women’s tears!”

Lila was concentrating on the work before her. She indicated that he should soak his other hand.

“Do you remember the things people told you in your manicurist corner?” Elias asked her.

“I heard gossip and mean things,” she said. “I heard about disappointments and ruined plans and scheming. I heard people’s dreams and aspirations, too. I took it all in and locked it away like I was a safe. I never discussed any of it with anyone. And to imagine that all I ever had was a backless chair, a table on wheels, a small basket, a towel, and a kit for my tools.”

“A spot in the heart of Jerusalem,” Elias said as if from a bird’s-eye view, “through which the lives of the city’s women passed.”

“Now, when I pass by, I don’t feel any pangs of nostalgia,” Lila said. “It was and now it’s over. For me, the salon will always be the place where I waited for you.”

“Do you think that one day you’ll be able to stop suffering from those years?” Elias’s voice was warm as an embrace. “Do you think you’ll get over your anger?”

“I really don’t know,” Lila said.

“With time,” Elias said, looking at her, “try to put up a fight when resentment gets the best of you. If you push it aside, you’ll find you have more space for other emotions.”

“Want to come with me to the market?” Lila asked.

“I’ll be happy to carry your shopping basket for you,” he said. “Even though the best vegetables in the city are on the Arab side of town.”

On their way home, early that evening, they stopped for a moment at Westfried House to make sure everything was in order there. Mano had brought a porch swing he had bought from an Arab in Shuafat. Ezra was replacing a malfunctioning sprinkler. Helga Westfried had just left after bringing a gynecologist to check the girls. Rita from the salon had come by with a poppy seed cake she had baked. Elias waited outside while Lila went from room to room kissing “her girls.”

Nomi came out from the kitchen. She had only a year left in high school, but as always she raced into Lila’s arms when she saw her. The boy who worked at the new pizzeria near her family’s apartment had taught her how to make thin-crust pizza, and now she was trying it out with the girls. She helped them with their homework and the papers they had to write for school while babies kicked in their wombs.

“Elias is outside,” Lila said, pointing to the street. “Go say hi to him.”

2006

The women from the salon came to Lila’s funeral together as if they were still a group. Many of “her girls” from Westfried House were there as well, all now mature women.

The funeral was small and silent; there was no wailing, no cries of pain. Elias, in a black suit, marched at the head of the procession to be as close to the woman of his life as possible. The rabbi came to rend his shirt according to Jewish mourning customs, but someone whispered something in his ear and he moved on, leaving Elias with no visible signs of mourning.

“Who will recite the Kaddish prayer?” the rabbi asked.

There was a moment of unpleasantness as people looked around for a next of kin. Finally, Ezra, in a wheelchair, came forward, and the others cut a path to let him through. He recited the prayer in a shaky voice but did not miss a syllable. Ezra, the cleaning man at the salon, was now ninety-two years old, and his wheelchair was pushed by his son.

The rabbi spoke of Lila, the woman so righteous that her soul was called to heaven on the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur. He did not, however, mention her work with the pregnant teens who found shelter with her during their most difficult days.

Hearing about Lila’s funeral from Elias was painful to Nomi, not only because Lila was gone but because no one from Nomi’s family, including Nomi herself, had been there. Her father, Menash, had been dead for years following a heart attack he suffered in the caravan he occupied in the Arava desert; Margo, her mother, had not been heard from for months as she hungrily swallowed up America, traipsing from city to city, the last contact with her a set of photographs from Miami, where she was seen dripping in diamonds; Nomi’s younger brother had made London his adopted home, and he worked there assisting Arabs and Jews who wished to leave Israel; Uncle Mano, who lived a long life as a bachelor, had lost his love of life and no longer left his home or his pajamas; Uncle Hezi, now a big-time contractor who built apartments in the occupied territories, had a groundbreaking ceremony for a new settlement in Samaria that day that he had to attend; and Nomi herself—why wasn’t she there? She knew it was something for work. A conference, she recalled now, at which she was speaking.

Now it was clear to her that she could have canceled her participation in that conference to attend the funeral. Everyone would have understood, since funerals are a legitimate excuse. But Lila’s funeral was pushed aside in favor of her galloping career, the career that trampled all her past pain and the people who witnessed it. Everyone she knew wanted to revisit their past, but not Nomi. Her efforts at rescuing herself from her childhood were so enormous that she was only, ever, able to look forward.

So this was how it happened that not a soul from Lila’s adopted family—the family that had adopted her and the family that she had adopted, the flawed, viral family that Lila spent every holiday with and many other days as well, never complaining—was present at her funeral. This family in which no one felt comfortable, no one belonged, and everyone was lonely, a family in which Nomi never felt safe or protected. Her family was built on faulty foundations that somehow survived but was as shaky as a house of matches in a storm.

But it struck Nomi that this was the family that Lila the orphan chose for herself, this woman who had lived so many years alone and then in the sequestered world that Nomi watched her shape with Elias after the Six-Day War. Theirs was a fortress built of love, and nothing was ever lacking in it—not possessions or furnishings or other people.

Nomi had been drawn to the harmony that existed between Lila and Elias ever since she had begun passing letters from one to the other and was privy to their secret, the only witness to what was taking place between them. It was the only love she knew and was allowed to touch. She wished they would adopt her, and why not? Through many nights lying in bed, she nurtured the hope that Elias and Lila would request that her parents give her up to them, and that Margo and Menash would agree, with pleasure.

She imagined a conversation in which her mother would say to her father, “Let them have her if they’re so keen. She’s only trouble for us anyway. She’s wild as a boy, she doesn’t excel at a single thing, she’s rebellious and a loner. Let her go with those two.”

And although she knew this hope of hers could never come to pass—after all, the secret of their love was kept from Margo as well—Nomi never abandoned the dream of becoming the third rib in their ideal world, of exchanging the darkness that flickered before her weak eyes for soft light. Even when she was no longer a child, she basked in the warmth of their love and was nourished by what transpired between them. To Nomi, Elias was many things all at once—quiet and self-confident and tender and kind—and when he passed along letters for Lila, he passed along the look of longing in his eyes as well. He was a man who had fulfilled the deepest wish in his heart, the only man in Nomi’s acquaintance to have done so. He was neither downtrodden and beleaguered like her father with his stilled heart, nor extinguished and bitter like aging Uncle Mano.

It was only after Lila’s death that Nomi realized she had chosen Lila and Elias, not only to be her parents but also as a perfect model: He was warm and embracing and overflowing with wisdom; she was determined yet delicate and loved without limits. To Nomi they were the paradigm of a flawless pair in spite of the suffering they had endured to be together, and as an adult, she was incapable of settling for anything less than the strength of the love she felt between them. No love at all was better than compromising for anything less than a great love like theirs, one that overturned worlds and touched eternity.

Still, Nomi believed that if such a love could exist, it would never happen to her; she was not equipped to deal with such a storm of emotions or to live inside one. Even if such a love were handed to her on a silver platter, she would not know what to do with it: how to love without inhibition, with eyes wide-open and eyes shut tight; how to willfully reject a foothold; how to overcome fear; how to be flooded with emotions without drowning in them or denying them. Anything less than such a love led to distance, disconnection, dismantling. As a young woman, she had flitted between unavailable men with gray hair and years of experience. She had survived several years of an immature marriage and had been alone ever since.

And yet, after all these many years of being out of touch, Elias had brought her back into his life. Facing the window of his hospital room, she was living the story of his love, a love that she herself had never experienced. During the past weeks spent at his side, she had received more of that love than she had her entire life.

Elias told Nomi that, one after the other, people at the funeral took their leave of him as though he were the sole torchbearer of Lila in life and death. When they had all dispersed and he was left alone there, rooted to the earth like a tree swaying in the wind, a redheaded woman in capacious clothing came up to him and told him that Lila had taught her to be proud of her pregnancy and to love her baby when it was still the size of a pea. Now she was pregnant with her fourth child; the first had been at Westfried House.

“This one,” she informed Elias, sliding her hand across her belly, “is a girl. And I’m going to call her Lila.”

“Can you imagine?” Elias exclaimed to Nomi. “There’s a tiny baby in this world named for her so that something remains of her, something that passed from Lila to this young woman and from the young woman to her baby. And who knows? Maybe there will be something of our Lila in her, even something small, like her freckles.” He smiled.

Nomi asked his permission to find the woman. “All right,” he said. “If you think it’s important.”

She used her influence and found the sole Lila born at Hadassah Hospital in the preceding year.

Elias urged her to visit. “Buy her a nice gift from me,” he implored her from his hospital bed.

Nomi wanted them to go together. She thought the presence of little Lila might breathe life into Elias and encourage him to put aside, at least for a while, the request he had made of her.

Nomi bought a soft gray blanket and a blue-and-white cloud mobile and set out to meet this baby who had no idea what she meant to several perfect strangers. On the way, her car brought her to Westfried House, the place she had spent so much time as a girl, afraid to miss any of the action. She had watched as Lila’s special touch guided these fifteen- and sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls as they entered, often discouraged and depressed, and as they left, when their time to give birth arrived. Their backgrounds were different, but their situations were similar: a pregnancy that had burst into their lives and ripped them from their normal surroundings, for better or worse—usually better, Nomi thought. They often preferred Westfried House to their own homes.

Nomi had watched these pregnancies grow, heard regretful stories about the moment they had occurred. She was witness to the girls’ ugly feelings about their mushrooming bodies and their fears of the unknown. She was there as they counted the days to the birth, to returning to high school or their kibbutz or their normal lives—to regular clothing and guilt feelings and the moment they signed away their babies for adoption, and the feeling of relief that followed.

The ones who signed were immediately relieved but bought themselves a lifelong wound; those who did not—and Nomi had heard of only one of those—spared herself the pain of abandonment but chained herself to young motherhood.

It was there, inside the walls of Westfried House, that Nomi decided not to bring children into the world, a decision that grew stronger and more stubborn with the years. Lila had told her she was young and would change her mind, but that had not happened.

Nomi parked outside Westfried House. Now there was a sign for an insurance agency on the old stone building. The arched windows were barred, and the garden had been paved. Fluorescent lighting hit her eyes as she opened the door. A secretary with the head covering of a religious woman held the receiver of the phone she was talking into away from her mouth for a moment and, eyebrows raised, asked what she could do for Nomi.

Nomi was speechless for a moment, but found her voice. “As a young girl I spent time here, and I’d just like to see the place,” she said.

The secretary finished her call and offered to show Nomi around the empty offices. “Everyone’s at a seminar today,” she explained.

“This place used to be a home for girls,” Nomi told her.

“What kind of girls?”

“Young and pregnant ones,” Nomi said.

“Lord have mercy!” said the woman. Nomi could see by the woman’s startled expression that she thought Nomi was one of them.

The kitchen was the most difficult for Nomi to witness, the center of warmth and giving. Now it was crammed full with a photocopying machine, a shredder, and shelves buckling under the weight of dozens of cardboard folders. Any sign of the carpets and curtains and sofas and books and phonograph and everything else Lila had collected was gone.

“May I use the bathroom?” Nomi asked. It was her way of stealing a little more time, just as she did when visiting biological parents or a potential adopting family. But even the bathroom did not give her what she was looking for. Disappointed with the emptiness and ugliness of this wonderful place turned into an office, Nomi returned to her car and made her way to little Lila. She got stuck in a traffic jam that increased her agitation and made her furious with Jerusalem, whose roads were narrow and whose drivers were rude, a place where everything seemed stuck.

She recalled that night at Westfried House when one of the girls—the one everyone called Little Raisin, because she was so tiny—had gone into labor and the ambulance could not get through a traffic jam caused by a demonstration. Lila was summoned, and before she could get there, Nomi placed cold compresses on the girl’s forehead. In the end, Little Raisin gave birth there in the house, and Nomi could hear her screams and her ragged breathing and then the cries of a newborn. Eventually, an ambulance came to take her to the hospital; Lila carried the baby, wrapped in a blanket.

Nomi would help abate the girls’ worries by playing a game with them. She would seat them in a circle and pass a notebook from one to the next. Each girl would write a few sentences without reading what had been written before. They wrote from the heart. In the end, Nomi would read the “story” composed by the girls, one taken from their own lives and often with startling results. They spent hours on this nightly, so that often Nomi would sleep at Westfried House because it was so late. That particular evening, when Little Raisin had given birth, Nomi stayed and went to sleep in the bed that had been occupied by Little Raisin.

In the warm and pleasant room, Nomi remained awake listening to the breathing of the pregnant girls around her, their bloated shadows turning this way and that in search of a comfortable position. She could picture the face of the baby born only a few hours earlier and thought about Little Raisin, who was no doubt sleeping now with Lila at her side, and about the baby, who would be handed to its new family in only a few hours.

Nomi could picture the baby’s new parents. They would be university educated, and they would live in a house whose walls were lined with books and whose floors were covered in carpets. There would be a piano and potted plants. The childless man would smoke a pipe, his childless wife in a checkered shirt, her hair straight and the expression on her face serene. The baby’s room would already be painted and furnished for him, with a crib and a white dresser and a rocking chair and bells that chime in the wind, and classical music. The two parents would feed him his bottle together, nourishing him, watching him, their education and their knowledge, tranquility, and grace all channeled to their newborn child.

And now she was on her way to little Lila. Her car climbed a new and sloping road toward shiny tall buildings, a shopping mall, and hills that Nomi had known as wooded hilltops that were now sparkling new neighborhoods for the well heeled. She rode an elevator up to the tenth floor and was greeted by a redheaded woman who introduced herself as Effie.