Cafe Nevo

Barbara Rogan

 

This book and its author owe much to the generosity of

Haim Baer, who suggested the café's name.

 

 

 

DEDICATED WITH LOVE
 

TO MY PARENTS.

 

 

 

Chapter One

 

Emmanuel Yehoshua Sternholz, son of Rebecca and Samuel Sternholz, father of Jacob, R.I.P., and grandfather of innumerable unborn Sternholzes, was a waiter. He served in a Dizengoff café called Nevo, and lived alone in a two-room apartment on the top floor of the same building. He was seventy-three years old. Except for an occasional touch of rheumatism and a chronic sleep problem, Emmanuel Yehoshua Sternholz was in the pink of health. This was surprising, considering where he had spent his youth.

Nevo consisted of one cavernous room which opened wide as the yawning mouth of a toothless old man, and spilled its tables out all the way to the curb, checking the flow of pedestrian traffic, as if the aforementioned old man had insolently stuck out his tongue. Inside, ancient, dusty signs, advertising brand-name liquor unavailable upon request, and photographs of former Nevo habitués, all of them distinguished for their utter insignificance—for Sternholz would have considered it unforgivably crass to hang pictures of the café's famous patrons—decorated the walls. A long bar ran along the south side of the room, and the gents' was out back, in the courtyard. There was no facility for ladies, nor did Emmanuel Yehoshua Sternholz encourage ladies to frequent his establishment.

He could not keep them out, of course, although he tried his best He gave them the royal treatment, which was enough to discourage most from ever returning. What was the royal treatment? First he cleaned their chairs for them. He kept a special rag for that purpose and for cleaning the stove. Then he never served their drinks without inspecting their glasses minutely, in their presence. If he saw even the slightest speck, and that was inevitable, with his half-blind busboy, he pulled out his handkerchief, spat genteelly into it, and wiped the vessel clean. Emmanuel Yehoshua Sternholz was a clean man, and his spit as pure as anyone's, but how were they to know that? If despite the royal treatment some ladies persisted in coming, Sternholz eventually grew reconciled and even, after many years, greeted them civilly.

For he was not a misogynist. Far from it; Sternholz was a man who had loved, loved deeply and more than once. Age had not lessened his appreciation of feminine beauty, though it had eroded his susceptibility to it. No, if Emmanuel Yehoshua Sternholz deplored the patronage of women, he was not moved by personal bias. He simply felt he had enough
tsuris
without them. He was cursed with an obstreperous, argumentative lot of customers, and it was all he could do to keep a reasonable semblance of peace in the café, without adding sexual fire to gunpowder. If asked, or even unasked, Sternholz would assert that mixed café sitting was the root of half the divorces in Israel, and that was true whether a man sat with his mistress or his wife. If the former, it was possible, even likely, that his wife would hear of it and make both of them unhappy; if the latter, his friends would give him no peace.

How many times had Sternholz heard it? “Poor Yoram, his wife has him on a leash.”

Look at Peter Caspi, sitting there with his arm around that little starlet half his age. He always had to show off, absolutely nothing subtle in the choices, either; and what did he expect Vered to do about
it, just sit and wait till the cows come home? The worst of it was that now
she'd
shown up too, hovering some tables behind her husband like a cross between a good Oriental wife and the avenging Shadow. It would not do. Emmanuel Yehoshua Sternholz, never a man to shirk his duty, went right up to her and said: ‘‘Vered, it won't do.”

“Hello, Sternholz. I'd like a brandy and soda, please.”

Sternholz sat at the table and showed her his palms. “What's the point?” he said. “What's the matter, you don't have enough trouble, you have to go out and look for it?”

She'd been an awkward girl but had grown into her looks. She had a graceful carriage which was thrown away on Caspi, an air of sadness that was all, or almost all, his doing, huge dark eyes, and a frozen mouth. “I don't know what you mean,” she lied. “I used to come here a lot.”

“Then was then,” the waiter said meaningfully. “Now is now.”

“What's your problem, Sternholz?”

“My problem is that you are setting a very bad precedent. Look at it from my point of view. What would be if Nevo was overrun by feuding husbands and wives, sitting at separate tables?”

“You'd double your business.”

‘‘I'd triple it. Everyone would come to see the show. But that kind of business I need like a hole in the head.”

“So
throw Caspi out.”

“Caspi lives here,” Sternholz said. “He's got nowhere else to go. You do. Listen to an old friend. Go home.”

“No.”

Sternholz compressed his lips. “Look here, Verdele,” he said, “you made your bed; right under my nose you made it. So what am I running here, a laundry?”

“A brothel?” she suggested, looking at her husband.

“Vered, you are making my nerves ache.”

“Pretend you don't know us,” she said.

“I don't know you?” He gave her a dark and wondering look. “Who do I know if I don't know you?” He walked away, shaking his head and muttering, “Pretend I don't know you!”

She watched him go. Mad Muny was up to some nonsense, standing on a chair and haranguing someone. Vered walked unnoticed to the back of the bar, where she poured herself a brandy.

 

“Dotan! Dotan, you miserable bastard, I'm going to break your neck!”

“Not here, Muny,” Sternholz said, touching his arm.

“Get your hands off me! Murder's too good for that bastard. I'd castrate him if he had any balls.”

“Get off the table, Muny.”

“He's got a nerve, showing his face here. Dotan, get your raggedy ass over here; I want to kick it for you.” Rami Dotan waved genially from Caspi's table. “Sternholz, hold my coat!” Muny roared.

“You haven't got a coat, you maniac.”

Muny jumped off the table and ran zigzagging through the café. Though he was only five feet two, with a belly like an overinflated beach ball and floppy bum's shoes, he was fast, Sternholz couldn't catch him, and no one else wanted to. Muny leapt onto the table beside Caspi's and dived headlong at Rami Dotan.

The force of the kamikaze attack knocked Rami off his chair and onto his back. Muny landed on top of him. Glass cascaded around them, shattering on contact with the pavement. Scrambling to his knees, Muny raised a shard aloft. “Death to the Philistines!”

Caspi reached over leisurely and relieved him of the shard. “Good show, Muny. Now go sit down, there's a nice boy.”

Muny levered himself up, using Rami's head as a fulcrum. “You don't understand, Caspi. You don't know what he did.”

“Enlighten me.”

“Three fucking months he held on to my manuscript, which happens to be the best work I've ever done. Then he sends it back with a form letter, a goddamn
form
letter! ‘Thanks for thinking of us, turkey, but we don't publish shit.' And this after he cheats me out of a million shekels in royalties on the last one.”

Caspi clicked his tongue. “Did you do that, Rami?”

Rami stood and brushed glass off his designer jeans. He picked up his pipe and said, “It's broken. Damn you, Muny.”

Muny danced on his toes, shadowboxing. “That's nothing. You wait for it, Dotan. Wait for it. One dark night. You wait, and you wonder. Muny never forgets.”

Caspi laughed. “The pygmy elephant struts his stuff.”

“Shut up, Macho Man. You're riding high now, but I hear things aren't so great in the Caspi eyrie. Look at wifey over there. If that woman isn't starving for it, I've never seen one who was. What's the matter, Caspi? Not enough left to spread it around?”

“Back off,” he growled.

Muny tittered. “All worn out, Caspi? Feeling your age? Drying up at the source?” This last was a sly reference to Caspi's literary output, which had been sparse for several years.

Caspi lumbered to his feet He was a big man, grown broader in recent years, and he loomed over Muny. Hie little man looked about nervously for someone to stop the fight. Sternholz stepped out of a sea of avid faces.

“All right,” he said sourly, “you've had your fun.”

“I exonerate you on grounds of drunkenness,” Caspi said softly. “Who can blame you? If I wrote like you, I'd drink, too. But there's no excuse for smelling as foul as you do. Go away, Muny.”

A buzz of disappointment rose in the café as Muny turned docilely and returned to his place. Rami examined his pipe. “It's broken,” he said again, sadly.

“My God, are you all right?” Caspi's little actress bleated.

Dotan ignored her. “The funny thing is, his manuscript wasn't that bad.”

“You're joking,” Caspi said. “Muny doesn't write poetry, he excretes it.”

“I tell you it was not bad. And we did all right with the last one, too. Not,” he added hastily, “that he earned out the ridiculous advance he squeezed out of us.”

“Then why not do the new one?”

Rami shuddered piteously. “Never again. God strike me if I ever publish that maniac again. He was in the office
every
day, pestering people, badgering me. He had to supervise everything. Cover, type; he insisted on hardcover and we gave him hardcover. Wanted a picture of himself on the back cover and we did that, too.”

“Probably cost you half your sales.”

“I don't know, I heard some people bought the book just to throw darts at it.”

Caspi's laugh boomed again. Vered glanced at him and away.

“He wanted us to print five thousand. Can you believe it? Five thousand! We finally compromised on two. Then he demands a publication party. Against my better judgment I agreed.”

“Was it a good party?” the actress asked wistfully. She was a lover of parties, and regretted every one she missed.

“Terrific, till he showed up. Then he punched out the
Yediot
literary editor and dumped the punch bowl over the Minister of Culture's head.” Over their laughter Dotan added gloomily, “He said it was in protest of the cut in theater subsidies.”

A voice at his elbow said, “Then why did it take you three months to return his manuscript?” It was Sternholz, kneeling to sweep up the broken glass.

Dotan did not (as one might have expected) reply, “None of your business.” He said defensively, “It takes some time till these things reach me.”

Sternholz sniffed and moved away.

A hand reached out and caught at his apron, and a slurred voice said, “Get me another.”

Sternholz clucked his tongue. “You've had enough, Arik.”