Cafe Nevo (31 page)

“What was to know?” muttered Sternholz, not looking at her. “Everyone loved her.”

“But were you a suitor? Did you try?”

The old man scrunched up his lips. “It would have been stupid to try. I'd only have embarrassed her; she'd have stayed away, and I'd have lost her. Besides—damn it, girl, it's none of your business. You're not your mother, no matter what you think.” He cranked himself upright and loomed threateningly over her. “You should mind your own p's and q's and not muddle about with what did or didn't happen before you were born. Your mother is dead, rest her soul. You're alive: and what are you planning to do about that?”

“I plan to work,” she said. It sounded hollow to her own ears.

“Work,” sneered Sternholz, “that's very nice. I'm all for work. What else? Don't give me that wide-eyed look; I'm talking turkey here. What are you going to do about Arik? That's what I want to know.”

“I hardly even know him.”

“Know, shmow. Do you like him?”

“Yeah,” she muttered, “I like him.”

“So?”

“So what?”

“This is like pulling teeth,” Sternholz complained heavenward. He pulled his chair up close and leaned forward confidentially. “So, what are you going to do about it? You think boys like Arik grow on trees? I've watched him grow up, I know that boy like my own—” He started to say “son” but, remembering that he'd hardly known his son, substituted, “like my own hand. He's bright, he's hard-working, and he comes from a fine family. What more do you want?”

“You sound like a
shadchan.”

“So?” he snapped. “Someone has to do it.” Smoothing his ruffled apron, he added more calmly, “Even for a beautiful girl like you Arik is a good match. He's got a great future,
if
he marries wisely, like his father did.”

“I'm not ready,” she said; Sternholz snorted rudely.

“If you were any more ready, you'd burst your britches,” he blurted, then blushed and mumbled an apology. “But you're a grown woman now; it's high time you started living your life.”

“Is it?” she asked doubtfully.

“Yes,” insisted Sternholz. “And Nevo is no place to live it, commission or no commission.”

Suddenly her face lit up with that teasing smile that so reminded Sternholz of Yael. “I can't help that,” she said. “I took the money.”

“The money doesn't matter,” the old man said, waving his hands in agitation.

She laughed. “Ah, but it might to whoever paid it.”

“I wouldn't know. You mark what I say, Sarita Blume. Nevo is a good place to visit but a bad place to put down roots. What
you
need, little Miss Head-in-the-Clouds, is grounding.” He turned his back on her deliberately and surveyed his domain. The natives were restless and clamoring for service. As he walked toward the bar, Sarita's voice followed him.

“I wondered”—it teased— “how you happened to know my address.”

Sternholz pretended not to hear.

 

So he never even tried, thought Sarita, following his indignant back. Would it have mattered if he had? Was he always so odd and cranky, or had he become like that after Yael was-gone? Was there ever a time when Sternholz might have had a chance?

Somehow she doubted it. The waiter was so much a fixture of Nevo that she could not conceive of his ever having been (or being) otherwise. Sternholz was that which remains the same, whereas Yehuda Blume and Uri Eshel and the other young men whom Yael had met in Nevo must have seemed fatally dashing, with their male friendships, gallantries, secret meetings, midnight forays, and skirmishes.

It had, perhaps, been a little wicked to show him the drawing, not least because it portrayed him as an old man, obviously a refugee, whereas Yael was young, vibrant, and native-born. In fact, he could not have been more than twelve or fifteen years older than Yael, yet for some reason, all of her sketches, regardless of their time frame, showed Sternholz as his current crotchety and faintly decrepit self.

She had not, however, meant to startle him, but only to change the subject and satisfy her curiosity at the same time. Sarita took her strange ability so much for granted that she sometimes forgot how unsettling it was to others. She judged her own work by its inner integrity: the tightness of the composition; the flow of color and form. Though she was a painter of people, her people mattered primarily for their relationship to the whole, not as individuals. She had heard that there were correlations between her imagined people and real ones of an earlier time; this claim was made too frequently for her to dispute the correlation, but she could and did disregard it. When pressed, she would declare that like most artists, she drew on her imagination; what fed her imagination was beyond knowing and therefore uninteresting. Further pursuit of the subject would meet with sullen dismissal.

Even she was startled, though, by the frequency with which Yael cropped up in her studies of Nevo. Her method of blind sketching certainly contributed to the phenomenon. Free of the constant check and correction provided by the critical eye, Sarita's hands seemed plugged into her imagination, or whatever faculty it was that informed her work. While she drew, she looked only at her subject, never at the pad; and sometimes she was jolted at the end to look down and discover that she had grafted Yael's head onto someone else's body.

Sarita was not a superstitious girl (though some might say she had reason to be); she did not believe in spirits, or automatic writing, or automatic drawing for that matter. She did not, therefore, conclude from this odd manifestation that Café Nevo was haunted by Yael; indeed, she drew no conclusions, preferring not to question, not to know. For if she harbored any superstition at all, it was the fear that if she understood the phenomenon, it would cease to exist, and Sarita was too dogged in pursuit of her craft to welcome such impoverishment.

She decided—and it was a measure of her as yet unrealized but dawning emancipation that
she
made the decision—that since Yael was so insistent on being in the picture, she would put her in, center stage, as befit a star; let people say what they would, when the painting was seen. (They would say, of course, that she was fey; but they wouldn't say it to her face, and that was all she cared about.)

The odd thing, even by her liberal standards of oddity, was that by admitting one ghost, she seemed to have opened the door to a host of others. Strange faces began appearing in her sketch pad; some she didn't know at all, others she recognized as younger versions of Nevo's current clientele. A few of the old chess players cropped up as younger men, and in one sketch she made, an old chess player was pitted against himself, thirty years younger; by their faces the younger man was winning, and cocky about it. A young Muny turned up here and there, and Arik's father appeared as his contemporary. Sternholz himself remained ageless and unchanging.

 

The silver sea beckons, the moon lights the way, and soft sea breezes carry the scent of distant forests, green beyond imagining, in a land where water flows like sorrow. That land Emmanuel Yehoshua Sternholz has forsworn, and faithfully kept his vow: never, since his homecoming, has he left the borders of Israel. He has kept even his thoughts from straying.

Memories buried by the force of disaster are like petrified wood, perfectly preserved in form, albeit changed in substance. The sea beckons; the old man is weary but cannot sleep. Seductive sirens sing to him, their rippling voices carried on the breeze. Sternholz closes his eyes; he surrenders.

The memory comes clothed in a young man's senses. Sternholz smells the majestic scent of living pine and feels the moist earth slip through his fingers as he crouches by a stream. He tastes water: clear, running brook water, a lovely taste and a great wetness to his parched mouth. (Slouched in his armchair, the old man runs his tongue over his lips.) He hears—oh, treacherous memory: like a broken projector it rattles on, unstoppable—he hears a volley of shots; screams and moans; a second round of scattered gunshot; then silence.

He was far away, a kilometer or more. It was not possible for him to distinguish voices. Yet he heard then and hears now the voice of his small son, screaming, “Papa! Papa!”

Weeping, the old man covers his ears.

He has not thought of that night since he reached the shores of Palestine. Though he retained the bare knowledge that his wife and son were rounded up and shot, he had succeeded in forgetting that he heard them die.

Amnesia is bliss, for what is memory but a comet with a tail of guilt? Sternholz ought to have been home when the Nazis came; instead, he was out searching for work. Not that he could have saved them; but at least they would not have died alone. A man who lets his wife and baby die alone has no right to exist, and Sternholz, an educated man, a former schoolteacher, knew that in a deterministic universe, that which has no right to existence cannot exist. If it was a matter of pure chance that he had survived, then to dl intents and purposes he was dead, buried in the same mass grave in the forest where Greta and Jacob lay.

 

Being dead has its disadvantages, sleeplessness chief among them, but it is peaceful. Thing
happen around Sternholz, not to him; he is the unmoved mover, a material ghost. No wonder so many ghosts are poltergeists; with opportunities for mischief so plentiful and tempting, the wonder is that any refrain. In his public life Sternholz sees himself as a deus ex machina—not a deviser, but a device. His personal life barely exists; he is just marking time, serving out a life sentence without parole.

Lately, however, Sternholz has noticed some cracks in his prison walls. That sly girl, Sarita, with her insinuations like constant drops of water chiseling through rock: what was her interest in unsettling the dead, himself included? What was it to her, how he felt and how he acted toward Yael Blume? Must he account to that little slip of a girl?

Yael Blume was dead, like everyone else he had ever loved; she was dead nearly twenty years. What spell had Sarita cast on him to reopen that old wound? And what right had she to reproach him with inaction, she who was no less ghost-ridden than he? How could she mistake him for a man capable of acting on his feelings?

“We're alike, you and I,” she'd said to him, in this very room. He denied it then and denies it now. “Live your own life,” he told her; who would dare say that to him, who has none? Yael is dead; Greta and Jacob are dead; and so is he.

But dead men don't love, he thinks suddenly. Dead men don't cry. He wipes his eyes with his sleeve and shuffles to the bathroom. Dead men don't piss, either, he thinks as he relieves himself. A peculiar sound escapes his throat: Sternholz is laughing.

His window faces west; he cannot see the downing of the sun, but he feels it nonetheless. The silver sea turns a steely, opaque gray, the moon loses its sway, and the wind shifts, coming from over the land. Sternholz drinks his morning coffee and smacks his lips. He has been drinking coffee all night, but this cup is different. The long night is almost over.

 

 

 

Chapter Twenty

 

In his heart, Caspi knew himself for a family man. He saw himself surrounded by children young and old, half a dozen kids all looking up to him, whispering outside his study door, shushing each other, vying to bring him bottles of beer and cups of coffee while he works. He saw them all together at table, himself at the head and Vered at the foot, as he carves a joint of meat and passes down the serving plate. He saw Vered walking with him in the garden (which they don't have) like Beauty with the Beast, and when they quarreled, he saw his eldest son lead his mother aside and say to her, “Come on, Mom, you know how Dad is. You know he loves us.” He saw Vered smile fondly and hug the boy and say, “Yes, I know.” In this context she could forgive his little peccadilloes, knowing that nothing could cleave the rock of such a family.

Over the years Caspi had nurtured this fantasy in secret, giving names to the children, inventing escapades for them, binding their wounds, solving their little crises. And this was odd because when Vered wanted children, then he, Caspi, had resisted with all the strength and guile at his command. Somehow he had conceived the notion that children drain the creative juices of men, while stimulating those of women; every child borne, he declared, is a book unwritten.

As Caspi's creativity waned, his fantasy solidified, becoming more real for him than the angry woman and frightened little boy who were his true family. His fantasy children were far more unruly than Daniel, who would not dream of troubling his father for a glass of water or help in tying shoes. Sometimes these naughty children went so far as to tug on his arm while he was writing and to whisper in his ear while he was trying to concentrate, destroying his train of thought. They seemed determined to prove the very antithesis of Caspi's theorem by demonstrating (or ensuring) that every unborn child was a book unwritten.

Caspi had a mental morgue for unwritten books, like the back room of an abortion clinic where the poor rejected “products of conception” lie awaiting burial. His lost masterpieces, he called them, his miscarriages. Every time a book broke away from him before it was viable, achieving independence at the cost of life, Caspi felt a sharp
ting
inside him; he wept and raged, but the process was irreversible.