They swerved onto the Jaffa Road. Helene took Toby's hand in her right one and Angelica's in her left. How numb her own hands felt, her arms too. Obediently her relatives turned toward her. They would always turn toward her. But she would slip away from them, wouldn't she . . .
“Tante, your glove is ripped,” said Angelica.
. . . like Papa, Mama, the spinster aunts; the girl next door tumbling on the patterned rug, the schnorrers, the naughty shammas; like . . .
She disengaged her hands. Beyond Toby's profile and the profile of the American next to him she saw King George Street, Ben Maimon Street, all the familiar ghostly streets. The cab paused at a traffic light.
In front of an apartment building stood a slope-shouldered form. Its tattered, shiny dress, reflecting the setting sun, cast a greenish glow. Its brown-paper head was topped by an ancient cloche. “The trash collectors missed that creation,” said the American.
“The kids who made it must have had fun,” said Toby.
“Regina,” Helene called. “Regina!”
“Tante . . .” whispered Angelica.
Helene leaned forward, elbowing the bewildered girl. All these years! All these years dealing with thieves in a thievish city. All these years sustaining the weary fable of Salonika, Constantinople, a Turkish husband, a spice shop. Pretending that the goose Guralnik had not stayed in Antwerp. Had not been carted off with the others.
She threw herself across Toby's lap and clutched the American's shoulder. Rapidly she opened the window. She waved her emptied glove again and again at the figure in the ridiculous hat.
The light changed. The cab moved forward. She let go of the American and sank back between Toby and Angelica. She patted their arms with hands that had regained their strength, hands good for a few more years of cleaning house, writing checks, coolly caressing the youngest young visitors. “I'll mend the glove,” she promised.
The Message
O
n a small stone balcony in Jerusalem, across a round glass table, Carolyn was guardedly looking at Terence. Terence was looking at his bowl of yoghurt and apricots; he was not complaining; he was practicing his customary comfortable silence while his mind whirred.
She leaned forward. “I should have bought cereal.”
“That's all right.” His eyeglasses glinted at her. “The coffee is delicious.”
It was Terence's first visit to the city that Carolyn knew well. There was a further imbalance: she spoke serviceable Hebrew, whereas he spoke only English, French, and German, though he read both Latin and Greek. And the weather had made itself his enemy the moment he stepped off the plane. Carolyn knew the weather. She spent every October in Jerusalem, renting the same apartmentâit was the pied-Ã -terre of a Tel Aviv family, complete with two sets of dishes and even two sets of ashtraysâand she
always packed for a burst of autumn warmth. This hot Saturday morning her skin caught whatever breeze there was; her arms and throat were bare in a gauzy halter that was almost the same golden brown as her recently dyed hair. But Terence had flown in unexpectedly from a conference on epistemology in Zurich, bringing only his professor's wardrobe. He'd inherited a taste for drab clothing from his Methodist forefathersâtheir daughter teased that he'd inherited the clothing itself. Last night he'd worn a dark suit and tie to a restaurant where every other male patron had on a short-sleeved shirt buttoning imperfectly over a paunch. He had gone to bed in his underwearâhe would have melted in his flannel pajamasâand this morning his face seemed almost as white as his round-necked undershirt. A man with a malady, she'd suddenly thought, her composure sagging. But no: Terence was always pale, just as he was always thin. When they'd met, thirty years ago, he was already slightly stooped.
“I'm used to your hair being gray,” he said mildly. “Is this what they call henna?”
She caressed her nape. “Cognac is the official name. In Jerusalem all women of a certain age dye their hair.”
“Cognac . . . I didn't know anthropologists could go native.”
“Well, no. But I'm not a professional anthropologist.” She smiled, trying to lighten the exchange. “I'm not a professional anything; remember?” She had a couple of Master's degrees: certificates but no status. She currently held a grant to study the residents of East Talpiot, one of the oldest Jerusalem suburbs. Once a year she squeezed airfare out of the little grant, and paid a month's rent on this apartment in the leafy Emek Refaim neighborhood. During the other eleven months she lived in Boston with Terence,
and taught sociology in an adult center, and wrote a paper or two, and attended a few seminars. “I'm a bronze-crested dilettante,” she said now. “Maybe somebody should get a grant to study
me.”
He looked at her with a brief intensity, as if studying her might be a good idea. She knew that look. It meant that he was thinking about Wittgenstein, or maybe Kant.
He had arrived yesterday, Friday. He would leave tomorrow. “The conference is wretched,” he'd said over the telephone on Thursday morning. “I'll skip the banquet, come spend the weekend with you. If my arrival won't be an inconvenience,” he'd added, not ironic, merely considerate.
It would be a great inconvenience. “Wonderful!” Carolyn had said to Terence, south warming north, wife deceiving husband, Mediterranean splashing onto Swiss shrubbery. “I'll meet you at the airport.”
“Not necessary.”
“The cabbies would skin you. I'll be there!”
Then she'd had to climb the stone stairs, to knock on Natan's door, to explain the situation, to endure his immediate fury.
“Twenty-eight days a year we have together; and now you rob me of three of them!” He held her by the forearms and shook her slightly. “And Saturday night, we have tickets for the quartet!” he remembered.
“I'm sorry,” she said. What a bellow!
“You
go to the concert.”
“Alone? Bite your tongue! You are
sans merci,
like all lovely women. Without compassion.
L'lo rachmim!”
he wound up, though he usually spoke Hebrew to her only when within earshot of American tourists. “Carolyn?” he then inquired, signaling the end of his outburst.
She was silent.
“Oh, your Christian tolerance,” he sighed. “A Jewish woman would have already told me to shut up. I'll visit my daughter this weekend. I haven't been to Haifa for three months. I'll play with my granddaughter. Little Miriam is a beauty, too. Okay?”
He scowled at her and then grinned. Gold flashed from the brownish mouth that always smelled of tobacco, though he smoked only five cigarettes a day in her presence, numbering each one aloud. She figured that he consumed fifteen or twenty when she was out conducting interviews. Their aroma had seeped into her apartment. Luckily she found it aphrodisiac.
He was tall, wide, big-bellied, large-freckled; a teacher of high-school biology, retired. His apartment, up one flight and across the hall, was a mirror image of hers. Since his wife's death six years ago he had turned the place into a kind of terrarium. Mushrooms flourished underneath panes of dark glass. Thistles dried on a loveseat. Vines, climbing up strings, completely enclosed the balcony. Sometimes Natan and Carolyn made love within this green tabernacle, lying on an old mattress pad. The morning sun, penetrating here and there, further mottled his piebald back.
Her
balconyâthe balcony of the Zebelons of Tel Avivâbetrayed its owners' indifference to horticulture. A single orange tree grew crookedly out of a tub. In the center of the table Carolyn kept daisies in a jar. Across the homely bouquet she and Terence now made their plans. They would return to the Old City, would continue through its labyrinth. Yesterday at one of the stalls she'd bought Terence a loose woven collarless shirt striped in purple and orange; he'd smiled and named it The Garment. He had walked contentedly beside her; in his usual attentive silence he had
observed alleys, excavations, beggars, and corners golden with ancient dust.
Now he studied the city map. “This afternoon let's visit the University. We can take bus number Four.”
“If we don't mind waiting for it all day. The busses don't run on Shabbat, not while the sun is up. But about an hour into the darkness they move again, glowing, all of them at once, like night-blooming plants . . .”
The telephone rang. It rang again. Terence raised his eyebrows.
“I've got a machine,” she told him.
The instrument was nearby. Her own voice floated onto the balcony, first reciting practiced Hebrew, then English. “. . . return your call as soon as possible.”
The caller was a breathless American hanger-on, everybody knew her, everybody avoided her. “I haven't even laid eyes on you this visit,” she wailed into the void. “Please get in touch.”
Carolyn, smiling at Terence, turned her thumb down like an Emperor.
“Do taxis run on the Sabbath?” he asked.
“They do; and . . .”
The telephone again. This time the caller was one of her Yemenites from East Talpiot. The woman's Hebrew was accented but clear.
“Madame, I cannot meet with you on Wednesday; my son returns from Army. Maybe Thursday? At ten in the morning?”
Carolyn nodded, as if the woman could see her.
“Your appointment with the hairdresser is changed,” said Terence. “From one dayâI heard
yom;
that's day, isn't it?âto another
yom.”
“Almost! It was an interviewee; but you're right about the switch in day. What an ear you've got. A month here and you'd be bargaining with the
moniot
âthe taxis . . .”
A third ring. “I've received more calls this morning than all last week,” Carolyn said. “My friends are putting on a show for you,” she added, her real voice intertwining with her recorded one, though they were both real, weren't they; the difference was temporal, not essential . . .
Natan. The caller was Natan. Natan the mischievous, Natan the yea-sayer. He spoke in the Hebrew tongue, in case Terence was listening. He spoke in the vocabulary of an acquaintance, in case someone else was listening. His tone was perhaps too rich. But the message was unimpeachable.
“Carolyn, this is your pal Natan. I have come to Haifa to visit my granddaughter. We have bathed three times alreadyâthe bouyancy of the sea has made me young again. In the blue depths I thought of my green balcony, and I call to ask you to water the vines on my behalf. I will return on Monday. Monday.”
She had inclined her head slightly at the first sound of his voice. She was afraid to straighten it, as if the gesture might give her away.
“Another
yom,”
said Terence.
“Yom sheni.
Monday,” said Carolyn; and now she dared resettle her head on her neck. “My upstairs neighbor is in Haifa visiting his family; he asks me to water his plants.”
“You are not telling the truth.”
“. . . pardon?”
“Forgive me; you are not rendering the message faithfully.”
Carolyn closed her eyes. “He mentioned swimming with his
granddaughter. It was rejuvenating. I believe that was all he said, except for naming his day of return. The sea is blue, he said.”
“He said your eyes are blue,” said Terence.
She opened them now; but his gaze was elsewhere, resting on the little telephone table just inside the archway. His lips pursed with distaste. “I will tell you what he said, your friend, Mr. Etan . . .”
“Natan,” she helplessly corrected.
“. . . Mr. Natan, he said that your eyes, though not as blue as the sea, though green, really, have spokes of a darker color.” His voice labored, as if he really were translating. “Your eyes remind him of a tropical leaf.”
“He didn't say that, any of that, Terence, honestly, what are you imagining . . .”
He continued to stare at the telephone and its attachment. “He said that when his arms are encircling your naked back he thinks he is touching silk.” He paused to hunch and then widen his shoulders as if trying to wriggle out of a jacket; Carolyn longed to help him, but there was no jacket. “The small rough mole on your collarbone makes his blood pound. He yearns to fall into your lap, to lick your salty belly.”
In all their years together Terence had never spoken to her in such a manner. Once or twice he had admired a piece of jewelry; and he had often thanked her for her graciousness to the junior faculty. Otherwise they spoke of his work, her work, their children; friends; books. Their lovemaking was conducted in peaceable silence. Silence made guilt endurable.
“He yearns to hear you laugh,” said Terence to the answering machine. “He finds it thrilling. He thinks he cannot live without
your voice. He thinks he cannot live without your presence . . . without you.”
Again, the familiar silence. Carolyn considered rising from her chair, kneeling before her husband, acknowledging the declaration that she recognized as his own, the avowal that had been wrung from him as if by thumbscrews. But no; melodrama would shame him; and besides, if she got up she might fall. Her trembling hands rummaged through her new hair; her wrists crossed in front of her breasts; finally her splayed fingers came to rest on the table. Still seated, she watched his profile. Two drops of sweat slowly made their way down the side of his neck. When the second had spent itself on his undershirt she said in a low tone, “My final round of interviews is nearly over. The research is finished. I'll be coming home in November for good.”
He flushed purple, as if enduring a merciless spasm. Then his normal pallor returned. He wiped his mouth with his napkin and looked at his watch. “Shall we be on our way?” And left the balcony.