Don't Call It Night Read online

  I sat in my undershirt at the desk in my bedroom and tuned my transistor to London. Between news bulletins there was a programme about the life and loves of Alma Mahler. The presenter said that the male world was incapable of understanding her heart and saw in her a different character, not who she really was; then she began explaining what Alma Mahler was really like. I cut her off in mid-sentence, to show her that the male world has not improved, and went barefoot to the kitchen to raid the refrigerator. I was only after a sip or two of cold water but the soft light inside the refrigerator ambushed me like a caress. So as not to lose it and be left in the dark I poured myself some cold wine and peeled a triangle of cheese and meanwhile I found that I was tidying up the shelves. I sniffed the open carton of milk a couple of times, suspicious both of the milk and of my own sense of smell. I dropped a cluster of sausages in the garbage can because their colour looked off. I drew up the yogurts in a rear line in order of date and closed the ranks of the eggs in the plastic trays. I hesitated before a jar of tuna, but compromised by covering it in plastic film. I pulled down some bottles of juice from a cupboard and slotted them into the door of the refrigerator to plug some gaps in the line. I arranged an orderly display in the vegetable tray and again in the fruit basket. It was only with difficulty that I fought off the temptation to attack the freezer compartment. I advanced on tiptoe to the door of her bedroom: I'm here if I'm called for. If not, at least I can try to catch a whiff of her slumber; perhaps I will absorb some of her surplus sleep.

  From there, to the balcony, and the faded, old-fashioned chair.

  The night is almost transparent. The whole world is bathed in a cold silvery light. It is not breathing. The two cypress trees seem to be carved out of basalt. The moonlike mountains look swathed in lunar wax. Hazy creatures crouch here and there, and they too look moonlike. In the valleys there are shadows within shadows. There was a single cicada that I notice only when it stops. What did the men mistakenly see in Alma Mahler and what was she really? If an answer to this question was possible, I missed it. It is almost certain that the question is meaningless, that it is framed in an empty fashion, and that no answer is theoretically possible. The presence of the barren hills in the darkness cancels words like "almost certain" or "theoretically possible", and empties out the question, What did I see in you, Noa, or what do you see in me? I shall stop. Let's suppose that you see in me what I sometimes see when I look at the desert. And how about me? Let's say: a woman who is fifteen years younger than I am with a pulse like that at the core of life itself, a protoplasmic, rhythmic pulse, from before words or doubt existed in the world. Sometimes, without meaning to, she suddenly touches your heart. Like a cub, or a chick.

  Years ago I learned to find my way around the map of the stars. It was something I learned in the army, or even earlier, in the youth movement. On clear nights I can still identify the Great Bear and the Little Bear and the Pole Star. As for the planets, I can still locate them but I forget which one is Jupiter, Venus or Mars. Right now in the total silence everything seems to have stopped and even the planets seem to have ground to a halt. It seems as though the night will go on forever. All the stars look like tiny pinholes in the floor of the upper storey, droplets of luminosity from the light of the sky shining on the other side. If the curtain is drawn back, the world will be flooded with radiance and everything will become clear. Or be burned up.

  There is a good telescope indoors, behind the bed linen on the second shelf on the left. I could go inside and get it so I can see better. Maybe Nehemia left her the telescope that used to belong to Peeping Gorovoy. Or to Yoshku, her cousin. There are still three or four such objects lurking around the house. The rest have gone. Disposed of. Even more spoiled than he was, she once said during a row, even more of a Neanderthal male. She stopped short. She never repeated it. Even when we fight she keeps tight control of herself, and of me, her foot always firmly on the brake pedal. I am careful too, I know the limits: like touching glass with glass and drawing back just in time.

  From the east, from the mountains, comes a gust of piercing desert wind. Like a cold sharp scythe. The wilderness is secretly breathing. The dust and stone look like an expanse of calm water in the dark. It is even, suddenly, cool. Nearly two o'clock. I'm not tired but I'll go to my bedroom without switching the light on, I'll get undressed and go to bed. Radio London will tell me what is not known here yet. How is the world tonight? Tribal clashes in Namibia. Floods in Bangladesh. A big rise in the number of suicides in Japan. What's coming next? Let's wait and see. What comes next is punk music, merciless, penetrating, rough and bloodthirsty, from London, at a quarter past two on Wednesday morning.

  I WOKE up at six and managed to write the memorandum. Muki Peleg will go over it and Linda has offered to type it out. At lunchtime I'll send it to Avraham Orvieto, with copies for the Mayor and the Treasurer. Who else should I send it to? I must find somebody who has some idea. Perhaps I should get hold of a copy of the official regulations and learn them all. Should I consult Theo anyway? That's all he's waiting for, like a hunter. He knew from the start that I'm not up to the challenge. He knew that after one or two slip-ups and failures I'd come running straight to him. Meanwhile, he's tactful enough to say nothing and not interfere. Like a grown-up who allows a toddler to climb wherever he likes but keeps a close watch and holds his hands out, where the child can't see him, to catch him if he falls.

  I began the memorandum with an account of the "development of the idea". I found this expression unsuitable, but I couldn't find a better one. One of our students died in an accident "consequent upon drug-taking". There are various conflicting accounts circulating in the staff room about the circumstances of the incident. I was interested in the young man in question, even though I never actually managed to exchange more than a few words with him. Immanuel Orvieto was a quiet pupil. One of three boys in a literature class containing thirty girls. In recent years shy pupils have disappeared, they are all noisy during break and drowsy during literature lessons. Tired, disconnected, they stare blankly at Flaubert and me with a stubborn expression of amused contempt, as if we were trying to sell them fairytales about storks and babies. But there was something about Immanuel that always reminded me of winter. Once he was late handing in an essay on Agnon. I stopped him in break and asked why. He lowered his eyelashes, as if he had been asked a question about love, and answered softly that the story in question was not particularly relevant to him. I interrupted sharply, Who's talking about relevance, we're talking about an obligation. He found no answer to this, even though I kept him there cruelly for a whole minute before I said coldly, All right, let me have it by next week.

  He handed me the essay ten days later. It was a fine, carefully reasoned, understated piece of work. After the concluding sentence he had added a personal line in brackets: In the end I did find some relevance in the story, despite the obligation.

  Once I asked him on the stairs why he never put his hand up in class, surely he had things to say, I'd have liked to hear him talk occasionally. Again he had to pause before he answered hesitantly that he found words a trap. Not long before Pesach, I voiced the opinion in class that Yehuda Amichai wanted to express his opposition to war, and suddenly there was Immanuel's introverted voice, as though talking in his sleep, and with an interrogative note at the end of the sentence: Whatever the poet did or didn't want to say gets in the way of the poem?

  I decided I should find the time to get him to talk.

  But I didn't find the time. I forgot. Put it off. I have three classes and two literature sets, including the special set for recent immigrants. Each one has close to forty pupils most of whom have a tortured look. I'm rather fed up myself, after all these years. Now I don't even bother to remember their names. They're almost all girls; they mostly wander around all through the summer in bright-coloured shorts with a tear at the very edge of the crotch; they're almost all called Tali. Actually, there's always one in every class who keeps correcting me,
it's not Tali it's Tal, or vice versa.

  The truth is that until after it happened I didn't even know as much about Immanuel Orvieto as his class teacher and his counsellor did: that he had been living here in Tel Kedar from the age of ten with an unmarried aunt who worked in a bank. That his mother was killed a few years ago in the Olympic hijack. That his father is in Nigeria as a military adviser. There was a vague story circulating in the staff room that the boy had fallen in love or got involved with some girl in Elat, several years older, who was a junkie and might even be a pusher. Before the incident, I listened to this with only half an ear, because the staff room is always full of all sorts of gossip. So is the whole town, for that matter.

  He was found not far from the abandoned copper mine near Elat, after he had disappeared from his aunt's home and been missing for ten days. He had fallen off a cliff. Or jumped. He had broken his back and apparently lay dying at the foot of the cliff for a day and half a night before he finally expired. It was to be hoped that he had not been conscious all that time, but there was simply no way of knowing. He had previously been taken there and been drugged, or drugged himself, or been tempted. I tried not to listen to these things, which here always come accompanied by excitable voices and gestures of stunned self-righteousness and a hint of secret glee: Look, what do you mean a backwater, look, we've made it to the national news, real-life excitement has come to us, too, and there's a well-known journalist and a photographer, they've been prowling around outside since this morning but the executive have decided that none of us must be interviewed, we have to answer No comment.

  The funeral was postponed twice because the father was delayed. A couple of days later the aunt died too, and the talk in the staff room was of a stroke, guilt feelings, the hand of fate. All kinds of cackle that I tried not to listen to. The fact is, I loathed the father even before seeing him. An absentee father, an arms-dealer, in Nigeria, probably foil of complaints, probably only blaming us. It isn't difficult to pass judgment from a distance, on the basis of a few hints that converge into a conclusion. I imagined the father as a kind of ex-stormtrooper, prosperous, judgmental and self-righteous. I made up my mind not to participate in the delegation from the staff room that went to see him in his room at the Kedar Hotel even before the funeral. From the African jungle, here he was at last condescending to come here only to blame us for the awful fate of his son, how did we fail to see, why did we ignore, surely it was inconceivable that the entire teaching staff? In the end I went anyway, maybe because I recalled the boy's way of standing, quiet yet nevertheless disturbing, shy, as though plunging to his own seabed before surfacing and telling me almost in a whisper that words are a trap. There was a quiet plea for help in these words that I either didn't catch or caught and ignored. And so, refusing to recognize and recognizing and rejecting the recognition that if I had chatted with Immanuel, if only I had tried to get a little closer to him, and shrugging what the hell, drop it, you're crazy, I went along with the other teachers to meet Avraham Orvieto a few hours before they buried the boy and his aunt. There, in the hotel, in the father's room, this thing began that has filled the whole of my being ever since.

  There was also the episode of the dog. Immanuel Orvieto had a dog, a depressive creature that always kept its distance. From the morning to the end of lessons he would lie and wait for the boy in the sparse tamarisk grove which grew, or rather decayed, opposite the school gate. If you threw stones at him he would get up wearily and pad a few yards away and lie down again to wait. After the calamity, this dog started coming into the classroom each morning, oblivious of the chaos in the corridors, mangy, floppy-eared, his drooping muzzle almost touching the dusty floor. Nobody dared to shoo him away or bother him during the days of mourning. Or even afterwards. He lay there the whole morning, with his sad, triangular head resting, motionless, on his front paws. He had selected a regular spot in a corner of the classroom next to the wastepaper basket. If anyone threw him half a roll or even a slice of salami in break, he did not bother to sniff it. If he was spoken to, he did not react. He had a pitiful, brown, bewildered look that forced you to look away. At the end of lessons he would slink out abjectly with his tail between his legs, and vanish until the eight o'clock bell the next morning. A Bedouin dog, not young, the colour of the earth hereabouts: a faded grey. Dusty. Now, in hindsight, I think he may have been dumb, because I don't recall him ever uttering a bark or even a whine.

  Once he made me want to take him home with me, to bathe and feed him and make him happy: his undying devotion to a boy who would never return suddenly touched me. If I fed him milk from a spoon and got the vet to take care of him and made him a bed in the hall, he might eventually get used to me and let me stroke him. Theo detests dogs but he'd be bound to give in because he's the giving-in sort. If only I knew how to make him understand how oppressive I find his overwhelming consideration. I could see him screwing up his small eye, the left one, with his silvery retired British army major's moustache concealing a slight quiver: Look here, Noa, if it really matters to you, and so forth. So I gave up the dog. He was a pretty repulsive creature and the truth is that he showed no sign of needing a new attachment.

  One morning he was run over. Nevertheless, he still arrived in class precisely on the first bell. His hind legs were smashed and looked like broken twigs. He dragged himself to his regular spot and lay there as usual. There was not so much as a whimper. I made up my mind to call the Public Health Department vet to come and take him away, but at the end of the day he vanished and the next day he didn't come back. We thought he must have dragged himself away to die in some secluded place. A couple of months later, the evening of the class party, after the greetings and the sketches and the refreshments and the headmistress's speech, when we left at one o'clock in the morning, the dog appeared again, bony, misshapen, cadaverous, wriggling along on his forelegs and dragging his paralyzed hindquarters, crossing the light of the lamp in front of the grubby tamarisk grove opposite the school gate, creeping from darkness to darkness. Unless it was another dog. Or just a shadow.

  Avraham Orvieto stood to greet us, leaning back against the door of the balcony from which the mountaintops to the east could be seen shimmering in the heat haze. A small suitcase was lying shut on the hotel double bed. Two lemons on the table. A lightweight summer jacket draped over the back of the chair behind it. He was a small, frail, narrow-shouldered man, his thinning hair was turning white, his wrinkled face was suntanned, he looked like a retired metal worker. This was not the image I had of a military adviser or an international arms-dealer. I was especially surprised when he started talking to us, without waiting for the formal condolences, about the need to prevent other schoolchildren from falling victim to drugs. Speaking in a colourless voice, with a kind of hesitancy, as though he were afraid of making us angry, he asked whether Immanuel was the only one of our pupils to succumb. And he asked us to tell him how long we had known about it.

  There was an embarrassed silence, because the truth is that we knew nothing until afterwards, discounting the staff-room gossip. The Deputy Head, stammering with tact, pronounced the opinion that Immanuel started taking drugs only at the end, in Elat, after he disappeared, that is to say more or less in the last days perhaps. Even the aunt had not noticed any problematic changes, although it was hard to tell. To which the father replied that we would probably remain in ignorance forever. There was another silence. This time it was protracted. Avraham Orvieto put his two wrinkled hands to his face, brown peasant-like hands with scaly fingers, then he laid them back in his lap, and the Deputy Head began saying something, and at the same moment Avraham Orvieto asked which of us knew Immanuel best. The Deputy Head resorted to vague mumbling. There was a silence. A young Bedouin waiter, dark-skinned and slender like a pretty girl, wearing a white bow tie, wheeled in a trolley covered with a white cloth and holding fruit and cheeses and a selection of soft drinks. Avraham Orvieto signed the bill and added a folded banknote. Help yourselves, he said,
twice, but nobody touched the refreshments. Suddenly he turned to me and said quietly: You must be Noa. He liked your lessons, he had a talent for literature.

  I was so startled I did not deny it. I muttered a few banalities, a sensitive boy, withdrawn, rather, um, reserved. The father smiled in my direction like someone who is not used to smiling: like someone opening a crack in a shutter for an instant to reveal a beautiful room with a chandelier and bookcases and a fire burning in the grate, then closing it as though it had never opened.

  Six weeks later Avraham Orvieto turned up one morning in the staff room during the mid-morning break to ask our help in realizing an idea: he was considering giving some money to set up here in Tel Kedar a small rehabilitation centre for young people, schoolchildren, perhaps from other parts of the country, who were addicted to drugs. He wanted this centre to be a memorial to his son. Tel Kedar was a quiet little town, the desert itself might help: seeing the wide open spaces could inspire various reflections, it might be possible to rescue one or two. Of course there would be local opposition which he could well understand, still, why not try to sort out some basic terms that would allay the fears.

  I was startled when he chose to ask me, who was not Immanuel's class teacher to agree to put together a sort of informal team whose task would be to make a preliminary study and jot down on a sheet of paper what the difficulties would be and what aspects were liable to antagonize the local residents. He himself came to Israel only every few months, but he had a lawyer; Ron Arbel, who would be at my disposal whenever I needed him. If I refused, he would understand and would look for someone else.