NINA’S BREATHING WAS quiet and even. In and out. In and out. In and out. She was asleep. I closed my eyes. It was a long time before Bruegel’s tower faded from my thoughts. I reached to the side, towards the little display on my night table, and found the hip flask. The whisky glowed in my head and instead of the tower I suddenly saw a church on a medieval square. All around it were coloured floodlights, so garish that the church looked as if it were made of plastic. Frankfurt. This was in Frankfurt. ‘Almost makes you wonder where the air valve is,’ I had said to Abram Gans. Gans was a colleague of Uncle Herman’s and he was here to promote the German translation of his book, State and Society, already a classic upon publication. We were with a group of four others, and we’d gone on ahead to look out for a decent bar. ‘That is a question which has always intrigued me,’ he said, ‘with regard to all of Germany.’ The floodlights wrapped us in a mist of red, yellow, and blue. We walked with averted heads through the haze of light and found, back in the darkness again, the oak facade of a Stube called Am Kirchplatz. Gans waved to the group and ducked into the shadow of the swinging doors.
What made me suddenly think of that? I felt the gentle burning of the whisky in my stomach. Jameson’s. Gans had been drinking Jameson’s, there in that bar. My madeleine: the smell of Irish whisky.
We had sat at a round table in the middle of the bar, observed by a waiter in a polyester shirt and a couple of softly crooning Italian-Germans. It was late October, but already there was a plastic Christmas wreath in the middle of the table. We drank Hefe, white wine, and Jameson’s. Gans and I were the outsiders in this group of novelists: he, a sociologist, me, a fairy tale writer. A deep twilight hung beneath the rafters. Someone said that this atmosphere gave him the ‘Christmas Blues’ and began reminiscing about a Christmas fair in a German village, stalls that sold greenery and cherubs and candles. I shivered. Gans looked at me and said, ‘Did you know that Herman always said that the only real Christmas was a German one?’ His gaze was heavy with irony. ‘We don’t always see eye to eye.’ He asked me what my idea of Christmas was. ‘Uncle Scrooge McDuck in ‘Mickey’s Christmas Carol’, I said. ‘Bing Crosby. Frank Sinatra singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Stockings over the fireplace.’ Someone else made a remark about the Americanization of the world. I was about to open my mouth, when Gans said that Herman knew what he was talking about. He knew this country better than any of us, perhaps even better than the Germans themselves. I had stared at him with overly raised eyebrows. ‘It’s true,’ said Gans. ‘He knows the black and the white of it, and all the colours in between.’
Late that night I was woken up by the telephone. It took me a while to find it. I heard Gans’s voice through the receiver and it sounded as if he were a continent away, even though his hotel room was directly above mine.
‘Am I right in thinking, from your reaction this evening, that you don’t know why Herman knew Germany so well?’
‘Bram,’ I said.
‘Yes.’
I turned on the light and propped my pillow against the wall. ‘I don’t know a thing.’
‘He never told you anything about it?’
‘Herman only ever tells me something when he’s trying to educate me.’
I picked up the phone and walked over to the mini-bar for a bottle of Coke. Outside, bluish light flickered. It was a sidestreet off the Kaiserstrasse, that shopping street awash with fur coats, Rolex watches, and Swiss chocolate. On this side were shops, hotels, and a couple of houses. The opposite side looked as if there had just been a war.
‘He was sent along as a researcher with the units that liberated the camps. A misbegotten plan. They had seen such terrible things that they needed a scholar to make sense out of it. Herman was one of the first to set foot in Bergen-Belsen. It was an inferno. At the end of January there were 22,000 prisoners, at the end of February, 41,000, middle of April, 60,000. But by then, typhoid had broken out. In February, 7,000 people died, in March, more than 18,000. When Herman arrived the bodies were piled up all over the camp. There were even piles outside the barbed wire. They had run out of space. And everywhere, the smell of rotting flesh. The British soldiers checked all the barracks, but when they inspected the beds, they couldn’t tell the difference between the living and the dead. Sometimes they were lying together in one bed. In some places, in the women’s camp, there were no beds at all. People slept on the floor. There were so many dead, they had to use bulldozers to throw the bodies into pits. Then they transported those well enough to be moved and burned down the camp. Herman was there. He questioned the German commandant. He was there when the guards were led around and forced to see what they had done. They had no regret whatsoever, he said. Not a spark of compassion.
‘Nathan, he saw this country as a well of misery, as the heart of evil. Yet he came back here after the war. He believed that we shouldn’t leave the Germans alone with their guilt. He said: “The curse of Germany is romanticism. They’ve romanticized their own, non-existent past. They’ve romanticized a future. Let’s not give them the chance to romanticize their guilt as well.”’
Directly opposite the hotel was a large building with a badly painted sign that said Bazar Istanbul. The facade was blackened, the windows smashed. Earlier that evening, on the pavement outside the building, I had seen a roll of carpeting. The roll was moving now. A head popped out and looked at the blue light that was shooting nervously across the housefronts. Five police cars stood any old how in the middle of the street, their doors open. About fifteen feet away, a handful of policemen were holding three men in leather jackets at gunpoint. The head in the carpet roll moved slightly and then disappeared again. Sirens wailed in the distance. I drank my Coke and watched the film. I suddenly thought of the beggars I had seen in the Kaiserstrasse: three tall men dressed in rags. They had been standing outside a jewellery shop, bolt upright, completely motionless, their raised right hands like three bowls.
Gans was quiet. The silence on the line suggested a distance far greater than the one floor between us.
‘I’m going back to sleep, Bram.’
It was a while before he answered. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes.’
I finished my Coke and crawled back into bed. When I fell asleep, the memory of my night-time stroll through Frankfurt washed over me like a slow tidal wave. A taxi through the neon-lit darkness. The driver, bent over his steering wheel: Habib! Habib! ‘This is the car of the Indian ambassador that you have scratched, sir!’ Falling towers, streets arched their backs and reared up from the depths of the U-Bahn, the ruins of the night sky. Through gorges of concrete. Tilting flats, snarling cars emerged from the sewers. Spinning Big Mac cartons. From north to south and east to west.
In the middle of my troubled dream, the night broke in two. Day came, and then night once more.
I saw Abram Gans standing before me. He said: ‘This is Germany.’
Zeno never showed up. No: ‘It’s a cold, cold land.’ Nor my familiar denial: ‘This isn’t you.’ The glow in the hearth dwindled, it grew colder, night bowed over the four-poster bed. I listened to Nina’s breathing, waiting for the ghost of my brother, and now and then I went under and fragments of memory floated up in a half-dream: Frankfurt, America, Wales, Sophie, Rotterdam, Manhattan. It wasn’t until deep in the night that I finally slipped away. I felt the sleepiness moving across my eyes like a shadow. I saw, before me, the view from the house where Eve and I had lived. The gently sloping hills, the grey ribbon of river between them and the little white shop on the far side of the valley. The image disappeared. Night fell. Behind me the sun sank into the countryside (as if it were bleeding to death on the hilltops), below me the last rays of daylight ran together in a muddled pallette of blue, yellow, orange and purple. I was floating. I was a traveller above a world without people, a world where no one had ever been.
On the screen, a pale moon hung over a dismal plain; across the aisle, fast asleep, was the only other passenger flying first class. Now and then I could feel the plane squeezing its way through the darkness. The floor quaked and an ominous tremor ran through the aluminium shell. The plane plodded on through a night as thick as treacle.
We sat next to each other, Eve by the window, me on the aisle. We stared silently at the screen. Now and then we looked at each other, and smiled, so we wouldn’t have to speak.
Halfway through the movie, when it had been quiet for a long time, Eve fell asleep. She was sitting upright in her cornflower-blue seat and still seemed to be watching the adventures before her, but her eyes were closed and her face was empty as glass. I leaned over and carefully removed her headphones. Her eyebrows twitched, but she didn’t wake up. She sighed once and laid her head on my shoulder.
‘Can I get you a drink, Mr Hollander?’
A stewardess, who looked as if she had just been freshly unwrapped. She leaned over me. I gave her a mechanical smile.
‘Whisky, no ice, a drop of water.’
Glancing at Eve, she listed the various brands in stock. I chose mine, and smiled again when she did, as if to confirm my order. A minute later she returned with my glass on a paper napkin, something I had become accustomed to in the United States. She had also brought a blanket, which she laid over Eve and tucked loosely around her.
‘Would you like to see the rest of the film?’
I turned my eyes to the screen, where four silent men on bony horses were riding down the desolate main street of a shabby desert town. I shook my head.
Shortly after the stewardess had left, the picture vanished. The cabin was enveloped in the glow of tiny bulbs. I looked sideways, at the window, and saw nothing but blackness.
When we had said goodbye at JFK, Manny had clasped us, as they say, to his bosom. The departure hall buzzed around us, a cloud of voices descended from intercoms, in the background was the rattling of suitcases on wheels, the faint, faraway screech of jet engines.
‘This may be our last goodbye,’ he said.
At these words, I had felt my heart sink.
‘What are you talking about?’ I cried, too lightly, too cheerfully. ‘We’re flying KLM!’
There was relieved laughter. But all three of us had known what he meant. He wasn’t getting any younger, we were going back to Europe, and …
Eve yawned and rubbed her eyes. ‘God,’ she said, ‘I hate flying.’ She had been borne to the surface of sleep on automatic pilot. Just before we left she had taken half a Mogadon, hoping she would sleep through the entire flight. Her waking up now didn’t mean a thing. She always woke up after half an hour, as if she needed to have one final look around before really falling asleep. When I asked her if the blanket was too warm, she frowned, but before she could answer, her eyes fell shut again. The wrinkle between her eyebrows faded. It was as if someone had drawn a veil across her face: her features grew soft and rounded, her clenched lips relaxed. As she sank farther and farther down, her mouth falling slightly open, I felt a pang in my chest.
From the first day we met, in 1970, there had never been a moment when I felt I had to keep anything back from her. I was not the sort of man who could easily relax, I knew that, but with Eve, I came very close to finding the peace that I had been searching for all my life. We had got to know each other one summer in Ipswich, when I was wandering through a park and ended up at the tourist office where she worked. She asked where I was from. When I told her I came from the Netherlands, she was surprised. She gave me a map with the route to some local tourist attraction and a few brochures. Then, just as I was about to leave, I asked her if she might like to have a drink with me. That was the first time I had ever dared to ask such a thing of a woman I had barely met. She looked at me for a moment, and then nodded, as if I were a supplier who had delivered a box of Xerox paper and wanted to know if he should bring another one the following week.
It was a Sunday when we set off. I sat beside her in the car and saw the asphalt lying before us like a discarded ribbon. We drove uphill and downhill, past hedges and walls and down a narrow, hollow road where Eve honked before rounding the bend. ‘I come here every weekend,’ she said. ‘This is the best of England, I always say. Perhaps I’m wrong, I don’t know, there are so many parts of England I’ve never seen, but still … Here we are.’
We’d stopped outside a small village pub. Eve parked the car on the verge and we went inside. It was a bare, empty space with an unpainted wooden floor, wobbly round tables where silent men in caps sat with women in flowery dresses, and a bar made of dark wood that gleamed like fresh dung. Eve went up to the bar and greeted the woman standing behind it. They chatted briefly. Then the woman looked over at me and nodded. I nodded back. About three minutes later Eve beckoned and we walked out through a side door, into a small garden with an unmowed lawn. We sat down at a white wooden table, while the lady with whom Eve had spoken began bringing out the tea things. As the table grew fuller and fuller, Eve and the landlady exchanged bits of news. I listened with my eyes closed, the sun on my face.
Within ten minutes we were separated by a sea of plates, forks, platters of scones and sponges, sandwiches and cream. Eve poured the tea. We drank from thick green cups.
‘And what do you think of England?’
‘It’s the Occident,’ I said. ‘The land where the European sun sets. I saw a tramp in London once. A huge black fellow in a coat that was ripped at the seams, with enormous shoes, no laces of course, a ratty beard, frostbite on his face.’
‘Frost …’
‘Frostbite. Blackish patches, as if he’d been burned. You normally only see it in Eskimos and Lapps, or Austrians who’ve had an accident in the mountains. I realize that some people are less fortunate than others, but I’d never really thought much about it until I came here, to the land I regarded as … as the zenith of Western European civilization, a land that had been governed for so long by Socialists. At first I assumed it was the fault of the Conservatives, that they were the reason this country was going to the dogs, but the day after I saw that tramp, I arrived in Birmingham, and the day after that, in Manchester. It was like travelling back in time. To the turn of the century. The air smelled of carbon monoxide, the streets were filthy, cardboard boxes lying everywhere, pale, skinny children playing with a leaky football. The buildings were sooty, with smashed windows, blackened chimneys that no longer smoked, most of them half-collapsed. The walls were covered with genuine cries for help. Somewhere in one of these “Coronation Streets” I saw a blank wall with goalposts painted on it, and over that: Help us! Abandoned factories, polluted rivers, people dressed in rags. God, I mean, I’ve read Ford Madox Ford and Waugh and Barbara Pym and here I am in that country and nothing is what I expected. That can’t all be the Conservatives’ fault. The place is too far gone for that.’
‘You’ve seen only part of the country.’
‘Oh, I’ve been through Kent and East Anglia, too, and I’ve driven down seemingly endless country lanes and wandered through village after village of pastel-coloured cottages. I’ve seen splendid old pubs, where they still pull the beer by hand, all those things you English are so proud of. But I’ve never forgotten that tramp in London. I keep seeing him, a big man, slightly stooped, in a car park with three grimy walls, rubbish piled up in the corners, newspapers with pictures of naked girls blowing across the pavement. The sickly smell of rotting vegetables. England, the future of Europe.’
‘Aren’t you exaggerating just a bit?’
I had shaken my head.
But I didn’t tell her, there on the grass, about when I had heard the church bells ringing in Ipswich. It was a Sunday afternoon, around five or six o’clock, the sun shone low in the deserted streets. Quiet, hardly any cars, the occasional pedestrian. I had drunk half a lager in a dreary pub next to the bus station. Then I had walked into town. I was standing there looking into a bookshop window, when I heard bells ringing at the end of the street. The sound came rolling down the street like a great bronze ball. The heavy peals echoed between the houses. I began walking in the direction of the sound, when I heard, in the distance, the first unsteady tones of another bell, with a slightly higher pitch. And then I heard another and another and another. After several minutes the chiming of several dozen church bells was ricocheting through the streets. I could no longer tell where the sound was coming from. It was behind me, in front of me, it rained down from the sky, it leapt up from the pavement. There wasn’t a soul in sight. It was as if I were completely alone in this town, where everything was sound, spiralling streamers of sound. The street began turning beneath my feet, the houses melted, the whole town was a whirlpool of noise.
‘No,’ I had said, when Eve told me that the country was in a transitional phase, that things were getting better, much better, in fact. ‘No, things aren’t getting better. England is an example. It shows us that everything falls apart in the end. It’s a law of nature, from man to mite: birth, life, death. Inevitable ruin.’
Eve had looked at me with raised eyebrows.
‘Joseph de Maistre,’ I said. ‘Les Nuits de Saint Petersbourg.’
I had leaned back in my chair, that afternoon, surrounded by the flowering grass and the tall privet hedge, vaguely aware that I could stay here forever, as if I had travelled through a hurricane and landed in the eye of the storm, where everything was peaceful, everything still. Birth, life, death, it was all here, but different. Here it was a natural progression, grass grew tall and went to seed, birds rose up and were caught in mid-flight by a falcon, a rabbit sat in a field staring at the horizon and was attacked by a weasel. In London and Birmingham and Manchester it had been decay, the squirming of maggots on a rotting corpse. Here, that same process was softened by the tranquillity of the countryside. The same, but easier to accept.
Halfway through tea we had to shelter from a sudden downpour. We stood side by side under a hurriedly fetched umbrella, while the rain came down around us. Eve shivered in her thin cotton dress. It was raining so hard, we couldn’t see the pub. At a certain moment we had both looked sideways, straight into each other’s eyes, and knew it had happened.
The rest of my holiday I spent round and about the town. We saw each other almost daily and it was as if Eve were pulling me along in her wake, straight out of the chilly rooms of my mind. I began to see through her eyes and realized that the world was worth seeing. The trees stood in clusters on the hills, like little old men hatching a plot, the sky was blue, the clouds were as creamy as Ambrosia rice. It was an English summer: twittering birds, the sparkle of sunlight on the hedges along the roads that led to the villages where Eve liked to drink tea, patches of farmland scattered on either side. The corn stood tall, the saturated yellow of old bronze. Here and there was a tractor waiting in a field, so old it was impossible to tell what colour the thing had been, and sometimes, in the distance, a long, narrow hill where oak and beech trees grew.
I felt like a blind man who opens his eyes after an operation and sees for the very first time. Everything was new, everything clean and fresh, everything equally marvellous.
The evening of my departure, in Eve’s flat, we kissed goodbye and I promised to return within a month. Six months later we were living together in a valley in Wales, where she had been made director of the local tourist office. Shortly after that we got married and I became an inhabitant of the Occident, the land to which we were now headed.
Eve was asleep and not asleep. I knew she would wake up again, the way she just had, but apparently she wasn’t yet ready to open her eyes. She let the tide of sleep flow through her, back and forth, back and forth, slow and pleasing. She was dreaming, I could tell, and I wondered what about. Two days earlier, while still in the U.S., she had told me one morning what she had seen in her sleep. She saw me, straight-backed, lonely, alone, on the edge of the desert. She sat in the car and looked through the windscreen at the stripe of the horizon, and at her husband, standing some thirty yards away from the car, between her and the sloping land, staring into space. The sun lay on the plain and was red as blood and the blood of the sun flowed out into the sky, over the sand and the rocks and … The image reminded her of something she had seen before, she said, during our first summer together. After tea we had driven to East Bergholt and got out to take a walk. As we climbed a hill covered with oak trees, we had seen the sun setting. ‘Run,’ I had said, ‘to the top.’ But as we ran, the light began to fade. We ran uphill, faster and faster, laughing, crying. By the time we reached the top, we were nearly too late. We gazed at the horizon where the orange light flowed over old England, the Isle of Gramarye, the days of King Arthur and his noble knights, a raised sword before the globe of light that … And there in the desert, in her dream, I had stared at the light in the very same way, said Eve, all alone, a man who would never be not-alone. Both times she had wondered why I seemed most alone when I was staring at a blood-red, setting sun. What did I see in that light? What did I see that she didn’t? And why did she have the uneasy feeling that she never would?
‘It was a dream, Eve, just a dream,’ I had said. ‘You shouldn’t attach any significance to dreams.’
‘Nathan, I don’t know you, and you don’t want to be known.’ The first time that I had ever spoken about Zeno, for instance, was one evening when she was reminiscing about her youth and had told me how, as a child, she had been so impressed by the Passion that she wished she were Catholic instead of Anglican. Then she could become a nun and suffer, like Jesus, for the salvation of mankind. Apparently I had smiled at her and said there was no need, Zeno was already doing that. When she asked me what I meant, I had shrugged my shoulders and stared out the window.
‘What are you trying to say?’ I had looked at her, sitting there on the edge of the hotel bed, slender and blond and, despite her early-morning disarray, elegant.
‘Nothing. Only, I know so little about you. I’m not “attaching any significance” to that dream, as you put it, but I do understand the symbolism. I see you standing there, but I have no idea what’s going on inside you. I know every inch of your body and I know that warm weather gives you a headache and that you hate tea with breakfast and … All sorts of things. But I don’t know what’s underneath those things.’
‘Do you think I know that about you? Do you think it’s possible to know another person?’
‘Don’t turn this into a philosophical debate,’ she had said, rather sharply for her. ‘This isn’t something you can intellectualize. I’m talking about us. I’m not talking about absolute knowledge. I’m talking about the fact that I know nothing about you, nothing about your family. I don’t even understand why you’ve all got such peculiar names!’
That conversation, filled with memories and accumulated misunderstanding, had taken place less than two days before and still echoed in our dealings. We had been, up until then, two people who loved each other and were wise enough to leave each other alone. We didn’t have the sort of modern relationship in which mutual analysis inflicted so many wounds that you stayed together for the memory of the pain alone. But the code, the unspoken agreement not to trespass on each other’s mental territory, had been broken, and now we were flying back in a half-empty plane and it was as if we had only just met.
The strange thing about the sudden loss of intimacy between myself and Eve was that I didn’t know what the deeper cause might be. Nothing we had said, or not said, on the plane. That was merely the completion of something that had begun earlier, an elegant sort of farewell; my balanced inner peace and her Anglo-Saxon cool, merging to form the paragon of the happy divorce.
The estrangement happened long before, I thought, as I sipped my whisky.
We had gone to spend a few days in the east of England. ‘A romantic weekend,’ Eve had said, adding that we ‘bloody well’ deserved it. She herself was tired, dead tired, but it was my silence that had been the deciding factor. The last few months, she said, I had changed, I was colder, more withdrawn, and she had reminded me how, a while back, she had come home and found me in the sagging armchair by the fireplace, staring at the chunks of wood and the wads of newspaper below them that flickered in the dusky hearth like motionless white flames. When she asked what I was doing, I jumped. Several seconds went by before I was able to tell her that I had forgotten to light the fire. ‘You’re just a bit overworked,’ she had said, ‘we ought to get away for a while.’
In Colchester we found bed and breakfast in an ancient medieval house. By the time we arrived it was dark and all the rooms were taken. We put down our bags and waited while the landlady glanced through her booking register. ‘All I have left,’ she said after a while, ‘is the bridal cottage.’ She had led the way, chatting to Eve. As we walked out the back door of the hotel and the darkness enfolded us, an image flashed into my mind, one I didn’t recognize: through a window framed in weathered wood I saw a tall chair with an embroidered seat, and in that chair was Eve. She looked back over her shoulder and smiled. I suddenly thought: She doesn’t belong with me.
The cottage was even older than the main building. It leaned forward wearily, sheltered by an enormous linden tree whose crown extended over the roof. The windows were small squares of bumpy glass. The landlady unlocked the door and let Eve in first. ‘This way, dear.’ On the first floor she showed us a room that was made almost entirely of wood. The low roof was a nest of collar beams, the floor had the patina of boards that had been trodden on by generations, the walls were panelled with gleaming dark wain-scotting. There probably wasn’t a splinter of wood in that room younger than Eve, the landlady, and I put together. A huge brass bed stood against one wall, and opposite that, a small wooden sideboard. Next to the window, which offered a view of the hotel, stood a little table with a chestnut gleam.
When the landlady had left us, we stood in the room and looked around in silence.
‘It’s almost too much,’ Eve had said.
I nodded.
‘I mean, it’s almost a caricature of Merry Old England.’
‘The Tourist Office couldn’t have done better,’ I said.
That was the sentence that did it. Although it had nothing to do with us, I knew for certain that this one, casual little remark had said it all. I had felt the loneliness slipping over my shoulders like an old coat. I stared at the wood and wondered where that chill had suddenly come from. Before I could think of anything the cold penetrated deeper inside me. I felt Eve drifting away. The feeling was so strong that I panicked, as if I had a great black lake inside, an internal Loch Ness whose slow current parted to reveal the soaring head of a prehistoric monster. I turned round, wanted to call her, but when I looked at her, she smiled. I stammered something and said I was going to have a shower.
In the bathroom, I had stared at my reflection in the mirror. It was as if my body had acquired a roommate who was perfectly at home in his new surroundings.
Later, when I went into the bedroom, Eve was lying naked on the big bed. She looked over her shoulder and smiled with her eyes. I saw her rosy body, soft and seductive in the light reflected by the wood, and felt the coldness whirling inside me. I thought: This used to be a sign. I heard our glass of happiness fall.
The bridal cottage in Colchester was where it had begun. This much I knew, though I didn’t have the slightest notion why.
I had told myself to stay calm, to wait, let things run their course, in a few months’ time I would know what I wanted and what I should do. That was how I lived my life, that was what others valued in me, what I valued in myself. The chill I felt was perfectly normal. All over the world were men and women who felt alone in the company of their partner. It was just part of being together, and probably only temporary. I knew all that. But still I spiralled inescapably downward, towards an end I didn’t know and didn’t want. I stood at the window of our house in Wales, next to the cold, blackened hearth, and stared out at the rain, the river, the indifferent landscape. Sometimes the grey monotony of the valley gripped me so hard by the throat that I raced upstairs and ran a bath. Once I was lying in the hot water my thoughts would drift along on the steam to the panelled ceiling and I’d remember, with painful accuracy, the wooden room in the bridal cottage.
Eve stirred in her seat.
She opened her eyes (but slowly, the way the lights come up in the theatre) and looked at me. ‘Just barely,’ she said.
‘Would you like a drink?’
She shook her head.
I raised my glass and sipped.
‘Why don’t you try and get some sleep?’ she asked.
I smiled. ‘I only sleep in bed. I once made a deal with myself that there had to be at least one place in the world where I could feel safe. I decided on my bed. That’s where I can sleep.’
‘Why shouldn’t you feel safe anywhere else, N?’
I turned and looked at her. ‘You really are awake, aren’t you?’
She nodded.
There was a long silence. Eve, who had discovered the blanket across her legs, pushed it off. She repeated her question.
‘Have you ever had a good look at my mother?’ I asked. ‘She takes care of everything. And when I say everything, I mean: the entire world. Not only does she keep an inexhaustible supply of canned goods, a buffer stock of toilet paper that would last an orphanage five years, and enough detergent to clean all of Europe, she keeps track of the rest of the world, too. Every night before she goes to sleep, my mother talks to God and tells him what still needs to be done. If other people think my mother is a disbeliever, it’s probably because she’s so critical of God. He’s not doing his job. He doesn’t put away his toys. God doesn’t wash behind his ears. He doesn’t listen to my mother.’
I paused. I noticed I was getting worked up. Then I said, ‘I’ll bet my mother is God’s mother, too. Do you know how she sleeps?’
Eve shook her head.
‘With clenched fists and gnashing teeth. Her teeth are worn down from all that gnashing.’
‘So are yours.’
‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you. This is the world I come from, that’s the way I am. Everything has to be under control, and on a plane I have nothing under control. That’s why I can’t sleep.’
And that’s why, Eve, I thought, he always sits next to you, when you’re driving, with one hand in the strap above the door, the other hand on the dashboard. That’s why I hardly slept the first year of our marriage, and if I did, I woke up in the middle of the night, screaming. Terrifying nightmares, all year long. I sat bolt upright and roared to the skies. I roared so loudly I was hoarse the next morning. I had inherited that from my mother. My mother had dreamed that way all her life. Sometimes it woke us up, but after a while it didn’t scare us anymore.
‘You can’t have everything under control, N.’
‘I know.’
‘We, we two, for instance. You can’t have us under control.’
We looked at each other for a long time.
‘I can’t tell if you’re happy,’ she said.
I tipped back my head slightly, as if I was about to look up, but kept my eyes on her. ‘Do you feel that I’m unhappier since we’ve been together?’
Eve shook her head. ‘The point is,’ she said, ‘you’re not happier.’
‘Happiness doesn’t exist.’
She nodded a vehement ‘yes.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Some times are less terrible than others, sometimes it even seems as if you know why you’re alive. But that’s not happiness. That’s the minimum requirement for going on.’
‘For God’s sake, N.’
I twisted round in my seat until I was sitting almost in front of her.
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘It’s 1957. Haifa. Arabian snipers are prowling about the centre of town. Shlomo Finkelstein has taken cover from the bullets in the portico of an apartment building. All of a sudden his friend Wolf Kreisky comes running into the portico. He falls against the door and stands there, panting. “My God,” says Finkelstein, “what are you doing here?” His friend looks up, points to the Bay of Haifa and says, “Life has no meaning, it’s hopeless, I’m going to throw myself in the water and drown!” They get into a terrible row. Finkelstein tries to convince his friend that life really does have meaning. Okay, maybe things are tough now, but after a storm comes a calm, and so on, and so on. Kreisky won’t be persuaded. “After a storm comes a calm,” he says, “and after the calm comes more rain. I’m sick and tired of it, I’m giving up.” Finkelstein gets angry. “Fine, go ahead, drown yourself. There’s the water, what’s to stop you?” Kreisky looks at him, flabbergasted. He stares out at the street, where bullets are tearing up the pavement. “Are you crazy?” he says. “With those snipers?”
Eve smiled briefly. ‘Why,’ she asked me, ‘do I get the feeling that I’m your sniper?’