"Angry," said Tsippy, "isn't the right word. He's—what should I say?—mourning."
"Naturally."
"No, you don't understand: he's not mourning just for the Acrobat. He's mourning for the two of you. If I were you, Yoel, I wouldn't have come here today."
"Tell me. What happened in Bangkok? How did it happen? Tell me."
"Don't know."
"Did he tell you not to say anything to me?"
"I don't know, Yoel. Don't press me. It's not only you who finds it hard to live with."
"Who does he blame? Me? Himself? The bastards?"
"If I were you, Yoel, I wouldn't be here right now. Go home. Listen to me. Go."
"Is there anyone in there with him?"
"He doesn't want to see you. And that's putting it mildly."
"Just let him know I'm here. Or, rather"—Yoel suddenly laid his hard fingers on her soft shoulder—"wait. Don't tell him." In four paces he had reached the inner door and entered without knocking, and as he closed it behind him asked, How did it happen?
Teacher, portly, well groomed, with the face of a discriminating culture-consumer, his gray hair cut with precision and good taste, his fingernails carefully manicured, his plump pink cheeks smelling effeminately of after-shave, looked up at Yoel, who took care not to lower his eyes. At that instant he saw that yellow cruelty like an overfed cat's glinting in the small pupils.
"It doesn't matter how," the man replied with a singsong Gallic lilt, which on this occasion he chose to exaggerate, as though it gave him a malicious pleasure.
Yoel said:
"I have a right to know."
And the man, with no interrogative tone and with no ironic emphasis:
"Indeed."
"Look," said Yoel, "I have a suggestion to make."
"Indeed," the man repeated. And he added: "It won't help, comrade. You'll never know how it happened. I shall personally see to it that you never find out. You'll just have to live with it."
"I'll have to live with it," Yoel said. "But why me? You shouldn't have sent him. You sent him."
"In your place."
"I," Yoel said, fighting back the upsurge of mingled sorrow and anger, "would never have stepped into that trap. I didn't buy the whole story from the outset. That whole replay. I didn't believe it. The moment you told me that the girl was asking for me to come, letting fly all sorts of personal clues about me, I had a bad feeling. It smelled fishy. But you sent him."
"In your place," Le Patron repeated, this time very slowly, pronouncing each word separately. "Now—" and as though by prearrangement the ancient square Bakelite telephone on his desk began to ring hoarsely and the man cautiously raised the cracked receiver and said: Yes. Then, for ten minutes or so, he sat back and listened motionlessly and without making a sound except that he twice repeated: Yes.
So Yoel turned and walked over to the only window. Through which he could see a thick, almost porridgelike, gray-green sea, framed by two tall buildings. He remembered that it was less than a year ago that he had been thrilled by the prospect of inheriting this office when Teacher moved out to his colony of nature-loving philosophers in Upper Galilee. In his mind he sketched again that pleasing little scenario. He invites Ivria here on the pretext of consulting her about redecorating the room. Changing the furniture. Fixing up the gloomy office, which is beginning to look shabby. He sits her down there, facing him, on the chair he himself was occupying a moment ago. Just like a child amazing his mother after years of gray mediocrity. You see, from this Spartan office your husband controls a service that is considered by some to be the most efficient in the world. And now the time has come to change the prehistoric desk flanked by two metal file cabinets, to get rid of the coffee table and those ridiculous wicker chairs. What do you think, my dear? Maybe we should replace this bric-a-brac with a push-button telephone with automatic memory. Throw out the tattered curtains. Should we or shouldn't we leave the views of the walls of Jerusalem by Litvinowsky and the alley in Safed by Rubin hanging there as a reminder of bygone days? Do you see any point in keeping the National Fund collection box with its inscription "Bring Redemption to the Land," and its map of Palestine from Dan to Beersheba dotted with flyspecks indicating the tracts of land purchased by the Jews up to 1947? What shall we keep, Ivria, and what shall we throw out forever? And all of a sudden, as though with a faint quivering in the loins heralding the renewal of desire, it occurred to Yoel that it still wasn't too late. That in fact the Acrobat's death had brought him closer to his goal. That if he wanted it and if he calculated carefully, if he thought out his moves without making any mistakes, a year or two from now he would be able to invite Netta here on the pretext of asking her advice about redecorating the room, to sit her down precisely there, facing him across the desk, and explain to her modestly: You could describe your father as a sort of nightwatchman.
When he thought of Netta he was hit by the sharp, blinding realization that it was thanks to her that his life had been saved. That it was she who had not let him go to Bangkok this time, even though in his heart of hearts he had longed to go. That if it had not been for her obstinacy, her capricious intuition, the alarm raised by the sixth sense that came from her lunar-astral illness, he would be lying now in place of Yokneam Ostashinsky in the sealed lead coffin, perhaps in the hold of a Lufthansa jumbo jet making its way at this moment from the Far East over Pakistan or Kazakhstan in the dark toward Frankfurt and from there to Ben-Gurion Airport and from there to that rocky cemetery in Jerusalem, to the catarrhal voice of Nakdimon Lublin drawling the memorial prayer with comical mistakes in the Aramaic words. Thanks to Netta alone he had been saved from making that journey. From the seductive webs that woman had woven for him. And from the fate that the rotund, cruel man whom he sometimes, for purposes of emergency communication, called his brother had reserved for him. Now here he was, saying, "Yes. Thank you," putting the receiver down, and turning to Yoel and resuming his sentence at the precise point at which he had broken it off ten minutes earlier, when his shabby telephone had croaked:
"...it's all over. And I must ask you to leave."
"Just a minute," said Yoel, running his finger as usual between his neck and his shirt collar. "I said I have got a suggestion to make."
"Thank you," said Le Patron. "It's too late."
"I'm offering"—Yoel chose to ignore the insult—"to go to Bangkok to find out what happened. Tomorrow. Even tonight."
"Thank you," said the man, "but we have all we need." In his accent, which was still more marked, Yoel thought he detected a trace of mockery. Or restrained anger. Or maybe just impatience. He spoke with a coquettish emphasis that sounded like a parody of a French immigrant. He stood up and concluded:
"Don't forget to tell my beloved Netta to call me at home about the matter she and I have been discussing."
"Wait a moment," said Yoel. "I also wanted to let you know that I'm prepared to consider returning to work now. Maybe on a part-time basis. Let's say in Operations Analysis. Or in Training."
"I've already told you, we have all we need."
"Or even in Archives. I don't mind. I think I can still be of some use."
In less than two minutes, when Yoel had left Le Patron's office and was walking along the corridor whose stained walls had finally been soundproofed and covered with cheap imitation-wood sheeting, he suddenly recalled the Acrobat's mocking voice telling him here not long ago that curiosity killed the cat. So he stepped into Tsippy's office and said only: "Excuse me a minute; I'll explain later," and he grabbed the intercom on her desk and, almost in a whisper, asked the man on the other side of the wall, "Tell me, Yirmiyahu, what have I done?"
Slowly, with didactic patience, the man stated: "You want to know what you've done." Then he continued as though dictating an official summary for the record: "By all means. You'll have your answer. An answer that you know already. You and I, comrade, are both refugees. Holocaust kids. They risked their lives to save us from the Nazis. They smuggled us here. And on top of that they fought and were maimed and killed to make a state for us. They handed it to us on a tray. They picked us up out of the shit. And after that they also did us an enormous honor. They let us work in the inner sanctum. In the heart of hearts. That puts an obligation on us, doesn't it? But you, comrade, when you were needed, when you were sent for, you wriggled out of it and got someone else sent in your place. One of them. And he was sent. So now just you go home and live with that. And don't call us three times a day to know when the funeral is. It'll be in the papers."
Yoel limped outside to the parking lot, because of the injury to his knee that morning when it collided with the stool. For some reason he was tempted, like a punished child, to exaggerate the limp, as though he had a serious injury. So he limped up and down for twenty or twenty-five minutes, passing every car three or four times, looking in vain for his own. At least four times he returned to the spot where he had parked. He could not imagine what had happened. Until he had a minor brainstorm and realized that he did not bring his own car, but Krantz's blue Audi, which was parked precisely where he had left it. With a kindly winter sun splitting into a thousand dazzling flashes on its rear window. And so he came to terms, more or less, with the realization that this chapter was now closed. That he would never again set foot in this old, unimposing building, surrounded by a high wall and hidden by thick cypress trees, shut in by many modern buildings of glass and concrete, all much taller. At that moment he felt a little pang of regret for something he could never do now: often during his twenty-three years here he had felt an urge to reach out and check once and for all whether anybody occasionally dropped a coin through the slit of the blue National Fund collection box in Le Patron's office. Now this question too would have to remain open. As he drove Yoel thought about the Acrobat, Yokneam Ostashinsky, who could not have been less like an acrobat. If anything, he had resembled an old Labor Party apparatchik, a quarry worker who in the course of time had become a regional boss in the construction cooperative. A man in his sixties with a tight drumlike belly. Once, seven or eight years ago, he had made an embarrassing mistake. Yoel had come to his rescue, and succeeded in extricating him from the consequences of his error without having to resort to a lie. Unfortunately, it subsequently transpired that, as often happens with the beneficiary of a favor that cannot ever be repaid, Ostashinsky nurtured petty spite against Yoel, and spread the word that he was a condescending prig. Yet, thought Yoel as he crawled along in the heavy traffic, if it is possible to use the word "friend" in my case, he was my friend. When Ivria died and Yoel was summoned back from Helsinki and arrived in Jerusalem only a few hours before the funeral, he discovered that all the arrangements had been made. Nakdimon Lublin drawled that he had had nothing to do with it. After a couple of days Yoel went in to clear up how much he owed and to whom, painstakingly checking the receipted bills for the funeral expenses and the announcement in the newspaper, and everywhere he found the name Sasha Schein. So he called the Acrobat to ask how much he had spent, and Ostashinsky, in an offended tone, swore at him in Russian and told him to fuck off. Once or twice, after a fight, late at night, Ivria had whispered to him: I understand you. What did she mean? What did she understand? What was the extent of the resemblance or difference between people's secrets? Yoel knew that there was no way to know. Even though the question of what people really know about each other, especially people who are close to one another, had always been an important one for him and had now become an urgent one. She almost always wore a white blouse and white linen pants. In winter she also wore a white sweater: a sailor whose fleet had set sail without her. She had worn no jewelry apart from the wedding ring on the little finger of her right hand. It was impossible to get it off, although her thin, childlike fingers were always cold. Again Yoel longed for their cool touch on his bare back. Just once, the previous autumn, on the kitchen balcony in Jerusalem, she had said to him: Listen. I'm not well. When he has asked what sort of pain she had, she had replied, No, you're wrong; it's not something physical. I'm just not well. And Yoel, who was waiting for a phone call from El Al, had answered, to evade the issue, to free himself, to cut short what was likely to develop into a long saga, It'll pass, Ivria. It'll be all right; you'll see. If he had responded to the call and gone to Bangkok, Le Patron and Ostashinsky would have taken on the task of looking after his mother, his daughter, and his mother-in-law. Every betrayal he had ever committed would have been forgiven and forgotten if he had gone and not come back. A cripple born without arms and legs was almost incapable of doing evil. And who could do evil to him? One who had lost his arms and legs could never be crucified. Would he never get to know what really happened in Bangkok? Maybe it was just a trivial accident at a pedestrian crossing or in an elevator? And would the members of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra be informed one day that it was the man who at this moment was lying in a sealed lead coffin in the hold of a Lufthansa jumbo jet flying in the darkness over Pakistan who a few years ago, by his wisdom and courage, and with his gun, had saved them from massacre in the middle of their concert in Melbourne? At that moment Yoel felt an upsurge of rage at the secret joy that had been coursing through his chest all day: So what? I got rid of them. They wanted me dead and now they're dead themselves. He died? It shows he failed. She died? So she lost. Too bad. I'm alive. It proves I was right.
Or perhaps not. Maybe it's just the wages of treachery, he said to himself as he left the city and charged wildly past a line of four or five cars on his left, tore up the empty right-hand lane and cut in four inches in front of the nose of the front car in the line at the very split second the lights changed. Instead of going straight home, he turned off in the direction of Ramat Gan, pulled up outside the shopping center, and entered a large store selling women's clothing. After an hour and a half of reflection, comparison, examination, and fine reasoning he left, carrying an elegant package containing a daring, almost naughty dress for his daughter for saving his life. He was never wrong about sizes or about the fashions or about the quality of material or about colors and cut. In his other hand he held a bag containing, in separate packages, a shawl for his mother, a belt for his mother-in-law, a cute scarf for Odelia Krantz, a nightdress for Annemarie, and half a dozen expensive silk handkerchiefs for Ralph. There was also a package done up with a bow and containing a handsome, conservative sweater as a parting present for Tsippy: one could not simply disappear without a trace after all those years. Although, on second thought, why not just slink away without leaving any mark behind him?