Yonatan thought of the words “beyond the call of duty.” That was how the army magazine had described his conduct on the night of the raid on Hirbet Tawfik. In the hasty retreat from the enemy’s position on those terraced, shell-blasted hills, lit by the hideous glare of Syrian artillery flares, he had carried on his back a bleeding soldier he didn’t know, a squat man who kept gasping, I’m done for, I’m done for, I’m done for, the last word drawing out into a thin wail.
And you, you suddenly decided that you’d had it. I can’t carry him another foot. Everyone else is already home safe except for the two of us lost in these hills with the Syrians breathing down our necks. If I just put the dying son-of-a-bitch down and let him die in peace among the rocks instead of on my back I may save my life, and no one will ever know, because there’s no one to rat, and I’ll be alive and not dead.
How the thought of that scared me. You’re crazy, I said, you’re out of your fucking mind, and I began to run like hell with that dying bastard on my back, and bullets and tracers and mortar shells exploding all over from that other Tawfik, the upper one, the one we never took, the one the Syrians held, and that fucker kept bleeding into my ear like a torn garden hose, screaming I’m done fo-o-or until he had no breath any more, and neither did I. My lungs were full of burned smells, burned fuel, burned rubber, burned weeds, burned blood. If I’d had a free hand, I’d have cut his throat with my hunting knife just to make him shut up, but I kept on running, bawling like a boy.
How we got through that mine field before Kibbutz Tel Katzir I’ll never know. By then I was howling too, oh God save me, God come save me, I don’t want to die, oh God I’m done fo-o-or. If only the bastard would die but not on my back before we reach Tel Katzir—he’d better not leave me alone here. And then this one crazy shell landed twenty meters off just to teach me not to run like a lunatic, to run more slowly. Oh God is he heavy, I can’t go on any more!
But we’d reached Tel Katzir, we were in the middle of all this barbed wire, being shot at. Don’t shoot, I began to scream, hey, don’t shoot, can’t you see we’re dying, hey, can’t you see we’re dying, until they heard me and brought us to a field hospital in a bomb shelter. That’s when they took him off my back at last. We were all glued together with blood and saliva and sweat and piss and all the fluids in our bodies like two newborn puppies, one blind filthy lump. We’d been soldered to each other, his nails stuck into my chest and back like staples. When they unpeeled him, there were pieces of my skin on him, and so soon as he was off me, I collapsed like an empty sack on the floor.
Suddenly in the badly lit bunker it turned out that I was really out of my skull, that it was all a mistake, that the blood which soaked through my clothes and my underwear and into my crotch and even my socks wasn’t his at all. He wasn’t even wounded, just in shock. All that blood was my own, from a piece of shrapnel in my shoulder, barely two inches from my heart.
They bandaged me up and gave me a shot and said as you’d say to a child, “Take it easy, Yoni, take it easy, Yoni,” but I couldn’t take it easy because I couldn’t stop laughing. Someone said, “This man’s in shock too. Give him ten cc.’s to calm him down.” But even in the ambulance on the way to hospital as they kept asking me to calm down, to get a grip on myself, to tell them where it hurt, I lay on the stretcher and roared with laughter so hard that I began to choke. “Look at him,” I gasped, “he’s done for! Just look at him! He’s done for!” all the way to the hospital. Then they put me to sleep for the operation and after that they published a story in the army magazine; I remember the title exactly: “Wounded Soldier Saves Comrade’s Life.”
That joker, the old-timers say when they talk about him, from three feet away he managed to miss a bull. And a bull, mind you, isn’t a matchbox. But he managed to miss it, and, believe it or not, today he’s the owner and president of the Esplanada Hotel chain in Miami Beach, Florida, where he lives like a lord.
After supper, Yonatan and Rimona returned home from the dining room. He couldn’t remember what his mother Hava had asked him when she came over to their table at the end of their meal. He could only recall saying that tonight was out of the question.
The two of them stood for several minutes by the heater to thaw out. They were so close that her oulder grazed his arm. He was enough taller than she to look down on her rain-drenched hair falling gently over her shoulders, the left one rather than the right. Had he wished, he could have stroked it. But he stooped and turned up the flame of the heater instead.
The room was lit as usual by the reddish-brown light cast by the heavy lamp shade. Everything was in its place. Everything was neat and tidy. Rimona had even folded the newspaper and stashed it on the low shelf where it belonged. Even the floor tiles gave off a subtle scent of cleanliness. Tia lay sprawled by the heater. It would have seemed a house at perfect peace had it not been for the crying of a child from the next-door apartment.
“These walls,” said Rimona.
“What’s wrong?”
“They’re so thin. You’d think they were made out of paper.”
It seemed a meaningful kind of crying, neither a whine nor a tantrum, as if the child beyond the wall had broken some toy that he loved and knew he alone was to blame. A woman sought to soothe him. Only the tone of her voice reached Yonatan and Rimona; the words could not be made out.
When Yonatan asked Rimona if she was busy, she wanted to know why he asked. Did he want to explain something to her on the chessboard perhaps? Although they never played chess with each other, she was always willing to sit with him for half an hour or so, the pieces arranged before them on the board, while he explained various strategies: the Nimzowitsch Opening, the King’s Indian Defense, the flanking versus the direct attack, the correct way to play the Queen’s Gambit, the sacrifice of this or that piece for the sake of a tactical advantage. Rimona found it pleasant to listen to such things. If he cared to set up the pieces, she added, she would make coffee, fetch her embroidery, and be with him in a minute.
Although Yonatan didn’t reply, Rimona went to make the coffee. Like a soldier caught in a crossfire, he spun wildly around, stepped away from the heater, and crossed over to the bookcase, where he stood with his back to the room. His eyes finally fell on an old photograph of Rimona that she had framed and placed among the books, a black-and-white snapshot of the two of them taken on a hike in the Judean Desert. He was astounded to discover that they were not alone. Behind her, in the lower right-hand corner, appeared a strange, hairy, uncouth leg in short pants and army boots. Now was the time to make his move, to say or do that crucial thing. Doing his best to steady himself, he finally managed to say, angrily, “My cigarettes. Did you by any chance see my cigarettes?”
Rimona came into the room carrying a tray with two mugs of coffee, some pastry, and a small blue Bokhara creamer.
“Why don’t you sit down? You can pour the milk in our coffee while I get a fresh pack from the drawer. There’s no need to be upset.”
“Forget it!” snapped Yonatan. And then, bitingly, “Who the hell asked for a fresh pack? My cigarettes are over there. Look, right under your nose! On the radio. What did you say?”
“I didn’t say anything. You were talking, Yoni.”
“I thought you did. Maybe you started to and changed your mind. Or maybe you just meant to. Here, I’ll pour’a da milk. That’s how Bolognesi says it, ‘pour’a.’ I always feel I’m interrupting you, even when you’re silent.”
“How strange,” said Rimona, though there was not the slightest touch of wonder in her voice.
“And maybe you’ll be good enough to stop saying ‘how strange’ all the time. Everything seems ‘strange’ to you. There’s nothing ‘strange’ about it. Why don’t you sit down instead of wandering all over the room? Sit down!”
After she was seated before him, his eyes came to rest on the cleavage of her blouse and he thought of the rest of her—of her twelve-year-old’s breasts, of the cold, dainty lines of the torso hidden beneath her clothes, of her navel like a shut sleeping eye, of her sex like some pious, genderless illustration in a facts-of-life manual for teenagers. It won’t do her any good, Yonatan thought, nothing will any more, not her lovely red sweater, not her long blond hair, not even her bashful smile. The smile of a sweet little girl who’s been naughty and knows that she’ll be forgiven because everyone loves her and everything will be all right. Only this time she won’t be forgiven and nothing will be all right. This time it’s hopeless and everything is all wrong. Just look at her, that skin sagging on her neck, behind her tiny ears, underneath her adorable chin, all those places where she’s drying out and cracking like weathered paint or an old shoe. It’s the beginning of her old age and there’s not a thing that she can do about it. Nothing can save her. The magic of Zanzibar is lost. Gone forever. The End. And I don’t feel in the least bit sorry for her because no one in the world feels sorry for me. The only thing I feel sorry about is all the time that’s been wasted.
“Did you forget?” asked Rimona, with a smile.
“Forget what?”
“I’m still waiting.”
“Waiting?” said Yonatan in amazement. He felt a moment’s panic. What could she mean? Waiting for what? Did she already know? But she couldn’t possibly.
“I don’t get it,” he added. “Waiting for what?”
“For you to set up the chessboard, Yoni. And I’ll turn on the radio. There’s a Bach fugue on. I’ve already brought in my embroidery, and you told me not to bother about getting the cigarettes because you would, but you forgot. Don’t get up. I’ll do it for you.”
Some minutes later they sat facing each other in the twin armchairs. Music came over the radio. Rimona hugged the coffee mug with her palms to absorb the warmth. For the last time Yonatan reviewed in his mind the words he had decided to use.
“I’m ready if you are,” said Rimona.
Once, when he was on patrol and crossing the border at night into Jordan near the village of Tarkumiyya, Yonatan suddenly found himself scared to death for no good reason. The night seemed full of eyes. Among the rocks the darkness crackled with a wicked laughter. They’re waiting for us. In some unaccountable way they know we’re coming down this wadi tonight, and they’re lying in ambush, as invisible as we are conspicuous, laughing to themselves because the trap is sprung.
A shadow passed over Rimona’s brow. Through her slightly parted lips, Yonatan could make out the white tips of her teeth. He thought of expanses of white sand incandescent in the sun, blasted by the wild midday light of the Zin Desert near a bone-dry site that was marked on his map as Caravan Spring. The memory flooded him with a pain unlike any he had ever known, and the sharpness of it made him shut his eyes.
He recalled how their love began. He recalled the weeks before their marriage. The long ride by jeep through the mountains and down to the gray flatlands below. The campfire of dried branches that smoldered all night long. The sleeping bag they shared on that desert night behind the silent jeep. Her child’s breasts caught in his heavy hands like two warm starlings. Her tears, her whispers. “Try not to mind it, Yoni. It’s not your fault. You just go ahead and don’t mind.”
He thought too of how their love had ended. Three years ago at half-past-two in the morning when she said, “Look, Yoni, lots of girls are like that. You have to try not to mind.”
He thought of her first pregnancy. And of the last one. Of the dead baby girl he had refused to look at in the hospital. And once more of her delicate body, that cold, exquisite slab of marble. Of his last, abasing attempts to arouse in that pale adamant some life, some pain, some injury or anger. So many days and nights, nights and days. And the distances. Her suffering that he could only imagine, and not even that. His aloneness. At three in the morning on a wide, arid sheet beneath a wide, arid ceiling with everything gleaming like the bones of a cadaver in the light of the full dead moon in the window, wide awake yet abducted by some white nightmare in a snowy polar wasteland, wide awake but alone with a corpse.
The shame of words. Of lies. Wastelands of unspoken truths. Sleeping. Waking. The pallor of her fingertips. The white tips of her teeth. The sight of her naked body, so fragile, chaste, and pitiable, in a cold shower on a summer day. The taste of her silence. Of his. The permanently dead space between his and hers. Her duplicitous, hollow beauty. Her feigned tenderness that mustn’t be touched even when you felt most like touching. The rub of her small hard breasts against the skin of his face, the muscles of his belly, the hair of his chest. The patient, bitter beating against her, the more and more desperate search everywhere for some opening, with kisses, with caresses, with cajolery, with silence, with cruelty, in the darkness, in the half-light, in the hot light, on sultry afternoons, in the hours before dawn, in bed, in woods, in cars, in sand dunes, like a father, like a child, like a savage, like an ape, gently, despairingly, jokingly, pleadingly, obscenely, violently, servilely—all in vain.
The breath that whooshed out of his lungs like a sob each time that he came so loathsomely far from her and from himself and from any love, always stymied in the end by the same dead frozen silence on the same dead frozen lips. Her body as stiff as a corpse. The rustle of the sheets cold and venomous and between them the soft sibilance of thrashed silk. The fruitless movement of her lips in the hair of his chest, the vain meander of her tongue down to his groin, his hands with sudden fury grasping, shaking her shoulders, shaking her back, her whole body, as if it were a watch that had stopped ticking, even cuffing her face with the back of his hand, one time even with his fist. All in vain. Always the same creeping wanting, the same fear, the same regret, the same ruses, the same shame, the same suffocating venom welling up inside him like a scream being screamed underwater. And afterwards his questions. Her silence. Her questioning. His silence.
And, always and without fail, her insane baths and ablutions, as if she were scrubbing some filth or poison from her skin, extirpating the last of his and her body odor with hot water and suds, before getting back into bed suffused with the fragrance of the childish almond soap that he hated, all pink and clean like a baby, like a God’s angel in a kitschy religious tableau. And falling asleep right away while he lay there listening to another woman’s laughter through the wall or the whispers of couples on the lawns, drifting through the open windows on summer nights.
Once and for all to grab the bread knife and plunge it into her soft skin, into her veins and her arteries, and down deeper yet, to open her up, to rampage through the dark lymph of her and the fat and the cartilage, to the innermost nooks and crannies, to the marrow of her bones, to carve her till she screamed. He had had enough. He couldn’t go on any more in such againstness.
Thus Yonatan, so far from forgetting the words he had prepared for that evening, was suddenly repelled by them, and, indeed, by anything that could be said in words. If only he could draw what he felt, or play it on an instrument, or jot it down as a simple equation in clear mathematical terms.
“The coffee you made me,” he said. “I’m sorry. I forgot to drink it and it’s cold.”
“There’s more hot coffee on the stove. I didn’t drink mine either, because I was embroidering and thinking. I’ll pour us both some more.”
“What were you thinking about, Rimona?” Opening his eyes, Yonatan saw the flower of blue flame beneath the white-hot stove shield and, glancing down, the quick, nervous tremors that ran down Tia’s spine as she lay with outstretched paws by the heater.
“I was thinking,” said Rimona, “that maybe tomorrow they’ll finally fix the steam boiler in the laundry room. It’s been hard for us without it.”
“It really is about time,” said Yonatan.
“On the other hand,” said Rimona, “you can’t exactly blame anyone for it. Lipa has been sick. Your father’s not much better yet either.”
“My father keeps telling me I need a haircut. Do you think I do?”
“You don’t, but if you want one, get one.”
“I haven’t been sick once all winter. Except for this stupid allergy. Sometimes it makes people think I’m crying. Praise’a God who dries’a the tears of’a the poor. That’s what Bolognesi says whenever my eyes tear. Look at me, Rimona.”
“The winter isn’t over yet, Yoni, and you keep running back and forth all day from the tractor shed to the metal shop without a hat and with torn boots.”
“You’re wrong. Only one of them. Bolognesi said he’d fix the sole. You know, that whole tractor shed business isn’t for me.”
“But you once liked it.”
“So what if I did?” snapped Yonatan. “So once I did and now I don’t. What is it that you’re always trying to tell me without ever saying it? Or if you do start to say it, you stop right in the middle. Why don’t you come out with it and stop playing games? I’m asking you to talk. I promise not to interrupt. I’ll be quiet as a mouse and listen to every word. Go on.”
“It’s nothing,” said Rimona. “Don’t be angry, Yoni.”
“Who’s angry? I’m not angry. I’m only asking you a question and hoping to get a straight answer for once in my life. That’s all.”
“Then ask it,” said Rimona, bewildered. “You’re angry that I’m not answering, but you haven’t asked me anything.”
“Okay. It’s this. I want you to tell me exactly what you thought three, three-and-a-half years ago on that Saturday night when you decided all of a sudden that we were getting married.”
“But that’s not the way it happened,” said Rimona softly. “And besides, why are you asking?”
“I just am. To get an answer from you.”
“But why ask now? You never did before.”
“Because sometimes I think … were you going to say something?”
“No. I’m listening.”
“But I want you to stop just listening your whole goddamn life! Talk. Open your mouth. Say something. You’re going to tell me right now why you married me, what you wanted from me, what was going on in that head of yours.”
“All right, I will,” said Rimona, adding after a brief silence, “Why not?” Almost smiling, she huddled in her armchair clutching her fresh mug of coffee with all ten fingers. Her eyes seemed to trace in midair the musical forms pouring from the radio. “Yes, I’ll tell you. It was like this. When the two of us decided to get married we were each other’s first. You were my first and I was yours. And you said to me that we would go on being first all our lives, that we wouldn’t copy anyone, and that whatever we did, in the house, in the garden, anywhere, we would do as if no one had ever done it before. That’s what you said. That we would be like two children who are lost in the woods but who hold hands tight and aren’t afraid. You said that I was beautiful and that you were good, and that from now on it wouldn’t embarrass you any more, because when you were little you were embarrassed that everyone, your housemothers and your teachers and your friends, always said you were good. You said that you would take me hiking in the desert and teach me to love it. And you did. And you said that I would teach you to be quiet inside and to love classical music, especially Bach. And I did. We thought we’d get along well together even if we never talked all day, even if we sat together a whole evening without saying a word. And we thought, both of us, that it would be best for us, and best for your parents, if we lived together instead of in separate rooms, you with Udi and Etan R., and I with those two visiting girls. Because once we were married we could live together and not have to meet out-of-doors in all kinds of weird places. And the summer was coming to an end. Do you remember, Yoni, it was almost autumn and then it would be winter, and in winter there would be no place to meet. And so we decided to get married before the rains began. Don’t cry, Yoni. Don’t be sad.”
“Who’s crying?” said Yonatan angrily. “It’s just that fucking allergy of mine making my eyes smart. I’ve told you a thousand times that they sting and that you should stop putting pine branches in your vases.”
“I’m sorry, Yoni. It’s just that it’s winter now and I can’t find any flowers.”
“And I’ve told you a thousand times too to stop saying I’m sorry, I’m sorry all day long like some waitress or a chambermaid in a movie. What you should be saying is ‘What now?’
“What now, Yoni?”
“I’m asking you what’s left now. And I’ll thank you not to repeat all my questions but make a little effort to answer what you’ve been asked.”
“But you know what now. Why ask? You and I have been husband and wife for years. Why are you asking me?”
“I don’t know why. I just am. I want to hear an answer for a change. Look here, are you purposely trying to drive me up the wall? How long are you going to go on talking to me like a little moron?”
She glanced up from her embroidery and her eyes once again appeared to be tracing the music in the air. Indeed, at just that moment the fugue seemed about to overflow its banks, surging upward, beating against mighty walls. And right after that, a gentling took place. The melody relented, as though despairing of cresting the dam, and, surrendering at last, dove deep to burble beneath the foundations. The powerful current of the theme forked into several thin eddies, each flowing its own way, each oblivious of the others, but swirling about one another with bashful desire, and slowly overcoming their forlornness to build up passionately to yet another floodtide.
“Yoni, listen.”
“Yes,” said Yonatan, feeling his heart grow limp with the sudden evaporation of his anger. “What.”
“Listen, Yoni. It’s like this. You and I are together. By ourselves. Close to each other, as you said we’d be. You’re good, and I try to be beautiful for you, and not to copy others, but still to be the first. We almost always get along. And if sometimes something goes wrong or annoys you, like a minute ago when I told you not to cry and you got angry, it’s still all right. I know you’ll calm down in the end and we’ll feel good with each other again. Maybe you think new things should happen all the time, but that isn’t so. I’m not telling you to look at other people, but if you do look at them anyway, you’ll see that new things don’t happen to them every day either. What should happen, Yoni? You’re a grown man. I’m your wife. This is home. All this is us. And it’s the middle of the winter.”
“It’s not that, Rimona,” said Yonatan, almost in a whisper.
“I know. You suddenly got sad,” said Rimona, running one finger along the table. Then, with an uncharacteristically rebellious movement, she rose and stood before him.
“Have you gone completely out of your mind? What are you undressing for?”
The rebellion ended. She blanched and dropped both arms.
“I just thought that maybe,” she said, trembling.
“Put your sweater back on. No one told you to undress. I don’t need you with your clothes off.”
“I just thought,” she whispered.
“It’s all right,” said Yonatan. “Never mind. You’re all right.” He nodded once or twice, as if in wholehearted agreement with himself, and said no more. Neither, seated across from him again, did she. The music grew soft and tranquil. In a minute it would fade away and be gone. Rimona reached for the cigarettes, took one, lit it with a match, and began to cough until the tears came, because she didn’t smoke. With a gentle, careful movement she stuck it between Yonatan’s lips.
“That’s how it is,” he said.
“What is, Yoni?”
“Everything. You. Me. Everything. Did you say something? No, I know you didn’t. Then say something, goddamn it! Say anything, scream, tell me what’s on your mind, if anything ever is. What next? What’s going to happen to you? To me? What exactly is going on in that little head of yours?”
“The winter will end,” said Rimona. “Then spring and summer will come. We’ll go somewhere on vacation. Maybe to upper Galilee, or the seashore. We’ll sit on the porch in the evening watching the stars come out or the full moon rise. Do you remember once telling me that the moon has a dark side where everyone goes when they die? You shouldn’t frighten me like that, because I believe whatever you tell me, and I don’t stop believing it until I hear you say you were only joking. And then at the end of the summer you’ll be called up as usual to the reserves, and when that’s over, you’ll take two days off from work and tell me about the new people you met and the new equipment your unit has. It will still be hot, and when you’re done working for the day, you can sit on the lawn with Udi and Anat and talk politics. At night they’ll come over for coffee and two of you will play chess.”
“And then?”
“Then it will be autumn again. You’ll go to the all-kibbutz chess tournament and maybe win another medal. When you come home, it will be time for winter plowing. Your brother Amos will get out of the army and maybe he’ll marry Rachel. You’ll start picking lemons and grapefruit, and then oranges, and you and Udi will be busy all day getting the shipments out on time. But I’ll ask you just the same, and you’ll agree, to turn the soil in the garden so that I can plant chrysanthemums again, and other winter flowers too. And then winter will come back, and we’ll light the heater and sit here together, and it can rain and rain all it wants and we won’t get wet.”
“And then?”
“Yoni, what’s wrong with you?”
Yonatan jumped up from his chair and savagely stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray. Tensing his neck, he thrust his head forward on the bias, a movement that resembled his father’s attempts to hear. A cowlick fell into his eyes and he brushed it roughly away.
“But I can’t take it any more! I can’t go on like this!” His voice was choked and seemed on the verge of panic.
Rimona looked at him quietly, as if he had said nothing more than please turn off the radio.
“You want to go away.”
“Yes.”
“With me or without me?”
“By myself.”
“When?”
“Soon. In a few days.”
“And I’ll stay here?”
“That’s up to you.”
“Will you be gone for long?”
“I don’t know. Yes. For a long time.”
“And what will there be for us afterwards?”
“I don’t know what there will be for us. What’s this ‘for us’ stuff? Who says there has to be anything for us? What am I, your father or something? Look. I can’t go on like this any longer. It’s that simple.”
“But you’ll come back in the end.”
“Are you asking me or telling me?”
“I’m hoping.”
“Then don’t. You can stop hoping. It’s a waste of your time.”
“Where will you go?”
“Somewhere. I don’t know. We’ll see. What difference does it make?”
“Will you study?”
“I might.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know. Why keep asking? I don’t know anything now. Stop grilling me as if I were a criminal.”
“But you’ll come sometimes.”
“Would you like me to?”
“If you feel like coming, you’ll come, and if you want to go again, you’ll go. It can be whenever you want. I won’t change a thing in the house or cut my hair as I thought I would do in the spring. Sometimes you’ll want to come to me, and then I’ll be here for you.”
“No, I’ll want to stay away. Maybe I’ll even go overseas, to America or somewhere.”
“You want to be far away from me.”
“I want to be far away from here.”
“From me.”
“All right. Yes. From you.”
“And from your parents and your brother Amos and all your friends.”
“Yes. That’s right. Far away from here.”
Rimona lowered her shoulders. She slowly touched her upper lip with a fingertip, like a slow pupil working on a math problem. He bent over to see her tears. There were no tears. She seemed supremely concentrated, lost in thought. Her attentiveness had lapsed and wandered back to the music. It’s that radio, thought Yonatan. All that music has completely spaced her out. Ever so quietly she’s going out of her mind, or else she’s been a total halfwit all along and I just didn’t notice. She’s not even listening to me but to the music. It goes in one ear and out the other like the ticking of a clock or the sound of the rain in a drainpipe.
“Turn off that radio. I’m talking to you.”
Rimona turned it off. Irately, as if that were not enough, Yonatan yanked the plug from the socket. There was a moment’s silence. The rain outside had stopped. From the neighboring apartment came the sound of something falling, as if a tower of blocks had collapsed on the rug. The neighbors laughed.
“Listen, Rimona,” said Yonatan.
“Yes.”
“I guess I should start explaining, why and how and since when. That’s hard for me.”
“You don’t have to explain.”
“No? You mean to tell me you’re so smart you don’t need any explanations?”
“Yonatan. Look. I don’t understand what’s the matter with you, but I don’t want you to start explaining. People always want to explain and understand, as if life were just a matter of explanations and solutions. When my father lay dying in the hospital of cancer, and I sat next to him all day without talking, just holding his hand, the doctor came by and said, ‘Young lady, if you’d care to step into my office for a few minutes, I’ll explain the situation to you,’ and I said, thank you, doctor, there’s no need to, and he must have thought I was either callous or an imbecile. And when I gave birth to Efrat and they told us she was stillborn, and Dr. Schillinger in Haifa wanted to explain it to us, you yourself, Yoni, said, ‘What is there to explain? She’s dead.’
“Rimona, please. Don’t bring that up now. Not that.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re all right,” said Yonatan uncertainly, his voice betraying a momentary wave of affection. “You’re just a strange girl.”
“It isn’t that, though,” said Rimona. She stared at him, and then, as if fathoming the tip of some obscure idea, she added, “It’s hard for you.”
Yonatan didn’t answer. He laid his broad, ugly hand on the table close to Rimona’s pale, thin fingertips, taking great care not to graze them. The contrast with his own stubby fingers with their hairy knuckles and nails black from engine oil pleased and soothed him. In some enigmatic way it seemed not only just but comforting.
“When do you intend to do it?” asked Rimona.
“I don’t know. In two weeks. Maybe a month. We’ll see.”
“You’ll have to tell your parents. There’ll be all sorts of meetings. Everyone will talk about it. There’ll be lots and lots of talk.”
“Let them talk. What do I care.”
“But you’ll have to talk too.”
“I have nothing to say to them.”
“And I’ll have to prepare all kinds of things for you to take with you.”
“Please, Rimona. Do me a favor. Don’t prepare anything. What’s there to prepare? Nothing. I’ll just throw a few things in my knapsack and take off. I’ll just pick up and go.”
“If you’d rather I didn’t, I won’t.”
“Right. All I want is for you to keep cool during the next few days. And if it’s not too much to ask, to try not to hate me too much.”
“I don’t hate you. You’re mine. Will you be taking Tia?”
“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about her. Maybe. Yes.”
“Do you want to talk some more? No, you don’t.”
“Right.”
She fell silent again. Yet it was not an ordinary silence. It was as if she were listening, as if now that the talking had ceased she could concentrate on hearing alone. After a brief interval she took his hand in both her own, glanced at his watch, and said, “It’s almost eleven now. If you’d like, we can listen to the news and go to sleep. We have to be up early.”
Yonatan felt her fingers on his wrist. A moment later he felt them on his shoulder, because he still hadn’t answered. Was she saying, “Listen to me, Yoni, what I wanted to say was that it’s almost eleven and you’ll miss the news, and besides, you’re terribly tired and so am I, so let’s go to sleep”?
Her fingers were still on his shoulder. His hand reached out and groped for the coffee mug on the table, but when he raised it to his lips, it was empty.
When the baby was stillborn at the end of the previous summer, Yonatan drove straight to the hospital from the citrus groves in his work clothes and sat on a hard bench outside the maternity ward all afternoon and evening. When night came, someone said to him, “Why don’t you go to sleep now, fellow, and come back in the morning.” But he refused to leave and continued sitting there with a crossword puzzle on his knees that couldn’t be solved because it had been misprinted, all its Downs and Acrosses confused. Close to midnight an ugly old nurse with a flattened nose and a hairy black mole like a blind, third eye stepped out of the ward. “Excuse me, nurse,” he said, “maybe you could tell me what’s going on in there.” And she answered him in a voice rubbed raw by cigarettes and worries, “Look, you’re the husband, you know your wife’s not a simple case. We’re doing our best but she’s not a simple case. As long as you’re here, you might as well make yourself some coffee in the staff kitchen. Just don’t leave a mess.” At three in the morning the same god-awful-looking woman appeared again and said, “Lifshitz, try to be strong. Women can have normal births even after more than one such mishap. Two hours ago we decided to get Professor Schillinger himself out of bed for you. He drove all the way from the outskirts of Mount Carmel just in time to save, I literally mean save, your wife’s life. He’s still working on her now. Perhaps he’ll have a few minutes to talk to you when he’s done, but please don’t keep him too long. Tomorrow, I mean today, he has several operations to perform and he isn’t a young man any longer. Meanwhile, make yourself another cup of coffee in the kitchen but please leave it clean.”
Yonatan shouted, “What did you do to her?” The nurse replied, “Young man, I’ll ask you not to shout here. Really, what’s the matter with you? Stop behaving like a caveman. Try to think logically. You’ll see that all that matters is that your wife is alive. Professor Schillinger literally revived her. Instead of being thankful for the blessing you’ve received, you stand here shouting. She’ll be all right and the two of you are young.”
Outside, by the hospital gate, the dusty, decrepit old jeep that belonged to the field hands was waiting for him. Completely forgetting that they would need it for work by four or four-thirty, he started it up and headed southward until he ran out of gas some thirty kilometers past Beersheba. A hot, sandstormy morning was breaking beneath a grimy sky. The desert was gray and shabby, its hills like garbage dumps, and beyond its huge mountain peaks like scrap metal running the length of the horizon. Yonatan left the jeep, walked a short distance, relieved himself, lay down, and fell fast asleep in the sand. Three paratroopers passing by in a command car woke him. Get up, you crazy nut, they said, we thought you’d killed yourself or been slaughtered by the Bedouin. Yonatan looked around him at the filthy, shifting sand dunes polluting the air with dust and at the hideous mountains in the distance.
Yonatan turned on the radio, but the station was off the air. He took a sheet and blankets from the linen chest, and went to the bathroom to wash up and brush his teeth. When he emerged, Rimona had already made their bed and was setting the clock by the twelve o’clock news from the army broadcasting service. The announcer expressed grave concern over the possible results of the conference of Arab military chiefs scheduled for the next day in Cairo. The situation gave signs of rapid deterioration. Yonatan said he was going out to the porch for a last cigarette and then forgot to do so. Rimona undressed in the shower as usual, reappearing in the heavy brown flannel nightgown that resembled a winter coat. When they woke Tia from her snooze at the foot of the table, she arched her back, shook herself, let out a yawn that turned to a thin whine, padded to the front door, and waited to be let out. A few minutes later she was let back in, and the lights were turned out.