Yael was tired and stretched out on the divan. Hemdat offered her a pillow. She asked him to sit next to her and ran her hand along the wall. Back when her hair had been long, there had been a nail over her bed. She had slept on her side with her hair wrapped around it and her mother had woken her by undoing it and laying it on the pillow by her head. Everyone said it would grow back.
Yael lay on the divan. “Poets lose their hair on top,” she said, “and philosophers in front. Some men are so bald that they don’t have a single hair left.” There was a man in Dostoevsky with hair on his teeth, but Yael had her doubts about that. “I’ll bet he made it up,” she said. How could anyone have hair on his teeth? However, she also had doubts about her doubts, because her best friend Pnina had a dark white spot right over her heart.
Hemdat’s room was agreeably restful. Yael lay on the divan and Hemdat sat by her side. She opened her eyes, and when their eyes met both turned red as if a blush had passed between them. Hemdat rose determinedly and went to open a window to keep his flushed cheeks from being seen. The lamplight trembled. He hastened to trim the wick. The night blew sweetly through the open window. One summer Yael had spent moonlit nights like these in the lean-to of a field guard in the vineyards of Rehovot. Night cloaked the earth and the foxes barked and the wind blew through the vines and Pizmoni told legends of long ago on a straw mat in the vineyards of Rehovot.
“Tell me a story,” Yael said to Hemdat. “Tell me something you remember.” Right away she forgot what she had asked him and began telling him how hard her first days in Jaffa had been, when she lay ill by herself in a rented room until she was taken to the hospital.
Hemdat covered his eyes to hide his tears and a tear tumbled onto his fingers. How sorry he felt for her and how happy that she was telling him all this. Her eyes shone serenely in dark, green-tinted repose. Calmly she showed him the scar on her arm. The same arm that deserved to be covered with kisses bore the scrawl of a scar. Thank God she was going to Jerusalem, where there was a good hospital for her to get treatment.
Yael glanced at him and said, “Who knows when we’ll see each other again? I want you to tell me something.”
“And what, my child,” asked Hemdat with a smile, “is that?”
Yael ran a hand over her hair. “What are you?”
Hemdat did not answer.
Yael pouted indignantly and said, “I’m not asking if you’re a Zionist or a communist or anything like that. When I was a girl I had a friend who wrote in my class yearbook: ‘Our lives are as pointless as a dead tree.’ Isn’t that a nice way of putting it? He used to say, ‘I don’t care what party you belong to, I care what you are.’ What are you?”
“Me?” said Hemdat, letting his head fall back. “I’m a sleeping prince whose true love puts him back to sleep. I’m love’s beggar walking around with love in a torn old bag.”
5
Yael was still in Jerusalem, and Hemdat puttered about busy Jaffa. What was he doing there? What had brought him to this place? He twisted and turned inside himself, his torment unremitting. He was as lost on the dark plain of time as a solitary groan or a faded spark. His shadow marched before him beneath a profuse sun, up and down winding streets without a blade of grass to relieve their harsh lines. How small it was and what tiny legs it had. A man’s foot could cover the lower half of it.
Behind him, like a solid mirror, was the life he had lived, sunk in the doldrums of melancholy. And as in a mirror, he saw the days ahead, without change or the prospect of change. There was nothing to see but the endless, oppressive emptiness of a mirror reflected in a mirror. He wanted to cry and vent his sorrow, but the sun would have dried his unshed tears. Hope alone kept him going. The black mood would pass, he told himself. He would sleep for twenty-four hours, take a hot bath, and emerge a new man.
He longed for it to be winter. A cold wind would blow, the sea would pound, and he would rise cheerful and fit from a delicious sleep beneath warm blankets. Then would come days in which he would write his great novel. The kettle would boil and hot coffee would froth in his cup. In the garden the citron would flower beneath a brilliant moon, its branches dripping fragrance. The starry sky would sweeten the soft silence and Hemdat would pour the dew of his soul into the sea-blue night.
A caravan of camels plodded by, four-legged porters carrying twice their weight. Behind them came their driver, a two-legged camel crooning to Allah for strength. People passed, among them Mrs. Ilonit. A dentist drove by in a carriage and the coachman cried, “Cheap! Cheap! Cheap! Twelve bishliks a tooth, teeth pulled for twelve bishliks!” Men and women crowded around, and the dentist pulled their teeth.
The souk was teeming. Arabs stood selling cold drinks on crates filled with bottles and glasses. Here and there a white Panama hat gleamed amid the forest of red fezes. Shopkeepers sat in front of their shops, hawking bolts of fabric and colorful clothes in loud voices. Greek vendors hunched over their coals and spits of meat. A big beefsteak draped with gold tinsel hung before a butcher shop, glittering brightly despite the bugs and flies swarming over it. An old Arab straddled a basket of bananas, peeling them unhurriedly for customers who stood spitting out the seeds. Sailors from all over strutted with outthrust chests as if to embrace every female that their hungry eyes devoured. A semicircle of squatting women sold cut flowers and wild lilies.
Everyone was busy but Hemdat, alone in his own hapless world. I can’t simply do nothing, he told himself. I had better go see Pikchin. Perhaps he’ll give me some work or have news of Yael. There were two bishliks left in his pocket. He bought a bunch of roses with one and looked around for a shoeshine man. Two ran for Hemdat’s shoes and started to fight over them. One took his shoeshine stand and hurled it at the other’s head. While the blood was running down the second man’s face, a third came along and grabbed Hemdat’s feet. Hemdat threw him his last coin, and the man let out a whistle and scampered off with it.
Everyone, everyone, thought Hemdat self-improvingly, is doing something. How could he remain idle, faced with such a spirit of enterprise? He wanted to work, to accomplish. He would make lots of money before Yael returned to Jaffa. He had been a fool to throwaway a good job.
Hemdat entered Pikchin’s office just as an armless man was carried in and laid on the couch in the waiting room, like a broken wagon wheel waiting to be fixed. Hemdat sat without moving, embarrassed to have the full use of his limbs. He crossed his legs and looked out to sea. A southbound ship was making for the harbor. Soon it would anchor with another group of immigrants, new faces with new hopes and the same old problems.
Dr. Pikchin attended to the amputee and then sat down with Hemdat and dictated a few letters. Hemdat reached home exhausted. His head ached and he could barely move his legs. Yet even when he flopped down weakly on his bed and fell asleep, his nerves kept crawling like worms. Something was the matter with his brain. Perhaps it needed to be pulled by a dentist. He sat upright in bed, terrified of going mad. What would become of him? One morning he would awake to find that he was out of his mind.
Although Hemdat came on his father’s side from a distinguished old family, its vital force had run down in him, its last hope. Of course, he was young and had hardly lived yet. But did not Rabbi Nahman say that some people had lived more by the age of eighteen than others at seventy?