I put my arm around him and embrace him. Dina. He leans over me radiantly the lights keep changing next to us. At last. Asi is teaching at the university he’ll go straight home from there. I drag him back to the sidewalk slow-moving cars barely missing our feet He throws his cigarette into the street he’s confused he can’t get over me he leans heavily on my shoulder pedestrians jostle us stopping to watch us meet. I reach the sidewalk first I stand on tiptoe and kiss his face warmly generously. He’s moved he drops his valise at his feet and hugs me with tears in his eyes. It’s about time I laugh it’s about time he repeats mesmerized his eyes shut as he steps up onto the sidewalk.
“Let me carry your bag for you.”
“Don’t even think of it!”
“Then at least your coat and hat.”
“They’re no trouble. I’ll wear the hat.”
He puts it on smiling surveying his surroundings. The crowd presses against us sweeping us along toward Zion Square. We drift aimlessly with it.
“Where to now?”
“To the bus stop and home.”
“Maybe we should have something to drink first. Are you in a hurry?”
“Not at all. It’s just that Asi will be home soon.”
“It won’t kill him to wait. Come, I want to talk with you. Isn’t there some nice café around here? Let’s get out of this mob scene. Were there always such crowds in this place?”
He tucks his arm in mine and youthfully but with surprising brute force spins me around into a dark little street as though he had his bearings exactly he stops by the glass door of a bank walks on turns back crosses to the opposite sidewalk looks up and down and returns to me. “It’s become a bank,” he murmurs. “Let’s go to the Atara then. Is it still there?”
His speech is a quick clipped Hebrew with a slight musical Russian accent.
“When were you last in Jerusalem?”
“Long ago. I skipped over it on my last visit three years ago. That must make it five years or more. Over there, in America, I often wonder about this city. There’s a photograph of it in all the offices of the Jewish community centers and it’s always the same: the towers of the Old City, the Wailing Wall, the Israel Museum, all in the same pretty colors. No one ever photographs this shabby, gray, congested triangle of streets in which the real life of Jerusalem goes on and all those little bombs keep exploding.”
We elbow our way into the Atara Café people turn to stare at us we’re a curious-looking couple. We find a small table at the back and he takes off his hat. A waitress appears he orders coffee for us and gravely asks about the cakes he even decides to have a look at them he consults with the waitress smiling at me from afar. Finally he points a long finger at his choice and disappears into the men’s room. I take out my pad a wave of warm words in my gut.
She gives off warmth she kisses the old man generously. She opens patiently to him listening suspending judgment refusing to categorize. A crushed felt hat a little mustache a warm yet violent exterior. A touch of the hand. His lust for cake. Describe a cake. Between two worlds. His different father.
He sits down next to me his hair combed and slightly damp beads of water still on his brows looking quizzically at the writing pad as it slipped back into my bag.
“Now then. At last I can take a good look at you. Relate the reality to the picture. So here you are. It’s really you. Where did he find you?”
“Asi? In the university, where else.”
“They tried to prepare me for you in their letters. Asi wrote: ‘I think she’s very pretty but that’s not the main thing.’ Just what the main thing was, though, he never said. And Ya’el in her cut-and-dried manner: ‘We don’t know much about her. She’s retiring and doesn’t talk much. Her family is very religious but it doesn’t show on her. Extremely pretty.’ End quote. After the wedding Tsvi wrote me too: ‘The bride is beautiful.’ As if they wanted to give me over there something tangible to take hold of, inasmuch as no one seemed able to explain, not even to himself, why Asa was in such a hurry to get married or who the young woman was. But if she was beautiful, perhaps I’d understand and accept. To tell you the truth, though, it wasn’t much help to me. In fact, it only confused me more. Why, of all people, a religious beauty — those being the two things that everyone referred to? Either the combination was accidental or else it was supposed to tell me something. Was it mere caprice on his part? A misjudgment? Something temporary or a genuine decision? Because when I last saw him three years ago he had another girlfriend, a student from one of his classes. You must have heard of her. A girl with character, they had known each other since childhood. And then out of the blue I get an invitation to a wedding with a religious beauty! What was I to make of it? I’m not blaming anyone, but it was as though I wasn’t wanted. That kind little note that you added at the end didn’t amount to much either. You’ll forgive me, but I’m sensitive to language. As if it didn’t really matter whether I came or not. And there it was winter, in the middle of the academic year, and with no money set aside for the trip. Was I supposed to show up here just to stand arm in arm under the wedding canopy with the woman who tried to murder me while the rest of them stood by… was that it, eh?”
Coffee and cake are brought I’m in a daze I feel dizzy from this fantastical outburst. This sudden show of frankness. This violence. He keeps his eyes on me they’re Asi’s that split-level look but in light brown. The musical direct uninhibited speech that flows so powerfully. They wanted to murder him? My God, what can he be talking about? Did I hear right? Then he must be ill too. What kind of family have I landed in? Delicious tremor of fright. He bends over to sniff his cake sensually. He takes out two greenish pills and swallows them.
“To wake me up. I’m still limping along seven hours behind you and I can’t seem to catch up. I’ve never suffered this way from jet lag before. I suppose I must be getting old, eh?”
He takes a bite of cake.
“I wanted to write a letter of apology to your parents, and of course to you too. I did manage to find out a bit about them through a friend of mine in Jerusalem. I understand that they own a grocery store. That they’re decent, unassuming people. Hungarians?”
He stops to sip his coffee cuts himself another piece of cake and crams it in his mouth wrinkled desire suffusing his face.
“But in the end you didn’t,” I almost whisper.
He seizes my hand.
“I wasn’t sure they’d understand… and to have to start explaining it all… with what they already knew about me… after all, such people put great stress on family life. I wrote a page and threw it away… but I told myself then that one day I still would explain myself. And now here I am alone with you… and you are very lovely… the way you stopped to kiss me with such feeling in the middle of the street, without giving it a second thought! You’re not only beautiful, you have character. And I’m glad that we’re alone and my first meeting with you is tête-à-tête, because Asa would have begun arguing right away. He’s spent his whole life arguing with me from the minute he was born, he already started in the cradle. Well, he’s got his students to argue with now, I suppose…”