“Fine. He actually seemed in good spirits.”
“Yes. He seems happy.”
Gaddi ran up to father and poked him in the back. Father bent and hugged him warmly, then picked him up and kissed him with an emotion that surprised me. The toy looked excited too and kept pointing at the locomotive that he held. They returned to us with their arms around each other. Ya’el got up to hug father. His face was wet, his hair damp. There was a faint smell of vomit about him.
“I didn’t feel good. I don’t know what happened to me all of a sudden.”
“It was your fear,” blurted Kedmi without looking at him.
“Fear of what?”
“Never mind…”
A nauseating man with a nauseating sense of humor.
Father made a move to sit down but Kedmi began giving him orders too.
“Go eat something. It won’t help any to be hungry.”
“Sit, father,” I said. “I’ll bring you something. What would you like?”
“Just tea and cake or something. But wait a minute…”
He reached for his wallet and took out some dollar bills.
“I don’t need them,” I said.
Kedmi hovered jocularly around us. “You still haven’t changed your dollars, eh, Yehuda? You’re a rational man, you know a dollar changed tomorrow is worth two changed today…”
Father interrupted him short-temperedly. “Where is there a bank around here?”
“Not now… not now…’’ we all exclaimed together.
“But I have to. I must.”
“Come here, I’ll change them for you. How much do you want?”
Father gave Kedmi a hundred-dollar bill. Kedmi held it up to the light, grinning impishly. “There are counterfeits making the rounds.” He picked up a newspaper to check the exchange rate and showed it to father.
“Fine, whatever you say,” mumbled father with loathing.
I went to get lunch and returned with it. I said nothing, watching them remotely from some tenuous, still point inside me. Gaddi stared at the loaded tray that I’d brought. Father forced some pound notes on me. Kedmi grinned. Ya’el kept her eyes silently on father. Where is Dina now? People came and went. Dishes clattered. Jerusalem seemed a world away. The morning’s lesson. Kedmi scurried about, conversing with people, scanning newspapers. At one point he furtively slipped me some document. “If you can catch her between the acts, see if you can’t gently get her to sign this. It’s a copy of the agreement that I gave her. If you don’t stay cool, who will?”
I said nothing.
At two o’clock we were standing by the train. Kedmi put us aboard as though we were luggage, finding us our seats, buying us our tickets. He’d put father’s valise in his car and given him a yellow cardboard file holder which said Chief Rabbinate on it. There was nothing he hadn’t made his business in his revoltingly jovial way. How did the two of them live together? But Ya’el was her usual patient, passive self, thoroughly held in check, always ready to give in, to let him poke his nose everywhere, even go through her purse.
“Why do you all look so alarmed?” he called to us from the platform. “Don’t worry. It’s an honest-to-goodness train. It will be an experience. I’ll come to get you at five, five-thirty. Gaddi, don’t forget your locomotive on the train. And ask your uncle to show you around it.”
He waved at us and departed, leaving us out of time in the still, empty train. A hell of an experience to have to go through for the boy’s sake. What was I doing here? I wondered. I felt paralyzed, dog-tired. I watched Ya’el open a large plastic bag and take out a big blue woolen shawl and a flowery robe to give father to give mother as presents. He accepted them gratefully, and together they removed the Israeli labels. Slowly the train began to move. It crept along through the freight yards of the port, among cranes, past ugly factories, warehouses and grim garages, stopping for no reason and starting up again, nearing some blocks; of public housing. Father was restless. He chain-smoked, asked about relatives, sighed, combed his hair. “I won’t say a word there,” he promised again. “I’ll let you do the talking. Asa will go first.” He opened the cardboard file holder that Kedmi had given him and studied its contents.
I took Gaddi for a tour of the train. We walked to the last car and, from a rattling passage by the rear window, watched the unweeded rails slowly receding. The boy stood silently by me, a softer edition of Kedmi but terribly earnest, the locomotive still in one hand and the other on his chest. He stood glued to the window. I took out the document that Kedmi had given me and leafed through it. Their divorce agreement. Brutal legal phraseology spelled here and there by sentimental cliches. The last page enumerated the joint property to be divided. With what perverse pleasure Kedmi had listed all the furniture, inventoried everything, estimated its value down to the last cent. I shook with anger. Where is Dina now? What am I going to do with her?
It took us a ridiculous hour to reach Acre. At the station we found a taxi and drove to the rabbinate building in the walled seaport, not far from the old citadel. “Here you’ll leave it to me,’’ announced father with a sudden show of firmness. “It won’t take me long.” And so we waited in the taxi, bus stops and felafel stands around us, old stones from the citadel piled on the curb. The driver got out to clean the windshield. Gaddi drove his locomotive back and forth in the front seat. Ya’el sat huddled next to me with a guilty look on her face. Does she ever actually think? Think, Ya’el, think, we used to beg her whenever she would suddenly go blank.
“You know… he’s going to have a baby over there… with that woman…’’
“Yes. He told me.”
“Have you told Tsvi?”
“He knows.”
“What did he say?”
“He just laughed.”
“He did? Why didn’t he come with us today? I phoned him last night but got no answer.”
“I spoke to him.”
“Why didn’t he come with us?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t want them to get divorced. He likes having their apartment…” She didn’t finish the thought. But it was Kedmi’s anyway, not hers.
“Is that what he said?”
“No. All he said was that he didn’t like hospitals.”
“I couldn’t sleep last night. I kept tossing in bed. That baby slays me…. Who would have thought it of him?”
She didn’t understand, though. Her eyes grew large with wonder.
“What makes you say that?”
I shook with anger again. My lost time. I missed Jerusalem as though it were years since I had last seen it. Father was taking his time. The driver had gone to sit in a nearby café. I glanced at the vaults of the citadel, at a strip of sea on the horizon. I opened the car door.
“Come on, Gaddi. I’ll show you something.”
We strode along the seawall until we came to some steps that zigzagged down to a recessed apse at one end of it. A dry, gray day, with a hot desert wind from the east. The U-shaped bay was a blur, the Carmel range a purple mass. I grasped Gaddi’s fat hand to keep him from slipping on the guttered stones, the locomotive still under his arm, explaining to him what we saw and showing him the hills across the water where he lived, although he preferred looking at a column of flame rising from the oil refinery on the bay to flicker in the foul wind.
1799. From a hillock nearby Napoleon gazed down on these walls, reached out his hand to them. Had he wished to take them or merely to comprehend, to palpate the pulsebeat of history with his sensitive touch? And then he retreated. This was not the place. Never mind. It was through this trivial defeat that he came to know himself, his true powers, the mission entrusted him. That he found the necessary point of connection. The last years of the eighteenth century were where I must begin.