“Hey, take it easy. I know you’ve had a hard day.”
“Can I try your patience some more and ask you for a favor?”
“Yep,” he said. He had always liked Gary Cooper and it came as a heavy blow to him when that handsome old fellow died. I remember the day; we went to a movie theater on Ben Yehudah Street, and it seemed hard to believe that all the life had gone out of that face brightening up the screen. The whole audience was sad and unusually quiet. I expected any moment someone would come up to me and say: “It’s not true. Some goddamn drunken reporter made it up.”
“What’s the favor?” he asked.
“Can you help me brush up on my English, old buddy?” I said. “I’ve landed a job.”
“You’ve landed a job?” he repeated in a voice full of joy. “Does this mean you won’t have to leave for …”
“On the contrary, that’s where the job is. I got a letter from my friend in Australia.”
“And …?”
“I’m going.”
“Oh, my god!” Robert said.
“Yep. He’s found me a job in some local company. And, of course, he’s sponsoring me. They’ve even agreed to pay my way, something they never do. I’ve no idea how he managed it. He’s probably not only had to vouch for me, but also given them an IOU. I’ll have to sign a five-year contract.”
“What kind of job is it?”
“When I was in the consulate today,” I said, “the officer who has been processing my application …”
“I asked you what kind of a job,” Robert broke in.
“In a mine!” I shouted in anger. “What did you expect?
That they’d ask me to head the Baptist Church in Melbourne, for Christ’s sake?”
“No, I didn’t. But I don’t think a mine is the best place for someone whose field is eighteenth-century literature.” He fell silent; I watched his face in wonder as it slowly turned toward the woman. God, he was absolutely great: the dismay and shock he wanted somebody to witness and his confidence as an actor were truly incredible. Looking straight into her eyes, his face transfixed with horror, he said to me, “You, a specialist in literature of the Enlightenment, to work in …” and then he stopped, unable to go on, as if suddenly he seemed totally helpless and everything was unworthy of words.
Now it was my turn to be silent for a while, so that his words would have time to sink in. Finally I glared at him, and, remembering to speak softly, asked, “Do you think I had any choice?”
He turned to her much more swiftly than you would expect, considering his bulk, and slowly unclenched his fist. In the middle of his sweaty palm lay a crushed booklet of paper matches. You crush matches like that unconsciously, in a spasm of internal anger. “Do you have …?” he mumbled and broke off.
“A light?” she asked.
“Yes.” He took the lighter she gave him and lit a cigarette. But he didn’t return the lighter to her at once; he sat squeezing it tightly in his sweaty hand, staring straight ahead as if he’d suddenly gone blind. He was pretending to be utterly shocked by my decision, even though what I said was the text he had prepared for me.
“Give the lady back her lighter,” I said. The sound of my voice brought him back to life. He returned the lighter, and although I couldn’t see his face, I knew it was filled with shame and embarrassment.
“I’m very sorry,” he said.
I glanced at her; her face also reflected embarrassment at having overheard our conversation; and I could see pity in her eyes.
“Don’t be,” she said. She smiled, and it was at that moment that something Robert calls the invisible bond of friendship joined our hearts together.
He turned to me with a crazy look on his face, a look that was the natural reaction to the sight of a gentle and sad feminine face.
“Now you want me to teach you English,” he said in a high shrill voice. “Me, the guy who has gone over the whole of Elizabethan literature with you, who has even translated Macbeth’s monologue for you.”
“That won’t be useful to me anymore,” I said. “And please, stop shouting. They aren’t going to pay me for knowing Shakespeare, but for pushing wagons of coal. Or whatever else the job demands.”
“What about your future?”
“My future? That’s a word I won’t be needing anymore.”
He jumped up from his chair and stood in front of me. “Why don’t you just kill yourself?” he said, his fat lips quivering. “Don’t you think it would be better for you?”
Hearing this, I stood up also. “I didn’t ask you for advice. When the time comes, I’ll know what to do. Right now all I want from you are a few hundred measly words which come in handy.”
I gave him a violent push and walked away, my back and shoulders shaking with emotion. I dived into the sea and swam around for a while. The water was still warm, but you could feel that in an hour or so the evening cool would come and give the sweltering city a moment’s grace. I thought of what Robert was doing now, thought of him just getting up from the sand. I didn’t have to to turn around: I knew the script.
“I’m very sorry,” Robert says. “I’ve never seen him so upset.”
“Has something happened?”
He gives her a dead stare. He doesn’t understand the question.
“Has something happened?” she asks again, her voice tremulous.
“I thought you heard,” he says.
“Your friend is planning to go away?”
“He isn’t planning, he’s made up his mind. This is the worst thing that could happen. You know, he belongs to a dying species. He’s one of the few who always do what they say. Poor fool, he doesn’t even know how unfit he is for surviving in this world.”
“Aren’t you exaggerating?” she asks. “Being a miner isn’t the end of the line, you know. One of my cousins …”
“He’s not one of your cousins!” Robert shouts, interrupting her rudely. He is angry at her for not being able to grasp the simplest facts. “You don’t know what a fool he is. For five years, while studying for his degree, he worked nights as a cab driver to support himself. He studied literature. His father was a tyrant who didn’t want him to study and refused to help him even once during all that time. And yet when he got his degree, he came back home and said to his father … You know what he said?”
“What?” she asks.
“Well, he said, ‘Dad, I …’” And then Robert falls silent and just waves his hand. It’s not even a wave, just a shadow of that gesture, signifying utter dejection.
“Come on, what did he say?” she asks.
“Forget it. It doesn’t matter now, does it? Did you hear what that fool said about his future?” Robert is mocking me now, but in the way you mock someone you love deeply. “‘Future’s a word I won’t need anymore.’ Shit! The worst thing is I believe him. I believe him because nobody knows him like I do.”
And that poor sad cunt will never know what I said to my tyrant of a father, who sometimes was a lawyer and sometimes a doctor; for the cunts from New York he was a lawyer, for the ones from California a doctor. Or maybe the other way around. It’s unimportant. The beautiful thing is, she’ll never know what I said. And Robert doesn’t know either, but he’s taught me to appreciate the power of an unfinished conversation, which can be resumed naturally and easily after a few hours or even a few days. My real father was a good and gentle man who died when I was six. But a father like that was absolutely worthless, Robert said. “Forget him. Your father has to be straight out of a Dickens novel. Maybe even a religious fanatic who drove your mother to an early grave. Leave your parents to me.” I soon learned one of my uncles was a madman who had murdered his wife in a sudden attack of jealousy, that my parents were both alcoholics, and later — this was when we were hustling the girl from Boston — that I didn’t have a father at all but was the illegitimate son of a poor washerwoman who knew nothing about my father except that he was a corporal on summer maneuvers with his regiment. “The unfortunate child grew up unwanted like a weed and a sore in everybody’s eye,” Robert told the poor bitch, pointing at me. Both of them had tears in their eyes.