But something is bothering Abadi.
“Excuse me, in which works of music is the harp so vital? I usually don’t hear its sound.”
“You apparently don’t really know how to listen,” she chides the engineer. “But if you were to remove the sounds of the harp from a symphony by Mahler or Tchaikovsky, it would totally flatten the tone and resonance.”
He absorbs the correction graciously and seeks to express interest:
“How many strings did you say in a harp?”
“Forty-seven, and they create a hundred and forty-one tones.”
“So many? How is that possible?”
“Because a harp also has seven pedals.”
“So that’s the thing… the secret…”
He keeps chewing politely and gathers sandwich crumbs with the tips of his fingers. He is her age, and has already inherited her father’s post. He’s a nice-looking man with smooth black hair, in contrast with the baldness or shaven heads of many of his peers, and his chin sports a tiny bohemian beard, not typical of a municipal engineer. He looks at his watch and wants to continue the job, but Noga stops him:
“Just a minute. Tell me, did my father ever mention me?”
“When?”
“Whenever, the way people talk about their families.”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t detect a certain tone of criticism or disappointment?”
“Disappointment? Why?” The word disturbs him. “Disappointment over what?”
“That I didn’t want children.”
He seems taken aback. He stands up and carefully drops the remains of the sandwich in the trash and says, “Now we’ll attach the hook to the little window.”
But the small window in the bathroom refuses to comply. The frame is swollen and rotted from years of steam and moisture, and refuses the grip of any screw. Moreover, the light in the room is too dim. Abadi goes to the parents’ bedroom, takes the reading lamp from beside the electric bed, connects it to an extension cord and hands it to Noga, so she can assist him in the battle against the rebellious window. He ingeniously nails two pieces of wood to the window and screws in the hook, which he admits will function more symbolically than practically to protect her from the little invaders from the upper floor.
“This will do until you go back to Europe, but the new tenant will have to replace the whole thing.”
“There will be no new tenant,” Noga says quietly, lighting Abadi’s face with the lamp. “Ima will return, and nothing will come of the experiment.”
And she turns off the light.
Nineteen
SHE WATCHES HIM CLOSELY as he gathers his tools, detaches and winds up the extension cord and returns it to his tool chest. Then she follows him into her parents’ bedroom, where he puts the reading lamp back in place. And before he takes his leave, she says:
“How can I repay you?”
“Don’t be silly.”
But she insists:
“I’m not being silly. You barely ate my sandwich, and the carpenter is entitled to some sort of gift.”
Even as he waves his hands in refusal, she opens her parents’ emptied clothes closet and shows him her father’s new suit, and the shoes and socks below.
“Ima gave away tons of clothes, my father’s and hers, to the neighborhood charities, but she felt sorry for this suit, and rightly so, because he hardly wore it. Honi is unwilling to wear his father’s clothes, so before this good suit also flies away to some religious creature, you take it. Knowing that it’s you wearing the suit would please him.”
“Please who?” He is shocked.
“Abba.” She laughs. “If he’s still interested in his suits wherever he is now.” She removes the jacket from its hanger with a flourish. “Try it on, don’t be shy. What can happen?”
She expects him to resist, but Abadi, as if hypnotized in the gathering dusk, slips his arms into the sleeves of the jacket, which is too wide for his shoulders, and studies his reflection in the mirror with a mixture of concern and satisfaction. She then grips him by the shoulders and pulls the jacket tighter from behind, to demonstrate how it might be altered to fit his narrower frame.
And though Abadi is embarrassed by the demonstration, he is not averse to the surprising offer. “Yes, maybe, if no one else wants it.”
“There’s no one else.”
“If that’s really so, then rather than have the jacket go to a total stranger, I’ll take it to the tailor and wear it to remember him by.”
“Yes, to remember him by,” she happily exclaims. “But also the pants, because it’s a suit.”
“The pants?” He laughs uneasily. “No, the pants are undoubtedly too short.”
“Says who? At least try. It’s not right to separate the two.”
Now he is upset. This he didn’t expect. Aware of her power, she firmly insists. “Why not? We won’t know if you don’t try them on.” Now he smiles slightly, his embarrassment giving way to comprehension, even excitement, and, still wearing the jacket, he bends over and sheds his shoes, undoes his belt, removes his pants and puts them on a chair, and takes from her the trousers of a man of seventy-five, who a year or two before his death indulged a desire to own a tailor-made black suit of the finest wool gabardine, perhaps to blend in with the black-suited Orthodox of the neighborhood. Although it’s clear that the trousers will be short on him and too big in the waist, Noga persists, and as if she were an artist of needle and thread as well as the harp, she gets down on her knees and shows him how the surplus fabric in the cuffs can be used to lengthen the legs, and then pinches the extra cloth at each of his hips. And deliberately or otherwise, she can feel that her fingers, the strong, precise fingers of a harpist, also know how to arouse desire.
“Here, it can be made narrower. It would be a shame to separate them… a shame to give it away…”
Unnerved by his erection, Abadi seeks a quick getaway. “No, it won’t work,” he mumbles, and wriggles free of her hands, climbs out of the trousers of his beloved late mentor, tries to conceal his tumescence as he hurriedly puts on his own pants and tosses the suit jacket on the electric bed. “No, not this either,” he says, blushing, and picks up his toolbox and says goodbye without a look. And she knows he won’t be back, even if the bolt and hook fall off and the electric bed falls silent.
Twenty
IN THE MORNING SHE WENT to buy food at the corner grocery and inquired, for the first time since her arrival in Jerusalem, about her monthly account. “You don’t owe us anything, Nogaleh,” said the owners, an elderly couple who have known her since childhood. “Your brother left his credit card information, and what you buy is immediately paid for. Rest easy, sweetheart, and in the future, don’t hesitate to buy things you didn’t dare buy till now, because your credit here is unlimited.”
This unlimited credit makes her angry, but since she doesn’t want to annoy her brother, who for good reason has begun to fear for the outcome of his experiment, she simply decides that from now on she will purchase with her unlimited credit only basic necessities, and anything else, despite the distance, she will bring home from Mahane Yehuda in her mother’s old shopping cart.
After lunching on a few delicacies from the shuk, she prepares for the television temptation of the little boys. She lowers blinds and draws curtains to darken the apartment, takes off her clothes and puts on a light robe, alert to the clatter of the shoes that now begin to scamper up and down the stairs, accompanied by the wild chortling of the dizzy little tzaddik. Soon, she knows, the boys will silently approach the front door and listen closely to determine whether or not the tenant is home, or perhaps asleep.