“I have to get going,” Marc said. “While it’s still quiet on the road. We’ll talk about it some other time.” He gave his girlfriend a soothing little kiss — she was a brave woman. Then he walked away. In the doorway, he turned and waved. And although the mother didn’t really have enough strength to do so, she waved back.
Marc closed the door and walked briskly to his car. He was looking forward to this. They could stop along the way someplace, at a romantic restaurant.
HER DAY’S WORK was over. In the cellar where she lived, Lucy’s owner chained her to a heating pipe, so she wouldn’t run away and do crazy things.
The owner looked at her for a moment as she settled down in her sleeping bag. “You’re lucky,” he said tenderly. “Other people have to sit in the car for hours to get to work. But where you are is where your work is; you take your work with you everywhere, no matter where you go. You’re a privileged person.”
He sighed deeply a few times and left Lucy alone. It wasn’t easy, always having to find new people from exotic countries to massage the working population. They worked long hours, true enough, but they were better off than in their own countries, and they never had to sit in traffic.
AWROMELE AND XAVIER were in the back of the Alfa. It was cozy in Marc’s car. Marc was sorry that Xavier wasn’t sitting next to him, but in Amsterdam there would be time enough for farewells. Never give up hope, he told himself. Looking on the bright side of life was half the battle.
They drove down the street. “Here we go,” he said, and looked at the boys in the mirror. They were holding each other tight.
THE MOTHER WAS standing in the kitchen. The blood had started clotting; her pajama pants were sticking to the wound. Later, on she would have to pull it loose. That felt unpleasant. She put it off for a little while.
She noticed that the house was quiet, and because there was no one at home anymore, she lay down on the cold kitchen floor. That was nice, to lie down for a bit. She had to recover from the act of love. She closed her eyes.
Across town, the rabbi’s wife awoke. She tiptoed immediately to her eldest son’s room; the bed had not been slept in. Although she knew it was no use, she looked under the blanket and then, just to be sure, under the bed. “Awromele,” she whispered. “Awromele, are you there?” As though he might be hiding in the closet.
Then she went back to her bedroom and shook the rabbi. “You ran him out of the house,” she said, “you chased him away, you’ve ruined us.” She pounded her fists on his chest, but all he did was mumble: “Leave me alone. What do want from me? Stop blaming me for everything. I’m not God.”
IT WAS STILL EARLY when the Egyptian drove to his kebab restaurant, to prepare himself for the meeting with the woman who thought he smelled of desert and dogs. He could hardly wait. His own wife was still asleep; he had left a little note for her in the living room. He had fed the dogs.
He tapped his hands on the wheel of his old Mercedes, to the rhythm of Um Kalsum. Something was reminding him that he was alive. Amid everything that was dead — and almost everything was dead — there it was all of a sudden, life. Overwhelming, almost incomprehensible, but pleasant, terribly pleasant.
He opened the restaurant, sat down in his regular spot at the back with a few Egyptian papers he hadn’t read yet and several ledgers that he kept up for the sake of appearances. Despite everything, they pleased him, the ledgers — the appearance of order seemed like quite a feat to him at his age. He didn’t know what he was looking forward to, but he was looking forward, there was no doubt about that.
The city was slowly waking up. The Egyptian made coffee, and thought about opening early, since he was here anyway. He liked seeing the customers come in, the schoolchildren, the tourists doing Europe on a budget that left little room for a healthy diet, the office clerks in a hurry. Because he was hungry, he looked in the fridge and found a plate of falafel balls he had made the night before. He was thinking about the woman who had seduced him for her country only a short time before, and who’d had to admit that he was different from the others she’d caressed on her country’s behalf.
Since he was waiting for her anyway, for the woman who had given him something he had never received before, he decided there was no reason not to fry up a few falafel balls. No better breakfast than falafel. He used to eat them for breakfast all the time, back when he had just started the kebab place.
He picked up the can of oil and poured a big puddle of it into the fryer. He had enough oil — he always kept up his stocks. He turned on the radio. The music was something he vaguely recognized, something Spanish, and he tried to whistle along with it. He thought about the parties he’d gone to in France when he worked there, parties where the music was too loud and there was too much smoke. Yes, he had been a partygoer once. Long ago.
He watched the oil heat up slowly. It took so long for oil to heat up. He liked to watch it. He rubbed his cheek; last night, before going to bed, he had shaved carefully, and even used the nail scissors to trim the hairs in his nostrils.
The Spanish song began to irritate him. He turned off the radio and picked up a tape — the piano concerto by Beethoven, always a good choice. He turned on the tape player and sat down in a chair beside the fryer, a plate of raw falafel balls in his hand. He tried to summon up a picture of the woman who had come to visit him yesterday. He didn’t have anything to tell her, nothing new, nothing she didn’t already know; he was the informant without a story. At first she would be disappointed, but she would understand. She wouldn’t mind. His story was his body. That’s what she would say to him, too, as she held him in her arms. Your body is your story, your smell is the information you’ve collected for us.
IN BASEL IT was now ten o’clock in the morning. The mother lay in her kitchen and dreamed about her son as a baby, about how he had sat on her lap, how she had breastfed him, her wedding party, the knife. The dreams were brief and vivid. Occasionally she awoke with a start and realized that she was lying on the floor of her kitchen, but that didn’t bother her. Nothing was worth getting bothered about. She didn’t get up. It was good this way, the way it should always be.
THE OIL IN the fryer was slowly growing hot, gradually reaching the point where the frying could start. The Egyptian dropped in the falafel balls one by one. He was almost happy. It was wonderful to watch them turn brown. The piano concerto soothed him; he had nothing to worry about; it hadn’t been a mirage; he knew what she had said to him, and she would know what he smelled like. She would be drawn to his smell. She could pick him out of the crowd, she could locate him blindly.
IN THE CLASSROOM, the tall boy and his friends were bent over a math exam. They were concentrating; for the moment, their thoughts were not on Kierkegaard or the girl with braces whom they’d recently taken under their wing. But halfway through the assignment, the tall boy’s thoughts began wandering anyway. Next time I see her, I have to tell her that, he thought, the girl with the braces. It’s not Snoopy who understands us. I have to tell her that: Girlie, it’s not Snoopy who understands us.
THERE WAS A KNOCK on the door. Maybe she’s early, the Egyptian thought. Yes, she was early. She couldn’t wait to see him, either, the informant unlike other informants. She had raced to him, on a moped perhaps, or one of those Italian scooters, the kind you saw in commercials. He couldn’t remember what the commercials were for, only that the people in them raced around on scooters and found each other.