At last he switched off the radio. His face looked serious, severe.
“Do you study in a seminary too?”
I told him what I did.
“What is your father’s name?”
I told him.
He knew at once that he had died about a year and a half before, even though we hadn’t published an obituary in the newspapers because of the war. He added some dry, precise details about my father.
“Did you know him personally?” I was amazed.
No, they had never met, but he knew all about him, as if he had a personal file in front of him.
And he left me to myself — I couldn’t sleep anymore. At five in the morning I got up, folded the sheets, I had to return to Haifa to open the garage at seven. It was only a few months since I’d reopened the garage, which had been closed during the war. Competition was tough at the time and one had to work very hard not to lose customers.
I went outside. A hazy summer morning. I strolled about the neglected garden, hungry, drowsy after my uncomfortable night, watching the newspaper delivery boys arriving one after another and throwing at the doorstep all the morning papers, in all the languages. I wanted to leave, but not without saying goodbye, and I didn’t know which was her room. In the end I tapped lightly on one of the windows.
It wasn’t long before she came out to me, her hair combed, wearing a light morning dress, her face radiant. She came close to me and said seriously, almost solemnly, “I dreamed about you.” And she described a dream that was clear, orderly, logical, almost impossibly so. A dream that could be taken to mean that she was telling me directly — “I am willing to marry you.”
ASYA
The old cabin of the movement, but a little larger. The time early evening, winter twilight. They seemed to be preparing for a play, some of them were wandering about in patchwork costumes, straw hats, coats made from blankets, rope belts. Someone paced about with make-up on his face. One of the young men was writing the music for the play, and the girls crowded around him as he sat on the floor in an oriental position, bent over an exercise book, writing the words at great speed. They hummed a tune and he wrote words that were not just words, but words in which music was hidden. From the corner where I stood I could see above the heads of the girls the melodious words that were written at such haste. But they were still waiting for somebody to arrive. The star? The producer? Somebody important, somebody precious, without whom the play could not go ahead. Listen, the sound of a train approaching, stopping for a moment and continuing on its way. We rushed outside to meet him. And he really had arrived. The train that had stopped for a moment and disappeared again, leaving only the shining tracks behind it, had put down a big hospital bed on the platform. Somebody was lying in it. We crowded around him, he was sick, not actually sick, exhausted rather. Something had really exhausted him. Postnatal exhaustion, he had sired sons, but he was happy as well, proud of himself, a weak smile of triumph on his pale face, a combination of Zaki and somebody else, lying there in khaki clothes, under an army blanket.
And the group began to fuss around him, carrying the bed into the cabin, happy all, a collective happiness, because the babies were there too, like a pile of sacks. Piled to one side, quiet and smiling. They were little people already, not newborn infants, they had hair and teeth, and were dressed in little romper suits with buttons and buckles. They put them up on a wooden stage, under a baggage canopy, and there was general confusion and happiness, and only this solitary, independent childbearer was perplexed, sad even. And I stood to one side, feeling deserted. Did he not love me once? Lying now supported on a pillow, watching the crowd dance around the children born of no mother, the children borne by him for the sake of all, that was the point. I approach him cautiously, without looking at him, watching instead the children, who lie there immobile, their lower limbs tied tight. I know that they have some terrible, hidden defect. The people pick them up and put them back, choosing them, urging me too to take one of them, and I see there lying in the corner a child almost fully grown, an aged foetus, a cataract in his eye, stretching out his little hands to me.
“Quickly, quickly,” I hear around me —
ADAM
So at least I understood. Disturbed and excited, standing there in the withered, neglected garden, on a crisp summer morning, leaning on the wing of my little car, watching the girl who stood there in front of me, both strange and familiar, watching her serious face, the sharp face of a bird, the thick lock of hair falling on her breast, studying her body, her sandalled feet, the shape of her legs, while listening to a clear and vivid dream, which for a moment I was sure that she’d invented as a means of declaring her love. I didn’t know then what became clear to me after I married her, that such are her dreams, clear and lucid, that she always remembers them, to the smallest detail. So different from my dreams, which are rare and unfathomable.
We agreed to keep in touch –
But I returned to her that same evening, this time bringing pyjamas, shaving gear, a toothbrush and a change of shirt. Already in love with her, as if by secret orders, my love required no effort. It was enough for me to remember the girl whom I roused that night in the tent, who seemed to me infinitely more beautiful than this girl. In love not with her, nor with the other, but with something between the two.
She was a little surprised to see me returning that same day. Her father, who was pacing about like a caged lion, stopped for a moment and looked at me, then resumed his pacing. (He paced around the house like this for many years, hardly ever stepping outside, not wanting to see his friends. He was proud and angry with the world, sure that he was right, that an injustice had been done to him.) Only her mother, a gentle, delicate old woman with weak eyes, came to me and shook my hand lightly. Most of that evening we spent in her room. She talked about her studies and her plans and what was going on in the world. She was interested in politics, in equality, in socialist policies, she mentioned the names of leaders and events, in possession of all kinds of secret, unknown information which seemed to her of the highest importance. Then I realized how those long years of hard and solitary work in the garage had diminished my curiosity. At last I touched her, took her in my arms, kissing her lips and her breasts, tasting the bitter taste of soap.
That night once again a bed was made up for me on the old sofa in the living room. At two or three in the morning again the deposed leader came in, in his torn pyjamas, his face on fire, bending over the old radio set and turning the knobs, passing from station to station, searching for the mention of Israel or his own name in the distant void. I curled up silently, pulling the sheet over my head, asking myself if I really loved her. When he finished and went back to his room I couldn’t sleep anymore. In the end I got up, dressed quietly, shaved and went to her room to wake her, but she was in a deep sleep, curled up, probably dreaming. Do I really love her, I never stopped wondering, wouldn’t it be better to escape from here before it’s too late? I left a brief note and drove with the first light back to Haifa.