At noon she arrived at the garage. Her father must have given her the address. I was lying under a car changing the exhaust pipe and suddenly I saw her standing nervously in the doorway. I got up at once and went to her, oily and dark, but without speaking she signalled to me to carry on with my work. She looked at me with a scared look that pleased me and put me at my ease. It seemed appropriate. I lay down again under the car, working quickly and with concentration, to be rid of the owner of the car, who was watching her now as she paced around among the heaps of junk, glancing at the tools that were scattered about, examining a picture of a nude girl that I’d cut out from a newspaper and put up on the wall. She examined everything carefully, with great interest, even putting her head inside an old engine that lay on the workbench. At last I succeeded in fixing the exhaust pipe and the customer disappeared with his car. I went to her. She didn’t explain why she’d come so suddenly, nor did she ask why I ran away in the morning without saying goodbye. She just wanted to know how an engine works. I explained it to her. She listened gravely, her eyes sad, her voice shaking a little, on the verge of tears. But she asked intelligent questions and let me talk of nothing else. And I talked, I even dismantled an old carburettor to show her its parts, explaining and explaining. I never thought it possible to say so much about the workings of a simple gasoline engine.
Three months later we were married –
She transferred her studies to Haifa and we lived for the first few years in my mother’s house.
I didn’t know if it would last long, sometimes I was sure that in a while she would leave me, would regret it, find someone else to take her in. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if she’d betrayed me within a short time. But our life went smoothly from the start. She was engrossed in her studies and we lived an orderly life. In the mornings she went to college, then to the library. And when my day’s work was done I went there to pick her up. With my old invalid mother she got on splendidly, attentive to her endless chattering, going shopping with her, sympathetic to all her silly ideas, heedful of her advice. When my mother and I realized that she was a very poor cook we gave her other chores around the house, the washing of the dishes or the scrubbing of the floor, tasks she performed with great efficiency, not turning up her nose at any work. Even then I noticed her strange liking for older women. She had several elderly aunts in Haifa to whom she was devoted and frequently visited.
And studying, studying. Always with books, note pads and files. While at the seminary she also enrolled for evening classes at the university. She seemed to be taking an exam almost every fortnight, preparing for it with her fellow students. She would leave me an address where I could pick her up at the end of the day: a library, a private house, a café, sometimes even a public park. And I would arrive there after work, grimy, my clothes dirty, walking heavily through the reading rooms of the library, between the tables, drawing the attention of the readers, finding her and touching her lightly on the shoulder. She would nod her head and whisper, “Just let me finish this page.” I would sit down beside her and leaf through a book lying open on one of the tables, reading and understanding nothing. Once I said to her with a smile, “Perhaps I ought to study something too, change my profession, it isn’t too late.” She was astonished. “Why you?” Why me, indeed. Nothing in her world attracts me particularly.
Although she suggested we abandon these meetings, that she was quite prepared to make her own way home, I insisted on always going to meet her. I wanted to know where she was, who she was seeing, what her daily routine was. Sometimes I was gripped by a strange jealousy, hurrying to close the garage before my work was done, leaving early, deliberately arriving an hour or two before the time we’d agreed on, lying in wait for her on the stairs, or spying on her from a corner of the library. But all in vain. She had no intention of leaving me, it never occurred to her to fall in love with anyone else. Now that she’d found herself a husband and a home, she could be free for the things that really interested her, she could even take a mild interest in public affairs. She was a member of the Students’ Committee and once she organized a successful strike.
In the second year of her studies she’d already found herself a part-time job, teaching in a primary school. At first she had a difficult time there. The children drove her mad, although she never said exactly what the trouble was. She used to come home a little dazed in the evenings. But she tried very hard, preparing for her lessons with care, sometimes even shutting herself up in the bathroom and reciting the lesson aloud, asking questions and answering them. She used to draw illustrations and charts as well, painting big sheets of cardboard, sticking them with dried flowers and making cheerful patterns. As in all practical matters, she had two left hands, and I used to help her a little with these preparations.
All in all, as I saw at once, a complacent and agreeable woman. At pains not to argue with me, treating me with respect, even with a trace of fear. Perhaps a little too talkative, but since I had a habit of subsiding into prolonged silences it was only natural that she should sometimes talk on my behalf as well. We used to make love almost every day or every other day, but for some reason I was usually the only one who was satisfied. Mother was with us all the time, and since we were both out all day, she used to look forward very much to the evenings when she could talk to us. She never left us alone. She used to come into the room without knocking, while we were undressing. If I tried to lock her out she hammered on the door, calling to me in panic. At night she left the lights on in the house, she was a light sleeper and we were sometimes visited in the middle of the night. Sometimes I was forced to wait until the early hours of the morning before waking Asya.
She obeyed me. Sometimes she would whisper in her sleep, her eyes still closed, “One minute, just let me finish this dream,” and I would sit on the end of the bed waiting for her to wake up by herself, and she would smile a final smile, open her eyes and help me to undress her. In the second year, when she started working, it became harder and harder for me to wake her early in the morning before I went out to work. I made love to her while she was still asleep, interfering with her dreams. Then I hired my first Arab worker, Hamid, and I gave him the key to the garage so that he could open up in the morning and receive the first customers. He was the first worker I ever employed, on a temporary basis of course. I paid him a daily wage and could dismiss him if I found him too expensive, but business began to prosper and it wasn’t long before I took on another worker. So we could take our time in the mornings, and listen to her dreams, which were becoming for me increasingly strange. Sometimes we talked about ourselves, how and why we had got married, if we regretted it. She was shocked. “Do you regret it?”
No, of course not, why should I regret it. But sometimes when it seemed to me that I no longer loved her I became terribly depressed. Still, as I say, she was an agreeable woman, she did what I wanted, but I wanted nothing special. That’s it — she aroused in me no special wants. I worked very hard in those days, difficult physical work, but it wasn’t for that reason alone that I was so tired in the evenings.