The glistening asphalt of the road expanded our hearts, especially since it stretched on and on, beyond the twists and turns in the road that hid more road, stretching out before us with all the beautiful, tremulous sadness of the unknown.
We stepped in the scandalous silence of a pact of love, be what it may, faithful at last to the same vision, the same oath, the same story that had resigned itself to being a thread, a remnant, a vestige, a flicker: the rain, the unforgettable experience of the rain.
It took us time to understand it, this experience, its particular and magical purpose as we walked: it came down our heads in fine, continuous threads, in tiny drops, and then, when it approached the surface of the road, about eighteen inches above the road, it changed direction and drifted upward again, not touching the ground at all, collecting in the air, at about the height of our knees, and turned into a thin, airy lake, flat as pita bread, with no dimension of depth, shedding an unworldly radiance, golden and transparent.
“Allah yistor,” God help us, said the mother, looking at our dry feet on the dry road, whose smooth glittering appearance came not from the rain but from the reflection cast by the thin lake of rainwater that lay above it like a polished glass roof, and she repeated “Allah yistor,” in a dry, matter-of-fact tone without dread, awe, or any other excessive emotion, since where we were at that moment and what we saw in the rain left no room for excess, or the hollowness of heart that gives rise to it. We walked for more than two hours, knowing the time by instinct and not by the clock, crossing the thin lake cutting the line of our knees, whose rainwater retraced its course and rose into the sky, back to the rain clouds, without diminishing or changing its volume or radius, so dedicated was it to the precise and unchanging mindfulness of its measure and its quality.
CLOCK
FOR THREE DAYS before he died, Maurice listened around the clock to passages from the Koran read on the radio. Corinne said that he turned his back and died, waited for death with his face to the wall, “or else death was the wall,” she said after thinking for a minute. She also said that after the mother died, he didn’t want to live a minute longer, and he even said, to her or others, the words “the husband” is supposed to say: “After her I have nothing left,” Corinne said that he said, and even if he didn’t in so many words, explicitly and out loud, his whole being said it, giving a convoluted, arabesque meaning to the words “after her” with their inference to “before her,” as if there really had been a “before,” whose presence had vanished, and an “after.”
It wasn’t as if his hollowing out — his matchstick limbs eroded in his white flannel underwear — was completely a consequence of the death of the mother: it had been coming for a long time and was only waiting for her death to complete itself, to reach the remote and godforsaken suburbs of his body and fill them with emptiness.
In the democracy of suffering and diminishment decreed by old age, he could be considered a privileged citizen, because “he was used to it,” said Corinne: for years he had been practicing solitude, illness in solitude, vagrancy, hardship, with “nobody to make him a cup of tea.”
Actually there was. Two or three times a day the boy Dror dropped by his room in the Hatikva quarter, brought him things, delivered things for him, made tea, or, as Maurice liked to say, “a little tea.”
“Behayatak a little tea,” Maurice asked him, following his every movement in the kitchenette opening off the room, from his cognac-colored leather armchair, crisscrossed with cuts as if someone had slashed it with a razor blade. The east-facing window behind him bathed him in a dazzling glare: in this cage of shattered light, surrounding him like shards of broken glass, sitting up with effort in an unnatural stiffness that was liable to give way at any moment, his wild eyes planted in his face with a stony look, he resembled nothing so much as the portrait of Pope Innocent X in the series of the screaming popes by Francis Bacon.
The cut-up cognac-colored leather armchair, the boy Dror, another loyal acolyte, Salomon, for whom Maurice had once done some big favor in the past, his old typewriter, his “papers,” the calendar that was also a wall clock, illustrated by a picture of a field of blazing poppies — a gift from the Migdal insurance company — had wandered with him for years from room to room, almost the only permanent features.
He sat for hours with his eyes fixed on the poppy field of the calendar, refusing the world with the firmness and politeness of his “min fadlak” and “behayatak,” “if you please” and “do me a favor,” words of politeness and request that were nothing but sentries guarding his inner non-world, silencing the inner conversation that had always gone on in his head but had stopped: it was a long, empty hall.
From time to time he left the hall that was his mind in the last months of his life, returning to it after a little while. In spite of everything he still found the will to gather up a little strength and go out: “I arranged to see him again,” he reported wearily to Sammy.
“Him” was Sammy’s uncle, the brother of the biological father from Cairo, who lived close to Maurice, “a few steps away.” Maurice was trying to get the brother to soften the recalcitrant father, to persuade him to meet his son at last, for there to be a sulha, some kind of reconciliation. But there was no sulha: every week, when he met Maurice at the café in Aliya Street, the uncle brought only “small change,” reporting in great embarrassment on slight shifts in the father’s rigid position, which came to nothing. Maurice refused to give up. He mobilized all his cunning, his resourcefulness, his charm, his eloquence, to bring about the meeting between the father and son, for some kind of healing to take place — he was fighting, it seemed, to keep some promise he had not made to the mother but had promised himself for her sake, against her express wishes, and for her crushed, secret wish that had no voice and could not be put into words.
But the father didn’t want to see Sammy until the day he died.
“He’s a dry tree, that man, a blockhead.” Maurice cursed him on one of the few times in his life that he cursed anybody except for the Ben-Gurionists, dragging himself off to meet the brother “for the last time,” getting dressed in his gray raw silk suit with the burgundy waistcoat, in which he swam, like at the mother’s funeral, when he wore it, too, collapsing and stumbling on the long dirt path in the cemetery, while Sammy and Mermel made a chair with their arms and carried Maurice between them, hoisting him high in the air like a birthday boy, or a big rag doll, when her body was cast into the pit.
BORDEAUX
SHE CALLED ALL shades of red “Bordeaux,” and not because she couldn’t tell red from Bordeaux, but because she saw red as a kind of superfluous pause on the way, and she wanted it to hurry up and be Bordeaux. In addition, she liked rolling the word “Bordeaux” around her tongue. “It suits you, that Bordeaux dress,” she said. “It’s red,” I corrected her. “Can’t you see that it’s red?” “You’re right,” agreed the mother, “you should always wear that Bordeaux.”
She upholstered the sofas in burgundy (“It looks like a brothel,” said Corinne), knitted a burgundy sweater for Sammy “for everyday,” which she abandoned halfway through, painted one of the walls in the yellow hall burgundy, when there was “that fashion for colored walls,” sewed a “corniche” for the bedroom curtain in burgundy, bought a bedside mat in burgundy, and countless tubes of gouache, a third of them red and black, to mix into burgundy, when she started to paint.