19
After four days of rain and fog it dawned so crisp and clear you could feel the air tickling the back of your larynx when you breathed it in. The sky was a very pale blue–as cold and clear as the eye of a Siamese cat.
Shuli lived in the German Colony, in a flat in one of the tall buildings at the end of Hazfira Street, where the tennis courts are. A nice neighbourhood: trees and little parks, the buildings clad in creepers, birds buzzing about. When I dropped her off that night I asked her whether she fancied a game, and she’d laughed and said, ‘One day.’
‘How about tomorrow morning? Are you working tomorrow?’
‘I’ve got a night shift,’ she said, touching my unshaven cheek with her palm and opening her door. It was her father’s flat: Davidi Vaknin had been delighted to have Shuli back home after her divorce. Not only to help her through it but also because his daughter and her ex-husband had drifted away from religion in their four years of marriage and he nursed hopes of coaxing her back to God. And also because he was lonely. Shuli’s mother had succumbed to a long disease a few months after the wedding, her sister was off backpacking round India.
‘Night shift–which means I’m not working in the morning.’
So that morning I parked the Polo near her house and we walked along Hazfira Street towards Emek Refaim Street. I held her hand for a while, but she didn’t seem comfortable with it. Her hands were cold, she claimed. She needed to put her gloves on.
‘Don’t worry,’ she reassured me. ‘You’ll see. Tonight.’
‘I’m not worried,’ I said, and she lowered her eyes and smiled a smile that was half embarrassment and half a promise. I did know that she had just lost her boyfriend, that everything had just been thrown upside down, and everything like that, but it seemed to me somehow that she was the sort of person who would always be like this: heightened, impulsive, very alive. A wave of warmth broke from my heart and flooded upwards to my throat, and for a few seconds I actually seemed to be unable to breathe. I could feel my heart beating faster, desperately trying to get some oxygen into my blood.
We went to the post office. In order to get her chef’s certificate she needed a year’s experience in a recognised restaurant, references from qualified chefs (Alon had been happy to oblige) and to pass exams in theory and practice at the Tadmor Hotel in Herzliya. She sent off the forms she had to send off. In a bakery she bought a loaf of bread for her dad; in a stationer’s she bought a notebook for herself. She had decided to write to Giora every day. I asked whether she was planning on telling him everything.
‘I never hid a thing from him in the four months we were together.’
‘And what about him?’
‘Well, who knows? Every night when we went to bed we’d tell each other everything that had happened to us that day. I’d say, “Tell me something else”, and I’d keep saying, “Something else” until he’d told me the lot. And then I’d tell him everything back.’ She fell silent for a moment. ‘Did you hear from the guy who met Giora in Tel Aviv?’
‘Binyamin? The guy from the PalmPilot? We said we were going to go and find him in Tel Aviv.’
‘Yeah, we said that, didn’t we? But maybe tomorrow?’
I wasn’t in any hurry. Tonight I was going to see. ‘OK,’ I said.
‘Now I need an Ice Europa,’ she decided. There wasn’t any debate. She said it, we did it.
The place was pretty full. The security guard searched us with his metal wand on the off-chance we were packing any landmines, his big steel lollipop emitting its somehow disappointed little cheeps. Shuli ordered a croissant and an Ice Europa. I went for an egg sandwich and a cappuccino. I overruled her attempts to pay (‘I owe you,’ she said) and steered us towards a round table for two not far from the entrance and sat down facing the street. She sat opposite and stared at me until I said, ‘What?’
‘Why did you choose this table?’
‘I don’t know. It was free.’
She looked around and her gaze took in the other free tables.
‘You want to move?’
‘No. It’s just that this is our old table. How did you choose this table out of all of them? And you talked to him a minute before he died. It’s like…’ She blinked back the tears that were never far from her surface. ‘Don’t listen to me, I’m talking crap,’ she said. ‘It’s funny, I always sat facing the street, and he always sat opposite me. So now I can see what he used to see. All the people here.’
I stared at her and said, ‘There’s one thing he could see that you can’t,’ and the memory of the night before flashed like a bullet train through my mind: the drive to the edge of the desert, her smile, our kiss, and what happened after; her long neck, her dark silky skin, the dark down on her forearms, and how, when I kissed my way down to her breasts, she’d held her breath for what seemed like a minute until my lips grazed her nipple and she breathed out. How she’d unbuttoned and pulled down her jeans and how I bent over to her ankle and bit the little crocodile crawling up it, and how I travelled with little butterfly kisses over her knee, her thigh, navel, ribcage, breasts, collarbone, throat, jaw, all the way to the mouth that was patiently waiting for me. How my finger found one of the cotton flowers embroidered on her underwear, began to circle it, wandered with the help of another finger under the stretched elastic where her wonderful skin was softest of all. I touched the soft fluff, the hollow in the tendons of her thigh, and then slipped inside her, and she was kissing my ear by now and whispering to go on and my other hand was everywhere, and she came with her head pressed deeply into the space between my jaw and shoulder, my left hand bracing her bucking shoulder. Then she was sucking in air, almost sobbing, and my wet fingers were resting on her silver thigh, and, mixed with the smells of sex and coconut air-freshener, a very faint tang of gun oil from Humi’s rifle–Humi, who only two days before had been sitting where Shuli was now catching her breath. She’d wanted to go home straight after. It was totally fine with me.
‘What are you thinking about?’
The bullet train disappeared. I looked up, caught red handed, and saw that she knew what I was thinking about.
‘Don’t embarrass me,’ she said, but she was smiling.
‘Well. “We’ll see tonight”…’
My phone intervened. Gili from work. I told her I was still in Jerusalem, and she told me that I was going to have some explaining to do to Jimmy. I said I’d explain everything. Shuli said, ‘Nike and Nokia. That’s who you are.’
‘And who are you?’
‘I cook for the Nikes and Nokias. Actually, I’m not sure. I never see them. I arrive when they’re still asleep, along with the vegetables from the market and the bread from the Angel bakery, in the dark in winter. I come in the rear entrance, with the tahini from Nablus and the pitas from the Old City.’
The sandwich was as good as it always was. Sliced hardboiled egg with tomato and mayo on brown bread. I always add lots of salt and pepper. Waste of time.
‘D’you want anything else?’
‘I don’t know. I want to go to Giora’s grave. To be with him a little bit on my own. And then maybe we’ll go again to the shiva?’
I reached over to touch her hand. I was prepared to do whatever she said. It wasn’t exactly because I’d fallen in love. I mean, something had happened, I’m not denying it. Something started growing there. But as much as anything else I was amazed by what had happened to time. It seemed to have stopped. I wasn’t chasing after it, I wasn’t running. Jerusalem was somewhere else. I looked at the people eating in the Café Europa: who were they? How come they had all this time? Didn’t they need to work? A beautiful black-eyed girl smiled at me from the other side of the table and excused herself to go to the Ladies.
Only when she’d gone did I hear the music: ‘Bab al-Wad’. First star’s light above Beit Mahsir. Some people were moving their lips to the lyrics. I turned away and looked outside at the electric pale blue. Jerusalem itself seemed to be sitting under the sky like a growth of mould. It looked coated in fear. ‘Gabi told the security guard to get the guy out of the restaurant. The security guard says, “My shift doesn’t start for ten minutes.”’ A group of guys on the next table. ‘So Gabi says, “OK. You leave it a minute, then,” leaves through the back door and runs a mile. So the guy pushes the button but he had a problem with the detonator…’ The listeners burst out laughing. I looked over the red bar stools, the red and black tables; I smelled the coffee and the tuna; I opened a newspaper and I read that Private Humi Glazer, aged nineteen, had been laid to rest yesterday in the military cemetery in Petach-Tikva. Maybe I ought to visit his family too…I ate the little chocolate cube you got with your coffee, and then I ate Shuli’s cube too. I wanted more coffee but didn’t have enough energy to go and get it. Though I shouldn’t overdo it with the caffeine: everything starts to feel as if it’s taking place at some weird distance away from me. I got so worried I looked into it once: the caffeine increases neuronal activity, which fools the pituitary gland into releasing hormones that tell the adrenal gland to get pumping. And then the pupils widen, the trachea dilates, blood vessels shrink, blood pressure rises, the liver releases sugar into your blood to boost energy, the muscles tighten and, oddly enough, your hands cool down.
‘Why are you looking at your hands like that?’
‘What? No reason.’
‘Let’s change places. I want to see the street.’
I rose and waited for her to move past me and when she sat down I touched her on her shoulder–a small but intimate gesture. I moved to the other side of the table. She said–or so I remember–she said:
‘I was thinking, Croc. I was sitting in the toilet and I was thinking that life really does go on. Life stays in this world. It doesn’t disappear. Giora’s gone, and you come and sit down at the same table, and life goes on. We’re still breathing. He was a good man, did you see that at all?’
‘Yeah. Yeah, I think I could.’
‘He was a good man, and it is terrible. It hurts very, very much. I saw him every day. I touched him and talked to him. He had such a pretty voice.’ Her voice, pretty too, was higher than usual and trembling; a little strangulated. ‘But I was sitting there thinking that you just cannot stop this life. It’s like water finding its way over rocks and concrete and tarmac into the earth. You can’t stop it.’ She fell silent and I don’t think I said anything. Her eyes were fixed on some spot on the tabletop; possibly her fingers were stroking her Ice Europa cup. ‘Whatever,’ she said. ‘I mean, it was a nice kind of thing to think. Maybe the nicest thought I’ve had in a while.’ And she smiled, with her mouth closed, more with one corner than the other, a hopeful, sad, wise sort of smile, and it seemed like the air trembled between us.