The food rose in my gullet with a terrible burning, together with an alien, annoying presence. Vincent had awoken to acknowledge the contents of the box. I was not pleased to see him. He echoed within me, hollow, slick and unnatural, like a child interrupting the conversation of adults. Nothing but insipidness was left of the longing I had had for him in the morning.
CHAPTER SIX
It was the same night, silent and getting cooler. For two hours, maybe longer, I slept curled up on the damp seat. I woke up and vomited over the side, finding no relief. Dew moistened my clothes. The command car was sweating as well. Somewhere a cock crowed. A donkey rebuked it with a weary bray. I peered behind me at the mountain-top, looking for the gentle glow of the dawn. I could not see the summit of the sycamore. Had it wandered into Anton Khamis' dream that night?
I was restless, anticipating the morning, while at the same time fearing the heat and the light it would bring. I turned the key. A rattle rent the night. The clutch slipped and the engine died. I made another attempt; this time it was successful.
There was no light in any house. No door was open. The smashed headlights could not brighten the pale glow of the stone thresholds or the bunches of garlic drying on balconies. I turned towards the Athenaeum; by the light of the lamp in the guard hut, I could see drops of ointment on the floor of the car. I honked for the guard as I wiped away the drops with my finger and transferred them carefully to the box.
Another wave of pressure passed through my stomach. Unthinkingly I gave a long, plaintive fart, and felt ashamed. I hit the horn again, for no reason, to shatter the dreadful silence. This time the noise was hoarse and fragmented, horrifying me too. I was like a wandering ghost seeing itself in the mirror, aware of a painful shattering within me while helpless to stop it. The guard was taking forever. The world grew fuzzy. Maybe, at last, the night had vanquished the wind: the Corinthian edge of the Athenaeum roof drifted in and out of my vision in soft waves. In the sharp glare of the courtyard spotlights the trees wandered from one spot to another. The phone line from the guard hut seemed cut in the two. Fibers hung like the nerves of an amputated arm. I laid my head on the steering wheel, then awoke with a start immediately.
The phone line really was cut.
Slowly, so as not to aggravate the pain spreading through my head, I went down the iron steps, stepped over the chain and walked into the middle of the courtyard. I stopped next to the place where the line had been cut, wondering where to begin looking for the evil, whatever it might be. The Athenaeum, with its dark windows and the stump of the cable between it and the hut, was wrapped in the sadness of one who has let a drowning man slip out of his grasp.
The hut. How could I have missed it? The radio which was not playing the usual night music, the soldier on duty who had not appeared. I ran there. The door was closed, the shutter down. I tried the handle. Locked. Someone had bent the mechanism by force. A light dusting of chalk remained at the spot where a stone had been banged against the metal. I heaved with my shoulder, kicked, rattled the handle again, to no avail. I raced to the command car and jerked the arm off the jack. I pushed it into the crack between the handle and the door frame and pulled with all my might. The door responded with a creak of its hinges. Another pull. The sound of splintering wood. It was open. Inside the hut thick darkness covered something unknown, hard. Again I hurried to the command car, to bring a torch.
First I saw the face, dark, blank, covered with a liquid sheen, like an internal organ protruding from a body. After that the blood, not a lot but in the right places: the nostrils, the corner of the mouth, the scalp. Finally the fear: concentrated in the body, in the way it was huddled at the end of the camp-bed, pressed into a corner of the room, enclosed within itself with folded limbs.
Terror also had a name, written on the wall haltingly, in crooked letters, by an unpracticed hand:
GIVE BACK ANTON KHAMIS
There was no time to think about the message. My thoughts wandered from the soldier to the open door, from the oppressiveness of the tiny room to the help I could ask of the people sleeping in the big building. At the same time I felt the first, tentative touch of guilt.
With my hands behind my back, I bent over the victim. Something, the flutter of an eyelid, the almost imperceptible movement of a line in his face, indicated life. I forced his jaw open. Two teeth lay on his tongue in a mixture of saliva and blood. I raked them out with my fingers, pulled his legs until his entire body was stretched out on the bed. I pressed his chest twice, to make breathing easier, and moved his arms up and down.
The soldier began to breathe heavily, staring into my face with swollen eyelids. His arm came up in a defensive motion. I pushed it away with a firm hand, almost offended.
"Don't be afraid."
I still had to call the others. In my mind's eye I could see the looks they would give, hear the things that would be said afterwards, in their dormitories and in the garage.
With weary steps I walked back to the command car, reached my hand out to the wheel and leaned on the horn. The noise adapted itself to the circumstances; in it was a heartrending, imploring sound. One by one, the windows of the Athenaeum opened. Somebody looked out from the door. A bell rang. With a sense of relief I crouched down on the steps of the car and closed my eyes, to rest.
The garage supervisor was the first to arrive. His gray hair was transparent in the light of the spotlight, revealing the virginal skin of his scalp. He could only murmur: "I knew it, I knew it." He glanced painfully at the blind front of the command car, then into the trunk, where the tools lay in a jumble. His mechanic's soul brought an expression of shock to his face. Weakly, I gestured behind my shoulder, where the door was swinging on its hinges in the night wind. At the same time, there was a rush of activity, shouts flew in the air. Everyone from the Athenaeum pressed passed me, nearly touching my head, which was bent forward.
Two soldiers brought the wounded man out on a stretcher. One of his arms trailed at the side. His shoes had been removed and placed between his legs. The smell of medication and sedatives wafted towards me. The medic warned the men to be careful, but there was no need. Those thick, hairy arms wielded the wooden frame with immense love, with the tenderness of comrades-in-arms. I felt a certain resentment, the grudge of someone used to falling alone.
Gloomily, I noticed the beginning of daybreak. The lines of the mountain became clearer above us. On the stairs, as I went to my room, I unbuttoned my shirt. In the doorway I took it off and sank onto the bed in my trousers, dirty and exhausted. For two hours I struggled with the fragments of a thought which disturbed my sleep. Eventually, painfully tense, I awoke.
I had something urgent to do.
The duty officer in the communications room agreed to cooperate. Something in my crumpled, harassed appearance must have indicated urgency. He dialed an exchange, and we waited. The duty officer doodled numbers in the margin of the newspaper spread in front of him, as he held the earphone. The headline read: 'P.M. in Knesset: Tourism and Trade Accords with Lebanon Soon.' It seemed our days in the Athenaeum were numbered. Now, at the other end of the line they were asking questions.
"Try to find him," the duty officer insisted. "It's urgent." I thanked him with a movement of my head. He listened for another moment, then held the receiver out to me.
"Who's speaking?" I asked suspiciously.
"Me, Scheckler..."
"Your voice sounds different..."
"Yours sounds the same..." Now I could hear the familiar nasal tone. "They've already told me everything..."
"We've got to find him. It's all becoming serious... It would be a pity if there was a tremendous stink here because of a mistake in registration..."
"Don't worry..." The rest of the sentence was lost in a series of noises.
"What?"
"I said, don't worry. Tomorrow everything will be okay. I can't discuss it on the phone, but the matter is being dealt with..." More noises. "There won't be any more problems..."<
br />
The promise sounded too heavy.
"When are you coming?" I asked.
He was impatient. "I told you, tomorrow, and everything will be all right..."
A long static was followed by silence.
"We've been cut off." I presented the receiver to the duty officer. He flicked a switch and listened in his headphones.
"Shall I try again?" he asked. I hesitated for a moment, then shook my head and went out. Again I wondered whether I should contact Tel Aviv and report that the place was getting too stormy for what had been planned.
But I suddenly realized that something else was really bothering me. Something closer, within my grasp, a perfectly simple truth which had come to me in my sleep and then slipped away. I stood in the direct sunlight for another moment, narrowing my eyes, and then, led by the memory of the dream, turned towards the guard hut.
There were two soldiers there, scrubbing and painting. In the daylight the scene was less ghastly. The bloodstained bed had been removed, the phone line repaired. Only a few letters of the message on the wall still showed through the layers of damp whitewash. The rest lay in flakes on the floor. I picked up a few flakes and felt them. Then I scraped some whitewash off the wall with my fingernail. Not a lot, but enough to know where I had seen that weak green paint before.
And in a sudden recollection of dusk in the pine wood with the smell of sour apples, I realized that what the priest had been holding yesterday, the two copper containers linked by a tube, a piston and a valve, had been neither a vacuum cleaner nor a spray pump, but a homemade, rural version of a paint spray gun.
***
Only in the shower did I relax. What remained was the unease of uncertainty. I washed my clothes and hung them in the courtyard to dry. The soldiers watched me from the windows. From the other side of the fence, from the growing refugee camp, they watched too. For a moment I constituted a link, a transmission station of stares, in which the two forces - the one which did not fear to wear a uniform and the one which concealed the uniform beneath an innocent, civilian exterior - crossed. Was the priest also a link? One hand extended to Tel Aviv, blowing the horn with the hunters, and the other toward the fox, striking and running and striking again?
It was important for me to know it all, in full and without delay.
The command car was parked in the entrance courtyard. The garage supervisor was fixing it himself. Two new lights were already installed. Other scars had been removed with a dash of paint. I did not dare ask for it again. I walked slowly past, hoping that maybe he would offer it to me. He glanced at me then immediately turned to pick up the hood. A few more steps and I was outside.
Nobody outside paid any attention to me either. Not openly, at any rate. At the top of the road I discovered a short cut, a path that went through the rocky courtyards of the houses and connected the two arms of the arc made by the main road. Already in the distance it was possible to see the closed shutters of the priest's house. As I came near, I saw that the gate was wide open, the courtyard deserted. Between the legs of a rickety table a net was stretched, and three rabbits cowered among some cabbage leaves. Where could I begin? The green Morris was parked beneath the fir tree, as it had been yesterday and on that unexpected afternoon. I opened the trunk; inside lay engine parts mixed with oiled tools. I moved them aside. Underneath was a piece of gray tarpaulin wrapped around something solid and tied with a rope. When I felt between its folds I could sense the coolness of metal and a set of buttons. I memorized the way the rope was tied, then untied the knots and found a transmitter.
It was a simple transistor radio which had also been adapted to transmit, and operated on five penlight batteries. The frequency selector had been fixed to the middle of the scale with a screw, to save transmission time. I memorized the frequency, 165, and packed it away again the way it had been. After that I sat down at the edge of a trough that overflowed with scrap-iron.
Half of my hypothesis had been verified. The priest was indeed reporting to someone. Perhaps on the basis of the frequency, I could discover to whom. I wondered what I should hope for. His affiliation with a hostile side would require investigations. The information he had transmitted would be examined. In any event the operation would be postponed, perhaps cancelled. An affiliation with us, on the other hand, would raise questions about his involvement in the recent attack. Whatever happened, the debilitating, humiliating waiting would continue, until he was kind enough to reveal himself.
And what was to be done meanwhile?
Should I prepare the detonator? The Butyllithium-rich ointment was safely stowed away in the cupboard in my room, but I had no desire to go back. A scorpion emerged from the scrap heap and hurried past my feet, its tail arched forward. A messenger of fate showing the way to the clinic? I had no reason to offer for going there. I could neither ask for antibiotic ointment nor for the books which, I knew, she would deny me. All that was left was my need for something to melt the knot of loneliness, something to satisfy a strong, pressing desire that rose and enveloped my whole being, as restricting, paralyzing and isolating as a bell jar.
If Dura had been a normal place, with bookshops, cinemas, prostitutes for passing the time... On the other hand, who would it have helped? I remembered Tel Aviv and the night when a man who was no longer young had stood, half-naked, pretending to court a prostitute on the deserted quay of the old port. How could I have failed to realize that with the loss of the name Vincent I had been deprived of the special relationship I had had with life, the relationship of a happy Sisyphus who had found a way of cheating the stone he had been condemned to roll up the mountain. What relationship could Danny Simon develop with that stone? What tools were at his disposal apart from his loneliness, his great need?
My eyes now sought new, secret paths of the place: the edge of the wood touched a forested slope and a strip of orchards. From there an abandoned, almost non-existent, path wound to the water course. The water which flowed from the spring dribbled pathetically in an exposed bed of pebbles. With the satisfaction of a peeping tom I noticed the roots of the trees of the village which had burst through the layers of rock and were hanging in the air. Suddenly I was a little more optimistic. In a world where others sought more fertile soil, lonely people without ties were at an advantage.
I quite easily found the place from which to climb up to the clinic. A few crushed bushes, the souvenir of my first night there, a pile of stones, the flattened top of the earthen mound and the radish bed. I circled the courtyard. The dogs were in their place, nestled into the warm sand. The garage door was shut, perhaps concealing the Rolls. The usual two tracks led away from the entrance. I was about to wait at the spot where they met the road.
The usual things began to happen. A growl, then the barks and snarls. Everything from a distance, everything within the confines of the courtyard.
A curtain moved in the window of the house. The transparency of the window-pane was darkened. After that, for a long moment, nothing happened. The nervousness and pain of a protracted wait spread through me. I weighed the chances: Michel on his own, the woman on her own, the two of them together.
The door opened.
The woman, her eyes fixed on the ground, walked barefoot towards the clinic. She was wearing the yellow house robe and a shawl, which covered her shoulders. I thought I discerned the glint of her anklet. Why didn't she look at me? I pursed my lips to call her. An inner voice, the kind that warns drivers of dangers around the bend, instructed me to hold my peace. She inserted a key in the door and pushed it with her shoulder. After a moment I saw the upper part of her body pass the window of the waiting room on her way to the doctor's room, where the windows were opaque. The front door remained open.
I waited.
Nothing happened. Only the door stayed open, inviting, and the dogs were still drawn up in their secret way. Absent-mindedly, I classified them: first lay the group of three, then the pair, finally the single, bold ones, who protected the flanks of the
troops.
Then I understood.
I walked carefully along the eastern side of the square, on the line leading from the road to the clinic door. Some of the dogs were dozing, others scratching earnestly in the sand. Now, as far as they were concerned, I was just another of the patients and visitors who walked along this line day after day, for years. At the entrance to the clinic I hesitated, peered towards the garage and the house, listened to the muffled chime of a grandfather clock on the other side of the wall, breathed deeply, filling my lungs with the smell of scrubbed tiles and whitewash, and went in.
The waiting room was empty. I crossed it quickly, trying to remember if there had been dust on the plastic armchairs and flyspecks on the poster advertising painkillers fifteen days earlier, the day of the doctor's arrest. The door to the next room was half open. I knocked on it lightly twice. There was no response.
Slowly I pushed the door on its hinges. The room was smaller than I remembered. From inside, the windows were not completely obscured, revealing the backyard and the front courtyard whitely and unclearly. The woman was sitting on the far side of the doctor's white desk, her left hand holding her right elbow. Her lips were compressed in an expression of determination. Taking small steps, I advanced to a metal chair and sat down.
Something had happened to her face.
She said, "Was everything all right with the basket?"
I nodded slowly.
"Did you see him?"
"I sent someone."
She swallowed. "I want to know that he's well."
"He's well," I said.
"...And when do you intend to bring him back...?"
"It's hard for me to say."
She grimaced with a mixture of surprise and despair. "With all your efforts..."
I shrugged my shoulders.
"He's not built for this sort of thing," she added. "He won't last long there."
The Rainy Day Man: Contemporary Romance Page 11
