The Rainy Day Man: Contemporary Romance

by Amnon Jackont

  I could hear his footsteps going off. They had taken up the carpet. What had they found underneath it? Ancient floor-tiles? Concrete? Wooden planks? My mind drank in the few background noises which the phone could transfer: church bells chiming, the sound of cars passing the open window and the creak of a door opening.

  "Hallo," a woman's voice lilted. "Madame Joubert speaking."

  "It's Vincent, Madame Joubert. How are you?"

  "Vincent?"

  "I lived in flat number 4."

  "Ah, yes, Monsieur Vincent..."

  "Could you do me a favor...?"

  She hesitated.

  "I'll cover all the expenses..."

  She consented to listen and three times I repeated the address, the questions she was to ask and the message she was to give.

  "The Alley of the Iron Chick?" she asked again. "Are you sure that's what it's called?"

  "Yes, yes."

  "And are you sure that she'll give me the letters, that aunt of...how do you spell his name, with a C?"

  "Khamis," I shouted, "Khamis with Kh. Tell her that his life depends on it... And if she doesn't have letters, then anything else she received from him in the last few years..."

  As I put the receiver down there was a faint click behind me. The door to the room moved slightly. I went into the corridor and to the living room. The record was still going round beneath the Perspex lid.

  "Have a pleasant flight," Eugenie said. Then there was a pause during which the pupils were supposed to repeat what had been said. Hannah was sitting in silence in the green armchair.

  "Thank you," Eugenie said in the left loudspeaker. "You have been very kind."

  ***

  For me Saturday nights in Tel Aviv are particularly difficult. The awakening pace represents a renewed victory of tension over tranquility. I see a calmness mingle with a collective frenzy, and sense in the air the first electric currents of a hard, unkind and routine week.

  And so I retreat to books, thoughts and solitude, moments which Hannah hated in particular. She claimed she could see me sinking into a different world, one that was mine alone. That Saturday evening, after she had returned from the club to a long afternoon nap, she closed herself in her room and watched television. I stayed in the kitchen, where I could think and read in the comforting presence of homemade food and the warmth of the cooker. I heard Jonathan's footsteps echoing as he ran home from the bus-stop. I put some milk on the burner. When he came in, panting, through the back door, I already had two cups of cocoa on the table.

  "Sit down," I said.

  He looked around. "What's happened?"

  "We haven't talked for ages."

  "That's all right," he put out his hand, turned my book round and glanced at its binding. "I can live with that. Where's Mother?"

  "In her room."

  He sank onto one of the chairs and pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. "Why are you suddenly showing an interest in me...?"

  “It's you who's been avoiding me the whole weekend..."

  "Now you've noticed," he grumbled and lit a cigarette with movements which delighted me. They were masculine, confident and indicated the start of an experiment.

  "Doesn't smoking affect your fitness?" I asked.

  "...As if you care about my fitness." Bitterness and hostility emanated in his voice.

  "I care about everything you do, everything that happens to you," I said in an even voice.

  "Stop talking rubbish, okay?"

  Gently I removed the skin in my cup. "I mean every word I say."

  "I told you to stop, okay?" The anger that was churning inside him was now very near the surface. "I hate it when you begin with all that ingratiating stuff."

  "It's not ingratiation..."

  "So how come you're suddenly showing an interest in me?" he burst out. "Why just today and not two months ago, when I failed English, or last week, when I was scared to register for the tennis tournament..."

  "Don't shout."

  "I will shout," his voice rose excitedly, "if I want, I'll go berserk too. You've got no right to tell me what to do after having deserted me."

  "Who told you all those things?"

  "What things?"

  "That I'm ingratiating, that I deserted you..."

  "No one needs to tell me. Do you think I don't see for myself? I always understood what was happening! Kids understand everything, they just don't say... Ever since I can remember it's been clear to me that a father is someone who comes and goes, someone who's busy with all kinds of mysterious things outside the home." His hands gripped the warm cup. They were large and square, possibly the heritage of the old man. Tufts of hair fell on his forehead. I half expected him to shake his head to toss them back, but he put them back in place with a gentle movement of his hand.

  "Correct," I said. "I was far away, but that doesn't mean that I didn't love you."

  "So why weren't you with us?"

  "Among other things, because I couldn't live with your mother."

  "Why?" A recalcitrant muscle which twitched in his arm emphasized the contrast between his physical strength and a certain fragility under the skin.

  "It's complicated," I hesitated. "We have different expectations of one another and of life."

  "You could have compromised and stayed if I was so important to you..."

  I wavered for a moment. He calmed and leaned his elbow on the table as he licked drops of cocoa off his downy upper lip. Suddenly his features were completely alien to me. Who was my son, in fact? I compared his fresh skin with my own wrinkled one, his abundant mop with my thinning hair, his innocent passion with my practiced indecisiveness. I wondered whether his youthful experience was anything like the one I remembered, what he thought about at night before he fell asleep and what the future looked like to him. All this was a preliminary to the bigger question: how much compassion had he for me beneath the layer of tension? Would he be able to understand what I was going to say to him, appreciate its frankness and resist the temptation to be insulting?

  "I suppose," I began, "that I couldn't love you at the price of a compromise that would have made me miserable. If I had stayed here only because of you, I would have borne you a grudge for every day of tedium and humiliation, for every quarrel with your mother, for every night of dreariness."

  For a while he said nothing and examined me intently.

  Then he asked, "And when you chose the other way and lived in all those distant places, how did your love for me express itself?"

  "In the fact that I was always happy to come back to you, that I thought about you, phoned and wrote and felt close to you."

  His lips were pursed, like Hannah's when she was about to say something harsh. "And to Mother?" I remained silent. "Doesn't the knowledge that you made her miserable bother you?"

  "Mother made herself miserable."

  "It's easy to blame her."

  I looked at him. "I'm not blaming your mother for anything, just saying that I had nothing to do with her bitterness. No one can be responsible for someone else's happiness."

  "Happiness is always connected with other people," he said in that voice of young people when they think they have formulated some essential truth.

  "It's connected with other people but can't be obtained from them, only from oneself. Other people merely participate in a process but it's basically yours alone. That's why one can't blame others when one's unhappy either..." His cocoa had grown cold and turned pale. Absent-mindedly, he stirred the drink with a spoon, arresting the descent of the chocolate particles to the bottom.

  "You mustn't put yourself in the same trap which your mother has been in all these years," I added, "feeling that you were the price of my freedom. It's tempting to blame me. In the short term you might manage to rid yourself of the need to cope and even cause me guilt feelings, but in the end it will only destroy you. If you get used to seeing the failures of your life as the result of what people around you did or did not do, yo
u'll lose your own ability to create happiness..." His expression was confused and I could see it turning into aggressiveness. I thought of Michel and the difference between them - the one tormented and bitter, the other confused and demanding...

  The phone rang with a volume which made me jump.

  "Mother will answer," Jonathan said. He stretched his arms and, with the movement of a basketball player, threw the kitchen towel at the phone. Under his arms white salt stains had accumulated in the fabric of his shirt.

  "With all that wisdom of yours," he challenged me, "are you happy?"

  "Not always," I said tensely. One compartment of my mind was counting the number of times the phone was ringing. "In many respects I'm at the beginning of the road. I hid for too many years. I invested in means, not ends. I was good at all kinds of unimportant things..." A murmur came from Hannah's room. Jonathan was bound to me with a springy kind of concentration. "Now," I continued, "I think that I'm capable of developing, of changing... among other things," I chose my words carefully, "if we have the strength, Mother and I will separate..."

  He did not say anything, merely finished his cocoa. His adam's apple rose and fell rapidly, which I regarded as a sign of yearning and sadness.

  "One of your women," a tired voice said behind me, "wants to talk to you, providing you pay for the call."

  I grabbed the receiver. "Are you prepared to accept a reverse charge call from Paris?" the operator asked, "from a Madame Joubert?"

  "Yes," I said, "I'll take the call." Jonathan gave me a pained look. Hannah stroked his head.

  "Monsieur Vincent?" the concierge shrieked. "Monsieur Vincent. I went there."

  "Well?"

  "It's far away, past the Pѐre Lachaise cemetery. On the way back I took a cab, otherwise I wouldn't have managed to wash the stairs this evening. They were so nice, those people, they phoned for me and ordered a cab..."

  "I'll pay. Now tell me, what does the house look like? Who lives there?"

  "No one. There's just a shop there, actually a warehouse... Of old books, that is..."

  "Just a minute!" I tore the next day's page from the calendar on the wall and took a pen from my pocket. "Now tell me!"

  "It's an old building, very dirty, not like mine. In the staircase there was only one mailbox and a door with a bell on the second floor. I rang, but no one answered. I went around the whole building and didn't find any other entrance, just that shop. So I went in and asked the salesman. He didn't know anything. The cashier said that I must mean the old woman who lived upstairs. He didn't know what she was called but when I said that name, Khamis, he said that she may have been an Arab."

  I wrote everything down. "Is that all he said?"

  She was quiet for a moment, then said: "You'll have to tell him that she's...she's dead."

  "Oh," was all I could say.

  "I'm really sorry. It happened just over a month ago, and she was very old, that's what they said, and they were sad and so very nice, they phoned and ordered..."

  "A cab..."

  "Yes, I've only just got back and the whole day's gone... Will you bring me the money or send it?"

  "I'll send it. How much?"

  "I haven't worked it out."

  "Fifty francs?"

  "Everything has gone up since you left and..."

  "A hundred?"

  "A hundred and fifty would be more appropriate, Monsieur Vincent, and may God bless you and the old lady who is with Him now..."

  "Thank you, Madame Joubert, good night."

  "To you, too, Monsieur Vincent, good night."

  Jonathan shifted in his place, waiting. Hannah was on guard.

  "Go to sleep," she commanded him, "you have to get up for school tomorrow."

  "Just a few minutes more," I pleaded, "in a few days I'm going back..."

  "You said you'd stay," Jonathan said, "the day before yesterday, at lunch."

  Hannah looked at me in silence.

  "It's not working out..." I began, but he was already in retreat. I started after him. Hannah moved and blocked the doorway with her body.

  When we heard the door of his room close she said, "Now you've begun doing to him exactly what you did to me all these years." Anger rose into her face. "You're a terrible pain, Danny Simon; you destroy whatever you touch. But there's one thing that comforts me - you're also your own punishment. I know how tormented you are..."

  ***

  After she had gone back to her room I fell into the armchair and switched off the reading lamp. In the darkness I was not at all sure about what I had preached to Jonathan. In front of me were ranged all the lies of my life and the victims of them. And behind, enveloped in embryonic mists, waited the lies I was yet to tell and wounds that I was yet to inflict.

  It was then that I made up my mind not to go to Dura, whatever the Head might do. It was even clear that no trial or punishment could outweigh the alienation, injury and pain of my son. Even to remain at home was not repugnant when I realized my fierce desire to knock on Hannah's and Jonathan's doors to volunteer to make them happy with my presence from now on. I put my legs up on the table, wrapped myself in a blanket and waited, as submissive as a child who has seen the error of his ways, for a sleep that would appease.

  I knew that it would not come.

  There would always be Dura and there would always be Yvonne, a place and a woman to draw me with the promise to calm the overwhelming tension within me. The force drawing me back to Dura, to my role as munitions expert-cum-saboteur, deceiving lover and vessel destined for controlled destruction, was the same that had caused me to flee from it three days ago. The only consolation was the thought that I was going back to grapple with the very weakness I had run away from.

  Weary sleep spread through my limbs, intermingled with a sense of apprehension: I would have to be careful. The person who was so anxious for me to return to Dura not only knew those weak points, he was counting on them.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Dura was again something else. The light had diminished and the trees had discarded their leaves. The autumn, which in Tel Aviv was most noticeable as a slight change of atmosphere, was reflected here in a violent stripping which revealed nature's skeleton.

  At the Athenaeum, soldiers went up and down stairs, dragging furniture, hammering at walls and giving one another orders over the loudspeaker. A new notice announcing a 'Storeroom' was hanging on the door of my room; the lock had also been changed.

  I walked down a corridor soaked with water overflowing from the toilets. Through various open doors I saw new arrivals engaged in all sorts of surprising activities. One of the rooms was being painted white. Soldiers were sawing away parts of the doorframe to another room to allow a metal cupboard to go through it. On the door of Scheckler's old office hung a notice: 'Commander's Office.' I knocked lightly on the door, pressed the handle and went in.

  The captain was standing at the window, inspecting the little world he had created in the garden. As I came in he pointed down to a group of paratroopers standing along a long, white rope, passing bricks from one to another. A short distance away from them several uneven rows of soldiers were marching in haphazard parade under Scheckler's command.

  “Dis-miss" Scheckler yelled into the loudspeaker. The soldiers moved off in various directions. Most were carrying various hoes, spades and pickaxes. "Group A - begin digging on the left-hand side," Scheckler called out. Group A was lost in the commotion.

  "My room..." I said.

  "We're using it now."

  "I sleep there."

  "We've arranged something else for you," he cupped his hand over his mouth and called outside: "Scheckler!"

  "Coming," came the reply. The captain smiled. "He's so efficient I decided to keep him here..."

  Only then did I notice the absence of the sound of engines in the general bustle. "What's happened to the garage?"

  "Went back to Israel. Only Scheckler stayed on."

  The main event was nearing, then, and wou
ld take place within a few days. Had the tin been stolen from the rabbit warren? The door behind me opened. Without turning, I could recognize the nervous step.

  The captain called out, "Sit down with us, Scheckler," and flapped his beret to drive a stream of flies away. "Where have these come from?"

  "From the wine cellar," Scheckler said. "There are thousands more there." I turned my head to look at him. His staff-sergeant insignia had vanished, and was now replaced by a fig-leaf: he now held the rank of sergeant-major.

  "Where's he going to sleep?" The captain pointed to me.

  Scheckler gave me a blank look, without even the usual squirming. "With everyone else, I think?"

  "By what right did you take over my room?"

  The captain turned to face me. "I'm the commander here," he said calmly and glanced at Scheckler. "You haven't given him the new instructions..." He rifled through the desk drawer, the key to which still lay in my pocket. "Here are my orders," he read out from a telegram form. "One, you are subject to our command, and two," he gave me a confident look, "you are not allowed to leave the place."

  "Do you intend to imprison me here?"

  "I presume that there won't be any need, that you'll understand for yourself that it's not healthy to be too involved with the locals."

  I went over to the window. In the garden, in various shades of khaki, was a far larger force than was needed in a remote village on the edge of no man's land. Was I still the only one who knew what everyone was waiting for?

  "And supposing a bullet is fired accidentally," I said, watching his face closely," or someone simply reacts to a stupid provocation and an incident develops?"

  He shrugged his shoulders. "It's war. Things like that happen..."

  "And the price?"

  "The price..." he repeated angrily. "You Arab-lovers forget there's a price to be paid for everything you get... You live here without fear and have time to question the price only thanks to people like me, people who don't hesitate to pay it when necessary..."

  "I didn't get anything for nothing either."

  "Yes?" His voice grew hoarse. "How many funerals have you attended? How many parents have you paid condolence visits to? And what would you say to those parents? 'I'd be prepared to negotiate for peace, but some stupid officer decided that we should fight...?' Here," he struck his forehead, "a whole cemetery has accumulated, dozens of boys whose lives could have been bargained for, maybe even successfully. The whole way from the border to this village is full of mountains, roads, strategic junctions, key points. What do you think they're called? Beit A-Din Junction? Sil village? The Beaufort? No, they're called Uri and Hezi and Motti and Shai and Zvika and Yossi and Ron. Friends, officers, soldiers. Don't you think we owe them something?" Angrily, he picked the papers up from his desk, fitted his beret on top of his knitted skullcap and left the room.