She mingled with a family chewing biscuits from an oily bag. They offered her one and she lingered briefly. I pushed a group of children aside and hurried forward. The father of the family stared at me, then offered me the bag as well. I put two fingers in and drew out a lump of uncooked dough. Yvonne backed away, wobbling dangerously on the edge of the wadi. Her anxiety, and perhaps her revulsion, too, made her face so ugly that for a moment the certainty of my attraction, even my love for her, was replaced by the feeling that she was not worth all this bother. She turned and disappeared behind another family. Then her movements acquired their usual grace and my thoughts fell into place. With the same clarity that had illuminated my previous experience, I knew that I longed for her, for some matter in her which I had never managed to define.
"Yvonne," I called after her. My voice hovered over that place like the magic that could not turn a single mouse into a noble horse or a pumpkin into a carriage. She turned to me momentarily, emitted a short cry and limped rapidly away.
The ceremony was over. The guests rose from the benches and flooded into the square in front of the houses like the conclusion of a comic opera. The local residents remained where they were standing, closed in by the soldiers. Yvonne climbed the other side of the wadi and disappeared behind the branches of the sycamore tree. I could hear the pips for the one o'clock news from a transistor radio in the pocket of one of the soldiers. The meeting with Michel was close. I remembered my promise to go straight to the garage. But I did not have the strength to restrain myself. I ran to the wadi and climbed up the other side behind her.
From the other side the gouged-out shoulder of the mountain looked like a bite out of an enormous apple. The earth had lost its rich color, and had acquired the dusty-yellow hue of something bleached. The man in civilian clothes appeared from nowhere and ran over to watch me. I waved reassuringly. He did not react. I turned to descend the path to the vegetable garden, strewn with empty tins, paper bags and the remains of camouflage cloth. The barbed-wire fence had been trampled and cots were no longer visible in the garden. The water-channel was blocked with earth and the dogs were all tied to a rope wound round the trunk of the sycamore. Three soldiers lay in a trench, studying the horizon through binoculars.
"Erja, Erja. Go back," one of them reprimanded me in Arabic.
"It's all right," I replied in Hebrew and he kept quiet.
The windows of the house were blocked by wooden planks which had obviously been hastily put there. I went over and peeped through one of the cracks. Yvonne was sitting on her bed, reading. Her hair was loose and fell around her face in brown waves, the color I would always connect with warmth, the kind warmth of walnut wood furniture, chocolate and earth. It seemed natural to me that the robe she was wearing should also be brown, as was her look, her face, her hands holding the book and the objects untidily scattered around her, an empty cup, books, clothes, two or three French magazines, sewing things.
I tapped the wooden frame with my hand. She looked up and stared, unseeing, at the shutters.
"It's me," I said softly, ready for anything. She remained sitting, her head extended in a movement which embodied acceptance and very little interest.
I walked around the outside of the house with a growing sense of unease. The kitchen door was locked. The bent end of a line of barbed-wire lying nearby opened the lock easily. Dishes were floating in the sink in a mixture of water and vegetable peelings. The tap was dripping and the floor was stained with damp footprints. A heavy sorrow hung in the house. However much it was my fault, I could not help thinking only of my own, private misfortune. How did one bring a lost chance back to life? How did one regain the right to embrace another?
I stood in the doorway to her room. The soft light from the lamp gave it the sacred appearance that all the ornaments of the church could not create. I saw that two drawers had been placed on the floor, that one of the doors of the cupboard was open and that inside it everything was jumbled.
"Are you leaving?" I asked.
She looked from me to the open cupboard and back to me.
"The soldiers. When I was out they came in and poked around."
I took one step forward. "Did they take anything?" I asked. Attempted pillage, however doubtful, could become an excuse for a new beginning...
"They only poked around."
There was a small brooch on a silk blouse lying at the end of the bed. I bent down to examine it. It was a delicately-worked gold cross. I looked again at the open cupboard and the drawers beside it. The tension within me shifted to another direction. Soldiers do not poke around, they take things. Whoever had been here had not come to take anything but had been looking for something. I looked into the corridor. The footprints which had not yet dried showed three pairs of shoes: my rubber-soled pair, Yvonne's and one other, a relatively small pair with worn-out heels. I went over to the cupboard. A search interrupted in the middle is like a fingerprint. Lots of little details are revealed, characteristics emerge. Only the door on the left was open and the drawers had also been pulled out with someone's left hand, their handles leaning to the left.
"You're poking around in my cupboard," Yvonne said.
"It wasn't soldiers. Someone was here searching..."
"That doesn't interest me," she burst out. "Fight your wars outside..."
"Don't you want to know who it was...?"
"I don't want to know anything. What I want most of all now is never to see you again, to forget that you exist."
I could not go, nor did I know how to stay. She sat on the edge of the bed and waited. The silence deepened and we could hear the sound of a wood-worm somewhere in the furniture.
"I can understand what you feel..." I began.
"I don't think you can," on her face hovered a smile which was far harder than the most bitter of the priest’s.
"I wanted to help," I said quietly.
She rejected this with a shake of her head.
The movement was too severe a punishment for a sinner wavering on the brink of penitence. Once again the need arose to tell her everything, the whole truth. Where should I begin? I was ready to spill out my secrets and my truths all at once, to confess the one, basic lie which stood between us.
Instead I said, "I love you."
She leaned back against the wall, her legs tucked up beneath her. I could imagine every detail of her body, beneath the robe. I felt soft, ready and expectant, like an alchemist who has unleashed a magic formula on reality.
But she only said angrily, "Don't use that word - you don't know anything about love..."
"Do you think you understand what I feel better than I do?"
"I'm more experienced than you are," she said, more with weariness than hostility. "For years I've been wandering beside love, around the wall of paradise. True love cannot arise in circumstances where there is falsehood. It needs time, space, a chance..."
I knew what she was talking about, and even about whom. On what her experience was based, I wondered bitterly. On an unattainable man who was so engrossed in being perfect that he had condemned her by endless waiting to a slow death? I stepped forward and held my hand out to her.
"There's so much readiness in me..."
She did not take my hand. "What is that readiness made of? Tricks, little, well-oiled devices..." Her eyes were damp. I let my hand fall and stood there, clumsy and superfluous. I could feel my detachment mechanism readying itself. God, I requested, not now, don't cut me off this time. How does one part from a disaster in whose course one has had a share?
"If you need anything..." I stammered.
She remained silent.
'Go,' said the walls, the objects on the floor, the little worm chewing away in the cupboard. So I did.
I stopped in the doorway to the house. The Rolls was in the garage. Its back had been damaged like a crushed tin of beer. The dogs were licking their testicles noisily, happy with their new chains. The loudspeakers in the village once again emitted terse, mil
itary commands and a row of low clouds indicated that the festive Israeli day would give way to a perilous, starless Lebanese night.
Michel came out of the garage door, the suitcase in his hand. As I walked towards him I had the feeling of a circle being closed. The look on his face was as confused and awkward as if he were being arrested. The faint light which came through the clouds gave him a strange, pimply chin and a greasy, lifeless forelock which hung over sad eyes. It suddenly occurred to me that something might have gone wrong that summer's night in Beirut and the basket which Yvonne had found on the hospital steps was not the one she had left. At the same time I realized that only two of my meetings with this young man who was so alien to me had been in full daylight, and the others, which had taken place at night, had left me with a vague memory of another youngster, one who was very different, handsome and energetic.
When he saw me he turned, lay the suitcase on the boot of the Rolls and stood beside it, waiting. It was rectangular and yellow with a large stain the color of dried blood. I touched it with my fingertip, then scratched at it with my nail. As far as I could tell, it was dried blood.
The door of the house opened and Yvonne stood there. I tugged at the locks hastily, before she could stop me with a shout or a rebuke. The objects were those with a daily use. Their existence, in a bloodstained suitcase and far away from their owner indicated only one thing: they belonged to a dead man.
A folded towel covered everything. Underneath I found a shaver, a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, a shaving brush, two bars of Syrian-made soap, a thin wallet containing a Lebanese identity card and some bills, a folded shirt which had already acquired a dank smell, a box of pills for heartburn and a book, "The Pastoral Symphony" by André Gide; the first, original edition, Gallimard, 1919.
André Gide again.
I went through the pile once more, knowing that I did not understand anything. Like the letter Anton had left, like his character and his actions, the remains of his life were also an enigma, just as they appeared to be clear and open. The shirt was of Italian manufacture. The toothbrush was a Jordan Superfine, millions like it could be found in drugstores from Karachi to New York. I tore the wrapper off one of the bars of soap. Just soap. What now? It was twenty-three minutes to two. The Butyllithium, and that was the only thing I was sure of, had already formed a boiling hot puddle on the fiberglass. In a little while, when the napalm was ignited, I would become the most unnecessary being in the village. What would they do with me? The mail room? An even more inferior position? Home?
I took the book from underneath the towel. In addition to the desire to read, to delve into it, which a dim memory of the story aroused in me, there was something stirring in the thought that this was the reading matter the doctor had chosen to take with him on a journey from which he was not sure if and when he would return. The old, tattered binding promised consolation in any situation which might develop. I could envisage myself reading it happily at a dusty desk in my next enforced job or while waiting outside a disciplinary court, and even placing it on the shelf at home, beside the leather binding of the Plutarch I had received in Paris. The basis of an old man's library.
"Now comes your part," Michel said.
I looked at him in embarrassment. "I have nothing to say."
He watched me as I dug into my pocket and took out the copy of the letter, which was torn and damp with sweat.
"Now it's yours," I lay the folded piece of paper on the suitcase. Without looking at him, I went out and walked through the deep sand. Yvonne, in the doorway of the house, did not move. I put out the hand holding the book.
"You agree to give it to me, don't you?"
She did not say anything. Michel, behind me, remained silent as well. After all, what was left to say or do? Behind the house the soldiers lay in the trench, and each of us had something to hide. Maybe that was the eternal formula for survival in Dura: every reality there had a counterpart, a more difficult, hidden reality. Each secret paled beside the next, graver one. Each of us - myself, the priest, Yvonne, Scheckler, the man in civilian clothes and even Michel - rested on our offenses, invisible stains which the war had revealed with the unerringness of an ultraviolet ray.
Only Anton was clean.
***
When I reached the road I lit a cigarette. The ruin, at the top of the mountain, emitted the smell of cool ashes. An engineering unit was clearing away obstacles at the entrance to no man's land. On the outskirts of the new Friendship Square soldiers were guarding a barrier. "Erja," they called to me from afar. Had that word been included in the operational command issued that morning?
"It's okay," I replied and put one foot over the barbed-wire.
"No one's to go through, even if you're one of ours."
"Why?"
They answered with a shrug of their shoulders. "That's the order."
My watch showed twelve minutes to two. On the other side of the slowly emptying square stood the houses, as decorated and useless as empty gift boxes. The man in civilian clothes was wandering around in front of them together with the family which had starred in the ceremony, only one out of the three hundred and fifty he had promised in the captain's office. They seemed to be waiting for something.
"What book is that?" one of the soldiers asked suddenly.
"Just a book."
"Can I see it?"
I handed it to him without taking my eyes away from the scene below. The little girl rocked a doll in her arms. The two boys threw a red ball to one another in a manner too strange, too precise. An army bus groaned up Peace Boulevard. The man in civilian clothes looked at his watch. The family stood behind him as if on parade. He walked forward, into the middle of the square, gesturing to them with his hand. They moved away from the houses and smiled in the prearranged fashion.
The soldier beside me turned the yellow pages of the book. "It looks old."
The man in civilian clothes looked around the square. His glance, dark and impenetrable, fell on me, then moved off to the bus, where a new group of photographers and journalists alighted. Anyone who had missed the ceremony would be rewarded with pictures of the happy family at the entrance to its house, maybe even with the first account of the explosion.
The soldier beside me grew bored. "What's the book about?"
"A priest," I explained reluctantly, "who adopts a girl..."
"What's special about that?"
"She was blind and one day she opened her eyes and discovered that he..." A long shiver went through me, followed by a weakness that almost sent me to my knees. Like a shout decoded from a distance, the details, down to the very last one, formed a single solid picture. It was all there, in the book. How is it that the things which are closest to us are the least readily comprehensible?
The man in civilian clothes put out his hand to stroke the little girl's head. His left hand! I had no doubt that his heels were run down as well. It suddenly occurred to me that the victory was mine, but I did not yet know what to do.
I started calling to him. "Listen! - Hey! - Wait!" What was his name, actually? And what was the priest's name, didn't it appear in the letter? The captain's name? Scheckler's first name? How could I have lived my life to this moment without knowing anyone's name? I cupped both my hands round my mouth. "Ho!" I shouted. He turned round and walked towards me.
"What are you doing?" he asked sharply, gesturing towards the journalists.
"Get me out of here."
He nodded at the soldiers as I jumped over the barbed-wire barrier.
"Seven minutes to two," I said.
"Yes," he answered in a concerned tone, glancing towards the reporters in the square behind him.
"You did a marvelous job."
He permitted himself a small, happy smile. "You were okay too, in the end..."
"No, no," I rejected the compliment. "Your work is much more difficult, preparing, supervising and even managing to jump over there," I nodded towards the mountain, "and conduct a little sea
rch..."
The brightness went out of his eyes.
"The thing you were looking for," I took the book out of the soldier's hand, "is here, in my hand."
He pursed his mouth tensely.
"He destroyed the letters, it seems, but the real thing is in the books, and they are there, shelves of them."
He swallowed and looked at the soldiers.
"Are you looking for someone?" I went closer to him. "Someone to send quickly with orders to burn the entire library? Arrest the woman too? Maybe me?"
On a parallel track in my mind all the events of the last few weeks were falling into place.
"It won't help. In another few minutes this village will never again be anonymous. More important, it’s filled with people, each of whom understands a part of the picture, components of a dormant bomb just waiting for a tiny spark, a nosy reporter, or maybe a commission of inquiry..."
His face took on a violent expression and I added, "I know what you're thinking now: 'The priest can be spirited away - we'll frighten the woman - the boy will go away sooner or later and the blind girl was only a diversion'...but, " I put my hand on his arm, "you've forgotten me. I won't keep quiet."
He shook my hand away. "Why?"
"Because I'm sick of living in a bubble of bad weather and supplying destruction and misery to order. I don't want to belong to what's about to happen." I glanced at my watch. Two minutes to go. The journalists lined up at the door of the bus. I started walking towards them.
"And what will happen then?" he said behind my back in a surprisingly soft voice. "After you've revealed everything you know? You'll be a hero for a few days, maybe you'll go down in history... What will you do when it's all over and no one is interested in you anymore? To what will you get up each morning?"
The Rainy Day Man: Contemporary Romance Page 24
