He waved his short arm at the lowering sky. "You can't escape from that weather, Simon. You've become accustomed to living there. Even if you sometimes have a little dream about sunny days, you really know that you don't have a chance of surviving them. They'll erode you till you die of a surfeit of satisfaction..."
With a few small steps he crossed the distance I had managed to put between us. "I know what's happened to you here during the last few weeks. Everyone has periods like that, and in the end everyone comes home. After so many years you can't expect any major changes..."
"Nonsense. Anything can change..."
"No, not everything. Look at the people around you, soldiers, public figures, journalists, politicians, even some of the locals. In another minute they'll see history being made. Suppose one of them could change something now, at this very minute, by pressing a button, do you think he'd do it?" He shook his head vigorously. "No. The chances are that he'd be scared, sweat and miss the moment. People learn to trust the tracks they're on, even if they are random, and full of mistakes, even when the mistakes are given all kinds of grand names and one has to fight a war to defend them..."
I looked at him in surprise. This was not the sort of thing I had expected to hear from a small, rotund and obedient man. He smiled shyly, almost apologetically, just as a rapid rush of air came from the front row of houses. A very economical, precise flame emerged from the roof, twisting regularly. The happy family, photographers who had not yet reached the bus and soldiers in the area retreated to the edge of Friendship Square. Leaflets fluttered on the waves of hot air and landed at their feet.
"Anton Khamis?" a journalist asked in surprise, writing the name in his notebook. The fire caught the adjacent buildings. Tremendous heat rose up and hung in the air, mixed with the smell of burning wood. A convoy of military vehicles raced up from the center of the village. A helicopter emerged from behind the mountain. This time only the Chief of Staff was in it.
The journalists photographed him as he examined the collapsing ceilings with a grave expression. From a transmitter affixed to the back of a jeep an initial report was conveyed to the Prime Minister, who was already on his way to Jerusalem. The soldiers began rounding up the local inhabitants in an improvised pen at the edge of the square. The Chief of Staff, against the background of the bus, gave a first television interview.
"We are preparing to respond, even if we have to advance our forces beyond no man's land..." Huge trucks appeared once more on the road winding up from the valley. This time they were laden with tanks.
"We've done our bit," the man in civilian clothes said. He was looking at me with a worried expression.
"Yes," I said wearily and walked back to lean against the side of his car.
Now there was relief on his face. "We'll see what we can do to help you..."
It was a moment of reward that was devoid of joy or elation. I looked across the barbed-wire fence, where a few dozen villagers were sitting in rows, legs folded beneath them. Only the priest was standing, leaning on the branch of a tree, his face displaying severity and calmness, as the doctor's letter had instructed him. I saw myself as he saw me: a wicked weather forecaster escaping in a small car from the storm he had anticipated. To escape to where? To what?
"Maybe Paris..." I said aloud hesitantly, "my former job..."
The man in civilian clothes answered immediately, as if he had been expecting me to say just that: "It will be hard for you. After all, you’ve changed."
"It will be more difficult anywhere else."
Silently he opened the car door. In front of us, in a row, shuffled a soldier leading the old man, who was leading the blind girl into the pen.
"What can you see, Father?" the girl asked in her musical voice.
"Winter," the old man said. "Here it comes."
As if to endorse his statement, the wind now turned into a storm that plunged into the village with the speed of a wounded bull. With it came the large, heavy drops of the first rains, falling like the vanguard of something worse to come.
PART THREE: THE HAPPINESS OF OTHERS
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
By spring it all seemed to have settled. From the heights of the little flat I had rented near the Place d'Italie all the roads that stretched away from Paris looked long and promising. Once a fortnight Jonathan wrote a brief but not hopeless letter, my replacement from the previous spring had been sent elsewhere and Hannah's lawyer was polite whenever he phoned to make the final arrangements.
Only the nights were not yet under control. My sleep was disturbed by nervous waking; memories, and wild thoughts dominated the hours until dawn. Nonetheless, I allowed three weeks to pass before I went near the two-story building at Number One the Alley of the Iron Chick and, from the dimness of a café opposite, on the other side of Boulevard Menilmontane, watched what was going on.
It was as the concierge had described it: a side entrance with a yellowish staircase and a well-locked door, outside which a pile of letters had accumulated, and a bookshop occupying the entire first floor. In the shop window was a notice which read: "Bibliophil S.A. - Main Warehouse," and inside, the two people she had mentioned were working: one plump, short and dark, the other tall, thin and with a rust-colored walrus mustache.
The plump one spent his time by the door behind what looked from the outside like an old cash register. His colleague ran around a maze of shelves hidden behind plywood screens, emerging from time to time in the front part of the shop to place small, well-packed parcels on the counter beside the cash register. From time to time messengers appeared and took the parcels to cars waiting with engines running. I kept a precise record on the serviette. Everyone who entered left. The two employees, who arrived at nine in the morning, left exactly at four in the afternoon.
The fourth day of my vigil was a Saturday. The shop closed at noon. As I was about to pay the waiter a taxi stopped in front of the closed shutter. Whoever had arrived in it did not stop to pay, but got out and stood sorting through a bunch of keys. A raincoat made it difficult to discern whether it was a man, a woman or a boy. In the other hand was a small leather bag and a basket of groceries. The taxi disappeared and the person bent over the lock, then raised the shutter deftly and disappeared behind it.
I ordered another coffee and waited. The street filled with the usual Saturday afternoon strollers of a working-class neighborhood, workers on their day off, boys on bicycles, women with strollers. The café grew too crowded. I left, crossed the road and strolled slowly past the shutter. It was fully closed and locked from the inside. I turned into the courtyard and walked silently up the stairs. The pile of letters at the foot of the door did not seem to be there by chance. As I picked a few of them up I thought I saw a thin strip of light under the door.
I went back to the courtyard. Behind the house was the electricity box. I opened it. The lens in the control hatch had been covered with black paint. I looked up: the washing lines were empty, the chimney smokeless and the shutters closed, as I expected.
But when I turned to go the wall came to life. I pressed my ear to the plaster. A gentle flowing sound came from the pipes. I hurried to the road and bent down by the manhole outside the shop door. Beneath the metal cover came the sound of flowing water.
On Monday morning I was at the café at eight-thirty. At five to nine the two assistants climbed up the steps from the Metro station. The plump one held the two briefcases while his colleague struggled with the lock. The letters forming the sign "Bibliophil S.A." shook as the shutter rose and hit the doorframe. A moment later the light went on over the cash register indicating that the shop was open for business.
I crossed the road and went in. The air inside did not have that fragrance of ink, paper and glue which characterizes places housing a great many books. At the ends of several shelves which protruded from the plywood screen were piled a dozen or so well-wrapped parcels. The plump man was munching a sandwich. The tall one was reading a paper. They both looked at me.
Neither of them asked me what I wanted.
"I'm looking for a book..."
"We sell only wholesale and by order," the tall one explained.
"Two thousand copies," I responded to the challenge. "For a readers' club..."
The plump man inspected me with a lazy, almost sleepy, look. The tall one ran along the counter.
"By all means," he took a small pamphlet out of a drawer. "This is our list. And these are the instructions..."
The list ran to about forty pages, filled with names of books presumably never written and writers apparently never born.
"What about this one?" I pointed at random to, "Ancient Weapons in the Modern World," by A. Mulinovsky.
The plump man jabbed his finger at the page of instructions. "The books will be supplied," the first one went on, "in the quantities and on the dates to be determined by the supplier."
In other words, never. Suddenly the resistance my presence aroused was so clear and palpable that the tall man turned to lift the end of the counter and see me to the door. I took Gide's book out of my coat pocket and put it down in front of him.
They exchanged glances.
I pointed to the ceiling. "I want to talk to the person who lives upstairs..."
The tall man bent over to look at the binding, careful not to touch it.
"I have regard for him."
He opened his mouth to say something, but someone on the other side of the wall forestalled him.
"Let him come up," said a voice which was thickened and distorted by the plywood screen.
The tall man gestured unwillingly toward the rear. The dust swirling around the empty shelves and the echo of my footsteps on the stone floor reminded me of a church in a remote village somewhere in the east, which was very close at that moment, so close that the figure standing in the darkness at the top of the stairs seemed to have always been waiting for me.
I raised my head to him. "Up or down?"
He did not reply, simply turned to descend carefully, one step at a time. When he was half way down I could see that his cheeks had become sunken and his flesh dry. A slight swelling of his youthful lips and something light and clear in his eyes were all that remained of the tranquil, well-fed expression of Anton Khamis.
***
This time it was he who gestured towards the outside. Before he went out he lingered by the door and peered into the street. Then he began to walk along Boulevard Menilmontane. I accompanied him from behind, staying about ten paces back. The Napoleonic gate of the Pѐre Lachaise cemetery was closed with its magnificent lattice gate. He went in through the pedestrian gate. The gatekeeper approached with a map. He rejected it with a wave of his hand. I hurried after the retreating doctor along the main avenue. The gatekeeper growled something and shrugged his shoulders.
He went up the steps leading to the musicians' plot and I lost him in the complex of ancient graves and enormous trees. I stopped at a fork from which several shady lanes led. Along one of them I could see footprints on the layer of moisture. I went that way. After walking a while I found him sitting with hunched shoulders on the stone edge of a tombstone. Behind him two stone cherubs looked as though they were about to take flight.
"It's quiet here," he said.
I went closer, wondering if he was referring to the spot where we were, the neighborhood he had chosen to live in, or Paris in general. He clasped his fingers, tense and distracted.
"How are things there?"
I hesitated. "I think you succeeded..." What did he know of all that had happened? "They think you're a wonderful person, a hero..."
His gaze wandered to the book in my hand. "When did you realize?"
"Only at the last moment," I tapped the binding. "This story, about a priest who takes a blind girl into his house and then falls in love with her..."
He grimaced uncomfortably.
"It was very clever," I said encouragingly and sat down next to him. "The letter, the book and the priest's afternoon diversions, three components which could explode only when combined. Anyone reading the letter would think that the sentence about the blind was a proverb or, at the most, something connected with the blind girl who lived in the cellar. The book on its own also seems innocent. Reading matter for your journey. Even someone reading the discovery of the priest's perversion couldn't tell anything about you. Only in one place could the meeting of all the components take place, and only one person would interpret it as a message: a sin for a sin, silence for silence..."
His gaze wandered over the graves.
"The priest..."
"I was afraid he'd begin to reconstruct," he said in a low voice, "to investigate. I was afraid of what would happen to Michel after all the years he had trusted me as if I were his real father..."
I remembered the copy of the letter I had given the boy. "It would have been easier if you had let me in on things..."
"They said you'd understand on your own."
It was evident that he knew nothing of what had happened between Yvonne and me. His controllers had fed him, as was customary, only with what they wanted him to have.
"I might not have," I said gently.
"I asked about you in the months I've been hiding. In a sense, it all depended on you and I had nothing better to alleviate my irritability." He smiled apologetically as he listed my good qualities. "They told me that you were experienced and professional, an intelligent man who had lived for many years under a different identity and always did what you were told to do in the best possible way..."
I could understand the villagers' affection for him. His face displayed genuine, convincing innocence. "I don't even know your real name," I said cautiously.
He raised his eyebrows in a gesture of acceptance. "I've almost forgotten it too in all the years I've been Khamis..."
If he was pretending, he was first-rate. "Since when is that?"
He thought for a moment. "Since ‘46."
The more natural his answers were, the more disbelief took hold of me. I slid along the rough stone to his side.
"How..." I asked sympathetically, "How did you get into this?"
"I was a child," he replied with no hesitation, "alone on a kibbutz. My parents had been killed on the border, when we fled from Syria with a group of other Jews. When I was seventeen, someone came and asked for me one day. He brought regards from a distant uncle of my mother's and suggested that I might go to study in Beirut. Medicine sounded appropriate, a profession with good pay, status, honor. At first I didn't guess a thing, I was grateful and the people who came from time to time to sleep in my flat or the fact that my name became Anton Khamis didn't bother me..." He breathed deeply. "I don't know if I'm allowed to..."
I offered him a cigarette. He declined. "In fact, I know the rest," I said through the cloud of smoke. "In ‘47 you began to participate in debates and go to meetings to create the required impression, and in ‘48 or nine you went to the border and waited until a group arrived that would suit you..."
He wet his lips. "The way you put it..."
"That's how it was, wasn't it?"
"It began like that. Afterwards he was my friend."
Even here, having successfully emerged from the quagmire of his life, he managed to seem fragrant and pure. That was something unfair to me and to others I had known who had done similar work and paid the price in spiritual suicide and the loss of the capacity to trust. It was even more annoying when I thought that Yvonne had preferred him to me.
"He was such a good friend," I said, "that instead of confessing to him you probably threatened to blackmail him if he ever revealed the truth about you..."
"I couldn't take chances..." Now there was true pain in his face, of a kind refined by nights of loneliness. "That doesn't detract from the fact that he was very close to me and Dura was my home and Michel..." His voice broke.
"...And your wife." I wouldn't give up.
"Yvonne. She wasn't my wife."
I didn't bother to look surprised. "
How much of all this did she know?"
"Nothing." He leaned back against the headstone. "I made sure she didn't know. All the years I lived alone, in secret, receiving my orders in parcels of books and reporting back via the transmitter... The night I was knifed I nearly broke, I was on the verge of telling her. I put disinfectant ointment on the wound, bandaged it somehow and sat in an abandoned building up there, on the mountain. I knew it would be my last night in Dura, maybe the night before last. There was so much to do. To go back, find the transmitter and destroy it, burn the books with all the information they contained, leave money..."
The wind stirred up dust at the top of the tombstone and laid it gently on his shoulders and hair.
"Don't think I wasn't ready. I had been thinking for years about the end, I had planned it. When the invasion began and they asked me to gather information prior to your mission I had the feeling that would be my last action in Dura. But that night, knowing the moment had arrived, together with the pain of the wound, paralyzed me. I did none of the things I should have done. I had an emergency transmitter hidden in a hollow tree right in the middle of the ruin. I took it out and sent the signal to Tel Aviv. Then I sat down to write the letter. You were already on your way and two days later you arrested me..."
The loss he had borne and his desolation made my sympathy outweigh my suspicions.
“But why that way," I asked, "such a complicated way? You could have left quietly, maybe fabricated some evidence of your death..."
"...And leave behind a woman and a boy abandoned by the man who had looked after them?" He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose noisily. "I had to think of them, leave them a future as the family of a hero..." A piece of paper slipped out of the folds of the handkerchief and fell to the ground. A visiting card. I held it out to him, print downwards. He turned it over. "Montreal. In another two days I'll be there. Not something big. A pharmacy. Far away from people who might identify me, from the memories..."
The Rainy Day Man: Contemporary Romance Page 25
