Don't Ask Me If I Love

by Amos Kollek

  “I finished the big affair with Gila,” he added finally, with an effort.

  I raised my eyebrows but didn’t comment. I was having a hard time catching my breath.

  “I didn’t think it was right from the beginning,” he said apologetically. Then he turned and moved quickly to the head of the line.

  Chapter Three

  THAT was as far as my thoughts went back.

  As Frank Sinatra’s last song for that evening’s program came over the car radio, my thoughts trailed and shifted away. I liked the words.

  “On a clear day you can see forever and ever and ever and evermore.”

  Ram’s voice, from the other side of the car, snapped me back into the present and into reality.

  “Really want to go to the Blue Goose?”

  I sat up and switched the radio off.

  “Yeah.”

  “We might as well get going then.”

  I turned the key in the ignition and put the lights on.

  “Did you like her?”

  “Oh, I don’t care,” he said. “I’ll watch you.”

  The Blue Goose was just like the few other discotheques you find around Jerusalem. It was a long, cave-shaped room, with a small bar, a dancing floor, a few tables and not much more.

  That night it was quite crowded with Israelis, Arabs, and lots of tourists.

  Ram and I were pleased to find a single vacant table. We ordered two gin fizzes as we were instructed by the Arab waiter, and then turned to have a look around.

  There was quite a lot of noise. A record was being played rather loudly, and most of the people were talking loudly. There were a few couples on the dance floor shaking and twisting in a most grotesque manner. Joy was nowhere to be seen. I ordered myself another drink and winked encouragingly at Ram’s mask of boredom. I forced myself to look at the dancers to catch some of their brilliant technique. I was not fond of dancing. First of all, because I couldn’t do it well, and secondly, because I felt silly when I did do it.

  After half an hour of this Ram started tapping his fingers on the table impatiently. I was getting annoyed myself, because the drinks were very small and lousy, and there wasn’t anything else to do but drink.

  “Doesn’t look too promising,” Ram offered, at length.

  “Hang on,” I tried to convince myself, “never lose hope.”

  He stared at his watch and said nothing.

  Then Joy stepped in.

  She was accompanied by a dark, rather good-looking young man.

  I forced a long, low whistle through my teeth.

  Ram chuckled quietly to himself.

  They looked around for a free table and seeing none, walked over to the dance floor and began dancing.

  Looking at them irritated me. She was a snappy dancer and when she moved, her light hair bounced on her shoulders and flowed with her motions. I realized she was rather tall. Her partner was a bit shorter than she. At least I was tall.

  They danced for a quarter of an hour or so and then there was a break in the music.

  The dark man moved over to the bar to get drinks. Joy remained standing in one of the corners, leaning on a wall.

  I finished Ram’s drink and got to my feet. He looked up at me and his mouth curled playfully.

  “Take it easy, pal.”

  I snapped my fingers and gave him a smile.

  “Sure.”

  But I felt as nervous as a cat.

  I walked over to her. The music started again.

  “Good evening,” I said to Joy.

  “Hi.”

  She looked at me and smiled faintly. In the background, I could see her friend approaching us with two cocktails.

  “Will you dance?” I asked her.

  “Thank you.”

  She moved with me to the floor and started swaying her long, elastic body with the music. She looked at me through half closed eyes without much expression.

  “You’ll have to excuse my dancing,” I said. “I never found it necessary to dance before, so I never did.”

  “Do you find it necessary now?”

  “Your boy friend was hunting you with two enormous cocktails. I thought I’d better ask you to dance.”

  She showed two rows of white healthy teeth.

  “He isn’t my boy friend.”

  “Well, that does help.”

  “Are you a student?”

  “No. I’m still in the army.”

  “You must be having a hard time, then?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, considering it. “But I’ll be through in a few weeks.”

  There was silence. I stepped on her foot.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She just laughed.

  “How long have you been in this country?”

  “Over three months already.”

  I watched her body swinging with absolute ease and hoped whoever was in charge of the records would have the brains to put on something slower. I found it difficult to keep up with her.

  “Immigrating?” I asked her.

  “Not really.”

  “Just hanging around?”

  “Are you kidding? I’m a hard-working girl.”

  “Doing what?”

  “TWA office, in the King David Hotel.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “At 22 El Rais Street. That’s inside the walls.”

  “Age?”

  “Twenty-two. White. Unmarried. Maybe you should take notes.”

  “My memory is quite good.”

  “Oh, well then.”

  The music stopped for a moment.

  “Would you like to sit down?” I asked.

  “Why not?”

  We walked over and joined Ram at the table.

  “You’ve met,” I told them.

  The dark young man appeared behind Joy.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” he said.

  “I was picked up, meanwhile,” she explained. “Girl can’t be left on her own these days.” She motioned him to a chair. “This is Ram, this is Assaf, and this is Muhammed.”

  She looked at us expectantly.

  I wondered why I hadn’t realized before. I felt helpless anger building inside me.

  “How do you do?” Muhammed said politely.

  Ram and I just nodded our heads slightly.

  I stared disgustedly at my empty glass. Suddenly I wanted no part of all of this. I had nothing against those people, I told myself. People were not born good on one side of the border and bad on the other. It was all a matter of fate. Fate played with people, and they played with one another. That was all.

  But then, we’ve been killing the Arabs and being killed by them for more than two decades now. Sentiments are not rational. They are not supposed to be.

  And blood is thicker than water.

  I tried to listen to the ongoing conversation.

  Joy was saying that Muhammed was her neighbor, and that he was showing her around in Jerusalem.

  I didn’t comment on that. I was wondering if they had been to bed together. They used to say Western girls were crazy about dark men.

  I looked at Ram. He was staring at me thoughtfully and I was sure he was reading my thoughts. I turned my eyes away from him.

  Suddenly I became aware that no one was speaking, and they were all looking at me. I glanced at Joy. She was studying me with her pale blue eyes. I got the impression that she wasn’t too sure of what she saw there.

  I looked back at Ram.

  “I think we will be going,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  I rose.

  Joy kept staring at me. The expression on her face betrayed bewilderment, and I thought, maybe also hurt. Muhammed, politely, looked at the table.

  “So long.”

  “So long,” said Ram, getting up.

  “Good-bye,” Joy said frozenly.

  Muhammed nodded politely.

  We walked out.

  “You’re a funny guy, you know,” Ram said to me. />
  We got into the car. I sat at the wheel but didn’t start the engine. The goddam girl, I thought angrily, sitting in there in her white dress like a goddam virgin.

  “Let’s go home.”

  I didn’t react. I was trying to figure out what made me leave like this, like a whipped dog with his tail between his legs.

  “You didn’t have to go if you didn’t want to, but since we are out let’s beat it.”

  I could have tried to ask her to come home with me. Maybe she would have. You could never tell what a girl would do.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Ram, who was above conflicts, and above moods, and above girls, said disgustedly, “it won’t do any good to sit here all night.”

  “What’s your hurry?” I asked aggressively, “got something better to do?”

  “I had a rough week,” he said placidly, “I could use some sleep.”

  That was true, I thought dully. The company commander had been on leave for the past ten days and Ram had taken his place. He had reason to be tired. I looked at his handsome, impassive face. His superior self-control and indifference irritated me suddenly. I couldn’t match it.

  “Let’s go and get drunk.”

  “No.”

  “Let’s go and look for girls then.”

  “No.”

  “Oh come on. Stop being too good to be human.”

  Shut up, I told myself. What’s the matter with you? Do you have to ruin everything? O.K. So it’s not your day, so what? Go back to your room and crawl into bed like a good boy.

  “I’m going home now,” Ram said, “if you don’t want to drive me, I’ll walk.”

  “Go.”

  He didn’t even look surprised. His face remained blank. He started to get out of the car.

  I tapped him on the shoulder and as he turned his face to me I hit him viciously on the mouth. My knuckles smashed into his teeth and it sent a stinging pain through my fist. I looked at my hand with genuine disbelief. The skin was bruised and covered with small drops of blood. I froze in my sitting position, holding my wrist in my left hand.

  Ram half-fell through the door. He was up on his feet almost before he touched the ground. He walked slowly around the car and opened the door on my side. He looked at me with his calm, thoughtful eyes. Then he grabbed me by the collar and pulled me out. He did it easily, he was very strong. I saw his fist coming and I heard it connect dully with my jaw. The world began going around me in crazy circles. It finally slowed down when I slipped to the pavement and threw up my supper on the side of the car.

  “A spoiled child,” he said.

  I saw a thin trickle of blood making its way slowly down his chin. He turned and walked away.

  I put a weary hand on the handle and hoisted myself up. I got into the car and turned the radio on.

  I woke up late in the morning. I shoved my head under the cold water and let it run for a while. Then I swallowed a couple of aspirin and went downstairs.

  I was relieved to see that my parents had already eaten and the kitchen was empty. No family debates at least. I made myself a few pieces of buttered toast and a cup of tea.

  Lately, whenever I spent any time with my parents, we ended up before too long on the subject of my future political career. Despite the fact that there were about thirty parties in the country, my father could see my career in his party very clearly in his mind. There was only one party that mattered, he said, and that was the Labor party. It was the only one that mattered because it was the only one that won. He had good connections with its leading figures. He always knew what was going on and followed it closely. Getting me into politics would not be difficult, it just required good planning. The only problem was that I wasn’t interested.

  I liked art. I liked literature. I didn’t like politics.

  There was nothing wrong with art and literature, my father said, but there was no power in them. A man had to be practical. He had been practical. In the thirty years that had passed since his father died and left him his small, crumbling bank in Tel Aviv, he hadn’t wasted a day. It wasn’t for money’s sake. He had always dealt only with things that interested him. Economy, industry, defense, but he had had no time for politics. He bought a new Dodge every year. My mother had a small Dodge. Neither she nor my father would drive a German car.

  Twenty-four years ago my father left Tel Aviv and moved to Jerusalem. He married my mother on the same day. She had also been an immigrant from Germany and was five years his junior. She hadn’t come to the country before the war as he had. She had spent three years in a concentration camp. But there was no bitterness in her. I never heard her talk about that period in her life, and I couldn’t sense any negative influence on her character. She was always gentle and kind and didn’t seem to hate anyone. For her, the new country was the most wonderful thing in the world. It was a miracle. She didn’t need anything more.

  After I had breakfast, I went to the terrace and sat in the sun. The main thing was to make time pass.

  Just six weeks.

  I had lunch with my parents.

  “This government,” said my father, after we had sat down and started with the soup, “is no good.”

  “We have a very good Defense Minister,” my mother protested gently.

  This was one of the issues on which there was general agreement in the family.

  “That’s not the point,” he said. “This government represents too many parties, that’s the problem. It cannot hold any firm line. It cannot come to any decisions. Right now, not making decisions is worse than deciding wrong.”

  “You know,” I said, wanting to irritate him a bit, “if you consider it objectively the Arabs have better arguments than we. The excuse that two thousand years ago there were Canaanite tribes here to whom we are doubtfully connected is only for laughs. Even according to that line the Arabs are no less entitled to this country than we.”

  He shook his head grimly. “Six million of this nation were killed because they were stuck in foreign countries, among foreign peoples. We came here so that never again could such a thing be. How’s that for an argument?”

  As he talked my mother looked at me anxiously with her sad brown eyes. I regretted I had started with that subject.

  Mom served the meat and the potatoes.

  “The only thing that matters,” I said, “is that we’re here, so we have to make the best of it.”

  “I talked with Barak, the party secretary, the other day. I told him you might be coming to work for him in a few weeks. He said welcome.”

  “He did? And what did I say?”

  He regarded me blankly, unimpressed. “The steak is delicious,” he said, turning to smile at my mother.

  “I don’t like it,” I said.

  “It was cooked specially for you,” my mother said, with a hurt expression.

  But I was getting worried. It seemed that he was really determined. In the past few weeks he had spent some time actually talking to me. He had never gone that far before. “I don’t like it,” I said again, louder.

  “You have a future, maybe,” he said kindly, “but you shouldn’t waste time.”

  I sat silently at my place and ate the dessert. I saw a tall, blond girl in front of my eyes, whose body was swaying to unheard music.

  If you want something, go get it. Otherwise—you’d better not want it.

  I wiped my mouth with the napkin.

  “O.K., I’m going.”

  “Ram again?” my mother asked.

  “How’d you ever guess?”

  I left the house and drove over to Ram’s place. His family lived in a small flat in the neighboring quarter. His mother worked in a government office and had to support herself and her two sons. They didn’t have a lot. But Ram was making some money himself, and it helped take the load off her back.

  As I took the stairs, three at a time, up to their apartment, I remembered my behavior of the previous night, but I relied on Ram to be the type not to bear a grudge.

&nb
sp; I rang the bell.

  His mother opened the door. She was a tall, handsome woman with brown eyes and brown hair. She always dressed simply.

  “Well,” she said, “I haven’t seen you for a long time.”

  I smiled back at her.

  “I’ve been busy soldiering.” I walked in. “Is the lieutenant around?”

  “In his room I believe. Think you’ll be able to find it?”

  I shook my head dolefully. “Madam, you are underestimating me.”

  Udi, Ram’s sixteen-year-old brother, appeared in the hall. He was almost as tall as his brother, though not quite so handsome. That still made him better looking than average.

  “Hey, Assaf!” he said glowingly.

  “Hi, old man.”

  Udi liked me.

  “When are you going to start making movies, or writing books, or gangstering around?” he asked. “I am watching after you, boy.”

  “You keep that spirit, uncle,” I said, starting toward Ram’s room.

  “Are you going to drag Ram with you into politics?” he asked behind me.

  I frowned.

  “I am not going into politics, and Ram is not willing to become a movie star, so I don’t know what I can do.”

  I walked into Ram’s room. He was sitting on his bed reading Dayan’s Sinai Campaign. I moved over to the window and opened it. The air outside was dry and hot; it wasn’t a pleasant day. I shut the window and sat at his desk. I picked up Ben Gurion’s Talks with Arab Leaders.

  Ram’s interests were not hard to define.

  I put the book down and stared out of the window. Everything was still and quiet, typical of early Saturday afternoon. Ram stopped reading and started shifting around. He looked at his hands and then put them inside his pockets and looked down at the floor.

  “What’s on?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Have any ideas?”

  “No.”

  “Sorry you had to walk home last night.”

  “Good for my health.”

  “I don’t know why there’s never anything for us to do on vacations.”

  “Yes.” He shrugged. “Fortunately we go back to the valley tomorrow.”

  I grimaced.

  In our high school days Ram and I used to spend many weekends on short journeys to different parts of the country. We liked walking and had never had any trouble passing free time. The army had brought a change. We didn’t have much of an urge to walk or travel after parading in full kit throughout the week. There wasn’t a lot else we were capable of doing for amusement, except go to the movies every now and then. We were both outstandingly inefficient where having fun was concerned.