Don't Ask Me If I Love

by Amos Kollek

  We strolled around in the supermarket for about half an hour, buying all sorts of food. Finally we joined the shortest check-out line.

  “I hope this will be enough,” Joy said, handing me two huge paper bags. “Actually,” she said, “we probably won’t even need all of it. We’re having dinner out tonight.”

  “I forgot to tell you,” I said as we were walking slowly toward the exit. “I can’t go this evening. I’ll have to call Ram’s mother and apologize.”

  Joy stopped walking and turned to me, surprised.

  “You can’t go? Why not?”

  I took a few more steps but she didn’t come after me, so I turned and walked back to where she stood.

  “I have to go and see Bennett. He is leaving tomorrow morning.”

  “Why do you have to see him again?”

  “I want to show him two outlines I’ve written. I’ve got to be sure I have it right.”

  “Why can’t you show them to him this afternoon?”

  “He’ll be on the West Bank,” I said patiently, “and later in the evening he’ll be asleep.”

  “Oh.” She shook her head in cold understanding.

  “Send it to him in the States. You’d get an answer within a week.”

  “I don’t want to lose time on this,” I said. “He could find someone else or change his mind altogether. Anyway, I told him I was coming. I can’t cancel it now.”

  Her mouth tightened into a thin, unpleasant line.

  “Sometimes I just don’t believe you,” she said.

  “Look, do we have to discuss it here? Let’s at least …”

  “We’ll bloody well discuss it here,” Joy said sharply. “What’s your hurry? He isn’t expecting you yet.”

  “O.K.,” I said.

  “One would have thought,” she said, “that Ram would mean more to you than Bennett.”

  I stared through the glass at the street outside.

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Is that what I’m being?”

  “What the hell has this got to do with Ram? Why bring him into it? For that matter, I don’t give a damn about Bennett.”

  “Don’t shout.”

  “Bennett can be dead and buried as far as I am concerned,” I said calmly, “but I want to make that movie.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t intend to blow it because of one meaningless dinner.”

  “I wonder what you’d consider meaningful,” she said bitterly.

  “Don’t you want to be an actress? He said you might get this role. Don’t you want it?”

  “I want it, but I wouldn’t sell myself for it.”

  I waved my hand in exasperation.

  “You’re coming out with some really heavy thoughts.”

  “You’d really throw away anything just because of some …”

  “Not some, this is a very rare opp—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” she said scornfully. “If worst came to worst, you could always get the money from your bloody father.”

  We looked at each other silently for a moment.

  “The whole point is,” I said quietly, “that I don’t want to get the money from my bloody father. I don’t want it to be his money.”

  She looked down helplessly.

  “Sometimes I wonder what the hell I see in you.”

  I put out my hand and touched her shoulder.

  “Look,” I said, “Everyone is watching. Let’s get out of here.”

  She raised two mocking eyebrows.

  “I’m sure you don’t mind the audience. You’re so keen on show business.”

  I bit my lip impatiently.

  “Are you coming or not?”

  “All right.”

  I turned and started walking toward the glass door.

  “Oh damn, I forgot to get coffee,” her voice said behind me. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  I grimaced irritably and walked out.

  I put the two packages in the back of the car and yawned.

  A huge explosion knocked me sideways and threw me against the door. I was completely dazed for a few seconds, just leaning on the warm metal with my eyes closed.

  By the time I turned around people had already begun screaming.

  The glinting pieces of glass were on everything in sight.

  I ran back through what had been the entrance of the supermarket and jumped over a few tin boxes and overturned stands. Then I stopped short. I could only see the white of her dress and the blood. There wasn’t any face.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  TWO weeks later, I sat in my old room in my parents’ house and looked at the finished portrait of Ram. It stood on my bed, leaning against the wall. It had good, strong colors. They caught the eye immediately. I had painted the shirt and the background deep red. It fitted peculiarly well with the bronze color of the face. I loved to look at it.

  It’s strange, I thought, how alive pictures can look. Just a mixture of chemicals. And yet, there is so much vitality in the meaning you attach to them. There isn’t anything there at all. It’s just in you. It’s all in you, and you choose in what objects to place it, and in what people. People don’t matter for themselves. They matter because of the importance you add to them because you can’t keep it all in yourself until it chokes you. It’s because you want to make sure that they exist that you let it outside of yourself and lose it. But afterward you can’t get it back because it disappears with whatever it was attached to. And the quantity is limited, that is probably why it hurts.

  You lose part of yourself, when you let yourself out. It’s safer inside.

  But it chokes you. That’s why you have to get out of yourself.

  Memories, I thought. They’re ugly things. They make you feel as though your life is over. One shouldn’t have memories.

  When you were small, really small, everything was beauiful, remember? There was no one else but you.

  But then, there were other times, later. There was that evening in the hotel, when she said she would, and you hadn’t expected her to because you had always known that she wouldn’t, but she did. Remember?

  And there was the trip. More than two weeks when there was no one else. She said it would be all right, it would only take time and you’ll have to wait. Everything takes time.

  And there was the first time you saw her when she was walking by herself on the sidewalk wearing her white dress and she looked like a little girl.

  It’s just that there is nothing to occupy your mind with, sitting alone in an empty room with a silent picure.

  And remember how she came home only two days ago so happy about those new sentences she had learned and she said them with her funny peculiar accent “I am a girl, it is summer now, the sun is shining and everyone is happy.”

  My father knocked on the door and walked slowly into the room. He looked at me carefully and saw the thin smile on my lips. His face was tired and grim.

  “Oh,” he said slowly, carefully, “I am glad to see that you are feeling better.”

  “Yes,” I said, “yes yes yes.”