The Lover

by A. B. Yehoshua

  Of course I wept and cried and pleaded but it didn’t do any good. My mother kept quiet, she didn’t want to get into a quarrel on my account, she couldn’t tell me why it was Adnan and Faiz and not Na’im, she couldn’t say it was because they were the children of another woman, an old woman who died years ago and Father gave her his word before she died.

  It was so hard at first getting up in the morning. Father used to wake me up at half-past four, afraid I might not wake up by myself, and I really didn’t want to wake up. Darkness all around and Father touching me, pulling me gently out of bed, sitting there and watching me getting dressed and eating breakfast. Leading me to the bus stop through the village that’s just beginning to wake up between electric lights and firelights through side streets full of mud and puddles among donkeys and sacks. He turns me over to Hamid like a prisoner. They put me on the cold bus with all the other workers, Mother’s homemade bread in a plastic bag in my hand. Slowly the bus fills up and Muhammad, the driver, takes his seat and starts running the engine and shouting at late comers. And I look out through the steamed-up window and see Father sitting there hunched up under the awning. A wrinkled old man wrapped in a black cloak raising his hand to everyone who goes past, starting to talk to somebody but all the time watching me sideways. And I used to get really angry with him, laying my head on the rail in front of me and pretending to be asleep and when the bus started moving and Father tapped on the window to say goodbye I’d pretend not to notice. At first I really did sleep the whole journey and I used to arrive at work dead tired. Yawning all the time and dropping things. Always asking the time. But after a while I began to get used to it. In the mornings I woke up on my own and I’d be one of the first to arrive at the bus stop, sitting down not far from the driver, no longer feeling sleepy. At first I tried taking a book with me to read on the way but they all laughed at me, they couldn’t understand it, me going to work in a garage with a book, and a book in Hebrew at that. They thought I was crazy. So I gave it up. I couldn’t concentrate anyway. Reading the same page over and over again but not taking it in. So I just look out at the road, seeing the darkness disappear, the flowers on the mountains. I never tire of this route, the same route day after day, an hour and a half there and an hour and a half back.

  At four o’clock in the afternoon we’re already standing at the bus stop waiting for Muhammad’s bus and from all over the city the people of our village and villages nearby are assembling, construction workers, gardeners, bin men, kitchen workers, manual labourers, domestic help and garage hands. All of them with plastic bags and identity cards ready at hand in shirt pockets. Jews get on the bus too, Jews of all kinds with heavy baskets, most of them get off at the Acre Road. And in Acre more Arabs get on and some Jews as well, a different kind, immigrants from Russia, and Moroccans too. They hardly understand Hebrew. And on the way the Jews thin out and the Arabs too and in Carmel the last of the Jews leave the bus and only Arabs are left. The sun on our backs is nice and the road flies. Haifa disappears from the horizon, Carmel is swallowed by the mountains, the electricity pylons thin out. No smell of Jews now. Muhammad tunes the radio to a Baghdad station that broadcasts verses from the Koran, to entertain us. We go deeper into the mountains, driving among orchards on a narrow road twisting among the fields and there’s nothing to remind us of the Jews, not even an army jeep. Only Arabs, barefooted shepherds in the fields with their sheep. Like there never was a Balfour Declaration, no Herzl, no wars. Quiet little villages, everything like they say it used to be many years ago, and even better. And the bus fills with the warbling of that imam from Baghdad, a soft voice lovingly chanting the suras. We sit there hypnotized, silent at first and then crooning softly along with him.

  ADAM

  One of those Friday night debates, fruitless conversations among the plates of nuts and the dripping olive oil, when they start on that political crap about the Arabs, the Arab character, the Arab mentality and all the rest of it, I get irritable, start grumbling, lately I’ve lost patience with these debates. “What do you really know about them? I employ perhaps thirty Arabs in my garage and believe me, every day I become less of an expert on Arabs.”

  “But those Arabs are different.”

  “Different from whom?” Getting up from my seat angrily, not knowing why I’m so agitated. Asya blushes, watching me tensely.

  “They depend on you … they’re afraid of you.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  But how can I explain? All entangled in my ideas. I sit down again, saying nothing.

  Hamid, for example –

  My own age perhaps but with the body of a youth, very thin. Only his face is wrinkled. The first worker I ever had, he’s worked with me nearly twenty years. Silent, proud, a lone wolf. He never looks at you straight, but if you catch his eye you’ll see that the pupils are very black, like coffee grounds in an empty cup.

  What’s he thinking to himself? What does he think about me, for example? He hardly ever says a word, if he does speak it’s always to do with work, engines, cars. Whenever I try to draw him out on other subjects he refuses to talk. But his loyalty is really unique, or maybe it isn’t loyalty. In all these years he hasn’t been absent a single day, and not through fear of getting sacked. He’s a permanent employee with full rights. On the first of the month Erlich gives him four thousand pounds in cash, which Hamid stuffs into his shirt pocket, without counting it, saying nothing. What he spends this money on I can’t imagine, he always appears in scruffy clothes and worn shoes.

  An expert and senior mechanic. These last few years he’s worked in a small shop that he built for himself in a corner of the garage, and that’s his kingdom. He restores old cars. A complicated professional job requiring precision, imagination, golden hands and infinite patience. He dismantles old engines, some of them completely wrecked, drills and cuts out new parts and breathes life into them. He works without rest, no radio beside him, no casual conversation or joking with the other workers, no teasing the customers. He’s the first to return to work after meal breaks but he also stops working the moment it’s time to go, he’s never been prepared to work overtime, he washes his hands, picks up his empty plastic bag and goes.

  Two or three years ago he suddenly became religious. He brought from his home a dirty little prayer mat and every now and then he’d stop work for a few minutes, strip off his shoes, go down on his knees and bow towards the south, towards the lathe and the tool racks on the wall. Reciting passionate verses to himself, to the Prophet, who knows? Then putting on his shoes and going back to work. A strange kind of piety, grim somehow. Even the other Arabs in the garage used to stare at him darkly.

  Because in spite of his solitariness he is a kind of leader to them, even if he doesn’t try to have too much to do with them. He walks among them aloof and silent. But when I need a new worker he brings me a boy or a youth within two or three days, as if he’s the chief of a whole tribe. Eventually I realized that most of the Arabs in the garage are in fact his relations, close or distant cousins.

  I asked him once, “How many cousins have you got?”

  A lot, he’d never bothered to count them.

  “And how many of them work here?”

  “How many?” He tried to evade the question. “There are a few …”

  In the end he admitted to at least ten, in addition to his two sons. This surprised me very much because I never imagined that those were his sons, he didn’t seem to have any special tie to them.

  “How many children have you got altogether?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Just … curious.”

  “Fourteen.”

  “How many wives?”

  “Two.”

  He was really upset by questions like these, fidgeting nervously all the time with a screwdriver, turning his back to me, impatient to get rid of me and go back to his work.

  To his credit, although he used to provide me with new workers, he never inte
rfered later on and if I was forced to sack them he didn’t say a word, only bringing me a few days later some new cousin or relative from his endless supply.

  On the first day of the war he arrived of course, but only a few others came with him. They were afraid to leave their villages, they didn’t know what was going to happen. I grabbed him at once.

  “Where are the others?”

  He said nothing, not even looking at me, what did I want from him? But I wasn’t letting him off that easily.

  “Hamid, you tell them all to come to work. What is this? This war of ours isn’t a holiday for you. There are cars here that need repairing, people will come back from the front and expect to find their cars repaired. Do you hear?”

  But he didn’t reply, looking at me with hatred, his hands in his pockets, as if all this had nothing to do with him.

  “You should really be fighting with us, you should’ve been called up too. Anyone who doesn’t come in tomorrow will be fired. Tell all your relations.”

  He shrugged his shoulders, as if he didn’t care.

  But for the whole of that day I didn’t let him work on his engines, I gave him dirty, menial jobs, tightening brakes, changing flats, charging batteries. He said nothing but it was obvious that his pride was hurt. The next day all the Arabs came in and he went back to his workshop. During the entire war not a single worker was absent. Hamid even made it his business to bring in workers to take the place of Jews who’d been called up.

  But beyond this I don’t get involved with him, nor with the others. I’ve always refrained from visiting their villages and being a guest in their homes, as some of the employers in the neighbourhood do. It always ends in trouble, it gets out of hand sooner or later. In general I’ve rather kept my distance in recent years, convinced that the business runs itself quite smoothly without me. Already there are many workers whose names I don’t know, what with such a turnover. The garage has become full of boys over the last few years, sometimes even children. The Arabs bring small boys with them, brothers, cousins, or just waifs from the villages. They are quiet and obedient, dragging the boxes of tools around, fetching keys, opening hoods, tightening brakes, wiping black handprints from the doors, changing stations on the radio. The Arabs love little personal servants like these, they like having somebody they can shout at, give orders to. It gives them a sense of importance and security. The more the garage grew in size, the more little boys ran about in it.

  Once I asked Erlich, “Tell me, is this kindergarten costing me money?”

  But he smiled, shook his head. “Don’t worry, they’re saving you tax, you’re profiting from them.”

  Some of the boys were given the job of cleaning the garage, sweeping up, scrubbing the floor. The garage began to look clean and respectable. One day I was standing by myself in the yard, deep in thought, and suddenly somebody pushed a broom between my feet and said rudely, “Do you mind moving?” I looked down, a little Arab boy with a big broom, looking at me steadily and insolently. I felt a little stab of pain in my heart. I was reminded of Yigal, I don’t know why, something about those dark eyes.

  “Who brought you here?” I asked him, wondering if he knew I was the boss.

  “My cousin, Hamid.”

  Hamid, of course. Every other man here is his cousin. It won’t be long before I discover that I’m related to him too. These Arabs, they don’t spare their children. They’d be better off at school than sweeping up the rubbish and picking up screws here.

  “How old are you, boy?”

  “Fourteen years and three months.”

  “How is this? Didn’t you want to stay on at school?”

  He blushed, in a panic, afraid I was going to throw him out. He started to mumble something about his Either, who wouldn’t let him … little liar.

  And he went on sweeping around me. And suddenly I was moved, I put out my hand and lightly touched his tousled head, covered with dust from his work with the broom. This little Arab, my employee, what’s he thinking about? What’s his business? Where’s he from? What’s happening to him here? I’ll never know. He told me his name a moment ago and already I’ve forgotten it.

  NA’IM

  In the early days it was very interesting in the big garage. New faces all around me, coming and going, all kinds of Jews bringing their cars in, laughing and shouting. Some of the mechanics were Jewish bastards, some were local Arabs, corrupt as hell with their complicated jokes. Noise and confusion. On the walls in every corner there were pictures of naked girls, showing nearly everything, maddening, breath-taking, Jewish and non-Jewish blondes and brunettes, black women and redheads. Amazing. Unbelievable. Lying with eyes closed on new tyres, opening the doors of smart cars, resting tits and asses and long legs on engines or screws or sets of spark plugs. On the ass of one of these gorgeous chicks they’d drawn the whole year’s calendar, it was that big. These pictures drove me crazy. I was afraid to look at them and I couldn’t keep my eyes off them. Sometimes I got so hard it hurt. In the noise and the dirt among the cars and the workers I used to wander about in the first few weeks daydreaming. Several times my underpants got wet. In bed at night I was squeezed by desire, remembering the girls and not letting them go. Coming all over the place, a fountain of come I was. Leaping from one to the next, unwilling to do without any of them, kissing and burning and coming and getting horny again. In the morning I used to get up exhausted and pale and Mother and Father were worried about me. But then slowly I began to get used to the pictures and after a month I could stare at them indifferently, like at the other pictures on the wall, the two presidents, the live one and the dead one, and that old woman who’s the prime minister, all hanging there among the girls. I stopped getting excited.

  At first I wasn’t really doing anything. Fetching tools for the mechanics and taking them back to the toolboxes, cleaning dirty fingermarks off the cars. I tried to keep close to Hamid but of course he didn’t need an assistant because he didn’t work on the actual cars, he stood at a workbench taking engines apart.

  After a week they gave me a broom and a rag and a bucket and I spent all my time sweeping the floor, picking up old screws, spreading sawdust on patches of oil, it was my job to keep the garage clean. An impossible job and terribly boring. Everybody ordered me around, Arabs, Jews, anybody who felt like it. Even strangers who just happened to be passing. Fetch, boy, lift, boy, grab this, boy, clean that, boy. Anybody who felt like giving orders used to catch me and order me around. And they called me “boy” on purpose to annoy me. But I kept quiet, not wanting to argue. I was really fed up. I hated the work. I had no enthusiasm for anything, even the cars didn’t interest me. When will I get to be a mechanic, when will I learn something and what’s it all for anyway? Luckily the garage was so big I could disappear sometimes without being missed. I’d take the broom and looking at the floor I’d sweep and sweep towards the back exit until I was right outside the garage, go into the backyard of some empty house and sit down on a box watching the street, seeing children in school uniform going home with their school bags. So miserable. Thinking about the poems and stories they read and how I’m going to end up really dumb with this broom and these rusty screws. I’d cheer myself up a bit whispering a few lines from Bialik, once I knew so much of it by heart and now every day I remember less and less. In the end I’d get up and take the broom and start sweeping around me and slowly go back to the garage, still sweeping, going inside and mixing with the people, who hadn’t noticed that I’d gone or that I’d come back.

  Who’s our boss anyway? It was a long time before I figured out who the boss of the garage was. At first I thought it was the old clerk who sits there all day in the little office, the only place where there’s no pictures of naked women. But they told me he was only the cashier, just a clerk.

  Then I had my eye on one of the Jewish mechanics who was in charge of the work and gave out orders, he was the one who dealt with the customers, testing their cars for them. But they told me he was the f
oreman. In the end they pointed him out to me, the real boss, the one that everything belongs to, his name’s Adam, about forty-five years old, maybe more than that, with a big beard. Maybe it was because of the beard I didn’t realize he was the boss. I didn’t think he belonged to the garage at all, I thought he was some kind of artist or professor. What’s the beard for? How should I know? I never guessed that everything belonged to him.

  He wears partly working clothes and partly not working clothes. A white shirt or a nice clean sweater and blue working trousers. Most of the time he isn’t in the garage but driving around in a big American car, an old car but very quiet. Uses the car to fetch a new engine or some complicated bit of equipment for the garage. When he arrives he’s surrounded straightaway by a bunch of mechanics, they follow him, talking to him, asking him questions, consulting him. And he looks all the time like he’s about to drop, he always looks tired, thinking about something else that’s got nothing to do with the garage. But in the end the circle closes around him and he stands there in the middle, listening and not listening. Standing there patiently, looks like all he wants is not to touch them and not to be touched. If he talks at all it’s quietly, with his head a bit bent, chewing the end of his beard like he’s ashamed of something. He’s not even interested in women and sometimes we get some really attractive high-class chicks coming into the garage with neat little cars and they spend half the day wandering about and getting in the way. We’re so busy watching them we start dropping tools. Even the ones lying underneath the cars watch them. And they run after Adam as well, trying to talk to him, trying to make him laugh, but he isn’t the type that laughs easily. He hardly notices them. He looks through us ordinary workers like we’re air. He doesn’t really care about the work in the garage anyway. But when he walks around the place we all start to move faster and we even turn the radios down, though he’s never said anything against Arab music. Sometimes when there’s a difficult problem they ask him to look at an engine or listen to it or bring him some part that they’ve taken out, showing it to him and asking if it’s any good or if it should be changed. He looks and listens, his hands in his pockets. And then, so sure of himself, without hesitation, he tells them what to do.