The Lover

by A. B. Yehoshua

“Who are you looking for, boy?”

  “Er … the Alterman family …”

  “Alterman? There’s no Alterman here … who sent you here?”

  I didn’t say anything. She stood in my way, if I pushed past her she’d scream. I know these witches. We’ve got a few in the village.

  “Who sent you, boy?”

  I still didn’t say anything. I had no idea what to say.

  “Are you from the supermarket?”

  “Yes …” I whispered.

  “Then come and take some empty bottles.” I went into her kitchen and took a dozen empty bottles and some jars and gave her ten pounds. She was delighted. She didn’t seem to notice I was all bandaged up.

  “Come back again next week.”

  “O.K.”

  And I went away in a hurry. They’re quick enough when it comes to taking money back, these Jews.

  Three blocks farther on I threw everything into a dustbin. I went back to the garage. My cuts were starting to hurt again, the bandages were dirty. In the garage they were worried about me. They’d even sent a car to the Red Cross station to find out what’d happened to me.

  “Where have you been? Where did you disappear to? How are the cuts?”

  “Fine … just fine …”

  I was careful not to look him in the eye. If he knew where I’d been he wouldn’t stroke my head again. I could’ve given him his neighbour’s compliments.

  In the bus when we’d got past Carmel and there was just us Arabs left I took the book out of the sling. I opened it at the first page. Stars Outside, And in round handwriting – Dafna. I put the name to my lips. Like I said before I must’ve been a bit crazy. I turned another page.

  The tune you idly forsook still remains and the roads still open lie and a cloud in the sky and a tree in the rain still await you passer-by.

  Not bad. I can understand it –

  I had three days holiday in the village while the cuts healed. Quiet days full of sun. I lay in bed the whole time and Father and Mother looked after me. I read the book through maybe a dozen times. Though there was a lot I didn’t understand, I could learn some of it by heart. But I said to myself – what for? Who for?

  ADAM

  You’re sure now that the garage can get along without you, and all you have to do is call in the afternoon and collect the money. Over the years you’ve built a machine that works perfectly, you’ve trained a staff of capable and experienced mechanics, some of whom hardly touch a screwdriver now but take care that others work, giving good advice and carefully checking every car when the repairs are done. Not to mention Erlich, who works wonders with the accounts. And you walk about the garage in the morning and see the foreman taking charge of the cars as they’re brought in, directing them to the different workshops according to the different problems – cooling systems, batteries, brakes, engine tuning, electrical transmission, body work and painting. And we have our own expert on vehicle licensing who renews customers’ licences, and Hamid is there too in his dark little corner renovating his engines. So you wander about in the middle of all this activity, beginning to feel you’re not needed, and even if they are always coming and asking you to listen to an engine or look at some component or other they don’t really need your advice, they’re just informing you of decisions that they’ve already taken.

  Until suddenly something happens and you see how helpless everyone is. One of the workers gets hurt. One of the boys. You see a boy crawling out from under one of the cars covered in blood. His face and hands dirty with soot and grease, and a lot of blood. And he stands there quietly, nobody taking any notice of him, they walk past him without a word or even joking among themselves and if you don’t do something nobody will move a muscle. Erlich seems surprised when you lead him into the office. “He can wait outside,” he says, “I’ll come right away, I just want to finish sorting out this bill.” You have to scream your head off before Erlich makes a move.

  It may be I’m exaggerating. The cuts aren’t deep, but all that blood scares me. And after all this is the boy who a week ago was sweeping up here, already he’s being allowed to lie under cars and fix brakes. What do you know about him? Suppose he gets killed – no matter, tomorrow Hamid will bring you a replacement. They’re a bit surprised at your sensitivity but this isn’t the first time you’ve seen a boy lying in a pool of blood.

  Now I watch Erlich bandaging him, bringing out little old bottles of iodine and pouring it over the cuts. The boy’s as white as a sheet, eyes popping out of their sockets, groaning with pain but not saying a word. And Erlich brings out narrow bandages and starts to fold them in a strange manner.

  Meanwhile I examine the first-aid box. Completely inadequate. It’s been here since the days when my father and I worked alone in the garage. I take five hundred pounds from my pocket and tell Erlich to buy a new box and equipment tomorrow. He waves the money aside brusquely, he’ll get the stuff for next to nothing from a customer who manages a firm that produces surgical equipment and he’ll claim the rest from taxes.

  Now the boy’s all bandaged up, sitting there beside the cash register, looking at me with those dark eyes of his, not realizing that the blood’s escaping through the badly tied bandages and dripping on the papers.

  Of course Erlich yells at him –

  I send him to the Red Cross station, giving him money so he can come back by taxi.

  And I stay behind in the garage, wandering uneasily around the various workshops, starting to get involved in all kinds of things. Suddenly all sorts of minor scandals come to my notice. One of the workers who doesn’t have a driver’s licence is moving cars around and collides with one that was just standing there. Another tries to start the engine of a car that’s got a broken fan belt and he ruins the pistons. Another nearly sets fire to an engine putting in the wrong kind of oil. They’re all angry and on edge. They’re used to being without me. They don’t know why I’m hanging around here and taking charge.

  But I’m waiting for the boy to come back and there’s no sign of him. I send a car to the Red Cross station and it doesn’t return.

  I have an argument with the foreman, who’s been rude to a customer, I even have a go at Hamid when I find him taking parts for the car that he’s renovating from an old car parked at the side. At last when it’s almost time to go home the boy comes quietly into the garage, all covered in bandages. The little bastard’s been wandering around the town. And I was worried about him. I touch him.

  “Where have you been? How are the cuts?”

  “Fine … just fine …”

  Hell, why am I so worked up? I get into my car and drive off in a hurry.

  NA’IM

  He applied to study medicine in Tel Aviv and was turned down, he applied to study medicine in Haifa and wasn’t accepted, he tried Jerusalem and got rejected, he went to the Technion and failed the entrance exam, he wrote to Bar-Ilan and got a negative answer. He had a chance of getting into Beer-Sheba but was late with his application. All the time we thought of nothing but him and his studies. The whole house revolved around him. Father couldn’t sleep at night from worry. People came and advised him to apply here, to write there. Somebody knew so-and-so and so-and-so knew somebody else. They began working on their connections. They even wrote a letter to the Citizen’s Advice Bureau. They sent an old sheik to the Registration Department. Father even went to the Ministry of Defence and said, “For twenty-five years I’ve informed on whoever I’m supposed to and when my son wants to study medicine they slam all the doors in his face.” And they really did try to help. They told him they’d found him a place to study Arabic language and literature and Adnan turned it down, he didn’t want to be a teacher, everybody’s a teacher. They found him a place to study the Bible, he said, “I must be crazy.” They offered him a course in Hebrew literature, he said, “You want to bore me to death?” He was so stubborn and proud. It had to be medicine or electronics or something like that. He drove us all crazy. In the mornings he got up late
and did nothing. Father didn’t want him to tire himself with work, just to study and prepare for the entrance exams. They gave him the best room in the house and made sure he wasn’t disturbed. They bought books and note pads and spared no expense. But he shut himself up in his room and paced around nervously all the time, he went whole days without eating. He was desperate right from the start. On nights before exams Father sat and prayed outside his door. In the morning Adnan left the house as white as a sheet, trembling all over. Wearing a new suit that they’d made for him and a little red tie, Father’s old tie from Ottoman times, but with dirty old shoes, going to some university or other to fail, and coming back in the evening exhausted and hardly saying a word. He’d sleep for two or three days and then start wandering around the village in the same suit but without the tie, sitting in a café with the other young men of the village and waiting for the results to arrive by post. And meanwhile his hatred grew and grew. He hated them all and the Jews especially. He was sure they were failing him on purpose. One evening at the supper table after he’d got another rejection slip he started to curse and went on and on. They sat there eating and drinking and hearing him curse the whole country. Suddenly I got fed up with listening to him and said quietly, “Could it be that you’re just not smart enough and it isn’t Zionism that’s to blame?” and before I’d finished the sentence Father hit me across the face with all his strength. The old man nearly tore me apart. And Adnan jumped up, knocking over the dishes. I fled and he fled and Father was yelling and howling. For a whole week I slept at Hamid’s house. I was afraid he was going to kill me, even then I got the feeling he was dangerous.

  In the end, after we hadn’t spoken to each other for maybe a month, Father forced me to make up with him. I went and asked his forgiveness because I was younger. I kissed his thin hand and he patted my shoulder like patting a dog and he just said, “You … Bialik, you.” And he smiled a bit.

  Nuts –

  But when the university term started and he still hadn’t found a place I too began to hurt. Faiz sent papers from England to try to enrol him at some university there but Adnan had no strength left. He really began to think that maybe he wasn’t college material. He thought maybe he had a talent for something else. Now when I left the house in the morning I sometimes met him in the alleyway beside the house. He looked very thin, his clothes were crumpled, returning from nights spent prowling around Acre and the other villages. He’d found himself new friends. We’d stand and talk for a while, I in my working clothes and he still wearing his suit and the white shirt with the black collar. I already felt more friendly towards him. I didn’t know that he’d decided to leave us, that at night he was already checking out the roads and the gaps in the border fences. Some time later he disappeared. Somebody said he’d been seen in Beirut. Although we were sorry he’d gone and Father was terribly worried about him we thought maybe it was a good thing for him to get away for a while from the Jews, who bothered him so much.

  We never imagined that suddenly he’d want to return.

  ADAM

  It’s a real art, you don’t appreciate it, to live this kind of double life among us, to live our world and to live its opposite. And when you’re talking again in your Friday-night armchairs, unable to keep off the subject, quibbling about elite groups and voluntary suicides and frustrated fanatics, I want to laugh or cry (but in the end I say nothing, just angrily stuffing another handful of nuts into my mouth). What are you talking about? Today he’s a worker in my garage, humble and patient, smiling and reliable. And tomorrow – a savage beast, and it’s the same man, or his brother, or his cousin, the same education, the same village, the same parents.

  There, for example, was this ghastly terrorist attack starting at the university, and I watch my workers closely. I employ thirty Arabs and I have time to watch them, because I no longer concern myself with cars, only people. You ask yourself, what are they thinking? Does anything matter to them? Do they have any idea what’s happening?

  They know. The news spreads fast. In the garage there’s a fussy old yeke, Erlich, the cashier, who hates music during working hours. He thinks it’s barbaric. And Arab music irritates him most of all. He’s already started coming to work with cotton stuffed in his ears, because sometimes there’re as many as twenty radio sets in the garage blaring Arab music at full blast. And when this nasty business starts he takes a little transistor out of his briefcase and, trembling with irritation and tension, shouts “Turn that music off, bloody murderers” and within a few minutes all Arab music is gone from the garage. They know where to draw the line, they tune their sets back to Radio Israel or the army wave bands. They’re on our side after all, you say to yourself. But after a while you see that something in the tone of the newscasters and commentators makes them nervous, they switch the radios off, preferring not to hear the news, working quietly, a little closer together perhaps, in no hurry to take the cars out on road tests. The boys are uneasy. They stop laughing. And someone working by himself in a dark corner quietly tunes in to a foreign Arab station, and a few others go over to him to hear the story, a sort of thin smile on their faces.

  So, then, they’re on the other side.

  But during the lunch break they sit in a corner eating their bread, starting to laugh a little, and this at a time when we’re crazy with suspense, they talk among themselves about trivial things, it doesn’t concern them at all. And as the gunfire of the shoot-out comes over the radio they come to me with practical questions, do the tyres of the Volvo need changing or just repairing?

  They’re in a different world, they don’t even ask how it’s ended.

  But when it’s time to go, after they’ve put away the tools and washed their hands, they wait for one another, which is unusual for them, and they leave the garage and go to the bus stop in a tightly knit group.

  And next day I understand why. A first cousin of Hamid, a brother of one of the workers, related to most of them, led the terrorists there. And it seems they knew this from the start, they sensed it. And yet they gave no sign, didn’t bat an eye. Perhaps at home, when they’re alone, they’ll weep for themselves.

  NA’IM

  And suddenly the nervous voice of a newscaster breaks into the music and the singing. Something’s happened. The Jews start to huddle around the radio. Hamid gives us a look and all the Arab music is switched off. We too begin to hear the details. Something at the university. An attack on the registrar’s office at the university. They’ve taken hostages.

  My heart stands still. That’s him.

  Adnan has returned. The whispered curses of the Jews. The bright ideas. Everybody has ideas about what should be done. And we make ourselves small. Walk about quietly, we have nothing to do with all this. Trying to behave naturally, only working feverishly.

  At ten past twelve they threw the body of a clerk out the window. Such cruelty. One of the Arabs smiles to himself, a thin, faraway smile. I slip down under one of the cars and try a thousand times to tighten a screw that keeps slipping out of my hand. I’m not here.

  All around the usual talk about the death penalty and revenge. Our brother. What’s he doing? Where does he get the guts? This cursed pride. And why don’t the damn Jews take better care of themselves?

  A cabinet meeting. The army. The Ministry of Defence. The same old story. Time for our lunch break. Drying our hands, taking our bags and sitting down on the floor to one side. I sit beside Hamid and keep close to him. He doesn’t say anything. As silent as usual. The others talk in low voices about other things, arguing about the new Volvo, about automatic gear boxes. I have no appetite, I want to cry but my eyes are dry.

  Negotiations begin. Declarations. Conversations through a bullhorn. The arrogance. The usual descriptions. Just one novelty. One of the fedayeen is walking about in a suit and tie like he’s at a party.

  I throw my bread to a stray dog that’s always wandering around the garage. Go back to work with the others. Everything’s as usual. The Jews co
me to take away the repaired cars, arguing over the price, but with anxious eyes, listening to the songs on the radio in great agitation. One of the Arabs quietly tunes in to Radio Damascus. It’s a different story there. A great battle, the university in flames. The lies. The fantasy.

  And all the time I’m thinking only of Adnan.

  We start closing the toolboxes and changing our clothes. And suddenly everything’s happening at once. The newscaster starts shouting like a commentator at a football game. They’re attacking. The sounds of gunfire come over on the radio like the rattle of a broken drill. They understand nothing. They’re killing him. Right now, they’re killing my brother. His eyes are seeing the light for the last time. Goodbye. Madman. Curse him. What he is doing to us. The shame. The cursed pride. My poor brother.

  The Jews start to breathe more easily, even though a few of their own people have been killed. Suddenly they stop answering our questions, they’ve remembered to be angry with us. And we walk to the bus stop a bit closer together than usual, there are cops on the street to stop anyone having a go at us. But nobody wants to touch us, they don’t even look at us. On Radio Damascus the battle’s still raging. They’ve brought in tanks and fighter planes. We get on the bus. I sit beside Hamid on the back seat. Nobody says a word. Now Hamid takes out his transistor and puts it to his ear. And I look up at the hill, at the university sitting there like a flat white stone, like a tombstone. God, how long will this go on? Suddenly Hamid bows his head. On Radio Damascus they’re reading out the names. Hamid nudges me gently. It’s him. But I knew already, right from the start I knew it. Attacking the registrar’s office at the university in a suit and a tie and with a Kalashnikov. That could only be his idea. Only his.

  In the village they know already. News travels fest. We don’t need the radio to tell us. A crowd of people outside the house. Women crying. I go inside the house and it’s full of chairs. They’ve brought in chairs from all the other houses, brought them here for the mourners. And Father has shut himself up in his room and isn’t speaking to anyone. And relations arriving all the time from other villages. And the women all in one room, their eyes red. What good is crying? To hell with it all.