The Lover

by A. B. Yehoshua

  “I’m in no hurry,” I say. “A line is a line.”

  “Then what can I do for you, sir?”

  A typewriter ribbon, I whisper to myself.

  “Typing paper.”

  But he’s looking for a special size and a special kind, he sends the assistant climbing up ladders and running down to the basement until she finds what he wants. He goes out. Hurriedly I buy a rubber and run after him. Fuck it. He disappears into a barber’s shop.

  To wait or not to wait?

  What can I do? Pity to lose him so soon. I find a fence with a good view and sit down on it to wait. Five minutes pass and Tali and Osnat appear, sit down beside me and start gossiping. And then he suddenly emerges from the barber’s, just as tousled as before, maybe they’ve taken off two hairs. I jump at once, breaking off in midsentence, and hurry after him. Now he goes into a tobacconist, I stand beside him, brushing against him. He buys tobacco, pipe cleaners, cigarettes and coffee. He touches me lightly. I tremble. He looks down at me, I smile but he looks away, absent-mindedly, not connecting me with the girl that he saw in the stationery shop. He pays and goes out. I buy one cigar and I’m on his trail again.

  Now he’s standing beside the fence where I was sitting, waiting for someone, pacing about idly. Watching the girls walking past, you can see how he turns his head slowly, changing his position to get a better look at their legs. I remember his bowed head, falling on the typewriter at three in the morning, nestling against the machine. He takes a little notebook from his pocket and writes something in it, some idea, I suppose, smiling to himself in satisfaction. I’m afraid he may notice me standing at the side watching him and I decide to walk in front of him. This time he stares at me intently, a penetrating look, passionate almost, the dirty old man. Suddenly he smiles a sweet smile, his face lights up, not at me, at a little old man with a white hat, a well-known Haifa poet whose name I’ve forgotten. They talk for a while and then part. And he’s alone again, looking at his watch all the time, until a pale young woman arrives with a little girl in a stroller. He comes to life at once, kissing the child, arguing with the woman. The three of them cross the road, stand at the bus stop.

  And I follow –

  Should I give up? At least let’s see where he lives. Where it comes from, the light that shines on me at night. I climb on the bus behind them, but the bus is going down to the lower city, I just hope they’re not going to visit somebody. They get off, start to wander about the streets, looking for a table or a cupboard, going into all the furniture shops. Leaving the child outside in the stroller and going in to look at the furniture. And all the time I’m standing in doorways and at street corners, spying on them secretly, there’s a moment when I almost lose them but I find them again. They don’t notice me, only the child dragged along behind them in the little folding stroller watches me in silence, with a friendly look, she’s just like him.

  In the end they don’t buy any furniture, all they’ve done is confuse the salesmen. They go into a grocery and buy a kilo of garden peas, hop on another bus, going home at last I hope. The little girl must sleep sometime.

  Three hours now I’ve been on his trail. It’s evening. I no longer have the energy to hide and I sit down not far from them, tired. They’re exhausted too, talking quietly, glancing at me every now and then, shelling the raw peas and eating them, giving some to the child as well, putting the empty hulls back in the bag. The bus drives into a mountain suburb that I don’t recognize, though it can’t be far from our neighbourhood. Every hundred metres it stops and people get off, slowly the bus empties. At the terminus they get out and I follow. The street is empty, few houses. They ignore me completely, leaving the bag in a dustbin and walking fast, polling the stroller behind them, the little girl sits there half asleep, her head nodding from side to side. I look around trying to find our house but I can’t pick out anything that’s familiar. An ordinary street without a view. I follow in their footsteps as if in a trance, bound closer and closer to them, really scared now, it’s all growing dark around me. Streetlamps coming on. What am I doing? How shall I get home from here? Maybe at night he writes in a different house, maybe he leads a double life, maybe this isn’t him but his twin brother. But suddenly the street bends sharply and they disappear into a big new apartment house that stands there alone. And all at once the view opens out, the sea appears, more housing developments, straightaway I pick out our neighbourhood and I can even see our house, so close, across a narrow wadi. There’s the window of my room, all dark.

  I stand there looking, full of a silly joy at finding the right place. I start climbing the stairs, just to find out his name and then go. Maybe he’s a famous writer. But there’s somebody moving there in the darkness, a giant shape. It’s him. Waiting for me. His voice is full of bitterness, fear almost.

  “What do you want, girl? What have we done to you? Who sent you to follow me? Get out of here … go …”

  And before I can say a word he disappears up the stairs, fleeing from me.

  NA’IM

  A normal day. In the morning I get up at nine because if even at nine I’ve got nothing to do why should I get up at eight? Breakfast on the table but I’ve got no appetite, I eat a slice of bread, drink some coffee, all this in my pyjamas, not shy anymore in front of this old woman, I’ve got so used to her I sometimes forget she’s there, watching me and whining, “Why aren’t you eating, you won’t grow if you just eat bread.” But I laugh. “No child stays a child forever.”

  Then she’s interested in what I saw at the movies yesterday and I give her a summary of the plot. She asks questions, mainly she’s interested in the actors, there’re a few names that she remembers – Clark Jable, Humphrey Gumbart, somebody Dietrich, she wants to know if I’ve seen them and how they are and if they’re still as handsome as they used to be. A real character this grandmother. But I’ve got no head for the names of actors, the main thing is the plot, what happens, that’s what’s important. One actor today, another tomorrow, what does it matter?

  And she says, “You’re wasting your money, you don’t understand films. They’ll be the ruin of you.” And I laugh –

  Already I’m so used to her, I don’t understand how I could ever have been scared of her, like I was that first evening when she looked like a witch. I sprawl on the chair with my pyjamas unbuttoned, when she tries to get at me I just laugh, what’s the point in getting worked up?

  Then I get dressed, take a piece of paper and write down the day’s shopping list. So many instructions it’s like an army operation. Every vegetable has to be bought from a different grocery store. Tomatoes here, olives there, this kind of cheese here, another kind there. She explains exactly what I’ve got to buy and how much and especially how much I should pay. I take the baskets and make the rounds and come back, put the shopping down on the table and the cabinet meeting begins. She examines everything, sniffs everything, puts the bad fruit aside, goes over the bill, cursing me, the storekeepers and the government, and then sends me out again to take the bad stuff back. They already know me well in the neighbourhood, the storekeepers know that all this nonsense isn’t my idea but hers and they don’t mind me pestering them a bit.

  So the morning goes by without any excitement and lunchtime comes around. I eat lunch, eat everything on the plate. Then I go out and fetch Yediot Aharonot, wait awhile and go out and fetch Ma’ariv, and then it’s quiet because she sits down in an armchair, puts on her reading glasses and buries herself in the papers. I do the washing up in a hurry and go out to the movies. Luckily most of the cinemas in Haifa show movies that suit me fine. But sometimes it happens that the pictures outside give me the wrong idea and I find myself watching something really complicated, and when I come out, my eyes not yet used to the daylight, I go back to the box office and buy a ticket for the same movie, for the evening show, because there’re some things I didn’t understand and I’ve got to get it right. Why did I think he was the good guy, why did he get killed in the end?r />
  I come back and find her dozing in the armchair, newspapers over her face and she’s hardly breathing. I move the papers off her to give her room to breathe. She opens her eyes like she’s being roused from the world to come, like she doesn’t know me. I ask her if she’d like some tea and she nods her head. I make tea for her and for myself and without her asking me I tell her all the nasty things that happened in the movie, to cheer her up. And she listens and starts to cry. She doesn’t understand anything, she thinks she does but she doesn’t really. When she starts crying I take the empty tea cups to the kitchen and go to my room. This blubbering of hers isn’t for me, I’m really too young for things like that. In the end she calms down, goes to the kitchen to make supper, I hear her moving the pans and the dishes around so slowly it’s like her arms and legs have gone to sleep.

  I don’t have much appetite for supper, it’s like her tears have fallen in the food and I’m swallowing them. The thought of that gives me the shivers. I take out the rubbish, mend something in the house, a tank or a tap, all the pipes here are mouldy. A mouldy old Arab house. Then I sit down to read the papers to her, the bits in small print that her eyes are too weak for. Who’s died, who’s got married, who’s been born, and then I throw in an article on the Palestinian problem, with my comments, and the big row begins, I get up and leave.

  Now it’s nighttime. I’m living alone, all my life I’ve never been so alone. Sometimes I get really homesick for the village and the fields, but I get over it in the end. I miss Dafi a lot. Some days I go up to Carmel and walk around near her house but there’s no sign of her. Maybe Adam’s worried about her, sorry that he let her come out with us at night. I haven’t seen him for three weeks now. It was the old woman who told me that we were stopping the night work for a bit but we’d be taking it up again later and for the moment I ought to stay here, and she gave me three hundred pounds from him for pocket money.

  So why should I ask too many questions?

  It’s a good life, really good. For the moment –

  I’m independent, I don’t have to work and I’m well looked after –

  So long as I’ve got money for the movies –

  I’ve got movies on the brain now –

  I go into the first show, come out with my head in a whirl. Where’s Bialik, where’s Tchernikhovski, what good are they to me when the real world’s so different and the real problems are so difficult?

  I return home, thinking about the movie, trying to whistle the theme music. This is the quiet time in our neighbourhood, the in-between time, after the traders have gone and before the hookers arrive. I ring the bell, she opens the door, her face is grey, neither of us says anything. We’ve done enough talking already today. I go straight to my room, count the money I’ve got left. Oh God, what am I doing in this house, in this strange city?

  I start undressing and suddenly she comes into the room, creeping in quietly, wearing a different dress and looking all fresh, sits down on the bed. What the hell does she want?

  “Well, Na’im, how are things?”

  I’m here, dammit, what do you want now?

  “What was the film?”

  “Don’t worry. The good guys won in the end and got married too.”

  She sighs. “You’ve been getting cheeky this last month.”

  She picks up my trousers and examines them, gets up and goes into the other room, pokes around in the drawers and comes back with an almost new pair of trousers. “Put these on, let’s see if they fit you. They were my grandson’s when he was your age.”

  I put them on. Why should I care? Put my hands in the pockets and pull out mothballs, sniff at them.

  “These are for you,” she says. “I was going to keep them for his son, but he isn’t here and he has no son.” I wonder if maybe I should say something nice to her, say maybe he’ll come back and have a son, but I just say, “Thank you very much,” think for a moment and then go to her and quietly kiss her hand, that’s the only place where you can kiss old people and that’s what they do at home in the village.

  She smiles, she really likes it, you can tell.

  She starts telling me stories about the Jews who used to live in the Old City of Jerusalem and how they were kind to the Arabs, who murdered them in the end. She groans and groans, then at last she shuts up and goes out.

  I undress in a hurry, I get into bed but I’m not really tired. What have I done today? Nothing much. I toss around in bed for a while, remembering the movie I saw, a horrible hunchback, a magician with a burned face. Suddenly I start trembling.

  I’m alone. What kind of a life is this? Stuck here in this hole. Adam’s forgotten me, Father and Mother and Hamid and all the rest of them have forgotten me. I get out of bed, go to the window to watch the ships in the bay, I already know how to tell destroyers and missile ships apart. The first hookers arrive and take up their positions. A patrol car draws up, the cops get out and talk to them. It’s warm outside. The window’s open.

  I stand there watching till my eyes start to close and I fall on the bed. In the morning I get up at nine, because if even at nine I’ve got nothing to do why should I get up at eight?

  DAFI

  I’ve noticed before, this isn’t the first time, that I’m capable of really scaring people, even grownups, it isn’t only the maths teacher who’s started to be afraid of me, there are others too – this disturbance gives me strength. Sometimes I follow somebody in the street. I just pick somebody out, an adult, an old man, and I follow him everywhere, relentlessly, for half an hour, an hour, until he turns pale and gets angry. It drives Tali and Osnat crazy. I can even scare myself.

  Once we were sitting in the cinema at a matinee and it was a boring movie, kids’ stuff. In the row in front of us there was a bald old man with a sort of beret on his head and I wondered what on earth he was doing watching a children’s movie and I whispered to Tali and Osnat, “Do you think I ought to pull his ear?” and before they had time to understand what I was saying or ask why, I’d already grabbed hold of his nasty ear by the soft and hairy lobe and given it a sharp tug. This is what frightens me. I just thought of it and it was done. So quickly, no hesitation between thinking it and doing it. The old man turned around on us at once as if he’d been waiting to have his ear pulled, because he wasn’t concentrating on the movie either, and he started cursing loudly in Rumanian or Hungarian in the silence of the dark cinema. He was sure Osnat had done it, he wanted to kill her. The three of us got up and fled before the manager arrived.

  All that evening I was depressed. Osnat was furious with me, she didn’t want to talk and she went home, only Tali, silent as usual, followed me through the streets, she didn’t care about missing the film, didn’t ask me why I did it, what came over me.

  Anyway, what could I have said? This restlessness that’s got hold of me lately, I can’t sit still in one place, like Mommy, who’s always rushing about, from teachers’ meetings to seminars at the university, God knows what she’s doing. But I don’t do anything, just wander around from place to place, touring the city by taxi. Yes, lately I’ve started riding around in taxis. I’ve got plenty of money, at night I raid Daddy’s wallet, he’s got so many hundreds of pounds he can’t tell anyway. There isn’t much I can do with the money, if I bought a blouse or a skirt they’d notice straightaway. So I’ve started taking rides in taxis. I bought a street map and because it was impossible to stop a taxi, they just wouldn’t stop for me, the drivers thought I wanted a free lift, I used to go to the taxi rank, get into the first one, give the name of a street and drive off. That way I started taking trips around the place, going to some hill not far away, walking about among the pine trees looking at the view or at the sunset and returning to the city. The whole round trip wouldn’t cost me more than thirty or forty pounds.

  At first the drivers were mostly amused, surprised at a girl going around alone like this, but in the end they got used to me. Once someone asked me before I got in, “Have you got any money?” so
I showed him the hundred-pound note and said, “Yes, but I’m not going with you if you don’t trust me,” and I went to look for another taxi.

  I always sit in the back seat, on the right-hand side, making a note of the driver’s name and the number of the cab in case he tries to start something or make trouble, holding on tight to the strap and going downtown until the meter shows twenty-five pounds. Sometimes I go down to the docks, walking for a while by the gate and watching the ships, buying nuts or Swiss chocolate, eating in a hurry and taking the bus home.

  Once Mommy nearly caught me. The taxi stopped at a traffic light just half a metre from Mommy’s Fiat. I curled up at once. She was sitting there at the wheel, staring up at the light as if it were a flag, awfully tense. Her face hard, thinking deeply, for a second she closed her eyes, but as soon as the light changed she jerked forwards ahead of the rest and disappeared in the traffic, in a real hurry to get somewhere.

  The days are getting longer, the nights crawl. Things are hard at school. Since that business with Baby Face it’s as if I’m in limbo, all the time they’re considering my fete, they want to throw me out. In the meantime it seems the teachers are ignoring me, even in the subjects that I’ve done some work for they no longer ask me questions, it’s as if they’re not bothering with me anymore.

  And I’m beginning not to bother too. Leaving the school at three in the afternoon, getting into a taxi and going down to the lower city, no longer looking for a view but just a crowd to move about in, among the sweaty, noisy people, going into shops to finger clothes or crockery, to touch fruit and vegetables. Always being jostled, swept along in the crowd, wanting to be sick but walking on, and suddenly somebody touches me lightly, says softly, “Dafi …”