by Meir Shalev
“I’ll be your driver. On that happy note you can even raise my salary”
“I am willing to raise your salary so that you won’t be my driver.”
That is what she said, but in the weeks following, Sigal began phoning me from time to time to chauffeur Liora around. Sometimes she would sit next to me and sometimes in the back of Behemoth, her wide-set blue-gray eyes perusing papers or the screen of her Mac in preparation for some meeting or deal, while my deep, close-set brown eyes — the eyes of a bull who has guessed his fate—shifted back and forth from the road to the mirror. If I tilted the mirror and my head at the proper angles, the wide space between her eyes and the small one between her knees would reflect back at me inside a single frame.
This new situation awakened new passion in me and, apparently once, in Liora as well. We were traveling from Jerusalem to Beit Shemesh at Emmanuel’s request, to look in on several properties in a development being built there for the ultra-Orthodox community I suggested we leave the main road and drive through Ein Kerem, Bar Giora, and the Valley of Elah.
So we had done when suddenly my wife ordered me to turn Behemoth onto some dirt side road that I myself was not familiar with, and there, under a large and secretive carob tree, we lay upon a blanket I extracted from the back of the vehicle, a blanket that I had bought and that had already given up all hopes of ever being used. Afterward, happy with the unexpected pleasure my wife had granted me and mournful of its rarity, I fetched from Behemoth the alpine camping stove and a kettle and skillet, so that by the time Liora had awakened and stretched and smiled I had already prepared a field meal for the two of us, seasoned with leaves and herbs I had found between the rocks.
“I had no idea you and Behemoth were so well equipped,” she said. “What else have you got in there?”
“Everything you need.” And more: a set of tools and recovery equipment and cooking utensils, a large sleeping bag and a thin, self-inflating air mattress, jerricans for gas and water, a headlamp, batteries, a kerosene lamp, a coffee kit, cloves of garlic, instant soup, salty things — that is what my mother would say about Benjamin and me: “Benjamin likes sweets and Yair likes salties”—everything I would need for departure or banishment.
And a spare set of keys for Behemoth kept in a secret, sealed hiding place on the chassis. Thus, if one day Liora informs me that I must leave, I will be able to get up and depart immediately, without the complicated embarrassment of packing and loading, of how many and which clothes to take and of “Did you happen to see my keys anywhere?” I will leave just as banished women once left: bedecked with their gold and jewels. I will leave, I will go, and until some other rich woman takes me in, I will manage to survive for the first few days in the hills.
The next day Itzik informed me that my wife would no longer be in need of my services as a driver but that my salary would continue to be paid in full. Several days later I was summoned to the office, signed a few papers, and went from being a partly employed tour guide to “director of the transportation department” of the Israeli branch of the firm, a department established overnight so that I could head it. Behemoth and I, who once trailed around after migrating birds, now found ourselves ferrying lecturers, singers, and actors and—since we are both capable of departing from paved roads for dirt ones — senior engineers from the Israel Electric Company, foreign television crews, and special guests of the Office of the Prime Minister and the Foreign Ministry That is how I met the American Palmachnik and his friends, whom I took to the Harel observation point and the Palmach cemetery at Kiryat Anavim and the monastery from which the Baby’s final pigeon took flight.
It was during all these trips and all this ferrying that I began to ponder the possibility of not returning. Of finding myself a different home, my own place. My lack of ease in Liora’s house had eaten away at me from some years, but now I had an opportunity for scouting and searching. And more than once, when driving a lecturer or singer or sing-along leader to some small village, I took advantage of that opportunity While my passenger made an appearance in the local clubhouse or community center, I scoured the place, pursued FOR SALE signs and houses bereft of people, homes that wished to be filled with someone new, a place to build me as I built it.
If there was a sign on the house and someone inside, I would knock at the door. If the house was empty, I would draw near and peer in the windows. Sometimes a suspicious neighbor would approach: who was I and what exactly was I doing there?
“I’m the driver of the guest artist appearing this evening in the clubhouse.”
“And what are you looking for?”
“A home.”
And at once my mood would improve. There are few people who can define so easily who they are and what they want.
Chapter Six
1
ISET OUT to find myself a home. One that would wrap around me, provide a refuge of sorts. I passed down village lanes stippled with light and shadow and the cooing of turtledoves. I peeped and knocked, I entered local grocery stores and inquired of shoppers, I perused bulletin boards studded with thumbtacks and strewn with slips of paper. I paid visits to the village secretariats, all with matching gray desks and people, all with the same aerial photographs: patchwork quilts of orchards and fields, agricultural buildings, pens dotted black and white with cows caught in the amber of the lens.
Like a vulture I soared, scouting after the collapsing, the dying, the dead. I met ruined farmers and couples that had split up. I scoured farmyards of thorns and dust. I drank tea with old people who refused to sell and their children who wished them dead, heard pigeons coo in an abandoned hayloft and winds howl in a breached roof. I saw dreams that had faded away, loves that had been proven false, crumbling cement and cobwebs.
I was a fugitive and a vagabond, my hands on the large, soft steering wheel of Behemoth as I searched throughout the country and, eventually, found it. Here it is, the house you intended for me. Small and decrepit in appearance, it has two old cypress trees that can be seen from the window, just like you loved and told me to look for, and two giant carobs in the corner of the lot, and weeds growing through cracks in the pavement, just as you craved and commanded.
Hello, house. Your walls are peeling plaster, your door is nailed shut to the doorposts, your windows are boarded up, but your rooms beyond are bereft of people and they echo to me: Come. A large spiny-tailed lizard bolts through the tin drainpipes; its toenails make my skin shudder. Ancient sparrows’ nests overflowing with straw poke out from slits in the roof. I walked round and round it, making my way among angry thorns as tall as I. A pitiful fig tree, a balding lawn, a lemon tree poised to die. A sudden noise frightened my feet. A large skink skittered away
On the other side of the house, the view ambushed me. Wide and self-assured, feigning nonchalance but here and there making an effort in green, and, unlike other views in this country, it is unhampered by roads and electrical wires and other villages. Only hills upon hills, like the backs of sheep growing distant and paler and topped with small and stubborn mastic trees, and slopes running yellow Here there was a lone carob tree; there, cow pens and cattle fences. And in the shallow wadis there were low terraces and patches of cultivated land and dirt roads. It was a simple view but cunning and inviting, a view you could step out of the house and walk into.
The house was built on a slope, and its western side was supported by columns. In the space beneath it, junk had collected: an old toilet, planks, pipes and elbow joints. Someone had used two of the columns and some chicken wire to make an enclosure that held a tin trough, two broken egg-laying compartments, and four strange, tiny mounds of feathers. I examined them with the tip of my shoe and was filled with revulsion: they were the shriveled corpses of four chickens. Whoever had lived in this house had left them imprisoned there, to die of hunger and thirst.
I left. Barring any traffic jams, I would make it in time for dinner with Liora in Tel Aviv Several ravens circled overhead in search of a bird of prey
they could tease before settling in for their evening’s rest, and above them feeble, feathery clouds, the sunset pinkening their edges and pushing them eastward.
I stopped. Behind my back I felt the house I had found for myself For one lone moment the entire world was mine. One lone moment, followed by another in which my foot mashed the pedal and my hands turned the wheel as far as it would go. Behemoth was surprised; it usually heads home like a cow to its trough, while here it was, driven to the shoulders of the road in a big, soft leap, then spun around in a spurt of mud and gravel. I retraced my tracks and returned by way of the fields to the home I had found for myself
Behemoth took its time scaling the steep slope behind the house. I removed the sleeping bag and mattress from the trunk. I inserted a crowbar, pried away a few boards, and climbed up and sat on the sill of the broken window “When you find your new place,” my mother instructed me, “check it in the morning and the evening, at different hours and seasons.” One should consider the range of sounds and scents, you explained. Measure the rising heat in the roof and the cold slithering from the walls. Chart the times of sunset and blooming, read the sundials and weather vane at the window
“Hello, house …” I said, my voice loud and clear in the awaiting gloom. I fell silent, inclined my ear. The house breathed and answered. I entered, walked its void without seeing or encountering a thing. I smiled to myself In Liora’s house, rising at nighttime is an adventure on the high seas. First near shore, one hand touching the walls, and only later, with the sudden courage of the explorers, I become more daring. Hands splayed, I feel my way, bump into things, pull back from shoals of furniture and reefs that have sprung up overnight. On several occasions I have even smitten my toes and forehead on thresholds and lintels that have changed position.
Here I marched about with confidence. The air was surprisingly fresh. The floor, which had not felt the touch of feet in a very long time, was glad. I spread upon it the inflated mattress, stripped off my clothes, and slipped into the sleeping bag like an animal in its den. Right away I sensed I was lying precisely on a line of longitude, my feet pointing due north, the south a pillow for my head, and in addition to the pleasantness I was feeling, I had a sense of buoyancy I shut my eyes and heard the special sound wind makes when it blows in large trees, and the second of three rounds of jackals howling, and then a night bird with a voice that was light and hollow and rhythmic, and precise as a metronome. Before falling asleep I told myself that in the morning I would have a look in the bird-watcher’s guide I kept in Behemoth and I would ascertain which bird this was. And then, when I would know this, I would make my decision. I would do a FOR and AGAINST. I would decide the way you did.
2
IN THE MORNING, as soon as I opened my eyes I knew where I was. I got up and went out to Behemoth. The night bird turned out to be an owl, Otus scops, which is “small, common, and hairy” I chuckled: Liora would say that description suited me as well. I circled the house once again, observing and appraising: the curse of the dead chickens, the forest of thorns in the garden, the water spots on the walls, the insistence of the lizard’s nails, the necessity of making decisions and taking action—these said AGAINST. The capacious view, the age of the carob trees in the garden, the placement of the cypress trees in the picture, the breathing of the house, my confident movements inside it—all these said FOR.
I said that I, too, was FOR, and all at once I felt great joy “For,” I repeated, surprised at my newfound ability to decide. I returned the mattress and the sleeping bag to Behemoth and removed the camping stove. I drank my first cup of coffee in the house I had found for myself and went off to make inquiries at the village secretariat.
Between the house and the village secretariat stood five hundred feet, three houses, two tended gardens and one that was dry and balding, four more pairs of cypress trees that would gladden your heart, and a single giant pine that must be home to scores of birds, judging by the quantity of bird dung beneath it.
“For sale? Which house are we talking about?” asked the man in the village secretariat.
“That one,” I said, pointing.
As in every other village secretariat, there were aerial photographs hanging on the walls. The short, sharp shadows of cypress trees, like a band of compass pointers, attested to a summer afternoon. A light-colored car—whose?—was parked right up next to the house. Sheets, frozen in the frame, kept their secrets as they hung on a clothesline. The camera had made a single entity of the parked car, the slow movements of the shadows, and the cloth flapping in the wind.
“Sure is,” he said.
“Who do I need to talk to?”
“Right here.”
“You?”
“You see someone else here?”
“It’s your house?”
“No. The house belongs to the community”
“Who lived there until now? It’s all boarded up.”
“Nobody now There were renters, but they took off without paying. Six months of water bills, electricity, and rent. But we’ll take care of that. That shouldn’t bother you.”
And what’s the price?”
“There’s a committee—you ought to know that—and a treasurer. We’re not some hick town. We have a lawyer. From Tel Aviv. And there’ll be a selection process,” the man added, “because we’ve got other bids. But don’t worry We can reach an agreement with you.”
Are you announcing a tender?”
“A tender? What for? Whoever wants to can make a bid, and we’ll take the best offer.”
I left, returning to the house, and gave it a last look-over, then started Behemoth’s engine and slid down the short slope to the field. A flock of pelicans circled high overhead. A Danish bird-watcher had once told me that in autumn pelicans circled clockwise and in spring, counterclockwise. That made me think of the Double-Ys, Yariv and Yoav, and what Yordad had said about the whorls of the hair of identical twins.
There are two more things I recall about that trip. One was the feeling that the house was escorting me from behind as I gained distance. And the other, that when we rejoined the asphalt road, Behemoth turned its nose right instead of left. That was how I came to understand that I was driving to Meshulam Fried’s office in Jerusalem and not Liora Mendelsohn’s house in Tel Aviv.
3
A LONG TIME had passed since my last visit. I see Meshulam fairly often, but only at Yordad’s, whom he visits regularly An extra floor had been added to the company offices and two extra words to the sign out front: AND DAUGHTER. A security guard greeted me, phoned someone, and let me pass.
The door to Meshulam’s office stood half open. I knocked and stuck my head in.
“Iraleh!” Meshulam cried as he rose to his feet. He spread his arms and came out from behind his desk specially to welcome me. “You insult me! On the door of Meshulam Fried you knock?”
He gave me a strong embrace, kissed both my cheeks, and smiled happily “What a guest, what a surprise … you used to play jacks here with Tiraleh and Gershon, remember?”
“Yes.”
“Ever since Gershon, I’m nothing but memories,” he said as he produced his handkerchief He wiped his eyes and asked to what he owed this visit and how he could help.
I said, “I need you for a couple of hours.”
Meshulam said, “I have all the time in the world for you, Iraleh. Something good or something bad?”
I said, “Good. I found myself a house. I want you to come and see it.”
“You found yourself a house?” Meshulam beamed. “I didn’t know you were looking for one. Congratulations! What’s it for?”
“So that I can have a place of my own,” I said, quoting you.
“What does that mean, ‘a place of my own’? You have a big, beautiful home in Tel Aviv Professor Mendelsohn told me about the fancy things you got there. And what about Mrs. Liora? She know about this new house?”
“Not yet.”
“You win the lottery?”
“If your wife isn’t part of this and you didn’t win the lottery then where’d the money come from?”
“I’ve got it. Never mind from where. When will you have a little time to come have a look?”
Meshulam went to the door. “Now Let’s go.”
Quick decisions startle me. “Now? It’ll take some time, it’s a little far—”
“Don’t worry about the time. I got enough of that. Meshulam Fried isn’t as rich in money as people think, but he’s awful rich in time. So he decides when he’s going to spend it and when he’s going to save it.” He smiled. “I got so much time that I’ll probably die before I use it all up.”
He went to the next office, gave a few instructions there, then marched down the corridor with me in tow With a glare he repelled someone who wanted a word with him, put a calming hand on the shoulder of another man, turned to me and thundered, “That’s true freedom for a person. Not money, but time.”
I went out to the parking lot. For a moment Meshulam vacillated. His hands, like two independent creatures, made a little gesture of yes and no. “We’ll take your car,” he decided at last. “We’ll make a little trip and you’ll tell me on the way all the tales you sell to the tourists. Where Muhammed flew in the air and where Jesus walked on water and where the angels got Abraham’s wife Sarah pregnant.”
He slapped my thigh. “But first to Glick’s kiosk—we’ll take some samwiches for the road.”
We left the city I was planning to tell him about the Roman road we would be meeting up with soon and perhaps even stop for a short walk, during which I could tell him about the gift my mother had given me, but Meshulam had already started in on his own stories. First he pointed out buildings he had erected, then others that he had razed, and after that, hills he had fought on during the War of Independence as a member of the Palmach. “What did you think?” he said. “That everyone in the Palmach was tall and blond like your mother? Well, there were guys like me there, too.” And then he got to the heart of matters, his Tiraleh. Tirzah.
