“How the heck didn’t I notice it?” I wondered.
“You must have been busy with other parts of my body,” she taunted me, and I realized that this was true, and that since my return I hadn’t gone over every bit of her again, with my tongue. “I’ll put that right, this minute,” I said, and I did. But what she’d said echoed inside me, and later on we would get back to thrashing it out.
“I was a warrior. Or more correctly, I tried to be one,” I was attempting to respond to what she’d said. “And while I was, I came to understand a few things. I know what my capabilities are, and what their order is: loving you and art come first. Being a warrior comes much lower down.”
“I’ve given it a great deal of thought, so don’t dismiss what I’m about to say,” Niki said. “Being a warrior isn’t last on your list, even if at the moment you think it is. True, you are an artist and a lover, but being a samurai is first and foremost to belong, and only after that to fight. And when necessary, fighting climbs up the order of priorities, overtaking the other concerns that are so important to you today.”
She gave me a minute to digest this. I did indeed belong, and I felt that I belonged, my whole life. For one month a year, I had demonstrated this in practice by doing my army reserve stint, and the rest of the year I’d been an artist and an art teacher, and I’d looked for love. But when Dolly’s death told me that the “necessary” time had come, I left everything behind and became a warrior again.
“I know what agony it was for a samurai to abandon those he’d been loyal to. And I see it in your eyes, even though you don’t talk about it. I know what my grandfather went through when he left Japan and came here. I do not want you to undergo that same anguish. I’ve told you that I wanted to be a samurai. I believe that a samurai is loyal not only to his shogun or to the place where he lives. Wandering samurais used to seek out masters for themselves. I’ve heard your story, and your parents’ and your country’s stories. I’ve read a lot about Israel, way back then, after we met, and mainly in the last few months since you vanished.”
I am truly a sort of samurai, I thought. I and my fellow soldiers, the tens of thousands of youngsters who join the combat units of the Israeli army – we are a nation of samurais. And more than I was aware of it was, perhaps, imprinted in me.
I thought I knew where she was heading. Would she be prepared to come to Israel with me, to live with me there, and let me stay in the Mossad? Or did she want to be the woman waiting for her warrior here in Toronto, with me changing the hub of my life, coming and going from here instead of Tel Aviv? Both possibilities intrigued me, although what I wanted most was to be with her and to be an artist. But Niki had taken a step further than my imagination allowed me.
“You had to do some weird stuff to get a borrowed Canadian identity. I have an authentic one. And I’m also a samurai, like you. What do you think about …”
She didn’t finish the sentence, and it already seemed too good to be true. To my amazement, my artistic career dropped away, in light of the new coalition formed between Niki, the Mossad, my country and my parents. I had no idea what Udi and the organization would make of it.
“Whoa, wait,” I said. “It’s too early to speak about this. And please forget about the samurai thing. If you want to follow me, to join me, and I were to be here with you and you’d let me carry on with my missions, it would have to be because we are very much in love. Not because of any romantic samurai traditions, please, with all the respect that I have for them.”
Niki listened in silence. Then she responded:
“I don’t know how to separate the two. My culture is part of me. For me to be loyal is cultural. It’s not preordained. To follow my man is cultural, not preordained. The same goes for being a warrior. And even to love like we love is cultural, to some extent. Not everything is biological, as you tend to believe. If we were living in another place and at another time, perhaps we wouldn’t be able to give our feelings the expression that we can here and now. I feel the way I do now because my feelings have erupted. I feel the way I do because that’s the way my life has pointed me, and what has shaped me to a certain degree has been the culture I received from my father, and to a certain degree the culture I received from my mother and from the kids I grew up with. Don’t try to make me separate these things, because I can’t.”
As I digested this I realised that the same was true for me. I would not have been who I was – and I certainly would not feel the same burden of loyalty to my country and my people – if it had not been for my parents’ past, and the history of my nation, and the society I grew up in. Even my having fallen so powerfully in love was perhaps the product of social concepts that I had been exposed to. But now all that didn’t matter. What mattered was how I felt, and what Niki was enabling me to feel, to do, to be. She was enabling me to live enormous parts of my life. As for the art – it could wait for the evenings and the weekends. And it was up to me to enable her to feel what she felt and to do what she wanted to do.
I was at a loss for words to express my gratitude. I just held her tight.
“I think it’s time for me to meet your parents,” I said.
“I’ve already set up a dinner date. It’s happening on Saturday. My mother insists that it be at their home.”
This step up in our relationship accentuated the fact that I had not set any kind of a timetable with Udi. The matter had been left open-ended. Even though he’d said we had to find an ending for my love story, I nevertheless felt as if I was living on borrowed time. It wasn’t at all reasonable to expect Udi and the Mossad to let me carry on like this, without even officially seeing my contract through. I didn’t assume that they would simply let me go, although they had perhaps classified my performance in Amman as a failure.
I decided to wait for them to take the initiative, and in the meantime to work on my love story, whose actual ending couldn’t be foreseen.
We agreed that I’d take Niki’s parents a painting, and I spent the next few days working, in watercolours, on a portrait of her that I called, Girl with Green Eyes. Although I could sketch her in a minute, and although I had worked most of my coloured paintings in oil when holed up in my studio for hours and days, or in acrylic, which dries quicker, I thought that in aquarelle I’d be able to better capture her translucent skin and her radiant eyes and the invisible aura of joy that surrounded her. The delicate combination of the transparent watercolours and the shade of the paper would also enable me to express Niki’s spirit and spirituality more faithfully. I would have to wait before applying the paint for each colour until the one before had dried, but I was ready to lovingly devote all the time in the world to it.
Because I didn’t have the necessary supplies I went out to buy a few sheets of heavy, absorbent, paper and soft sable-hair brushes. The brushes, made from the fur of that rare Siberian animal, were insanely expensive – 200 Canadian dollars for the fine brush, 300 for the medium and 400 for the thick. The firm of Winsor and Newton had originally made the Kolinsky sable brush for Queen Victoria. They were out of reach for hard-up artists and I didn’t know if I’d ever use them again but, I too, wanted the very best. Neither did I compromise on my watercolours, and I selected a Cotman set whose little squares of paint looked softer and more delicate than the German Schmincke. The Canadian supplies were different from those I was familiar with in Israel, and I thought I’d have to do a certain amount of improvisation, something appropriate to this medium which enables both maximum precision and spontaneity.
I sat Niki down facing me and I painted her directly, using the fine brush, with transparent and translucent colours, dispensing with a pencil sketch, although I knew that I would have almost no way of making corrections. I began with an off-white outline of her face and upper body, and when it looked sufficiently accurate, I waited for it to dry and in the meanwhile mixed the paints that would catch the radiance of her skin: white, ochre, pink and orange, and then I filled in the face and throat, leaving sp
aces for the eyes. I enjoyed creating the fine, transparent layers of colour with the brush, and the shades and tints that formed on the paper and were absorbed by it, looking as if they had grown out of it, not placed onto it.
Before the paint dried, I dabbed in pink highlights on the cheeks, and the touch of paint spread as a gentle blush without a clear outline. Then I began working with slightly darker paints, carefully and delicately, on her beautiful throat and collarbones. I felt that I was managing, with a small number of pigments, to build Niki’s soft and vivid harmoniousness but, in order to obtain the ivory shine of her skin I used moist cotton-wool to brush over her cheeks and forehead, thereby lightening them to get the gleaming radiance just right.
I also felt that I was conveying her internal essence, by elongating her eyes a little and giving them the brilliant green tint that shone through them. Then I worked on her smile, both restrained and captivating, in a bright red, and with a few more touches of cotton-wool I completed the brightness surrounding her image. Niki posed for many hours, an obedient, contented model. After I let her get up, she whooped with joy when she saw the final result. “Am I so beautiful in your eyes?” she asked, hugging and kissing me.
I continued painting applying dark shades to her hair and bright colours to her dress. But I left the background of the room and furnishings dim and lacking in detail, the more to highlight her lustrous image. Next day I took the finished portrait to be framed at one of the galleries where I’d placed my work. When they saw it, the owners immediately said they could sell it, or any similar work for not less than twelve thousand Canadian dollars.
Once again, I donned my suit, and Niki said I looked “just perfect”. She wore trousers, a thick turtleneck sweater and no makeup: she was the perfect petite and beautiful girl-woman.
Niki drove us in her little car northwards, out of the city centre. We passed the high-rises, along Mount Pleasant Road, and into a more residential area. The homes here were single family residences and the further north we drove, the larger they became. Still two-storeys high, some were constructed of red and black brick, others of brown and light-coloured brick, with roofs that were less pointy and gardens that were bigger and better tended. Niki turned into a street of really large homes, some of them reminiscent of small castles nestling deep inside expansive gardens, and reached by private driveways. She drove into one of these, up to a large house with a roof of grey tiles set at varying angles that immediately reminded me of the tiled roofs of houses in Japan. Niki saw what I was looking at and said, “Welcome to Little Japan.”
She gave a short toot on the horn, and lights went on in the front of the house, the door opened and light from the inside silhouetted a tall woman and a stocky man.
Niki’s mother looked like your typical WASP – blonde and blue-eyed, tall and slender. “Emily,” she introduced herself, coming up to me and air-kissing both my cheeks. Her father was the short, strong-looking type of Japanese, with a handsome face. He said “Yoshima” and bowed deeply. I did the same, a little shallower. I’d read up on Japanese etiquette, and Niki had briefed me, and it seemed to me that by doing this, I acquired both his trust and his affection.
“So, I understand you met back in Japan,” he said when we were inside the large entrance hall, which gave off a Japanese warmth: the ceiling and the floor were both made of wood, and the walls were partitions of paper in wooden frames, which served as wide sliding doors. We both confirmed what he’d said, and when I saw Niki slipping her shoes off I remembered that she’d warned me I’d have to do the same.
“A ten-year friendship is no small matter,” said Yoshima, apparently unaware of the almost decade-long break. His wife put him right, saying, “But it was pure coincidence that you met up again here, I gather. When you came to sell your paintings in our galleries.”
“Though we actually met at the university,” Niki said. “He came to get some papers for a friend.”
I gulped. What else was she going to divulge? But it turned out she just wanted to get the facts straight.
I handed my gift to Niki’s parents. The way they opened the wrapping was mannered but their outburst of admiration for the portrait was spontaneous and genuine. So was mine, when I saw Niki’s painted form, with all my love reflected in her face, a rendition which to my eyes was a marvellous combination of Niki herself, of my love and of my handiwork.
Emily took down a reproduction of Jan Vermeer’s Girl with a Red Hat that was hanging on the living room wall. It was a painting I was familiar with from my theoretical studies at Bezalel, but only in recent years had I gone deeper into Vermeer’s work, after the publication of the novel by Tracey Chevalier, Girl with a Pearl Earring, inspired by a work which Vermeer himself called Girl with a Headscarf.
Emily hung my painting in the place she had vacated. The three of them clapped hands enthusiastically at the radiant effect, and Niki gave me a shy kiss on the cheek.
We went into the dining room, where there were both a conventional, long western-style table and a low Japanese table, with cushions around it. I was glad when we sat at the normal one. During the meal, Emily asked me a host of questions about my painting. I didn’t tell her much. I found it easier to talk about the picture she’d taken down than about myself. If it had been an interrogation, they would certainly have been convinced that I was an authentic artist or an expert on art: I showed them how the red shades of the prominent round hat were reflected in the face and the whites of the eyes of the girl; how the light coming in from the window – a motif common to many of Vermeer’s works – illuminated her face and made her nose almost translucent. I spoke of Vermeer’s unique use of shadows, which were for the first time not black but just a little bit darker than objects near them, and I told them about the theory that Vermeer used a camera obscura to obtain the perfect perspective in his works. To finish off, I told them that despite the suggestion in Chevalier’s novel – which had just been made into a film starring Scarlett Johansson – that the artist had a love affair with the maid who ostensibly was the model for Girl with a Pearl Earring, it was actually his daughter who posed for him, as far as was known.
Niki’s parents, who had apparently been interested in publishing Chevalier’s novel in Canada were surprised and even more surprised to hear that there was uncertainty as to Vermeer’s first name – whether it was Jan, Johannes or Johan, and that some authorities added a “van” before his family name. The details of his life, which were overshadowed by those of other giants of Dutch art of his period, were vague.
Yoshima asked me about my military service. I told him a little about the work of the Engineering Corps and about mine clearing, a subject that turned out to interest both parents greatly. Much-publicized efforts were under way at the time to clear minefields from former battlefields, such as Okinawa, Cambodia, Vietnam and others. I refrained from mentioning the mines I had laid around our fortified positions in southern Lebanon, most of which remained in place when Israel finally withdrew in 2000.
Niki’s parents liked what they heard, and were polite and sympathetic, but didn’t really know how to react to the strange match their daughter had made. It’d be interesting to see how my parents would react to her, I thought.
Yoshima, I discovered during our conversation, had started off as a print worker, became the owner of a printing works, and had met Emily when she was a literature student. After she became a literary agent, he began printing work that she selected, along with the other print jobs. “Emily’s ability to assure authors whom she selected that their books would be published without being dependent on other publishers’ decisions gave her a lot of power,” Yoshima said. “And some of that power has recently passed to Niki.”
“In fact, since Niki’s been working with me, we’ve become a combination of a literary agency and a small publishing house,” Emily added. “Niki’s got a really good eye for literature, and we don’t pass on the writers she picks.” I noticed that Niki had gone a little red in the face
. What her mother was hinting at was that they didn’t want her to stray away from the family business.
After the meal, there was a surprise in store for me. Yoshima took me into a space which in Japanese homes serves as an internal garden, and which here housed a kind of dojo, a judo gym with a wooden roof. Yoshima said something to his daughter in Japanese, bowed, and she bowed back and disappeared into the house. Then he bowed to me and to Emily, who was standing next to me, and also entered the house, with measured paces. I guessed what was about to happen, and waited expectantly.
“This is in your honour. They haven’t done this for years,” said Emily, who seemed a little embarrassed.
When Niki and her father came back, they were in samurai garb, which resembled judo robes but were made of a different fabric, with silk patterns, and also cut differently. Vests made of some stiff material protected their chests. Both were carrying swords, about thirty inches long with grey steel blades and black hilts, the type known as katana, Niki told me later. I was more and more intrigued. Yoshima also had a wakizashi, a shorter sword with a hilt studded with precious stones, at his waist.
The sword fight between the two was stunningly beautiful. Yoshima was restrained but firm, his movements hard and strong. Niki hovered like the wind, delicate, fleet, agile, but her strokes and thrusts were very powerful. The blades clashed with great force and the metallic sound resonated in my ears like cymbals. She circled around Yoshima like a bird of prey, and he fought back like an ageing lion. Twice he trapped her in a corner of the room, his sword pressing hers down, but both times she escaped with a glorious wheeling leap. Once she managed to get her sword onto his chest. I watched them enchanted and mesmerized.
After what could have been between five and ten minutes – it was difficult to estimate – the two stood facing each other, their swords pointed downwards, and bowed deeply.
Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller Page 24
