Cafe Nevo

by Barbara Rogan

Sternholz looked, blinked, took out a pair of steel-rimmed reading glasses from a shirt pocket, polished them and put them on, looked again, and said, “Good God.”

  “Who is it?” Sarita whispered.

  “Don’t you know?”

  She pointed to the only woman in the picture. “I know that’s my mother.”

  “That’s her. And that’s your father on her right.”

  “And who’s this?” She touched the man who sat on her mother’s left, leaning toward her and saying something that made her laugh.

  Sternholz bent his old head down to hers. “That’s Uri Eshel, maybe thirty years ago. You can see the resemblance to his son, over there. Sarita”—he used her name for the first time—”how did you do that?”

  She shrugged like a truculent child. Her finger touched the man who hovered behind the trio, his eyes fixed on the woman. “You didn’t say who that was.”

  “That’s the waiter,” Sternholz said, a trifle glumly.

  “He hasn’t changed much,” Sarita said, studying the picture closely. “I know what he’s thinking.”

  “What?”

  She laughed up at him with a touch of her mother’s gay wickedness. The suddenly amplified resemblance made his old heart ache. “The waiter is thinking he waited too long,” she said.

  Rami Dotan, who sat facing the street, suddenly straightened and said, “Look who’s coming. I told you you should never have brought him here.”

  “Khalil,” said Caspi, surprised.

  “You didn’t invite him?”

  “Hell, no. We spent the morning fighting over the contents of the anthology. He’s a stubborn bastard and a real chauvinist I’m surprised he would come here; I assumed he went back to Nablus. Maybe he thought of something else to tell me.”

  Khalil parked his BMW at the curb, and entered the café like a fox prowling in the dark of night, hungry but also wary of larger predators. Head held still, chin high, eyes active. He saw Caspi and nodded. Caspi gestured toward a chair, but Khalil walked the other way, into the inner room of the café. Rami Dotan and Caspi exchanged puzzled glances and turned to watch him. He padded softly up to Vered’s table. She looked up, closed her pad, stood, and offered him her hand. “Son of a bitch,” Caspi exploded. Khalil kissed Vered’s hand, and they sat down together.

  “Oy vey,” sighed Sternholz.

  Chapter Seven

  “I know what you’re doing.”

  Vered looked at him.

  “I don’t mind. But I want you to know that I know.”

  The assertion created a pocket of intimacy. She said, “Why don’t you mind then?”

  Khalil showed his teeth, and a fine, even set they were. “I have scores to settle.”

  “With Caspi?”

  “Among others.”

  Sternholz hobbled over to their table and stood beside Vered. “Enough already,” he said to her. “Go home.”

  “Emmanuel Sternholz, Khalil Mussara,” she said.

  Automatically the old man stuck out his hand. When Khalil’s was in it, he said earnestly, “This isn’t nice, what you’re doing here.”

  “Isn’t he the waiter?” Khalil asked.

  “Of course I’m the waiter; who’d you think I am, Kublai Khan?”

  “Bring us some coffee, please,” Vered said.

  “We’re all out,” Sternholz said, and stalked off. Khalil stared after him with knowing eyes.

  “He doesn’t like my coming here,” Vered apologized. “It’s not you. Sternholz is no racist.”

  Khalil shrugged. “In this country the only non-racists are fools and hypocrites. If this were Nablus or Hebron and you were an Arab woman sitting with a Jew, do you know what would happen to you?”

  “What?”

  “You’d die.”

  “You say that as if you approve.”

  “Of course. Every morning I pray that education has not distorted my understanding or diluted my blood so that if I ever caught my sister with a Jew I would fail to do the honorable thing.”

  “How–”

  “Barbaric?” Khalil smiled. “You agree with your husband, then. He thinks I am an ape in man’s clothing.”

  “I agree with Caspi about nothing,” Vered said. (Khalil’s eyes gleamed beneath lowered lashes.) “I object to your regarding your sister’s life as your property.”

  “Your feminism has no application in our world. Men do not free their women before they themselves are free. The Jews stole our homes and our nation. Should we let them cut off our balls as well?”

  “Whose balls are you attacking?”

  “You chose the place, Mrs. Caspi, and the time.”

  She was silent.

  “Understand me, Vered.” Khalil leaned forward and boldly, under the eyes of her husband and all of Nevo, took her hand. “I don’t mind playing games, especially with such an attractive and sensual partner. But I know the rules, and I always play to win. By meeting me here and now, you’ve announced to the world that you’re cuckolding your husband with a colleague of his—worse yet, an Arab. I am far from offended; I am delighted to have been chosen. But it would be most dishonorable if, having made the announcement, you were to fail in the consummation.”

  Without moving, Vered withdrew, hiding behind her sunglasses. Convinced of her own secret cowardice, she feared its discovery by others. But Khalil, an Arab in the Jews’ country, knew all the disguises of fear. He pressed his challenge home.

  “Right now,” he murmured, leaning toward her, “your husband is telling himself you wouldn’t dare. Are you going to prove him right?”

  “What my husband thinks is no concern of mine.”

  “No? Then take the first step. Come with me.”

  “Where?”

  “To a place where we can discuss Arab-Israeli relations in private.”

  “You think I’m afraid?”

  He smiled.

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s go.” She preceded him, passing Caspi by without a glance. Khalil opened the door of his BMW with a flourish. Vered got in, and they drove away.

  “Never mind, darling. It happens to every man sometimes. The important thing is not to worry about it” Dory blew a kiss and walked naked into the bathroom, shutting the door behind her.

  “Shit,” said Caspi. “Hell and damnation.” It was the first time he’d ever failed, and it boded ill; take away his virility, and what was left? Dory’s advice-column patter made him feel worse, reduced to the ranks of Everyman.

  The fault manifestly lay with Vered. Caspi was on top of Dory, poised for penetration, when suddenly a vision of Vered and Khalil similarly situated flashed before his eyes. He shriveled instantly. As Dory opened her eyes quizzically, he ground himself savagely against her, but it was no good. Rolling off, he covered himself with a sheet and endured her attempts at commiseration. He knew she would be on the phone before he was out the door. “Oh, Caspi,” Caspi groaned, “how the mighty have fallen.”

  Driving home, he planned his chastisement of Vered. The provocation, the deliberate outrage could not go unremarked, lest she be driven to still greater extremes; but restraint would be the key, moderation the tone of his reproach. His attitude would be that of a rational man coping kindly with an irrational wife, an approach calculated to drive her mad. He would not give her the pleasure of referring to the race of her cohort. Why should he? What was it to him if she chose to sit in Nevo, with an Arab, on a Friday afternoon, when all of his, Caspi’s, friends and enemies congregated? And then to leave with the Arab. Waltz past him without a glance, as if he weren’t there, and get into that car, which a third-rate pseudo-intellectual A-rab poet had no business owning. No, he decided, the race thing didn’t bother him. He ran a light.

  Not for a moment did Caspi believe that her betrayal had gone further than display. But if it had, if she really were sleeping with that Arab whelp of a syphilitic dog, he’d slaughter the bitch.

  Of course, race aside, one had to allow that Khalil’s behavior had bee
n reprehensible. You don’t work all morning with a colleague, shoulder to shoulder, then meet his wife in his own café. Among civilized people it couldn’t happen. But then Khalil, for all his literary claims and educational pretensions, sprung from primitive stock, one generation removed from peasants who bought and sold their women. In a way, that made his crime the greater. As women were a form of currency in the primitive Arab mentality, it followed that Khalil was an embezzler. As women were chattel, Khalil was a rustler. As women were the ground on which men built their lives, Khalil was a trespasser. Any way you looked at it, the Arab was an outlaw.

  Caspi drew up in front of his house, surprised to see that the apartment was dark. He’d expected a penitent little light showing somewhere, most likely in the kitchen, as Vered calibrated her sorrows in cups of coffee. Caspi ran upstairs, threw open the apartment door, and bellowed her name.

  There was no reply.

  He peeked into the open door of his son’s room. The little bed was neatly made, and the tattered monkey that was Daniel’s constant companion was gone. The Mickey Mouse clock on the dresser showed ten o’clock.

  He entered Vered’s study. The empty room mocked him: so dainty, so pretty, so Caspi-free. The divan where she spent most of her nights was neatly covered with the diamond- patterned afghan that Jemima had given her. Her pillow was cool to the touch but bore her scent. He lay on the divan and stared at the prints on the wall and the shelves of books, so prim in their orderliness, as if in reproachful opposition to his own scattered library, which lay in stacks on every flat surface in the rest of the apartment. Her books, carefully arranged by author, looked untouched, though he knew they were not; his own had broken spines, torn or missing jackets, whole sections of text ripped out and used as toilet fodder. (No light reader, Caspi despised writers who couldn’t write and envied those who could.)

  He got up and looked at her desk. The gray folder which contained her work-in-progress was missing from the desk top. Sometimes she kept it in the top drawer. Caspi reached for the knob, then drew his hand back and lit a cigarette instead, dropping the match onto the floor. She kept her passport in there, too. Caspi had long envisioned himself coming home to an empty house, finding wife, child, and passports gone. In this recurring fantasy, Vered stole his passport to hinder pursuit. Caspi had recently locked his passport in his bank deposit box, and would have taken hers, too, but for the fear of putting ideas into her head. He finished his cigarette and stubbed it out on her desk, though an ashtray was at hand. The telephone rang, and he lunged for it. “Yes?”

  “Where are you? I told Vered I had a party tonight. I’m already late.”

  “So go,” he said. He teased the top drawer open with one finger and rifled through it. The gray folder was there, and beneath it; in a white Peltours envelope, her passport. The pounding in his ears momentarily drowned out Jemima’s voice.

  “What’s your problem?” he said. “Need an escort?”

  “Very funny. What do you expect me to do with Daniel, take him along?”

  “Daniel’s with you?”

  Jemima was silent for a moment “Where’s Vered?” she asked quietly.

  “Out screwing some A-rab,” Caspi drawled.

  “I wish she had it in her. It would serve you right.”

  “Goodbye, Mother.”

  “Don’t hang up! And don’t call me that. I’m not your mother, thank God. Would it be too much to expect you to pick up your son?”

  “I’ll be right over,” Caspi said, and hung up. He thought of taking the boy to a hotel somewhere for a night or two, just to give Vered a scare, but decided it was too much trouble.

  He returned to his car, and drove down Dizengoff, pausing in front of Nevo. Vered wasn’t there. The café was half empty, and Sternholz was sagging against the bar, his head on his hand. Stubborn old bastard, Caspi thought; why didn’t he get someone in to help him, beside that useless geriatric busboy of his? Could it be greed? But it was an open secret that Sternholz owned Nevo. Even if his customers were the scum of existence, which they were, himself excluded, their money was as good as anyone’s. Perhaps it was another kind of greed. He imagined Sternholz as a vampire, sucking the blood of some customers to infuse others, nourishing himself in the process.

  “Old fool,” Caspi muttered, pulling away from the curb. What did he know about books? All the critics praised his work. Yediot declared him “the master stylist of our generation,” and Ha’aretz called him “that valiant explorer of the dense underbrush of the Israeli soul.” Who was the waiter to judge? Unbidden, a picture arose in his mind of Nevo in its heyday, during Caspi’s youth, when the real artists hung out there. Shlonsky, Alterman, Goldman, that maniac Alexander Penn: not one of them that Sternholz hadn’t fed.

  “That doesn’t make him an expert,” Caspi argued with himself. Who was Sternholz to say that Caspi’s work was trash? To his horror and amazement Caspi felt tears trickling down his cheeks.

  He crossed Ibn Gvirol and drove down Kaplan, leaving the lights of the city behind him. When he hit the coastal highway, he rolled down his windows to let the sea air in.

  Jemima threw open the front door and stood with arms akimbo. Her blond hair was upswept, emphasizing the strong bones of her face. She wore a shimmering pale blue caftan of her own design and a choker of luminescent pearls. As he approached, Caspi smelled her scent, a distillation of newly mown grass. “You took your time,” she said. “Where’s Vered?”

  “I told you where Vered is,” Caspi said. He entered the salon with its cathedral ceiling and sunken sitting area and looked about. “Where’s Daniel?”

  “Sleeping, of course. Do you think he keeps your hours?” She crossed to his side and looked up at him. “What kind of foolish joke was that about Vered?”

  “No joke, Mother, darling.”

  Suddenly noticing his reddened eyes, Jemima lowered hers. She sat on a sofa and pointed toward her bedroom. “He’s in there.”

  In her room the surf beat like a heart and the moon shone softly, its glow diffused by white lace curtains. In the center of the large room, on a rattan bed, Daniel lay sleeping. He sprawled on his back, snoring lightly, his monkey nestled beneath his chin. In the moonlight the soft lines of his emerging boy’s face regressed into a baby’s lineaments. Daniel’s hair was soft as down, honey-blond like his mother’s. Caspi sat beside him for a moment, just looking. Then he nudged him and, when the child didn’t respond, shook him roughly.

  Daniel woke with a start. He focused on Caspi and said, “Where’s Mommy?”

  “Mommy’s not here, Daniko. Daddy’s going to take you home.”

  Daniel’s eyes filled with tears but as usual he held them back. Caspi didn’t know exactly when the boy had stopped crying, only that he had. Vered said it was his doing and he supposed it was, for he used to shout at the child when it sniveled.

  “Did you have a good time with Grandma?” Caspi asked as he bundled the boy up.

  “Where’s Mommy?”

  “Mommy’s home.” He carried the child out to the salon. Jemima came over and kissed him.

  “Goodbye, darling.”

  “Bye-bye, Grandma.”

  Over the boy’s head Jemima said, “Have Vered call me.” She touched Caspi’s arm, an unusual gesture. Caspi felt the question in the touch, but he shrugged and left.

  He placed the boy close beside him in the front seat. As the child’s sleepy warmth huddled against his side, Caspi leaned over to lock the door and surreptitiously sniffed Daniel’s hair. It smelled of baby shampoo, milk, and, faintly, Jemima’s scent. Daniel looked up and said, “I want Mommy.”

  Caspi snarled, “Shut up!” and gave the boy a shake. Then he regretted it, but what good did that do? Daniel had already pulled away and buried his head in his monkey’s soft side.

  Caspi, who loved his son, cursed the day he was conceived. He had tried every stratagem he could think of to prevent conception (save vasectomy, which he believed reduced men’s potency). Even after
Vered caught on and forced him to desist, he never really believed she would succeed, never believed that an egg of hers and a sperm of his could meet in anything but hand-to-hand combat.

  His instinctive aversion to the idea of fatherhood had proved well founded. To have a child meant entering into a state of permanent pillage-and-rape. It meant choosing to live on the cliff-edge of the most intense and untutored love. Loving where one could not afford to hate, loving irrevocably, was a perilous fool’s game, and Caspi could never understand who so many men chose willingly to play it.

  It was different for women. Formed to nurture, they had defenses men could barely conceive of. Caspi’s harshness with his boy was but a poor and makeshift cover for the truth, which was that Daniel had him by the balls. Was it his fault the boy didn’t seem to grasp that?

  “You know Daddy loves you,” Caspi said to the little bowed head. God help him but he could not keep the surliness from his tone. Daniel gave him a boldly dubious stare. Caspi pulled over and stopped the car.

  “Daniel, would you like to go look at the sea with me?”

  The child nodded, and Caspi carried him down to the water’s edge. When he put him down, Daniel began scrabbling at the buttons of his shirt.

  “What are you doing?”

  He pointed. “I want to swim.”

  “Not now, Daniko. It’s nighttime. Let’s just sit here for a while.”

  Obediently, Daniel dropped cross-legged to the sand. Caspi lumbered down beside him.

  “The sand is damp. Come sit on my lap. Look at the stars, Daniko. Do you know the constellations?”

  Nestled in his father’s arms, Daniel looked at the sky.

  “There is Orion, the hunter. Orion loved the goddess Diana, but he died at her hand. Diana didn’t mean to kill him, and in her anguish she plucked the living soul from his dying body and flung it heavenward. There he stands, bow drawn, arm flexed, quiver ‘round his waist: luminescent but eternally remote.” Daniel sighed, and his head fell back against Caspi’s chest. Caspi stroked his soft hair and thought that in a world ruled by a jealous god, men never got what they wanted, for in the very moment of attainment the object of their desire was transformed. Certainly this was true of Caspi’s women. Vered thought that his philandering was aimed at her, but she took credit where none was due. Caspi sought, truly and industriously, the mystery embodied in women’s flesh, but he was questing for the grail. The moment he touched them the mystery was gone.