"Excuse me," I touched his shoulder.
He collapsed.
It was more than a collapse. It was a disintegration accompanied by an unusual and loud noise: the clatter of five or six wooden sticks which had been nailed together. The habit lay on the floor like a deflated tent, and a squashed cushion, which had created the illusion of a head, rolled into a corner. For a moment I experienced a sense of satisfaction. In such circumstances I preferred tricks to mysteries.
I went out through the main door and ran across the wood. Torn newspapers and the remains of army tins were lying around the courtyard behind the church. The rear of the house of prayer was as closed and secretive as it had been that afternoon when I had followed the priest there. I went up the stairs straight to the middle of the wall and felt the stones which closed up the entrance. They were firm and solid and looked as if they had been set on top of one another for many years. I returned to the courtyard. Beneath the staircase was a low hollow which smelled of urine. The remains of a concrete surface ended in a small wooden door. I listened, peered back into the empty courtyard and stopped again to listen. Then I tried the door. It was not locked.
Inside was a tense silence. I walked carefully along the strip of light that came from the open door, feeling my way past statues of saints, piles of broken furniture and crates of mildewed books. When I had moved in about ten paces a shadow flitted from one of the corners and ran out.
He was naked and agile, carrying his clothes in a bundle close to his chest. Even so I recognized him by his mane of black hair, his narrow shoulders and the chocolate color of his body against the open door. I remembered him both from the café, where he had bought an enormous quantity of cigarettes, and from a day earlier, when he had vanished from my sight into the same courtyard from which he had now escaped.
I made my way back to the door, to close it. Only then did I remember one who I had now trapped in the dark. Was that what it was all about? The unexplained afternoon disappearances, the dummy at the window, the stealing in and out of the house, the lying, the pretense, the constant need to be on guard?
The smell of urine from the outside made the situation even more pitiable. It was pathetic to think about love in those conditions. I wondered about the pressure exerted on him when we had recruited him, and how it was that lust was one of the cardinal sins while treachery was not.
I went back to the middle of the room, bumping into all the objects and ritual junk I had taken care to circumvent before. The air was full of short breaths, tiny movements of air, the careful, sensitive shuffle of soles on the floor.
"Let's make it short," I said into the darkness. "I've got a few things to ask, then I'll go away and forget everything that doesn't interest me."
The noise stopped. Had he found a comfortable position or been stricken with fear upon realizing that I knew that he was there? I crouched down and listened. What was he doing? Shrinking in fear, writhing in shame, sitting still in the hope that I would go, wondering how I had found him out, praying for the miracles he had always wanted to believe in, planning something?
The idea of his planning something aroused me, and also dispelled a great deal of my compassion. He needed time so that I would get tired of waiting or draw the conclusion that I had been wrong and there was no one else in the cellar.
"I know you're here," I called, to dispel any such notion he might have. "I've been to your house."
He did not respond. Something of my confidence began to crumble. "Your dummy disintegrated," I added, sounding like a death announcement. In a certain sense it was. Some things in his life would not be as they had been in the past.
I took another step or two forward into the silence, then jumped back. Something had touched my forehead, light and fluttering like the movement of an insect. It was a very thin nylon cord which I pulled with a lack of caution which was most inappropriate for an explosives expert. Yellow light poured from a bulb hanging in the middle of the room.
This was a real advantage, which brought us back to the old game: one position against another, one gain against another. He did not reveal himself, but I could sense his restlessness. I left the lamp and crouched on the floor, in the center of the circle of light.
My lack of caution was nourished by the assumption that if he was armed he would have tried to reach me before, when I had been standing against the background of the open door. Still, I was worried to some extent.
"I think we're in a similar situation," I began to establish my demand for cooperation. "We are both burdened by the same subject."
Nothing.
"There are developments in connection with Anton."
No response to that either.
"Hell," I said, partly out of calculated logic, partly out of exasperation, "you're entrenching yourself in your little affair, when the real problem is what you did all the years to your trusting flock, to your neighbors who lived with you, to your best friend..."
One of the walls responded with a slight rustle, something between a chance scratching and a movement indicating discomfort. I waited, attentive, in the middle of the circle of light. The rustle grew stronger, gathering direction and strength and becoming the familiar shuffling of sandals on the floor.
"I've already told you," a hoarse voice said, "I am not your agent."
"I didn't believe you then and I don't believe you now..."
He was very near. I thought I saw the edge of his habit appearing and disappearing in the flickering circle of light.
"There are too many signs," I called out to him, turning my head parallel to what I surmised to be his movements around me. "The transmitter, Anton's arrest..."
Now I did see his feet, naked in the leather sandals, pressing painfully against the straps.
"I may be guilty of his arrest," the echoing space turned his voice into a dull roar, "but I was never your agent."
"Let's not waste time," I said, tired. "Everything points to it..."
He remained silent for a moment. Then said, "For years now I've known that there was an Israeli spy in Dura. I sometimes picked up Morse transmissions on my radio or saw signals by flashlight at night. Once a low-flying plane dropped something in the fields..." His voice wandered around me in circles as he stepped towards the line of light. "When the war broke out I began to worry. More and more planes appeared. I knew that he was signaling to them and I was afraid that one day he would direct them straight to us. I told Anton everything. Michel heard too and began spending nights outside, lying in wait. One evening, a few weeks ago, the boy came to me and told me about a fresh path he had found on the mountain, not far from the summit. We drove to the clinic in the Morris. Anton was not there. The woman said that he had gone to visit a patient. Michel and I climbed the path. At the top stood a man in a heavy raincoat dealing with something that looked like a box. Michel had a knife. He shouted: 'Stop.' The man bent down and Michel threw the knife and hit him in the shoulder. The man disappeared into the bushes. We were sure he was dead, but when we got to the place all we found was a transmitter and the bloodstained knife."
Now he was behind me, not far from my back. I turned round slowly. "What happened after that?"
"We went back to the clinic. An hour later Anton arrived and suggested that we wait and see if anyone came to receive treatment for a knife wound. But by midnight no one had come, so I went home. Two days later you arrived, Anton was arrested and the man from the mountain never appeared..."
"Don't you have any idea, even a guess, who it was?"
"The coat covered everything. I do not understand why he was wearing it in the middle of the summer."
I did. It was the transmitter aerial, sewn as metal mesh into the lining.
One other thing still had to be clarified. "You said that you were guilty..."
He hesitated. "If I had been cleverer, we could have vanished down the path to the center of the village into the market alleys. Presumably this man was watching us from the undergrowth. He coul
d not have mistaken Michel, and he thought that I was Anton..." There was sadness in his voice. Sorrow had displaced his arrogance, not fear or any pressure I had tried to exert on him. "Anton realized it that night," he added. "He was worried. Only after he had been arrested did I realize that Anton had known that the spy would not rest until he'd gotten him out of here." He breathed deeply. "As usual, he did not try to save himself - he did not want to harm Michel or me..."
"'Everything that happens is expected,'" I remembered.
"You read the letter, of course."
I said nothing.
"Don't deny it. You gave yourself away when you went to the blind girl."
"If you weren't the agent..." I began, then stopped. Everything was so confused now that all my assumptions had been overturned. "Why did you come to my aid?"
"You were the only channel to Anton." If there was a note of appeasement in his voice, it vanished the moment he added: "That, of course, was before I realized you were bluffing."
The light suddenly became a disadvantage. "You had no contact with him at the detention camp, because he was never there." His voice oppressed me from the darkness, each time from a different angle.
"There are ways of knowing - rumors, people who have been released..." Something within him was recovering, motivated by resentment and frustration. "Anton wrote about rainy days coming. I should have realized that you were the man who would bring them. That calm exterior of yours, the quiet way you speak, the placidity which covers your eagerness... But I chose to see the few acts of kindness you performed..." He smiled bitterly. "They repeat themselves, our mistakes. A matter of fate, or maybe heredity. It happened thirty-three years ago, to my father, in the village of Biram in Galilee..." He appeared in front of me, the front part of his body in the light, his face hidden. "They were very like you, the people who cheated him - polite, persuasive and impatient under their outer calmness. They came one winter night in ‘49. 'Just leave this place for a day or two,' they said, 'until the front stabilizes.'"
I stood facing him. "That doesn't interest me now."
He did not move. "You must know what Galilee winters are like: cold and rainy. But the soldiers were generous. They gave us blankets, helped us into the trucks. Our priest, a naive man, did not lock the church doors. He even left the register of births and deaths."
I shone the lamp onto his face. His hair was ruffled and stood up on his head like a brush. He spoke with the rapidity of someone on the verge of losing control. "Father's nephew had a shop in Jish. We slept there, fourteen people in one room. After all, it was only for one night, perhaps two... On the third day it was time to return, as we'd been promised. We walked through the fields and every now and again another family joined us. That is one of my childhood memories: Galilee full of our neighbors, acquaintances and relatives - all going home..."
"Each one of us has a story to tell..." I tried to stop him.
He did not even hear. "...The soldiers who were guarding the village were new. The ones who had made the promise were no longer there. An argument developed, then there was a scuffle. In the evening we returned to Jish. The children, that is. The adults were ashamed, they wandered about the fields until late at night. A few days after that they offered us other houses. Some of us were tempted. They settled in Shfaram, Haifa, Nazareth. But we mostly stayed in Jish and waited. After a few months the land was taken away, and even the name. The new kibbutz was called Baram. Our houses in Biram began to sink. One stone after another rolled down, to the new kibbutz, to become part of a path, a wall, a house. Only the church tower remained, because some law forbade harming it. Every day, at noon, we heard the bell ring. We thought: a miracle, a sign. Until a few of us who had been hired to work in the fields which had once belonged to us said that they had seen the bell in the kibbutz, hanging next to the dining room. The cook would bang it with a hammer to announce that dinner was served..."
I glanced at my watch, which only reflected the brightness of the lamp. "In a minute you will go," he said. "I did not expect you to understand. It has been a dream of mine, to stand in front of an Israeli and tell him. In recent years I heard things about you, I listened to your radio stations and read a few newspapers I found. I learned that there are those among you who speak of peace, even of a Palestinian state. I thought: maybe there really has been a change. When I heard about the invasion, I hoped that the first of you to get here would see us and say, ‘But these are the refugees we drove out in ‘48 and ‘49..." His voice became fainter. When he opened the door and went out a sudden gust of fresh evening air burst in. The smell of the old books and the junk became unbearable. I tied the lamp to a pile of crates, to light my way. From the courtyard I could see a yellow flare going up from the roof of the Athenaeum. Somewhere in the wood soldiers were peeing noisily. The watch on my wrist beeped. Eight. I began to run.
***
It was not far to go. I circled the building and went in through the main door. Fresh candles were burning on the altar, and the flowers had also been changed.
I sat in the front row. An aching loneliness filtered through my limbs. Without warning, I was suddenly seized by an inner trembling, a yearning which began in my stomach and rose in my chest. Its origin was vague, like a verse which has been learned and forgotten, an elusive obligation. It was nourished and crystallized in a distant dream which had suddenly come to life.
I opened my eyes, but the dream was so vivid it controlled me even in a waking state: against the background of the large, dust-encrusted spaces, I saw the figure of a seemingly eternal woman, one I had never seen before and for whom, I was sure, I had always longed. Slender of limb, dark haired, she was wearing a narrow skirt over long thighs and, maternal and seductive, helpless and protective, she wandered across the illuminated entrance of what seemed to be a dark tunnel. The scenery behind held no promise but neither could it disappoint. It was as transparent as water and as secretive. She wandered across it as though she were in a short film advertising the future.
One of the candles died and its demise moved me almost to tears. It was a shaky moment, in which I might have wept at the sight of a passing car, a smiling child, a slice of salami or a celestial revelation. I had never before experienced myself with such intensity. I touched the wooden back of the pew, the fabric of my trousers, the warm flesh of my arm. What was it that was inducing this sense of myself? Perhaps the waiting, the arrest of life, the cessation of activity. Only by severing his ties with Cordelia was Kierkegaard able to grasp the full extent of his love for her. Only with the collapse of Candide's protected life did he gain a genuine understanding of the nature of the world and his existence in it. Vincent had read so many books; how had he failed to realize? How much waiting had he wasted on those books, looking anxiously over his shoulder or simply being bored? All the waiting for Hannah to smear her vagina with spermicidal cream and place her slack, pink body at his disposal. For another woman, in Geneva, to finish masturbating, and for yet another, in Lourenço-Marques, to count the bills. For the woman he had picked up in the bar of the Nicosia Hilton, and the one who had picked him up in the Shakespeare bookshop in Paris. The waiting for the explosion or the dry rush of a shot fired with a silencer. For baby Jonathan to burp on his shoulder and for contacts who did not always show up. His life had moved from one period of waiting to another, it was a waiting period, perhaps even a long period of expectancy for this moment.
A figure moved towards me from the shadows.
"I've been waiting for you," I smiled hopefully.
"She's not coming," Michel said.
I jumped. The high ceiling made the creaking of the seat echo. From here there was no escape. But he held out two empty hands, fingers spread, to stop me. His voice, the look on his face, his posture, all indicated that he was trying to calm me.
"I've come to talk..." He shook his hair out of his eyes with that characteristic movement, which was also softer this time, as if promising that this meeting would not have the
violent aspect of our previous ones.
I approached him. "Where is she?"
"She's gone to talk to the priest," he moved back, keeping a safe distance. "She doesn't know I'm here."
The expectation within me turned into anger. He added hurriedly, "I don't believe the priest."
Now I also knew why. I remembered how he had spoken to the boy with the black hair, at the entrance to the café, next to the Rolls.
"I don't believe you either."
I remained silent.
"All the same, if I have to choose between the two of you, I've more chances of finding him through you."
The statement aroused my compassion. All his love for the doctor, his naivety and inexperience, combined with a touching acknowledgment of a power I did not have.
"She said that you wanted to see the suitcase..."
I was careful not to show the faintest flicker of interest.
"I'll let you look at it and you'll tell me everything you know..."
I nodded. The tension in his voice indicated that the main statement remained unsaid.
"...And I won't let you fix me like..." his face reddened and he could barely get the next few words out, "...like you fixed her..."
"What do you suggest?"
"That you give me a guarantee. Something which will ensure that you won't cheat me."
"I don't have anything of value to give you."
"Find something."
"There isn't anything," I said, mentally reviewing my few possessions. "There just isn't."
Without saying a word he turned round and started to leave.
"Wait," I called. He stopped and remained standing in the aisle. "Maybe there is something," I said quietly.
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
"Something that will enable you to continue to search on your own, if I can't help..."
He turned and started to walk back towards me. His nervousness emerged as he tossed his head twice fiercely.
The Rainy Day Man: Contemporary Romance (Suspense and Political Mystery Book 1) Page 22
