Cafe Nevo (21 page)

“Do you? Do you make it in his car? I need to know.”

Vered made a disgusted face. “Now you're getting a taste of what I've felt all these years.”

“It's not the same thing!” he declared, moving his chair closer to hers. “How do you expect me to swear off women when my wife has sworn off sex? And why should I? Why should I give up my greatest, nay, my only source of pleasure?”

“I thought that was writing,” she said, and he gave her a wounded look.

“I adore women. Women in motion, women doing household things: pulling on stockings, lifting a child, glancing into mirrors, reaching for things. Women nursing babies!

“And by God,” said Caspi, “I have a talent for them, a gift of discernment, like less fortunate men have for wine or food. No mere connoisseur, I am a pioneer of women, seeking out beauty in places where other men fear to tread. Why, I married you, didn't I?”

She laughed helplessly. “You bastard.”

“And the work I put in,” he wailed, encouraged, “doesn't that count for something? What devotion, what sacrifice! Do you think
you
are the only one who suffers for my art? What arrant nonsense, what nauseating banalities, what sentimental sludge I have endured from the mouths of beautiful women! What excruciating boredom, hour after hour of twiddle twaddle for the sake of a relief which is always paltry compared to my expectations! You should pity me, Vered; indeed you should. I am a disappointed man.”

“Poor Caspi,” she sneered, but he hardly heard her; he was rapt in contemplation of his tormented soul.

“I don't know why it is,” he mused. “I don't know where it comes from. Maybe it's hereditary; I wouldn't know. Or perhaps it comes from never having had a mother and so having missed those things that other men had in full measure when they were young.”

“Give it a rest, Caspi. Remember, I've seen your orphan act before.” As many times as she'd thought these words she'd never said them. Caspi looked genuinely hurt.

“Never mind, then,” he said. “The point is, do you really think you are woman enough to compensate for all the other women in the world? Ha! If you were, you could never have stayed out of my bed so long.

“Besides,” he said, winding down, reaching for a cigarette, “I need them for my work.”

“Your work, yes. You're really touching all the bases tonight, Caspi.”

“Cynicism does not become you, Vered. Yes, I need them for my work. How do you expect me to create women if I don't
know
women? Those girls, they are just my research, required reading if you will.
You
were the only one I wrote about. I never betrayed you.” His voice trembled with wounded sincerity.

Vered, torn between laughter and tears, remembered nights and nights of lying sleepless and alone, listening for the car door, his foot on the steps, his key in the latch. Remembered him coming in at dawn, whistling and singing off key; dancing into the bedroom, smiling in pleased surprise, and saying, “Vered! Up so early?” Remembered him once coming into the bathroom while she was bathing, perching on the toilet seat, and confiding, as if to his best friend, “I think I'm in love.” She had thrown a bar of soap, followed by everything else she could lay her hands on. Caspi had been hurt and offended that she would not rejoice in his good fortune.

She felt the old bitterness slip through her veins like poison. That much of her anger was self-directed took nothing away from the portion directed at Caspi; toward him her wrath was like a mother's love, bottomless.

“You never betrayed me?” she said.

Caspi raised his hand, palm outward. “I swear to God. Those girls had nothing to do with us.”

“Then try,” she said, “to think of Khalil as having nothing to do with us.”

Caspi fell back in his chair, clasping both hands to his heart like a mortally wounded man. To Vered, who knew him well, the theatricality of the gesture was no indication of falseness. In Caspi much that seemed sham was actually a twisted mode of self-revelation—as if Caspi could not deal with emotions on a human scale but had to project them onto a large screen in order to respond. Looking at his shaggy misery, she felt a thrill of pity, which she sternly repressed. She was only doing what had to be done. Caspi staggered to his feet.

“Don't taunt me,” he said. “Don't play with me. I'm giving you fair warning. I've thought it all out and I've nothing to lose. Know, Vered, that I will never divorce you. What I will do, if you continue to see this wog, is to destroy him.”

She laughed. Her eyes were watchful. She said, “You're not stupid enough to kill your wife's purported lover.”

“He's an Arab. No one would look twice.”

“I don't believe you.”

“I will do it in a way that makes it look like the work of one of the Jewish terror gangs. A random killing.”

“Then why tell me?”

“My dear,” he said, with civil astonishment, “I don't
want
to do it. I'm hoping to avoid the necessity.”

“You're being ridiculous. You know very well that if you harmed him, I'd go straight to the police.”

“You couldn't prove it.” Caspi beamed, inviting her to share his delight in his own ingenuity. “I don't mind if people guess, so long as no one can prove it. I'd have an alibi, of course.”

“Dory?” she said grimly.

He shrugged. “It would work, Vered. I hope for both our sakes that you believe me.”

She stared at him and he returned her gaze. He saw the very moment that disbelief changed to belief. Vered licked her lips and said, “You haven't thought it all out.”

“No? What have I overlooked?”

“Picture yourself with a gun, Caspi, aiming it at Khalil. Will you shoot him in the back?”

“No,” he said.

“Then you'll have to face him. He's unarmed. He's done nothing to you that you haven't done to dozens of other men. He's defenseless, at your mercy. Can you murder him in cold blood?”

Caspi made a gun of his fist and pointed it at Vered. He cocked his thumb. “Bang,” he said, and pulled the trigger.

 

 

 

Chapter Thirteen

 

Just outside Afula, the bus's air conditioning broke down, and at once the atmosphere turned close and malodorous. Ilana struggled unsuccessfully with the window beside her seat. Her seatmate, a wizened Yemenite woman of anywhere between fifty and seventy-five, whose black dress exuded an odor of sweat and cumin, reached over and with a flick of her wrists released the latch and raised the heavy glass.

“Thanks,” Ilana said.

The woman clicked her tongue. “In your condition,” she said reprovingly, “you shouldn't strain yourself.” Ilana's hand flew down to her flat abdomen, and the old woman cackled. “Forty years a midwife,” she boasted. “No one can fool me. I know before the rabbit does. Visiting someone, dear?” Her eyes glittered with good-natured curiosity.

“My family.” Ilana stumbled over the word.

Groaning slightly, the Yemenite bent down to the aisle and extracted a white packet from her voluminous straw bag. Immediately, as she unwrapped the paper, a strong smell of garlic rose into the air.

“Care for a bite?” Ilana shook her head and swallowed hard, tasting bile. “Got to keep your strength up, dear.”

“No, thank you.”

The woman nodded sympathetically. “You'll get over that part soon.” She bit into the pita and sausage sandwich, then wiped her mouth daintily on her sleeve. Ilana turned to the window.

They had left the coastal plain behind and were traveling through rough terrain. The hills around them were scantily clad in a thin layer of topsoil, through which the bare white rock extruded like a broken bone through skin. Scrawny pines dotted the landscape, and the road twisted upward ahead, glistening with melted tar. It was the hottest day so far. She could have driven up in half the time, in air-conditioned comfort, but for the folly of appearing in a brand-new snow-white Porsche in the village of her childhood. She had dressed carefully for this visit, choosing a simple cotton blouse and an old denim skirt, cinched at the waist by a leather belt that her uncle, the shoemaker, had made for her on her sixteenth birthday.

The belt fit as usual, for she had not yet begun to show. How, then, had the Yemenite known? (Sternholz, that sharp-witted old meddler, had guessed her secret, but that was no mystery; she oughtn't have ordered milk.) The Yemenite's effortless perception worried her. Was it written somewhere? Did it show on her face, in her eyes? And if her condition was so obvious, was not its precariousness equally perceptible? Perhaps the old woman's profession rendered her clairvoyance selective, for though the two weeks prescribed by Rafi Steadman had come and gone, then another week and yet another, Ilana had not decided, but merely postponed.

David called her nearly every night, never pressing the issue but, skillful negotiator that he was, assuming a positive outcome. He asked her how she felt, discussed his work, made plans for a visit which they both knew without saying was predicated on her continued pregnancy.

Still, she could not make up her mind, or rather could not assert mind over matter, for there was every rational reason in the world to seek an abortion. Having the child would destroy a way of life which Ilana (before) had thought perfect. If she had the child, she would have to raise it herself—giving it up for adoption was unthinkable—and that meant an end to travel and career and the onset of loneliness. She would lose a world to gain this baby, with nothing to replace that which she had lost, for where would she fit in? One can live without friends if one has family and without family if one has friends. But to live and raise a child with neither friends nor family: that was a daunting prospect.

Who would help her? Who would teach her? None of her women friends, ladies of the demimonde, had children. They would think her mad, or wicked, and even the kindest of them would be torn away, finally, by the different style of their lives and that secret envious gnawing that Ilana herself had experienced in proximity to young mothers. Children, it was tacitly understood, were one of the things one renounced, the greatest part of the price one paid. Having a baby at this late stage would strike them as cheating, perhaps even tempting fate. Had they known of David's proposal, and on what irrational grounds she had refused it, they would have cast her off in horror as a kind of Jonah.

To whom, then, could she turn? In desperate hope she set out one sunny morning to visit a nearby park where, driving by, she had often seen groups of young mothers and babies congregating. She managed to approach a couple of women sitting on a bench in the playground, close enough to overhear their conversation. “Poor Ilana's teething. She cries all night. I don't know
what
to do.” “Try ointment on her gums. It worked for Anati.” “Look, there's Nira. Can you believe her big boy's still in diapers!” But the moment they noticed Ilana they fell silent and stared, breaking into excited whispers as she hurriedly strode past, pretending she had a destination. Those women would
never
accept her, save as a curiosity and a subject of gossip. “
Guess who I talked to today, in the park with her little love child?”

Certainly the men in her life would drop her, terrified of being tagged as the father of her child, and without them, her past, present, and future lovers, whom did she have? Her family, who took her money but wanted nothing to do with her? There was only Sternholz, who nagged her, “Go home.”

“ ‘Go home,' “ she mimicked. “Do you know what you remind me of, Emmanuel? Those toy crystal balls that kids used to play fortune-teller with, remember? Ask a question, shake the ball, and read the answer in the little window. Of course, it's always one of the same four answers, no matter what you ask.”

“Nu, so what are my four answers?” he grumbled.

“Go home, get married, have a baby.” She thought a moment, then concluded:
“Sei gesunt.”
Go in health.

Sternholz cackled, slapping the table in his mirth; then, shaking the tears from his runny eyes, he bent his old head down to hers. “They all apply to you,” he whispered.

And despite her mockery she listened; for when Sternholz spoke only fools shut their ears. Marry she would not; but the rest of his advice had a cohesive logic she could not deny and an attraction she could scarcely resist. Sternholz spoke to her dreams, her fantasies. He spoke to that part of her that overran her waking and sleeping hours with visions of the sentient fetus growing and moving inside her; of herself, big with child, breasts bursting with milk; of that moment when she would behold her child for the first time, press it to her heart, and kiss its soft cheek. The harsh landscape faded from her sight, and Ilana sat in a rocking chair, in a bright nursery, singing to an infant who sucked at her breast. Its slight, resilient body shifted in her arms, and she smelled its sweet, milky breath as the babe broke off nursing to peer upward at her face.

The familiar beeping tones sounded, introducing the hourly news broadcast At once the bus quieted. Passengers leaned forward in their seats, and the driver turned up the volume.