Cafe Nevo (8 page)

Because she was too shy to meet the eyes around her, she sketched instead, then studied the sketch closely. There was something there. Those faces, so proprietary, so at home, that they hinted at the existence of a closed and integral society; that precise positioning of chairs in just such a way as to attain maximum exposure while maintaining anchorage to a particular table; the faint indications of an elaborate and formal structure beneath the formless meandering on the surface: Nevo was like some great puzzle whose pieces wandered around of their own accord. When Sarita realized that the point of the picture would be to decipher the puzzle and paint the pieces in their proper places, she knew she had accepted the commission.

 

 

 

Chapter Five

 

“Then I quit,” Arik said.

“Quit if you must; but not till you cool off.”

“You're cool enough for both of us. You know, you surprise me, man. I thought, I come to Seltzer with a problem like this, he's going to help out. He's got the resources. And you do, you bastard. You just don't have the will.”

“We don't have the resources, Arik. That's what I've been trying to tell you. Do you know what it costs to run a club like that? Not to mention your salary, which presumably you want paid.”

“This party has branches all over the country. You can't plead poverty.”

“We're not going to close branches to support your project. Be reasonable. If we put every cent we have into the youth center, it wouldn't be enough, and there'd be nothing left to continue the struggle.”

“What struggle?” Arik howled. “The struggle to look yourself in the face every morning? The way you're going it's no wonder you're losing it. You're so in love with the means you've completely lost sight of the end.”

“Arik, Arik,” Seltzer sighed. “So impetuous, so like your father in his youth, before he sold out to Labor.”

“I don't want to talk about my father, and you're in a poor position to talk about selling out.”

But Seltzer, warming to the subject, said, “Why don't you talk to
him?
If anyone can raise the money, he can. It would be small change to Labor. Or he could shake down that fat kibbutz of his.”

“You hypocrite. What happened to all that crap you've been handing out these past months, about the natural alliance between Sheli and Mitria? All that heart-rending rhetoric about saving their black, Likud-tainted souls and showing them the light? The minute it looks like costing more than talk, you're ready to toss the whole package over to Labor.”

David Seltzer was an owlish man of fifty-six. He had a headful of gray curls, beady brown eyes, eloquent hands, and a smoker's cough. He'd been a Hagana comrade of Arik's father, Uri Eshel, and though their political paths had diverged, they'd remained close friends. Arik liked him anyway, or had until today. David Seltzer spread his hands and leaned forward.

“I'm not tossing them away. You've done great things with those kids, Arik, great things. Until you came along, they were nothing but hoodlums; in the course of one year you not only had them organized but had them organizing others. The wonder of it is not that you got fired but that the Ministry took so long about it. Believe it or not, my friend, your firing and the closing of the Jaffa Youth Center are very good signs. It shows they're getting frightened. They're striking out at our alliance.”

“What alliance?” Arik hooted. “And who is this ‘they' you think you're scaring? Sheli is just a bunch of tired, ineffectual old coots waving red banners they can hardly lift anymore. I've got sorry news for you, buddy: you and your friends couldn't scare a fly. Aw, for God's sake, Seltzer.” Arik sat down beside him and took his arm lightly. “I'm not talking altruism here. I know better than that. Saving that center would be the political brainstorm of the century. It would demonstrate once and for all the thing that most people doubt: that Sheli doesn't just talk, it acts, it fights! And with the same stroke you'd win yourselves the loyalty of those kids, who've got more energy in their little fingers than you have in your whole organization.”

“You've made a persuasive case, Arik. I wish we had the funds to do it.”

In one fluid and furious movement Arik rose and crossed to the door. “Then to hell with you. I've had it with you and your hopeless bunch of crazy dreamers and wishers and wouldn't-it-be-nicers. You can go on playing your games, Seltzer. I've got work to do.”

Slamming the door behind him, Arik stepped onto Bograshov Street. I had to do it, he thought. What an asshole hypocrite Seltzer turned out to be. But outside in the cool clear night, Arik felt a heavy fog of bereavement settling in over yet another parting. Then Coby appeared out of nowhere and sidled up to him. He looked up at Arik's face and shrugged knowingly. “I told you.”

“Get off my back, Coby.”

“What'd he say?”

“He wished us luck.”

“Fucking prick!” exploded Coby. “What did I tell you? But no, you had to go running to your
vus-vus
friends, begging for handouts. Don't you have no pride, man? You know something? If they came to us on their knees with a sackful of greenbacks, I'd shove it right up their asses.”

“It ain't gonna happen,” Arik said, turning up Reines toward Dizengoff with Coby dancing by his side.

Coby was small and fast, taut and mean as barbed wire. At seventeen, when Arik first met him, he was the youngest warlord in his gang's history. Coby had resisted the youth center longer and harder than anyone else. His primary tactic was to heap ridicule on Arik: his illustrious first and last names, his kibbutz background, race, faggot profession (social worker), and general ignorance of the world according to Coby. “Golden boy” he called Arik, who hated the name.

The ragging didn't stop until Arik finally lost his temper and swung at him. Coby swung back, aiming for the face. He blackened one eye and drew blood before Arik flattened him with a combination that came out of nowhere. When Coby came up fighting, Arik kicked the legs out from under him. Then he saved Coby's face by walking away first, saying he'd had enough.

Arik got a professional fighter, a friend of his, to give clinics in the center. Coby couldn't pass it up. Eventually he took Arik under his wing, treating the older man like a slightly impaired younger brother with a woeful lack of street smarts. Of all Arik's kids Coby had taken the news of the center's closing the hardest. He blamed Arik.

As they entered Dizengoff Circle, Coby was still complaining vociferously. “We never should have got involved with those bozos in the first place. That bunch of
vus-vus
politicians: what did they ever do for us? They just wanted to use us. Hey, why don't you say something? What's the matter with you, cat got your tongue?”

“What do you want me to say, I fucked up? Okay, I fucked up. You're right, we never should have joined that coalition. That's what made them close us down. My stupidity.”

“Hey, lighten up, man. We'll raise the money. We'll run the goddamn place ourselves with no fucking Welfare Ministry breathing down our necks. We'll hire you ourselves.” He thought about that and laughed. “That'll be something. I'll be your boss. “Hey, Arik honey, make me some coffee.'“

Arik said, “Where are you going to raise that kind of money? Selling cookies?” Two girls in mini-skirts passed by, giggling arm-in-arm. Arik and Coby paused to look back. With his eyes on one of them Coby said, “We'll raise it.” Then he laughed.

Outside Nevo Arik stopped. “I feel like being by myself for a while. I'll catch you later.”

“Where're you going?” Coby asked.

“Nowhere,” Arik said, and turned into Nevo.

A half-dozen old men were hunched over chess sets, and mad Muny drank alone in a corner. Sternholz was perched behind the bar, reading a book. He noticed Arik come in but did not bestir himself except to say, “You again?”

“I thought you liked me, Sternholz.”

The waiter snorted.

“Can I have a coffee?”

“You got money?”

“What if I don't? You going to refuse me coffee?”

“No, but I'll send the bill to your—”

“Don't say it!”

A small smile of enjoyment flickered over the old man's whiskery face. When Sternholz brought the coffee over, with an extra cup for himself, Arik noticed that he was all dressed up. Under his great white apron he wore pressed black pants, a fine ivory-toned shirt, shiny black shoes, and, wonder of wonders, a tie. The shoes were a relief to Arik. Lately, Sternholz had taken to wearing his bedroom slippers in the café. On the kibbutz, when old people began appearing unshod for meals, it meant their time was near. Sternholz claimed he was just saving his feet, but Arik didn't like it. One day slippers, the next a cane, then a wheelchair, and finally they tipped you in your grave and tossed dirt in your face. Sternholz shuffling around in mules brought an unwelcome whiff of mortality into the café: for if Nevo had one redeeming quality, it was permanence.

Sternholz spread the wings of his apron and settled stiffly onto a chair.

“So,” he said ponderously. “Have you found a job?”

“I'm not even looking. I told you I'm going abroad.”

“Yeah, yeah. You got your ticket yet?”

Arik gave him a sour look. “Goddamn, this place is dead, Sternholz.”

“Some people have better things to do than sit around cafés all night, wasting money they don't have. Some people have to get up for work in the morning.”

“Not your customers.” Arik eyed the old man. “What are you all dressed up for?”

Sternholz puffed his cheeks belligerently. “Today happens to be my anniversary.”

Although it was common knowledge that Sternholz had lost his wife and child in Germany, he never talked about them, or indeed about his life before Nevo. First Arik blinked and looked away. Then, with an effort, he leaned toward the waiter, opening his mouth to speak, but Sternholz forestalled him.

“Forty-five years in Nevo,” he said with dour pride, as a jailer might say, Forty-five years in Sing-Sing. “Forty-five years to the day.”

Arik relaxed. ‘‘Buck up, old man. Maybe you'll get a remission for good behavior.”

“Very funny. Where will you be in forty-five years?”

“I'd hate to know.”

“Wandering? Drifting? Blowing around the world like a tumbleweed?” There was an outcry across the room as one of the old chess players checkmated his opponent. The kibitzers murmured approval, and the loser gave way. The board was reset. Sternholz's voice whispered low in Arik's ear. “Look at those poor, homeless men.”

Arik's jaw jutted forward, and he cocked his head. It was a mannerism inherited from his father, which he disliked but could not shed. “Lay off,” he growled. “I'm in no mood tonight. I just quit Sheli.”

“You're getting good at quitting.”

“Lay off, I said!”

“First the kibbutz, then the army, now Sheli.”

“I thought you didn't like Sheli.”

“I didn't say I disliked them, I just said they were losers. That's got nothing to do with it. The point is, you don't quit every time some little thing doesn't go your way.”

“I quit the army over Lebanon. That was no little thing.”

“You've got great principles, kid,” the waiter sneered.

“What is it with you, Sternholz? You were all in favor of my leaving the army.”

“It's getting to be a bad habit with you. What are you going to quit next, the human race?”

Arik sighed. “Leave me alone, old man.”

“Have it your own way.” Sternholz sniffed. “Do what you want. Run away. Join the circus. Desert the ship. Just don't come crying to me, forty-five years from now.”

 

Later, much later, Emmanuel Yehoshua Sternholz rested in his armchair overlooking the sea, and reached down to stroke a dog that wasn't there. Seven years had passed since the dog died, but Sternholz's hand remembered even to flinch. Old Red nipped him half the time. Sternholz had the only bad-tempered Irish setter ever bred, the dog
'
s cantankerous character an argument for the primacy of nurture over nature. Red used to wander the café at will, baring his teeth at some customers, nipping the heels of others, protected from retaliation by the jealous eye of his owner, who would not hesitate to eject anyone suspected of interfering with his dog. Sternholz's better half Muny called him, but Red and Sternholz had the last laugh when Red took a bite out of Muny's ass that kept the poet on his feet for a week. Remembering, Sternholz laughed aloud. Muny had borne no grudges. A few weeks after Red died, he showed up at Nevo with a purebred Dalmatian pup in his pocket, claiming he'd found it. Sternholz was moved but refused the gift. He told Muny it was because he'd never find a dog who'd suit him as well as Red; but later, over whiskey, he admitted to himself the real reason, that he couldn't bear another loss.