Five Seasons (25 page)

At two the doorbell rang. It was the driver, a burly Arab of about Molkho's age who came from a village near Zeru'a. “How come you're so late?” Molkho scolded him. Despite the man's explanation that he had lost his way for two hours and couldn't find the address, he debated whether to go; but in the end, the thought of the girl and the car expenses prevailed. “You'll have to bring me back, though,” he warned the driver, who, however, disclaimed all knowledge of any such responsibility. His job was to drive Molkho to Zeru'a; perhaps someone else would return him. Again Molkho hesitated; then he went to get the file, put it in his briefcase, added a pair of pajamas and some slippers wrapped in a newspaper just in case, and put on some old, heavy shoes. “Let's go,” he grumpily said to the Arab, locking the door of the house.

The car turned out to be an old pickup with a load in the back and the Arab's wife, a large peasant woman dressed in black, in the front. Before Molkho could protest, he was made to sit between them, and they started out, driving slowly and with a great clatter of the engine in the heat of the day. Every now and then, they turned off the main road to make a delivery to some remote Arab village that Molkho had never even heard of. Sweatily squeezed between the driver and his wife and dismally cursing his fate, he watched the road go by while throwing hostile glances at the man shifting gears, an operation that was conducted each time with great caution but little sign of expertise. After asking where the man knew Ben-Ya'ish from and being told that the council manager had close ties with the nearby Arab villages and even helped them with their books, there was nothing left to talk about and they drove on in silence, the Arab's wife dozing with her head resting lightly on Molkho's shoulder. By the time they began the climb into the mountains, his eyes, too, began to close; periodically he nodded off, found himself tilting against the peasant woman's heavy breasts, and sat up again with a start. The trip took three hours and included a stop in the driver's village—which looked like something from the wilds of Anatolia—where the woman got out, took off her shoes, and slipped into her house while her husband unloaded the remaining crates and invited Molkho, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes, to come in for a cup of coffee. He went to the bathroom, which surprised him by its cleanliness, and returned to the sitting room to find the coffee waiting there. “I understand you lost your wife,” said the Arab. Molkho was nonplussed. Was it written all over his face? But no, the man had heard of it in Zeru'a. What else had he heard there? Molkho asked. Nothing. They just told him to bring Molkho in his truck.

It was 5
P.M.
when he reached the school building. Though he saw at once in the mild afternoon light that it was locked and deserted, he did not feel at all surprised; on the contrary, something had told him all along that Ben-Ya'ish would not be there. The fields had yellowed a bit in the ten days that had passed, but here and there he saw summer flowers he hadn't noticed the last time, and on the whole, the place seemed more livable. He walked between the houses, feeling watched by dark silhouettes of Indians. “It's that man from the ministry again,” he heard someone say. Slowly he crossed the shopping center, where this time, as though out of compassion, people avoided his eyes.

He walked on to the little house on the hillside, passing under the tall, humming pylon and once again experiencing the sense of déjà vu, though this time it was possible that his previous visit was the cause of it. Ben-Ya'ish's house was locked and silent, the lowered blinds preventing a glimpse inside, but when he knocked on the door, he thought he heard a sound there. “Mr. Ben-Ya'ish?” he called out. “Mr. Ben-Ya'ish?” But the sound stopped, and Molkho, all but trembling with anticipation, walked back down the hill to the house of the treasurer, whose daughter opened the door. “Where's your father?” he asked, feeling himself turn as red as her polka-dot dress. She seemed to have grown smaller since last he had seen her, but her gaze was as pure and earnest as ever. Her father, she said, was in the hospital. “In the hospital? How long has he been there?” he asked, his heart sinking. But he had gone only that morning and would soon be back, she informed him, her thin, finely wrought hand on the door, uncertain whether Molkho wished to enter, perhaps even concerned that he might sleep in her bed again. Nor was he at all sure himself how proper it was to be alone with her in the house. He felt unsteady, as if squatting inside him were a sexless little gnome who had fallen in love with a nymph. Behind her he could see her bedroom with one end of her antique bed, its blanket thrown off, and the heavy furniture. She followed his gaze earnestly, a joyless, humorless, somber little Indian, just like her father. “Do you want to wait here for him?” she asked. “No,” Molkho said, “I've come to see Ya-ir Ben-Ya'ish. Do you have any idea where he is?” “He was waiting for you all morning at the school,” said the girl, raising an arm as if to fend Molkho off. “You should look for him there.” “But the school is locked,” he said patiently, “I just came from there,” and when she said nothing he continued, “Why don't you show me where the secretary lives, that music teacher.” She glided outdoors in her bare feet, explaining to him how to get there; yet touching her so lightly that he barely felt her, as though she were made out of air, he said, “Take me there yourself, please. Just put on some shoes first.” And so again he followed her between the houses, looking at her matchstick legs in their sneakers while trying to carry on a conversation, first asking her about her mother and when the new baby was expected, then about the cow, and finally about the wild ravine, the name of which he had forgotten. But she did not know it either and was not even certain that it had one. All she could tell him was that if you walked a ways down it, you came to a waterfall. “What waterfall is that?” Molkho asked. “Oh, just a waterfall.”

The music teacher turned pale when Molkho arrived with the girl. “It's you? You came after all? But when? We'd already given up on you.” “
You'd
given up?” he snickered. “Yes, we waited for you all morning. Ya'ir was beside himself. An hour ago he took the bus to Fasuta to look for the driver.” While Molkho related what had happened, she hurried to give him a chair and a drink, and told the girl she could go. Molkho, though, did not want to stay in her house either, for it was noisy with children and too full of cheap bric-a-brac and glassware. He had a deep urge to stroll in the honeyed spring light, vigilant though forbearing in the knowledge, which both pleased and touched him, that the council manager was afraid of him, but determined to meet the young man and do what he could to console him. “Never mind. I'll take a walk around and wait for him at their house,” he said to the music teacher with a nod toward the girl, who stood frozen for some reason in a corner. “Is your father back?” the music teacher asked her. “He will be soon,” said the girl. “Then find Mr. Molkho a place to rest,” said the teacher, happy to get rid of him.

And so once more Molkho walked behind the girl along the path between the houses, aware of the surreptitious stares cast his way. “Where's the trail leading to that waterfall?” he asked her. She guided him to it, leading him across a field to a broad dirt track. “Well, then,” he said, “I'll go down and have a look and come right back.” She was reluctant to leave him there, though. “You'd better let me show you the way.” “There's really no need to,” answered Molkho, not trusting himself alone with her in the ravine. “I'll find it by myself. Just please take my briefcase back to your house.” And indeed, the request reassured her, so that she stood there watching him set out, squinting through her comic glasses with a sudden, sweet flutter of her eyes. The broad trail soon narrowed and grew rocky, bushes and boulders blocked the way, and moisture from an unseen source softened the earth beneath his feet, which glistened a turfy green. And yet the more tangled and difficult the path became, the more lustrously vibrant grew the light. The far side of the ravine was hidden by the thick bushes, and from time to time he had to slide down a steep rock on his bottom. Should he stop and turn back? But the winding trail lured him on, the damp earth giving off new smells, joined now by a metal pipe, no doubt for sewage or irrigation, which snaked downward through the lush undergrowth, in which it seemed strangely out of place. Molkho followed it, treading on it now and then to make sure he could find his way back through the thickening brush. He skirted little puddles of water and crossed other paths joining this one, trodden grassless by hikers. It grew darker, there was a pungent smell of dust and rushing water, the walls of a little canyon rose on either side of him, and then all at once he was standing in a clearing of golden light and there was the waterfall.

It was not nearly as small as he had thought it would be. Falling gilded by the sunlight into a gray-green pool that trickled off in an unseen direction, the water burst forth from mosses that concealed a lipped groove in a boulder. He sat on a rock facing it, enjoying the coolness of the air and gazing at some unfamiliar purple flowers and at a weeping willow whose little leaves were like delicate ferns, the sharp scent of artemisia riveting his senses. Here was a place of eternal wakefulness, and though he failed to remember it, he felt sure he had been here as a boy, for the Scouts would never have missed it. How his wife would have liked it too! Places like this made her fall profoundly silent, her judgmental nagging briefly stilled. How sad to think of the lost peace this cascade would have given her! And yet it was years since they last had taken a pleasure trip, and then, too, they never went on foot. Even before she fell ill, she had always been too tired to go anywhere on Saturdays and had passed the time irritably glancing at the weekend papers and uttering her jeremiads. “Stop reading all that junk,” he would say to her. “It's all a lot of lies and exaggerations. Why let it get to you.” But she simply saw in this one more sign of the dangerously Levantine, apolitical naivete that was leading the country to catastrophe. Now she was rotting slowly, decomposing in the earth, and he was by himself, squatting comfortably on his heels in Levantine fashion across from the marvelous waterfall, overcome by sorrow and longing. He picked up a pebble and chucked it into the pool.

Just then he heard a rustle of branches and the sound of children, and a minute later the children themselves appeared, staring down at him from further up the ravine, having followed him apparently from the village. He beckoned to them. At first, they hesitated; then, the bigger ones first and the smaller ones after them, they descended like a herd of dark goats and stood with an unwashed smell in a circle around him while he chatted with them easily and patted their heads and backs, until suddenly, green with envy, the girl appeared and drove them away, her father having returned and sent her to look for him, afraid he might be lost. Molkho laughed. “Has Ben-Ya'ish come back too?” he asked. But the girl hadn't seen him.

And so, yet another time, he found himself walking behind her, his eyes on her thin, skimming legs as he climbed arduously up the steep path with the children scrambling in his wake like a pack of nimble monkeys. At the entrance to the ravine, he found her father waiting in the company of two or three other anxious men, all apparently afraid he had taken leave of his senses. “What were you looking for down there?” they asked. “Nothing,” said Molkho, brushing off his clothes, “just the waterfall. Your daughter told me about it, so I went down to have a look.” “You walked all the way to the waterfall?” they marveled, making him wonder how old a man they took him for. “Yes, is that so unusual?” he replied before asking them about Ben-Ya'ish. But Ben-Ya'ish, it appeared, was still being looked for. “Never has a bureaucrat been given such a runaround by a citizen,” sighed Molkho pensively with something like inner satisfaction, basking in the mild, clear light that made the whole world look transparent. “Well, I suppose there's nothing to do but wait for him,” he added, turning to go to the Indian's house.

Though the Indian seemed unprepared, he had little choice but to join Molkho, who was already striding purposefully toward the house, in front of which he found his briefcase. Perhaps they'll offer me the girl's bed again, he thought, but instead he was ushered into the familiar living room and asked if he wanted some coffee. He accepted and sat drinking it, trying once more to elicit the details of the man's illness, at least the names of the drugs that he took. But the Indian was no more forthcoming than before, and perhaps he really knew nothing about it, as if his illness were someone else's that he had merely borrowed for a while. Remembering with longing his sleep of ten days ago, Molkho stole a tender glance at the girl's room. “He's playing a game with me, this Ben-Ya'ish of yours,” he sighed, tired from the trip and his hike in the ravine but doubtful whether he could fall asleep so late in the afternoon, especially since the soporific wind was no longer blowing. “Maybe he's just afraid of me, but he's playing with fire,” he continued, trying to make the Indian feel a measure of guilt or, at least, responsibility. But the Indian too, so it seemed, had despaired of understanding the council manager; sitting straight-backed on the edge of his chair beside his daughter, who appeared, with the light glinting off her glasses, to imitate his movements with unconscious precision, he said sulkily, “I told him he had nothing to be afraid of, that you were a reasonable man and would give folks like us a fair hearing. But I guess he's afraid you won't understand his method of bookkeeping and there'll be trouble.”

There was a long silence in the room. The cow mooed longingly in her shed, and Molkho sat back in the little armchair, surprised at his inner serenity, which the Indian, perhaps because he feared another session of sleep, appeared to regard with apprehension. “So you really think he won't show up?” asked Molkho. “I honestly don't know,” said the Indian. “But where is he now?” asked Molkho. The council manager, replied the Indian, was last seen departing for the Arab driver's village; since then, he hadn't been heard from and the music teacher had gone to look for him. “He promised me a ride back to Haifa too,” Molkho said. The Indian, however, had no idea how such a promise might be kept. “When is the last bus out of here?” Molkho asked. In fifteen minutes, was the answer. Yet he made no move to rise from his chair, too entranced by the silent aura of the girl to tear himself away. I must be going crazy, he thought, gazing at her bare arms and legs, on which, near the ankle, there was a fresh, thin scratch. “Your daughter cut herself,” he told the Indian. “Perhaps you should put on a Band-Aid.” “It's from the ravine,” explained the girl, rubbing the dried blood off with some saliva. “Well, then,” said Molkho, reaching for his briefcase, “I guess I'll be on my way.” He stepped out into the charmed evening, cut behind the house, paused to regard the big cow in her shed, and continued along the path that skirted the village, which he now seemed to see for the first time in all its pathetic decay: the unwatered fields, the untended hothouses, the abandoned chicken coops, the half-empty cowsheds, the tractors rusting beneath their tattered tarpaulins, the forlorn wildflowers in a sea of yellowing thistles. The whole place, he thought, was like a dying patient who lets the doctor do what he wants with him. The villagers he passed looked at him unseeingly, sometimes keeping in step with him awhile before falling behind or forging ahead. The dead keep giving us orders, he thought, not without satisfaction, recalling, while continuing his tour of the village, how his wife would send him out for such walks to perk him up from the long hours of sitting by her bed, mechanically making small talk—but just then he froze, for there, in the little shopping center, a bus had just pulled in and was disgorging weary-looking passengers returning from work, among them the Indian's pregnant wife, who started out for home on her short, knobby legs. Why, it's the last bus, he realized with a panicky yet oddly happy sensation, watching it pull out past the perimeter fence while feeling how, bright but invisible in the lingering light, someone was shadowing him, perhaps Ya-ir Ben-Ya'ish himself, who, in the most childish case of corruption Molkho had ever encountered, had used government money as a slush fund for the local inhabitants.