The Lover (5 page)

“It’s O.K.” I closed the hood carefully, smiled at him. He suddenly seemed more cheerful. There was a lot of traffic in the street for such an early hour.

“Have you got any money?”

He hesitated for a moment, then said, “Yes, it’s O.K.”

“If you return today, come here. You can still stay with us. If they detain you for any reason, don’t forget us. Keep in touch.”

He nodded, absently.

And a last picture engraved on my memory – his cheerful wave through the window as the car drew away down the slope.

I went back to the house. Dafi was sitting in an armchair, dozing, her hair dishevelled, Asya was already dressed and sitting in the study marking exam papers. “He’ll be back this evening, I’m sure, what could they do with him?” She smiled at me, a relaxed smile, and went on with her work.

He didn’t come back that evening. We sat up late waiting for the phone to ring, in vain. For several days his sheets lay folded on the pillow in the study, we were still convinced he’d be coming back. More days passed, not even a postcard. It seemed that they’d called him up after all. The war grew and he was gone.

There was no sign of him at his grandmother’s house, evidently he’d passed that way before going to the depot and had closed the shutters. The days of madness pass slowly. The first cease-fire, the second. Peace returning. But he has disappeared, and those last hours with him become so important. Another week goes by. Still no sign. It’s as if he’s playing games with us. I went to the local office of the army, but there was such a crowd there that I left at once. More days pass. The first reservists are discharged. The first rain falls. I went again to the army office,
waited patiently for my turn to speak to the receptionist. She listened to me in astonishment, thinking I’d come to cause trouble. She refused even to write down his name. Without an army number, a military address or the name of his unit she wasn’t prepared to start a search.

“Anyway, how do you know that he was drafted?”

How, indeed –

“Who is he? Your cousin? A relative?”

“A friend …”

“A friend? Then approach his family. We deal only with relatives.”

More days pass. Asya says nothing, but I become deeply uneasy, as if I’m to blame, as if his disappearance is aimed at me. How little we really know about him, we have the name of no other person to whom we can turn. Erlich had a friend in the border police. I passed the name on to him, to find out if he had left the country, perhaps he just went off. Two days later I received an official reply, which was negative. I went to the hospitals to check the lists of casualties. The lists were long and confusing, there was no distinction between wounded and sick. One evening I went to one of the big hospitals, began walking up and down the corridors, glancing into the wards, sometimes wandering among the beds, watching the young men playing chess or eating chocolate. Finding myself sometimes in
unexpected
places, a big operating room or a dark X-ray room. Going from ward to ward. There was so much confusion in the hospitals in those days that nobody challenged me, in my overalls I passed for a resident technician.

I spent a whole evening checking the floors, combing the place thoroughly. Sometimes I thought that I heard his voice, or saw someone resembling him. In one of the corridors they were carrying a wounded man on a stretcher, he was completely covered with bandages, his face too. He was taken into a room. I hesitated for a moment and then followed. It was a small room, full of instruments, with only one bed. The wounded man, his whole body burned it seemed, lay unconscious, like an ancient wrapped mummy. There was just one small table lamp alight in the room.

Perhaps this is him, I thought, and took up a position by the
wall. A nurse came into the room and connected him to a machine.

“Who is he?” I whispered.

She didn’t know either, he had been brought in from the Golan just a few hours before. There had been an exchange of fire there at noon.

I asked for permission to remain, I had been looking for some time for a man who had disappeared, perhaps this was him. She gave me a puzzled look, shrugged her shoulders wearily, she had no objection, in the last few weeks they had got used to all kinds of lunacy here.

I sat near the door, staring at the shape of the body blurred beneath the sheets, watching the bandaged face. There wasn’t a sign, but anything was possible.

I stayed in that darkened room for an hour, perhaps two hours. The hospital grew quieter, from time to time someone opened the door, looked at me and went away again.

Suddenly there was a groan from the injured man. Had he regained consciousness? I stood up, went close to him: “Gabriel?” He turned his bandaged face towards me, trying to locate the voice, but his groans grew louder. It seemed that he was dying in this lonely place, writhing, trying to tear the bandages from his chest. I went out into the corridor and found a nurse. She came, went out again hurriedly and returned with two doctors and another nurse. They put an oxygen mask on his face and tore the bandages from his chest. I was still unable to identify anything. I stood among them, watching. The injured man continued to die. I touched one of the doctors lightly on the shoulder, asked them to remove the bandages from his face. They did as I asked, sure that I was a relative. I saw a fearful sight. His eyes blinked at the light, or at me. It wasn’t him. I knew it.

A few minutes later his breathing stopped.

Someone covered his face, pressed my hand and left the room.

I went out, looked through the big windows into the gloom of the day. I still hadn’t searched the top floor. I hesitated for a moment, then turned and left the building.

We of class six G of Central Carmel High School lost our maths teacher in the last war. Who would have guessed that he’d be the one to be killed? We didn’t think of him as a great fighter. He was a little man, thin and quiet, starting to go bald. In the winter he always had a huge scarf trailing behind him. He had delicate hands and fingers that were always stained with chalk. Still he was killed. We worried rather about our P.E. teacher, who used to visit the school from time to time during the war in uniform and with his captain’s insignia, a real film star, with a real revolver that drove all the boys mad with envy. We thought it was marvellous that even during the war he found the time to come to the school, to reassure us and the lady teachers, who were wild about him. He used to stand in the playground surrounded by children and tell stories. We were really proud of him and we forgot all about our maths teacher. On the first day of the war he had ceased to exist for us, and it was days after the cease-fire that Shwartzy suddenly came into the classroom, called us all to our feet and said solemnly, “Children, I have terrible news for you. Our dear friend, your teacher Hayyim Nidbeh, was killed on the Golan on the second day of the war, the twelfth of Tishri. Let us stand in his memory.” And we all put on mournful faces and he kept us on our feet for maybe three full minutes, and then he motioned with a weary gesture that we shouldn’t stand, glared at us as if we were to blame and went off to call another class to its feet. I can’t say that we were all that sorry at once because when a teacher dies it’s impossible to be only sorry, but we really were stunned and shocked, because we remembered him living and standing beside the blackboard not so long ago, writing out the exercises with endless patience, explaining the same things a thousand times. Really it was thanks to him that I got a pretty good report last year because he never lost his temper but went over the same material again and again. For me someone only has to raise his voice or speak fast when explaining something in maths to me and I go completely stupid, I can’t even add two and two. He used to make me relax, which was boring, it’s true, deadly boring. Sometimes we actually went to sleep during his lessons, but in the middle of all this drowsiness, in the cloud of
chalk dust flying around the blackboard, the formulas used to penetrate.

And now he was himself a flying cloud –

Naturally, Shwartzy used his death for educational purposes. He forced us to write essays about him, to be put into a book which was presented to his wife at a memorial ceremony that he organized one evening. The students that he’d taught in the fifth and sixth grades sat in the back rows, in the middle the seats were left empty and in the front rows sat all the teachers and his family and friends, even the gym teacher came especially, still in his uniform and with his revolver, although the fighting had ended long ago. And I sat on the stage where I recited, with great feeling and by heart, the poems that are usual on these occasions, and between the poems Shwartzy preached a fawning and flowery sermon, talking about him as if he was some really extraordinary personage that he’d secretly admired.

And then they all went and stood beside a bronze plaque that had been put up by the entrance to the Physics Department. And there, too, somebody said a few words. But those we didn’t hear because we slipped away down the back steps.

Shwartzy was a quick worker. In Israel they hadn’t yet finished counting the dead, and he’d already got the memorials out of the way.

Meanwhile we not only forgot the maths teacher, we forgot the maths as well, because for two months we studied Bible instead of maths. We had eight hours of extra Bible studies every week and we went at such a pace that we did ten out of the twelve Prophets. The joke went around that there’d be nothing left of the Bible for us to study in the seventh and eighth grades, and we’d have to study the New Testament.

At last the replacement arrived. A young man, a student from the Technion, a bit fat, very nervous, a doubtful genius who decided to try the new maths on us. Right away I felt that what little I knew was fading fest because of him.

At first we tried to annoy him, at least until he came to know our names. I dubbed him Baby Face and everybody called him that because he really was a baby face, he hardly shaved at all. But he soon made a record of names and he used to put down marks all the time. We weren’t much impressed by this record, because
usually the teachers themselves get tired of this stupid system long before they broke us. But for some reason he picked on me from the first moment. For almost every second lesson he called me up to the blackboard, and when I didn’t know the answers he kept me there and went on being cruel to me. I wasn’t particularly bothered, I have no great pretensions in maths, but suddenly he began being rude to me as well. He took my name right at the start but he didn’t seem to know my surname and he certainly didn’t realize that my mother taught history in the senior classes of the same school. Not that I expect any special treatment but I just like it to be known. Just that it be known. But he was determined not to grasp it, although I tried various hints at it.

Only towards the end of the year, when we were really at war with each other, when I said to him in front of the whole class “It’s a pity you weren’t killed instead of the last teacher” and he went running to the headmaster, only then did he grasp the fact, and then it was too late. Both for him, and for me.

Where did I not wander in my quiet persistent search for him. One morning I even went to the Bureau of Missing Army Personnel. It was a bright morning, a spring-like winter’s day. Something about the garage was getting on my nerves. All those Arab workers sitting under the shade for their breakfast with their flat loaves of bread, joking, singing to the Arab music from the car radios. And in the morning paper I found an announcement about the bureau, how it functioned, the means at its disposal, its achievements. And before long I was there, sitting in the waiting room beside a silent old couple. I thought, it’ll take only a few minutes, to give his name, just to try.

This was after all the great confusion, the return of the prisoners, the notorious scandals. Lessons had been learned and a whole new machinery set up. Three large offices in a secluded suburb of Tel Aviv. Most of the clerks were officers. There was a first-aid room with a doctor and nurses. There were telephones on the desks and outside on the square there were at least a dozen army vehicles. I hadn’t waited long when an officer led me into a room that was furnished not like an office but like a room in a
private house. Behind the desk sat a very attractive woman, a charming major. Beside her sat a young lieutenant. The entire team listened attentively to my story.

And my story was a little odd.

Of course, I couldn’t tell them that I was looking for my wife’s lover. I said, “A friend.”

“A friend?” They were a bit surprised, but it was as if it made it easier for them. “Just a friend?”

“A friend. A good friend.” They didn’t ask me what the hell I was doing looking for a friend here. By what right. The second lieutenant took out a fresh form and handed it to the major, there were already a number of forms there ready for use. Efficiency and sympathy and much patience.

I gave his name and address, told them how he’d come to Israel a few months ago, I mentioned the problem of the legacy and the grandmother lying in a coma in the hospital. They wrote down every word. But only ten lines were filled by the round, feminine handwriting. What more could I tell them, I had no photograph, I didn’t know his army number, nor his passport number, nor his father’s name, and of course I had no idea to which unit he’d been sent. I said again, “Perhaps he didn’t get to the front, perhaps he wasn’t even called up. It was us, actually, who sent him to the army. But since the second day of the war he’s disappeared. Can it be coincidence? Perhaps I’m wasting your time.”

“Oh no,” they protested. “We must investigate.”

The young officer was sent away with the details to the computer building, and the other two took out a special form for recording physical details and characteristics. Colour of hair, height, weight, colour of eyes, distinguishing marks. I began to describe him. Of course I’d never seen him naked. I was only a friend. I said something about his smile, his gestures, his manner of speech.