The Same Sea (4 page)

Back in her bedroom alone she unzips her skirt, in front of the mirror
she strips. She looks at her body: its wild, it's new, it turns men on
and it turns her on too. This body wants sex and it wants it
now, this body wants Rico, it does, but how: Rico's not here.
She's got the itch, her body's in charge and she can't resist. Naked
she throws herself down on her bed, into her pillow she buries
her head then rolls herself over as quick as she can and hugs that pillow
as though its her man. She wants to stop but her body says no, it's started
now and it's got to go. She ruffles and tickles his body fur so he'll have
gooseflesh just like her. She buries her face between his thighs and her tongue
plies wildly as her body sighs and she drips with juices like rare perfume
as her body is pierced by a tender tune. Their hands intertwine and she stifles
a groan. He is inside her but she's alone. When it's done, she plants six
little kisses in the soft of her arm for the man she misses, and then as she falls
asleep on her bed she counts to herself inside her head how much cash she has
stashed away and how can she raise the 4k to make a movie out of the script
that she wrote about the love of Nirit. Cross your heart: is Nirit you?
That's a question Dita's not got an answer to.

The forecast, that had promised a chance of snow on high ground,
had not kept its promise. But Nadia, who had promised nothing, appeared
at his door one Saturday morning, in a light-colored frock
with a red scarf round her neck, somewhere between a girl and a woman. Did I
surprise you? Are you free? (Am I free? Oh, painfully free. His heart dissolved
in bashful glee. Nadia. Has come. To visit. Me.)
Albert was renting a room from a childless couple in old Bat Yam. They were
away for the weekend. The flat was all his. He sat Nadia down on his bed
and went to the kitchen to slice some black bread, and came back bearing
a tray with a choice of feta or honey. He paced round the room,
then returned to the kitchen, and chopped some tomatoes to make
a salad so fine and well-seasoned, as though this would convince her
that he was right. He would not let her lift a finger to help him. He made
an omelette. Put the kettle on. Like a man in his element This surprised her,
because previously whenever they went out together to a café or the cinema
Albert had seemed so hesitant and unassertive. And now it emerged
that at home he did precisely what he wanted, and what he wanted was to do
everything himself. She touched his hand with her fingertip:
thank you. Its nice here.

Coffee. Biscuits. But how do you start on love on a rainy Saturday morning
like this, in a shabby room in old Bat Yam in the mid-Sixties?
(In the headlines in the paper on the kitchen table Nasser threatened
and Eshkol warned of the risk of escalation.) The light flickered. The room
was small. Nadia sat Albert faced her. Neither of them knew how to begin.

The would-be lover was a shy young man, who had only ever dreamed
of sleeping with a woman. He dreaded yet wanted it; he wanted it
but was deterred by a faint fear of bodily embarrassments.
His would-be partner, a reserved divorcee, lived in a room on a roof,
sewed for a living, her past was somewhat conventional. She
was no hind and he was no young hart. How and with what
do you begin to love? Nadia sat. Albert stood.

Outside it was raining again, the rain getting heavier, teeming down on rows
of dull grey shutters along the empty wet street; hammering on overturned
dustbins, polishing the panes in the tight-shut windows, pouring down
on rooftops, on forests of antennae trembling in the freezing wind that beat on zinc tubs hanging on grilles of kitchen balconies. And the gutters
grunted and choked like an old man sleeping fitfully. How do you start
love now? Nadia stood. Albert sat.

Through the wall from the next-door flat came the Saturday morning
program on the radio. A musical quiz. Nadia is here but where am I?
He tried to tell her some news from the office, not to break the thread
of the conversation. But the thread was no thread. She was waiting
and he was waiting for whatever would come at the end of the thread.
What would come? And who would make it come? She was embarrassed.
So was he. He kept on and on trying to explain something in economics.
Instead of words like credit side, debit side, Nadia heard, My sister,
my bride. And when he spoke of bulls and bears she translated, You have
doves' eyes. While he was talking she reached for a cushion, and Albert
trembled because on the way the warmth of her breast touched his back.

It's up to me to overcome his fear. What would a really experienced woman
do now in my place? She cut in: apparently, all of a sudden, she had a speck of dust in her eye. Or a fly. He bent over to get a good look. Now his face was close to her brow, she could clasp his temples with her hands, and at last lower his lips for a pleasing, teasing first kiss.

Two weeks later, in her room on the roof between two rainshowers, he asked
for her hand. He did not say, Be my wife, but instead: If you'll marry me
then I'll marry you. Because it was Nadia's second marriage they had a small,
intimate party, at her brother and sister-in-law's home, with a handful
of relatives and a few friends, and the elderly couple in whose flat
Albert lodged. After the ceremony and the party they took a taxi
to the Sharon Hotel. Albert undid the straining hooks one by one
down the back of her wedding dress. Then the bride turned out the light
and they both undressed modestly, in total darkness, on opposite sides
of the bed. They groped their way toward each other. She sensed
she would have to teach him: after all I presumably know
better than he does. It turned out however that shy Albert could teach her
something she neither knew nor imagined: the broad, flowing surge of joy
of one who was shy as long as the light was on but in the pitch dark
was insatiable. In the dark he entered into his own element.
No butterflies now and no tortoise at all, but like a hart panting for water
or a swallow for its nest. His chest to her back, and belly to belly, horse
and his rider and into every breach.

The fictional Narrator puts the cap back on his pen and pushes away the writing pad. He is tired. And his back aches. He asks himself how on earth he came to write such a story. Bulgarian, Bat Yam, written in verse and even, here and there, in rhyme. Now that his children have grown up and he has known the joy of grandchildren, and he has produced several books and traveled and lectured and been photographed, why should he suddenly return to versification? As in the bad old days of his youth when he used to run away at night to be all alone in the reading room on the edge of the kibbutz where he would cover page after page with jackals' howls. An acne-scarred, yellow-haired, angular boy forever swallowing insults, with his high-falutin talk arousing some ridicule and some pity, hanging around the girls' quarters, hoping that Gila or Tsila might want him to read them a poem he had just written. Naively imagining that a woman is acquired by a sermon or a verse. And indeed he sometimes managed to stir something inside those girls that later, in the night, accompanied them when they went to the woods to give and receive love, not with him but with burly haymakers who reaped with joy what he had sown with his words almost in tears. He is almost sixty, this Narrator, and he might sum it up roughly as follows: there is love and there is love. In the end everyone is left alone: those hairy haymakers, and Tsila, and Gila, and Bettine, and Albert, and even the Narrator in question. And he who is climbing mountains in Tibet and she who embroidered in the quiet of her bedroom. We go and we come, we see and we want until it is time to shut up and leave. And then silence. Born in Jerusalem lives in Arad looked around him and wanted this and that. Since he was a child he has heard, impatiently, time and again from Auntie Sonya, a woman who suffers, that we should be happy with what we have. We should always count our blessings. Now he finds himself at last quite close to this way of thinking. Whatever is here, the moon and the breeze, the glass of wine, the pen, words, a fan, the desk lamp, Schubert in the background, and the desk itself: a carpenter who died nine years ago worked hard to make you this desk so that you would remember that you didn't start from nothing. From starlight down to olives, or soap, from a thread to a shoelace, from a sheet to the autumn. It wouldn't be a bad thing to leave behind in return a few lines worthy of the name. All this is diminishing. Disintegrating. Fading. What has been is being gradually wrapped in pallor. Nadia and Rico, Dita, Albert, Stavros Evangelides the Greek who brought up the dead and then died himself. The Tibetan mountains will last for a while, as will the nights, and the sea. All the rivers flow into the sea, and the sea is silence silence silence. It's ten o'clock. Dogs are barking. Take up your pen and return to Bat Yam.

Dita is at the door. On her slender back a mountain of a backpack
with another bundle tied to it, clutching some plastic bags
and a handbag: she is seeking refuge, for a couple of days,
a week at most, if it's not an imposition. She's ended up with no flat
and no money, all her savings and everything gone; she found
some kind of producer, got taken for a ride. But why are you standing
in the doorway? You'll fall over. Come inside. Then you can
tell me all about it. We'll have a think. We'll get you out of this mess.

She gulped down a soft drink. Undressed. Took a shower. For a moment she embarrassed him when she emerged wrapped in a towel from mid-breast
to thigh. She stood in front of him
in the kitchen and told him in detail how she had got stung.
And her parents were abroad and their flat was let, she had simply nowhere
to turn. It was no good his staring down at the floor:
the sight of her naked feet
sets his heart at odds with his body.

Rico's room is yours from now on. It's empty
anyway. Here is the bedding. That's the air-conditioning. His wardrobe isn't
too tidy, but there's some room. I'll bring you a cold drink in a minute.
Lie down. Get some rest. We'll talk later. If you need me for anything
just say Albert and I'll be right there. Don't be shy. Or simply come
to my office. It's through there. I'll just be sitting finishing off some accounts.
You're no trouble at all. On the contrary: for some time now—
He stopped himself. Under the towel her hips made a whispering sound
and he was blushing as though he had been caught red-handed.

A widowed father with an honest name
lies wide awake in the night consumed with shame:
a sleeping woman the cause of his pain.

She's there alone—his eyes are open wide—
next door she's lying naked, on her side.
So young. A child. My daughter, my bride!

He switches on the bedside light and blinks
at his son and wife on the sideboard. He thinks
for a while. Then pads to the kitchen and drinks.

He sits down at his desk and begins to dream
heavy thoughts: his shadow stares back from the screen.
What a difficult summer, he types, this has been.

From the garden outside where nothing has stirred
in the light-groping darkness, a single bird:
narimi narimi.
Yes, I heard.

Restless he stands: how he longs to spread
a blanket on her, and stroke her head.
He stifles these feelings, and goes back to bed.

He turns and tosses. Of sleep there's no sign.
He turns on the light and checks the time:
it's five o'clock here—so in Tibet it's nine.

Its nine in the morning now in Bhutan. Without the Dutchmen. On a bench
in a wood the youth sits wrapped in a blanket, absorbing
the mountain shadows among the mountains. A tranquil silence
envelops the view. How empty and strange the light here flows, light
longing for shade. Light shading itself. Wind in the grass. A deserted valley.
True peace shall surely come.

remembers him: the last of the boys.
His brow. His eyes. The groan as he came.
The touch of his arm and the spring of his seed. When the others had left
he came back and kissed the soles of her feet.

After four troubled nights he went back to Bostros Street for a second visit
to the old Greek who called forth the dead. True, on his previous visit
all that his money had bought him was two glasses of water, one lukewarm
and the other cool and fresh. And a picture of a crucified Christ-child
looking as though the Crucifixion and the Resurrection had preceded
the raising of Lazarus and the other miracles. As he left he had seen a woman
going down the street who had looked a little like her from behind. This time
he would not give up. He would follow her to the ends of

Mr. Stavros Evangelides, the eighty-year-old sorcerer, his bald head patterned
with brown stains, moles and sparse grey bristles, his Phoenician nose,
big and protruding, but his teeth were young, and his joyful, guileless
eyes, which seem to see only good, looked down at the visitor
from a sepia photograph in a tortoiseshell frame. In his place was a skinny
crow-like old woman with cracked leathery skin and an evil mouth. She
motioned him to sit, claimed her fee, counted the cash, went out, returned,
and handed him a glass containing a viscous liquid with a yellow taste.
While he drank she bent over him. Sweet and terrible the smell of her flesh
hit him, a smell of decay. She waited. Motionless. Her dress was embroidered.
Once or twice her beak opened wide, parched with thirst, closed then opened
a crack.
Narimi,
she cried harshly and flew away. In his bosom
one black feather remained.

Dubi Dombrov Productions Ltd. woke up at ten o'clock, sweaty and
thick-headed. He went for a piss, his eyelids still gummed together, then
turned on the tap and washed in cold water. He thought about shaving.
Couldn't be bothered. Put on a rancid shirt from yesterday, and clumsily
groped his way to the kitchen to make some coffee. When he went
to the rack for a clean cup a spider ran away. Why? What's the matter?
What have I done? I'd never harm you, so why are you running away from me?
Barefoot, tired, he sat down to wait for the water to boil and remembered
Nirit's Love,
that script by Dita Inbar. And the money. True, it wasn't exactly
honest what I did, but she had only herself to blame, and why did she have to
show me, right to my face, that she found me disgusting, like some lower kind
of scum? Surely even a repulsive man has a right to be attracted to
a woman, has a right to finer feelings which a woman can choose to
ignore, but why must she rub salt in the wound? Why did she have to
show me how disgusted she was? And just when I was thinking that she
was different from all the rest, that she had a higher tolerance.
My fatal mistake was that like an idiot apparently I identified her
with her screenplay, where this Nirit takes pity on a real dog of a man. As for
the money, no one has ever given anything back to me. Everyone has always
taken from me. All I've ever had back has been insults.