The Tunnel, page 25
“Her remains, her ashes,” the nurse says.
“All the ashes?” Luria picks up the urn, to estimate its weight.
“I still don’t understand,” says Shlomit, annoyed, “why the executor who decided to cremate the body didn’t take her ashes with him to Paris.”
“He said that if she had decided to move to Israel, it wasn’t fair to take her away, despite the dementia.”
“And to cremate her without asking her opinion is fair? Is it even allowed? Is it Jewish?”
“Don’t ask me what’s allowed and not allowed for Jews,” says the nurse evenly. “Recently they started cremating here and not just burying. Of course, it depends who. Somebody once told me it says in the Bible that the bodies of King Saul and his sons were burned, and if so, why not cremate other Jews?”
“Israelites,” Luria corrects her.
“Whatever you say.”
Luria puts the urn under his arm and hands the flute to his sister. Okay, we’ll take care of it, but are you sure we don’t need some authorization, so nobody will say we stole a dead woman’s ashes? No, no need for any authorization or signature.
In front of her house, before Shlomit parts ways from her brother, Luria suggests he look after the flute and she take care of the urn. But his sister’s answer is firm and clear-cut: “No, my dear, if we had driven in my car, I might have taken the urn, but because the ashes are in your car, you decide whether to keep them or scatter them in a respectful place. And don’t you dare throw them in the rubbish or some empty space. Maybe think about the sea, or the desert. Somewhere a little symbolic, she deserves it. But discuss it with Dina, she’ll guide you correctly, as always.”
the tunnel plan
Dina’s answer is clear. When she returns from the clinic, disheartened by changes made in her absence, she decides the urn of ashes will stay in the car, to avoid the risk that little Noam, during Luria’s afternoon nap, will try to discover what’s in it. Who’s going to clean up the ashes all over the apartment? On the other hand, the flute can go inside, and if no one can get a decent sound out of it, we’ll hang it on the balcony, and the wind from the sea will play a tune in memory of the deceased.
Meanwhile, there is another matter beyond the urn and the flute. Next week, the committee will meet to discuss the plan for the army road, which therefore needs to be completed this week. As Maimoni summarizes on the phone: “Because the State of Israel has never asked me to plan a tunnel, neither short nor long, this tunnel will be your contribution, dear Zvi, to yet another human predicament arising from two nations living in the same homeland. It’s fine with me if you prefer to run the program on your laptop, because friendly computers converse more candidly than people do, so while you’re working on the tunnel—depth, length, and height, itemized cost breakdown for materials and equipment—my computer will put it into the overall plan for the road. Therefore, we meet again tomorrow night in our office, and you’ll see that in your honour I replaced the cracked glass on the picture of our beloved Ben-Zvi. And one more little thing: please don’t argue anymore with the night watchman. He’s a former official who was fired for embezzlement, a bitter person, and last night he wrote down your licence plate number, and today he filed a complaint with the director general, who learned your identity from the police. When I was asked if I knew anything about your visits to the office at night, I didn’t want to say you were involved with planning the secret army road, but I admitted that you came to the office, where we reminisced about my father, your former legal adviser. And because the director general was impressed by a speech you delivered, he said: ‘If it’s that pensioner wandering here at night, don’t bother him, he’s not a man who breaks rules.’”
The next day at dusk, Luria drives to the offices of Israel Roads, and though he’s driven this route thousands of times, he keeps his promise to his wife and turns on the GPS, to follow the fluent instructions of a female voice. The office is open and lit, and Maimoni has brought in an extra desk for his unpaid assistant, and he connects his desktop to Luria’s laptop, so the two computers can have an intelligent dialogue.
Luria, after carefully studying both the photograph and the diagram of the hill, draws the opening of its future tunnel, outlining its height and width, then slowly digs it out with the cursor in bright purple, joining it to the army road that appears in minute detail on Maimoni’s screen. The pensioner praises the road. Very nice, Asael, exemplary professional work. But the time has come for the previous generation to prove itself, first by planning the supports and anchor bolts, then the interior width and coating of the walls, and the angles of vaults and arches that will prevent internal collapse. And, of course, several mandatory air vents, and the source of light in the tunnel, to be provided not by the Israel Electricity Corporation but from solar panels in the desert sun, which according to Hanadi’s camera has a twin in the Ramon Crater.
Maimoni rises from his chair, stands behind Luria, looks with interest at his work, then glances at his watch and says: “I hope, Zvi, that you won’t be angry if I leave you now, because the twins are getting back from a school trip to Jerusalem and my wife is abroad, so I have to pick them up.”
“How old are your twins? They must be older than the pictures you have here.”
“For sure, the world doesn’t stop, they’re ten now. I really should bring a more recent picture.”
“How come they schlep them to Jerusalem so young? It’s not dangerous there?”
“They don’t take them to the Temple Mount, only Mount Herzl and Yad Vashem, and for dessert, the Biblical Zoo. That’s the itinerary. God knows who in the Education Ministry plans such trips, but there it is. So I hope you won’t mind working here alone, and when you’ve finished, turn off the lights and lock the door. Tomorrow I’ll submit the plan to the committee we’ll be facing next week.”
“We’ll be facing? You want to drag me there too?”
“Why not? Even if you don’t say a word, your presence, as a former division head, is a strong endorsement of the tunnel.”
“Okay, then,” says Luria with a smile of satisfaction. “Drive carefully.”
Here he is again, working in his office at night, the indispensable pensioner. After he estimates the time needed to dig the tunnel, and decides that the excavator with the rotating cutting head is perfect for this terrain, he goes to the internet to learn more about the Nabateans, the better to protect their heritage. Clearly they offer proof that in antiquity the Negev was not an accursed wilderness. As he jots down a few ideas on Maimoni’s notepaper, his old office phone sounds a forgotten ring.
Luria hesitates. Both Dina and Maimoni have the numbers of his two mobiles, so it makes no sense they would call an ancient office phone. It must be the night watchman, who has recognized his car in the car park. But the ring is persistent, even desperate, and when he picks up the receiver a soft voice whimpers: “Asael? Are you there?”
“Hanadi?” Luria quickly fixes on the young resident-without-identity. “Hanadi?” he persists, eager to breach the sudden silence on the line. “Is that you? Is it? Maimoni’s not here, I’m alone, you remember me? I’m the other engineer, the older one. I’m here alone, Maimoni’s gone, you can try his mobile, you have his number? Can you hear me? Hanadi? You remember me, Hanadi?”
More silence. But from years of experience with this phone, Luria can tell that the line isn’t dead. If he were younger, he’d even hear the sounds of her silence. But his compassion for the flustered young woman won’t let him hang up, and again he says, “I’m here, I can hear you, but if it’s urgent, Hanadi, why not catch him on his mobile?”
His insistence on calling her, over and over, by the Palestinian name she divulged in a moment of weakness might be what persuades her to break her silence, and reply in a soft, delicate voice: “Yes, Mr Luria, of course I remember you, and I’m sorry I called the office, Maimoni doesn’t like it if I call his mobile when he’s with the kids, but never mind, it’s not urgent, I’ll find him. Meanwhile, if I may, Mr Luria, I would like to ask, how is your wife? Maimoni told me she was very, very ill, and I worried about her, even though I had no chance of meeting her.”
Now Luria understands how deep the bond has become between the Palestinian woman and the engineer who took her under his wing. He is upset, but responds warmly. “Thank you, Hanadi, thank you for caring, my wife is at home now and went back yesterday to her clinic, because she’s a doctor, I suppose Maimoni told you that too, she’s a paediatrician, which is how she caught some sort of virulent bacteria from a boy who happened to come from you—I mean the Palestinian Authority.”
“Of course, of course,” says Hanadi excitedly, “I know she’s a doctor, and in my family, we spent so much time with doctors when my mother was ill, we never thought that doctors could be patients, but now I think that if I were a doctor and also a patient, I would be able to understand my illness better and explain this illness better to sick people and other doctors—”
“But how are you, Hanadi?” he interrupts the girl whose beauty he remembers well. “Would you believe I just finished the plans for the tunnel in your hill so your father can keep hiding there.”
“It’s not a waste of your time, Mr Luria?” she asks with a little laugh, an Arab lilt in her gentle voice. “Abba will eventually give himself up, and us too. Hiding on the hill can’t be a permanent arrangement.”
Luria does not want to hear that his work will go down the drain, so he asks again: “Meanwhile, Hanadi, what’s happening with you? Maimoni says you’re studying drama at the Kibbutz Seminar, you’re doing some actual acting?”
“I’m acting a little all the time,” she laughs, “but you, Mr Luria, insist on calling me Hanadi, and that’s a name from the past, which I never should have told you, because now I am always Ayala.”
“In any case, what is Hanadi? What does it mean? You told me a purple flower, but Maimoni told me there’s another meaning.”
“I didn’t want to scare you. The meaning is a sword, not a purple flower.”
the policewoman
The night watchman waits in the car park, not to reprimand Luria but to apologize for not recognizing him and for giving his licence plate number to the police. “Don’t apologize,” says Luria, “I don’t understand my outbursts either. I was a senior employee here for many years, but there’s no reason you should recognize me in the dark. Even in daylight, I myself have a hard time recognizing people. You, for example, who are you?” “I am Haimon, Yosef Haimon from the finance department, and I knew your secretary, who brought me your expense accounts for approval.” “Haimon?” says Luria. “I don’t have the slightest memory of your name, but don’t be offended, you are not alone. More important people than you have been forgotten. How did you go from finance department official to night watchman?” “They found financial irregularities, but couldn’t tell if it was really embezzlement, so they decided not to go to the police but just send me to the car park.”
A few raindrops end the conversation. Luria knows that after the tunnel plans are finished, he’ll have no need to come back at night, yet he gives the watchman a hearty handshake. And however ridiculous and humiliating it may be to use GPS to go home by a route he has taken thousands of times, he is faithful to the promise he made to his wife, and softly, slightly embarrassed, he gives the glowing screen his home address. After a sharp chirp confirming the request, the navigation system suggests a different way home, a long and complicated one.
Did something go wrong with the satellite hovering in the sky? Or did it discover something new? He finds the original route, and on the lighted map not one but two icons indicate an accident, surrounded by policemen’s caps. Clearly a serious accident, with many vehicles crowded on the two-lane road and nowhere to reverse.
But even a smart satellite, directing traffic with great finesse, doesn’t know what Luria knows from years of experience: that it’s possible to bypass the accident site on a half-decent dirt road that crosses an old orchard. Even the dementia, if it tries hard, can remember the scent of the flowering citrus. And the springtime that fills the empty spaces of his mind overrides the GPS and lures Luria to the original route, to the epicentre of the accident, certain that he can avoid it via the orchard. Ambulance and police sirens echo up ahead, and flashing reds blend with blues and yellows, and because the column of cars crawls slower and slower, Luria edges to the right, ready to cross the yellow line of the shoulder, on the assumption that the orchard will soon appear.
But some of the drivers crawling bumper-to-bumper are irked by an elderly white-haired driver in a red car, who is trying to break the rules from the right. Since they have no way of knowing that this is an experienced road engineer, who doesn’t want to cut in but merely to escape to a road they don’t know exists, they protest with angry hooting, and some also get onto the shoulder either to follow him or else to block his path. Either way, progress is sluggish, and finally the row of cars grinds to a halt, and from a distance it’s clear that a bad accident has indeed occurred. A bulldozer fell off a huge truck and crushed two private cars, and now in the moonlight it waves its toothy shovel at the sky, like the trunk of a yellow elephant turned on its back.
Ambulances and police cars are still screaming as the cranes of two emergency tow trucks feel their way to the depths of the disaster, to the crushed people, who are either wounded or dead. Policemen and women try to impose order on the chaos and find a way to detour the traffic, and a policewoman is dispatched across the yellow line to intercept anyone who at such a terrible moment is trying to dodge the law. In the spotlights circling the policewoman, who is wearing neither cap nor helmet, are shadows of the orchard Luria is determined to reach. Is this young woman, waving a big torch, her hair cascading to her shoulders, a real policewoman with a gun and handcuffs in her belt, or is she just a young cadet, or an actress? As his brain burns with desire for the flowering citrus, Luria pictures her as none other than Hanadi, playing the part of a Jewish policewoman for a class at the Kibbutz Seminar, and the young Palestinian beckons him to hurry to her, to escape and go quickly to his waiting wife, and he eagerly agrees and accelerates and can’t stop before the car knocks Hanadi down.
Angry cops rush to assist their comrade. They get her back on her feet and order Luria to go to the edge of the ditch bordering the road. And just as he realizes how close he now is to the dirt road that crosses the orchard, they ask that he turn off the engine and remove the ignition key and produce his documents. One of the cops closely examines his identity card, driver’s licence, car registration papers, and insurance, and another officer peppers him with questions. What kind of driving is this? Isn’t one accident enough for you? Why are you driving like a madman and on the shoulder, and running over a policewoman on duty?
And the policewoman, her shirt torn and bare arm freshly scratched, accepts a water bottle from a police sergeant, and when she has finished drinking, quietly but without anger she scolds the driver who injured her. “Is that how you drive, sir? I motion for you to stop and go back to your lane, and you speed up and try to run me over?” He is shocked by the blame he had not imagined possible. “Why would I run you over? On the contrary, I thought you were telling me to hurry to you.” “To me? Hurry to me for what?” For what? He is surprised by the question, which has such an obvious answer: to get to the orchard that will take him out of the traffic jam. “Let’s say that’s what happened,” she answers patiently, “then why did you accelerate towards me?” “I didn’t think you were a policewoman, in the dark you didn’t look like a policewoman, you don’t have a hat or a helmet, and your hair is down to your shoulders, I thought you were a different woman calling out to me.” “A different woman?” “Exactly, a different woman.” “What woman would do that in the middle of a terrible accident, and why? What woman were you thinking about?”
What woman was I thinking about? He mumbles, not wishing to hand Hanadi over to the police. Yes, who could it be? Luria puts the question to himself, then starts to explain that it’s only the illusion of a woman. And please understand, he says, now trying to wriggle out with a friendly confession, this is the problem, I’ve been experiencing dementia of sorts for a while, not serious, but real.
frontier justice
Upon hearing the word “dementia” from the lips of the offender, a wise police lieutenant takes a moment, amidst the maelstrom of a terrible accident, to think about the future, the uphill battle against carnage on the roads, despite the fact that only a shirt was torn, the scratches on the policewoman’s arm will soon heal, and she bears no grudge against the man who knocked her over. Now, while other police officers are working to clear a path for hundreds of cars in the traffic jam, the lieutenant has a chance to turn his vehicle into a makeshift courtroom and revoke the licence of the driver who confessed to dementia.
He leads Luria to the police car and offers him water from the same bottle the policewoman drank from. But Luria, irate and bitter, doesn’t want water, he only wants to tell his wife not to worry. Hands trembling, he takes the two phones from his pockets and speed-dials his home from one of them, but because Dina has been talking endlessly to her sister in his absence, he doesn’t wait for the landline to clear, but uses his second phone to dial her mobile and leave a voice message: I had a tiny accident, Dina, I’m fine and the car is fine, but a policewoman was hurt accidentally, it’s no big deal, just a little scratch, she’s here with me smiling, she has already forgotten the scratch. But the main thing, which had nothing to do with me, there was a terrible accident on Highway 461, west of the Savion junction, you’ll see it on TV, there’s police all around, and emergency teams and ambulances for the wounded, not just wounded but dead, so because of all this tumult, but it’s not in any way connected, they decided to detain me for a little investigation, maybe because this is a real policewoman, not just a civilian or imposter, but the police are nice, and I’m in good hands, so not to worry if I’m late, I’ll get there eventually.
