The Tunnel, page 5
A waiter carrying a big tray urges Luria to try the canapés, which artfully combine clashing flavours, sweet and spicy, and competing textures, crispy and soft. Luria tries one canapé while already reaching for another, and the smiling waiter suggests a third one, a pity not to try that too, and Luria complies, and as it crumbles in his mouth he moans with pleasure and wipes his lips with a napkin and says, “Yes, they are marvellous, don’t tempt me any further, because others are hungry too,” but the waiter doesn’t relent and points to an hors d’oeuvre of red meat he must sample, and Luria sighs and eats it, protesting, “How come you’re spoiling me like this?” And only now does the waiter in a black waistcoat and bow tie reveal his identity—it’s Havilio, veteran driver of the big earthmover, a vehicle that was retired along with its operator. In honour of the good old days, Havilio recommends another treat, and Luria is happy to see the worker who years ago, under his guidance, bulldozed an entire hill of basalt between Route 85 and Route 866, and in the joy of running into the power-shovel operator turned waiter, he can even remember his first name, but resists the additional canapé, there’s a limit to snacks, more delicacies await at the table, to miss them would pain him greatly. True, agrees Havilio, and you have to leave room for the wonderful desserts with the burning sparklers.
“Dessert with sparklers?” Luria marvels. “I see Divon wants his party to be unforgettable.”
He makes his way to the table, hoping that amid the food and the diners a snippet of an engineering project may materialize, to help his spirit do battle with his dwindling brain, but he is intercepted by the incoming director general of the Roads Authority. The young man, promoted following a purge of corrupt managers, asks Luria to honour the retiree with a few words.
“A speech?”
But keep it short, as there will be many speeches. The two African engineers who worked with him in Nairobi will deliver a first-hand report, illustrated with slides, about the ideas and plans that the Israeli brought to their country. A representative of the Foreign Ministry is coming from Jerusalem to speak about the importance of Israeli aid for countries in distress. And he, the incoming director general, will also say a few words. And Divon will respond to his well-wishers. But he dropped a hint that it’s very important to him for someone from the inside, namely, the former director of the Northern Division, to reminisce about major initiatives that were realized before he left for Africa. After all, Divon insisted that his party be held here, at the institution where he spent most of his career.
But Luria, who already figured he’d be asked to speak, remains hesitant.
“True, the two of us worked as a team, and we had a few successful projects in the North where Tzahi Divon was the prime mover, and therefore I was not only disappointed but angry that after I retired he refused to take my place, and quit instead.”
“Disappointed, okay, but why angry?”
“Why?” Luria laughs and peeks at his palm, in case the new director’s name is miraculously inscribed there too. “I trained him to be my successor, and trusted him to take the lead after I retired, and then, for a fat salary, he defected to Africa and left the department in confusion, as if, I don’t know, some dullness or even dementia had come over it.”
But since this young man is the one who approved Divon’s request to hold a farewell party at the institution he left five years ago, he tries to defend him. The departure for Africa was not a matter of greed, he explains, but because of his mentally disabled son, to provide him with a secure future after his parents’ death.
“Wait a second,” interjects Luria, “do you by any chance know the mother’s first name?” He suddenly can’t recall it.
Her first name? The new director met her this evening for the first time, but if Luria wants to include first names of family members in his remarks, he’ll find out for him.
“No, no, no, don’t ask anybody. If I need her name or other names, they’ll surface on their own, provided I drench my atrophy with black coffee, so it won’t trip me up.”
“Your what?”
“Forget it, just a word that came to me.”
Meanwhile, the honoree and his entourage approach. And as Tzahi Divon hugs his former boss, his wife also walks over, and pulls Luria away, facing him silently, unsmiling, studying him sternly as if to determine if he notices any change in her. Yes, she is thinner, the “tragic woman”, her wild hair is stylishly short now, with a splash of red, her wrinkles are smoothed, and the embroidered blue suit flatters her figure. Her husband’s ample salary, and the servants surrounding her in Africa, have apparently dispelled her gloom. Luria wonders if her first name will spring from her tiny, reptilian eyes, as the two adult sons introduce themselves to the engineer who mentored their father many years ago at the Roads Authority. And following his brothers, in a wheelchair, attended by an elderly, bearded African, is the third son, tall and bent, with the face of a fallen angel, and the young man suddenly seizes Luria’s hand and lifts it, as if intending to kiss or bite it, and as Luria nervously withdraws his hand, the lights go down and a bluish darkness envelops the hall.
a short film
The Africans did not bring slides from Kenya, but rather a film, twenty-five minutes long. Motorways, bridges, and tunnels appear on the screen, also a small junction, isolated and inexplicable, that pops up in a barren desert, and Luria’s professional eye notices similarities to a junction he and Divon designed for the Upper Galilee, but whose budget was not approved. It’s a film clearly made in haste, lacking sound or subtitles, and even Divon himself, enthusiastically posing beside a bridge or tunnel, is struck dumb in mid-enthusiasm. To fill in the blanks, one of the African engineers stands beside the screen, and in precise English provides explanations and expresses appreciation for the chief planner and leader, who invited him and his friends to his farewell party in Israel.
At the end of the screening the lights remain dimmed in the hall, as the guests are invited to feast discreetly on scrumptious desserts that arrive from all sides, adorned with colourful sparklers. Luria, sitting nervously next to the new director general, not far from the honoured family, skips the desserts and listens intently for a chance mention of the first name of the “tragic woman”—a nickname her husband once mentioned, inadvertently.
The man from the Foreign Ministry is asked to say a few words. He is young, thin, and balding, an intellectual type, unafraid to read out a page of bold reflections to an audience of strangers.
“To my shame and sorrow as an Israeli citizen, and especially as an official of the Foreign Ministry, most Israeli aid and exports in recent years to developing and failed countries in Africa and Asia involve weapons systems and military know-how. Senior officers, retiring from the army at a relatively young age, are not satisfied with the handsome pension they receive from the Defence Ministry and are driven by the desire to make a lot of money quickly. They take advantage of the vast knowledge they acquired during their army service, typically not on the battlefield but by calmly operating computers and secret electronic equipment in fortified bunkers, to hook up with shady international arms dealers, who enable corrupt dictators to tighten control of their regimes and fight ruthlessly against their enemies via the expert experience of the Israeli army.
“And so, dear friends, employees, and pensioners of the Israel Roads Authority, you know better than anyone else that in the 1950s and ’60s, a different tune was heard in our little country, and the State of Israel, poor but ethical, extended a different helping hand, civilian and not military, to young African countries, newly liberated from the yoke of colonialism. During those glorious years, it was not the art of warfare that came from Israel, but guidance in fields such as agriculture, transportation, water planning, and education, and people from the Water Authority and Public Works built roads and factories in Africa, and the Solel Boneh construction company founded an entire university in Ethiopia for the benefit of all its inhabitants.
“And so, ladies and gentlemen, I’ve come down here from Jerusalem on this rainy day not on a mission from the Centre for International Cooperation, but on a mission of my own, to take part in the retirement party of Mr Yitzhak Divon and express appreciation for this accomplished engineer, who willingly left a top position at the Roads Authority to benefit the people of Kenya with his creative knowledge of engineering. He also took his entire family on this important mission, in the hope that they would ease his loneliness in a difficult country and provide vital moral support to ensure the best results of his work.
“You see with your own eyes, ladies and gentlemen, that it is not only I who have come from afar to salute him, but also people from Kenya and its embassy in Tel Aviv are here to celebrate his retirement. Here is my wish: may it come to pass that young engineers and planners, serving at the Roads Authority or other agencies, will follow in the footsteps of Yitzhak. And although I am still a minor official at the Foreign Ministry, I promise that I will afford them all the practical and moral support I can.”
“If this boychick keeps talking this way, he’ll be a minor player at the Foreign Ministry for a long time,” whispers the young new director general to Luria as the audience applauds. Luria gets up and approaches the minor official, to congratulate him on his candour and to ask if he can have the text, faintly hoping that the first names of Divon’s family are included there, but it turns out that what’s written is only what he read.
Luria’s last resort is the new director, who in his remarks will surely mention the name of the woman who keeps staring at him. But the new director realizes that he knows little about the former employee, who left five years ago, never to return, and rather than stumble into vapid words of praise or inaccurate details, he now decides not to speak at all, and instead invites Luria to congratulate the heir apparent who declined his legacy.
Meanwhile, the host has instructed the waiters to bring in another round of sparklers with the coffee and tea, and in order to maintain the dazzling ambience, the lights remain low in the hall, where Luria’s elderly friends sit half asleep, and these dim silhouettes of forgotten colleagues inspire him not to deliver a banal and superficial speech, but to dare to say something personal about a talented engineer who defected to a distant continent before reaching retirement age.
First Luria looks at the palm of his hand to make sure that the first name, faded by now, is correct, and, maintaining the hope that the wife’s name will bubble up from the well of forgetfulness, he begins speaking to his friends.
the speech
Luria has delivered many a speech in this hall, or more precisely, routine salutations, usually at the launch of joint projects with government ministries, the Jewish National Fund, the settlement department of the World Zionist Organization, the traffic police, the road safety organization Or Yarok, and of course municipalities, mainly Arab and Druze towns in the North that benefitted, if only rarely, from new roads, or at least repairs. But sometimes Luria had been asked to say a few words of farewell upon the retirement of subordinates, either lower-level or senior employees. He would draft these in advance, to be polished by his wife, who would add, often without knowing the retiree, a few elegant turns of phrase to inject warmth and feeling into her husband’s dry prose. Once, to mark the expansion of a complex motorway junction, in partnership with the traffic police, she embellished her husband’s remarks with a few lines from the renowned poet Avraham Shlonsky, whom Luria had never heard of.
But this evening Luria has nothing on paper, no heartwarming poetry. He had a hunch that if he came to the party he’d have to speak, but it didn’t occur to him to come equipped with the name of Divon’s wife.
And now, for the first time, he will speak knowing that the dementia diagnosed by the neurologist is a permanent component of his personality. He must navigate carefully between the new reality he’s stuck with and his original, sane existence. In the darkened room, with dessert sparklers flickering and coffee cups softly clinking, Luria decides to position himself somewhere between the family and the audience:
“Dear Tzahi, my loyal and able deputy for ten years in the Northern Division, the natural candidate to replace me as director, I wish to congratulate you, and also your wife, a devoted and loyal partner, and your three children, whose names I have not forgotten, because I never knew them to begin with. And you, dear friends, may be asking yourselves: how can it be that a manager didn’t know or want to know the names of the children of a person he worked so closely with for many years, not any person, but his close deputy, destined to take his place when the time came? And my explanation may seem strange or repellent to the young people among you, but it is a valid reason, and I believe a basis for good working relations everywhere, especially in public institutions such as ours. Dear friends, I, today, am seventy-plus, but from the time I began working here as a young road engineer, I decided to draw clear boundaries in my relationships with other employees, those I worked for and especially those who worked for me. I decided to do all I could to avoid mixing personal, family, or political matters with work. And to do so, of course, while preserving openness and transparency in all things professional. Let’s be honest—there’s always a risk that intimate relationships among employees, or political opinions both left and right, or disputes between religious and secular, will interfere with clearheaded professional thinking, and lead to failures on the job, and even encourage corruption, such as fixed bids and nepotism. Millions of shekels, if not billions, flow through the Roads Authority, in numerous projects. So despite the close working connection between me and Tzahi Divon, in the office or during field trips we did not discuss personal or family matters, but only motorways and junctions, and the best angles for entering and exiting intersections, and the proper placement of road lighting, and the precise location of traffic signals. And we consulted with each other about how to get around budgetary restrictions, in a legal and ethical manner of course, to improve roads in remote places. And because my relationship with Tzahi Divon was purely professional, never involving personal matters, good or bad, do not be surprised, ladies and gentlemen, that it never occurred to me to invite him to the brit of my first grandson, nor did he invite me to his second son’s bar mitzvah, and we scrupulously avoided talking about family problems, or the illnesses of spouses, children, or relatives that sometimes kept us away from the office. Between me and him, and all my other subordinates, there was an atmosphere of trust, an assumption that whoever didn’t come to work was absent for a good reason, and there was no need to justify it with a doctor’s note. In all the years we worked together, Tzahi never visited my home, not even for a brief conversation about work. Whereas I was in his house but once, after he went off to Africa, when he asked me to take to his wife, dear Mrs Divon, who had remained for a while in Israel, a few obsolete plans and photographs from the archive.”
Meanwhile, all the sparklers have fizzled out, but the person in charge of the lights refrains from turning them on, so as not to startle the speaker and his attentive audience, thus leaving the remainder of the speech in darkness.
Still Luria feels that the heart of his speech is yet to come. He peers at the Divon family, a murky block in the dusky hall, and walks a few steps towards them, hoping that Divon’s wife’s name will flare up like a final sparkler. The sound of rain, the soothing darkness, inspire Luria to address the man directly:
“Yes, Tzahi Divon, despite the personal freedom we gave each other, and absolute nonintervention in personal matters, I must admit I was angry when you announced, upon my retirement, that you had undertaken a mission to Africa instead of taking over my position. I was angry because I knew that after my retirement and your departure, a number of bold and beautiful plans we had prepared together for Route 754 would go down the drain, and there would be no one to insist on repairs and an additional lane for Route 879. I also knew that whoever was appointed to replace me would be unable to understand the ideas you and I shared regarding the junction of 96 and 989, where so many accidents had taken place. It was obvious to me that both of us leaving would bring about confusion and paralysis, and although I said nothing to you, my anger did not subside during the many years you were absent from Israel, so much so, I confess, that I hesitated to come to this impressive party you organized in your own honour.
“But, but, but—when I heard just now this young man, a brave representative of our Foreign Ministry, praising the human contribution, civilian and not military, that you and other Israelis have bestowed on poor, confused countries, and when I saw that engineers who worked with you in Kenya came from far away to demonstrate to us concrete examples of how important your work was to them, and when I understood it was not easy for your family, especially your wife, dear lady, to leave Israel and live in a distant African land, the anger I brought with me into this hall abated, even disappeared. And I am pleased, Kobi—excuse me, Tzahi-Tzahi-Tzahi—that not only did I come, but that I agreed to the request of the young, dynamic new director general, whose name I haven’t yet learned or written down, to congratulate you in my name and in the name of all the pensioners whose ranks you join today. And because I am sure that with your talent, and with the increased experience you bring from the Dark Continent, you will not remain unemployed in our little homeland, I permit myself to reach out and inform you that if you invite me, a veteran pensioner, to be your assistant or adviser in a new project, private or public, I think I would not refuse.”
