The Tunnel, page 6
And he considers stopping here, or improvising another idea, for he feels that the darkness in the hall corresponds nicely with the darkness that grips his mind. But applause and a quick hug from Tzahi Divon dictate that he yield the floor.
tell me my name and i’ll leave you alone
The lights have yet to come back on, as the master of ceremonies continues to surprise his guests. Instead of one more tedious speech, he screens another video for the well-wishers, not further evidence of his engineering feats but rather a nature film, replete with breathtaking landscapes and exotic animals, documenting a family trip to neighbouring Uganda which, at the dawn of the twentieth century, unbeknownst to the Ugandans, was proposed by bold if naïve Jews as an alternative to their ancestral homeland. It is obvious to the assembled that the newly minted pensioner is doing all he can to upgrade the party he threw for himself, to ensure it will be remembered not only as a worthy farewell, but also as atonement for his premature desertion. Accordingly, he shows the Israelis what they lost, but also what they gained, by dismissing the notion of a different homeland.
But Zvi Luria has no interest in assessing delusional profit and loss, and quietly slips away from the family to try to find among the pensioners a friend or acquaintance to drive him home to his wife. But a female hand, soft but strong, grabs the nape of his neck and pulls him to the drinks table. “Thank you for agreeing to speak,” the woman whispers intimately, “and thanks too for letting go of your anger, because Tzahi was sorry you weren’t there with us in Africa to see the scope of his important work and understand why he turned down the chance to replace you.”
“Yes,” he says, slightly aroused. “I decided to let go of stubborn and superfluous anger.”
“But the anger you abandoned landed on me.”
“On you? How?”
“Because instead of simply mentioning not just his name in your speech but mine too, you got all tangled up in formality. What’s with the ‘devoted partner’, ‘Mrs Divon’, ‘dear lady’, instead of simply my name?”
She fixes a serious look on him. And Luria asks himself whether in her remodelled appearance, the result of the good life in Africa, she still qualifies as a “tragic woman”.
With a cautious smile he tries to defend himself. Why would he need to add the first name of a woman unknown to most of the audience, having stressed in his speech that the professional success of his long partnership with her husband was based on avoidance of private and family matters?
But she is adamant: he didn’t just happen to omit her name, he did so on purpose.
“On purpose? Why?”
“To prove you had erased me from within you.”
“Why would I erase you?”
“If you have no reason, then let’s have it, Zvi Luria, say my name.”
“Say it to whom?”
“To me!”
He looks at her with fearful curiosity, hoping that the lost name will miraculously float to the surface from within her pain.
“Why tell you something you know so well?” he jokes.
“Because it’s the only way you can prove you haven’t erased my name, because, let’s say—”
“Because what?”
“Because you lusted after me.”
Luria is shaken. “If there was lust, it was nipped in the bud. I immediately blocked it.”
“But who asked you to?” she whispers in a strange tone. “Who wanted you to block it?”
Luria’s glance wanders to the family: will her husband notice that they are engaged in conversation and come and join it? He takes her arm gently and steers her towards the exit. “Not block the lust? In what sense?” he whispers.
Now she is angry. “What is sense and what is nonsense, Luria, we’ll postpone for another time. Give me back my name and I’ll leave you alone.”
Give her back her name? He is shocked. What’s going on? Did Africa add madness to the “tragedy” of the Israeli woman? How to give her back a name that’s vanished? In order to appease her, he may be forced to confess that the mild atrophy is eating away at first names, but if he confesses, will she believe him? And if she believes him, she’ll end up taking revenge for the unrequited lust and warn her husband and others not to get mixed up with an old fool looking for work.
He looks around to find someone or something to distract her, but everyone is watching the family journey to Uganda, and wow, it’s magic, she herself is on the screen at this very moment, attractive in a safari suit and pith helmet, feeding an ear of corn to an animal, maybe a deer or an antelope or some new sort of camel with a crown of golden horns.
“Look, look,” he points at the screen, “it’s you! Look! But what is that amazing animal called? You weren’t afraid to feed it?”
Before she can answer, he gently touches her hair and mumbles, “Wait, wait here a second, I’ll bring you back your name right away.” He turns around, hurries down the corridor, escapes up the stairs, and goes to the second floor. From his working years he remembers a magnificent men’s room, intended for foreign visitors or members of the board of directors. And though the second floor is dark, he needs no light to find the door, which alas is locked from the inside, probably by an elderly pensioner who also knows his way around. But he can’t wait for the door to open, so he rushes to the elevator, which takes him to the top floor, to the offices of the Northern Division, where everybody worked for him. Here too it is dark, but not dark enough to deter a person who, thanks to many years on the job, can identify every door he passes. From far off he sees a thin ribbon of light licking the last doorway, his old office. What’s this?
shelved plans
A few years prior to his retirement from the Roads Authority, Luria was asked by the Ministry of Defence to plan a bypass road in northern Samaria, to buttress the security and peace of mind of a small West Bank settlement that was accessible only by a road adjacent to a Palestinian village. He assigned the planning to Divon, and it soon became clear that owing to topographical conditions, the cost of the bypass road would exceed the cost of moving the whole settlement to a different place. So Divon went out into the field to find a way to “bypass the bypass”—in other words, not to build a new road, but to upgrade an old dirt road that, according to the archaeologist of the Roads Authority, dated from the Second Temple period. This road was also not far from the Palestinian village, but its hillside location made it less vulnerable to rock throwing or Molotov cocktails. Divon worked hard, took photographs, drew maps, calculated costs, and submitted an inventive, inexpensive plan to the Defence Ministry. But then it turned out that this old road ran over an ancient graveyard, possibly from the First Temple period, and rather than fight with the ultra-Orthodox burial authorities over every bone, it was decided to shelve the plan, and instead build a stone wall alongside the Arab homes nearest the access road, thereby hiding the Palestinians from the Jews, and the Jews from the Palestinians, so that each side could indulge its own identity without fearing the gaze of the other. Divon’s creative plan, with its photographs, maps, and diagrams, was buried in the archive, but Divon himself did not forget it, and a few weeks after he went to Africa, he surprised Luria, then preparing for retirement, by asking him to locate the abandoned plan and send it to him, for reasons unknown. And since Divon’s wife had been delayed in Israel to deal with renting out their house, Divon decided the safest and quickest way would be for the Roads Authority to deliver the plan to her by messenger.
In fact, as the settlement expanded and the stone wall grew so high as to erase the name of the Palestinian village from Jewish memory, there was no need to preserve, even in the archive, an audacious plan to resurrect an ancient dirt road. But to forestall gossip about a public plan falling into private hands, Luria decided that he, and not some blabbermouth messenger, should personally fulfil the final request of a man he worked with for so many years. “Just confirm your home address for me,” he had asked. “And if possible, remind me of your wife’s first name.”
And so, a few months before his retirement, Luria had removed the shelved plan from the archive, stuck it in a big envelope, and on a cloudy morning, as prearranged, he parked in front of a house he had never visited before—a large house in a rural area, older than he’d expected and, on the eve of its rental, also a bit sad and neglected. On the yellowing lawn, amid trees of withered fruit, were scattered cardboard boxes and, in a corner, a pile of old kitchen utensils and some dilapidated furniture. But near the gate with the for rent sign stood a beautiful young woman, clearly of Asian origin. Her dainty hand rested on the shoulder of a boy with the face of a tormented angel, staring from his wheelchair into the distance. This was Divon’s mentally disabled son, whom Luria had heard of. He wore a leather helmet, to cushion his head-banging on walls, but now, with no wall nearby, he intermittently clapped his hands two or three times, to fortify himself. Before Luria could say anything, the young woman surprisingly addressed him by his full name, informing him in a pleasant voice that the door was open and he was welcome to enter.
“She had a long, rough night,” the young woman explained, “and now she’s finally sleeping, but in any case, don’t leave that envelope anywhere around here. The house is so chaotic that even a big envelope could easily vanish. So please don’t be afraid to wake her up and hand it to her, that’s what she said you should do.”
The sweetness and beauty of the East Asian woman, and her precise Hebrew, with no trace of a foreign accent, stole the messenger’s heart. And since he was not eager to enter a strange and chaotic house and wake up a woman he had always taken pains to avoid, he suggested to the carer that he leave the envelope with her, to ensure it would reach its destination. “After all,” he added with a hint of regret, “I gather they are also taking you with them to Africa.”
“To Africa? Why? I’m not leaving Israel,” said the young woman. “There will be plenty of affordable servants there to deal with everything both necessary and unnecessary. No, I’m already out of the picture,” she repeated emphatically. “Today’s my last day. His grandparents are coming to pick him up, and he’ll stay with them till next week’s journey. So you have no choice, Mr Luria, you must deliver the envelope to her personally, that is what she requested, along with permission that you wake her up.”
Despite the personal invitation to invade the privacy of the sleeping wife of a colleague who worked beside him for years, he was in no hurry to enter. Impressed by the young carer’s fluent, unaccented Hebrew, he asked when she had arrived in Israel. And it turned out that the beautiful woman had not arrived, but was born here, and she proudly explained that her parents were Vietnamese boat people, refugees who were rescued at sea by an Israeli ship. No other country would take them in, and a generous Israeli prime minister offered them citizenship. But her parents, who could never stop longing for their old identity, returned years later to their home country. “And you,” asked Luria kindly, “you didn’t want to join them?” “I tried it out, if only to understand why there had been such a horrible war there.” “And did you understand?” He could not take his eyes off her. “No, I understood nothing,” she laughed, her pupils glittering like pearls, “and believe me, Mr Luria, the Vietnamese, North and South, also don’t understand why they killed each other with such cruelty. But it wasn’t because I didn’t understand that I returned to Israel, which is crazy in itself, but because my parents planned to marry me off to a relative. You tell me, Mr Luria, why should an Israeli citizen like me get married in a poor and distant country to some dubious relative if I have many suitors here?”
Such a candid revelation prompted Luria to prise out more details about the house he was soon to enter. Before the grandparents could arrive and cut off conversation, he wanted to know who these many suitors were, and giddily jested that if he weren’t an old grandpa on the verge of retirement, he might be tempted to join the crowd. The Vietnamese sabra half-seriously bowed her head in thanks, but the boy in the wheelchair, running out of patience, interrupted their chat with a loud sigh. With her small, shapely foot the carer released the brake on the chair, but Luria grabbed a wheel: wait, one small question before parting. The young beauty wisely felt that the boy should not hear the question, or the answer, even if he understood none of it, and freed the chair from Luria and gave it a nudge, to encourage the boy to wheel himself, and as the chair inched forwards, Luria quietly asked if she happened to know, or had herself heard, that Divon sometimes called his wife a “tragic woman”. “Yes,” she answered, “that’s what he calls her sometimes, even in front of strangers, but not in a mean way, only because that is how she has defined herself ever since she was forced to give birth to this child, her third, against her will.”
“Forced?”
“That’s what she told me, more than once.”
“But who forced her?” Luria is alarmed. “And why?”
“That,” she said impatiently, “is something that you, Mr Luria, need to find out for yourself. As I told you, the door is open and you are welcome to enter, and even if she’s still in bed, don’t give up, she really is waiting for you.”
the chaotic house
He rings the doorbell repeatedly, even though the door is unlocked, hoping the ringing will free him of the duty to rouse a strange woman from her bed. But no human sound responds to the bell. So he must push open the heavy door and enter the house, where chaos exceeds all expectation. Pieces of furniture, evicted from their regular places, huddle in the centre of a large living room, presumably to expose walls that need plastering. In a corner, a stack of cartons full of books and other items, apparently destined for the trash. A pile of obsolete Israeli road maps sits on an armchair, as if hoping Luria will return them to the archive. The new tenants seem impatient: some of their belongings, stashed in a corner, have moved in before them. Divon left Israel in a big hurry, so as not to lose the cushy job in Kenya, and took his two healthy sons with him to begin the new school year, so the long-term rental of this house was placed in the hands of a woman saddled with a sickly child born against her will.
But where is she now? This is an old, spacious house in the country, apparently enlarged several times, and quite dark, because stacked cartons are blocking the windows. Yes, Luria could shout her first name, to wake her and ask her to come out, but wouldn’t it be ridiculous to stand amid this chaos and call out the first name of a woman he had avoided meeting till now? That morning, his wife was surprised and even resentful to learn that he wanted to deliver the envelope in person, yet now, on the eve of his retirement, he yearns to know more about the private life of a talented co-worker who shunned the job Luria intended for him. And in fact, he’s not sorry he came.
But when he enters a huge kitchen, the disarray disappears and a painful barrenness prevails. The cupboards, their doors open, have been emptied of all pots and pans and dishes, and only a carton of milk remains in the open, dark refrigerator. This means they will be leaving soon. He goes into a corridor leading to the living quarters, passes two vacant rooms, possibly of the two older boys, and the doorway of the youngest son, where a spare wheelchair stands by an unmade bed, and continues down another corridor, which brings him back to chaos, a dark bedroom, a heap of blankets and clothes. Three suitcases lie open, and, curled up in the big bed, a woman.
Did she really not hear the doorbell or his footsteps, or did she pretend to be asleep as he entered the room? Because his visit was pre-arranged, this was probably a performance intended to prove the extent of the “tragedy” she attaches to herself. Luria is no random messenger who would address her as “Mrs” or “Madam”, still it seems too intimate to call her by her first name, which he only learned two days before, and since he has no idea where the light switch is, he decides, as someone on the verge of retirement, to gently touch the warm blanket and say, “I’m sorry, but the carer asked that I hand this envelope to you personally.”
From her quick awakening and easy smile, it seems very likely that she indeed heard his ringing and footsteps, and not only remained snugly in bed, but even now neglects to turn on a light, merely extending a long white hand to receive the envelope and place it on the pillow beside her, where her husband’s head should be, and in a hoarse, dreamy voice she says, “Thank you, Zvi Luria, but explain what’s so special about these old plans that he’s driving you crazy with them too.”
It is awkward for Luria to converse with a complete stranger who defies her husband from her bed in the dark. Still, he leans slightly forwards and tells her about the old request to build a bypass road to ensure the serenity of a small settlement, and says that although the plan was scrapped long ago, maybe it can spark her husband’s imagination for a project in Africa. Spark? Yet another spark? Divon’s wife sighs with despair. Of course, she knows her husband well, always looking for sparks, usually in his former projects, this house is filled with such old plans. “But tell me,” she asks slyly, “are they planning to build settlements in Africa too?” “I hope not,” Luria smiles, and begins to wonder with mild anxiety whether she intends to get out of bed, or whether she even can, or if by staying there she is telling him to say goodbye and leave. But instead she commands him with womanly authority to clear her clothes off the armchair so he can sit down and not stand over her. Spark or no spark,” she sneers, “thank you anyway, Zvi Luria, for not sending a messenger, but coming yourself, this way I finally get to meet the man Tzahi cannot stop praising, not only for his superb professionalism but also for his patience and generosity. And although you are famously afraid of mixing personal matters with professional relationships, now that Tzahi has left Israel Roads for good, and you are about to retire, why don’t you let yourself sit a few minutes with me, since most likely we’ll never meet again.”
