Café Shira, page 3
“This tourist was sitting next to me the whole flight, and I was dying for him to make a pass at me, but he was unbelievably shy, not even daring to look at the flight attendant, and only when I fell asleep on his shoulder—I was really tired—did he ask me something, to wake me up, so then he started to ask me about Israel, the Holy Land, he called it, and every other word is Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, all in this French accent, oh what a sexy accent, and he was so cute when he spoke, so finally I couldn’t help myself and I told him he could call me if he wanted someone to show him around Jerusalem a bit, and I gave him a phone number, and he wrote down his email for me on a slip of paper—look at this beautiful handwriting—christian.joubaux@gmail.com.”
Table Two
Writing in small letters, closely spaced. As if trying to penetrate the letters’ very heart. What is writing but a symbol, an attempt to get at the inner essence? A foolish, tragic effort. Because, of course, one cannot get at the real thing. She has written herself and her life off more than once on this account, because if her art is bound to fail from the outset, her life is futile, and it would be better to put an end to the farce straightaway. But last week she had an insight, at this very table by the door: writing is a heroic act. It is just this desperate attempt to put into words what cannot be described in words, to understand the secret code of the soul and of life, that yields meaning and purpose.
Writing in small letters, closely spaced.
It is Ruhama Shittin over by the door. The poet. You must have heard of her. Or maybe not. Who hears today about serious poets whose books sell less than two hundred copies?
So she is trying to cross over to the other side, the prose side. Trying to write a story about herself, about her childhood. But it isn’t going well. Her childhood. Childhood itself. An empty desert.
She has never made a cent on poetry. It is nothing but aggravation. And there are expenses. The special notebooks, for example. She doesn’t write on a computer, which seems sacrilegious, or in ordinary notebooks, only in special ones made with high-quality, recycled paper that she buys from a little workshop she once come across on the outskirts of town.
So what does she live on, you may ask? A trust fund. Her parents set one up for their two daughters. The older one married a rich building contractor, and she doesn’t need the money. And Ruhama somehow gets by on about five thousand shekels a month, not exactly a cornucopia.
She has been sitting here for years, at the table by the door. Avigdor is considering naming the table for her. Why did she choose a table by the door? She herself can’t explain it. Maybe it had something to do with living betwixt and between: if something should happen, she could always slip away. Avigdor says it’s like school: every child takes a seat the first day of classes and stays there for the rest of the year.
In Ruhama’s poetry, more is concealed than revealed, more unspoken than said. Does that sound a bit strange? Everything about poetry is a bit strange. In any case, she would like her Wikipedia entry to say more is concealed than revealed. The problem is, no one has yet written about her in Wikipedia, and she doesn’t dare to write the entry herself. How does she even know there is such a thing as Wikipedia? From her neighbors, Liora and her children, who live one flight down. Naama, the eight-year-old, has shown her all kinds of marvelous things: YouTube, Facebook, Instagram. Ruhama looks upon these things with curiosity mingled with disgust. How can people waste their time on them? Children, too. Weren’t there board games anymore? Don’t they go out to play? In Ruhama’s view (and you may already have seen this in her poetry), the new man, twenty-first-century model, is not quite human, but rather a cross between the computer, the robot, and an evolutionary vestige of the ape. Maybe in another twenty or thirty years this species will be given a name and a scientific description. Meanwhile, we mistakenly consider ourselves human.
The insight about the heroism of writing has already faded, but in any case it hasn’t cheered her up. (Avigdor says she has an insight du jour, the way he has a soup du jour. He knows all about it, because who can she talk to about her insights if not him?) She might be diligent, faithful to her poetic destiny, but she circles in vain between the flowers and the beehive, between real life and the language of symbols. No one will understand what she writes except the great critic who will come along one day, maybe after she dies. Aren’t all the great poets discovered after they die? And he will come along, that great critic, and he will know how to elucidate and praise her poetry, which was ignored during her lifetime. But it is the very fact of being ignored that gives her hope. Because it is intentional. Clearly. Not mere indifference. Deliberate. But on whose part?
Arranging her three pencils, she decides on a new course of action. If up to now she has sat in the café for two or three hours every day, from now on she will stay the whole day. This is home. What use does she have for her physical home, which offers only boredom, self-reproach, endless questioning, and depression? Not to mention the need to keep the place clean. I’m not doing any more cleaning, she promised herself a month and a half ago, and so far she has kept to her resolve. It is either cleaning or writing. One person, no matter how talented, can’t do both. And at home she hardly writes at all. Only here at the café. Here she has everything she needs: food, company, a bathroom. And there is a view, too: from the doorway you can see three trees out in the courtyard. Just the right number, not too many, not too few. If she wants it to be a grove, it is, or if a forest, it is that, and it’s always there to keep her company.
Arranging the pencils, and enjoying the firmness of her decision to move here altogether, not just for a few hours, she feels better and better about the realization that she doesn’t have to return home. She will spend the night in the café, too! At night in particular, when the café is empty and quiet and, outside, the streetlights wink at her, she will be able to bring forth the deepest of poems. Her words will emerge most forcefully. Alone but not lonely, surrounded by her true friends—the ornate cups, the chairs with stories to tell, the big espresso machine that resembles a long, many-teated she-wolf—all these will stand by her while she realizes her destiny.
The next day, she will return with a big satchel and inform Avigdor she is there to stay. Or maybe not a satchel, just a plastic bag with a toothbrush, underwear, a light dress. You don’t need much to write poetry. She doesn’t even need to bring books. On Avigdor’s shelves you can find any volume of poetry you want. Even her own. Four copies of each book—autographed, discounted.
A Surprise
Gaby, Café Shira’s veteran bartender, is the one who raised the crema designs on top of the coffee to the level of an art. At one time they could be hearts, leaves, blossoms, even cat faces with mustaches. But Gaby took it further: he started to work the milk foam into representations of the customers’ faces. It became an attraction. But here and there, problems arose. Ruhama Shittin has made a stink. She has a complicated relationship with her appearance and has not allowed herself to be photographed for twenty years. (There was one exception, when she received a literary prize from the mayor, but there she was far from the camera and out of focus.)
The first time Rutha brought Ruhama coffee with her image in the crema, it stirred up an emotional storm. Herself an artist, she couldn’t help but be impressed with this new art form. On the other hand, her less fortunate features stood out at once: the oversized nose, the unattractive eye, the pointed chin. These things dogged her, try as she might to get away from them. She stopped speaking to Gaby, certain that it was a dirty trick on his part, an attempt to put her down in the least expected, most intimate fashion: in her coffee.
In Rutha’s opinion, Gaby is terrifically talented. Once she showed him a sketch of hers, nervous about what he would say. He came out with a “nice,” but was clearly not enthused.
Gaby was so successful with his coffee creations that before long he began to get invitations to international exhibitions, trade fairs, and whatnot. From time to time he posts photos on Facebook with new images, full of inspiration and creativity. The latest development is three-dimensional: the image changes as the crema diminishes. What started in the top layer as a superficial representation slowly becomes a richer, deeper portrait. If on the surface there is a smile, below that a tormented soul is revealed. But wait, beneath that will be a foundation layer. When you finish drinking the coffee, a kind of signature is left in the bottom of the cup, a surprise. We won’t tell you what it is; come to Café Shira when Gaby gets back.
A Good Thing the Frenchman Is Tall
One thing Ruhama has no doubts about: she needs a tall man. She can compromise on age, appearance, education, life plans. In the last analysis, none of these things matter much. When she meets the right guy, he will look good to her anyway, and his education, whatever it is, will suffice for him to write her love letters of the old-fashioned kind.
Everybody should be sent to Lilliput sometime to experience it. A person who looks up to you has expectations of you. You are the mast that looms over her. You shackle her and oppress her. You are her point of reference.
She is aware that short people, too, might have problems. They probably think people don’t see them. They have inferiority feelings. They might have trouble reaching the top shelves. But there are simple solutions for all these things. For example, they can get up on a stool. But that is nothing compared to what she has to endure when her legs get stuck in the back seat of a car and she prays to God to make her shorter, at least momentarily. What is she going to tell her date? Get a different car? Buy one with a sunroof? No one understands how humiliating it is to have someone she knows run after her in the street, shouting, “I spotted you from a distance.”
True, it is just a matter of measurements. She wants to see beyond this. But when she looks in the mirror she can’t see her soul because of all the body that gets in the way. She extends from floor to ceiling, and there is no way out of it.
Even as a small child her body began to elongate beyond what is normal. Before reaching bat mitzvah age she was already taller than her mother. A few weeks later she surpassed her father, too. And without stopping to rest, her body continued to grow until she dwarfed the houses in the village, and so it continued, dangerously, until she could see the whole country from above, the way one does on a map, with the slightly curved shoreline and the cleft running from the Sea of Galilee down to the Dead Sea. It could have continued up into the atmosphere as well (with a view such as one sees from a satellite), but this she no longer recalls. She might have blacked out, until one day she woke up again the way she is now, terribly tall.
Table Three
“Yoram,
I’ve been sitting in Café Shira for days, trying without success to write to you. I’m not sure what I want to write, or why. I don’t even know where you are or where to send this. The last time I tried to send something to your email address, three years ago, it bounced back. Sometimes I think you aren’t anywhere. It’s a bit egotistical of me, I admit, wanting to believe that without me you don’t exist.”
Ora looks up from the page. It’s an interesting opening, no doubt. The problem is, he might get the idea that she still loves him. And that’s out of the question. To begin with, he needs to know how angry she is. The opening has to be blunt, not flattering, and certainly not sentimental. It needs to be clear that he owes her. After that, we’ll see.
She tears off the page and slides it into a plastic sleeve. She’ll file it when she gets home. To this day, she hasn’t reread a single one of these openings, but she feels the need to keep them. It would be interesting to see what would happen if at some point she sat down to read all of them and even more interesting if they were to be sent to him (after she died?) in a single, long letter.
She looks over the people sitting near her in the café. Two couples are deep in conversation. A woman is trying to write something (and, like her, obviously not succeeding). The waitress is rubbing her eyebrows with her finger. The bartender is speaking softly to someone on his cell phone. It’s one of those days that won’t lead anywhere.
What’s the matter with all these people? What are they looking for? And why here, of all places? They can’t have come together here by chance.
Maybe she should dye her hair? When you’re into your thirties, it no longer makes any sense to have red hair. It’s cute for the first ten years, mischievous for the second ten, then tolerable until thirty-one or thirty-two. But still a redhead, and a natural one at that, at thirty-five?!
“Yoram,
You’re a son of a bitch.
Ora”
Okay, she hadn’t really meant to write that, but that’s the way it came out. Maybe this is the letter that will hit home. Eight words all together. No need to read between the lines. And what’s nice is that part of her believes, at a certain moment in the writing, that Yoram actually gets and reads her unsent letters, that he gets insulted where he should, upset where he should, annoyed where he should.
She writes these letters to help her understand what happened, to map out the relationship, herself, life before and after. For what was it about this guy, who was not especially good-looking or attractive or smart or rich, that drove her so crazy that she still can’t free herself of him? It has been fifteen years since the trip and another year and a half since she got married.
The truth is that to the nineteen-year-old she was then he was handsome and attractive and smart, and even potentially rich, with all his ideas of starting a company, a startup, a venture-capital fund, and what have you. Any one of those ideas could result in something big. And those eyes of his . . . eyes that . . . maybe the only way to describe them is that when she looked into them, into their dark depths, what she saw with wondrous clarity was herself.
What has she not done to move on? Other men, therapy, trips abroad. And she always winds up back at the starting point. It was when Orly first told her about him and suggested she join the excursion to the Old City.
Maybe there’s an alternate universe, with an alternate café, where an alternate Yoram sits thinking, What did I do wrong?
“Dear Ora,
True, it’s been fifteen years.”
“Dear Ora,
When I saw you for the first time, a stunning but introverted redhead, I thought that . . . and that. . . .”
“Dear Ora,
Let’s put it simply: we deserve a second chance.”
She’ll go to work again tomorrow. At the office, they’ll think everything is okay. They’ll ask the usual questions, say the same things, try to persuade her to join the committee, day after day after day.
Avigdor goes by. He wants to say something but thinks better of it. He once asked her who still writes letters with a pen, and she burst into tears.
A young man with mangy black hair comes in, looking lost in his heavy coat. He sits down at a table near the bar. She is sure that when the waitress comes over he won’t look up. But she is wrong. Does he ever look up! And when the waitress turns around and walks away, he keeps on looking. Ora tries to figure out what he’s thinking, but there’s no way of knowing. If at a glance she could figure out what people were thinking, she might know what Yoram really had in mind when he spoke of love.
Table Four
At Café Shira again. Again, having to decide.
Strange, he feels no tension. Some strain, perhaps. He should probably comb his messy hair a little. Or take off his tie. He can see his reflection faintly in the windowpane, his broad, catlike face. That’s what she calls him. Puss. When she comes in, he’s willing to bet she’ll say, “Hi, Puss.” He has fifteen minutes until then. She tends to be punctual.
He still loves her. But it’s clear that they’ll have to break up at some point.
It’s also clear that it’s up to him. It troubles him. Whenever he wants her, she’s his, and that’s what attracts him but also puts him off.
The fact that she’s married doesn’t have much bearing on the situation. Of course it complicates things a bit. But it also adds excitement. He hasn’t been with unmarried women much in recent years. But Anat isn’t just anyone. After twenty years with her and without her, he feels about her what other people (he imagines) feel about their lawful wives.
He sometimes wonders what would happen to him if he got married. Could he be content with one woman? It’s hard to imagine. Maybe one main, significant woman, but how could he give up the instinct for the chase? It just happens. Not that he feels good about it. He’s full of guilty feelings, stretching from here to Africa, where he began his diplomatic career and also the womanizing. He was more successful in both pursuits than he had meant to be.
He looks around. The people look familiar to him. Not surprisingly. After all, they were here at previous critical junctures, so he calls the place Resolution Rendezvous, even though the rendezvous is mainly with himself. He came here when they offered him the job in Kenya, and there were strong pros at the time but also strong cons, and he sat at this very table for nearly an hour mulling it over and finally tossed a coin.
He hates to make decisions. Why do we have to be deciding all the time? Why can’t decisions come, neatly packaged, of their own accord? He once considered half seriously opening a toll-free, phone-in decision service. You would call and state the arguments for and against, and the service would make the decision for you, free of charge. Do other people have such a hard time deciding? That woman by the door who’s always writing—she was here on all the previous occasions. She was also once his parents’ neighbor. She made problems for them when they wanted to renovate their apartment. Of course he pretends not to recognize her, but she is so wrapped up in herself that she doesn’t notice him or anyone else. And that couple arguing in the middle of the café, she in the low-cut evening dress and he in the dirty T-shirt—he remembers them, too. First-class jerks, both of them. Each of them thinks he deserves something better. Neither can appreciate what he already has. (Like him. Soon Anat will be here. He gets excited. How can he leave her?) And that woman sitting just behind him at the round table. She was old then, too. There are such people, so marked by age that they must have been born that way. And of course there’s the character with the scarf, sitting under the chandelier, just looking for someone to talk to. And the proprietor, Avigdor, also unchanged. Same shirt, he’s willing to bet.
