Café Shira, page 4
It would be better to decide right now. If he tells her it’s over, there might be a scene, but that would be better than another year or two of uncertainty. Especially now, with his new position at the United Nations. He doesn’t get much vacation, and it would be better to spend it without having to fret about getting a deal on a hotel. It would be better to decide before she gets here. He knows very well what will happen when she walks in, with her subtle beauty. The decision will be put off until the next visit. There will be yet another “for the time being,” as there has always been until now. And if he tells her it’s over, is there a chance of their remaining just friends? How? It will come back of its own accord at the first opportunity. And besides, what will they talk about? Life? And there’s another problem: where will he get sex? His luck is up. When did things change? And why? It’s not that he’s bad-looking. Women still find him attractive. But what happened to the electrifying encounters that ended up in bed? True, there are more conversations. His ears have been pummeled to bits. And something is seriously missing.
He hates to pretend. He has known for a long time that in this short life you have to do what you want, not just what’s required. It’s so easy to get this wrong. He has seen his parents. His sister. His colleagues at the Foreign Ministry. The way people get confused: they let others set an agenda for them. A whole life lived according to opinion polls.
At forty-five, it’s time to settle down. Not to get married, but to settle down. Let there be one woman he can take to cocktail parties. No more stories. Just saying, “Meet Anat.” Furnishing a home together. Maybe even having a child.
He met Anat’s children once, by chance. She was coming toward him in a supermarket, pushing a grocery cart. The younger one was in the cart, while the older one ran up and down the aisles loading up on snacks. They were exactly as she had described them. In fact, even if she hadn’t been there he thought he could have recognized them. He was so shaken by that encounter five or six years ago that for three days afterward he couldn’t concentrate. They could have been his own children. And come to think of it, maybe they were his. At least the little one.
He is staring hard at the big window. There is a clear, bright moment of decision, a moment when the air changes its texture. The decision will come now. But into his sharpened field of vision, which is preparing for the imminent choice, comes Anat, and all at once her perfume disrupts everything. “Hi, Puss,” she says. “I heard you mewing from a distance.”
Table Five
“Hi, Puss,” she says. “I heard you mewing from a distance.”
That’s just what the woman who goes by, leaving a faint scent of perfume, says to the heavyset man by the window.
At first Udi thinks she means him. She’s headed in his direction and must see that he is essentially a stray alley cat. That’s how he’s felt his whole life, even more since his mother died.
Who would have expected it to be so hard? He hadn’t realized he was so close to her until she was dead. And now there’s no turning back the clock. Over the past year he has hardly been able to get himself to do anything new, other than a few websites he set up for income. (He started to set one up in his mother’s memory, too, but the project got bogged down at the point of putting in text. Pictures, he had plenty.)
You’re young, they say at the kibbutz. You should go have a good time, get to know girls.
That’s what is left of the kibbutz: everyone has firm opinions about everyone else, especially about him.
It was yesterday, when Avigdor asked him where his mother was. The timing of it was amazing: he had just been pondering the fact that, now that a year had passed, something would start to change. But Avigdor’s question sent him back in time. It was here, at Café Shira, that he used to sit with his mother almost every week. She made it a habit to go into the city on errands every Thursday. Even when she had nothing special to take care of, she would go and invite him to join her. As a rule, he would go along just to have a good time in town, and at least he could expect a meal, and sometimes new clothes, at his mother’s expense. In this respect, he was still a child in need of spoiling. At the café, she would read a mystery novel, and he would surf a few websites, and although they hardly spoke, he remembers those being their good times. Even when she got sick she went on running her errands, and though eventually she became quite weak, she insisted on climbing the steps to the café, where she could sit at her regular table and drink the ginger punch, full of vitamins, that the proprietor brought her.
When Avigdor asked where his mother was, he flew into a rage. What? Is he blind, this guy? Hadn’t he noticed her decline? How could he not have noticed that her table had been orphaned for an entire year? Though Udi didn’t expect words of consolation that day, for some reason he assumed Avigdor, along with everyone else, would know and that he would care. It turned out that he didn’t know, and now, hearing about it from Udi, the only thing he could say was, “Sorry to hear it,” after which he ran to the kitchen, as if death itself were chasing him away from table five.
When he woke up this morning, Udi didn’t feel like doing anything. He remembered it was Thursday already, errand day, and without thinking he picked up his laptop and drove into town. “Mom, save me a place at the table,” he murmured, as he always had. He still carries on conversations with her at the café. They talk more than ever. She asks him about his life. He tells her the truth: nothing is happening. She tries to understand these things he’s doing with the computer. He tries to explain them to her, and though it’s all completely foreign to her, she listens and nods. “Who are you writing to there?” she asks. He thinks she’s angry with him for meeting girls on the computer. To her, it’s way beneath him. She isn’t completely wrong, but his story is completely different. He has gotten addicted to role-playing. On one site, he is a prince coming to the rescue of a princess. (In France, there’s a girl who is on the computer twenty-four hours a day, and every time he logs on she is ready to be rescued by him.) On another site, there’s a young girl in Ohio, and he is her mother, making sandwiches for her to take to school, choosing her clothes, explaining to her how to steer clear of strangers. Lately, he has also been the host at a virtual stand-up comedy club on the Copacabana. All this his mother accepts uncomplainingly, with an encouraging smile. Well, as long as he’s happy.
I’m not happy, Mom. I haven’t been happy for a long time. And I’m not sure I’ll ever be happy. Maybe we haven’t talked much, but at least we told the truth.
He is surprised to hear his mother crying. Yes, it really is her way of crying, not something imagined or virtual. He looks up and sees, at a table by the window, the woman who called out to her puss, weeping the way his mother did, and the heavyset man with the mangy hair handing her a crumpled tissue.
Christian Joubaux
Naked in the darkness of his hotel room, a clock on the wall, Christian Joubaux sits teary-eyed. In Jerusalem, of all places, where his dream of a visit is finally being realized, a familiar depression has landed on him with its full weight. His right ankle has started to swell and is getting more and more painful.
In every place he’s ever been, little villages or big cities, remote fields or crowded subway stations, he has always felt the presence of Jesus Christ, his best friend. But here in the Holy City of Jerusalem, of all places, Jesus has abandoned him altogether. There’s no sign of Him and not a trace of the feeling he has always had of a connection to the divine and the holy.
He strokes his forehead, his shoulders, his loins, his belly. He seeks consolation. How could he have been abandoned? He knows that people have endured greater trials, yet the darkness that has descended upon him is more than he can bear. He goes on stroking himself: his loins (avoiding his privates), his thighs, his calves, his painful ankle, his strong feet. In all this darkness there have been, on this difficult day, only two points of light: the eyes of the waitress, beautiful as the Virgin, who served him that morning. Christian, who has longed in his dreams for a mother figure to embrace him, is excited by her presence but also scared. He sees young women as a threat. At the seminary in Paris, he found himself between two novice priests who represented opposite approaches: curly-headed, well-educated Gilbert, who had decided as a teenager to take monastic vows and kept his distance from women ever since, and, by contrast, Xavier, a worldly fellow from Nice who had entered the seminary out of a genuine desire to help the poor, among whom he had grown up, but who was intent on getting his fill of life’s pleasures as long as he hadn’t taken his vows. In a theology class, he confided to Christian that he had already slept with more than a hundred women, including twenty-three virgins and seven minors.
He remembers a conversation in English he overheard that morning between two young women sitting behind him. One, with a high-pitched voice and a dramatic manner, was telling the other she was afraid to drive. “I can’t do it,” she kept saying, “but I have no choice. I’ve got to take my son to preschool and do my shopping.” She then described something that had happened to her a few days before, when she had had an anxiety attack on the highway and felt she had to stop, but there was nowhere to pull over. She was afraid her foot would step on the brake of its own accord and foresaw the accident that would result, but a voice inside said, more and more insistently, “You’ve got no choice. Keep going, keep going. You’ve got to keep driving.” She convinced herself she had to get out of this predicament, not just then but for good, because what she had to do no one could do for her. She had a life to live and goals to achieve, and, fearful as she was, she couldn’t give up.
Remembering this, Christian Joubaux decides in the darkness of his room to regard that voice as the voice of Jesus, a loving, melodious, insistent voice conveying a message just for him. It is a voice of life, telling him there is hope even in the darkness, and, with all the pain in his body and soul, he has to persevere. So he gets up and slowly dresses himself and heads back toward the café, where, he hopes, he will find the lovely waitress, who will be kind to him, provide him with food and drink, and restore his soul.
Table Six
On the steps of the old building leading up to the café, a girl has fallen asleep. She is four and a half, and when she wakes up she cries, “Mama, Mama,” then falls back asleep. Yahel has a feeling she is beginning to understand who her little girl actually is. There is an element of fire in her, as well as water.
“Where’s Avigdor?”
“He’ll be back in a few minutes.”
When Yahel hears Rutha’s answer she bursts out laughing, almost waking the girl. That’s what he used to say then, too, when she worked here, but he never came back, or if he did, you couldn’t tell what kind of state he’d be in.
She hears Fuad’s familiar voice: “The Arab is ready.” That’s what he calls the Arab salad, and evidently they still haven’t convinced him not to shout. “Rutha, come get the Arab already!”
She looks at this waitress, a new generation at Café Shira, a generation that didn’t go through the great dramas of five years ago. It’s almost a sacrilege, an outsider coming in here and serving coffee just like that. One of Avigdor’s classic picks, she is: tall, attractive, with big eyes, on the fair side. So what if he’s gay; in such things he’s worse than the lowest-class restaurant managers. She herself was once tall and thin, but in the intervening years she’s gained weight and probably gotten shorter. It’s the pregnancy and the financial difficulties.
She sits down at table six and wonders what has or hasn’t changed. Although this table is out in the middle, she has always loved it, maybe because it’s made of old wood. Light from the big window wraps the café in an aura of times gone by, and even the hubbub is familiar: the noise of the buses in the street (still the number nine, if the numbers haven’t changed), the chirping of the birds in the three trees, the sounds of mingled conversations, the whistle of the espresso machine. But Elad, where is Elad? And where is Justin from Louisiana? And Lihi, who once gave her a shampoo? What happened to the terrific crew that once made her think of abandoning all her plans and staying here forever?
God knows that’s how they used to talk back then: “Café Shira to the bitter end.” It was Elad who started to talk that way, overzealous Elad, who had been discharged from the army in combat shock from service in the Territories, Elad who had wanted to lead a commando group and could hardly qualify as a shift manager with Avigdor, Elad who might be her daughter’s father, or might not.
Someone told her he had been hospitalized in a closed institution, but she doesn’t believe it. As she sees it, everyone goes around with some kind of craziness and somehow lives with it. The whole world is a closed institution, and Café Shira, when it comes to that, is the most difficult ward.
Elad would sit with her at table six and spin out plans to start a private army. He believed the country was on the decline and wouldn’t be able to defend itself, so obviously an alternative way of protecting it had to be found. He had files with labels like INDIVIDUAL, SQUADRON, AND PLATOON EXERCISES IN THE VALLEY OF THE CROSS. Yahel was alienated from this country to begin with and really didn’t care who was going to defend it. As she saw it, the country was the most incidental part of her biography, which is what made it so easy for her to leave and go traveling in the Far East. It was the café that made it hard for her to leave. She gave birth to the girl in India, two weeks after it had come to her during meditation that she would call her Shira.
To this day, she isn’t sure who the father is, but she doesn’t much care. What good would it do Shira to find out that her father was a military psycho? Or that he was a colorful, confused guy from Louisiana who had converted to Judaism, had second thoughts, and finally immigrated to Israel to seek out roots he didn’t have? Justin would start every morning by kissing the espresso machine. Then he would go sit in the green chair on the porch, puff smoke from a cigarette he had rolled, and talk excitedly about coffee and coffeehouses, like the founder of a new religion. Eventually, he quit because Avigdor refused to buy a better grade of coffee.
Hearing him talk about the transcendent qualities of coffee, she fell in love with him, but when, a month later, he gave the same lecture to a new waitress, she lost interest. This was her luck and also her curse: no guy ever captured her heart for long, nor did any house, or country, and finally not even a café. And though it was fun here, she was no less attached to a dozen other places where she’d waited tables, five of them in Southeast Asia.
What would she have thought if someone had told her, back then, that she’d become a mother? She wouldn’t have believed it. Having witnessed the failure of her mother, who had had no idea how to raise a child and certainly not a girl, it was clear to her that she would never let herself fall into that particular trap. Still, when the two stripes appeared in the pregnancy test, she got tremendously excited, and sometime later, under the influence of a soft-spoken volunteer at an institution for crippled children in Uttar Pradesh, she decided to hand the process over to forces greater than her own. That same week, she met Lihi, her friend from Café Shira, in a dark, dingy tea shop that would be remembered in Yahel’s autobiography as a place of miracles. Lihi enfolded her and her pregnancy in a loving embrace, and even though she had no answers to Yahel’s worries or misgivings, she gave her confidence that things would somehow work out. And in fact, aside from money, they didn’t turn out too badly.
She misses Lihi. Maybe she could have helped her raise Shira. Isn’t that the way it used to be? Women banded together to take care of their children and help one another through life’s complications, whereas real ties with men, she thinks, only last a day, or at most a week. (In other words, even if they drag on beyond that, they aren’t real ties. She knows a number of married couples who keep it going for ten, twenty years, but that doesn’t mean there’s a real connection between them, and in fact the married people she knows are quite unconnected with each other. Better to call it a lie than a tie.)
She looks at Shira’s beautiful, sleeping face. She sometimes wonders if Avigdor might not be the father. It can’t be, but anything is possible. She’s sure she got pregnant at that wild Independence Day party. Of course, it wasn’t the only party. They made a semisecret practice of staying on for a “third shift” at the café. When the last customer left, they would bring out beer and wine, light candles, turn up the music, and take the weed out from its hiding place. They’d spread out a mattress in the kitchen, where they could find relaxation and transient love. When Avigdor first found out about these parties he fired two waiters and a cook. He also replaced the lock (but then gave keys to half the staff because he couldn’t get up early enough in the morning to open and also hated staying to lock up at night). But after a couple more incidents, he decided to join the party himself. It was Justin, with his management theories, who persuaded the boss that staff morale was more important than anything else. He was flat-out exhausted at the time, Avigdor was, and needed something to regain his equanimity. Yes, equanimity. Pot parties until dawn have a balancing effect—try proving otherwise.
