Читать книгу Kin - Dror Burstein - Страница 10

YOEL

Get up, Yoel, get up. And running.

Almost running, he’s got a cut from shaving, he crosses the street, leaving the shade of the trees in the avenue, opposite the birdsong, the chiming of the wind chimes on the open porches, making a beeline for the fixed route share-taxi, the kids push ahead of him in the queue, he doesn’t say anything, he’ll wait for an empty van. One is sure to come. No, not empty, but with room for just one more. An old man gets out, Yoel gets in. Like someone penetrating a dank jungle, forging on with head lowered through the sounds echoing in the interior, yes, route 5, he sits down in the old man’s place as the taxi takes off with screeching tires, orangutans shriek from the branches, a tiger slinks through dense foliage, roars, an iceberg creeps slowly from the north, a sun sits on the snowy horizon. He sits down and passes a gleaming coin to the passenger in front of him, who bends his hand backward, here, give it here.

So you tell me, Professor, the driver said to him as if continuing a lengthy conversation, is it permitted or forbidden for the driver and the passengers to have a conversation? And one of them, a pregnant woman with a bag on her knees from one of the bridal boutiques in Dizengoff Street, jumps in: In the buses they used to have stickers, it used to say, “Passengers may not stand next to the driver or talk to him while the vehicle is in motion,” but I don’t see any sticker there behind you, and the driver said, never mind the sticker, forget about the sticker, I’m talking to you about a principle here, is it permitted to talk to the driver or forbidden to talk to the driver? If I have an accident, said the driver, yes? if I have an accident, and we’re all God forbid killed here to death, will they come and say afterwards it’s because he didn’t have a sticker with “It’s forbidden to talk to the driver” on it? I don’t understand you, Sharon, I really don’t! Let me concentrate on driving, let me concentrate on the road! Let me go with the traffic flow, I’m taking a turn here now! And the woman said, pardon me, if it doesn’t say that it’s forbidden to talk to the driver I’ll talk to the driver, and if you don’t like it you don’t have to answer. I take taxis specifically to talk to the driver, if I didn’t want to talk to the driver I’d get onto a long bus and sit on a back seat, and the driver laughed and suddenly braked to let a cat blind in one eye cross the street.

One of the passengers, sitting behind Yoel, who had a blue inflatable felt cushion tucked under his backside and whose whole appearance shouted “senior bureaucrat” said, in your case there should be a sticker saying the opposite, “It’s forbidden for the driver to talk to the passengers,” and the driver said, and maybe there should be a sticker that says, “It’s forbidden for the driver to read stickers”? All the passengers laughed, and Yoel laughed too, and said to the driver, can I talk to you for a minute? And the driver said, feel free, there’s freedom of speech here, and the pregnant passenger said, so why have you been drumming it into my head for an hour that talking to the driver is forbidden, now you’re telling him that it’s permitted to talk to the driver, and she smiled at Yoel, and the driver said, sure it’s permitted to talk to the driver, it depends which driver, I meant another driver. The bureaucrat shifted his position on his blue cushion and said, I’ve never in my life talked to the driver or stood next to the driver, I always bring a cushion and sit at the back, and Yoel turned round and asked, the cushion, is it for piles? And the bureaucrat said, not at all, the cushion is for added height, and Yoel saw that the top of his head was already pressed right up against the roof of the taxi. Hilik, you need a cushion for your head as well, how many times have I told you? Padding top and bottom, why discriminate, the driver roared with laughter as he let off an old woman, interrupting her “thank you” with a “good day,” his eyes on the green light. “Hurry up, get in, there’s a Jumbo behind us,” he said to a couple of young women laden with packages, “but please don’t talk to the driver or stand next to him!” And one of the new passengers sat down and said to her friend, Oho, my father was a bus driver for thirty years, I know those stickers by heart, “Don’t put your hand or head out of the window,” “Don’t crack sunflower seeds—don’t spit—don’t litter,” apparently people used to like to spit a lot, “Don’t put your feet on the seats,” “Passenger! Have you forgotten something on the bus?” I would copy those stickers whenever I had to write one of those “My Family” compositions at school, I would always end up writing about the bus, that’s what everybody was interested in, not my mother who was a seamstress and who didn’t have any stickers or anything else, only the tak-tak-tak-tak of the sewing machine, tak-tak-tak-tak from seven o’clock in the morning in the textile district, if there’s a word I really hate it’s “textile,” but that didn’t interest the teacher, the teacher always told me, give me stories about the bus, “all the children want to hear them,” and once I made up a story about how they broke the windshield with the red hammer, it was utter chaos in the class, I couldn’t even tell you. Yoel looked at his shoes but he was listening closely. In twenty minutes he would arrive and leave the taxi and go up to their apartment and stand before Emile’s parents. And he already knew that he would stand before them tongue tied. In other words, that once more he wouldn’t go up at all, that he would chicken out, like yesterday and the day before. You’ll chicken out again, Zisu, he said to himself. Chicken. His tongue passed over his front teeth. I would stand behind him, every day I would come back from school with him on bus no. 5, there were no shared taxis then, and even if there were I wouldn’t have taken one, because I had a free bus pass as a member of a Dan Bus Company family—and her friend interrupted her and said, which is funny, since your last name really is “Dan”—and the first one went on talking and said Shosh, don’t pour salt on the wounds Shosh, my father changed our name in order to prove his loyalty to the company, a lot of drivers did that then, today nobody changes their name, but then? They changed their surnames to “Dan” and sometimes their first names too, and some of the people who rose to the highest positions in the Dan Company called themselves “Daniel Dan” or “Dan Daniel.” Right, the director of Dan was Dan Daniel and the head of the conductors’ department was Danny Ben-Daniel, cried the driver, holding up the mike of his two-way radio. And my father, continued the passenger, who was only a simple driver on bus no. 5, called himself “Yaakov Dan,” though everybody else called him “Kuba Dan” when they weren’t just calling him plain “Dan.” And he was proud of it at first, that he had the strength of character to make the change, and I would stand behind him, all my childhood I remember being in the bus behind the plastic barrier, and I would whisper to him softly, “Daddy . . . daddy . . . ” but he didn’t hear me, or else he just didn’t answer me because talking to the driver was forbidden. He was afraid there might be an undercover inspector on the old people’s seat at the front of the bus, maybe disguised as an old lady, and the minute he opened his mouth and said something to me the old lady would jump on him and give him a fine. But he would wink at me in the big scratched mirror.

And there was silence in the taxi sailing onto Rothschild Boulevard, and a soldier got off at the Dizengoff Center, and the driver rattled his collection of five-shekel coins. And the driver said, “What a life,” and fell silent, and remembered the half-blind cat crossing the street and its closed eye, and he thought of Moshe Dayan, who he had once seen, when he was a young soldier, and he wanted to shout at him, Dayan, Dayan, what did you do. He pulled to a stop with the ruins of the Habima Theatre behind him. In the end I would pull the cord and the “stop requested” sign would light up and I would get off at home. He wouldn’t say good-bye to me, he was too afraid of the undercover inspectors who got on the buses disguised as blind men in order to catch the drivers out, they just waited for the driver to make one little mistake and immediately got up and took him off the bus or put a reprimand in his file. And once he spat out of the driver’s window, the case they made against him, Dreyfus, the disgrace . . . And what now? the friend whose name was Shosh interrupted her, and the daughter of the Dan driver said, “Now? Now he’s dead.”

The taxi arrived at the corner of Balfour, and Shosh said good-bye to her friend and got off, carrying a big X-ray photo in a big envelope, and the friend turned to Yoel, who didn’t look at her, and said, “She’s very sick. Not yet forty,” and fell silent. Yoel wanted to ask her how the story about her father ended, if there was any more to it, but the woman turned away to look out of the window. Yoel turned to look at the pregnant woman in the seat behind the driver, who all this time had gone on talking to the driver and arguing with him about whether talking to the driver while he was driving was permitted or forbidden. Neither of them tired of this conversation, which seemed to have begun very long ago and might go on forever. He fixed his eyes on the woman’s swollen belly. The taxi stopped in a traffic jam on the corner of Sheinkin Street. The bureaucrat’s cell phone rang and he got out to answer it, apologizing for the disturbance. A colorful procession crossed Rothschild Boulevard from east to west. Yoel closed the window near him against the whistles and the drums. “Close your window,” he wanted to say to the pregnant woman, “so the baby won’t be startled by the noise,” but he was too shy to start a conversation. The taxi was buzzing with talk. Yoel took out his MP3 player, which was a little dirty with sea sand and now contained only a few Bach organ pieces and Schubert Lieder, aside from the camera function that took up most of the memory card, and plugged in the earphones. He closed his eyes and leaned his head on the windowpane. He managed to hear the driver say, “I’m switching off the engine until they go past. It’s the exodus from Egypt, except on Purim.” But there was still time. A burglar alarm ripped through the air but could not penetrate the skin of his dream. People shouted outside, he didn’t hear. He was tired, it was the middle of the day. Well, to be precise, he did hear the sound, to be precise, sure. He wanted to sleep, even though it was only noon. He dreamed that he was riding in a taxi and dreaming that he wanted to sleep, and what Amikam, his old father, said to him when he was small, Yoel too said in his sleep: How good it is to sleep when you’re tired. A little bird flew through the taxi, entering through an open window, leaving through an open window. And other dream fragments came up and thrust themselves upon him but as usual he forgot almost everything. If he had remembered his dream he would have seen a transparent train ascending to the top of a tower, drawn by a whistling, straining iron locomotive, but when you looked at its wheels, you saw that there was nothing there, that it wasn’t transparent but absent. And he woke up in an empty taxi.

Someone had forgotten a cell phone on one of the seats. The phone drilled into the cushion and its light blinked.

The taxi stood in the parking space of the new central bus station. At first the driver was nowhere to be seen, and then Yoel caught sight of him through his dazzled, freshly awakened eyes, sitting outside on a bench next to a few other drivers and drinking a hot drink from a plastic cup. Yoel’s neck hurt. Vapors rose and misted the faces of the drivers and their heavy-framed spectacles. Yoel’s sleep had crushed him, his neck was stiff, his MP3 player was silent and its earphones were plugged into his ears like white corks. Did you hear anything at all? Dream fragments flitted past his eyes. A window. A cloud. A whistle. A watch. He looked, without raising his leaning head, at the silent, empty taxi, at the seats on which thousands of passengers had imprinted their shapes and smells. And how sunk into themselves these seats were, he now saw for the first time, how much weight had compressed them. Compressed and deepened. He rubbed the upholstery. Like a herd of donkeys whose backs were worn and hollowed, he thought. And the taxi, like a beast of burden, drove north-south and didn’t complain. Again you fell asleep, again you arrived at the central bus station, again you have to begin to go back.

Yoel got up with difficulty and climbed out of the taxi. Then he heard the driver calling him, from a distance. “Did you have a good sleep? I didn’t want to wake you. You slept like a baby.” And he turned to his taxi-driver friends and said to them, lowering his voice, explaining, “He fell asleep . . . ” And then, after Yoel walked away and could no longer hear him, the driver added, “Him, he likes to sleep in taxis.” And after a few seconds he commented gruffly to the tips of his shoes: “Him, not a week goes by that he doesn’t fall asleep in my taxi.” The other drivers looked at Yoel stretching himself opposite the central bus station as though it were a real spectacle.

To begin to go back again. No, he didn’t have the courage to go up. But the next day he would go there again.

But the next day he would be there again, in the taxi. And he would travel all the way, alone in the taxi, thinking, why not go up today. For five shekels I could get a private taxi. But in the middle of Levinsky Street he would say to the driver, “I’m getting out here. Have a good week,” and the driver, who would perhaps be the same one as yesterday, or perhaps not, would say to him, “What do you care, ride a little further, it’s the same money, get off at the last stop like a human being. Who gets off in the middle of the road?” And Yoel would admit, “There’s something in what you say,” even though he already had one foot outside the taxi. And the trees all along Levinsky would be low and leafy and their fruit thick-skinned, and a great shadow would pass along them and through them and over the bridge, all the way to Sheinkin until it disappeared. “Are you headed back north?” Yoel would ask, and the driver would say, “Where north, I do the route, drive round in circles,” and Yoel would say, “In that case, I’ll go back with you.”