Читать книгу Kin - Dror Burstein - Страница 15

YOEL

No, he wanted to go on working, without a break, even on the long nights, that’s what he said to the company director, how did the word “long” get out, damn, a mistake, a mistake . . . but in his heart he tried to be glad about being forced out, and he saw himself, his wallet bursting with pension money and severance pay exchanged for foreign currency, traveling the world with a light bag and a light coat and a pocket camera, looking at airplane and train schedules, not in a hurry, falling asleep on a train on a cold night in Budapest and waking up the next morning in Venice opposite boats and big lit canals and the water of the Great Canal rippling in front of his opening eyes. Two months after his retirement Yoel was still trying to realize this freedom, for the first time after decades of work under elevated roads, a yellow helmet on his head, shouting at foremen, holding blueprints, always mistakes the minute he turned his back. In his dream he drives on his own over highway interchanges he was responsible for building, like the Netanya interchange, driving alone in his new jeep, in daylight, knowing that the bridge is about to collapse, sticking his arm out of the top of the vehicle in order to hold onto something when he falls, a tree branch or laundry line, and he knows that there’s nothing there but nevertheless he stretches his arm through the open roof, even though he knows, in his dream, that the jeep isn’t a convertible, but the roof opens and he feels the strong wind on his hand, and he goes on driving a little longer and he counts, one, two, three, and goes on counting more and more until he hears the bridge crumbling under his wheels, and for a second he sees the blueprint in his mind’s eye and identifies the fault, and it was his mistake, and he knows it. His mistake. And then the car begins to lose height and tip forward toward certain destruction, he’s already stopped counting but he hears his voice going on as if on a soundtrack, and he stretches his arm a little further and utters a long kind of aaahhhh until someone takes his hand and pulls him out of the car. Now too, in the spring of 2007, after his retirement, a few days before his seventieth birthday, the dream sometimes came back, and he would wake up in the morning and look at the apartment, which now seemed emptier, and he would go outside to the avenue and get onto a no. 5 share-taxi and ride to the south of the city, sometimes even at five in the morning, while Emile was still sleeping, and he’d get off mostly between Nachmani and Balfour Streets and walk around there, showing his pensioner’s card to an invisible audience, walking slowly down the avenue or in the streets and looking at the trees and the shop windows, wandering aimlessly and thinking to himself never mind, some great idea would grow out of this idleness, perhaps a story, and he would write it all down at once, in a café, and publish it. When he was a child Yoel could draw the coastline of the Mediterranean Sea with astonishing accuracy. And now, in the café, he tried to draw it again. His pen rose north from the Haifa Bay and already he’s in Greece, and already he stops to put in Cyprus, goes back up, to Italy, adds the islands. And the more sea and harbors appear, the younger he grows. And joyfully he reaches the Straits of Gibraltar, and skips a little lower down, how he had imagined swimming across these straits as a child, with his parents standing on either side leaning down and applauding him, shouting, over the sea, as indeed they did, but it was over his desk. And he begins his return journey, stopping at Djerba, Tripoli, Alexandria, the smell of fish, and suddenly a great desire to sit opposite the sea and eat olives and honey.

He stood up and sat down again. He went to the ATM. Withdrew a large sum. And put it in an envelope. He would count it at home. The exact amount.

And he wrote down, in another notebook, lists of things he noticed, for example, the tendency of young girls to wear very low-slung pants and tattoo something in a triangular pattern on their lower backs, a tattoo that called for a whole new wardrobe, low trousers and high tops, which of course called for a radical diet and the tanning of ordinarily hidden areas, and mainly, thought Yoel, a boundless readiness for sexual adventurism. He made notes on the subject of cellular telephones, and remembered how when he was a child there was a man who talked to himself out loud on the street until one day an ambulance stopped next to him and took him away, whereas now it was the people who didn’t talk to themselves who were the minority. Going past on the avenue were more and more young, energetic men and women, all of them suddenly thin, Yoel noticed and wrote down, tall and muscular and shaven headed. All the men shaven headed in skinny pants, all the women with big breasts, he noticed, and a tattoo on their lower backs or on their shoulders. All of them suddenly making money, all suddenly healthy and young, all in fast new cars, all sitting in cafés. Above all he was astonished by the number of people in cafés in the middle of the day, young people who would once have been at work and now they were drinking coffee and talking on cell phones and not sweating even in the middle of August. They never left the air-conditioning. Big breasts and a little blue light in their ears where once they would have stuck a flower. And he didn’t understand what they were saying. As if Hebrew had been changed into some other language. He was sure that it was Hebrew, but he didn’t understand much of anything that the young people said, they spoke so fast, and the accents sounded foreign. Attached to their ears they had instruments flickering with blue light and they talked loudly and walked with brisk steps, waving one hand in the air, and to Yoel it seemed a spectacle of utter madness, apocalyptic, even though he knew very well that there was nothing more natural, that a person from the eighteenth century would look at him in exactly the same way, if Yoel were standing under an overpass or talking on the phone at home. A wind swept dry leaves onto the asphalt path between the houses. He went into a stairwell and sat down. He opened the notebook with his story, wrote the date carefully on the first page and put the notebook back in his bag.

In the first days after his retirement he would sit at home facing the avenue and stare at the treetops. Birds screeched, quarreling in the foliage. Music. It was hard to concentrate. Books. A page, two pages. And suddenly he stood up. Thinking about the city and its future. Worried by the summer in December. And once the taxi driver said, “We have to really fuck ’em, the Arabs, not only in Lebanon,” and Yoel suddenly rose furiously to his feet and moved to the door and got out and was nearly run over. And he knew that he was waiting in unacknowledged suspense for a phone call from the office, and the telephone that didn’t ring somehow seemed to ring anyway, there was a silent ringing in the house. And he turned away from the tree and looked at length at the old black telephone, a heavy rotary-dial phone that he insisted on using even though it made so much noise and in spite of the new telephones with their buttons and short cuts and then those cell phones with all their memories and cameras. The telephone was silent and Yoel got up and went to check if it was connected to the wall, but he checked nonchalantly, as though absentmindedly, as if to show that it didn’t really bother him. He pushed the plug, but the plug was firmly in place. During his last weeks at work, when his young replacement had already started running around both the office and the building sites with his two telephones and his palm computer, Yoel had imagined his retirement as a great convalescence, but in its first days he actually felt like someone who had just fallen ill, not a severe illness but a bout of flu, throat a little sore, lower-back pains too, no need to stay in bed, no high fever, but something not right nevertheless, something out of joint, a slight pressure in his head. As if after swimming in the Amazon all your life, one morning you found yourself in the Yarkon. Now you’re in the Yarkon, he thought, and wrote in his notebook, “Go for a row on the Yarkon,” “Suggest it to Emile,” because you won’t be able to row the boat alone. And he knew that he wouldn’t suggest it, and he knew that Emile wouldn’t agree. And he felt his arms and said to them,“What a pair of sticks.” And he remembered how they’d sailed on the Yarkon, he and Emile and Leah, in a wooden boat, when was it, maybe the beginning of ’74, after they returned from the three-month trip they’d begun the night of Yom Kippur. And Yoel rowed and Emile fell asleep at the bottom of the boat, and Yoel stopped rowing for a minute and let the boat move of its own accord, and both of them looked at him lying there in the sunlight as the air moved through his green shirt. And he heard Leah’s voice saying to the water, “What a boy,” and suddenly he picked up the phone.