Five Seasons Page 13

  He found a small sign that said “Please Do Not Disturb” in several languages, including Arabic, hung it on the outside door handle, and went back downstairs, feeling he had earned the right to go off and see Berlin on his own, especially as she already knew the city and he didn’t. For a moment he considered eating her breakfast, which was going to waste in the dining room, yet how would it look if he did? And so he stepped outside and into a nearby café, where he ordered a second breakfast of coffee and a small frankfurter to help brace himself against the cold. Their main meal, he assumed, would again be in the evening, when she would have her strength and appetite back. The question of the Talwin, however, still bothered him: he would have to find the drugstore and count the number of pills in a box to know how many she had taken.

  Outside the day was in full swing and on the steamy sidewalks the shopkeepers were busily sweeping away the snow and polishing the brass handles of their doors. The entire area seemed to be undergoing renovation, for beside slummy old grocery and junk stores there were other, quite fashionable shops, all kinds of boutiques and art galleries. He soon reached the drugstore, but the funny old man with the cravat wasn’t there. In his place stood two slender, stern-looking pharmacists defending their locked cabinets of drugs, the open straw hampers, apparently a private promotional device of the night shift, having vanished too, so that, after a brief debate with himself, Molkho decided to forgo the Talwin and walk on, treading adventurously on the snow past the high wall of the old fortress, though perhaps it had been a factory or school. The street ran downhill now, curving left, then right, and soon grew quieter and less crowded. The snow beneath his feet was thicker too. Passing an apparently abandoned building and stopping by a concrete wall between two houses, he noticed a rusty skein of barbed wire protruding from the snow. Dimly he had a sense of déjà vu: there was no way of passing the barrier or seeing what lay beyond it, and so he tried to outflank it to his left, only to encounter it again, slightly taller than a man and scribbled over with graffiti. Only now did he realize that it was the Berlin Wall itself, which he had never imagined being so low and so gray. He stepped back, looking for a vantage point from which to see the other side. A few deserted houses were visible there, and something that looked like a frozen pond. Suddenly, with a surge of pleasure, he knew what he was reminded of: it was of that other divided city, the Jerusalem of his youth. At first, half-afraid of some Communist body snatcher, he walked parallel to the wall at a distance. But the cold grew harsher, snowflakes swirled around him, and afraid of slipping, he followed it more closely, making his way slowly alongside it. Once in all his childhood it had snowed in Jerusalem; his mother had been so afraid of his catching pneumonia that she refused to let him out of the house and—it still made him laugh to think of it—sent his father up to the roof with a wash basin to bring him down some snow to play with. If only she could see him now!

  Nevertheless, not wanting to take any chances with the storm, which was getting fiercer, he turned and walked back to the hotel, deciding when he reached it, however, not to go inside just yet. Let her sleep a while longer, he thought. In fact, it was beginning to seem likely that she might sleep for another day or two and force him to extend his stay. It was lucky his children were grown and could get along without him, he told himself, passing the hotel entrance and disappearing down some more side streets, which soon emptied into a large square. Yes, it was an oversight not to have asked his mother-in-law for the name of her old street, which he pictured being like one of these. Why, right here might be where his wife had played as a child, unless it was further on, in what was now a no-man’s-land between East and West. He could hardly believe that just four months after her death he was touring the city she had refused to come back to. But the storm was still gathering strength, and he resolved to return to the hotel for his fur cap, which he had had the good sense to pack.

  In the lobby he wondered why the old lady at the reception desk had changed clothes; then, coming closer, he saw that a different and even older old lady, who smiled at him blankly, had replaced her. “Sechs,” he said in what he felt sure was a much-improved accent while raising six fingers, and she gave him the key at once, responding in German to an English remark about the snow, so that they stood talking for several minutes in perfect agreement until he nodded one last time and went up to his room, where he found a swarthy young chambermaid changing the soap in the bathroom. Excusing himself, he rummaged through his suitcase until he found the hat. The windows of the room were frosted over. For a minute he debated going upstairs to lock the legal adviser’s door against the chambermaid, but in the end he thought better of it. His fur hat on his head, he descended the stairs again, nodded to the old woman, returned the key, and strode gaily out into the snowstorm, whose soft, giant flakes now whirled round and round in the viridescent light of a sun reflected back from the battered old sidewalk.

  A church bell rang in the white fog, which seemed to issue from some vast darkness and through which, brushing by him as bulky as bears, pedestrians made their way. He paused by the window of a small, empty barbershop in which an old, white-smocked barber sat reading a newspaper in a big, multilevered leather chair, the tools of his trade set out gleaming before him—razors, scissors, old clippers, a stack of spotlessly laundered white towels—as though in a cozy little operating room. A fireplace was burning in one corner, beside which stood a potted plant. On the walls hung pictures of clean-cut, smooth-shaven men, and there was something so confidence-inspiring about the whole place that Molkho nearly stepped inside for a haircut. In the end, however, he continued on his way, once again regretting the lack of his mother-in-law’s old address, since tracking down his wife’s childhood could have given this aimless morning a profound purpose of its own. Should he step into a post office and call her long distance? But he knew that by the time she understood him and remembered how to spell the German name, the call would have cost him a fortune, and so, rejecting the idea, he entered a large department store full of shoppers seeking shelter from the storm.

  Fingering the clothes, he went from floor to floor and even bought a sweater for his daughter, a double-barreled canteen for his younger son, and, for his mother-in-law, a collapsible cane with four jointed sections that made him think of Mozart’s magic flute. In the furniture department he opened closets, slid drawers back and forth in their grooves, and passed through a huge area divided up into living rooms, going from one to another and sitting with his legs crossed in sofas and easy chairs while pretending to be a welcome guest in each. And yet, thinking of the woman asleep in her hotel room, his pleasure was mingled with guilt, as it had been in those not so distant days in Haifa when he had sometimes done shopping while his wife lay in her large bed, the prow of which breasted the waves of a different existential sea.

  Through the windows of the store he could see that the sun was back out and that the snowstorm was over. The morning was getting on. Most likely the legal adviser was up by now and wondering where he was. He hurried back, proud of his perfect sense of direction in the little streets of the pleasant neighborhood, entering the hotel on a carpet of fresh white snow played on by squealing children. Though the lobby was as silent as ever, breakfast was gone from the table. Had they finally given up on her or had she actually come down to eat? He sechsed the old lady at the reception desk, was given his key, and went first to his room, which had been tidied up, took off his hat and coat, and shoved the gifts into a suitcase before bounding upstairs. Apprehensively he entered her room. She was still lying motionless, though it was already after eleven. The Germans, so it seemed, had let her sleep. At once he cheered up again, feeling as if all that snowy morning he had been burrowing toward this strange woman down some hidden tunnel. And yet the guilt and the fear were still there. Suppose something had really happened to her? The room was dark, pungent with the sour smell of sleep. He decided to wake her, no matter what.

  “Get up,” he said, “get up. Those pills really k
nocked you out. It’s almost lunchtime and you haven’t eaten yet. I’m worried about you.” She opened her eyes, and he helped her sit up weakly in bed. “There, you had me worried!” he said. “I told you not to take a second pill, it was really unnecessary.” She sat listening dreamily, her eyelids poised to shut again, the dry skin of her face deeply creased, an aging woman he had slipped a powder to. “The first was unnecessary also,” she said at last, perfectly distinctly. He smiled anxiously. “Maybe it was,” he confessed, “I didn’t know you were so sensitive.” In the ensuing silence he thought he was losing her again, but suddenly she exclaimed, “Just to these,” and said no more. And in fact, he now recalled with a glow that his wife, too, though she was used to all kinds of medicines, had slept a great deal when first put on the Talwin in late spring. Every new drug had been an adventure then, her reactions to which they had vigilantly lived through together. Sometimes, curious to know how she felt, he had even been tempted to try it himself, deterred only by his reluctance to gamble with his health, on which the entire family depended, for if at first he had sought to be sick together with her, gradually he had had to relent and let her illness serve for the two of them. Now, observing the legal adviser’s stupor, he remembered his wife’s reaction to the Talwin, the “philosophy pill,” as they had called it, for it had caused her mind to feel separated from her body, and her thoughts to be uncommonly clear. The long conversations they had had then were carried on as if from opposite ends of the earth, and yet, though even her quickest responses seemed to travel across far continents, they were unfailingly sharp on arrival. The memory of it made him miss her. Where are you now? he wondered. Are you really gone forever? And when would he join her there?

  He let out a laugh. So did the legal adviser. Her eyes were shut again as though with the pleasure of her involuntary slumber, over which he presided worriedly. I’ll bet the old squirrel doesn’t do this often, he thought; it isn’t every day that a high-strung career woman like her gets such a good night’s sleep. Her breathing grew slow and regular, as if, glued to the rumpled sheets, she once more wished to drift off, but he refused to let her and was even about to turn her over in bed when suddenly he remembered her foot. “How’s your ankle?” he asked. She didn’t answer, still drugged by the potion in her veins, and so he pushed aside the blanket and groped for her bandaged foot, which seemed to have shrunk to a child’s size during the night. He lifted it and expertly undid the elastic like a crack surgeon treating a minor infection. “It’s much better,” he announced happily, as if discovering that it presented a different and less worrisome case than that of its owner. The legal adviser said nothing; no doubt he could have her other foot, too, if only he would let her sleep. Swiftly he replaced the bandage, talking out loud to himself as he had done in his wife’s final months. “This can’t go on. You have to eat. You’ve already missed breakfast, but I’ll go get you something, at least some coffee and rolls.” And indeed, off he went to ask the old lady at the reception desk, in a combination of sign language and English contrived to sound like German, for a canister of coffee, after which he dashed out into the street to buy some rolls and pastries, bringing it all back up on a tray, only to find the patient fast asleep again. He drew the curtain, pulled up the blinds, even opened the window to let in a blast of cold air, determined to make her wake up.

  And she did, wearily and unwillingly. He helped her out of bed, amazed at how light she was, hurrying to check the sheets as soon as she shut the bathroom door behind her. Sure enough, they were sticky and slightly damp. Deftly he shook them out, reversed them, and spread them again on the mattress; so proficient a sheet-changer had he become that he could even do it while his wife lay in bed. Then he tidied up as best he could with one ear cocked toward the bathroom, afraid that the silence there might spell a new and dangerous relapse. At last, though, she emerged, washed and even wearing makeup, causing him to marvel at the quiet intimacy that had sprung up between them, as though they were an old married couple. Perhaps, it occurred to him as he served her from the tray, her hibernation was simply a way of getting attention. She ate and drank, laughing at being so weak that she could scarcely swallow her food, while he poured himself a cup of coffee and ate another roll. “Where have you been all morning?” she asked, regarding him for the first time as if he were more than just a bedside shade. “Oh, around,” he replied. He had even run into the Berlin Wall not far from the hotel and been disappointed. “But that isn’t the place for it,” she explained. “Go to the Brandenburg Gate. It’s much more impressive there. It cuts right through the heart of the city.” He told her about the storm, too, of which she had been unaware. “Berlin’s white all over,” he said. “The snow’s caught up with me from Paris, though the Germans seem to be taking it more calmly than the French.” Maybe I should bring her a bowl of it, he thought when she expressed regret at missing it. Yet, as funny as that seemed, he only answered, “You should rest up for the opera tonight. There’s no need to overdo it.” He watched her lie flushed on the pillow, hypnotized by the to-and-fro movement of her earrings—something his wife had never worn—while she looked quizzically back at him, trying dutifully to listen and pecking at her roll like a child who has no appetite, evidently unused to such loving care, even from her doting family.

  He wondered whether to take her temperature. Could her sleepiness be a symptom of some deeper disorder? Outside the window the snow was flying grayly again, and the rumble of the radiator broke the silence like an airplane. The daylight grew faint, turned to a milky grime by the storm, and he sat in the armchair feeling logy himself, trying to get her to talk about something, her childhood, for instance, or even her reasons for choosing this hotel. Had she been here with someone, perhaps her late husband, on a previous opera tour? She was not up to answering, though; her replies were short and drowsy, as if a new attack of sleep were imminent, and so he switched the subject to himself, or rather to his wife, who, though bom in this city, had never wanted to return to it. The legal adviser, however, seemed to know all about it, for she dozed off in the middle of a sentence. She must have been a pharmaceutical virgin if two little pills could do this to her, Molkho thought, carefully removing the tray with its half-eaten roll and nearly full cup of coffee from her limp hands, which made her sit up with a start and then slump to a prone position in the bed. “I suppose it’s partly my fault,” he whispered, hoping for a little sympathy. At first, lying mutely on the pillow, she didn’t react, yet all at once she smiled bitterly. “Just partly?” she asked, which was more than enough to alarm him. “I never thought,” he stammered, “that you would be affected like this. Why, they weren’t even prescription pills. I bought them over the counter. My wife...” But sleep had carried her off again, and her breath came in slow, heavy waves. How, he asked himself worriedly, could he fly back to Israel tomorrow if she didn’t break the habit by then? He had no choice but to stay by her side and wait for her to sleep off the poison in her system. Meanwhile, not even the snowstorm seemed able to rouse her.

  He stretched out in the armchair and watched the snowflakes, which, caught in an updraft, seemed to blow skyward from the earth; they did not look to him like crystals of frozen vapor but like the tom whites of an egg or some scrambled, primeval matter. Well, then, he told himself, I’ll just sit here like I used to do in Haifa. In fact, it was even quieter here because of the storm windows. He thought of that final month, in which so much time had sometimes elapsed without talking that at last his wife would beg, “Say something, anything, tell me what’s new in the world.” “Nothing is new,” he would answer. “All I care about is you, nothing else interests me”—which happened to be true enough. Now he was sitting by another bed, trusting once more in his patience to compensate for the intellectual superiority of its occupant, yet harassed by a feeling of fatigue. Groping for a pick-me-up, he noticed a copy of the Bible here too. This one—perhaps because the bed was a double one—had the Old Testament in it as well, but unfortunately on
ly in German. He tried mouthing the first line of Genesis, but then shut the volume and put it down.

  He could feel his tiredness flowing through him. Should he take off his shoes and lie down beside her? After all, his coming and going all morning had exhausted him too. And yet he stayed where he was. In the first place, it might frighten her; and in the second, even if it didn’t, as soon as she realized he only wanted to sleep, she would suspect him of being a pervert. The best tactic was to get some shut-eye in the chair while she slept. Was she someone he could marry? And if so, where would they live—in his house or hers? Perhaps they would have to sell both apartments and buy a single larger one with room for all their children. He was beginning to doze off himself now, lulled by the rhythm of his breath, but suddenly, still curled beneath her blanket, she woke him by saying quietly, “You really needn’t sit here all day. Why don’t you have a look at the city? You’re flying home tomorrow, and who knows when you’ll be back. There’s an expressionist museum not far from here with some important early twentieth-century paintings. Go out and enjoy yourself. I’ll feel better soon, I promise.”

  He sensed a note of rejection in her voice. “All right,” he said, getting up, “I’ll take another walk.” He collected the coffee cups and unfinished roll and asked if there was anything else she wanted, a thermometer perhaps. “No thanks,” she replied, leaving him to exit quietly with the tray, though he could just as well have left it behind. As he waited for the elevator he heard her patter across the floor and turn the key in her lock, and felt sure, cut to the quick, that their brief affair was over.