Forty-Seventeen Read online

  His young ex-girlfriend in London had once said she admired his ‘completeness’ after he had told her that he had finally got some things right in his life, his clothes, his travelling gear, his filing system. He handled his job well. He enjoyed the accoutrements of living, being properly equipped to face life. But he had confined his personal estate, he had no family, no major possessions. Even so, he felt that this pared-down existence, this confined estate, was still fragile, was on the verge of escaping his control.

  In the car on the way to Beirut, Yizhar said, ‘I have to repeat that this is dangerous country. Although we are in a non-military vehicle, even though we are staying in the Christian zone – it is still dangerous.’ Yizhar was out of uniform but on the floor on the passenger’s side was an Uzi and a two-way radio.

  They passed an occasional armoured personnel carrier, now and then a tank, they saw displaced persons riding on the top of their possessions on the backs of trucks – a now-familiar photographic image from many wars.

  On this visit to Europe he had wanted to seek out the traces of the Spanish Civil War and to play out the film The Passenger and perhaps to die in the Hotel de la Gloria. Now he thought, I am in another civil war, and I might die here, instead.

  ‘Beirut was named after Julia Augusta Berytus, the Roman emperor’s daughter, 64 BC. She was licentious,’ Yizhar said in the voice of a tour guide.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Edith said with a rush, delighting in her recollection, ‘she got into trouble with Augustus, didn’t she. I seem to think he banished her. Because of her behaviour.’

  ‘Something like that,’ said Yizhar.

  ‘I’m rather pleased I remembered that,’ Edith said.

  Had his great-grandmother been licentious? He was glad that he was offering himself up to death in a city named after a licentious woman.

  He wondered about Edith and her youth as a technical officer for the League of Nations in Beirut, living in the hotel district on the Avenue de Paris as she had described it. Dancing at night clubs. Was she wild? And in Spain as Ascaso’s mistress – or just friend, she hadn’t been clear on that.

  The bad thing was to be living but diminished by not wanting to be living. If you lived, you should live to the full, he’d always tried to do that. Either live fully or die. He was not good at living. He lived out of a swag. He had no centre. Today he was just as curious about death as he was about whatever living had to offer up ahead. He stared out at the windows of the worn and damaged buildings, welcoming any bullet which might spurt from them. He enjoyed the stark seriousness at least of having an Uzi machine gun on the floor at his feet. The two-way radio messages coming and going in flat Hebrew. He picked up the Uzi.

  ‘I hope you know about guns if you are going to play about with it,’ Yizhar said.

  ‘I know a bit about guns,’ he said, ‘I did basic army training.’

  ‘It’s the guns that I don’t like about all this,’ Edith said.

  He put the Uzi back on the floor at his feet.

  ‘I would, however, like to hold it for a moment,’ Edith said.

  He turned to Yizhar who said to her, without taking his eyes from the road, ‘Just don’t touch the trigger, Edith.’

  ‘Oh I won’t do anything silly.’

  He picked up the Uzi and carefully handed it over to Edith in the back.

  He remembered a party in his youth in Australia when Turvey had shot off a round from a Bren gun. He laughed to himself now about the hysterics of that evening. He told Yizhar and Edith the story. But now parties were predictable because infinite promise had gone from their lives. Turvey back then was forever preparing for revolution. Now he owned a computer software company.

  Negotiation had become the adventure of his life now. Negotiation over the wording of a preambular paragraph, the annexure, the attachment, the operative paragraphs – recalls, considers, affirms, concerned, aware, expresses, urges, declares, requests.

  ‘Of all the weapons, the machine gun is most full of evil intent,’ Edith said, handing back the gun.

  ‘I like firing machine guns,’ he said. ‘Do you like it?’ he asked Yizhar.

  ‘Not particularly. I see it as a desperate sort of weapon. Firing away all that lead in the wild hope of hitting something.’

  They passed through Sidon, where bulldozers were pushing garbage into the sea.

  Yizhar’s hand was on the horn almost constantly, moving aside people and animals who moved but did not bother to look at the car.

  ‘Of course when I was here before the war,’ Edith went on, ‘I never got down to the south – we went to the mountains. Now when I see it all in such disarray I feel we are falling backwards into history.’

  Yizhar stopped the car. ‘You drive,’ he said, getting out of the car and giving him the driver’s seat. ‘I’d better ride shotgun for a while. Remember, no matter what happens keep driving. There are no traffic police here. Rules, none.’ Yizhar took out a map.

  Guided by Yizhar he drove the car into Beirut.

  They had reached the green line which divided the Christian and Muslim sectors when a shot sounded and shooting began somewhere nearby. Despite the uselessness of the action, both he and Yizhar ducked involuntarily at the sound of the first shot.

  ‘Keep driving,’ Yizhar said, ‘whatever happens don’t stop.’

  Then a thud and a crack of the windscreen shattering at the back.

  ‘We’re hit.’

  ‘Keep on going,’ Yizhar said, gesturing south, bending down and taking up the Uzi which he cocked clumsily with none of the practised ease of an infantry man.

  The firing receded behind them.

  ‘You OK, Edith?’ he said, and he and Yizhar looked around, he fleetingly, returning his eyes to the road, having registered though that Edith was not all right, was slumped in her seat. ‘Shall I stop – has she fainted? Is she OK?’

  ‘You keep driving, I’ll look,’ and Yizhar rolled himself over into the back seat.

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘stop.’

  ‘Is she hit?’

  ‘No – I don’t think so.’

  Yizhar with Uzi in hand looked out and around the area. ‘Pull over against that wall.’

  He looked at Edith who was still unconscious, unmoving.

  Yizhar handed the Uzi to him. ‘Shoot anything that seems hostile. I think it’s her heart. She isn’t hit. But she’s dead. She’s gone.’ He was working on her chest.

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Afraid so. Let’s get the hell out of here,’ Yizhar said, ‘there’s nothing I can do. We’ll be better off back in Israel.’

  ‘She’s really dead?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  He looked down at her: but Edith, I was the one who wanted to go, you’ve got my bullet. But go with God, Edith. Or go with the universe you cared for.

  ‘She was seventy.’

  ‘She seemed to have lived well enough,’ Yizhar said, ‘but go, go.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, starting the car, pulling back onto the road, suppressing the shaking which was moving through him, ‘she probably did. She was going to leave her husband.’

  He pulled out the hip flask. ‘You want a shot?’ he asked Yizhar.

  Yizhar shook his head. ‘I’ll wait till I get back to the safety of the Hilton.’

  He decided to wait as well and put the hip flask back in his bag.

  Yizhar’s hand nervously patted the dash. ‘I’ll have some paperwork to do. Thank God she wasn’t killed by gunshot. We’ll avoid an inquiry. I’ll have to fiddle place of death. You might have to do false swearing.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I have friends at hospital. We’ll be OK.’

  ‘She could just as well have died on a flight of stairs.’

  Yizhar nodded. They drove back in virtual silence, not commenting on the urine and excreta smells coming from Edith.

  He had a dreadful feeling that he might have to live out the rest of his life, that somehow an early death had been taken from h
im – this was a nonsensical way of thinking, but as Louise had once said to him, ‘You have to decide whether to take omens or not to take omens.’ He had never decided whether to take them or not. Or whether reversing omens was a way of taking them too.

  ‘Were you close to her?’ Yizhar asked after a time.

  ‘In an odd way we were becoming closer. We’d been thrown together by this delegation.’

  He would have to talk to her husband. And to the government. And probably the news media back in Australia. She was an eminent person.

  ‘I was prejudiced against her at first – probably because of her age. But she was also very earnest – she lightened up as we went on. I seem though to have such a small reaction to her death. Sad, but not dramatically sad.’

  He told Yizhar that he’d heard of the death of his former wife from cancer while he’d been in Vienna. He had not been satisfied by his reactions to her death either. His reactions had seemed somehow deficient.

  ‘I think we expect culturally to be awed and stunned and so on by it. But generally we aren’t. I think it’s normal with someone not close to us to feel nothing.’

  Nothing to be said. Nothing to be known. Nothing to be felt.

  He found himself smiling at the recollection of Edith helping with a trick in Vienna that they’d played on the Russian delegate.

  Remembering too the drunken night in Vienna when late at night in her room their eyes had met with fleeting, hopelessly inappropriate carnal intent. Remembering her naked. Remembering the optical illusion of seeing his girlfriend’s face in Edith’s in the art gallery.

  Ex-wife Re-wed

  She did not tell him herself, Louise told him with that status of voice used for information or gossip of profound content – ‘Did you hear about Robyn?’

  He noticed that Louise did not use their usual expression ‘ex-wife’. Robyn had not been known as anything else but ‘ex-wife’ since they divorced – Jesus Christ, was it really fifteen years ago – and she remarried. She had become again the person ‘Robyn’ not just the ‘ex-wife’ character in Louise’s and his conversation.

  ‘Well? Tell me.’

  How would Louise have heard anything of Robyn, who now lived in Portugal and who moved in a different world?

  ‘It’s the Big C.’

  The Big C. Louise’s voice was enlivened by her role as the bearer of grim news, by being able to dance death into their lives.

  Louise was one of the few of his current friends who had known the ‘marriage’.

  ‘How did you hear?’ He wanted to know how she knew and he did not – given that neither of them was any longer in contact with Robyn.

  ‘Purely by chance,’ Louise said. ‘I was in Lyon at a trade exhibition when I met her.’

  ‘Does she say I gave her the cancer?’ It was a joking toughness to block the shock and the pity which were reaching him. ‘She blamed me for everything else.’ Louise managed a small laugh, it was their style of humour not Robyn’s style of humour. ‘How bad is it, Louise?’

  ‘Bad. Irreversible.’

  Next day there was an uninformative overseas call from Robyn on his answering machine. The first contact for years. He did not telephone but wrote a letter which told her he knew about her illness and which like all other exchanges since they’d broken was another effort to discharge the guilt he felt about their time together. A fading guilt, and an unfairly borne guilt, given that they’d married as teenagers. At times of low spirit, though, he still felt it was he who’d failed, who’d broken the vows. Of course it wasn’t like that, but at these low times he felt he should have stayed with the marriage despite the incompatibility which had shown up early. Would he have been any the worse off? Maybe he would have been anchored enough to become a writer when he’d mistakenly thought he would need to be unanchored. He was still plagued by how she’d crashed their bright red car on the third day they’d had it and he’d yelled at her, failed to comfort her. It was their first significant possession, a materialisation of their relationship. He should have comforted her; instead, he yelled at her. Or was she unconsciously crashing their relationship? As a callow husband he’d attacked her for feeling pre menstrual tension. He had read to her from a book which said it was ‘all in the mind’. He had forced her to admit that it was ‘all in the mind’ and to pretend she suffered nothing.

  His letter to her was short, he said he’d heard she was ill and he was willing her recovery and rooting for her with all his spirit, which he was. Rooting was an odd word for him to have settled on, in their country-town school days it had been fucking. He pondered this and then left the word in the letter.

  He said that for his part he remembered good times and rich moments from when they’d been young kids going into life together. He said he still suffered too from things he’d handled badly. He mentioned their ‘farcical reunion’ a few years earlier.

  She wrote back saying how affected she was to get a letter and that she too certainly carried good memories in her heart and had since laughed about their ‘farcical reunion’.

  Their daughter whom he’d never known was now at university in the States.

  She said she was returning to Australia and hoped he’d be in the country and able to see her and that it would not be a second ‘farcical’ reunion.

  After the boozy night with old friends at the Journalists’ Club he drove her back to their home town which was no longer a town so much as a suburb of a city.

  ‘We should call it “the suburb”, I suppose, not the “old town”,’ she said.

  ‘I guess we still see the town.’

  ‘I can still feel the town.’

  She had lost much weight but still seemed agile and he still saw in her the movements of the girlish hockey player. She gave off what he saw as a strained cheeriness and he had not mentioned her cancer and neither had she. He didn’t feel he should raise it, sensing it to be perhaps anti-therapeutic to acknowledge it or that cancer was something best handled with hauteur rather than candour.

  ‘The old school is really now the old school,’ he said, ‘as old as anything ever gets in this ever-renewing country.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘let’s go to the school. I’d like to see the old school again.’

  He felt the unspoken part of her sentence.

  ‘Remember planting those trees in the new school when we were prefects?’ she said, as they sat in the car looking at the row of eucalyptus trees which they’d planted, now well grown – twenty-five-years old. The summer wind gave them a green-silver light and the leaves seemed to shake, frustratedly, against the unmoving solidity of the trunk and limbs. The trees took him back to before high school, to the primary school and hot endless days when she and he had been children in the playground, hot and breathless, aware of each other but unable to express or understand this uncomfortable awareness, only able to express it finally by chasing, hair-pulling, tickling.

  ‘A penny for them.’

  They had been going so well and now she’d come out with one of those detestable phrases which he remembered once made up so much of her conversation. Her intelligent ordinariness had enraged him back then. During adolescence he’d fought against what he’d seen then as the tyranny of ordinariness and the tyranny of convention. He’d used excessive behaviour, flamboyance borrowed from literature, self-dramatisation, rule-breaking, bohemian posing, all as resistance to, and inoculation against, the ordinariness of his country-town life. He’d laid down rules for his friends’ conversation at high school – no clichés, no wishing people good luck, no salutations, no greetings. And now, even near her death he couldn’t let her get away with it, out it came.

  ‘I don’t know what I was thinking but I’m now thinking about how we tried to ban those sorts of expressions when we were here at school.’

  ‘What sorts of expressions?!’

  ‘Oh, sayings like, “a penny for them”.’ He felt foolish for having made the point.

  ‘Oh God yes, so you did.’ />
  He was trying to be light but somewhere there in him was the adolescent trying to remake the world, to impose his own minor tyrannies. He hoped she didn’t sense it. Back then she’d always been praised for her ‘common sense’, for being ‘down to earth’. He’d been striving for an ‘uncommon sense’. His models then were artists, revolutionaries, dreamers – none of which he’d become, becoming instead a servant of an international agency, practising mundane idealism, circumscribed dreaming, deferred dreaming, the illusions of a negotiated revolution. He turned again to her, recalling that along with the down-to-earthness she had also believed in some non-rational things, the meaning in coincidence, the usefulness of astrology. But what about his own White Knight plague of coincidences which had swept through his life that year? He smiled to himself, unable to reveal it to her. He still had to set an example for her, as he had tried to do back in high school, as the relentless rationalist. He then wondered fleetingly if she really did have cancer or whether this was a mid-life panic, had she really been diagnosed or was it some sort of intuitive self-diagnosis? She was capable of that.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you didn’t want people to say hello or goodbye, it wasted time, we were to speak only if we had something to say worth saying or truly felt. Yes. And everything had to be “original”.’ She snorted.

  ‘I was a bit of a zealot.’

  ‘You sure were.’

  This hurt, he didn’t want her to confirm that, he didn’t think he’d been a zealot. ‘Did you really all think I was a zealot?’

  ‘Oh yes. There was lots of talk about you. You were always trying to make the school – or our year – into some sort of branch of the Communist Party or a commune or whatever it was you were reading at the time. Walden. Maybe not a zealot but a very, very serious boy. Maybe that’s why I married you.’

  He remembered that it was back then that he’d had to confront his first sad misconception about the world. He’d wanted to believe that his friends at school were true students, his teachers true scholars, all concerned only with inquiry. That all adults respected truth and the weight of evidence.