The day after she saw Yoel to his plane, David, the Jewish foreman, came accompanied by three Arab workers, members of the same family, looking amazingly alike. They all wore old woolen hats. They sat on the edges of the chairs, careful not to ruin the upholstery, with their eyes cast down most of the time. Only occasionally would they raise their eyelids and cast a quick glance at her and the apartment, squinting at the baby on her lap. David wrote down some kind of agreement on a piece of paper, explaining some sentences in Arabic, and they nodded their heads in consent. David copied their names from a form he’d brought with him and their identity numbers from the creased documents they took out of their pockets. He wrote out a description of the dimensions of the room they were to build, detailing the thickness of the walls, the number of electric sockets and their location in the room, the break through the opening for the stairs, the type and color of the plaster. Beside the description he wrote the amounts to be paid as the work progressed. Before signing, she insisted that a final deadline be clearly written, obligating them to finish the work within two months, before Yoel’s return.
Then the three of them stood up at the same time and headed for the door. There, on the threshold, after she thanked him for his assistance, David replied, “Think nothing of it, dear lady. It’s because I can see you’re a fine girl, with an adventurous character. Not many women would do something like this. So here’s to you! And if you need something—ask for David in the Hershkovitz building any time. Good luck! They’re good workers, up on scaffolds from the age of fifteen,” and in her ear softly, “Better than ours, believe me.”
Sitting on the open roof that summer, opposite the sky spread above her with rows of painted white clouds, hearing her baby babble, his voice rising and falling as he tried out his vocal cords, she thought: how did things go so far that those men, whose gaze avoided her eyes, who shrank in her presence with shoulders bowed as though narrowing their bodies, answering her questions with a soft voice as though forever guilty, how did it happen that on that first evening in November they sat on the edge of the chairs, and by December they were already marching through her house like lords of the manor, turning on Yoel’s radio, opening the refrigerator to look for fresh vegetables, rummaging through the cabinet for fragrant shaving cream, and patting her baby on the head?
AT FIRST THEY still seemed to her like a single person, before she learned that Hassan had elongated eyes whose bright color was like the band of wet sand at the water’s edge. Ahmad had a broad nose, sitting in the middle of his flattened face, between his narrow eyes, his lips thick like an African’s. Salah’s ears were pointed and his cheeks were sunken. Only the pimples on his face gave it some thickness, making it look like the pocked, thick skin of an orange.
On the first day, they arrived in an old pickup truck that had once been orange, but now on its dented face there were only islands of peeling paint and its windows were missing. They got out and unloaded gray cinder blocks near the parking lot. Then the truck pulled away with a grinding noise, returning in a short while with a long wooden beam on top. After a short consultation among themselves, the truck was parked in the parking lot and the beam laid on an angle, the lower part leaning on the back of the truck and the top rising above the edge of the roof. Until the baby started crying inside the house, she stood at a little distance, her hands in the pockets of her slacks, and watched how one of them drew out a tangle of ropes with a saddle-shaped yoke at the end. He stood on the roof and harnessed himself with knots, looking like a coolie in a historical film. One of the others loaded block after block into the basket on the rope, and the worker on the roof pulled them up along the apartment beam, while the third worker, standing on the edge of the roof, leaned over and gathered the bricks one by one. Examining them from below, she saw how their faces grew sweaty with the effort, and their hands became dusty and scratched by the rough blocks. By the time she had put the baby to bed and come out again, she saw that they had unloaded the rest of the blocks on the lawn and disappeared with the truck, though she hadn’t heard the sound of the motor. The next day, after turning the matter over in her mind for sleepless hours, she decided she must demonstrate her authority over them, and was ready and waiting for them in her window, cradling the baby in her rounded arms, anger lending force to her movements. From the window she shouted at them as they approached, “Why did you leave in the middle of work yesterday? And today . . .” She looked at her watch with a clumsy movement, stretching her neck over the baby lying at her breast. “Today you come at nine! You said you’d start working at six! This way you won’t finish in ten months!”
“Lady,” said the one with the golden eyes, insulted, “Today was police roadblocked. Not possible we leave early before four morning, lady.”
Something in her recoiled at the sight of the beaten dog’s eyes he raised up toward her in her window, at the sound of his broken voice. But she, tensing her strength to suppress the tremor that awoke within her, threatening to soften her anger, shouted, “And yesterday what happened? Was also roadblocked?” Maliciously she imitated his grammatical error. “You went away and left half the blocks down there on the grass.”
For the first time she saw the movement that was later to become routine: the jaws clamping down on each other as though chewing something very hard, digging a channel along the line of his teeth. Later she was to learn: that’s how they suppress anger, hatred. They clench their teeth to suppress the wild rage that surges up, that only rarely breaks out and flashes in their pupils.
“Yesterday my friend Ahmad, he hurted his, the nail his finger.”
Behind him his companion raised a bandaged hand, and she looked out of her pretty window, framed with Catalan-style wooden blocks, feeling how the three men in their tattered work clothes were defeating her, looking up at her from their places.
And two hours later, when she had fed and changed the baby and put him to sleep in his crib, her mind was constantly on the uncomfortable feeling that had dwelt in her ever since her conversation with them, when she had spoken to them like a cruel lord of the manor. Now, knowing full well she was doing something she shouldn’t, but still letting the spirit of the moment drown out the voice of reason, she went out of the front door carrying a large tray, bearing a china coffeepot decorated with rosebuds, surrounded by cups with matching saucers, spoons with an engraved pattern, and a platter of round honey cakes. She stood there clutching the heavy tray, her head tilted back, debating whether to put the tray down on the marble landing of the stairs, climb up the wooden ladder that leaned against the building, reaching the edge of the roof, and invite them down for coffee; or perhaps it would be better to call them from where she stood. Relentlessly aware of her ridiculous position, she suddenly discovered she didn’t remember any of their names. Then a head appeared over the edge of the roof, and she found herself calling to him quickly, before he disappeared, “Hello, hello, I have some coffee for you.” Ashamed of the shout that had burst from her, she set down the tray and escaped before one of them came down and brought her offering up to his companions.
That afternoon, placing her wide-awake baby in his crib, she put on old jeans and Yoel’s army jacket and climbed up to the roof to see how they were getting along with the work. The tray with the rosebud pattern coffeepot and the pretty cups stood in a corner of the roof, cigarette butts crushed in the remainder of the murky liquid in the saucers. She stood and looked for a long while at the sight, which she would recall afterward as a kind of symbol: the fine Rosental china from the rich collection her grandmother had brought from Germany heaped up carelessly, lying next to sacks of cement and heavy hammers.
“We finished the concrete rim,” said Hassan, who seemed to have taken upon himself the task of spokesman. “Now we have to put water and it dry.”
“Is it twenty centimeter?” she spoke like them.
“It twenty to the meter” He took a metal measuring tape out of his pocket.
“Is it two centimeters over the edge of the floor?”
It seemed to her they exchanged hurried glances, as if they had conspired together before she came, and she grew tense and suspicious.
“Did you bring