Far behind, in Dizengoff, a little bit of cold breathed out of the open shops. The street itself stank like a dump.
The mother and daughter were swallowed up under the trees in Balfour Street, and Yoel thought that he had better get off before the avenue came to an end and the taxi reached the area of the central bus station. On no account did he want to end up there. In other words, that was where he was supposed to end up. And he said, “Nachmani Street please,” and the driver pretended not to hear because he wanted to catch the green light and he said, “What?” and Yoel said, “I want Nachmani, please,” and the driver said, “What, here?” and stole another few meters, for no reason, and then stopped after turning into Bezalel Yaffe Street. Which was where he liked to stop.
It was very quiet in Tel Aviv on that day. There was no explanation for this.
Yoel stood up to get out and suddenly, for no particular reason, he turned to the driver and said, “I want to say something to you, sir,” and the driver looked at the green light and said in a Bukharan accent, and with obvious impatience, “Well, what,” and Yoel said, “I wanted to thank you for the ride, I had a very comfortable ride. Anyone can see that you’re a professional driver.” And the driver looked at him for a moment, trying to decide if the white-haired passenger was setting a trap for him, and his right hand gripped the handle attached to the nickel rod that opened and closed the door. And his short thick fingers opened and closed on the worn nickel handle, and he said to Yoel, after some hesitation and a long look, “You know what?” and there was a long pause, and he stared though the front window at the traffic light, which turned orange and suddenly red, “Seven years I’m driving this taxi, seven years, and nobody ever said anything like that to me before. Not ever.” And he went on staring at Yehuda Halevi Street for a few seconds, and Yoel raised his hand in embarrassment. And when he raised his hand the taxi began to drive very slowly, as if reluctantly, and Yoel sensed the driver’s eyes fixed on his back. And he thought, if I lower my hand he’ll stop and reverse towards me. For sure. And he lowered his hand.
Ten years after she gave him away the idea of having another child came up. They were twenty-six, both of them. “The difficult period” was already ostensibly behind them. They wanted to turn a new page. There was a smell of cigarettes in the house, the walls breathed in the smoke day and night. Breathed it out. They decided to quit. They quit. For a month or two. They painted the walls white. And she tried to get pregnant. But the walls coughed. The walls were giving up smoking. Black walls. Suffocating walls. Black lung-walls. Coal. They had various copper vessels full to the brim. Ashtrays. The house wouldn’t let her.
Every day she went downstairs and tipped all the stubs into the garbage. Knocked the copper against the bin. But when she went up again the stench would hit her in the stairwell.
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