“Yochi, is that you?”
“What’s up?” Rivlin asked quietly.
“Did you eat so fast?”
“It seems I did…”
“But there’s someone else with you,” she said worriedly. “Who is it?”
He dodged the question. “Who could it be?”
“But there is!” She sounded fearful. “Someone is with you! Is it your driver?”
“My driver?”
The unseen husband smiled ironically. His blue, froggy eyes darted with amusement, as if reconfirming the oddness of the woman he had married and suffered with. Putting a finger to his lips, he turned and left.
Ayal arrived at last, tired but in full possession of himself. When told of his father’s visit, he said angrily to Rivlin, “You shouldn’t have let him come near her,” as if he were talking about two disturbed children.
It was ten o’clock when, back in a wet, glittering Tel Aviv street full of strollers taking the air after the storm, he climbed into the jeep and woke Rashid — who, having filled the vehicle with smoke from one of Fu’ad’s cigars, now lay fast asleep beneath a blanket.
“Look here, Rashid,” he said. “It’s turned into such a long day that I’m not driving back with you unless you let me pay you.”
“Pay me?” The messenger’s coal black eyes regarded him blearily. “You couldn’t afford what a day like this costs.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” the Orientalist said, offended. “I’m not a charity case. I can afford whatever you would normally take. Just tell me honestly what that is.”
“Normally?” Rashid smiled to himself, as if at a new thought. “For a long, hard day like this with a four-wheel drive vehicle, I’d take… at least… at least fifteen hundred shekels.”
“Fifteen hundred?” Though unable to conceal his shock, he quickly recovered and laughed derisively. “If that’s the going price, fine. Why not?” Grandly he pulled out a checkbook and wrote a check, while promising Rashid that his wife would read up on the immigration laws dealing with the reunion of families.
The Arab jammed the check in his pocket and replied in a half hopeless, half newly dismissive tone:
“You can tell the judge not to try too hard, Professor. Laws have got nothing to do with it.”
15.
I have a strange pet, half kitten, half lamb. It’s a hand-me-down from my father, but only now has it begun to grow.
— Franz Kafka
THE HEAVY RAINS, WHICH went on falling in the north for another week, turned the dirt roads of the Israeli security zone in southern Lebanon into treacherous bogs. After a Bedouin tracker was killed by a mine concealed in the mud, Central Command suspended all foot patrols and kept the roads open with armored vehicles. The Commanding Officer of the trackers’ platoon, a lieutenant whose name was Netur Kontar, hurriedly applied for leave and was granted it.
The CO was a Druze of about forty, a heavy man with a big mustache. Before leaving his base, he informed his family on the Carmel that he was going first to the village of B’keya in the Galilee, where he had promised to let his Christian dentist friend Marwan pull an infected wisdom tooth. If the weather improved, he might also join him and his friends for a night of hunting.
Kontar had been an avid hunter since he was a small boy. His father, discovering early that he had a natural instinct for finding his way at night without getting lost, took him along on his hunting trips, during which young Netur sometimes spent entire nights perched silently in the treetops. It was so hard to wake him the next morning that he was almost expelled from school. If it hadn’t been for his older sister, who did all his homework, he would never have graduated.
It was in the army, however, that his abilities became fully appreciated. As a recruit in boot camp, he so impressed his officers with his navigational skills that they vied to take him on their nighttime maneuvers. When his three years of conscripted service were over, the Northern Corps, loath to lose an ace tracker, made him the unusual offer of a commission, without requiring him to take an officers’ training course, and immediate command of a platoon in southern Lebanon.
The young Druze accepted, not only because the conditions were good and the job was a feather in his cap, but also because the army was a first-rate base from which to pursue his life’s passion. Throughout his long years of daily exposure to mines, bayonet charges, and booby traps, he took comfort in the regimental armory, out of which he enhanced his collection of weapons with an array of silencers, telescopic lenses, starlight sensors, and other devices, to say nothing of camouflage nets, which made excellent snares, and stale bread from the kitchens, which was good bait for wild boars. After losing his right thumb to a mine blast, he was afraid he had impaired his trigger finger, and for a while he suffered from depression. But the impediment was overcome, and the old army jeep that he was given in compensation, which he quickly filled with the equipment that now went with him everywhere, made him a legendary figure among the hunters of northern Israel and even of southern Lebanon.
Today, however, as he knocked on the door of the dental clinic in B’keya, Netur Kontar was in a troubled mood, both because of his painful wisdom tooth and of a strange story told him by his father. At first he didn’t mention it. Leaning back in the dentist’s chair, he opened an uncomplaining mouth and let his head be jerked this way and that while his friend gaily pulled his tooth and told funny stories to distract him. Yet once Netur Kontar had spat out the last of the blood, rinsed his mouth thoroughly, admired its new hole in a hand mirror, and taken off his bib, he asked the assistant to leave him alone with the dentist so that he could speak his mind.
Netur Kontar’s father, the renowned hunter of his childhood, was now an octogenarian. Yet several nights ago, Netur told the Christian dentist, the old man had gone hunting in the hills near Megiddo — where, in the moonlight, he spied a creature like none he had ever seen before. It had the height and shape of a large lamb and the head and claws of a cat, and it moved by alternating wriggles and skips. Its round, green eyes, wild and roving, were catlike and lamblike at once. Instead of cat’s whiskers it had heavy muttonchops that gleamed pink in the light of the moon.
Surprisingly, the old hunter told his son, this strange mongrel made no attempt to flee. Curious and frisky, it let out a sound that was neither a meow, nor a purr, nor a bleat, but rather a hoarse groan, and approached the old Druze in a friendly manner, nuzzling him and sniffing at his clothes as if they were on the best of terms. Yet as the old Druze was wondering how best to trap the animal and bring it back to his village, it seemed to guess his intentions and sprang from his arms, scratching his forehead and disappearing on the bushy hillside.
The old man was determined to pursue the matter. Although being clawed by an unidentified beast required medical treatment, he spent the next day secretly making a large rope net, with which he returned to the scene of the encounter the following night. He set out a bowl of milk and a chopped fish, sprinkled them with fresh alfalfa, and hid in the branches of a tree to see what would happen.
It was only toward dawn, as he crouched in the tree half-asleep and half-shaking from cold, that the mongrel appeared again. This time it resembled neither a cat nor a lamb, but a cross between a goat and a German shepherd. It sniffed at the food, consumed it all, and glanced fearlessly at the old hunter as he slipped slowly down from his tree. This time, too, it let itself be petted and even turned over on its back, enabling him to see that it was sexless — neither male, female, nor in between. “Well, then,” Netur Kontar’s father thought, his desire to show the strange animal off to his friends and family growing stronger by the minute, “this is a pure miracle, a one-time creation of God’s that will never reproduce itself.” Yet as soon as he spread the large net he had brought, the animal gave a great leap and — before bounding off toward the valley of Jezreel — nearly tore out the eye of the old Druze who had planned to catch it.
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