A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [241]
I developed a secret little game that I could play for hours on end without moving, without speaking, with no accessories, not even a pencil and paper. I would look at the strangers in the café and try to guess, from their clothes and gestures, from the paper they were reading or the drinks they had ordered, who they all were, where they came from, what they did, what they had done just before they came here, and where they were going afterward. That woman over there who had just smiled to herself twice—I tried to deduce from her expression what she was thinking. That thin young man in a cap who had not taken his eyes off the door and was disappointed every time anyone came in: what was he thinking about? What did the person he was waiting for look like? I sharpened my ears and stole snatches of conversation out of the air. I leaned over and peeped to see what everyone was reading, I observed who was in a hurry to leave and who was just settling down.
On the basis of a few uncertain outward signs, I made up complicated but exciting life stories for them. That woman with the embittered lips and the low-cut dress, for example, sitting at a corner table in a thick cloud of cigarette smoke: three times in the space of an hour by the big clock on the wall behind the counter she has stood up, disappeared into the ladies', then returned to sit in front of her empty cup, chain smoking with her brown cigarette holder, casting an occasional glance at the tanned figure in the vest sitting at a table near the hat stand. Once she stood up and went over to the man in the vest, bent over, said a few words to which he replied only with a nod, and now she's sitting smoking again. How many possibilities there are! How dizzyingly rich the kaleidoscope of plots and stories I can weave from these fragments! Or maybe she just asked him if she could have the newspaper he was reading when he was finished with it.
My eyes attempt in vain to escape the profile of the woman's ample bosom, but when I close them, it comes closer, I can feel its warmth, it almost enfolds my face. My knees begin to shake. The woman is waiting for her lover, who has promised to come but forgotten, and that's why she's sitting there chain smoking so desperately, drinking one black coffee after another, to soothe the lump in her throat. She disappears to the ladies' from time to time to powder her face and hide the signs of her tears. The waitress has brought the man in the vest a goblet of liqueur, to drown his sorrow because his wife has left him for a younger man. Perhaps at this very moment the pair are sailing away on some love boat, dancing cheek to cheek by the light of the moon, which is reflected in the ocean, at a ball given by the captain, dreamy music from the Edison Cinema wafting around them as they dance, on their way to some outrageous resort: St. Moritz, San Marino, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, Sans Souci.
I go on weaving my web. The young lover, whom I visualize in the form of the proud, manly sailor depicted on the packet of Nelson Navy Cut, is actually the man who promised the chain-smoking woman to meet her here this evening, and now he's a thousand miles away. She is waiting in vain. "Have you, too, sir, been abandoned to your fate? Have you, like me, been left all alone?" That, in the language of old romantic stories, is how she addressed the man in the vest when she went over to his table a moment ago and bent over him, and he answered with a nod. Soon the forsaken couple will walk out of the café together, and outside in the street they will link arms without another word needing to be spoken.
Where will they go together?
My imagination paints avenues and parks, a moonlit bench, a lane leading to a little house behind a stone wall, candlelight, closed shutters, music, and here the story becomes too sweet and terrible for me to tell it to myself or to bear, and I hasten to take my leave of it. Instead