10th Scene
“WHAT ARE YOU DRIVING AT?”The living room of the Shahari family.
Nurit’s father sits at the table waiting for his evening dinner while Nurit and her mother are in the kitchen, busy preparing it.
Nurit’s Father (addressing the audience): I’m sitting here and wait for my food. Grammar means nothing to me. Outside, there’s a soft wind, and it’s blowing. I’m back from work. So, as a matter of course, I sit here. The sea’s not far from here. I can smell its tang and its salt. Yet, if I paid no attention to it, I wouldn’t notice. But on evenings like this I’m drawn to the scent, and I seek it out.Our army is throwing scat-rockets on South Lebanon once again. One of our soldiers has died on the Lebanese border. There’s no innocence in this world, and if you’re seeking the innocent you are seeking in vein.Around me there’s Haifa, a city with no innocence either and with no innocent souls living in it. The streets are empty after darkness in this city. In Tel Aviv, and even down in Jerusalem, life begins after darkness. But Haifa, it seems, prefers a good night’s sleep.In the kitchen there’s my wife and my daughter. And still, dear friends, I am waiting for my food. (He listens, as we hear the door bell ring.) Someone is ringing the door bell.
Maybe he’s smelled the food. (shouting for Nurit) Nurit!Nurit’s Voice: Yes.
Father: Open the door!
We hear the door being opened and Nurit and her mother exchange greetings with the visitor, who proceeds to enter the living room. He is a man in his seventies, tall and energetic, despite his progressed age
.ENTER ROSENBAUM.
Father: Shalom, Mar Rosenbaum! I welcome you to the humbleness of this hut. How are matters?
Father: They’re in a mess, of course. Pray take a seat!
Rosenbaum: Thank you. (He sits down.) Your daughter, I must say, is growing more beautiful by the day. She’s become a young lady, almost intimidatingly real. If that’s the expression…
Father: She’s adorable.
Rosenbaum: I can still see her sitting on my knees -a bold memory for an old man, seeingher as she is today- playing with that doll…whatever did she call her? her as she is today- playing with that doll…whatever did she call her?
Rosenbaum: Ruti. Indeed. After a story I told you.
Nurit: I still have her.
Rosenbaum: And do you still play with her?
Nurit: Sometimes.
Rosenbaum: Very good.
Sarah brings the food.
Father (inviting the guest as the food is served): Please! Bevrakha!
The family and their guest begin to eat.
Sarah: Take some salad, Nurit!
Nurit: No, thanks.
Sarah: It’s vitamines. It’s what keeps you going. You never eat them.
Father: You are refusing the very thing that makes you beautiful and strong.
Rosenbaum: Take a little bit of it, then, thinking of the children you’ll bear.
Sarah: Stop it.
Nurit: I simply don’t like eating salad. I’ve got no taste for it. That’s why I tend not to eat it.
Father: Who asks of your tastes? Why don’t you simply eat it, so this talk will stop and I can take in my own food in peace?
Nurit: Because that’s not my way of life.
Rosenbaum: Your daughter is a nice girl.
Yalla, Mar Rosenbaum, I can give her to you if you like.
Rosenbaum: Poor old me, what shall I do with her?
Father: Y o u r problem.
Rosenbaum: Well, she’s too old for adoption and too young for a wife.
The remark causes a little laughter.
Father: Sell her.
Nurit: Someone like me is not easily sold.
Father: I bet you’re right there.
Sarah (to Nurit): You’re taking a long time about your meal. You’re picking at your food like something is not right. (She looks intensely at Nurit, contemplating her and then says) What happened?
Whatever I will say, I ask for your patience. My mind, my awareness, my emotions -that is to say: me-, my whole thinking, is, am, are -- confused. But I can no longer ingnore it. Plus, I can’t hide it from you. As long as I can think back, my heart was filled out by the feeling of loneliness, so much so that there was no room for anything else. Emptiness was the substance of my world and the essence of myself was hypocrisy. My eyes were open wide, thirsty for the sight of the stars but when I looked up to heaven, I didn’t feel safe. It was too vast, I guess, and my perspective too limited. It felt like losing the ground under my feet. Still, I couldn’t help longing for it, and longing became a monotonous pain, driving me to seek this vastness, which became my obsession, and I began to see the fragments of what I could have been, and so I, too, was torn. The ground on which I stood, however, solid and immobile as can be, was tornness itself, canonised and denied,
nourished by the thousand fears that we refuse to name. Shallowness, in this world, is our only protection. It allows its pillars to remain stable by merit of their unquestionability: conventions silently agreed, taboos to make our thoughts stop at the treshold of doubt, when there’s a threat of trespassing into the no-man’s-land where it begins, songs about dead soldiers and black veils in the faces of their widows whose features have become living monuments of our national consciousness, some kind of eternal justification of everything we do. I devoted myself to the fragrances, colours, sounds and tastes of this country, to its resilience and to that damn vitality of its without ever seeing it, without ever realising that it is this vitality that is the very clearest symptom of our depression, of our despair and speechlessness, our incapability of finding an answer to the existential question we face every day. Or which, to say it all, we don’t face.
(The spotlights focus the following three speakers and then go back to Nurit.)
Father: What are you driving at?
Rosenbaum: At the answer. Then Nurit’s father gets up, deciding to act because something needs to be done. The intensity of the spotlights increases as they focus on him.
3rd Voice: It’s over.
From somewhere behind the drawn curtain we hear Nurit’s father say:
There is darkness and things fall apart.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Father: The answer. You found it?
Nurit: I found it, father. (to Sarah) I’m tired of this, mother. I’m tired of eating my food and sticking it out, losing myself in compromises until I can no longer recognise myself in the mirror. I found the answer, and to me it was like the first sign of rain after a thousand years of draught. I found it in the night-coloured eyes of an Arab in whose voice reverberates the dust of this land and in whose smile shines its sweetness, with the wistfulness of the sabras in bloom. The encounter of our looks has erased our bounds, and, boundless now, I see clear. There is the light of a hope in whose rays the guns, the tanks and the bombs burn -and the wretched threat that comes from them, until they’re nothing but scare ghosts, shadows and nightmares of the past.
The spotlights, in a flash, focus Nurit’s father, then go back to Nurit.
Father: And what is this hope?
Nurit: We.
Sarah (with spotlights on her, speaking like under shock, or like at the discovery of a long hidden betrayal): You love him.
Silence.
1st Voice: Down! To the ground!
2nd Voice: Watch out!
We hear a shot.
Nurit: I have to talk to you. (All eyes are at her, which causes her to pause for a second, braving herself. The spotlights focus on Nurit’s parents and their guest as they are listening to her.)
There is something I have wanted to tell you about. I’ve wanted to say this for a long time. You are my family, my parents who raised me. You have to know about this. At least, this is what conventions demand, for we are social beings and what not…- even if, when one thinks of it, what I will have to tell you might be rather far from agreeing with conventions. But you will get to know it anyway.(Now the spotlights feature Nurit.)
