Dew on Gilboa

In Gan Ner the blue shirt Vilgelm hangs on the line at noon is dry before he finishes lunch. In Porto Alegre the same shirt took three days. Porto Alegre sits way down at the bottom of the map of Brazil, among rivers and lagoons, and in winter, from June to August, clothes are slow to dry. The shirt spent those days on the line in the laundry room, a small space at the back of the house next to the kitchen, and came down smelling of the beans Brazilians eat almost every day.

Vilgelm’s parents’ house was large. In the Brazil of those years an upper-middle-class family had a maid the way it had a refrigerator, because millions of poor women washed, ironed and cooked in other people’s houses for the minimum wage or less. The maid’s name was Maria. She would pinch the collar between her thumb and forefinger, look at the sky and say Thursday, and on Thursday the shirt would be dry. Maria knew the day because the laundry was her work. Vilgelm was born in a hurry and learned to wait from Maria and from the winter.

He has been married four times. Each marriage taught him something that was of no use in the next one, and the fourth, so far, has had no next one. The humidity of Porto Alegre outlasted all four put together. These days he lives alone, by choice.

Bom Fim is the Porto Alegre neighborhood where the Jews who came from Eastern Europe settled, among them the Russian grandfather who left his grandson the name Vilgelm. The grandson lived his whole life in Bom Fim until the day he made aliyah. He took the blue shirt and left the clothesline, which would not fit in the suitcase. He chose Gan Ner because of a four-wire clothesline in the yard of the first house they showed him.

Gan Ner is a village of houses with yards at the foot of Mount Gilboa, in the north of Israel. It is October and still hot. In Israel it hardly rains between April and October, and in those months many plants have only the night dew to rely on. At eleven Vilgelm lowers the metal shutters, as the neighbors taught him to, and in the dark he reads the same paragraph three times before moving on. After lunch even the dogs on the street give up barking. Late in the afternoon he raises the living-room shutter and looks out at the flat Jezreel Valley, green and brown with fields as far as Afula, known as the capital of the valley. In the yards of Gan Ner the grass is green because it is watered, and behind the house Gilboa rises dry and yellow, with pines planted in rows and a few bald patches where the trees have not taken.

The neighbor’s name is Shula. She was born on a kibbutz in the valley, at a time when everything there belonged to everyone, even the children. She learned the Bible at school and knows by heart things Vilgelm has only heard about. One afternoon Shula saw him take the shirt down half an hour after he had pegged it on the line and decided to explain the phenomenon to him. She told him that the first king of Israel was called Saul and that he died on that mountain with his son Jonathan, in a battle against the Philistines. She also told him that the future king David was so grief-stricken that he asked, in a lament, that neither dew nor rain fall on Gilboa. Shula pointed to the bald slope as proof. Vilgelm did not argue, because against three thousand years of mourning all he had was a clothesline, and the clothesline sided with David.

His daughter’s name is Ilana. She stayed in Porto Alegre and is an architect, a good one. In an afternoon she designs a house he could not imagine in a year. She gave him proof that a father has done well in life when his daughter becomes more capable than he is. Ilana hardly ever calls and says her projects are to blame. Vilgelm knows he is. She is married and for now has no children. He does not ask about grandchildren, because Maria taught him not to take a shirt off the line before Thursday.

A few weeks ago he began to write in a notebook to the grandchildren who do not yet exist. He writes by hand, because he doubts the computer will last until they come. Sometimes he suspects he is writing to them what he cannot say to Ilana. On the first page he told them that his Russian grandfather had crossed the ocean to reach Bom Fim and that he himself had crossed the same ocean in the opposite direction. The grandfather left a name. Vilgelm wants to leave a notebook. On another page he warned them that if they live in Porto Alegre, they know what a three-day shirt is, and that if they no longer live there, they are happier than the ones who stayed.

Vilgelm misses Bom Fim, and he knew he would before he boarded. In Gan Ner he discovered something else to miss, which he has not yet managed to put into the notebook. He misses the man who used to wait three days for a shirt. That man had a Thursday because Maria washed, wrung and hung everything, and all he had to do was wait. Vilgelm only understood that when he started washing his own shirts. The man who lives in Gan Ner has adapted too well to the heat. He drinks water before he is thirsty, does his shopping before nine, hangs up and takes down his laundry during lunch, and goes through Thursdays without noticing they are Thursdays.

Yesterday he left the blue shirt out on the line and forgot about it. This morning he opened the window at six, when it was still the middle of the night in Porto Alegre, and found the shirt cold and wet with dew. Until then he had not known about the dew, because he had always brought his laundry in at lunchtime. He pinched the collar between his thumb and forefinger and said Thursday out loud, the way Maria used to. The sun took almost an hour to dry the collar. Vilgelm stayed in the yard the whole hour, let his coffee go cold and waited for the shirt as he once had in Bom Fim. Then he went inside, opened the notebook and at last managed to put into it the man he misses. He wrote to his grandchildren that he will wait for them the way he waits for a shirt, because for three thousand years, against the will of a king, the dew has fallen on Gilboa.