Don't Call It Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

reimbursing travel, and how much should be a recompense for the time I spend on the project. Four times in vain I have asked the lawyer, Ron Arbel, to stop the checks coming.
    Theo warned me, You're getting sucked in, girl, a financial arrangement like this is just asking for unpleasantness and trouble. It's difficult to believe that a hard-headed businessman would do such a thing out of absentmindedness. If all he really wants is to give some money for a memorial to his son, why doesn't he simply set up a trust? With a treasurer and proper accounts? If on the other hand what he wants is to set up a business venture, a private clinic for rich kids, an exclusive cuckoos' nest, three hundred dollars is peanuts for what you're worth to him by way of softening up public opinion, and you haven't even begun to realize how you're being used, Noa. Anyway, since when have you been into setting up institutions or refuges for junkies? There isn't a chance of getting the residents to agree to it—who wants an opium den in their backyard?
    I said: Theo, I'm a big girl now.
    He screwed up his eye and said nothing more.
    He went back to the hall to continue ironing his shirts.
    Of course he was right. The whole town is against it. Somebody wrote anonymously in the local paper that we won't let ourselves be turned into a rubbish dump for the whole country. There are so many things I'll have to learn from scratch. Things I've sometimes half-heard on the radio or skipped in the paper, operations, costs, capital fund, association, board of directors, budgeting; it's all still very vague but I'm already finding it exciting. Woman of forty-five finds new meaning in life: possible headline for a colour feature in one of the weekend supplements. Actually I've already been approached for an interview in an evening paper. I turned it down. I wasn't sure if such an interview would help or harm the project. There are so many things I've got to learn. And I will.
    I sometimes say to myself in the third person: Because Noa can do it. Because it's a good thing to do.
    There are three more members of the team, apart from me: Malachi Peleg (known to the whole town as Muki), Ludmir, and Linda Danino. Linda is an asthmatic divorcee, an art lover; she volunteered for the team so as to be near Muki. Her contribution is typing on a word processor. Muki Peleg came because of me: he would have joined even if I had been setting up a finishing school for carrion crows. As for Ludmir, a retired employee of the electricity company, he is a rambunctious member of a number of protest committees: an enemy of the quarries and the discotheque, denouncer of defective signposting, and writer of an impassioned weekly column under the title "A Voice in the Wilderness" in the local paper. He roams around the town in summer in a pair of baggy khaki shorts, with battered flip-flops on his veiny, sun-browned feet, and every time he sees me he greets me by saying, There's Noa smoke without a fire, and then apologizes with a smile: Don't take offence, my lovely, I was only joking.
    In practice I have all the responsibility. I've been caught up in it for several weeks now: running around the southern offices of the Departments of Social Security, Health and Education, tugging at the sleeve of the League Against Drug Abuse, besieging the Agency for Young People in Distress, coaxing the Parents' Committee and the Education Committee, begging the Development Agency, responding to the local paper and chasing after the Mayor, Batsheva, who has so far refused even to put the idea on the agenda. I've been four times to Jerusalem and twice to Tel Aviv. Once a week I make the pilgrimage to the regional government offices in Beersheba. Here in Tel Kedar friends and acquaintances have taken to eyeing me with a sort of worried irony. In the staff room they say, What do you want with all this extra bother, Noa? What's biting you? Anyway, nothing'll come of it. I answer: We'll see.
    I have no