From a Sealed Room

by Rachel Kadish

  “It’s a beautiful night,” Rina says.

  “The most beautiful,” I answer quickly, and I hear Rina’s smile. For an instant I direct my thoughts to Gil. I picture him seated beneath the shelter, someone offering him food or asking his help with a small task. Please, I urge him.

  We pause at a patch of bushes and Dov scans with his flashlight for twigs. While he fills his arms with larger branches, Rina and I gather what we can from the bracken.

  “What will you do when you’re finished with college?” Rina asks.

  “Me?” The question catches me off guard. I open my mouth to tell her I don’t know. Then, instead, I seize upon an answer that has never before crossed my mind. “I want to do what my mother does in America, only here. I want to start a center to solve problems between groups.”

  The notion must seem as ridiculous to them as it does to me. I have no training, I have no skills, I know almost nothing of the problems of this country I’ve lived in for half a year. But suddenly I’m decided. I’ll get skills. I’ll make a life here, make a difference. So what if my only experience with the issues is in my letters to my mother? If Gil can make a fresh start, so can I.

  Rina sounds interested. “Problems between which groups? Mizrahi and Ashkenazi? Arabs and Jews?”

  “I haven’t quite decided,” I admit.

  Rina rolls a bundle of twigs between her palms, then nods approval. “Me, I want to be a schoolteacher. I want to work with children.”

  Together Rina and I snap twigs under the beam of Dov’s flashlight. Wordlessly she directs me away from a thornbush. The events of the day have left us not adversaries after all, but friends. It makes me bold; I open my mouth, and as I address Dov directly for the first time since he almost drove us off the road, I let a sliver of anger slip into my voice. “What do you think you’ll do next?” I ask.

  Before he can respond, Rina speaks wearily. “He’ll do more army. Dov is going to be a career officer.”

  Standing so close to him, I can hear the slow release of his breath. Instantly my anger transforms into fear.

  Dov takes Rina’s twigs and bunches them with his own. He snaps some to a more manageable size. “It’s not that I like war, Rina. Why do you always have to make it sound that way? It’s not that I like war. It’s just that war is a fact.”

  She bends to pick up another twig.

  “Rina.” He speaks her name softly, a request.

  “You have more talent than anyone I know,” she says, straightening, “and you’re going to put it into fighting.”

  “Defense.” Dov scans the ground with his flashlight again.

  “I know we need defense. I know we need the best defense. And I know you can be the best. But can’t someone else do it?”

  Dov’s silence is filled with reproach.

  “I know. That’s how you think.” Rina offers the single twig to Dov like an apology. “And that’s probably why I love you. But I can’t help how I feel.”

  Taking the twig, Dov turns off his flashlight. He starts down the path, but after a few steps he wheels to address me. “When I was eight years old,” he says, as if picking up the thread of a long-standing argument between us, “I saw the funeral procession of my neighbor’s older brother.”

  I stand on the path, uncertain whether to respond with sympathy or to remain silent. I have no idea why Dov should want to explain himself to me.

  “He was a soldier and he was killed in a terrorist attack on his base. And I watched out the window and saw my neighbor’s mother, the same mother who fed us poppy seed cake and juice after school, flailing at her husband. Trying to beat him, trying to punish her husband with her fingernails and fists, for giving her a son who would die in war.

  “My father saw me watching and he said to me, ‘Be a good soldier when it’s your turn. Don’t be afraid and don’t let the nonsense get to you. Just keep your sense of humor and go where they tell you to go, and you’ll be all right.’” Dov speaks with great precision. “‘Keep your sense of humor,’" he repeats. His free hand lifts helplessly in the air, and drops.

  “So I go. They tell me to go, and I go. They tell me what they need from my unit, and I find a way to make it happen and keep my soldiers safe.” Dov continues to face me as he speaks. “Is there anything so terrible about that?”

  Rina answers from behind me. Her words are heavy with regret. “I know you’re doing the best you can. You always do. It’s just that a lot of people who mean well end up doing things they would never have imagined doing. Like all those poor guys serving in the territories, who spend their time enforcing curfews on children.” She hesitates. “Remember what Rafi used to say?”

  “Don’t talk about Rafi,” he says. “Please.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rina says, and I know that she is.

  When she turns down the hill, I follow. Dov falls in behind me.

  “A center to solve problems between groups?” My cousin’s footsteps shadow mine. “You Americans.” He chuckles, but his laughter is thick.

  I make my way along the trail, my eyes on Rina’s dim figure descending the hill ahead of me.

  “You always want to fix everything,” Dov continues. “Like other countries’ damn business. Well, maybe not everything can be fixed by some pretty conversations between diplomats. Maybe war is war and there’s no way out for us. Maybe your boyfriend is right on just that one point.”

  I hunt for something agreeable to say. It’s not that I want Dov’s approval—I’ve given up on that. It’s simply that I don’t want to be the focus of his attention.

  But Rina is listening, and her presence shames me into going through the motions of argument. “What if the country gave the peace process a try?” I say to him.

  It is the prompt Dov has been waiting for, and he lashes back bitterly. “What do you know about our lives here, our decisions? You Americans come here with something to work out. Some high moral position. You come here and judge us for a few weeks or months, then you go back to your comfortable houses and forget all about the problems.”

  I want to quote my mother to show him he’s wrong. But my mind is blank.

  Dov snorts his laughter. “Americans don’t bother to learn, they just like to be photographed saving everyone. Maybe there’s no way out of our situation. Did you ever consider that? Sometimes you try and try and there’s nothing you can do because this is just the world we’re given.”

  We’ve reached the bottom of the valley.

  “You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about,” he says.

  A few more steps would carry us to the rim of the pool; voices come filtered over the water. Rina stops in her tracks and turns on Dov. “So I suppose that makes us bigger than everyone else,” she accuses. “I suppose we’re better, nobler people because we have hardship? And no one else can possibly understand us, because war brings out the best in us.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  Dov stares at the dry branches in his arms. Then he turns to me. “You,” he says hoarsely. “You walk in and out of this country. I live here.”

  My voice rises. “All I’m saying is maybe there’s another way.”

  The harshness in Dov’s words is out of proportion to anything I might have said. “You want us to take risks? People die as it is, but more people will die if we take a risk that goes bad. So if you want to try another way, be prepared to lose someone. Be prepared to lose someone you love.”

  I make no answer.

  Dov shakes his head in disgust. “You have no idea what that means.”

  I listen to Dov’s footsteps fade along the rocky edge of the pool. A minute later he reappears, a sturdy figure in the gathering beneath the shelter.

  “I’m sorry,” is all Rina says. Then she too is gone.

  Across the water, flashlight beams flit conversationally. A peal of laughter draws me closer. I wander to the stone steps, where I can watch the group from a distance. Someone has laid a
metal drum across a pile of rocks and propped a blowtorch beneath it. Two girls bend over the torch, then one spits chewing gum into her palm and uses it to patch the torch’s fuel hose. I see Dov, standing shadowed behind them like some ancient warrior, pouring oil from a jug into the drum. After a moment’s conference among the assembled figures, the blowtorch blooms with a popping sound—a blue flower clasps the bottom of the drum. A low picnic table beneath the shelter has become a chopping board, someone ferries ingredients from table to cooking drum. Scattered about the stone rim of the pool, others sit in twos and threes.

  On the steps I find my backpack and pull my sweater over my head, grateful for the scratchy wool on my bare arms. I take a clear ribbed bottle from the pack as well, still half full. The water is warm, and tastes of plastic. Across the pool a jackal paces and stands, perhaps hoping for scraps from dinner. Its pale-brown body flickers in the reflection of the blowtorch across the water. I lower the bottle to my hip. As I watch the jackal turn and disappear, the wind, rising from beyond the valley, vibrates a low note across the top of the bottle.

  It is the sweetest, most comforting sound I can recall. I stand perfectly still, afraid to move and lose this low-voiced blessing. As I focus on the bottle humming in my hand, I fight a sense of foreboding. What if Dov is right? What if he and his willfully miserable mother are both right, about fresh starts?

  As the wind fades, I watch the others. They cluster around the blowtorch and dip ladles into the drum. I try to pick out Gil, but I can’t; Dov and Rina, too, are anonymous among the milling figures.

  The beams of the shelter, lofty and invisible at dusk, have reappeared: blank timbers against the brightening stars. The girl with the guitar plays something unfamiliar, and a few others sing along. They gather on the stones along the water’s edge, plates in hand.

  The wind has died; my hands are emptied of sound and my vision shimmers with tears. Looking over the friends seated on the rock sill, I know that they love each other fiercely. For a long while I watch them, huddled beneath this shelter that provides no shelter. It occurs to me to wonder whether a whole community with its members’ arms wound tight around one another can still be lonely.

  I wish I were bigger. I wish I were big as a giant, big enough to protect them.

  When I join them, they make a place for me on the rocks and offer steaming coffee without a word. The girl with the guitar starts singing once more, and raggedly the others join in. Israeli pop and Hebrew folksongs and the Beatles. Someone makes a request for “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and she obliges with enthusiasm. I stifle a groan at their English. “I want to fold your hand,” some of them are singing.

  Only after the final chorus do I think to look for Gil. At first I don’t see him. Then, peering once again into the shadows beyond the campfire Dov is tending, I see Gil sitting on the ground. He is watching me, his face expressionless. I smile at him but he doesn’t respond.

  Against the murmur of the fire, soft conversation emerges. Someone’s father is still so unreasonable about her curfew, doesn’t he know she’s been in the army, doesn’t he know she’s got her own life already? Someone’s older brother has a new girlfriend. A girl with a mop of dark curly hair is laughing to herself. “My little sister spent the whole Gulf War asking our dad where babies come from. She was relentless, and my father had nowhere to escape. We sat in the sealed room, just laughing at him while he spouted euphemisms, and she shot every one down in her little five-year-old voice.”

  “The Gulf War,” a gawky boy intones. “A family experience.”

  “I always thought the Gulf War was more of a lovers’ war,” says the girl with the guitar. “Everybody locked up like that night after night. Look at all the babies born nine months later.”

  “A lovers’ war?” a girl named Tali echoes. “Yes, but what about all the stress, what do you think that produced? If you want to see what kind of love we got in the sealed rooms, come volunteer with me at the women’s shelter. During the war our calls went sky-high.”

  “All right. True.” The girl with the guitar stops tuning to wave in acknowledgment. “But still, lovers didn’t do too badly. And not just lovers. I know whole groups of friends who had fallen out of touch. They spent the SCUD nights together, sleeping on each other’s floors and catching up on life.”

  My hands drift around the cooling metal of my coffee cup. At the edge of the group, turned halfway toward the water, Dov is stone-faced and silent. Beyond the campfire Gil sits apart, his eyes glittering in the low light of the flames. I look from one to the other, careful to keep my eyes moving. Rina sits near me; the slight furrow between her eyebrows tells me that she and Dov have not reconciled.

  Above us the stars have grown enormous. Larger daubs of white light stand out against a carpeting of smaller stars. I trace fanciful constellations between the beams of the shelter, and wait for the singing to resume.

  It is Rina’s low groan that draws me down from the sky and into a growing clamor. Belatedly I become aware of the heated tone the conversation has taken. They are discussing politics. Dov’s expression is blank. Beside me, Rina is tight-lipped. Voices spin against each other and recoil; I slouch lower over my coffee. I’m drunk with exhaustion. Maybe Dov is right: I’m only an American girl, out of place in this gathering of soldiers and former soldiers. Maybe I don’t understand. I don’t even know, I realize, whether I want to.

  “I can’t take any more of this,” Rina whispers to no one. I turn to her, relieved, but she is looking across the group at Dov.

  We can’t go on the way we’ve been going, someone is saying.

  You can’t take a person’s home away, another voice picks up, steady and reasoned. You can believe you have all the best reasons in the world, but eventually you have to compromise, or there will be poison between people forever. At least, that’s what I think. About the Palestinians.

  Other voices call out sharply now, the jumble of declarations and objections rising through the open roof to the star-dusted sky. Heavy-lidded, I let the sounds sail past me.

  That’s what we need to make peace. We need faith even where everyone says it’s impossible.

  What, like the blacks have faith?

  Maybe. Maybe just like that, except without their intolerance. Without their backward ideas about God-given land. We need faith just like them, only there’s no Messiah coming to save us—we have to be the Messiah ourselves. We’ve lived too long in a fortress. We’re strong enough to try something new.

  You know that’s shit. Faith never stopped a terrorist. Only security. Haven’t you read their charter, did you miss the bit about wiping out our country? Let them make a home in some other country, there are plenty of Arab nations to choose from. We have only one, why are you so eager to give it away?

  Because maybe if you want a change you have to give up part of what you love.

  Jerusalem?

  Jerusalem Jerusalem, why not damn Jerusalem? I won’t miss half a city if we have peace.

  Through the molten air over the low campfire, I see Gil focusing his binoculars on one speaker after another.

  In the name of all the survivors of the Shoah. In the name of all the ones who didn’t survive, in their memory, how can you be so casual about security?

  Hamas promises another genocide if there’s a peace agreement, you want to test them? At least this way we’re losing lives but we’re not getting wiped out. For the sake of the Six Million, this country has to remember the danger.

  For their sake shouldn’t we forget? Shouldn’t we move forward?

  Forget? You sound like the anti-Semites. Like the Nazis.

  And you sound like the blacks, with their no compromise and not wanting anything in the world to change. What good is it if we remember so hard it cripples us?

  You want to lose another child to a bomb? Another dozen children to bombs? How can you talk about making concessions?

  “Bullshit.” Gil’s voice cuts across the circle.

  I op
en my eyes.

  Unified as a flock of birds wheeling to settle on a wire, the others fall silent.

  “You’re all full of shit,” Gil says. He has lowered the binoculars.

  The fire makes a soft skittering noise.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” says the girl with the guitar. Her voice is familiar and I know she played a part in the argument, but I can’t recall which.

  “You act like it matters.” Gil’s words are a clanging of bells, furious and strident and hopeless. Alert, I watch the dislike taking shape in the others’ postures, the fists’ resting loosely on hips as if readying for a fight. Looking from one keen, expectant face to another, I want to warn them: Back down. Let him be, it may pass.

  “You act like your pointless opinions actually make a difference. Like a few kilometers of land here or there could change something. You act like there’s hope if you just do the right thing.” Gil stares the group down. “There’s not going to be any peace. Not with concessions and not without concessions and not with any amount of your ridiculous faith and priggish patriotism. You believed all those scout troop songs? Then you’ve been sold a bill of goods. There’s never going to be peace and there’s never going to be security.”

  When he’s finished, it is silent.

  “So what do you suggest, my friend?” Yair speaks up from across the circle.

  “I suggest nothing. I suggest stop acting so full of yourselves, because it doesn’t make a difference.”

  Yair gives a low whisde. “Ah, wisdom from on high.”

  Gil is on his feet in an instant. “Go ahead and say it,” he taunts. “Go ahead and say you remember me from basic training.”

  Slowly Yair stands. He is shorter than Gil, and compact.

  “Go ahead and say, ‘Why should we listen to him after what he did in the army.’”

  Yair takes his time to respond. So quiet I hardly hear myself, I whisper a warning to this freckled stranger. Don’t, I tell him.

  “No need for me to say what everyone already knows,” Yair is telling Gil. “You can’t hide a dishonorable discharge. Or the time in dafuk. What did they sentence you to? I imagine it must have been at least a year.”