Look for Me

by Edeet Ravel

  I quickly pulled out the shoe box that held the photo of Rafi and removed it from the box. I stared at it and wondered what to do; I felt like a fairy-tale hero who has to find a clever way to dispose of a magic object without activating some dreadful curse.

  First I would find Daniel, then I’d decide. In the meantime I placed the photograph on my work table.

  I showered, slept for two hours, had a container of yogurt, and set out for the condolence call. It would be a lot harder than the drag carnival, but it was more urgent. I took a taxi to our meeting place at the train station. The taxi driver was in a good mood and whistled cheerfully as he sped down the empty streets. “Where are you off to this early?” he asked conversationally.

  “A condolence call,” I said. “Two children were killed.”

  “Good for you!” he exclaimed. He’d misunderstood, and I didn’t have the energy to correct him and get yelled at. Maybe he wouldn’t yell at me, maybe he’d only shake his head and sigh, but I didn’t want to take a chance. Once a taxi driver had thrown me out of the car because of my views. That was the only time, though, that I was banished altogether, and it was because the driver had narrowly missed being blown up that afternoon, had seen body parts flying through the air.

  “You’re an asset to the State,” the happy driver told me. “Please give them my condolences, too.”

  “I will,” I said.

  He whistled all the way to the train station. He’d probably had sex the night before. Just like me.

  There were two minivans at the train station, waiting to collect everyone. We were a small group: sixteen people in all. The condolence call was in Hroush, which normally would have been a short drive from the city, but it took us nearly eight hours to get there because our two vans were stopped and held up so many times. At one point we were told we had to turn back altogether. Desperate, we climbed out of the vans and sat on the road so that other vehicles would not be able to pass either. There were only two soldiers at this isolated road-stop, and they couldn’t drag us all away.

  A furious taxi driver who was delivering a group of settlers to their burgundy-roofed homes in the territories flew out of his car and started shouting at us. “What have I done to you?” he cried out, his body tense with rage. “I might like you, if you didn’t do things like this. Now you’re just making me hate you more!” He turned to the soldier. “Why don’t you do something! Why don’t you make them move?”

  “I’m just waiting to hear from the commander, take it easy,” the soldier said. He looked very depressed.

  “I can’t wait! I have a car full of people here. They need to get home. Idiots!” He meant us.

  “He’s right, just let us through!” shouted a white-haired man who was sitting next to me. I knew him a little; we had spoken several times on buses or marches. His name was Ezra, and though he was in his eighties he never missed an activity. He wore plaid hiking shorts and his thin, muscular legs were covered with white hair. I pictured him on a farm; I pictured him pushing wheelbarrows for several decades. “Just let us through,” he repeated, this time calmly.

  “I can’t, I have to wait for orders,” the soldier replied.

  “Why are you here in the first place!” a woman behind me cried out at the soldier. She sounded exasperated and plaintive, as if she were his mother and wanted him to clean up his room. “Why are you cooperating with the occupation!”

  “Leave him alone,” Ezra said. “It isn’t his fault. He’s just a soldier.”

  The driver couldn’t control himself any longer. He grabbed Ezra and began pulling him unceremoniously by forearm and shirt collar. Some people rushed to protect Ezra, but he shouted at us, “Don’t move! Don’t get up!”

  The soldier came over and announced, “Okay, you can go through, everyone can go through, yallah, get a move on.”

  We reached Hroush in the late afternoon, but we were not immediately permitted to enter the town. A large ditch had been dug on the main road in order to prevent anyone from getting through. We parked the vans near the ditch and negotiated with the army. The negotiations began with phone calls to various army officials, who all said the decision wasn’t up to them, and ended with begging, nagging, and harassing the soldiers until they got bored and relented. I wandered a little off the road to photograph the grotesque remains of an uprooted olive orchard. The twisted trunks and amputated arms of the trees looked like mute messengers of some unspeakable doom, the details of which, perhaps fortunately, we were unable to decipher.

  The soldiers watched us as we began crossing the ditch; it was hard to tell what they were thinking. We slipped going down and we slipped climbing up the other side. Those who reached the top first helped the others; I was reminded of a hundred scenes of Palestinians pulling their children up over walls, over rocky mounds of earth, up steep hillsides. By the time we reached Hroush our hands and legs were covered with mud, and the feet of people who had worn sandals were no longer visible.

  But our appearance was appropriate for Hroush. Hroush wasn’t anything like Ein Mazra’a, which had managed to hold itself together. Nor was it in ruins, like Dar al-Damar, which I had seen only once, after an incursion. Militants had holed up in Dar al-Damar several times, and the army had fired at buildings from helicopters and shelled them with tanks; there had also been fighting in the streets. The town had been reduced to heaps of rubble: houses had spewed out their insides as they collapsed, and bits of furniture—cribs, dishes, mattresses, lamps, embroidered pillows—lay in random patterns on the uneven mounds of stone and dust. Some buildings had survived, but they did not seem habitable.

  Here the devastation was more subtle. The village was deserted: everyone was indoors because of the curfew, though there were women and children on the balconies and roofs, silent and watchful, as if decorating their houses with their bodies. No two houses were alike because they’d been built at different times by different people, with whatever material was at hand or had struck the fancy of the builder. The result was a genial display of textures and types of stone or concrete or plaster—porous and rough, smooth and symmetrical, each one a different variation on off-white. Hopeful metal rods protruded from the flat roofs and the beginnings of staircases clung to the sides of the houses, stopping Escher-like in midair: they were vestiges of an intention to expand. Poured concrete pillars would cover the rods and support higher floors, which the stairs would then reach.

  The stores were all shuttered down: metal shutter after metal shutter, closed and locked. The awning of one of the empty stores had come loose and lay in a tangled heap on the ground. The fabric had Arabic and English print on it, and I could make out the words Abu-Jiab Optic, and a drawing of a pair of glasses. Litter clung to the edges of the wide path that ran through the town, and in a corner formed by two crumbling walls I saw what looked like human shit covered with blue-green flies. Some soldier with nowhere to defecate must have used this improvised outhouse in the middle of the night; the soldiers were still there, inside two armored carriers. Three of them sat on the roofs of their carriers and watched us with stony faces. I took a photograph of the crumbling walls, which were covered with graffiti, and of the horrible excrement in the corner. Remarkably, ordinary cars, including a Red Crescent ambulance, were parked here and there: incongruous signs of the outside world in this closed-down paleoscape.

  We considered our sorry state and wondered what we could do about it. The mud had clung to our skin and clothes and we did not feel presentable. We walked over to an outdoor water faucet next to the ambulance and turned it on. Yellow, evil-smelling liquid spluttered out, choked, then vanished altogether. We searched our bags for tissues, poured a few drops of bottled water on them, and did our best to wipe our hands. Ezra went up to the soldiers and asked for a thermos of water. The soldiers ignored him.

  We followed the organizer, a short, rotund woman who looked even shorter under her wide-brimmed straw hat. She was holding a piece of paper on which she’d printed directions,
but she didn’t really need to consult her notes, because as we walked sturdy-looking men leaned out of windows, greeted us, and told us which way to go.

  Near the center of the village the buildings were closer together and the houses were older, with pretty domes rising from the roofs. It wasn’t as eerie here, because the tanks were farther away and people felt freer. Women sat on chairs just outside their houses and children played noisily on the rooftops.

  We knocked on the door of the bereaved family, and a young man with almond-shaped cat eyes and a struggling mustache opened the door. “Yes, yes, please, my parents wait. Thank you, we are happy you come,” he said in English, but his voice was unconvincing. He sounded tired and very angry.

  It was a relief stepping indoors: the house was full of people, and brought us back to reality. The visiting room was spotless and the walls were bare apart from a few framed photographs of family members and an Arabic text in elaborate calligraphy, also framed. The television was on, but the volume was so low that I wasn’t sure what language the man on the screen was speaking. Folding chairs had been brought in to accommodate the several generations represented here: older children held bcobys on their laps, the knees of teenagers touched those of the aged. Everyone looked unhappy, but they welcomed us enthusiastically and urged us to sit down. The children gave us their seats and moved to the carpet; one of the bcobys began to cry and her mother, who appeared to be about sixteen, took the baby away to the kitchen to nurse her. We’d brought a few bags of food and diapers and we set them discreetly in the corner. The young man with the cat eyes served us sweetened tea in small glasses. I wondered whether the sixteen-year-old mother was his wife.

  When I brought out my camera, the atmosphere in the room became very serious and intent. The bereaved parents stared hard into the camera lens, as if they were pinning their last hopes on these photographs, as if they believed or prayed that maybe, possibly, when people saw the images and knew the story something would be done. I felt guilty and heartbroken.

  Then we watched a video of the children being shot—someone who’d been sitting on a balcony had caught it with a camcorder as he filmed the tanks crawling through the streets. The killing was very distant and small on-screen. Now the children would live forever as video images, their death would be seen again and again, the tiny distant bodies crumpling on the white street. The two boys, Ashraf and Jamil, had misunderstood; they thought the curfew was lifted; that’s what their father had told them. He was the one who had misunderstood, he said. The blaring sound of the megaphone, the bad accents of the soldiers—he had misheard. And they were so excited about going out, they ran onto the street, clutching the two coins their father had given them for chocolate. The coins were still in the fist of one of the boys when his body was retrieved.

  I stood near the wall and thought about Rafi and wondered what he would do in this room and what he would say to the parents. He would be able to speak to them in Arabic. The mother was crying, and she had to leave the room when the video came on, but the father was quiet.

  We left the village in a gloomy mood. The soldiers watched us with the same blank looks. We avoided their eyes.

  In the van driving home, one of the men, who was religious, read us a psalm from a pocket Bible. He had sandy hair, gray eyes, and a sensuous, trusting face. “The Lord looks down from heaven, he sees all the sons of men. A king is not saved by his great army, a warrior is not delivered by his great strength.” The sound of the words was soothing, but no one was comforted by the words themselves, not even the man who read them.

  When I came home I called Rafi. He said he’d come over after Naomi was in bed, later in the evening.

  I went for a walk on the beach, but for once even the sea failed to seduce me. A barrier of images blocked my escape: the house full of relatives, the man with the cat eyes and his teenage wife, the folding chairs, the intense faces staring into the camera, the mother running out of the room. The two small bodies crumpling on the street.

  A woman in a black-and-ruby swimsuit was sitting on a rented beach chair reading the newspaper. The tanned, blond man who collected payment for the chairs passed her and asked, “So did they kill him in the end, or not?” There had been an assassination attempt in the morning, but it wasn’t clear yet whether the targeted man was dead or merely wounded.

  “So did they kill him in the end, or not?”

  The words had a hollow, metallic quality to them, like a corroded pipe in a deserted factory. “So did they kill him in the end, or not?” The question echoed in the air: small talk between strangers. Maybe I was starting to go mad.

  I was glad to find Benny in my flat when I returned; I wanted some company. Benny looked a little more spruced up than usual. He was wearing a clean blue shirt and a pair of trousers instead of his usual denim shorts.

  “Going out?” I asked him.

  “Yes, to visit you,” he said. “Where have you been all day, Dana? I need to talk to you. I brought some wine and stuff.” I saw that he’d set a bottle of wine on the kitchen counter along with all sorts of snacks: cheese borekas and salads from the bakery around the corner, and a poppy seed cake.

  “What’s the occasion?” I asked.

  “I have something I need to talk to you about. Where were you today, by the way?” He lit a cigarette.

  I wondered what was going on. Benny was a pragmatic person, and he liked things that were plain: plain food and plain songs and plain people. And if people weren’t plain, if they were only predictable, that was fine, because he mistook predictability for plainness and he didn’t notice complexity or else he pretended it wasn’t there. If he came across anything that required a little more effort on his part, some insight or a departure from his usual way of thinking, he looked the other way. At the same time he was a very restless person, and I sometimes felt he’d become a taxi driver because he couldn’t sit still, and that he couldn’t sit still because something was missing from his life and he was hoping to find it.

  “I went to photograph a condolence visit, two Palestinian children who were killed by a tank.”

  He sighed. “What about our victims, have you paid any condolence visits there?”

  “We’ve had joint condolence visits … our families, their families.”

  “You don’t care about our dead …”

  “People are doing this so we’ll all have fewer dead, hopefully.” We’d had this conversation many times. We were constantly repeating ourselves, but neither of us minded. Every time we said the same things they seemed new, they were new. “You know how I feel about our dead, Benny.”

  “Yes, yes … I just get fed up with you.”

  “You’ve never even been to a refugee camp. Not even once in your life.”

  “So what? I know what they’re like. It’s sad, but they have only themselves to blame. Besides, we have poverty too. They don’t have the monopoly on bad living conditions.”

  “What have you been doing?”

  “The usual. I had a fare all the way north today. Rich bastards. You wouldn’t believe the money some people in this country have, it boggles the mind. The whole time they were talking about their investments. The numbers they were throwing around … Wine?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “This is very good wine,” he said, opening the bottle and pouring. “Who painted this mural for you?”

  “Someone Daniel worked with.”

  “Some people have talent … Look at those cows.” He smiled. “Very cute.”

  “Well, what do you need to talk to me about?”

  “I want to marry you.”

  “Marry me! Benny, you know I’m married.”

  “I know we can’t marry technically, though I think there’s a possibility you’d qualify for divorce based on desertion—I don’t know what the rules are. I asked around, but no one seems to know. But even if we can’t marry technically, we can live as if we’re married. And we can have children.”

  “I don’t k
now what to say.” I was sorry for Benny, but at the same time I was a little suspicious of his motives. I thought he might be trying to get back at Miriam; maybe he wanted to even things out so he wouldn’t be so tormented by her new relationship.

  “I love you, Dana. I can’t stop thinking about you. I come into this flat while you’re away, I look at everything, and I feel I’m losing my mind. I watch you while you’re sleeping, I’ve even stroked your hair, I know it’s wrong but I couldn’t help myself. I feel I’ll explode if I can’t have you. There are a million obstacles, and I keep telling myself over and over that it’s impossible. First, your politics. My family would just go through the roof if they found out. And knowing you, they’d find out in the first five minutes of meeting you, you’re not the type to keep that sort of thing to yourself. But on the other hand, I’m over forty, I no longer have to listen to my parents. I’m a big boy, I can do what I want. They’d get used to it, and if they didn’t, tough. Then there’s the problem of children. If I can’t marry you, they’d be illegitimate. That would be really hard in this country. But we could look into it, we could see whether there’s a way for you to get a divorce. I think you qualify, someone told me that after a certain amount of time if the husband is missing you qualify, I’m not sure. I don’t have a lot of money, this divorce and the war have destroyed me. So there are lots of problems, but on the other hand, I’m just going insane. If you say no, I don’t know what I’ll do. I feel you like me, but I don’t know. Everything depends on you, of course. But maybe even if you don’t feel you’re ready to decide, you could give me a chance. Get to know me, give me a chance to prove myself.”

  I was a little stunned by this speech, though I tried not to show it. My dreams about Benny crouching by the side of my bed had not been an invention after all; he had really been there. I couldn’t help being moved. “I like you, Benny, but don’t you think this is just about Miriam? Maybe you’re just trying to get away from her.”