She told the doctor to go. She said that if he didn’t say anything, she wouldn’t say anything either. Now each of them had his own dead man. They didn’t owe each other anything. Just silence. But he still asked who the man was. Insisted on knowing. She didn’t answer him. What that man had done wasn’t her secret. It was Semar’s. A few seconds later, she thought he understood. He wasn’t stupid, her doctor. He saw Semar’s face and the beating that filthy man had given her. And he had seen the color of the baby she had given birth to.
There was a moment of silence, and then he went out and came back with the jacket. For a brief moment she thought he was going to stay. Even though he no longer had to. He put the jacket around Semar, whose entire body was shaking, and then turned to look at her. The filthy man lay between them and there was nothing to say about it. He looked at the filthy man and the knife she had stuck in his stomach. Then he turned around and left.
Now she had to get out of there. Gather everything she had, which was quite a lot, and take off. She turned away from the earth under which the filthy man lay and began walking back to the caravan. On the way, she passed the garage. Two nights earlier a baby was born there. Yesterday morning it died. Then a man was killed there. Then the doctor left. Now the garage stood as empty as it had been on the night she found it. She walked faster.
At the door to the caravan, she stopped to water the roses. Considered taking them with her, but that was stupid. Semar would look after them, or one of the others would. Or maybe they would just wither and die there. They wouldn’t be the first. No sound came from inside, and that was good. She didn’t have the strength now for the endless chattering of that bunch of cleaners after a day of work. She opened the door and turned on the light.
Three Bedouins were sitting on the mattresses.
*
Despite everything that happened in the hospitality tent of the people of the desert, when the sun rose on the village the next morning Sharaf’s father poured black coffee into a glass and went to wake up his son. He walked into the tin shack and held the glass very close to his son’s nostrils so he would inhale it. Sharaf inhaled. But he didn’t get up.
Several days later, Sharaf started working with Sayyid. His father didn’t know about it. Two weeks later, Mussa went back to work on the kibbutz and told Matti that he appreciated everything he’d done for him, and Matti said, “No problem, Mussa, you and me, we’re family.” He continued to return every night with 150 shekels rolled up in his hand, and he came home so tired – humiliation is exhausting, Sharaf thought – that he never noticed Sharaf sneaking out in the middle of the night. Sayyid would wait for him in his new BMW, behind the hill. At first, Sayyid didn’t want him to bring Mohannad along, said he made a lot of noise, but when Mohannad showed up one day with a rifle he’d stolen from a soldier who was taking a shit in the Beersheba central bus station, Sayyid decided to give him a chance. After Sharaf and Mohannad had scared the hell out of all the dishwashers in the city for him, convincing them that it would be worth their while to pay Sayyid and not only the gangs in Rahat, Sayyid was really satisfied. “Now I can give you both a man’s job.”
A man’s job turned out to be the worst night of their lives. Nine hours at the meeting point not far from the Tlalim junction, shaking with cold in their too-thin jackets and dying of boredom because Sayyid swore that if they spoke to each other he would cut off their pricks. Who knew, there could be a police ambush waiting for them. Not a word. Don’t move. Don’t even piss. For Sharaf, that wasn’t hard – he was used to holding it in from the mornings he waited for his father. But Mohannad was freaking out. Sharaf heard him groaning as the hours passed, sweating despite the cold. Maybe he hoped to sweat the urine out and finally deliver his tormented bladder from its suffering.
The sun had begun to rise when Mohannad broke the silence and rasped in a throaty, tormented voice, “That’s it, Sharaf. He’s not coming.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He’s not coming. Sun’s out. No Eritrean. Let’s go.”
“But what about the shipment? What are we going to tell Sayyid?”
“That we waited all night and no shipment came.”
“He’ll kill us.”
“Us? If he kills anyone, it’ll be the Eritrean. We have to get out of here before it’s morning and someone walks by and asks himself what we’re doing here.”
So they took off, but not before Mohannad peed for three straight minutes. When Sharaf got home, his father was already sitting outside, drinking coffee. He didn’t ask where Sharaf had been and he didn’t offer him any coffee. He didn’t even look at him. And Sharaf – who was tired and thirsty and still felt the cold of the night in his bones, actually wanted very much to sit beside his father and sip hot coffee – walked inside, lay down on his mattress and didn’t wake up until long after two o’clock.
When they called Sayyid to tell him that no one had come with the shipment, he shouted, “What? Are you sure?” Then he told them he’d check on it and hung up. After that, he didn’t call them for weeks. He said he believed them and everything, family is family, but he didn’t want them to be mixed up in his business anymore. Maybe he thought they’d bring him bad luck. They’d almost started working as dishwashers at the gas station on Kibbutz Beit Kama when he called, almost two months later, and told them to go and talk to the Eritrean’s wife.
He was still shaking when he turned the SUV from the dirt road onto the main road, and for a moment thought maybe he needed to pull over and calm down before going on. But his desire to get away from there was greater. Four kilometers east, a man in jeans was lying on the floor with a knife in his stomach. When he thought about that, his hands began to shake again. It wasn’t that he hadn’t seen dead people before. But this time it was different. Because she had intended to kill him. He had no doubt about that. There hadn’t been an iota of alarm in her eyes after it happened. They might even have held a challenge: look – I did it. So what have you got to say about it?
He had nothing to say. The man lying on the floor had managed to beat the hell out of Semar before he fell, and Eitan had a pretty good sense of how things had played out before that. The thought of the rape nauseated him, but he was honest enough to admit that the nausea he felt was only indirectly related to Semar. First and foremost, he thought of himself. He wasn’t supposed to see it. He wasn’t supposed to know about it. As if someone had left the cover off a street sewer and the shit had risen and flooded everything. The shit was always there, everyone knew that. But not in their faces, not right in front of their eyes. Eitan was experiencing the same feeling he had when he went into a public bathroom and saw that someone had defecated and not flushed the toilet. A great deal of disgust, a bit of curiosity, and mainly anger at the person who had spilled his shit for all to see, a disgusting public display that couldn’t be ignored. What that man had done to Semar was horrible, but it wasn’t Eitan’s shit. He wasn’t supposed to open the door and see it. Not that he didn’t want someone to deal with it. He was willing to invest public money and he was willing to vote for someone who promised that such things would not happen. But he wasn’t willing to have it shoved in his face.
Not far from the Tlalim junction, the nausea was replaced by something that at first he couldn’t define. Relief. Because in fact, if you thought about it, he was a free man. She’d said so herself. She’d understood immediately, even before he did, that the balance of power had changed irrevocably. No longer the extorted and the extorter, but two equals. Each one and his dead person. He thought again about the man lying on the garage floor. He wondered suddenly if he had dared to touch her as well. And was surprised to discover that the thought sent chills of anger through him. But he reassured himself that it wasn’t possible. After all, he knew her. Then he gave an ironic laugh.
Knew her?
He didn’t even know himself. Two months ago, he had run over a man and driven away. He hadn’t known he was capable of such a thing or
all the things that came afterwards. Perhaps she too had been completely different until that moment. A Sirkit he couldn’t describe or even imagine. That regal stillness, that icy power. Perhaps those qualities had been born there. At that moment. They hadn’t been there before and would not have existed if it hadn’t happened. (But there had to be something, some seed. In both of them. Or perhaps they might have lived their entire lives without anything growing from that seed. Silent carriers.)
None of that changed anything. He was on his way home. There would be no more treatment in the garage, no more phone calls, sudden visits by her to his home. There would be Liat and Yaheli and Itamar. There would be work. There would be no more nights of silence, no more whistling. And suddenly, after the nausea and the relief, a new, not entirely clear feeling rose in him. Before he could feel it completely, he found himself driving the SUV quickly to the mall entrance, having made a firm decision: he would take home a pizza as a surprise. A large family-size pizza. With mushrooms. And olives. And one of those plastic toys for kids.
*
On the way to the Eritrean woman, Sharaf sat next to Hisham and thought about the gun Hisham had in his pants pocket. He’d already seen guns a few times and Mohannad had even let him shoot one bullet from the rifle he’d stolen from that soldier, but Hisham’s gun was in a different league. Small, elegant, like something you see in an American movie. Before they left, Mohannad asked Hisham if he could hold the gun and Hisham had laughed in his face and said, “Are you kidding? As it is, Sayyid sent me to take care of two babies.” Mohannad didn’t say anything, but Sharaf knew he was furious. Sharaf was furious too. He played with his switchblade the entire time they were in the car, opening it and closing it so that Hisham would see that even though he had a gun and a driver’s license, Sharaf still had a weapon of his own. It didn’t matter that the only thing he’d ever cut with that knife was orange peels. Hisham didn’t know that. The Eritrean woman didn’t know that. He’d give her a good scare and she’d tell them what they wanted to know, and even Hisham would have to admit to Sayyid that those babies knew how to work just as well as the grown-ups did.
They waited a long time for the Eritrean woman. They thought she’d be home at noon and it was already evening. They were edgy, tired. Hisham knew that the night patrol car at Tlalim junction got there around six. Which meant that they’d definitely stop them. Open the trunk. Turn the car inside out. Ask questions. He knew the cops would hassle them a little and then let them go. They had other cars with Bedouin drivers to stop. The cops would let them go right away. They didn’t argue. They knew how to sit quietly, answer when they were asked, look down at the asphalt and not into their eyes. But the kids in the other cars, they didn’t know yet. They’d start whining. Why are you stopping me, why not them? Just because I’m an Arab? Why are you turning the car inside out? Why are you talking to me like that? They didn’t understand that all that would only make it take longer. The kids got pissed off. It’s not fair. “Fair” is a word for Jews. In the end, the police would let them go too, and they’d go back to the car, put things back in order, more or less, and drive away. Off the good, paved road onto a dirt road that led to the tin shacks. They’d shout at their mothers to turn on the generator, they couldn’t see a thing.
Sometimes at night, one of the guys says they should go back to the junction. Throw stones at the patrol car. Maybe burn it. Others say no, he should calm down. It would just make trouble. He’s quiet. It isn’t his pride that’s injured, it’s something else. But in the morning he gets up and goes out again. To the mall in Beersheba, where they need a security guard. To the university cafeteria, where they need a cleaner. To the Bedouin hospitality tent the kibbutz opened for tourists; maybe they need someone to saddle the camel. Sometimes he gets sick and tired of all that, and then he checks out other things he could do. First of all, they make sure he’s stopped throwing stones at patrol cars. Letting your anger out like that gets you nowhere. The fire in your eyes has to turn to ice so you can do something with it. When they see that he’s okay, they start giving him things to do. First, small things like waiting at the Kestina junction with a shipment. Then bigger things. For instance, asking the Eritreans if anyone was close to that guy who was killed with Sayyid’s package. Finding out if he was married. Then going and checking to see how his wife is doing.
When the woman came in, it was already very late. That had made them edgy even before the conversation began, and the woman’s behavior only made them even edgier. Hisham had already opened his mouth to speak when Sharaf interrupted – they don’t have a drop of respect, these kids – and asked the woman if she’d been with her husband the night the shipment disappeared. She said no. Her Arabic was different, hard to understand, but it was still clear that they didn’t scare her at all. She looked them right in the eye when she spoke, and she kept looking at them right in the eye even when Mohannad told her she was lying and slapped her face. It was too much. It didn’t make sense that they had to keep their eyes downcast with the cops, and this woman looked at them as much as she wanted. Everyone had to know when they couldn’t look at someone else’s face. That rule was very clear to animals; anyone who had a dog knew that. You don’t look at someone stronger than you are; if you do, it’s like you don’t understand that he’s stronger. And then he has to explain it to you.
Sharaf stood up and pulled out his switchblade. He wasn’t planning to do anything with it, just show it to that woman and enjoy the moment of fear in her eyes. But there was no fear there, and that really confused him. She looked at the knife, and looked at his face, and for a moment it reminded him of the way his unmarried teacher Tamam looked at him, and that made him hesitate. But an instant later, a nasty little smile appeared at the corners of her mouth, the same sort of smile he’d seen on the face of the kid in the hospitality tent. This woman looked at his knife, looked at him and said without words, is that all you have kid? Before he knew what he was doing he had gone over to her, grabbed her chin the way he’d imagined grabbing Tamam’s chin so many times, and instead of kissing her, the way he’d imagined kissing Tamam, instead of sticking his tongue between her lips, he stuck the tip of the knife through the soft skin under her ear, and shook as much as she did when the first, large drop of blood welled up in the cut.
13
THE PIZZA WAS STILL HOT when he got home. The smell in the SUV had driven him mad, but he’d sworn to restrain himself. He wanted to open the box with everyone. Miraculously balancing the giant-size box and two bottles of Coke in his arms, he opened the front door and called out twice, “Who wants pizza?” realizing only then that the house was empty.
Their coats weren’t there. Or their umbrellas. That made sense. If they’d gone out for supper with friends or something, they’d need them. But even Mr. Bear wasn’t there, and that seemed strange. Yaheli never went to sleep without him. Mr. Bear spent his days in the living room, in front of the turned-off TV, watching special programs for bears. In the evening, Yaheli would take him to sleep, once again challenging the limits of his father’s patience. Eitan said that the thing should have been put in the washing machine a long time ago. Liat and Yaheli defended Mr. Bear zealously, though each had different reasons. Yaheli claimed that Mr. Bear hated water and he swore that if they put him in the wash, he’d go in after him and take him out. Liat agreed that after a year and a half of being dragged from room to room, the stuffed animal really did look more like a rag than a bear, but she said that psychologically it was very important for a child to have something of his own. “I’m not planning to kidnap the bear,” Eitan had said, “I just want it not to be filthy.” “If you wash it, it’ll stop being it,” Liat had said. “Things look different after a washing. And they smell different. It won’t be the same thing.” Eitan tried to object, but the united forces of a three-and-a-half-year-old boy and his wife were too much for him. Mr. Bear continued to spend his days on the living-room couch and his nights in Yaheli’s bed, as grubby as usual.
But now he wasn’t there. The couch was empty. Eitan went into the kids’ rooms; maybe Yaheli had gone to sleep early with him. But there he discovered that the toy theft had continued – not only Mr. Bear, but also the two plastic soldiers that had always stood beside the bed, fearlessly determined in their war against the dark, had deserted their posts.
But he persisted in believing that everything was fine. They’d be right back. He went into the kitchen and put the Coke bottles in the fridge, where the vegetables were lined up in perfect order. He closed the door and checked the calendar that was hung on it with magnets. No, there was no event scheduled in Itamar’s class. Or in Yaheli’s nursery school. No obscure agricultural holiday, no birthday. So where were they?
Unconsciously, his gaze wandered over the fridge door: calendar; shopping list. An entire household expressed in banal facts. Liat always wanted to add pictures, hang drawings, but he objected. Told her that he liked his fridge to be businesslike. He didn’t tell her about his parents’ fridge, how all the notes and drawings had taken revenge on them after Yuval was killed. How before, his mother had hung funny notes and poems on the fridge door. Had cut clippings from the literary supplements and hung them on the fridge door among the shopping lists and wedding invitations. The lists changed, as did the weddings. But the notes and the poems stayed where they were. A week after Yuval was killed, a container of cottage cheese was still inside. Its sell-by date was the date he had died. Everyone noticed it, but no one said a word. The poems on the door had exactly the same words as they’d had before. Not a single period had thought it should move from where it was only because once there had been another person in the house and now he was gone. The rhymes didn’t change either. But at the end of each poem was a silence that had not been there before.
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