The Place Will Comfort You

by Naama Goldstein

  The teacher sought the pale face beside her, then attended back to her student. She squatted down. Her thighs even squashed in this position remained thin and Shulee admired this like everything else. A near bus honked. She found the teacher’s eyes peering at her level.

  “I’ll go sit with your friend,” the woman said. She rose and left Shulee’s field of vision.

  The bus gathered its strength, strained, growled and pulled away as the Dress Patterns teacher sank into the window seat. Shulee sat stiffly, looking forward. The teacher twisted in her place, probably reaching in a pocket, then put something in her mouth, probably a pill. She gulped water from a canteen, and swallowed.

  The cord of a microphone whipped back and forth below the dashboard, Shulee following its movements. She had gotten what she wanted, a seat away from Yona. Why was she still unhappy? Your friend, the teacher had said. Two wounds dealt as one. Shulee was not Yona’s friend! Yet her favorite person on this Trip thought so, and had seen in her the betrayer of a friend. Once again Shulee was stuck in the Reverent woman’s grim company, and once again she had brought the punishment on herself. The sins were only building up with every hour. She meant so well.

  By now she was nearly positive this teacher did not recognize her voice. As a final test, she cleared her throat with resonance. The woman did not snap her head, accusatory. She didn’t recognize the voice. God above had chosen to deal with Shulee in addressing that especially bad case of swearing. If she had only sat with Yona, as a friend, she would have been entirely redeemed by now.

  The microphone cord swayed back and forth with the leanings of the bus. The wire-covered head sparkled. Very soon the girls would be bidding again for turns to sing. She turned towards the window seat. The Dress Patterns teacher returned the scrutiny, then attended to the task she had been busy with, arranging a bundled shirt against the shuddering pane. She leaned her cheek against the shirt and closed her eyes. She emptied her lungs with a sigh. Her white neck was glossy with sweat, her hair visible only at the nape, where it protruded in a tangle of dark wisps from under a traditional wife’s kerchief. Soon her shoulders mellowed, slumping like butter in the sun. She reverted to a curious breathing pattern. The lips locked just prior to each exhalation, so each breath emerged with a soft pop.

  Slowly, Shulee rose. She questioned the driver’s eyes with hers. He shrugged. She extracted his microphone from its clamp.

  She spun slowly to keep her balance, and blew into the mike. The Dress Patterns teacher stirred but didn’t awaken. The steel mesh of the mike was cool and rough against the lips, and smelled like batteries dipped in mint. The instrument was narrow but weighty. She pursed her lips and sang:

  “She loves the pain in him the pain of him she left me for his pain, ooh wahh! If she could see mine now.”

  Two Textile girls in the neighboring front seat watched, scowling, incredulous. Of course they wouldn’t know this song. This was like nothing witnessed on the bus so far. Not a ululating love song from a market stall cassette, not the latest winner from the Eurovision fest. Not sung-poems of high purpose, love of land and sacrificed youth. No, this was the nation’s first homegrown hard rock, a new sound for the nineteen eighties. And on the drums! Her beloved. Her baldie Marcus Bentov at the drums!

  He didn’t sing, she had to simulate him as the verse repeated. She turned her gaze skyward, enraptured by a mounting strain. She saw the roof hatch cracked, showing a crescent of blue, but screwed her eyes shut at the view as Marcus always did, sticking the tongue out as far as it would go. She turned her face towards her fanship, nostrils flexing, but did not engage their eye. Hers opened only to the drums.

  They were everywhere. They were diverse. Her Marcus was a traveler as he told the interviewer sent by Maariv for Teens. He didn’t use the ethnic instruments as much as he would like but when he could he liked to augment the sound, when the hide could be heard he liked to use it. She couldn’t remember any of the names in his collection. She could only see them. Mosty, like her Marcus, she stuck to the modern ones, with a pounding of sticks. The solo grew more and more complex, the grimaces more wrenching. She wiped her brow.

  She was almost at the point to give the crowd their first real glimpse of naked fury when her vision was interrupted. In the aisle before her stood the Art History teacher, looking on all this with high esteem. She was tapping her foot. She ran a palm over her elegant scalp but stopped the motion early to correct her balance. She watched the performer and nodded, and of course she would. She would appreciate a Marcus Bentov, an overlooked beauty, stumpy and cold-eyed, bulky and snarling, shorn so that the private details of his skull were common knowledge, young but imaginable as old and still as furious—a woman of sprawling aesthetic horizons would see why him. This was after all a teacher who could project onto a screen nothing but smears and dribbles and say, Now here we see before us an artistic milestone, very controversial in its time.

  Light beamed through the cracked roof hatch, illuminating the aisle—not an aisle, the middle longitude of an enormous concert hall.

  The teacher held out a slender brown hand and removed the microphone from Shulee’s grip.

  “You have gone over the acceptable time,” she said. She turned and called for a showing of interested hands. As she awaited the next singer, she shifted her feet in constant adjustment to the vehicle.

  Shulee ducked deeper and deeper into the woods, glancing over her shoulder. When the time had come to sit to lunch there was no avoiding the girl any longer. And now Yona Rodelheim was at large, tramping over the loose red soil with their food, under the pines. Twice Shulee had heard the quiet voice call for her.

  That was a long time ago. Now she was safe. Black pearls of goat droppings gleamed on the ground. No one but she would venture this far from the group. Only Shulee. When she returned she would be in spectacular trouble, a star, and she would also have eaten. For, looking out from the bus, over the teacher’s sleeping head, she had seen a food stand on the side of the road. She stepped onto a gravelly shoulder and gazed across. An old Arab woman sat on a bucket, selling treats on a rough table of plywood propped on cinder blocks. No traffic was coming, and it seemed none would come for a long time.

  There were pines on the other side, too, the same kind. Needle leaves hissed mildly all around. Needles had fallen on the woman’s table. Some rested on the silver tops of unfamiliar soda cans. The branches behind the woman let through shards of man-made color, far-off Arab laundry hanging, and doors and shutter slats painted in Arab blue. The cans were brighter than any of this. The type was familiar, after all, though also unfamiliar. This was Pepsi, which you could not get in the country because it was not distributed in the markets, due to the Arab Nations Boycott, as her cousin Tomer would have explained whenever he explained it.

  How was it, then, that she beheld the beverage in its canned form, only four bus hours’ distance from home? Of course. The Arab Nations had asked Pepsi to boycott the state of the Jews, this woman wasn’t a Jew, so Pepsi decided, why should she suffer? She was a private distribution channel. Many more like her no doubt existed. Who knew? Uncle Chelomo went to the Arabs for his sausages and skewer meat; this was why Grandpa Daoud would not eat meat in Aunt Yvette’s kitchen. Perhaps next time Shulee would go along with Uncle.

  The plywood was laden with dented metal trays, as well. One was crammed with triangles of baklava speckled with radiant green pistachio dust. Another was laden with date-stuffed domes of maamul, and another with cubes of rahat, glowing dark amber through a frost of sugar powder. All this put off the same smells as the same treats sold at Central Station. But Pepsi! Who would have guessed it? Pepsi-Cola.

  She examined the cans again, a dozen of them. She reached for one and took it, the warm metal dimpling in her grip. The only other time she had held this, the can had been empty and the occasion upsetting. Tomer had brought it from a tour of duty in Lebanon. He had brought also Lebanese cherries, and a macabre aside, which he told those who gat
hered to enjoy the fruit on his parents’ porch. She herself had still been fascinated with the smell of the can, planning to lift it to her nostrils again at the time when he said what he said. The scent had recalled that of the Sabbath wine cup, the silver sticky after the blessing and the meal.

  So Shiko finds a Hezbollah jaw in a shoe. The shoe he leaves. I tell him, What’s wrong with you, take it in the shoe. He says, Shoes we find all of the time. I say, Not with a jaw in them. He says, The jaw I got. I tell him, A jaw you’ll find again, too. He says, Not in a shoe.

  No response had come from the family and no commentary, even though to say this he had cut Grandpa off. Tomer had been strange in his demeanor and abrupt. And worse, when no one responded he looked to her. They were close in age, they had played together. That very stare had often goaded her towards feats of nerve, public accomplishment, once even to ring the doorbell of crazy Kokkinos down the street in the course of a game Tomer and she had refined to one rule, that the designated player inquire of an ominous third party whether he had lost a given object that couldn’t possibly be his. The winner was the one to start an angry chase, then come back and tell all.

  On that Shabbat afternoon, in the presence of their elders, she had found Tomer daring her again, but with much more vehemence than ever before, and much less persistence. For soon with a nauseous expression he had turned away and walked off, smacking the base of a new pack of cigarettes. She recalled the muscles jerking in his back. He had brought back from Lebanon also the habit of smoking nearly constantly, one cigarette lighting the next.

  The youngest of the adults could not bear responsibility for the group! It was not for her to have orchestrated a turning point as the tension hung, and Tomer shouldn’t have expected it. He couldn’t have. He wouldn’t have required her to issue the response. Was there one? The terrorists should all be crushed, Amen. Good going. But it had seemed to her you should not keep the bones. Was she to have gasped at the manners of the battlefront from the safe center, a schoolgirl turn her nose up at a foot soldier? Maybe that was his point in the first place. What was the point? She couldn’t even follow the plot in the dialogue. Did Shiko end up taking the jaw? Maybe not. Maybe the whole thing was soldier banter. Was Tomer’s goal humor? Perhaps the only contestable issue was that he had brought up the matter with her little nieces playing Five Rocks in the corner with five brass cubes. Someone should have told him to watch his mouth. Could you tell a man defending you with his life to watch his mouth? They were right to have said nothing at all to him, but couldn’t someone have explained it to her, later? Very soon no one had seemed bothered anymore.

  About the Pepsi, Tomer had said it tasted different from any other cola, but it was difficult to say how.

  The old Arab said something. Shulee nodded to indicate she was still making her decision. Did it cost the woman money to let her make her decision? It didn’t appear that she was in a hurry to rise from her bucket.

  “Just a minute,” Shulee said, but when she caught the vendor’s eye she almost regretted sneaking off. In all her sixteen years and nine months she had never stood face-to-face with an Arab in order to interact. The woman peered with the gaze of steel rivets in a square-jawed handbag, more glint than character. Shulee set the can back in its place.

  The old Arab spoke again, shrilly, and Shulee found she no longer wanted the drink. If she was to skip lunch successfully she needed solid candy. A breeze lifted a mist of sugar powder off the rahat and carried the scent of rosewater to her nose. The old Arab tapped the tray and lifted three fingers. Just out of curiosity, Shulee pointed to the soda, as well.

  The old woman raised all of the fingers of one hand, then folded them, and raised two. Outrageous! Pepsi was the finest soda in the world, or else the Arab was doing her part to impose the ban. Shulee pointed back to the candy and raised the finger to point up. One. The woman raised two. Shulee nodded. The old Arab reached down and tore a section from a stack of newspapers on the ground. A child emerged from behind her, stretched on the tips of her toes, picked out two cubes of rahat, took the paper and wrapped them. She turned the small packet over to the old woman, who looked at Shulee and waited. Shulee prodded at her jeans pocket, but found herself distracted and inept, staring at the child with all the fascination she didn’t dare impose on the elder. The little one was beautiful! Like a kitten, miniaturized. Wearing a too-short tricot shirt, a small tan stomach exposed, tiny hip bones and a dainty knot of navel. On the fabric above, an image of the television muscleman, Mr. T, bulged shirtless.

  “Mister T!” Shulee said. “Mister T, right? Good. I like, too!”

  The child said nothing, but could it be that Shulee’s efforts with her were softening the old face, or did the leathery jaw simply jut less than she had first perceived? And why not a softening? If a woman put up a table she wanted to sell, that was all. And here was a buyer. There was no malice. It was only natural that Shulee should have distrusted her at first, travel was dangerous. But had an old candy seller and her helper girl ever knifed a hiker in a waadi? Hijacked a bus and burned the passengers alive? Floated landward on inflatable rafts to massacre a hotel lobby full of tourists? Or taken high schoolers hostage on their Annual Trip, and shot twenty-one of them dead on their sleeping bags? Those had been eleventh-graders. No. Buying candy was not what got them killed. They had been asleep. It wasn’t a sought encounter. In a daytime engagement, entered willingly, it was up to you. You could pay attention, you could use your eyes. You could see what kind of Arab you were dealing with, a murderer or not a murderer. This Arab wanted only to sell. Shulee would buy. One very successful interaction for the record. Once she returned to her group, she will have done something here. If someone in the woman’s village should say, The Jews are a dark spawn which must be liquidated, the old woman would answer, I met one and she was perfectly delightful. In turn, when Shulee boarded her bus with rosewater breath, she would say, Bought it at an Arab village, sure; my Uncle Chelomo purchases certain items from them, too, and afterwards sits there and drinks coffee.

  True, how much more impressed the girls would be if she managed, in all this, also to thwart the boycott and show up with a cola they had never tasted. Not this time. It wasn’t meant to be.

  She twisted her canteen on its belt to better work her hand into the pocket. The old Arab observed, uttering her harsh sounds. Wind mussed the pines and exposed more of the village beyond. Shulee found her coins, yanked her hand out again, dropped everything she had into the Arab’s waiting hand, disregarded the packet of sweets being held out in exchange, grabbed a can of Pepsi, and ran like the devil.

  Goat droppings stuck to her soles and pine needles stuck to that. Through the leaning trunks she saw the roadside clearing where the group had stopped to eat. She saw no girls, but there was the hindmost bus, the exhaust pipe smoking.

  The exhaust pipe moving, the bus rolling away. She could hear its companion, rumbling ahead. She came to a jolting stop and watched as the vehicles revved up around a bend and vanished. Running footfalls came from the direction of the trees behind her. She whirled and collapsed on her haunches, fear draining the power from her limbs, the soda can dropping.

  She closed her eyes to spare herself what she knew was coming: By the supernatural powers of hate the old woman had hauled up the sheet of plywood from her table, and with it dashed across the road, and through the trees, and back to the road in an arcing path, to crush the skull of her enemy’s youth. Or the child had fetched the mob she had been sent for. Murderers! Bandits. She had given them everything in her pocket, even if it was short of the price they had named. The price was exorbitant.

  “Can they do this?” someone said in Hebrew. Shulee opened her eyes. Yona Rodelheim gazed at the clearing, wonder-struck, her orange Pumas set widely apart on the bed of needles. She approached Shulee and squatted beside her. The weight of the backpack she was lugging nearly upended the girl. Her eyes acquired a sudden shine. “Can they leave us?”

  “Don’t
you cry.” Shulee retrieved her soda from the dirt and stood up. “Crying we don’t need.”

  “I would think there are regulations. I would think by law—”

  “Stop that,” Shulee said. “Slow yourself down.” She couldn’t stand the girl’s voice. When a sentence finally started coming, the words streamed out in too much of a rush, with too little variety in the inflection, the harried disclosure of a robot with a gun at his back. At her forehead, hadn’t the girls said. “Why didn’t they wait?” Shulee asked.

  “How would I know?” Yona said. “I was with you.”

  “You spied on me?”

  “I thought that you were going to the toilet. I thought you’d want a lookout.”

  “Did I ask for a lookout?” Yona seemed to consider this. “Did I go to the toilet?”

  “No.”

  “But you kept sneaking after me.”

  “I was trying to catch up. If I shouted the teachers would hear.”

  “Do you even know how to shout?” Yona had nothing to say to this. “Maybe today we’ll find out, now you’ve got us stranded here. We’ll have to see what happens to us now because of you.” Shulee reached for the girl’s hand, pulled her to her feet, spun her away from the road, and herded her back towards the trees. There Shulee took the lead, walking among the trunks.

  “Where are we going?” Yona said.

  Shulee continued the retreat from the road. A songbird alighted on a low branch before them, but fluttered up in a frenzy just as suddenly. A crow shouted nearby. Yona’s panting quickened. Shulee passed the soda can again from hand to hand.

  “The Art History teacher has it in for me,” she said. “She can’t stand my level of self-confidence. It bothers her, she has to be boss. She’s trying to get back at me for having a mind of my own. She’ll be showing up again, any minute now.” Her wrist was tired. “They drive a ways more, she’s satisfied, she comes back to get me, here’s what I tell her: The Bureau of Education is going to hear about this.”