The Wanting

by Michael Lavigne

  “You’re a fucking insect eater. Go eat an insect. I’m a man. You can’t eat me.”

  “I can try.”

  I thought about this a minute. “Okay,” I told him, “here’s the truth. You weren’t here first. We were here first. You little Palestine birds are always so full of shit. You think I don’t know ornithology? In 1900, maybe twenty of you in the whole goddamned country; now you’re the most common little rat bird in Israel. No problem. Live and be well. Just stop singing the same old song.”

  “Let’s face it,” he squeaked, “you’re not subtle enough to appreciate the song of the Palestine sunbird, never have been and never will be. And by the way, you were born in Moscow. So who’s the latecomer?”

  With this, he began chomping at my hairline in earnest.

  “Stop! You son of a bitch! Stop!” I cried.

  But he kept on pecking, harder and harder, deeper and deeper, like he was churning a corkscrew through my skull.

  “God in heaven!” I screamed at him. “I don’t want to die like this!”

  And then all of a sudden I was grabbing at that little bastard with my fingers. I felt his gummy little feathers in my palm and then a crazy flurry of wings and his wildly thumping heart, and then …

  “Hey, mister. What are you doing there? Let me help you.”

  I felt a hand upon my leg.

  “You’re stuck pretty good. I’ll go around the other way to get to the top.”

  Blood trickled over my eyebrows and down onto my lip, and I couldn’t move my head enough to see who it was. But a moment later I realized my hand was free.

  “There, now pull up!”

  I stretched my arm as far as I could in the direction of the sky, grabbed at the ledge above me, sucked in my torso, and, like a rat squeezing under a door, I pulled myself free. And there I was, standing atop the rock, with the whole desert spread before me all the way to the sea. And next to me was Abdul-Latif.

  He squatted, like Arabs do, with his arms around his knees, and watched me. “I heard about the boys and I feared for you. Been looking for two hours at least. Here.” He handed me an old soda bottle filled with water. “I am full of regret for them.”

  I watched him carefully. I did not trust his water and set it aside.

  Meanwhile, the bird had taken up a station on the far edge of the bluff. I noticed there was a small stream percolating up at the base of the rock, which until now had been hidden from my view. It was really just a puddle beneath a swarm of bulrush, but for those few meters the soil was moist and dark, giving life to a garden of thick plants and bushes. Well, so much for the mystery of my sunbird. I gulped down the wild perfumes of the date and hollyhock but felt no need for the water. There was a rustle among the leaves, and suddenly, miraculously, a beautiful ibex emerged from the brush and gracefully bent to drink from the spring. A male, it had vast curved horns, a feathery black beard, and silver hooves.

  Abdul-Latif did not move. The sunbird hopped over and sat beside me.

  “Idyllic, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Shhh,” I said to the bird, “you’ll scare him away.”

  Now the ibex raised his head, sniffed the air, became still as the rock we were sitting upon, and searched the horizon with its soft brown eyes.

  “It’s a stupid weak animal,” the bird said.

  “No, it’s beautiful,” I replied.

  He whistled.

  The ibex bolted, charged from the water’s edge, and dashed across the stand of date palms.

  “I told you to be quiet!” I said.

  “Not me,” he replied, and pointed with his glassy wing.

  Now I saw it. A small leopard had sprung from a furrow in the rock and leapt at the ibex, corralling him with his powerful legs into smaller and smaller circles—the ibex, its eyes melting with fear, darted back and forth as the trap closed upon him—but they were both so glorious, and I did not know whom to love better, whom to hope for, root for: the leopard, nearly extinct, with his snowy body and deadly eyes, desperate for anything to eat, or the ibex, with his startling grace and resplendent horns, not in the least rare, yet all the more fragile.

  “To the death,” the little bird said.

  And then the ibex made a run for open desert, suddenly, crazily, brilliantly, but too late. The leopard had him in his teeth, and they went down together.

  In despair, I said to the bird, “Why did he save me?”

  “I don’t know,” replied the bird. “For the hell of it.” He winked at me, rose into the air, hovered there a moment as sunbirds can do, purposely annoyed me with his miserable little song, and then flew off toward Ein Gedi like a stone flung from a sling. I followed him until he was well out of sight, which was less than a second, so swift was he, and so small.

  “Mister! Mister! We have to get you home. You are talking crazy. You have to drink that water.”

  “I drank.”

  “No, mister. You haven’t drunk anything. Drink!”

  But I don’t believe I drank the water, because the next thing I knew I was in a bed, and the smell of fried kibbe was in my nose.

  Lying there, I recalled the sunbird’s song. It occurred to me, maybe it hadn’t been singing at all. Maybe it was just the ringing in my ears. It never stops. I just ignore it. I forget about it. But of course it’s always there, and maybe it fooled me, because how could any of that have happened? I held my hands out in front of me. My skin was coated with what looked like white powder. I must have been in the sun even longer than I thought. This country was out to kill me one way or another.

  In Moscow, my father had once told me the only safe place for Jews was the Land of Israel. Here they say: Go to America.

  Oh, we all had the same ridiculous ideas. How surprised we were to come here and find that half of Israelis were from Iraq or Syria, the other half acting as though they were still living in a Polish village in the seventeenth century, and the third half considered us Russians too loud, too garish, too aggressive, and altogether too dishonest. There was no crime in Israel until the Russians! Maybe so. They say we brought the Mafia to Israel; well, in Moscow, everything was Mafia, from top to bottom. If you didn’t game the system, you were an idiot. The truth is, it’s not so different here. The worst sin in this country is to be called a sucker, and as always, you wish you were someone else living somewhere else.

  But for me it was not like that. For me, it was like entering a magical kingdom and finding the mystical house of Baba Yaga in the middle of the dark forest where all my wishes were granted.

  I arrived at Ben Gurion with Anyusha in my arms. She already had a cowl of shocking black hair and those daring blue eyes. On the flight she ate continually and never cried. But that was Anyusha. She took in everything with her eager eyes and apparently found it good. Only when we stepped from the plane onto the Jetway did the howling begin. Perhaps it was the sudden change in temperature—we were met with a blast of hot air—but I think more likely she was frightened by the soldier with the Uzi resting on his hip. The poor guy reached out to soothe her. “Shoo, shoo,” he said. But I said to him, “Let her cry. It means she’s finally alive.” He didn’t speak Russian, so I tried it in Hebrew, “She shalom!” He laughed and said something I didn’t understand, either.

  But I must say, not understanding and not being understood—for the first time, I loved the Russian language. I now spoke a language that carried with it no consequences. My words flew out into space and never came back. As for Hebrew, it made no impression on me at all. It bounced off my head as if it had been varnished with clear coat. I experienced a miraculous and unexpected feeling of peace.

  Of course, it didn’t last. They sent us to an absorption center in Dimona. I was delighted to be there, even though the huge apartment complexes reminded me too much of home. The one difference was I could go outside and it was never cold. The air was remarkably clear, and when you took a deep breath, notwithstanding the fact that you were killing yourself with radiation from the nearby
reactor, it seemed like you were taking in 100 percent oxygen with none of the pollutants, the fumes of sadness, regret, frustration. Maybe that’s why I have always felt solace in the desert.

  They provided child care for Anyusha, and I went to Ulpan, where I was quite literally bathed in the Hebrew language. I was astonished by what happened. Hebrew came to me as if I were merely excavating some forgotten stratum of my existence. Almost without trying, I was speaking, reading, writing. There emerged almost instantly a naturalness to my Hebrew that belied my origins. The distinctive grammatical errors and mispronunciations of the Russian immigrant are largely invisible in my speech. It is not exactly native Hebrew the way sabras speak it, but someone once said to me it was like how Hebrew must have sounded three thousand years ago, in the time of David. I think she meant a barbarous Hebrew, a violent and poetic Hebrew, a literary Hebrew that refuses to look over its own shoulder or search for new words, a Hebrew without history. As you can imagine, my teachers marveled at my progress. I went straight to the head of the class.

  The next obstacle was the army. In those days, a person of my age—I was only twenty-six—would normally be inducted rather quickly, become assimilated, master the nuances of slang and the general military culture that permeates the social fabric of Israel. Of course, I wanted to get my architect’s license, but I wanted to be in the military even more, which strikes me as odd, since I’d spent so much time and trouble getting out of the Soviet draft. But with Anyusha, how could I? There was no wife, no sister, no cousin, no aunt, no grandmother to care for her. Plus she had been crying more or less continually since our arrival. I began to think the place was disagreeable to her. On top of this, I didn’t know what to do with her, how to feel about her. She was just a baby, I hardly knew her. Then, miraculously, my mother was given her visa, and, two months later, I left Anyusha in her care and went off to basic training. I knew these months in the army would be the best, the most precious I would ever have in my life. And I must say, I was deliriously happy.

  But now all these years later, as I studied the dead skin on my arms with a decidedly benign detachment, it was clear to me that that happiness had been an illusion. It was not without a jolt of nausea that I realized that whispered Arabic was seeping through the walls. I could not understand what they were saying any more than I understood the head hovering in my demented sky or the soldier greeting us in the Jetway, but I had the feeling they were not talking about my health.

  I now took a moment to look around the room. On the walls, a few photos, a rug, some prints of sayings, I guessed, from the Koran. I grimaced when I saw the photographs and thought back to the head. I hadn’t seen it since I’d left Ganei Z’rikha, but right now I really wanted to talk to him. I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself for what he did. I wanted to ask him if he was satisfied with himself, flying around with no body all over Israel. But we never did seem to connect. The asshole.

  And here I was in his bed.

  Chapter Twelve

  Dear You,

  I never finished telling about Miriam. That’s because I had to go. I have to meet Yohanan, and I’m waiting for him right now at the bus stop.

  But I think before I go any further with all this telling of everything, I absolutely must describe myself on this day, everything about me. OK. My hair, as everyone knows, looks exactly like Billy Idol’s, only it’s black, and I don’t put anything in it, no goo or spray or any of that crap. I would describe my hair as a mop with a few sharpened points, like tongues of fire. Frequently, almost always, I have magenta streaks in it, ergo the fire, but today I rinsed it out because I wanted the world to see my hair in its pure state, what I would call my hair as a thing in itself. I used to have long, beautiful princess hair, and Babushka literally cried like a baby when I cut it; well, actually she cried before I cut it, and pleaded, yelled, offered me some of her famous “smile cake,” threatened to shoot herself, all the classic Babushka tricks, but I was determined 100%, and when I make up my mind—SNIP!—short hair. Pop didn’t say anything. He just shook his head and said, “It starts.” Very annoying. But where was I? Yes, no magenta today. Now my hair is pure, absolute, and cosmically black, absorbing the entire spectrum of sunlight into its huge and terrifying blackness, a black hole in the middle of Ha’atzmayut Street, get out of its path, that’s my hair. My skin, however, is (as always) very, very white, also unlike every other Israeli I know. I like it white. If it wasn’t so white naturally, I’d put talcum on just to make it white. But all I have to do is use Lady Lot SPF 40 sunscreen on every single inch of me, even on the parts that never show, because you never know when you will have to take off some piece of clothing that you never took off before, and though this has yet to happen to me, it could, it could maybe happen today. That could be quite a spectacular thing. Naturally, I did put on a little lipstick and eyeliner. I use Jade. I like the candy gloss for the lips, and the deep black eyeliner. Also today, blue iris eye shadow. As for clothes, I’m wearing my thigh-length black skirt over my pink-striped three-quarter leggings. I have on my red high-top sneakers and black-and-white polka-dot socks. You can only see about five centimeters of skin on my leg, but they are an amazing and mind-boggling five centimeters. I am also wearing a sleeveless black camisole that has a row of lace running along the top that I got on Neve Tzedek when Pop took me to Tel Aviv. I have on three bracelets, one yellow, one pink, and one the color of tropical seas. I have my three rings on my fingers, and just my black dot earrings, because today is not a day for dangles.

  That’s it. That is me today.

  Why do I tell you my brand of lipstick and where I bought my camisole? Because every detail of today is of utmost importance. And now is the time for me to tell it all, everything, all my secrets. Of course, God probably knows how I am dressed today, but my father doesn’t. Perhaps my mother knows, but I guess I don’t believe that. Maybe God doesn’t know either. Why should he? This is not his world, that’s for sure. But I do hope someday my father will read this. I hope when he does, he will be able to see me exactly, precisely, as I am today, because when this day is over, the person who I am right now will be gone forever. You may think that is just a truism. But I hope he will read this and say Anna’s outfit really kicked! Anna’s eyeliner was absolutely fabulous! Anna’s lips were glowing and shimmery with the perfect color. I hope he will see me just as I am and think, Anna was beautiful today. That’s all I want.

  So, Miriam.

  First of all, it was really Yohanan who started teaching me all this stuff. He knows an amazing amount. He can read Talmud in Aramaic, and he studies midrash. But after a while he said to me, I can’t teach you anymore. You’re too smart for me. That’s when I started going to see Rabbi Keren. I think this was about a year ago.

  You think girls don’t study, but the modern Orthodox are not Haredi, and you’d be surprised how many girls study. Usually they have a woman teacher, but not me! But I didn’t want to be in a class, so for a long time it was just Rabbi and me, or just Rabbi, me, and Yohanan, because I felt better when Yohanan was there, and Rabbi didn’t care. If I said something stupid and Rabbi’s eyes went blank, Yohanan would say, “I think what Anna meant was …” Some people wouldn’t like that, but I did, even when it wasn’t exactly what I meant. Yohanan always said I would outgrow him because I’m smarter than he is, but that’s ridiculous.

  So I started studying. You can always tell when you’re special, and I could see I was special to Rabbi Keren. It wasn’t like school—I always wanted to go and I rushed there after class. But Shabbat was my big problem. Women don’t have to go to shul, but I loved being there, and Pop would have killed me, but sometimes when he decided to go to work I did go. And also on Shabbat night I could say I was going over to one of my friends, and then I could stop by and do Havdalah with Yohanan’s family. But then after the bombing, Rabbi Keren introduced us to Shlomo, and as I said, Shlomo introduced us to Miriam. And right away, you know, I liked her.

  It was when Shlo
mo explained about Kach and the martyred Rabbi Kahane and the twentieth mitzvah and the Institute for Redemption.

  Now don’t go saying, oh my God, Kach! Right-wing crazies and all that. First of all, it’s not true. They’re not terrible people at all. After all, a person has to defend himself (or herself in my case). A whole people has a right to exist and to defend their right to exist and to exist in their true homeland, even if you don’t necessarily completely believe that God gave it to you. Still, it’s been your home for like four thousand years, way before anyone else who’s around today. Because let me give you the idea, OK? The whole history of Jews is weakness. Being pushed around. Being everybody’s slave. You know the song—Calves are easily bound and slaughtered never knowing the reason why. That was about us. Israelis are different, for sure. But what do we do? When we finally win the Six-Day War and we finally get back Jerusalem, what do we do? We give the Temple right back to the Arabs. They don’t even let us go there to pray. We want to do a little archaeology to find the remains of the Temple, they riot. They store weapons there, too. And they destroy all the evidence down in the tunnels and the cisterns where you can see the remains of the real Temple. Is that fair? Why don’t we do something about that? And when Jews want to bomb someone, our police stop them. But when they want to bomb us, their police help them. They have so many children, just more and more and they all want to move back here and push us into the sea. Why should we let them? Why shouldn’t we be able to pray at the Temple Mount? Why should we be so afraid of them? That’s more or less how they explained it to us.

  But I couldn’t help myself. I raised my hand (even though it was just the four of us) and said, You want to rebuild the Temple and have animal sacrifices? With, like, the blood and all? I tried to explain to them that, based on what I read in the Bible and what little I knew of Talmud, God probably has moved on from that. For instance, I said, when Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac, God was saying, “Don’t need no more human sacrifice! Not my thing anymore.” And it also seemed to me that if God destroyed the Temple (because he is in charge of history, after all), then he’s probably saying, “That’s it for me with the animals! Let’s sing some songs, read some prayers, and eat bagels.” Because if God wanted animal sacrifice, we’d still have a Temple—obviously!