Misha Abromovich stood up. “I want to welcome everyone, and say to you, Shabbat shalom!”
“Shabbat shalom!” everyone replied.
There was to be a lecture on Jewish history by Tamara Belkina, who had been doing research more or less openly for years and was considered by everyone a great scholar. I think she may have known what she was talking about, as far as any Soviet could know Jewish history, but as for me, I was already far away, in Zagoryanka, pouring the foundation for my house with the beautiful, protean concrete my friend Lonya would have managed in his Byzantine way to acquire with a case of export-quality vodka and a carton of American cigarettes.
The idea of it made me laugh out loud with pleasure. Belkina glanced up at me. “What?”
Collette did not even bother to look over.
Later she said, “I have to go home now. Charlie is coming over. Probably you won’t want to be there.”
Belkina. Charlie. Zagoryanka. What were these things to me anymore? Now there was only Anyusha, the Head, the Sunbird, Moishe, and the bedroom door, which Abdul-Latif had locked behind him when he went out.
Chapter Fifteen
STILL IN THIS BASEMENT IN JERUSALEM, waiting around for something to happen and naturally thinking about things, in this case, Pop.
The thing is, it isn’t so easy being him. Take what happened to him when he was a kid. He grew up in a place where no one trusted anyone, not even your best friend or your mother or father or anyone. I mean, if I couldn’t trust Yohanan or Miriam, I don’t know what I’d do.
He used to tell me this story about some strange guy who lived in the basement of his house in Moscow—an old guy who had been in the Gulag and everything—and this is what he told my pop, word for word (I know because Pop told it to me so many times). In this story my dad is like six or seven years old. So imagine this old guy’s voice, or rather Pop talking in this old guy’s voice, with a thick Georgian accent and coughing up phlegm for effect, saying: “So, Roman, do you know what a traitor looks like? I will tell you! If he smiles at you too easily, he is an informer. If he doesn’t smile at all, he’s also an informer. If he wants to know what happened next, never tell him. If he makes a great show of not wanting to know, that is even worse. If he brings you real coffee, he will betray you. If he invites himself in, or if he never allows himself to come in, beware! If he says, ‘I’ll bring you something from the store; after all, I’m going out anyway,’ then stay away from him! If he’s very humorous, he will turn you in without any remorse. If he’s strict as a commissar, then that’s exactly what he is. If he showers you with kisses, if he gets you tickets to the Bolshoi, if he makes an effort to keep the hallway clean, if he complains about every aspect of his life, if he reads Pravda even once a week, if he always criticizes the leadership, if he’s the nicest guy you ever met, it’s all the same. You only have to do one thing, my Little Octobrist—look into his eyes! That’s right. Look into his eyes. If they sparkle with joy and yet you feel the coldness of death, then he is the one. It’s very simple. Even you can do it. Your parents taught you a lot, but they did not teach you everything. Oh! Somewhere in this world there is a county in which you can trust your neighbor and count on your friend, but not this one!”
When Pop tells me this story, I always ask him, But what was that guy doing in your basement? And he says, Oh, he had an important job! He sorted through the stuff coming out of our toilets. We flushed so many secrets down the bowl—they couldn’t let all that information go down the drain. He was the last and the best of the Communists!
Then my father always laughed and kissed me good night.
But I think this story tells a lot about what Pop went through as a kid and how hard it was for him to be him. And that’s what I want everyone to understand.
Luckily, Miriam and I spend tons of time together. Pop doesn’t know anything about it. Miriam takes me everywhere. When we were talking about Noah (because there is this whole thing having to do with redemption in our time if everyone, even non-Jews, just follows the Seven Laws of Noah), she took me to the zoo to teach me.(!!) Then we went into Jerusalem and prayed at the wall—well, she prayed at the wall. I kind of watched and waited for something to happen, but nothing did. I thought she would be upset with me, but she just took me for falafel. Another time we went to visit the Temple Institute where they have this model of Solomon’s Temple and all these crazy implements to use when they rebuild the temple again—you know, the menorah and the fire pans and the things to collect blood and everything, all of gold and silver and bronze. They even built an Ark of the Covenant, like Moses made. It was crazy, but it was also very exciting, to be so close to things that were exactly like they were in the Bible. Sometimes we didn’t do anything religious at all and just talked about stuff, and I told her a lot about my life and also about Pop. She seemed to know a lot about him anyway. After all, he’s an architect. Anyway, one day she said to me, Why don’t you ever talk about your mother? And I said, I don’t have a mother. She was quiet for a long time, and then she said, It must be hard, and I said, Not really, and she said, Yes, really, and then I didn’t know what she wanted me to say. Once we went to her house with her husband, and she cooked, and that was the first time I wondered why she didn’t have any kids, because Orthodox have kids when they’re like thirteen or something, and I kind of let it slip, and she looked at her husband, and then she did that smile of hers and she said, HaShem—that’s what she calls God—will deliver in his time. I wanted to tell her, I don’t have a mother and you don’t have a kid! But I didn’t.
The question she really wanted me to focus on was what was the right way to live your life and what was the wrong way. As far as she was concerned, the Law is the right way, and protecting the Jewish People and the Land of Israel is the right way, and it’s our duty, and nothing else is as important as that, because only that way will the Messiah arrive to heal the world.
But let’s be honest. Forget the Messiah. He’s not coming. Because something that’s made up cannot actually appear. So I’m not interested in the Messiah, even for Miriam’s sake. And as for leading a holy life, I’d really like to, but so far I can’t. It just won’t happen. I mean, I still eat shrimp.
But, when it comes to protecting the Jewish People? Well, after what happened to my father, things got a lot clearer for me.
You just can’t let someone kick you out of your own land.
And also, if you don’t stand for something, if you’re just for yourself, what kind of person are you? Selfish, that’s what. And that is exactly what I don’t want to be.
So then this whole thing came up with the Temple Mount, and they kept asking me, like every day, and every day I couldn’t say yes and I couldn’t say no, and it was really horrible, plus I had no idea what they were actually asking me to do, they were kind of vague, and then when Pop didn’t come home that night and when Yohanan came through the window, and when the house was so noisy and insane with laundry and everything, and I went to Rabbi’s and they asked me one last time because it’s all happening today, and it was Miriam herself who asked me and it was never Miriam who had asked before—I don’t know—I just said yes.
And that was when everything seemed to happen. Yohanan and I and the others went off with Shlomo, and he told us where to be and when and how important it was, and asked us a million times if he could count on us, and made us repeat our oath like a thousand times, and grilled us on our quotations, and made us repeat our history, and talked to us for what seemed like hours and hours about Torah and Mishnah and Talmud and Akiba and Bar Kokhba and Israel and Zionism and how there needs to be a new Temple, a Third Temple, because without the Third Temple how could we ever make the korban, the four kinds of sacrifices: the sacrifice of peace, the sacrifice of guilt, the sacrifice of sin, and the burnt offering, because without sacrifice, my children, how can we come close to God etc. etc. etc. And I kept saying to myself, I don’t have to exactly believe this, and that’s OK. I don’t have to be
100% sure, I just have to listen to what Miriam and Rabbi Keren tell me, and follow the commandments with an open heart. I just have to do.
Because, you see, during that whole time they were working with us, I couldn’t tell them the truth. Not even Miriam. I was supposed to be ready to hear, but the noises around me got so loud that sometimes I could barely hear myself.
And then, this afternoon, when Yohanan took my hand, all the noise went away. That is worth thinking about.
Oh! I’ll finish this later. They just brought us some McDonald’s from the new kosher one at the mall in Mevaseret Zion—Shlomo thought he was bringing us gold and diamonds. All I really want to know is if Miriam is coming or not.
I saw Fadi less and less. The older I got, the more angry with me he seemed to be. His whole life was angry.
“How is it you’re not angry?” he said to me.
“I don’t know” was all I could think of to reply.
I knew that other boys my age were already trying to be in al-Shabiba so they could graduate into Fatah or even into the Fatah Hawks and go kill Israelis, or they hung around with the Popular Front or Islamic Jihad, but Fadi was Democratic Front. That’s what he was always spouting about. And then he ran off every day to be with his new friends. He wore only black pants and a black shirt and a black band around his head. It was pretty obvious he created this uniform on his own—all his friends wore ordinary clothes, T-shirts, jeans, whatever they had; they were poor, but he had money now, so he bought American clothes and sunglasses. Once I mocked him for that, calling him a Paul Newman. He just laughed at me and said, “Go to your mother, little baby.” Most of the time, though, he still tried to convince me. “Come on, Amir, come on. What’s the matter with you? What are you still doing with playhouses and card games?” He looked at me sadly. “Don’t you read the news? Don’t you watch TV? Everything is happening right now! Are you deaf? Or maybe you’re just an idiot.”
But sometimes the old days returned to us, and Fadi was just Fadi again.
One evening we walked out by the Wadi Ibrahim, the small winter river that gave our town its name, or maybe it was the other way around, nobody really knew. The spring flowers were still in bloom, though the water was already down to a trickle running through the spine of the wadi, and the earth around it was already turning hard, like baked brick. This, oh this, was our time of the year! The smell of the drying earth, the fresh scent coming off the stream, the slight perfume of the flowers and shrubs, and the sound of our feet scratching along the rock and mud. How many scorpions had I killed here? And how many scarabs had I held in my palm for good luck? Each year we found a new stone upon which to carve our names. The first time, Fadi showed me how:
FADI
——
Amir
1980
And every year since, the same, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984.
But then one year he didn’t want to do it anymore. “We’re not girls,” he said.
So I went there by myself, found a decent rock, and carved,
FADI
——
Amir
1985
But now we were together again, strolling along the edge of the stream, looking for snails.
“Did you see what Djamel Zidane did?” cried Fadi in his old voice. “Three goals all by himself! Especially that one from at least twenty-five meters—pow!”
“And the one where Madjer was all over him, and then from nowhere …,” I answered.
“The kick! Ya-ala!” Fadi threw his arms in the air. “That is what you call real poetry!”
When his arm came down, it rested on my shoulder. Nothing would have been more natural than to reach up and take his hand, but I didn’t. We walked along this way for a while, feeling like we used to feel, Fadi towering over me, his long, thin body embracing me in its shadow. In a year I’d probably be as tall as he. Then, I supposed, these moments would be over for good.
We spoke of nothing much—my school, his work, his problems with Nadirah, which I enjoyed talking about quite a bit, my parents, my sisters, more football, all the things that carry a person from one step to the next. Then he looked up and rubbed his eyes: the sun had begun to set.
“Let’s get back,” he said.
“Why don’t we watch the sun go down together?” I suggested.
“What for?”
“I don’t know. Just for the sake of it.”
“You’re getting crazy as you grow up, you know that, Amir?”
“Why? I just thought …”
“It’s getting dark. What’s the point of being out here in the dark?”
“Why not?” I demanded.
“I have to get home, Amir.”
“Why? Because of Nadirah?”
“Of course because of Nadirah.”
“Why is it always Nadirah? Nadirah, Nadirah, Nadirah! What about us?”
“ ‘Us’?”
“I mean …”
He crossed his arms. They might as well have been two scimitars. “It’s time to get over it, Amir. For everyone’s sake.”
“Over what?”
“Oh, Amir!” he said.
“What?”
“I’ve been trying to be patient, but you just … I have to say something. I’ve been thinking about it for a while now. I think maybe you shouldn’t spend so much time with Nadirah and me anymore. Maybe that would be best. Yes, I think it would definitely be best. You have to stay away from us, Amir. Nadirah and I, we need some privacy, you know? Can you understand that? Amir, you can’t be with a person you don’t like.”
“But I do like you. I love you!” I cried.
“Not me, you idiot. Nadirah. You don’t accept her. Everyone knows that.”
“But you’re my cousin,” I replied miserably.
“She’s also your cousin. And she’s my wife. She will be the mother of my children.”
“I know that.”
“No, I don’t think you do.” He now took five steps back, and with each step receded deeper into the darkness of the approaching night. He held up his hand as if to wave good-bye, but actually it was just a shrug, as if there really were nothing more he could possibly say to me. He walked off in the direction of the village, and before I could say a word he was swallowed up in the misty blackness of that night, and I was left alone in our wadi with the water trickling over my shoes and the first flutter of bats swirling over my head.
You see? You see? This is exactly what the Prophet, Sayyidina Rasulullah, Allah’s blessing upon him, warned: Beware of suspicion, do not find fault with each other, do not spy upon one another, do not compete with one another. But I was filled with envy! Strange feelings bit into my heart and strange thoughts interrupted my sleep. Even now, I feel the pangs of envy creep into my phantom groin. But what is it I covet? Even as I look down upon Dasha Cohen in her brilliant silence, in her magnificent stillness, I cannot say if it is she I desire, or my lost life, or simply the black freedom of death. Perhaps if she would speak my name, I would understand why I tarry. Perhaps if she cursed me, spit at me, if she blinked her eyes, one time for disgust, two times for vengeance, I might at least make sense of the connection between us. Shattered and pale, her hair a tangle of thorns, her nails clipped like a boy’s, her legs slightly parted, her neck exposed to the collarbone, one ear protruding from her hair like a slice of ripe pear—
Pear.
The months passed, the season turned to winter yet again, and I marched off, as I now did every day, in the direction of the garage and then, as always, detoured onto the Street of the Four Wells and then cut through the alley behind Nasser’s vegetable stand, said hello as always to abu-Mahmed, who always seemed to be wherever I was, and bent under the banyan because I loved the smell, and anyway it was always raining this time of year, taking a minute to shake the water from my hair and pull my shirt from my back, and then I skirted the rear of the houses hiding myself under the eaves and pressing up against the walls because I wanted to remain as dry as possible
. And then, at last, I reached the Tomb of Nadirah, which is what I now called the house in which she and Fadi lived, and there I placed myself beneath the window—that is, whichever window opened upon the room in which she happened to be, of which there were two, the kitchen where I had first seen her, which was also the main room with its one sofa and one chair upon which she sat to watch television, and the bedroom. In the last days, this was where I always found her, lying atop the half-made mattress of the wedding bed Fadi had given her as a bride price. She had one leg bent like a pyramid upon which she balanced her ashtray. As usual she was wearing her blue jeans with white stitching on the pockets and a heart of white sequins sewn upon the hem of her right leg, the leg which was now stretched to the edge of the mattress, her bare foot and bright orange toes dangling over the side. When she walked the streets in those jeans, old women and religious men yelled at her. Today she had been reading something, but the book was already lying open on her breast, an abandoned butterfly, rising up and down with each breath. I loved her blouses. Today she wore the T-shirt that said BON JOVI: BAD MEDICINE. I read enough English to see that. And anyway, everyone knew Bon Jovi. One sleeve was torn on purpose to reveal a slice more of her shoulder, the V where it came down into her arm like the mouth of a river. I knelt beneath the casement still as a rock.
How many times had I come here? After school, before school, in the early evening before Fadi returned, whole seasons had I come, four months, six months, eight. Spring had turned to summer, summer to fall, fall to winter. He thought I hated her. I did. Yet if I did not make my pilgrimage to the altar of her window each day, I was consumed with mourning for the day that was lost. What had she been wearing, what had she been reading, what had she cooked, what had she listened to, who among her boring girlfriends had visited her; and if she had not been home, where had she gone? And oh! if she was not home how my heart raced with anxiety. I would drop from her window, which then would seem just a stupid window on Fadi’s house, and run first to Saliah’s house, and if she was not there, then to the apartment building where I knew Adeela lived, where I would have to wait a block away and watch for the door to open and close, which it did almost constantly, but rarely with Nadirah coming through; and if not there, to Rima’s or Monique’s or Jala’s; and if not there to the juice bar or the café or the bakery or the cultural center. One time I waited three hours near the movie theater, and when the film let out and she was not there, I was abject to the point of tears.
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