I was no longer invited along to her soirees or rendezvous. If Charlie came by, they would go for long walks, and though he was always polite, he no longer showed any interest in me. Sometimes they got into his car and drove as far as Peredelkino, got out, and walked in the woods where they might hear the crunch of leaves of anyone who might be tailing them. Once or twice I drove with them, seated in the back. It was clear I was to wait in the car while they walked, which I did, saying nothing on the long return home. But mostly I watched them drive off from the kitchen window.
So why did I stay? Who knows? But if I were not there when she arrived home, she would phone me angrily. She would not allow me to spend the night, but also would insist I stay until two or three in the morning. She cried frequently, and would vacillate between fits of temper and fits of laughter. “You must sleep,” I said.
“How can anyone sleep in this country?” It went on this way for weeks.
From time to time I still saw my old friends, but it was not the same, especially with Irina, Marik’s wife, whom I used to love. One day she telephoned me.
“Roman, you must listen to me for once.”
“Why? What?”
“What are you doing with this woman? She’s poison for you.”
“How dare you!” I said.
“I dare,” she replied.
“You don’t understand. She’s different. She understands things we don’t. Her soul is—”
“What, better than yours?”
“Yes.”
“What nonsense. She lives in her own world—anyone but you can see that. She makes things up. She has you wrapped around her finger. It’s disgusting.”
We fell into a weary silence.
Finally, I said, “Irina, why do you even care?”
“Idiot!” she said, and slammed down the phone.
Then, in the first terrible days of August when the air was thick as blood and the sun burned the sidewalks white, Collette telephoned me.
“All right, I’m coming right over,” I said.
“No,” she said, “I don’t want you to. I don’t want you to come here anymore.”
“But why not?”
“I don’t want to see you again,” she said.
“But why not?”
“Don’t be a baby, Roman. I don’t need you anymore. Please stay away.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I’m perfectly serious.”
“I don’t understand.”
Finally she said, “Pascal is back. He’ll take care of me now.”
“Pascal? You said that was over.”
“How could it be over? If you knew me at all, you would know that. How can you love someone in the way we love each other and it be over? If you think that, you don’t know what love is.”
“You’ve been waiting for him all this time.”
“Of course.”
“You’ve been writing to him, haven’t you?”
“Roman,” she said, “what is there to discuss anymore?”
“You said it was over” was all I could think of to say.
I wanted to get drunk that night, but it was impossible for me to get out of bed. I couldn’t lift an arm or move a foot.
Now that I had stopped seeing Collette, I quickly finished the engineering specs for my dream house, which I had to simplify almost out of existence because hardly any of the materials I wanted were available, and I went down to Zagoryanka, towing Fima Dragunsky along with me. Together, we tore down the old place. It came apart with a few blows of the sledgehammer and a few turns of the crowbar. When it was all in a huge heap, my uncle Max, who had acquired it for us in the fifties, unexpectedly showed up at the gate, having taken the train on some perverse impulse. He had been very happy to have the dacha torn down and a new one built. But now he sat on the upturned soil and wept.
After he left, we cleared the rubble and laid out the boundaries of the new foundation. We dug our corners, set the frame, leveled it, and waited for Lonya to arrive with the bags of concrete. I became impatient. A sort of desperation took hold of me. Fima reminded me that Lonya undoubtedly had to go through many steps to secure the concrete from his various sources, and on top of that he had to finagle a truck and scam some guys into loading it, and he probably had to find some extra vodka or cigarettes at the last minute to ease some complication or pay off some fifth wheel.
“Has Lonya ever failed you?” he reminded me.
But I hated Lonya at that moment. I yearned only for the icy scent of poured concrete gurgling over the lip of the wheelbarrow. From its smooth, ripe surface my house would blossom, and I could not wait another minute. But what could we do? We sat down on the tattered velvet couch that we’d set up near the overgrown vegetable garden and smoked our cigarettes. Fima produced two apples. He ate his very deliberately; I gobbled mine down. Then we smoked again, and when Lonya still hadn’t arrived, Fima dug into his bag and came out with two bottles of Baikal. When this was consumed, and still no Lonya, Fima sang something from the Beatles.
“I think I do it well,” he said.
At last, we heard the truck lurching up the road with the blood-curdling cry of rusty gears and the rattle of side rails hanging on for dear life. We charged up the path and went around to unload the cargo. But the truck bed was empty. I tore open the cab door where Lonya sat glumly, still clutching the steering wheel.
“What happened?” I said. “Where’s my concrete?”
“Roma,” he replied, “I have something to tell you.”
“What? Those assholes want more vodka? I told you I’d pay for it. I know they have the fucking concrete, because I saw it myself.”
“Let me out,” he said.
“What is it they want? Just tell me. I’ll get it. I don’t care what it is.”
“I didn’t even go there,” he said. “Let me out.”
“You didn’t go there? What did you do? You drank all my fucking vodka with your fucking Communist friends and their whores!”
“Jesus God!” He flung open the door, pushed me to the ground. He shook his fists at me. “Collette’s been arrested.”
“What?”
“Please don’t tell me you didn’t know.”
“But I didn’t know. I don’t know anything.”
Lonya leaned down ominously, his glass eye so close to my face I could see the scratches in it. “You swear to the God of this shit-fucked universe that you don’t know anything. On Lenin’s head!”
“I swear to you.”
“Ah, Romka,” he sighed. “For Christ’s sake, it’s all over Moscow. She tried to hijack a plane.”
Chapter Eighteen
I WOULD LIKE TO DISCUSS my confusion.
I’m here. I’m there. I’m nowhere at all.
And then suddenly I am in my father’s house. And—impossible!
Is that Guttman? Guttman? In my own bed? Breathing the air of my very father and sisters as if he might suck the memory of my life from every corner of existence?
Can I describe this situation? Can I comprehend it? Have I descended not to earth but to Hell?
I have flown from the southern desert across the Judean Highlands; rising up from the Dead Sea, I have traversed the great cities of Dimona, Be’er Sheva, Arad, and circled the myriad towns and villages, the Bedouin encampments, the army bases without number, some so secret even the soldiers don’t know where they are. I have encompassed in my vision all this ancient landscape stretching east to what they call Jordan and west to Sinai and the lip of the Mediterranean and south to the Gulf of Aqaba and north to the ripe Golan, but for what? To find Guttman in my bed? At the center of all my travails lies Guttman, dreaming?
Is he dying? I perceive, through the grace of Allah, that he is not willfully avoiding the water that lies a few inches from his right hand. He simply no longer comprehends that he is thirsty. Dehydration occurred in the first minutes he was exposed to the searing heat, and acute dehydration within, perhaps, two hours, some lon
g moments before he became stuck in the crevice, argued with the sunbird, and witnessed the death of the ibex. He has by now cycled through the phases of headache, blurred vision, dislocation, and hydrophobia. He cannot recognize the very idea of thirst. Half a liter of water would save him, but he cannot abide the idea of it. He is confident in his body; indeed, he has a clarity of mind he has never before experienced. No longer exposed to the sun, he will survive much longer. But not ultimately, unless he himself takes hold of the water my father offers him. Do I pity Roman Guttman? I must ask him: Roman Guttman, did you think of the blistering sun when you foolishly turned your car toward Bethlehem instead of heading home to your little city in the Philistine plains? No. You did not consider the consequences of turning east instead of north, of ignoring the warnings of your own brother-soldiers, of trekking into the desert without your bottle of water, your hat, or your knife. And did you take into account the ramifications of your actions on others? For instance, on the ibex, for whom, had you not climbed that rock in search of birdsong, things might have gone differently, or for the white leopard who must now live with his murderous deed. And did you think of the young daughter, who even now must be weeping into the folds of her handkerchief, and did you think of, did you think at all of my father and my sisters and the pain of Beit Ibrahim?
He can’t even see me, though here I am! How can I teach him anything? He opens his mouth to speak, but no sound emerges. Perhaps he thinks he is trying to explain his life. Roman Guttman—no one is around to hear! Even I cannot hear you! Only Allah can hear, only He, and He is far, far from this place.
In the outer room sits my father, his head in his hands, swaying under the melody of his sighs. My sister Marya and my sister Hanadi busy themselves with sidelong glances. Beyond the walls of the house a crowd is forming of my old friends and neighbors. A speech I discern coalesces in the minds of Issak Al-Daya and Abdullah Saad, the headmen of our local PLO. They are contemplating their tactics, a delicate matter, even for them. For they cannot intuit my father’s wishes. Is it vengeance he seeks? Or is he an angel of mercy?
• • •
I, too, had days of doubt and foreboding.
In the hours before I donned the white robe of purity and posed with my Kalashnikov and Qur’an, again and again I demanded: Who is this God of such dark power that every calamity that befalls you is already inscribed by Him in the Book of Decrees? They told me the Prophet says, Act, for each of you will find easy that for which he was made. But I asked, is this what I was made for? What, do you think it is a light thing? The great weight of the belt even now pulls my soul earthward. Perhaps for others it was not so; they say most smile at that moment and the ascent to Heaven is swift; they say most have already ascended long before that day, and for them all is pleasure. They live not for this world, but for the next! Yet in the days and weeks of prayer and preparation I had nothing but feet and stomach, smell and touch. The hand of life had descended upon me, and I could not unburden myself of its desires. It hung on me with as great a weight as the belt, greater even, more oppressive, more terrifying. Do not fear the unknown, they told me, and we said the confession, There is no God but Allah.…
I did not go inside for the washing, though it was definitely my place to be there. They had wrapped Fadi in the kafan, and brought him out on a wooden board. I stood off to one side as they covered him with flags, black, red, green, the colors of Fatah and Palestine, a photo of Arafat at his head. Though in life Fadi spat on Arafat, in death the leader’s smiling face was pasted to his shroud. Then there were prayers: O Allah! Forgive those of us that are alive and those of us that are dead; those of us that are present and those of us who are absent; those of us who are young and those of us who are grown into adults, our males and our females. O Allah! Whomsoever of us You keep alive, let him live as a follower of Islam, and whomsoever You cause to die, let him die as a believer. As always I began to feel sick. I looked around, and there, in the far corner, in her mother’s arms, eyes closed, tearless, yet weeping all the same, Nadirah. The mullah folded his hands, and my Fadi was hefted like a refrigerator upon the shoulders of the men. I should have been among them, but I could not seem to get there; my feet simply wouldn’t carry me. My father glared at me: Don’t be so sad! Be proud! But he himself wept like some old Bedouin. “He was my pride and joy,” he sobbed.
They gathered in a great crowd. Checkered headbands and kaffiahs, black masks, green scarves all paraded down Hebron Street. I was swept along, drowning. What did I see? The sky occluded with fists. The bier adorned with oaths. Fadi was to be buried here in Jabal, not in our village. “He died here,” my father had said to me, “that is the law.” Thousands came out for this funeral. Who were these people? Those of our khamulah seemed lost among them, retreating before the onslaught of strangers and famous sheiks. Finally, I tried to push through the ocean of screaming boys and men, but they refused to part for me. Who do you think you are? someone said. Stop pushing! And when we arrived at the burial place, I was still far back, just one of the numberless mourners.
I closed my eyes. Again, I saw Fadi setting the stone in his sling, turning toward me.…
“Amir!”
It was my father. He reached through the crowd with his willowy arm and grasped my childish hand in his oil-stained fingers. He slapped my face. “What are you doing back here? Come on!”
My father threw up his arms again, and the folds of people opened before him.
I was now in the circle of our family, our khamulah having congealed around the gravesite. The body in its white sheath was lowered into the grave, and Nadirah, in spite of all custom, in spite of the mullah’s outraged objections, in spite even of the Prophet’s proscription, had come to the grave site. Worse still, she now knelt over it, unafraid to watch as they laid the stones upon her husband. Brazenly she drizzled a handful of dirt upon him and then, without a word, floated back into the crowd, carried on the wings of her enormous, invisible sorrow.
I had never seen her dressed in the jilbab before. Gone were the jeans and polos and the sweaters that might have suggested to me the actual form of paradise in this or any other life. This new Nadirah I did not know; redesigned by grief, her hair and neck obscured by the hijab, her face a moon shining from a dark, remote, and heartless scarf, her eyes and lips as dry as the well that had always sat unused in the ruins above my village. The crowd bleated like a herd of goats desperate to be milked, and Nadirah was gathered up within it, swallowed and held tight. Now I understood. I would never see her again. I would never see either of them again.
The years after that passed in a kind of dream.
I sat with my father watching television. I no longer cared much about school. And as for stories? My throat was stopped up and nothing came out but a kind of bark. I went every day to my father’s shop. I worked on whatever car was there, but in time there were no more cars. These were the days of intifada. Let’s face it, I told my father, no Jews, no cars.
So the shop was closed, and my father and I watched television.
My mother hinted many times that I should be out there throwing stones. “What’s the matter with you?” she said. I told her that everyone who throws stones ends up in jail. “Not everyone,” she replied.
But I didn’t want to be in jail. I didn’t want to be anywhere. And I realized with a flash of terrible certainty that I didn’t care about any of it. About Palestine, about Israel, about Nadirah, about my father, about my mother, or about my sisters. As soon as I had this thought, I closed my eyes and fell into a deep sleep.
How many more years passed until that day I was sitting near the Pool of Suleiman smoking a cigarette? I don’t remember when I started to smoke, but by this time my cigarette had become my closest companion. Ab had stirred himself months before and reopened the garage. Everybody thought because of Oslo there would surely be a Palestinian state in two weeks’ time, and tourists were pouring back into Bethlehem. My older sisters one by one were going off to Beth
lehem University or getting married, and the others were still babies. My mother blithely forgot all the words she had said to me in the years of her insanity and went back to teaching school—and I was just sitting there near the Pool of Suleiman because it wasn’t too far from our town and lately I often found myself there, not really thinking of anything, just sitting. I heard in the distance some children, and for some reason this brought to mind the storytelling of Uncle Ahmad. He was long dead, just as my father had predicted, of emphysema and Parkinson’s, and his gift to me, his Book of Tales, was lost, I didn’t know where because I’d never bothered looking for it, but then the image of Uncle Ahmad faded and I saw in my mind my father’s garage. I’d begun working there again, mostly on Muslim cars now. Muslim cars! I laughed. And these broken-down cars reminded me for some reason of the prostitute I’d been visiting, Safa, and then the faces of one or two of the other girls, but the perfume of Safa wiped them away, and I was reminded by her perfume of the drinks I now consumed most every evening when I was done with her, and then I looked down and saw my legs dangling over the edge of the pool and this reminded me of something from so far in my past it could have been as ancient as this cistern, at least two thousand years old, and for some reason the sound of a hawk came into my ears, and the scent of cucumber filled my nostrils, and the song of goat bells filled the air, but I looked past my legs to the water, which in the light of approaching night was as dark as blood on pavement, and I thought of the water of the Nile that Mussa turned to blood and I understood that this water was not only blood; it was also flesh because I could make out the reflection of my own face and the bottom of my own feet, and the perspective made it seem that there was nothing between my feet and my face, and I thought, what is it that is between my feet and my face? And I answered, My heart.
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