I could tell that he’d also looked up, and in a dreamy lilt I said how wonderful the sunsets in Tel Aviv were at this time of year, the end of autumn, and that I’d give anything to be there now. ‘Just to see one sunset and then come back here.’
‘Hey, look.’ I pointed to the moon that had abruptly appeared over the buildings.
He murmured something and his chest emptied out with a sort of sigh and his shoulders drooped.
‘What was that? I couldn’t hear.’
‘The moon…’ He lowered his eyes and they met mine again. ‘It’s almost full.’
Almost full? I debated for a moment, then said hesitantly: ‘Isn’t it the opposite?’
His eyes were somewhere else. ‘Opposite of what?’
I said that when the moon was waxing, the opening in its crescent faced left, so the one above us now was actually waning: ‘See? It’s facing right.’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, still gazing distractedly at the sky. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Positive.’ I traced the Hebrew letters of the mnemonic in the air: gimel and zayin. ‘We have this system to remember it, because of the Hebrew letters’ shapes.’
We got to the store at 5.50. Hilmi headed to the oil paints and I followed him down a colourful aisle arranged by the colours of the rainbow. I scanned the thick aluminium tubes, reading the names on their labels, while he walked up and down picking out the ones he needed.
At the end of the aisle we got to the blues, where dozens of shades and sub-shades fanned out, from very dark to extremely light. There was ink blue and indigo, sky blue and turquoise, navy and baby blue, and colours with poetic names like midnight blue, lagoon blue and china blue. There were shades based on metallic pigments – cobalt blue, manganese blue and fluorescent blue. Some even had nationalities, like French blue and Prussian blue and English blue.
‘Look at this one.’ I showed Hilmi a tube: ‘Copenhagen blue.’
He chose peacock blue, hyacinth blue and sapphire blue, and searched the tubes to show me another shade: ‘This is a very expensive colour, they make it from a rare type of snail.’ Before I had time to wonder if it was tchelet – the unique light blue used to dye the corners of prayer shawls – and whether he would even know about that, he looked up and waved his hand at the rest of the aisle. ‘Doesn’t it make you weirdly hungry, all this?’ He eyed the shelves behind me ravenously. ‘It’s like you just want to devour them all.’
Devour. He opened his mouth very wide when he said that. For a minute I could see right into his throat, the darkness inside and the redness of the roof of his mouth. I was impressed by the lovely English word he had chosen, devour, which sounded enchanting and startling at the same time.
‘Hey,’ I said when we left the store, ‘have you ever gone diving? Snorkelling, or scuba diving? Have you ever done that?’
‘No,’ he scoffed and shook his head at me.
I bragged about the advanced scuba diving qualification I’d got when Noam and I took lessons six years ago, and I told him about the coral reefs at Sharm and Sharks Bay, in the Sinai Desert. ‘You can’t imagine how incredible it is there, just amazing…’
‘Sharm el-Sheikh?’ His brow climbed even higher. ‘In the Red Sea?’
‘Yeah, Sharm,’ I said, and turned my head back because he’d slowed down behind me. ‘Also Dahab, and Nuweiba.’
He fished out his Lucky Strikes and held out a bent cigarette. ‘Want it?’
I nodded and took it from him. ‘Thanks.’
The lighter creaked in his hand a couple of times until it produced a feeble flame that threatened to die at any second. ‘Come here,’ he cupped his hand around the flame, ‘quickly.’ He leaned in close as though we were sharing a secret, tilting our heads to hear something. But the flame was no good, it touched the edge of the cigarette and went out. He came a little closer. ‘It’s the wind.’
When I shielded the lighter from my side, I felt one of his curls brush against my forehead and his warm breath on my cheek. I wondered whether, when he looked at me like that, half a head taller than me, he could see my pulse beating in my temples.
I inhaled and the ember turned red and glowed with a whisper. I stepped back. ‘Thanks.’
‘Great.’ He gave the curl of smoke a satisfied look, then crumpled the pack in his fist and shot it straight into the trash can behind us.
‘But Hilmi—’
The empty lighter flashed as it too sailed through the air. ‘What?’
‘That was your last one.’
‘So?’ And with a swift, rakish scissoring of his fingers, he plucked the cigarette from my hand. ‘We’ll smoke it together.’ He took two straight drags. The first with a deep inhalation, the second shorter. ‘Beseder?’
He knew a couple of Hebrew words and phrases. Beseder: OK. Balagan: chaos. He’d let a few others slip as we’d walked: ‘Give me that,’ ‘Good morning,’ ‘How are you?’
When I didn’t answer, he repeated: ‘Beseder?’ which confused me even more. I wasn’t sure what he was asking. I gazed at him a moment longer and our eyes locked, like the two pairs of fingers holding the cigarette whose smoky curls spiralled up into the wind.
‘Of course.’ I came out of my daze and pulled my hand away. ‘It’s yours.’
‘But now it’s yours, too. Here.’
‘Together, then.’
‘Yes, together.’
From 27th Street we walked back to Broadway and up towards the subway station. This part of Broadway was more of a wholesale area, less touristy. The shops were relatively down-market, selling cheap clothes and sneakers, wigs and women’s handbags. We stopped at a little bakery and bought two lattes and a couple of warm pretzels fresh from the oven. Somehow after that, the topic came up again.
‘You have to try it,’ I said. ‘Really, the first chance you get.’
He laughed in surprise. ‘What, diving?’
‘Listen,’ I put my right hand on my heart, ‘it’s truly amazing.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Here’s the thing about me.’ He put his right hand on his chest as I had done. ‘There are three things I don’t know how to do.’
‘Only three? That’s not bad.’
‘Three things a man should know.’
‘Should?’
‘Yes. A man should know how to drive, and I don’t. I’ve never driven.’
‘Walla?’ I said, expressing my surprise.
He grinned as he had on the previous times I’d used Arabic words like walla or achla.
I held up my thumb, starting to count his flaws: ‘You don’t drive.’
‘I don’t know how to shoot a gun.’
Unintentionally, my thumb and finger formed a childish pistol. ‘Yes…’
‘And swimming. I can’t swim.’ He saw my face fall. ‘I was born and raised in Hebron,’ he said, as if by way of apology, ‘there’s no sea there.’
‘I know, but…’
‘And then we moved to Ramallah, and there isn’t one there either.’
‘Yes, but what about Gaza?’ My voice came out high pitched and awkward. ‘You guys have a sea in Gaza.’
He laughed wearily. ‘The sea in Gaza?’ Then he enumerated all the ways the IDF made it difficult to get from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip: the permits, the months of waiting. ‘Me, ever since I was a kid,’ he said, and it seemed as though he could scarcely believe it himself, ‘I’ve been to the sea only three times. Three times my whole life.’
After a few steps he realized I’d stopped walking. Everything I’d said earlier, all the cheerful chatter, the excited questions. ‘Hilmi, I’m…’
‘Nu, come on.’ He held out his hand with half a smile. ‘I’m not going to throw you into the sea because of it. Let’s go.’
We walked on silently for a while. I didn’t know what to say and all I could hear was the sound of our footsteps, a hollow double thud striking the pavement again and again.
‘But one day, you know,’ he went on in surprising
ly high spirits, ‘one day it’ll be everyone’s sea, and we’ll learn how to swim in it together.’
‘Together?’
‘Yes, together.’ Then he seemed tentative suddenly, and started digging through his coat pockets. ‘What the…’
‘Together where? What are you talking about?’
‘Hang on, wait a second, my keys. I can’t find my keys.’
chapter 4
Out came the scarf and the pencil case again. The brown gloves, the thick spiral-bound notebook. The subway map, a folding umbrella, all shaken out onto the engine hood of a parked car. He shook his head in disbelief, stomped his foot on the pavement, flung off his coat and patted it over and over again, as he had done with the backpack after emptying it out. There was a painful expression of disgust on his face. I bent over to pick up a few coins that had rolled onto the pavement. Passers-by glanced at us over their shoulders and walked on indifferently. The pages of the notebook fluttered in the wind. I watched him dig desperately through his trouser pockets, constantly raking his lower lip with his teeth.
‘Stop for a second.’ I gave him an encouraging look and put a cautious hand on his arm. I asked him to try to reconstruct where he’d last had the keys. ‘Maybe it was at the paint shop, maybe when you paid…’
‘No,’ he muttered and shut his eyes wearily, ‘I don’t think so.’ He opened his eyes again and looked defeated: it might have been at the café, when the bill came. He thought he’d heard the keys jangle when he’d taken money out of his pocket.
We turned back to Broadway and headed south this time, from 28th towards Tenth Street. We walked briskly, purposefully, alert to every metallic glimmer on the pavement. Down to Union Square, right, then left, and down Sixth Avenue, Hilmi taking large, energetic strides, paving a path for us through the crowds, and me behind him. As we searched among all the moving feet in case the keys had fallen on the way, we passed the same window displays and brightly lit alleys we’d seen before, the same doorways of shops and giant department stores, the same lines of trees and shady treetops and office buildings, now on our left, dark and locked.
The repeated sights brought a replay of our chatter, everything we had said an hour earlier going up Broadway, but the conversation also proceeded in reverse order, from end to beginning. Like playing a record backwards and imagining subliminal messages emerging from the garbled sounds, or rewinding a cassette tape with its squeaky distorted playback, so my sense of guilt accelerated and grew sharper, and my heart pounded faster, matching the beat of our hurried steps. In retrospect, I noticed all the things I’d missed before, when I’d talked longingly about the sea in Tel Aviv, and raved about my diving adventures in Sinai. I recalled how he’d kept quiet here, or hadn’t responded there, and I remembered a serious look he’d given me at this intersection, and how right here, when we stopped to gaze at the moon, he’d sighed deeply.
I was now attuned to every tone of voice and every expression. I thought twice before speaking, phrased things carefully to prevent any misinterpretations that might arise from my English. I nodded vigorously whenever he spoke and laughed too loudly at his jokes. I scanned every inch of the pavement, throwing myself into the search for the keys in an attempt to compensate, to repair, to restore what had been lost – a spontaneity, a light-heartedness that was no longer there.
Kosher-Kosher-Kosher-Kosher. All the delis in downtown Manhattan seemed to have become kosher, and I spotted more and more menorahs lit up among the Christmas trees in the shop windows. Two ultra-Orthodox men with streimels and bobbing side locks came towards us, and further down the street we could hear thunderous darbuka drumming from a tattoo and piercing den. Another branch of ‘Humus Place’, another corner store selling newspapers and magazines in foreign languages, including Maariv and Yediot America alongside papers with Arabic headlines.
We entered the desolate darkness of a bar and asked to use the bathroom. While I stood outside the single cubicle in the women’s lavatory waiting for someone to emerge, I wondered whether Hilmi, in the men’s room on the other side of the wall, was also reading the word in the little door lock – Occupied – and thinking about the occupation.
My series of knocks on the cubicle door produced a muffled voice from inside: ‘Just a minute.’
Alone now, I replayed what had almost happened back when we’d stood at a crosswalk and he’d suddenly looked at me, bathed in a reddish glow from the light. His eyes had lingered on my face, focused on my lips, and I was struck by a certainty that he was about to lean over and kiss me. I remembered the wave of air that had hung between us, and the trembling, almost-happened second that ended abruptly when the light changed to green and everyone around us stepped onto the street. I didn’t even realize I was banging on the door again.
‘Just a minute!’
I stifled not only the urge to pee but also the pleading voice that burst into my head as though it had just been waiting for its chance to get me alone: What do you think you’re doing? You’re playing with fire. Tempting fate. Don’t you have enough problems? What do you need this for? I suddenly felt a need to see what I looked like, how I’d looked to him at that crossing. There was no mirror above the sink or on the paper towel dispenser, but I caught myself in the dark glass on the emergency supply cabinet, and my face looked cloudy and tormented.
When was it? Five or six years ago. I was on a jitney bus in Tel Aviv. I got on at the old Central Bus Station, and we hadn’t even made it around the bend to Allenby Street before we got stuck in a huge traffic jam. It was midday and the jitney was almost empty. Two passengers sat in the back, and one woman in front of me. At some point the driver got sick of the music on the radio and started flipping through fragments of verbiage and snatches of melodies until he tuned in to a religious station, Arutz Sheva or something like that. He paused there, and actually turned up the volume when an announcer yelled: ‘Dozens of young girls, Jewish women, every single year!’
It was the deep, warm voice of an older Mizrahi man with impressively enunciated glottal sounds. ‘Daughters of Israel! Lost Souls!’ he kept shouting. ‘Seduced to convert to Islam, God have mercy! Married off to Arab men who kidnap them and take them to their villages, drugged and beaten, where they are held in conditions of hunger and slavery, with their children! In central Israel, in the north, in the south…’
Through the dusty window I could see a trail of blue buses crawling towards Allenby in the summer light. The voice went on: ‘Sister’s Hand, an organization founded by Rabbi Arieh Shatz, helps rescue these girls and their children and bring them back to Judaism, into the warm embrace of the Jewish people. For donations or to reach the emergency hotline, call now—’ Then I heard the passenger in front of me talking to the driver. I remember her telling him about her sister-in-law’s daughter, who was one of those women who’d fallen in with an Arab: ‘Some guy working construction near where they live in Lod. He’s from Nablus…’
‘Oy, oy, oy,’ I remember the driver responding with a gasp. Then he clucked: ‘God help us.’
‘And he doesn’t look Arab at all!’ the astonished woman added.
The driver clucked again: ‘Those are the ones you really have to watch out for.’
She told him how the man had pursued the girl, spent lots of money on her at first, showered her with gifts. Her poor sister-in-law had begged the girl not to go with him. She’d cried her heart out. But nothing helped. She dated him for a few months and was already pregnant when they got married. ‘Now she’s rotting away there in Nablus, you can’t imagine…’
‘Dear God…’
‘Two kids and pregnant again.’
‘God curse them all.’
‘She hardly has any teeth left, he beats her so badly.’
‘Those animals! For them to nail a Jewish woman is a big deal.’
Someone flushes the toilet loudly in the stall. When the door finally opens, a long-legged blonde emerges. She mumbles something and gestures back at the floor. ‘Watch
out,’ she says loudly, pointing to a puddle at the foot of the toilet, ‘it’s slippery in there.’
I tiptoe in. As I squat on the seat, the loud hum of the tank refilling from the pipes in the wall mingles with the girl’s voice in my ears: watchoutitsslipperyinthere, watchoutitsslippery… I wonder whether it’s a sign: her warning, the light changing at the critical moment, the keys. Yes, the lost keys: that’s a sign that I shouldn’t go to Brooklyn. It was divine intervention that knocked those keys out of his pocket, the hand of God protecting me from what might happen, reaching out to put an end to this story before it begins. A bad feeling flickers inside me again, that alternating glow between push and pull, between attraction and fear.
I walk out and wash my hands, resolving to help him find his keys and then go home. When we get to Café Aquarium I’ll say goodbye warmly, maybe we’ll exchange phone numbers, a peck on the cheek, and I’ll head straight home. But even as I wipe my hands on a paper towel and tell myself these things, I know they will not happen. I know they are hollow words meant to calm me. I walk out of the bar and he is waiting for me. A serious smile shudders between us, and I cannot help noticing his eyes locked on my lips. His curls glow like flames in the red light at the crosswalk.
At Café Aquarium they’d changed shifts, and a new waitress greeted us when we blustered in, then watched us march to the window table and crouch down to search under the chairs. As far as she knew, no one had found any keys. This was confirmed by the kitchen staff and the manager, who phoned a waiter from the earlier shift.
‘What are you going to do?’ I asked Hilmi outside.
He was still looking up and down the pavement, and he hissed something in Arabic. He dug through his coat pockets again.
All the Rivers Page 3