All the Rivers

by Dorit Rabinyan

  ‘Do you want to come up to my place?’ I pointed down the avenue. ‘To make a call?’

  How could I abandon him now? How could I tell him I was going home and he was on his own? I felt somehow responsible, as though a thread of guilt tied us together, a shared destiny of sorts.

  He walked ahead, scanning the side of the road the whole time. ‘I need a cigarette first,’ he said.

  Earlier, when we’d walked back down Broadway, I’d said that if worst came to worst we could get a locksmith. I told him that in September, a couple of days after I’d moved into the apartment, the door had slammed shut and locked me out. The guy was there in forty minutes, easily broke the lock and installed a new one.

  I pointed to a payphone visible through the tree trunks and caught up to him. ‘Let’s call, we’ll ask him to come now,’ I said, reaching into my bag for my phone book. ‘That way, by the time we get to your place he’ll be waiting at the door.’ I kept talking in the plural, but I was no longer sure I would accompany him to Brooklyn; I doubted there was any point going on with this evening. When I looked up from my bag I saw his eyes light up on hearing a metallic clang, until he realized it was my own keys jangling. I was struck again by a dim echo of guilt and by the inescapable symbolism: the loss of his keys and the jangling presence of my own as a simplistic metaphor for our miserable situation back home.

  When we approached the cigarette kiosk at the corner of the avenue, I looked at Hilmi and wondered whether all these things were reverberating in his heart too. He stopped near a tree and turned his back on me, and I wondered whether he would tell me he was similarly aware of the irony. Either way, the quick glance I gave him (he cleared his throat sharply and spat) was enough to convince me that he was troubled at the moment by more pressing questions than the right of return.

  A chubby young Indian man ran the cigarette stall. ‘Lucky Strike,’ Hilmi said, holding out a fifty-dollar bill. ‘And give me a lighter, too.’

  ‘If I remember correctly, he wasn’t all that expensive,’ I said, leafing through my notebook. ‘Something like fifty bucks.’

  Hilmi ripped off the cellophane wrapping. ‘Who?’

  The Indian handed him his change. ‘Here you go, sir.’

  ‘The locksmith.’ I refused his offer of a cigarette. ‘A nice Irish guy.’

  ‘What happened?’ the Indian asked, with a pronounced accent. ‘Are you locked out?’ He looked oddly curious and enthusiastic. ‘You need a locksmith?’

  Hilmi shielded the lighter flame from the wind and lit a cigarette. ‘Something like that.’ He looked around before turning back to the Indian. ‘Maybe someone found some keys and turned them in here?’

  The Indian held out a business card, but Hilmi persisted: ‘Kind of a small bunch, two keys, with a red keychain shaped like a G-clef.’ He swirled the shape in the air with his hand. ‘Have you seen them?’

  The cigarette vendor’s grin spread from ear to ear. ‘If anyone found your keys it would be Jackson,’ he replied confidently. ‘Jackson’s always hanging around here, picking things up off the street.’ He looked straight at Hilmi’s dubious face. ‘Go to Union Square, say you’re looking for Wilcher Jackson.’

  ‘Wilcher?’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ I protested in disbelief. ‘You’re not really—’

  ‘But it’s just here.’

  Somewhere along 14th Street I slow down and ask him to stop. My feet are aching and the wind brings tears to my eyes. The whole long trek, north and south, west and east, back and forth again, was like an endless maze. His stubborn plan was predicated on a naïve belief that he’d be able to find some poor homeless guy in the crowd, and there I was trailing him down the streets, swept along in the bitter cold wind like his hostage, unable to break away. I should have left after we searched the café. I should have torn myself away from him and let him continue this dazed voyage alone.

  I stop outside a huge display window full of electronics and watch his back fade into the distance. Down the street I can see the treetops in the park and the shadow of George Washington high up on his horse, waving at me as if to say: Stop, Liati, it’s gone far enough.

  There is a mirror on the wall between this store and a clothing shop next door. I sniffle, wipe my eyes and look at my face, which is red from the brisk walk. The mirror is dirty and faded, and even when my eyes are dry and I peer up close, everything looks blurred: my reflection, the street’s reflection, and now Hilmi’s appearing behind me.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Listen,’ I turn to him sullenly, ‘I’m going home.’

  ‘No! Why? We’re almost there!’ His gaze still pulls eastward, away from me.

  ‘I’m beat.’

  ‘But we’re almost there…’

  ‘Hilmi, stop. It’s late.’

  He wrinkles his forehead and looks at me with that very American brand of supportive pity. ‘I know, right?’ He smiles slightly, while biting his lower lip. ‘I’ve worn you out, hey, Bazi? You do look tired.’

  It hasn’t even been three hours and he already has a nickname for me. Somewhere along the way he started calling me ‘Sweet Pea’, and then found a literal translation in Arabic, which he kept repeating delightedly: ‘Bazila hilwa,’ he’d say musically, longingly – ‘sweet bazila.’ Then he tried ‘hilwa pea’. Until finally he shortened it to ‘Bazi’.

  Not even three hours and already I respond to the name: ‘Yes, I’m tired out.’ I rub my eyes with my fists. I reach for my bag, which he started carrying at some point and is now swinging from his arm.

  ‘No, wait.’ He clutches the bag to his waist. ‘Don’t leave.’

  In the grimy mirror I see pedestrians and cars reflected, and suddenly something happens, a flash that vanishes so quickly that Hilmi doesn’t catch it. For a moment our two reflections are doubled, multiplying and procreating endlessly, drawing an infinite chain of more and more Hilmi and Liat behind us.

  ‘Did you see?’ I pull back my head in astonishment. ‘Did you see that?’

  I discover the source of the illusion on the edge of the pavement: two removal men have unloaded a large mirror from a pick-up truck and now carry it away carefully, moving the picture of the street captured in the glass as they go. A third man emerges from the clothing shop to watch their every move and warn passers-by so they don’t crash into the mirror. Our eyes follow the mirror, but the optical illusion has melted away, as has the burdensome thought of all the Israelis and Palestinians walking along with us all evening, following us through the streets.

  ‘Nu, come on.’ He pats his shoulder and turns sideways with a beaming smile. ‘I’ll give you a piggyback.’

  My image laughs at him in the mirror. And he laughs, too, feigning a scream: ‘Help! Help! I’ve been kidnapped, help!’ He mimics my accent: ‘Aravim – Arabs! Arabs have kidnapped me!’

  I’ve already forgotten how the pin story came up, but it’s only an hour since I told him about Roni Gotlieb and how she invented a self-defence weapon in case Arabs tried to kidnap us on the way to school. Early in the morning, we used to arm ourselves with a sewing pin each and sprint along our route to school through the outskirts of the neighbourhood. It started in the summer of ’82. There was a dirt road with grey skeletons of unfinished houses on either side, and other buildings in various stages of construction. We’d race past them with our hearts pounding, especially on winter mornings when the seven o’clock light was still tenuous. We were terrified of the construction workers who looked out at us from bare window frames, rooftops and backyards, Arab workers who had slept there all night and were waking up for another workday. We were afraid they’d kidnap us like they’d snatched Oron Yarden and Nava Elimelech, children whose kidnappings were the nightmarish headlines of the day. That’s no good, I remember Roni said one day when I snuck a kitchen knife up my sleeve and showed it to her proudly. Knives are dangerous, she said, because the Arab could grab it from you. You hide the pin like this between your fingers, and then when
he attacks, you quickly stab his eye or his heart, and run for your life.

  ‘We kept it up for almost two years, I swear,’ I told Hilmi, ‘until they finished the construction.’ He laughed with such astonishment that I had to laugh too.

  He repaid me with a story about a time from high school when he went for a hike in the wadi near Ramallah with his nephew and a neighbour, both young boys. Suddenly three religious Jewish kids came towards them from one of the settlements nearby. When they saw the Palestinian boys, they froze.

  ‘At first they just looked at us, and we looked at them, and no one moved. No one said a word. But then another one suddenly appeared, a little redhead kid, I have no idea where he came from, and he started screaming…’ At this point Hilmi was laughing out loud. ‘He screeched hysterically, he was totally crazed. Aravim! Aravim!’ Hilmi yelled excitedly in a high-pitched voice, flattening out his guttural and glottal sounds to imitate the Israeli accent. ‘And all the others screamed too: Aravim! And they all took off! Aravim! Like they’d seen… I don’t know…’ His eyes glistened. ‘Like they’d seen a wolf.’

  Another strange, uninvited thought flies through me: those two faded, laughing reflections will be engraved in the mirror even after we leave. They will keep hovering in this dingy glass together, silent and blurred, even after Hilmi and I go our separate ways. This beautiful living picture of the two of us will live on in the mirror, scratched and misted like a phantom reflection.

  ‘Come on, come with me.’ His eyes still gleam. ‘Please.’

  From the eastern side of the square a large traffic jam crawls towards us. All the traffic lights are blinking yellow. One of the two southbound lanes is closed for roadworks, and cars all around us slow down and flow into the busy intersection, where yellow tape stretches from one end to the other, warning: Caution Caution Caution.

  We get to the subway station after circling the entire perimeter of the square. A few vendors are still standing around the arc of steps, and Hilmi talks to them all: the woman selling sunglasses and silk scarves, the posters and T-shirts guy, a man with long dreadlocks who is packing up a tourist souvenir stall. But they all shrug their shoulders and shake their heads. They don’t know Wilcher Jackson and have no idea what Hilmi is talking about. He leans over to an elderly woman playing the cello and apologizes for interrupting, but she angrily recoils and mutters something in Russian. An emaciated drunk lying on a bench looks up blankly when Hilmi kneels down beside him. Only one guy standing on the edge of the square handing out fliers says, ‘Sure, everyone knows Jackson. Wilcher Jackson, yeah.’ He just saw him around here about an hour ago. He says we should try outside the subway station, where Jackson sometimes hangs out.

  But at the entrance to the station, all we can see is a supermarket trolley full of empty cans and bottles. They rattle and clang when Hilmi kicks the trolley and curses. ‘OK, that’s it. Come on,’ he finally acquiesces, ‘let’s call the locksmith, give me the number.’

  ‘Hello! Hello!’ Shouts come from the street. ‘Get away! You, get outta here!’

  A grey-haired homeless woman with glasses makes her way between the honking cars. She ducks under the warning tape, growling at drivers and waving her fists, then barrels down the pavement towards us. ‘Leave him alone! Hey, leave him… What’s going on?’ She glares at us through her thick lenses. ‘What do you want with him?’

  Hilmi mumbles something and steps back awkwardly. The woman jerks the supermarket trolley towards her, and behind the mound of cans and bottles we now see a wheelchair, in which a pale old man dozes, hunched over, bundled in blankets up to his shoulders. A cardboard sign affixed to his chest reads: ‘If I’m lost please call Jackson,’ followed by a phone number.

  chapter 5

  In the end we did find Wilcher Jackson and he had the keys. It wasn’t the elderly man in the wheelchair but his son, a short hippie of about fifty, to whom we were taken by the lady with the shopping trolley. He said he’d found the keys on the pavement on 18th Street less than an hour ago. Hilmi took a twenty-dollar bill out of his pocket, and the guy held out the keys.

  Afterwards, waiting with a crowd for the local train to Brooklyn, under the sharp fluorescent lights in the Union Square station, I begin to see little details I hadn’t noticed before in Hilmi’s face. A scar in the indentation of his chin, pockmarks on his cheeks – traces of adolescent acne or chickenpox – behind the dark shadow of stubble. I examine the light cinnamon shade of his eyes again, which in this harsh light reveal tiny honey-coloured flecks. And I can smell him. Through the smoky subway air, the steam and the soot, I smell the masculine, slightly woody scent of his neck, with a hint of shampoo from his hair and a sour note of sweat.

  ‘We only moved to Tel Aviv when I was fifteen. In high school,’ I explain.

  Hilmi tosses his bunch of keys up and catches it. ‘And before that?’

  ‘It’s a small town, I don’t think you’d know it.’

  He throws the keys up again. ‘Whereabouts?’

  ‘Not far from Kalkilya.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘Ten minutes away.’

  ‘My uncle’s wife is from Kalkilya.’

  ‘We lived four or five miles away. We used to go there all the time,’ I tell him. When I was little, my parents, my aunts and uncles, my neighbours, we all did our shopping at the Kalkilya market. My eyes travel over his shoulder for a moment, looking far into the depths of the tunnel. ‘I can hardly believe it now, you know?’ I look straight at him again. ‘It seems so long ago, but before the intifada and everything? When I was fourteen, fifteen? We bought everything there. All our clothes, our shoes… They used to buy me these lovely frilly dresses, full of lace and sparkles.’ I laugh and illustrate with a girlish flourish.

  The dimple in his left cheek lights up. ‘I can picture you as a little girl.’ He hunches his neck, his shoulders climb up, and he mimics a grumpy tot, fists clenched tight. ‘Running around with your little needle in your hand.’

  We both laugh too loudly, drawing curious looks, and then he whispers ‘Aravim!’ in Hebrew, pressing both hands to his cheeks in fear: ‘Aravim!’

  ‘I’ll never forget this one time, when I was four or five, and they left me waiting in the car on my own.’

  The laughter still hangs on his lips. ‘In Kalkilya?’

  ‘Yes, at the market. I must have been bored, or maybe I got hot, so I got out of the car. And this girl comes up to me. She was a bit taller than me, and she was holding a string between her fingers.’ I put my hands up, palms facing, to demonstrate the lacing movements. ‘You know?’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘It’s this game…’ I look around, unsure how to explain. ‘A girls’ game.’ I take off the elastic band I’d used to tie my hair back and I improvise. ‘Come here, give me your hand.’

  ‘You look nice like that,’ he says. He holds out his left hand and looks at my hair, loose around my shoulders. ‘Free.’

  I take his hands and place them palm to palm. ‘Hold here.’ I wrap the elastic band around them. ‘Now here.’ I thread one finger this way, the other that way.

  ‘Yeah, a girls’ game,’ he murmurs, nodding, ‘I guess so.’ He follows my movements, then asks: ‘What did she want?’

  ‘She just came over to me with her string, a kind of grey yarn stretched between her hands like this, and she started talking to me in Arabic. I guess she thought I was someone else, a friend of hers, because she chattered away casually. She wanted me to play with her.’

  ‘So did you?’

  ‘I couldn’t understand what she was saying. And maybe I was a little afraid of her, of that directness. I just didn’t move. And then she realized she didn’t actually know me, and maybe she got scared too. So we just stood there looking at each other, without saying anything, until she turned and left.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Yes, she just looked at me, at the car, at the clothes, at my shoes. I remember I watched her hands while she walke
d away. They were still bound in the grey string when she went back into the market. I was paralysed. I couldn’t move. It was like my legs were tied.’

  Could I have said something wrong again? As I talk he looks away and stares down the platform. Why on earth did I bring up Kalkilya? I fiddle with the elastic band, shifting it from one hand to the other. How did we get to Kalkilya, of all places? I grow more nervous the longer he keeps quiet, and I can hear my sister’s voice as if she’s on the phone from Israel: For God’s sake, what was all that about? Tales of Arabian Nights? Are you going to tell him about the Arab grocer you used to go to? And every humus joint you’ve ever had lunch at in Jaffa? Oy, those Arabs, she sighs, mimicking our grandmother, who used to cluck her tongue and murmur those words in a worried voice every time there was bad news on TV. Oy, those Arabs. Not just about terrorist attacks, but even when they reported criminal activities or discussed the inflation: Oy, those Arabs.

  I crane my neck, impatiently watching for the train.

  ‘It’ll be here soon,’ he says. Then he snags the elastic band from my hands and gently but accurately lassoes it around my neck. ‘Your parents. You’re very close with your family…’

  My hand lifts up unconsciously and touches the necklace they gave me. ‘Why do you say that?’ I ask in a muffled voice, embarrassed by his mention of them.

  ‘I don’t know, it just shows. I can tell you’re from a good home.’ And just like that, so simply, he takes the elastic band as though we’ve known each other for a thousand years, and ties his curls back with it. ‘You don’t need this,’ he says with a sideways glance. ‘You stay like that.’

  I watch him fasten a bun of curls on the back of his neck, and think about my mother and father sleeping in Tel Aviv. I stand in the doorway to their dark, breathing bedroom, looking inside like I used to do in high school when I came home early in the morning from Friday night parties. ‘Is that you, Liati?’ my mother would murmur hoarsely; she’d been waiting for me to get home. ‘Yes, Mum, goodnight.’ I could hear my father’s gentle snores. ‘Goodnight, honey.’