And quietly, as if not to disturb the peace at home and wake anyone, I ask Hilmi, here on the other side of the earth: ‘How can you tell?’
‘I just can. I can see you’re a good girl.’
I think about what my father would say about his good girl if he knew I was getting on a train with a strange man, an Arab, someone I met only a few hours ago. What would Dad say if he could see me now? And not just any Arab, but from the Territories, I hear my mother say, Liati, God knows who this man is and what he’s like. My father approaches nervously behind her: We don’t know who his family are, God help us. Even Andrew hardly knows him, and it’s so late at night…
Their voices disappear and I blink at Hilmi. ‘But you’re a good boy, too.’
His braying, infectious laugh rings out. ‘Yes, I am too.’
Oh yeah, sure he’s a good boy, my sister laughs on the phone, snorting at me from far away. He’s the boy next door.
‘But you’re better,’ he adds, still laughing, as if to confirm her words.
A warm gust on our faces announces the train’s arrival. A rustle travels down the platform as bags, coats and umbrellas are gathered and people step closer to the tracks. Hilmi touches my shoulder lightly, rousing me from my thoughts of Mum and Dad. ‘R train. That’s us.’ The noise soars, the iron tracks creak, engine lights appear in the darkness. ‘Has it been a while since you’ve seen them?’ he shouts.
I squint against the train’s blast of wind. ‘Since August,’ I yell over the din. A line of lit-up windows gradually slows down, square by square. ‘And I’m only going back in six months.’
His ponytail loosens in the breeze, and he grabs the elastic band before it falls off. ‘So you’re here for another six months?’
I nod and the train carriages slide towards us with a whistle. ‘Yeah, I have to go back in May to teach two summer courses.’ My voice resumes its normal volume when the doors slide open. ‘Back to Israel.’
chapter 6
We got off in a neighbourhood I’d never been to. He lived in south-west Brooklyn, almost at the edge of the yellow artery on the subway map, shortly before it meets the river. It was 10.15 when we walked out of Bay Ridge Avenue station onto dark, windswept streets. The lone spots of light in a row of shuttered stores came from a deserted laundromat and the display window of a shoe shop across the street.
At his building, the front door shut heavily behind us and a neon beam from outside barely illuminated a staircase and two doors on the right. I saw the shadow of his hand reaching out for the light switch, and then there was a pop and a filament flashed in the dark. The bulb had burned out even before Hilmi let go of the switch.
‘Are you all right?’ His voice probed the dark hallway in front of me. ‘Come on, it’s in here.’ His keys jangled. ‘One sec.’ He dropped his backpack by his feet and pushed the door, switching a light on and blinking with me. ‘At last!’
The chill gave way to the welcoming whisper of central heating. A refrigerator’s metallic hum came from the little kitchen, and the bathroom gave off a slightly mildewy whiff. I did as he did and took my coat off. ‘Great, give that to me,’ he said, and his voice had a different echo inside the apartment. It sounded deeper. He pointed to the studio. From the doorway I could see a long table surrounded by wooden boards, rolls of paper and cardboard. Canvases leaned against the walls, face in. There was a faded blue couch and a copper tray on carved wooden legs. Opposite me was an old television, a stereo system, and piles of CD cases. On the long table were heaps of stained rags, jars covered with paint, little baskets containing pots of paint and brushes and crumpled tubes, scrapers and bottles of paint thinner. I also saw a computer, and metal shelving with more rolls of paper and cans full of paintbrushes, pencils, books and notebooks.
He threw our coats on the couch, and for a moment they looked like us collapsing there in a tired embrace. Then he cracked the window open a little. ‘Something to drink?’
The ashtrays were full, and there were traces of dust, spills and stains of oil paints everywhere. Their sharp scent filled the air, mingling with cigarette smoke and some of the bathroom odour.
‘Yes?’ He offered again, rubbing his hands together. ‘Tea?’
I was still walking around, looking.
‘I have some fresh mint.’ He took his shoes off and came to stand next to me. ‘Just bought it.’
I giggled when I spotted a porno video tape among the newspapers and CDs on the table. A black girl and a white girl were on the cover. ‘Oops.’ He laughed, grabbing the tape and putting it away on a shelf. ‘I wasn’t expecting guests…’
From the studio I could see two rooms. The one on the left had its door slightly ajar. ‘That’s Jenny’s room,’ his voice came from behind me when I peeked in. He opened the door to the second room: ‘This is mine.’
His bedroom was smaller, and apart from the pale pink curtains and linen I’d caught sight of in the other room, they were identically furnished: futon, laminate wardrobe, window. But here, in Hilmi’s room, my eyes were drawn upward.
‘Wow…’
Strings were hung from wall to wall, close to the ceiling, and attached to them with laundry pegs were dozens of pencil drawings on large sheets of paper. The entire space above the bed was filled with delicate lines all depicting one figure, a boy with a large head of curly hair like Hilmi’s, a skinny body and long limbs, bead bracelets on his wrists and ankles, and huge feet. His eyes were closed in all the sketches – sleeping, or possibly dead. He wore a white nightshirt, a djellaba of sorts, and floated in midair, carried along in a drunken, feather-light glide between earth and sky like a loose thread, with a blissful expression. One picture showed him over a big city, another above the sea in the middle of the night. In one he flew alongside birds in a closed room, in another among clouds in a train carriage.
It was not just the floating that reminded me of Chagall and his flying lovers. There was something about the innocence of the lines and the details that evoked the notion of an Arab – or Arabesque – Chagall. Like the boy’s mane of curls and his long eyelashes, the world around him also swirled. Birds and fish, flowers and trees, antennas on rooftops, ripples of water, sun rays – soft curls waved through them all, and in each drawing the sense of flight was increasingly vivid, the boy’s stringy limbs more circling and dizzying, and with them his drunken expression, the shy wondrous smile, the unselfconsciousness, which must have been evident on my own face, too.
I realized he wasn’t standing behind me any more. ‘Hilmi?’ Suddenly I was alone in his bedroom. Alone inside that intimacy of his sheets and his clothes scattered on the bed. ‘Hilmi?’
His voice reached me from the kitchen at the end of the hallway. ‘Just a minute.’
His scent was clearly here. The smell that had been in my nostrils all evening and had surged when we were about to get off the train permeated the room. I looked at his clothes, his unmade bed.
‘I put water on to boil.’ He stood in the doorway, leaning against the frame. ‘We’ll have tea soon.’
His huge, pale flat feet were the feet of the boy in the drawings. Despite their size, they looked delicate and vulnerable.
‘It’s so beautiful.’
He crossed his arms over his chest and hunched his shoulders. ‘Really?’
‘Come here,’ I said in a stifled whisper. ‘Come, you have to see this.’
He stood next to me and looked up at the artwork, grinning with open enjoyment, as if he really were seeing it for the first time.
I looked back up at the ceiling. ‘So beautiful…’ I took in a deep breath, filling up my lungs, and all I could produce was a third, even more astonished, ‘So beautiful…’
‘Now imagine all this,’ he widened his eyes and fanned out both hands like a magician about to pull off a trick, ‘in colour.’
‘Wow…’
‘I know, right?’ His laughter surged and burst out in a loud trumpeting, echoing between the walls. ‘It is going to be
wow.’
With a hasty, childlike move, a touching one, he put his hand over the smile frozen on his lips and looked from one drawing to another, suddenly serious.
‘It is going to be wow,’ he repeated in a worried voice.
chapter 7
Very late at night, my head surfaces from the crook of his neck. I carefully extricate my shoulder from under his sleeping arm, gather my thighs and hips off his ribs, my entire body still brimming, saturated with his warmth and the weight of his limbs.
I sit up on the edge of the bed. My eyes are closed and my body is sleepy, touched by the emptiness of the air. I open my eyes and rediscover how small the room is. The shadows fall long on the bed and mottle the walls. I bend over to pick my jeans up off the floor, stand up, and retrieve my sweater too.
Then the sheets rustle, and his legs shift under the blanket. I see his face in the vulnerable befuddlement of sleep, as though he were staring back at me. I do not move when he inhales sharply, turns over onto his stomach and sinks into a diagonal position with his arm around the pillow. I see the shadow of his shoulder blades and his vertebrae, like a chain of rings down his spine, the soft down at the tailbone, the curves of his long thigh muscles. My heart leaps at the sight of him, pounding with desire to dive in for more, to be wrapped in his heavy arms and crushed beneath his weight – but it stills and catches its skipped beat when I pick my underwear up off the floor and quietly shut the door behind me. I get dressed in the dark, feeling my jeans and bra straps tighten against my body, and the clothes instil me with wakefulness. A lush, weary contentment sweetens my limbs as I move. I sit down at the computer desk and put my shoes on. My hand shifts the mouse slightly and the screen flickers on with a soft static hum. It’s early morning, not even five, and I look around and find a cordless phone in the screen’s blue light.
On the fridge I spot a taxi company’s magnet. The music that answers when I call the number thunders in the night’s silence. It takes me a few seconds to realize that I have no idea what the address is.
He stands in the doorway in his underwear. ‘What happened?’ One eye is winked shut and his face is scrunched. He scratches his head with his right hand. ‘Where…’
I hang up with a pounding heart. ‘Umm…’
‘Where are you going?’ His steps are heavy, sleepy.
‘Home. I’m…’
His chest is very close to my face now. His warmth radiates, blazing at me like an open fire.
‘Why?’ he asks in a flat, sleepy voice, a hoarse sort of growl. ‘Why aren’t you staying?’
‘I don’t know, I…’
And with the same gravity, the same laziness, he bends his face over me as if in a dream.
‘I have to…’ I barely manage to say, ‘lea—’
His mouth closes softly, thirstily, on the side of my neck, kissing and licking my skin until it shudders. With infinite tenderness, just as I taught him a few hours before, he runs his teeth over my flesh and bites softly, devouring my whole neck. He grazes all the way to the exquisitely sensitive spot on my collarbone, and gnaws until my body moans and goes limp. My face is flushed, wild with pleasure. My legs falter and I grasp him. The hoarseness of my voice echoes in my ears as if from another era: ‘I have to leave…’
chapter 8
The cordless phone left on the kitchen counter overnight is ringing.
I know where I am even before I open my eyes. At Hilmi’s. I remember that after my aborted exit at dawn, I fell asleep here in the end. I blink at the outline of his shoulder, the curve of his neck and the mess of curls on the pillow. I scrunch my face at the daylight and the ringing noise, then roll over with my back to him, my arm over my face, but my heart races in my chest as I recall details from last night. The faraway chimes in the kitchen are joined by the extension next to the bed, which chirps incessantly.
I hear him lean over and pick up. ‘Hello.’ His voice is hoarse and very deep, sleep-struck, humming behind my back. ‘Ah…’
‘Ah, yama,’ he murmurs in Arabic with another weak sigh. ‘Sabakh al’khair.’1 A muffled voice reaches my ears through the receiver like distant twitter. ‘Tamam, ana sakhi.’2 The voice buzzes and chirps on the other end of the line. ‘Ana samei’hom, mnikh.’3 A hint of a smile fills his voice: ‘Ah, mumtaz ktir.’4
Here and there I can make out a word or two. ‘Intum fi el’bayt?’ he wonders upon hearing the outburst of yelps on the other end. ‘Akid, mafish muskileh.’5
My eyes are open now, staring at the window. Two rectangles of thin, translucent chiffon are draped over the window, through which the outlines of the buildings across the street are visible. And the drawings float above us like a garden hanging over the bed.
‘Ana hala batsel,’6 he says. He moves closer to me, sliding his legs under the blanket. ‘Hala.’7
I turn to him with half a smile but the phone is still at his ear. ‘Just a second, it’s my mum,’ he whispers, kissing my hair.
Those eyes. Not even a whole day, and already I know that look. ‘I’ll just call her back for a minute,’ he says. His finger lifts off the button and the dial tone starts. I move my head back and my cheek sinks into his shoulder as I watch his fingers on the keypad, hesitating after each digit. The area code surprises me: ‘Really?’ I ask. ‘You’re also 972?’
His finger scolds me with a soft tap on the edge of my nose. ‘What did you think?’
A second ring, then a third, and then a woman’s voice. ‘Hello? Hello, ya, Hilmi?’
‘Ah, yama.’ He holds the receiver away slightly and positions it between our heads, inviting me to listen. ‘Kif el’khal indkom?’8
I tilt my head curiously and listen in for a moment. ‘Il-hamd u l’allah. Kul il’usbua ma khaket ma’ak.’9 Her voice is pleasant, airy, with an easeful music. ‘Hala Omar hon, ma Amal ou Nour, kaman huwe bi’ul ino ma khaket ma’ah.’10
‘Awal imbarakh dawart aleiya.’ His speech sounds slightly different in Arabic, lighter, easily sliding out of his mouth, free of a certain seriousness that English imposes. ‘Itasaltilo ala maktab.’11
It’s Sunday. I don’t know what time, but it doesn’t look like I’ll make it to the eleven o’clock yoga class. Joy will be disappointed: we arranged to meet at yoga and then have lunch together. I think about our conversation yesterday morning, when I told her about my weekend plans. I was going to clean the apartment, do some laundry, meet Andrew at four. ‘But other than that I don’t have any special plans,’ I told her on the phone, and never for a moment imagined myself in this bed, never dreamt that I would wake up the next day in this room in Brooklyn.
The FBI agents. Café Aquarium. I replay the strange pursuit through the streets in my mind, our journey here and the events of the night, how it began with us awkwardly chatting on the couch, how we got high, and how things continued in the bedroom, his curiosity and hunger for me, how coordinated we were, how riveted. We were so impressed with ourselves, with how stunned and excited we constantly felt. I remember our dreamlike encounter in the kitchen before dawn, how he melted and undressed me and delighted me until I completely cracked open, up against the counter, and how back here, when he crashed into my arms and I slowly began to fall into sleep, how in those last moments before I dived after him, feeble and exhausted, I thought sadly, with genuine remorse, as though I were already missing him, about what a pity it was, what a waste it would be to give him up, how difficult it would be to forget him.
‘Isma?’12
What’s her name?! My eyes widen and turn to him: what is he doing telling his mother about me?
His grin spreads and lights up his eyes mischievously. ‘Isma Bazila,’13 he says sweetly into the phone.
His mother laughs: ‘Shu Bazila?’14
‘Ah, hilwah.’ He reaches his hand to the corner of my eye to brush away an invisible crumb. ‘Hilwah Bazila.’15
Footnotes
1 Yes, Mum. Good morning.
2 It’s OK, I’m awake.
3 I can hear t
hem, great.
4 Yes, very good.
5 Are you at home? Sure, no problem.
6 I’ll call soon.
7 Soon.
8 Yes, Mum, how are you?
9 Thank God. I haven’t talked with you all week.
10 And now Omar is here, with Amal and Nour, he also says he hasn’t heard from you.
11 I tried him the day before yesterday. I called him at the office.
12 What’s her name?
13 Her name is Pea.
14 What do you mean, Pea?
15 Yes, sweet. Sweet Pea.
chapter 9
It might be the smell from the bathroom that repels me – there’s no window or air vent, and a slight whiff of sewage hits me when I step into the damp, confined space – or it might have been walking barefoot across the sticky, dusty floor. In the daylight I see rings of scum in the toilet bowl, and congealed remnants of shaving cream and facial hair around the drain in the greasy sink. I see the mouldy plastic curtain, the grey limescale on the porcelain tiles. And under the sink a mousetrap.
Or perhaps it’s the annoying shower head, with most of its holes clogged up so that the drizzle of water goes every which way, spraying jets that prickle my flesh. Perhaps it’s the rush of water and the gurgling groans from the plumbing in the wall, although I can still hear Hilmi talking on the phone, pacing back and forth from the kitchen to the living room, speaking loudly, alertly, not with his mother any more, perhaps with a brother or some other relative, almost yelling.
Or could it be the Arabic he’s speaking, playing in my ears with a natural familiarity. The Arabic in which, even before I deciphered the Hebrew echoes and understood the similar words, I recognized the khet and ayin in their guttural Middle Eastern pronunciation. The Arabic that now, thundering through the bathroom door in his deep masculine voice, suddenly sounds menacing, crude and violent, like a string of expletives. I turn off the water and try to figure out whether he’s talking about me again, listening for any mention of ‘Israel’ or ‘Jewish’. I hear him laugh out loud and a vague stench hits my nostrils again, causing my throat to contract.
All the Rivers Page 5