I step out from behind the curtain and see that he has been in the room. He must have opened the door without me hearing. My expression softens when I look down at the toilet seat cover – which he lowered – and find a dark green, neatly folded, fresh towel. Through the wall I hear him whistling to himself; his phone call is apparently over. I hear a hummed song moving further away into the kitchen. I wrap the towel around myself and hurry out, shut the door and tiptoe to the studio.
When I catch sight of the table, I freeze. It’s set for two, laden with pitta and various cheeses, tomato and cucumber and olive oil, tahini and green olives, a pat of butter, a jar of jam, chocolate biscuits.
When did he have time to buy all that? Just yesterday we were looking for something to eat and could barely find anything, and from the minute we woke up he’d been on the phone, so how did he produce this feast? I’m very hungry, but perhaps that’s why I also feel so irritable, suddenly grumpy, so that even the elaborate breakfast and the smell of good coffee get on my nerves, just like the clean towel. This romantic bliss – the surprise breakfast he prepared for his lover, his cheerful whistling in the kitchen, the casual hum, his eagerness to please me, to flood me, to love me, even the chiming of church bells in the distance and the crow calling outside – they fluster me, and all I can hear is the crow screeching in Hebrew: Ra! Ra! Ra! Bad! Bad! Bad!
‘What is all this?’ I ask when he comes over, carefully carrying two steaming mugs. ‘When did you have time?’
He gives an ingratiating grin. ‘I went out early.’ He puts the mugs on the table with relief. ‘Just after you fell back asleep.’
I recall again what I thought about at dawn, before I fell asleep: how difficult it will be not to fall in love with him. How impossible, I thought worriedly, how tricky, to insist on not falling in love, to make my heart forget this strange, gentle man and this exciting night, to not get swept away. On the brink of sleep, enveloped in his breath, I thought how dangerous and complicated it would be, and how if I wasn’t careful I might fall in love with him right at that very moment.
His hand rustles inside the bag of biscuits. ‘My stomach was grumbling,’ he says, dipping a biscuit in his coffee. ‘Didn’t you hear it? It was making so much noise.’ He giggles and goes on talking behind my back. I waver for a minute in the doorway to his bedroom, then push the door shut.
I dry myself quickly, purposefully, rubbing the towel all over my body. Stop it before it’s too late, I think. Be firm, as you should have been yesterday. I squeeze my hair out, tighten my fists around the ends, and remember how we darted around town the day before, and how hard I found it to tear myself away from him. My hand sharply flips the blanket over and digs around for my bra. Yes, just like that, say goodbye and be on your way. Cut this off quickly, decide with a heavy but determined heart that it’s better this way, better for both of us. And never see him again. Go on living in New York for another six months and do not meet him again, not even at Andrew’s. Even if he finds me, even if he calls, just deny it. Yes, that’s it. I’ll pretend this night was really fun, a great night, but no, come on, it was nothing serious, that pot you gave me was some powerful stuff. That’s it – just blame the weed for everything that happened.
Dressed and buttoned up, my hair tied back in a high ponytail, I walk out of the room and find him in the exact same position, standing there holding the bag of biscuits. He smiles when he sees me, and smacks his lips. ‘Oh,’ he remembers, wiping his mouth, ‘I got these too.’
He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out two new toothbrushes. He seems so jolly and vivacious as he makes the brushes dance from side to side. ‘Blue or yellow?’ Traces of chocolate and crumbs mark his teeth. ‘Which do you prefer?’
chapter 10
Two hours later we’re in my apartment. He follows me into the kitchen. ‘And that?’ He gestures at the jar of vitamins on the counter.
‘Yes,’ I confirm, putting the mop and broom back in the cupboard. ‘That’s mine.’
I shove the bucket and all the cleaning materials in, too. Everything looks just as it did when I left yesterday. The chairs are still in the positions where the investigators sat, and on the table lies a copy of the form they filled out, which I now examine. Should I keep it? Who knows, I might need it some day. But in a fit of anger I crumple the paper and toss it into the wastebin.
I keep moving, clinging to the purposeful mood that entered the house with me, unable to stop putting things in order, picking things up. I bump into him again.
‘And the computer?’ He points at the flock of flying toasters dancing across the screen. ‘Is that yours?’
I nod and turn to the vacuum cleaner.
From the minute we entered he’s been walking around examining the furniture and the house plants, eyeing the windows, the pictures, pausing every so often to guess whether something belongs to me or to the apartment owners, wondering whether he can identify my tastes over theirs. He is impressed by the CD collection, runs over the book spines, smooths his hand over the back of the sofa. Now he notices a newspaper folded on the VCR, with a pair of glasses lying on top. ‘These too?’ he asks warmly, putting them on his own nose. ‘Yours?’ His eyes wander over to me questioningly, blinking through the thin, feminine frames. ‘Bazi…’
I laugh. ‘They’re only for reading.’
It’s strange and funny to see him wearing my glasses, as though a feature from my own face is looking back at me from his. He picks up the paper. ‘UN observers,’ he reads the headline out loud like a newscaster, ‘arrived in Iraq last night.’
I go back to the vacuum cleaner. I’ve already pulled the plug out of the socket and wrapped the cord. Now I steer it backwards down the hallway to the study.
Mum and Dad, looking festive and beautiful, beam at me in the dim light that comes from the living room, smiling proud and happy grins. The photo, taken at my sister Iris and her husband Micah’s wedding, is pinned to a corkboard over the desk, among notes and memos and a few other family pictures: my sister with Aviad in her arms when he was an infant, Yaara on her third birthday at preschool, Dad and Micah playing backgammon in the garden, a rare portrait of my grandmother smiling.
I tense up upon hearing his voice coming closer. ‘Is this the bathroom?’ he asks and opens the door to the left. ‘OK, I found it.’ He shuts the door behind him.
On the desk, next to the fax, the answering machine blinks its red eye, signalling five new messages. The first is an anxious-sounding Andrew, urging me in his peculiar, heavily accented Hebrew to pick up the phone: he has to run and get Josie, he needs to cancel our meeting. I must have been in the shower when he called. The second message is a reminder from the vet’s office that the cats are due for their vaccinations, which I skip halfway through. Joy informs me bitterly that she has unexpected guests and won’t be able to make it to yoga. Andrew again, apologizing, says he asked his Arabic teacher, Hilmi, to stop by the café: did Hilmi find me? ‘Wait, I have another call coming in,’ he says, interrupting himself, ‘maybe it’s him.’
‘Hi, Liati,’ Iris’s voice rings out now, sounding sleepy. ‘How are things? I tried to get you earlier,’ she says disappointedly, flipping channels on the television. ‘Call me if you get back soon because I’m totally—’ she yawns and keeps talking, ‘beat. We were in Haifa with the kids all day, at the science museum. You should have seen Micah and Dad’ – the tone of her smile comes through in the recording – ‘like two little kids themselves.’ He’s so warm and good and sweet to me, I tell her with a whimper in my heart, so what’s the problem? She answers: What do you care what people think? I respond: I don’t know, it scares me. And she: What is there to be scared about? You’re just having fun, screwing around a little, nothing more. Obviously, I reassure her and myself, it’s only one weekend. It’s not like you’re going to marry him tomorrow or anything, she says. Yes, you’re right, I agree. Make love not war, she jokes, maybe it’ll do us all some good here. ‘OK, well, I don’t kn
ow why I’m rambling. Goodnight, honey, we’ll talk tomorrow.’
The machine beeps to announce the end of the messages. ‘To erase, press one-six. To save, press nine-two.’ I press one and six, but the gnawing worry that there is in fact something troubling about what’s happening so quickly between me and him – that is not erased.
I hear the water flush in the bathroom and walk out of the room. From the doorway I glance back, and the light reflected from the photographs winks at me for a moment, dancing on the faces in the dark: a pale yellow spot of light on Mum and Dad, a glimmer on Grandma.
‘So are you telling me…’ he calls out from down the hallway.
I shut the study door and stand in front of it tensely, with my arms crossed over my chest like a guard.
‘…that the only thing you have to pay is utilities? And apart from that, what?’ He follows me into the bedroom and sits down on the edge of the bed. ‘Feed two cats?’
‘And water the plants.’ I turn the light on.
There’s a mess in here too. The T-shirt and jogging bottoms I took off before showering are on the floor, and the sneakers, one here and the other there. I pick up the towel and socks and shove them into the laundry hamper. It’s overflowing with clothes and sheets. I push the lid down, sit on it and look up.
‘Is that yours too?’ he asks.
Of all the books resting on the nightstand, he had to choose that thick, modest-looking one.
‘It’s the Bible,’ I say, and notice him flinch slightly.
‘The Bible?’ He seems surprised to discover what he’s holding in his hands. ‘Really?’
He holds the book away from his chest, gauging its thickness and weight, turning it from side to side. Something of the strange sensation I had earlier, in the living room, when he wore my glasses, reverberates again when he starts leafing through the pages.
He opens up to the middle. Samuel I, chapter 31, I see when I get up and stand next to him curiously. I watch him turn the pages from Samuel I to Samuel II, and I feel the shadow of a smile creep onto my lips, because for a moment, as he gravely studies the book, rustling the thin pages, I have the notion that he is praying. He flips ahead to Psalms, surprises me with a quick lick of his thumb and jumps from Kings II to Jeremiah, from Ezekiel to Proverbs, from Song of Songs to the Book of Ruth. Random verses fly in front of my eyes, floating and gliding before I have time to read them, but even just skimming the words, I can feel the Hebrew echo in my heart.
‘Do you study this in school?’ he asks.
‘From second grade on.’ I sit back down on the laundry hamper facing him. ‘All the way through high school.’
He looks up questioningly and pats the bedspread. ‘Come here.’
I shrug my shoulders. ‘I’m comfortable here.’
My sister murmurs at me again: Why are you teasing him? One minute you can’t take your hands off him, and the next you’re cold and distant.
I can still hear her voice as I speak. ‘I assume you study the Koran in school.’
‘In Islam class, yes.’ He twists his mouth and wrinkles his forehead. ‘But I already told you,’ he rustles the pages, ‘I never liked it.’
On the subway he’d told me that in the past few years his mother had been getting more religious, which he found difficult. It had started in ’96, after his father died of a heart attack at age sixty-nine, when Hilmi was in his first year in Baghdad. He flew home for the funeral but went back to his studies after a month, and the next time he saw his mother, two and a half years later, it was in Saudi Arabia – she made the holy pilgrimage to Mecca with a group of women from her mosque. He said if his father had lived to see her like that, praying all day long, covered in black, his heart would have broken again.
‘He was a total atheist. A stubborn atheist. When all our neighbours were fasting and praying, he would open his most expensive bottle of whisky. The Koran says, “La ill’a ila Allah,” which means, “There is no God except Allah.” But my father used to tell us: “La ill’a wa’khalas” – “There is no God and that’s that.” He was just a simple man, not some kind of scholar or intellectual. He owned a grocery store when we lived in Hebron. Oil, spices, that kind of stuff. A simple man, but with an artist’s soul. He liked to carve wooden dolls, he made all kinds of statuettes, and kites when we were kids. He had a golden touch. He bred pigeons on the rooftop, and he used to go up there to feed them every morning. He grew geraniums and wormwood, too, in rusty tins. He really was a special man, and I don’t say that because he was my father. He was a person who loved life. He loved drinking, eating, laughing. And he adored my mother.’ Hilmi sounded sad when he talked of his father. He kept crushing his lips together, and I realized that was what he did when he was emotional. ‘That’s why we feel so sad that she became this way.’
There were four brothers and three sisters in the family, he told me. The oldest sister was a kindergarten teacher in Hebron, then there were twins: a high-school teacher in Ramallah, and a graphic artist at an advertising firm in town. One brother is doing film studies in Tunis, another is in Berlin studying political science and law, and one sister is a pharmacist who lives in Jordan with her husband and kids.
Hello, Liati, my sister calls from the other room again. Where did you come up with this vegan Arab? He must be one of those Westernized ones – might as well be an Ashkenazi! Her laughter tickles at my lips.
‘Did you get this as a gift?’
‘What?’
He holds the Bible up, open to the first page, and indicates the forgotten inscription written in blue ink in the top left corner: ‘We wish you great success in your IDF service. Base 80 Commanding Staff. November, 1991.’
I read the words written all that time ago, eleven years, by an anonymous officer on a basic training camp near Hadera, which some secretary at the commander’s office had scrawled out dozens of times, Bible after Bible. Even though yesterday it was clear to me that this moment would come, that it would crash down on us one day, it still catches me by surprise.
‘Um, that’s…’ I stammer. ‘I got it in the army. When I was a soldier.’
‘In the army?’ He tenses, but recovers quickly, arching his eyebrows. ‘So when you enlist in the army…’ He holds the Bible up high, ‘they give you this?’
‘Uh-uh.’
‘To all the soldiers?’
‘Yes,’ I reply cautiously, and feel a twitching sense of betrayal – as if someone might overhear, as if I were handing over classified intelligence to the enemy.
Stripes of smoke, fiery letters burning against the black sky, flags billowing in the bothersome wind, stars sparkling all around. The distant nighttime picture comes to me over the heads of female soldiers and I remember myself standing there in one of the rows, shivering with cold, at the swearing-in ceremony held with great pomp at a base in the Judaean Desert. I was a stunned eighteen-year-old, in my slanted cap and olive-green uniform, saluting with a startled look, standing tensely at attention: I hereby swear and pledge… Right hand trembling on the Bible. I hereby swear and pledge… Uzi butt squeezed in my left hand. …my allegiance to the State of Israel…
‘Yeah, well,’ he nods sadly, ‘just like in Hamas.’ He puts the Bible back on the nightstand. ‘With the Kalashnikov and the Koran.’
‘What?! No, no,’ I protest, at once guilty and enraged, ‘I don’t see it that way at all.’ My voice rises and I enunciate the words clearly, as if for the benefit of those ears pricked up far away on the other side of the wall, the other side of the phone line, in Israel. ‘It’s not at all the same thing.’
‘Why not?’ He gets worked up too. ‘Isn’t it the exact same fascist scene, with guns and soldiers and holy books?’
‘The scene might look similar,’ I concede sourly, my face burning with anger, ‘but to compare the IDF with Hamas?!’
He raises a sceptical eyebrow. ‘No?’
‘Not at all.’ I’m all puffed up, shaking my head. ‘The Israeli army, like the French o
r the American army, like the Syrian army or the Algerian army,’ I continue, even when his eyes glaze over and travel away from me to the window, ‘is an army meant to protect the citizens of a sovereign state.’ Get a load of this! Iris’s voice jabs me again. Who appointed you Israeli ambassador to the UN? ‘And just the way Japan and Iran and Germany all have armies,’ I insist, ‘we have one too, and I’m not about to apologize for that.’
‘I didn’t ask you to apologize.’
‘Not for having a state, thank God, and not for having a strong army to protect me.’
‘Your strong army is occupying a civilian popul—’
‘And you know what? I won’t apologize for being on the powerful side of this conflict either! No, because if the situation were reversed, God forbid, if in ’48 you had won the war…’
As I drone on in that voice so convinced of its righteousness, sailing away on a diatribe that surges inside me, I am filled with disgust. The whole argument sounds pointless and superfluous, like the tiresome babble on talk radio.
His sigh is heavy. ‘Are we really going to have this argument now?’
‘It’s you,’ I say defensively, sparks flying. ‘You started it!’
‘Me?’ He breathes out sharply. ‘Look at you!’
How did we get stuck here? ‘Forget it.’
chapter 11
When evening falls, the wind rattles the windowpane and the street beyond. On the corner of University Place a big rubbish bin has blown over, and it grabs everything in sight, raking dry leaves and newspaper shreds. One minute the gale soars and drags all the treetops to one side, rocking the street lamps, and the next it flips to the other side and bursts out again wildly, speeding up and defiantly taunting the cars on the street, as though by whipping more and more bags and cans and papers around it is rising up against the impeccable order that prevails here, against the ruler-straight numbered avenues and streets, the city lines graphed out horizontally and vertically, flawlessly engineered.
All the Rivers Page 6