All the Rivers

by Dorit Rabinyan

  You’ll probably read this and say it’s just the joint we smoked in the afternoon, or the beer we drank, which paints everything in this harmony. Or perhaps, like you once said, it’s that stolen water tastes so sweet: the intoxicating sense of freedom it gives us. The secret feeling of victory that envelops us when we go out onto the street, two anonymous individuals embracing among the endless blinking lights and the huge commotion of the city.

  I look up at Hilmi again. He’s mixing paints. The tip of his tongue sticks out from the corner of his mouth, pale pink, in concentration. He dips the brush into a mound of yellow paint and unloads the rich, oily streak into the middle of the palette next to the white mound he’d created before. He adds a generous dip of blue. Then another light touch of a darker blue. He mixes them together, blending and streaking them into blue-yellow-white.

  Now the magic begins. The mysterious miracle that draws my eyes away from the computer every time. I follow the brush, watch it shuffle the colours, circling and raking and spreading them this way and that. From one moment to the next the yellow grows dirty and grey, its bright light muddying, and the blue fades and turns pale, losing its blueness and assimilating in the grey. As I watch him mix, from within the disappearing blue and yellow a completely new colour is born: a living shade of green.

  My eyes turn back to the screen. I go over the last few lines. Then I read everything from the beginning, deleting and revising. But my thoughts crumble and slip away, too aware of Hilmi’s presence in the room. They wander to his torn T-shirt and his thigh muscles moving under his jeans, then on to the bracelets of hair, the spots of paint on his fingers, the bruises, green and yellow and blue, on the skin of his cheeks and forehead.

  In those moments it seems as though New York, beautiful and glowing like in the movies, is spread out at our feet. When we walk here together, carried along on the waves of people, I feel that this huge city is also in love, drunk like we are. The buildings look taller and the trees greener and brighter, the night sky has a deeper colour, a polished bright blue, the trains careen faster and rattle louder, and a huge glow of celebration lights up the streets with chaotic sounds suddenly layered upon the city’s noisy music, a—

  ‘What is that, Bazi?’

  His voice is very close. He kisses me on the back of my neck.

  ‘Wait, are you writing about me?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  He bends over the back of the sofa, half his face lit up in the computer’s glow. He glances at me with curious anticipation out of the corner of his eye. ‘Then why do you keep checking on me?’

  ‘No reason. I just like to once in a while.’

  ‘Still writing to your sister?’

  ‘Yes.’ I move the computer away and put it on the table. ‘Or maybe not…’

  ‘Then go on and write.’

  ‘I don’t even know if I’m going to send it any more.’

  ‘Well, either way, write about how gorgeous I am.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And smart.’

  ‘Smart and gorgeous. Got it.’

  He plunges his lips onto my neck, making my hairs stand on end. ‘Write that you are very…’ He murmurs into the shadow of my ear, ‘very…’ He cups my earring in his mouth, and begins to unbutton my shirt with his left hand. ‘Very…’

  His hand is calm, confident, lingering between one breast and the other. I gaze down at his paint-stained fingers gently circling one nipple. My eyes follow his hand up the other breast, circling around and around, paint spots and pale streaks hinted along the path of his caress, and a worry flickers inside me like a distant light in the fog: we are like those colours, flowing together, mingling unrecognizably, green and yellow and blue. Above his head, as he bends over and goes deeper, over the mess of frizzy curls which my fingers plough through, my gaze meets the laptop screen and the words I poured out all afternoon. And it is then that I realize I am not writing to Iris any more. That the recipient is in fact myself, an as-yet-unknown self, a me who has long ago gone back to Israel and is living my tomorrow-life in Tel Aviv, a distant me who will one day open up this file and read the words, and perhaps with hindsight have a better understanding of what is occurring inside me now, what I am going through in these mad and beautiful days. She will remember us as we once were, in New York, in Hilmi’s Brooklyn studio. She will read the lines and remember how I sat here once on this couch, in December of 2002, like the bird perched on the windowsill all afternoon, and watched myself loving him while I wrote these words.

  chapter 15

  On Thursday, I tell Iris on the phone, we went out with Joy and Tomé to the opening of ‘a stunning new exhibition’ in Chelsea, and then for dinner at a little bistro they knew, ‘where real French people were eating, it was amazing’, and at the end of the evening they took us home to Brooklyn and came up to see Hilmi’s art, ‘and you won’t believe how much they loved it.’

  In the background I can hear her emptying the dishwasher, opening and shutting kitchen cabinets. ‘They said it was wonderful,’ I boast, ‘and beautiful and extraordinary.’ My enthusiasm grows: ‘They were falling all over him.’ I hear the hum of the cordless phone moving around with her, and water running intermittently. ‘And then – listen to this,’ my cheek hugs the phone, ‘Tomé said he has a friend who’s a senior editor at Random House, in the art books department, and he’s going to introduce her to Hilmi. He said she’d be crazy about his stuff.’

  The pencil in my hand keeps scribbling stars and pyramids, doodling in the margins of ‘Termites and Amber Stones: Endo-symbiosis in the Miocene Age’, the Xeroxed article glowing with yellow and blue highlights which I was immersed in before the phone rang.

  ‘Hilmi,’ I tell my doodles lovingly, ‘almost passed out when he heard that. He didn’t even know—’

  ‘Where is this going, Liati?’ she suddenly asks impatiently.

  ‘…Which publish—’

  ‘Huh?’ The sound of her breath cuts into my words. ‘Where is this going, honey?’

  The smile still hangs on my lips. Where is what going? Before I have time to ask, she’s back at the noisy tap. ‘Hilmi, Hilmi, Hilmi.’ She rustles something close to the mouthpiece. ‘Hilmi did this, Hilmi said that. It’s been maybe two months now,’ her voice is briefly lost in a sharp clash of stainless steel, ‘that all I hear from you is Hilmi, Hilmi, Hilmi.’

  My pencil drops. Because here, too, among the stars and triangles, a few incriminating Hilmis adorned with flourishes have somehow appeared. I pull myself together a second later and say bitterly: ‘Iris, what is your problem?’

  ‘My problem, Liati? What is my problem?’

  Beyond the initial shock and the stinging insult, something in me is also surprised by how transparent I am. How does she always see right into me? My clever big sister who, even from the other side of the world on a transatlantic phone call, can be so painfully accurate.

  ‘Fine, then, I won’t tell you anything any more,’ I mumble defensively. ‘If you don’t want to hear—’

  But she quickly shoots back: ‘This Hilmi guy, I mean… It’s like he’s completely taken over. I can’t talk to you about anything else, ever since you met—’

  ‘Oh, come on, it’s not like—’

  ‘Honestly, it’s like he put a spell on you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ever since you met him it’s like you’re…’ She pauses for a moment. ‘I don’t know, in some kind of giddy…’

  ‘It’s called,’ I hiss sourly, with that annoying intonation I sometimes use with her, the argumentative inflection of an adolescent, ‘being in love. Heard of it?’

  You, big sis, after five years of marriage and two kids, may have forgotten what love is, I think to myself. You, with your errands and laundry and daycare, is it possible that you’re a little jealous? I wave the pencil irritably, impatiently, as if she can see me. And maybe that’s why you’re sick of hearing—

  ‘Being in love is all well and good,’ sh
e replies school-marmishly. ‘I wish you all the best. Go ahead and be in love just as long as you want—’

  ‘Oh, thanks a lot, really—’

  ‘But all the…’ She lingers on another long hum, her mind distracted by the dishes again. ‘All this…’

  ‘All this what?’ I lose my patience.

  ‘You know, all this stuff about flying, “we’ll be flying in the sky any minute now”, all that…’

  Shit, shit. I hold the phone away from my ear, gripping it furiously. Shit. That stupid e-mail. I was so stupid to send it to her. When I got home on Saturday night and reread the message, I was afraid of exactly this. I was afraid she might think it was pathetic. And as if to discount my own words or somehow temper the sentimentality, I added at the bottom: ‘God, I don’t even know if I should send you this at all.’ Then I inserted an obsequious smiley face. And even though I knew it was really late and I was tired and I should probably wait until morning, I hit ‘send’. The wings on the yellow envelope flapped as it glided over to her inbox, and I knew I would regret it.

  ‘What can I tell you, Liati…’ She sighs, sounding troubled. ‘This whole story… I’m getting the feeling recently that it isn’t just a…You know… just a… a fling like it was at the beginning. And I’m getting a bit worried because—’ Her voice is swallowed up by a rattling of pots and pans.

  ‘Iris, either you’re talking to me or you’re doing something else!’ I snap, surprising myself. ‘Really, you can’t have a conversation like that!’

  Everything goes quiet for a minute and only the cordless phone’s buzz comes through. After a moment she says: ‘Wait a second, I’m going outside.’

  Far away in Benyamina, she steps from the kitchen through the living room to the garden. It’s afternoon there. In the background a cheerful tune from a kids’ cartoon comes from the television, and here, on the margins of the article, the pencil in my hand starts scribbling again, more lines and triangles. I remember what she said when I called from Brooklyn last week: ‘Oh, you’re at his place now?’ Her voice had cooled abruptly. ‘He’s here next to me,’ I said, laughing, ‘but he can’t understand what I’m saying. How’s everything?’ She sounded hesitant: ‘Never mind, just call me from home.’ ‘No, wait, I’ll move to the other room.’ I got up quickly off the couch. ‘Liat, come on, I can’t talk to you like this,’ she insisted even after I shut myself in Jenny’s room, ‘let’s just try tomorrow or something.’ ‘OK,’ I conceded, disappointed, ‘if that’s what you want.’ And then, somewhat apologetically, as if to brush me off and comfort me at the same time, to make up for the disapproving distance I could hear in her voice, she added, ‘I don’t know, Liati, it’s you talking but it’s like you’re a different person, it makes me uncomfortable…’

  Now I hear her dragging a plastic chair, and birds chirping. ‘You should see what we’ve done in the garden,’ she says, sounding more relaxed. ‘Everything’s blooming so well this year.’ It’s exactly what she used to do when we were kids and she’d suddenly decide to call off a fight and go back to playing as if nothing had happened. I find myself almost won over by her chatter about the budding daffodils and tulips, the row of newly planted cypress saplings along the fence, and how quickly the passion flower vine is spreading. After I resist saying anything for a long time, she finally relents: ‘I don’t know, Liati. I just don’t know. I’m just thinking that if Mum and Dad knew…’

  My breath stops. ‘What?’ I silence my pounding heart for a beat or two. ‘You told them?!’

  ‘I said if…’

  And all at once, like in those time-lapse nature films with petals opening up and withering in three seconds, or fruit ripening and rotting in the blink of an eye, I feel my face burning hot and riddled with uncontrollable spasms. ‘I can’t believe it, how could you—’

  ‘Look, just listen—’

  ‘How dare you? Why did you do that?!’

  ‘No, no, calm down!’ she yells, clearly upset. ‘I said if! If they knew… I haven’t told anyone, not even Micah.’

  ‘Mummeeee!’ I hear my little nephew Aviad’s high sweet voice getting closer, asking something about a Teletubbies tape.

  ‘Just a minute, sweetie,’ Iris promises, ‘Mummy’s almost done on the phone.’ She blows him a kiss. ‘We’ll sort it out in a minute.’

  I still feel horrified at myself and my extreme response to the mere possibility that Mum and Dad know about me and Hilmi. I think back to what I told Joy when we stood in line at the cafeteria a few weeks ago and she asked me, with a serious, fearful expression: ‘Let’s say your parents knew about him. What would they do?’

  I remember my spur-of-the-moment response, a quip I pulled out of nowhere without thinking: ‘They’d hang me.’ I shrugged my shoulders with bemused indifference and laughed as if it was nothing. ‘They’d hang me from the highest tree in Tel Aviv.’

  At the time I thought it was something in Joy’s worried look, the tense expectation in her eyes, which had made me go overboard with my cynical response. Her grave and yet tolerant expression somehow irritated me. But maybe it was just the question that stressed me out? I wondered later, turning the moment over and over again. Was it the very mention of Mum and Dad? Either way, I felt compelled to put a little dent in her coddled American naïveté with my sabra thorns, though seeing her blue eyes widen in astonishment, I quickly added: ‘Not really! I’m just kidding,’ and laughed a little too hard. Her response was a blink, a slightly hurt look, and the hint of a smile that curved forgivingly, as if to say: I knew that. ‘But it is a little odd, that image you chose, isn’t it?’ she said as she shifted her tray from one hip to the other and turned back to look at me. ‘To say they’d hang you from a tree isn’t just like saying “my parents will kill me”.’ She glanced at my eyes, which blinked back awkwardly. ‘Hanging someone from a tree,’ she went on in a measured but puzzled voice, ‘is a public sentence. It’s punishment for show. I’d almost say it’s…’

  ‘Biblical, yes,’ I finished her sentence, my voice heavy. ‘It’s a biblical punishment.’

  When I reconstructed the conversation afterwards, I remembered being annoyed by something she’d told me about Tomé. Hilmi and I had been over at their place a few days before, and Joy said that after we’d left, Tomé had wondered what exactly the problem with Hilmi was: was it that he was Arab or that he wasn’t Jewish? ‘Let’s say Hilmi was just an American guy, a Protestant or something. Would Liat disqualify him then?’ Tomé had asked. Joy insisted that he was genuinely trying to understand – as if there were anything to understand. As if either of them could really hope to understand.

  ‘I just want to know you’re taking care of yourself, honey, that’s all. I want to be sure that you’re not getting too attached to him.’ Iris’s voice has softened.

  ‘I’m taking care of myself, don’t worry.’

  ‘Well, it really doesn’t sound like it.’

  ‘I told you, I’m fine.’

  ‘You’re not, you’re getting carried away.’

  ‘I’m not getting carried away. I know it’s temporary, I know it’ll have to end one day, but for now, it’s…’

  ‘…Just an adventure. You said so yourself: an adventure, an island in time…’

  ‘Yes, an adventure, an island in time, whatever you say.’

  ‘What do you mean, “Whatever you say”? Those were your words, Liati, from maybe a month ago. You said it was all in parentheses.’

  ‘In what? I said it’s not—’

  ‘Micah’s coming,’ she mutters.

  Even before she tells me to be quiet, I hear the kids cheer: ‘Daddy! Daddy! Mum – Daddy’s home!’ Then the familiar voice of Micah, who comes out to the garden with them, and the smack of a kiss.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he asks in the background. ‘Liat?’

  Aviad, obviously in his father’s arms, commands in a sweet voice very close to the mouthpiece: ‘Daddy, come now, fix this for me.’

  ‘One second, Micah
wants to say hi,’ my sister says.

  ‘No, Iris, wait.’ I barely finish my sentence before I hear the phone rocking wildly: ‘Now, Daddy, come on, now!’ Then Micah’s deep voice: ‘What’s up, Liati? How’s New York?’ He laughs through Aviad’s pleas. ‘Have you found yourself a nice Jewish boy yet?’

  In winter we grow apart, Iris and I. It doesn’t happen all at once, but over the next few months our phone calls become less frequent. There are the usual excuses, the obligations of life and things to do and the cost of calls and the time difference. When we do speak occasionally, I avoid mentioning Hilmi. I don’t say anything to my girlfriends in Israel either, when we talk or e-mail. When someone from Israel comes to New York – which happens twice: a close friend in January and another couple over Passover – I tell them that, yes, I’m going out with someone, a really nice Greek guy.