All the Rivers

by Dorit Rabinyan

  chapter 17

  We left the Midtown cinema after watching a stupid comedy. It was snowing and it was so cold that we took a cab. As we warmed up and thawed out, the driver turned on the radio, and after the commercials came guitar sounds and Annie Lennox wondered how many sorrows we could try to hide. We knew all the words, and sang along when she promised the miracle of love would wash away the pain. After the chorus, when she belted out, ‘They say the greatest coward can hurt the most ferociously,’ Hilmi stopped singing and asked: ‘What does “ferociously” mean?’

  I stopped too. ‘Ferociously?’ I had no idea.

  He leaned forward and asked the driver through the glass. The driver looked at us in the rear-view mirror. ‘Ferociously is like…’ He turned the volume down. ‘Like wildly, cruelly.’

  ‘The greatest coward can hurt…’

  ‘The most ferociously…’

  We looked at each other in silence and the taxi flooded with our recollection of the harsh words Hilmi had thrown at me when we’d fought a few days earlier: not only was I the biggest coward he’d ever met, he’d said, but I’d turned my cowardice into a flag which I waved at every opportunity, and that it looked like a white flag but really it was ammunition for my selfishness, my dispassion, and my cruelty.

  It had all started with a bad joke. We were in the study – me at the desk and he at the computer – when I looked up and saw it was almost two o’clock. I reached out to the phone and even before I started dialling, I asked him to go into the living room so I could call home.

  He didn’t take his eyes off the screen. ‘You can call,’ he said after a minute.

  When he didn’t move, I urged him: ‘Go on, Hilmi.’ He started to leave and I stood up. ‘And be quiet.’ He muttered something begrudgingly and I smiled and nodded at his back. ‘Only ten minutes.’ Before shutting the door, I grinned: ‘Just disappear from my life for ten minutes!’

  I’d never seen him so hurt and angry. His face was furious, rigid, sparking with insult. His eyes were terrifying, the veins on his neck popped and the tendons looked swollen, and he shouted at me so loudly that I cowered. He’d never raised his voice at me before. I sat on the edge of the couch and watched him pace the rug, talking and wagging his finger at me, waving it in the air and hurling accusations, and sometimes jabbing his own chest.

  I tried to go back to the starting point and insisted that it was just an innocent joke. I tried to defend myself, I pleaded, but everything I said only made him more irate. When we heard the lift stop in the hallway, followed by the neighbours’ footsteps, he finally held his head and closed his eyes. In a different voice, he brought up things I’d said two or three weeks earlier, tenderly and lovingly, but when he quoted them now it was with a contemptuous sneer. His lips sprayed saliva and his hand flew up to wipe it away as though he were slapping someone.

  ‘It’s amazing, it’s exactly the same thing. Get up and leave. “Go on, go into the living room and disappear from my life for ten minutes.” “Now come back and love me.” It’s that fucking control you always need to have. “Love me, Hilmik, give me everything you have. But don’t forget – it’s only until May twentieth. You can only love me until May twentieth.” And why, Baz? Why is that? Because on May twentieth “I’m going back to my real life.” Yes, real. We’ll play our little game for five months, we’ll play it for four months, three more, but only until May twentieth. Then khalas, game over. We’ll have a farewell party and it’ll all be done. “This isn’t reality, my love, this is New York.” “This is just a long dream we’re having together.” And you know what I remembered in those ten minutes when you kicked me out of your life? You know what?’

  It was the pin. The pin I’d held between my finger and thumb when I was a little girl, running to school early in the morning. The pin that was supposed to protect me from Arab kidnappers. He said I was still clutching it, holding it between us. He said that sometimes I was so self-absorbed, so preoccupied with my cowardice, that I didn’t even see that I was pricking him over and over again with that pin.

  The last time we’d talked about it, I’d confessed that it was about more than my parents and my fear of what it would do to them. The truth was that I didn’t have the guts for it. I didn’t have the courage to live this kind of life – a heroic, inconvenient, defiant life. I dreamed about something simple, a red roof and a couple of kids, with someone like me. ‘That’s the truth,’ I’d said, and shrugged my shoulders. ‘I’m too conventional for this.’

  Now I saw his eyes narrow through my tears, and as I wiped them away I noticed the quick ripple down his throat, and my heart went out to that lumpy Adam’s apple moving up and down. I reached over the back of the couch and almost fluttered my hand over his arm, but his chest hardened and his head pulled.

  ‘You don’t even see it.’

  chapter 18

  A few weeks earlier, at the beginning of January, the first Friday of the year, I spend the whole morning in the children’s clothing area of a huge department store near Union Square, taking advantage of the post-Christmas sales to buy gifts for my nieces and nephews. My sister faxed me their heights and weights, and a heart-rending tracing of Aviad’s right foot next to Yaara’s left, which was even smaller than my hand. On the way home, with shopping bags in both hands, I stop at the organic deli next to the university and buy a bottle of red wine and a cake for dinner.

  In the afternoon I get dressed and put on make-up and take the subway to the Upper West Side. I get off at 110th Street and walk east to Amsterdam Avenue. The doorman asks for my name, and after a short phone conversation he calls the lift for me. I go up to the eighteenth floor. Maya’s and Gidi’s apartment door has a children’s crayon drawing on a sign that says ‘Welcome!’ in Hebrew and English. I can hear an old Kaveret favourite playing from inside.

  The door opens, and the song reaches me together with snippets of conversation and the smells of home cooking. One of the twins stands at the doorway, barefoot, wearing pyjamas with an astronaut print.

  ‘Hello.’

  He has straight, sand-coloured hair, a shiny nose, and light freckles all over his face. ‘Hello.’ He looks up at me with a covetous grin – two front teeth missing – and reaches out with both little hands for the gifts peeking out of my paper bags.

  ‘No, Tali, sweetie!’ Maya appears behind him, wiping her hands on a dish towel. ‘Those aren’t for us.’ The twins inherited their fair skin, hair and freckles from her. She wears grey slacks and a thin bat-sleeve sweater that complements her green eyes. ‘Hi, Liat, come on in!’

  The boy bows his head and wraps himself around his mother’s thigh in shy disappointment.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t mind?’ I ask in between kisses. ‘I couldn’t resist…’

  Maya takes the bags and gauges their weight. ‘It’s nothing,’ she promises, ‘you should see the stack of appliances I pack for barely two weeks in Israel.’

  Earlier that week, after the fifth message she’d left, I called her at work and apologized. They’d invited me to light candles on Chanukah and I didn’t make it, and there was the New Year’s Eve party I wriggled out of, and now, as I awkwardly take off my coat, I apologize again. ‘I bought some wine and a cake,’ I say, but then I realize I forgot the deli bag. ‘I left them at home…’

  ‘No worries.’ She hangs my coat and gestures at the table. ‘There’s plenty of everything.’

  The table is lavishly set for twelve, as it was the last time I came, on Rosh Hashanah. Spread out on the white tablecloth are braided challahs with raisins, bottles of wine and colourful dishes of salads. On the windowsill a pair of Shabbat candlesticks with lit candles are reflected in the dark glass.

  ‘Well, hello, young lady!’ Gidi welcomes me with feigned surprise. He gives me a crushing hug and stands back pretending to be insulted. ‘Where have you been? We never see you!’ He’s Maya’s age, around forty, with a shaved head, connected dark eyebrows and dark brown skin. Underneath his designer
denim shirt and the professional veneer acquired during his years in America, Gidi has that masculine, Jerusalemite warmth, a Middle Eastern air that arouses immediate fondness in me. ‘So, naughty girl, where have you been hiding?’

  I start to apologize again. I blame work, the translations I had to submit by the end of the year. While I speak, I see Yael and Oren, and I exchange kisses with them too. Yael’s belly has grown a lot since the last time I saw her. She’s in her thirtieth week. ‘It’s a boy,’ she says. Another Israeli couple, Dikla and Kobi, nod at me from the couch: ‘Shabbat Shalom.’

  Oren points his wine glass at Maya’s brother: ‘You know Yaron, right?’

  I remember how Hilmi and I almost ran into him in the East Village. One afternoon we were strolling through Tompkins Square Park and suddenly, between the trees and the shadows, I recognized Yaron walking his Labrador. I let go of Hilmi’s hand and looked down. Fortunately, the dog stopped to sniff a utility pole, and while Yaron was busy with her, we hurried by. Hilmi didn’t pick up on anything, and even when I led him away with a made-up excuse, he didn’t notice I was upset.

  Gidi inspects me thoughtfully. ‘Something’s different…You did something…’

  My antennas respond at once: ‘Did what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Several pairs of eyes turn to me expectantly. ‘Maybe something about your hair…’

  ‘No.’ My hand reaches up involuntarily to touch my head and slides down to my neck. ‘I haven’t done anything.’

  At dinner we discuss President Bush’s appetite for oil and the big demonstration against the invasion of Iraq last weekend in Central Park. We talk about Saddam Hussein’s speech, which was on TV the day before yesterday, and reminisce about the comic relief on TV in Israel during the Gulf War, and how we all had to seal off a room at home and sit there every time there was an air-raid siren, in case there was a chemical attack. We talk about Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut who will be going into space in ten days, and the Israeli flag and the Torah he is going to take with him on the Columbia shuttle.

  The candle stubs are still burning after dinner, two flames in congealed waterfalls of wax, diffusing a faint, warm smell of Friday night. I go out for a smoke on the balcony and turn to see Yaron sliding the glass balcony door open. When he sees that I’m bundled up in my coat and scarf and realizes it’s cold outside, he says, ‘One second.’ He pulls the door shut and motions for me to wait for him.

  Maybe he did see me in the park that day? Maybe he didn’t want to embarrass me so he let me walk past nervously, without saying hi? But maybe now, when it’s just the two of us, far from the others, he’ll say something?

  But after I take another shallow drag and let out the smoke, I realize my guilt is ridiculous. After all, even if he had seen us there, he couldn’t have known that Hilmi was Arab – to know that, he’d have to talk to him and hear the accent.

  ‘Hi there.’ He appears in the doorway again.

  I flash him an overwrought grin of innocence and relief, as compensation for that day.

  He wears a grey coat with leather elbow patches over his sweater, and holds a glass of whiskey. ‘Would you like one too?’

  He has a manicured French beard and round cheeks, a sharp nose, thin-framed glasses. His face reminds me of a squirrel or a hamster, some sort of cute little rodent. At the beginning of the evening I heard him tell Dikla about his doctoral dissertation on the Saudi economy in the first half of the twentieth century. ‘Saudi Arabia?’ Dikla wrinkled her nose. ‘Why there, of all places?’ Yaron explained that he’d done Middle Eastern studies as an undergraduate, in Israel, after serving in Intelligence as a career soldier for a while. ‘They’re following us all the way here, those Arabs, heh?’ she said teasingly, and Yaron scoffed. Dikla is a very beautiful woman, tall and attractive, and he was clearly flattered by her attention. ‘Where we live, in Queens,’ she went on in a worried voice, ‘there are loads of Arabs now.’

  On the balcony I expect him to light a cigarette, and I hold out the pack of Lucky Strikes that Hilmi left at my place. But Yaron waves his hand: ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Oh,’ I sound unconvincingly surprised, ‘I thought you…’

  He says he hasn’t smoked for almost two and a half years. His ex made him give it up. He snickers into the rattling ice cubes and takes a sip. ‘That’s pretty much the best thing I got out of that whole story.’ He leans over the railing and looks down on to the avenue. The passing cars make a constant spitting sound with their tyres on the wet road. He tells me that on the way here, a police car stopped him for a breath alyzertest. ‘Cheers, guys!’ he teases them with a vindictive smile before taking another sip.

  He has that cynical, wise-ass adolescent style, like he’s seen it all before and nothing could possibly surprise or excite him. But his body emanates discomfort with itself, as though it finds this mask of indifference confusing and has resorted to childishly pleading for love.

  ‘What about you?’ he goes on, playing the charmer. ‘Seeing anyone?’

  The flirtatious tone obviously does not come naturally to him. Feeling pressured by this unexpected, clumsy courting, I don’t make it any easier on him. I just shake my head. ‘Nope.’ I discard my ash over the railing and concentrate entirely on the act of smoking.

  A couple of months back, the four of us had seen a play and then gone for sushi afterwards. Yaron had driven me home in his silver VW Golf. Now he offers to give me a ride home again. ‘We can leave soon, as far as I’m concerned,’ he says, showing me the time on his elegant wristwatch. I remember Maya’s reflection in the women’s bathroom at the Japanese restaurant, when she smiled as she reapplied her lipstick. ‘I think my brother likes you.’ She winked at me in the mirror, her red-wine lips smacking against each other. I wonder whether at a different time, if I hadn’t met Hilmi a few days later, something could have happened between us.

  It’s quarter to ten. I put out my cigarette. ‘Pretty soon.’ I pick up the Lucky Strikes and lighter and turn to Yaron with a deliberate shiver. ‘Should we go inside?’

  He stops me, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. ‘Liat, um…’ The alcohol seems to have made his eyes narrow and dark, scheming, ‘Do you know that secret place, PDT?’

  For a moment I think he might be playing a trick on me, hinting at some information he has.

  ‘Please Don’t Tell?’

  ‘Please what?’ I tense up suspiciously. ‘Don’t tell what? I don’t get it.’

  ‘It’s on Macdougal Street, not far from your place. It’s a speakeasy.’

  ‘Oh, a speakeasy.’

  You have to go through a pizzeria, then there’s a hidden intercom that you have to know how to find, and when you press it they see you on camera and buzz the door open. ‘It’s become my regular place,’ he says, putting a hand on my shoulder as we walk inside. ‘We could stop there on the way.’

  Down on the street a car honks, then another answers with a lengthy hoot. ‘I have to get up really early tomorrow,’ I apologize, and make a sad face.

  Back inside, with coffee and cake and nuts, the conversation turns to the Israeli elections that have been pushed forward to the end of the month.

  Gidi, still wearing the yarmulke he’d put on for the Shabbat blessings, blue velvet with gilded embroidery, peels an apple and sheds a long snake of red peel onto the dish. Oren agrees with him that here in America an anti-religious campaign like the one the Shinui party has launched in Israel wouldn’t be tolerated. ‘It would be considered anti-Semitic,’ he claims.

  ‘Oh, come on, Mitzna’s problem isn’t his lack of charisma,’ Kobi says, refusing the last piece of apple Oren offers him on the tip of a knife. ‘The problem is Hamas. It’s the terrorist attacks.’

  Everyone nods. They all sigh heavily. Yael says the son of a good friend of hers was injured in the suicide bombing at Pat Intersection in Jerusalem – he was waiting at the bus station and the terrorist blew himself up just feet away; he’s had fifteen operations. Kob
i waits impatiently for Yael to finish, and recounts with horror how only a few days ago, completely by accident, he found out that he knew one of the young women who’d been killed in the attack at the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus – her husband Shmulik was in his army unit.

  ‘I remember when they got married,’ he says, holding his head in both hands.

  Just the thought of Hilmi sitting here with me in Maya and Gidi’s living room, with Oren and Yael and the others, gives me a stomach ache. The attention we would draw from the minute we walked into this Hebrew space with our enforced, killjoying English. ‘Everybody, this is Liat,’ Maya would announce in her heavily accented English, ‘and this is Hilmi.’ The silence, the awkward embarrassment that would surely follow. I imagine the raised eyebrows, the glances flying from one couch to the other, until Gidi pulled himself together and got up to shake our hands and invited Hilmi to sit down. ‘Can I get you a drink?’ he’d ask Hilmi. And then Hilmi’s accent, which no Israeli ear could miss, and the knowing smirks, perhaps even winks. Then the ostensibly polite enquiries, the curiosity designed to confirm their suspicions. The quick glances at me, the secret wonderings about me.

  The loaded atmosphere might have dissipated a little later on and the conversation would probably have picked up. But I cannot envision Hilmi in this room with me, surrounded by Hebrew on all sides like a babe in this wood of Israelis, all graduates of the army, without being overcome by anxiety. I can’t help imagining the wave of gossip that would surge as soon as we left, the jokes and the laughter that would break the tension the minute the door shut behind us.

  Yaron went home in a cab that night. We did end up going out, and he was too drunk to drive, so he left his car parked near the piano bar we sat in until after midnight. The pianist, a big black woman with close-cropped hair and huge gold hoop earrings, played with her eyes mostly shut and sometimes accompanied herself with raspy singing. On the tables were candles, cardboard beer coasters and single carnations in thin china vases. I ordered a glass of red wine, and Yaron had another whiskey on the rocks.