‘From Ramallah? How wonderful!’ Diwan gushed in the background, and we all laughed. ‘I’ve heard it’s such a cool city!’
The dinner table was set gloriously. Joy sat Hilmi on Pervez’s right and me on his left. When he was young, Pervez had taught Iranian history to Joy and her friends, and he conducted the holiday rituals. Just like on Jewish holidays, there was a series of blessings for the new year. The candlelight symbolized happiness, the hyacinths were for growth, and the chocolate coins promised abundance and success. Two plump goldfish swam in a round glass bowl in the centre of the table, and anyone who looked at them was assured a year of fairness and fertility. There were seven foods whose names began with the letter sin, the Iranian equivalent of s, and they were passed around with prayers and good wishes: for renewal – wheatgrass sprouts; for beauty and good health – apples; for healing – pickled garlic; for longevity and patience – a drop of wine vinegar. The little bowl of honey represented the return of the sun, and purple-red sumac connoted sunrise.
‘And last but not least,’ Pervez finally declared, passing a dish of green olives to Hilmi, ‘love!’ His look moved from Hilmi’s eyes to mine, and then to the rest of the table: ‘May this be a year full of love.’
Then platters of rice and sweet dishes began arriving: rice with raisins and carrots, rice with almonds and prunes, braised meat with eggplant and cherries, herbed leek fritters with yogurt sauce, and stuffed roast chicken with rosemary and pomegranate.
‘You eat these dishes at home?’ Hilmi couldn’t get over the flavours and colours. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Apart from the butter and the yogurt,’ I said, licking my fingers, ‘but that’s the only difference. Other than separating milk and meat, Persian Jews cook exactly the same as the Muslims.’
‘Tonight there’s no such thing as Christians or Muslims or Jews,’ Pervez interjected, waving a bottle of wine and filling our glasses. ‘Tonight we are all brothers! We are all Zoroastrians!’
At the end of the evening, after gorging ourselves on food and drink, after the music has stopped and the last of the instruments has been packed up – Diwan’s string trio played wonderful classical Persian music on an oud, a tar, a ney and santoors – the musicians and most of the guests retire, sleepy and tipsy, to disperse among the five upstairs bedrooms.
Downstairs, in the now tranquil reddish darkness, only Pervez and Hilmi and I are still awake. Two other couples have also volunteered to spend the night here, in sleeping bags, and their still bodies are outlined on the rug in the fire’s glow, like scouts on a camping trip.
‘Harmony…’ Pervez’s deep voice waxes poetic. ‘Cosmic harmony.’ His whispers jolt the shadows cast by the candlelight on the ceiling. ‘Tonight there is perfect balance. The world is at the exact point’ – the fire sizzles up for a moment when the embers softly crack – ‘of equilibrium.’
He is sitting behind us, wrapped in a wool blanket with a dog at his feet, watching the square of rug where Hilmi and I lie as close to the fire as we can get, burrowed in our sleeping bags.
‘—between light and dark—’
I’m close to falling asleep. The sound of his voice quietly rolls through the darkness and stirs up a sweet weariness like a lullaby or a bedtime story. I feel it crawl around thickly, melting into the hot fire, seeping into my eyes.
‘—between good and bad—’
I lie on my back, Hilmi on his side. He rests his flushed cheek on his hand, his eyes glassy and quiet, focused on the fire. All evening he stared at it as if bewitched, and his gaze is still transfixed by the flames. Two tiny red tongues light up and dance in his pupils. When the string trio played, he settled down here by the fireplace, leaning over every so often to prod the logs with a poker, sending up waves of sparks.
‘—a new day, a new world.’
I look at Hilmi and my eyelids feel heavy. Scenes from our journey here, our day together, the joys of the drive, the freezing northern landscape and the roads through America – all these descend upon me with an intoxicating weakness augmented by the warmth of the fire. I see the flames reflected in the lines of his face. A reddish film glistens on his forehead. I feel heaviness in my limbs, which the flames seem to spread through and lap at, and I dream that a great bear attacks Hilmi with her claws – a huge she-bear with red fur. I try to beat her off, but my arms are too weak, they are only the sleeves of an old coat. I pound the beautiful bear with my fists and try to separate them, but suddenly she is very close and she grabs me, and it is I who am devoured.
Footnote
1 Persian: She says she understands a little, but the question is how little?
chapter 24
The plan was to go for a walk around the lake in the morning. But after a late breakfast, and by the time the rain and fog had subsided, it was already 2.30. Hilmi and I had to drive back to Manhattan that evening, so we decided to skip the tour of Hillsdale and stay at home with the others. Joy went up to feed Liam and put him down for a nap. In the living room, Pervez and Hilmi played cards. Shirin dozed on the couch. I went into the empty kitchen and began loading plates and glasses in the dishwasher. I was about to tackle the bowls and cutlery when Joy poked her head around the doorway.
‘Leave that, we’ll take care of it later.’
‘Too late,’ I said over my shoulder, ‘I’m almost done anyway.’
When I’d glanced at the clock over the door a few moments earlier, it had occurred to me that my father was also standing in the kitchen, in Tel Aviv, loading the dishwasher with dishes from Friday night dinner. I was planning to phone home soon, and I pictured him wiping his hands as he went to answer the phone. I imagined his voice in my ears, and my mother’s from the extension in the living room. I could see our living room at this peaceful hour, the most beautiful hour of the week, with cake and teacups and the weekend newspapers and crosswords. I couldn’t remember whether Iris and Micah and the kids were there today.
‘But everyone will be back soon…’ Joy’s voice came up closer behind me, sounding lazy and indulgent. I turned off the tap and heard music from the living room. ‘And then it’ll be crowded again.’ She put her glass of cava up to my lips and reached out brazenly to untie the apron from my waist. ‘Oops!’
I took a sip. Her eyes were damp and flushed, unsteady. Last night, after greeting the guests with Tomé, she’d waved her glass of wine and explained that after ten months of breast-feeding and sleepless nights, they’d finally weaned Liam and got him to take a bottle. A wave of applause and cheers arose when she tilted her head back, took a first sip, and declared that from now on she could drink as much as she wanted.
‘Come on, sit down with me for a while,’ she said, rubbing her cheek against my shoulder like a cat and hanging on me. ‘We’ve hardly had time to talk.’
I followed her out of the kitchen. Ambient bass lines came from the living room. She sat down on the second-to-last step and made room for me next to her. Suppressing a burp, she waved away the coffee I offered. ‘I’m so sad you’re not staying longer.’
‘It really was a short visit.’
‘It’s only Friday.’
‘I know, I wish we could stay.’
‘Then why don’t you call? Say you got stuck or something…’
‘No, no, we promised we’d be back tonight.’
‘Just stay for the night, tell him you—’
‘I told you, Andrew needs the car, we can’t.’
My impatience at her drunkenness, and the effort it took to hide it, led my eyes to the kitchen. Seeing the embers of greying light in the windows reawakened my anxiety about making the long drive home in the dark. I took another sip of coffee – I couldn’t see the clock from this angle, but the green numbers on the microwave said 3.37 – and with its bitter flavour in my mouth I looked towards the living room again.
‘He’s such a sweetheart,’ Joy said, giving me a melting grin. ‘Look at him.’
Pervez was at the dining table, playing solitai
re. He dealt out the cards with a grave expression.
‘Oh yes, he is such a lovely man,’ I agreed. ‘Last night, after you went to sleep, it was like—’
But Joy wasn’t talking about Pervez. She put her arm around my shoulder and steered me to the other part of the living room, which I hadn’t been able to see. Hilmi was dancing, with his eyes shut, his legs apart on the rug, hardly moving, gently circling his head and arms.
‘He’s so…’ she started to say. She paused for a long time, watching him with a satisfied sort of delight. ‘So…’
‘So Hilmi.’
She laughed right near my ear. ‘Exactly!’ Her eyes were glazed, and she looked emotional. ‘So Hilmi, honestly.’
Now Diwan and Shirin appeared, dancing their way over to him secretly, Diwan twirling his hands and Shirin swaying her hips. I smiled at Hilmi’s embarrassed look when he blinked his eyes open and saw them. He laughed happily, throwing his head back, and took a puff from a joint Diwan held up to his lips. Shirin moved and swirled around them both.
I moved away from Joy and glanced back at the glowing green microwave clock. It was 10.45 in Israel.
‘Is it all right if I call my parents from here?’
‘Of course.’
‘They’re expecting to hear from me around now.’
‘No problem.’
I moved towards the phone, expecting Joy to offer me one of the quieter rooms upstairs, but she kept sitting there. I tried to remember again what Iris had said on the phone the other day about where they were having dinner on Friday night, and I thought longingly about Aviad and Yaara and hoped they wouldn’t fall asleep before I called.
‘How can you not be jealous?’ Joy surprised me by asking.
‘What?’ I was confused, and it took a moment for me to realize what she meant. ‘About Hilmi?’
She examined my face with a look of wonder. ‘Not even a little?’
She pinned her blue eyes on me with an emotional, pleading look, and I felt as if I should apologize. ‘I don’t know, sometimes.’ Perhaps she sensed my discomfort with this drunken, sentimental version of her. Wanting to bridge the distance, I went on honestly: ‘Sometimes I’m jealous when I think about the wife he’ll have one day.’ I spoke into my coffee mug, unfocused, sounding unfamiliar to myself. ‘The woman who will have Hilmi in the end, after all this is over.’
Formulating that dismal thought, hearing myself utter it for the first time out loud so casually, brought a catch to my voice which I tried to disguise with a gulp of coffee. It was too hot for gulping, and it burned my throat as it slid down.
She pouted and exhaled sharply. ‘Good God, how?’ she moaned. ‘How can you?!’
‘How can we what?’
‘How can you love each other so much and know the whole time that it’s temporary.’
Her words pained me, but she was upset and too drunk to notice.
‘How can you love with a deadline, with a stopwatch running?’
I bit down the strained smile that suddenly made my lips tremble. ‘What choice do we have?’
‘I don’t understand how you can do it.’
I threw my hands up helplessly. ‘That’s how it is.’
*
Last week, at the supermarket, it had hit me. Glared back at me from the crowded shelves. The trickling time looked straight at me from a box of cornflakes. The time that was dwindling into nothing.
It was a Friday afternoon. I pushed my trolley past thousands of cereals until I found the ancient Kellogg’s rooster. I reached out for a box and was about to put it in my trolley, when my eyes caught the expiry date: ‘Best Before 05.20.03’ it said, and my heart leapt. That was the date printed on my flight ticket, the date I had set way back in summer when the travel agency had made the booking. My flight back to Israel – it suddenly hit me, concrete and vivid, right in front of my eyes – was in two months and one week.
Time – that abstract space that stretches from one entirely tangible minute all the way to something that will happen far in the future – shrank down into a printed stamp that said ‘Best Before 05.20.03’, and became a concrete fact. Like this cardboard box, like the bag of bread, like the carton of eggs and the milk. In two months and one week I would be going back to Israel. In two months and one week I’d be returning home – saying goodbye to Hilmi and resuming my previous life. The two of us, like those cornflakes, had only nine weeks left. Only nine more Fridays to be together, nine Saturdays and nine Sundays, and then it would be over.
I wanted to tell Joy that afterwards I did the rest of my shopping: I bought vegetables and noodles and chicken, but I didn’t buy that box of cornflakes. Somewhere along the way to the checkout, I took it out of my trolley and left it orphaned on a shelf among tubes of hand cream, deodorant and shaving foam. But later, on my way home, and when I went up to the apartment with the groceries, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I saw him walking through Washington Square without me, in a year or two. I saw his curly head and the back of his blue coat passing through the crowds. I felt suffocated by my future longings when I saw that distant, unknown Hilmi sitting here on a bench on his own, or with someone else.
That afternoon we met for lunch at Café Aquarium, and then I went to the East Village with him to get his hair cut. In the evening we saw the new film about Frida Kahlo, and when we walked out he hugged me and asked me why I was in such a bad mood. I said I’d just woken up like that, and avoided telling him anything the next morning, too, when I woke up with that fateful feeling, and all Saturday when it stayed with me – when we bathed together, sat at the Korean café near his place, cooked pasta for dinner, and went back to bed. I couldn’t stop calculating how many of these lovely sunlit mornings we still had together. I couldn’t stop silently counting the days and nights, tallying how many cups of coffee we had left, how many walks and meals, how many kisses.
I didn’t tell him, but Hilmi sensed it. He sensed it in the look I gave him, in the way I held his hand. And maybe he had his own ominous box of cornflakes, his own reminder of the expiry date getting closer and closer. Because on the train home after the movie he lunged at me with urgent thirst, uncharacteristically ignoring the other passengers as he hugged and kissed me. His breathless fervour gave me the hurtling sensation that this train ride, the rest of the way to Brooklyn, was all we had left – that these few minutes until we crossed the river were our last. At night, when I thought about how few chances I still had to love him, I gripped him with the same desperate pain.
It was 3.54 p.m. I blinked back the tears that suddenly came to my eyes. Life goes on, I wanted to tell Joy. You can’t keep remembering that the end is near, you just get up in the morning and somehow forget.
But Joy didn’t even notice that I was trying to get out of the conversation. ‘Don’t you talk about it?’ she persisted. ‘You don’t talk about it at all?’
‘What is there to say? It was agreed from the get-go.’
‘But what happens afterwards?’ She seemed so foreign to me all of a sudden, so foolish and spoiled. American, self-centred. ‘When you go back to Isr—’
‘There is no afterwards, Joy,’ I cut her off. ‘Stop it, I told you, on 20 May it’s over, it’s not going anywhere.’
‘But you’re so happy together!’ Her whisper roared up to the ceiling. ‘You’re so… You’re so fucking right for each other.’
‘I know.’ I nodded with my eyes shut. ‘I know.’
A moment later, burying my head in both hands, I felt the weight of her soft, maternal arms surrounding me in a hug. ‘Hey, hey. It’ll work out for you in the end, I’m sure it will,’ she whispered in my ear, and gave me a comforting kiss. ‘You’ll see, love wins out in the end.’
‘How will it work out?’ I lost my patience and shook her off. ‘What’ll work out? What are you talking about?!’
She finally caught hold of herself and put her hand up to her mouth. ‘Oh, honey, I’m sorry…’
‘Jesus, Joy.’
‘You’re a terrible drunk, Joy, seriously.’ I gave her a grumpy, impatient hug. ‘It’s unbelievable, you’re just—’
‘Awful!’ she cried with a sob of guilt into my neck. After apologizing again, red faced, and making sure she was forgiven, she sighed. ‘And a romantic.’
‘A hopeless romantic.’
‘A bad drunk and a hopeless romantic,’ she snivelled. ‘Yeah, I guess so. Because, you know, I think about you all the time. Every time I see you with him, I can’t get you out of my head afterwards. And please, please don’t get mad at me, but really, I am so hopeful for you. I don’t know… I just want to believe. I want to hope that maybe it can work out after all. In the end somehow, against all odds, as they say. I think… who knows? Maybe you’ll stay here in the States, you’ll live far away from all your troubles, in the end it will be possible.’
We heard the front door open and the dogs padded into the kitchen thirstily. Joy just had time to say: ‘These things do happen, after all. They do.’ And then came the voices, and all the guests came in with Tomé and the kids. ‘In real life.’
‘Hi, Dad, Shabbat Shalom.’
‘Oh, my sweetness!’ I could hear him sigh with relief and imagined the smile spreading across his face. ‘What a joy to hear your voice! Shabbat Shalom.’
I cradled the phone tightly, comfortingly. ‘How are you, Daddy?’ My voice trembled for a moment. ‘How is everyone?’
‘Thank God, everyone’s fine, God willing. What’s the story? Why so late? We waited, we were starting to think you wouldn’t call.’
‘I’m away from home, I’m out of town.’ The Hebrew felt like bubblegum in my mouth at first, soft and focused, flooding me with dizzying sweetness. ‘I’ll tell you in a minute. How are things?’ I sat down on the edge of the bed with the phone on my lap. ‘Where’s Mum? What are you doing?’
All the Rivers Page 18