Without any preamble, I launched into a breathless, grumbling monologue about how hot I was. The humidity in Tel Aviv was at eighty per cent tonight, and my phone was almost dead. I’d been at the college all day, and if we got disconnected it was because of the battery. In the same rushed, businesslike tone, I sighed and asked how you were, where you were calling from, how your garden was coming along. You said you were fine, and tried to figure out where I was. I told you I was on a girls’ night out at a club, and complained that I was tired and dying to get out of there, that I only came because a good friend of mine was going abroad the next day. I’d barely slept the night before, and I’d come here straight from college, hadn’t even had time to go home and shower and change my clothes. I sighed again and carped about the heat: I’d barely been out of the A/C for two minutes and I was already sweating.
Perhaps you wanted to ask what had kept me from sleeping last night, but instead you said that Ramallah was actually quite pleasant this evening. There was good air. ‘Where are you? At your mother’s?’ I asked. Your said you were at Omar’s, on the balcony: ‘Where Omar and Marwan made that movie, the one we watched together in your apartment.’ Perhaps you were already holding up your hand with the cigarette, about to tell me that if I looked east I could see you waving. But then you heard heels clicking, someone mumbling in Hebrew, my indecipherable answer, and puckered kisses. When I cleared my throat and apologized, explaining that I’d run into someone I knew, you wanted to say we’d talk another time. I sounded foreign to you, odd, and somehow forced.
But then I suddenly said, ‘Hey, Hilmi, are you getting married?’
Unsure you’d heard right, you said nothing. You played the words back in your head: Getting married? Getting buried? Both options sounded ridiculous. ‘Am I what?’
Something about the confused tone of your stunned response amused me. ‘You’re not?’
‘I don’t understand. Married to who?’
When my laughter erupted and filled your ears, you realized I was joking and you laughed too. How you loved to hear me laugh. ‘Just laugh,’ you used to say. ‘Just laugh.’
The delight was still in my voice when I said: ‘I dreamt about you the other night.’
‘About me?’
‘Yes, and I thought… I don’t know, it seemed real…’
But before I could tell you about the dream, the call was cut off. You called me back and it went straight to voicemail. You listened to my voice reciting my number in Hebrew. You listened to the whole message without recognizing anything except ‘Shalom’ at the beginning, and ‘Liat’ and ‘Bye’. After you heard the hint of a smile at the end, and the beep, you hung up.
You had often heard me talk on the phone with my sister or with friends from Israel, and with Andrew when we sometimes switched to Hebrew. The foreign, masculine Hebrew you once knew – with its honed ‘resh’, flat ‘ayin’ and sterilized ‘khet’, and a clenched pronunciation that sounded derisive – had since been repainted in my colours, my voice. For your first few weeks back in Ramallah, you thought about me every time you came across unintelligible Hebrew text, like when you passed a road sign or handled shekel bills. You scrutinized the rigid, squared letters, examined the portraits on the twenties, fifties, hundreds. Standing in the dairy section in the grocery store, taking a container of yogurt off the shelf, buying laundry detergent, or a popsicle. Maybe you also thought of me when you saw military jeeps, settlers’ vans, the antennas on the roof of the Civil Administration building. And the soldiers at the Kalandiya checkpoint on the road to Birzeit – perhaps it occurred to you that any one of them might be my friend or my neighbour, my uncle or cousin, and that I myself, ten years ago, could have been one of those female soldiers. Maybe I came to your mind every time you heard a helicopter clatter overhead, and whenever an Israeli politician came on your news. When they showed the streets of Tel Aviv you scanned the passers-by, hoping to catch sight of me.
chapter 33
On Highway 1, at the southern exit from Jerusalem, amid a line of cars coasting down the mountain, one of the coasters in the right lane is an old silver Toyota Corolla. Five figures are visible inside: three rear-seat passengers, and a fourth – now discernible as Marwan – next to the driver. He holds a camera away from his body in both hands and presses a button. When he aims it at the wind-screen, the time and date flash red: 11.23 a.m. on the bottom right, 08-14-03 on the left.
Marwan shoots the asphalt rushing beneath the wheels. Then the camera surveys the mountainous road ahead: limestone walls rise up on either side, creating a corridor of pitted, chalky rock. The evergreen of pine trees, cypresses and oaks accentuates the starkly pallid stone walls and the pale blue sky.
The Toyota, with a slightly dented front bumper, coasts down the last incline around the foot of the mountain. At the exit from Sha’ar Hagay it slows before the bend, then picks up speed and joins the cars charging west on the highway. A green road sign comes closer, with three destinations in bright white letters in Hebrew, Arabic and English: Ben Shemen 23 km., Tel Aviv 40 km., Haifa 131 km., then it quickly flies past.
A chain of amber beads and a scented cardboard fir tree dangle from the rear-view mirror. The engine roars and the wind whistles in through the open windows. The driver is a gaunt middle-aged man with a prominent Adam’s apple and greying moustache and eyebrows. Aware of the camera, he grips the wheel with both hands and holds his head high. He gives a shy glance and quickly looks back to the road.
‘—urn on the rad—’
The driver adjusts his rear-view mirror so he can see the back seat.
‘—us some music?’
But the voices are drowned out by the clamouring engine.
‘—adio, pl—’
The driver touches his earlobe to indicate that he can’t hear. He shuts his window, slightly dimming the noise. ‘What?’ he shouts.
‘Radio! Radio!’
The camera pivots to the voices, squeezing in between the seat backs to reveal Shadi in the middle of the back seat, grinning from ear to ear. Arabic pop can be heard in the background. Shadi, hand on his chest, throws his head back and sings loudly: ‘Ya habib albi!’ He warbles and winks mischievously at the camera.
Hilmi looks out of the window, squinting at the sun and the blast of air. He wears a faded T-shirt with horizontal blue stripes, and his curls are windblown, exposing his neck.
Shadi’s head rocks back and forth as he sings along with the radio, and the camera glides to the left and shows a pretty girl sitting next to him. Her black hair is tied in a loose ponytail and dark Ray-Bans perch on her freckled nose. It’s Siham, Shadi’s girlfriend, who came on the trip at the last minute. She waves at the camera, tilts her head charmingly and blows kisses in the air.
A little later and there’s a different Arabic melody on the radio, with muffled rhythmic notes from an electric organ and darbuka drums. The landscape and colours have changed too, and Tel Aviv is visible through the windows: the beach, and the promenade road on the way to Jaffa. The car slows down in the city, and so does the picture. It runs smoothly past a long line of palm trees and a few billboards, big car parks, a petrol station. After Drummers’ Beach and the abandoned concrete lot of the Dolphinariaum nightclub, the grass strips of Charles Clore Park come into view. A row of green hills accompanies the Toyota on its southern drive past the amusement park, the fish restaurants, the wooden bridges and benches and street lamps on the promenade. And all this time, sprawled out on the right, winking and blinking in and out of sight, is a light blue strip of sky and the dark blue sea.
There is the grand clock tower at the entrance to Jaffa, standing handsomely in the middle of the picture, just like in a postcard. Beyond it is the usual traffic jam at the beginning of Yefet Street, and Abulafia’s bakery, and the left turn into the flea market. The camera scopes the glimmering square, which looks summery and sleepy, and moves across the antique stalls, hookah shops and souvenir stores. The digits on the edge of the picture
show 1.05, as does the Jaffa clock – just for a second the little hand is missing: it’s exactly five minutes past one. With both hands united, it seems to be indicating not the time but a direction, as if it were a compass needle. The camera follows the arrow west, to the sea.
The light changes. The driver makes a wide turn. The police station is visible over his head, behind a high stone wall and a row of blue police vans. His hand reaches out and turns off the radio. His eyes dart at the camera. ‘Khalas, that’s it. We’re here,’ he hisses, looking tensely in the mirror. ‘Turn that off.’
In the back seat the voices are jubilant. Close to the microphone, Marwan’s excited voice says clearly: ‘Wait, wait, just a second!’
The car drives fifty yards ahead, then slides into a sandy car park behind one of the restaurants. Siham gets out first, wearing a straw hat. A floral cloth bag is slung over her shoulder. Then Shadi emerges and slams the back door. And finally Hilmi comes out. Only Marwan stays in the car, filming through the window.
Hilmi can be seen moving away from the group. He leaves the frame and a moment later the camera catches him padding down the sand. In his hand, which the camera zooms in on, he holds Shadi’s mobile phone. His fingers press the digits and he holds the phone up to his ear. When he turns his back to the camera, Shadi’s and Siham’s voices come from outside the frame, giving instructions to Marwan, who has agreed to go and buy supplies:
‘And get cigarettes, too!’
‘Buy pitta, and maybe some cheese and fruit.’
‘No, I have enough.’
‘Just be careful, Marwan!’
‘Yeah, come back soon.’
‘You want me to come with you?’
‘No, it’s OK.’
‘See you later, Abu Shukri. Thanks.’
‘See you this evening.’
Siham and Shadi move away from the Toyota as it reverses, and Hilmi re-enters the frame, waving and yelling: ‘Marwan, grapes!’ He waves the phone over his head. ‘Bring gra—’
For a moment they disappear from the camera’s eye, then the picture rocks a little and turns back to reveal three small figures walking away quickly. It captures a snatch of them from a distance, a moment before they disappear behind a large sign announcing in Hebrew, Arabic and English: ‘No Swimming’.
chapter 34
He phoned just after three on a Friday afternoon. Flushed and sweaty from pedalling up the boulevard, I locked my bike outside the building and was about to go up to my new apartment.
I’d seen the notice posted on a tree trunk near the college: ‘Affordable, well-lit, quiet 1BR on a small one-way street off Chen Avenue’. I met the landlords in the apartment that evening – they had renovated the kitchen and opened it up to the living room, the bathroom was spacious, a large ficus tree filled the balcony window – and signed a lease. I wrote out twelve post-dated cheques and we shook hands. I booked movers for Sunday, which was my day off, and at 9 a.m. they arrived in a truck with all my boxes and furniture that had been in storage all year. I spent the whole week unpacking clothes and belongings, arranging the apartment and cleaning. When I got home that Friday with groceries and flowers for Shabbat, the neighbourhood was settling into its pre-Shabbat stillness. A speckled grey pigeon sat motionless outside the building and did not budge even when I carefully stepped past it into the cool, dark lobby.
When I heard the muffled ring of my phone and felt it vibrate in my backpack, I knew before I saw the flashing words on the screen – ‘number blocked’ – that it was Hilmi. He’d tried to get hold of me the day before, from his nephew’s phone. He’d called a few times, but on Thursdays I teach from twelve to five, and I only checked my voicemail when I was waiting for the bus in the early evening. Even though I strained my ears and listened to the message several times, it was completely unintelligible. He must have been talking in the open air, and a strong wind swallowed up his voice. It sounded like someone near him was shaking out a thick fabric or a tin sheet.
When I got onto the bus I called Shadi’s number, but I got his voicemail. I left a message asking him to tell Hilmi I’d called and that I’d try again the next day. But as I guessed even before I put down my bags and took the phone out of my bag, he beat me to it.
The empty space of the lobby, which amplified the sound of my bag dropping to the floor and the rustling plastic bags, also made the ring sound louder. Usually when I saw ‘number blocked’ on the screen, it was Hilmi calling from the payphone in Jifneh, and I was already straightening up and moving closer to the mirror next to the lift, smiling at my reflection, cheeks flushed and sweaty. I answered expectantly: ‘Hi, Hilmik!’
There were strange noises on the line this time, too. ‘Hello?’ He sounded distant and broken up, as though he were calling from beyond the ocean. ‘Hello?’ In the background I could hear a commotion of people talking, and a bell chiming.
‘What is that? Where are you?’ I spoke louder, increasingly tense. ‘I can barely hear.’
The pigeon in the doorway started at the echo. In the mirror I saw it flap its wings and fly into the shade of the ficus tree.
‘Liat? Hello, Liat?’
I blinked. ‘Liat,’ he called me, not Bazi. But I was always Bazi, even when he introduced me to people. And now there was this odd, distant formality, and voices in the background, and an urgency in his voice – an unfamiliar anxiety that made me suspect something was wrong. I immediately thought he must be in some kind of situation, under arrest at a checkpoint, surrounded by soldiers. My heart pounded and I looked up and down the stairs, convinced he was in trouble. A wild, nightmarish, spasmodic thought flew through my mind: I might find myself in trouble too, because of him.
‘What’s the matter? Are you—’
‘Liat, I need to…’
He sounded far away and troubled, like a stranger.
‘What’s going on? Are you all ri—’
‘Can you listen to me for a minute?’
And then all at once, like brakes screeching, I realized with a sinking heart that it wasn’t Hilmi. It wasn’t him on the other end of the line. It was his brother Wasim.
I hadn’t seen him since that evening in the Tribeca restaurant. For a moment it occurred to me that he was calling to apologize.
‘Yes, Wasim, hello.’ I cleared my throat and changed my tone. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m calling from Schönefeld, from the airport.’
That explained the background noise and the chiming announcements. But it still didn’t explain why Wasim would be calling me, or why he was at the airport. I had a foolish, unconvincing idea that he wanted to share a secret with me, a surprise he was preparing for Hilmi.
‘I’m on my way home, to Ramallah,’ he said.
‘Home?’ Part of me was still confused, as if, because his voice was so similar, I had not given up on the possibility that this was Hilmi talking.
‘Yes. Can you hear me, Liat?’
‘That’s wonderful. Hil—’
But it didn’t sit right with me. Something was wrong. Why on earth was he calling me? Where did he get my number?
‘That’s why I’m phon—’
‘Does Hilmi know? He’ll be so happ—’
‘Liat, Hilmi—’
‘—to know you’re coming.’
After that I screamed horribly. They told me I screamed so loudly that all the neighbours came out to the stairwell. But in those moments there was only the echo rolling through my head, a thousand screeches rising up horrifically at once. I felt my head exploding, and my legs gave way. Sobbing and shaking and deaf with panic, my shout was also a cry of guilt. Perhaps because of the arrest I had imagined at the beginning of the conversation, when I’d pictured Hilmi surrounded by soldiers at a checkpoint. It was the only interpretation I could conceive of in those moments – that he’d been shot, that our soldiers had killed him. That was my first, immediate guess.
That’s what flickered in my mind, and a summary of all the news broadcasts I’d ev
er seen was frantically projected in an agitated stream of fragmented pictures. There were smoke grenades, tanks, soldiers in helmets armed with sub-machine guns, masked faces, Molotov cocktails, burning tyres. I saw ambulances flashing their lights, casualties in hospital beds, women crying, old ladies wailing, furious men in funeral processions on the streets. Except that now, in this special news flash, the one in my subconscious, it was all horrifyingly personal: the body lying among stones scattered on the road was Hilmi’s. The one on the stretcher, carried lifelessly into an ambulance – it was Hilmi. The person the women were lamenting, the figure wrapped in shrouds, carried aloft by an angry mob on the streets – it was also Hilmi. They were all Hilmi.
Suddenly there were concerned strangers all around me. One woman sat next to me on the floor with her arms around me. Another bent over and put a glass of water to my lips. I could see more neighbours up the staircase. One guy, with dreadlocks and bloodshot, sleepy eyes, sat stunned on the other side of the banister and looked at me. I sipped the water and heard myself crying. I heard the crying subside and the creaks of my sobs getting softer. The woman next to me kept stroking my back the whole time. I used the bundle of tissues they handed me to blow my nose, spluttering, embarrassed. The woman helped me get up. They called the lift and she walked inside with me, and the minute the doors slid shut I remembered what had happened and screamed the whole way up.
They took me into their apartment. Michal from the third floor and her husband Motti. He came in a few seconds after us, I saw him from the sofa walking in with my groceries and flowers, and my backpack. He put them down on a table in the hallway, and placed my phone on my backpack.
All the Rivers Page 24