Girl Unwrapped

by Gabriella Goliger

  “I don’t fucking know.”

  Janet leaps up and paces back and forth in front of the doorway, head bowed, arms crossed over her chest. Her bare feet slap softly on the terrazzo floor. The movement of her billowing skirt makes the candle flames shiver. She stops abruptly, looks keenly at Toni as if noticing her properly at last.

  “Hey, you must be starving. I am. I’ll get some food. To hell with him.”

  Despite the long hike from the dorm and the lateness of the hour, Toni isn’t the least bit hungry. Her throat feels closed to food, but she nods eagerly anyway and follows Janet across the patio and the garden to a galley kitchen in the main house. Janet loads a tray with salads, hummus, cheese, a loaf of rye bread.

  “No booze,” she apologizes. “That fucker was supposed to bring the booze.”

  They return to the patio where several wicker stools and a small wooden table wait under the gnarled branches of a tree. Janet lights lanterns and suddenly the garden is alive with dancing light and shadows.

  “This is where we eat most of our meals. David does the garden. He rescued it from near death. We’ve got roses, cactus, bougainvillea, our own herbs. He pruned this fig tree. He’s got the touch.”

  Toni makes out soft blooms against the foliage and breathes in sweet and spicy scents. The stone wall, about as high as her shoulders, surrounding the enclosure creates a cosy space, reminding her of bonfire nights at Camp Tikvah. Beyond the wall is the solid darkness of the wadi. How often Toni lay on her cot at the dorm or sat at Hebrew class at the university campus and tried to imagine this place, and now she is here, at last. Her jittery fingers pinch pieces of rye bread into a heap of pellets while Janet, leaning over the table, busily eats. It is a great piece of luck, Toni decides, that David has gone AWOL, allowing her this reunion with Janet on her own.

  “I was saying that the euphoria about Israel wears away,” Janet says, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “But not for everyone. David’s still high on being in Jerusalem, the Holy City. Of course, he’s just high, period. He lives in his own zone, a different level. Know what I mean?”

  Toni isn’t sure, but an uncomfortable truth strikes her. “You really like him.”

  She is appalled at how resentful her statement sounds, but Janet doesn’t seem to notice.

  “Huh!” is all that Janet offers as reply. A skeptical snort. Or a preoccupied grunt. Or perhaps a defensive “don’t-remind-me-of-what-I-feel.” But whatever the case, Toni’s comment is a conversation stopper as Janet rummages for cigarettes, lights up, and drags deeply, eyes shut in concentration like a condemned man on a firing line trying to savour his last request. After a long pause, Janet’s eyes blink open.

  “So what is it you’re doing here again?” she asks, her gaze drifting from Toni’s face to the depths of the darkness beyond the garden wall, where trees rustle and a cool breeze wells up.

  Happy to change the subject, delighted at another chance to present her new self—the grownup, scholarly, almost-Hebrew-speaking self—Toni tips forward on her three-legged stool. She babbles. She rearranges Janet’s cutlery. She marches the army of bread pellets back and forth. A sudden stiffening of Janet’s posture stops the army in its tracks. Janet’s head shoots upward in a listening position, and now Toni hears it too, a faint whistling in the distance, which grows stronger as it approaches, resolving itself from a wispy sound into one of the Singing Rabbi’s hypnotic melodies. The whistled tune is accompanied by the tinkle of glass.

  “That’s him!” Janet pronounces breathlessly. She stubs out her cigarette, smoothes her hair, straightens her shoulders and stares hard in the direction of the whistling. There’s a scrambling by the wall, and then a tall, lean figure swings over and drops to the ground in a deft movement, noiseless, except for the clinking of bottles. “Hey, babe. How’s it going? I see you got grub on the table. Sweet darling! I’m starved.”

  The voice is rich and deep. The words flow like melted chocolate poured from a vat.

  “Where were you, you shithead?”

  David grins, showing a flash of white teeth beneath a droopy black moustache. He removes a small embroidered cap, the kind worn by religious Jews in the Bukharian Quarter, and scratches the scalp beneath a shaggy mane of hair.

  “Places, man. Places!” he says in a tone both emphatic and wondering, as if no other explanation were needed, but as if he is amazed at these vague, mysterious places he’s been privileged to visit. With sinking heart, Toni notes he is undeniably handsome. Tall, but with a slight scholarly stoop, giving him a gentler air than the forceful Israeli masculinity common in the streets. He wears some kind of ethnic shirt of soft white cotton, a leather choker, patched jeans, and sandals. Big, gardener’s hands. Arched, quizzical eyebrows. An impish cleft in his chin. Intense dark eyes.

  “I could kill you. I could bloody well kill you.”

  Janet has reared off her stool and grabbed the butter knife and waves it menacingly toward his chest.

  “Aw, don’t be like that, babe.”

  He drops before Janet on one knee, opens his knapsack and pulls out several bottles of beer along with some kind of liquor, which he places at her feet. A pack of cigarettes follows. He adds a handful of change from his pocket to the offerings. Next, he starts to take off his shirt as if he means to give her that too.

  “Oh quit it, you asshole.”

  But a grudging softness has come into her voice, and to Toni’s astonishment she allows him to pull her down to the ground and envelope her in a hard embrace. His hair falls forward to cover both their faces.

  “This is Toni,” Janet says in a slightly breathless voice when they’ve staggered to their feet. David studies Toni with a frank, unsmiling curiosity that makes her blood rise. She’s become accustomed to these cool, appraising looks—from young men in particular—who seem to want to figure out what’s not quite right about her, what ingredient is missing. She stares back, jaws clamped tight, until his hand shoots out to enclose hers in a firm, manly grip, the kind of handshake one fellow might give to another. An unexpected spark of pleasure warms her chest. The keen look on his face is one of interest, not judgement, she realizes, and she can’t help but be flattered. Introductions over, David opens the beer he brought, squats down on a stool, and helps himself to supper, including the leftovers on Janet’s plate—the crusts and smeared hummus. He stuffs food into his mouth with his fingers, eating heartily, smacking his lips, and wiping his hands on the legs of his patched jeans.

  “You’re famished,” Janet says, surprised. “I thought you’d have eaten by now.”

  “Went to the Kotel, lost track of time. What a trip. People dancing, singing, high on Shabbas. Aw, man, you should have come.”

  Janet considers him for a long a moment.

  “You said you were going to synagogue.” She pauses. “Meet anyone?” Her voice is guarded.

  “Yeah.” He chews thoughtfully and swallows. “Elijah the Prophet. After the Kotel, I went up the Mount of Olives. Sat on a wall above the cemetery. Black as tombs all around me, and across the valley the lit-up city floated in mid-air. Elijah said to me: ‘Far fucking out!’ Those were his very words.”

  All this is said deadpan. Janet makes a face and finally smiles. She pushes a teasing finger into the cleft of his chin.

  “Aren’t you a scream.”

  “Anything else to eat?”

  Wordlessly, Janet slips off her stool and pads across the flagstone patio. She returns with another plate of tidbits from the fridge. While David eats, she sits close beside him, touching his arm and shoulder and watching the food disappear with obvious pleasure. At the end of the meal, David picks his front teeth with the edge of the long fingernail at the end of his pinkie finger. Toni stares in fascination. It’s a custom for Middle Eastern men—both Jewish and Arab—to grow that one long nail, so uncouth to European eyes, Toni knows. She has not seen a single Western Jew thus equipped. David smiles and belches loudly.

  “The Bedouins consider bu
rping a compliment to the host. Opposite of Western culture where bodily functions are dirty. I consider the human body holy, don’t you?”

  Toni detects a glint of merriment in those studying eyes.

  “Sure. Every hole is holy,” she banters back at David.

  David guffaws and nudges her hard, so that she nearly falls off her wicker stool.

  “Toni really is spiritually minded,” Janet says, smiling at them both, pleased to see them getting along. “She’s nuts about Jerusalem.”

  David beams. “Thought you might be. Could see that you’ve got depth. I can read a face pretty well.”

  “This town is too serious and uptight for me,” Janet says peevishly. “I prefer gritty old Tel Aviv.”

  “Jerusalem will grow on you, babe. Give it a chance.”

  David takes one of her hands in his own big paws and traces the lines with his thumb.

  “These lines don’t lie. I see you discovering your deep-down soul. I see an amazing spiritual journey on the way.”

  He presses Janet’s palm to his lips. Janet sucks in her breath and her body seems to melt toward him. Jerking her head away, Toni studies the ghostly white roses by the garden wall.

  “It’s late,” she says. “I should go.”

  “Should or want to?” David drawls. “‘Should’ is the most evil word in our vocabulary. William Blake said, ‘Better to strangle an infant in its grave than to listen to the dictates of should.’ He said something like that, anyway. Are you telling me you want to leave?”

  “Three’s a crowd.”

  At this, David and Janet both burst into laughter. Janet reaches across the table and pats Toni’s hand.

  “You’re a sweet kid. Have some more beer.”

  The three of them clink bottles together.

  “So, what’s your trip, Toni?” David asks, folding his hands behind his head and stretching his long legs out in front of him. “Whatcha seeking?”

  Not wanting to repeat the tale Janet found so tedious (Six-Day War, being part of history, blah, blah), Toni focuses on her university plans, her excitement about being accepted into a science program. David utters an unimpressed “humph” that seems to say you’ll soon be rid of those illusions. An awkward silence ensues.

  “David’s got a degree in philosophy. He’s been to graduate school too,” Janet says.

  “Dropped out of graduate school,” he corrects her. “Flew the coop. Whoosh.” His hand arrows through the air to suggest a plane taking off. “Couldn’t stand the bullshit. Univer-shitty. That’s where they try to stifle independent minds.”

  Toni tries to take this in. Dropping out seems almost criminal, an act of breath-taking recklessness. Yet David clearly has no regrets. He relates some of the adventures he’s had since chucking his exam booklet into the garbage and sticking out his thumb on the open road. He camped with the Navaho in the desert and on a houseboat with a fisherman who could have been Hemingway’s twin. He did an ashram. Got busted in Paris. Wooed a girl in Rome. As he talks, David rocks his body and his hands tell the stories along with his voice. In a country where everyone talks with their hands, his fluid gestures still seem unusually expressive.

  By and by, he pulls a silver-foil packet the size of a sugar cube from the lining of his embroidered cap. From his pocket he produces a penknife and a metal pipe.

  “Ah,” Janet murmurs happily. “I’ve been dying for some shit.”

  “Moroccan gold.” David chuckles. “The best.”

  He shaves the lump with his penknife, fills the pipe, and lights up, filling the air with a burnt hay aroma. The pipe passes from hand to hand. Toni hesitates for just a heartbeat. The intimate glow of the lanterns, Janet’s dreamy smile, and David’s nodding head snuff out silly admonitions from another lifetime about frying one’s brains and landing in jail. She clutches the pipe, sucks hard, and explodes in a coughing fit as the hot smoke sears her lungs.

  “What a waste,” Janet says with a shake of her head, but David instructs Toni in the art of taking small, manageable puffs and holding them down as long as she can. She waits eagerly for something to happen, and presently—is it her imagination or is it real?—she feels light as thistledown, heavy as clay, aware of the bigness of her body but not unpleasantly so. After what seems a long time, Janet rises and drifts toward the path by the side of the house, her palms uplifted as if feeling for rain from the cloudless sky. David gets up too, encircles an arm around Janet’s waist and beckons Toni to follow.

  They walk out the front gate, across the road, to a border of wild cactus bushes along the lip of the wadi. David leads the way through a gap in the bushes, down a narrow sloping path into black nothingness. Clusters of lights glitter here and there on the hills in the distance, but immediately around them solid gloom presses in. Janet takes Toni’s hand as they stumble along, single file, over stones and between thorny plants that scratch their bare ankles. They reach level ground and stop. Then Toni is on her backside in soft cool dust. She smells the remnants of a campfire, hears the silky rustle of nearby olive trees. The vast dome of the sky blossoms with stars.

  “Where are we?”

  “Our favourite spot,” Janet’s voice says through the thick dark.

  “The centre of the universe,” David chortles.

  A match flares to reveal David’s pursed lips sucking on the pipe, his eyes crinkled against the smoke. Janet snuggles up against his shoulder. A few moments later—or has an hour gone by?—the three of them lie flat on their backs, their bodies radiating outwards like spokes in a wheel, heads touching. Toni breathes in a cloud of heavenly scents— hash, smoke, dust, the dry grasses and thistles of the field, the lemony fragrance of Janet’s hair—each smell perfectly distinguishable and also beautifully blended. Laughter rolls around beneath her ribs.

  “Good vibes, eh?” David’s elbow nudges her side. “How d’you like my city so far?”

  “Your city? How come it’s your city?”

  David mimics her tone of indignation. “How come it’s your city?”

  Again he and Janet burst into giggles.

  “It’s the City of David. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Toni agrees. She’s feeling most agreeable.

  “And my name is David Konig. King David. Get it?”

  He tells them a story. In ancient days, Jerusalem belonged to a Canaanite folk called the Jebusites. King David conquered them but did not drive them out, marrying one of their princesses—Bathsheba— and absorbing them into his people instead. Jerusalem, a central point in the lands of the Israelite tribes, became his capital to which, with much fanfare, he brought the Ark of the Covenant. The King himself led the procession, dancing out in front to the tambourines and drums.

  “Guy was a fucking genius,” David says, exhaling smoke with a whistling breath. “He had vision. He got down with the people.”

  Janet’s sweet voice pierces the night. She sings an old Hebrew folk song Toni remembers from camp about David, King of Israel. In Janet’s mouth, the childlike ditty becomes a wistful ballad, exquisitely tender.

  How very odd, Toni thinks, to be here, enveloped by the magical darkness, stoned out of her mind and talking with Janet and David, as if the three of them have been pals forever. Earlier today she was grasping for connection, and now—is this really now? Or are they back at a campfire under the stars? Or is it another time altogether, 200 generations ago, when King David wooed the lovely Bathsheba? Where have they landed, the three of them? At the bottom of a crater in their own dusty, sweet-smelling planet, while her room at the dorm is as distant as the moon.

  Later, as they clamber giddily up the steep path toward the winking lights of houses above, Toni stops abruptly to announce to Janet, “I’m not the same, you know. Not like I was back then. I want you to understand.”

  Her voice swells with earnest avowals. Janet squeezes her hand.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay. I know.”

  chapter 16

  Rush out of Hebrew class. Slap along t
he flagstone walk in sandalled feet. Hurry, hurry, hurry, across the lush campus lawns, past splashing fountains, rose gardens, white marble buildings, down dusty shortcuts and into the sun-parched wadi. Scramble along the rocky, dusty path, up the thorny slope, through the gap in the tangle of prickly pears, to the little house in the cul-de-sac. Heart thumping, throat parched, head a-throb with the heat.

  “You again,” Mrs Katz, the landlady, croaks. She keeps watch in the shade of her porch during the day, dozing in her chair. Still as a gecko until she hears the sound of shoe leather on pavement, then she twitches awake.

  “Very good. Give that other one something to worry about. She’s too snooty.”

  The old lady cackles. Off her rocker, Toni thinks, not for the first time, as she hurries down the garden path to the whitewashed cinder-block hideaway with the green metal doors.

  “Knock, knock,” Toni calls breathlessly, though the doors stand wide open.

  “What’s this knocking shit?” David roars.

  She helps herself to water from an earthenware pitcher on the floor, drinking straight from the jug in big gulps, the cool liquid spilling onto her shirtfront. No formalities required. In this room, formalities are forbidden. In the daylight, the room’s colours come to life—the reds, purples, greens of the fabrics from the Arab market, the deep rust of Janet’s hair, the cool turquoise of the walls. David chose to paint the room this particular shade of blue-green, soothing as the sea and popular throughout the Middle East, except in the homes of European Jews, where all plaster is treated with mildew-fighting whitewash.

  Seated cross-legged on the mattress while strumming her nylon-stringed guitar, Janet looks up and smiles vaguely. David, beside her, bends back to his books. He seems to be reading several at once. There’s a volume open in his lap, others scattered about, bristling with notes. Toni thinks of her father in his cherished library, how he would approve of David’s voracious reading appetite, though perhaps not of books left open, face down on the floor in spine-cracking positions, or the choice of titles. There are texts on the Kabbalah, Hassidism, Sufism. There’s Buber, Heschel, Hesse. Siddhartha and I and Thou and The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. There’s also a tattered paperback— Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers—which David found when it dropped out of some hippie’s knapsack at the central bus station. An excited smile plays across David’s lips as he reads, rocking back and forth, yeshiva-style, and humming a Sabbath hymn in soft falsetto beneath his breath. The white Bukharian cap embroidered with doves and vines in gold and silver threads—so much groovier than a plain old yarmulka—adorns his head.