“Do you want to change seats?” her father asked. “Be sure about this,” her father said. “The sun is setting. Just sit in the driver’s seat,” her father said. “All you have to do is sit. This car isn’t going anywhere.”
He wanted to shake her, but he didn’t.
After five minutes she decided she wanted to change seats.
That’s how right some parts of this country can be sometimes, her father thought.
They changed seats. He had never before managed to get her to sit in the driver’s seat.
He watched her hands, her small hands, as they clutched the wheel. Her hands were small, even for her small body, disproportionate. He had noticed it the day he saw her with her uniform, how unexpected it was to see a hand as small as hers clasp the handle of an M-16.
He remembered the soft touch of her palms grabbing his face when she was eight, the day he told her the first and last story he ever told in his life. Her hands were clammy, but her child sweat smelled sugary. He remembered her high-pitched, excited voice when she asked, again and again, “And then what? And then what?” And then he remembered when it was that their time was gone.
His daughter tightened her grip on the wheel. The sun was setting; he could see its orange strokes lengthening on the water. This moment too would soon pass. He and his daughter would switch seats; he would drive her away from the ocean and up the hills of Jerusalem all the way back to her mother’s home. Even in that moment, silently watching and adoring his daughter’s small hands, he couldn’t help but worry, wonder. And then what?
He wanted more. He knew that it might be months before he would be able to get her in the driver’s seat again.
Right before the orange sun thumped the water, he heard himself mumble. His lips said that if she wanted to, she could drive the car into the water. If they didn’t drown, he’d buy her a new one.
He was joking but then he wasn’t.
SHE TURNED the key in the ignition. She didn’t know what to do next. The car grumbled; her thighs shook with it under her boy shorts. She looked at her father. She touched the stick shift, it was difficult to move it, she didn’t believe she could move it, it was like a sword stuck in a stone, but then it moved; it got stuck in one spot, then another; then her hand had no more strength, none at all; if someone had held a gun to her hand she could not even have made a fist.
She thought she was paralyzed, and so she tried to wiggle her toes, and it was a surprise: they moved, her long toenails curling inward inside her sandals. She could also turn her neck. She looked at her father. She didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what to do. He thought he should do something, but he didn’t know what. He thought, There is never a bad time to start.
He moved the stick shift for her. He could feel it, before she pressed the gas. Her foot. Her body. It was a part of him, and the machine and country.
UNDERWATER, AFTER she had opened the door and swum out, her eyes could see nothing but musky green. She remembered her foot, how it had moved, how it had moved the whole car, all that power. She kicked with her foot and she could feel the bottom of the ocean, soft and cold between her toes. Her hair scratched the surface of the water, and then her whole face was out, out in the warm air and sun. She opened her mouth, gasping for air. Then she didn’t know what to do. She was sucked back down. She kicked with her foot again and could feel her body floating up, but not far enough. She thought of her father, but she could not see him, and she didn’t know what to do but then she did. She punched the water with her fist. Then she kicked it with her leg. Then she punched it with her other hand. She kicked with the other leg. Hand, leg, hand, leg, hand, hand, hand, and again, and soon, though she was a Jerusalem girl, though she had never done it before, she was moving forward, floating, swimming. It was the oddest thing; she could barely breathe, ashen dots flitted across her eyes, but with each violent act of her body she could hear them, hear that she was hitting them, those who had drowned, in the Holocaust and in Tripoli and in Baghdad and the North Pole even, and they answered back not in pain but with questions, two questions. Where to, hon? What’s next, kid?
After her father pushed his way out of the car, he swam out to shore alone and then watched her swim for minutes that seemed like days that were all years, years he had not seen her grow. And there was his daughter, swimming, and he knew that she would eventually reach the shore, and him. She reached the shore, her clothes dripping water, and sat on the sand very close to him, in silence. He put his wet arm around her and his heart pulsated into her forehead, her unsteady breath slowing, becoming one with his. She smelled his sweat and knew one new thing, one thing no one but her knew and that she had not known until that second but was now so sure of, her lungs might burst. She knew that she did not have that passing Zubari hysteria. That she was going to be sad her whole life, her life ahead.
1.5 Bedrooms
in
Tel Aviv
Ron looked at Lea. She looked like the world’s mother when she worked. She cut open the wheat bread with delicate twists of her wrist, as if she felt each jag of the knife as it cut through the dough. She rested the romaine lettuce on top of the strawberry wedges as if she were tucking in children for sleep. She wiped her hands on her black apron and her large breasts swung under her loose shirt. She looked up. Her gray eyes met Ron’s.
“What?” Lea asked. Ron realized he must have been staring at her, at his new employee. There were no customers in line. He was sitting on a plastic chair under the striped roof of the kiosk.
“Just thinking. What are you doing with your money?” His ears burned from having to come up with something on the spot. The sun hit the yellow leaves scattered on the boulevard so that he could see the heat in waves.
“I pay rent,” she said.
“Yeah, but aside from that,” Ron said. He recognized a tired quality in her eyes, one that did not exist in the eyes of all the other wannabes who came to the city. Still, it was clear she was from out of town. Her colorful T-shirts’ necklines were all cut by scissors, and she had a backpack instead of a purse. Ron wondered what she had come to Tel Aviv to become. An actress? An architect? Nothing he thought of seemed quite right. He had been looking for an older employee, someone out of high school, past the army, and he had lucked out with her.
“I just pay rent. I have a one-and-a-half-bedroom apartment on a pricey street.”
Ron wondered why she called her street pricey, instead of just saying the name of the street. He wondered why someone would live in Tel Aviv and work twelve hours a day just so they could afford the rent. He wondered what it meant, he always had, to say that an apartment has one and a half bedrooms. So he asked her.
“One and a half bedrooms? I never got that.”
“What’s not to get? There is a bedroom and then half a bedroom,” Lea said.
She smiled. But she was not smiling at Ron. Two middle-school boys with a poodle ordered a sandwich with salami, banana pickles, basil, and popcorn, and her gaze had turned to them.
IN THE midst of the city, where the Japanica sushi stand used to be, where Rothschild Avenue meets Allenby Street, Ron had opened the We Don’t Judge sandwich kiosk. His buddies and parents were skeptical. The Japanica had been popular among the drunks who filled the clubs on both sides of the stand, but the city demanded a disgusting amount of rent for the space because of its location. Even though the Japanese cook and Israeli cashier had had to turn away about eighty customers each night, the business had still bled money and the Japanica chain owners had decided to cut their losses and close up after five years.
Ron had always been drawn to a challenge. He had gotten the idea for the sandwich shop at 7:00 a.m. on a bus home to Ra’anana after a night of drinking in Tel Aviv during a weekend break from the army. He hadn’t eaten all night, but he was always picky about food and couldn’t find quite what he wanted. Indian, vegan, fusion, Yemenite, pizza—nothing could be quite as good as the breakfast he would make out of his parents’
fridge at home. So he decided to wait, and in his famished drunken state he got the idea for the sandwich shop. He thought the idea was great when he was drunk; he liked it even more after rolling it around his head while sober, back at his desk on the base. He served as an Arabic translator in one of the intel bases, transcribing and translating radio broadcasts from Jordan all day. The job was boring but cushy, and it gave him three years to think.
ONE OF the lunch regulars, an old man who spat when he shouted instructions, was giving Lea a hard time.
“Now, baby cakes, I want my yellow peppers roasted for two minutes and my red peppers roasted for ten minutes, and I want the edges cut off from the turkey slice,” the man said for the second time.
“Of course,” Lea said and placed her hand over the counter to touch his sun-spotted arm. “The usual,” she winked.
“Ump,” the man grunted. “Last time I could swear you roasted both types of peppers for the same amount of time.”
She hadn’t. She had followed his exact instructions.
“I am so sorry that happened to you,” Lea said with a deliberate, grave face, as if the man had just reported that his granddaughter had been murdered while under Lea’s care. “I am going to do everything I can to help.”
It made Ron feel good, warm, that Lea took her job as seriously as she did. He put his heart into this kiosk. He wanted it to succeed, whatever it took. He had dropped quite a bit of money on a pepper-peeling machine (copper; made in Sweden). He had dropped even more money on a butane torch for crème brûlée (aluminum; France). It had taken him hours to figure out how the massive thing worked, but when Lea used it, it was a matter of seconds before the flame burst yellow and orange. Her eyes danced with it.
“You are such a good retailer,” Ron said after the peppers man left the kiosk. He had intended for days to say something nice to her and then, maybe, ask her out to dinner. He wanted to wait for a good opportunity. “You are Russian, right?” he asked.
“Half German,” she said. “And half Moroccan, but it doesn’t show.”
She looked sad that day, even sadder than usual. A few times she froze, stared, took small breaths like a child sipping soup.
“You are doing such a good job. Is this really your first job after the army?” Ron asked. Lea had ignored his compliment and turned her back to wash the guts of the peppers from the cutting board.
“Yes,” she answered. “I told you at the interview I just finished my service.”
“Did you work on the side during your service?” Ron asked. His shoulders were slouching; he had wanted to give her a compliment, but here he was annoying her with interrogations. This was not how he wanted the conversation to go.
“Not all of us were lucky enough to have Mommy and Daddy set us up with an office job. I barely got breaks,” Lea said. She dumped a handful of caramelized onions into the blender but waited before she pressed the “on” button.
Ron was expected to respond. He had the urge to tell her that his parents did nothing for his army posting, that he had just worked really hard during high school on his Arabic classes because he knew combat was not for him, but he resisted the urge. His instincts had not gotten him very far. He was a pragmatic guy in business, and he wanted to be one in love. He suddenly remembered the slogan of the ministry of transportation safety campaign: “On the road don’t be right; be smart.”
“Where did you serve?” Ron asked.
“Military police. I was an officer.”
“Like snitching on soldiers who do drugs and all?”
“No. Transitions unit. Checkpoints. West Bank.”
“Wow,” Ron said. He reached for what to say next, like an arm reaching through a hole too small for the rest of the body. “Couldn’t have been easy,” he said finally.
“It wasn’t that bad,” Lea said.
“Did you know anyone at the checkpoint where they stabbed that soldier right in the neck?” Ron asked. He remembered reading about it a while before. The newspaper had said the neck was cut almost in two, and he had wondered then what they meant by “almost.”
That’s when Lea turned on the blender. The blades spun, scratching the plastic, an ungodly screech.
THE TRUTH was, Ron’s parents were not well off at all. After his time in the army, he worked like a dog at a gas station for two years so he could collect the preferential job benefits for postservice citizens from the government. You’d be surprised, but that’s some money. His work friends blew it on trips to Thailand and Peru or university entrance exam prep courses. But Ron played with the money. He played in real estate, and then he had more money to play with. He played in the market, then real estate again. He had always been good with money, a risk taker, even when he was just a twelve-year-old dog sitter. He had never thought it would be so easy. By the time he was twenty-seven he had so much money in the bank he was embarrassed to look at the exact number. The bank statement burned a hole in his jeans pocket. He had nightmares about his parents finding out just how much money he had. He still lived with them in their three-bedroom apartment in Ra’anana. He was looking for apartments to rent in Tel Aviv. In the end he still settled on a one-bedroom apartment, because the price in the city for anything more was so revolting, his good sense did not let him pay it, no matter how much money he had. But before he found a place, when he was still looking through newspaper ads while sitting around the kitchen table and eating his avocado, lemon pickle, and French fries pita, that’s when he read that the Japanica was closing, that they were renting the kiosk out. His mother kissed his ear before she headed off to work in the textile factory. That’s when he knew. It was time. Life was starting, and he was ready to jump in headfirst.
ONE NIGHT shift, Ron wondered if he was becoming obsessed with Lea. It bugged him that he thought about her so much, even though there was so little he actually knew about her, even though he knew he should stay focused on the business. For all he knew, she could be shooting him down because she was some sort of prude, a former religious settler, maybe? After all, there were plenty of other girls, girls in plastic heels, swarming in circles all over the city. And it’s not that he was even looking. Throughout his service, he had been sleeping with a blonde from Kfar Saba who transcribed Spanish intel. She was a sweet girl, generic. After the army she got on a plane to Thailand like everyone else. Then came the e-mail, the one about someone else, someone specific.
Ron told himself not to lose his focus. Two film students from TAU were still yapping about the new Natalie Portman movie, even though they had long been served their green olive and steak sandwich and it was past midnight.
“I just think the movie could have been a lot more interesting if she actually fucked the brother when she thought her husband was dead, if her husband didn’t just suspect it because he was war crazy. Now that’s complexity,” one of them said. His feet were too long for the bar stools of the kiosk’s counter.
“I agree—it would have been so believable. I mean, she thinks her husband’s dead and his brother’s this fuckable guy from Brokeback Mountain,” the second film-school guy said. He had sunglasses in his long hair, holding it back like a girl’s hairband. “What do you think?” he asked Lea.
Lea was listening to the two guys with her chin in her hands, her elbows resting against the counter. A crowd pleaser. “I haven’t seen the movie,” she said.
“Oh,” the sunglasses guy said. “I’d say I’d take you, but I’d rather take you to a movie that’s actually worth something.”
“I will say, even though I haven’t seen the movie, when in doubt, have as many characters as possible fuck Natalie Portman,” Lea said. She was no prude.
“What a smart girl. I wish there were more girls like you in this city,” the sunglasses guy said. He reached over the counter and touched a strand of Lea’s hair. “When in doubt,” he said and laughed.
It was only because this kiosk was making him spend all this time with her, Ron thought. He should not lose his focus. He sho
uld not obsess. He got up from his plastic chair and walked to the counter. He stood by Lea. She smelled of skin, of flesh. He counted to three. Then he reached over the counter and punched the sunglasses guy in the forehead.
The sunglasses hit the gray pavement but did not shatter. Ron wanted to unclench his fist but couldn’t. He looked at the two guys who stood quiet, fuming. He looked at Lea.
“Just go,” Lea said to the two film students. “For me?”
The tall one bent to lift the sunglasses off the street. It took him a while; he was drunk.
“For you,” he said, then tapped his friend on the shoulder and pulled him away. The sunglasses guy walked backward a few steps, staring right at Ron. Then he turned his back, dramatically, and kept on walking away.
“Lea …,” Ron said. She was staring right at him, her eyes catching the orange streetlights. He didn’t know why he had done what he had just done. He didn’t know what to say. He had never had her, and now he had lost her.
“Hey,” Lea said. “It’s Ok.”
Ron covered his eyes with his hands. She was a crowd pleaser. And that’s what he was: a crowd; worse than that, a boss.
But then.
“Would you like to go out with me once Vera comes in for her shift?” Lea asked. She put her palm on the back of his neck. “Hey,” she said. He had just hit someone, and here she was touching him for the first time, letting him stand so close.
It was strange. Even after she slowly took away her hand to grab a butter knife, he could still feel her fingers on his neck.
A LOT of people think that brilliance in business comes out of an ability to make cold, sensible observations, but Ron’s business sense came right out of his warm, open heart. Tel Aviv was full of tired, lonely people, people who had all moved to the city when they knew what they wanted but who had been quickly sickened by the race, by having to always get everything all on their own, by waking up in their tiny apartments, morning after morning, naked, sweaty, and afraid. To Ron all these people were the same, and they were not hard to understand. What they wanted was someone who would give them exactly what they would give themselves if they weren’t so tired, whatever it was. Someone who would never judge.
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid Page 21