The principle was simple. Each customer could ask for whatever he wanted in his sandwich and have it prepared in whatever way, down to the last detail. No explanation or demand was too long or too difficult. A falafel sandwich with no falafel? Rye and turkey with three spoonfuls of sugar sprinkled on top? A pizza slice inside a pita with mayo? Orange juice that was heated in the microwave for twelve seconds? No problem! If the customer wanted an ingredient the kiosk didn’t have in stock, he could pay for ten sandwiches in advance and thus purchase a pink and lime green punch card and a guarantee that the ingredient would be available the next day and every day for the next four months. The shop was more than a gimmick—it was a solution.
LEA WALKED ahead of Ron down the streets of the city. Every time he caught up to her she started walking faster, until he somehow understood that walking this way was what she wanted, that this was the way she liked it. He accepted, he was in the business of accepting, and he trailed a few steps behind her. The streets were full of people, discarded toys, clothes, leaflets. Nothing in the city ever quite seemed to match. Even then, at 2:00 a.m., they saw a little girl walking all by herself, but she didn’t look poor—she wore a Gap sweatshirt—and she didn’t look lost. She was humming. On a bench, a skinny young boy and a middle-aged man with an accordion huddled over the sports page. Stores were out of line, bulging a little too much toward the sidewalk every so often. A shop selling hiking equipment next to a Judaica store—none of it made sense. With Lea walking in front of him, everything was strange but no less familiar.
At the LimaLima club, after a few drinks, when Lea disappeared and went to get herself one more, he still thought of the streets of the city, and his thoughts became weirder. Something was off, or maybe he was just not used to drinking so much. He remembered that a friend of his dad’s had once told him that the people who had built the city had been so idiotic they built it so the streets went parallel to the ocean, so that everywhere you go you get a view of someone’s porch rather than of the Mediterranean. The club was packed, the music so deafening, it blasted his chest cavity. In the darkness all he could see were tongues. He smelled parched breath and sweat and hair spray; limbs rubbed against his stomach, his ass; he pondered the possibility that perhaps the city was someone’s half-assed idea, like the sandwich shop was his idea, that nothing was as it was meant to be, that maybe the city was never quite meant to exist on this earth, some bizarre cosmic glitch—
Lea threw her arms around his neck, careful not to spill her vodka Red Bull.
“That’s your fifth drink!” he screamed into her ear. He too was drunk, he reminded himself, although he had had only three drinks.
When she pushed her tongue into his mouth, he was still pushing away the pesky thought that something was not quite right; he pushed it and pushed it. Then he pushed Lea’s body closer to his and told himself he thought too much, that perhaps there were some disadvantages to being so pragmatic all the time.
On the dance floor, Lea’s fingers slid under his shirt. Her fingernails scratched him.
“I am not the good girl you think I am!” she shouted into his ear. “I have done some pretty bad things.” Her shout was the perfect volume—just loud enough so that he heard every word.
“Whatever it is, I don’t care,” he shouted back. He pulled her into a hug, the kind of hug you give a child. She was the best thing, a brilliant concept, the only good idea anyone had ever come up with, the only thing that fit just right, his brain decided.
HE KNEW it, actually, before his brain did. That she was right. For the first three months the We Don’t Judge sandwich kiosk bled money like a slaughtered donkey. It did a little better than the Japanica had—their colossal mistake had been paying all this rent for a stand that only drew customers at night. No Israeli wants overpriced sushi for breakfast, and hardly any Israeli wants it for lunch, when the sun makes the fish stink. Overpriced sushi is a food you order in Israel when you are stumbling home or to another club after dark, when you can’t bring yourself to care, when you want to give the girl you picked up whatever she wants and get everything over with: this one stupid night, your whole stupid life.
Ron’s sandwich shop was open twenty-four hours, and he was there for fourteen of them for the first few months. He hired two of his teenage female cousins to take orders and an illegal worker from the Sudan to make them (and clean), but by August he knew he had to find new employees because his cousins had to start school. It was pathetic how many people in the city were desperate for a job, any job. His phone wouldn’t stop ringing. Models, PhD students, theatre actresses. For every dozen phone interviews he had, he scheduled one girl for a trial shift at the shop. He knew the gimmick was not enough, that in order for the business to succeed he had to have the right human resources. A girl who wouldn’t judge. A girl you’d want to buy a sandwich from. Lea.
In the interview, he asked each candidate to describe his or her dream sandwich. He asked them not to make something up just because it was original but to be honest, to tell the truth about themselves.
Lea said she would never dare to tell him the truth about her sandwich, about herself. That she was afraid he couldn’t take it. It was the most pretentious answer he got for that question but also the one he most believed.
He didn’t hire her because he wanted to fuck her. He hired her because she was good for business, simple as that. Falling for her the second he saw her was just a coincidence. Well, it was not a coincidence—what could a customer ask for other than being served exactly what he wanted by a girl no one could help but love?
SHE CUT in front of him after he turned the keys to the front door of his apartment. She walked through the door as he put the keys back in his pocket and bent over to take off his shoes. Her neck was stretched high, as if she didn’t even register that he was there. She looked around the living room, picked up the remote, then threw it back on the sofa. She stuck her head in the kitchen area, switched on the light, then switched it off again immediately. She walked through the short hall, opened the broom closet door, shut it, then opened the door to his bedroom. He could hear her body landing on the bed. “Well?” he heard her say while he was standing in the living room. And he felt foolish, so foolish, that he wasn’t already in there with her.
He realized he had never gotten around to fantasizing about sleeping with her. He had not expected her to sleep with him that night, but it felt as if it had all been planned, like the world had spun webs around his brain for years and eventually dropped him in those very moments, like the first time you see your favorite movie, and your mind already holds the memories of all the times you’ll see it next.
HE HAD been drunk, so all he could remember was falling asleep to the sound of his own moaning, but he woke to the sound of someone else’s. It was still dark out.
He found her in his bathroom, her face red. She had been crying, but now she just held his towel to her face and stared, frozen, sitting on the tiles of the floor.
He turned on the light and the yellow blinded him.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Do you regret … this?”
“I am sorry,” she said. “I am such a mess.”
“You don’t ever have to be sorry with me,” he said and sat by her on the cold floor. “Whatever it is.”
“You don’t want to be with me,” she said and smiled. “I told you, I am not a good person. I have done disgusting things.”
Even in his hungover, sleepy state, he was still a smart guy. He could guess what this was about.
“You mean to the people at the checkpoints?” he asked.
She nodded.
“That’s everyone who has been there. It’s not you. It’s this fucked-up army; it fucks you up,” he said.
“You don’t know what I did,” she said.
“Whatever it is,” he said, “it won’t change a thing. Tell me you had to kick a grandpa in the balls and I wouldn’t care.” Ron felt angry, sickened, at the city, at the country—at
whatever circumstances had made Lea cry like that. It wasn’t right. It had never been right, this whole seventy-year-long war. He had never realized that before now.
“What are we?” Lea said and laughed. “Are you saying we are like some sort of item now, as they say in this city?”
“Yes,” Ron said. “We are an item. Come back to bed.”
He would fix it, he decided then. Whatever it was that made her eyes so knowing the first time he saw her, he would fix. This was what he had to work with, and he would make it work. That’s pragmatism right there.
HE TOOK it very far very quick—but he couldn’t help it. The month he found out the sandwich shop was finally doing more than breaking even, that it was beginning to make a profit less than a year after he had opened it, he told Lea, “In a few years there will be enough money to start a family with.” He was amazed at how well it was going. Were there any other food places in Tel Aviv that had managed to establish themselves this quickly? His brother had told him he would have to invest money for a good two years before it would start paying off.
“Watch it there, tiger,” she said. She wiped the counter. She smiled. At him.
After the lunch rush, a middle-school girl with a brace on her face was giving Lea trouble.
“Your sign says that you will put whatever I ask for in the sandwich, and I want a baguette with pot brownies,” the middle-school girl spat out.
“I wish I could do it, but we don’t even have a liquor license,” Lea tried to reason with her.
“I want what I want,” the girl replied. She was avoiding the gentle way in which Lea tried to catch her eyes, the way Lea tried to humor her in whatever way she could.
“I know, sweetheart, I know—but my hands are tied.”
Before they were together, “an item” as she called it, Ron had wondered where Lea’s supernatural patience for the customers came from, but now that they had been together for a few months, he knew. Still, Lea had yet to let him come see her apartment, hadn’t even agreed to share a cab or tell him where she lived.
“You know what it is like in this city,” she said, resorting to cliché when he asked her about it. “Your apartment is all you are.”
Still. He knew more than just the Lea who worked at the shop; he knew another Lea too. He knew two Leas. Three, actually. There was the Lea who wore dresses short enough to be shirts to dance clubs, who dragged him through the streets of the city from one club to another: the Cat & Dog club, the Oman 17, all the big names. This was the Lea who could dance for hours, whom everyone at the bar knew and liked, and they would chant for her as she finished her fifth, then sixth drink. The Lea who came to his bed almost every night, giggling, laughing, acting as silly as a child and all at once entirely a woman.
Then there was the other Lea, the one whose crying woke him close to dawn, the one he caught in his arms as she tried to run out of the bed, the one with hardly any words.
The third Lea, still his favorite, was the Lea from the sandwich shop, the star employee. She behaved exactly as she had on her first day. But it was he who was different. How could he not be?
“How about you get the fuck out of here?” Ron screamed at the middle-school girl. “You are not being funny. Or cute. Your face looks like a Rottweiler with that brace.”
“You’ll be sorry,” the girl said. She flung her Manga backpack on her back and walked away.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Lea said. “I had it under control.” She turned to peel roasted eggplants.
Ron was trying to calm down. Tel Aviv people pissed him off. This shit would never go down anywhere else, but in this city everything was fair game. A man could not even get away with a gimmick. When Domino’s said they would provide thirty-minute delivery to anywhere in the city or the pizza would be on them, hundreds of people waited for when it was daylight saving time and then yelled at the delivery guy that he was an hour late and demanded their pizza for free. Ron had even started suspecting that the people of the city were stealing things when Lea and Vera looked away. Things had a tendency to disappear—utensils, cups—that day he couldn’t even find the butane torch.
He watched Lea crack walnuts by rolling them on the wooden cutting board. Her ponytail swished. Something was different. He watched her as she bent below the sink to throw out the walnut shells. She moved slowly, methodically, bending her knees, keeping her back straight.
“Did you hurt your back or something?”
“Didn’t I just say I had things under control?” Lea said. She stood upright again, grabbed a butter knife. She gave Ron an unnerving look.
“I am sorry, I am sorry. I just don’t want you to hurt yourself,” Ron said.
“You are gonna get hurt unless you shut your mouth,” Lea said. She pointed at him with the butter knife. Then she stepped closer, dropped the knife on the counter, reached over. She grabbed Ron’s hand. Her hand was soft, and when she smiled, Ron forgot his annoyance, forgot his question, forgot that questions could even be born into this world.
“I LIKE my job a lot.” She suddenly spoke during one of those premorning hours when he held her in his arms. “I like being able to give people what they want. At the checkpoints you’d hear all these fantastical stories—everyone had a mother who had less than a day to live somewhere, the wedding of a child who had survived an attack by evil wolves—and all I could do was say that my hands were tied because they didn’t have the right color permits, or because they were five minutes late.”
Ron didn’t know what he could say. He kissed her shoulder.
“Thanks for giving me the job,” she said.
“Did you ever feel like looking the other way, letting someone through the checkpoint when you weren’t supposed to?” he asked after a few silent minutes.
“I thought about it, a little, sometimes. Then that man stabbed one of us in the neck through a car window. We weren’t supposed to come so close to the cars, but that soldier did—I guess the man in the car pretended to have a story too. And when I was an officer I couldn’t just let people through, because then I was an officer.”
Lea’s body was much smaller than Ron’s; it felt even smaller when he held it. When she drank too much, he sometimes carried her up the stairs. And still he knew she had done things that he couldn’t; well, maybe he could have done them, but either way he hadn’t. He had transcribed Arabic in an office. Knowing this made it easier and harder to hold this naked woman in his arms. Easier because he knew she was stronger; she didn’t need him; she merely wanted him. Harder because he always wondered if his arms were clutching her strongly enough. “Couldn’t have been easy,” he said finally. His words still failed him, but he had to say something, and holding her so close, he hoped Lea would understand.
“It wasn’t,” she said. “Even though I never even liked Yaniv, the boy who was stabbed. He had these pointed bushy eyebrows, like furry arrows.”
“That’s why you didn’t like him?” Ron asked.
“They looked like surprised worms.”
“It is Ok not to like someone. You didn’t know.”
“Maybe.”
THE EVENING after the girl asked for pot brownies, another jokester came. He was drunk, Russian, fat.
“I want baby meat in challah bread,” he demanded.
“Baby lamb? Baby cow?” Lea asked.
“Baby baby, bitch,” he said. “That’s what I want.”
Lea froze and looked at him.
“I can see it in your eyes you’d do it,” the man said. The rims around his eyes glowed sickly yellow. “Your sign does say, ‘whatever you want,’ doesn’t it?” he asked. “I can see it in your eyes you’d do it.”
Lea looked at her sandals. Then she looked up. She looked to the left, to the right. Ron had never seen her so scared. It was as if the man had a gun to her head, as if the whole world were out there, waiting to chase her.
She ran out of the kiosk.
Ron heard her sandals slapping the pavement at a stead
y pace. “Wait!” he called.
He took a five-hundred-shekel bill out of the register and handed it to the old man who always ordered the red-and-yellow-peppers sandwich.
“If you can just keep an eye on the place until Vera gets in for the night shift, I’ll give you more,” he mumbled.
He didn’t wait for the old man to respond. He ran.
She was quick, but he was quick too. He caught a glimpse of her hopping in a cab and lucked into one of his own. Lea did not look back. He wanted to tell the driver, “Follow that cab!” but he felt silly. He didn’t even know if saying something like that was legal in real life. Instead, he just told the driver he’d give him street-by-street directions. He told the driver he remembered the road to where he wanted to go; he just could not remember the place itself.
IT WAS a pricey street. He watched her get off right by Rabin Square and walk down Zeitlin Street. He gave the driver a fifty without waiting for the change, got out, and walked slowly behind her. He followed her into the building and waited in the staircase until he heard her close a door on the third floor. He wondered how she’d respond, why he didn’t just call her name. He realized he was curious about where she lived; and, as happy as he was knowing three or even four Leas, he would be most happy with just one, with just her.
He waited for five minutes. He played with the dust on the plastic plants in the hallway.
He knocked.
She opened the door barefoot, wearing nothing but a long white shirt.
“You shouldn’t have followed me,” she said.
“I had to see what a one and a half bedrooms looked like,” he tried to joke.
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid Page 22