Turning his head to rest on the other cheek, Ofir saw a white blur through the tears. He raised his head, and there was a face. Annoyed, he sat up, wiped his eyes. He didn’t want to see anyone. He had waited until two in the morning, played as quietly as possible, so nobody would hear him and offer their fake praise and bullshit encouragement.
When he recognized the girl he had been daydreaming about when the bus blew apart, he felt sick, like he might throw up. She wore the same white sundress. It was disorienting, things being just as they were, as if nothing had happened—his room, the dining hall, the trees outside his window, the same leafy green as last summer. If anything, the girl looked prettier, her lips painted a bright coral.
“Did you feel as if I were playing just for you again?” he said sarcastically, though part of him hoped that maybe, just maybe, he hadn’t been hearing himself properly. “Like God was playing through me?”
Claudette shook her head.
He turned to the keys. Her answer hurt, but at last someone had been honest with him. Not cruel. The downward curve of her bright lips when she shook her head revealed how sorry she was. Ofir closed his eyes, making Claudette wonder why she had thought for even a second that she could help anyone.
She said, “I’m sorry. I’ll go now.”
“No.” He opened his eyes. “Don’t go. I like that you told me the truth.”
Claudette fidgeted with the waist of her dress as Ofir wondered what to say next. Maybe nothing. What right did he have to ask the girl to stay with him? She had been drawn to his music. Now the music was gone, and he was just a charity case.
“I mean, of course you can go. I couldn’t tell how loudly I was playing. Sorry if I woke you up.”
“I was awake.”
“At two a.m.?”
“I take long walks at night.”
Ofir lowered his head, contemplated the black-and-white keys. Should he keep playing? Or, rather, keep failing to play?
“If you don’t want me to, all you have to do is say so, but if it’s okay, can I walk with you a bit? This is the first time I’ve left my room in twenty days.”
Claudette felt the Bad Feeling awakening, stretching its arms, but she couldn’t say no because of it.
Outside the dining hall, Ofir glanced left and right to make sure the coast was clear, then beckoned Claudette around the side of the building, hemming close to the wall. “If I’m seen out late with a foreign volunteer, there’ll be talk. When you live somewhere this small, you learn the less people know, the better.”
Claudette, having also grown up in a closed community, understood this, but recoiled at the idea of there being anything to “know” about her and the boy. They were doing nothing wrong. Nothing wrong.
“Have you been to the spearmint field?”
“I only wander among the houses.”
Claudette tried to stay calm as they walked past the feathery cedars looming against the night sky and down the dirt path to the fields. The rusted rod gate that opened onto the fields was draped in pink and purple bougainvillea. The lush mint plot, just up ahead, beckoned with its heady, sweet fragrance.
When they reached the mint, Ofir waded into the dense green foliage. “You won’t believe the smell when you’re standing in the middle of it.”
Claudette followed him through the plants, their leaves and branches brushing up to her waist. She remembered seeing this dark green square of field from the cemetery, when she had asked Ziva how she wanted to die, and she had said working.
Ofir grabbed her hand and pulled her along. Claudette panicked. She had to assure herself that he took her hand. What could she do? Yank her hand from a sick boy? It was no different than when Ziva slipped her arm through hers. No different.
When they reached the heart of the field, Ofir turned to her. “I keep telling myself: I don’t need music to make life worth it. This smell should be enough.”
Claudette tried to ignore Ofir’s warm hand still gripping hers.
“The thing is . . .” His face twisted. “. . . I can’t quite convince myself. I just don’t know what to do with the smell of things now. How to enjoy it.”
Claudette shook her head. “Me neither.”
Ofir regarded her with interest, and she noticed now that his right pupil wasn’t round. Both his pupils had been round when he shook her awake that morning, his bloodshot gray eyes the first things she saw, informing her she was still alive. Now the right pupil was shaped like a teardrop, giving his eyes a sad beauty. No, not beauty, she thought, afraid. But beauty didn’t have to be sexual. There was nothing wrong with beauty. Nothing wrong.
Ofir had the same sensation he did the first time he spoke to her, the rare sensation of not being alone, of being understood. “Let’s take as big a sniff of the mint as we can and see if we can enjoy it, okay?”
Claudette agreed, and at the count of three, they both inhaled deeply, smiling at how silly they looked, nostrils flaring, straining to smell together. Claudette’s gaze fell from the boy’s mismatched eyes to his mouth, where the moonlight glowed on his lower lip. The world reduced itself to the flare of moonlight on the boy’s bottom lip.
Ofir looked down at Claudette’s lips, the color of the ripe pitangos he used to hunt for in the bushes near the schoolhouse, popping them in his mouth while they were still warm from the sun. He leaned forward.
Claudette saw his face coming toward her but didn’t believe it, couldn’t believe it.
When his lips touched hers, she screamed—a scream amplified tenfold for Ofir by his hearing aids. She pushed him with surprising force. His balance no longer what it was, he stumbled and fell back into the bushes of spearmint.
Claudette pressed her hands against the sides of her skull as if that could control the insurrection forming inside.
Ofir scrambled to his feet, hurried to apologize. “I . . . I guess I misread you.”
She crushed her head as hard as she could. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no.”
“I’m sorry!” He stepped toward her, then stopped himself. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s vile. I’m vile. I’m thirty-one. You’re too young. Too, too young. I can’t. I can’t.”
Ofir figured she was older than him, but thirty-one? That was old. Two months ago he might have balked. But this wasn’t two months ago.
“I don’t care if you’re a hundred and one.”
“I want to go back. Now.”
“I’m not twelve, you know. I’m almost eighteen. I patrolled the West Bank for six months. I’ve been through a hell of a lot. I think I can be considered an adult.”
Claudette hugged herself and rocked. “I’ve never kissed anyone. Never. And I never will. I’m sick. Please, leave me alone. I’m sick. Very, very sick.”
Ofir gaped at her. Did she have AIDS? Or some other STD? Is that why she couldn’t kiss anyone?
“What do you mean? Sick?”
She kept rocking, bowed her head. “Mentally.”
He didn’t know what to say, but he wasn’t going to do what others did to him, downplay her pain.
“That must be terrible.”
“Sometimes I think . . .” She brought her clasped hands up to her mouth and looked up at him. “I think it was because of me . . . that you were in the bombing. That I’m a conveyor for evil.”
Ofir looked at her sideways, wearing a small smile. “That makes sense. It’s because of you, and not the jihadi with the bomb strapped to his chest.”
Claudette’s mouth twitched a little. She was shocked to find that she did see the humor in it. The idea still hurt, but it was also a little funny.
They stood in silence.
Ofir imagined that far beyond the mint field right now, on the other side of the world, yesterday’s sunlight still shone on his American alter ego as he practiced the piano. He had to try to let that guy go. They weren’t in competition anymore.
He said, “I really don’t want to go back to my room yet. I can only go out at night because
my skin and this eye still can’t take the sun. If I promise not to try to kiss you again, can we keep walking?”
Claudette nodded.
“Have you been to the old olive trees? They’re two hundred and fifty years old.”
Claudette shook her head.
“Do you want to see them?”
She nodded again.
Halfway into his shift Adam decided that as soon as he’d wiped off the last dish he would walk over to the dairy house and ask Ulya on a proper date. Ever since their day in Tel Aviv, he could feel her toying with the idea of being with him. At dinner, she watched him from across the table as if waiting for him to do that one thing that would help her make up her mind. Last night she had a good laugh at the only joke he knew about Russians. How did Russians light their houses before they started using candles? Electricity. He hoped they could go out tomorrow night. The next morning the ad would appear in the paper, and after that, he was going to want to stay near the phone.
He pulled down his yellow rubber glove to check his watch: 2:40 p.m. Exactly twenty minutes to go. After two and a half months of standing in the dishwasher’s foul steam sponging off egg yolk and baba ghanoush, twenty more minutes felt like forever. How the hell did people do it? Wash dishes, or fold clothes at the mall, or cross off to-dos in a cubicle, or endlessly snap pieces of plastic together on an assembly line? All day, nearly every day, for fifty years. It was fine for the few who had interesting jobs. Civil-rights lawyers, Martin Scorsese. But most people weren’t Martin Scorsese.
Zayde used to wake up three hours before his shift at Leo’s! so he could drink his coffee and eat his marmalade toast with an unhurried grace. Then he’d take his time to shave properly, comb his thick, silvery hair, polish his shoes, slip horn stiffeners into his collar. All that prep to earn chump change selling twenty-somethings futons and laminate bookshelves. And yet Zayde did this job with grace, always walking his customers up and down the floor with a smile and friendly conversation. At night he’d come home and tell Adam what he’d noticed about the young people that day: “How come you don’t have an earring, Adam? All the other boys do.”
Why was Zayde able to do it but not his mother? She used to hit the snooze button twenty times before finally staggering out of her bedroom toward the kitchenette. There, leaning against the counter as if she didn’t have the strength to stand, she would drink a cup of microwaved coffee through a scowl. One time, while Adam was waiting by the door to go to school while his mother leaned on the counter drinking her coffee, hours after they should’ve left the apartment, the phone rang. She didn’t pick up. It rang and rang, stopped for a few seconds, and started again: brrring, brrrring. She grabbed the handset. “I can’t. I just can’t, Mike.” A pause while she chewed her lip. “I don’t give a fuck! Tell the bitch to clean her own fucking toilets!” After hanging up, his mother slunk down to the floor, repeating, “I just can’t do it anymore.”
At last it was time to take off the rubber gloves. Adam walked around the washing machine, asking Yossi if he had a restaurant he could recommend.
A smile spread on Yossi’s sweaty face. “This for a date? Who’s the lucky girl?”
“Yeah, it’s a date. I need a nice place. White tablecloths, candles.”
“Around here?” He heaved a stack of plates onto a steel trolley. “I’ll have to think about it.”
Adam freshened up at the hand-washing station, splashed his face, tweaked his hair. On his way to the dairy, he passed the laundry house, the medical center, the swimming pool with its rumpus of children on summer vacation, running and cannonballing into the water. When he arrived at the whitewashed dairy house, he was grateful for its lack of windows. Ulya couldn’t see him pausing to take a fortifying breath. You’re just asking someone on a date, he told himself. Straightening his shoulders, he pulled open the door.
Inside four women wearing latex gloves sat at four separate tables pouring yogurt onto cheesecloths. More people wasting their lives on drudgery. Three of them looked up to see who’d come through the door and then rotated in their seats to watch him walking down the center of the room. Only Ulya, at the far right table, took no notice. She worked, lost in some daydream, only noticing him when he stood over her table.
“What are you doing here?”
The other girls didn’t turn back around. It creeped Adam out the way people openly watched each other on a kibbutz. People watched each other in New York, but people they didn’t know—the crazy guy taking a shit between parked cars, the couple engaged in a shouting match on the subway platform—and then forgot about them as soon as they looked away. Here everyone had front-row seats to a never-ending soap opera starring their neighbors. Adam gestured with his head toward the door. “Can I talk to you outside for a second? In private?”
Peeling off her gloves, Ulya smirked at the other girls and then strutted out the door, Adam tailing. Outside, she pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “So? What do you want?”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “What exactly are you doing in there? Making cheese?”
“Labneh. I have to boil the milk, cool it, mix it with old yogurt, make these disgusting pouches.”
Ulya wasn’t wearing makeup for once, her skin clean and fair in the sunlight. Without mascara, the lashes framing her cobalt eyes were blond.
Adam mindlessly kicked the dairy house. “My job sucks too. Wiping off all that soggy half-eaten food. Sometimes it actually triggers my gag reflexes. But these shitty jobs, they’re just for now. We’re not going to be doing them forever.”
Ulya eyed Adam as she took a drag—studying him again. She blew smoke, lips pursed off to the side. “Not me anyway.”
“What? You think I’m going to wash dishes for the rest of my life? As soon as I’m done here, I’m going back to school, finishing my degree—”
“Adam, I can’t leave the yogurt out. What do you want?”
He dug his hand into his back pockets, stretched his chest. “Well, I’m here to ask you something.”
Ulya’s shoulders fell slightly, her head too, as if she anticipated what he was here to ask and didn’t want it. Hoping he was misreading her, he plowed ahead. “I’m here to ask you on a date. A real date. To a nice restaurant.”
Ulya observed her cigarette smoldering between her chipped red nails. She should do it. Fake interest. Later fake love. It could be nice to go on a real date, to a restaurant, instead of lying on a hill with rocks digging into her back.
“How are you going to take me to a restaurant? In Tel Aviv, you didn’t have money for a bottle of water.”
“We got our stipends. I’m willing to blow all of mine on you.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow night.”
Thursday nights she got to spend a little more time with Farid. Fridays being half days, she could catch up on sleep in the afternoon. Sometimes she stayed out until four in the morning.
She shook her head. “Not Thursday. Maybe Tuesday?”
“Why, ’cause you have that secret thing you do at night?” He worried about missing that phone call. Then again, by Tuesday night the ad would have run for five days already. Surely she would have called by then. Or he’d be going crazy. “Okay. Tuesday. On the later side.”
Ulya looked down at the dusty ground. As soon as they settled on a plan, she knew it was no use. She could lie to her mother, steal clothes, fake being a Jew, but she couldn’t pretend to like someone she didn’t. Maybe for a night, but three years? She’d never make it. She’d get to New York, but not like this.
She raised her head. “Actually, no.” She threw down her cigarette and squashed it under her boot. “I can’t go on a date with you.”
“What? You just said you would.” He felt whiplashed. “Why can’t you? Do you have a boyfriend or something?”
“No,” she sneered as if nobody around here were good enough.
“Then what’s the problem? Think of it this way: you get a free meal, a night on the town, and I get a cha
nce to change your mind about me. Nothing more. If you never want to do it again, fine.”
Ulya shook her head, unable to stop herself from smiling. She felt lighter, freer now that she had made up her mind.
“Why? We eat dinner in the dining hall together every day. What’s the difference?”
She never understood this: why guys pressured a girl who didn’t want to go on a date with them to go on a date with them. So stupid.
“Because it’s a waste of time, Adam. I will never ever ever ever be your girlfriend.”
Shocked by the certainty, the callousness, Adam couldn’t find his voice.
“Sorry,” she said, turning for the door. She smiled widely before disappearing inside.
Adam stood in front of the closed door, taking a different kind of fortifying breath. What was with that smile? Did she get off on hurting people? Why did she say she would never ever ever ever be his girlfriend as if she were talking about eating a cockroach? Was it now obvious to anyone who looked at him that he was a cockroach?
He left the dairy house, gripping the brooch. Never mind. He had to suck it up. Maybe he deserved this. It would have been wrong, starting up with Ulya, moving on with his life, before he’d taken care of the brooch. If all went well, in two or three days, the brooch would be safe with Dagmar and he would be on a plane back home, never to see Ulya again.
Ziva, seated on a stepladder, chopped her umpteenth onion. Through the tears in her eyes, her hands appeared the same color as the onion skins. The steam belching off the industrial pots compounded the sweltering August forenoon, and yet her short-sleeve shirt remained bone dry. She had forgotten to tell the doctor about the lack of perspiration. She turned her attention to the ponytailed cook, a Jew of Yemenite parentage, rolling dough at the other end of the steel table. “Who told you we wanted to eat egg cylinders?”
Claudette, peeling carrots across from Ziva, was relieved to hear the old woman’s voice. Ziva hadn’t said a word all morning, not since they first arrived and Claudette offered to fetch her a stool. Claudette had expected the old woman to say no, as she always did, claiming she liked standing up, that it was more efficient to work on one’s feet, but instead she had muttered “All right” and then remained silent for the next three hours.
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