She never announced her visits. Sometimes she rang my doorbell in the middle of the night, sometimes she visited me at my office. She had two Persian cats, big, lazy animals, overfed and with matted fur. Tal cared for them on a sporadic basis. During a good phase, she brushed one of the cats (never both), filled their bowls with delicacies, and constantly picked them up and held them in her lap. But if Tal was in one of her difficult phases, the animals would go without food for days on end. She treated me like her cats: sometimes with exuberant affection, sometimes coldly. We both knew what war meant and what it was like to see someone die. To let someone die. When I translated or when I drank my orange juice, I saw the light blue fabric slowly soaking up blood and the pool of blood on the sidewalk. I could reach out to her, touch her. I heard the voices of her murderers. More and more clearly. Most of the gun barrels that I saw were real.
7
The mood in the office was boisterous—our boss was on vacation. One colleague had even brought in cake to celebrate the occasion. I, too, did nothing except click through the entire Internet. Then I decided to call Sami in California from the office phone. I went into the kitchen and shut the door behind me. It was the only non-air-conditioned room in the building, so I opened the fridge door and stood in front of it for a while.
He answered on the first ring and didn’t bother with small talk, but got right down to business: “I can’t do this any longer. An Arab moved in next door.”
“So what?”
“Come on, Masha. You know how it is. He’s a real Arab, born and raised in Egypt.”
“But isn’t that what you are?”
“Precisely. When he found out, that’s when the shit hit the fan. He started inviting me over all the time, coming over unannounced, constantly borrowing stuff and never giving it back. At some point he found out that Minna is Palestinian and spat at my feet.”
“What?”
“He spat at my feet.” Sami laughed. “And you know what? That wasn’t all.”
“What else?” I asked.
“He also gave a little speech. You fled and left your land, your houses, and your families behind. The only reason you’re still alive is that you took up with the occupying forces.” As Sami recited this speech in Arabic he imitated the Egyptian accent, pronouncing the words especially hard and talking so fast and loud that it sounded hysterical. I couldn’t stop laughing, especially since Sami normally attached such importance to his Lebanese accent, which was softer and quieter than the Egyptian one. “Then he started insulting me as the representative of all Palestinians. You gotta hear this. Cowards, a disgrace to the Arab people, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then the highlight: Your daughters are sleeping with Jews.”
I fell silent.
“Masha, are you still there?”
“What did you say?” I asked hesitantly.
“That this is complete bullshit. That my daughters would never sleep with Jews, that I didn’t even have a daughter. Besides, that I’ve slept with a Jew. And not only slept with. Loved.” This last part Sami said very quietly, hardly audible.
Elias stood next to me, completely immersed in cutting vegetables, his movements fast and precise. His bangs had grown out, so that he looked a little like Harry Potter.
I choked, tears welling up. I could have said something, but instead I reached out for Elias and asked, “Then what?”
“Well, yesterday somebody scrawled a swastika onto my front door.”
I thought of an incident in an American zoo: A boy was so enraptured with a baby penguin that he sneaked into the compound and stuffed him into his backpack. The penguin suffocated. Sami had told me this story, when I told him for the first time that I liked him, by which I meant, loved. He never forgave me for using that word. Rightly so, as I was to find out later.
The next day I called in sick, went up to the deck, and looked out at the ocean. The water shimmered. The air was warm. I went back to bed.
I forced myself to call my parents. The conversations were a drag, but I was still playing the role of successful daughter. Except that they didn’t buy it anymore and had begun searching for cracks in the paint. But my grief was no illness and Israel no sanatorium. My father had even sent me a telescope that almost didn’t make it through customs.
And all along, I didn’t know why I couldn’t just talk to them. A few minutes into a conversation and I’d already had enough. Had nothing to say and wasn’t listening anymore. Ironic, as I made my living from listening. I wished that I could show more interest and care for them, but I neglected them and lied to them about the state I was in.
On the other hand, when I talked with my mother on the phone, sometimes I was hit by a longing for a home, even if I didn’t know where that was. What I desired was a familiar place. In general, I didn’t think too highly of familiar places. To me, the term homeland always implied pogrom. What I longed for were familiar people. Except that one of them was dead and the others I couldn’t stand anymore. Because they were alive.
Tal and I were watching the sunset. The air covered us like a duvet. This time the sun set without dramatic changes of light. The waves swam toward the shore and the light slowly disappeared behind the bulwarks. Everything was in its place, the beach empty with the exception of a few couples and the rare jogger.
She lay right in front of me, head turned to the side, eyes closed. I watched her belly rise and fall. Two large birds were tattooed into her shoulder blades, black and precisely drawn. They might have been blackbirds or bluethroats. She had tied her hair in a bun, revealing the tattoo on her neck—four tiny Hebrew letters: aleph, he, beth, he. Ahava. Love. I began massaging her back, first along the spine, then the shoulders and arms. When I looked at Tal I felt slightly nervous and sick to my stomach, accompanied by a faint gag reflex. Maybe I simply had to fill in a blank and Tal was as good as any.
Tal let out a contented moan and slowly relaxed. I opened her bikini top. My fingers now kneaded specific muscles, then I stroked her back with my flat palm and finally I bent down and traced her back with my mouth, from tailbone to neck.
A military plane passed over us and left a white condensation trail in the sky.
“Maybe they’re finally off to bomb Iran.”
I couldn’t tell if she was joking.
“A Douglas A4,” Tal said.
The condensation trail dissolved. I took a sip from the water bottle in my bag. A cool breeze swept by. I lay down on top of her and breathed in the scent of her skin.
8
It was a while before I got my bearings. I’d taken a lot of sleeping pills the night before—to be expected, given the date—and was now having trouble orienting myself. I had been awoken by jackhammers. The noise invaded my bedroom through the open window along with the fine sea breeze.
I padded barefoot onto the deck to make sure that the world outside of my apartment still existed. It did. The sun burned in the sky, old ladies and gentlemen marched toward the beach, cars honked, and the renovation of the house at the end of the street was in full swing. My neighborhood was in a permanent state of noise. In the morning the heavy cleaning trucks arrived, followed by construction, hammering, drilling, and later the buses, cars, and Vespas. And the passersby contributed their fair share.
I went back in to shower. I’d forgotten to turn on the boiler and the water was cold. I dried myself off, went to the kitchen, dissolved an aspirin in a glass of water, and made Turkish coffee. I took Elisha’s photo from my wallet, leaned it against the wall, and lit a candle in front of it. I often looked through his photos, and in my mind reexamined every second of our last night. Why hadn’t I woken up earlier? How could I have prevented his death?
This photo had been taken in Morocco, during our sole, but long, trip together. Elisha was smiling into the camera. My face was buried in his hair. Looking at the photo I smelled him and clearly saw the texture of his skin in front of me. In a tea house, I had asked a man with a mouth full of gold teeth to take a pictur
e of us. The man immediately identified himself as a tour guide and tried to talk us into a guided tour. I politely declined while Elias was busy adjusting and double-checking the settings on the camera. I dissolved another aspirin in water, quickly got dressed, and left the apartment.
The conference was organized by the French embassy in a hotel not far from my apartment. I hurried along the beach promenade toward the hotel: the sea and blue beach chairs to my left, to my right towering hotels, built in honeycomb design. The street was crowded with taxis and Vespas. I arrived sweaty and out of breath, opened my bag for the security check at the entrance, and was let in. I picked up my badge at reception and went straight to the booths.
I’d been booked on short notice, as a replacement and after lots of back-and-forth. As a result, I was nervous as hell. I introduced myself and the two other interpreters—the one for Hebrew and one of the English guys—shook my hand. As it turned out, the head of our team was nowhere to be found and neither was my booth colleague. More and more interpreters showed up. Nobody knew anything and it was only a few hours until the conference was set to start. We didn’t know where the organizers were, nor did we have the documents or even the order of the speakers. My palms were slick with sweat.
My colleagues stood in a circle, looking very relaxed, assuring me that this conference would be a cakewalk. Among them a few legendary interpreters. My shivering intensified. A colleague grabbed my elbow and pointed to a man walking toward us, whistling. Our head of booth had long slender limbs, closely set eyes, and frameless glasses. His whole presence was somehow disarmingly amiable, even though I knew that this was an illusion, as he was famous for his choleric fits. He introduced himself, handed out the documents, and assigned us to our booths. When I asked about my booth colleague he smiled mischievously and said, “That would be me.”
“What an honor,” I said and swallowed hard.
“We’ll see about that,” he said. “You’re our youngest colleague and if I’m not mistaken, this is your first time working for us. I’ll keep an eye on you. You have to know that this will be a pretty easy event. It’s only about cultural exchange. Nevertheless, focus and hand over immediately when you start to struggle. I expect the utmost professionalism!”
From my booth I observed the room. Only three people were listening to the Russian channel. That calmed me down a little bit and I returned my attention to the speaker, watching him gesticulating on the video screen.
I was supposed to interpret the opening address of the French cultural attaché before the first coffee break as well as the initial part of a talk by a professor emeritus on Jewish identity in French literature after 1990.
When the attaché began speaking my heartbeat accelerated. I was convinced my three listeners would hear it as well. But the attaché spoke slowly and used the first fifteen minutes to welcome the majority of the audience by name. Afterward, he read out the names of the speakers and the titles of their talks. Both were also displayed on a second video screen. When he started talking about the purpose of this conference my booth colleague tapped me and took over. I felt like I’d just been fucked over.
Half an hour later, I got to take over again. The attaché was still talking, slowly and deliberately, interspersing jokes that I translated quite freely into Russian. My listeners smiled. The speech was not very challenging and I interpreted at a suitable pace. My boss’s face relaxed. When polite applause for the speaker set in, he even left me alone in the booth for a minute. The professor, on the other hand, didn’t make life easy for me. Despite the fact that the subject of his talk was contemporary literature, his choice of words was antiquated. And he delivered the speech at a breakneck pace.
The air in the booth grew increasingly stuffy. Suddenly I was an entire sentence behind and my colleague kept writing technical terms on his pad and pushing them toward me. But all I needed was a short pause—as my speaker cleared his throat I spoke even faster into the microphone and caught up.
After the coffee break had been announced we both exhaled. The head of booth even smiled at me and asked in French, “Where did you study?”
“In Germany.”
“Not bad at all. You’ll definitely get there.”
Then he went off to the dining hall and I locked myself in a bathroom stall for the entirety of the lunch break.
When I got home that night, I was dead tired. Paralyzed with exhaustion. The candle in front of Elisha’s photo had burned down. The concrete mixer outside was still running.
My mother had left a message on the answering machine. They’d gone to the cemetery and had placed a stone on the grave for me. I should call her back. That day Elisha’s death had become something final—a fact that left no room for hope.
9
In Germany the season had long ago turned into fall, but here the summer heat prevailed. The dried bodies of cockroaches piled up in the hallway. The days melted into one another. The weekends and holidays I spent at the beach or visiting boutiques. I almost never bought anything and only occasionally let a shop assistant talk me into trying on a dress. On Frishman Street I found a shop that carried old clothes from Berlin. Refashioned. Israeli-style. In general, everyone loved Berlin that summer. Most had already been and couldn’t wait to go back.
I would visit Ori in his workshop in the south of Tel Aviv. The noise and intensity of the city concentrated there. Refugees from Sudan, nurses from the Philippines, artists, students—they all lived in Florentin. Ori was a cabinetmaker who channeled his love of wood into big, heavy pieces of furniture. We often sat on the stoop of his workshop, with watermelons and cold beer. Sometimes, the owner of the upholstery shop joined us. The entire street was filled with furniture makers. And our favorite bar, Hoodna, wasn’t far either.
It was only my fabricated worries that distracted me. I feared that Tal would get into an accident, imagined her crashing head-on into a truck. Her motorcycle under the rear end and her ribcage smashed. Or she could fall in her entryway, or get attacked and robbed. A serial killer could sneak up on her and plunge a knife into her back. Tal would slowly bleed to death. Her hands twitching. A pool of blood spreading around her. Most of all, I was afraid that something would happen to her at one of the protests, that she would get hit by a stray bullet or crushed by a tank. There were so many possibilities. I toyed with the idea of anonymously reporting her to the police. On the grounds of her political activism, for example. At least she’d be safe in prison.
I called her.
“Are you OK?”
“Yes,” she responded, bored.
“Why are you breathing so heavily?”
“I’m not.”
“OK.”
“Masha, is anything wrong?”
“No.”
“OK. I’m at work. I can’t talk right now.”
“OK.”
“I’m hanging up then.”
“Don’t drive so fast,” I said.
“I’m not driving. I’m at work.”
“But later, you will. When you go home.”
“You’re not my mother.”
“I’m just worried.”
Tal let out an exasperated sigh.
“I was in the West Bank. One trip home won’t kill me.”
“Statistically, more people here die in traffic accidents than in terrorist attacks.”
“You’re sick.”
She hung up. I couldn’t understand how I had become so dependent on her so quickly. Mostly I just called to make sure she was still breathing. I would call, waiting for her to answer and hanging up with her first breath. When she called back I didn’t respond. Said my phone was messing up. The key lock. Not my fault. Tal gave me a new phone.
10
A hot, dry chamsin blew in and brought nothing good. The air was stuffy and I felt the taste of dust on my skin and lips. Ori had asked me to drive him to a meeting point in the Negev. We would take his car and I could bring it back to Tel Aviv and use it for the next three weeks. Or driv
e out to Sinai for a nice trip. He presented these options like a salesman laying out his goods, although I’d said yes right away. He sounded so exhausted and depressed that I didn’t have a choice.
He was waiting for me in front of his house, wearing a khaki military uniform, a machine gun slung over his shoulder. Seeing him made me sick. My thoughts immediately turned to Farid, who hadn’t come back either. Suddenly I remembered what he had looked like: a gangly boy with a gap between his front teeth. I saw him descending the stairs, wearing my father’s jacket, which was way too big for him. A tote bag over his shoulder. I was sure I’d never see Ori again. Israel had me.
“I won’t let you go,” I said.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“No.”
Ori laughed insecurely.
“I won’t drive you,” I said coldly.
“Fine by me. I’ll just take the bus.”
I felt that I had it in me to kill him and that I’d rather do it myself than wait for the news of his death to reach me.
“I don’t want you to go!” I yelled at him. Two Thai girls shot us a puzzled look.
“I have to.”
“You don’t have to do shit!”
He shook his head and gently touched my shoulder. I whimpered, asked him not to go. He ran a hand through my hair. I yelled at him, called him Elias. Elias, Elias, Elias. He looked at me, perfectly calm. My fists hammered his shoulders and he stifled my cries by pulling me close to his chest. He held me tight. I gasped for air, but none came. My tongue swelled and my throat constricted, and no air came. And when I shivered and ran out of breath and begged him not to go, he tried to calm me down, but no air came. Ori carried me into his apartment, the machine gun bobbing against his back. Gently he put me down on the sofa, covered my shoulders with a blanket, stroked my back, along the spine down to the tailbone. Once I’d recovered a bit, we drank coffee and smoked pot. In the evening he left to join his unit.
All Russians Love Birch Trees Page 14