It was because of this singer, probably, that she even stopped being angry with herself after the first moment; she abandoned herself to the internal gallop of the song, the bitter power in it – she danced and moved and burned with closed eyes. Her arms were thrown, powerfully, to her sides – her knees bounced wildly to the rhythm, almost without moving from her place. She tuned herself against the sound coming from the deepest place inside herself, at the farthest distance from the fat red man slouching back in his chair with the toothpick in his mouth, and along with it, later, an expression of surprise, and a faint smile; he leaned back and clasped his hands behind his neck –
When she finished, she just turned off. Turned herself off. She couldn’t be ablaze in front of him without her shield; she was too certain that everything she wanted to hide was already out in the open. The room continued to echo for a few seconds more, her fusing streams of energy.
‘You’re not bad . . .’ said Pesach Bet Ha Levi. He took the toothpick out of his teeth and sucked it, and screened her with a mixture of suspicion and amused respect, then looked at his mother, who smiled toothlessly and nodded through the whole short performance. ‘What do you say, Mamaleh? She’s something, that little one, isn’t she?’ His father was sitting, asleep, on a bench behind her. Tamar tried not to listen to the conversation. She hoped for a normal bathroom around here where she could take a shower, first thing. He’s only a small-time crook – she courageously repeated to herself what Shai had told her on the phone, calling from this very room. Only a small-time crook who’d found a little, original niche in the world of crime; but my life – Shai sighed in the middle of his speech – he ruined my life. Big time.
‘We’re done here.’ Pesach started wrapping up. ‘We’ll see where we put you tomorrow morning.’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’
‘Don’t worry. Go now. Get settled in, rest up. Perhaps this was easy for you. Until now. The hard work starts tomorrow, and that’s when you’ll be told where you’ll be, in what city.’
‘I’m not going to be in Jerusalem?’ She tensed up. This possibility had never occurred to her.
‘You’ll go wherever you’re told. Clear?’
Again, his empty eyes. The eyes of a dead man. She shut up.
‘Go on, sweetie, time’s up.’ His eyes left her; he wiped her from his thoughts and went back to dialing numbers on both telephones.
She walked out of Pesach’s room, with Dinka behind her. She still didn’t know where she was, what this place was. The tiles laid in the floor of the corridor were broken, crooked, and sunken; the ground showed through in a few places, and weeds and thorns poked out. You could see where, as soon as people left the place, nature had returned with a vengeance – Tamar thought her family had gone through a similar process. The corridor went on and on. There were signs on the walls: TO SPECIALIST CLINICS, TO LOBBY, SURGERY, CHILDREN’S INTERNAL MEDICINE. She peeped behind a half-open door and saw an iron bedstead, a mattress and blanket rolled up on it. Perhaps someone was sleeping there, and perhaps not. The floor was stamped with the rusty marks of many beds. Pipes and electric wires hung from the ceiling. Another sign reading OXYGEN with a torn Madonna poster next to it. She found the room at the end of the corridor. She had to struggle with the door to push past the weight of the mattresses piled behind it. The air was dusty and compressed inside. She pulled a mattress off the pile; it was striped and very heavy, and covered with large stains. She tried to put it back and take another, but whatever had come out of there wouldn’t go back in. Blankets were piled on top of the mountain of mattresses; she climbed it, pulled two blankets out, trying not to smell them. The smell of dust and urine rose with her every motion. There were no sheets. She would have to touch those blankets, sleep under them. Their smell would stick to her skin. Never mind, she reminded herself despairingly. The important thing was to get him out of here. That was why she had to get in here anyway, really get in, in her entirety.
She dragged the mattress back along the corridor. It weighed almost as much as she did; it came down heavily on her back, doubling her over, dragging behind her like a train of poverty. The one advantage to it, she thought, was that she wouldn’t bump into Shai face-to-face before she was really ready for it. Dinka ran around her, trying to get under the mattress, but each time she tried she was pushed away by it and she whined. Every few moments Tamar would stop, open one of the doors, and peep in under her hunched back. Each room had a bed or two in it and looked inhabited. She saw a guitar leaning against the wall in one of the rooms. Her heart leaped in her chest – maybe this was his room. The room was empty, and graffiti was smeared on the wall in charcoal: If the world doesn’t understand me, the world is not the world. She thought it was like him to make such a statement, but the jeans thrown on the bed were far too short for his long, long legs. She closed the door and opened the one after it. Empty beer cans and heaps of cigarette butts. Two green Maccabee Haifa scarves hung, crossed, on the wall. Someone sat there, his naked back to her; the thin white back of a boy concentrating on a Game Boy – he didn’t notice that she had opened and closed the door.
It pulls you in so hard, Shai had told her during that phone call, with unusual force. You end up wanting to get sucked in, to fall apart and shatter into your smallest fragments. It’s as if you’re dying to see how low you can go – that’s the impulse that takes you over, and you have no will, no nothing. Things crash so quickly, Watson . . . At that point, when he said her secret nickname, her eyes closed with indescribable pleasure, as if it erased everything he had said a moment before. She hadn’t heard him call her that for long months. She didn’t know how much she had missed it. A moment later, she heard the first slap, and after that – the beatings, the fists, and him crying out.
She shut the door. When she turned to keep going, bowed under the mattress, her lowered eyes saw a pair of big, bare, dark feet, the feet of a girl with thick toes and nails painted a shining purple. A loud voice, full of laughter, said, ‘Why, you’re completely buried there, let’s lift it together.’
She didn’t see her face, just felt that someone was coming up behind her, bending down, and taking up the burden of the mattress, sharing it with her. She suddenly felt relieved.
‘Where are we going?’ Tamar asked.
‘Second floor.’
Tamar was silent. Her legs searched for the stairs. She climbed one, and two, the mattress floated on her back. She and the girl started swaying forward and backward under the weight of the load, and again went back down to the corridor and stood still for a moment. They started climbing again, and swayed, and Tamar heard a burst of laughter behind her. ‘You know what it reminds me of? Two years ago we did Don Quixote in a school play, and me and two other girls were the horse, and we were walking just like this, each one with her head in the other’s ass, and suddenly the sheet ripped open and this is how everybody saw us.’ The memory intensified her rolling, infectious laughter, and the mattress jiggled and shook and was pulled backward, and after a moment, the two of them fell, the mattress on top of them. They crawled out and lay on it, shoulder to shoulder, without looking at each other, and laughed till they couldn’t breathe, both of them. Tamar, with all her heart, dove into the laughter of this strange girl.
‘Sheli,’ the girl said, wiped her tears against the back of her hand, and rubbed her arm against Tamar’s.
‘Tamar.’
‘Hey, Tamar.’
‘And this is Dinka.’
‘Hey, Dinka.’
Tamar saw a big laughing face by her side, cratered with old chicken pox scars, teeth with big gaps, and a smile full of grace, topped with fluorescent green, Brillo-pad hair.
‘Let’s try it again.’ Four silver earrings hung from each of Sheli’s round ears, and a silver stud shone in her nose as well; she had a big eyebrow ring, and a large tattoo of an archer stood out on her stomach as she stood. She stretched a strong hand out to Tamar and pulled her up. It became clear that
she was a head and a half taller than Tamar.
‘Well, here I am.’ She shrugged, almost apologizing for her height. ‘Complete, uncut, unabridged. Back to the mines!’ They both crawled under the mattress again and lifted it together. It took them about ten minutes to get it up the stairs; they were laughing so much, they collapsed and stood and groaned, and their eyes teared with exertion, and by the time they made it to the second floor, they were already exhausted and a bit tangled together.
Sheli opened the door. It was a smaller room than the others. The floor tiles were broken and missing here as well, and the PVC pipes and electrical wires hung down from the ceiling, but the bed by the window was made, the blankets on it folded carefully. A colorful Mexican tapestry hung stretched on the wall, and a book, The Bird of the Soul, rested on the bed. Some kind of shelf, supported by red bricks, was under the window; on top, a few colorful stones and a thick red candle, and books leaning on each other. Tamar’s eyes clung to them with hunger.
‘“Do you find the rooms pleasant?”’ Sheli asked with a smile.
‘“Truly? I do not find the rooms pleasant,”’ Tamar quoted back, and was rewarded by a merry sparkle from the eyes in front of her.
‘“Well, will you not stay with us?”’
‘“I will and I’ll stay with a willing heart!”’ – Tamar smiled – ‘“because the neighbors are fine in my eyes,”’ and received a smile as wide as a hug from Sheli.
‘Welcome to Hell,’ Sheli said. ‘Make yourself at home. How long has it been?’
‘Been since what?’
‘Since you left home.’
For a moment she hesitated. Sheli was being so generous with her, and Tamar was almost tempted to tell her the truth.
‘Hey, hey, I’m not the police.’ Sheli laughed. ‘You really don’t have to tell me anything.’ But Tamar saw her shining, cheerful eyes darken a little.
Tamar longed to tell her the truth; she felt suffocated by the burden of her secret. But she had no choice. ‘Sheli, don’t be insulted. I need a little time.’
‘Take your time, baby. We’ll be here for a while. I think we’ll be here for the rest of our lives.’
Tamar, who had started spreading her blanket on the mattress, stopped. ‘The rest of our lives? Why?’
Sheli lay back on her bed, lit a cigarette, and swung her legs up on the little iron railing at the edge of the bedstead.
‘Why, why?’ Sheli’s lips pursed toward new cracks that had plowed the length and width of the ceiling. ‘And now, Tamar, our listener from Jerusalem, asks, “Why?” And really, why? Why did my mother decide, at the age of forty-five, to marry such a repulsive man? Why did my real father die on me when I was seven? Is that nice, is that . . . sporting? And why do fleas like to live in mattresses?’ she asked, smacking at her tanned thigh.
‘No, really,’ Tamar said, approaching her bed. ‘Why . . . why do you say it’s for the rest of our lives?’
‘Scared, huh?’ Sheli said quietly, and with compassion. ‘Never mind. Everybody is like that at the beginning. Me, too. You think you’ve come here for a week, two weeks – it’ll be like a summer camp, sure, that’s it, an art colony for all the good boys and girls who have cut Mommy’s apron strings for a taste of freedom. You stay. And then you stay, and you stay, and even when you run away, well, eventually, you come back. This business sucks you in. It’s hard to explain to someone new. It’s like a nightmare you can’t escape.’
Tamar went to her bed and sat down.
‘I don’t envy you,’ Sheli said, sitting up, her legs sprawled out. ‘You’re still at the stage when it hurts, when you still miss home – suddenly you smell something in the air, and you remember the omelets mother used to make, with a finely chopped salad on the side. Right?’
Tamar lowered her head. It wasn’t the salad for her, actually. When was the last time her mother had stood in the kitchen? When was the last time she had said a single sentence Tamar couldn’t anticipate or that wasn’t straight from some family TV drama? When was she there at all, her real self, without the layers of self-pity wrapped around her? Without every facial expression or hand gesture mourning the fate that brought her to this family. When did she ever stand up for her own opinions with integrity, in front of Tamar, or in front of Tamar’s father? And when the hell was she ever really a mother to ‘all these Tamars,’ as she called her with a sweetly cutting sigh, yes, yes, all these Tamars, who yearn and constantly quarrel with one another – and with no warning, she was hit by an unexpected yearning for her father, and shivered; for a minute, she was drawn, against her will, into the unfinished business between them – she was, again, on one of their nighttime strolls, just the two of them walking quickly and in silence for an hour, an hour and a half. He needed a lot of time before he was willing to peel away the tough rind of his childish, twisted arrogance; to finally stop teasing her, cutting into her every sentence with some sarcastic comment. Only then would she meet him, so briefly, meet the man he had buried, systematically and cruelly, so deeply inside himself. She remembered that once, a year ago, no more, he had stopped her with his hand at their front door and blurted, ‘Talking to you is like talking with a man.’ She knew that was the greatest compliment that could come from his mouth, and kept herself from her automatic response, to ask him why he didn’t have one friend, one man he could pour out his heart to.
‘I’m already past that part, thank God,’ Sheli said, from very far away. ‘I’ve erased them completely from my life, both of them. They’re dead, as far as I’m concerned. Now I’m my own mother and father. Hell, I’m a complete PTA meeting!’ and she threw her head back again and the peals of her laughter rang in the air, even though now they rang a bit too loudly. She nervously searched through one of her bags and pulled out a new pack of Marlboros.
‘Do you mind the cigarettes?’
‘No. Do you mind the dog?’
‘Why should I? Her name’s Dinka? Let it be Dinka. Dinka – isn’t it kind of like Alice’s cat, Dinah, in Alice in Wonderland?’
Tamar smiled. ‘You’re the second person in the world to ever guess it.’ The first one was Idan, of course.
‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Sheli said. ‘If I was getting my high school diploma this year, I’d definitely be majoring in literature.’ She pointed toward the dog. ‘Come here, Dinka,’ and Dinka stood and approached her as if they had known each other for years. ‘Come to Mommy, and to Mommy’s mommy, and to Daddy’s mommy.’ She lit the cigarette and blew smoke out of the side of her mouth. ‘What eyes she has . . .’ she whispered. ‘She understands everything.’ She pressed her face into the dog’s fur. For a long moment there was no movement in the room except for Sheli’s shoulders, shaking slightly. Dinka stood, beautiful and noble, looking straight ahead. Tamar turned her face to the window – sprays of light came in diagonally through the torn window screen, and thousands of dust motes flew in, blowing in constantly. Sheli shifted on her bed and sat with her back to the room. ‘It’s contagious,’ she finally said, in a voice that cracked. ‘When someone new comes with the smell of home still on her, it attacks you, too. Fucks up all your defense mechanisms.’
Tamar sat on her bed and played with her toes. Then, in a swift motion, she lay on it full length, feeling the hollows and the hills, and the prickles of the rough blanket.
‘Congratulations,’ Sheli said. ‘That’s the hardest step here. It’s like going into the sea, the moment the water reaches your you-know-what.’
‘Tell me,’ Tamar asked, ‘how come there’s hardly anyone in the rooms?’
‘Because they’re all out performing.’
‘Where?’
‘All over the country. They’ll start coming back early tonight. Some spend a day or two on the road, but they all return here. And everyone is here on Friday night, always.’ She blew a smoke ring and traced a smile inside it. ‘Like a big, happy family.’
‘Ah.’ Tamar digested this new information. ‘How are the guys here?’
‘Oh, there’s all kinds. Some are fuckable, especially the guys who play – they’re really hot – and some just suck. Most of them are pretty psycho. They won’t talk to you and can’t even tell if you’re there, they’re high most of the time, and when they’re not’ – she waved her hand holding the cigarette – ‘you had better keep your distance. If you give them any trouble, they’ll eat you alive.’
‘High? But that guy Pesach told me –’
‘That drugs are off limits here? Sure,’ she said, stretching the word out, her voice rough. ‘He’s covering his ass.’
‘Really?’
‘“Really”? You’re so cute, I swear.’ Sheli scrutinized her briefly, her eyes dissecting. ‘You don’t belong here, you know. It’s not like’ – she searched for a word, and Tamar irritatedly finished the sentence in her head – ‘like in your books.’ But Sheli didn’t want to hurt her; she flashed a smile and cautiously sidestepped the words, avoiding any friction. ‘C’mon, who do you think sells it to the guys at marked-up prices? Who? And who makes sure that there will always, but always, be pipes and works available here? Not him? Not his bulldogs?’
‘Who are his bulldogs?’ Tamar asked faintly.
‘The guys who drive us around. They guard us during the performances. You’ll get to know them only too well. But he doesn’t know anything, understand? He’s clean. He’s just in it for the art, and to keep us off the streets, and to give some poor orphans a hot meal every day; he’s a would-be Yanush Korczak. But not a day passes when they don’t try and sell to me, and they’ll try to sell to you, too.’ Sheli tilted her neck back slightly and looked at Tamar. ‘Well, maybe not at first. First they need to check out just who and what you are. Tell me . . . do you use?’
Someone to Run With Page 5