Someone to Run With

by David Grossman

  ‘Victorious.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My name. Victorious. Take more. Mother makes these herself.’

  He said ‘Mother’ in a warm, intimate voice. The situation was odd, but Assaf felt nice sitting with him there, on the bench under the willow. He took another pastry. He wasn’t crazy about salty stuff, but the thought that Tamar liked these cookies, ate pastries exactly like these . . .

  Dinka licked the bowl and stretched out, heavy and long.

  Then it dawned on Assaf: ‘So, you come out here every day with cookies and coffee and wait for her?’

  Victorious looked aside and shrugged. ‘Not every day. What, every day? You think I come here every day?’ A long silence. And then he said, casually, ‘Maybe every day. What do I know? It’s only so if she comes, I’ll be ready.’

  ‘And you’ve been waiting like this for a month?’

  ‘Why not? Is it hard? I happen to be between jobs, so I’m usually free. Do I mind coming down here in the evening to wait a little? You pass the time.’

  A man walked down the road, in their direction. Victorious saw him coming long before Assaf or Dinka did. He immediately turned, twisting his body to the side and arching backward until he had almost turned his back to the road. The man passed; he was old and deep in thought, and didn’t notice them.

  Assaf waited until his steps had faded into the distance. ‘And you and Tamar, you two would talk?’

  ‘Do we talk? Are you serious?’ Victorious spread his hands out with pride, as if he were presenting a wide sea. ‘Believe me, you can’t talk like this with anybody in the world, because people, right away they look at you funny. Am I right or wrong? From the moment you meet they think he’s like this, he’s not like that, they think how you look on the outside is the most – understand? But take me, for example. To me, outer looks don’t change anything ever, ever! Do you agree with me? That the most important thing is what’s inside the person? True, yes? And that’s why I’m telling you – I don’t have friends, and don’t need friends.’

  He quickly pushed two more cookies into his mouth, between his torn, stitched lips. ‘Because for me, personally’ – he said, a little later – ‘what’s important to me is knowledge, yes? As much knowledge as possible. That’s why I study. Don’t you believe me?’

  Assaf said he believed him.

  ‘No, because you looked like . . . Listen, I think, what’s most interesting to me is stars.’

  ‘What stars? Famous people?’ Assaf asked hesitatingly.

  ‘What famous people? What people are in your head?’ Victorious laughed a long, silent laugh, hiding half his mouth with his hand. ‘In the sky! Now tell the truth – did you ever think about stars? Seriously think, I mean? Did you ever think?’

  Assaf admitted that, no, he never did think about stars. Victorious slapped both his spread-out hands on his thighs, as if he had again, for the thousandth time, discovered more despairing proof of human beings’ lack of understanding. ‘Did you even know there are perhaps another million suns? And galaxies? Did you know in the universe you have another million! Not another poor star, like our earth, not another system like our solar system – galaxies, I’m talking about!’

  He got very excited talking about that, and his other cheek, the healthy one, also became red. Three boys passed by, pumped up over some game. Victorious immediately turned and tilted his head, as if he was sunk deep in thought.

  ‘Hey, Victorious,’ they said, ‘what’s up?’

  ‘Cool.’ He didn’t move from his thinker’s pose.

  ‘What’s up with the stars? How’s the Milky Way doing?’

  ‘Cool,’ Victorious said again, gloomily.

  ‘Count them good,’ one boy advised, bouncing his ball very close to Victorious’s leg. ‘Better keep track of those stars.’ He moved in close to Assaf. ‘Know why Victorious never goes to watch Wimbledon?’ Assaf stayed quiet – he thought a fight would break out soon.

  ‘Because he’s afraid he’d have to look both ways!’ The boy screamed with laughter, and demonstrated it while the other two laughed with him. The boy stretched his hand out and snatched a nectarine from the plate, took a full bite, and the three of them walked off laughing.

  ‘And I subscribe to every journal on the subject!’ Victorious continued, as if their conversation hadn’t been interrupted. He puffed himself up a little to restore his wounded honor. ‘In English, too! Don’t you believe me? For two years I study English in the Open University, a correspondence course, fifteen hundred shekels – my mother paid that for me as a gift – you don’t even have to leave your house, you only have to go there for exams. But I didn’t go. What do I need their exams for, and their grades? But come and see my room, you’ll see all the issues of Science and Galileo, in order, stacks of them! I’ve filled two and a half shelves already! And next year, God willing, Mother said she will buy me a computer, and then I will be a member of the Internet, and there I will find all the knowledge. You don’t even have to leave your house. Everything comes to you, complete. Powerful, huh?’

  Assaf nodded quietly. He thought that if it wasn’t for Tamar, he would have passed by him, seen his face, perhaps recoiled a bit, then felt a little sorry for him, nothing more.

  ‘So, did you talk about all this stuff with Tamar?’ Assaf asked eventually. ‘About galaxies, and all that?’

  ‘Sure!’ The smile spread over his whole face, into the purple stain. ‘She . . . what do you think! She wants to hear about it again and again, how the quasars go, and holes in time, and pulsing stars, and the universe expanding, and how this, and how that, and do you get it? Because, that girl, she’s never seen one star in her life! You see? And maybe it’s because of this. Maybe because of her psychology she wants to know so much, if you follow my logic.’ Assaf thought he must have missed some critical sentence during the conversation. Victorious didn’t stop. ‘She sits here for half an hour, an hour, won’t let me stop. When I come home after Tamar, I go straight to bed, I’m finished. Well, actually’ – a forced laugh escaped his mouth, exposing, for a moment, crooked teeth – ‘maybe it’s me. I’m not used to talking a lot about this, because, to tell you the truth, Mother, she’s not really interested in the scientific stuff.’

  Assaf still lagged a few sentences behind; there was some mystery to his words, or perhaps just confusion.

  ‘Now,’ Victorious said, and bent toward Assaf a little, ‘when I was a child, very small, I had a little accident. Nothing serious.’ Again, he spoke quickly, but with a kind of indifference, as if he were talking about someone strange and far away. ‘Mother was cooking something. Soup. She knocked a boiling pot on me by mistake. It happens. Wasn’t her fault. And then I was in a hospital for a year or so, plus some surgery here and there, and it was all a big mess. But since that time I’ve learned what a human being is. I swear to you. I became like a psychiatrist. On my own, no books, no nothing. And because of this, I can understand her from the inside, and I can also help her, even without her feeling that I’m trying to help her. Got it?’

  Assaf shook his head to say no.

  ‘Because they, they have their pride, and you need to talk to them as if it’s nothing, as if it just comes to you, like it’s every day that you sit in the street with someone and explain the scientific stuff. Got it?’

  Assaf asked warily who ‘they’ were. He already knew the answer, but it was as if he had to hear the exact word again, and to feel the same pain strike him deep in the gut.

  ‘Them, you know, people who have problems – it’s important to let them have their pride, because, between you and me, what do they have except their pride?’

  ‘And you saw her in a . . . difficult situation?’

  ‘No.’ Victorious laughed. ‘It’s normal for her. It’s how she was born. She doesn’t know any other situation.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Assaf cried out, finally waking up from his daze. ‘How was she born?’

  ‘Blind.’
>
  Assaf jumped off the bench, simply jumped and stood still. ‘She’s blind? Tamar?’

  ‘Didn’t they tell you? Look at the dog. It’s a guide dog.’ Assaf looked: right, sure, she was the exact same breed, a seeing-eye Labrador, or a semi-Labrador, at least. Not really, though, not exactly. He opened his mouth to say something, but he thought Dinka was staring at him especially profoundly. Her eyes didn’t let go of him; it was as if she was trying to communicate something to him, warn him. Assaf thought he was going crazy. Blind? And Theodora didn’t say anything about it? And the pizza man said she was riding a bike! And how did she elude the detective?

  Victorious smiled with satisfaction. ‘I amazed you now, didn’t I?’

  A woman’s voice called out from far away: ‘Victorious, it’s almost seven, come in the house!’

  ‘That’s Mother,’ Victorious said, and got up at once and started gathering the remaining cookies. He poured what was left in the coffee cups on the ground and wrapped everything, the cups, plates, napkins, Dinka’s bowl. Assaf still didn’t move. He was standing still, amazed.

  ‘Okay, I’m going in the house.’ Victorious lifted the bag up onto his shoulder. ‘Do you feel like coming tomorrow, too? I’ll be here. We can talk again. Why not.’

  Assaf stared at him.

  ‘In another hour, hour and a quarter,’ Victorious said, and pointed his finger upward, ‘look at the sky. The greatest show in the universe!’

  Assaf asked which stars you could recognize at first glance. He wanted to buy some time; he thought he was starting to guess something. Victorious raised his hand and showed where Venus would appear, and the North Star and the Great Bear . . . Assaf wasn’t listening. Something wonderful, even exalted, took shape for him. Something about Tamar, and her courage, every once in a while, to do really crazy things, to make up and follow her own private rules. Victorious continued explaining, and Assaf sneaked a peek down and met Dinka’s conspiring gaze. Obediently he returned his eyes to the sky. He thought of Tamar’s generosity, with Theodora and with Victorious. It wasn’t generosity having to do with money – it was tricky to explain. It was generosity of another kind.

  ‘Me?’ Victorious said, somewhere beside him. ‘My dream? That soon, God willing, there will be travel to space. Spaceships will go like buses from Central Station.’ He put his hand over his mouth like a bus driver and announced: ‘Spaceship to Mercury, departing in ten minutes! Spaceship to Venus, leaving now!’

  ‘Will you go?’ Assaf asked.

  ‘Maybe yes, maybe no. Depends.’

  ‘Depends on what?’

  ‘On how I feel that day.’ He patted Dinka again. ‘Okay, I’m off. If you find her, tell her – Victorious, he is collecting information for you all the time. You tell her. You won’t forget, right? Victorious, that’s my name.’

  When he got home, life, meaning all those things he had escaped from that day, collapsed on top of him. There were five messages on the answering machine from Roi, one from Danokh, one from Rhino, and one from his parents saying they had landed already and everything was okay. Assaf finally went to the bathroom and read half an issue of Name of the Game without really absorbing the words in front of his eyes. Then he took a shower, and called Danokh at home and told him he had been running after the dog for a whole day. He asked for permission to follow her (‘Her?’ Danokh asked, surprised. ‘It’s a bitch?’) for another day, and permission was granted. Then he called Rhino to let him know he was still alive. Assaf admitted that his sleuthing work still hadn’t uncovered any great leads – but he couldn’t tell Rhino that, for some reason, he had the feeling he was gradually closing in on Tamar.

  Only then, in the middle of talking to Rhino, he remembered and was shocked by something Victorious had told him. Some very important information. Assaf had actually meant to ask him about it once they got a little deeper into their conversation, but in the middle of everything that had happened, he forgot about it.

  ‘Assaf, are you still there?’

  ‘Yes. No. I remembered something I forgot.’ She’s looking for someone, Victorious said, then got scared – he had probably revealed some secret of hers, because then he said it was a ‘private’ matter. Whom was she looking for? Why didn’t I ask him? How could I miss a thing like that?

  ‘Have you heard from your folks?’ Rhino buzzed into his ear.

  ‘Not really,’ Assaf said, confused, and hung up. He was relieved that he had spoken to Rhino before having a long conversation with his parents.

  Dinka wasn’t hungry. He arranged a place for her and lay beside her on the rug stroking her fur, trying to figure out whom Tamar was looking for. They both passed out in complete exhaustion like that for an hour or two. When they woke, the house was completely dark, the echoes of a telephone ring vanishing in the air. Assaf made himself some Mjadra instant rice, adding a few hot dogs with ketchup to the meal and finishing it off with half a watermelon. For some reason, he didn’t feel like eating out of the full pots of food his mother had left him; he enjoyed taking care of himself. He took the plate into the living room, breaking house rules, and ate, staring at the sports channel. He watched a replay of a league game from two months ago, and let the whirlwind of the day subside. The phone rang three times. He knew it was Roi and didn’t pick it up until it was really too late to go out. Then he answered.

  ‘Assaf, you loser, where are you?’

  Assaf heard a lot of noise in the background: music, laughter. He said he got stuck at work. Roi burst into loud laughter and immediately ordered Assaf to get off his ass and come down, now, to Coffee Time, because Dafi was waiting for him, and she was pissed off.

  ‘I’m not coming,’ Assaf said.

  ‘You’re what?’ Roi couldn’t believe what he had heard. ‘Listen good, Zero: Maytal and I have been going around town for three hours now with your Dafi, who, by the way, is looking like the bomb tonight, portable porn-movie, tight black top, snaps and all, so don’t give me, “I’m too tired from work”! What do you do there all day anyway except scratch your balls?’

  ‘Roi,’ Assaf said quietly, with a tranquillity that surprised him, ‘I’m not coming. Tell Dafi I’m sorry, it’s not her fault. I just don’t feel like it tonight.’

  Silence. He heard the wheels of Roi’s brain turning. He knew how they worked. Roi sounded a little drunk, but he was still sharp and knew that Assaf had never spoken to him like that, with that tone in his voice.

  ‘Listen closely to me,’ Roi said, in a whisper bubbling with venom, and Assaf thought that someone else had already spoken to him like that today. He couldn’t remember who, he only remembered that someone had wished him ill. Of course, the undercover cop. ‘If you are not here in one quarter of an hour, on the dot, you’re finished. You got me, you little shit? Do you understand what I’m saying? If you’re not here, you’re dead to me.’

  Assaf didn’t answer. His heart was beating hard. They had been friends for twelve years. Roi was his first true friend. Assaf’s mother talked about how, during that first year of kindergarten, before meeting Roi, Assafi had been so lonely; and she was so happy when he came home that one time with lice, because it was a sign that he at least had had contact with another boy.

  ‘You’ll be alone,’ Roi whispered, and Assaf was amazed by the strength of the hatred in his voice. Where had it been hiding all these years? ‘No one in class, no one in the world will even piss in your direction, and you know why? You really want to know why?’ Assaf shrunk, preparing for the blow. ‘Because I’ll stop being your friend.’

  It didn’t hurt.

  ‘Look, Roi,’ Assaf said. He thought he sounded a bit like Rhino now, speaking quietly, heavily, in a manner that left no doubt. ‘The thing is, you haven’t been my friend for a long time.’ He hung up the phone. Enough, he thought, feeling nothing. It’s over.

  He went and sat by Dinka. She gazed at him with her expressive eyes. Later, he lay down on the carpet and put his head against her, feeling her breathe. He wo
ndered what would happen now, whether he would really notice any change at school. He thought not; for the past few years, he’d actually been pretty lonely the entire time he spent with Roi, and everyone, whatever stuff they did, going to parties, laughing at jokes, playing basketball for hours, going out on Friday nights, when they would sit for whole evenings in smoky coffeehouses and stuffy rooms. What did those guys really do during those dozens of endless evenings? Knocked back a few beers, hit on girls, smoked a lot of cigarettes, and drank a little vodka; and he? He would contribute a few sentences to the conversation every once in a while, about teachers and parents and girls, and when they were smoking a hookah he’d take a few puffs and say that it tasted good. And when they danced, he would always be the one stuck to the wall next to one of the other boys, and would chat with him until the boy managed to summon up the courage to ask some girl to dance and never came back. Vacations were the same, only worse; the endless rounds around town, from one coffeehouse to another, from one bar to another; and he? What did he do? He spent most of the time trying hard to hide what he really felt from them. He did the bare minimum required to save face, and always, after such a mind-bogglingly vacant evening, he felt like a beanbag filled with thousands of foam balls. Strange; he was in fact lonely, he just had never thought of himself that way. Other boys and girls were lonely. Nir Chermetz, for example, who had never had a single friend in class. Or Sivan Eldor, the snob. Assaf always pitied them for not belonging; but who was he? What did he have?

  It occurred to him that he almost never spoke to Roi about photography. Roi knew that Assaf, for three years now, went, every other Saturday, to his photography course, and went with his class to the Judah Desert, and the Negev, and up north, and showed his pictures in exhibitions (even though he was the youngest of them by at least ten years); but Roi never asked, was never interested, and, it went without saying, never went to any of the shows. It seemed strange that Assaf had never once thought of telling him, for example, about the pleasure he got from taking a good photo, from waiting for three or four hours in a wheat field by Mikhmoret, until the shadow fell exactly on some old bus station, with its cracked concrete, the caper bushes bursting through. Somehow conversations with Roi never had the room for these things. Certainly not in a foursome of the two couples. He thought of Tamar. He thought he would like to tell her about it, to describe the amazing change photography had brought to his life, how it had opened his eyes to see things, and people, and beauty in the little things, the so-called boring things. He would like just to sit with her sometime in a beautiful place, not a coffeehouse, and talk, really talk to her.