He had so many things to tell her, and didn’t open his mouth. Not because he was afraid of her, but because this is how he always was with girls, with every girl, almost. And when he was with a girl who really excited him, he could feel himself starting to descend, step after step, submissive, accepting, down the ladder of evolution.
He sat, clasped his hands over his knees, and waited. The skinny guy rocked back and forth, his eyes closed, as if both of them were her prisoners. The longer the silence stretched, the more Assaf’s anger at himself grew: after this entire arduous journey he had taken, traveling so far to find her, he had hoped he would be a little different with her. He had felt himself starting to change a little, even with Leah – and what had come out of all of it? He was still the same miserable soul, afraid to open his mouth.
Suddenly the guy said, without opening his eyes, ‘Isn’t that Dinka?’
‘Dinka?’ Tamar shivered, and looked in the direction of the barking.
Assaf said, ‘I brought her to you.’
‘You brought her? But how . . . from where . . . ?’
‘Doesn’t matter. I had to bring her to you, so I did.’ He sent his hand to his shirt pocket and touched the paper there, the barely legible printed-up letters of Form 76. ‘Never mind,’ he muttered, crumpling it into a little paper ball and shoving it into his pocket. Subtract another 150 shekels toward a telescopic lens he would not be buying this year.
Tamar stepped backward quickly, not taking her eyes off Assaf. She climbed the little hill, and when she yelled ‘Dinka!’ the dog simply tore the belt off the bush and flew to her. A cloud of dust rose where they met, and cries of amazement, and barks. Assaf watched it and, even with all the pain, had to smile. He scrambled up, trying to recover. He knew that now he would simply leave here, return home, and for the rest of his life hate himself for being such a loser – and still was unable to change anything. If Roi had come here instead of him, he would have already started talking, charming her with exaggerated tales of adventure; mainly, he would make her laugh. Make her laugh? Just that? Hah. He would have her rolling on the ground in laughter.
As soon as he moved, she raised the two-by-four in front of her. Assaf took two steps forward, shrugged, showed her his hands were empty – if she just let him pass he would go home. His mission here was over, and tomorrow was another workday at City Hall. Tamar looked at him in doubt, because his entire internal debate was sketched on his face, which now seemed full of sorrow and strife. She didn’t understand who he was, and for a moment she wasn’t so sure that he really was dangerous – but she was still scared. When he took another step in her direction, she spat, ‘Dinka, go!’ Assaf looked at her, stunned (he couldn’t, of course, have known that Tamar’s father had agreed to buy her a dog, only under the condition that it undergo special training to protect Tamar, if necessary. Now, nine years later, Tamar suddenly remembered that strange condition). Dinka’s ears pricked up and she didn’t move. ‘Go, Dinka, go!’ Tamar yelled, frightened, unwittingly imitating the South African accent of the trainer. Dinka took a few steps, went over to Assaf, rubbed her head against his knee, and put her nose into his palm. Tamar stood, amazed. She had never seen Dinka make this gesture to anyone but her. Assaf said, ‘Someone found her walking through the city and brought her to City Hall. I’m working there over summer break –’
‘In City Hall?’
‘Yeah, my father knows someone there – never mind. So I walked around with her a little. We were looking for you.’
Tamar looked at Dinka, as if asking her to confirm his words. Dinka looked right, looked left, passed her tongue over her muzzle, then rose on her hind legs and placed her paws on Assaf’s chest. Tamar let the wood fall from her hand. ‘I can see you also got beaten up on the way,’ she said. He passed a hand over his collection of injuries.
‘I don’t usually look like this,’ he said, embarrassed.
‘I don’t usually hit like this.’
Assaf didn’t say anything. Shifted his weight from one foot to the other, scratched his ankle with his shoe. ‘Oh, you have a few messages,’ he suddenly remembered. ‘From Theodora, and from the pizza man, also from Victorious, and Leah, and Noa. And from a guy named Honigman who was at Leah’s place.’ With every name, her eyes grew larger. ‘And from someone in Lifta, Sergei, and also from a detective who once almost caught you, and a girl who plays the cello in the pedestrian mall with a red hat.’
Tamar took one step toward him. He thought she had eyes like a wolf, sober, sad. ‘Did you meet all of them?’
He scratched Dinka with embarrassment. ‘She took me to meet them.’
Shai was off to one side, swaying and mumbling by the rock. Neither of them took any notice. For each of them the world was only a pair of eyes. Tamar came closer to Assaf. She studied him with total absorption, forgetting herself, as if she were draining something out of his eyes, his face, his big, clumsy body. Assaf didn’t move. Usually such a look would be torture, make him bubble and stumble. Now he felt only a slight weakness in his legs.
‘I am Tamar.’
‘Yes, I know.’ After a second he remembered. ‘I am Assaf.’
A moment of embarrassment. Should we shake hands? Too formal. They had already gone to a deeper place than that sometime before.
Tamar escaped first. She pointed: ‘And this is my brother, Shai.’
‘Your brother?’
‘My brother. Why, didn’t you know?’
‘All this time I thought he was – I mean, that you and he – but I didn’t know at all!’
She understood immediately. ‘You thought he was my boyfriend?’
Assaf laughed nervously, blushed, shrugged. A tiny wheel in his brain started turning, more quickly than the others, making a noise that went somewhere along the lines of ‘So, if that’s the case, then maybe – maybe –’ Things started moving inside Assaf in a new and confusing rhythm; in his soul, in his body, he felt the wild notion that some new tenant was now breaking into him, immediately starting to furnish him inside at a wild tempo, moving heavy tables and tossing out moldy armoires, bringing in something light, airy, flexible, bamboo-like. All of a sudden Assaf felt that he had to settle a very important matter between them, now. He took off her backpack and handed it to her. She snatched it up, hugged it to her chest, and stared at Assaf, suspicious. ‘Even this –?’
He straightened his shoulders, preparing for the blow he was about to deliver. ‘Listen, uh – I read through the notebooks a little. I mean – I had no choice.’
‘You read my diary?’ she screamed, utterly taken aback. It hurt him when she distanced herself by even one step. ‘You read my diary?’ Her eyes went black with rage; in a blink the war flag of her privacy flew over them, and Assaf knew he had lost her the moment he had found her.
With the same suddenness, she took the flag down and just looked at him, her eyes pained, disappointed – but waiting for an explanation.
‘I only read a little,’ he mumbled. ‘Just a few pages here and there. I thought that maybe, through the diary, I’d be able to find you, you understand –’
She didn’t respond; curving her lips a little, pensively, as she always did when she was thinking. Even in the midst of her rage, she was amazed that he had told her so soon after he had met her, because he could have hidden it and she would never have known. Strange, she thought, how he seemed to need to get it off his chest at once, as if he didn’t want there to be any lies or concealment between them.
‘So you read it,’ she repeated slowly, trying to grasp that thing that was not yet completely clear: he had read her private diary. It was the worst thing anyone could have done to her. Now he knew about her, he knew her and the way things stood between her and herself. She looked at him cautiously – he didn’t seem particularly appalled or disgusted. She blinked a little, nonplussed. Something new was happening here – she needed time to understand it.
Assaf mistook her silence: ‘Look, don’t worry, I’ve forgott
en all of it by now, anyway.’
She felt a strange pinch of sorrow. ‘No, no, don’t forget anything,’ she said quickly, surprising him, but herself even more. ‘Everything you read there is me; it’s who I am. Now you know.’
He said, ‘Not really.’ He actually wanted to say, I would actually like to know more, but it was almost impossible for him to speak in long sentences without having to swallow in the middle of them.
‘So what now?’ she asked, a little embarrassed by his size and how close they were still standing, face-to-face. ‘I mean, what do we do now?’
Suddenly she missed her long, thick hair. At least she could have hidden behind it a little, and wouldn’t feel so bare, almost naked. And why was she saying such nonsense? What was this mutual ‘do’? What did they have to do together? Did she have anything to do with him? She tried to step backward and couldn’t; fissures opened within her.
‘Whatever you decide.’
‘What, what did you say?’ She didn’t understand. The warmth flowing from his body was a lot clearer to her than his rough, awkward words. He was silent. Why was he so quiet? She hugged herself with her arms, as if it had grown cold. She lowered her head and smiled to herself a smile she hadn’t used in a long time – but then again, nothing made her laugh, right? She glanced at his left ear, his right sneaker, licked her lower lip, which was dry, shrugged for no reason, moving her shoulders and rubbing her arms, feeling as if she had no control over any of it. Her body was starting to move as if it were playing out some role in an ancient ritual, or in a dance whose rules had been prearranged, millions of years in advance, and were out of her control.
‘Anything I decide?’ She smiled. Her heart made a quick slalom. Assaf smiled back, shrugged, and stretched his arms above his head. Suddenly his whole body contracted; he kicked the earth a little to loosen his legs, ran his hand through his messy hair. His back was itching terribly – his upper back, between the shoulders, in that place you can’t reach on your own.
Her smile widened a little. ‘But you said that you came here to bring Dinka to me, so you did, didn’t you? What now?’
He gazed profoundly at the tips of his sneakers; he had never noticed their remarkable design, the fascinating combination between the body of the shoe, which was black, and the soles, which were white. After a moment they seemed silly and ugly, and, most of all, terribly large. How could he have been walking around in these monsters for a whole year now? No wonder everyone had been laughing at him, no wonder Dafi was so embarrassed by him; the only remaining, fatal question was: Had Tamar noticed them already? Or could he, perhaps, still save something? He quickly moved one of them behind the other, and almost lost his balance. Oh great. This was the last thing he needed right now – to fall down, right here, in front of her. What do you do, damnit? His face felt hot; who knew how many pimples were popping out on his face, right this minute, and the itch in his back was driving him crazy. What was wrong with him?
Again, he stretched his shoulders, and the full length of his arms, then crossed them over his chest as if to pull strength from himself. He said what he didn’t believe he would dare. ‘If you want me to . . . I mean, maybe you want me to stay?’
‘Yes, yes.’ She went silent, and panicked. Where had those two yeses come from? Was that what she wanted? When had such a will evolved in her? What did she have to do with him – she didn’t know him at all. Why would she ever make him participate in this, her most fatal and private affair? ‘Wait a second.’ She forced herself to laugh, suddenly many years more mature than he. ‘Do you even know what you’re getting into?’
Assaf hesitated. He understood that she was running away from somebody, he said, and he could see that Shai was not in the best –
‘He’s been on heroin for almost a year.’ Tamar cut him off, examining his reaction. She was relieved by what she saw in his face. ‘I’ve been here with him for two days. He’s having a good moment right now, but just before you showed up, we were in the middle of –’
‘Yes,’ Assaf said. ‘I heard. But why is he like that?’
‘He’s in withdrawal. Do you know what that is?’
Assaf nodded; another new possibility, no less exciting than the others, took form in his mind – perhaps the drugs she’d bought weren’t for her?
‘So tonight and tomorrow and tomorrow night will be the peak’ – she reported in a stiff voice, carefully checking the effect of her words on him – ‘the peak of the withdrawal. At least this is what some . . . experts told me.’
‘Leah?’
‘What?’ She was so shocked that the cover of formality was torn from her voice, leaving it exposed, naked of all estrangements. ‘Yes. Leah’s been through it, too.’ Silence. She peered at him, vaguely aware that he would surprise her again and again in all kinds of ways. She also knew she didn’t have the time to digest this now and had better return at once to the solid ground of fact. ‘Usually, in his condition, it takes up to four or five days, withdrawal. We’ve already been through two and a half; so think about whether you really want to stay, because it’s not going to be easy.’ She lingered, adding with tired seriousness, ‘Because what do you need this for?’
‘What? No, that’s fine, just tell me something.’
‘Yes?’
She had turned to help Shai, who had thrown out his hands for help like a weak baby; she had also turned around to give Assaf the chance to leave now that he knew, before he felt any obligation.
He already stood beside her. ‘So why. . . why is he actually in such bad shape? Doesn’t he have the drug here?’
‘He’s trying to get over it here. We . . .’ She didn’t know how to say it. ‘We’re here, working together, so he’ll get over it.’
Shai screamed; sharp pain racked his body. Within a second, he went from half-asleep to curled up in pain and howling. Tamar looked at Assaf; their intimate moment was over. Her eyes said, ‘Are you staying?’ His eyes said yes. ‘Then let’s take him back to the cave,’ she said. Assaf had more questions; he also had things to tell her, about Theodora going outside – but now he had to act, to be nothing more than a decisive action. He caught Shai under the arms and helped him stand up; he was surprised by the lightness of the body he was holding; it was as if Shai were completely hollow. Shai grabbed Assaf’s shoulders with the fingers of a drowning man. Assaf thought how strange it was – they hadn’t even spoken one word to each other, he and Shai, and they were already entangled like this.
This thought came back to him a few dozen times that evening and night, until it melted away. Shai was screaming and crying and vomiting all around him. Sometimes he lay, staring, scratching his arms and legs until he bled. About once a minute he would yawn a noisy, big yawn, until his jaws nearly popped out. One moment he would fall asleep, exhausted – then the next, his body would twitch and jerk almost into the air with the force of the pain. Assaf and Tamar tended him continuously, cleaning and washing and wiping, changing his clothes, giving him things to drink. Assaf didn’t even notice the sun sinking, the night deepening. Time was composed not of moments but of actions; in every moment, something else needed to be done. Only Shai’s voice could be heard in the cave; Tamar and Assaf hardly spoke to each other. They quickly developed a language of eye signals and hand gestures instead, like an operating-room team, or two deep-sea divers. Assaf erased from his mind any thoughts of the world outside the cave. There was no world. There were no people dear to him. There was no Rhino who might call the police to search for him, and there were no people chasing after both him and Tamar. When he thought about the two days Tamar had been here alone with Shai, he didn’t understand how she could have borne it. Later, he realized that she probably hadn’t closed her eyes once since she’d arrived here; but she uttered not a single word of complaint. She leaned over Shai, in front of him. He passed a towel to her. She gave him the empty water bottle and signaled him, with her eyes, to bring a full one over. Her lips curved into the words ‘toilet paper’
and Assaf thought she had lips as beautiful as a picture. He went to the corner of the cave and brought two rolls. She had already removed Shai’s pants. Assaf took the filthy toilet paper from her hand. At the same time, they both noticed Shai was wearing Snoopy-print boxer shorts; they both stared at them, and then at each other, to confirm that it was really true. Snoopy, in the middle of all this.
An hour, and another hour. Three hours, five hours, eight. In the few moments Shai slept, they hardly spoke, because they were tired, but also because it seemed strange to strike up a polite, first-date conversation, like two people who have just met. They lay on the ground, across the second mattress, beside Shai’s sleeping form, their legs resting on the ground. They breathed deeply, gazed at the ceiling, at the walls of the cave, tried, and failed, to sleep a little. They were careful not to touch, and each felt, in the other’s presence, charged with new and exciting powers; but those powers also agitated them too much to permit sleep. Sometimes Tamar would flash a slightly miserable smile at him, a smile sympathetic to his troubles – you never asked for any of this, her smile apologized, and Assaf would respond with his best smile, his most trusting smile. But she saw that he was slowly being worn down, that he was losing out to it – not the physical effort, he seemed completely solid, made of strong stuff – but because of Shai’s torments, because of this reality he was suddenly plunged into, with no preparation.
At two in the morning, Shai woke up out of his mind and started looking for a fix. He was certain Tamar was hiding another one there. He interrogated her over and over. How much, exactly, had she bought from the dealer in Tziyyon Square? Half a bundle, right? That’s five fixes. So where is the fifth? I’ve taken four already, so where is the fifth?
The explanations didn’t help; she had already told him a thousand times, he used up the entire stash while they were still at Leah’s. He ran around the cave like an animal, tore through the groceries she had stacked up, searched in the guitar she had brought from home, in his shoes, made her and Assaf take their shoes off and looked in there as well. In his insanity, he managed to uncover the hollow where Tamar had hidden the cattle prod and the handcuffs. He sat and stared at them for a long moment. Tamar thought that once he had discovered what she had prepared for him, those things that, in her stupidity, she thought she would have the courage to use, he would murder her. But his mind was working in a completely different way; his world was divided into only two things: his fix and everything that was not his fix. The handcuffs didn’t interest him. His brain didn’t interpret the cattle prod as something that could help him now. Assaf saw them, however, guessed at their use, and looked in shock at Tamar. She shrugged: What choice did I have? Assaf began to see the dim outlines of everything Tamar had planned and done.
Someone to Run With Page 15