He shrugs. “Both ends of the spectrum. The people we call extremists often start out like us. Then something happens to them, something they feel would be immoral to ignore.”
“So they’re more moral than the rest of us?” Ya’el laughs. Goronsky shrugs again.
Ya’el turns to Caddie. “And what are you interviewing him for?” She smiles, but she’s being annoyingly persistent.
“He was able to provide some information I needed on medical supplies at the Gaza hospital,” Caddie says. She sounds formal, she knows, and defensive. She hopes Ya’el will take the hint and leave.
“Medical supplies?” Ya’el’s voice rises in surprise. “So it’s not only psychology that interests you?”
A look of impatience floods Goronsky’s face for a second before being replaced by a smile. “It’s broad,” he says.
“Must be.” Ya’el is usually so warm—too quick, in Caddie’s view, to treat strangers as family—but now she’s cool, slit-eyed.
“Ya’el,” Caddie says, “how about some coffee? Or do you have to get going?”
Ya’el shakes her head. “So, how much longer will you be in Israel?” she asks Goronsky.
“Not sure yet.” Now, instead of speaking slowly, Goronsky runs the words together. “You have a young child, I take it?”
The non sequitur seems to surprise Ya’el as much as it does Caddie. She hesitates before answering. “Two, actually.” Now her look, Caddie sees, is even more cautious.
“And you are a bookkeeper? An accountant?”
“I work at Bank Leumi,” Ya’el says. “I help new customers, usually people who have recently made aliya. You know what that is?”
“Of course.” Goronsky sits down again and looks at Caddie. He is suddenly—but clearly—oblivious of Ya’el. Caddie has felt flattered by the way Goronsky seems to shut out everything else when he focuses on her. In front of Ya’el, though, it’s embarrassing.
Ya’el looks back and forth between them. “Well,” she says, and she draws the word out. “So since you have company—or is this an interview?—well, anyway, you probably can’t—”
“Actually, I’ve just spoken with my office,” Caddie says. “I’ve got to make a couple calls and rush in. Sorry.”
“Hey, it’s okay,” says Ya’el, her voice finally warming again. She steps closer to Caddie and half-turns her back to Goronsky. “So we didn’t get to talk after you came in from some godforsaken clash the other day. What are you working on, anyway?”
Caddie considers trying to explain briefly the story she envisions, the effect of violence, the context, the layers. “Settlers,” she says, opting for simplicity. “Spent last night at a settlement with a family.”
“Sounds like a nightmare,” Ya’el says. “Sleeping with our fringe element.”
Caddie shrugs. “It’s an interesting time. They’re like cornered animals right now.”
Ya’el’s eyebrows rise. “That’s what’s dangerous.”
“It’s manageable.”
“You’re out of touch with what’s manageable,” Ya’el says.
“Well, don’t worry,” Caddie says. “The settlers haven’t exactly warmed up to me. They aren’t letting me in much.”
“Good.” Ya’el hugs Caddie, puts a hand on the doorknob but then doesn’t open it. She looks again at Goronsky. After a moment she clears her throat. “Come see me later, okay?”
Only after Ya’el is gone does Caddie realize it might have looked odd—Ya’el leaving, but Goronsky making no move to go. He heads into the kitchen now and she follows. He opens a cupboard door and pulls out two cups as though he already knows where they are. He pours coffee for himself, and then for her.
“I have this connection to Gaza and the West Bank, too,” he says speculatively, as if continuing a conversation. “I grew up with snow on the boulevards, but it turns out I was meant for those dusty alleyways. The curses and wails. The frank emotion.” He sits at the kitchen table and stares at his hands. “That honesty. I could never emulate that. Still, it attracts me.” He blows across the top of his coffee, then drinks. “You want to join one of these settler patrols? Be there when they do their justice?”
She hadn’t mentioned patrols to Ya’el, had she? “How,” she asks, “did you guess all that about Ya’el?”
“What, the child, the job?” He shifts his shoulders. “She had a stuffed toy and a calculator sticking out the top of her purse. Then I saw her stroking her fingertips with her thumb, as though they ached.” He smiles. “I wondered where you were in the middle of the night,” he says.
Though he says it matter-of-factly, her breath quickens. She watches his hands embracing the coffee cup. He has a small scratch near one knuckle. She turns away with effort, opens the refrigerator, stares in blankly, then turns back. “How long were you there? At my door?”
He sweeps the table with his palm as though wiping away invisible crumbs. “You know what I told you the other evening? About my family? That was the first time I ever told anyone.”
She shakes her head. “No.”
“My mother didn’t want to talk about it, not ever,” he says. “And no one asked me about my father when I was growing up. Why would they? A fatherless boy was common in my neighborhood. People stayed out of one another’s business.”
She feels him gauging her reaction, and hopes her expression shows the full measure of her skepticism. “So no one knew?” She doesn’t want to let him turn this into a “first time” with all that emotional responsibility.
“Ludmilla Federova knows,” he says. “She’s my supervisor at the university. She has a long acquaintance with my mother.”
Caddie reaches into her refrigerator and pulls out a juice bottle. She can’t believe that she’s the first. The story was so smoothly told, so practiced.
When she turns back, Goronsky is holding a spoon between two fingers like a cigarette.
“I used to smoke,” he says. “It’s not only the nicotine. There’s something about holding live fire between your fingers. Bringing it close to your face. Owning it.” She watches him wrap both hands around the spoon as if smothering a cigarette. “But only for a few moments.”
“How long were you waiting outside my apartment?” Caddie leans against the open refrigerator door, waiting.
“I’m planning a trip to Lebanon,” he says. “I thought you might want to go with me.”
“What,” Caddie tightens her hold on the juice bottle, “the hell are you talking about?”
“Three, four days in Beirut. For my study.”
She shoves the juice back unopened and leans in to study the mustard, the jar of pickles. To block her face from his view.
“You have things to do there.” He says it like a fact, not a question.
“I have,” Caddie closes the refrigerator, “a call to make. And work to get to. Finish the coffee. If you want. Then let yourself out.”
She doesn’t wait for his response. She goes to her bedroom, trying to slow her breathing. She picks up the phone, misdialing Moshe’s office once before she gets it right. This time he answers. “I hear from you so soon?” He doesn’t sound surprised.
“What’s with the house burning?” She sounds angrier than she wants to, Caddie realizes as soon as she’s spoken.
“What house burning?”
“C’mon, Moshe.” She makes her voice reasonable. “Settlers set a house on fire in the village to the north. The same village that your neighbors were blaming for last night’s attack.”
“Caddie, I’m beginning to be insulted by your insistence on linking me to acts of violence that occur anywhere within fifty miles of my home.” Mock outrage in his voice.
“Perhaps your committee decided upon a dual action?” Caddie asks. “A letter to the prime minister and a punishment for the village?”
“Don’t you know yet that most of these stories are invented by the Arabs? I can’t think of another people anywhere who, given the situation we live under, would show
such restraint.”
His voice is too smooth, his outrage too practiced. He’s lying, but she’s got to come at this right or she might as well hang up now.
“You put me in a tough position, Moshe, by not letting me attend that meeting.”
“Closed session. I told you.”
“If I’d seen it myself, I’d know what happened. I could speak with authority.”
“All of our meetings are closed, as a matter of course.”
“As is, I have no proof.”
“That way, everyone can speak freely.”
“Now it’s your word against theirs in the copy.”
She’s working Moshe so hard that she’s almost forgotten Goronsky. Almost. Now she feels his presence as palpably as a sharp change in temperature. He’s come into her bedroom and is standing behind her. Part fear, part anticipation rolls through her. The same feeling that comes when she’s covering the clashes.
He’s looking at her hair. She thinks he might touch it. She resists the temptation to go into the bathroom and lock the door. She walks to the window instead. She focuses on Moshe, who is in the process of saying no in different ways. No one at last night’s meeting would have agreed to include an outsider, particularly not a journalist. And no one would have violated the decision reached during the meeting. No one would take aggressive vigilante action. It’s a dust storm of words. She has to stop it.
“I know there were people who were interested in revenge,” she says.
“They lost the vote.”
“Fine, then, let me be there. For everything, not only the moments like your kids reciting what they’ve learned during the day.”
Moshe sighs.
“I need to see how you handle attacks,” Caddie says. “How you argue these things through. And how you go about protecting yourselves.”
“Caddie—” Moshe begins, and she can tell from his tone he’s going to be negative, so she doesn’t let him finish.
“You can’t be afraid of people knowing you, Moshe. In fact, it’s to your benefit. The more people who understand your position, the greater your advantage.”
“Caddie,” Moshe says, “we aren’t responsible for burning down anyone’s house.”
“I need,” she says, “to witness the process.”
She hears him take a sip of something. “Getting you into a meeting,” he says. “That’s a long shot. Long, long.”
Damn. She can decipher that tone.
If Moshe won’t be the source, maybe he could be the conduit. “What about a series of interviews in the settlement?” Caddie asks, thinking aloud. “That could give me a full range of opinions and you could still have your meetings private. If you urged your neighbors to talk frankly to me, I think they might.”
As she’s speaking, she notices Anya on the sidewalk below, walking woodenly, turning her head from side to side as though searching. Her hair is in disarray; the front of her shirt looks stained.
“Let me see what I can do,” Moshe is saying. “I’m not promising. We’ll talk next week.”
“Good.” But even as she hangs up, she knows this will come to nothing. She’s going to have to find another way to gain access to the settlers who are patrolling the night, burning homes, harassing their enemy-neighbors.
Anya is looking up toward her window, squinting. She spots Caddie, and suddenly she opens her mouth wide, as though yelling a single word. Her face creases in apparent pain. She turns and rushes out of sight.
Caddie steps quickly away from the window. It’s Anya, she reminds herself. Poor, disturbed Anya. Exactly what she and Marcus said to each other before Lebanon. Nothing more.
Goronsky is behind her. “I know why you want this so much,” he says.
“Want what?” She faces Goronsky.
“To be with the settlers.” He brushes her hair out of her face. The skin on his fingers burns like sandpaper. “It’s a relief, isn’t it, to be immersed in someone else’s fury?” She smells the coffee on his breath. “And they wouldn’t scare you, would they? All cats are gray at night. An old Russian proverb.”
She backs away. She wants him to quit talking. She needs to get to the living room.
“I once saw a man shoot another point-blank,” Goronsky says in a voice so distant from emotion that it brings her to a halt.
“Right-o,” she says.
He ignores her arch tone. “They faced each other. The one with the gun was standing, the other kneeling with his back to a parked car, only three feet between them. And another three feet between them and me.”
“For your government study, this was?”
“Their knowing came about thirty seconds before the shot was fired. It was clear then that there was no turning back. Fear flooded the face of the kneeling one, a runny, liquid kind of fear, painful to watch. The one standing, he had this implacable expression, but he had fear, too. His was hard and sharp. They were scared of the same moment. Of the border each was about to cross.”
Goronsky is concentrated on somewhere Caddie cannot see. “So what happened?” she asks, half-believing in spite of herself.
Goronsky seems to refocus then, and looks at Caddie with surprise. “He fired.”
“And where, exactly, did this happen?”
“Time passes,” he says, “and still it doesn’t turn into a memory, not in the normal way. In my mind, I’m first one of them, then the other. The shooting itself remains frozen in perfect focus. Like a photograph. Often, it seems more crucial to me than my own history.” He spreads his arms in a palms-up gesture. “So you see, I understand.”
A flush of confusion washes over her cheeks. The way he refers to a photograph gives her the sense that he’s talking about Marcus.
“I can get you what you want,” he says.
“If you mean Lebanon—” she begins curtly, but he interrupts.
“This time I mean the settlers. A nighttime patrol.”
She gestures dismissively.
“I got the list of medicines, didn’t I?”
“How, exactly,” she asks, “does a professor get hooked into a renegade settler movement?”
“I’m studying the psychology of extremism,” he says patiently, as though explaining the constellations to a child.
“So?”
“I meet these people.” He shrugs and gives that smile, surprising, self-deprecating. She resists it.
“I meet them, too, Goronsky.”
“I’ve managed to build relationships.” He steps closer. The sudden charge between them makes her slightly dizzy, empty of breath. “I can get you on a patrol,” he says. “Why not trust that, use it? You want me to set something up?”
No. Absolutely not.
He puts his hand lightly on her shoulder, barely touching it.
A patrol. Her thoughts come haltingly, as though her brain is taking a nap. A patrol with the settlers would give her the story. And she won’t get that kind of access without help from someone.
He slides his hand to her elbow, then to her hip.
“No.” She steps away and brushes back her hair with both hands. “No. Thank you. I’m all set.”
He straightens. They stand unmoving, inches apart. “Okay,” he says after a moment. “If you change your mind, let me know.” Then he surprises her. “You need to get to work,” he says. He heads down her hallway toward the front door.
She wants him to go. She’s glad he is leaving.
“Wait,” she says.
He pauses.
“You know what you said about reporters prying into other people’s lives basically to escape their own?” she says. “That’s a cliché.” She tries to force herself not to blink, like in the childhood staring contest.
“Okay,” Goronsky says after a long moment.
He turns. She hears the door close behind him. She is relieved to have escaped his intensity, the way he crowds her. But she notices the scent of sea seems to linger in her apartment. And while she pulls on her boots—only then, only briefly�
�she allows herself to remember the way his eyelids looked while he slept.
Seven
“SO HE SAYS his unit’s headed somewhere dangerous next week, he won’t say where, of course, but he wants to point out that maybe I should consider that, surely that’s more important than whether or not my kids see him in his boxers.” Ya’el, legs crossed in the passenger seat, gives a subdued snort and waves her hand as though shooing a fly, then glances sideways. “Caddie! You listening?”
“Yes.” Sort of. But a million preoccupations swoop like bats through her brain. Driving, for one thing. She’s headed to the mechanic’s shop so Ya’el can pick up her car, and it’s in southeast Jerusalem, where the roads are particularly pockmarked, the traffic especially crunched. Horns blare at all sides for no reason other than general frustration. A gunshot goes off behind her, making her jump even as she knows it’s not a gun, just a taxi backfiring. She grips the wheel.
“The tired old last-sex-before-I-die line,” Ya’el says. “Like every woman in Israel over the age of fourteen hasn’t heard that message a million times.”
And then there’s the message Rob left on her machine yesterday afternoon: “Hi, Caddie. Guess what?” Followed by static and dead air. Cut off before the punch line. Guess what? It’s the first time she’s heard from him since Lebanon and she must have replayed his voice half a dozen times, lingering over the few floating words, imagining his next ones.
Guess what? I think we should go back to Beirut together. Guess what? It’s time for us to grab those thugs by their short hairs. Guess what? I’m finally ready to smell their blood.
“What I really want, of course, is to connect with somebody. I don’t mean just in bed,” Ya’el says. “For what I want, he has too much swagger.”
“Hmmm.” Swagger. That’s what the protest boys have: swagger and bravado. It’s been two days since Caddie has “been out”—the euphemism for going to cover the violence. Two days since she’s stood next to the protesters as they shoot marbles with slingshots, tolerating the tear gas, feeling dread punch from inside her stomach like a trapped creature. This morning she has an appointment to interview Halima, the cucumber girl. But afterward, she’ll find some fighting. Perhaps in Hebron, where a funeral is scheduled. When she calls Pete on his mobile, she wonders if he’ll tell her what’s going on where, or if he’ll say, “Nothing cooking, Caddie,” as has been his wont lately. Maybe she’ll call one of the other photographers instead.
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