“What out?”
“What happened to Marcus.”
“What do you mean?”
Why is he being so obtuse? “Maybe you know someone from Chechnya,” she says. “Someone who, for some money, would go into Beirut and . . .” She lets her voice trail off.
“What are you talking about, girl?” Rob says. “That’s a place you don’t even want to go.” He leans back in his chair and stares at her. She sits up straight. If she has to endure this inspection, if she has to be the only one who sees the importance of responding to what happened, then okay. After a minute, a drawn-out grin contorts Rob’s face. “Nothing matches the shock of seeing one of your own go down, does it?” he says. “Guess that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing now, the three of us.”
His way of catching up is starting to make Sven’s remote telephone manners seem charming.
“Look at me,” Rob says. “I used to cover the diplomatic scene, remember? Analysis pieces. Now all I want is bang-bang. A moth to the flame. Sound familiar?”
“No,” she says. “You—” She hesitates. She and Rob were never close. But, what the hell, she’ll ask anyway. “You using?”
“And you would too, filing from there,” he answers.
She looks out the window. That’s not true. She’s never been much interested in drink or drugs, although Rob doesn’t know her well enough to realize that.
“Why don’t you stop, then?” Caddie asks after a minute.
“And do what? Go to London and become some bored old fat fuck covering cricket matches, like Sven? I’ll pass. Hang around this less-than-Holy Land like you because I can’t bear to leave the scene of the crime? No thank you.”
“That’s not me,” Caddie says. She keeps her voice cool.
“Yeah?”
“This is a perennial good story,” she says. “Great action, great quotes, front-page stuff. That’s why I’m here.”
“It’s Jews and Arabs fighting and plenty of random slaughter,” he says. “You get your bloodletting on a regular basis. There’s the key.”
“Hey, listen,” she says. “Did Marcus ever, by chance, say anything to you about wanting to leave?” The question comes out bitterly, and she flushes even as she asks it. Damn, she’s revealing her ignorance, and to Rob. But she’s after a change of subject.
“No, but I can believe it,” Rob says. “Anybody who’s sane has got to decide it’s enough after a while. And that’s everybody except you and me, right?” His smile is distasteful. “I’ll bet you’re out there every day, taking the risks. Making sure you’ve still got the devil’s luck. Am I right?”
“Oh yeah,” she says with heavy sarcasm. “That’s it.”
“C’mon, admit it, Caddie. To me at least.” He starts talking machine-gun fast. “It’s intoxicating. Russian roulette. Whose name is written on the bullet? Someone you’ve passed on the street, shared a joint with, or maybe a bed? In this game, there’s no thrill like survival.”
He takes another hit of beer. He’s wired, and the beer isn’t mellowing him out.
“You’re no healthier than I am,” he says. “I wanted to see, and I have. Those moments on that Lebanese road are going to brand us for the rest of our fucking lives. Nothing will ever be the way it would have been if Marcus hadn’t bit it. There will always be shadows at the edges of our internal screens. And we’re always going to be trying to punish ourselves.”
“C’mon, Rob.”
“That’s right. Punish—and maybe you especially.”
She makes a scoffing sound. “Me? For what?”
He laughs, low and mirthless. “For starters, for not doing anything about that guy talking on the walkie-talkie at that checkpoint.”
“What guy?” she asks. “What walkie-talkie?”
“A bunch of armed militants not known for mental dexterity got pissed at Marcus,” he says, “and used that walkie-talkie to set up the hit. I see it now. I think I even suspected it at the time. But I brushed it off. I mean, I spent weeks arranging that damn interview. I didn’t want anything to interfere.” He makes a sound a lot like snorting. “And then I never did get to Yaladi. A big zero.”
“I don’t remember any walkie-talkie,” she says. “But even so, Rob, what could we have done?”
He spreads his hands, open-palmed, as if to signal the inanity of the question. “Go another way. Make the driver change his route.”
“The driver, yes.” Caddie feels a rush of interest despite her distrust of Rob. “The driver. I always thought he was somehow connected.”
Robs stares at her a moment, then nods. “Makes sense, you thinking that,” he says. “Another reason for you to feel guilty.”
“Guilty?”
Rob wipes his mouth with a napkin. “After all, you chose him,” he says.
“What?” she says. “You chose him.”
Rob laughs.
“You were in place in Beirut before us, you and Sven,” Caddie says. “You—not we—knew these people. You—not we—chose the driver. I was worried about him from the start.”
“You don’t remember that I brought you two guys and you picked that one? You called him the lesser evil.”
What the hell is he talking about? She’s aware of an inner din, a chewing noise like broken gears. “I don’t know why—” she says. “But—”
“Most of all, though, I’d suspect,” Rob interrupts, “you feel guilty for pushing Marcus into Lebanon.”
“What?”
“Because he should have been, of course, in New York.”
She feels the blood rush to her cheeks, her stomach tighten.
“Maybe you’re not aware of it,” Rob says. “You always had a gift for denial. I admire you for that. Wish I did. But watch out, Caddie girl. You’re as done in by the past as the rest of us.”
“That’s a load of crap.”
“You aren’t moving on. And if you keep the pause button pressed long enough, eventually you’ll run out of that luck of yours. You’ll end up buried here, smack between some furious Jew and a mad Shiite.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Get close enough to violence,” he says, “and you’ll get burned in the end. That’s the lesson of Marcus. Burned.” He spits the word out, then takes a breath. “But of course, you know that by now. It’s not really about survival anymore, is it?” He’s talking slowly, as though to make each word count. “It’s about self-destruction. About hating yourself enough to want to do yourself in.”
She’s having trouble finding air. “You’re full of shit,” she manages.
Rob shrugs. “A little too much honesty for your taste, Caddie girl?”
“You’re drunk, worn down, stoned, I don’t know what.”
He takes another gulp of beer. Then he grins. He has the nerve to grin, and somehow that, coupled with him calling her “Caddie girl,” gives her strength.
She stands. Concentrating on keeping her hand from shaking, she pulls too large a bill from her pocket, drops it on the table and turns to go.
“Thanks for the illuminating talk,” he calls after her as she leaves the café. “We’ll call it even, by the way. One lost story for one lunch.”
CADDIE TAKES LONG STRIDES, putting distance fast between herself and Mia Café, trying for deep breaths to mask the echo of Rob’s voice. She hasn’t forgotten, no. Rob is totally screwed up. Caddie is the one who remembers.
He chose that guy, that surly wild driver who took them down that dirt road past the woman and her child. Did one of the men have a walkie-talkie? She doesn’t think so. But no denying that her fucking memory has become clumsy. There were—she recalls it now—two possible drivers. She remembers Rob trying to decide which one to take. She didn’t have any role in that. Did she?
Even if she had, what was he implying?
Nothing worth thinking about. He’s gone off. Too many shattered nights, too much of whatever he’s using. Under normal circumstances she wouldn’t let him rattle her.<
br />
But is he right?
Slumber parties. That’s what Caddie thinks of now, a mainstay of her adolescence. At every sleepover, predictable as nightfall, they launched into horror tales in the dark, the way girls must do everywhere. They sat in tight circles in their button-up pajamas, as one with their tiny inhalations and nervous laughter. Everyone took a turn, the only rule—unspoken—being that each subsequent narrative had to ratchet up the stakes. Each one had to be more realistic, more directly threatening. So they began, Caddie and her friends, with strange wispy creatures in British graveyards, and moved to murders in America and ended with crazy men who held their daughters prisoner in cellars on the very street where they were huddled.
Caddie had fallen asleep for nights afterward recounting the stories in her head. They added excitement to her bland, one-dimensional days. A harmless thrill, too, because she knew she was personally immune from danger. That conviction held both in Grandma Jos’s house—no matter what had befallen her parents—and in the Middle East—no matter how often she saw wounded crumple to the ground like waddedup paper.
Since Marcus, though, she has imagined it. Her body sprawled, one leg bent awkwardly, blood seeping from above her right ear. Boys dragging her by her arms over the bumpy pavement, and then, recognizing it is too late, ditching her behind a barrel until the day’s shooting is over. Pete cursing her privately, then praising her in public. Some newspaper executive searching fruitlessly for living relatives. Colleagues, maybe, designing a memorial web page for her. Just like they did for Marcus.
And her insides twist, her neck muscles pinch, her hands turn slippery with sweat.
She stops walking. She’s been flying along without any awareness of destination. Now she takes stock. She’s in the middle of a busy sidewalk, near a newsstand and the place she and Goronsky had dinner one night. She notices an ache in her chest, a soreness in her legs. What a lousy night’s sleep. What a lousy morning. She’s wiped.
Even so, she’s not ready to go back to her apartment. She is, she realizes, only two blocks from Bank Leumi. Ya’el.
INSIDE THE UNDERVENTILATED, overly fluorescent bank, she takes the stairs to the second floor, where Ya’el and four other employees sit at desks in a large open room. Ya’el is peering down at a small stack of papers and doesn’t glance up until Caddie sits in the chair next to her desk.
“Hi.” Ya’el looks surprised to see Caddie but sounds comfortingly normal.
“I’m not crazy, am I?”
Ya’el laughs. “Maybe we better come up with a good working definition before I answer.”
“It’s Rob,” Caddie says. “I mean, I had no idea. You should have seen him.”
Ya’el leans forward. “Who?”
“Physically he looks awful. Verbally he ripped into me.”
Ya’el, serious now, touches Caddie’s hand. “Let me get you some water.”
“Going to Chechnya may have pushed him over. I mean, I had nothing to do with choosing that driver.”
“What driver?”
Caddie shakes her head. “What am I saying? You don’t even know who Rob is, do you?”
“That’s okay,” Ya’el says.
“He was with Marcus and me. In the Land Rover. Hot in here, isn’t it?” Caddie takes an envelope from Ya’el’s desk and begins fanning herself. “He never got in touch with me, not once afterward. And now he shows up,” she takes a deep breath, “out of the blue. I don’t even know what he’s accusing me of, exactly.”
“Wait.” Ya’el goes to the cooler and brings Caddie a paper cup of water.
Caddie waves the water away. “Do you think I should go? Back to Lebanon? He didn’t even bring it up. I thought he would.”
“Absolutely not.” Ya’el shakes her head, fast. “I know the impulse, Caddie. I know the anger. But it’s a bad, bad idea.”
Caddie wishes she could clear her head. She takes a sip of water. Ya’el is, of course, absolutely the wrong person to ask about Lebanon. Ya’el would prefer it if Caddie never went near the West Bank. “Did you realize that Marcus was thinking of quitting?” Caddie asks. “Leaving here?”
Ya’el studies her a moment without speaking, then shakes her head slowly.
Caddie slumps back in the chair. “Of course not.” Marcus and Ya’el weren’t close. Caddie is acting deranged. She realizes, then, that this is the first time she’s spoken to Ya’el since they went to the mechanic’s shop. “I shouldn’t have barged in here like this. You’re working.”
“No, I’m glad you did.” Ya’el takes her hand. “I want to help, Caddie. I really do. This is not something you get over. It’s something you finally incorporate.”
“Ya’el? I’m sorry for the other day.”
“It’s okay.”
Caddie rubs the back of her neck with one hand. “But I’ve got to go now.”
“Stay. I get a break in ten minutes. We can get a cup of coffee.”
Caddie shakes her head, rises, then sits again, and speaks fast, before she can change her mind. She has to say it aloud. “Do you know he wanted to be in New York that week?” she asks. “I’m the one. Oh God. I talked him into postponing it, into going to Lebanon with me.”
Ya’el squeezes Caddie’s fingers.
“If not for me, he would have been in New York. Do you know that?”
“Caddie, we all feel like traitors for surviving.”
Caddie is surprised to feel her eyes filling. She can’t attribute this to dust, damnit. “Sorry,” she says.
“Don’t apologize.”
“No, really, coming in here like this. I’ve got to go.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I absolutely do,” she says, standing, “I do,” rushing down the stairs, ignoring Ya’el’s voice behind her, Ya’el calling her name.
AFTER BANK LEUMI, Caddie walks more slowly, as though her legs were stone. She lets her hand run over a rocky wall bordering the sidewalk as she pulls herself along. The very first time Jerusalem’s ancient dust settled on her tongue and between her teeth, she knew this city was for her. A stewpot of frenzy and serenity. A contradictory mix of passion for life and ardor for afterlife. A center for needle-sharp moods that reverse within seconds: tender one moment, defiant the next. It appealed to her—no, more appropriately, filled her—as if Jerusalem were the missing marrow to her own bones.
Not far from home, she stops in front of a newsstand and stares at the selections. Ha’aretz, Yediot, Jerusalem Report. The newspapers and magazines merge and separate. The day’s timing has been thrown off: it feels like it should be darker outside than it is. Colder, too.
She hears humming behind her, off-key and a bit shrill, but lovely in an odd, elusive way. It’s Anya. She wears sandals instead of being barefoot, and she looks serene. Her eyes are focused. Good signs, all. This is a day when Anya seems clear enough to listen, and to talk. This is a chance, then; the one Caddie didn’t realize she was waiting for but suddenly doesn’t want to miss. Yes, Anya is crazy, full of elusive words. But her craziness may hold an eyelash of truth indistinguishable to most.
If Caddie rushes Anya, though, she knows from experience that Anya will be frightened and flee. The conversation will end before it begins. So she waits for Anya to approach, to look at her and smile, to raise an arm in greeting. Caddie sees words written in black ink on the inside of one of Anya’s loose long sleeves. “Peace,” Anya says.
“Anya, can we talk a moment?”
Anya smiles and takes Caddie’s arm. Anya’s right hand feels rough and warm, like a cat’s tongue. She smells strongly of dusty gardenia. She doesn’t seem to notice as Caddie turns her hand to read some of the writing on the inside of her clothes. “Lord, Who Watches Over Us . . .”
Does Anya recall Caddie’s name? Can she even pull up her dead husband’s name anymore? Caddie has no idea.
“Looking out my window a few days ago,” Caddie begins, “I saw you on the street. Do you remember?” Anya’s smile deepens; that is her onl
y answer, if it is an answer. Caddie presses. “You seemed to be trying to tell me something.”
Anya stops, tilts her head. “What could it have been?” After a moment she snaps her fingers, an odd gesture coming from her. “Oh yes. About your friend.”
Caddie’s breath turns shallow. “What about him?”
“The one I’ve seen you with.”
Caddie moves closer. “Who always wore cameras around his neck?”
Anya begins picking at the skin on her throat. “We should not overanalyze, overplan,” she says, her voice growing shriller.
“I knew you wanted to tell me something about him,” Caddie says.
“Lenin was afraid of spontaneity. Believed it was dangerous.” Anya speaks rapidly and her hand begins moving over her own chest, her fingers pinching.
“Tell me what you were going to say. Please.”
Anya’s face is chalky now, except for a red blotch on each cheek. “I see these things.” Her voice is anguished. She backs away.
Caddie tentatively gathers Anya’s hands into her own. “It’s all right. What things?”
“Terrible, terrible things.” Anya pulls away. “The colors, that’s worst of all. The red.”
Caddie holds her breath, afraid of what Anya will say next, needing her to continue. Anya glances skyward, murmuring to herself in an agitated way, pulling at her dress with her right hand. She drops her head and falls silent for a few moments, then looks up, her voice sharp, urgent. “Are you spontaneous?”
Caddie strokes Anya’s arm. “Anya,” she says. “What about my friend?”
“You should be.” Anya claps her hands twice. “Lenin was wrong.”
Caddie looks down the street, empty except for a soldier at the corner reading a newspaper. Maybe if she plays along, Anya will grow calmer and they will eventually get to what ever she saw or felt about Marcus. “Spontaneous,” Caddie says. “Maybe. But I like to make plans.”
Anya shakes her head, serious as if they are disagreeing over a momentous issue. “Don’t be afraid,” she says. “Spontaneity is in the family of wonder. And you know what Sir Thomas Browne said about wonder.”
The Distance Between Us Page 17