The Distance Between Us

by Masha Hamilton

He smiles at her arch tone. “This is an unhealthy addiction. There’s only so much one can take before pulling out—or going nuts.”

  “If it is an addiction,” she says, “it’s one that makes us more alive.”

  “All addicts think that, don’t they?” Jon clears his throat, and she sees a blush creep up his neck. “I’m not trying to say anything about you, by the way,” he adds.

  She looks at her hands. “Right-o.”

  “Probably I’m burned out right now,” Jon says. “Temporarily.”

  The silence, then, is self-conscious. After a moment he holds up the paper clips for her inspection. Amazingly, he has fashioned them into a tiny, intricately chorded bridge that arches as though over water.

  “Where’d you learn to do that?” she asks.

  He shrugs. “I was a kid. I played with paper clips. It beat sitting around doing nothing but listen to my parents argue on Sunday afternoons.” He offers it to her.

  She takes it, oddly touched and embarrassed at once. This confessional session hasn’t ended badly, but she still prefers the way interviews usually finish: a handshake and a thank-you. A hell of a lot less awkward.

  “What brought you by, anyway?” Jon asks after a moment.

  She rises. “Nothing in particular.” Enough confidences for one day; she doesn’t have the energy to mention Lebanon now. “Just getting air.”

  WITH SPEED, but aimlessly, Caddie walks the Jerusalem streets.

  She shoots past the open-air cafés with their scent of falafel and baba ghanouj, the taxi drivers yelling greetings to one another out their open windows.

  Past the dawdling tourists floating bewildered in a sea of fast-moving foot traffic, like leaves above a current.

  Past a stand of money changers, an Armenian ceramic shop, a Steimatsky bookstore.

  Why did I prevent him from speaking?

  She finds herself on the edge of Mea She’arim. One of the city’s extremes. She didn’t plan it, not consciously, but it suits her perfectly. She covers her hair with the scarf she always carries in her backpack and parks herself on the steps in front of the main square. It’s still lunchtime, so children are outside playing: girls with long braids, boys with their peyot. Women wearing wigs beneath their scarves and men in layers of black pass her quickly, most without a glance in her direction. The children, not quite so well trained yet, even in this strict ultra-Orthodox ghetto, peek at her sideways for several minutes before becoming bored, more interested in their own diversions. A group of kneeling girls plays kugelach. A half-dozen boys with a ball argue in Yiddish.

  On the walls around Caddie, posters warn against television and mixed-gender swimming. The children don’t think to question the message—don’t, in fact, even notice these placards of admonition. They’re simply part of the daily landscape. What comfort, when one is without doubts. Every child must experience this phase, however briefly, though as far as Caddie can remember, she was always skeptical.

  One girl disengages herself from the kugelach players and skips toward Caddie. “Hello,” she says in English. “You don’t remember me?”

  Caddie studies her face, then recognizes something in her smile. “Of course,” she says. Not by name. But this is one of Moshe and Sarah’s daughters. The one who came into the kitchen and recited part of her mother’s doughnut poem. “How are you? What are you doing here?”

  A darkness passes over the girl’s face so briefly Caddie almost misses it, then she smiles again. “Visiting. Ema is here also. She will want to see you.”

  “Oh, well,” Caddie begins. She doubts that is true. But before she can devise a way to object politely, the girl takes her hand and pulls her into a narrow alleyway. Here the houses are stacked and huddled together in tight rows. Frail balconies reaching from both sides of the street meet above their heads. The sound of male voices reading the Torah pours from a yeshiva.

  The girl presses against a door on a ground floor, pushing it open with her shoulder. “Ema?” she calls.

  “Here, Ruthie.” Sarah appears from an inner room followed by another woman. She is carrying a dish rag. She wears a blue-and-white loose dress that reaches to her ankles and, again, a brightly colored scarf. Her eyes widen. “Shalom,” she says.

  “Look who I found,” says Ruthie proudly, and she pushes Caddie in the direction of her mother.

  “A surprise,” Sarah says.

  “I was taking a walk when your daughter spotted me and . . .” Caddie breaks off. “You’re visiting friends?”

  Sarah nods. “Come in.” She is gracious, but Caddie hears the caution in her tone.

  “I don’t want to intrude,” Caddie says. “I was only—”

  “Ruthie, the burekas are almost ready,” Sarah says. “We eat in half an hour.” She turns toward Caddie. “But come in now. Please.”

  “I can only stay a minute.”

  The girl waves to her mother and heads out the door, back to her game. The other woman slips away, too, deeper into the house, closing a door behind her.

  Caddie and Sarah sit next to one another on a worn plaid couch. The living room, with small windows and a low ceiling, is cave-like, lit by a single lamp. It smells of sour milk and dust. Caddie hears the clatter of dishes being stacked in the kitchen. “A vacation?” she asks.

  “Of sorts, I guess.” Sarah, straight-backed, spreads the dish-rag on her lap, folds it. “Until tomorrow.”

  “Is Moshe with you, then?”

  Sarah shakes her head. “He has work.”

  Caddie looks at her questioningly, but says nothing.

  Sarah’s chest moves as though she is silently sighing. “It’s the children.”

  “They’re okay?”

  “Samuel is doing poorly at school and the girls worked themselves into a fit of tears last week. Moshe and I agreed we needed to get them away for a few days.” She smoothes the rag on her lap. “We don’t allow television or radio, of course. But somehow they hear about every ambush, every explosion—”

  “Hard to escape it,” Caddie says.

  “I try to explain,” Sarah says. “It will be all right, once our leaders stop restraining the army. Right now, however, the Arabs are so bold against us.”

  “So the settlers are taking steps of their own?” Caddie asks, probing lightly.

  Sarah looks at her hands. “The Arabs were never alone in Judea and Samaria, you know. Before us, it was the Jordanians, and before them, the British, and before them, the Turks. But we love this land more than all of them put together. And that makes them hate us.”

  It’s all Caddie can do not to wave her hand, to wipe away fake generalities like this. “Don’t you ever think about moving?” she asks. “Taking your children somewhere where daily life would be easier?”

  Without hesitation, Sarah shakes her head. “Two kinds of people find their way to this place. Those who leave, and those who stay.”

  As simple as that. Caddie imagines Sarah pigeonholing people into two neat groups: those who move on versus those who hang on. She knows, now, on which side of that line Marcus fell. As for herself, that paragraph is still unwritten.

  “You’re so sure about things, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “I envy you that.” Caddie leans forward to pick up the only item sitting on the scuffed coffee table: a plain-looking periodical called Consistency, a Journal of Ultra-Orthodox Thought. “What would you do, though, if, despite all this certainty, you found that you had made a mistake?”

  She is thinking of her and of Marcus, but as soon as the words are out of her mouth, she feels a flush spread on her cheeks. She flips through the periodical, trying to look casual. How crazy must she sound? To invent such a question, to ask it in her mind, is fine. But, dear God, not aloud, not aloud.

  Sarah, though, acts as if her words were entirely natural. “Teshuva,” she says. “It means you recognize what you did wrong, you’re sincerely sorry for it and won’t do it anymore.”

  “And that’s
all it takes?” Caddie gives a small smile.

  “Of course, you need to set things right if you can. But perhaps the restitution lies in changing yourself.”

  Caddie closes the periodical, replaces it on the coffee table. Sarah’s advice seems, at once, too easy and too difficult.

  “Well, I’d better go back and help with the cooking.” Sarah rises and Caddie follows her to the door. There, Sarah stops. “By the way,” she says, “I have made mistakes.”

  Caddie hesitates. “Any you want to share?”

  She is surprised that Sarah returns her smile, and even more surprised when she reaches to squeeze Caddie’s hand. “Maybe,” she says. “Next time.”

  CADDIE BREWS A CUP OF CHAMOMILE TEA, slips on an oversized sweatshirt, lights a candle and sets it on the windowsill in the living room. Then she pulls out Marcus’s journal and settles on the couch, leaning against the pillows, a blanket over her knees.

  She rests the journal on her hands, battling her own reluctance to open it. She’s not angry with him anymore, not that. It’s that she knows when she’s finished, when she’s examined all the pictures and read all the words, it’ll be over. He’ll be dead. Again.

  She moves her hands over the cover, opens it and looks at that first picture, the one of her among the men and the weapons. Then she lets the journal fall open to the final section.

  The first photographs of this part show Palestinian men in a small West Bank facility for the insane. She remembers doing that story with him. Victims of fighting who’d gone nuts, many now chained to their beds. One thought he was Cleopatra’s husband. Another snapped at her like a mad dog. Young, most of them. Men who, after gazing with clear vision at the rest of their lives and realizing what they could expect, became irretrievably distant from this world. And who could blame them?

  Marcus chose two shots for his journal. One shows a man lying stretched on his bed, grinning, his head cocked as though gazing at the heavens. Caddie would not guess he was crazed if she didn’t look closely at his vacant eyes. The other shot is of a man in the opposite physical position: curled into a ball, his arms wrapped around his head, one open eye visible. Different ways of being crazy? Is that what Marcus intended to show? Or maybe nothing that specific. Maybe he was simply being loose. That was the advice he always gave her when she groaned in front of her computer, fighting with a story. “Write loose,” he’d say. “Sometimes some zigzagging is necessary in order to reach the center.”

  The next photographs, then, are wholly unexpected after all the other shots in the journal, the pictures of bloodshed and journalists covering it.

  One snap shows a dining room table laid out with food. By a keffiyeh in the corner, Caddie sees it is a Palestinian home. A second photo is of a girl holding a doll. The picture doesn’t show the girl’s face or body, only her slender arm, her hand and the doll.

  Then a shot of three Moslems standing in a row, hands clasped in front as they pray in a small room somewhere. Except for the photograph’s mood of tranquillity, this is closer to trademark Marcus. An overdone subject, actually; a cliché in another’s hands. But not with what Marcus managed to capture in those three faces—stubbornness in the fully devout old man in the middle, rebellion mixed with piety in the younger two on either side of him.

  How did he manage it, eliciting these plays of feature, then trapping them with a push of the button? Had he acted invisible? Not in her presence. She’d seen him chat with his subjects between pictures—sometimes even during. Engaging them, often charming them. Yet he managed to catch them as if they were totally alone. Nothing artificial in their demeanors, nothing held back. That’s why he’d won the awards.

  The next: a close-up of some gray, dusty shrub in clear, bright focus. Absolutely unremarkable. Prescient, though, in a way that startles her.

  Then a thumbprint-sized photo that shows only the outline of a face, the features themselves darkened. Caddie recognizes it as herself. Staring at it, a wild hair of an idea comes. This is it. Proof that he intended to ask me to go with him. Looking at that ID-sized snapshot, she’s convinced momentarily. Then she realizes, it’s just a picture.

  And besides, would I? Would I have left the story for him?

  She quickly drains her teacup in an effort to stop the stinging of her eyes.

  The final photo is of him. The only one in the journal. He took it with a timer, she guesses. He turned his back to the camera, bent over with his blond hair hanging, stared at the lens from between his legs. And he smiled. A childish, carefree pose. Caddie can almost hear his laughter. She’d loved that laugh, for all it promised her. She’d depended on it. And he knew it. So he kept giving it to her. Even, apparently, when he had to pretend.

  This smile, though, is genuine. He’s not feigning here. The photo is worth the whole journal to her.

  She almost wishes that was it, the final thought. But a last bit of writing follows.

  “War strips us naked. I’m horrified by what I find in me.”

  Nothing more.

  Horrified by what I find in me. It means he would have forgiven her. Forgiven her erratic reactions over the last few weeks: leaping close, dashing away, teetering on a sheer edge of too much or too little. Pardoned, even, her refusal to listen when he tried to tell her—more than once, she’s sure—that he didn’t want to keep taking pictures filled with black and white and red. Didn’t want to aim his lens at more wounded, more dead, another survivor or aggressor. Didn’t want, goddamnit, to catch a flight to Lebanon to hunt for more.

  Her selective deafness. Her rigid boundaries.

  She flings her cup across the room. It hits the wall with a thud but refuses to break. She presses her forehead against the joyful, captured image of Marcus, and stays there, frozen, as though waiting for an answer.

  Twelve

  AVRAHAM IS IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT again and she’s sandwiched in the back and they’ve just drawn away from this evening’s “Village of the Condemned”—a different village but a catchall name, Caddie has learned. Avraham’s car is in front, with the companion vehicle from the other settlement behind them. This trip has been, until now, what Caddie figures must be the usual: screaming of vulgar threats, releasing of random shots into the dark. Somewhere in the middle of it, Avraham called back to her a Torah riddle: “What kind of man was Boaz before he got married? Ruth-less.” And he laughed, like a man cheered by an evening out.

  The settlers seem marginally more comfortable in her presence. Though they still are vigilant about not touching her, they hold their bodies less stiffly and have met her glance once or twice. She’ll wheedle some quotes tonight somehow, and she’ll write this story, though she can’t quite see its shape yet. She has time to find the words, though, because tomorrow is Lebanon. She’ll fly via Cyprus and land in Beirut and walk into the Intercon and avoid the bar and the third floor where she stayed last time, and it will be okay, it will be fine. She’ll do other things there, not writing, but what exactly, she isn’t sure yet. She’s been trying not to think too much about that.

  To block it out now—the future, the past, the checkpoint and the driver, the woman and the child—she leans forward to study the darkness. That’s when she notices, to her left, an eerie radiance. A small glow seeping from a cave-like area in the rocks to their right.

  Her confusion is brief, followed by certainty. Ambushers. Ambushers hiding in the fissure, warming their hands by a tiny fire, waiting for the revenge she knew was coming.

  Another surprise attack. To tell the truth, she’s been expecting it.

  But how many are there? Is it a shallow cave that hides one or two, or a deep tunnel that harbors ten? And how well armed?

  She sees herself as if from the sky. Crammed in the backseat between two men, again. No one else noticing, again. Blood pulses at her temples. Avraham’s Subaru isn’t as open as a Land Rover, but at this close proximity, she and the others are easy targets.

  “Wait.” Again, her voice is soft, damnit, so quiet th
at Avraham doesn’t hear. “Wait,” she repeats more loudly.

  Avraham slows the car, glances back. She gestures toward the cave.

  He sees it, then. Proof that she’s not inventing phantoms in the night. They all see, and all lean forward in the car. Avraham murmurs into his walkie-talkie, brakes and kills the headlights. He nods and the man sitting next to him gets out, joined by someone from the second car. Their abrupt, wind-up-toy strides tempt Caddie to inappropriate laughter.

  Through the open window, she hears one of the settlers yell in Hebrew, “Who’s in there?”

  No reply. The rocks look slimy in the moonlight. Her breathing quickens.

  This time, it’ll turn out differently. This time, none of hers will get killed.

  “Get out,” the other settler says harshly in loud Arabic. “Now.”

  Still no response. The two Israeli settlers exchange words. By the way they bend their knees, Caddie knows they’re preparing to charge. She tightens her body, waiting.

  Before they can storm the mouth of the cavern, though, three men shoot out from behind the boulders. Caddie ducks, fingernails digging into her palms, but there is no immediate ping of gunshots. So she peeks up to see each body flinging itself in a different direction. Three sets of stick-arms and narrow legs rotate wildly. Half a dozen scuttling feet scatter pebbles.

  One settler fires a shot. The other pursues the fleeing forms.

  Get them, get them.

  The man on her right swings out of their car. The one on her left is breathing hard as he follows. Only she and Avraham are left behind. A settler from Avraham’s car—her car—catches one, jerks him by a scrawny arm to the cave. Hauls him with that tight knot of anger that does not shock Caddie, that in fact has become as familiar as the inside of her own arms. Avraham switches on his headlights, and the two of them, Israeli and Arab, are lit up in a way that seems garish, unreal. The villager wears a white T-shirt bearing the word “Marlboro” in red letters. He is hollow-chested, about twenty-five. His face is hairless, rigid. His mouth: a flat horizon. His eyes: holes.