“There is some truth to that, but there may be another reason.”
“Explain.”
Liza looked up at the ceiling as if the words were up there.
“You guys have been so emotionally castrated,” she said. My ears pricked up.
“If a girl cries, people comfort her, but if a boy cries? People say, ‘Don’t be a baby’ or even ’Don’t be a little girl.’ So you’re not allowed to cry, you’re not supposed to say ‘I’m sad,’ or ‘I’m weak,’ or ‘I’m afraid,’ so all that you have left is ‘I’m angry’ and ‘Goddamnit’ or something like that. These are considered masculine emotions, right?” She scratched her armpits like a gorilla.
“Not sure that I got it, Do that again” I said and took out my phone to document her ape gestures, but I saw I had a message from Donna.
“No, seriously,” she continued, “I still haven’t found one man − one − who can come and talk to me about his emotions. Find me one man who will say, ‘I’m scared,’ or ‘I’m disappointed,’ and I’ll marry him. The only thing I encountered with baboons like you is anger and annoyance.”
“How did I turn out to be the baboon?” I asked her.
“Never mind. You want some Bamba?”
“You have Bamba?” What a surprise. I was not prepared for that. I would kill for a taste of the peanut snack that is almost impossible to find anywhere in the world outside of Israel. She opened her suitcase and in it were five bags with the iconic smiling baby on them. “How did you think to bring Bamba here?”
Liza said that she is addicted to Bamba. “When I was a kid, I was allergic to peanuts. My mother watched me like a hawk, but when she wasn’t around, my father fed me Bamba.”
“Isn’t that dangerous? You can die from it, can’t you?” It reminded me of the neurotic Yoel who was in high school with me. Even a picture of a peanut gave him an attack.
“My father saw the medical report that said it was not a severe allergy. When the doctor told them about the two different approaches, staying away from it entirely versus cautious exposure, each one of them preferred a different approach. I would only get one Bamba each time, and I always wanted more.
“So your father was right,” I said, and she nodded. “Smart man.”
It took me a while to feel comfortable in her room.
“Yup. He was a wise man,” Liza said. “Wise and sneaky.”
I sat up in my chair.
“He passed away?” I mumbled.
She shook her head and said, “No. He disappeared.”
Disappeared? How? How old was she? Did he run away? Was he forced to leave? What about her mother? Does she have siblings? I had so many questions, but all I managed to say was, “Wow.”
“Yes, I have a strange story,” she said, sliding her fingers through her shiny hair.
“Now you got me interested,” I said as I glanced at the clock. It was close to 8:00 p.m. “But I have to go to sleep now. Tomorrow I start early.”
“All right. We’ll talk tomorrow,” she said. “We can hang out somewhere and grab a beer.”
“Umm, yeah, sure,” I said, and left.
“See you later,” she smiled at me with her smiling-almost-closed-eyes.
I took the stairs down to my floor. On my phone screen, Donna’s name appeared. I opened the message from her. It read, “Can’t talk right now. Am in the hospital.”
Chapter 28
Donna only told one other person about what she called “our problem.” She told Na’ama, her friend from the university who she was with the night we met. The first time she told her about it, Na’ama asked if I was gay. I know about it because we once had a fight, and Donna mentioned it. Ever since then, I can’t stand to hear about Na’ama.
Donna told her that before the battle, I was fine, and besides, I’m very attracted to her.
Na’ama mentioned that we had met after the battle, so how could she know everything was fine? Donna told her that I had had relationships before, and that she trusts my word, but she was sorry she ever mentioned it.
After that conversation, Donna didn’t talk to anyone about it. After every failed attempt, I would get angry. When she suggested therapy, I replied with three words: “No. No. No.”
I called her the next morning, right before I entered the exhibit hall.
“Go in,” I said to Liza and Avmeicher as I listened to the phone dialing. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”
“Do I have to go to the hospital to get a call from you?” she asked me.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“My hand still hurts, but I’ll be fine,” she told me. I asked her to tell me the whole story, but she refused.
Liza waved to me from a distance. “Come on. We want to get started.”
“Well,” I told her, “if all is well, then it seems to me that…”
“I’ll be fine, Itay! You’re not fine at all!” she said as I turned down the volume of the phone call since I didn’t expect all that hollering.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” I told her. She cried. I indicated to Liza that I would arrive in five minutes.
After 10 minutes, she relented and told me what happened.
It was after a casual night out with her friends from school. They were at a bar in Mahane Yehuda. She was tired after half a glass of wine, paid the bill and came out of the bar. She turned and ran back into the bar as she saw a wave of people rushing down the street, screaming, “Run! He has a gun!”
A box of vegetables was in her way, and she fell onto the wet ground. People were running around her. She managed to get up and continued to run, holding her injured right hand with her left hand.
“Hurry! Something’s happening there!” she yelled at her friends, pointing in the direction she came from. She was going to keep running down the street, but Lior pulled her into the bar, grabbed her head, and pushed it down beneath the counter. “It’s safer here,” he told her.
Chapter 29
Liza took a cab to the hotel an hour ago, Avmeicher and I waited for the last of the delegates to leave the exhibit, and we took a taxi back to the hotel.
“Did you hear about the mess in Israel?” Avmeicher murmured as we sat in the cab.
“Sure. The attack in the market?”
“That’s old news,” he said and pointed to his phone screen. The headline of the news site showed the bespectacled face of Seffi Keinan. “Breaking: an ISA soldier has been held captive for a year.”
“Oh, that,” I said.
“How did they hide it?” Avmeicher was surprised.
“He’ll be released soon,” I said, using the mantra we have been told for months to use.
“Did you know about that?” Avmeicher asked.
“There were rumors,” I told him.
The taxi stopped and Avmeicher gasped like a 100-year-old.
“Just one drill for our beloved Liza, and I’m done for today,” he said.
“What drill?” I asked him.
“Cordless drill,” he said.
“Not funny,” I said, “what’s this exercise?”
“A security drill, duh? It’s her supervisor who asked me to do it.”
When I thought of how Liza opened the door for me yesterday, I was pretty sure that after the drill, she probably wouldn’t be in the mood for a beer.
I looked at my phone and saw a message from Donna. She wrote that she was going back to her parents’ house. It was hard for her before this incident at the market, but now it was too much.
“My poor thing,” I wrote to her, and she asked in her formal manner, “I would appreciate it if you didn’t go on these delegations again.” Whenever she went into the formal-letter-writing mode, I knew I had pushed her to the edge.
I asked her, “Can I call?” and she said, “Sorry, I don’t have the ener
gy. I’m going to sleep.”
My room was a mess, and I’d already gotten used to coexisting with the puddle on the shower floor. I looked up in the mirror and saw a tense man with tight fists. I relaxed my hands and my jaw, which was tight as well. I recalled the yoga class we did once in the army. I sat on the bed, breathed, and exhaled slowly.
I took off my belt and shoes, plopped down onto the bed, and stared up at the ceiling. This day had been too long.
I thought of Donna and wondered how much her hand hurt. I was going to have to make this absence of mine up to her. I stretched out on the bed and rolled over onto my stomach.
A message from Liza: “Are we going or what?”
“Sure” I answered. I put on a shirt and buttoned it up in the corridor. When I got to her floor, she sent me another message: “I’m downstairs where r u?”
I spun around at the same speed my father does when he leaves and realizes he left the hot water boiler on. The elevator doors stopped on my shoe a second before they closed, and I descended to the ground floor. I exited the hotel through the revolving door at the exact second that Liza came back inside, and we both revolved like idiots. She went inside the lobby, and I was outside, but she didn’t notice me. She was stunning, wearing a dress showing her beautiful, delicate shoulders with her hair falling onto them. It was so shiny that it reflected the cheap chandelier above her.
She was dressed simply, not trying too hard. Everything was perfectly in place.
Liza appeared to be well trained in going from a surprised and shocked look to graceful laughter. Her smile showed beautiful dimples and her eyes that turned into two small perky lines, almost closed.
“Do you see anything when you smile?” I asked her.
“People tell me I look slightly Chinese when I laugh.”
“So I can guess the drill was all right?”
“Yup, it was nothing. “
“Did you identify it?”
“Of course. Avmeicher, that clown, sent one of the hotel workers to knock on my door. But why should I open the door for her? It’s not like he send me some hot plumber.” She winked.
“What a pro!” I said.
“You don’t say!” She grinned and lightly pushed my shoulder through the exit.
We started walking down Fuzuli St. and I realized that I was leading and didn’t know where we were going.
“What do you feel like doing?” I asked.
She replied, “I don’t know. Didn’t you plan anything?”
I hadn’t planned anything, and it was already late. I needed to be up the next morning at 7:30, eat a quick breakfast, and go to the airport. I had to sleep for at least six hours. I was inflexible when it came to sleep. That left me two hours with Liza who, so far, seemed easy to be with.
The street was full of people, and as we continued walking, Baku seemed to turn into Mamilla Blvd. The people outside were better dressed and well kept, and the street became cleaner and brighter. When we reached the city center, Liza stopped and said “Wow!”. Walls of an old city appeared in the city center, just like in Jerusalem. The street became more crowded, the people happier, and there were even occasional conversations in English, instead of the “shurum-zurum” I had been hearing for the past six days. A group of Australians were playing cards on a wooden table at the first bar we passed. At the crosswalk, a German or Austrian man (I can never tell the difference) was talking on the phone.
Liza and I slowed our pace outside the first bar we saw. “Here the people are too old,” I said by the first one, and “Here it’s too loud,” at the next club we passed. We kept walking and talking about anything that came to mind . . . whatever we could to avoid talking about what really interested us, such as why were we walking around Baku together. Why was she so beautiful this evening? Why do I feel a pulse in my ear when I look at her?
“Aren’t you cold?” I wondered out loud.
“I was born in Russia,” she reminded me.
The street continued to become narrower, and the street lights farther apart. We passed by a sex toy storefront, and we both pretended not to see it.
“Let’s go in here!” Liza surprised me with a burst of energy, grabbing my hand as though it is something she does all the time. I was praying she didn’t mean the store with the vibrators. I turned and saw that she was heading towards the neon sign of a shady-looking casino.
“Let’s go in!” she said.
“Really? That’s what you want to do?” I asked hesitantly. I was told three different times never to go to a casino overseas: once at the Unified course, once in the unit, and once at the briefing before the flight.
“Come on, just one round,” she begged, launching charisma from her tiny green eyes like two laser beams.
“Liza, listen,” I begged her as she started walking toward the lights. “Let’s not. I don’t think we’re supposed to, and I don’t want to get in trouble.”
She stopped 10 meters from the casino door. “What’s the big deal? Just for a little while.”
I took a deep breath. “I don’t feel comfortable going in there. Actually, we’re officially not allowed to be there.”
She stood there, between the casino and me, begging me not to disappoint her. Maybe just this one time, I thought. No one would know either way.
“So just sit and watch me. What do you care?” she jumped up and down excitedly.
I took a deep breath.
“No, Liza. Come on, we need to go now . . .”
“What’s the big deal? Just one song and we’ll go,” she stomped her feet.
One song?
I looked up and saw that the casino shared a wall with a small karaoke club, with a projector and people singing songs on demand. Game on.
Chapter 30
The Baku street was sleepy. My cheeks were heavy, too, but Liza didn’t seem to be tired at all. I ordered a local beer, and she got a Coke. By the time the bottles reached the table, she already had the microphone in her hand and spelled out to the DJ the name of the song she wanted to sing. The Azeris cheered her on as soon as the song began. For them, too, the fair-haired perky girl was like a fresh breeze straight into their faces. Liza asked the DJ to play “Tom’s Diner” and took the microphone. All heads turned when she started to sing, since she sounded like she composed the song herself. Who’d have known that the girl from Ashdod could sing with a perfect American accent? When she sang the chorus, “tu-tu-tu-too-tu-tu-too-too . . .” she sang it with a graceful smile, and all the men looked at each other in appreciative agreement, the way men do when they see a really stunning girl. When she finished and came back to sit at our table, a dumb smile spread on my face. Everyone was looking at me like I’m the luckiest bastard in the place.
We left the karaoke bar 10 minutes after my phone rang. At first, the phone’s vibration shook my whole body. I thought it was Avmeicher in his drill-mood. But it was just Leroy who sent me two messages:
“What’s up, buddy?”
“S. is still missing you.”
I wondered if S. is for Sidawi or for Seffi, and then I realized that it’s been three consecutive nights I hadn’t dreamed of Seffi Keinan and that for four days I hadn’t heard Buchnik’s breathing in my ear. Hell, I love Azerbaijan!
The cheap chandeliers of the hotel cast a weak light on Liza’s beautiful skin. She was standing in front of me the way they do in The Academy fight ring. Unlike the people you find in the ring, she was gentle and delicate. Zaor was sitting by the reception, waving at us and smiling.
“I had a great time,” she said.
“So did I. I didn’t expect to have fun in Azerbaijan.”
“That’s the way it is. It doesn’t matter where you are, it depends on who you’re with,” she said, and put her hand on mine.
Her face was close to mine. As I swallowed, I felt my heartbeat pulse in my lips. T
he shimmering chandeliers and marble walls looked like a decorated background painted around her.
“It’s back to Israel tomorrow,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, and her hand slowly slid off my shoulder, her other hand covering a cute yawn.
“You’re tired,” I said.
“Yes, I bet I look like one of Avmeicher’s jokes. I’m going to bed.”
The sound of creaking wood could be heard in the lobby as Zaor shifted his position. I had at least two more topics for discussion that would keep her with me and to hell with my six hours of sleep. Liza hugged me good-bye, pressing her chest against mine, and I felt her breasts. She put her chin on my shoulder and leaned on me a little longer than usual.
I lied, saying that I needed to ask Zaor a few questions. I didn’t want to go up in the elevator with her. That would be too much tension in too little space.
“What are you doing awake?” I heard Avmeicher’s terrible diction behind me.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him. This time he had no tasteless jokes up his sleeve.
“I was supposed to check if Zaur is here, but why are you awake?” he demanded.
“What’s the problem, dude? Midnight now, I’m getting up tomorrow at 6:30,” I told him. The cogwheels behind his eyes were spinning in full force.
“Where were you?” He asked me.
“Here in town. Any problem with it?” I asked him.
“In the country you’re in right now − yes,” he said.
“What’s going on in the country?”
“Oh, nothing! You’re just two hours away by car from your worst enemy!” he said, and took out his phone.
“Am I supposed to guess that having fun is forbidden here?” I asked him, but he didn’t answer. He texted something on his phone, and after he finished, he said, “I’ll have to pass this on to your superiors.”
“Be my guest,” I told him. He opened his mouth to say something further, but I was already on my way to my room.
Showered and in bed in room 1783, I set my alarm for six hours and five minutes later.
Fracture Point Page 16