Peace, Love and Lies

by Oren Sanderson

  On the way to the cafeteria, Haroush hugged me like a good father. I sat down on the first chair I found and thanked God and Haroush for the hot coffee.

  “No milk?” I mumbled and started to get up to head for the counter.

  “Hold on a minute,” he tried to stop me.

  “No, it’s alright.” I wasn’t totally conscious.

  I approached the counter as a television crew walked towards me: a soundman, a reporter and a cameraman in a black t-shirt. He had long auburn hair, shifty brown eyes, and an embarrassed smile. I was slouching.

  After a couple of eternities, or maybe just a few seconds, I found myself supported by the black t-shirt cameraman.

  “Are you alright? You have me worried.”

  I would have recognized that voice even if I was about to pass out. I looked up at it. “I didn’t pass out, Ronny,” I mumbled. “If you hadn’t pushed me nothing would have happened to me.”

  “Sorry.” It was impossible to pick a fight with this guy. He uttered his words with a certain softness that only made me want to swoon in his arms again.

  “Are you alright now?”

  “I’m always alright,” I said, but I looked at him like a drowning woman looking for a lifeguard. “Were you at the prime minister’s briefing?”

  “Yep,” he replied softly. “I was listening to him and thinking about you. It’s going to be very tough. I hope you are strong enough to go through this. I’ll be around in case you need me.” He stroked my cheek with the back of his hand in a friendly gesture. I suddenly had a hot flash and was just about ready to kiss his fingers. He got that embarrassed look once more and the moment of comforting magic was gone. He turned on his heels and disappeared, just like that time at the entrance to the embassy in New York.

  I went back to my table and tried to regain my composure.

  “You know, you need to rest. You just have to. You’re almost gone, sweetheart.” Haroush couldn’t let it go.

  “It’s nothing,” I replied. “Let me finish my coffee in peace. In ten minutes, I’ll be as good as new.”

  He didn’t respond, and I stared into my coffee and somehow saw the long auburn hair and the mocking, worried look.

  “You’re not going to reopen that whole story with him,” Haroush remarked matter-of-factly.

  “I don’t know, I don’t think so,” I wondered out loud. “And in any case, we still have a long night ahead of us, as they say. The briefing will start in a few minutes. Start thinking about replacement crews and a reserve reporter that we can use, and maybe think about two more people from the office who will need to replace you and me when we are really washed out. I’ll go and look for some quiet corner where I can rest for a few minutes.”

  The large CNN van was standing nearby in the special parking area reserved for the press. A few feet away, there were blinding spotlights and reporters were enthusiastically broadcasting their analyses, and occasionally, interviewing each other just to fill in time gaps. Our van was parked in the darkness. I walked around, sneaked up quietly, and sat at the wheel, gazing for a long time at the terminal building. I then shut my eyes tight and tried to control the panic that was overtaking me. I wanted to be somewhere else, with other people. But where and with whom? My mind was numb and my head was close to exploding. ‘Relax,’ I whispered to myself angrily. ‘Relax, you are strong. You are talented. You’ve been through a lot. You won’t break. Breathe deep.’

  I heard a knock on the windshield but kept my eyes tightly shut. I hoped I was just imagining it. There was another knock. It was soft but insistent.

  I opened my eyes and saw the same cars coming and going. The same soldiers manning the projectors that were lighting up the skies with spears of blue rays wandering restlessly. In Manhattan, they used this kind of lighting for gala openings. The man stood three feet away from me, almost blending in with the surrounding darkness. A black t-shirt and an embarrassed look that I could feel despite the darkness. I opened the window. I didn’t utter a word. He stood there quietly, with his mocking smile.

  I was the first to break the silence game. “What is it you want?”

  “May I come in?”

  “You’re cold,” I said after examining him patiently. He took it as an authorization, went to the other side, stepped in and sat beside me.

  “Like that night at Central Park?” Ronny asked in a quiet voice.

  “Like the night of the witches in Macbeth. I’m not sure it’s really happening. It the same sense of horror and surrealism. I am not sure we are even here “

  “We are here. It’s happening.”

  “Like always, you are around at the most difficult times,” I sighed

  “Or simply at the most fitting moment.” He picked up a short lock from my forehead and smoothed it between two fingers.

  “And I always lose you immediately afterward.” I was ready to cry.

  “In life, just like in the news, there’s no point in staying behind once the story is over.” He was sad and charming and hopeless. He didn’t change.

  “So the story is over?”

  “Not sure. Maybe not yet.”

  He was too desperate for human touch. I could still feel the back of his hand on my cheek. He stroked my face slowly and gently. One moment he was like a good father, and the next he stroked my neck and shoulders. I felt a lovely chill running from my head down my back and to my thighs.

  I didn’t react for a long time. I let his hands go on roaming as if he were touching someone else. I could almost observe us from outside, but his hands were warm and comforting and their sweetness was mine, not anyone else’s. I reached out to touch his shoulders, his neck and his back under the t-shirt. I was all over him, looking to bury myself in his warmth. Just like that other time. Like two wrestlers, grabbing and hugging each other, tasting one another and attacking, we sailed in a storm, choking in our seats, until we reached a safe shore with surprise and a cry, and then found comfort. We sat there, quietly holding each other, for almost half an hour.

  He was first to shake himself free.

  “Life awaits us.”

  “A soldier’s quickie?” I was purring like a kitten.

  “A female soldier’s quickie,” he said quietly.

  “It isn’t over, Ronny,” I informed him half hoping and half threatening, trying my best not to sound like I was begging.

  He didn’t say a word. Kissed the base of my neck again, gave me another chill and exited the van.

  * * *

  Chapter 20

  Uzi went back to Jerusalem after one month and regained Dad’s respect. He would send him magazines from New York and call him every other day for very long personal conversations. Uzi never turned his back on Dad. On the contrary, he would update him with long details, into the night and try to transfer the call to the minister on occasions, but it didn’t work. The call would usually get disconnected and the minister never called back. It wasn’t fair. Danny worked hard and was very persuasive in withstanding the attacks against Israel, just as he had promised the minister.

  New York was cold now and alien. I tried every now and then to look to the tops of the skyscrapers but would get dizzy and nauseous. The broken and filthy sidewalks appalled me, and the homeless who populated them looked strange and scary. I imagined them to be members of a secret cult waiting for a pre-arranged sign to rise up and take over the street, starting by killing all the passers-by. I walked the streets now with great haste, like most of the people hurrying to get away from the street, to find a safe shelter somewhere.

  I started studying at the Ramaz Middle School in a depressing building of the Jewish Modern Orthodox school. Promising to shape the future of the Jewish people, they would promise to teach me the gold rules of commitment to the Jewish people, to Medinat Yisrael, and to Orthodox observance—the strength of our heritage. I was unable to imagine how that should work anymore. We started every school day with the morning prayer of Shacharit and had to bless every sandwich with the
blessing of the food. It was a girls-only classroom, so at recess and during mixed activities they all tried to check out the boys. I wasn’t part of it. Both the Israelis and the Americans would point at me behind my back, as the latest newcomer, and the daughter of the most senior emissary of Medinat Yisrael in the city. The teachers and the schoolmaster, however, treated me as an Israeli war orphan. What a joke. It must have been something Danny told them as an excuse for my poor conduct. After a long, boring lecture by the teacher who was really nice and tried hard, I agreed to join Devora Chaya, the sweetest girl in the class, to a Sabbath dinner at her home in a penthouse on Park Avenue. Her father who wore all white for the dinner was a diamond dealer during the week and now played a rabbi. It was odd and funny and the smells were awful. I swore that I would never again repeat this experience. That world was strange to me, and I wanted nothing to do with it. I was impatient.

  I thought about Ilan, about the evenings in Jerusalem when we would sit on a park bench, afraid to hold hands, and talk for hours, and later, the days when we would sneak out of school and go to his house, close the shutters and hug and kiss. I didn’t want to meet anyone who would take his place. I thought about him joining the army the following year. He would have new friends and a new life for sure, and I wouldn’t be there by his side. Every day, I wasn’t in Jerusalem, he was growing farther away from me, and every day I was losing him a little bit more.

  I spent three months glued to the television day and night. Mom was either at the university or getting ready for a reception, or else she would lock herself in her room. Danny would arrive and disappear at irregular hours. After I stopped going to the receptions held in the official wing of the house, I essentially stopped talking from the moment I arrived home. I became a regular friend of Hawkeye Pierce from M*A*S*H, of tiny Lucy Ewing from Dallas, and of Carol Burnett. I took a special liking to news anchors Bill Curtis and Diane Sawyer on CBS and Peter Jennings on ABC. I would wait for my nightly date with them. And because I had no other friends, I got used to their companionship.

  I did want to talk to Mom, very much, but usually it didn’t work out. I was very worried about her. She had lost weight and had black circles under her eyes most of the time. When Danny would ask her if she was sick, she would usually look at him with her sad eyes and say, “No, no Cheri, everything is alright, I am just a little worried, that’s all.”

  “Worried?” he would ask from time to time, surprised, and almost offended. “What are you worried about?”

  “It’s the girl,” Mom would say. “I think she isn’t integrating well. She is very unsettled.”

  I sat in my room trying to understand Abraham Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address. Why the hell did I need to dive into this American culture when I was Israeli and my real father was a hero from Beit Ha-Shita and not a UN ambassador or a counselor in Rome or a minister’s assistant?

  Mom was losing her focus. I just had to touch her and look her in the eyes to make sure that she was still there. “Mommy.” I tried to stroke her hair one evening, and she recoiled. “You’re not going to leave me. If you are suffering like I am, maybe we should run away together. You have to tell me.”

  “The truth, my little birdie, is that it’s indeed very hard for me.” She stared at me with a very distant look. “It’s very hard for me.” And then she wept, and I started weeping with her and made it even worse.

  We lived in two conjoined apartments on the twenty-first floor of a New York skyscraper. I found myself looking at the security measures in the windows, anxious about Mom and happy that the windows to the street couldn’t be opened. Mom would sit and stare out the window, her look sad and so vacant that I was filled with great fear.

  She continued to drift and I couldn’t even talk to her. All the years in Bak’a and all the conversations about her friends and about her ambitions, it was all gone with the wind. The reception parties went on twice and three times a week in the official wing of the house. Danny would work the room with ease, hovering easily from one guest to another with an easy smile and a kind word for each one. Mom did the job with a permanent fake smile, some niceties, and a few intelligent phrases, mostly quoted from English literature. They would look at her with a mix of envy and superiority at her British-French accent. Most of them took her for a small, lucky woman who had married such a bright and admirable man.

  On a bright Tuesday morning, I joined Danny for a meeting at Hunter College. Mom wasn’t ready to leave home, and I wanted to return to the place where they had given Karni, my admired diplomat, such a hard time after the Lebanon war. It was now a reception honoring International Women’s Day. The wide lobby, where we were blocked five years ago, was now beautifully decorated. The best New York caterer had donated the refreshments. The guests wolfed down the food as if the end of the world, in the way we knew it, was just around the corner. They pushed and shoved in their fancy tuxedos so that for a moment it became hard to tell the guests and the waiters apart. Women with heavy make-up, well-groomed hairstyles, and fancy gala dresses, were side by side with blue-jeaned wild-haired younger academicians and activists; both groups were carefully checking and grading each other, pretty much like I was doing. Danny walked among the people with a constant smile. He had kind words for everyone and instant highbrow intellectual exchange with the more serious ones. Kathleen Turner kissed him fondly and Henry Kissinger shared whispered secrets in his ear.

  “You must be terribly happy and proud that your father is doing such wonderful work.” A Jewish matron with multiple chins was trying to dive into the depths of my soul.

  “Yes, I sure am.” I wanted to move on, but she insisted on pushing further.

  “What would you, my darling, consider home now?” She moved on to run a psychological test on me.

  “Jerusalem.”

  “How wonderful,” she gasped in joy. “You must know Professor Grodetzky, my husband’s cousin.”

  “I sure do,” I confirmed. “Professor Grodetzky from the university, right?”

  “Yes, yes, yes.” Her happiness was boundless. “From Hadassah Hospital. He is a very well-known optometrist, everyone in Jerusalem knows him.”

  I gave her a quick sweet look and said, “Yes, not only everyone in Jerusalem; he is well-known all over the country. A wonderful man.” She quickly walked away from me. For some reason, I still couldn’t play the game right.

  We left the cocktail party back to the soft leather seats of the black huge official Chevrolet. “Let’s go to the Village, to Sebastian,” said Dad. George, the Filipino driver seemed to know the place. “After-party.” He smiled at me: “it’s going to be very, very interesting. You’ll join me, won’t you?”

  I said I was tired and asked George to take me home. The Hunter College reception didn’t work well for me.

  “Too bad, you’ll be missing out. It’s going to be a great party. Wonderful party. I promise you, you’ll enjoy this one much better,” he tried again.

  “Mom is alone,” I said.

  As soon as I went into the apartment, I knew that something was very wrong. I actually felt it as I rode up in the elevator. It was in the air. It had been there even before we had left. I opened the door of the living section. For the first time in a long while, all the lights were on. The radio was blaring with something by Beethoven and Mom was nowhere to be found. Her bed was a mess. The make-up table looked as if it had been hit by a hurricane. I ran in panic from one room to the next. I opened doors and closed them until I reached the guest bathroom in the official wing of the house. The door was locked. I knocked but there was no reply. I continued to run between the rooms in the two joint apartments, almost three thousand square feet and nobody in sight, no security guys, no domestic staff and all lights burning, Beethoven banging on the piano, Mom gone, and the bathroom locked.

  I went back to the guest bathroom and banged on the door with both fists. I couldn’t hear a sound. My heart was pounding like a broken washing machine, and all I could hear inside m
y head was, “Wonderful party, wonderful party.”

  I pressed the emergency button to the security guard at the embassy. The phone rang immediately and a quiet, male voice said, “Good evening, Shira, this is Ziv from the UN Mission. What is happening?”

  I cried, and quietly said, “There’s been a disaster.”

  “Shira, please calm down,” he continued in a quiet voice. “What happened exactly?”

  “Mom isn’t home and all the lights are on.”

  He was quiet for a while. I could hear his astonishment. “Why is that a disaster?”

  “Something very bad has happened,” I continued with confidence. “It just can’t be… she can’t be anywhere else.”

  “Have you checked all the rooms?”

  “That’s exactly the point. There’s nobody in any room and the guest bathroom door is locked.”

  “Could it have been locked by mistake?”

  I thought about this for a moment then said, “I don’t know, I guess it could happen.”

  “Do you know how to open that door from outside? There is a tiny hole in the handle. If you push a pin into it and press, the door will open.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know, but I am scared, there may be someone inside. Maybe something happened.”

  “If you are scared, don’t touch anything. Sit down on the floor in the far corner of a darkened room. We will be there in ten minutes. Do not open the door to anyone but us.”

  “Alright, alright,” I mumbled trying hard not to break in tears and went to look for a room where I could sit on the floor. A siren in my stomach continued to wail.

  I sat down for one minute but couldn’t stand it any longer. I jumped to my feet, ran to the locked bathroom, banged on the door with my fists and shouted, “Mom! Mommy, are you there?” For a minute I thought that I heard groaning from within. I looked right and left, searching for a pin I could use. At Ramaz they had taught us how to do this as part of what they called ‘defense class’. I took a hairpin from my hair and stuck it in the tiny hole in the door handle, pushing it inside with the palm of my hand. I felt the pricking of the hairpin in my hand as the door opened.