All I Love and Know

by Judith Frank

  He wasn’t forgetting Ilana’s wish that they be taken away from Israel. But maybe, he thought, his thoughts moving gently and clearly, Ilana hadn’t made the best decision; maybe her background had made her more punitive toward her parents than wise about her kids’ futures. And he didn’t have control over the whole geopolitical nightmare here. He didn’t. What he had control over was one small piece of the world, four people, and he could make their lives better. That seemed incontrovertible.

  He should stay: the thought jolted him awake, and he remained awake for much of the night, thinking. They would return to the U.S. so he could quit his job and discharge his obligations there, and put his house on the market. His mind spun around a thousand details: the furniture, much of which was Matt’s, what his boss and colleagues would say, Gal’s school. His parents: he was scared to tell them. He wished he had someone besides Debra to talk to about it all. He didn’t want to raise hopes when the prospect of moving was so daunting, or to be persuaded out of it, which he thought he might be if he talked to Derrick. He would miss Derrick! The thought came with a stab.

  He rose the next morning exhausted, and over the next few days he went about his business imagining that he lived in this city, in this apartment. He went to the offices of Debra Frankel’s nonprofit and applied for a job, and over coffee they talked about the politics of migrant labor in a country with many thousands of unemployed and immobilized Palestinians. He asked her if she didn’t think the migrants were like scab labor. Her position was: perhaps, but they’re here, and if they’re here, I can help protect their basic rights. And that felt right to him, or right enough.

  THE AIR COOLED GAL’S clammy hand as Daniel released it to open his backpack for the soldier at the entrance to the Machane Yehuda market. It was an early Friday afternoon, three hours or so before the start of Shabbat, and a fog of bad mood, of sadness churning into anger, hung over her. Daniel had just picked her up at Leora’s house. The soldier returned Daniel’s backpack and Daniel zipped it up and slung it over his shoulder.

  As they stepped into the market, the sun was abruptly cut off and they were engulfed by a wave of color and noise. She used to come there with Abba on Friday afternoons, and before coming back, she hadn’t been able to remember those trips anymore. She just knew they’d taken them, because the story was told so often, and because she’d been quizzed on it. What did he buy you there, Gal-Gal, do you remember? Half a falafel. And we’d split a can of Coke. But now, taking in the market smell of cigarette smoke and citrus and roasted nuts and spices, she remembered again. Ahead of her, legs shuffled impatiently behind other legs and swinging plastic shopping baskets; to the sides were stalls with colorful and bountiful displays of fruits and vegetables, nuts, candy, presided over by brusque brown-skinned men who threw bags of produce onto scales and held out their fingers, cupped and upside down, waiting to drop change into customers’ hands. She remembered holding her father’s hand as he steered them through the crowd, as she held Daniel’s now; she felt the combative jostle of shoppers and the small dirty boys on errands running against the tide; the taste of grapes came to her lips, and she remembered taking them out of the bag in Abba’s shopping basket—one, two, three off the stems without him noticing—and feeling the dry, dusty unwashed outsides with her tongue and then the sweet spurt of juice. For a moment she was back in her old life, with her father. She always looked forward to going, but the feeling of being overwhelmed and a little scared when she was actually there was familiar to her, too. There were times when they didn’t go to the shuk at all, because the Arabs put bombs there that killed people.

  That wash of complicated sense memory came over her now as irritation, and she began to lag behind, causing Daniel to pull her a little harder. “Ow!” she yelled. “Stop pulling so hard!”

  He stopped and turned, causing a woman wearing a head scarf to bump into him and give him an exasperated stare. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, Gal-Gal.”

  Her face was so stricken and so vulnerable he asked her if she wanted him to pick her up.

  “I’m not a baby,” she said stoutly.

  “Oh, honey, I know that,” Daniel said. When he left her at Leora’s, she was being yanked by Leora down the hall to her bedroom. When he returned, they were eating a snack of crackers and avocado at the kitchen table with Gabrielle. Gal was sitting barefoot and cross-legged on her chair, talking loudly with a mouthful of crumbs and green mush. Leora was trying to talk over her, one admonishing finger held aloft, and Gabrielle, her elbow on the table, her chin resting in her hand, was listening to them gabble with a lazy, amused expression on her face.

  “Can’t you just stay here forever?” she said teasingly to Daniel. “I’m just crazy about this little girl.”

  Gal looked expectantly at him, then her expression corrected itself self-consciously as she realized it was just idle love-talk on Gabrielle’s part. She’d been struck hard by Gabrielle’s affection, Daniel saw, and he’d stepped toward her and laid his hand gently on her hair, wanting to tell her that they could stay there forever, they could, but knowing it wasn’t the time. She moved it away, and turned slightly to block him from her sight. He felt a surge of empathy for her.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he’d said. “Why don’t you stay here for another hour, and I’ll come back and get you on my way to the shuk.”

  “Okay,” she’d said blithely.

  He’d found a kiosk that sold newspapers, and sat in a nearby park reading for an hour before returning to pick her up, with a promise she could come back the next day. She was shut down and unresponsive in the car. He was conscious that he’d been sensitive toward her, and that she hadn’t thanked him or even acknowledged that he’d been nice. That, my friend, he told himself, is parenthood.

  “C’mon,” he said now. “Let’s buy some vegetables for dinner and then we’ll go have falafel.”

  She allowed herself to be led again, looking straight ahead and down at blue jeans, women’s calves encased in nylons, thick ankles emerging from pumps and sneakers, sprigs of greens fanning from plastic bags, squashed fruit smears and discarded peels on the cobblestones. She thought about Leora, who was taking a martial arts course, and who had shown her some moves, inexpertly trying in slow motion to wrestle her mother to the ground as Gabrielle laughed and mock gagged and complained facetiously, and finally collapsed gently onto the floor. Gal twitched at the sound of a man speaking Arabic nearby, looked up into his face; he was intently explaining something to someone, his thumb and forefingers pinched and jabbing the air for emphasis. She tripped on something, righted herself.

  They passed a candy store that was one of the prettiest sights she’d ever seen, more candy than you could even imagine in brightly colored wrappers, stacked, fanned, bunched, and binned. She stopped and gazed into the little stall, pulling her fingers out of Daniel’s hand gradually, experimentally. She waited for him to grab her hand again, but when she looked for him he was at the next stall, picking out change from his palm as a man tossed a plastic bag of carrots on a scale. She took a few steps in the other direction, self-conscious under the gaze of the candy stall proprietor. Would it scare Daniel if he couldn’t find her for a minute? The moment she thought that, the impulse to scare him—not entirely conscious, just fizzing at the edges of her mind—intensified.

  And then, so quickly it bewildered her, she’d drawn away, and couldn’t see or hear him anywhere. She thought she heard him call her name, but when she turned in that direction a different man was calling something else. She tried to retrace her steps back to the vegetable stand where she’d seen him buying carrots, but found herself at a different vegetable stand with a woman in charge. She opened her mouth to call his name, but felt too self-conscious to call attention to herself, and closed it again.

  Just then she noticed a cardboard box, unattended at the side of a stall, its top flaps loosely folded in on one another. Her attention worked it over for a long minute. She was supposed to report an unatten
ded package or bag; it had been drilled into her so often, she had to retrain herself at the Jackson Street School not to go to the teacher about every backpack she saw lying in some random place. But it occurred to her now that she didn’t know who she was supposed to report it to. She looked for a soldier, but none passed by. She looked at the faces of the people around her—stern and engrossed as they examined fruit, held out money, felt fabric in their fingers—and panic seeped through her body. She turned and began to walk away, then broke into a run, her sneakers pounding the stones. It wasn’t hard to dodge people; to anticipate the curbs and gaps in the sidewalk. She picked up speed, and as she ran she felt an echo, a shadow, a hot presence at her heels: her parents, running hard, being led by her to safety. She headed for brighter light, where the covered market ended and the street began, and when she reached it, she stopped, making people cry out “Little girl!” and lurch around her to avoid knocking her over. She looked behind her. She waited, panting. She went over to a wall and sat down on the ground, catching her breath, and waited some more. Her heartbeat roared in her ears.

  There was no explosion. No panic, no screaming, no glass or limbs flying through the air, no spray of blood. No burning smell, no smoke, no sirens, no Ema and Abba lying dead. She cautiously let relief trickle though her, but with it barged in a loneliness so powerful she started to cry. “Ema!” she whimpered.

  She sat there for a minute or two, exhausted, until a shadow passed over her. A big man in a dirty white apron was kneeling down in front of her. “I saw you running!” he said. “Are you lost?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Did you lose your ema?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Come with me,” he said, holding out his hand, “and we’ll find her.”

  She hesitated, too embarrassed to set him straight.

  “Your ema probably told you not to go off with strangers,” the man said. “But I’m no stranger. I’m Chezzi, and everybody knows me.” He took her hand and walked her back into the market to a fish stall, where he gestured to a small battered chair beside the counter. “I’m just going to sit you right there,” he said, “where everybody can see you.”

  He spoke with strong gutturals like Abba’s friend Avram, the Hebrew of a Sephardic Israeli, and the words bounced in Gal’s ears like a jeep on a rutted road. She saw the chair and thought it would be okay to sit in it, especially since nobody around her seemed frightened or upset. The smell of fish was overpowering. People were jostling in front of the counter, their eyes on the moist silver heaps of fish on display, shouting, “Give me a kilo of this!” and “Give me a kilo of that!” Behind her, a teenage boy wearing bunny ears and pink lipstick was hacking at a salmon on a slippery counter. Heaping a pile of fish on a scale, the fish man turned his head and yelled at him, “Stop stop stop! Smoothly! You’re not cutting down a tree!” He muttered a few words to himself. “Come here and work the counter for a second. I have to take care of this little girl. C’mon, can’t you see there’s a line?”

  The teenager tossed down the knife and moved to the counter, muttering, “Okay, okay!”

  “What’s your name, motek?” the fish man asked, taking a cell phone from his apron pocket and dialing.

  “Gal.”

  “Gal! Isn’t that a boy’s name? Gal what?”

  Gal shrugged anxiously. “Gal Rosen.”

  “What?”

  “Rosen.”

  “I thought Gal was a boy’s name,” he said again, his ear pressed to the phone. “Allo!” he said. He talked with great volume and excitement for a minute or so, then cried, “Yes! He called! Tell him to come to Chezzi’s fish counter—just ask anyone—okay. And to keep a closer eye on his niece!” He looked at Gal, nodding, still listening. “Okay. Okay.”

  He ended the call and said, “Your uncle is looking for you. He’s terrified! He’s coming to get you.” He studied her, hands on his hips. “Do you want to learn how to fillet a fish?”

  He put an apron loop over her head and wrapped the cloth several times around her body, tied it tight. “Come,” he said, and positioned her in front of him before the counter; her nose was level with the salmon’s belly, so he told her to wait a second and went to get the chair so she could stand on it. She stepped up. The fish was huge and shiny, and Gal looked down into its dead, rimmed eye.

  “He’s already taken out the guts and scaled it,” the fish man said, and then muttered, “And that’s all he’ll be doing in the future.” He gestured toward a pail with glop quivering in it and opened the fish at the slit with his thumbs to show clean, pink meat.

  “Now, the first thing, your knife must be very sharp. Do you hear me? Very sharp. And you must wet it with water”—he shook some water over it from a liter Coke bottle with its label half peeled off—“so that it doesn’t catch on the meat. You never saw at it, like that ahabal over there, because that rips the flesh. Look at this!” He tsked, gesturing toward a small jagged part at the beginning of the cut. “What you do is, you make a nice, long movement.”

  She watched him finish the cut behind the fin, down to the backbone. “See?” he said. “Now you cut along the backbone. You should be able to feel the knife sliding along it.”

  His knife hand slid gracefully halfway down the length of the fish’s body. Gal stood between his arms, looking at the bones on the underside of the fish’s head, which was now only half attached. She felt a great, debilitating wave of fatigue wash over her. “You try,” the fish man said. He took her hand and closed it around the knife handle, then put his own large and damp one over hers, and together they moved the knife the rest of the way down the fish, to the tail. It made Gal queasy, the gleaming pink flesh and the white-white bones.

  “Wait, you didn’t tell me you’ve done this before!”

  “I never did!”

  “What! Did you hear that?” he bellowed jovially to the people in line at the counter. “This little girl is lying to my face!” He removed the fillet and turned the fish over, and just when Gal was ready for the teasing and the fish filleting to be over, she heard Daniel call her name.

  His face was pale as he lifted her off the chair and held her so tightly her ribs hurt. He was saying “Thank you, thank you, thank you” in Hebrew to the fish man. He was babbling about how Gal didn’t know his cell phone number, and asking her whether she knew her Jerusalem address. “I thought I’d lost you!” he was saying. “I was so scared!”

  She could feel his hands clutching her, the warm dampness of his shirt, his pounding heart. A sense of cold triumph filled her. But when he finally put her down, holding her away from him by the shoulders to examine whether she was okay, it was pity she felt, and embarrassment. She suddenly wanted to drag him away, so the onlookers, who were crowding around with jovial commentary, wouldn’t see his naked, haunted face.

  IT TOOK DANIEL A few days to recover, for the sensation of racing through the market, hot with panic, to dissipate into ordinary memory. I can’t spare her: that was the thought that had pounded at his mind as he called for Gal, first tentatively and then with a scream that made people’s heads whip around. And then, starting to run: Ilana’s going to kill me—which now, in retrospect, he was able to laugh about. When he finally had Gal in his grasp, it felt as though he couldn’t get her close enough to him, even as he was crushing her to his chest.

  In the meantime, he had to put up with Gal compulsively telling everyone she knew the story of how he’d lost her in the shuk, which included flourishes like “If the fish man hadn’t found me, I might still be lost today, or kidnapped!” and “I was so scared I thought I was going to die!” In her telling, Chezzi was the crafty, streetwise hero and Daniel the incompetent idiot, and that irritated Daniel to no end, although he went secretly to the shuk a few days later to bring Chezzi an expensive bottle of wine, which the fishmonger accepted with a blush and an “It’s not necessary” before setting it carefully on the ground beside his lunch bag. He also had to put up with Yaakov t
aking him aside and reminding him that Gal was just a little girl, and he had to be careful when he took her into crowds. Clearly he and Malka had had a talk about the best way to handle this. “Malka and I were very surprised and disappointed to hear this,” Yaakov admonished, shaking his head gravely. “You of all people should know that Jerusalem can be a very dangerous place.”

  At bedtime, Daniel arranged Gal’s blanket and stuffed monkey around her chin, the way she liked them, sat at the edge of the bed and brushed the hair off her face with his palm. “You know I would have found you no matter what,” he said. “With Chezzi, without Chezzi, I would have flown like Superman throughout that shuk till I found you.”

  “You didn’t look very much like Superman when you found me,” she told him.

  He gave her a look. What a tough little stinker she was. Being on the other end of the sharp, speculative gaze she was leveling at him was daunting, and she was only seven. On the rare occasion he’d imagined the kids he might have one day, he’d never imagined one like this. Then again, he thought, leaning down to brush her temple with his lips, was anyone able to imagine their kid, the one that actually came to exist in the world?

  Shabbat passed and the new week began, along with the playing-hooky feeling they got when the bus stops crowded once again with people heading to work. He’d borrowed Malka and Yaakov’s car, and ferried the children to their house, to Leora’s, to Gal’s friend Ruti’s. One evening he took Gal’s hand and led her into her parents’ bedroom, which she’d been phobic about even looking into for the week they’d been there. “What are you afraid of?” he’d asked, and she’d said, “Everything.”