11
It was sunny, hot, and humid. The moment I stepped onto the street, sweat was trailing down my skin. I sat, freezing, under the A/C unit, working on a translation that turned out to be more difficult than I’d expected. It was a sociological paper, studded with footnotes and bold technical terms. But since it was Friday and the office was almost empty, I took generous breaks. I couldn’t concentrate, I looked out the window and forced myself to plan something for the evening, even though I wasn’t in the mood for much of anything. I could go out with Tal—she might even agree to that—but then I would have to shower, shave, get dressed, and put on makeup. Afterward I’d be stuck waiting for her on my deck, since I’d be done way too early. She would cancel on me last minute and I would have to ask myself some existential questions. All in all, it could turn into a nice Shabbat that would stretch into desperation late at night, leaving me with no choice but to numb it with alcohol.
I made myself a coffee in the kitchen. Mushy sandwiches from an unknown benefactor were spread out on the table. I decided to buy burekas. On my way I saw a man slowly strolling down the street, pushing his bike. He had hardly changed. Our clothes touched in passing and I followed him. He went down the street, turned into an alley, then into another one, until we were back on King George Street. The sidewalk was crowded and I had to give way to people again and again. It was as if they’d united into a single collective body that was in my way. At the crossing with Bograshov Street he locked his bike in front of a small shop. I followed him inside. On the rails hung Goa hippie clothes in even brighter colors than usual. My throat was dry. I wanted to drink something, but didn’t have my water bottle. A pair of pants over his arm, he stood next to the dressing room, looking at me questioningly. He, too, wore things that didn’t match. But it wasn’t Elisha. The shop assistant asked whether she could help me, her tone and volume bordering on hysterical. Colors and sounds mixed, as if a fuse had just popped in my head. I began shivering and sweating and ran outside, across the street, toward the sea. At some point, I collided with a corpulent woman. From her shopping bag tomatoes spilled out across the pavement. Overly red and overly meaty. A soldier with dimples and an Uzi asked me if I was OK. His voice beating my eardrum. I shivered and ran on. Everything was unbearably loud and vivid. I leaned against a wall for support, felt a hand on my shoulder, screamed, shook it off and ran a few steps. Toward the sea. When the panic subsided a little I fell into the sand. The sea was calm. I closed my eyes and tried to reconstruct Elias’s face, but the image remained blurry. Were his lashes brown or black? And how much did his right ear stick out? The shivering intensified. I sweat and shivered and sweat. Taking a seat in a cafe, I ordered a glass of cold milk.
I breathed deeply, watching the people pass by. When they ceased to seem threatening, I went to the bathroom and washed off the sweat. I sat back down, called work, and told them I’d twisted my ankle. Then I ordered another glass of milk. I saw him, him, and only him. Then somebody waved at me from across the street and yelled my name. It wasn’t a hallucination this time. It was Daniel, the Judeophile, who came toward me, smiling, with a sunburned nose and a gigantic backpack.
“I knew you’d end up here sooner or later,” he said, throwing his backpack onto the chair next to mine. He hadn’t changed much, except that his skin was lobster-red from all the sun and he’d gotten a little chubbier.
“I just got here from Lebanon. Wanted to get a better idea of the situation there. You were kind of right. It’s not OK what Israel does there. It would be a nice gesture to give back the Occupied Territories—especially now.”
“It would have been a nice gesture in 1967 as well. Or last Thursday. This is not about nice gestures. Have you lost your mind?”
My heart rate was back to normal again and the light had changed with the setting sun.
“But especially now! Just think about it!” he said euphorically.
I interrupted him. “What do you mean, anyway? A nice gesture? Not to annihilate the Jews would have been a nice gesture as well. And since when do you care about Palestine?”
“I taught in a refugee camp there. The kids really liked me. And you know, sometimes we talked about the conflict.”
“And what did you tell them?”
“Come on. They were the ones doing the talking. How horrible it all had been. With Israel. All this injustice and wars. I had no idea. You always brushed me off. They told me they hate the Jews. They wish they’d die. But I corrected them. Told them it’s wrong to hate the Jews. You can’t tar them all with the same brush. They were kids, after all. Six- and seven-year-olds. I told them it’s not the Jews who are to blame. But they can go ahead and hate the Israelis.”
12
I had lost all control. Even over my own body. I left Daniel sitting by himself at the table, went home, and poured a glass of vodka. As soon as the alcohol started to warm me from the inside, I took a shower and let the cold water wash the heat off my skin. Then I wrapped myself in a towel and drank another glass. Then I reached for the telephone, dialing slowly, as if for the first time, and when I heard Cem on the other end, I cried and hung up. He called back.
“I dialed the wrong number.”
“That’s a lie,” Cem answered calmly. “How are you?”
I took the phone with me out onto the deck. It was dark already. Mosquitos swarmed in the cones of light around the streetlamps. A cockroach sat on the rail. I removed my shoe, took aim, squished the cockroach, and brushed its body off the rail with my shoe. I started to cry again. The tears came from my core, from my stomach and intestines, and I couldn’t stop and I cried and cried. A choppy, staccato wail that took my breath away. My hands started shivering again. I was anxious. But this time I heard Cem’s breath on the other end of the line, at the other end of the world, and after a while my breathing calmed again. It was only now that Cem spoke: “Masha, I’ll be there soon.”
Cem really came. The sweetheart. My consoler. I’d asked him on the phone what he wanted to see and he said it would be enough to take a trip to Jerusalem. And besides, he was coming to check on me, not to climb the Mount of Olives and await Judgment Day.
In the end, we didn’t go anywhere. Just lay next to each other on the beach, making sure that the other one didn’t get sunburned. We swam, but the water wasn’t cooling and we enjoyed the shower at the beach more than we did the sea itself. In front of us a white, Russian-speaking grandmother played with her dark-skinned grandson.
“Things are not going to be easy for him,” said Cem, pointing at the boy.
“Why not?”
Cem looked at me, tauntingly. “Soon he’ll realize that he’s different from them. He still thinks they’re all the same. But not too long from now he’ll notice that he’s black.”
“When did you start feeling different?”
“In elementary school. Fourth grade. Shortly before they decided who would be going on the college track and who wouldn’t. A new boy came into our class. Pierre-Marie. The teachers were beside themselves. The boy hardly knew any German but everyone thought of him as extremely intellectual, because he was French and because they thought his German would be perfect in a week. And then I looked around at my class. Full of kanacks. Marcel spoke Italian, Georgi Greek, Taifun Turkish, Ali Persian and Armenian, just like his twin sister. And all of us spoke German, too. Without an accent. And yet none of us was considered intelligent enough to go on the college track. We were destined for remedial school, or—at best—trade school. Our parents weren’t supportive enough, they said. I thought of my grandfather, who had always told me and my brother, Turkish is the language of the ancestors, Arabic the language of prayer, and Persian the language of love. Such bullshit. I think that’s when I decided to learn the languages the Germans admired so much, and speak them better than they ever would. To have the last laugh. About them and their cultural hegemony.”
The grandma lovingly helped her grandson put his flippers on. The sea was blue and even.
“Later came the constant questions. Where are you from? Do you feel more German or Turkish? When I was sixteen I had to go to the immigration office for my residence permit. I mean, what the hell? I was born there. I even had to stay home from our high school graduation trip. They went to London. I didn’t get a visa. You know what my teacher said to me? If we were decent people, we would have gotten German passports long ago.”
Cem looked straight out onto the sea. Then he grinned and said, “But this little guy here won’t screw up. He’ll read and understand everything. All the classics of postcolonial studies, critical witness studies, racism theories, Fanon, Said, Terkessidis. By the way, I’m getting my Ph.D. now.”
In the evening we went to a restaurant, both drained from the sun, and had steamed vegetables with rice. There was no air-conditioning and therefore only a few tables were occupied. But the food was good and all the windows were open. My bare thighs stuck to the leather seat. Cem sat facing me and talked about his Ph.D. thesis. He felt guilty toward his parents for pushing back his entry to the workforce even longer, and I tried to reassure him. An ambulance passed us, its siren blaring. We fell silent and followed it with our eyes, each wondering if there had been an attack or an accident.
“How is Sami?” I asked after a while.
Cem studied my face. “He’s back in the States.”
“I see.”
“When was the last time you talked to him?”
“About two months ago.”
“Anything else?” Cem asked.
“What do you mean?”
Cem refilled my wineglass and leaned back. “Masha, I’ve been watching you guys make each other unhappy for years now. Either let it go or get together.”
“Is he with Neda again?” I bit my lower lip and Cem drummed his fingers against the edge of the table almost soundlessly.
“I don’t understand what you’re doing here,” said Cem. “The beach and the food are OK. But what do you want here?”
“I don’t know.”
Cem kept his temper in check, fell silent. I could see him weighing how direct he could be with me. Then he asked: “Did you find religion? Did you discover Judaism as your cultural identity?”
“I had to get away.”
“Don’t you want to come back?”
I traced the rim of my plate with my finger.
“Not yet.”
“When?”
I felt so stupid, I nearly cried. I was alone in a city I didn’t know, missing my friends. I wanted them to misunderstand me and didn’t even know why.
“Come home.”
“Germany? Home?”
“I’m not talking about Germany. You know how things are there. I mean Frankfurt, Gallus.”
“That’s where Elias died.”
“Not in the Gallus neighborhood.”
We happened to run into Ori on Rothschild Boulevard. He was walking our way in shorts and an undershirt. In his right hand he held a bottle of beer, in his left his overpriced cellphone. Cem and Ori liked each other right away and we sat down in an ice cream parlor. It turned out that the two of them had the same taste in literature, music, and fashion. We went on to a bar in Florentin, where a friend of Ori’s was DJ-ing.
The bar was filled to capacity, the air thumping with fast-paced music. Most people stood around, drinking and smoking. A few were already dancing.
Cem went straight to the dance floor. Ori followed him. Cem seemed to be genuinely enjoying himself—unlike so many occasions when I’d seen him on the sidelines of the party, sourly waiting to leave. I played with the straw in my drink, watching them. They were good dancers. The beat seemed to migrate from the dance floor to their bodies.
The music got louder, the room smaller. Panic welled up inside me. I could feel it spreading in my chest, drying out my lungs and crawling up into my head.
“I have to go home,” I whispered into Cem’s ear and ran out.
Outside I took a deep breath, but it didn’t help. I was hyperventilating. I got into a cab, clinging to the door, and somehow made it into my apartment. Ten minutes later Cem was there, stroking my palms, my arms, and my face as if he wanted to apologize for something that wasn’t his fault. He dialed the emergency number.
The doctor pulled on rubber gloves and gave me an injection. I saw the needle disappear into my flesh and then became calm, almost instantly. My breathing slowed. The fear, Elisha, and the woman in the light blue dress were gone. My head felt as if it were wrapped in cotton. A gigantic Q-tip. The doctor ordered me to go to the psychological emergency service tomorrow and have them prescribe benzodiazepine. Other than that, no big deal.
As soon as I had the pills I was better. I now knew that the problem was a concrete one and that it had a concrete chemical solution. I fell asleep.
After half a day in the psych ward—with Cem repeatedly imploring me to return to Germany—we were sitting in a cafe on Dizengoff Street. I was soaking a croissant in my iced coffee, trying to recall whether this was the cafe that forbade its employees to speak Arabic. Or was it the one next door? I was tempted to inquire about it in Arabic, but Cem was not a fan of the idea. He looked at me like I was crazy, then, like a fury, brought up my mother, my father, and his mother—though she’d stopped caring years ago—as a way of threatening me. He wouldn’t stop talking about Germany. But I wanted to stay and lose myself in little pieces, never to be reassembled.
I suggested we drive to Jerusalem and thought he might cool off along the way.
At the bus stop we bought ice cream. Then we entered the main hall, looking for the shuttles to Jerusalem. On the lawn in front of the building sat refugees, waiting for work. The Russian-language press called them Gastarbeiter, guest workers. I had no idea how anyone could find this term appropriate. Inside and around the station were many small shops that sold sweets and cheap, colorful clothes. Surly men with open shirts and gold chains nestled in their thick chest hair walked next to young soldiers in uniforms and sandals.
“Just explain to me once more, why exactly you want to stay here?” Cem hissed.
Five Asian women were in the shuttle already. One of them held a plastic bag filled with plums in her lap. The others helped themselves, chatting and laughing. The overly sweet scent of fruit filled the van. We drove past dried-out sunflower fields. The radio blasted pop music. Cem didn’t look out the window, but into a folder for an upcoming conference. From the corner of my eye I read financial transaction tax, restructuring law, structured liquidation of banks, limitation period of D&O liability for shares, protester problem. He was probably offended.
Cem wasn’t particularly impressed by Jerusalem. The only thing he seemed to appreciate were the plaques with golden Latin letters informing anyone who cared to read them about who had donated a building, a bench, or a flower bed. On our walk through the inner city, Cem studied each of the plaques, asking if I knew the donor and if I thought he or she got a thrill out of seeing their name on the plaque.
It was a cool evening and we squeezed through the Christian pilgrims, extended Arabic families, and a group of American Birthright tourists, their members admiring the armed soldier who was there to guard them. Orthodox Jews hurried through the street—men in dark coats and wide-brimmed hats, women in wigs or head scarves. Quite a few were poorly dressed and almost all were surrounded by a gaggle of children. Cem shook his head and I felt myself once again tempted to defend a way of life that I personally rejected. But Cem didn’t say anything and neither did I.
The same driver who had taken us brought us back to Tel Aviv. Except this time we rode with a group of Orthodox Bukharan Jews who were carrying on a loud conversation in Russian. One after the other took the tefillin and the prayer books from their bags. The smallest one urged Cem in Hebrew to put on tefillin as well. Cem only shrugged and returned his attention to his vocabulary. The men started praying in their singsong voices.
Three days later Cem flew back to Frankfurt, alone.
13
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In the morning I found a letter from Elke in my mailbox. Her pedantic handwriting filled the floral white paper.
I tore the letter into small pieces and let them snow down into the trashcan. I considered setting the trashcan on fire, but it was light out and many people were on their way to work. And so I went off to work as well.
Kids’ pajamas and panties hung on clotheslines. White-and-blue flags fluttered. Commuters waited at the bus stops, cars honked, and I thought the asphalt was going to melt under my sandals. In front of the post office—where typically there would be a crowd of people pushing, elbowing, and yelling—there was only a small group of friendly-looking people and multiple police cars. I asked one of them what was going on. Nothing much, he said. Potentially a bomb. The squad was defusing a plastic bag and they’d probably be letting us back in soon.
When I arrived at the office I felt drained and sticky. On my desk were three folders to be translated. A Post-it was stuck to the one on top. Urgent. Reports from a few Israeli-Arab groups, each of which received major financial support from the foundation that employed me. They’d finally sent over the reports on their cultural activities. A Jewish-Arab celebration for senior citizens, attended by fifteen people. A writing group for Bedouin women—number of participants: five. The project coordinator delivered a rhapsodic report of the women’s meeting with an Israeli writer who wrote novellas about cats. Then the words dissolved into lines and dots and my shortage of breath was back, a hand tightening over my throat. I thought it belonged to Elias. I ran out and locked myself in a bathroom stall, swallowed a few benzodiazepines and calmed down again. I called Ori but he didn’t answer. I left a voicemail and asked him to pick me up from work. He called back an hour later and asked if it was urgent. I told him about Elke’s letter.
All Russians Love Birch Trees Page 15
